Knowledge, Art, and Power: An Outline of a Theory of Experience by John Ryder (review)

Do not let the subtitle fool you. “An outline” is a far too modest description of Ryder’s book, for it presents an interesting and carefully crafted account of experience in the broadly pragmatic naturalist framework. The author mentions John Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience as his primary background inspiration and his analysis is at its best in the aesthetic parts of the work, which is by no means to discredit the merits of its other major sections that deal with the cognitive and the political dimensions of experience in interesting ways. Indeed, Ryder’s book is among the most important texts in the tradition of pragmatist aesthetics of recent years and everyone interested in pursuing aesthetics in the spirit of Dewey’s Art as Experience should find it an interesting read. The Deweyan idea of experience as an interaction with the environment, substantiated with recent work on embodiment (Shusterman, Johnson) and enactivism (Rowlands, Noë), serves as the bedrock of Ryder’s approach to experience. He, however, argues that these more contemporary views lack a proper ontological grounding, which Ryder seeks to establish with a position he calls “ordinal ontology.” This kind of ontology views all entities as multilayered complexes, which are constituted by their relationships to other complexes. Instead of trying to distinguish external relations from internal ones, we should be looking at the level of constitution. All relations are constitutive, in Ryder’s view, but some relations are more constitutive of a complex than others. What follows is an emergent view of reality: more complex complexes—mind, culture—emerge from the interaction between simpler complexes, but cannot be reduced to them.