Danto and His Critics

By Mark Rollins

Updated and revised, the Second Edition of Danto and His Critics presents a series of essays by leading Danto scholars who offer their critical assessment of the influential works and ideas of Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and long-time art critic for The Nation.

• Reflects Danto's revisions in his theory of art, reworking his views in ways that have not been systematically addressed elsewhere
• Features essays that critically assess the changes in Danto's thoughts and locate Danto's revised theory in the larger context of his work and of aesthetics generally
• Speaks in original ways to the relation of Danto's philosophy of art to his theory of mind
• Connects and integrates Danto's ideas on the nature of knowledge, action, aesthetics, history, and mind, as well as his provocative thoughts on the philosophy of art for the reader

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118252987

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For my daughter, Alison

Notes on Contributors

Myles Brand (1942–2009) was President of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), of Indiana University, and of the University of Oregon. He authored many books in action theory, e.g., Intending and Acting, and later advocated for academic reform on behalf of student-athletes.

Peg Brand is an artist and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis, whose specialty in aesthetics is feminist art and theory. She is editor of Beauty Matters and Beauty Revisited.

David Carrier is Champney Family Professor at Case Western University/Cleveland Institute of Art. He has been a Getty Scholar and contributing editor at Arts Magazine. His books include Artwriting, Principles of Art History Writing, and Poussin's Paintings.

Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include Beyond Aesthetics, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, The Philosophy of Art, and The Philosophy of Horror. He is past president of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Diarmuid Costello is in the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick. He is editor or co-editor of The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, and special issues of Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Art History, as well as a number of articles and papers in aesthetics. He is on the executive committee of the British Society for Aesthetics.

George Dickie is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Art and the Aesthetic, The Art Circle, The Century of Taste, Art and Value, and Evaluating Art.

Jerry A. Fodor is the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Among his many publications are A Theory of Content, Psychosemantics, The Modularity of Mind, RePresentations, The Language of Thought, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, and What Darwin Got Wrong.

Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, and Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory.

Daniel Herwitz is Director of the Institute for Humanities, Mary Faire Croushoe Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Marking Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde and Race and Reconciliation.

Kathleen M. Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas. She is the author of The Music of Our Lives and Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

Mark Rollins is Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program and the Sam Fox School of Visual Design and the Arts at Washington University. He is the author of Mental Imagery: On the Limits of Cognitive Science and co-editor of Begetting Images: Studies in the Art and Science of Image Production. He is completing The Strategic Eye: Perception and the Pictorial Arts.

Carlin Romano, literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education, has taught philosophy at Yale, Yeshiva University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Gary Shapiro, Tucker Boatwright Professor in the Humanities at the University of Richmond, has written Nietzschean Narratives, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, and Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts. He edited After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places. He has authored articles on the history of philosophy, among other topics.

Richard Shusterman, author of The Object of Literary Criticism, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, and Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, is also editor of Analytic Aesthetics and co-editor of The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, and Culture. He is currently Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.

Robert C. Solomon (1942–2003) was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas. His works include In the Spirit of Hegel, From Hegel to Existentialism, and About Love.

Richard Wollheim (1923–2003) was Mills Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and Civil Polity at the University of California, Berkeley; and Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at the University of California, Davis. His books include Painting as an Art, The Thread of Life, Art and its Objects, On Art and the Mind, Freud, and The Mind and its Depths.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ernie Lepore, who originally suggested the first edition of this book for the Philosophers and Their Critics series, and Jeff Dean, philosophy editor for Wiley-Blackwell, for his support and advice for this second edition. I am grateful to Washington University, College of Arts and Sciences, for funding during a leave for the completion of this project. I am particularly indebted to my research assistant, MaryEllen VanDerHeyden, for her excellent help in the preparation of the manuscript.

Mark Rollins

The editor and publishers gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the following material in this book:

Table 6.1: The Enraged Musician. Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 3: Originally published as The Invisible Content of Visual Art, by Mark Rollins, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59/1, 2001: 19–27. Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics.

Chapter 9: Danto's New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories, by Noel Carroll, in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 37/4, 1997. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Chapter 10: Diarmuid Costello, Danto and Kant: Together at Last? In Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones, eds., New Waves in Aesthetics, 2008. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Selected Bibliography of the Works of Arthur Danto

The Artworld, The Journal of Philosophy 61, October 15, 1964.

Nietzsche as Philosopher: An Original Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

What Philosophy Is: A Guide to the Elements (York: Harper & Row, 1968).

Analytical Philosophy of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33, 1974.

Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Viking, 1975).

Moving Pictures, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Winter 1979, 20–21.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

Munakata in New York: A Memory of the '5Os, New Observations, 47, 1987, 3–10.

Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987).

Artifact and Art, in Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1988).

Beautiful Science and the Future of Criticism, in The Future of Literary Criticism, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1988).

Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals, in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Andy Warhol, The Nation, April 3, 1989.

Anselm Keifer, The Nation, January 2, 1989, 26–28.

