Stanley Cavell and the Everyday of Thinking

Eric Ritter

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 35, Number 1, 2021, pp. 1-26
(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785381

[ Access provided at 2 Apr 2021 08:37 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

 jsp
Stanley Cavell and the Everyday of Thinking

Eric Ritter
vanderbilt university

abstract: In the summer of 2019, the Cavell family, acting as literary executors of
Stanley Cavell’s estate, designated Eric Ritter to organize and catalogue the masses of
books and documents and papers with which Cavell had filled his study. In the process,
Ritter found a surprising amount of unpublished work and presents some of it here for
the first time. Building on the archival work as well as on recent scholarship, this article
presents Cavell’s conception of philosophy as the public expression of moral perfectionist
practice, for which writing is catalyst, medium, and result. The article then enumerates
some consequences that follow from this conception, especially a certain relation of
philosophy to the arts and to a notion of philosophical pluralism. It also suggests that
key themes in Cavell’s work already converse implicitly with ongoing debates about
“American Philosophy” and have great potential to do so more explicitly.

keywords: Stanley Cavell, American Philosophy, moral perfectionism, aesthetics, or-

dinary language philosophy

DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.35.1.0001
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021
Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 1 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 2 eric ritter

1.

Stanley Cavell’s study, where he worked for nearly fifty years, looks out over
Brookline’s trolley tracks, at “beautiful trees in mild movement,”1 and at a
walking path that can take you straight to Fenway Park. The floor-to-ceiling
bookshelves are overflowing; the books that don’t fit are piled on the floor,
stacked on his writing desk, or balanced on two nearby stools. There is an
air of hardworking improvisation to the workspace, a jazzy elegance, a pur-
suit of intellectual adventure, which also permeate his writing voice. Flipping
open the books, many are layered with rounds of penciled annotations,
with time and age discernible by handwriting style, or sometimes by colored
pencil; the spines of some, like Emerson’s Essays, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations, and J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, are worn and
battered from repeated handling. The marginalia reveal decades of lively
conversation, as if the books were old friends. In the back of the room,
five large file cabinets full of work, totaling twenty deep drawers, testify
to nearly seventy years spent writing, reading, and teaching. Yet piles of
papers—Cavell’s notes, letters, and even rough and unfinished drafts—
also lie around casually, as if he were just around the corner, coming back
any minute. This was the way Stanley Cavell left it, when he passed away,
in June of 2018.
When I arrived in June of 2019, the study had effectively not been
touched since his death. I was there because Cathleen Cavell, Stanley’s wife
of fifty years and literary executor, had designated me after his death to devise
a system to organize and catalogue the masses of books and documents
and papers with which her husband had filled his study. The task was
to develop an initial archival system to remain in place at least until the
Cavell family decided to transfer the material to a library or archive suitable
for scholarly research. With the guidance of librarians from Vanderbilt
University and a small group of scholars, I began by taking detailed pho-
tographs of the bookshelves, the desks, and indeed of the entire space.
The aim of the photography was to document my trace on the study, so that
future scholars could understand what Cavell’s workspace looked and felt
like when he was still working in it, and to capture some of the idiosyncrasies
that made his study his own.
We modeled the initial archival system itself after those of Richard Rorty,
at UC Irvine, and Hannah Arendt, at the Library of Congress. The archival
categories, devised with Vanderbilt librarian assistance, were separable but

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 2 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 3

often overlapping: research notes, teaching notes, philosophical journals,

professional materials, correspondence, biographical materials, and several
subcategories of drafts and manuscripts. I went through each document
one by one: reading, deciphering, sorting, and inventorying. Cavell wrote
endlessly. He would dash notes and journal entries to himself at seemingly
all hours of the day, with a special intensity when he was traveling; I was
forced to learn his handwriting, or rather his handwritings, as they changed
over time. I also needed to keep a growing list of his shorthand: “LW” for
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “JLA” for John Langshaw Austin, “HDT” for Henry
David Thoreau, “RWE” for “Ralph Waldo Emerson—and “Ø” for philosophy,
as if that achievement was not always evident. By the end of the summer,
after many late nights, I had read, sorted, and inventoried about twenty-four
archival boxes full of Cavell’s paper files, or about twenty-four linear feet of
paper in archivist’s terms. I had in addition read, sorted, and inventoried
more than a dozen smaller boxes with fragile, old, or precious material
stretching back to the 1940s, as well as several hundred digital documents
and dozens of his most prized and well-worn books.
In the process of this archival work, I also found a surprising mass of writ-
ings: unpublished and uncollected essays, manuscript ideas that never came
to fruition, earlier drafts of Cavell’s most well-known pieces, an extensive
set of experimental philosophical notebooks, and letters and emails to well-
known colleagues, friends, and of course family. Working through this
material was an often-personal matter, and Cavell’s love for his family was
everywhere present. It is especially fitting then that his younger son David
was with me the night I came upon an unpublished book manuscript,
Here and There: Sites of Philosophy, that Cavell assembled in late 1999 and
made extensive plans to publish, but never in fact did. We were listening
to the Red Sox and could almost hear the cheers, not only on the radio but
live (Fenway Park being a short enough distance down that walking path
for the crowd sounds to carry). We quickly brought it downstairs to show
the rest of the Cavell household, and the manuscript is now in the process
of posthumous publication.
In addition to Here and There and various other unpublished works
described in the next two sections, what I found in Cavell’s study was
the evidence, the remnants and the tools of a distinctive, evolving, philo-
sophical practice. The study was, in retrospect, like an archaeological site
where the tools and materials used to build a philosophical dwelling, to
construct a particular human existence, had been left scattered around.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 3 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 4 eric ritter

Said otherwise, the study was a kind of moral perfectionist workshop,

where the well-known metaphilosophical features that give shape to
Cavell’s written philosophy—from a Wittgensteinan “leading words back
to their everyday uses,” to Emerson’s excavation of and aversion to cultural
conformity, to a Freudian “reading by being read”—these features were
exercised, practiced, or used. As Daniele Lorenzini has put it, philosophy
for Cavell is “conceived as an activity, as a practical experience of trans-
formation of self in order to have access to truth, or better, to a certain
way of being and of living.”2 The study resonated with extensive ethical
activity on the way of thinking; or better, the discursive practices evidenced
throughout the study did so, and in this essay I will accordingly begin to
accent the roles of writing in Cavell’s philosophical practices. Seen in this
light, Cavell’s philosophy is composed of sites of philosophical and auto-
biographical activity, public but highly autobiographical expressions of a
transformed self-relation.
It is hardly news that Cavell’s philosophy has an autobiographical or
personal dimension.3 Long ago, Stephen Mulhall identified the object of
Cavell’s philosophy as a particular form of self-knowledge: something more
than just the ability to state one’s beliefs and commitments, but rather a
way of gaining critical purchase on them, of getting underneath them as it
were, so as to facilitate transformation (Cavell’s shorthand for this being
“acknowledgment”).4 More recently, there has been interesting historical
work, initially opened up by Arnold Davidson, linking what Cavell called
moral perfectionism to Foucault’s late turn toward an ethics of the “care of
the self.”5 These scholars have noted that Cavell and Foucault reshape an
atypical, originally ancient Greek notion of philosophical ethics as “work on
the self by the self,” as a set of “existential” or “spiritual exercises” in Pierre
Hadot’s term. While this literature introduces a historical dimension I do not
evaluate here, it otherwise resonates with the notion of Cavell’s philosophy
as perfectionist practice presented in this essay. In yet a third dimension of
“autobiography” present in his work, Cavell often describes his inheritance
of ordinary language philosophy in broadly autobiographical terms, that is,
as requiring the capacity to feel from within the attraction or temptation of a
particular philosophical insistence on what the world must be like.6 There
are a number of other fascinating directions in which those who have been
inspired by Cavell are currently taking the autobiographical emphases in his
thinking.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 4 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 5

