Stanley Cavell and the potencies of the voice 9781501349485, 1501349481

Table of contents :
Potencies of the voice --
Jungle man --
Skeptical man --
Common man.

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STANLEY CAVELL AND THE POTENCIES OF THE VOICE

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STANLEY CAVELL AND THE POTENCIES OF THE VOICE

Adam Gonya

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Adam Gonya, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Toby Way Cover image shows a detail from The Blue Whale (2016) by Patrick Gonya All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4948-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4950-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4949-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of Margaret, dedicated to Darrel

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments viii List of Abbreviations x INTRODUCTION 1 Part One TWO POTENCIES OF THE VOICE 21 Part Two JUNGLE MAN 49 Part Three SKEPTICAL MAN 89 Part Four COMMON MAN 131 CONCLUSION 163 Notes 175 Index 208

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While engaged on this project I have incurred many debts of gratitude. William Desmond, as both professor and philosopher, has been a source of encouragement and inspiration. I am fortunate to have been one of his students. Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury has been a model of professionalism who over the years has patiently guided this project to completion. I am grateful to Amy Martin and Amy Jordan, both also at Bloomsbury, for their assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. I am grateful to Leeladevi Ulaganathan for her careful work on the text. For their thoughtful responses to an earlier version I am grateful to Arnold Burms, Paul Cortois, Antoon Vandevelde, and Richard Eldridge. I also appreciate the responses from two anonymous readers of an earlier draft; they have made this a much better book. This project has inestimably benefited from the insight and generosity of Stephen Mulhall. My family has been a support throughout, particularly my father, Darrel Gonya, to whom it is my honor to dedicate this book. My thanks to Julie Oles, and Mary Grace and Jim Lucier. Thanks to Alpha and Amadou. Thanks to my sister, Martha, and to my brother, Patrick, who kindly allowed me to use a detail from one of his paintings on the cover. Thanks to Fenella Amarasinghe for all the patience, care, and encouragement. I am grateful to my friend Blair McDonald for his support, particularly as I was preparing the final draft. Thanks, too, to my friends Richard Wang, Aldo Mendizabal, and Matthew Brown. I would be negligent if I failed to mention some other friends, some of whom have been, in various ways, closely associated with this project. Sarah Allen’s generosity is pretty much at the start of everything. Going through the plays of Shakespeare with Dan Phelan counts as one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. Scott Withers, my creative companion of many years, has been inexhaustible in his ideas, stimulation, and hospitality. With David Lambert I spent many wonderful hours discussing books and cinema. Frank Faraday was a staunch support during difficult times. My friendship with Arnis Ritsups has amounted to a philosophical education in itself. My friendship with Adriaan Spruyt has enriched my life immeasurably. To all, my heartfelt thanks. Portions of this text have been previously published in an altered format. I am grateful to the editors for giving me the opportunity to develop these ideas. Let me single out in particular Costica Bradatan, who included an early attempt at these connections, “Stanley Cavell and Two Pictures of the Voice,” in a special issue of The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms. Journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI). It was entitled Philosophy as Literature, Vol. 14, No. 5, 2009. A few passages from the section

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on Schopenhauer appeared in “Pleasure not for us ordained: Schopenhauer, Milton, and the Beauty of the World,” which was published in the Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2009) ed. by Cyril McDonnell (Dublin: IPS, 2010): 150–59. And a condensed version of Part I “Two Potencies of the Voice” appeared as “Assertion and Receptivity: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Poet’s Redemptive Utterance,” in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Volume 41, No 2 © Taylor and Francis, 2010. Finally, let me express my deep and enduring gratitude to the wonderful group of scholars at the University of Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BT CHU CR CW DK HDTW IQO KP MWM NYUA Passages PDAT PI PP SC SW TE TOS WWR I/II

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Stanley Cavell. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990. Stanley Cavell. The Claim of Reason: Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979. Stanley Cavell. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004. Stanley Cavell. Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. J.L Austin. How To Do Things With Words, edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Stanley Cavell. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1988. Saul Kripke. Wittgenstein on Rule and Private Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Stanley Cavell. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Stanley Cavell. The New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein, Albuquerque, Living Batch Press, 1989. Stanley Cavell. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1995. Stanley Cavell. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2005. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscome, Oxford, Blackwell, 2001. Stanley Cavell. A Pitch of Philosophy, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994, Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994. Stanley Cavell. The Senses of Walden, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1972. Stanley Cavell. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, edited by David Justin Hodge, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Stanley Cavell. Themes out of School: Effects and Causes, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation, translated by E.F.J. Payne. 2 vols., New York, Dover Publications, 1966.

INTRODUCTION

1  The Two Potencies Suppose you are writing a text. Having an idea already more or less in mind, you deliberately select the words that express your meaning. We might say that here your intellect, your conscious mind, is doing the work. Yet, at other times, that description may not seem quite accurate. Now it is more as if the intellect is merely receiving. Not chosen in light of some idea, it is now as if the words themselves become active. Some interplay between these two seems to be present when, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks, What happens when we make an effort—say in writing a letter—to find the right expression for our thoughts?—This phrase compares the process to one of translating or describing: the thoughts are already there (perhaps they were in advance) and we merely look for their expression . . . . But can’t all sorts of things happen here? I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. (PI, §335)

Part of being a writer, then, would involve developing a productive calibration between these two ways of relating to language—now selecting the words we mean, now receiving the expression that comes. Though temperament might incline us more to one than another, for novelists or poets, or indeed almost anyone working with language, in principle it hardly matters which predominates—so long as we get the words we want on the page. But is it the same for the philosopher? Whatever else it may be, a philosophical text typically presents itself as a deliberate and considered compilation of words. And if it is deliberate, then “behind” every word—every clause, every preposition—there is, so goes the assumption, the clear and distinct thought, a claim of responsibility for exactly these implications. What then is the philosopher to make of these words that, rather than being deliberately selected by the intellect, just come? Is it wise for the philosopher to trust this energy? Might it conceal alien meanings, stowaways of the unintended? In short: what is this energy and how, as we endeavor to make ourselves intelligible, should we relate to it?

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Quite apart from his or her own temperamental inclinations, the philosopher may also have occupational qualms concerning the way in which our words or expressions can just come to us. The more we demand to be in control, the more equivocal these energies become. The philosopher, we want to say, whether writing or speaking, at some point has to know something, for it is presumably upon the basis of this knowing that the philosopher carefully sorts through numerous available words until, having found precisely the right ones, the philosopher asserts. There is some secured, justified position for the sake of which the words of the philosopher (put into phrases, organized into paragraphs) go forth as emissaries. Suggested in outline here is what I am calling a picture of the voice. Expression in this first picture of the voice attends the passage of an intellectual intimacy into language. We know what we want to say, and then we say it— and the “then” in this sentence adds nothing to what was known at the outset. Everything meant is asserted; what is not asserted is not meant. Walter Pater, for instance, seems to rely on this sort of picture in his appreciation of Flaubert, whose talent, he claimed, revealed itself in the search for the “word’s adjustment to its meaning.” “The first condition of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your own sense exactly.” First you have to have a clear perception of this preexisting sense. After that, the job becomes finding the exact word. “In every one of those masterly sentences of Flaubert there was . . . the exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the meaning.”1 A receptive orientation, however, would see the process differently. Rather than the intellect doing the work through assertion, here, in this second picture of the voice, the process is better characterized by those occasions when the words themselves seem to come into articulation as if under their own power. But not only words, new aspects may also come to light—new insights, startling, even revelatory, and colluding in ways unforeseen with the syntactical, semantic texture of our language. We might put it this way: the second picture of the voice invokes the expressive energies outside the knowing (asserting) intellect. Emerson’s “The Over-Soul,” for instance, is a paean to that which could only be associated with the receptive second picture of the voice: “When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me,—I see that I am pensioner,—not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.”2

2  Two Principles of Going on What is the philosophical status of this alien energy, associated here with the second picture of the voice? Do we, should philosophers, exclude it? Or is the task rather to discover a more hospitable sort of relation? To bring these questions into focus: is this alien energy to be trusted as an aid to self-

Introduction 

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expression in our attempts to make ourselves intelligible, or is it instead an obstacle, if not the obstacle—that against which we have to struggle? These are some of the questions this book explores, first as a preliminary, in the work of Schopenhauer and the young Nietzsche. And then, in much greater detail, in the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. Before any of that, however, a few more words about these potencies. Our investigation concerns the interaction of these assertive and receptive principles in how we go on, whatever the occasion—writing letters, or talking to our friends, or welcoming strangers into our homes, or murmuring confidential advice . . . . If this sounds too general, keep in mind that the second receptive picture is really meant as a negative definition. When Schopenhauer distinguishes what falls outside the province of the intellect as “feeling,” his claim is not that “feeling” is all one thing, but simply, however it may be constituted, it is not intellect. The same applies here: what I am calling the second picture of the voice must inevitably remain a closed region. If I have linked the term “intellect” with the assertive, this is because the term has currency with the philosophers we consider. But you may call it what you like. Because what are we dealing with here? For some this may be no more than a matter of stylistics— disciplined and precise, for instance, preferred to expansive and open. Walter Pater likely had this in mind when he praised the prose of Flaubert. Others, meanwhile, discern still larger structures. One could argue that it is exactly this receptive facility that Sigmund Freud relies on in his “talking cure,” in which the speaker eliminates the criticism “by which he normally sifts the thoughts that occur to him.” The patient is told to report “whatever comes into his head,” no matter how apparently trivial or irrelevant. “If he succeeds [in suppressing his critical faculty] innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold.”3 While at a still further remove, as with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, we come up against nothing less than the metaphysical ground of existence. Given the nature of our investigation, we will have to move among these different representations without losing sight of the assertive and receptive principles interacting in our humble everyday conceptual performances. I once thought it would be an amusing exercise to imagine a day in the life of a Logical Positivist. We begin with him at the breakfast table grumbling to his sleepy wife. Finding his favorite parking spot occupied by a junior faculty member’s hot rod, he mutters a few tart curses. During his office hours, more in his element, he holds forth, a man who definitely knows his stuff. There would be these vignettes and more, but the point of this lighthearted exercise was to show the diversity of his everyday uses of language in the hours leading up to the climax of our story, which is when he enters the lecture hall and somberly informs his students about the hallowed status of protocol sentences, everything else being nonsense. All this to highlight the tension between his everyday life with language—which, according to his own account, would largely consist of nonsense—and his ideal, all of which in turn is an illustration of the sort of thing

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we are calling a picture of the voice. Of course our professor is nothing more than a caricature. Yet as a philosopher he is also not completely unrecognizable, at least in this idea of limitation. That is something philosophers tend to do, often for good reason: they restrict, narrow, exclude. At the end of his big book, The Claim of Reason, contemplating the dead pair of Othello and Desdemona, Cavell asks: “Can philosophy accept them back at the hands of poetry? Certainly not so long as philosophy continues, as it has from the first, to demand the banishment of poetry from its republic” (CR, 496). He is reminding us, of course, that Plato famously kicked the poets out of his Republic. Cavell, though, has chosen an odd way of putting it. On the one hand, he is suggesting that “from the start,” as a kind of inaugural move, philosophy has made this demand. But what was poetry doing in philosophy’s republic in the first place? Does this suggest an age where the two might have freely mingled? Also, what philosophy has done “from the start” is not to have actually banished the poets (who supposedly gathered up their pipes and scrolls and wandered out into the countryside and then everyone lived happily ever after in separation), but to have (as it were, continually) demanded the banishment of poetry. It is as if the poets never got the message, as if these oblivious trespassers have always been wandering the streets of the philosopher’s republic, hence always requiring that the demand for their banishment be renewed. There seems, in other words, to be some connection between the act of exclusion (banishment) and the possibility of philosophical self-recognition. Is it even worth wondering why the poets did not first kick out the philosophers? Would such a thing have been unnecessary for poetry to recognize itself? Though this is hardly obvious, whatever the tension, whatever the acrimony between those two, it appears hard to imagine it was shared. Philosophy had some difficulty with poetry which poetry, more open-hearted, perhaps, or its attention simply on other matters, did not return. Elsewhere Cavell has suggested that it was an idea of rigor innate to a certain conception of philosophy that has kept both Emerson and Thoreau from being more widely recognized as the major philosophers he believes them to be. Which means, from Cavell’s point of view, this conception of rigor, this need to limit and exclude, has prevented people from seeing something right in front of their faces. And Cavell seems to suggest that this longstanding and continually renewed demand for a separation may be denying philosophers certain resources of sensitivity, reflection, or insight. The Claim of Reason, after all, closes with the question: “But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?”4

3  Philosophy and the Voice Speaking of the poets, we can do ourselves a favor by not reducing the assertivereceptive relation to this age-old distinction or supposed conflict between philosophy and poetry. Not that it is irrelevant. But is there any reason why

Introduction 

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poets ought to be allowed only one sort of conceptual performance which, one assumes, would be receptive and called the lyrical? Such an approach presents the matter too neatly. Rather than taking place unproblematically within the field of philosophy, this has instead to do with the voice of philosophy itself. According to Henry Staten, in the philosophical tradition “form is the transphenomenal boundary of the phenomenon by virtue of which the phenomenon becomes accessible to knowledge. It is the common element in thing, thought, and word that makes them line up with each other in truth.”5 The relation of thing, thought and word is underwritten in the integrity of the logos, which excludes the accidental, the indeterminate, the equivocal.6 And the temptation has been to restrict equivocity to “a movement on the surface of language, while underneath we find the stasis of unitary essences with their corresponding names.”7 In example A we see an author presumably trading in these unities. The no-ownership theorist fails to take account of all the facts. He takes account of some of them. He implies, correctly, that the unique position or role of a single body in one’s experience is not a sufficient explanation of the fact that one’s experiences, or states of consciousness, are ascribed to something which has them, with that peculiar nontransferable kind of possession which is here in question.8

The words, we suppose, are ordered as concepts in fealty to the higher protocol bound up with the logos. So much is this the case we may even be tempted to view meaning as only contingently related to its earthly habiliments, the material nature of words: free ideality then becomes the “telos of language.”9 But what are we to make of example B? Nothing is so beautiful as spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look like little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.10

Rather than trading in unities, Hopkins’s paratactic alliteration turns the accidental into a generative principle. Yet the accidental is “the ‘outside’ of essence, the solvent in which the knowable and speakable could lose its form.”11 Rather than relying on a fact about the world or the nature of reality (the conceptual unity), Hopkins’s way of going onto the next word seems to depend on nothing more than a scandalously contingent fact about one particular language. More exactly, it depends on the conceptual sign’s coarse material

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nature—merely that these words happen to rhyme: spring, wring, sing, fling, and lush, thrush, brush, rush; or that long, lovely, and lush all happen to begin with the same letter. If philosophical discourse has to do with reality, this seems to be heading in exactly the wrong direction. In taking as primary what is “outside of the essence,” does this not undermine the original basis that links together thing, thought, and word? Now one might assume that in example A we have an example of the assertive philosopher, and in example B we have the receptive poet. But this is what I meant by making things too neat. Because one could easily imagine the opposite: there is Peter Strawson, in the heat of argument, finding exactly those words readily at hand; down they go, not to be changed. Meanwhile, Hopkins painstakingly searches out various combinations of word-sound. Or perhaps, indeed, it is the other way around—but who knows? We ought, in other words, to distinguish between two different variables in our posture toward language. See them as two spectrums, separate but related. There is first the assertive-receptive spectrum, our chief interest here. And this, again, has to do with the complex mélange of how we assert and yet how our words also emerge “on their own.” Our posture toward language according to this variable might be described, for any particular utterance, as having a preponderance of one potency against another, now more assertion over reception, for instance, now more reception over assertion. But our posture toward language as we go on might also be placed along a second spectrum. This concerns whether our assertions emphasize more the material form (as a word) or instead its ideal form (as a concept). And this is the problem our traditional philosopher would have with the words of Hopkins: not so much that he has gone on receptively, but rather that he has not asserted on behalf of any special (known, perceived) content. Philosophically speaking, even if he does mainly go on through assertion, Hopkins literally has nothing to say—as would, presumably, anyone who went onto the next word via contingent formal elements like rhyme or alliteration. This too can be expressed as having a preponderance of one over the other: we might assert according to the idea, or according to criteria related to material form. But neither spectrum allows one interest to completely extirpate the other. They are fused. Strawson’s writing, to point out the obvious, is not indifferent to form. Notice, for instance, the alliterative positioning of “fail” and “facts.” And Hopkins for his part did not choose just any words. He did not choose, say, livestock, livery, livid. He too traffics in the conceptual unities implicated in the words of his poem. This is why we ought to see both as preponderances along a spectrum. Having now distinguished between the two spectrums, it has to be said that in this study the assertive potency tends to end up endorsing the ideal aspect of words. This mention of posture may seem out of place. Yet if the assertive and receptive are present in everyone’s experience of going on as they make themselves intelligible (and, for the record, I shall presume they are), it does seem we might usefully characterize their preponderances as a posture. People,

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in other words, have a tendency to go on in a certain way. Which raises the question: why? Well, we might say, perhaps because of how each person has come to conceive the activity. Yes, but then this of course is no answer, as we will soon be asking: well, why do they conceive it this way and not some other way? Because people are different? Again this answer hardly satisfies. Yet such basic differences in sensibility probably lurk in the background of many philosophical disputes. As a result, the two potencies available to us in our relation to language—these two sorts of conceptual performance in our attempts to go on—are anything but neutrally experienced. They come to be involved in what we are calling pictures of the voice. Think of the picture of the voice as the soil in which grows the conception of the expressive act. This picture of pictures is from Stephen Mulhall. The idea, he writes, “is rooted in the picture, the picture is the soil from which the idea grows. This tells us that the idea is logically secondary to the picture, that it depends upon it for its existence and flourishing; and just as soil is not typically nutritious for only one plant or type of plant, so a picture can and does nourish a range of related ideas.”12 So when, for instance, one is inclined to go on with words principally through assertion, the energies along the other axis may become adversarial, alien, perhaps even a maelstrom of chaos. At the same time we may become more preoccupied with the star of the show, what we are calling the intellect. Meaning is taken to be a matter of fixing, resisting, harnessing, overcoming nonsense with finish. An orientation more sympathetic to the receptive strain, however, might, in this different picture, growing in this different soil, instead endorse a conception of those very same energies as welcome, even downright redemptive. Rather than admiring the assertions of the intellect, the preoccupation here tends to be with what some have called an origin, or a source, and we may even find ourselves asking odd-sounding and yet unavoidable questions like “Where do our words come from?” (PDAT, 60). The point here is this: our initial conception often has the force of a selfevident starting position that goes unexamined. Hence I use the term pictures of the voice: they become the soil in which particular ideas are rooted, carry conviction, seem right.13

4  The Argument These two potencies of the voice offer a new way to think about Cavell’s philosophy. Some twenty years after it first appeared, Cavell suggested that a central motivation in writing The Claim of Reason had been “to help bring the human voice back into philosophy.” Where had the human voice gone? It had, in Cavell’s words, “become lost in thought” (PP, 58). Where does a voice go when it is lost in thought? If he was ever tempted to theorize about a “voice that precedes language”—what we are calling the first potency—Cavell instead

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preferred to ask what we say when. “Letting that matter,” he writes, “presented itself as a defiance of philosophy’s . . . repression of voice” (PP, 69). Seen in the light of these two pictures, then, Cavell’s retrieval of the human voice lost in thought will be presented as a therapeutic broadening of what we have called the first potency to include the resources of the second (receptive) potency of the voice. To understand this, we need to ask: how, according to Cavell, do we make ourselves intelligible so far as words are concerned? “Through endless specification, by exemplification, in the world (of and with others) of when words are called for and when there are no words.” Cavell goes on: Call this the absolute responsibility of the self to make itself intelligible, without falsifying itself (say by overstepping the limited ways in which it can express itself—but since these are the human repertory of ways of expression, how can we humans “overstep” them, how can we so much as try to, what drives us to excess, something extreme or something central in the human?). (CHU, xxvii)

Intelligibility and falsification—these wrestle at the heart of Cavell’s philosophy. So much so that we can say these register the larger context in which a voice that is lost in thought may become a voice that is retrieved. But note that this falsification has two prongs: a failure to bring together words that people understand, and the failure to bring together words that people understand and that express (make intelligible) your life. The intelligibility imperative, in other words, is not answered just because someone happens to speak or act intelligibly as such. This important qualification is easily captured if we approach Cavell under the aspect of the two potencies. Consider the following diagram. JUNGLE MAN Defects of application

SKEPTICAL MAN Defects of assertion

COMMON MAN Defects of reception

Successful going on with shared criteria

At the bottom is what we might call the achievement of making oneself intelligible, presumably with the least amount of falsifying. If I seem to hedge it is because there is the question, I suppose a metaphysical one, of whether the “real” self can ever entirely converge, even in fantasy, with social forms (words, phrases, gestures). Suffice it to say, for now, this “successful achievement” is ordinarily the best that we can expect. Nothing deeper than that is posited. Like Cavell’s definition of intelligibility, the positive nature of this success need not really be specified. How, anyway, could success be declared for all possible future cases? (This will not stop us from trying to say more about it in the conclusion.) Above this successful center are three distinct zones of expressive strain or miscarriage or even failure, and each in this book are represented by one cautionary figure. Each figure, then, represents a distinct

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liability given that we go on with words via these two potencies. More exactly, the liability of speakers being conceptual initiates, and the ease associated with what we say when illustrated by the defective conceptual applications of the uninitiated Jungle Man (Part Two); the liability of speakers being able to assert, illustrated by the defective assertions of Skeptical Man (Part Three); and the liability speakers being able to receive, illustrated by the defective receptivity of Common Man (Part Four). Cavell’s work, then, provides a comprehensive exposition and therapeutic for each.14 Before considering each of these three figures in turn, however, we ought to explain why, in Part One, we begin with a consideration of two other philosophers. Schopenhauer and the younger Nietzsche, first of all, do an excellent job of revealing the particular characteristics of these two potencies. For Schopenhauer, the voice is expressed by the intellect (the pure knowing subject), possessed of a perception, working upon language through assertion. In him we discern a sensibility highly suspicious of the energies outside the asserting intellect (though this is only as far as words are concerned; music, as we shall see, is another matter). The intellect relates to words exclusively as conceptual signs. If any phonetic or lexical attributes come to be invoked, as they are explicitly by the poet, this only has to do with pleasure. Any addition of meaning will only threaten what is there with unmeant aspects. From this point of view, the receptive potency is not just uncooperative; it is that against which the intellect must strain in order to assert its meaning. To quickly summarize this picture of the voice which we will explore later: First, a known intellectual content precedes the conceptual performance. Second, the task is to assert on behalf of this mastered content by using concepts. And third, the success of a first picture conceptual performance would depend on the degree to which the mastered content can be asserted against the noise of the heterogeneous and therefore recalcitrant conceptual medium. No new aspects are discovered in expression. If there is a meaning, it is because it points back to the original (intellectual) content. The rest is noise. And now consider, as an example of the second picture of the voice, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. A direct and emphatic response to Schopenhauer’s intellectual assertions, Nietzsche’s account endorses instead these very same receptive energies. Here the intellect only hinders the expression of real creativity. Nietzsche surmised the presence of some demiurgic monster, the primordial unity, the cosmic creator being itself, discovering through us, but not for us, its own lovely semblance. Whatever words as signs mean to us is to the primordial unity a complete irrelevance. Instead, the material form of our concepts becomes the artery for its own selfexploration, akin to the way an isolated jungle tribe coming by chance upon a screwdriver might use it to adorn the chief ’s headdress. Though das Ur-Eine takes over our words, it has no interest in the meanings we have attributed to them. Subjectively we experience this through what Nietzsche calls “musical moods.” We are seized by an expressive impetus yet never allowed to see into its

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core: a closed cell enters consciousness and literally takes control of our words. To summarize what later will be seen in greater detail: First, for Nietzsche, this special conceptual performance is not preceded by, nor based upon, a known intellectual content. Rather, what he calls the “musical mood” is the origin of the voice. Second, the task is to discover the “content” through its aspects as it comes into articulation. Hence the model of conceptual performance here is necessarily more of a coaxing release, a trafficking with energies, as it were, at large outside the ambit of the intellect. And third, in expression the content is neither diminished nor alienated. Quite the opposite: in expression it is discovered, revealed, acknowledged.15 In Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, then, we see both potencies defined and endorsed. Yet each is advocated at the expense of the other. As neither posits any principle of integration, there is only struggle and collision. The challenge, it seems, is to find some way for them to relate—or perhaps to reimagine a picture of the voice that makes room for both. And for this we turn to our third philosopher. That words do seem to have a life of their own has been differently interpreted by different sensibilities. If our sympathies are with the first picture of the voice, this fact is only going to threaten the clear and distinct quantum meant at the start. Where they cannot be mastered, Schopenhauer, for instance, with perfect consistency, excludes them; where they cannot be excluded they are, with pessimistic resignation, tolerated. But it is one of the virtues of Stanley Cavell’s work to insist this implication need not be drawn. If each word [Cavell writes] had to be sounded for its powers before we entrusted ourselves to it, we would be able to say nothing, never come to the beginning, let alone the end, of a sentence. Some philosophers spook us, or themselves (not alone Derrida), with this thought; they speak, for example, of meaning as always deferred. Who would deny that our words mean more, and other, than we ask them on a given occasion to say? That is reason enough to be interested, as I am, in the fact that meaning is—also—not deferred, that I can mean, now, here, exactly, precisely, accurately, fully, assuredly, what I mean, for instance that here are five red apples. (CW, 332)16

Especially in the philosophical tradition in which Cavell grew up, philosophy, it seems fair to say, tended to emphasize our assertive potency with words. The energies of occurrence, which emerge outside the surveillance of the knowing intellect, might in some sense be viewed—and this was no complement—as the poetic. Cavell, however, makes the case for the philosophical pertinence of what we are calling receptive conceptual performances by showing how the endeavor to make oneself intelligible requires recourse to both potencies. Indeed, as we will see, Cavell examines at length the consequences, sometimes insignificant, sometimes tragic, from going on in ways that seek to exclude any contribution from the second potency.

Introduction  11

So these passages on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are helpful as extensive reflections on how these word-potencies work. But is that the only relevance to the main section on Cavell? Let us here anticipate some of the other connections made in this book, even if unavoidably we do so at the risk of causing some confusion, as we are still in the introductory stages. See, in any event, Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject as a cousin of the Cavellian skeptic. The transcendental drive of the pure knowing subject would match the skeptic’s incessant search for absolutes. Such a position alone would appear to satisfy the skeptic’s “illimitable desire” (DK, 3). There is another similarity. Both the skeptic and Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject have to get around the preposterous fact that words occur to us. An avoidance of the conceptual, then, would likewise be a stilling of the currents upon which words are constantly circulating, constantly insinuating themselves into our lives. From the transcendental standpoint, and so from the standpoint of the skeptic’s search for absolutes, the ordinary language philosopher’s prompting of what we say when would be nothing more than the whirring speech-motor that produced the endless blathering Schopenhauer heard all around him. Hence it is little wonder that Schopenhauer depicts the escape of the intellect from the thralldom of the will as nothing more momentous than finally being left alone. In the nunc stans, the standing now, the wheel of Ixion stops—and so do all those pestering words. Any speaking absolutely would be reminiscent of a transcendental (and of course fantastical) version of what Wittgenstein called the primitive picture of language in which we go on one word at a time (like we were putting beads on a string). More relevantly, it would mean going on from a position of complete authority amid complete stillness. No longer would our words be noisy volunteers blundering off into action. Whatever might have powered their circulation before has now been commandeered by the intellect. Drained of any impetus, totally compliant, our words would be selected solely according to the sematic exigencies of expressing the transcendental content. For the philosopher, this would at best be a question of managing unavoidable semantic noise, keeping it down to an acceptable level, all from the recalcitrance of these empirical forms. This sort of going on, as we will see, is explored below as a retractile conceptual performance, where the orientation is always “upward,” toward some highest principle, perceptible to the knowing intellect. Necessarily, any energies associated with the second potency would have to be suppressed. And what about this other potency, then, if the Cavellian skeptic can be seen in relation to the Schopenhauerian pure knowing subject? Not stillness, and not the careful, meticulous selecting of words according to some transcendental criteria, the second potency instead seems to work, in Nietzsche’s account, through a kind of epiphany brigandage: these insights attack the intellect, seize hold of it, compel it to raise their flag and speak only of their mysteries—all while never revealing their true identities. At most, the intellect might be aware

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of the onset of a certain “musical mood.” If for the first potency perception and stasis mark the point of maximal purification, the second potency by contrast finds its purest expression when the intellect is lost in a state of madness. The stillness of the Schopenhauerian Sabbath is opposed to the Bacchic ritual of sparagmos, that frenzied rout in which the body of King Pentheus was torn apart and scattered over the hillside. Here the intellect is inert. The insights act. So much so that the chant of the Dionysian celebrant amounts to a very different sort of going on, not a retractile conceptual performance but what we will call an expansive conceptual performance, in which the closed cells of the musical mood generate new aspects while never allowing the concepts to become windows into their interiors. Though Nietzsche’s formulation is notably extreme, it has the advantage of illuminating this second receptive potency we have with our words, just as Schopenhauer’s had with the assertive. We might see Part One, then, as preparatory in the sense of Elizabethan pantomimes, like the dumb-show in Hamlet, in which some of the general moves explored later on are exhibited through more dramatic (i.e., metaphysical) gestures. There is, however, another reason for this preliminary matter. Nietzsche was not the only German-speaking philosopher to fall under the spell of Schopenhauer at an early age. By all accounts Schopenhauer was one of the very few philosophers Wittgenstein ever closely studied. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s writings were widely read among the central cultural figures during the fin de siècle Vienna of his childhood. Even so, we need not depend on coincidental linkages, so plentiful otherwise are the similarities and resonances. My general approach includes the supposition that in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein was revisiting arguments elaborated in his earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. As it is in that early work that the traces of Schopenhauer are the most obvious, it follows that Philosophical Investigations, a work so central to Cavell’s philosophy, in some respects amounts to a criticism of certain Schopenhauerian ideas. All of which, in turn, raises the question of whether traces of these same ideas are to be found in the work of Cavell himself.

5  Jungle Man One morning a boy wandered from his village to gather seeds and nuts, but that evening did not return. Fifteen years later, noticing some animal has been pilfering fruit from their garden, the villagers set a trap. During the night the trap is sprung. They hurry over, hold up a torch. With a cry of surprise a woman recognizes her brother. But he, this strange intruder, stares in bewilderment. For fifteen years, alone in the jungle, he has been unable to joke, to barter, to criticize, to praise, to flatter, to hint, to upbraid, to reminisce. Lacking any shared concepts, he now has only rudimentary ways of structuring experience. Obviously, there is no question of him making himself intelligible in language— for the simple reason that he no longer seems to have one.

Introduction  13

According to Cavell, we are able to go on, to apply concepts to the world, because we have been initiated into our community’s forms of life. Rather than being fixed by rules, our conceptual performances emerge through a sense that we have grounds to go on as we do. Of course, we may in some cases be mistaken—perhaps, in the end, our projections cannot be followed, or not by many. Each of our attempts to go on, each of our criterial judgments, is a claim of community. This marks the pedagogical usefulness of Jungle Man, the subject of Part Two: he shows the role of our forms of life, from whence we derive our shared criteria, in the configuration of our experience, and therefore in our attempts to answer the intelligibility imperative. At first glance, though, Jungle Man’s conceptual ineptitude might seem a merely transitional phenomenon. Once you are initiated, once you know how to go on, you would have finished with the liabilities represented by this strange figure. So he represents children, say, or those unlucky enough to get lost in a jungle for a decade or two—that would be the assumption. But this is not the full story. In Jungle Man we have a placeholder for both the obvious errors of concept application, but additionally a whole subset liability associated with going on in more specialized vocabularies. A good example is Kierkegaard’s acquaintance, Adler, who, one day, declared that he had had a revelation. It did not take long for Kierkegaard to realize, however, that Adler did not really understand what the Christian term revelation meant. Alder had failed to become a master initiate of Christian terminology (just like many others of his day who claimed to be Christians). In the case of the more obvious mistakes in vocabulary or grammar, competent initiates can guide and correct. But if Adler is “not familiar with, accustomed to, and strictly disciplined in the conceptual language within which one is expressing one’s emotion,” Kierkegaard writes, “then the same thing happens with a person as with someone who speaks too fast and does not articulate carefully—he babbles.”17 Babbling (chattering, blathering) is a recurrent theme in our circle of philosophers. Adler’s mistake has this particularly insidious consequence: he gets bogged down. Worse still, he does not even realize it. Someone would have to take him aside and say, as Cavell hears Thoreau effectively saying: “What you might call Christianity, if you were accurate to its own criteria, does not exist or is in any case not what you call Christianity” (SW, 65). With Adler as an example, in how many of these specialized zones of concept application have we also gotten bogged down, perhaps also without even realizing it? Kierkegaard’s task, then, as Cavell puts it, “is one of providing, or re-providing, [the] meaning” of the dogmatic concept of revelation, “as we use it in our lives—what it means, that is, to anyone with the ability to use it.” Such remedial conceptual work is, to Cavell’s mind, itself a “philosophical activity” (MWM, 166). The first half of Part Two, on Jungle Man, provides a fairly standard exposition of Cavell on Wittgensteinian criteria. It is in the second half, starting at section 8, that the two potencies of the voice return to the foreground. Commentators, having introduced the notion of shared criteria, often move directly onto how

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the skeptic repudiates them and at what cost—topics, without any doubt, of great importance, and indeed the subject of Part Three. Yet we may first want to ask: how exactly do we access these shared criteria? Our answer: we do so through the two potencies of the voice, the assertive and the receptive, and hence the critical importance of examining this step. We consider first the ease associated with criterial invocation, what the ordinary language philosophers would call what we say when, but which for us seems very much a recourse to the second (receptive) potency of the voice. Once initiated, Jungle Man is no longer Jungle Man; he is a talker who can go on. The effortless fluency that characterizes so many ordinary interactions is itself of philosophical relevance. As an example of accessing a competence we compare it to playing music and the carrying out of manual tasks. We then consider an essay by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He distinguishes two contrasting ways in which poets respond to an initial poetic hankering or impetus, what he calls the masculine and the feminine actions. Here we see Heaney, in effect, delineating our two potencies (the assertive and receptive). Either way of going on, he demonstrates, leaves a detectable trace in the music of the poetry. This emphasizes in small scale a larger point made throughout this book: that the manner in which each potency relates to shared criteria has real consequences for the expressive undertaking—a difference furthermore rooted in how the very act of going on happens to be pictured. Heaney orients his reflections with a passage from William Shakespeare. Cavell, in a late essay, has wondered how Wittgenstein and Emerson, two philosophers dear to his heart, could have responded so differently to the Elizabethan playwright. If Shakespeare’s writing caused Wittgenstein unease, Cavell speculates it was because he detected in the poet’s language “the continuous threat of chaos clinging to his creation” (PDAT, 49). Emerson, on the other hand, writes of Shakespeare that “he of all men best understands the English language, and can say what he will.”18 We might think this drives Wittgenstein and Emerson apart, supposedly weakening Cavell’s claim of some deep affinity between them. What I argue, however, is that this contrast can be gathered into a deeper tension that runs right down into the Cavellian schematism, (a term, by the way, I use loosely). In one of the more extraordinary passages of The Claim of Reason, Cavell differentiates between the economy of speech and the aesthetics of speech, which we can read as registering the difference between the control of criteria of words (which come before us) and our expressions of desire (as they occur to us). Wittgenstein’s anxiety, if that is the word, seems very much to reflect imperatives associated with the economy of speech. Speech is meaningful because it is not excludable as nonsense. Emerson, on the other hand, is clearly more concerned with issues around the aesthetics of speech, namely the expression of desire. If talkers need to worry about anything, it is certainly not nonsense. It is the threat of conformity, exemplified in the “silent melancholy” of Common Man.

Introduction  15

6  Skeptical Man When Skeptical Man, the focus of Part Three, attempts to make himself intelligible, he suffers from a defect of the assertive potency. Before anything like the skeptic can emerge, however, there must have been an ordinary which allowed for an ease of going on. Rather than a first-strike venture, skepticism is akin to something more like an autoimmune disorder. Only from within the texture of these ordinary practices, and the ease of going on that they allow (what we say when), does a talker become a skeptic. And why should anyone become a skeptic at all? Perhaps the skeptic is making an inference from what conditional scope we do have to assert—if we can only purify this, so goes the reasoning, we would at last be able to satisfy the exulted standard of control we are demanding. Cavell in any case suggests the temptation is innate. During the early modern period this perennial liability of the human mind came to be exacerbated by new ways of thinking that prized knowledge as the chief mode of relation to the world. Putting the matter as simply as I can at this point: a talker becomes a skeptic when he or she becomes disappointed with shared criteria and attempts to go on solely via the first (assertive) potency. As this requires a shutting down of the second (receptive) potency, it is not hard to infer what the therapy will look like: a reorientation away from the transcendental heights and a descent to the actual “rough ground” disposition of the things and the words of the ordinary. This would include, of course, the invocation of shared criteria in what we say when, as well as the willingness to acknowledge new aspects brought forth by the resources of the second potency. Such a reorientation is all but formalized in what Cavell calls the moral of skepticism, which, incidentally, could not be clearer in its opposition to anything like a pure knowing subject: “The human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not one of knowing, anyway, not what we think of as knowing” (CR, 241). Such a claim effectively disavows the whole transcendental knowing register of which Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject seems so vivid a fantasy. This reintegration therapy for the assertive potency is the formula for Skeptical Man’s troubled relation to a set of significant others, each of them explored in extended sequences. First, there is the relation to the world; second, there is the relation to the expressiveness of the skeptic’s very own body; and third, there is the expressiveness of the body of the other. There are few finer celebrations of the receptive dimension than those lines from Emerson’s “The Over-Soul” quoted earlier. And it is this facet of Emerson’s thought that Cavell draws upon as a counterweight to the traditional philosopher’s predilection for first potency assertions. Yet there are limits to the extent Cavell can announce the good news of receptivity. This has to do with his (Wittgensteinian) emphasis on shared criteria, which tell us what a thing is. A radical receptivity like Emerson’s “surprised spectator,” on the other hand,

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Stanley Cavell and the Potencies of the Voice

seems to point toward a dynamic somewhat prior to that criterial level, and so threatens to displace the world-wording power of this speaker. We might put it this way: is the speaker bringing something into articulation, or is something coming into articulation through the speaker? Here the work of William Desmond is especially helpful. He distinguishes between the conatus essendi and the passio essendi. The first is what we might call our capacity to take on being as our own project, the second the more fundamental givenness of being—the gift of being as good. Setting Cavell’s ordinary against Desmond’s between, the first with its emphasis on projection and the second an emphasis on porosity, it becomes difficult to imagine the breakthrough of any of those alien powers Emerson describes happening in both. For what is this other? If we are reading Cavell correctly, the Cavellian subject would appear to be non-porous. So whatever we confront in this “alien energy” would only be another aspect of ourselves, because we are the ones who have taken an interest, seen the connection, projected it, put it there.

7  Common Man Common Man, the subject of Part Four, suffers from a defect of the receptive potency. Like Skeptical Man but unlike Jungle Man, Common Man has been fully initiated into his community’s forms of life. Functional in every practical linguistic sense, he may even be known as a fine speaker. Let him be a celebrated member of society, constantly in the thick of things, delivering a toast, presenting views on matters of import, or shouting encouragement to someone rounding a racetrack. None of this changes anything. His problem remains: his words do not express his life. Precisely what makes concepts so powerful—their commonality and scope—is his affliction. His own impression is immediately excluded to make way for the common, which is all he notices. Common-Man-ism, if we could put it that way, is a condition in which the ease of ordinary and perfectly grammatical going on (what we say when) blocks the emergence of new routes within shared criteria more in fealty to an individual’s particular self. Especially since Kant, Common Man has had bit parts in the work of many philosophers. As we will soon see, for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche he is the one blathering away without the benefit of being, respectively, the pure knowing subject or Dionysian celebrant. But such a figure will also be found in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, not to mention others, and indeed his sojourning can take him outside traditional philosophy altogether. Consider his noteworthy appearance in the final volume of Marcel Proust’s massive novel. The narrator, “Marcel,” is describing the epiphany which made the entire work possible. If reality were a kind of residue of experience, more or less identical for everybody, because when we talk about bad weather, a war, a cab-stand, a

Introduction  17 brightly lit restaurant, a garden in flower, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were just that, then no doubt some sort of cinematographic film of things would be enough and “style” and “literature” which departed from their simple data would be an artificial irrelevance. But was this really what reality was? When I tried to ascertain what actually happens at the moment when something makes a particular impression on us . . . I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator.19

Common Man’s problem is that he lacks any sense of his book, let alone the ability to translate it. Concepts owe their force and usefulness to the discovery of commonalities, and this requires, as a matter of course, the exclusion of whatever is not the same. So if he wanders among the cabs and brightly lit restaurants, these are merely the “simple data” of the everyday concept. The artist, however, attempts to get “beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words,” to the original and “true impression.” As Proust puts it—and this might serve as a decent gloss on Cavell’s reading of Emerson—the “work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever had really existed lies unrecognized within us.”20 Failing this, Common Man lives his life at a distance. Year after year he misses what is most essential. His gaze flies instead to where the concept points, “the personal root of [his] own impression having been suppressed.”21 Common Man, then, lives resolutely, calamitously, within the realm of the conceptual; in any perception he clings to what is common, neglecting what happens to be his own. Not only does he not mean his words, he misses the genuine content of his life. As Proust’s narrator puts it: The greatness of true art lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize this reality, distant as it is from our daily lives, and growing more and more distant as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes denser and more impermeable, this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life.22

If Skeptical Man aspires to go on solely through assertion, Common Man for his part is practically buried beneath the energies of occurrence (what we say when). He never makes a mistake, and yet with every word he falsifies his life. Rather than being strained and vexed in metaphysical disputes (like Skeptical Man), his words tend to be prompt and automatic. In him is epitomized the perilous viscosity of language, the apparently exact fit between general terms and what is rumored to be his life—only because the latter has become so smooth, so utterly compliant and unresisting. In Cavell’s reading of Thoreau,

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Common Man has not yet learned to speak with the father tongue. He merely repeats what he has heard in the mother tongue. “We do not let the words assess our lives,” Cavell writes, suggesting we are a society of Common Men, “we do not mean what they could mean, so what we do when we repeat those words becomes the whole meaning of ‘man’ and ‘chief end,’ and ‘glorify,’ and ‘God,’ etc., in our lives; and that is a curse” (SW, 62–63). And as Cavell reads Emerson, expression has a prior step which, not taken, makes the bulk of what we say mere quotation. Quotation is but superficially receptive. Idiosyncratic glimmerings, the raw autistic flash—where these are not ignored, they are immediately suppressed. Yet how can we accuse Common Man of unoriginal quotation when, after all, words came before him? Words come before all of us, so presumably we all have this problem. Does this mean we are chronically unoriginal? Answering this question requires some consideration of Cavell’s response to the work of Jacques Derrida. Cavell admits to having been tempted to philosophize about a metaphysical voice which would precede, and give itself to, our (unoriginal) words. Such a thing would not be so unlike the transcendental content of the Schopenhauerian poet. Instead of moving in that direction, however, Cavell insisted on letting what we say when matter. Assuming there is no alternative to these words—and what could that be?—it is in this “locale” that “quotation becomes more original than its original” (IQO, 133). And this would depend, in turn, on the how the individual inherits these words.

8  The Origin of our Words At the end of this book, then, what can we say about the workings of the second potency? Inevitably, one seems to come up against the notion of an origin. You can hear this in Cavell’s awkward, yet perfectly reasonable question: “Where do our words come from?” (PDAT, 60). Set that next to Wittgenstein’s inaugural bewildered reflection on how he can “surrender to a mood and the expression comes.” The next question is obvious: comes from where? Not to spoil the ending, but the workings of the second potency of the voice shall remain mysterious. The issue then becomes how we relate to this dimension. As Cavell reads Thoreau, Emerson, and even the later Wittgenstein, our task is not to master—to know—the origin out of which our words emerge. Nothing less than that had been the goal of Nietzsche’s Socrates, a perfect monster of rationality who took umbrage that the origin of words should not also be fully transparent to words. Skeptical Man and Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject reveal their shared bloodline in attempting to go on with a purified first potency, which would, supposedly, at long last, allow us to speak absolutely, and to leave behind all the messy, inconclusive compromises required by ordinary words.

Introduction  19

For Cavell, the task is to relate to this origin as other more in the way Thoreau thinks of “neighboring.” Neighbors are not two people who have first failed to live together. They simply live in separate households, though true enough they do, in larger sense, live together—on the same street, or in the same town. But this general condition of “being next to” the origin of our words allows the freedoms that come with a separate entrance. Our words may then circulate in the world’s call for words without getting bogged down in local fixations. Rather than an anxious struggle for perfect expression, this relation might be better described as a patient, musing discernment animated by a faith that our shared criteria will be hospitable to our recurrent attempts to answer the intelligibility imperative. Going on in such a way, you would enlarge this shared criteria, expand the provision of the means of expression, and thus allow another to venture down a route they otherwise might never have taken. This is why, in Cavell’s reading of Emerson, genius is “the name of the promise that the private and the social will be achieved together” (TE, 92).

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Part One TWO POTENCIES OF THE VOICE

1  Schopenhauer and Reason “What happens,” Wittgenstein asks, “when we make an effort—say in writing a letter—to find the right expression for our thoughts?” (PI, §335). Here in kernel form is the first picture of the voice, sponsored by the workings of the first potency. Thought precedes expression, and it is only through deliberate work—making an effort—that it finds its way into language. Surely we can all identify with trying to come up with the right word. But is this the artery for the voice? This is what we find in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, an advocate for the assertive potency. The picture we will now explore in greater detail has three key elements. First, a known intellectual content precedes the conceptual performance. Second, the intellect asserts this into language, a recalcitrant material where much of the original content unavoidably gets lost. And third, no new aspects are discovered in expression. We begin with the intellectual content that precedes expression. The sole function of the understanding, according to Schopenhauer, is the application of the category of cause and effect. “To know causality is the sole function of the understanding, its only power” (WWR I, 11). Accordingly, the rest of the Kantian categories are rejected out of hand: “Because the law of the causality is the real, but also the only, form of the understanding . . . the remaining eleven categories are blind windows” (WWR I, 446). Only through the application of cause and effect does the Schopenhauerian understanding perceive. In this man is nothing special. “The changes experienced by every animal body are immediately known, that is to say, felt: and as this effect is referred at once to its cause, there arises the perception of the latter as an object” (WWR I, 12). Both man and animals perceive in this way (WWR I, 21). What is the result of this perception? Schopenhauer calls it pure knowledge. Calling it absolute immediacy would be saying too much. It is, after all, mediated by the senses, and put together through the application of causality upon the sensual modifications of the body, which to us is immediate object.1 For all its purity, then, pure knowledge is still in some minimal sense surmised. Then why call it

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pure? Because it is pre-conceptual (or nonconceptual in the case of animals). Otherwise, it gets no better than this: pure knowledge is the metaphysical gold standard. As from the direct light of the sun to the borrowed reflected light of the moon, so do we pass from the immediate representation of perception, which stands by itself and is its own warrant, to reflection, to the abstract, discursive concepts of reason (Vernuft), which have their whole content only from that knowledge of perception, and in relation to it. (WWR I, 35)

The faculty of reason abstracts from this perception to create concepts. This is done by reflection. Instances are compared, differences rejected, commonalities retained, and the result is the formation of the concept. Exactly this removal from perception is what gives it such scope and power—or, as Schopenhauer calls it, its “sphere” (WWR I, 35). And now mankind is set apart from the rest of nature. “The animal feels and perceives; man, in addition, thinks and knows; both will.” (WWR I, 37). Reason creates an expedient organization or re-representation of that primal representation. So it would even be fair to say that concepts are “representations of representations” (WWR I, 40). They either take perception as a ground, or another concept.2 Thinking and knowing, then, are accordingly operations that take place abstracted from perception. Now derivative it may well be, but this abstraction also made language possible. And language lies at the very root of civilization. Without the faculty of reason we would be little more than a breed of extravagant apes, scattered across remote mountain forests, struggling to express even the crudest of messages. “Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harmonious and consistent action of several individuals, the planned cooperation of many thousands, civilization, the State” (WWR I, 37). Precisely because of abstraction, however, it becomes impossible to talk about the perception itself. As soon as we talk about it, we have already abstracted from it. Language is “nothing but a very complete telegraph communicating arbitrary signs with the greatest rapidity and the finest difference of shades of meaning” (WWR I, 39). It is merely the endless flickering exchange of cerebral shorthand, “reason speaking to reason” (WWR I, 40). All rational knowledge, then, lies at this level of abstraction. Words and concepts will always be barren and dry, for this is their nature . . . . The thought itself is only the mummy of . . . perception and the words are the lid of the sarcophagus. Here we have the limit of mental communication; it excludes the best. [But all the same they are useful] just as the botanist’s tin box for plants itself is lifeless metal, but enables him to take home and preserve the flowers that he finds.3



1.  Two Potencies of the Voice

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2  The Will Few philosophers have been so unimpressed by the power of reason. Consider the human body, this miraculous feat of engineering. Was it reason that made this? Did reason create the whale, or set the planets spinning? Not even a superbrain in a mad scientist’s lab could ever have thought itself into existence. It may wish to deny it, but the intellect and its faculty of reason was brought into existence by another power, and for reasons of its own—for dark, inscrutable reasons the intellect can never know. Schopenhauer, in other words, reverses the traditional relation between will and intellect. The will is “the true and ultimate point of unity of consciousness, and bond of all its functions and acts. It does not, however, belong to the intellect, but is only the root, origin, and controller” (WWR II, 140). The ground of consciousness is not the intellect; it is the will. So the forms of thought themselves conspire against the interests of the intellect, our conscious selves. If the self was a sphere, and through a sort of metaphysical autopsy we managed to slice it in half, only the extremist edge would correspond to the intellect. For only there would it have access to phenomena, which, given that it is solely concerned with the relation of things in perception, it requires as a precondition. “Through the forms of the phenomenon separate individuality becomes possible, and on this individuality rests consciousness, which is on this account confined to phenomena” (WWR II, 325). Whatever is left over—outside the intellect, named by the intellect—is feeling, the category reason has devised for everything else. To this, qua intellect, it has no access. Consequently it—supposing that feeling answers to an “it”— will on no account submit to conceptual analysis, reduction, or explanation. With perfect consistency Schopenhauer concedes this can only be a negative definition: “Thus the immeasurably wide sphere of this concept includes the most heterogeneous things, and we do not see how they come together so long as we have not recognized that they all agree in this negative aspect of not being abstract concepts” (WWR I, 51). The metaphysical will, as Schopenhauer understands it, is nothing less than everything. But this everything presents itself to us under a certain aspect: as representation, as objects for subjects. After all, we are the ones who perceive the world around us. Without us, those (representations of) forests, mountains, or waterfalls would be as nothing (WWR I, 5). This is the phenomenal realm, knowable, subject to laws, in the jurisdiction of the principle of sufficient reason. The other aspect is that of the thing-in-itself, the will, which breaks out of its primal unity into the principle of sufficient reason. The will in its singularity can never be known. Without us the forests or waterfalls would be as nothing: fine, but then why are they the way they are? If the world is a gigantic assortment of multitudinous aspects, the will conspires that we build our representations only out of some and not others. We are intended, in other words, to see things

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in a certain way. Though it might, strictly within its own ambit, be a creative construction, it is carried out solely on behalf of the will. The ordinary person is less a creator than a forcefully delegated witness, the “powerless agent of a cosmic Subject-Eye that insists on seeing as It chooses.”4 But this is also the realm in which our words have their currency. Our concepts were formed under pressure from the interests of the will. To merely one aspect of any perception—the one we are supposed to notice—the concept might be more or less adequate. But to every other aspect it is a traitor. To all except one it lies. As we have seen, the highest form of knowledge is pure, nonconceptual perception. But this can only ever be the starting point; what one perceives is immediately and comprehensively betrayed by the expressive medium at hand. Language cannot directly express what we perceive. To express what we perceive is, again, not to actually express it, but rather to make a defective copy of it—in short to create another representation. Our everyday lives, it follows, are lives of almost perpetual delusion. Empirical consciousness, writes the young Schopenhauer, “is like a squirrel running in a treadmill.”5 We think we have our purposes, but this is merely the deeper, inscrutable interest of the will transcribed into a motive that the misled intellect takes as its own. “In every living being the will-to-live has gained an intellect, which is the light whereby the will pursues its purposes.”6 So long as the intellect looks after the will’s deeper, utterly inscrutable exigency, the intellect can justify it however it likes. Few emotions—to give one example— strike us as authentic as love: but this, closely investigated, is just a ruse of nature, that sexual evil genius, which can attain her end only by implanting in the individual a certain delusion, and by virtue of this, that which in truth is merely a good thing for the species seems to him to be a good thing for himself, so that he serves the species, whereas he is under the delusion that he is serving himself. In this process a mere chimera, which vanishes immediately afterwards, floats before him, and, as motive, takes the place of reality. This delusion is instinct. (WWR II, 538)

Instinct works through us to ensure the healthy composition of the next batch in the series of individuals. So long as the job gets done, it could hardly matter less what we thought we were doing. Primary in love is the urge for possession. And possession is not about flirting and flowers and love letters, but solely about genital sex, because only sex will bring about reproduction. Goethe’s Werther could look forward to a lifelong friendship with Lotte, more picnics, more Ossian by candlelight. Given the will’s interests, however, this relationship was going nowhere. Once it became clear he would never possess her, the poor man blew his brains out.



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3  The Pure Knowing Subject There are rare moments, however, in which the intellect does manage to break free from the thralldom of the will. The intellect then becomes what Schopenhauer calls the pure knowing subject; this happens during aesthetic experiences. To explain this we need to go back a little. The unity of the will as the thingin-itself is objectified into plurality, where it then, as representation, becomes knowable through determinate forms. These forms range across a spectrum of complexity, from the lowest (basic forces, inert masses) to the highest (rational man). Simple life forms, like bacteria or plants, would fit along a spectrum between, say, a lump of igneous rock on one side and Immanuel Kant on the other. Schopenhauer calls these the (Platonic) Ideas, primal forms, the unitas ante rem, previous to particularization into this chair, this tree, or this apple. Ideas float midway between the unitary will and its particularized objectifications as “persistent forms of this whole species of things” (WWR I, 195) and constitute the immediate objectivity of the will at each given grade.7 A genius is gifted with an exceptional preponderance of intellect. And in certain moments the genius’s power of perception pierces the clutter of particularities screening these eternal (Platonic) Ideas. He sees, at last, after his interests (qua intellect). Breaking the shackles of conceptual thought, pulled out of this world of suffering and turmoil, above it, as it were, like the rainbow above the waterfall, he becomes the “clear eye of the world”: the pure knowing subject (WWR I, 186). During these special moments, the “particular thing becomes the Idea of its species,” and the intellect now perceives existence objectively (WWR I, 179). “This has for its object the (Platonic) Ideas, these being apprehended, however, not in the abstract but only in perception, the true nature of genius must lie in the completeness and energy of the knowledge of perception” (WWR II, 376). This brings us to our second point, the assertion of this special content in language. Having perceived an Idea, the genius may take a further step and create a work of art that would reveal the knowledge of this Idea. And those who take pleasure in art can consequently become, for a time, and to varying degrees, pure knowing subjects. So long as we are willing subjects, so long as we carry out the endless and greedy behests of the will and concern ourselves solely with relations, peace is impossible. From this arises the undeniable pleasure of aesthetic experience. When the willing self becomes the knowing self, then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us on its own accord, and all is well with us. It is the painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for at the moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure

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But a problem arises. Once the intellect breaks free and perceives pure knowledge, how does it, as it were, get back down? This is the problem of the World Eye. “If,” Schopenhauer writes, “a being of a higher order came and took all the trouble to impart [the solution of the riddle of the world] we should be quite unable to understand any part of his disclosures” (WWR II, 185). But then anyone who did manage somehow to glimpse things “as they are” would likewise suffer, almost as a condition, this illuminist’s predicament, which banishes these insights from the realm of intelligibility.8 Precious though it may be, whatever the genius has glimpsed is essentially alien to his everyday existence. One’s life becomes stretched between epiphany and the ordinary. And when the epiphany ends, we are speedily returned to all our woe. Of these mysteries, then, no one has ever truly spoken. The poet, however, has a few tricks. The success of the poet in revealing the Ideas depends on three things. First, the poet presents the reader with particulars, examples of the Ideas, in contrast to philosophy, which acquaints them instead with the inner-nature of what is being expressed in the examples. Glimpsing what the world is, then, the poet works upon language to reveal the corresponding Ideas.9 Because the poet reveals the objective inner-nature of man, which is the matter, the genres of poetry can be put on a spectrum from lowest to highest, depending on their objectivity. Lyric poetry is the lowest, as here the subjective state itself is the object.10 In dramatic poetry, on the other hand, the poet’s subjectivity vanishes before the revelation of man’s inner-nature. Consequently, lyric poetry is by far the easiest. Any half-decent poet can write satisfying lyrics, as the object (his own subjective state) stands so conspicuously before him. Dramatic poetry, however, requires a poet of a higher order. Yet the poet’s might seem in any event a futile endeavor, presenting particularities through concepts that are by definition abstractions. But—this is the second indispensable element—the poet has an artful way of combining concepts so that their “spheres intersect one another, so that none can continue in its abstract universality.” As one dull knife can sharpen another, so the poet can restrict the abstract nature of these empty words. Or, to give Schopenhauer’s image, the poet might be likened to a chemist who “obtains solid precipitates by combining perfectly clear and transparent fluids” (WWR I, 243). The third part involves the imagination of the reader, upon which the first two elements entirely depend. Hence the best definition of poetry is “the art of bringing into play the power of imagination through words” (WWR II, 424). Blockheads are no more likely to see the Ideas in the poem than they are in the world. The greater the intellectual power of the reader, the more powerfully they perceive any Ideas revealed in the poem. Only as intellectual signs, asserted by the intellect, do concepts have any use in the revelation of the Ideas. Meter and rhyme are the “special aids” of the poet



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(WWR I, 243). Aids should be distinguished from the tricks of combination mentioned above, as these special aids play no role overcoming the weakness of conceptual abstraction. The empirical qualities of the words—rhythm, rhyme, assonance, etc.—are completely extrinsic. Schopenhauer considers meter above rhyme on the grounds that rhythm is essentially temporal, which is a pure a priori intuition, but rhyme, “a matter of sensation in the organ of hearing,” is by contrast a matter of empirical sensibility. (WWR II, 428). But he appears to think both are anyway unimportant to the expression of the Ideas, though they keep the listener’s attention and lend a poem persuasive force. Rhythm and rhyme become means partly of holding our attention, since we more willingly follow the poem when read; and partly through them there arises in us a blind consent to what is read, prior to any judgment, and this gives the poem a certain emphatic power of conviction, independent of all reason or argument. (WWR I, 244)

A good poem expresses an idea as if it “already lay predestined, or even preformed, in the language, and the poet only had to discover it” (WWR II, 428). The result of this, for the listener, is pleasure. In its very structure language itself appears to endorse the idea. Schopenhauer also says that if the presentation, what merely pleases the ear, at the same time “contains a meaning, expresses an idea, [then it] presents itself as an . . . unexpected gift that agreeably surprises us, and therefore, since we made no demand of this kind at all, it very easily satisfies us.” Not only do we get a series of delightful sounds, we also get an interesting thought. But he goes on, “If this idea is such that, in itself, and so in prose, it would be significant, then we are delighted.” Whether or not the thought expressed is shallow, the effect of meter and rhyme “contain a certain completeness and significance in itself, since thereby it becomes a kind of music” (WWR II, 429). But this is not to claim that the poet is ever able to create in full fidelity to his intentions. Quite the contrary, no poet is ever a complete author. There is, Schopenhauer implies, an aspect of a poem’s meaning that belongs entirely to the sound itself, an inborn recalcitrance in the empirical features that has to be wrestled with, but which can never be overcome. Bad poets— the bunglers—write verse determined not by their ideas but by the empirical features of the material, the fact, to put it simply, that this word rhymes with that. “If we could see into the secret workshop of the poets,” he writes, “we should find that the idea is sought for the rhyme ten times more often than the rhyme for the idea” (WWR II, 428). Unable to fully harness the meanings of word-sound, unable in their workshops to force this empirical medium into compliance, these unfortunate hacks are almost entirely at the mercy of their materials. “Thus either the idea is stunted for the sake of the rhyme, or else the rhyme has to be satisfied with a feeble a peu pres” (WWR II, 430). By no means, however, is this only a problem for bad poets. All poets suffer. The triumph of the greatest master is still only a triumph of degree. Empirical word-sound can

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never be fully disciplined to the perception, owing to the latter’s transcendental origin, and language’s empirical provenance. So even the expert poet can still only take partial credit for a poem: “Thus he [the poet] is only half responsible for all that he says; meter and rhyme must answer for the other half ” (WWR II, 427). Yet it is also true that language might just as readily endorse shallowness, so that “even distorted and false ideas gain an appearance of truth through versification” (WWR II, 429).

