Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy

Espen Dahl

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253012029
• eBook ISBN: 9780253012067
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

"Impressive . . . a gifted theologian . . . manages to place Cavell in conversation with continental thought as productively as anyone before him." — Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) is a secular Jew who by his own admission is obsessed with Christ, yet his outlook on religion in general is ambiguous. Probing the secular and the sacred in Cavell's thought, Espen Dahl explains that Cavell, while often parting ways with Christianity, cannot dismiss it either. Focusing on Cavell's work as a whole, but especially on his recent engagement with Continental philosophy, Dahl brings out important themes in Cavell's philosophy and his conversation with theology.
"It is undoubtedly tricky business writing a book about Stanley Cavell and any book enterprising enough to bring him into conversation with Christian theology should be additionally commended, especially one as likable as Espen Dahl's." — Modern Theology
"Clearly, concisely, and powerfully shows Cavell's frequent and deep links to and engagements with religion and religious themes and with (so-called) Continental philosophy . . . Dahl has also written a highly accessible book on Cavell, and yet one which in no way 'waters down' or dilutes Cavell's thinking. There ought to be more books of this kind on Cavell." — International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion
"In making such a convincing case for claiming that religion is Stanley Cavell's pervasive, hence invisible, business, Espen Dahl also puts Cavell's writings into sustained and productive dialogue with the work of Levinas and Girard in ways other commentators have not previously managed." —Stephen Mulhall, Oxford University

ONE

Modernism and Religion

Right from his entrance on the philosophical scene in the late 1960s, Stanley Cavell has insisted that philosophy is confronted with the same cultural problems, burdens, and commitments—collectively known as modernism—that confront art. From some moment during the nineteenth century, artistic conventions for representation and composition no longer seemed to be adequate bearers of contemporary expression; along with the corrosion of the given framework of conventions, the stable relation between artist and audience also became more fragile, at times broken. As Cavell sees it, this situation is mirrored in philosophy: after Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, there is no simple answer as to how one should establish and continue to write philosophy; its past conveys no reliable answer for how to proceed, its future relevance cannot be known, and its attraction of an audience has become a goal rather than a given. Hence, both art and philosophy must find new modes of continuing their respective tasks. The absence of traditional authorities in art and philosophy might be rooted in the corrosion of a shared recognition of God and a cosmic order. From this perspective, modernism can be regarded as a reaction to secularization: the metaphysical isolation of modern subjectivity, its loss in the conviction of another reality, and its various attempts to connect with the finite reality. But it is also viable to regard religion as entering a modernist situation, that is, not as outdated and hence impossible, but as possible although problematic.

While Cavell at times expresses reluctance toward religion in general and aspects of Christianity in particular, this disinclination is but one side of his stance toward religion, the other being affirmative. Consequently, any reading of Cavell’s relation to religion that does not take both sides into account will invariably be one-sided. In this chapter I shed light on the motivation behind Cavell’s ambivalent stance toward religion by suggesting that the modernist situation, as Cavell conceives it, not only has bearing on art and philosophy, but also sheds considerable light on the conditions of religion.

Between Christianity and Nietzsche

In order to contest the reading of Cavell as presenting a one-sided account of Christianity, I address the passages on which that reading fundamentally relies. It is incontestably true that Cavell does attack Christianity, particularly some of its conceptions of sin, its understanding of the human body, and its fundamental passivity coupled with the requirement for external intervention. In doing so, Cavell draws heavily on Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, for example when writing the following:

Can a human being be free of human nature? (The doctrine of Original Sin can be taken as a reminder that, with one or rather with two exceptions humankind cannot be thus free. Yet Saint Paul asks us to put off our (old) nature. What is repellent in Christianity is the way it seems to imagine both our necessary bondage to human nature and our possible freedom from it.… ) (CR, 416)

The repellent “way” presumably refers to the Pauline understanding of humanity as bound to sin, and to the depiction of redemption from sin through external grace, made possible through Christ. Though readings of the relevant passage are often restricted to these lines, it is crucial to my reading to cite the passage further:¹

In this, Nietzsche seems to me right, even less crazy than Christianity. But he persists in believing both that humankind must get free of human nature and that the human being cannot be free of human nature. Hence the logic of his advice to escape this dilemma of our humanity by overcoming our human nature. I hope he was wrong in this persistence … that we will … overcome ourselves nihilistically, solve the dilemma of our humanity by becoming monsters. (CR, 416)

Let me draw attention to two points: first, Cavell’s suggested parallelism of the Christian outlook and Nietzsche’s alternative, and second, the fact that Cavell hopes Nietzsche is wrong, that to opt for the superhuman (Übermensch) implies the quest for the inhumane by becoming monsters. Hence, Cavell does not confront us with two options, one obviously wrong and one obviously right. Even if the perspectives eclipse each other—the Nietzschean critique of Christian sin and redemption, versus the Christian objection to Nietzsche’s monstrosity—Cavell is not taking a stance here. He can speak of his conception of philosophy “as the achievement of the unpolemical, refusal to take sides in metaphysical positions” (PoP, 22). Accordingly, Cavell’s aim in the present case is not to decide, but to put the options on display. Taken to the extreme—as here—both options have their own attractions in light of the other option, and both might repel us.