But what is less well developed, or at least not yet entirely accepted in
the literature, is that Cavell’s perfectionist and autobiographical conception
of philosophical thinking was not an argument for what philosophy should
be, in the abstract. To understand things in this way is to miss the point of
Cavell’s attention to metaphilosophy. Metaphilosophical clarity was import-
ant to Cavell not because he was legislating what philosophy is or isn’t, but
because such reflexive understanding—leading words back to their every-
day use; breaking through the ice of conformity; reading by being read—
are formulations of the evolving ethical practices or activities that facilitated
the movement of thinking and of perfectionist transformation in particular
cases. Cavell’s perfectionist practices, that is, his metaphilosophical descrip-
tions, acquired robust meaning because he used them, in particular cases,
on particular occasions. They are descriptions of an unfolding process of
philosophical activity. Although of course Cavell’s philosophy also invites us
to share in the ongoing process of perfectionist transformation, that invita-
tion to be efficacious must also leave you to yourself. Perhaps in order to so
much as share his philosophical practices, they must be “inherited,” put to
use in a new case, and hence pluralized. In short, Cavell’s study showed
that he lived a practice of philosophy. Imitation quite literally just misses
the point.

2.

Let us return to the archaeological site of the study, to the piles of papers
and materials scattered on every surface and tucked away in his file cabi-
nets. Cavell left behind unpublished and unfinished essays on film, music,
Derrida, Austin, Dewey, and Freud, among others. With those are drafts
of nearly all of his published books and files full of teaching notes and
lectures, as well as an exciting, extensive set of philosophical journals.
The journals are experimental and essayistic, calling to mind the Nachlass
of Nietzsche, Emerson, or Thoreau. They are replete with Cavell’s charac-
teristic way of interfacing philosophical reflection with descriptions of ordi-
nary life and with experiences of art; here we find Cavell working through
inspiration, hope, isolation, and despair over the course of an ordinary day.
We also find him, even more interestingly, working through formulations
and concepts from the history of philosophy, often as a further mode of

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 5 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 6 eric ritter

active “responsiveness” to embodied, daily existence, roughly analogous to

the form of “Little Did I Know.”
Given the sheer quantity of work in Cavell’s study, it was evident that
writing had a special sort of role in his practices of philosophy. How do we
make sense of this? It is a multifaceted question and I aim to only make
a dent here; but the contents of the study suggested that it is difficult to
conceive of perfectionist transformation apart from the practice of writing,
at least for Cavell himself. In his journals and notes, Cavell is continually
putting into practice the descriptions of philosophy with which he is asso-
ciated in his published work. He does not merely write about Wittgenstein’s
practice of “leading words back to their everyday uses,” or about Emerson’s
practice of aversion to habitual deployments of words and stock phrase
that encourage conformity and keep at bay one’s own experience. Cavell
rather deploys these methods, in individual cases, at particular points in time,
in order to propel himself from “here to there,” toward a “next state” of
himself—and importantly toward a state that may not yet be discernible in
advance, before such transformation occurs. In the abstract, divorced from
the practice of moving the self “from here to there,” Cavell’s descriptions of
metaphilosophy idle and fail to engage. Conceived of as a practice, however,
they are powerful, useful, and of course alluring. The study resonated with
such a philosophical practice.
This suggests another way of conceiving of the point of Cavell’s phil-
osophical practices. Cavell’s Nachlass is a testament to the ways in which
language has the possibility of achieving a remarkable power to confront
the unfamiliar in the familiar.7 As in Freud’s notion of transference, the
achievement of adequately describing or “acknowledging” a current inhab-
itation, confusion, fixation, or fantasy means that I am already well on
my way to being free of its constrictions. But the power or the possibility
of language for such a “transforming perception of things,”8 to borrow a
phrase from Cora Diamond, is not a standing possibility in the way that,
say, moving my arm is a standing possibility for me as an able-bodied indi-
vidual. One has to be in a dynamic relation to language, to oneself, and to
others in order to achieve such “transforming perception.” Indeed one way
of understanding Cavell’s conversation with those thinkers who predict-
ably show up most often in the margins of his books—“RWE and “HDT,”
“JLA” and “LW,” as well as Freud in his own way—is that they are each in
different ways engaged in investigating the liberating power of language:
what it is, how it is lost, how it is regained. In Cavell’s study, in his life,

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 6 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 7

and in his philosophical texts, words regularly lose and—through his prac-
tice of ­philosophy—regain the power of freeing him from constrictions
and returning us to the adventure of ordinary life. Writing is the catalyst,
medium, and also the result of such a practice.9
Cavell’s lived, discursive practice of adventuring in the ordinary is in
many respects exemplified in the unpublished manuscript that I found
with his son David. In his notes and correspondence about the manuscript,
Cavell sometimes called it Here and There: Sites of Philosophy. At other
times he added a word to the title, calling it Both Here and There: Sites of
Philosophy. The two titles evoke slightly different meanings, as detailed in
the next section. Cumulatively, across four different draft tables of contents
for the manuscript, Cavell included thirteen pieces that have never been
published anywhere or have never been published in English. Those four
tables of contents collectively included a set of four unpublished essays on
the philosophy of music, three prefaces he wrote to various translations
and editions of The Claim of Reason, several unpublished interviews, and
unpublished pieces on ancient skepticism, psychoanalysis, and William
Faulkner. The rest of the pieces Cavell included in the tables of contents
had already been published, but he was concerned that they were difficult
to find, that they had been included in books or collections no longer in
print, or simply that they had earned a significance out of proportion with
their apparent neglect. The chronologically final table of contents from late
1999 included thirty-five pieces in total, twenty-five of which were either
already published at that time, or were later published, in Philosophy the Day
After Tomorrow (Harvard, 2005), Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford,
2003), or Cavell on Film (SUNY, 2005).

3.

