CONNECTIONS TO THE WORLD aT oncepts of Philosophy ARTHUR C. DANTO WITH A NEW PREFACEONNECTIONS TO Uae ORLD The Basic Concepts of Philosophy With a New Preface Arthur C. Danto UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles. LondonUniversity of Californta Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © Preface (1997) by Arthur C, Danto © 1989 by Arthur C. Danto First University of California Press printing 1997. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Danto, Arthur Coleman, 1924 Connections to the world : the baste concepts of philosophy / Arthur C. Danto. Boom, Originally published: New York : Harper and Row, © 1989. Includes index. ISBN 0-520-20842-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy—Introduction. 2. Philosophy, Modern—20th century. 1. Title, BD21.D36 1997 100—de21 96-7031 ce Printed in the United States of America 98765432 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American [National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984For my brother BruceContents Preface (1997) Preface (1989) xi xxi PART I The Singularity of Philosophical Thought Philosophy and Its History The Character of Philosophical Problems Two Sorts of Illusions Philosophical Kinds Philosophy as Pathology Wittgenstein and Plato Inside and Outside the World The Intelligibility of the World The Structures of Philosophical Thought COI AKMewWNe PART II Understanding 10 Vehicles of Understanding 11 Verification 12 Feeling and Meaning 13 Metaethical Controversy 14 Two Views of Language 15 The Empiricist Theory of Understanding 16 Definition and Dialectic 3 6 14 17 20 24 29 35 39 45 54 60 67 76 86 9517 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Contents Analytic, Synthetic, A priori, A posteriori Totalistic Thought Geometry and Reality PART III Knowledge The Analysis of Knowledge Doubt, Dream, and Demon Thinking and Certainty Internalism and Externalism The Ontological Argument The Notion of Existence Representationalism and Idealism Idealism, Realism, and Phenomenalism Matter, the World, and Philosophies of Knowledge Coherence and Reality Reality and Rationality PART IV_ The World Substance The Mind-Body Problem Persons Behaviorism and Functionalism Neurophilosophy Intentionality and Representational Materialism Representational Beings Causal Analysis Mental Causation The Realm of Spirit Index 104 111 119 129 137 144 151 155 162 167 176 186 194 214 219 228 237 242 249 257 265 270 275Preface (1997 F ALL HUMANISTIC DISCIPLINES, philosophy has proven most O immune to the tremendous upheavals of consciousness which have shaken academic culture since the late 1960s. It is prac- ticed today very much as though deconstruction, multiculturalism, and gender studies were distant perturbations on alien continents of thought. Occasionally these concepts find their way into philo- sophical discussion, as topics of symposia or as articles in profes- sional journals, but only on condition of being transformed into philosophical problems, tractable to the same clarificatory modes of analytical address as the problem of the external world or the mind/body problem or the semantics of fictional names—as if philosophers did not regard these concepts in any large way threat- ening to the central practices of their discipline. On different floors of the Humanities Center—or even along the same corridors— what had once been departments of literature have become depart- ments of cultural studies, shaken with curricular revolutions and agonized by contests regarding the canon; philosophy departments continue to be given over to logical or phenomenological analysis of problems which, in other forms, to be sure, would have been recognizable to their predecessors from Plato and Aristotle to Rus- sell and Husserl. There have been internal critiques of philosophy in our own times, but these, again, have been treated as internal topics of philosophy, problems in, rather than for, philosophy as a discipline. Nothing Deconstruction has said could be as challeng- ing to philosophy as the attacks against it by Logical Positivism at mid-century, when almost the entirety of philosophy was con-xii Preface signed to nonsense on grounds of its non-verifiability. Bit by bit the Criterion of Non-Verifiability crumbled into logical dust against the bastions it was intended to demolish. It is hardly likely that those bastions will have been shaken by agitated normaliens saying something obscure about the metaphysics of presence: what is in- tended as a devastating critique refers to a position in a total array of positions which philosophers have dealt with since the time of Heracleitus. Nor can philosophers for long take seriously Nietz- sche’s charge that philosophy is largely confessional and autobio- graphical, or Derrida’s contention that its texts are in the end some kind of literature in disguise. Russell’s theory of types or Goodman's new riddle of induction or Quine’s concerns about the inscrutability of reference do not in any plausible ways reflect patterns of pater- nalist oppression, or the politics of phallologocentrism, however human all too human their sponsors. Philosophy, to borrow the title my friend Annalita Alexander gave to one of her plays, is a grinding machine. By the time even the most urgent of human concerns finds its way into philosophy, it has been transformed into terms philosophy knows how to deal with and so put into the kind of perspective