3This essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, I will endeavor to illuminate why pragmatism is a humanist philosophy. The second part discusses why most pragmatists have been unwilling to consider the significance of aesthetic form. Central to my argument is the idea that Dewey’s naturalist aesthetics does not offer a convincing conception of form. Insisting upon the unity of form and content and considering the distinction between form and matter a metaphysical gesture, Dewey’s aesthetics is of only limited value in the confrontation with modern works of art. In the final part, I will argue that a pragmatist humanism that refuses to historicize the concept of form and ignores the radical formal and narratological innovations of modern art and literature (from aestheticism to the historical avant-garde’s attack on the organic artwork) weakens its own position.

4It is crucial to note that I will consider form-giving as a kind of poetic agency. The latter term directs attention to the interwovenness of intelligent action and poetic imagination. It denotes creative forms of making, of poiesis, or constellations of contingent creative acts. Form-giving as poetic agency, as I will contend, is an integral part of the antirepresentationalist, antifoundationalist, and anti-authoritarian story of progress and emancipation that characterizes pragmatism. What pragmatism scholars have mostly ignored so far is that aesthetic theory can help one appreciate the far-reaching implications of this story.

1. Pragmatism as Humanism

6James’s version of pragmatism is central to the notion of pragmatist humanism. In his view, the world is unfinished, incomplete, malleable, and thus waiting for humans to add something to it. In the manner of an Emersonian and Nietzschean poet-philosopher he maintains that the subject’s creativity is capable of shaping and enriching the world that it finds. James holds that humans’ worldly interpretations must not center on concepts such as correspondence, imitation, mimesis, or copying. In The Meaning of Truth, he unequivocally states that “thought’s mission [is] to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence” (James 1987 [1909a]: 870). Knowing does not describe a process where a rational knower, in a dehistoricized realm, grasps and faithfully mirrors a passive object, that is, it is not a relation between the subject’s rational ideas and a nonhuman reality. Rather, knowing is a process that offers one the possibility of getting into fruitful relations with a historical and cultural reality (as Dewey would later also argue in The Quest for Certainty and Experience and Nature).

8As a pragmatist humanist, James proposes that movement, change, transition, and novelty are more than forms of mere appearance that distract from the ideal of immutability or transhistoricity as propagated by rationalism and monism. As a pragmatist, his primary focus is on the “world of finite multifariousness” (James 1987 [1909b]: 652), which is the world of praxis, the world of our biased beliefs and daily desires. In James, the idea of pluralism is closely linked to the notion of free will, that is, only in a pluralistic world does the subject appear as the author of genuine novelty. Only in this kind of world does the human subject appear as maker, that is, someone who is fascinated with the plurality of perspectives and vocabularies, who is capable of confronting contingency and unpredictability, who realizes the value of redescription (to use Rorty’s term), and who understands that every vocabulary and perspective that has produced something new can only be man-made and hence temporary. James writes: “Towards this issue, of the reality or unreality of the novelty that appears, the pragmatic difference between monism and pluralism seems to converge. That we ourselves may be authors of genuine novelty is the thesis of the doctrine of free will” (James 1987 [1909a]: 1055). Monism’s apriorism, with its emphasis on fixed principles, abstract principles as finalities, first things, firm doctrines, and its gesture of converging to the antecedently real and pure, inevitably has to deny the possibility of a pluralistic world where humans engage in contingent forms of making that might result in genuine novelty. The link that James illuminates between pluralism, free will, and novelty prepares the establishment of a postmetaphysical culture, since it helps his readers to understand that instead of claiming that their rational beliefs and sentences are world-directed and correspond to reality as it really is, they should grasp the full implications of the idea that they, as makers and poets in the broadest sense, have created the world that concerns them and that has value. It is James’s contention that one comes naturally “to the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them” (James 1987 [1907]: 598).

