A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов

A Movable Feast. New York: Vintage Classics.

      24 Kortum, Richard D. 2013. Varieties of Tone. Frege, Dummett and Shades of Meaning. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

      25 Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      26 Proust, Marcel. 1895. Chardin and Rembrandt, translated by Jennie Feldman. New York: David Zwirner Books, Ekphrasis, 2016.

      27 ———. 1927. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI, Time Regained, translated by C.K. Moncrieff revised by Terence Kilmartin and T.J. Enright. London: Vintage Books, 2000.

      28 Quine, W. V. 1953. “Meaning in Linguistics.” In From a Logical Point of View, by W.V. Quine, 47–64, Second, Revised Edition, 1961. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963.

      29 Sartwell, Crispin. 2013. “Danto as Writer.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Vol. XXXIII, 709–717. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

4 Sartre, Transparency, and Style

      TAYLOR CARMAN

      In 1975 Arthur Danto published a short, mostly expository little book titled simply Jean-Paul Sartre. It offered an overview of Sartre’s philosophy, emphasizing but not focused exclusively on Being and Nothingness, a tome that, despite its being at times “repetitious and portentous,” Danto considered “a masterpiece” (1975, x). Though a relatively minor work in Danto’s corpus, Jean-Paul Sartre is impressive in several ways.

      For one thing, it was written at a time when American philosophy departments were most sharply (and counterproductively) divided between the analytic mainstream and (what was then just beginning to be called) Continental philosophy. Danto was ahead of his time in dismissing that “ideologized division” as “silly and destructive” (1975, xii–xiii). In an admirable effort to translate Sartre’s technical vocabulary and rhetorical style into a recognizably Anglo-American idiom, Danto gave his chapters twin titles: each features a Sartrean term followed by a phrase or phrases more recognizable to analytical theorists of language, mind, knowledge, action, and morality. The gesture is less sharply polemical than the title Nietzsche as Philosopher, but the ecumenical intention is the same (Danto 1975, xii). In neither case, Danto insisted, would the innovations of professional philosophy refute or discredit the thinker; on the contrary, the tools of analysis turn out to articulate their ideas in surprising and fruitful ways.

      More significant than Danto’s rising above professional parochialism, however, is the way he traces the key elements of Sartrean thought while at the same time elaborating his own views on the nature of philosophy, linguistic and pictorial representation, and above all, art. Danto was an original thinker, and like all creative readers of the history of philosophy he invariably heard in those who caught his attention echoes, faint or raucous, of his own thoughts.

What did Danto find in Sartre that was useful to his own conception of meaning, representation, and artistic style? And how, though without saying so, did Danto resist Sartre and his categories, endorsing instead a concept of style put forward by Sartre’s sometime philosophical friend and rival, Maurice Merleau-Ponty? Danto admired both thinkers, but never (to my knowledge) commented at any length on their differences, as they unfold for example in Merleau-Ponty’s essays on literature and painting.

      Early in the Sartre book Danto hints at, but stops short of asserting, a partial convergence of Sartre’s early conception of art and literature, expressed in the novel Nausea, as enjoying “a specially privileged sort of reality” (Danto 1975, 30), with his own account of artworks as things inhabiting a unique ontological domain, a category articulated by “an atmosphere of artistic theory,” which he calls the artworld (1964, 580). On the last few pages of Sartre’s novel, Roquentin dreams of writing a novel of his own, a kind of ideal (non)entity that might justify his existence precisely by transcending existence, escaping the muck of contingency, floating “behind the printed words, behind the pages … above existence,” like the jazz song he hears beyond the sound coming from the scratchy record playing on the phonograph (Sartre 1964 [1938], 178).

      Danto scoffs at this “hyperaesthetic, precious view of art and artistic creativity” (1975, 31), but he takes the metaphysical point: artworks are not real things exactly; they are not ordinary objects with extraordinary “aesthetic” properties added on. Staircases in fictions have no determinate number of steps (unless specified), nor is a song quite the same thing as the sounds one hears when one hears the song. This is very like saying, as Danto does elsewhere, that even if Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box had been qualitatively identical to actual Brillo boxes – indeed, if Warhol had simply put actual Brillo boxes in the gallery, instead of the wooden, silkscreened facsimiles he manufactured – they would still be, thanks to the “atmosphere of theory” surrounding them, works of art and not just (plain old) Brillo boxes. Like persons, which are not, pace Descartes, mere combinations of minds and bodies, artworks are “irreducible to parts of themselves, and are in that sense primitive” (Danto 1964, 576). Persons and artworks belong to a category of things distinct from ordinary objects, and for this reason Danto acknowledges the plausibility of Sartre’s view, “as a matter of ontology” (1975, 31).

      That allusion, however, that hint of an affinity between Sartre’s early notion of the ideality (or virtuality) of art and literature and Danto’s theory of artworks as constituted by their participation in the artworld, comes and goes in the opening chapter of Jean-Paul Sartre without explicit discussion. More significant are Danto’s occasional references, in this book and elsewhere, to the mature ontology of Being and Nothingness, in particular the distinction between “being-for-itself” (être-pour-soi), which describes the negative reflexive relation in which consciousness stands to itself, and “being-in-itself” (être-en-soi), the being of things constituted positively by their objective properties. The distinction is a refined version of what is more commonly known as the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, or the inner and the outer, and it lies at the heart of Sartrean existentialism. It also runs parallel to one of Danto’s central insights: that artworks externalize and concretize “styles” or ways of seeing the world that in their original, naive occurrence necessarily remain transparent to those whose styles and perspectives they are.

How far does Danto’s theory of artistic style run parallel to Sartre’s ontological categories? To find out, we need to define a few more terms. To say that human consciousness exists pour-soi is to assert that its structure consists in its prereflective, “nonthetic” awareness of itself, which Sartre distinguishes from the explicit “thetic” knowledge one comes to have of oneself qua object. Sartre calls the latter connaissance de soi, the former conscience (de) soi – the parentheses around the de forestalling any suggestion of division or duality, since the self at this primitive level just is (that is, coincides with) immediate consciousness (of) itself. This unified “prereflective cogito,” as Sartre calls it, precedes and makes possible psychological and otherwise empirical self-knowledge, which is on all fours with our knowledge of others. For what I can say of myself qua object, others can as easily say by referring to me by name or in the third person: “He is happy” says of me what I say when I report that I am happy, but “He is sorry” says less or other than what I say when I express my regret by apologizing. To apologize is not just to say but to show that one is sorry. And just as Wittgenstein (1958, 66) proposes that “I” should therefore be understood as having two cases, subjective and objective – for avowals and ascriptions, respectively – so the pour-soi has two aspects, what Sartre calls transcendence and facticity. The transcendence of consciousness is its direct relation to a world beyond or external to itself, a relation that is at once a reflexive relation to itself. The facticity of consciousness, by contrast, is its quasi-objective aspect, its inescapable exposure to the consciousness of others, as well as to itself from a reflective, third-person point of view.

      Although Sartre is not entirely consistent on this point, it is crucial to his system that the aspectual or perspectival