Arthur Danto, Beauty and the Beast

8/15/2019 Arthur Danto, Beauty and the Beast

1/6

nd saw her sweet unravished limbs, andkissed

H e r pale and argent body undisturbed.. .

— a n d sometimes Matthew Arnold andwater:

O singer of P ersephoneIn the dim meadows desolateDost thou remember Sicily?

The fairy stories have a faint anemiccharm, but they are spoiled by a surpris-ingly leaden preachiness; they are toosentimental to sparkle like Perrault, toovoulu to speak to the child's subcon-scious like the tales of the brothersG r i m m . The Picture of Dorian Gray goesoff at half cock. Unlike Huysmans's ARebours, by which it was much influ-enced, it does not convey a true sense ofdecadence, and unlike Aubrey Beards-ley, Wilde has no lively sense of evil. Thepeople in Dorian Gray seem to be play-ing at being bad; and whereas in TheImportance of Being Earnest our feelingthat the characters do not mean whatthey say is part of the charm, in thenovel it produces flatness. Stevenson isfar more sinister in D r . Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, and at half the length.

The essays and the dialoguesare hothouse blooms ofthe '90s, now looking ra-ther overblown and faded.

By far the most elaborate of these is TheCritic a s Artist, a study of the nature of artin the form of a dialogue between twoexquisite young men. It is amusing andacute, with genuinely probing andprovocative ideas embedded in it; but itis vitiated by some preposterously purpleprose. On Oxford:

O n e can loiter in the gray cloisters at Mag-dalen, and listen to some flutelike voicesinging in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in thegreen meadow, among the strangesnakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sun-burnt noon smite to a finer gold thetower's gilded vanes

O n Homer:

Behind the embroidered curtains of hispavilion sits A chilles, in perfumed raiment,while in harness of gilt and silver the friendof h is soul arrays himself to go forth to thefight. From a curiously carven chest thath is mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord of th e Myrmidons takes outthat mystic chalice that the lip of m an hadnever touched

One would like to think that this sort ofthing was a send-up of bejeweled aes-thetic prose (and it is fair to say that oneof the enticements of this style, and oneof its dangers, was its vague hoverbetween the serious and the flippant).But when one thinks of Salome or theself-congratulation of D e Profundis, onemust fear that at least half of him

thought he was being impressive.What, then, of Wilde's plays? The

Importance of Being Earnest is imperish-able, but the rest wilt under scrutiny. Hisfirst play, Vera, is a farrago of nonsenseabout a tsar who falls madly in love withan anarchist. His second play. TheDuchess of Padua, is a dull verse drama insub-Shakespearian vein. The absurdities

of Salome aie

perversely redeemed by itsmassive insincerity, which even the daz-zling artifices of Strauss's operatic set-ting cannot quite conceal. T'hat leavesthe three dramas of modern life, LadyWindermere s F a n A Woman of N o Impor-tance and An Ideal Husband. These getrevived from time to time, they hold thestage reasonably well, they contain someexcellent jokes; but in the last analysisthey are not very good plays. At heartthey are conventionally Victorian draw-ing-room comedies with an overlay ofmelodrama. The plots are sentimental,the psychology false. "Dead, and nevercalled me mother"—that much-mockedline is from the stage version of Mrs.Henry Wood's East Lynne, but it is thechief plot mechanism, more or less, of

Lady Windermere's Fan.Schmidgall writes entertainingly and

with spirit, though his relentless perki-ness occasionally lapses into vulgarity.He makes mistakes. Unlike BertieWooster, he is particularly unsound onscripture knowledge; he gets into a terri-ble muddle about Balaam's ass, and forsome reason he thinks that a poem by

John Gray about St. Peter is autobio-graphical. He is prone to think that anytime his hero uses the word "wild,"- he ismaking a pun. But he is alert, stimulat-ing and quite often perceptive. Perhapshe underestimates the gaiety that is atthe core of Wilde's best work. In his last,impecunious years Wilde was offeredcommissions for new plays, but herefused them, because he could neveragain recapture the lightness of heartthat had been among his essential gifts.After his release from prison, he wrotenothing more.

