Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology

Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology REFLECTION AND THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION SERIES Series Editor The...

Author: Peter Dula

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Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology

REFLECTION AND THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION SERIES Series Editor Theodore M. Vial, Jr., Iliff School of Theology A Publication Series of The American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press LESSING’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT Toshimasa Yasukata AMERICAN PRAGMATISM A Religious Genealogy M. Gail Hamner OPTING FOR THE MARGINS Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology Edited by Joerg Rieger MAKING MAGIC Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World Randall Styers THE METAPHYSICS OF DANTE’s COMEDY Christian Moevs PILGRIMAGE OF LOVE Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life Joy Ann McDougall MORAL CREATIVITY Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Moral Life John Wall MELANCHOLIC FREEDOM Agency and the Spirit of Politics David Kyuman Kim FEMINIST THEOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DIFFERENCE Margaret D. Kamitsuka PLATO’s GHOST Spiritualism in the American Renaissance Cathy Gutierrez TOWARD A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology Jason A. Springs CAVELL, COMPANIONSHIP, AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY Peter Dula

Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology PETER DULA

1 2011

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dula, Peter, 1970– Cavell, companionship, and Christian theology / Peter Dula. p. cm.—(Reflection and theory in the study of religion series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978–0–19–539503–7 1. Cavell, Stanley, 1926– 2. Philosophy and religion. 3. Church. I. Title. B945.C274D86 2010 191—dc22 2010000842

The lines from “Transcendental Etude,” Poem VII of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” from The Dream of Common Language: Poems of 1974–1977, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness. . . . I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. . . . Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. . . . Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them. . . . Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship”

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Contents

The Ordinary: An Introduction to Stanley Cavell, 3 Part I 1. Companionship and Community in Cavell and MacIntyre, 33 2. Scenes of Instruction in Cavell and Liberalism, 57 3. Private Languages in Cavell and Sebald, 75 4. Fugitive Ecclesia, 95 Part II 5. The Claim of Reason’s Apophatic Anthropology, 117 6. “Can We Believe All This?”: Cavell’s Annexation of Theology, 155 7. Evidence of Habitation, 179 8. Truly Human, 209 Conclusion, 223 Notes, 231 Bibliography, 267 Index, 275


Preface

Theology has always been in conversation with philosophy. Those conversations can be amicable, antagonistic, illuminating, uncomprehending. In the English-speaking world in recent decades, those conversations have been wide ranging. But few theologians have taken up the work of the man Richard Rorty referred to as “the least defended, the gutsiest, the most vulnerable” of American philosophers—Stanley Cavell.1 As the analytic tradition came under increasing pressure in the late twentieth century, its mid-century orthodoxies increasingly worn, those challenging it or those on its fringes became important resources. Theologians, in particular, welcomed neo-Aristotelianism, pragmatism, and poststructuralism. But somehow Cavell got missed, allowed to fall through the cracks between, say, Dewey and Derrida. Cavell’s relative obscurity in philosophy departments is perhaps not surprising. Cavell wrote books on Emerson and Thoreau, a book on Shakespeare, and three books on film and, to the annoyance of many colleagues, called them all philosophy. His repeated gestures toward theology didn’t help him in many philosophical circles, but they do make the theologians’ lack of interest all the more disturbing. Like a few of the French postmodernists, and unlike the Anglo-American analytical philosophers, Cavell cannot let go of the issue of faith. He once told an interviewer, “To choose between Judaism and Christianity is, I suppose, still a live issue for me.”2 Cavell is fascinated

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by Christian theology and by the figure of Christ in the way few postEnlightenment philosophers have been. In this book, I offer an account of Cavell’s fascination with theology and what Christians might learn from him. I do so in part by entering a highly charged debate about things like “communitarianism,” “liberalism,” and “new traditionalism.”3 I will develop an account of companionship that might thicken, and thereby strengthen, the influential theological turn toward community. Although it may seem to some that I undermine community, I intend an account of companionship that will be compelling enough to rescue community from the cliché it threatens to become. In so doing, perhaps these pages can also offer succor to some of those trying to account for their sense of alienation from, or suffocation within, the church. Part I places Cavell alongside a few of the most influential recent philosophers writing in English: Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and John Rawls. Those chapters make clear what is distinctive about Cavell’s moral and political philosophy, and they expose some inadequacies of communitarianism and liberalism. In MacIntyre, I locate a disturbing insensitivity and contempt directed at “the modern subject.” In Nussbaum and Rawls, I locate an impatience with the complaints of victims of the liberalism they defend. Hence, chapter 3 relies on the fiction of W. G. Sebald to provide an extended display of the sort of companionship Cavell offers as an alternative, an alternative that preserves, even heightens, MacIntyre’s sense of catastrophe, yet replaces his contempt with compassion and his self-exemption with solidarity. Chapter 4 begins to extend those lessons to ecclesiology. Part I may be read as a distinct and independent survey of standard options in moral and political philosophy as they converse with Cavell. But my interest in MacIntyre and Rawls/Nussbaum is in the way communitarianism and liberalism have influenced contemporary debates in Christian theology. Hence, part I also may be read as ground clearing. The critique of MacIntyre and Rawls/Nussbaum is in service of prying theology loose from them in order to replace, or at least supplement, their views with those of Cavell. Cavell occupies, or has created, a unique space between philosophy and theology that deserves to be explored because of the ways he illuminates and instructs both philosophy and theology. His struggles with philosophy’s history seem to me like admirable ways for theology to struggle with its history. Moreover, his struggles have enabled him to think about theology, and philosophy’s relationship to it, without the animus of so much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Cavell is famous for having challenged the conventional boundaries between philosophy and literature. He deserves to be equally famous for challenging the conventional boundaries between philosophy and theology.

