Stanley Cavell

We present here excerpts from seminars, interviews, and conversations with Stanley Cavell during the time of his visit to Caracas in 1998, collectively known as the ‘Caracas Seminar’. This material comprises Cavell’s responses to questions raised at the seminar, extracts from an interview with Maria Elena Ramos and Victor Krebs, and a subsequent letter they received from Cavell in response to further questions. Krebs’ introduction to the collection sets the scene for Cavell’s visit and sketches some reasons for the relevance (...) of Cavell’s philosophy to Latin America and the nature of its reception there. (shrink)

In work influenced by Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell has explored a connection between philosophical scepticism and social alienation. He has found this connection symbolized in, of all places, the art of Golden Age Hollywood, specifically in Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon. In one Fred Astaire song-and-dance number from that film, Cavell finds a representation of anxiety produced by failures of knowledge and understanding, and in another Astaire number he finds restored human connections that relieve that anxiety. However, Robert (...) Gooding-Williams has challenged Cavell’s interpretations, taking these dances to represent, and to exemplify, white American privilege and cultural exploitation rather than general human conditions of anxiety and relief. This article defends Cavell’s reading by arguing that, under Minnelli’s direction, Astaire’s performances pay tribute to the subcultures of several oppressed American groups, thereby displaying a broad aspiration for America and humanity. Astaire’s dances become nuanced expressions of an ideal, not simple cases of cultural appropriation. (shrink)

This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596) and gendered democratic flourishing. My first section rehearses Geraldine Heng’s argument in Empire of Magic (2004) that the medieval romance genre channels Crusades trauma into imagined British nationhood, as embodied by Merlin. My second section finds a second wave of romantic overflow in Shakespeare’s play via the fairy king Oberon. My third section identifies Cary Grant's “C. K. Dexter Haven” as the (...) film’s Merlin/Oberon. The Dionysian current of this Merlin-Oberlin-Grant flow I call “magical weakness,” a strategic male self-weakening for gendered democratic flourishing. (shrink)

This article examines Armando Robles Godoy’s 1969 Peruvian film La muralla verde (The Green Wall) through the philosophical lens of Stanley Cavell, particularly his concepts of scepticism, acknowledgement, and moral perfectionism. The film’s depiction of a family seeking renewal in the jungle, only to be devastated by tragedy, stages an encounter with the limits of human mastery over nature, the fragility of social bonds, and the inevitability of grief. Rather than offering nostalgia for a lost harmony or a straightforward political (...) denunciation, The Green Wall invites a sustained engagement with the ethical demands of acknowledgement—of others, of the environment, and of the limits of one’s own knowledge. Read against the background of Latin America’s colonial legacy, Cavell’s Emersonian call to the ordinary provides a counterpoint to the region’s inherited scepticism and its persistent ‘cultural melancholy’, marked by the tension between cosmopolitan ideals and autochthonous realities. In this light, Robles Godoy’s film can be seen not only as a reflection of Perú’s fractured history but also as an instance of cinema’s philosophical power: its capacity to reawaken democratic hope and ecological awareness, and to enact what Cavell describes as an ‘education for grown-ups’—a conversion grounded in mourning, finitude, and the possibilities of moral responsiveness. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell discerned early on that philosophy and literature as practised by contemporary academics made for a contentious pairing. Writing, as he so often did, across disciplinary gaps and contested isthmuses, Cavell occasionally found himself foreign on his home turf or risking rebuke when visiting other intellectual terrains, texts, and traditions. Travelling between cultures, he took upon himself the art of acculturating one to another; such transit or translation regularly—if inimitably—addressed the very sound of the prose that gave expression to (...) rival factions. Consider how he closes his magnum opus by asking ‘But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?’ Part of his own measured reply, by way of testing and exemplification, was a perpetual practice of writing philosophy as literature. In this article, borrowing and adapting Garrett Stewart’s notion of ‘phonemic reading’, I propose Cavell as a phonemic writer—one who sought to teach philosophy and literature about one another through the sound and soundness of the lettered wor(l)d. (shrink)