To remember that man is the measure of all things, i.e. of his whole experience-world, and that if our standard measure be proved false all our measurements are vitiated; to remember that Man is the maker of the sciences which subserve his human purposes; to remember that an ultimate philosophy which analyzes us away is thereby merely exhibiting its failure to achieve its purpose, that, and more that might be stated to the same effect, is the real root of Humanism, whence all its auxiliary doctrines spring. (Ibid.: xx)

10It is crucial to see that for James and Rorty pragmatism is the broader term, and humanism denotes a special pragmatist attitude. By contrast, for the British pragmatist humanism serves as the broader term that is capable of subsuming other doctrines. Pragmatism, for Schiller, is a method, and it “is in reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of knowledge” (ibid.: 24).

11Schiller’s pragmatism is a philosophy of creativity or poetic agency that highlights the significance of imagination and novelty, as well as the idiosyncratic and unpredictable creativity of individuals in their particular historical circumstances. Instead of abstract ideals, eternal forms, or the rigidity of traditional logic, he appreciates the creativity of humans who suggest new ways of thinking, new forms of thought, which might help and stimulate their fellow human beings in the attempt to cope with their environment and to solve their problems. In “The Definition of Pragmatism and Humanism,” Schiller pointedly defines humanism as “really in itself the simplest of philosophic standpoints; it is merely the perception that the philosophic problem concerns human beings striving to comprehend a world of human experience by the resources of human minds” (Schiller 1907: 12).

12Like Schiller, Dewey establishes an intimate connection between knowing and doing. Differentiating between pure rational or theoretical activity on the one side and practical action or doing and making on the other, as the pragmatists argue, is central to metaphysics. Dewey repeatedly underscores that knowledge is this-worldly, it is a process that takes place in the world in which we live. His critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics primarily concentrates on two aspects. First, the idea that pure knowledge or pure intellect would offer the subject the possibility of escaping from the world of peril and uncertainty to a higher realm. Second, Dewey criticizes the conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is capable of disclosing the properties of the antecedently real or the ultimate real. He rejects the correspondence theory of truth and the idea of mimetically reproducing the antecedently real and instead emphasizes that knowledge is this-worldly and a form of doing. This mode of doing is a central part of humans’ attempt to cope with their environment and to project the consequences of their actions and experiments into the future. Knowledge is problem-oriented, and at the same time one cannot grasp its function without paying attention to the power of the imagination. Radically questioning the idea that there is a complete correspondence between knowledge and what is real, and thus the suggestion that what is known is real in being, Dewey repeatedly underscores that inquiry and philosophical analysis will never be able to exclude the element of practical activity. Moreover, it is this element of practical activity that enters into the construction of the object known and that also reminds one that inquiry, experiment, and analysis are historical: “In dealing with the proximate instead of with the ultimate, knowledge deals with the world in which we live, the world which is experienced, instead of attempting through the intellect to escape to a higher realm. Experimental knowledge is a mode of doing, and like all doing takes place at a time, in a place, and under specifiable conditions in connection with a definite problem” (Dewey 1988: 82).

13As a naturalist humanist, Dewey’s contention is that philosophy must radically alter its nature. This primarily signifies that knowledge must stop being contemplative and focused on the stasis of the antecedently real and instead become practical and experimental – a form of intelligently conducted doing. For our purposes it is important to note that there are passages in Dewey’s texts that show that his stress on experimental doing sometimes ought to be interpreted as the endeavor to illuminate the significance of experimental creation. In “The Development of American Pragmatism,” for instance, he states that the “individual mind is important because only the individual mind is the organ of modifications in traditions and institutions, the vehicle of experimental creation” (Dewey 1998 [1925]: 12). On the one hand, Dewey, as a pragmatist humanist, is satisfied with the notion of knowing as doing, and he holds that neither his ideal of social democracy nor his idea of experimental inquiry needs an understanding of knowing as creating. On the other hand, he writes in Experience and Nature in a Nietzschean manner: “Thinking is preeminently an art; knowledge and propositions which are the products of thinking, are works of art, as much so as statuary and symphonies” (Dewey 2008a: 283). We will see in the next part of this essay that this ambivalence also characterizes Dewey’s conception of form.

