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TAYLOR CARMAN

In 1975 Arthur Danto published a short, mostly expository little book titled simply Jean-Paul Sartre. It offered an overview of Sartre’s philosophy, emphasizing but not focused exclusively on Being and Nothingness, a tome that, despite its being at times “repetitious and portentous,” Danto considered “a masterpiece” (1975, x). Though a relatively minor work in Danto’s corpus, Jean-Paul Sartre is impressive in several ways.

For one thing, it was written at a time when American philosophy departments were most sharply (and counterproductively) divided between the analytic mainstream and (what was then just beginning to be called) Continental philosophy. Danto was ahead of his time in dismissing that “ideologized division” as “silly and destructive” (1975, xii–xiii). In an admirable effort to translate Sartre’s technical vocabulary and rhetorical style into a recognizably Anglo-American idiom, Danto gave his chapters twin titles: each features a Sartrean term followed by a phrase or phrases more recognizable to analytical theorists of language, mind, knowledge, action, and morality. The gesture is less sharply polemical than the title Nietzsche as Philosopher, but the ecumenical intention is the same (Danto 1975, xii). In neither case, Danto insisted, would the innovations of professional philosophy refute or discredit the thinker; on the contrary, the tools of analysis turn out to articulate their ideas in surprising and fruitful ways.

More significant than Danto’s rising above professional parochialism, however, is the way he traces the key elements of Sartrean thought while at the same time elaborating his own views on the nature of philosophy, linguistic and pictorial representation, and above all, art. Danto was an original thinker, and like all creative readers of the history of philosophy he invariably heard in those who caught his attention echoes, faint or raucous, of his own thoughts.

What did Danto find in Sartre that was useful to his own conception of meaning, representation, and artistic style? And how, though without saying so, did Danto resist Sartre and his categories, endorsing instead a concept of style put forward by Sartre’s sometime philosophical friend and rival, Maurice Merleau-Ponty? Danto admired both thinkers, but never (to my knowledge) commented at any length on their differences, as they unfold for example in Merleau-Ponty’s essays on literature and painting.

Early in the Sartre book Danto hints at, but stops short of asserting, a partial convergence of Sartre’s early conception of art and literature, expressed in the novel Nausea, as enjoying “a specially privileged sort of reality” (Danto 1975, 30), with his own account of artworks as things inhabiting a unique ontological domain, a category articulated by “an atmosphere of artistic theory,” which he calls the artworld (1964, 580). On the last few pages of Sartre’s novel, Roquentin dreams of writing a novel of his own, a kind of ideal (non)entity that might justify his existence precisely by transcending existence, escaping the muck of contingency, floating “behind the printed words, behind the pages … above existence,” like the jazz song he hears beyond the sound coming from the scratchy record playing on the phonograph (Sartre 1964 [1938], 178).

Danto scoffs at this “hyperaesthetic, precious view of art and artistic creativity” (1975, 31), but he takes the metaphysical point: artworks are not real things exactly; they are not ordinary objects with extraordinary “aesthetic” properties added on. Staircases in fictions have no determinate number of steps (unless specified), nor is a song quite the same thing as the sounds one hears when one hears the song. This is very like saying, as Danto does elsewhere, that even if Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box had been qualitatively identical to actual Brillo boxes – indeed, if Warhol had simply put actual Brillo boxes in the gallery, instead of the wooden, silkscreened facsimiles he manufactured – they would still be, thanks to the “atmosphere of theory” surrounding them, works of art and not just (plain old) Brillo boxes. Like persons, which are not, pace Descartes, mere combinations of minds and bodies, artworks are “irreducible to parts of themselves, and are in that sense primitive” (Danto 1964, 576). Persons and artworks belong to a category of things distinct from ordinary objects, and for this reason Danto acknowledges the plausibility of Sartre’s view, “as a matter of ontology” (1975, 31).