From Must We Mean What We Say? to Here and There: Sites of Philosophy,
Cavell was duteous about the titles of his books and articles.10 They reward
more than one approach to reading them, or rather can be read from more
than one perspective, each perspective complementing and deepening the
others, spinning a web of intersecting meanings.
The manuscript title Both Here and There is no different. It reflects
the heterogeneity of philosophical subject matter contained in the volume,
from essays on music (“here”), to essays on ancient skepticism (“there”).

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 7 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 8 eric ritter

Each of these different subjects may become a “site” of philosophy. At the

same time, the wordplay reflects a standard or measure of progress within
each essay or “site,” that is, a sense of the progression from here to there
within a philosophical project. The notion of a philosophical progression
“from here to there” recalls Cavell’s insistence that the pursuit of philo-
sophical understanding has a practical or autobiographical dimension;
each “site” of philosophy is an opening for the transforming perception
of the practice of philosophy to take place. We are reminded that there is a
question or issue for us behind each particular turn to philosophical think-
ing, an inchoate desire, need, or problematic, which can be covered over
but never erased.11
Looking closer, the title “Here and There: Sites of Philosophy” also
speaks, in a more complex way, to Cavell’s conception of a “quest for the
ordinary.” Here as everywhere, what Cavell calls the “ordinary” is not
opposed to the unusual or to the critical but instead stands in opposition
to the “skeptical,” the “transcendent,” or the “Absolute” (words Cavell
sometimes uses interchangeably).12 If in philosophical thinking we take
something up about everyday experience and aim not for transcendence
but for transformation within the ordinary, then the other shore of philo-
sophical thinking—the “there”—is already “here,” already in the ordinary.
Both here and there, considered as two opposite points of a philosophical
progression or understanding, are part of “the ordinary.” Or more strongly,
where we aim to go in our philosophical thinking is, on Cavell’s account, in
an important sense already “here.” Without the modifier “both,” one may
lose Cavell’s emphasis on a genuine progression or transition that remains
within the plane or dimension of so-called ordinary experience.
At the same time, the manuscript title, like Cavell’s conception of phil-
osophical thinking more generally, is not static but dynamic. If we recall the
difference between what Cavell calls the “actual everyday” and the “even-
tual everyday”13—if we recall that the ordinary both belongs to the finite
and human realm of sensible experience and refashions “a place we have
never been”14—then the aim or goal of philosophical thinking is not simply
“here,” but is also not yet attained, not yet reached: it is “there.” We are thus
guided toward the following picture: the here and there of the practice of
thinking are both already within the “ordinary”; and yet, since the ordinary-
to-be-achieved is also a place we have never been, the “there” is also not yet
here, is still to be attained. The complex and playful conceptual web offered
in the title “(Both) Here and There: Sites of Philosophy” allows us, as one

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 8 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 9

might put it, to affirm intellectual adventure and discovery while delimiting
or conditioning it in the finite and human realm.
Finally, Cavell’s understanding or inheritance of what he calls mod-
ernism implies that there is no given rule or standard by which a moral
perfectionist progression “from here to there” can be measured. There is
no analogue to the greatest happiness principle or to the rational applica-
tion of a “pure good will.” Measuring or accounting for philosophical and
perfectionist transformation—the overarching question of its sincerity or
honesty, as well as the general measure of its “use”—is part of the practice
itself. This means that the peculiarity of philosophical progress is that one
is at the same time undergoing perfectionist change and determining a
suitable measure or account of such a change.
One significant source of this fundamentally uncanny conception of
philosophical thinking “from here to there”—where what we aim for in phi-
losophy is not transcendence but a new familiar, an unfamiliar familiarity—
is the later Wittgenstein’s principle set of metaphilosophical remarks in the
first book of the Investigations. In these passages, Wittgenstein famously
claims that his philosophy does not advance either “theses” or hypotheses,
speaks of philosophical “clarity” and of “perspicuous presentations” over
and against a correspondence theory of truth, and prioritizes the seeing
of new “aspects” over understanding the essence or immutable properties
of them.15 One may analogously, Cavell argued, find such a conception of
philosophical progress—“from here to there,” but in another sense still
here—in the work of the American Transcendentalists, not to mention, in a
different but related sense, in early Heidegger.16

4.

Such a conception of philosophical progress evoked in the title of Here and

There: Sites of Philosophy places philosophy in conversation with the work
that can be accomplished on us by other art forms. This mutual compat-
ibility between philosophy and the arts more generally hearkens back to
Cavell’s earliest work and has many precursors in the history of philosophy.
In this light it is interesting to revisit one of the central themes in Must
We Mean What We Say?. Throughout the book, Cavell argues that the dis-
ruptions in the field of philosophy posed by the work of J. L. Austin and
(the later) Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1960s have their analogues in the

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 9 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 10 eric ritter

disruptions posed by other “modernist challenges to the tradition” within

other art forms undergoing transformation at the time—with, for exam-
ple, the abstract sculptures of Anthony Caro, the “atonal” music of John
Cage or Arnold Schoenberg, the sensual movies of Jean-Luc Godard, or
the otherworldly theatre of Samuel Beckett. On Cavell’s account, success-
ful challenges or disruptions to artistic media end up expanding what the
various media can do, or even what those mediums themselves are; but
this expansion is also an important and inevitable element of their histo-
ries. By linking the disruption or challenge—which can also, for Cavell, be
understood as a kind of “faithfulness” to a history that manifests in a disrup-
tion17—within the field of philosophy to the disruption sparked by the mod-
ernist artistic innovations of the 1960s, Cavell effectively reclaimed a space
for philosophy as companionable to artistic practices.18 This is not by any
means to say that philosophy is the same as literature or abstract painting or
film or theatre, but rather that philosophy shares a similar mode of retun-
ing understanding and perception, with different but parallel contentious
history or histories, sets of conventions (there to be twisted and broken),
and media. This was—and remains—an outsider’s (perhaps a musician’s)
way of conceiving philosophy, and if it seems to have gained some traction
in professional philosophy, it has often done so independently of conversa-
tions happening around Cavell’s work.
These modernist challenges, at once disruptions and continuations,
moreover, have their corollaries, and in a sense their context, in social move-
ments, in radical social change. It is not an accident that, in the opening few
pages of his updated preface to Must We Mean, Cavell writes that he barely
had time to receive the news of his first book’s publication because he was
so preoccupied with the takeover of Harvard’s administrative buildings by
students who were demanding, among other things, an African American
or Africana studies program and a curriculum that would not be exclusively
white, as well as a more critical stance on the ongoing war in Vietnam.19
In 1968, Cavell and John Rawls famously presented the students’ demands
to the Harvard faculty, as Cavell recounts in Little Did I Know.20
What we might highlight, however, and what has received less scholarly
attention, is that the social movements of the 1960s were, for Cavell, insep-
arable from the transformations in philosophy and in the arts that moti-
vated his first book. And they are important, too, to all that comes after, for
example when Cavell sometimes suggests that the ethical practices of phi-
losophy, the arts, and the work of social movements are of the same general

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 10 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 11

kind. One may think of Cavell’s continued references to Wittgenstein’s

(horizontal)21 notion of “forms of life” in this regard, as an effort to capture
the evolving, social, yet limit-setting bedrock of our life with words. Social
movements such as what Cavell lived through in the 1960s, like his practice
of philosophy, can help reset these limits and change our life with words.
This is essential because a democracy anchored in the “ongoing process”
of increasing education and “experience”—to evoke Dewey22—requires
such perfectionist resets. And for Cavell, philosophy does not stand in a
transcendent or nihilistic relation to the evolving social bedrock of cultural
“forms of life,” but in a constant dialectic of acknowledgment and exam-
ination. Even if the desire for philosophical knowledge often begins from a
fantasy of attaining such transcendent knowledge, Cavell’s practice of phi-
losophy exemplifies how to rechannel it in more effective, indeed creative,
directions, moving us from here to there.23

5.

