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Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism
The Carus Lectures, 1988
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eBook - ePub
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism
The Carus Lectures, 1988
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In these three lectures, Cavell situates Emerson at an intersection of three crossroads: a place where both philosophy and literature pass; where the two traditions of English and German philosophy shun one another; where the cultures of America and Europe unsettle one another."Cavell's 'readings' of Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Emerson and other thinkers surely deepen our understanding of them, but they do much more: they offer a vision of what life can be and what culture can mean.... These profound lectures are a wonderful place to make [Cavell's] acquaintance."âHilary Putnam
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Philosophy History & Theory1
AVERSIVE THINKING
Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche
In taking the perspective of the Carus Lectures as an opportunity to recommend Emerson, despite all, to the closer attention of the American philosophical community, I hope I may be trusted to recognize how generally impertinent his teachings, in style and in material, can sound to philosophical earsâincluding still, from time to time, despite all, my own. But what else should one expect? My recommendation is bound to be basedâunless it is to multiply impertinenceâon something as yet unfamiliar in Emerson, as if I am claiming him to remain a stranger. In that case to soften his strangeness would be pointlessâwhich is no excuse, I do realize, for hardening it. About my own sound it may help to say that while I may often leave ideas in what seems a more literary state, sometimes in a more psychoanalytic state, than a philosopher might wishâthat is, that a philosopher might prefer a further philosophical derivation of the ideasâI mean to leave everything I will say, or have, I guess, ever said, as in a sense provisional, the sense that it is to be gone on from. If to a further derivation in philosophical form, so much the better; but I would not lose the intuitions in the meantimeâamong them the intuition that philosophy should sometimes distrust its defenses of philosophical form.
It is common knowledge that Emersonâs âThe American Scholarâ is a call for Man Thinking, something Emerson contrasts with thinking in âthe divided or social state,â thinking, let us say, as a specialty. I do not know of any commentary on this text that finds Emerson to be thinking about the idea of thinking. Uniformly, rather, it seems to be taken that he and his readers understand well enough what it is he is calling for, that it is something like thinking with the whole man; and I suppose this can be taken so for granted because there has been, since Emersonâs time, or the time he speaks for, a widespread dissatisfaction with thinking as represented in Western philosophy since the Enlightenment, a dissatisfaction vaguely and often impatiently associated, I believe, with an idea of romanticism. And of course there has been, in turn, a reactive impatience with this dissatisfaction. Emerson is, in his way, locating himself within this struggle when he calls upon American thinkers to rely on and to cheer themselves: âFor this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomedâdarker than can be enlightenedâ (âThe American Scholar,â p. 75). As if he anticipates that a reader might suppose him accordingly to be opposed to the Enlightenment, he will famously also say, âI ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; . . . I embrace the common, I sit at the feet of the familiar, the low,â a claim I have taken as underwriting ordinary language philosophyâs devotion to the ordinary, surely one inheritance of the Enlightenment.
Existentialismâin the years in which it seemed that every mode of thinking antagonistic to analytical philosophy was called Existentialismâwas famous for some such dissatisfaction with philosophical reason, expressed, for example, by Karl Jaspers in his book on Nietzsche, originally published in 1935:
That the source of philosophical knowledge is not to be found in thinking about mere objects or in investigating mere facts but rather in the unity of thought and life, so that thinking grows out of the provocation and agitation of the whole manâall this constitutes for Nietzscheâs self-consciousness the real character of his truth: âI have always composed my writings with my whole body and lifeâ; âAll truths are bloody truths to me.â (Jaspers, Nietzsche, p. 386)
(âCut these sentences and they bleed.â) Philosophy, as institutionalized in the English-speaking world, has not much felt attacked by nor vulnerable to such criticism, partly because the style and animus of the criticism is so foreign as to suggest simply other subjects, but partly, and sufficiently, because surely since Frege and the early Russell, analytical philosophy can see what thinking is, or should be, namely reasoning, expressed in a certain style of argumentation.
