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.
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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.
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.
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.
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."
As a second prefatory matter, we must discuss meaning. Although we must prescind from the philosophical debate over the nature of meaning — and so cannot say whether it inheres in great works of art in indefinite amounts — we can and should address what Dewey has in mind when he uses the term. (If his account of meaning turns out to be problematic, then his account of aesthetics will inherit those problems.) First, we must follow Dewey in distinguishing between expression and statement. "Science states meanings," Dewey tells us, but "art expresses them." (84) This claim has some intuitive appeal insofar as many of us can call to mind examples of this contrast. Science tells us that humans are animals with extraordinarily complex minds unlike all else in the animal kingdom and perhaps the world; Magritte's Collective Invention expresses this, among other things.
But this analogy does not clarify aesthetic experience completely. Magritte's work is art, but much that we would not consider art may also express what science states. It seems natural to say that the visual illusions devised by psychologists express what their theories state. For example, one might say a Necker Cube expresses what vision researchers have stated concerning the human visual system's ability to "generate" three-dimensional percepts from the two dimensions of information available to the fovea. Since the visual system outputs more information than it receives as input from the fovea, it must make "assumptions." Viewing a Necker Cube, the visual system appears to make conflicting assumptions, so that the cube seems to "flip" from one face being foremost to another being so.
Fortunately, Dewey continues:
Statement sets forth the conditions under which an experience of an object or situation may be had…expression as distinct from statement does something different from leading to an experience. It constitutes one. (84–5)
This too seems to hold for both Collective Invention and a Necker Cube — or, anyway, it is not entirely clear that the Necker Cube fails to constitute an experience. The meanings of Collective Invention are no doubt various and complex, so let us put them aside a moment and consider the Cube. It does seem right to say that viewing a Necker Cube constitutes an experience: it is a slightly disorienting experience, and it has the cube's "flipping" as a part. If there were no experience constituted by viewing a Necker Cube, we should not be able to truly describe it as we just did. Should we say, then, that the Necker Cube is art?
Perhaps it is, but our analysis so far is incomplete. For Dewey further distinguishes between the experiencing of things and an experience:
Does it carry with it its own individualizing quality? Perhaps not. Perhaps one cannot see what is distinctive about a Necker Cube unless one has already experienced two-dimensional renderings of cubes, and unless one already knows that they should not "flip" as the Necker Cube does. But if we are this rigid with the "self-sufficiency" condition on an experience, Collective Invention likely will not satisfy the condition either. Plausibly, its distinctive quality depends conceptually on the viewer's having experienced fish, the ocean, and so on.
We should note that the unity found in the Necker Cube is quite modest compared to the richness of Magritte's painting. The latter's dark waves unify experiences of a fearsome and truly elemental ocean in the winter, of a fish's waterside flopping as simultaneously pathetic, terrifying, and heart-breaking, and one's own experiences of helplessness. But we should be loath to take these differences in degree of unity as differences in kind of experience. Viewing either Collective Invention or a Necker Cube constitutes an experience, rather than simply leading to one. We should say that each is a work of art.
Collective Invention, however, is perhaps great art. If so, then according to Dewey it should not only be the case that viewing it constitutes an experience, as with the Necker Cube; it should be that viewing it repeatedly constitutes repeated experiences, and that each successive experience is deeper — which, one may assume, is to say that each successive experience unifies more experiences.
Let us now ask how it could seem that something — anything — continually unifies ever more experiences. Consider the relationship between close friends, lovers, or family members. The briefest interval of separation is often concluded with an excited exchange of details of what each did in the other's absence. A husband reports the details of his day to his wife, who responds in kind, and then they ask their child to do the same. Dewey has told us that conversations are exemplary of the self-sufficiency of an experience, and it is plausible that they are unifying as well. If nothing else, they unify the experiences reported with the experience of reporting and sharing with one's companion, and in most cases also with listening to and inquiring about one's companion's experiences.
These conversations do indeed seem to become ever richer and greater in their unifications. The dinner-table talking unifies each family member's daytime activities with those of the other family members, and these with the dinner-table discussion itself. Tuesday's dinner is unified with Monday's, with the recent holiday's, and with all the dinners the family had together the previous year. In more dynamic families, there is more than a simple accretion of experiences — perhaps a mother gives helpful feedback on her son's day while a sister cracks fond jokes. As Dewey says, each participant retains her own character while simultaneously revealing it; we may add that each participant also develops her character further and comes to understand those of her companions with deeper subtlety.
Can one have such a "conversation" with Collective Invention? Every time one returns to it, it unifies ever more of one's experiences — it "speaks to" the viewer of all the things done since last viewing it, and associates them with what appears to be the picture's theme: a near-universal feature of modern life and the artist's intent in creating it. Let me focus on one aspect of the experiences Collective Invention unifies for its viewer, setting aside the viewer's relationship with the painter, other viewers, and so on.
José Ortega y Gasset said, "to live is to feel oneself lost." Let us suppose that this is true at least for many of us in modern times — perhaps it is not so in places or at times where divine convictions dominate an entire culture, or where indigenous humans commune more completely with the earth, or in the Garden of Eden. This experience, where it is felt, is pervasive. Though a wife might often claim that her husband makes her feel "at home," she can always doubt that he loves her; she can always suspect that she is massively deceived and that all the experiences that ostensibly give her life meaning are in fact illusory. She has and can have no guarantee that the world she lives in is not completely foreign to her and that, in the next moment, its thorough unfamiliarity will be revealed.
Collective Invention expresses these feelings perfectly. The figure in the painting is not just a "fish out of water" — its situation is even worse. It has a fish's gills and a human's ungainly legs. Out of the water, it may walk, but it cannot breathe. In the water, it may breathe, but it is poorly equipped for swimming: its front is made to glide through the water side to side while its bottom is best suited for kicking like a propeller. The viewer sees in Collective Invention a creature that surely feels itself lost, and so the painting gives an image to the pervasive feeling of living. We might say, then, that it not only "speaks to" feelings of helplessness and being lost, it also "speaks for" them — it gives voice to them.
I have attempted to clarify John Dewey's claim that great art contains a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning. For Dewey, the meaning of art is expressed rather than stated; that is, viewing art constitutes an experience. Viewing great art, then, should constitute an especially rich experience. I have characterized the seeming inexhaustibility of "especially rich" in temporal terms: as the viewer's returning to the art product on multiple occasions. This is primarily a convenient way of clarifying the point — I do believe that the depth of meaning in a great work of art can seem inexhaustible even within a single viewing.
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