the transfiguration of the commonplaceby arthur c. danto

Philosophical Review

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. DantoReview by: Warren QuinnThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 481-486Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184501 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 07:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Philosophical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.105.245.44 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:35:56 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=philreview

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184501?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


BOOK REVIEWS

ures are Gadamer and his opponents (Habermas, Apel, etc.) and the catch- word is 'critique'.

Gadamer in his magnum opus "Wahrheit und Methode" (Truth and Method) makes the most of the concept of 'Wirkungsgeschichte', meaning the inevitable historicality of our knowledge which is stamped by tradition in a way not immediately recognizable to us. One can easily detect the inspiration of Heidegger, who transformed hermeneutics from a meth- odology of humanities (Dilthey) into a basis for reformulating ontology. Now, however, the critics claim that the ontological tendency prevents the theory from providing an adequate account of the methodical approach to truth based on intersubjective consensus. They demand, moreover, that the dominant role of tradition should not prevent a criticism of existing prejudices.

Both objections indicate a disagreement with regard to rationality. Are the methodical procedures of science as well as humanities the product of reason or do they represent a limitation of reason in the name of intersubjective communication of researchers-a limitation that is itself thoroughly historical and has, therefore, to be made transparent by philosophical analysis? As for critical reflection, does it offer an effective cure against prejudices, or is a certain 'fore-structure' of knowledge necessary to a degree that even radical criticism presupposes it? Such questions could be fruitfully discussed in the context of contemporary hermeneutics and would open perspectives to related positions, for example, the late Popper, Kuhn or Rorty.' Our author, however, restricts himself to a report of 'querelles d'Allemands'. This is a valuable "stepping-stone," as the preface modestly underlines, but makes sense only if further steps lie ahead.

RuOD1ER BUBNER

Universitdt Tfibingen

'Richard Rorty has a long discussion of hermeneutics in his remarkable recent book (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton 1979). The only thing I dislike is that he seems to give up the rationality of hermeneutics in favour of its 'edifying' qualities.

The Philosophical Review, XCII, No. 3 (July 1983)

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE COMMONPLACE. By ARTHUR C. DANTO. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981. Pp. 212.

The most fundamental propositions of the theory presented in this difficult, densely written, but fascinating book seem to me to be these: 1)

481



BOOK REVIEWS

That art is, generically speaking, a form of communication in which subjects are represented. 2) That each mind is at bottom an idiosyncratic way of taking in the world-a way that is not captured by the contents of the beliefs and perceptions taken in. And finally 3) That art is distinguished from other representational media by its power to make an individual's idiosyncratic way of registering the world manifest to others. Danto offers rather little direct argument for any of these theses; he seems to prefer to let them emerge gradually, gathering force and significance in the discussion of various familiar aesthetic topics.

The conception of art as essentially representational, which for Danto as for Goodman means essentially symbolic and referential, shows up first in his explanation of why art and philosophy, as we understand them, arose in the very same places at about the same times. The answer given is that art, with its gap between the represented and the representation, and philosophy, with its obsession with all aspects of meaning, were clearly made to stimulate and provoke each other. The preoccupation with representational meaning is further sustained in Danto's witty treatment of the time-honored idea that artworks are necessarily made to be contemplated in loving and attention to detail. Twentieth-century idea art, on which Danto continually relies, has shown the contingency of this approach. Duchamp's "Fountain" (an ordinary urinal) gets to be art because Duch- amp makes a particular kind of' statement with it (no doubt a con- temptuous but witty statement about art as the contemplable). The gleam- ing surfaces and subtle curves of the particular urinal chosen are, or may be, completely irrelevant to that statement. It is worth remarking that Danto here betrays no anxiety whatever about the possible fraudulence of the urinal or other noncontemplable artworks. It is as if' this possibility does not exist or is in some deep way uninteresting.

All this fits together with his general attack on formalism, which seems to be defined (quite perceptively I think) as the idea that the status of an object as art makes no logical difference to the sort of aesthetic appreciation that must be brought to it. The formalist holds that interpretation is merely ancillary to aesthetic appreciation. It finds the multi-dimensional objects represented in a painting and the characters and situations represented in a novel but there it ends. These shapes and situations are not to be regarded as further vehicles of' meaning; they are to be distanced and contemplated in the way that a shape presented by a natural object or a situation from life could be distanced and contemplated. But for Danto, interpretation seems to penetrate all the way through to the end of' art. The novel's characters and situations may and perhaps must be treated as constituting a parable for our own lives. And what is left after we have squeezed all possible representational meaning out of the artwork is some-

482



BOOK REVIEWS

thing that still, in a way, refers us to something-not of' course to further content but rather to the way the artist conceives his content.

