What Danto’s Philosophy Is

 
by
D. Seiple
 
“The realm of spirit is dark and difficult terra incognita insofar as philosophical understanding is concerned, though it is as well, so far as human
understanding is concerned, the most familiar territory of all.  It is in the realm of spirit that we exist as human beings.”
 
-- Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World, p 274
 
 
 
 
Arthur Danto has been well-known as an avowedly secular philosopher.  Yet something
remarkable has been going on in his later work.  His final sentence of Connections to the World is
this: “It is in the realm of spirit that we exist as human beings.” This suggests for Danto something
“close to what Hegel meant by ‘objective spirit,’”[1] and this has struck some commentators some as
very surprising.   For here is Arthur Danto, signatory to Paul Kurtz’s Secular Humanist Declaration,
adopting an arguably non-secular vocabulary. 
 
Though Danto himself does not regard this “spiritual turn” as an especially radical departure
from his earlier work, there is something thoroughly radical about it.  For here we have a substantial
claim, at least implied on Danto’s part – that into the “dark and difficult terra incognita” of
spirit, we do nonetheless see.  And what we find there (apparently) is not opacity but a stubborn yet
penetrable translucency.  I find this utterly fascinating.  I shall not make complete sense of it here, but
I shall try to give an introduction to the contours of Danto’s thinking, in a way that might suggest,
however obliquely, where this all might someday lead. 
I shall be concentrating on what Danto view of “philosophy” turns out to be.
 
********
 
“What Philosophy Is” was the title of a little book by Danto, published back in 1968, which
begins with an interesting and perplexing puzzle. For if we raise the question of what philosophy is --
unlike, say, physics or architecture -- we do not step outside philosophy itself.  A question like “What
is physics?” (asked at a certain level of profundity) is not really a question a physicist is going to
answer, at least not from within her actual practice of doing physics – any more than, in Plato’s
celebrated dialogue, Euthyphro can wisely answer questions about what “piety” is merely by pointing
to what he’s doing to his poor father.  This same question about philosophy draws us spiraling ever
deeper into philosophy.   And so “the question of the nature of philosophy…is, unfortunately, an
internal question.”[2]
 
This distinction between external and internal has been an important motif for Danto’s work
ever since. The way he addresses and employs that distinction sets him apart from others these days
who ask this same general kind of question.  Many who have puzzled about the strange status of
philosophy have concluded that philosophy is not all it’s cracked up to be.[3]  Thus, for some,

1
philosophical terms (along with language in general) are supposed to be inherently unstable,
shimmering with marginal semiotic resonances that defy firm meanings; but even if meanings were
firm (they insist) we are still imprisoned within the house of language itself.[4]  So one obvious way to
go in such matters is to declare that philosophy as a discipline has no deep things to say, just because
we can’t ever get out of the spiral of questions about the very language in which any answers have to
be framed.  This, though in far too rough and crude a form, is the general approach taken by perhaps
the typical “postmodernist”– or, as Danto at one place puts it, by the philosopher whom we might
call, “for somewhat complex reasons,”[5] simply “R.” 
 
Danto himself, on the other hand, retains a comparatively “high” view of philosophy’s standing
– though not quite as high as some of his illustrious predecessors have.  It is true, he would say, that
philosophical questions are not empirical ones: they leave the world just the way it was before any
such questions are even asked.  And the succession of philosophical questions has a remarkable
cadence to them: from system to system throughout the history of philosophy, “the same drama being
reenacted over and over again, as though in compliance with the same choreography.” But this has
not led Danto to suppose that philosophical questions are either a meaningless misuse of language, or
a mere reflection of transitory cultural conversations (“edifying”[6] or otherwise).
 