4  Translating Poetry into Prose For Schopenhauer, the “correct and pure expression” of an idea should be in prose, which he appears to hold as a kind of expressive benchmark. Ultimately it is in prose that an idea must stand or fall. We are not seeing it clearly until it is expressed in pure unrhymed unmetrical nakedness. Even a few ideas of the most famous poets, bereft of the cap and bells of meter and rhyme, and thrust onto the well-lit stage of plain speech, stand before us shamefully diminished. Even famous passages from famous poets shrink up again and become insignificant when they are faithfully reproduced in prose. If only the true is beautiful, and the most cherished adornment of truth is nakedness, then an idea [Gedanke] which appears great and beautiful in prose will have more true worth than one that has the same effect in verse. It is very surprising and well worth investigation that such trifling, and indeed apparently childish, means as metre and rhyme produce so powerful an effect. (WWR II, 429)

In all fairness it should be pointed out that this notion of verse-prose translation contrasts with his frequent claim that good art cannot be reduced to concepts. “We are entirely satisfied by the impression of a work of art,” he writes, “only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept” (WWR II, 409). And indeed he even warns of the potentially absurd results of translation: “It is therefore an undertaking as unworthy as it is absurd when, as has often been attempted at the present day, one tries to reduce a poem of Shakespeare or Goethe to an abstract truth, the communication whereof would have been the aim of the poem” (WWR II, 409). Admittedly, there is some tension between these two statements, but they are not completely inconsistent. The translation into prose need not be a reduction to an abstract truth, but rather a faithful reduction into clear prose; equally truthful, though perhaps less pleasurable. But suppose we did try to translate a poem—suppose it was the first part of The Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here are the lines: I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in



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his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!11

And here is my prose translation: “This morning I saw a falcon.” Schopenhauer claims it is possible to translate faithfully. I gather no one would the dispute the deficiency of this translation. But by what standard could its failure be demonstrated? More complications are hinted at in the subtitle: “TO CHRIST OUR LORD,” which asks whether the purpose of a poem can be translated, whether one can pray—supposing this is a kind of prayer—in prose. Can the substance of a prayer qua prayer be translated? Can one translate (faithfully) an ecstatic outburst? Is it still an outburst? But to continue with the translation: in Schopenhauerian terms Hopkins would be expressing the Idea of this bird presented through its particularity. Some magnificent bird glimpsed as it sailed across the sky, probably during the morning, probably—just a hunch—some sunny day in autumn. The reader is humbly invited to attempt to render it faithfully into prose. That Schopenhauer might think such a thing possible comes about through the presupposition that a poem is merely a different kind of presentation of what we could just as well come across in a piece of prose, or for that matter a painting or—why not?—a film. The (Platonic) Ideas in question are the fixed point around which the translation moves. In philosophical prose we would not concern ourselves with the particulars, but rather the innernature of which these are mere expressions. Instances of alliteration, assonance, internal-rhyme, sprung rhythm—all these are merely matters of pleasure and, from the standpoint of what the poem means, dispensable.12 If one English writer ever commanded the resources to attempt such a translation, it would be John Ruskin. Try reading this passage as a prose translation of Hopkins’s poem: We will take the bird first. It is little more than a draft of the air brought into form by plumes. The air is in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh, and glows with air in its flying, like a blown flame: it nests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it;—is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.13

But of course Ruskin’s prose is beset with the same ploys our translation was supposed to exclude. Notice how the third sentence abandons its branch in bursts of iambic exertion, “subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it,” and then swoops down when Ruskin writes “—is the air,” only to recover, ascending the hydraulic

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with trochaic wing-beats: “conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.” (Or is this passage in fact less about the bird than what increasingly seems the real subject—the air, the Queen of the Air? And if so, how shall any of that ambiguity survive translation?) In any case, it looks like we may even need to translate this translation, to strip away all this suggestion and superfluous euphony to get at a more reliable nakedness. Come to think of it, though, what would prevent this text from being a translation of the poem? Any translation of The Windhover would not convey content unique to Hopkins’s poem; they would be revelations of the same thing (Idea). So if in aggregate the same Ideas are invoked in the poem and Ruskin’s prose, what extra features would be left over for the “real” translation to have? Schopenhauer is able to claim that a poem can be translated because a Schopenhauerian poet is a worker in knowledge before a worker in language. We are all too tempted to see words as the bearers of the Ideas in their specificity. Schopenhauer himself gives this impression when he writes that good poems “contain a meaning, express an idea.”14 The poet perceives, and goes into his workshop. Smoke rises from the chimney, the hammer beats against the anvil. Now the door opens, and the words emerge outfitted for pleasure and contain (bear, express, present) a particular conceptual instance of the coordinating Idea. And so when they are translated, it is this mysterious quantum of meaning that, somehow, has to be conveyed into prose, which means, if it is there, its presence has nothing to do with the poem’s formal aspects. But then how else can it be there? The Ideas are “present” in the words of the poet solely through their power to intellectually stimulate the reader’s imagination. A poem, you might say, is like a code tuning the reader into certain objective truths about the world—a cosmic descrambler, which reveals, amid the haze of particularities, the underlying and persistent forms. A poem provokes pleasing communion with the world, a lessening of the reader’s subjective willing self and enlargement of the knowing self. But this does not depend on the empirical qualities of the language. Again, only as intellectual signs are words of any value in the revelation of the Ideas. Of course this is a peculiar limitation. After all, might not word-sound and the other nonconceptual elements of poetry bring the imagination into play? Take for instance a few lines from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: There Hero sacrificing turtles blood, Vaild to the ground, vailing her eie-lids close, And modestly they opened as she rose: Thence flew Loves arrow with the golden head, And thus Leander was enamoured. Stone still he stood, and evermore he gazed . . .15

The spondee of the last line brings the reader to halt, brings, you might suppose, our imaginations into play picturing the stupefied Leander, standing stone-still.



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Obviously, though, if Schopenhauer believed that these formal elements alone could excite the imagination, faithful translation would be out of the question, if indeed poetry is the “art of bringing into play the power of imagination through words” (WWR II, 424). Because then the invocation of another’s imagination through formal elements—not conceptual tricks—virtually dooms the notion of any translation, as it, the meaning, would be rooted in the poem’s empirical specificity. Yet for Schopenhauer the tools of poetry—rhyme, meter, etc.—do not widen its scope of expression. They only add pleasure.16

5 Music Music, however, is a different story. It is through music that the abstractions of the intellect are overcome. Poetry and the other arts have as their objects the Ideas. Music does not concern itself with the Ideas, nor for that matter the phenomenal world. Instead it is because music is a “copy of the will itself ” that music assumes metaphysical priority (WWR I, 257). More than all the other arts, then, music enjoys an intimate relation with the “innermost being of our world and of our own self.”17 Of primary importance is the melody. It is as if the melody is satisfaction wrenched into time, forced from the motionless peace of its tonic. Then it seeks to reunite, to extinguish itself again in consonance, perhaps in a different key. And it does so precisely in the fashion that we, given the temporal nature of our willing, are very much “the vibrating string that is stretched and plucked.” The melody has an integrity of movement in time, and this corresponds with the experience of man—that is, “the copy or impression whereof in actual life is the series of its deeds. Melody, however, says more: it relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will” (WWR II, 451). But how does it do this? Melody “portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summaries under the wide and negative concept of feeling and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason” (WWR I, 259). Music relates the history of a part of the self that the intellect summarizes as feeling. Of course the intellect would give it a name, because it, whatever it might be, would hardly bother to name itself. The term “feeling,” as a “wide and negative concept,” inadequately describes this other part, that domain within which “a secret history” unfolds. On its own terms it has no name. It is at any rate here, to and through this unnamed part of the self, that the composer can reveal “the innermost nature of the world.” More than any poet or sculptor, the composer creates unconsciously and without reflection. He is “inspired” (WWR I, 260). For what use could concepts and rational reflection be to a composer composing? None—in fact they would be detrimental. The nameless part of the self, the nonconceptual, breaks into song, and in this music, especially in the melody, we are presented with the “in-itself of the will itself ” (WWR I, 261).

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Concepts are at best weakened substitutes for what is perceived. The broader the reach, and the more that is included under a given concept, the weaker that concept becomes and, consequently, the greater violence it commits upon the thisness of a particular perception. But music is the contrary: it commands a universal domain but does not, for all that, cease to be this particular melody. And the more that is included under it, the more powerful it becomes. If concepts are abstracted weakenings, music is an “extracted quintessence” (WWR I, 261). Music, then, gives us the extracted essence of inner states, never this particular state, but “joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves” (WWR I, 261). The concept of the tiger gives us a universalia post rem; the musical expresses the fear of the tiger—the universalia in re (WWR I, 263). So for Schopenhauer music is more precise and faithful to existence than any conceptual utterance. From it we learn the secret history of our soul. And this, to repeat, is told to a part of the self that reason has called “feeling.” Music would seem to have its effect on the will: “i.e., the feelings, passions, and emotions—of the hearer” (WWR II, 448); it is the language of “feelings” [Empfindungen]; music expresses “the storm of the passions and the pathos of the feelings” (WWR II, 449); from a Beethoven symphony we hear “all human passions and emotions” (WWR II, 450). Music gives us the most profound, ultimate, and secret information on the feelings expressed in the words, or the action presented in an opera. It expresses their real and true nature, and makes us acquainted with the inner-most soul of the events and occurrences, the mere cloak and body of which are presented on the stage. (WWR II, 448)

The audience is having a very different experience from the state of distracted indifference in which they have passed their ordinary day. Because of the music, they are like people observing an event in life through miraculously expanded powers of perception, as if a new bandwidth has just opened upon experience. Before their eyes, before their ears rather, is exhibited solely the significant. Like an assembly of Gods, they “see only the heart” (WWR II, 449). Music whispers the innermost soul of events into our “inner-most being” (WWR I, 256). But both music and our innermost being are, of course, will. Which means that the composer has merely closed a circuit: music is the sound of the will communing with itself.

6  Poetry and Knowledge We might summarize Schopenhauer’s account like this: before anything else, the meaning of the poem, the Idea, is perceived by the poet, a worker in knowledge. This is the content which precedes the conceptual performance.



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The poet then goes to work on language, which means deliberately asserting this in a recalcitrant medium. Concepts are employed in such a way that they mutually restrict their abstract nature, and thereby overcome the initial abstraction that drained our everyday utterances of intimacy with the world. All empirical aspects of language, meanwhile, are only a matter of pleasure, though these frequently put at risk the already known transcendental content. It is the empirical dressing of this nakedness (as intellectual sign) that remains outside the intellectual ambit, hissing with its own meaning, never fully mastered. As these empirical features were never (intellectually) meant in the first place— were not implicated in the original insight—they can be excluded, and the conceptual nakedness clothed in a different guise—in other words, translated. The Schopenhauerian poet seems to have a rather remarkable relationship to language. For one thing, he always knows what he wants to say. Perceiving the Ideas, the job is simply to get concepts to excite the imaginations of others. Which means nothing new is ever discovered in, for instance, the manner words are cast together—anything from this region would only endanger the original content. Expression is always a retreat from the intimacy of the original insight, and this insight is only served through intellectual assertion. Greater poets assert themselves more than lesser, while the assertions of the worst are so feeble they vanish into the noise against which all must constantly contend. But what is this noise? Just what is the intellect asserting itself against? As our concepts are formed in fealty to the interests of the metaphysical will, the last thing they can convey is what the pure knowing subject has perceived after its own interests. So the misfit between transcendental insight and empirical means certainly accounts for some of the poet’s exertion. Yet it seems the assertive intellect is also in contention with the other expressive energies of the self. Energies present, I would suggest, in the everyday gulf-stream drift of words, words that occur to you through the viscous facility of empirical forms themselves—because this word rhymes with that, or scans with it, or reminds you of it—or simply because it happened, one day, to wash up on the shore of awareness. The whole receptive dimension of our lives with language is what the Schopenhauerian poet has to resist. Which is to say, the noise that endangers the meaning he wants to assert is nothing other than the workings of the second potency of the voice. Though hammered and harnessed, though beaten down and subjected by the Schopenhauerian intellect, these same energies would soon join under a charismatic, ruthless and inscrutable leader. In the new dominion described by the young Friedrich Nietzsche this picture is reversed. Not intellectual assertions, but everything opposed to them now become the origin of genuine poetry and indeed the redemptive utterance which overcomes conceptual abstraction. And when, astir with inspiration, the Nietzschean poet gives up his individuality, so great is the influx of expressive energy the intellect is almost torn apart—so powerful are the mysterious workings of the Dionysian.

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7  Nietzsche, the Dionysian, and the Second Picture of the Voice We focus on The Birth of Tragedy and other early texts written explicitly under the influence of Schopenhauer. This picture has three key elements. First, it is a mood rather than any intellectual content that precedes the conceptual performance. Second, the content is revealed as it comes into articulation, not through assertion but through reception. And third, new aspects are discovered and freely acknowledged. Language, according to the younger Nietzsche, is merely the result of a “peace treaty” between individuals in the state of nature which allowed societies to form. To help eliminate conflict, they fixed what would count as truth as “a way of distinguishing things as invented which has the same validity and force everywhere, and the legislation of language also produces the first laws of truth.”18 The creator of language had no interest in the world as such; the whole point is simply to designate relations to human beings. Concepts are formed not to serve as a “memory” of the particularities of any unique thing. Quite the contrary: this is the first aspect sacrificed, the first aspect which, moreover, must be cut aside to draw the “thing” (event, whatever) into the ambit of the conceptual. Hence the primary experience of the thing is sacrificed “because at the same time it must fit countless other, more or less similar cases.”19 Concept formation requires an arbitrary equation. “Every concept,” Nietzsche writes, “comes into being by making equivalent that which is not equivalent.”20 If we merely used concepts to give directions or order meals in restaurants, that would be one thing. It might even be a useful sort of rudimentary human communication, reason speaking to reason, as Schopenhauer put it. But problems arise when we make an additional, extravagant presumption. We forget that we have created this system of concepts through a vast series of forced equivalences. And we want our terminology to become a tray of glittering scalpels capable of cutting nature to its core. Yet nature knows neither generalities nor particularities. So language, from its very inception, pulls away from our primary encounter with the world. For Schopenhauer, the (Platonic) Ideas lay fixed in the very structure of the universe. But Nietzsche dispenses with these. Our essential relation to the world is not one of knowing (Ideas) but relies, instead, on our powers of expression. This is the primal impulse to metaphor which “originally flowed in a hot, liquid stream from the primal power of the human imagination”21 and which created language in the first place. In better days, perhaps not far off, when the forest-bird sings again, this will reassert itself and set up new translations, new metaphors, new metonyms: it “constantly manifests the desire to shape the given world of the human waking being in ways which are just as multifarious, irregular, inconsequential, incoherent, charming and ever-new, as things are in the world of dream.”22 Our primal encounter with the world, then, is not a matter of knowing, but of expression; not a scientist placing a specimen into a box, but an occasion to celebrate, an impetus of creativity, like a king’s birthday.



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No regular way leads from these intuitions into the land of the ghostly schemata and abstractions; words are not made for them; man is struck dumb when he sees them, or he will speak only in forbidden metaphors and unheard-of combinations of concepts so that, by at least demolishing and deriding the old conceptual barriers, he may do creative justice to the impression made on him by the mighty, present intuition.23

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche distinguishes between two artistic drives, the Apollonian, the image-maker, and the Dionysian, the imageless art of music (BT, 14). Like the sexes, they exist in perpetual tension and dependency. The Apollonian drive is linked to the construction and duration of dreams. It seeks lovely semblance, “measured limitation, that freedom from wider impulses, that wise calm of the image-making god” (BT, 16). The Dionysian drive, on the other hand, is associated with intoxication (Rausch). Contrasted with the serenity and bright explicit stillness of the first, the Dionysian can be glimpsed when the first has “broken down.” These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in intensity, cause subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting, awaken either under the influence of narcotic drink, of which all human beings and peoples who are close to the origin of things speak in their hymns, or at the approach of spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by lust for life. (BT, 17)

The Apollonian favors measured form and stability. A relation to dream associates it with Schopenhauer’s world of representation, the realm ruled by the principle of sufficient reason and the validity of conceptual consciousness. But once man is powerfully stimulated to express, the inadequacy of concepts instantly become evident. All through The Birth of Tragedy we hear of people under the influence of Dionysian states that struggle toward expression but find no outlet in words. They cannot simply open their mouth and tell the person next to them how they are feeling. How could words express that? They sing. They dance. Their bodies become a pliant, expressive material. Not merely language, but rather the full gamut of expressive powers is brought to bear. “The essence of nature is bent on expressing itself,” he writes. “A new world of symbols is required” (BT, 21). But it is essential to notice who the actor is. You do not begin with an idea, pure knowledge, and then work on language. There is not even a workshop. In fact, this has almost nothing to do with you. The more I become aware of those all-powerful artistic drives in nature, and of a fervent longing in them for semblance, for their redemption and release in semblance, the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical assumption that that which truly exists . . . the primordial unity, simultaneously needs, for its constant release and redemption, the ecstatic vision, intensely pleasurable semblance. (BT, 26)

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Suppose we follow a band of these celebrants. Clad in Dionysian regalia, they ascend a wooded hillside on the outskirts of Thebes, murmuring with every step the usual preparatory laudations. In a clearing at the foot of an ancient cedar runs a stream of shining glass: it is here they will congregate, here they dance. Yet all this, of course, is nature, beautiful we may grant, but still the site of perpetual suffering. The “shrieking and howling” Schopenhauer heard echoing across even the most gorgeous landscapes is heard also by the young Nietzsche (WWR II, 354). It was the wisdom of Silenus, the notorious companion of Dionysus, who, caught in the forest by King Midas and compelled to speak, pronounced: “Wretched, ephemeral race . . . . The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon” (BT, 23). Because what is life but suffering? What is eating but the staving off, like some ferociously determined animal with a stick, the death that must eventually come? Schopenhauer’s lyric poet—like all his artists—is distressed by the epiphany, both the strength of it and his being bereft of it in the everyday.24 Nietzsche, however, will not accept resignation. At length the beauty of the place begins to affect the members of our band. Reclined under that ancient cypress, they soon descend into a swoon of Dionysian intoxication. But they also dream. And, as they dream, nature itself at last awakes from its nightmare of perpetual suffering. As the eyes of the poet close, the huge eye of das Ur-Eine opens and now it, with ecstatic pleasure, beholds itself. The poet has given up his individual will and become “a medium, the channel through which the one truly existing subject celebrates its release and redemption in semblance” (BT, 32).

8  Dionysian Poetry For Nietzsche, the lyric poet exemplifies exactly the dynamic his book seeks to unfold. In the lyric poet the “mysterious unity” of the two art divinities are revealed. At first the two powers stand differentiated: Homer, as the great naïve Apollonian artist, and Archilochus, that Dionysian “warlike servant of the Muses, driven wildly through existence” (BT, 29). Now this, he points out, is not to juxtapose the objective with the subjective. All great art must by definition be objective, the hard-won fruit of “disinterested contemplation” (BT, 29). Here Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer, but then he must show how his lyric poet, this goat-eyed Archilochus, is, in fact, disinterestedly contemplative. Not an easy case to make, it would seem. To explain the falling-silent of Archilochus’s “I,” Nietzsche does what Schopenhauer could never have tolerated: he conjoins the lyric poet with the musician (BT, 30). As we saw, Schopenhauer refused to grant any meaning to the mere form of a poem, for instance, the syntax or the sound of the words. Formal aspects merely add pleasure and, though they may become “a kind of music,” have nothing to do with the musical as a copy of the movements of the cosmic ground, the will. No genuine gradient can be



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constructed from prose-sound into music; an impassible phenomenal barrier separates the two. Nietzsche’s linkage to music comes in an oblique but significant reference to Schiller. In a letter to Goethe, Schiller writes, “In my case the feeling is initially without a definite and clear object; this does not take shape until later. It is preceded by a certain musical mood, which is followed in my case by the poetic idea.”25 Under the influence of a musical mood, then, the poet senses the approach of an intuition—is, as it were, intellectually aware of it— but lacks any direct intellectual access. Though it is within consciousness, it is closed to consciousness. Though closed, it asserts its own expressive exigency upon the materials of intellectual exchange, and emerges as what is called the “poetic idea.” It does not emerge in the intellect, though after the fact the intellect may give it a name. The musical mood, then, quietly marks another respectful deviation of apprentice from master. Schopenhauer’s perception of the Ideas, the insubordinate intellect glimpsing existence for once after its own interests, resulted in a heartening if ultimately ephemeral intimacy with the world. For Nietzsche, the intellect is not the actor. Quite the opposite: it is the nonconceptual insights that act, that arise and, apparently under their own power, penetrate their way into consciousness. Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject purifies itself to “know” the Ideas. For Nietzsche, however, the insights, powered by alien enthusiasm, contaminate themselves, taint and pollute themselves with the impurities of conceptual forms while never allowing these forms to become windows into their interiors. Rather than explain and lay bare, conceptual forms cling to them haphazardly. They are sported with the happy indifference of a God in terrestrial disguise. I have said this energy is alien to the intellect: What does that mean? And what exactly powers these invasive nonconceptual Dionysian insights? The energy is alien because it works along a precisely contrary tangent. The intellect by its nature seeks abstraction—the surefire inference from specificity to generality. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Schopenhauer. In fact, you could argue that Schopenhauer’s intimacy with the world amounted to a doomed fantasy of intellectual union, an unobstructed continuation along that very tangent of abstraction to nothing less than the ultimate condition, the will. Our painful subjection consists of our not being allowed, due to the will’s gigantic, covert and utterly self-serving agenda, to fully exercise our intellectualizing powers. Consequently the energy throughout his account is marked by a pervasive retractile tendency: how all of existence, all the jarring, disparate aspects, can first be gathered, however feebly, into concepts; from concepts a still denser agglutination into the (Platonic) Ideas; and these, in turn, are merely modes of the absolute: the thing-in-itself: the unitary will. The Birth of Tragedy, however, has this reversed. Not the story of particularity coming under an ultimate singularity, but rather this very singularity shattering into multiplicity: that is the tangent that interests Nietzsche. Rather than an (intellectual) energy that would subsume, Nietzsche’s Dionysian energy craves

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expansiveness, yearns to transcend itself in “explosive unity.”26 Not the unity of gathering, but rather the unity of squander, of capriciously variegated selfdiscovery. So our conscious lives are structured by the counteraction of two contrary forces: the intellect’s innate retractile energy suspended by dint of its own operation upon the will’s expansive energy.27 Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche appear to agree that the retractile tendency of the intellect confers at best a passing sense of intimacy with the world. But existence cannot be captured in the meager forms of human knowing. Whatever intimacy is on offer may for a time sooth and console, but it is neither lasting nor life-enhancing. On this point Nietzsche is in complete accord: from that tangent resignation can be the only conceivable outcome. But there is, he suggests, this other route—one which likely would have left Schopenhauer deeply perplexed: “In this enchanted state the Dionysiac enthusiast sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr he in turn sees the god.” And this vision amounts to the “breaking-asunder of the individual and its becoming one with the primal being itself ” (BT, 44). This “breaking asunder of the individual” hinges on Nietzsche’s rejection of the doctrine of (Platonic) Ideas, a change of significant consequence.28 As in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the original contradiction at the core of existence is individuation, the pain of embodied being—severance from intimacy with the metaphysical whole. Schopenhauer’s brief, solacing communion was through the perception of the Ideas. And this is a movement, as it were, upward, further along the intellect’s retractile tangent, toward the perception of more integral and structuring unities. But without the Ideas, how will Nietzsche assuage of the pain of individuation? By going in the opposite direction: not “upward,” but making a Dionysian descent toward the absolute limit of individuation. This is the Dionysian “intoxication” (Rausch: “rapture,” “ecstasy,” “frenzy”).29 Not a movement toward the coordinating principles of representation, but rather a sinking of the intellect in a direction that threatens to cancel out its workings altogether: to grind the retractile energies of the intellect into the will’s expansive energies, which means the disintegration of representation itself, but also that it, the intellect, becomes the field of play and self-discovery for those very same expansive forces. My suggestion is that we conceive the expansive tangent, the Dionysian, as a reverse concept. Concepts are retractile unities discovered through comparison and abstraction. Certain aspects of “horse,” for instance, become the marks and features organizing any such future cases, while the rest is excluded. But the expansive unity goes in the opposite direction. Remember it is beginning in unity, namely the primal unity (das Ur-Eine), out of which all aspects originate, and then seeks to discover itself in difference. This is why the intellect has to be broken down: the retractile imperative for conceptual knowledge is the opposed correlate of the primal being’s imperative for lovely semblance, to discover itself in different forms. And just as the scope of the concept is widened when the concept refers to a larger field, so does the expansive tangent seek to shatter its



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unity into a fund of maximal differentiation, sending itself out to “colonize” the most far-flung regions which might otherwise be closed to it—like the forms of our retractile intellect. Which is why, whenever they do get the chance, these Dionysian insights force themselves upon us, taking over our words for their own purposes.30 This is the opposite of solace through intellectual knowing. This is the “breaking-asunder of the individual” which allows it to become “one with the primal being itself ” (BT, 44). And this is the condition for genuine creativity. Only the artist who has “given up his subjectivity in the Dionysian process” can create great works (BT, 30). As long as anyone persists in their empirical selves, they are an “opponent of art and not its origin.” If, however, they have descended, pressed their retractile intellects up against the expansive blast, they become “a medium, the channel through which the one truly existing subject celebrates its release and redemption in semblance” (BT, 32).

9  Socratic Reaction If the greatest of the Greek dramas might be called Dionysian, this is only because they enjoyed a relative preponderance of the Dionysian against the Apollonian. But both art drives are required: indeed each requires the other, as reproduction requires male and female. When the reaction came, it was not so much to restore a balance favorable to the Apollonian; it was to extirpate the Dionysian altogether in favor of the intellect. As we have seen, in Dionysian art the intellect comes in for considerable neglect. It gains no special access to those Dionysian nonconceptual insights. Instead, they mysteriously arise and act upon the conscious mind without revealing their core. From the intellect’s point of view, the lyric poet, humming with musical invention, creates little more than a big conceptual mess. Get rid of the harps and flickering candles and you are left with words strewn about recklessly—even the person declaiming does not know what he is talking about: Aeschylus himself did what he did unconsciously. Few were more sensitive to the scandal of this than Socrates, who, says Nietzsche, spearheaded the revolt against the Dionysian. Socrates was the paradigmatic man of reason.31 He walked about Athens and, with his special brand of belittling irony, revealed that practically everyone “lacked even a secure and correct understanding of their profession, and performed it only by instinct. ‘Only by instinct’: the phrase goes to the heart and center of the Socratic tendency” (BT, 66). That even our most basic practices cannot be explained, nor everyday words properly defined, left Socrates astonished, given his belief in the all-pervasive force of reason, which should by rights make everything explicit. Hence our inability to rationally account for our lives amounted to a failure to realize ourselves as rational-theoretical-optimistic beings. So pronounced was the theoretical in Socrates that his famous daimonion—rather than prompting him, or spurring him on, instead “always warns him to desist.” “Whereas in the

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case of all productive people instinct is precisely the creative-affirmative force and consciousness makes critical and warning gestures, in the case of Socrates, by contrast, instinct becomes the critic and consciousness the creator—a true monstrosity per defectum!” (BT, 66). And Socrates was not alone. Euripides, Nietzsche implies, was impressed but deeply disturbed by the work of his great predecessors. Long after the performances ended he “sat in the theatre, brooding restlessly, and confessed to himself, as a spectator, that he did not understand [them]” (BT, 59). He did not understand them: the world, art, existence: all were material for the understanding. His work became perversely animated by this principle of aesthetic Socratism, which maintained that, “in order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable” (BT, 62). As a result art became “overgrown with philosophical thought” (BT, 69). And why should it not? Why should it not seek preeminence? Especially given the “profound delusion” that was brought into the world by Socrates, “the imperturbable belief that thought, as it follows the thread of causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being, and that it is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it” (BT, 73). Both Socrates and Euripides attempt to recuperate the intellect as origin for words—no musical mediation here—and knowledge the only genuine mode of intimacy with the world. Above all nothing ought to be closed to consciousness. Whenever truth is unveiled, the ecstatic eyes of the artist remain fixed on what still remains veiled, even after the unveiling; similarly theoretical man enjoys and satisfies himself with the discarded veil, and his desire finds its highest goal in a process of unveiling which he achieves by his own efforts and which is always successful. (BT, 72–73)

The two energies struggle for preponderance. But what seems of particular concern to both Socrates and Euripides is this baffling Dionysian predilection for the unconscious. In Dionysian states, suppose that of a lyric poet, the nonconceptual “musical” insights move through consciousness as closed cells, and inscrutably explode as image sparks, into the words that the intellect cannot “understand,” neither at the time of expression, nor through forensic recuperation afterward. Hence the intolerable thing for a Socratic rationalist are exactly these “musical moods,” because this opaque origin, infused with an alien energy, diminishes the power and scope of reason.32 And here we glimpse the intellect’s totalizing impulse: the ideal—which is also the expectation—is that the origin of words should ultimately become transparent to words. The new opposition, accordingly, became the Dionysian and the Socratic— the expansive and the retractile—and it did not take long for the Socratic to win out. And now the natural, inborn stimulants of the Dionysian and Apollonian are replaced by “cool, paradoxical thoughts—in place of Apolline visions—and fiery affects—in place of Dionysiac ecstasies” (BT, 62). Unsurprisingly, anything nondeliberative or nonconceptual at its origins is utterly extirpated: “As a poet,



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Euripides is thus the echo of his conscious perceptions.” In the new theoretical dispensation—while the Dionysian spirit slumbered, dreaming of Wagnerian rebirth—contradictions at the very heart of this culture, with its “universal greed for knowledge,” were soon expressed in qualms and disquiet (BT, 74). Theoretical man needed reassurance.

10 Opera From this insecurity came the dubious art form of opera. For all its tinsel and flash, the culture of opera is really nothing more than an expression of theoretical man in denial. Nietzsche evidently has in mind the work of composers like Claudio Monteverdi, whose Orfeo is numbered among the first operas in any modern sense. But because the origins were not musical this is doomed from the very start. How could opera emerge from nonmusical origins? Theoretical man needed to reassure himself that his central and defining postulates were true, and so, in opera, he supposedly returned to the primal language of man. [A] form of art is forced into existence here by a powerful need, but a need of a non-aesthetic kind: the longing for the idyll, the belief that at the very beginning of time mankind was both artistic and good. Recitative was thought to be the rediscovered language of those original humans, and opera to be the rediscovered land of that idyllic or heroic good being who follows a natural artistic drive in all his actions. (BT, 90)

Nietzsche makes essentially three criticisms. The first—the other two pretty much follow in consequence—is the downright nonmusical nature of the art. Instead of any urgent, inscrutable Dionysian insights demanding expression, this is simply a calculated, not to say extravagant way for theoretical man to shore up belief. No stirrings of mystery required, nor any possible outlet for the Dionysian. As a consequence, and this is his second criticism, the audience, largely “amusement-hungry” aristocrats, being thoroughly unmusical themselves, demanded to enjoy music as “the reason-governed rhetoric of passion in sound and word” (BT, 89). Of course they were not indifferent to “the sensuous pleasure afforded by the arts of singing,” but they absolutely insisted on understanding the words. “For, just as the spirit was so much nobler than the body, the word was supposedly nobler than the accompanying system of harmony” (BT, 91). This leads to the third criticism. The entire art, corrupt at its origins, attempted to mingle appeals to both the understanding and the “ground of music,” presumably the emotions. Which meant that if a singer ever felt the keen exigencies of music—“the drive to discharge himself in music and present his voice in a virtuoso manner”—this impulse had to be curbed, unless the needs text had been fully served (BT, 89). But this mixture, this periodic back and forth between “half-sung declamation, and fully sung interjection” is

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a monstrous blend of opposites, a “most external mosaic-like conglomeration” (BT, 90). Concerning the first criticism, what might this mean—the accusation that opera is derived from nonmusical origins? To understand this we have to recall how Nietzsche has reversed the Schopenhauerian trajectory between voice (origin) and language. For his master, the intellect, unhampered, ascended to the heights of the pure knowing subject, but in the thin, bracing air of the nonconceptual stratosphere the voice could not ever find a full expression in language. An attempt could be made, however, either in art, or in a philosophy with a due sense of the necessary limitations (one like Schopenhauer’s, for instance). But for Nietzsche the intellect is merely a receptacle. As knowing beings, “we are not one and identical with the essential being” (BT, 33). It is the musical moods that are the origin. Before these Dionysian “insights” can come into contact with the conceptual, though, there is an intervening step, and here Schiller’s reference to music is relevant. The lyric poet, as a Dionysian artist, “entirely at one with the primordial unity . . . produces a copy of this primordial unity as music” (BT, 30). Music acts as a sort of mid-point between the conscious mind and the primal unity. Any sympathetic God— as Schopenhauer mentioned—who descended to reveal all the secrets of the universe would, to our earthly ears, no matter how we strained, proclaim at best in a booming gibberish. But what if he had sung? (Wittgenstein writes: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (PI, 190). But what if the lion could sing?) And indeed this is what, out of its own inborn urge to luxuriate in diversity, the primal being consents to do. Only into music can the unity (das Ur-Eine) discharge what cannot possibly ever be spoken (the pain of original contradiction); only music allows it the constraint of differentiation—thus rescuing it from undifferentiated silence—and yet also a relative freedom (in that music is not based on phenomenal forms). As a Dionysian he can go no further, but now, “under the influence of Apolline dream, the music becomes visible to him as in a symbolic dream-image” (BT, 30). Nietzsche supposes this is in the spirit of Schopenhauer, but surely he knew he was taking a step in a direction his master never would have endorsed (BT, 31). The idea of any communication between poetry and music, and of an expressive gradient more generally, goes against Schopenhauer’s distinction between the (Platonic) Ideas as the modes of the phenomenal appearance, and then the substrate “movements” of the will itself.33 Hence a textbook Schopenhauerian might well object that the distinctive power and depth of music is put at risk. But, as we saw, Nietzsche has no use for the Ideas, though their aesthetic consequence remains: that Dionysian music is non-phenomenal. This makes possible a creative interchange between nonconceptual Dionysian music and the Apollonian image world. “The image-less and concept-less reflection of the original pain in music, with its release and redemption in semblance, now generates a second reflection, as a single symbolic likeness



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(Glichnis) or exemplum” (BT, 30). At each stage the “insight”—seeking along its expansive trajectory redemption in semblance, without ever surrendering its nonconceptual core to conceptual consciousness—moves first into music, thence into images and from images into words. We see the intoxicated enthusiast Archilochus sunk in sleep—as Euripides describes it in the Bacchae, a sleep on a high alpine meadow, in the midday sun, and now Apollo approaches and touches him with a laurel. The Dionysiac-musical enchantment of the sleeper now pours forth sparks of imagery, as it were, lyric poems which, unfolded to their fullest extent, are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs. (BT, 30)

By “straining to its limits to imitate music,” language aspires to the universality denied to it through its provenance in abstraction (BT, 34). Concepts stand over material, but the greater their scope, the weaker they become. Music, however, which commands a universal domain and yet retains its own particularity, is an extracted quintessence. Music restores what was excluded through the retractile working of the intellect. For Nietzsche to argue that certain conceptual performances come, not so much out of the sound of music, but rather out of these musical moods,34 is for retractile concepts to aspire to the expansive tangent—an aspiration, if you will, to change masters. Giving up the regional unities of empirical consciousness, these words now serve instead in the primordial unity’s drive for lovely semblance. “The word, the image, the concept seeks expression in a manner analogous to music and thereby is subjected to the power of music” (BT, 34). So if lyric poetry, in the discharge of a musical mood, is considered to be “the imitative effulguration of music in images and concepts” (BT, 35), these concepts seek nothing less than their own festive reversal, indeed, they seek to expiate the very exclusions that brought them into existence. Schopenhauer’s poet knew how to use words as intellectual signs, but could never entirely master their formal aspects, nor what we called the receptive dimension of language. Precisely these now become the chief arteries of expression: which means, as intellect, we literally lose control of our words. No longer do they point to retractile unities based on common marks and features. Instead, throwing down the banner of the intellect, our words become a principle of difference for the primordial unity. Delighting in its own semblance in music, the “original artist of the world” (BT, 33) now surges higher still, into regions of ever greater differentiation and self-discovery, discharging first into images and then, as if from the highest spout on the cosmic fountain, the conceptual forms of the lyric poet. But opera, this absurd “parasitic creature,” has it all backward: right at the top is not the receptive intellect, but the supposedly productive intellect” (BT, 93). Unable to put aside persistent doubts of its grand narrative, anyway needing reassurance, it musters its feeble so-called creative powers to write the text (the

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libretto). These were intended simply to endorse the chief but all-too assailable myths of theoretical man, hence the inborn “idyllic tendency of opera.” To show that man is essentially good, man is depicted in his primal state, when, kind and gentle, at one with the world and bursting with song, he “lay in the bosom of nature,” which implies: do not fear, for we still are this very same pure, happy, gentle, wholly good, and thoroughly worthwhile creature—an original relation to nature is always, even now, on offer. Secondary implication: we theoretical men have lost nothing under the intellect’s imperium. The route is still open back into nature’s embrace. And here opera attempts to soothe theoretical man’s deepest concern: that the intellect alone establishes a true and constant jointure between self and cosmos, that the intellect alone brokers access to the real. Rather than featuring a lost age, then, opera depicts “the cheerfulness of eternal re-discovery, comfortable delight in an idyllic reality which one can at least imagine to be real at any time” (BT, 92). And this—one might even say, this intellectual propaganda—is passed down into music, which is explicitly the servant to the words. Nietzsche seems even to imply the deliberate humiliation of a triumph. As once-threatening foes are marched, chained and groveling, through the gates of the city, music is obliged to celebrate its subjection to the concept. Music, as we have seen, is formally the medium closest to the primordial unity, thus the medium in which Dionysian insights could be expressed with the least distortion and consequentially the most power. And yet here, at the very origins of opera, music is merely the slave of the intellect, which must, in the interest of perpetuating its own myths, assiduously block the pulverizing insights that threaten to rise through music’s subterranean tunnels. There is a precedent in new Attic Dithyramb, “where music no longer expressed the inner essence, the Will itself, but simply reproduced appearances inadequately, in an imitation mediated by concepts.” Even back then music had become “alienated from itself ” (BT, 83). The art form emerges from unmusical origins not only because it placates a mortifying quasi-moral insecurity. To the extent there is any creative principle at work, it is, preposterously, the naked intellect; nothing in the universe is further from the Dionysian ground, nothing could be further from what is real. This brings us to his second criticism, the privileging of words over music. In the poetry of folk song “we see language straining to its limits to imitate music.” Nietzsche then adds, “With this observation we have defined the only possible relationship between music, word and sound, the word, the image, the concept seeks expression in a manner analogous to music and thereby is subjected to the power of music” (BT, 34). The only trajectory is from (behind? underneath?) music, through language and then through the intellect. Hence his remark is either, narrowly construed, a contradiction, or an indication of just how perverse opera really was: perverse as an attempt to make music imitate language, to subject it to the power of the concept. And the result is this distasteful, unnatural mishmash of appeals to intellect and to the musical ground. So went his third criticism of opera.



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11  The Greatness of Richard Wagner The operas of Richard Wagner, on the other hand, work boldly along the Dionysian trajectory—in fact with such power that, in order to protect ourselves from these overwhelming expressions, tragic myth must first be interposed. Anyone constitutionally susceptible to the power of music—anyone for whom music is their “mother tongue,” and “who relate[s] to things almost exclusively via unconscious musical relationships”—is actually in danger of being “shattered” by music so purely Dionysian (BT, 100). The Apollonian shelters us from this elemental blast by inserting an image world, the illusion of particular characters on stage. Tristan, or King Mark, or Isolde, they attract our attention, become the radiant, back-lit shielding symbols of what cannot possibly be endured in its pure, unmediated form. “This is where the power of the Apolline, bent on restoring the almost shattered individual, bursts forth, bringing the healing balm of a blissful deception” (BT, 101). The action is illuminated from within, just as reality itself is suddenly illuminated from within. Not through conceptual investigations, but rather by dint of our now “spiritualized eye” we penetrate to the interior (BT, 102). We view “in sensually visible form, so to speak, the undulations of the Will . . . as if [we] could dive down into the most delicate secrets of unconscious stirrings” (BT, 104). Of course Wagner has librettos of his own, but the word in musical tragedy is utterly different from the word in early Italian opera. For in Florence the word attempted, preposterously, to extend its influence into music, to constrain music solely within the scope of its abstracted, meager, and totally unmusical content. But musical tragedy does something different, indeed something so magnificent and saving it ranks with the achievements of the great Greek tragedians themselves: it places the word beside “the depths from which the word is born, and clarif[ies] for us, from within, the genesis of the word” (BT, 103). And with that, the catastrophic breach between our words and the world— the real—has at last been mended. No longer is the unexpressed crushed under a stifling and inexpressive “world of symbols.” In fact the preponderance has been reversed. So great it is the Dionysian saturation of the Apollonian, that the Apollonian, incredibly, begins to speak the language of the Dionysian, and “negates its Apollonian visibility.” It is, one might even say, the climax of the entire book: Thus the difficult relationship of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in tragedy truly could be symbolized by a bond of brotherhood between the two deities: Dionysos speaks the language of Apollo, but finally it is Apollo who speaks that of Dionysos. At which point the supreme goal of tragedy, and indeed of all art, is attained. (BT, 104)

But this should not be seen as an elaborate rerouting of the same old questions of meaning and representation.35 This is not, in other words, a drama where

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“knowledge” journeys through different mediums. In no sense does the primordial unity release, for instance, a quantum of “knowledge” which is then passed through music and into language in the way that, in the first picture of the voice, the intellect moves from an intimacy of knowing to the exile of its representation. When the Dionysian artist, brought to the utmost limit of individuation, presses his ear up against the ribcage of existence, there will be no revelation of knowledge—that would be a contradiction.36 Knowledge is coordinated by concepts, and is as native to the intellect and the realm of representation as it is to the retractile workings of the intellect. But this tangent is exactly what the Dionysian artist has surrendered. In keeping with our contrast between retractile and expansive energies, in the violent assertion of its tangent, this amounts to a communication of force.37 Dionysian rapture consist of what we cannot possibly know, the ground of existence, passing through us, using our thoughts solely as a conductive material, where it discovers itself, for its own inscrutable reasons, its “lust for and pleasure in lovely semblance” (BT, 30). How different this is from Schopenhauer’s poet, that genius, that prodigy of perception, who overcame conceptual abstractions through a purified communing with the world through the Ideas. It is as if, during those rare moments, a secretive existence at last takes the intellect into its confidence. But in Nietzsche’s account the intellect enjoys no special privilege. In fact, it only gets in the way. When from the musical mood the Dionysian insights have shot forth their Apollonian sparks, not even then does the insight lay bare its “contents” to the intellect. Which is bad enough, but on top of that these “image sparks” playfully dance and frisk about in the intellect’s carefully ordered conceptual language. To the intellect, merely looking on, the conceptual forms adopted—the sparks into which the musical mood discharges—are at best a misleading, impromptu Apollonian disguise, like children playing dress-up, but at worst they are the weeds and bits of foam that cling to the sea-monster as it heaves itself onto the beach. Of course the intellect can interpret. But it cannot reconstitute the expressive kernel on intellectual terms, let alone translate it, because it, this play of the primordial unity, lies outside our forms of knowing. As a communication of force, there simply is no conceptual “message.” So even at daybreak, when, with crowns of ivy and crooked fennel wands, our sleepy votaries of Bacchus descend the hill, even then the mystery persists. If the discharge of a musical mood may borrow the forms of conceptual consciousness, to them it will never be transparent. Perplexed by the dance, the intellect examines the empty wineskins, the broken drum, and feels what heat remains in the blackened rocks. Baffled by the transcendental song, the intellect investigates the empirical pipe, found dangling on a branch. But nothing can come of it. The Dionysian utterance, like a crime scene, is its singularity.



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12  Two Pictures of the Voice For Schopenhauer, the failure of our words to connect with the real is only overcome when the pure knowing subject, breaking free to perceive the world after its own interests, perceives the (Platonic) Ideas. Given their transcendental content, these serve to refresh and, in a sense, correct everyday conceptual performances which otherwise, having only to do with the interests of the will, would be little more than chatter. Not that mere words could ever fully capture what he had glimpsed, as the fundamental will / concept heterogeneity can never be overcome. All the same, through artful arrangement, through the tricks of the poet’s trade, these words, whether poem or philosophical text, may stimulate others into perceiving something about the world permanently available to any free-roaming intellect but obscured by the pressure of the will’s tyrannical interests. Nietzsche, by contrast, moves in the other direction. Rather than an intellect breaking through the limits of conceptual thought, Nietzsche endorses a posture of reception. Here the intellect is not the actor. At large in the cosmos circulates an expansive energy, the Dionysian ground of existence: this is what does the work in the conceptual performance. For its part, the intellect, a hopeless case so far as getting at the kernel of existence is concerned, simply needs to become an open circuit. To do this, it would have to cease its innate retractile operations while making its concepts and distinctions available to the encroachments of this inscrutable power. Nietzsche, in other words, endorses a different comportment toward the nonintellectual expressive energies in the self—the musical moods, the inklings, the intimations, the premonitions—all of which remain outside the intellect’s ambit and therefore resist conceptual inspection. As the energy of the intellect is taken over by the elemental restlessness of the Dionysian, Nietzsche can easily dispense with the doctrine of the (Platonic) Ideas, replacing their transcendental role with music, specifically music’s porosity to the Dionysian. These are the image sparks where the ground of existence, kindling in the spirit of music, leaps up into language and thereby redeems it from abstraction. Whatever the grand invocations of demiurgic powers, each philosopher, then, endorses one sort of conceptual performance as we preside over the scene of going on. Both distinguish between a deficient common use of language (the morons, the everyday babblers) and exceptional redeeming cases (the poets, some philosophers). And for both it is the purification of one of these contrary potencies which would allow us to overcome conceptual abstraction and recover, however briefly, a heartening intimacy between our words and the world.

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Part Two JUNGLE MAN

1  The Intruder Caught pilfering from the garden, surrounded by angry villagers, the hunched, wild-eyed intruder cowers in the torchlight. Meanwhile the night rings with expostulations, descriptions, explanations, and speculations, all in a language he cannot comprehend. Many years ago he had been one of them. In fact there is his sister, pushing her way through the crowd—she is about to recognize him. But for some fifteen years—how long exactly he has no idea—he has been fending for himself alone in the jungle. Of what had he been deprived that now sets him off so decisively from the others? In what would the education of Jungle Man consist? According to Cavell’s influential reading of the later Wittgenstein, Jungle Man would not have been initiated into his community’s forms of life. And because of that, he lacks the shared criteria by which he would know how to apply concepts to the world, hence also to make himself intelligible. We will explore this in some detail, and consider debates about how the necessity of going on is best expressed. The key point, however, will be this: nothing ensures that our attempts to go on—our attempts to answer the intelligibility imperative—will be understood. No transcendental rules ensure that when we go on others will be able to follow. For some, for perhaps more than some, this discovery may be accompanied with a degree of unease. But it also exposes the very heart of going on to the pressures of the two potencies of the voice—the assertive and the receptive, and indeed to pictures of what it is to go on with words. Later sections will explore some of the pertinent differences in how the two potencies interact with shared criteria, in part through the example of Shakespeare. For now, though, we should probably reiterate that Jungle Man is not meant to register a primitive stage through which we all quickly transition, presumably in childhood. Every attempt to go on is prone to that insidious threefold risk, the capacity to apply concepts to the world, and the defects associated with the two potencies of the voice (assertion and reception). In that sense, no matter how inspired we are, and no matter how powerfully we command our words, the shadow of Jungle Man shall always be upon us.

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2  Forms of Life Throughout Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, there is the figure of the child and the scene of instruction. The work commences with Augustine’s description of what it was like to learn a language. “The Investigations,” according to Cavell, “is a work that begins with a scene of inheritance, the child’s inheritance of language” (NYUA, 60). Augustine writes, When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved toward something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard the words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. 1

Wittgenstein soon finds Augustine’s picture unsatisfactory. It assumes that this child Augustine already had (something approximating) his own language. The task was merely to align it with the words of the grownups.2 There was already a realized, self-conscious core which needed only to discover adult correlates. “I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified.” He had, to put it differently, access to these objects before having the words which signified them. Immediately after Augustine’s account of learning language, Wittgenstein asks us to perform the following thought experiment. Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam.” A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.—Conceive this as a complete primitive language. (PI, §2)

We might, at first, take this as a perfectly unremarkable scenario. But when we try to conceive this as a complete primitive language we are struck by their “lack of imagination.” After all, these grown men have only four words.3 Their lives with language are defined solely in the context of the construction site, with not a single trace of any other interests. Nothing else has apparently warranted even so much as a fifth “sound,” not the quality of light, the burden of their lot, nor the satisfaction of work gone well. There is (we assume) no greeting when



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they arrive, no farewell as the sun descends. (Where do they go? To what sort of life do they return?) Conceiving it as a complete primitive language, or at least trying to, it becomes hard not to see them as basically a pair of glazed-eyed cavemen, “moving sluggishly, groaning out their calls.”4 In Augustine’s case, he was taught words as if he already had a language. But our response to the builders raises instructive objections to a picture which holds that “every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the world. It is the object for which the word stands” (PI, §1). The idea is that we learn words as isolated units, as if each new word is added individually, and these two builders only happen to have (so far?) managed to get four beads onto their string.5 Augustine’s description, it emerges, is not “all right as far as it goes,” even about proper names. It contains assumptions or pictures about teaching, learning, pointing, naming—say these are modes of establishing a “connection” between language and the world—which prove to be empty, that is, which give us the illusion of providing explanations.6

Cavell stresses the importance of how this new recognition had to emerge, perhaps because we failed to distinguish between language as communication— thus between adults, like the builders—and the phenomenon of a child’s coming into language. And this seems a wholly different story.7 He gives the example of trying to teach a child what a pumpkin is. You can point to it and say the word “pumpkin.” But immediately the question arises: Is knowing what a thing is called the same as knowing what a thing is? For masters of a language Cavell says this would generally hold. If an adult is confronted with an object of which he does not know the name, or a name which designates he does not know which object, this can be found out, relying upon the huge conceptual network of already mastered familiarities.8 The child, however, has not yet mastered even these sorts of background assumptions. To know what a pumpkin is—what we say a pumpkin is—would involve knowledge of how it has come to be classed (that it is grown in fields, that we make pies out of it). And this further assumes that there are words to be learned: that you can ask for and discover the meaning of a word. But how can the child be taught the meaning without first knowing what meaning is? So even if the child could, when we point to a pumpkin, say the word pumpkin, we cannot be entirely sure that there is not “something different about the pumpkins in his world.” Or when we think they know what the word “kitty” is, Cavell points out that they could very well have in mind an entirely different set of associations. “Aren’t soft things nice?”9 When children learn a language they are not assembling words for entities to which they otherwise have access. The child learns “not merely what the names of things are, but what a name is,” and so “not merely what the name for ‘father’ is, but what a father is” (CR, 177).

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They are, in other words, being initiated into how their community has come to organize the world—their routes of interest, perceptions of salience, a shared sense of the remarkable—which Wittgenstein calls their forms of life. “To imagine a language is to imagine a life-form” (PI, §19). “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (PI, §241)

Upon what rests the validity of our “normal” way of doing things? We could imagine a tribe whose forms of life, for instance, prompt them to class certain animals not by species but according to the size, or color, or perhaps even taste. It would not be hard to imagine practices even more divergent. Is ours just one way of looking at the world? Wittgenstein seems to encourage such a picture when he writes: “What has to be accepted, the given is—so one could say—forms of life” (PI, xi, 192). The so-called objective world seems to disappear behind these forms of life, precisely because they are said, in turn, to be constitutive of our world. Aside from our simply having decided to do it this way, they do not seem to rest on anything. Positing forms of life as a basis for intelligibility, then, seems to force us into relativism. Beyond our forms of life, we have no real alternative.10 Such a view, however, threatens to all but absorb the natural into the conventional, emphasizing the form at the cost of the life. Cavell resists this. He distinguishes between the twin senses of a form of life: the ethnological (horizontal) and the biological (vertical). The first accounts for differences in human society like marriage or the division of property. The second sense of the form of life “recalls differences between the human and so-called ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ forms of life, between, say, poking at your food, perhaps with a fork, pawing at it, or pecking at it.”11 Too often, he says, Wittgenstein is taken only in the first sense. “The partial eclipse of the natural makes the teaching of the Investigations much too, let me say, conventionalist, as if when Wittgenstein says that human beings ‘agree in the language they use’ he imagines that we have between us some kind of contract or an implicitly agreed-upon set of rules (which someone else may imagine we lack)” (NYUA, 41). Wittgenstein himself implies that our forms of life do ultimately interact with “certain very general facts of nature” (PI, xii, 195). They are not a matter of convenience. “They are,” Cavell writes, “rather, fixed by the nature of human life itself, the human fix itself ” (CR, 110). We might imagine a mother bored by the death of her child, residents indifferent while an earthquake destroys their town. As in general people do not respond like this, we would be imagining remarkable or abnormal cases. “Here the array of ‘conventions’ are not patterns of life which differentiate human beings from one another, but those exigencies of conduct which all humans share” (CR, 111).12



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3 Criteria Forms of life yield criteria for what a thing is; the criteria, in turn, control the deployment of concepts. Everything that is present to us, all our knowledge, is governed by criteria.13 Criteria, put simply, tell us how to apply concepts to the world, how to word the world. They are utterly constitutive. Criteria reveal their genuine force not merely in specifying, for instance, what sort of object might stand before us, but rather in allowing there to be a world in which objects come to appear. Criteria are “necessary before the identification or knowledge of an object.”14 Our criteria are learned during what, in the Philosophical Investigations, is emblemized as the scene of instruction. The relevant passages from Wittgenstein involve the initiate’s ability to continue a series, which is usually read as the child being able to project a word into new situations. When the adult (master) performs a series, the child (novice) attends closely. Now the child tries; the adult approves the attempt: the child can go on. How can he know how he is to continue a pattern by himself—whatever instruction you give him?—Well, how do I know?—If that means “Have I reasons?” the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons. (PI, §211)15

Instead of the faultless Kantian downloads of the concepts of the understanding, then, Wittgenstein has this perilous scene of instruction— perilous because meaning itself seems to depend on nothing more than people seeing the point, catching on. But if this inheritance is not automatic, can we really imagine a child who just did not care to learn words, or how to eat, or walk, or explore the world? “Nothing is more serious business for a child than knowing it will be an adult—and wanting to be, i.e., wanting to do the things we do—and knowing that it can’t really do them yet” (CR, 176). And this exigency is in turn matched by the adept’s willingness to show, repeat, teach, correct, or simply wait. Does the child (mysteriously, perversely) demand justification? We do our best, but there is no ultimate justification for our practices. “If I have exhausted the justifications,” Wittgenstein writes, “I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (PI, §217).16 Given their special constitutive status, Wittgensteinian criteria depart somewhat from the ordinary concept of criteria. Ordinarily—for example, in judged competitions like dog shows or diving competitions—criteria “are specifications a given person or group sets up on the basis of which (by means of, in terms of which) to judge (assess, settle) whether something has a particular status or value” (CR, 9). The dog and the dive are both judged according to well-established and explicitly agreed-upon criteria. The question for the judges, then, is not whether the various excellences exist, but whether,

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and to what extent, they happen to be instantiated in this particular case. If judges disagree on the extent, they merely exercise their prerogative as judges. But it is beyond their writ to wonder, in the case of a dive, for instance, whether “excellence of entry into the water is a criterion of excellence of a dive” (CR, 12). They apply standards, in other words; they do not create them. Wittgensteinian criteria, however, are different in three ways. (1) The first so-called disanalogy is that there are no standards to indicate the extent to which any given instance satisfies the criteria (CR, 13). If you have mastered the criteria, then you will know whether the criteria do or do not apply. You will know whether this is an apple or not an apple, and not defer to some standard which would indicate the extent to which the criterion of appleness happens to be satisfied. But this, of course, does not mean there will be no problems of application. Life may present us with occasions which defy ready application. We do not, in other words, possess criteria for all possible situations.17 (2) The second disanalogy is owing to the constitutive nature of Wittgensteinian criteria. It is “grammar which tells us what kind of object anything is” (CR, 16). Only with criteria are we able to apply concepts to the world. A dog show is not convened to sort out whether a dog exists. What the event seeks to establish, instead, is what other exemplary status concepts might possibly apply to the animal. But before the application of Wittgensteinian criteria, there is, quite literally, no-thing. “In official criteria we start out with a known kind of object whereas in using Wittgensteinian criteria we end up knowing a kind of object” (CR, 16). (3) The third disanalogy concerns the source of authority. Criteria for Wittgenstein are not decided by a panel of experts, nor in the deliberations of exemplary greats, who would supposedly perceive nuances missed by the ordinary person. In fact it is the reverse. Criteria are based on attunement, and this attunement is fundamental. There is no extra step, for instance, in which we, as independent rational beings, accept or reject; this attunement runs far deeper. “There is a background of pervasive and systematic agreements among us, which we had not realized, or had not known we realized” (CR, 30). Attunement does not mean continual self-evident agreement, but a sort of thorough conceptual calibration, rather like “being in harmony, like pitches or tones, or clocks, or weighing scales, or columns of figures” (CR, 32). As a consequence, there are no experts; there is only the way we do things—the way we make our criterial judgments. “The only source of confirmation here is ourselves. And each of us is fully authoritative in this struggle” (CR, 19). The “we” is the final arbiter. “For nothing is deeper than the fact, or the extent, of agreement itself ” (CR, 32).18 Some have read Wittgensteinian criteria “to be the means by which the existence of something is established with certainty” (CR, 7).19 At first glance this seems to be borne out by passages of the Investigations. “Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is” (PI, §373). Or “Essence is expressed by grammar” (PI, §371). But for Cavell—and herein lies a good portion of his distinctive reading—Wittgensteinian criteria are not meant to overcome



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skepticism, as in: put it to rest, finally bring up against the skeptic a lasting rebuttal. It would likewise be a mistake to read Cavell as implying that, for all intents and purposes, Wittgensteinian criteria give us, where the real deal escapes, nonetheless a high degree of certainty. “Wittgenstein’s appeal to criteria,” Cavell writes, “though it takes its importance from the problem of skepticism, is not, and is not meant to be, a refutation of skepticism” (CR, 45).20 No difference in criteria can be appealed to between an instance of X and an instance of real X. Criteria, then, “are ‘criteria for something’s being so,’ not in the sense that they tell us of a thing’s existence, but of something like its identity, not its being so, but of its being so” (CR, 45).

