bs_bs_banner

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2012

Stanley Cavell in Conversation with

Paul Standish

Having acknowledged the recurrent theme of education in

Stanley Cavell’s work, the discussion addresses the topic
of scepticism, especially as this emerges in the interpretation
of Wittgenstein. Questions concerning rule-following,
language and society are then turned towards political
philosophy, specifically with regard to John Rawls. The
discussion examines the idea of the social contract, the
nature of moral reasoning and the possibility of our lives’
being above reproach, as well as Rawls’s criticisms of
Nietzschean perfectionism. This lays the way for the
broaching of questions of race and America. The theme
of the ordinary, which emerges variously in Cavell’s
reflections on Emerson, Wittgenstein and Austin, is
taken up and extended into a consideration of Thoreau’s
‘experiment in living’. The conversation closes with
brief remarks about happiness.

Paul Standish: Perhaps our starting point could be your 2004 title Cities of
Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, because that
title brings together several of the main themes you have been concerned
with over the years: ‘cities of words’, with its inheritance of Plato and
Augustine, simultaneously places the political in relation to language, and
language in relation to the political, and it combines with the rest of the title
to evoke moral perfectionism and education, and the nature of (philosophi-
cal) writing and teaching. I would like to come back more specifically to
matters of education later on but perhaps bear in mind throughout our
discussions that this is the recurrent, sustained theme in what you say and
write. Can we begin though with something seemingly more circum-
scribed: the abiding preoccupation in your writing, so it seems to me, with
scepticism? Now, scepticism surfaces most clearly with what you say about
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and with your rejection of the
idea that the Investigations is to be taken as a refutation of scepticism. It is
not exactly that you deny that there is any refutation. It is rather that you
take this to miss the point, which is that Wittgenstein’s writing attests to the
existential truth in scepticism. The problem seems to be solved, but the itch
returns. Peace is found, but only for the problem to start up again. Could
you, as a starting point, just expand a little on why scepticism has been so
important in your work?

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by Blackwell
Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
156 P. Standish

Stanley Cavell: Well, you’ve put your finger on the place intellectually
where it started from, and you yourself have already said that there’s an
existential dimension to it. But intellectually it didn’t start with my
feeling first of all absolutely knocked out, or simply stopped in my
tracks, by the Philosophical Investigations, really feeling that I had to
start work all over again. Not at first. At first the Investigations just struck
me as a kind of unsystematic pragmatism, so I’m not surprised that
people just regard it that way, but I wish they would have a second
thought. That it transformed everything for me in philosophy—that was
also true. And almost simultaneously with that—but not really, not simul-
taneously, but a second inheritance of the Investigations—was the dis-
covery that the economical way, the virtually received way, to take the
book was as a refutation of scepticism. And that seemed to me wrong in
a way that was completely essential to what seemed to me inescapable in
the text: that there is a dimension of anxiety, of threat, in human con-
versation and confrontation that the Investigations seems to me respon-
sive to; that this couldn’t be so if the possibility of scepticism were not
incessantly on its mind. Why ideas of risk, threat, anxiety all seemed to
me to be catered for within the concept of scepticism I didn’t know when
this came out. It’s what philosophy calls scepticism but what in Wittgen-
stein turns out to be something different: thirty years later I will say that
Wittgenstein gives a portrait of the modern subject that contains issues of
diversity and anxiety and sickness and torment. Those are the things that
I found in the Investigations at the beginning that disassociated my
responses from those of virtually all of my friends who were reading
the work. They took away the pain and solace from the book, which for
me was exactly to miss its dark side—its treatment, its recognition of the
possibility, even sometimes I say the necessity, of scepticism. I felt this to
be, for example, fundamental to meaning, to speech, to the inherent risk
in speech.

P.S.: If I take you outside the Investigations, and we move to scepticism in

epistemology, is it right then to say that scepticism in this intellectualised
form—its philosophical form in epistemology—is a symptom of the
repression of an anxiety at a more existential level?

S.C.: Your understanding is that scepticism itself was an intellectualisation

of this problem?

P.S.: What I tried to say was that if we consider scepticism in its episte-
mological formulations, then even in its most dry, theoretical arguments it’s
actually a symptom of a repressed anxiety.

S.C.: That’s exactly what I think, but I didn’t see it that way. I had to come
to it. I saw scepticism as really so many philosophers do. Rorty is famous
for thinking it’s just simply a made-up philosophical problem: it’s just
something you teach freshmen to titillate them. And I could see why it was
often taught as nothing more than an intellectual problem.

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 157

P.S.: In the opening of Part Three of the The Claim of Reason you talk
about the way that false views of the inner and the outer produce and
sustain one another.1 This seems to me a very rich way of putting what’s
going on in the Investigations, as well as evoking powerfully a Wittgen-
steinian sense of the autonomy of grammar. At an early point in The Claim
you write: ‘the polis is the field within which I work out my personal
identity and it is the creation of (political) freedom.’2 I just wonder if you
could expand a little on how the autonomy of grammar and the relationship
between conceptions of the inner and the outer relate to the creation of the
polis or the individual’s relation to the polis.

S.C.: Good question . . . hard question. As I think into this, I’m trying to put
aside your questions about scepticism in order to think about that some
more, because I’m not satisfied with where I left that. Let’s go on, then
we’ll go back to it. The idea of the city as the outer and the individual as the
inner is first of all something that itself I want to question. One way to start
thinking about it is that I want to make both the private and the public
problems. Another is to make each of them tasks. When the issue of private
language comes up in Wittgenstein, and when philosophers insist that
language is public, they tend to find a substitute for these thoughts in the
idea that grammar is autonomous. I find that contentious: it advances
pictures of how things are, as Wittgenstein would put it. That language can
become private needs to be acknowledged, and to make language public is
a responsibility in each of us. So this means to me that what’s called the
public can also become unknown to itself. In a sense, the idea is to make
sense. Since I put the issue of morality—especially perfectionist morality
but morality quite generally—as an issue of making oneself intelligible to
those to whom one is required to be intelligible (that’s not to everyone all
the time), that obligation already suggests that language is not, as such,
either public or private. Not public because you never see to the end of it.
Not private because there is always a particular route in which it has
become private. So at the end of the private road, you can find somebody if
you know how to walk the road. This goes with the title Cities of Words. It
really encodes this issue of wanting to problematise both the sense that the
city is public and the sense that the individual may simply withdraw into
privacy in their language. In the context of The Republic, in which the idea
of the city of words comes up at the end of book nine, Socrates in effect
says that the philosopher will only become public, make his thoughts
known, enter the polis obviously, in the perfect city. And as there is no
perfect city (he also insists on this), there seems to be the implication that
you are to harbour philosophy as a matter only of conversation among
friends and keep it hidden from the rest of society—until this paradoxical
thing happens of philosophers becoming kings, which we may or may not
be able to even imagine. And when I then in the very opening introduction
say that the next self is hidden within the present self, I also say the next
society is hidden within our present society.3 This refers to something in
The Republic. In The Republic, you don’t have a picture of societies getting
better. You have a picture of society being imagined by philosophers and

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
158 P. Standish

then devolving into worse and worse states. So I want to problematise the
question whether the individual or language or society are themselves
either, as such, inner or outer.

P.S.: In your work on J. L. Austin, and with regard to such ordinary

language philosophy formulations as ‘When we say . . . , we mean . . .’, you
have put emphasis on the way that this is a first-person plural utterance.
And two things, I think, come through: that the individual speaker is
offering something for others to register their thoughts or their responses
against; and, equally, that there must be an assent to the political realm
within which one finds oneself, such that the offering of the words is a
continual attempt to express or test the possibilities of that assent. It seems
very important to me that that’s happening not just at the level of overt
political discussion. It actually pervades what we do. It runs through all our
ordinary words. That same responsibility is there. Is that about right?

