Dewey on Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience

Within aesthetic theory, the last decades have seen an increasing interest in everyday aesthetics, an interest that can take different directions. For some scholars, the everyday is the reservoir from which any art must draw in order to transform it into aesthetic expressions; for others, the emphasis on the ordinary marks a need to relocate aesthetics outside the canon of fine art and bring to attention the manifold ways in which aesthetic experiences unfold within the everyday itself.Footnote ² In any case, such everyday aesthetics have brought ordinary experience to the status of something worthy of philosophical attention. As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has pointed out, the longing for overcoming art’s self-enclosed autonomy by appealing to everyday experiences is far from new; in the last century it was central to such different movements as those of the avant-garde and arts and crafts, and was seen also in philosophy—first and foremost in Dewey’s philosophical aesthetics. Nevertheless, the appeal to the everyday is still called for today, Gumbrecht argues, even if at times it appears more nostalgic than future oriented. According to Gumbrecht, the nostalgic orientation comes to expression in current interest through the overlap between aesthetics and religious experience:

This passage is relevant to my undertaking because it emphasizes the affinity between experiences of art and religion, which, by implication, suggests that aesthetics might shed light on religious experience. However, Gumbrecht’s point is not to celebrate that opportunity, but rather to indicate the way aesthetic and religious experience become allies in their common disappointment: both experiences have lost convincing entrenchment in everyday life. What Gumbrecht proposes is to reopen different domains by demonstrating the multiple modalities in which aesthetic experience permeates the everyday world through a “more dispersed decentralized map of aesthetic pleasures.”Footnote ⁴ As Dewey already has made clear, the central problem we are faced with is indeed the separation between aesthetic (and religious) experience and ordinary experience.Footnote ⁵ While Gumbrecht wants to leave the affinity between the religious and the aesthetic behind in order to move on, could we not follow another direction? Without giving up their affinity, we could also ask why aesthetic and religious experience have become alienated from ordinary experience, and possibly attempt to give a different account of why they nevertheless may be rooted in ordinary experience. I take Dewey to suggest precisely this.

Even if one finds some telling examples of ordinary life in his Art as Experience—noticing fire engines rushing by, watching the grace of a ballplayer, poking a stick into a burning wood fire—Dewey is not trying to enhance ordinary events into an aesthetics of their own, as the current trend of everyday aesthetics proposes. In keeping with the other trend referred to above, his aim is to track the roots of aesthetic experience of art, traditionally conceived, back into the soil from which it springs.Footnote ⁶ Dewey commences with the following program: “The task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience” (AE, 9). Dewey’s move is prompted by what he calls “the museum conception of art,” a conception that deliberately puts works of art on a pedestal and thus estranges them from ordinary experience.

Surprisingly perhaps, given Dewey’s skepticism toward institutionalized religions, he frequently illustrates aesthetic experience with examples taken from religious contexts. Foreshadowing Gumbrecht’s diagnosis of the separation between art and ordinary experience, he says that the “forces at work are those that have removed religion as well as fine art from the scope of the common or community life” (AE, 12). More interestingly, this negative unity of art and religion also suggests a corresponding positive one. There are times when Dewey argues both that there are religious dimensions of aesthetic experiences and, conversely, that there are religious occasions, such as cults and rituals, that cannot be understood except for their aesthetic impact (AE, 199, 36). Thus, on this level, there are no strict divisions between aesthetic, religious, or, say, moral experience—they can all share the same quality.Footnote ⁷

The question is what, more specifically, ordinary experience means in Dewey’s philosophy. Dewey has often been criticized for not providing strict definitions of what he means by his central notions, such as “experience”; he is not even completely consistent in his employment of his terms. In the beginning of Art as Experience, Dewey makes appeals to ordinary experience literally on every page. He speaks of “everyday events, doings and suffering,” of the needed recourse to “ordinary forces and conditions,” of the dangers of separating art from “objects and scenes of ordinary experience”; he pays heed to ordinary machines excavating holes, housewives tending their plants, and so forth (AE, 9–18). This sense of the ordinary seems to refer to experiences made within a social web, furnished by culture and technology, and scenes and situations occurring from day to day, independent of theoretical reflection.

