A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов

      One factor is the systematic, architectonic nature of philosophy as such, “which imposes an external regimen upon its least systematic practitioners … philosophers are systematic through the nature of their enterprise.” Danto’s point is not that Nietzsche “intended his work” to exhibit structural coherence – indeed, Danto claims that he could not have intended this, for “by his own admission” he was unaware of the system that his writings embodied. Rather Nietzsche’s writings exhibit a coherent structure because Nietzsche concerned himself with philosophical problems, and because “the problems of philosophy are so interconnected that the philosopher cannot solve, or start to solve, one of them without implicitly committing himself to solutions for all the rest.” Danto’s Nietzsche was a system builder, for, “if only tacitly,” he submitted his thinking to the demands of the philosophical “discipline,” “where there is no such thing as an isolated solution to an isolated problem” (Danto 2005, 6–7).

      The second factor is “the retroactive unification that historical understanding imposes.” There is “doubtless continuity in any writer’s thought,” Danto proclaims, “but in part the continuity is to be attributed to his readers who look back to the early writings with the late ones in mind.” In consequence, his readers see his writings as the author himself “could not have seen them when he wrote them, for he could not have known his own unwritten volumes.” For Danto, according to his theory of narrative sentences, historical understanding is a retrospective reconstrual of earlier events in terms of later ones. Applied to the practice of textual interpretation, it is a retrospective reading of earlier texts in terms of later ones. Thus, had a writer’s “later writings been different, we should perhaps have been as forcibly struck by themes to which we are in fact blind as we are by those we find so impressively precocious.” In sum, Danto ascribes the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s writings no less to the unity-in-continuity established through historical understanding than to “systematizing dynamisms” that, he presumes, drive philosophical inquiry (Danto 2005, 7).

Before further considering the analysis of historical understanding Danto develops in his Analytical Philosophy of History, let me note a difference between his use of the idea of retrospective interpretation in his book on Nietzsche and that in the 1964 essay, “Nietzsche.” In the essay, Danto admits that, while “recent developments” in analytical philosophy have enabled us to appreciate much in Nietzsche’s philosophy that must have been obscure, “even to himself,” it would be “wrong,” from “the historical point of view,” to represent Nietzsche as a “dispassionate, careful analyst.” In other words, he grants that his attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s thought in the spirit of (then) contemporary analytical philosophy is open to the objection that his reading is likely to be anachronistic and thus to produce a misleading account of Nietzsche’s thinking. To answer this objection, and “to remedy, in some measure, whatever historical distortions a systematic treatment of [Nietzsche’s] thought might entail,” Danto proposes “to support [his] interpretations of Nietzsche’s thoughts, wherever possible, with his own words … by the device of ample quotation.” This approach differs sharply from what he does in his Nietzsche book, where, unlike in the essay, instead of flagging the concern that his interpretation was bound to falsify Nietzsche, he used the idea of retrospective reinterpretation to authorize – to justify – his claim to find structural coherence in Nietzsche’s thought. Reading the early Nietzsche with reference to the later Nietzsche is, Danto seemed to believe, unobjectionable, but reading him, early and late, with a view to the still later, mid-20th preoccupations of Anglo-American analytic philosophers invites the complaint of historical distortion (Danto 1964, 386).

      Danto’s answer to this complaint – his proposal to ground his reading of Nietzsche in Nietzsche’s “own words” – finds an echo in the 1964 “Preface” to Nietzsche as Philosopher, when he argues that presenting Nietzsche as systematic and analytic thinker is a matter of “chart[ing] the changes in signification that his words sustain in their shifting from context to context and back.” By observing this methodological dictum, Danto expressly intends to treat Nietzsche as a philosopher, “whose thought merits examination on its own,” independently of both the “strange personality” that nurtured his reputation as an “intellectual hooligan” and the “special cultural circumstances” that occasioned his notoriety as the “semicanonized proto-ideologist of Nazism.” “Only now and again, when a special historical explanation is called for,” Danto remarks, “will I include biographical or historical information” (Danto 2005, xxiv–xxv).

      By appealing to Nietzsche’s words and their significations, Danto purports to secure his reading of Nietzsche, first, against the possibility of mistaking contemporary philosophical preoccupations for Nietzsche’s philosophical thought (anachronism), and second, against the possibility of mistaking Nietzsche’s mental life and his use for political purposes (his personality and his semicanonization by the Nazis) for his philosophical thought. To avoid these “mistakings” and the confusions to which they might give rise, he resolves to record the philosophical content of Nietzsche’s thought “on its own,” apart from its psychological causes, its reception by the Third Reich, and the supposition that Nietzsche was an analytical philosopher avant la lettre. In both “Nietzsche” and his 1964 “Preface,” Danto eschews historical understanding and suggests that Nietzsche’s words and their meanings objectively fix the content of his thought. On Danto’s view, a philosophical reading of Nietzsche can grasp his thought, while avoiding historical distortion and omitting to consider his mental life and the impact of his ideas, by giving proper attention to those words and meanings.⁴

      In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto invents a character he dubs “the Ideal Chronicler.” As Danto describes him, the Ideal Chronicler

      knows whatever happens the moment it happens, even in other minds. He is also to have the gift of instantaneous transcription: everything that happens across the whole forward rim of the Past is set down by him, as it happens, the way it happens. The resultant running account I term the Ideal Chronicle (hereafter referred to as I.C.). Once E [an event] is safely in the past, its full description is in the I.C. (Danto 2007, 149).

The Ideal Chronicler is an ideal witness. Of any event, however, there is a class of descriptions, comprised of so-called “narrative sentences,” under which the event cannot be witnessed, even by an ideal witness. These descriptions, Danto writes, “are necessarily and systematically excluded from the I.C.” (Danto 2007, 151).

      Occurring most typically in historical writing, narrative sentences “refer to two time separated events and describe the earlier with reference to the latter.” “Aristarchus anticipated in 270 B.C. the theory which Copernicus published in A.D. 1543” is a narrative sentence, for it describes Aristarchus’s accomplishment in terms of Copernicus’s accomplishment hundreds of years later. This sentence could not appear in the I.C., because the Ideal Chronicler, while possessing a perfect knowledge of what transpires, when it transpires, is blind to the future. Thus, he is incapable of grasping the significance that a past event acquires when an historian, or a biographer, describes it in terms of a later event with reference to which the past event could not have been described when it occurred (Danto 2007, 164, 156).

      Danto’s notion of a narrative sentence clarifies his idea that historical understanding is retrospective; that it is a matter of assigning significance to earlier events in light of later ones – thus, a matter of placing earlier events within a story we wish to tell. The stories we tell, Danto emphasizes, vary with the “topical interests” of the storyteller – imagine, for example, a biographer of a scientist less eminent than Copernicus who described Aristarchus’s achievement as anticipating a theory the less eminent scientist had published. There is something inexpugnably “subjective” and “arbitrary” about the meaning historical description assigns to an event, for it depends on the storyteller’s decision to relate a past event to one rather than another set of later events. As Danto also recognizes, the storyteller can revise and complicate the significance she retrospectively assigns to a past event when the passing of time and the advent of new events affords her a new “temporal location” from which to write new narrative sentences that