15It becomes clear from Rorty’s elaborations on his notion of a poeticized culture that he intends this kind of culture to be the final, and most exciting, stage of the process of secularization. His antifoundationalist story of progress ends here. In other words, Rorty wants us to no longer deify anything and to continue the process of emancipation and secularization that ought eventually to culminate in a postmetaphysical poeticized culture. He wants us to “try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance” (Rorty 1989: 22).

16The members of a Rortyan poeticized culture, as ironists and nominalist historicists, continually look for new possibilities of creatively and imaginatively redescribing and recontextualizing things and people, that is, their desire for novelty, new sets of metaphors, and surprising gestalt switches lets them contribute to the establishment of a radically new kind of postmetaphysical culture in which the notion of correct representation no longer plays a role and in which vocabularies are considered as “poetic achievements” (Rorty 1989: 77). The ironist’s realization of the contingency of her final vocabulary, her awareness of the power of redescription, and her search for the most elegant way of combining certain vocabularies are characteristics of an aestheticized culture in which books are continually placed in new combinations, in which exciting new vocabularies kill off old ways of speaking, and in which people and cultures are seen as “incarnated vocabularies” (ibid.: 80). In Rorty’s literary or poeticized culture, final vocabularies, as poetic achievements, are all we have, and there is thus no possibility of comparing our current way of speaking with things as they really are. In this kind of culture, critique can only have the form of an imaginative redescription that makes the old vocabulary look bad and rather useless.

17It is noteworthy that in highlighting the novelty of a poeticized culture, which prefers metaphors of making to those of finding and which centers on the potential of a plurality of forms of poetic agency, Rorty does not see the necessity of talking about the significance of aesthetic form. Form neither plays a role for his scenario of a poeticized culture nor for his pragmatist understanding of the task of the novel.

2. Pragmatism and Form

18While poststructuralists like the later Roland Barthes, deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and Marxist theorists like Theodor W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson have shown a profound interest in form, the same cannot be said about most pragmatists. Why have pragmatists always been reluctant to highlight the significance of form? In their opinion, form is abstraction and it transforms problems that have their origin in experience, the problems of men and women in the Deweyan sense, into purely formal issues. Furthermore, form is ahistorical and acontextual, without connection to the particulars it seeks to govern. Refusing to reconcile the world of pure reason with the concrete order of experience, form transcends life and descends from without upon material. Form is the general and universal, it categorizes and, moreover, strives to separate purely intellectual studies from the pragmatic and from action. One should also see that most pragmatists and pragmatist aestheticians would advance the idea that form is static, immutable, and necessary and hence directly opposed to the empirical world that is governed by contingency and the unpredictability of humans’ actions. What this boils down to is that form belongs to a world of thought that is completely removed from the world of experience and ordinary life.

19The form-content dualism in aesthetics, as we will see, confirms the pernicious subject-object dichotomy and is diametrically opposed to the Deweyan notion of continuity. On a more general level, form reinforces the distinction between knowing and doing and thus the prestige of the theoretical over the practical. Form is central to what Dewey termed the quest for certainty, since it helps one to grasp that only the systematic discipline of philosophy, employing reason and logical form, can apprehend the absolute, noumenal, transcendent, or ultimate reality. In other words, a concentration on form is of the utmost importance if one intends to demonstrate that only the realm governed by philosophy is marked by a superior dignity, since only philosophy is capable of going beyond the ordinary, empirical, and phenomenal world of everyday experience. As Dewey pointedly puts it in The Quest for Certainty: “In form, the quest for absolute certainty has reached its goal” (Dewey 1988: 16). Form, as pure thought, offers a higher knowledge.

