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CASEY HASKINS

“I couldn’t avoid Dewey’s influence,” Danto recalls in a 1990 interview about his early years at Columbia, where he received his PhD and began teaching in the early fifties. Dewey was a towering figure in the same department from 1905 to 1930. Danto goes on:

[H]e was a big deal at the time. He’s getting to be a big deal again. But from the very beginning I thought he was just awful, just muddy, like a preacher, portentous and uninteresting. I still think a lot of that is true, but I think analytic philosophy enables one to see Dewey as one of the main systems, a somewhat ‘holistic’ system. In Dewey as a writer, I don’t have much interest and in this I am in complete disagreement with Rorty. I don’t see any structure in him, while I have passion for the architecture of philosophical thought … I like connections to be clear, and I like to see structures, whereas with Dewey it’s an unstructured world in which you sort of move through a fog. … However … you can understand why he does it, what the systematic reasons are, and if you take a sufficiently distant view of that you can see that the lack of structure is one of the great historic alternatives to clarity. But it is not the way that I would want to do philosophy. I’m something of an eighteenth-century person, I really do see this as an ordered universe…. (Borradori 1994, 90–1).

Danto nowhere discusses Dewey or pragmatism at any great length, but he expresses similar sentiments throughout his writings. One senses that Danto regarded Dewey as a spectral presence that, in a field fueled by what William James famously called “clashes of temperament,” is better ignored than frontally engaged. This particular clash is interesting for the window it affords onto not only the careers of two singular thinkers but also onto the evolution of American Anglophone philosophy from the early postwar era to the present. Danto’s initial antipathy toward Dewey occurred amidst the shifting currents within the field in the fifties. It may also, as his remarks above suggest, have been rekindled by the Rorty-led neopragmatist revival of the 1970s and 1980s. In his 1989 Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, Danto accordingly describes pragmatism as a philosophical system confusedly bent on bringing analytically healthy philosophy, rooted in a historically stable “cycle of positions,” to an end (Danto 1989, ch. 5).

Yet there are also intriguing hints in Connections’ second (1997) edition of a further shift in Danto’s thinking about philosophy as a whole that brings him programmatically closer to Dewey than is evident in his earlier writings. More of this later. First, let us look further at the sources of Danto’s reaction to the classical pragmatist of whom he was the most critical but whose philosophy, at the same time, continues to offer a powerful lens for a critical reassessment of Danto’s own views.

Danto’s early reaction to Dewey at first seems puzzling. Portentousness and preacherliness aside, how could anyone find Dewey – who continues to attract new generations of readers in multiple disciplines, from phenomenological philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience to ethics, aesthetics, education theory, and ecophilosophy¹ – uninteresting? It helps here to recall the shifting matrix of intellectual coalitions, conflicts, and ideological change that was American academic philosophy in the early fifties.

This was a time when no single movement – pragmatism, logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, or the kind of pluralistic history-focused study that gave equal time to Anglophone and Continental philosophy – quite yet dominated the curricula of leading departments, including Columbia’s. But the balance between what were earlier dubbed “speculative” and “critical” approaches – with pragmatism cast as speculative and analytical methods as critical – was clearly shifting in the latter direction. The earlier dominant influence of Dewey’s “experimental philosophy” over the Columbia department was waning. This was also a time of other dramatic ideological upheavals in the United States that bore directly and indirectly on the viability of certain research programs in philosophy and other humanistic disciplines. Increasingly, the embrace of analytic methods for many philosophers (if not the methods themselves) itself came increasingly to resemble an ideology – an ideology distinctly hostile toward such “uncritical” enterprises as Continental philosophy, Marxist theory, and pragmatism.²

Danto, whose interests embraced figures and ideas on both sides of philosophy’s midcentury continental divide, never fully embraced the reigning analytic orthodoxy, even while he thrived in its atmosphere. That said, why, more exactly, did he find Dewey’s philosophy and style so unappealing?