In taking on Emersonâs view of thinking I will not be interested to advocate his view over, nor much to characterize it against, views more familiar to us (say a view of reason as rationality) but rather to ask attention to an attitude toward or investment in words that Emersonâs view seems to depend upon, an attitude allegorical of an investment in our lives that I believe those trained in professional philosophy are trained to disapprove of. The disapproval of the attitude interests me as much as the attitude itself. If, as professional philosophers, we were asked whether philosophizing demands of us anything we would think of as a style of writing, our answer, I guess, would waver, perhaps because our philosophical motivation in writing is less to defend a style than to repress style or allow it only in ornamental doses. In speaking of disapproval, accordingly, I am not raising a question of taste, of something merely not for us, but a question of intellectual seriousness and illicitness. However glad we may be to think of ourselves as intellectually fastidious, I do not suppose we relish the idea of ourselves as intellectual police.
I should perhaps confess that an ulterior stake of mine in speaking of Emersonâs attitude to words is thatâto begin specifying a suggestion already madeâI find J. L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein to participate in a region of the attitude, the region that places an investment in the words of a natural language so heavy as to seem quite antithetical to sensible philosophizing. It was half a lifetime ago that I began writing philosophy by preparing a paper (âMust We Mean What We Say?â) for this division of our philosophy association defending J. L. Austinâs practice with ordinary language against criticisms of it articulated by Benson Mates, criticisms notably of Austinâs apparently insufficient empirical basis for his claims to know what we say and mean when. I did not really answer Matesâs criticisms because I could not account for that investment in the ordinary. I still cannot. This failure pairs with my inability to answer Barry Stroudâs question to me twenty years later, at another Association meeting, about whether my Claim of Reason didnât amount to a claim to find a general solution to skepticism. I wanted to answer by saying that by the end of the first two parts of that book I had convinced myself not only that there is no such solution, that to think otherwise is skepticismâs own self-interpretation, but that it seemed to me, on the contrary, work for an ambitious philosophy to attempt to keep philosophy open to the threat or temptation to skepticism. This left me what I named as Nowhere, and it led me, in the fourth part of my book, to particular territories customarily associated with literatureâespecially to aspects of Shakespearean and of certain romantic textsâin which I seemed to find comic and tragic and lyric obsessions with the ordinary that were the equivalent of something (not everything) philosophy knows as skepticism. Emerson became more and more prominent an inhabitant of these regions. His investment in the ordinary is so constant and so explicit that, perhaps because of the very strangeness and extravagance of his manner, it may indicate afresh why a philosopher interested in the manner might spend a reasonable lifetime looking for an account of it.
The first half of this lecture takes its bearing from pertinences Emersonâs American Scholar address bears to Heideggerâs sequence of lectures translated as What Is Called Thinking? (all citations of Heidegger are from this text); the second half continues the discussion broached in my Introduction of that moral perfectionism for which Emersonâs writing is definitive, particularly in connection with its dominating influence on, among others, Nietzsche.
Emersonâs sense of thinking is, generally, of a double process, or a single process with two names: transfiguration and conversion. For instance (still in âThe American Scholarâ), âA strange process, . . . this by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hoursâ (p. 70). And again:
The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest observation. . . . Not so with our recent actions,âwith the business which we now have in hand. Our affections as yet circulate through it. . . . The new deed . . . remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself . . . to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption, (pp. 70â71)
Transfiguration is to be taken as a rhetorical operation, Emersonâs figure for a figure of speechânot necessarily for what rhetoricians name a known figure of speech, but for whatever it is that he will name the conversion of words. In âSelf-Relianceâ he calls the process that of passing from Intuition to Tuition, so it is fitting that those who find Emerson incapable of thought style him a philosopher of Intuition, occluding the teacher of Tuition. Tuition is what Emersonâs writing presents itself to be throughout; hence, of course, to be articulating Intuition. It is when Emerson thinks of thinking, or conversion, as oppositional, or critical, that he calls it aversion. This bears relation not alone to Emersonâs continuous critique of religion but to Kantâs speaking of Reason, in his always astonishing âConjectural Beginning of Human History,â as requiring and enabling âviolenceâ (to the voice of nature) and ârefusalâ (to desire), refusal being a âfeat which brought about the passage from merely sensual to spiritual attractions,â uncovering âthe first hint at the development of man as a moral beingâ (pp. 56â57). And Emersonâs aversion bears relation to Heideggerâs discussion of why thinking in his investigation of it âis from the start tuned in a negative key.â (What is Called Thinking? p. 29)
Accordingly, a guiding thought in directing myself to Emersonâs way of thinking is his outcry in the sixth paragraph of âSelf-Relianceâ: âThe virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.â I gather him there to be characterizing his writing, hence to mean that he writes in aversion to societyâs demand for conformity, specifically that his writing expresses his self-consciousness, his thinking as the imperative to an incessant conversion or refiguration of societyâs incessant demands for his consentâhis conforming himselfâto its doings; and at the same time to mean that his writing must accordingly be the object of aversion to societyâs consciousness, to what it might read in him. His imperative is registered in the outcry a few paragraphs later, âEvery word they say chagrins us.â Emerson is not, then, as the context might imply, expressing merely his general disappointment at some failure in the capacity of language to represent the world but also expressing, at the same time, his response to a general attitude toward words that is causing his all but complete sense of intellectual isolation. It is his perfectionismâs cue.