21Dewey’s aesthetics of continuity argues for the necessity of the endeavor to connect art and life, that is, it critiques aesthetic theories that sharply distinguish art from everyday life and want to consign art to a special or separate realm (for instance, the museum or theater). In his opinion,

the trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that “spiritualizes” it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. […] Were works of art placed in a directly human context in popular esteem, they would have a much wider appeal than they can have when pigeon-hole theories of art win general acceptance. (Ibid.: 17)

22Dewey’s naturalism also governs his aesthetic theory. He contends, for instance, that all art expresses the relation of the subject and its environment, it is the product of forms of interaction between the live creature and its environment. Naturalism, as Dewey argues, “is a necessity of all great art, even of the most religiously conventional and abstract painting, and of the drama that deals with human action in an urban setting” (ibid.: 156). How does Dewey interpret the meaning of aesthetic form? The “formal conditions of artistic form [are] rooted deep in the world itself” (ibid.: 152). He expands on the relation between naturalism and form as follows: “Interaction of environment with organism is the source, direct or indirect, of all experience and from the environment come those checks, resistances, furtherances, equilibria, which, when they meet with the energies of the organism in appropriate ways, constitute form” (ibid.: 152). It already becomes obvious from these quotations from Art as Experience that Dewey argues against formalism and any metaphysical version of art criticism and aesthetics. Forms are rooted in the world since they indicate a reorganization of energies, actions, desires, perspectives, and materials. They are part of the continuum subject-nature since they are rooted in the subject’s biological rhythms and the larger rhythms of nature. Dewey writes: “Underneath the rhythm of every art and of every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment” (ibid.: 155).

23Regarding the form-content dialectics of the work of art, Dewey clearly reduces the significance of form (which should also be regarded as a gesture directed against the formalism of the New Critics and some analytic philosophers). This becomes obvious, for instance, in the chapter “The Common Substance of the Arts” in Art as Experience. Dewey goes very far when he avers: “Apart from some special interest, every product of art is matter and matter only, so that the contrast is not between matter and form but between matter relatively unformed and matter adequately formed” (ibid.: 195). Further below he formulates even more pointedly: “’Stuff’ is everything, and form a name for certain aspects of the matter when attention goes primarily to these aspects” (ibid.). Throughout Art as Experience, Dewey places a stress on the notions of wholeness, organicity, union, coherence, balance, and harmony. In a manner that reminds one of idealist aesthetics, he maintains: “The form of the whole is therefore present in every member” (ibid.: 62). Moreover, he advances the idea that “[m]utual adaptation of parts to one another in constituting a whole is the relation which, formally speaking, characterizes a work of art” (ibid.: 140). It is of the utmost importance to understand that Dewey does not see the necessity of historicizing his concept of aesthetic form. Rather, it is one of his primary concerns to make clear that one should not regard aesthetic form as a transcendent entity, that is, as something that descends “from without”: “Is ‘beauty’ another name for form descending from without, as a transcendent essence, upon material, or is it a name for the esthetic quality that appears whenever material is formed in a way that renders it adequately expressive?” (ibid.: 112).

24A discussion of the Deweyan conception of form offers one the possibility of bringing together his critique of traditional epistemology in The Quest for Certainty with his analysis of the function of art in Art as Experience. Dewey’s antidualism calls attention to how problematic it is to identify form with the rational and intelligible and matter with the irrational, unpredictable, and contingent. His anti-Platonism, and anti-Kantianism, radically critiques this metaphysical understanding of the form-content dialectics. There is no room in Dewey’s thought for the notion that form has a dignity and necessity that matter or content lacks. In the chapter “Substance and Form,” he contends:

