Cavell Passionate Utterances

Contending with
Stanley Cavell
Russell B. Goodman,
Editor
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENDING WITH STANLEY CAVELL
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CONTENDING WITH
STANLEY CAVELL
EDITED BY
Russell B. Goodman
1
2005
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Contending with Stanley Cavell / edited by Russell B. Goodman
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-517568-9
1. Cavell, Stanley, 1926– I. Cavell, Stanley, 1926– II. Goodman, Russell B.
B945 .C274C66 2004
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In memory of my father
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Contents
Contributors ix
Introduction 3
1. Cavell on Skepticism 10
Richard Rorty
2. On Refusing to Begin 22
Stephen Mulhall
3. Cavell’s “Romanticism” and Cavell’s Romanticism 37
Simon Critchley
4. Cavell and the Concept of America 55

James Conant
5. Rethinking the Ordinary: Austin after Cavell 82

Sandra Laugier
6. Cavell and American Philosophy 100

Russell B. Goodman
7. Guessing the Unseen from the Seen: Stanley Cavell

and Film Interpretation 118
Andrew Klevan
8. The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell 140

Garrett Stewart
9. Responses 157
Stanley Cavell
10. Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter 177

Stanley Cavell
Selected Bibliography 199
Index 201
Contributors
STANLEY CAVELL is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory
of Value at Harvard University, Emeritus. A list of his publications is given in the bibliogra-
phy of this volume.
JAMES CONANT is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He has written

articles on Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, Frege, Carnap, and Wittgenstein,
among others.
SIMON CRITCHLEY is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty, New School

University, New York, and at the University of Essex, England. He is author of five books,
among them Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (second edition, Routledge, 2004), from which
the contribution to this volume is taken, and most recently On Humour (Routledge, 2002).
He is currently working on the philosophical significance of the poetry of Wallace Stevens
and on a theory of the ethical subject and its relation to politics.
RUSSELL B. GOODMAN, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, has

written American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge University Press,
1990) and Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is the
editor of Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge, 1995) and Pragmatism: Critical
Concepts in Philosophy (Routledge, 2005).
ANDREW KLEVAN, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent, is the author of
Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Flicks Books,
2000) and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (Wallflower Press, 2004).
His “Teaching Film Style” will appear in Style and Meaning (edited by Douglas Pye and
John Gibbs, Manchester University Press, 2004).
SANDRA LAUGIER is Professor of Philosophy at the Université d’Amiens (France). She

is the author of several books, on Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Austin, and a translator
of the work of Stanley Cavell.
STEPHEN MULHALL is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford. He is

the author of Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford University
Press, 1994) and the editor of The Cavell Reader (Blackwell, 1996). His most recent publi-
cations are Inheritance and Originality (Oxford University Press, 2001) and On Film
(Routledge, 2002).
RICHARD RORTY teaches philosophy in the Comparative Literature Department of Stan-

ford University. He is the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1979) and Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 2000).
ix
x Contributors
GARRETT STEWART, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa,

is the author most recently of Dear Readers: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-
Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Between Film and
Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
CONTENDING WITH STANLEY CAVELL
Introduction
Stanley Cavell writes like no one else, with a range of interests and competencies
unmatched by any of his contemporaries. He is not only an important philosopher
but the author of three books of film criticism and theory, a literary critic who is a
major interpreter of Shakespeare, and an important voice in American studies.
Within philosophy, he is a prominent interpreter of Wittgenstein, the first writer to
point out the Kantian background to Wittgenstein’s thought and to take seriously
the therapeutic nature of his method. Cavell is the only major philosopher in any
country to write a book on Thoreau, and, with the exception of Nietzsche, the only
major philosopher to seriously engage Emerson. His work has implications for
moral theory, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of lan-
guage, and political philosophy.
And yet Cavell occupies a curious position in all the fields in which he works:
he is at the same time a major figure and one whose work people do not quite
know how to use. He is, to use the verb employed by Garrett Stewart in an essay
included in this book, “avoided” by the literary—and other—establishments. A
recent account of his work on film, for example, observes that “within the field of
film study, the potential usefulness of philosophy—as he understands and practices
it—remains generally unrecognized.”1 A primary aim of this volume is to show a
predominantly new generation of writers at work on and with Cavell’s ideas.
When Cavell and I began to talk about assembling this volume, we agreed on
three criteria for the critical essays: that they stand on their own as works of writing
and thinking; that they illustrate the range of Cavell’s work, not only in philosophy
but in literature and film; and that they offer criticisms to which Cavell could
constructively respond. We also sought to include writers not known for their inter-
est in Cavell, but who have taken up and used his thought in new ways. The
collection accordingly includes discussions of Cavell’s work in literature, film, and
American thought, as well as in philosophy; and four of the eight critical essays
are by Europeans, each of whom comes to Cavell from a different intellectual
background. While some of the essays are more critical and others more expository,
Cavell’s extended set of responses is testimony to their richly searching character.
The collection also includes Cavell’s groundbreaking new essay in speech act the-
ory, “Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter.”
Stanley Cavell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1926, moved with his family to
Oakland during his teenage years, and took his B.A. in music at Berkeley in 1946.
3
4 Introduction
He moved to New York to study composition at Julliard the following year, but
found himself more interested in reading—Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Sigmund
Freud—and in going to the movies than in pursuing a musical career. In 1948 he
returned to California to enroll as a student at UCLA, first in psychology, then in
philosophy, where he met a visitor from Harvard, Morton White, who suggested
he apply there. It was at Harvard in 1954−55 that Cavell met another visitor, John
Langshaw Austin, from Oxford. Austin’s precise delineations of “what we say
when,” of the multiple things we do with words, and of the ordinary as opposed to
the philosophical worked a revolution in Cavell’s thinking. In Cavell’s hands, the
ordinary language philosophy of Austin (and Wittgenstein) provides a series of
bridges: to psychoanalysis in its idea of philosophy as a form of therapy (as Cavell
argued in one of his earliest essays, “On the Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later
Philosophy” [1962]); to literature, in its contrast between ordinary trust and fantas-
tic skepticism (in “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear” [1969]);
and to an “undiscovered” region of American thinking (in The Senses of Walden
[1971]).
In the new essay with which this collection concludes, “Passionate and Perform-
ative Utterance: Morals of Encounter,” Cavell returns to Austin, taking up his work
on performative utterances—those “things we do with words.” In How to Do
Things with Words, Austin draws a distinction between illocutionary and perlocu-
tionary acts. An illocutionary act is what we do in saying something, for example,
christening a ship, or making a promise by uttering appropriate words in appro-
priate circumstances. Perlocutionary acts, in contrast, are what we do by saying
something, for example, frightening someone. They need not be accomplished
through language—I may frighten someone by jumping out from behind a tree,
without saying anything at all. Austin puts the perlocutionary aside, after distin-
guishing it from the illocutionary, so that his theory of “speech acts” is mostly a
theory of illocutionary—essentially linguistic—things we do with words, such as
stating, inquiring, ruling, and promising.
Cavell’s innovation is to set forth the conditions for a class of perlocutionary
acts—acts, as he puts it, that confront their hearers with something, in a way not
governed by convention. His examples range from “I’m bored,” said when it is
obvious that I am bored, to Carmen’s “No. You do not love me,” uttered in re-
sponse to Don José’s false protestation of love. These utterances invite responses
for which there is no established procedure, invitations that may be taken up, re-
fused, acknowledged, avoided, or countered. If illocutionary acts are offers to par-
ticipate in the “order of law,” Cavell suggests, then passionate utterances can be
understood as “improvisation[s] in the disorders of desire.”
Passionate utterances, Cavell holds, are representative of human language gener-
ally, which “everywhere reveal[s] desire.” He intends his essay to work toward
“something I want from moral theory, namely a systematic recognition of speech
as confrontation, as demanding, as owed . . . ” This new paper is thus at once a
contribution to the philosophy of language and to moral philosophy, subjects which
have been Cavell’s concurrent concern beginning with “Knowing and Acknowl-
edging” and “The Avoidance of Love,” in his first book, Must We Mean What We
Say?; through The Claim of Reason (the subtitle of which is “Wittgenstein, Skepti-
Introduction 5
cism, Morality, and Tragedy”); to the “Emersonian moral perfectionism” delineated

in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, This New Yet Unapproachable
America, and Cities of Words. Like Kierkegaard, Cavell addresses “existing indi-
viduals” (not least himself), whose lives are governed by norms or claims as well
as by the laws of nature, and who yet have the chance—indeed who cannot avoid
the chance—to determine those lives through their own free actions.
The essays in this volume begin with Richard Rorty’s “Cavell on Skepticism,” a
review of The Claim of Reason (1979) that originally appeared in The Review of
Metaphysics and was then reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism (1985). As
Cavell says in his responses, this was “about the only serious and substantial treat-
ment of the book as a whole to have appeared, so far as I know, for most of the
decade after the book’s publication.” Parts of Rorty’s review are quite critical of
Cavell, for from Rorty’s neopragmatic perspective, disciplinary boundaries have
faded away and Cavell’s allegiance to “philosophy” is outmoded. Rorty agrees
with Cavell’s diagnosis of the Cartesian project as an impossible attempt to tran-
scend human finitude, but he argues that pragmatists and others appreciated the
point long before Cavell made it. He accordingly finds the first half of The Claim
of Reason unhappily committed to traditional philosophical problematics, but he
praises the second half of the book (parts three and four), where, as he sees it,
Cavell succeeds in freeing himself from “what the ‘professionals’ do.” The third
part of the book (“Knowledge and the Basis of Morality”) is, Rorty claims, “all by
itself . . . one of the best books on moral philosophy which has appeared in recent
years.”
Rorty usefully distinguishes Cavell’s project from other attempts to find com-
mon ground between the Anglo-American and Continental traditions. Whereas
many writers try to show that the Continental philosophers have “good arguments”
after all, and so are respectable candidates for inclusion in a canon that includes
Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, Cavell’s originality consists in his attempt to
“romanticize our own tradition.” Especially in part four of The Claim of Reason
(“Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance”), Rorty finds, Cavell effectively and
properly sets Wittgenstein in a philosophical context that includes such “friends of
finitude” as Rousseau, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
Stephen Mulhall’s “On Refusing to Begin” continues the discussion of The Claim
of Reason, slowing things down for a close reading of the first five paragraphs of
the book. Mulhall begins with the issue of Cavell’s style by quoting Anthony
Kenny’s early, irritated review of it (in The Times Literary Supplement). Kenny
wrote: “Despite Cavell’s philosophical and literary gifts [The Claim of Reason] as
it stands is a misshapen, undisciplined amalgam of ill-assorted parts.” Mulhall’s
response is to carefully consider Cavell’s method, as revealed and described in the
book’s opening pages.
Cavell begins the book by raising the question of when and how philosophy
begins—in particular the philosophy called for in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical In-
vestigations, and by extension the philosophy of The Claim of Reason itself. The
epigraph to The Claim of Reason is from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”:
6 Introduction
“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from
another soul.” Cavell’s suggestion is that the Investigations is a provocative text,
written “in criticism of itself,” in a style that is internal to its teaching. Mulhall, in
turn, considers The Claim of Reason’s provocations and its multiple styles (lyric
and dramatic modes, for example). He argues that The Claim of Reason, like Witt-
genstein’s Investigations, is both “modernist” and “perfectionist”: written without
any sure context of philosophical conventions, but teaching good readers to dis-
pense with certain illusions—of knowledge, “human cultivation,” or philosophy.
Part four of The Claim of Reason foreshadows Cavell’s developing interest in

romanticism, which he conceives as “the discovery that the everyday is an excep-
tional achievement” (p. 463). In the central essays of In Quest of the Ordinary
(1988), Cavell portrays romanticism as a set of responses to skepticism—a skepti-
cism conceived more broadly than the Cartesian intellectual project of doubting
the existence of the external world. Skepticism becomes for Cavell a name for
something that we live: an existential condition of alienation and strangeness, from
which (and from the philosophical responses to which) romanticism seeks a re-
covery.
In “Cavell’s ‘Romanticism’ and Cavell’s Romanticism,” Simon Critchley con-
siders Cavell’s romantic project from the perspective of German romanticism,
chiefly that of Friedrich and August Schlegel, authors of the Athenaeum Fragments.
The Schlegels seek a union of poetry and philosophy, as do the English writers to
whom Cavell devotes most of his attention, William Wordsworth and Samuel Tay-
lor Coleridge. But writing with the Schlegels’ notion of the fragment in mind,
Critchley objects to Cavell’s claim that a union of poetry and philosophy is given
“a fair realization” in Emerson’s essays. For romanticism, he argues, no such real-
ization is possible.
In the second section of his essay, “Why Stanley Loves America and Why We
Should Too,” Critchley considers whether Cavell’s employment of the concept of
America is “close to a form of cultural nationalism.” He writes of America’s ex-
treme disjunctions—Yosemite and Graceland are his examples—and finds in Ca-
vell’s writing both a deep critique of, and a perfectionist aspiration for, America.
That aspiration follows the direction taken by Wordsworth, Emerson, and Witt-
genstein: not toward the remote or otherworldly but toward the (recovery of the)
everyday, common, ordinary, or low. In the end, Critchley finds a “tragic wisdom”
in Cavell’s approach.
The idea of America is taken up again in James Conant’s contribution. Taking his
cue from Cavell’s appropriation of Emerson’s idea of a “new yet unapproachable
America,” Conant finds America to be a goal rather than a place, something to be
achieved rather than something that already exists. Just as Kierkegaard found him-
self in “Christendom” but doubted whether there were any true Christians, so,
Conant suggests, Cavell and Emerson find themselves in “Americadom, . . . a state
of affairs in which, because almost everyone in America already knows that he is
an American, hardly anyone any longer takes the trouble to become one.”
Introduction 7
In the second part of his essay, Conant considers the style of American philo-
sophical writing as compared to the French—the characteristic diffidence of Amer-
ican writers like Thoreau, and the characteristic brilliance of Parisian intellectuals
like Derrida. Cavell’s project, Conant holds, is not simply to revive interest in
Emerson and Thoreau, as if no one pays any attention to them any more, for many
do; but to recover or encounter their thought as philosophy. Doing so requires a
readjustment in what we understand philosophy to be and in how we expect it to be
written, the attainment of a perspective from which European philosophy appears
provincial and even “somewhat unphilosophical (in taking a certain dispensation
of philosophy to be philosophy itself).” Conant ends his chapter with a consider-
ation of Cavell’s discussion of America in his early essay “The Avoidance of
Love.” Written during the height of the Vietnam War in 1969, the essay finds an
America that, like King Lear, seeks love as proof of its existence, and becomes
enraged and destructive when it feels unappreciated.
Sandra Laugier considers the fruitful idea of “ordinary language philosophy” that
Cavell originally learned from Austin and Wittgenstein. Like romanticism, ordinary
language philosophy is a response to skepticism; but it is not, Laugier makes clear,
a refutation of skepticism. According to Cavell, Thoreau and Emerson (and Austin
and Wittgenstein) respond to skepticism “not by offering new knowledge or a new
belief, but by a recognition of our condition.” That recognition, and the acceptance
of our form of life called for by Wittgenstein, is not to be confused, she warns,
with simple conventionalism. There is nothing obvious or immediate about the
ordinary: like “America,” “it is to be discovered.” Laugier argues that the conven-
tionalism advocated by some interpreters of Wittgenstein, with its emphasis on the
arbitrariness of language and the conventional character of words’ relation to the
world, actually cuts us off from a recognition of our life with things. Working back
through some of Cavell’s earliest writing, Laugier considers the connections be-
tween Cavell’s work on the ordinary and his discussions of Wittgenstein on know-
ing other minds, Kant on aesthetic judgments and Rousseau on the social contract.
The problems of knowledge Cavell considers are to be solved by a recovery of the
ordinary, but this is a recovery in which we have to take some of the steps. Laugier
concludes that works such as Emerson’s essays, Wittgenstein’s Investigations, and
Cavell’s The Claim of Reason, are self-critical and provocative writings that have
“something of autobiography, but a curious autobiography that is also our own.”
My contribution, “Cavell and American Philosophy,” begins by charting the trajec-

tory of Cavell’s interest in Thoreau and Emerson, as he learns to extend the idea of
ordinary language philosophy to the issues of intimacy discussed by the American
transcendentalists. Cavell speaks of “inheriting” Emerson and Thoreau, and of their
founding a distinctive American way of doing philosophy. This raises the question,
as Cavell is well aware, of his and their relation to the more canonical representa-
tives of American philosophy, the pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William
James, and John Dewey. In scattered remarks and in his essay “What’s the Use of
Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” Cavell distances himself from pragmatism, seeing
Dewey in particular as a naive child of the Enlightenment who does not see
8 Introduction
that the Enlightenment (including modern science) has brought its own forms of
ruin.
I argue that Cavell looks only at one side of Dewey—what Rorty characterizes
as the “let’s make everything scientific” side of him—and neglects his romantic,
poetic and, non-instrumentalist side. Moreover, the skepticism and sense of despair
Cavell does not find in pragmatism in fact permeates a pragmatist work such as
James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Finally, I consider the question of James’s
presence (and hence an American presence) in Cavell’s “inheritance” of Witt-
genstein, for James is referred to more than almost any other philosopher in the
Investigations, and Wittgenstein, late in life, anxiously considered his own relation
to pragmatism.
Andrew Klevan’s “Guessing the Unseen from the Seen: Stanley Cavell and It’s a
Wonderful Life” represents Cavell’s interest in film and at the same time connects
with the issues of the ordinary and the everyday discussed by Laugier, Conant,
Critchley, and Goodman. For the fundamental insight of his chapter, as of his
book Disclosure of the Everyday, is that the ordinary is undramatic and uneventful.
Drawing on writings of the film theorist Victor Perkins and the philosopher George
Wilson, Klevan investigates factors in A Wonderful Life that, though “peripheral
to the basic tale,” modify or displace the main issues raised by the drama. Klevan’s
example is a banister knob that, to James Stewart’s continual annoyance, keeps
coming off. At the end of the film, when Stewart realizes how much there is in his
“ordinary” life, he kisses the banister and “it assumes a new aspect.”
Klevan also considers Stewart from the perspective of Cavell’s discussions of
film’s power to create “stars.” A star such as Stewart or Katherine Hepburn is a
person, not a character, someone who transcends his or her filmic roles. Stars
appeal to us, according to Cavell, because of “their power of privacy, of a knowing
unknownness.” Thinking about Stewart, Klevan considers the relation of the power
of privacy both to the human capacity for suffering and to democratic freedom.
Garrett Stewart’s “The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell” assesses Cavell’s position in

literary studies, where, as in philosophy, he is both seen as a major figure and yet
somehow avoided. Stewart points out that Cavell’s work on Shakespeare, now
collected in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, relied on and
made claims about authorship and the human condition just at the time when cut-
ting-edge literary theorists such as Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore
were challenging the legitimacy of precisely such notions as “author” and “text.”
Cavell’s interest in marriage as a form of “conversation” between potentially auton-
omous persons, for example, runs up against contemporary suspicions of language,
autonomy, and the self. The hermeneutic of suspicion, Stewart argues, keeps the
traditional literary effects that are Cavell’s concern “ at arm’s length,” for Cavell’s
close readings also posit a reader with convictions about—and convictions by, as
Cavell likes to say—a text. For Cavell, the reader is as much read by, as she is a
reader of, the text. “In the epoch of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and the
semiotics of social energy,” Stewart writes, “what are called legible texts, in their
constitutive deceit, don’t exactly require what we once called reading at all.” Stew-
Introduction 9
art concludes with a series of more positive remarks, about Cavell’s conception of
philosophy as “a textual process” and his ability to produce in his writing a form
of “prose flight.”
Cavell’s responses to these essays begin with an extended discussion of skepticism,

pragmatism, and his own philosophical education. Acknowledging that many of
his best teachers at Harvard were responding to or continuing pragmatism in one
way or another, he found nevertheless that their ways of doing philosophy were
not “possible or hopeful” for him. He agrees with Rorty and the pragmatists that
traditional epistemology has been overcome, but he nevertheless sees skepticism
not only as a live intellectual option in philosophy but as something endemic to
our condition. The task, as he sees it, is not to get rid of skepticism (e. g., by
proving that there is a world or other people or by simply ignoring it), but to learn
to manage or “govern” it—a lesson Cavell finds taught in the Investigations and
in Emerson’s “Experience,” but not in pragmatism. With these words and others
Cavell continues the conversations his work has provoked.
This volume was originally conceived as part of a series edited by Herman Saat-
kamp, whose Richard Rorty: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics (Vanderbilt
University Press) provided the model for its format. David Justin Hodge and Patri-
cia Aragon scanned previously published material. The contributors were amaz-
ingly patient and understanding as I assembled the book, and Stanley Cavell was
a steady companion throughout, and a happy and thoughtful interlocutor at the end.
To all of them, my sincere thanks.
Note
1. William Rothman, “Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera,” in Richard Eldridge,

Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 206.
1
Cavell on Skepticism
RICHARD RORTY
Cavell’s The Claim of Reason consists of two books in one—the first (parts I–II)
written some twenty years back, and the second (part IV) composed quite recently.1
Most (parts I–II) of the first book is about epistemology, and this is the book with
which I want to take issue. So I shall spend most of my time on it, saying only a
little, toward the end, about the second. This is unfortunate, since I admire the
second book as much as I disagree with the first. But one always has more to say
in disagreement than in agreement.
Parts I–II suggest that the material studied in the standard introductory courses
in epistemology (Descartes’s table, Berkeley’s tree, Moore’s hand, and the like)
helps us see something important about the human situation, about human finitude.
It takes us from epistemology to romance. It promises to relieve us philosophy
professors from the shame we have felt ever since we began to suspect that our
introductory courses in epistemology merely kicked up a cloud of dust around our
students—so that they might be grateful to us for leading them out of it into the
light. Austin, Bouwsma, Wittgenstein, Wisdom, and Ryle all suggested that we just
shrug off the claims which Berkeley and Descartes and Moore made on us—that
we teach epistemology as the history of some bad ideas. Now Cavell tells us that,
unless we take these claims very seriously indeed, we shall not get the full benefit
of what Wittgenstein and Austin (in particular) can do for us. We must not, he
tells us, shrug off skepticism too easily, for then we may miss “the truth of skepti-
cism”: “that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the
world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing”
(p. 241).
What Cavell wants us not to miss is, to be sure, as important as he thinks it.
But does he have to drag us back through Berkeley and Descartes to get us to
see it? Why are not “Rousseau and Thoreau and Kierkegaard and Tolstoy and
Wittgenstein” (to cite one of Cavell’s lists of heroes) enough? Why “the external
world” again?
Cavell sometimes seems to argue as follows:
Wittgenstein is as important as Rousseau or Thoreau or Kierkegaard or Tolstoy, for
getting us to see these things.
Wittgenstein spent a lot of time discussing problems raised by people who claimed
to doubt the external world.
So we had better take such doubts seriously.
10
Cavell on Skepticism 11
This seems to me like arguing that we should take Napoleon seriously because of
the amount of time Tolstoy spent on studying him in War and Peace. Frederick
the Great would have served Tolstoy’s purposes almost as well, especially if the
latter had been an Austrian rather than a Russian. Analogously, I think we should
view skepticism about the external world as just a handy, local, “English” example
of a much more general phenomenon, what Cavell calls “the attempt to convert
the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty” (p.
493). Had Wittgenstein stayed in Central Europe, he would have met philosophy
professors who worried more about the transcendental standpoint and less about
skepticism. But he would probably have written pretty much the same books, and
directed our attention to the same things.2
Wittgenstein, however, is not Cavell’s only hero. Shrugging off the problem of
the external world would matter to a reading of Austin, Moore, or C. I. Lewis.
Perhaps we just would not read them any more. These writers, unlike Wittgenstein,
are just philosophy professors. One may feel grateful to Austin for freeing one
from Moore’s worries about unsensed sensibilia, or Lewis’s about terminating
judgments, but this is the perfunctory gratitude due a doctor who cures a minor
ailment, brought on by a colleague’s malpractice. It is not the sort of gratitude one
feels toward the romantic hero, or the psychoanalyst, who saves one from monsters.
Cavell, however, does seem to view Austin as a romantic hero. He even views
Lewis and Moore as something more than professors. Thus he speaks of the “genu-
ineness of philosophical inspiration in the teaching of C. I. Lewis.” One of his
epigraphs is a tribute by I. A. Richards to Moore’s “intensity.” He dedicates The
Claim of Reason in part to Austin and in part to Thompson Clarke, who, Cavell
says, showed him that “the dictates of ordinary language . . . were as supportive as
they were destructive of the enterprise of traditional epistemology” (p. xii). More
generally, Cavell says that one of his motives is to
keep lines open to the events within American philosophical life that we can call the
reception of ordinary language philosophy (sometimes called then Oxford philosophy,
and represented here primarily by some work of J. L. Austin’s) together with that of
Wittgenstein’s Investigations, as if certain paths for philosophy, opened by those
events, are always in danger of falling into obscurity. (p. xiv)
For, he says,
it can seem that the reception of Wittgenstein and of Austin has yet to have its public
or historical effect on this [our American] philosophical culture. I do not say that
this is a bad thing. Wittgenstein’s writing is not of a character that lends itself to
professionalization . . . and if Austin wished for professionalization, it was not to be
as philosophy. Nor do I say that this lack of a certain reception is surprising. Philo-
sophical Investigations, like the major modernist works of the past century at least,
is, logically speaking, esoteric. That is, such works seek to split their audiences into
insiders and outsiders (and split each member of it). . . . If I say that the basis of the
present publication is that Wittgenstein is still to be received, I mean to suggest that
his work, and of course not his alone, is essentially and always to be received, as
thoughts must be that would refuse professionalization. (p. xvi)
But if one is not concerned about being professional, why worry about “Ameri-
can philosophical life”? The latter phrase can only refer to current trends in fash-
12 Contending with Stanley Cavell
ionable philosophy departments. Among intellectuals generally, Wittgenstein is in

fact being read and used more and more. It is only within certain philosophy de-
partments that he, and “Oxford philosophy,” are vieux jeu. Such parochial matters
should not concern Cavell, nor lead him to conclude that “certain paths for philoso-
phy, opened by these events, are always in danger of falling into obscurity.” Cavell
says he wants to “understand philosophy not as a set of problems but as a set of
texts,” and believes that “the contribution of a philosopher . . . to the subject of
philosophy is not to be understood as a contribution to, or of, a set of given prob-
lems” (p. 34). So one would have expected him to conclude that Wittgenstein
would be better served by forgetting “events within American philosophical life”
than by recapturing them.
Cavell’s ambiguous attitude toward the “events” of which he speaks is part
of an equally ambiguous attitude toward academic philosophy’s place in culture.
Sometimes he uses “philosophy” in a large sense in which it means “the criticism
a culture produces of itself” (p. 175) or “the education of grownups” (p. 125).
Sometimes he uses it in a narrow “professional” sense in which it is plausible to
say that epistemological skepticism is central to philosophy and in which fashions
in philosophy departments matter to philosophy. He plays back and forth between
these two senses in such passages as the following, which treat “philosophy” and
skepticism as near synonyms:
But the philosopher has to make a problem for us, show us in what sense it might so
much as be a problem. And though intellectual advance often depends upon some-
one’s ability to do just that, the conclusion the philosopher takes us to goes beyond
anything we should expect from investigations which seem to proceed as his does.
To some philosophers that fact has itself, I think, proved the power and subtlety
of philosophy; while to others it has only demonstrated its intellectual frivolity. If
one has felt both of these ways about skepticism, then one may come to sense that
this very conflict itself may be displaying, or concealing, some critical fact about the
mind, and one which neither side has been able, or willing, to articulate. (p. 159)
[T]he methods of ordinary language, far from trivializing the impulse to philosophy
(as many of its detractors, not, perhaps, without some reason, have found it to do)
show how complex and serious an ambition the criticism of philosophy, which must
inevitably remain internal to philosophizing itself, ought to be. (p. 166)
In the latter passage, “the impulse to philosophy” is implicitly identified with the
impulse to raise the sort of problems (of epistemological skepticism) in which the
“ordinary language philosophers” specialized. Nobody, after all, has thought that
the criticism of culture was frivolous. But they have thought that philosophers were
frivolously neglecting the duty to offer such criticism by getting hung up on “the
external world.”
Perhaps I can make this complaint clearer by distinguishing between two intel-
lectual phenomena that I think Cavell wrongly conflates:
(a) The ‘‘professional” philosopher’s skepticism created by what Reid called “the
theory of ideas” (the theory that analyzes perception in terms of immediately,
certainly known givens).
(b) The Kantian, Romantic worry about whether the words we use have any relation
to the way the world actually is in itself.
These two phenomena have all sorts of historical connections, but they are dialec-
tically independent. Suppose one pooh-poohs the theory of ideas in good Austinian
fashion. Unlike Austin, one may still feel something like panic at the thought that
there is no way to hold the world in one hand and our descriptions of it in the
other and compare the two—to get, as Cavell says, “outside language games.”
Both (a) and (b) seem distinct from a third phenomenon (c), described by Ca-
vell as
that experience I have called “seeing ourselves outside the world as a whole,” looking
in at it, as we now look at some objects from a position among others. This experi-
ence I have found to be fundamental in classical epistemology (and, indeed, moral
philosophy). It sometimes presents itself to me as a sense of powerlessness to know
the world, or to act upon it; I think it is also working in the existentialist’s (or,
say, Santayana’s) sense of the precariousness and arbitrariness of existence, the utter
contingency in the fact that things are as they are. . . . All of existence is squeezed
into the philosopher’s tomato when he rolls it toward his overwhelming question. (p.
236)
The tomato in question is the one about which H. H. Price, in the opening pages
of his Perception, said, “There is much that I can doubt.” The differences in tone
between that work, Fichte’s Vocation of Man, and Sartre’s Nausea might normally
be accounted for by saying that Price was presupposing (a), whereas Fichte was
expressing (b), and Sartre (c). Price does not find his questions overwhelming, nor
do most writers on the subjects he discusses, most of the writers in what Cavell
calls “the English tradition” (p. xiii). Cavell, however, lumps these writers together
with Kant, and (a) together with (b), in such passages as the following:
Locke avoided skepticism only apparently, through distraction and good English
sense; Berkeley through God; Descartes through God and a special faculty of intellec-
tual “perception”; Kant, denying such a faculty, avoided it through world-creating
categories; Hume, to the extent that he did through “natural belief”; Moore, through
furious common sense. And all who have followed the argument respond to it as a
discovery about our world, one catastrophic in its implications, overturning what we
all, until now, believed as completely as we believed anything. (pp. 222–23)
The “argument” in question is the usual textbook, Pricean argument, in which we
are driven to admit that we do not see a whole tomato, but only. . . . Cavell is either
being obscurely ironic, or is just wrong, in saying that “all who have followed the
argument respond to it as a catastrophic discovery.” Most of them, including Locke
and Hume, thought of the skeptical consequences of the theory of ideas in the same
way as the developers of a revolutionary scientific theory think of the “anomalies”
(in Kuhn’s sense) which the theory generates. They view them as annoying and
unfortunate, but by no means catastrophic, and providing employment for epigoni.
(If Cavell means by “apparently” and “to the extent that,” that Locke and Hume
should, by rights, have been overwhelmed, then he is not making the point he
wants to make.) The only people who go all existential about the invisibility of the
rest of the tomato are lecturers on epistemology who relieve the classroom tedium
by hype. When such lecturers encounter an unstable freshman who actually does
feel the tomato to have catastrophic implications, they hasten to join his more
robust classmates in assuring him that it is all “just philosophy.”
One would have thought that, once we were lucky enough to get writers like
Wittgenstein and Nietzsche who resist professionalization, we might get some criti-
cism of philosophy which did not remain internal to philosophy. (As Montaigne,
Spinoza, and Feuerbach gave us criticism of religion which was not internal.) But
Cavell switches with insouciance from the narrow and professional identification
of “philosophy” with epistemology to a large sense in which one cannot escape
philosophy by criticizing it, simply because any criticism of culture is to be called
“philosophy.” To resolve this ambiguity, Cavell would have to convince us that
skepticism in the narrow sense, the sense used in ritual interchanges between phi-
losophy professors (Green and Bain, Bradley and Moore, Austin and Ayer), is
important for an understanding of skepticism in some deep and romantic sense. He
would have to show us that “skepticism” is a good name for the impulse that leads
grownups to try to educate themselves, and cultures to try to criticize themselves.
Then he would have to connect this broad sense with the narrow, “technical” sense.
My main complaint about his book is that Cavell does not argue for such a connec-
tion, but takes it for granted. He does not help us see people like Moore and Austin
as important thinkers. Rather, he answers the transcendental quaestio juris—how
could they, appearances perhaps to the contrary, be important?—while begging the
quaestio facti. He is “professional,” it seems to me, in just the sense that he criti-
cizes others for being so. He takes for granted that the “philosophical problems”
with which we infect the freshman by assigning Descartes and Berkeley are some-
thing the freshman really needs—not just so that he can understand history, but so
that he can be in touch with himself, with his own humanity.
In an attempt to establish connections between (a), (b), and (c), Cavell connects a
particular notion of knowledge which he takes to be characteristic of “the Cartesian
project” with the attempt to escape from human finitude which he takes to be “the
cause of skepticism.” He says that
the project of assessing the validity of knowledge as a whole, as that is prosecuted
by the Cartesian tradition, is based upon a particular concept of knowledge (and thus
leads to a particular problem of knowledge), viz., the concept I have characterized,
with little sense of satisfaction, as a concept of knowledge as revelatory of the world’s
existence; and I contrasted that with a concept of knowledge such as Austin’s, a
concept of knowledge as the identification or recognition of things. (p. 224)
This contrast seems to me real and important, but not to serve Cavell’s purposes.
It is the contrast between knowledge as what Kant told us we could not have—
knowledge of things as they are in themselves formulated in those things’ own
language, rather than ours—and knowledge as justified true belief, where “justifi-
cation” is the ordinary sort given by the language-game we in fact play. Kant made
epistemology Romantic, and thereby made room for moral faith. The theory of
ideas as Reid knew it, before it went transcendental, was not romantic. It was just
an incidental spin-off of the Galileo-Newton world-picture, one which did not pan
out well.
By contrast, Cavell can connect (b) with (c), Kant with Sartre. He can view the
Kantian hope for an impossible kind of knowledge, a knowledge unmediated by
our language-games, our patterns of justification, our ideas or words—knowledge

“revelatory of the world’s [not just our world’s] existence”—as produced by the
Sartrean sense that only such an impossible sort of knowledge would overcome
our terror at the sheer contingency of things. But I do not see how he can connect
Pricean puzzles about getting from perceptions to non-perceptions with either Kan-
tian longing or Sartrean terror.
Cavell seems to think he has made this latter connection by noting that, in his
phrase, epistemological skepticism has to be about a “generic object”—not a gold-
finch but “the physical object as such,” not one’s sister but “any passing humanoid
form.” To questions about whether it’s a goldfinch or a goldcrest, whether one’s
sister is disappointed or pleased, there are commonsensical answers, and common-
sensical justifications of these answers. To set the freshman up for epistemology,
we have to generalize our way out of common sense. This is a very nice point, but
it does not do the job Cavell wants it to do—it does not take us across the Channel
from Berkeley to Kant, from (a) to (b), from perceptual error to romance. All it
shows is that we can only get the freshman from the silly stuff about tomatoes to
the heavy stuff about things-in-themselves by dropping the “problem of percep-
tion,” skipping sense-data, and inculcating a contrast between “for us” and “in
itself” that problems about perception do not illustrate. As long as we stick to
breaking the tomato up into sensibilia, there will be, as Austin said, “the bit where
you say it and the bit where you take it back,” the bit where you deconstruct the
tomato and the bit where you reconstruct it. It is only when we drop the Lockean
question about whether the redness is “out there” or “in us” and get to the romantic
Kantian question, “Is there anything beyond the coherence of our judgments to
which we can be faithful?” that the student is hooked. There is no logical connec-
tion between the “in the mind/outside the mind” contrast and the “for us” vs. “in
itself” contrast.3 “For us” means, roughly, “inside our language-games, our con-
ventions, our form of life, our standards of legitimation.” “In the mind” is an
uncashed and probably uncashable metaphor, as Reid saw very clearly. Kant’s
phenomenal world is not Price’s tomato on a grand scale. It is a change of subject,
a way of expounding (b) rather than (a). Cavell’s point that skepticism only makes
sense for generic objects shows just what he does not want to show—that one can
leave Ayer and Price in the care of Austin and Ryle, and hasten on to the serious
thinkers across the water.
Cavell says (in unfortunately professionalized terms) that he is interested in
a tradition, anyway an idea, of philosophizing opposed to the tradition in English, as
that tradition is represented in the best English-speaking departments of philosophy.
But, he says,
I have made no effort to sophisticate my early, tentative amateur efforts to link the
English and the Continental traditions, because I want them to show that to realign
these traditions, after their long mutual shunning, at any rate to write witnessing the
loss in that separation, has been a formative aspiration of mine from the earliest of
the work I refer to here. (p. xiii)
Nevertheless, the strategy of these efforts is clear. Cavell’s way of linking the
traditions is the reverse of that used by most bridge builders who start from our
side. Usually we Anglo-Americans try to deromanticize the Continental tradition

by showing that it has some good arguments. Cavell tries to romanticize our own
tradition by showing that it does not. As he says, the “discovery” that “the object
is gone, unknowable by the senses alone” (p. 222) is a stage effect, produced by
intruding “an invention, a production of dialectic, a historical-philosophical con-
struction called the senses” (p. 224). To show that this invention is not just a
suitable subject for Rube Goldberg or Ronald Searle (which is how Austin thought
of it), he has got to show that the motives for its fabrication are the same as, or at
least as interesting as, the motives for various bits of Continental apparatus.
I take it that Cavell’s strategy is to find these motives in (c)—the Sartrean sense
of contingency—and to construe the attempt, described by Heidegger and Sartre,
to escape our humanity, our finitude, as an attempt to evade this sense. He wants
to construe “ordinary language philosophy” as an effort “to reclaim the human self
from its denial and neglect by modern philosophy” (p. 154), and he thinks of the
history of this topic as suitably titled “Philosophy and the Rejection of the Human”
(p. 207). I think that Cavell is dead right in analyzing the Cartesian project as an
expression of this need to transcend our condition, but I think that he oversophisti-
cates his point. It seems a sufficient diagnosis of Cartesianism to say (with Gilson,
Burtt, Maritain, Randall, Malcolm, and others) that Cartesianism asks for impossi-
ble certainty, that its methodological solipsism is an impossible demand to do it all
by oneself. This Luciferian attempt to cut oneself off from God, or one’s fellow
humans, by using only one’s natural light has usually been taken as sufficient
motive for inventing what Cavell calls “absolute simples . . . outside language-
games” (clear and distinct ideas, sense-data, indubitable first principles, primitive
terms, and so on) (p. 226).
Cavell, however, thinks that “the quest for certainty” is an inadequate diagnosis
of the Cartesian project. He criticizes the Deweyan dismissal of this project as “not
taking the problem of the existence of objects seriously” and says that “it is too late
to tell a philosopher to forgo the quest for certainty when it is the sheer existence of
objects—of anything at all—that seems to be at stake” (pp. 224–25). Perhaps he
just means that anybody who has somehow managed to connect textbook skepti-
cism about the external world with the experience of “seeing oneself outside the
world as a whole” will not be responsive to the usual Gilson-Dewey-Malcolm
treatment of the Cartesian illness. This is doubtless true; but it seems like saying
that somebody who is wholeheartedly psychotic, rather than merely neurotically
confused, will not be helped by psychoanalysis. What we need to understand is
how it is possible to get this far out, how one could connect (a) with (c), how
anybody could think that textbook “English” epistemology is intimately connected
with a sense of the contingency of everything. My complaint about Cavell’s treat-
ment of skepticism may be summed up by saying that his book never makes this
possibility clear for someone for whom it is not yet an actuality. It is fairly easy
to connect (b) with (c): the realization that the world is available to us only under
a description hooks up with the realization that it exists without a self-description,
that it has no language of its own which we might one day learn. Its existence
“makes no sense” because sense is relative to descriptions and existence is not.
But, just as I do not know how to hook up (a) with (b), I do not know how to
hook up (a) with (c) either. Thus (c) seems to me not to serve as a useful link
between (a) and (b).
So much for my complaints, which have centered upon Cavell’s discussion of
“external world” skepticism in parts I and II. I hope, however, that dissatisfaction
with the argument of these parts will not prevent readers from forging ahead
through parts III and IV. In part III Cavell drops the topic of skepticism and the
attempt to recapture the importance of “ordinary language philosophy.” This part
consists of four short essays on what is wrong with what various people have said
about the nature of moral philosophy—Stevenson, Rawls (in his early “Two Con-
cepts of Rules”), and Prior. These essays remind us that moral reflection cannot be
identified with appeals to principle, that
morality is not a name for whatever influences choice, that morality must leave itself
open to repudiation; it provides one possibility of settling conflict. . . . Other ways of
settling or encompassing conflict are provided by politics, religion, love and forgive-
ness, rebellion, and withdrawal. Morality is a valuable way because the others are so
often inaccessible or brutal: but it is not everything. (p. 269)
Part III, all by itself, is one of the best books on moral philosophy that has
appeared in recent years. It ranks with Iris Murdoch’s Sovereignty of Good as a
criticism of the notion that moral philosophy must be a search for yet more “abso-
lute simples”—self-evident principles, basic values. Like Murdoch, Cavell criti-
cizes the Bentham-Kant-Sidgwick notion that rational action is action on principle,
and the corollary that moral reflection is the attempt to discover the rules by which
each of us, simply as a human being, is committed to living. He says:
No rule or principle could function in a moral context the way regulatory or defining
rules function in games. It is as essential to the form of life called morality that rules
so conceived be absent as it is essential to the form of life we call playing a game
that they be present. . . .
. . . [A] suggestion emerges about why philosophers appeal to rules in theorizing
about morality, and about how rules are then conceived. The appeal is an attempt to
explain why such an action as promising is binding upon us. But if you need an
explanation for that, if there is a sense that something more than personal commitment
is necessary, then the appeal to rules comes too late. For rules are themselves binding
only subject to our commitment. (p. 307)
He thus helps us see the quest for “foundations of moral obligation” as parallel to
the Cartesian quest for “foundations of knowledge.” Both are attempts to get out-
side language-games, to find some “natural” way of getting in touch with reality
or goodness that is independent of the actual people among whom we live, who
talk in a certain way. Both help us avoid acknowledging that we are mortals, who
think and talk as we do because we have read the books we have read, talked with
the people we have talked with. They encourage us to think that philosophy will
do for us what we once thought religion might do—take us right outside language,
history, and finitude and put us in the presence of the atemporal. They lead the
philosopher to think himself so little dependent upon his community that what he
says will “work on people at random, like a ray” (p. 326).
Cavell’s comments on the form of life of Anglo-Saxon moral philosophers are

much more external, and thus much clearer and more useful, than his comments in
parts I and II on that of Anglo-Saxon epistemologists. In the case of the moral
philosophers, he sees why they want to do what they do, diagnoses it quickly and
surely, and then lets go of it. In the case of epistemologists, he insists on regarding
their plight as a sickness that somehow we are all bound to suffer, as a necessary
stage in reaching intellectual maturity. His insistence on the pathos and ubiquity of
epistemology leads him, I have argued earlier, to confuse temporary, historically
conditioned little frenzies (the seventeenth-century theory of ideas, ordinary lan-
guage philosophy) with aspects of the human condition. In part III, by contrast, he
no longer avoids history. He briskly and brilliantly explains (pp. 259ff.) the connec-
tion between Galilean models of scientific explanation and the philosophical claim
that science is “rational” in a way that moral reflection is not. He concludes:
If you begin by being struck with the peculiarity of ethical arguments as perhaps
unsettleable, and struck with how different other questions are, then you will pick
examples from science which illustrate its capacity for agreement, and then you will
have the idea, or illusion, that you know that, and why, science is rational and moral-
ity not. (p. 263)
Applying lessons learned from Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Cavell

in these pages does a great deal to help rid us of the distinctions between “science”
and “nonscience,” “objective” and “subjective,” “fact” and “value,” “reason” and
“emotion,” which have been the warp of intellectual life in recent centuries.
Part IV is rather perversely called “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” but
is coextensive with chapter 12, which is more helpfully titled “Between Acknowl-
edgement and Avoidance.” This material is, Cavell tells us, more recent than any-
thing else he has written. In particular, as noted earlier, it was written some twenty
or twenty-five years after some of the material in parts I–III. In this later manner—
that of “Leopards in Connecticut” and “The Avoidance of Love”—he comes into
his own. He speaks with a much stronger voice. Now he is free of worry about
rival philosophers, or about what makes epistemology, or skepticism, or philoso-
phy, special and deep. He just reflects on the fact that there are such things.
In this part Cavell is concerned with a “problem of other minds” that does not
even pretend to hook up with the “professional” problem of how, given that the
logical construction of the Other’s body uses up the sensory qualia I receive, I
have a right to construct a mind for him as well. Wittgenstein taught us that this
problem results from thinking that one first describes oneself to oneself in osten-
sively learned Mental, the Lockean inner language of the ideas themselves. So one
might expect Cavell to repeat that if we drop Locke and the theory of ideas we
shall no longer speculate about private languages, the possible inner emptiness of
the Other, and so on. Instead, Cavell shrugs off all that and goes straight to a deep
reading of such speculations:
The wish underlying this fantasy [of a private language] covers a wish that underlies
skepticism, a wish for the connection between my claims of knowledge and the ob-
jects upon which the claims are to fall to occur without my intervention, apart from
my agreements. As the wish stands, it is unappeasable. In the case of knowing myself,
such self-defeat would be doubly exquisite: I must disappear in order that search for
myself be successful. (pp. 351–52)
This reading uproots the “problem of other minds” from the soil in which it is
usually taken to have sprouted—empiricism and phenomenalism—and transplants
it across the Channel. It is now the sort of problem you have after reading the
Phenomenology of Spirit, or the Critique of Practical Reason, or Being and Noth-
ingness. This is a good thing to do if you want to find something interesting to say
about Other Minds. It ignores the question of whether the “professional,” “En-
glish,” epistemological question has anything to do with romantic Kantian ques-
tions, whether (a) has anything to do with (b).
One of the advantages of the later over the earlier Cavell—of part IV over parts
I–II—is that he does ignore this question. For now he is no longer concerned about
hooking up with what the “professionals” do. This permits him, at last, to explain
what he was hinting at in earlier passages about “reclaiming the human self” and
modern philosophy’s “rejection of the human.” What he has in mind is summed
up in such passages as the following:
The skeptic insinuates that there are possibilities to which the claim of certainty shuts
its eyes, or whose eyes the claim of certainty shuts. It is the voice, or an imitation of
the voice, of intellectual conscience. Wittgenstein replies, “They are shut.” It is the
voice of human conscience. . . . In the face of the skeptic’s picture of intellectual
limitedness, Wittgenstein proposes a picture of human finitude. (p. 431)
Where else can we find out about human finitude? Presumably in novels, plays,
and works of “Continental” philosophy rather than in epistemology courses, or in
the sort of reflection on science in which “English” philosophy specializes:
science fiction cannot house tragedy because in it human limitations can from the
beginning be by-passed. This idea helps me explain my difference in intuition from
those philosophers who take it that a scientific speculation, or fiction, is sufficient to
suggest skepticism; for example, the speculation that for all I know I may be a brain
in a vat. (p. 457)
The human self that philosophy has been avoiding is the one described in all
the vocabularies which are of no use for predicting and controlling people—the
vocabularies which are useless for science, and for philosophy when it is conceived
as quasi science. “Literature” tells us, as do Hegel and Sartre, that there is no
universal religious, or scientific, or philosophical vocabulary to use in talking
about, or dealing with, our fellow humans, but that we cannot help thinking that
there must be one:
Tragedy and comedy are all but filled with this possibility—that one among the end-
less true descriptions of me tells who I am. (p. 398)
Pre-Kantian, pre-Romantic philosophy was filled with assurance that that possibil-
ity had been actualized. The self-knowledge which was prevented by this kind of
philosophy (a kind which survives in Anglo-Saxon philosophy departments, though
it is pretty much extinct elsewhere) is the knowledge that
with respect to the external world, an initial sanity requires recognizing that I cannot
live my skepticism, whereas with respect to others a final sanity requires recognizing
that I can. I do. (p. 451)
This makes “final sanity” consist in getting out from under the impulse that led to
“professional” philosophy, in escaping the temptation “to convert the human condi-
tion, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty” (p. 493). In one of
the best remarks in part IV—a part studded with splendid sentences—Cavell says:
Not finitude, but the denial of finitude, is the mark of tragedy. This denial of finitude
has also been taken as the mark of sin. It was to free humanity of that libel of
sinfulness that Blake and Nietzsche undertook, as it were, to deny the distinction
between the finite and the infinite in thinking of the human. (p. 455)
I doubt that the aim of “modern” writing has been better stated than in this final
phrase.
I hope that my account of the various parts of The Claim of Reason has made
clear that its second half (parts III and IV) makes it an important book, and also
why a prospective reader should not be daunted by part I, nor by Cavell’s (occa-
sionally) heavy-handed style. One way of describing its importance is to say that
it helps us realize what Wittgenstein did for us. Unlike Austin and Ryle, he did
not just help us shrug off the theory of ideas. He also raised the question of the
moral worth of our epistemology courses, of our discipline, of our form of life.
We philosophy professors are lucky that one of the great writers of the century
came among us, and left behind a description of our habits that we might never
have formulated for ourselves. Wittgenstein suffered from, and constantly com-
plained about, the company he had to keep in the course of this endeavor. But he
persisted, and produced writings which even the determined efforts of a host of
commentators will not be able to construe as offering “philosophical theories” or
“solutions to philosophical problems.” Cavell is one of the few interpreters Witt-
genstein has so far had who (at least in part IV of his book) is free from the
temptation so to construe him.4 He is also one of the few who puts him in suitable
company—that of Rousseau and Thoreau, Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, Blake and
Nietzsche, the friends of finitude, the friends of man.
Notes
I am grateful to John Cooper for helpful comment on the first draft of this essay.
This essay was previously published in the Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980–81): 759–774.
Reprinted by permission.
1. Parenthetical page references are to this book. Part III is a reworking of material
from Cavell’s twenty-year-old dissertation (as were, to some extent, Parts I and II).
2. See Jacques Bouveresse’s treatment of Wittgenstein as “the anti-Husserl” in Le
Mythe de I’Interiorite (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1978).
3. Recently, however, philosophers have once again started to run these two contrasts
together. For example, Bernard Williams, in his Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry,
tries to rehabilitate Descartes’s project through a notion of “the absolute conception of real-
ity,” a notion which Williams thinks involved in our intuition about the nature of knowledge,
and which raises the skeptical question of whether knowledge is possible. This notion, as
Williams formulates it, is ambiguous between a “determinate picture of what the world is
like independent of thought” (Williams, p. 65) (the sort of thing that Kant told us we would
not have) and a description of the world “using concepts which are not peculiarly ours, and
not peculiarly relative to our experience” (ibid., p. 244). The latter phrase is Williams’s
attempt (unsuccessful, in my view) to update Locke’s notion of “resembling objects.” An-
other example is Thomas Nagel’s use of the “subjective vs. objective” distinction to cover
both the difference between a “personal” and an “impersonal” account of, e.g., the morally
relevant features of a situation and the difference between the linguistically inarticulable
phenomenological character of an experience and a characterization of the experience in
ordinary public terms. (See Nagel’s Mortal Questions [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978], chap. 14: “Subjective-Objective.”) Both Williams and Nagel, on my view,
misleadingly yoke together the contrast between the veridical (the “objective” as the “inter-
subjective”) and the nonveridical (the “subjective” as the “merely apparent”) with the quite
different contrast between the communicable (what our concepts catch) and the incommuni-
cable (what they may, or must, fail to catch).
4. Another of these happy few is James C. Edwards. See his Ethics without Philoso-
phy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1982). Ca-
vell’s and Edwards’s books, taken together, suggest that Wittgenstein commentary has re-
cently turned a corner.
2
On Refusing to Begin
STEPHEN MULHALL
Despite Cavell’s philosophical and literary

gifts [The Claim of Reason] as it stands is a
misshapen, undisciplined amalgam of ill-
assorted parts. . . . [It] is a worthwhile book,
but it could have been much better had it
been pruned of dead wood and over-exuber-
ant foliage. The need for trimming can be il-
lustrated by the very first sentence. . . . The
exasperated reader might well put the book
down and go no farther.
Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement,
18 April 1980
What kind of text is The Claim of Reason?1 What does it ask of its readers, and
what designs does it have upon them? Since any such designs can be effective only
if those who encounter this text choose to stay with its orderings of words, we
must first ask how it aims to elicit such a choice—how its opening encounter with
its readers is designed to attract them. But where and how does this text conceive
that its readers are to approach it? How are we to let this book teach us, this or
anything?
First Paragraph: Integrity and Reflexivity
We might, provisionally, begin at the beginning. After all, the book’s Emersonian
epigraph tells us that “[t]ruly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I
can receive from another soul”; and the opening sentences of The Claim of Reason
are certainly amongst its most provocative:
If not at the beginning of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, since what starts philosophy
is no more to be known at the outset than how to make an end of it; and if not at the
opening of Philosophical Investigations, since its opening is not to be confused with
the starting of the philosophy it expresses, and since the terms in which that opening
might be understood can hardly be given along with the opening itself; and if we
22
On Refusing to Begin 23
acknowledge from the commencement, anyway leave open at the opening, that the
way this work is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we cannot
understand the manner (call it the method) before we understand its work; and if we
do not look to our history, since placing this book historically can hardly happen
earlier than placing it philosophically; nor look to Wittgenstein’s past, since then we
are likely to suppose that the Investigations is written in criticism of the Tractatus,
which is not so much wrong as empty, both because to know what constitutes its
criticism would be to know what constitutes its philosophy, and because it is more to
the present point to see how the Investigations is written in criticism of itself; then
where and how are we to approach this text? How shall we let this book teach us,
this or anything? (CR, 3)
From such provocation, what instruction? First, that The Claim of Reason is, above
or at least before all, a reading of the Philosophical Investigations, a response to
that highly unusual text. Second, that any such reading should begin by reflecting
upon its own beginnings; it originates in its responsiveness to the issue of its own
origin, in a capacity to regard the proper place and manner of its own commence-
ment as a genuine question. (Here, the form of the first sentence—with its seem-
ingly endless series of clauses deferring completion in favor of reiterated begin-
nings—underwrites its substance.) Third, that the series of clauses through which
this question is articulated also constitutes a provisional answer to it. The fourth
clause asserts the futility of beginning from the historical context in which the
Investigations was written and is read; the fifth and first clauses deny that earlier
points in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development can provide a useful opening;
the second warns against assuming that the opening of the Investigations contains
everything needed to comprehend its own philosophy; and the third suggests that
the book’s substance is inseparable from its form. Taken as a whole, they tell us
that we must avoid treating the Investigations as a part of a larger whole, or treating
any of its parts as more important than the whole they make up, or treating its
manner or method as if it were not integral to its work. In short: if we are to read
it properly, we must read it whole.
A further implication is that, properly read, the Investigations will give us every-
thing we need to answer the external and internal questions that have just been
rejected as inappropriate approaches to that text. For Stanley Cavell, it is funda-
mental to the work of the Investigations that it simultaneously provide the terms
in which its readers can understand its work (and so its manner or method), the
terms in which it will criticize itself and other philosophies, and the terms in which
it might be related to its personal and historical context; and by linking these
apparently separate issues in a single sentence, as if they add up to a single, com-
plete thought, he further implies that the terms needed to comprehend them will
turn out to be, if not identical, then internally related. Each budget of terms will
form part of a larger lexicon; understanding the work of the Investigations appears
inseparable from understanding its parts, its manner, and its context.
If, however, Wittgenstein’s text must provide its readers with the terms in which
to read it, that responsibility must have priority; the first aim of its teaching must be
to teach the terms in which its teaching can alone be taken up. The consequent
paradox is evident. If only the book as a whole can teach us the terms in which to
understand its teaching, how can we learn which terms those are? It would seem that,
if we are to learn anything from this book, we must first understand it. It is to this
paradox, the apparent burden of The Claim of Reason’s first sentence, that its second
sentence is a response: “How shall we let this book teach us, this or anything?” What
does this second sentence have to teach us, and how shall we let it do so?
First, it is a response to the book’s previous sentence—as if this text’s progress
will be determined as much by Cavell’s responses to the Investigations as by the
Investigations itself. Second, it does not directly answer the preceding question,
but rather restates it—as if this investigation neither begins nor ends with theses
but is rather a matter of continuously renewed questioning, as if this sentence itself
constitutes a new beginning to the investigation, as if every sentence in this book
aspires to be a new beginning (and so, a new end). Third, it restates the question
by reformulating it; the second sentence drops the unquestioning reliance of the
first upon the idea of an approach to the Investigations and shifts from active to
passive mode. It thereby asks whether this idea of an approach (as opposed to a
mode of reception) is prejudicial—whether the sense of paradox that the first ques-
tion generates is a function not of the task it describes but of the present description
of it. Shall we move on to this further question? Has a sufficiently attractive hori-
zon opened up for us to stay with this ordering of words? Have we really exhausted
the interest of this first paragraph?
I am inclined to stay a little longer with it, to question a further range of its
significance. For my guiding intuition is that The Claim of Reason’s characteriza-
tions of the text to which it is a response are also self-characterizations, and so that
their opening instructions concerning how (and how not) to read the Investigations
apply also to readers of the book whose opening they constitute. This does not
mean that I take The Claim of Reason to be a mechanical reiteration of the teach-
ings and methods of the Investigations, as if Cavell’s response to this text is to
ventriloquize its voice. My claim is rather that the various extensions and denials
of Wittgenstein’s voice to which Cavell is driven by the need to investigate his
own preoccupations in his own way are compatible with his continuing to look to
its general form or manner, and in particular its tendency to embody self-character-
izations within its orderings of words, as exemplary for the present of philosophy.2
From such an intuition, what tuition? On this reading, the opening sentence of
The Claim of Reason tells us that its fundamental task is to begin providing the
terms needed to understand its teaching, terms that will also make sense of this
book’s modes of self-criticism, its criticism of earlier texts by Cavell, and its criti-
cism of other philosophers, as well as its historical placement. This text cannot
therefore be understood by approaching it via these contextual and intratextual
matters; it must rather be taken as a whole, and it can only be so taken if its manner
or method is seen as internal to its work. This means that the paradox apparently
involved in understanding the Investigations seems equally applicable to The Claim
of Reason: only those who already understand it can come to understand it. Where
and how, then, are we to approach this text?
The second clause of the book’s first sentence appears to intensify our difficul-
ties. For it claims that we should not regard the opening of the Investigations as
an approach to the book as a whole, “since its opening is not to be confused with
the starting of the philosophy it expresses, and since the terms in which that open-
ing might be understood can hardly be given along with the opening itself” (CR,
3). Does it not then follow that approaching The Claim of Reason through its
opening violates the book’s proffered terms for understanding itself? My intuition
is that the instruction contained in this clause has no such implication.
An external ground for this intuition appears in Cavell’s recently published
“Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations.”3 They
contain a late version of a set of lecture notes through which Cavell has introduced
his students to Wittgenstein’s thought, and they begin precisely with the opening
sections of the Investigations; indeed, Cavell claims that “what’s left of these open-
ing lectures in The Claim of Reason, or epitomized there, is its paragraph-length
opening sentence” (PP, 126)—which suggests that The Claim of Reason implicitly
opens, not with its discussion of Wittgenstein’s notion of a criterion, but with a
compressed response to the Investigations’ famous opening. Since, however, this
line of thought might seem to violate another of its opening instructions—that
which forbids utilizing texts other than The Claim of Reason as part of an approach
to it—I will not pursue it here. I want instead to suggest two other ways of re-
sponding to our difficulty. The first is to suggest that the second clause of the
opening sentence does not guide its readers away from beginning their encounter
with The Claim of Reason with its opening, but guides them away from thinking
that its opening is a way to approach The Claim of Reason; in short, that what we
are being warned off is the idea of there being “an approach” to this or any other
such text.
The second response is to suggest that beginning with the opening of The Claim
of Reason need not involve either confusing that opening with the starting of the
philosophy it expresses or assuming that the terms in which it might be understood
can be given along with it. We might, for example, think that the book’s opening
offers some guidance for interpreting both itself and the book it initiates, without
assuming that it offers all the guidance we shall need; on the contrary, when we
do move beyond its opening paragraph, we shall find that further, vital specifica-
tions of how The Claim of Reason should be read appear regularly throughout this
text. Similarly, we can begin a reading of The Claim of Reason with its notorious
opening sentence without confusing that opening with the starting of the philoso-
phy that the book expresses; we might, for example, think that its philosophy starts
before that opening—with the epigraph to the part of the book in which this open-
ing chapter appears, with the title, subtitle, and epigraph of the book itself, or with
its foreword. The fact that our reading begins by passing over these elements does
not entail that it must overlook the instruction they contain; a reading of a text
might as properly go on from the point at which it begins by going backward as
by going forward. Mine will do both.
Second Paragraph: Texts and Problems
Shall we go on? The third sentence of the book’s opening chapter, the opening
sentence of its second paragraph, has as follows:
I will say first, by way of introducing myself and saying why I insist, as I will
throughout the following pages, upon the Investigations as a philosophical text, that
I have wished to understand philosophy not as a set of problems but as a set of texts.
(CR, 3)
I believe that this sentence has been taken to establish two conclusions. First, that
this is where Cavell first appears in person in The Claim of Reason;4 and second,
that in so doing he asserts that The Claim of Reason as a whole is predicated upon
an understanding of philosophy as a set of texts rather than a set of problems.5
Both appear to me to be based on misconstruals of the sentence.
The first conclusion is doubly erroneous. It fails to appreciate that the pronoun
that appears for the first time in this paragraph is the first person singular—the first
paragraph is studded with instances of the first person plural, and as always, “we”
includes both speaker and addressees. It further fails to appreciate that the explicit
deployment of the first person singular pronoun is not needed for an author to leave
his personal mark on a sentence. On the contrary, if any sentences of philosophical
prose fit the aphorism Le style c’est l’homme même, it is surely those opening The
Claim of Reason; they perform as full an introduction to their author’s philosophi-
cal personality as might be desired. What the shift from “we” to “I” rather implies
is Cavell’s sense of isolation, his sense that he cannot even hope (and perhaps does
not even wish) that the idea he will advance is something with which others al-
ready, unknowingly agree. The second conclusion registers the contrastive force of
the “but” in Cavell’s sentence but fails to register the presence and the tense of the
verb “to wish.” This sentence does not say that Cavell understands philosophy not
as a set of problems but as a set of texts; it does not even say that he wishes so to
understand philosophy; it says that he has so wished. The past tense strongly im-
plies that this wish is one by which he is no longer possessed, or at least with
which he is no longer comfortable as it stands—that it is something from which
he has attained, or wishes to attain, a certain perspective; without entirely wishing
to spurn it, he harbors a suspicion about it. We might feel that this suspicion is
also registered in his description of himself as “insisting” upon the Investigations
as a philosophical text. In the Investigations itself, Wittgenstein is always suspi-
cious of interlocutors who are led to insist on something; and Cavell maintains this
wariness throughout The Claim of Reason. We might therefore ask ourselves: when
Cavell insists that the Investigations is a philosophical text, who does he take
himself to be informing, and of what? How or why might anyone think otherwise?
These suspicions are clarified in the following sentence:
This means to me that the contribution of a philosopher—anyway of a creative
thinker—to the subject of philosophy is not to be understood as a contribution to, or
of, a set of given problems, although both historians and non-historians of the subject
are given to suppose otherwise. (CR, 3–4)
Here, the stress falls not upon the idea of problems but upon their givenness. Cavell
appears not to propose a view of philosophy as a set of texts rather than problems
(a proposal requiring a suspiciously simple opposition between problems and
texts), but rather to oppose the presumption that philosophical problems can be
thought to form a given set or list. The implication is that if we properly acknowl-
edge the obvious fact that philosophers typically contribute to their subject by
means of texts, then we will question the idea that we can define a distinctively
philosophical problem by pointing, or by enumerating a given set of features. For
Cavell, what a distinctively philosophical problem might be is itself a philosophical
problem, and of a fundamental kind.
This idea harks back to the emphasis of his first sentence upon the idea that the
terms of criticism and self-criticism that a philosophy deploys are definitive of it.
For they crystallize that philosophy’s understanding of what it is for a position or
statement to be philosophically problematic or questionable; and on Cavell’s view,
to elaborate terms of criticism is precisely the work of philosophical texts. To
characterize philosophical texts by their shouldering of such burdens is bound to
unsettle given philosophical conceptions of the nature of a text, as well as the idea
that which texts count as philosophical can be specified by a given list—in terms
of what one might call a canon (one from which literary texts, for example, are
excluded). In other words, Cavell’s investigation aims to question our conception
of philosophical problems as given by questioning our conception of philosophical
texts as given; so for him, the concept of a philosophical problem and that of a
philosophical text are not so much opposed as internally related.
All of this preliminary unsettling induces the first intervention of many from his
interlocutor (or at least the first intervention from one of his many interlocutors)—a
signature effect of this text:
—And is the remark about texts and not problems itself to be taken as a philosophi-
cal text? It seems argumentative or empty enough, since obviously not all texts are
philosophical ones, but only these that precisely contain problems of a certain sort!
(CR, 4)
Cavell’s response to this intervention is a straight-faced, even stuffy reply to the

