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RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Arthur Danto’s relationship with pragmatism is unclear. He did his doctoral studies at Columbia University’s Philosophy Department and then taught there for many years, the same department that John Dewey first brought to prominence when he moved to New York’s Columbia University from the University of Chicago in 1905. Although Dewey’s pragmatism was still very much in the air when Danto studied at Columbia, it was already being eclipsed by the analytic philosophy in which Danto subsequently made his career, writing a series of books with titles such as Analytical Philosophy of History, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, and Analytical Philosophy of Action before taking up aesthetics, which was then and remains a marginal field for analytic philosophy. Danto’s writings pay very little attention to pragmatist philosophy, including the field of pragmatist aesthetics on which my text will focus. Although his work seems very much opposed to key principles in pragmatist aesthetics, he helped to promote it, partly by encouraging my own work in this field. Unlike some of his analytic colleagues, Danto did not regard a turn toward pragmatism a departure from good philosophy. One aim of the present essay is to express my debt to Danto and move beyond our important differences to highlight what we share and thus what he shares with pragmatist aesthetics.¹

Danto was one of the three persons, along with Richard Rorty and Pierre Bourdieu, who made my career in pragmatism possible, and thus helped to revive pragmatist aesthetics in the 1990s (Shusterman 2014, 13–32). Rorty convinced me to evolve from the analytic linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin to embrace the more socially engaged philosophical perspectives of James and Dewey. He also encouraged me to leave my tenured appointment in Israel and move to the United States where I would be closer to pragmatism’s genius loci. Pierre Bourdieu, who first brought me to Paris in 1990 and introduced me to French intellectual life, convinced me that I needed to understand the social context of language, culture, and art in a much more scientific, complex, and conflict-conscious way than the way pragmatist and analytic philosophers (including Danto) explained these cultural fields. Bourdieu’s powerful account of the social privilege underlying our notions of art and aesthetics provided one of the key challenges that provoked me to formulate a pragmatist aesthetics that democratically defends popular art and the pervasiveness of the aesthetic also in non-elitist lifestyles. (It was Bourdieu who introduced my manuscript on pragmatist aesthetics to Jerome Lindon of Minuit, who published it as L’art à l’état vif in 1992). While Rorty’s debt to pragmatism is obvious, Bourdieu displays a complex relationship to this style of thinking, sharing its emphasis on the concepts of practice and habit but opposing its melioristic faith in revisionary theory.

Although never identifying with pragmatism, Danto inspired my vision of its aesthetics by showing how it was possible for an analytical philosopher to treat the most current and controversial styles of contemporary art and culture through detailed and sympathetic criticism of their concrete expression in particular works of art. Danto’s celebration of Andy Warhol, along with his enthusiastic analyses of other contemporary artists deeply influenced by popular culture, provided space and confidence for my own writings on hip hop culture. Danto’s encouragement of my work was also quite personal. While other senior colleagues disapproved of my study of rap. Danto enthusiastically supported it, writing a very generous blurb for the back cover of Pragmatist Aesthetics, and, even earlier, encouraging me to go to Paris to write that book (Shusterman 1992).

Despite his generosity toward pragmatist aesthetics, Danto opposes some of its key views. The first important difference concerns Danto’s essential emphasis on a sharp division between art and life, the artworld and the real world, or as he puts it in one chapter title, between “works of art and mere real things” (Danto 1981, 1). Pragmatist aesthetics instead seeks to soften or blur such divisions, rejecting a rigid dichotomy between the contrasted terms without denying that their distinction can often be useful. Affirming the intimate continuity between art and life, pragmatist aesthetics sees art as an expressive emergence of the energies, forces, and experiences of life. As art depends on life, so it also serves life, even when it has been pursued under the purist ideology of art for art’s sake. If art had no use value for life–even if such use is mere pleasurable diversion from ordinary practical value–then art’s persistent survival and transcultural ubiquity seem hard to explain. If art depends on human life, then conversely human life has evolved to survive by developing and deploying art’s cultural forms and meanings to bring people together and inspire them with shared values, projects, and joys. Human life has incorporated art’s communicative pleasures, imaginative visions, cultural symbols, and social glue to make both our shared experience and our private moments more satisfying. If life ultimately survives because we living creatures want to continue to live, then art in its multiple forms and styles, high and low, contributes to the sense that life is truly worth living by giving us experiences of deep meaning, value, and pleasure. Besides this interdependence, art and life are also continuous in that art takes its materials, energies, meanings, and values from the manifold experiences we encounter in the conduct of life, while conversely enriching life by giving it additional energy, meanings, ideals, pleasures, and new modes of perception.

