Stanley Cavell Excerpt

stanley cavell

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY

AFTER TOMORROW

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2005

Copyright 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cavell, Stanley, 1926Philosophy the day after tomorrow / Stanley Cavell.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

Contents: Something out of the ordinary The interminable Shakespearean text Fred Astaire asserts the right to praise Henry James returns to America and to

Shakespeare Philosophy the day after tomorrow What is the scandal ofskepticism? Performative and passionate utterance The Wittgensteinian event

Thoreau thinks of ponds, Heidegger of rivers The world as things.ISBN 0-674-01704-8 (alk. paper)

1. Philosophy, Modern20th century. I. Title.B945.C271 2005

191dc22 2004046229

To my granddaughter

Elizabeth Masters Batkin

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1 Something Out of the Ordinary 7

2 The Interminable Shakespearean Text 28

3 Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise 61

4 Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare 83

5 Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow 111

6 What Is the Scandal of Skepticism? 132

7 Performative and Passionate Utterance 155

8 The Wittgensteinian Event 192

9 Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers 213

10 The World as Things 236

Works Cited 283

Acknowledgments 291

Index 295

INTRODUCTION

The interactions of the themes, and perhaps disciplines, of the mem-bers of the opening pair of the ten texts to follow are developed vari-

ously, in scope and concentration, in succeeding chapters. Both mem-

bers of that opening pair were in effect celebratory addresseswhich

meant that each allowed unusual latitude of subject and of treatment

invited for presentation in 1996. And it seems that, about once a year

since then, whatever else I have been working on, I have composed an

essay that exists within, or in response to, those latitudes.

The rst text is my Presidential Address to the American Philosophi-

cal Association, in which I take up early preoccupations of mine with

skepticism (as the opening gesture of modern philosophy, in Descartes,

continuing in Hume and in Kant) in response to, and in retrospective

preparation for, the traumaintellectual and religiousrepresented in

the success of the New Science associated with the names of Copernicus

and Newton and Galileo. My interest in the pervasiveness of the threat

of skepticism was elicited by the revolutionary philosophical practices,

in roughly the middle third of the twentieth century, of J. L. Austin and

of the later Wittgenstein, in whose appeals to the ordinary or everyday

in our speech and conduct I seemed to nd a perception that what we

call our ordinary lives, or the perspective from which we understand the

everydayness of our liveslet us say, the extraordinariness of what we

accept as the ordinaryis determined by a prior surmise of that life,

and its language, as vulnerable. Vulnerable, I would say, to skepticism,

but with the understanding that skepticism wears as many guises as the

devil.

That address goes on, in contrast to the current prominence, per-

haps dominance, in Anglo-American professional philosophy of the

naturalizing of philosophy, which means regarding philosophy as, in

Quines phrase, a chapter of science, to offer the picture of art as a chap-

ter of the history or progression of philosophy. (Quines proposal is a

late, greatly sophisticated, version of Lockes recognition that with the

advent of the New Science philosophy must no longer compete for a

place at the head of the table of knowledge.) These are not head-on

clashes of philosophical ambition; the greater contretemps would be if

they failed to touch. What is at stake is, even before the idea of knowl-

edge, the sense of how human experience is to be called to account. The

classical empiricists idea of impressions as the origin, or cause, of

ideas, like Quines check-points of experience in the service of the-

ory-building, stylizes experience.

So what? If you cut down and stylize a handy tree branch by smooth-

ing it and whittling one end to a sharp point, you may kill deer for din-

ner. Shall I say that it is the experience of the remains of my day that

concerns methe facts of hunger and stalking and aggression and cun-

ning and cooking and aroma and resting and companionship and con-

versing? These are parts of human natural history. Are they of interest to

philosophy, any more than they are to physics? But that is my question. I

might say that much of this concern would be precisely with wording

the impressions made upon me by the things and persons and events of

the world, the ways they matter to me, count for me, a capacity in the

word impression whittled away in the empiricists impressions. (And

a good thing too; remember that running deer.) Yes, but what if, when

what we used, remarkably, to call the inner man is satised, my impres-

sions of the world and of myself and others in it do not return to inter-

est and amuse me, and I am left philosophically blank to most of the

necessaries of my life?