Immediately following that section, Dewey professes to give us a coherent idea of what such ordinary or normal experience amounts to. Here he draws attention to the basic natural underpinning of perception, modeled on the organism adapting to its environment. Basically, there is no detachment between the organism and its environment; the organism dynamically adapts itself through lack and satisfaction, resistance and fulfillment. The dynamics of temporary breaks and reunions are particularly significant to Dewey, because they make up the conditions for experiencing something like an aesthetic quality (AE, 22). The merits of such a naturalist explanation are that it enables Dewey to regard the split between subject and object, mind and matter, as derived from a more original, pre-reflective involvement with the world. Moreover, it also serves as an organic explanation that can illuminate dynamics underlying ordinary and aesthetic experience. While such a naturalist explanation is part of Dewey’s larger philosophical project, it nevertheless appears as a far cry from the examples he cites in his previous section. The culturally oriented and the naturalistic explanation seem strangely at odds with one another.

Interestingly, in Experience and Nature, Dewey develops his notion of experience in a way that might reveal why he thinks that both socially embedded practices and the organic dimensions of life belong to his wide notion of ordinary experience. The distinction between what Dewey calls primary experience and secondary experience is introduced as he argues for a model of philosophical reasoning that undercuts any illusion of regarding theoretical constructions as more real than ordinary things. Primary experience, then, is the “what” of experience, given prior to reflection, while secondary experience arises in reflection and is the outcome of theoretical explanations. Importantly, ordinary (or primary) experience is both the inalienable starting point and the terminal point of Dewey’s philosophical method.Footnote ⁸ As Dewey employs it, ordinary experience is not bound to any region or content; rather, it refers generally to the pre-reflective experience in one’s life. Ordinariness, then, does not so much denote daily living along cultural norms; neither does it solely concern the organic basis for connecting to the environment, but it designates the common immersion in both culture and nature prior to secondary reflection.

How does such ordinary experience relate to aesthetic experience? Dewey’s central idea here is that of intensifications or enhancements. Analytically, an intensified experience cannot be cut off from, but rather, presupposes a prior, less intense experience, but at the same time the former must distinguish itself from the latter, being denser, more compressed, indeed, intensified. Such an intensification is “no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but … is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience” (AE, 52–53). Even if the ordinary is predominated by the less-intensified experiences, some experiences occasionally stand out. Dewey distinguishes between, on the one hand, “experience,” in its general and more or less dull sense, where the experience always remains fragmentary and inchoate, and, on the other hand, “having an experience,” where the experience runs its course to fulfillment as all parts are made complete within an accomplished unity (AE, 42). This might include particular occasions that make a difference, such as the difference between enjoying a meal at a top restaurant and an ordinary meal. Having an experience means that one no longer simply recognizes the things that surround us, where objects are either habitually identified or made into means to particular purposes. In the former case, there is a change from recognition to perception in the proper sense, where what is experienced is taken in and attended to for its own sake (AE, 63). Such a wide category comprises different kinds of experiences, including aesthetic and, arguably, religious experiences.

What is brought to light in an experience, such as an aesthetic experience, is not the sheer presence of a work, a thing, or a situation. As mentioned above, central to Dewey’s notion of experience is that it is decidedly non-atomistic and holistic. That means that any phenomenon will be informed by all the previously accumulated experiences in the relevant field, so that when an artwork intensifies an experience, the past is brought into the present. Such an aesthetic experience is like a climax that can gain its intensity only through the way the plot builds up toward it, or, in Dewey’s word, a flash of lightning in a dark landscape where “the recognition is not itself a mere point of time. It is the focal culmination of a long, slow process of maturation” (AE, 29). The ordinary makes up the slow process of maturation, with its experiences made through repeated doings and sufferings, and despite their humble appearance, ordinary experiences are precisely what is brought to the fore, compressed and intensified.

It is not only the past temporal dimension that bestows the distinct quality on an experience but also its spatial counterpart. According to Dewey, the quality of an experience is not dictated by either subjective states or objective traits but draws on the sense of unity that embraces a situation, sometimes spoken of as setting, background, or horizon. As with the past, backgrounds to situations also remain silently implied. Any time we direct our attention to a focal object, we already presuppose the background that recedes from the foreground. A thing without a background is without identity and unity. Still, Dewey argues that we cannot attend directly to the quality of the situation or fix it conceptually, as the background inevitably withdraws from our attention (AE, 198). Despite such withdrawal, the quality is not vague but sketches out a unity that points beyond perception toward a whole that gives the present object its specificity. The achievement of a work of art consists in allowing us to experience the evasive quality of the whole, given as a compressed mood or emotional inflection.Footnote ⁹ Aesthetic experiences draw on the temporal and spatial horizons made up by ordinary experience, by things, people, the sky, streets, the sea, and so on. By means of their intensification, experience makes present the otherwise neglected aspects of our daily life.

