METAPHILOSOPHY

Vol. 22, Nos. 1 and 2, JanuarylApril 1YY1

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BOOKS

Review Article

DANTO’S CONNECTIONS

MICHAEL E. HOBART

For nearly thirty years Arthur C. Danto has made his philosophical
presence felt both within academic circles and in a more amorphous
entity, the intellectual public. Forceful, intelligent, and learned, that
presence pervades his writings, whether advancing new positions
(Particularly in philosophy of history and aesthetics), interpreting other
philosophers (e.g. Nietzsche, Sartre), grappling with current issues in
epistemology and philosophy of language, or criticizing art for The
Nation. Always mindful of his analytical Ps and Qs, Danto nonetheless
possesses a literary style and sensibilities, rarely equaled by academic
philosophers, that take philosophical analysis to its limits and often
refashion its insights. In his care even old ideas acquire freshness and a
place in contemporary concerns. Indeed, few philosophers stand better
equipped to survey the “wide horizons” of philosophy, a task risking at
once excessive commonplaces for the specialist and excessive allusions
for the uninitiate.
In Connections to the World,’ Danto undertakes the risk and essays a
broad look at what philosophical inquiry consists of and how it
proceeds. Through forty brief chapters, divided roughly into four
decades, he considers the “whole of philosophy” as a “single text that
counts itself content as well as container,” and broaches the major
topics that have captivated Western philosophers since Antiquity.
[CW, xvi] (He also occasionally introduces an argument from the Orient
for a comparative, clarifying perspective.) These topics sift into three
components of the “basic cognitive episode” (subjects, representations,
and the world) and three relationships between them (understanding,
truth, and causality.) [CW, xii-xiii] Some might question the value of
this broad view, and recommend instead reading the “greats” in their
own words or plunging directly into the minutiae of a philosophical
debate. Yet Danto’s richly textured description serves to convince
readers, particularly those having experienced only a close brush with
philosophy - perhaps drawn by the flame but fearing immolation, or
simply interested but intellectually engaged elsewhere - why they ought

‘Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, New
York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1989; xvii, 281 pp. (Hereafter CW.)

162
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to read Plato, Wittgenstein et al., and why narrow arguments sometimes

yield momentous consequences.
The perspective succeeds because Danto shapes his description into
an alluring argument, one that keenly exploits a paradox, or at least a
tension, between traditional philosophy and contemporary analysis. On
the one hand, the central thrust of the argument identifies and defends
an older view of philosophy as the disciplined inquiry into the global
assumptions, or foundations of rational activity (frequently termed
“foundationalism” in contemporary literature). He intends his descrip-
tion as a kind of Cartesian cleansing, a preparation for new foundations,
even though here he does no more than sketch a few lines of
“representational materialism,” his cautious candidate for the new
picture. (Elsewhere he identifies himself as but the “prophet” of the
new philosophy that art has prepared for us.’) On the other hand he
embraces fully “a whole new way of viewing philosophical thought,”
which he acknowledges as emerging in his lifetime, a way most
frequently associated with the analytic tradition and the death of
foundationalism. [CW, 1181 Danto’s treatment of the “basic concepts of
philosophy,” then, seeks to expose the chasm between foundationalism
and anti-foundationalism, a faultline cutting deeply through the
discipline, as a propaedeutic for building a bridge between them.
Few philosophers, I suspect, believe such a bridge possible, and even
Danto voices his own doubts. Nevertheless, confronting his fine prose,
trenchant illustrations, and impressive command of philosophy’s history
both confirms that the impossibility of bridging the chasm owes nothing
to the want of imagination and reaffirms the instrumental value of
philosophy. Throughout the following paragraphs I shall develop these
observations, first considering some of Danto’s description, then
turning more directly to his argument. By thus separating philosophy as
content from philosophy as container in Danto’s account I wish to
extrapolate from it a distinction between what I shall term ‘global’and
‘regional’ foundations, a distinction critical for an evaluation of
cqntemporary philosophy. As embodied in traditional philosophy the
former may well be no longer possible; as a function of analysis the
latter remain necessary.
Danto begins by devoting an entire section to “The Singularity of
Philosophical Thought,” where he remarks that even the present
century’s “anti-philosophical philosophies” (positivism for one) pre-
suppose and proffer foundations. To attack philosophical foundations
and proclaim the death of philosophy is to resurrect the corpse while
performing the autopsy; to object to philosophy one must succumb to it.
[CW, 20-2, 1231 This presents a curious feature about philosophical
engagement, perhaps best described as the interconnectedness of
Arthur C . Danto, The Philosophical Di.senfranchisernent ofArt, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986, p. 210. (Hereafter P D A . )
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philosophical claims. Philosophy, he holds, is “of a piece” and one