With this background in mind, we can now see more clearly how Here
and There: Sites of Philosophy also speaks to the philosophical plurality and
heterogeneity of Cavell’s work more broadly. On the one hand, Cavell’s phi-
losophy is “pluralist” with regard to the breadth of academic field and phil-
osophical subfield (“here and there”). Not only epistemology and deductive
inference but also Shakespeare, Hollywood film, Mozart, Judaism, and
the  pain a society holds in its silences about its history—these may all
become “Sites of Philosophy.” On the other hand, Cavell’s conception of
philosophy embraces heterogeneity with respect to the different progres-
sions from here to there that each of us might take within each of these
subject matters. Philosophical progress may be expressed differently in
each of us, depending both on where we start from, and on the specific
practices we bring to bear on the sites in which we work. Moreover, as we
will see momentarily, these two notions of pluralism (“here and there”) and
heterogeneity (“from here to there”) may be combined, forming yet a third.
At one level, pluralism is no surprise for Cavell’s readers. In his pub-
lished work, Cavell famously showed a rare breadth of interest not only in
debates in analytic philosophy of language, skepticism, and philosophy of
mind but also in post-Kantian continental philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy
of art, ordinary language philosophy, and American philosophies. He of

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 11 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 12 eric ritter

course read widely in both the continental and analytic traditions, as well
as in “American Philosophy,” a term to which we will return in due course.
His library and research notes, moreover, are testaments to his love of read-
ing in each of these fields; surveying his books, one cannot help but think
they are an embodiment of his conviction that philosophical thinking may
usefully leave a trace on anything we might move through or come upon
on an ordinary day.24 In later work, Cavell insists that that we may become
“stopped” or “arrested” by almost anything in our path, that each of these
“stops” may become a “site” for philosophical thinking. Again, this was not
merely something Cavell said or wrote; he lived this practice, as evidenced
by his journals and research notes.
Yet even this accenting of the pluralism of the possible sites of philoso-
phy does not do justice to the heterogeneity, the attention to difference, that
pervades Cavell’s practice of philosophy, and especially his later work. For
Cavell, we each have the possibility of achieving “our own experience” of a
site of philosophy by bringing our own philosophical practices to bear upon
them. That is, we embody these differences not only in the choice of subject
matter—a basic sense of pluralism—but also, more interestingly, in the
very nature of our experience of the objects or sites we select as philosoph-
ical thinking. There may, in other words, be different “trajectories” from
here to there within the very same “site of philosophy.” And this of course
raises questions about what we count as “the same” site of philosophy, and
how to live with these differences.
Take, for example, the fact that in nearly each of the fields and subfields
in which Cavell worked, he not only advanced specific theses and contrib-
uted to the various philosophical debates specific to each one, but he also
worked to reshape his readers’ perceptions, experiences, and sensibilities
about what each of these fields could be. One might think here of his under-
standing of opera as the form of art in which the individual voice is most
celebrated, or his imagination of film as “the moving image of skepticism.”
Or of course, there is his multifaceted view of philosophical skepticism.
These comprise various “sites of philosophy,” as it were, but also reimagi-
nations of those sites, transforming perceptions of them. So how ought we
to think of agreement and disagreement in such a domain?
We are in the proximity of an enormous topic: Cavell’s well-known
inheritance of Kant’s understanding of aesthetic judgment. I only wish to
make a minor point here. For Kant (at least in many of his presentations
of it in the Critique of the Power of Judgement), in the very ground of the

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 12 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 13

“subjective universality” of one’s own power of aesthetic judgment, there

is also a very specific humility, precisely because the source of such judg-
ments can be “none other than subjective.”25 Cavell, for his part, incorpo-
rates aspects of this understanding of aesthetic judgment into domains
not typically characterized as “aesthetic.” What is central for Cavell in
Kant’s notion is that in order to remain responsive to the encounter with
art or philosophy one must stay rooted in one’s own experience of the aes-
thetic object, even as one claims, posits, and hopes for agreement. Such
is the ground of humility; an acknowledgment of the singularity of the
experience that is the ground for the activity of philosophizing. The rub
is that this way of recognizing singularity, even as it is coupled with a
claim to community, ultimately makes room for a healthy relationship
to difference. For in such cases we do not “agree to disagree”; rather the
disagreement itself reveals something worth knowing: my differentia-
tion, my separateness, that we live (in this respect) in different worlds.
I achieve “individuation,” as Cavell sometimes puts it. This makes pos-
sible an affirmation of the worth or value of conviction in the face of
inevitable disagreement, both intra- and intercultural. It is an existential
standpoint for reclaiming a political voice in a liberal, democratic, and
heterogeneous polis.26
Thus once again we come upon a sense of the political in Cavell’s work.
Simultaneous with the pluralistic breadth of sites of philosophy is a hetero-
geneity embedded in the very identification of any one site of philosophy;
together they encourage a practice of simultaneous humility and conviction
in the face of difference. In both of these respects, Cavell’s pluralist concep-
tion of philosophy should be read in tandem with ongoing arguments for
the expansion of the discipline put forth by, among others, those working
in critical social theory, critical race theory, or critical philosophy of race
who argue not only for taking seriously the role of different lived experi-
ences in philosophy, but also and relatedly for a wider expansion of what
counts as philosophical subject matter.27
At this point, to be sure, it might be easy to conclude that there is no
unity or cohesion in Cavell’s work. But it would be a mistake, as Daniele
Lorenzini has written, to conceive of Cavell’s oeuvre as just a set of “eclec-
tic and dispersed” projects with no substantial or significant philosophical
threads running through and between them.28 It would be a mistake to
conclude from the “here and there” of “sites of philosophy” that there is no
larger shape to Cavell’s thought.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 13 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 14 eric ritter

We have, in fact, already seen one such pillar of cohesion: an evolving

and dynamic practice of philosophy, put to use on particular occasions on
particular sites of philosophy to facilitate movement from here to there in
one’s thinking. That is, we have excavated a dimension of Cavell’s work
in  which writing, reading, and thinking philosophically serve to clarify,
challenge, and/or deepen one’s past and present convictions, to allow one
to let go of wishful fantasies, and ultimately yet most augustly to reclaim a
voice, a self-relation, which is unafraid to think and “represent” itself in a
thoroughly heterogenous and pluralistic society.29 This brings us, finally, to
Cavell’s conception of American Philosophy.