Absent a detailed answer from Danto himself, his metaphilosophical metaphors, at least, are suggestive. In contrast to Dewey’s muddiness and fogginess, he says above that he prefers “architecture” and clear “structure.” In these connections, Danto had long drawn inspiration from the ideal of analytical clarity he found in the writings of Descartes, famous for his image of a building’s foundations as a metaphor for the conditions of knowledge and certainty that philosophy aims to articulate. Actually, Danto’s evolving metaphilosophical vision would turn out to be significantly unCartesian in its denial of the formal demonstrability of virtually any large ontological or epistemological thesis. But he would remain resistant throughout his career to the full fallibilist implications of Dewey’s signature theme of the illusory and culturally situated character of modern philosophy’s Cartesian “quest for certainty.” For Dewey and most pragmatists, thought never stands still long enough to be unconditionally certain, clear, or distinct. Intertwined with earthly bodily life in ways that render Cartesian imagery of pilots and ships quaint and outmoded, thought’s central and normal characteristics include phases of situation-specific indeterminacy and uncertainty along with phases possessing the formal clarity of logic or mathematics. To this extent, what Danto calls Dewey’s own “muddy” and “foggy” qualities here, along with his holism, become Rorschach tests for dramatically different metaphorical pictures of human thought’s relationships to embodiment and agency.

One vivid example of Danto’s own favored picture occurs in his recounting of Chuang-Tze’s story of a butcher:

The king is watching the butcher, and the butcher with just one move makes the carcass fall in pieces. The king says, “How do you do that? You don’t seem to put any effort into it.” And the butcher says, “I studied Tao, and when you study Tao you know how things fit together.”… [T]he butcher adds, “Between two bones, there’s an empty space, and the knife goes into emptiness. When you put emptiness within emptiness, the knife never goes dull and everything falls apart.” That’s what philosophy should be³ (Borradori 1994, 98–9).

This anecdote conveys Danto’s unpreacherly fondness for eighteenth-century-inspired models of analytical clarity. It would have carried decidedly different meanings for Dewey, whose relentless critique of such models was deeply informed by romantic writers such as Wordsworth. (“Sweet is the lore which Nature brings/Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things/We murder to dissect.”)

Another of Danto’s images would likely have raised Dewey’s eyebrows even more. Recalling the experience of writing his 1965 Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto says that

The book ended with a discussion of what was called Methodological Individualism, the idea that every statement about history is analyzable without remainder into conjunctions of statements about the actions of individual agents. This position paralleled the program that statements about physical objects are analyzable without remainder into conjunctions of statements about sense data. … I had the sense of holding a problem in the muscles of the mind, applying pressure the way a starfish applies pressure in opening a mollusk, until the shell gives way and one sees what was inside (Danto 2013, 19).

Such methodological sentiments contrast vividly with Dewey’s. To think that a concept of any complex phenomenon – of a complex historical event or of certain physical objects, say – is analyzable “without remainder” into conjunctions of more basic concepts or statements is to commit what Dewey called the “analytic fallacy.” A staple of classical empiricism, this pattern of thought makes the mistake of artificially abstracting selected aspects of a whole, historically and culturally, situated experience of inquiry from an original context that includes some specific purpose of the original inquirers (say, prediction and control) and then interpretively projecting them back onto the description of the original situation as if from the beginning they possessed separate, context-independent existences of their own (Dewey 1931).

As it happens, Dewey had himself, decades earlier, described a mind as “a sort of biological thing with arms or tentacles reaching out everywhere, and when they get appropriate food just fastening down upon it” (Dewey 1902, 334). This image condenses the argument of his seminal 1896 article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which focused on the example of a small child curiously reaching for a burning flame, and then upon touching it recoiling with newfound experience and knowledge. Even such simple instances of intelligent behavior, Dewey maintained, show that experience is not structured, contrary to an empiricist tradition that Danto and many other analytic writers still embraced generations later, around an efficiently-causal stimulus-response process in which brute sense data first trigger Lockean-style ideas whose further molecular permutations appear in the understanding, and then afford empirical knowledge. In his example, it is not the sensations from the reaching activity that are properly regarded as explanatorily primary for understanding the child’s behavior (along with its endless analogues throughout the realm of human action). What occupies this role, rather, is the reaching itself, understood as an always-already, future-directed, goal-seeking impulse whose sensorimotor and cognitive components are inextricably bound together in a feedback-looping relationship between the action’s larger and evolving environment. Thus even a little child turns out to be capable of inquiry – Dewey’s term for the myriad ways in which humans seek fresh integration with an environment that continually challenges them not simply to represent it abstractly but reconstructively to interact with it in the course of pursuing and refining their desires.