Well then, why – given this monotonous lack of progress in the discipline -- has
Danto not given up on philosophy?  The answer I think lies with two key notions he employs
throughout his work, the first of which is the notion of indiscernibility.  Danto’s view is that
philosophical distinctions, whatever they are, are not “natural” distinctions – they are not, as analytic
philosophers often say, natural kinds.  There may indeed be natural (“real”) distinctions between, say,
hydrogen and oxygen, or horses and hyenas, or humans and non-humans (or whatever) –
but philosophical distinctions cannot be like these.  For these natural distinctions are ultimately the
sort we can discern – or at least stipulate -- with scientific precision (if not simply by commonsense
observation).  These are empirically significant.  But philosophical distinctions, on the other hand,
have to do with distinctions between empirical indiscernibles: two different philosophical
explanations leave the world unchanged, regardless of which might turn out to be correct. 
(Remember, for example that famous “refutation” of Bishop Berkeley by Samuel Johnson….[7])
 
If this is right, then the difference between philosophical “worlds” cannot really consist of the
fact that in one world there exists something lacking in the other.  And this is worth reiterating: this
very point about what a philosophical difference has to be, Danto thinks, is virtually required by the
history of philosophy itself.   Only this can account for the strangely repetitious cadences of
philosophical explanation -- where, for example, idealism gives way to empiricism and then swings
back again.  For if philosophical differences were internal to the world, then why do idealists and
materialists keep reappearing at almost predictable intervals, as philosophy has moved from one era
to the next?  Philosophical claims are not like claims about, say, phlogiston.
 
Thus at one point Danto seems to wonder whether William James wasn’t right: perhaps
philosophy is not “knowledge” after all: “instead, philosophy is like a mood, a coloration of the
whole of reality…It is as though philosophically different worlds turned more on faith than on
knowledge, like the world of the religiously inspired.”[8] The extent to which this is Danto’s own view
is not entirely clear from the context in which this passage occurs.
 

2
 ****
 
                     To get clearer on this, let’s give an example.  Danto was led to think about these
matters not directly from traditional philosophical problems, but more from questions having to do
with art.  What intrigued him about the art scene in the early 1960s was the move out of abstract
expressionism to pop and conceptual art, and especially the innovations of Andy Warhol.  For it was
Warhol, following in the steps of Marcel Duchamp, who came up with the brilliantly bland idea that a
mere Campbell’s soup can or Brillo box, ordinarily a commodity on a store shelf, can be transfigured
into a work of art simply by a kind of cultural fiat.[9] 
 

Andy Warhol
Brillo Boxes
1970 (enlarged refabrication of 1964 project)[10]

This of course scandalized those had taken art “seriously” up to then, but one of the subtexts of
Danto’s work has been his willingness to debunk the pretensions of established convention, without
however contesting any and all significance whatsoever.  This is not an easy trick to pull off, because
once the aura of established authority has been dimmed, it’s not all that uncommon for petulant self-
indulgence to replace philistine conventionalism.  Danto tries to navigate between these two.
Two points are important here.  (1) What distinguishes Warhol’s work of art from a
commonplace item in the supermarket is, for Danto, a matter of ontology.  It’s a philosophical matter,
and this has led to his interesting (and controversially misunderstood thesis about the “end” of art). 
Since Brillo Box is virtually indiscernible from a box of Brillo pads, the difference has to be
something along the lines of what philosophers try to discern. (Whether or not this philosophical
discernment can be a matter of “knowledge” is an intriguing puzzle.)  (2) And this, importantly, is not
just a matter of abstract theory, but of  what one might call “shared consciousness,” and this cultural
phenomenon is of course an historical development.  Danto in this respect is actually a self-avowed
Hegelian,[11] though he did not actually begin speaking in quite such a way until later in his career. 
Early on, he spoke instead of “an atmosphere of theory” on the part of those in the “artworld”[12] who
pay attention to gallery openings. 
So, once again, Brillo Box as first exhibited by Warhol in 1964 was virtually indistinguishable
as a natural object from its commercial counterpart.  The difference here is a philosophical, not an
empirical, difference, and this is a model of what Danto takes a philosophical problem to be.  The
philosophical account of something is not to be decided by any difference internal to that thing as a

3
natural object in the world, because there is no such difference.  Philosophical differences are
empirically indiscernible.  Philosophy leaves the world just as it was.  Any genuinely philosophical
explanation is external to the world – or, as Danto is fond of saying, philosophical accounts lie “at
right angles to the world.”
 