first rather than the second of its sentences; he simply points out that the shortness
of his own remark is no bar to its being counted as philosophical. This is hardly
calculated to satisfy the interlocutor, for it responds to what is (clearly?) a piece of
sarcasm disguised as a query as if it were a genuine question and leaves entirely
unaddressed the substantive (argumentative?) points contained in the second sen-
tence. Insofar as it does, however, it brings into question the interlocutor’s standing
conceptions of what a well-directed philosophical intervention, and what a satisfy-
ing philosophical response to it, might be. It implies, for example, that the sarcastic
query is a more genuinely philosophical intervention than its argumentative follow-
up, more genuinely deserving of a philosophical response. Why? Because it at least
takes the form of an attempt to apply the (argumentative?) content of Cavell’s third
sentence to itself, to test its consistency with or responsiveness to itself—to mea-
sure its self-consciousness or reflexivity. The implicit instruction here is that no
text that fails to measure up to the claims it advances can count as genuinely
philosophical, that a philosophical text is one whose form and content are mutually
attuned from top to bottom. In reality, however, Cavell does not overlook his inter-
locutor’s second sentence. For he immediately develops the theme of the length of
philosophical texts into what he calls a budget of philosophical genres or para-
digms, and this development contains the following remark:
Some philosophers are able to make about anything into a philosophical text, like a
preacher improving upon the infant’s first cry; while some people are not even able
to start a quarrel with God. (CR, 4)
Here, Cavell implicitly denies that he is endorsing what the interlocutor thinks his
earlier remark about texts and problems commits him to—the idea that all texts
are (at least potentially?) philosophical ones. For him, someone who treats anything
and everything as a philosophical text is no more a genuine philosopher than some-
one who improves upon an infant’s first cry is properly preaching; both, in their
eagerness to extend the reach of their responses, have exceeded their grasp of what
might merit or require such a response. Of course, it also implies that those who
find nothing to be worthy of a philosophical response have equally lost touch with
the point of philosophy; it has gone dead for them, receded from their grasp. In
this sense, Cavell has no quarrel with his interlocutor’s second remark; since he
does not wish to assert what the interlocutor denies, he need not oppose that denial.
He cannot, however, simply refuse to satisfy the interlocutor’s wish for an argu-
ment, because of the way the interlocutor formulates the denial. The interlocutor
does not say: “Not all texts are philosophical ones, but rather: “Obviously not all
texts are philosophical ones”; and the criterion invoked for this obvious distinction
is the fact that a text contains problems of a certain sort. That “obviously,” paired
with the assumption or a standing sense of what sort of problems are distinctively
philosophical, conflicts with Cavell’s view that whether a text is one to which a
philosophical response is appropriate, or (if you prefer) one that raises problems of
a sort requiring a philosophical response, is not given or obvious, but is rather to
be discovered through individual acts of what one might call philosophical criti-
cism. After all, the whole of the Investigations can be thought of as a philosophical
response (to a preacher’s response) to an infant’s first utterances, its first cry for
language (and we might ask whether Wittgenstein thinks that Augustine was
(philosophically?) wrong because he improved upon that cry, or because he im-
proved upon it in the wrong way); and the whole of The Claim of Reason might
be thought of as attempting not to start (or to transcend) a quarrel with God.
Third Paragraph: Writing, Speech, and the Human Voice
Within the first of his overtly self-introductory remarks, Cavell devotes his third
paragraph to a further specification of what he wants from the idea of a new empha-
sis upon (or an emphasis upon a new) conception of philosophical texts:
A measure of the quality of a new text is the quality of the texts it arouses. That a
text may exist primarily in an oral tradition would not counter my thought here.
Though the fact that it exists primarily in an oral tradition may determine the size or
shape of its response, i.e., of an acceptable contribution to its text. I may say that
while Wittgenstein’s philosophizing is more completely attentive to the human voice
than any other I think of, it strikes me that its teaching is essentially something writ-
ten, that some things essential to its teaching cannot be spoken. This may mean that
some things he says have lost, or have yet to find, the human circle in which they
can usefully be said. (CR, 5)
Clearly, Cavell’s concept of a text does not signify writing as opposed to speech.
Nevertheless, from the third clause of his opening sentence, his emphasis upon
philosophical texts has hung together with an emphasis upon the essential contri-
bution made to philosophical work by philosophical writing, its manner and its
method; and he states that some things essential to the teaching of the Investiga-
tions (and thus, according to my intuition, to The Claim of Reason) cannot be
spoken. However, this assertion is multiply qualified. First, since Cavell also re-
gards the Investigations as fundamentally attuned to the human voice, its written-
ness appears not in opposition to that voice but as essential to its proper expression;
if anything, what this remark opposes to the voice is not writing but speech. And
second, Cavell’s own (admittedly tentative) gloss on his claim that some things
essential to Wittgenstein’s teaching cannot be spoken bargains away the necessity
of that “cannot”; he suggests that the context in which it might be spoken may be
absent only at present.
Here is a concrete instance of his methodological claim that essence is expressed
by grammar, and so must be understood as a function of the embodiment of the
language it governs in a form of life, which means in the particular arrangements
of a human community. This Wittgensteinian conception implies that essence and
necessity ultimately rest upon the responses that are normal and natural to human
beings, and so that what is necessary can be subject to alteration, to the forces
(however vast, unintended, and slow moving) of contingency. With respect to the
particular essences and necessities in question here, Cavell’s second qualification
shows that for him, both the essential connection between Wittgenstein’s teaching
and writing, and the essential opposition between that teaching and speech, are a
function of the prevailing forms of human community to which that teaching is
addressed. It suggests, in other words, that in another human community, or in this
one under another dispensation of culture, what must now be written could usefully
be said—that the human voice could reappear in both oral and written texts.
Fourth Paragraph: Modernism
Why, then, under the present dispensation of culture, must this teaching—both
Wittgenstein’s and that of The Claim of Reason—be written? Cavell devotes his
fourth (entirely parenthetical) paragraph, still within the first of his overtly self-
introductory remarks, to a reformulation of and response to this question:
If one asks: When must a work, or task, be written, or permanently marked?, one
may start thinking what makes a work, or task, memorable. And of course the answer
to this alone should not distinguish philosophy from, say, music or poetry or early
astronomy or ruler and compass proof in geometry (or, I wish I knew, what level of
logic?). Poetry (some poetry) need not be written; novels must be. It seems to me
that a thought I once expressed concerning the development of music relates to this.
I said (“Music Discomposed” pp. 200, 201) that at some point in Beethoven’s work
you can no longer relate what you hear to a process of improvisation. Here I should
like to add the thought that at that point music, such music, must be written. If one
may speculate that at such a stage a musical work of art requires parts that are unpre-
dictable from one another (though after the fact, upon analysis, you may say how one
is derivable from the other), then one may speculate further that Beethoven’s sketches
were necessary both because not all ideas are ready for use upon their appearance
(because not ever ready in any but their right company), and also because not all are
usable in their initial appearance, but must first, as it were, grow outside the womb.
What must be sketched must be written. If what is in a sketch book is jotted just for
saving, just to await its company, with which it is then juxtaposed as it stands, you
may say the juxtaposition, or composition, is that of the lyric. If it is sketched know-
ing that it must be, and gets in time, transformed in order to take its place, you may
say that its juxtaposition, or composition, is essentially stratified and partitioned; that
of the drama; the drama of the metaphysical, or of the sonata. Here are different tasks
for criticism, or tasks for different criticisms. (CR, 5–6)
I want to concentrate on the instructions this paragraph contains for reading the
Investigations, and so for reading The Claim of Reason; we have, after all, been
told that the form of both texts is internal to their work, and the most fundamental
fact about their form—more fundamental than any fact about how they are writ-
ten—is that they are written. According to Cavell’s opening formulation, one rea-
son for thinking that a certain teaching must be written is the idea that it would
otherwise be impermanent, that its oral expression or marking would not ensure
that it remained open to remarking. Presumably, then, in the present state of human
(philosophical) culture, if this teaching were not written, it would be forgotten; it
is written in the name of a past or future human circle, of a kind that our present
circle cannot recall or create (remember or re-member). But why is our present
human circle unable to preserve this teaching in the absence of its written record?
Cavell offers an analogy, recalled from his earlier writings, to develop this theme.
It will help our understanding of what is to come if I recall some sentences from
that essay, in which he describes Beethoven’s earlier work:
One can hear, in the music in question, how the composition is related to, or could
grow in familiar ways from, a process of improvisation; as though the parts meted
out by the composer were reenactments, or dramatizations, of successes his improvi-
sations had discovered—given the finish and permanence the occasion deserves and
the public demands, but containing essentially only such discoveries. . . . Somewhere
in the development of Beethoven, this ceases to be imaginable. . . .
Why might such a phenomenon occur? . . . The context in which we can hear
music as improvisatory is one in which the language it employs, its conventions, are
familiar or obvious enough (whether because simple or because they permit of a total
mastery or perspicuity) that at no point are we or the performer in doubt about our
location or goal; there are solutions to every problem, permitting the exercise of
familiar forms of resourcefulness; a mistake is clearly recognizable as such, and may
even present a chance to be seized; and just as the general range of chances is circum-
scribed, so there is a preparation for every chance, and if not an inspired one, then a
formula for one. But in the late experience of Beethoven, it is as if our freedom to
act no longer depends on the possibility of spontaneity; improvising to fit a given lack
or need is no longer enough. The entire enterprise of action and of communication has
become problematic. The problem is no longer how to do what you want, but to
know what would satisfy you. We could also say: Convention as a whole is now
looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as a continuing improvisation
in the face of problems we no longer understand. Nothing we now have to say, no
personal utterance, has its meaning conveyed in the conventions and formulas we
now share. . . . [O]ur choices seem to be those of silence, or nihilism (the denial of
the value of shared meaning altogether), or statements so personal as to form the
possibility of communication without the support of convention—perhaps to become
the source of new convention. . . . Such, at any rate, are the choices which the modern
works of art I know seem to me to have made.6
Add to this, as Cavell immediately does, the thought that at such a point, such
music must be written, and the work of the Investigations and The Claim of Reason
appears as essentially modernist. Their teaching is triply devoid of memorability.
Its parts or elements can no longer be read as reenactments or memorials of insights
originally discovered by improvisation; this is because neither writer nor readers
possess a common fund of agreed-upon conventions that they might call upon or
recall to control their sense of what a philosophical problem is, what might count
as its solution, of what resources might be used to discover those solutions, what
might count as a mistaken resolution; and the absence of such familiar landmarks
or reference points puts the direction of any exercise of philosophical thinking, and
so the tasks of predicting or recalling its progress, in the absence of a permanent
record of it, essentially beyond us. In these conditions, philosophical teaching must
be written, and written in face of the thought that the entire enterprise of creative
thinking has become problematic, that thinkers in the present circumstances of
human culture lack any grasp of what they want of thinking, let alone how to
achieve it. In short, there are no given philosophical conventions; the present philo-
sophical task is continuously to improvise them, and to do so through the writing
of texts that offer statements so personal as to permit communication without con-
vention, or the origination of new conventions.
Given this, would we want to say that The Claim of Reason is a lyric or a
dramatic composition? Were its elements fully formed on their first appearance and
written down only to await their right company; or were they preserved so that
they might grow outside the womb, to allow the transformations through which
they might find their proper place? On the one hand, parts two and three appear as
reduced but otherwise unaltered from their original appearance in Cavell’s disserta-
tion. Their pairing is intended to facilitate comparisons and contrasts between epis-
temological and moral debates (CR, 250); and the reader’s sense of shock in mak-
ing the transition from part three to part four, thereby encountering prose possessed
of a very different range, complexity, and intensity, indicates that parts three and
four appear to be at best related by juxtaposition—with neither adapting to nor
accommodating the specificities of the other’s style and substance. On the other
hand, Cavell’s description of the dramatic mode of composition as “essentially
stratified and partitioned” seems an apt characterization of The Claim of Reason as
a whole: it is partitioned into four portions, and multiply stratified by its shifting
periods of composition and its alterations of textual telos.
I take it, then, that answering the question of this book’s composition depends
upon whether we read its parts as prefabricated units or as organically prema-
ture—as building blocks or body parts. The fact that the textual indications point
to two different answers shows, I believe, not that we can read The Claim of
Reason as either a lyric or a dramatic composition, but rather that we must read it
as both. I think of this as the book’s theory of itself—as composed of fragments

or as fragmentary—and understand this theory as both a confirmation and a further
specification of The Claim of Reason’s understanding of itself as a modernist work.
If we focus on the dramatic aspects of the book’s composition, its fragments will
appear as both embryos and members—each is capable of further growth (even if
outside the womb), but each thereby grows toward taking its place as a member
of, to remember, a larger organic whole. But there remains the undeniable sense
that this book remains somehow fragmentary, its members never shaking off the
aura or memory of dismemberment. We might ask why this air of the embryonic
is internal to the book’s work; and if we now try thinking of its fragmentariness in
lyric terms—in terms of building blocks rather than body parts—we will start
thinking of the book as an edifice arising from ruins, and of its material as stones,
slabs, pillars, and blocks strewn along the ground.
Such an image recalls the work of the builders at the opening of the Investiga-
tions; it also recalls Wittgenstein’s interlocutor’s sense that philosophy as he prac-
tices it destroys everything that is important, “[a]s it were all the buildings, leaving
behind only bits of stone and rubble” (PI, 118), in response to which Wittgenstein
claims that he is only “clearing up the ground of language” on which structures of
air, philosophical houses of cards, once stood.
So is a modernist philosophical text engaged in destruction or reconstruction, or
both, or neither? Is destroying structures of air true destruction? Is clearing up the
ground of language on which they stood a form of construction or of reconstruc-
tion, or a preparation for (re)construction? What are the materials for such a proj-
ect, and what does it aim to build? From what we have learned so far, we might
say: the birth or rebirth of a new human circle, which means a new dispensation
of culture, one that dispenses with the present illusion of human cultivation in the
name of a possibility of genuinely creative thought, of a form of life in which
thinkers (which means language users, which means all human beings) can dis-
cover genuine satisfaction, in which the fragments of past communities of meaning-
ful thought and value can be used in the reconstruction of new but personally
authorized conventions. In such a circle, what Wittgenstein and Cavell hope to
teach can indeed be usefully said; but since the texts they now write are written in
the name of that future possibility and in the shadow of the present actuality, on a
ground where construction is possible but only with the ruins of the past and amid
the ruination of the present, they must take on a form that is both dismembered
and embryonic, a half-built edifice whose form acknowledges both its origin in
ruins and the completion it foreshadows.
Cavell effects just such an acknowledgment by placing his most recent writing
as his book’s final part; it thereby appears as the future foreshadowed in (that is,
unpredictable from but retrospectively derivable from) the book’s preceding and
originating parts—the fragments, as he tells us in the foreword, of his past disserta-
tion. Sequentially and thematically, part four draws upon, develops, and reworks
material from the other three parts; and in terms of his philosophical development,
it is only at its center that Cavell hears himself using his own voice (a voice that
is at once an extension and a denial of Wittgenstein’s (CR, xv) to say “something
fairly continuously at the right level” for thinking about the problems that sparked
his original interest in Wittgenstein, the shifting focus of his dissertation and his
continuing concerns in philosophy (CR, xiii). Accordingly, anyone interested in
the mode of composition of The Claim of Reason must be concerned with the
mode of composition of its culminating portion; and in this too, the foreword has
more than autobiographical value.
There, Cavell offers the following account of the composition of part four:
What emerged . . . was something I more and more came to regard, or to accept, even
to depend upon, as the keeping of a limited philosophical journal. Writing it was like
the keeping of a journal in two main respects. First, the autonomy of each span of
writing is a more important goal than smooth, or any, transitions between spans
(where one span may join a number of actual days, or occupy less than one full day).
This ordering of goals tends to push prose to the aphoristic. . . . Second, there would
be no point, or no hope, in showing the work to others until the life, or place, of
which it was the journal, was successfully, if temporarily, left behind, used up. (CR,
xix)
I note the implication that this part of The Claim of Reason conforms to both the
lyric and the dramatic modes of composition that one could apply to the book as
a whole—its entries are at once autonomous building blocks juxtaposed with one
another, and yet responsive to conclusions formed in earlier entries (there are real
transitions between them, as Cavell’s note on the overlapping ranges of the subti-
tles he assigns to their various phrases makes clear [CR, viii]). I note also certain
ideas of temporality and progress—the dailiness or diurnality of the journal form
(and name), the idea of entries as records of past inhabitations and experiences,
but as allowing new inhabitations and new experience (so that their composition
amounts to the remembering of a journey, the using up of nostalgia in the name of
the future). I note finally the idea of the aphorism as a paradigm for prose produced
under such pressures, an idea that Cavell has recently argued is as applicable to
the Investigations as it is to this part of his text, and internal to its modernist work.
Can the motley of writing modes to which Cavell resorts in the development
sequence of part four be more precisely characterized? Instruction emerges in two
further passages. The first, from part one, interprets Cavell’s reading of Wittgens-
teinian criteria as showing that statements of fact and judgments of value rest upon
the same capacities of human nature, that only a creature that can judge of value
can state a fact (CR, 14–15). He reformulates this as the claim that “what can
comprehensibly be said is what is found to be worth saying” (CR, 94), which he
thinks of as requiring an aesthetics and an economics of speech:
In the former case we follow the fact that understanding what someone says is a
function of understanding the intention expressed in his or her saying it, and then the
fact that one’s intention is a function of what one wants, to a perspective from which
responding to what another says is to be seen as demanding a response to (the other’s)
desire. When in earlier writing of mine I broach the topic of the modern, I am broach-
ing the topic of art as one in which the connection between expression and desire is
purified, . . . [in which nothing] secures the value or the significance or an object apart
from one’s wanting the thing to be as it is. . . . A strictness or scrupulousness of
artistic desire thus comes to seem a moral and intellectual imperative. About the latter
case. . . . —If we formulate the idea that valuing underwrites asserting as the idea
that interest informs telling or talking generally, then we may say that the degree to
which you talk of things, and talk in ways, that hold no interest for you, or listen to
what you cannot imagine the talker’s caring about, in the way he carries the care, is
the degree to which you consign yourself to nonsensicality, stupefy yourself. . . . I
think of this consignment as a form not so much of dementia as of what amentia
ought to mean, a form of mindlessness. It does not appear unthinkable that the bulk
of an entire culture, call it the public discourse of the culture, the culture thinking
aloud about itself, hence believing itself to be talking philosophy, should become
ungovernably inane. (CR, 94–95)
Here, the Wittgensteinian philosopher’s responsiveness to those moments when

we find ourselves meaning something other than what we took ourselves to be
saying, or meaning nothing intelligible at all, is interpreted as a response to mo-
ments when our speech loses touch with comprehensible human desires and inter-
ests; and this inanity is read as exemplary of a possibility that our present culture
faces or has already actualized. In this light, philosophy becomes the education of
grown-ups; its task, that of turning its interlocutors away from mindlessness, and
toward a form of life in which they might become genuinely interested. Texts
written in this spirit ask for a species of conversion or rebirth, and attempt to effect
it by forcing their readers to acknowledge themselves as internally split—fixated
upon spurious forms of culture but attracted to a new circle of possibilities. Hence
the connection, mooted in the foreword, between modernist philosophy and esoter-
icism (CR, xvi); hence also Cavell’s future interest in moral perfectionism. Retain-
ing from this press of implication the idea of an aesthetics and an economics of
speech, we can turn to a final passage bearing upon the method or manner of part
four. It occurs within that part, in the pause between its opening exposition of
Wittgenstein and its later development, where Cavell denies that Wittgenstein’s
(and so his) aphorisms are to be understood as metaphorical—certainly not when
the idea of “metaphor” in play is reductive, one that pictures metaphorical meaning
as reducible to, exhausted by, paraphrase. Instead, Cavell suggests the following
paradigm:
Such remarks . . . may be looked upon as myths, or fragments of a myth. . . . I should
imagine that a reason one feels certain remarks about the soul to be metaphorical is
that one does not want, or know how, to speak of them as mythological. (CR, 364)
What, then, might it mean to regard them as mythological? I assemble a list

of distinctive features mentioned in succeeding pages. Myths are the subject of
interpretation and argument; they will generally deal with origins at which no one
can have been present; they are open to continuation, which can be thought of as
revision; a false myth is not just untrue but destructive of truth; when the mythol-
ogy and actuality cease to coexist harmoniously, then you have stopped living the
myth. Cavell’s view seems to be that our myths of the soul and the actuality of
which they are mythological expressions (which in this case means our sense of
ourselves, and our lives, as embodied individuals in community with others) have
come apart, and that we consequently find ourselves burdened with fragments of
myths that we have stopped living, or with fragments of false myths—myths that
are destructive of the truth of our nature, myths that cannot or should not be
thought of as humanly livable. These are the materials with which the Wittgenstei-
nian philosopher finds the ground of language strewn; they are the fragments from
which a properly responsible modernist philosophy must construct its criticism of
present human culture and attempt to reconstruct a humanly inhabitable form of
life:
Wittgenstein’s expression “The human body is the best picture of the human soul” is
an attempt to replace or reinterpret these fragments of myth. It continues to express
the idea that the soul is there to be seen, that my relation to the other soul is as
immediate as to an object of sight, or would be as immediate if, so to speak, the
relation could be effected. But Wittgenstein’s mythology shifts the location of the
thing which blocks this vision.
The block to my vision of the other is not the other’s body but my incapacity or
unwillingness to interpret or to judge it accurately, to draw the right connections. The
suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this
darkness upon the other. (CR, 368)
This interpretation of Wittgenstein’s myth-fragment or aphorism exemplifies the
way in which Cavell takes mythological uses of words to invite accounts of why
they seem to epitomize or give expression to (to construct) a truth, or to destroy
it; and by giving an account of why a given word is or is not the word I want—of
whether or not it gives expression to a genuine human desire or interest or re-
sponse—I make it possible to move away or to move on from those words, proba-
bly to some others. Cavell points out parenthetically that “the willingness and the
refusal to exchange one word or expression for another, as well as the usefulness
or futility in doing so, are themes running throughout the Investigations” (CR,
363). This same willingness or refusal is the engine of part four of The Claim of
Reason. It moves from one aphoristic myth-fragment to another, constantly purify-
ing their responsiveness to human desires and assessing their proper modes or rates
of exchange, and thereby exemplifying at once an aesthetics and an economics of
speech; and by forming itself from fragments of myth and aphorism, it can never
itself be other than fragmentary or embryonic in form—thus continuing in philoso-
phy one line of the modernist impulse in modern human culture.
Fifth Paragraph: Approaching the Hermeneutic Circle
We have so far completed an interpretation of the first of the two self-introductory

remarks Cavell offers before embarking on his opening interpretation of Witt-
genstein’s notion of a criterion. The second of these remarks provides his solution
to the paradox that emerged in the first paragraph of the book:
But I was supposed to be saying something more, having said something first, by
way of introducing myself, and concerning how we should approach Wittgenstein’s
text. Accordingly, I will say, second, that there is no approach to it, anyway I have
none. Approach suggests moving nearer, getting closer; hence it suggests that we are
not already near or close enough; hence suggests we know some orderly direction to
it not already taken within it; that we sense some distance between us and it which
useful criticism could close. (CR, 6)
Our paradox was: if the terms needed to approach a book can only be learned from
the book itself, how can we ever begin to learn from it, this or anything? It can
now be seen that the misunderstanding here arises from our having recourse to the
idea of there being an approach to the text—for that places us entirely outside the
text, and makes the text entirely opaque to us. The reality is that anyone capable
of opening its covers is already close enough to learn from it—in part because no
reader can begin a text entirely without a range of relevant capacities and experi-
ences, or a basic orientation toward it; in part because to begin to read it is to begin
to learn from it, which includes beginning to learn how to read it.
Yet some texts are produced under conditions that entail that the reader’s pre-
liminary orientation cannot be trusted, and so they must bear most of the responsi-
bility of establishing the terms on which they can be understood—perhaps by
attracting their readers across an unhelpful distance, perhaps by issuing rebukes
that create a fruitful perspective. In these cases, nothing outside each text itself
will provide an opening; only directions already taken within them will help. They
cannot give their readers everything they need for deeper understanding at the
outset; but they can give them enough to go on further, where they can be given
more. On this understanding, there can be no objection to beginning our reading at
the opening of a text, beginning with what it can teach us about how to learn from
this text and then going on to explore other directions proposed within it; but there
can be no excuse for confusing the end of that reading with the completion of our
understanding, and less than none for refusing to begin.
Notes
This essay is reprinted from Common Knowledge, Fall 1996, by permission of the author
and Oxford University Press.
1. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); hereafter cited as CR.
2. See CR, xv.
3. In Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 125–86; here-
after cited as PP.
4. “Before introducing himself in The Claim of Reason, thus reserving the first-person
pronoun for his second paragraph, Cavell insists that his reader enter the text through a
labyrinthine first sentence of two hundred and sixteen words.” Michael Payne, “Introduc-
tion,” Bucknell Review 32 (1989): 15.
5. “Why an interest in texts over problems? . . . The problems of philosophy for Cavell
are secondary to the contributed texts of philosophy.” Richard Fleming, The State of Philos-
ophy: An Invitation to a Reading in Three Parts of Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 24.
6. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), 200–202.
3
Cavell’s “Romanticism”
and Cavell’s Romanticism
SIMON CRITCHLEY
I do not deny that truth can be used as a

weapon; especially when it comes in frag-
ments.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
The Romanticization of Everyday Life
Romanticism is a persistent theme in Stanley Cavell’s work that has assumed in-
creasing prominence in his later writings, in particular In Quest of the Ordinary
(1988) and This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989). As one would expect
from Cavell, the trajectory of his recovery of romanticism is singular: it leads from
his abiding interest in the procedures of ordinary language philosophy, in particular
Austin, back to the recovery of an American romantic tradition in Emerson and
Thoreau, and forward into a strongly perfectionist reading of Wittgenstein and
Heidegger, where these twin peaks of twentieth-century philosophy are seen “as
showing philosophy to be [possible] as a continuation of romanticism” (NYUA,
5). Indeed, his intensification of interest in romanticism seems to be continuous
with his perfectionist turn. The fascinating consequence of this linking of romanti-
cism to perfectionism for the reading of Wittgenstein and Heidegger—that is, on
Cavell’s account, for the continuation of philosophy—is that their concern with
the ordinary or the everyday cannot be assimilated to a defense of certain common-
sense or common-room beliefs about the world, but rather that they are both en-
gaged in a contestation of common sense in the name of a transfiguration of every-
day life. Thus, the Wittgensteinian teaching that philosophy must become a practice
of leading words from their metaphysical usage to their everyday usage becomes
a fantastic practice (NYUA, 66), insofar as Cavell claims that Wittgenstein views
the actual everyday as a scene of illusion, best represented by a Spenglerian picture
of culture as decline or a Nietzschean diagnosis of European civilization as nihil-
ism. On Cavell’s reading, Wittgenstein is proposing a practice that would deliver
us from the actual everyday to the eventual everyday (eventual might be considered
speculatively here as both having an event character, an Ereignis in Heidegger’s
37
sense, and linking the eventual to the possible, in German eventuell), a deliverance
that is not a Platonic ascent out of the cave and the public space of doxa, but
is rather a descent—a downgoing—into the uncanniness of the ordinary, or, in
Heideggerian terms, the enigma of the everyday (NYUA, 46–47).1 This would be
what Cavell calls a diurnalization of philosophy’s ambitions, looking beneath our
feet rather than over our heads.
As I see it, Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, particularly his biological interpre-
tation of forms of life (NYUA, 42–45), is a crucial advance upon the breathtaking
cultural and political complacency of much that passes for Wittgensteinian philoso-
phizing: the everyday is not a network of practices or forms of life to which we
can return by leaving our colleges and taking a turn in the street or a job in Wool-
worth’s. Rather, the turn to the everyday demands that philosophy becomes therapy
or, to use Cavell’s words, “the education of grownups.” That is, it becomes a way
of addressing the crisis of late modernity where the everyday is concealed and
ideologically repackaged as “common sense,” what the later Husserl rightly saw
as Lebensweltvergessenheit. We do not, therefore, return to the ordinary, the every-
day or the Lebenswelt, so much as turn to them for the first time, undergoing a
turning around, a conversion. The ordinary is not a ground, but a goal. It is some-
thing we are in quest of, it is the object of an inquest, it is in question—hence
Cavell’s ambiguous title In Quest of the Ordinary. Of course, it is in relation to
this sense of the ordinary as something extraordinary that we might begin to con-
sider the relation between romanticism and everyday life:
Romanticism’s work here interprets itself, so I have suggested, as the task of bringing
the world back, as to life. This may, in turn, present itself as the quest for a return to
the ordinary, or of it, a new creation of our habitat; or as the quest, away from that,
for the creation of a new inhabitation. (IQO, 52–53)
The world must be romanticized, the quotidian must be made fantastic and the
human made strange, “attracting the human to the work of becoming human.”
Although it is not dealt with at any length in The Claim of Reason, romanticism
remains a persistent presence in that work. In the concluding pages of part two,
after claiming that a serious bond between Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be
found in the way in which they both acknowledge the question of the mystery of
existence, Cavell adds gnomically, “To be interested in such accounts . . . I suppose
one will have to take an interest in certain preoccupations of romanticism” (CR,
241). However, romanticism assumes more centrality in the extraordinary fourth
part of The Claim of Reason. In addition to the allusions to romantic poets, espe-
cially Blake, in the multiple epigraphs to part four and the sporadic outbreaks of
citations from romantic texts, Cavell writes:
One can think of romanticism as the discovery that the everyday is an exceptional
achievement. Call it the achievement of the human. (CR, 463)
Thus, romanticism is the discovery of the exceptionality of the everyday, or, in

terms discussed here, the uncanniness of the ordinary.
However, the discovery of the everyday as an exceptional achievement must be
combined with the acknowledgment that this achievement is never achieved. That
Cavell’s “Romanticism” and Cavell’s Romanticism 39
is to say, romanticism is that process of secularization (CR, 470) or de-divinization

that aims at the establishment of a community based on moral autonomy, but this
ideal of community is never realized. Romanticism is, in my terms, a response to
the problem of nihilism that aims at a de-theologized re-enchantment of the world.
Happily, it fails—which does not imply a rejection of romanticism, but an elabora-
tion of its unworked, nonromantic essence. This is why Cavell concludes, “So
romantics dream revolution, and break their hearts” (CR, 464).
Emerson as the Literary Absolute
I will come back later to this question of a broken-hearted romanticism, but I first
want to criticize a specific claim that Cavell makes about romanticism. It concerns
Cavell’s reading—or rather misreading—of The Literary Absolute. In the preface
to In Quest of the Ordinary, which is essentially a foreword to Cavell’s 1983
Beckman lectures on romanticism, he notes:
As I pack off the present material, a general misgiving is focused for me in my having
just read The Literary Absolute. . . . There I find features of my Beckman lectures
preceded, generously and practically, in certain opening themes and strategies, from
the other side of the philosophical mind—the German by way of France, opposed to
the English by way of America—specifically, the theme of a romantic call for the
unity of philosophy and poetry precipitated by the aftermath of Kant’s revolution in
philosophy. (IQO, xi)
Cavell rightly sees the central demand of romanticism as the unification of phi-
losophy and poetry, a demand that he places alongside another demand announced
in the foreword to The Claim of Reason, namely the unification of the two halves
of the philosophical mind—the analytic and the Continental, of the English by way
of America and the German by way of France. It presumably remains Cavell’s
philosophical ambition—or his ambition for philosophy—“to define and date a
place” of the overcoming of these opposed traditions; adding—with some justifi-
cation, I think—that part four of The Claim of Reason is written “as though these
paths had never divided” (CR, xiii). As Cavell has recently written, taking up a
metaphor I discussed earlier, his thinking operates “within the tear in the Western
philosophical mind, represented, so I believe, by the distances between the English-
American and the German-French dispensations.”2
However, this tear or rift in the Western philosophical mind reflects a third—
and most important—aspect of division and demand for unification, which is the
splitting within culture itself (CR, xiii). This is a crisis at the level of everyday
life, which calls for a mending of the world. The diagnosis of crisis emerges most
strongly in a text like This New Yet Unapproachable America, where Wittgenstein
is rightly read as a philosopher of culture, who opposes the nomadism and nihilism
of contemporary life with a practice of philosophy that has in view the achievement
of the everyday, the redemption or—Cavell’s preferred word—recovery of culture.
But rather than basing this claim in a reading of Wittgenstein’s Culture and
Value—a more obvious and highly illuminating para-text and successor to Schle-
gel’s fragments—Cavell argues that it is the very form of the Philosophical Investi-
gations, with its weave of voices, that provides a picture of a redeemed culture,
the imagined practice of an eventual everyday. Of course, this makes Witt-
genstein—and Cavell, too—a prophet (NYUA, 74).
Thus, the way in which Cavell’s interpretation of romanticism is, as he says,
“preceded” by the concerns of The Literary Absolute permits us to focus three
demands for unification in his work:
1. that of philosophy and poetry,
2. that of analytic and Continental philosophy,
3. that of culture with itself through the mediation of philosophy.
So far so good, we might say. This rehearses arguments set out earlier and
shows that Cavell’s work is continuous with the bewildering naiveté and failure of
Jena Romanticism.3 However, continuing the quotation from In Quest of the Ordi-
nary, Cavell makes a crucial second claim that takes him well beyond the argument
of The Literary Absolute. He writes:
It would have been, it seems to me, of exactly no philosophical use for me to have
sought to weigh the relative merits of these starting places [i.e., Cavell’s own and
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s] apart from establishing to my own satisfaction that,
among other matters, Emerson’s writing bears up under the pressure of the call for
philosophy, that he constitutes a fair realization of the bonding of philosophy and
poetry that both Coleridge and Friedrich Schlegel had called for [emphasis added].
(IQO, xii)
Thus, the romantic demand for the unification of philosophy and poetry is, Ca-
vell claims, given a “fair realization” in the writing of Emerson. A good deal turns
here on what is meant by “fair” and on how this adjective modifies and softens the
substantive “realization.” If we let the adjective soften the substantive, then Ca-
vell’s claim would seem to be that Emerson is a “fair realization” in the same way
that one might speak of a fair likeness in portraiture, that is, it is the best available
under present conditions. However, Cavell makes the same claim in the opening
pages of This New Yet Unapproachable America, entitled “Work in Progress,” the
difference being that “realization” is no longer qualified by “fair,” but stands alone.
I quote at length:
Accepting the thesis presented by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (which they find antic-
ipated in Walter Benjamin and in Maurice Blanchot) that the idea of literature becom-
ing its own theory . . . is what constitutes romanticism (in its origin in the Athe-
naeum), and beginning to see Emerson’s responsiveness to that Athenaeum material
(or to its sources or its aftermath), my wonder at Emerson’s achievement is given a
new turn. . . . So I should like to record my impression that, measured against, say,
Friedrich Schlegel’s aphoristic, or rather, fragmentary, call for or vision of the union
of poetry and philosophy, Emerson’s work presents itself as the realization of that
vision. I do not mean that Emerson’s work is not “fragmentary.” Indeed it seems to
me that the puzzle of the Emersonian sentence must find a piece of its solution in a
theory of the fragment: maintaining fragmentariness is part of Emerson’s realization
of romanticism. (NYUA, 20–21; emphasis added)
Thus, Emerson’s writing is no longer “work in progress”—which, as Lacoue-

Labarthe and Nancy remark and as we saw earlier, “becomes the infinite truth of
the work” (LA, 48) or “the work of the absence of the work”—but the Work itself,
the realization of the ideality of romanticism. Measured against the fragmentary
nature of Schlegel’s call for the unification of philosophy and poetry, a call that
results only in failure and unfinished works, Emerson is the realization of that
call. Emersonian writing is the literary absolute, “the transformation of genius into
practical power,” or again, “the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture.”4
But what does this claim mean? How exactly is Emerson the realization of
romanticism? This is obviously bound up with the enormously privileged status
that Cavell attributes to Emersonian writing: that is, to the genre of the Emersonian
essay, the Emersonian sentence, and even the Emersonian word. First, and impor-
tantly, the Emersonian essay is not a renunciation of fragmentation in the name of
wholeness—the great novel of secular modernity—rather Cavell claims that the
essay is the realization of the fragment, the fulfillment of this genre. As Emerson
writes of himself and the essay form in “Experience,” “I am a fragment, and this
is a fragment of me.”5 Second, the Emersonian essay is not a realization of romanti-
cism in the sense of a return to a precritical immediacy that allegedly characterized
the art of antiquity. The essay as form is essentially self-conscious, self-critical,
and modern. In what sense is it therefore a realization? In his labyrinthine, and at
times highly convoluted, discussion of Emerson’s “Experience,” Cavell writes:
I would like to say that Emerson’s “Experience” announces and provides the condi-
tions under which an Emersonian essay can be experienced—the conditions of its
own possibility. (NYUA, 103)
Focusing on the phrase “conditions of its own possibility,” we might say that
the Emersonian essay, like a miniature transcendental deduction—a hedgehog-
sized version of the First Critique—self-consciously announces the conditions of
possibility for its own intelligibility. The claim here is that each essay, each sen-
tence, and each word has a reflective self-awareness of the conditions of possibility
for its own realization.
The effect of this form of writing is inertia or what Stephen Mulhall calls “lack
of momentum.”6 In In Quest of the Ordinary, Cavell quotes Thoreau, where the
latter imagines that a philosophy book suitable for students would be written with
next to no forward motion; it would be a book that culminates in each sentence,
and for which we can find no reason to continue reading from one sentence to the
next (IQO, 18). For Cavell, the virtue of Emersonian (and, incidentally, Wittgen-
steinian) writing is that it knows when to stop, and this knowledge opens a certain
relation to finitude. Indeed, reading an essay like Emerson’s “Experience,” it is not
difficult to see what Cavell means about Emersonian writing: the rhythms of Emer-
son’s English are strange to my English ears—the style has a staccato muscularity,
where each sentence seems to be the culmination of the argument and an argument
in itself, the sentences form a dense linguistic undergrowth, each sentence plantlike
and damp with individual pathos, momentarily reflecting a light that seems to ema-
nate from an unseen source.
Thus, Cavell presents Emerson (or, on Mulhall’s account, presents himself)7 as

a realization of the Schlegelian demand for the unification of philosophy and po-
etry, and he presents the Emersonian essay—the sentence and the word—as the
realization of the romantic fragment. That is to say, the “hedgehog theory” of
the fragment discussed earlier, where the fragment is “entirely isolated from the
surrounding world” and “complete in itself.”
However, and this is my critique, in terms of the reading of Jena Romanticism
set out earlier, Cavell must be said to misread The Literary Absolute and misunder-
stand the theory of the romantic fragment—a misunderstanding that, I believe, is
at least partially caused by the fact that Cavell overlooks the decisive influence of
Blanchot’s conception of literature upon Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. If, on my
account, Jena Romanticism is rooted in the acute self-consciousness of its unwork-
ing or failure, the exploration of the lack of final synthesis in a continual process
of self-creation and self-destruction and the quasi dialectics of wit and irony, then
Cavell’s romanticism would seem to take us in a rather different direction. Jena
Romanticism is rooted in essential ambiguity, which is the ambiguity of the genre
of the fragment itself. The ambiguity of the fragment is continually directed toward
and open to the future, a future underwritten by a lack of final synthesis. I would
argue that it is the very futuricity of fragments that explains why we carry on
reading them, and why their reading is not, as Cavell suggests, characterized by
lack of momentum or inertia, but rather by a relentless and vertiginous forward
motion without destination. The abrupt and discontinuous music of the fragments
leaves the reader perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually craving more and perpetually
frustrated by their seeming superficiality and evanescence. Cavell’s claim that Em-
erson represents a (fair) realization of the unification of philosophy and poetry, and
an achievement of the theory of the fragment, misunderstands how the fragment
works—or rather, unworks. To speak of realization in relation to the fragment is
to misunderstand the fragment. It is to try and arrest the restless futural movement
of worklessness; it is to try to close down the future opened by fragments; it is to
put satisfaction in place of the dissatisfaction that haunts romanticism; it is to claim
the coincidence of ideality and reality that characterizes the aesthetic absolutism
discussed earlier, and whose pernicious political consequences I mentioned. Fi-
nally—and paradoxically, as we shall soon see—Cavell’s claim for Emerson dis-
arms the threat of skepticism by arresting the limping of irony; it permits us not to
be disappointed with criteria; it leaves the romantic without a broken heart.
Digression: Why Stanley Loves America

and Why We Should Too
The name “Emerson” has a privileged status in Cavell’s discourse. But it has to be
associated with another name, a name to which it is intimately linked, a name
which functions like “Germanien” for Heidegger, like “Auschwitz” for Adorno,
and like “Israel” for Levinas. That name is “America.” The place of Emerson in
Cavell’s work is profoundly related to America as a place for philosophy, as a
response to the question “Has America expressed itself philosophically?” (IQO,
11). The singular trajectory of Cavell’s thought, which takes him back from the
philosophical present of Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Emerson and Thoreau, is
driven by the fact that Emerson and Thoreau are American philosophers, part of
an American formation, foundation, and inheritance. As Cavell notes in This New
Yet Unapproachable America, Emerson’s writing is the “provision of experience
for America, for ‘these’ shores” (NYUA, 92). Again, in In Quest of the Ordinary:
On the contrary, my wish to inherit Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers, my claim
for them as founding American thinking, is a claim both that America contains an
unacknowledged current of thinking, and that this thinking accomplishes itself by
teaching the inheritance of European philosophy—an inheritance that should make
me not the master of this European philosophy, but also not its slave. (IQO, 181–82)
Neither master nor slave to the European tradition, but a distinct and distinctive
voice—these are handsome republican sentiments that aspire to putting America
on an equal philosophical footing with Europe. But I think Cavell goes slightly
further than this. We saw earlier how Cavell claims that Emersonian writing real-
izes the romantic demand for the unification of philosophy and poetry, analytic and
Continental philosophy and the division within culture itself. Now, the place where
this union is most actively sought, where the gradual domestication of culture
might take place, is America. Might we not hear this when Cavell writes:
To claim Emerson and Thoreau as of the origin in America, not alone of what is
called literature but of what may be called philosophy, is to claim that literature is
neither the arbitrary embellishment nor the necessary other of philosophy. You can
either say that in the New World, distinctive philosophy and literature do not exist in
separation, or you can say that the American task is to create them from one another,
as if the New World is still to remember, if not exactly to recapitulate, the cultural
labors of the Old World. (IQO, 182)
America is an origin or is of the origin in a way that precedes the bifurcation of
philosophy and literature. America’s founding texts ignore or sublate this bifurca-
tion; they are, in a sense, both pre-and post-Platonic, both the union of philosophy
and poetry seemingly sundered by the Republic and sought by romanticism and its
heirs.
Although Cavell does not make this vast claim for actually existing America,
but for a kind of perfectionist Amerique a venir, in Emerson’s words, “this new
yet unapproachable America that I have found in the West,”8 America is the roman-
tic place par excellence. It is the place which promises romanticism, it has romantic
promise, it is the achievement of romanticism as a promise. What Cavell often
refers to as America’s belatedness is also the reason for its place as the destination
of Europe, as both Europe’s exhausted disappearance and its fulfilled completion.
This is perhaps what Hart Crane meant by referring to the American condition as
“an improved infancy.”9
But shouldn’t such views arouse a little suspicion? Looking again at the earlier
quotations from In Quest of the Ordinary, one might begin to wonder what Cavell
could mean by “inheritance” and “founding.” What is the relation between the
inheritance of the European philosophical tradition and the founding of America,
specifically an American philosophical tradition? In Cavell, the notion of “found-
ing” is often connected with “finding,” namely the alleged “finding” of America
by Europeans—the title of Cavell’s piece on Emerson in This New Yet Unap-
proachable America is “Finding as Founding”—and the founding of a nation.
What, one might ask, is the relation between philosophy and the founding of a
nation? What does it mean to claim Emerson and Thoreau as founders of American
philosophy, that is, as the origin of America’s self-consciousness as something—as
a place—distinct from Europe?
One might begin by noting the connection between founding/finding and inheri-
tance, where the founding of an American philosophical tradition, and of America
tout court as something new, is articulated together with the question of the inheri-
tance of the European tradition. America inherits: that is to say, it is the recognition
of both the exhaustion of the European tradition upon the territory of Europe, and
of America as the continuation and completion of that tradition in a new territory.
American philosophy, for Cavell, seems rooted in the experience of immigration,
in the migration of words and worlds from the Old to the New, an experience of
uprooting, displacement, and settlement. The question of founding raises the vast
issue about the relation of America as it is figured in Emersonian writing to both
the past of America as a place already founded, that is, native American culture,
and also to cultural memory of extermination and slavery, which has produced the
many countertraditions and counterinheritances that are found in late American
modernity. To his credit, Cavell has persistently raised the question of slavery and
oppression in relation to Emersonian writing, and one might note the following
revealing passage from Must We Mean What We Say?
It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a
sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color—the superficial fact about
a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American, fighting for his
love of country, that the last hope of earth [emphasis added] should from its begin-
ning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its
rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God. (MWM, 141)10
It must be asked: What is the relation of Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism to

the hybrid ensemble of traditions and inheritances which make up the great rhizome
of American cultural identity?
Although it is doubtless banal to be reminded of this fact, the connection be-
tween philosophy and the founding of a nation or polis has decisive precedents in
the philosophical tradition, whether one thinks of Plato’s misadventure in Syracuse
or Heidegger’s repetition of Platonism in his National Socialist commitment. How-
ever, although it would be wrong to accuse Cavell of falling prey to the gross
naı̈veté of philosophical nationalism, one can nonetheless note a continual conti-
nentalism in Cavell’s writing that typifies a whole genre of philosophical and politi-
cal discourse, a continental drift where the names “America” and “The United
States” become synonyms, and where the name of the nation is inflated and identi-
fied with an entire continent. Cavell, like so many others, does not speak of the
Americas, but of America in the singular, which means the United States. Ameri-
can philosophy is, at best, a national philosophy with pretensions of becoming a
continental philosophy.
What does America mean as a philosophical event? What is the place of

America in philosophical discourse? We might begin by considering a tradition of
political philosophy that to my knowledge begins with Locke, where America is
characterized as an infinite state of nature, and therefore the condition of possibility
for the development of private property, mercantile capitalism, and liberal govern-
ment.11 America is imagined as an infinite and empty space, as the wild, unculti-
vated, unpopulated resource for individual property and capital accumulation. Of
course, America was not empty before European colonization and this myth of
emptiness is as pernicious as Zionist claims that Palestine was empty prior to the
establishment of the state of Israel.
What is the time of America? Philosophically and politically, America is the
thought and the land of the future.12 This is a trope that also recurs in political
philosophy, for example in Tom Paine, where American revolutionary democracy
is declared to be the future of Europe, an American future that begins in France in
1789 and will spread to all corners of Europe, even England.13 In this way, for
Paine, the New World regenerates and rejuvenates the Old World and the onward
march into the future will be accompanied by the music of collapsing monarchies.
For Europe, America is an idea, an idea of democracy as Tocqueville described,
an idea in the Kantian sense, the promise of a better future and the expression of
political hope. Within the United States, America is also an idea, the core of a
political theology. It is something in which the citizen is obliged to believe either
as an object of love or intellectual and cultural hatred (which is but another form
of love).
America is the place for utopia, its locale—which is to say that America is the
romantic place par excellence, the place where, in Emersonian terms, genius might
be transformed into practical power. This is particularly visible in Coleridge’s plans
for Pantisocracy, but also in Blake’s prophetic dreamscape where the ideas of revo-
lution, liberty, and passion are defended against the wrath of Albion.14
But what of America as a place? The idea of America as the place for utopia,
as the place where ideality should be (but cannot be) realized, allows us to highlight
what I would see as a “founding” disjunction in the experience of America. What
does one find in the West? Does one approach the unapproachable America? One
anecdote among others comes to mind: driving from Death Valley to Las Vegas is
a trip from the unearthly to the unreal. One traverses the desert and—lo!—the New
Jerusalem rises out of the desert, shimmering with inexplicable, tacky splendor. Las
Vegas is a shining beacon of nihilism, a place where European civilization evapo-
rates into a series of casino complexes. Concrete, steel, and glass accelerate into
the desert scrub, a hallucinatory architecture adorns itself in a submythology of
imaginative travesty: Desert Sands, Excalibur, Treasure Island.
America is an experience of absolute disjunction. On the one hand, it is to be
overwhelmed by the utter sublimity of nature, say the un-Alpine granite vastness
of Yosemite. But on the other hand, America is the cheerful celebration of the
disappearance of culture into kitsch: the Liberace Museum, Graceland. There are
two Americas and perhaps they are equally unreal: the double unreality of nature
and culture. I also think here of the appearance that American cities have for the
European, the cinematically induced conviction that this is what cities should look
like—muscular, vast, inhuman spaces. But their effect exceeds reality, which is
what Baudrillard, in his piece of romantic cultural metaphysics, means by hyper-
reality.15 American culture, in its justified historical revolt against Europe, is per-
haps the aspiration that culture might achieve the condition of nature, become
nature. I think this is what Baudrillard means when he describes America as the
last remaining primitive society on earth.16 This might sound like faint praise, but
praise it is.
Two Americas: both utopia and dystopia. This much would seem to be clear in
Cavell when he reads Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture in the tradition of
Nietzsche and Spengler, where culture is diagnosed as decline, as nihilism, so
Cavell reads Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture in order to read his own
culture as this decline, as the acceleration of European nihilism. But, for Cavell,
the experience of culture as decline in America and as America is always linked
to the perfectionist hope for a redemption of culture through a recovery of the
everyday, the demand for a sky under which philosophy might be possible (NYUA,
7). For Cavell, and this is the source of his disagreement with Rorty, the greatest
danger is a culture without philosophy, that is, without that endless play of voices
that Cavell finds at work in Wittgenstein’s Investigations. It is the latter that pro-
vides Cavell with both the diagnosis of culture as decline—the actual everyday—
and the image of a redeemed culture—the eventual everyday. In Cavell, this two-
Americas problem is focused in his repeated invocation of Emerson’s remark, “I
know the world I converse with in the city and in the farms is not the world I
think.”17
But how is one to approach this new but unapproachable America? Is one to
approach it? Cavell does not pretend to solve this dilemma; rather he recommends
to us another Emersonian sentence, “Patience, patience, we shall win at the last.”
What might Cavell mean by this? What I find here—and it is very little—is the
offer of “a passive practice,” that is, a way of inhabiting the actual everyday with
one eye on the eventual everyday, a passive power that Cavell explicitly links to
Thoreau’s notion of civil disobedience (NYUA, 115). Such is perhaps Cavell’s
weak messianism.
However, Cavell’s most revealing passage on America appears in his 1969 essay
on King Lear, and it allows one to glimpse another America in Cavell, an America
of unworked romanticism, a separated and tragic America. Cavell writes:
Those who voice politically radical wishes for this country may forget the radical
hopes it holds for itself, and not know that the hatred of America by its intellectuals
is only their own version of patriotism. (MWM, 345)
America, Cavell insists, needs to be loved. It needs love like no other nation, and
like no other nation has it been the object of love. The union of love is what
America has always wanted; it is what it tore itself apart in the Civil War trying
to achieve. America has never been able to bear its separateness and therein lies
its tragedy. In lines written at the height of the fateful involvement of the United
States in Vietnam, Cavell writes of America, in an act of literary civil disobedience:
Union is what it wanted. And it has never felt that union has been achieved. Hence
its terror of dissent, which does not threaten its power but its integrity. So it is killing
itself and killing another country in order not to admit its helplessness in the face of
suffering, in order not to acknowledge its separateness.
“America,” Cavell goes on, “is the anti-Marxist country,” the nation where, as
Baudrillard cheerfully notes, the nineteenth century did not happen.18 But things
could change. After all, it’s a free country, “but it will take a change of conscious-
ness. So phenomenology becomes politics” (MWM, 346).
“Has America happened?” (NYUA, 114). Cavell grants that this is a romantic
question, the romantic question par excellence, for it concerns the unification of
philosophy and poetry as a unification of culture with itself and the possibility of
a transformation of genius into practical power. Such a unification would be the
moment when phenomenology becomes politics, the fantastic moment when Plato
lives happily ever after in Syracuse and when Heidegger benevolently looks down
from his hut on a Germany resolute in its collective Dasein. Now, although Cavell
comes close to a form of cultural nationalism (or even cultural continentalism) that
is both historically fallacious and politically pernicious, failing to take account of
the deep hybridities of American memory; and although Cavell’s names—“Emer-
son” and “America”—call for a careful critical dismantling, I would claim that
nonetheless he avoids the deepest naı̈veté of romanticism, namely its aestheticiza-
tion of politics. America, for him, is the tragic experience of separation I will return
to later, an unworked America that hesitates in the tension between nihilism and
its overcoming, between the actual everyday and the eventual everyday. America
is a philosophical event that can never happen. All that remains is an approach and
a series of hallucinatory clichés: the Manhattan skyline emerging from the mist to
the accompaniment of Gershwin, the soiled pearl of Las Vegas shimmering in the
baking desert heat, the sublimity of the nighttime Chicago sky-scape. We arrive
and it is too late. There is only the approach.
Cavell’s Romanticism
What happens to us at the death of the body is what happens to the music when the
music concludes. There is a period of reverberation, and then nothing. (CR, 410)
I Live My Skepticism
Cavell’s “romanticism” is, on the view I have presented, not romantic. His reading
of The Literary Absolute, and particularly his claims for “Emerson” and “America,”
yield a version of romanticism that can be offered as an aesthetic absolutism ripe
for Hegelian/Schmittian critique. However, and this is the positive thought that I
would like to pursue in concluding, this does not mean that Cavell’s thought is not
ultimately romantic, despite itself, and despite its “romanticism.” The curious thing
about Cavell’s Emersonian “romanticism,” at least on my account, is that it is un-
Cavellian. As is clear from the opening chapters of The Claim of Reason,19 Cavell’s
thought is dominated by the insight that criteria come to an end (CR, 412). The
idea of a criterion, which is understood as the means by which the existence of
something is established with certainty, thereby refuting the possibility of skepti-
cism, fails to provide us with the certainty we desire. To take the famous Wittgen-
steinian example of whether I have criteria to decide whether another person is in
pain, Cavell concludes that my criteria will always fall short. There is no epistemic
assurance that my words will reach all the way into the other’s interiority. Thus,
rather than refuting skepticism, criteria—whose necessity only arises at that fateful
moment when attunement or agreement (Ubereinstimmung) is threatened or lost,
when the social contract breaks down—reveal the truth of skepticism, that is, its
irrefutability. Of course, to acknowledge the truth of skepticism is not the same as
admitting that skepticism is true, for this would constitute a further escape into a
new inverted metaphysics of certainty, namely relativism. Rather Cavell is seeking
to draw us into a position where we are denied both the possibility of an epistemo-
logical guarantee for our beliefs and the possibility of a skeptical escape from those
beliefs. Of course, this is hard for us to bear, but it is here that we must learn to,
as Putnam puts it, “wriggle.”20
The burden of much of Cavell’s argument in The Claim of Reason is to show
that this struggle with skepticism provides both the animating intention and dramatic
tension of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The deeply self-conscious and
willfully unsystematic rhetorical form of the Investigations, particularly its endless
play of questioning and answering voices, is, according to Cavell, intended to show
our continual exposure to the threat of skepticism. The Investigations is both para-
digmatic of philosophy, insofar as criteria do not overcome skepticism but are
disappointed and disappointing, and paradigmatic of what it means to be human as
such, because the denial of skepticism would ultimately be the denial of what it is
to be human.
To grasp this second claim, we have to understand that the problem of skepti-
cism (particularly skepticism concerning other minds) is not first and foremost a
theoretical problem. For Cavell, unlike Heidegger,21 there is no everyday or com-
monsense alternative to skepticism (CR, 431). To entertain skeptical doubt is an
everyday occurrence, and there is nothing about other minds that satisfies me for
all practical purposes. (Is this true? Does it not assume the activity of reflection at
all stages of everyday life?) As Cavell puts it, to live without skepticism “would
be to fall in love with the world” (CR, 431). Perhaps the desire that governs so
much philosophy is this wish to fall in love with the world and to achieve what
Cavell calls “empathic projection” (CR, 420) with the other, the identity of subject
and object without remainder, slack, or excess. Perhaps this goes some way toward
explaining what is going on in Heidegger’s existential analytic of inauthenticity in
division I of Being and Time—but that is another story for another occasion. For
Cavell, on the contrary, “I live my skepticism” (CR, 437). That is, skepticism is a
praxis, a practice of the self conditioned by the acknowledgment of ignorance and
limitation. As Cavell puts it, “My ignorance of the existence of others is not the
fate of my natural condition as a human knower, but my way of inhabiting that
condition” (CR, 432).22 Thus, the real problem with skepticism, according to Ca-
vell, is that we attempt to convert the way we inhabit the human condition into a
theoretical problem and this prevents an acknowledgment of the limitedness of the
human glimpsed in skepticism. However, it should be noted that the theoreticism
of skepticism is only a problem for modern, epistemological skepticism and the
same claim cannot simply be made for ancient skepticism, which was not merely
theoretical doubt about the truth of certain metaphysical theses but a practical doubt
about the whole of one’s life, a full existential epoche. In this light, Cavell’s work
might be viewed as a tacit recovery of the ethos of ancient skepticism.23
Cavell’s Tragic Wisdom

This brings me to what I see as the central insight of Cavell’s work, what one
might call its tragic wisdom, which, like a musical leitmotif, is rarely explicitly
formulated but which constantly returns in different variations throughout his work:
the need for an acceptance of human finitude as that which cannot be overcome—
that is to say, an acceptance of the finiteness of the finite, of the limitedness of the
human condition.
Contra Mulhall, this is why Cavell’s work can be seen as neither Christian nor
anti-Christian, that is, crudely “Nietzschean,” insofar as both the Christian and the
Nietzschean share the belief that the human condition is something that must be
overcome whether in redemption through the person of Christ revealed through
Scripture or through Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman. To express this with a
historical figure, I think Cavell rightly accepts Pascal’s tragic vision of the limited-
ness of the human condition without his accompanying faith in the possibility of
overcoming that condition through redemption. As Mulhall’s use of Charles Tay-
lor’s Sources of the Self attempts to show, the roots of Cavell’s philosophical
preoccupations may well be religious, but I do not see why this entails that their
consequences should be religious.24 To make this move is to sidestep the problem
of nihilism which has been the framing theme of this book. Philosophy cannot say
sin, but neither can it say salvation. What philosophy can say is itself, an endless
self-assertion, an endless arrogance and arrogation of the voice that is in conflict
with the religious (i.e., Kierkegaardian-Weilian) vision of dying to the self that
characterizes the awaiting for God.
However, such assertion is not the expression of the self’s mastery, but the
expression of its frailty, its separateness; a minimal but irreducible ipseity that
returns reluctantly to itself in the absence of God, a self for whom at the moment
of the body’s death, “there is a period of reverberation and then nothing.” In these
disappointing circumstances—and it has been my claim that philosophical moder-
nity is the attempt to live with(in) the disappointment of religion—the best that
can be hoped for is an acknowledgment of this limitedness, whilst the worst is the
failure to make this acknowledgment. Responding to the skeptical teaching of King
Lear—ventriloquized through the character of Edgar—Cavell writes: “What the
skeptic opens my eyes to is the knowledge that this is the best—the occurrence of
this tree, of that stone, at that distance, in this light, myself undrugged and unham-
pered, in the best of health” (CR, 432–33).
“This is the best”—such is the maxim of the person who has survived skepti-
cism, something that is doubtless true of a tragic figure like Edgar, but perhaps
equally true of the comic hero: of Chaplin, Keaton (CR, 452), or, as Cavell has
recently said, Groucho Marx—for these are also survivors of skepticism. Perhaps
the secret desire of this lecture is to replace Emerson with Groucho Marx as the
hero of Cavell’s philosophy and as a spokesman for this new yet unapproachable
America.25 The inanity and insanity of Groucho’s words, these words in migration,
these words of immigration, such is Cavell’s spectre de Marx: Groucho rather than
Karl-o.26 Recalling the most Marxist moment in Cavell—”It wasn’t hurting, I was
just calling my hamsters” (CR, 89) we can see how the whole problem of skepti-
cism (was he really calling his hamsters?) also opens in the experience of the
comic.
Moving from the comic to the tragic, the path from skepticism to tragedy be-
comes clear in part four of The Claim of Reason, “tragedy is the public form of
the life of skepticism with respect to other minds” (CR, 476). That is, in Cavell’s
terms, tragedy is the dramatization of the failure to acknowledge others. The skepti-
cal teaching of tragedy—and the tragic teaching of skepticism—is the fact that I
cannot know the other. In part four of The Claim of Reason, Cavell gives three
examples of tragedy by looking at Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, A Win-
ter’s Tale, and a stunning, extended reading of Othello. The book closes with the
image of Othello and Desdemona dead on their nuptial bed. For Cavell, this image
constitutes an emblem for the truth of skepticism. Othello—like America—could
not yield to what he knew, he could not accept the tragic wisdom of the limitedness
of his knowledge of Desdemona and consequently he failed to acknowledge her
separateness, her alterity. This is why Othello kills Desdemona.
For Cavell, intrinsic to any acceptance of the limitedness of the human condi-
tion, of the finiteness of the finite, is an acknowledgment of separation. In a retro-
spective remark, Cavell writes, “I have argued for an understanding of the having
of the self as an acceptance of the idea of being by oneself” (CR, 367). Cavell is
proposing here a conception of self in terms of ‘aloneness’, ‘oneness’ or what
Thoreau calls “holiness.”27 In relation to the problem of skepticism, the claim here
is that skepticism concerning other minds becomes a way of acknowledging the
other’s separateness from me and my separateness from the other. Of course, to
say that I and the other are separated is to say something about the nature of our
relationship, namely that it is a relationship across separation, a relation between
separated terms, an absolute relation. Of course, this is what Levinas, and Derrida
after him, call justice. As Cavell puts it: There is “no assignable end to the depth
of us that language reaches; that nevertheless there is no end to our separateness.
We are endlessly separate, for no reason” (CR, 369).
“For no reason”—as Cavell puts it elsewhere, where the rationality of moral
argumentation breaks down, we do not witness the collapse of morality but the
beginning of moral relationship (CR, 326). Both skepticism and tragedy con-
clude with the recognition of separation, with the anti-Hegelian recognition that
intersubjective relations are not based on cognition or recognition, but on acknowl-
edgment.28
But what is romantic about Cavell’s tragic wisdom? Simply this: that the picture
of philosophy (and picture of culture) that Cavell claims to find in Wittgenstein’s
Investigations, with its endless circulation and oscillation of voices and positions,
is the very picture which I claimed earlier was the truth of romanticism, namely
its nonromantic essence. The play or “wriggling” between the demand for criteria
and the skeptical disappointment of that demand—what Putnam sees as the neces-
sity of learning to live with the double bind of acknowledgment and alienation
(RP, 178)—can be mapped directly onto the quasi dialectics of wit and irony that
I presented earlier in relation to Schlegel. The criterial demand for Witz and Wissen,
the attempt to unify subject and object in a creative act of synthesis, is always
subject to the destructive activity of irony, that ‘höchste und reinste skepsis.’ The
näiveté of romanticism is rooted in the self-consciousness of its failure, of the fact
that the demand for the Work—the aesthetic or literary absolute—like the demand
for criteria, will always open itself to the skeptical movement of unworking, it will
never achieve “realization,” not even a “fair realization.” In terms of the problem
of other minds, the empathic projection of the philosopher stumbles across a seam
in human experience behind which the other withdraws. The general claim made
earlier was that this oscillation between wit and irony, work and unworking, and
criteria and skepticism is (barely) held together by the genre of the fragment it-
self. This is what I meant when I stated that Cavell’s claim for Emerson was un-
Cavellian and unromantic. Namely, that it attempts to realize the ideal, thereby
disarming the skeptic and freezing the movement of irony in the living present of
aesthetic Witz and Wissen. The work is always in progress, which is to say that it
opens the future, is the possibility that the future might have a future.
What is Cavellian and romantic, in my view, is the endless wriggling between
criteria and skepticism, a movement that is manifested in both romantic texts and
the Investigations themselves, but equally in the fragmentary quality of Cavell’s
prose. Exemplary in this regard, I feel, is part four of The Claim of Reason, which
might be read as an amnesial rewriting of the Athenaeum Fragments. With its
endless play of voices and sheer aphoristic force, Cavell’s writing recalls the prac-
tice of romantic fragmentation. It is a writing that is rambling, deviatory, tenden-
tious, obscure, but littered with moments of explosive brilliance. Cavell’s style is
Shandyesque: it is marked by ellipses, circumlocutions, parentheses, occasionally
agonizing formulations which are, turn and turn about, defensive and defenseless.
I note his predilection for certain words, for an idiosyncratic and quasi-religious,
quasi-legal language: settlement, dispensation, inheritance, entitlement, rescue, re-
covery, rebirth; and his taste for present participles: accounting, counting, acknowl-
edging, founding, finding, declining. And yet, in reading Cavell there is the convic-
tion that one is listening to a philosophical voice, that this voice, like no other I
know currently writing in English, exemplifies philosophizing.
Finiteness, Limitedness
I have claimed that romantic oscillation—between wit and irony, work and un-
working, criteria and skepticism—yields an insight into finitude, a tragic wisdom
centered in an acceptance of the limitedness of thought, of the finiteness of the
human condition as that which cannot be overcome. In the Lyceum Fragments,
Schlegel notes in passing, before quickly dismissing the idea, that wit is the substi-
tute for an impossible happiness (CR, 59). For me, this remark captures well the
mood of melancholy that is the ambience of the fragments, the night whose vast
profile is briefly traced by those tiny explosions of wit and irony.
But what exactly is the link between the romantic fragment and the thinking of
finitude? For all systems of thought that take seriously the question of finitude and
the problem of nihilism, the fundamental philosophical quest is that of finding a
meaning to finitude. If death is not the gateway to another life, and if it is not just
going to have the contingent character of a brute fact, then one’s mortality is
something that one has to project freely, as the product of a resolute decision.
Death is therefore something to be achieved; it is a Work.
However, the interpretation of romanticism given here emphasizes its explora-
tion of the lack of final synthesis, its inability to produce the aesthetic absolute, the
great work, the work of death that would give meaning to life and overcome nihil-
ism. The ceaseless quasi dialectic within romanticism perpetually postpones the
possibility of finding a meaning to finitude, thereby making death impossible, un-
graspable and unworked. In their refusal of final synthesis, fragments provoke us
into an acceptance of finitude as that which evades the grasp of my criteria, as that
towards which I am certainly destined but without knowing the time and the man-
ner of my arrival. Beneath their explosive brilliance, their substitution for an im-
possible happiness, romantic fragments quietly recall us to the unworking of the
work, the ungraspability of the finite, the impossibility of death and the endless
process of mourning. We are left unable, impotent and insomniac, trying to imagine
what happens when the body dies, when the reverberation of life fades into silence.
As Beckett writes, “No, life ends, and no, there is nothing elsewhere.”29
The future is faced with fragments, with fragments of an impossible future, a
future that itself appears fragmentary. And this is the best, and for no reason. Out
of the bonfire of our intellectual vanities come the ashes of compassion, of tender-
ness and generosity, and for no reason. After the unworking of human arrogance,
we become “the finally human natives of a dwindled sphere.”
Notes
This text, originally written in 1994, is extracted from a much longer discussion of Stanley
Cavell’s work in relation to romanticism that can be found in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing
(London: Routledge, revised edition, 2004). Reprinted by permission.
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1962), 423.
2. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy. Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4.
3. See Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997), 85–117 [ed.].
4. Emerson, “Experience” and “The American Scholar,” in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer
Ziff, 311 and 99.
5. Ibid., 309.
6. See Stephen Mulhall’s extremely helpful book Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Re-
counting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), xii.
7. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche remarks, against his earlier Wagnerian incarnation, that
every time one sees the name “Wagner” in his work, one should erase it and insert the name
“Nietzsche” (trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, 82). I wonder

whether this remark might be applied to Cavell, and that every time one sees the name
“Emerson” one should strike it out and write “Cavell.” This question of nomination and the
proper name would seem to resonate with Cavell’s recent autobiographical exercises in his
Jerusalem Harvard Lectures and with the history of his own name: Goldstein—Cavalier—
Cavalerskii—Cavaleriiskii—Cavell (A Pitch of Philosophy, 25–30). Cavell is therefore not
so much a name as an alias. What interests me is why Cavell decides to tell us this fact.
Why does he need to confess? After all, what’s in a name? Interestingly, he shares this
obsessional and confessional relation to the proper name with Derrida in his recent text
Circonfession, where the young Jackie changes his name to Jacques when he publishes his
first book (Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993, 41). What is the difference between Jackie Derrida and Jacques
Derrida, or between Stanley Goldstein and Stanley Cavell? And to what extent is this ques-
tion separable from the issue of Cavell’s or Derrida’s Jewishness?
8. Emerson, Selected Essays, 302.
9. Cited in Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1992), 31.
10. This would be the place to begin a reading of Emerson’s “Emancipation Address”
from 1844, which discusses at length the question of slavery in the British West Indies and
the United States, in Essays, Second Series (London: Harrap, no date), 191–229. See also
Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
11. “Thus in the beginning all the world was America.” Two Treatises of Government,
ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988), 301.
12. See Hegel’s famous remark in the Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956),
86–87: “America is therefore the land of the future.”
13. Tom Paine, Rights of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. J. Beer (London: Dent, 1963), 18; William
Blake, America: A Prophecy (1793), in The Prophetic Writing of William Blake, eds. D. J.
Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 47–62.
15. Baudrillard, America, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988).
16. Ibid., 7.
17. Emerson, Selected Essays, 310.
18. Baudrillard, America, 90.
19. Cavell’s arguments are impressively documented in part two of Mulhall’s Stanley
Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, 77–181. For an excellent account of skep-
ticism in Cavell, see Gerald Bruns, “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry, 16
(spring 1990): 612–32.
20. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 177; hereafter RP.
21. Being and Time, 229. Heidegger restates, in his fashion, the classical refutation of
skepticism: “A skeptic can no more be refuted than the Being of truth can be ‘proved’. And
if any skeptic of the kind who denies the truth, factically is, he does not even need to be
refuted. Insofar as he is, and has understood himself in his Being, he has obliterated Dasein
in the desperation of suicide; and in so doing, he has also obliterated truth. It has no more
been demonstrated that there ever has “been” an “actual” skeptic . . . than it has been demon-
strated that there are any ‘eternal truths.’”
22. Emphasis added.
23. For a discussion of ancient skepticism, see J. Annas and J. Barnes, The Modes of
Skepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
24. Mulhall, 301–2. I return to a similar question around religion in Very Little . . .
Almost Nothing, lecture 3, where I criticize Martha Nussbaum’s interpretation of Beckett.
25. See “Nothing Goes Without Saying,” London Review of Books, vol. 16, no. 1
(1994), 3–5.
26. As Cavell speculates at the end of his review of the Marx Brothers scripts, such
would be the gift of American culture to Derrida.
27. Incidentally, it is in terms of aloneness and separateness that Harold Bloom de-
scribes the American religion, the post-Christian, gnostic tradition that he traces back to
Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Bloom writes, with his characteristic penchant for provoca-
tion:
The American Orphic ecstasy never has been Dionysiac, for the Bacchic freedom is
the freedom to merge into others. American ecstasy is solitary, even when it requires
the presence of others as audience for the self’s glory. Our father Walt Whitman,
despite his self-advertisements and the dogmatic insistences of our contemporary
gays, seems to have embraced only himself. (The American Religion, 264)
28. The elements of Cavell’s work that I have chosen to emphasize have certain dis-
tinct resonances with the work of Levinas as interpreted in Lecture I of Very Little . . .
Almost Nothing. Cavell’s proximity to Levinas can be seen in the way in which the problem
of skepticism (which is also extensively discussed by Levinas) opens a noncognitive relation
to the other as a distinctively ethical insight. The Cavellian need to accept the limitedness
of human cognition, the need for the acknowledgment of the other’s separateness from me
and my own irreducible separation can be placed alongside Levinas’s account of the ethical
relation to the other exceeding the bounds of knowledge. Might not such a view have the
perverse consequence of viewing Levinas as a romantic thinker? For a brief but suggestive
comparison of Levinas and Cavell, see Gerald Bruns’s “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,”
619–20.
29. Beckett, Six Residua (London: Calder, 1978), 38.
4
Cavell and the Concept

of America
JAMES CONANT
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well,

that is the way I know I am an American.
America is the only idealistic nation in the
world.
Woodrow Wilson, Address at Sioux Falls,
8 Sept. 1919
There is nothing the matter with Americans

except their ideals. The real American is all
right; it is the ideal American who is all
wrong.
G. K. Chesterton, “The American Ideal”
The business of America is business.

