Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: November 19, 1989
(Page 3 of 5)

Danto applied to New York University, which turned him down because he hadn't studied any philosophy, but was accepted by Columbia. He spent 1949 and 50 studying in Paris on a Fulbright, and another year teaching at the University of Colorado, where he met two former students of Gilbert Ryle and Norman Malcolm, leading British analytic philosophers. He was hooked. When he came back to Columbia in 1951, he says, it was with ''this sort of mission that I was going to teach analytical philosophy.''

In the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that Danto practices, philosophical problems are resolved by closely analyzing ordinary language. For example, one might approach the old philosophical question of the relation between determinism and free will as G.E. Moore did, by attempting a logical analysis of the sentence ''He could have done otherwise.''

Danto is unusual in having used the analytic mode to examine topics far afield. In such books as ''Analytical Philosophy of History,'' ''Nietzsche as Philosopher,'' ''Mysticism and Morality'' (on Oriental philosophy) and ''Jean-Paul Sartre,'' he has taken up subjects most analytic philosophers consider too metaphysical, slushy or subjective.

Thirty-eight years after he began teaching at Columbia, Danto retains his passion for doing analytic philosophy: ''I don't know of any comparable discipline. I used to get this wonderful sense of thinking about a question and putting a lot of logical pressure on it and just having it open, like a starfish opening an oyster - if you just put enough pressure on it, it will yield. There was a time when I was growing up as a philosopher when I thought that all the problems of philosophy, and maybe everything else, were going to yield to this very powerful method.'' At the same time, he acknowledges that analytic philosophy has ''become somewhat trivial now. I don't think anybody knows really what it is now. I think philosophy is sort of wandering in the dark.''

Danto himself has branched into other disciplines. Fascinated by the topic of mental representations - how minds form ideas - he team-teaches courses with two Columbia colleagues from the department of psychology. With Prof. Julian Hochberg, he teaches a course on perception and moving images; with Prof. Herbert Terrace, who became famous in the mid-1970's with his work on the linguistic competence of chimpanzees (notably, Nim Chimpsky), he co-teaches a course called the Philosophy of 20th Century Psychology, which covers such topics as artificial intelligence, the representation of cognitive events in the animal mind, Freud, and the analysis of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky.

In addition to carrying a full teaching load at Columbia, Danto writes prolifically on a wide variety of topics. In recent months, he has written for The New York Times about the Broadway version of Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'' and published essays in Grand Street on the cultural meaning of chairs and on the battlefield of Gettysburg as a ''site-specific'' art work. He has written on connections between philosophy and detective fiction in the Gettysburg Review. He sees every major museum show and most important gallery exhibitions in New York.

Despite his overstuffed schedule, editors and conference organizers can count on him as the softest touch around.''I'll do it at the drop of a hat if they ask me,'' he says about the many invitations to write and lecture he currently receives. ''I can't think of any reason not to.''

I WOULDN'T WANT JUST to have been an academic,'' Danto remarks as we drive with the artist Tim Rollins through the South Bronx, en route to the Longwood Neighborhood Office Center, where Rollins maintains a studio with Kids of Survival, a group of black and Hispanic teen-agers with whom he collaborates. The group's large paintings have caught the attention of the art world and now hang in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art and the Saatchi Collection in London. It's hard not be amused by the fact that Danto, who purports to stand outside the politics and hype of the art world, should just happen to be chasing after one of the hottest acts around.

Danto, who will be writing a catalogue essay on Rollins and the Kids group for their fall show at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, clearly relishes the chance to escape from his familiar habitat, and listens with exuberant attention as Rollins describes how amazed some of the Kids members were at seeing Picasso's ''Guernica'' encased in bulletproof glass at the Prado in Madrid.

Always the philosopher, he immediately launches into a discussion of one of his pet theories: the difference between art that's disturbing (and ''gets fascists angry'') because it represents disturbing things in disturbing ways (for example, ''Guernica,'' or Goya's ''Black Paintings'' or Leon Golub's paintings of torturers and their victims) and what he somewhat impishly likes to call ''disturbational'' art, which breaches the boundaries between art and life. ''Reality must in some way then be an actual component of disturbational art,'' he has written, ''and usually reality of a kind itself disturbing: obscenity, frontal nudity, blood, excrement, mutilation, real danger, actual pain, possible death.''