Mead’s Account of Aesthetic Experience. A Contextual Assessment

This essay examines Mead’s view of “aesthetic experience” by focusing primarily on his only paper devoted to the subject. The paper argues that he significantly contributed to pragmatist aesthetics, sharing Dewey’s efforts to provide a theory of experience that included an account of its aesthetic features, and opposing the dominant autonomistic current within the discipline. The author claims that Experience and Nature provided an opportunity for Mead to enrich his philosophy of the act with a conception of aesthetic experiences as those acts in which even intermediate stages or means of achieving ends can be enjoyed. However, the author argues that he still seems to view aesthetic experience in terms of instrumental action, because he considers things, events, and situations in terms of what the agent can do through them within a teleologically oriented action, and tends to overlook qualitative experience, i.e. what things do directly to the organism.