The isolation is enacted in âThe American Scholar,â whose occasion is enviably if not frighteningly distinctive. Whoever Emerson invokes as belonging to the class of scholars that commencement day at Harvard in the summer of 1837âhimself, his audience (whether as poets, preachers, or philosophers)âthe principal fact about the class is that it is empty, the American Scholar does not exist. Then who is Emerson? Suppose we say that what motivates Emersonâs thinking, or what causes this call for the American Scholar, is Emersonâs vision of our not yet thinking. Is this plain fact of American historyâthat we are, we still find ourselves, looking for the commencement of our own cultureâworth setting beside the intricate formulation whose recurrences generate Heideggerâs What Is Called Thinking?: âMost thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinkingâ (p. 6). (Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken.) It probably does not matter that the translation cannot capture the direct force in the relation of bedenklich to denken and the senses of bedenklich as doubtful, serious, risky, scrupulousâit would mean capturing the idea of the thing most critically provoking in our riskily provocative time to be that we are still not really provoked, that nothing serious matters to us, or nothing seriously, that our thoughts are unscrupulous, private. (Emersonâs remark in his âDivinity School Addressâ echoes for me: âTruly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.â What translation will capture the idea of provocation here as calling forth, challenging?) Nor hence capture the surrealistic inversion of the Cartesian thought that if I am thinking then I cannot be thinking that perhaps I do not think. In Heidegger, if I am thinking then precisely I must be thinking that I am (still) not thinking. I say the translation may not matter because one who is not inclined, as I am, at least intermittently to take Heideggerâs text as a masterpiece of philosophy will not be encouragedâon the contraryâto place confidence in a mode of argumentation which invests itself in what is apt to seem at best the childâs play of language and at worst the wild variation and excesses of linguistic form that have always interfered with rationality. For someone who has not experienced this play in Heidegger, or in Emerson, the extent of it can from time to time appear as a kind of philosophical folly.
I summarize two instances from the essay âExperienceâ to suggest the kind of practice that has convinced me that Emersonâs thought is, on a certain way of turning it, a direct anticipation of Heideggerâs. Emerson writes: âI take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.â You may either dismiss, or savor, the relation between the clutching fingers and the hand in handsome as a developed taste for linguistic oddity, or you might further relate it to Emersonâs recurring interest in the hand (as in speaking of what is at hand, by which, whatever else he means, he means the writing taking shape under his hand and now in ours) and thence to Heideggerâs sudden remark, âThinking is a handicraft,â by which he means both that thinking requires training and makes something happen, but equally that it makes something happen in a particular way since the hand is a uniquely human possession: âThe hand is infinitely different from all grasping organsâpaws, claws, fangsâ (Heidegger, 16). (It matters to me in various ways to recall a seminar of C. I. Lewisâs on âThe Nature of the Right,â given at Harvard in the academic year 1951â52âthe year Heidegger delivered the lectures constituting What Is Called Thinking?âin which Lewis emphasized the hand as a trait of the human, the tool-using trait, hence one establishing a human relation to the world, a realm of practice that expands the reaches of the self. The idea seemed to me in my greenness not to get very far, but it evidently left me with various impressions, among others one of intellectual isolation. Lewisâs material was published posthumously under the title, âThe Individual and the Social Order.â) Emersonâs image of clutching and Heideggerâs of grasping, emblematize their interpretation of Western conceptualizing as a kind of sublimized violence. (Heideggerâs word is greifen; it is readily translatable as âclutching.â) Heidegger is famous here for his thematization of this violence as expressed in the world dominion of technology, but Emerson is no less explicit about it as a mode of thinking. The overcoming of this conceptualizing will require the achievement of a form of knowledge both Emerson and Heidegger call reception, alluding to the Kantian idea that knowledge is active, and sensuous intuition alone passive or receptive. (Overcoming Kantâs idea of thinking as conceptualizingâsay analyzing and synthesizing conceptsâis coded into Emersonâs idea that our most unhandsome part belongs to our condition. I have argued elsewhere (in âEmerson, Coleridge, Kantâ) that Emerson is transfiguring Kantâs key term âconditionâ so that it speaks not alone of deducing twelve categories of the understanding but of derivingâsay schematizingâevery word in which we speak together (speaking together is what the word condition says); so that the conditions or terms of every term in our language stand to be derived philosophically, deduced.)