S.C.: That’s absolutely right.

P.S.: When your concern is to problematise the individual and the society,
I wonder how you react then to the line taken by Stephen Mulhall, who
seems keen to cast you as a liberal—presumably as opposed to a commu-
nitarian.4 In some ways what you write seems to me to defy the very terms
of that dichotomy. How do you feel about that?

S.C.: I feel that that’s also right. In the collection on my work edited by
Andrew Norris,5 on the relations of my work with political theory, often in
conjunction with Wittgenstein, the discovery on the part of a large number
of individuals is that that’s exactly what interests them in what I’m doing.
That it tests the distinction between communitarianism and liberalism. That
the community, rather than its existence being taken for granted, is always
in the process of forming itself in every word.

P.S.: Why do you think it’s important to Stephen Mulhall to cast you in that
way?

S.C.: I think it’s related to his wanting to protect the idea of rules as the
basis of grammar that he inherited from a kind of economical reception
of Wittgenstein. It’s a loyalty to his education. He’s an extremely intel-
ligent person. I think he once described his motive in writing his large
book about my work in terms of his wanting to reconcile what he’s
grown up with, on the one hand, with my innovations in the subject, on
the other, and to find that they weren’t such a large departure. There are
a number of departures which he cares about, which is what prompted
him to write the book, but he wanted to think that he could preserve at
least what was said about the inheritance of language and still have Freud
and Heidegger, the relationship with the arts, the other things that he
cares about, and keep all this intact. That may be much too crude an
answer, but it is how I think about it.

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 159

P.S.: On the topic of your relation to rules, perhaps we could talk also about
your relation to Rawls. Your writings on Rawls extend back over more than
four decades, including significant stretches of The Claim of Reason. Quite
late in your essay on Rawls in Cities of Words, in which you acknowledge
in various ways what Rawls has achieved, you say: ‘Grant that Rawls has
accomplished this feat of justification for specific principles of justice.’6
You have great respect for his work, but you have doubts about the whole
project of a contract theory of political philosophy, where you identify
problems of an epistemological kind. And you think Rawls’s emphasis on
cooperation sells us short of conversation, which is what we need. And, a
further point which I shall come back to later on, you worry about Rawls’s
entertaining of the possibility of our lives’ being above reproach. But what
turns on the idea of conversation for you has a lot to do with a shift from the
kind of responsibility that contract theory might provide towards a respon-
sibility that extends into a responsiveness—and that seems crucial to so
much of your work. Can you elaborate on some of that, please?

S.C.: Yes, again it’s an issue of the contract as not having happened in the
past. The way I want to bring it into the present is not to ask whether I
would have agreed to these principles of justice in the past when they were
open with this thought experiment going on . . . and so forth. It’s rather that
what I have to do is to continually assess my consent in the present, that
society is in fact itself always in formation. That thing he says happened—
and that I can as a thought experiment go back into—is in fact actually
happening, and I am participating in this now. We are now in the process of
choosing. We’re hoping, and in a democracy the wager is, that we can get
closer and closer, as it were, to acting on principles that we can accept. But
this sense of the fragility of the community in every sense . . . Of course it
doesn’t seem as though we’re doing that, but it doesn’t seem as though the
apple is drawing the earth to it either, it’s so small. But the attraction, as I
want it, is to go both ways. I make the apple increment in drawing society
to me.7 And that for me involves considerable difference, so far as it goes,
with responsibility and response. Rawls’s wanting to be able to say to a
fellow citizen that he is above reproach is exactly what can never be said.
It’s the ‘never’ that interests me there. Rawls’s ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, a
very important essay from 1955,8 is really transported at large into A
Theory of Justice. His definition of an institution as characterised by rules
is all I want from that. He characterises baseball as formed by rules, and
that’s the large example that he uses throughout the essay. That allows him
a response to questions or criticisms in the form of: ‘You don’t know the
game. If you ask for four strikes, then you don’t understand the rules. The
rule is that you have three strikes.’ And I say that in the moral life there is
no such rule. Translation: to invoke a response as a rule of an institution in
response to a moral criticism is to say to the person raising the criticism that
they are morally incompetent—they don’t know the game. And I say that in
the moral life there is never a moment that you can say that. You can hope
that society is good enough. You can hope that the society you are in
obedience to is good enough to tolerate. But if you say to the critic,

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
160 P. Standish

breaking them expertly open, ‘You don’t know the rules of the game’,
you’re ruling the fellow citizen out as a morally competent judge of
whether the society is shared, is fair enough, whether it meets the condi-
tions of the principles of justice well enough to support.

P.S.: In the process of discussing this you use this rather wonderful image
of whittling down the problem so that you sharpen the stick until it becomes
something to kill a deer with.9 While that’s clearly a concern with regard to
contract theory, it’s actually a concern you have about moral theory more
broadly, and sometimes you refer to moral theory, or maybe the institution
of morality itself, as having degenerated into moralism. Can you place this
in relation to the distinction between acting in accordance with the moral
law and acting for the sake of the moral law? How far does the latter lead
towards the kind of conversation that you’re after, the other commitments
you’re expressing?

S.C.: I’m always amazed to find, to discover, how often Kant is in the
background of my thoughts. I would say there that it is something that I
need to be getting at an interpretation of, that distinction in Kant. But I
think conformity with the law is Emerson’s conformity—that you’re imag-
ining that there is a set of laws which dictates how you are to respond to
them and which could have umpires saying whether you have or have not
obeyed them. But for the sake of the law opens up the question what the law
is and the extent to which you can be sure that you’re obeying the law. Kant
says you can never be sure, and that ‘never be sure’ I take with the utmost
seriousness. Sometimes Kant suggests ‘don’t go there—we’ll never reach
there if you go: we’ve got to obey the moral law, even if you suspect that
it’s in bad faith.’ But my further interpretation is that it’s that possibility,
that hope, that keeps perpetually open the conversation of justice—the
conversation of individual justice as well as the conversation of society’s
justice.

P.S.: In this conversation of justice then, is the moral law always still to be
discovered or always still to be achieved?

S.C.: I assume both. I assume that the moral life is not pursuable apart from
conversation.

P.S.: Yes, I’m trying to open up a distinction, at what is, I think, a meta-
physical level, between a moral law that’s somehow already there, which
human beings, frail creatures that they are, have difficulty in deciphering,
and a law that is much more projective or existential or Emersonian, let’s
say—something that is only ever to be worked out in the living and is
always still to come.

S.C.: Well again, I want room for both. There’s a sense in which it’s only
in conversation that the moral law is lived in the right spirit. But I want
room also to be made for what it means to say that the moral law is always

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 161

there whether we see it or not, whether we recognise it or not. That sense

of objectivity about morality is a measure that guides all moral conversa-
tion in my view. That we’re never just talking about you and me, however
personal these explorations of the soul, as I put it, get. It’s always me as a
human being that I’m talking about, which is something Aristotle says has
to be true of morality. If we’re talking about what’s just and what’s good,
we’re not talking about what’s good for generals or husbands or jewellers,
we’re talking about what’s right and what’s wrong, and good and bad and
pleasurable enough.

P.S.: I didn’t at all mean to undermine the possibility of objectivity, but

does it make sense to talk about an objectivity to be achieved?

S.C.: Ah! There I think what that means is that there is something that is not
in question. Then no, I don’t think that. What I don’t think is that there is
a good or right that stands there for us merely to discover.