6.

Cavell’s conception of philosophy as practice is never far from his under-

standing of “American Philosophy,” a troublesome and essentially con-
tested term. In tandem with the previous section, in which I argued for a
dual sense of plurality and heterogeneity of “sites of philosophy” in Cavell’s
work, Cavell’s conception of “American Philosophy” resonates surprisingly
and presciently with important ongoing debates about the directions of the
field.30 These debates have moved toward a conception of American phi-
losophy as a diverse enterprise of creative expression and argumentation,
companionable to the other art forms, and unified by certain broad theoret-
ical and practical commitments yet untied to the geographical territory of
the contemporary United States. Cavell’s conceptualization of “American
Philosophy” is, in a word, an open-ended search for an eventual, hetero-
geneous, democratic philosophical community, and harmonizes well with
such an understanding.
Cavell often framed his quest to trace and inherit an American phil-
osophical tradition by suggesting that the work of Emerson and Thoreau
constitutes an “American difference” in philosophy. As he puts it in A Pitch
of Philosophy:

I have argued enough, if insufficiently, over the years for Emerson’s

and Thoreau’s characters of mind as philosophical, for their qual-
ity of intellect as equal to an inheritance of philosophy . . . and for
their position as all but uniquely open to a responsiveness to both
the German and the English traditions of philosophy, to that spiritual

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 14 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 15

rift in the Western philosophical mind . . . features that in my fantasy

nominate them as reticent, belated founders of some eventual philosophical
culture that will include both America (both hemispheres) and Israel—I
mean their devotion to philosophy reaching beyond Christendom, beyond
the West; and their problematic discovery of America (which for them
has not happened), which is to say . . . making new people of these
strange newcomers to this land, which proved not to be empty.31

In bringing Emerson’s methods to bear upon his philosophical practice,

Cavell seeks to inherit this “American difference” in his own work. But
there are at least three reasons why such a quest and an inheritance of
an American difference may sound peculiar. First, of course, the classical
American Pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey has historically been
considered to center “American philosophy.” This may reasonably lead one
to think that we therefore already have an American difference in philoso-
phy, and thus that Emerson and Thoreau prefigure this work in significant
respects. Second, on some historical accounts, the significant insights of the
American pragmatists were not so much displaced by the work of the logical
positivists (as in the standard “eclipse narrative” of early twentieth-century
American philosophy), but rather absorbed into the “pragmatisms” working
in the background of important thinkers in the later Anglo-American tradi-
tion, such as W. V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, C. I. Lewis, and others, leaving
the work of the American Transcendentalists more or less entirely behind.32
Finally, third, Cavell’s quest for an “American difference in philosophy”
may sound peculiar because the very term “American Philosophy” reads as
overtly nationalistic and exclusively white, seeming to privilege the United
States as the source and center for so-called American philosophy, not only
ignoring Latin American and indigenous thinkers across the Americas as
well as African-American philosophers, but also and more perniciously
decoupling philosophy from its attachment to any particular place or time.
Cavell’s understanding of American philosophy proposes interesting
responses to each of these questions, all of which take “American Philosophy”
as the founding of an eventual, multiethnic, multireligious community, a
“we” that does not yet exist. For example, we can see in the passage quoted
above that Cavell does not think of the American difference in philosophy
as necessarily or even historically tied to the geographic boundaries of the
United States, except insofar as Emerson is key to this tradition. There
Cavell explicitly extends the idea of an American difference in philosophy

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 15 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 16 eric ritter

“beyond Christendom, beyond the West,” including both hemispheres of

the Americas and Israel as possible sites of “American” philosophy.
Moving on to the historical objections to the use of the term “American
Philosophy,” Cavell’s primary reason for insisting on an “American dif-
ference” in philosophy is to uncouple the work of Emerson and Thoreau
(never mind the work of the other “Transcendentalists,” notably Margaret
Fuller) from their status as precursors to the pragmatism of, say, James and
Dewey. Emerson and Thoreau’s work is both significantly “philosophical” in
its own right and significantly different from the work of James and Dewey
to warrant the heading of another lineage of “American” philosophy. In this
vein, I do not read Cavell as denying the importance of the American prag-
matists. For Cavell, who was working in an environment which effectively
equated American philosophy with the classical American pragmatists, the
danger lay in deemphasizing the innovations of the Transcendentalists, in
particular the self-reflexive form of questioning ordinary experience which
he found in Emerson, Thoreau, and the lineage(s) of philosophical and
literary expression they helped inspire.33
Cavell’s use of “American Philosophy” should thus not be read as
collection of universalist conceits voiced from the United States, a uni-
versalism which is pernicious not because it hopes for or even “claims”
community or agreement, but because of the way in which such a com-
munity is claimed, and because in presuming such a community it
cannot but deny the multiplicity and diversity of the very community it
aims to speak for.34 The notion of practices of American philosophy as
involving a claim, and the search, for new community is precisely what
Cavell locates in the self-reflexive, autobiographical form of the American
Transcendentalists’ writing. If Emerson’s writings “arrogate” philosophi-
cal authority, that is, if they aim to speak for himself but also not merely for
himself, as Cavell argues philosophy and in a sense all effective voicings
of experience must do, then this “arrogation” is not undertaken by means
of delineating the boundaries of the rational versus the nonrational (or
the human versus the less than human) but rather with the aim of finding
or “founding” a shared community. Emerson knows he does not and will
not speak for everyone—an awareness he, like Cavell, incorporates into
the very self-reflexive and autobiographical form of his writing. But this
does not mean that Emerson speaks “privately,” speaks only for himself.
Thoreau, analogously, says that his work is like a coat which all may try
on in order to see what fits; it is not merely a private or autobiographical