Danto's discussion of' the relation of an artwork to what he calls its material counterpart is interesting but not altogether satisfactory. When someone looking at Bruegel Landscape with the Fall of Icarus points to a tiny blob of' paint and says, "That is Icarus," or when a 1950's "olfactory artist" insists, "This is (just) black and white paint," a special artistic sense of the is" of identity is, according to Danto, in effect. One does not with these

sentences make the statements one would make in pointing to the real Icarus or to spilled paint on the floor. And the special sense of identity is also supposed to be in effect when one identifies the sentences of'a novel as descriptions. In the first case, Danto may have in mind the special form of make-believe identification in virtue of' which we say that Icarus appears in the painting and that we can see him there falling into the sea. And something like make-believe is also clearly involved in regarding fictional sentences as genuine descriptions. But when the painter says, "'This is black and white paint," it is not very likely that he means we are to make-believe this. It is perhaps true that he means to say something relevant to aesthet- ics. But it hardly follows that some of his words must have a special aesthetic sense.

The topics of metaphor and expression lie at the center of' Danto's theory. Art represents in large part by means of' metaphoric and therefore expressive vehicles. For Danto, the function of' metaphor and rhetorical figures generally-whether linguistic, pictorial, or otherwise-is not to point to some range of' fact about the subject beyond that which can be conveyed by literal sense, but to convey the peculiar impact the subject makes upon the author, his special way of' conceiving and feeling it. Meta- phor does this by getting us to think about the subject through the media- tion of' symbols or representational devices with their own connotations and resonances.

Expression, to make a long and somewhat confusing story short, occurs in art because every artwork contains at its heart a metaphor through which its subject is meant to be viewed. Interpreting a work is a matter of finding this crucial pair, subject and metaphor. What is expressed in the work is that view of or about the subject that one gets with the help of' the metaphor. Danto does not seem to realize that the "aboutness" built into his theory of' expression precludes such standard examples as that of a musical work's expressing sadness. In expressing something about its subject, it is hard to see how what an artwork expressess could fail to be something which, were it to be stated in paraphrase, would appear propo- sitional. Of' course, it would be a pseudo-proposition because what it ex- presses, the author's way of seeing the subject, is not for Danto any genu-

483



BOOK REVIEWS

ine further fact about the subject. So if a piece of music were about the world or about human life it might express that the world or life is sad, but it could not express sadness itself.

Style, which embraces artistic metaphor and expression, includes every- thing that remains of representation when content is subtracted. For Dan- to, a mind is not simply a collection of internal representations, it is an idiosyncratic structure which survives change of content-a way of perceiving or believing whatever is perceived or believed. It is also, if this is different, an emotional outlook on the world. "Structure," "way," and "outlook," are meant to convey aspects of mind that cannot be reduced to some purely transparent kind of belief, some diaphanous relation between mind andzworld. The idiosyncratic mental structure in each of us is in some deep way what we really are, although it is not something that we can become aware of except through a complex and difficult effort at self- identification. If art has a function, it is to make this underlying structure of our consciousness manifest, to give our inner selves a public profile. And it is style, the sum of the artist's conscious and unconscious choices between semantically equivalent modes of representation, that makes this possible.

It should by now be clear that a belief in the essential representationality of art underlies virtually every part of Danto's theory. How to treat such apparently nonrepresentational arts as abstract painting and instrumental music therefore becomes a major problem for the theory to solve. Danto has surprisingly little to say about this, and not all of what he does say appears consistent, but much of it is interesting. There seem to be two different stories scattered throughout the book. The first leans heavily on an alleged analogy between the representational status of art and the status of actions as having reasons. Although not every action has a reason, for some we may do "for no reason at all," every action is such as to make the question, "Why was it done?" applicable. Danto appears to think this shows that there is some interesting way in which even actions done for no reason, in contrast to mere movements of the body, remain connected with the scheme of reasons. (This cannot, however, come to the claim that such actions can only lack reasons contingently, for actes gratuits seem to lack them essentially.) In any case, nonrepresentational art is held to lack subject matter in this same weak way, a way which is supposed to leave the artwork suitably enough connected with the concept of subject matter for Danto's purposes. But this first way of treating nonrepresentational art raises two difficulties. First it is not clear what the difference between categorically and noncategorically lacking a subject comes to, and therefore not clear what work this distinction can do. Danto may be thinking that nonrepresentational art uses representational schemes in the way that

