Danto as Educator

Abstract

From the title as Educator (1874)1 it would be natural to expect Nietzsche to offer us a detailed account of how Schopenhauer's philosophical system influenced his own thought, or perhaps at a minimum how the sage of Frankfurt's work was crucial for his development as a thinker. After all, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation clearly left a profound mark on Nietzsche's earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy. But Nietzsche frustrates these reasonable expectations in the essay, as he is almost entirely silent on Schopenhauer's actual philosophical system. By the point in time of writing as Educator, Nietzsche has apparently taken for granted that this post-Kantian's version of transcendental idealism, his will-less aesthetics, the ethics of compassion, and the praise of asceticism as redemption from the will-to-life are just plain wrongheaded. So why would Nietzsche call Schopenhauer his educator, if Schopenhauer's oeuvre was not particularly educational?Nietzsche focuses on the man as educator. He lauds Schopenhauer as an example of how to be a true philosopher for one's time and culture. Most impressive to him was Schopenhauer's manner of living: independent, free from the dominant religious, political and social thinking of his day; free from the need to draw an income; and, accordingly, free from a formal academic environment. Above all, what was most worthy of emulation, according to Nietzsche, was Schopenhauer's quest for the truth and the suffering he undertook for truth's sake. He suffered in part because of the intellectual climate in which he philosophized that favored Hegelian currents rather antithetical to Schopenhauer's peculiar mixture of Plato, Kant, Vedic thought and attention to contemporary natural science. Ultimately, it is the example of the free, truth-seeking and suffering genius that creates a philosophy with the capacity to disturb that makes Schopenhauer his educator.2Arthur Danto was one of my most important educators. He is responsible, for better or for worse, for putting me on the intellectual and academic path I've been pursuing for the past 20 years, that is, to reconstruct many facets of Schopenhauer's thought, especially his metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics for contemporary use. Unlike Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche, however, it is both Danto's work and his personal example as an engaged philosopher and art critic that educated me. Further, Danto's model as a philosophical educator is anything but that of a solitary, untimely sufferer for the sake of the truth, though he did exemplify a kind of freedom from traditional academic style and freedom from the oftentimes-sterile academic concerns of his day. While Danto certainly sought out the truth about the nature and importance of art, history, and many other philosophically rich topics, he was no solitary sufferer. On the contrary, Danto was a very sociable and even joyful philosopher, deeply engaged in his contemporary society, in the academy, and especially in the world of art past and present.I decided to pursue graduate study in philosophy at Columbia in the early 1990s largely because of Arthur Danto. As an undergraduate I read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), and I recall reading the whole 200-page book in one sitting. In that book, Danto takes the reader on an exhilarating, ridiculously erudite journey through the history of philosophical aesthetics, the history of art, and through contemporary currents in the visual arts especially in the 1950s and 1960s. The meandering but purposive path he takes in the book delivers a compelling case that the essence of a work of art, as opposed to an ordinary object, is that it is an embodiment of meaning, and further, that one needs to understand the historical and institutional background of artistic practice in order to grasp that meaning and to grasp the essential nature of art and why it matters. …