*********
So what Danto wants to say about philosophy is that it lies, in a way, outside the world because
it represents the possible ways of assessing a human being’s status with respect to the world.  For
Danto, the enterprise of philosophy is an articulation of philosophical kinds,[13] of which there are a
limited array of possible configurations.  And so we have those “strange cadences of the history of
philosophy,” where the same disputes seem to reoccur over and again, as if choreographed within a
narrow repertoire of what is logically available. 
 
This philosophical repertoire is comprised of a trinity of doctrines -- of Understanding,
Knowledge, and Being ( i.e., “the world”), which are renderings of the relation between subject and
representation (understood meaning), the relation between representation and world (knowable truth)
and the relation between subject and world (empirical causation):
 
 
Danto's
philosophical
architecture

Understantding
(Meaning)
Subject Represetntation

Causation
Truth
(denotation)
"Being" (reality,
the world)

                
 
Philosophical inquiry depends on the fact that these can of course be variously portrayed. 
Berkeley erased the world, by rendering it translatable into the content of representations had by
subjects – so only two of the three relata remain.  Hume eliminated even the subject, so that only
representations remain, and so on.  But whatever configuration we take to be the “true” philosophical,
what makes it true is not something in the world itself.
 

4
 Now this makes Danto what he calls an “externalist” when it comes to philosophy. 
(“Externalism” and “internalism,” in this sense, relate to questions of philosophical language: does
linguistic reference lie outside or inside the linguistic realm?)  This brings into view Danto’s second
key notion, which is representation.  Representation, as Danto means it, turns out to be important
because it speaks to a natural objection one might raise at this point.  For this idea of philosophy as an
externalist activity seems entirely counterintuitive, at one level at least, because both the subject and
the representation areinternal to the world, in a way that our little diagram above seems to miss.  (For
where are selves and thoughts if not in bodies?)  And this is obviously right.  This is a point that
pragmatists, and especially neo-pragmatists,[14] tend to favor: language for them is just a natural tool
for accomplishing things in praxis.  There is a laterality about all this, which is apparent (once again)
when we consider art.  Danto relates how the painters have made use of what we might call lateral
reference – allusions to the work of others, as when Raphael painted the Holy Family in the style of
Leonardo’s famous work on the same subject, or how John Trumball painted George Washington on
a horse that recalls the noble steeds depicted from Roman days.  Nonetheless, Danto declares, it is not
those allusions that are being represented in what we might call a vertical sense.  The representational
subject is the historical Mary and child, or it’s the actual Revolutionary General, not (he insists) the
mere idea of them.
 
This example is meant to draw the distinction between references within the representational
firmament itself – what we call semiotics these days -- and references to the external world.  But from
painting it still might not be so obvious that a representational vehicle, as Danto calls it, can serve
double duty in just this respect.  So think here instead of a photograph taken at a convention of Elvis
impersonators.  At one level, we might say that the photo is “of” Elvis Presley – tiresomely so,
perhaps, since here might be dozens of persons depicting the same dearly departed entertainer.  This
is what the picture is “about” at one level – Elvis and none other.  But at another level, it’s really
“about|” the particular Tom, Dicks, and Harrys who actually attended the convention, and all the
regalia of sideburn and gracelandish costume does not alter that representational fact. 
 
