Substance and Form
Consistent with his non-dualistic thinking, Dewey does not draw a sharp distinction between substance and form. He states that “there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance.” For Dewey, substance is different from subject. One could say that Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale has a nightingale for a subject, but for Dewey the substance of the poem is the poem. Substance represents the culmination of the artist’s creative efforts. Form for Dewey is the quality of having form. Having form allows the substance to be evoked in such a way that “it can enter into the experiences of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own.” This process exemplifies Dewey’s triadic relationship between artist, art object, and creative viewer.
Read more about this topic: Art As Experience, Chapters
Famous quotes containing the words substance and/or form:
“Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest art of all the arts.
Painting and sculpture are but images,
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
Existing in itself, and not in seeming
A something it is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“One of the many to whom, from straightened circumstances, a consequent inability to form the associations they would wish, and a disinclination to mix with the society they could obtain, London is as complete a solitude as the plains of Syria.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)