Decades later, Dewey would use another suggestive metaphor in the “Nature, Life, and Body-Mind” chapter of Experience and Nature, which remains a key text for discussions of the metaphysical bases of embodied phenomenology and cognition. Here he comments that

To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process (Dewey 1925, 224).

In addition to emphasizing the emergent-naturalist theme of the ontological continuity of cognitive and bodily processes, Dewey signals his process-philosopher’s rejection of atomistic methodologies (“marbles in a box”) in a variety of traditional contexts, including in classical empiricist and Kantian accounts of perception. Danto never undertook to rebut this centerpiece of Deweyan experimental pragmatism in any detail in his influential books of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Analytical Philosophy of Action, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, and Analytical Philosophy of History. Why the silence? One possibility – this is just a guess – is that, given how passé Dewey had become for many analytic readers by then, Danto saw no need to pick a fight with a ghostly opponent. And this all the more if that opponent’s philosophical system – as was suggested by the metaphilosophical perspectivism which became central to Danto’s thinking by the 1960s – had an inferential structure that he saw to be incommensurable with his own. (But ghost-banishing is not, as later neoDeweyan turns in philosophy and elsewhere would bear out, sufficient for ghost-busting.)

Be all that as it may, the above deep methodological differences also underpin the two philosophers’ contrasting images of human action. Danto’s atomistic ontology allowed him to argue, famously, that actions are tokens of a person’s bodily behavior possessing an antecedent cause in an intentional state informed by impinging sensory stimuli. All of the main components of an action, whether that action be, in Danto’s idiom, “basic” or “mediated,” preserve a strict ontological discontinuity between the inner and outer aspects of agency. Such thinking has no place in Dewey’s more teleological and emergent-naturalist model of behavior. There, the neurosensory and cognitive strands of agency are organically interconnected in a way that defies assimilation equally to Cartesian interactionist dualism and classical empiricism’s methodological dualism of concepts versus sensa (or scheme versus content, in the idiom of Donald Davidson’s critique of “the very idea of a conceptual scheme,” which Dewey anticipated and Danto fatefully ignored).

Dewey’s kind of emergent-naturalist model of intelligence presents, in effect, a third alternative to the Cartesian/interactionist and more baldly mechanistic naturalistic models that remained in place for many twentieth-century philosophers. Danto’s long-standing resistance to certain aspects of that alternative would turn out not to be entirely graven in stone. But to appreciate why, consider a couple more ways in which he continued to picture Dewey’s philosophy as opposed to his own.

One large context for that opposition is Danto’s metaphilosophical perspectivism – his view, articulated most fully in Connections, that all significant philosophizing occurs in systems whose conflicts (unlike conflicts between propositions within such systems) cannot be adjudicated in fully cognitive ways. Danto’s philosophy represents one such supposedly settled system; Dewey’s, another. Danto further briefly describes his distance from Dewey by means of a distinction between two antinomically opposed stances about the interrelations of mind, knowledge, and world that, in a familiar and rather open-textured analytic-philosophical idiom, he calls internalism and externalism. In his 1968 Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, Danto characterizes Dewey and other pragmatists, along with Marxists, as internalists (Danto 168, 234). Three decades later, in the “Internalism and Externalism” chapter in Connections, he revisits this basic dialectic, this time with the meanings of the key terms reversed in keeping with shifting analytical-philosophical usage. Descartes is now a prime specimen of what Danto earlier called Externalism, now rechristened as Internalism. Dewey and classical pragmatism are not explicitly mentioned, with Nietzsche (whom Danto had famously described earlier as a proto-pragmatist) now slotted in as the exemplary Externalist.

Given the pervasive influence of Dewey’s organicist externalism within the twentieth-century Anglophone canon, readers might wonder why Danto would here once again ignore him in a book written in part, after all, as a polemical defense of analytic philosophy’s methods against the imagined threats from pragmatism. My ghost-banishing hypothesis may apply here yet again, but now with a further twist. Connections offers a masterly, if unabashedly partisan, introductory overview of many key lower and higher-order philosophical issues of the day. Danto makes no secret of his own internalist sympathies, but he is dialectically street-wise enough to portray the internalist/externalist dialectic as possessing an antinomical structure, rooted in his deeper perspectivism. To personally prefer one deep ontological or epistemological perspective over another, Danto implies, is one thing; to give conclusive reasons in support of such tastes is another. Like Dewey, he well understood (without going the entire pragmatist distance) that the second scenario of ideal certainty is a Cartesian fantasy. This is hardly the only respect in which Danto’s late philosophy departs dramatically from that of Descartes.

