A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов
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against which one might test the theory. I remember writing a too-long paper on the connection of semantics and ontology in Arthur’s view as I understood it. I hesitated to turn it in. It contained a number of objections, which I thought he might take to be snotty and superficial. The paper, in fact, was the model of politeness, but I thought that he might not like being objected to (as some philosophers do not) and especially not if the source of the objection was a puny graduate student. So, I showed the paper to Sidney Morgenbesser, with whom I had worked a fair amount, and he thought it was OK. So I turned it in and held my breath. As it turned out, Arthur thought they were pretty good objections to some theory, just not to his theory. This was a jovial result for him; he thought it a good effort on my part but that I had misunderstood his views at what he took to be a crucial turn in the argument.
Some things never change. In our last philosophical exchange, this time in print, he still thought I misunderstood what he was driving at. In the intervening years, Arthur had been a co-supervisor of my dissertation, supported me vigorously in getting my career off the ground, gave visiting lectures at the places I taught, and we met many, many times at conferences, at bars, over meals, and at his apartment on Riverside Drive. With my good friend Lydia Goehr, whom Arthur deeply admired and loved, I visited him two days before he died. But the misunderstanding abided.
Arthur resisted my characterization of his view that artworks embody their meaning as a form of social expressivism. I considered this not a criticism at all. The expressivism I had in mind was bound up with what I took to be a Hegel-inspired social externalism about the meanings of artworks, to which I took Arthur to be fully committed. I thought and still think that Arthur’s aesthetic theory both conceptually and historically combines the two major trains of thought that preceded his own account, representationalism and expressivism about content, but in a way that transforms both strands. This faintly Kantian taxonomy appealed to him as a matter of philosophical historiography, but I believe he thought that bringing his views too close to expressivism implied that his account was psychologistic. He preferred a formal way of putting his point that he loosely modeled on Frege’s account of concepts as functions, a formulation that he made in his blockbuster essay “The Artworld” and in altered form in Transfiguration. But Transfiguration had the power it did because it substantially fleshed out the internal structure of his views, and I was concerned that the structure did not cohere quite the way he thought, especially if one took as canon law his rather minimal formal definition of a work. Arthur’s formal side liked to express his view that “interpretations constitute artworks,” by construing interpretation as a “function” that “mapped” art-content onto physical objects. But to my mind this did not rule out an important sense in which a work might be said to express interpretation through content. His connection of content to concepts such as “point of view” and “metaphor” in the later chapters of Transfiguration seemed to me to offer an account of expression, not of artists’ intents through works perhaps, but certainly of the art itself. He came to call this embodiment, but I could not see the difference between that and, coupled with the idea of an artworld and its “atmosphere of theory,” the sense of expression I took to be part of his debt to Hegel. In the end, I guess I thought that the formula Arthur used to represent the relation of interpretation to work was more gesture than substance, a nod to the way analytic philosophy was done in the day but not really much more.
Was Arthur right that I misunderstood his views? Perhaps. Was I right that social externalism was a part of the view? Perhaps. Arthur’s own character was not to belabor disagreement. There was his definitive shoulder shrug, not dismissive but reconciliatory: if we disagreed, so what? The reason I detail the disagreement and its unsettled nature is that it tokens something deeper, I have come to think. In his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud asserted that projection is a process in which one takes negative traits of oneself that are difficult to accept and recognize as such and ascribes them to another in order to both make criticism of the trait possible and reduce anxiety. Subsequent psychoanalytic theory has refined this Freudian understanding somewhat but retains the emphasis on the negative character of what’s projected. This seems too restrictive, for there are plenty of cases where projection operates in tandem with positive self-assessment. Projection of positive qualities can be a function of wanting others to be like oneself or oneself to be like others. Where the other person is someone one finds deeply admirable, even lovable, that seems especially plausible. What my and Arthur’s disagreement about the internal structure of his aesthetic views meant, why I kept coming back to those views and wanting to make sense of them in what I took to be their own terms, was about more than simply settling something philosophically. After all, was I really saying to Arthur: look, I understand your views better than you do?
Perhaps part of what Arthur taught me was the importance of letting go. Philosophical disagreement is not so important finally; it is subservient to imagination and intellectual depth. Sometimes disagreements are productive, sometimes not. And sometimes they are productive for a while and then peter out. The value in letting go is to be able to start over again someplace else, someplace where the philosophical imagination operates with more impetus and range. That Arthur could treat his own work that way, as something he was willing to let go of, expressed a deep trait in him. I know that I must, in time, let go of Arthur, but that has always been a difficult thing to do.
Figure 3 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.
Working with Arthur C. Danto
Michael Kelly
I first met Arthur in person when I was being interviewed in 1986 for the Managing Editor position at the Journal of Philosophy at Columbia University (he was President of the Journal). The second, informal interview took place at the December annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, held that year in Boston. Arthur suggested that we meet at the Institute of Contemporary Art, located at the time next to a fire station on Boylston Street. When I arrived, Arthur was talking to a few friends, so I waited, thinking we would be meeting alone. But he called me over and introduced me to Nelson Goodman and Richard Wollheim, who were standing in front of a contemporary work on paper by David Salle. If Goodman was wondering when the work was art, if it were, and if Wollheim was closely seeing in the work hoping to discern it as whatever the artist intended it to be, Arthur was mischievously disinterested in making any aesthetic judgment of it, though he was already an art critic for The Nation. He was instead trying to understand what could account for the work’s ontological status as art. It embodied meaning, he divined, even if the meaning it embodied were largely to provoke vexing questions about art among some of the world’s leading experts at the time. Whether good or bad, Salle’s work corroborated Arthur’s definition of art as embodied meaning, to which he added “wakeful dreams” as a third criterion in his last, recently published book, What Art Is.
I worked closely and fortunately with Arthur for sixteen years. In the long run, however, he ruined my life as an employee, and I told him this because he was so generous, judicious, and respectful that I came to expect similar treatment everywhere else I have worked since leaving Columbia. If I have not found it in other employment situations, and if I have not developed the same leadership qualities on my own, both are less a criticism of others, myself included, than confirmation of how special Arthur was in this regard. Should there be an afterlife, Arthur should be president, even if work is not required.
At the same time, Arthur had an uncanny, enviable ability to deflect any criticism of his philosophy, and perhaps of his person too. While he could seem aloof in doing so, he was really returning the criticisms to the senders, cleverly inviting them to think instead about their own ideas. Any such exchange with Arthur was an opportunity, hopefully characterized by wit and erudition on the interlocutor’s side, too, for each person to become clearer about her ideas, not simply as one’s own but as ideas. This is perhaps why Arthur did not have many, if any, students in the typical academic way that a prominent philosopher might foster students to develop and sustain his theories. Rather, he encouraged independent thinking, which was his gift as a teacher and friend.
Turning