Calvin Coolidge, Speech to the Society of
American Newspaper Editors, Jan. 17, 1935
I am willing to love all mankind, except an

American.
Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell
in The Life of Johnson
Your American eagle is very well. Protect it

here and abroad. But beware of the Ameri-
can peacock.
R. W. Emerson, “American Nationality”
Is there, as President Wilson thought, an internal relation between the concept of

America and a certain ideal? Or is it that, as Chesterton thought, there is nothing
the matter with Americans except their ideals?1 Or does America stripped of its
ideals amount to nothing more than President Coolidge’s vision of it? And, if so,
ought one then to sympathize with Dr. Johnson’s view of the matter? Or is there a
55
distinction to be drawn, as Emerson thought, between the ideal and its debasement
by those who most loudly proclaim it?
As these quotations evidence, the topic of America—what it stands for, what it
is, and what it should be—excites and aggrieves both those who make their home
in America and those who do not. Many of the former (whose visions of America
differ as widely as do those of President Wilson and President Coolidge) worry
about what sort of home America is or ought to be; and some of the latter (whose
views about real Americans differ as widely as do those of Mr. Chesterton and Dr.
Johnson) worry about the way Americans worry about this. Some who do not make
their home in America are drawn to reflect on the topic not out of distrust or
disdain for America’s idealism, but out of their own idealism—and often because
they, too, wonder what sort of home America, at its best, might be able to make.
The reason that there is an America at all is because there have been people of this
last sort. Many of these are drawn to wonder about America precisely because they
do not (or are made not to) feel at home where they live and imagine America as
a place where things might be otherwise. None of the quotations here is from such
a person—a prospective immigrant.
Karl Rossman, the hero of Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, is such a person. The
novel begins as follows:
As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann . . . stood on the liner slowly entering the
harbor of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of
Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The
arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and all around the figure blew
the free winds of heaven.2
No other Kafka narrative begins with—or is as suffused with—such a note of
hope. What does Karl Rossman hope to find in Amerika? What is this possibility
that can suffuse even a Kafka narrative with hope? The beginning of the novel
provides some hints. But this is still a novel by Franz Kafka and so questions about
the soundness of the hope linger. The scene opens with Karl seeing something he
had sighted long before and had been seeking to reach for even longer—a statue
named Liberty—only now suddenly seeing it in a new light, as if for the first time.
Does the sudden burst of sunshine that seems to illumine the countenance of Lib-
erty provide him with a clear or a distorted view of her features? Is the wind that
blows around Liberty free? Does the arm with the sword rise up as if newly
stretched aloft or will it, upon closer examination, prove overwrought and awk-
wardly frozen in time? Does or can or should America measure up to the hopes of
those who seek the place Karl Rossman seeks in seeking Amerika?
A Peculiar Concept
‘AMERICA’ always means two things:
a country, geographically, the USA,
and an idea of that country, the ideal that
goes with it.
“American Dream,” then, is:
a dream OF a country
Cavell and the Concept of America 57
IN a different country,
that is located where the dream takes
place . . .
‘I want to be in America’, the Jets sing
in that famous song from West Side Story.
They are in America already,
and yet still wanting to get there . . . .
Wim Wenders, “The American Dream”3
Kierkegaard draws a helpful distinction between objective and subjective catego-

ries. A short and simple way of trying to distinguish the concepts that belong to
the former from those that belong to the latter category would be just to say that
objective concepts characterize the different kinds of ways in which an object can
be, whereas subjective concepts characterize the different kinds of ways in which
a subject or a person can be. But this will not quite do: there are many concepts
that can be predicated equally of objects and persons—being six feet tall, weighing
two hundred pounds, being in a certain location, and so on. So our initial formula-
tion stands in need of some qualification along the following lines: objective con-
cepts characterize the different kinds of ways in which objects qua objects can be,
whereas subjective concepts characterize the different kinds of ways in which sub-
jects qua subjects can be. (This allows us to say that being six feet tall, weighing
two hundred pounds, being in a certain location, etc., are not characterizations of
subjects qua subjects, but rather characterizations of them qua objects.) Or, as
Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms prefer to say: subjective concepts characterize a
subject or person qua existing individual.4 Both objective and subjective concepts
can be predicated of human beings: a given individual has, say, blue eyes, is six
feet tall, weighs two hundred pounds, and is also, say, a husband, a Christian, a
philosopher. But the former concepts hold of the person regardless of whether or
not he would predicate them of himself; the latter concepts hold of an individual
(not merely if he is indeed prepared to predicate them of himself, but) only to the
extent that his daily existence is beholden to the ethical or religious demands such
concepts entail—to the extent that his life is shaped by these demands.5 These
latter concepts, Kierkegaard argues, if they are properly understood as subjective
concepts—that is, as properly subjective characterizations of the lives of existing
individuals—must be clearly distinguished from certain merely objective concepts
which these same words (‘husband’, ‘Christian’, ‘philosopher’) might also be taken
to denote.
The word ‘husband’, inflected subjectively, signifies participation in a certain
sort of ethical relationship between two individuals pledged to devote their lives to
one another; inflected objectively, it signifies a certain juridical status. A husband,
in the latter sense, is something one either is or is not (depending upon whether
one’s papers are in order); a husband, in the former sense, is someone (Kierkegaard
says) one becomes—it presupposes involvement in an existential task that must be
reaffirmed and renewed every day of one’s married life. (If a wife says to her
husband “This isn’t a marriage!” he does not rebut her charge by producing their
marriage certificate.) The word ‘Christian’, inflected subjectively, signifies an
involvement in a religious way of life; inflected merely objectively, it signifies

certain straightforwardly observable external facts about a person’s behavior (e.g.,
that he goes to church on Sundays, has his children baptized, puts money in the
collection box, etc.). Understood the latter way ‘a Christian’ is something one
either is or is not.6 Understood subjectively, ‘a Christian’ is someone (Kierkegaard
says) one becomes—it presupposes the undertaking of an existential task that must
be reaffirmed and renewed every moment of one’s existence.7 (If Kierkegaard says
“While Christendom flourishes Christianity gradually withers away!” someone
does not rebut his charge by pointing out how full the churches are on Sundays.)
Here is a characteristic passage in which one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms,
Johannes Climacus, offers a comparatively straightforward example of a conflation
of subjective and objective categories:
Once it was at the risk of his life that a man dared to profess himself a Christian;
now it is to make oneself suspect to venture to doubt that one is a Christian. . . . [I]f
a man were to say quite simply and unassumingly, that he was concerned for himself,
lest perhaps he had no right to call himself a Christian, he would indeed not suffer
persecution or be put to death, but he would be smothered in angry glances, and
people would say: “How tiresome to make such a fuss about nothing at all; why can’t
he behave like the rest of us, who are all Christians?” . . . And if he happened to be
married, his wife would say to him: “Dear husband of mine, how can you get such
notions into your head? How can you doubt that you are a Christian? Are you not a
Dane, and does not geography say that the Lutheran form of the Christian religion is
the ruling religion in Denmark? For you are surely not a Jew, nor are you a Moham-
medan; what then can you be if not a Christian?8
The term ‘Christendom’ is Kierkegaard’s name for such a state of affairs—one in
which everyone already thinks he or she is a Christian and thus no one takes the
trouble any longer to become one.
Now what about the concept American? Should we classify it as objective or
subjective? Should it be grouped together with Dane or with Christian? Well,
surely, one can be an American in the same sense that one can be a Dane. Thus
understood, an American is something one either is or is not (depending upon
whether one’s papers are in order, or upon other equally objective facts about, say,
one’s birth, upbringing, or cultural heritage.) But “America”9 is also the name of a
certain moral and political ideal and thus “to be an American” can also signify a
commitment to that ideal,10 and thus an existential task, a way of life, and even a
kind of person that one must struggle—and that one can fail—to become. If we
are to follow Kierkegaard’s lead, then we should seek clearly to distinguish be-
tween the objective concept of being an American and the subjective one. This
will lead us to the conclusion that one can be an American in the objective sense
while failing to be one in the subjective sense. We could then further follow Kier-
kegaard’s lead and introduce the concept Americadom to signify a state of affairs
in which the merely objective inflection of the concept has gained ascendancy—a
state of affairs in which, because almost everyone in America already knows that
he is an American, hardly anyone any longer takes the trouble to become one.
Yet this fails to do justice to the peculiar complexity of the concept of America.
As a first step toward appreciating the peculiarity of this concept, it helps to notice
that it involves what Kierkegaard seems to regard as an impossible combination of

categories: it combines some of the logical features of an objective concept with
some of those of a subjective concept.11 At one and the same time, ‘America’
names a certain place at a certain time with a certain history and signifies a certain
dream of what might happen in that place if certain moral and political ideals could
be realized.12 To be an American can mean, at one and the same time, to be some-
one who happens to be a citizen of one particular nation (rather than another) and
to be committed to a moral and political project whose continuation cannot be
guaranteed simply through the continued existence of that nation (as merely one
among others).13
The aforementioned peculiarity of the concept of America notwithstanding, the
following feature of Kierkegaard’s analysis remains pertinent: an expression retains
its ethical (or religious) significance only if it continues to be predicated of individ-
uals whose lives reflect a commitment to the exigencies of thought and action it
entails; if not—if it comes to be predicated solely of individuals whose lives in no
way bear the stamp of such exigencies—it will be drained of its former signifi-
cance. In the latter case, the expression may continue to circulate in daily use and
retain an aura of ethical significance, but it will no longer have its original import.14
It may, with time, even shed that aura and acquire some other perfectly coherent,
utterly non-ethical—descriptive or juridical or institutional—meaning. As a hus-
band can remain “married” in the eyes of the law, even if he has a made a mockery
of his vows, so, too, Americans can retain their juridical status as “American citi-
zens” and a place named ‘America’ will continue to stand as one nation alongside
others, even if America makes a mockery of the words that figure in its founding
pledges to itself—the pledges that constitute the original ground of its existence.
Once one has distinguished between objective and subjective sorts of concepts,
it becomes possible (as Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms frequently do) to say
some seemingly paradoxical things that can come to be understood to be not merely
true, but platitudinous—to have the status of categorial (or as later Wittgenstein
prefers to put it: grammatical) truths. Not just things like “A ‘husband’ may not
be married,” or “There may be no Christians in Christendom”; but also things like
these:
Christianity is not plausible.
Religion only conquers without force.15
The principle that the existing subjective thinker is constantly occupied in striving,
does not mean that he has, in the finite sense, a goal toward which he strives, and
that he would be finished when he reached this goal.16
A human being can forget to exist.17
The substitution of the word ‘America’ for the word ‘Christianity’ in the first, for
‘religion’ in the second, for ‘existing thinker’ in the third, and for ‘human being’
in the fourth of these sentences would yield four sentences very much like ones
scattered throughout Stanley Cavell’s writings about America. But what could it
mean to say such things in characterization or criticism of something as seemingly
palpable, enduring, and powerful as America? How could America forget to exist?
How tiresome of this fellow Cavell to make such a fuss about nothing at all!
Parisian Brilliance and American Diffidence

I have attempted more and more systematically
to find a non-site, or a non-philosophical site,
from which to question philosophy. But the
search for a non-philosophical site does not be-
speak an anti-philosophical attitude. My central
question is: from what site or non-site can phi-
losophy as such appear to itself as other than it-
self, so that it can interrogate and reflect upon
itself in an original manner? Such a non-site or
alterity would be radically irreducible to philoso-
phy. But the problem is that such a non-site can-
not be defined or situated by means of philo-
sophical language.
Jacques Derrida in Dialogues with
Contemporary Continental Thinkers18
Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not

unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I
fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone
weighing about a pound and a half, and could
tell accurately when the stone left the bottom,
by having to pull so much harder before the
water got underneath to help me. This is a re-
markable depth for so small an area, yet not
one inch of it can be spared by the imagination.
What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not
react on the minds of men?
Henry David Thoreau, Walden19
Much French philosophy has a distinctively French sound. And there is nothing in
that sound that precludes it from sounding like philosophy. On the contrary, to the
ears of many today—and not only of those who live in Paris—it is the sound of
philosophy. If one comes across a passage from the writings of a French philoso-
pher, such as the passage from Jacques Derrida quoted here—regardless of whether
one likes its sound (or of whether one takes oneself to understand what it says, or
of whether one takes oneself to agree with what one thus understands)—for better
or worse, one knows this much about it right off: this stuff is (or is, at least, trying
to sound like) philosophy.
Derrida is far from alone among philosophers, at least since Kant, in thinking
that a radical questioning of philosophy is to be achieved only from a site that is,
in some sense, “outside” (what we presently understand to be) philosophy—a site
that allows one, without turning one’s back on philosophy, to confront it on an

altogether new ground. And Derrida (and, again, not only Derrida) appreciates the
difficulty of finding or arranging for such a site. For a radical questioning of philos-
ophy would seem to require a radically new kind of philosophical discourse—one
conducted in altogether different cadences from any in which philosophy has hith-
erto been attempted. And the problem is that nowadays—especially in France—the
call for such a discourse tends to result simply in the production of further sen-
tences whose sound is indistinguishable from that characteristic of business as
usual in French philosophy. (Sentences that sound like this: “Such a non-site or
alterity would be radically irreducible to philosophy; but the problem is that such
a non-site cannot be defined or situated by means of philosophical language.”)
What else could a call for a different philosophical discourse sound like? Will it
not of necessity itself sound like philosophy? And if it no longer sounded like
(what we know as) philosophy, how would we be able to recognize it as such?
The sound of much of the language in Thoreau’s Walden is apt to strike a
reader—at least on a first encounter—as not particularly philosophical at all, as
not even trying to be philosophy. Admittedly, the text does have moments when it
seems to want to veer toward (something recognizable as) philosophy. But mostly,
on a first listen, it can seem to be nattering on about how much certain items cost,
how to live in the woods, hoe beans, or measure the depth of a pond. Indeed, the
writing’s intermittent gestures in the direction of something that has the aspect of
philosophy (such as the concluding lines in the above quotation) may even strike
a reader, at first blush, as puzzling digressions from its primary concerns. Not all
of the remarks in Walden are of this sort, of course. Some of them may even
immediately strike one as sage. (“Beware of all enterprises that require new
clothes.”20) And some of them may immediately strike one as clever. (“A man sits
as many risks as he runs.”21) The tone may occasionally even remind one of Socra-
tes (“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let
alone.”22) A sentence or two here or there may even strike one as the sort of thing
that might actually have been said by Socrates. (“If I seem to boast more than is
becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than myself; and my short-
comings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.”23) But the
resulting whole, made up of these and other remarks, is not apt immediately to
strike one as in serious competition with the enterprises of a Kant or a Hegel or a
Derrida. If one comes across a quotation from Thoreau, such as the one paired
with the passage from Derrida above—regardless of whether one likes the sound
of such writing (or of whether one takes oneself to understand what it says, or, if
so, whether one takes oneself to agree with what one thus understands)—the fol-
lowing two features of the prose will be hard to gainsay: it has a distinctively
American sound, and its sound is not that of European philosophy. Could the find-
ing or founding of a site from which to question the inheritance of European philos-
ophy possibly sound like this? How does one measure the depth of Walden?
In his book The Senses of Walden, Cavell asks: “Has America expressed itself
philosophically?”24 Some years ago I participated in a conference in France on
American philosophy whose title sought to allude to this question of Cavell’s. The
conference was titled “Exist-il une philosophie americaine?” Many of the French
participants understood the question to be asking whether there had been individu-
als who managed to be genuinely original philosophers even though, at least for
the better part of their lives, they grew up in and were educated in America. The
French participants at the conference each wanted to answer the question resound-
ingly in the affirmative; and each did so by giving a paper explaining why he or
she admired the work of some particular American philosopher or philosophers—
Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James, Dewey, Quine, or, notably (in the case of several
of the French participants), Cavell. Being French, many of them were equally con-
cerned to make clear why they vehemently opposed some alternative candidate for
the title “important American philosopher”—always one, of course, that one or
another of their French colleagues were concurrently concerned to champion.
(Among the candidates that were particularly contested in this regard were Emer-
son, Thoreau, Rorty, and Cavell.) I take it that Cavell himself (in asking his ques-
tion that provided the conference with its title) meant to be asking something that
went unaddressed in these displays of generosity and enmity—that is, in efforts to
demonstrate or deny that there had indeed been this or that individual who was
both undeniably American and who could qualify as a first-rate philosopher even
when judged by the highest European standards.
Cavell’s question speaks rather to an internal relation between philosophy and
the broader cultural context within which the activity of philosophizing takes
place—an internal relation between America and those individuals who happen to
be both Americans and philosophers. One cannot hear Cavell’s question until one
recognizes that it turns upon a prior claim that philosophy necessarily exists on a
different cultural basis in America than in, say, France—that a different economy
of exchange prevails between the culture at large and those who attempt to speak
philosophically in it—and this affects what it can mean for a philosopher to attempt
to speak philosophically to (or for) his culture. In order to become clear why this
might be thought to be so, it will help first to review some facts—facts about
America and facts about, say, France.
If you ask your average intellectually inclined French citizen if he has ever read
any Descartes or Pascal or Rousseau, he will almost certainly tell you that he has
(and in most cases he will be telling you the truth). To be a French intellectual and
to be simply unacquainted with the classics of French thought and to be happy to
admit that one is thus unacquainted is to be a very unusual person indeed. There
is no American philosopher ignorance of whose work could strike a measure of
fear or embarrassment in the soul of an American man or woman of letters at all
comparable to what it would mean for a French intellectual to have never read a
word of Descartes. If you attempt to hit upon the name of an American philosopher
that almost every educated American has read, you will seek in vain. Insofar as
you can find a philosopher that most educated Americans have read, it will not be
an American—most likely, it would be Plato or Descartes or Hume or Nietzsche.
There is nothing you could call “American philosophy” which plays a role in the
formation of an American intellectual identity that parallels the role that French
philosophy plays in French culture. A highly literate American intellectual may
well have read a great many of the classics of English, French, and German philos-
ophy without necessarily having any literacy in something you might call “Ameri-
can philosophy.” He may, of course, have also read some pages of William James
or John Dewey, but then again he may not have.
To be a French intellectual means in the first instance to have a certain literacy
in certain landmark moments of the history of French thought. To be an intellectual
in the United States means in the first instance to have a certain literacy in certain
landmark moments in the history of European thought. To be an intellectual in
France means, above all, learning how to be a French intellectual. The intellectual
in America is not haunted by the fear that he might be failing to be an American
intellectual; more often he is haunted by the fear that he might be succeeding in
being just that—and hence perhaps someone a European might look upon as a
philistine.25 (It generally does not occur to such an American that this is itself a
recipe for philistinism.26) Even if someone were somehow to fall under the illusion
that becoming an intellectual in America meant, above all, learning somehow how
to become an American intellectual, there would be few American landmarks by
means of which he or she could confidently navigate his or her way toward such
an identity.
These facts have a significance that extends well beyond philosophy. There
exists no single article of American letters of any sort (say, a novel or an essay)
that most Americans share as a common intellectual inheritance in the way that the
work of a Descartes or a Rousseau is a shared possession in France.27 Indeed, it is
not an uncommon event in the history of American letters for Americans to become
excited about some domestic product (say, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or the
novels of Ernest Hemingway) because a Frenchman (a Baudelaire or a Sartre) told
them it is the work of a great writer. To the extent that there is some single object
of American culture that a group of randomly selected educated Americans will
have in common as a shared American cultural reference point, it will, as likely as
not, be a classic Hollywood movie. This is not to deny that many Americans partic-
ipate in a shared fantasy of a common literary culture consisting of a range of
widely cherished documents—to cite a few candidates: The Constitution of the
United States of America, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, The Adventures of Huckle-
berry Finn—but these tend to be cherished at a distance. How many Americans
have really read, let alone retained, the words and thoughts contained therein?
(Most are at least as likely to remember the details of a TV show or movie or
cartoon either about or loosely based on and bearing the title of the text in ques-
tion.) Regardless of how much significance is attached to the fact of their existence,
the bulk of the prose in these documents does not presently circulate in America
as shared possessions of the citizenry. With the exception of a few inaudibly fa-
mous phrases, there are within American cultural circles no documents of Ameri-
can writing to which one can safely allude with the same confidence in the possibil-
ity of shared intimacy that a judicious allusion to a line or scene from a widely
cherished Hollywood movie—to cite a few candidates: The Wizard of Oz, It’s a
Wonderful Life, Casablanca, or Dr. Strangelove—is likely to be able to achieve.
If Dorothy were to find herself suddenly transported to a region of America where
allusions to literary or philosophical texts were able to forge this sort of intimacy,
she would have reason to exclaim: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas
anymore!”28
The facts reviewed here must be kept in perspective if one wishes to understand
any of the following: what Cavell means to be asking with his question “Has
America expressed itself philosophically?” what could count for him as an answer
to it (and why the accomplishments of a thinker such as Quine, however great they
may be, cannot bear on it), why this leads him to wonder at the chronically Ameri-
can tendency to undervalue the work of figures such as Emerson and Thoreau as
philosophers (and, in particular, to ignore their role in founding a distinctively
American moment in philosophy), and why he thinks this is a function of a chronic
American tendency to overpraise and undervalue any distinctively American cul-
tural achievement (most tellingly, he thinks, the high-water marks of the golden
age of Hollywood29).
Some of my French colleagues at the conference on American philosophy as-
sumed that Cavell’s interest in Emerson and Thoreau was that of someone who
wishes to revive interest in two previously famous but now neglected American
philosophers. To think this is to miss the salience of the following two facts for
Cavell: (1) Emerson and Thoreau have not fallen out of view; they continue to be
celebrated as important American writers of some kind; but (2) precisely on the
condition that the title of philosopher be withheld from them—on the condition,
that is, that one neither take seriously their claim to both inherit and challenge a
prior tradition of European philosophy (most especially the tradition they them-
selves looked back upon as that of German Transcendentalism), nor take seriously
their claim to have thus opened up new possibilities for philosophy, let alone their
claim that these new possibilities rested on and arose out of possibilities for cultural
and intellectual newness possible only in a New World. One way of taking the
measure of the degree to which Emerson, in particular, is not credited with having
what it takes to be a philosopher is to notice how difficult it is for even Emerson’s
American admirers seriously to credit Nietzsche’s claim to have been profoundly
influenced by him,30 let alone his assessment of him as the greatest philosopher of
their (i.e., the nineteenth) century.31
Part of Cavell’s interest in drawing attention to this phenomenon is in order to
sharpen the following question: What, within the history of American thought, is
America prepared to count as an instance of an American difference in philoso-
phy—an instance of a mode of thought that is both philosophy and distinctively
American? Perhaps the answer will be: Nothing. But then Cavell wants to know:
Why? Is it because any American candidate that openly bears the stamp of its
Americanness is somehow too American to count as an uncluttered instance of
serious philosophy? So that to do philosophy just is to participate in and therefore
to accommodate oneself to a European tradition?32 So that to speak with a voice
that is recognizably philosophical is of necessity to speak with a European accent?
Or is it because America is, above all, the name of a democracy and a business
that is as inherently practical as democracy can have at best only an incidental
bearing on how an enterprise as inherently theoretical as philosophy ought to be
conducted? If either of these is our conclusion, then it is one which rests on as-
sumptions—assumptions Cavell wishes to examine—about what can count as an
inheritance of philosophy and about the possibilities of thought available to some-
one who does not wish to suppress the American accent in his voice. It is a further
claim of Cavell’s that a reception of the thought of Emerson and Thoreau depends
upon an appreciation of the ways in which they sought to contest such assump-
tions—so that the reception of their thought requires not only a simultaneous re-
thinking of what philosophy, America, and Europe each are, but a rethinking of
each in the light of the other two.
On this ambitious conception of what the establishment of a genuinely “Ameri-
can philosophy” is to achieve, there will turn out to be a significant internal relation
between the concepts philosophy and America: a relation between what we are
able to recognize as philosophy (and whether it presently rests on an impoverished
idea of philosophy) and what we are able to recognize as cosmopolitan (and
whether it presently rests on an impoverished idea of the cosmopolitan—one which
is itself a form of provincialism—and recognizable as such only from the vantage
point afforded by a non-European perspective).33 An American philosophy is thus
to provide a new perspective on our old ways of thinking and living—a perspective
which is to enable our European conceptions of the philosophical and the cosmo-
politan to come into focus together as somewhat unphilosophical (in taking a cer-
tain dispensation of philosophy to be philosophy itself) and somewhat provincial
(in taking the aspiration to an American culture to be a quest for a secondhand
version of European culture).
In the midst of a discussion of J. L. Austin, Cavell indulges in the following
offhand sketch of the difference between the French and the American intellectual:
Austin was committed to the manners, even the mannerisms, of an English professor
the way a French intellectual is committed to seeming brilliant. It is the level at which
an American thinker or artist is likely to play dumb, I mean undertake to seem like a
hick, uncultivated. These are all characters in which authority is assumed, variations
I suppose of the thinker’s use—as unmasked by Nietzsche—of the character of the
sage.34
Aristotle’s elucidation of the concept of the sage takes the form of a question we
are to ask ourselves: “What more accurate standard or measure of good things do
we have than the Sage?”35 If it is constitutive of what it is to be a French intellectual
that one is committed to seeming brilliant, then it is bound to be difficult for
such an intellectual to recognize someone who is undertaking to appear lacking in
cultivation as the personification of a sage (in Aristotle’s weighty sense of the
term), and it will be harder still for him to credit the cultivation of such an appear-
ance as itself a guise through which intellectual authority is asserted—as itself a
guise of the Sage.
This is not to deny that many American intellectuals are committed to seeming
brilliant. (All that proves is that many Americans seek to emulate a Parisian model
of what it is to be an intellectual. Some of them, given the choice, would even
prefer to live in Paris—or, at least, to go there when they die.36) Nor is it to claim
that those American intellectuals who do not seek to emulate such a model are
therefore eager to mount a critique of European intellectual life. It is to claim only
that many American authors and artists and thinkers find the Parisian model cannot
be theirs. A European will not understand the intellectual manners of a Henry
David Thoreau or Mark Twain or William Faulkner or Robert Frost or Howard
Hawks if he or she fails to appreciate what underlies their apparently intellectually

uncultivated postures—as thrifty woodsman or riverboat captain or Southern gen-
tleman or New England farmer or uncouth cowboy—if he or she fails to appreciate
how these modes of cultivating an apparent lack of (European) cultivation are
themselves forms through which the American artist or author expresses his refusal
of an alien standard or measure of good things and seeks to fashion his own native
standard or measure.
These differences between the French and American scenes are themselves a
function of a difference in their respective relations to history—and, in particular,
to the accomplished edifice of European culture. The French philosopher or author
or artist can take that accomplishment for granted and build on it without threat to
his or her identity. The challenge for the French intellectual lies in finding or
clearing room for something new to do within the confines of that edifice. This is
not the challenge the American philosopher or author or artist qua American feels
him- or herself to face. Mark Twain narrates the adventures of a Tom Sawyer or
Huck Finn in a voice that betrays little hint of interest in or familiarity with the
accomplished edifice of European literature. The apparent naturalness of that liter-
ary voice—its apparent innocence of European cultivation—is an integral and eas-
ily overlooked aspect of its achievement. Emerson and Thoreau seek to fashion a
mode of philosophical writing that actively refuses to lay claim to the accomplished
edifice of European philosophy, as if philosophy’s history could be made to begin
again—as if “no time had elapsed [since] the oldest . . . philosopher . . . [first]
raised a corner of the veil.”37 The American philosopher or author or artist often
seems to proceed thus, as if history could be made to begin anew—as if the accom-
plishments of European culture could constitute only a dangerous temptation for
an American, at all costs to be resisted—as if those accomplishments could only
become his, for the taking and making his own, at the cost of placing his own
identity in pawn.
Among the opening remarks in an address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at
Harvard in 1837, Emerson famously declares the following hope:
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws
to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on
the sere remains of foreign harvests . . . . In this hope I accept the topic which not
only usage but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day,—the
AMERICAN SCHOLAR.38
Ever since at least this address bearing the title, and issuing its call for, The Ameri-
can Scholar, it has been a central ambition of American thinking and writing and
art to call forth a form of culture in which American intellectuals—philosophers
or authors or artists—can eschew European models—of philosophy or authorship
or art—in a manner that will enable them finally to be able to feel at home in their
homeland qua philosophers or authors or artists (as they imagine their European
counterparts are able to feel at home in their respective cultures). The realization
of such an ambition is supposed to require a reciprocal change on the part of
American thinking and writing and art and on the part of the homeland itself; and
the accomplished fact of such reciprocal change is an integral part of what it means,
for Emerson, for the American scholar finally to have come into existence. But to
say that American thinking and writing and art have been fueled by such an ambi-
tion is not to say that such a vision of America has ever yet been realized—that
the American philosopher or author or artist has ever yet been able to feel him- or
herself permanently or comfortably at home in America.39
This is not to deny what one shrewd native observer of the American scene
has called the greatest single fact about our modern American writing—namely,
America’s writers’ (and thinkers’ and artists’) “absorption in every last detail of
their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.”40 What
is at issue here is neither the familiar European intellectuals’ loudly proclaimed
revulsion at and revolt from the diurnal and everyday (familiar since at least Baude-
laire) nor the equally familiar European intellectuals’ loudly proclaimed longing to
be reconciled with and incorporated harmoniously into the rhythms of an already
available mode of diurnal and everyday life (familiar since at least Tolstoy). An
attentive absorption in the details of an American life that engulfs the author com-
bined with a quiet yet ineradicable alienation from the very life which so absorbs
and fascinates him remains a hallmark of great American writing throughout the
generations, from that of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to that of
Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo.
This characteristically American (“deep and subtle”) form of cultural alienation
should not be confused with a far less deep and subtle form of cultural alienation
that is equally characteristically American—an alienation that is cultivated and
displayed as a badge of honor by a different constituency of American intellectu-
als41 —namely, those whose understanding of their identity as “intellectuals” de-
pends upon a principled disinterest in any project of attentive absorption in the
details of their American life. Such “American” intellectuals—especially those
most preoccupied with what it means to be an intellectual, and most especially
those in the thrall of the Parisian model of what it is to be one—will themselves
generally never be able see past the rough-hewn manners of a Thoreau or Faulkner
or Frost or Hawks to the exquisite cultivation shining through that surface, to the
extraordinary rigor of their undertakings (to reinvent philosophy or poetry or the
novel or the cinema). But whereas a Parisian intellectual can without threat to
herself permit herself to be fascinated by the exotic manners of such an American
literary woodsman or cowboy (and thereby discover in them a new and usable
measure of the good, the true, or the just), the American intellectual in the thrall
of the Parisian model is generally unable to permit himself such latitude. Here his
own Americanism comes into play and freezes his powers of perception. He is apt
to recoil from what he perceives as the vulgarity of his countrymen’s provincialism
and amateurism. But often what chagrins such an American intellectual is simply
his Americanism—his fear of his own lack of cultivation. His recoil from cultural
efforts distinctively marked by an American provenance is often a reflection of his
own shame—a symptom of his fantasy to be someone he is not. Nowhere are the
great achievements of American culture more undervalued than in America, which
is not to deny that nowhere are they more celebrated. It belongs to the nature of
great American cultural achievements that they not only easily permit, but actively
invite their audience thus to underestimate them.42 (Apropos Emerson and Thoreau,
Cavell remarks: “[T]hey leave themselves dismissible.”43) To assess such work

requires first punching through its false bottom.44 If it is characteristic of the French
thinker or author or artist to be committed to seeming brilliant and to playing the
part of the genius, then it is equally characteristic of the American thinker or author
or artist to be committed to diffidence and to playing the part of someone who is
just doing his job—say, measuring the depth of his pond.45
America’s Drama of Self-Constitution

It is simply crazy that there should ever have
come into being a world with such a sin in it, in
which a man is set apart because of his color—
the superficial fact about a human being. Who
could want such a world? For an American,
fighting for his love of country, that the last
hope of earth should from its beginning, have
swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a
justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to
measure only with God.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?46
The quotation is from Cavell’s early essay on Beckett’s Endgame. His subsequent
writings intermittently pick up the thread here left hanging, in further sudden re-
marks, often in contexts no less surprising than a reading of a Beckett play. But
this may well be the earliest of these recurring moments in Cavell’s corpus—mo-
ments that are equally expressions of love and expressions of anger and disappoint-
ment in America. The earliest occurrence of an extended meditation on this theme
occurs, less surprisingly perhaps, in Cavell’s first extended meditation on Shake-
spearean tragedy, titled “The Avoidance of Love.” This is where the question of
America’s discovery is first broached by him:
America . . . had a mythical beginning, still visible, if ambiguous, to itself and to its
audience: before there was Russia, there was Russia; before there was France and
England, there was France and England; but before there was America there was no
America. America was discovered, and what was discovered was not a place, one
among others, but a setting, the backdrop of a destiny.47
The drama of America begins with its birth; and it is essential to its myth of
itself as a destiny that its birth be unlike that of other nations. Long before there
was a Russian or English or French nation or revolution or constitution, there were
already a Russian or English or French kingdom or empire or realm, already Rus-
sian and English and French history and architecture and literature, and already a
distinctively Russian and English and French language and people and identity.
The issue in founding America was not just to arrange for there to be one more
such place alongside Russia and England and France. It was to show the world
what a nation and a constitution and a revolution could and should be, and thereby
to create not only a new nation but a new concept of nation—one that was to have
no history or literature or identity prior to the completion of its revolution and the
realization of its constitution, comprising a people united by neither language,
creed, nor blood—one whose history and literature and identity were forged through
a vision of how a people might be united such that they no longer could be divided.
But how is one to tell if such a revolution attains its end, if such a constitution is
fully enacted, if such a union stands achieved?
Cavell’s meditation continues as follows: “It began as theater. Its Revolution,
unlike the English and French and Russian Revolutions, was not a civil war; it was
fought against outsiders, its point was not reform but independence.” One might
argue that America’s beginning as theater was both its blessing and its curse. It
bore some of the earmarks of other revolutionary conflicts: shots were fired, colo-
nies liberated, ties with a monarch severed, royalist administrators evicted, and so
forth. But such a beginning was largely a blessing for the very reasons that might
lead one to declare that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all: in its
declaration of independence America did not declare war on itself, no king was
beheaded, no guillotines were erected, no people’s tribunals convened, there was
no orgy of bloodletting to expiate, and the empire to which it had once belonged
continued happily on without it.48 These seemingly unrevolutionary aspects of its
Revolution were a blessing because it meant America could begin the business of
nationhood with a public debate over its founding principles to determine how each
could have a voice in the ensuing whole and what kind of voice it should be,49
rather than with a tribunal of inquisition to determine who was a friend of the
Revolution and who its enemy, sorting its citizenry into those who formed part of
the solution and those who formed part of the problem. The American revolutionar-
ies had no need to justify an extended internecine conflict in the name of an indivis-
ible will of the people, in whose name violence could be demanded and in expecta-
tion of whose gratitude all sins would be washed away. Instead of having to invoke
the will of the people, the Founding Fathers could afford to seek their consent.
Instead of insisting upon the indivisibility of such a will, they could seek to accom-
modate and protect a diversity of opinion. Instead of replacing religion with the
state, they could seek to separate them.
Was the American Revolution therefore a success? How does one measure the
success of a revolution? Hannah Arendt has devoted a book to this topic. She notes
a marked tendency—exacerbated by a literary and philosophical concentration on
the example of the French Revolution—that she thinks is apt to cloud our thinking
on the topic. The tendency is to identify the concept of revolution with the idea of
a violent overthrow of an existing order (something she takes to be a merely acci-
dental feature of the concept). This identification leaves out what she takes to be
the essential end of revolution: namely, the institution of a new order—not merely
in the superficial sense that a new one replaces an old one, but in the deeper sense
that it brings into being the conditions of the possibility of a new kind of order—
one which alters not only the quantity of freedom but also its quality. A revolution
is to be assessed not by how much it destroys, but by what it creates—not by its
powers of dissolution, but by its powers of constitution. If, rather than measuring
the success of revolutions by the degree to which they afford freedom from a prior
state of affairs, we instead go by the degree to which they enable freedom for the
institution of something radically new—an unprecedented yet stable form of social

order—then, Arendt argues, this will dramatically affect an estimate of the relative
success of the American and French Revolutions. But she thinks this is not the
measure usually employed. Arendt laments:
It was the French and not the American Revolution that set the world on fire, and it
was consequently from the course of the French Revolution, and not from the course
of events in America or from the acts of the Founding Fathers, that our present use
of the word ‘revolution’ received its connotations and overtones everywhere. . . . The
sad truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has
made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has
remained an event of little more than local importance.50
An American such as Thoreau might easily agree with Arendt that it is lamentable
that the French Revolution has been the preferred model for subsequent “revolu-
tions,” while still feeling that the question has yet to be answered what it would
mean for the American Revolution to have been “triumphantly successful.”51
Does it mean, as the national anthem declares, that America is now the land of
the free and the home of the brave? If so, Thoreau will want to know what those
words mean, particularly since, at the time of writing Walden, America was hiding
from itself the withering irony of its having swallowed slavery. It is at this point that
Cavell sees an internal relation between the drama of America and that of Shake-
speare’s tragedies—dramas that turn on a hero’s failure to acknowledge what he
cannot help but know. In The Senses of Walden, on Thoreau’s behalf, Cavell laments:
For an American poet . . . the American Revolution is . . . apt to constitute the absorb-
ing epic event. Only it has two drawbacks: first, it is overshadowed by the epic event
of America itself; second, America’s revolution never happened. The colonists fought
a war against England alright, and they won it. But it was not a war of independence
that was won, because we are not free; nor was even secession the outcome, because
we have not departed from the conditions England lives under, either in our literature
or in our political or economic lives.52
Thoreau thinks his countrymen have allowed themselves to mistake the first act
(the framing of a constitution) for the drama itself (the actualization of the free-
doms it envisions), and thus to remain unclear as to what ought to count as their
having finally departed from the conditions England lives under. Do we know what
the next act of the drama is to be and when it ought to be performed? Or has it
already been performed? Is America now the land of the free? It has, we are often
told, freed its slaves. So was the Civil War the second act of the Revolution?
America’s Civil War does in some ways resemble other countries’ revolutions:
one half of the country fighting the other, brother sometimes taking arms against
brother, one side fighting to uphold tradition and property, the other claiming to
represent freedom and equality. But it was not a revolution—the point, according
to one side, was to make what was formerly one nation two, and the point, accord-
ing to the other side, was to ensure that it remained one. And to the extent that
either point was settled, it was not by its being settled in the way things are settled
in a revolution, not merely because America has as such never suffered defeat, but
because, since its initial inception, its subsequent growth pains have been accompa-
nied neither by the sort of overthrow of an existing order that would mark (and
has marked) the completion of a successful revolution in England or France or
Russia nor by the sort of change in political constitution that would mark the
completion of a successful revolution by Arendt’s lights.53 And, surely, this is a
blessing that has helped to protect it from some of the recurrent crises of coherence
and confidence that afflict so many other nations. Yet the fact of America’s inno-
cence of such national traumas does not by itself answer Thoreau’s question: Is
the drama of America—the drama of the nation’s taking possession of itself—
accomplished or still underway? Is the absence in its history of the moments that
are formative in the history of other nations—moments of traumatic birth or loss
or change of identity, of defeat from without or overthrow from within, of collapse
of empire or toppling of ancien regime, of change of constitution or convulsion in
system of government—its curse or its blessing? There is, after all, no shortage of
those on the outside who think that it has been its curse that it has been so seem-
ingly blessed—and therefore that there is nothing America needs today more than
a humbling. What should those on the inside think?
In his early meditation on America, Cavell notes these dimensions of national
inexperience and observes:
So its knowledge is of indefeasible power and constancy. But its fantasies are those
of impotence, because it remains at the mercy of its past, because its present is contin-
uously ridiculed by the fantastic promise of its origin and its possibility, and because
it has never been assured that it will survive.54
The thought that America must overcome fantasies of its own impotence in order
to believe in itself (and thus become itself) provides one immediate link with the
topic of Cavell’s essay—King Lear. But it also provokes a question that reflects a
feature of the times in which that essay was written—the late 1960s. Continuing
the present theme, I might phrase the question that haunts the essay as follows: Is
the Vietnam War (and the War at Home it provoked) a further act in America’s
drama of self-constitution? Here is the passage in which Cavell touches most ex-
plicitly upon the connection between the topic of America (and its discovery of
itself), the subject of the essay (Shakespeare’s King Lear), and the matter men-
tioned in its title (the avoidance of love):
Since [America] had a birth, it may die. It feels mortal. And it wishes proof not
merely of its continuance but of its existence, a fact it has never been able to take for
granted. Therefore its need for love is insatiable. It surely has been given more love
than any other nation: its history, until yesterday, is one in which outsiders have been
drawn to it and in which insiders are hoarse from their expressions of devotion to it.
. . . It is the need for love as proof of its existence which makes it so frighteningly
destructive, enraged by ingratitude and by attention to its promises rather than to its
promise, and which makes it incapable of seeing that it is destructive and frightening.
It imagines its evils to come from the outside. So it feels watched, isolated in its
mounting of waters, denying its shame with mechanical lungs of pride, calling its
wrath upon the wrong objects.
It has gone on for a long time, it is maddened now, the love it has had it has
squandered too often, its young no longer naturally feel it; its past is in its streets,
ungrateful for the fact that a hundred years ago it tore itself apart in order not to be
divided; half of it believes the war it is now fighting is taking place twenty-five years
ago, when it was still young and it was right that it was opposing tyranny. . . . Union
is what it wanted. And it has never felt that union has been achieved. Hence its terror
of dissent, which does not threaten its power but its integrity. So it is killing itself
and killing another country in order not to admit its helplessness in the face of suffer-
ing, in order not to acknowledge its separateness. So it does not know what its true
helplessness is.55
As I read these lines today, thirty-five years after they were written, I find them to
have acquired a peculiar pertinence in the wake of the events of September 11,
2001.
America has seldom received more declarations of love, from outsiders as well
as insiders, than on the days immediately following the events of that day. Yet
America remains, now more than ever, incapable of seeing how it appears from
the outside, having squandered that love as unreservedly as it was proffered.
America, so confident of its own goodness, has always found it difficult to see
itself—as those on the outside see it—as destructive and frightening. But this self-
blindness has deepened, now that the fantasy has been catastrophically reinforced
that America’s evils come from the outside. As America responds to her momen-
tary feeling of impotence with awesome displays of power, and to her continuing
fear of violation with calls for unprecedented acts of surveillance, a question about
the times in which this essay (on “The Concept of America”) is written arises: Are
we seeing the curtain open on a further act in the drama of America’s self-constitu-
tion? Or has the drama become irretrievably stuck, somewhere in the middle of the
third act?
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, many things were as differ-
ent from the days of the Vietnam War as one could wish for. The following de-
scriptions of the nation all seemed to be evidently true: it was not only not divided
against itself, but its citizens were eager to declare that they stood behind its presi-
dent; its young were not ungrateful and openly protesting its hypocrisy in the
streets; it was not presently killing another country; its fears of violence were
directed not at the actions of its own citizens but at those of outsiders, thereby
enabling it to unite against a common enemy. And even if America was not quite
able to tell itself, with all the confidence it could muster when younger, that it was
opposing tyranny, it could at least tell itself that its enemies were the enemies of
freedom and thus would-be tyrants. So whatever threats there were, there seemed
to be none that threatened the union as such—whatever national trauma was under-
way, it did not seem to be one that threatened internal schism—now that its people
seemed suddenly able, once again, to stand united, indivisible, and firm. Now, less
than three years later, none of these seemingly evidently true descriptions is any
longer evidently true.
America’s sense of its own helplessness in the face of suffering was seldom
more acute than on that September 11 and its appetite for action seldom more
provoked. America feels again, as seldom before, mortal—and wishes proof not
merely of its continuance, but proof that it is indeed America (and not just some
heavily armed superpower) that thereby continues. Thus the rhetoric of proof vastly
exceeds any reality that it thus demonstrates. Seldom have those in power felt less
humility when invoking—seldom have they found it easier to pronounce—words

such as “freedom,” “justice,” “truth.” Every action America commits, every treaty
it breaks, every bomb it drops, every border it crosses, it declares it does in the
name of freedom, suggesting that this is something that it thinks it can—and re-
vealing that this is something it has never believed it can—take for granted.
Today, it has once again become evident that the struggle for union is hardly at
an end. Today the young, certainly in comparison with the generation of the sixties,
are not notably ungrateful or angry: they are not in the streets in great force rebuk-
ing the hypocrisy of their elders or protesting America’s betrayal of its promises
to itself. But that is not to say that they are grateful, or even that most of them feel
any urgency about remembering or reminding others exactly what those prom-
ises—what exactly the Revolution or the Constitution—were. America will vehe-
mently deny that it is presently killing another country. But that is not to say that
it will now affirm that it is not killing anyone—or even that, when it now seeks to
shoot at the enemy, its aim is particularly good. True, its fears are presently di-
rected not at the violence of insiders but at that of outsiders. But that is not to say
that it is able to tell the one from the other. It is perhaps in some—alas, increas-
ingly notional—sense still true that it stands internally united against a present
common enemy. But that is not to say that it is in agreement with itself about
where that enemy is or what would count as having defeated him. (With each
passing day, there appears to be less agreement about what sort of victory ought
to be sought and what would count as its having been achieved.) And even if
America can still tell itself that its enemies are enemies of freedom, it must now
rest uneasy in the knowledge that it has made a habit of befriending its enemies’
enemies whether or not they are truly its friends or freedom’s friends. Its enemies
of today it was calling, only yesterday, friends—friends it was eager to help against
a prior common enemy. Amidst these shifting allegiances, it becomes increasingly
difficult to tell freedom’s friends from its foes—not only when looking at those on
the outside but also at those on the inside, and not only for for those on the outside
looking at us, but also for those of us on the inside looking around at each other.
For, as in Kierkegaard’s Christendom, so, too, in today’s America, there is reason
to worry that those who experience the least difficulty in declaring themselves
faithful to certain values are the ones who are most likely to succeed in depriving
them of the necessary conditions for their application.
America could not disguise from itself that the Vietnam War (and the War at
Home it provoked) was a struggle over its own soul. But now that America can
tell itself that it has been attacked, that it is vulnerable, and that it acts only to
protect itself, it has become easier than ever for it to disguise from itself how its
continuance depends not only on what it does but on how it does it. America’s
threats from within—its triumphal assurances to itself that its constitution stands
fully achieved and its equally vehement rejections of such assurances—have now
become clothed in the guise of arguments about how to deal with threats from
without. But if it is to have a soul worth saving, attacks on it from without must
not silence its ongoing argument from within over what would count as its having
a soul worth saving. For it belongs to that peculiarity of the concept of America
that I have sought to elucidate here that there is no contradiction in the following
thought: America might cease to exist on the very day that its citizens become
convinced that the continued existence of “America” has been safeguarded and
now rests assured.
Notes
This essay is an excerpt from a longer manuscript. I am indebted to the audience at the
University of Athens and at Wesleyan University for valuable discussions at occasions when
parts of it were given, and to conversations with Stanley Cavell about America, with Sandra
Laugier and Jean-Philippe Narboux about France, with Aristides Baltas and Vasso Kindi
about modern Greece, with Jonathan Lear about Kierkegaard, with Joel Snyder about Ameri-
can art, and with Lisa Van Alstyne about everything.
1. “The American Ideal,” New York Times, Feb. 1, 1931. Reprinted in Sidelights (in
The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Volume 21: What I Saw in America and Other
Writings [San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990], 523). The passage continues:
The real, natural Americans are candid, generous, capable of a beautiful wonder and
gratitude; enthusiastic about things external to themselves; easily contented and not
particularly conceited. They have been deliberately taught to be conceited. They have
been systematically educated in a theory of enthusiasm, which degrades it into mere
egotism. The American has received as a sort of religion the notion that blowing his
own trumpet is as important as the trumpet of doom.
2. Franz Kafka, Amerika, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1946), 3 [I have amended the translation]; Der Verschollene (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Verlag, 1983), 9.
3. Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in Emotion Pictures, translated by Shaun
Whiteside (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 117–19; Emotion Pictures: Essays und Filmk-
ritiken (Berlin: Verlag der Autoren, 1988), 142–43. The line here from West Side Story
(rendered by Wenders as “I want to be in America”) also appears in English in Wenders’s
original German text; but it is a misquotation. What they sing is “I like to be in America”—
which in its ungrammaticality is nicely ambiguous between (an observable accomplished
fact about the singer) “I like being in America” and (a subjective aspiration of the singer)
“I would like to be in America.”
4. Or, as Kierkegaard says even more frequently: qua subjectively existing individual.
Someone will want to object that the occurrence of “subjectively” here makes the definition
circular. But what is offered here, in any case, cannot be a definition but, at best, an elucida-
tion. And the circularity is already present without the explicit inclusion of the word “subjec-
tively.” This elucidation is understood only if one understands “existing” and “individual”
here each already as subjective concepts. In ordinary language, we can equally say of rocks
and persons that they “exist.” To understand what it means to say subjective concepts char-
acterize existing individuals requires understanding the relevant sense of “existence.” (Kier-
kegaard and his pseudonyms reserve the term ‘existence’ for persons and ‘being’ for ob-
jects.) We can, in ordinary language, speak equally of an individual rock and of an
individual person. To understand what it means to say subjective concepts characterize exist-
ing individuals requires understanding the relevant sense of “individual.”(Kierkegaard and
his pseudonyms will therefore want to distinguish between mere particulars (that merely
have being) and genuine individuals or agents (who are faced with the task of existence).)
Every elucidation of a subjective concept—including the subjective concept subjective—
will itself have to employ further subjective concepts.
5. Thus someone may want to predicate such a concept of him- or herself without
being entitled to do so. This, Kierkegaard thinks, is the case with most who are eager to
avow that they are Christians.
6. Kierkegaard himself refrains from using the terms ‘Christianity’ and ‘Christian’ in
this way and uses other terms instead—such as ‘churchgoer’ and ‘Christendom’—to refer
to individuals whose lives are characterized merely by the external motions of leading the
life of a Christian.
7. It is perhaps advisable to head off a common misunderstanding: Kierkegaard’s (and
his pseudonyms’) employment of the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ is misunderstood if
it is taken to mark a distinction between that which is epistemically public and that which
is necessarily epistemically private—a distinction the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are
often employed in contemporary philosophical parlance to mark: on this way of speaking,
what is ‘objective’ can be shared, captured in concepts, expressed in language, etc., whereas
what is ‘subjective’ is inherently private, eludes the grasp of concepts, and is inexpressible.
The terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ in Kierkegaard’s parlance do not work in this way.
This should be evident from the fact that they are supposed to mark a distinction between
kinds of concept, each of which is expressible in language (e.g., by terms such as ‘church-
goer’ and ‘Christian,’ respectively). Many commentators have been tempted to run Kierke-
gaard’s distinction together with the currently fashionable one. The following features of
his thought no doubt have encouraged this misunderstanding: (1) understanding utterances
involving subjective concepts, for Kierkegaard, is necessarily a more fragile and delicate
affair than understanding those involving objective concepts; (2) subjective concepts, Kier-
kegaard thinks, will generally apply only to the thoughts and actions of isolated and extraor-
dinary members of a community; (3) the communication of thoughts involving subjective
concepts requires what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication.” For all of these reasons
one might be drawn to say that the acquisition and possession of subjective concepts is a
less “public” (hence a comparatively “private”) matter in comparison to that of objective
concepts. But none of these reasons entails that for Kierkegaard subjective concepts are
inherently incommunicable (indirect communication is a form of communication for Kierke-
gaard) or that they have an essentially private meaning (when one says of two individuals
that they are each struggling to become a Christian, Kierkegaard thinks one is saying the
same thing about each of them—something each of them can also say about themselves or
each other—without equivocating on the meaning of the term ‘Christian’).
8. Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript [henceforth CUP], edited by
S. Kierkegaard, translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1968), 49.
9. “America” for the purposes of this essay means the “America” in “The United States
of America.” This is, of course, not all this word can or does or should mean. But this is
what it means, and all it means, in this essay. This restriction of topic will, no doubt, appear
to some readers (north and south of—as well as nowhere near—the U.S. border) to be
inexcusably chauvinistic. My only excuse is that there is such a concept of America and it
is the one I am trying to understand in these pages. It lies with others who are more qualified
to do so than I to say what the America as it occurs in other contexts—e.g., the compound
“Latin America”—can or does or should mean either to themselves or to others.
10. Commitment to this ideal is not a matter of commitment to some fully fleshed out
moral, political, or religious orthodoxy. Indeed, it is not a matter of commitment to a doc-
trine or creed at all in any except a very attenuated sense—namely, the minimal sense in
which a commitment to principles such as freedom of speech or freedom of religion can be
said to constitute a commitment to a particular sort of political doctrine or creed. The appli-
cation of such principles within a particular institutional or juridical frame may, of course,
involve and even require the specification of very detailed sorts of legal or procedural doc-
trine. But someone who is committed to the ideal here at issue is not a fortiori committed
to any particular specification of the ideal. Thus to be committed to the ideal in question—
i.e., to be an American, in the weighty sense of the term—does not require one to be
committed to every law of the land. Indeed, one may feel that it obliges one to protest
certain laws. (It was, for example, partly out of fidelity to their understanding of America’s
pledges to itself that Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers were able to take themselves
to be justified in opposing various municipal and regional ordinances to the point of civil
disobedience, as it was out of fidelity to their understanding of America’s pledges to itself
that Emerson and his followers were able to take themselves to be obliged to resist certain
federal laws—such as the Fugitive Slave Act.) Indeed, often, the closest thing to a point of
orthodoxy one encounters in connection with the ideal here at issue is precisely the proscrip-
tion of certain kinds of orthodoxy. Thus we often encounter unbending pronouncements of
the following sort in American public life: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional
constellation, it is that no official . . . can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nation-
alism, religion, or other matters of opinion” (West Virginia State Board of Education v.
Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 [1943]).
11. I do not mean to suggest it is unique in this regard. Consider the logic of the
concept Jew.
12. Since the gratuitous chauvinism of Wilson’s remark—that “America is the only
idealistic nation in the world”—is bound to annoy and distract, it is worth noting that the
idealism and the chauvinism can be disjoined. But there are more and less delicate ways to
disjoin them. Here, for example, is Josiah Royce:
When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical material-
ism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists. . . . When I speak, in
this way, of contemporary American idealists, I do not now specially refer to the
holders of any philosophical opinions. . . . I here use the term in no technical sense. .
. . I mean by the word “idealist,” a man or woman who is consciously and predomi-
nantly guided, in the purposes and in the great choices of life, by large ideals, such
as admit of no merely material embodiment, and such as contemplate no merely
private and personal satisfaction as their goal. In this untechnical sense the Puritans
were idealists. The signers of our Declaration of Independence were idealists. Ideal-
ism inspired us during our Civil War. Idealism has expressed itself in the rich differ-
entiation of our national religious life. . . . [U]sing the term “idealism” in this con-
fessedly untechnical sense, I say that many of our foreign judges have failed to see
how largely we Americans are today a nation of idealists. To be sure, we are by no
means alone amongst modern men in our idealism. (“On Certain Limitations of the
Thoughtful Public in America,” in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969], 1111–112)
Royce’s way of keeping his declaration of America’s idealism from degenerating into gross
chauvinism is to suggest that, although America is rather remarkable for the breadth and
depth of its idealism, there is nothing peculiar about its brand of idealism—its ideals are the
same as those of people elsewhere. This invites the following rejoinder: Is not the concept of
America internally related to certain particular ideals (rather than others)—ones that might
not be to the taste of certain “idealists” (in Royce’s loose sense of the term)—and, however
related those ideals might be to ones held by people prior to the founding of America, have
not those ideals received a particular and decisive articulation through the course of Ameri-
ca’s struggle to keep its promises to itself? If so, then—while it is silly to think that America
is the only idealistic nation in the world—it is not silly to think that understanding the
concept of America involves understanding how America has differed from other nations
and how those differences are partly due to the particular ideals that shaped the aspirations
of those who helped to shape America: the Puritans, the signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, the author of the Gettysburg Address, etc.
13. This is not to deny that “to be an American” can, and nowadays often does, signify
little or nothing more than that one falls under certain objective concepts—such as that one
is a citizen of a certain country, that one has the right to vote, that one is entitled to a
passport, etc. To concede this is not to gainsay the following: if the day comes to pass when
this is all the word ‘American’ any longer means, then we will have lost a concept (of
America) we previously had. The question then is: What kind of loss is this? And: Should
such a loss be mourned or welcomed?
14. This is the topic of my “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Anscombe on Moral Unintel-
ligibility” (in Morality and Religion, edited by Timothy Tessin and Marion von der Ruhr,
New York: St. Martins Press, 1995).
15. Variants of both this sentence and the preceding one recur throughout Kierke-
gaard’s The Case of Adler (in Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler, translated by
Walter Lowrie [New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994], see, e.g., pp. 147n–148n, 162); origi-
nally published in English as On Authority and Revelation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1955). For reasons that will become clear, it is worth noting that both remarks are
quoted by Stanley Cavell in his essay “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in Must
We Mean What We Say? [henceforth MWM] (New York: Scribners, 1969), 169.
16. CUP, 84
17. See CUP, 223.
18. “Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Think-
ers, edited by Richard Kearney (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), 108.
19. Walden, chap. 16, par. 6 (in Walden and Other Writings, Modern Library College
Edition, edited by William Howarth [New York: Modern Library, 1981], 256.
20. Walden, chap. 1, par. 36; p. 21.
21. Walden, chap. 6, par. 16, p. 139.
22. Walden, chap. 2, par. 1, p. 74.
23. Walden, chap. 1, par. 79, p. 44.
24. The Senses of Walden [henceforth SW] (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 32.
25. Not that there has ever been any shortage of Europeans willing to second Matthew
Arnold’s quip: “[O]ur Society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace;
and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the populace nearly”
(Preface, Culture and Anarchy, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960], 19–20).
26. There are, of course, those who attempt to escape the problem by simply recoiling
into the opposite point of view. Nothing I say here is meant to deny that this is a recipe for
a far more terrifying species of philistinism—more terrifying because of the unsavory mix-
ture of chauvinism and anti-intellectualism it encourages. The cultural inferiority complex
of those Americans who fear the condescension of Europe is not cured (but merely re-
pressed) in those who imagine that they make progress when they undertake simply to shake
off their cultural hypochondria by declaring that it is actually we—Americans—who ought
to be doing the condescending. The following passage from Daniel Boorstin, from a chapter
bearing the title “Our Cultural Hypochondria and How to Cure It,” exemplifies this recoil
from insecurity to smugness:
We are too easily persuaded that the cancers of European life . . . are healthy growths
and that we are deformed for not possessing them. . . . It is, of course, some solace to
a declining European culture . . . to think that their ills are simply the excesses of their
virtues. That theirs must be the virtues of all cultures. And hence that the accidents of
history which may have immunized us against such vices also sterilize our culture
and doom us to philistinism and vagrancy.
There is no denying that our intellectuals and, most of all, our academics, being
the most cosmopolitan part of our culture, have been especially susceptible to the
well-meaning advice of our sick friends in Europe. Like many sick friends, they are
none too sorry to be able to tell us that we are not in the best of health.
We have, in a word, been too easily led to deny our peculiarly American virtues,
in order to seem to have the peculiar European vices. Moreover, our intellectuals . . .
have been much too sensitive to the charge of chauvinism. Hence they, too, have
been readier to tell us what we lack than to help us to discover what we have. Our
historians and political scientists . . . have failed to help us discover the peculiar vir-
tues of our situation. . . . Is it any wonder that the very word “patriotism” should
come to be suspect among intellectuals? Is it any wonder that we suffer from cultural
hypochondria? (The Genius of American Politics [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1953], 182–83)
Boorstin retains the central assumption of the view he opposes: namely, that Europe and
America between them have only one form of culture worthy of respect and admiration.
The view he opposes takes European culture to be the real article and American culture to
be a pale imitation. He suggests instead that we ought to regard European culture as sick
and dying and American culture as healthy and vibrant. These two views are mirror images
of one another—each feeds on and sustains the other. One can sympathize with Boorstin’s
thought that one of the reasons that patriotism comes less naturally to American intellectuals
has to do with their tendency to identify culture and cosmopolitanism with Europe, without
sympathizing in the least with his thought that the way for America to cure itself of this
unhealthy self-conception is to learn to view itself as the paradigm of a healthy nation and
to look upon the glories of European culture as symptoms of illness.
27. Cavell is concerned to take the point much further than I do here. The issue turns
for him not merely on the relatively superficial matter of the extent to which there are
certain commonly shared texts in the culture at large but on the far more searching matter
of how they circulate in the culture and authorize what can count as a contribution to the
culture’s discourse about itself. Hence Cavell writes:
Suppose it is true, and significant about the American “style of thought,” that it has
lacked the concept of ideology. . . . Is this like lacking thirteenth-century cathedrals
(also true, and significant, of American culture), or like lacking churches of any kind,
or like lacking the concept of religion altogether? In the last case you may have a
theory of human culture that tells you this is impossible, in which case one tack for
you to take would be to look for what concepts “do duty” for the absent concept. I
think a related cultural difference between American and European intellectual life is
that the American (with isolated exceptions) has no sacred intellectual texts, none
whose authority the intellectual community at large is anxious to preserve at all
costs—no Marxian texts, no Freudian, no Hegelian, no Deweyan, and so forth. Every
text stands at the level of professional journal articles, open for disposal. . . . If the
concept of ideology depends for its usefulness on its functioning with such favored
texts, then its absence in American intellectual life would be explained by the absence
of such texts. . . . [I]t surely makes for drastic barriers to communication, both within
American intellectual life and between American and European thinkers. (Themes
Out of School [henceforth TS] [San Francisco: North Point, 1984], 59–60)
28. The Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn (New York:
Bantam Doubleday, 1989).
29. Cavell holds, on the one hand, that the relatively accomplished edifice of distinc-
tively American cinema is able partially to compensate for America’s failure to realize that
it has expressed itself philosophically, while holding, on the other hand, that the significance
of this accomplishment must, nonetheless, remain obscured in the absence of a correspond-
ingly accomplished edifice of American philosophy:
I assume that movies have played a role in American culture different from their role
in other cultures, and more particularly that this difference is a function of the absence
in America of the European edifice of philosophy. And since I assume further that
American culture has been no less ambitious, craved no less to think about itself,
than the most ambitious European culture, I assume further still that the difference
everyone recognizes as existing between American and European literature is a func-
tion of the brunt of thought that American literature, in its foundings in, for instance,
Emerson and Whitman and Poe, had to bear in that absence of a given philosophical
founding and edifice, lifting the fragments that the literature found, so to speak, handy
and portable. Finally, I assume that American film at its best participates in this Western
cultural ambition of self-thought or self-invention that presents itself in the absence of
the Western edifice of philosophy, so that on these shores film has the following pecu-
liar economy: it has the space, and the cultural pressure, to satisfy the craving for
thought, the ambition of a talented culture to examine itself publicly; but its public
lacks the means to grasp this thought as such for the very reason that it naturally or
historically lacks that edifice of philosophy within which to grasp it. (Contesting
Tears [henceforth CT] [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 72)
30. “Emerson.—Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home . . .
—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.” (Nietzsche, posthumous fragment, translated
and quoted by Walter Kaufmann in his translator’s introduction to The Gay Science [New
York: Vintage, 1974], 12.)
31. Ibid., “The author who has been richest in ideas in this century has been an Ameri-
can (unfortunately this has been made obscure by German philosophy).” For a discussion
of Nietzsche’s relation to Emerson, see my “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Scho-
penhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, edited by Richard Schacht (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
32. Was Socrates, when he pestered his fellow citizens in the Agora with his questions,
participating in a European tradition? How does a tradition of philosophy begin?
33. I am drawing here on remarks from Cavell’s essay “An Emerson Mood” (see SW,
148).
34. TS, 29.
35. Aristotle, Protrepticus, fragment 5; in Aristotelis Fragmenta Selecta, edited by W.
D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 33.
36. “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris” (attributed to Thomas Gold Apple-
ton, reported by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table [Pleasantville,
NY: Akadine, 2001], 125). Oscar Wilde, in his play A Woman of No Importance, adds a
characteristic wrinkle:
Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go
to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
(The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [Leicester, UK: Galley Press, 1987], 421)
37. Walden, chap. 3, par. 1, p. 90. In connection with this question, Cavell himself
offers a contrast between Derrida’s (characteristically European) and Emerson’s and Tho-
reau’s (distinctively American) relations to the history of European philosophy; see CT,
64–65.
38. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”; in Essays and Lectures, edited
by Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 53.
39. This pertains not only to how an American writer is apt to experience his or her
relation to a wider American public, but to the converse relation as well. Archibald MacLe-
ish, in a striking passage, speaks in this connection of how American writers often appear
to live in a kind of domestic exile:
[T]hough the possibility for artists and writers to work in America can be demon-
strated by the work itself, it is not so obviously self-evident that they have a place in
American life . . . . Our writers appear . . . to live in a kind of domestic exile. They
are noticed in the news columns when they die or when they distinguish themselves
in some artistically irrelevant way such as selling a novel to the movies for more than
the last novel brought, or marrying for the seventh time, but their opinions on ques-
tions of public concern are not recorded. There are, that is to say, no American
Goethes. There is not even an American Sartre. (A Continuing Journey: Essays and
Addresses by Archibald MacLeish [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968], 181)
40. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982),
xv. Immediately after noting this fact about modern American writing, Kazin goes on to
explain (in the paragraph from which his book takes its title) the shape of his own project
in On Native Grounds—one of seeking to highlight and characterize (what he takes to be)
the distinctively American dimension of such writing:
There is a terrible estrangement in this writing, a nameless yearning for a world no
one ever really possessed, that rises above the skills our writers have mastered and
the famous repeated liberations they have won to speak out plainly about the life men
lead in America. All modern writers, it may be, have known that alienation. . . . But
what interested me here was our alienation on native grounds—the interwoven story
of our need to take up our life on our own grounds, and the irony of our possession.
To speak of modern American writing as a revolt against the Genteel Tradition alone,
against Victorianism alone, against even the dominance of the state by special groups,
does not explain why our liberations have often proved so empty. . . . To speak of it
only as a struggle toward the modern emancipation—and it was that—does not even
hint at the lean and shadowy tragic strain in our modern American writing. . . . Nor
does it tell us why our modern writers have had to discover and rediscover and chart
the country in every generation, rewriting Emerson’s The American Scholar in every
generation . . . but still must cry America! America! As if we had never known
America. As perhaps we have not. (ibid., xv–xvi)
For all of their differences, Kazin’s and Cavell’s accounts of American writing have this
much (and this much of Emerson’s account) in common: they take America to name the
(re)discovery of something that America’s great writers are compelled to write about as if
it remained largely undiscovered.
41. To avoid confusion, it should be noted that in the remainder of this paragraph the
expression “American intellectuals” is employed in its most minimal sense—involving the
mere conjunction of the attributes American and intellectual—to refer to individuals who
fancy themselves intellectuals while happening to live in and be citizens of the United States
of America. Or to put the same point differently: in the remainder of this paragraph the
expression “American intellectuals” is employed in its merely objective (as opposed to its
weightier—Emersonian—subjective) sense.
42. Here we have a further reason that Cavell finds the greater achievements of Holly-
wood film and America’s relation to those achievements to epitomize a central feature of
the problematic of American culture. The structure of this problematic is brought out beauti-
fully in the following passage in which the relation between the mousefolk and their hero
in Kafka’s story “Josephine the Singer” is taken to presage the relation between American
culture and its public:
Its film prepared to satisfy the craving for thought, and its public thereby deprived of
recognizing the economy of its satisfaction, American culture casts its film and its
film’s public in the relation that is described in “Josephine the Singer” as existing
between Josephine and her public. Each will think that it is the creator of the other:
and film’s public, for all its periodic adoration of its art, will fall to doubting the
specialness and beauty of its art, and its own need for it; it will even come to doubt
that its art is an art—that it sings—at all. (CT, 72–73)
43. CT, 66. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence takes it to
be almost a defining characteristic of an American literary classic that it possess “a duplici-
tous surface”—one that the reader must penetrate if he or she is to reach (what Lawrence
calls) “its marvelous under-meaning.” See, for example, his essay “Nathaniel Hawthorne
and The Scarlet Letter” (Studies in Classic American Literature [New York: Penguin, 1977],
especially pp. 89, 106).
44. Thoreau is a master of prose structures with such false bottoms. My epigraph from
Thoreau not only is an instance of a piece of writing that has such a false bottom but it is
about what kind of bottom something called Walden has, how to measure its depth, and
how to recognize the moment at which the effort to fathom it has struck bottom.
45. See, in this connection, Leo Steinberg’s discussion (in the title essay of Other
Criteria [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], 57–59) of why “Thomas Eakins is the
type of the American artist,” and especially his discussion of Eakins’s William Rush (a
painting of a painter painting a nude model) and how it “reverses all of the attitudes” of his
French teacher Léon Gérome’s Pygmalion (also of a painter painting a nude model)—and,
in particular, how it furnishes an American reversal of the European relation between art
and work, between painting a painting and doing one’s job.
46. MWM, 141.
47. MWM, 344.
48. Thus Garry Wills writes:
The American Revolution was more properly an act of secession than a real revolu-
tion. We did not remove King George from his throne or dissolve the Parliament in
London. We did not replace them with a new government of our own creation. We
simply took our colonies out of the empire—which continued its course without us.
(A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government [New York: Simon
Schuster, 2002], 179)
49. This raises questions about who falls under the scope of the variable “each” here
and how—the initiating questions of what one might call the argument of America: Can
America mean the words laid down in its founding documents if it also sanctions slavery?
or if it refuses women the vote? or if it inters its citizens just for being of Japanese origin,
or allows them to be stopped by the police just for being black? or allows a visitor to be
detained just for having an Arabic-sounding last name?
50. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 55–56.
51. What Arendt means is, first, that its aftermath was a “triumphant success” if mea-
sured against the events succeeding the French Revolution, and, second, that it was a trium-
phant success, if measured in terms of many of the goals that the theorists and protagonists
of the French Revolution and its aftermath set themselves for what a revolution is supposed
to accomplish. No doubt. But that still leaves open the question what it would mean for it
to be a triumphant success, if measured by the goals that the theorists and protagonists of
the American Revolution and its aftermath set themselves.
52. SW, 7.
53. I am rehearsing themes touched on in “The Avoidance of Love”; see MWM,
344–45.
54. MWM, 345.
55. MWM, 345.
5
Rethinking the Ordinary