which can be healing or frustrating for those who brought it to philosophy in the first place, seeking whatever help or meaning whatever harm. Notwithstanding this outward imperviousness, the history of philosophy in the twentieth century has been the history of self- dissatisfaction, as its many internal critiques testify. Those who have found it a scandal of thought, who wrote it off as pathology or bad poetry and sought to purge or redeem it, have been as frustrated as attacks from without by the way their weapons have been blunted through the same grinding processes. So philosophy stands in the landscape of contemporary thought, like a somewhat mysterious citadel, invulnerable but baffling. It is baffling to those without its walls because philosophers communicate with one another, typi- cally, in dense, technical articles, often inaccessible to readers illiter- ate in the notations of symbolic logic, addressing issues whose larger human relevance is as obscure as the immediate purport of the articles themselves. But philosophers, able of course to say whatPreface xiii limited achievement is being aimed at in these communications, themselves may be at some loss in explaining what ultimate human purpose is furthered through that limited achievement. Not that the citadel is a reenactment of the Tower of Babel, but certainly the overall architecture of the citadel is not something those who know their way through its Piranesian maze, through its galleries and colonnades and up and down its dark staircases, are always alto- gether capable of describing. One benefit of the internal attacks has been to make philosophers themselves conscious of philosophy as a bounded whole, different from other human undertakings like sci- ence or art, and different, ultimately, from the humanistic disci- plines which have, unlike it, crumpled under ideologies that philos- ophy has been able to repel or ignore. The internal attacks have also made philosophers aware that the nature of philosophy is an inter- nal problem of philosophy and that that recognition is something which must be taken into account in philosophy’s self-definition. As with human beings as such, the question of what we are is part of what we are. On the other hand, as with each of us individually, there is often so much to handle in the regular order of life that self-knowledge is something we are prepared to defer for as long as necessary, so that even at this late date philosophy remains a puzzle as much for philosophers as for the rest. “The word ‘philosophy, ” Wittgenstein wrote as a parenthesis in his masterpiece, “must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences” (Tractatus, 4.111). In an influential text, the philosopher Richard Rorty, for exam- ple, sought to reduce philosophy as a whole to one of its posi- tions—the idea that the mind reflects reality like a mirror—and, mounting two or three not unfamiliar arguments against it, walked off, dusting his hands, looking for something more profitable to do with his time. Philosophers themselves were less impressed with Rorty’s destructive analysis than they were with the larger question Rorty raised of what philosophers might do that would be of some more apparent human service than the minute analyses with which day-to-day philosophical activity is taken up. Rorty’s recommenda- tion that philosophers engage in “edifying conversation” with thosexiv Preface in other disciplines yielded a tiny problem for philosophical analy- sis, namely how “edification” is to be understood. But more deeply, it left the question of what philosophers might contribute to such conversations beyond what members of those disciplines might contribute to conversations between themselves. The implication of Rorty’s discussion is that philosophy has no subject matter—he has even advocated the demolition of philosophy departments and the distribution of its various subdivisions among other academic departments, e.g., history, psychology, literature, and mathematics, despairing of finding a saving irresoluble remnant. This would doubtless realize an academic administrator’s dream, but it leaves unresolved the question of what philosophers might bring to their various new venues that justified the benefits package to which they would still be entitled. The “mirror of nature,” that metaphor with which Rorty pre- tends to find such difficulty and at the same time to regard as so easily dispensed with, remains today as the problem of conscious- ness—something which nothing elsewhere in the universe resem- bles and which has resisted reduction and assimilation with some- thing of the tenacity of philosophy itself. Philosophers have at times found wonderment in the fact that anything exists at all. But there is a greater wonderment in the fact that what exists can be an object for itself. That there should be a fold in the universal fabric through which that fabric becomes in its entirety, the fold itself in- cluded, an object of awareness to itself, is not something for which our knowledge of the rest of the fabric altogether prepares us. “Fold” is no better a metaphor than mirror, but we have nothing better than metaphors to use for referring to what we do not really need metaphors to recognize as unique. Awareness, object, exis- tence, and truth partially define the core topics of philosophy, and if nothing else, philosophy serves to remind humankind of the won- der and