“But any experience, even the most ordinary,” Dewey writes, “has an indefinite total setting” (AE, 197). This means that any ordinary thing, act, or event has a background that refers further to an indefinitely wider totality. Hence, there are no clear boundaries to a setting or situation. To be in a situation is like being surrounded by a horizon that constantly widens as you move. The horizon stretches out indefinitely, and thus awakens the feeling of something more, something beyond the present. Whenever the feeling of unlimitedness is intensified, Dewey notes, it becomes religious, even mystical.Footnote ¹⁰ Even as marginal as mystical experiences sound, Dewey says that “there is every reason to suppose that, in some degree of intensity, they [mystical experiences] occur so frequently that they may be regarded as normal manifestations that take place at certain rhythmic points in the movement of experience.”Footnote ¹¹ This is perhaps not that strange, given that horizons and qualities are always part of ordinary experience. Even as there are no boundaries to a quality, it nevertheless presents itself as a whole. Aesthetic experience, then, ultimately invokes the all-inclusive whole in which we live. But so can religious experience. By use of the imagination (which, for Dewey, in no way means making up illusions), religious experience directs itself to encompassing horizons.Footnote ¹² This convergence suggests why religious feeling often accompanies aesthetic perception, of which Dewey writes: “We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world.” If this were all, then religious feeling would lose its relevance for ordinary life and experience; it would be cut off into a separate realm. But that is obviously not what Dewey has in mind, for he goes on to evoke “a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experience” (AE, 199). In other words, both aesthetic and religious experiences refer us to background qualities that are always implicitly there in ordinary life, even if they point beyond the ordinary, but they are first uncovered as such in condensed experiences.

The Heterogeneous Everyday

Expanding on Dewey’s notion of ordinary experience, I want to fill out one dimension not yet mentioned that I will call the everyday’s “heterogeneity.” I think that one of the implicit premises made when earlier researchers equated the profane with the everyday was that they took for granted the everyday as fundamentally homogenous. The everyday was, and still is, often portrayed as the repetition of the same, founded on habits and conventions, and thus a closed sphere of sheer familiarity. Now, it is true that what happens from day to day for the most part does follow such descriptions. Take habits and social conventions—they unburden our attention so that we can direct ourselves to other tasks at hand. Habits not only unburden but are, following Dewey, the very functions by which we become one with the world in the first place: “Through habits formed in intercourse with the world, we also in-habit the world. It becomes a home and the home is part of our every experience” (AE, 109). It is by habits that we first are installed in our organic environment, that we are able to act and speak within a social environment, and in both cases, habits stabilize and make those environments our home. Habits also influence our intellectual ideas insofar as the latter feed on sensations, which in turn are filtered and rearranged by habits as they flow into perceptions. No doubt, Dewey thinks habits run deep: “the thing which is closest to us, the means within our power, is a habit.”Footnote ¹³

Now, if habits are all there is to the everyday, it is not hard to understand that art must be set apart from the everyday and religion relegated to the complete otherness of the sacred sphere. Indeed, Dewey points out that it is precisely such a homogenous idea of the ordinary—as habitual, monotonous, and stereotypical—that fuels the idea that art and religion must be something completely different (AE, 264). The question is whether the everyday is more than this: Is there no room for the strange, the extraordinary, or the sacred, as contained therein? Although Dewey mentions ruptures and breaks in the ordinary flow of experience, he does not take any sustained effort to counterbalance the conception of the homogeneous everyday. On the contrary, he says that ordinary experience is anaesthetic, is slack, can make us drift, and is characterized as apathy and lassitude (AE, 46, 264). Yet, it is possible to expand on some of Dewey’s analyses in order to show that the ordinary is indeed crossed by some kinds of extraordinariness within the ordinary.