That allusion, however, that hint of an affinity between Sartre’s early notion of the ideality (or virtuality) of art and literature and Danto’s theory of artworks as constituted by their participation in the artworld, comes and goes in the opening chapter of Jean-Paul Sartre without explicit discussion. More significant are Danto’s occasional references, in this book and elsewhere, to the mature ontology of Being and Nothingness, in particular the distinction between “being-for-itself” (être-pour-soi), which describes the negative reflexive relation in which consciousness stands to itself, and “being-in-itself” (être-en-soi), the being of things constituted positively by their objective properties. The distinction is a refined version of what is more commonly known as the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, or the inner and the outer, and it lies at the heart of Sartrean existentialism. It also runs parallel to one of Danto’s central insights: that artworks externalize and concretize “styles” or ways of seeing the world that in their original, naive occurrence necessarily remain transparent to those whose styles and perspectives they are.

How far does Danto’s theory of artistic style run parallel to Sartre’s ontological categories? To find out, we need to define a few more terms. To say that human consciousness exists pour-soi is to assert that its structure consists in its prereflective, “nonthetic” awareness of itself, which Sartre distinguishes from the explicit “thetic” knowledge one comes to have of oneself qua object. Sartre calls the latter connaissance de soi, the former conscience (de) soi – the parentheses around the de forestalling any suggestion of division or duality, since the self at this primitive level just is (that is, coincides with) immediate consciousness (of) itself. This unified “prereflective cogito,” as Sartre calls it, precedes and makes possible psychological and otherwise empirical self-knowledge, which is on all fours with our knowledge of others. For what I can say of myself qua object, others can as easily say by referring to me by name or in the third person: “He is happy” says of me what I say when I report that I am happy, but “He is sorry” says less or other than what I say when I express my regret by apologizing. To apologize is not just to say but to show that one is sorry. And just as Wittgenstein (1958, 66) proposes that “I” should therefore be understood as having two cases, subjective and objective – for avowals and ascriptions, respectively – so the pour-soi has two aspects, what Sartre calls transcendence and facticity. The transcendence of consciousness is its direct relation to a world beyond or external to itself, a relation that is at once a reflexive relation to itself. The facticity of consciousness, by contrast, is its quasi-objective aspect, its inescapable exposure to the consciousness of others, as well as to itself from a reflective, third-person point of view.

Although Sartre is not entirely consistent on this point, it is crucial to his system that the aspectual or perspectival distinction between transcendence and facticity not be conflated with the ontological distinction between pour-soi and en-soi. Facticity is not the brute objectness of the en-soi, but rather one of the essentially personal dimensions of the pour-soi. Or better, it is consciousness qua object in the grammatical sense of accusative, or target of awareness, not the metaphysical sense of (mere) thing with properties. Our facticity is our third-person presence to ourselves and others – but the person in the phrase “third-person” is crucial: encountering someone, even in an objectifying way, whether in love or in hate, desire or contempt, is fundamentally unlike encountering an inanimate object. Sartre sometimes talks as if we are doomed to regard each other as either radically incommensurable, inscrutable subjects or just brute things, inert flesh. But any inclination to that kind of literal reification could only yield a bizarre caricature of interpersonal relations, for in real life we experience ourselves and others not as brute stuff, but as vulnerable, sensitive, exposed to one another’s awareness. My primitive sense of others, Sartre famously says, is an acknowledgment of them not as objects in my world, but as subjects: they see me. The so called problem of other minds can therefore never be a real epistemic problem, for my knowledge of others has always already been shaped by my apprehension of their apprehension of me. Doubt necessarily comes too late. Moreover, arguably the deepest insight in Sartre’s account of our being “for others” (le pour-autrui) is precisely that the only objectivity consciousness has, or can have, is the external surface it presents to the consciousness of another. Without other persons in my world, my own consciousness would be so transparent as to be invisible, even to myself – like Schopenhauer’s eye that does not see itself. The ethical and epistemological implications of Sartre’s phenomenology of “the look” (le regard) are profound, but the metaphysical picture framing it must be kept firmly in view: ontologically speaking, others are not and cannot be mere things (en-soi) for my gaze, nor am I or can I be a mere thing (en-soi) for theirs.