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Demonstrating that, however, makes for a more complex, less linear stretch of writing than what is offered in part I. Part II begins by stepping back to look more closely at the heart of Cavell’s work. I provide in chapter 5 an extended reading of The Claim of Reason, Cavell’s lengthy, category-defying investigation and diagnosis of modern skepticism and, therefore, of modern philosophy. Skepticism, Cavell argues, is not an intellectual mistake. The problem with skeptics is not that they are incompetent. There is no piece of information about the world or about others with which we can provide them. Skepticism is a condition, a frame of mind. The curious parlor games of the philosopher—how do you know you are not dreaming? what if he is an automaton?—are interpretations of common, everyday experiences. Cavell’s response to this kind of skepticism is to ask a very simple but counterintuitive question: what if skepticism is not the product of the failure of knowledge, but of its success? What if skepticism is a cover, an excuse for our estrangement from others? “In making the knowledge of others a metaphysical difficulty, philosophers deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s gaze, or bear of it.”4 Or elsewhere, “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. . . . (‘To interpret a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.’).”5 Scattered throughout The Claim of Reason are references to Christianity. “The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.”6 “You may battle against the Christian’s self-understanding from within Christianity, as Kierkegaard declares, or from beyond Christianity, as Nietzsche declares. In both cases you are embattled because you find the words of the Christian to be the right words.”7 Chapter 6 documents these references to theology, Christianity, and the figure of Christ from a variety of places, not just The Claim of Reason, in an attempt to map the space between philosophy and theology that Cavell has created. Stephen Mulhall, one of Cavell’s best readers, writes, “The question of Cavell’s understanding of his relationship with religion is not merely one element amongst others in his work, but the most fundamental and revealing of his preoccupations.”8 While I sometimes differ with Mulhall’s interpretations, this book is in many ways a continuation of his exemplary work on Cavell and Christianity.9 Cavell once wrote that Christianity is something “I am not in a position to share but to admire and rejoice in.”10 Chapter 6 brings Cavell and theology into close proximity and reveals their affinities. It shows, with help from Rowan Williams, the most Cavellian of contemporary theologians, why Christianity is

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something Cavell admires and rejoices in. Chapters 7 and 8 use these two thinkers to work out each other’s differences, to show why, despite Cavell’s admiration, Christianity is not something he is in a position to share. I hope both Cavellian philosophers and Christian theologians (and those who aren’t sure where they belong) find this book of some use, and will discover each other to be the kinds of friends whom Emerson called “beautiful enemies.” But I am all too aware of the weaknesses that both philosophers and theologians will find throughout this text. It is not to excuse such inadequacy that I add that I also hope this book is something of what Robert Pogue Harrison, introducing his Dominion of the Dead, called “a reader’s book.” Some books are writer’s books, in that their authors undertake the largest share of the labor, do most of the thinking, circumscribe (as much as possible) the horizon of reference, and draw the final conclusions. The Dominion of the Dead is different. It is more like a net than a cloth. Its articulation is full of empty spaces for the reader to enter and wander about in. It calls on its interlocutor not only to think along with the author but to establish independent connections, leap over abysses, pursue his or her own paths of inquiry, bring to bear adventitious considerations, and, through the tracings offered here, discover the topic for him- or herself. Given its intrinsic limitations (of which I am all too aware), I have tried to turn my approach into one that opens rather than closes the horizon of speculation.11

Acknowledgments

Much of this book was written at Duke University. I am grateful to Professors Sarah Beckwith, Rom Coles, Bill Hart, and Stanley Hauerwas, who served as my dissertation committee, to Martin Stone for his seminar on The Claim of Reason, and to Nicholas Lash who encouraged my first readings of Cavell at a time when no one else seemed to have heard of him. During those years, I was rarely far from the company of Steve Jolley, Rich Church, Jen Graber, Stacy Vlasits, Charlie Collier, Erin Martin, Scott and Jenny Williams, Rosalee and Sam Velloso Ewell, Joel Shuman, Isaac Villegas, and the wonderful people at Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship. I am particularly grateful to Chris Huebner and Alex Sider. When I first arrived at Duke, Hauerwas told me that, in graduate school, professors don’t really do anything but get students together to educate each other. While that underestimates what I owe to him (for his patience with my affection for Emerson, among other things), after more than ten years of conversations with Chris and Alex, I think I know what he meant. Most of chapters 1, 2, and 4 were written in Addis Ababa. For the hospitality of Meserete Kristos College, the Amharic tutors in Zenebewerq, Janet and Negash Kebede, Mekonnen Dessalegn, Kebede Bekere, and especially the extended Dula family, I am grateful. Chapters 3 and 4 were begun in the company of Keith Miller and Sofia Samatar, in the coffee shops of Alexandria and on the veranda of their Cairo apartment. The last two chapters were