Moreover, since things are rendered knowable by these forms, it was concluded that form is the rational, the intelligible, element in the objects and events of the world. Then it was set over against “matter,” the latter being the irrational, the inherently chaotic and fluctuating, stuff upon which form was impressed. It was as eternal as the latter was shifting. This metaphysical distinction of matter and form was embodied in the philosophy that ruled European thought for centuries. Because of this fact it still affects the esthetic philosophy of form in relation to matter. It is the source of the bias in favor of their separation, especially when that takes the shape of assuming that form has a dignity and stability lacking to matter. (Ibid.: 120-1)

30Dewey’s aesthetics also does not offer the possibility of fully appreciating the iconoclastic gesture of the historical avant-garde. Both Dewey and, for instance, the surrealists around André Breton strive to abolish the strict separation between art and everyday life (“pratiquer la poésie!”). However, while Dewey, although calling attention to the meaning of tension and resistance, holds on to the notion of the organic work of art, the members of the historical avant-garde radically reject the last remnants of idealist aesthetics and hence clearly favor the fragmented and nonorganic artwork. The surrealist montage, a novel or “récit” like Breton’s Nadja (1928), or the iconoclastic gesture dominating Dadaist performances – all these urge one to rethink the significance of form for a naturalist aesthetics. In Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), Peter Bürger convincingly argues for the crucial role the nonorganic artwork plays for the historical avant-garde. He expands on the difference between the organic and the nonorganic artwork thus (his understanding of this difference is strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory):

• 19 For Bürger’s thought-provoking analysis of the problematics of the post-avant-garde (for instance, (...)

The organic work intends the impression of wholeness. To the extent its individual elements have significance only as they relate to the whole, they always point to the work as a whole as they are perceived individually. In the avant-gardiste work, on the other hand, the individual elements have a much higher degree of autonomy and can therefore also be read and interpreted individually or in groups without its [sic] being necessary to grasp the work as a whole. In the case of the avant-gardiste work, it is possible only to a limited extent to speak of the work as a whole as the perfect embodiment of the totality of possible meaning. (Bürger 1984: 72-3)19

31Presumably, my critique of Dewey’s notion of art as experience will seem problematic, or pointless, to most pragmatist or naturalist aestheticians since this critique can only be developed from a production-aesthetic point of view. However, I wish to submit that the shortcomings and inadequacies of a Deweyan aesthetic theory in the confrontation with aestheticism, the radical formal and narratological innovations of, for instance, Flaubert, Woolf, Gide, Joyce, and Faulkner, and the attack on the organic artwork by the historical avant-garde can only be dealt with if one is willing to consider the potential usefulness of this production-aesthetic position within a pragmatist framework. I will further expand on this in the next part of this essay.

32While Dewey saw the necessity of discussing the question of form within his pragmatist framework, and while Adorno demonstrated how especially a materialist aesthetics might profit from the attempt to examine the meaning of form, Richard Rorty has no use for the notion of aesthetic form. The latter’s contention is that pragmatist literary critics should concentrate on highlighting the moral task of the novel and that this does not necessitate an analysis of aesthetic form. Rorty proposes that one must not regard the aesthetic as a “matter of form and language,” but rather as being governed by “content and life.” In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he puts this as follows: “This idea that somehow language can be separated from authors, that literary technique is a godlike power operating independently of mortal contingencies, and in particular from the author’s contingent notion of what goodness is, is the root of ‘aestheticism’ in the bad sense of the term, the sense in which the aesthetic is a matter of form and language rather than of content and life” (Rorty 1989: 166-7). Why does Rorty speak of “the disastrous Kantian distinction between form and content” (ibid.: 168n)? In his opinion, most literary and cultural critics refuse to ignore the question of form. He holds that this refusal confirms that professional literary critics and scholars, using abstract categories such as form and narrative technique, too often assume that their task has something to do with knowledge. By contrast, Rorty’s notion of a literary or poeticized culture stands for the pragmatist move against theory and toward narrative. Literary and aesthetic theory that insists that literary criticism and aesthetics are forms of knowledge that can elucidate the real structure and meaning of a text or an artwork belongs to an old way of speaking. Theorists claim that one has to step back from the literary text and analyze it by means of conceptual tools, and this would eventually allow one to penetrate the text’s depth. The direction of this process is vertical (like that of the metaphysician’s perspective).