4 Necessity Once again, we are asking how, according to Cavell, we are able to go on in our conceptual performances when we make ourselves intelligible. So far we have said this much: we learn language by being initiated into the forms of life of our communities; from these forms of life emerge our shared criteria for wording the world. Yet at best this is only a start. Because now the question becomes: if our shared criteria allow us to go on intelligibly—to apply our concepts to the world— what is the nature of the necessity they exercise on our conceptual performances? Written as a defense of the procedures of ordinary language philosophy, Cavell’s early essay Must We Mean What We Say? amounts to his first attempt to formulate an answer. The critique came from Benson Mates, and centered on the apparent inability of ordinary language philosophers to verify conclusions about ordinary use. Gilbert Ryle, for instance, argued that philosophers have run into all sorts of difficulties by employing a stretched use of the word voluntary, one which stands in contrast to the word’s ordinary use. “We discuss whether someone’s action was voluntary or not only when the action seems to be his fault” (MWM, 3). We might, for instance, say that the boy was responsible for breaking the window, but not, by contrast, for the timely completion of his homework (MWM, 6). “In this ordinary use, then,” he concludes, “it is absurd to discuss whether satisfactory, correct or admirable performances are voluntary or involuntary.”21 John Austin, on the other hand, takes it as a matter of course that we might, for instance, “join the army or make a gift voluntarily.”22 Here, if we ask after the responsibility, we obviously do so without implying that anyone was particularly at fault. Both seem like reasonably satisfactory or even admirable performances. Against Ryle’s conclusion, then, we might call them voluntary without implying anything morally fishy about either action. For Benson Mates this provided an excellent example of why the procedures of ordinary language philosophy were so thoroughly dubious.23 After all, here were two master practitioners, in uncoordinated scholarly pursuits, coming to contradictory conclusions. And because ordinary language philosophy depends upon the patterns of regularity in ordinary use—and upon which

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these two eminent men appear unable to agree—the viability of the approach is clearly put in question. The most important procedure of such a philosopher is to illicit what we say when. Both have asked themselves this question; both have come to different conclusions. The disagreement, then, is “symptomatic of the shallowness of their methods” (MWM, 2). In answer, Cavell distinguishes among three different types of statements we can make about language. There are, first of all, instances. “We say this, but we don’t say that.” Secondly, there are explications: “When we say this, we mean that.” And, thirdly, there are generalizations (MWM, 3). As he sees it, the problem lies in the movement from instances to explications. Ryle provides us with a perfectly acceptable instance; he was correct that we would ask whether an action was voluntary when there was something, as Cavell puts it, morally “fishy” about an action. But Ryle was wrong in his explication; Austin’s counter-example shows this is too narrow. Not only morally fishy actions might be described as voluntary, but the same would count for all sorts of other fishy action, like remarkable gifts, for instance. Indeed, precisely because it is remarkable (abnormal, bizarre, out of the ordinary) we are inclined to ask whether a given action was voluntary or involuntary. Otherwise the question does not arise. And in this Ryle was perfectly correct to limit the scope of the term. To suppose every action need be either voluntary or involuntary, says Cavell, is to identify linguistic antithesis with logical contradiction. Why should every action be answerable to the question: “Voluntary or involuntary?” When it comes down to it, what we would normally do is neither voluntary nor involuntary. It is simply what we do (MWM, 7).24 Mates’s key objection was that ordinary language philosophy lacked a reliable method.25 Cavell tries to account for the nature of necessity at work in the move from the instance to the explication. When for instance Austin asks if the gift was made voluntarily, he is allowing us, competent native speakers like him, to make certain inferences—namely, that something fishy was going on. In saying X you must mean Y. Cavell’s point is that this must is unavoidable, and not the addition of something extra linguistic. “Learning what these implications are is part of learning the language; no less a part than learning its syntax, or learning what it is to which terms apply: they are an essential part of what we communicate when we talk.”26 Cavell’s provisional answer on the necessity of criteria redeploys a Kantian term. The sort of necessity that attains between instance and explication is captured in Transcendental Logic. “All I am arguing for is the idea that pattern and agreement are distinct features of the notion of logic” (MWM, 94). Now Kant’s transcendental inquiry sought to uncover the conditions of possible knowledge. Accordingly, transcendental knowledge would tell us what the conditions were for something to be whatever it is. We are asking, then, after the essence of a phenomenon. And this Cavell specifically links with Wittgenstein’s remark: “Our investigation . . . is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena” (PI, §90). By asking what we say when,



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in other words, we are aspiring to discover what both Kant and Wittgenstein were after: “The knowledge of what would count as various ‘matters of fact.’ Is this empirical knowledge? Is it a priori? It is knowledge of what Wittgenstein means by grammar—the knowledge Kant calls ‘transcendental’” (MWM, 64). But how can looking at the way we talk provide us with anything as profound as transcendental knowledge? As Cavell reads Wittgenstein, concepts are not inbuilt a priori mental capacities. They depend instead upon our community’s forms of life, out of which our criteria are articulated. And our shared criteria in turn tell us what a thing is—in other words, account for the essence of the phenomenon. Rather than being born with concepts as latent a priori capacities, we undergo extended initiation into their use. Keeping the Kantian transcendental target of investigation—the possibility of phenomena—Cavell you might say rearticulates the “home” of rationality. It is no longer an a priori fixture of the human mind, but a running postulate at work in the community’s forms of life. So when we ask what we say when—as for instance around the use of the word “voluntary”—we are uncovering what might at first seem merely empirical practices of no huge significance. But because we learn the world and language together, asking ourselves what we say when, inasmuch as it discloses our tacit linguistic knowledge, is revelatory of both the world and ourselves. As Epsen Hammer puts it, “The possible configurations of the world necessarily accord with nonarbitrary yet human constraints. Hence the affinity between Cavell’s account of ordinary language and Kant’s transcendental idealism. Both aim at showing how the intelligibility of the world is conditional upon our practices and concepts.”27 How, then, is this necessity best expressed? Some have been inclined to read in Wittgenstein an impersonal structure guiding our conceptual performances: these would be rules. Such a claim has a long history.28 Put simply, rules would stand over each application. During the scene of going on, rules would be the rails. From the beginning of his published work, however, Cavell has unambiguously rejected this: “That everyday language does not, in fact or in essence, depend upon such a structure or conception of rules, and yet that the absence of such a structure in no way impairs its functioning, is what the picture of language drawn in the later philosophy is about” (MWM, 48). In the following we briefly survey three different accounts of how we go on, beginning with Cavell’s critique of Kripke’s rule-based reading of Wittgenstein. After that we turn to a more recent exchange between Stephen Mulhall and Stephen Affeldt, and then to Hilary Putnam, who argues that, rather than rules, it is our attunement that best expresses the necessity in how we go on.

5  Kripke: The Idea of Meaning Vanishes into Thin Air Every day, Saul Kripke argues, we perform simple mathematical operations and apply concepts to the world. But if challenged by a skeptic, we would be

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unable to say what it is about us which determines what we mean. He gives an example: for years I assumed that I have been adding when I perform the operation indicated by the plus sign (+). Yet if the skeptic argued that, actually, I instead “always meant quus” (in which, when x and y are less than fifty-seven the answer is always five), we feel he is wrong, but if so “there must be some fact about my past usage that can be cited to refute it” (KP, 9). And this, amazingly, is exactly what I cannot produce. So the question is: “How can I justify my present application of a rule when a sceptic could easily interpret it so as to yield any of an indefinite number of other results?” Whatever we say, the skeptic can claim that other interpretations are possible. Each application—it now suddenly seems—is nothing more than an “unjustified stab in the dark” (KP, 17). Kripke calls this the Skeptical Paradox, which is most clearly formulated in section 201. This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. (PI, §201)

Even to a god gazing into our minds, no such fact (no account, nor any justification) could be discovered. Kripke goes through some possible responses, but, rejecting them all, he finally concludes that Wittgenstein has indeed discovered a new, alarmingly robust skepticism which seems to have demonstrated that “all language, all concept formation to be impossible, indeed unintelligible” (KP, 62). The solution, as he sees it, amounts to Wittgenstein’s so-called private language argument. Anyone who was alone could be said neither to be conforming to any rule nor in dereliction of one. Wittgenstein has written: “It is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it” (PI, §202). So, even if Robinson Crusoe believed he was following rules—learned before the shipwreck—this goes no deeper than his impression, his feeling that he is following a rule. “By definition, he is licensed to give, without further justification, the answer that strikes him as natural inevitable” (KP, 89). No one would be in a position to say that what he did was wrong, nor that it failed to accord with his past applications.29 To do so would require, before anything could be said, making him one of us, and judging him according to our rules. In a community the case is different, because others could ensure his applications were sound, acceptable, in accord with the way they do things. Facts, in this reading, are not at issue. Kripke reads the Investigations as rejecting the picture of language as a statement of truth conditions, and putting in its place a picture of language based on assertability conditions. All that is needed to legitimize assertions that someone means something is that there be roughly specifiable circumstances under which they are



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legitimately assertable, and that the game of asserting them under such conditions has a role in our lives. No supposition that “facts correspond” to those assertions is needed.” (KP, 78) The solution [to the skeptical problem] turns on the idea that each person who claims to be following a rule can be checked by others. Others in the community can check whether the putative rule follower is or is not giving particular responses that they endorse, that agree with their own. The way they check this is, in general, a primitive part of the language game. (KP, 101)

Going back to the scene of instruction: if still the child cannot go on, continue the series, then what? Kripke argues that nothing ensures that we will go on as we have in the past. There is no fact about me, nothing particular to me, which justifies what I do. But Kripke does keep the idea that rules must be grounded somehow, though he accepts the skeptical conclusion that there is no rational justification for what we do. There is no objectified meaning that guides our applications. “We can only replace the (illusory) justification with a psychological grounding in community consensus.”30 The community mutually polices one another’s practices, and children who cannot discover (sufficient) continuations are isolated from the community. “When the community denies of someone that he is following certain rules, it excludes him from various transactions” (KP, 93). And also, “One who is an incorrigible deviant in enough respects simply cannot participate in the life of the community and in communication” (KP, 92).31 Cavell finds Kripke’s account disturbing. He believes that Kripke’s reading is already internalized in the Investigations, encoded as one of the voices. That, during the scene of instruction, and indeed in each of my applications, my authority is based on nothing particular about me does not, for Cavell, result in a skeptical outcome. At least it need not; any idea that it should is a presupposition needing to be explored. And it is this which in large part gets the skeptical amazement off the ground. “I take this absence not as a skeptical discovery,” Cavell writes, “but as the skeptic’s requirement” (CHU, 76). Only because the original expectation goes unquestioned does the revelation of its absence assume the character of an alarming discovery. The skeptic alone, so runs the implication, has discovered this unexpected and quite intolerable “gap” in the world, which, for thousands of years, people have always assumed was filled (CHU, 79). For Kripke, it is as if the “entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air” (CHU, 80). The question then becomes: yes but whose idea of meaning has just vanished?32 As Cavell sees it, the chief casualty here is the self. The expectation that there must be a position—some regulative principle, a coordinating super-concept, anyway an impersonal something—to ground the way that we apply concepts erases the self from the picture. What justifies what I say and do is, I feel like saying, me—the fact that I can respond to an indefinite range of responses of the other, and that the

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Stanley Cavell and the Potencies of the Voice other, for my spade is not to be stopped, must respond to me, in which case my justification may be furthered by keeping still. The requirement of purity imposed by philosophy now looks like a wish to leave me out, I mean each of us, the self, with its arbitrary needs and unruly desires. (CHU, 77)

Meaning, it is presumed, cannot just be left up to us. We want some external guarantor. “I must empty out my contribution to words,” Cavell writes of this impulse, “so that language itself, as if beyond me, exclusively takes over the responsibility for meaning.”33 To suppose that we could discover superprinciples that would justify every instance is a “hyperbolic expectation” (CHU, 84). But this discovery of a supposed lack produces what some have called vertigo. According to John McDowell, it brings about “a terror that there is nothing that keeps our practices in line except the reactions and responses we learn in learning them. The ground seems to have been removed from under our feet.” And it is only natural, McDowell goes on, for us to “recoil from this vertigo into the picture of rules as rails.”34 Then again, some concepts do seem to suggest such a conception might not be so implausible. With mathematical concepts, for example, we can settle in advance what will count as an instance. In fact, the entire series can be determined (2x+1 . . . etc.). But ordinary concepts do not work this way. The instances of our ordinary concepts do not form a series, which is no lack, for precisely this allows room for projections—for our projections. Even so Cavell maintains, perhaps at first glance surprisingly, that “in precision, in accuracy, in the power of communication, ordinary concepts are the equal of the mathematical” (CHU, 90). What, after all, could more effectively capture the object—“carve it out”—than the concept “red apple”? The object healthily saturates the words. We do not see it darkly, nor is it a shady placeholder awaiting more exact determination. This is the “humdrum perfection of the ordinary” (CHU, 90). But to say that ordinary concepts are precise is not to say they are, or need be, mathematically precise. This expectation disparages ordinary concepts as lacking. “That mathematical and nonmathematical concepts are different is then true,” he says, but “the sense that ordinary concepts lack something, wants to say something more. The something it wants to say Wittgenstein diagnoses as sublimizing” (CHU, 91). The more narrowly we examine our actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. (PI, §107)

With Cavell’s response to Kripke we see distinguished two poles: intelligibility (the rules, community checking) and self-revelation (the self that is left out), how they invade and repulse each other, how going on seems to involve the



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two in a mysterious wrestle. Still, it seems hard to deny that there is something “structural” here—you cannot, in saying a word, mean whatever you want. Each word has entailments, for instance, a grammar. So how do we account for the fact that our uses of language “are pervasively, almost unimaginably, systematic” (CR, 29)?

6  Attunement and the Voice Stephen Mulhall has argued, in his book Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, that criteria “determine what it is for anything to fall under a given concept and so constitute an instance of a particular sort” (SC, 152). This is done on the basis of “marks or features,” which provide us with a standard for calling, for instance, an X a table and Y a bicycle—in other words, how to apply concepts to the world. “They determine what makes one thing a table, another a chair, this thing a human animal, that a non-human animal” (SC, 153). Each of these individual concepts is inextricably tied to the notion of its grammar. This would guide the relation of this particular concept with other concepts. The two—both the “marks and features” and the grammar—are inseparable aspects of language mastery. “Criteria tell us what kind of object anything is in part by determining which other concepts can intelligibly be applied in contexts in which the concept of that object has its application” (SC, 79). If, for instance, we say someone has a toothache, we have presumably mastered the web of concepts linked to that phenomenon. We do not have, in the middle of this web, as it were, full and unimpeded access to the toothache, and the rest is an expendable additional familiarity. Both are required. Knowing what a toothache is, we would likewise know what counts as a toothache, what our response would be, how to relieve it, that it is a painful circumstance we would prefer to avoid rather than a happy occasion worth celebrating, that someone is suffering and wants relief. The grammar of our concepts is an expression of our routes of interest—the accumulated grain, if you will, of our natural reactions. There is, then, in the grammar, a “prior alignment of words and world” and the judgment involved in each concept application depends upon this prior alignment (SC, 153). To speak intelligibly, then, is to apply concepts licensed by this framework, “within which alone human speech is possible” (SC, 104). As a result, what normativity is in language is expressed in this framework of rules. Steven G. Affeldt has criticized this presentation of criteria.35 For our purposes we will mention only two points. In the first aspect of criteria—that it provides us with “marks and features” which allow us to identify an X as an X—Affeldt recognizes the problematic mixture of Austinian criteria. For Austin, the recognition of those telltale marks and features provide the basis of our judgment. If we are challenged, we point to them as evidence. But this is not how Wittgensteinian criteria work; for them, we do not go on marks and features—because what would be the marks and features of existence? Affedlt

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quotes Cavell saying that here, instead, we go on “very general facts of nature or culture” (CR, 73). We go on because we are initiated into the forms of life of our community. And how can we defend our applications, when we are challenged? This is how I go on. My spade is turned. “In speaking we do not, that is, have the evidentiary relation to all that is involved in our being initiates of our forms of life that we have to Austinian criteria on the Austinian model of judgment.”36 Affeldt also maintains that Mulhall, perhaps impressed by the systematicity of our uses of language, supposes the presence of such extensive normativity must rely upon some greater structure of language. Cavell himself does not mention a “grammatical framework.” But that we manage in the absence of such a framework is, according to Affedlt, precisely what Cavell considered to be Wittgenstein’s central insight. To quote Cavell again, “That everyday language does not, in fact or in essence, depend upon such a structure and conception of rules, and yet that the absence in no way impairs its functioning, is what the picture of language drawn in the later philosophy is about” (MWM, 48). Furthermore, “there is no conception of criteria . . . according to which they could function as the basis of a judgment.”37 It is, instead, the other way around. We only have a sense of our criteria in our judgments. Hence, “it is more accurate to say that criteria rest upon the intelligibility of judgment.”38 Moreover, the very presence of such a framework of concept application seems to leave no room for any notion of voice.39 My point or position in speaking [Affeldt writes], and hence the ground of my intelligibility, is neither carried by nor insured by a mediating structure. If I am to speak intelligibly I must articulate my point or position; I must draw a connection between what I say and what is before me (whether a particular phenomenon, a person, an experience, or previous remarks of my own or another); I must establish a particular salience in what I say; I must establish relations among concepts by bringing them into relation with one another.40

In his gracious reply, Mulhall explains that, prior to writing his book on Cavell, his approach to Wittgensteinian criteria was “heavily influenced” by the work of Gorden Baker and Peter Hacker. For them the concept of grammar is tied up with rules.41 And he believed that nothing in Cavell’s reading would be “threatened by reformulating it in the Baker & Hacker terminology.”42 True, Cavell had been suspicious of any linkage of criteria with rules. But Mulhall had trouble seeing how this suspicion was grounded. And the two key texts which seemed to pronounce on the matter Mulhall found less than clear. “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” was polemically interested chiefly in Pole’s interpretation, rather than stating a general conclusion on the question, and the response to Kripke “confronts the question of the rules of grammar only in a brief aside.”43 Mulhall remained convinced that such an approach was still viable, and that a good portion of Affedlt’s response had merely to do with the “dubious” connotations of the concept of rule.44



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Mulhall, however, does suggest that Affeldt is “onto something when he says that the account of criteria that I give in [Mulhall’s book] SC tended towards the elimination of any role for Cavell’s concept of voice.”45 This is not because he accepts the criticism of a framework of language—because, as we have just seen, our agreement depends upon agreement in judgments. Nor does it implicate the idea of rules. Mulhall instead believes it has more to do with the “theme of personal responsibility for the positions we assume.”46 Grammar does not compel us to articulate our experience in a particular way, or to judge the articulations of others in a particular way; but it does determine that each particular way of articulating our experience carries commitments for which we can take responsibility only in a particular range of ways, and that each particular way of judging the articulations of others itself carries commitments for which responsibility must also be taken. In short, we can say whatever we want to say; but we cannot mean whatever we want to mean by what we say.47

Hilary Putnam has characterized Mulhall’s position as an “orthodox” reading of Wittgenstein, and this is associated with the work of Baker and Hacker.48 Putnam believes this approach is precisely contrary to Cavell’s insights on the later Wittgenstein. Wanting to be sure this difference is not merely a matter of word use, however, he proposes to find out what, for Mulhall, these rules actually do.49 As we saw, rules are not for Mulhall a way to process “marks and features.” They are instead—and this is in point one above—concerning “the order of justification, not that of perception or judgment.” Putnam claims to have trouble following when, having said this, Mulhall later says that criteria “are what we go on when we apply words to the world.” Clearly, in this account our conceptual performances, to be normative, to be anything less than nonsense, require criteria; it must be possible, Mulhall writes, “for us to justify how we go on.” For Mulhall, Putnam concludes, criteria are “construed as rules which belong to a framework of rules which is independent of the particular judgment those rules justify.”50 Going on in any normative fashion, then, means we go on according to the rules of criteria which justify our employments. And this, Putnam maintains, misses a key insight of Cavell’s work. Putnam’s point is that we do not go on according to rules, nor do we always have justifications for our conceptual performances. To argue his point he considers the dynamic of scientific discovery. If, well before a discovery—Einstein’s general theory, for instance—some impossibly prescient scientist had claimed what only later would be demonstrated, he “would have been utterly unintelligible. We would have had no idea what he was doing with his words.”51 Once the discovery has been made, however, this new understanding becomes normative. Scientists find themselves in attunement. “A physicist who deviates from it is regarded as irrational, as at best an unreasonable reactionary. But is it a rule?”52

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Stanley Cavell and the Potencies of the Voice Cases like these [Putnam goes on] illustrate the difference between “going on” in Wittgenstein’s sense (or “applying word to the world,” in Mulhall’s phrase) on the basis of a prior and independent rule and going on without any such basis, but in a way that is fully rational (if revolutionary), a way that would be comprehensible without our—often unforeseeable—attunement with each other. Note that I do not speak of going on on the basis of attunement . . . I do not think our attunements are a foundation, or a basis or a justification. They are rather the preconditions of intelligibility of our utterances.53

Putnam questions the sense that there is a need for justification, the idea that there is some “general problem” of how we go on, once we have gone on. What we say either makes sense or does not make sense in particular contexts; the same holds for a request for justification. Any response to a need to justify would be met, likewise, in a particular way. But there is no general explanation. “Our attunements enable us to understand ‘what is going on’; they are not facts that we appeal to in going on.”54 Yet we seem prone to a recurrent demand for something outside and supporting, an unseen stabilizing truss: all part of this misbegotten recourse to foundation. Putnam approvingly quotes a line from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation walls are carried by the whole house.” So we do not go on according to rules. And when we do make projections into new contexts we cannot say—others cannot say—a priori it is illegitimate. Instead, says Putnam, we “need to be told a ‘story’ about how the word is to be understood.”55 Each of us, then, is equally expert to make categorical declaratives. Each of us can speak from this deep-seated and systematic agreement in our forms of life. Consequently when you answer questions like what we say when, you do not simply describe how it is for you personally. As it necessarily depends upon our thoroughgoing attunement, the answer aspires to a sense of universality. We are not just answering for ourselves. We are saying: this is how we do it. Which does not mean there is always agreement; it is not that sort of necessity. And here Cavell further compares asking what we say when to an aesthetic discussion, to which it is analogous. He refers to Kant’s universal voice of the Third Critique. An indispensable aspect of these aesthetic judgments is their aspiration beyond subjectivity. We wish our judgment to be not just for us—not just how it appears to me—but “demand the assent of everyone.” So pronounced is this impulse, we might even wish to speak as if beauty is actually the property of the object itself—a Kantian impossibility, but in any event the “as if ” announces our ambition (MWM, 89 [footnote # 8]). “The something more these judgments must do is to ‘demand’ or ‘impute’ or ‘claim’ general validity, universal agreement with them; and when we make such judgments we go on claiming this agreement even though we know from experience that they will not receive it” (MWM, 89).56 A personal response will at the same time be a representative response—because the shared criteria will be applied to the



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world in exemplary ways. “It is essential to making an aesthetic judgment that at some point we are prepared to say in its support: don’t you see, don’t you hear, don’t you dig?” (MWM, 93). If this individual cannot see, hear, or dig, he cannot be prevailed upon to see what, in essence, are the claims to community. “I have nothing more to go on than my conviction, my sense that I make sense” (CR, 20). My sense that I make sense? Can it be no more than this? Given our attunement in forms of life and criteria, we judge how to go on prompted by a sense—and nothing more than a sense—that we make sense? This hardly seems an adequate expression of how criteria exercise necessity over our conceptual performances. Not only am I without any transcendental guarantor, with each claim to community I can only hope that others will be able and indeed willing to follow. The possibility of intelligibility itself, then, is no more deeply secured than these criterial judgments we make as we go on, with a sense that we make sense. No rule, no metaphysical postulate—nothing else ensures we go on intelligibly. “It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying” (MWM, 52).

7 Projection According to Cavell, then, what can be said “is not everywhere determined by rules, nor its understanding anywhere secured through universals.” Consequently we never quite exhaust the “potencies in words and [the] new ways in which objects are disclosed” (CR, 180). For Cavell it is essential that language is general enough to allow projection. Why do we allow words to recur, instead of coming up with new words according to each specific context? You might think the interests of precision require each word to be “pinned” to its definition, this in turn tying the word to its specific non-repeatable occasion. “But maybe,” Cavell writes, “the very ambiguity of ordinary language, though sometimes, some places, a liability, is just what gives it the power, of illumination, or enriching perception, its partisans are partial to” (CR, 180). In fact it is the other way around: exactly because a word has various meanings it enjoys greater precision. “The more uses words ‘can’ have, then the more precise, or exact that very possibility might allow us to be” (CR, 181). As Cavell points out, we use the word “feed” in reference to animals (cats, monkeys, fish, plants), or machines (parking meters, projectors, tree shredders) or for pride (which feeds on, for instance, praise). If we had a different word for each, we would no longer “discriminate differences which, in some instances, will be of importance.” Rather than increasing ambiguity, using the same word actually makes the projection more restrictive. It specifies, for instance, that in each occasion, if they are to count, certain related facts must also apply, albeit by implication. If the projection of “feeding” is invited into these contexts, so too is its grammar. Knowing the grammar helps others follow the projection. For each

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application the concept of overfeeding might just as well apply; what is being “fed” might require pacing appropriate to its receptivity—you are not stuffing or ramming, for instance, just as you do not feed your clothing into your closet, unless it is a very unusual sort of closet. “Though language—what we call language—is tolerant, allows projection, not just any projection will be acceptable, i.e., will communicate” (CR, 182). There are limits to criterial elasticity, perhaps even a breaking point, but these are not obvious in advance. “If we are to communicate, we mustn’t leap too far; but how far is too far?” (CR, 192). What is being projected must “invite or allow that projection.” And knowing this is part of the mastery of language, what it is to be an initiate. No rule could determine the success of a given word’s projection. Only the ability—the patience, the willingness—of other initiates to follow, to accommodate themselves to your projection, to see your point, determines whether the projection has communicated. Though there are no rules, and the totality of viable routes cannot be systematically explored in advance, it is not arbitrary. But now what may seem a strange question: why make projections at all? If language is metaphorical, then a “natural” projection is a previously made, accepted metaphor—one that has since, you might say, been taken up by its grammar. So we probably ought to distinguish between fresh projections and projections along routes already opened. Feeding a lion and feeding a parking meter, for instance, are existing routes, part of the grammar of the word feed. Being able to follow this sort of projection simply requires the mastery possessed by any initiate, as it is inherent in the language; the word has already been projected. But new projections seem to be doing something else: these seem to be unnatural projections. As Cavell puts it, in the final words of the chapter entitled “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language”: What is essential to the projection of a word is that it proceeds, or can be made to proceed, naturally; what is essential to a functioning metaphor is its “transfer” is unnatural—it breaks up the established, normal directions of projection. (CR, 190)

At least one commentator has read this passage to suggest that Cavell’s presentation devalues figurative language.57 No doubt such an impression is provoked by his calling metaphors unnatural, suggesting, one may gather, the strain of some willful departure from the natural ease which attends criteria as they ordinarily function. Such strains we might have expected to associate with the skeptic, and hardly with the likes of, say, Shakespeare. Then again, Shakespeare’s unnatural (metaphorical) projections—like those of any poet, indeed anyone straining after the telling image—undeniably pull away from our ordinary attunement formations. Here is a section from a poem by Emily Dickinson. There came a wind like a bugle; It quivered through the grass,



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And a green chill upon the heat So ominous did pass We barred the windows and the doors As from an emerald ghost; The doom’s electric moccasin That very instant passed.58

How can Cavell distinguish these sorts of poetic conceptual performances from the skeptical repudiation of the ordinary—seeing as they both appear to count as unnatural transfers? Cavell’s response is not to draw one into the ambit of the natural; both retain the designation of the unnatural. The difference instead has to do with the relation to criteria. A skeptical projection repudiates our criteria. “What makes skepticism unnatural is its occasion for coming to repudiate our criteria for applying the concepts of our language to anything; repudiating, I call this, our attunement with one another.”59 The metaphorical projection, on the other hand, though equally unnatural, enlarges our criteria. What makes metaphor unnatural [Cavell writes], is its occasion to transcend our criteria; not as if to repudiate them, as if they are arbitrary; but to expand them, as though they are contracted . . . . And metaphor transcends criteria not as if to repudiate our mutual attunement but as if to pressure this attunement (under which pressure certain of our attunements with others will fail; but with certain others will be intensified and refined). In the realm of the figurative, our words are not felt as confining but as releasing, or not as binding but as bonding. (This realm is neither outside nor inside language games.) (IQO, pp. 147–48)

While unnatural, these transfers—“the doom’s electric moccasin”—would pressure rather than repudiate our attunements to see the point, to follow, to accommodate ourselves. Of course it is always a risk that we may not see the point. Cavell leaves open the possibility that the skeptical projection is private, whereas the figurative is personal. But this would not be a way to reconstitute the personal figurative within the natural (IQO, 148). The skeptical projection confines, whereas the figurative releases, the first binds, the second bonds. If the skeptical projection risks the world, these figurative projections are linked by Cavell to intimacies with the world.60 This points to the relevance of the Kantian structure in Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, how the concepts which give rise to representation are not simply bequeathed to any rational being, but are at large in our community derived, ultimately, from our forms of life. As an example of criterial enlargement, take Cavell’s experience of the sculpture of Anthony Caro. Here he is, “so to speak, stuck with the knowledge that this is sculpture, in the sense that any object is.” But this is something that we have to feel, and not merely know (MWM, 218). The sculpture of Caro is a departure from a tradition in which a piece of sculpture is worked a certain

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way, occupies space in a certain way, is placed upon a base, goes un-painted, has a certain texture, and so on.61 None of these seem to apply to Caro’s work. Yet we feel, somehow, this is art. As a result, “we no longer know what kind of object a piece of sculpture (grammatically) is” (MWM, 218). It enlarges our criteria, in other words, rather than repudiating it. This compares with Cavell’s experience of the music of Ernst Krenek. Faced with the collapse of the “language” or form of life of tonality in the Western musical tradition, some composers, like Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok, sought to “re-invent convention.” But others made a different choice. In his essay “Music Discomposed” Cavell focuses on the writings of a pair of professional periodicals, Die Reihe and Perspectives of New Music, in particular the work of Ernst Krenek. Cavell calls this the “choice of nihilism.” The composer does not seek to reinvent convention—instead the growing difficulty for the composer to mean is pushed to its extreme: the composer incorporates chance into his compositions. Finding new ways to mean, then, has, in essence, required him to give up any explicit attempt to mean. This is based on a suspicion of that entire form of life. But it is not just the conventions that are rejected as hindering expression; it is also a thoroughgoing suspicion of inspiration itself. Krenek, in other words, has repudiated our criteria.62

8  How We Access Criteria in Going on How, then, are we able to go on? We are initiated into our community’s forms of life. From these are derived our shared criteria, and these, in turn, tell us how to apply concepts to the world. We learn words in certain contexts and then, with a “sense” that we have grounds, project them into others, though nothing guarantees our projections will be understood. That so often others are able to follow testifies to the depth of our agreement in judgments. Yet we also make projections that for some reason, perhaps for many reasons, others are not able to follow. But now we need to look at this more closely. How, in going on with words, do we relate to shared criteria? I argue: through nothing other than the assertive and receptive potencies. Our task for the remainder of this part, then, will be to explore this criteria-potency interaction. First, though, a point about pictures. The pictures of the voice described by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were not grammatical pictures. It is essential to see that this is different from the pictures we know from Wittgenstein’s use of the term when he writes: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it inexorably” (PI, §115). What he meant by picture here concerns faulty conceptual inferences. We could not get outside the picture because it was in language. These sorts of pictures, we might say, are at the cartographical-conceptual level, and this is controlled by shared criteria. Staying with the image of a map, there is another



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level, that of walking. In Schopenhauer and Nietzsche we had pictures of how to walk the route depicted on the map. These are, in other words, how we conceive this task of going on with words as we make ourselves intelligible. On a sunny day downtown people are crossing a square. This one is ambling, that one goes in a sprightly march, this fellow lopes, his arms casually swinging back behind his body. Their minds elsewhere, they have entrusted their bodies to that whorl of physiognomic muscle-memory (of joints, muscles, adaptations, and offsetting adjustments) particular to each. The question is whether there may be a comparable whorl in how we go on with words. What is it about talking that invites comparison with the concept of walking? Talking seems to be more like walking than walking is like talking, but this is because we are comparing one verb with another that is somewhat less concrete. In any case, what do they have in common? Surely there is in both the possibility of going on. You take one step and then, going on, you take another. But what would count as a step in talking? The suggestion is that this interchange of potencies would represent some internal sectioning to the act of going on—which resonates with the steps of walking, so in place of steps we have this rocking, this wavering, of assertion and reception, perhaps like Osip Mandelstam’s poet, who gets across the river not by the bridge but by jumping from one Chinese junk to the next.63 For both the later Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers, when examining the statement of a problem, the philosopher ought to carry out a grammatical investigation to discover whether these particular words are being used in their normal sense or in some nonstandard way. When philosophers use a word—“knowledge,” “being,” “object,” “I,” “proposition,” “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used this way in the language which is its original home?—What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (PI, §116)

Ordinary language philosophers would ask what we say when to elucidate whether a word or expression is being used in an arbitrary way. “We” includes every native speaker of the language. Once again, when we ask ourselves this question we are not revealing what it seems like to us personally; we are elucidating the basis for which (in this language) anyone can say anything. For both Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers, then, it was the philosopher’s willful deviation from ordinary practices which needed to be addressed. To repair the strained intelligibility of the speaker’s metaphysical utterances, both Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers— putting it into our parlance—effectively solicit resources from the second potency of the voice. Nothing like a musical mood need be implicated here. Yet note the receptive aspect. We are not asserting, not forcing. We recount our criteria: we stop and mumble: we ask what we say when, and then the words

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come. Perhaps as a result, for Wittgenstein (and Austin) philosophy “is the quintessential activity that has no language games of its own” (Passages, 143). Both Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers seek to anchor the wayward assertive strain in unforced criterial exemplification. There is, then, an innate receptivity to the very exercise of our linguistic competence. It should be noticed that the criterial invocation technique of what we say when is not itself a grammatical picture. It is, with emphatic explicitness, a picture of going on. It accords, in other words, with what we are calling a picture of the voice. Whatever difficulties Skeptical Man gets into would be relieved not by the substitution of a different local grammatical picture, but instead subtended at this other level by a different picture of going on—what we say when. This shift of levels lies at the heart of Cavellian therapy. Such a strategy, by the way, is not only practiced among philosophers. In a recent book the double-bassist Barry Green applies to playing music the “InnerGame” learning techniques devised by Timothy Gallwey to teach tennis.64 Central to the approach is the distinction between Self-one and Self-two. Selfone prevents you from realizing your potential: it is the source, for instance, of distractions or irritating mental commentary. (“Everyone is watching! Don’t screw up!”) Self-two, on the other hand, describes the tennis player (the skier, the musician) in natural and unforced engagement. Many of the exercises are simply strategies to reduce the presence of Self-one and increase that of Selftwo. To make the connection plain: Self-one would correspond to the intellect that vexes language and forces words into alien contexts. Self-two would characterize this Wittgensteinian-Cavellian resort to natural competence and the ease of words at home in their language games. This suggests a more general pertinence of how our expressive possibilities are bound up with our comportment toward our own competencies. It also suggests that what we are calling the energies of occurrence are an essential part of our natural competence in making ourselves intelligible. A musical skeptic, then, would abstract from his or her natural competence, and the performance of the piece would suddenly become—for instance—a series of dauntingly minute and complex movements to be carried out deliberately, as it were, one by one. A piece played like that might sound as forced and strained as the utterances of the philosophical skeptic. It would also, for the record, closely correspond to what Wittgenstein criticizes as the “primitive picture” of language, in which, going on, one word is added to the next. This is what the Inner-Game technique would help counteract. Someone with such musical-skeptical tendencies, for instance, might find it helpful while playing to think of a story, or a series of colors, so that the playing, free from the distractions from Self-one, would enjoy a greater natural activation of musical competence represented by Self-two. One might be tempted to see Levin, a chief character in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, as an early practitioner of the inner-game technique. Nowhere is this more obvious than when he goes out to cut grass with the peasants. According



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to Henry Pickford, this scene is a succinct statement of a preoccupation which runs through the entire book but culminates in Part 8, when the homely wisdom of the peasant results in the luminous insight into how to make sense of his life. But here is Levin out in the fields mowing: In the midst of his work [Tolstoy writes] moments came to him when he forgot what he was doing and began to feel light, and in those moments his swath came out as even as [the peasant leader] Titus’s. But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and started trying to do better, he at once felt how hard the work was and the swath came out badly . . . . More and more often these moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing. The scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments.65 The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and nearly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.66

When Levin thinks of what he is doing, and tries to do it deliberately, he messes up. He then gets frustrated, and weary, and wonders if he will ever learn. When he forgets himself, when the work goes smoothly and well, time passes quickly and he is happy. Pickford explains what is happening here—and by the way the Schopenhauerian vocabulary is no accident: Here Levin learns as it were the virtue of allowing his awareness, his conscious thoughts and intention, his will, to subside; without the self-awareness, selfinterpretation, his willful handling of the scythe, the actions of his body merge with those of the peasants . . . . Levin must give up a will to interpret, to infer, and simply accept what is given.67

Note how Tolstoy writes that it is as if the scythe itself does the work. When the work is going well, the actor, in other words, is not Levin but the implement, which became “full of life” and indeed even rather fantastically (sounding more like the nose in Gogol or the broom in Bulgakov) became “conscious of itself.” It is the scythe that, “as if by magic,” did the work. By now this should be a familiar displacement. Here Levin as the actor is figuratively displaced by the object (the scythe)—whereas before we saw that it was with Nietzsche an energy in language and the impetus it rode upon that the Dionysian poet had to rely. In the same way Levin had to give up his will, so too did the Dionysian celebrant. For both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, it bears repeating, these energies were intimately bound up with music, which was the marker for expressive energies outside the intellect. Wittgenstein writes, “Understanding a sentence

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is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think” (PI, §527). On this Cavell comments, “Perhaps the reason Wittgenstein surmises one may avoid this thought is that one imagines the understanding of a sentence to be a matter of understanding and combining the meanings of its constituent words, and that this in turn is a matter of knowing what objects they refer to.”68 This, again, is the “primitive picture” of language that Wittgenstein sought to examine. But if understanding a sentence is not just a matter of adding individually vetted words together, neither is saying a sentence a matter of mere addition—no more than playing a musical phrase is a simple matter of adding one note after the other. This is the picture put under pressure when, to stay with our example, Wittgenstein considers the expression that comes when you surrender to the mood.69 The energies of occurrence, then, testify to the way in which—like Levin’s scythe or the words of the Dionysian celebrant—our words are alive. Alive in the sense of not just hanging over the workbench and then taken down and pushed around by the intellect according to its interests. Cavell sees this present decisively in the later Wittgenstein, where we lead words back from metaphysical to their everyday use. “Objectivity,” Cavell writes, “is not a given but an achievement; leading the thought, allowing it its own power, takes you to new ground” (TE, 203). This new ground would be the extra that is discovered in the expression, acclaimed as a discovered aspect. That words are under a certain control, one that requires that they obey as well as that they be obeyed, is captured in Wittgenstein’s idea that in his philosophizing words are seen to be away and as having to be returned home (to their Heimat). What he says is not quite that “what we do is bring words back,” but more strictly that we lead them (führen die Wörter)—from metaphysical to everyday; suggesting their getting back, whatever that is, is something they must do under their own power, if not quite, or always, under their own direction. (CHU, 22)

Suppose someone likened the civic provisioning of our words—all these concepts controlled by shared criteria—as nothing more than a public facility for the making of sense, perhaps in the way that city-bikes are a public facility to help people get around. Words come before we do. There are certain rules for their use. You can borrow them for a while, but you have to put them back into circulation. In short, these words as city-bikes allow you to get around, to move through the streets. Given this shift of emphasis, however, a more appropriate image here would be horses. According to Emerson, the poet enjoys a relation to language in which “in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.” You steer a bicycle. To get it moving you have to pedal, but a horse might have ideas of its own. The horse might go faster or slower than you want. A horse might not recognize the difference between a roadway and a pedestrian zone. A horse might refuse to move. A horse might throw you



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off. Cavell comments, “The idea is that the words have a life of their own over which our mastery is the other face of our obedience” (TE, 203). But again, is the private life of words wholly circumscribed by shared criteria? Some kind of autonomous impetus is likewise relied upon, as we saw, in Wittgenstein, when we lead words back from the metaphysical to their everyday use, which Cavell, reading Emerson now, takes to be suggesting that their getting back, whatever that achievement is, is something they must do under their own power if not quite, or always, under their own direction. Alternating horses, as in a circus ring, teach the two sides of thought, that objectivity is not a given but an achievement; leading the thought, allowing it its own power, takes you to new ground. (TE, 203)70

9  Heaney’s Two Responses Consider a contrast suggested by the poet Seamus Heaney. Heaney distinguishes between two sorts of conceptual performances in response to the initial triggering impulse. First the impulse: “It is my impression that this haunting or donné occurs to all poets in much the same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a hankering, a readiness.” We might recognize this as Schiller’s musical mood. Like Schiller’s, Heaney’s image is explicitly musical: he calls it the “tuning fork.” Heaney goes on: “It is also my impression that the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donné.”71 See this, then, as an exploration of how the two potencies, the assertive and receptive, relate to shared criteria in going on. Both, at least to Heaney’s ears, leave a trace in the music of the words. Heaney distinguishes between the masculine and feminine actions. Consider first the feminine, which would seem allied to Nietzsche’s Dionysian model, which we associate with the second potency of the voice. No less a poet than Shakespeare serves as an example. In Timon of Athens, the Poet says: A thing slipped idly from me. Our poesy is as a gum which oozes From whence ‘tis nourished. The fire i’ the flint Shows not till it be struck; our gentle flame Provokes itself, and like the current flies Each bound it chafes.72

You might see this as a Shakespearian account of how the poet ought to comport himself toward his musical mood. Whatever is giving itself language here discovers no stability, no finality, in any single image, but plows through several: a thing that slipped, an oozing “gum”; a spark-throwing flint; a “gentle

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flame”; a current. To anyone of a different temperament—and Nietzsche’s Socrates comes to mind—this is a series of nonsensical contradictions. Because how does it, this poet’s thing, sustain itself through gum to flames to water? The Dionysian tangent, as we have seen, eschews any fixed expression. According to Heaney, this is “a vision of poetic creation as a feminine action, almost parthenogenetic,” meaning self-generating, self-triggering, like the selfprovoking flame. “And out of this vision of feminine action comes a language for poetry that tends to brood and breed, crop and cluster, with a texture of echo and implication, trawling the pool of the ear with a net of associations.”73 Primary is the ease of natural rupture, of things discharged with unforced, elemental fluency. The masculine action, on the other hand, seeks “to master rather than to mesmerize the ear,”74 “not complaisance but control,”75 a response that appears more in line with Schopenhauer’s picture. To the impulse, to the inceptive musical mood, the masculine rejoinder is not to surrender, but to force it into the daylight of assertion. “The origin of [masculine] poetry [is] not a sinking but a coming up against . . . not an alluring but an alerting strain.”76 The response to the musical mood is not freely flowing, but pertinaciously “hammered into a unity.”77 The words, Heaney writes, “are crafted together more than they are coaxed out of one another, and they are crafted in the service of an idea that precedes the poem.”78 Let the poet and playwright Ben Jonson serve as a characteristic masculine poet. Though he admired Shakespeare, he also criticized his friend’s fluency. “I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand . . . . He flowed with the facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped.”79 Language in the masculine mode is a “form of address; words are not music before they are anything else, nor are they drowsy from their slumber in the unconscious, but athletic, capable, displaying the muscle of sense.”80 As an example we might consider the following, from Jonson’s The Poetaster. In contrast to Shakespeare’s oozing gums and gentle flames, note the stability with which the image of poetry as Pegasus, once introduced, is not displaced but runs down through the rest like a spine. When, would men learn but to distinguish spirits And set true difference ‘twixt those jaded wits That run a broken pace for common hire, And the high raptures of a happy muse, Borne on the wings of her immortal thought, That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel, And beats at heaven gates with her bright hoofs; They would not then, with such distorted faces, And desperate censures, stab at Poesy.81



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Heaney relates the music of the poem to the way the poet responds to his or her donné. But the suggestion now is to see behind the masculine and feminine actions the two potencies of the voice, each with their aspirations for what ought to happen in the conceptual performance. The masculine seeks to discipline the expressive impetus according to its interests, like the Schopenhauerian poet, who “knows” the Ideas and takes language into his workshop to overcome its inborn recalcitrance with retractile conceptual performances. The feminine instead “surrenders” to the impetus, like the Nietzschean poet, in whose words the “musical mood” discharges its mysterious burden through expansive conceptual performances and without the surveillance of the conscious mind (or, in our parlance, the intellect). The first is suspicious of how words can surge, smuggling in their alien aspects. But the second rides this energy eagerly, this “original generating rhythm,”82 welcoming the new aspects in its conceptual costume—its newfound lovely semblance.

10  Wittgenstein on Shakespeare Ben Jonson is not the only one with reservations about Shakespeare. According to Cavell, in his essay, “The Interminable Shakespearian Text,” Wittgenstein could only admire Shakespeare with reluctance. “The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare,” he writes, “is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry . . . . His pieces give me an impression as of enormous sketches . . . as though they had been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything so to speak” (PDAT, 48). As we have seen in the quotation from Timon of Athens—though others could easily be found—the images, even the syntax, seem merely, one might be tempted to say, indications of a presence behind the words. The donné is not forced into daylight. A presence may visit language while disdaining the sort of clean, naked encapsulation that Schopenhauer, for one, required as a condition of poetic truth. Wittgenstein meanwhile placed great emphasis on bringing “language back home, back to the order he calls the ordinary, of calling language to attention, retrieving it, as if anew, from chaos” (PDAT, 48). As we saw, the young Nietzsche made much of what Schiller in his letter to Goethe referred to as a musical mood. Given what Wittgenstein has said about Shakespeare, it may come as little surprise that he would look askance upon such a notion. To his friend Drury he writes, In a letter (to Goethe I think) Schiller writes of a “poetic mood.” I think I know what he means, I believe I am familiar with it myself. It is a mood of receptivity to nature in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself. But it is strange to me that Schiller did not produce anything better (or so it seems to me) and so I am not entirely convinced that what I produce in such a mood is really worth anything. It may be that what gives my thoughts their

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It was, we may want to recall, the interaction of moods and word-production that started this whole thing off, namely in Wittgenstein’s bewildered observation that when he “surrender[s] to a mood . . . the expression comes.” Wittgenstein here seems to be saying that, when under the influence of this peculiar poetic mood, our thoughts do not glow but are artificially lit. This can prompt us to misapprehend their real worth. What we take to be an insight would be no more than luster. Yet this luster is not owing to anything special about the thoughts: it is not the thoughts themselves that “glow”—as presumably we would discover when we see them again in the cold and impartial light of day. This seems reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s claim that poetry could be reduced to prose: both move from the charged instability of the equivocal to a disenchanted, nondistorted baseline. So it might make sense, as Cavell has pointed out, that Shakespeare would cause Wittgenstein unease. The same could be said for Ben Jonson. Someone who surrenders to his facility—which should rather be resisted, harnessed, hammered—will not produce finished works but instead “enormous sketches.” Someone who allows himself anything will not even bother to blot out a line, if the report from the players is to be believed. Shakespeare’s words, Cavell infers, lack “a certain finish” which makes Wittgenstein wonder at their real worth—it is a finish that amounts to “the momentary breaking off of a stretch of language from the rest of what is being said.” And it is this finish, Cavell goes on, that Wittgenstein misses in Shakespeare’s effects of, let’s say, the maelstrom of significance. The matter is of such interest to me that I mark it for further study by hazarding further the thought, put more positively, that what Wittgenstein senses in Shakespeare’s language is the continuous threat of chaos clinging to his creation, an anxiety produced as the sense that it is something miraculous that words can mean at all, that such things can be said, that there are words. This suggests another approach to Wittgenstein’s, hence positivism’s, obsession with the possibility of meaninglessness, which they liked to call, in different tones, nonsense. (PDAT, 49)

Wittgenstein’s demand for finish: is this what Jonson thought Shakespeare would gain from blotting a thousand lines? Finish evidently contrasts with, is imperiled by, Shakespeare’s overindulged facility, producing what Cavell calls the “maelstrom of significance.” The more you surrender to facility, the less the finish, the more chaos threatens. Which means, seen now explicitly from the point of view of the masculine action: the less deliberate crafting and mastering that goes on, the less that meaning is really yours, because the less those words have been secured against nonsense. Our words in this picture are under constant internal threat. If we mean anything it is because we tenaciously



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subdue the inborn energies of language, a powerful but insubordinate material, continually threatening to dissipate what we mean. This would appear to touch on a matter of some sensitivity. Wittgenstein’s friend Drury, for instance, recalled that “throughout his life Wittgenstein was convinced that he could not make himself understood.”84 But even if Wittgenstein was unusual on that score, it would be misleading to suggest this was a wholly idiosyncratic take on Shakespeare. We have already seen similar sentiments from Shakespeare’s friend, Ben Jonson, who, in his Explorata: or Discoveries, advises young poets whose work misfires: “If then it succeed not, cast not away the quills, yet; nor scratch the wainscot, beat not the poor desk; but bring all to the forge, and file, again; turn it anew . . . . If it come, in a year, or two, it is well.”85 Jonson, it seems, like Schopenhauer, also has what amounts to a language workshop—with forge, a selection of filing implements and powered by a billowing fire. Samuel Johnson, surely another commentator of impeccable pedigree, found the musings of the Poet in Timon of Athens “very obscure.” He goes on, He [the Poet] seems to boast the copiousness and facility of his vein, by declaring that verses drop from a poet as gums from odoriferous trees, and that his flame kindles itself without the violence necessary to elicit sparks from the flint. What follows next? That it, “like a current, flies / each bound it chafes.” This may mean that it expands itself notwithstanding all obstructions; but the images in the comparison are so ill-sorted, and the effect so obscurely expressed, that I cannot but think something omitted that connected the last sentence with the former. It is well known that the players often shortened speeches to quicken the representation; and it may be suspected, that they sometimes performed their amputations with more haste than judgment.86

Like Wittgenstein, though after his own fashion, Johnson also seems to be asking for more finish. You can almost imagine him throwing up his hands. Where to even start? There is so much conceptual tidying to do. Johnson is being quite the Schopenhauerian in his sober-minded attempt to translate the poetry into a clearer prose summary, rendering it as a straightforward trot—as if to say, now let me just see if I understand. So little sense does it make—put differently: so little does it answer to one’s expectation of what sense-making is—Johnson can only suspect some corruption in the text. Can it be that Johnson is finding too little trace of what we called retractile conceptual performances? Is that why it lacks finish? Too much going on via expansive conceptual performances, which leaves in its wake what would appear to be a confused mishmash of images (“illsorted” and “obscure”)? Metaphors, Cavell writes, can pressure our attunement, “under which pressure certain of our attunements will fail; but with certain others will be intensified and refined” (IQO, 147). At least concerning these passages Samuel Johnson might be an example of the first (and, by contrast, we may infer the intensified attunement John Keats had felt, Keats who was

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frequently exasperated with Johnson’s comments on Shakespeare). Without making too much of a single quote, it seems Johnson is experiencing some of the same unease that (Nietzsche’s) Socrates and Euripides had felt when, long after the theater of Dionysus Eleuthereus had emptied, they sat brooding in their seats, baffled by the latest play of Sophocles. Think of finish, then, as a semantic sealant which allows our meaning to go forth and weather language’s empirical maelstrom. A text has “finish” to the extent that it has secured the previously known and fully mastered meaning that was “put” there. Expansive conceptual performances, however, what Heaney calls the “feminine” response to the impetus, release and even ride upon those very energies against which all disciplined “masculine” sensemakers must battle. To flow with facility, in other words, is not just to leave unsecured the “known” content of the expression—if there is any—but to court the suggestive viscosity of those very unmeant empirical features against which it—the mastered content—should rather be protected. Going further in this direction, we may recall, leads to the tipping-point at which, with drooping eyelids, Nietzsche’s Dionysian bacchanal loses control of her words. No longer sufficiently held in check, the words reverse their allegiance: from retractile they become expansive conceptual performances. This lack of resistance from the intellect allows a suborning porosity through which these energies—the maelstrom of significance—play havoc with the intellect’s many neat and orderly distinctions. Which suggests that finish, as an aspiration native to the first picture of the voice, might not only attain, as Cavell speculates, to a separable passage of text, it might also apply to that mastered meaning-portion of any text, even within a passage, the integrity of which in turn informs certain of Wittgenstein’s stylistic imperatives—according to which, as Cavell puts it, in Shakespeare’s language “the threat of chaos cling[s] to his creation.” Shakespeare, as a result, is not going on in the right way. He does not ponder his words. He is dashing them off—sketching. What is the status of words merely dashed off? As we saw, they lack finish. What is there too much of when there is a lack of finish? And would that be the same as nonsense? If so, this would seem to imply that a sentence might be sunk in some degree of the nonsensical as a man, half awake, might be sunk in degrees of unconsciousness. The adjustments that would enable one to find symmetry amid all the dashed-off asymmetry might then amount to the sentence shaking itself more fully awake. According to Cora Diamond, however, this goes against a view of nonsense that Wittgenstein seemed to hold fairly consistently through both his early and his late work. Nonsense is nonsense not because of what the sentence is saying, but because it cannot be read to be saying anything at all. As a result, it can be excluded, removed from circulation.87 In his early work Wittgenstein had attempted to draw a “limit” to the “expression of thoughts.” Indeed, Wittgenstein summed up the “whole meaning” of his Tractatus like this: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”88



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And for the loudmouths who do not remain silent? How is it that these words, this phrase, can say nothing at all? Again, this would be a nonsense that means nothing, rather than one which means something silly, ridiculous or outlandish (as in: “That’s a stupid idea! What nonsense!”) To borrow an image from Kant: would nonsense be the sea around an island of sense? As Cavell is implying, creation never quite seems to escape the threat of chaos. How to exclude what seems to be eating into the words themselves—as in the works of Shakespeare, those enormous, asymmetrical dashed-off sketches? By now, these are the familiar pressures we have come to associate with the first picture of the voice, sponsored by the first potency. This is what happens—this is how language begins to look—when you identify with what might be related to your (as intellect) assertions. Just because it does not fully say what I mean, it says, well, nothing at all. There is (my, asserted) meaning, and there is—nonsense. Perhaps this is what caused Wittgenstein unease. It is hard to know what to make of Shakespeare. His work seems to challenge our ability to make confident exclusions. To put it more fancifully, good writing would be to its meaning what a space capsule is to its astronauts: the one secures meaning from nonsense and “the maelstrom of significance,” the other the astronauts from the inhospitable vacuum of outer space. Shakespeare, meanwhile, seems to afford, as it were, no protection at all for his apparently doomed occupants. Consider the innumerable protective breaches in the sorts of conceptual performances acclaimed by Shakespeare’s Poet: A thing slipped idly from me. Our poesy is as a gum which oozes From whence ‘tis nourished. The fire i’ the flint Shows not till it be struck; our gentle flame Provokes itself, and like the current flies Each bound it chafes.

His words, he says, “slipped idly,” “oozed” from a source of hidden nourishment. Hardly the bold, masculine journeying forth of the Schopenhauerian poet. After all, what could the intellect have to do with anything that oozes—with any thought, any phrase that happens to slip idly? Anything that oozes or slips merely rides the pernicious viscosity of material forms. It would be hard to imagine anything more antagonistic to the asserting intellect—resisting, harnessing and hammering, forcing and straining on behalf of its quantum of already mastered knowledge. Yet Shakespeare’s Poet also suggests that if whatever is astir remains closed to the intellect, this does not mean it is in itself closed off, static, complete. It would be a mistake, in other words, to structure “it” as if this were a first picture sort of event, only, for some reason, we just happen to be blocked. For it is not static, not fixed, nor even a stable quantum. Call it a musical mood, call it a hankering: it is not even in principle a something

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that could be inspected. According to the Poet, this energy, this “gentle flame,” “provokes itself ”: self-stimulating, each word leads the thought—and only then do new aspects emerge. What is there beforehand? Who knows? You do not even know if there is anything there until the moment in which an “it” finally comes into articulation: the fire in the flint, he says, “shows not till it be struck.” This last point is significant: what comes into articulation is not known in advance. For adherents of the first picture of the voice, this is a scandal. Seeing things in this way, though, would mark a changed relation toward what the assertive picture excludes as unmeant noise. This is what Schopenhauer’s poet had to work against. This is the posited extra that creeps into every word, every expression, which you did not mean. Not knowing the content in advance is difficult enough for adherents of the first picture to follow. But the many entailments only make matters worse. Consider, after all, how a receptivity so characterized—the fire i’ the flint shows not till it be struck—seems to imply a certain inner-architecture of the subject. Put simply, a relation between the part that gives and another that receives. If we may combine the words of Schopenhauer and Shakespeare, the separation is of the intellect from the region in which the words are nourished. Yet it is crucial for Cavell, as we will see in the following parts, that this separation is not viewed as a failure of knowing. The reader, however, might have noticed a curious development. As we saw, Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers appeared to rely on the receptive potency as a way to access shared criteria by asking what we say when. In that case, the receptive potency exerted a constraint on defective metaphysical (and presumably assertive) projections. But now here Shakespeare, also via the receptive potency, seems to be doing something else, using the receptive artery toward a very different end. To put the question another way: What kind of work is being done in criterial invocation? Does merely being able to go on in accordance with shared criteria generate enough of a “new ground” to draw comparisons with what we saw of the second potency? Would having our utterances threshed of fantasias alone be productive of new aspects? If we say words are in some sense alive, are they animated only with the energy of returning to their homeland—like the horse that just wants to go back to the stable? Wittgenstein, in Cavell’s reading, claims that our words are in “exile” (TE, 114). Presumably an exile dreams of home. But can our words also sometimes be happy expats, travelers dreaming, instead, of new lands? Shakespeare’s poet, at any rate, does not seem to be describing or much less exemplifying the practices of the ordinary language philosopher. Those heterogeneous stylings do not seem to be words going to their criteriacontrolled homeland, but rather the sort of conceptual joyriding that tended to get on Wittgenstein’s nerves. Jonson and Johnson seemed to feel the same way. This is not reason speaking to reason. We get a helpful clue from Cavell when he aptly speculates: “[Wittgenstein] suggests that [Shakespeare’s] uniqueness lies in his perhaps being a ‘creator of language’ rather than a poet. Perhaps what causes Wittgenstein’s distaste, then, is a function of the idea of creating language



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as something private or personal, as if this must be opposed to Wittgenstein’s insistence on the publicness and commonness of language” (TE, 236).

