surface. But the fact that aesthetics derives its name from sensory perception (and is concerned with such perception) does not entail that it is not equally concerned with meanings, for meanings can be sensuously rendered and directly perceived through our cultivated senses and sensibility, as when we directly see that a painting portrays the crucifixion with the established meanings that scene conveys.
Although Danto rejects the pragmatist view that aesthetic considerations are important for defining art, he ultimately converges with pragmatism’s affirmation of the aesthetic (including beauty) as having a deeper and wider significance for shaping life and thought more generally (Danto 2003). William James and Dewey argued that the fundamental unity and direction of our thinking and action are determined largely by the implicit aesthetic feel of things belonging together or flowing coherently in the right direction, in what James famously called the stream of consciousness. As James claimed in “The Sentiment of Rationality,” so Dewey argued in essays such as “Qualitative Thought” and “Affective Thought” that logical thinking rests ultimately on a felt sense of relevance and coherence (Shusterman 2011, 2013a, 49–68). Toward the end of the last chapter of his final book, What Art Is, Danto enlists neither James nor Dewey to make this sort of argument for the aesthetic, but instead invokes the writings of pragmatism’s originator, C.S. Peirce.
Peirce argued that aesthetics is, in a way, the most fundamental normative science, ultimately grounding the norms of logic and ethics: for if ethics subsumed logic’s concern with the good or right ways of thinking by being concerned with the nature of the good or right, then the ethical norms of good and right are in turn subsumed or explained by what is “admirable,” the nature of which is the subject of aesthetics, a science which Peirce sometimes described as “axiagastics” or the science of “the admirable” (Peirce 1967, 40, 1998, 201). In arguing that “ethics rests… on aesthetics” (Danto 2013, 152), Peirce further affirmed that a man’s ultimate ethical goal should be “to make his life beautiful, admirable” (Brent 1993, 49). We should not conclude, however, that for Peirce the quality of being admirable or aesthetically good is limited to beauty; instead it can be found in any distinctively unified “positive, simple, immediate quality” emerging from “a multitude of parts” (Peirce 1998, 201). This immediate quality has an affective feel or mood; and such a mood provides the implicit, hidden background that shapes what comes into the foreground of consciousness. Pragmatism, therefore, is essentially a philosophy of feeling as well as of action (Shusterman 2012, 433–54).
Associating these “aesthetic qualities” of feeling with Heidegger’s formative notion of “moods” that shape our thinking, Danto eventually even affirms their importance for understanding art, as he recognizes that artworks often “are intended to create moods, sometimes quite powerful moods” (Danto 2013, 153 & 154). This recognition of art’s role in producing powerful affect is precisely what motivates the pragmatist to make aesthetic experience a useful concept for understanding art, for illuminating its motivations, consequences, and value. Danto concludes, “What I admire in Peirce and Heidegger is that they have sought to liberate aesthetics from its traditional preoccupation with beauty, and beauty’s traditional limitation to calm detachment” (Danto 2013, 154). This is precisely the program of pragmatist aesthetics, whose pluralistic project also includes liberating aesthetics from its narrow focus on the definition of artworld art, enlarging its scope not only to the qualities and meanings of our natural and constructed environments and our wide-ranging products of design but also to the qualities and meanings of the ways we shape our lives.
Why did Danto not come closer to pragmatist aesthetics and its program of bringing art (and aesthetics) deeper and more pervasively into life by blurring the differences between them? Part of the reason may be a personal one of temperament in doing philosophy, as Danto himself suggests in one of our published exchanges. Discussing my comparative analysis of his “Upper West Side Buddhism” with the aesthetic experiences of my Zen training in Japan, Danto distances himself from what he calls “the existential spirit that informed and continues to inform [my] philosophical quest, as well as [my] life.” He immediately explains: “By this I mean a certain courage, an openness to risks of a kind I would never have exposed myself to” (Danto 2012, 308). Because I admire Danto as not only a brilliant but a courageous thinker, I would prefer to construe our difference here in terms of his overriding preference for experience as mediated and interpreted through art and philosophy in contrast to the greater openness and respect for the import of immediate experience (which is always already mediated by our cultural world and habits) that I share with classical pragmatism.
Notes
1 1 For the most detailed and recent discussion of my philosophical differences with Arthur Danto, see Shusterman 2013b (that includes an afterword by Danto) and my contributions (“Art in a Box” and “Art as Religion: Transfiguations of Danto’s Dao”) to the two different Blackwell editions of Danto and His Critics (Rollins 1993, 2012). For an extended audiovisual encounter at the Tate Museum in London, which also included the art historian Thierry de Duve, see http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/contested-territories-arthur-danto-thierry-de-duve-richard-shusterman.
References
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