RICHARD JENKYNS is the author mosrecent ly of Dignity and Decadence: rian Art and the Classical Inheritance vard University Press).

B e au t y a n d th e B e as tB Y ARTHUR C DANTO

omo Aestheticus:

T h e Invention of Taste in the Democratic Ageby Luc Ferrytr nsl ted by Robert De Loaiza( U n iv e r s it y o f C h i c a g o P r e s s , 2 8 0 p p . , 3 2 )

Not long ago I sat throughone of Eric Rohmer's pal-lid late films, in whichattractive men and women

conduct indecisive flirtations over d innertables in handsome apartments in Parisor at charming weekend retreats. Thecentral female character was a philoso-phy teacher in a lycee, who is introducedby a student she meets at a dull party tothe student's father, a good-looking wid-ower. The student, a young woman ofalmost monumental self-assurance andvulnerability, seeks to throw her newfriend together with the father, chiefiy,one feels, to spite the father's girlfriend,whom she loathes. The girlfriend, anattractive and self-possessed business-woman, is ptirsuing an advanced degree

in philosophy. And at a diner a troix, thetwo women vie for the man's admirationby engaging in what one might call a phi-

losophy match—seeking to trap oneanother in lapses or confessions of igno-rance regarding some obscure passage inHusserl or Kant. Only in France is phe-nomenology thought to be the way to aman's hear t

A good many of France's majorphilosophers—Sartre and Beauvoircome to mind—began their careers aslycee teachers in the classe terminwhere students spend a year in the studyof philosophy before sitting for the bac-calaureate exams. To be a middle-classperson in France, in other words, is tobe philosophically literate in a way thatis unthinkable in the United States,where philosophy is but a liberal artselective. Philosophers in the UnitedStates write mainly for one another, andit is rare that a thinker of even greatphilosophical renown is recognized byname outside the narrow circle of pro-


2/6

ssional philosophy. But Rohmer'smmes savantes are part of a naturaludience for France's ph ilosophers, whoay write for one another on occasion,

ut typically address readers who deememselves competent to follow argu-ents and to catch allusions to texts ine history of philosophy. (In t967ichel Foucaul t ' s Les mots et les choses,

naccountably translated here as Therder of Things, was a best-seller inance.)T he professionalization of Am erican

hilosophy is almost certainly the conse-uence of the infusion into our philoso-hy departments of German thinkersho fled Europe in World War ii, bring-g with them the austere teachings ofgical positivism and especially the dis-pline of mathematical logic. T he posi-vists cheerfully dismissed pretty muche whole of traditional philosophy as

onsense, and sought to transformhatever remained into somethingpproxim ating an exact science. T herst generation of American philoso-hers trained under these auspicesecame, even in subjects as seeminglyhospitable to logical analysis as aes-etics, logical analysts of one or

no ther d egree of technicality. T hiseant that their writings were perceived inaccessible and formidable. Incent years perhaps the only academic

hilosopher who has been able to reachaders outside those who follow theofessional journals has been Richardorty; a writer such as Richard Schuster-an , whose Pragmatist Aesthetics b e c a m ewild success in France and elsewhereEurope, not least because of his cele-

ation of hip-hop culture, has made lit-e impact at home.