Mendelssohn and Cavell both use Shakespeare’s Othello to motivate and illustrate their thoughts about skepticism. This striking parallel, philosophically unexplored thus far, receives its first in-depth treatment in this paper. It delineates their differences and commonalities in thinking about skepticism and human self-alienation. It also brings out their joint metaphilosophical vision in opposition to a current trend. That trend casts traditional philosophical problems as artificial or unreal, and thus as avoidable. A prime example, particularly on debates about truth and skepticism, (...) is Rortyian ironism: it proposes to move beyond such debates and towards an “ironic” outlook that privileges literature over philosophy in finding the right “vocabulary” no longer beset by skeptical doubts. Mendelssohn and Cavell conversely insist on the pervasiveness of skepticism and philosophical problems in the everyday: they see us human beings as always vulnerable to skeptical worries that render us alien unto ourselves. What is more, both agree that literature serves to bring out rather than escape these pervasive problems. The upshot of the paper is a better understanding of this Mendelssohnian-Cavellian parallel, and of the stakes of skepticism as dependent on our human vulnerability to self-alienation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay, Emily Miller Budick sets out to explore narrative in the manner that it appears in Stanley Cavell's writings, as a way of exploring the human condition. Storytelling can be in service of didactic or moralistic argument or principles. But those dimensions of human experience—in ethics, epistemology, politics, metaphysics—coexist and are co-dependent on human minds that perceive and live these matters. ‘Suppose', Cavell writes in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, ‘the issue is not to win an argument, but (...) to manifest for the other another way.' Stories, and critical reflection upon them, can open the possibility of other ways of thinking and other ways of being. In the light of references to Jane Austen and to Emerson's ‘aversion to conformity', the essay reflects on aspects of Cavell's autobiographical writings, especially on the significance of his recollections of his friend, the philosopher Kurt Fischer. It goes on to focus on questions of race and antisemitism, in the light of close attention to J. M. Coetzee’s novels, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. (shrink)

In this interview with Naoko Saito, Stanley Cavell responds to questions about how he became interested in Wittgenstein and his sense of Wittgenstein’s fundamental importance for the question of what philosophy is or can be. Wittgenstein’s difference from Dewey and pragmatism is discussed in relation to the tone of philosophy, including possibilities of its not being characterized by polemical argument or geared towards problem-solving. This develops into a series of reflections on Emerson and Thoreau, as Cavell pursues these in The (...) Senses of Walden. Similarly, some apparent similarities with, though in fact important differences from, Heidegger are considered, especially regarding the returning of philosophy to the ordinary and the finding of the ‘sublime in the pedestrian’. The conversation then turns to Wittgenstein’s alleged behaviourism: Cavell clarifies what he takes Wittgenstein to be opposing, and what endorsing, in conceptions of mind. Finally, a question is raised regarding the sounds of philosophy, in connection with religious inflections in Wittgenstein and with Cavell’s apparent receptiveness towards East Asian thought. The task of philosophy is identified as involving a kind of cultural criticism, understood as other than comparative philosophy or cultural studies. This involves finding the place you begin from, an exploration in which cross-cultural dialogue can play a significant role. The interview took place in November 1997 and was originally published in Japanese under the title ‘Return to the Ordinary: The Voice of Myself, and the Voice of America’, in Gendai Shiso, in a special issue on Wittgenstein. This is the first publication of the English text upon which the Japanese version was based. (shrink)

Contemporary social life is saturated with inequality, dissensus, and competitive individualism. Life expectancy has dropped for the poorest 50% of the US population, and the richest 10% now receive 45% of the total national income. Nation-states seem unable to address political, social, or environmental collective decision problems. Schiller holds out hope that aesthetic education might undo this unhappy condition, but that hope founders on the reciprocal formations of current individual character by current institutions and current institutions by current individual character. (...) Cavell’s tentative, invitational practices of ordinary language philosophy and critical self-scrutiny offer a better way to live with and address our continuing imperfections without despair. (shrink)