cannot “address a part of it without addressing the rest.” [CW, 1241
Whatever our entry point from within experience, once we fix on a
philosophical belief, “considerations of consistency” compel us to adjust
our thinking elsewhere in order to account for all of experience, to
explain the “whole world as a whole.” The “as” here merits high-
lighting, for philosophical problems distinguish themselves from others
by being about all experience, the entire “order of fact,” rather than, as
with the natural and human sciences, treating what goes on within it.
Typically, this has led philosophers to account for the world by
demarcating appearance and reality, a distinction separating “the whole
world as we experience it” from “something more real,” and by showing
how the former has been taken for the latter. In short, “whatever it
means to explain something in a philosophical way,” each philosophy
“must be total ,” capable of explaining everything both in ordinary
experience and in other philosophers’ accounts of it. [CW, 13-15]
Philosophy then, in Danto’s apt phrase, commences at the borders of
“radically different but otherwise indistinguishable worlds.” [CW, 131
As he illustrates with numerous cases, indiscernibility designates the
criterion for identifying philosophical interest. (Though he doesn’t so
specify, the criterion would appear to be both sufficient and necessary
given the examples he adduces.) For instance, in the Meditations,
Descartes, whose shadow hovers throughout Danto’s philosophical
landscape, postulates that all experience might be a dream, rather than
an awake state, and that nothing internal to experience can serve to
discriminate one state from the other. Similarly, in his analysis of
causality Hume imagines two universes exactly alike - one deterministic,
one of pure chance -with nothing internal to either capable of deciding
which is the case. O r take artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy
Warhol. Each created “works of art” that, whether urinal or brillo box,
look to the eye like ordinary objects in every particular, making the
difference between artwork and quotidian object purely philosophical.
(In another essay Danto argues that, as a consequence, “with the advent
of its own philosophy” art ends, at least its historical, “disenfranchised
existence. [P D A, 1071) The caselist continues, but the above establish
the claim: through such “absolutely indiscriminable” pairings of
universes, philosophy finds its quest, at “right angles” to the universes
themselves. [CW, 6-11, 1921
Philosophy’s right-angled singularity generates far too many inferences
to follow here, although Danto’s incisive pursuit of these various, often
hidden tracks comprises one of the books main strengths. For now, two
characteristics stand out in his description of the philosophical enter-
prise. The first stems from his remark that “internally speaking,
philosophy does not have a real history.” [CW, 51 Initially, this early
comment seems at odds with his later assertions that (metaphorically at
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least) the mind is a “text”, that it is constantly being rewritten by means

