Rhythm ’n’ Dewey: an adverbialist ontology of art

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a process-based ontology of art following John Dewey’s concepts of experience and rhythm. I will adopt a pragmatist and embodied point of view within an adverbialist framework. I will defend the idea of an artistic way of experiencing – a subtype of aesthetic experience – as something which allows us to assign the ontological category of art to an object or event. The adverbial features of this artistic way of experiencing will be characterized as being rhythmic in nature. This goal will be achieved in three steps. First, I will explain and elaborate on the concept of adverbialism. Second, the importance of rhythm in experience will be taken into account through a close reading of Dewey’s philosophy and by incorporating the nuances of the Pre-Socratic idea of rhuthmos, as well as some recent findings about brain and bodily oscillations from cognitive science. Third, to conclude I will propose four necessary but not sufficient features of the rhythmic engagement enacted while an artistic way of experiencing takes place: a necessary degree of object or event awareness, a positive feedback dynamic, a loosening of the sense of agency, and being attentionally demanding.