The “nothing” in Being and Nothingness thus refers to the ontological subjectivity of the pour-soi as such, but also to the practical and epistemic transparency of our transcendence toward the world. To say that consciousness is nothing is to say that it is never the kind of something that can be defined simply by its positive objective properties, but we are also each of us nothing in a more refined sense, namely, that however we might be described from a third-person point of view – whether in physical or psychological terms, as embodied agents, as creatures or persons with thoughts and feelings – all such factical attributes necessarily fall short of and at the same time presuppose the immediate relation we have to ourselves when we have the world itself directly in view, that is, when we are transparent to (and in a certain sense, absent from) ourselves. Sartre’s notion of transcendence is thus akin to G. E. Moore’s claim that sense experience is “diaphanous,” so that, for example, “when we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue” (Moore 1993 [1903], 41). Gareth Evans argues that the same is true of belief: if someone asks me if I think there will be a third world war, “I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question, ‘Will there be a third world war?’” (1982, 225).

Sartre’s notion of consciousness as a nothingness is the topic of the longest chapter in Jean-Paul Sartre, but it also figures prominently in Danto’s discussion of artistic style in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. What makes something an artwork? Danto insists that it cannot be a peculiar kind of aesthetic property visible in the object, just as real (i.e., ordinary) qualities are visible in real (i.e., ordinary) objects. Nor can the artistic character of a work of art lie in its semantic content, that is, in what it says or means, on analogy with the meaning of a sentence. Semantic theories of art are especially implausible when we try to transfer the putative transparency of consciousness to the way in which artworks manage to have the kind of meaning they have. What Danto calls the “transparency theory” of art – a mimetic theory that figured prominently in Renaissance discourse surrounding unified linear perspective and techniques for capturing the reflection of light in metal, glass, and the human eye – is the idea that artworks aspire to the inconspicuousness of a pure medium, like a lens or a window through which we see the world. On this theory, Danto says, “the artwork is the message and the medium is nothingness, much in the way in which consciousness is held, by Sartre for instance, to be a kind of nothingness. It is not part of the world but that through which the world is given, not being given itself” (1981, 152). Like consciousness in its prereflective transcendence toward the world, such a medium of artistic representation would achieve “pure diaphaneity” (1981, 157), having no properties of its own beyond those of the objects exhibited through it.

Danto rejects the transparency theory as inadequate to how we talk about art and to artistic practice. Even the finest achievements of geometrical perspective and optical realism, after all, are nothing like actual illusion or trompe-l’œil (1981, 158). Nor do artworks simply mirror or reproduce the qualities of the things they represent. A painter might depict a blue sky with blue paint, but she might use yellow or green. Moreover, there is an obvious distinction between beautiful images of things and images of beautiful things: consider Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Caravaggio’s paintings of biblical beheadings, and William Eggleston’s radiant color photographs of parking lots, lawn furniture, and abandoned gas stations.

For Danto, an artwork is not a mere representation, with a particular kind of content (1981, 168). An artwork is constituted not by its aesthetic qualities or its semantic contents, but by something like rhetorical tropes, particularly metaphor. Metaphors are philosophically interesting not just because they exceed literal language, but because they stand outside the realm of ordinary meaning altogether. It is not that they say something esoteric, but that what they say is so manifestly inadequate to, even in a kind of tension with, what they allow us to see, feel, and understand. Content, then, at least as philosophers and linguists use that term, is the wrong place to look for the essence of art. Echoing a familiar theme from traditional aesthetic theory, Danto reminds us that “it is crucial to distinguish the form of a representation from the content of the representation” (1981, 172). A statue of Napoleon wearing a toga, sandals, and a laurel wreath could be the depiction of an actual (though unlikely) episode in real life, one that might have been a rhetorical gesture on Napoleon’s part. But that statue would not be the same as Eugène Guillaume’s 1859 sculpture Napoleon Ier, législateur, which is not a depiction of a rhetorical gesture but is itself a rhetorical gesture. Indeed, the two statues would not be the same even if they were qualitatively indistinguishable. As its title hints, Guillaume’s sculpture is not the image of something metaphorical, but a metaphorical image. Metaphors, whether verbal or pictorial, do not merely say or mean something peculiar in content; they “transfigure” what they present or refer to, even when they do so by means of content they share with nonmetaphorical expressions. Though it might be the same proposition, “Juliet is the sun” said by Romeo is not “Juliet is the sun” said by someone who has mistaken her for a giant ball of gas. For Danto, “every metaphor is a little poem,” indeed “metaphors are minor works of art” (1981, 189).