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completed in Baghdad and in Amman, where I was the Mennonite Central Committee’s Iraq program coordinator. It may be that some of the pages that follow betray the cynicism produced in lonely Baghdad hotel rooms in 2004, but they are far less so than would have been the case without the companionship of Khalil Rahoomi, Steve Weaver, Ikhlas Sidi, Menno Wiebe, Deborah Fast, Alexander Christof, Andrea Hilger, and Alain and Sonia Epp-Weaver. Revisions of the dissertation upon which this book is based were undertaken at Eastern Mennonite University. I am particularly grateful to Mark Sawin and to my colleagues in the Bible and Religion Department for a congenial and stimulating atmosphere in which to work, to Nancy Heisey for her able leadership, and to generous university funding for release time. My parents, Mamo and Mary Ellen; and my brother and sister-in-law, Andy and Michelle, and their beautiful children, Maya and Mesa, have put up with a lot over the years. This book could not exist without them. It also would not exist without the encouragement of James Wetzel and the editorial hand of Theo Calderara and Charlotte Steinhardt. When I wrote what became the first draft of this book, I read Cavell’s book on marriage, Pursuits of Happiness, from a distance, translating it into more general terms. Since then, Ilse Ackerman has been teaching me what he meant. Her encouragement and patience in the completion of this book are the least of what I am grateful to her for. Now, Simon Dula, four months old at this writing, will inherit language from us. Cavell wrote of the infant Augustine: The child reads to me, among other ways, as the witness of its elders’ lives, an image of children as beneficiaries and victims of an unclear world we have to leave to them. The rest of the Investigations is then a record of our discovering the capacity to come specifically, concretely, patiently, to their aid in clarifying it, something not perfectly distinguishable from coming to ourselves. I can imagine no better companion in that task than Ilse. I dedicate this book to both of them.

Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology


The Ordinary An Introduction to Stanley Cavell

Fathers and Strangers The main discipline is to keep finding life strange (this is the extent, and intent, of spirituality in me).1 “A Cover Letter to Molière’s Misanthrope” is as beautiful as anything Cavell ever wrote, and Cavell says that the essay “sees things together in a way that nothing else I have done quite manages.”2 By “sees things together,” I take it he means that the essay manages to gather and condense, in the space of its eight exquisite pages, some guiding concerns of Cavell’s—not just skepticism and ordinary language but also conformity, narcissism, resistance, consent, youth, violence. How it does so will require more than this introduction, but I begin here as a way of introducing themes that will circulate throughout the later, more extensive engagements with his work. Cavell’s lifelong preoccupation has been what he calls “preserving the threat of skepticism,” refusing to refute or ignore the skeptic, yet without being a skeptic himself, to keep the skeptic’s problem alive while not caving in to it. In the “Cover Letter,” Alceste stands in for the skeptic, and Cavell’s ambivalence concerning Alceste and his misanthropy parallels his ambivalence concerning skepticism. Importantly, it also makes clear the political stake in such ambivalence. Alceste, the protagonist of Molière’s play, is a misanthropic young man who has given up on human society. He has become

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disgusted with its charades and deceits, its show, artifice, and insincerity. All of it he finds pervaded by hypocrisy and so chooses to abandon it, and he proposes to Célimène that she go with him, that she also abandon the world, in order to find the whole world in him. One response to Alceste, Cavell’s first response, at the end of the first paragraph, is simply to say, “The world isn’t perfect. No one promised that it would be. Society requires compromises and sacrifices. That’s just the way it is and only your adolescent idealism keeps you from understanding that so grow up.” That is a pretty common response, and it may be a reasonable one. But Cavell is more interested in the question that follows “grow up”: “Why is this not the end of the matter?” (98). Why, that is, do we still find Alceste so important? Why do Célimène and Arsinoé and Philinte still love him and end the play by going to search for him? Why can’t they, like Judith Shklar,3 just say “grow up” and abandon him as he has abandoned us? Why can’t they realize, like Ben Franklin, the hero of Shklar’s essay, that “private affections [are] not politically relevant”? That “a democratic ‘social fabric’ would ‘come undone’ . . . if everyone were always ‘wholly frank with everyone.’” Why don’t they understand “the demands of democratic assemblies”? “Liberal democracy is a process that requires particularly obvious and vulnerable hypocrisies.”4 My old friend Judith Shklar is saying publicly that you finally lost the woman you love. This implies at the least that Célimène is right to refuse your offer of marriage with its condition that she abandon the remainder of the world, that she find the whole world in you. So I have to tell you that I agree with this verdict and will say so publicly. I will, however, go on to claim that the more significant fact, the mystery of your misanthropy, is that Célimène loves you, that they all love you . . . ; that they do not give you up but end their play by going to seek you out. Quite as if they think you are right, even if placed in the wrong, and cannot want to live without the thing you mean to them. (100–101) “What do you mean to them?” The fact that, for Cavell, it is not the end of the matter is crucial for understanding not just his differences with Shklar but his response to skepticism, his wish to tarry with it, not overcome it, his willingness to leave room for refusing the world, for the attempt to escape or deny an existence shared with others. Skepticism converges with narcissism as “a power that all who possess language possess and may desire: to dissociate oneself, excommunicate oneself from the community in whose agreement, mutual attunement, words exist.”5 Perhaps, Cavell suggests, Alceste thinks he represents purity in opposition to society’s corruption. But, he goes on, maybe it is better to say that Alceste

