The Keywords Of Dewey’s Aesthetics Thought:Experience,Nature And Art

John Dewey is a great thinker, philosopher and esthetician all over the world, and at the same time, he is the leader and principal representative of the pragmatic philosophy and aesthetics. Dewey has more than30books and almost1000papers. His writings relate to philosophy, sociology, psychology, pedagogy and so on, which has a great influence on American’s thought, philosophy and pedagogy. Reconstruction in Philosophy and Experience and Nature are his representative philosophy books; School and Society, Schools of Tomorrow and Experience and Education are his famous pedagogy books. Art as Experience is published in1934, which is considered as the only one aesthetic book of Dewey. The book is the essence and centralized reflection of Dewey’s aesthetic thought. He put naturalism into the field of esthetics and creates his pragmatism esthetics. Art and Experience is a book of no little importance in the development of American’esthetics and the formation of the pragmatic aesthetics; aesthetics of everyday life in the late1900’s, environmental aesthetics, natural aesthetics and the aestheticization of everyday life in China are all related to Dewey’s aesthetic thought. So it is necessary to sort out, analyze and research his aesthetic.The paper focuses on Dewey’s representative books:Art and Experience and Experience and Nature, by carefully reading them and borrowing the research achievement of Dewey, find and study ’experience’’nature’ and ’art’ in his aesthetic which are different from the traditional concepts. The paper will analyze and explain ’experience’,’nature’ and ’art’, besides, the inherent relationship of them. Therefore, people can go into the interior of Dewey’s aesthetic and seek the method of researching Dewey.Except for the introduction and conclusion, my paper has four parts.The first part analyzes and explains ’experience’. It is different from the Continental rationalism and the British empiricism. Dewey’s experience transcends the dualistic ones, because it is the primacy one, appears when people and environment meet, and it is a dynamic concept, involves subjective experience and objective experience, passive experience and initiative experience. Only when experience appears, can people rethink it. What’s more, Dewey’s experience is’one experience’, and ’the aesthetic experience’ is also the one experience.The second part analyzes ’nature’ and the relationship between experience and nature. Dewey thinks that nature is related to experience, experience can reveal and penetrate into nature and experience can expand through nature.The third part analyzes ’art’ and ’art as experience’. In Dewey’s opinion, art is a completed and continued experience. In Art as Experience, he clearly and definitely proposes to recover the continuity of art experience and daily experience, the elegant art and the popular art, and the fine art and the applied art. Above all, he wants to create an art theory that returns to daily life.The last part analyzes the aestheticization of everyday life in China, and find out the similarities and differences between the aestheticization of everyday life and Dewey’s aesthetics thought.