Here and There

Sites of Philosophy

Stanley Cavell, Nancy Bauer,Alice Crary,Sandra Laugier

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674276420
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The first posthumous collection from the writings of Stanley Cavell, shedding new light on the distinctive vision and intellectual trajectory of an influential American philosopher. For Stanley Cavell, philosophy was a matter of responding to the voices of others. Throughout his career, he articulated the belief that words spring to life in concrete circumstances of speech: the significance and power of language depend on the occasions that elicit it. When Cavell died in 2018, he left behind some of his own most powerful language—a plan for a book collecting numerous unpublished essays and lectures, as well as papers printed in niche journals. Here and There presents this manuscript, with thematically relevant additions, for the first time.These writings, composed between the 1980s and the 2000s, reflect Cavell's expansive interests and distinctive philosophical method. The collection traverses all the major themes of his immense body of work: modernity, psychoanalysis, the human voice, moral perfectionism, tragedy, skepticism. Cavell's rich and cohesive philosophical vision unites his wide-ranging engagement with poets, critics, psychoanalysts, social scientists, and fellow philosophers. In Here and There, readers will find dialogues with Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Freud, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Wallace Stevens, Veena Das, and Peter Kivy, among others. One of the collection's most striking features is an ensemble of five pieces on music, constituting Cavell's first discussion of the subject since the mid-1960s.Edited by philosophers who have been invested in Cavell's work for decades, Here and There not only gathers the strands of a writing life but also maps its author's intellectual journeys. In these works, Cavell models what it looks like to examine seriously one's own passions and to forge new communities through unexpected conversations.

PART I | Departures

1

Time after Time

This essay was written and translated into French for a forum sponsored by Le Monde in 1994 in Le Mans, France. The forum was entitled “The Future Today,” and participants were asked to envision a future for our polluted world. Cavell’s contribution, which picks up the environmental thread running through a number of his writings, was published in the London Review of Books in 1995.

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IN 1994, invitations to the Sixth Le Monde Forum held at Le Mans, with the title “The Future Today,” posed to its participants an introductory statement for discussion that contained the following passage: “Everything is worn out: revolutions, profits, miracles. The planet itself shows signs of fatigue and breakdown, from the ozone layer to the temperature of the oceans.” The disappointed or counter-romantic mood of this passage produced the following intervention from me, one that has distinctly affected my work since that time.

Keep in mind that I come from that part of the world for which the question of old and new—call it the question of a human future—is, or was, logically speaking, a matter of life and death: if the new world is not new then America does not exist, it is merely one more outpost of old oppressions. Americans like Thoreau (and if Thoreau then Emerson and Walt Whitman, to say no more) seem to have lived so intensely or intently within the thought of a possible, and possibly closed, future that a passage like the one I just cited would be bound to have struck them as setting, that is putting on view and enforcing, an old mood. Compare with that passage a sentence from the opening chapter of Thoreau’s Walden: “Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are [themselves] as old as Adam.” This is, I think we might say, a compounding or transcendentalizing of the sense of the worn out, showing that concept of our relation to the past to be itself nearly worn out. And this recognition provides Thoreau not with compounded tedium and ennui but with an outburst of indignant energy. He continues: “But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.” This is why he can say, when he appeals to sacred writings and defends them against the sense that they are passé: “We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.” As if to say: Beware of the idea of The Future Today—that is, of Today’s Future; it may be a function of Yesterday’s Today, and you will discover that Today was always already Tomorrow, that there is no time for origination. Yet Thoreau’s idea is that time has not touched the thoughts and texts he deals in. What chance is there for us to share his faith today, now? When is now?

An intricate intersection of old and new is also the burden of Emerson’s great essay “Experience.” Indeed it should not be surprising that America found its philosophical voice in thinking, and having to think, about the future—if you grant me the claim that Emerson and Thoreau represent the founding of the American difference in philosophy. Emerson writes in “Experience”: “In liberated moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible.… The new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be found.… The new philosophy must take [these skepticisms] in and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.” This demand for integration sounds like a beginning of that American optimism or Emersonian cheerfulness to which an old European sophistication knows so well how to condescend. But it has never been sure, even where I come from, that Emerson’s tone of encouragement is tolerable to listen to for very long—as if it expresses a threat as much as it does a promise. I note that his words about finding a creed out of unbeliefs, unlike those of his familiar followers as well as detractors, contain no word of hope. What occurs to us in liberated moments is that we know. That “we” claims to speak for us, for me and for you, as philosophy in its unavoidable arrogance always claims to do; and moreover claims to speak of what we do not know we know, hence of some thought that we keep rejecting; hence claims to know us better than we know ourselves. I suppose Emerson is claiming to know this, as we do, only in liberated moments. Then presumably his writing the thought was one such moment—as if something about such writing tends to such moments. Does reading such writing provide us with further such moments? If—or when—it does not, how could we fail to find Emerson’s claims intolerable?