Before we pursue the last point more fully, some discussion is in order regarding another subject dear to both Danto’s and Dewey’s hearts and about which both wrote groundbreaking books: art. (I will here be brief since other chapters in this volume focus more fully on Danto’s philosophy of art.) It might at first seem puzzling that Danto all but ignores Dewey’s Art as Experience through his many art-philosophical and art-critical writings. Here again, we may have a case of ghost-banishing. In any event, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and such later books as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History and The Abuse of Beauty, as well as numerous art-critical studies in The Nation and elsewhere, together project a decidedly non-Deweyan vision of their subjects. At its core is Danto’s ahistorically essentialist definition of a work of art as an “embodied meaning,” which is in turn rooted in his neoCartesian model of knowledge as a subject/representation/world triangulation.

Contrast this with Dewey’s more anti-representationalistically framed approach to the question of what is art. According to Art as Experience, a work of art is literally an action and not a product. More exactly, it is a consummatorily charged form of the organism/environment transaction that Dewey calls “an experience,” embodied (as are all experiences for Dewey) in a stretch of intelligent behavior that resists reduction to the kind of atomistically basic and molecularly mediated agency that is fundamental for Danto. Everything in this argument, including its further emphasis on the felt qualitative unity within all fully realized experiences in the arts and elsewhere, presupposes the basic antirepresentationalist and enactivist analysis of intelligent behavior that is central to Dewey’s mature experimental pragmatism.

Here the two writers’ temperamental clash along the internalist/externalist axis surfaces again. But it does so in a way possessing now more obvious normative stakes, especially amidst postmodern-era debates about the politics of recognition across various global and cultural divides both within and without the artworld. A comparative reading of their philosophies of art needs to keep in view the fact that whereas Dewey wrote in the heyday of prewar high aesthetic modernism (Art as Experience appeared in 1934) and was critiquing that era’s philosophical art/life divisions from within, Danto, writing from a more postmodern vantage point, was selectively reconstructing those divisions, historically speaking, from without. There is little question, in any case, that Dewey would have viewed Danto’s art product- and Artworld-centered, and visual art-privileging philosophy of art as a sophisticated variant of what Art as Experience attacked as the modernist-era “compartmental” or “museum” conception of art. One also imagines Dewey being tempted, in view of both Danto’s views about knowledge and his practice of generally using “art” interchangeably with “visual art,” to call Danto’s philosophy of art a spectator theory of its subject, in a double sense. For Danto’s theory makes the experience of the spectator – and paradigmatically the spectator of canonically visual artworks, as distinct from the audiences of other arts such as literature, music, dance, and cinema – more explanatorily central than that of the creating artist, even while it also appeals epistemologically to a version of what Dewey called the “spectator theory of knowledge.”⁴ For Dewey, there are no spectators – in his epistemic sense of that term – of anything, given that all thought is both intertwined with behavior and aspires to the condition of (remember his example of the reaching child) inquiry. And all inquiry is internally bound up in the culturally and historically specific contexts he calls “situations,” which no form of representation can fully transcend. (These also include political situations, such as that of modern democracy – another major context for Dewey’s writings on philosophy and art.)

What, with all of this said, might future intellectual historians make of the temperamental divide in the life of this philosophical odd couple? So far, it seems a wide divide indeed. But Danto’s dialectical distance from Dewey on the landscape of recent philosophy may well turn out, in the fullness of doxographic time, to be narrower than now appears. Let me explain.