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 16 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 17

coat, nor is it solely an impersonal or communal one. His work is a

search for (and a test of ) community, a “claim to community,” as Cavell
puts it.35 The conception of philosophical authority which Cavell locates
in “American Philosophy” involves the arrogance or arrogation of author-
ity, yes—something Cavell seems to be unable to imagine philosophy
parting with—but this arrogation is a search for community, and hence a
response to the loneliness of not yet having words for what one wishes to
say. It is quite distant from, even mournful of, the unthinking assertion
of a “we.”36
Cavell here follows his own path within the important recent push to
“diversify” the notion of what we call American Philosophy, untethering it
from any one place or tradition or “claim to rationality” and encompass-
ing all those philosophies united by a certain kind of commitment to the
practice of multiethnic democracy. One implication of American phil-
osophical thinking as a “search for community,” is that “America” itself
becomes reconceived as more of an idea than a physical place—an implica-
tion confirmed by Cavell’s claim that, for the Transcendentalists, “America
has never happened,” certainly not in the fledging nineteenth-century
slave democracy of the United States. This finds purchase in the futural
tense of Thoreau’s work: his sense that the country has yet to be achieved.
We  see this futural tense inherited in Cavell’s writings, too, an empha-
sis on political participation in “America,” where “America” is conceived
of as an idea of ethnic and religious multiplicity and political equality, as
well as an idea of intellectual and artistic freedom, always yet-to-be-attained,
rather than as a physical place in which those ideals have already been
achieved.
But it is one thing to espouse an idea; it is another to share the same
conception of what it means to work toward it. And this brings us around,
one final time, to the “here and there,” the possibilities of philosophical
progression, within every site of philosophy. We ought not to conceive of
perfectionist ideals, such as those almost equivalent with Cavell’s idea of
America, as something toward which we are continually striving but which
we never achieve, or repeatedly fail to achieve in the spirit of asymptotic
progression. What is at stake instead is the continual (re)negotiation of those
ideals. As Martin Gustafsson has argued, Cavell’s conception of perfection-
ist striving and perfectionist ideals not only makes room for but requires a
constant renegotiation of the very meaning of those ideals.37 Thus it is not
just the realization of the ideals of “America” which has not yet occurred;

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 17 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 18 eric ritter

there is also the ongoing task and the necessity—most notably, as we saw,
in the epistemic work accomplished by social movements—of reconceiv-
ing what those very ideals mean to “us.” Such a “non-ideal” conception of
principles or ideals resonates with currents of work in critical social theory.
If intellectual movement, development, or progress is the practice of phi-
losophy, then actualizing the promise of “America” as a space of freedom,
diversity, and equity requires philosophy.

7.

In August of 2019, after a summer spent preparing Cavell’s papers for

future scholarly life, I had the privilege of being present at the unveiling
ceremony for Stanley Cavell’s grave. Cavell is buried across the Charles
River at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, in Brookline, Massachusetts, near his
longtime friends and colleagues John Rawls and Robert Nozick.
The ceremony was a mixture of future life and present death. We
had just found (Both) Here and There: Sites of Philosophy and there was
so much of Cavell’s work that would continue to live on—yet there was
another, different kind of death in the air as well. Philosophically, Cavell
had already left us to ourselves. If one takes seriously the experiential prac-
tice of Cavell’s philosophy—the uses he put philosophy to on particular
occasions to achieve a “transforming perception” of things—then Cavell
had, in a sense, already passed away with each essay of his. His death, in
short, showed the futility of trying to imitate his philosophy, and the neces-
sity of forming one’s own.
To work on his eighteen, soon to be nineteen, books, while helping
to raise a family, Cavell worked whenever he could, often sleeping at odd
hours. David, his younger son, tells a wonderful story in this regard, also
hinted at in Little Did I Know. When David was a young child, his father
often took a nap in the afternoon. It fell to David to wake him up. Every
afternoon, as his youngest child gingerly woke him, Stanley Cavell would
greet him and the world with: “Hello, darling,” or “Hello, sweetheart.” This
spirit of love for the finite, human, everyday world—including the plurality
of others in it—pervades Cavell’s study, as it does his work.
That study, Cavell’s workshop of moral perfectionism, no longer looks
the way it did when the archival project first began. His file cabinets are
nearly empty of his papers; they are sorted and catalogued in archival boxes

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 18 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 19

on his study floor. Yet if you looked in Cavell’s own books, you could still
perceive the everyday of thinking, as if he were still present. Especially in the
last decade of his life, as his memory started to fade, Cavell regularly re-read
his own work, underlining, annotating, revising, renewing: still thinking,
always thinking. The handwriting for this period is shakier, but still his.38

notes
1. “Reverse Rip Van Winkle, I fell into a dream of work, and when I awoke
twenty or thirty years and a dozen books later, with the same beautiful trees in
mild movement outside my study windows.” Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know:
Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 514.
2. My own translation. Lorenzini has more of Foucault in mind in this passage,
but his point is that it may also apply to Cavell. Daniele Lorenzini, “La vie comme
‘réel’ de la philosophie. Cavell, Foucault, Hadot et les techniques de l’ordinaire,”
in La voix et la vertu: Variétés du perfectionnisme moral, ed. Sandra Laugier (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 474. The relevant passage in French
reads: “[la philosophie] était conçue comme une activité, comme une expérience
pratique de transformation de soi pour avoir accès à la vérité, ou mieux à une
certaine manière d’être et de vivre.”
3. Cavell’s Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1994) and Little Did I Know are the two texts that most
clearly present Cavell’s understanding of intersections between philosophy and
autobiography, but I have in mind also the numerous ways in which Cavell had
“uses” for philosophical reading and writing, that is, the ways in which his work
precipitates and guides not just theoretical but personal growth.
4. Cf. Steven Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The argument that Cavell’s philosophy
aims at a form of “self-knowledge” recurs throughout.
5. In this respect, Arnold Davidson has traced connections between Foucault’s
“care of the self,” following a path through what Pierre Hadot calls “the art of
living,” and Cavell’s account of moral perfectionism. See Arnold Davidson,
“Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 123–48. For an interestingly similar, but by no means
identical, account of the relationship between Cavell’s perfectionism and Foucault
on the “care of the self,” see David Owen, “Perfectionism, Parrhesia, and the
Care of the Self: Foucault and Cavell on Ethics and Politics,” in The Claim to
Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Norris
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 128–55. Finally, Daniele Lorenzini
has further probed this connection in Éthique et politique de soi: Foucault, Hadot,

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 19 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 20 eric ritter