Can I, must I, leave it to, say, literature, or history, or anthropology, to

2 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

articulate and preserve the richness of my experience for me? Are their

authorities in positions to word their impressions that are essentially

different from my capacities as a participant of a human culture? To

cede the understanding of my experience, trivial and crucial, to them

would require, from my point of view, a massive effort of discounting.

(But isnt that how Freud describes the ego, as forming, like a skin, a

protective shield against stimuli too massive to consider?) Taking up the

tip from Walter Benjamins conceiving of tragedy, anyway of the Ger-

man tragic play, as part of the process of philosophy, I adduce in the

opening text an apparently perfectly trivial routine of Fred Astaire as de-

manding, and rewarding, a stake in that process, as if no event of the

public street, or of the private apartment, is unworthy of philosophy.

The companion essay of the opening pair is a plenary address invited

for the 1996 Shakespeare World Congress. I had imagined that my re-

sponse would concentrate on the connection I had been following for

decades between Shakespearean tragedy and philosophical skepticism,

and it took me rather by surprise that the heart of the eventual text

turned out to concern difcultiesinternal and externalentangled in

the praise of Shakespeare. The idea remembers that the ability to praise

guards against the threat of skepticismas in religion the acceptance of

God may be attested less in the reciting of creeds than in the singing of

psalms. And if, as I allow myself to speculate, Shakespeares Sonnets are

the discovery of the problem of the existence of the other in the English-

speaking tradition of secular thinking (in philosophy from Descartes

through Kant, the skeptical problem had been focused on our knowl-

edge of the physical, not the psychical, world), and if we take in the fact

that the obsessive issue of that series of sonnets is praise and its vicissi-

tudes, then again what? How can praise be the answer to skepticism,

since praise is itself in question? We might rather ask: What is it about

praise that it should emerge as an essential topic of the examination of

our acknowledgment of the existence of others?

Then my suggestion describing the connection of the essays presented

here, that the rst pair set the main themes of the rest, becomes the sug-

gestion that the later chapters in various ways take up the capacity and

INTRODUCTION 3

the right of praise. This appears to be reasonably straightforward in the

case of the second pair, the chapters on Astaire and on Henry James.

And yet alerted by Shakespearean tragedy to the outbreaks of deranged

cursing associated with false praise (as notably in King Lear and in

Timon of Athens), we may wonder about Astaires bout with frenzy at

the center of his dance of praise that we consider. I recall a moment of

paranoia and vengefulness in the Book of Psalms: Hold not thy peace,

O God of my praise; For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the

deceitful are opened against me. Set thou a wicked man over him. Let

his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name

be blotted out. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: As he

clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into

his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones (Psalm 109). Naturally I

do not claim this register for Astaires frenzy in his dance, yet the logical/

psychological rigor relating cursing to tainted praise may prove to be no

less in play in Astaires comedic context than it is in Lears and Timons

tragic or melodramatic contexts. We might accordingly come to a sur-

mise that Astaire is bafed that a curse has been the condition, and may

be the cost, of his praise.

In the fth and sixth chapters, matters become more obviously com-

plex. It turns out that the meaning of Nietzsches speaking of the philos-

opher as the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, while it

may have seemed a continuation of the idea of the ordinary in my open-

ing chapter, contains an essential reference to an idea of praise, or ap-

praising, or appreciating, or, one might say, transference. Then in Chap-

ter 6 my interest in Levinasthat is, my interest in writing about certain

passages of his, that is, my sense that I might have something useful to

say about those passagescomes from my learning that in his work the

relation to the other can be said to begin with my knowledge of myself

as a threat to the other, one could say, my knowledge of our vulnerabil-

ity to each other, abashed by the demand to acknowledge the other. This

seemed to me a promising line of thought in view of my having arrived

at certain asymmetries between skepticism with respect to things and

skepticism with respect to persons. For example, the conclusion of the


1SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

It happens that I lived for the rst seven years of my life in a houseplaced three or four miles from the site of this hotel, in a neighborhood

intermittently still recognizable from my childhood images of Atlanta. I

realized, in choosing the material to present on this gratifying occasion,

that I wanted it to represent some fragment of a map by which to gure

how that distance and direction into the city and to this room can have

been traveled. I want such a map, since I keep discovering that I have to

go back to collect belongings that others may not have come to care for

as I have.