11  The Economy of Speech and the Aesthetics of Speech In that same essay, “The Interminable Shakespearian Text,” Cavell compares Wittgenstein’s response with Emerson’s appraisal of Shakespeare. At first, what Emerson says might seem rather simplistic. “Shakespeare’s principal merit,” Emerson writes, “may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best understands the English language, and can say what he will.” Cavell goes on to clarify: But this observation takes on life read against Wittgenstein’s responses. Emerson’s denial of originality seems remote from Wittgenstein’s claim of uniqueness. . . . Noting that Wittgenstein’s responses all have to do with his relation to Shakespeare’s language quite generally—as not liking it, as looking for a finish that it negates, as wanting to admire it but put off by others’ praises of it—Emerson’s praise serves to complete the thought that our relation to Shakespeare is the model or test of our relation to language as such. (PDAT, 50)

Shakespeare’s genius is unoriginal because he represents the flourishing of a capacity that lay in each of us. In that sense, says Emerson, “the greatest genius is the most indebted man” (PDAT, 49). The rare feat of genius is to “say what he will” and give exemplary voice to the “otherness of genius in each of us” (PDAT, 51). Shakespeare fulfills, to a magisterial degree, the burdensome, unrelenting imperative of human expression: that of making the self intelligible. All this is far beyond someone like the Common Man, whose “every word chagrins us.” Why? Not because his words are unintelligible exactly. Everyone understands what he says. But his words afford, as it were, no opening into which his voice may pass—to adopt an image of Emerson’s, in which God has his own secret passage into each of us, like an emperor into his theater. Now, rather than chaos, it is the continuous threat of conformity that clings to his creation. This is why in rebuking him we do not know where to start. What is needed is not a different word here or there, but an entirely different sort of relationship to language, which would amount to a different way of inhabiting the ordinary. And this is where Shakespeare is especially valuable. A genius like Shakespeare, says Emerson, liberates in four ways. He emancipates us from our ego, from the fashions of the times, from idolatry, and from melancholy. “Now melancholy,” Cavell goes on, “idolatry, entrapment in the views of others, and blindness to the existence of others trace a profile of skepticism. How are we to understand language, or what I was calling our relation to language, to liberate us from this complex?” Emerson attributes this to Shakespeare’s demonstration, for the first time, of

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The initial contrast here is between the conformist deformations of skepticism and Shakespeare’s exemplary liberating mode of expression. Against the conformist ways of going on, there is the “breakthrough to the discovery of the source of song.” We have seen something similar in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both of whom posit a way of relating to a creative origin that is beyond the limits of conceptual abstraction. For both this was music. Music for Schopenhauer was not an abstraction but an extracted quintessence. Nietzsche of course linked the renewal of tragedy with the spirit of music. Now there were, as we saw, some rather grand metaphysical reasons for this, but it included, and at the most significant of junctures, the linkage of music with conceptual going on. Perhaps we could even say that Nietzsche likewise made a “breakthrough to the discovery of the source of song”—the source being the expansive Dionysian forcing its way into the intellect’s narrower retractile operations. For Emerson, too, music is associated with the promise of a release from the limitations of the conceptual, and therefore also the pernicious threat of conformity. But how might we characterize the apparently different emphasis taken by Wittgenstein and Emerson? In a lengthy parenthetical remark in The Claim of Reason, Cavell distinguishes between the economy of speech and the aesthetics of speech. In a more recent work Cavell glosses this same distinction by saying: “The former [the economy of speech] refer[s] to the control of concepts by criteria, the latter [the aesthetics of speech] to the revelations of myself by what I find worth saying, or not saying, as and when I speak, or hold my tongue” (CW, 333). According to Edward T. Duffy, Cavell in those initial passages is “drawn irresistibly” to ask how it was that it ever occurred to us “articulate the world into such conceptual constellations as we find in widest commonality around us spread.” Duffy writes beautifully of how these conceptual networks come to be generated, not autonomously, as in crystal growth, but because of what matters to us: Cavell’s answer (which he computes as fragments toward an “economics” and an “aesthetics” of speech) is that everything given to us in the counts and recounting of our shared language traces what has mattered or counted for us. Around this axis, the lathe of the strenuous tongue shears out a continually reforming “constitution” of words. Since we count only what



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counts or matters to us, the play of our re-countings should be keyed to this question of what matters to us. They should be pitched toward what Cavell calls “the achievement [or ‘exits’] of desire.”89

Any achievement, in other words, would inevitably amount to some interaction between the two stems. The “lathe of the strenuous tongue” can only shear out that constitution of words if whatever happens to be spinning remains fixed to the axis. Call this the Cavellian schematism of (available) words and (expressible) desires. There could be no shearing without the one pressing up against the other. Shared criteria would then find itself in its current state because of the all the many “achievements of desire” on the part of those that have come before—and hence are now captured in this very language that likewise comes before us. More recently still Cavell appears to return to the same contrast of an economy and an aesthetics when he talks about the “root of speech.” 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, perhaps psychoanalysis. In an imperfect world the paths will not reliably coincide, but to show them both open is something I want of philosophy. (PDAT, 185)

If indeed these remarks are related, “the root of speech” would then itself consist of an indissoluble jointure. You cannot get any deeper than the economics and the aesthetics of speech, which remain, down to the very root, a non-fusable duality. And this would imply that the tension between what we might call the social (available public words) and the personal (promptings of desire) is permanently beyond any final relief. They can neither be merged nor fully disjoined. We may recognize some similarity with other joined polarities characterizing the voice as the yield of a mysterious structural tension. Kant’s chaste pair sleep in separate beds, they do not even touch in the Kantian schematism, where it was left to the transcendental imagination, a third term, homogenous to the two heterogeneities, to shuttle across the gap between the sensual manifold and the concepts of the understanding. In Schopenhauer any root of the voice would be a struggle between the intellect and the will, each with totally contrary interests. This tension unmistakably sponsors the wrestling principles of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the young Nietzsche’s reformulation. It was helpful of Nietzsche that he called them art drives, each activated by its own imperative in which it is finally free of the constraining other. Nowhere are the rights of implication more emphatically neglected than in the Dionysian utterance. So great was the subjective pressure of desire that not only the flimsy social form would explode. The Dionysian was so powerful that such an intensity could

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only be endured, let alone expressed, with the structural reinforcement of a shielding myth. Myth provided the Dionysian celebrant exactly what Byron plaintively yearns for in the third Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Could I embody and embosom now That which is most within me,—could I wreak My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, All that I would have sought, and all I seek, Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word, And that one word were Lightning, I would speak; But as it is, I live and die unheard, With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.90

Byron, in our context, would be imagining a scenario in which any imperatives associated with the economy of speech (the control of criteria and the provisioning of exactly these words that come before us) would never constrain those associated with aesthetics of speech (the expression of desire). Byron’s fantastical word is both super-hard—indestructible—and yet a faithful conveyance of that charged, lightning-bolt expression of personal desire. In such a fantasy there would be no shearing, nor would anything like Duffy’s lathe ever come to mind. This would be a fantasy in which the expression of desire reaches its uttermost while (miraculously) at no point is the social form a source of any constraint, not even when compressed into the smallest of possible units: a single word. To return to Wittgenstein and Emerson: the control of concepts, the “responsibilities of implication,” is contrasted with the “rights of desire,” which we might link with the “revelations of myself ” mentioned in the previous quotation, particularly as it is linked here as sometimes seen as “psychoanalysis.” This mixed metaphor of roots and paths, I contend, helps account for the difference in emphasis between Wittgenstein and Emerson, particularly when it comes to their evaluation of Shakespeare. It might seem an odd point to make. After all, Cavell has often been at pains to stress the similarities among his favorite four, Wittgenstein, Austin, Thoreau, and Emerson. One can point out differences and still agree that Cavell nonetheless has very good reasons for linking the four together, particularly when these very differences actually strengthen his case. Whatever their differences, all are concerned with the question of making the self intelligible. Wittgenstein and Austin do seem in general more preoccupied with the economy of speech (intelligibility, the control of concepts by criteria, what can be said, delimiting and overcoming the threat of nonsense) and Thoreau and Emerson seem in general more preoccupied with the aesthetics of speech (revealing myself in my words by meaning them, every single word I say, thereby overcoming the threat of conformity). Though intimately interrelated, each part nonetheless leaves room for competing



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imperatives which foster subtly divergent aspirations for language (i.e., what is supposedly going on when we go on). In every conceptual performance, then, the two hold each other in a sort of productive tension. We are now in a better position to answer a question raised earlier: what sort of work is being done in criterial invocation? More exactly, we wondered if the “new ground” which it brings might be compared to new aspects revealed in Shakespearian going on. The intuition that these were not quite the same appears to be supported by this distinction. The procedure of what we say when, as it accesses shared criteria, and hence the control of concepts by criteria, would be associated with the economy of speech. Of course, this would be the essential preliminary to saying anything at all, hence anything associated with selfrevelation. So if it is fair to say that Wittgenstein seems more interested in how criteria govern concepts, it is understandable that, given such preoccupations, language might very well appear to be continually threatened by nonsense and chaos, of people abjuring the pertinences and constraints of our shared forms of life.91 Emerson’s approach, by contrast, seems more concerned with self-revelation. And so Emerson might say (as might (Cavell’s) Thoreau and Kierkegaard): grant that we have established these forms of life, or criteria, of the conditions of meaning—it is hardly nothing, certainly, but then again so what? Only you, with intimations of your particular voice, can sense if you have spoken, if justice has been done, because only you have access to the intimation, the premonition, the secret stirrings of your words, call it the musical mood, call it whatever you like, which you seek to discover in expression. What good if my words are “objectively” meaningful, shielded by finish from the hiss of nonsense, if they are not my words? What good if I am unable to discover an intimacy with them, even though they may be perfectly understandable? The “great danger,” according to Duffy, is that “instead of becoming competently dexterous masters of a language, we will instead turn into incuriously rote parrots of those performances of it we have happened to hear.”92 See that as the Emersonian nightmare: a world in which slabs are fetched, apples purchased, children reproved, parents rebuked, speeches given, ballots cast—but where no one, incredibly, actually means a word they say. (How different would such a world look? How would we know this is in fact not our world?) And though they may never cease holding forth, they live, as Thoreau would call it, lives of “quiet desperation,” or in the words of Emerson, “silent melancholy.” So the perpetual crisis in our lives as expressive beings is not the threat of nonsense. It is the conformity of Common Man.

12  The Conformity of Criteria But the control that criteria exerts on our projections, and which would draw words back to their “home”—is that not conformist? By any measure it would

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have to be. How, otherwise, could it route you back to the meaning of the word controlled by shared criteria, not the “meaning” you think you have in your head? Yet conformity, with the connotation of freedoms fearfully forgone, is not really the word used in association with what we say when. As we saw, shared criteria acted as a constraint on harebrained metaphysical utterances, and could, in effect, perform a sort of search-and-rescue for the metaphysical mountaineers who get lost out on the skeptical alpine heights. “Philosophy for Wittgenstein,” Cavell writes, “includes returning words to what he calls their homeland, which in practice means into their free circulation through language released from their vexations in philosophical / metaphysical thesis that cannot fully be meant or believed” (PDAT, 60). The free circulation we further associated with the so-called inner-game, and the ways of accessing criteria through the ease of ordinary usages, typified in the smooth operation of Levin’s scythe. The ordinary language philosophers resort to shared criteria, then, was meant really as a corrective. Now, free circulation, a release from vexation, and peaceful return to the homeland, these phrases hardly seem what we would typically associate with conformity. How to account for this difference? If you are mainly concerned with sense overcoming nonsense, this return to the homeland would just about wrap things up. Wittgenstein, again, wanted to bring “language back home, back to the order he calls the ordinary, of calling language to attention, retrieving it, as if anew, from chaos” (PDAT, 48). Before there might have been confusion, but now there is clarity, perspicuity. “What is your aim in philosophy?” Wittgenstein writes, and then answers: “To shew [sic] the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI, §309). And what happens to the fly once it is out of the bottle? Well, philosophically speaking, who cares? That is the fly’s business. This session, this specific interval of thinking, would have come to an end.93 Where before there was restlessness there now would be peace. Here again we find another resonance with Schopenhauer, whose philosophy has no more ambitious goal than to culminate in resignation (a kind of peace or stillness), which is about all we can do to mitigate the mistake of consciousness ever having arisen in the first place. So it is not inaccurate to say that, for Schopenhauer, the stilling of the will would also just about wrap things up. Given so dark a world, what else could we hope for? Schopenhauer’s philosophy would show the fly of the intellect out of the big bottle of the will. (Or does the fly only escape the bottle intermittently in aesthetic experiences? Or does it amount to the same thing if the fly becomes resigned to never getting out of the fly-bottle?) Both philosophers, at any rate, seem to have this sort of association: on the one side delusion and perplexity; on the other, insight, clarity—a kind of peace. This was arguably a concern of Wittgenstein’s that transcended his later reconsiderations of his early work. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus logical form correlated with the structure of the world. The challenge was to reveal that in propositions. In that sense, there was a constraint upon nonsense (or chaos). His later work would then reveal a transition from logical form correlating with



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the structure of the world (in the Tractatus) to an initiated response (going on) according to cultural forms (in the Philosophical Investigations). Marie McGinn, for instance, writes that “it is the immediate object of his investigation that changes: his investigation is no longer directed at the idea of an exact calculus that underlies our use of language, but to our actual employment of language within our everyday lives.”94 And according to Janik and Toulmin, for Wittgenstein, in his early and later work, “the underlying philosophical task, of supervising die Grenze der Sprache at points where men are tempted into pointless confusion, was unaltered.”95 Consistent throughout was a search for a stay against chaos, the conditions enabling the miraculous but difficult feat of making sense. Somehow it is hard to imagine Emerson and Thoreau getting very excited about this. The invocation of what we say when accounts for the interests associated with the economy of speech and the control of criteria—well and good. But what about the aesthetics of speech? What of the imperative of selfrevelation, with how these now clarified and controlled words—these errant words brought to heel—attach to your life? That rocky island might have been a welcome sight for the castaway clinging to a barrel (given concerns about chaos and sense-making), but hardly a place you would want to spend the rest of your life (given concerns about conformity and self-revelation). From this point of view, Wittgenstein’s transition from the atomic facts (the structure of the world revealed in propositions) to cultural practices (shared criteria revealed in how we go on) would be a shift from a sterile, uninhabitable world (total control in the alignment of word and world, with no room to move) to a world populated by zombies and sleepwalkers (total alignment of reactions and initiated responses). Emerson’s reflections on Shakespeare, according to Cavell, seem “bland or vague enough, until one catches the implication that the rest of us are in various states of ignorance of our language and are unable to say what we will, chronically inexpressive, as if we are all to some extent aphasic” (TE, 273). One would search in vain for a similar distinction in Wittgenstein. In fact, this sounds like the very conclusion he most did not want to reach. Even in our grammatically impeccable ways of going on—even, that is, after we overcome the challenge of Jungle Man, “we are all to some extent aphasic.” Emerson, we cannot forget, had a problem with these people who always know exactly how to go on. Rather than the stammering of Jungle Man, it was the nonstop blathering of Common Men that caused Emerson wearisome chagrin. These were the “bugs,” the “spawn”—some of whom he might have seen gathered before him as he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1837—and yet all masters of going on according to shared criteria. Indeed, he very much feared, that was all they were, hence “bugs,” hence “spawn.”96 In that sense Emerson and Thoreau start with the very people to whom the ordinary language philosopher had just given a clean bill of health. Actually, the same goes for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They too had concerns about the babblers, the chatterers, those who went on perfectly, with never a mistake,

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perhaps even with celebrated eloquence, but were so caught up in their dried-out abstractions they lacked any relation to the real. Both philosophers deplored this mindless drift of grammatically correct speech, this impeccable going on that lacked any intimacy with the world. Making matters worse, those who chattered failed to appreciate their real interests. Again, it was this, and not the conceptual floundering of Jungle Man, that for both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the poet redeemed through certain conceptual performances— though, as we have seen, the two types of poets, the pure knowing subject and the Dionysian celebrant, do this by accessing different potencies (either assertive or receptive). But to close this section, if we may, with a fantastical proposal: suppose we trail behind our words as they are called back to their homeland in what we say when—where would we find ourselves? Where, that is, from this other standpoint, not concerned with overcoming chaos and the economy of speech, but like Emerson and Thoreau concerned with self-revelation and the aesthetics of speech—where would we end up then? We soon notice that here, in this very comfortable place, which is neither too hot nor too cold, and has many convenient places of rest, our words are always clear. No one has to strain to follow a projection. For the homeland of our words would be nothing other than the habitat of Common Men. Ordinary language philosophers, as we have seen, rely on the centripetal force of criterial invocation to constrain the metaphysical projections of the errant speaker. Common Man, however, would never require any interventions from such procedures. When it comes to going on, these Common Men would best be described as criterial centrophilliacs.97 No need to rely on the periodic interventions of asking what we say when, for he would be already in complete accord with any sessional invocation. Common Man, then, through inveterate centrophillia, manages always to align himself perfectly with shared criteria—and at tremendous personal cost, as we will see in Part Four. In fact, Cavell has a name for this extraordinary place: it is called the ordinary, though usually when we are here (of course, we are always here) we are the conflicted, contradictory creatures who tend to be impatient with what seem like its limitations. To say more about that, we turn now to Skeptical Man.

Part Three SKEPTICAL MAN

1  The Skeptic and the Pure Knowing Subject It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the profile of the Cavellian skeptic is basically what you get when a Schopenhauerian intellect finds itself in a non-Schopenhauerian universe. As we saw earlier, the pure knowing subject presented us with an ideal in which the assertive knowing self has finally, albeit with heartbreaking brevity, escaped the conceptual prison of the will. Perceiving at last according to its own interests, the intellect comes into a pure knowing relation with the world. This amounts to a transcendental relation, a movement which epitomizes what Richard Eldridge describes as “our desire to move beyond the ordinary into a grasp of reality in itself and into perfect expressiveness.”1 Here, with the rare, saving epiphanies of the pure knowing subject, we rise above—the spatial prepositions are unavoidable— the cheap, alienating forms of conceptual consciousness. Which also means, our most intense, most definitive experience of the world has no social or cultural mediation. No words are needed, no tradition, no local dialect—that is all irrelevant. Instead, between intellect and world there is a clean—pure— cognitive rapture. Yet this wholly depends on the (Platonic) Ideas. They stabilize the loworbital flight of the knower: they are high enough that the intellect may escape the formatting of social forms (shared criteria), and yet not so high that the content would be altogether unknowable. They provide, in other words, some nodal point to which the adventurous mind can still fasten. The (Platonic) Ideas, then, indispensable stabilizers for any high altitude intellection, allow the poet to work on language through assertion. (True enough, he or she might just as well remain silent, as no cognitive gain could ever come from the essentially derivative act of expression.) Talent would not only account for the overall perceptive power of any given artist. It would also show in the capacity for the artist to become a hinge between two heterogeneities. Formatted according to alien interests and totally concerned with sublunary matters, our concepts will by definition resist the expression of any transcendental insight. So if we can speak of friction or rough ground in Schopenhauer, it is the vertical tension

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of the transcendental tool-blade against the recalcitrance of the heterogeneous conceptual material. What we say when, therefore, could only be a source of bad resistance: the cracks and impurities in the stone, you might say, defying the chisel. Again, what is not asserted cannot be meant. But the Schopenhauerian poet as a worker in knowledge is not fixing that transcendental knowledge in language, anyway an impossible task. The poet instead is providing esoteric escape routes to the reader, cryptic invitations in language to enter a nonlinguistic register. All the poet can do is stimulate the imagination of the reader to perceive these same transcendental ideas. For Cavell, however, like Nietzsche before him, no such Ideas exist. It is the shared criteria of our community that allow us to apply concepts to the world. Consequently the skeptic has withdrawn from exactly the procedural constraints that make going on possible in the first place. Little wonder if the skeptic fails to go on intelligibly. Both Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject and the Cavellian skeptic, then, powerfully tempted by the idea of another route mediated by univocal knowing, are more than ready to eschew the messy agreements and tiresome compromises inevitably involved with shared criteria. Instead of all that, “burdened by—can we say?—thoughts of the infinite” (PDAT, 200), this stringent band makes an attempt on the transcendental heights.

2  The Skeptical Recital as Transcendental Search Descartes, according to Cavell, provides the classic skeptical recital. Put briefly: (1) there is, to start off, the rehearsal of beliefs. These are the “prejudices” that he, or indeed anyone, will in the normal course of affairs assume to be true. (This is an envelope, a piece of wax, a bird, etc.) (2) These are revealed to be ultimately derived from the senses. (3) The senses, however, are shown to be an unreliable basis for belief. (4) He then considers a generic object to test this sensual foundation for belief, in this case the piece of wax. (5) This is revealed to be inadequate. (6) The question then arises: So what then do we know? (CR, 131). Three structural features are fairly standard in such a recital. First, the conclusion is expressed as a discovery. Second, there is a clear conflict with our ordinary beliefs. And third, the discovery suffers from perpetual instability (CR, 129). Descartes insists his grounds for doubt are reasonable. These are not the willful, fatally idiosyncratic musings of, for instance, “certain lunatics whose brain is so troubled and befogged by the black vapors of the bile that they continually affirm that they are kings while they are paupers.”2 Such people are insane. These meditations are an entirely different matter. Cavell’s response is not to dismiss the arguments of the epistemologist outright, but to ask just what these arguments are expressions of. And they are expressions, it turns out, of this skeptical experience.3 “My major claim about the philosopher’s originating question . . . is that it (in one or another of its



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versions) is a response to, or expression of, a real experience which takes hold of human beings.”4 The experience is “a standing threat to the human mind,” “an experience that philosophers have characterized, more or less, as one of realizing that my sensations may not be of the world I take them to be at all, or that I can know only how objects appear (to us) to be, never what objects are like in themselves” (CR, 143). It is the experience of “being sealed off from the world, enclosed within my own endless succession of experiences” (CR, 144). “The world drops out” (CR, 145).5 It is, Cavell writes, “a response which expresses a natural experience of a creature complicated or burdened enough to possess language at all” (CR, 140).6 To answer the epistemologist, then, we have to “make that question real for ourselves.” Simply to say, with the ordinary philosophers, that the question does not arise can only make the epistemologist feel that the question has been begged; because for him the question has already arisen (anyway no one has shown it hasn’t) and using words in no obviously distorted sense (what sense do they now have?). (CR, 134)

This experience involves an altered relation to our shared criteria. Put simply, our criteria disappoint. Our criteria fail to take us into the heart of things. This Cavell calls “the uncanniness of the ordinary.”7 If it gives us our world, our ordinary language likewise has “the capacity, even desire . . . to repudiate itself, specifically to repudiate its power to word the world, to apply to the things we have in common, or to pass them by” (IQO, 154). Our criteria no longer seem adequate to do what “before”—the very moment before—they had been doing. In fact, it might seem impossible, even preposterous, that all this, everything we have numbered in our song, could be based on nothing more than mere agreements in forms of life. “To possess criteria is also to possess the demonic power to strip them from ourselves, to turn language upon itself, to find that its criteria are, in relation to others, merely outer; in relation to certainty, simply blind; in relation to being able to go on with our concepts into new contexts, wholly ungrounded” (PDAT, 205). Neither God nor any impersonal superlogical structures ensure that we mean what we say. Instead, our attunements in the forms of life, our shared routes of interest, make it possible to begin to make the self intelligible. Yet to the philosopher, under the pressure of extended meditations, it might seem that these are precisely what have to be excluded. It all seems too contingent. We want another route: an immediate, unconditioned connection. This prompts the philosopher to make questionable projections, questionable because they repudiate rather than confirm or enlarge our shared criteria. Consider that classic move where the skeptic holds up some prop—a tomato, an envelope, a piece of wax—as a generic object. Cavell’s point is that the philosopher’s ground for doubt itself requires projection. No concrete claim is

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entered in the philosopher’s skeptical recital. Instead, the philosopher “forces a non-claim context” (CR, 218).8 But then perhaps we are asked to imagine that we are seated before a fire, or that we see an apple, an envelope, a tomato. Of course there is nothing wrong with imagining. If the ordinary language philosopher might imagine a context in which saying certain words would be appropriate, the philosopher, for his part, can surely imagine a claim having been made. But here is the problem: to whom would it occur, in normal circumstances, to make such a claim? The imagined projection of the ordinary language philosopher depends precisely on the forms of life that make up the ordinary. This supposed knowledge claim, however, is borderline fantastical. A man sitting by the fire, after all, and a man claiming to know he is sitting by the fire are two very different things. In short we have problems imagining circumstances in which it would ordinarily occur to us to make such a knowledge claim.9 Cavell finds it significant that the generic object is taken as the best-case scenario. For Descartes, of course, it was the famous piece of wax. But how does it generalize? Why is it not simply a mistake limited to this occasion? If a man looks out the window and erroneously believes he sees a friend (in fact it is someone else), this is no great calamity. The human enterprise of knowing escapes unaffected. The error does not spread, in other words, because, indeed, it sometimes does happen that we make such mistakes. Perhaps the supposed friend was wearing a large hat; perhaps the hedge got in the way. We could in any event describe what could have made knowledge possible there.10 But for the generic object these qualifications cannot possibly arise. Any mistake in this case cannot be deflected into more manageable considerations of optics, or a lack of professional discrimination. As far as knowledge claims go, this is as good as it gets. If you can speak, if you know anything, you will know there is a pencil on the table. “Change any of the obvious factors any way you like . . . and you still won’t have so much as touched the question whether we know there is a table, a pencil, an envelope here” (CR, 134). The target, in other words, is nothing short of “an anything, a thatness” (CR, 53). Now suppose the skeptic says, “How do you know this really exists? You don’t see all of it. How can you be certain the back half exists when you can’t see it?” It is axiomatic that any competent speaker can make reference to what we say when; and here is the traditional philosopher, perfectly fluent, insisting upon the sense of his words. Perhaps he would admit “[they] are not the contrasts that the philosopher has begun with, [but] they are the contrasts his investigation has led him to.” What is his investigation but his attempt to speak—honestly, as he might see it—from this position? And this is what he has turned up, these are his discoveries—“discoveries of facts which we have not hitherto noticed but which, once we bring them out, undercut those normal contrasts with ones more radical. . . . Ordinary language has itself been shown [to be] not fully trustworthy” (CR, 164). The projection, then, is in the first instance neither fully natural nor fully unnatural. As we saw, the context of any projection has to invite that projection. And if at first we do not catch on, do



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not see how it is obviously appropriate, we may need, as Putnam said, to be told a story about it. Noticing our failure to follow, the other could give “relevant explanations of how it is to be taken, how the new context is an instance of the old concept” (CR, 192).11 If still we cannot follow, we might then be looking for “some convincing explanation of how a master of language may not know that he has changed the meaning of a word or has emptied it of meaning altogether” (CR, 166). Unless he can show us otherwise, his projections seem to repudiate our shared criteria. But can these odd projections help us understand what the skeptic hopes to discover? Holding up this generic object, the skeptic might say: “We fail to see all of it.” The skeptic does not mean that our view may be blocked or somehow obscured; there is no contingent hindrance to our knowing the object through our senses. And this, being a best-case scenario, is the whole point. He means instead (or at least seems to mean) that the object itself obscures itself, the front part concealing the back, the surface the inside, the aspects for me the aspects in itself. The story of these particular projections might be clarified from the skeptic’s starting point—that he is speaking from the skeptical sealedoff position. Consequently the way he projects the concept “see” implies that “we do not see objects because we do not see all of any object” (CR, 193). This idea of seeing all of something trades on the ambiguity of context. When we ask whether someone has eaten all of an apple we probably do not also mean the core and seeds, or whether someone has smoked all of a cigarette to include the filter (CR, 194). The expressions—“all of it,” “the whole thing”—in these contexts have a clear and agreed upon-use. But when the skeptic asks whether we see all of the generic object, we do not have an obvious sense of how the word projects into this context of seeing as such (in contrast to eating an apple or smoking a cigarette). “We require some explanation of the intended projection (an explanation of how this context invites the concept)” (CR, 198). The same holds when the skeptic says that an object has a part that is hidden from us—when in fact we are creating these parts through a sense of there being a part we do not perceive, that we are supposedly deprived of. “You cannot say something, relying on what is ordinarily meant in saying it, and mean something other than what would normally be meant” (CR, 212). The skeptic, it seems safe to say, is after nothing less than an escape route from finitude itself. Perhaps not coincidentally, the skeptic’s projections would appear to fit quite nicely into a world of gods: how else could it be taken for granted that we ever could see, at the same time, the front and back of it, the inside and the outside? Either gods or pure knowing subjects, those fortunate enough to perceive the (Platonic) Idea of the object—not just mere surfaces and mistake-ridden everyday inferences, but the essence, the real deal. As Stephen Mulhall puts it, The skeptic’s distortion of the ordinary conditions for human speech thus parallels his distortion of the ordinary human senses (disconnecting

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Cavell in all this is of course reading Wittgenstein, whose later writings, one could argue, explore the consequences of the absence of any such transcendental stabilizer, even as the temptation remains real and at times overpowering. Wittgenstein calls this our (being led to be) speaking outside language games. This begins in casualness but it continues in driveness and hauntedness, finding rest (such as it will be) in a particular structure (of absolute “seeables,” fixed perspectives, decontextualized, or depersonalized, “meanings”) from within which language seems a prison, or wasteland. (IQO, 147)

Hence the transcendental drive is in its very nature apt to repudiate our shared criteria. This is how we come to (try to) speak outside language games. The frustration of not achieving a transcendental position while at the same time insisting some such thing is on offer might be called the skeptical “experience.” These problems continually arise, in other words, because the skeptic is unable to reach a position like that of a pure knowing subject. Given the assumptions of the transcendental drive, that alone would be acceptable as an ultimate backstop. The challenge of knowing, then, becomes the challenge of relating to the world in this very special way, the impossible yet persistently fantasized linkage of this sealed-off mind with the totality of the cosmos as an object. Outside the forms of life, beyond our shared criteria, the philosopher seeks to establish a new and essentially intellectual relation—to insert the plug of the intellect into some grand transcendental socket. Skeptical doubt, Cavell writes, was produced by an experience which I described as one of being sealed off from the world, within the round of one’s own experiences, and as one of looking at the world as one object (“outside of us”). The philosopher’s experiences of trying to prove that it is there is, I will now add, one of trying to establish an absolutely firm connection with that world-object from that sealed position. (CR, 238)

The skeptic, perplexed by this special experience of being cut off, is haunted by the notion of another relation beyond shared criteria and structurally akin to Schopenhauer’s (Platonic) Ideas. When compared with this fabled “absolutely firm connection,” our ordinary ways of going on become disappointing. They fail to take us to the essence of things. Yet the continual failure to find this “absolutely firm connection” does not, as one might expect, lead to a revision of the belief that such a thing could be available. Instead, this whole failed



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endeavor seems to present a startling, indeed terrifying prospect: without this gold-standard connection, we are bereft of any basis to believe our senses even tell us of an outside world.

3 Reorientation Cavell has remarked on the confessional nature of the Philosophical Investigations.12 Wittgenstein’s confessions might be read as those of one who has himself experienced the lure of the absolute connection captured in the figure of the pure knowing subject. “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”13 He accounts for his temptations and how they wrought, but also how he resisted and overcame. This temptation might present itself as a bewitchment by grammar, an inclination to make a bad projection— to talk of existence as if it was a predicate, or that every word has an essence, or that language needs to be supported by an impersonal logical structure, or “an obsessional searching for mind, innerness, understanding that seems suspiciously close to searching for substance.” “This search,” Cavell adds, “or temptation, is part of what is under scrutiny in Wittgenstein’s interlocutors.”14 “A picture held us captive,” Wittgenstein writes. “And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it inexorably” (PI, §115). The projections we make under the influence of these pictures during the scene of going on can lead to confusion, blockage, stasis, impasse, but also to alienation from our own words, so that even words “stripped of their ordinary criteria do not lose all interest and sense for us, but can seem to be meant, indeed seem compulsively correct.”15 Our words are in “exile” (NYUA, 34).16 Perplexed by pictures, suffering from this crisis of expression, what do we do? Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers would undertake a grammatical investigation, eliciting our criteria for what we say when. This, says Cavell, is “the philosophical path to the end or disappearance of the philosophical problem” (NYUA, 36). And this will require that we give up the pictures, the metaphysical temptation, to sublime language and discover, say, essences or super-concepts or (Platonic) Ideas. “Where does our investigation get its importance from,” Wittgenstein asks, “since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood” (PI, §118). Cavell comments, “His answer, as I read Philosophical Investigations, is that the task of philosophy is to ask whether we know what is important and interesting to us” (CW, 299).17 The Investigations consequently also rejects the whole possibility of any ascent. In fact, the ascent is the problem.18 We are “dazzled by the ideal and fail to see the actual use of the word” (PI, §100). In giving up the metaphysical temptation, in giving up this urge to speak outside language games,

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Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, is rejecting the transcendental (Neo-Platonist) legacy of Schopenhauer. This is implicit in his repudiation of his earlier work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Jerry Clegg has written lucidly on this connection. “Corresponding to the Platonic Ideas that make up an uncreated and indestructible reality in [Schopenhauer’s] The World as Will and Representation are the ‘objects’ of the Tractatus. These are the being or substance of the world. They give it a fixed form and are together with the subject its limits.”19 According to Clegg, the Philosophical Investigations has many examples of “therapy being administered to the tenets of The World as Will and Representation.”20 Wittgenstein’s later work, then, rejects the whole possibility of anything like the (Platonic) Ideas which would, in giving the world a “fixed form,” somehow stabilize modes of solipsistic communion with the world-object from a sealed-off position. A grammatical investigation, then, moves resolutely in the opposite direction: back to the ordinary. Philosophy (as descent) [Cavell writes] can thus be said to leave everything as it is because it is a refusal of, say, disobedient to, (a false) ascent, or transcendence. Philosophy (as ascent) shows the violence that is to be refused (disobeyed), that has left everything not as it is, indifferent to me, as if there are things in themselves. [For instance, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of (Platonic) Ideas.] Sharing the intuition that human existence stands in need not of reform but of reformation, of a change that has the structure of a transfiguration, Wittgenstein’s insight is that the ordinary has, and alone has, the power to move the ordinary, to leave the human habitat habitable, the same transfigured. (NYUA, 46–47)21

Notice the two philosophical dispositions toward the ordinary: ascent and descent. Expressed in the first picture of the voice, the ascent seems to be just the thing philosophically. It has the sense of breaking free from the sketchiness and equivocation of empirical usage. Ambiguities resolve into permanent simplicities. But in seeking some point external to the actual conditions of meaningful speech—to speak without criteria or, as Cavell puts it, to speak “absolutely”—it becomes, precisely then, difficult to speak meaningfully at all. Wittgenstein writes, “We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” (PI, §107). So after the crisis, and after the destruction of pictures (the house of cards, Luftgebäude), there is the rededication to the ordinary. Rather than a “vertical” orientation, which seeks some essence, or what “points beyond the empirical or phenomenal,” Wittgenstein, according to Stephen Mulhall, endorses a rotation of our interest to the horizontal disposition of language, “towards a desire to stay with the surface we have hitherto wished to dig up or demolish, to attend to the logic of language as that is manifest in the empirical contexts within which our life with words is lived.”22



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Friction, resistance, rough ground: these likewise speak of the same rotation of interest. But with the reversal, with the refusal of any ascent, there is no longer any fixed point. Now there is no transcendental leverage. Instead, we are looking for this rough ground: the rough ground of language and usages is all we have. Now when we talk of friction it is not of transcendental knowledge meeting stubborn empirical resistance: it is the resistance of the ordinary as the means by which we can say anything at all. On Wittgenstein’s passage about getting back to rough ground Cavell writes, “I change the connective: ‘We want to walk; then we need friction.’ I would like this to suggest that our wanting to walk is as conditional—I might almost say as questionable—as our need for friction: If we want to walk, or when we find we are unable to keep our feet, then we will see our need for friction” (NYUA, 55).23 We ask, for instance, what we say when. Before such a hindrance, so encumbered with alien aspects, this very same recalcitrance after the rotation of interest now helpfully constrains our metaphysical adventures, our illimitable desire for perfect expression, to speak outside language games, our wish to speak absolutely. Rather than a downward vertical tension, breaking up the human habitat, Wittgenstein is looking, again in the words of Mulhall, “to stay with the surface we have hitherto wished to dig up or demolish.” All the same, and even if the gambit miscarries, the skeptic is onto something. This Cavell calls the “truth” or “moral” of skepticism, which is “that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not one of knowing, anyway, not what we think of as knowing” (CR, 241). Let us note for the record that this precisely excludes the possibility of anything resembling a pure knowing subject. After all, Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject very much on the contrary maintained that the human creature’s highest relation to the world precisely is one of knowing: the unfettered operation of the intellect’s perceptive powers working according to its own interests. Still, it can be hard for the skeptic to snap out of it. Wherever it threatens to break down, his picture can always resort to an apparently consistent internal account: our inability to relate to the world as knowing creatures could be because we are blocked. Hence the truth of skepticism—that our relation to the world as such is not chiefly one of knowing—in this light would only happen to be true because of some failure in our capacity to know. Such a claim seems to be implied by those who argue that this special content—what, during his meditations, the skeptic has divided himself from— might be retrospectively recuperated, as casualties of the philosopher’s necessary abstraction when he or she takes up the position of observer.24 So the skeptic “is blind to the fact that her philosophical reflection on our practice precisely begins with such a withdrawal from our practice.” Consequently, “the sceptic is forced to deny the very knowledge she cannot help but have: the very knowledge that is implicit in her practically responding to the world and other people.”25 Yet to say the skeptic is someone who merely forgets what he or she otherwise must know fails to account for what Cavell calls the skeptic’s “illimitable desire”

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(DK, 3). This would only seem to justify the skeptic’s sense that there are indeed knowable details out there which he cannot get at. Such an account remains wholly on the level of knowledge, merely distinguishing between knowledge that we can express, account for, and what we may (skeptically) deny but which remains implicit, and hence available to us, in our practices. Our “familiarity” with normal cases could be expressed as a form of knowing. Our lives remain composed of in principle recoverable bits of knowledge—fully explicable, in other words, just not simultaneously. But is our practical response “to the world and to other people” based on, having entirely to do with, knowledge? Is this all the skeptic is missing? Such a response itself seems to forget that Cavell only talks about the philosopher because he happens to be an especially articulate exponent of this more general liability of the human mind. The skeptic does not lack knowledge. Consider, for instance, the rotation of interest, the search for rough ground, for friction, for resistance—this is less a question of knowledge than it is a mode of relation toward the other, expressed here as a mode of habitation. Any change that takes place would not be akin to the skeptic suddenly slapping his forehead as he recalls what his abstractions had temporarily obscured. What Cavell is after is more about “standing in need of something like transfiguration—some radical change, but as it were from inside, not by anything; some say in another birth, symbolizing a different order of natural reactions” (NYUA, 44). In this light, the arc of the skeptical therapeutic—the ordinary, the transcendental drive, the disorientation, and the subsequent reorientation toward the ordinary— expresses a set of reactions that emerge from a mode of relation to the energies associated with the second potency of the voice. A more general way of expressing this would be to call it a matter of habitation.

4  The “Ordinary” and the “Between” Consider these three figurations, Jungle Man, Skeptical Man, and Common Man, as classic profiles in the habitation of the ordinary. How they go on, then, would, amount to how they relate to where they find themselves. Jungle Man, for instance, finds himself in a register characterized by the idiotic, a zone of unrefined crude immanence. Common Man, on the other hand, presides with an unreflective acquiescence to readymade determinations, avoiding whatever pulls away from the cozy warmth of centralized formations. But what about the skeptic? In an essay on Cavell, William Desmond characterizes one of the skeptical strains of the assertive potency: Think of a certain kind of skeptic as an anorexic mind: driven by an ideal of perfection, not always fully articulated; seeking a certain power over what initially presents itself as ambiguous and beyond; secretly desirous of its own sovereignty over what always threatens to disappoint it; more and more



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forced to close the circle of control over that which it believes it subdues; closing down the equivocal, but also closing down the “too muchness” of given life, and indeed its own insurgent energies that still come to surface unbidden; and at the end, binding mastery only over its own “no,” as it comes into its kingdom, where it inherits precisely nothing.26

In Desmond’s description the assertive potency, under the impetus of an ideal, seems to have a virulent allergy toward whatever is other. The ideal (of perfection) does not easily coexist with the ambivalent and equivocal: the ideal has to be realized, asserted over what is “ambiguous and beyond,” and certainly also over whatever presents itself in the guise of some unrefined “too muchness.” Like the texts of Shakespeare, given life can also seem a vast “maelstrom of significance” (PDAT, 49). Faced with that, what do we do? Assertion would involve these sorts of things: imposing, subduing, controlling, mastering, closing down . . . . All this describes a profile of habitation, a set of reactions which very soon begins to look rather like the ascent we associated with the transcendental drive. Remember it was through retractile conceptual performances that Schopenhauer’s philosopher achieved the best prose we can hope for, always relying on his quasi-sidereal insights as erstwhile pure knowing subject. Lucky for him the (Platonic) Ideas were there to stabilize, in this transcendental register, his daring excursions in supra-criterial perception. They made it possible, for a brief moment, to convert the relationship to the world into essentially one of knowing. Whatever had been “ambiguous and beyond” has in that luminous insight been mastered, completely overpowered. In that moment, all equivocities vanish. So if, in the end, even after all the imposing, and subduing, and controlling, and the closing down, the “anorexic mind” inherits “precisely nothing,” this is not from any lack of trying. But what about all that which has been imposed upon, and subdued, and closed down, and excluded? Desmond makes the case for a mode of dwelling in this middle space, between the call for a highest principle (registered by Schopenhauer’s Platonism) and the more inchoate summons of the immanent and unrefined idiotic (registered by Nietzsche’s Dionysian). This would amount to practicing what he names as a metaxological metaphysics. “Such a practice of philosophy,” Desmond writes, “asks a porosity of mindful thought to what exceeds complete determination in terms of finite immanence alone. It is a participant in this middle, does not overarch it from the outside; and if it is, as it were, lifted up from within, it too is always defined by passages in the between.”27 The between is where we find ourselves, and for Desmond it registers “the space of the middle as also open to mediation.”28 Like Cavell’s ordinary, Desmond’s between is not a place you can return to, as you never really leave it. But it is one that can be transformed under the shock of being as such. Cavell’s therapeutic reorientation toward the ordinary was one in which (to revert to a quotation we have seen before) the skeptic underwent a “radical change, but as it were from inside, not by anything: some

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say in another birth, symbolizing a different order of natural reactions” (NYUA, 44). A course of metaxological therapy for any skeptics suffering from these bouts of “anorexic mind” would likewise require a change in the mode of habitation of the between. Instead of all that zealous subduing, and controlling, and closing down, this would amount to a more finessed appreciation of where we find ourselves. If there is a return to the recalcitrances of given immanence [Desmond writes], in their otherness to self-defining thought, there is also a searching of the “more” of the given world, as charged with signs of what exceeds immanence alone. Reading the signs of this “more” as communicated in the saturated equivocity of the given world is intimate to the vocation of metaxological metaphysics. The vocation always and everywhere has this commission: wording the between—doing justice to it with the fitting words.”29

Austin was said to be wary of the compromises that would allow certain philosophical flying machines to get off the ground. For his part Desmond seems to be after a different relation to these “recalcitrances of given immanence” which otherwise are so often simply fed into the big philosophical processors. Flip the switch and, after the machine’s noisy dialectical work, out comes the purified philosophical statement of this “‘more’ of the given world.” Rather than dangerous flying machines, then, Desmond seems more concerned about what gets threshed through hasty or grandiose philosophical ventures to reduce equivocity under the ascendency of some univocal systematic. The between is not an industrial site awaiting development. Yet it is also not some pristine nature reserve. It is where we have always been—and, more importantly, where we have been given to be. This leads to another helpful distinction as we track the two potencies into their deeper resources. There are, according to Desmond, two principle dimensions of our being, a passio essendi and a conatus essendi. The passio first: “The ontological patience signaled by the passio essendi means our first being recipients of being, our being received in being, before we flower as being active on the basis of being already received.”30 Schopenhauer had his own way of saying this, when he meticulously detailed the many incredible, indeed inconceivable natural processes that had to take place before the (healthy, full-grown) rational man could finally step forth and, so ridiculously late in the day, put himself at the center of things. But Desmond does not share Schopenhauer’s abiding unease for this compromising dark origin which makes, for Schopenhauer, our porosity of being only a further humiliation. Desmond instead associates the passio with the good of the “to be.” Next to the patience of being, there is the endeavor to be, the conatus essendi. Desmond emphasizes the co-natus, which “refers us to a more original birth (natus), a being given to be, which is always with or from another (co, cum).” But there is always the danger that this



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given, secondary dimension of our being can seek to overcome the primary dimension out of which it has emerged. A certain unfolding of the conatus essendi, one endeavoring entirely to overtake the porosity and the passio, would turn itself into an absolute whole. But such an absolute whole is a counterfeit whole because it falsifies its own original being received in being. Relative to this receiving of “being given,” it is at all, primarily existing due to nothing of itself, for in the primal “being given” it owns nothing.31

If we see the skeptical assertion as a strained, dysfunctional expression of what Desmond calls our conatus essendi, then it really ought to be seen as a late arrival. A great deal has to precede it. The skeptical drive, then, is not an ontological first strike, not any emergent power boldly breaking forth. As mentioned earlier, the smooth functioning of ordinary practices ought to be seen as the first part, indeed the essential precondition of the skeptical-transcendental drive. So any move to subdue what is other to it would likewise seek to subdue that out of which it has emerged and lent it determinate form. More like an autoimmune disorder, skepticism as hubristic conatus essendi takes on the very conditions in and through which it has been given to be. So far we have addressed the assertive potency. Now what about the receptive? For Desmond, being open would refer to the openness of being, hence to a more wholesale porosity of being, and which would among other things amount to a mindful relocation of the self into the very zone in which things— determinate stabilities—are coming into articulation, just as the subject itself is. We have used the word open to describe how the first potency ought to relate to the second (allowing passages rather than closed to what is other), and that has now led us, taking our cue from Desmond, to talking about the rather more daunting openness of being. If the first (assertive) potency is an instance of our conatus essendi, then the linkage of passio essendi to the second (receptive) potency would accordingly be associated with porosity to our received being.

5  The Skeptical Reduction How might these reflections help us better understand Cavellian skepticism? The sixteenth century, Cavell maintains, saw a subtle but significant shift in the way we understand the world. The nature of the external world, and the nature of our access to it, came into question with particular emphasis on questions like “‘(How) do (can) we know anything about the world?’ or ‘What is knowledge; what does my knowledge of the world consist in?’”32 Not that this brought about a circumstance entirely new and hitherto impossible—because what emerged rather was an “expression of a real condition which takes hold

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of human beings” (CR, 140). A standing possibility, we may suppose, in those years became historically exacerbated. For various reasons, which include but go beyond the rise of the new science, the epistemological emphasis shifts, and “the concept of knowledge (of the world) disengages from its connections with matters of information and skill and learning, and becomes fixed to the concept of certainty alone, and in particular to a certainty provided by the (by my) senses” (MWM, 323).33 Far from being the concern of a few philosophers, this was widespread. Something more was going on, this new accommodation with the world that philosophers have called skepticism. The “ground of human existence,” Cavell suggests, had been “shaken.”34 Consequently whatever the philosophers were dealing with was likewise present, for instance, in the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. Cavell does not try to prove such a connection; he seems unsure how one would even go about such a task. It is an intuition, not a hypothesis, which means he does not require evidence, but rather “understanding of a particular sort” (DK, 4). In the same way the lone thinker, the philosopher, or perhaps just the ordinary man, is suddenly pulled up short, astonished— suddenly for the culture itself what had been straightforward now seems baffling and strange. Previous to those widespread changes, the inhabitants of that world had enjoyed what Cavell calls the “old absorption.” But then, with the changes: At some early point in epistemological investigations [Cavell writes], the world normally present to us (the world in whose existence, as it is typically put, we “believe”) is brought into question and vanishes, whereupon all connection with a world is found to hang upon what can be said to be “present to the senses”; and that turns out, shockingly, not to be the world. It is at this point that the doubter finds himself cast into skepticism, turning the existence of the external world into a problem. (MWM, 323)

In other words, knowledge became the chief mode of relation between self and world. As a result, between the subject and the things of the world, indeed, as we will soon see, even between the subject and the other people in this world, a hazy scrim descended. No, it was not what it had been. How could it be? What had been taken for granted in the supposedly simpler, perhaps naïve times of the old absorption here becomes hard to recognize, reduced to that which we may know by virtue of what is “present to the senses.” Deracinated, reduced to some purportedly explicit formulation, they are trotted out in the opening rehearsal of beliefs. And so an ancient richness, once threshed in the Cartesian recital, becomes little more than a set of initial “prejudices.” See this as a forced conversion of the ethos into a something that is merely known. Whatever might have escaped is either irrelevant or simply that which has not yet been subdued. But its turn will come. For anyone with the slightest metaxological sympathies, the alarm bells are already ringing. This is the critical stage, because this is where the philosophical



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processor-machine gets fired up: in one end the nuance and equivocities of “the old absorption,” and out the other a uniform slab of industrial-gauge ontology. To put it squarely in Desmond’s terms, here, in the sixteenth century, the conatus essendi becomes preoccupied with attempts to convert the passio essendi, and the crucial first step would be this conversion of the whole human relation into merely one of knowing. Much of what follows derives from this step, and any subsequent skeptical therapy would be incomplete without eventually redressing this initial reduction. Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics, then, may be seen as a way of registering the temptation for a high altitude synthesis while avoiding the bleaching of the between (be it via extraction, abstraction, conversion, reduction, etc.), always maintaining throughout the porosity of being associated with the passio essendi. It is worth lingering here a moment, too, if only to notice how little scope the old absorption has to protest on its own behalf. Indeed, the most any slighted richness may do is to endure its desecration in silence. What else but hope for advocates? So far as the skeptic is concerned, it (or whatever the yet un-deracinated relation to the phenomenon amounts to) is apparently essentially present even after the conversion and indeed remains at stake throughout all subsequent steps. Whatever gets lost along the way is not essential—that is at the heart of the skeptic’s contention, which might be neatly summed in the declaration: the rest is noise! But now anyone who comes along and tries to remedy the damage of these destructive early strokes really has their work cut out for them. If it was, say, an illogical move, you could point it out. Presumably most could agree on what constitutes a misstep there. But this is different. To those going on in that way, it seems to make sense. And so advocates for the slighted richness of being, advocates like William Desmond, would somehow have to show, or somehow get others to see, that their conversion of the ethos is not some ingenious distillation of essences but a coarse and reductive distortion. Yet becoming aware of that would require precisely the mode of habitation the skeptic had given up. How to get the skeptical reducer to comprehend any of this? In its structure such a confrontation should not be unfamiliar. It is a reversal of what has been called the illuminist’s predicament, or the problem of the solipsist—the immediate isolation of any mind that makes these supra-criterial excursions. The Schopenhauerian genius, for instance, either during or freshly returned from the epiphany of the nunc stans would have nothing to say to those who remain below, for there are no words that can ever begin to express transcendental knowledge. Now, however, this problem usually broached from the point of view of the perceptual voyager is seen from the vantage of those left behind. Now it is the homebody who never left the old absorption of the ordinary, who dwells in the between alive to the idiocies and recalcitrances of being—now, in other words, it is the one who has remained who struggles to speak to those intoxicated by the thinner air of transcendental heights. Incidentally, it would be a mistake to think this is merely a problem of philosophical perspective. Consider this as a local philosophical version of what

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continually bedevils practically all matters pertaining to culture, perception, or experience. You can recognize something like the advocate’s predicament in John Ruskin’s perplexed, infuriated helplessness at seeing what others cannot because of differences in habitation—expressed here, for instance, in his relationship to the Spring of Wandel compared to that of its current inhabitants: Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic in the world, by its expression of sweet human character of life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandel . . . . The place remains (1870) nearly unchanged in its larger features; but with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning . . . as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of that English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the best power of judgement I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them.35

Yet philosophers engaged in this sort of remedial ethos-defense can at least count on another factor. True, it is difficult to show the reductive conversion of the old absorption. But even if the advocate never gets through to Skeptical Man the story does not end there. According to Cavell, more or less what happens next is this. Somehow Skeptical Man becomes aware, vaguely at first, of a lack of intimacy, or what early on Cavell called a lack of presentness. What happens now? Does the skeptic, sensing what has been lost, relent and fall back into the ease of the ordinary? But why would he? Perhaps in our Cavellian diagnosis the lack of intimacy follows as a result of that reduction. For Skeptical Man, however, this would more likely confirm that he had been onto something in the first place. Seemingly convinced by the therapeutic mantra: the only way out is through, and hoping to achieve the same old intimacy while also enjoying its full subjection to the power of knowing, Skeptical Man seeks to reassure himself but in the compromised terms of the new dispensation—namely, in the terms of univocal knowledge and the new certainty. To his increasing bewilderment, however, the lack of intimacy persists, until, at some point, he hears himself whisper the hushed, terrifying question: what then can I know? Notice that this dynamic is intensified by the very attempt to recuperate the intimacy, the presentness that somehow had been on offer before. In a sense a picture holds him captive, but the picture was not so much in language but in his picture of his predicament, which would include conceptions of what intimacy is, what it requires, and how it is maintained—namely, via epistemological assurance. The skeptic, Cavell writes, forgoes the world for just the reason that the world is important, that it is the scene and stage of connection with the present: he finds that it vanishes



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exactly with the effort to make it present. If this makes him unsuccessful, that is because the presentness achieved by certainty of the senses cannot compensate and the presentness which had been elaborated through our old absorption in the world. But the wish for genuine connection is there, and there was a time with the effort, however hysterical, to assure epistemological presentness was the best expression of seriousness about our relation to the world, the expression of an awareness that presentness was threatened, gone. If epistemology wished to make knowing a substitute for that fact, that is scarcely foolish or knavish, and scarcely some simple mistake. (MWM, 323–24)

So if we ask whether the skeptic’s attempted conversion is a hubristic will-topower first-strike or instead the consequence of fear and anxiety, we may be tempted to answer: that depends. That is, the answer would apparently depend on what stage of this process we come to identify as precisely skeptical. Timothy Gould, for instance, is perfectly right to think of skepticism as “an expression of an anxiety that our words will not reach the world of objects and human beings that can be named, or addressed, or called upon.”36 But the skeptic only suffers from this anxiety because of the prior attempted conversion of the relation into one of knowing. Which is why it—the presentness, the intimacy—weakens exactly with the effort to make it present (according to the age’s conception of how epistemological presentness is to be assured). With that ensues all the anxious and fearful attempts to secure, in this new and tainted terminology, the intimacies associated with the old absorption. And so do we say, then, whatever anxiety may follow, that that initial move—the insidious conversion of presentness into a matter of the epistemological verification of an outside world—amounts to a hubristic first-strike? As Cavell puts it, “This is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism—the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle” (CR, 493). Again, it would depend on where we place the emphasis. What is it that motivates that attempt? Fear, or will-to-power? For his part, Gould also seems to locate that sunken, inaccessible first move as the “surmise of skepticism” when he writes, “In our responses to this anxiety about the distances of people and things—in our responses to the surmise of skepticism within it—we abolish not only the appropriate distances of these beings but, at the same time, their appropriate intimacies. And this, in turn, abolishes the distinctive otherness of the other.”37 If we might transpose the plight of the skeptic into the simplified parlance derived from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the point would be something like this: if we are divided (alienated, struggling), it is not between parts we know and do not yet know. Our division, in other words, will not be overcome when the citadel of the unknown at last surrenders to the knowing. Such a conception would carry into its core Gould’s undermining “surmise of skepticism,” and we saw where this leads. We might instead say something

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like this: there is, indeed, a knowing part (what, with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, we call the intellect) and then something amounting to the rest of the self. Must they be unified—must one completely master the other? The same might be asked of the relationship to the world: who said the world had to be fully known? Cavell explicitly invokes Nietzsche in his long essay on King Lear. Nietzsche thought the metaphysical consolation of tragedy was lost when Socrates set knowing as the crown of human activity. . . . We will hardly say that it was because of the development of the new science and the establishing of epistemology as the monitor of philosophical inquiry that Shakespeare’s mode of tragedy disappeared. But it may be the loss of presentness—which is what the disappearance of that mode of tragedy means—is what works us into the idea that we can save our lives by knowing them. (MWM, 323)

Rather than seeking to master through univocal knowing, a therapeutically reoriented relation would accept (acknowledge) the texture, the grain, and heft of the ordinary, which means the limitations and resiliencies of our shared criteria. This further suggests that the intellect, the assertive, knowing part of the self, requires a different sort of relation with the other expressive energies of the self. Unsurprisingly, one of the better formulations of this comes from a teacher of Cavell’s during his time at Harvard. In his wonderful book of philosophical mediations, The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee writes: “The world does not become less ‘unknown’ . . . in proportion to the increase of knowledge about it. We might be nearer the mark in saying that the understanding of our position is not fundamentally consummated merely as knowledge about the world. The world is not unknown, for example, as a secret withheld from us is unknown to us.”38

6  Wording and Intimacy This brings us to the problem of the Kantian settlement. Though Kant accepts that our relation to the world is not one of knowing, this is apparently construed as a limitation. Our relation to the world is merely through representations, which, moreover, we ourselves have put together (the sensuous manifold schematized by the concepts of the understanding). The thing-in-itself remains inaccessible to our faculty of knowing. In other words, we fail to know it. But why, Cavell asks, should this be a failure? The romantics will reconfigure this not as a shortcoming, but the sort of relation that can restore intimacy with the world. According to Cavell, the most fundamental concern of the romantics is the “relation of knowledge and the world” (IQO, 45). In other words: skepticism.