Luc Ferry's book presup-poses an audience com-posed of the kinds of read-ers portrayed in Rohmer's

lms. It is scholarly, argumentative andemanding, but it is not the kind ofook that American philosophers writer one ano ther. T he question that itkes up , while it is certainly no t withou tterest to readers in this country and

ossibly pertinent to our ultimate con-rns, has a meaning almost peculiar toe Fren ch intellectual: namely, what aretellectuals to be now that they are nonger Marxists?Being a M arxist, or being at least sym-

athetic with the overall goals of Marx-m, whatever one might have come toink of the Soviet Union, was a posturemost refiexively assumed by thinkersFrance. It constituted part of what the

ovelist Marcel Ayme once described asconfort intellectuel; and whe n i t s topp ed

eing that, the public thinkers of Franceegan to cast about for something to

replace it. (A few years ago I was invitedto participate in a conference in Parisingeniously t i t led La decouverte philo-sophique de I'Amerique, T he Ph i losoph ica lDiscovery of America, and the animat-ing idea of the conference, almostunth inka ble even a few years earlier, wasthat something of value might belearned from the political institutions,attitudes and practices of the UnitedStates.)

Ferry himself was a founding mem berof a group of brash young thinkers inParis, the so-called New Philosophers,who made news by breaking ranks withthe left and actually taking a standagainst Marxism in the 1970s, on thegrounds that it leads to Stalinism. He isessentially a political theorist. In thisbook he u ndertake s to advance a certainform of individualism, which he derivesin a way from Nietzsche, but more gen-erally from the history of aesthetics thatled up to Nietzsche. It is a form of indi-vidualism that he discovers in postmod-ern attitudes toward art.

Here is what I take to beFerry's overall conclusion.Nietzsche's thoughts, hewrites, are "more modern

than modernity itself, because they pre-pare a future that sees itself as unprece-den ted." T his is a future in which the sta-tus of the thinker—that is, the in-tellectual—"should go from that ofworker to that of artist." Hence homo aes-theticus, the human as aesthetic being.And hen ce the agenda of Ferry's book: a"search for a new figuration of individu-alism." T he latter should

find its most complete expression in art,taken in its most general sense as the mostadequate manifestation of the will topower . .. because, in a world that is nowwholly perspectival, in a world once againbecome infinite in that it offers the possi-bility of an infinity of inte rpreta tions, onlyart presents itself authentically as what it is:an evaluation that makes no pretense oftruth.

Nietzsche proclaimed that there areno facts, only interpretations. In someways Ferry sees this as the very essenceof postmodernism, where there are noaesthetic constraints because no form ofart is "more true " than any other:

T he most characteristic trait of the c ulturewe bathe in today is without a doubt eclec-ticism. In principle everything can cohabitwithin it, or, if one prefers putting it in away that conforms even more to tiie spiritof the times, nothing in the culture is a pri-ori illegitimate.

T he void left by the collapse of comm u-nism is to be filled with a radical indi-vidualism whose best model is that of

life on the l ine ...

BORDERPEOPLEUFEANOSOOETYIN THE US -MEXI COBORDERLANDS

OSCAR J. MARTINEZ

BORDER

PEOPLE

Life andSociety inthe U.S.-MexicoBorderlandsby Oscar J.Martinez

The U.S.-Mexico border—now here else do somany people from two dissimilar nations live insuch proximity and interact so intensely. Basedon firsthand interviews with individuals fromall walks of life. Border People reveals the forcesthat shape borderlanders' lives. $24.95 paper.

A major work. T he oral histories aloneconstitute a powerful testimony of the dyna-mism of the social system in the LI.S.-Mexicoborderlands." —^James W. WiUde

Also new in paperback —The Mexican Border CitiesLandscape Anatom y and P lace P ersonalityby Daniel D. Arreoia & ames R. Curtis, 15.95

The University of Arizona Press1230 N. P apl< Ave., Tucs on, AZ 85719V I s a / M C / D I s c , call 1.800-426-3797 • mall order, a d d $2 s&h

• America 's biggest selectio n of I

• Save up to 80% or more on recent over-stock s, remaind ers, Imports from all majorpublishers. Book s once priced at 820, 30, 40—now only 82 .95, 3,95, 4,95.

C C hoose from thousan ds of titles Includinghundreds of new arrivals each monthi

• Boo ks for every Interest.- Politics, Litera-ture, H istory, Science, Biography, F iction,Nature, Travel—over 40 smjject areas,

• Normal shipment within 48 hours.Moneyback guarantee.