A conjunction of quotations, from texts that were I think among the

earliest I recognized as belonging to some body of work called philoso-

phy, may give an idea of what it is I want to talk about today, in impor-

tant part to reminisce about. The rst is from John Deweys Construc-

tion and Criticism, dating from 1929:

As Emerson says in his essay on Self-Reliance: A man should

learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which ashes across

his mind from within, . . . else to-morrow a stranger will say with

masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the

time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion

from another . . . Language does not help us at this point; rather

the habits of our vocabulary betray us . . . To know what the words

mean we have to forget the words and become aware of the occa-

sions when some idea truly our own is stirring within us and striv-

ing to come to birth.

No wonderto do a little initial ax-grindingit is commonly said, in

the recent valuable rediscoveries or reconstructions of Deweys achieve-

ments, that pragmatism is an intimate continuation of Emersonianism.

And no wonder I keep nding that what is called pragmatism so often

strikes me as an intimate negation of Emersonianism. For while Dewey

takes up the Emersonian theme of our suffocation by conformity and

the accretion of unexamined habit, he discards the power that Emerson

precisely directs against xated form, namely the power of turning our

words against our words, to make them ours (ours again, we might say,

as if things had ever been less distant). How Emersons manner in what

he calls his essays accomplishes this task, and why, in the face of my

knowledge of how grating his manner can be to contemporary philo-

sophical sensibilities, I take it to be a mode of thinking lost without tak-

ing it up as philosophy, has been an insistent theme of mine for a decade

and a half now.

The quotation I conjoin with that from Dewey is from Nietzsches

Birth of Tragedy, published about sixty years earlier, when Dewey was

some thirteen years old and Nietzsche roughly twice thirteen. Nietzsche

wrote then:

Art has never been so much talked about [by critics, journalists,

in schools, in society] and so little esteemed . . . On the other

hand, many a being more nobly and delicately endowed by nature,

though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in the

manner described, might have something to say about the unex-

pected as well as totally unintelligible effect that a successful per-

formance of Lohengrin, for example, has on himexcept that per-

haps there was no helpful interpreting hand to guide him; so the

incomprehensibly different and altogether incomparable sensation

that thrilled him remained isolated and, like a mysterious star, be-


came extinct after a short period of brilliance. But it was then that

he had an inkling of what an aesthetic listener is. (chap. 22, closing)

Nietzsches portrait of the unexpected and vanishing existence of the

aesthetic listener recalls me to an early essay in the collection that makes

up my rst book, Must We Mean What We Say?so much of which is

engaged by my need to justify an interest in what J. L. Austin and the

later Wittgenstein name the ordinaryan essay called Aesthetic Prob-

lems of Modern Philosophy, in which I propose that Kants character-

ization of the aesthetic judgment models the relevant philosophical

claim to voice what we should ordinarily say when, and what we should

mean in saying it. The moral is that while general agreement with these

claims can be imputed or demanded by philosophers, they cannot,

as in the case of more straightforward empirical judgments, postulate

this agreement (using Kants terms).

I was not able when I wrote that essay to press this intuitive connec-

tion very far, for example to surmise why there should be this connec-

tion between the arrogation of the right to speak for others about the

language we share and about works of art we cannot bear not to share. I

gestured at comparing the risk of aesthetic isolation with that of moral

or political isolation, but what I could not get at, I think now, was the

feature of the aesthetic claim, as suggested by Kants description, as a

kind of compulsion to share a pleasure, hence as tinged with an anxiety

that the claim stands to be rebuked. It is a condition of, or threat to, that

relation to things called aesthetic, that something I know and cannot

make intelligible stands to be lost to me.

Experience lost or missed is what the conjunction of my opening

quotations speaks about (Deweys of missing an original idea striving to

get formed; Nietzsches of losing the world opened in art, instanced in

opera), and they are parts of what is for each writer a fundamental criti-

cism of his present culture. This fact or fantasy of experience passing me

by is also explicitly a way in which I have wished to word my interest in

Austin and in the later Wittgenstein, especially I think when their proce-

dures present themselves as returning us to the ordinary, a place we have

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY 9

never been. It seems that the more I might nd their instances trivial,

the more puzzled I could become that I had not realized, or could not

retain the realization of, their discoveriessuch as, in Wittgenstein,

what it is we go on in calling something a chair, or saying that someone

is expecting someone, or is walking, or why I sometimes imagine a dif-

culty over pointing to the color of an object (as opposed to pointing to

the object). To know how to tell such things, it seems, is just to know

how to speak. My oblivion of them came to strike me, intermittently,

not exactly as revealing my life to be unexamined, but as missed by me,

lost on me.