precariousness of our situation in the universe. Colin McGinn’s view that it is internal to consciousness that the under- standing of its own nature transcends its limits may be a defective view of things, but if it is even thinkable, the distribution of philos-Preface xv ophy’s preoccupations among disciplines whose province falls within our limits leaves everything essential to it untouched. What philosophy offers and nothing other than it does is a view of the whole of things—of consciousness, objects, existence, and truth—of the world in its entirety and our relationship to that en- tirety from within. Somewhere in his or her studies, a student ought for once to gain the sort of perspective that only so global a vision allows, in which the basic orders of things are identified and the relationships between them mapped. Nothing basic can be left out, everything must be accounted for, as it is in the great philo- sophical visions of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Dewey, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Sartre, to mention only the moderns. One cannot parcel out pieces of philosophy without losing the priceless benefit of a totality re- vealed. And sooner or later, the distributed parts of philosophy would reclaim, internally, whatever parts of itself had been par- celled out elsewhere. Philosophy is a single whole, just as its intel- lectual products are single wholes from which nothing essential is missing: the least unit of philosophical discourse is a total system. Which of the disciplines, for example, would deal with the ques- tions of the philosophy of art? Not art history, surely, nor psychol- ogy or anthropology. Just to begin with, the distinction must be drawn between works of art and ordinary objects, when, as has be- come vivid in recent times, there need be no perceptual difference between them. Why is a monochrome painting a work of art when something of the same shape and color is simply a painted surface? And then there is the question of what makes that a philosophical question. In some way the philosophical questions about art are closer to the questions Descartes raises of the difference between dream and waking when these, too, cannot be told apart, than they are to the questions addressed by the Institute of Dream Research in applying for grants. Descartes’s problem cannot be resolved by resort to electroencephalograms, any more than the question of what makes a snowshovel into a work of art can be settled through spectroscopic analysis. It is not like distinguishing the fake from thexvi Preface authentic. It is not connoisseurship but, to use the frustrating term, ontology. And there simply is no discipline other than philosophy for dealing with the question, even if the latter were raised outside of philosophy, in the internal evolution of modern art, rather than imagined by philosophers, whose powers of conception are, after all, as limited as anyone else’s. A philosopher of my acquaintance fell into conversation with his seat-mate on an airplane not long ago, and after considerable pressure from her acknowledged that he was by profession a philosopher. As a general rule, one keeps this information to one- self to avoid awkward conversation—not all philosophers have Socrates's appetite for engaging in dialogue with come who may. In this instance the woman was delighted to meet a philosopher and asked if he would tell her some if his sayings. It was too charm- ing a story for me to ask him what his response was, but I know what it ought to have been. “Doing philosophy” is not a matter of composing sayings, though the texts of philosophy are filled with pungent assertions. “The result of philosophy,” to cite again from a work which sometimes reads like a collection of sayings, “is not a number of ‘philosophical’ propositions.” Consider “Whereof you cannot speak, thereof you must be silent,” the famous concluding proposition (Proposition 7) of Wit- tgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophical. An entire class once recited it, like a chorus, when I referred to it in a seminar in France. I have seen it printed on T-shirts. But in context it rests on the distinction, central in Wittgenstein at the time and achieved with a degree of agonized thought, between saying and showing, between the sen- tences of a language and the semantics for that language, and finally between the sentences of philosophy and the sentences which rep- resent the world by showing the forms of its facts—as well as the important things that are not in the world, as for example the meaning of the world, which “must lie outside the world” (6.41). In the world, Wittgenstein goes on to write, “there is no value— and if there were, it would be of no value.” So “there are no ethical propositions”; hence we lack the wherewithal to say that some- thing is of value and must be silent when we want to shout out thePreface xvii wrongness of things. The Tiactatus is an architecture of pure philos- ophy, with reference to the whole from which Proposition 7 draws its meaning. For all its marvelous mystery, it is not an extractable saying. It is, in regard to its status, a fragment. But that is always true of philosophy. Each “saying” is a fragment of a whole. Philosophy ultimately deals only with these. And this means that if philosophers disagree, one must first establish what whole it is to which they are committed, and whether