Another decisive passage reads:

For of course there are those for whom the denial of the human is the human. (Cf. “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” 96). Call this the Christian view. It would be why Nietzsche undertook to identify the task of overcoming the human with the task of overcoming the denial of the human.… (CR, 493)

There is a tendency to read the reference to Christianity as a repudiation of it, and to downplay the presence of Nietzsche, at the cost of elucidating the parallelism that arguably is essential to Cavell’s account.² If such parallelism between the Nietzschean and Christian perspectives occurs in Cavell’s thinking, one must assume that if he rejects the Christian view, he also rejects Nietzsche’s. But if one must overcome the human in order to overcome the denial of the human, one moves away from what seems to be Cavell’s abiding picture of the human as placed between: between avoidance and acknowledgment, and between the drive to transcend and to inhabit one’s condition. Moreover, it is not obvious that Cavell believes that both the Nietzschean and the Christian outlooks are misguided. Rather, it seems more likely that what is at stake here is their truth—perhaps similar to how it is essential to Cavell’s understanding of skepticism that it also articulates some truth, however distorted it comes out (CR, 241).

No serious reception of Cavell would claim that he is invariably hostile toward Nietzsche; other texts reveal that Nietzsche is one of the impetuses behind Cavell’s elaboration of his moral perfectionism (CHU, 48–53; PDT, 116–119). If there is a systematic parallelism of Nietzsche’s view and that of Christianity, this would suggest that Cavell holds a similar high regard for Christianity. The quotation above refers to Cavell’s own “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” where, without mentioning Christianity explicitly, Cavell states that philosophy concerns insights that one “cannot, being human, fail to know. Except nothing is more human than to deny them” (MWM, 96). I take the lesson not to be that such denials should be purged from what we regard as human; rather, Cavell suggests that our standing temptation to deny what is human must be included in our conception of our humanity, as an acknowledgment of something that begins to resemble inescapable sinfulness. The upshot of the quotation above is that both the denial of the human (that is, the Christian view of original sin) and the wish to transcend humanity (here phrased as Nietzsche’s overcoming of that denial) are integral parts of Cavell’s view of humanity.

Cavell’s sweeping generalizations about Christianity are not meant to take its historical and systematic complexity into account, but to draw attention to inevitable dimensions of our own cultural heritage, akin, perhaps, to Nietzsche’s genealogy. For Cavell, philosophy is designed to confront our culture with our present criteria for meaning (CR, 125). The portrait of culture that emerges from these passages is one that accentuates the split between culture’s religious and distinctively non- or anti-religious dimensions. The significance of this cultural ambivalence for Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy is suggested in what seems to be the most significant passage from The Claim of Reason in this respect. Unsurprisingly, we again encounter the juxtaposition of Christianity and Nietzsche:

You might battle against the Christian’s self-understanding from within Christianity, as Kierkegaard declares, or from beyond Christianity, as Nietzsche declares. On both cases you are embattled because you find the words of the Christian to be the right words. It is the way he means them that is empty or enfeebling. (CR, 352)

As the context makes clear, these “words of the Christian” concern passivity and activity; more specifically, Cavell here refers to Nietzsche’s suspicion that Christianity disguises actions as sheer passivity. Again, one must ask, whose self-understanding is right? Cavell replies that “the answer is, Both” (CR, 352), and leaves it to the reader to figure out how and to what extent both can be right, but also, in another sense, wrong.

Far from providing a one-sided attack on Christianity, the remarks on religion in The Claim of Reason should be read as interwoven with a more complex cultural and philosophical web. Cavell seems to be attempting to depict the human struggle over its own human condition, as it unfolds within the modernist situation. This situation is characterized by modernism’s ambivalence toward religion, but also by the unwillingness of philosophy—or at least the unwillingness of Cavell’s philosophy—to settle for either side. The modernist culture, according to Cavell’s portrait, is certainly rooted in a secular age in which Christianity does not belong to the unquestionable cultural framework, but neither is it in an age in which Nietzsche’s prophecy of the death of God has proven right, at least not in its most straightforward sense.

