Adrienne Gálosi

Philosophy without Art

The unimaginative title of this paper could point at different approaches of the philosophy and art relationship. Perhaps the most obvious would be to examine the intricate relation of two modes, let us say methods of writing philosophy – one that sees its high-est vocation in its being a “rigorous science” (e.g. Husserl), and the other which rather considers the only possible methodological character of a treatise of philosophy a “detour”, a kind of artistic presentation of truth.¹ This investigation, especially if focused on 20^th century philosophy, could reveal much about how philosophers understood the nature of truth and the ensuing task of philosophy.

However in this paper I follow an easier path, insofar as I focus on Arthur C. Danto’s explicate views, as he repeatedly discussed the relation between philosophy and art in detail. It is possible to take Danto’s philosophy of art, which is basically in the vein of analyti-cal philosophy, though with some “continental drift”, as one possi-ble settlement of the “old dispute” between art and philosophy.² He speaks about philosophical disenfranchisement of art, and asserts that art has reached its end. At the first sight it seems, and is often interpreted like this, that according to this perspective of their rela-tionship, philosophy has overtaken art. Obviously, this has not been

1 „Detour” – Umweg, artistic „presentation” – Darstellung are Walter Benjamin’s terms that I use only as examples here, since he was one of those great philosophers whose work is also a great prose. At a more fundamental level this division between philosophy “with” or “without art” is obviously needless, as all philosophical writings are structured forms using special well-chosen language and they all provide the pleasures of (philosophical) imagination. (I deliberately use a weighty term of aesthetics.) From this standpoint it is only a matter of degree how much and whether methodologically intentional and purposeful “art” a given philosophical text reveals. This paper has its centre around Arthur C. Danto’s philosophy of art, were it not to fall under suspicion of obscurity due to a literary term, I would willingly call him the protagonist of this writing. To set the stage for him and also for my paper let me quote him about the literariness of philosophy:

“[…] the concept of philosophical truth and the form of philosophical expression are internally enough related that we may want to recognize that when we turn to other forms we may also be turning to other conceptions of philosophical truth.” Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of literature,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 140.

2 “Old dispute” – παλαιά διαφορά – this is what Socrates calls the tension between philosophy, the realm of truth and poetry, or mimesis, the realm of illusion in the Republic. Plato, Republic, 607b.

the only philosophical resolution of this dispute. In a simplifying manner, we can say that there has been another tendency in the phi-losophy of art, starting from Schelling, perhaps best represented by Heidegger, which has come to apparently opposite insights. While Danto asserts that art needs philosophy to know itself, for Heideg-ger art is a medium where the unfolding of truth takes place, thus art has a certain superiority as a revealer of truth over philosophy.

Surely, it would not be advisable to bring these two philosophers into closer contact, but in spite of their radical differences they both seem to obliterate the distinction between art and philosophy, they share the intention to seek for certain essence of art. They seem to find it in something independent from the sensual, and they both relate to Hegel’s thesis about the “end of art”, however, differently.

Heidegger basically accepts Hegel’s judgement on the end of art, which remains in force for us, but it is only a diagnosis for the pres-ent, and whether great art may yet return is an undecided question for Heidegger.³ For Danto the end of art means the end of the pos-sibility of internal progressive development of arts.

I will focus on this infamous “end of art” narrative (infamous inasmuch as the artworld is still flourishing), and I intend to detect what this dictum means for philosophy, since already in Hegel’s thought it was as much about philosophy as about art. If art and philosophy are so closely connected, it is worth attending to the question again what the end of art means to see what consequences it has got for the state of philosophy.

It is almost the thirtieth publication anniversary of Danto’s book The End of Art that contains two provocative papers.⁴ One “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art” gives an understanding of art history as its suppression by philosophy, the second, “The End

3 See: Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. and eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 50–52.

4 The volume in which both papers appeared is The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art” was written as a plenary address delivered before the World Congress of Aesthetics in Montreal, 1984, and “The End of Art” was the lead essay in “The Death of Art”, ed. Berel Lang (New York:

Haven Publishing, 1984).

of Art” offers a Hegelian model of art history, attesting to the end of art, meaning that we cannot understand contemporary art by describing it in terms of historical development. In their reception, these treatises were mainly considered apart, the critical response mostly focused on “The End of Art”, attempting to prove that art really has not ended.⁵ In the last decades “the end of art” has been re- and over-interpreted many times, a complete interpretative busi-ness flourished around the possible ends, and by seeing the unprec-edented prosperity of art institutions, nobody thinks any more that this thesis would say anything about the everyday practice of the artworld. As we witness it lives happily ever after.

All these considered, we seem to have a double task: First we have to clarify the relationship of art and philosophy within Danto’s theory, then we can ask how we understand the role and the possi-bilities of philosophy if one of its subjects is over in one sense, but the other sense leaves us with enough to investigate.

There is no need to here enlist the main stages of the long and concussive history of the philosophy and art relationship, but it can easily be the case, that they never really existed without each other.