In the way Dewey speaks of religious feelings of a world beyond, we can realize how any focal object ultimately refers us toward an open horizon. This open horizon does not only designate the “total setting,” which Dewey, in Hegelian fashion, can say, but, more radically, I think, it is a horizon that even withdraws from that totality.Footnote ¹⁴ This can be glimpsed by expanding his analysis of focal objects and background qualities. The background comprises everything silently implied in the perception of a focal object, from the concrete context expanding to an outer horizon. But there is also an inner horizon in the focal object, hidden from an external perspective, such as its inner constitution and materiality. We usually just rely on such horizons, but there are also occasions when we take things in the usual way, and it turns out that we are wrong: I take something for an apple, but once lifting it to my mouth, I realize it is a wooden copy; or I pass a window and see a person inside, which upon closer inspection turns out to be a mannequin. Such trivial examples show that we do imply horizons and wholes that inform what we take focal objects to be, but which we have not, strictly speaking, perceived. More importantly, since the identification of every focal object relies on the horizons we imply, any one of them can, in principle, turn strange. The perceptual change of the apple or the person indicates that there is always more to ordinary situations; indeed, they take place on a horizon that cannot be exhausted, let alone fixed.

In traditional metaphysics, such a possibility is always foreclosed, because all contingencies are dispensed with in order to fix an essence in which nothing is obscure. According to Dewey, this only reveals how insufficient the notion of metaphysical knowledge is. To his mind, any object is charged with aspects and potentialities that are not explicit. This simply belongs to the way we are immersed in a world that exceeds the grasp of knowledge. To fix objects as having “no hidden possibilities, no novelties or obscurities, is possible only on the basis of a philosophy which at some point draws an arbitrary line between nature and experience.”Footnote ¹⁵ Of course, any object within a setting must be given some orientation. Thus, the sudden strangeness does not turn the object into a “wholly other” but instigates a wavering between the familiar and the strange. We can learn that something was not an apple after all, but the experience brings with it the experience of a surplus I have never fully been aware of. It is not only the focal object that can change; in fact, the entire background quality can explode, so to speak, and prove itself to be radically open, open to something more and different. Far from being a stable totality, the ordinary opens up and leaves us in a state of wonder, not knowing in or out.Footnote ¹⁶

Not only things but also other people can reveal themselves in a similar manner. As Emmanuel Levinas has expressed it: “To meet a man is to be kept awake by an enigma.”Footnote ¹⁷ While this might be so, many times during the day we are surrounded by people we do not know, leading lives of their own and experiencing pleasures and pain of which we have not the faintest idea. We pass people on the street, and we hardly notice their faces. We can even see acquaintances and greet them only with a nod or avoid them altogether. There is no wonder or mystery in this, because we do not really see them; in Dewey’s lingo, we only recognize them, that is, identify them, according to old habits and stereotypes. But sometimes we stop and see in an emphatic sense—we make what Dewey calls an experience. He writes: “Sometimes in contact with a human being we are struck with traits, perhaps of only physical characteristics, of which we were not previously aware. We realize that we never knew the person before; we had not seen him in any pregnant sense” (AE, 59). This example has a structure similar to the examples with the apple and the mannequin cited above: It starts with a perfectly ordinary encounter, and suddenly, for some reason, the chain of habitual recognitions is interrupted: the experience is opened up and intensified, as the familiar turns strange. It is possible to take such interruption as an opportunity to deepen our familiarity with the other, learning to know the other in a new, perhaps deeper way. That would be a way of confirming our habitual recognition, with its more or less fixed identity. But Dewey’s insistence on seeing in the pregnant sense seems to pull in the other direction, toward a seeing that remains open to what exceeds that recognition, something more and other, or again: “We realize that we never knew the person before.” This implies that every person retains secret horizons that are not on the other side of an encounter but that are inscribed in it, as the potential for strangeness always kept in reserve.

The point of expanding on Dewey’s examples of the focal thing and the foreignness of the acquainted other is to suggest that the ordinary is far from homogenous. It harbors scattered traces of surprises, extraordinariness, strangeness, and even sacredness. If this is so, then the ordinary cannot be conceived as a familiar sphere closed in on itself. Graphically put, the routes of our daily life do not form a neat grid of the totality of our lifeworld; rather, they make up a labyrinth or network of activities and language games.Footnote ¹⁸ And of course, in such a network, there will be no neat categorization or detached “God’s-eye view,” in which everything falls into place; on the contrary, any familiar routes can be crossed by sudden encounters, shocks, interruptions, and breakdowns. Sometimes we quickly reorient ourselves and regain our grip on reality, as in the case where I thought I was taking an apple, which turned out to be a wooden copy, or when I thought I saw a person in the window, which, upon closer scrutiny, turned out to be a mannequin. At other times, we are left without words, in wonder or holy awe, for instance, when taking a newborn child in our arms or watching how the first snow transfigures the landscape. The religious traces—met in the vulnerable face, the beauty of a horizon, or a symbolically charged thing—do not transport us outside the ordinary; they make up the extraordinary of the ordinary.