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Romanticism [is] a working out of a crisis of knowledge, a crisis I have taken to be (interpretable as) a response at once to the threat of skepticism and to a disappointment with philosophy’s answer to this threat, particularly as embodied in the achievement of Kant’s philosophy—a disappointment most particularly with the way Kant balances the claims of knowledge of the world to be what you may call subjective and objective, or, say, the claims of knowledge to be dependent on or independent of the specific endowments— sensuous and intellectual—of the human being. (IQO, 52)39

Because where, in the Kantian account, is the world—if every which way we think about it has more to do with us, and our faculties and perspective, than it does with the world as the in-itself? As Cavell reads Coleridge, for instance, these Kantian concepts of the understanding are linked with death. This is the world of “objects as objects,” made in our categories, which means “since the categories of understanding are ours, we can be understood as carrying the death of the world in us, in our very requirement of creating it, as if it does not yet exist” (IQO, 44). Kant has merely given us a skeptical treatment of skepticism, prolonged it; as Hammer puts it, “rather than accepting the fragility of our position as knowers in the world, our separateness, it hypostatizes the death of the world—by our own hands.”40 The romantic turn to poetry, then, is not just to redeem philosophy, but aspires to the “recovery of the world” (IQO, 45). A word first about death: what is dead, and what is this in contrast to? Owing to this intimate mutuality between the world and our wording of the world, the world lives or dies in our configuration of it. But there is another mode of skeptical death-dealing: the forms of life tell us what counts as something; they determine how a concept will be discovered in its instances. They put that miraculous “seam” in the world individuating people from apples, and apples from seagulls. The skeptic, however, in his rejecting of criteria, no longer takes an interest in the world. He has no way of distinguishing one thing from another, because he no longer has, or bothers to apply, criteria.41 The challenge, then, is to summon against this skeptical death its opposite— which would be what exactly? You might say—to fall in love with the world (CR, 452). It would be the work of reanimation. Owing, again, to the inextricable mutuality of expression and intimacy, this work of reanimation will take the form of ending an expressive crisis. Cavell, then, would have us read the phrase bringing the world back to life in a surprisingly literal sense. A world that is alive, full of living objects, suggests a form of animism. The two skepticisms—of material objects and of other minds—Cavell sees as “reciprocal counters” of one another. Both share important features. But which, if any, is primary? As he has said elsewhere, you can get by, though not without cost, if you harbor doubts of the other; skepticism of the world, however, cannot possibly be lived. Yet suppose if we allow, for a moment, the skepticism of the other to be fundamental, it would stress the importance that our relation to the world “is

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as to something [like Desdemona] that has died at our hands” (IQO, 55). The things of the world, according to the romantics, “need redemption from the way we human beings have come to think, and . . . this redemption can happen only poetically” (IQO, 66). Why should this be so? Is it because only the poet can say certain things? “Is there something we have to say to nature if we are to say some things at all? To say some poems, for example?” (IQO, 72). How do we communicate with objects? If in our thinking we block a relation of intimacy with the world, then, according to M. W. Rowe, we need to “reconceptualize the relationship between man and nature, and let a higher, more subtle philosophy repair the damage that analytical crudities had inflicted.”42 Franz Kafka, having received a box of flowers from Felice, his long-suffering inamorata, writes back to thank her, and then goes on: I might not have become so much aware of being a stranger among flowers, if toward the end of my schooldays and during my time at university I hadn’t a great friend . . . who, without being especially sensitive to delicate impressions, even without having any feeling for music, had such a passion for flowers that if, for example, he happened to be looking at flowers, cutting them (he had a beautiful garden), watering them, arranging them in a vase, carrying them, or giving them to me . . . he was literally transformed by his love, so much so that his whole voice changed—I could almost say acquired a ringing tone, despite the slight impediment in his speech.43

With uncanny pertinence this superb letter illustrates Cavell’s reading of an essay by John Wisdom, “Gods.” The question is put provocatively: “Do flowers feel?” Imagine a man, like Kafka’s friend, who is passionately devoted to his flowers; he talks to them; he enjoys giving them water, arranging them, pruning them, placing them in the light. Now suppose someone watching all this over the back fence, with mounting disbelief, asserts: “You believe flowers feel!” Of course the observer knows very well flowers do not feel. Consequently he suggests that the man’s behavior is distinctly odd. But—and this is what Cavell takes as Wisdom’s point—the observer has missed an important step. If instead he had simply observed what the man was doing, he might have been prompted to ask himself what counts as a flower, and what sorts of treatment we would consider appropriate. And in doing so he would have undertaken the essential work of recounting our shared criteria for things. After all, it was only from watching his friend’s treatment of flowers that Kafka was first prompted to realize he was “a stranger among flowers.” How do flowers count for us? (IQO, pp. 68–69). After completing The Claim of Reason, Cavell reports sensing an obscure pull toward romantic literature. Edward T. Duffy has an interesting accounting of this change, namely how Cavell came to see [the concept of animism] as in need of rescue from the frozen reception and understanding it had fallen into, and then how, through his



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passionately aroused interest in some representative romantic texts not just freighted with animism but powered by it, he thawed the concept out into a dilating flood of new light on how it might be a peculiarly modern and postKantian predicament that, time after time, we have to find our way back to the life’s breath of a world gone dead by our own murderously suffocating constructions of it.44

Duffy detects Cavell’s unease with romantic notions of the world as being alive in any animistic sense. Yet in the end this is what Cavell was able to “thaw” into a new approach to the epistemological failure encoded in the Kantian settlement. This is all finely put. But having gone through Duffy’s dense, startlingly beautiful readings of Wordsworth and Shelley, it is hard to avoid the same question raised earlier with Desmond’s contrast of the conatus essendi with the passio essendi. There is the criteria—yet they are dead, merely “‘word-shells’ in need of some warmly fluent human breath to bear them on to their world-wording work.” How, according to Duffy, are the dead word-shells brought back to life? “They must be voiced or ‘called out’ by individual users of the language.”45 Yet we might ask: what kind of otherness are we dealing with here? To put it as plainly as possible, and redeploying a Cavellian idiom: is it a change in relation to the other, or is it a change in relation to the other? Is it the romantic trope of the wind-blown coal or a Dionysian upsurge? A windblown-coal would safely husband this transformative power within the ambit of the Cavellian subjectivity. What is revealed is not so much the showing forth of an alien other, but a new aspect of the self. It is not, as in the Dionysian, an incursion of any outside power. Duffy’s revelatory account of Shelley’s Epipsychidion, in particular, relies on the incendiary-transformative power of the wind-blown coal. It amounts to an interest that had fallen dormant stirring again to life. Would it be obtuse to ask about this combustible matter? Merely an unburnt subjective reserve of oneself? Or the fanning wind, does that at least come from outside? Probably not, if we are dealing with the application of Kantian concepts of the understanding or the calling out of Wittgensteinian shared criteria. Criteria, as we saw earlier, are “necessary before the identification or knowledge of an object” (CR, 17).46 What wind could blow in from beyond the schematism? Earlier, in Cavell’s essay on Shakespeare, we saw what at first seemed to be a tension between Wittgenstein and Emerson resolved at a deeper level with Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the economy of speech and Emerson’s on the aesthetics of speech. But here it is not obvious how any such deeper resolution might be reached. Emerson, we may recall, declared himself a “surprised spectator of this ethereal water” which “pours its streams” into him. He is a “pensioner” and “from some alien energy the visions come.” One wonders if these heady lines from Emerson caused Cavell to feel the same sort of unease as with the animist romantics. (Perhaps this accounts for his avoidance of Emerson’s early Nature?) Let there be interest, renewal, revitalizing enthusiasm—but let it remain enclosed

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within the self. It is hard to see in this anything resembling a pensioner, and it is a fair question how genuinely alien these visions could ever be. There seems, in other words, to be an irreducible tension between Wittgensteinian criteria and Emersonian receptivity. So if Cavell’s therapeutic reorientation of Skeptical Man would turn him away from the energies associated with the assertive potency and the transcendental ascent and toward the resources of the receptive potency, which include not only shared criteria but also all the revelatory (acknowledgeable) aspects from vagrant or circulating word energies, the receptive potency apparently implicated here by Cavell does not, as with Desmond and Emerson, emerge out of anything like a porosity with the givenness of being, the passio essendi, or some inflowing “ethereal water.” Putting it in the terms of Desmond’s contrast, any reanimation, any flaring-up-again of interest would be wholly constrained to the realm of the conatus essendi. The question becomes whether this reanimation is something we can fully do on our own. We too need to come to life again [Desmond writes] but we cannot do it ourselves; the dead may be left to bury themselves, but the dead do not resurrect themselves. Part of the dubious danger of any Romantic project of projection is that it becomes a will to reanimate the world though one’s own self-projection: but in this case it must be doomed to defeat, since selfprojection would be again the spreading of the death-in-life.47

7  The Legible Body Riding out sleepily just after four in the morning, the medical officer of Tostes arrives at the Les Bertaux farm at sunrise to find Monsieur Rouault in bed, “moaning feebly.” He has a broken leg. Fortunately it is a simple fracture, and Charles sets it with ease. Assisting him is the farmer’s daughter. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were lustrous, delicately pointed, cleaner than the ivories of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, not pale enough, perhaps, and rather dry round the knuckles; also, it was too long, and its shape had no softness of outline. But her eyes were indeed beautiful; although they were brown, they appeared black because of the lashes, and she looked straight at you with a gaze that was candid and bold.48

At first this young woman is something of a mystery. Flaubert describes Emma in detail—her appearance, her words and gestures, her clothing. But we only see her as Charles sees her. After their marriage, however, a dramatic change takes place. Now, as readers, we leave Charles behind and penetrate her interior life. It begins with this sentence, the first to reveal information about her which



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could not possibly be available to Charles: “Before her marriage, she had believed that she was in love; but since the happiness she had expected this love to bring her had not come, she supposed she must have been mistaken.”49 Charles may have married Emma, but we are the ones who enjoy full possession. “The local housewives admired her for her thrift, the patients for her politeness, the poor for their charity. But [we know!] she was filled with lusts, with rage, with hatred.”50 With these words we hit fictional bedrock: we do not suppose, for instance, there could be any sort of gap between her depicted thoughts and her real thoughts. What if, heading out to an assignation with Rodolphe, though we read of the excitement, the quick steps, the breathlessness—what if she really only cared about space travel and life on other planets? Could we read the novel and keep this possibility open? As a matter of course we do not entertain the possibility she only has these thoughts for us, while having others (about aliens, warp drive, etc.) for herself. Quite the contrary: at times we have better access than she does. Godlike we span her history, sift recollections, and even witness the emergence of her thoughts.51 As Cavell puts it, “No mere character, no mere human being, commands the absolute credibility of a narrator. When he (who?) writes, ‘He lay flat on the warm brown, pine-needled floor of the forest . . . ’ there is no doubt possible that there is a forest here and that its floor is pine-needled and brown” (MWM, 335). Our insight is limited only by death: eventually, like everybody, she becomes a corpse, and we lose our special position. We are back on the outside. Emma had her head resting on her right shoulder. The corner of her mouth, set open, looked rather like a black hole in the lower part of her face; her thumbs were curved across the palms of her hands; a sort of white powder besprinkled her eyelashes; and her eyes were beginning to blur under a pale film of mucus that was like a soft web, just as if spiders had been at work upon them.52

Madame Bovary is a fictional character whose mind invests the world with ravishing possibilities, and who becomes, in death, pure physical description, an inert part of a world she once sought so ardently to animate. As readers we are cast out, yet our being outside is different from when, earlier on, we saw Emma through the consciousness of Charles. (Indeed, if there is now no inside, how could we be outside?) The corpse of a literary character is, you might say, the ideality of a pure materiality. Here the great romantic idealist becomes mere material. Charles stands over his dead wife. He could still hear the laughter of the little boys dancing for joy beneath the apple-trees; the room was full of the perfume of her hair . . . . He felt a terrible curiosity: slowly, with fingertips, his heart trembling, he lifted her veil. But he gave a cry of horror.53

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A dead body is inert, but still a body; our applications of criteria are not so much frustrated as sent into vacancy. With his “cry of horror” Charles takes up a position exactly opposite to the skeptic: not the amazement that there might very well be no one there, but the amazement that now this person is gone. Absolutely, irrecoverably absent. A corpse, says Wittgenstein, “seems to us quite inaccessible to pain.—Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different.” (§284)54 Any interpretation of her “expression” would be like seeing a face in a doodle, a figure in striations of rock, a whale in a cumulous cloud. It cannot be a smile because that is not what we mean by the word “smile.” A contingent disposition of features, then, in thrall to physical laws, as unintended as the way, for instance, raindrops break across a windowpane. There would, in other words, appear to be a seam in our experience. With our criteria we look at people differently than we do at the sky or at trees—we look with an entirely different set of expectations.55 To see an aspect, then, is to see the body as expressing a soul. The idea [Cavell writes] of the allegory of words is that human expressions, the human figure, to be grasped, must be read . . . . The human body is the best picture of the human soul—not, I feel like adding, primarily because it represents the soul but because it expresses it. The body is the field of the expression of the soul. (CR, 356)56

For Skeptical Man, of course, this would hardly seem to measure up. According to his hunch, there is a whole order of certainty—real certainty—behind these pictured souls and so-called fields of expression. Would this be like the relation we enjoy with Madame Bovary? Her we know. There is no room for any doubt, and no need to bother with any of this reading of bodily expressions. Rest assured, she would not have managed to sneak off into the woods and cheat on us. After all, “no mere human being, commands the absolute credibility of a narrator.” Absolute credibility, not just the regular version: Skeptical Man would certainly like the sound of that. Yet how could he even dream of having that very special kind of relation with the people in his life—real flesh and blood people? Skeptical Man has two problems when it comes to the legibility of the body. The first is the legibility of his own body; the second is the legibility of the other. These will be examined in turn. For both, though, we might begin by rehearsing the same steps we saw earlier in external-world skepticism. A kind of vertigo ensues from the conversion of an existing relation, an old absorption, into a narrower relation of univocal knowing. Here again the breakdown of intimacy is understood within the terms of the new dispensation. So the failure to reconstitute the same presentness does not cause the skeptic to fall back into the old absorption—and hence also to tumble out of skeptic-hood. Instead, the other becomes a site of available but blocked knowledge: the lack of intimacy is



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conceived as a lack of knowledge. Yet neither our relation to the world nor to the other finds its consummation (Bugbee’s term) through knowledge. To the extent the skeptic has this idea, one might say the skeptic has gotten bogged down through a faulty picture. All that is left is for him to suffer, and if he is lucky he will suffer his way out of it. Which is to say: suffer until he is ripe for a reorientation in which the presentness of other minds, or the expressions of his own body, can be acknowledged. [Cavell writes] we think skepticism must mean that we cannot know the world exists, and hence that perhaps there isn’t one (a conclusion some profess to admire and others to fear). Whereas what skepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged. (MWM, 324)

8  King Lear and the Passionate Utterance In Cavell’s reading of King Lear we find an exploration of the problem of Skeptical Man’s relation to the legibility of his own body. Lear was unable to acknowledge his daughter Cordelia because to do so would require him to reveal himself, and this Lear could not endure; the very thought strikes him with terror. “My hypothesis,” Cavell writes, “will be that Lear’s behavior in this scene [the division of his kingdom] is explained by—the tragedy begins because of—the same motivation which manipulates the tragedy throughout its course . . . by the attempt to avoid recognition, the shame of exposure, the threat of selfrevelation” (MWM, 286). The failure to recognize others, then, is a failure to let others recognize you, a fear of what is revealed to them, an avoidance of their eyes . . . . For shame is the specific discomfort produced by being looked at, the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces . . . . Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of shame. (MWM, 278)

If our lives in the human involve being able to see the other, right here, in the flesh, and this requires the application of shared criteria—what about us? Our habitation in the human, and our attempt to answer the intelligibility imperative, requires no less that we too become legible, and acknowledge ourselves as such. If my body is the best picture of my soul, it follows I will not always (ever?) be able to control or fully survey my aspects. An anxiety of having one’s soul “pictured” by the body is central to Cavell’s reading of King Lear. Before we go into more detail, however, it would be helpful to look at his much later work on John Austin and the passionate utterance. It is a testament of the coherence and

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richness of Cavell’s philosophy that we can profitably reenter the earlier work through the later. In How to do Things with Words John Austin’s main objective is to expand philosophical consideration of what people say. Philosophers have typically supposed that, of all utterances, philosophically the most important was the statement. Statements describe a state of affairs, and do so either truly or falsely. Given the tremendous diversity of human utterances, the shortcomings of such a philosophical predilection, the so-called descriptive fallacy, soon became apparent. There is of course a place for statements. Austin prefers to call them constatives, noting that not all true or false statements are descriptions (HDTW, 3).57 But if our objective is the “total speech act in the total speech situation,” constatives alone cannot be the full story (HDTW, 148). Austin distinguishes among three categories: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary. He defines a locutionary act simply as the act of saying something (HDTW, 94). An illocutionary act accounts for what is done in saying it, the perlocutionary, meanwhile, what is done by saying it. According to Austin, the performance of a locutionary act is, at the same time, the performance of an illocutionary act, which, again, accounts for what is done in saying it. “Trees have leaves” may well be a constative, but when are we ever likely to hear these words? If we imagine someone saying it, this person is, in saying it, doing something: reminding, instructing, informing, pronouncing, lecturing . . . . Austin shows how even such fantastic things as constatives are fated to be drawn back into the earth-bound ambit of people talking. “Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act” (HDTW, 139).58 The performance of a locutionary act—and therefore some sort of illocutionary act—can in addition have what he calls a perlocutionary effect, which accounts for what is done by saying something. And this, says Austin, “will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of the other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention or purpose of producing them” (HDTW, 101). Illocutionary acts are resolutely conventional. All three forms must be open to discrimination between merely attempting to do it, and the actual (successful, happy, consummated) act. Austin, however, is at pains to distinguish between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Both involve consequences, but the integrity of the illocutionary act must be protected from the manifold of possible consequences. “We have then to draw the line between an action we do and its consequences” (HDTW, 111). Clearly, though, an illocutionary act must involve its consequences. Austin says they need three in particular: the securing of uptake, the taking of effect, and the invitation of a response or sequel (HDTW, 117). Perlocutionary effects, however, pose more challenging problems. How, for one thing, do they relate in any systematic fashion to their consequence(s)?



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Austin did not pretend to know. They lack the neater lines of a convention, which would presumably give rise to a range of conventional responses. And these responses could then be evaluated according to the three consequences given above. Lacking this, the perlocutionary effects of an utterance might seem to be nothing less than a “chance by-product of our utterances: depending on the audience and perhaps the time or place or other circumstances, the same utterance might generate very different perlocutions.”59 And the production of a perlocutionary effect need not even require a locutionary act.60 You can threaten someone with words and get your way; but you can also wave a big stick (HDTW, 119). The perlocutionary valence of any speech act, then, balances perilously, unsystematically, over its consequences. For clearly any, or almost any, perlocutionary 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). (HDTW, 110)

Cavell sees three reasons why Austin would say so little about the perlocutionary. First, Austin is after a list of explicit performative verbs, which, after the revision of his starting presumptions, becomes a list of “illocutionary forces of an utterance.” Second, Austin steadfastly avoids what Cavell calls the “passional side of speech” (PDAT, 170). And third, as we have seen, the perlocutionary does not easily stand apart from its consequences. The illocutionary force requires both intention and context, and submits nicely to being systematically revealed in his six conditions. But how the perlocutionary works is less obvious. You can say “I promise you,” but you do not say, “I convince you, I alarm you.” “The illocutionary act is, we might say, built into the verb that names it” (PDAT, 172). This does not apply to the perlocutionary. If to say “I alarm you” actually was to alarm you, “I would be exercising some hypnotic or other ray-like power over you, you would have lost your freedom in responding to my speech” (PDAT, 172). If it provokes a sequel, as Austin points out, any statement can do that just as well. Rather than a hindrance, though, Cavell sees this as an opening. We may say: Perlocutionary acts make room for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity, unequally distributed capacities among the species. Illocutionary acts do not in general make such room—I do not, except in special circumstances, wonder how I might make a promise or a gift, or apologize, or render a verdict. But to persuade you may well take considerable thought, to insinuate as much as to console may require tact, to seduce or to confuse you make take talent. Further, that perlocutionary-like effects—for example, stopping you in your tracks, embarrassing you or humiliating you—are readily, sometimes more effectively achievable without saying anything, indicates that the urgency of passion is expressed before and after words.

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Passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes. (PDAT, 173)

Cavell here proposes a rhetoric of passionate utterance. Mortally ashamed at the mere possibility of exposure, Lear adamantly refused the demands made upon his singular body. The whole point of that opening illocutionary charade—the division of his kingdom according to the pronouncements of his daughters’ love for him—had been an attempt to avoid exactly this sort of exposure. In this light Lear sought to convert his relationship with his daughters into something controlled by a grandiose illocutionary utterance, just as the skeptic would go on without criterial sanction for the projection of a concept. At first it appears to work. At least with the two older daughters, there appears to be “uptake.” Yet the meaning is not secured by any convention—none exists—but only because his two older daughters happen to be cunning enough to go along with this make-believe illocutionary utterance—in which something is done simply through the saying of it. Of course, Cordelia does not pretend. So much for Lear’s great plan. The tragedy that follows might be seen as an exploration of the perlocutionary shockwaves sent out from the very quiet inaugural cataclysm brought about by her saying (the word) nothing. But all that also could be derived from the old man’s inability abide the legibility of his own body. Which is to say, put into these special terms: Lear’s inability to tolerate the uncontrollable perlocutionary effect of the passionate utterance that (for that very reason) he never directed to his most-beloved daughter (at least not while she was alive). Wishing above all to hide, Lear had to forgo the anything like a passionate utterance, which includes the “expressive side of speech.” For all his admiration of his mentor, Cavell finds Austin rather ambivalent when it comes to the emotions.61 Cavell’s intention is “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.”62 Cavell’s extension of the perlocutionary consists of the articulation of passionate utterances. They are not primarily meant to inform, but they do await response. And in general, Cavell says, we do have a fairly good idea what the response will be. By this we mean, to put it minimally, that we have expectations; sometimes we are surprised, sometimes not. “To know what perlocutionary acts I am liable for ‘bringing off ’ is part of knowing what I am doing and saying, or am capable of knowing and saying” (PDAT, 174). But who can say for sure how the other will react? If the perlocutionary effects cannot be completely known beforehand, they are, for the most part, no great mystery. Yet even here we may have surprises in store—and these, of course, we would want to have explained. The picture of language Cavell is recommending to philosophical interest, then, is one “designed to work on the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others coevally with its design in revealing our desires to others and to ourselves” (PDAT, 186).63



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If I could not rationally expect, by variously expressing myself to you, to have the effect of alarming you or reassuring you, of offending you 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. (PDAT, 172)

A passionate utterance singles out the other, makes a claim upon them, stakes a future together. Cavell adds that the party thus singled out can refuse—indeed, a refusal may even become “part of the performance” (PDAT, 183). The ragged edges of the perlocutionary act—the difficulty of drawing a line between it and its consequences—helped exclude it from Austin’s consideration. But Cavell’s passionate exchange generally does suggest a demarcation of sorts, because it resolutely holds itself open to the response of the other, in suspension, whether the utterance is returned in kind or not. From his examples: “Heinrich, what have you done to me?” This is sung by Elisabeth to Tannhaeuser. The sequel: “Elisabeth effects a duet of love with Tannhaeuser; this is happy” (PDAT, 183). But it could easily have been unhappy; if he is not moved to respond in kind, a line might well be drawn, though who knows what may follow. That is of the essence: in the performance of a passionate utterance, there are no rules. “A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire” (PDAT, 185).64

9  Expression Machines The position Lear desires, then, is that of the unseen seer: to not be revealed by the human, to be nothing more than a mere pair of eyes—hence the rich seam of imagery concerning sight and seeing, not to mention the ghoulish culmination of Gloucester getting his eyes gouged out. Lear wishes to be the beneficiary of the human without being its debtor. He wishes to read others without himself being legible. In all this Lear shows a consistent first picture understanding of expression. When it comes to the expressiveness of the human body, in other words, Lear, the skeptic, is working with a fairly coherent translation of the plight of the Schopenhauerian poet. Granted, this may sound farfetched. But just as this picture holds that no new aspects are discovered in expression, so the aspects of uncontrollable bodily legibility are nothing more than noise—hence to be excluded. They have as little meaning as the noise of language against which the Schopenhauerian poet had to work in the name of transcendental knowledge. Moreover, this explains why Lear should feel shame not at anything in particular being revealed, but shame instead at the whole brute fact of exposure itself. It is the shame of simply having a body that is legible to others. The lesson—which Lear certainly learned the hard way—has to do with how the self relates to these aspects, whether through denial or acknowledgment.

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To let yourself matter is to acknowledge not merely how it is with you, and hence to acknowledge that you want the other to care, at least to care to know. It is equally to acknowledge that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them. This means allowing yourself to be comprehended, something you can always deny. Not to deny it is, I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of your expressions, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever be of you. (CR, 383)

To a certain cast of mind, then, a preemptive denial of legibility may not seem like such a bad idea. It certainly simplifies matters. If the other cannot be known from expressions—really known—then the same goes for me. My expressions would have no “outside” that escapes me, nor would they recruit new aspects to which I would fail to have access. All that may reassure the skeptic, not least because when we find ourselves in the ordinary and legible to others a certain anxiety emerges: that in my expressions I undergo exposure, uncontrolled revelation, become completely legible in every single quality and gesture. In the first anxiety the expressions are unreliable; well, and what if they are totally unreliable? What if my expressions always exceed my ability to gather them? With all my expressions flying outward, what if I only, as it were, see the occluded backs of them, but everyone else sees squarely from the front? In the latter part of his essay on the passionate utterance, Cavell writes, As I read the later Wittgenstein, as well as Freud, what happens is that they [human beings who have language] have become (always already) victims of expression—readable in every sound and gesture—their 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 virtually, turning ourselves down). (PDAT, 186–187)

It is little coincidence that Cavell here invokes Schopenhauer. Owing to our (as intellect) everyday inability to become the pure knowing subject, enthralled by the will’s alien interest, we continually disperse a static of unmeant “meaning” through our everyday actions and words. We are “condemned” by these expressions because, though they can be comprehended by others and attached to us, they are not controlled and emitted by the (knowing) intellect. Instead, they are treacherously released through the workings of its grand adversary, the will. So almost as a consequence of there being, extremely occasionally, those moments of existential intimacy (as pure knowing subject), for the rest of our lives, in this wasteland, we are on the outside of our expressions, which remain legible to others. As intellect, you might say, we are exiled from our



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bodily expressions just as our real (transcendental) meaning is permanently exiled from our words. So it is the legibility of our willing that Schopenhauer excludes—quite consistently by the way—because it expresses alien interests that cannot be recuperated through acknowledgment. Our unfortunate predicament is all but summed in Cavell’s mention of “victims of expression.” It is no surprise that in this very same passage the human body comes into consideration as an “expression machine”: we become victims of the expressions mechanically thrown off. In the essay “What is the Scandal of Skepticism?” Cavell derives this from Schopenhauer’s account of our lives as willing subjects, “portraying the human body as ‘full of expression.’ ” (PDAT, 143). “It is the idea of the finite human being,” Cavell writes, “as possessed of infinite responsibility—or say of the unending demand for responsiveness, to itself and others (a function of its perpetual expressiveness)” (PDAT, 143).Yet if the expressiveness of the body is propounded but excluded by Schopenhauer— it is legible but meaningless, as it is all about the will and has nothing to do with the intellect—it is taken by Freud as revelatory: our bodies are still these expression machines but now are symptomatic and legible in the expression of pathologies. Just as the noise of language betrays the expression of any transcendental insight, our “bodily structure” continually “betrays” us with its legible noise, making of us “victims of expression.” For those who dare to go a little further in this speculative direction: if we think of private language as a marker, or fantasized endpoint, of the assertive potency of the voice, let the marker of the second potency of the voice be opera. Opera presupposes the impossibility of anything like a private language or indeed any private domain inaccessible to music. Opera presents a world in which the human self is centrifugally broken open, the “inward” or “soul” now as music and costume and gestures and sheer corporal presence on the stage. If a private language rejects the bearing of aspects, opera, on the contrary, registers a world in which human beings are incessantly—inescapably—legible. Not only does opera delight in the confusions, scandals, and imbroglios associated with expression, opera “absolutizes” the condition of being abandoned to our expressions. Hence it should come as no surprise that Cavell, considering bodily expression, should draw examples from opera. What Cavell calls the passionate utterance, then, draws upon the resources of the second potency of the voice. This would be through acknowledging the legible aspects of the body in the expression of desire. (Merely as an experiment, imagine that passage as a therapeutic injunction being given to the transcendental idea—you—about its relation to the words—your body—which would claim to express it. It would be like saying to the transcendental, which always escapes expression: This means allowing yourself to be comprehended in empirical forms.) As we saw in the earlier discussion on Wittgenstein and Shakespeare, the narrower the circle of control, the more the noise and chaos threaten. In the same way, here, in the legibility of bodily expression, the more the skeptic narrows the circle of control, the more the body becomes

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an expression machine—and the more the noise is turned up. Yet, as Lear learned, and at what cost, this is an inescapable dimension of our finitude. If he understood this in the end, Lear had to struggle with the idea that “your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them,” and that your body is “you on earth, all there will ever be of you” (CR, 383). Putting it into the general framework of what has gone before, then, we might say: to make ourselves intelligible in the common terms of our community, we make projections according to our shared criteria (the responsibilities of implication). And making ourselves intelligible requires likewise making our desires intelligible (the rights of desire). Making our desires intelligible in turn relies upon the expressiveness of our human body, our willingness to acknowledge it, and the ability (not to say willingness) of others to apply criteria and read it: “The body is the field of expression of the soul” (CR, 356).

10  The Private Linguist as Transcendental Object The task for Skeptical Man, then, when it comes to the body of the other, would be to establish an absolute connection that does not rely on applying criteria to bodily expressiveness. Hence here too the skeptic is an example of our wish to transcend our finitude. Yet what might be this other? Toward what point, if we exclude the expressions of the body, would the gaze of the skeptic be oriented? Would we not find ourselves tempted to speak of some transcendental (Platonic) Idea-equivalent of the other? Actually, readers of Wittgenstein do not have far to look: this would be the so-called private linguist. Were a private linguist possible—if only theoretically—there would then be a mode of the other cleanly severed from bodily expressiveness. Just as transcendental (Platonic) Ideas exist outside concepts and social forms, so this other, this private linguist, would exist disconnected from all bodily expressiveness. And this, as we will now trace, would accordingly be the point to which the skeptic, motivated with a first picture understanding of bodily expression, would want to connect. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a private language. “I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation.” To do so, a sign, “S,” is written down each time a certain sensation is experienced. But a question arises: how do you know whether each time the sign was being used correctly—that is, in the same way as before? Suppose one day he feels the sensation, he writes “S.” Three weeks later he believes he feels it again. But is it the same? There is “no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right.” The immediate response might be to enforce the connection. “I concentrate my attention on the sensation—and so, as it were, point to it inwardly . . . for in this way I impress on myself that connexion [sic] between the sign and the sensation” (PI, §258). In the case of the wording of the world— naming objects, places, etc.—there is the constraint of attunement. But here



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there seems no way to know whether sense is being made. Whatever he thinks, he will never be able to directly compare a past sensation with the one he is having now. As Wittgenstein says later on: “Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you” (PI, II, 207). In The Claim of Reason Cavell considers the so-called private language argument after a section on our perennial disappointment in expression. Cavell summarizes Wittgenstein’s teaching on that score: “My references to my pain are exactly my expressions of pain itself; and my words refer to my pain just because, or to the extent, that they are (modified) expressions of it” (CR, 342). And it is immediately followed by a short but significant stretch dealing with aspect perception, namely, how the body has to be read. The specific moral of the so-called private language argument is, according to Cavell, “the dependence of reference upon expression in naming our states of consciousness.” Cavell seems less impressed than others by the supposed special focus of these sections. He sees little in them not already dealt with elsewhere, “so that the very frame of this argument suggests to me that it has been miscast” (CR, 343). Many readers, in any case, understand Wittgenstein to be asserting that no such thing as a private language is possible.65 For his part, Cavell points out, “Wittgenstein does not say there can be no private language” (CR, 344). Cavell appears less interested in whether such a private language is really possible than in asking why there should be the impulse to imagine the possibility. It is significant that Wittgenstein asks us, “Could we imagine . . .” such a language? Cavell picks up here the tone “of someone allowing a fantasy to be voiced.” And what fantasy is this? According to Cavell the point “is to release the fantasy expressed in the denial that language is something essentially shared” (CR, 344). Diagnosed with a serious illness, a woman is asked to keep track of the quality and intensity of her pain. She carries around what comes to be called a painbook. This helps her doctors regulate the mixture of painkillers, each for a different facet of the pain and taken in time-release capsules. Whenever the pain increases beyond that threshold, she takes a break-though, a smaller, fastacting dosage of hydromorphone, and duly makes a note of it in her book. If they find she is taking more of these breakthroughs, the dosage of the timereleased capsules—the “screen”—is increased. One morning the woman writes in her painbook: 10:14 am Pain—throbbing, six or seven. Later she would express this simply by writing PT6-7, rating the intensity of the pain on a scale of 1–10. Others might understand, but they need not; she can explain when the doctor visits. She might have used the sign “S,” say, whenever she had a particular pain, or a pain of a particular intensity. As Cavell reads Wittgenstein, “There is nothing wrong with this, so far. There could be lots of reasons for wanting to keep track of this sensation, medical or psychological or spiritual reasons” (CR, 345). But then Wittgenstein says: “I will remark first that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated.”

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Why not? Because the sign has no established use in the language, “so everything has to be taken care of by the definition” (CR, 345). We could define red as the color that occurs to me when I hear the word red, as Wittgenstein does in § 239. But we could not say that “S” is the definition of the sign I write when I get a certain sensation. As far as red is concerned, it already exists in the language world; it is not waiting for a definition. If not a definition, then this sign “S”—but it could be any sort of mark, an asterisk, say—surely has an explanation. Rather than naming anything, it is a “kind of abbreviation” (CR, 346). For whom, anyway, would the definition be informative? Perhaps the “sign’s sheer being there is all that matters; its use is all the meaning it has.” She could explain what this mark is for. But it would be impossible to give anyone “the meaning (or the use) of the sign in such a way that he could use it” (CR, 347). As Stephen Mulhall points out, Wittgenstein’s remark that a definition cannot be formulated might be seen as a prod to the diarist. Why, anyway, would Wittgenstein bother to say the sign is indefinable, “when that feature of it is obvious to all”?66 But this certainly does the trick. Suddenly defensive, the diarist insists he can give himself an ostensive definition. To do so, he impresses upon himself the link between the sign and the sensation—rather as if he was directing his own attention to the sensation. And Wittgenstein responds, But “I impress it on myself ” can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about “right.” (PI, §258)

Does this mean that the woman who writes in her painbook is carrying out an empty exercise? When she makes an entry she merely thinks she is grading them relatively, but in fact her memory could be mistaken.67 Cavell reads the phrase “here we can’t talk about ‘right’” to refer, not retroactively to the writing of “S,” but instead limited to the idea of “impressing the connection on myself.” This urge to impress is itself a philosophical data: why do we want to impress the connection? What was missing—what did we sense was missing—in the first place? Again, the “sign’s sheer being there” is enough. Its use precisely is its meaning. This writing of the “S,” as we have seen, Wittgenstein (according to Cavell) quietly accepts as a coherent practice. The sign itself is enough. The sign is the expression of the sensation. So why, then, do we have this urge to impress the connection? “In each of Wittgenstein’s attempts to realize the fantasy of a private language,” Cavell writes, “a moment arises in which, to get on with the fantasy, the idea, or fact, of the expressiveness of voicing or writing down my experiences has to be overcome” (CR, 348). This extra step, the formulation of the definition, shows the need to get around the expression, which alone is deemed insufficient. There are in



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Cavell’s treatment, then, evidently two interacting strands. First there is the reasonableness of the woman making that sign in her painbook. Both a reason and a use exist for this procedure; the action is not meaningless. And this, says Cavell, Wittgenstein has accepted. In the second strand, however, there is a skeptical unease with this supposed sufficiency of the writing of “S,” and that it could all depend on nothing more than that. And so when in § 270 Wittgenstein imagines that the mark is now correlated with a rise in blood pressure, which is also measured by a manometer, and it no longer matters if our expression is right or not, this comes as an anticlimax. On this Cavell comments, This thing of our “writing ‘S’”, and other things we do and experience no deeper metaphysically than this, is all there is for our confidence in our experiences to go on. And it is enough; it is in principle perfect. But we keep passing over this supposition of our example, as if the incident of writing kept getting mentioned only to fill the image of a diary. But the writing of the “S” just is the expression of S, the sensation. It may, in fact, be the only S-behavior in our repertory. (CR, 350)

The fantasy of a private language, in other words, is preoccupied with the attachment of significance to our expressions. In the first picture of voice, as we saw, expression is a diminished, deceptive dispersal of the transcendental content, in relation to which our words and gestures are to some unavoidable extent inexpressive. With the second picture of the voice, though, new aspects are revealed in expression: the fire i’ the flint shows not till it be struck. This underlies a different anxiety: not that one may mean nothing in one’s expressions, but rather that one may mean too much: the continual and unmanageable babbling of the empirical self, a leaking out through legible aspects the intellect cannot supervise. And both anxieties are present in Cavell’s reading: So the fantasy of a private language, underlying the wish to deny the publicness of language, turns out, so far, to be a fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known; or one in which what I express in beyond my control . . . . Why do we attach significance to any words and deeds, of others or of ourselves? . . . How can anything we say or do count as doodling, be some form or nonsense; and why is all the rest condemned to meaning? (CR, 351)

She winces. She holds her leg. “Does any of that,” the skeptic asks, “get me one bit nearer the pain, the pain itself? And isn’t that what I wanted to know?”68 No, these do not give us, the caregivers, a clear and distinct perception of the pain. “So criteria are disappointing,” the skeptic would conclude. “They do not assure that my words reach all the way to the pain of others” (CR, 351).

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But wait—a clear and distinct perception? Of what—the pain? Since when is such a perception ever broken loose from the human bodily structure? Nothing can satisfy that sort of inquiry. Notice the similarity with the separation of a word’s ideal form from the material form. Likewise what is sought now is the ideal correspondence of this material expression, whatever that would be; to get the first without the mediation of the second, to get around expression made intelligible by shared criteria. But there is no such route.69 Consequently there is, we might feel like saying, something in the room from which the skeptic has excluded himself.70 Meanwhile there is no extra piece of knowledge withheld from him—this is “not an incapacity in human knowing,” but instead “an insufficiency in acknowledging what in my world I think of as beyond me, or my senses.”71 Because of what Cavell is calling the human—our way of reading a body as expressive of a soul—we are, in a real sense, trapped with the pain too. “It is a presence, and yet it is not present to me, so it seems an absence, a void; it affects everything and nothing. Yet I feel called upon to know its presence, if it is there” (CR, 80). For the caregivers it is not just something something faint or provisional, like a rumor, or a preliminary assessment. Such an idea would link urgency with clarity: in which case our response would hinge on the intensity of our certainty rather than the intensity of her pain.

11  The Call of the Other Maybe it might be put this way: in ordinary life the presence of pain was not just not in question; the presence of pain was overwhelming. And this has to do, again, with the way we are “called upon to know its presence” (CR, 80). Four points are worth making about our response to this call. First, when Cavell says we have to acknowledge the pain of others, he is not enjoining us to care about how others are feeling. Rather, he is pointing toward the naturally imperative manner of our response to this call, that our response is grammatically entailed. “In a word I must acknowledge it, otherwise I do not know what ‘(your or his) being in pain’ means. Is” (MWM, 263). Second, the response is through an attitude. Cavell explains this in part by saying that in doing so I take up an “inflection of myself toward others” (CR, 360). In this attitude I express the knowledge that the other has the state being expressed. Can this be proved? Perhaps not, but we do have, according to Wittgenstein, “imponderable evidence” (PI, II, 227). This Cavell reads as saying “I can’t tell you how I know.” Of course this is hardly reassuring for those craving certainty, but at least it will be a familiar frustration. Other parts of our lives share this same requirement for the other to catch on, “to take the next step, unaided by anything more from me save my belief in your readiness to take it” (CR, 358). So we would look in vain for any so-called deep criteria for the application of criteria—which would tell us to apply these criteria to only these sort of objects,



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to a body and not, say, stones or buildings. This is simply what we do. Cavell does not see why everything we do should go no further than our conventions, nor why our conventions should be insulated from the world in which we happen to live. A general fear of tigers may well be conventional, but surely that tigers are dangerous is not irrelevant. Our conventions are “fixed by the nature of human life itself, the human fix itself ” (CR, 110). Thirdly, the application of psychological criteria to the other—this reading of the body—may give us knowledge, but it does not give us certainty. On this point Cavell disagrees with what he calls the Malcolm-Albritton view of criteria, which holds that Wittgenstein’s criteria “are meant to establish the existence of something with certainty.” As ever, our criteria disappoint (CR, 37).72 Fourthly, criteria are not fixed into the structure of the world; criteria are human conventions. Our ability to see an aspect, to see the body of the other as expressive of their soul, is in no sense guaranteed. It is not that the other becomes hidden or obscured. Instead, “The suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this darkness upon the other” (CR, 368).73 Our references to the other’s pain, then, are “responses to another’s expressions of (or inability to express) his or her pain” (CR, 342). As such the human is constantly in danger of being closed, lost, of vanishing altogether—all it takes is for someone to come along and decide they cannot see it. “If I stopped projecting,” Cavell writes, “I would no longer take anything to be human, or rather I would see no radical difference between humans and other things . . . . Projection already puts a seam into human experience” (CR, 425).74 The seam, in other words, is not there unless it is “put” there. But there is some ambiguity. Cavell says it simply has to do with “seeing.” According to this account, there is no extra step. The soul, Cavell writes, “is there to be seen . . . my relation to the other’s soul is as immediate as to an object of sight” (CR, 368). Elsewhere, however, Cavell writes: Imagination is called for, faced with the other, when I have to take the facts in, realize the significance of what is going on, make the behavior real for myself, make a connection . . . .“Seeing something as something” is what Wittgenstein calls “interpretation.” (CR, 354)

To what extent, though, is an object of sight also an object of interpretation? Stephen Mulhall has criticized Cavell for this. Not only does it conflict with Cavell’s supposedly equivalent claim that there is no extra step, but Mulhall argues further that, for Wittgenstein, interpretation is not the same as seeing as. It is, he writes, “one of the fundamental aims of Wittgenstein’s treatment of aspect perception to show that aspect dawning and continuous aspect perception are a matter of seeing rather than interpretation.”75 This ambiguity only increases when Cavell talks of aspect-blindness. What blinds me to the other, then, “is not the other’s body but my incapacity or unwillingness to interpret it accurately, to draw the right connections” (CR, 368). But which is it—an incapacity or an

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unwillingness? Each presents a different picture of the skeptic: if the first, this is a natural fault; if the second, willful blindness.76 Trouble begins when he seeks to answer the call without the application of criteria, to get around expression.77 So the skeptic might say we have no reason to treat behavior as expressive of mind. Is he wrong? Actually, Cavell is not so sure. The skeptic may be onto something. “For what it pictures is the fact that behavior is expressive of mind; and this is not something we know, but a way we treat ‘behavior’” (MWM, 262). To this the skeptic says: why do we so much as imagine that expressions are of a soul? What is it that we go on when we treat expressions in that way? And this much Cavell will endorse—this is certainly worth investigating. We cannot reach a position which would eliminate the possibility of either the self or the other being unknown. But when the skeptic says, in other moods, that we only may know another’s mind by his actions, this is a different story altogether. Why, Cavell asks, should philosophy insist on the significance of “only” here? “Only” here suggests some disappointment with my behavior as a route of what is going on in me, our route faute de mieux—not a disappointment with this or that piece of my behavior, but with behavior as such, as if my body stands in the way of your knowledge of my mind . . . [Wittgenstein’s idea] I might say, is that this philosophical use of “only” . . . is not merely a sign that we, say, underestimate the role of the body and its behavior, but that we falsify it, I might even say we falsify the body: in philosophizing we turn the body into an impenetrable integument. (IQO, 163)78

Cavell’s point is that if you refuse to see a body as expressive of a soul you cannot make it up through some other means. There is no other route; “the slack of acknowledgement can never be taken up by knowledge” (CR, 338; but originally from MWM, 347). Yet if we could reach such a position, the human would not be something that, in each moment, is either threatened or sustained by us. Like the other, we would be impaled on their pain, perhaps necessarily impaled upon everyone’s pain. Of course, we have ways of presiding over our mutual separation in the human, namely by applying criteria.79 But it is this type of seeing that the skeptic refuses, and consequently “scoops mind out of [expressive behavior]” (MWM, 262). “Skepticism meant to find the other, search others out with certainty. Instead it closes them out” (CR, 84). It closes them out because of the response to the call. In life there are many cases where we fail to know a piece of information, cases involving “a blank,” missing data. But information is not what the skeptic lacks; that is not his failure. “A ‘failure to acknowledge’ is the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness. Spiritual emptiness is not a blank” (MWM, 264). The projection, then, is assumed to be accidental and unreliable: the skeptic wants to get at “the sensation apart from its expression, [to] get past the merely outward expression, which blocks our vision as it were” (CR, 341).



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If we hope to get closer still, then, it will not be through the expressions. As we can get closer to the person on the other end of a telephone, we need to get past the body, here merely the expressive medium. We want a direct connection with what is beneath this obscuring flesh. This could very well be the same skeptic who before craved an immediate knowing relation to the world from the sealed-off position. Similarly, he now wishes to establish an immediate relation to the other without having to rely on expression. “The reason I want to wedge in language is that our working knowledge of one another’s (inner) lives can reach no further than our (outward) expressions, and we have cause to be disappointed in these expressions” (CR, 341). Here the skeptical drive is concisely stated: an inner life can reach no further than mere expressions. The next step, accordingly, is to “penetrate his behavior with my reference to his sensations, in order to reach the same spot his reference permits him to occupy before, so to speak, the sensation gets expressed” (CR, 342). Which is nothing other than to achieve the position of the voice before expression. The voice—her voice—ought then to be rescued, uncontaminated by expression, accosted in prelapsarian impulse before its setting forth. Then, at last, according to our picture, we are in a position so utterly intimate certainty could not but follow. It is precisely a feature of the skeptic’s predicament that the question is persistently posed as one of connection. Because the skeptic’s problem, in responding to the call by seeking a deeper relation, is equally a refusal to tolerate separation, that the finite other, “this creature among all the creatures of the earth similar to me, is also, or rather is therefore, absolutely different, separate from me.” The problem of the existence of the other, then, is “not establishing connection with the other, but of achieving, or suffering, separation from the other, individuation with respect to the one upon whom my nature is staked” (PDAT, 146).

12  The Caregivers Whether reanimating the world or seeing the claims on our compassion right before us, it is up to us to read, to project, to make connections. As talkers, ours is the power to grant or to deny the human. The body of the other might writhe and call out, and in doing so give us every reason to apply certain concepts. In the end, though, we have to take an interest. Un-tune that string and, look, the body of the other (of Desdemona, of Hermione) turns into alabaster or into stone. By registering the givenness of being, we may recall, Desmond’s passio essendi helped underline the lack of anything similar in Cavell. Both the reanimation of the world and the response to the call of the other would be, to stay with Desmond’s terms, an endeavor squarely in the domain of the conatus essendi. The bestowal of acknowledgment upon the other would be the sovereign task of this upright neurotic animal capable of speech. And in this, even if it may

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look extreme—and perhaps there in particular—Cavell is only remaining consistent. As we said earlier, his readiness to embrace a more freewheeling Emersonian alien otherness is constrained if not undermined by his staunchly held Wittgensteinian commitments: we know an object or another through the application of the shared criteria into which we are initiated. Hence the difficult-to-exaggerate significance of the going on. And hence, here again, the question of the otherness of the other. For instance, just how much of what Timothy Gould called the “specific otherness of the other” is accessible to a subject who at the same time so consequently determines the very presence of this other? Such an otherness need not be some extreme traumatic breakthrough as, for instance, in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed, this would remain a valid concern even in the acknowledgment of new aspects brought forth by the workings of the receptive potency. How other might it ever have scope to become? As Desmond puts it, “The conatus becomes a limitless self-mediation tending to take over from, to make over, all intermediations with other-being.”80 Wittgensteinian shared criteria would then amount to a social conatus, which would give expression to the social endeavor-to-be, drawing us out of “singular intimacy.” But the danger, Desmond writes, is that “the social erotics of the conatus that makes servile its own passio, to the closing down of received and receiving porosity that keeps us open, individually and socially, to the more original sources of coming to be.”81 For Cavell projection is essential. For Desmond, instead, it is porosity— porosity to the otherness of the passio which “surges and lives more through its own determination of its participation in the primal affirmation of being.”82 Can we say the Cavellian subject is porous? Porous to what? Is there anything in Cavell like these “more original sources of coming to be”? One might be tempted to imagine some zone of susceptibility below, as it were, the water-line of applied criteria, one through which otherness can intrude, still remaining other. But the criterial hull is watertight. And as we will see, the accrual of new aspects described in what Cavell calls Emersonian Perfectionism is only drawing larger circles, only a self gaining a new aspect on itself. The Cavellian subject, then, is many things. Though it is receptive, and though, as we will also see, it is capable of transcendence, in the important metaphysical sense Desmond is using the word: no, the Cavellian subject is not porous. This may help explain his associations with what Desmond calls the idiocy of being. For Wittgenstein and Cavell, Jungle Man suffered a depravation that was nothing short of catastrophic. Criteria, after all, are “necessary before the identification or knowledge of an object” (CR, 17). And without criteria, where does that leave the poor fellow? These pathos can be appreciated too in Cavell’s shock that Kripke would require the prompt isolation of any child who failed to get the knack of going on. Separated out and trapped in the idiotic, which here is liable to be associated with silence, asphyxiation, or madness. For Desmond, on the other hand, the idiotic would remain, even for a conceptual initiate,



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a permanent dimension of being, not sterile and empty, but rich with overdetermination. Receptivity without porosity would also keep the emphasis on seeing the point. In Cavell’s description of the automaton, for instance, a mechanical creation lures forth concepts proper to a living being only to confound them there: for this thing is not alive at all (CR, 403). But consider the caregivers coping with the progress of the disease. Until now they had no difficulty seeing her body as the field of expression of her soul. If it was a surprise for Cavell to peer at the mechanical innards of the automaton, unsure how to apply concepts to this person/thing, his unease could hardly be too different from that of the caregivers presented with scan after scan (dark spots on gray, spectral backgrounds) and reports (with endless numbers, values, percentages). How to apply concepts of the person they know to these? Now they have to work to make the connection, make it real for themselves. On the operating table she is cut open. Parts of her body are removed. She is sown up again. Through her veins run other people’s blood. There are moments of almost unendurable poignancy, when the presence of the soul flares in the presence of the body: this body is hers, it is her on earth, all there ever will be of her.83 But then her soul grows less intact with her body. Being human is the power to grant being human. Something about flesh and blood elicits this grant from us, and something about flesh and blood can also repel it. How far can we maintain fellow-feeling, let alone love, in the face of a failure of intactness, of a deformation of the body or of the psyche? (CR, 398)

Here it is neither unwillingness nor incapacity that blots out the other. These caregivers have no distorting skeptical ambition for absolutes. Nor is it the jealous rage of an Othello, nor the manic, destructive suspicions of a Leontes. Cavell suggests that there is something about “flesh and blood” that can repel the grant of the human. Is this what is happening to the caregivers? Concepts are losing their grip. More exactly, the concept of her is losing intactness with this body. For the romantics the wind-blown coal flared or banked according the quality of one’s interest. Now it is as if the soul of the other has become a wind-blown-coal: breathed upon by some mysterious wind, the soul flares up within this body and then, a moment later, as the wind fades, so the body again darkens into integument. But is it kindled according to the interest of the caregivers? They want nothing more than for this body to remain the home of the concepts they associate with her. It seems fair to say: if the skeptic repudiates shared criteria, the caregivers, empowered to grant the human, have their criteria repudiated. These would be, one supposes, the deformations of the body Cavell mentions. They are certainly trying to see the person there, trying to see the soul in this field of expression.

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Visitors, meanwhile, are shocked by the wasted figure with sunken, glassy, staring eyes. Her murmured words scatter before the completion of a thought. One evening, when the caregivers wake her for the evening pills, the voice of a brash interloper fills the room. Why, the voice demands, have they chained to the bed? If they plan on killing her, they should get it over with! In character and accent there is no resemblance to the woman they knew. But if this is not her— her on earth, all there will ever be of her—then where is she? The caregivers may sense that she has retreated below this interruption at the surface. Now she, like the skeptic’s other, is being hidden, her voice behind this voice, inside this body, a point toward which our thoughts remain tenaciously fixed. And this is only confirmed when, hours later, after the anti-psychotic medication has had its effect, she is again, in a few mumbled words, or the pressing of a hand, unmistakably present, there. No less than the skeptic, then, the caregivers undergo the repudiation of categories which organize their experience of the world. But in this case they have not repudiated shared criteria; one is tempted to say that the world has. And so this was for them no more a moral failure than it was for Charles Bovary, when, standing over his dead wife, “slowly, with fingertips, his heart trembling, he lifted the veil” and “gave a cry of horror… .”84

Part Four COMMON MAN

1  The Quiet Crisis Going on, struggling under the pressure of sense itself, we say the words that are called for, and some will be projections, and these might be natural or unnatural, or repudiate our criteria, or enlarge it, or then again perhaps do neither. Projections, then, are part of this endeavor to make the self intelligible. So much was covered in the exploration of Jungle Man and his initiation into the shared criteria of his community. If there is no external guarantor, failure is by definition a possibility in every conceptual performance. But it is really no more than this—people talking about their world, saying how it is with them— that accounts for the distinctions present in our shared criteria. The question now, as we turn to Common Man, becomes how we inherit these distinctions already present in our language. “The most essential thing about language,” Cora Diamond writes, “is that it is not fixed [as rules]. Learning to use a term is coming into life with that term, whose possibilities are to a great extent to be made.” She continues, “Knowing the life with the term, one can go on, in ways that perhaps no one else would, expecting that others will follow what one has said.”1 This inheriting, this “coming to life” with a term, suggests an intimate linkage between the how (we go on, make projections) and the who (is going on, making themselves intelligible). As we saw earlier, Cavell diagnosed Kripke’s as a vertiginous gambit to let language and community checking take care of meaning, as if to completely remove the self from the picture. Yet to take over the responsibility of meaning, rules would all but take over the self ’s imperative to make itself intelligible. The question is whether criteria are better seen as a system of rules or as a trellis of possibility. This image has depth: the trellis does nothing active, nothing coercive, and is of use to the plant solely by virtue of exigencies within the plant itself, expressed initially in the testing offshoot. Grappling, it raises itself into the light, out of the spiraling mess in the shade. Rules, in this case, would amount to the trellis twisting around a slack, utterly indifferent bean-plant, heaving it up through its own inherent energies and interest.

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We are, if only in this connection, no farther ahead with Mulhall’s conceptual framework or Putnam’s attunement. Whether Mulhall is right that intelligibility depends upon the normativity present in some body of rules or grammatical framework, or whether Putnam is correct that our attunements are the “preconditions of [the] intelligibility of our utterances”—in either case our utterances do not, no matter how magnificently intelligible, require that we mean our words. The fact that everyone goes on intelligibly is no guarantee that even a single person means a word they say. I am arguing, in other words, that a fuller account needs to link this with what is gestured toward when Affeldt writes that “If I am to speak intelligibly I must articulate my point or position,” and explicitly called onto stage when Mulhall mentions Cavell’s concept of the voice. Once we have included this other dimension, the role of our attunements in how we go on could well be seen in a different light. That most of us do not mean our words, though we talk all the time, is an important critique made by Thoreau and Emerson—and of course, in different terms, by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Hence the limitation of Putnam’s claim is that it only accounts for mere intelligibility; the problem of, say, Jungle Man. Yes, thanks to attunement, he can go on, but for the sake of what? What is he doing with his words? What are they for? Mere intelligibility? Whether it is attunement or rules which allow us to go on—are you meaning every word? Do your words reveal your life? Here we transition to the quiet crisis of Common Man. Like Skeptical Man, his crisis concerns shared criteria and its relation to the potencies of the voice. Unlike Skeptical Man, however, Common Man suffers from a defect of the receptive potency: earlier we described him as a criterial centrophilliac. He repeats exactly—nothing more, nothing less—what we say when. Perhaps we might call this a counterfeit receptivity. If Skeptical Man came to grief attempting a grand conversion of the ordinary (the between) into a knowable relation, Common Man’s conversion, by contrast, is of the texture and heft of his own life, which shared criteria happen to hold in aversion, and which he alltoo-readily sacrifices. Common Man’s failure to mean his words is not because in going on he pulls away from shared criteria (like Skeptical Man). On the contrary, it is because he cowers within that very same criteria. And the effect of this cowering, according to Cavell, is nothing less than catastrophic.

2  Emerson and the Initializing Step “Man is timid and apologetic,” Emerson writes. “He is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass, of the blowing rose . . . they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”2 Cavell hears a direct reference to Descartes’s Second Meditation, which has that “I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time I pronounce or conceive it in my mind” (TE, 85). Whether Descartes uses this as a first premise, or as a sort of special performance, what is important is that,



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if you say “I exist,” it must be true for you. But what—and this is Emerson’s approach—if you do not say it? What happens then? This is especially relevant given the implication in Descartes’s text that, if you ceased to think, you would cease to exist. “For it might perhaps happen, if I totally ceased thinking, that I would at the same time completely cease to be.”3 This does not demonstrate that thinking brings about existence; the point is just that you would not know for sure. The cogito, then, is only “half the battle.” This implies that being a self requires an initializing step, the actual thinking of the cogito. If and only if I think, then I exist; otherwise I do not exist. And this not existing, Cavell adds, summons the specter of skepticism in which one merely “haunts the world” (TE, 86). As a result, the answer becomes: “I am a being who to exist must say I exist, or must acknowledge my existence—claim it, stake it, enact it” (TE, 87). Being human is a perpetual task. There is, in each moment, the unceasing strain of possibility, the perpetual burden of revealing our uncreated life in the matrix of our community’s shared criteria. The uncreated life, our “individual possibility,” is hidden by conformity. Cavell finds in Emerson a view of the self which distinguishes between actions and thoughts that merely happen to be ours, and others of a let us say more integral character. Cavell admits this whole “problematic of enacting one’s existence skirts the edge of metaphysical nonsense.” In what sense can my thoughts or words not be mine? To whom otherwise would they belong? Yet that is what Emerson challenges us to imagine—that we are, in some way, “worked from inside or outside” (TE, 88). Humankind, as Emerson judges it, represents “a scene of incessant heteronomy, looking solely to borrow or steal thoughts for private interest and the approval of others; in a word, a world of conformity, depersonalization, philistinism, simulation, exteriority” (CW, 217). At the farthest possible end of this spectrum would be the position occupied by Common Man, who eagerly surrenders the intimated texture of his own life for the ease of conceptual generalities. Let him stand for this human possibility. His every action is heteronomous.4 Approvingly Cavell quotes Mill: “Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of . . . until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved.”5 What this implies is that if I do not perform the cogito—claim it, stake it—my life is not really mine. People have so conformed to usages that, as Emerson has famously said: “Every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to set them right.”6 Not one particular word is out of place. It is not a question of precision. If someone called a table a chair, or mistook seagulls for butterflies, it would be easy to set them right. But not them, not these masters of conformity—they would not make such mistakes. For they move among us in seditious anonymity. One is tempted to say of Common Man—this mascot for a liability with which every speaker has to contend—that words come first is his personal tragedy. And in this sense his words approximate the creepy utterances of a lifelike automaton. You just do not know where those words are coming

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from. A robot, we assume, does not mean words like we do, if it means anything at all. A robot is not making its subjectivity intelligible. And an imposter at least has a hidden origin for his or her deceptive words. But the Common Man’s incredible feat is to not even be present there. Not even at the origin of his words, the scene of going on. He is worn smooth by attunement’s conformist energies. Conformity, then, is this threat to our “individual existence, to individuation.” To make sense of this turn [the becoming of the self], Emerson needs a view of the world, a perspective on its falleness, in which the uncreatedness of the individual manifests itself, in which human life appears as the individual’s failure at self-creation, as a continual loss of individual possibility in the face of some overpowering competitor. This is to say that, if my gloss of Emerson’s reading of Descartes is right, the cogito’s need arises at particular historical moments in the life of the individual and in the life of the culture. (TE, 89)

Before the blowing rose and the blade of grass we are “ashamed.” Cavell detects an instability that makes this transitional: once we are ashamed, we can then become ashamed of our shame. That we are separate from nature, that the rose in its simplicity chides us, need not necessarily imply the romantic pathos of nature closing out self-consciousness. This would make the division irreparable. If we can do nothing—if the failure is structural and not ours—why should we feel shame? But Cavell hears Emerson implying that the separation has instead to do with how we apologetically peep and cower our way through lives of “unnecessary acquiescence” (TE, 90). Self-consciousness, in other words, is not what we usually think it is. “It, or our view of it, is itself a function of poor posture.” The man crushed by conformity has bad posture. He does not stand. He skulks; he slouches. Rather than saying something, “what we do instead is . . . quote” (TE, 91). Emerson claims that man nowadays “dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘“I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.” And in this there is, Cavell points out, a certain irony: precisely when Emerson makes the critique that people constantly quote, he himself apparently quotes the cogito of Descartes. Cavell has no doubt this is intentional. If the words of his countrymen grate with “chagrin,” there are, for all that, “no other words to say than the words everyone is saying.” The revolution Emerson wants, according to Cavell, requires a new relation between words and life. Hence each of the words at Emerson’s disposal is one that he has found used in a tone or place or out of some inattentiveness or meanness that requires unswerving examination. His language is hence in continual struggle with itself, as if he is having to translate, in his American idiom, English into English. (CW, 8)

The life of a human being, then, requires an extra step: this is the authoring of oneself. Authoring has two inflections. The first links authorship to the cogito.