Austin after Cavell
SANDRA LAUGIER
Certainly Stanley Cavell has discovered a new way of thinking about the ordinary.
Of course, he was not the first to invoke a return to the ordinary; even before
Wittgenstein and Austin, a certain British empiricism also laid claim to such a
return. But it was Cavell who conceived this return as a return to where we have
never been and the ordinary as a nextness new to the world, at once near and far.
By starting from this nextness we can, contrary to what we might expect, rethink
the question of “realism” in ordinary language.
The idea of the ordinary is doubly mythological: object of both rejection and
fascination, the ordinary is as it were the other of philosophy—what it wants, in
its arrogance, to surpass, but also that to which it aspires, in its nostalgia, to return.
Thinking about the ordinary means avoiding these two tendencies, which are of
such weight in philosophy that they seem to determine all the possibilities, espe-
cially today. To think the ordinary we must pose the question: do we really know
what is ordinary, what is ordinary for us? These are old questions, which come to
us from at least as early as antiquity: but all the same they are to be posed anew.
That means: to begin philosophy again, not with nothing, but with what we have
to hand, and before our eyes, and still to discover.
It is this new departure that marks, for philosophy, what Cavell defines as Amer-
ican philosophy. Is there an American philosophy? Is it not, like America, simply
the result of successive immigrations and importations, or is it something truly
new? Cavell’s idea is that what belongs to American thinking, thus to its capacity
to begin philosophy again in America, is to be found in its capacity to imagine the
ordinary. This new departure of philosophy, which is not a blank slate but—as in
the Hollywood comedies of remarriage that Cavell has put among his privileged
subjects—a second chance, is also a reversal or a return of philosophy’s two invet-
erate tendencies: the denial of our ordinary language and of our ordinary character
(of our ordinariness) in the philosophical pretension to leave them behind, correct
them, or reform(ulate) them, and the symmetrical philosophical pretension to know
“what we mean” from the false obviousness of our ordinary beliefs or our forms
of life. One of Cavell’s earliest claims, in Must We Mean What We Say? (whose
title sums up the whole difficulty), is that we do not know what we think or what
we mean, and that the task of philosophy is to bring us back to ourselves—to bring
82
Rethinking the Ordinary 83
our words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use, or to bring knowl-
edge of the world back to knowledge or nearness of self—something that is neither
easy nor obvious, and that makes asking after the ordinary the most difficult quest
there is, even if (precisely because) the ordinary is there, available to everyone.
For Cavell this was already, in a sense, the discovery of Socrates:
What I take Socrates to have seen is that, about the questions which were causing
him wonder and hope and confusion and pain, he knew that he did not know what
no man can know, and that any man could learn what he wanted to learn. No man is
in any better position for knowing it than any other man—unless wanting to know is
a special position. And this discovery about himself is the same as the discovery of
philosophy, when it is the effort to find answers, and to permit questions, which
nobody knows the way to nor the answer to any better than yourself. (MWM, xxviii)
In these lines written by Cavell in 1969, more than thirty years ago, at the moment
when he began to make heard, squarely in the domain of analytic philosophy, a
new voice—that of ordinary language—there was in the United States a whole
program whose point was precisely to rethink the ordinary starting from the very
idea of ordinary language as presented in Austin and Wittgenstein. From the begin-
ning of this program, there was the question: I, how can I say (know) what we
say? This question, raised obsessively, directs the whole renewal of philosophy to
which American philosophy today aspires. The voice of the ordinary, as Cavell has
taught us once more to hear it, cannot be fully understood except as a response to
the risk of skepticism—to this loss or this estrangement of the world, this loss for
words that hangs over us every day in our world. The appeal to the ordinary and
to how “we” use words is not a source of data nor a solution; it is itself traversed
by skepticism, by what can be called “the unsettling strangeness of the ordinary.”
It is in this context that we must consider Cavell’s return to Emerson and Tho-
reau. By their attention to the ordinary, the common, and the familiar, they antici-
pate, for Cavell, the philosophy of ordinary language in Wittgenstein and Austin.
The connection means that I see both developments—ordinary language philosophy
and American transcendentalism—as responses to skepticism, to that anxiety about
our human capacities as knowers. . . . My route to the connection lay at once in my
tracing both the ordinary language philosophers as well as the American transcenden-
talists to the Kantian insight that reason dictates what we mean by a world. (IQO, 4)
Transcendentalism, like the philosophy of ordinary language, responds to skepti-
cism not by offering new knowledge or a new belief but by a recognition of our
condition—which is also, to cite one of Cavell’s many plays on words, our diction
together. It is in this sharing of language that the skeptical question, far from
dissolving, takes on its most radical sense: what could permit me to speak in the
name of these others? How could I know what we mean, to take up one of his
central puns, by a word or by a world? It is Emerson’s perfectionism that raises
this question—that of my voice in a community, and in a society—most clearly.
Emerson’s response to it is his concept of Self-Reliance. “Self-reliance is the aver-
sion of conformity” (see CW, 2: 29).
For Cavell we are not so much to reinvent everyday language as to recover and
recuperate it: the recovery he thus calls for is not only a recovery in the sense of
a finding again but also a recovery in the sense of a healing (to take up the Wittgen-
steinian theme of therapy)—which is not the same thing as discovery, since it is
characteristic of ordinary language that it is already there, that there is in a sense
nothing for us to discover: “Words come to us from a distance; they were there
before we were; we are born into them. Meaning them is accepting that fact of
their condition” (SW, 64). Of this there is an echo in This New Yet Unapproachable
America: “All my words are someone else’s. What, but philosophy of a certain
kind, would tolerate the thought? (NYUA, 74–75). What sort of philosophy? This
is what Cavell has sought to characterize, beginning with his first book, Must We
Mean What We Say? The Claim of Reason is, to date—in the fullness of its
breadth, treating all of Cavell’s chosen topics: Shakespeare, Romanticism, Freud,
Emerson, Thoreau, politics, the movies—the most complete expression of this
questioning about our form of life in language, about the enigmatic fact that “lan-
guage is everywhere where we find ourselves, which means everywhere in philoso-
phy (like sexuality in psychoanalysis)” (NYUA, 118).
The content of this questioning is, from the beginning of Cavell’s philosophiz-
ing, throughout determined by his encounter with Austin. He alludes, in his preface
to the Claim, to the shock Austin’s teaching was for him at Harvard in 1955 and
to the complete philosophic reorientation he sustained—he was, he says, quite
literally “grounded” by the procedures of the philosophy of ordinary language. The
first result was the drafting of “Must We Mean What We Say?”an essay in which
Cavell, in a context that was hostile, or at the very least incapable of hearing his
voice (the context of professional analytic philosophy as it dominated the institu-
tion of philosophy in America in the fifties), sets out for the first time what he has
found in Austin. Thus began what Cavell calls his “lifelong quarrel” with analytic
philosophy (TOS, 31)—a quarrel that has largely died down today in the United
States, where Cavell’s work is recognized as among the most important of the
century, but which has now found a kind of new life in France with the publication
of a translation of his principal work. It is a quarrel that, in effect, underlies The
Claim of Reason, particularly its opening pages. The book begins with an interpre-
tation of Austin and continues with one of Wittgenstein, and these questions of
interpretation are also questions of politics, as Cavell remarks in “The Politics of
Interpretation” (in Themes Out of School). If we insist here—as Cavell does in all
his texts, and especially in his autobiographical work A Pitch of Philosophy—on
the Austinian origin of his work, it is because we find already in that origin the
Claim’s (political) course of interpretation: to retrieve (to recover) the voice of
signal authors of the analytic professional tradition, whose work has been lost in a
scholasticism (in Austin’s case, pragmatic; in Wittgenstein’s, analytic) which has
severed our contact with them and has made their writings and their teaching empty
words—dead signs, to which we must give life, as he put it in The Claim of
Reason. For Cavell, we have not yet understood, or we have quickly forgotten, the
original point of departure for analytic philosophy, the linguistic turn, and we have
not understood or have forgotten what it means to be interested in language. From
this point of view we are hardly beyond, and rather still perhaps behind, the teach-
ing of Austin and of Wittgenstein (as well, certainly, as that of Gottlob Frege).1
We have become unable to understand them and to hear their voices. And this
inability is a symptom of a more general inability, an inability to hear ordinary

language, and so to speak it, to mean what we say. To this inability to be subject
to our language, to speak a shared language, Cavell again gives the name of skepti-
cism. It is just this that is the subject of The Claim of Reason.
Why was the encounter with Austin so essential? Because, as Cavell puts it in
the opening of “Must We Mean What We Say?” the idea “that what we ordinarily
say and mean may have a direct and deep control over what we can philosophically
say and mean” (MWM, 1), which belongs to the philosophy of Austin, has a sig-
nificance that goes beyond the traditional subject of the philosophy of language;
and if it is often rejected by philosophers (Continental as well as analytic) and
understood as simplistic or blind to the depth of philosophical questions, that im-
pression “can come from a truth about ourselves that we hold at a distance.” The
philosophical interest of the return to “what we say” becomes clear when we ask
ourselves not only about saying but about who we are. How can I know what we
would say in these or those circumstances? How is the language that I speak,
inherited as it is from others, mine? Cavell hears an echo of these questions in
the opening of the Philosophical Investigations (which begins with the citation of
Augustine (“all my words are those of another”). But it is Thoreau (and Emerson,
who comes to have even greater importance in Cavell’s work after The Claim of
Reason), in his attention to the ordinary and the common, who, Cavell writes,
“underwrites the practice of Wittgenstein and of Austin.” Without Thoreau, there
would not be in Cavell the passage from Austin’s ordinary to Wittgenstein’s ques-
tion of skepticism and of criteria, this need for a change in the hearing of language,
toward sensitivity to its voices. Our words, like our lives, have lost their senses,
and we must learn to get them back. This is the task that Walden sets itself: “[O]ur
reading, our conversation and thinking are all on a very low level, worthy only of
pygmies and of manikins (W, 97). This is what Emerson is saying in a celebrated
exclamation, frequently cited by Cavell: “Their every truth is not quite true. Their
two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say
chagrins us” (CW, 2: 34).
What is at issue here for Cavell is our criteria, that is to say our shared agree-
ment on or rather in language, and more precisely the we that is in question in
“what we say when.” What founds the appeal to ordinary language? Everything
that we have, what we say, and our agreements in language. It is not on meanings
that we agree, but on uses, as Wittgenstein clearly saw. We specify “the meaning
of a (given) word” by its uses. Asking after agreement (asking “what would you
say if . . . ,” as Austin does constantly) is founded on everything but meanings and
the specification (even problematic) of senses “shared” by speakers. The agreement
of which Austin and Wittgenstein speak does not have the character of an intersub-
jective agreement: it is not founded on a “convention” or on any actual act of
agreeing, entered into by already civilized speakers. In this sense, it has nothing to
do with the “solidarity” invoked by Richard Rorty. It is an agreement as objective
as anything (Austin speaks in this connection of “experimental data”). But what is
this agreement? Where does it come from, and why should we give it such author-
ity? That is the problem for Cavell. In all his work, he raises the question: what
permits Austin and Wittgenstein to say what they say about what we say? And his
response is fertile in surprises and paradoxes. For Cavell, the radical absence of
any foundation for the claim to “say what we say”—his first discovery—is not a
mark of any absence of logical rigor or rational certitude in the procedure that
arises from this claim—his second discovery. This is the meaning of what Witt-
genstein says about our “agreement in judgments” and in language: it is not
founded on anything but itself, on us. Clearly, there is in this the makings of
skepticism, and this is thus quite properly the central topic of The Claim of Reason.
But to understand the nature of our language and our agreements is also to under-
stand that it “does not abolish logic” (cf. PI, §242); and that the lack of any external
foundation for our agreement in language rather represents something fundamental
to our rationality—this is what Cavell defines as, in the strict sense, the truth in
skepticism. The Claim of Reason is, as a whole, a development of a remark in one
of his first essays, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected and expect
others to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will
take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of
rules) . . . It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because
it is) terrifying. (MWM, 52)
One can see here the movement that is accomplished in Cavell from the question
of shared language to the question of the sharing of the human form of life, a
sharing that is not merely a matter of being part of social structures but of every-
thing that makes up human activities and existences. This is why sociological inter-
pretations and uses of Wittgenstein always miss the true force of his anthropology:
it never suffices for Wittgenstein to say “this is what we do.” The problem is to
know how to connect the I to the us and vice versa. In this way, skepticism is
inherent in every human practice, linguistic or otherwise: all certitude or confidence
in what we do (follow a rule, count, etc.) is modeled on the confidence that we
have in our shared uses of language.
“The acceptance of our form of life,” immanence, does not afford us a pat re-
sponse to philosophical problems. Wittgenstein certainly would not have appreciated
certain talk nowadays of supposedly Wittgensteinian inspiration, in which “the accep-
tance of our form of life” becomes a flight from every investigation or questioning
of forms of life, and a pretext for talk about the end of philosophy. Rorty’s reading
and use of Wittgenstein is clearly guided by this sort of “conformist” interpretation
of form of life. From this point of view, one of the merits of Cavell’s reading is its
radically putting in question such a conception of “form of life,” a putting in question
which is inextricably tied to sustaining and transforming skeptical questions. Cavell
shows at once the fragility and the depth of our agreements, and he seeks out the
very nature of the necessity that emerges, for Wittgenstein, from our human form of
life. All of Cavell’s work begins from the following three thoughts, which the official
readings of Wittgenstein have constantly avoided:
1. There is a rationality and an objectivity to these procedures, one which is founded
on our “form of life.” This is, in effect, what Cavell has always maintained, and
it means also that this is a necessity that is inherent in all of our uses of language,
on the basis of which we mean something.
2. A rule is neither a foundation nor an interpretation: it is there, but this in no way

diminishes its rigor, for it is natural. A unique aspect of Cavell’s position is his
redefinition of the necessity of ordinary usage and rules in language in terms of
nature: it is this very particular understanding of nature that defines for him the
ordinary.
3. There is not, then, for Cavell, an “answer” to the skepticism that emerges from
the fragility of our agreements. That our ordinary language is founded on nothing
but itself is not only a source of anxiety as to the validity of what we do and say:
it is the revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not want to recognize—
that “I” am the sole possible source of their validity. To refuse this, to attempt to
surpass skepticism, is to end up reinforcing skepticism. That is what Cavell means
by his famously saying in the Claim: “we live our skepticism” (CR, 440). This is
not an “existential” interpretation of Wittgenstein, but a new understanding of the
fact that language is our form of life.
The accepting of this fact—which Cavell defines as “the absence of foundation

or of guaranty for our finitude, for creatures endowed with language and subject to
their powers and to their weaknesses, subject to their mortal condition”—does not
come here as a relief, or a deliverance, but rather is an acknowledgment of finitude
and of the everyday, whose source Cavell finds in Emerson and Thoreau. It is on
this condition that we can regain our “lost contact with reality,” the nearness of
the world and of words broken in skepticism. So a response to the question of
realism, so much discussed today in the philosophy of language, is not to be found
except in ordinary language, in what Austin and Wittgenstein show to be the entan-
glement, the reciprocal involvement of language and life. The adequacy of lan-
guage to reality—the truth of language—is not to be constructed or to be proven:
it is to be shown, as we can see Austin showing it, in language.
Cavell’s originality lies in his reconsideration of the nature of language, and in
the connection that he draws between its nature and human nature, which is fini-
tude. It is in this sense that the question of our agreements in language is ultimately
the question of the human condition, and that the acceptance of the one goes along
with the acceptance of the other. What is at stake then, is the accepting of expres-
siveness itself: bearing being expressive, wanting to say. Here a question of mean-
ing reappears which is not a question of sense or of reference, but as Wittgenstein’s
terminology at the beginning of the Blue Book indicates, meaning, wanting to say.
The philosophical problem that ordinary language philosophy raises has there-
fore two parts: First, with what right does it found itself on what we ordinarily
say? Second, on what, or on whom, does it found itself in determining what we
ordinarily say? But—and here is the insight of Cavell’s approach in Must We Mean
What We Say? and in The Claim of Reason—these questions are at bottom the
same: they are the question of my (my words’) connection to the real (to our
world), that is to say, for Cavell as for Wittgenstein, of our criteria. To see this,
let us return to the question of our agreements in language: “We share the criteria
by means of which we regulate our application of concepts, through which we
establish the conditions of conversation.” What Wittgenstein investigates and deter-
mines, in the Investigations, is our criteria, which govern what we say. But who is
he to claim to know these things? It is this absence of foundation for the claim to
know what we say that supports the idea of criteria, and that defines what it is to
claim.
The philosophical appeal to what we say, and the search for our criteria on the basis
of which we say what we say, are claims to community. And the claim to community
is always a search for the basis on which it can or has been established. I have nothing
more to go on than my conviction, my sense that I make sense. . . . The wish and
search for community are the wish and search for reason. (CR, 20)
The central enigma of rationality and of community is thus the possibility that I
can speak in the name of others. It is precisely here that we find the problem of
“Other Minds,” of knowing how to get to the mind of the other, an obsession of
Wittgenstein’s:
But how does he [Wittgenstein] know such things? . . . [H]ow can he so much as
have the idea that these fleets of his own consciousness, which is obviously all he’s
got to go on, are accurate wakes of our own? But the fact is he does have the idea;
and he is not the only one who does. And the fact is, so much of what he shows to
be true of his consciousness is equally true of ours (of mine). This is perhaps the fact
of his writing to be most impressed by; it may be the fact he is most impressed
by—that what he does can be done at all. (CR, 20)
This accounts for the very unusual tone of the Investigations, that they have some-
thing of autobiography, but a curious autobiography that is also our own. It can
seem sometimes that Wittgenstein has undertaken to voice our secrets, secrets we
did not know were known or did not know we shared. And then, whether he is
right or wrong in a given instance, the very intention, or presumption, will seem
to some outrageous. It is this tone of confidence that brings Wittgenstein close to
Rousseau and Thoreau, and leads Cavell to find in Wittgenstein’s reflection on
agreement in language an interrogation of the nature of subjectivity. This point is
clearly put in The Senses of Walden:
It is the appeal from ordinary language to itself; a rebuke of our lives by what we
may know of them, if we will. The writer has secrets to tell which may only be told
to strangers. . . . They are secrets because few are anxious to know them; all but one
or two wish to remain foreign. (SW, 92)
There is not then in Wittgenstein a refutation of skepticism by the ordinary.

Such a refutation would in any case be circular: for the ordinary is precisely that
which is threatened by skepticism. But most important, for Wittgenstein, as for
Austin, there is nothing obvious or immediate about the ordinary: it is to be discov-
ered, and that is the task that Austin’s minute analyses and Wittgenstein’s innumer-
able examples set themselves. What I mean is that the appeal to ordinary language
does not hold out an easy solution to philosophical problems, and that it certainly
cannot be reduced to any falling back on a plain sense or a shared meaning. This
is what most strongly distinguishes Wittgenstein and Austin from a philosopher
like Moore, who would seem to know, right off the bat, what common sense would
be, what we ordinarily say or think. But in reality there is nothing that is more
difficult or more painful to know: Austin goes to great pains in order to say what
we understand by “intentionally” or by “it’s a fact”; Wittgenstein has need of the
whole of the Investigations to know just a bit better whether we think that we have
access to the mind of another person. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell asks again
and again after our ordinary way of understanding the pain of another, or the
connection between the soul and the body: he asks why, for instance, we can more
easily imagine the soul of a prince in the body of a frog than we can the soul of a
frog with the appearance of a prince? Do we ordinarily think of the soul, the “I,”
as being within my body, or as being my body? (CR, 398). These are questions
that do not have a straight-off answer, and they show the impossibility, or the
danger, of responding to skepticism with arguments that appeal to our ordinary
beliefs: philosophers who would like to proceed in this way have already given in
to skepticism: “they live it.” This returns us again to the question of the foundation
of our agreement: that of the nature of me, of my capacity to speak, and so to
conform in the use of shared criteria. It is not enough to invoke community; we
still have to know what authorizes me (what gives me the right) to invoke it.
When I remarked that the philosophical search for our criteria is a search for commu-
nity, I was in effect answering the second question I uncovered in the face of the
claim to speak for “the group”—the question namely about how I could have been
party to the establishing of criteria if I do not recognize that I have and do not know
what they are. . . . [T]he claim is not that one can tell a priori who is implicated
by me, because one point of the particular kind of investigation Wittgenstein calls
grammatical is exactly to discover who. (CR, 22)
Cavell thus gives us a starting point for asking after “what it is convenient to call
linguistic conventions.” The strength of Cavell’s analysis of convention in chapter
5 of The Claim of Reason—and what fundamentally distinguishes it from Rorty’s
analysis of community and conversation—is that it makes us revisit the profoundly
problematic character of every appeal to convention, and the difficulty therefore of
locating a “conventionalism” in Wittgenstein. We can see the difficulty in this
passage of the Philosophical Investigations, which connects to all of Cavell’s work:
It is what human beings say that is true or false, and they agree in the language that
they use [in der Sprache stmmen die Menschen überein]. That is not agreement in
opinions but in form of life.
If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement [Überein-
stimmung] not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments.
This may seem to abolish logic, but does not do so. (PI, 241–42)
That we have our agreements in language is certainly not the end of the problem
of skepticism, and to adopt conventionalism would not be responsive to the kinds
of questions I mean to be posing here. It is of the first importance for Cavell that
Wittgenstein says that we agree in and not on language. That means that we are
not makers of the agreement, that language precedes agreement just as much as
agreement makes language possible, and that this circularity brings with it an irre-
ducible element of skepticism. A response to the problem of language is not to be
found in the idea of convention, because convention is itself a difficulty and a
mystery. Most conventionalist interpreters of Wittgenstein (certainly I am thinking
here of Saul Kripke) take a false path: the idea of convention, particularly as it is
conceived in “conventionalism,” does not in fact help us to define agreement in
language. The idea of convention does indeed mean something (and in this sense,
it is indispensable): it acknowledges the strength of our agreement, and the extraor-
dinariness of our ability to speak together. But it cannot be the basis of an account
of the real practice of language, and furthermore it can encourage us to avoid
seeing that language is natural:
[S]ince we cannot assume that the words we are given have their meaning by nature,
we are led to assume they take it from convention; and yet no current idea of “con-
vention” could seem to do the work that words do—there would have to be, we could
say, too many conventions in play, one for each shade of each word in each context.
We cannot have agreed beforehand to all that would be necessary. (CR, 31)
That we agree in language means that language—our form of life—produces

our understanding of one another just as much as language is a product of agree-
ment, that it is natural to us in this sense, and that the idea of convention is there
to at once ape and disguise this necessity. “Beneath the tyranny of convention,
there is the tyranny of nature,” Cavell writes. At this point, the criticism mounted
by Cavell, in This New Yet Unapproachable America, of usual interpretations of
“form of life” becomes relevant. Cavell opposes these interpretations by his use of
the formulation “form of life,” by contrast with “form of life.” What is given is
our form of life. What leads us to want to violate our agreements, our criteria,
is the refusal of this given, of our form of life not only in its social but in its
biological dimension. It is on this second (vertical) aspect of form of life that
Cavell is insisting, while at the same time recognizing the importance of the first
(horizontal) dimension, that is, social agreement. What discussions of the first sense
(that of conventionalism) have obscured is the strength in Wittgenstein of the natu-
ral and biological sense of form of life, which Wittgenstein picks out in evoking
“natural reactions” and “the natural history of humanity.” What is given in our
form of life is not only social structures and various cultural habits but everything
that can be seen in “the specific strength and dimensions of the human body, the
senses, the human voice” and everything that makes it the case that, just as the
dove, in Kant’s phrase, needs air to fly, so we, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, need
friction to walk (PI §107). In thinking of convention we resist the naturalness of
language, which is, appearances to the contrary, just as or even more essential than
convention to language’s being public. Perceiving the naturalness of language is
precisely what can lead us back to language’s natural realism, while conventional-
ism distances us from that natural realism, in its emphasis on the arbitrariness of
language and the conventional character of the relation of words to the world. (It
is thus not surprising that the most thoroughly conventionalist interpretations of
Wittgenstein tend inevitably in the direction of some sophisticated form of antireal-
ism, say, idealism.) The putting in question of the concept of convention allows us
to frame a new sort of naturalism, which is not the naturalism of the contemporary
naturalists in cognitive scientific style, and that is thus rooted in facts of nature
even more certain, or in any case more difficult to deny than those by which those
naturalists purport to be inspired: those facts are precisely what Wittgenstein means
by “form of life.” Cavell, in concluding the first part of The Claim of Reason, asks
in this way about what he calls “the natural ground of our conventions”:
What is the natural ground of our conventions, to what are they in service? It is
inconvenient to question a convention; that makes it unserviceable, it no longer allows
me to proceed as a matter of course; the paths of action, the paths of words, are
blocked. “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” ([Philosophical Investi-
gations] §19). In philosophizing, I have to bring my own language and life into
imagination. (CR, 125)
This leads Cavell to redefine the task of philosophy, in a passage from The Claim
of Reason that has become famous:
In this light, philosophy becomes the education of grownups . . . . The anxiety in
teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require education. And for
grownups education is not natural growth but change. Conversion is a turning out of
our natural reactions; so it is symbolized as rebirth. (CR, 125)
The recourse (the return) to the ordinary, and to the ordinary use of language,
is thus a way of accomplishing change. It is clear, however, that such a change
cannot be conceived as a response to skepticism: it is rather a recognition of the
truth in skepticism, announced in Emerson: “I know that the world I converse with
in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think” (CW, 3:48). This is how the
movement from the problematic of ordinary language to that of transcendentalism
is justified, for the ordinary itself is a myth and an illusion: this is explicitly the
main idea in This New Yet Unapproachable America.
What is still, then, to be brought into view, as Cavell discovered after The Claim
of Reason with his (re)discovery of Thoreau and Emerson, is the idea of an inti-
macy, of a nextness to the world, which appears, in Cavell’s recent writings, as
fatally problematic:
Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s attacks on philosophy, and on skepticism in particu-
lar—in appealing to what they call the ordinary or everyday use of words—are count-
ing on some intimacy between language and world that they were never able satisfac-
torily to give an account of. (NYUA, 81)
This nearness is also Kant’s problem of a possible, or necessary, adequacy of our

understanding to the world. And on Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, Austin, and
Kant, this problem is insoluble if it is posed in the philosophical terms of skepti-
cism, and that for a reason truly radical: namely, that it is impossible for there to
be a foundation for connection between my language and the world (this is what
Cavell calls the truth in skepticism). Perhaps the best way, then, to pose the prob-
lem of nearness is in not in terms of a foundation, nor in terms of intersubjectivity
or of objectivity, but rather by analyzing the demand for a foundation itself. As in
certain riddles, the solution here has perhaps the form of a question, there where
we had not expected to find it. It is thus in examining the claim of reason to express
or explain its own adequacy to the world (which is also the subject of the riddle
of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) that we can clarify the question of skepti-
cism. The Kantian tone of the term “claim” indicates Cavell’s willingness to con-
sider the Investigations (as well as, what is rather easier, the Tractatus) as an
extension of the transcendental questioning of the Critique. When Wittgenstein
said of his investigation that it was “grammatical” and glossed this by saying that
“it is oriented not toward phenomena, but toward possibilities of phenomena,” this
means, for Cavell, that “what he means by grammar plays the role of a transcenden-
tal deduction of human concepts.” Wittgenstein differs from Kant in that, for Witt-
genstein, every word in our language requires a deduction: “each one must be
retraced, in its application to the world, in terms of what he calls the criteria that
govern them.” It would be in this sense that our grammar is a priori—in the sense
in which “human beings are in agreement in their judgments” (IQO, 170). For
Cavell, another reprisal of the Kantian questions comes in transcendentalism, which
resolves—as Thoreau does in Walden, for example—the “loss of intimacy between
words and the world” by this statement of the ordinary: “[T]he world responds
consistently and obediently to our conceptions.” This leads Cavell to read ordinary
language philosophy and transcendentalism as “reactions” to skepticism, and more
precisely as extensions of Kant’s intuition that “reason says what we mean by a
world.” This is how Cavell translates the eternal question of how words “hook on”
to the world: by his use of the word claim.
Here then is a first approach to the sense of claim: it is the pretension to speak
for “us,” at once curious and legitimate, like the pretension of reason, according to
Kant, to raise questions whose answers are beyond its power. We can recall here
the first epigraph to the second part of The Claim of Reason, taken from the preface
to the first edition of the Critique:
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened
by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to
ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is not able to answer. (CR, 127)
Cavell locates this tension (exactly expressed by the word claim: the demand that
knows itself to be in a sense impossible to satisfy), which according to Kant is
characteristic of human reason, within the use of language. But as the title of
Cavell’s book indicates, in passing from reason to language, nothing is changed.
The naturalness of reason—the questions are “posed by its nature”—like that of
language, is at once impossible to avoid and impossible to maintain, or to satisfy.
It is this that guides the definition of the term claim in Cavell. We have already
seen that claim designates my pretension to speak in the name of the community:
but its sense is not solely linguistic. Wittgensteinian criteria pose a question that is
as much political as it is philosophical. It is not only a question of my belonging
to the community of those who speak my language but also one of my being
representative: whence do I get the right? What is its foundation, philosophically?
The criteria Wittgenstein appeals to—those which are, for him, the data of philoso-
phy—are always “ours.” . . . When I voice them, I do so, or take myself to do so, as
a member of that group, a representative human. (CR, 18)
But I am not by definition representative of the human. Our agreement can always
be broken. I can be excluded (or exclude myself) from the community, linguistic
as well as political. The possibility of disagreement is inherent even in the idea of
agreement, and it is on the basis of agreement that I lay claim (by my speaking)
to being representative. That disagreement is always possible sums up the threat of
skepticism: the rupture of the passage, the suspension of the generalization, from I
to us.
Two questions are immediately to be expected 1) How can I, what gives me the right
to, speak for the group of which I am a member? What confidence am I to place in a
generalization from what I say to what everybody says ? The sample is irresponsibly,
preposterously small; 2) If I am supposed to have been party to the criteria we have
established, how can I fail to know what these are? (CR, 18)
For Cavell, it is the question of the social contract that underwrites or defines that
of agreements in language, as is shown by the spirited analysis of Rousseau that
he offers at the opening of The Claim of Reason. If I am representative, then I
have to have a voice in the common conversation. My society, if it is an expression
of me, must also allow me to find my own voice. But am I really allowed to? As
Cavell went on to show, in chapter 2 of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome,
it is not at all obvious. If the others strangle my voice, speaking for me, I might
still always seem to have consented. One does not have a voice, one’s own voice,
by nature: I must find my voice if I am to speak for others and they are to speak
for me. Here we see again the connection with the question of the contract—the
political question in general—and with the question of education. For if my words
are not accepted by these others, I lose more than language: I lose my voice.
I do not know in advance how deep my agreement with myself is, how far responsi-
bility for language may run. But if I am to have my own voice in it, I must be
speaking for others, and allow others to speak for me. The alternative to speaking for
myself representatively is not : speaking for myself privately. The alternative is hav-
ing nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute. (CR, 28)
The error of the scholastic post-Wittgensteinian is to think he or she sees a stark

opposition between public and private (the same prejudice keeps the innumerable
discussions about “the private language argument” going.) Cavell explodes the
opposition. To not be public is not to be private; it is to be inexpressive. Not even
mute, without voice. If I do not speak, it is not because there is something that
cannot be said, but because I do not have anything to say.
Our agreement (with others, with myself) is an agreement of voices: our überein-
stimmen, as Wittgenstein calls it: “That a group of human beings stimmen in their
language überein says, so to speak, that they are mutually voiced with respect to
it, mutually attuned top to bottom” (CR, 32). In this passage, Cavell gives a sense
to agreement that is neither psychological nor subjective, that is not founded on
anything but the validity of my voice: my individual voice claims to be a “universal
voice.” Claim is what a voice does when it takes no other foundation but itself for
the establishment of a universal assent—a pretension that, however exorbitant it
may be, Cavell demands that we formulate even more exorbitantly, that is to say,
in place of every condition of reason and understanding.
In Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell posed the question of the foundation
of language in Kantian terms as the problem of a “universal voice,” showing the
kinship between the procedures of Wittgenstein and Austin, and their connection
to a paradox inherent in aesthetic judgment: my foundation lies in me for saying
what we say. In this way we can see the type of rationality that defines and creates
ordinary language philosophy: “I will suggest that the aesthetic judgment models
the sort of claim entered by these philosophers, and that the familiar lack of conclu-
siveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the

kind of rationality it has, and needs” (MWM, 86).
Cavell begins with an analysis of Hume in order to show that if agreement
produces judgments of taste, this does not mean that taste is irrational. Here, too,
we see the sense of claim: the discovery of a sense of rationality not exhausted by
the scientific concept of rationality:
Hume’s descendants, catching the assumption that agreement provides the vindication
of judgment, but no longer able to hope for either, have found that aesthetic (and
political and moral) judgments lack something: the arguments that support them are
not conclusive the way arguments in logic are, nor rational the way arguments in
science are. Indeed they are not, and if they were there would be no such subject as
art (or morality) and no such art as criticism. It does not follow, however, that such
judgments are not conclusive and rational. (MWM, 88)
The idea is developed in Kant, in §8 of the Critique of Judgment, and he can stand
here as the source of thought about agreement. With aesthetic judgment, Kant asks
us to “discover a property of our faculty of understanding which without this analy-
sis would have remained unknown to us”: the “pretension to universality” which
belongs to the judgment of taste, which makes us “attribute to everyone the satis-
faction afforded by an object.” Kant then distinguishes the agreeable from the
beautiful (only the latter claims universal assent) in terms of a distinction between
private and public judgments. How can a judgment that has all the characteristics
of the private pretend to be public, to have force for everyone? Kant himself brings
out what is profoundly strange and “disconcerting” in this thought, and Witt-
genstein follows out the same strangeness to its limits. A judgment of taste de-
mands universal assent, “and in fact everyone expects this assent [Einstimmung].”
What sustains this pretension is what Kant calls a universal voice (allgemeine
Stimme). In Wittgenstein as in Kant, this is a voice that is to be understood in terms
of the idea of agreement: uebereinstimmen is the verb employed by Wittgenstein to
describe our agreement in language (PI, 241–42; v. above). It is the universal voice
that sets down our agreement and thus our claim to speak in the name of others,
our claim to speak at all.
Kant’s “universal voice” is, perhaps with a slight shift of accent, what we hear re-
corded in the philosopher’s claims about “what we say”; such claims are at least
as close to what Kant calls aesthetic judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hy-
potheses. . . . I wish to suggest that it is a claim or dependence of the same kind.
(MWM, 94)
For these reasons, the question of “what we ordinarily say” is not “merely” a
question of “language,” but, as Austin always claimed, is also a question about
things themselves, about facts. In Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell notes,
bringing Austin close to Wittgenstein: “One sometimes has the feeling that Aus-
tin’s differences penetrate the phenomena they record—a feeling from within
which the traditional philosopher will be the one who seems to be talking about
mere words” (MWM, 103).
Such facts perhaps only amount to saying that the philosophy of ordinary language
is not about language, anyway not in any sense in which it is not also about the
world. Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about.

(MWM, 95)
This familiarity, this closeness to the things themselves, certainly constitutes the
center of (ordinary) language—its claim to things in that they are said (what Austin
called “doing things with words”); and it is this exigency that is contained in the
title of claim.
The claims of ordinary language philosophy, then, are a demand that one hear
the claim of ordinary language, that one do what the philosophy of language (in
all its various recent forms, be they semantic, pragmatic, or cognitivist) has refused
to do, in its rejection of a certain dimension of the work of Austin and of Witt-
genstein, who hold that language must also always be a voice.
Kant’s attention to the “universal voice” expressed in aesthetic judgments seems to
me, finally, to afford some explanation of that air of dogmatism which claims about
what “we” say seem to carry for critics of ordinary language procedures, and which
they find repugnant and intolerant. I think that air of dogmatism is indeed present in
such claims; but if that is intolerant, that is because tolerance could only mean, as in
liberals it often does, that the kind of claim in question is not taken seriously. It is,
after all, a claim about our lives. (MWM, 96)
Bringing our words back “from their metaphysical to their everyday use,” to the
shared ordinary, as Wittgenstein did, is not a “philosophy of language”: it is bring-
ing us nearer to the real. By way of conclusion it remains for us to determine the
sense of this nearness. What Wittgenstein and Austin share, beyond their differ-
ences (made explicit by Cavell in The Claim of Reason), is this form of realism
that one hardly dares call such, since it is precisely what is forgotten, or rejected,
in philosophy now and in debates about realism. Of course, difficulties in receiving
ordinary language philosophy are not new, and Cavell’s first essays, published in
the early sixties, detail particularly clearly the misunderstandings that had already
accumulated around the work of Wittgenstein, and, to a lesser degree, around the
work of Austin. When Cavell, in Must We Mean What We Say? (in the essay
“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”) claimed a rational dimension for
statements like those of aesthetic judgment, he went against a dominant theory of
his time, emotivism (now called non-cognitivism)—a theory that continues to play
a decisive role in contemporary discussions. This theory came out of the idea that
only cognitive statements, which represented states of things, were really state-
ments, furnished with sense, and that no other putative statement could express
anything but an emotive attitude associated with the putative statement. One can
find an origin of this idea in the idea that language is or ought to be essentially
descriptive, where descriptive means that it names states of things. Contrary to the
interpretation of the Tractatus popularized by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in
The Meaning of Meaning, and, in a different way, by the Vienna Circle, nothing
could be more untrue to Wittgenstein than the idea that we cannot talk about aes-
thetics, or that aesthetics is in the domain of the merely “emotive,” or more gener-
ally, as Cavell puts it, that there is a split within language, between the cognitive
and the noncognitive, one part responsive to reality, while the other could do away
with it (TOS, 36).
In criticizing the cognitive/emotive distinction in Must We Mean What We Say?

Cavell meant not only to be defending Austin but to be opposing a standard inter-
pretation of the Tractatus and of the Philosophical Investigations. The domain of
ethics and aesthetics (ordinary statements that are, in a sense, not descriptive) is
not, according to Cavell, apart from logic and truth (and this was what Austin, too,
meant to show with all his ordinary statements). One might think that beginning
in the thirties, Wittgenstein renounced his earlier logical and logicist orientation in
order to begin studying “all of language,” nonsense, and so forth—to junk the
Tractatus, in a word. But that would be a mistake. Wittgenstein did change, but
from a completely different point of view. He made a “return to his studies,” but
around the same fixed point. He kept the idea, found in the Tractatus and in Frege,
of a nonpsychological treatment of the mind, only the “necessity” that presides
over the mind is no longer that of logic, but is that of rules and of our uses. The
approach or direction remains, however, fundamentally the same: a nonpsychologi-
cal treatment of the mind, inasmuch as it is entirely there, now, in our uses of
language and in our agreements. Recognizing that it is use and rules of use (rather
than something psychological or intentional) that give life to the sign, is not a
matter of renouncing “the rigor of logic,” but rather finding logic again, there where
one least expected to find it (from the point of view of logic in any case), in our
ordinary uses themselves, in language: it is there that it shows itself.
“Everything is already there in . . . .” How does it come about that this arrow
points? Doesn’t it seem to carry in it something besides itself?—”No,
not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that.”—That
is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being
makes of it.
This pointing is not a hocus-pocus that can be performed only by the soul. (PI,
454)
To say that everything is in the use means, what we have seen from many different
points of view, that there is nothing else than use in what we say, and that there is
nothing with which our language and our uses must agree. To understand that is
to throw away the ladder of the Tractatus, and this time for good. One sees here
why the perspective of ordinary language philosophy and its immanent agreements,
if one holds it truly thoroughly, is radically anti-metaphysical. The only agreement
to be sought is in language; that is to say, as Kant says, in a “use . . . in agreement
with itself”:
[Logic] must teach us the correct use of the understanding, that is to say, the one that
is in agreement with itself [den mit sich selbst uebereinstimmenden Gebrauch].2
All of Frege’s work, and Wittgenstein’s in the Tractatus, constitutes answers to
this challenge of Kant’s, to articulate a use of the understanding that is based in
agreement with itself and with nothing else. The Investigations are as well, for
they take up and follow out Kant’s formulation in affirming that we must seek our
agreement in language in our uses themselves, that the agreement we are seeking
is one of language with itself. And the philosophy of Austin is as well, by locating
in our agreements, in what we would say when, the sole possibility of coming to
agreement with the world, and thereby redefining logic as within ordinary lan-
guage, revealing the sense of the famous proposition: “It is what human beings say
that is true or false; and they agree in the language that they use. This is not an
agreement in opinions but in form of life” (PI, 241). The interest, and also the
specific difficulty of the definition and practice of philosophy of language, is that
the speaking of language is speaking about what one is speaking about (and how,
and where). Austin said it very clearly in “A Plea for Excuses,” in his trademark
mock-superficial manner:
When we examine what we should say when, we are looking again not merely at
words (or ‘meanings’ whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words
to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception
of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena. (PP, 182)
Clearly this is not enough. But Austin has here announced what the stakes are in
a philosophy of language. It is absolutely characteristic of Rorty that he has poked
fun at this passage, as if we were dealing here with the last illusions we must
eventually abandon about language: in Rorty’s view, after the linguistic turn the
philosopher must renounce all inquiry in which “phenomena that are linguistic are
to help us discover phenomena that are non-linguistic.”3 This criticism is insepara-
ble from the idea, which goes far back with Rorty, that a linguistic turn must lead
to a dissolution of traditional philosophical problems. But a major question remains
to be raised, after a century of philosophy of language, and that is: why in the
world should we be interested in language? Cavell’s response, after Austin, is
simple: the philosophy of ordinary language concerns itself with everything that
we talk about in language. In this sense, philosophy speaks of nothing but language,
and Austin in particular has lots to say about differences that language marks.
Ordinary language is a host of differences, and it “contains all the distinctions that
humans have judged it useful to draw, and all the relations that they have judged
useful to pass on,” and which are certainly more subtle and solid than “what we
could come up with, you or I, installed in an armchair for a fine afternoon—the
preferred methodological alternative” (PP, 181). With this in mind we can better
understand the enigmatic passage from “A Plea for Excuses,” where Austin talks
(with irony, but still) about linguistic phenomenology, or this other passage, from
“Three Ways of Spilling Ink”:
If we reach this agreement, we shall have some data (‘experimental’ data, in fact)
which we can then go on to explain. Here, the explanation will be an account of the
meanings of these expressions, which we shall hope to reach by using such methods
as those of ‘Agreement’ and ‘Difference’. (PP, 274)
This conception of differences and resemblances (a theme Austin shares with Witt-
genstein) constitutes the center of Austin’s thinking, and his idea, mock-naive
again, of the community of language with the world. It is the notion of difference
that will define the connection between a conscience sharpened for the use of
words, and our perception of the world (without ever adopting the facile solution
that the way we see things depends on how we describe things and our words for
them). Cavell was the first to make this point:
Too obviously, Austin is continuously concerned to draw distinctions, and the finer
the merrier, just as he often explains and justifies what he is doing by praising the
virtues of natural distinctions over homemade ones. . . . Part of the effort of any phi-
losopher will consist in showing up differences, and one of Austin’s most furious
perceptions is of the slovenliness, the grotesque crudity and fatuousness, of the usual
distinctions philosophers have traditionally thrown up. Consequently, one form his
investigations take is that of repudiating the distinctions lying around philosophy—
dispossessing them, as it were, by showing better ones. And better not merely because
finer, but because more solid, having, so to speak, a greater natural weight; appearing
normal, even inevitable when the others are luridly arbitrary; useful when the other
seem twisted; real where the others are academic. . . . One sometimes has the feeling
that Austin’s differences penetrate the phenomena they record—a feeling from within
which the traditional philosopher will be the one who seems to be talking about mere
words. (MWM, 102–103)
The naturalness (or the necessity) of distinctions drawn in language makes them
superior to distinctions drawn by philosophers, and in particular to distinctions
established by an “analysis” of words. They are, says Cavell, more real (“real
where the others are academic” [MWM, 103]). And this is the source of Austin’s
and (even if Cavell would not say it this way) Cavell’s particular form of realism.
Austin, before Quine, criticized the notion of analyticity and the idea of equiva-
lences and substitutions between terms. In this sense Austin, no less than Witt-
genstein, is not an analytic philosopher. Cavell writes, again in Must We Mean
What We Say?:
This is plainly different from their entrance in, say, philosophers like Russell or Broad
or even Moore, whose distinctions do not serve to compare and to elicit differences
but rather, one could say, to provide labels for differences previously, somehow,
noticed. (MWM, 103)
Austin’s philosophy aimed to establish the connection between language and the
world, but not in the traditional analytic terms of realism or correspondence
(though there is of course a rehabilitated notion of correspondence in Austin’s
concept of truth [see, for example, Charles Travis’s work on Austin, surprisingly
close to Cavell’s approach]): in terms (to use, rather, the Wittgensteinian expres-
sion ) of a harmony between words and world. The kind of realism involved here
(a realism that cannot be claimed as a theory or a thesis) appears in a very illumi-
nating way in this passage from Austin’s “Truth”:
To ask ‘Is the fact that S the true statement that S or that which it is true of?’ may
beget absurd answers. To take an analogy: although we may sensibly ask ‘do we ride
the word or the animal?’ and equally sensibly ‘Do we write the word and the animal?’
it is nonsense to ask ‘Do we define the word or the animal?’ For defining an elephant
(supposing we ever do this) is a compendious description of an operation involving
both word and animal (do we focus the image or the battleship?) and so speaking
about ‘the fact that’ is a compendious way of speaking about a situation involving
both words and world. (PP, 124)
Surprisingly (or not) the only place where Cavell comments, or at least uses, this
Austinian point is (parenthetically) in Pursuits of Happiness:
(J. L. Austin was thinking . . . about the internality of words and world to one another
when he asked, parenthetically in his essay “Truth,” “do we focus the image or the
battleship?”) (PH, 204)
This makes Cavell’s views on agreement relevant, in a radical and surprising way,
to the analytic debate over realism: and it is maybe the ultimate connection between
Austin and Wittgenstein: “The agreement, the harmony, of thought and reality
consists in this: if I say falsely that something is red, then, nonetheless, it isn’t
red” (PI §429). This intimacy (or harmony, conceived not as correspondence but
as intimacy) of words and world is Cavell’s main subject: it is the old topic of
adequacy, but reconceived in terms of our adequacy to our words, which are also
the terms in which what we say is pertinent or not. Cavell recalled quite precisely
the surprise, and the seduction exercised over him and his fellow students in the
seminar by what Austin proposed, the extreme relief that it gave in an analytic
education in the fifties. Cavell’s work is, as a whole, an attempt to recover the
spirit of discovery, but also to recover the spirit of agreement as Austin defines it:
Here at last we should be able to unfreeze, to loosen up and get going on agreeing
about discoveries, however small, and on agreeing about how to reach agreement.
(“A Plea for Excuses,” PP, 183)
This revelation of one’s own pertinence, of the possibility and above all the neces-
sity of making use of who one is, is something that all Cavell’s readers and students
owe him, and it this that Cavell not only took up and inherited from Austin but
perhaps accomplished more happily.
Notes
Translated by Anne D. Goodman, with Sandra Laugier and Russell Goodman. The following
abbreviations for Cavell’s works are used in this chapter: CR: The Claim of Reason (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979); IQO: In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988); MWM: Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976; SW: The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: Northpoint Press, 1981); and TOS:
Themes Out of School (San Francisco: Northpoint Press, 1984). Other abbreviations are CW:
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Spiller et al. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971); PI: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
(New York: Macmillan, 1958); W: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Random
House, 1965); PP: J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1961); and PH: Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remar-
riage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
1. On Frege, see C. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the
Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
2. Immanuel Kant, Deutsche Akademie de Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1900), IX.14.
3. Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
31.
6
Cavell and
American Philosophy
RUSSELL B. GOODMAN
In the philosophical landscape of most English-speaking philosophers, American

philosophy does not exist, certainly not in the way that Greek philosophy or even
post-Kantian German philosophy exists: as a tradition of thought important for
much of subsequent philosophy, in which certain founding thinkers (Socrates,
Plato, Kant, Hegel) set the terms for continuing discussion. The minority of profes-
sional philosophers who study or continue “American philosophy” tend to see a
distinctive American tradition emerging in the writings of the pragmatists and other
professional philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: C. S.
Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, G. H. Mead, John Dewey.
It is a mark of Stanley Cavell’s originality, if also of his isolation from much of
professional philosophy, that he falls into neither of these two camps. For although
he seeks to “inherit” an undiscovered tradition of American thought, it is not
Peirce, James, and Dewey to whom he attends, but Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau—figures whose status even as philosophers is not secure,
and who have been neglected not only by Anglo-American analytic philosophers
but for the most part by students of “classical American philosophy.”1 Cavell
speaks of the repression of Emerson and Thoreau by American culture generally.
Cavell took up Thoreau first, in his 1971 book The Senses of Walden, where he
argues that Walden is as much a book about reading and writing as about “nature,”
and that its significance can be registered in a philosophical context that includes
Heidegger, Kant, and Wittgenstein. His 1979 essay “Thinking of Emerson” marks
a turn toward the founding American transcendentalist, who becomes the subject
of many of Cavell’s essays in the ‘80s. In such books as In Quest of the Ordinary,
This New Yet Unapproachable America, and Conditions Handsome and Unhand-
some, Cavell argues that Emerson and Thoreau are concerned with “an intimacy
with existence, or intimacy lost” (IQO, 6). In offering their writings as provocations
or guides to the recovery of that intimacy, Cavell argues, they serve as “philoso-
phers of direction, orienters, tirelessly prompting us to be on our way, endlessly
asking us where we stand, what it is we face” (SW, 141–42).
Cavell’s “ordinary language philosophy” of the 1960s emerged from readings
of Wittgenstein and Austin, but he learns, in the ’70s and ’80s, to extend the idea
100
Cavell and American Philosophy 101
of ordinary language philosophy to the issues of intimacy discussed by the Ameri-

can transcendentalists:
Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s attacks on philosophy, and on skepticism in particular—
in appealing to what they call the ordinary or everyday use of words—are counting
on some intimacy between language and world that they were never able satisfactorily
to give an account of. It was in Emerson and Thoreau that I seemed to find what I
could recognize as this space of investigation, in their working out of the problematic
of the day, the everyday, the near, the low, the common, in conjunction with what
they call speaking of necessaries, and speaking with necessity. (NYUA, 81)
But why is it Emerson and Thoreau, and not other writers, Cavell asks himself,
that he is
so insistent on inheriting? Other writers also lie in common behind Wittgenstein and
Heidegger—the work of Kant itself, and that of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, not
to mention Spengler.—Yes, but inheriting, by interpreting in some way, the texts of
Kant or Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard, not to mention Spengler, will not, so far as I
can see, suggest one’s credibility as a present philosophical voice, not for an Ameri-
can writer. Whereas what? Inheriting by interpreting the texts of Emerson and Tho-
reau will? But you yourself like to say that these writers are repressed by their culture.
Then now I am taking precisely that condition to signify their pertinence to the pres-
ent: I do not, the culture does not, repress the thought of Schopenhauer or Kierke-
gaard or Spengler; they were simply not part of our formation. (NYUA, 82–83)
Cavell thus sees himself as “an American writer” who both interprets and continues
to develop American culture. Nevertheless, he is careful not to think of his project
as American in a narrow sense; he seeks something of value to philosophy gener-
ally in the American texts:
My discovery, or rediscovery for myself, of Emerson and of Thoreau seems to me a
kind of hearkening to Emerson’s call to American scholars. When I ask whether we
may not see them as part of our inheritance as philosophers, I am suggesting that our
foreignness as philosophers to these writers (and it is hard to imagine any writers
more foreign to our currently established philosophical sensibility) may itself be a
sign of an impoverished idea of philosophy, of a remoteness from philosophy’s ori-
gins, from what is native to it, as if a certain constitution of the cosmopolitan might
merely consist in a kind of universal provincialism, a worldwide shrinking of the
spirit. (SW, 148)
Notice that Cavell does not consider as candidates for his inheritance any Amer-
ican thinker after Emerson and Thoreau. It is this absence that I wish here to
consider, especially in view of Cavell’s recent attempts to distinguish Emerson and
Wittgenstein from the pragmatists.2 Cavell, of course, has every right to “inherit”
the writers of his culture who, as he says, “do me the most good” (NYUA, 83).
Yet his inheritance is also offered to us, his readers, as something that helps us to
understand the history and presence of philosophical thought in America. In “The
Philosopher in American Life,” for example, Cavell questions whether “pragma-
tism, often cited as the American contribution to world philosophy, was expressive
of American thought—in the way I felt that thought could be or had been ex-
pressed” (IQO, 11).
In American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, I argue for a deep continu-
ity between the American romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau, and the emerging
philosophies—including what they and others call their pragmatism—of James
and Dewey. These continuities may be seen, for example, in James’s discussions
of an “intimacy” with the world and in his somewhat contrary (and explicitly prag-
matic) sense of “the shaping powers of the human mind”; as well as in Dewey’s
explicitly romantic idea of “art as experience” and his discussion of the role of
“interest” in education. My argument, however, relies explicitly on Cavell’s explor-
ations of romantic philosophy and literature, especially in In Quest of the Ordinary.
In the first part of this essay, accordingly, I review and assess Cavell’s criticisms
of pragmatism, without forgetting the underlying continuities between the “pragma-
tists” and the “transcendentalists.” In the second part, I come at Cavell’s relation
to James from another direction, through Wittgenstein. There is, I suggest, an
American presence in Cavell’s “inheritance” from Wittgenstein, indicated but not
exhausted by the references to James in the pages of Wittgenstein’s Brown Book,
Philosophical Investigations, and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology.
Dewey and James
Cavell has read more Dewey than have most American philosophers, and he is
capable of appreciating Dewey’s virtues; even, he suggests, of feeling “the thrill
of certain moments of Dewey’s philosophy” (IQO, 14). In “Thinking of Emerson,”
he refers to Dewey’s “Empirical Survey of Empiricisms” as agreeing with Emer-
son’s point that “what is wrong with empiricism is not its reliance on experience
but its paltry idea of experience” (SW, 126). Ten years later, in his contribution to
the Carus Lectures inaugurated by Dewey, Cavell praises Dewey for combating
two forms of moralism: the enforcement of morality by immoral means, and the
use of the ideals present in one’s culture to distract attention from “otherwise
intolerable injustice.” Cavell’s appreciation extends to the five potent works by
Dewey which he includes in his selected bibliography: Art as Experience, “Emer-
son: The Philosopher of Democracy,” Experience and Nature, The Quest for Cer-
tainty, and Theory of Valuation. Yet Cavell’s praise for Dewey is the windup to
the assertion of fundamental differences:
On such an occasion as the Carus lectures, prompting for me old memories, I remem-
ber, when first beginning to read what other people called philosophy, my growing
feeling about Dewey’s work, as I went through what seemed countless of his books,
that Dewey was remembering something philosophy should mostly be, but that the
world he was responding to missed the worlds I seemed to live in, missing the heights
of modernism in the arts, the depths of psychoanalytic discovery, the ravages of the
century’s politics, the wild intelligence of American popular culture. Above all, miss-
ing the question, and the irony in philosophy’s questioning, whether philosophy, how-
ever reconstructed, was any longer possible, and necessary, in this world. (CHU, 13)
Cavell concedes that Dewey, like Emerson, is some sort of “perfectionist,” but
not an Emersonian one:
For Dewey, . . . the relation between science and technology is unproblematic, even
definitive, whereas for Emerson the power manifested in technology and its attendant
concepts of intelligence and power and change and improvement are in context with
the work, and the concept of the work, of realizing the world each human is empow-
ered to think. For an Emersonian, the Deweyan is apt to seem an enlightened child,
toying with the means of destruction, stinting the means of instruction, of provoking
the self to work; for the Deweyan the Emersonian is apt to look, at best, like a
Deweyan. (CHU 15–16)
Cavell’s statement in a roughly contemporaneous essay relates the idea of the en-
lightened child to the idea of the Enlightenment:
Dewey assumes that science shows what intelligence is and that what intelligent prac-
tice is pretty much follows from that; the mission of philosophy is to get the Enlight-
enment to happen. For Emerson the mission is rather, or as much, to awaken us to
why it is happening as it is, negatively not affirmatively.”3
A decade later, Cavell returns to these criticisms in a paper originally delivered

at a conference on pragmatism in New York City, entitled “What’s the Use of
Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” How, he asks, do pragmatist texts work on their
readers?
It has been said that pragmatists wish their writing, like all good writing, to work—
that is, to make a difference. But does writing (or art more generally) work in the
ways that logic or technology work; and do any of these work in the way social
organization works? . . . Freud speaks of mourning as work, something Emerson quite
explicitly declares it to be. . . . Does the writing of Dewey or James help us under-
stand this idea of work?4
The work Cavell has in mind is the work of the self’s transformation, which is at
the same time the achievement of a renewed relation to the world. In “Mourning
and Melancholia,” one of Cavell’s sources for his discussions of mourning, Freud
writes of “the inhibition and loss of interest” that characterize mourning and de-
scribes “the work of mourning” as detaching libido from a loved but no longer
present object. “[W]hen the work of mourning is completed,” Freud writes, “the
ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”5 Cavell understands this freedom episte-
mologically, as a way of gaining objectivity. Emerson, he asserts, “finds a work of
what he understands as mourning to be the path to human objectivity with the
world, to separating the world from ourselves, from our private interests in it”
(WU, 73).
To Cavell’s question whether “Dewey or James help us understand such work,”
I would say yes—in the case of James, at least. For the chapters of Varieties of
Religious Experience entitled “The Divided Self and the Process of Its Unification”
and “Conversion” are centrally concerned with the self’s suffering and return from
“melancholy”—often through a process not of willful overcoming but of “yield-
ing.”6 James writes in “Conversion,” for example, of “the throwing of our con-
scious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more
ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption.”7
Varieties is a veritable catalogue of ways in which such generalized attitudes as
melancholy are entangled with our apprehension of the world. James characterizes
“melancholiacs” as living in a world that “looks strange, sinister, uncanny”;8 and
he finds that the conversion experience includes a “sense of newness,” “an objec-
tive change which the world often appears to undergo.”9 James affirms the continu-
ity of these states with the ordinary experience of humankind:
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane
melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its
solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily
fact.10
Yet also:
[A]part from anything acutely religious, we all have moments when the universal life
seems to wrap us round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the
woods or on the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering
with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like a dry
warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly ringing with the
world’s security.11
James’s idea of “powers more ideal than we are actually” places him within
what Cavell calls the tradition of “moral perfectionism.” This would not exactly
be news to Cavell, who lists Varieties of Religious Experience as a perfectionist
work in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (CHU, 5) and dispenses his own
wonderful observation about James’s writing in “What’s the Use”:
William James characteristically philosophizes off of the language of the street, which
he respects and wishes to preserve, or to satisfy by clarifying the desire it expresses.
This mode of philosophizing seems to me quite uncharacteristic of Dewey. In Dew-
ey’s writing, the speech of others, whose ideas Dewey wishes to correct, or rather to
replace, especially the speech of children, hardly appears. (WU, 75)
High praise of James indeed, and a searching criticism of Dewey, or of Dewey’s

