Literary Art in the Formation of the Great Community: John Dewey’s Theory of Public Ideas in The Public and Its Problems

ion This process involves abstraction. As Dewey observes, “Every work of art ‘abstracts’ in some degree from the particular traits of objects expressed.”7 The artist begins with materials as encountered in experience but abstracts from them, shapes and reshapes them as elements of a new experience that nonetheless retains the particularity and hence the vitality of the original. While a still life, for example, works with everyday materials such as apples and bottles, a still life by Chardin or Cezanne presents these materials in terms of relations of lines, planes and colors inherently enjoyed in perception. This re-ordering could not occur without some measure of ‘abstraction’ from physical existence.8 Speaking of Renoir’s nudes, Dewey states, The voluptuous qualities of flesh are retained, even accentuated. But conditions of the physical existence of nude bodies have been abstracted from. Through abstraction . . . ordinary associations with bare bodies are transferred into a new realm, for these associations are practical stimuli which disappear in the work of art.9