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represents purity to society’s sense of purity lost—“not as if corrupted exactly but as if misplaced, thus still present somehow” (98). A purity we had to give up when we grew up, had to lay aside when we consented to the world. So Alceste reminds us that we had something like a choice in the matter, one we may have made out of fear, and that another option, the one he chooses, or is trying to create, is to refuse consent to a world found uninhabitable and to have the courage for the loneliness that such a choice entails. But how does it happen that the world comes to seem uninhabitable? “What is the feeling? Evidently it must be understood as a mode of disgust, a repugnance at the idea that your life should partake of the world’s, that what it does, you do; or is it at the idea that the world’s life partakes of yours, that what you feel, it feels? . . . I believe in the potential epistemological significance of this mode of disgust” (99). That means Cavell believes in the epistemological significance of adolescence, a significance discovered by Hamlet and, later, by Rousseau and Emerson, Nietzsche and Nabokov. For adolescence is the place at which consent to adulthood is most clearly in view and where the hypocrisy of adults, or at least the world of adults, is most clearly exposed. It “is invented as the time of preparing for that agreement, and is ended by it.” It is the place where “the tribe shifts the responsibility for its pain from its back onto yours; and instead of opening secrets to you, it informs you that it has none, that what you see is all there is to it. Hence to its recruits it is now reduced merely to saying ‘Grow up’” (100).6 To saying, “Emerson is for sophomores.”7 To saying that the wish to want the world, to have a world worth wanting, is “unrealistic.” In refusing Alceste, we may refuse the reminders that “the tyrant’s power continues to require our complicitous tyranny over ourselves” (102) and that “most of us will mostly go along with the tide of events, and even argue that we (mostly) ought to” (103). Shklar located a modern version of Alceste in the student radicals of the 1960s.8 But “was hypocrisy really the charge that the students brought against America a few years ago? Their claim was to be in revolt because revolted, because horrified, by what they were being asked to consent to” (104). The horrors of our war machines live off our inability to cultivate disgust at what we have consented to. “My question here is whether one is prepared to credit revulsion and horror as conceivably political responses, as perhaps the only epistemological access to the state of the world” (104). (Are you or are you not revolted and horrified by the “war on terrorism” and the way your life partakes of the country which is waging it?) Are we prepared to credit Alceste’s wish to withdraw with Célimène as a conceivably political response, a response worth honoring? Are we prepared to honor the turn to exclusive intimacy that emerges from revulsion at the world? To honor the sense that the chance for being

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known by one other is all that is left us, to hope for companionship as we despair of community? (You may wish to linger here with, say, Huck and Jim before we get to Othello and Desdemona.) From another angle, we might say that Alceste presents us with what we may have forgotten or ignored or repressed and therefore offers us as “consenting adult[s] in a world of horrors (thus, as Rousseau and Thoreau perceive, a conspirator[s] of that world, chained by partialities) confronting [ourselves] with the chance to forgive [ourselves], hence the chance to start again” (102). In Alceste’s refusal to consent, we are offered the chance to reconsider our refusal to refuse. “You see that I would try to tempt you back” (102) for his sake and for ours. Cavell presents Alceste with the conviction “that there are those in the world who have not forgotten what you know, hence who feel the rebuke in your taking offense” (102), yet they have found a way both to remember what Alceste knows and to accept the world, have found a way of growing up without growing up. With luck, they may be better prepared to evade the tragedy Alceste has prepared for himself, at least if Cavell is right that he is a semblable of Othello, another narcissist of sorts who demands that a woman find the whole world in him, who demands an intimacy so exclusive that no other “claim or desire could be opposed, could conceivably count; as if the jealousy is directed to the sheer existence of the other, its separateness from him.”9 Call that the danger of (a certain kind of ) companionship. The stakes are too high, the failure, if it comes, too awful a betrayal. Cavell closes the essay with the following lines, which may seem as odd and as beautiful to you as they do to me: Montaigne seems, if I understand you both, to share your view of the exclusiveness of friendship, hence to be another of the most private of men; and yet somehow he puts this together with sociability. He invented, in inventing the essay, an intimate discourse for addressing strangers. He calls those whom he addresses his “relatives and friends,” and so they are, after his discourse has made them so (which it does in part by showing its strangeness to them, hence their strangeness to him, so that they may understand that there is something yet for them to become familiar with). Isn’t this a staggering thing when we remember our fathers? We may have known them not to have had the education they provided for us, and sometimes felt their heartiness as well as their melancholy to be bullying, to run roughshod over our subtleties. But I can remember instances of my father in conversation with strangers—in a shop, a lobby, a train—animated, laughing, comparing notes, when the

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charge of insincerity fell from my grasp and I would gaze at his behavior as at a mystery. How can he care enough what the other thinks to be provident of his good feeling, and yet not care so terribly as to become unable to provide it? What skill enables him to be the one that puts the other at ease? Where can he have acquired it? He knew no more about the other than the other knew about him. He seemed merely able to act on what nobody could fail to know, and to provide what nobody could fail to appreciate, even if in a given moment they could not return it. Call it sociability. At such a time I felt I would be happy to have my father as an acquaintance, to be treated by him to a serious regard, if somewhat external, for my comfort and opinion; to count not as an intimate but as an equal. The very need of formality, of ceremony, would all at once seem to me freeing, and for a while I glimpsed a splendor, a tenderness, in the idea of the sociable. (104–105) What is going on here? How and why does this count as an ending to a letter to Alceste? How did we get from Alceste to the Vietnam War, when Cavell “was going around . . . subject to fits of hearing screams in my ears” (104), and from the student demonstrations to our fathers and their behavior with seatmates on a train? What does Cavell know about Alceste’s or Molière’s fathers? Or about my father or yours? (We are meant to be included here.) Nothing at all. So what is he doing? To begin with, it is an invitation to us to see if our experience of our fathers or ourselves has anything in common with Cavell’s. If it does not, then it shows his strangeness to us, offers that strangeness to us as a gift, so that we may understand that there is yet something for us to become familiar with. If it does, then we are invited to appreciate our fathers in a way we perhaps had not done before, to see anew their strangeness, to look past their heartiness or their melancholy and to reconsider our subtleties. We are invited to question, reconsider, regret, and even be ashamed of our lack of sociability. We are given the opportunity to make that lack an epistemological problem, to ask how our attachment to exclusive friendships and our suspicion of sociability might be produced by a certain fear.10 And perhaps to hope that what you cannot do in a shop, a lobby, a train, you may do in a book and honor your father after all. Cavell is identifying himself with Montaigne and attempting, like Montaigne, to achieve in writing the same sociability his father achieves in spoken conversation. He is calling us, making us, his relatives and friends. That means that Cavell’s philosophy must meet the standard expressed in the claim that his father “knew no more about the other than the other knew about him. He seemed merely able to act on what nobody could fail to know.” So

