Dewey, Magritte, and Wallace: Inexhaustible Meaning in Art
This paper examines John Dewey's claim that great art possesses a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning, applying his aesthetic theory to two modern masterpieces: René Magritte's painting Collective Invention and David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Drawing on Dewey's Art as Experience, the paper clarifies the distinction between art products and works of art, between statement and expression, and between mere experiencing and "an experience." It then argues that both works speak to a pervasive modern feeling of dislocation and being lost — as articulated by José Ortega y Gasset — and that this thematic resonance with broadly shared modern experience is what makes their depth of meaning seemingly inexhaustible for contemporary viewers and readers.
- Introduction: Dewey's Claim and Its Complications: Frames Dewey's thesis and its definitional difficulties
- What Is a Work of Art? Dewey's Relational Account: Art as relation between object and active viewer
- Meaning, Expression, and the Nature of an Experience: Dewey's distinction between statement and expression
- The Necker Cube and the Limits of Aesthetic Experience: Testing Dewey's criteria against a perceptual illusion
- Collective Invention and the Feeling of Being Lost: Magritte's painting as expression of modern dislocation
- Infinite Jest and the Pervasiveness of Dislocation: Wallace's novel as encyclopedia of modern hurt
- Conclusion: Thematic Universality and Inexhaustible Meaning: Qualified defense of Dewey's inexhaustibility claim
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper carefully stages its argument, establishing theoretical groundwork (Dewey's definitions of art, meaning, and experience) before applying it to specific works, making each analytical move legible and well-prepared.
- The author is explicit about qualifications and limitations — acknowledging that "inexhaustibility" cannot be proven in an unrestricted sense — which lends intellectual honesty and academic credibility to what could otherwise be an overreaching claim.
- The use of a contrasting example (the Necker Cube) to probe the boundaries of Dewey's criteria is an elegant dialectical technique that sharpens the distinctions being drawn before the main analyses begin.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates concept clarification through progressive refinement: rather than defining key terms once and moving on, it returns repeatedly to concepts like "self-sufficiency," "unity," and "expression" as new examples test their limits. This iterative method — common in analytic philosophy — allows the author to arrive at a nuanced, defensible position rather than a simplistic one.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by framing Dewey's claim and its definitional difficulties, then methodically unpacks his aesthetic theory across several sections. A pivot occurs at the Necker Cube discussion, where the theory is stress-tested before being applied to the two chosen artworks. The final two analytical sections treat Magritte and Wallace in parallel, both organized around Ortega y Gasset's idea that "to live is to feel oneself lost." The conclusion synthesizes the findings and explicitly restates the paper's qualified thesis.
Introduction: Dewey's Claim and Its Complications
John Dewey has claimed that great art has a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning. It is very difficult to evaluate this claim. The precise denotation of "meaning" is obscure and hotly contested in philosophy and elsewhere. It is similarly unclear how we should understand "inexhaustible" — surely the meaning of a masterwork is not impossible to exhaust in the unrestricted sense of impossible. It is possible that an omnipotent deity exists, and something omnipotent could exhaust the meaning of anything. But then how should we understand the scope of possibility? And how can we determine whether something's inexhaustibility is sufficient to be seemingly inexhaustible?
It would be dubious to settle these questions here, even though doing so would be necessary to reaching an unqualified conclusion. This paper is resigned, then, to a qualified conclusion. It first rehearses Dewey's claims in favor of the inexhaustibility of meaning, clarifying his thesis as we proceed. Afterward, we ask whether these considerations hold for two masterpieces: Magritte's Collective Invention and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
The conclusion is that insofar as they "speak to" universal features of human life, they indeed contain inexhaustible depths of meaning. This paper does not claim that there are universal features of human life, nor that if there are it is possible to "speak to" them. Rather, it takes these two great works of art to "speak to" features very common in modern life, and their depths of meaning are thus seemingly inexhaustible for many modern individuals.
What Is a Work of Art? Dewey's Relational Account
In order to decide whether some particular work of art seems to have an inexhaustible depth of meaning, we must be clear about what Dewey considers a work of art — and it is not what one might assume. For Dewey, da Vinci's Mona Lisa is not a work of art; neither is Dante's Divine Comedy nor Brunelleschi's Il Duomo. These are all, rather, art products. Insofar as we think of them as artifacts that sit passively and enjoy their reputations as masterworks independent of any appreciator, they are not works of art. The work of art, on the contrary, is essentially constituted by the interaction of art product and the one who actively appreciates it. The following remarks are representative of Dewey's thoughts on the matter:
…the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears. (249)
The "thing" in which a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning inheres, then, is in fact a strange sort of thing — it is a relation. It is the relation between art object and viewer. With this noted, and in order to avoid clumsy and circuitous locutions, this paper will refer to the "work of art" associated with any art product by the same name as that product. Thus, the work of art involving both Magritte's Collective Invention and some viewer will simply be called "Collective Invention."
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