Why We Need Fiction: An Interview with Arthur C. Danto

Abstract

Why We Need Fiction: An Interview with Arthur C. Danto AQR: There are many people who feel that contemporary philosophy has no connection with the broader culture and, more alarmingly, neither with the culture’s intelligentsia: artists, writers, journalists and the like. Do you agree with that? Danto: I think it’s a justifiable complaint. It has been a long time since philosophers wrote in ways in which nonphilosophers, whether they’re writers or poets or whatever, would find interest in them. Probably the last one that has reached across in that kind of way, at least from among what we think of Anglo-American philosophical tradition, would be Ludwig Wittgenstein. He really continues to excite artists and writers, I think, because of his imagination and imaginative way of writing, and probably because of the unfinished character in what he’s doing. You get the sense of somebody really thinking through questions—somebody who maintains a certain distance from philosophy, and tries to think about philosophy in an open and pictorial way. So, Wittgenstein would certainly be, I guess, the last of the great ones. AQR: What about some of the current Continental philosophers, for example, Jacques Derrida, and other post-structuralists and deconstructionists, who appear to have influenced literary critics and theorists? Danto: One thing I really admire about my American philosophy peers is that they’re not easily bamboozled. I think almost every academic discipline in the humanities has simply crumpled in the last twenty years under the onslaught of interesting, but bad, ideas from the Continent. For some reason, the Anglo-American philosopher has been immune to that. There is a positive and negative side to that. As a discipline, philosophy has managed to carry on its investigations and its writing without just slopping over things the way almost everybody in other disciplines, it seems to me, has done. It’s hard to read criticism any longer, because you get disgusted with the pretentiousness of it. But, you never feel that way about philosophy. It’s as though philosophers felt they had a moral duty not to be pretentious. [End Page 213] AQR: Well, if the complaint is that philosophers are no longer connected to the broader culture, no longer “write with their blood,” as Nietzsche would have it, then, is it possible, let’s say, for a fiction writer to profit by reading it? Could they profit stylistically, but also substantially, in the sense of coming away with some vision of things which could then serve as an inspiration for their own writing? Danto: I think philosophers, when they do write well, write better than anybody. For example, writers could profit by reading contemporary philosophers such as Willard Van Orman Quine, who is a great stylist. In philosophy today it’s still a place where clarity and concision are prized qualities. Philosophy is a poetry of thought, if you like. And when it’s done in a professional way, I suppose there’s as much value in it as there is in watching great athletes perform. If you really want to see what thinking is—real thinking, then you want to go to the philosophers, and it almost doesn’t matter who you read from that point of view. Although there are thickets of formalism in any of them, I think one could read them as writers with great profit because of those extraordinary virtues, as well as their civilized wit—which you don’t find much in writers these days. The exception is perhaps Milan Kundera, who has that kind of urbanity and is naturally a philosophical writer, I mean a novelist who is really thinking philosophically and thinking about philosophical questions. AQR: Could an apprenticeship to a significant classical philosopher help the fiction writer? Danto: I think if the fiction writer really wants his mind to be a philosophical mind, then there’s no alternative to doing the dry, hard work, so to speak, of philosophical analysis and learning how arguments hold together, and how you know when you’re right, and what a counter example looks like, and how somebody overcomes a counter example, and you witness those little logical dramas that are...