of representations through which it connects to the world, and that
representations have a history. [CW, 253, 2731 If as a “single text”
philosophy embodies subjects (or selves), representations and the
world, and if these textual embodiments are depicted as historical, then
it would appear that philosophy as well must have a history. With this
inference Danto concludes his book’s journey at the gateway to Hegel’s
domain of “spirit,” a domain that remains largely philosophical “terra
incognita” from which he demurs entering. (He leaves such hesitations
aside when writing on art.) By contrast, the terra cognita whose
geography Danto does map lies in the realm of “nature,” to keep the
Hegelian parlance, and its text contains the “bulk of philosophical
reflection.” [CW,2741 Philosophy’s lack of internal history thus refers to
a radical discontinuity in this text. Each chapter regards itself as a “new
beginning,” one that discovers the “errors” of all previous philosophies,
expunges them, and solves for once and ever all the problems of
experience.
In this text as well philosophy produces mistakes of a particular sort,
neither errors in judgment, nor false hypotheses, nor wrong theories,
but theories based on a “certain kind of wrongness,” which, once
revealed, renders largely irrelevant the thoughts contingent upon them.
And thus does philosophy take its right turns. Of course, from the
perspective of later generations it will seem to have an historical
development, but this is a “long nightmare” from which true philosophy
longs to awaken, and from which any given philosopher believes he has
awakened. [CW, 4-51 His demurs to Hegel notwithstanding, Danto
never relinquishes this prescriptive as well as descriptive belvedere:
“unlike art, philosophy is something that will have no post-historical
phase, for when the truth is found, there is nothing further to do.”
[ P D A , 2101 Presumably too philosophers will then wither away.
In the meantime, these discontinuous and right-angled turns spawn a
second observation about the Queen of Sciences. Since philosophers
argue about radically different but otherwise indistinguishable worlds, it
follows that there cannot be something in one philosophical world
lacking in another. The “experience” in Descartes’ postulated dream
world must match that in wakefulness. Otherwise stated, no changes in
factual knowledge, or even an “appeal to possible cognitions,” can bear
upon genuinely philosophical questions. [CW, 131 Were this not the
case, then new discoveries would enable us to determine which
philosophy embraced the truth and to what extent. Philosophy would
indeed have an internal history; it would be the history of science. But
because philosophical worlds all share the same content, namely
experience, each philosophical position “makes not a single internal
difference to the world we are obliged to live in.” [CW, xvi] Descartes
can surely, through radical, hyperbolical doubt, “prove” in a sense that
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he is a certain kind of thinking being, namely one who asks what kind of
a thinking being he is, and who answers that he has ideas and affirms
them. To deny affirming an idea when stating “I think” would be “self-
stultifying” - not exactly self-contradictory, but unusual in that the act
of denial remains incompatible with its own content, something like “I
am saying nothing.” Yet for all that, Descartes’ life (not to mention the
lives of the teeming millions) could and did go on perfectly well without
such “proof”. Nor, a more telling charge, does his or any other science
require it: “The world as we live in it and know it is consistent with all
possible philosophies of knowledge.’: [CW, 1921 In short, Descartes’
cugito reveals only that he is a philosopher, with a proof only “a
philosopher can give” (and, we should add, understand), a proof that
“consists of doing philosophy.” [CW, 14671 The fact of his philo-
sophical thinking establishes his thinking philosophically.
These sorts of moves tend to leave one breathless at times, but Danto
doesn’t recoil from their dizzying implications; rather he generalizes
from them, claiming that what is true of Descartes is “by and large” true
of all philosophical theories of knowledge and experience, and hence of
philosophy writ large. “Philosophy,” he cites Wittgenstein’s profound
remark, “leaves everything as it was.” On this view and at its best,
philosophy becomes either a kind of conceptual poetry or something
akin to religion. Like poetry, it “makes nothing happen” [CW, 1911; like
religion its differences must be “revealed” [CW, 12 (his italics)]. In
epiphanous moments philosophy can convey through its extended,
right-angle metaphors the deepest of intuitions about experience, a set
of beliefs that one may hold or not according to preference. But on this
account too philosophy becomes, at its worst, completely trivial and
irrelevant, and philosophical disputes just so many furious pillow fights
on the backside of Mars. “At once momentous and negligible” its
abstract remoteness from experience makes philosophy everything or
nothing, depending only on whether one does it or not. [CW, xv, 1471
What gives philosophy this all or nothing character and how d o we
ever get drawn into it? The answer, simpliciter, is argument. Accord-
ingly, we must shift our attention from the content to the container.
Throughout his discussion of philosophy’s basic concepts, Danto
discerns common patterns of argument, “structures of philosophical
thought,” that supervene the major divisions of the “basic cognitive
episode,” of philosophical inquiry. [CW, 39-41] In Part Two, “Under-
standing”, he stipulates “representations” as the central components of
philosophical utterance, employed both to convey meanings or content,
and to designate whatever may be true or false. The issue here is
whether among representations there must be some - be they atomic
propositions, observational sentences, “analytical” statements, self-
evident truths, “primitive terms” or other “simples”, such as, in ethics,
Moore’s unanalyzable “good” - to which one ascribes primary status in
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order to account in principle for the rest. Verificationists, to proffer a