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Cavell rejects writing that “claims to be philosophical and also to know something others do not know.”11 When Socrates learned that the Oracle had said no man is wiser than Socrates, he interpreted this to mean, we are told, that he knew that he did not know. And we are likely to take this as a bit of faded irony or as a stuffy humility. What I take Socrates to have seen is that, about the questions which were causing him wonder and hope and confusion and pain, he knew that he did not know what no man can know, and that any man could learn what he wanted to learn. No man is in any better position for knowing it than any other man— unless wanting to know is a special position.12 All that is a way of saying that these paragraphs, and the whole essay, are a model of “ordinary language philosophy.”13 This is the risk, the astonishingly courageous vulnerability of Cavell’s writing: “The price of a certain writing is a demand for friendship.”14 The risk is taken in the hope that what appears as strangeness will not further our isolation but instead may turn out to be what Emerson called “rejected thoughts.”15 They are strange not because we have never met them, but because we have never acknowledged them, perhaps because afraid that would leave us alone, a fear that Cavell understands more than any philosopher since Emerson and Wittgenstein. Cavell and Emerson and Wittgenstein take the risk of abandoning their fear in the hope that we will be inspired by their example to do the same and thereby reward their gamble by giving them company.16 This final paragraph of the “Cover Letter” is, after all, an intimate “if somewhat external” moment. It is just that Cavell holds out for intimacy with all of us (and calls it philosophy). I suppose I should say “a sort of intimacy,” but that is obvious. And it is obvious not because it is clear that this isn’t “real” intimacy, but because intimacy only comes in sorts. Not realizing that is one of Alceste’s problems. In these lines, sociability is identified with formality and ceremony, things that Alceste identifies with hypocrisy. It suggests that the issue of Alceste’s refusal of formality and ceremony, or his mistaking them for hypocrisy, might have to precede the question of consent to society. You have to earn the right to refuse consent. You must be sociable before you can be unsociable. Our fathers know something about others, even about strangers, which we don’t, or don’t acknowledge. It isn’t much; it is “no more about the other than the other knew about him. He seemed merely able to act on what nobody could fail to know, and to provide what nobody could fail to appreciate, even if in a given moment they could not return it.” That nobody, not Cavell and Alceste and you and I, could fail to know, which means that we must refuse to acknowledge that we know it, must refuse to act on what we know and to cover that refusal with

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unknowing. But how? And why? At least in part because we fail to appreciate it when someone else’s father is next to us on a train and provident of our good feeling and we are trying to read, say, Cavell. Thinking that Borges must have been lying, or already blind, when he said, “Give me five minutes of a man’s life over all the books in the world.” Cavell wants to have it both ways. He also wants Alceste to want to have it both ways, hence Montaigne and the invitation to writing, the invitation of writing. This is, after all, a personal letter, one that “sees things together in a way that nothing else I have done quite manages” and, I think, asks us to read ordinary language philosophy, especially Cavell’s work, as “an intimate discourse for addressing strangers.” But there is also an argument here with Montaigne which, if missed, smoothes over the tension-laden terrain that Cavell is trying to traverse. In the letter, Cavell mentions Montaigne’s horror at our capacity to be horrified by the human. Cavell had also picked this up in Pursuits of Happiness, where he summarizes a bit of Montaigne with the words, “Life is hard, but then let us not burden it further by choosing tragically to call it tragic where we are free to choose otherwise. I understand Montaigne’s alternative to horror to be the achievement of what he calls at the end a gay and sociable wisdom.”17 But here in the “Cover Letter,” he adds the qualification: “The world during my lifetime rather shows that it is yet more horrible to lose this capacity for horror” (103). Montaigne’s advice is to accept the world. Cavell’s question for Montaigne, even as he is trying to win back Alceste, is, “To whom is the advice usable? And how do we understand why it cannot be taken by those in directest need of it? The urging of moderation is valuable only to the extent that it results from a knowledge of the human possibilities beyond its urging. Is Montaigne’s attitude fully earned, itself without a tint of the wish for exemption from the human?”18 And now the wish for exemption is revealed as present not just in Alceste but in his opposite. I have called this letter tension-laden. Maybe I should have said confusing or even contradictory. I suppose he knows that, and yet (one more tension), the final line of the essay is, “it is not as hard as some of my acquaintances make out to find where I am” (105). I read “acquaintances” as referring to those like Anthony Kenny who, in a review of The Claim of Reason, called it “a misshapen, undisciplined amalgam of ill-sorted parts. . . . [It] is a worthwhile book, but it could have been much better had it been pruned of dead-wood and overexuberant foliage.”19 Or Alasdair MacIntyre: Cavell announces at the outset [of The Claim of Reason] that the importance of Wittgenstein’s writing is that it “is not of a character that lends itself to professionalization”: nonetheless, his own exegesis