That is somewhat hyperbolic. Not all rhetoric is art. In addition to transfiguring their subjects, artworks draw attention to the way they do so; they exhibit the style in which they represent what they represent. What is style? Danto begins by drawing an analogy, in Sartrean terms, between historical periods and individual persons:

Each has a kind of interior and an exterior, a pour soi and a pour autrui. The interior is simply the way the world is given. The exterior is simply the way the former becomes an object to a later or another consciousness. While we see the world as we do, we do not see it as a way of seeing the world: we simply see the world. Our consciousness of the world is not part of what we are conscious of (1981, 163).

A style, historical or personal, is a kind of “global coloration,” something like what Frege calls the subjective Färbung in contrast to the objective content of a proposition. Consciousness colors reality, but in a way ordinarily invisible to consciousness itself, just as the tint of sunglasses vanishes as one acclimates to them on a sunny day.

What is transparent to me, however, is opaque to others. What do they see, that I do not, in the idiosyncrasies of my appearance and behavior? “The term style derives etymologically from the Latin term stilus – a pointed instrument for writing,” Danto tells us, and adds.

It is as if, in addition to representing whatever it does represent, the instrument of representation imparts and impresses something of its own character in the act of representing it, so that in addition to knowing what it is of, the practiced eye will know how it was done.

We may thus reserve the term style for this how, as what remains of a representation when we subtract its content – an algorithm licensed by the contrast between style and substance enshrined in usage (1981, 197).

In this same spirit, Danto cites Buffon’s observation that style is the man: “it is the way he represents the world, minus the world,” so that the style-inflected “qualities of the representation do not penetrate the content” (1981, 198). Style is also characterized by “the absence of a mediating knowledge or art,” and here Danto appeals again to the transparency of consciousness – beliefs, for example, being “transparent to the believer; he reads the world through them without reading them. … Thus the structure of my beliefs is something like the structure of consciousness itself, as viewed by the great phenomenologists,” notably Sartre (1981, 206). Style, then, is “those qualities of representations which are the man himself, seen from the outside, physiognomically,” qualities that “are not commonly given to the man whose representations they are: he views the world through them, but not them.” Moreover, “to be his style they have to expressed immediately and spontaneously” (1981, 207).

Here I think we need to distinguish artistic style from mere innate or spontaneous character. Kierkegaard reminds us that, like style according to Danto, “character is something engraved,” the Greek χαρακτήρ meaning stamp, mark, or distinctive feature (Kierkegaard 2001 [1846], 69). It is visible primarily if not exclusively, Sartre says, from a third-person perspective, whereas my primary relation to myself is the transparent egolessness in which, strictly speaking, I do not appear to myself at all. Prereflectively, I am (literally) nothing but my transcendence toward the world; it is only in my encounter with others that I am (so to speak) robbed of my self by their gaze, which captures me in my visible aspect, in my facticity. What is crucial in this is precisely the fact that what the other sees is no mere image or shadow of my true self, but me. Or, to indulge the analogy for a moment, if my self is like an image or shadow present to others, Sartre says, it is the “hidden side of the cards” they hold, “a shadow that is projected on to some moving and unpredictable material, such that no system of cross-references could allow us to calculate the distortions resulting from these movements” (2018 [1943], 359). The analogy with images and shadows is necessarily misleading, however, for the force and significance of the other’s gaze is precisely that it penetrates me, touches me to the core: I am vulnerable to it because there is no separation between what the other sees and the self I know myself to be. As Sartre insists, “it really is a question of my being, and not my being’s image” (2018 [1943], 359).