time-eroded example, wield a razor keener than Ockham’s and reduce
meaningful propositions to observationally verifiable statements or to
analytical statements. The resultant stock of foundational sentences
enables them to ground all possible meanings and to excise the rest, save
of course the principle of verification itself, which because of “certain
leakages in logic” manages an escape from both observation and
analytical restatement. [CW, 58-91
Similarly, in the third section on “Knowledge” Danto shows that
justifying true beliefs has been held typically to require foundational
cognitions, which must be assumed the case for other cognitions to gain
currency. As sketched above, Descartes’ cogito provides the archetype.
Finally, in Part Four, “The World”, Danto attends the “heroic
irrelevance of the great useless positions on the mind-body problem” by
unearthing the concept of “substance” on which it rests and of which it is
an “artifact.” The pattern here replicates those of the earlier sections.
Abandon the foundational ‘‘~ubstance’~ and the mind-body problem
fades like the grin of the Cheshire cat; keep it and the problem remains
intractable.
As Danto’s depiction conveys, these patterns of argument have been
challenged strenuously in the twentieth century. They presuppose a key
term in the philosopher’s lexicon, “must,” understood in a specific way
(guttersnipes at philosophy take the “must” as mental mold, but such
complaints need not detain us here). Glossing grossly, “what must be
the case” needs to be established as logically prior to distinguishing
“what seems to be the case” (appearance, often cast as “subjective”)
from “what is the case” (reality, often “objective”). The “must”
establishes foundations for philosophical argument. Increasingly, how-
ever, various candidates for “must” status have been shown to be self-
contradictory (e.g. Russell’s set paradox), incomplete (e.g. Godel’s
Incompleteness Theorem), context-bound (e.g. the later Wittgenstein)
or dogmatic (e.g. Quine on empiricism). The result has been not simply
a whole new way of thinking about foundations, but one which defines
philosophy against what it must repudiate, the doctrine of global
foundationalism - in effect, the “philosophical thought of millennia.”
[CW, 1181 Philosophy has become, in short, a tool, a powerful
instrument for sorting out the linguistic and logical requisites of
clarifying concepts and constructing arguments, and then applying them
to various domains within experience. Few any longer profess philo-
sophy tout court as the recursive, chimerical pursuit of global founda-
tions, but rather practice philosophy of something - science, mind,
moral action, history, art, religion and the like.
Philosophical analysis nowadays, then, requires a complement, one
designating a portion .of experience that provides the “explanation
space,” in Hilary Putnam’s phrase, which frames a content embodying
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the structures and patterns of argument. Within a domain of experience,

the issue of foundations gains a life integral to the domain or region
(hence the term regional foundationalism). It becomes necessary to
identify and clarify a core of foundational sentences, primitive concepts,
or “simples,” failing which realities and appearances within the
designated field cannot be discerned. Consider Danto’s own philosophy
of history. Historical knowledge, he contends, must be cast in narrative
sentences that convey a temporal relationship entailing at least two
times, the moment of the referred event’s occurrence and the
subsequent moment of historian’s utterance. This temporal relation
tenders a logical sine qua non for historical language and hence
knowledge. It must be the case in order to distinguish real historical
claims from pseudo-claims, and from this foundation Danto can analyze
a host of subordinate issue^.^ Stated another way, relying on this
foundational claim is just what it means to do history; educing and
explicating the claim is just what it means to do philosophy of history.
Two classes of problems traversing regional foundationalism deserve
mention in the present context. The first is simply whether the
foundations proffered for any given discipline comprise the right ones,
whether they adequately capture the primitive status one ascribes to
them, and whether subsidiary issues and claims follow from them. The
second, related cluster of questions revolves around whether the
boundaries between domains have been carved in a philosophically
defensible fashion. Distinguishing science from pseudo-science, or
history from art, or ethics from aesthetics - to cite but three
philosophical maria - reveals this cluster of issues as particularly
troublesome. Dimensions of experience do not abut one another with
the clarity of Venn diagrams, and even if they did lexical translations
from one dimension to another would resist the exactitude of mathe-
matical mapping. Yet these and similar philosophical contests pre-
suppose the constraints of boundary conditions. And though frontiers
may appear blurred, or domains incommensurable, or translations
problematic, it does not follow that boundaries neither cannot nor ought
not be sought. Danto’s own specialized studies in philosophy of history
and art demonstrate abundantly the necessity and results of such
extended investigations.
This being so, at least roughly, the interesting question raised by
Danto’s Connections becomes what happens when “philosophy of’
posits “philosophy” as its complement. We may stipulate that philo-
sophical arguments apply to domains, frequently bracketed for dis-
cussion, and that, however cast, many primitive concepts and rules of
See in particular Arthur C. Danto, “Historical Language and Historical Reality,” in
Narration and Knowledge, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 311, and more
generally the entire text of Analytical Philosophy of History [c. 19651, also reproduced in
the above collection.
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argument apply to more than one domain. Whether and how they apply
reflexively to the domain of philosophical argument stands as the central
issue of controversy. Here it seems argument impales itself on
dilemma’s horns. On the one horn the rules of argument must apply to
themselves. As Danto puts it, a philosophical account of representations
must be self-inclusive, for the account comprises a representation, and a
philosophy of philosophy that forgets this blinds itself to a fundamental
fact of just what constitutes philosophy. One thus reaches foundational
bedrock. But this invariably produces a form of “internalism,” the
position that knowledge (in this instance of the rules of argument) must
be sought from within consciousness and its presuppositions. Internal-
ism, he continues, has “furnished the agenda for the theory of
knowledge” since Descartes, and the scepticisms to which it gives rise
have remained altogether irresoluble. [CW, 153-41
Yet on the other horn, if the rules of philosophical argument do not
apply to themselves, a type of “externalism” results. Externalists such as
Nietzsche hold that knowledge simply describes through its linguistic
and logical structures how creatures of a certain sort represent the
world, and that nothing further can be said by way of justification.
[CW, 1531 Here one reaches another kind of foundational bedrock,
though an extremely porous one, for in maintaining that arguments
apply to other domains but not to themselves, externalists undermine
their claims to generality. If the rules of argument do not hold for
philosophical discourse itself, then how can they with any assurance
pertain to other arenas of investigation? Externalists commit the “self-
excepting fallacy,” to borrow the felicitous expression of Maurice
Mandelbaum, and wind up with a self-stultifying,arbitrary fate every bit
as sceptical as that confronting internalists. At the ‘meta-most’ level,
therefore, the philosophy of philosophy harbors scepticism, in addition
to epiphanous insight andor irrelevance.
The dilemma at this deepest level of reflection provides the constraint
on Danto’s suggestive remarks concerning his theory of “representa-
tional materialism,” to which he devotes only the sketchiest of lines at
conclusion of his book. The theory posits two kinds of matter in the
universe, matter that represents and matter that does not, and essays to
account for representational beings (among which, humans) as consti-
tuted of both: body is sentential; mind is material. [CW, 243-81 As
foundational, these postulates contribute to a theory of intentionality
that merits far greater investigation. They may well prove necessary in
order to speak intelligibly about ourselves as ens representans. But even
if successful the endeavor will remain bracketed and regional. (Can
causation, for instance, be the same for both types of matter? On this
point, Danto’s brief treatment raises more questions than it answers.)
One ventures to say it will be a philosophy addressing phenomena
within experience, not adequate to the whole of it.
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The impasse over global foundations suggests that at its most