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of Wittgenstein is all too likely to produce the opposite impression. This is partly a matter of unfortunate lapses of style. The result of what may be an attempt to pin down every last detail of the argument is that all too often one cannot see the wood for the twigs.20 I could go on culling various charges from the reviewers. Cavell’s style is “self-indulgent” and “inexcusable.” He abandons “reason for imagination, arguments for images.” His endless qualifications and parentheses “do not refine but cancel. The reader feels not that his life is being restored but that Cavell is hiding.” The prose, unlike “straight philosophy,” is designed to remain immune to “the uncovering of fallacious arguments, unsupported premises, or inconsistent principles.”21 Which is it? Is he too professional or too unprofessional? Is it too much argument or too little? Is he self-indulgent or is he hiding? (Are we sure we know the difference?) The answers, were they available, may not be as important as the simple fact that these reviewers find him unreadable. Such things have been said often enough. No criticism of Cavell is more common than complaints about his style. The sentences are too long and convoluted, the punctuation too unorthodox, the argument too meandering; he doesn’t so much “pin down every last detail” as chase every last detail around trees and through creeks, constantly shifting direction when another detail catches his eye. He just doesn’t sound like Rawls or Davidson or Quine or McDowell or even Derrida or Deleuze. So it is not surprising that those who most admire Cavell do so for the same reasons that Kenny, MacIntyre, et al. do not. Michael Wood called The Claim of Reason a powerful and beguiling work which manifestly reflects a man who is in love with thought; with the risks, and the sillinesses, and the joys of it. . . . I shall live happily for some time with the sound [which Wood describes as “intimate, murmuring”] of The Claim of Reason. The writing is remarkable here, the philosopher as novelist gives density of detail to fleshless old questions.22 And Arthur Danto wrote of Pursuits of Happiness: This is a voice like no other in philosophy, today or ever, and the only voice it resembles at all is fiction. . . . In the end I loved the book, loved the author, felt, as with few authors I have read, that I was involved in a relationship something like the one of the couples in the films I still cannot take as seriously as he: as if the experience of reading the book confirms its thought.23

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It will be obvious that I side with Wood and Danto here, that I have no wish to distinguish how he says from what he says, that I find the sound of Cavell’s voice irresistible, indispensable, and that “in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference.”24 I highlight two things from Wood and Danto. First, “the philosopher as novelist” and “the only voice it resembles at all is fiction.” For a great many philosophers, like the reviewers mentioned prior to Wood and Danto, there is little reason to consider this anything but an insult. For others, like Cavell, that will be symptomatic of philosophy’s and literature’s mutual shunning of one another, which means it is about philosophy’s and literature’s self-perceptions. One reason Cavell writes as he does is to expose such perceptions, to keep alive the question of philosophy and literature’s relationship. Not because he thinks, like Richard Rorty, that they should merge nor because he thinks their differences are unimportant, but because he thinks an appropriate account of their differences is, as yet, unknown. Second, when Danto writes that “I was involved in a relationship something like the one of the couples in the films,” he is referring to the couples of what Cavell calls “the comedies of remarriage.” They are involved in relationships of comic repetition. A repetition engendered by the acknowledgment of the partner’s separateness, by a refusal to ever say “I know all or enough of you.” It is a joyful and difficult repetition, a continual turning back to the other. It is an attraction, a state of being mutually drawn toward each other repeatedly because each is found to be complex enough, mysterious enough, to be given time. Cavell, in one of those remarks he is always making about someone else but which applies to himself, wrote, “I do not mean to deny [Wittgenstein’s] awful obscurities in [his remarks about the inner life] (which perhaps are not willful, but a true expression of their difficulties, philosophical and practical).”25 That Danto finds this in the eccentric prose of this particular writer “as with few authors I have read” is not accidental. Erich Heller once wrote that, with most great philosophers (his example is Kant), studying them is like climbing a mountain. It takes enormous amounts of energy, but with time and diligence you can say you have reached the top and gained its panoramic view. But with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, or Pascal and Kierkegaard, it is less like climbing a mountain and more like getting to know a city. There are always alleys and byways, cafes and bars, bookshops and libraries, parks and gardens you have not yet discovered. “Do you know Rome?” means something very different than “Have you been to the summit of Mont Blanc?”26 Heller’s Rome, like the couples in the remarriage comedies, and like Montaigne and his readers, remains capable of combining intimacy with surprise, familiarity with strangeness. Our relatives and friends must remain strange to us. We must allow them to remain strange, must invite them to

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reveal their strangeness to us, must continually acknowledge that there is yet something for us to become familiar with.27 That, I think Cavell would say, is a necessary condition of any friendship, not just marriage. But the claim at the end of the“Cover Letter” is also that it is a necessary condition for philosophical writing, which manifests itself as a refusal to assume too much about your audience. We are now surrounded by misanthropic and self-anointed prophets. What was once the province of a few lonely souls like Alceste is now commonplace. We are told that it is “tediously obvious” that we are “sentimental barbarians”;28 that the church “promotes a hellish society beyond any terrors known to antiquity”;29 that “we are already in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it.”30 We have been told this so many times that we know denying it is barbarian. But we don’t know why affirming it isn’t also barbarian, like Lear’s sermon in his madness, “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (IV.vi.184–185), thereby declaring himself a fool, which we already knew. Is it because Lear sees the world as a stage that he sees everyone as fools, or is it because he sees everyone as fools that he sees the world as a stage? Once everyone is a fool, you must turn the world into a stage. That is, you must theatricalize all others, avoiding them, refusing to put yourself in their presence, refusing to allow them any voice which might destabilize the script. It is a common enough feeling. Emerson was well acquainted with it in himself and so fought it every step of the way with his chilling version of Pascal’s wager. “Let us treat the men and women well, treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.”31 But Lear and Alceste are exiles, and now our prophets are no longer exiled or no longer go into exile. Instead, they are perched on endowed chairs and we do not know if this is because they are not prophets at all, or because there is nowhere to go, no city outside this stage of fools or no one sane to guide us there. Like Socrates, we wonder if, or fear that, the only good city is the city of words. Unlike Socrates, we fear that the city is not shared, but is a private, personal fantasy. For all the current talk of a theology that would reflect on practice, the truth is that we remain uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice. . . . In his or her uncertainty as to where to find this, the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his own head. . . . Today it can feel as if it is up to the theologian alone (as in another sphere the artist, or the poet) who must perform this task of redeeming estrangement.32