Connections to the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989).

La Transfiguration du banal, trans. C. Harry-Schaeffer (Paris, 1989).

Ming and Qng Paintings, The Nation, October 23, 1989, 469–472.

Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990).

The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity, The Nation, October 18, 1991.

Description and the Phenomenology of Perception, in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, & Keith Moxey (London and New York: Harper-Collins, 1991).

The Sacred Art of Tibet, The Nation, December 16, 1991, 788–792.

The Shape of Artistic Pasts, East and West, in Culture and Modernity, ed. E. Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991).

Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992).

Narrative and Style, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49/3, Summer, 1992.

What Happened to Beauty? The Nation, March 30, 1992, 418–421.

After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003).

Introduction

Mark Rollins

This revised and expanded edition of Danto and His Critics marks the thirtieth anniversary of Arthur Danto's influential and widely read work, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Beyond commemorating the publication of that now-classic text, however, the essays contained here provide critical insight into the development of Danto's thought since the first edition of this book appeared, some 15 years ago. Even at that point Danto had produced a very substantial body of work. It included books on epistemology, action theory, the philosophy of history, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and art criticism. Each of these topics is covered by one or more of the original essays, and most of them compare Danto's views in at least two domains. Of course, much of the interest in his work has been in the philosophy of art, and a recurrent theme in the essays is how to understand his theory of art in relation to his theories of knowledge, action, history, or mind. In the period following the first edition, Danto published many new monographs, collections of essays, revisions of earlier work, and critical commentaries. And he developed a new conception of art. Moreover, his own artwork, made before he began his philosophical career, has attracted attention recently, having been collected and exhibited in several shows. Thus, in addition to a number of new postscripts responding to Danto's replies to the earlier essays, five essays have been added that take up new themes, including the relation of his more recent definition of art to the view that he initially espoused. The essays are followed by a new afterword, in which Danto discusses the impact of his life as an artist on the views he was to later develop.

Two major features stand out in Danto's work, the significance of which goes beyond the role they have played in his philosophy of art. One is an abiding concern with the concept of representation, the other is the method of indiscernibles. As David Carrier puts it, the concept of representation provides a framework from which to evaluate the whole of Danto's philosophy. And as a number of writers here point out, the use of visually indistinguishable pairs of objects or events, which are otherwise not identical, has often been Danto's point of entry into a variety of problems: how to differentiate action from movement, reality from appearance, knowledge from belief, artworks from mere objects. Indeed, if Daniel Herwitz is right, from Danto's perspective, distinguishing indiscernibles by way of a theory of the relations into which they enter is what philosophy is all about. Thus it is possible to find in his work both a system and a method. They are the focus of Part I.

Part I: System and Method

In the first essay, Carrier argues that Danto's view of philosophy is basically Cartesian. Danto sees the history of philosophy in terms of the discovery of problems, rather than in terms of descriptions of problems that are dependent on time and place. The problems have to do primarily with the nature of representation and are unaffected by changes in the forms that our representations take. The point is important to an understanding of Danto in two respects.

First, the question of how to construe Danto's historicism runs throughout these essays. Carrier's claim is that Danto's overall view of philosophy is non-Hegelian and anti-historicist. Yet it is clear that his view of art is that it depends – for its production and content – on an art-historical context. Carrier argues that the apparent conflict can be reconciled because, unlike actions for instance, artworks are special objects that can change substantially. That is, the basic categories or subtypes of art can change, whereas basic action categories cannot. Thus, aesthetics must account for something that is historical in nature, but it does not follow that the problem of how to account for the contextual character of art history will itself have to undergo change. In Noël Carroll's terms, Danto holds an essentialist philosophy of art; it's just that one of the essential features of art is historical variability. A Hegelian understanding of art history does not entail a Hegelian understanding of philosophy. One way to understand Danto's claim that we have come to the end of art when art becomes philosophical is in terms of this contrast; the developmental, context-dependent character of one gives way to the recurrent concern with discovered problems in the other. The issue then remains of whether a Hegelian and historicist view of history is correct, an issue addressed directly by the essays in Part IV.

The second respect in which Danto's Cartesian view of philosophy is important for his overall approach is its connection to the method of indiscernibles. As Carrier notes, the method of imagining fictional objects that are visually identical but ontologically distinct can be viewed as employing a literary device to address philosophical issues. In that respect, it is comparable to Descartes' meditations on the possibility of hyperbolic doubt. As I have noted, indiscernibility motivates Danto's theories of action, knowledge, and art. In each case, the result of applying the method is the same: the concept in question is seen to require explication in non-perceptual, relational, and theoretical terms. But Richard Wollheim argues that the application of the method of indiscernibles needs to be made with care. Because the concept art does not have determinate conditions of application, he says, we can only test assumptions about its application. That any of these might be unsatisfied in one particular case, where the concept appears to be instantiated anyway, does not constitute a critical test of how the concept should be understood. It has to be shown that the assumptions in question might never be satisfied, something that Wollheim thinks Danto has not done. He argues that Danto's use of the method relies on the assumption that an initial indiscernibility between an artwork and a mere object cannot be overcome by later knowledge; for example, concerning their histories of production. And that, he notes, is to embrace a specific view, according to which vision is cognitively impenetrable. This view of perception is commonly associated with Jerry Fodor's conception of the modularity of mind; that is, the mind's organization around special-purpose modules that are informationally encapsulated from one another and isolated from the effects of background knowledge and beliefs. Wollheim argues that, because such isolation is not found beyond the level of early vision, the effects of knowledge at higher levels of perceptual processing might supersede the earlier constraints, producing a difference between an artwork and its non-artwork twin that is discernible to the eye.

