Research On Dewey’s Aesthetics Thought

Dewey’s aesthetics used the interactions of natural needs of human organism, human beings and nature, organism and nature, organism and environments as his foundation and also reorganized the concept of experiences on the same ground. For him, each experience was the result that one living thing interacted with its surroundings. Experiences are practice,the communications with the world. Dewey broadened the concept of aesthetic experiences through the that of experiences and made a difference to the whole aesthetics, which was the theme of Dewey aesthetics.His perspectives also influenced his attitudes to arts. Dewey criticized and discussed categorizes of aesthetics, spatial arts and time arts, etc., which are all influenced by traditional aesthetics, and believed that aesthetics was not equal to arts. At the same time, he also protested the serious distinctions between sciences, education and arts, etc. since Kant times for he thought experiences were the first. He tried to find the pre-human and pre-society philosophy and to seek the sources of human cultures; in his views, the mentioned distinctions were the development of society and all these disciplines had one basic root to some extent,which were experiences, whereas arts was just the essence of experiences but not one special field could be separated with other experiences.Although Dewey’s aesthetics has its own limits, such as ambiguous definitions, obscure concepts, general aesthetics and so on, he subverted traditional aesthetics in Western society,set the place of aesthetic experiences in art filed and reconstructed the relation between arts and daily life, which greatly widened scope of arts, diminished the gap between arts and daily life, shortened the distance of arts for common people; such changes play a great role in social practice and development as well as explaining and offering many references and much help for the present art practice properly.