As it happens, Dewey had himself, decades earlier, described a mind as “a sort of biological thing with arms or tentacles reaching out everywhere, and when they get appropriate food just fastening down upon it” (Dewey 1902, 334). This image condenses the argument of his seminal 1896 article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which focused on the example of a small child curiously reaching for a burning flame, and then upon touching it recoiling with newfound experience and knowledge. Even such simple instances of intelligent behavior, Dewey maintained, show that experience is not structured, contrary to an empiricist tradition that Danto and many other analytic writers still embraced generations later, around an efficiently-causal stimulus-response process in which brute sense data first trigger Lockean-style ideas whose further molecular permutations appear in the understanding, and then afford empirical knowledge. In his example, it is not the sensations from the reaching activity that are properly regarded as explanatorily primary for understanding the child’s behavior (along with its endless analogues throughout the realm of human action). What occupies this role, rather, is the reaching itself, understood as an always-already, future-directed, goal-seeking impulse whose sensorimotor and cognitive components are inextricably bound together in a feedback-looping relationship between the action’s larger and evolving environment. Thus even a little child turns out to be capable of inquiry – Dewey’s term for the myriad ways in which humans seek fresh integration with an environment that continually challenges them not simply to represent it abstractly but reconstructively to interact with it in the course of pursuing and refining their desires.
Decades later, Dewey would use another suggestive metaphor in the “Nature, Life, and Body-Mind” chapter of Experience and Nature, which remains a key text for discussions of the metaphysical bases of embodied phenomenology and cognition. Here he comments that
To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process (Dewey 1925, 224).
In addition to emphasizing the emergent-naturalist theme of the ontological continuity of cognitive and bodily processes, Dewey signals his process-philosopher’s rejection of atomistic methodologies (“marbles in a box”) in a variety of traditional contexts, including in classical empiricist and Kantian accounts of perception. Danto never undertook to rebut this centerpiece of Deweyan experimental pragmatism in any detail in his influential books of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Analytical Philosophy of Action, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, and Analytical Philosophy of History. Why the silence? One possibility – this is just a guess – is that, given how passé Dewey had become for many analytic readers by then, Danto saw no need to pick a fight with a ghostly opponent. And this all the more if that opponent’s philosophical system – as was suggested by the metaphilosophical perspectivism which became central to Danto’s thinking by the 1960s – had an inferential structure that he saw to be incommensurable with his own. (But ghost-banishing is not, as later neoDeweyan turns in philosophy and elsewhere would bear out, sufficient for ghost-busting.)
Be all that as it may, the above deep methodological differences also underpin the two philosophers’ contrasting images of human action. Danto’s atomistic ontology allowed him to argue, famously, that actions are tokens of a person’s bodily behavior possessing an antecedent cause in an intentional state informed by impinging sensory stimuli. All of the main components of an action, whether that action be, in Danto’s idiom, “basic” or “mediated,” preserve a strict ontological discontinuity between the inner and outer aspects of agency. Such thinking has no place in Dewey’s more teleological and emergent-naturalist model of behavior. There, the neurosensory and cognitive strands of agency are organically interconnected in a way that defies assimilation equally to Cartesian interactionist dualism and classical empiricism’s methodological dualism of concepts versus sensa (or scheme versus content, in the idiom of Donald Davidson’s critique of “the very idea of a conceptual scheme,” which Dewey anticipated and Danto fatefully ignored).
Dewey’s kind of emergent-naturalist model of intelligence presents, in effect, a third alternative to the Cartesian/interactionist and more baldly mechanistic naturalistic models that remained in place for many twentieth-century philosophers. Danto’s long-standing resistance to certain aspects of that alternative would turn out not to be entirely graven in stone. But to appreciate why, consider a couple more ways in which he continued to picture Dewey’s philosophy as opposed to his own.
One large context for that opposition is Danto’s metaphilosophical perspectivism – his view, articulated most fully in Connections, that all significant philosophizing occurs in systems whose conflicts (unlike conflicts between propositions within such systems) cannot be adjudicated in fully cognitive ways. Danto’s philosophy represents one such supposedly settled system; Dewey’s, another. Danto further briefly describes his distance from Dewey by means of a distinction between two antinomically opposed stances about the interrelations of mind, knowledge, and world that, in a familiar and rather open-textured analytic-philosophical idiom, he calls internalism and externalism. In his 1968 Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, Danto characterizes Dewey and other pragmatists, along with Marxists, as internalists (Danto 168, 234). Three decades later, in the “Internalism and Externalism” chapter in Connections, he revisits this basic dialectic, this time with the meanings of the key terms reversed in keeping with shifting analytical-philosophical usage. Descartes is now a prime specimen of what Danto earlier called Externalism, now rechristened as Internalism. Dewey and classical pragmatism are not explicitly mentioned, with Nietzsche (whom Danto had famously described earlier as a proto-pragmatist) now slotted in as the exemplary Externalist.
Given the pervasive influence of Dewey’s organicist externalism within the twentieth-century Anglophone canon, readers might wonder why Danto would here once again ignore him in a book written in part, after all, as a polemical defense of analytic philosophy’s methods against the imagined threats from pragmatism. My ghost-banishing hypothesis may apply here yet again, but now with a further twist. Connections offers a masterly, if unabashedly partisan, introductory overview of many key lower and higher-order philosophical issues of the day. Danto makes no secret of his own internalist sympathies, but he is dialectically street-wise enough to portray the internalist/externalist dialectic as possessing an antinomical structure, rooted in his deeper perspectivism. To personally prefer one deep ontological or epistemological perspective over another, Danto implies, is one thing; to give conclusive reasons in support of such tastes is another. Like Dewey, he well understood (without going the entire pragmatist distance) that the second scenario of ideal certainty is a Cartesian fantasy. This is hardly the only respect in which Danto’s late philosophy departs dramatically from that of Descartes.
Before we pursue the last point more fully, some discussion is in order regarding another subject dear to both Danto’s and Dewey’s hearts and about which both wrote groundbreaking books: art. (I will here be brief since other chapters in this volume focus more fully on Danto’s philosophy of art.) It might at first seem puzzling that Danto all but ignores Dewey’s Art as Experience through his many art-philosophical and art-critical writings. Here again, we may have a case of ghost-banishing. In any event, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and such later books as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History and The Abuse of Beauty, as well as numerous art-critical studies in The Nation and elsewhere, together project a decidedly non-Deweyan vision of their subjects. At its core is Danto’s ahistorically essentialist definition of a work of art as an “embodied meaning,” which is in turn rooted in his neoCartesian model of knowledge as a subject/representation/world triangulation.
Contrast this with Dewey’s more anti-representationalistically framed approach