Danto once stated that art emerges only in those societies which make a distinction between reality and appearance, meaning that true art arises together with philosophy which provides the con-ceptual viewpoint necessary to embrace the possibility of simulta-neous reality and appearance. What is required for the birth of art is a conception of the world and a conception of its representation.

We find, writes Danto, that “philosophy has arisen only twice in the world, once in India once in Greece, civilisations both obsessed with a contrast between appearance and reality”.⁶ Not only when Danto conceptualizes the end of art, but already when he strives to find the “origin of the work of art”, he recourses to a conceptual con-dition, namely that reality and the representation of it, as it is put at

5 It was fifteen years later when the “smoke began to clear” when Jane Forsey wrote a paper with the joint interpretation of the essays seeing them as integrate parts of one narrative. Jane Forsey, “Philosophical Disenfranchisement in Danto’s

‘The End of Art’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 59, No. 4 (2001):

403–409.

6 Arthur C. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1981), 79.

a distance, should be conceptually available. The art proper does not cover magical re-presentations, for instance statues of gods which do not stand for and denote the deity, but make it to be present as part of the reality; but artworks proper presuppose this distinction, and entail the interpretation of the reality and representation rela-tionship.⁷ So for Danto both at the beginning and at the end of art history, there is a history of “before” and “after” which we categorize in our cultural practice as art – we displace the objects of these eras in museums and art biennales – but which do not fall under the art history proper which, as we can see, seems to be always connected to philosophy. Let us turn to the end of this story, because here I am interested in what happens to philosophy after the “end of art”.

Danto explicitly cultivates his philosophy of art out of Hegelian thought. He states that “my thought is that the end of art consists in the coming to awareness of the true philosophical nature of art. The thought is altogether Hegelian.”⁸ For Danto, in my view, the most appealing in Hegel’s philosophy is that he connected metaphysics and history. I am not saying that he subscribes to the metaphysi-cal commitments involved, but used Hegel as a model combining history and a principle that can give unity to it, so while Danto acknowledges that “essentialism and historicism are widely regarded as antithetical”,⁹ he argues, in a Hegelian vein, that essentialism and historicism are compatible in the philosophy of art. “There is a kind of transhistorical essence in art, everywhere and always the same, but it only discloses itself through history.”¹⁰ This means that Danto

7 For Danto representation is not only the key term for talking about arts, but in general for philosophical purposes he defines human beings with the fact that we form representations, through which we make connections to the world. See:

Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, 1989).

8 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 31.

9 Arthur C. Danto, “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense,” History and Theory 37 (1998): 127–143, 128. Michael Kelly examines the compatibility of the two in Danto’s theory, focuses mainly on “The End of Art” and he blames Danto for resolving the conflict in exactly the same disenfranchising way that he criticized. Michael Kelly, “Essentialism and Historicism in Danto’s Philosophy of Art,” History and Theory 37 (1998): 30–43.

10 Danto, After the End of Art, 28.

understands the history of art from the view of the present as it has developed into its final stage, and holds that only this linear history leading finally to pluralism, to the extreme differences among art-works, gave the possibility of defining art with a universal concept.

Talking about essentialism may sound unusual in contemporary philosophy, but not for Danto. By essence he understands the neces-sary and sufficient conditions to fall under a concept, and working out of these conditions is the eminent task of philosophy. In the con-temporary artworld essentialism seems impossible, because works of art hardly seem to have anything in common. On the contrary, Danto needed precisely this ultimate pluralism to ask the question concerning the essence of art properly. And once the essence is found, this makes pluralism possible, because a real philosophy of art must be so general and abstract that it should be applicable to any kind, style, movement, era etc. of art. So on the one hand plu-ralism is presupposed for the essence, and on the other hand it is guaranteed by the essence.¹¹

In Hegel’s system “art occupies a unique position between abstract conceptual thought and sensuous immediacy, participat-ing in both but functionparticipat-ing as a ‘middle term’ [Mittelglied] that brings cognition and sensibility together without giving prior-ity to either.”¹² This double nature grants art its unique character that it cannot be reduced to other forms of knowledge, however its inseparability from sensuous intuition makes it to be a subor-dinate stage of the absolute spirit (Geist), since the ultimate, most adequate understanding of the spirit is attained by philosophy, the explicitly conceptual understanding of the Idea. Consequently, art recognises the same truth as philosophy does, but it expresses the spirit’s self-understanding through sensuous objects, not in con-cepts. History as a progression of the spirit to grasp itself

conceptu-11 Danto refers to Clement Greenberg, saying that he was one of those who gave essentialism a bad name, because Greenberg understood the concept of essence as something that is identifiable only with some of its instances which have the privilege to embody that essence, so instead of defining the essence that is true for all art, Greenberg’s essentialism derived from his particular critical perspective.

See: Danto, “A Philosophical Defense”, 128.