P.S.: Let me take you back to Rawls. A further thing you criticise him for
is his representation, or misrepresentation as you would put it, of
Nietzsche—of Nietzsche’s perfectionism. And this clearly is going to be
very close to your heart because of your development of Emersonian moral
perfectionism. Could you just say a little bit about how Rawls gets
Nietzsche wrong, especially with regard to the idea, in Nietzsche, of an
aristocracy?

S.C.: There is something that’s simply wrong in this interpretation. What

I’m in doubt about is the extent to which Nietzsche encourages or invites
the misreading that I accuse Rawls of. It may be that he is playing with the
reader there, and it’s playing with the reader that’s questioned. That is an
open question in my mind why he’d do that. That has something to do with
‘I see a higher self above me, and all I do is for the sake of that.’ Now Rawls
takes this as self-evidently a case of elitism in which you subject yourself
to the will of a higher person; and I say that that higher person is you. In
Emerson, it’s much clearer. I think it’s probably the thing he is more
indebted to Emerson for than anything else. Consider the idea of the
illustrious. The idea of Emerson wanting to take another as someone to
idolise, and to put one’s life in service of, is so grotesque that there’s no
room for doubt. But in Nietzsche, why would he allow you, even encourage
you, to make this mistake? I’m still in two minds about it. Nietzsche may
himself later have been in two minds about this, I think. At least in the early
work, in a work such as Schopenhauer as Educator, it can be read as
though the higher self is yours. ‘But isn’t Nietzsche the man who talked
about the superman and so forth and was inspired?’ It’s the cliché in
Nietzsche, and of course I wanted to move against that. I now see what I
was mostly concerned with was one more repression of Emerson, since this
is about as close as one writer can come to another. When I put those
passages side by side with Emerson, I just take it that one can see that he
is transcribing an Emersonian thought here. So, in rejecting Nietzsche,

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
162 P. Standish

Rawls is joining the line of philosophy in principle rejecting Emerson.

That’s what in that moment was as much at stake for me as anything in
Nietzsche. One question on my mind is why Rawls couldn’t just have
accepted this and not insisted on that interpretation of perfectionism. I am
very attracted to the idea that the person that Rawls really had in mind there
is George Bernard Shaw. It fits exactly the sort of popularised Nietzschean-
ism that Shaw went in for at a certain moment in his life. No Rawlsian to
my knowledge has tried to answer this. It is true that I have great admiration
for Rawls’s books, but it remains to my mind to be determined how large
a concession it would require for a Rawlsian just to believe that these things
might be so. One concession I think it might be impossible for a Rawlsian
to accept concerns the issue of being above reproach. There is a sense in
which the entire theory of justice can be seen as a way of understanding
how one can tolerate existence in a society that is inevitably to some extent
unjust. Well, that’s Plato’s problem, Socrates’ problem, and at the end of
The Republic he just simply says you cannot. Philosophy cannot tolerate
this. It cannot allow itself to be subjected to the wrath of an unjust society.
Now since Rawls is committed to democracy, and so am I, he has to give
some answer to how it is one can live. And all he answers to the question
of how can we bear this as philosophers who know, who recognise the
injustice, is that we can do it because personally we are above reproach: it
is as good as it can be; or we are able to work to make it better; it is
re-formable. Maybe it is to say that you are above reproach personally that
the entire theory allows you to do. But what is the point of it? Is it just to
measure a society and have a taxonomy of society? But I don’t think that’s
what this is for. The mode in which I conceive the just society is in a
reflective judgement in my intuition. I am able to say our partial compli-
ance with the principles of justice is good enough. Good enough to support.
And my support in this is shown in being able to say: ‘I’m above reproach
and if you challenge me, I’ll tell you you’re morally incompetent.’ Now
take that away and say instead with me: ‘You’re right I’m compromised,
we’re all compromised, and if you want you can either go to work on it or
say that you’re doing all you can do.’You are exposed in that way, and then
it’s a version of ‘This is what I do’ (as in Wittgenstein) that you have to be
prepared to say.10 And there you take the sins of society upon you. That’s
not above reproach. You can continue the conversation of justice or you can
refuse to continue the conversation of justice, but that’s the choice in every
moment. You are confronted and either you say go to hell or you say let’s
talk further.

P.S.: A significant moment in your own early confrontation with the sins of
society, with the gravity of the apple’s fall, is recorded in Little Did I Know,
and I would like to recount that briefly here.11 Around the time of your
seventh birthday, in what must have been 1933, you are performing,
playing the piano, in the Kiddie Fox Review at the palatial, fabulous Fox
Theater in Atlanta. In an interlude you make your way upstairs to an open
area, where other children from the review are playing, and you notice a
further long flight of stairs over which is the sign ‘Colored Entrance’. You

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 163

remark wryly, in recalling this, that the British empiricists were right in
their theory that every idea in our heads is derived from elements that leave
an impression on us. This leaves an impression on you . . . But let me move
forward. It must be some time in 1942 or 1943, when you are sixteen or
seventeen, that you begin to escape the loneliness of your adolescence
through jazz. You perform in high school and other bands, and quite soon
you find yourself playing lead alto in a mostly black, professional band,
playing experimental music that excites you beyond your dreams. This
must have been quite overwhelming.

S.C.: I felt beatified . . .

P.S.: Then can I see this as one inflection of the ‘apple as increment’ in
drawing society towards you? Jazz, I am inclined to think, has special
significance in these things, and we’ll come back to this. But here there is
also a troubling thought. I have sometimes heard the view expressed that,
as a philosopher of American culture, you have not engaged sufficiently
directly with questions of race: you have not said how you see your relation
to these matters and to the black community at large.

S.C.: My ‘relation’? What is my relation? What is my relation to my son,

my wife . . . ? What is my relation? . . .

P.S.: I don’t imagine that you will react warmly either to the description of
yourself as a ‘philosopher of American culture’, on the grounds, I would
guess, first, that this is to objectify and contain that culture, very much in the
way that Emerson, in being embraced as part of the American literary
heritage, is philosophically repressed. Further, that this risks confining
matters to a politics of recognition that, for all its achievements, is inclined
to reduce or fix the very thing it sets out to respect. And further, that to see
things in terms of issues quite occludes the complex textures of experience
in which we have been formed. In fact, it is hardly the case that you have not
addressed matters of race—in your writings, say, on Emerson and Thoreau
with regard to slavery, on Fred Astaire dance routines, on Hollywood
movies more generally, or in the multiple cadences of Little Did I Know.12
These writings are not without their risks, as your critics have sometimes
been anxious to show, but you have not shied away from risk.13,14 And these
are costs of your being prepared, as you have sometimes phrased this, to
conduct your education in public.——But let me move the clock forward.
About a quarter of a century after the time when you are playing alto in the
band, now in 1969, you find you have a different part to play, in a crisis that
arises with the demand amongst students and colleagues at Harvard for the
establishment of a Department of Afro-American Studies. In fact, Rawls
joins you in support. And Cornel West will later go on to say that if it had not
been for you, there would never have been African-American Studies at
Harvard. He has also said explicitly, recently, ‘This courageous support is
consistent with his love of black people, including his love for me!’15 Your
intervention and support here are, it seems plain, commitments to extending