the differ- ence arises within the same whole or between different wholes. This makes philosophical criticism treacherous, since disagreements between those who subscribe to different wholes is not a well- understood matter. Bertrand Russell once jocularly divided philoso- phers into those who “believe the world is a bowl of jelly, and those who believe it a bucket of shot”—between those who think there is one single unitary fact, everything being part of it, and those who, like Wittgenstein, see the world as a collection of logi- cally independent facts. Russell believed himself an atomist, moved though he was by the mystical vision of a single underlying unitary being, and he argued fiercely with his senior contemporary, F H. Bradley, who was a holist. But because the two visions are so in- compatible, any given proposition subscribed to by one kind of philosopher will mean something different from that very sentence subscribed to by another kind. Controversies between adherents of the two systems will inevitably be frustrating and inconclusive. Russell’s jokily formulated division goes back to the very begin- nings of philosophical thought. It captures the difference between Parmenides and Democritus, between Spinoza and Leibniz, as well as between Bradley and Russell. The alarums raised by Derrida against the metaphysics of presence are an attack on some version of atomism, though its author, who greatly aspired to the status of standing nowhere at all, obviously had no patience with working out the holistic implications of his own position. There are holisms today in the philosophies of language and of mind. When Professor Quine writes that “as far as knowledge is concerned, no more can be claimed for our whole body of assertions than that it is a devi- ous but convenient system for relating experiences to experiences.xviii Preface The system as a whole is underdetermined by experience,” he writes as a holist, though he would hardly relish bedding down with Hegel. The atomists for the moment are on the run. Still, there is an entire system of atomism available to whoever might care to work its details out, and which reflects our practice at least as well as holism does. But how many such total philosophical systems are there? Is there a third kind of system, unabsorbable to what William James called the One and the Many or Russell compared to jelly and to shot? This profound meta-philosophical question is scarcely raised in Connections to the World. I have sought, rather, to organize the com- ponents which every system of philosophy must deal with into a system in its own right, which takes as central the concept of repre- sentation. In it I treat human beings as ens representans—as beings defined for philosophical purposes through the fact that we form representations. We are, in our capacity as ens representans, connected to the world under two orders of relationship, that of causality and that of truth. The book really does take responsibility for attempt- ing a definition of philosophy from within, which emerges from the systematic ordering of representation, causality, and truth as key concepts. There is more to us than our capacity for representation, but it remains arguable that pretty much the entirety of the tradi- tion is built around this remarkable activity. Consciousness of the world would mean very little if we were not able to extract some representation of that of which we were conscious. Readers curi- ous about the citadel of philosophy will find in this book a guide, and those who inhabit the citadel, if they find it wanting, might themselves accept the challenge to write one more adequate. Some such guide is certainly needed, more today than ever, since philoso- phy seems to stand apart from the seething humanistic discourse which surrounds it. In my concluding section, however, to which I assign the somewhat Santayanesque title, “The Realm of Spirit,” I have defined a site where philosophy and the humanities might meet and even join. There I take up the distinction between the natural and the human sciences and attempt to defend it. Philoso- phy has sought in the main to model itself on the natural sciences,Preface xix but a very different model is required for addressing what defines us as human beings, or as ens representans, and such a model, al- though vaguely articulated, underlies the wild ideologies of the hu- manities today. It is not a model, clearly, which philosophers have greatly understood, and by bringing it in as my final word, this book indicates, almost quantitatively, what a proportionately small segment of traditional philosophical thought it constitutes. It would badly misrepresent the history and structure of the philosophical tradition to give it more space, but it will only be by cultivating this site that philosophy can develop and the humanities become disci- plined. Were this book to have a sequel, it would be erected here. Beyond this, and speaking as an author, the book is very dear to me, and I am all the more grateful to the University of California Press for extending its life, and particularly to Edward Dimendberg, the humanities editor, for his confidence and friendship. A.C.D. New York City 1996Preface (1989) Af AND CHARACTERISTIC EPISODE in the lives of cognitive beings—of ourselves, animals, perhaps some ma- chines, and possibly gods and angels if there are any—consists of the world causing us to represent