484



BOOK REVIEWS

nonsense poetry uses natural language. This might seem to explain how such art could be expressive, deploying echoes or traces of subject matter for expressive purposes, rather than subject matter itself. But it is not clear that any of this could be made plausible for an art like instrumental music in which the basic scheme itself seems nonrepresentational. Second, and more important, Danto needs to show that the "weak" lacking of subject that the analogy establishes provides enough of a connection with subject matter for his own notions of expressivity and style to get a purchase. Expressivity, as we have seen, consists of the way the artwork is a metaphor for its subject, and style captures the way its subject is conceived. It is unclear, therefore, how art that in any way lacks subject matter could be expressive or show style.

For these reasons, I think Danto may be better served by his second line, the suggestion that apparently nonrepresentational art in some way represents itself. His example of Michael Fried's illuminating views on some of Frank Stella's paintings is very suggestive. And the idea of self-representation may also have musical application. In some music it might be possible to regard development as an analysis of or commentary on the thematic materials which could then be regarded literally as the musical subjects of the work as a whole. But just how far this strategy could be pushed remains unclear.

Danto's other two basic claims-that each mind has idiosyncratic ways of registering (conceiving and perceiving) the world, ways not captured by the contents of whatever internal representations it happens to contain, and that art is the special form of communication by which such ways of internal representation are made manifest-are presupposed in his treatment of metaphor, expression, and style. They are more difficult to assess because it is less clear what they mean. When Danto speaks of the artist's attitudes toward his subject, for example, Rembrandt's manifest love for Hendrickje, we feel on fairly firm ground. To the extent that the way we see the world consists in the attitudes we take toward it, Danto's project begins to remind us of the famous noncognitivist investigations of ethical discourse. Attitudes, the noncognitivists agreed, are not captured by the contents of one's beliefs and perceptions, and therefore require special forms of expression. There is one respect, however, in which Danto's project seems broader. Although his clearest examples of ways of seeing are attitudes, the very use of such expressions as "way of seeing" suggests that he has something more elusive in mind-some element of subjectivity that permeates our conception of the world more completely and is therefore less extricable from it than anything we would commonly call an attitude. Perhaps he has in mind something about the arrangement of our beliefs and perceptions, the way in which they organize themselves into

485



BOOK REVIEWS

foci of' importance. But however "ways of seeing" is finally understood, I suspect there is one further way in which the dialectic here will resemble that of ethics. For there will no doubt be those who feel that the sharp dichotomy between manner and content of' vision is artificial and that the great artist is great not because he sees in some especially interesting noncognitive manner but because he sees more, more broadly and more deeply. For such aesthetic cognitivists, the importance of art would always lie in content although not perhaps in any part of' content that could be called subject matter.

As to the languages of art, one may wonder whether Danto can be right to locate their differentia in the capacity to display the subjective character of the mind. For surely every piece of complex communication does that, revealing much more of its author than he may want or know. The Trans- Jiguration of the Commonplace, with its elaborate use of' rhetorical devices of all sorts, is a conspicuously stylish book. Doesn't philosophical style, no less than painterly or musical style, reveal the man and the way he sees the world? Of course, to be interested in Danto's work as philosophy is to be interested in its truth as a theory of' art and not in its revelation of' the author. Is the difference, then that our attitude toward artistic communication does not exclude the latter interest but rather puts it at the center? If' so, this would be a curious and mildly ironical result. For it would mean that the formalists, despite their many errors, got one important thing right. Lying at the heart of art is the special attitude we take toward it, an attitude we may take toward other things as well (philosophical texts, for example) but rarely so profitably.

WARREN QUINN

University of California, Los Angeles

486



the transfiguration of the commonplaceby arthur c. danto

Documents