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As God authors us for Descartes, so we must author ourselves.7 And this is not a single bold act, but a “continuing task, not a property, a task in which the goal, or the product of the process, is not a state of being but a moment of change, say of becoming—a transience of being, a being of transience” (TE, 89). Emerson’s reading of the cogito (in Cavell’s reading) suggests that there is an uncreated part of the self, a part that it is up to you to create, to author.8 One significant consequence is that it questions any conception of the self that is not essentially at stake in the inheritance of words. Rather than anchored by some fixed content, secure in some kernel or core, the self is constituted precisely in the act of going on. Taken seriously, this would have to mean: if we fail to go on, we fail to exist. “The philosophical self,” Cary Wolfe writes, “is thus condemned not to ‘founding’ its existence by reference to traditional philosophical categories [as in a transcendental core], but rather to . . . ‘finding’ . . . ‘the task of onwardness.’”9 Words, however, come before we do. Consequently, “language is an inheritance” (TE, 92).10 For Kant, the twelve concepts of the understanding are inherent. Which implies: we have no choice, qua rational being, how we could otherwise configure the sensuous manifold. Such a suggestion would be a Kantian absurdity. Instead, in the depths of the soul this mysterious business is quietly conducted as the formal a priori conditions of possible experience. As we have seen, however, Wittgensteinian criteria are not inherent a priori but at large in society. Conceptual performances are made possible by initiation in social practices, emblemized in the scene of instruction. Our attunement becomes a precondition for intelligibility as such. Now, though, this very same attunement puts at risk, not intelligibility, but rather the specific texture of the life of the individual speaker. Words have meanings which preexist the human subject. Instead of the deduction of the twelve Kantian categories, now every single word in the language requires a discovery of the conditions of employment. For Kant the unity of the self (the transcendental unity of apperception) was a correlate of the unity of the representations of the world under the twelve categories. But without these inherent categories, and without any metaphysical kernel, the self seems to tumble into language—or more precisely, right into the scene of going on. These inherited terms, as it were, “structure that emptiness.”11 This self that Emerson describes, then, according to David Greenham, “is drawn neither from a limited number of a priori concepts (Kant) nor from a pattern observed in discrete phenomena (empiricism), but from language itself. It is the self ’s struggle to address itself as itself within the categories, or words, provided for it a priori.”12 Whether I actually speak or merely quote amounts in this context to asking “whether I do or do not exist as a human being.” Your existence needs to be staked, acknowledged, and this is through making yourself intelligible, and “what this comes to is the inheriting of language, an owning of words, which does not remove them from circulation but rather returns them, as to life.”13

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3  Thoreau, the Mother Tongue, the Father Tongue Cavell finds Thoreau to be confronting this very problem. Walden is in simple terms an account of Thoreau’s residence on Walden Pond, two years conflated into one. He builds a shack. He plants beans. He observes the pond, the animals, and the forest in the changing seasons. While this might merely seem a recipe for nature writing, Cavell understands Walden to be nothing less than a work of philosophy (SW, 91). And this is a work of philosophy that gives an account of a crisis. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Cavell reads Thoreau to mean that “we” Americans suffer from “a want of expression” (SW, 55). Surely this is hinted by the adjective quiet. Because the mass of men suffer from “a want of expression,” they suffer likewise from a craving of reality (SW, 70). The world is lost to them. Recovering the world, renewing our intimacy with our words, requires a new relationship with language. Bringing this about is Thoreau’s task. “The return of a word requires the recovery of its object for us” (SW, 63). Exactly as in Emerson’s diagnosis, this has to do with the intersection of the historical and individual in the act of inheriting. Thoreau’s venturing into the woods—on the fourth of July—reenacts the first movement by Americans into the wilderness (SW, 8). Nothing might seem more central to the idea of America than this original migration, the primal assertion of founding a new place. In this, no doubt, there is great pathos. But it risks fixing a contradiction right into the heart of America: if it seeks renewal, any structures, any patterns or routines, anything built, any “city on a hill,” gains unavoidably the savor of a lost opportunity. How after all could renewal come to an end? Given the presence of widespread “quiet desperation,” the mere idea, not to say its constant platitudinous repetition, according to Mulhall, “mocks [the people’s] potential and constitute[s] a parody of the promise of renewal upon which their nation was founded” (SC, 250). But this pressure, Cavell says, is present in the text in Thoreau’s “mood of at once absolute hope and yet of absolute defeat, his own and his nation’s” (SW, 9). The pressure is also present in a more general way. With the theme of renewal Thoreau will resolutely keep faith, as we shall see. Yet in his very call for renewal, Thoreau inescapably duplicates the previous callers before him. The more Thoreau tries to distance himself from the Puritan colonization, the more he identifies with them, “not only in their wild hopes, but in their wild denunciations of their betrayals of those hopes” (SW, 10).14 But who is he—this itinerant teacher, this one-time employee of a pencil factory—to rebuke his community? What authorizes his “wild denunciations”? Unabashed and stimulating impertinence make up a good portion of Thoreau’s unusual power. Cavell takes him at more than his word, and reads Walden in the register of prophecy and scripture. “This writer is writing a sacred text. This commits him, from a religious point of view, to claim that its words are revealed, received, and not merely mused” (SW, 14).15 Like Jeremiah, like Ezekiel, Thoreau suffers the ambiguities of being singled out with a message. This is



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present in four ways. First, he shares the mood swings “between lamentation and hope.” Second, they are apt to confuse their words with God’s. Third, they have a remorseless “mandate to create wretchedness and nervousness.” Fourth, they constantly repeat themselves. But Thoreau’s position is still more ambiguous. Unlike Jeremiah and Ezekiel, he writes in a post-prophetic age. They have already come, in blazing-eyed exasperation, and gone. Those days are over; “the law has been fulfilled” (SW, 19). No one, especially not in New England, expects any further prophecy. And yet the task of Walden is to wake us up. What if we think we have already been told? What if all the prophets have spoken, and still the words are not hearkened to? “There were prophets, but there is no Zion; knowing that, Jesus fulfilled them, but the kingdom of heaven is not entered into.” What more can be said? Nothing: “There is absolutely no more to be said about them. What is left is the accounting” (SW, 30). And what would this mean? Not a rehash of everyday news, but a very special sort of text, “with each word a warning and a teaching; a deed, with each word an act” (SW, 30). Thoreau’s prophecy, however, depends not so much upon conveying any particular message. Perhaps you could say that people do not need to listen, not in the first instance; they simply need to hear. As long as they lie within earshot, they might be wakened. Thoreau says, “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, [which no one would listen to] but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”16 About this phrase Cavell writes, “The purity of the chanticleer’s prophecy in that he can speak only to waken and to warn; his essential calling is to watch” (SW, 38). Waking up will mean discovering a new relation to language. “Until we can speak again, our lives and our language betray one another” (SW, 34). At night Thoreau as chanticleer would hear his enemy, the foxes, “as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights . . . barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light.”17 It is a condition, in short, “without expression” (SW, 55). We fail to express ourselves—we speak only in our “brutish” mother tongue—and the world is lost. Why? Either we have forgotten how to speak— like Skeptical Man, repudiating our criteria by misguided attempts to speak “absolutely.” Or we have never learned how to go on, not in the father tongue. Thoreau distinguishes along either side of “the memorable interval between the spoken and the written language.” The mother tongue is the first, which we just happen to speak. Anyone with a language already finds words in their mouth. The mother tongue is “a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers” (SW, 15). The father tongue, on the other hand, is a “reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.”18 This represents instead a heightened cultivation of the subject’s expressive powers within the place they find themselves. The father tongue marks the difference between capable parroting and actual speaking; it represents the “second inheritance of

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language.”19 According to Cavell, the father tongue is “precisely a rededication to the inescapable and utterly specific syllables upon which we are already disposed” (SW, 16). As a putative piece of scripture, Walden is written in the father tongue. Such writing needs to be “read as deliberately and reservedly as [it was] written” (SW, 15). Hoeing his bean field becomes a trope for writing.20 And here we have Cavell summarizing Thoreau’s calling as a writer, which amounts to a wisdom of presiding over the expressive act. His [the writer’s] calling depends upon his acceptance of this fact about words, his letting them come to him from their own region, and then taking that occasion for inflecting them one way instead of another then and there, or for refraining from them then and there, as one may inflect the earth toward beans instead of grass, or let it alone, as it is before you are there. (SW, 28)

Unless we speak (or write) with responsibility, unless we mean every word we say, we are not capable of “serious speech” (SW, 33). Only this “reserved and select expression” can carry our convictions and, as a result, restore the world to us. Again we see the two explicitly linked: expression and having access to the world. “[A] fact is not merely an event in the world,” Cavell writes, “but the assertion of an event, the wording of the world.” But meaning every word we say is not to propound a model in which we fix the meaning before we speak. Can you tell beforehand that you will be understood, that you will find your meaning in the words you choose, that a line of wording will “cleave you”? You cannot. “But when it happens, it will feel like the discovery of the a priori, a necessity of language, and of the world, coming to light” (SW, 43). These, then, are the conditions of serious speech. Our words, like our writing, must assume responsibility, both for the meaning of words and for the life to which they give expression. And this we continually fail to do. We must in particular assume the responsibility: (1) that every mark of a language means something in the language, one thing rather than another; that a language is totally, systematically meaningful; (2) that words and their orderings are meant by human beings, that they contain (or conceal) their beliefs, express (or deny) their convictions; and (3) that the saying of something when and as it is said is as significant as the meaning and ordering of the words said. (SW, 33)

4  Maturity and the Mother Tongue Though at first it may not seem like it, Cavell’s endorsement of a mother-father tongue distinction is a daring move. This goes unnoticed because he is also,



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at the same time, doing something else that is rather daring. His linkage of Wittgenstein (and Austin) and the two American Transcendentalists draws attention to what all have in common. But here again, as in the earlier example of Shakespeare, differences may prove as illuminating as commonalities. Of course we could, as we did then, associate Wittgenstein more with what Cavell calls the economy of speech and the control of criteria. Thoreau, on the other hand, more apt to emphasize the other side of the Cavellian schematism, the aesthetics of speech and the expression of desire, might for his part ask: what good is the supposed validity of any expression if it bears no connection with your life? Admittedly, this would contain the tension within this larger Cavellian framework. Yet if we want to appreciate Cavell’s conception of the voice, the differences, too, are important. A good place to start a search for differences is by asking for any comparable mother-father tongue distinction in Wittgenstein. If nothing leaps to mind, this should come as no surprise. Wittgenstein left himself little room after having made the fundamental contrast that of sense and nonsense. The mother tongue, however, is indisputably on the side of sense. We would completely misunderstand what Thoreau is saying here if we mix up the problems of the mother tongue with the problems explored in our study of Jungle Man. This pertains only to native speakers, which the latter definitely is not. According to Naoko Saito, it is exactly “because of [the mother tongue’s] familiarity and intimacy” that “it also entails a potential danger of creating the state of conformity of the self to itself, and to language. Relationship with the father tongue then suggests the necessity of creating distance from within the native.”21 This is what makes Cavell’s move so daring: he is joining the ordinary language philosopher’s what we say when (the invocation of shared criteria) with a second (mother-father tongue) distinction which only takes place within the new space opened up by the first. And what is this space but the actual voice of a criterial master, a voice, in other words, that can effortlessly go on? See the mother tongue, then, as marking the locale to which the tractor beam of what we say when inexorably attracts the uninterested sleeper. And that, as we saw earlier, is the cozy, temperate habitat of Common Man, the scenic clearing in the woods where this strange, perfectly familiar monster wastes his life, skulking and slouching, crumpled under the centrophillic pressure of shared criteria. The father tongue would require both this criterial mastery and, as Duffy suggests, a special kind of interest in the task of making oneself intelligible. For Emerson, as we will see, this amounts to an aversive thinking which allows us to resist the gravitational pull of shared criteria, to shunt back the shoulders and walk upright. Read in this way, it is worth pointing out that Thoreau’s association with gender would not associate mothers, let alone women, with some general expressive deficiency. It is mother and father instead of woman and man, which would suggest the central organizing presence of the child, and so would mark the stages in the life of this child. “Father and mother,” Duffy writes, “will be united and ‘the word . . . [re]born’ in us when by dint of such

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incisiveness and an answering impressionability, we will have to put a stop to our ‘mortal career,’ by which Thoreau, ever the wisecracking wordsmith, means our fatally careening loss of control over, and interest in, the ordinary of our own life and our only world.”22 Curiously, Thoreau seems to represent this lack of interest as a failure of maturation. “Our moulting season,” Thoreau writes, “like that of the fowls, must be a crises in our lives.”23 But it is not as if puberty is brought on as a result of a young person deciding to take an interest in new things. And if birds molt, or if snakes shed their skins, these are not activities but developments that have to do with growth. Yet associating the mother tongue to Common Man would suggest that his being bogged down in conformity does indeed derive from a failure to mature, so much is interest-taking implied in the very idea of what counts as a full-grown human being. Put more colloquially, all this skulking and slouching conformity is just the sort of failure we point to when we chidingly call someone a mama’s boy—a boy, or more likely already a youth, who still avails himself of the securities, conveniences, and blandishments appropriate to an earlier stage of life. In terms of his life with language, he needs to forgo the home-cooking and start doing his own laundry. He has aged; he has not matured. As a contrast on the theme of voice and maturity, consider the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. For him, form is inevitably a degradation. This means that “man cannot express himself because, first of all, only that which is already ordered in us and mature lends itself to expression, and all the rest, that is, our immaturity, is silence.” The kind of silence Gombrowicz refers to is the silence of Jungle Man: dumb, brute, animal incapacity, not the silence of Common Man, who instead suffers from timidity, muteness, aphasia. “Therefore,” he goes on, “form will always be something compromising.”24 As a result, “man is created from the outside, that is, he is inauthentic in essence—he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between his people. His ‘I,’ therefore, is marked for him in that ‘interhumanity’ . . . to be a man is to recite humanity.” In Gomborowicz’s account there are no happy marriages between self and social form. The essential distinction between the formed (maturity) and the unformed (youth) has already been made. So anything like the position of a father tongue would at best be a superfluous refinement of that which has already been ordered within us and hence already cut off from our resources in immaturity. On Gombrowicz Bruno Schultz writes perceptively, Our immaturity (and perhaps our vitality) is tied in a thousand knots, braided with a thousand atavisms to a second-rate suite of forms, to a second-class culture. While under the cover of official forms we honor higher, sublimated values, our real life plays itself out secretly and without higher sanctions in that dirty realm, and the emotional energies located in it are a hundred times more powerful than those the thin layer of officialdom dispenses.25



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If for Gombrowicz the voice likewise gets bogged down, it is not because of any slackening of interest. It is the treachery of form itself. So anyone who tries to answer the intelligibility imperative has in a sense already lost—it is too late, whatever you express has already been ordered—but those who persist must always be oriented toward youth, the immature, the un-formed, where our “real” life is played out before becoming petrified by maturity into “officialdom.” In any immature youth, then, the mature man is always confronted with his superior. Depending on your orientation, the notion of a mother tongue is either a privileged locale positioned close to vital energies, or a rudimentary way station as one moves on toward more sophisticated expressive mastery. Recall that Nietzsche more or less issued a public health alert concerning those for whom music is their “mother tongue,” and “who relate to things almost exclusively via unconscious musical relationships,” as these people find themselves in danger of being “shattered” by any music with too high a concentration of the Dionysian (BT, 100). A comparison with Wittgenstein is particularly striking— one could even call it a reversal: just when Wittgenstein might say we have at last heaved ourselves out of the stormy seas and into the lifeboat—when we have crossed the line from nonsense to sense—for Gombrowicz, exactly then, we have been tossed into the most dangerous waters of all. There is something of this Wittgensteinian reversal in Cavell’s reading of Thoreau and Emerson. The counterweight to the formed (“mature”) self is not some dark, atavistic energy associated with our real self. Instead, it is a dimension of ourselves simply missed, or blotted out through inattention, undiscovered because of a calamitous lack of interest. Looking forward: Cavell will find in Emerson different ways of talking about this still “uncreated” self, this intuition to his (spoken) tuitions. But the important point is that a father tongue would identify a way of going on that, despite the crushing gravitational pressure of words that come before us, remains upright. As Duffy puts it, Cavell finds in Emerson the “insistence that maturation into a voice of one’s own is a singular attainment, one that has to be won over and over ‘in every word, with every breath.’” And yet we inherit our words—we come afterward. So the next question in our exploration of Common Man becomes: how can we originally mean words that are not original?

5  The Inheritance of Words This question goes beyond Emerson and Thoreau and touches on the wider critique made by deconstructive theorists. Cavell’s most significant consideration of it comes in “Counter-Philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,” the second part of A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Here Cavell is mainly concerned with how Jacques Derrida has interpreted John Austin. If we

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might put it into our parlance, however, it also deals with pictures of the voice and what, according to these pictures, might come before language. Whatever this pure origin, Cavell says, for Derrida “it would be a self-presence into whose unity a pure difference would have to arrive. If this self-presence would be, or presents itself (in fantasy) as, the exercise of voice, and there is no such pure origin, then what is there ‘instead,’ closest to pure origin, is the movement of difference.” This Derrida calls the trace, and “this way of placing the origin of trace indicates how writing may be said to come ‘before’ voice, as well as, classically or colloquially, after it” (PP, 66). Cavell then goes on in a significant passage, which we quote in full: Though I did not, I might just possibly then [in The Claim of Reason], as now, have captured in my experience, and theorized, a fantasy of voice that precedes language, that as it were gives itself language. This is not quite the fantasy of acquiring language by stealing it, since that carries the implication of coming late to language—not preceding it—so that there always remains a problem whether language is mine, something that giving myself language should precisely settle . . . . In practice, however, [my italics] the moment I felt that something about ordinary language philosophy was giving me a voice in philosophy, I knew that the something was the return of the voice to philosophy, that asking myself what I say when, letting that matter, presented itself as a defiance of philosophy’s interest in language, as if what philosophy meant by logic demanded, in the name of rationality, the repression of voice (hence of confession, hence of autobiography). (PP, 69)

Cavell first suggests the temptation of theorizing on this “before”—which “as it were gives itself language.” In a second movement, however, the discovery of ordinary language philosophy’s concern for what I say when apparently dispels the temptation. But Cavell’s eschewing of the metaphysical voice raises two questions. First, does a reliance on the resources associated with the second potency of the voice mean, then, that we must be chronically unoriginal? After all, there is no pure intimacy (intention) anchoring our expressions as ours, which might be seen as answering to a sense of our unique, some might say transcendental insight, which we then struggle to put into everyday words. Secondly, what do we make of the “extra” not included in our intentions but ineradicably present in expression? A metaphysical voice has the advantage of distinguishing between the two, what is “mine” and what belongs, say, to empirical language, which can then be excluded as alien. But here there seems no way to protect my contribution. The second question first: what do we make of the “extra” not included in our intentions but ineradicably present in expression? Let us note that this problem emerges out of our picture of what exactly it is to go on. According to the first picture of the voice, for instance, our meaning is a purity asserted into



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an alien medium. Consequently any new aspects unavoidably bound up with the materiality of language threaten to contaminate the original insight. Cavell reads these concerns encoded in Emerson’s words: “Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”26 As a writer or a speaker you expose a flank to the audience. You leave, Cavell says, “your character unguarded” (TE, 57). With every word “you say more than you know you say” (TE, 95). But what is the significance of this? Do we educe that intention is always, ultimately, inevitably, dispersed? For Derrida, it is enough that intention cannot fully saturate the sign.27 That empirical language (material form) resists transcendental insight (ideal form) the Schopenhauerian poet knew to his cost. Yet precisely this other part, this “extra,” outside the ambit of intellectual assertion, is what Nietzsche saw as the genuine artery of expression. Unsurprisingly Emerson is firmly in Nietzsche’s camp (or Nietzsche firmly in Emerson’s). Rather than dooming us to failure, this supposed gap in our mastery, this denial of expressive closure, is nothing less than the artery of genius: God’s private passageway.28 “I find Emerson a further help here,” Cavell writes, commenting on Wallace Stevens, “in his articulation of the intersection of the subjective and the objective, or perhaps of their collusion, where he observes, ‘We but half express ourselves,’ which I understand, however else, to imply that the other half of our expression is in the hands of language, which is never wholly ours.” To Schopenhauer, who incidentally also figured on a half and half split, this was fatally compromising: “Thus [the poet] is only half responsible for all that he says; meter and rhyme must answer for the other half ” (WWR II, 427). But why should that be the case? The question is: how do we relate to what is in “the hands of language,” what is never “wholly ours”? Cavell goes on: I hear a version of this in [Wallace] Stevens where, instead of, as in Emerson, a Genius is standing at the door, Stevens places an Angel, “seen for a moment standing at the door” who announces that “in my sight, you see earth again, cleared of its . . . man-locked set, / And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone.” . . . [In other words, the Angel] who offers to make his sight and his hearing ours can only be awaited and glimpsed, like all that goes unseen, unheard, unimagined, unrealized, unsaid. The poet is the one who knows how to invoke and to await these appearances.29

Derrida and Lacan, Cavell writes elsewhere, “take [that we write beyond ourselves] to imply that what I termed the genius of the text, perhaps I should say its engendering, is fatal to or incompatible with the idea of an author and of an author’s intention” (TE, 96). But Cavell’s response has been to question these exclusions as a skeptical desire to escape the conditions of finitude: “The all but inescapable wish of the human to become inhuman, as if to accept monstrousness

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would be to escape perpetual knowledge of our disappointments, the maze of infinite desires in finite circumstances.”30 An orientation in sympathy with the assertive potency of the voice would be all but inclined to see the intention or transcendental insight—or whatever it is called—unavoidably betrayed by the extra, by language’s other half, what is left “in the hands of language,” this breath emitted by virtue or vice in every moment. Cavell, though, has criticized the supposed necessity of this picture. “If each word had to be sounded for its powers before we entrusted ourselves to it, we would be able to say nothing, never come to the beginning, let alone the end, of a sentence” (CW, 332). In keeping with an approach sympathetic to the receptive potency of the voice, rather than excluding in the name of some purity of intention, the extra can be acknowledged in the name of self-revelation.

6  Chronically Unoriginal Returning now to the first question: does this mean we must be chronically unoriginal, if our words, only ever inherited, always come before us? For Jacques Derrida, the answer might in a sense be yes.31 Derrida’s “reconstructive objective” is the metaphysical voice, locally in Husserl, but more broadly at work in the Western philosophical tradition. The starting point is self-presence as the ground of presence in general. According to Derrida, Husserl believed that the structure of speech was only accessible in its ideality: “the ideality of the sensible form of the signifier (the word) . . . must remain the same and can do so only as an ideality.”32 But where is this ideality? Certainly not in this empirical world. Instead, it is constituted entirely by the possibility of its repetition.33 And this is directly founded upon the notion of being as presence, not only because pure ideality is always that of an ideal “ob-ject” which stands in front of, which is pre-sent before the act of repetition . . . but also because only a temporality determined on the basis of the living present as its source (the now as “source point”) can ensure the purity of ideality, that is, openness for the infinite repeatability of the same.34

In Derrida’s reading, Husserl supposes a division in any communication: effectiveness works like an empirical and exterior cloak to expression, which is the ideal, compact, and indissoluble core. The pure intention—the soul of meaning to the flesh of word—is an expression of presence. “All speech, or rather everything in speech which does not restore the immediate presence of the signified content, is inexpressive.”35 This would be merely the cloak— flesh without spirit. “Pure expression will be the pure active intention (spirit, psyche, life, will) of an act of meaning (Bedeutung) that animates a speech whose content (Beduetung) is present.” Where is it present? Not in nature, but



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only in consciousness. More exactly, it is present to “an ‘inner’ intuition or perception.”36 “The meaning,” Derrida writes, is, present to the self in the life of a present that has not yet gone forth from itself into the world, space, or nature. All these “goings-forth” effectively exile this life of self-presence in indications. We know now that indication, which thus far includes practically the whole surface of language, is the process of death at work in signs.37

But what if it does not go forth: the case of the solitary monologue has the virtue of bracketing out the empirical aspects of language. The ambition here would be to discover an intimacy previous to the exile of indications. Do we, then, in a solitary monologue, at last enjoy an absolute intimacy (self-presence)? “In a monologue words can perform no function of indicating the existence of mental acts, since such indication would there be quite purposeless.” Obviously in a state of unmediated self-presence, words, or signs, which are only ever representative, would literally have no point. “For the acts in question are themselves experienced by us at that very moment.”38 Which again highlights the now as source point: lived experience is immediately self-present, so any sign would be a redundant intrusion of alterity. As Derrida puts it, in phenomenology “temporality has a nondisplaceable center, an eye or living core, the punctuality of the real now.”39 But Husserl seeks to broaden, to stretch, what is here only secured and vindicated as a point, when he includes memory: “If we call perception the act in which all “origination” lies, which constitutes originarily, then primary remembrance is perception.”40 And this, according to Derrida, in allowing the not-now into the scope of the primordial, both allows alterity into the purity of self-presence, and gives duration to the now as source point. “The fact that nonpresence and otherness are internal to presence strikes at the very root for the uselessness of signs in the self-relation [that is, in the case of the solitary monologue].”41 As a result, Derrida argues, Husserl’s division between internal and external breaks down. But collaterally implicated here is a premise of the first picture of the voice, which shares the presumption of an intellectual intimacy with an (extra-linguistic, nonconventional) content, which then, in expression, makes its way into the exile of language. After accusing Husserl of displacing difference into the exteriority of the signifiers, Derrida critiques this notion of an original center, a core of stabilizing self-presenting presence. Derrida’s critique of philosophy, then, has to do with what he sees as its interpretation of writing as an extension of speech. The meaning and contents of the semantic message . . . [are] transmitted, communicated, by different means, more powerful technical mediations, over a far greater distance, but still within a medium that remains fundamentally continuous and self-identical, a homogeneous element through which the

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unity and wholeness of meaning would not be effected in its essence. Any alteration would therefore be accidental.42

But Derrida’s account, according to Cavell, itself relies upon a pathos of impurity derived from precisely this same view of language. For instance, Derrida asks in Signature Event Context: Why is this identity paradoxically the division or dissociation of itself, which will make of this phonic sign a grapheme? Because this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability.43

Cavell wonders at the supposedly self-evident nature of this paradox. What does it assume? The pathos of impurity is in how this phonic sign must as a grapheme suffer division, dissociation, in leaving behind a prior intimacy.44 Cavell sees a parallel with his critique, made in The Claim of Reason, of “the classical empiricists’ identification of the universal in thought as the generalization of a present idea, or word.” The assumption: things are already given in particularity, on the basis of which thought then goes on to generalize. But in what sense can these words (or things) be present, be available to us, prior to their generalization? “Since all things that exist are only particulars,” Locke asks, “how come we by general terms [on which thinking depends]?” (PP, 69. Cavell’s interjection). But, again, in what sense are all things only particulars? And since when do we have access to them qua particularized entities—that is, without the generality of language as a precondition? “This suggests that the effort to explain the generality of words is initiated by a prior step which produces the idea of a word as a ‘particular,’ a step of ‘considering it in itself.’ And what is that like?” (PP, 70, also quoting from CR, 188). A prior, definitive affinity is presumed, one upon which generalized language comes to be rooted to the world. There is a fantasized juncture at which the world (with its particular things) and language (with its venturesome general terms) interpenetrate. It is at the level of the particular that word fastens onto world. Wittgenstein, as we have seen, has argued that there is really no point in seeking any general explanation for the recurrence of words, though there will be every temptation. What is this really to ask, though? We would be after, says Cavell, an explanation of why language refers to the (or a) world and how it is that we share language; and either of these questions are versions of Locke’s question that takes the particularity of existence as the unquestionable thing, or they seek to avoid through metaphysics a recognition that there is no case in which the reference of a word or our sharing of it may not be contested. (PP, 71)

For Locke, then, we enjoy access to particulars before thought goes onto generalize. In a similar way Derrida seems to presume a prior step: some



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(phonic?) unity before its recurrence as a signifying form, previous to iterability. This is the assumption that creates the paradox, that its unity is based upon the division of something prior.45 But Cavell’s point is that there can be no unity before, not without it already being the signifying form. “If the signifying form weren’t recognized to recur, it wouldn’t be a signifying form. It follows that ‘before’ the recurrence (in writing) the occurrence (in sound, in the mouth), whatever particular it was, was not a signifying form. Where is the paradox?” (PP, 71). Denying this prior intimacy is decisive for the critique of the first picture of the voice. In Derrida’s picture, it is this “before” which paradoxically has to fission into meaning. This unity, in its division, gives rise to iterability.46 In Derrida’s picture of a unity undergoing division and exile, where exactly is this gap between my intention and its transfigured iteration? A signal might be sent long distances, might fray, fill with static, and be hard to make out. But our use of words is different. “There is no such distance,” Cavell writes, “between the saying of a word and the understanding or misunderstanding of the word, the one in my mind and the same one in yours. Closeness and remoteness are not measured so.” And here Cavell suggests that, rather than my expressions being stifled, in my expressions I am precariously revealed: “Then the pathos in the identity of my words is perhaps not that they exist beyond control of my intention, in the fact that I do not understand all of my words’ arrivals (why should I? how could I?), but rather that I may be understood by them, in their return to me, too well” (PP, 73).47 For Cavell, then, the words come back in revelation and acknowledgment. Whereas for Derrida the words and the speaker turn their backs on each other.48 Thus if he ever felt tempted to theorize a fantasy of voice that “gives itself language,” in practice Cavell gives this over for letting what we say when matter. The fact that language is always there—that we are fated to it—need not necessarily lead to deconstructionist defeat. This “historical and individual process of inheriting” involves a way of presiding over the scene of going on that allows for self-revelation and the enlargement of criteria. In place of the search for a pure origin, that which “gives itself language,” Cavell chooses to let what we say when matter. It is, then, in this “locale” that “quotation becomes more original than its original” (IQO, 133). Cavell suggests it is a matter of emphasis. One (I take it the deconstructionist emphasis) will see the fact of inheritance as undermining the distinction between quoted words and their originals; since all words are learned, you may say all are imitated or quoted; but then none are quoted, since there are no originals to contrast them with. The other emphasis (represented by Wittgenstein, but also, I take it, by Emerson and Thoreau) will not wish to deny the truth in the first emphasis, but it will see that emphasis as deflecting attention, as rushing too quickly away, from the act or encounter entailed in the historical and individual process of inheriting. (IQO, 131)

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7  Thoreau Attempts to Wake up the Common Man How, then, does Thoreau propose to awaken us—all Common Men to some ineradicable extent—to this individual process of inheriting? According to Cavell, Walden is composed with the design of generating moments of perplexity. The book, in other words, seeks to enact the very difficulties that bring about the crisis—and in doing so aspires to nothing less than to provoke change. The author describes the changing seasons. Butterflies break out of cocoons. Birds renew their plumages. Amid such exquisite alteration man may not change at all, though he will surely age, and just as surely die—which may not, alas, be a conclusion. These lines we saw earlier: “Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives.”49 But it is not brought on from outside. “Nature does not manage it for us” (SW, 42). We must come to it ourselves. Yet there are hindrances to change. To change we have to abandon, release, let go. Match this with the Wittgensteinian destruction of the house of cards— Luftgebäude—the familiar pictures, the usual ways of going on. “The text [Thoreau] is producing,” Cavell writes, “for our conversion, is based, along with some other things, on an equation between morning (as dawning) and mourning (as grieving).” Even if we crave renewal, we remain “appalled by the prospect.” But Cavell sees in Thoreau’s work the positive linkage between “our capacity for loss” and our “chance of ecstasy.” The two run into each other. “For Walden’s writer I understand the morning of mourning, the dawning of grieving, to be the proposed alternative, the only alternative, to what he calls ‘our present constitution,’ which he says must end” (TOS, 53–54).50 The first step in provoking change—conversion, away from the blocked, fixated repetition of shared criteria—is to awaken us to the strangeness of our lives (SW, 53).51 Presupposed here is a notion of self “which is always to be found; fated to be sought, or not; recognized, or not.”52 A new self-relation is what Thoreau is after. “The quest of this book,” Cavell writes of Walden, “is for the recovery of the self, as from an illness” (SW, 79). To know yourself, then, is only partly a question of content, but chiefly to know what sort of a thing a self is, and namely that this is something “toward which I can stand in various relations.” There will never come a day when it is grasped finally; this, as Cavell reads Thoreau, is a “continuous activity, not something we may think of as an intellectual preoccupation” (SW, 52).53 Glimpsing the strangeness of our lives, then, we see “the lack of necessity in what we profess to be necessary” (SW, 54). Our clothes, our station, the words in our mouth—all these become strange. Thus we lose worldly necessities to recover the “necessity of human strangeness as such, the opportunity of outwardness.” An appreciation of the strangeness of our lives will help reveal the “bondage” of institutionalized meaning. In religion and politics we allow our choices to be made for us. A “fugitive,” for instance, is what we call a man



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who seeks to escape a brutal enslavement (SW, 62).54 We need to recognize that we have already built a dwelling; it is this that now holds us captive. Yet to find out where we are, the task is not to destroy it for the sake of some transcendental idea or some other permanent dwelling. Instead, again in the spirit of reorientation, the task is to accept responsibility for the construction. Hence “the first step is to see that we ourselves are its architects and hence are in a position to recollect the design” (SW, 80). Unblocked, cleared of the rubble of unconsidered choices, the outward becomes an opportunity. Only then can the present moment—during the scene of going on—begin to bloom. “The abode of the gods,” Cavell writes, “is to be entered not merely at the outermost point of the earth or at the top of the highest mountain, and maybe not at all; but anywhere, only at the point of the present” (SW, 54).55 A sense of the uncanniness of the ordinary allows us distance from our familiar ways of going on, the standard texture of unexamined choices which make up the best part of the mother tongue. It is the prerogative of the father tongue to eschew the seductive ease of the familiar, and instead open up that seam between word and world—to hold, as it were, the two side by side, assessing their correspondence. “The point,” according to Cavell, “is to get us to withhold a word, to hold ourselves before it, so that we may assess our allegiance to it, to the criteria in terms of which we apply it” (SW, 65). Our wording of the world shows how objects count for us; our words “are our calls or claims upon the objects and context of our world.” But if we unreflectively repeat, we are back at creating our own prisons, putting ourselves in bond to institutionalized meanings. “What is called necessity,” Cavell writes, “is commonly a myth; what we call voluntary poverty may in fact be ‘simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust’” (SW, 65).56 Cavell gives examples of the strategies Thoreau employs to enforce an illuminating distance from our words. One is to make frequent reference to how things are referred to: “In the opening fifty pages of Walden,” Cavell writes, “there are a dozen instances of modifications like ‘so-called’ or ‘what is called.’”57 Another strategy is to write sentences whose meaning requires a different emphasis from what the surface grammar suggests (SW, 65).58 But there is throughout the more general approach of a literary redemption of language, which amounts to “win[ning] back possession of our words” (SW, 90). Many of these are economic (profit and loss, rich and poor, possession, change, labor, ventures) which continually spill into, and arguably contaminate, how we attempt to make sense of our spiritual lives. To win them back, to pry them from fixed use into free circulation, Thoreau impugns the self-satisfied air of practicality, claiming that we do not know why we do what we do, and not only is this mysterious, but so too are the very facts these humdrum words purport to mean (ownership, to give one example) (SW, 88). We must word not this world—this old and crushingly finished place, which “has already come to an end for us”—but a “reconceived human existence” (SW, 90).

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8  Fate and Faith Word and object, then, are reborn together. This was, Cavell says, “one quest of Romantic poetry, and of the Kantian project to answer skepticism.” Cavell believes Walden takes on both questions (SW, 63). In particular Cavell sees in Thoreau something like the Kantian notion that objects of knowledge need a transcendental preparation, namely an elucidation of the a priori conditions of possible knowledge. “These a priori conditions are necessities of human nature; and the search for them is something that I think Thoreau’s obsession with necessity is meant to declare” (SW, 93). Where he differs from Kant is in the implication that these “a priori conditions are not themselves knowable a priori.” How then might they be discovered? They can only be revealed “experimentally.” Epistemologically, [Walden’s] motive is the recovery of . . . the thing-in-itself . . . . Morally, its motive is to answer, by transforming the problem of the freedom of the will in the midst of a universe of natural laws, by which our conduct, like the rest of nature, is determined. Walden, in effect, provides a transcendental deduction for the concepts of the thing-in-itself and for determination— something Kant ought, so to speak, to have done. (SW, 94)

We start with the second problem, the Kantian inheritance of the two worlds across which the self is stretched, the one determined, the other free. Where did the idea of determinism come from? Not from nature, says Cavell, as nature “has no destiny beyond its presence.” Instead, we are unwittingly projecting this notion onto nature so that we can then discover it there. It is a version, actually a reflected version, of what Thoreau calls fate. Thoreau seems to be arguing that people tend to confute the two, creating forces which control us “from outside” (SW, 94). As a result, they unwittingly subject themselves to their own projections. To put the same situation differently, they suffer from a crisis of expression owing to an inability to read. And in this Cavell includes the sense of the world or nature being a gigantic text. The line from Thoreau is: “There are the stars, and they who can may read them.”59 Reading, in this interpretation, is a “process of being read, as finding your fate in your capacity for interpretation of yourself ” (TE, 47). The reader is here, you might say, being read by Thoreau. He is asking, even challenging: How well will you read me? “Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?”60 What is the difference? A student we might imagine learning by rote. A seer on the other hand would answer to Thoreau’s imperative: “Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity” (TE, 47). We read our fate because what we read, or rather how well we read, cannot but become our fate. We interpret ourselves into the world in which we then find ourselves. As Thoreau has it—and here, Cavell says, he gives an “elegant summary” of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—: “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions.” We read whatever is before us (TE, 11).61 The key example cited is the railroad, which



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Thoreau deliberately describes as some monstrous creature of mythology. Cavell might have added that the reference Thoreau makes to the sleepers are literally the planks upon which the tracks are laid. But figuratively they are also the people, in this respect the Common Men, who subject themselves to powers supposedly outside them—in a word, to their fate. These same sleepers, of course, are then punctually run over according to the train schedule. But it only looks like fate, like unalterable necessity, because they have failed to see the creative opportunity. “It is,” Cavell writes, “you might say, their inability to trust themselves to determine their lives; or rather their inability to see that they are determining them” (SW, 95). Hence we live by fate. Instead, we ought to live by faith. In his journal Thoreau asks: “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”62 How one sees the world may inevitably, after Kant, be partial, but it hardly follows that these would all be identical. What is required instead is a perpetually renewed comportment toward the present moment with the faith to let go, to release the familiar imprisoning ways of going on, which, otherwise, are in constant danger of hardening into fate. “We have to learn what acceptance is, what it means that we have to find ourselves where we are, at each present, and accept finding in our experiment, enter it in the account” (SW, 97). This posture Cavell summarizes as resolution; this is what takes the place of our subjection to fate. Going on with faith will resonate when, in the conclusion, we consider what Cavell calls “the promise of an understanding without meanings.” But for now we note that it also has to do with “stillness, and with settling” (SW, 97). Exactly how we take up residence, as he did at Walden Pond, is part of how we possess the landscape; the country takes its origin in us.63 Stillness and settling—these register the virtues of a life that has abjured the heady temptations of any metaphysical ascent. This is about as far as you can get from the ambitions of Schopenhauer’s pure knowing subject and a wholly different disposition toward the ordinary. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a sentiment more antithetical to a transcendental ascent than the one expressed in Thoreau’s words: “You need only sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you in turn” (TE, 53).

9  Thoreau, Neighboring, and the Other Kant’s formulation of the thing-in-itself, however, does capture an essential truth: our relation to the world is not one of knowing, “understood as achieving certainty based on the senses” (SW, 104). Cavell claims that, in effect, Thoreau is providing a transcendental deduction of the category of the thing-in-itself. This requires a demonstration of the possibility of the experience of the world being closed off from the senses. As Paul Franks points out, to deduce the concept of the thing-in-itself is, at the same time, to “overcome skepticism.” It does so by rescuing the truth of skepticism from the skeptic’s own “paralyzing and

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deformed” expression of it.64 Kant’s formulation also suggests a failure of the human faculties. This implies that there is something we cannot do, that there is indeed a closed off realm to which we could otherwise—but when?—have access. “A thing which we cannot know is not a thing,” Cavell writes. “Then why are we led to speak otherwise?” (SW, 104). The skeptic takes this as a privation. But in Thoreau’s work Cavell sees a positive reformulation of the predicament, one that does not make it a failure. With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense [Thoreau writes]. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences . . . . We are not wholly involved in Nature . . . I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than you.65

This first sentence is important for Cavell, as it provides the principle by which he sees Thoreau answering the problem of the thing-in-itself. The externality of the world is not, as for the skeptic in full swing, a bulwark of hidden aspects. Thoreau articulates the externality of the world “as its nextness to me” (SW, 105). Instead of skeptical isolation from the world, then, Thoreau re-describes the “limitation” of knowing as a mode of being beside, of neighboring. “Our relation to nature, at its best, would be that of neighboring it—knowing the grandest laws it is executing, while nevertheless ‘not wholly involved’ in them” (SW, 103).66 The same goes for the relation of the different parts of the self. Thoreau sees this doubleness as renewing a sense of wholeness, not by binding refractory parts together, but easing them into relation across the remove of difference. It is “an intimation of the wholeness of self . . . out of a present sense of incoherence or division or incompleteness” (SW, 101). Being beside ourselves in a sane sense is, Cavell points out, “the dictionary definition of ecstasy” (SW, 103). To know yourself, it would appear, also requires you to know what sort of thing a self is—that there is, for instance, this irreducible doubleness. Being “beside ourselves in a sane sense” is a reinterpretation of the distances between parts of the self: a conception of neighboring doubleness that is not seen as a failure to know. Neighbors, after all, have not first failed to live in the same house. They are simply living next to each other. “This condition—the condition of ‘having’ a self, and knowing it—is an instance of the general relation the writer perceives as ‘being next to’” (SW, 103).67 In Thoreau, then, the voice in expression requires the awakening of a new understanding of what it is to be a self. Like Schopenhauer, Thoreau sees the medium of self-consciousness as tainted, shallow, one that obscures our



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own (intimate, idiosyncratic) relation to the world. “What we know as selfconsciousness is only our opinion of ourselves” (SW, 105). This is the cheap currency of public opinion. The only way to deepen our relation to our own lives—to find a place from which to speak, to allow the human self to come to expression—is to “resist” this everyday default mode of self-consciousness. But it is worth noting a difference between Thoreau’s spectator and the pure knowing subject. Schopenhauer’s subject, with transcendental aspirations, escapes its imprisoning doubleness, namely the servitude of the will. The intellect, the knowing part, breaks free from its antagonist and is rewarded with a consoling but dismayingly ephemeral transcendental glimpse. Thoreau’s spectator, on the other hand, reinterprets its doubleness. This may be likened to the reorientation Cavell saw in the later Wittgenstein, which, choosing to remain with the disposition of language in the ordinary, gives up any notion of an ascent and with it any fantasy of some other (pure, absolute) relation. Not by escaping, nor binding refractory parts together, nor annexing one to the other, but by easing them into relation across a remove of difference and allowing, with trust rather than suspicion, that there be this distance between words and the region out of which they originate. This is how we recover a salutary wholeness of self, how we return life to our language. We are [Cavell writes] to reinterpret our sense of doubleness as a relation between ourselves in the aspect of indweller, unconsciously building, and in the aspect of spectator, impartially observing. Unity between these aspects is not viewed as a mutual absorption, but as a perpetual nextness, an act of neighboring or befriending. (SW, 106)

As spectator we are beside ourselves in a sane sense, separated from the unconsciously building indweller. In Thoreau’s account Cavell sees a positive characterization of what for the intellect had before been a frustrating limitation of knowledge. Putting it into our terms, Thoreau’s indweller represents an internalized second potency—the nonintellectual expressive energies of the self—toward which the intellect now relates, not as master with all-penetrating knowledge, but instead as a neighbor, perhaps even as a friend. What we find in Cavell’s reading of Thoreau, then, is a conception of the self that integrates the assertive and receptive potencies. Going on is an activity derived from the collaboration of these two parts, the spectator and the indweller. The indweller’s separateness is not taken to be a failure on the part of the knowing self to master it. “Walden’s underlying notion, in its account of the doubleness—as opposed, say, to Plato’s notion of the harmony of the soul—is one of integrity conceived as an activity” (SW, 107). Our first resolve should be toward the nextness of the self to the self [I suggest: during the scene of going on]; it is the capacity not to deny either of its positions or attitudes—that is the watchman or guardian of itself, and

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hence demands of itself transparence, settling, clearing, constancy; and that it is the workman, whose eye cannot see to the end of its labors, but whose answerability is endless for the constructions in which it houses itself. The answerability of the self to itself is its possibility of awakening. (SW, 108)

10  Emerson and Receptive Thinking For Kant, our representations of the world are the work of inborn rational faculties. The transcendental imagination, homogeneous to both heterogeneous stems, schematizes the sensuous manifold with the concepts of the understanding. As a result the world that we know—the realm of representation—is enclosed within the ambit of transcendental subjectivity. Emerson reverses this. For him the intellectual hemisphere is passive, and it is the intuition that enjoys creative spontaneity. This alters considerably the picture of thinking at work. “The American Scholar”—delivered before an audience which included the young Thoreau—is enjoined to “[lead] a life in which thinking is of the essence, as a man whose wholeness, say whose autonomy, is in command of the autonomy of thinking” (TE, 14). Let this at least be our aspiration. The problem, however, as we have seen, is that most of us are “bugs, spawn”—which is not necessarily to say that we do not think enough. Typically this is what we criticize in so-called “bad” thinking—that an idea is half-baked, as in, has not been sufficiently thought through. But this is not Emerson’s point. He is saying, instead, that we do not even know how to think. Emerson writes, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition” (TE, 117, 146). As Cavell reads this, what are “unhandsome” are not the objects. They are not in themselves evanescent and lubricious. Rather, they take on that character “when we seek to deny the stand-offishness of objects by clutching at them.” Clutching would be a futile attempt to draw them close; this is the result of thinking conceived (along Kantian lines) as “say the application of concepts in judgments, as grasping something, say synthesizing” (TE, 117). This accords with what we called earlier the skeptical reduction, where we convert our relationship to the world into essentially one of knowing. But precisely through this clutching—a word which testifies to our fumbling impatience—we lose the world. It is then that the world becomes “evanescent and lubricious.” Once again, this is the skeptical gap that Kant has unwittingly encoded in his settlement: the unknowableness of the thing-in-itself constitutes a failure of our faculties to penetrate into the essence of existence. Quite explicitly Emerson is “correcting” this Kantian answer to skepticism, though, like Thoreau, not “denying the conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth.”68 Both Thoreau and Emerson, in other words, offer an altered comportment of the intellect to what lies closed to it.



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Thoreau, as we saw, had the position of the spectator and the indweller, but also a mode of being near, of neighboring, which did not suggest any failure of the knower. Emerson for his part draws a picture of our relation to the world that does not hinge upon the work of our faculties. The world is not something that we synthesize or put together. Cavell summarizes, “It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty; our relation to its existence is deeper—one in which is it accepted, that is to say, received” (TE, 16).69 Cavell sees thoroughgoing sympathies between Emerson and some works of Heidegger, particularly in the latter’s What is Called Thinking? And this is no coincidence, as both, Cavell feels sure, are brought into contact—“mediated”— through Nietzsche.70 A lifelong admirer of Emerson, Nietzsche is very much a presence in this book. Both Emerson and Heidegger suggest that, whatever we think we are doing, we are not yet thinking. And this, according to both, is the significant question when it comes to thinking. Heidegger puts it this way: “Most thought-provoking for our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”71 Of course this adds yet another twist to Emerson’s Cartesian cogito. Saying it is fine and good, but what if I think in a debased form—conformist (Emerson) or commonplace or one-track (both from Heidegger)? Do I exist, then, just like that? Or do I merely haunt my life? As Cavell points out, both criticize “Western conceptualizing” to perpetrate a sort of violence upon the world and its objects (TE, 147). Heidegger has the following: That which really is, Being, which from the start calls and determines all beings, can never be made out, however, by ascertaining facts, by appealing to particulars. That sound common sense which is so often “cited” in such attempts is not as sound and natural as it pretends. It is above all not as absolute as it acts, but rather the shallow product of that manner of forming ideas which is the final fruit of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.72

Heidegger seems to be describing the sort of plight we have associated with the Common Man. Our thoughts are deficient surrogates (abstractions) from the real. This is one facet of the problem. The other is that we do not realize it. But how would we when the circle is closed? The comfortable belief that we do have access to the world through our conceptualizing blocks us from the real. Science and technology, rather like Nietzsche’s view of early opera, reassure us of a deep, elemental intimacy with existence—and in that very same moment only confirm the separation. We form ideas, Heidegger says, reading Nietzsche, through “blinking.” “Ideas formed in this way present and propose of everything only the glitter, only the appearance of surfaces and foreground facets.”73 What we have here, then, might be described as a family of responses to the Kantian severance of the thing-in-itself. (Thoreau, Emerson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and now Heidegger.) The correlate of this, of course, might be formulated as: “The world is my idea.” “In this sentence,” Heidegger writes,

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“Schopenhauer has summed up the thought of recent philosophy. Schopenhauer . . . has most persistently determined the whole tone of all of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought—even where this is not immediately obvious.”74 You stand before a tree in bloom. Where, we might ask, is this tree essentially constituted? Is the tree in you? Is it merely an idea? Or does the tree instead come first, precisely so that we might then come face-to-face with it? “The thing that matters first and foremost, and finally, is not to drop the tree in bloom, but for once to let it stand where it stands. Why do we say ‘finally’? Because to this day, thought has never let the tree stand where it stands.”75 Rather than constructing, say, mental versions of the tree in bloom, thinking must hold itself open to what is. Thinking, then, is a matter of receiving, of letting be. As Cavell explains, A climactic moment in Heidegger’s descent into the origins of words is his understanding of the etymological entwining of thinking with the word for thanking, leading, for example, to an unfolding of ideas in which a certain progress of thinking is understood as a form of thanking, originally a thanking for the gift of thinking, which means for the reception of being human. (TE, 16)76

11  Emerson and the Uncreated Self But how is the self received in thought? In the same way that conceptual grasping can occlude the world, make it lubricious, bad thinking can obscure the uncreated self, block the perfectionist movement from the present self to the next self. Thinking, then, is a double process consisting of transfiguration and conversion. (TE, 144) Transfiguration accounts for the movement of experience into thought— and is, if you will, the personal root of one’s mental life.77 This accounts for where “thinking finds its ‘material.’”78 Recall that one’s everyday life in empirical consciousness was, for both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, where we are prone to the greatest alienation. Cluttered with myths and cheap abstractions, our everyday thoughts have little to do with real existence. You can see Emerson making a similar sort criticism. “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”79 Our everyday thoughts—the everyday conversion of intuition into tuition, the manufacture of which “goes forward at all hours”—suffer from the pressure of conformity. The “material”—Proust’s “personal root,” what Emerson calls “our spontaneous impression”—either remains unconscious, or is ignored, or, just as fatal, is foisted into some obscuring conventional formulation.80 Thinking as a transfiguration, then, points toward that which is to be made intelligible, accounting for the process by



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which it takes place: namely, where Intuition (unconfigured material) becomes “articulated” Tuition (a thought). And this, of course, takes place nowhere else but during the scene of going on. Transfiguration is to be taken as a rhetorical operation, Emerson’s figure for a figure of speech—not necessarily for what rhetoricians name a known figure of speech, but for whatever it is that he will name the conversion of words. In “self-Reliance” he calls the process that of passing from Intuition to Tuition . . . . Tuition is what Emerson’s writing presents itself to be throughout; hence, of course, to be articulating Intuition. (TE, 144)

Conversion accounts for the oppositional nature of this tuition. And it is opposition for the sake of making criterial judgments (projections, choosing the next word) that reveal this particularity, the uncreated self. Cavell calls this aversive thinking. That it should be aversive is only natural, if the uncreated self is to take priority over the common terms. For the philosophy of the voice, this is the crucial and potentially redemptive step. Because this is otherwise where Common Man gets lost—after all, there is nothing oppositional, nothing even remotely aversive about his thinking. He remains throughout the inveterate criterial centrophiliac we described earlier. At the cost of his own intuition, he readily accepts society’s tuition. You might see this as an Emersonian account of the intelligibility imperative. This is the juncture of the self coming to expression; this is where words are meant or are merely repeated. Which prompts Emerson’s classic phrase: “Every word they say chagrins us.” Emerson’s writing, by contrast, is “in aversion.” In the precarious movement from Intuition to Tuition, the Common Man becomes lost; Emerson means every word. The words of the Common Man are full of quotation. Emerson’s words express “his self-consciousness.”81 The challenge is to inherit the words, and to go on in a way that reveals the self through conceptual performances made possible by shared criteria. And this, according to Cavell’s reading of Emerson, is through receptive thinking. Receptive thinking has two inflections. To receive, we must abandon. The old circle sloughed, given up, the fixations released. But what heralds the coming of the new? And if it comes, how will we know it? This is the costly but comfortable predicament of conformity. In “Self-Reliance” Emerson writes, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius” (TE, 92). This sort of thinking, then, resists conformity for the sake of the movement of the self, namely the self “of becoming—a transience of being, a being of transience.”82 As a being of transience, the attained self presides in jostling animosity with the (yet) unattained self, which it blocks. But this is part of a larger tension, between the unattained self and the stultifying recognition accorded by society. “The virtue

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in most request is conformity,” Emerson writes. “Self-reliance is its aversion” (TE, 8). Commenting on this, Cavell writes, I gather him there to be characterizing his writing, hence to mean that he writes in aversion to society’s demand for conformity, specifically that his writing expresses his self-consciousness, his thinking as the imperative to an incessant conversion or refiguration of society’s incessant demands for his consent—his conforming himself—to its doing, and at the same time to mean that his writing must accordingly be the object of aversion to society’s consciousness, to what it might read in him. (TE, 145)

Self-reliance, then, would abandon and be averse to this attained self; conformity, on the other hand, would have us relinquish instead the unattained self. “This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes.”83 The idea is not that we release the pressure of convention only to grab onto something else, detaching “one’s self from the rock of others only to attach itself to another fixity, this time from within.” If the nature of the soul is to become, “grabbing” and “clutching” at any point will block the endless series of future selves. We need, in other words, to release fixity itself. What is required might seem to describe a heady, vertiginous openness: the liberation of the self, Cavell writes, “is precisely to let it become unsettled, to let what is thought to be great and important ‘dance before your eyes’ ” (CW, 298).84 Abandonment makes possible the second inflection of thinking: receptivity. In the first picture of the voice, the question of energy is unproblematic. The subject is acting, asserting. For Schopenhauer, as we saw, the act of perception is constitutionally innate. Words are chosen, tested, worked upon, if you will, with hammer and chisel, words being the inert material upon which the intellect asserts itself. Point being: the intellect is doing the work. But if we turn now to the nature of receptive thought, of thinking as thanking, it is not the energy of the intellect that matters. The poet, Emerson writes, enjoys a relation to language in which “in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.” Which would mean, as Cavell puts it, that “objectivity is not a given but an achievement; leading the thought, allowing it its own power, takes you to new ground” (TE, 203). Won through the allowance of a word’s “own power,” this new ground can be taken as the extra discovered in the expression. What the first picture would have to exclude, the second picture on the contrary acclaims as a discovered aspect. But there is another implication in Emerson’s choice of words as horses, as Cavell explains: [It] rules out, or differs from, for example, speaking of words as tools or saying that they are the bearers of meanings . . . . Given the idea of “every word” [in Emerson’s description of the poet] is not a generalization but bespeaks an attitude toward words as such, toward the fact of language, the horse suggests that we are in an attitude or posture of a certain grant of authority, such as



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humans may claim, over a realm of life not our own (ours to own), in view of some ground to cover or field to take. (CHU, 22)

To employ words in making ourselves intelligible, then, requires the cultivation of expressive mastery that is more than simply knowing which words happen to be the bearers of which meaning. We have said that mastery in this preliminary sense—words as bearers of meaning—might be enough to speak the language, sufficient, let us grant, for the first inheritance of language, the mother tongue. But this is where the troubles of Common Man begin. This next step requires you to go on according to shared criteria, structuring the emptiness, and yet doing so aversively, for the sake of your individuality. And this, as we have seen, involves the receptivity to expressive energies associated with the second potency of the voice—so that the next self can come into expression.85

12  Genius and Whim This whole process, according to Emerson, is nothing other than answering the call of your genius. “There are always good reasons,” Cavell writes, “not to obey this call, not to verify it” (TE, 30). Whether you hearken is the only relevant question: genius is receptivity. “Genius is not a special endowment, like virtuosity, but a stance toward whatever endowment you discover is yours, as if life itself were a gift, and remarkable” (TE, 92). This singles out the individual, summons each of us to our specificity. Yet it does so with insidious softness. Reluctant to abandon the familiar, we skulk, we slouch, we timidly request some authority. Of course, there is none. In his essay “Self-Reliance” Emerson writes, A doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.86

Cavell notes the obvious reference to Jesus. Like the promise of the kingdom of heaven, the pursuit of one’s genius will bring change and division (TE, 28). And like the message of Jesus, the call of one’s genius can be neglected, or shunned. If God probed, with the advent of his issue, into our mortal ranks, and is still not harkened to, what can be hoped for the quiet call of our genius? It is essential, yet coming through so faint a register we may not, in its apprehension, distinguish it even from whim. “The call of one’s genius,” Cavell writes, “presents itself with no deeper authority than whim. And what presents itself in the form of whim is bound sometimes to be exactly whim and nothing more” (TE, 28). The virtue of Emerson’s notion of whim, given our tendency to block

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future selves with quotation, is to question whether we already know what is important. Whim might be seen as the flashing gate which stops local car traffic to allow passage of the locomotive from faraway regions. We are accustomed to giving our attention to what most demands it—to both the threats and the dazzling displays of the world around us. But in this realm the sheer force of demand is no index of importance. Not force but—and this for Emerson is the single fact of any significance—simply that it has occurred to you. “Perception,” Emerson writes, “is not whimsical, but fatal.” It is yours, “because that fact alone . . . constitutes my fate; it is a matter of my life and death” (TE, 28).87 This of course resonates with Thoreau’s claim that we have locked ourselves in our own self-created prisons. We notice here, too, the so-called Emersonian inflection on voice: namely, the concern not so much with terminological precision (finish) but with let us say the prolongation and heft of that intimation’s actual specificity. Emerson’s marking of the doorposts echoes the mezuzah, in which two sections from Deuteronomy are inscribed upon a parchment and nailed to the doorpost at Passover, “as a sign to the angel of death to pass the house and spare its first born” (TE, 179). Cavell reads Emerson here to be announcing his own obedience to his genius, and that he shall follow wherever it leads. His essays, then, are mezuzahs, “declarations of faith” (TE, 29). Genius, however, is no mere consecration to idiosyncrasy. We can only make ourselves intelligible through our shared criteria. Otherwise we suffer as Jungle Man did, as he lacked any shared forms of life. The very pressure of attunement that makes this possible is what, at the same time, makes the endeavor so perilous. We only have access to our genius within the social, because only there can we make ourselves intelligible. Consequently both the first inheritance—the provision of words through the scene of instruction—and the second inheritance—the subjective discovery of Intuition—are required for a democracy to work. For Emerson you could say that this [the upbuilding of a man] requires both a constitution of the public and an institution of the private, a new obligation to think for ourselves, to make ourselves intelligible, in every word. What goes on inside us now is merely obedience to the law and the voices of others—the business Emerson calls conformity, a rewriting of what Kant calls heteronomy. (TE, 153)

John Rawls takes perfectionism to be a teleological theory with a moderate and extreme articulation. The moderate version seeks, through institutions and the duties and obligations of individuals, to maximize human excellence (in art, science, culture). Cavell fails to see how this can account for the disdain both Emerson and Nietzsche have for the institutions. And what, after all, is being maximized? This version seems to posit some cultural good extrinsic to what must already be distributed in society, which would be nothing more than the good in the transfiguration of the self, a turning toward the future self. What



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would this be? “Emerson calls it genius; we might call this the capacity for selfcriticism, the capacity to consecrate the attained to the unattained self, on the basis of the axiom that each is a moral person” (TE, 156). But Rawls’s extreme version is for Cavell still more unrecognizable. Rawls quotes Nietzsche, from his early essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator”—which according to Cavell is “to an as yet undisclosed extent” influenced by Emerson. Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings— this and nothing else is the task . . . . For the question is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? . . . Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.88

Rawls supposes that Nietzsche means a class of preeminent specimens for whom the rest of the society, lacking any intrinsic worth, should be dedicated. Cavell sees it differently. These (most valuable) “specimens” might instead have been translated as exemplars (as the original German has Exemplare). This shifts the meaning from connotatively biological to the relation of an instance to its archetype. “The acceptance of an exemplar, as access to another realm . . . is grounded not in the relation between the instance and a class of instances it stands for but in the relation between the instance and the individual other— for example, myself—for whom it does the standing, for whom it is a sign upon whom I delegate something” (TE, 158). Second, when Nietzsche mentions this life of culture, his concern is solely for “the good of the one living it” (TE, 158). This is more obvious in the idea that, when the young person “places himself within the circle of culture” he discovers a “dissatisfaction with himself.” Maximization [Cavell writes] is roughly the last thing on the mind of the suffering individual in this state of self-dissatisfaction, the state of perceiving oneself as failing to follow oneself in one’s higher and happier aspirations, failing perhaps to have found the right to one’s own aspirations—not to the deliverances of rare revelations but to the significance of one’s everyday impressions, to the right to make them one’s ideas. It is a crucial moment of the attained self, a crossroads; it may be creative or crushing. (TE, 158–159)

The exemplars create dissatisfaction. They provoke the healthy shame we feel at our “shriveled” present state; in them we see our genius transfigured, yet a genius of which we are only barely aware. In dissatisfaction the self grows big with the burden of its future self. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was the exemplar, but “the author of the text is scarcely consecrating himself to Schopenhauer.” Not Schopenhauer’s particularity, but instead what his master has caused to stir within Nietzsche: his genius, summoned out of conformist exile. In our parlance, Common Man is rebuked, is pointed away from the community’s words, and the finished wording of the world, back toward the singularity of his life. “The love of the great is, or is the cause of, the hate of one’s meanness, the hate

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that constitutes the sign of consecration” (TE, 160). Perfectionism, then, often depends upon another. Usually this is a friend, but it could be anyone—even a text—that happens to make us aware of our present meanness (namely, our failure to express ourselves in our shared criteria: these are not your words). “There is perpetually a further possibility of ourselves, which it is the task of the genuine educator to encourage us to find.” With their help, we gain intimations of our repressed, ignored, and (until now) undiscovered future self. Emerson’s essays, then, are attempts to awaken us, all Common Men to some degree, to a new attitude to language. One that would get us to preside differently over the scene of going on. We have only our community’s criteria within which to make ourselves intelligible. This is where we find ourselves— there is no other route. But if we go on in Emersonian aversion, shared criteria would not be repudiated. Instead, it would be expanded. So this new attitude would just as much be “a demand for the further possibility of culture, call it the provision of the means of expression” (CW, 218). And the concept of genius, then, would not refer to some hidden or inexpressible insight, but would instead name “the promise that the private and the social will be achieved together” (TE, 92).