34What our discussion so far has shown is that both Dewey and Rorty tell their antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist stories of progress and emancipation without considering the modern notion of aesthetic form. Can pragmatism as humanism and anti-authoritarianism really afford to ignore the work of aesthetic form?

3. Pragmatist Humanism, Form, and Poetic Agency

35The primary task of a pragmatist humanism is to elucidate the significance of poetic agency. The latter term urges one to see how intimately connected intelligent action and poetic imagination are. Poetic agency brings together the notion of embodied, interested, and purposeful human agency with the Romantic stress on the power of the imagination. It refers to humans’ creativity of action, imaginative redescriptions, inventions of new vocabularies and metaphors, and unpredictable forms of self-creation. This term thus denotes creative forms of making, of human practice, or constellations of contingent creative acts, which confirm humanity’s permanent desire for creative action and linguistic novelty. Form-giving is poetic agency; it is an integral part of the antirepresentationalist and antifoundationalist story of progress and emancipation. For pragmatists, poetic agency draws attention to the idea that humans’ only responsibility is to their fellow human beings in the world of practice. Furthermore, the term illustrates the implications of the idea that humans, realizing that there is no outside authority (God, Truth, or Reality) to which they can appeal, come to regard the world of experience, in which they creatively and imaginatively act to solve problems and achieve purposes, as the only one they have. In other words, poetic agency stresses human finitude; that is, it is directed against the idea that there is something that is not itself a human creation but judges those human creations from an elevated and timeless standpoint. Poetic agency continues Nietzsche’s revolt against Platonism, against the appearance-reality distinction, and against the notion of truth as neither a product of imaginative redescription nor of contingent circumstance.

37As a pragmatist, Dewey refuses to consign the act of form-giving to the aesthetic realm. Form-giving, in his opinion, dominates human subjects’ daily attempts to cope with their environment. As we have seen, Dewey’s thought is clearly directed against the artificiality of aesthetic form. Moreover, for him form too often is linked to the traditional aesthetic-practical dichotomy that defines art by its contemplative noninstrumentality. Within the framework of Dewey’s anti-Kantianism, this notion of contemplative noninstrumentality of course appears as his bête noire. The problem with his naturalist aesthetics is that its usefulness is severely limited when it comes to modern art and literature. There are two reasons for this. First, Dewey offers a version of pragmatist humanism that illuminates the meaning of poetic agency, but ignores the production-aesthetic point of view. Second, he is so focused on warning against the attempt to turn form into a transcendental term that he does not see the necessity of historicizing the concept of form. In modernism, form can no longer be regarded as the rational, eternal, and necessary, but it has to be seen as the contingent, idiosyncratic, and fragmented. Dewey’s aesthetics does not offer the possibility of analyzing these idiosyncratic contingencies of form.

38In the chapter “Experience, Nature, and Art” in Experience and Nature, Dewey summarizes his aesthetic position as follows: “There are substantially but two alternatives. Either art is a continuation, by means of intelligent selection and arrangement, of natural tendencies of natural events; or art is a peculiar addition to nature springing from something dwelling exclusively within the breast of man, whatever name be given the latter” (Dewey 2008a: 291). This is a stark dichotomy for an antidualist. When art appears as “a peculiar addition to nature” and when it “has nothing to do with other activities and products,” as Dewey argues, it has “an esoteric character” (ibid.). Modernism, from Mallarmé’s hermetic symbolism to Kafka’s angst-ridden allegories and Picasso’s cubist paintings, indeed often seems esoteric. However, simply stating this esoteric character is insufficient. The idea of art as experience here has to be supplemented by a production-aesthetic perspective, which would analyze how form, history, and the artist’s subjectivity hang together and which would thus explain how the form-giving process reflects social developments. One can only approach these artworks if one seeks to explain why the artist has chosen such an idiosyncratic form for his or her text, painting, or musical composition. How does an artist work with the artistic material that is available to them? Why do they privilege one material over all others? Do they advance the idea that in their society there can be only one artistic material that is historically most advanced and that the material’s transformation coincides with that of society? In what way does the artist condemn art that uses regressive materials? Do they hold on to the category of the work, or do they challenge the modern principle of aesthetic purity? It is also interesting to ask how the artist establishes a link between her chosen form and society (or refuses to do so). A production-aesthetic perspective will offer the possibility of answering these questions (without necessarily engaging in a quasi-Adornian kind of nostalgia).