writing. For Cavell’s criticism is consistent with the recognition that the child-
oriented education Dewey advocates in such revolutionary essays as “Interest in
Relation to the Training of the Will” and practiced in the Laboratory School at the
University of Chicago did encourage the speech of children. It is something about
Dewey’s writing and indeed of James’s as well that Cavell has in mind when he
distinguishes the work of the Emersonian essay from theirs.
A few lines after his tribute to James, Cavell continues: “Emerson retains
stretches of the vocabulary of philosophy but divests it of its old claims to mastery.
This is why his writing is difficult in a way no other American philosopher’s (save
Thoreau’s) has been, certainly not that of James or Dewey” (WU, 75). What is the
nature of this difficulty? Cavell’s phrase “divesting traditional philosophical terms
of their mastery” seems a reasonable description, not only of Emerson but to some
extent of James, and certainly of Dewey, who is deeply and explicitly critical of
the Western metaphysical/epistemological tradition.12 Is the criticism, then, that
Dewey divests old terms like “knowledge” and “truth” of their authority, only to
replace them with a new set of pragmatist terms formulaically applied (“transac-
tion,” “inquiry,” “experience,” “intelligence,” “democracy”)? James seems harder
to characterize as suffering from such a problem, for he sees and operates with
words as things to set “at work within the stream of your experience . . . less a
solution than a program for more work” (P, 32).
About James if not about Dewey, it seems appropriate to say what Emerson
said of the scholar: that his “words are loaded with life.”13 In James’s writing we
meet not only humanity but a human character or narrator, a friendly and engaging
tour guide to the phenomena, who arranges and displays in vast tableaux the expe-
riences of Tolstoy, Jonathan Edwards, and Saint Teresa. If the guide all but con-
fesses that he too exists among the “sick souls” he describes, and even surrepti-
tiously narrates a horrifying experience of his own, he still keeps his distance both
from the audience and from the various experiences he describes. In these texts,
James stands on the podium, as he did when delivering the lectures from which
most of his published work derives.
In Emerson’s essays (and in the Philosophical Investigations) there is, I would
like to say, no podium. The writer and his readers are somewhere together, working
with a common set of situations, temptations, ideals, glancing or steady insights.
Readers of these works find, as Emerson puts it in “Self-Reliance,” their “own
rejected thoughts” returning “with a certain alienated majesty” (CW, 2: 27). But of
course it is not just rejected thoughts that one finds in reading these works. In our
best readings of Emerson’s best writing, we find neither a lecturer nor a tour guide,
but the words of a wise companion and co-discoverer, who lives where we com-
monly aspire to be.
I shall return to this issue of writing in a moment, but I want first to consider
another main line of Cavell’s critique of pragmatism. This concerns pragmatism’s
allegiance to science and scientific methods. C. S. Peirce, for example, defended
the methods of science as superior to those of rationalistic philosophy in such
classic essays as “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and “The Fixation of Belief”;14
James took his degree in medicine and founded one of the first American psychol-
ogy laboratories; and Dewey joined the others in advocating scientific methods in
philosophy.15 Cavell finds Dewey’s position expressed in the following quotation
from Experience and Education: “Scientific method is the only authentic means at
our command for getting at the significance of our everyday experiences of the
world in which we live” (WU, 73).
Clearly this quotation reflects a strain in Dewey—as also in James. Richard
Rorty calls it the “‘let’s bring the scientific method to bear throughout culture’
side” of pragmatism—as distinguished from the “‘let’s recognize a pre-existent
continuity between science, art, politics, and religion side.’”16 Yet even in the com-
paratively minor work from which this sentence is taken, Dewey is quite clear that
“science” is to be understood in a wide sense. For on the same page as the sentence
Cavell quotes, Dewey states: “I am aware that the emphasis I have placed upon
scientific method may be misleading, for it may result only in calling up the special
technique of laboratory research as that is conducted by specialists.” Dewey means
by “science” the ability to learn from and control one’s experience, something
relevant not only to “the adult scientist” but to “a person six years old.”17 The basic
procedure of science, as Dewey sees it, is “the formation of ideas, acting upon
ideas, observation of the conditions which result, and organization of facts and
ideas for future use.” This is something, it seems to me, that one may do in many
domains, including the reading and writing which are Cavell’s special concern.
Emerson’s procedure in setting down his ideas in his journal, working them over
for incorporation into his essays, often with the help of elaborate indices, seems a
reasonable example of “organizing ideas for future use.” And is not an Emersonian
essay for us, its readers, a presentation of ideas to which we find it useful to return?
A reader of Emerson’s texts may experiment with “Self-Reliance” or the “Divinity
School Address,” as with a Beethoven symphony. Those texts, works, or recordings
that work for you are those to which it is worth your while to return.
If Dewey sometimes expresses the “‘let’s bring the scientific method to bear
throughout culture’ side” of pragmatism, it is important to remember that he also
expresses the “‘let’s recognize a pre-existent continuity between science, art, poli-
tics, and religion side.’” In the chapter “Experience, Nature, and Art” in Experience
and Nature, for example, Dewey observes that “modern thinking . . . feels under
no obligation to present a theory of natural existence that links art with nature; on
the contrary, it usually holds that science or knowledge is the only authentic ex-
pression of nature, in which case art must be an arbitrary addition to nature” (EN,
355). But this is a way of thinking Dewey wishes to counter. Science and art are
better conceived, Dewey maintains, as part of a whole matrix of thought and activ-
ity in which the scientific is subordinated to the aesthetic: “[A]rt—the mode of
activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed posses-
sion—is the complete culmination of nature, and . . . “science” is properly a hand-
maiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue” (EN, 358).
Dewey recalls this passage in Art as Experience (AE, 26), where he makes clear
that one of his grounds for asserting the inferiority of “science” to “art” is the
concreteness of the latter and the abstraction of the former:
Science states meanings; art expresses them. . . . The instance of a signboard may
help. It directs one’s course to a place, say a city. It does not in any way supply
experience of that city even in a vicarious way. What it does do is to set forth some of
the conditions that must be fulfilled in order to procure that experience. . . . “Science”
signifies just that mode of statement that is most helpful as direction. . . . Such, how-
ever, is the newness of scientific statement and its present prestige (due ultimately to
its directive efficacy) that scientific statement is often thought to possess more than a
signboard function and to disclose or be “expressive” of the inner nature of things. If
it did, it would come into competition with art, and we should have to take sides and
decide which of the two promulgates the more genuine revelation. (AE, 85)
One might well quarrel with Dewey’s refusal to allot to science the ontological or
objective role of disclosing or expressing the “inner nature of things,” and for the
crudeness of the distinction between expression and “statement” on which this
refusal rests. Yet, for our purposes in assessing Cavell’s claims about pragmatism,
we should note that Dewey here expresses a view about the relation of science and
art that he seems to have forgotten when he published the sentence Cavell quotes
from Experience and Education. Although nothing I have said counters Cavell’s
complaints about the naiveté or unfriendliness of Dewey’s texts, or about the dis-
tance between what they call for and the work of the Emersonian essay, doctrinally
at least, Dewey seems close in many ways to Emerson and Cavell—certainly
worlds closer than a “let’s make everything scientific” pragmatist like Sidney
Hook.18
Yet Cavell’s line of criticism still invites the question whether Dewey’s conception
of art as the culmination and expression of nature—and James’s understanding of
himself as a student of nature—ignores or obscures the work of the Emersonian
essay. In order to consider this question, I want to first distinguish two senses of
such key Emersonian terms as “experiment” and “the future.” The distinction runs
parallel to that made by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus when he writes: “If we take
eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life
belongs to those who live in the present.”19 Wittgenstein distinguishes two senses of
“eternity” or “eternal life”—”infinite temporal duration” and living in the present.
Similarly, we can distinguish two senses of “experiment”: one that is validated in
the future, through a series of confirmations; another validated not in the future but
in the present. Analogous remarks apply to “future” itself. The future is standardly
thought of as a series of events later than now. But Cavell, following Emerson,
draws on a sense of future not as a later event or set of events but as an altered
relation to the present—like Wittgenstein’s second sense of eternity. Cavell’s sense
of the Emersonian essay is of something working in this eternal present. He takes
pragmatism, in contrast, to be predominantly concerned with work toward the fu-
ture as later, the future successive:
Emerson’s writing . . . is a wager, not exactly of itself as the necessary intellectual
preparation for a better future, but rather of itself as a present step into that future,
two by two. It cannot be entered alone. . . . Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance”: “But
do your work, and I shall know you.” Your work now, in reading him, is the reading
of his page, and allowing yourself to be changed by it. I have, accordingly, wished
to place Emerson’s writing in a tradition of perfectionist writing that extends in the
West from Plato to Nietzsche, Ibsen, Kierkegaard, Wilde, Shaw, Heidegger, and Witt-
genstein. . . . To repress Emerson’s difference is to deny that America is as transcen-
dentalist as it is pragmatist. (WU, 79)
Cavell describes the work of the Emersonian essay, and the position of the
Emersonian persona, in terms of a “present step into that future” that “cannot be
entered alone.” This is the future also described in “Experience”—and in the title
of one of Cavell’s books—as a “new yet unapproachable America.” It is new
because it has never happened before, unapproachable because we are already
there.
Although Dewey knows about such places of arrival, he does not create or
provoke them in his writing. He speaks of, but not from, the Emersonian “present
future.” Consider, for example, these passages from Art as Experience (1936), the
late, great work in which Dewey appears at his most romantic:
What Coleridge said of the reader of poetry is true in its way of all who are happily
absorbed in their activities of mind and body: “The reader should be carried forward
not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, not by a restless desire
to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.”20
To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the
present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is
now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too
often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within
ourselves.21
The “future” that “surrounds the present as a halo” in the experience of the “being
fully alive” is the Deweyan counterpart of Cavell’s “present step into the future,”
and Emerson’s “Ideal that is always journeying with us” (CW, 3: 41). But Dewey
does not understand that future as entered “two by two”; and however powerful
and thrilling his writing can be in such passages, however much it beckons toward
that future, it still considers that future from the outside. Is this to say that Dewey
is not a poet? Is Cavell’s criticism based on an agreement with Wittgenstein that
“philosophy ought only to be written as a poetic composition”?22
I thus have no desire to repress the Emersonian difference; and I freely, even
gratefully, concede the difference between reading a work like “Self-Reliance”—
the words of which, as Cavell says in another context, have the power to “divide
you through”23 —and reading most of Dewey. It is to Emerson and not to Dewey
that I return for the “pleasurable activity of the journey itself.” And I know that
the problem of reading Dewey, of the difficulty, denseness, and unfriendliness of
his texts, will always be an issue in considering him, just as it will always be an
issue with Emerson whether he is a (systematic?) philosopher, and whether he has
a sense of tragedy. In different ways, it is just as easy to condescend to Dewey as
it is to condescend to Emerson. As one corrective to this condescension, I find it
helpful to remember Bertrand Russell’s reaction after meeting Dewey, in one of
his wonderfully observant letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell: “To my surprise, I liked
him very much. He has a large slow-moving mind, very empirical and candid, with
something of the impassivity and impartiality of a natural force.”24 One finds this
force in his prose, which, in its “impartial” way manages to avoid or evade (to use
Cornel West’s useful verb) traditional philosophical distinctions between self and
world, reception and action, the aesthetic and the theoretical and the scientific. I
am reminded of Dewey’s power when I teach his works and see how he attracts
certain students; or when I hear the occasional paper on Dewey, quoting some
remarkable lines, which lead me to ask myself, “Did Dewey really write that?”
Yes he did.
Emerson’s importance for Dewey’s philosophy by itself raises the question of
Emerson’s relation to pragmatism, and such a consideration casts light, as I argue
in American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, both on Dewey and on Emer-
son: for example, on the importance Emerson attaches to practice or action, and to
the shaping powers of the human mind. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson
states: “The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the
unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived.”25
Action, that is to say, is not just the result or the test of thought, but essential to
its very development. Consider in this light Emerson’s assertion of the great per-
son’s power to shape history and culture:
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers
and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seems to follow his steps as
a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after, we have a Roman Empire.
. . . An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as . . . the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley. (CW, 2:35)
If Emerson writes of a new yet unapproachable American future into which we
may step at any time, he also has a sense of the future as playing itself out over
time, shaped by the power of representative men and women.
There is also a “pragmatic” turn in such middle-period essays as “Experience”
and “Montaigne.” Emerson no longer speaks, as he had in Nature, of making the
“axis of vision . . . coincident with the axis of things,”26 but of managing or coping
with the flux of our experience, and of a “philosophy . . . of fluxions and mobili-
ty”(CW 4:91). In “Experience,” he portrays a life of shifting moods, where “Every-
thing good is on the highway” (CW, 3:36). The highway itself, however, rests on
no firm ground: “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on
them” (CW, 3:35).
Such a highway would have offered no impediment to William James, who
thinks of truth as a process of guiding us from one experience to another:
Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosper-
ously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfacto-
rily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so
far forth, true instrumentally. (P, 34)
I do not say that Emerson offers us a pragmatic theory of truth—he does not even
mention truth in his sentence about skating—but only wish to suggest that he lives
at least part of his life in a recognizably pragmatic world, a world of transitions,
negotiated by what is often a “muscular” or “sturdy” (CW, 3:34, 35), but at other
times a “great and crescive self” (CW, 3:44).
James, Wittgenstein, Cavell
Despite some admiring remarks about James, and the inclusion of The Varieties of
Religious Experience in a list of works of moral perfectionism, Cavell distinguishes
his Emersonian inheritance from the pragmatism of James. I want now to consider
James’s relation to Cavell’s philosophical inheritance, not via Emerson, but
through James’s presence in the life and thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the first year of his study at Cambridge, Wittgenstein wrote Bertrand Russell
as follows:
Whenever I have time now I read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. This
book does me a lot of good. I don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am
not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve
very much; namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in
which Goethe used the word in the 2nd part of Faust).27
Seventeen years later, Wittgenstein still thought enough of Varieties to recommend

it to an undergraduate friend, Maurice Drury. “A book you should read,” Witt-
genstein told Drury, “is William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience; that
was a book that helped me a lot at one time.” Drury replies: “Oh yes, I have read
that. I always enjoy reading anything of William James. He is such a human per-
son.” To which Wittgenstein responds: “That is what makes him a good philoso-
pher; he was a real human being.”28
Another book by James was at least equally important for Wittgenstein. This is
The Principles of Psychology (1890), to which Wittgenstein refers in his notebooks
as early as 1932 and as late as 1950.29 This thousand-page masterpiece is the sub-
ject of all the references to James in the Philosophical Investigations—which for
Cavell is the definitive Wittgensteinian text. If, as Cavell has written, the Investiga-
tions offers a picture of “our times,” our culture,30 consider James’s prominence in
that picture. In the Investigations Wittgenstein mentions seventeen people, among
them Beethoven, Schubert, Goethe, Köhler, and Faraday. Five others are mentioned
twice—Lewis Carroll, Moses, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, and Socrates. Of
the three remaining, Gottlob Frege and William James are mentioned four times,
and only Augustine exceeds them with five citations. Three of the four citations of
James occur in part 1 of the Investigations, completed before the Second World
War. The single citation of James in part 2 is the mark of a continuing interest in
James, which—judging by the typescripts on which it is based (Remarks on the
Philosophy of Psychology)—was perhaps at its most intense after the war. In these
postwar typescripts, Wittgenstein mentions James more than any other writer.
Whereas Wittgenstein has nothing but praise for the James of Varieties, his
remarks about James’s Psychology are usually critical. Yet he also learns from
James, as is indicated by a passage from an early version of the Investigations,
Eine Philosophische Betrachtung (1936):
This absence of the will act, as I shall now call it, was noticed by William James,
and he describes the act of getting up in the morning, for example, as follows: he is
lying in bed and reflecting whether it is time to get up—and all of a sudden he finds
himself getting up.”31
Wittgenstein is referring to the following passage from James’s chapter on “Will”

in The Principles of Psychology:
We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire,
and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most
persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace them-
selves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will
suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” etc., but still the warm couch
feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and post-
pones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance
and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such
circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not
get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up.
(PP, 1132)
This case shows that Wittgenstein was thinking along with James as well as against
him in the mid-thirties. James had written that his case of getting out of bed “seems
to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition,”
a remark that both points to the considerable reach of his claim and suggests Witt-
genstein’s substantial achievements in developing a philosophy of psychology that
takes this point into proper account.
In The Brown Book, Wittgenstein refers to James as holding the mistaken view
that a particular experience corresponds to words like “or” and not,”32 but he also
utilizes James’s getting out of bed case—without, however, naming James:
[I]t has been said that when a man, say, gets out of bed in the morning, all that
happens may be this: he deliberates, “Is it time to get up?”, he tries to make up his
mind, and then suddenly he finds himself getting up. Describing it this way empha-
sizes the absence of an act of volition.”33
In the Investigations, all reference to James on this point drops out, although
James’s lesson about the absence of the act of volition does not. There are many
other places in the Investigations where James is not mentioned but where his
influence can be traced.34
The upshot for Cavell is that there is an American philosophical presence in Witt-
genstein, and so, I wish to suggest—given the pervasiveness of that presence—in
Cavell’s inheritance of Wittgenstein. I do not think that the lessons Wittgenstein
takes from James are all usefully described as “pragmatic,” however.35 And it was
not James’s Pragmatism that Wittgenstein found so compelling, but Varieties and
The Principles of Psychology. Yet—this shows how complex a proper account of
“pragmatism” in James has to be—there are recognizably pragmatic themes
throughout The Principles of Psychology, the book Wittgenstein read and reread
over the last twenty years of his life. To take just one example, James portrays the
human subject as a sculptor of experience,36 whose intellect
is built up of practical interests. . . . The germinal question concerning things brought
for the first time before consciousness is not the theoretic “What is that?” but the
practical “Who goes there?” or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, “What is to
be done?”—”Was fang’ ich an?” . . . In all our discussions about the intelligence of
lower animals the only test we use is that of their acting as if for a purpose.” (PP,
941)
This passage chimes both with what James was later to call “pragmatism,” and
with the later Wittgenstein, who considered as a motto for the Investigations a line
from Goethe’s Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.”37
If Wittgenstein’s engagement with James raises the question of his relation to prag-
matism, that question arises on another front: Wittgenstein’s own writing. In On
Certainty, for example, he writes: “So I am trying to say something that sounds
like pragmatism. Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung” (OC,
422).38 And in a less well known passage from Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology, he asks himself: “But you aren’t a pragmatist?” and immediately an-
swers “No.”39 Cavell quotes the first of these remarks in “What’s the Use,” noting
that the similarity is “not welcome but burdensome to Wittgenstein” (WU, 76);
and he tries to lessen the burden, as it were, by pointing out that skepticism is a
pervading issue in Wittgenstein’s but not in the pragmatists’ texts. Cavell also
recalls a remark he had made almost thirty years before in “Must We Mean What
We Say?”
Wittgenstein’s role in combating the idea of privacy . . . and in emphasizing the func-
tions and contexts of language, scarcely needs to be mentioned. It might be worth
pointing out that these teachings are fundamental to American pragmatism; but then
we must keep in mind how different their arguments sound, and admit that in philoso-
phy it is the sound which makes all the difference. (WU, 73)
Yet, there seems to be a clash between Wittgenstein’s remark that he is saying

something that “sounds like pragmatism” and Cavell’s report about “how different
their arguments sound.” Perhaps the arguments Cavell points to as sounding differ-
ent from pragmatism are not those of On Certainty, where the form of pragmatism
at issue is the epistemological position James calls “humanism,” but arguments
embedded in the dialectic of the Investigations, where issues of meaning, mind,
and the nature of philosophy prevail. All the more important, then, that Witt-
genstein’s question in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology occurs in a con-
text where he is discussing such main topics of the Investigations as understanding
and meaning.
The paragraph preceding this question is worth quoting in full, for it introduces
yet another subject into the pragmatic-sounding mix: religion.
How about religion’s teaching that the soul can exist when the body has disinte-
grated? Do I understand what it teaches? Of course I understand it—I can imagine a
lot here. (Pictures of these things have been painted too. And why should such a
picture be only the incomplete reproduction of the spoken thought?40 Why should it
not perform the same service as what we say? And this service is the point). (RPP,
265)
But you aren’t a pragmatist? No. For I am not saying that a proposition is true if it
is useful. (RPP, 266)
Wittgenstein is here concerned with meaning, use, “service,” not—as in On Cer-

tainty—with knowledge. But his reason for denying that he is a pragmatist invokes
yet a third meaning of “pragmatism”: as a theory of truth. So Wittgenstein’s argu-
ment that he is not a pragmatist because he does not hold a pragmatist theory of
truth fails to show that he is not a pragmatist in some other sense.
In any case, the conjunction of a question about pragmatism with remarks about
religion suggests the relevance of the greatest book on pragmatism and religion
ever written, which also happens to be the only explicitly pragmatist book we know
Wittgenstein to have read: James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. In Varieties,
James defends the significance—as distinct from the truth—of religious language,
based on the fact that it is “used.” “God is not known,” he quotes J. H. Leuba as
writing. “[H]e is used.”41
It would be a mistake to try to understand James’s multiple influences on Witt-

genstein all under the pragmatist rubric. It would equally be a mistake to deny
Cavell’s claim that the pragmatists and Wittgenstein sound different, and that this
difference in sound—James might say “temperament”—is philosophically impor-
tant. I believe that Cavell is right in suggesting that part of this difference in sound
can be accounted for by the way skepticism is at issue in Wittgenstein’s texts and
not in the major texts of pragmatism—where skepticism is sidestepped or avoided
rather than insinuated and confronted; and right, too, in suggesting that part of
the difference lies in the confessional or provocative, “two-by-two” mode of the
Emersonian essay and the Wittgensteinian investigation.
I will conclude by suggesting another source for this difference in sound: Witt-
genstein’s conservatism,42 as contrasted with the pragmatists’ characteristic liberal-
ism. Wittgenstein once wrote:
It is all one to me whether or not the typical western scientist understands or appreci-
ates my work, since he will not in any case understand the spirit in which I write.
Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather
than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied
with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as
a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity
are valuable in themselves. . . .
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing
over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen
from different angles. (CV, 6–7)
Listen now to the difference in sound in a passage winding up Pragmatism’s

chapter “Pragmatism and Religion”:
I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous,
without therefore backing out and crying “no play.” . . . I am willing that there should
be real losses and real gains, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in
the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. . . . The
way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting it “aufgehoben,” or preserved
in the whole as an element essential but “overcome.” It is by dropping it out alto-
gether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that
shall forget its very place and name. (P, 142)
James clearly hopes to get somewhere, not return to the same place.43 He pursues
an ideal which is “an ultimate, not . . . an origin.” If you follow “the pragmatic
method,” he writes, you cannot rest with any such traditional explanatory terms as
“God,” “Matter,” “Reason,” but must instead
bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of
your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work,
and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be
changed.
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.
We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over
by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up, and sets each
one at work. (P, 31–32)
Here is the James whose pragmatism calls for “results” and actions; the pragmatism
Russell found to embrace an “appeal to force.”44 Here is a pragmatism that does
not sound like Wittgenstein.
Yet it would be a mistake to unambiguously associate James and his pragmatism
with “the Bismarckian belief in force,” as Russell did,45 and equally wrong to see
Wittgenstein as an unmitigated conservative. Consider what James says about the
moral and epistemological limitations of what he calls “the athletic attitude” (VRE,
49). Religious experience includes periods of weakness and breakdown, but, James
insists,
[O]ur very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we
have the emotionality which is the sine quâ non of moral perception; . . . What, then,
is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious
truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system,
forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it
hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from
its self-satisfied possessors?
If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that
the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptiv-
ity. (VRE, 30–31)
Far from embracing the aggressive, dominating, “hearty” approach to the universe
featured in standard caricatures of pragmatism, James gives equal credit to “recep-
tivity.” There is, as Richard Poirier states, a tension in James “between his promo-
tions, compounded by self-advertisement, of will and action, and the more insinu-
ated privilege he gives, as early as Principles of Psychology, to receptivity and to
an Emersonian abandonment of acquired selfhood.”46
Returning to Wittgenstein, notice that he distinguishes the current culture’s use
of “the word ‘progress’” from really “making progress.” Consider also the features
of his philosophy that lead Cavell to see it as within the tradition of “moral perfec-
tionism” in the West—a tradition that includes not only Plato, Emerson, and Witt-
genstein but James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and Dewey’s Experience
and Nature.47 Central to this tradition is a “journey of ascent,” if only one as
humble as a fly leaving a fly-bottle.
When he is thinking of Emerson along with Wittgenstein, as he often does,
Cavell sees Wittgenstein as “taking the open road,” hardly a conservative lifestyle:
What seems to me evident is that Emerson’s finding of founding as finding, say the
transfiguration of philosophical grounding as lasting, could not have presented itself
as a stable philosophical proposal before the configuration of philosophy established
by the work of the later Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, call this the establishing
of thinking as knowing how to go on, being on the way, onward and onward. At each
step, or level, explanation comes to an end; there is no level at which all explanations
come, at which all end. An American might see this as taking the open road. The
philosopher as the hobo of thought.48
To the degree to which we see Wittgenstein as conducting or establishing “thinking

as knowing how to go on,” we see progression, not simply reversion, something
that accords both with pragmatic fallibilism and with pragmatism’s orientation to-
ward the future. If Wittgenstein takes “the open road,” may he not travel some
way with the pragmatists?
Notes
I am grateful to Steven Affeldt for his substantial commentary on an earlier version of this
essay.
1. John McDermott is an important exception, for he recognizes how large a figure in

the American landscape Emerson is, and how large he looms for a figure like Dewey.
Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphy’s A History of Philosophy in America (New York:
Putnam, 1977) represents the standard view of Emerson as not in the main line of develop-
ment of professional philosophy. See also Cavell’s comments on Bruce Kuklick’s The Rise
of American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press) in “The Philosopher in Ameri-
can Life,” in In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 13–14.
2. Cavell is presumably responding to such works as Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces
of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Soli-
darity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard Poirier, Poetry and Prag-
matism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Cornel West, The American
Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989).
3. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson
after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch, 1989), 95.
4. Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” in Morris
Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Cul-
ture (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 73.
5. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.
14, 245.
6. “Yielding,” in William James, Writings 1902–1910 (Library of America), 195;
“sense of higher control,” 224; “melancholy” throughout, e.g., 152.
7. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (in Writings 1902–1910); hereaf-
ter VRE), 195–96.
8. VRE, 142.
9. VRE, 228, 229
10. VRE, 152.
11. VRE, 252.
12. This is also true of James. See, for example, Bruce Wilshire, William James and
Phenomenology: A Study of “The Principles of Psychology” (New York: AMS, 1979);
James Edie, William James and Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1987). See Nicholas Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 1981).
13. Selected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin,
1982), 92.
14. See The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (India-
napolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
15. The differences among them are considerable, however. See Richard Gale, The
Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
16. Richard Rorty, “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and
Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64.
17. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 112.
18. Rorty’s target in “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth.”
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311.
20. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), 5; hereafter
AE.
21. AE, 18.
22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24.
23. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: Northpoint, 1981), 12.
24. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Griffin (Boston, New
York, London: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 499.
25. Ziff 91–92. Cited in my Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader, p. 22.
26. Ziff, 79.
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters, ed. Brian McGuinness and G. H. von
Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
28. M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Per-
sonal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 120–21.
29. The earliest citation of James in the Oxford edition of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass is
dated 1 January, 1932 and occurs in the “Big Typescript” (Manuscript 213, 42 r).
30. Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in
This New Yet Unapproachable America, 29–75.
31. Eine Philosophische Betrachtung, ed. R. Rhees, in L. Wittgenstein, Schriften, 5
(Frankfort on Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 234.
32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the
Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 78–79.
33. Ibid., 151.
34. And there is a broad confluence in both writers’ attempts to keep something ordi-
nary, common, or concrete away from the falsifying clutches of theory. See my Wittgenstein
and William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
35. See the discussion in Wittgenstein and William James.
36. PP, 277. Another relevant passage: “[T]he states of consent and belief, character-
ized by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subsequent
practical activity” (PP, 914). Cf. PP, 940–41.
37. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press,
1990), 579.
38. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright,
trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). References to
this work are incorporated in the text as OC, followed by a paragraph number.
39. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, para. 266;
hereafter RPP.
40. In the Investigations, p. 178, Anscombe translates the relevant word, “Gedanken,”
as “doctrine,” but the sentences in which this word appears are identical in the two works.
41. VRE, 453. Wittgenstein mentions James in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychol-
ogy nine times—more than any other writer—but it is the James of The Principles of Psy-
chology who is so named, not the James of Varieties.
42. See, for example, Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ith-
aca: Cornell University Press, 1991), and J. C. Nyı́ri, “Wittgenstein’s Later Work in Relation
to Conservatism,” in Brian McGuinness, ed., Wittgenstein and His Times (Oxford: Black-
well, 1982), 44–68.
43. He seems close here to the Emerson of “abandonment” and “no past at my back.”
44. Collected Works of Bertrand Russell, vol. 6, 283.
45. Russell, 280.
46. Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 42. On James as a conservative—particularly in contrast to Dewey—see Gale,
250. On James’s idealization of American politics—or lack thereof—see Poirier, 118–22.
47. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Em-
ersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See p. xi and through-
out for the claim that Wittgenstein is part of this tradition; for Dewey and James, see p. 5.
48. Cavell, “Declining Decline,” 116.
7
Guessing the Unseen

from the Seen
Stanley Cavell and Film Interpretation
ANDREW KLEVAN
In his essay “The Thought of Movies,” Stanley Cavell quotes a famous passage
from Henry James’s essay “The Art of Fiction”:
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to
judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so com-
pletely that you are well on the way to knowing any particular corner of it—this
cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience. . . . Therefore, if I should
certainly say to a novice “Write from experience and experience only,” I should feel
that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add,
“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”1
The passage speaks of “a rather tantalising monition” and is itself “rather tantalis-
ing”: “feeling life,” James says, “in general so completely”; “you are well on the
way to knowing”; “this cluster of gifts may almost be said”; “Try to be one of
the people” [my emphases]—the aspiring novice is kept aspiring. Finding one’s
experience (or not being lost to it)—coming toward it without any necessary com-
pletions—is something Cavell, like James, is tactfully alive to. When he writes of
himself—”I had come to count on myself as one of the people willing not to be
lost to his or to her experience”2 —his “willing” expresses more than an inclination.
It expresses a continuing aspiration.
Cavell shows a willingness to be involved in the process of acknowledging
one’s experience (while also acknowledging the process). Hence the “commitment
to being guided by our experience but not dictated to by it.”3 He writes:
I mean . . . to capture the sense at the same time of consulting one’s experience and
of subjecting it to examination, and . . . of momentarily stopping, turning yourself
away from whatever your preoccupation and turning your experience away from its
expected, habitual track, to find itself, its own track: coming to attention. The moral
of this practice is to educate your experience sufficiently so that it is worthy of trust
. . . [O]ne learns that without this trust in one’s experience, expressed as a willingness
to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in
one’s own experience. . . . I think of this authority as the right to take an interest in
118
Guessing the Unseen from the Seen 119
your own experience. I suppose the primary good of a teacher is to prompt his or her
students to find their way to that authority; without it, rote is fate.4
Cavell suggests the potential for our experience to be wasted on us (to waste
our potential) and our experience to be lost to us, when “one is without authority
in one’s own experience,” when we fail to “take an interest” in it or to “trust”
it. Cavell justifies the value of studying film, and particular films, therefore, as
follows:
How could we show that it is . . . sufficiently . . . worth studying? Now we are at the
heart of the aesthetic matter. Nothing can show this value to you unless it is discov-
ered in your own experience, in the persistent exercise of your own taste, and hence
the willingness to challenge your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic con-
science.5
The “value” Cavell speaks of will be “discovered” not only “in your own experi-
ence” but in “the persistent exercise of your own taste” and “the willingness to
challenge your taste as it stands” [my emphases].
Cavell’s own “artistic conscience” is distinguished by an ongoing appreciative
engagement, or conversation, with the “Golden Age” of Hollywood cinema.6 But
within the field of academic film studies, where the study of Hollywood film has
long been established, even entrenched, within academic departments, this ongoing
appreciative conversation with the films—this process of acknowledgment—is of-
ten missing. The films receive frequent treatment—they are cases to be examined,
and then known, for all manner of cultural, psychosocial, historical symptoms—but
their expressive capacity, their ability to sustain an ongoing conversation, remains
unacknowledged. Cavell writes about a tendency in film study, to “claim . . . to see
and analyze something that the films they discuss cannot see and analyze, whereas
the films are, according to my reading, exactly about that something.”7 For Cavell,
this tendency produces “interpretations of a work . . . which do not allow the work
its say in its interpretation.”8 The eloquence of particular films, however, means
that they will continually have a “say” in their interpretation, ensuring that we will
never know them, or know our experience of them; rather, we remain in the process
of knowing them and knowing our experience of them—forever left guessing the
unseen.
The Significance of the Straightforward
Cavell asks, what is it in these Hollywood films that obscures our view of their
own perspicacity? He hints that the answer may be found in film’s relationship
with the “banal” and this is a dimension of its relationship with the ordinary and
everyday. He suggests that “without the mode of perception inspired . . . by the
everyday, the near, the low, the familiar, one is bound to be blind to some of the
best poetry of film, to a sublimity in it.”9 Elsewhere he writes:
I understand it to be, let me say, a natural vision of film that every motion and station,
in particular every human posture and gesture, however glancing, has its poetry, or
you may say lucidity . . . Any of the arts will be drawn to this knowledge, this percep-
tion of the poetry of the ordinary, but film, I would like to say, democratises the
knowledge, hence at once blesses and curses us with it. It says that the perception of
poetry is as open to all . . . so that a failure so to perceive, to persist in missing the
subject, which may amount to missing the evanescence of the subject, is ascribable
only to ourselves, to failures of our character; as if to fail to guess the unseen from
the seen, to fail to trace the implications of things–that is, to fail the perception that
there is something to be guessed and traced, right or wrong—requires that we persis-
tently coarsen and stupefy ourselves.10
One’s ability “to perceive” the achievements in Hollywood film might be especially
dependent on learning to “trust in one’s experience” because film’s significance
depends largely on our sensitivity to every, and everyday, “human posture and
gesture.” An example of what Cavell is suggesting here may be seen ideally in the
following passage by V. F. Perkins, discussing a moment in Caught (Max Ophuls,
1948, United States):
[I]n the opening sequence . . . Maud Eames [Barbara Bel Geddes] . . . is speaking to
her bed-sit-sharing mentor Maxine (Ruth Brady) of her hopes of escape from car-hop
drudgery via the Social Education available from Dorothy Dale [School of Charm].
Maud has been washing her feet and is sprawled across her bed towelling them while
Maxine washes up the sink in the background. During an extended take the camera
moves in on Maud, excluding Maxine (who becomes the off-screen voice of practical
cynicism) as she indulges a fantasy of working as a model in a fashion store. When
she has finished drying her feet, and while the conversation is still of mundane mat-
ters, she reaches out idly to take hold of a flimsy metal fly swat. She fiddles with this
throughout her daydream, turning it in her hand, rubbing it against her thigh and
tapping it on her knee. “ . . . And then one day in walks a handsome young millionaire
. . . And he’s standing at the perfume counter, and then suddenly he turns round and
sees me . . . and we don’t say a word for a long time.”
At no time during this does Maud pay attention to her gestures. She is not swatting
an imaginary fly. Indeed, her fiddling with the swat seems to indicate boredom and
aimlessness rather than a killer instinct. But on “ . . . sees me . . . ” she makes the
most forceful of her taps with the swat and then, in the pause as she bites her lower
lip with pleasant thought, holds it still in a way that would indicate—if she were
attending to her actions—that she had achieved or imagined a hit.
The fly swat gestures are a particularly brilliant invention whereby the film sug-
gests what is calculating and predatory in Maud’s innocently naı̈ve reverie. . . . The
effect could . . . be a great deal cruder. Maud could be shown in pursuit of a real fly,
with a killing made on the word “millionaire.”11
Perkins congratulates the film for what it “suggests,” allowing him to “trace the
implications,” discovering the unseen (what is “predatory” and “calculating” in her
romantic daydreams) from the seen (Maud’s fiddling with a fly-swat). Perkins is
“consulting” his experience of these matters; although fly swatting and romantic
daydreaming may be straightforward occurrences of his experience, they may not
obviously disclose aspects of their significance (because their straightforwardness
may mask their significance). A preoccupation of mine is to explore moments or
sequences of quality in film which do not overstate or proclaim their significance,
and moreover to take such moments to be special possibilities of the medium of
film.12 My book Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative
Film was partly inspired by Cavell’s thoughts on film and the ordinary. In the book,
I highlight four films which I label undramatic and which concern themselves, in
some respect, with the ordinary as uneventful.13 I conclude there:
Many of the undramatic images used by the films achieve force only as the films
develop, but they never present themselves, even when they finally occur, as individu-
ally arresting . . . So we might say that the undramatic films establish their emphasis,
that which they wish to stress, in an unemphatic manner. The achievement of the
films’ styles is to allow the narratives to remain skilfully poised, conveying routine
and repetition, without submitting to the possible banality of the routine; the films are
therefore able to unconceal the significance which often remains buried in the habit-
ual. The importance of these films is they find aspects of style which do justice to
the moments of life which do not proclaim their significance. An exploration of these
methods allows us to enhance our understanding of the discreet ways in which film
narration can bring the world to our attention.14
Fly swatting is presented by Caught to be, in Cavell’s terms, in the realm of the
ordinary, an experience of the ordinary; and although not necessarily “undramatic,”
much significance lies in Maud’s uneventful fiddling with an everyday object.
Cavell not only says that “without this trust in one’s experience . . . without thus
taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one’s own experience,” he also
says that this is “expressed as a willingness to find words for it.” Note, in this
respect, Perkins’s precise, yet simple, vocabulary evoking the movements of the
moment: “flimsy,” “fiddles,” “rubbing,” and “tapping.” Note also the syntactical
arrangements: in the sentence which begins “But on,” the clause within commas is
used to pause the sentence and thus evoke the “pause as she bites her lower lip.”
Similarly, a clause about attention, “if she were attending to her actions,” is brought
to our attention because it is set apart by the use of dashes. More precisely, our
attention to her lack of attention is expressed because the clause is held off from
the main body of the sentence, just as the insight into her behavior is held from
her. Perkins’s words are “expressed as a willingness” to be intimate with the film’s
expression.
Ordinary language is especially apt for those films where “the mode of percep-
tion [is] inspired . . . by the everyday.” It is additionally worth remarking that a
philosopher who sympathizes with Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin’s desire
to cleave to ordinary language (and ordinary language philosophy) is one who
appreciates Hollywood film. Cavell understands both the failure “to guess the un-
seen from the seen” in Hollywood film and the distrust of ordinary language to be
forms of stupefaction (and coarsening). He writes, “It was always being said, and
I believe it is still felt, that Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s return to ordinary language
constitutes an anti-intellectual or unscientific defense of ordinary beliefs,” and he
responds by saying, “The idea is less to defend our ordinary beliefs than to wean
us from expressing our thoughts in ways that do not genuinely satisfy us, to stop
forcing ourselves to say things that we cannot fully mean.”15 Perkins’s words,
rather than acting to “defend . . . ordinary beliefs,” invite the scrutiny of ordinary
activity (fiddling with flyswatters), as this is what he believes the film to be inviting
(and the tone of these invitations influences the manner in which I attend). Further-
more, the writing does not simply wish to present the critic’s view of what the film
means, it wishes to convey how the film works toward expressing what it means,
and the critic’s experience of these workings. This critical process is bound up
with the task of finding and using words which “satisfy” the writer’s experience of
a medium that is visual and aural, and moving.
It’s a Wonderful Life: The Creativity of Convention
The scrutiny involved in this critical process is useful when dealing with films that
are modest about their matters of deepest significance. The conventions of Holly-
wood films may be demonstrative and declamatory but they may contain this sig-
nificance and permit the modesty. The very same conventions that enable subtlety
of expression in this cinema are precisely those that may obscure the appreciation.
Cavell takes up one of the most notorious of Hollywood conventions—the happy
ending:
Shall we blame Hollywood moguls for the obsession with happy endings? We can
hear some maddening stories along this line. But the gossip will not account for the
good films which call for, and earn, their happy endings. All that the prevalence of
the happy ending shows—to the extent that it prevails and to the extent that it is
more common in American than in foreign films—is that Hollywood did its best
work in genres which call for happy endings. Of course it is arguable that the genres
and conventions of Hollywood films are themselves the essential limitation. But to
argue that, you have to show either that there are no comparable limitations in other
traditions or else that their limitations (say a Russian tendency toward the monumen-
tal or operatic, or a French tendency toward the private and provincial, or a German
tendency toward the theatrical and claustrophobic) are less limiting.16
The style and expression of underground cinemas, foreign cinemas, independent
cinemas, and avant-garde cinemas are often assumed to be more “radical,” more
“original,” and more “challenging” than Hollywood. Some of the claims for “radi-
cal” cinemas are based on the films’ attempts to break or ignore Hollywood con-
vention, as if it were taken for granted that such conventions were binding in the
sense of being disabling. Outside film study, one might remember, studies in the
handling of convention have repeatedly shown how, for novelists, poets, and com-
posers, conventions act as the core of their creativity.17
It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946, United States) has one of the most
famous of happy endings. Yet, what is it about the happiness of this ending that
can bring me to tears? The question might not be why am I so moved by the close
of It’s a Wonderful Life, but rather why am I so beguiled by its continuing ability
to move me? Why am I so grateful to be moved? Why am I not resistant to its
hold over me? In Cavell’s terms, I have the capacity to bring my experience to
“attention” (eager to ensure that my “artistic conscience” is free from guilt). He
talks of “the good films, which call for, and earn, their happy endings,” so how
does this film earn its tears?18
George Bailey (played by James Stewart), who lives in the small town of Bed-
ford Falls, has ambitions to leave and go to faraway places. Events conspire to
keep him in Bedford Falls, however, where he is forced to save the townsfolk from
the grip of nasty capitalism represented primarily by a businessman called Potter

(Lionel Barrymore). George takes over his father’s Savings and Loan firm in Bed-
ford Falls, and he tries to fight off Potter by keeping the town financially self-
sufficient. Unfortunately, Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), who works with George
in the bank, mislays a substantial amount of money. It is Christmas Eve, George
is distraught, and he is on the verge of committing suicide. Clarence the angel,
who we know has been watching him from a heavenly perspective, appears and
shows him what the world would have been like had he not lived. Invigorated by
this alternative vision, he returns home to his wife, Mary (Donna Reed), and their
children, for a glorious reunion.
As George gallops back into the main street of Bedford Falls, he screams and
shouts at all the buildings “Merry Christmas,” and he continues the screaming into
his house. Euphorically, the film embraces the convention of returning home, and
rediscovering the home, experiencing it afresh. The hugging of his wife and chil-
dren are a joyous show of affection and an ecstatic instance of the convention of
family reunion. It may be (at first) tempting to think that the euphoria and ecstasy
arise as the film exploits the many possible satisfactions of the plot’s contraction
(resolving outstanding problems, “tying up the loose ends”); but they are generated
as much by a physical expansion. George’s rediscovery is specifically enacted as
a filling, and as a flooding, as his corporeality fills the space of the house; and in
his hugs, George rediscovers the capacity to cling and clutch—and to touch. As
Mary pulls him down the stairs, the children hang around his body; they adorn his
life, like baubles on the Christmas tree, or like pendants on him, dependent on
each other. (And James Stewart’s stretched posture, his lanky frame, never evenly
balanced, or poised, is a fitting home for their pendulous suspension.) The filling
and flooding, hugging and hanging make this, at the very least, a strenuous han-
dling, and spirited embracing, of convention.
The effect of the sequence, however, depends on more than invigorating the
convention with physical energy. Its effect is also related to the previous sequence
when George experiences the nightmare of his absence from the world. The Pot-
tersville sequence is often summarized: “He sees what the world would have been
like had he not lived.” Consequently, George is suddenly faced with the question
of his own existence, the fact of it, through the absence of it. Throughout the
sequence he implores people to recognize him, and if the sequence is chilling, it is
not only because of the shift to a noir(ish) shadowy manner. The blanket manner
of asserted darkness and gloom cannot alone achieve the chill of the sequence. The
chill arises from the fact that George may be able to prove his existence, or get a
sense of it, only from the recognition of others. And when that recognition disap-
pears, George disappears. Little wonder, then, that in the final scene, George bursts
with giddy, uncontrollable laughter, overcome as he is by a sense of his body as
something which physically interacts with the world, and interacts in distinct, indi-
vidual ways (individual to him).19
We may also, understandably, be overcome. Yet, prominent aspects of the char-
acter’s situation, and our absorption in it, may serve to distract us from a wider
view. We can be lured into summary explanations of our experience that are seduc-
tive but inadequate—“I was moved because George Bailey is reunited with his
family.”20 The mistake, partly, is to invest the conventions of Hollywood cinema,

such as explanatory closure, with inappropriate explanatory powers. George M.
Wilson has eloquently argued that these features often mask the totality of a film’s
narrative structure:
Perhaps it is the confused idea that film is the most “direct and immediate” way of
narrating a story which has led most viewers, professional and otherwise, to suppose
that the requirements of plot exposition confine a film’s significance. . . . Viewers dis-
pose their attention toward the “focus” of the story’s ultimate resolution. They are
perceptually set to follow the evolution of those plot conflicts that are marked out to
be the subject of an audience’s most immediate and engaged regard. Indeed, it is the
normal goal of narrative strategies to make this temptation effectively irresistible.21
In the final scene, the broad satisfactions of the conventions are made deliber-
ately “irresistible” so that the film has control over the realization of other con-
cerns. The sense of George’s existence depending on others is, during the night-
mare sequence, taken to extremity, and consumed by an “effectively irresistible”
crisis, urgently “dispos[ing my] attention toward the ‘focus’ of the story’s ultimate
resolution.” Will I be sensitive to less demonstrative variations and remain alert
enough to “trace the implications”? Popular film has the capacity to use extravagant
plot currents as mechanisms of disguise; more sophisticated meanings, often cre-
ated by visual patterns developing more obliquely, can then be secreted, thereby
carefully adjusting the weighting of expression. In this way blunt or broad elements
of popular filmmaking may enable, or contribute to, delicacy of effect.22 Wilson
continues:
[T]here are narrative films . . . in which central aspects of their interest and signifi-
cance bear only an oblique relationship to the forms of dramatic closure they employ.
. . . That is, various factors that . . . appear on the screen . . . peripheral to the strict
development of the basic tale may be assigned a weight in the narration in such a
way that the chief issues raised by the drama come to be modified, displaced, or
otherwise reappraised. . . . [I]t is quite probable that the subtly weighted patterns of
visual content which ought to qualify or subvert the linear dynamics of plot will be
experienced in a fragmentary way. . . . The problem for the viewer . . . is to locate a
“centered position” from which the oblique strands of narrational strategy can come
together in a configuration that reorganizes his or her perception and comprehension
of the fictional events.23
Throughout the film at moments when George has wished to leave Bedford Falls
and put into practice his Romantic aspirations, some hapless twist of fate has kept
him in his small hometown. His destiny is forever to remain within Bedford
Falls—to remedy some situation, help a friend, and to resolve a crisis in the com-
munity. There have never been faces and bodies in the cinema as vivid and intense
as those who peopled the locations of this period of Hollywood cinema. In It’s a
Wonderful Life they are more than background flavor or coloring: they make its
world while being also worlds unto themselves.24 Uncle Billy, Ernie and Bert, Ma
Bailey: their time on screen need only be short for them to evoke personal histories
that are long. George is overwhelmed by their worlds, he feels he should serve
those worlds, and he is obsessed with keeping them turning. The film draws us
into their rotations—while inspiring us with the urgency of George’s actions and
seducing us with the charisma of his selflessness—and the strength of this momen-
tum belies less demonstrative significance. As the film progresses, we recognize,
as George does, that the people who surround him unavoidably keep him in the
town, prevent him from realizing the dreams—which haunt him—to build bridges
and buildings and go to faraway places. The Pottersville sequence, however, by
attending to the matter of existence, allows moments to resonate with more signifi-
cance. Leland Poague, also with some of Cavell’s concerns in mind, writes that
when George asks, after seeing Pottersville, to “live again,” “he acknowledges his
life to date as his own, as a life . . . [a] recognition that he had been living, living
at all.”25 Before this, although George exists, he does not feel that he lives his life
(because his life exists to feel the lives of others).
As George fills space in the final scene, the bank man, the reporters, and those
present to arrest him are made to watch on, uncomprehending. Their looking on—
their looking at him—now reverberates. Throughout the film George has found
himself in situations where others watched or listened in on his life: the man on
the balcony instructing him to kiss Mary in their courtship scene; Mary’s mother
listening on the extension phone while George and Mary talk to Sam Wainwright
on the phone downstairs; or the moment when George proposes to Violet Bick that
they go off together into the hills and frolic with nature, and the camera pulls back
to reveal a crowd of townsfolk laughing at his proposals. And Clarence and Joseph
permanently keep him in view. As Ray Carney says, “[George’s] experiences, his
aspirations, and his private desires are made the subject of endless discussions
among his friends. Every move he makes is scrutinized. His progress is continually
watched and monitored by solicitous others.”26 Carney thinks of this as George
being robbed of his mystery and privacy, indeed robbed of his selfhood.
The Recognition of Character
George’s treatment, most explicitly in Pottersville, might be an analogy for our

summaries of film narratives that too easily can strip the characters of their physi-
cality, ignore the dynamic of their interactions with people and locations, or fail to
acknowledge that they exist as flesh and blood. Cavell understands that on film,
characters have no existence apart from the particular human beings on screen, and
no life apart from the particular performers who incarnate them. In the theater,
character and performance are often thought of together precisely because they are
conceived separately, hence an acknowledged dynamic between them that is an
essential part of theater. The separation of character and performer is explicitly
part of theatrical expression, a practical and critical concern. Cavell writes:
For the stage, an actor works himself into a role. . . . The stage actor explores his
potentialities and the possibilities of his role simultaneously; in performance these
meet at a point in spiritual space—the better the performance, the deeper the point.
In this respect, a role in a play is like a position in a game, say, third base: various
people can play it, but the great third baseman is a man who has accepted and trained
his skills and instincts most perfectly and matches them most intimately with his
discoveries of the possibilities and necessities of third base. . . . The [theater] actor’s
role is his subject for study, and there is no end to it. But the screen performer is
essentially not an actor at all: he is the subject of study.27
For Cavell, the scrutiny of the camera makes the human beings in front of it only
partly described by the word “actors” because they are also, more deeply, subjects
of study, albeit subjects who have an active participation in the way the films
present them. The richness, or individuality, of character is found in the human
being’s relationship to the camera, and other aspects of the film’s world. In the
best Hollywood films, character and performer are inextricably intertwined—they
coalesce: James Stewart is George Bailey; George Bailey is James Stewart. Holly-
wood film performers find ways of exploring their characters while maintaining
the integrity of this coalescence.
Cavell’s understanding of film characterization, and its coalescence with perfor-
mance, helps us further explore the relationship between sentimental absorption
and the revelation of significance. The latter relationship is one important achieve-
ment of Hollywood film, and it finds its apotheosis in It’s a Wonderful Life. We
may presume the opposite, however, that the revelation of significance will only
be achieved by undermining sentimental absorption, and that one version of this
attempt is found in those films which seek to undermine the coalescence between
character and performer. Cavell writes about the work of filmmaker Jean Luc-
Godard:
[T]he sort of depersonalization [Godard] requires depends both upon our responding
to these characters as persons and upon our continuously failing to read their motions
within the stresses of ordinary human emotion and motivation. Some critics, I believe,
take Godard to have established in some such way a cinematic equivalent to Brecht’s
call for a new theater, in which the actor forces and maintains a distance between
himself and his role, and between stage and audience, thereby preventing a sentimen-
tal reabsorption of the intelligence art secretes. . . . I do not find that . . . Godard has
achieved it in the films of his I have seen. For a film director does not begin with a
medium in which actor and character have conventionally or momentarily coalesced,
nor with a conventional or passing denial of the distance between the stage and a
coherent audience. “Actor” and “audience” lack clear application to film. So one
reads the distance from and between his characters as one does in reality, as the
inability to feel.28
Godard’s approach, by “preventing a sentimental reabsorption,” might be consid-
ered a more discerning way of exploring the relationship between character and
performance and viewer than the approach of It’s a Wonderful Life. Cavell contin-
ues, “Evidently Godard’s admirers read his withdrawal of feeling as a combination
of knowingness and objectivity toward the corruption of the world. But objectivity
is a spiritual achievement, and apart from it knowingness is only a sentiment. In
that case, accepting Godard’s work is simply sharing that sentiment.”29 In these
terms, “Godard’s admirers” are still absorbed in a sentiment, but not one that
allows absorption in the film. A viewer’s sentimental absorption in a film may
mean that he will be “lost to his . . . experience,” but it may equally make him
alive to it.30 With the viewer enlivened and involved in this way, the performer
cannot escape examination: in what ways will he credibly handle the extremity of
feeling; find seriousness in situations possibly consumed for their sugar; and rescue
rare emotions so easily, and so often, lost to banality?
Cavell attends to a moment in It’s a Wonderful Life where the performer cannot
escape our attention, and in doing so distinguishes a quality of Hollywood presenta-
tion. He raises
the idea that Capra is not remotely as interesting visually as Eisenstein, along with
the idea that film is a visual medium. Certainly it is true that nothing in Capra could
satisfy an interest in the visual, in what one might call the melodramatically visual,
the way Eisenstein can by, for example, watching the carcass of a horse drop from
an opening drawbridge into the water far below. But suppose film’s interest in the
visual can be understood as a fascination with the fact of the visible. Then nothing in
Eisenstein could be more revealing than Capra’s camera, in It’s a Wonderful Life, in
the sequence in which James Stewart, greeting his returning brother at the railroad
station, learns that this return does not mean his release from his hated obligations
but his final sealing within them, as it accompanies Stewart’s circling away from the
scene of happy exchanges, reeling from the collapse of his ecstasy, working to re-
cover himself sufficiently to find a public face. We are vouchsafed a vision of the
aging American boy, as melodramatically private as a Czar.31
As his brother runs to get the baggage, George is left alone in the shot. There is a
cut to a closer shot of George, chest high, and the sequence continues with
George’s head getting ever nearer the camera. His eyes watch his brother, and then
his head darts around to look, off screen right, at his brother’s new wife and Uncle
Billy. He starts walking toward them, crossing in front of the camera that in turn
rotates around with him toward the right, as if drawing an arc, hence the “circling”
effect. Although he gets ever closer to the camera, his head eventually filling the
frame as he moves to meet it and drift around with it, the camera makes only a
slight move toward him. It executes its gentle arc and is without any anxious or
urgent demonstrations of its own: it efficiently and easily discerns, and stays with,
the performer’s intensity of expression, and thus conveys the life changing melo-
drama of a passing moment. The performer communicates the anxiety; the move-
ment of the frame enables the expression of this anxiety, but remains calmly sub-
servient. The camera is neither attracted to, nor involved in enhancing, an “interest
in the visual.” It stares, with some concern, at the flickers of his face, and can
instead “be understood as [having] a fascination with the . . . [various aspects] of
the visible.”
With “Stewart’s circling away from the scene of happy exchanges, reeling from
the collapse of his ecstasy,” the performer makes visible to the camera crucial
aspects of his character, while credibly keeping them invisible to the other charac-
ters. The Pottersville sequence is evidently ghostly, George floating through the
town like a phantom, with friends and family not recognizing him, as if not seeing
him; the railroad moment becomes another version of his invisibility—a variation
of ghostliness—where the recovery of his “public face” reinforces the disappear-
ance of his self. We may guess the unseen (this invisibility and this ghostliness)
from the seen (his “circling” and his “reeling” away)—in ways his family and
friends appear unable to do. From our point of view, George’s moment of deflation
can be recast as fears about haunting his own existence, being present to it happen-
ing, but watching it develop from the outside; present to his own life but not in
control of it.
With Stewart “circling away,” one of Cavell’s most alluring insights into Holly-
wood performance, is illustrated: “The wish, in the great stars, . . . is a function not
of their beauty, such as that may be, but of their power of privacy.”32As George is
“circling away,” he claims this “power of privacy” (a “vision . . . as melodramati-
cally private as a Czar”). Cavell’s insight suggests that a viewer’s engagement
with a performer need not depend on conspicuously attractive features, but on
the performer rendering accessible—available—aspects of his or her character’s
consciousness (although the viewer’s understanding of these unseen aspects, in his
or her character’s consciousness, may remain inconclusive or uncertain). Perform-
ers have the capacity to make the viewer conscious of their character’s conscious-
ness, or involve the viewer in their engagement with it. Such an understanding
should remind us that our disposition toward a narrative is not necessarily tied to
our identification with character—however elegantly refined—but lies equally with
appreciating the performer s’ capacities for revealing to us (hidden) aspects of their
character’s sensibility.
Cavell has said that Capra has seen “in Stewart’s temperament (which, of
course, is to say, see in what becomes of that temperament on film, its photogene-
sis) the capacity to stake identity upon the power of wishing, upon the capacity
and purity of one’s imagination and desire—not on one’s work, or position, or
accomplishments, or looks, or intelligence.”33 The insight concerning “the great
stars” emerges in a discussion of Bette Davis, in particular, and female performers
in general, and apart from finding ways to project their consciousness, for Cavell,
Stewart shares with them another quality: “Call the quality Stewart projects a will-
ingness for suffering.”34 Carney links suffering and consciousness in order to see
the more oblique purposes of the happy ending:
It’s a Wonderful Life is a film of endless frustrations, deferrals of gratification, and
of the complete impossibility of representing the most passionate impulses and imagi-
nations of the self in the world—and yet the title is still entirely unironic. Capra
wants us to know that George Bailey’s life is wonderful—not because his neighbors
bail him out with a charity sing-along . . . but because he has seen and suffered more,
and more deeply and wonderfully, than any other character in the film . . . The adven-
ture of consciousness that George has lived through in dreamland is greater than any
of the romantic adventures he has talked about going on—but it is at the same time
only an adventure of consciousness.35
The Aspects of Interpretation
George’s continuous engagement with his consciousness does not ensure that he
will have a clear or complete understanding of it (Carney’s “adventure of con-
sciousness” evokes, or is analogous to, the therapeutic process). Poague says that
George’s “desire to leave is equally well understood as a cover story, a displace-
ment or denial of other or deeper wishes.”36 The film’s skill is to find ways to
uncover the “deeper wishes,” while remaining faithful to their displaced or latent
quality. Understandings of George’s consciousness may be imparted, but they are

not provided as certain assessments or judgments. In one scene, George has been
taking out his frustrations on Mary, and he is about to leave her home in anger
when his old friend Sam Wainwright, from Bedford Falls, calls long distance on
the telephone. While Sam makes some business propositions, they both listen,
heads together, on the end of the phone. Finally, they drop the phone and George
grabs and shakes Mary while declaring his independence: “I don’t want to get
married to anyone, I want to do what I want to do.” His words here are insistent,
but at the moment he asserts his separateness, he is at first halted and then pulled
inexorably toward Mary; and although his words are passionate, he is compelled
by a force he hardly understands to caress and to kiss her. The phone call suspends
their heads, nestling without touching, with their glowing faces perched together
and the resulting charge burns up George’s assertions. The moment is an erotic
distillation of suggestive questions that run throughout the film. What is the true
direction of a life? Does George push his life forward or is he pulled seductively?
If he is pulled, does that mean that his life is not true to his intentions (to his
wishes), or that he fails to know what his wishes are?
Our failure to see that these meanings might be “visible” in such a moment
(or, for example, the meeting at the railroad station) may relate to anxieties about
overinterpretation, a particularly prevalent anxiety with regard to Hollywood film.
Cavell writes:
In my experience people worried about reading in, or overinterpretation, or going too

far, are, or were, typically afraid of getting started, of reading as such, as if afraid
that texts—like people, like times and places—mean things and moreover mean more
than you know. This is accordingly a fear of something real, and it may be a healthy
fear, that is, a fear of something fearful. It strikes me as a more discerning reaction
to texts than the cheerier opinion that the chase of meaning is just as much fun as
man’s favorite sport (also presumably a thing with no fear attached). Still, my experi-
ence is that most texts, like most lives, are underread, not overread.37
Do we fear that while we “guess the unseen” in Hollywood film we are searching
for the invisible, and in a medium that is created from the visible we are therefore
searching for something that is not there? V. F Perkins turns this around:
I suggest that a prime task of interpretation is to articulate in the medium of prose

some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium
of film. The meanings I . . . discuss . . . are neither stated nor in any special sense
implied. They are filmed. Whatever else that means (which it is a purpose of criticism
and theory to explore) it means that they are not hidden in or behind the movie, and
that my interpretation is not an attempt to clarify what the picture has obscured. I
have written about things that I believe to be in the film for all to see, and to see the
sense of.
. . . I claim that a meaning presented is a meaning made overt within the chosen
medium. A process like story-making in transmitted images develops as a medium
because artists explore its possibilities for “making overt,” which in large degree
means its capacity to imply. In other words, implication is a form of expression, not
of concealment.38
Successful expression of implication will depend on balancing the elements within