Part II: Intention and Interpretation

The importance of indiscernibility for Danto's theory of art is anticipated in his often-cited phrase, To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.¹ If he is right, then there is a sense in which the meaning of an artwork is invisible, despite its embodiment in sensuous form. In his discussion of Danto's theory of interpretation, Mark Rollins considers the dual role that modularity appears to play in that respect: as the ground for perceptual indiscernibility that motivates Danto's historical theory of art and as a bulwark against conventionalist alternatives (such as Nelson Goodman's) that appeal to perceptual plasticity. Rollins argues that the idea is important because it can be used to explain the sense in which two paintings might look the same but have different contents, without implying a perceived resemblance between the two. In so far as the paintings cannot be distinguished visually, that is because they activate the same basic visual capacities, which are impervious to differences in knowledge and belief. However, their contents differ because it is precisely on higher-order cognitive powers and beliefs that history and content supervene.

Like Wollheim, Rollins questions the assumption that early visual capacities are cognitively impenetrable; capacities on which Danto thinks our basic pictorial competence depends. However, Rollins argues that Danto does not actually need to endorse an empirical modularity thesis, strictly construed, either to show the possibility that pictures with different meanings might produce virtually identical perceptual experiences or to reject conventionalism. It is sufficient to show that there are neuropsychological processes or mechanisms that underwrite the categorization of objects in ways that are deeply habitual, not only for individuals, but shared within cultures and perhaps even across humans generally, as a result of the common features and tasks we confront in the world in which we live. Rollins cites recent evidence in support of the presence of such processes or mechanisms, which support what he calls perceptual strategies. He argues that this evidence lessens the significance of the fact, emphasized by Danto, that pigeons and other non-human animals can recognize objects in pictures. For Danto, the implication of this discovery is that basic picture recognition is a capacity that does not depend on cultural or historical knowledge. That we might share it with our more rustic relatives, unsophisticated animals who know nothing of art or philosophy, shows just how limited our understanding of pictorial art would be, if it went only so far. This is a point also taken up by Lydia Goehr, who considers what more Danto thinks is required for understanding works of pictorial art. However, Rollins argues that, as picture perceivers, such animals may also be creatures of habit; thus they must learn to deploy ordinary perceptual abilities to sort pictures, just as we must learn. And even if they rely only on innate, modularized object-recognition abilities, he says, it does not follow that, when humans fail to experience the differences in content in visually identical paintings with different histories, that is because they are in the grip of such automatic and undiscerning abilities.

Fodor does not discuss modularity here. However, he describes a Cartesian aesthetics within which Danto's views on the role of perception and knowledge in the understanding of art can be located, which depends on a representational theory of the mind. Fodor argues that our ability to wield such a theory to explain human action and the evidence that shows the view to be right warrants the appeal to a maker's intentions, to identify and understand interpretable artifacts. The basic idea is that an artwork is distinguished from its non-artwork twin by being caused in the right way by an artist's intentions; the right way meaning that the artist intends that the work should have an audience. Fodor interprets this intention in terms of a Gricean reflexive condition on vehicles of communication: the artworks are intended to cause a certain interpretation (to produce certain mental states in the audience); to be recognized as so intended; and to have an effect on the audience in virtue of being so recognized. Fodor then attempts to distinguish art from rhetoric in these terms and to deflect the charge of intentional fallacy.

What Fodor's analysis brings out is that Danto's thought-experiments show that being an artwork is a relational property, but that the relations might be construed in two different ways. On the one hand, they may be relations to a context (historical or theoretical); this is the neo-Wittgensteinian strand in Danto's account. On the other hand, the relations may be defined by the causal history of the object, with specific reference to the artist's intentions; this is the neo-Cartesian line. Fodor claims that the second construal is on the right track. The meanings or contents of external representations – words, pictures, performances – depend on the contents of mental states of the agents who produce them. Fodor argues that recent work in philosophy of mind has given us resources for ascribing mental content and thus for interpreting representations. These interpretive efforts should identify the beliefs and intentions of the agent who produced the target representation in some way. The question then is, in what way should the identification be made?