profound level philosophy today finds its historical counterpart in the
late sixteenth century, a period when the received “basic concepts of
philosophy” were crumbling at every turn. One thinks of John Donne
(“ ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;/All justgupply, and all relation;
. . .”) or of Montaigne’s clairvoyant perception of this fragmentation in
his revival of an argument from Sextus Empiricus:
To judge the appearances that we receive of objects, we would need a
judicatory instrument; to verify this instrument, we need a demonstration; to
verify the demonstration, an instrument: there we are in a ~ i r c l e . ~
Vicious circle or infinite regression at the prospect of a justified true
belief, such was the form of scepticism that haunted Descartes at the
onset of modern philosophy, a form addressed and subsequently
discarded in favor of a more scientifically, Humean flavored scepticism.
When we substitute “foundation” for “instrument” in Montaigne’s
observation, we realize how deeply and pervasively extends the form’s
resurfacing at the horizon of post-modern philosophy. Danto stands at
this horizon as observer and participant. He acknowledges the full force
of the “sheer incommensurability” between internalism and externalism,
[CW, 1531 all the while rightly insisting that to gain this acknowledge-
ment, called in an earlier age “learned scepticism” or “learned
ignorance,” one must engage in extended philosophical reasoning.
The structures of philosophical argument remain necessary for any
intelligible talk about the world, even though the cannot suffice to
ground relations between themselves and the world.Y Herein resides the
allure of Danto’s reflections and the sense behind succumbing to
philosophy even while objecting to it. Herein lies his eloquent testimony
for the value of philosophical inquiry, for few wield the instrument
better than he. And herein too Danto reveals, perhaps more clearly
than he would wish, why we must look beyond the tool for our most
fundamental connections to the world.

Bryant College
Smithfield, RI 0291 7

Donald M. Frame, trans., The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1943, p. 454.
Witness the following, Wittgenstein-inspired remark from an earlier book:
..
“. language is after all designed to talk about the world rather than any connection
between itself and the worldi’and a special wrenching-free from ordinary references is
required to make reference itself the subject of discourse.” Arthur C. Danto, Jean-Paul
Sartre, New York: Viking Press, 1975, pp. 95-96.