In the first chapter of Art as Experience, Dewey sets out two questions to be solved. One concerns the relation between ordinary experience and art, which I have attended to in the previous part; the other raises a similarly perplexing question: “If artistic and esthetic quality is implicit in every normal experience, how shall we explain how and why it so generally fails to become explicit?” (AE, 18). The question is directed toward ordinary experience and is a pressing one. For, given that the ordinary is implied in the intensification, as in aesthetic experience, and further, if the ordinary not only is the field of the familiar but also involves the foreign and strange, how is it that we usually fail to bring such things to our notice? An adequate account of the ordinary must not only preserve its heterogeneity but must also provide an answer to this. At least as a first move, we must recognize that the ordinary also entails an inner dynamics, wavering between what Heidegger calls the fallenness of the everyday and its occasional counter-events.Footnote ¹⁹ The wondrous and mysterious dimensions always implicitly present tend to be obscured by exactly those features that make the world our home in the first place: habits, routines, stereotypes, and monotony. This fallenness is the reason experiences do not become expressive; the apathy and stereotypes build, as it were, a “shell about the objects,” as Dewey complains, even contending that their “familiarity induce indifference, prejudice blinds us” (AE, 110). Importantly, this fallenness is not the original state that cancels the heterogeneity of the everyday but is rather a tendency to fall away from the original heterogeneity already there.

Cultic Play between Discontinuity and Continuity

I want to propose that not only the aesthetic experience of art but also religious experience as enacted and undergone in liturgy and worship has the power to crack the shell around objects. This is not principally different from the way in which interruptions and intensifications make the ordinary extraordinary; yet, as it comes to pass within the structure of a cultic event, it unfolds within a more or less institutionalized and rule-governed play.

Play has been an important category during the past one hundred years in a wide array of fields, such as theology, pedagogy, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Dewey himself does not utilize the notion of play in his investigations of aesthetics or religion, but he comments briefly on it in his philosophy of education. According to Dewey, it is fundamentally true that in play the activity is its own end. In play, there are no external ends: no penalties to be avoided or rewards to be gained. But the lack of external ends is easily misunderstood, Dewey claims, as if play had no internal direction—which would reduce it to a meaningless activity. However, the activity of playing has both meaning and direction, not dictated from beyond itself but as an internal direction that orients successive acts. It is this lack of external constraints or instrumental ends that makes it different from work.Footnote ²⁰

One of the pioneering thinkers who brought similar ideas into theological consideration about the same time was Romano Guardini, who proposed that the spirit of the liturgy could best be captured as play. Indeed, for him, the motive is also anti-instrumentalist: Cultic play must be understood as a break away from the modern compulsion that reduces all activity to means toward ends. Worship, in contrast, is play without any purposes beyond its own fulfillment, and hence with solely internal aims.Footnote ²¹ While it has been widely accepted that the nature of play cannot be reduced to a means toward an end, the question remains as to how play should be conceived with regard to daily life. To rephrase the dilemma I noted in the introduction: If there is no tie between cultic play and ordinary experience, then cultic play becomes purely esoteric with no relevance to everyday life; but if it just extends the everyday without distinction, nothing except the ordinary’s familiar, habitual, and fallen states will be repeated.

In reflecting upon the emergence of cultic play, Eugen Fink is aware of the danger of portraying cultic play with such brilliance and significance that everyday life must appear as its pale shadow. Such portrayal is, however, both partly right and partly wrong: right because there is a separation between the cult and the everyday, and yet wrong, since the point of the separation is not to remove the cult’s participants from the everyday. In a rather speculative manner, Fink suggests that in an imagined golden age, there existed no cult, because everything was shot through with the presence of gods and Being. However, as humans started to develop customs, this presence was clouded, much like in the fallen everyday. In order to break through the trivialization of the world of customs, humans set apart special cultic practices and demarcated sacred zones in time and space. While cultic play is a countermove against the fallen everyday, Fink argues that it is neither oriented toward the otherworldly nor detached from the ordinary world—rather, it seeks to preserve its depth and richness:

While this dialectical relation is very helpful, especially as it moves in close circles with the way aesthetic experience is provoked according to Dewey, little is said about how cultic play is supposed to accomplish this penetration of the everyday. It seems to me that we need to look more closely into two dimensions of play’s function—its discontinuity and its continuity with the everyday.