HAMILTONI Box 15-434, Falls Village, CT 06031 •

HATE TO SHAVE?Try ABOUT-FAC E™ shave cream. It 'sguaranteed to end your razor irritation.The smoothness will astound you.(Aloe, 7 maatmiBn, 5 anoOiaits, 20,000 in vilsimi E.)Avaibb k: Wakhaf-Astocia H otd , 301 Park Avenue, NY

TeL OBter 212 -533-2700 (N YC ), or 1-800-793-5433

W O R D LoVerSaDoRE VEX™

—the world's finest word game. Vermont-made,wooden gameboard and letter tiles enclosed in a

deiuxe wooden carrying case. Fun...challenging...addictive The perfect gift

$49.95. 9 1-800-789-GAME


3/6

artistic practice today. Art in the post-modern era shows the way to politicalsalvation.

Ferry begins his investigation byaccepting the slogan "the death ofman," a swift and dramatic way ofexpressing the proposition that wehuman beings are no longer "mastersand possessors of ourselves." We are notsuch masters and such possessors, hesupposes, because our mental lives aresplit between conscious and uncon-scious states, the former being in largemeasure determined by the latter, overwhich we have no control, and concern-ing which we would not even haveknowledge had it not been for the dis-coveries of psychoanalysis. The kind ofrationality presupposed in humanbeings being free, in the sense of having"the capacity to give oneself one's ownlaws," is accordingly invalidated. But it isinvalidated at the very moment (Ferryconsiders this a paradox) when self-determination and autonomy a re politi-cal ideals vehemently insisted uponacross the face of the world. And so hewonders to what degree it is possible, ifit is possible at all, to accept the politicalvalues of democratic individualism andat the same time to accept the truth thatthe philosophical presuppositions ofthose values have forever been falsified

"by the discovery of the various aspectsof the unconscious."

It is his thought—and it is this thatgives his book its considerable nov-elty—that a good place to treat thisproblem is aesthetics. For aesthetics is"the field par excellence in which theproblem brought about by the subjec-tivization of the world characteristic ofmodern times can be observed in thechemically pure state." Aesthetics servesthis purpose because it has, from thefirst, taken as authoritative the tastes ofthe individual subject, regarding which"there can be no dispute." Whethersomething is or is not aestheticallygood, or beautiful, is not an objectivematter to be settled by precise nieasure-ment or external authority. By contrastwith science, religion, history and law,aesthetics as a discipline begins withsubjectivity, and works outward. "Thehistory of modernity," Ferry argues, isreally the history of the decline of tradi-tions everywhere, leaving nothing butsubjectivity to deal with issues that usedto be arbitrated by those traditions.T hus aesthetics, which has alwaysaccepted precisely such a cond ition inmatters of taste, may have something toteach us in confronting so chaotic a sit-uation. One of the attractive features ofFerry's book is that he narrates the his-

If your n eighbo r can n o t sleep• •

Ethnic NationalismThe Tragic Death of YugoslaviaBogdan DenitchYugoslaxia

. . . you mil n o t be a lowed t o e i the r.T he old adage assumes an undertone ofdread as the world witnesses the destructionof Y ugoslavia. T his uneasiness is well-found-ed, as Bogdan Denitch makes clear in thisbrilliant book about the causes and possible

ramifications of the death of Y ugoslavia, one tha t clearly identi-fies events and trends that urgently demand the world's atten-tion. "Bogdan Denitch is simply the best Am erican au thor writ-ing on the states that used to constitute Y ugoslavia. EthnicNationalism represents his most synthetic and ambitious projecton this topic. . . . The definitive statem ent on the roots of thepresent disastrous civil war." Andreu Arato, New School forSocial Research$17.95 paper $44.95 clot h 224 pages

at bookstores or from

University of Minnesota Press415/308 1-800-388-3863

tory of modern aesthetics from tspective.