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Cavell fears this too. “Philosophy, and serious writing generally, no longer knows to whom to direct its voice, no longer quite believes that a message in a bottle will find its way to another shore. Then it stands on darkening straits, casting unsystematic lines, in hopes of attracting to the surface some darting wish for sense. I am without the authority to excuse myself either for, or from, that position.”33 The “serious writer” is here presented as an angler, fishing for companions as the daylight wanes and you can no longer see your fly on the water and have only the sound of the river and the fading hope that a fish will rise and a vague regret that your hobby isn’t golf. Casting lines, sixteen books, hoping to attract to the surface some darting wish for sense instead of endless criticisms of how unsystematic they are. The difference is this. The loneliness of our self-anointed prophets is because they know everything there is to know about us; there is nothing left for them to know. For Cavell, everything is left to know; nothing is known, except what nobody could fail to know, which is no more than the other knows about us. The possibility of friendship.

Fathers and Daughters In the previous pages, I suggested that ordinary language philosophy is a kind of writing that does not claim to know anything that others cannot know but commits itself to attentiveness to its companions. But a much fuller account of the ordinary will be necessary, because it remains one of the most confusing aspects of the legacy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau) Cavell inherits. A frequent assumption is that the ordinary refers to a widely held set of beliefs and so means something like common sense or conventional wisdom. Sometimes the ordinary is understood to refer to a particular kind of person, “the common man,” as opposed to the elites. Alternatively, the ordinary is often taken to mean certain words, or a way of using words that avoids specialized vocabulary or complex sentence structures.34 Those are all misleading assumptions, but when we begin to move away from them there seems to be no way to pin down just what the ordinary is supposed to mean. On one hand, it can be used to mean almost anything. On the other, it is used to draw a line excluding something else. But what? In what follows, I suggest that the most helpful way to understand the ordinary is as an activity, not an object; a mode of attention, not an object of attention; a kind of relationship or conversation. I will try to disengage the ordinary from things like common sense or pop culture or convention but confess at the outset that my interest is less in arguing for the inadequacy of such understandings than in displaying Cavell’s understanding.

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[Ordinary language] does not refer to particular words of wide use, nor to particular sorts of people. It reminds us that whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular people, and that to understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using them) mean, and that sometimes people do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, and that when they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, and perhaps cannot mean anything, and they are struck dumb.35 The ordinary is a commitment to a form of questioning, a mode of criticism, a way of doing philosophy, a way to think. I am led to such thoughts by the fact that the lines just quoted, the most succinct description Cavell ever gives of the ordinary, introduce his essay on King Lear, and therefore suggest that we will discover Cavell’s ordinary by observing what he does in that essay. It is an essay on the ordinary not because King Lear is an ordinary play. To be sure, in some ways it can be called ordinary. Many of the denials and avoidances performed by its characters are pretty ordinary ways we all abuse each other (though the ultimate consequences of those denials in Lear are hardly ordinary). Some of its characters—Gloucester and Kent, for example—are ordinary people, not kings or princesses. In some ways, the play is extraordinary: because of the beauty of its language; because it is poetic, not ordinary language; because it is among the greatest dramas ever written; because horrifying acts of cruelty are displayed; because some of its characters are royalty. But none of those reasons, none of what makes Lear extraordinary, are excluded from the ordinary in Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy. That is, kings and cruelty and pentameter still fall within the purview of this essay and hence within the purview of what Cavell means by the ordinary. It is an essay on the ordinary because it models what the ordinary language philosopher does, which is “remind us that whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular people, and that to understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using them) mean.” This is not the place to go into detail about the essay’s argument. I am only interested in saying enough to approach an understanding of what Cavell means by the ordinary. Cavell is at pains to counter two common themes in Shakespearean criticism, one having to do with Shakespearean criticism in general, and the other with Lear interpretation. The first is a curious conflict between character criticism and verbal analysis. A common way to summarize the history of Shakespearean criticism (and literary criticism in general) is to say that, at some point around the publication of Bradley’s Shakespearean

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Tragedy, the emphasis shifted from characters to language. It is a crude account if only because it is bizarre to see how Coleridge or Bradley, for example, could be interested in characters without being interested in the words those characters say. Or how Empson or Knight could be interested in words without being interested in the characters who say them. But it won’t do to counter with the claim that the critics are interested in both, not only because characters and words are bound up with each other, but because they should all be interested in one thing: the plays themselves. Nevertheless, the assumption is there even if it may be crude with regard to the greatest readers: Coleridge, Bradley, Empson, Knight, and others. Some critics make generalizations about characters that a closer look at the words belies. And sometimes they find intricate verbal patterns from which they draw conclusions independent of the characters. How could any serious critic ever have forgotten that to care about specific characters is to care about the utterly specific words they say when and as they say them; or that we care about the utterly specific words of a play because certain men and women are having to give voice to them. Yet apparently both frequently happen. Evidently what is to be remembered here is difficult to remember, or difficult to do—like attending with utter specificity to the person now before you, or to yourself.36 The critical treatment of the blinding of Gloucester will serve as an example of this as well as an example of the second theme that Cavell is concerned to contest: the sight imagery in the play. The dominant readings of sight imagery in Lear are examples of the emphasis on verbal analysis at the expense of character. For a long time, until Paul Alpers’ study,37 it was a commonplace of Lear criticism (especially among the New Critics) to say that the recurring references to sight and eyes in the play were to be understood as symbolic of moral insight, the perception of moral truths. This culminates in the blinding of Gloucester, which is read as a “gigantic symbol” and which begins a journey toward spiritual insight expressed most clearly with “I stumbled when I saw.” Most critics have thought that the blinding of Gloucester needed to be dramatically justified, that it would simply be gratuitous melodrama without some justification. The sight pattern justified it by placing it at the center of its symbolic field. As a symbol of insight, it shows us how those who can see are often morally lost, but “those who have lost their eyes may, in the very moment of losing them, receive a flash of moral illumination.”38 But when Alpers goes back to the play, he finds that all the references to sight “insist upon ordinary, literal uses of the eyes,”39 most important, the recognition of others. Gloucester’s “flash of