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
164 P. Standish

the democratic conversation.16——The risk-taking I have alluded to is an

opening to the new in conversation, very much along the lines exemplified
by jazz, in the way that Vincent Colapietro has recently tried to show, and
very much connected to what you find in Emerson too. Conversation is a
game of circles, Emerson tells us, with each new speaker emancipating us
from the last speaker, each taking his turn, each doing his turn, and then
giving way to the next, releasing us to new possibilities of the human.17 He
could be describing jazz. But to give this thought a further perfectionist
accent: each self is on a journey of ascent towards a further possibility of
itself, with no final perfectibility. And in this the figure of the friend
becomes crucial. This is not the friend who simply consolidates our position
where we are, but the friend who is ready to challenge us; Emerson speaks
of the ‘beautiful enemy’.18 And this has very rich echoes in Nietzsche. But
what is absent from Nietzsche, critically so for democracy, is the other side
of Emersonian moral perfectionism, and that’s the attention to ‘the low’, to
the common, which I take to be a further pull of the apple. It’s very
important for you that the ascent out of the Cave also involves the journey
back into the Cave. That aversion is not simply rejection. It may involve
something more like setting oneself up as an example, against what’s gone
wrong in one’s society, in order to lead it on to something else.——But I
would like to say something briefly about the relationship between the high
and the low in the account that I’ve just given. In respect to the high in
particular, the more Nietzschean emphasis, it seems that we have something
aneconomical here, something that at least breaks with economies of
exchange. I’m very interested in your writings on Coriolanus in this
respect.19 There, it seems to me, the infinite possibility, the non-exchange
aneconomy that exceeds bounds, is played off against an economy that is
quite rightly an exchange—that’s to say, an exchange involving the distri-
bution of food and the disposal of waste that any society must have as part
of its ordinary functioning. (It’s no coincidence that Shakespeare wrote the
play at a time when there were controversies over the development of the
sewage system in London.20) So if I’ve got it right, Emersonian moral
perfectionism has a place for both aneconomy and economy, the one
reaching always towards the next, best possibility, the other somehow
settling for what is good enough. Would that be right?

S.C.: I believe that is right, which means that Nietzsche is facing a response
on behalf of human beings committed to the possibility, to the wager of
democracy, as I guess I’ve put it a couple of times, which he rejects. I
couldn’t, in that way, be Nietzschean because this would be to have given
up a possibility of democracy before we have transformed ourselves. Either
we transform both or we are lost. But Nietzsche does find us at a dead
end—a dead end with Christianity and a dead end with democracy so far as
human beings so far have established themselves. That either we get to a
radical transformation of the human and let God die and regard ourselves
as equal to the deed of the killing of God, or there is no future . . . is
something that I don’t believe. In short, I’m much more of an Emersonian
than that. Emerson was as appalled by democracy in some ways as

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 165

Nietzsche might have been if he had experienced it. But appalled is

appalled, and I think he preferred to live with it. And the absolute idea that
there is something that only he knows and one or two followers is where I
can’t go with Nietzsche. I see it. I see how close it is. I see the temptation
for that. We can live with it and experience it in Heidegger. I think
Heidegger absolutely does see that, and if there is a way of accepting
Heidegger as a serious person, let me put it that way, in his connection with
Nazism, it’s in trying to understand this as an answer to some hideousness
that has already happened to the human being. And that it’s going to take,
not, as far as I can see, the murdering of all the Jews—I don’t think I have
to believe that that’s what Heidegger thought, I can believe that that is
something he regarded as an aberration . . . But, if there is forgiveness to
be found, it comes from accepting his seeing what Nietzsche saw with the
further step that he saw a solution, a political solution, which Nietzsche
most certainly did not.

P.S.: Perhaps I could go further with this idea of the low in Emerson and
touch on some of the Wittgensteinian associations.

S.C.: Yes, I didn’t even use the word ‘low’ there. Yes, well, I have said that
with the absolute rejection of Christianity comes the absolute rejection of
the low. I do mean that implication to be there. Emerson had not come to
an absolute rejection of Christianity—the church is another thing. But this
now gets really complicated, and we just have to take it very slow, but that’s
where I would look for the difference between them, in the relation to
religion.

P.S.: I’d like to get back to the idea of the ordinary via the low. You make
quite a lot of the notions of aversion and return at various points in your
work—for instance, of Wittgenstein’s returning of words to their ordinary
use. In your essay ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’,21 you say we are to turn, or
turn again, and that when Wittgenstein says that he means that there’s
something extraordinary about what we then find. The notion of the
extraordinary, of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, sometimes the
ordinary in the extraordinary, is something I would like to pursue. I want to
just try and get hold a little more firmly of what the idea of the ordinary
means for you. One aspect of it seems to be that there’s something fragile
or vulnerable about the ordinary. That the ordinary is not just the way
things happen to be. The ordinary, as we return to it, is an ordinary troubled
by scepticism. It’s certainly not a building block, as it were. This relates to
some extent to the ‘disappointment in criteria’ that you associate with
Wittgenstein, where to refuse the disappointment, not to sense the note of
frustration in ‘my spade is turned’, would be to risk metaphysicalising
criteria. It’s important that your concept of the ordinary is of something that
we shouldn’t be reverencing—that is, not giving it that special reverence
that you find in the ‘rediscovery’ of the ordinary in some art and literature.
In spite of your remarks about the extraordinary, I think you don’t want to
endorse that reverencing of the ordinary.

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
166 P. Standish

S.C.: Yes, that’s right. We don’t want, in short, the ordinary suddenly to
have become a metaphysical category. But I want to test a little the idea of
the fragility of the ordinary. Yes, it remains always to be rediscovered. Can
I respond a little?

P.S.: Yes, please do.

S.C.: One thing is to really start simple and to see that what I am trying to
do above all, and first of all, is to inherit Austin in Wittgenstein. I believe
in them as innovators quite essentially in philosophy. And their absolute
devotion to this idea is something that they left almost undiscussed. They
left it so that it’s just simply obvious that if you consult how we ordinarily
say things, judge things, you’ll see that philosophy is in continuous conflict
with this. How is it that we can do something like return words from their
metaphysical to their ordinary use? How can words get away from being
the ordinary things they are? And why should philosophy itself be disap-
pointed in the ordinary and have to attack it? Attack it in its dimension
called scepticism but also in its dimension called metaphysics? Metaphys-
ics and scepticism go together in Wittgenstein. You metaphysicalise the
idea of what it is to see an object then you create metaphysical objects
called ‘sense data’ or ‘objects as they are in themselves’ and so on. And
then you require what Wittgenstein calls a return to the ordinary. Austin
doesn’t speak of that, but I do. But I say this return is also to a place you’ve
never been. So I say let’s go, let’s speak then of two ordinaries: the actual
and the eventual. And now about the fragility, not only would I say—and it
seems to me you’ve put your finger phenomenologically exactly on some-
thing I’ve tried to refrain from saying over and over again—that we
shouldn’t treat the ordinary with reverence, as if we’re latter-day Words-
worthians. Not only not with reverence, but to see, to highlight in what we
accept, that the ordinary is violent. When Wittgenstein says of the ordinary
that philosophy leaves everything as it is, I’m taking this as an assertion that
the actual ordinary is precisely not something that philosophy has left as it
is. Philosophy has joined in the . . . (I wish I could have a verb for ‘violent’)
. . . in the making violent of the world: the thing that politics means by the
world having become a scene of power.

P.S.: The two ordinaries: we have, first, the actual ordinary, and then,
second, the eventual ordinary. Is it possible that the second is prior to the
first? (I know you like to say there are no ‘firsts’.) What I mean by that is
that the world into which children are brought is one that you might be
inclined to think of in terms of the actual ordinary.22 But that world is
already conditioned by adult society, which in its various levels of repres-
sion or recognition, of denial and acknowledgement, is already fraught or
freighted by the second ordinary.

S.C.: What that leaves out for me is the sense that you bring the child into
a world of mystery. You give a child a word and that word, each word, has
a destiny that is absolutely lost in the mist. That word keeps finding itself

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 167

in further and further regions, dimensions of itself.23 And then there’s the
moment at which education becomes the prohibition against any further
learning. There’s something you already know you want the child to mean
by these gestures, by these words, by this life it’s introduced to. So then it
must stop making a contribution to that world. It must stop wanting further
changes.