Experience missed, in certain of the forms in which philosophy has

interested itself in this condition, is a theme developing itself through

various of my intellectual turns in recent years, ones I would be most

unhappy to exclude from this occasion, ones that have exacted their

costs to justify as part of a prose that claims an inheritance of philoso-

phy; yet ones that have afforded me rare pleasure and instruction and

companionshipI mean for instance my interests in Shakespeare and

in Emerson and Thoreau and in lm and, most recently in an extended

way, in opera.

To epitomize the surprising extensions of the theme, and as an exper-

iment highlighting the difculties in the way of showing and sharing the

pleasures in its discoveries, I am going toward the end of this chapter to

discuss a brief lm sequence, chosen also so as to allow some chance, on

a very small scale, of showing a difference in my approach to aesthetic

matters from that of most, of course not all, work in aesthetics in the

Anglo-American ways of philosophy, or for that matter in the practice

of Kant (though not from passages to be found in Hegel and in Nietz-

sche and, for better or worse, in Heidegger), I mean the sort of emphasis

I place on the criticism, or reading, of individual works of art. I think of

this emphasis as letting a work of art have a voice in what philosophy

says about it, and I regard that attention as a way of testing whether the

time is past in which taking seriously the philosophical bearing of a par-

ticular work of art can be a measure of the seriousness of philosophy.

The fragment of lm I have chosen readily allows itself to be dis-


missed as inconsequential; but to my mind that fact precisely ts it to be

a memorable enactment of the ordinary as what is missable. It is a rou-

tine from a Hollywood musical comedy of the early 1950s, consisting es-

sentially of a man walking along a train platform, singing a not evi-

dently demanding song to himself. The man, it happens, is Fred Astaire,

by now all but incontestably recognized throughout the world as one of

the greatest American dancers of the twentieth century. He is also in-

contestably not exactly a trained singer, so the fragment contains an

open invitation to judge the routine, and its apparently uneventful cine-

matic presentation, to be trivial. It is a taskone I welcometo try to

make such a conclusion a matter of judgment rather than one simply of

taste; as it were to challenge taste.

To give this task a decent chance of success I need to do a bit more

philosophical table-setting, and then go on to give some details of my

interest in the voice in opera along with a related interest in Austins

sense of the powers of speech.

I have rather assumed, more or less without argument, since the early

essay of mine mentioned earlier, that Kants location of the aesthetic

judgment, as claiming to record the presence of pleasure without a con-

cept, makes room for a particular form of criticism, one capable of

supplying the concepts which, after the fact of pleasure, articulate the

grounds of this experience in particular objects. The work of such criti-

cism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Some-

thing there, despite being fully opened to the senses, has been missed. I

shall claim that while it is not a fact that the Astaire routine is trivial, the

sequence can be seen to be about triviality; and to show that will require

showing how its pleasure derives from its location of formal conditions

of its art.

A further variation in the relation of the ordinary to what may be

seen as the aesthetic is taken up in a later essay in Must We Mean What

We Say? which goes back to my having responded to Wittgensteins In-

vestigations as written, however else, in recurrent response to skepticism

but not as a refutation of it; rather on the contrary, as a task to discover

the causes of philosophys disparagement of, or its disappointment with,


the ordinary, something I have called the truth of skepticism. In that es-

say, Knowing and Acknowledging, the ordinary is discovered not as

what is perceptually missable but as what is intellectually dismissable,

not what may be but what must be set aside if philosophys aspirations

to knowledge are to be satised. There I articulate my sense of what

happens to philosophys aspirations by saying that skepticism is not the

discovery of an incapacity in human knowing but of an insufciency in

acknowledging what in my world I think of as beyond me, or my senses;

so that when I found, in a following essay on King Lear, that Shakespear-

ean tragedy enacts the failure to acknowledge an other, hence forms a le-

thal set of attempts to deny the existence of another as essential to ones

own, I came to wonder whether Shakespeares tragedies can be under-

stood as studies of (what philosophy identies as) skepticism.