But this doesn’t get us very far, either toward a theory of art or toward a plausible phenomenology of interpersonal experience. Sartre and Danto agree that artistic style and expression differ essentially from mundane character and meaning. Artworks are not just immersed unreflectively in their styles the way in which, for instance, linguistic accents go unnoticed by the speakers of a common dialect. Instead, they make their own styles manifest by revealing the way in which they reveal what they reveal. It is this manifestness of style, Danto says, that the transparency theory of art fails to capture:

It is to this coloration that the attributes of style and expression attach, and it is again this coloration that the transparency theory cannot account for. It is part of the representation without being part of the reality, and the transparency theory has no positive room for that difference. … It is as if a work of art were like an externalization of the artist’s consciousness, as if we could see his way of seeing and not merely what he saw (1981, 164).

Since Danto’s thesis is that the essence of art is to cast things under aspects that effect a kind of “metaphoric transfiguration” of their subjects (1981, 168), he cannot be suggesting that artists or artworks themselves are as blind to the styles animating them as people normally are to how they look when they walk, or how they sound when they laugh. On the contrary, he says, what is distinctive of artistic style is not its mere outward aspect, the inscribed character of unreflective habit, but rather its manifest presence in the expressive dimension of the work. What is

interesting and essential in art is the spontaneous ability the artist has of enabling us to see his way of seeing the world – not just the world as if the painting were like a window, but the world as given by him. … The greatness of the work is the greatness of the representation the work makes material (1981, 207, emphasis added).

What constitutes a work of art as a work of art is not style per se, then, but its explicitness, its manifestness, its expressive presence or materialization in the work. And that expressive capacity cannot just be a natural or spontaneous effect available only to observers standing at a historical or personal distance from the works, for it lies at the heart of the artistic achievement. This is why Danto locates the essence of art at “the point of intersection between style, expression, and rhetoric,” adding that “the concept of expression is the most pertinent to the concept of art” – in a word, “art is expression” (1981, 165).

This is where the inadequacy of Sartre’s categories, both in themselves and as conceptual tools for Danto’s theory, becomes clear. By his own admission, Sartre’s favored argumentative technique was to invest heavily in sharp categorical distinctions where common sense and philosophical refinement are inclined to see complexity and ambiguity. Just as there can be no tertium quid between being and nothing, neither is there middle ground between pour-soi and en-soi, consciousness and world, transcendence and facticity, self and other, freedom and causality, poetry and prose. Such stark dichotomies, however, leave no room for the phenomenon of manifest style and artistic expression, which according to Danto constitute the essence of art. Sartre, notwithstanding his early flirtation with the dubious notion of literary and artistic works inhabiting a transcendent sphere beyond the contingency of existence, cannot make sense of an expressive manifestation of style that is neither subjective and transparent, hence invisible to itself, nor objective and opaque, hence estranged in its facticity. Artworks are, for Danto, a blend of transcendence and facticity, of expressive spontaneity and, as it were, engraved character. They are inscriptions, both act and object. But that blend, that middle or unified whole, is what Sartre’s categories are designed to suppress and exclude in phenomenological analysis.

Among the phenomenologists Danto admired, Merleau-Ponty is the one whose reflections on art come closest to his own insight that artworks express, by making materially manifest, ways of seeing the world. Merleau-Ponty did not anticipate Danto’s account of artworks inhabiting the discursive-cum-ontological space of the artworld, nor did he propose anything quite like Danto’s thesis that art involves the deployment of rhetorical tropes, in particular the transfigurative power of metaphor. But that is in part because Merleau-Ponty was not asking the Socratic question that inspired Danto (as it did Heidegger), namely, What is art? His question was instead, What is painting? It wasn’t paint itself that he was interested in, of course, but images. What makes a picture a picture, as opposed to a sign, a symbol, an idea, a thought? What Danto and Merleau-Ponty share is a concept of expression that Sartre’s categories exclude as a matter of principle.