P.S.: So what I said missed out the mysterious nature of the child’s initia-
tion into the actual ordinary?

S.C.: Yes.

P.S.: I’m happy to have the actual ordinary further complicated. But
doesn’t the eventual ordinary cast its light back over all human practices?
The analogy would be, if I can just skip a few pages, that the father tongue
in Thoreau—that more mature, less immediate relation to language that we
come to via a kind of education, that ‘reserved and select expression, too
significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to
speak’24—casts its light back on the conditions in which the mother tongue
is apprehended.

S.C.: In some way it’s bound to, isn’t it? Now I think of all those childish
questions and childish jokes and puns. And there’s also a sense of ‘this far
and no further’ that’s a part of teaching, and that’s why it is that child wants
to grow up. What you’re saying yes to in all of this—that the region of
possibility is there . . . Absolutely, early on, I would like to say, probably as
early as language. By the time that the language becomes audible and
visible and comprehensible, it’s already quite late in the day. All kinds of
meaning are already established. How should one shape up to that? That
really is for me a fascinating but an open question.

P.S.: What I’m reaching for is something that disrupts developmental

psychology, at least as popularly understood. Can I try another analogy,
which is off at a tangent to some extent? Hubert Dreyfus talks about
Heidegger and the hammering in of a nail in a way that I find phenomeno-
logically quite convincing. But I’m inclined to think that no one hammers
a nail unless they’re already in a world in which you build a house, and
already in a world in which you will build a church. So the church casts its
light back on the ordinary action of the hammering in of the nail, or the
turning on of the light switch, or anything else you’d like to name.

S.C.: Well yes, Dreyfus has a rule-bound Heidegger which I can never get
very far into. It just seems to me it’s whatever is that we learned from the
interpretation of Wittgenstein that I deny, and from an interpretation of
Dewey or pragmatism that seems to be somewhat uninteresting. Quite early
in The Claim of Reason . . . Or let me put this differently—it really goes to
the heart of what you’ve just said. The heart of the question that’s raised is
of whether the four builders at the beginning of the Investigations are

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
168 P. Standish

speaking a language, and why the question ‘What are they building?’ has to
come up. Do you understand that when I say they are building? Or, do you
really imagine they’re building the first building? What is that? Are you
imagining? What is that? If not, what building do you think they’re build-
ing? And without that, it doesn’t make sense. Their barking is barking, and
the assistant comes and brings this thing . . . The best proof of what you’re
saying is the doubt that they are speaking at all.

P.S.: I think Wittgenstein is interested in edification—in what it is to edify

and what it is to build. In this he is not so far from Heidegger. But Dreyfus’s
Heidegger always sounds somewhat Californian to me in that it seems to be
reaching towards a kind of equilibrium and calm. Comparatively recently
he himself has acknowledged that he turned his eye away from the refer-
ences to death in the later part of Being and Time as a kind of existential
embarrassment.25 Yet it seems to me that the whole of Heidegger needs to
be understood really in those terms. The uninteresting reading of pragma-
tism that you refer to suggests again a kind of repression. It also partly
explains the failure to recognise the extent to which Thoreau anticipates
Heidegger, as your ‘Thoreau speaks of ponds, Heidegger speaks of rivers’
helps to show.26 It is difficult not to see Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond
as an experiment in building-dwelling-thinking, Heidegger’s title some one
hundred years later.27 You bring out very clearly in The Senses of Walden
the epic ambitions that Thoreau has for that book, however ironically these
may be expressed—for example, with The Iliad on his table alongside the
scraps of newspaper in which he has wrapped his lunch, both telling similar
stories. Conversely perhaps, the very subject of the book is the ordinary:
he’s just setting up a home for himself, planting his beans, weighing up his
neighbours, and so forth. You say somewhere in that book that Walden
might be seen as an exemplary perfectionist text on education and hence of
the same ilk as The Republic or Emile.28 Would you elaborate on that a
little?

S.C.: Sure, let me see. Well, some vision of human existence as perpetual
education is shared by the three of them. Something of the idea of human
society as it stands as lethal to individual human growth and education is
shared by them. In some ways, one might say avoiding the worst of a
culture is an issue for all of them. And education in some way as both the
content and the goal of human existence is shared by all of them. But not
shared is how you get this education, and not shared is how you’re chosen
for a different education. That is exactly a question that’s denied pertinence
by Thoreau and becomes all-important to Plato. Well, that’s a brief answer.

P.S.: That’s very helpful. I take it that it would surely be right to say that
Thoreau’s vision is, first, very much opposed to any kind of positivistic
politics or epistemology for that matter. Second, that it’s also opposed to
pragmatism. It’s at odds with the naturalism in Dewey, for example. It’s at
odds with the materialistic elements in pragmatism and maybe at odds with
what I referred to earlier, in connection with Dreyfus, as the equilibrium

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 169

that pragmatism sometimes seems to seek. The kind of politics Thoreau’s

writing invites, or the society that it invites, is a society of dissent and
maybe of irritability as well. You’ve talked about the irritability in the text
of Walden itself, and of course Emerson was famously uncomfortable with
Thoreau’s writing in certain phases. And third, there is the fact that, for all
the ways that Thoreau anticipates Heidegger, he is at odds with him in
crucial respects: we have Heidegger’s destiny and belonging, as against
Thoreau’s instilling and sojourning. Heidegger is nostalgic, longing for
home; Thoreau, living more lightly on the world, is ready for departure and
the new. Would that all be about right?

S.C.: Right. I now see . . . I didn’t at first see what you meant by the
equilibrium in pragmatism. Yes, it’s the thing that I fault at and still do in
the way Dewey thinks.29 He sets up what so often seem to me false
alternatives and then opts for the most obviously central. Yes, Thoreau is at
odds with each of them, as you suggest. But can I speak to this by trying to
think about whether the society that Thoreau envisions must be as irascible
as he himself is? That he is neither materialist nor transcendentalist
in Heidegger’s sense, nor an ‘equilibrist’, as Dewey may be . . . Neither
borrower nor lender be, neither impulsive nor rigid be, neither any
extremes—if I remember that sense of Dewey. I also get the sense in
Thoreau that he really means—and I don’t know how successful one can
take it to be—to be saying: ‘This is my way. I know how to do this. I know
how to build my own house and live on beans and so on. And what’s
yours?’ And that seems to me so fundamental in him that I ask to what
extent he can actually mean this? How far? He does use the phrase ‘trying
to find your own Walden’? And I do ask at what stage you can believe that
somebody can find their Walden and be a bank clerk . . . I do have to believe
that it cannot just be a life in the woods. I mean how could we be attracted
to this? How could there be an ecstasy for me in reading this thing—an old
Jew who spends too much time reading books and who gets impatient this
way and that way? If I really thought that what I ought to be doing is
planting a bean field . . . ‘But’, he seems to say, ‘I didn’t really like it
anyway. I did it because it helped me write.’ That he’s calling for a certain
eccentricity in human existence, not irascibility, but a certain insistence on
difference, I do believe; and I don’t know that we’ve cracked that case.
After all, it’s not in that way that different from Mill who’s asking for a
willingness to be eccentric if necessary.

P.S.: Let me float an idea with you, which may go beyond Thoreau: that
clearly he is not calling for a politics where we all share things in common
in the way that Heidegger is.

S.C.: That’s surely.