This reciprocal influence and continuity, however, does not mean that art and life should be simply equated, that there is no point in distinguishing art from other areas in life. The general context of life typically provides the background for foregrounding the specificity of artworld art, just as the ordinary stream of everyday experience provides the background for the particularly intense experiences that we identify and remember as a distinctively peak experience or as what Dewey called “an experience,” emphasizing the article “an” to emphasize the special unity and distinctiveness of the experience as characteristically aesthetic. Such experiences exist also outside the boundaries of the artworld, and they display aesthetic qualities similar to those admired in artworks. Indeed such experiences often inspire the creation of artworks by the power of these aesthetic qualities.

Danto himself traced this “gap between art and life” (Danto 1981, 13) back to Plato who distinguished imitative arts from reality to discredit artists as purveyors of illusion, thereby to establish philosophy’s superior dominion over knowledge and virtue. The fact that art represents the real does not, however, entail that it lacks reality or that its representation is intrinsically deceptive. Practical and scientific forms of knowledge also deploy representations to convey their truths. Similarly, though we can usefully contrast appearance to reality in some linguistic contexts, the fact that an aesthetic surface is an appearance does not entail that it is illusory, trivial, or devoid of meaning. Dividing art from reality not only minimizes its cognitive value but also serves to diminish art’s progressive powers for social action through its creative ideas and more promising visions of social life. By ignoring art’s wide-ranging cognitive and social potential, this division implies the essential “purposelessness” with which Kant influentially defined the aesthetic (as “purposiveness without purpose”) and it inspires the familiar perversions of the artist as anti-social dreamer and the true aesthete as frivolous wastrel.

Yet Danto takes up the Platonic distinction between art and reality precisely to invert its ontological valorization. Rather than being ontologically demeaned vis-à-vis ordinary real things like beds or grapes, the artwork, for Danto, receives an ontological promotion, while real objects, which may even be “like it in every obvious respect, … remain in an ontologically degraded category” (Danto 1981, 5). Artworks are thus not simply unreal; they instead partake of a higher ontological status than ordinary reality, one requiring a special mental act of artistic interpretation. “The distinction between art and reality is absolute,” Danto declares, linking this claim to Hegel’s elevation of art to the realm of Absolute Spirit while real objects merely form “the Prose of the World” (Danto 1992, 94 & 96). Art’s role is to “express the deepest thoughts” and convey “the kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing” (Danto 1997, 188, 2000, x). Pragmatist aesthetics, while insisting on art’s transfigurative and truth-disclosing power, maintains that art’s transfigurative experiences and meanings are immanent in this world. Such experiences are not a transition to a transcendent, higher world but instead the deeper and more penetrating perception of ordinary realities that reveals just how extraordinary the ordinary can be when properly perceived.

Another contrast between Danto’s approach and pragmatist aesthetics concerns the definition of art. Like most analytic philosophers, Danto is preoccupied with defining art, confessing “the philosophical aspiration of the ages, a definition which will not be threatened by historical overthrow,” and he ingeniously seeks this by defining art in terms of its own history and then claiming that this history, in an important sense, is now over with “the end of art.” He argues that twentieth-century art, pursued as a progressive inquiry into art’s essence, has evolved into the philosophy of art and, having reached the philosophical “understanding of its own historical essence,” has reached its logical end (Danto 1986, 209 & 204). Art continues to be produced, even though its history of progressive self-definition is over. It flourishes, instead, in its posthistorical stage where radical pluralism now prevails: anything can be a work of art if it can be interpreted as such in terms of the history of the artworld and its current practices in which you can “do what you damned please” in making art (Danto 1986, 114–15).

Danto’s definition of art as a complex socio-cultural practice essentially defined by its continuing history is an example of what I call a wrapper theory of art, and it may be the best wrapper theory we can get (Shusterman 1992). In faithfully representing our established concept of art and how art’s objects are identified, related, and collectively distinguished, it best realizes the dual goals of wrapper definitions of art: accurate coverage of art’s extension, that is, covering all and only things that have been, are, or will be called artworks and thus compartmentally differentiating them from all other things. Pragmatist aesthetics instead questions whether these goals have the great value that philosophy’s intensive efforts to achieve them seem to assume.

In defining art as a practice defined by art-historical narrative, all substantive decisions as to what counts as art are left to the internal decisions of the artworld as recorded by art history. Philosophy of art collapses back into art history; so the actual, momentous issue of what art is or should be gets reduced to a second-hand account of what art has been up to the present. If it merely reflects how art is already understood, philosophy of art condemns itself to the same reductive definition with which Plato condemned art. It is essentially an imitation of an imitation: the representation of art history’s representation of art. What purpose does such representation serve apart from appeasing the old philosophical urge for theory to mirror or reflect the real, an aim which has outlived the transcendental metaphysics of fixity that once gave it meaning?