a film. Perkins therefore writes: “Film-makers continuously develop the repertoire
of devices through which to adjust the prominence with which they present an item
of information to its importance in the film’s scale of values. (But we should
observe that there is no level of prominence that could constitute concealment.)”39
With Stewart “circling away” around the camera we do indeed have a “vision of
an aging American boy” and a premonition of ghostliness; however, the promi-
nence of the elements which allows us to trace these interpretations may be
checked, the relationship, or synthesis, of these elements, remaining indefinite.
Elsewhere Perkins writes of the ability of a film to achieve a “reconciliation of
clarity with depth of suggestion.”40 How aptly all the deeper significance is sug-
gested by Stewart “circling away,” and yet, at the same time, how little of it is
declared, modestly contained within what is also, clearly, a moment of intense
frustration.
Aspects of the ghostly and the visible, for example, adjust in prominence as the
film develops: indeed, the fascination resides not simply with the aspects them-
selves but with the way they emerge into view, into focus, like the world of Bed-
ford Falls, for Clarence, the angel, at the beginning of the film. The sense of aspects
coming into view rhymes with Cavell’s understanding of “duck-rabbit” as an anal-
ogy for interpretation:
I pick up the suggestion from Wittgenstein’s celebrated study, in Part II of Philosoph-
ical Investigations, that what he calls “seeing an aspect” is the form of interpretation:
it is seeing something as something. Two conditions hold of a case in which the
concept of “seeing as” is correctly employed. There must be a competing way of
seeing the phenomenon in question, something else to see it as (in Wittgenstein’s
most famous case, that of the Gestalt figure of the “duck-rabbit,” it may be seen as a
duck or as a rabbit); and a given person may not be able to see it both ways, in which
case it will not be true for him that he sees it (that is, sees a duck or sees a rabbit)
as anything (though it will be true to say of him, if said by us who see both possibili-
ties, that he sees it as one or the other). And one aspect dawns not just as a way of
seeing but as a way of seeing something now, a way that eclipses some other, definite
way in which one can oneself see the “same” thing.41
The figure is used in many philosophical contexts, but it seems particularly
appropriate for the interpretation of Hollywood film. Crucially, the figure (“duck-
rabbit”) might appear simple, but is in fact two things simultaneously. Let us say
you can see the duck, but not the rabbit. In Perkins’s terms the rabbit is “perfectly
and precisely clear” (or at least it is not any less clear than the duck because many
people immediately see the rabbit), and it is “not hidden in or behind” the drawing
(once again, no more “hidden” than the duck). When I point out the rabbit to you,
“it is not an attempt to clarify what the picture has obscured,” but to allow you to
see another aspect.
Seeing new aspects is at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life’s dramatic concerns.
The film presents George’s life as a series of intrusions, most comically represented
by the banister knob that to his endless annoyance comes off in his hand each time
he goes up the stairs. The banister knob is presented as a frustration, something
that is in the way and prevents the free progress of his life. On the return to his
home, he kisses it, and it assumes a new aspect: intrusions now become interven-
tions, possibly angelic, which, as it were, prove he is living a life. The furniture
transforms itself from something that interrupted his life, retarded its continuation,
into something that affirms that his life is progressing. This changed aspect prompts
a reconsideration of obstacles: do intrusions hinder life, get in its way, or are they
the stuff of life, the fabric of its progression?
As the final scene continues, all of the inhabitants of the town start to enter the
Bailey house to offer their gifts. It would be a mistake to think that the wonder of
the scene rests only on what is wonderful about their contributions. Furthermore,
thinking only this could result in an understanding of the film as a fairy tale for
the Depression, or the war era, and this might prevent us from seeing the richer
perspectives the film has to offer. Cavell writes with regard to the comedies of
remarriage, and in particular another film directed by Frank Capra, It Happened
One Night (1934):
The economic issues in these films, with all their ambivalence and irresolution, are
invariably tropes for spiritual issues. . . . It Happened One Night is a film . . . about
being hungry, or hungering, where hungering is a metaphor for imagining, in particu-
lar imagining a better, or satisfying, way to live. There are a number of foods in the
film, forming a little system of symbolic significance. There is also a woman, in what
I call a “Depression vignette,” who faints from hunger. What is the relation of the
symbolism to this vignette? . . . [I]s [Capra] . . . to be understood as taking the occa-
sion of the Depression to ask what it is we as a people are truly depressed by, what
hunger it is from which we all are faint? . . . Of course these films can be appropriated
. . . as fairy tales rather than, let us say, as spiritual parables. But so can Scripture be
similarly appropriated.42
In It’s a Wonderful Life, the contextual, or raw, material—depression, war, small
banks, corporations—allows a particular guise for the conventions, but they need
to be invigorated, realize their potential; otherwise they will remain inert. The
vigorous handling of this contextual material is achieved by the skillful arrange-
ment of aspects of style; for example, the relationship between performer and cam-
era in the railroad moment. The skill in handling the material is partly a matter of
maintaining a balance between containing and unlocking metaphor. It is this pro-
cess of controlling the release of metaphorical meaning, and thereby extending and
intensifying relevance, that enriches interpretations and deepens viewing. As the
townsfolk present themselves to George, one by one, the sequence resembles actors
unveiling themselves at the end of a play; we are invited to see the same bodies
and faces from a new perspective. The wonder of the scene relies less on what is
wonderful about their contributions than what is wonderful about their appearance.
These characters are seen in a different light, or we might say light is now cast on
their existence. George is not simply astonished at their generosity but startled at
their presence; a new aspect of their existence is being realized, and consequently,
George has a different conception of his own presence. Each character marches
into close-up, parades into definition for George. The crowd establishes a loosely
formed aisle, or passage, for each character to approach, without, as it were, direct-
ing their approach, so that they emerge, almost magically, conjured (or summoned)
enchantingly from the body of the crowd.
The Acknowledgment of the Medium
As each character emerges from the crowd, becoming separate and individual, the
world no longer passes George by, but exhibits itself in front of him. This rhymes
with a quality that Cavell understands to be at the heart of the medium, the way
that “reality is freed to exhibit itself.”43 He is critical of those who wish to mystify
the role of reality in film, and who find film an illusion of reality, or a dream of
reality. He insists that “the objects of film I have seen which do strike me as having
the force of art all incontestably use moving pictures of live persons and real things
in actual spaces.”44 He is equally keen, however, to distinguish the particular role
of reality in the medium. For Cavell, when we watch a film we do not see reality,
but rather, reality projected or screened: “In screening reality, film screens its giv-
enness from us; it holds reality from us, it holds reality before us, i.e., withholds
reality before us.”45 There is something resembling this tension in the final scene
of It’s a Wonderful Life, as George sees a new aspect of reality, not an illusion of
it, or even a dream of it (this is no longer Pottersville); but this new aspect causes
him to be more self-conscious about his relationship to reality. The townsfolk are
“held” from him, before him; “withheld” before him.
For Cavell, “the most significant films in the history of the art of film will be
found to be those that most significantly discover and declare the nature of the
medium of film,”46 and while this sequence allows a revelation for George, it is
also revelatory of the medium. When George sees the vividness of the faces before
him, we may be reminded of Mary’s comment to George at the high school dance,
when he first appreciates her beauty: she says, “You look at me as if you didn’t
know me.” In reference to conversations on film, Cavell writes about “words that
on one viewing pass, and are meant to pass, without notice, as unnoticeably trivial,
on another resonate and declare their implication in a network of significance.”47
An apparently straightforward line now has greater implication and significance:
the way you can see people but not know them, or know them but not really see
them, or the way the beginning of seeing might be the beginning of loving.
Particularly conscious of the possibility of its own reviewing, the film continu-
ally invites us to reconsider what we view. At the very end of the film, a book
appears magically on the table in front of George and his family, and it contains
an inscription. It reads, “Remember no man is a failure who has friends,” and the
words “no” and “friends” are underlined. Yet it is the word “remember” that may
be the most important, conveying the sense that George’s present should always
be informed by the past, in the same way that our understanding of the narrative,
our understanding of this moment, will be informed by remembering different mo-
ments across the whole film. The word “remember” is not underlined in the book:
perhaps the film is hinting at our capacity to mistake matters of significance, to be
too attached to what we find to be underlined in life.
The medium has a unique capacity to understand aspects of coming to experi-
ence in terms of coming to see, and here the process of audience reviewing is
related to George’s own transformation of seeing. The revelation of the medium is
deeply intertwined with the dramatic developments of the film, as if a virtuous
circle operates, where the drama is discovering the best way of using the medium,
and the medium is in itself being discovered by the drama—a magical mutuality.
For Cavell:
The first successful movies . . . were not applications of a medium that were defined
by given possibilities, but the creation of a medium by their giving significance to
specific possibilities. Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discov-
ery of a new possibility is the discovery of a new medium. A medium is something
through which or by means of which something specific gets done or said in particular
ways. It provides, one might say, particular ways to get through to someone, to make
sense; in art, they are forms, like forms of speech. To discover ways of making sense
is always a matter of the relation of an artist to his art, each discovering the other.49
It’s a Wonderful Life discovers possibilities for film endings, but the discovery of
these is so intricately enmeshed in the dramatic fabric, in the film’s particular
“network of significance” that the discovery is not declamatory. Cavell also refers
to a film’s discovery of possibilities as the “acknowledgement” of its medium, and
the depth, or sincerity, of the acknowledgment will depend on the tightness of the
meshing. Cavell says, “The question of acknowledgement, or self reflection, is not
exhausted, as appears sometimes to be thought, by the tendency of films to be self-
referential. The latter is at best a specialized (generally comic) mode of the for-
mer.”50 Elsewhere he notes that it “is exactly not equivalent to a random running
through of film’s various remarkable “effects,” nor of its random ways of self-
reflexiveness, of calling attention to its own making.”51
There is a moment in It’s a Wonderful Life when the film freezes the frame to
show George, now grown-up, with outstretched arms. Is this merely a “remarkable”
effect? Carney writes:
Capra insists upon the specifically filmic nature of events in this film. . . . [A]s George
is choosing a suitcase to take with him on a trip he ultimately never makes, Joseph
(or Capra) actually stops the image on the screen to inspect it and comment on it,
exactly as an editor or director putting a film together at a moviola might. It is an
astonishing moment—a sudden and utter collapse of whatever illusion the movie has
generated up to that moment, and a reminder that it is only an illusion. It is rubbed
in our faces that we are watching not life, but a movie, an artificial construction of
human consciousness, something that has been photographed, lighted, and projected
and that can be stopped or started at any time at the desire of the director, editor, or
projectionist. It is a movie being edited by and for angels, of course, but it is undeni-
ably also a movie by Frank Capra that we are watching in a movie theater. At this
exhilarating moment, it is hard not to enter sympathetically into Capra’s equation of
the two movies, not to feel his pleasure in and gratitude for his virtually godlike
cinematic powers.52
Carney has offered us many generous interpretations of Capra’s films, so his inter-
pretation is disappointing here, too seduced, perhaps, by the “remarkable ‘effect.’”
Only if we take the film, up to this point, to be an “illusion” that we have been
“watching . . . life,” will we consider this moment a “sudden and utter collapse.” If
we have taken the opening of the film, however, to be inescapably expressive,
eloquent and lucid, then it is “astonishing” that the film needs so crudely to declare
its “powers” of communication. Why demonstrate that a film can be “stopped or
started at any time at the[ir] desire,” or assert that this is a “movie by Frank Capra
that we are watching in a movie theatre”? If Capra was genuinely “grateful” for
his “godlike . . . powers,” I would expect him to take pleasure in moving in more
mysterious ways.
Cavell asks, “How specifically are movies questioning themselves, and what
specifically requires acknowledgement in their making?”53 He continues:
The explicit form of acknowledgement is “I know I [promised; am withdrawn; let
you down]. . . . ” But that is not the only form it can take. . . . We should not assume
that the point of the personal pronoun here is to refer to the self, for an acknowledge-
ment is an act of the self (if it is one of recognition, then it is not like recognizing a
place but like recognizing a government); and it is not done apart from an admission
of the existence of others (denial of which made the acknowledgement necessary) or
apart from an expression of one’s aliveness to that denial (the revelation in acknowl-
edgement). Without developing the philosophy this calls for, it is plain enough that
self-reference is no more an assurance of candor in movies than in any other human
undertaking. It is merely a stronger and more dangerous claim, a further opportunity
for the exhibiting of self.54
Carney’s account makes the moment appear like an “opportunity for the exhibiting
of self”: “a movie by Frank Capra.” He seems to be desperate for the film to assert
its acknowledgments. Cavell writes:
It seems that there should be some stronger connection between an assertion and the
world it asserts than my asserting of it is empowered to make. (Of course, I can
precede anything I assert with the formula “ I assert . . . ”; but that is just a shift on
the same plane of assertion.) One almost imagines that one could catch the connection
in the act, by turning the camera on it—perhaps by including a camera and crew in
the picture (presumably at work upon this picture), but this just changes the subject.
The camera can of course take a picture of itself, say in a mirror; but that gets it no
further into itself than I get into my subjectivity by saying “I’m speaking these words
now.” . . . If the presence of the camera is to be made known, it has to be acknowl-
edged in the work it does. . . . Knowing your claim to an acknowledgement from me,
I may be baffled by the demand you make for some special voicing of the acknowl-
edgement. . . . Why am I called upon to do something, to say specific things that will
add up to an explicit revelation?55
What does the freeze frame acknowledge, and how might we acknowledge it?
The film may be imagining that freezing segments of the world, apart from being
an effect of filmmakers, is a power given to angels. It allows them to pay close
attention and observe moments with care and dedication (providing a little instruc-
tion, perhaps, for our own viewing). In a general sense, therefore, the freeze frame
is integrated into the film’s angelic vision. Yet, the particularities of their vision
here may lock the frame even more securely into the film’s patterns of significance.
The frozen frame comes near the start of the sequence when Clarence, the angel,
first sees George as an adult, and it is the first time in the film that he is in the guise
of James Stewart. Carney notes “Capra’s . . . relishing of his own filmic effects as
Clarence and Joseph comment on the attractiveness of the image of James Stewart
stopped on-screen.”56 A sensitive point is submerged here because of the emphasis
on filmic effects, a “relishing” that infers a lick of the lips at a stunt, or a trick—ah
ha, James Stewart, at last, now you see him. But as Cavell writes, “You cannot
sidestep the claims of a position with a trick. The question is whether you can
choose to occupy any, and do it honor.”57 What position does the film occupy when
Stewart’s “attractiveness” is “stopped”? Joseph says, in voiceover, “I want you to
take a good look at that face,” and Clarence responds, “It’s a good face. I like it.
I like George Bailey.” The freezing is in fact a framing, and a stilling, of a face,
and rather than the medium merely proclaiming its capacity to be stopped, it re-
marks upon its power to do what it commonly does, keep presenting faces to us,
keep framing them.58 This moment is a benchmark for a concern which is inflected
throughout the film and climaxes in the final scene when a series of faces present
previously unseen aspects to be seen by George. The film allows us to consider
the relationship between our facility to see a face with our capacity to know it, or
to acknowledge it, or to learn about it. Without recognizing the particularities of
the stilled frame, and its relationship to the rest of the film, the moment looks
instead like an assertion of technique; with the recognition, the moment has the
effect of “giving significance to a possibility of film.”59
Because Hollywood narratives move dynamically forward, it may appear that their
moments have little time to deepen. Yet repeated viewing of the film—and few
films have been as repeatedly viewed—allows us to play off our later understand-
ings as we view the earlier stages, and we see with increasing richness how certain
matters are suggested but not crystallized. Understandings are refined, interpreta-
tions enriched, meanings differently inflected; and each time, as previously subdued
elements emerge as salient, as decisive moments, original ways of viewing present
themselves. Cavell acknowledges “the fateful fact of human life that the signifi-
cance of its moments is ordinarily not given with the moments as they are lived,
so that to determine the significant crossroads of a life may be the work of a
lifetime.”60 Similarly, then, the significance of narrative moments in a film are not
necessarily given—or experienced—in the moments as they are viewed, so that to
determine the specific crossroads of a narrative may be the work of a lifetime.
Cavell often refers to the “redemptive” quality of great Hollywood films. Stew-
art indeed projects a “willingness for suffering,” but his suffering does not in itself
cause my tears at the end of the film. The actor also projects an intense capacity
for loving, and George is so busy loving, that he never quite knows, until this final
scene, how much he is loved. He has missed this meaning of his life. Because I
am partly overwhelmed by the town’s display of love toward him, my tears are
also a sympathetic physiological upsurge in recognition of George’s recognition of
the town’s recognition. This particular occasion is redemptive in itself, but the
great films are redemptive in a related sense: they show us that happenings we
initially understood to be straightforward may hold a wealth of unexpected signifi-
cance. They encourage us, in Cavell’s words, to “subject . . . [experience] to exami-
nation . . . turning . . . away from whatever [our] preoccupation and turning [our]
experience away from its expected, habitual track.” My tears are an acknowledg-
ment that, like George, I have misunderstood the narratives of my life. I was too
caught up in their progression to see exactly what was making them move.
Notes
I would like to thank Edward Klevan and Vivienne Penglase for their invaluable assistance
with this essay.
1. Stanley Cavell, “The Thought of Movies,” Themes Out of School: Effects and
Causes (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 6.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage
(Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 10.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Cavell, “The Thought of Movies,” 11.
6. “[F]or around fifteen years, say from the middle thirties to the early fifties, [Holly-
wood] provided an environment in which a group of people, as a matter of its routine
practice, turned out work as good, say, as that represented by the seven movies forming the
basis of my book on the remarriage comedies—work, that is to say, as good, or something
like as good, as It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing up Baby
(1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), and
Adam’s Rib (1949). . . . [I]t is no part of my argument to insist that major work can only
come from such an environment or to deny that significant movies continue to be made in
Hollywood. But I expect that no one still finds that they come almost exclusively from
there, and routinely, say every other week, something like twenty or twenty-five times a
year. Over a period of fifteen golden years, that comes to between three hundred and four
hundred works, which is a larger body of first-rate or nearly first-rate work than the entire
corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama can show.” Ibid., 10. References to Hollywood
cinema in this chapter refer to this “Golden Age.”
7. Stanley Cavell, “Reply to Modleski,” Critical Inquiry 16 (autumn 1990): 239.
8. Ibid., 239.
9. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 15.
11. V. F. Perkins, “Must We Say What They Mean?: Film Criticism and Interpreta-
tion,” Movie 34/35 (winter 1990): 5–6.
12. This observation first appeared in Andrew Klevan, “The Composition of Charisma:
The Lines of Sporting Seduction in Ron Shelton’s Tin Cup,” Film Studies 1.1 (1999): 52.
13. Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narra-
tive Film (Trowbridge: Flicks, 2000).
14. Ibid., 209. The book discusses four films in detail: Journal d’un curé de campagne
(Diary of a Country Priest; Robert Bresson, 1950, France); Làsky jedné plavovlásky (Loves
of a Blonde; aka A Blonde in Love; Miloš Forman, 1965, Czechoslovakia); Banshun (Late
Spring; Ozu Yasujirō, 1949, Japan); Conte de printemps (A Tale of Springtime; Eric Rohmer,
1990, France).
15. Stanley Cavell, “The Ordinary as the Uneventful,” Themes Out of School, 192.
16. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (enlarged
edition) (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 174
17. Work on the conventions of film genres, and their developments and variations
over time, is plentiful, but in film study the role of the convention for generating excellence
in expression is less often pursued. Three good exceptions to this are Andrew Britton, “The
Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and ‘The Classical Style,’” Cineaction!
15 (winter 1988/89): 47–63; Robin Wood, “The Noriko Trilogy,” Cineaction! 26/27 (winter
1992): 61–81; Douglas Pye, “Bordwell and Hollywood,” Movie 33 (winter 1989): 46–62.
18. In the long period of time between finishing this piece and proofing prior to publi-
cation, I was lucky enough to discover the essay by George Toles, “No Bigger than Zuzu’s
Petals: Dreaming the Real in It’s a Wonderful Life” and its companion piece, “Thinking
about Movie Sentiment: Toward a Reading of Random Harvest” in A House Made of Light:
Essays on the Art of Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Toles has a su-
perbly sustained account of the therapeutic possibilities for sentiment in films and Capra’s
specific handling of it, and because his account uncannily shares many of the concerns of
this piece, I am keen to include some of his eloquent insights in the footnotes.
19. Toles writes: “Capra seizes upon conventions as the quickest route into a scene,
just as Astaire sidles his way into a dance by a series of simple, orthodox steps, which are
minimally communicative about the flights of invention that his motions will inscribe later
on. Conventions bring the ground for scenes into preliminary focus, but the scene-structures
that feel their way into being on that ground are meant to shed this easy affiliation with the
usual setup and become self-sustaining. Capra is not at all interested in the habitual, some-
what protected mode of response that conventions necessarily bring with them. What he
consistently strives to distill out of them is a moment that effectively bursts the bounds of
a familiar situation. His goal is to powerfully transcend convention without undermining it
. . . For his major scenes to work properly, Capra believes that they must be made to feel
highly compressed. Convention allows Capra to bring the viewer swiftly into the midst of
a strong dramatic situation.” Ibid., 57.
20. Cavell wrote this in 1971, but it still holds relevance for me: “Only about operas,
certainly not about novels or stories or poems or plays, would we accept so casual and
sometimes hilariously remote an account as we will about movies.” Cavell, The World
Viewed, xx (original preface).
21. George Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore;
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 10.
22. This observation originally appeared in Klevan, “The Composition of Charisma,”
54.
23. Wilson, Narration in Light, 10–11.
24. Cavell compares this period of Hollywood to the modern period: “The quality of
distinctness assured through recurrence was equally obvious in the supporting players of
Hollywood’s stock company. Not to remember the name of a traditional Hollywood bit
player is possible, if hardly excusable; not to remember their faces and temperaments is
unthinkable. But the fact is that I cannot call back the faces of critical minor leads in several
of the best recent neo–Hollywood films. . . . In itself this may not be surprising. These fig-
ures just haven’t been in enough films to have become memorable. But there is more to it.
My feeling is that they could not become memorable. I have no sense of the range of role
or temperament they may occupy, and these isolated films have been insufficient to establish
that sort of resonance for them. But without that, there is no world before us.” Cavell, The
World Viewed, 76.
25. Leland Poague, Another Frank Capra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 186.
26. Ray Carney, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Hanover and London:
University Press of New England, 1996), 392.
27. Cavell, The World Viewed, 27–28.
28. Ibid., 97.
29. Ibid., 98.
30. Toles explores the therapeutic benefits of a viewer’s sentimental absorption: “Too
often ignored are the possible psychic benefits of integration [with the film]: a less guarded
way of attending to the visions and voices that film offers us. Integration, as an imaginative
experience depending on a willingness to be ‘seized,’ a willingness to be wholly vulnerable

to something, to be released from the protection that control and distance give us (at a
price), may well bring normally isolated areas of the psyche into healing contact with each
other. The bridging of inner gaps which the conscious mind does not really know how to
accomplish . . . is one of the possible results of a strongly emotional participation in film.”
Toles, A House Made of Light, 85.
32. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown
Woman (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 128.
33. Stanley Cavell, “What Becomes of Things on Film,” Themes Out of School, 180.
34. Ibid., 180.
35. Carney, American Visions, 433.
36. Poague, Another Frank Capra, 200.
38. Perkins, “Must We Say What They Mean?” 4.
39. Ibid., 5.
40. Perkins, “In a Lonely Place”: The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio Vista,
1994), 231.
42. Ibid., 5–7. Although not my concern here, Cavell also uses these observations to
take up the matter of the aesthetics of human suffering.
43. Cavell, The World Viewed, 166.
44. Ibid., 165.
45. Ibid., 189.
46. Cavell, Contesting Tears, 122.
48. “Capra’s strategy throughout Wonderful Life is to ask us to look at things as though
he expected us to grasp them immediately, to catch them at a glance, as it were (and we do
proceed with that confidence); then, once we have taken the incomplete view as the com-
plete one, Capra ‘remembers’—with the convincing illusion of afterthought common to
master story-tellers—that what we have effortlessly sized up is “not quite all” that we need
in order to make a correct judgment. The ‘forgotten’ detail that he delays bringing into play
until that point when the viewer supposes that nothing further is required, usually transforms
his sense of what is truly the matter at issue . . . Capra counts on our imaginatively holding
on to the things that he most quickly relinquishes. For it is chiefly in their absence that
things demand to be known more intimately, and that we begin to give them the weight and
value that belong to them . . . Numerous crucial details . . . are slipped into the narrative by
Capra with such rapidity and such a glancing touch that it almost appears that they were
not meant to be recalled; but of course, they are, and it is gratifying to feel that a whole
host of things one casually latched onto in passing prove to be essential pieces of knowledge
later on. All of them are eventually called back, just as the entire community is in the film’s
closing scene, for an emotionalized rediscovery.” Toles, A House Made of Light, 64, 58, 67.
50. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 14 (footnote).
51. Cavell, Contesting Tears, 122.
52. Carney, American Visions, 426–27.
54. Ibid., 123–24.
55. Ibid., 127–28.
56. Carney, American Visions, 427.

58. Other aspects of his body are shown as well as his face, including his outstretched
arms—and accounting for the significance of this would amount to a further aspect of this
discussion—but I emphasize his face here because it is his face that is emphasized by the
angels.
59. Ibid., 186.
8
The Avoidance
of Stanley Cavell
GARRETT STEWART
Stanley Cavell, professor emeritus of aesthetics and the theory of value at Harvard,
though a philosopher by training and appointment, has sent to print in the last three
and a half decades some of the most passionate and commanding essays on literary
aesthetics and literary value to be found anywhere in the postwar critical canon.
Over this achievement there is little if any dispute. Despite the accolades, then,
why has this work been to a discernible extent overlooked in the discussions that
stand most to gain from engaging it? Such was the broad question that led to my
embarking on this essay. In the commissioning editor’s more specific terms, I was
asked to consider “any hesitancy in the literary response to Cavell’s work, as well
as what has really been useful.” The more precise the formulation, the more dis-
turbing the question.
Useful? Reason not the need? The trouble with any weighing of use value in
the literary academy today is not a problem in the general “theory of value,” much
less in the free flow of ideas in a disinterested economy of exchange. Just because
Stanley Cavell’s stock has always been high does not mean that his ideas have
been heavily traded. Right at the moment, multinational interests hold sway: post-
coloniality, race, subaltern studies, globalization, cultural hybridity, pluralist iden-
tity politics. Before that, New Historicism. And before that, deconstruction. Just
when Cavell emerged to wide notice in the late sixties with his monumental essay
“The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear” which reminded us that philos-
ophy might be the true interlocutor rather than the mostly silent partner of High
Theory, the well-advertised cartel of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault was beginning
to monopolize the Anglo-American field—and at times seeming to swallow up
Cavell’s own premises, however dimly glimpsed.1
The passage of years has scarcely improved the situation for interdisciplinary
exchange in this vein. Indeed, my essay lines up behind several others of the last
decade on the regrettable undercirculation of Cavell’s ideas. This alone may give
pause. How many books and articles on the disciplinary nonassimilation of Stanley
Cavell’s thinking would begin to count as redress? But then that is not exactly the
right question. The point is not to decide how much Cavell is appreciated, or not,
or how widely, or even how deeply—and then to fill the gap. The point is to
wonder (and so to ask out loud) why there persists a particular kind of “hesi-
140
The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell 141
tancy”—or resistance—wherever the work is quarantined from serious consider-

ation.
Michael Fischer has written a whole book to investigate the grounds of “ne-
glect” in the specifically literary reception of Cavell—namely, the neoskepticism
at its base.2 Stephen Melville, surveying the full armory of Cavell’s interests, laun-
ches a more recent essay by locating what we might call four avatars of disregard,
with Cavell positioned as “a maverick figure within the American philosophic
academy, an obscure resister of mainstream contemporary film theory, an odd man
out with respect to the current literary theoretical orthodoxy, and, I imagine, a
figure of retrograde enthusiasms to a community of Americanists largely in flight
from New Critical canonization.”3 It is the last resistance that Melville confronts
most directly when he draws out an implicit epistemology of reading from Cavell’s
account of Emerson’s philosophical essays.
Two observations may deserve to interrupt at the outset this compressed resumé
of response. The first has to do with the articulation, the second with the distribu-
tion, of resistance. First, what increasingly strikes a reader looking to assess the
gauntlet thrown down by Cavell’s work to reigning literary-critical models is that
the complaints against him are best, and most often, phrased by his champions.
This strikes me as close to unprecedented in the ordinary channels of academic
discourse. It is as if the nuance, capaciousness, and candor of Cavell’s thinking
hold the seeds of dissent within the toils of their own subtlety, so that only his
most devoted close readers can judge the pressure of counterargument from within
the weight of original formulation. You have to be tuned in to begin with to imag-
ine where the static might occur. Sympathetic readers of Cavell, that is, best pledge
their allegiance by imaging an objection as if it were their own, so that even debate
waits within testimonial as its true measure. And is not this (we may come to think
with a little more evidence) no less than the very proof of the Cavellian method: a
reading so intense as to internalize the shadow of its own alternatives?
The second preliminary observation has to do with the different cast of resis-
tance to Cavell’s enthusiasms depending on whether he is meditating on Shake-
speare or on such favored authors of the now debunked “American Renaissance”
as Thoreau or Emerson. Although the tragic humanism of Cavell’s Shakespeare
does not sit well alongside the latest postures of critique, it is the particular brand
of American liberal humanism, namely heroic individualism, that makes Cavell’s
approach to certain American authors so uniquely unpalatable to the newer genera-
tion of politicized and materialist readers. The Cavellian problematic of self and
other, however melancholy, is found to turn its back on materialism precisely
where the given of the human spirit takes precedence over what is given to it as
material subject. Socioeconomic readings of the capitalist American canon—and
Emerson’s reputed sponsoring place in it—feel obliged to resist what they see as
Cavell’s complicity in the elevation of the liberal free agent, emancipated by suffi-
ciency to the leisure as well as the labor of spiritual contemplation. To borrow the
title of Cavell’s book centrally on Emerson, Conditions Handsome and Unhand-
some, the most unhandsome facts of economic determinism would be found by its
critics to disfigure his very topic, occluding a class- and race-based problem of
other bodies as well as (and before) other minds.4
This is a difficulty in the assimilation of the Americanist Cavell that has, since
Melville’s essay, been lucidly drawn out by Cary Wolfe.5 In a separate but not
unrelated context, Emily Miller Budick sees Cavell as the potential mediator be-
tween the excesses of Americanist New Historicism and those of Anglo-American
deconstruction.6 This mediation would be made possible by Cavell’s salutary effort
to break the deadlock of what Budick rightly detects as a “linguistic (and hence
moral and political) determinism” (59). For New Historicism, words are so satu-
rated with cultural weight and hence ideology that they block hermeneutic freedom,
whereas for deconstruction they are so underdecided that they resist reading. Ideo-
logical critique forecloses meaning in the culturally foregone conclusion; decon-
struction foreshortens meaning into a verbally unfixed and decentered skid of refer-
ence, flattening the sign to sheer signifier. Each, as Budick puts it, “may obliterate
the space between ideology and interpretation” (60). Cavell’s approach to reading
would reoccupy that space, making it habitable once more. Here again two of the
reigning movements of the last three decades in literary scholarship have stood to
gain more than they knew from Cavell’s sustained discriminations.7
The same parting of methodological ways attenuates the conversation around
Cavell’s Shakespeare studies as well. I will be turning to this “hesitancy” over
Cavell’s version of Shakespeare after considering a resistance more pervasive yet,
bedeviling the reception of Cavell’s work on Walden and The Philadelphia Story
as much as on Othello. Cutting through questions having to do with difference of
“opinion” in literary and philosophical circles, one writer has looked the problem
straight in the eye. I refer to the question of Cavell’s style and to its most searching
defense in the work of Timothy Gould, a defense which intersects with the larger
issue of methodological reception at another level. Brilliantly relocating the prob-
lem of style as a problematics of voice philosophically defined, Gould thus situates
manner at the heart of Cavell’s matter: a manner probing as it does the grounds of
human connection, yet with a flourish that appears so self-involved, so “insinuating
and domineering by turns,” that its writerliness seems to undermine the very claims
of “ordinary language” on which it stakes its chances of success.8 Gould’s allusion
to Wittgenstein’s “gaudy and painstaking modes of writing” (xii) would seem to
apply in a different key to Cavell’s. That such extreme forms of expression should
be mounted in Cavell to stage the possibility not of style’s signature effects but of
communicable voice as a condition of human intimacy is a “central irony” (1) of
Cavell’s work, according to Gould, and a disabling one in some quarters.
Cavell’s diction is straightforward enough, no technical argot, and the syntax
much of the time cadenced not unlike speech, but it all comes at us with a heft and
velocity and wrought thrust that transfigures the ordinary (from within, perhaps, but
often beyond recognition). At his farthest “pitch of philosophy” (from the title of
Cavell’s recent book), the high-flying periods have an unholy confidence and bra-
vura intonation that put us in mind of prose arias, but only in mind—not in earshot.
To think of this as a case in point for the everyday voicing of human expression
is a critical stretch. Gould makes it into a philosophical leap. But the temper of the
times would not let every literary theorist take the plunge with him, as Gould is
well aware. One name for this refusal, though vestigial enough at this stage of
posttheorical cultural studies, is deconstruction. This is the literary school which
Michael Fischer’s book had already joined a host of previous critics in teasing out
as, in its own right, a form of skepticism: a skepticism on those overlapping fronts
crucial to Cavell’s problematic, a doubt about the availability of the world (through
reference), of other minds (through expression), and of myself (through any inner
voicing of the cogito).
Gould will not let the specter of deconstruction get in the way of what he
has to say about Cavell’s modes of saying, nor of their place in the “model of
reading” that he incrementally educes from Cavell’s hermeneutic as well as philo-
sophic practice. Disentangling the suasive force of Cavell’s writing from all mysti-
fied aura of “metaphysical voice” (108−10), where self-presence is a grounding
only because transcendental axiom, Gould attends instead to the pluralized and
oscillating play of Cavellian voices in order to win them back, variously if not
collectively, for a paradigm of conversible interchange with the reader: Cavell’s
reader, yes, but before that the literary reader whose recruited investments in a
text have been so powerfully examined by Cavell himself. To render this auditory
of voices a shade more hospitable to deconstruction, with its overthrown phonocen-
trism adrift across the flux of the signifying mark, as one might be inclined to do
by putting quotes around the “voice” of writing, would be mostly meant to clear
the air for a sharper registration of the true Cavellian tone rather than to plug our
(otherwise duped) ears to it. But in doing so, we are also beginning to track a
more widespread reverberation of the deconstructive critique, one that collides with
Cavell’s Shakespeare essays precisely where such critique, following the likes of
Foucault and Althusser, has widened its aim beyond human textuality to the hu-
man agent itself as quasi-textual assemblage. We thus cross the receding threshold
from deconstruction to constructionism. This will take a little more space to bring
out.
If my reflections had never been invited, there is already on record an essay
that, as far as it went a decade back, serves expertly in this same line of inquiry:
an essay staring over a paradigm brink when it still looked like a contested water-
shed. This is Richard P. Wheeler’s “Acknowledging Shakespeare: Cavell and the
Claim of the Human,” whose title alone lodges two of its main points: Cavell’s
continued dedication to the textual integrity of authorship and his abiding preoccu-
pation with the human condition and its inherent finitude, in both its given and its
self-inflicted limits.9 From the vantage of Wheeler’s essay in 1989, these commit-
ments were found at odds with the New Historicism’s growing hegemony, as repre-
sented by such critics as Jonathan Dollimore, Jonathan Goldberg, and Stephen
Greenblatt, each (with their deconstructively inflected posthumanism) arguing in
different ways for the dissolution of authorial into social energy. Words are no
longer determinedly those of the major author but rather discourses of the writer’s
culture dubiously funneled through the single strong work. And anyway words no
longer express the human subject off the stage or page either; in being evacuated
from that subject, they void it by definition. Cavell’s passionate ear for “dialogue”
(part of his commitment to conversation in Shakespeare, in Hollywood comedy,
and in the circulatory energies of his own writing) would founder on this logopho-
bic skepticism—if, that is, it were nearly so convincing an approach as Cavell’s
own. Wheeler certainly does not find it so.
But I have highlighted only two facets of Wheeler’s overview. For him, there
are in fact five premises animating Cavell’s work on Shakespearean theater that
have fallen into fashionable discredit since the 1969 appearance of the Lear essay:
autonomy, unity, expression, intentionality, and human nature (136−37), each of
which, as touchstones, can of course be seen passing between author and charac-
ter—or constitutively denied to both at once. As “an attribute of art, of a work of
art, of a genre, of an artist, and of a human subject” (136), autonomy has been
decentered and diffused beyond (re)cognition—and with it the unity for which it
strives, the intentional expressivity that fulfills it. The Shakespeare text, as model
of such expressive unity, such autonomous plenary authority, no longer draws stu-
dents and scholars of the period in the same way as it did—and does—Cavell.
Wheeler takes us even deeper into the issue when he grapples more directly
with Stephen Greenblatt’s influential reading of Lear, where the play’s theatrical
illusion of violence and its purgation can be historically located not just in Catholic/
Protestant debates over witchcraft and exorcism—debates which we read today, in
hindsight, as passé, naive, and ideologically invested on both sides—but in the
very retrofit of contemporary audience response.10 Here lies, for Greenblatt, the
continuing cultural viability of a theatrical violence that sustains wholesale, by
locally extirpating, the illusion of lived fullness in a world otherwise recognized as
that of self-presentation rather than self-presence. Catharsis is overturned as para-
digm by constructionism, a variety of what Greenblatt would call cultural self-
fashioning. From his slightly removed seat in the balcony, the structuring of desire
seems clear. We go to Shakespearean theater not to live through a death but to live
through the illusion of a depth of identity worth dying to confirm—an illusion
long-lost to the present-day viewer. Compared to this historical distancing and
emotional withering of the play in more recent criticism, even Cavell’s slips are,
for Wheeler, the defects of an inestimable virtue. In Wheeler’s specific arguments
with Cavell’s account of King Lear—in its purported underreading of incestuous
sexuality in Lear’s panic over a loosening grip on his daughter—Wheeler finds
that Cavell identifies so completely with the tragic hero that he participates in
Lear’s own fantasy of unstinted reciprocation for a father’s love. A passing com-
ment in a footnote is revealing here, since “such may be simply one of the hazards
his criticism runs, dependent as it is on his deep immersion in the texts he reads.
It is, I hasten to add, a hazard well worth running” (159, n. 28).
In a further effort to pin down the terms of Cavell’s reading, its reason for never
speaking the name of one of the loves that dare not speak its own, I need to
mention two other orientations of Cavell’s work—in Shakespeare and in film—that
have fallen out of favor, or at least popularity, before drawing the renewal they
might have in an encounter with just that work: namely, a psychologizing rigor
repeatedly drawn back to the family romance as the structuring fundament of all
desire; and, equally urgent and waning, a metatheatricality so constitutive that it
rethinks the whole formalist mandate in the reading of such “performance” texts.
To draw out the inferences of the first, in the teeth of Wheeler’s critique, is at the
same time to highlight a missed bridge to another of the most powerful literary
thinkers of Cavell’s day. This is René Girard, whose searing view of derivative
passion in postromantic literature, its always mediated or triangular nature, is partly
explained in terms of an Oedipal rivalry that never goes away, that poisons all
desire with contest, that deforms every love object into a rejection of the original.
Oedipus is the blind patron of all discredited romantic passion. Or put closer to
home: the father’s ghost hovers over all disenfranchised desire. In a passage to
which Wheeler alludes (and from which he quotes a few phrases) in his argument
that Cavell minimizes Cordelia’s felt incestuous threat from her father, we might
well take this to be just the point of Cavell’s fine unfolding thought:
I do not wish to suggest that “avoidance of love” and “avoidance of a particular kind
of love” are alternative hypotheses about this play. On the contrary, they seem to me
to interpret one another. Avoidance of love is always, or always begins as, an avoid-
ance of a particular kind of love: Human beings do not just naturally not love, they
learn not to. And our lives begin by having to accept under the name of love whatever
closeness is offered, and by then having to forgo its object. And the avoidance of a
particular love, or the acceptance of it, will spread to every other; every love, in
acceptance or rejection, is mirrored in every other.11
This is not (pace Wheeler) to deny or even minimize Shakespeare’s sense of inces-
tuous anxiety in Lear but rather to suggest that, in this play, the threat of incest
lies not so much in looming abuse as in the disabusing of all illusions about love.
In fortifying Cavell’s argument against Wheeler’s otherwise revealing demur-
rals, I scarcely wish to blame Cavell for not openly invoking Girard, far less to
ferret out an “anxiety of influence”—here or in the repeatedly thematized avoid-
ance of an incestuous deadlock in the Hollywood remarriage comedies taken up in
Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness. There is no retributive fantasy of poetic justice
lurking here. It is not that Cavell is now punished by apparent neglect in some
circles for what he himself commits in the case of Girardian triangulation: availing
himself of a fallout so subtle and pervasive that it does not count as uptake. For
even that would be an optimistic reading of Cavell’s own legacy as widespread
and indelible. My point is rather that even the “deconstruction” of autonomous
desire in Girard—its displacement into a chain of narratable substitutions—seems
too literary in its application, in part because too character-based, for recent schools
of social materialism and cultural poetics. Girard is concerned, like the great ironic
literature he probes, to denaturalize from the ground up a human autonomy whose
nonexistence is now taken untroublesomely for granted. Like Cavell, Girard writes
as if major literature were the lens under which the deceits of desire come into
focus, whereas the most sophisticated recent criticism insists on seeing literature
itself, in its very form of dissemination, as implicated in the artificial maintenance
of such desire, such constructions of the subject.
In that second regard, if to a different end, the artifice of theatrical literature,
with its complex lines of identification and distance on stage, has often preoccupied
Cavell’s metadramatic commentaries—and offers a direct link to his suggestive
ontology of screen versus stage in The World Viewed. The dramatic rather than
cinematic side of these issues is never more fully articulated, however, than in his
essay on Lear, with its pressing investigation of theatrical presence and remove.
For Cavell, the untraversible distance from us of characters on stage is a function
of a skepticism activated but bracketed by the theatricalized conditions of specta-
torship. If the skeptical withdrawal from the world can, in general, be depicted as
the reduction of life to a drama performed at a fixed distance from us, then drama
per se can be called a skeptical therapy. And less because we feel for a suffering
not our own than because we embrace our outsideness to all real pain as temporary.
This is the way the stage work does its work for and upon its audience. Theater
keeps our distance for us until closure, when its silence leaves the rest up to us.
Shakespearean theater, by “giving us a place within which our hiddenness and
silence and separateness are accounted for,” thus “gives us a chance to stop” (Dis-
owning Knowledge, 104), which is to say a chance to start afresh, to take up with
the world once more. A chance and a risk. When the play is over, and our power-
lessness to intercept its pain has been lived through, we can now elect our presence
again to the world beyond the stage, can cease sitting back from it. If theater
succeeds, its power is less to have suspended our disbelief in the fictive (a relatively
simple matter) than to have openly and artificially suspended our belief in the real,
thus releasing us back to it in due course. Skepticism puts the world at a fixed
distance; theater puts just that withdrawal on hold for the scene of another sort of
distance penetrated at once by meaning and by feeling. In sum, the complementary
relation between the skeptical and the theatrical installed by tragedy becomes a
corrective one.
The metatheatrical probity of this Cavellian dialectic is not calculated to win
interest (forget credence) from those critics supposedly wised up about literary
identification. Wheeler’s essay, as I say, offers a finely judged plateau from which
to view, in retrospect, a widening and unfordable gulf in Shakespearean studies.
A decade later, prospects cannot be said to have brightened.12 Beyond the early
methodological fissures noted by Wheeler’s essay, especially the break into decent-
ered semiosis that drove all pre-Nietzschean philosophic considerations from the
field of early modern (formerly Renaissance) studies, it must also be said that there
are two further “schools” out of sympathy not only with the reciprocations of
metatheatrical sympathy in Cavell but with the whole ideologically freighted notion
of “love”: the feminists and the Foucauldians. Cavell’s reception has been ill-
served by a sex-and-gender paradigm braced against the supposedly placid hetero-
sexist norms in so much of his writing on theater and popular film. The feminist
critic might well be so quick to see Cordelia’s victimage, for instance, that any
investigation of the play focused through Lear’s skeptical deadlock might easily
lose force. Unguarded asides of Cavell’s like the following from Disowning Knowl-
edge do not help much either, as regards the tenor of reception in this camp: “Then
are we to conclude that the issue of skepticism does not arise for women? (I do
not want this question now to expose the apparently more general question whether
philosophy as such arises for women” [16].) Fully justified in a context of a one-
sided anxiety in The Winter’s Tale about whether one’s children are knowably
one’s own, the gendering of the skeptic’s pain leads Cavell into apparently exclu-
sionary waters. When his thinking takes a similar turn in his book on the Holly-
wood comedies—where the male protagonist is repeatedly seen to assist in the
“creation of the woman” by overcoming his own doubts about, if you will, the
fullness of her company—the formulation can seem openly paternalistic, to say
nothing of feminism’s underlying doubts concerning the whole book’s celebration
of marital parity as a thing of wit rather than politics. For much of the misunder-
standing that has attended such remarks, Cavell has sought not expiation but clari-
fication in his prolonged engagement with feminism and queer theory in Contesting
Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996). But is the film studies
(now cinema studies) audience he once unjustifiably lost even listening anymore?
The avoidance of love goes even deeper, deeper even than the deconstruction
of sex itself, in the Foucauldian (via Althusserian) master plot. We can approach
this from material already at hand. What I am suggesting is that the differences so
well demarcated by Wheeler between Greenblatt and Cavell do not reduce to a
narrow specialist debate about metatheatricality in Shakespearean drama. The pre-
sumptions—or at least the moves (mutual evacuation)—that render the elegant
schematic reversals of Greenblatt’s thinking so cleverly accessible were already at
the time widely familiar to academic audiences well beyond the confines of early
modern scholarship. They have to do less with the theatrum mundi rethought by
Cavellian irony than with the private theatricals of identity-formation itself. From
a perspective like Greenblatt’s, the tragic exit scene of any one dying hero on stage,
with all that is sensed lost by such violence, would seem to forestall admission of
a greater and definitional loss. Enter, of course, Foucault. The imitated plenary
beings that give utterance to themselves on stage are the undead of humanism, yes,
but we are their vampires as well—nostalgically feeding our own comforting illu-
sions of presence. Shakespearean tragic heroes, that is, die for our sincerities, which
have everywhere else lost their savor and faith. Their deaths hide the foregone
conclusion of a greater Death: not of Christ, or even of God, but of the Human.
Like sex, violence is the exception that proves the rule of integrated—rather
than dispersed and transgressive—human agency. Foucault is everywhere the guru
of this thinking—and the phantom sparring partner with Cavell, I suspect, in a
widespread impatience with the latter’s terms. But this is a Foucault who has with-
drawn so far behind the curtain as to leave his arguments as the very ether of
received wisdom. The issue is no longer, as in Cavell, the perceiving subject setting
out to theatricalize existence as its only way to know it, in distance and hence
obliteration. The deeper issue, we are now shown, is that the subject is itself theatri-
calized from within, a construct and an enactment, or—in that most vitiated (and
hence, one assumes, inimical) borrowing from Cavell’s own master, J. L. Aus-
tin—a “performativity”: the cogito replaced by something like “I do myself.”
Cavell’s terms could only seem entirely backward, in both senses, to the Fou-
cauldian initiate as posthumanist. Instead of love, there is violence in Shakespeare,
yes, which we are to think, via Cavell, betrays all that any kind of love, sexual
included, would affirm. But we have been smartened up since Shakespeare’s day.
Sex, as is all the more obvious with love, is a discourse not a praxis, an armature
of acculturation rather than its private chaotic remission. With a capital S for Signi-
fier, Sex has been reified by the apparatuses of culture into a category, where
otherwise its activity would be all too palpable and nonabstract. So, too, with
violence. Where sex unsettles, violence punishes the body or mind at the additional
expense, but also as the only proof, of the human spirit. Violation is everywhere
in Shakespearean drama, this thinking would suggest, if only so that we might be
a little more sure that there exists something to violate rather than merely to manip-
ulate. It is also there so that, in recoil, we might even harbor thoughts of the
inviolable. Watching characters who are “made up” on stage—invented and given
face—and then driven to the limit of their existence, we are put in mind of all that
we take, also on faith, to make us up. Under humanist ideology, then, character
and role on stage do not deconstruct personhood but shore it up from the underside
(projected as the inside) of dialogue.
I continue to undo some of the inferential knots that bind up this thinking into
a programmatic view, with the full knowledge that any summary of the position
may harden to a cartoon. But so can Cavell be reduced to a cartoon caricature from
the other side. In any case, some general outlines of the rift remain discernible.
Tragic violence comes center stage in Cavell as a figure for a world-annihilating
skepticism, a forced distancing of the other, a killing dissociation. But this is to
pull up short, according to a reading like Greenblatt’s. Looking harder, we are
meant to shred the veil of such tragic sentiment. Posed against all that desperation,
cornered or crushed by such violence, surfaced as inference only by its own efface-
ment, is the otherwise unstageable human essence. This makes tragic drama the
ultimate sop to the attending mob. As an extreme form of two ideological shibbo-
leths, individuality and privacy, the strain of tragic isolation is the cover story of
ideology, masking a lack ingredient to the self and reified as a deficiency outside
it. In this way is skepticism itself a problem manufactured by ideology as the very
supplement of selfhood. In this way does Doubt get reified, set off as a problem
for rather than about the self. Over against Cavell, skepticism emerges on this view
as a prosthesis of the human subject rather than its greatest danger.
This is to say that if the problem of other minds is the secular displacement of
the problem of God, as Cavell shows, this same problematic, lodged at the heart
of humanism as its negative image, is a tactical displacement of the problem of my
own mind. Ideological interpellation depends on me thinking I know my own mind,
and therefore knowing myself to have one, so that I can seem to choose what is
already imposed upon me, what constructs me. If I can cordon off from self-image
my annihilating doubts about the reality of other minds, then in my walled vacuum
(which is actually my Althusserian state prison) I am still deluded into thinking
myself freely empowered, if only in my disaffection and retreat. That is why, we
are asked to realize, characters on stage suffering to their utmost do not, as they
do (among other things) for Cavell, make me accept (rather than insist on) my
distance from them with an empathetic clarity denied to me in the encounter with
real others. Rather, so one version of the constructivist position would object, by
the merest verbal signs, and however much othered by distance, these stage fig-
ments seem to bespeak a metaphysical inwardness which, once we credit it in
them, we borrow by osmosis for our own thoughts, to say nothing of our own
utterance. If selves can be known through the symptoms of their expressive trouble
and doubt and endurance, then so may we be known, even unto ourselves. Suffero,
ergo sum.
On this account, skepticism about others, for Cavell the ultimate threat to some-
thing we might have called humanism, is in fact its soundest bulwark. The retrench-
ment against the skeptic’s repudiation of the world posits as a betrayal of the other
what is in fact a reflex warrantee of the self. To remain locked within the problem-
atic of skepticism as Cavellian philosophy (as well as bourgeois culture) does, we
are told to see, is a way of underwriting the autonomous self that skepticism would
seem to eviscerate. In other words, all that exercised anxiety about skepticism is a
rather direct way of buying into the ideological lie of “unaccommodated man” as
a “bare, forked,” organic, self-present entity (Lear 3.4.99)—when in fact the hu-
man being is a threadbare split subject held in place by the accommodating tem-
plates of the social network. Skepticism, therefore, despite all of Cavell’s florid
angst, should be embraced, we are asked to realize, as the halfway house to a
deconstructed modern agency rather than impugned as a lethal depletion of spirit:
a case of epistemic lucidity rather than a cause for grief.
But slow. If such objections do not seem quite to rise to the occasion of Lear’s
howling desolation, Othello’s maddened grief, Leontes’s contagious paralysis,
Hamlet’s tormented emptying-out of desire, and Antony’s lethal absolutism, then
Cavell might be holding onto something in the plays that is worth not losing. If
Lear avoids the incestuous intensity of his desire by driving away the other kind
of love its human vessel offers instead, all so as to avoid acknowledging his own
dependency and need; and if Othello avoids survived marital consummation for
the same reason, trying to make love into death so that he will not have to live
with never being sure enough of such love in the other to keep it going in himself;
and if Leontes steels (or stones) himself against acknowledging the love of wife
and child so as not to have to doubt, or even to live in the tolerance of such
potential doubt, their legitimate relation to himself; and if Hamlet avoids love under
interdict of the primal scene and its ghostly entailments; and if Antony knows love
only as a foregoing of the world, and hence a fatality—if all this seems plausible
precisely because moving, then Cavell has made his case that these self-assigna-
tions with a tragic fate offer facets of the same historically rooted crisis of episte-
mology: a skeptic turn from the otherness of the world and the minds that people
it. Though we do not have in print Cavell’s views on the massive acceptance of
the Death of Man hypothesis in literary discussion, one can only guess that its
unexamined manifestation in study after study would strike him as doing what
Shakespeare’s tragic heroes do, if without the pain or eloquence: turning skepticism
into a fanaticism in order to render it invulnerable to inner doubts about the very
logic of its outer ones. This is to say that the referential skepticism everyone sees
in linguistic deconstruction extends to antihumanist social critique as well, which
thus stands in need of just that continued challenge it is likely to eschew in Cavell’s
Shakespeare book, among others.
In light of that book’s very title, this is not just a case of disowning knowledge
but of disavowing whole ways of knowing through words. I am not making this
up. The most recent student teacher whose class I visited, a doctoral candidate in
literature, happened to be teaching King Lear that period and led students through
their responses to the scene of Gloucester’s blinding without ever opening the play
during the hour, quoting a single line or phrase from it, or once mentioning meta-
phors or symbols of vision, either by name or concept. Apprentice scholars have
other things on their minds these days, and the craft of reading slackens. The
effects are generational, which is to say exponential. Students who have read only
a little Foucault, taught by younger professors who have read with full enthusiasm
little in criticism before him, are as likely to carry a grudge as a torch. The conse-
quences spread beyond any specific political agenda, less mission than attrition. A
political distrust of “great” writers has devolved into a disuse of great writing.
Yes, the philosophic author of The Claim of Reason has his reasons, anathema
to some, for seeing skepticism as the dead end of human reason; but, worse for the
circulation of these ideas, in reasoning them out he also makes claims on our
attention of an untoward (because so pointed) kind, claims to which increasing
numbers of literary scholars have trouble cultivating a response. In nervous back-
lash, the charge of abstruseness becomes a euphemism for old-fashioned—or the slur
word for too beautiful. When Cavell is at his hardest he may sound soft. In writing
as if discourse could either retain or usefully invent a human voice, writing as if he
would agree, for instance, with Timothy Gould’s way of reading him—as if there
were the idea of a self left to be spoken for in that way—Cavell can seem to under-
mine the acceptance of his whole enterprise among the second-generation rank and
file of social-materialist critics, not least because he makes just such assumptions on
the reader’s behalf. Recalcitrance feels co-opted as well as impatient.
We are nearing the heart of the issue, I am afraid. In a 1993 Bucknell University
seminar printed alongside his published lectures on Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin,
and Derrida, an unidentified appreciative interlocutor is met more than halfway by
Cavell: “When one reads Lacan one looks for hitching posts which allow you to
oversee what you have read. I do something similar to that when I read your texts.
I look for places where you make your discoveries.”13 Cavell: “And you have
trouble finding them? That of course might be a sign of my failure to write or to
think well enough. But it also might be a sign of my best success” (85). This as
opposed to Lacan, one assumes. In Lacan, what one oversees from the hitching
post is the whole much-tilled (if still rocky) methodological terrain. Seeking respite
from the undulations of ruminative detail in Cavell, looking to see where he has
driven his wedge or stake so that you can call it a post, even a signpost, you
realize you have already been ambushed by an intuition from the far horizon before
recognizing it as your own. Cavell continues in this ad hoc response to suggest
that “what I want in writing philosophy . . . is to show that whatever discoveries
are in store, they are not mine as opposed to yours, and in a certain sense not mine
unless yours” (85).
Note Cavell’s telltale phrase “in writing philosophy,” which is not to say not
doing it, of course, or not living it, but which is more than to say, for instance,
“talking philosophy”—or “thinking philosophically.” Philosophy is a textual prac-
tice. That is the way Cavell treats its history—and that is the way he enters it. This
is a point expanded upon in a closing essay to the Bucknell lectures by Richard
Fleming, where he highlights Cavell’s stress on philosophy less as a set of prob-
lems to be solved than as a set of texts to be read (109). But read how? Philosophi-
cally? Literarily? For Cavell, of course, literary textuality writes philosophically,
and should be read that way, when it tackles those crises in language or relationship
to which, in its separate sphere, philosophy, when locating them as problems, has
thought to propose solutions—where it has in fact been (like literature in its differ-
ent way) simply generating texts about them.
The question remains: how to write—and read—such texts, within what permis-
sive (or transmissive) limits. In his reply to John Hollander’s grandly appreciative
review essay of The Claim of Reason, Cavell was moved—or should we say remo-
tivated?—to find that the poet-critic Hollander was responding to something both
poetic and novelistic in Cavell’s prose, since lacking “such perceptions of the fact
of my writing, of a reality to its ambitions, it would have no way to achieve the
ground of conviction it aspires to.”14 The point is reprised in a more complex way
a few years later, where it is clear that the “ground of conviction” is not external
to the writing act, not a matter of audience but of immanent force. In a headnote
to the reply to Hollander when reprinted in Themes Out of School, Cavell recalls
his gratification by explaining “that I look for the conviction of others in what I
say only to the extent that I can manifest my own conviction by it” (141). This
could well seem inside out. Only if he meant what he said could he expect others
to be convinced by it: that would be the ordinary road of argumentative cogency
in philosophical or critical discourse, a one-way street. In Cavell’s suasive circuit,
though, other minds must fund or replenish the perception as if at its source. And
what is this but the literary moment par excellence, intensively “voiced” so as to
be the more readily ventriloquized by the reader’s own participation? It was in the
same year as Must We Mean What We Say? one recalls, that Georges Poulet fa-
mously said of reading and its transfers of consciousness that I become “the subject
of thoughts other than my own.”15 Cavell would return those thoughts to us as our
own after all.
And he would return them for the best of reasons, which is to say for reasons
that go to the undernoticed crux of his entire writerly ambition. To admit to the
fantasy of writing a prose that will be read by others as if they had thought of it
themselves is not a rhetorical vaunt, let alone a sleight of hand, but rather the
lodging of a phenomenological hypothesis—to be tested on the pulse of every new
reading. It is therefore directly to the (missed) point here that Cavell’s sustained
contemplation of the image in Thoreau of “heroic books” as like “stars” in a textual
firmament, so that “they who can may read them,” has not been taken up either by
the thinning ranks of literary phenomenolgy (or for that matter its critics) or even
by such practitioners of a psychoanalytic narratology as Peter Brooks.16 The invita-
tion remains ripe. For what Cavell educes from this master trope in Thoreau is a
sense that stars are the least impersonal of texts, since it is in them that we read
our own fates. As the astrological figure becomes a philosophical paradigm, so
might it have also deserved account in the proliferating work on literary transfer-
ence and countertransference, since for Cavell, amplifying Thoreau, it is the truest
work of a text, in the act of reading, to read and interpret us. Hermeneutics gets
reversed to cognitive therapeutics. As argued into the open here by Cavell, and as
infusing the very texture of his writing in many other places, this is nonetheless a
philosophically grounded view of literature’s reciprocal interchange gone unnoted
by traditional reception theory as well as by the latest wave of psychopoetics—and
left instead, in the best of hands at that, to the gripping last chapter of Timothy
Gould’s philosophical commentary.
So much for the literary roads not taken. Lately, we are often faced with the
more immediate problem of no one at the wheel. In my lingering over this, time
has come for a disclaimer. It could never sensibly have been the burden of this
essay to suggest that all lines of recent literary inquiry conspire to diverge from
Stanley Cavell’s unique intersection of philosophy and literature. A good deal of

common cause has been lost, it seems clear, but this is no place for exaggeration
or lament. Symptoms of hermeneutic decline hold the interest of these reflections
only as they can help us, by default, to a clearer perspective on the operative logic
of Cavell’s whole program, its implicit and pervasive theory of reading. Indeed,
given Stanley Cavell’s abiding allegiance to the phenomenological grip of literary
writing as bearing the potential for philosophical inquiry, he might well be among
the first to agree that the risk of his own going unread is the least of the problems
for so-called departments of English at this methodological juncture. It is the status
of literary reading per se that is in peril, enervated by the very critiques that (in
the first flush of New Historicism) drove reading to such voracious intake outside
the literary canon. Let me make plain the sliding scale of negative associations that
have attached to the literary object in whose spirited “profession” Cavell once
helped instruct his academic neighbors. When read too brilliantly, a Shakespeare
or a Thoreau may end up seeming inimical to all those who resist power in its
every form, including the power of humanist eloquence. And not least because of
the invasive power of such eloquence to render up images of ourselves. This is,
however, a whole new level of retreat from the latent seductions of the literary
signifier. Deconstructive reading, in its furiously literate heyday, used to be called
against-the-grain reading. Rubbing literary texture the wrong way, exposing its
weave and nap, roughening its surface, was at least a way of noticing that surface.
But suspicious antihumanist reading is different. The ideologically compromised
literary effect is now kept at arm’s length, often hermetically sealed off from any
detailed notice. The suspect becomes the distanced. And reading without closeness
is the very rejection of what Cavell would mean by reading.
Over a decade ago now, and already looking back on years of wavering interdis-
ciplinary response, Cavell wrote: “I become perplexed in trying to determine
whether it is to addicts of philosophy or to adepts of literature that I address myself
when I in effect insist that Shakespeare could not be who he is—the burden of the
name of the greatest writer in the language, the creature of the greatest ordering of
English—unless his writing is engaging the depth of philosophical preoccupations
of his culture” (Disowning Knowledge, 2). Leaving aside whether the “ordering of
English” remains a shared concern at all for the newer “adept” of literary qua
cultural study, how was one ever to write (as well as to think) that insistence on
the “Shakespearean” from across a disciplinary border? Cavell further puts the
question to himself this way: “Is the issue of communication between philosophy
and literature itself a philosophical or a literary issue? Something mannerly and no
doubt something unmannerly in my prose is caused by acceptance of such a ques-
tion and by my refusal to decide it prematurely, to decide it judiciously (‘It is
both’), or to decide that it is undecidable (‘It is neither quite’), before closing with
it, keeping it open, enacting it, experimenting” (3). In Cavell’s best moments, as
in that last capping run of verbal apposition sprung from latent paradox (“closing”/
“open”), syntactic structure “enacts” the drive of its own onrushing thought.
To write this way is to command reading closely—which is the answer to his
own perplexity, once rephrased. If Cavell writes neither exactly philosophy nor
exactly literary criticism, maybe what he writes is in fact literature.17 I almost said
just plain literature, but what I would have meant even then is literature in its most
complex form, where demand and reward are interchangeable. And not, of course,
literature as opposed to philosophy. Instead, Cavell outstrips all truisms about the
wedding of form and content in any discourse to generate a mode of writing more
keenly inductive (versus propositional) than most philosophic exposition—but no
less conceptually pressured: a mode and a mood of writing where the ordinariness
of language is estranged from within (the old formalist benchmark in a new philo-
sophic valence). In Cavell’s writing, just as in literary prose, argument and articula-
tion grow indissoluble at the level of affect—and hence of conviction. And if
literature is thus one fair answer to the question about what it is that he writes,
then this would be the first and most obvious reason why mainstream literary schol-
ars will increasingly have a hard time with Stanley Cavell, not as an interloper but
as a challenge for which the skills and the taste and the very aspiration have atro-
phied. In the epoch of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and the semiotics of
social energy, what are called legible texts do not exactly require what we once
called reading at all. And to set out merely to decode, rather than to encounter
along the very contours of expression, the writing of a Cavell or, for that matter,
an Emerson is to give up the game in advance.
After so jaundiced a view of the downhill slide in institutionalized literary study,
I can be forgiven the need for an upbeat finish. Though undeniably providing
litmus tests of our current academic malaise, Cavell’s pages offer, more impor-
tantly in the long run, its tonic alternative. The year was 1971, and not being a
Shakespeare scholar, I suspect I had not yet come upon the Lear essay in Must We
Mean What We Say? But I well remember the thrilling feel of a single reading
moment three paragraphs from the end of Cavell’s brief and inexhaustible book on
film, just out. This was The World Viewed, the play of its very title literary through
and through. The moment in question was a response to the last shots of Carl
Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, where the camera leaves behind a close-up of Joan at the
stake for her own sighting of birds that “wheel over her with the sun in their
wings.”18 In their wings, not on: a most Wordsworthian internalization. The literary
is already in full swing, linked to the sense of cinematic epiphany. On view is
film’s indexical record of a world surviving death—as well as the marked symbol
of a personal resurrection. From the immolation of one life arises the immanence
of a larger life of which the martyr has until now been a part. And more—which
mostly goes unsaid, intuited between the lines, between the words. In death, there
is always continuance. An immortality machine, film is the true medium of this
secularized perpetuity. Those birds go on holding the attention of prose as well as
camera in this tacit four-word ontology of all projected screen presence: “They,
there, are free” (159). What is this but philosophy as criticism as poetry? The
instantaneously eroded grammatical space between the nominative and the locative,
between pronominal subject and its free and separate adverbial placement, arranges
that one word should—as naturally, you might say, as can be—get phonetically
detached from the other as the very microdrama of release in a monosyllabic the-
ater of phrase. In the further swift gust of the verb across the cadenced swoop of
“ey/ere/are,” we audit on the underside of writing a pervasive “air,” the subliminal
breath of airiness itself, all but spelled out as the medium of uplift.
As those numbering ourselves among Cavell’s captive audience know full well,
this is the kind of prose flight that can readily be set loose, whether in a smiting
brevity or a heady dilation, on any page of his work. As exactly a measure of his
“best success,” it is the kind of thing that takes your breath away with thoughts
you did not know you had until they seem drawn forth, already worded, from the
back of your mind—and worded just ordinarily enough in their surprise to ring
true. Even in this academic latter day and age, they still await the attuned reader.
They, there, are free: yours for the taking, both in and up.
Notes
1. In Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York:
Scribner’s, 1969), 267−356.
2. Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), xii, where Fischer notes of Cavell’s apparent dim hearing among
“literary theorists”: “Despite Cavell’s longstanding indebtedness to literature, not very much
has been written about him” (xii). Reasons are sought in the remaining chapters on theory’s
refusal of “the ordinary,” a concept central to Cavell’s deliberations.
3. Stephen Melville, “Oblique and Ordinary: Stanley Cavell’s Engagements of Emer-
son,” American Literary History, 5.1 (spring 1993), 172.
4. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1990). Widening the circle of otherness beyond
human agency does no more to rope Cavell’s thinking into recent debate. It is only the latest
sign of methodological disconnect that when Thoreau is wrenched free from both literary
and philosophical consideration in the interests of deep ecology and ecocentrist theory, he
is entirely—and counterproductively—detached at the same time from a potential Cavellian
model whereby rethinking precisely skepticism’s defensive epistemological distance from
the world might have helped, just might, to philosophize a nonanthropocentric rapport with
the biological economies of the planet. The possibility would at least have been worth
posing. Cavell’s powerful writing on Thoreau in The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking,
1972), however, goes utterly unmentioned in the roughly two dozen cited studies, not all of
them late-breaking by any means, that find their way into a two-part New York Review of
Books overview of the current naturalist debate on Thoreau by Americanist Leo Marx, “The
Struggle Over Thoreau,” 24 June 1999, 60−64, and “The Full Thoreau,” 15 July 1999,
44−48. The story is not as full as it seems.
5. Cary Wolfe, “Alone with America: Cavell, Emerson, and the Politics of Individual-
ism,” New Literary History, 25.1 (winter 1994): 135−57.
6. Emily Miller Budick, “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory
of American Fiction,” in Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkan, eds. Cohesion and Dissent in
America (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994): 48−73. For appreciative
readings of Cavell’s Americanist thinking less immediately concerned to defend Cavell
against tacit detraction, see Giles Gunn, who correlates Cavell’s project with that of neo-
pragmatist literary critic Richard Poirier, in Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology,
Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 146−49;
and Barbara Packer, “Turning to Emerson,” Common Knowledge 5.2 (fall 1966), 51−60,
whose own acquired taste for Emerson is traced out along lines of the conversionary experi-
ence—reading as the overcoming of resistance—detailed in Cavell’s own approach to Em-
erson. See also Sharon Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Imper-
sonal,” Critical Inquiry 25 (autumn 1998), 1−31, where Cavell’s confrontation of philoso-
phy with autobiography (28, n. 36) is correlated with her sense of Emersonian negotiations
between the impersonal and the subjective.
7. It seems exactly right that one of the rare engagements with Cavell here, and directly
against Derrida, would come from the language poet and critic Charles Bernstein, with his
own hypersensitive ear for Wittgenstein’s language games. In “Reading Cavell Reading
Wittgenstein,” Boundary 2, 9.2 (winter 1981), Bernstein finds support in Cavell for his
sense of Derrida’s work as “the philosophy of paranoia” (304). He explains: “The lesson of
metaphysical finitude is not that the world is just codes and as a result that presence is to
be ruled out as anything more than nostalgia, but that we can have presence, insofar as we
are able, only through a shared grammar” (304), which is to say, via Cavell, only through
keeping alive the possibility of reading, not only each other but ourselves.
8. Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2.
9. Richard P. Wheeler, “Acknowledging Shakespeare: Cavell and the Claim of the
Human,” The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1989), 132−60. For the engagement of a general literary theorist
rather than a Shakespearean scholar with Cavell’s book, see Gerald L. Bruns, “Stanley
Cavell’s Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry 16. 3 (spring 1990): 612−32.
10. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” Shakespeare and the
Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985),
163−87, an essay which nowhere mentions Cavell’s landmark reading of the play even
though Greenblatt’s later encomium on the back cover of Disowning Knowledge—and here
is another symptomic disjuncture in the “use” of Cavell—celebrates the essays as “thrilling
and essential reading.”
11. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72.
12. A recent book (by Judy Kronenfield) called King Lear and the Naked Truth: Re-
thinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
makes this all too clear. Despite Cavell’s probing speculations on the Christian subtext of
the play, and, what is more, his project’s overall sense of “the problem of the other as the
replacement of the problem of god” (Disowning Knowledge, 11), Kronenfield makes no
mention whatever of his writing in the index or the voluminous list of cited works. This at
least has the virtue of the naked truth. For there is in fact no point of contact, in this self-
avowed study of historical semiotics, with the reach of Cavell’s thinking, even when it
might impinge directly (but aslant) on the author’s chosen material.
13. Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 85.
14. Stanley Cavell, “A Reply to John Hollander,” Critical Inquiry 6.4 (summer 1980),
589−91; rpt. in Themes Out of School (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 142.
15. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1 (October
1969), 56.
16. For Cavell on this passage in Thoreau, see In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of
Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 16. For the
complicities of invested and displaced identification in the reading act, as often foregrounded
by frame narratives, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narra-
tive (New York: Knopf, 1984) and Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994).
17. This is a suspicion lent weight by Timothy Gould’s thorough case ( see n. 8 earlier)
for the Cavellian task of language as deliberately “producing an illumination that is hard to
capture in a paraphrase” (34). Not only do you have to have been there, reading along, but
to just this extent Cavell’s own writing rises to the literary standard whose chief violation
in the axioms of New Criticism was indeed “the heresy of paraphrase.”
18. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New
York: Viking, 1971; enlarged ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 159.
9
Responses
STANLEY CAVELL
After a number of amiable questions, some fifteen years ago, concerning my path
from the study of music to that of philosophy and how that path might have af-
fected what I expected from philosophy and how I imagined a contribution I might
have anticipated making to the field—fairly familiar issues to me by then, yet still
ones I was happy enough to try to think through in response to new formulations
of interest—an interviewer asked me whether in my contributions I felt the philoso-
phy or the writing to come first in importance, or inspiration. I puzzled myself by
falling quite silent, I might almost say shamed myself, since, according to my
philosophical upbringing, to confess, or even to give the impression, that the way
prose is written matters as much, or in the same way, as what it says or seeks to
establish, compromises philosophy’s intellectual purity from the start, and at the
same time claims something from writing that no standing field could be expected
to ratify.
I seem, notwithstanding, or rather withstanding, to have had no choice over this
hesitation, and I have persistently raised the question of philosophy and writing
specifically when pressed, characteristically in connection with Wittgenstein’s Phil-
osophical Investigations or with Emerson’s Essays or with Thoreau’s Walden,
briefly and more recently in connection with Austin, defending him against Derrida
(sometimes briefly taking note of Kant’s Critiques as proving, or, say, having had
to prove, that world-historical philosophy can be achieved by what we think of as
professors, in academic prose), rarely in any explicit and concerted attempt to
characterize my own manner. I suppose when I have spoken of how philosophy’s
possibilities and necessities have presented themselves to me—an issue that arose
in the first two essays I published that I still use, the opening two of Must We
Mean What We Say? (the first is its title essay, the second is “The Availability of
Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”)—I have increasingly sensed myself sometimes
to be cornered by opposed, it can seem exhaustive, directions of thinking repre-
sented in the traditions of philosophy called the analytical or empirical and the
continental or metaphysical (the names are notoriously poor ones, which for me,
unlike for others of my acquaintance, suggests not that differences between them
are not real and fateful but that they resist formulation, or, say, the discovery of
some third place of perspective), and sometimes by the distrust of philosophy and
literature of each other (more, doubtless, by the wall of the analytical line than by
that of (a strain of) the continental.
157
My stuttering in testifying to the intended precedence in my work of writing or