Meaning Too Much

When Cavell writes above that “the words of the Christian [seem] to be the right words. It is the way he means them that is empty and enfeebling” (CR, 352), he alludes to a distinction between saying words and meaning them, which is the central theme of Cavell’s title essay in Must We Mean What We Say? In this essay, Cavell argues that there is no pure semantic meaning at our disposal that in turn can be applied to an external, pragmatic context. According to ordinary language philosophy, there is no such pure or private meaning; what words must mean is exacted by the conventions and implications of what we are saying under particular circumstances (MWM, 9–12). Ordinary language philosophy wants to draw attention to how we must use words in order to mean anything at all. Words are never self-sufficient unities of meaning, but are only meaningful in a wider context. To learn words is also to enter the world in which words have their distinct application. Ultimately, language can only be understood against the background of the entire form of life, as Wittgenstein has pointed out (PI, § 19). Words are consequently exposed to the shifting historical configurations of that form of life; their meaning can contract and expand, become obsolete, and gain a new life. One can discover treasures among apparently obsolete words, but words can also appear to say things or even to reveal further depths when their meaning—their interest, value, and role in our form of life—has in fact been lost (MWM, 43). Naturally, this also applies to religious words. More precisely, such insights have a dual consequence for religion, in that religious words can mean both too much and too little. In meaning too much, words have implications and consequences for the speaker or writer that outrun his or her intentions; in meaning too little, words seem to convey information or express depth when they in fact do neither (CR, 351).

Mulhall says that Cavell employs “Christian words in essentially unchristian ways,” which raises the question of whether Cavell can do this consistently.³ Mulhall asks, appropriately, whether such words can be employed without being committed to the framework in which the words have evolved and find their proper meaning—in Cavell’s case, the framework of post-Reformation Christianity. More precisely, what Mulhall has in mind is Charles Taylor’s narrative of the Reformation’s contribution to modern moral identity, summed up by what Taylor calls “the affirmation of ordinary life.”⁴ The Reformation resulted in a new evaluation of daily work, of family life, and of ordinary commitments. Mulhall claims that the appreciation of the near, the common, and the ordinary, whether conceived in English romanticism, American transcendentalism, or ordinary language philosophy—in short, Cavell’s concept of the ordinary—must be regarded as heavily indebted to the inheritance of the Reformation.

But in what sense must this affect Cavell’s thinking? Taylor’s point is that the notion of the ordinary still has an impact on our contemporary conception of the self, and, accordingly, Mulhall thinks this should make us question the coherence of Cavell’s criticism of Christianity.⁵ One might, however, reply with Simon Critchley that although Cavell’s key concepts historically have religious roots, it does not follow that they are still religious.⁶ But this is hardly the way Cavell asks us to think about it; precisely the fact that the inheritance of our religious past is not definitively over, though without exactly answering the present problems either, constitutes the central problem of the modernist state. The troublesome aspect is that religion is still present, haunting even.

More pertinently, Critchley openly recognizes that Beckett—or more accurately Cavell’s reading of Beckett—regards our world as “overfull with meaning.”⁷ In Cavell’s reading of Beckett’s Endgame, it is such a conviction that attunes Cavell’s attentive ear to the religious register alluded to in almost every moment of that play. Against the widely accepted assumption that Beckett wants to demonstrate the meaninglessness of our ordinary words, Cavell contends that Beckett seeks rather to highlight their total and even totalitarian success. In other words, Cavell does not read Endgame as depicting the void after the death of God, but as displaying our inability to rid words of their religious meaning: “Positivism said that statements about God are meaningless; Beckett shows that they mean too damned much” (MWM, 120). Accordingly, our language always takes on meanings that lead beyond private control—we are exposed to meaning that, among other things, comes to us from the past: “Words come to us from a distance; they were there before we were; we are born into them. Meaning them is accepting the fact of their condition” (SW, 64). Hence, it is not up to Cavell, nor anyone else, to prescribe what Christian words must imply; we can certainly choose among various words, but we cannot choose what they mean. This is not to say that meaning takes care of itself independent of us, but neither is it to say that just any form of life will bring the meaning of certain words into life. If words mean too much for Beckett, that proves that they still are intertwined with our form of life, for better or worse.

In Endgame, stories of redemption have become a curse to Hamm and Clov; they cannot believe such stories, but they cannot give up faith in them, either. They are torn between despair and hope, entangled with meaning from which there seems to be no escape—and yet, they cannot stop trying to escape. Taken as a clue to how the play asks to be read, this means that Beckett is testing the degree to which we can purge ordinary language of its burdensome religious meaning. One of the procedures Beckett uses is to take words literally: as in positivism, he insists on accepting words only as denotations, omitting their connotations. For instance, what at first sounds like swearing—“What in God’s name could there be on the horizon?”—turns out to be an actual question, asking whether there is something on the horizon that appears in the name of God. Its dark humor stems from these words’ inexorable meaningfulness, that they cannot but avoid meaning more than we think they mean, which ultimately entails that we, the language animal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Modernism and Religion
• 2. The Ordinary Sublime
• 3. Acknowledging God
• 4. Skepticism, Finitude, and Sin
• 5. The Tragic Dimension of the Ordinary
• 6. The Other and Violence
• 7. Forgiveness and Passivity
• Conclusion: The Last Question: Self-redemption or Divine Redemption?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index