As Fink correctly observes, the cult must be set apart from the everyday, as discontinuous with it, in order to break open the shell of its habits and customs. Every game—from children playing with dolls to theaters and rituals—constitutes its own play world according to its inner, constitutive rules that have no direct application outside it. While taking place in the actual world, play brings to the presence an imaginative or, in Fink’s words, “non-actual” world, compressed into playthings. The doll is not a fabrication but a specific girl, the actor does not present himself but embodies a character, and the bread of the sacrament is not only bread but also the body of Christ.Footnote ²³ There has been a tendency in anthropology to regard this play world as a realm of its own. Roger Caillois, for example, writes that “play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and space…. Nothing that takes place outside this ideal frontier is relevant.”Footnote ²⁴ More promising, in my view, is the way Dewey refers to the special experience of procession, incense, music, and radiance of colored light in cultic play. Speaking about the experience of such things, Dewey says that it “intensifies emotional thrill and punctuates the interest that belongs to all break in familiar routine” (AE, 37). The relevant argument I take Dewey to suggest is that, in contrast to Caillois, the breaks and discontinuities that are certainly part of the sacred game are entrenched in breaks and discontinuities that happen within the ordinary world. As much as ordinary breaks bring attention to the otherwise neglected, so much more does a dramatized sequence of cultic play let the hidden strata of the ordinary stand out. Its discontinuity with the ordinary brings the latter to the fore in an intensified experience.

The discontinuity of cultic play so conceived does not prevent but rather discloses a deeper sense of continuity between cultic play and the everyday. The continuity is double: it moves from the everyday to cultic play, and from play toward the everyday (I will return to the latter toward the end). The path that leads from the everyday to the cult follows Dewey’s analyses of aesthetic experience. The awakening of the heightened attention invoked by processions, solemn hymns, sacrifice, and so on presupposes that ordinary experience is already stored. Some of those more or less ordinary experiences already stand out, say, as a thing or person turning strange, but most of them have been absorbed beneath the threshold of consciousness, like foreign and familiar traces to which we have never fully attended. These latter experiences are normally forgotten, not because they are disagreeable and hard to integrate, as in Freud’s unconscious, but, on the contrary, Dewey says, because they have so deeply sunk into ourselves that we are not able to discern them—they have become part of who we are (AE, 77–78). Upon singing a hymn, not only is former acquaintance with that hymn blending into the experience but a whole field of our ordinary life with music is as well. And likewise, particular gestures—folding of hands, making a cross—that take on symbolic meanings are unintelligible without presupposing a gestural language that can be at once activated and transcended in the cult. The outcome is not only a heightened attention to the sacred traces that lie hidden in the ordinary but a transfiguration of them: the ordinary turns extraordinary.Footnote ²⁵

Take the Christian Eucharist as an example. The bread is certainly an ordinary object, known from countless meals, at breakfast and supper. It not only becomes, literally, part of us as we eat and digest it, but all the instances in which we take the bread for granted become important points of orientation in the repetitive structures of our everyday lives. For all its deep familiarity, even a loaf of bread contains traces of something foreign, perhaps as the way in which we are nourished from sources beyond ourselves. In the sacred play of the liturgy, the bread now becomes part of a rule-governed play world, discontinuous from daily nourishment. By means of this discontinuity, however, the bread is intensified and presented as sacred: it is not of our own making but the bearer of sacred dimensions that come toward us, restoring life. This is the transfiguration where the ordinary and extraordinary intersect: The wafer is still bread, and at the same time something else, namely, the body of Christ—both familiar and strange at the same time. Cultic play intensifies this oscillation.