Now reception, or something received, if it is welcome, implies thanks, and Heidegger, in passages as if designed to divide readers into those thrilled and those offended, harps on the derivation of the word thinking from a root for thanking and interprets this particularly as giving thanks for the gift of thinking, which is what should become of philosophy. Does it take this thematization to direct attention to one of Emersonâs throwaway sentences that, as can be said of essentially every Emersonian sentence, can be taken as the topic of the essay in which it finds itself, in this case âExperienceâ?: âI am thankful for small mercies.â To see that this describes the thinking that goes on in an Emersonian sentence you would have to see the joking tautology in linking his thankfulness with a mercy, that is to say a merci; and to recognize âsmall mercyâ as designating the small son whose death is announced at the beginning of âExperience,â an announcement every critic of the essay comments on, a child never named in the essay but whose death and birth constitute the lines of the fatherâs investigation of experienceâand it is the philosopherâs term âexperienceâ Emerson is (also) exploring, as in Kant and in Humeâan effort to counteract the role of experience as removing us from, instead of securing us to, the world. The idea, again argued elsewhere (in âFinding as Foundingâ), is that Emersonâs essay âExperienceâ enacts the fatherâs giving birth to Waldoâthe son that bears Emersonâs name for himself, hence declares this birth (as of himself) as his work of writing generally, or generously. The clearer the intricacies become of the identification of the child Waldo with the world as such, the deeper oneâs wonder that Emerson could bring himself to voice it socially, to subject himself either to not being understood or to being understoodâyet another wonder about intellectual isolation. I am for myself convinced that Emerson knew that such devices as the pun on âthankfulâ and âmercyâ were offensive to philosophical reason. So the question is why he felt himself bound to give offense. (An opening and recurrent target of Deweyâs Experience and Nature is thinkers who take experience to âveil and screenâ us from nature. Its dissonance with Emerson is interesting in view of Deweyâs being the major American philosopher who, without reservation, declared Emerson to be a philosopherâwithout evidently finding any use for him. For Dewey the philosophical interpretation of experience was cause for taking up scientific measures against old dualisms, refusing separation. For Emerson the philosophical interpretation of experience makes it a cause for mourning, assigning to philosophy the work of accepting the separation of the world, as of a child.)
It is in Nietzsche, wherever else, that some explanation must be sought for the inner connection between a writer (such as Heidegger) who calls for thinking knowing the completed presence of European philosophy or, say, facing its aftermath, as if needing to disinherit it, and a writer (such as Emerson) who calls for thinking not knowing whether the absence of the philosophical edifice for America means that it is too late for a certain form of thinking here or whether his errand just is to inherit remains of the edifice. Nietzsche is the pivot because of his early and late devotion to Emersonâs writing together with his decisive presence in Heideggerâs What Is Called Thinking? But no matter how often this connection of Nietzsche to Emerson is stated, no matter how obvious to anyone who cares to verify it, it stays incredible, it is always in a forgotten state. This interests me almost as much as the connection itself does, since the incredibility must be grounded in a fixed conviction that Emerson is not a philosopher, that h...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Copyright
- Title Page
- Series Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Staying the Course
- 1. Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche
- 2. The Argument of the Ordinary: Scenes of Instruction in Wittgenstein and in Kripke
- 3. The Conversation of Justice: Rawls and the Drama of Consent
- Epilogue
- Appendix A: Hope Against Hope
- Appendix B: A Cover Letter
- Bibliography
- Index of Names and Titles
- Thematic Index