Many “philosophers” these days, admittedly, will not want to follow Danto at this point.  Many
remain “internalists” when it comes to the language of philosophy – or whatever is left of philosophy
when the external dimension is shorn away.   Indeed, “it is impossible to emphasize too heavily the
sheer incommensurability of an externalist and an internalist approach”[15] in these matters.  And to
many, Danto’s insistence on vertical reference might seem quaintly conservative. This is after all just
the kind of preoccupation that analytic philosophers have typically been cornered by – questions
about how (as Bertrand Russell famously asked) an expression can denote anything, and when it
comes to a sentence whose subject is a non-denoting expression (like ‘The present King of France is
bald’ or ‘Unicorns have horns’) – how such sentences can be meaningful or even, in some cases,
true? 
 
This is a very long story, which Danto refers to as the “chilling tale of fictional reference.”[16] I
shall not add any more cold wind by drawing it out any further.  The point I really want to make is
that from an analytic standpoint, Danto is rather quite radical, because not only does he want to
addvertical reference to the concerns of literary criticism (which has not been much preoccupied with
such things lately); to philosophy, he also wants to add the concerns of horizontal reference – what he
calls the “network of reciprocal effects,”[17]  which are the very stuff of any semiotician’s study.  And
what’s especially interesting to me is this.  When these two concerns are combined – when our very

5
lives as physically embodied human beings are regarded both as reciprocally related texts and as
objects of horizontal reference, we have entered the space Danto calls “spirit.” And here we require
not just two planes of reference, but a third – a “z-coordinate” – which we can call self-
representation.  And at least from my own reading of Danto’s work, which he is now apparently
prepared to accept,[18] here is just where Foucault enters the picture, as the spiritual power of self-
representational discourse becomes apparent to those who experience themselves being transfigured
through the cultural icons in which they recognize their own depiction.  
 
This then seems to be what Danto wants to say about art and about spirit as well.  When he
claims that a literary text “contains an implied indexical,”[19] what he seems to mean is that the act
of really reading a text is also the act of transfiguring oneself in imagination.  And one does this same
thing insofar as one really lives one’s life, as one invents one’s own narrative.  The existentialist
connection here is not accidental: two of Danto’s earliest books were about Sartre and Nietzsche, so it
is perhaps not too surprising that this is the kind of point he should now be making.  Others have
made similar points.[20]
 
This is why literature cannot be simply a network of reciprocal effects, a mere semiotic
phantasm, “an infinite windowless library”[21] where, as in a Huysmans novel,[22] life is only a shadow
play of weightless images – a kind of Cartesian dream lacking only the Evil Genius.  Life itself is a
performance, and performatives[23] presuppose a reference to the context that makes the sincere
performance real.  There is a kind of bad faith in supposing one’s own life to be lacking such a
context, just as there is a kind of blindness in supposing that even a French literary critic is drawn to
literature simply to be drawn to literature.  No (Danto insists) -- good literature is “about” us its
readers, and when we read in this way, we refer not just to representations themselves, and not just to
the rest of the external world, but to us  as subjects – who are at the same time both external to the
text and internal to the act of reading it.
 
And this is just where the translucency of spirit coincides with the metaphors of texts.  It is a
fascinating fact about our humanness, apparently, that reading texts this way has a power that reading
texts in other ways lacks.  For Danto, this is the power of spirit, whose effects are creative and
transformational -- ontologically generative, in fact – through a kind of “rebirth”[24] that awaits anyone
who fully masters the interpretive cultural skills at our human disposal. Again: “it is in the realm of
spirit that we exist as human beings.”
 
******
 
But what does this really mean, in more specific terms?  It means, first of all, that the spiritual
realm – whatever else one wants to say about it – is not a realm apart from the physical.  As humans,
we live as intentional beings and not just as neurological cogs; but this does not mean that our
intentions are mysteriously non-physical events.  The philosopher Donald Davidson made a similar
point about intentions:[25] the fact that an intentional description cannot be reduced to a physical
description does not mean that the two cannot pick out the same event.  At the discrete moment one’s
hand is raised – either as an unintended reflex or as an intentional signal – the empirical difference
between the two kinds of events would be indiscernible. What matters is the larger context in which
they occur.  And in the case of intentional conduct (i.e., action), though not in the case of mere reflex,