nd indeed, in at leagreat originating tethe eighteenth centHume and in. Kant

thetics really does endeavor to deathe issue that Ferry proposes aspolitical paradox of our time, thneither Hume nor Kant perceivejectivity and rationality to be quopposed as Ferry imagines them tHume appears to find in mattetaste the possibility of an agreebetween subjects one hardly woulanticipated in so skeptical a th"T he gre at variety of T aste, as wellopinion, which prevails in the wotoo obvious not to have fallen everyone's observation," Hum e whis canonical essay, "Of the StandTaste," in 1757. His view precisethat "beauty is no quality in t

themselves: it exists merely in the which contemplates them."

But Hu m e's originality lay in insifirst, that this radical subjectivnot entail that every jud gm en t ofhas equal validity and, secondthere is a singular consensus on wgood and what is not, so that tafinally not that different from pperson, even if it is not underw ritobjective reality. "Whoever woulan equality of genius and elebetween Ogilby and Milton, or Buand Addison," Hume wrote in a fasentence, "would be thought to dno less an extravagance, than if he maintained a molehill to be as hiTeneriffe, or a pond as extensive aocean." Some account must be gHume evidently believed, of whyments of taste so often concur if ething is merely subjective. And sthe reason is that subjects are notthat different from one another.

It might be pointed out, with Fproblem in mind, that causality, tono quality of things themselves, ing to Hume, but also exists in the that contemplates them. Caustions are spontaneously ascribed onbasis of habitual association, andhave no greater power over hassociation than we are alleged toover our unconscious drive hungers. Hume could certainly bein support of "the death of man": ihe, after all, who asserted that r(and ought to be ) the slave of paAnd yet people generally come upthe same causal picture of thingsview the world in basically similaSo far as the global clamor for a

omy is concerned, people prettywant the same kinds of things (conin the realm of taste, the stupe


4/6

opularity of American popular culturee world around) and are against theme kinds of things. So in fact the

death of man" m ight be perfectly com-atible with demands for autonomy,ithout any special need to reconcileem through aesthetics. Htime's philos-

phy of mind is of a piece, whether heas thinking of art or science.

Kant's aesthetic theory is too intricateits own right, and too implicated withe rest of his system, to take up in aview. Suffice it to say that Kant's aes-etics resembled Hume's in thisspect: taste belonged to the sameental architecture as causality, space

nd time. Kant, too, began with deustibus non disputandum est. judgments taste can no more be demonstratedan beauty (in Hume's philosophy)

an be pointed to in things. Still, Kantgued that one c annot judge some-ing beatitiful withotit tacitly universal-ing that judgm ent. To find som ethingeautiful is to believe that all rationaleings must find it beautiful. In thisspect Kant's aesthetics and his moral

hilosophy are nearly of a piece, for aonuniversalizable moral judgment isso facto invalid.A person who believed in the "death

f man" might single out Kant foriticism, since he treated human beings

ery largely as rational beings, wherease trend today is to insist that there isore to the self than its rationality, thate are infiected by gender, race, tradi-ons, cultural and historical locationnd so on. In fact, Kant took someotice of the South Sea Islanders, argu-g that we could not rationally will thefe that they led, which was a life of purensual pleasure. But the thinkers of theghteenth century were only beginning awaken to anthro polo gical difference

Gook's Voyages had recently been pub-shed), and it is difficult to know howant would have respond ed to multicul-ralist criticisms, or whether he would

ave persisted in his thesis that jud g-ents of taste would be universalized

cross cultural lines.

