John Dewey: What Resists Us Helps Us

(This post is an installment of CommonSensical)

Last week I presented some ideas concerning restriction as a creative catalyst, and touched upon the writings of John Dewey (1859-1952), one of the finest intellects this country ever produced.

Dewey was the rare sort of soul whose scope of achievement seems wholly the product of genius born into an earlier and more salutary age. He was a preeminent university educator for most of his adult life, a major philosophical influence on American pedagogy, an accomplished psychologist, an authoritative social commentator and Humanist spokesman, and a highly effective political activist. It’s enough to boggle the mind of contemporary admirers.

Somehow, Dewey also managed to compose some of the most adroit and eloquent writing in the “side area” of aesthetics, and it’s here that he had much to say about the paradoxical benefits, in creative terms, of a somewhat blocked creative expression. Last week I wrote:

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

John Dewey would concur. In fact, I was basically paraphrasing the man.

And today I’d like to share some selected excerpts from Dewey’s great work Art As Experience (1934).

Instead of “restriction,” Dewey’s keyword is “resistance.”

“Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—whether through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed.

Dewey refers to biology and the adaptive processes of living creatures in order to argue the usefulness of resistance. It’s a good frame of reference, and gets one thinking positively about resistance as imperative to personal and creative growth and evolution.

However, because I’m excerpting selectively here, I should make clear that Dewey’s analogy is not meant to point out the ruthlessness required for survival of the fittest, nor the merits of Social Darwinism — nothing of the kind. Rather, in truer Dewey manner, the subject here is the mysterious, unexpected ways our creativity is enhanced or reduced in the face of certain inevitable forces (the day job, the dishes, distractions), and thus the ways our ideas succeed or fail to come to full fruition. In the following passages we could substitute “creativity” for “life” and cut to the analogy’s chase.

If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life [creativity] grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives….

If life [creativity] continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life [creativity]. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. …Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, because of, tension.

Granted, too much resistance can prove harmful, but medium-size tension can be a good thing. If the resistance we face is not completely obstructive, and we’re allowed to make steady, incremental progress toward our creative ideal, we may ultimately find ourselves arrived at what Dewey calls “a more extensive balance … a more significant life.”

Pushing through resistance, our ideas get toned up, driven to evolve into something better, more creative, and more robust, somewhat in the way a body grows immune to disease by low-level exposure. The ideas’ final execution may altogether outshine our original concepts. What’s more, we may find that the whole process of germination, resistance, and achievement has taken us to new personal and creative heights.

Strange as it seems, a creative undertaking — whatever it is, so long as it is serious — will likely profit from influences reasonably adverse to its expression (the day-job, etc.). In fact, Dewey sees resistance, and the surmounting of it by the creative soul, as aspects of a simple natural rhythm — the yin and yang, or perhaps winter and summer, of existence — and indispensable to a fulfilling life experience. Too much won too easily rarely satisfies, as many a morality tale has told us.

The rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union not only persists in man but becomes conscious with him; its conditions are material out of which he forms purposes. … Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. …

Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment after consummated irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one. The outcome is balance and counterbalance. These are not static nor mechanical. They express power that is intense because measured through overcoming resistance. …

…A world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict. Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and re-establishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. …

And yet, of course, having pushed through all obstacles and ushered a creative work into existence, we learn anew that the natural rhythm of germination and resistance must continue. We see that engaging this process (“not shunning moments of resistance and tension”), and growing in our most meaningful work over time, is the stuff of a fulfilling life.

The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew. Any attempt to perpetuate beyond its term the enjoyment attending the time of fulfillment and harmony constitutes withdrawal from the world. Hence it marks the lowering and loss of vitality. But, through the phases of perturbation and conflict, there abides the deep-seated memory of an underlying harmony, the sense of which haunts life like the sense of being founded on a rock. …

And now monsieur Dewey gets downright poetic:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. …Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates opposition and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.

There is no art without the composure that corresponds to design and composition in the object. But there is also none without resistance, tension, and excitement; otherwise the calm induced is not one of fulfillment.

Artists and creatives: give thanks for the eloquent insight of John Dewey. Fear not resistance. Harness it if you can. And keep working.

You may also enjoy:

“Roadblocks, Resitrictions, and Other Helpful Things”

“Working Without Working”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan”

“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“Are You An Amateur? Why Not?”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”