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      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.

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