Let us provisionally surmise just this much from Emerson’s passage: if we are to think anew it must be from a new stance, one essentially unfamiliar to us; or, say, from a further perspective that is uncontrollable by us. If we formulate this by saying that to think the future one would have to be in the future, this sounds like a way also of summarizing Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, whose subtitle is “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” This is as it should be since that text of Nietzsche’s—like so many of Nietzsche’s texts, early and, as in this case, late—is pervasively indebted to Emerson’s Essays, “Experience” pivotally among them. But unlike his reiterated, implicit rebuke to Wagner’s Der Kunstwerk der Zukunft, Nietzsche’s continuous invocation of Emerson is something we will recognize and remember only intermittently, in liberated (vanishing) moments.

Beyond Good and Evil speaks, as Emerson does, of thinking through pessimism to affirmation. Nietzsche specifies pessimism as what is most world-denying; Emerson’s name for this, in the passage I cited from “Experience,” is skepticism; its opposite Nietzsche specifies as world affirmation, which is precisely what Emerson understands the new world to be awaiting. Nietzsche specifies the world-affirming human being as one who, reconceiving time, achieves the will to eternal recurrence; Emerson specifies this figure as one who finds the knack of liberation in moments. Since Nietzsche’s thinking through pessimism in his articulation of nihilism, the philosophical stakes he puts in play are not alone the national existence of the so-called new world, but the continuation of old Western culture, of what it has so far told itself of the human.

Emerson and Nietzsche are variously explicit in saying that philosophy as such is thinking for the future—so that their sense of going beyond philosophy in what they say about the future is at the same time a claim to the stance of philosophy. In Beyond Good and Evil: “More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to today.… By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement.” We might think here of Plato, who is explicit in his Republic in staging the moment of philosophy, specifically of philosophy’s entrance into the public world, as in some future that is now datable only paradoxically, as when philosophers will become kings; in the meantime we (re)construct our city only with words, as with the text of the Republic. Or we may think of Kant, for whom moral sanity depends on a reasonable hope for future justice, and his necessary positing of the good city as a Realm of Ends—where each of us is legislated for in legislating for all. Unlike Plato’s Republic, Kant’s good city is essentially unrepresentable by philosophy: if we could represent it we could claim to know it, but that would leave room neither for genuine faith in our effectiveness toward a future nor for genuine knowledge of the present. (Among the choices we have for dating the modern, one may choose Freud’s discovery that anything I think, except negation, I can dream, and anything I dream is a work of representation, hence a guide for myself to what I all but inescapably already know.)

Nietzsche’s words about the philosopher as the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, hence as necessarily having to find himself in contradiction to today, and his specifying this as his vivisecting the very virtues of his time, are virtual transcriptions (with a Nietzschean accent) of words of Emerson’s. In Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” there is a pair of sentences I have previously had occasion to variously cite and interpret: “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.” I will merely assert here that Emerson uses his signature concept of self-reliance, in contradiction to the conforming usage of it in most request, to characterize his writing, hence his thinking; hence to place it, in every word, in aversion to, and as averse to, his conforming society. And assert further that Nietzsche’s sense of the philosopher’s words as in “contradiction to today” are not only rewriting of Emerson’s “aversion to conformity” but that Emerson’s citing of conformity as a virtue, and precisely as epitomizing the virtues of his today, from which in every word he writes his writing recoils (“Every word they say chagrins us” is another formulation in “Self-Reliance”), casts Emerson as the figure most directly captured in Nietzsche’s terrible image of the philosopher as vivisectionist. (This is evidently a further shade of intervention than Socrates is colored with, as gadfly or midwife.) That Emerson is supplying words for Nietzsche’s description of the philosopher—or himself, of course—comes out again later in the same paragraph, in his speaking of philosophical violence as the philosopher’s betraying his own secret of a new greatness of man, which Nietzsche specifies as an untrodden way to man’s enhancement.