Fodor makes a distinction in that regard that is comparable to a related one made by Peg and Myles Brand. He argues that being an artwork is not actually the central concern of aesthetics, but being an interpretable artifact is. In particular, aesthetically valuable artifacts are those that make the reflexive condition on communication primary rather than secondary (as it is in, say, advertising). And while the actual intentional etiology of a representation matters to its status as an artwork, what matters to its status in aesthetics is its virtual intentional etiology, that is, the interpretation or interpretations that are plausibly grounded on the etiology it could have had.

In a similar vein, the Brands discuss the distinction between surface and deep interpretation. The former is correct in so far as it captures the artist's intentional etiology; the latter can be multiple and depends on a conceptual framework not dictated by the artist's mental states. The Brands' concern then is to explicate Danto's view of the relation between surface and deep interpretation and to propose a more plausible construal than his.

In light of the account of the compatibility of Danto's conception of art with a Cartesian view of philosophy and of the mind, we might expect him to hold something similar as a theory of action. Such a view, which they call a causal theory, is defended by the Brands. On their account, something is an action in virtue of particular sorts of causal antecedents – the intentions, beliefs, and desires of the agent. The authors then develop an analogy between action and art as illuminating Danto's view of interpretation.

The analogy is appropriate. As Carrier puts it, Danto's basic metaphysical problem actually has two dimensions: how we know the world in our representations and change it in our actions. These two dimensions, representation and action, are clearly connected. In the Brands' terms, representation (in particular, art) is an action; and, like representation, action must be interpreted. Thus, to draw out the analogy: (1) a description of the art object is like a description of a bit of behavior; (2) the surface interpretation of an artwork is like an agent's understanding of his own action; and (3) the deep interpretation is like a perceiver's understanding of someone else's action.

There are then two ways, according to the Brands, that the relation between surface and deep interpretation might be understood: Danto's view, which they call the weak Content Dependency thesis, and their own, the Constitutive Dependency thesis. The former treats a deep interpretation as correct only if it is consistent with the surface interpretation. The latter makes deep interpretation depend on surface interpretation (in the sense that there must be an accurate surface interpretation for something to be a work of art), but it allows that there can be correct deep interpretations that contradict the surface understanding. In Fodor's terms, virtual etiologies can diverge from actual etiologies.

Following the Brands' assessment of Danto's theory of interpretation on the model of action and Fodor's argument that the theory recapitulates ideas in the philosophy of mind, Lydia Goehr considers Danto's view from the perspective of a kind of moral psychology. Drawing on his earlier work on description and depiction, she treats his construal of interpretation as involving ekphrasis, the rich or poetic characterizations either in or of art. In so far as artworks represent their objects ekphrastically, we might say (using Danto's more recent terms) that their meanings are embodied in sensuous forms; consequently, they provide content beyond that which mere description can provide. In addition, the seeing of such representations takes on a special form: a perceptual reading, which Danto calls interpretive seeing and which Goehr characterizes as seeing through. Because this is a special mode of perception that is peculiar to the arts, it is compatible with – but goes beyond – the cognitively impenetrable basic visual processes that we share with other animals and on which the problem of art-object indiscernibility depends. Yet because seeing through has a narrative, metaphorical, or poetic character, it cannot be explained entirely in terms of the effects of ordinary cognitive processes, that is, purely discursive uses of propositional attitudes. Moreover, Goehr argues, Danto's emphasis on that character means that his is not an overly rigid intentionalist view. While he holds that the artist's intentions inform the content of a work, ekphrasis underwrites the possibility of deep interpretations in which richer meanings are ascribed.

It is, in fact, by way of the ekphrastic nature of art and its interpretation that the commonplace is transfigured, for Danto, and the transfiguration is understood. However, Goehr argues that, beyond the ontological transformation of mere representations or ordinary objects into artworks, there is another way the commonplace may be elevated in art, which Danto purposefully disregards. This sort of transformation occurs when what would ordinarily be seen as vulgar is presented as a vehicle for the expression of moral values or religious ideas; as for instance in Hogarth's prints, which depict scenes of coarse aspects of everyday life. This contrast between uses of the commonplace is important for an understanding of his view of philosophy and art. Goehr argues that, in turning away from issues of morality and religion in favor of ontology, Danto reflects a Nietzschean, humanistic attitude toward the plurality of values that art can contain. While reading art perceptually requires more than mere seeing, it is not the fact that particular values can be read into it that makes what is thus read an instance of art. It is rather precisely the fact that it requires an extraordinary mode of cognition, a narrative seeing through visual metaphor and style. Goehr suggests that, while this pluralistic perspective is laudable, it coincides with a tendency to overemphasize the ontological aspect of interpretation and detaches the artworld from the larger concerns of human affairs.

Part III: Philosophy of Art

As the essays in the preceding section bring out, interpretation involves more than the identification of the artist's or agent's intentions for Danto; it also involves the ascription of content to an object or event in a way that takes account of historical context and reflects an appreciation of the attitude expressed metaphorically. Three essays reprinted from the first edition (by Noël Carroll, George Dickie, and Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins) discuss Danto's earlier attempt to define art in these terms as a type of symbolic expression theory. Two new essays (by Diarmuid Costello and a second piece by Carroll) consider Danto's more recent account of art as embodied meaning.