If in being drawn to the skeptical surmise Descartes reaches a point of

astonishment that opens him to a fear of madness, and the young Hume

a point that presents itself to him as his suffering an incurable malady

from the knowledge of which he seeks to protect his (non-philosophi-

cal) acquaintances, a point that to Kant represents a scandal to philoso-

phys quest for reason, then can the great literature of the West not have

responded to whatever in history has caused this convulsion in the con-

ditions of human existence? Or were the philosophers not to have been

taken quite seriously in their airs of melodramatic crisis? Yet might it

not well haunt us, as philosophers, that in King Lear doubt as to a lov-

ing daughters expressions of love, or in Othello doubt cast as jealousy

and terror of a wifes satisfaction, or in Macbeth doubt manifested as a

question about the stability of a wifes humanity (in connection with

witches), leads to a mans repudiation or annihilation of the world that

is linked with a loss of the power of or the conviction in speech?

Or, again, should we consider rather that philosophy has indeed

properly drawn the moral of tragedy, namely that since we all already

know that skepticism is some species of intellectual tragedy, or folly, we

are advised that the rational response to it is not to revel in it or culti-

vate its allure, but to seek to avoid it. To take a celebrated instance, when

Quine implicitly blocks skepticism out of the court of epistemology,


that is, naturalizes epistemology, by (as in Pursuit of Truth) repu-

diat[ing] the Cartesian dream and enrolling philosophy as a chapter of

the science of an antecedently acknowledged external world, he cites

as a normative point of philosophys self-inclusion in science that it

[warns] us against telepaths and soothsayers (p. 19). The year that

book of Quines was published I was giving a lecture about Macbeth in

which I articulated the terror Macbeth seeks refuge from as an interac-

tion of telepathy and soothsaying. I spelled them differently, namely as

mind-reading and prophecy. Take them as terms of criticism naming

enemies of reason, and link them with the list of philosophys irrational

competitors identied in Kants Religion within the Limits of Reason

Alone, which he names as fanaticism, superstition, delusion, and sorcery.

This budget of favorite enemies of the Enlightenment also constitutes a

fair set of dimensions of the events in Macbeth, and indeed, in different

economies, of those in the other great tragedies of Shakespeare. So I

have also in effect suggested that Shakespeares tragedies are themselves

something like warnings against the craving for telepathy and soothsay-

ing, and I do not know that they and their kin have been less effective in

their warnings than scientic philosophy has in its, nor that to choose

one against the other is safe.

In Quines construal of philosophys ambitions for empirical knowl-

edgewhat he calls the construction of a unied system of the

worldthe only, but indispensable, role of experience is to provide for

such a system its checkpoints in sensory prediction. It is, I suppose, in

response to such an idea that, for example, William James and John

Dewey complain of other empiricisms that they have a poor view of ex-

perience. The richer experience Dewey champions he tends to call aes-

thetic; James most famously documents varieties of the religious. Even if

you disagree with Quines view of epistemology you can enjoy the dem-

onstration of the power, even the beauty, of science in showing how far

a little experience can go. Whereas you have to agree with James and

Dewey further than I doand I mean to grant all honor to their efforts

to save experience from its stiing by unresponsive institutionsin or-

der not to feel sometimes that they demonstrate how a mass of experi-


ence can go philosophically almost nowhere (for Dewey into a hundred

abstract rejections of some patently unintelligent thesis together with its

obviously undesirable antithesis; for James into a mere surmise of tran-

scendence).