it in a way that is true. Such episodes are as routine and incessant as respiration or digestion; and evolution, which gave us our cognitive as it did our meta- bolic structures, must underwrite—through our survival as in- dividuals and as a species—the truthfulness of our representa- tional systems. For the life of a cognitive being does not consist solely of a series of basic cognitive episodes—we are not passive instruments on which the world plays representational melo- dies—and representation is standardly and smoothly translated into actions, upon whose success our continuation depends. The possibility of illusion is a by-product of our cognitive architec- ture, to be sure, and falsehood is as much the dark companion of truth as death is of life. Still, if we are satisfied with statistical frequency, the preponderance of true over false representations must be stupefyingly great. In part this must be due to the fact that very few of their cognitive translations impinge on the con- sciousness of the beings they define. Like most of what takes place in body and in brain, the life of representation takes place without our being aware that it is taking place. Our basic cogni- tive competence is a piece of biological inheritance over most of which we exercise no control whatever. It is no doubt a blessing of nature that so little of the impres-xxii Preface sion that the world makes on us should be registered as an object of conscious awareness. In part this is due to the extreme ineffi- ciency this would impose on the conduct of our cognitive af- fairs—think how little time we would have left over if we had to tend to what happens to what we have eaten once we have put it in our mouths, And even this degree of residual efficiency would be reduced were we obliged to determine, on the basis of rep- tesentations that had become conscious, whether these were caused by what would make them true if they are true, and hence if it is safe to act on the information we believe these representations disclose. The philosopher Descartes acknowledged as much when he turned his back on what he termed a “rash impulse of na- ture’—the belief that his representations correspond to their causes—and undertook the dangerous meditations on certainty with which modern philosophy properly began. The question for Descartes was whether one could deduce from one’s representa- tions alone that there is anything outside ourselves that causes us to have them and of which they are true. Had nature allowed us to begin our existence in the way in which Descartes began his Meditations, we would have been among its most ephemeral ex- periments. It is a felicity of adaptation that the mechanisms of representation should be segregated from conscious meditation, or perhaps that those representations that do cross the threshold into consciousness should be but marginally relevant to our animal ex- istence. But this is tantamount to saying that it was a fortune of evolution that our species did not begin with philosophers. It is biologically safe to philosophize only when we have become sta- ble as a species. Descartes’s decision to meditate on the cognitive reliability of his representations only when he could do nothing more practical—he was snowbound and immobilized—is a meta- phor for this truth. The basic cognitive episode, as I have called it, is composed of three components and three relationships, and inasmuch as these are the fundamental concepts of philosophy, it might be worth dwelling on them before our image becomes clouded with detail. The com- ponents are the subject, the representations, and the world:Preface — xxiii subject ———_—_——___ representation No world The relations are between the world and the subject, between the subject and its representations, and between the representations and the world. The first relation is that of causality, and the third that of truth. Together these constitute, philosophically speaking, our connections to the world. The second relation concerns our connec- tion to ourselves and I shall, shortly, sketch some of the ways in which philosophers have supposed this connection must be analyzed. For the moment, all that matters is that it is as a representing being that we are connected to the world in terms of causality and truth—inside the world, one might say, under causality and outside the world under the truth-relationship. In daring to ask whether he was justified in believing that his representations answered to causes outside himself, Descartes was calling into question his (our) con- nections to the world. In answering his question with a qualified affirmation, Descartes supposed that he had discharged the philo- sophical task of reconnecting us to the world. But, in the first moment of his meditation, all he felt he really knew was that he was a being with representations that, for all he could tell, would be just as they were whether or not there were a world to cause them or make them true. And were he to fail in his reconnective enter- prise, he would have to end where he began, as a being with representations or, as he put it, an ens cogitans—a thinking being, certain of nothing else. Descartes looms large in this book and, indeed, my picture of the basic cognitive episode owes a great deal to him: It was he who defined our structure in the terms my first paragraph takes for granted. Nevertheless, it is worth stressing right at the beginning