As part of his attempt to clarify misunderstandings about his own institutional theory of art and to distinguish it from Danto's view, Dickie argues that there appear to be two projects in Danto's account of art, one ontological, the other epistemological. On the one hand, there is the concern with what it is for something to be a work of art; on the other, with what it is for someone to recognize that a certain kind of thing could be a work of art. It is on the first point that Dickie takes issue with Danto. He argues, as does Carroll, that for Danto, artworks express the states of mind that give rise to them, and that those states provide standards of correctness for interpretations of the works. Thus expression and representation go hand in hand. What is represented will be represented in a certain way that is expressive of the artist's state of mind, attitude, or point-of-view. However, Dickie asks, what is the subject or content of so-called non-objective works of art? In a sense, on Danto's account, they are self-referential; they are about aboutness. Alternatively, Danto suggests, it is not necessary that artworks actually be about something but only that they be the sorts of thing that could be about an object or event. But, Dickie argues, the self-reference in this case is somewhat mysterious, and the mere possibility that an object could represent something is not very compelling. In a postscript to his original article, he presses a counterexample to Danto's theory in the face of Danto's replies.

Carroll develops a comprehensive account of Danto's earlier philosophy of art that treats it as both essentialist and expressionist. As he notes, in addition to the requirement that artworks have a subject, express a point-of-view, and require interpretation that depends on an art-historical context, Danto treats works of art as essentially metaphorical; indeed, it is largely in virtue of that feature that interpretation is required. But, Carroll asks, can Danto's essentialism co-exist with his expressivism and his historicism about art history? The danger is circularity: the argument for essentialism depends on eliminating possible future counterexamples, and that requires Danto's historicist conception of art history. But that conception is grounded on the account of Duchamp's readymades and Warhol's Brillo box duplicates – the appeal to indiscernibility. Carroll argues then that the appeal to indiscernibility itself reflects an essentialist philosophy of art; it is the method of essentialism. Beyond that, like Dickie, he sees the emphasis on the aboutness as inadequate to account for what is distinctive of art.

In his second essay, Carroll considers the implications of the fact that the explicit definition in After the End of Art drops the condition that art requires an atmosphere of art theory. What remain are two necessary conditions, that the object be about something and that it embody its meaning, that is, that it involve a mode of presentation that is intended to be appropriate to the meaning. Despite the fact that Danto does not view these two conditions as jointly sufficient, Carroll maintains that, in the absence of an appeal to a context of theory in which the work is located, the new account cannot distinguish between artworks and mere representations or ordinary objects that function symbolically (e.g., a sword designed to be seen as fearsome). In addition, because the theoretical background previously served to differentiate artworks from their non-art twins, the method of indiscernibles now seems to be unnecessary, and the historical significance of Warhol's Brillo Boxes is lost. As Carroll puts it, it cannot now be said that art came to an end with Warhol's work, when it posed the question of the difference between artworks and real things; for it seems that both can embody meanings. As a consequence, Danto cannot argue that his definition of art is protected against any future counterexamples, and his essentialism is undercut.

According to Diarmuid Costello, there is another respect in which Danto's recent theory has roots in the Transfiguration. However, articulating it reveals internal problems for the account that is given there. Specifically, Danto has resisted the idea that art can be defined in terms of aesthetic properties such as beauty. To assimilate artistic value to aesthetic value would be to collapse the distinction between artworks and mere representations or real things that is central to his view. However, Costello argues that, in his recent attempts to find some common ground with Kant, Danto allows that beauty may be a necessary feature of some works of art; viz. where beauty is internal to their meaning (i.e., where the meaning requires that they be beautiful, as in David's Death of Marat). Other works may be externally beautiful (e.g., Duchamp's Fountain), but that is coincidental to their meaning. In the former case, beauty plays a rhetorical role: it colors or inflects the perceiver's attitude toward what is represented. In the latter case, it does not. In finding such a role for beauty, Danto invokes his earlier theory of art, which includes the condition that an artwork project an attitude or by means of rhetorical ellipsis. At the same time, Costello argues, Danto tends to undercut his original account, by allowing that some works do not have internal beauty, at least in so far as it is the means by which the artist's attitude is supposed to be conveyed.

Of course, for Danto, the idea that art conveys meaning by way of rhetorical ellipsis is rooted in his view of metaphor, which he takes to lie at the heart of all art. Danto generally relies on an Aristotelian view of metaphor as an enthymeme that we complete by grasping what it implies logically. However, Costello argues, there is an alternative view, according to which metaphor is the source of aesthetic properties. And there are reasons for associating it with Danto's account. On this interactionist theory of metaphor, the audience plays an active role, constructing new meaning rather than simply completing a thought. This construal of metaphor has some precedent in Kant's account of the aesthetic ideas to which Danto's embodied meanings are compared. In addition, Costello says, some of Danto's examples treat our understanding of metaphor as involving more than the completion of a logical syllogism. They require that the audience also come to have certain feelings toward what is depicted, an association that suggests the interactionist view. Thus, Costello concludes that Danto's view of art as embodied meaning draws out a tacit appeal to aesthetic properties that was already present in his earlier work but that does not fit comfortably with other aspects of Danto's view.