of philosophy (against a reluctance to affect either indifference to the issue, or to
claim equality between the alternatives, which would not be false so much as
empty) persists, I find, in my responses to the set of essays presented in this vol-
ume, for whose quality and provocations I am most grateful. I mean that I am
equally or alternatively drawn both to an interest in whatever so interesting a series
of interventions have to say about writing and ideas of mine, yet at the same time
no less strongly to a desire to contend with them when they seem to me not to
have taken a particular point of mine. I have no intention of trying to keep track
of which attraction prevails in which passages.
The two initial essays of mine I just mentioned were both written in defense of
what I could point to as something I wanted philosophy to be, the former in defense
of the work of Austin, the latter of the work of Wittgenstein’s texts preparing for
Philosophical Investigations. Both Austin and Wittgenstein, in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, were repeatedly, in my hearing, under attack (and remain so, by pow-
erful philosophical forces) as philosophically empty, even deleterious to philoso-
phy. Richard Rorty in effect asks me—in his prompt review essay of my Claim of
Reason, about the only serious and substantial treatment of the book as a whole to
have appeared, so far as I know, for most of the decade after the book’s publica-
tion—why I care whether their work is accepted as philosophy, rather than, as they
themselves sometimes seem to invite their reader to conclude, work that replaces,
or escapes, what is called philosophy. Rorty is an American philosopher of my
generation—and there is no other known to me who is intellectually or culturally
more broadly informed—who came to be as dissatisfied with his philosophical
education (which is as much as to say, with the contemporary dispensations of
philosophy given to him) as, halfway through a Ph.D. dissertation, I found myself
to be. I had had gifted, generous, committed teachers (it is a pleasure to cite, as I
have in the past, the names of Henry Aiken and Abraham Kaplan and Morton
White) and it seemed to me that each of them was, in different and not-so-different
ways, also dissatisfied with contemporary developments in philosophy; but they
were taking ways beyond them that were, for one reason or another, not open or
not hopeful to me—each of them, as it happens, attempting to recapture something
in pragmatism (in part through their criticisms of it) that its dominant cousin posi-
tivism had eclipsed, something like (maintaining their common allegiance to en-
lightenment thought and to the achievements of modern science) pragmatism’s
concern to understand and further the, let us say, cultural role of philosophy in its
relation to politics and education and science and religion and the arts. I crave
something like this understanding and ambition, but as part of understanding and
furthering philosophy’s quest for itself.
Rorty asks, in effect, if academic or professional philosophy had, as I seem to
imply in my criticisms of epistemology as conventionally taught during my gradu-
ate studies, largely abandoned any such quest by the time, two decades later, I was
completing The Claim of Reason, why it is I bother to attempt to resuscitate that
dispensation rather than save my breath for a direct engagement with more realisti-
cally attractive issues. I might say that resuscitation is not, for me, in question.
Austin and Wittgenstein, as Rorty is right to suppose, have done their work; tradi-
Responses 159
tional epistemology has not survived in anything like its traditional form, if at all.
But their very success had the effect on me—paradoxical it may well seem—of
renewing, indeed increasing, by shifting, its interest. Now the question becomes
how its preoccupations could ever have seemed to express our fundamental con-
cerns about our relation to the world and I and others in it, which, for me, is to
ask how modern skepticism (in Descartes and Hume and Kant) can (have) come
to seem the fundamental question of philosophy. To suggest, as Rorty no doubt
facetiously does, that the rumor of depth to the surmise of skepticism was merely
a ruse of professors trying to convince undergraduates of the significance of philos-
ophy, is an understandably angry memory of tender time wasted and youthful
goodwill abused. His serious criticism here is, I suppose, expressed in his demand
of me “to show that ‘skepticism’ is a good name for the impulse which leads
grownups to try to educate themselves, and cultures to try to criticize themselves”
(p. 14). He thus alludes to, and seems conditionally to offer intellectual companion-
ship in accepting, two of my favorite characterizations of philosophy’s aspirations
for itself.
The offer is handsome, showing how clearly and sympathetically Rorty per-
ceives something fundamental to my ambitions for philosophy; but the condition
he sets upon extending it is one I have to recognize that I had already failed (who
knows how permanently?) to meet, for to characterize the name of skepticism as
capturing, helping define, philosophy’s irreducible responsibility for the world, had
been the guiding, however tangled, thread throughout the writing of The Claim of
Reason. Something like the climax in tracing skepticism, in that book, is its con-
cluding attempt to show its working in Shakespearean tragedy. It is a certain real-
ization of a late intuition of mine that other minds skepticism is, in comparison
with external world skepticism, the more fundamental orientation (The Claim of
Reason, e.g., pp. 451, 454). Of the many asymmetries or interactions I propose
between these addresses of skepticism, the one that at the moment seems to me to
speak most directly to that intuition is this relation to tragedy, namely, that in the
case of other minds the skeptical denial of existence is most clearly revealed, or
expressed, not as discovered but as inflicted, as indeed my denial. Here Descartes’s
notation of “astonishment,” in recognizing that he has no proof of the world’s
existence, is the least of the matter. Here I am instead revealed as lethal, not a
murderer of the world exactly, but the dealer of those small deaths of everyday
slights, stuttered hesitations of acknowledgment, studied reductions or misdirec-
tions of gratitude, that kill intimacy and maim social existence. This perception of
skeptical practice is what has led me sometimes to speak of skepticism as nihilism.
(Skepticism shows its political face when policy rests upon a denial of the human
existence of the other.)
But Rorty will doubtless feel that this begs his question, which is precisely what
the relation is of such instances of, let us say, skepticism, to that dreary discussion
of invented surfaces of things and possible or impossible dreams or hallucinations
that passes for the philosophical investigation of our relation to the world. This
depends essentially, it seems, on Rorty’s opening description of his experience of
The Claim of Reason as two books, one of which he expresses a liking for (Part
Four, the longest part, the one that ends the volume with the discussion of tragedy)
and the other of which a disliking for (Parts One and Two in particular). Naturally,
I can see how one might feel this way. Part Four can seem simply and suddenly
to wrench itself away from the moment in Part One from which it takes its cue,
and begin again, in, as it were, a different frame of mind. I wonder how I might
defend my conviction that the parts could not exist, or, say, would not be what
they are, apart from each other, that they call for each other.
I would like to say that the sense of the later “wrenching itself away” from the
earlier, the air of beginning “again,” already implies a dependence, especially if
one can feel that a certain wrenching, or desperation to achieve freedom, persists
through the book to the end. Here I have to appeal to my sense of the Wittgen-
steinian event, which in my life incorporates and is colored by the Austinian
(whose small body of texts remains, to my mind, drastically underread, as if their
achievements are begrudged). In Philosophical Investigations, where what I under-
stand as skeptical impulses are met with metaphysical assurances that must at best
come too late, the defeat of ordinary language under the pressure of thought (or I
have sometimes said, in the essential restlessness of the creature complex enough
to be compelled to speech), we are held responsible for the illusions of sense that
chronically come out of our mouths. These are, for example, illusions revealed in
the perpetual examples whose counterforce upon our excesses we recognize not
through acquiring and studying new facts but rather by bethinking ourselves of
what we say and want to say about our lives and the world that grounds them.
Recognizing the correctness of Wittgenstein’s replying to one who cries out “No
one can have THIS pain” (striking himself on the breast) (Investigations, sec. 253),
namely that this is no way to provide the criterion, or say to identify, a sensation,
one recognizes (in oneself, not in the unfortunate habits of some beleaguered
teacher or other) that one has distorted the world, the way things are, in an attempt
to demonstrate, or assure, or confess, or deplore, one’s unknownness to it. We are
left with a small instance in which are asked in philosophizing to take on the
responsibility for the world. It will naturally be out of the question to say when
the reality of such a demand will strike one. But without it, Wittgenstein, and the
line of those he sometimes cites as his precursors, the James of Varieties of Reli-
gious Experience, Milton rather than Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, will remain no
more than fine writers.
Another small instance (they are all apt to be small, all ordinary, since all must
fit what falls to our human hands, but their consequences are untrammeled, and
unsurveyable) occurs, I find, in Rorty’s recent review of Bernard Williams’s book
Truth and Truthfulness (London Review of Books, 31 October 2002). Countering
the suggestion that pragmatism denies truth in denying the correspondence theory
of truth, Rorty says: “For Williams himself accepts Nietzsche’s view that, as he
puts it, ‘there is no standpoint from which our representations as a whole’ can be
measured against the way the world is ‘in itself.’” (I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s
remark that a philosophical problem is not well expressed as our inability to do
something, for example, I imagine, see all of an object, know with certainty, will
the consequences of our actions, have the feelings of another.) The Claim of Reason
recurrently dedicates itself to tracing the production and power of a metaphysical
idea of the “in itself,” with a view toward indicating that the failure of our represen-
Responses 161
tations to correspond with what that proposes is not a fault in our representations,
any more than the failure of a sword thrust to impress a ghost is a failure of the
particular thrust. In its metaphysical intensity, “in itself” is used (or pressed), in
Wittgenstein’s familiar term, outside its language game(s). The term implies that
there are language games in which the idea makes perfectly good sense: “It’s the
ambient light that makes the shawl look lavender; in itself it is blue.” But there is
no general set of given conditions under which we (must) view the world as a
whole, or fail to view it, so there is nothing to call the way the world is in itself.
The shawl is blue. Or again: “It is true that the shawl and the gown are both blue,
but their different saturations clash.” The idea that a pragmatist accommodation or
compromise enters into (what we mean by, want from) the objectivity of the con-
cept of a thing’s being, for example, of a blue color is misplaced reasonableness;
metaphysics’ refusal of accommodation (its placing of the in itself absolutely be-
yond us) should not be accommodated; it is a human (mis)construction, to be, in
Austin’s term, dismantled, or, say, defrocked. The shades of blue, it is important
to me, and I have a right, to insist, clash (to my eye). We may get no farther, but
this clash between us reveals something coming between us, a limit in our mutual-
ity (like not sharing a sense of humor).
What causes metaphysical (and skeptical) self-defeat is, for Wittgenstein, we
might say, an incurable, but not, we could say, ungovernable or unassessable fact
of human existence (as it stands), of the life form of the creatures with speech.
From this perspective, pragmatism is a distraction from a knowledge of our condi-
tion, a false relief from the task of grasping its consequences, call this the conse-
quences of finitude. (To give up the quest for certainty concerning the in itself is
to give up nothing—which turns out to be hard to do. I am inclined to say that to
give up the quest for certainty regarding our fundamental convictions concerning
the way our lives are is to give up seriousness in our judgments. They may be
overthrown.)
The human existence portrayed in Philosophical Investigations, as I see it, is
one of continuous compromise with restlessness, disorientation, phantasms of lone-
liness and devastation, dotted with assertions of emptiness that defeat sociability
as they seek it (“I know how tall I am,” placing my hand on my head). Pragmatism
is surely a grand relief (I may say a godsend) in an emergency caused by supersti-
tion, bias, idolatry, magic, or another darkness of ignorance, as when the young
doctor in Bleak House puts the best available intelligence into his caring of Esther
in her terrible illness. But in the incessant, inattentive forces and effects of ordinary
exchanges in which most of life is spent, where we sense ourselves lost, our intelli-
gence baffled, a further reflectiveness is in demand; Wittgenstein calls it under-
standing, the understanding it is philosophy’s vocation to identify and prompt us
to. Wittgenstein characterizes speaking outside language games as being led to
speak absolutely, to ask for absolutes (e.g., the absolutely simple parts of a chair,
as in sec. 47). The alternative is not speaking relatively, since that idea maintains
the metaphysical impulse to imagine that there is something coherent that in princi-
ple is truer than anything we can say. What Wittgenstein seeks to understand, what
Austin seems unable to face, is our craving to speak without a point, to be dissatis-
fied with what can be meant, with this condemnation to speech.
My sense of what I want from my writing is the registration at all times of what
I have called the threat, or menace, of skepticism, expressed as the sense of the
restlessness of, the compromise with, the ordinary. I shall not now, since none of
my commentators on this occasion raise the issue, attempt to compare, to trace the
connection of, this constant compromise of the everyday with the political compro-
mise with justice we live with, hence ratify, in societies that at their best are good
enough (that embody justice enough, meaning that they contain justice enough to
permit reform) to consent to. We are responsible for our participation in both regis-
ters, call them roughly the private and the public (in a sense they are neither).
With philosophical exchanges, as noticed in ordinary language philosophy, we are
responsible at all times for our skeptical and metaphysical flights and plights; with
political exchanges we are responsible, when addressed by a cry for justice, for
judging both whether our society’s partial compliance with justice (using Rawls’s
idea) is acceptable to us, and for responding by indicating how we are serving that
compliance, bearing its compromise, well enough for us to live with it happily, as
happily as the sadness of the world permits. I suppose philosophy’s distinctive
contribution to political argument—doing what will not be done if philosophy and
its contesting with skepticism does not undertake to do it—is to register whether
our arguments with enemies are leveled within a realm that grants humanity to
our enemies, withholding which, out of our skeptical and metaphysical capacities,
withholds us from our humanity.
Several essays (those of Stephen Mulhall, Simon Critchley, and Garrett Stewart)
explicitly, within their differences, make a point of the way I write, something I
know presents a problem for some who might in principle wish to read me. I am
grateful to have the issue presented to me since I feel particularly unsteady, as I
have indicated, in determining how to come to my own defense over it.
Mulhall’s epigraph, from Anthony Kenny’s review of The Claim of Reason,
shows the address of his response to be, in the first instance, turned toward experi-
enced, sophisticated philosophical readers who, it seems, are exasperated by the
writing precisely because they feel it spites the very talents that produce it. Mul-
hall’s strategy, as it were, is to show, continuing the example Kenny adduces from
the beginning of the book, that the writing of the opening paragraphs of the book
is, let us say, responsible, that “trimming” it, as Kenny advises, would deprive it
of something I evidently judge as essential to describing, and exemplifying, my
aspirations for the book. It is, it hardly needs saying, gratifying to have one’s
aspirations so well and specifically and sympathetically understood, and to have
the sympathy attested by the risk of using forms and formulations of my own as
formulations of his, acknowledged when he cites a text of mine that concentrates
on the opening paragraphs of the Investigations, and sealed when he concludes his
opening paragraph by repeating, or trying, in his own voice the concluding sentence
of the offending opening paragraph of The Claim of Reason. But however gratified
I am by the strategy, I can imagine that it may only increase the offense. (As if
one were to respond to the advice to trim by remarking that “trimming,” while it
can mean getting rid of excess, can also mean adding ornamentation, opposite
ways, let us say, of achieving balance and solidity.) The offense seems to concern
Responses 163
the expression of such aspirations at all, in particular an expression that embodies

them. For it is hard to imagine that one reading that opening sentence of mine was
unaware that its author had had some sense of its strangeness, had indeed gone to
some trouble to realize the surprising impulse to begin this book with a gesture
calling attention to the difficulties of beginning to philosophize, to mark off the
particularity of that ambition, let us say confess the arrogance of it, one might even
say the outrageousness of it. The value of such a gesture is hard for the writer to
judge. In my case I can see that, having published three books in roughly succes-
sive years beginning a decade earlier, to no very evident notice, I wanted to begin
again with some indication that I recognized my manner, and interests, to have
given some offense and that, since that seemed, and seems, to me not a matter of
willfulness on my part, I could at best show an awareness of my idiosyncrasies, if
that is what they are, and an intention to take on responsibility for them.
But I can see a little further. I take Mulhall’s partial echoing of certain of my
procedures as earnest of good faith in his declaration as a guiding intuition of his
that The Claim of Reason’s characterizations of the Investigations, and instructions
in reading it, are at the same time a species of something like abstract self-charac-
terizations of, and instructions in reading, The Claim of Reason. I do not wish to
deny the intuition, but it may seem rather more startling in its unprotectedness than
it needs to be. Something like identification with the text under investigation is apt
to be produced more obviously by the mode of, let us call it, interpretative criticism
that I bring to texts that particularly interest me, than is produced by the argumenta-
tive mode of criticism more normally practiced in professional analytical philoso-
phy. I was, anyway to begin with, and for a long time, much less interested in
whether I agree with Philosophical Investigations, than in discovering how that
text has managed to find expression for impressions and ideas that I had to make
sufficiently my own to continue from, in order to follow my own work, as if to
attempt to avoid them (as if that were my only alternative) would have created
destructive obstacles or evasions. (It seems to follow that it is on the whole a good
idea not to encounter Wittgenstein too early in one’s experience of philosophy.
Although it may be with certain texts as Freud sometimes says of unripe interpreta-
tions of sexual material—they should do no harm, since those unready for them
will not understand them.) If there is defiance in my pursuing a different path here,
in, for example, concentrating more on Wittgenstein’s, as it were, literary register
than sorts well with current philosophical decorum, the defiance is directed against
the idea that my way shows more arrogance in response to his texts than does a
dismissal of the literary in favor of a professional insistence that counters, or re-
presses, that register in favor of a literary register that maintains a more purely
argumentative, distancing, face.
I add a further modification to the idea of The Claim of Reason’s reflected self-
characterizations. That idea fits the manner of Part Four more closely than that of
the earlier three parts (except for the opening paragraphs to which Mulhall gives
his concerted attention, written after the years of revisions of the text were com-
pleted, so that at about the middle of page 6 the writing moves into, and palpably
maintains, exactly the words of the opening of my original dissertation, completed
some sixteen years earlier). This suggests two improvements to the accuracy of my
earlier description of the texture of Part Four as wrenching itself away from that
of the earlier parts. First, the first three parts were the result of embarking on the
writing down of a selection of material that was, for the foreseeable future of itself,
meant to stay, let me say, shapely and disciplined enough to be accepted as a
doctoral dissertation. The writing was not everything, but by no means external to
the thing I had come to expect of myself in relating myself to professional philoso-
phy. It was essential to this expectation that I had accepted and gone through the
years of an assistant professorship in the absence of a doctoral dissertation, which
meant that by the time I completed the dissertation, embodying the results of five
years of teaching, it was a document that contained a considerable amount of work
I had lived through and had confidence in. But second, for this reason the writing
periodically, almost chronically, would threaten to bend the constraints of academic
exposition too far, or as I sometimes felt, leap out of its skin. I feel this promi-
nently, with some continuity, at the conclusions of chapters 4 and 5 of Part One.
The question that effectively begins the movement of Part Four—“In what spirit
does Wittgenstein ‘deny’ the ‘possibility’ of a private language?”—is repeated
from that region of chapter 4.
I seem to have had the thought that the seeming arbitrariness of that casual
beginning, starting from what first occurred as a mere aside, could suggest that
unpredictably many—any—past sentences and words of the text might show them-
selves to want or need to be taken further, that philosophy is inherently a matter
of going over something, starting again. (Not a particularly happy thought for one
trying to finish a dissertation.) It was out of some such idea of the philosophical
that the break into Part Four was, in retrospect, called for. Without it, the ideas of
the opening three parts did not seem to me to warrant publication; and at the same
time I felt sure that Part Four would not be professionally acceptable material apart,
at a hope, from its departure out of those opening parts. One foot in, one foot out.
Then, as Freud put the matter, concerning a related sense of progress, in ending
the pleasures of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, citing what he calls the words
of the poet: “It is no sin to limp.” (Are we to register in this an allusion to the
condition of Oedipus? If we did we would have to start again, but down a different
path.)
While Simon Critchley generously perceives my writing, “with its endless play of
voices and its sheer aphoristic force” (p. 51), as recalling the practice of romantic
fragmentation, even as “an amnesial rewriting of [Friedrich Schlegel’s] Athenaeum
Fragments,” he brings the work of the writing within the orbit of his own project
in recalling romanticism, something I am glad of even though he consequently
finds cause to contest my reading of a text we both adduce in furthering our
thoughts in this region, namely Jean-Luc Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthes’s greatly
valuable The Literary Absolute. I do not wish here to defend my reading or use of
their work against Critchley’s, and I confess defenselessness against his charge that
I “overlook the decisive influence of Blanchot’s conception of literature” (p. 42)
on these writers—I am still barely beginning to read Blanchot. But it may be worth
noting that a few minor inaccuracies in Critchley’s account of what I do seem to
me caused by his way of contextualizing what that is. His principal questioning of
Responses 165
my faithfulness to, or misreading of (p. 39) The Literary Absolute is represented

by my apparent claim that the romantic demand for the unification of philosophy
and poetry is “given a ‘fair realization’ in the writing of Emerson” (p. 40), which
might have been consistent with my claim that it is work in progress, except that
when I repeat the claim I omit the qualification “fair” and thus in my own voice
claim that Emerson’s work actually is “the realization of the ideality of romanti-
cism,” namely, claim that it is the literary absolute (p. 41), or in Emerson’s predi-
cates, is “the transformation of genius into practical power” and is “the gradual
domestication of the idea of Culture” (ibid).
But I do not, in dropping the qualification “fair,” drop all qualification of “real-
ization.” What I say, after saying that “Emerson’s work presents itself as the real-
ization of that vision [of the union of poetry and philosophy],” is that “maintaining
fragmentariness is part of Emerson’s realization of romanticism” (quoted on
Critchley’s p. 40). I cannot recapture a sense of what caused me to place that
emphasis on realization, following the qualification “presents itself as”; I surmise
it was an attempt to suggest that Emerson’s goal was to make the goal itself realis-
tic, as I go on, in effect, to replace “fair” (meaning roughly, as Critchley recog-
nizes, “the best available under present circumstances” [ibid.]) by the specification
of the work as “Emerson’s,” thus qualifying, limiting, the work as Emerson’s effort
at realization, in contrast with an absolute realization. I gather that Critchley inter-
prets the passage so as to read with the emphasis “Emerson’s realization,” while
dropping my qualification “presents itself as.” It never occurred to me to guard
further against such reading (perhaps I continue to underestimate the philosophical
difficulties that task might run), since my emphasis on fragmentariness, and the
context of “the gradual domestication of culture” and “the transformation of genius
into practical power” occur in a context of Emerson’s calling for patience (the
closing paragraph of Emerson’s “Experience”), which in effect is a demand for the
kind of waiting, or, say, suffering, necessary to achieve a new future. It is a future
I imagine characterized by Emersonian ideas of “unsettling all things”—a remark
directed at those who claim to have “settled” America—and the perception, one I
have quoted repeatedly, that “Around every circle another circle can be drawn.” In
recent years I have rather harped on Emerson’s citing of the idea of “a new dawn
at noon” (picked up from Wordsworth and Milton), which I have understood to be
transfigured in Nietzsche’s calling for a philosophy of the future. I take the idea to
mean simultaneously a future philosophy, or, say, a future in which to philosophize
effectively (a thought broached at the end of book 9 of Plato’s Republic), as well
as a (present) philosophy interpreting futurity; the future is not, so to speak, the
natural successor of the present, but a departure to be seized and recommended in
one’s own life and work. The future of philosophy and the philosophy of the future
can only occur together; or say that the future is an intervention of philosophy, a
certain (perpetual) overcoming of itself. (Emerson puts the thought by saying that
the young owe us a new world.) This is what I see as compressed in Nietzsche’s
characterizing the philosopher as the man of the day after tomorrow, of Übermor-
gen, of the overmorning, a supermorning, a morning beyond morning, what Nietz-
sche calls “the philosophy of the forenoon.” (Why does this idea not succumb to
Wittgenstein’s attack upon philosophy’s drive to “super-concepts” (Über-Begrif-
fen, as in Investigations, sec. 97)? Perhaps because Nietzsche is not advancing a

thesis, but describing, however oddly, or in however compressed a form, how
things strike him. Take it or leave it.)
My guess is that Critchley is helped to his thought of my claiming to possess
in Emerson an absolute realization of romanticism’s call for a union of poetry and
philosophy by what I called, a moment ago, a few minor inaccuracies in his de-
scriptions of my work. For example, unless I mistake the narrative tone, Critchley
takes me to say that “The idea of a criterion, which is understood as the means by
which the existence of something is established with certainty, thereby refuting the
possibility of skepticism, fails to provide us with the certainty we desire. . . . Cavell
concludes that my criteria will always fall short” (p. 48). That articulation of crite-
ria (almost irresistible, I found for years, in reading the Investigations) is on the
contrary an idea attributed in The Claim of Reason to skepticism’s understanding
of itself. Wittgenstein’s opposing idea is that criteria, in association with grammar,
tell us “what kind of object anything is” (sec. 373), thus leaving open what kind
of issue is posed by the sense of needing some further proof of existence—so that
criteria do not “fall short” in their specification of the real. The sense of their
falling short lies in us, creates, or accounts for what I call a disappointment in our
knowledge, which nothing short of a new future, a new stance of humanity, could
overcome. (This is something I take to be implied in Critchley’s major accuracies,
if I may express my gratitude so, in emphasizing that the everyday or ordinary for
which Wittgenstein seeks to “return” is not to be identified with, is indeed con-
cealed by, an “ideologically repackaged ‘common sense’” [p. 38], and his linking
what I speak of as the “eventual” everyday with Heidegger’s sense of Ereignis
[p. 37].)
Nothing I have said blunts the pertinence of Critchley’s pointed questions to me
about the privileged status I assign the name “Emerson” in my discourse, and
hence what I mean by “America.” I do not know that I can say much briefly of
much use. The place I begin is with my sense that Emerson’s (and Thoreau’s)
claim to philosophizing is, and has from the beginning been, largely repressed,
condescended to, in American philosophy and American literary study. (Even the
American philosophers who loved what Emerson accomplished, particularly
Dewey and William James, were unable to do much textually with him, I mean
take up the transcendental, daily intensity into their utterances. I do not say they
should have; I say they are different.) Nietzsche, as seems to be coming better
known, continued to take inspiration from Emerson with astonishing intimacy, in-
cluding that of aggressively altering what he took. And, as I have said, this inti-
macy is largely forgotten as suddenly as it is remembered, since the inherited
picture of genteel Emerson is incompatible with Nietzsche’s extravagance of obser-
vation.
But the question is why I care about this. One answer is that Emerson’s relation
to classical (European) philosophical discourse (with its necessities and contingen-
cies, impressions and ideas, essences and accidents, fate and will, appearance and
reality, nation and land, intuition and argument) is one of irony and suspicion, in
a manner still, I trust, affording inspiration to philosophy. Another answer is that
if philosophy’s generality and illumination is not that of science, is in a sense not
Responses 167
global, even resists the global (even while it universalizes), then the idea of one of
philosophy’s tasks as bringing a culture to consciousness of itself can be done only
by one who touches that culture’s singular unconsciousness. I do not say this can
be done only by one who is native to the culture, any more than I say that those
native to the culture are mostly in a position to accomplish it. A further answer is
that the America I have wished to discover (Emerson insisting, in effect, that it
exists only in its discovery) is the America in which Emerson and Thoreau oppose
its view of itself as destined to what Critchley calls continentalism, say in the form
of Manifest Destiny and wars with Mexico. Still further, or further back in my
mind, is Locke’s unforgettable remark that in the beginning all the world was
America. The form the thought releases in me is one begun in Emerson’s sugges-
tion that America does not exist, or is not inhabited, that it has not been approached
and arrived at. The thought, panic-struck, is that there may be no longer an
America, not because of its global dispersion, but because the idea of democracy,
of inclusive, equitable, mutual legislation, cannot be mocked indefinitely without
threatening to disappear. My characterization of Emerson and Thoreau as philoso-
phers of immigrancy (a kind of opposite of Heidegger’s thoughts of dwelling and
building) includes the sense that it is apt to be in memories of oppression that
freedom remains heart’s blood. Yet some are capable of imagining oppression as
if they are remembering suffering it.
James Conant patiently and satisfyingly identifies and questions various ways of
mistaking my interest in discovering an American difference in philosophy, and
goes on constructively to locate the conceptual field of my concern by deploying
Kierkegaard’s distinction between subjective and objective categories in order to
define “the peculiar concept of America,” and in a large middle set of sections
omitted from the present version of his text, he adduces details of a project of
Seferis’s that puts a comparable pressure on the concept of Greece. I appreciate
the coup of the idea—apart from the intrinsic interest of the Seferis case—in this
way of recommending a hesitation in concluding that the issues raised for me in
the concept of America are “a fuss about nothing at all” (Conant, p. 60). Among
the other comparable concepts Conant cites, beyond Kierkegaard’s “Christian” and
“Dane,” are “husband” and “philosopher” (ibid., p. 57). Since the Seferis material
is not before us, I shall focus for a moment, out of the array Conant presents of
peculiar concepts, on that of “philosopher.”
It is my impression that my seeking an American difference of philosophy in
the writing of Emerson creates an impatience with respect to the concept of
America, but something more like disapproval with respect to the concept of phi-
losophy—disapproval, I suppose, particularly with the implication that there is
more than one way, even conflicting ways, of becoming, hence recognizing and
evaluating the work of, a philosopher. (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that it goes
without saying that I cannot be understood to recommend that all—American?—
philosophers turn to a study of Emerson. My rescue effort, as I sometimes grandly
think of it, is strictly to lend an ear to those who, drawn by the knowledge of
Emerson as a scrupulous thinker, are apt to be dissuaded by reasons external to
philosophy from following their attraction. If that attraction, pursued, is not enough
to undo what I call the repression of Emerson as a thinker by his culture, then
there is no hope for it.)
The peculiar difference in the instance of the concept of philosophy, using Co-
nant’s application of Kierkegaard, is suggested in the very fact of objective ways
of challenging being a Christian, a husband, an American (no record of baptism, no
acceptable document of divorce from a previous marriage, defective naturalization
papers), whereas we all recognize cases of significant philosophical voices who
have no institutional credentials for their authorization to compose philosophy.
Nietzsche is perhaps the most lurid modern case here; Rousseau and Hume would
be other interesting cases. Suppose we say that the criterion of being a philosopher
(after its self-distinction from being a scientist, or a theologian, or an artist) in the
absence of objective credentials, is that other philosophers recognize the work as
pertinent to their thinking. But is not that really all that shows any work to be
philosophy, since one with objective credentials may produce work that is not
(even does not purport to be) philosophy? The regress (who recognizes the philoso-
pher who recognizes another philosopher?) expresses the fact that philosophy can
accept no authority beyond itself. But there is something more at stake.
If it is taken to follow from the criterion of recognition that there is no formal
criterion of philosophy (for example, the presence of an elaborate and predictable
form of argumentation), then what is looked for in the recognition of philosophy
is, let us say, its seriousness. (Two summers ago at the annual Wittgenstein con-
gress in Kirchberg, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death, half
of the members of a panel on the reception of Philosophical Investigations were
prepared to say either that that text is not philosophy, or consists of work so poor
in its self-understanding as to belie any effort to promote it as representing a signal
philosophical achievement. I am taking the perpetual existence of a conflict so
fundamental within the ranks of professional philosophers as a mark of the nature
of philosophy, in particular, in our age, that it is not a (function of) science. That
is to say, it is a mark of its nature that the claim that philosophy is science, a
particular body of advancing knowledge, must be contentious. Then the persistent
threat to philosophy is not, or not alone, irrationality (in the form of bias or super-
stition or fanaticism, any of which argumentation can serve) but fraudulent serious-
ness, call this sophistry, born with philosophy, as it were its envious (because
despised) twin. I take Nietzsche’s call for joyfulness, following Emerson’s, and
Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s punctual hilarities, as expressive of the irreducible
vulnerability of philosophy to false seriousness. I might at the same time take the
attraction to the particular originating beauties of analytical philosophy to be its
promise of defeating or exiling fraudulence from philosophy from its beginning.
(This was explicit, and insistent, in Austin’s instruction.) But suppose that philoso-
phy’s bad twin is not another than yourself, but rather allegorizes the ineluctable
position of finitude, namely, that one’s quest for reason and for freedom requires
a perpetual overcoming of guises in oneself in which reason and freedom are be-
guiled, fixated, stranded.
The kinds of passages I have favored in citing Emerson (e.g., “I would write on
the lintels of the door post Whim”; “Every word they say chagrins us”; “We lie in
the lap of an immense intelligence”; “Patience, patience; we shall win at the last”;
Responses 169
“In every work of genius we find our rejected thoughts return to us with an alien-
ated majesty”; “Is it so bad then to be misunderstood?”; etc.) seem to me under-
standable as concealing/revealing expressions of, tests of, philosophical seriousness.
I know of no consecutive prose that internalizes these concealments/revelations
more systematically than Emerson’s, including their paradoxes: “We dare not say
‘I think’, ‘I am’, but instead quote some saint or sage”—in this writing of what
we must dare to say, has Emerson said it, or just quoted the sage Descartes saying
it? Seriousness is here exemplified as a form of originality, of which anyone should
be capable, a demand for the origination, call it, of one’s utterances. In Witt-
genstein’s manner: “What we do is return words from their metaphysical to their
everyday use”—which is to say, a use I can own as mine.
Conant several times recurs to the American tropism toward Europe for ratifica-
tion of what counts as intellectual sophistication. It is something that Emerson
shared, and fought, not alone in others. Let us remember that it is only within well
into the twentieth century that American music and American painting have entered
into the history of world art (jazz and film are something slightly else). American
classical literature traveled more readily; but the current interest I have noticed in
Europe in the writing of Melville and of Wallace Stevens takes place in the absence
of a knowledge of the ambience of Emerson throughout American writing. My
prediction is that the interest will not sustain itself so.
The concept of American philosophy not only contrasts with the concept of
European philosophy (I do not guess how well-defined a concept that is) but, in
Emerson and in Thoreau, suggests a confluence of Western philosophy, behind
Europe’s back, with Eastern philosophy (linking up with a strain in Schopenhauer
and in Nietzsche). That there is still need for extravagant measures in counterbal-
ancing Europe’s dictation of intellectual standards (even in an era in which Europe
is in many spots adopting Anglo-American analytical philosophy, that is to say,
reclaiming some of its loss to England and America of the originators of analytical
philosophy from pre-war Vienna and Berlin) is indicated, to my mind, by the
current strong pressure in Europe to identify American philosophy as pragmatism.
I do not think Sandra Laugier’s interest, from her European perspective, in the fate
of philosophy in America is unrelated to these considerations. I have profited (be-
yond the incessant opportunities for clarifying and furthering my thoughts in dis-
cussing with her problems arising in translating texts of mine) from her insistence,
for example, on the idea of Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s philosophizing about, and
in, the ordinary, as bearing decisively on the current, dominant discussion in En-
glish-speaking philosophy concerning questions of realism and of naturalism. I
have no quarrel with what she says in her essay, and what I might add to it would
be better explored in less haste in other circumstances. I would like to acknowledge
that it is her unusual featuring of Austin in her account of contemporary develop-
ments in American philosophy that have helped prompt my return to Austin’s texts
with renewed remuneration (as Austin might have been glad to call it). Critchley
says, having found my treatment of Emerson “Un-Cavellian,” “What is Cavellian
and romantic, in my view, is the endless wriggling between criteria and skepticism,
a movement that is manifested in both romantic texts and the Investigations them-
selves, but equally in the fragmentary quality of Cavell’s prose. Exemplary in this
regard . . . is Part Four of The Claim of Reason.” This movement seems more or
less to be what I earlier called my sense of Part Four as maintaining a sense of
being “wrenched,” pulled this way and that. One struggle is between criteria (i.e.,
the ordinary) and skepticism (the desire for the empty, freedom from myself);
another is between the ordinary and the aphoristic (the desire for the transcendental,
for a satisfaction out of the ordinary that is not provided by the provision of lan-
guage games, that indeed will eventually be disappointed by the correction in lan-
guage games).
Such matters raise two further questions: How am I (each of us) in a position
to speak for (all) others? (It is a question Sandra Laugier emphatically recurs to.)
And also: What fits me in particular to voice what we say? Evidently I must show
how it happens that I have become aware not alone of our common ground, but of
the fact, or circumstance, that we do not occupy it in commonness, that our com-
monness is woven of illusions. This latter awareness is, perhaps one can say, of
the circumstance that I do not share my native language. Emerson expresses this,
I should say, when he cries out, “Every word they say chagrins us” (“Self-Reli-
ance”), and Nietzsche when he asks, “Who today knows what loneliness is?” (new
preface to Human, All Too Human). How do we live with this knowledge of the,
let us say, compromise of the ordinary? This rather reverses the traditional question
of epistemology, namely, What can I know—what justifies, what is the basis of,
my claims to knowledge of the world? Our question becomes rather, How can I
not know the basis of my knowledge, that this is a hand, this a stone, this a man?
How do I repress this knowledge of what we cannot just not know? While that is
not a question Austin would have been pleased to consider, it was in his classes that
the question first took form for me. (This paragraph, I suddenly realize, contains a
reprise of certain formulations in the new preface I recently composed for the
appearance in French of my Pitch of Philosophy. That preface was itself prompted
in conversations with Sandra Laugier, the senior translator of that publication.)
Russell Goodman so reasonably and attractively presents a case for the specificity
of Wittgenstein’s relation to certain texts of James and the generality of his relation
to certain features of (Deweyan) pragmatism at large, and concedes so much of
what is important to my having been moved to emphasize Emerson’s (and Tho-
reau’s) differences from what seems to be included in the label “pragmatism,” that
I almost forget why I felt my emphasis was important to maintain. Certainly I have
no wish to deny that Wittgenstein may “travel some way with the pragmatists”—
Goodman, among many reassuring moments, remembers that in the first essay of
mine I still use, the title essay of Must We Mean What We Say?, I specify (p. 36,
n. 31) three essential points of coincidence between them (the stress on the function
and context of language, and the denial of privacy)—nor deny that Wittgenstein’s
rejection of a pragmatist theory of truth shows “that he is not a pragmatist in some
other sense” (though it is not clear what Goodman takes that other distinctive sense
to be). Dewey’s and James’s insistence on a fidelity to human experience(s) that
goes beyond anything the empiricist tradition had envisioned is precious to me (as
Goodman recognizes), but how is that fidelity captured by overtones of the label
Responses 171
“pragmatism”? What purpose is served by that label? It seems directed to distin-

guish their work, or temperaments, from what might be called the metaphysical, a
struggle against metaphysics as a kind of intellectual emptiness that is no less
essential, as I began by stressing, to Philosophical Investigations. This struggle is
surely an affinity between these pragmatists and Wittgenstein (almost no matter
what their differences in what they conceive as metaphysics); but this affinity is
shared with Kant and with the legion of those influenced by the Kantian event in
the history of philosophy. Given my philosophical outlook, the fact that in the
Investigations the struggle against the metaphysical is bound up with the detection
of the skeptical (as what metaphysics would block), and that the skeptical is a
recurrent threat internal to the possession of human language, is sufficient to distin-
guish his work from a pragmatist (or positivist) instinct toward, let us call it, veri-
fiability, or, say, cash value. It may come to a difference no less deep than how
one thinks of human nature.
Goodman insists, and gives fine evidence for his good faith here, that he “[has]
no desire to repress the Emersonian difference” (p. 108), and it is a valuable warn-
ing he delivers in noting that “In different ways, it is just as easy to condescend to
Dewey as it is to condescend to Emerson” (ibid.). But my own insistence arose
from the pestering number of times Emerson was being identified, with increasing
casualness and assurance it seemed to me, as something like a proto-pragmatist, as
if that were the price of Emerson’s admission into the history of American philoso-
phy, and never, in my memory, with any gesture toward assessing the resistance
Emerson’s prose might put up against this assimilation. So I suppose the issue
between Goodman and me turns on how we will each arrive at an articulation of
the differences we find essential to preserve. Always in the background of my
consideration of such an issue is the question, what would be lost in America’s
knowledge of itself if it lost the acuity of hearing its transcendental voice? (Both
the pragmatic and the transcendental voices are Yankee; there will be others, as
for example those Henry James reports hearing, in The American Experience,
among the immigrants on the lower east side of Manhattan.).
My early, halting effort (which Goodman cites on p. 112) at least to mark the
importance to me of articulating the differences was to say that, even when Emer-
son and pragmatism are at their closest, they are still radically different in “sound.”
Without exactly denying this, Goodman strikingly adduces Wittgenstein’s late re-
mark, or speculation, in On Certainty, that he is trying to say something that sounds
like pragmatism. But of course in saying that their “arguments” sound different, I
meant that Emerson and Thoreau “sound” as much like, for example, Friedrich
Schlegel as they sound like Dewey. Whereas Wittgenstein’s sense is (not conceiv-
ably supposing that his discourse resembles that of the pragmatists’, not even
James’s) that he may “sound like pragmatism” in the sense that we might say “She
sounds like she has made her decision” or “From this report, his condition sounds
dangerous”—neither of which suggests a sensuous resemblance, but rather notes
an impression gathered from a limited set of signs. Goodman cites (p. 103) a later
articulation of mine according to which Dewey takes the mission of philosophy
“to get the Enlightenment to happen” whereas for Emerson “the mission is . . . as
much to awaken us to why it is happening as it is,” as demonically out of control
as it is. This is something I have meant when I have in effect said: All honor to
Dewey for his tireless combating of prejudice, superstition, fanaticism, and magic
thinking wherever he finds them (these are the signal Enlightenment virtues Kant
attempts to secure in, for example, keeping religion “within the bounds of reason
alone”). But there are other ways the human being has of being lost, not ones that
prevent us from taking the path from ignorance to knowledge, which let us grant
is irreducibly vital; but ones which block the path from what Emerson calls “silent
melancholy” (what Thoreau calls “quiet desperation”)—which he sees everywhere
around him—to clarity, orientation, discovery, a freedom for joyfulness, which he
takes as also an irreducible project of philosophy.
Emerson invents a parable for this second, philosophical path, which I cite at
the end of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (p. 126), in which he glosses
his remark (in “The American Scholar”) “Books are for the scholar’s idle times”
by saying: “When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted
in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness
come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shin-
ing—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to
where the dawn is.” Here Emerson takes the alternation of day and night as a figure
for the inevitable mood shifts from joy and relatedness to their loss in melancholy
and withdrawal, and presents his writing as the appropriate guide back to the begin-
nings of daylight. Nor can I help adding the suggestion that Emerson’s allegory of
the book as a lamp is an allusion, and a contesting, of the idea of the Enlightenment
as the dawn of human understanding, and is something that Nietzsche will continue
in his figure of the madman “who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to
the market place, and cried incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’” (The Gay
Science, sec. 125)—namely, by the light that killed God. (One might, perhaps
should, at the same time take the figure as a parable of Romanticism, linking the
madness in the absence of God and the madness in seeking the return of this
presence by oneself.)
It is worth adding, for those who will find Nietzsche more a precursor of prag-
matism (in his assessing morality in terms of life) than a successor of Emerson,
that the lantern in the bright morning is at the same time an image of an idea of
the future as a new dawn (of Nietzsche’s philosopher as the man of the day after
tomorrow, of Übermorgen, of the present regrasped) that, to my mind, decisively
distinguishes Emerson’s sense of futurity from that of Dewey (as Goodman relates
these on pp. 107–108). The “new,” in “new dawn at noon” is something Emerson
harps on in his essay “Experience,” in contrast to the old, in various contexts
(ranging from Old and New Testaments to old and new worlds). Perhaps it is
because Emerson’s step into the future creates a discontinuity with the present, and
Dewey’s a continuity, that Dewey, so far as I recall, has no conception of, or takes
no issue with, the modern (or the other way around), unless the modern just is to
be identified with the reign of science. This is what has moved me to say such
things, noted by Goodman (p. 102), as that I miss in Dewey’s responses to the
world “the worlds I seem to live in.” Unless, again, there is the suggestion that
America was born unobstructedly modern, or experimental, so that the measure of
the condition of modernity is best taken in taking on America’s issues.
Responses 173
Andrew Klevan continues his preoccupation (drawn at length in his book Disclo-
sures of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film, a work whose
maturity and finish was, remarkably, achieved as a doctoral dissertation, guided by
Victor Perkins) “to explore moments or sequences of quality in film which do not
overstate or proclaim their significance, and moreover to take such moments to be
special possibilities of the medium of film,” (p. 120). Klevan does this in the pres-
ent instance by taking as a test case the film It’s a Wonderful Life, which almost
anyone else would approach, given its participation in high melodrama, by dicta-
tion from its memorable dramatic, or, say, overstated, proclamations of significance
(the twin path of achievement in narrative film). I find his treatment of the case
convincing and rewarding. Since he strikes so directly at fundamental questions of
how film makes sense, how it invites its extreme range of emotionality (in the
present instance, tears), it is a notable achievement to have kept their complexities
tractable to discussion.
The issue he keeps in focus, which he takes as epitomized in Henry James’s
characterization of the reach of experience by juxtaposing, in a further cluster, the
gifts or powers “to guess the seen from the unseen” and “to trace the implication
of things.” The complexities are indicated by his speaking of these resonances as
“masked” or “disguised” (p. 124) or “suggested” (p. 129) by the very pressures of
narrative (that way of making sense, call it discursive), and they come forth explic-
itly in a strain between two fine passages Klevan cites from Perkins, the first of
which declares that “the meanings I . . . discuss . . . are neither stated nor in any
sense implied,” the second of which speaks of a medium’s “capacity to imply” (p.
129). There need be no contradiction here, since we may, for example, distinguish
between the implication of concepts (e.g., that if you are a widower then you were
married) and the implications in (making) assertions (e.g., that if I tell you it is
raining this implies that I believe it and that you do not know it, or perhaps I am
suggesting that you have not drawn the implication that the parade is threatened)—
the latter presumably rhyming with what Henry James suggests, in the passage
Klevan takes off from, in speaking of the implication of things (which pretty obvi-
ously does not stop at physical objects, but includes gestures, postures, settings,
inflections of voice, etc.), and what Perkins means by contrasting the capacity to
imply with the fact of being filmed, a matter he precisely requires of criticism that
it explore. But how tricky the exploration must be is no less than saying whether
the body conceals or reveals the mind, or, more to the present case, articulating
what I earlier registered by locating the ordinary as a ceaseless compromise be-
tween actuality and eventuality (the habitation of talking creatures whose expres-
sions, in word and hence in deed, are perpetually significant beyond their powers
of survey). This is a fact that, one might wish to say, all by itself calls for the
invention of film.
Klevan’s notation in the film of ghostliness, and of George Bailey’s declaration
of his existence only in the recognition of his sense of its absence, all but forces
one to test one’s conviction in film’s specific, or let us say, innate powers of
intelligence; call it revelation. (The discussions of film I admire most, and I sup-
pose of any art, to some extent put one to this test.) The name “Pottersville” virtu-
ally pronounces “Potter’s Field.” (This must have been noted often before. I seem
to recall that the name of the cemetery Clarence takes George to is actually called
“Potter’s Field”—namely the locale St. Matthew names as a place “to bury strang-
ers in” (Matthew 27:7), but at the moment I cannot believe the reference can be
quite so blatant.) The implication is that, apart from certain conditions, our cities,
or polities, are necropolises. The conditions are capacities to sacrifice ourselves, or
our interests, for the common good—not necessarily in world-historical ways, as
perhaps in war, or other catastrophes, but in the everyday ways that require forbear-
ance, self-command, responsiveness to genuine need, however sometimes counter
to one’s most forward inclinations or desires, the plainest condition of the moral
life. (It is hard to understand what, without it, provides respite from skepticism
with respect to others, in which we deal out what I earlier called the little deaths
of everyday, gestures of withdrawal, distraction, indifference, resentment. Among
recently familiar expressions of vices of democratic politics, veiled appeals to greed
(“lower taxes [unspecified] create more jobs”) and scurrilous implications of lack
of patriotism (“criticism encourages our enemies”) strike me no more as undermin-
ing the will to democracy than as false appeals to our capacity for moral goodness,
where we are helpless individually to do significant good (“compassionate conser-
vatism”).) Made the year after the end of the Second World War, Capra’s film
invokes the cemeteries that will commemorate the suspension of civilized existence
imaged and created by a state of war, but also the counterimage of a patriotism
expressible in contributing to existence under suspension. The overstatement re-
quired in the fighting, and the understatement in waiting, will have to recognize
and comprehend each other, not be strangers to the other’s experience. (In a democ-
racy, despair is a political emotion. Let us hope that it does not always require an
angel to manage the perspective that brings us out of it.) Put otherwise, as Aristotle
expresses the matter in the Nichomachean Ethics, the leading of a human existence
requires that each life takes its life upon itself; as we may say, requires that it be
led. Aristotle calls this being active. But it is the nature of human beings that you
may not tell by looking whether they are active or passive.
Garrett Stewart’s acceptance and handling of the assignment to consider “any hesi-
tancy in the literary response to Cavell’s work, as well as what has really been
useful” (p. 140) has produced a document that the contriver of that work—I hope
not he alone—must read in a circling of exhilaration and ruefulness. The main
narrative is one of neglect, dismissal, undercirculation, and bad timing (summa-
rized in the sadly lovely phrase “avatars of disregard” [p. 141]), yet punctuated by
subplots and characters and a narrative voice of striking understanding, whose
extrapolations of the work are cause for rejoicing. Of the various matters about
which one with a certain burden of ambition cannot know about his or her work,
among the most obvious are whether its reception (good, bad, or indifferent) is
deserved and whether it is likely to change.
In the face of so insistent an account as Stewart’s, I cannot deny that I have
struggled over the years with a feeling of some disproportion between cause and
effect concerning the sequence of texts I have published, kept alive during a couple
of decades of near public silence accompanied by private letters of acknowledg-
ment and rumors of approval. Sometimes this has taken the form of a note accom-
Responses 175
panying the gift of a publication (article or book) whose author attests that while
my work has been prompting (sometimes adding that he or she expects this will,
or will perhaps not, be obvious), my name does not appear in the publication since
she or he saw no way of articulating this indebtedness. And because that fact itself
was evidently considered unsayable, I felt invited to conceive of my enterprise as
bound up in some illicit trade. But despite the recent events Stewart reports of
what seem deliberate and hostile refusals of inclusion, the more general climate,
as he notes, has markedly changed in recent years, as the present volume happily
attests.
Among the stories that have made their way to me, one of the most recent is
from a good acquaintance who was moved to tell of an event that occurred the
year after The Claim of Reason was published. At a meeting of the American
Philosophical Association he introduced himself to an admired, close friend of
mine, and in the course of things said to him that he liked my book. He reports
the friend as replying: “So do I. But it is a book for the next generation.” Some-
thing like a generation has now passed, and whether or not my friend’s prediction
is proving to be true, it expresses one thread of explanation for the odd pattern of
acceptance and rejection of what I do that I should like particularly to stress—I
mean the sense of unfortunate timing.
Stewart strikes the note in his second paragraph, beginning a sentence with “Just
when,” noting that the time at which my essay on King Lear (the concluding essay
of my first book Must We Mean What We Say? in 1969) was beginning to, or had
a chance to, make itself felt, the French onslaught of “theory” was beginning its
domination of advanced work in the humanities—Stewart says that it “at times
seem[ed] to swallow up Cavell’s own premises, however dimly glimpsed” (p. 140).
And something of the sort is surely no less true of the two books of mine that
followed in the next three years, The World Viewed and The Senses of Walden.
But how does one understand why this, let us call it, simultaneity or parallelism of
discovery (or some rough equivalent in the nonsciences) happened as it did? Is it
even quite unfortunate?
I criticize the New Criticism, especially for its shunning of philosophy, yet I
would not have found my path without having read Kenneth Burke and William
Empson and R. P. Blackmur when they were on fire; I criticize logical positivism’s
treatment or stylization of human experience, yet I would not have reached the
Wittgenstein I care about (or the Austin) without studying positivism when it was
the philosophical avant-garde; I criticize Heidegger, and I think Walden a much
finer gift to philosophy than Heidegger’s incomparably more philosophically cele-
brated work on Hölderlin’s Ister Hymn, yet it is hard for me to think I would have
come to my sense of Walden without having studied Heidegger while it was, for
Americans, still a difficult, almost isolating, study. (It would interest me greatly to
explore the idea of fortunate and unfortunate timing, of what Emerson speaks of
as “accepting the place the Deity has found for you,” by citing formative memories,
only available to one of a certain age, of, for example, being taken by my mother
to a recital of Fritz Kreisler’s, affording my first glimpse of an audience of a degree
of cultivation speaking of worlds I had barely imagined; or of going alone to hear
Ben Webster play the saxophone with a small group on 52nd street in New York,
experiencing another, competing, decorum of listening; or, the season I moved to

New York after college, ostensibly to concentrate on my music, seeing July Holli-
day in the original production of Born Yesterday, and Marlon Brando in that of A
Streetcar Named Desire, and Laurette Taylor in that of The Glass Menagerie. Not
for the first time I think of Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s Red Desert: “Everything
that happens to me is my life.”)
It is familiar that revolutions, even of intellectual fashion, may leave even cer-
tain of the victorious silenced and bitter. And the late 1960s and 1970s saw a
sequence of various revolutions—in literary studies, following the revolution of
New Criticism to the revolution of structuralism and then to post-structuralism and
so on, as noted by Stewart; in philosophy, from the revolutions associated with
logical positivism in Vienna and Berlin in the 1930s, brought to England and
America by those seeking refuge from Hitler’s Germany, to the ordinary language
turn associated with Oxford after the war (in both of which Wittgenstein, the earlier
and the later, played a decisive role), to the reception of Heidegger in the United
States in the 1950s and ’60s. Yet each of these still enters into good and definitive
work, one way or another, even if none continues its blaze. I think I might consider
myself a kind of exile from each of these developments, as though that kind of
perpetual homelessness provides a reasonable intellectual home. This reflects the
fact that I began doing work that I still use so long ago (for example, publishing
in the first years of the reception of Wittgenstein and of Austin, and the first years
of modern film theory, and the first years of the revival of interest in Emerson), that
I am somewhat protected from the sense that all that is happening intellectually, or
intellectually happening, is the latest eventuality. Being odd, and staying odd, of
course has its pains, but surprisingly, even increasingly, its pleasures, even that of
remaining, however precariously, contemporary. When the breakers of canons dis-
cover that they have themselves become repetitive in their newer authorities, the
older, modified out of their old authority, can have another hearing.
There were two principal sources of anxiety for me associated with my sense of
disregard, or disapproval. One was a fear that graduate students on whose doctoral
dissertation committees I served would be harmed, one way or another, in their
chances to begin a reasonable academic career. The other was a temptation to a
coarsening of my sensibility or temperament, and a consequent falsifying edge in
my diction, of cynicism, elegy, or tantrum, marring whatever good my stubborn
insistence on my path of work could accomplish and recommend. Such events as
represented by this book, of independent, extended responses by friends and strang-
ers, have been reassuring to me about the former (the penalty to students), and
about the latter (uncreative defensiveness), more than enough to shame a rational
being into reasonableness. Failure here would be no one’s fault but mine.
My few comments on this occasion will scarcely do what they are meant to do,
namely, express the degree of my gratitude to each of the contributors to this
volume for the heartening care with which they have written, and to Russell Good-
man for his conceiving and managing it.
10
Passionate and
Performative Utterance
Morals of Encounter
STANLEY CAVELL
But what kind of disagreement, my friend,

causes hatred and anger?
Socrates to Euthyphro
Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in

their proper places in various sentences, . . .
I used them to express my own desires.
Augustine, quoted at the opening of
Philosophical Investigations
It is in so far as discourse is common that it

can become at once a place and an instru-
ment of confrontation.
Foucault, “Le discours ne doit pas
être pris comme . . . ”
In Aristotle’s Categories, meant to list the basic objects or components of thought,

the little that is said about the concept of passion (or affection) is paired with the
concept of action, and the only example offered, I believe (in chapter 4, referred
back to in chapter 9), is the following: “ ‘To lance,’ ‘to cauterize’ [are terms indi-
cating] action; ‘to be lanced,’ ‘to be cauterized,’ affection.” Call this the metaphysi-
cal sense of passion. The psychological sense of passion, as naming members of a
constellation of emotions (for example, anger, fear, pity, envy), Aristotle treats
most fully in his Rhetoric, as aids to the rhetorical goal of persuasion and dangers
to the means of worthy argumentation. The connection between the metaphysical
and psychological “senses” of passion, suggested in the idea of suffering, is that
of passiveness. Principal philosophers who emphasize the connection between
metaphysical passiveness and psychological passion are Spinoza and Nietzsche, for
whom the relative powers of action and suffering or passion is at issue, is perhaps
177
the issue. For a philosopher of passion such as Hume, this connection seems at
odds with his system of the passions and with the moral point of constructing it.
(Something of the sort is sometimes reflected in psychoanalysis in the distinction
between alloplastic and autoplastic adaptations.) My contribution to the present
rehearsing or rehearing of the Aristotelian categories takes up the role of passion
in what may fairly be called a modern Rhetoric, another systematic study of ways
of effecting or affecting action by or in speech, J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things
with Words, a set of lecture notes (as Aristotle’s texts are), edited and published
posthumously in 1962. In my discussion, some fresh light might be thrown upon a
philosophical interest in the question of the relation of passion to speech, and in
the passiveness of passion, if only in raising the question of philosophy’s tendency,
notable in my experience particularly within the tradition of analytical philosophy,
to discount the role of passion in human life, as if that discounting might be a step
toward a welcome reduction of it.
What has struck me on rereading Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (here-
inafter the text of Austin’s referred to unless otherwise noted) are various passages
in which Austin is skittish about emotion (“there are numerous cases in human life
where the feeling of a certain ‘emotion’ (save the word!) or ‘wish’ or the adoption
of an attitude is conventionally considered an appropriate or fitting response or
reaction to a certain state of affairs” ( p. 78)), or sheepish about it (in introducing
the fourth of his five classes according to their illocutionary force, he flags behabi-
tives, which includes “expressions of attitudes to someone else’s past conduct or
imminent conduct” (p. 160) by tagging onto this title the parenthetical (“a shocker
this”); but more important than these asides will prove to be a passage in which
he breaks off his analysis catastrophically early, I mean at just the point at which
passion would have had to come systematically into play, a turn to which I will
devote some care.
It seems to me in retrospect that I was disappointed with this skimping in Aus-
tin’s text when I heard originally the lectures on performative utterance given at
Harvard in 1956, but I was not, until fairly recently, able to articulate this reaction
with any sense of accomplishment. My attempt here will be to extend Austin’s
theory, using techniques he made characteristically his own and which have entered
into the texture of philosophical discussion, while his name goes with compara-
tively little mention in contemporary Anglo-American philosophizing. So I should
say at the outset that I find Austin to be a powerful and inspiring philosopher, well
beyond anything his current reputation among philosophers suggests, and that what
he says about performative utterances in How to Do Things with Words, as with
other subjects he put on the modern philosophical stage, for example the topic of
excuses, are far from exhausted in their philosophical interest. I do not claim to
have mined any of it fully, or to have understood as well as I would like even what
I feel I have most profited from in it. But I trust that this is not required in order
for me usefully to take the steps I have in mind here. It is my impression that
Austin’s work on the performative utterance is read more widely and cited with
fresher interest at the moment in literary and cultural studies than in professional
philosophy (I mention particularly the issue in gender studies of the idea of “perfor-
mance”), and partly for that reason I am going to go somewhat slowly through an
Passionate and Performative Utterance 179
exposition of certain stages of Austin’s theory (of course leaving out the perpetual
qualifications he counts on); I keep finding that matters fundamental to his account
fail to be given their due (for example, Austin’s attention to the charge of nonsense
in dealing with the issue of the nonstatement, and to the distinction Austin draws
between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect).
Early in his text Austin associates himself with what he calls a revolution in
philosophy, something he characterizes by saying that “it has now been shown
piecemeal [by various philosophers; he alludes most specifically to the logical posi-
tivists] that many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mis-
take—the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which
are either (in interesting nongrammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as
something quite different.” Putting aside what he hints at as his philosophical vari-
ance, in method or motive, from other participants in this revolution, he moves at
once to characterize a type of utterance whose opening examples “can fall into no
hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of ‘statement’, which are not
nonsense, and which contain none of those verbal danger signals which philoso-
phers have by now detected or think they have detected (curious words like ‘good’
or ‘all’, suspect auxiliaries like ‘ought’, or ‘can’, and dubious constructions like
the hypothetical): all will have, as it happens, humdrum verbs in the first person
singular present indicative active” (pp. 4−5). The examples he goes on to give are
still worth commemorating: “ ‘I do’ (take this woman to be my lawful wedded
wife)’ . . . ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ . . . ‘I give and bequeath my
watch to my brother’ . . . ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.’” Austin com-
ments: “In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course,
the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be
said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of
the utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue
it. It needs argument no more than that ‘damn’ is not true or false: it may be that
the utterance ‘serves to inform you’—but that is quite different. . . . When I say,
before the registrar or altar, etc., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am
indulging in it.”
It will be of the essence for Austin, having announced that his examples are not
nonsense and asserted that they are neither true nor false, to articulate how they do
what they do, what constraints or conditions they operate under which insure that
they communicate or do their work as perfectly as they do, as perfectly as the most
unobjectionable true-or-false statements do theirs. This will mean articulating the
conditions of what Austin will call (not, of course, their truth or falsity but instead)
their felicity or infelicity. These conditions will detail specific points at which
performatives may fail to do what they say (marry, bet, bequeath, name), staking
out a dimension of philosophical analysis that Austin calls criticism, of speech, of
action more generally.
What intellectual plausibility can Austin be counting on (granted the obvious-
ness of his initial claims about his examples) for the suggestion that what he names
felicity and infelicity can be seen to provide as philosophically stringent a mode
of the “criticism” of speech as does the ancient assessment of truth or falsity? The
philosophical stakes seem so disproportionate: the dimension of the felicitous turns
merely—does it not?—on human conventions, whereas the dimension of truth in-

vokes our fundamental relation to, our knowledge of, whatever there is, human or
otherwise. But Austin will eventually claim that truth (truth itself, so to speak) is
to be understood precisely as a dimension of what he calls the criticism of speech.
His aim in his study of performatives is at once to lift the nondescriptive or nonas-
sertional or nonconstative gestures of speech to renewed philosophical interest and
respectability, and to bring, or prepare the ground on which to bring, the philosoph-
ical concern with truth down to size.
Sympathetic as I may be with this program, it exacts a price that I am here
proposing to weigh: I mean the relative, continued neglect of the passions, or say
the expressive, in speech. (I say relative neglect, but the few occasions on which
Austin mentions emotion serve, as I indicated, to scare off further philosophical
attention.) My interest is not exactly or simply to commend the passional side of
human nature to further concern in modern philosophy (though the reign of Kan-
tianism and Utilitarianism in academic moral philosophy has I think tended to
discourage this concern, Kantianism because the sternness of morality demands it,
Utilitarianism, especially in Mill’s classical work, because the sternness of society
deprives too many of its subjects from having passions of their own at all) but to
question a theory of language that pictures speech as at heart a matter of action
and only incidentally as a matter of articulating and hence expressing desire. The
particular unhappiness this causes me is my sense that this one-sidedness of Aus-
tin’s How to Do Things with Words is unnecessary, indeed is counter to the spirit
(or one spirit) of its progress. I do not mean, insipidly, to take a rich text to task
for lacking a further richness beyond its plan. I mean that I find the absence of the
expressive side of speech in Austin’s text to go suddenly counter to its own drift,
to close a door it should at least invite others to open. To extend to myself such
an invitation is what I mean by my proposal to extend Austin’s theory so as to
take into consideration what I will call passionate utterance in a way that strikes
me as remaining in the spirit of his theory.
Before approaching that, I note, or report my sense of, Austin’s somewhat manic
tone in reporting his discovery of a type of utterance that is neither nonsense nor
true or false. As if when he says, “They [The performatives ‘I do,’ ‘I name,’ etc.]
are neither true nor false. I assert this without argument,” he is daring a philosopher
to deny that they are neither true nor false or else to assert that they are nonsense.
Austin had a few pages earlier noted, in sketching the revolutionary context for his
theory of the performative, that “It has come to be commonly held that many
utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended
in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts: for exam-
ple, ‘ethical propositions’ are perhaps intended, solely or partly, to evince emotion
or to prescribe conduct or to influence it in special ways.” (I do not know when
Austin first wrote the versions of his lecture notes that were eventually published,
but I can testify that the common view was still held by my teachers in graduate
school in the early 1950s who touched on moral philosophy, or else was held in
contempt by them, but without anyone being able, in my hearing, to say anything
interesting or forceful enough either to dislodge it or to remove its air of paradox.)
Now the most famous of the texts holding that view, nicknamed the emotive or
noncognitive theory of (ethical or aesthetic, etc.) meaning, was A. J. Ayer’s Lan-