CONCLUSION

1  The Creative Origin We began with what Cavell called the intelligibility imperative, the task of making ourselves intelligible as we go on with our words. Seen under the aspect of the two potencies, this is prone to three risks of falsification, each represented by one of our three cautionary figures, Jungle Man, Skeptical Man, and Common Man. Present in all of our utterances are the liabilities of not having gone on in ways that others can follow (because we lack or misapply the terms, like Jungle Man, or because, seeking to go on through pure assertion, we repudiate shared criteria and become unintelligible: Skeptical Man), and having gone in ways that are followed alright, but are false to our lives (because we do not reveal ourselves: Common Man). These are three general sorts of mishap to which we are prone when accessing shared criteria through the two potencies. If shared criteria may illuminate and enlarge, they may also perplex and constrain. Hence the happy alignment of a particular life (the “personal root,” the “essential book”) and the shared concept is nothing short of an achievement—and one moreover that must be constantly renewed. “To be moved to give voice to a plight of mind and circumstance,” as Richard Eldridge puts it, “is to express a specific sense of how, here and now, one’s human capabilities for free and fluent voicing and action are somehow enabled and inhibited by one’s culture and one’s life with others as they stand.”1 But is there nothing more we can say about what successful going on might look like? For Schopenhauer it was the (Platonic) Ideas. For Nietzsche it was the Dionysian energies at work in the cosmos. These were what, in each account, allowed the conceptual to come into relation with what lay beyond its ambit— and this, for both, would be the thing-in-itself. Such a relation is what enabled the speaker, whether as assertive pure knowing subject or receptive Dionysian celebrant, to overcome, albeit temporarily, the abstractions of concepts and to say at last something that is more than mere chatter. Nietzsche would go farther, and claim that the words of the inspired speaker emerge out of the spirit of music. If Schopenhauer insisted on their fundamental separation, it was to protect the special status of music. Yet for both philosophers it was music that would best epitomize what William Desmond has called “that communication from a creative origin on the other side of domesticated determinacy, and passing

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through genius as the medium in which this other, surpassing source found its voice or articulated release.”2 So now, in conclusion, the same question might be put this way: what, for Cavell, would count as a relation to this “creative origin”? This may seem an awkward question. How do we talk about that which is, and must be, left out of domesticated determinacy? For Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, one could argue, music was a way of recuperating at least some of what had been lost in the formation of the abstract concept. This has a bearing, of course, on Cavell and the problem of Common Man, who finds himself imprisoned within the domesticated determinacy of shared criteria—which becomes, in such moments, Wallace’s “man-locked set” or petrifies into something like what Bruno Schultz named “officialdom.” As Cavell reads Thoreau, Common Man must be woken up. But what must happen so that he wakes? What would count as waking up? There would have to be some emergent sense of the failure, of the falsification, in how he has gone on. Emerson would call it shame. Seeing the misfit between words and life would amount to a recognition of his life as somehow blocked or stunted by the repetition of words that are not his. And so a therapy for Common Man, no less than for the traditional skeptic, would demand a new relation between his words and that “creative origin”—one that reduces the preponderance of the assertive potency and opens passages for the resources associated with the receptive potency of the voice. There is another complication to keep in mind. Earlier, in our consideration of Skeptical Man, we said that the Cavellian subject was receptive but not porous. For the receptive, new content is acknowledged as a revelation of the subject, even if it emerges from what Schopenhauer dismissed as the other half of language. This, however, remains within the ambit of the (expressive and legible) Cavellian subject, and indeed only comes into existence through the application of shared criteria. Porosity is different. Much of Emerson’s work, for instance, emphasizes the coming into articulation of something larger, perhaps we might call it an active principle, a primal and sovereign spontaneity. To this otherness the individual intellect might be described as a tributary or a pensioner. “The mind that grows,” Emerson writes, “could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.”3 To express this spontaneous entry as, for example, the flaring up of a wind-blown coal would fail to capture the genuine advent of such a new arrival. Porosity, instead, is structurally Dionysian: it allows for the showing forth of an otherness which comes into articulation in and through us and yet which remains other—indeed, which remains persistently allergic to any fixed criterial assessment. Porosity does the subject the favor of preventing it from closing into a watertight absolute whole. As Desmond puts it, “such an absolute whole is counterfeit because it falsifies its own original being received in being.”4 In Desmond’s terms, the passio essendi is the primal givenness of being out of which the conatus essendi can subsequently emerge—only for the latter then to commence the hubristic project of sealing itself into an absolute whole. So if we are asking about a “creative origin” in Cavell, this would have to

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be one to which we relate through reception and acknowledgment, not through anything like Dionysian porosity. As well as awkward, though, this question might seem pointless. Did Cavell not eschew the metaphysical voice in place of what we say when? And would that not settle the matter? Not necessarily: a metaphysical voice which “gives itself to language,” as in the first picture, may be excluded without ruling out all transcendental relation as such. It would only rule out a univocal knowing relation. And on this Cavell is clear. If the moral of skepticism is that knowing does not fully characterize our relation to the world, then our relation to the transcendental, to any such creative origin, would likewise not chiefly be one of knowing. But that does not mean there is no possible relation. Indeed, given what we have seen of Cavell’s argument, particularly when it comes to the receptive, the implication of some sort of transcendental register—a relation of some sort to a dimension beyond the conceptual—seems unavoidable. In this he has no shortage of encouragement from the many Emersonian notions he has taken over, like the unachieved self, or intuition, or genius, or the fatal volatility of whim. How shall we think of this region out of which new content emerges—what Desmond, once again, calls the “creative origin”?

2  Music and the World Unevenly distributed on either side of the philosophical divide (between “analytical” and “continental” philosophy), Cavell sees two pictures of how language relates to the world. One between those in either space whose intuition of the issue of language and the world is that language comes to be hooked onto or emitted into the world, and one between those whose intuition is, with some perhaps necessary vagueness, of a reverse direction, in which the world calls for words, an intuition that words are, I will say, world-bound, that the world, to be experienced, is to be answered, that this is what words are for. (PP, 116)

The first intuition of a language that is “hooked or emitted into the world” presupposes a world that is otherwise already there, independent and stable even without language. Cavell is clearly more in accord with this latter intuition in which the world calls for words. We have already noted the similarities between his treatment of the skeptic’s relationship to language and the skeptic’s relation to the expressions of the body of the other. Now, with words too, we see the same interaction: our projections are in response to the world’s call for words. In this connection Cavell quotes Wittgenstein: “My relation to my words [that is, to my utterances] is wholly different from other people’s” (PP, 116. Quoting from PI, 191, Cavell’s interpolation). But if our words are not prepared

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at a metaphysical register before expression, what is our relation to our own voice? Or, as Cavell puts the question elsewhere: “Where do our words come from?” (PDAT, 60). It may be difficult to appreciate the oddness of this question, even if it is obvious Cavell is not asking about the historical or etymological origins of our words. This goes all the way back to Wittgenstein’s bewilderment quoted earlier: how, for instance, writing a letter, we can find not only words for our thoughts, but also “surrender to the mood and the expression comes.” Well, comes from where? What is this energy and how do we relate to it? In response to his own question—“Where do our words come from?”—Cavell asks another: “What is it to hear music?” “What is it to hear music’s origin, hear it originating, what the composer hears?” (PDAT, 60). Actually, Cavell had some experience with this. Before turning to philosophy he had studied music composition. (Reflecting on this change, Cavell has said: “One thing it means is that, whatever I want philosophy to be, it has to serve as some sort of aftermath of music. It contains but it overthrows what I wanted from music.”5) To draw this together: rather than “hooked or emitted,” our words are “called” into the world, yet not from some stabilized zone of knowing. Trying to think of where our words come from, Cavell asks us to imagine a composer hearing his or her music originating. So Cavell, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, associates this creative origin with music. Indeed, the association is explicit when he follows his question about hearing what a composer hears by remarking, “When Schopenhauer finds that music is not the representation of the world but is the (will of the) world, one can understand him as finding something true of language generally, but generally all but lost to it” (PP, 116). What does Cavell mean by this? Our earlier reflections on Schopenhauer will be of help. For Schopenhauer, music was not a representation of the world because it did not trade in (Platonic) Ideas, as paintings or poetry would. Instead, music is “a copy of the will itself ” before it has been broken up into the determinate forms of the realm of representation (WWR I, 257). This would account, for instance, for the fundamental confusion of the sound-painting in Beethoven’s 6th Symphony. Music as will is metaphysically prior to any representations of the will, hence prior to any of these musically mimicked singing birds and tinkling streams. Nietzsche saw the same sort of confusion sullying early opera: music had been surrendered to the service of nonmusical librettos. Rather than making a general comment about Schopenhauerian metaphysics, however, Cavell is saying that when Schopenhauer is referring to music as the will he could just as well have been saying something about language. Cavell is linking this sort of structure—representations with the will itself—to the relation of words with their origin. So words would be compared not to representations of the will, but the will of the world itself, we may gather in the sense that, as we saw in Emerson, the scene of going on could be said to structure the emptiness. The world comes into being according to shared criteria; criteria, as we saw, “are necessary before the identification or knowledge

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of an object” (CR, 17). But then the worded world would not be the (final, fixed, definitive) representation of the (call of the) world. As the Schopenhauerian will is prior to representations, so is this musical origin of our words prior to the worded world—the world we have, the world of the achieved self. Yet the worded world risks becoming petrified in the way we have gone on. This creative origin, in other words, is constantly at risk of being confused with its representations. Hence it would be a mistake to confuse this worded world (the home, as it were, of the achieved self) with the world’s call for words (and the unachieved self). The confusion illustrated in Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, then, is akin to the mistake Common Man makes practically all the time: both have substituted a mere representation for what is metaphysically prior and which has then become lost to it. This is why Cavell would add that language as the will of the world “is generally all but lost to it.” We find a further clue about this “creative origin” in Cavell’s comments on Wittgenstein’s remark: “Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think” (PI, §527). Cavell writes, A pervasive purpose of the world of the Investigations is to trace and to awaken, as if from a trance, each of the interminable consequences of what Wittgenstein calls this primitive picture of human language [i.e., “the understanding of a sentence to be a matter of understanding and combining meanings of its constituent words”], and its hold upon philosophical thought. Thus the very invocation of the understanding of a musical theme as a guide to philosophical understanding, among the reorientations in this traumatic breakthrough of philosophical imagination—call it the promise of an understanding without meanings—is a utopian glimpse of a new, or undiscovered relation to language, its sources in the world, to its means of expression.6

Cavell here invokes in connection to music a promise of an understanding that would be in contrast to the specific ways of going on, as in the primitive picture of understanding as a matter of combining a series of individual words. What would a therapeutic reorientation away from that primitive picture require? We saw something like this in his reading of Emerson. The release from a primitive picture of language is not in order to grab onto another primitive picture, but to assume a different orientation entirely. The word promise, then, is important to help loosen our grip: this would be the therapeutic contrast to those regional fixations in which we seek full expressive mastery—as Eldridge put it, “our desire to move beyond the ordinary into a grasp of reality in itself and into perfect expressiveness.”7 When Cavell interprets Wittgenstein’s notion of leading the words back, it is not so that we might get to any particular place, but simply so that words are freed from fixation into circulation: “The welcome idea of returning words to the circulation of language and its (sometimes unpredictable) projections rather than keeping them fixated in some imaginary

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service” (PDAT, 199). Whether we are, like Skeptical Man, seeking to speak absolutely, or, like Common Man, going on through the constantly whirring speech-motor of what we say when, we are now traumatically woken with “the promise of an understanding without meanings.” What Cavell calls the “lifegiving power of words” is precisely bound up with “your readiness to subject your desire (call it whim), to become intelligible, with no assurance that you will be taken up.”8 You would go on, then, with no assurance of success, but with a belief, Thoreau would call it faith, a sense of promise that in your attempts to answer the intelligibility imperative our shared criteria will be hospitable to the expression of your (still) uncreated self.

3  Opera and the Ordinary We find another clue in Cavell’s work on opera. For Cavell, as for Nietzsche, the appearance of opera was indebted to historical circumstances. And both refer to one of the first great operas, Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo. After his wife succumbs to a snakebite, a grieving Orpheus descends into the underworld where, through the power of his voice, he manages to win her release, but only on Pluto’s condition that, as they ascend to the world of light, he is not to look back. Sure enough, on the way up, a sudden need to reassure prompts him to glance behind, and she is lost to him again. Cavell reads this as a skeptical parable in which the loss of the world is figured as the loss of a wife. Orpheus loses his wife by trying to confirm her presence, “through looking.” The question of whether the Orpheus myth is to end happily or sadly provides us with two general matching interpretations of the expressive capacity of song: ecstasy over the absolute success of its expressiveness in recalling the world, as if bringing it back to life; melancholia over its inability to sustain the world, which may be put as an expression of the absolute inexpressiveness of the voice, of its failure to make itself heard, to become intelligible—evidently a mad state. (PP, 140)

For the first modern opera, this was the perfect myth. Both key moments are captured—the power of shared criteria to word the world (“the expressive capacity of song”), but also the tension of this same world to block the individual voice—(“the absolute inexpressiveness of the voice”). And it is no coincidence that the decade in which Orfeo was first performed also saw Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Coriolanus, both plays about “the destruction of worlds as a function of the loss of voice (the incoherence of one’s own, the loss of language altogether), or the inability to withstand voices of others, as if fearing their takeover” (PP, 139). Yet the form of opera itself expresses this same tension. This in turn allows Cavell to find in opera a study of the ordinary. Cavell has in mind something

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like what Kant described in his two standpoints taken simultaneously (PP, 143). This may sound like a strange claim. What, after all, might opera have to do with the ordinary? Think of those far-fetched plots, the gaudy costumes, the conventions of extravagant gesture—opera, if anything, seems to be the very opposite of the ordinary. But suppose that is the point. Suppose for that very reason opera might testify to the interventions upon the ordinary from a transcendent realm, much as we just saw contrasted in Cavell’s remark on Wittgenstein, which contrasts the primitive picture of language with music and “the promise of an understanding without meanings.” Opera, in other words, expresses the tension between the ordinary and the “supervening of music into the world as revelatory of a realm of significance that either transcends our ordinary realm of experience or reveals ours under transfiguration” (PP, 141). Singing, then, would “express the sense of being pressed or stretched between worlds—one in which to be seen, the roughly familiar world of the philosophers, and one from which to be heard, one to which one abandons one spirit” (PP, 144). We could sum it up by saying that singing illustrates this transformation of the ordinary under the pressure from another (transcendent?) realm. Hence Cavell calls singing from this world “the expression of the inexpressible (for there is no standing language of that other world; it requires understanding without meaning)” (PP, 144). This other world—the still uncreated world of the uncreated self—even in its lack of form, even with its lack of a “standing language,” would be that for the sake of which we release the old ways of going on, attracted by the promise of a “utopian glimpse of a new, or undiscovered relation to language.” New or undiscovered: this means we are never more conformist than in these trances of going on, and the contrast here is not with another way of going on (which would only be another trance) but a promise of a new relation—even if, or particularly when, in that very same moment we do not know what shape the new relation could take. So this would be the significance of music for Cavell: it registers the dimension of what there is beyond the world that we have worded through the application of shared criteria. This is expressed in a sentence with which both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche would have heartily agreed: “Music, like infancy, marks the permanence of the place of understanding as before what we might call meaning, as if it exists in permanent anticipation of—hence in perpetual dissatisfaction with, even disdain for—what can be said” (PP, 160). How to go on with “what can be said” under the pressure the other dimension? It is of this pressure that Thoreau and Emerson are constantly reminding us. Common Man, for his part, is perfectly content with what is already said. This accounts for Emerson’s chagrin. This is likewise what puts Thoreau in mind of the “sleepers” stretched out under the railroad track. Cavell a little later in the same text develops the idea along the lines of the Kantian “universal voice.” We have seen this before, when Cavell accounts for the “transcendental logic” in the force of criteria, which rest upon our individual but attuned application of concepts. But if it is aversive in the Emersonian sense by definition it would

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not be a projection we could be sure of in advance. We would not know, in that moment, if anyone could follow. How shall we think of this? Think of this [Cavell writes] as assertion without a priori (transcendental) assurance that it is well-grounded, grounded in the conditions of understanding or of reason—as must be the case with those concepts that assure us of a world, concepts such as substance and causation . . . . The point of this contentious summary is to propose that we think of the voice in opera as a judgment of the world on the basis of, called forth by, pain beyond a concept. (PP, 149)

In opera, then, Cavell sees pictured the structure of Emersonian perfectionism. It is your life, one is tempted to say, aversive to this worded world and to which you need to give expression, as your intuition, your genius, your uncreated self are all ambivalently related to the concepts that currently “assure us of a world.” What is beyond this worded world would be that toward which you as a being of transience are oriented—namely, the expression, during the scene of going on, and in the shared terms of your community, of your still uncreated self. And here, as we have seen, is where Common Man comes to grief. With no sense of his “personal root” (Proust), and imprisoned in the petrified structures of his achieved self, he becomes a terminal conformist. His projections never test the “outer” variance of any concept, relying invariably on the “inner” constancy. Which is another way of saying: he never goes on except in such a way that would assure him of this finished and already existing world. It is this tension—the unachieved pressing against the achieved, the uncreated against the created—that for Emerson and Thoreau constitutes the lifelong emergency. To Thoreau it was a scandal that in this worded world men who struggle for their freedom are called fugitive slaves. If only Common Man could feel just a little dissatisfaction with his ways of going on. Strange as it may sound, this is the tension Cavell finds figured in opera. “The exposure is to a world of the separation of the self from itself, in which the splitting of the self into speech is expressed as the separation from someone who represents to that self the continuance of the world—a separation that may be figured as being forced into a false marriage” (PP, 151). The misfortune of Common Man is his refusal to recognize that his supposedly wonderful marriage is really a failure. He is, you could say, all too happily married to that special someone “who represents to [his] self the continuance of the world.” But to give expression to any marital disquiet during the scene of going on, he would have to author himself, to think aversively, turn this (private) intuition into (public) tuition, which accordingly would require a different relation with the resources associated with the second potency of the voice. Out of this other world, Cavell writes, emerge new aspects of the self: “That realm is to be understood as an irrupting of a new perspective of the self to itself ” (PP, 145).

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With this in mind, let us go back to Cavell’s question: “Where do our words come from?” Henry Bugbee, who, again, was a teacher at Harvard when Cavell was a student, quotes a remark by Max Picard: “Spring does not come from winter; it comes from the silence from which winter came and summer and autumn.”9 Bugbee makes a lovely inflection of this—in effect providing us with a picture of the voice—when he writes, “True words do not originate from antecedent words construed merely abstractly in serial order. True words flow from that stillness from which antecedent true words have flowed.”10 Given the constant contention of word energies throughout this book, any stillness would have to be significant. Schopenhauer, we may recall, located a profound stillness at the creative origin, the nunc stans (the standing now), but only so that the intellect as pure knowing subject could assert out of its own impetus and for the sake of transcendental knowledge. For the assertive potency, this is a fantasy of ideal conditions. Nietzsche’s of course was a fantasy in the opposite direction. Any stillness in his case would be associated with the defenseless stupor into which the intellect has sunk, like a patient immobilized for an operation, so that those inscrutable Dionysian insights might enjoy the fullest possible scope for play and self-discovery. But Bugbee is pointing to a different kind of stillness. Not the stillness that follows a forced submission or a battlefield defeat, but the stillness, for instance, in which Thoreau recommends we sit “in some attractive spot in the woods” so that “all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you in turn.”11 For Cavell, this stillness would be associated with the world’s call for words. See it as the expectant stillness of a listening world, the stillness of it having posed a question, because “the world, to be experienced, is to be answered,” and “this is what words are for.” So a stillness at the “creative origin” would be that into which, and out of which, our non-fixated, world-bound words would freely circulate, between the call of the world and our answer. Meanwhile, we would relate to these words as a composer hears his or her music, “hears it originating.” At the center of this relation between the world and the self, then, at the center of the voice, if we can say such a thing, there is carried out a continual call and answer, an Emersonian (Heideggerian) giftexchange of thinking as thanking.

4  A Music-making Socrates But now let us go back even farther, to that question posed at the very start— about whether of all people the philosopher can afford to trust the word energies associated with the second potency. Let us try to imagine such a philosopher who does. Call him a music-making Socrates. Compared to the standard philosopher, who is likely more inclined to discipline this unruly impetus and to go on with retractile conceptual performances, our music-making Socrates has a more freewheeling manner

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always under the sign and promise of the next thought. The fire i’ the flint shows not till it be struck. How limber he seems, how free of fixations and moving through expansive conceptual performances like an acrobat leaping from one trapeze to the next, which is to say: if he grabs hold it is only so that a moment later he lets it go. Reading Thoreau’s wonderful line in the conclusion of Walden that it is practically the duty of truth to betray its every partial formulation, one wonders if a few Dionysian proselytizers after all had made it to New England: “The volatile truth of our words,” Thoreau writes, “should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.” Such a maxim would delight our music-making Socrates. Another favorite would be his own modification of a line from Mandelstam on poetry: “For where there is amenability to paraphrase, there the sheets have never been rumpled,” there philosophy “so to speak, has never spent the night.”12 So if he knows anything about language, the music-making Socrates knows he can only express himself in the words that occur to him now because, if there is any “abode of the gods,” and it has a way in, it is “only at the point of the present” (SW, 54). You can see him trying not to smile as traditional philosophers, relying on that totally overvalued first potency of theirs, toil away at painstaking reformulations of this “residual statement.” These are people, let us not forget, who, in going on, have to ensure that they have only such insights as might count as further vindications or refinements of what has come before, which acclaim, or at least can fit into, the old way of putting it. Somehow those old formulations are supposed to withstand the load and the shock of all subsequent insights? They must be dreaming if they think the “volatile truth” could ever be found there. How, in words so drearily amenable to paraphrase, could philosophy ever be convinced to stay the night, let alone rumple a few sheets? No, they are definitely not to be envied. And yet if at times he does mock them—on a more serious note—he is well aware that their touchiness is a result of the constant strain that at any moment a new insight could come along and blow all their “residual statements” apart. That said, and as the traditional philosophers would be quick to point out, the philosopher working from a musical origin has problems, too. His or her work would need to have enough formal continuity, enough residual stiffness as it were, to accept any new insights as coherent elaborations of what came before and yet—this is important—be more than merely a circle drawn around a random conglomeration of remarks. In fact, spending time with the musicmaking Socrates you may begin to wonder if this whole possibility of second potency going on is what the poets came to represent to the philosophers and why, in the end, they demanded they be kicked out. Such an association would have been unfortunate. But then the philosophers might say: you simply have to draw the line somewhere. It is easy for the music-making Socrates to stand there and smirk. But how much of this musical going on can philosophy take and still be philosophy? He never had an answer for that one.

Conclusion  173

Of course, if he or she does insist on writing, a philosopher working from a musical origin is liable to produce work which, to some ears at least, will be of questionable philosophical seriousness. Yet given what we have seen of this second potency of the voice, a musical origin would aspire to contrast the traditional philosopher’s clarity not with obscurity and murk, but instead with the sort of incandescent pertinence in which, for instance, Shakespeare’s Othello illuminates our lives with skepticism. But then here we are back at the same old question: Can philosophy accept [Othello and Desdemona] back at the hands of poetry? Certainly not as long as philosophy continues, as it has from the first, to demand the banishment of poetry from its republic. Perhaps it could if it could itself become literature. But can philosophy become literature and still know itself? (CR, 496)

174

NOTES Introduction 1 Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1910), 31–33. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1971), 149–50. 3 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 175–76. 4 CR, 496. For extended reflections on this theme, see William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). 5 Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 10. 6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 9. 8 From P. F. Strawson, “Persons” in Wittgenstein and the Problem of Other Minds, ed. Harold Morick (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 135. 9 “If we think of the highest dignity of language as its capacity to correspond in the ideality of its sense to the form of Entity, of what really is (whether empirically, ideally, or logically), then its variable phenomenal surface can be set apart as having no essential role, as a deficient or inferior stratum of the Logos.” Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, 25. 10 Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Spring, collected in John Hayward, ed., The Penguin Book of English Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1956), 387. 11 Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, 16. 12 Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 37. 13 We might see the sensibility behind Augustine’s picture in Mulhall’s analysis: “For speaking as the adult who developed from such instruction, he [Augustine in his Confessions] condemns his stubborn childish preference for the playfulness of literature over the rules of grammar . . . and by more or less clearly associating literature . . . with self-indulgence, the temptations of the flesh and sinfulness, and grammar with austerity, self-discipline, and an earthly image of divine authority . . . he thereby dissociates playfulness from the essence of language in an essentially Manichaean way.” Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 50. A similar point can be found in Staten on Augustine’s notion of the language of fiction: ‘So fictions incite to involvement with the desires of the body, and the desires of the body or desires which are directed at the bodily existence of other human beings are desires for what is also a fiction, a nonbeing. Only the Unchanging truly is. Fiction is therefore the same as evil, which is defined by nonbeing or distance from God, and to approach God is to escape being nothing or a mere fiction.” Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, 137.

176 Notes 14 These three liabilities and hence the three figures resonate with Robert E. Innis in his “Language and the Thresholds of Sense: Some Aspects of the Failure of Words” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2008, 110: “Our language . . . can fail to ‘fixate’ and ‘grasp’ this world of felt meaning if (a) we have not developed the appropriate linguistic connoisseurship [the problem of Jungle Man], (b) we are systematically unreflective, [the problem of Common Man] or (c) we substitute linguistic violence for linguistic insight [the problem of Skeptical man]. The psychic, not to say political, consequences of these failures can be catastrophic.” 15 A similar distinction is briefly mentioned by Timothy Gould in his pioneering Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). His is one between the metaphysical and the lyrical voice. The metaphysical is characterized by “the demand that the mind be intelligible to itself, before the existence of any actual language . . . . The corresponding demand for a voice that is prior to any actual voice using any actual words is also part of this metaphysical conception of language. Inevitably, the actual voices and actual uses of words will be compared unfavorably to the ideal voice and its perfect intelligibility to itself ” (108). But he finds this “uncomfortably close” to the lyrical voice, in which there is likewise something unduly metaphysical when “certain lines of poetry release us from at least our sense of confinement in the conventional structure of language.” That said, “there can still be differences between the metaphysical voice, which presents itself as assigning its transparent meaning to the syllables it will henceforth use, and the voice of the lyric poem, which does not assign its meaning but rather finds them. In finding them, the voice finds itself, in the specific syllables on which it has already been disposed” (109). 16 Many other passages could be quoted here. To give only one: “And you always tell more and tell less than you know. Wittgenstein’s Investigations draws this most human predicament into philosophy, forever returning to philosophy’s ambivalence, let me call it, as between wanting to tell more than words can say and wanting to evade telling altogether—an ambivalence epitomized in the idea of wishing to speak ‘outside language games,’ a wish for (language to do, the mind to be) everything and nothing. Here I think again of Emerson’s wonderful saying in which he detects the breath of ‘virtue or vice’ that ‘our character emits’ at every moment, word so to speak always before and beyond themselves, essentially and unpredictably recurrent” DK, 83. 17 Soren Kierkegaard, The Book on Adler, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 114. 18 Quoted in PDAT, 50. 19 Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 198–99. 20 Ibid., 205. 21 Ibid., 199–200. 22 Ibid., 204.

Notes  177

Part One 1 WWR I, 13. See also the discussion on pp. 19–20. 2 Concepts that rely directly upon perception he calls concreta; those, on the other hand, which rely only indirectly upon perception—so chiefly depend on other concepts—are called abstracta. WWR I, 41. 3 Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, trans. by E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1989), vol. III, 24. 4 Jerry S. Clegg, On Genius: Affirmation and Denial from Schopenhauer to Wittgenstein (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 9. 5 Quoted in Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. by Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 198. 6 Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, III, 543. 7 Exactly this, Schopenhauer maintains, was what both Plato and Kant had been getting at, of course with minor differences: Kant with the thing-in-itself, Plato with his theory of forms. “Both declare the visible world to be a phenomenon which in-itself is void and empty, and which has meaning and borrowed reality only through the thing that expresses itself in it (the thing-in-itself in the one case, the Idea in the other)” WWR I, 172. 8 Jerry S. Clegg has argued that Schopenhauer seems to have believed that a private language was possible, though “idle,” because the speaker and audience would lack any criteria of identity. “Our inner mode of perception, being private, provides us with no criteria for identifying what others experience . . . . We would have no way of knowing what its names meant—no way of knowing, that is, what they named.” And yet, he goes on, there is nothing wrong with supposing that the world subject, he who “sees” through the world eye, discovers, “ready-made so to speak, a language of insight in which all the profound, important and interesting lessons of life reside . . . . What might be called a transcendent solipsism in this way solves the problem of the illuminists’ efforts to speak a truthful, but private, tongue.” Clegg also deals with Wittgenstein and the private language argument in Jerry S. Clegg, “Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Lonely Languages and Criterianless Claims” in Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday, ed. Eric von der Luft (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988). 9 “The truth which lies at the foundation of all the remarks we have so far made on art is that the object of art, the depiction of which is the aim of the artist, and the knowledge of which must consequently precede his work as its germ and source, is an Idea in Plato’s sense, and absolutely nothing else” WWR I, 233. 10 On some of the problems of this aspect of lyric poetry, see Barabara Neymeyr’s Asthetische Autonomie Als Abnormalitat (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), section 19, Die Inferioritat der Lyrik in Schopenhauer’s Dichtungstheorie, 351–63. 11 Hayward, ed., The Penguin Book of English Verse, 387. 12 Coleridge comes close to doing the same when he says that the test for good prose is precisely its inability to suffer translation into different words of the same language. But this, too, is only to put off the question, as it must defer to some “sense” that would help us decide whether or not a given passage has been translated faithfully.

178 Notes 13 John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm, paragraph 65. (Online: www.g​utenb​erg.o​rg/fi​les/1​2641/​12641​-8.tx​t) 14 WWR II, 429. My italics. 15 Christopher Marlowe, from Hero and Leander, in Hayward, ed., The Penguin Book of English Verse, 34. 16 Schopenhauer is not unaware of the difficulties arising from the exclusion of formal aspects of poetry. Thus lyrical poets are justified in neglecting logical sequence, “in order that the unity of the fundamental sensation and mood expressed in them may take its place” WWR II, 432. The changes, only superficially disparate, are linked by the mood, which is presumably distracted and jumpy, and thereby reasserts a unity on some deeper level. Yet how could the neglect of logical sequence suffer translation? 17 WWR I, 256. This, Schopenhauer concedes, is an obscure and difficult subject; how, after all, can we talk about one language in another? Nevertheless he claims that through the dim glimmer of analogy the relation can be made (slightly more) manifest. Given that the Ideas are the adequate objectification of the will, and given also that music, as if through a kind of radio astronomy, figures forth a copy of the will itself, there must be some correlation between the two. Schopenhauer claims there is. Consider the lowest note on a double bass. This would accord with the lowest grades the will in its lower degrees of phenomenal representation— rockslides, crystal growth, ocean currents, and so on. At the absolute margin of the hearable—at least to human ears—where pitch separates from tone, form divides from matter (WWR I, 258). But moving upward we discover that bass note through the accompanying vibrations, which accords with how the various life forms developed out of the primal mass of the plant. And as we move further up the scale we ascend the gradient of the will’s objectification. Unharmonious chords struck in relation to our bass note can be likened to nature’s occasional “monstrous abortions” (WWR I, 259). 18 “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” included in BT, 143. 19 Ibid., 145. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 151. 23 Ibid., 152. 24 See Adam Gonya, “Pleasure Not for Us Ordained: Schopenhauer, Milton, and the Beauty of the World” in Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2009), ed. Cyril McDonnell (Dublin: Irish Philosophical Society, 2010), 150–59. 25 Quoted in BT, 29–30. 26 The phrase is Sartre’s, from whom I adopt the distinction between expansive and retractile forms of unification. He is commenting on modern French poetry, within a general discussion of Jean Genet. On the expansive form, he writes, “We are gradually made to see in a miscellaneous collection the breaking up of a prior totality whose elements, set in motion by a centrifugal force, break away from each other and fly off into space, colonizing it and there reconstituting a new unity.” The retractile, however, seeks to make externality “a nothingness, a shadow, the pure, perceptible appearance of secret unities.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Pantheon Book, 1983), 464.

Notes  179 27 This is why on the very first page Nietzsche calls them drives (“Triebe”). “These two very different drives [the Apolline and the Dionysiac] exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give birth to ever-new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them,” BT, 14. 28 If we link the Apollonian with Schopenhauer’s world subject to the principium individuationis, in other words, the world as representation, then the aesthetic references to the Apollonian might be a place holder for Schopenhauer’s Ideas. See Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 33: “It seems clear, therefore, that while that which is Apollonian in the metaphysical sense is Schopenhauer’s world ‘as representation,’ that which is Apollonian in the aesthetic sense is Schopenhauer’s world as ‘Idea.’” 29 “It is Dionysian because it is the world symbolized by Dionysus and accessible only to those who are in the state of Dionysian Rausch. When Nietzsche personifies the metaphysical principle he still does not call it ‘Dionysus,’ but instead the ‘Dionysian world-artist.’” Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 194. 30 The idea of the primordial unity sending itself out to “colonize” far-flung regions of existence employs a word used by Sartre to describe the workings of expansive unity (see note 26 above). If the knowing intellect is closed to it, “the original artist of the world” (BT, 33) is denied a zone of release and redemption in semblance. The susceptibility of the lyric poet, then, is through the weakening of the retractile energies of the intellect. “The artist has already given up his subjectivity in the Dionysiac process; the image which now shows him his unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene which gives sensuous expression to the primal contradiction and pain, along with its primal lust for and pleasure in semblance” BT, 30. A surrender of the knowing self invites such a colonization of the intellect’s conceptual forms, namely, words and concepts, to be used after the primordial unity’s own inscrutable purposes. 31 As Keith M. May puts it, in Nietzsche on the Struggle between Knowledge and Wisdom (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 32: “Socrates is what Nietzsche calls him, ‘the Theoretical man,’ because such is his entire God-directed nature. He is this unprecedented creature not just in being the first to subject human life to theoretical inquiry but in examining mortal opinions so thoroughly that he seems bent on extravagant purpose, namely to subordinate life to thought.” 32 According to Werner J. Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974): “The theoretical world view is understood by Nietzsche as the greatest challenge to the tragic view of the world. Its essential component is . . . the belief in the fathomability (Ergründlichkeit) of nature and in the universal healing power of knowledge” (122). “Theory implies the sovereignty of reason. All things are brought before the bar of reason to be judged in its light” (123). 33 By the time he was writing BT, Nietzsche had come to believe that even calling the thing-in-itself the will was a mistake. Rather than being the ultimate reality, the will is only “the most universal form of appearance of something that is for us otherwise completely undecipherable.” Quoted in Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 196. Safranski summarizes this “break” with the Schopenhauerian formulation: “The unknowable must not be interpreted as a negative image of the knowable, otherwise one runs the risk of using the logic of the antipode to project

180 Notes

34

35

36

37

determinations of the knowable world onto what is indeterminable. It is essential not to interpret the ‘thing-in-itself ’ as will, which accords far too much specificity to the indeterminate essence of the world.” Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (London: Granta Books, 2003), 48. On this see also James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysis: an Essay on The Birth of Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 60. “It is clear that poetry is generated not out of music as sonorous phenomenon but out of music as the poet’s musical mood that precedes verbalization: a sort of transcendental music or unheard melody that would thus be the pure form of music” (Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 210). In Paul de Man’s deconstructive reading, “Genesis and Genealogy (Nietzsche)” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), The Birth of Tragedy is “a text based on the authority of the human voice that receives this authority from its allegiance to a quasi-divine figure” (95). The “dispossession” of word in favor or music was an inescapably “logocentric gesture,” one which only ‘serves to strengthen the ontological center (theocentric, melocentric, logocentric) and to refine the claim that truth can be made present to man. It also recovers the possibility of language to reach full and substantial meaning. A great number of passages from The Birth of Tragedy seem to place the text forcefully within the logocentric tradition” (88). But, as Henry Staten has pointed out, this reading only sustains itself by linking up polarities that ought to be left more fluid. For instance, de Man matches Dionysus and Apollo with appearance and its antithesis. “Appearance is of something that can only be Dionysus” (De Man, 91). So we have a simple opposition with the representation and the thing-in-itself. But as I am arguing it—the primordial unity’s lust for lovely semblance—conceptually never arrives. Dionysian (or tragic) knowledge is still not this sort of transmission. From instance, when scientific knowledge is taken to its limit, we “stare into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to [our] horror, [we see] how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and medicine” BT, 75. Also, Nietzsche writes: “I conclude that music is able to give birth to myth, i.e., to the most significant example, and in particular to tragic myth, myth which speaks of Dionysiac knowledge in symbols” BT, 79. This is in the next paragraph linked to “Dionysian wisdom” (80). As Safranski puts it, “Dionysian wisdom is the power to endure Dionysian reality” (79). He goes on, “One is simultaneously transported by the Dionysian, with which life must retain contact to avoid becoming desolate, and dependent on the protective devices of civilization to avoid being sacrificed to the disintegrating power of the Dionysian” (80). “The Dionysian Rausch is a state in which the ‘nearness’ of a presence ‘speaks through forces’” (redet durch Kräfte), shows itself as “forces felt, and not condensed into images . . . and these forces are those of excess . . . of the life surge that ruptures the boundaries of individuality” (Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 210). See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Colombia University Press, 1983), 3: “We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.”

Notes  181

Part Two 1 Quoted in PI, §1. 2 According to Wittgenstein, “Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And ‘think’ would here mean something like ‘talk to itself ’ ” (PI, §34). 3 As Cavell puts it, “A child can be said to have just four words, but then imagine that stage of life with those words, imagine the happy repetitions, the improvised shrieks and coos, the experimental extensions of applications, etc. The child has a future with its language; the builders have next to none” NYUA, 63. 4 NYUA, 62. “For me to imagine their lives, they have to make sense to me. And this seems to mean: I have to imagine them making sense to themselves, which is presumably not a gloss I would ask were I trying to understand the behavior of bees or beavers.” “Notes on Wittgenstein’s Investigations,” in Passages, 161. 5 Such a scenario would presuppose, as Warren D. Goldfarb puts it, “an independent process of thinking that is behind and animates language. It is to imagine language as stuck on to people who already have thoughts; thoughts are what make noises into language.” Warren D. Goldfarb, “I Want You to Bring Me a Slab,” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Critical Essays, ed. Meredith Williams (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 22. He also says, “The trouble comes when we segment the description, i.e., when we take ‘naming,’ ‘wishing to point’ and so on, as if they picked out isolatable phenomena, whose character can be given independently of any surrounding structure” (24). 6 Passages, 131. As Mulhall puts it, in a good discussion of Augustine’s text in the Investigations, rather than saying Augustine’s picture is wrong, Wittgenstein’s point is “diagnostic.” “What he actually says is that Augustine’s picture will seem unproblematically correct to someone who has nouns on her mind; he does not say, and it does not follow from what he does say, that the picture is applicable even to that kind of word.” Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 39. 7 “We don’t, I believe, say that we learn our first language, our mother tongue. We say of a child who cannot talk yet that he or she cannot talk, not that he hasn’t learned his native language” Passages, 144. But it also has another important implication: “It suggests that we may at any time—nothing seems special about the matter of false generalization, saying more than you quite know—be speaking without knowing what our words mean, what their meaning anything depends on, speaking, as it were, in emptiness” Passages, 133. 8 See MWM, 21, for the discussion of looking “umiak” up in the dictionary. 9 CR, 172. See also “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy”: “A child I was taking for a walk saw a younger child stumble and fall, and she asked me, ‘Why did the baby fall?’ I answered, ‘He just lost his balance.’ The child immediately replied, ‘Where did he lose it?’ and began looking around in puzzlement . . . . The child will eventually learn what we mean by the phrase ‘lost his balance,’ or perhaps we should say, she will learn how we use it; that will happen when she also learns how we use forms like ‘lost his way’ and ‘lost his chance’ and ‘lost his turn’ and ‘lost his sense of humor’ ” TOS, 222–23.

182 Notes 10 See Richard Eldridge, “The Normal and the Normative: Wittgenstein’s Legacy, Kripke, and Cavell,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 46, No. 4, (June 1986), 555–75. Here this is called the No Real Alternatives View. 11 “Declining Decline,” NYUA, 42. For ethnological speculation concerning what might be taken as the limit between these two senses, see Veena Das, “Wittgenstein and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 27, (1998), 171–95. Considering acts of horrendous violence, she makes the suggestive point that “the precise range and scale of the human form of life is not knowable in advance, any more than the precise range of the meaning of a word is knowable in advance” (182). 12 As Mulhall puts it, “Being in the human world thus seems to be a matter of sharing or failing to share certain facets of human nature: normality seems to be a matter of finding certain things natural, as if the very distinction between normality and abnormality rests upon a distinction between the natural and the unnatural” SC, 117–18. 13 CR, 14. Here the linkage to the Kantian role of concepts and knowledge is particularly emphasized. 14 CR, 17. But this is not automatic; we have to apply the criteria, which means, in a sense, we have to notice the world, make a claim of pertinence. Avner Baz criticizes John McDowell for leaving out this step, suggesting that our perception of the world invokes the same content of our judgments. “Faced with a philosophical anxiety concerning our capacity for articulating our world, McDowell has responded by, in effect, regulating the responsibility for particular articulations to the world itself. . . . In trying to get us not to worry about one thing (call it the problem of how words are responsive to the world), McDowell has ended up appearing to deny, or at rate avoiding, the reality of quite another thing (call it the problem of how to make ourselves and our words responsive to the world). Avner Baz, “On When Words are Called for: Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of the World,” Inquiry, Vol. 46, (2003), 496. 15 For an unconventional reading of this scene, see chapter 2 in Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida. 16 But Cavell insists this need not be the end of the encounter. “I conceive the good teacher will not say, ‘This is simply what I do’ as a threat to discontinue his or her instruction, as if to say: ‘I am right; do it my way or leave my sight.’ The teacher’s expression of inclination in what is to be said shows readiness—(unconditional) willingness—to continue presenting himself as an example, as the representative of the community into which the child is being, let me say, invited and initiated” CHU, 72. Cavell distinguishes between reading this as a “strong” or a “weak” gesture, Kripke’s reading being an example of the former. See below, and Stanley Cavell, “Time and Place for Philosophy,” Metaphilosophy, Vol. 39, No. 1, (January 2008), 51–61. 17 “In no case in which he appeals to the application of criteria is there a separate stage at which one might, explicitly or implicitly, appeal to the application of standards. To have criteria, in his sense, for something’s being so is to know whether, in an individual case, the criteria do or do not apply. If there is doubt about the application, the case is in some way ‘non-standard’” (CR, 13). For instance, Cavell asks whether Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Garden is a tonal work. Then again this predicament—not knowing what to call an X—is familiar

Notes  183

18 19

20

21 22 23

24

25

enough for us to have some concepts on hand precisely for not having anything better. This might be linked to questions of assessment. “Such problems, or related ones, are, I believe, sometimes discussed as matters of borderline cases or of conceptual deviance or divergence. In the assessment case there is room for something we might call a borderline case, viz, an eventuality in which I have articulated my (our) criteria well enough, and they are met about half way.” The problem is that “we have not yet found a convincing concept for it” (CR, 87). See also NYUA, 48, in his discussion of the forms of life of talkers. Cavell refers to Norman Malcolm’s review article “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” and Rogers Albritton, “On Wittgenstein’s Use of the Term ‘Criterion.’” He calls the view that the Investigations is intended to do battle with skepticism the Malcolm-Albritton view. (See CR, 7, but he considers them in more detail in the second chapter of CR, “Criteria and Skepticism.”) Both essays are included in Wittgenstein: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. G. Pitcher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company: 1966). “What is the source of the view that criteria are meant to establish the existence of something with certainty?” CR, 37. Elsewhere he writes, concerning Wittgenstein’s background remarks that suggest criteria give us certainty: “First, they seem to capture our relation to the world and others (and ourselves) that are irreducible, primitive; second, to say of any of these formulations that they are certain is either laughably questionable or helplessly weak, I think both. I understand my efforts with respect to Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria to wish to capture the sense in which they articulate the all but unshakeable depth of our hold on the world at the same time as they trace our vulnerability to the ways of that world.” “Reply to four chapters,” in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 283–84. I quote from Benson Mates, “On the Verification of Statements about Ordinary Language” in Ordinary Language, ed. V.C. Chappell (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), 66. J.L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses” in Philosophical Papers, eds. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 191. Benson Mates makes the distinction between two possible routes of statement verification. The extensional method examines a number of different empirical cases; the intensional method involves a more Socratic approach, probing the language user to discover if they are really using the right word. Alone, each has limitations. Bates recommends both be used in judicious combination. Ordinary language philosophers “tend toward an armchair version of the extensional method, though sometimes they read the dictionary for intensional guidance before surveying the cases in which they know or suppose the term would be applied” (“On the Verification of Statements about Ordinary Language,” 69). As Mary Mothersill puts it, “If someone asks you whether you dress the way you do ‘voluntarily,’ you will not take this as a slur on your moral character, but neither will you imagine that he is merely collecting evidence for some hypothesis about free will.” (Untitled Review) The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 72, No. 2, (January 30, 1975), 37. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz have also argued against Cavell’s conclusions. “The Availability of What We Say,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXII, (1963), 57–71. The brunt of their critique is against his claim that knowledge of

184 Notes

26 27 28 29

30 31

32

what we say when is fully nonempirical. They distinguish between what a native speaker says in speaking their language from the speaker’s metalinguistic claims; being able to do the first does not qualify them for the second. “What Cavell has failed to show is precisely that the possibility of an empirical description of a natural language presupposes the truth of the metalinguistic claims of its speakers” (60). They believe Cavell also errs when he says that we are not often wrong in our explications—witness the general inability of ordinary language philosophers to agree on basic terms. (65) Cavell also does not spell out how disagreements in explications should be decided “without appeal to empirical evidence” (66). Jerry A. Fodor wrote a follow-up article “On Knowing What We Would Say,” The Philosophical Review, LXXIII, No. 2, (1964), 198–212. Richard G. Henson (for the most part) defends Cavell in his response “What We Say,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 2, No.1, (January 1965), 52–62. Austin, by the way, has anticipated some of Fodor’s objections in “A Plea for Excuses.” MWM, 12. Cavell’s italics. Epsen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 10. For a good summary, see Michael Rosen’s “The Role of Rules,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, (2001), 369–84. “If our considerations so far are correct, the answer is that, if one person is considered in isolation, the notion of a rule as guiding the person who adopts it can have no substantive content. There are, as we have seen, no truth conditions or facts in virtue of which it can be the case that he accords with his past intentions or not. As long as we regard him as following a rule ‘privately,’ so that we pay attention to his justification conditions alone, all we can say is that he is licensed to follow the rule as it strikes him” (KP, 89). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Critical Essays, ed. Meredith Williams (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 65. This would read the moment of “hitting bedrock” as a strong gesture. Cavell writes, “Kripke expressed, and is helped to sustain, his strong gesture by articulating Wittgenstein’s moment of reaching bedrock as one of being ‘licensed to say,’ where Wittgenstein says ‘inclined to say.’ This shift of picture allows or invites us to imagine the teacher as an unhesitant representative of the culture in examining a new recruit, as though it is out of the question that teachers may have something more to learn about themselves and their culture from the resistance of their pupils.” “Time and Place for Philosophy,” Metaphilosophy, Vol. 39, No. 1, (January 2008), 56. Of course there are different notions of just what exactly has just vanished. Rupert Read argues that Kripke has simply forgotten the lesson of Frege, who held that the “minimum unit of linguistic significance is properly the sentence.” Oddly, then, when Kripke writes, “There can be so such thing as meaning anything by any word,” assuming Frege is right, Kripke is perfectly correct to say this about any individual word. So what vanishes here is not meaning as such, but, according to Read, “a tempting but ultimately wholly worthless picture of sentence-meanings being the result of ‘adding together’ the meanings of individual words.” Rupert Read, “What Could Kripke Possibly Mean?” in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 78. For John McDowell (“Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical

Notes  185 Investigations: Critical Essays, ed. Meredith Williams (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007)), the real troublemaker is the tempting picture that our ability to understand a rule—hence our ability to go on—is based on interpretation. Because then we have to sort out how we can be sure we have the right interpretation. This is what starts the regress of interpretations—“no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule”—that is only brought to an end, at least in Kripke’s account, by community checking. The other alternative is to “picture following a rule as the operation of a super-rigid yet (or perhaps we should say ‘hence’) ethereal machine” (99). Instead we need to realize, as Wittgenstein has it in §201, “that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.” For McDowell, the answer is by belonging to a custom, practice, or institution. 33 He continues, “I say this struggle with skepticism, with its threat or temptation, is endless; I mean to say that it is human, it is the human drive to transcend itself, make itself inhuman, which should not end until, as in Nietzsche, the human is over” NYUA, 57. 34 John McDowell, “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following” in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 43. Here he is commenting specifically on Cavell. 35 Steven G. Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment, and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell,” European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 1, (April, 1998), 1–31. 36 Ibid., 10. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Ibid., 9. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 Ibid., 22. 41 Stephen Mulhall, “The Givenness of Grammar: A Reply to Steven Affeldt,” European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 6, No.1, (April 1998), 33. Many points first made there are reprised in “Stanley Cavell’s Vision of the Normativity of Language: Grammar, Criteria, and Rules,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79–106. 42 Mulhall, “The Giveness of Grammar,” 33. 43 Ibid., 34. 44 “Once again, however, the deep problem Cavell identifies here appears to lie, not in the very idea that criteria might be thought of as rules, but in a particular use to which particular versions of that idea might be put.” Mulhall, “Cavell’s Vision of the Normativity of Language,” 83. Here in other words the problem is the local and defective conception of rules, as in the tendency for philosophy “to regard logic as normative for the normativity of the world” (105). 45 Mulhall, “Cavell’s Vision of the Normativity of Language,” 41. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 43. 48 Hilary Putnam, “Rules, Attunement, and ‘Applying Words to the World,’” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction, eds. Chantal Mouffe and Ludwig Nagl (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 9.

186 Notes 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59

60 61 62

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Putnam’s Wittgenstein quotation is from On Certainty, 248. As Stephen Mulhall writes, “Part of what it means to be capable of making aesthetic judgments is to be capable of entering the relevant sorts of support for one’s judgment, of recognizing competently entered objections to it, and of making appropriate responses to those objections” (SC, 25). Only through this sort of exchange—provided of course that the speakers are capable and willing—are the widespread patterns of agreement brought to consciousness and articulated. That agreement is not guaranteed is no sign of weakness, but rather ensures that when agreement is achieved, “it is based upon subjectivity rather than upon its exclusion” (SC, 28). As far as aesthetics is concerned, then, the critic is someone who, rather than getting rid of their personal response, seeks to express it, to “master it in exemplary ways” MWM, 94. See Robert Mankin’s essay, “An Introduction to The Claim of Reason.” This is the text to which Cavell responds in this postscript. Emily Dickinson, from “There came a wind like a bugle,” collected in The Penguin Book of English Verse, 367. “The Skeptical and the Metaphorical,” IQO, 147. The rest of this sentence gives us a fairly exact picture of the way the first picture of the voice relates to language: “Wittgenstein calls this our (being led to be) speaking outside language games. This begins in casualness but it continues in driveness and hauntedness, finding rest (such as it will be) in a particular structure (of absolute ‘see-ables,’ fixed perspectives, decontextualized, or depersonalized, ‘meanings’) from within which language seems a prison, or wasteland” IQO, 147. On this connection, see Ted Cohen, “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1, (Autumn, 1978), 3–12. Cavell gives an account of Caro’s departure from traditional—in other words, categorically unproblematic—sculpture on p. 217. Cavell quotes Krenek: “Generally and traditionally [Krenek writes] ‘inspiration’ is held in great respect as the most distinguished source of the creative process in art. It should be remembered that inspiration by definition is closely related to chance, for it is the very thing that cannot be controlled, manufactured or premeditated in any way. It is what falls into the mind (according to the German term Einfall) unsolicited, unprepared, unrehearsed, coming from nowhere. . . . Actually the composer has come to distrust his inspiration because it is not really as innocent as it was supposed to be, but rather conditioned by a tremendous body of recollection, tradition, training, and experience” (Quoted on MWM, 195). Cavell explains, “The invocation of chance is like an earlier artist’s invocation of the muse, and serves the same purpose: to indicate that his work comes not from him, but through him—its validity or authority is not a function of his own powers or intentions. Speaking for the muse, however, was to give voice, to what all men share, or all would hear; speaking through chance forgoes a voice altogether—there is nothing to say” (MWM, 202). For a different opinion, see

Notes  187

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73

Stephanie Ross “Chance, Constraint, and Creativity: The Awfulness of Modern Music,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 19, No. 3, (Autumn, 1985), 21–35. Ross does not think Cavell’s charges of fraudulence are valid. Focusing on a particular work of Krenek’s 1957 composition for voice and instrumental ensemble, she suggests that for contemporary music the question awaits empirical verification to decide whether serial procedures are perceptible to the ear. She believes Cavell argues that fraudulence is not to be found in the work itself, but in the “processes through which it comes about” (26). “Cavell has given us no reason to think that a composition like Sestina cannot be freely chosen and freely meant.” It may be that she takes Krenek’s choosing not to mean, to “forego to choose” to be an assertion of meaning. “Why should this choice, freely made, relegate their music to the category of fraud?” (27) But this immediately follows her claim that philosophers could probably divine an intention at work in a “crumpled handkerchief ” (mentioned by Cavell on MWM, 197). Her analysis is hampered by the general lack of consideration of the Wittgensteinian context in which Cavell is writing. She also makes no mention of the next companion essay, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in which Cavell clarifies and further develops his position against criticism. The image is from his splendid essay, “Conversation about Dante,” from Osip Mandelstam: Critical Prose and Letters, ed. and trans. Jane Gary Harris (Woodstock and New York: Ardis Publishers, 2003), 398. Barry Green with W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Music (London: Pan Books, 1987). Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 251. Ibid., 252. Henry W. Pickford, Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 50. See Cavell’s Epilogue in Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, eds., Music of My Future: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 176. “Now if it were asked ‘Do you have the thought before finding the expression?’ what would one have to reply? And what would be one’s reply to the question ‘What did the thought consist in, as it existed before its expression?’” (PI, §335). This line continues in the following few paragraphs. “But didn’t I already intend the whole construction of the sentence (for example) at its beginning?” he asks. “An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question” (PI, §337). “Emerson will say, or show, that words demand conversion or transfiguration or reattachment, where Wittgenstein will say that they are to be led home, as from exile” TE, 114. Seamus Heaney, “The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 61. William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, I, i, 20–25. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Seamus Heaney, “The Fire i’ the Flint” also in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 19681978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 83.