41In Lukács’s account, aesthetic form must never achieve autonomy, and it must never threaten to destroy the organic wholeness of the work of art (as it does in the surrealist or expressionist montage, for instance). Realism, according to Lukács, is incompatible with the idea that form would be more than a specific mode of the reflection of reality. Form that is divorced from any connection with life only leads to the worst extremes of modernist subjectivism. A reduced significance of form, an emphasis on the organic wholeness of the artwork, and the attempt to explain that the unity of the world that is depicted in the work of art ought to be regarded as a living whole that is inseparable from the human subject – these are important parallels between Lukács’s materialist aesthetics and Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics. These parallels ought to make us think. The ultimate irony would be that a pragmatist aesthetics, when discussing modern art and literature, repeats some of the misjudgments of a materialist aesthetics governed by the idea of a “Widerspiegelungstheorie” (reflection theory).

4. Conclusion

42Who needs aesthetic theory? Rorty obviously does not. Underscoring his “scepticism about ‘aesthetics’ as a field of inquiry,” he makes clear that he is “not sure that we need an aesthetic theory, or an aesthetic programme, at all. I doubt that there is much to be said about what unites painting, literature, music, sex and birdwatching while distinguishing all these from science, morals, politics, philosophy and religion” (Rorty 2001: 156). Faithful to his anti-Kantianism, Rorty, like Dewey, warns against the attempt to split culture up into three isolated spheres. This is problematic insofar as Rorty’s version of pragmatist humanism particularly relies on the notion of poetic agency. Aesthetic theory, as I have suggested, can explain the significance of poetic agency and the role of form-giving for a pragmatist humanism. This also signifies that aesthetic theory adds to the pragmatist’s understanding of the development from finding to making and to his or her endeavor to grasp the role of poetic agency and form-giving for the anti-authoritarian story of progress and emancipation.

43By criticizing a priori philosophies and their ideal of timeless pure thought, as well as their theory-practice dichotomy, pragmatists argue that there are no nonhuman truths and forms of authority, no eternal moral principles, and no need for the subject’s answerability to the world. In a detranscendentalized and postmetaphysical culture the world would no longer be a conversation partner, and the subject, by creatively and imaginatively acting to solve problems and achieve purposes, would appear as a maker. Faithful to the Nietzschean suggestion that only we have created the world that concerns us as human beings, pragmatist humanists contend that once we have set God and the various God-substitutes aside, we can present ourselves as the makers of our truths, principles, laws, and forms. Moreover, the immanence of pragmatist humanism also means that the subject as maker, refusing to lose him- or herself in theoretical abstraction, not only calls attention to the richness of the real world and its concrete facts, he or she also shows that this real world is incomplete, malleable, and hence waiting or asking for interpretation or other forms of human creativity and imagination (such as cooperating with each other for the common good). What this boils down to is that pragmatist humanism offers one the possibility of regarding form-giving as a central human activity, as creative action that radically questions the necessity of obeying a nonhuman authority. Developing a pragmatist aesthetics that offers a more nuanced and multilayered understanding of form than Dewey and Rorty is still a desideratum. The relation between pragmatism and aesthetic form is undoubtedly a topic that will preoccupy us in the future.