The theoretical ideal of reflection originally had a point when reality was conceived in terms of fixed, necessary essences lying beyond ordinary empirical understanding. For an adequate representation of this reality would always remain valid and effective as a criterion for assessing ordinary understanding and practice. But if our realities are the empirical and changing contingencies of art’s career, the reflective model seems pointless. For here, theory’s representation neither penetrates beyond changing phenomena nor can sustain their changes. Instead, it must run a hopeless race of perpetual narrative revision, holding the mirror of reflective theory up to art’s changing nature by representing its history.

Pragmatist aesthetics has a different way of understanding the definition of art. The aim is not perfect extensional coverage or accurate reflection but an effort to improve our experience of art by a definition that invites a change of perspective regarding art, one that could lead to improved experience, partly by highlighting art’s special role in the context of life. Dewey’s definition of art as experience, I have argued, is one such definition. Experience is obviously hopeless as a wrapper definition of art because peak aesthetic experiences exist outside of art, while many artworks fail to provoke the sorts of strongly unified and pleasurable experiences that Dewey highlights as what the best of art delivers. Defining art as experience, however, is very helpful in reminding us that what is most rewarding in art is not the physical objects with which art is typically identified but instead the experiences that those objects are used to express and provoke (Shusterman 1992, 3–61, 1997). In the same way, in defining art as what I have termed “dramatization” – that is, the placement of an object or event in a formal frame to intensify its experience – I do not mean to preclude as art the many things dramatized outside the recognized artworld, such as ritual and sports events. To dramatize means both to stage something (to put something in a frame or mise-en-scène) and to intensify. The idea of defining art as dramatization is to highlight the connection of background frame, which includes the socio-historical context and institutions of art, with the heightened interest or meaning of content that this frame intensifies (Shusterman 2001). In this way, a pragmatist aesthetics combines the two main currents of modern aesthetics, supplementing the sociohistorical, institutional or context-based approach well represented by Danto with a strong emphasis on the content of intense experience that Dewey emphasized.

If art history’s crucial role in framing the creation and reception of artworks is one of the key views that Danto shares with pragmatist aesthetics, then another is that this history is one of developing change whose direction can be largely determined by the creative efforts of artworld members. Danto’s long and admirable career in practical criticism, as art critic for The Nation shows his recognition that art needs more active care than mere wrapper definitions that simply reflect the status quo. Art history can be made not only by the work of artists and critics, but also through the intervention of theorists, whose views have traditionally been central to the creative and critical context in which artists, critics, and art historians function. Consider, for example, how Aristotle’s Poetics dominated centuries of dramatists and critics, or how Kantian ideas of aesthetic imagination and judgment helped shape romantic poetry and justify modernist formalism. As Danto’s philosophical theories of art pervade his art criticism, he exemplifies the pragmatic idea of putting theory into practice, while conversely using practice to guide and inspire his theorizing.

Despite his insistence on the division of art and life and his consequent claim that art’s history evolves autonomously through “its own internal development” (Danto 1986, 204) rather than through external influences, Danto eventually seems to share pragmatism’s faith that art can make a significant difference to reality far beyond its effects in the artworld. In his book on Andy Warhol, he claims, “Revolutionary periods begin with testing artistic boundaries, and this testing then gets extended to social boundaries more central to life, until, by the end of that period, the whole of society has been transformed: think of Romanticism and the French Revolution, or of the Russian avant-garde in the years of 1905 to 1915 and of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s slogan ‘Art into life!’” (Danto 2010, 29). Many historians would argue, however, that the French Revolution is what inspired Romanticism, and that the Russian avant-garde were themselves very much influenced by social transformations that predated the 1917 Revolution. But the key point to retain here is Danto’s recognition of the strong links between art and life, even if he prefers to read the causality of these links only in one direction.

I conclude with a topic that, on the surface, sharply divides Danto from pragmatist aesthetics but at a deeper level unites them. This topic is “the aesthetic” and its traditional concern with pleasure and beauty. Danto has repeatedly insisted that the aesthetic is not central to the philosophy of art because most artworks are not made primarily for aesthetic purposes of beauty or pleasurable “delectation.” As “art is philosophically independent of aesthetics,” so he argues (citing Duchamp) that “delectation is the danger to be avoided” (Danto 2013, 144 & 145). Rather than beauty and pleasure, “embodied meanings” are what Danto regards as central to art; he even claims his definitional “theory, in brief, is that works of art are embodied meanings” (Danto 2013, 149). Danto essentially disregards the concept of aesthetic experience, focusing instead on interpretation as what is essential in art, not only for understanding an artwork but even for constituting it as such. Pragmatism, on the contrary, makes aesthetic experience central to our understanding of art’s meaning and value. Although recognizing that many (or, in contemporary practice, most) artworks do not make beauty and pleasure their highest concern, pragmatist aesthetics nonetheless affirms these qualities as having significantly shaped art’s concept and history while also contributing to art’s value. Pragmatism likewise insists that beauty and pleasure are often realized through the embodied meanings that Danto invokes as the essence of art. Danto assumes that the aesthetic deals only with the sensory surface. But the fact that aesthetics derives its name from sensory perception (and is concerned with such perception) does not entail that it is not equally concerned with meanings, for meanings can be sensuously rendered and directly perceived through our cultivated senses and sensibility, as when we directly see that a painting portrays the crucifixion with the established meanings that scene conveys.