May we think as follows? If philosophy of science can be taken to be

what philosophy is, that is because philosophy is, and is content to be,

recognizable, or practicable, as (a chapter of) science; whereas were phi-

losophy of art to make of itself a chapter of one or more of the arts, it

would no longer be recognizable as philosophy. Without challenging

this now, what I am proposing is something rather else, following what I

construe Kants examples of the transgressions of reason, in their inter-

section with Shakespearean drama, to suggest (perhaps it is Hegels sug-

gestion): that the arts, beginning with tragedy (or, in Hegels aesthetics,

ending with tragedy), may variously be seen, or claimed, as chapters of

the history, or development, of philosophy, hence perhaps of certain of

its present manifestations. I am going in a little while, as said, to extend

the thought to a polar relation of tragedy, a Hollywood musical. It is a

suggestion based on two contentions that I have argued for in various

contexts over the years. First, that in the modern period of the arts

marked variously by splits in the audience (and conception) of art be-

tween the academic and the advancedthe great arts together with

their criticism increasingly take on the self-reective condition of phi-

losophy (teaching us, let us say, to see that King Lear is about theater as

catharsis, that Macbeth is about theater as apparition, Othello about the

treacherous theater of ocular proofs, Hamlet about what surpasses the-

atrical show). The second contention is that the medium of lm is such

thatfrom the time of its rst masterpieces in the second decade of its

technological establishmentit could take on the seriousness of the

modern without splitting its audience, between high and low, or be-

tween advanced and philistine.

To prepare more specically for proposing an Astaire routine as a

checkpoint, or touchstone, of experience, I want to summarize the way

it gured in the introduction to a course I gave recently on the aesthetics

of lm and opera. The idea of the course is that words and actions suffer


transguration in opera (the art which replaces speaking by singing)

that bears comparison with their transformation on lm (the art which

replaces living human beings by photographic shadows of themselves).

So my summary must begin to specify in which philosophical forma-

tion lm and opera form chapters that measure some particular condi-

tions of these arts, or call them media.

Here I should simply confess that my interest in opera is tied to a con-

viction that matches yet one further way I have formulated an interest in

the work of Austin and the later Wittgenstein. Their sense of returning

words from their metaphysical to their everyday use is driven by a sense

of a human dissatisfaction with words (not as it were solely a philosoph-

ical dissatisfaction) in which an effort to transcend or to purify speech

ends by depriving the human speaker of a voice in what becomes his (or,

differently, her) fantasy of knowledge, a characterization I have given of

what happens in skepticism. In Wittgensteins case of a man striking

himself on the breast and insisting Only I can have this sensation! we

are to witness a speaker abandoned by his words, or abandoned to mere

words. Now opera is the Western institution in whichbeginning in the

same decade as the composition of the great tragedies of Shakespeare

the human voice is given its fullest acknowledgment, generally in the

course of showing that its highest forms of expression are apt not to be

expressive enough to avoid catastrophe, especially for women.

If we provisionally characterize the medium of opera as musics ex-

ploration of its afnities with expressive or passionate utterance, then

one specic response it invites from the recent present of philosophy as

represented in Austins work is to determine how his theory of speech as

action may be extended, in a sense re-begun, in order to articulate a the-

ory of speech as passion that can propose an orderly study of the effects

of the voice raised in opera; but this must in return allow the study of

opera to inspire philosophys interest in passionate speech. To sketch the

progress of my thoughts in this project will not exactly prepare for the

use to which I wish to put the Astaire sequence, but it will share the bur-

den of signicance I load it with, and help to specify why I press it into

service.


The examples which initially I ask a theory of passionate speech to il-

luminate are in part from the operas I assigned in my course. It is im-

portant for my purposes that all are warhorses of the medium and that

they still, or again, inspire new productions: The Marriage of Figaro,

Don Giovanni, Carmen, Tannhuser, Otello, La Bohme, and scenes from

Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, and Lucia di Lammermoor. I want also to be

guided by the warhorse examples from emotive or expressive utterance

that were the rage in moral philosophy, and in so-called value theory

more generally, when I was in graduate school. I recall the list from

chapter 4 of A. J. Ayers Language, Truth, and Logic: You acted wrongly

in stealing that money, Tolerance is a virtue, You ought to tell the

truth, and, most delightfully, I am bored. Ayer characterizes the ex-

pressions of moral judgment, famously, by denying that they say any-

thing and claiming that they are rather pure expressions of feeling, and

are calculated to provoke different responses, and as such do not come

under the category of truth and falsehood (p. 108), they are not in the

literal sense signicant (p. 103).

Now the claim that certain familiar human utterances are compro-

mised in their meaningfulness on the ground that they do not come

under the category of truth and falsehood is precisely the thesis to

which Austin, in his theory of speech acts (presented in his How to Do

Things with Words), provides massive classes of counterexamples. Austin

opens with the examples I do (take this woman, and so on), I bet

you . . ., I name this ship . . ., I give and bequeath . . ., and says of

them: It seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appro-

priate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be

said in so uttering to be doing . . . : it is to do it. None of the utterances

cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it

(p. 6). But the philosophical kick of the examples rests on two of Aus-

tins earlier introductory remarks about which he is prepared to say that

he asserts them as obvious: that the type of utterance we are to con-

sider is not, of course, in general a type of non-sense, and that they fall

into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of state-

ments (p. 4).


