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Amsterdam: Rodopi.

7 Danto on Dewey (and Dewey on Danto)

      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

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