Cavell et les techniques de l’ordinaire (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J Vrin, 2015) and
in “La vie comme ‘réel’ de la philosophie,” 469–87. Recently, Piergiorgio Donatelli
has challenged the intimacy of the connection between the tradition of the art of
living and “an ethical life in the perfectionist register” in his “Moral Perfectionism
and Virtue,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 2 (2019): 348–50.
6. For this idea and formulation, I am indebted, in different ways, to the work
of Jim Conant and Cora Diamond. See, for example, “From Positivist Rabbi to
Resolute Reader: James Conant in Conversation with Niklas Forsberg,” The Nordic
Wittgenstein Review 2 (2013): 153–54. See also, of course, Cora Diamond, The
Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2001), especially “Introduction II: Wittgenstein and Metaphysics,” 13–39.
Alice Crary and Joel de Lara’s “Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Ordinary Language
Philosophy? A Plea for Reviving a Wrongly Reviled Philosophical Tradition” is also
relevant here: Graduate Philosophy Journal 39, no. 2 (2019): 317–32.
7. The idea here is not that language is always necessary for communication,
as opposed to gestures, grunts, etc. Rather, the idea is that, as human being,
one is always already thrown in language, history, and culture, and only through
linguistic reflection does one become aware of the layers of this “thrownness.”
8. Cora Diamond, “Missing the Adventure: A Reply to Martha Nussbaum,” in
The Realistic Spirit, 313.
9. For one example of Cavell’s attention to the role of writing in moral
perfectionism, see Cavell’s chapter on Emerson in Cities of Words, especially the
account of the role of writing. Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register
of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 25–27.
10. The title “Must We Mean What We Say?” is obviously not merely a “yes”
or “no” question. For starters, it also includes an ethical question, the sense of
“ought” as “must.” Moreover, it raises the question of what happens when we don’t
achieve meaning in what we say.
11. Cavell often applies a psychoanalytic practice or mode of attention to the
question of what moves him to philosophize. His philosophical autobiography,
Little Did I Know, is everywhere preoccupied with the question of “a philosopher’s
or writer’s autobiography, which, like Wordsworth’s Prelude (quality aside), tells
the writer’s story of the life out which he came to be a (his kind of) writer?”
(Little Did I Know, 5). Stephen Mulhall offers insightful comments about Cavell’s
various relations to psychoanalytic and Freudian thought in particular in the
introduction and commentaries in The Cavell Reader (New York: Blackwell, 1996),
1–21, and in his Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary.
12. One can see this most clearly in Cavell’s early work, where he also
occasionally uses “philosophy” or “traditional philosophy” synonymously with
terms designating transcendence, or rather attempts at transcendence. “This is the
sort of thing that happen with astonishing frequency in philosophy. We impose a
demand for absoluteness (typically of some simple physical kind) upon a concept,

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 20 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 21

and then, finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand,
we accommodate this discrepancy as nearly as possible.” Cavell, “Aesthetic
Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77.
13. The catchphrase and distinction between the actual and the eventual
everyday, which then catches on both in Cavell’s own thinking and, explosively, in
the writing on Cavell, comes from Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America:
Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press,
1989), 46. Andew Norris has a very fine discussion of this distinction, and it’s
forbearers in Mill and Heidegger, in Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical
Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018),
9–10. Stephen Mulhall also finds resonance between Cavell’s thinking here and
Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s constant confrontation with “the they.” See
The Cavell Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996).
14. The ordinary language procedures of Austin and later Wittgenstein, Cavell
writes, “present themselves as returning us to the ordinary, a place we have
never been” (emphasis in original). Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 9–10. For more on this,
see Sandra Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, trans. Daniela
Ginsbourg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
15. There are of course many metaphilosophical remarks in the Investigations;
in a sense, the entirety of the text may be taken to be “metaphilosophical.” But I
have in mind, as a start, §89–133 of what was previously known as “Book One”
of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,
P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). There is
an extraordinary quantity of literature on these passages. For one representative
example, see James Conant, “Wittgenstein’s Methods,” in The Oxford Handbook
of Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 620–45.
16. One of Cavell’s earliest and most sustained attempts to trace resonances
between the Transcendentalists and Wittgenstein comes from his This New
Yet Unapproachable America. For more on this connection, see Sandra Laugier,
“Transcendentalism and the Ordinary,” European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy I-1/2 (2009), https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/
pdf/966.
17. I am grateful to Tyler Roberts for this reminder. Cavell’s notion of modernism
is in this respect quite different from that of, say, Arthur Danto.
18. For an interesting comparison, with many similarities and (hence) many
differences to Cavell’s view, and of course much more detail than can be provided
here, compare John J. Stuhr’s account of philosophies in Pragmatic Fashions:
Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism, and the Absurd (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2016).

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 21 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 22 eric ritter

19. For further information and historical records on the “Association of Afro
and African-American Students at Harvard,” later redubbed the “Harvard
Black Students Association” in 1977, see “African and African American
Studies at Harvard: Historical Sources,” https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.
php?g=1020373&p=7391617.
20. See Cavell, Little Did I Know, 505–12. A few years earlier, Cavell participated
in the 1964 “Freedom Summer,” organized by SNCC (Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee), one of only three Harvard faculty members to accept the
invitation to teach at Tougaloo College, a Historically Black College outside of Jackson,
Mississippi. Cavell’s participation in the 1964 Freedom Summer undoubtedly
informed his support for the resolution at Harvard four years later in 1968.
21. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America.
22. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 1939b, “Creative Democracy: The Task
Before Us,” in John Dewey and the Promise of America, Progressive (Education Booklet
No. 14), Columbus, Ohio: American Education Press. Reprinted in LW14: 224–30.
23. Cavell’s characterizations of moral perfectionism often convey this feel: of
rechanneling the “disappointment with the world as it is” characteristic of skeptical
denial into a more useful direction: toward self-fashioning or toward a “reform of
transfiguration of the world.” Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register
of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2.
24. Cavell’s definitive exploration of this topic is his 1996 Presidential Address to
the Eastern APA, reprinted as “Something Out of the Ordinary,” in Philosophy the
Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7–28.
25. Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:212 and 5:216.
26. Cf., for example, Cavell’s claim in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome
that he aims for the account of moral perfectionism he is developing to not only
“be compatible with democracy, but its prize.” Cavell, Conditions Handsome and
Unhandsome: Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990), 28.
27. For a robust and detailed recent argument along these lines, see Linda
Martín Alcoff, “Philosophy’s Civil Wars,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 87 (2013), 16–43. See also Amir R. Jaima’s “Africana
Philosophy as Prolegomenon to Any Future American Philosophy,” Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2018): 151–67.
28. Daniele Lorenzini, “Stanley Cavell, 1926–2018,” Radical Philosophy
Review 2, no. 3 (2018), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/stanley-
cavell-1926–2018. Lorenzini notes two strands or threads giving unity to Cavell’s
work: (1) what Cavell called “the quest for the ordinary”; and (2) Cavell’s “quest for
a specifically American philosophical tradition, independent of the (mainstream)
analytic one,” a tradition branching off from Cavell’s readings of Emerson. Here,
I am adding a third, one which Lorenzini’s work has also helped to clarify: namely,
this notion of a philosophical practice of activity through writing.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 22 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 23

