The consummatory: A Deweyan account of the esthetic in instrumental, moral, and religious experience

The goal of this dissertation is to offer an account of John Dewey's notion of consummation. In order to do this I show the importance of consummated experiences in Dewey's epistemological, moral and religious thought. Before we can understand what consummation is for Dewey we must have a firm grasp of both his notion of experience and his fundamental ontological concept: the situation. Ultimately, for Dewey, the live creature is an experiencing being existing in a given situation. The process of understanding Dewey's notion of the situation can be facilitated, I argue, by taking into account the groundwork in understanding relations as directly experienced provided in several essays by William James. The situation is the context in which the living organism experiences, and some of These experiences, says Dewey, are of such a nature that the events which precede them are drawn into a single moment of felt unity: this is the consumated moment. As I investigate in the dissertation, this sort of experience figures centrally into Dewey's thought. Dewey comments on the consummated experience in Art as Experience , his work dedicated to aesthetics, and this dissertation will take into account previous scholarship covering this area of Dewey's thought. The scarcity of works directed at Dewey's aesthetics is both troublesome and telling of a problem that Dewey himself identified: our tendency to privilege the problems of epistemology above other, often more vital, philosophical questions. In "Existence as Precarious and Stable" Dewey attributes this tendency to our preference for the stable over the changeable, and perhaps this is the underlying reason that Art as Experience is often left out of a consideration of Dewey's work. The nature of the aesthetic experience is often taken anemically as "simply" a psychological event both elusive and indefinite. The body of Dewey scholarship is largely made up of examinations of Dewey as an epistemic thinker which cast his aesthetics, if they treat it at all, as something of an afterthought. In contrast to this trend, in this dissertation I instead pursue the claim that the consummated experience, which Dewey describes in his discussion of aesthetics, is pervasive in key areas of his thought.