12 Janson Gaiger, “Hegel’s Contested Legacy: Rethinking the Relation between Art History and Philosophy” The Art Bulletin 93, No. 2. (2011): 178–194, 187.

ally, its evolution of self-knowledge, out of an inevitable historical necessity, leaves art (and later religion) behind, because art is an inadequate manifestation of the current modality of the spirit. In the highest sense, there is no need for art, if we can have philosophy.

So Hegel conceives of art’s contribution as a prehistory to philoso-phy and when this pre-history is closed, the spirit generously leaves art to itself. But it does not mean that art would lose its functions all together. Art still has a function in the modern (post-Reforma-tion) age, namely to explore the contingencies of finite human life in a more prosaic way, and in this capacity of it “art will always rise higher and come to perfection”.¹³ For Hegel the greatest achieve-ment of art had already been attained in Greek classical art, the art proper, for it is the fulfilment of the concept of art in that it is the perfect sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit. Greek gods in their divine subjectivity, who took the form of individuals, could be sensuously portrayed not as symbols but as visible embodiments of the freely self-determining spirit. “Classical art became a conceptu-ally adequate representation of the Ideal, the consummation of the realm of beauty. Nothing can be or become more beautiful.”¹⁴ In the historical unfolding of art, a new level of consciousness is reached, and the history of post-classical art – romantic art in Hegel’s terms – is nothing but the history of the process of art “transcending” itself as art, a “progression of art beyond itself” because the content that is to be expressed “demands more than the representational form of the work of art can achieve.”¹⁵ “That is to say, the shadow of the

‘end of art’ has been looming over art since antiquity.”¹⁶ From here art is superseded (ist aufgehoben – in the double sense of preserved

13 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1: 103.

14 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 517.

15 For Hegel’s description of Romantic art as “progression of art beyond itself [ein Fortschreiten der Kunst über sich selbst],” see Hotho (1823), 36. His claim that “in romantic art the content goes beyond the form, demands more than the representational form of the art work can achieve,” is to be found in Hotho (1823), 119. Heinrich Gustav Hotho‘s transcription from the 1823 series is published as Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998). quotes: Gaiger, Hegel’s Contested Legacy, 194.

16 Robert Kudielka, “According to What: Art and the Philosophy of the ‘End of Art’,” History and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 4. (1998): 87–101, 92.

and overcome) by philosophy, while the former “considered in its highest vocation is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity […] art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.”¹⁷ Art is only a stage in the internal development of the consciousness of the spirit and as that, it is no longer the most adequate way of expressing truth, there is no more space for thinking outside reflex-ivity, no chance for a thought to emerge out of sensuous experience.

Though, art still has the function of giving expression to our finite humanity.

For Danto this Hegelian model of art history in which art comes to an end with losing its function to satisfy the needs of the spirit is a clear disenfranchisement of art by philosophy as the latter makes the former redundant. As Danto says, Hegel gives, “a degree of validity to art by treating it as doing what philosophy itself does, only uncouthly.”¹⁸ Art is only a weak form of philosophy, thus this must take over the job of art, and art becomes only a pretext for phi-losophy. However the question remains, how Danto adapts the role of philosophy, whether he reinforces it in its oppressing position, or rather regards it as the means of re-enfranchising art?

As Hegel set a pattern for the philosophical appropriation of art, Danto rewrites the history of art as a quasi-Hegelian history of the growing self-consciousness of art, culminating in Duchamp and Warhol. But it is important to emphasize that what is a metaphysical thesis for Hegel, becomes purely historical for Danto. It is an often voiced criticism against Danto that he ignores the aspect of Hegel’s thesis, that there the highest vocation has something to do with art being connected to other realms and functions of the spirit thus serving other than its own autonomous ends.¹⁹ Art is “past in its

17 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 11.

18 Arthur C. Danto, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 7.

19 See e.g. Brigitte Hilmer, “Being Hegelian After Danto”, History and Theory, Vol. 37, No.4, (1998): 71–86. She claims that it is an open question for Danto whether art ever had its “higher” vocation, and finally she emphasizes the merit

highest vocation”, says Hegel, and for Danto art has no other voca-tion – though it may sound “disappointing” – than to learn what art is. So it is important to consider the shift of the subjects of the two lines of development: while in Hegel’s work, it is the spirit that has to come to self-consciousness in art as well, in Danto’s case, art is the subject of its own self-knowledge. We can say that Danto formulates his Hegelian thesis from a post-Hegelian position with a completely autonomous art in mind.²⁰ So much the more the doctrine of auton-omy has to be presupposed as he wants to make an ontological dis-tinction between art and the “commonplace”, or the “mere thing”, showing that the criteria of interpretation and judgement of these two spheres are incommensurate.²¹ So for Danto, art history, the philosophy of art history is the necessary precondition for arriving at an ontology of art, because it is precisely in the unfolding pursuit

In document Edited by Megyer Gyöngyösi, Zsolt Kapelner, Zsófia Ádám, István Faragó-Szabó (Pldal 150-174)