Notably absent, it appears, from the types of utterances Austin goes

on to investigate are those warhorse examples of Ayers, or their descen-

dants, that Austins theory is designed to challenge. This may have been

a tactical decision, meant to shift a new argument onto philosophically

fresh ground (a new site for eld work, Austin would call it). But there

is reason to think that Austins experience had been xated by the way

he re-begins his theory to include the perlocutionary effect in distinc-

tion from the illocutionary force of speech acts. When he is led to say

clearly any or almost any perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off,

in sufciently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without cal-

culation, of any utterance whatsoever, (p. 110), he is evidently in the ter-

ritory in which Ayer was tying ethical words both to the different feel-

ings they are ordinarily taken to express, and also [to] the different

responses which they are calculated to provoke: Here Austin distin-

guishes between ordering someone to stop (illocutionary) and getting

someone to stop by saying or doing something alarming or intimidating

(perlocutionary), but he then seems unable to do much with the eld of

the perlocutionary comparable to his mapping of that of the illocution-

ary. It is from here that I am suggesting Austins theory must re-begin

againgoing back again to the fact of speaking itself, or I might say, to

the fact of the expressiveness and responsiveness of speech as such.

How?

Lets reformulate slightly and say that in a passionate utterance the

feelings and actions I wish to provoke (Ayer) or bring off (Austin) are

ones I can acknowledge, or specically refuse to acknowledge, as appro-

priate responses to my expressions of feeling. This is presumably true

even of Ayers I am bored, which, if it is said to you by a child, is per-

haps an appeal for an interesting suggestion or offer of amusement, and

if by a friend (romantic or not) is apt still to be an appeal and still to set

a stake on some piece of your future together. You had in either case

better answer, and carefully. Again, Ayer observes that if I say to some-

one, You acted wrongly in stealing that money, I am stating no more

than if I had simply said, You stole that money . . . [and] evincing my

moral disapproval of it (p. 107). So presumably I could equally have


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The title I have given this volume is derivedby a route I explain in

Chapter 5, which bears the same titlefrom a phrase used prominently

and repeatedly by Nietzsche in the second half of the 1880s to announce,

or to characterize, ambiguously, the philosophy of the future: does he

mean the future as seen (now) by philosophy or a future as it will be in-

habited by a (new) philosophy, or conceivably both at once (if ever)?

The phrase speaks of the philosopher as the man of tomorrow and the

day after tomorrow. I was so enamored of my understanding of this

phrase, or idea, that I repeatedly alluded to it over the years for talks

having in common only, or mostly, my explication of Nietzsches phrase.

My idea of it rst appeared in an essay written for a colloquium entitled

The Future Today, sponsored by Le Monde in the autumn of 1994 in Le

Mans, and published in The London Review of Books under the title

Time after Time: The Future Today.

Chapter 1, Something Out of the Ordinary is reprinted from Pro-

ceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, volume

71, no. 2, November 1997.

A shorter version of Chapter 2, The Interminable Shakespearean

Text, was read at the 1996 Shakespeare World Congress under the title

Skepticism as Iconoclasm, and printed in Shakespeare in the Twentieth

Century, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl (University

of Delaware Press, 1998).

Early versions of Chapters 3 and 4 (Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to

Praise and Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare)

were delivered in Amsterdam as part of my duties as Visiting Spinoza

Professor at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 1998. The ma-

terial of the former was broached in a talk in 1999 at the invitation of

Professor Jane Bennett, on behalf of The Foundations of Political

Thought, a section of the American Political Science Association. Both

texts are published here for the rst time. Vigorous issue with my read-

ings of the Astaire routines is taken by Professor Robert Gooding-Wil-

liams in the essay he has contributed to a volume entitled The Claim to

Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Theory, edited by An-

drew Norris, forthcoming from Stanford University Press, which also

contains responses by me to each of the essays. The reading I include in

Chapter 3 of Jamess late story The Birthplace is adapted from its oc-

currence in Henry James Reading Emerson Reading Shakespeare,

which appears in my Emersons Transcendental Essays, published in 2003

by Harvard University Press.