188 Notes 74 75 76 77 78 79

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 75. Heaney, “The Fire i’ the Flint,” 84. Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 394. 80 Heaney, “The Fire i’ the Flint,” 88. 81 Act I, scene i. Ben Jonson’s Plays (London: Dent, 1964). 82 Heaney, “The Makings of a Music,” 61. 83 Quoted in Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Penguin books, 1990), 522. 84 Drury is quoted in Rei Terada, “Philosophical Self-Denial: Wittgenstein and the Fear of Public Language,” Common Knowledge, Vol. 8, No. 3, (2002), 464. The Wittgenstein described by Terada does not seem to have tolerated well the fragility of sense. According to Rei Terada (also from p. 464), “Wittgenstein’s confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expectation that he would himself be unintelligible.” 85 Jonson, The Complete Poems, 447. Jonson mentions also that Virgil “brought forth his verses like a bear, and after formed them with licking.” It follows, one might suppose, Shakespeare’s verse could have used more licking. Heaney quotes T.S. Eliot, who said of Jonson, “unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse but in the design of the whole.” See Heaney, “The Fire i’ the Flint,” 85. Frank Kermode writes of Ben Jonson: “When he said that Shakespeare ‘wanted art’ he meant the laboriously excogitated craft he himself developed, something we can admire in him but do not look for in Shakespeare . . . . He himself preferred and practiced poetry that showed the ‘labour of the file.’” Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin Books, 2001), viii–ix. 86 Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare (Vol. VIII of the Yale edition), ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1968), 707. 87 Cora Diamond, “What Nonsense Might Be,” Philosophy, Vol. 56, No. 215, (January 1981), 5–22. “For Wittgenstein there is no kind of nonsense which is nonsense on account of what the terms composing it mean—there is as it were no ‘positive’ nonsense. Anything that is nonsense is so merely because some determination of meaning has not been made; it is not nonsense as a logical result of determinations that have been made.” And among her quotations in support of this is PI §500: “When a sentence is called senseless it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.” Stephen Mulhall concurs: “A meaningless utterance is one to which no sense has yet been given, not one which cannot have meaning because of the sense that it (or its component terms) have already been given.” Inheritance and Originality, 68–69. 88 Ludwig Wittgenstein and C.K. Ogden, trans., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge. 2006), 27. But see also Cavell’s discussion in CR, 336–37, where he comments on section 500 of PI on meaning something incoherently: “I am surmising. And wishing to isolate, a different human possibility,

Notes  189 one that arises from the possibility of meaning words in particular ways . . . namely the possibility of meaning them all right, but of meaning them the wrong way, or with an unseen sense.” 89 Edward T. Duffy, Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 23. Duffy quotes Cavell from IQO, 28. 90 “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto III, XCVII, from Lord Byron, Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 448. 91 Wittgenstein’s appreciation of Shakespeare is also briefly mentioned in “Henry James Reading Emerson Reading Shakespeare,” where Cavell writes: “[Wittgenstein] suggests that [Shakespeare’s] uniqueness lies in his perhaps being a ‘creator of language’ rather than a poet. Perhaps what causes Wittgenstein’s distaste, then, is a function of the idea of creating language as something private or personal, as if this must be opposed to Wittgenstein’s insistence on the publicness and commonness of language” TE, 236. 92 Duffy, Secular Mysteries, 36. 93 Concerning the 693 sections of Part I of the Philosophical Investigations, Cavell said, in an interview with Arnis Ritsups, “Philosophy in this book starts 693 times and it stops 693 times, each time it comes to an end.” The full interview has been posted online: https​://ww​w.rig​aslai​ks.co​m/mag​azine​/stan​ley-c​avell​-1877​2 94 Marie McGinn, Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Logic and Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 107. Here is a fuller quotation: “However, even once the illusions are abandoned, the question of how language signifies, and of the nature and status of logic, still remain. These questions are ones that Wittgenstein still believes will be answered by means of clarification alone, but now the work of clarification is to be undertaken in respect of our actual practice of using language, and in what Diamond calls ‘a realistic spirit.’ In a certain sense, it is the immediate object of his investigation that changes: his investigation is no longer directed at the idea of an exact calculus that underlies our use of language, but to our actual employment of language within our everyday lives. It is this change in the object of investigation that calls for a completely different approach to the one that Wittgenstein takes in the Tractatus. However, beneath the surface of the important and striking differences in approach, there remains, I will argue, a fundamental continuity of philosophical purpose and insight; it would, I want to claim, be almost correct to say that the Philosophical Investigations is a re-imagining of the most important philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein’s early work, one which is purged of the illusions to which the early Wittgenstein was subject.” 95 Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1996), 257. They go on: “And the reason why it was important to keep this boundary line was still the same. This was, to guard against the imposition of needless constraints on clear thought and right feeling, in areas where these genuinely matter—namely, in the sincere expression of human emotion, and in the free exercise of creative fantasy.” 96 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 55. 97 The word centrophillic is not found in the OED, but it appears to be a scientific term geneticists use to describe a clustering near the center of a mitotic spindle.

190 Notes

Part Three 1 Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 64. 2 Descartes, Meditation One, quoted by Cavell in CR, 131. 3 Not everyone accepts that there is a common single experience behind skeptical expressions. Richard Rorty, for example, says that Cavell has unduly conflated three different sorts of skepticism: (a) the applied, deliberate, and contained musings of the professional professor; (b) the Kantian concern that our words relate to the world as it is in itself; (c) the existential panic—say Sartre’s—of contingency in the way things are. “My complaint about his book,” Rorty says, “is that Cavell does not argue for such a connection, but takes it for granted.” Richard Rorty, “Cavell on Skepticism,” in Contending with Cavell, ed. Russell B. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14. Cavell seems to have anticipated this: “I hope it will not seem perverse that I lump views in such a way, taking the very raising of the question of knowledge in certain form, or spirit, to constitute skepticism, regardless whether a philosophy takes itself to have answered the question affirmatively of negatively” CR, 46. See Cavell’s general response to Rorty in TOS, 198. James Conant has argued for the distinction between two genres of philosophical skepticism, the Cartesian (centered on knowledge and doubt of an external world) and the Kantian (“the conditions of possibility of mindedness as such” (104)). Discussions often fail to take these differences into account and unwittingly shift from one to the other, as happens, he argues, in Putnam’s Dewey Lectures. James Conant, “Varieties of Scepticism,” in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 4 “My major claim about the philosopher’s originating question—for example, ‘(How) do (can) we know anything about the world?’ or ‘What is knowledge; what does my knowledge of the world consist in?’—is that it (in one or another of its versions) is a response to, or expression of, a real experience which takes hold of human beings” CR, 140. 5 See Frank Cioffi, “Congenital Transcendentalism and the ‘Loneliness Which Is the Truth about Things,’” Wittgenstein on Freud and Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). This nuanced, insightful, and perhaps necessarily inconclusive essay provides examples of this sort of experience from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Twain, Pater, Tolstoy, and others. “The thesis I wish to advance,” he writes, “is that the utterances in which the problem of solipsism finds expression are precipitates of something else, more cloudy and indeterminate—the feeling of having stumbled on a momentous but deeply hidden significance, involving the epistemic relation of our being in the world to that to the being of others. . . . The solipsism I am talking about requires oxymoron for its expression— it might be called universal solipsism. The feeling of a profound and irremediable solitude which finds expression in solipsistic fantasies transcends skepticism and is unaffected by its refutation” (239–40). For Cioffi, what sums it up best is the line from Virginia Woolf: “The loneliness which is the truth about things.” 6 Cavell considers the relation between the arguments and the experience: do the arguments cause the world to drop away, or rather is it precipitated, again on an experiential level, by the idea of being alone, sealed in, closed off from the world?

Notes  191 “In itself the circling of the experience does not surprise me,” he writes. “It suggests that phenomenologically the form of the skeptical investigation is, after the fact, that of having confirmed our worst fear for knowledge” CR, 145. 7 “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” IQO, 154. Cavell gives an example of this in the Investigations, in how Wittgenstein was one day—but not before—stopped by Augustine’s account of learning to talk. Given that Wittgenstein never really says the account is wrong, Cavell senses that the Investigations wants to keep open the possibility that it can be taken both as remarkable and unremarkable. See Passages, 135. 8 As Stephen Mulhall puts it, these propositions “are not things which it makes sense for us to claim to know.” Consequently they do not “function in our lives in the way that pieces of knowledge characteristically do” SC, 105. See also Hilary Putnam, “Skepticism, Stroud and the Contextuality of Knowledge,” Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 4, No. 1, (January 2001), 2–16, where Putnam applies this insight against arguments from Barry Stroud. 9 From the skeptic’s point of view, “it must be the investigation of a concrete claim if its procedure is to be coherent; it cannot be the investigation of a concrete claim if its conclusion is to be general. Without that coherence it would not have the obviousness it has seemed to have; without that generality its conclusion would not be skeptical” CR, 220. 10 CR, 134. Cavell uses Austin’s example of the Goldfinch; this is a question of its identity, not its existence. 11 He goes on: “If we are to communicate, we mustn’t leap too far; but how far is too far?” 12 The Investigations “contains what a serious confession must: the full acknowledgement of temptation (‘I want to say . . .’; ‘I feel like saying . . .’; ‘Here the urge is strong . . .’) and a willingness to correct them and give them up (‘In the everyday use . . .’; ‘I impose a requirement which does not suit my real need’). (The voice of temptation and the voice or correctness are the antagonists in Wittgenstein’s dialogues)” MWM, 71. For the indebtedness of Wittgenstein to the romantics, and especially to Goethe, see M.W. Rowe, “Wittgenstein’s Romantic Inheritance,” Philosophy, Vol. 69, No. 269, (July 1994), 327–51. Rowe argues that the romantics in turn drew upon and transformed Christian confessional literature. So whatever affinities exist between Wittgenstein and the confessional tradition should be seen with romantic mediation. These include the wisdom of “what is already to hand” (338); to see clearly where we stand in the everyday; to look and see the world freshly, unhampered by presuppositions or generalities (342); to achieve harmony within oneself, and ending an internal dialogue, which gets bogged down with “the construction of false pictures and fantasies . . . . These pictures are often firmly rooted in the surface grammar of our language and can be only extirpated with immense difficulty” (344). 13 Commenting on this section (PI, §123), Cavell writes, “It conceives philosophy’s beginning for me as one of recognizing that I have lost my way, and in that way am stopped . . . . The progress between beginning and ending is, accordingly, what Wittgenstein means by grammatical investigation, which, since we begin lost, may be thought of finding ourselves” Passages, 157. 14 Passages, 149. Hence his attempts to find new metaphors to break up the misleading texture of language, to gain a perspicacious view of the situation. “The

192 Notes results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery” (PI, §119). Richard Eldridge has argued in his reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that there is a constitutive restlessness in our attempts to make ourselves intelligible. “The protagonist figure of Philosophical Investigations, moving through successive moments of doctrinal aspiration and its undoing, becomes for us a figure of acknowledgement, someone in whom we might see ourselves. . . . Expressive freedom and rational peace in and through cultural life [shared criteria, for instance] are longed for and sought. Efforts are made to articulate their conditions of perfect achievement. But these efforts one and all founder.” Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, 119. 15 From Cavell’s reply in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, 285. 16 Other relevant passages from Wittgenstein would include: Our language is “idle” (PI, §132), “on holiday” (PI, §38). Our words are like a wheel which, though it may turn, “is not part of the mechanism” (PI, §271). We say things that cannot possibly be informative—“But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!” (PI, §253). In this connection Cavell mention’s Kierkegaard’s The Book on Adler: “Most men live in relation to their own self as if they were constantly out, never at home . . . . Spiritually and religiously understood, perdition consists in journeying into a foreign land, in being ‘out.’” Quoted in NYUA, 39. 17 Elsewhere Cavell comments on §118, “What I mean by uncanniness in these words is their Zen-masterish assurance that every theoretical attachment to words (structures of air) is an attachment to illusion and the assurance that we have some mode of inhabitation outside such structures, or else that we can live without habitation” TOS, 30. 18 Though pervasive throughout, see in particular the sections between §96–§116. 19 Clegg, On Genius, 66. See especially Chapter 3, “How to Cure a Philosopher.” According to Clegg, “The Philosophical Investigations is a deeply anti-metaphysical work. In it there is no ‘limit’ to the world, no transcendent will, and no ‘objects,’ no ‘names,’ and no aspect-blind Geniuses. Neither are there transcendental disciplines. There logic is a set of techniques that an animal prone to confusion and extravagant vanities may use to gain clarity and to translate itself, as Nietzsche would say, back into nature and ordinary life” (170). Wittgenstein’s rejection of Schopenhauerian ideas would be implicit in his rejection of his earlier Tractatus. “In the Tractatus philosophy is precisely what Schopenhauer said it was: a ladder that once climbed is to be thrown away” (62). 20 Clegg, On Genius, 173. 21 “The rhetoric of humanity as a form of life, or a level of life, standing in need of something like transfiguration—some radical change, but as it were from inside, not by anything; some say in another birth, symbolizing a different order of natural reactions” NYUA, 44. 22 Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 92. 23 According to Eldridge: “Walking is here an image of natural gracefulness in our commerce with ordinary language as it stands, and with one another, freed from the enervating sting of misbegotten metaphysical pursuits of desire. But it is an image of something we still need to learn or relearn to do.” Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, 192. Wittgenstein continues in the next paragraph: “The

Notes  193 preconceived idea [or prejudice] of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” (PI, §108) 24 See, for instance, Andrea Kern, “Understanding Scepticism: Wittgenstein’s paradoxical reinterpretation of sceptical doubt,” in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus. “This explains why everything might appear to be in question in the skeptical light of the philosophical perspective. For, from the very start, this perspective is one in which we have broken off our familiar relationships with the world and other people, such that they might appear to us as strange . . . . One becomes a sceptic irrevocably when one conceives of philosophical reflection as explaining the possibility of our practices without making use of the idea of our being familiar with these practices, hence with our being familiar with its normal cases” (215). Kern does not suppose that Wittgenstein’s work dissolves doubt, as in a refutation; instead, it performs a therapy of skepticism. 25 Wittgenstein and Scepticism, 215. 26 William Desmond, “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 145. 27 William Desmond, The Intimate Universal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 167. 28 Desmond, Philosophy and its Others, 4. “Metaxological intermediation is itself plural. It is significantly double in that the mediation of the between cannot be reduced either to the mediation of the self or the mediation of the other, should either of these two sides claim to mediate entirely the complex between” (4–5). See especially the first book of his metaphysical trilogy, Being and the Between (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). 29 Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 167. 30 Ibid., 214. 31 Ibid., 220. 32 “My major claim about the philosopher’s originating question—e.g., ‘(How) do (can) we know anything about the world?’ or ‘What is knowledge; what does my knowledge of the world consist in?’—is that it (in one or another of its versions) is a response to, or expression of, a real experience which takes hold of human beings” CR, 140. 33 The new epistemological emphasis is also noticed by Northrop Frye. For him this contrasted with two earlier phases of how language was understood, the metaphorical and then metonymic. “This third phase of language begins roughly in the sixteenth century, where it accompanies certain tendencies in the Renaissance and Reformation, and attains cultural ascendancy in the eighteenth. In English literature it begins theoretically with Francis Bacon, and effectively with Locke. Here we start with a clear separation of subject and object, in which the subject exposes itself, in sense experience, to the impact of the objective world. The objective world is the order of nature; thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection. Continuous prose is still employed, but all deductive procedures are increasingly subordinated to a primary inductive and fact-gathering process. . . . Hence this approach treats language as primarily descriptive of an objective natural order.”

194 Notes Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 13. 34 DK, 4. “In Descartes’ thinking, the ground, one gathers, still exists in the assurance of God. But Descartes’ very clarity about the necessity of God’s assurance in establishing a rough adequation or collaboration between our everyday judgments and the world (however the matter may stand in natural science) means that if assurance in God will be shaken, the ground of the everyday is thereby shaken” DK, 3–4. 35 From Ruskin’s Introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, 1895), 3–4. 36 Timothy Gould, Hearing Things, 161. 37 Ibid., 141. 38 Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1999), 76. 39 See also Rowe, “Wittgenstein’s Romantic Inheritance,” 327–51. 40 Hammer, Stanley Cavell, 169. 41 See Mulhall, SC, 154. On the death of the world, Desmond writes: “Nature as machine, with the extrinsic God of Deism, seems a little like the estranged human dualistically opposed to an other with which it has no inherent rapport. With nature devalued, dedivinized, with any deistic god perpetually on the verge of vanishing, the human being wakes to itself as lost in an immense indifference.” (152) When being is objectified, there is a “neutering of being as other to us” (153). See Desmond, “A Second Primavera.” 42 Rowe, “Wittgenstein’s Romantic Inheritance,” 334. 43 Franz Kafka, Letter of March 10–11, 1913, Letters to Felice, James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth trans. (New York: Schoken books, 1973), 219. 44 Duffy, Secular Mysteries, 46. 45 Ibid., 52. 46 But this is not automatic; we have to apply the criteria, which means, in a sense, we have to notice the world, make a claim of pertinence. Avner Baz criticizes John McDowell for leaving out this step, suggesting that our perception of the world invokes the same content of our judgments. “Faced with a philosophical anxiety concerning our capacity for articulating our world, McDowell has responded by, in effect, regulating the responsibility for particular articulations to the world itself . . . . In trying to get us not to worry about one thing (call it the problem of how words are responsive to the world), McDowell has ended up appearing to deny, or at rate avoiding, the reality of quite another thing (call it the problem of how to make ourselves and our words responsive to the world).” Baz, “On When Words are Called for,”496. 47 Desmond, “Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” 158. 48 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16. 49 Ibid., 32. 50 Ibid., 96. 51 It is the feat of the novelist, in omniscient accounts, to give the impression that the character lies open to us in every relevant dimension—even though, as readers, we only accept the author’s strategic disclosures. In other words: we cannot “get out” and “walk around” the character, inspecting it at our leisure. The trick is to

Notes  195 get the reader to believe that, were such a thing possible, nothing new would be discovered. 52 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 270. 53 Ibid., 273. 54 Cavell in this connection also quotes, “Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves life) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious” (§281); “What gives us so much the idea that living beings, things, can feel?” (§283). See CR, 83. 55 Flaubert certainly took full advantage of this in his fiction, and made sure his pupil Maupassant did as well: the rendering of inner states not so much through subjective description (though there is a place for that), but through that state’s physical manifestation. At last, deep in the secluded woods, Rudolphe has Emma alone. Flaubert does not write: Rudolphe felt lustful, but Emma was afraid. Instead: “smiling a strange smile, with a hard look in his eye, with his teeth clenched, he closed in upon her, opening his arms. She recoiled, trembling” (129). Hence Charles’s horror: where his “loving” wife once was, now abrupt and brutal absence—a vertiginous reduction to inert physical qualities. 56 For Cavell, there seems to be a species limit between the human and the animal. “My knowledge of myself is something I find, as on a successful quest; my knowledge of others, of their separateness from me, is something that finds me. I might say that I must let it make an impression upon me, as the empiricists used to say.” Stanley Cavell, “Comments on Veena Das’s ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’,” Daedalus, Vol. 125, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), 98. But why should acknowledgment not also count for animals? This point is brought out by John McDowell, who, echoing Cora Diamond, suggests that there is ample basis in Cavell’s work to relate to the lives of animals. These texts are gathered in Cary Wolf, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolf, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). See also Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009). 57 For the descriptive fallacy, see also “Performative Utterances” in Philosophical Papers, 234. 58 Compare “The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating” (HDTW, 148). 59 Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things with Pornography,” in Reading Cavell, eds. Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 71. 60 But then the same would seem to hold for illocutionary acts. “Strictly speaking, there cannot be an illocutionary act unless the means employed are conventional, and so the means for achieving it non-verbally must be conventional.” Austen then adds: “But the fact remains that many illocutionary acts cannot be performed except by saying something” (HDTW, 119–20). 61 Cavell compares Austin’s perlocutionary unease with the manner in which A.J. Ayer describes (emotive) ethical judgments. “The function [Cavell quotes] of the ethical word is purely ‘emotive’ . . . . It is used to express feeling . . . [and] calculated also to arouse feeling and so to stimulate action.” To this Cavell responds: “ . . . 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 (might be), is a moral

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(moralistic) decision masquerading as a metaphysical or logical truth about language” PDAT, 176. “Performative and Passionate Utterance,” in PDAT, 159. From early on in Cavell’s work this concern has been present. “Because Wittgenstein does fuller justice to the role of feeling in speech and conduct than any other philosopher within the Anglo-American academic tradition, it is disheartening to find his thought so out of reach. Pole extends the line of those who, shocked at the way academic reasoning is embarrassed by the presence of feeling—its wish to remove feeling to the ‘emotive’ accompaniments of discourse, out of the reach of intellectual assessment—counter by taking feeling too much at face value and so suffer the traditional penalty of the sentimentalist, that one stops taking his feelings seriously.” (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” MWM, 69.) Austin also makes the point that the perlocutionary can have an effect on the speaker. See HDTW, 101. According to Stephen Mulhall, Cavell may not be supplementing Austin’s account at all. Mulhall wonders whether Cavell is not instead after a more profound change, one that might even bring on a second catastrophe—that is after Austin went back to the drawing board when the performative toppled back into the constative. This transforms the idea of the performative from inside. Cavell’s wish to open, in every utterance, the path of passion, is not meant as a supplement to the “responsibilities of implication,” which Austin has supposedly already elucidated. They both ought to be there. Cavell’s goal, Mulhall says, “is not to counterbalance the idea of order with that of disorder, but to suggest that Austin’s idea of the dimension of law in which speech necessarily participates must be one that makes room for—makes possible—the ways in which speech allows us to improvise our way through disorders of desire. If both paths spring from the root speech, then the path of desire can no more be entirely without order (improvisation is not anarchy) than the path of implication can be entirely flexible (to be accountable is not to be enslaved).” Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh, eds., Reading Cavell (London: Routledge, 2006), 32. Alice Crary has welcomed the role the notion of passionate utterance plays in Cavell’s more general program of (Emersonian) Perfectionism. She maintains that in making his detailed argument against what might be called the philosophical constative—in other words, the belief that “correspondences between language and the world [are] the prerogative of independently meaningful sentences”—Austin does so without, at the same time, “retreat[ing] from the notion of objective truth.” According to her, Austin insists we give up the supposition, or perhaps aspiration, that we ever could elaborate an account of the world from an extra-conventional standpoint. There is, however, “no such thing as non-conventional alternative to our current conception of the world” (Reading Cavell, 53). Charles E Marks has argued that, even if we suppose that the diarist’s memory was not at issue—even if he could be relied upon to compare his sensations accurately—Wittgenstein’s argument would not lose its force because the diarist would be unable to meaningfully sort the sensations into kinds. “The reason for saying that the diarist’s sorting of private objects into kinds on the basis of considerations of sameness and similarity doesn’t constitute a recognition of kinds is that the kinds thus recognized play no genuine role in induction and the formation of expectations, that whatever they play could be played equally well by

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any parceling of private objects into kinds.” (Charles E. Marks, “Kinds of Private Objects,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supp. Vol. No.1, part 2, 1974.) Jerry S. Clegg maintains that throughout the elaboration of the argument Wittgenstein actually had Schopenhauer in mind. “The child genius Wittgenstein imagines is Schopenhauer’s illuminist whose language is intelligible only to himself. Clegg, On Genius, 191. Wittgenstein’s point is that Schopenhauer was mistaken in thinking that we have reliable tests—criteria—by which we diagnose our own sensations— tests that are our own alone and that we cannot use to diagnose the sensations of others . . . . The nagging problem the diarist faces is that he has no use for a test of truth for his newly minted vocabulary, not that he lacks and cannot find one. . . . The failure of the illuminist to find a propositional format for his newly minted marks destroys their status as a prototype for a language of insight to be used by philosophers, artists, and saints. They are not even words” (197). Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 104. He continues, “But if we read it as an uninsistent way of raising a question, however faint and dismissible, about the security of the sign’s connection with what it records, in order to see just how quickly and excessively the diarist will react to it, and thereby to uncover the anxieties that possess him, then its philosophical point becomes rather more clear” (104). As Wittgenstein puts it elsewhere, “Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you” (PI, II, 207). But is the problem that your memory constantly deceives you, or that it is not constantly reliable? Here Cavell is voicing the skeptic, CR, 79. As Alex Irwin puts it: “It is the living, speaking person who has the pain in some part of his or her body. This does not dissolve, but instead confirms the link between body and soul or personhood. Reacting to the situation of suffering, we do not seek to enter into contact with some sort of ghostly mental entity hidden within the physical envelope in order to gauge its condition and offer it reassurance.” “Face of Mystery, Mystery of a Face: An Anthropological Trajectory in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Kaufman’s Biohistorical Theology,” The Harvard Theological Revue, Vol. 88, No. 3, (July 1995), 393. This use of “something” refers to the something / nothing juxtaposition in Cavell’s reading of PI, §296: “Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying my cry of pain. And it is on account of that that I utter it.” As Cavell writes, “This idea of ‘something’ is what the parable is about. Evidently this interlocutor has been led to his insistence on ‘something’ . . . by his taking Wittgenstein (or someone) to have said or suggested that nothing is, or may be, going on inside him, whatever his (outward) expressions” CR, 335. See also “Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No.2 (Winter, 1990), 255. Stanley Cavell, ‘Something Out of the Ordinary,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 71, No. 2 (November 1997), 26. For Malcolm in the recurrence of a symptom Y we learn that it is “always or usually associated with Y; that so-and-so is the criterion of Y is a matter, not of experience, but of ‘definition.’” But Cavell wonders what sort of certainty this might be, when Y is neither logically implied nor the infallible concomitance of Y (CR, 38). For Albritton, from the fact that someone behaves in a certain manner, showing pain X, we may not be able to read this as necessarily entailing that he

198 Notes indeed has pain X. But, “it can entail that he almost certainly has a toothache” (CR, 39). Both essays are included in Wittgenstein: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George Pitcher (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966). 73 See also CR, 399, where Cavell considers soul-blindness. 74 “What appears in material object skepticism as an intellectual lack, namely the discovery that the best position I can be in is not enough to assure my certain knowledge of an object, in other minds skepticism becomes (more openly?) my rejection or avoidance of its object. It is up to me to determine what my stake in an object (i.e., a subject) is and what I am willing to risk responsibility for in acknowledging it.” From Cavell’s reply in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus (London: Routledge, 2004), 286. 75 Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990), 79. 76 This point is made nicely by Judith E. Tonning, who develops the ambiguity—is it an incapacity or an unwillingness?—in her theological reading. She argues that this local ambiguity “leads to a pervasive ambiguity in Cavell’s concept of scepticism which seemingly allows him to describe scepticism (particularly in his later work) as both a natural human propensity and a reprehensible moral stance, but which does not in fact provide a sufficient basis for such a dual claim.” See her article, “Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism,” The Heythorp Journal, Vol. XLVIII, (2007), 390. 77 Judith E. Tonning draws it together well: “It now becomes clear that the sceptic not merely mistakes but actively interprets the fact of human separateness (with both its opportunities and its paralysis) as an intellectual limitation, and does so precisely in order to repudiate the risk and responsibility that the act of perceiving another person, and of letting oneself be perceived by that person, entails.” Judith E. Tonning, “Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism,” (390). Wittgenstein for his part writes: “Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else’s fear or pain” (PI, §303). 78 See also PDAT, 198: “Don’t we already know, for example, from our everyday experience, that if I say ‘I know how he feels about her leaving only from what little he tells me, and what less he shows me,’ my reservation (‘only’) suggests my sense that he is withholding something from me . . . . When Wittgenstein objects to the philosophical assertion that we know others only from their behavior, (or rather, attempts to get us to see that this is a philosophically forced assertion), he is asking us to question whether we wish to stand behind the sense that there is something the other is always, necessarily, withholding from us, and affirm the implication that I have in all cases no independent means of knowing what it is.” 79 On the issue of the skeptic and intersubjectivity, see Marie McGinn, “The Real Problem of Others: Cavell, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Scepticism about Other Minds,” European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 6, (1998), 45–58. 80 Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 270. 81 Ibid., 271. 82 Ibid., 215. 83 Here I modify Cavell’s “Not to deny it is, I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of your expression, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever be of you” (CR, 383). 84 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 273.

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Part Four 1 Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics, Vol. 98, No. 2, (January 1988), 268. 2 Quoted on TE, 90. 3 Ibid., 86. 4 In his discussion of the film Gaslight, Cavell gives a fairly good description of the figure we have called the Common Man. “The man of Gaslight is one grisly realization of what, adapting Kant’s term, we can call the completely heteronomous human, whose every action, absolutely without autonomy, is motivated from outside. He is not so much immoral—putting his satisfactions before the rights of others, failing to meet certain specific obligations—as unfit for the moral life altogether, immune to moral criticism, incapable of moral conversation. He hypnotizes, but he is hypnotized” CW, 208. 5 This, I gather, is what Cavell sees so beautifully captured by John Stuart Mill, when he writes, in On Liberty: “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves, what do I prefer? . . . Or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play and enable it to grow and thrive? [Instead] They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? . . . It does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of . . . until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved.” Quoted on CW, 97. 6 Quoted on TE, 55. 7 “That human clay and the human capacity for thought are enough to inspire the authoring of myself is, at any rate, what I take Emerson’s ‘self-Reliance,’ as a reading of Descartes’ cogito argument, to claim.” 8 But there is also the obvious analogy of authoring our lives with the authoring of a text. A writer (or artist) relates to the text (or artwork) though a complex of intentionality. Did the author mean everything we discover? Cavell argues for a mode of taking artistic responsibility which can gather the manifold of aspects retrospectively, acknowledging them as mine. Much the same, one could argue, is going on here. In authoring your life, you acknowledge your existence (as an artist acknowledges the aspects of the artwork), and, in doing so, you assert the burden of your specificity. See Cavell’s discussion of Fellini’s La Strada, in MWM, 230–37, which concludes: “In morality, tracing an intention limits a man’s responsibility; in art, it dilates it completely. The artist is responsible for everything that happens in his work—and not just in the sense that it is done, but in the sense that it was meant. It is a terrible responsibility; very few men have the gift and patience and the singleness to shoulder it. But it is all the more terrible, when it is shouldered, not to appreciate it, to refuse to understand something meant so well.” 9 Cary Wolfe, “Alone with America: Cavell, Emerson, and the Politics of Individualism,” New Literary History, Vol. 25, No.1, (Winter, 1994), 140–41. 10 See “Skepticism and a Word Concerning Deconstruction,” in Quest, 133. And from PDAT, 198: “We do not enter adulthood as Socrates, but perhaps as one stunned at the failure of our assertions to convince Socrates. So that we do not know to

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20

21

what extent our ordinary, or say unexamined, lives are spent in exile from our expressions. (Other philosophers, Emerson among them, have spoken of our living as aliens, or rather as in alienation from our thoughts; Kierkegaard says we live as if we are ‘out,’ meaning not at home; Wittgenstein will add: not at work.)” Wolfe, “Alone with America: Cavell, Emerson, and the Politics of Individualism,” 151: “the forms, the ‘terms’ which structure that emptiness [in this context referring to Whim]—under which nothing stands, as it were—are in a very real sense all we have.” Much of this sort of change is what Gary Hagberg values in Wittgenstein’s work: how the sensed depth of the (let us say metaphysical) self really ought to be converted into an investigation of language and its (surface) connections. “The trouble, we may too easily be inclined to think, is deep in the well from which language springs, and not in that language itself ” (198). “The sense of depth, to put it one way, may well be entirely within language, and the sense of depth may be caused by the wholly verbal, wholly articulable associations an utterance may awaken, or by the implications an utterance may hold that are, again, wholly within the realm of the sayable” (199). Gary Hagberg, “On Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 27, (2003), 196–210. For an application of this Wittgensteinian approach to aesthetic questions, see his Art as Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). David Greenham, “The Skeptical Deduction: Reading Kant and Cavell in Emerson’s Self-Reliance,” ESQ, Vol. 53, (3rd Quarter, 2007), 266. Ibid., 266. As Richard Eldridge puts it, “Whatever transfigurations and rebirths there are to be are to have more the nature of revisionings of ourselves in relation to our practices than either of revolutions or escapes or reforms that leave our conceptions of our interests untouched.” “Review: Romantic Rebirth in a Secular Age: Cavell’s Aversive Exertions,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 71, No. 3, (July 1991), 412. See also “The Philosopher in American Life,” in IQO, 9, where its status as a testament is emphasized. Thoreau, quoted on SW, 35. Ibid., 56. Quoted on SW, 15. As we quoted above, if “learning a first language is thought of as the child’s acquiring of it, then poetry can be thought of as the adult’s acquiring of it, as coming into possession of his or her own language, full citizenship” (CR, 189). See also “Skepticism and a Word Concerning Deconstruction,” in IQO, 133, where he links the father tongue with the second inheritance. Here he writes, “Because the mother and the father tongue is said by Thoreau to be a ‘reserved and select expression’ . . . it follows that the father tongue is both later and at the same time more original than the mother tongue.” “For the writer’s hoe, the earth is a page; with it, the tiller ‘[makes] the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass.’” Quoted on SW, 25. Naoko Saito, “Perfectionism and Love of Humanity: Democracy as a Way of Life after Dewey, Thoreau, and Cavell,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 20, No. 2, (2006), 98.

Notes  201 22 Duffy, Secular Mysteries, 63. 23 Quoted on SW, 42. 24 Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, trans. Lillian Vallee, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 289. 25 Ibid., 290. 26 Quoted on TE, 57. 27 Henry Staten writes, “This denial may not seem like much . . . . Yet this margin of difference, no matter how small, is all Derrida is looking for. Once this margin is admitted, the question becomes, what are we to do with it?” Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, 119. 28 To give just one of many possible quotations to support this, Emerson writes: “It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.” Quoted in Greenham, “The Skeptical Deduction,” 275. 29 Cavell, “Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke,” 77–78. Cavell is commenting on lines from the poem “Angel Surrounded by Paysans.” 30 Ibid., 78. 31 As Epsen Hammer puts it, “In the deconstructionist account the distinction between quoted words and their originals it seems is undermined by the fact of inheritance: since linguistic behavior is learned, all words are imitated or quoted; and yet, since there are no original words to which quoted words can be contrasted, no words are ever quoted” (Hammer, Stanley Cavell, 155). 32 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 52. 33 Ibid., 52. 34 Ibid., 53. 35 Ibid., 40. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Here Derrida is quoting Husserl, Speech and Phenomena, 49. 39 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 62. 40 Quoting Husserl, Speech and Phenomena, 64. 41 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 66. 42 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited, Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 3. 43 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 10. 44 Gorden C.F. Bearn, mentioned below, in “Sounding Serious: Cavell and Derrida,” Representations, No. 63, (Summer, 1998), 65–92, neglects to consider this part of Cavell’s critique, which then enables him to keep repeating that iterability “breaches” and “broaches” the linguistic act, which is precisely what Cavell is contesting. He does, however, in the end, point out that Cavell implicitly rejects it. “Nevertheless, in spite of approaching similar conclusions, these two philosophers

202 Notes

45

46

47

48

49 50

are divided by an abyss: Cavell’s implicit rejection of the dramatic Derridean assertion that iterability breaches linguistic action” (75). And yet Derrida is arguing that we never had this in the first place. His argument, then, as Charles Altieri puts it, “depend[s] upon the absence of what we never had.” Altieri suggests that this paradox is inevitable once there is the metaphysical separation of word and intention. He shows how Wittgenstein can provide an alternative departure point for many of these questions without running into the same problems. “Wittgenstein argues that once the words are taken as primarily signs of something else, once verification depends on people’s intentions or on their particular intuitions of the reality referred to, there will always be a gap between direct experience and linguistic expression, a gap which we try to fill with concepts of representation and of the necessity for a person self-consciously to mediate between signs and sources of meaning.” Charles Altieri, “Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory,” MLN, Vol. 91, No. 6, (December 1976), 1397–423. This is a movement we might recognize in Schopenhauer’s poet, whose wearying task it is to move from the purity of the Ideas to the alien material of empirical concepts. Stephen Mulhall writes “One might say that Derrida’s idea of selfdissociation makes sense only insofar as we think of recurrence or iterability as something belated or secondary, as if signifying forms (say, universals) are what material marks or sounds (say, particulars) become—as if all that (really or originally) exists are particular, perhaps material, things” (83). “Deconstruction and the Ordinary” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction, eds. Chantal Mouffe and Ludwig Nagl (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), (75–92). This suggestive essay considers the relevance of the ordinary (in Wittgenstein) to deconstruction, and questions whether some of Derrida’s conclusions might stem from an idea of conceptual rigor and precision (“all or nothing”) without benefit of any tempering from the ordinary. He concludes with a beautiful reading of the opening scene of the Investigations. See especially the third section, “Wittgenstein’s Child.” Elsewhere Cavell writes, “A symptom of this intimacy or abyss is Derrida’s sense, or intuition, that the bondage to metaphysics is a function of the promotion of something called voice over something called writing; whereas for me it is evident that the reign of repressive philosophical systematising—sometimes called metaphysics, sometimes called logical analysis—has depended upon the suppression of the human voice. It is the recovery of this voice (as from an illness) that ordinary language philosophy is, as I have understood and written about it, before all to be understood” TOS, 49. “The absence of the sender [Derrida writes] . . . from the mark that he abandons, and which cuts itself off from him and continues to produce effects independently of his presence and of the present actuality of his intentions, indeed after his death, his absence, which moreover belongs to structure of all writing . . . of all language in general.” Quoted on PP, 123–24. Quoted on SW, 42. Hence Thoreau’s parable about losing “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove” (quoted on SW, 49). Cavell comments, “The writer comes to us from a sense of loss” that has to do with “a connection with things.”

Notes  203 51 This is no less Cavell’s objective. According to Richard Eldridge, Cavell’s writing “increasingly has the ring of prophecy, as he casts the necessity of a sense of the strangeness of the human and of the uncanniness of its given routines as a form of awareness of genuine possibilities of rebirth, while the lack of this necessity is cast as a form of cowardice or of repression.” “Romantic Rebirth in a Secular Age: Cavell’s Aversive Exertions,”411. 52 Here Cavell is interpreting Thoreau’s rather suggestive lines beginning: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail.” 53 Naoko Saito, “Truth is Translated: Cavell’s Thoreau and the Transcendence of America,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 2, (2007), 130: “Cavell awakens us to the illusion of the knowability (and, in the skeptic’s reaction, the unknowability) of the immediate and invites us to keep discovering and rediscovering the strange and the foreign within the same, to release from within ourselves the voice of the different that eternally escapes our full grasp.” Here Saito uses the notion of neighboring and nextness as a principle of cultural translation, which would be sensitive to the other while enriching common terms. But the translation is also from within the given culture: the philosopher, then, “plays translator by converting the mother tongue into, as it were, a ‘foreign’ father tongue, by seeking the indirectness and separation that is the means of a common still to be achieved” (131). See also the interesting collection of essays in Paul Standish and Naoko Saito, eds., Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2017). 54 “In religion and politics, literality is defeated because we allow our choices to be made for us. In religion our hymn books resound with a cursing of God because the words are used in vain. . . . We do not let the words assess our lives, we do not mean what they could mean, so what we do when we repeat those words becomes the whole meaning of ‘man’ and ‘chief end,’ and ‘glorify,’ and ‘God,’ etc., in our lives; and that is a curse” (SW, 62–63). 55 Here Cavell is glossing the line: “Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere” SW, 54. 56 See Donata Schoeller-Reisch, “Thinking Changes: Stanley Cavell and Eugene Gendlin,” Existential Analysis, Vol. 19, No. 2, (July 2008), 308. 57 For instance, “By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity” (I, 5); “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” (I, 45) This is not just used by Thoreau. In the postscript to “The Politics of Interpretation” Cavell writes, “I have learned from the prose of Austin and Wittgenstein and Emerson and Thoreau certain uses of devices like ‘what you may call’ or ‘let us say’ of ‘so to speak’; but even I get to feeling that they can be used only so many times” (TOS, 55). 58 Also worth mention is the frequency of the word “interest,” encouraging the readers to take an interest in their lives. “It would be a fair summary of the book’s motive to say that it invites us to take an interest in our life, and teaches us how” (SW, 66). There is also the strategy of conspicuously abandoning the text to the reader, in which the reader is made aware that he is coming to the words after the writer has left them; hence the claim of Walden as a testament. See “The Philosopher in American Life,” in IQO, 9, where Cavell interprets Thoreau’s phrase: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” Cavell concludes, “There is, accordingly, no philosopher there nowadays, unless

204 Notes

59 60

61

62

63

64 65 66 67

68

you are one, that is, unless you accept the promise as yours, which would mean to identify yourself as one who ‘reviews its vision’” (IQO, 11). Quoted on TE, 47. For an elaboration of this notion of reading, see Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Gould develops a model of reading with three moments of reversal (155): “(1) with the act of turning away from the actual reader to become the reader of the prior text; (2) with the action (or passion) of letting oneself be read by the prior text; or (3) with the effort to embody one’s transactions with the prior text in a text that exhibits those transactions of reading in a new text, one that is in its turn usable and encouraging to a new set of readers, who are thereby invited to take on the position of the philosophical reader.” Reading, then, is creative. In fact, says Cavell, “Reading is a variation of writing, where they meet in meditation and achieve accounts of their opportunities; and writing is a variation of reading, since to write is to cast words together that you did not make, so as to give or take readings.” From “The Philosopher in American Life,” TE, 49. Quoted in Rick Anthony Furtak, “Skepticism and Perceptual Faith: Henry David Thoreau and Stanley Cavell on Seeing and Believing,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 43, No. 3, (2007), 551. Furtak (552) summarizes Thoreau’s position this way: an “‘attitude toward phenomena’ is an affective disposition that can be deliberately cultivated, even if it is a stance we are not always able to take. The person who manages to develop this perceptual faith will gain access to many ‘significant facts’ that are unknowable from the vantage point of dispassionate reason.” “Thoreau [shows] that this being seated or residence is part, as the word says, of possessing the landscape that radiates from him, and the farms and the trees and, in short, everything with the dozen miles of every side of where, sitting, he is living; the country is taking its origin in him” (TE, 53). Paul Franks, “The Discovery of the Other: Cavell, Fichte, and Skepticism” in Reading Cavell, ed. Alice Crary and Sandford Shieh (London: Routledge, 2006), 169. Quoted on SW, 100. Cavell suggests linkages with the “state” of the conclusion of Oedipus at Colonus, “the absolute awareness of self without embarrassment— consciousness of self, and the self ’s standing, beyond self-consciousness” (SW, 101). Paul Franks says much the same, answering his question: “But how is the truth of skepticism to be characterized in positive terms?” “The Discovery of the Other: Cavell, Fichte, and Skepticism,” 169. On this, though, William Desmond has asked: “What does ‘by’ mean? ‘By’ whom or what is one affected? Could being by oneself also mean being beside oneself? And what is this sane sense of being beside oneself? Is this the temptation: to have one’s cake and eat it too? I mean: to be by oneself as a kind of counterfeit of divine madness that cannot let go, though it looks abandoned to what is outside, what is besides, what is other, what is next . . . I cannot again avoid wondering about a religious displacement.” “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” (166–67). This requires a necessary mourning of the passing of the world, emblemized in Emerson’s distance from his feelings about his dead son. But there might be a

Notes  205

69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81 82 83 84

greater emphasis on this in Emerson’s later work, say, “Experience,” compared to “Nature.” “Ultimately, Emerson concludes, there is a mystery at the centre of our being, a common origin called ‘spontaneity,’ ‘Instinct,’ and ‘Intuition,’ upon which all attempts to analyze or understand it (tuitions) depend. Because we cannot know it, we have fallen away from that which we might trust, and the ground of our reliance is then all too easily mistaken for society, church, and state, but rarely held to be the ‘self ’ in its own original action.” Greenham, “The Skeptical Deduction.” “So the similarity of Emerson to Heidegger can be seen as mediated by Nietzsche, and this will raise more questions than it can answer” (TE, 17). Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 17. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 44. Cavell quotes Heidegger: “The thanc means man’s inmost mind, the heart, the heart’s core, that inmost essence of man which reaches outward most fully and to the outermost limits.” In connection with this Cavell quotes Emerson’s “American Scholar”: “The new deed . . . remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself . . . to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption” (TE, 144). “Material” of thought is Cavell’s term, which he takes from psychoanalysis (TE, 150). Emerson’s Essays, 30. Kierkegaard, in his The Book on Adler, makes a similar argument: that the “definite life-impression” can become occluded in the “comparative criterion” of expressive miscarriage. “Silence is inward deepening and the road by which an originality is gained that is more than a substitute for the originality of genius. . . . By holding firm to a definite life-impression, a definite single thought, in absolutely silent inwardness, by not wanting to open the slightest communication with any other person (by which one slyly obtains the relative and comparative criterion, the criterion of mediocrity), anyone, provided he is not on the way to losing his mind (since there undeniably is this danger), will acquire originality.” The Book on Adler, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 280. Of course the same can be said of Cavell. See, on this note, Stephen Mulhall’s close reading of the opening passages of CR in the introduction to Inheritance and Originality. TE, 89. Quoted on TE, 89. David Greenham writes, “Thinking, speaking, and writing all reside in our ability to distinguish ourselves from our inheritance within that inheritance, to find ourselves and to acknowledge our difference. The writer, if he or she is to think— and in this sense to think is to acknowledge a uniqueness that has to stand in for knowledge of being—has to learn to abandon any reliance on the language of

206 Notes

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86

87

88

conformity, and anything we may claim to ‘know’ of ourselves.” “The Skeptical Deduction,” 274–75. TE, 139: “Call this 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 to 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.” For Stephen Melville, the problem is not “that we are removed by language from our actual habitation but rather that both the fact and difficulty of that inhabitation happen in unapproachable intimacy. We can work to turn toward it, but there is finally no position that will bring it fully face-to-face with us.” “Oblique and Ordinary: Stanley Cavell’s Engagements of Emerson,” New Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 1, (Spring, 1993), 187. Quoted in TE, 27. Cary Wolfe, in “Alone with Emerson: Cavell, Emerson, and the Politics of Individualism,” has argued that in fact Emerson’s brand of individualism is so exacting it cannot, as Cavell tries to show, find its way in a compromise with the other. Ultimately the self and its demands will always turn away from the social. “This is so because Emerson’s unruliness arises in repulsion not to a certain form of the social, but rather to the social as such, to the fact that the Emersonian self is not the origin of the preexistent ‘agreements’ and ‘stipulations’ which constitute the shared space of the social and the other” (145). He goes on to argue that Cavell has taken insufficient notice of how Emerson’s picture of the self is heavily reliant on concepts of ownership. And “To see selfhood as possession, in other words, is to see the self as always already alienated from others, and structurally so” (152). There may be some tangential relevance here with Avner Baz’s critique of John McDowell (already mentioned above) and how we word the world. (See “On When Words are Called for,” 473–500.) Baz’s claim is that in McDowell’s account we become, in the way we perceive the world, mere “registrars of truth” (495), in that our experience of the world “‘contains claims’ in the sense that it provides us with the very same content that a claim, or a judgment, might have” (473). He goes on: “I find that this portrays our basic and general relation to the world as something like eavesdropping on a conversation.” We do not just perceive passively; we notice. McDowell, in other words, has failed “to do justice to the way in which we are implicated in the ways we word our world” (495). Quoted in TE, 156.

Conclusion 1 Richard Eldridge, “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance” in Stanley Cavell, Richard Eldridge ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 2 Desmond, “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” 167. He asks: “Is Cavell’s own form of being beside oneself, but in a sane sense, connected to music?” (166). 3 “Intellect,” Emerson’s Essays, 181. 4 Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 220.

Notes  207 5 “Interview with Stanley Cavell,” The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, Vol. 5, (1996– 1997), 11. 6 “Epilogue” 176. 7 Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, 164 8 “The point I emphasize here is only that the life-giving power of words, of saying ‘I,’ is your readiness to subject your desire (call it whim), to become intelligible, with no assurance that you will be taken up” TE, 93. 9 Quoted in Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 83. 10 Ibid., 84. 11 Quoted in TE, 53. 12 Mandelstam is apparently himself modifying a line from Turgenev. See “Conversation about Dante” 397. Incidentally, I came across Jan Zwicky’s fascinating work too late for inclusion. Anyone interested in the relation of philosophy and poetry would do well to consult her Alkibiades’ Love: Essays in Philosophy (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). The last sentence of the first essay, “What Is Lyric Philosophy?”, adroitly draws together some of our key themes: “To appreciate how our understanding can be limited by fear, by a will to mastery, by a need to control, is to begin the learning / unlearning that constitutes the practice of lyric philosophy” (18).

INDEX Austin, John  55–6, 61–2, 70, 84, 100, 113–17, 139 Bugbee, Henry  106, 113, 171 Byron, Lord  84 Cavell, Stanley application of criteria to the body on  112–13, 124–30 Austin on  114–16 bodily legibility on  118–20 Derrida on  10, 141–7 economy of speech and aesthetics of speech on  81–5 Emerson and Shakespeare on  81 Emerson on  132–5, 154–62 forms of life on  50–3 Heidegger on  155–6 historical emergence of skepticism on  101–3 intelligibility imperative on  8 King Lear on  106, 114, 116 Kripke on  57–61 language and the world on  165 metaphysical voice on  142 music and  165–8 necessity of shared criteria on  55–7 Nietzsche on  106 opera on  168–71 ordinary on (see ordinary (the)) passionate utterance on  114–16, 117 philosophical reorientation on  95–8 private language argument on  120–4 projecting words on  65–8 romanticism on  106–9 schematism and  14, 81–5 Schopenhauer on  118, 166 skeptical recital on  90–5 skeptical reduction on  101–6

Thoreau on  136–41, 148–54 Wittgenstein and Shakespeare on  76 Wittgensteinian criteria on  53–5 conceptual performances expansive  12, 38–40, 43, 46–7, 75, 77–8, 82, 172 retractile  11, 12, 37–40, 43, 46–7, 75, 77, 82, 99, 171 criteria  6, 8, 11, 99, 106–10, 112, 113, 116, 124, 131, 149, 167 access via two potencies  68–73 Austinian  62 conformity of  85–6, 131–2, 162–9 criterial centrophillia  88, 132, 139, 157 disappointment in  91, 123 elasticity of  66 enlargement of  67–8, 147, 163 hospitality of  168 invocation of  14, 15, 70, 80, 85, 88, 95, 139 judgements and  13, 62, 157 necessity of  55–65 the other and  124–30 repudiation of  67–8, 93, 130–1, 137, 163 shared  14–16, 19, 49, 53–5, 73, 83–7, 89, 90, 91, 94, 108, 120, 124, 148, 159, 160 Wittgensteinian  53–5 Derrida, Jacques  10, 18, 141–7 Descartes, Rene  90, 92, 132–5 Desmond, William  16, 98–110, 127–8, 163–5. See also porosity essendi, passio and conatus  16, 100–1, 103, 108–10, 127–8, 164 Diamond, Cora  78, 131 Dionysian, see Nietzsche, Friedrich Duffy, Edward T.  82, 84–5, 108–9, 139, 141

Index Eldridge, Richard  89, 163, 167 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  2, 15–19, 132, 136, 141, 143, 147 aesthetics of speech and  82–8, 109 aversive thinking and  139, 157, 162 genius on  159–61 initializing the self (authoring) and  132–6 intuition on  141 Nietzsche and  143, 155, 160–1 perfectionism and  128, 160–2 philosopher as  4 poet on  72–3, 158 receptivity on  110, 154–7 Schopenhauer and  14, 81 uncreated self on  156–9 Flaubert, Gustave  2, 3, 110 Freud, Sigmund  3, 118–19 Gould, Timothy  105, 128 Heaney, Seamus  14, 73–5 Heidegger, Martin  16, 155–6 Hopkins, Gerald Manley  5–6, 28–30 Husserl, Edmund  144–5 inner-game, the  70–1 Johnson, Samuel  77–80 Jonson, Ben  74–7, 80 Kafka, Franz  108 Kant, Immanuel  16, 21, 25, 53, 56, 64, 79, 83, 135, 150, 169. See also Thing-in-itself, the Emerson and  154–5 the romantics and  106–9 Thoreau and  150–3 Wittgenstein and  57, 67 Kripke, Saul  57–60, 128, 131 Locke, John  146 Mandalstam, Osip  69, 172 McDowell, John  60 McGinn, Marie  87 Mulhall, Stephen  7, 57, 61–3, 93, 96, 97, 122, 125, 132, 136

209 music  9, 14, 68 Cavell and  165–9 creative origin and  163–71 Emerson on  82 inner-game theory and  70–1 music-making Socrates and  171–3 music of words  27, 73–5 musical moods and  9–10, 12, 37, 47, 69, 73, 75, 85 Nietzsche on  35–46, 82, 141, 163–4 private language and  119 Schopenhauer on  31–2, 82, 164–9 Wittgenstein on  72 necessity, see criteria Nietzsche, Friedrich  3, 9–12, 16, 68, 69, 90, 105, 156 Apollonian and  35–6, 39–40, 42, 45–6, 83 Cavell and  106 Dionysian and  33, 36, 39, 71, 73–5, 78, 83, 99, 141, 163, 171 Emerson and  143, 155, 160–1 expansive conceptual performances (see conceptual performances) Heidegger and  155 language on  34, 87–8, 132 music on, see music musical mood, see music opera on  41–6, 166, 168 poetry on  34–9, 88 Socrates on  18, 39 Wagner on  45–6 opera  32, 41–6, 119, 155, 166, 168–70 ordinary language philosophy  11, 14, 55–7, 69–70, 80, 86–8, 92, 95, 139, 142 ordinary (the)  15–16, 75, 81, 86, 92, 96, 98, 103, 118, 124 between and  99 conversion of  132 ease of  104 interest in  140 language  65 opera and  168–70 rededication to  96, 153 repudiation of  67, 95, 167 resistance of  97 uncanniness of  91, 149

210 Index Pater, Walter  2–3 Plato  4 harmony of the soul on  153 Platonic (ideas)  25, 29, 34, 37, 38, 42, 47, 89, 93–6, 99, 120, 163, 166 porosity  16, 47, 78, 99, 100–3, 110, 128–9, 164–5 private language  58, 119, 120–4 projection, see Cavell, Stanley Proust, Marcel  16–17, 156, 170 pure knowing subject, see Schopenhauer, Arthur Putnam, Hilary  57, 63–4, 93, 132 Rawls, John  160–2 romanticism  106–11, 129, 134, 150 Ruskin, John  29–30, 104 Schopenhauer, Arthur  9–12, 21–33, 68, 94, 99, 100, 105, 106, 158 expression on  118–19 Heidegger and  155–6 language and  22, 26–31, 33, 164 music and  31–2, 82, 164–9 Nietzsche and  16, 35–8, 132, 161 poetry and  18, 25–31, 32, 43, 46, 74–80, 88, 90, 117, 143 pure knowing subject  15, 18, 25, 47, 89–90, 97, 103, 151, 153 reason and  21–2 resignation and  86 retractile conceptual performances (see conceptual performances) self-consciousness and  152 stillness and  11, 171 Thoreau and  153 Tolstoy and  71 Will and  23–4, 83 Wittgenstein and  12, 86–7, 96 Shakespeare, William  14, 28, 49, 66, 99, 102, 106, 109, 139, 168, 173 Emerson on  81–7 Seamus Heaney on  73–5 Wittgenstein on  75–81, 119 skepticism  15, 55, 58, 81, 82, 101, 112–13, 119, 133, 154, 173 other and  124–7

reduction of  101–6 repudiation of criteria and  67 romanticism and  106–10, 150 truth of, moral of  97, 151, 165 Socrates  18, 39–40, 74, 78, 106 music-making  171–2 stillness  11, 12, 35, 86, 151, 171 thing-in-itself, the  23, 25, 37, 106, 150–2, 154, 155, 163 Thoreau, Henry David  18, 87, 132, 154, 160, 169, 172 aesthetics of speech and  84–5, 88 Christianity on  13 deconstruction and  147 fate and faith on  150–51, 168 Kant and  150, 154–5 mother/father tongue on  17–18, 136–41 neighbouring and  19, 151–4 philosopher as  4 stillness and  151, 171 waking up the common man  148–50, 164 Tolstoy, Leo  70–1 transcendental  46, 49, 57, 65, 90, 96, 119, 135, 150, 153 ascent  151 assurance  170 content  18, 33, 47, 123 deduction  150–1 drive  11, 94, 98–9, 101 ideas  90, 119, 149 imagination  83, 154 insight  33, 89, 119, 142–4 knowledge  15, 56, 90, 97, 103, 117, 171 logic  56, 169 object  120 relation  89, 165 stabilizer  90, 94 unity of apperception  135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  1, 18, 21, 42, 94, 124, 146, 165, 166 criteria and  13, 15, 49, 53–5, 61, 85, 109, 125, 128, 135, 139

Index Emerson and  82, 86–7, 109–10, 128 expression on  112, 118–20 forms of life on  50–2, 67 friction for walking on  96–7 interpretation on  125 Kant and  56–7 Kripke and  57–60 leading words back on  69, 72–3, 86, 167 music and  72, 167 necessity and  55–64

211 nonsense and  78, 86, 141 ordinary language philosophy and  69, 80 pictures on  68, 95 primitive picture of language and  11, 70, 72, 167, 169 private language and  120–3 Schopenhauer and  12, 86, 96 Shakespeare and  14, 75–82 Thoreau and  148, 153

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