While it is true that the non-actuality of play is constitutive of it, an interpretation of it as mere fiction loses sight of its anchorage in elements of actual things, words, and deeds. The non-actual and imaginative component—say, the bread taken as the body of Christ—does not point elsewhere but calls otherwise hidden dimensions into presence.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the imaginative aspect of play, even if non-actual, is not to be regarded as a deficiency but, on the contrary, an augmentation. It adds new dimensions to our experience of the ordinary world, and for such reasons, Fink speaks of the non-actuality of play as constituting not a lower reality, but an “elevated actuality.”Footnote ²⁷ In being taken out of the traffic of the everyday, play gains the power of pointing back toward or even beneath the crust of ordinary life. The imaginative non-actuality of play means that ordinary things are turned into playthings, such as symbols, sacred things, and sacred acts. As things are set free from their ordinary constriction, they are able to open themselves afresh.

Exactly what is brought forth and presented in the non-actuality of play? For Dewey, both the aesthetic and the religious experience point toward a whole, toward a larger horizon in which everything is inscribed (AE, 199, 275). Something similar is true of Fink’s account, speaking of play as presenting our world relation as such. This is all the more important because, although our world relation is presupposed all along, the everyday only presents us with scattered and fragmentary experiences. The cult has the power to gather those fragmentary experiences. With allusion to various cults, specifically the Eucharist, Fink writes:

This rich passage brings out a number of things: it points back to the everyday from which the intact and sacred things are drawn; as symbols of the whole, the cult gathers the otherwise scattered experiences; and finally, the sacred intactness points forward toward an intact whole, or what Dewey calls the total setting. Thus, cultic play both points back to our primary, ordinary experience as the reservoir of any cultic play and points forward toward a possible everyday, exposing us to a transfigured unity of our world relation which is already present but never fully articulated in ordinary life.

The manner in which cultic play points both backward and forward to the everyday can be further clarified by way of what Dewey calls his “denotative method.” It entails that philosophy’s starting point is always the ordinary or, more technically, the primary experience from which any sound philosophy takes its subject matter. The philosophical reflection with its explanations and theories—what Dewey calls secondary experience—must eventually lead back to the everyday in testing its adequacy and fruitfulness. The problem with much philosophy, Dewey holds, is that it has forgotten to observe this double role of ordinary experience. Philosophy thereby casts a cloud over ordinary experience.Footnote ²⁹ What a sound philosophy should do, however, is to subject its reflections to the “first-rate test,” by exposing itself to the following question: “Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experience and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?”Footnote ³⁰ Of course, Dewey is not speaking of religious cults at this juncture but of philosophical method. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that a circular movement is involved in both cases: Starting from the ordinary, via philosophical reflection or cultic play, the experience returns to the ordinary and enriches the latter. Thus, there is not only a circular movement but also a progress that points onward. This movement mirrors the way in which the discontinuous cult prepares for a deeper continuity, not only behind the ordinary experience that is taken up into play, but also forward, toward possible ways to experience the ordinary lying in wait in its heterogeneous character. In so doing, it holds open the possibility for a more significant, luminous, and fruitful way to inhabit the ordinary than has so far been the case.Footnote ³¹

I started out with a paradox: The cult seems to be both distinguished from and yet entrenched in the ordinary. In order to argue that both poles of the paradox are indeed the case, the first part of this article followed Dewey’s aesthetics in order to argue that aesthetic and religious experience are both deeply anchored in the ordinary. Their striking or elevated character does not suggest a breach but rather an intensification of the ordinary experience itself. The second part suggested that, far from being a sphere closed in on itself, the ordinary should be conceived as an open and heterogeneous web that is constantly exposed to experiences that point beyond the common and familiar. Cultic play, as I suggested in this final part, must be seen as both in opposition to and in deep continuity with ordinary experience. It breaks away from the habitual everyday in order to open the ordinary to itself, beyond its tendency to fall into routines and habits. Play reopens its overlooked traces of strangeness and sacredness, as well as the encompassing unity that escapes fragmentary experiences. Just as in aesthetic experience, the extraordinariness of cultic play is, to repeat a passage from Dewey, “no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but … is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience” (AE, 52-53).

However, one might wonder: Does not such a position completely ignore the vertical transcendence from above and leave us with an all-too-human horizontal transcendence? Do not thinkers like Otto, Barth, and Levinas have good reasons for insisting on the total otherness of the sacred or divine? The answer will depend upon what the sacred means and what its foreignness implies. Besides, in the case of Christianity, it is worth remembering that its central event did not take place above our heads, but beneath our feet, as it were, within the ordinary itself. God incarnated as a human being must be the strongest symbol of the extraordinariness of the ordinary.