A Study Of John Dewey’s View Of Natural Appreciation

Dewey’s aesthetic views of nature are based on his views of nature, naturalistic empiricism and the theory of aesthetic experience.Unlike the traditional empiricism which confines the experience to epistemology,the naturalistic empiricism holds that the experience is the interaction between the organism and the nature,broadening the area and the meaning of the experience.Aesthetic experience is a special experience,which is the intensive form of one experience.Because of disturbing factors inside and outside,daily experiences are frequently unable to become aesthetic experiences.In order to get the aesthetic experience,a creative perception is needed.Aesthetic experiences have these features,such as the wholeness,integrity,emotionality and accumulation. Dewey’s one of great contributions to aesthetics is that he is trying to bridge the gap between the daily experience and the aesthetic experience.Dewey regards the nature from the perspective of the modern ecological concept.One of the faults of the past philosophy is that the continuity between the experience and the nature is artificially cut off.Dewey thinks that the nature is firstly within the experience,and the experience is the only way to access to the nature.As a matter of course,as the intensive experience,the aesthetic experience is helpful to uncover the truth of the nature.Secondly,the nature is the combination of the substance and the meaning.We would not understand the meaning without the nature.The meaning is the potential nature,and the meaning and the nature is consecutive.What’s more,unlike others taking the nature as the end or the means separately, Dewey thinks that the nature is the combination of the end and the means.The process of natural appreciation begins with the interaction between human-beings and the nature,and develops by the highlights of meaning in the situation of the nature.Not all nature is beautiful.The nature has its pace,which shows something similar to or is good for the aesthetic process.Moreover,the pace of the nature is before the pace of the art.The nature with the combination of the volatility and the stability is suitable for and has a advantage in appreciation.Nature as the aesthetic object is always within the experience.Dewey puts the human-being in the nature(environment) again. He acknowledges that the timeliness of our life also has impacts on our appreciation of the nature.The Dewey’s views on the appreciation of the nature lay a profound philosophical basis for the nature aesthetic theory,making the combination of the nature and the humanity possible,and they have an out-reaching influence on the study of the theories of environmental aesthetics and ecological aesthetics,no matter for the perspective of the content or the method of thinking.