late philosophy departs dramatically from that of Descartes.
Before we pursue the last point more fully, some discussion is in order regarding another subject dear to both Danto’s and Dewey’s hearts and about which both wrote groundbreaking books: art. (I will here be brief since other chapters in this volume focus more fully on Danto’s philosophy of art.) It might at first seem puzzling that Danto all but ignores Dewey’s Art as Experience through his many art-philosophical and art-critical writings. Here again, we may have a case of ghost-banishing. In any event, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and such later books as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History and The Abuse of Beauty, as well as numerous art-critical studies in The Nation and elsewhere, together project a decidedly non-Deweyan vision of their subjects. At its core is Danto’s ahistorically essentialist definition of a work of art as an “embodied meaning,” which is in turn rooted in his neoCartesian model of knowledge as a subject/representation/world triangulation.
Contrast this with Dewey’s more anti-representationalistically framed approach to the question of what is art. According to Art as Experience, a work of art is literally an action and not a product. More exactly, it is a consummatorily charged form of the organism/environment transaction that Dewey calls “an experience,” embodied (as are all experiences for Dewey) in a stretch of intelligent behavior that resists reduction to the kind of atomistically basic and molecularly mediated agency that is fundamental for Danto. Everything in this argument, including its further emphasis on the felt qualitative unity within all fully realized experiences in the arts and elsewhere, presupposes the basic antirepresentationalist and enactivist analysis of intelligent behavior that is central to Dewey’s mature experimental pragmatism.
Here the two writers’ temperamental clash along the internalist/externalist axis surfaces again. But it does so in a way possessing now more obvious normative stakes, especially amidst postmodern-era debates about the politics of recognition across various global and cultural divides both within and without the artworld. A comparative reading of their philosophies of art needs to keep in view the fact that whereas Dewey wrote in the heyday of prewar high aesthetic modernism (Art as Experience appeared in 1934) and was critiquing that era’s philosophical art/life divisions from within, Danto, writing from a more postmodern vantage point, was selectively reconstructing those divisions, historically speaking, from without. There is little question, in any case, that Dewey would have viewed Danto’s art product- and Artworld-centered, and visual art-privileging philosophy of art as a sophisticated variant of what Art as Experience attacked as the modernist-era “compartmental” or “museum” conception of art. One also imagines Dewey being tempted, in view of both Danto’s views about knowledge and his practice of generally using “art” interchangeably with “visual art,” to call Danto’s philosophy of art a spectator theory of its subject, in a double sense. For Danto’s theory makes the experience of the spectator – and paradigmatically the spectator of canonically visual artworks, as distinct from the audiences of other arts such as literature, music, dance, and cinema – more explanatorily central than that of the creating artist, even while it also appeals epistemologically to a version of what Dewey called the “spectator theory of knowledge.”4 For Dewey, there are no spectators – in his epistemic sense of that term – of anything, given that all thought is both intertwined with behavior and aspires to the condition of (remember his example of the reaching child) inquiry. And all inquiry is internally bound up in the culturally and historically specific contexts he calls “situations,” which no form of representation can fully transcend. (These also include political situations, such as that of modern democracy – another major context for Dewey’s writings on philosophy and art.)
What, with all of this said, might future intellectual historians make of the temperamental divide in the life of this philosophical odd couple? So far, it seems a wide divide indeed. But Danto’s dialectical distance from Dewey on the landscape of recent philosophy may well turn out, in the fullness of doxographic time, to be narrower than now appears. Let me explain.
We saw that Danto early on cast his relationship to Deweyan pragmatism in terms of an internalist/externalist dialectic. He regarded this dialectic as separating his own methods decisively not only from Dewey but from pragmatism generally, and especially from neopragmatists like Rorty and others who had come, by the Cold War years, to perceive the more ideological forms of analytic philosophy as intellectually and socially repressive. But in the Preface to the second (1997) edition of Connections, Danto also takes a new stab at describing what he saw as the essential methodological tension in contemporary professional philosophy. This time his candidate is not, as in Connections’ original 1989 text, internalism-versus-externalism; it is now atomism-versus-holism. (These, again, are the two stances he had attributed to himself and Dewey, respectively, in the interview I quoted at the beginning.) Rorty himself, tellingly, had invoked the same two stances in his own account of Anglophone philosophy’s central fault line in 2007 (Rorty 2007). “The atomists,” Danto notes, “for the moment are on the run.” Clearly, this is at least an allusion to the anti-Analytic rebellions mentioned above. The remark also seems to gesture toward the sweeping late-twentieth century turn toward holistic “complexity” within the human and natural sciences.
Might Danto also have been channeling the retreating atomist in himself? For here, he hints for the first time at the possibility of a “third kind of system” whose elaboration would inform the agenda for a possible sequel (never published) to Connections. Such a philosophy would not (unlike, he says, most modern philosophy) model itself on the natural sciences but would instead freshly address “what defines us as human beings, or as ens representans” (Danto 1997, xix). He adds that this “is not a model, clearly, which philosophers have greatly understood.” Such a third model would interweave Connections’ closing Hegelian theme that we are social, self-interpreting spiritual beings with a less atomistically reductive version of the idea, central to the post-positivist analytical culture of Danto’s early career, that we are also natural beings.
Coincidentally (or not, if you are a certain kind of Hegelian), this is an accurate brief, as far as it goes, for the arguments of books like Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment and Terry Pinkard’s Hegel’s Naturalism. These studies appeared toward the end of Danto’s career and helped prompt certain dialectical shifts in conceptions of human rational activity that had previously both defined and separated the two Anglophone traditions of analytic philosophy and pragmatism. Even though Danto never substantially discussed that literature, his remarks in Connections suggest a shift in his own later thinking paralleling a larger sea change within mainstream analytic philosophy at the turn of the millennium. If analytic philosophizing embodies, as Danto himself evidently thought, something like Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, it is not a stretch to suppose that the latter’s recent movement ran, in the end, through Danto’s work as well.
This, if so, also suggests a shifting picture of Danto’s doxographic relationship to Dewey. To that extent, there is a sense in which Danto both never walked back his lifelong aversion to pragmatism and, to recall his remark with which I opened, never fully escaped Dewey’s influence. This seems especially true if we view Dewey as one of many thinkers who laid the groundwork for recent accounts of Hegel’s relationship to pragmatism and naturalism. Analytic philosophy’s phenomenological development here also puts the lie to earlier beliefs in its separation, as a “critical” enterprise, from other more “speculative” enterprises such as pragmatism. Expressions like “pragmatism” and “analytic philosophy” indeed don’t denote neatly compartmentalized natural or transcendental kinds. They denote cultural kinds (although for an emergent naturalist like Dewey, all cultural kinds are ultimately natural kinds, and vice versa). So understood, their history is as much one of emerging hybridizations, syntheses, and “third models” as it is one of lower-order clashes between what may initially appear to a given generation – as Dewey’s externalism and Danto’s internalism initially appeared to Danto – as incommensurable perspectives among which we