P.S.: So there’s a sense of opposition, at least, or dissent built into it. Might
he also be calling for a politics where one wants the problems? Where one
doesn’t aspire to there being a harmonious society in a sense that we all

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
170 P. Standish

share everything? Where one accepts that part of the price of the good life
is that it’s problems all the time? People are difficult, and you want to stay
with those problems, and you don’t want to get away from them.

S.C.: What I assume him to be saying is that you are going to have to put up
with problems no matter what you decide. There are other people in the
world. But I don’t want him to have to say more than he is. How you include
other people in your life is obviously the most open of questions for him. All
the problems start when somebody else tries to inhabit the same space.
Society is a standing problem. I don’t think you have to go so far as to say
he wants the problems, but I think he is saying something about expect
them. It’s hard. You haven’t even begun to try to live your own life. The
problems I have are ones with being as independent as the book shows you
need to be. But what happens when you introduce one other person into this
scene is a deeply important question, and I think one must be very careful
not to answer that too soon. You don’t have to create problems. You don’t
have to want problems. They are going to be there. One thing to say is: be
prepared to live in opposition to any of the ways that society starts to
organise itself. In this way it seems to me you’re absolutely right: it’s going
to try to organise itself in such a way as for there not to be problems. So what
you have to be prepared to do is to live in opposition to whatever is decided.
Now, how can everybody live in opposition to whatever is decided? That
doesn’t seem to make any sense. And how does one play this out? How is
one to imagine this? You can say that of course most people aren’t going to
obey this impulse—to try to live in opposition. But for those who can, and
to the extent that you find your Walden, it will be in opposition. But it
doesn’t mean—he is careful to say—it doesn’t mean you are attacking the
way other people live. You’re not being irascible. I would not run amok
against society. I would prefer to have society run amok against me.

P.S.: You point out there’s no Sophie and there’s no close other in the book
at all.30 I think that what I was trying to do there was to shift the question
of the good society away from the bigger questions of political institutions
and how I might stand for them or oppose them—civil disobedience and so
on—to the more, if you like, domestic level or the level where one shares
an office with someone, as a bank clerk or fellow teacher. And, you know,
a part of ordinary human intercourse is that people get on your nerves
sometimes. And sometimes you may feel like going away to the woods and
buying your little cottage in the country. But the good life would be not to
want to get away from those problems—to accept those problems as a
condition of our living together. I’m going away from Thoreau and won-
dering where you stand with regard to that. In a way, it’s a bit like the Cave
as well. Not wanting to escape the Cave, or at least overcoming that want
and going back to the mess. It’s very relevant to schoolteachers actually,
this, as well.

S.C.: Isn’t it? Yes, indeed. I don’t know what I think about that and I should
know.

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 171

P.S.: I’m sorry to interrupt you but I think it’s symbolised to some extent in
the Coriolanus essay where you go back to the muck and that’s what
Coriolanus can’t do.

S.C.: Oh I absolutely believe you go back, that’s for sure. My question is

the sense in which you want what’s impossible about Walden. Why is that
not going to happen? It’s the question that is always asked in trivial
reductive ways when they say ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but he went and he had
dinner at his mother’s house all the time. He didn’t really do what he made
out he did . . .’ I mean, this sort of low-life suspicion about his life there.
But what’s the truth of the impossibility of what he wants? One truth is that
he wants to write a book. One truth is that he wants to talk to somebody.
And he wants, he craves, he’s got to have this. Can you imagine him
not talking to the birds, and not talking to the trees, and not talking to
whoever’s going to come to his . . . book of Walden? And he says an old
man would have lost his senses before now. He knows that. What does this
life look like when it’s populated? So is it that you don’t want to run away
from these problems? Is it that you want to choose which problems you’re
willing to deal with? What determines your choice of friends? What deter-
mines your choice of occupation? All those choices somehow have to be
measured by these ecstasies that he’s able to see. But he has to go to these
lengths because the questions aren’t even raised. The questions that start
the book—Were you lonely? What did you eat? What are all these things?
. . . —these are the questions that are to measure our lives. These are the
questions in which you are examined in your life. That’s the philosophy of
it. What would life look like if it were the best it could be? Imagine one’s
life now. That taking one step towards this sort of freedom that he’s talking
about would be an ecstasy. Not even a summer place to get away to because
he says ‘I go to the country and I meet the same corruption that I found in
the city.’ There isn’t any place to go to. Utopia means there’s no place. I
suppose one kind of answer to you, when you say those are the problems
you shouldn’t want get away from, is ‘Don’t worry. You won’t.’ It really is
not a question whether you choose to get away from those problems or not.
If you chose to get away from those problems, you would never have a
moment of the joy that he’s describing in Walden. And the idea of the
particular issue of getting away only comes up, I think, under the aegis of
crisis. The loon-bird retires to a lonely pond to live through the crisis in its
life, the crisis of moulting in its life. So how often are there crises? I feel
you could ask your question in the form: ‘What crises should I not want to
get away from?’ Or, the other way: ‘There are certain crises I should not
want to get away from, I should not want to fail to recognise that I am in.’
This doesn’t mean that I should cultivate crises. There’ll be crises. But that
the book is written in a state of crisis does . . . I keep coming back to that
as my sense of the mood in which it affects me. You try to live your life and
these crossroads come up. Robert Frost’s dividing of the paths comes up.31

P.S.: Just a final thing: on the absence of Sophie in Walden. Given the
concern you have with marriage, particularly in connection with the genres

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
172 P. Standish

of Hollywood film you name,32 but also in your writings on Shakespeare,

and in respect of Milton’s claim that a ‘meet and happy conversation is the
chiefest and the noblest end of marriage’,33 to which you refer, what do you
make of the absence of sexual relationships or any reference to that area of
human life in this book? I can see how it connects with his being isolated
against society. One could hardly have that same sense of isolation if
Sophie were there. But, in terms of his political vision, where does it leave
us, that that much is absent?

S.C.: One question is to what extent you have to see this withdrawal in
religious terms? Is this a type of religious withdrawal? After all he returns,
he does at the end of the book, there is a return. And, the crisis is spent
without a sexual existence. But, if instead of saying there are troubles you
want to embrace, you put that as there are compromises that we should
learn to live with happily, even with the pain of them, then ‘happily’ means
the opposite of irascibility. Happiness . . . Cheerfulness, in a democracy, is
what I call a political emotion. Your democracy requires that morale be kept
up. It’s difficult. If it’s not a royal family that’s responsible for the happi-
ness of society and you have to accept the place that the monarchy finds for
you, then you have to be in a position of saying ‘We’re doing all right.’ This
is the amount of betterness we can have.

P.S.: Stanley Cavell, thank you very much.34

Correspondence: Paul Standish, Centre for Philosophy, Institute of Edu-

cation, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H0AL, UK.
Email: p.standish@ioe.ac.uk

NOTES
1. ‘I have suggested that the teaching is in service of a vision that false views of the inner and of the
outer produce and sustain one another, and I would be glad to have suggested that the correct
relation between inner and outer, between the soul and its society, is the theme of the Investiga-
tions as a whole. This theme, I might say, provides its moral’ (Cavell, 1979, p. 329).
2. The full paragraph runs: ‘What I consent to, in consenting to the contract, is not mere obedience,
but membership in a polis, which implies two things: First, that I recognize the principle of consent
itself; which means that I recognize others to have consented with me, and hence that I consent to
political equality. Second, that I recognise the society and its government, so constituted, as mine;
which means that I can answer not merely to it, but for it. So far, then, as I recognize myself to be
exercising my responsibility for it, my obedience to it is obedience to my own laws; citizenship in
that case is the same as my autonomy; the polis is the field within which I work out my personal
identity and it is the creation of (political) freedom’ (p. 23).
3. ‘So when Emerson asks of the American Scholar that he and she raise and cheer us, he is asking
for a step of political encouragement, one that assures us that we are not alone in our sense of
compromise with justice, that our sense of an unattained self is not an escape from, it is rather an
index of, our commitment to the unattained city, one within the one we sustain, one we know there
is no good reason we perpetually fail to attain’ (Cavell, 2004, p. 18).
4. Mulhall has written on Cavell in various texts, but see especially his painstaking and in many ways
fascinating book, Stanley Cavell’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Mulhall, 1999). For passages
indicative of the theme taken up here, see especially pp. 69–74. Somewhere near the middle of the
book, Mulhall phrases one of the conclusions he has reached in terms of the way that the