The picture of philosophizing as taking steps on a path is an ancient one, but Emerson’s “Experience” is remarkable for its concentration on the idea of thinking as a new succession, or success: “To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road … is wisdom.” This might strike one as giving up on the future; the possibility will come back. English translation of Nietzsche’s passage rather loses another echo from “Experience” in rendering Nietzsche’s philosophical secret of a new greatness of man by speaking of an untrodden way to man’s “enhancement.” “Enhancement” conceives greatness, which Nietzsche calls eine Grösse, as found on a path to his heightening, whereas Nietzsche’s characterizing the newness as a Vergrösserung, enveloping and intensifying Grösse, leaves quite open what form the magnification is to take—“expansiveness” is one characteristic Emersonian term for productive human thinking.

The value of leaving open the proposed idea of human increase or expansiveness is that it is at the end of the section begun by Nietzsche’s paragraph concerning the new greatness that he reformulates the question of the future by asking: “Today—is greatness possible?”; a question explicitly both about the human capacity to think and the capacity to will. Now Emerson’s “Experience” can be taken as an essay on greatness, and greatness precisely as preparing a joyful future—if the human past of grief, with its endless cause for grievance, may be set aside, not so much survived as outlived. As Emerson here measures grief by his response to the death of his young namesake son, he repeatedly figures the possibility of expansiveness, in mood and in thought, as the greatness of pregnancy. (English used to speak about “being great with child.”) This is how I read Emerson’s call for the “soul [to attain] her due sphericity,” and his account of “the great and crescive self,” perhaps above all his report of insight from “the vicinity of a new … region of life,” which he conveys as a region of new life giving a sign of itself “as it were in flashes of light.” He reports: “And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.” What’s going on? What number of hearts does Emerson feel beating, one or two? If America opens a joyful future, why is it “unapproachable”—which seems to imply that it is forbidding, or hideous, or otherwise beyond clear grasp?

Put aside the arresting fact that Emerson identifies the writing of this essay with the growth of an embryo, and focus on the underlying Emersonian proposition (not without apparent contradiction elsewhere) that greatness is to be found only in little things. From Emerson’s essay “Character”: “Is there any religion but this, to know, that whenever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if none see it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact.” This perhaps marks the point of Nietzsche’s radical difference with Emerson. In Beyond Good and Evil we have heard: “The time for petty [kleine] politics is past: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale [grossen] politics.” This prophecy made in the late eighties of the nineteenth century seems a fairish way of tracking the progress of the twentieth, including a certain prediction of an essential region of Heidegger’s reflections on his century. Has the century ended? Was it in 1989? And in Berlin, or in Moscow?

Plotting the reticulation of differences implied in the audiences or possibilities of America and of Europe is still worth some patience; and I would like to sketch here two further encounters between Emerson’s Essays and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil—1. regarding the specific way time is reconceived and 2. regarding the appearance of the feminine in characterizing, or protecting, philosophy.

Take time first. In “Circles,” perhaps Emerson’s most concentrated pages on the concept of the new (pages from which Nietzsche cites explicitly and climatically near the end of his Untimely Meditation with the title Schopenhauer as Educator), the first paragraph contains these sentences: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn.” This is, whatever else, a formulation of what an Emersonian essay is, and does; each Emerson essay contains such self-formulations. Emerson goes on at once to gloss the image of the circle by saying that there is “no end in nature, but every end is a beginning,” and that “under every deep a lower deep opens,” and that “there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon.” Thoreau—I suppose Nietzsche’s only rival as an interpreter of Emerson—recasts the thought more famously in the concluding two brief sentences of Walden: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” The figuring of “more day” or of “another dawn risen on mid-noon” provides a hint for taking Nietzsche at his characteristic word when he says that the philosopher is “a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”

English and French picture the leap over the day after today as its being “after” (après) that after. But German says Übermorgen, which plays uncannily into the attention Nietzsche gives to the prefix über. I take it we are to understand the relation of Übermorgen to Morgen on the model of the relation of Übermensch to Mensch—so that the Übermensch precisely is whatever the man of Übermorgen is, its discoverer or creator. This singles out the one who has learned (which must mean that he has taught himself) how to think of, and how to live in, a further day, which is to say, in the future—the thing Thoreau calls “more day” and that Emerson calls “another dawn,” an after dawn. Such a day is not one assurable from the fact of the past risings of the sun (Hume was right enough about that), but one the course to which is plottable only through an ambitious philosophy, thinking it through, aversively, which is to say, by turning ourselves around, not presuming at once to head into the future. The future—call it...