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Each semester for a quarter-century, as I've geared up to teach one text or another by Arthur Danto, I've introduced him – as I did in my class on beauty on Thursday, Oct. 24 – as "our greatest living philosopher of art." By the time we reconvened the next Monday, that statement was false; Danto died on the 25th at age 89, completing a transition from the idiosyncratic to the canonical.
I first read Danto's work – specifically his classic work in aesthetics, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace" – in the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working in philosophy of art. It had a liberating effect, for a number of reasons. For one thing, aesthetics had long been a marginal sub-discipline in analytic philosophy, and seemed ready by then to peter out entirely. Serious philosophers wanted to talk about the semantics of modal logic or the structure of science rather than the disconcertingly elusive and passionate realm of the arts.
In that context, the existence of Danto seemed a bit miraculous. He was by then an eminent analytic philosopher who had already taken on many of the most difficult questions in the discipline. And not only had he been engaged in the visual arts as an artist, a critic, and a philosopher, he thought of aesthetics as a foundation that could shed light on all the other questions, including those in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Every time one of my professors or fellow students hinted that aesthetics wasn't really serious, I'd wave that book around: literally, if I had a copy handy, which I usually did. I ran through a number of copies, wearing them out or giving them away as a form of proselytizing.
When he began publishing in the '60s, Danto associated his own work in the most explicit way possible with analytic philosophy, writing books titled "Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge" and "Analytical Philosophy of Action." But from the first, his work expanded the genre far beyond technical questions in logic and language. He wrote about Lao Tzu and Nietzsche, Proust and Borges, Duchamp and Warhol. And when he brought them into the contemporary philosophical discourse, he expanded the discipline to encompass or re-integrate them.
Art and philosophy, it seemed to me then, had gone their separate ways, and were conceived as opposing and incompatible cultural zones. Danto developed an ingenious (if not unproblematic) reconnection that was also a revival and transformation of all the traditional questions of philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, in his view, the avant-garde art of the period and analytic philosophy were not just compatible, they were made for each other. In developments like pop art and conceptualism, he asserted, art had become a form of philosophy, which is one thing he meant when he said that art was over. Whether this was exactly true or not, it mirrored his own development in its synthesis of the sensual and the intellectual.
For Danto not only wrote about art; he wrote with art. This is what really impressed (I want to say "transfigured") me as a graduate student. As it turned out, I didn't particularly agree with his philosophy. But I loved his writing inordinately and have often tried to emulate it. Among my first publications was an attack, written in an admiring simulation of Danto's own style, on what I took to be the basic argument of "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"; he thrilled me by sending me a letter, administering gracious correction. At the time, I was reading – under professorial obligation – figures such as Kant, Dewey and Wittgenstein, and whole pages full of logical symbols that constituted arguments in philosophy of language or truth theory. It seemed to be an assumption shared by professors and students alike that the suffering endured when reading philosophy was a measure of seriousness or even of truth, perhaps on the ground that nothing important can be achieved except through pain. Indeed, graduate school in philosophy – in the '80s or in almost any era – could profitably be regarded as a series of object lessons in how not to write.
Danto thought of aesthetics as a foundation that could shed light on all other philosophical questions.
Danto's own writing often shared the precision of the analytic philosophy with which he emphatically associated himself. Yet just as often (or more) it was wildly unpredictable and endlessly digressive. In either mode, Danto's prose is delectable. What often sticks with me is not the argument or even the conclusion, but a hundred ingenious and erudite examples, excursions, flourishes; lovely turns of phrase, improvisations, jokes, flashes of unexpected illumination. His discussion of metaphor in "The Transfiguration," for example, starts by remarking on how appropriate it is to speak of men as swine. Then it proceeds through dozens of useful amusements to a discussion of "Napoleon got up in empire robes," from there to Nazi transvestites, and on after many more doozies to the insight of one of his students that "Juliet is the sun" does not entail that "Juliet is the body of hot gases at the center of the solar system." Reading Arthur Danto at that moment, in that place, was an aesthetic – almost an erotic – pleasure.
And that's what I most want us to hold on to: Danto's proof that philosophy can be a lovely thing as well as a quest for truth, his demonstration of the identity of philosophy with art – not as a premise of his argument that art is at an end, but as actually enacted in his writing. In an autobiographical sketch written for "The Library of Living Philosophers," Danto says that he abandoned his successful career as an abstract expressionist printmaker one day in 1963 when he was working on a woodcut and suddenly realized he'd rather be writing philosophy. After that, his art simply continued in another medium.
That sketch also describes his experiences growing up in Michigan, serving in Europe during World War II, as a rising intellectual figure at Columbia, as a man-about-town on the New York art scene, and as a mature master. It's a remarkable story, set in the worlds of art and academic philosophy, featuring such intellectual and aesthetic and personal companions as Alberto Giacometti, Norwood Hanson, George Santayana, Chiang Yee, Ernest Nagel, Stanley Cavell, Red Grooms, Robert Motherwell and Ti-Grace Atkinson, among many others. For a philosopher, Danto led an extraordinarily cosmopolitan and cultivated life, and the philosophy he leaves us reflects that with remarkable accuracy.
I'm 55. As people of my generation have lost or will soon lose our parents, philosophers in my cohort are losing the living presence of the major figures of the period of our apprenticeship, the figures who gave rise to us and who had to be emulated or resisted or refuted for us to find our own voices. In the last 15 years or so, we've said goodbye to such emblems of an era as Richard Rorty, John Rawls, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-François Lyotard, Donald Davidson, W.V. Quine, Bernard Williams, Thomas Kuhn, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Robert Nozick and now Arthur Danto. I'm not sure my generation can yet claim figures of comparable accomplishment. It might be a good time to ask, as the late George Jones asked about the great country singers of that same generation, "Who's gonna fill their shoes?"
Crispin Sartwell teaches in the art department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. His most recent book is "Political Aesthetics."
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