Dissolve to Nietzsche. Niet-zschean individualismdoes not lend itself to uni-versalization or harmo-

zation. "More mode rn than modernityelf," it anticipates the eclecticism ofe "postmodern moment" because ofe kind of radical incommensurabilityat Nietzsche found between individual

nd individual, each interpreting theorld in its own way, and none of theterpretations true, because there are

o facts. And this, with some qualifica-

ons that are not worked out in thisook, is Ferry's view as well. Of course,nce no interpretation is true, non e can

\n rfie s t y l e a n d t r a d i ti o no f I F S t o n e . '

ShadowsofHopeA F r e e h n k e r ' s G u i d e toP o l i t i c s in th e T im e o f C lin t o n

Sam Sm irii S h a d o w s of H o p e i s m t he s ty l e and t r ad i t i on of

I . F. S t o n e . I t ca r r i e s //le r e a d e r f r o m fi D e-C o n s t r v c t i o n i s m o f rfie B u s h yea r s . . . i n to a n e w

f jo l it ic a l o r d e r o f P o s t - M o d e m i s m . . .— 'E u g e n e J . M c C a r t h y

W a s h i n g t o n jo u m a li st S a m S m i th a s k s, w h o isB i ll C li n to n a n d w h a t c a n w e l e a rn f r o m his

p e r s o n a l b a c k g r o u n d , h is p e r f o n n a n c e i n thecam pa ign , an d h i s fi rs t yea r i n o ffi ce? U p- to - t t ie -

m in u t e i n t e m i s of is su e s a n d W a s h i n g t o n g o s s i p ,t fi e b o o k a l so r e a ch e s b e y o n d t h e s c o r e - c a rd

a p p r o a c h to p la c e C l in t o n w i t h in t h e c u l t u r e -p o l i t ic a l , s o c i a l , a n d e c o n o m i c — o f o u r t im e .

Sm ith te ll s a c a u t io n a r y t a le f o r a l l A m e r i c a n s .

clolh $22.50

HateSpeechT he History of an American ControversySamuel Walker

"A readable, insightful chronological history of the UnitedStates' unusual policy on hate speech."—Publishers Weekly

"An original contribution to the literature not just of hatespeech but of modern First Amendment issues generally. . . .T his is a fine piece of work ; it deserves wide atte nti on ."—Kermit L. Hall, University of Tulsa

Samuel Walker examines the hate speech issue, from theconflicts over the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and AmericanNazi groups in the 1930s, to the famous Skokie episode in1977-78, and the campus culture wars of the 1990s.$11.95 paper, $25.00 cloth

At bookstores. University of Nebr aska Press • Lincoln, NE • 8 00-7 55-1 105


5/6

be in any logical sense incom patible withany other.

So maybe we could achieve a certainharmony if we could get everyone toaccept that what divides them from oneanother has nothing to do with truth.But try telling Jews and Muslims in theMiddle East that what divides them (orlarge numbers of them) is merely inter-pretation, with truth and falsity of norelevance whatever, and you will all atonce give them a common target,namely you. It is precisely their claims totruth that have so far brought them tobitter strife. For the faithful, it would beno consolation for the loss of truth to beassured that their systems of belief arelike works of art, that Jews and Muslimsalike are but homines aestheticus.

fter he r elective course inphilosophy, the Americanundergraduate—let us callher Eveline—^will know

that exhibiting her knowledge ofHusserl will not earn her many points inthe pursuit of love, not even on theUpper West Side. But she will know athing or two about belief and tru th: thatto believe that p is to believe that p istrue. And she will probably have dis-cussed Donald Davidson's Principle ofCharity, according to which a conditionfor understanding the utterances ofanother is to credit him with prettymuch the same beliefs as her own—sothat, contrary to Ferry, mo dern philoso-phy does not cut "the shared world" out

from under us.Eveline will certainly be skeptical of

"the death of man," for her professorwill have tau ght her to take psychoanaly-sis with a grain or more of salt. T rue,Eveline has learned that folk psychologyin general is under heavy fire, and thatperhaps the entire language of will,motive, intention and even belief mayon e day be replaced with an advancedneurochemical idiom. But for the life ofhe r she cannot see what this has to dowith political autonomy. Whatever theexplanation of what we speak of as our

wants, autonomy consists in not beingprevented by our institutions from real-izing them. What, she wonders, wouldthe Kurds or the Bosnians or the rebelsin Chiapas say to the proposition that,since man is dead, there is somethingparadoxical in demanding autonomy?