Chapter 5, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, also published here

for the rst time, was given at Bucknell University in February 2003, and

adapted as one of my Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Lectures at Harvard in

October of 2004.

Chapter 6, What Is the Scandal of Skepticism? was invited for a

conference in the summer of 2000 at Amsterdam, organized by James

Conant and Andrea Kern, and is to appear in the volume of the confer-

ence proceedings edited by them.

Chapter 7, Performative and Passionate Utterance, was invited by

the Pompidou Center in Paris as part of a series of papers delivered un-

der the collective title Philosophy for the Twenty-rst Century. A rst ver-

sion of the text appears, translated into French, in the museums publi-

cation of the series. A somewhat later version is to appear in the

collection of papers on my work, with responses by me, edited by Rus-

sell Goodman under the title Contending with Cavell, forthcoming from

the Oxford University Press.

Chapter 8, The Wittgensteinian Event, was written for two celebra-

292 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

tions of the ftieth anniversary, in 2001, of Wittgensteins death, one in

Kirchberg, Austria, the other in Delphi, Greece. Versions of it were pre-

sented the following year as part of the Howison Lectures at Berkeley in

2002, and of the Donnellan Lectures at Trinity University, Dublin.

Chapter 9, Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers, is a revi-

sion of a text that was prepared for a conference on Heidegger organized

by James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall and that originally ap-

peared (under the title Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau) in the

proceedings of the conference edited by them entitled Appropriating

Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2000). It was given as the

Roland Altherr Memorial Lecture at Haverford College in 1999.

The thought of composing a text on philosophy and collecting, re-

sulting in Chapter 10, came from the organizers of the joint exhibition

whose catalogue, in which this piece was rst published, gives its name

and mission: Rendevous: Masterpieces from the Centre Georges

Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums, copyright 1998 by The Solo-

mon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

I am grateful to the various publishers for their permissions to re-

print, and to the respective institutions for the honor of the invitations

to prepare and to present, the material of these texts. As with so much

of what I publish, conversations with friends, real and imaginary con-

versations, echo across my pages. Much of Chapter 1 sketches work de-

veloped in a late aesthetics course of mine given at Harvard in the 1990s,

on opera in relation to lm. I had had a number of discussions about

opera with Michal Grover-Friedlander, discussions not infrequently

joined in, here and elsewhere, by Eli Friedlander, and I was indispens-

ably assisted in every phase of the course, intellectually and practically,

by Steven Affeldt. For what I see as the companion, succeeding chapter

on Shakespeare, I asked, at a critical moment of loss of direction, a

group of friends to listen to a draft of what I had. I remain grateful for

that day, among many other days, to Affeldt again, and to Norton

Batkin, Nancy Bauer, William Flesch, Paul Franks, and Hindy Najman. I

remember with pleasure and gratitude the introduction to my lectures

in Amsterdam, Chapters 3 and 4 here, given by Hent de Vries, whose

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 293

comments also during the good discussions there were helpful to me in

arriving at reasonably stable texts. James Conant shared responsibilities

of the Spinoza Professorship with me, and his responses and sugges-

tions, here as elsewhere, continue to leave their mark on what I have

done. The original draft of Performative and Passionate Utterance was

distinctly improved by comments on it given me by Ted Cohen. His pa-

per Illocutions and Perlocutions and Timothy Goulds The Unhappy

Performative are part of the background of what was moving me in

this intervention. Further thanks are due to Norton Batkin for reading,

and suggesting welcome alterations in, the nal chapter, on collecting

and exhibiting. Many of the ideas in these as in other texts of mine have

been topics of discussions with Sandra Laugier, not infrequently as part

of the preparation of translations of them into French.

Not for the rst time, I am grateful to Lindsay Waters, Executive Edi-

tor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press, for his powers of

attention and his insistence on calling a book over when its over. And

again it is a pleasure to thank Camille Smith for her seemingly tire-

less editorial ear and amiable good sense in preparing a presentable

manuscript. And yet again David LaRocca, happily for me, undertook

to construct an index and gather together a bibliography to make the

book handier.

294 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stanley Cavell Excerpt

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Transcript of Stanley Cavell Excerpt