Although Danto rejects the pragmatist view that aesthetic considerations are important for defining art, he ultimately converges with pragmatism’s affirmation of the aesthetic (including beauty) as having a deeper and wider significance for shaping life and thought more generally (Danto 2003). William James and Dewey argued that the fundamental unity and direction of our thinking and action are determined largely by the implicit aesthetic feel of things belonging together or flowing coherently in the right direction, in what James famously called the stream of consciousness. As James claimed in “The Sentiment of Rationality,” so Dewey argued in essays such as “Qualitative Thought” and “Affective Thought” that logical thinking rests ultimately on a felt sense of relevance and coherence (Shusterman 2011, 2013a, 49–68). Toward the end of the last chapter of his final book, What Art Is, Danto enlists neither James nor Dewey to make this sort of argument for the aesthetic, but instead invokes the writings of pragmatism’s originator, C.S. Peirce.

Peirce argued that aesthetics is, in a way, the most fundamental normative science, ultimately grounding the norms of logic and ethics: for if ethics subsumed logic’s concern with the good or right ways of thinking by being concerned with the nature of the good or right, then the ethical norms of good and right are in turn subsumed or explained by what is “admirable,” the nature of which is the subject of aesthetics, a science which Peirce sometimes described as “axiagastics” or the science of “the admirable” (Peirce 1967, 40, 1998, 201). In arguing that “ethics rests… on aesthetics” (Danto 2013, 152), Peirce further affirmed that a man’s ultimate ethical goal should be “to make his life beautiful, admirable” (Brent 1993, 49). We should not conclude, however, that for Peirce the quality of being admirable or aesthetically good is limited to beauty; instead it can be found in any distinctively unified “positive, simple, immediate quality” emerging from “a multitude of parts” (Peirce 1998, 201). This immediate quality has an affective feel or mood; and such a mood provides the implicit, hidden background that shapes what comes into the foreground of consciousness. Pragmatism, therefore, is essentially a philosophy of feeling as well as of action (Shusterman 2012, 433–54).

Associating these “aesthetic qualities” of feeling with Heidegger’s formative notion of “moods” that shape our thinking, Danto eventually even affirms their importance for understanding art, as he recognizes that artworks often “are intended to create moods, sometimes quite powerful moods” (Danto 2013, 153 & 154). This recognition of art’s role in producing powerful affect is precisely what motivates the pragmatist to make aesthetic experience a useful concept for understanding art, for illuminating its motivations, consequences, and value. Danto concludes, “What I admire in Peirce and Heidegger is that they have sought to liberate aesthetics from its traditional preoccupation with beauty, and beauty’s traditional limitation to calm detachment” (Danto 2013, 154). This is precisely the program of pragmatist aesthetics, whose pluralistic project also includes liberating aesthetics from its narrow focus on the definition of artworld art, enlarging its scope not only to the qualities and meanings of our natural and constructed environments and our wide-ranging products of design but also to the qualities and meanings of the ways we shape our lives.

Why did Danto not come closer to pragmatist aesthetics and its program of bringing art (and aesthetics) deeper and more pervasively into life by blurring the differences between them? Part of the reason may be a personal one of temperament in doing philosophy, as Danto himself suggests in one of our published exchanges. Discussing my comparative analysis of his “Upper West Side Buddhism” with the aesthetic experiences of my Zen training in Japan, Danto distances himself from what he calls “the existential spirit that informed and continues to inform [my] philosophical quest, as well as [my] life.” He immediately explains: “By this I mean a certain courage, an openness to risks of a kind I would never have exposed myself to” (Danto 2012, 308). Because I admire Danto as not only a brilliant but a courageous thinker, I would prefer to construe our difference here in terms of his overriding preference for experience as mediated and interpreted through art and philosophy in contrast to the greater openness and respect for the import of immediate experience (which is always already mediated by our cultural world and habits) that I share with classical pragmatism.