Dewey’s Deconstructive Hermeneutic: Contra the Phenomenology and Morphology of Aesthetic-Mystical Experience Statically Conceived
Journal of Aesthetic Education March 1, 2014 Gregory Aisemberg
John Dewey's anti-essentialist empirical naturalism rejects the idea that aesthetic-mystical experience is a static, instantaneous event. Instead, such experience is an intensified development of the traits belonging to every normally completed experience, which Dewey calls 'an experience.' Its dynamic form runs its course to fulfillment. Dewey's 'principle of continuity,' rooted in the unity of the habitual body that preobjectively confers sense and temporal continuity, shows that aesthetic-mystical experience cannot be divorced from past and future. Beauty is not a simultaneous perception emerging from nothing; it has dynamic temporal direction and thickness.