6
 that difference lies in the intentional representations that constitute the motivational psychology of
the agent.
   This also appears to suggest that much unproductive theological discussion – where references
to “spirit” are supposed to be housed – can be put to rest (at least for philosophers).  In speaking
about God, theologians have sometimes depended upon the distinction between “transcendence” and
“immanence”; Danto turns “transcendence” into an historicist category. What is transcendent to the
Brillo box on the store – its status as an art object, which it lacks on the check-out counter -- is really
immanent to the historical process by which Andy Warhol came along and moved it to his exhibition
space.[26]  “Transcendence,” in other words, is a relative term, and from time to time, we as humans
experience such remarkable expansion (if we are “fully” human and not incapacitated by depression,
etc).  Insofar as a certain self-representation takes, this amount to a spiritual transfiguration of our
commonplace existence, on a par with the ontological transfiguration of ordinary objects into
artworks, and this in turn amounts to a kind of narrative reading of our own lives, parallel to the
absorption one experiences in the throes of a good novel.  This is of course why scriptures are
important to religious communities, because without the narratives that scriptures and their attendant
ritual practices invoke in the believer, no such religious experience would ever occur.
 
I have suggested that the category to understand this might be “spiritual autonomy.”  This
places the entire matter within the context of action theory, which Danto was instrumental in pushing
back in the 1970s but has lost much of its interest because it failed to serve the foundationalist
purposes Danto was then (but is no longer) attracted to.[27] I suspect that its adherents have given up
too quickly on action theory.  This, however, will require a separate discussion…   
 
 
 

 CITATIONS

[1]
 Personal correspondence, 8/1/04.
[2]
 Arthur C. Danto, What Philosophy Is (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 2.
[3]
 After Philosophy: End or Transformation? edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge MA:
MIT Press, 1987).
[4]
 (Or as an analytically trained philosopher might put it, we can reach beyond  the “object language” to the “metalanguage,” but
never between language itself.)
[5]
 Arthur C. Danto, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 71.
[6]
 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
[7]
 "After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the
non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is
not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty
force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus.'" (Boswell's Life of Johnson, Hill edn., Oxford Univ. Press,
1971, Vol. 1, p. 471).
[8]
 Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 13.
[9]
 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
[10]
 “More than thirty years after their first exhibition at Stable Gallery (in 1964) in New York, Warhol's Brillo Boxes continue to
unsettle museum visitors through their deadpan replication of American commercial culture.  As part of Warhol's first sculptural
project, the Brillo Boxes comment on the commercial framework behind the pristine spaces of the art gallery and art museum,
while rubbing the nose of high culture in the mundane is order of the supermarket stockroom.” 
http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/collection/warhol.html

7
 
[11]
 Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), xviii.
[12]
 Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," in Philosophy Looks at the Arts, ed. Joseph Margolis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1987), 156-67.
[13]
 Danto, Connections to the World, ch 4.
[14]
 I.e., Richard Rorty
[15]
 Danto, Connections, 153.
[16]
 Danto, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," 69.
[17]
 Danto, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," 74.
[18]
 See Appendix at the end of this paper.
[19]
 Danto, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," 78.
[20]
 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
[21]
 Danto, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," 81.
[22]
 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature (Au Rebours), translated by Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin, 1959).
[23]
 Cp. J. L. Austin.
[24]
 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 12.
[25]
 Donald Davidson, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes," The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963 1963), reprinted in Essays on Actions
and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3-19.
[26]
 This is not precisely what happened, but Warhol’s replication of the box amounts to virtually the same thing, in Danto’s view.
[27]
 Arthur C. Danto, "Basic Actions and Basic Concepts," 1979, in The Body/Body Problem (Berkeley CA: University of California
Press, 1999), 45-62.
 
 
Presented to the Philosophy Forum, Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center (New York City), May 28, 2005