The topic of changes in Danto's view over time is also taken up by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins. They describe Danto's career as involving a shift from the atomism of his earlier work to the Hegelianism of his philosophy of art. That shift, they argue, implies that understanding art as a type of human action takes on new, non-Cartesian dimensions. Consciousness is not a private matter, on the Hegelian view; we gain access to the contents of other minds and mental states precisely through their expression in art. As they note, Danto does not . . . believe that expression theory has succeeded in supplanting representation theory, but, they argue, his emphasis on the importance of individuals makes his view comparable to the expressionism of Nietzsche, a point that resonates with Goehr's discussion of the humanistic aspects of Danto's work. What Solomon and Higgins argue is that the Nietzschean, expressivist side of Danto's conception of art should be further developed. In her postscript, Higgins considers Danto's treatment of beauty and, like Costello, suggests that he makes room for appropriate uses of it in art. However, she argues that the contrast between appropriate and inappropriate uses of beauty is consistent with Danto's larger concern with the context-dependence of meaning and its expression in art. Thus it is born out of Danto's Hegelian turn.

Part IV: Historical Knowledge

As a general conception of knowledge, the Hegelian turn that Solomon and Higgins discuss is contrasted with Foucault's account by Gary Shapiro. The contrast is between an evolutionary and teleological view of history, on the one hand, and a stratified, abruptly divided, and archeological view, on the other. As Shapiro notes, the claim that art comes to an end when it becomes philosophy can be analyzed in terms of changes in the concept of representation and the prevalent model of thought: from an emphasis on resemblance, to a focus on the scope and limits of representational skill, to a concern with expression and reflexive awareness. So construed, the Brillo Boxes of Andy Warhol that have played such a pivotal role in the development of Danto's thought about art comes to be seen as exemplifying the advancement of self-knowledge; a comic endpoint, as Shapiro puts it, at which art comes to know the meaning of its own past.

On Foucault's account, however, what Warhol's work reflects is the dissolution of the very model of representation and thought that Danto himself employs: the relational model that appears to be forced on us by the problem of indiscernibility. For, Shapiro argues, the repetitious and multiple character of Warhol's work actually undermines the purported indiscernibility between his art objects and real things. This undermining of visual indiscernibility has the effect of destroying the motivation for interpreting art, action, and knowledge claims in terms of unifying theory or etiology. The point of Warhol's work, on Foucault's view, is a radical revision of the theory of art, according to which similitude between artworks and ordinary objects again has an important place, but one fragmented by the recognition that any object radiates indefinitely many images or simulacra. Art, in this sense, does reflect mind, but not in the unified, rationalistic sense of either Plato or Hegel; the emphasis on simulacra provides a model of thinking, but without the attempt at closure or unification. In his postscript, Shapiro develops this point further in light of Danto's earlier reply.

The question then is whether the assumption of such abilities and integrative effects produces an account of history and knowledge that is, in fact, overly structured. That is the question addressed by Daniel Herwitz, who sees schisms in contemporary art and philosophy, the postmodern result of the split-up of the avant-garde. Herwitz argues that Danto can be read as concluding that art is serious only when it aspires to philosophy; or that, on the contrary, its freedom is found in the independence that follows the end of the aesthetic paradigm of self-discovery. This, Herwitz thinks, is the legacy of the avant-garde. Part of that legacy is an emphasis on rationalization and idealization as the human capacity that art tries to exemplify. But both art and philosophical explanation, he concludes, are less structured in practice than that suggests; philosophy itself is a postmodern art.

In his second essay, Carrier also considers divergences within philosophy, specifically in regard to how the bearing of historical context on philosophical problems should be understood. According to the tradition in which Danto works, philosophical arguments have general validity: They appeal to human reasoning abilities that are universal, perhaps because of our common biological or psychological make-up; and they aim to derive conclusions that apply across time and place. However, Danto thinks that art itself can only be understood in relation to its historical context. The question then is whether Danto's construal of the nature and understanding of that relation has general validity, as his approach to philosophical issues would require. Carrier argues that it does not, by contrasting it with other ways of understanding the historical character of art.

In particular, Carrier notes, Wollheim holds that art is essentially historical; yet his procedure for historical analysis is different from Danto's and results in a more diversified account than Danto would allow. For Wollheim, a historical account begins with original or primary works of art and then articulates rules by which subsequent works are derived from them. The procedure purports to provide a historical definition of art in terms of a lineage in which later art derives historically from earlier forms. Nonetheless, Carrier argues, Wollheim's method only provides a universal aesthetic by ignoring important differences in periods in question; for instance, the emphasis on religion in one artistic movement that is absent from another. Instead of general concepts of representation and expression, what Wollheim's procedure gives us is a way of accounting for developments within single traditions.