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 173
‘philosophical practice of recounting criteria’ stands ‘in some intimate relation to the ethics of
liberal individualism’ (p. 186). Late in the book he ponders tensions between, on the one hand,
Cavell’s appropriation of religious terms (‘redemption’, for example) and sense of the self as
divided, and, on the other, a fully secular liberalism (pp. 292–301).
5. The title is The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Norris,
2006).
6. In responding to A Theory of Justice, Cavell has been pondering the likelihood that ‘those in
relatively advantaged positions are going to have to remind those relatively disadvantaged that the
terms under which they are operating or cooperating come “as close as a society can to being a
voluntary scheme,” namely one to which consent is owed’ (Cavell, 2004, p. 187). This has a
bearing on the question of the place that remains for resentment or for (self-)reproach, and for the
importance of the sense of discrepancy that each would sustain.
7. At the end of the Introduction to Cities of Words, which has the sub-heading ‘In Place of the
Classroom’, Cavell writes: ‘What I call Emersonian perfectionism I understand to propose that
one’s quarrel with the world need not be settled, nor cynically set aside as unsettlable. It is a
condition in which you can at once want the world and want to change it—even change it as the
apple changes the earth, though we say the apple falls. (Nietzsche’s word for the spreading
inability to want the world is nihilism.)’ (Cavell, 2004, p. 18). See also a paragraph late in The
Claim of Reason, referring to Kleist: ‘One text from which to decipher the significance of our
suffocating from the half-swallowed apple of knowledge is Kleist’s “Marionette Theater”. Is being
human exactly to be incapable either of swallowing it or spitting it out? Is the gasping of the
human voice, say sobbing or laughing, the best proof of the human? or best picture, i.e., mask? To
swallow once for all would be to live always within ordinary language-games, within the every-
day; to spit once for all would be to live apart from just that life, to live without. In particular, to
live without the human voice (e.g., without appeal, without protest).—Is the temptation to
knowledge a product of the prohibition of knowledge, or the other way around, the prohibition a
projection or explanation of the temptation? (The decisive moment in the conjuring trick.)’
(Cavell, 1979, p. 477). On this parenthesis, see also Wittgenstein’s parenthetical remark: ‘The
decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one we thought most
innocent’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, #308).
8. Rawls’ essay was first published in The Philosophical Review (Rawls, 1955).
9. In the Introduction to Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Cavell writes of the contemporary
‘naturalizing’ of philosophy, its becoming a chapter of science, in Quine’s phrase. The classical
empiricist’s idea of ‘ “impressions” as the origin, or cause, of “ideas” ’ stylizes experience. ‘What
is at stake is,’ Cavell writes, ‘even before the idea of knowledge, the sense of how human
experience is to be called to account . . . If you cut down and stylize a handy tree branch by
smoothing it and whittling one end to a sharp point, you may kill deer for dinner . . . I might say
that much of this concern would be precisely with wording the impressions made upon me by the
things and persons and events of the world, the ways they matter to me, count for me, a capacity
in the word “impression” whittled away in the empiricists’ “impressions” ’ (Cavell, 2005, p. 2).
10. ‘If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am
inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.” ’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, #217).
11. See, especially, Cavell, 2010, pp. 21–23.
12. Relevant sections in Little Did I Know include pp. 428–432, 447–448, 506–511, 538–540. The
Senses of Walden—written one summer in a period of some six weeks, at a time when the war in
Vietnam was at its most disastrously intense—considers Thoreau’s response to slavery and to the
Mexican War (Cavell, 1992, esp. pp. 23–24, 78–82). See also the consideration of slavery in
‘Emerson’s Constitutional Amending’ in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Cavell, 2003, pp.
192–214). Reading Emerson’s ‘Fate’ in relation to the earlier address ‘On Emancipation in the
British West Indies’, and not forgetting philosophy’s ancient, perhaps continuing collusion with
slavery, Cavell writes: ‘The absoluteness of the American institutions of slavery, among the forms
human self-enslavement takes, hence the absoluteness of philosophy’s call to react to it, recoil
from it, is announced, as I have more or less said, in the sentence cited earlier from the West Indies
address: “Language must be raked, the secrets of the slaughter-houses and infamous holes that
cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been.” I take the idea of
raking language to be another announcement, in a polemical context, of Emerson’s philosophical
authorship, of what cannot be undertaken polemically’ (p. 210).

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
174 P. Standish

13. Robert Gooding-Williams criticises Cavell’s ‘Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise’, which
includes a reading of a dance sequence from Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 film The Bandwagon
(Gooding-Williams, 2006, Chapter 4; Cavell, 2005, Chapter 3). Astaire plays a song-and-dance
man seeking to make a come-back. At one critical moment, in a sequence that Cavell details
meticulously, Astaire trips over the outstretched foot of a black shoeshine man, and, as the scene
develops, the two enter into a dance together. Gooding-Williams acknowledges that certainly
Cavell is ‘right to insist that the walk-off demonstrates that the two can dance together on an equal
basis, equally choreographed, equally happy, and so on’ (p. 60). But he formulates and presses to
a different conclusion the question ‘How can white praise of a black culture whose terms of praise
it has appropriated defeat its perhaps inevitable tendency to a sort of theatricality that is pitched
to white fantasies and ideologies about African Americans?’ (p. 62)—a question that turns on a key
concept whose origins in Cavell are indicated by Gooding-Williams’s italicisation. Although this
may seem proximate to the burden of Cavell’s concerns, these are phrased rather in terms of how
far the acknowledging of mutuality, ‘gratitude for another’s existence, as for one’s own, . . . is
threatened by the routine’s raising the question of the right to praise’ (Cavell, 2005, p. 68).
14. In ‘White Philosophy in/of America’, an essay on Cavell and Rorty, Michael Peters has com-
mented on what he takes to be a ‘serious lack of historical reflexivity even among its most original
and enterprising philosophers’. This lack is ‘not just an occluding of the social or ignorance of the
political but rather reflects a consistent and continuing failure of American philosophy in its own
self-understanding and in its social and political awareness of itself’. Criticising such philosophy,
which he conjoins with the liberal political theory of Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, for being
‘colour-blind’, Peters christens it ‘white philosophy’. It is ‘not until Cornel West appeared on the
scene in the 1990s’, he writes, ‘that questions of race made it into mainstream American philoso-
phy and black philosophy at last became part of the canon and a legitimate object of philosophical
study’ (Peters, nd).
15. Correspondence between Cornel West and Paul Standish. See also Lawrence Rhu, whose Stanley
Cavell’s American Dream provides a thoughtful discussion of this aspect of Cavell’s work and, in
particular, of the reaction to his analysis of the Astaire routine (see especially Chapter 6, ‘Cavell’s
Rome’, in Rhu, 2006). Cavell recalls the campaign for a Department of Afro-American Studies at
Harvard in Little Did I Know (Cavell, 2010, pp. 508–512).
16. A few days after the discovery of the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers, Michael
Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, in Southern Mississippi in late June 1964,
Cavell travelled to Tougaloo College, a black liberal arts college on the edge of Jackson, Mis-
sissippi. At the invitation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he had agreed to
be a member of a group that, in manifestation of its solidarity with the civil rights movement,
would replace the summer school faculty at Tougaloo. This was conceived in response to the call
by Robert Moses—the Co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of
civil rights organisations, and the main organizer of the Freedom Summer of 1964—to concen-
trate on education rather than voter registration. The suggestion was that Cavell, in addition to
involving himself in discussions of philosophy, screen a film and offer a public lecture on it; in
the event he also played the piano in a concert of chamber music. Reflecting on the experience,
and having acknowledged the fear that had mounted in anticipation of the visit, Cavell writes: ‘If
there are two kinds of people, those whose instinct of response to a crisis is primarily political
and those whose instinct is psychological, I suppose I belong to the latter kind. Nevertheless, I
felt at once that to refuse the invitation to join this effort would have meant not merely failing
to put politics first, but to declare that I had no marked and developing political desires at all’
(Cavell, 2010, p. 430).
17. ‘When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last
speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to
another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men’ (‘Circles’, in Emerson, 1983,
p. 408). See also Colapietro, 2012.
18. ‘Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial
conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside’ (‘Friendship’, in Emerson, 1983, p. 351).
19. ‘Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics (“Who does the wolf love?”)’ (Cavell, 1983, pp.
60–96).
20. At the time of the play’s first production there was a dispute about water rights and about
the disruption to landowners caused by a project to bring fresh water through channels from