We saw that Danto early on cast his relationship to Deweyan pragmatism in terms of an internalist/externalist dialectic. He regarded this dialectic as separating his own methods decisively not only from Dewey but from pragmatism generally, and especially from neopragmatists like Rorty and others who had come, by the Cold War years, to perceive the more ideological forms of analytic philosophy as intellectually and socially repressive. But in the Preface to the second (1997) edition of Connections, Danto also takes a new stab at describing what he saw as the essential methodological tension in contemporary professional philosophy. This time his candidate is not, as in Connections’ original 1989 text, internalism-versus-externalism; it is now atomism-versus-holism. (These, again, are the two stances he had attributed to himself and Dewey, respectively, in the interview I quoted at the beginning.) Rorty himself, tellingly, had invoked the same two stances in his own account of Anglophone philosophy’s central fault line in 2007 (Rorty 2007). “The atomists,” Danto notes, “for the moment are on the run.” Clearly, this is at least an allusion to the anti-Analytic rebellions mentioned above. The remark also seems to gesture toward the sweeping late-twentieth century turn toward holistic “complexity” within the human and natural sciences.

Might Danto also have been channeling the retreating atomist in himself? For here, he hints for the first time at the possibility of a “third kind of system” whose elaboration would inform the agenda for a possible sequel (never published) to Connections. Such a philosophy would not (unlike, he says, most modern philosophy) model itself on the natural sciences but would instead freshly address “what defines us as human beings, or as ens representans” (Danto 1997, xix). He adds that this “is not a model, clearly, which philosophers have greatly understood.” Such a third model would interweave Connections’ closing Hegelian theme that we are social, self-interpreting spiritual beings with a less atomistically reductive version of the idea, central to the post-positivist analytical culture of Danto’s early career, that we are also natural beings.

Coincidentally (or not, if you are a certain kind of Hegelian), this is an accurate brief, as far as it goes, for the arguments of books like Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment and Terry Pinkard’s Hegel’s Naturalism. These studies appeared toward the end of Danto’s career and helped prompt certain dialectical shifts in conceptions of human rational activity that had previously both defined and separated the two Anglophone traditions of analytic philosophy and pragmatism. Even though Danto never substantially discussed that literature, his remarks in Connections suggest a shift in his own later thinking paralleling a larger sea change within mainstream analytic philosophy at the turn of the millennium. If analytic philosophizing embodies, as Danto himself evidently thought, something like Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, it is not a stretch to suppose that the latter’s recent movement ran, in the end, through Danto’s work as well.

This, if so, also suggests a shifting picture of Danto’s doxographic relationship to Dewey. To that extent, there is a sense in which Danto both never walked back his lifelong aversion to pragmatism and, to recall his remark with which I opened, never fully escaped Dewey’s influence. This seems especially true if we view Dewey as one of many thinkers who laid the groundwork for recent accounts of Hegel’s relationship to pragmatism and naturalism. Analytic philosophy’s phenomenological development here also puts the lie to earlier beliefs in its separation, as a “critical” enterprise, from other more “speculative” enterprises such as pragmatism. Expressions like “pragmatism” and “analytic philosophy” indeed don’t denote neatly compartmentalized natural or transcendental kinds. They denote cultural kinds (although for an emergent naturalist like Dewey, all cultural kinds are ultimately natural kinds, and vice versa). So understood, their history is as much one of emerging hybridizations, syntheses, and “third models” as it is one of lower-order clashes between what may initially appear to a given generation – as Dewey’s externalism and Danto’s internalism initially appeared to Danto – as incommensurable perspectives among which we can make only non-cognitive choices.

Intellectual prophecies are notoriously unreliable. But my guess is that the above-described phenomenological movement in Anglophone philosophy will certainly continue to bear out Danto’s intimation of a “third model” – a development that Dewey, as even the older neoHegelian Danto never acknowledged, already substantially pioneered decades earlier. This movement also promises to encompass more radically transdisciplinary developments within this century’s intellectual networks that are receiving the attention of many older-school philosophers only now.

Such observations begin to take the story of what Danto’s critique of Dewey and Dewey’s reconstructed critique of Danto mean beyond what either envisaged. Their disagreements were, as we have seen, deep and many. But dialectical encounters—even hypothetical ones like mine here—can sometimes also bring new pieces of common ground into focus. Danto ultimately turned out to share the spirit if not the letter of Dewey’s thought that the full meaning of any action, conversation, or practice lies as much in how it shapes the future as in its roots in the past and present. That thought paves the way, dialectically, for another which increasingly frames the work of, among many others, Hegelians, pragmatists, and analytic philosophers in this century. This is that our always-unfinished contributions to the future ensure that no one will get the last word about our connections to the world, even if nothing in the world could ever matter more to philosophers than getting those connections right.