For Danto on the other hand, it is not necessary to show how one period or form leads to another. On his account, works of art express a culture's worldview; it is thus through an understanding of worldviews and how they are expressed that art is defined. What is needed is a theory of how historicized content, at any moment in history, is given appropriate form. However, Carrier suggests, while this approach does not lead to a focus on separate traditions and lineages in art, it does imply that the history of art, as one practice or domain of thought and action, can begin and end, while history itself goes on. He raises two questions in that regard. First, if art history can come to an end, could not social and political history also end? In that sense, it might be argued that there is an end to history itself, either because one tradition triumphs over all others or there is a stasis or historical stalemate. If so, Danto's historicism about art may sow seeds that that will make fallow his realism in the field of history generally. Second, Carrier asks, is it true that art history has ended, as Danto claims? Does Danto describe art history as it really is? Carrier thinks he does not. Nonetheless, he thinks that Danto's injunction to understand the expression of worldviews in artworks is a healthy tonic for the overly narrow character of other analytic philosophies of art.

Part V: What Philosophy Is

The question of how to understand history applies in a particularly trenchant way to the history of relations among the institutions, practices, and forms of knowledge of philosophy, religion, and art. Richard Shusterman argues that, in contrast to Hegel, Danto denies that art has been superseded by religion and philosophy; on the contrary, in its capacity for dealing with larger issues, it has superseded them. In using the language of transfiguration, Danto deploys Christian religious ideas to convey the sense in which art embodies deep meaning for human life. However, Shusterman argues that there is another and better concept of transfiguration contained in some of Danto's writings; viz. the difference in perception and attitude that ritual and contemplation, as in the Buddhist tradition, can bring about. This is not the cognitive penetration of perception by background knowledge and beliefs to which Wollheim refers, nor is it seeing through art by way of poetic representation that Goehr describes. However, this phenomenology of seeing suggests another solution to the problem of indiscernibility. On Shusterman's account, it is also compatible with a pragmatist aesthetics: through it, the place of an artwork in the everyday world is grasped.

That claim leads naturally to a consideration of Danto's role as art critic, in which he has had a remarkable impact on an audience that ranges well beyond the professional philosophical community. To be sure, criticism is not simply reportage; but it appears in a journalistic venue quite removed from specialized scholarly volumes. The relation of the roles of philosopher and critic is the subject of Carlin Romano's paper. Romano argues that the concept of interpretation is a fundamentally pragmatist notion. Interpretation, like making art, is an action; and it requires the combined skills of the historian, journalist, critic, and philosopher. But Romano argues that, even in his philosophy of art, Danto exemplifies the activist role that some critics think he should press further. Danto's philosophical analyses, on Romano's account, are continuous with his art criticism. The analytic definition of art that Danto deploys expresses conditions under which artworks become candidates for interpretation and members of a changeable community. He performs a role not unlike that of the critic in the historical definition of the community's bounds.

The thought that philosophy with a pragmatist bent might be indiscernible from the deployment of definitions (either in the strict analytic sense or in the historical sense of development toward a self-fulfilling goal) is, of course, consistent with Danto's own Gedanken technique. In applying the method of indiscernibles to Danto's books, Romano takes the injunction to look beyond the visible as a formula for philosophical investigation. Like representation, interpretation requires the skillful exercise of creative power; this, Romano suggests, we find in both aspects of Danto's work.

In this new edition of Danto and His Critics, the reader will find a much more comprehensive, integrated, and incisive treatment of Arthur Danto's work than has previously been anywhere published. The result, I hope, will be a better understanding of the influence that Danto – both the work and the man – has had on several generations of philosophers. The further result then should be identification of a number of important issues that philosophy, in various guises, will want to address.

Note

1. Danto, The Artworld, Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, 580.

Part I

System and Method

Chapter 1

Danto as Systematic Philosopher, or Comme on lit Danto en français

David Carrier

It is of less importance to enact the ritual task of philosophical journeymanship – putting holes in leaking conceptual vessels – than to ponder whether this vessel will serve our purpose even if sound.

Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge

There are three ways that the history of philosophy may be thought of: in Descartes' way; as Hegelian historicists do; and as Derrida does. The first view is that the essential philosophical problems are there, waiting to be discovered. The history of philosophy is the story of the discovery of these problems which, because they are problems about the structures of our thought about the world, do not change with time. We associate problems with the names Plato or Kant, but these problems can be connected with work done at other times. Descartes' Meditations sets forward positions on much-discussed issues without indicating how he was influenced by the earlier literature.

Second, the history of philosophy is the history of reflection on these issues. It is impossible to distinguish between how these problems are understood and how they are described by philosophers. Schopenhauer thinks differently from Descartes because Hume and Kant intervene between him and his precursors. There is no way to identify the problems as such apart from mentioning the proper names of the philosophers who deal with them. For the Hegelian historicist, not all things are possible at all times.