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish 175
Hertfordshire to London (see Bliss, 2000, pp. 3–4). Moreover, theatres in London had recently
been closed because of the plague. Throughout the play there is a sustained imagery relating
to the consumption of food and the disposal of waste.
21. Chapter 8 of Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cavell, 2005, pp. 192–212).
22. A further gloss on this might be that what we might think of as the innocence of the actual ordinary
contrasts with, in the case of the eventual ordinary, a returning from, or a survival of, or maybe a
living with, this jeopardising by doubt. This eventual ordinary means that we are ‘judges of what
calls for, or tolerates, change in our ways of thinking and wording the world; whereas skepticism
demands, in effect, that we forego this judgment’ (Cavell, 2005, p. 134). For further discussion,
especially in relation to Levinas and poststructuralism, see Standish, 2007.
23. See especially the sections entitled ‘Learning a Word’ and ‘Projecting a Word’ in The Claim of
Reason (Cavell, 1979, pp. 168–190). Cavell imagines a small child learning the word ‘kitty’. The
cat comes by, on the prowl or in a picture-book, and she says it again: so we can put a new entry
in the Baby Book under ‘Vocabulary’. But then, he continues, she sees a fur-piece, and it is ‘kitty’
once again. So should we be disappointed that she does not really know the word after all? Does
she think ‘kitty’ means fur? Or is she perhaps saying: ‘this is like a kitty’? Or, ‘See, I remember
how pleased you are when I say “kitty” ’? And how, in any case, are we to judge that these
possibilities in her syntax are comparable with our own? ‘Can we decide this?’ Cavell writes. ‘Is
it a choice between these different alternatives? In each case her word was produced about a soft,
warm, furry object of a certain size, shape, and weight. What did she learn in order to do that?
What did she learn from having done it? If she had never made such leaps, she would never have
walked into communication. Having made it, meadows of communication can grow for us’ (p.
172). This is not a romanticisation of the creativity of the child—however wondrous, however
close to the wellsprings of language, this originality may be—but rather a means of drawing
attention to limits in what we should presume to know—or, say, theorise.
24. The passage occurs in the chapter called ‘Reading’ (Thoreau, 1992, p. 69).
25. Dreyfus has acknowledged that the pragmatist tendency of his reading of Being and Time was the
product of his having more or less ignoring Division II of Heidegger’s book as ‘something of an
existentialist embarrassment’ (Dreyfus, 2000, p. 313).
26. The chapter is called ‘Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers’ (Cavell, 2005, Chapter 9).
27. Heidegger’s lecture ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’ was given in 1951 and later published in English as
‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (Heidegger, 1971, pp. 143–162).
28. ‘Walden is, among other things, a tract of political education, education for membership in the
polis. It locates authority in the citizens and it identifies citizens—those with whom one is in
membership—as “neighbors.” What it shows is that education for citizenship is education for
isolation. (In this sense Walden is Emile grown-up. The absence of Sophie only purifies the point.)’
(Cavell, 1992, pp. 85–86).
29. In the Introduction to Cities of Words, Cavell writes: ‘for my taste pragmatism misses the depth of
human restiveness, or say misses the daily, insistent split in the self that being human cannot,
without harm to itself (beyond moments of ecstasy) escape, and pragmatism’s encouragement for
me, while essential, is limited’ (Cavell, 2004, p. 5).
30. That is, in contrast to Rousseau’s Emile.
31. Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ was published originally in 1916, in his collection Mountain
Interval. A revised edition of the collection was published in 1920.
32. Cavell writes of ‘the comedy of remarriage’ and of ‘the melodrama of the unknown woman’
(respectively in Cavell, 1981 and 1996).
33. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was first published in 1643, with an expanded edition
in 1644. The quotation is from Chapter 2.
34. Patricia Smith is thanked for her patient work on the transcription. Gordon Bearn and Naoko Saito
offered valuable suggestions, and Cathleen Cavell and Cornel West helped in verifying some
details. These notes have been compiled by Paul Standish.

REFERENCES
Bliss, L. (2000) Introduction, in: Shakespeare, Coriolanus (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press).

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
176 P. Standish

Cavell, S. (1979) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford,
Oxford University Press).
Cavell, S. (1981) Pursuits of Happiness: Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press).
Cavell, S. (1983) Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago
Press).
Cavell, S. (1992) The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago
Press). The Senses of Walden was originally published by The Viking Press in 1972.
Cavell, S. (1996) Contesting Tears: Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, IL,
University of Chicago Press).
Cavell, S. (2003) Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, D. J. Hodge ed. (Stanford, CA, Stanford
University Press).
Cavell, S. (2004) Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge,
MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
Cavell, S. (2005) Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press).
Cavell, S. (2010) Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University
Press).
Colapietro, V. (2012) Voice and the Interrogation of Philosophy: Inheritance, Abandonment, and
Jazz, in: N. Saito and P. Standish (eds) Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (New York,
Fordham University Press).
Dreyfus, H. (2000) Responses, in: M. A. Wrathall and J. E. Malpas (eds) Heidegger, Authenticity,
and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).
Emerson, R.W. (1983) Circles, in: Essays and Lectures (New York, Library of America), pp.
403–414.
Gooding-Williams, R. (2006) Look, A Negro: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics
(New York and London, Routledge).
Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York, Harper and
Row).
Milton, J. (1643) Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/
reading_room/ddd/book_1/index.shtml. Accessed 5 February 2012.
Mulhall, S. (1999) Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford, The
Clarendon Press).
Norris, A. (ed.) (2006) The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philoso-
phy (Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press).
Peters, M. (nd) White Philosophy in/of America. Online at: http://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/
summer2011/Peters.pdf. Accessed 5 February 2012.
Rawls, J. (1955) Two Concepts of Rules, The Philosophical Review, 64, pp. 3–32.
Rhu, L.F. (2006) Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood
Movies (New York, Fordham University Press).
Standish, P. (2007) Education for Grownups, A Religion for Adults: Scepticism and Alterity in
Cavell and Levinas, Ethics and Education, 2.1, pp. 73–91.
Thoreau, H.D. (1992) Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. W. Rossi (New York,
W.W. Norton and Co.).
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford,
Blackwell).

© 2012 The Author

Journal compilation © 2012 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain