Themes out of School

Effects and Causes

Stanley Cavell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226075150
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell characterizes philosophy as a "willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape."Fantasies of film and television and literature, flashes across the landscape of literary theory, philosophical discourse, and French historiography give Cavell his starting points in these twelve essays. Here is philosophy in and out of "school, " understood as a discipline in itself or thought through the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Brecht, Makavejev, Bergman, Hitchcock, Astaire, and Keaton.

EXISTENTIALISM AND ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY

In collecting the essays that make up Must We Mean What We Say?, I chose, for a number of reasons, to leave out the present piece of work. But it hits on, if sometimes prematurely, expressions for some things that matter to me that I have not been able to improve; and sometimes, for those who share its preoccupations, it is illuminating in its very primitiveness, its recurrent inabilities to formulate intuitions that seem right over its shoulder; and in any case it continues to be cited, I believe with increasing frequency. Recently it has been given a role in a valuable set of conjunctions and reflections (with and on Michael Fried and with Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida) by Stephen Melville in his “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism,” which appeared in October, no. 19, Winter 1981. So, awkwardness and all, and imperfectly remembering the circumstances that could have induced me to undertake the assignment of comparison, I am glad for the chance to make this piece more readily available. It was published in the Summer 1964 issue of Dædalus.

One reason for my earlier reluctance to reprint was my having named in it a certain duplicitousness of language—certain of its exchanges between the literal and the figural, or between the direct and the indirect, or between the grammatical or logical and the rhetorical or semantic—as a function or expression of irony. While I went on to claim that irony is not Wittgenstein’s stance toward these exchanges, I did not know how to express my contrary sense that irony is as much his enemy as his aspiration. I knew that the laughter he used in philosophical diagnosis is more good-humored than it is in the spirit of irony; perhaps more sociable, and certainly more self-catching. But I was not yet ready to see this comedy in relation to the tragedy that philosophy observes or enacts, call it the tragedy of skepticism. Wittgenstein is speaking of this, as I have come to see it, in noting that in philosophy (I mean, in the risk in any taking of thought) our words get away from our real need, from our (everyday) lives. You may also speak of this, I find, as the world’s receding from our words, as the withdrawal of the world (of religion, of politics, of art, of philosophy). So that now, when sometimes it seems that irony has become yet more fashionable as an attitude to strike on the issue of language’s duplicity, it is something that I feel my work well enough past, or better able to shake off.

The academic exercise of the several pages on logical analysis and logical positivism are worth retaining not only for the use of those who have so far avoided those two philosophy courses they know they should have brought themselves to take, but also as an example for those more sophisticated now, who know just about everything, to remind them of the rote and repetitiveness that is the price of one’s having, of course for good and sufficient reasons, to control material to which one can make no contribution in return; of presenting oneself as a victim to learning. So much of education seems fated (while the necessity gets lost in the shadows of our institutions) to the turning of bread into stones. Of course if it is worth it to you to study philosophy it should be worth it to you to study, for example, Russell’s Theory of Descriptions, hence possibly to postpone it. But nothing is worth hearing such a theory repeated, as if a password, at the beginning of a good half of the courses taught one under the rubric of philosophy, say two or three courses a year, for four years (I transferred in the middle of graduate studies and virtually began again), with no hope of making the thing one’s own to divine with. No real science would accept so unprogressive a hold on its paradigms, I mean would treat its paradigms as passwords, their fruitfulness exhausted in their correct saying. Science hasn’t that kind of guilty conscience. One has not learned the love of philosophy until one has despaired of even in a sense learned to treasure, its awful stubbornness. At such a time one can sense the implacable sternness just under the elation of a thinker like Austin, not unlike the elation of an escapee.

So I am reminded that the inner history of the development of analytical philosophy is only now being composed, as if only now is analytical philosophy, in its late development, disposed to oppose its internal opposition to history, no doubt a version of philosophy’s internal opposition to time, you may say logic’s opposition to rhetoric. I mention examples of the work of three young analytical philosophers from which I am glad to be learning, to whatever degree my resources will permit, who have started, as I have in this matter, from the lectures and the conversation of Burton Dreben of the Harvard Department of Philosophy: Warren Goldfarb’s “Logic in the Twenties: The Nature of the Quantifier” (Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 44, 1979); Peter Hylton’s “The Nature of the Proposition and the Revolt against Idealism” (to appear in R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History, Cambridge University Press); and Thomas Rickett’s “Objectivity and Objecthood: Frege’s Metaphysics of Judgment” (forthcoming in Synthèse). In addition, Hylton’s doctoral dissertation, or its successor, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press, under the title Russell and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy. For another inner judgment, none better earned, this time that the program of analytical philosophy in its logical or constructivist form has come to an unsuccessful conclusion, I recommend the recent writing of Hilary Putnam.

And I mention in this connection Richard Rorty’s frequently cited Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with its claim to be recording, among other things, the failure of much of what I suppose is to be thought of as professional or academic philosophy, especially its analytical version(s). Compared to the work of the philosophers I was just citing, Rorty’s strictures are external to the discourse they would undo—or rather, if this is so, Rorty would, I think, regard it as a proud feature of his achievement. In his recent collection of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty includes a review-essay of my The Claim of Reason in which, after some gratifying praise of the second two parts of that book, he spends almost all of his space (understandably) on his disagreements with the first two parts. His counter-diagnosis of skepticism and counter-proposals concerning the problem of other minds demand and deserve full and specific discussion. Here I want to pick up just Rorty’s more general charge, which I express for the moment in terms of questions like the following: If the portion of professional philosophy I am concerned with is as bankrupt as I seem to find that it is, then shouldn’t I think of giving up my quarrel with it? Why spend hundreds of pages to understand, often in its own tortured terms, why philosophy is bankrupt? Why not just give it up for lost and get on with whatever good you have in mind?—It has occurred to me. But then it never fails to reoccur to me that to find philosophy’s loss of itself is my good; at any rate, I see none apart from that.

Rorty is, I think, assuming that (what I am calling) the professionalization of philosophy—at least in its English-speaking reaches—is external, simply foreign, to what philosophy is, or to what philosophy’s successor might be; as if what is professionalized—say as in a university (analytical) philosophy curriculum—is just something else. It strikes me otherwise. That there is so much as an issue here I take to show that philosophy is neither science nor poetry—matters people keep trying to turn philosophy into, matters philosophy more or less resembles, or competes with. But there is no analogous issue of academic professionalization in science or in poetry. No one wonders, or not many do, whether what is taught in the physics and mathematics departments of major universities really is, in general, how physics or mathematics is done: if there is an issue in a given place, someone had better call in experts to take things in hand. If the experts divide, you have an intellectual crisis on your hands; new institutions will form. And no one wonders, or not many do, whether what is taught in the literature departments of major universities is really, in general, how poetry is made: that just is not, it seems plain, the mission of a literature department, what it professionalizes is something else, say scholarship, or say criticism. If some such department happens to think that its own valuable mission is enhanced by, or somehow owes, support to contemporary practice, it may see fit to hire a practitioner to teach it in his or her own way. (This outsider may, by chance, also be an insider, also an academic.) If there is doubt about whether it is poetry that a given practitioner exemplifies, a reasonable way to handle the problem is to hire another practitioner of a different stripe. (The foreword to Must We Mean What We Say?, “An Audience for Philosophy,” further defines such matters and acknowledges them as internal to my practice, or to its aspirations.)

From saying, or implying, that it is internal to philosophy that it can be professionalized, and that its professionalization, in one of its versions, looks like this (say a large American department of philosophy), it does not follow that philosophy exists only as professionalized (what indeed could that mean?). What I have said here is only that this is an issue. And it is an ill-defined one. To what extent is the issue one of assessing the vicissitudes of an aspiration that cannot have, or has lost, institutionalization—like religion outside churches? or perhaps politics outside governments? or maybe like love outside marriage, or outside society? And what if the fundamental fact of philosophy lies in its recognition of a certain social role, as in Plato’s image of the philosopher as gadfly, or Locke’s of the philosopher as under laborer in the commonwealth of learning; a role for which, perhaps, a given society has no particular professional preparation. Perhaps “gadfly” is the name in philosophy of what in it forever resists professionalization. (Who but a gadfly would undertake to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle?) And perhaps “under laboring” is now the name of whatever it is that philosophy, to proceed in its clearings, forever has to undermine.

When the professionalization of philosophy has most seemed to me a desert of thought (they make a desert and call it a clearing), the thought appears to me that the desert is—to some as yet, by me, unassessable degree—mine, or rather philosophy’s, and I find it to have a value the world would be a greater desert if it lost. So a quarrel with professional philosophy remains mine to conduct, and hence my discourse is in part controlled, pent, by a wish to stay within reach of the discourse of that profession. Could I perhaps cease claiming philosophy for my writing in favor of claiming that it is (merely) continuous with philosophy? That might be all right, but how much of a shift that would be would depend on how you understand such continuity to be managed (it may present itself for example, as discontinuity), hence on what you take philosophy to require itself to manage; perhaps it has to manage its continuity with itself.

Accordingly, I should emphasize that the impatience I was expressing in using the teaching of Russell’s theory as an example of professional instruction was not a response to this theory’s asking for, and exemplifying, a technical discourse. I do not assume that we have a good sense of what this idea of the technical comes to, nor do I assume that the technical is the only way, or the chief way, or a sure way, in which philosophy may be lost. Say that my impatience was directed to the manner of my inhabitation of that discourse, to my being its prisoner. I do not assume that the technical is the only, or the main, discourse within which one can imprison oneself, or perhaps comfort oneself.

Such possibilities are under observation in Walden when Thoreau is accounting for his departure back to civilization after his better than two years in the woods, and he remarks that after just a week at the pond he could note the paths, or ruts, that his tracks, repeated treks, were cutting into the new territory. And this confinement, don’t forget, came from his pleasures, not his fears (if you get the distinction). Let us not underestimate such pleasures or fears. For what is an alternative to subjecting oneself to a standing discourse, and letting it stand? Perhaps you forever question the ground your discourse occupies and forever try the routes it proposes—call this philosophical dialogue, Emerson calls it our antagonism to fate. (I go further into this in “Genteel Responses to Kant?,” in Raritan, Fall 1983). Or perhaps you give up the effort to buy into intellectual currency and settle into the use of a kind of scrip, good for all the essentials the country store has to offer, but worth next to nothing on the international market. It is a standing temptation for American literary theorists. I think at the moment, beyond the figures of Emerson and Thoreau themselves, of the theoretical writings of Kenneth Burke and of Paul Goodman, whose admirers know to be rich out of all proportion to their current circulation.

So when I spoke of primitiveness at the start of these introductory words, I was thinking not alone of what was perhaps unnecessarily rudimentary in my education, but of what was more rigorously closed off by it. I had, for example, got through hardly more than a small handful of pages of Being and Time, fighting for every inch of lost ground, as I wrote the piece of work I am introducing here. The piece can be said to be about, or to enact, I imagine to its credit, the difficulty, in the era in which it was written, of finding one’s philosophical hands and feet, let alone voice—a place to stop and work. This sometimes presents itself as having been cheated by one’s education, not exactly as having been lied to, but sometimes as having not fully been taken into the confidence of one’s teachers. How otherwise, except in blessed science, would we come to feel that we have to begin all over again? Not everyone has the feeling, or has use for it, and I assume that it did not become a characteristic feeling about one’s education until, on the American calendar, the time of Emerson and Thoreau, whose warnings to scholars against reading too much in books, which seems a crazy warning to a people with hardly a literature to its name (though that was doubtless part of the point of the warning), is as much as to say: no one knows any longer what it is we must know in order to say what we have it at heart to say. Out of such a sense it is understandable that one’s education, or edification, should become the subject of major Romantic works, say, beyond Walden, of The Prelude and of the Biographia Literaria—works in which the quest for one’s own question, and for what it takes to pose it, are entered on together. One is not a preparation for the other, the madness and the method are the same. (There is no metaphilosophy.) I gather this is not true of science, even definitively not true. So if a distinction between, say, discovery and justification defines what science is, and you think philosophy is essentially science, then what I was just saying in connection with philosophy should have no interest for you. Perhaps it is because I am thinking these days of the outcropping of Romantic texts and preoccupations in the last part of The Claim of Reason (some lines of Blake, the Boy of Winander, Coleridge’s “Ode on Dejection,” Thoreau on neighboring, or nextness), and certainly because, as I have had occasion to note before, I understand the Philosophical Investigations as, whatever else, a work of instruction, that I am not much moved to assert philosophy’s distance from the aspirations and scruples of the Romantics, for example from their willingness to see the entanglements of poetry with philosophy.

So the difficulty in finding one’s own work (supposing for the moment that one has been able to find work) is not quite expressed in the familiar picture of our critical powers as growing out of proportion to our creative acumen. There are even people now, with reason, who undertake to deny this distinction between the critical and the creative. The further twist in the difficulty is better pictured not as the pressure of a familiar criticism hostile to one’s creativity, but as the pressure of another creativity, a foreign creativity, on a par with, and apparently hostile to, one’s own. Or you may say that one knows the contempt each side of the philosophical mind harbors of the other earlier than one knows the accomplishments of both or the possibility of managing both modes. Then to the extent that one becomes and remains in some memorable way struck by both, a standing possibility is that one will be made unready for learning either. It is my sense that in the years this conflict was most virulent philosophy failed to keep its share of the talented young attracted to its study. Which means to me that the mutual shunning of the English and the German traditions of philosophy (one way of putting the issue) represents a genuine rift in the spirit, or intelligence, of philosophy, hence a genuine expression of the present of philosophy—some late expression of the relation Emerson wished to see in taking England as the noon and Germany as the night of the daily cycle of philosophy.

The outcome of this conflict is unsettled. More talent, maybe deeper, is responsive to it now than in the era of this reprinted piece, but the issues are correspondingly harder to see, harder to say. Our danger is, as elsewhere, of a state of primitiveness sophisticated, like the pair of officers on duty at the console of a Minuteman silo wearing pistols, not against intruders, but in view of one another. Dreaming these dangers seems to me worthy of a philosophical discourse.

One mode of this dreaming in any field is simply to imagine where everyone is residing at this moment, what it is they are ready for, and getting ready for. And the nearest danger is from those who feel themselves ready for anything.

. . .

Hopeless tasks are not always thankless. I have tried to make the task of comparing analytical philosophy and existentialism in a few thousand words less thankless by organizing my remarks in the following way. In a brief opening section, I indicate a few general comparisons of these philosophies in order to discover why a general comparison between them is hopeless. In Section II, I sketch a history of the main movements within analytical philosophy, something I do not attempt for existentialism. The excuse for this disparity of treatment is that a history of existentialism would entail a history of European literature since Goethe and Hegel, whereas the stages or strands of modern analytical philosophy are at once fairly definite an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• The Thought of Movies
• The Politics of Interpretation (Politics as Opposed to What?)
• Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics (“Who does the wolf love?”)
• A Cover Letter to Molière’s Misanthrope
• On Makavejev On Bergman
• A Reply to John Hollander
• Foreword to Jay Cantor’s The Space Between
• North by Northwest
• What Becomes of Things on Film?
• The Ordinary as the Uneventful (A Note on the Annales Historians)
• Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy
• The Fact of Television
• Notes