29. Cf., for example, Cavell’s claim in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome
that he aims for the account of moral perfectionism he is developing to not only
“be compatible with democracy, but its prize.” Cavell, Conditions Handsome and
Unhandsome, 28.
30. There are many examples of this, including: Erin McKenna and Scott L. Pratt,
American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015; Linda Martín Alcoff, “Philosophy’s Civil Wars,” Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 87 (2013), 16–43; Amir R. Jaima,
“Africana Philosophy as Prolegomenon to Any Future American Philosophy,”
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2018): 151–67; Lewis R. Gordon, An
Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
31. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 46.
32. Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin, “Introduction,” in The Pragmatism
Reader: From Peirce to the Present, ed. Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1–12.
33. For a flawed but representative example of Cavell’s attempt to differentiate
Emerson’s procedures from Dewey’s in particular, see Cavell’s “What’s the Use
of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” reprinted in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes,
ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 215–24.
A better example of Cavell’s attempt to isolate something particular about the
achievements of the American Transcendentalists can be found in Cavell’s study
of Walden, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
34. That is, if part of the ambition of European Enlightenment philosophy is
to demarcate the world-disclosing faculty of “reason” from the world-concealing
faculties of “passion” or “imagination,” or to show the role or non-role of each
faculty in the constitution of human knowledge, then such a project cannot but be
tied up in the demarcation of the boundaries of the nonrational, or even of the non-
or subhuman, for those ways of being and knowing that do not fall in line with
the “rational.” I say “cannot but be tied up” in such a project because, whatever
their achievements, thinkers of the European enlightenment were informed by a
colonial-era episteme of reason versus passion, civilization versus savagery, much
larger and more controlling than their own work could account for: a source of
“unreason” their pursuit of reason did not, and arguably could not, uncover.
35. Many similar thoughts can also be found in Dewey’s aesthetics, yet another
reason one might conclude that Cavell was so preoccupied to defend his claim
about Emerson and Thoreau’s unique contributions to philosophy that he
undersold opportunities to note their resonance with Dewey and James, as Russell
Goodman has suggested. See Goodman’s “Cavell and American Philosophy,” in
Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell Goodman (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 100–17.
36. For a fascinating and deeply relevant application of these ideas, see Paul
Taylor’s “Melting Whites and Liberated Latinas: Identity, Fate, and Character in

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 23 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 24 eric ritter

Fools Rush In,” in Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136–58.
37. Martin Gustaffson, “Familiar Words in Unfamiliar Surroundings: Davidson’s
Malapropisms, Cavell’s Projections,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies
19, no. 5 (2011): 643–68. See also Gustaffson’s “What is Cavellian Perfectionism?,”
Journal of Aesthetic Education 48, no. 5 (2014): 99–110.
38. I am very grateful to Sabeen Ahmed, Wout Cornelissen, John Lachs, and
Tyler Roberts for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as to
the useful comments of two anonymous reviewers. I am grateful to Cathleen and
David Cavell, for many reasons, and once more, for everything, to John Lachs.

works cited
“African and African American Studies at Harvard: Historical Sources.” Harvard
Library. Last updated September 4, 2020, https://guides.library.harvard.
edu/c.php?g=1020373&p=7391617.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Philosophy’s Civil Wars.” Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 87 (2013): 16–43.
Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Cavell, Stanley. “Emerson.” In Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the
Moral Life, 19–34.
Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004.
Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002.
Cavell, Stanley. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After
Wittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989.
Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2004.
Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1994.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
Cavell, Stanley. “Something Out of the Ordinary.” In Philosophy the Day After
Tomorrow, 7–28.
Cavell, Stanley. “Thinking of Emerson.” In The Senses of Walden: An Expanded
Edition, 121–38.
Cavell, Stanley. “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” In Emerson’s
Transcendental Etudes, edited by David Justin Hodge, 215–24. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 24 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 cavell and the everyday of thinking 25

Conant, James. “From Positivist Rabbi to Resolute Reader: James Conant in

Conversation with Niklas Forsberg.” The Nordic Wittgenstein Review 2
(2013): 131–60.
Conant, James. “Wittgenstein’s Methods.” In The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein,
edited by Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn, 620–45. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Crary, Alice, and Joel de Lara. “Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Ordinary Language
Philosophy? A Plea for Reviving a Wrongly Reviled Philosophical
Tradition.” Graduate Philosophy Journal 39, no. 2 (2019): 317–32.
Davidson, Arnold. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient
Thought.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary
Gutting, 123–48. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Dewey, John. “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.” In John Dewey and the
Promise of America, Progressive Education Booklet, No. 14. Columbus:
American Education Press, Inc., 1939. Reprinted in John Dewey: The
Later Works, 1925–1953: Volume 14, 1939–1941: Essays, Reviews, and
Miscellany, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 224–30. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1988.
Diamond, Cora. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
Donatelli, Piergiorgio. “Moral Perfectionism and Virtue.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 2
(2019): 332–50.
Goodman, Russell B. “Cavell and American Philosophy.” In Contending with
Stanley Cavell, edited by Russell B. Goodman, 100–17. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Gordan, Lewis R. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
Gustaffson, Martin. “Familiar Words in Unfamiliar Surroundings: Davidson’s
Malapropisms, Cavell’s Projections.” International Journal of Philosophical
Studies 19, no. 5 (2011): 643–68.
Gustaffson, Martin. “What is Cavellian Perfectionism?” Journal of Aesthetic
Education 48, no. 5 (2014): 99–110.
Jaima, Amir R. “Africana Philosophy as Prolegomenon to Any Future American
Philosophy.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2018): 151–67.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of the Power of Judgement. Edited by Paul Guyer.
Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Laugier, Sandra. “Transcendentalism and the Ordinary.” European Journal of
Pragmatism and American Philosophy I-1/2 (2009), https://journals.
openedition.org/ejpap/pdf/966.
Laugier, Sandra. Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy. Translated by
Daniela Ginsburg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Lorenzini, Daniele. Éthique et politique de soi: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell et les
techniques de l’ordinaire. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J Vrin, 2015.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 25 18/02/21 11:28 AM

 26 eric ritter

Lorenzini, Daniele. “La vie comme ‘réel’ de la philosophie. Cavell, Foucault,

Hadot et les techniques de l’ordinaire.” In La voix et la Vertu : Variétés du
perfectionnisme moral, edited by Sandra Laugier, 469–87. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2010.
Lorenzini, Daniele. “Stanley Cavell, 1926–2018.” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 3
(2018): 122–26.
McKenna, Erin, and Scott L. Pratt. American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the
Present. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Mulhall, Stephen. Introduction to The Cavell Reader, 1–21. Cambridge: Blackwell
Publishers Ltd., 1996.
Mulhall, Stephen. On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing
Aspects. London: Routledge, 1990.
Mulhall, Stephen. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994.
Norris, Andrew. Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work
of Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Owen, David. “Perfectionism, Parrhesia, and the Care of the Self: Foucault and
Cavell on Ethics and Politics.” In The Claim to Community: Essays on
Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy, edited by Andrew Norris, 128–55.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Stuhr, John J., Pragmatic Fashions: Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism, and the Absurd.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Talisse, Robert B., and Scott F. Aikin. Introduction. In The Pragmatism Reader:
From Peirce to the Present, edited by Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin, 1
–12. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Taylor, Paul. “Melting Whites and Liberated Latinas: Identity, Fate, and Character
in Fools Rush In.” In Ethics at the Cinema, edited by Ward E. Jones and
Samantha Vice, 136–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009.

JSP 35.1_01_Ritter  Page 26 18/02/21 11:28 AM