One of the things that la decouvertephilosophique de VAmmque might turn upis how differently philoso phy is donehere than in Paris. And it is an impor-tant part of the difference that Ameri-can philosophy still believes in truth,dividing only in how truth is to be ana-

lyzed. Does this suggest that there is noshared world to speak of between thetwo philosophical cultures? This might

be true, without the explanation beingthat philosophy is only interpretationthat makes "no pretense of truth." Andit may be granted that there is no pre-tense to truth in art; the absence of sucha pretense is what tmderwrites the possi-bility of a pluralistic art world. But nopretense to truth in a book into whichso much scholarship and so much analy-sis have gone? The author can say this,but he cannot really believe it.

As a sometime aesthetician in a philo-sophical world where aesthetics ismarginalized, I would dearly love to seea heroic role assigned to the discipline.But not at the price of giving up all pre-

T h e Tw itBY W ENDY LESSER

Roald Dahl: A Biographyby Jeremy Treglown(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 322 p p . , $251

The good thing—or rather,on e of the many goodthings, bu t probably at theroot of all the good

things—about Jeremy Treglown's biog-raphy of Roald Dahl is that it is unautho-rized. The family did not want him towrite it, and only one or two of themeventually, reluctantly, cooperated in hisresearch. For a biographer, this has somedisadvantages: he cannot quote at lengthfrom the published writings, cannothave access to many of the most poten-tially informative letters, cannot inter-view those who were closest to the man(as opposed to the writer). But all ofthese disadvantages are outweighed bythe biographer's freedom to choose andto express his. own attitude toward hissubject. In the case of Dahl this freedom

is crucial, because he was, as both awriter and a man, so complicatedly irri-tating, so complexly appealing, that hisbiographer requires the full range ofemotions from which to select an appro-priate response. Jeremy Treglown hasmade the selection with consummate,admirable grace.

T his tonal delicacy becom es app aren tearly in the first chapter, where Tre-glown explains how he went aboutattempting to answer his own questionsabout this world-famous author of chil-dren's books, this man who was "a war

hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, adevoted family man" and also "a fanta-sist, an anti-Semite, a bully and a self-

tense to truth I cannot imagine philosophy and then saying thaquestion of truth doesn't arise. NI bet, could Nietzsche. And neithercertain, can Ferry. Philosop hical ences can be explained by sayingno one ye t knows the truth. To githe pursuit of truth, however, is toup philosophy—or, what comes to sion of that, to turn philosophy in

ARTHUR C . DANTO is the art critic forNation and the author most recenEmbodied Meanings: Critical Essa'^Aesthetic Meditations (Farrar, StraGiroux).

publicizing troublemaker." Wi unerring sense of rhythmic and mbalance that comes to seem typihim over the subsequent 300 pageglown comm ents about D ahl's cotory character: "Many people lovand have reason to be grateful to many—some of them the same peofrankly detested him."

If you have read Dahl's autophies. Boy and Going Solo, as welown self-promoting jacket cop already have a general if factually fsense of the life. He was indeed bWales of Norwegian ancestry, wRepton (a less-than-first-rate Britilic school), was employed for a whShell O il, flew with the RAF in the SeWorld War, worked as a British ain Washington. If you are a m

magazine fan, you know m ore: hemarried to the actress Patricia Nefive children with her (includingwho died of measles and one whofered permanent brain damage in afic ac cident) , and nursed her throterrible stroke and a long recoveryhe divorced her and, toward the enhis life, married his longtime miFelicity Crosland. And if you are a ent, a schoolteacher or a child, you know still more, for in that case youlikely to be familiar with Dahl's from James and the Giant Peach, Gan d the Chocolate Eactory a nd The TThe Witches, Matilda, The BFG andten others.


6/6

Documents

Arthur Danto, Beauty and the Beast