guage, Truth, and Logic, perhaps the most successful single book of professional
philosophy, measured in terms of sales, to be published in the twentieth century.
(It appeared in 1936; in my edition, from ten years later, a new introduction by
Ayer excuses the young man’s passion in the writing of the text but reaffirms the
belief “that the point of view which it expresses is substantially correct.”)
In that book Ayer famously claims, worth again commemorating, that because
such propositions, Ayer calls them moral judgments, as—taking examples from its
chapter 6, “Critique of Ethics and Theology”—”You acted wrongly in stealing that
money,” “Tolerance is a virtue,” and “You ought to tell the truth” are “sentences
[which make] no statement at all,” “do not say anything,” and “are calculated to
arouse feeling, and so to stimulate action”; that, in short, “they are pure expressions
of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood” (p.
108), “they are not in the literal sense significant” (p. 103), they “have no objective
validity whatsoever” (p. 108), they “[have] no factual meaning—that is, express
. . . no proposition which can be either true or false” (p. 107). The view assigns to
ethical terms what it calls an emotive function (e.g., p. 108).
But the claim that an utterance which is neither true nor false is thereby non-
sense is precisely that for which Austin’s work on the performative provides waves
of counterexamples, the instances of which mount, he claims, beyond a thousand.
And I cannot doubt that Austin’s work on performatives contributed as much as or
more than any other source to the recession of interest in the view (a different
matter from its refutation, whatever that should mean). Yet while he cites the view
as one of his precursors to, or companions in, the overthrow of philosophy’s obses-
sion with the statement, or say the tyranny of assertion, he does not directly chal-
lenge it with his mildly swaggering, “They are neither true nor false: I assert this
as obvious,” which is daring only if it is meant to imply, or assume, as in the case
of Austin’s performatives, “and they are not (on that ground, or any other) non-
sense, or lacking in objectivity, etc.” But this evidently was anything but obvious
to, and hence assumable by, those who held the view commonly called the emotive
theory of meaning. Is Austin leaving it open that such a view may be right, or
righter than wrong? Or that, once his view of the performative is laid out, his
readers may draw their own conclusions?
It is important to me to ask why Austin does not signal his suspicions of exam-
ples so disembodied, or surrealistically underdescribed, measured by the proce-
dures he urges, as the sentences I cited from Ayer’s chapter on the critique of
ethics. Even considering that Austin wishes to avoid the tangles of danger signals
like “all” or suspicious auxiliaries like “ought,” is it to be understood that “Toler-
ance is a virtue” cannot be intelligibly responded to? (for example, by suggesting
that tolerance is under certain circumstances a vice, a participation in evil, and
suggesting further that the utterer is apt to be, in brute fact, a prig); or imagined
that “You ought to tell the truth” can be nothing other than a recitation of an old
memory and not, for example, constitute a claim with a specific reason tied to the
present case which makes it clear why one feels the truth might be withheld, given
the momentous immediate harm, and little eventual good, it can do; or accepted
that we have actually imagined someone saying exactly “You acted wrongly in
stealing that money” (how should you have acted, more menacingly? what else
should you have stolen, the television monitor?). It is true that Ayer asserts the
equivalence of saying “You acted wrongly in stealing that money” with saying
simply “You stole that money” in a peculiar tone of horror (p. 107). Here there is
a statement that is obviously true or false, and a tone “evincing moral disapproval”
(ibid.), which obviously is neither true nor false. So why should Austin demur?—I
do not mean why should he contest this account of moral intervention (he has
already said he is leaving that aside for his purposes), but why or how does the
case bear on his analysis of the performative utterance (which he has, in alluding
to Ayer, suggested that it does).
Well, if the two utterances are equivalent, then presumably we are to recognize
that “You acted wrongly in stealing that money” is also to be imagined as said
with the same tone of horror that makes “You stole that money” its substitute. (An
emotionless assessment of the act so described would have its own peculiarity.)
Then the question becomes—does it not?—whether that tone of horror is appro-
priate. If what had been said was—with the same tone of, let’s call it, horror—
“You’re standing here” or “You’re tracing tracks with your fork on the tablecloth”
(as it happens in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound), these utterances (that is to say,
the saying of them, which Austin often calls the issuing of them) will not at once
be intelligible (significant? objective? factual?); yet they are true or false. It is not
news that moral and other judgments of value are the causes, as Socrates takes to
be obvious in the Euthyphro, of “hatred and anger.” What should have seemed
news, if true, is that the expression of passion, where appropriate, is a separate
feature of the judgment, to be “added” at the discretion of the utterer. Ayer says,
characteristically: “The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal
meaning . . . it merely shows that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings
in the speaker” (p. 107), as if including the attending feelings to the expression
were like adding a wink to your words, or slapping on a funny hat at their conclu-
sion—matters also apt to affect their intelligibility. Then was it news to Austin
that the “tone” of an utterance gets stuck to the utterance, that an “inappropriate”
tone (not, as it were, the sheer fact of the tone) can make an utterance unintelligi-
ble? (Is this something Austin should have “argued”? I am calling attention to the
obviousness of the fact.)
I do think, and I shall try to make this clearer, that what I have described as my
sense of Austin’s avoiding as far as he could the issue of passion or expression in
speech leaves what he does say about it with the air of conceding that the passional
side of utterance is more or less a detachable issue. Austin has been thought, by
philosophers of my acquaintance whom I greatly respect, to have, sometimes, been
what they called “cagey” in his argumentation. I suppose I took this to mean
roughly that he gave the air of having thought through an issue more thoroughly
than he was quite showing. In the present case I think he was shy about a matter
that was more important to his work than he knew he had found ways of articulat-
ing. He might have said so. (Sometimes, attractively, he did: “I know I do not see
my way clearly in this,” from the closing paragraphs of “Other Minds.”)
Let us ask: For whom is the appropriateness of passion a question? An emotivist
will presumably maintain the stance that this question of appropriateness is simply
a shift in register of the same emotive matter, one whose answer is again, or still,
neither true nor false, hence not a response to an objective, factual matter. Whether
horror is appropriate to stealing is not a matter of fact (but what? a feeling about
a feeling?). But Austin must, I think, feel that a fundamental issue of his mode of
philosophizing would be neglected in such a dismissal: first, because he relies on
the idea of appropriateness in defining the performative utterance (it is critical to
the third rule or condition for an utterance being performative, doing what it says
it is doing, that “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be
appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (p. 34); second,
because the fourth of the five categories into which he differentiates performatives,
or more strictly, illocutionary verbs, the category he names behabitives, is concerned
specifically, as in a passage cited earlier, with “the numerous cases in human life
where the feeling of an emotion . . . is conventionally considered an appropriate or
fitting response” (p. 78); third, because “There are more ways of outraging speech
than contradiction merely. The major questions are how many ways, and why they
outrage speech and wherein the outrage lies?” (p. 48) (taking it that outrageousness
here is inappropriateness in the extreme); and fourth, because Austin’s method of
clarifying concepts by asking what we should say when is quite generally a matter
of constructing examples so that our sense of appropriateness and inappropriateness
can have clear play. Appropriateness is as essential on Austin’s view of assessing
ordinary utterances as validity is in assessing formal arguments.
I am not saying that I agree with all of this, though I have profited from much
of it. I am rather indicating why I am puzzled that Austin, in his companionable
invocation of emotivism, lets moments of it pass that are incompatible with his
teaching. While I think the omission is not innocent, it will take some more exposi-
tion of his theory of the performative utterance to say how not.
After introducing his initial four examples of performatives and entering other
preliminary material, much of which has elicited interest and caused controversy,
Austin moves in lecture 2 to “state schematically . . . some at least of the things
which are necessary for the smooth or ‘happy’ functioning of a performative . . .
and then give examples of infelicities and their effects” (p. 14). He announces six
“rules” or “conditions,” the breaking of any of which will cause, not falsity of
course, but what he calls unhappiness or infelicity in seeking to do what a perform-
ative utterance sets out to do. (I omit a complexity Austin introduces into his letter-
numbering of the rules.)
From How to Do Things, pages 14−15:
1. There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conven-

tional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons
in certain circumstances, and further,
2. The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate
for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
3. The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
4. Completely.
5. Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain
thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the
part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure
must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to
conduct themselves, and further
6. Must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.
According to Austin’s rules, for example, for me successfully or happily to christen

a ship I must (1) participate in a culture in which christening exists, (2) be the one
authorized in the relevant subculture to do the naming, and in the presence of the
appropriate authorities, celebrities, and onlookers, (3) at the appropriate place and
time and with the appropriate implement in hand (here a bottle of champagne), say
the required words (including, I suppose, “I christen this ship the N. N.”) and break
the bottle on the ship’s edge, and (4) audibly, visibly, and without abbreviation.
Rules (5) and (6) would not come in here, as they would in, for example, marrying
or bequeathing or apologizing, where there may be, as in christening, an audience
present, but where there must be other specified participants in attendance, perhaps
as witnesses and necessarily as participants in (or objects of) the act, who must
accept their role in a procedure I have committed myself to, one the point of which
is “to inaugurat[e] certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant.”
Upon the satisfaction of these conditions (and perhaps others), my saying some-
thing (“I do (will),” “I christen . . . ,” “I give and bequeath . . . ”) will have consti-
tuted not my report of something but my doing something. (You may report the
event, say for a newspaper, but if what you report is not what I (together perhaps
with others) did, but only what I said, you will be suggesting some doubt about
what happened or perhaps expressing some surprise that it, after all the doubts,
actually happened.)
Austin then goes into the exceptions and refinements that give him his character-
istic pleasures in philosophizing, pleasures other philosophers have taken the grav-
est exception to (both are directions of energy that might well bear philosophical
scrutiny). Summarizing, for my purposes here, the narrative of the argument, a
point is arrived at that causes a certain crisis in Austin’s account, namely, that what
he has discovered to hold for performative utterances equally holds for constative
utterances. After going through many “ways in which performative utterances can
be unhappy,” which “amounted to saying, if you prefer jargon, that certain condi-
tions have to be satisfied if the utterance is to be happy,” Austin reformulates the
stage he has reached by observing that this “commits us to saying that for a certain
performative utterance to be happy, certain statements have to be true” (p. 45).
He mentions four cases as especially notable: “(1) If the performative utterance
‘I apologize’ is happy, then the statement that I am apologizing is true. (2) If the
performative utterance ‘I apologize’ is to be happy, then the statement that certain
conditions obtain—those notably in Rules 1 and 2—must be true. (3) If the per-
formative utterance ‘I apologize’ is to be happy, then the statement that certain
other conditions obtain—those notably in our rule 5—must be true. (4) If perform-
ative utterances of at least some kinds are happy, for example contractual ones,
then statements typically of the form that I ought or ought not subsequently to do
some particular thing are true.” How it is that the performative utterance implies
the truth of each of these statements is just what Austin claims to have been ex-
plaining. (A striking feature of determining the truth of the implied or presupposed

statements, that is, for determining that the rule obtains, that it is satisfied, may be
a matter of judgment, or decision: “But you promised!”—“I know I said so, but
you knew that this interruption was possible at any time.”)
Austin’s sense of crisis in his account is produced by his going on to announce:

“But what is of interest is to compare these ‘implications’ of performative utter-
ances with certain discoveries made comparatively recently about the ‘implica-
tions’ of the contrasted and preferred type of utterance, the statement or constative
utterance, which itself, unlike the performative, is true or false” (p. 46). Austin
then considers “three of the many ways in which a statement implies the truth of
certain other statements” (p. 47), namely, entailment, implication, and presupposi-
tion, distinctions much on the mind of philosophers of language at the time he was
writing and delivering these lectures, and finds that in the case at least of implica-
tion and presupposition, these relations hold equally in the case of the relation
between a (happy) performative and certain other statements. About implication:
To say “the cat is on the mat” when I do not believe it (an instance of what was
known as Moore’s paradox) is, in Austin’s term, a species of unhappiness (asser-
tion implies belief), and moreover it is “exactly the same as the unhappiness infect-
ing ‘I promise . . . ’ when I do not intend, do not believe, etc. The insincerity of an
assertion is the same as the insincerity of a promise” (p. 50). About presupposition:
To say “John’s children are all bald” when John has no children is not false (Austin
joins in at this stage of a long and fateful history of the analysis of descriptive
functions whose reference is void); its unhappiness is different. “People say [Straw-
son most notably] ‘the question does not arise.’ Here I shall say ‘the utterance is
void’” (pp. 50−51). But “null and void” is exactly how Austin describes the situa-
tion with infringements of the first four rules, cases in which the persons or the
context are inappropriate. About entailment Austin is more cautious: “It might be
that the way in which in entailment one proposition entails another is not unlike
the way ‘I promise’ entails ‘I ought’: it is not the same, but it is parallel: ‘I promise
but I ought not’ is parallel to ‘it is and it is not’” (p. 51). Both procedures are
“self-stultifying” (ibid.) These correlations are sufficiently impressive to Austin as
to “suggest that at least in some ways there is danger of our initial and tentative
distinction between constative and performative utterances breaking down” (p. 54).
This critical moment in Austin’s discussion has been taken by some as a flaw
in Austin’s attempt to distinguish his types of utterance, by others as his running
into an aporia; in any case, as representing some kind of defeat of Austin’s analy-
sis. I do not wish so much to deny these descriptions as to insist that this critical
juncture also represents a signal victory for Austin, for what it shows is that per-
formatives bear the same ineluctable connection with, assessment by, fact, with
and by what is the case, that statements do. (This is perhaps the most fateful point
missed by Derrida in his consequential treatment of Austin in “Signature Event
Context.”)
Performatives may fail to fit the facts in the way statements do; and, as Austin
goes on more briefly to suggest, statements may fail to fit the facts the way per-
formatives do. For example, Austin asserts that “France is hexagonal” is not a true
or false description; what is true is that it is a rough description (p. 143). (This is
not, I suppose, what we should say about the statement “There are three plates on
the shelf” said when there are palpably four. Of course there need be nothing
wrong here; you need, and I know you need, just three; I help you by telling you
you’ll find three on the shelf. But if you respond by remarking that it is false to
say there are three when there are palpably four, I perhaps will not insist that what
I said was true, or true enough for the purpose at hand; but I might wonder, and
ask, why you insist on being perverse with me; and of course you may be wonder-
ing the same about me. Is perverseness of philosophical interest here? Is insistence?
Perhaps we have here a vignette of philosophy, in wishing for perfect communica-
tion, making communication impossible.)
In pressing further to find grammatical criteria to clinch the difference of per-
formatives from constatives, hoping to come up, in the confusion of grammatical
signals, with the form of an explicit (or paradigmatic) form on the basis of which
a list of performative verbs could be made, Austin discovers that, whatever further
problems arise, “we still have utterances beginning ‘I state that’ . . . which seem to
satisfy the requirements of being performative [to say it is to do it], yet which
surely are the making of statements, and surely are essentially true or false” (p.
91). So the difference again seems to evaporate. (And he already knows that to
state is a member of a large, variegated class of performatives (the fifth of the five
he distinguishes; he will call them expositives), one that includes to affirm, to
remark, to tell, to testify, to concede, to revise, to argue, to distinguish, to call, and
so forth.)
It is here that he responds: “It is time then to make a fresh start on the problem.
We want to reconsider more generally the senses in which to say something may
be to do something, or in saying something we do something (and also perhaps to
consider the different case in which by saying something we do something)” (ibid.)
It is now, in “go[ing] farther back for a while to fundamentals—to consider from
the ground up how many senses there are in which to say something is to do
something” (p. 94), that he presents his new (ternary) distinction among speech
acts to replace or to articulate further his binary distinction between constative and
performative utterances. Here we are given the locutionary act (saying something
meaningful), the famous illocutionary act (what is done in saying something), and
the perlocutionary act (what is done by saying something).
To perform a locutionary act is (“in general,” p. 98) to perform an illocutionary
act, for example, to ask or answer a question, to give information or assurance or
a warning, to announce an intention or a verdict, and so on. Further, to perform a
locutionary act, and therein an illocutionary act, “may also be to perform an act of
another kind,” one that produces “certain consequential effects upon the feelings,
thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it
may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them” (p. 101).
The salient feature of these further acts—the perlocutionary—is that they are not
illocutionary. To say “I warn you” (locutionary) is to warn you (illocutionary), and
it may, further (as perlocutionary) alarm you or exasperate you or intimidate you,
which are surely not illocutions; as it may further convince you (that I am serious
in my concern) and persuade you (to take action), which are also not illocutions.
But to utter “I alarm you” or “I exasperate you” or “I intimidate you” or “I persuade

you” would not as such be to alarm or exasperate or intimidate or persuade you—if
these are, indeed, as they stand, quite intelligible English locutions. (They may be
short for: “I exasperate you, admit it,” or “I intimidate you, so I hear,” or “I alarm
you, it seems,” or “I begin to persuade you, I see.” Why the first person in the
perlocutionary cases needs, let me say, disclaiming in such ways wants an ac-
counting.)
A little more, not much, is said by Austin about the perlocutionary act. This is
felt, I believe, to do no theoretical harm, for it seems to me at least three reasons:
(1) We have heard and will hear again that “The total speech act in the total speech
situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged
in elucidating” (p. 148; cp. p. 52). (2) A few pages after making his “fresh start”
and introducing the new distinctions between the locutionary, the illocutionary, and
the perlocutionary, Austin makes it clear, or cautions, that “Our interest in these
lectures is essentially to fasten on the second, illocutionary act and contrast it with
the other two. There is a constant tendency in philosophy to elide this in favor of
one or other of the other two” (p. 103). (3) Having placed the illocutionary act, he
is enabled to proceed to the closing or crowning effort of his work on speech as
performance: “We said long ago that we needed a list of ‘explicit performative
verbs’; but in the light of the more general theory we now see that what we need
is a list of illocutionary forces of an utterance” (p. 150−51), and his closing pages
go on to list, and briefly compare, his five classes of illocutionary acts, each class
containing a dozen, or two or three dozens of examples, not meant to be exhaustive.
The second reason recalls the suspicion that Austin is rather avoiding, even
rather occluding, the passional side of speech. He has gone persistently to painstak-
ing lengths to distinguish, in effect, the illocutionary from the locutionary (doing
something from simply saying or stating something), and articulated how it is that
philosophers can have “constantly” “elided” these, or falsely separated them. Now
the only philosophers he has alluded to who may be said to have elided the illocu-
tionary with the perlocutionary are those who have distinguished the emotive func-
tion of (value) judgments in affecting action or persuading to action from the issu-
ing of (verifiable) statements, without distinguishing this occasional or deniable
use of language (an instance of the perlocutionary effect) with the well-behaved
and undeniable force of the illocutionary.
The paragraph announcing his interest as focusing on the illocutionary goes on
to contrast it with the perlocutionary on the ground that the illocutionary is conven-
tional (p. 103), “in the sense” (ibid.) that the performative formula applies to the
illocutionary act and not to the perlocutionary act: “We can say ‘I argue that’ or ‘I
warn you that’ but we cannot say ‘I convince you that’ or ‘I alarm you that’” (pp.
103−104). I am not sure I see how this makes illocutionary acts “conventional,”
unless it is that in them the first four rules of the performative apply, so that “to
say them is [eo ipso, Austin sometimes adds] to do them”: the illocutionary act is
built into the verb that names it. Here my suggestion of “disclaimers” that allow
“I alarm you” to be said (“They tell me I alarm you”) points to the reason the
perlocutionary act is not, as it were, built in to the perlocutionary verb: if to say
“I alarm you” (or chastise, or seduce, or outrage, or discombobulate you) were
(eo ipso) to chastise or seduce or outrage or discombobulate you, I would be exer-

cising some hypnotic or other raylike power over you and you would have lost your
freedom in responding to my speech. Contrariwise, if I could not rationally expect,
by expressing myself to you, fairly reliably to have the effect of alarming you or
reassuring you, of offending or amusing you, boring or interesting you, exasperating
or fascinating you, . . . I would lack the capacity to make myself intelligible to you.
And what you would lack is not some information I might impart to you.
I am getting ahead of myself. What I emphasize here is that after comparatively
few further considerations, Austin, in the succeeding chapter, declares that “the
perlocutionary sense of ‘doing an action’ must somehow be ruled out as irrelevant
to the sense in which an utterance, if the issuing of it is the ‘doing of an action’,
is a performative” (p. 110). The reason he gives for this is what, anticipating, I
earlier called the catastrophe in his theory. I suppose I only mean that it is a
surprising and unnecessary limitation. The reason he gives for ruling out the perlo-
cutionary as relevant to performativity is that “Clearly any, or almost any, perlocu-
tionary act is liable to be brought off, in sufficiently special circumstances, by the
issuing, with or without calculation, of any utterance whatsoever, and in particular
by a straightforward constative utterance (if there is such an animal)” (ibid.). Any?
Almost? Liable? Why is that roughly the end of a story rather than the (new)
beginning of one? What has happened to Austin’s pride in setting out actually to
count or estimate the number of illocutionary verbs in English, expressing his im-
patience with philosophers (Wittgenstein would have been a prime example) who
used to claim that there are “endless” or “countless” uses of language? (See Witt-
genstein’s Investigations, §23.) Here Austin does not lift a finger to count and
classify the number of perlocutionary verbs, nor does he suggest, or leave open the
sense, that it may be somebody’s business to do this, or worry about it, if not his
own. The example he goes on to give is, “You may convince me that she is an
adulteress by asking her whether it was not her handkerchief which was in X’s
bedroom” (p. 111), a straightforward interrogative utterance, to be answered truly
or falsely, capable so far as we know of producing its disproportional effect only
in this context. For it to have had the perlocutionary effect of helping to drive
someone mad with jealousy took the cunning of an Iago to stage it and the imagina-
tion of an Othello to be irrecoverably convinced by it. Once performed, however,
it is within the normal range of human capacity to suffer from witnessing it, indeed
for an audience of humans to suffer together in witnessing it. (I confess to being
reminded here of a sentence from Charles Stevenson’s Ethics and Language, pub-
lished in 1947, which quickly became the central book advocating a (sophisticated)
version of the emotive theory, and which was, more generally, one of the most
famous academic philosophical texts of the 1950s: “Any statement about any matter
of fact which any speaker considers likely to alter attitudes may be adduced as a
reason for or against an ethical judgment.”) What seems true to say is that any
meaningful utterance may be shown, in certain circumstances, to count as incorpo-
rating a perlocutionary act (or to constitute a moral judgment), provided that we
already know under what conditions an utterance does count as having a perlocu-
tionary effect (or being a moral judgment). But these conditions are precisely what
was, or should have been, in question in the instances of Austin’s (uncharacteristi-

cally impatient) (and Stevenson’s) generalizations.
Go back to the characterization I cited from Austin as he is motivating the
introduction of the third of his new terms for speech acts, the “perlocutionary” act:
“There is yet a further sense in which to perform a locutionary act, and therein an
illocutionary act, may also be to perform an act of another kind [“further” in not
having to name directly, if at all, its locutionary or illocutionary context]. Saying
something [of this further kind] will often, or even normally, produce certain con-
sequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the
speaker, or of other persons; and it may be done with the design, intention, or
purpose of producing them” (p. 101). But how is this description of perlocutionary
function different from the description Ayer gives of (emotive) ethical judgments:
“The function of the ethical word is purely ‘emotive.’ . . . It is used to express
feeling . . . [and] calculated also to arouse feeling and so to stimulate action” (p.
108)? Take again Ayer’s observation that “if I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly
in stealing that money,’ I am stating no more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole
that money’ . . . [and] evincing my moral disapproval of it” (p. 107). Presumably I
could equally, that is, to the same effect, have said, “Why did you steal that
money?” which specifies that I am questioning your conduct, and therewith perhaps
more intimately staking our future. This would be clearer if Ayer had observed,
more explicitly to the moral point, that saying to someone “You acted wrongly in
stealing . . . ” is stating (not no more than but) no less than that you stole it and is
(not just simply but) distinctly expressing disapproval. Does Ayer’s proposal that
that is all I am stating suggest that there might be more? But having confronted
you, questioned you, faced you with your conduct, what more is there, except in
the same vein—prepared as I may be to reason (further) with you, depending upon
your response—for me to say? Or is the proposal rather that there is no more to
say? But to decide that to be so, without hearing (or imagining) what the other’s
response is (or might be), is a moral (moralistic) decision masquerading as a meta-
physical or logical truth about language. The use of metaphysical or other false
profundities to avoid one’s ordinary commitments (here the commitment to listen
to one whom you have questioned) is noted early in How to Do Things with Words
as the ulterior philosophical vice or temptation that the theory of performative
utterance is most interested to combat. (I refer to the passage in which Austin
adduces Hippolytus’s saying “My tongue swore to, but my heart did not” as para-
digmatic of oily efforts to renege on promises or vows (pp. 9−10).) By the way, I
take issue with Austin’s interpretation of the particular line from Euripides’ Hip-
polytus, not in general with Austin’s moral sensibility, in my discussion of Derri-
da’s homage to/attack on Austin’s theory of the performative in a chapter of my
book A Pitch of Philosophy.
I want to introduce some articulation into the region of the perlocutionary act,
with a view toward letting it play a larger role in determining our sense of the
effects of speech in and as action than it does in Austin’s concentration on the
region of the illocutionary act.
To that end, I propose now to extend Austin’s theory of performative utterances to

take account of what I shall call passionate utterances, one or more groups of
instances of which will be emotive utterances. So I should make it explicit that I
am considering examples as from ordinary or civilian life, judgments directed by
one person to another, and not, for example, ones announced by a judge from the
bench, in which case “You were wrong . . . ” would perhaps (if not in small claims
court) be condensed into a verdict plus an assignment of penalty. This is not the
context of a passionate utterance, which requires (so far) exchange, not mediation
or arbitration. (At some stage a third person of some kind may need to come in.)
My extension (if that is what it is) consists primarily of proposing that there are
conditions for perlocutionary utterances corresponding to the conditions Austin
lists as the six conditions for the felicity of illocutionary utterances.
Here are a range of initial examples (comparable to Austin’s “I do,” “I bet,” “I
christen,” “I bequeath”) to which my proposals must be responsive:
a) “I’m bored” (I add this exhibit of Ayer’s as a way of re-invoking the other
three principal examples from the chapter of his that I have just considered)
b) “You know he took what you said as a promise.” (Roughly a challenge from
Margaret Schlegel to Mr. Wilcox in Howard’s End. I cite this to invoke and further
contextualize the examples of moral encounter in my Claim of Reason, [pp. 265−67])
c) “Monster, felon, deceiver!” (Donna Elvira to Don Giovanni)
d) “Heinrich, what have you done to me?” (said—through singing—by Elizabeth
to Tannhäuser)
e) “Only in its enjoyment do I know love” (sung by Tannhäuser to the other
contestants in the Song Contest)
f) “Carmen, I love you” (end of Don José’s Flower Song).
g) “They say I (or: Perhaps I; or: I would not wish to) anger, mortify, charm,
affront, encourage, embarrass, confuse, alarm, offend, deter, hinder, seduce, intimi-
date, humiliate, harass, incite, etc. you.”
h) “You (or: Are you attempting to . . . ?) anger, mortify, charm, affront, encour-
age, embarrass, confuse, etc. me.”
About all that these cases of words having, and meant to have, some effect on
action may at first seem to have in common is that they are not illocutionary in
force and they are not meant (merely, only, primarily) to inform their addressee of
something, even though most of them (in statement form) are true or false. I would
like just to declare, as Austin does in the case of the illocutionary, that this fact
(that they are not meant primarily to inform) is obvious and not argue it; but
someone might, I sense, give me an argument about it.
“Encourage” may seem to satisfy the illocutionary formula “To say ‘X’ is to
X,” hence not to be a perlocutionary verb. But it does not satisfy something else
Austin also calls an illocutionary formula: “If ‘X’ is illocutionary, then ‘I X you
that . . . ’ is English” (a test that does not always work). I cannot encourage you
that, though I can encourage you to; perhaps that is illocutionary enough. Then
perhaps “encourage” for some reason is in a half-way region. Yet terms in the
semantic range of encourage, such as hearten, inspire, rouse, embolden, have no

tincture of the illocutionary about them: we cannot say “I hearten you” to hearten
you, or “I embolden you to” to embolden you to. It may be that “I encourage you”
is taking on a ritualistic air, like “I congratulate you” or, I gather in certain circles,
like “I insult you,” or like “I dare you to” or “I urge you to.”
Ayer takes the example “I’m bored” to illustrate something like this claim of
the primacy of expression over assertion where statements of emotion are in ques-
tion, hence where ethical assertions are in question, a point that distinguishes the
ethical theory he urges: “Whereas the subjectivist [theorist] holds that ethical state-
ments actually assert the existence of certain feelings, we hold that ethical state-
ments are expressions and excitants of feelings which do not necessarily involve
any assertions” (pp. 109−10). That expressions of emotion excite emotion is an
important fact about the working of passionate utterance, which needs developing.
Ayer’s clause adding that such expressions do not necessarily involve any asser-
tions (meaning “without uttering any words at all” [p. 109]) is something Austin
also likes to emphasize at times. Philosophers often do. I believe the point of the
addition in the present cases, for different reasons, is to avoid, or avoid seeming
to, overemphasize language, or mere words. This is all right; words are not every-
thing in human life; but the fact is underanalyzed. If not to “involve assertions” or
words in your expression means to keep silent, this may come from being silenced,
from not wanting to say something or not sensing the right to say something. If
“I’m bored” needs saying, it may also be obvious, perhaps should be obvious,
without saying; then saying it would place a demand that I may be unwilling or
unable to face, a demand that you acknowledge the obvious. That speech is not
everything is true; that speechlessness may be forced, that speech is difficult, is
something else. (Sometimes, as with excuses or apologies, words are essentially
owed. Flowers are not a substitute. This suggests a subject on its own.)
The final pair of my examples, (f) and (g), uses disclaiming functions to intro-
duce in principle all perlocutionary verbs into the picture. I call the functions “dis-
claiming” to suggest why it is that the first person present indicative active pronoun
cannot be used unprotectedly with perlocutionary verbs. This may indeed be the
first definitive difference of the perlocutionary from the illocutionary. (Austin of
course notices the fact [p. 104], but becomes distracted from trying an explicit
interpretation of it.) The interpretation must turn on the fact that the claim to my
having embarrassed or harassed you by saying something must come primarily
from you, not from me—I can claim, or claim not, to have meant to, even not to
have done it, to deny that my words could rationally be taken as you have taken
them.
As Austin insists, even though it may be only implicit in various grammatical
forms, in illocutionary acts “The ‘I’ who is doing the action does . . . come essen-
tially into the picture” (p. 61). So I might say: The ‘you’ in perlocutionary acts
comes essentially into the picture. But how is this second person established? What
does this difference amount to?
Before getting into this, another word about my list of examples. The three—
(c),(d), and (e)—coming from the world of opera, which precede the final pair, are
there to invoke that world in which passionate utterance has its cultural apotheosis
(perhaps as opposed to its political apotheosis in oratory). In the case of Donna

Elvira, the effect of her outburst is to exasperate and intimidate Don Giovanni, who
escapes; Elizabeth’s outburst to Tannhäuser elicits their Love Duet; Tannhäuser’s
outburst to the contesting knights incites them to draw their swords in order either
to kill or to exile him again. These are not (when or why would they strike us as
being?) just any statements made in just any contexts to just any effect; once
issued, each appears as deeply characteristic and revelatory of both the utterer and
of his or her addressee.
Let me now propose what may count as conditions for the successful function-
ing of such perlocutionary objectives, aligning them with Austin’s six conditions
for the illocutionary.
Austin’s Illoc 1: (Illocutionary Condition 1) [see earlier, pp. 183–84]

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conven-
tional effect, . . . to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain
circumstances.
Analogous Perloc 1: (Perlocutionary Condition 1)
There is no accepted conventional procedure and effect. The speaker is on his or
her own to create the desired effect. (This is about as far as Austin goes in differenti-
ating the functioning of the two forms of performance, differentiating the perlocu-
tionary effect from the illocutionary force. The following conditions are essentially
working out the consequences of this difference, in which the expectations recorded
in Austin’s conditions are generally quite undone).
Austin’s Illoc 2:
The particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate for the invocation
of the procedure.
Analogous Perloc 2a:
(In the absence of an accepted conventional procedure, there are no antecedently
specified persons. Appropriateness is to be decided in each case; it is at issue in each.
I am not invoking a procedure but inviting an exchange. Hence:)
I must declare myself (explicitly or implicitly) to have standing with you (be
appropriate) in the given case.
Analogous Perloc 2b:
I therewith single you out (as appropriate) in the given case.
Austin’s Illoc 3 (together with Illoc 4):

The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
Austin’s Illoc 4:
Completely.
(Illoc 3 and 4 have no analogues for perlocutionary acts, there being no antecedent
procedure in effect.)
Austin’s Illoc 5 (together with Illoc 6):

Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain
thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the
part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure
must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to
conduct themselves, and further
Austin’s Illoc 6:
Must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.
Analogous Perloc 5a.
(The setting or staging of my perlocutionary invocation, or provocation, or con-
frontation, backed by no conventional procedure, is grounded in my being moved to
speak, hence to speak in, or out of, passion, whose capacities for lucidity and opacity
leaves the genuineness of motive always vulnerable to criticism. With that in mind:)
In speaking from my passion I must actually be suffering the passion (evincing,
expressing, not to say displaying it—though this may go undeciphered, perhaps will-
fully, by the other), in order rightfully to
Analogous Perloc 5b:
Demand from you a response in kind, one you are moved to offer, and moreover
Analogous Perloc 6:
Now.
I add to this list, registering a final asymmetry:
Perloc 7:
You may contest my invitation to exchange, at any or all of the points marked by
the list of conditions for the successful perlocutionary act, for example, deny that I
have that standing with you, or question my consciousness of my passion, or dismiss
the demand for the kind of response I seek, or ask to postpone it, or worse. I may or
may not have further means of response. (We may understand such exchanges as
instances of some region of moral education.)
Austin, in discussing (pp. 26 ff.) what counts as “accepting” a conventional

procedure, or what it means for one to “exist,” as required by his condition 1,
emphasizes that “It must remain in principle open for anyone to reject any proce-
dure—or code of procedures—even one that he has already hitherto accepted” (p.
29). I may refuse to accept a slap as a challenge to duel, or “Done!” as the accep-
tance of a bet, or refuse to be picked when everyone else is taking sides to play
Charades, or refuse to recognize the legitimacy of divorce or of war. “One who
does so is, of course, liable to sanctions: others refuse to play with him or say that
he is not a man of honor” (ibid.). I may feel my autonomy depends upon such
refusals, but without the power of refusal I would have no autonomy to speak of:
I would have become, as it were, a creature of convention.
The refusal envisioned in my seventh condition is different. In Austin’s case,
refusing to recognize a challenge or an offer of marriage or a game of Charades is
the end of the matter; just as, in happy illocutionary acts, accepting the bet or
bequest is the end of the matter (and the beginning of another). But in the realm
of the perlocutionary, refusal may become part of the performance. This is regis-
tered in my formulating a separate and final perlocutionary condition that has no
analogue among the illocutionary conditions Austin formulates.
In this mode of exchange there is no final word, no uptake or turndown until a
line is drawn, a withdrawal is effected, perhaps in turn to be revoked. Elizabeth
effects a duet of love with Tannhäuser; this is happy. Donna Elvira effects a further
rupture, anyway further deviousness, from Don Giovanni; this is unhappy, yet who
can fail to be intimidated as well as thrilled by what she has to sing? Carmen’s
“No. You do not love me,” in response to Don Jose’s protestation of love in his
Flower Song, is a definitive case of perlocutionary sequel or “consequence,” the
absence of predictable (conventional) end. (Carmen conventional?) With illocu-
tions, decisions are sometimes to be made as to whether an instance is happy
(Austin cites the case of a ship sliding into the water before the ceremony of
christening is concluded); with perlocutions interpretation is characteristically in
order, part of the passionate exchange. Every critic I have read on the subject takes
Carmen at that moment of refusal to be further seducing Don José, ridiculing his
sense of honor, enticing him to come with her into the life of freedom from law.
But the written score (it is not always performed so) marks her line pianississimo
(triple piano). She is at that moment, as I perceive her, paradoxically, and as far as
humanly possible, expressionless, and utters with no expression a pure constative,
the simplest of truths, that he does not love her. She stares blankly at the truth and
is bewildered. The unprecedented event, finding no love where she has commanded
and returned love, causes her to issue a flurry of invitations and taunts meant to
cover her bewilderment, confused and confusing gestures to which this man, in her
eyes, has, within the space of a song, a song she rejects, become irrelevant; she
denies that it is she who has been singled out in his song. That much has ended in
her. But how will it end between them, who will have the last word? Who does
have the last word?
In the case of performative utterance, failures to identify the correct procedures
are characteristically reparable: the purser should not have undertaken to marry us,
but here is the captain; you may refuse to acknowledge that you had seriously
accepted the offer of a bet beyond your means, but it had better not happen again;
you may fly in tears from the altar, but suppose it is only into an adjacent room.
Our future is at issue, but the way back, or forward, is not lost, whereas failure to
have singled you out appropriately in passionate utterance characteristically puts
the future of our relationship, as part of my sense of my identity, or of my exis-
tence, more radically at stake. One can say: The “you” singled out comes into play
in relation to the declaration of the “I” who thereby takes upon itself a definition
of itself, in, as it may prove, a casual or a fateful form. A performative utterance
is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passion-
ate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire. (Improvisa-
tions may reward a certain spiritual talent. Participation in the law had better not.)
From the root of speech, in each utterance of revelation and confrontation, two
paths spring: that of the responsibilities of implication; and that of the rights of
desire. It will seem to some that the former is the path of philosophy, the latter
that of something or other else, say psychoanalysis. In an imperfect world the paths
will not reliably coincide, but to show them both open is something I want of
philosophy. Then we shall stop not at what we should or ought to say, nor at what
we may and do say, but take in what we must and dare not say, or have it at heart
to say, or are too confused or too tame or wild or terrorized to say or to think to
say. We do not know where the dream of harmony may take us, with others, with
ourselves, nor when—so often—time or patience and talent or magnanimity and

conscience or perception, in a word, our responsiveness, will run out on our efforts
to make the dream practical. Philosophy must nevertheless not lose its thread. It is
little help in this work, to my mind, to take reassurance from the supposed fact (on
certain readings of Austin and of the later Wittgenstein) that language is public,
that it is shared. This prompts us to avoid seeking sociably to provide help and
example sufficient to make it public, to see it shared, the first step toward which
might be, as in Wittgenstein, and in Freud, to recognize when it has become
private.
In acknowledging a mode of speech in or through which, by acknowledging my
desire in confronting you, I declare my standing with you and single you out,
demanding a response in kind from you, and a response now, so making myself
vulnerable to your rebuke, thus staking our future, I mean to be following one of
Austin’s ambitious statements of methodological aim: “The total speech act in the
total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we
are engaged in elucidating” (p. 148). If I were to continue here, I would try making
explicit the kind of challenge which the idea of passionate utterance poses in my
mind to the idea of performance as an image of what speech is (remembering
Austin’s seeking to “rule out the perlocutionary act as an instance of a performative
utterance”), the idea of speech (perhaps I should make explicit that this includes
writing, while writing has formal conditions of its own) as designed to work on
the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others coevally with its design in revealing
our desires to others and to ourselves. The emphasis on performance goes with
other of Austin’s main programs of philosophical labor, notably that of excuses
and of pretending or imitation, other lines along which actions, taking speaking as
acting, can fail quite, in specific respects, to be done, to enter as desired into the
world. And it shapes Austin’s theory of knowledge more generally, since he takes
“I know” to parallel “I promise” in functioning to undertake a similar responsibility
(of subjecting yourself to future scrutiny) and as subject to a similar range of
failures (not merely that of being “wrong”).
I cannot say whether what I have been presenting in these pages is apt to consti-
tute some contribution to the philosophy of language (if Austin’s contribution still
is). (Although an apparent difference between his text and mine—matters of qual-
ity aside—is that mine treats his sometimes in its literariness, which is to say, as
a source of passionate utterance, as texts with moral designs upon their readers ask
to be treated. The invitation can, as I have insisted, be refused; and the grounds of
refusal will be no less moral than intellectual.) It evidently favors some kind of
theory of expression, and in Whitehead lectures delivered at Harvard a few years
ago, Crispin Wright, if I understood him, while showing some interest in what he
called an expression theory of language, registered strong doubts that expression
could ground or sustain a theory of language, observing that human beings have
so few natural expressions. But this observation seems to me to underestimate what
happens when creatures of a certain species fall into the possession of language and
become humans. As I read the later Wittgenstein, as well as Freud, what happens is
that they have become (always already) victims of expression—readable in every
sound and gesture—their every word and act apt to betray their meaning. In the
backgrounds of both Freud and Wittgenstein there is Schopenhauer, whose vision

of what he calls will and representation speaks of the human bodily structure as
“full of expression,” of the personality as “our willing with its constant pain”—as
if we are expression machines, and virtually never turned off (or can one say?:
only rarely, and then only virtually, turning ourselves down).
But if what I have been aiming at is indeed some fragment of a view of expres-
sion, of recognizing language as everywhere revealing desire (and I am prepared
to persist farther than I am perhaps prepared to recognize, regarding a cry in pain,
or a prolonged silence, as a “preverbal” call for help; a tear as a trace of rage,
perhaps at oneself; a sob as a reminder of comfort), the view is meant in service
of something I want from moral theory, namely a systematic recognition of speech
as confrontation, as demanding, as owed (not only, but perhaps especially, when it
is moulded in the form of moral reasons, and even when it proceeds out of sincere
cooperation, as in Paul Grice’s study of rational conversation), each instance of
which directs, and risks, if not costs, blood. So my idea of passionate utterance
turns out to be a concern with performance after all. That I articulate the concern
from the side of passion perhaps suggests that I am calling for an anti-morality (as
many philosophers I admire are accused of doing, I think of Emerson and Nietz-
sche). I would rather think of it as a refusal of moralism.
All honor to Kant’s focus on the judger rather than the judged: the moral law
applies to me first (to each of us first). And to Rawls for articulating the ground of
the right of and the respect for and the responsibility toward difference (the value
of freedom), and the ground of the moral irrelevance of difference (the value of
equality). And to Mill for his horror at the lack of difference enforced by the
tyranny of conformity. They can all be taken as defenses against moralism, against
judgmental interventions unjustified by genuine social or personal emergency or
by principles of justice. But these defenses may come too late in a current moral
crossroads, before our societies have largely interiorized the moral vision of such
thinkers. We need, each of us, the means, and authorization, to deflect both unfair
rejection and suspect concern.
It is here that emotivism has its appeal, as the ridicule of the moral busybody,
spreading personal disapproval. (As a rebuke of the tyrant it is too little too late,
though here the interest of the originators of modern, logical positivism in the
structure, and reconstruction, of the world as an image of the reconstruction of
society should come into consideration.) That people will in daily fact issue moral
judgments with the fastness and looseness perhaps allegorized in Ayer’s “Stealing
money is wrong” (or, in another favorite of mine from those years, “You ought to
keep promises”) puts me in mind of Lacan’s mood (of how I imagine it, of course)
when he compares the unrosy life of an analyst with that of a garbage dump, made
to endure heaps of utterances that are, as Lacan puts it, of doubtful value either to
the analyst or to their subject (see The Psychoses, Seminar III, Chapter III); and I
further imagine that this is his view of most of what most people say most of the
time, as it is something like the view of many philosophers, who may dream of
replacing (or anyway of strictly confining) the language in which what is said
everyday is said. I might say that my view of the role of ordinary language in
relation to the imperative of expression, is that it is less in need of weeding than
of cultivation. Otherwise, as we stand, we are stopped short in the obligation to

make our desires, hence our actions, intelligible (and to ourselves) and hampered
in our demand and right to be found intelligible in those desires and actions, to ask
residence in the shared realm of reason.
Because it is not to my hand here, or perhaps ever, to lay out a fuller geography
of the courses that “endless” passionate exchanges can take in satisfying the condi-
tions of perlocutionary utterance, and because I think of myself here as wishing to
honor Austin’s work, I cite one brilliant source of such passionate exchanges that
I imagine Austin would feel quite happy to be associated with, indicated in his
announcing one of his once-famous courses of lectures at Oxford, the one on the
foundations of empirical knowledge, in roughly the following form: SENSE AND
SENSIBILIA. J. AUSTIN. The source I have in mind is Jane Austen’s Emma.
Jane Austen’s world is one her namesake John would have cause to cherish. It
is one in which love talk is referred to benignly, even lovingly, as talking nonsense,
and in which those who require this talk also crave and are capable of the daily
exchanges necessary to what they call rational society. While that society is de-
picted in all Austen’s novels, not all emphasize explicitly, as in Mansfield Park,
the hideousness of the slave economy that supports the world of such Parks. But
all are plain enough in their descriptions of arbitrary and massive disproportion
between talent and goodness and reward (especially among women) so that one
senses a shared consciousness of a pressure, a necessity, for change. And so strong
on the whole, and sociable, are the individuals who undergo, let’s call it, rational
transformation, that one might believe more readily of their world than of ours that
happiness depends on the change of heart in its individuals more than on the reform
of its institutions.
Here, for a reminder, is a taste, chiefly from the concluding pages of Volume
I, Chapter XV. I trust it bears out pretty clearly the range of my perlocutionary
conditions—2a (declaring one’s standing), 2b (singling one out), 5a (suffering the
passion), 5b (demanding a response), 6 (here and now), and 7 (showing each to be
contestable)—as well as instances of the seven, or perhaps nine, opening perlocu-
tionary verbs in my examples (g) and (h), p. 190. (Is it significant that the passage
seems to contain slightly fewer paradigmatic illocutionary verbs than it does perlo-
cutionary? I count: interpret, confess, recommend, admire, be sorry, resent—en-
courage may perhaps go either way, like insult or urge or dare. Here we would
need other passages and other writers for comparison.)
“Charming Miss Woodhouse! [it is Mr. Elton, continuing to speak, having found
himself alone with this lady in a moving carriage]. Allow me to interpret this interest-
ing silence. It confesses that you have long understood me.”
“No, sir,” cried Emma, “it confesses no such thing. So far from having long under-
stood you, I have been in a most complete error with respect to your views, till
this moment. . . . Am I to believe that you have never sought to recommend yourself
particularly to Miss Smith?—that you have never thought seriously of her?”
“Never madam,” cried he, affronted in his turn: . . . [M]y visits to Hartfield have
been for yourself only; and the encouragement I received”−−−
“Encouragement!−−I give you encouragement!−−sir, you have been entirely mis-
taken in supposing it. I have seen you only as the admirer of my friend. In no other
light could you have been more to me than a common acquaintance. I am exceedingly
sorry: but it is well that the mistake ends where it does. . . . [T]he disappointment is
single, and, I trust, will not be lasting. I have no thoughts of matrimony at present.”
He was too angry to say another word; her manner too decided to invite supplica-
tion; and in this state of swelling resentment, and mutually deep mortification, they
had to continue together a few minutes longer [until the carriage is stopped at its
destination]. If there had not been so much anger, there would have been desperate
awkwardness; but their straight-forward emotions left no room for the little zigzags
of embarrassment.
Later, after Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley have reached an understand-
ing, she asks for his reaction, which she needs at once, to a letter from a pivotal
mutual acquaintance that recites another couple’s major zigzags of love, to which,
after completing his reading, Mr. Knightley says, in one of his sometimes preachy
(he recognizes himself, critically, as having often “lectured” Emma (Volume III,
Chapter XIII)), but characteristically sterling, deliverances that are an honor to
(what Jane Austen calls) rational society (then as now in danger of vanishing):
“Mystery; Finesse−how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every
thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our
dealings with each other?” (Book III, Chapter XV). Or as J. L. Austin is pleased
to put an allied caution in How To Do Things With Words: “Accuracy and morality
alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.” (p. 10) That
is not everything there is to say about saying. But, as Austin was always finding
new ways to say, nothing is everything there is to say.
I wish to thank Ted Cohen and Norton Batkin for their comments on an earlier draft of
this paper.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Categories, Rhetoric, and Nichomachean Ethics in Basic Works of Aristotle (Ox-
ford translation, 1931), ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941.
Austin, J. L.. How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press,
1962).
. “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 3rd Ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and G.
J. Warnock, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1988).
Recommended but Not Cited
Cohen, Ted. “Illocutions and Perlocutions.” Foundations of Language 9 (1973): 492−503.

Gould, Timothy. “The Unhappy Performative,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. An-
drew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London: Routledge, 1995).
Selected Bibliography
Books by Stanley Cavell
Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. New York: Scribner’s, 1969. Reprinted
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. New York: Viking, 1971. Reprinted
with “More on the World Viewed,” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
The Senses of Walden. New York: Viking, 1971. Reprinted, together with “Thinking of
Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” San Francisco: North Point, 1981. This expanded
edition reprinted by University of Chicago Press, 1992.
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon,
1979. (French translation, 1996.) Reprinted with a new preface, 1999.
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981. (Translations: French, 1996; Spanish, 1999; Italian, 1999.)
Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. San Francisco: North Point, 1984. Reprinted,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987. (French translation, 1993.) Expanded edition, 2003.
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988.
This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albu-
querque, NM: Living Batch, 1989. Reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989. (Translations: French, 1991; Dutch, 1998; Spanish, 1999; Portuguese, 1999.)
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. (French translation, 1993.)
A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994.
Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996.
The Cavell Reader. Ed. Stephen Mulhall. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.
Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Ed. David Justin Hodge. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003.
Cities of Words: Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press (2004).
Cavell on Film and Television. Ed. William Rothman. Albany: State University of New
York Press (in press).
Selected Interviews
“An Interview with Stanley Cavell,” conducted by James Conant; and “A Conversation with
Stanley Cavell on Philosophy and Literature,” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, edited
by Richard Fleming and Michael Payne. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press,
1989.
199
200 Selected Bibliography
“Un Entretien avec Stanley Cavell,” conducted by Christian Delacompagne, Le Monde, 25

October 1994.
One of nine interviews conducted by Giovanna Borradori for The American Philosopher,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Books and Collections about Cavell’s Work
Smith, Joseph H., and William Kerrigan, eds. Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis,
and Cinema. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Fischer, Michael. Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989.
Fleming, Richard, and Michael Payne, eds. The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1989.
Cohen, Ted, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds. Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of
Stanley Cavell. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1993.
Fleming, Richard. The State of Philosophy: An Invitation to a Reading of Stanley Cavell’s
The Claim of Reason. Bucknell University Press, 1993.
Mulhall, Stephen. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Claren-
don, 1994.
Perl, Jeffrey M., ed. “A Taste for Complexity: Ten Nondisciples of Stanley Cavell.” Com-
mon Knowledge 5.2 (Fall 1996):21–78.
Gould, Timothy. Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Laugier, Sandra. Recomencer la Philosophie: La philosophie américaine aujord’hui. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
Rothman, William, and Marian Keane. Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophi-
cal Perspective on Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000.
Hammer, Espen. Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary. Cambridge:
Polity Press/Blackwell, 2002.
Eldridge, Richard, ed. Stanley Cavell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Index
Adorno, Theodor, 42 Brooks, Peter, 151

Aiken, Henry, 158 Budick, Emily Miller, 142
America, 6–7, 82, 100–102, 107 Burke, Kenneth, 175
Cavell on, 165, 166–67, 171 Burtt, Edwin A., 16
the concept of, 55–81
and romanticism, 37, 39, 42–47, 49– Caesar, Julius, 109
50 Capra, Frank, 122, 127, 128, 131, 133–34
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 176 Carmen, 4, 190, 194
Arendt, Hannah, 69–71 Carney, Ray, 125, 128, 133–34
Aristotle, 174, 177, 178 Carver, Raymond, 67
Augustine, St., 28, 85, 110, 177 Cavell, Stanley, 157–98
Austen, Jane, 197–8 “On the Availability of Wittgenstein’s
Austin, John Langshaw, 150, 175, 176 Later Philosophy,” 4, 86, 156
Cavell on, 65, 158, 160, 161, 168, 169, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of
177–98 King Lear,” 4, 7, 18, 68, 81, 139
and ordinary language, 7, 37, 82–99, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein,
100–101, 121, 169 Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy, 5,
on skepticism, 10, 11, 13–16, 20 6, 7, 37, 151,
on performative utterances, 4, 147, Cavell on, 158–61, 163–4, 166, 170,
178–95 175, 190
Ayer, A. J., 14, 15, 181–82, 189, 190, Laugier on, 84–93, 95
191 Mulhall on, 22–36
Critchley on, 38–9, 47–51
Bain, Alexander, 14 Rorty on, 10–20
Baudelaire, Charles, 63, 66 Conditions Handsome and Unhand-
Baudrillard, Jean, 46, 47 some: The Constitution of Emer-
Beckett, Samuel, 52, 68 sonian Perfectionism, 5, 93, 100,
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 29–30, 106, 110 104, 141, 172
Bel Geddes, Barbara, 120 Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melo-
Benjamin, Walter, 40 drama of the Unknown Woman,
Berkeley, George, 10, 13, 14, 15 78 n29, 147
Blackmur, R. P., 175 In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skep-
Blake, William, 20, 38, 45 ticism and Romanticism, 6, 37, 38,
Blanchot, Maurice, 40, 42, 164 39, 40, 41, 43, 100, 102
Bloom, Harold, 54 n27 Must We Mean What We Say? 151,
Boorstin, Daniel, 77–78 n26 152, 153, 174
Bouwsma O. K., 10 Cavell on, 157, 170
Bradley, F. H., 14 and ordinary language philosophy,
Brando, Marlon 176 82, 84, 85, 87, 93–96, 98
Brecht, Bertolt, 126 on pragmatism, 112
Broad, C. D., 98 on slavery, 44
201
202 Index
Cavell, Stanley (continued) and America, 47, 49–50, 55, 56, 78–79
This New Yet Unapproachable n29
America, 5, 84, 90, 91, 100 Cavell and, 3, 100–102, 103, 141, 150
and romanticism, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44 as dismissible, 67
“Passionate and Performative Utterance: and perfectionism, 5
Morals of Encounter,” 3, 4–5, and the ordinary, 83–84, 85, 87, 91, 170
177–98 and romanticism, 6, 37, 39–44, 51,
A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographi- 165–67
cal Exercises, 84, 189 and philosophy, 7, 64, 66, 104–105,
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood 168–9
Comedy of Remarriage, 98, 145 and pragmatism, 106–109, 114–15,
The Senses of Walden, 4, 61, 100, 175 171–72
on the American Revolution, 70 and skepticism, 9
on ordinary language, 88 on thinking and patience, 46
Themes Out of School, 78 n27, 84 Empson, William, 175
“What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Euripides, 189
Pragmatist?” 7, 103, 104, 112
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Faraday, Michael, 110
Ontology of Film, 145, 153, 175 Faulkner, William, 65, 67
Chaplin, Charlie, 49 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 14
Chesterton, G. K. 55, 56, 74 Fichte, Johann Gottleib, 13
Cohen, Ted, 198 Fischer, Michael, 141, 143
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 40, 45, Fleming, Richard, 150
107–108 Foucault, Michel, 140, 143, 147, 149, 177
Conant, James, 6–7, 8, 55–81, 167–69 Fox, George, 109
Coolidge, Calvin, 55, 56 Frege, Gottlob, 5, 84, 96, 110
Crane, Hart, 43 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 84, 163, 195–6
Critchley, Simon, 6, 8, 37–54, 162, 164– Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 164
67, 169–70 “Mourning and Melancholia,” 103
Frost, Robert, 65, 67
DeLillo, Don, 67
Derrida, Jacques, 7, 50, 60, 61 Gilson, Etienne, 16
Cavell on, 150, 157, 185, 189 Girard, René, 144–45
Descartes, René, 10, 13, 14, 20 n3 Godard, Jean-Luc 126
and Emerson, 169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 109, 110,
and French intellectuals, 62, 63 111
and modern skepticism, 159 Goldberg, Jonathan, 143
Dewey, John, 7–8, 166, 172 Goodman, Russell, 8, 100–17, 170–72, 176
and American intellectuals, 62, 63 Gould, Timothy 142–43, 150, 151, 198
and the Cartesian project, 16 Green, Thomas Hill, 14
and Cavell, 100–109, 114 Greenblatt, Stephen, 8, 143, 144, 147, 148
and empiricism, 170–71 Grice, Paul, 196
Dollimore, Jonathan, 142
Don Giovanni, 190, 192, 194 Hawks, Howard, 65, 67
Dreyer, Carl 153 Hegel, G. W. F., 19, 61, 100
Drury, Maurice O’Connor, 110 Heidegger, Martin, 16, 42, 44, 47, 176
on dwelling and building, 167
Edwards, Jonathan, 105 and the everyday, 37–38, 166
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62, 153, 157, and skepticism, 48
175, 176 as taken up by Cavell, 43, 100, 101, 107
Index 203
on thinking, 114 Locke, John, 13, 18, 45, 167

and Walden, 175 Luther, Martin, 109
Hitchcock, Alfred, 182
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 175 Malcolm, Norman 16
Hollander, John, 150–51 Mann, Thomas, 4
Holliday, Judy, 176 Marx, Groucho 49–50
Hume, David, 13, 62, 94, 159, 168, 178 Marx, Karl, 47
Matthew, St. 174
James, Henry, Jr. 118, 171, 173 Mead, George Herbert, 100
James, William, 62, 63, 166 Melville, Herman, 67, 169
Cavell and, 7–8, 100, 107, 102–105, Melville, Stephen, 141, 142
170 Mill, John Stuart, 180, 196
on truth, 109 Milton, John, 160
and Wittgenstein, 109–15, 160 Montaigne, Michel de, 14
Joyce, James, 4 Moore, G. E., 10, 11, 13, 14, 185
Cavell on, 98
Kafka, Franz, 56, 80 n42 contrasted with Austin and Witt-
Kant, Immanuel, 60, 61, 100, 159, 195 genstein, 88
on aesthetic judgment, 7, 94, 95 Moses, 110
Cavell on, 101, 171, 172, 196 Mulhall, Stephen, 5–6, 22–36, 41, 42, 49,
and romanticism, 39 162–63
and skepticism, 13, 14–15, 17, 20 n3 Murdoch, Iris, 17
and Wittgenstein, 3, 90–92, 94–95, 96
Kaplan, Abraham, 158 Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Philippe Lacoue-
Kazin, 80 n40 Labarthe, 40–42, 164–65
Keaton, Buster, 49 see also The Literary Absolute
Kenny, 5, 22, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 62, 107, 160,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 10, 20, 73, 101, 168 170
on Christianity, 6, 57–59, 75 n 7, Cavell on, 65, 165–66, 168, 172, 177,
167 and Emerson, 3, 64, 79 nn31–32, 169
and finitude, 5, 20 and finitude, 5, 20
and perfectionism, 107 as a philosopher of culture, 46
and Wittgenstein, 160
King Lear, 4, 7, 46, 49, 71, 144, 148–49, Ophuls, Max, 120
153, 154, 175 ordinary language philosophy, 82–99,
Klevan, Andrew, 8, 118–39, 173–74 121
Köhler, Wolfgang, 110 Othello, 50, 142, 149, 188
Kreisler, Fritz, 175
Kuhn, Thomas, 13, 18 Paine, Tom, 45
Pascal, Blaise, 49, 62
Lacan, Jacques, 140, 150, 196 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 7, 62, 100, 105
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc perfectionism, 6, 34, 37, 83, 114
Nancy, 40–42, 164–65 and America, 43–44, 46
see also The Literary Absolute and Dewey, 103
Laugier, Sandra, 7, 8, 82–99, 169–70 and Emerson, 107
Lewis, C. I., 11 and William James, 104, 109
Leuba, J. H., 112 Perkins, Victor, 8, 120, 121, 129–30, 173
Levinas, Emmanuel, 42, 50, 54 Plato, 44, 47, 62, 100
The Literary Absolute, 39, 40–42, 47, and the future, 165
164–65 and perfectionism, 107, 114
204 Index
Poague, Leland, 125, 128–29 skepticism, 4–5, 6, 10–20, 49, 159

Poirier, Richard, 115 n2 and drama, 145–46, 148–50
Poulet, Georges, 151 Socrates, 61, 100, 110, 177
pragmatism, 7–8, 9 Cavell on, 83, 182
Cavell on, 101–103, 158, 160, 161, Spengler, Oswald, 46, 101
169, 170–72 Spinoza, Baruch, 14, 177
and Emerson, 107, 109 Stevens, Wallace, 169
and scientific method, 105–107 Stevenson, Charles L., 17, 188–89
and Wittgenstein, 111–15 Stewart, Garrett, 3, 8, 140–56, 162, 174–
Price, H. H., 13, 15 75, 176
Putnam, Hilary, 48, 50–51, 115 n2 Stewart, James, 8, 122–23, 126, 127–28,
130, 134–35
Quine, W. V. O., 62, 64, 98 Strawson, P. F., 185
Ramsey, Frank, 110 Tannhäuser, 190, 192, 194

Randall, John Herman, 16 Taylor, Charles, 49
Rawls, John, 17, 162, 196 Taylor, Laurette, 176
Reed, Donna 123 Teresa, Saint, 105
Reid, Thomas, 12, 14, 15 Thoreau, Henry David, 70, 71, 141,
Richards, I. A., 11 157
Rorty, Richard, 5, 9, 1–21, 46, 62 Cavell on, 41, 43, 67, 88, 104, 160–61,
Cavell on, 158–62 163
Laugier on, 85, 86, 89, 97 and finitude, 5, 20, 87
on pragmatism, 8, 105 and literary criticism, 151, 152
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 7, 10, 20, 62, and the ordinary, 83, 84, 85, 91, 92,
63 121
and autobiography, 88 as a philosopher, 7, 60–62, 63–67,
as a philosopher, 168 166–67, 169
and the social contract, 93 and pragmatism, 170–72
Royce, Josiah, 76–77 n12, 100 as taken up by Cavell, 3, 10, 37, 43–
Russell, Bertrand, 5, 98 46, 50, 100–102
on Dewey, 108 Toles, George, 137 nn18–19, 137–38
on pragmatism, 114 n30, 138 n48
and Wittgenstein, 109, 110 Tolstoy, Leo, 10, 11, 20, 67, 105
Ryle, Gilbert, 10, 15, 20 Travis, Charles, 98
Twain, Mark 65
Santayana, George, 13, 100
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 13, 14–15, 16, 19, 63 Vitti, Monica, 176
Schlegel, August, 6
Schlegel, Friedrich, 6, 40–41, 51, 164, Webster, Ben, 175
171 Wenders, Wim, 57
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 101, 169, 196 West, Cornel, 108, 115 n2
Schubert, Franz, 110 Wheeler, Richard, 143–47
Shakespeare, William, 3, 8, 50, 84, 160 White, Morton, 4, 158
and literary criticism, 140–46, 148–49 Wilde, Oscar, 79 n36, 107
and philosophy, 152 Williams, Bernard, 20 n3, 160
see also King Lear, Othello Wilson, George, 8, 124
Shaw, George Bernard, 107 Wilson, Woodrow, 55, 56
Sidgwick, Henry, 17 Wisdom, John, 10
Index 205
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 43, 59, 142, 150, and philosophy, 32, 46, 108, 158, 165–66
188 and pragmatism, 8, 101–102, 111–15,
Cavell on, 5–6, 22–26, 34–35, 37–38, 170–72
39–40 and professionalization, 14
on criteria, 166 and romanticism, 50
on eternity, 107 and skepticism about the external
and expression, 195–96 world, 10, 11, 98–99, 160
and film, 130 and skepticism about other minds, 7,
and finitude, 20 18–19, 48, 160, 164
and the human voice, 28–29 and therapy, 4, 84
Kantian background of, 3 and William James, 109–15
and the ordinary, 82–83, 85–97, 100– Wolfe, Cary, 142
101, 169 Wordsworth, William, 6, 164

Cavell Passionate Utterances

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright  2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

4. Cavell and the Concept of America 55

5. Rethinking the Ordinary: Austin after Cavell 82

6. Cavell and American Philosophy 100

7. Guessing the Unseen from the Seen: Stanley Cavell

8. The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell 140

10. Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter 177

JAMES CONANT is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He has written

SIMON CRITCHLEY is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty, New School

RUSSELL B. GOODMAN, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, has

SANDRA LAUGIER is Professor of Philosophy at the Université d’Amiens (France). She

STEPHEN MULHALL is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford. He is

RICHARD RORTY teaches philosophy in the Comparative Literature Department of Stan-

GARRETT STEWART, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa,

cism, Morality, and Tragedy”); to the “Emersonian moral perfectionism” delineated

Part four of The Claim of Reason foreshadows Cavell’s developing interest in

My contribution, “Cavell and American Philosophy,” begins by charting the trajec-

Garrett Stewart’s “The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell” assesses Cavell’s position in

Cavell’s responses to these essays begin with an extended discussion of skepticism,

1. William Rothman, “Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera,” in Richard Eldridge,

ionable philosophy departments. Among intellectuals generally, Wittgenstein is in

our language-games, our patterns of justiﬁcation, our ideas or words—knowledge

side. Usually we Anglo-Americans try to deromanticize the Continental tradition

Cavell’s comments on the form of life of Anglo-Saxon moral philosophers are

Applying lessons learned from Kuhn’s Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions, Cavell

Despite Cavell’s philosophical and literary

First Paragraph: Integrity and Reﬂexivity

Second Paragraph: Texts and Problems

Cavell’s response to this intervention is a straight-faced, even stuffy reply to the

Third Paragraph: Writing, Speech, and the Human Voice

Fourth Paragraph: Modernism

as both. I think of this as the book’s theory of itself—as composed of fragments

Here, the Wittgensteinian philosopher’s responsiveness to those moments when

What, then, might it mean to regard them as mythological? I assemble a list

Fifth Paragraph: Approaching the Hermeneutic Circle

We have so far completed an interpretation of the ﬁrst of the two self-introductory

1. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy

I do not deny that truth can be used as a

The Romanticization of Everyday Life

Thus, romanticism is the discovery of the exceptionality of the everyday, or, in

is to say, romanticism is that process of secularization (CR, 470) or de-divinization

Emerson as the Literary Absolute

Thus, Emerson’s writing is no longer “work in progress”—which, as Lacoue-

Thus, Cavell presents Emerson (or, on Mulhall’s account, presents himself)7 as

Digression: Why Stanley Loves America

It must be asked: What is the relation of Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism to

What does America mean as a philosophical event? What is the place of

Cavell’s Tragic Wisdom

“Nietzsche” (trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, 82). I wonder

Cavell and the Concept

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well,

There is nothing the matter with Americans

The business of America is business.

I am willing to love all mankind, except an

Your American eagle is very well. Protect it

Is there, as President Wilson thought, an internal relation between the concept of

Kierkegaard draws a helpful distinction between objective and subjective catego-

involvement in a religious way of life; inﬂected merely objectively, it signiﬁes

that it involves what Kierkegaard seems to regard as an impossible combination of

Christianity is not plausible.

Religion only conquers without force.15