Drawing on Hegel, Augustine, and Freud, this chapter argues that selfhood is a status-concept naming a role to be achieved; there is no such thing as the self. Cavell accepts this thought, and he goes on to track a standing incompleteness to the achievement of selfhood that amounts to a standing immigrancy. In the face of this immigrancy, he further points to possibilities of heightened attentiveness to life that are afforded by works of art and by resonances to them. The (...) fate of reflective reason is that we must live with immigrancy but can nonetheless sometimes be fruitfully absorbed, animated, and composed by experiences of art. (shrink)

Cavell’s writing offers and enacts a distinctive conception of human being in the world. Human beings are embodied animals, thrown into recalcitrant nature and a divided and conflictual social world, but also capable of arrest by and absorption in moments of experience. Working through these moments critically offers an open-ended mode of address to problems of meaning in life and of satisfaction in activity that avoids the various dogmatisms and despairs of rationalism, empiricism, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. His work helps (...) us to know how to go on in exercising distinctively human powers of meaning-making democratically and in more satisfying ways that also always remain bounded and partial. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy from roughly 1900 to 1965 is motivated by a sense of joint practical life as in need of and open to reform. This holds true of both its scientific-epistemological variants (Russell, Carnap, Quine) and its ordinary language variants (Moore, Austin, Ryle, Strawson). When this fact is appreciated, then specific instances and styles of conceptual analysis emerge as bound up with specific cultural contexts and the possibilities of more meaningful and satisfying life that are immanent within them. Cavell makes (...) explicit the immanent and context-bound character of conceptual analysis and notes its affinities with broader artistic and critical ways of coming to terms with culture and possibilities of freedom within it. (shrink)

Professional academic philosophy in America is dominated by the pragmatist liberal instrumentalism that is likewise dominant in the culture. Cavell argues that this stance often expresses conformism and issues in silent melancholy and quiet despair. In doing so, it betrays an important and available image of America as a place for futural achievements of meaningful freedom. Against that instrumentalist betrayal, Cavell poses the practice of philosophy as situated, immanent conversation that aims at rebirth into more meaningful activity. The ongoing argument (...) between these two stances—itself internal to Cavell’s writing—offers our best hope for going on realistically to move closer toward an America that more fully embodies lived freedom. (shrink)

In a late, posthumously published essay, Cavell describes the importance of music as he experienced it to its ability simultaneously to liberate constructive energies in the listening (and composing and performing) subject and to bind those energies to temporally unfolding development. Here his description echoes both Wordsworth’s poetics and his own earlier account of ordinary language philosophy. Music, Wordsworthian poetry, and ordinary language philosophy each afford possibilities of awakening to fuller meaningfulness within life in time, through unfoldings of developments in (...) media, without either escapism or tyranny. In doing this, they both model and advance the proper work of philosophy itself in its elucidations of concepts. (shrink)

This chapter explains and defends Cavell’s accounts of both the nature of film realism and the value of (some) films as art, focusing on photographic production and continuity editing. What is central to Cavell’s account of the powers and artistic achievements of film is neither plot alone nor photography alone, but rather how plots of human importance are presented in photographically produced and aptly edited moving images. The artistic interest of the Cavell-defined genres of the comedy of remarriage and the (...) melodrama of the unknown woman are traced to how they respond to social circumstances and the possibilities of meaningful life they enable and inhibit, and the fate of these genres under contemporary social conditions is considered. (shrink)

This chapter develops a Wittgensteinian-Cavellian picture of language-learning to identify some resultant plights, fantasies, and powers of subjects of conceptual consciousness as such. As bearers of immigrant conceptual consciousness, we naturally waver between seeking groundings of our commitments dogmatically and questioning all commitments skeptically. Drawing on and extending Kant’s criticisms of dogmatism and skepticism, Hölderlin’s prose and poetry map out and enact an unclosed, livable middle way of acknowledgment. Key to this achievement is Hölderlin’s ability, echoed in Cavell, to find (...) words that register simultaneously a sense of drift amidst problems unsolved and a sense of possibilities of freer and more meaningful life to be seized voluntarily. (shrink)

Cavell’s readings of Shakespeare’s tragedies center around the importance of avoiding choosing between understanding characters and understanding their words, as well as around the preconceptions about literature and the desires for mastery that seem to force this properly avoidable choice on readers. The way forward to understanding Shakespeare is to articulate how his major tragic protagonists bear anxieties, fears, fantasies, and desires in which we partake. We might come better to understand this fact about ourselves by acknowledging their tragic courses (...) as affine to our own. Doing this will require giving up the posture of neutral mastery in reading and instead opening oneself to being read by the literary work. (shrink)

CAVELL AND DAY FOR NIGHT: For Cavell, movies are the pre-eminent form of art of the twentieth century, uniquely suited in their material bases and modes of organization to scrutinize possibilities and inhibitions of free and meaningful human life. He develops this thought not abstractly, but rather through attention to singular films that have attracted his interest and generated his felt conviction in their presentations. Do any films exist beyond those about which Cavell has specifically written that have this kind (...) of power? Developing Cavell’s thought, this essay argues that François Truffaut’s Day for Night––a movie about making a movie––is an exemplary instance of a film that convincingly depicts and reflects on the nature of free and meaningful human life that is also shadowed by partiality and finitude. (shrink)

Cavell argues that mutual transformation away from egoistic instrumentalism is necessary for human happiness and that the accomplishment of a (re-)marriage models this achievement. The happily re-married pairs of these comedies achieve a purposiveness without a purpose with one another as they figure out together what they are to do, with no aim exterior to the relationship in view. In doing this, they continually rebind themselves to one another freely. The members of the film genre of the comedy of re-marriage (...) that Cavell discusses specifically depict this achievement under American social conditions between 1934 and 1949. Are such achievements still possible and valuable in contemporary life, and which, if any, films depict them? (shrink)

Cavell describes the human subject as coming to discursive-reflective awareness and thus to the acquisition of selfhood by way of entry into language. In emerging in this way, the human subject is both bound to ordinary life and resistant to it, in both taking on norms from others and seeking its own path. Ordinary life is thus inherently open to being experienced as uncanny: both familiar and enabling to the human subject and foreign to it. Open re-orientation within the ordinary (...) is sometimes achievable through the entering of a claim of reason that is simultaneously a claim to self-knowledge and to community as well as to reason. Doing the work of reading is a further way of continuing the work of re-orientation. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell’s modernist practice of philosophizing begins from initiating experiences of blankness, perplexity, disappointment, and obscure elation. His writing about these experiences seeks (greater) animation and interest in life by working through them: finding words for them in order to give them shape and stability through the articulation and development of their content. In this way he seeks to achieve composure in a sense of powers of meaning-making exercised well and of human identity achieved temporally. Elizabeth Bishop’s major poetry, especially (...) her “Arrival at Santos,” is similarly motivated, and it proceeds along similar paths. It thus makes manifest the nature and value of philosophico-poetic work as it is achievable and achieved within time and history. (shrink)

These chapters describe and defend Cavell’s philosophical anthropology and critical-aesthetic practice. They situate that practice as both a response to and a furthering of an image of America as a site of futural freedom always to be achieved, and they extend Cavell’s practice into new readings of works of poetry, film, and music. In doing so, they show us how we might live with our shared modern condition more productively, through engagement with the affordances of art. Cavell’s own writing in (...) turn both describes and re-enacts this achievement, thus itself manifesting the powers of art in response to modern life and serving as a model of ‘knowing how to go on’ within its ambit. (shrink)

Building on remarks by Dewey, Brandom, and Wittgenstein among others, this chapter characterizes and defends a general style of philosophy as elucidatory analysis of concepts in circulation within a culture. Drawing on work by Sacvan Bercovitch, the chapter argues that the use of this style is motivated by America’s distinctive religious history and that this style is present in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau in a marked way. Stanley Cavell is the most self-conscious contemporary inheritor of this religious history, (...) and there are important connections between the style and the substance of his inheritance, on the one hand, and his continuing openness to futurity unmastered, on the other. (shrink)

Cavell regards movies between roughly 1927 and 1970 as a pre-eminent form of American popular and high art alike. This view depends on the perception that major movies during this period realistically presented heroic protagonists acting for the world’s good or evil characters defeated. He laments continuously, however, that movies have some time in the 1960s significantly lost their pre-eminent power as a result of uncertainties about the possibility of heroism. These uncertainties are reflected in film in the increasingly episodic (...) careers of less heroic protagonists and in directorial mannerisms that call attentions away from plots. This chapter investigates whether, where, and in what forms traces of that pre-eminent power might nonetheless still be found. (shrink)

Making ourselves intelligible, we often contend with what exceeds our control. One example is the way words come to us on their own, sponsored by what might be called word energies. While this usually poses little difficulty for poets or people going about their ordinary lives as native speakers, philosophers have often found the matter less straightforward. Should word energies be trusted? Should they be repressed? This article approaches Stanley Cavell’s accommodation with word energies first through the philosophy of Arthur (...) Schopenhauer. Then it explores the same subject through Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein and Emerson. Though they are apparently contradictory, Cavell brings the ideas of both philosophers together in what this article will call the ‘Cavellian schematism’. In conclusion, we reflect on the theme’s relevance to education and the usefulness of the expression ‘the thought of other cultures’. (shrink)

John Rawls was what we might call a “frenemy” to Stanley Cavell. Time and again, Cavell states his admiration for Rawls's political philosophy but criticizes it for two reasons. First, he believes that Rawls too hastily dismisses a perfectionist tradition that is essential for a flourishing liberal democracy. Second, he attacks certain aspects of Rawls's theory of justice as moralistic and legalistic. The first half of this article examines Cavell's critique of Rawls and argues that the two authors are more (...) closely aligned than suspected. It begins by reconstructing Cavell's critique of Rawls, and using archival materials from Harvard University, presents for the first time Rawls's interpretation of this critique. The second half of the article highlights perfectionist themes in Rawls's A Theory of Justice. The contribution of this article is to reevaluate the relationship between two of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century and also to provide a more expansive theory of liberalism that incorporates the psychological depth, moral subtlety and political hopefulness of moral perfectionism. (shrink)

There are striking similarities between Jacques Rancière's treatment of the pedagogue in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Stanley Cavell's treatment of the skeptical instructor in the second chapter of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. In this article, I argue that this pairing highlights the ways in which both Rancière and Cavell approach the figure I call the skeptical pedagogue. They share the term “stultification” for the effect of this figure on the process of learning and teaching. Skepticism and the explanative method erode (...) the student's capacity to show their intelligence and the teacher's willingness to perceive it. I also show that both Rancière and Cavell share an egalitarian ethos in their writing on education and aesthetics. Against the skeptical pedagogue's misleading foundationalism, the connection between Rancière and Cavell illuminates how the presupposition of equality enhances the context of education, focused not on a single proper starting point or a procedure of rule-following but on acts of translation and creative intelligence. This article responds to key texts on Rancière and Cavell in educational theory and aesthetics and develops an account of practices such as rule-following in judgment and communicability in aesthetic education. After describing the skeptical pedagogue and presenting an account of egalitarian education, I show how a distinctive conception of translation enables both Rancière and Cavell to describe ways for the student and teacher to go on together. I develop the connection between Rancière and Cavell and argue that they share a conception of egalitarian education that emphasizes what we owe to ourselves and each other as reasonable beings. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to say something significant about Stanley Cavell's style. To accomplish this task, we adopt a distant reading approach, quantifying what seems to be an idiosyncratic use of parentheses. After outlining our methodological approach and the choices of texts from Cavell's corpus, we will present the results of our quantitative analysis. Two kinds of results will be presented and interpreted: the result of a comparison between Cavell and other authors (i.e. why Cavell's use of parentheses (...) is exceptional) and the result of a quantitative analysis of Cavell's texts (i.e. how Cavell uses parentheses throughout his books). For both results, we will provide our own interpretation. In the conclusion, we will draw the moral of this parenthetical story, hoping to open future parentheses. (shrink)

It is not hard to measure the experience of Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (2013) alongside the classic comedies of the 30s and 40s that Stanley Cavell identifies as comedies of remarriage. As viewers, we come to the film knowing that the couple – Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) – have known one another "from the beginning," a tale of knowing that is revealed in Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). The central questions of the remarriage comedy genre (...) are also undeniably the central questions here: How are we to understand the running quarrel that threatens to force them apart? And what enables them to find a way (necessarily provisionally) back together, to remake their connection? Other commentators on Before Midnight have overlooked its roots in remarriage comedy. For them, Jesse and Céline's luxurious scenes of conversation early in this film are largely wiped away by the fight scene in the hotel room and by the assumption that the pair's fate is sealed. I argue, on the other hand, that their film-long argument about who they are, singly and together, needn't be read as fatal. It is driven by their periodically finding themselves out of sync in time: memory and foreboding are, respectively, what fix Jesse and Céline's contrasting relations to time. (This is the film's contribution to and innovation of the remarriage comedy.) The resolution in Before Midnight's ending is conferred by Jesse's interest, and Céline's willingness, to discover a way to be in the same time together – a change of perception that depends on the arrival of words born from knowledge and born, as always in remarriage comedies, from desire. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell’s influential philosophical work on American cinema concerns itself with the thought that some of the most famous movies of classical Hollywood constitute two related, but previously undefined, genres that he names “the comedy of remarriage” and “the melodrama of the unknown woman,” respectively. In this collection, the first devoted to the subject, leading figures in philosophy and film studies provide detailed readings of more recent Hollywood films that show how the two genres continue to be inherited in American (...) cinema, not least by the films’ participation in a certain moral outlook—concerning personal and cultural transformation—that Cavell calls “Emersonian Perfectionism.” The films discussed include Rich and Famous, As Good as It Gets, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Revolutionary Road, On the Rocks, Palm Springs, and Tenet. (shrink)

Die verhaltene, weithin verpönte Stilbildung philologischer Arbeit hat am Leitmedium Shakespeare eine Reihe provokativer Ergebnisse hervorgebracht, deren sachlicher Kern in der Arbeit so markanter, unkonventioneller Shakespeare-Forscher wie William Empson, Stanley Cavell und Wolfgang Iser exemplarisch diskutiert wird.

Stanley Cavell wondered in his memoirs whether or not his writing sought to make friends of strangers and strangers of friends. What could it possibly mean to pursue this aim? This chapter explores this question by way of a conviction Cavell shares as to the kind of community possible between a writer and their readers. Cavell’s exploration of his reticence to share his conviction, and subsequent demotion of the conviction to an exaggeration, offers a study in how far philosophy can (...) demand the friendship of strangers and the estrangement of friends. (shrink)

This article argues that cinema studies should return to Stanley Cavell's conception of genre-as-medium for its promise as a method for engaging with film genre philosophically. Through a reading of Cavell's film work and his philosophical work on questions of skepticism, visibility, and moral perfectionism, the gangster films of Martin Scorsese are read as articulating the ordinary and normative force of the life of a gangster on its subjects. Describing the desire for that life as the desire for power over (...) how one is visible to others, this Cavellian reading of Scorsese's gangster films argues for the methodological utility of favoring limited corpuses of films as constitutive of genres as a basis for doing philosophical work with film. (shrink)

Review of Greer, Erin (2024), Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation.

Both Wittgenstein and Cavell see riddles as an important model of intellectual difficulty. By drawing attention to it, they remind us that not all of our intellectual challenges take the form of empirically answerable questions - there may be cases of our not merely lacking knowledge, but of being caught in the fantasy that a certain type of knowledge can be had. They further remind us what is involved in solving riddles, namely the transformation of our initial understanding of the (...) problems. I argue that these insights guide Cavell’s diagnosis of the problem of skepticism as the tragic expression of our modern human condition. In comparing the problem of skepticism to a riddle, Cavell proceeds to ask: If the skeptic’s conjuring trick consists in leading us to treat an essential aspect of our life as a merely epistemological problem, what ulterior motive does this serve? Cavell here appeals to the Nietzschean idea that the skeptic’s theoretical riddle serves to conceal that which it would be too painful to find out, namely the real, practical problem of our finitude and separateness. What is needed, in order to acknowledge the truth of skepticism and overcome it, is a radical transformation of philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter is a substantially expanded version of (and so substantially supersedes) “Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life Out of Music)” that appeared in Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2020). It offers to read Cavell’s claim that “philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical.” Its guiding thought is that a life that finds a home in philosophy from out of its devotion to music (as is true of, among others, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, all (...) philosophers Cavell wrote about and cared about) will take on a certain character. In Cavell’s case, his distinctive orientation in philosophy—call this his lifelong coming to terms with his abandoning a life in music—is guided in part by (1) an interest in those moments in experience where words seem to run out, or veer toward nonsense, leaving in their wake touchstones of ecstasy; and (2) an interest in the education of the senses, without which interest we risk their starvation. These twin claims are illustrated through an interweaving of remarks and reminiscences of Cavell on music that culminate in a reading of his last published pieces devoted to music, primarily “Impressions of Revolution.”. (shrink)

In his lecture “Philosophy and the Unheard,” Cavell invites us to observe a pervasive analogy between Schoenberg’s idea of the twelve-tone row and Wittgenstein’s idea of grammar, which is supposed to encapsulate an expansive, sweeping philosophical program—Cavell’s own. For Cavell, the analogy evinces not only the kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation, which is attuned to Wittgenstein’s seemingly paradoxical amalgamation of embrace and resistance in regarding to the conditions of modernity, but also a kind of philosophy of music, which (...) is illuminated by musical procedure. In this essay I probe into Cavell’s analogy, which, I contend, rests on Cavell’s interpretation (contra Von Wright) of Spengler’s influence on Wittgenstein. I argue that Cavell delineated the analogy in a way which does not consider a deeply felt gradation in Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitude toward modern music. This ultimately renders Schoenberg’s composition with twelve-tone incommensurate with Wittgenstein’s Spenglerian scheme of musical decline. I also argue that “Schoenbergian unheard” is not analogous to its purported Wittgensteinian counterpart. While the former inheres in comprehensibility—namely, correct, conscious application of the kind of contrived rules that would ensure coherence—the latter inheres in transparency, namely, a familiar physiognomy, which is internally related to the preconditions as well as the lived, embodied realities of musical intelligibility. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, the Schoenbergian idea of the row with its unforeseen yet pervasive consequences turns out to be tantamount to an idea of grammar for music for the meaning-blind. I conclude that in this “tale of two unheards,” Cavell invariably remains on the side of Wittgenstein. Philosophy, as it mattered most to him, has no business with music for the meaning-blind. (shrink)

In his essay “A Scale of Eternity,” Cavell probes into Mahler’s ‘Cassandra-like fate’—being blessed with a perfect capacity for telling or expressing the truth and cursed with the fate of forever being misunderstood—in relation to Wittgenstein’s predicament as a philosopher in a time without culture. Cavell observes that both Mahler and Wittgenstein were concerned with the maddening and distortion of life, a concern which gives rise to a yearning to hear the music—in human life and in language. Both exhibit the (...) kind of fear of inexpressiveness or suffocation, and a twin fear of uncontrollable expressiveness and exposure, which are fundamental to Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In this essay I take a closer look at this nexus of ideas, which portrays Mahler (reasonably, I contend) as a sort of intellectual alter-ego for Wittgenstein. I argue that Cavell’s observation is supported by his reading (contra Von Wright) of Wittgenstein’s diurnalized Spenglerian view of cultural decline. From that perspective, Mahler’s unique stature is to be portrayed as being endowed with an ability to pronounce the truth in the specious present of the normal, internal death of “high culture” music in the West. I argue further that Wittgenstein’s little studied middle-period diary entries on modern and future music lend support to the contention that, for Wittgenstein, Mahler’s music did not fit the ‘standard’ absurdities of musical decline. It is sui generis philosophical absurd, a limiting case in the history of music. Wittgenstein’s frustration with Mahler had little to do with not caring for his music, and everything to do with Mahler’s artistic failure to allow for an after-image of the breakdown of similarities that unity our form of life, hence his failure to revolt against cultural decline by embracing it—a failure, Wittgenstein feared he shared with Mahler. (shrink)

Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer and a devoted student of music, the arc of Cavell's wide-ranging investigation maps consistently with a proximate concern with features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (including its possession and its divestment), the presence/problem/potentiality of silence in human communication, and related features of (...) sonic experience central to life lived at the scale of the everyday. (shrink)

I argue that Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality can be productively read as perfectionist in Emerson’s sense. After reconstructing the debate on Nietzsche’s perfectionism, I problematize the literature’s almost exclusive focus on Schopenhauer as Educator at the expense of the Genealogy, which has caused scholars to construe Nietzsche’s perfectionism in merely individualistic terms. By contrast, I show that the Genealogy can be interpreted as a perfectionist endeavor, at the heart of which lies the first-person plural: the “we.” I thereby emphasize the (...) relevance of “we-making” for a novel reading of Nietzsche’s perfectionism—what I call his genealogical perfectionism. I conclude that the analysis of the genealogical dimension of Nietzsche’s perfectionism provides us with much-needed resources to construe it in nonindividualistic terms. (shrink)

There is rising skepticism within public discourse about the nature of AI. By skepticism, I mean doubt about what we know about AI. At the same time, some AI speakers are raising the kinds of issues that usually really matter in analysis, such as issues relating to consent and coercion. This essay takes up the question of whether we should analyze a conversation differently because it is between a human and AI instead of between two humans and, if so, why. (...) When is it okay, for instance, to read the phrases “please stop” or “please respect my boundaries” as meaning something other than what those phrases ordinarily mean – and what makes it so? If we ignore denials of consent, or put them in scare quotes, we should have a good reason. This essay focuses on two thinkers, Alan Turing and Stanley Cavell, who in different ways answer the question of whether it matters that a speaker is a machine. It proposes that Cavell’s work on the problem of other minds, in particular Cavell’s story in The Claim of Reason of an automaton whom he imagines meeting in a craftsman’s garden, may be especially helpful in thinking about how to analyze what AI has to say. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that forms of self-opacity— vicissitudes of self-consciousness and disruptions of straightforward self-knowledge, registrations of dissonance and self-strangeness— need not be understood exclusively or necessarily as pathologies nor as brute psychological facts, but can be valued as part of a rich moral psychology and conception of selfhood. I consider a prominent contemporary account of self-knowledge that situates self-knowledge in the context of philosophical moral psychology and analyzes self-knowledge as an achievement of “rational, responsible self-directed agency.” While (...) this model provides resources for understanding both self-knowledge and self-opacity, its broadly Kantian normative or axiological orientation means that forms of opacity tend to be framed as privations or pathologies of rational agency, in such a way as to leave us potentially cut off from the kinds of complexity, value, and significance that they might have for us. I then turn to some suggestive remarks by Bernard Williams, Lionel Trilling, and a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, that serve not only to indicate a way of thinking about the value of opacity, but suggest that attending to this value might call for imaginative and metaphorical forms of representation. This is to say that attending to this particular topic—the significance of self-opacity—involves attending to questions of philosophical and aesthetic style. (shrink)

The article discusses the relationship between Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of ordinary language - FLO, and the possibility of self-knowledge through the uses of ordinary language. In this sense, I discuss the ideas of normativity and personal responsibility involved in the possibility of intersubjective communications, in which meaningful uses of ordinary language can be shared and which result in self-knowledge. Thus, I analyze the Cavellian conception of FLO, correlating it with the conditions of subjective expression, a central theme in Cavell’s philosophy.

Abstract:Taking its cue from a resonant passage in Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, this essay reflects on the necessity of the figure of the child for Cavell's philosophy and for his understanding of the differences between Austinian and Wittgensteinian criteria. It develops the difference between instruction and initiation by meditating on how we learn the words for love. Finally, I examine briefly the figure of the boy Mamillius, son of the skeptic Leontes, in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, whom (...) Cavell first noticed as central to the play's energies. (shrink)