Like literary works, Merleau-Ponty argues, paintings can be said to have a kind of voice. Indeed, the art of painting, like all art, whether it trades in images or in words, is defined by “the phenomenon of expression” (1993 [1945, 1952], 71). Life itself, he even says, is saturated with expression, hence style. Though language can be analyzed as a system of signs, we experience it as opening us onto a world. Speaking and forming images are both ways of evoking, referring, revealing, rendering visible. The writer’s task, Merleau-Ponty says, is to apprehend and make the world manifest through language, and in this respect, “his procedure is not so different from the painter’s” (1993 [1945, 1952], 82). Spoken language is “simply the highest point of a tacit and implicit accumulation of the same sort as painting. … Like a painting, a novel expresses tacitly” (1993 [1945, 1952], 113). Literary language bears a “halo of signification” comparable to “the mute radiance of painting” (1993 [1945, 1952], 114–115). In addition to the explicit, articulate language of words and sentences, “there is a tacit language, and painting speaks in this way” (1993 [1945, 1952], 84).

Merleau-Ponty’s argument was in part a reply to the essay, “What Is Literature?” in which Sartre had drawn a sharp distinction between writing and art, prose and poetry. Whereas language is an instrument for disclosing facts about the world, painting merely uncovers the appearance of particulars: “The painter is mute” (1988 [1948], 27). Sartre’s distinction was not between linguistic and pictorial representation, but between denotation and decoration: “The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music” (1988 [1948], 28–29).

Merleau-Ponty rejects Sartre’s crude dichotomy by insisting, first, that visual artworks never merely display, but also speak (so to speak) of the things they show, and second, that no language, no matter how artless or prosaic, is wholly styleless, a mere transparent signifying instrument or medium. Pictorial and linguistic expression both embody ways of seeing. Even ordinary seeing and hearing are imbued with a character: “perception already stylizes” by means of an “inner schema,” a “system of equivalences” that coordinates one’s grip on things and allows the world to reveal itself as coherent and intelligible (1993 [1945, 1952], 90–91). For example.

Our handwriting is recognizable whether we trace letters on paper with three fingers of our hand or in chalk on the blackboard at arm’s length, for it is not a purely mechanical movement of our body … but a general power of motor formulation capable of the transpositions that make up the constancy of style (1993 [1945, 1952], 102).

Perception itself already has expressive significance, for the body itself brings a style of comportment to its apprehension of what it perceives: “if expression recreates and transforms, the same was already true … of our perception of the world before painting, since that perception already marked things with the trace of human elaboration” (1993 [1945, 1952], 96). We find ourselves with unique and individually recognizable ways of walking and talking, and artistic expression is a further deliberate refinement of those spontaneous dispositions: “For each painter, style is the system of equivalences that he sets up for himself” (1993 [1945, 1952], 91). The cultivated body schema of the artist is a kind of second nature, a set of acquired yet spontaneous skills, which come to feel natural though they are products of years of effort and practice. Carving out a unique artistic style, over and beyond one’s everyday personal way of moving and speaking, is like learning a second language. Merleau-Ponty therefore refers to “the painter’s labor and study, that effort that is so like an effort of thought and that allows us to speak of a language of painting” (1993 [1945, 1952], 92). If painting is a language, it is a language learned with reference to the more primitive means of expression inherent in ordinary perceptual behavior.

By recognizing artistic expression as an extension and refinement of the already inherently stylized nature of ordinary perception and speech, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that human experience and understanding do not have the rigidly dualistic character that Sartre describes in his distinctions between pour-soi and en-soi, transcendence and facticity, prose and poetry. Danto, I believe, found Sartre’s conceptual apparatus useful, but only up to a point. By drawing attention to the extremes of subjective and objective, transparency and opacity, spontaneity and character, Sartre cast indirect light on what falls between those extremes, namely, the manifest style of expressive works that transfigure what they disclose by, in Danto’s words, “externalizing a way of viewing the world” (1981, 208). But how is such a thing possible? Crucial to Danto’s formula is precisely that the (so-called) “externalization” accomplished in works of art cannot just be the reification and alienation of a (so-called) “internal” point of view, but must manifest or disclose a “way of viewing the world” in its – always already – outward, worldly aspect. World is not outside, perspective is not inside. In describing art as imbued with meaning – as rhetorically inflected, metaphorically rich, transfigurative – Danto recognized the worldly context of significance that Sartre’s categories indicate only negatively, and so threaten to render unrecognizable.