A third, Derridian, position claims not just that ways of thinking about these issues have changed, but that we cannot even describe the earlier positions in our vocabulary.¹ The belief that Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, and Davidson are concerned with the same problems may be an illusion. When we use our language to describe Descartes' work, inevitably we will get things wrong because we must translate his account of what we call mental representation into our language. Descartes' view of representation differs so radically from ours that it is unclear how they may be compared. The problem is not translating his Latin or French into our English; but translating an alien conceptual scheme. The medium of talk, language, is itself a system of representation. There is no way around this problem, no neutral way of talking about philosophical problems. Discussion of the theory of representation uses one or another medium of linguistic representation. And that language involves philosophical presuppositions.

Baudelaire's poetry does not entirely translate into English, which lacks equivalent rhymes and rhythms; but we can explain in English roughly what has been lost. In philosophy the situation is different. We can say a lot about older ways of talking about representation and about our ways of describing them; what is lacking is the possibility of comparing them. Since each way of talking employs a different, incommensurable view of representation there is no sense in which some common topic is being discussed.

Perhaps Derrida's position is not coherent. If no way of comparing these views is accessible, how can we know that the same issues are being discussed? In fact, since we think that Descartes discusses issues of concern to modern philosophers, how can there not be some overlap between his position and ours? But perhaps we can only talk about Descartes in our terms, aware that we are doing violence to his way of talking. Even if there is no possibility of indicating exactly the nature of that violence, beyond knowing that we cannot get things right, still we may know that it is impossible for us to accurately discuss his work.

I use this admittedly schematic account to introduce Danto's work. His very basic anti-Derridian assumption is that we can talk about the earlier philosophical models in our language. And his anti-historicist view is that the philosophical problems themselves can be discussed without needing to worry about exactly who said what. He discusses the great traditional philosophers, but does not think that identifying the positions they hold requires a historical analysis of their place in the tradition. Danto holds a Cartesian view of the history of philosophy.

Danto's anti-Derridian view is implicit everywhere in his books on Nietzsche and Sartre, whose working assumption is that Nietzsche's and Sartre's concerns may be translated into the language of analytic philosophy. So Danto's Jean-Paul Sartre translates his concepts into ours; what Sartre calls shame is a version of our problem of other minds. Analytic philosophy is often criticized for being ahistorical, and for lacking a genuine interest in other philosophic traditions. While Danto's system is in one way self-consciously ahistorical, he certainly takes an interest in alien philosophical systems. I have quarried Sartre's work . . . over the years, taken fragments of his thought which I would never . . . have been able to think of by myself . . . he is part of my history and world.² Only when he goes a bit farther afield geographically and temporally, in his book on Oriental philosophy, does he define the limits of his determined cosmopolitanism.³ The trouble with analytic philosophy, poststructuralists say, is that it treats its parochial concerns as if they were universally valid. The force of that very general complaint is easier to understand if we focus on one detail of Danto's analysis – his use of visual models – which poststructuralists like Derrida reject. Because such metaphors play a special role in Danto's aesthetics, I focus on that part of his philosophical system.

The relation of a systematic writer's aesthetics to his philosophical system is complex. For some philosophers – Plato in Danto's account and Kant according to some commentators – philosophy plays a central role in revealing structures of the mind we would not otherwise know.⁴ That there are artworks changes the entire way that the world and its representations are thought of. For Schopenhauer, artworks provide privileged access to the nature of things, permitting us to experience the unity of the world as will, which normally we can only know as representation. For Nietzsche, tragedy provides privileged access to the history of European culture.

For Danto, aesthetic theory is not a special source of knowledge in these ways. The indistinguishable indiscernibles, the basis for his account of knowledge and action, appear also when we look at art. But this doesn't show that artworks are kinds of entities which reveal anything to a philosopher about the world. Artworks are not identical with the physical objects from which they are indistinguishable. In this way they are like representations; indeed, and this raises potential complications, many of them are representations. But, so far as I can see, the ontological status of art does not influence Danto's larger system. Of course, that system was developed before he published the body of his work on aesthetics. But when the materials in Analytical History of Knowledge and Analytical Philosophy of Action are reworked in his recent Connections to the World they are not redeveloped in any radical way. There is no reason why they should be. The structure of argument in Danto's aesthetic mirrors that presented in his larger philosophy, without modifying its conclusions.

No special light is shed on the basic metaphysical problem, how we know the world in our representations and change it in our actions, by art. This perhaps is one reason why Danto's involvement in the artworld did not lead him early on to write about aesthetics. His interest in art, and his art criticism, has relatively few philosophical consequences.⁵ In this way, Danto's aesthetic, like his historiography, developed earlier in Analytical Philosophy of History, stands outside the central concerns of his system. That our ways of knowing the world and acting have changed has no especial importance for his