Rhythm, Poetry, and the Prose of Life.Critical Naturalism and Pattern Re-use between Dewey’s and Hegel's Aesthetics

This essay explores the bidirectional intersection of John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics and G.W.F. Hegel’s conception of poetry, focusing on rhythm as a key to understanding experience, creativity, and critique. It develops the idea that rhythm—understood not as static repetition but as dynamic, patterned variation—is a fundamental structure of experience and aesthetic form. Drawing from Dewey ontology of rhtyhm, read in relation to phenomenological accounts, rhythm is shown to mediate between natural processes and human habits, shaping the dialectical movement from alienation to empowerment. Art, particularly poetry, is framed as a form of rytmic 're-use', and presented, recasting Hegel’s formula from the Aesthetics through the lenses of Dewey, as a reconfiguration of the “prose of life”—the habitual, routinized patterns of perception and expression. The critical function of poetry lies in its capacity to imaginatively disclose alternative possibilities embedded within the present, thereby disrupting ossified norms and enabling transformative insight. Establishing a reflective equilibrium between Dewey, Hegel, and Romatic poetry, the essay underscores the figurative and reconstructive power of poetic language as a medium of imaginative emancipation. It proposes a “critical naturalism” in which aesthetic experience becomes a vital site of resistance to convention and a rehearsal space for future forms of life.