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moral illumination” (that Edgar is innocent) is because Regan told him Edmund betrayed him, not because of some sort of internal illumination. Moreover, what we need to know, if the dominant reading is correct, is how Gloucester’s lines confessing that he was wrong about Edgar get to be called “moral insight,” but his speech immediately preceding his blinding, in which he rebukes Regan, is not moral insight. If his blinding has given him some special access to moral truths, how shall we describe the truths he declares to Regan? How then is the blinding of Gloucester justified if not by its moral symbolism? Alpers’ suggestion is that an attack on the eyes, among the most vulnerable of human organs, best dramatizes the human capacity for cruelty. Cavell departs from Alpers here and simply goes back to the text and reads it to us. . . . but I shall see

GLOUCESTER

The winged vengeance overtake such Children. CORNWALL

See’t shalt thou never. (III.vii.64–66)

At which point, Cornwall puts out one of Gloucester’s eyes. A servant then intervenes but is stabbed from behind by Regan. FIRST SERVANT

O! I am slain. My Lord, you have one eye left

To see some mischief on him. Oh! CORNWALL

Lest it see more, prevent it. Out vile jelly! (III.vii.80–82)

Cornwall has told us why he is blinding Gloucester. Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eyes to prevent Gloucester from seeing him. There is symbolism here, “but what it symbolizes is a function of what it means. . . . what this particular act of cruelty means is that cruelty cannot bear to be seen. It literalizes evil’s ancient love of darkness.”40 All you have to do to see what Cavell sees here is pay attention to the words and have some understanding of the characters voicing those words. Cavell goes on: “This relates the blinding to Cornwall’s needs; but it is also related to the necessities of Gloucester’s character.”41 Gloucester opens the play by revealing to Kent his shame that he has a bastard son. It is central to Gloucester’s character that he is ashamed.42 “Shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at,”43 and so the impulse is to avoid being seen. (In the opening scene, Gloucester’s way of doing this is through joking about it, a common enough way for anybody.) And so Cavell offers his answer to a perennial question of Lear criticism: how is the blinding of Gloucester dramatically justified?

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Gloucester suffers the same punishment he inflicts: In his respectability he avoided eyes; when respectability falls away and the disreputable come into power, his eyes are avoided. In the fear of Gloucester’s poor eyes there is the promise that cruelty can be overcome, and instruction about how it can be overcome. That is the content which justifies the scene of his blinding, aesthetically, psychologically, morally.44 It is not necessary at this point that you agree with Cavell’s reading of Gloucester’s blinding. I am only trying to show how Cavell’s reading tries to place words and experiences in “alignment with human beings in particular circumstances who can be imagined to be having those experiences and saying and meaning those words.”45 The power of Cavell’s reading comes from the entire nest of avoidances he identifies in the play, each of which feeds off the others, and of which I have described only one. Among the others are Lear’s initial avoidance of Gloucester’s recognition when he meets him in act IV, cruelly “picking at Gloucester’s eyes, as if to make sure they are really gone”46 before he will allow himself to be recognized; Edgar/Tom’s refusal to reveal his identity to his father (“Until some half-hour past, when I was arm’d”; V.iii.193); Lear’s avoidance of Goneril and Regan at the end when Cordelia asks, “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” and Lear responds, “No, no, no, no!” preferring instead, another avoidance, to go to prison with Cordelia as “God’s spies.”47 He is still avoiding her a few lines later when he says, “Wipe thine eyes,” assuming that she is weeping for the same reasons he would—for how far the mighty have fallen—and he cannot see that she weeps for him, for the way he is still avoiding her and himself.48 Then comes the crucial move in the essay. Cavell’s reading of the play has only pointed out the obvious. You don’t have to be a Shakespeare scholar, trained in Elizabethan literature, to see it. (By now, Cavell has become one of our great readers of Shakespeare, but this essay, published in 1969, was his first venture into Shakespearean criticism.) Everything he has said is right before the reader’s eyes. But then, if his reading is plausible, how can everyone from Coleridge to Empson have missed it? His answer is that it has not been missed so much as avoided. That is, the great genius of this play is the way it is able to implicate us in its mechanisms of avoidance. “In failing to see what the true position of a character is, in a given moment, we are exactly put in his condition, and thereby implicated in the tragedy.”49 When we, as viewers or readers of Lear, fail to see that Lear keeps avoiding Cordelia right up until the end, we also avoid Cordelia. When we fail to see that Edgar’s failure to reveal himself to his father—who has said, “Might I but live to see [Edgar] in my

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touch, / I’d say I had eyes again” (IV.i.22–23)—partakes of the same cruelty as that of Cornwall, we avoid Gloucester. When we reduce the blinding of Gloucester to a symbol, we sidestep Gloucester in the name of a higher truth, one made available by avoiding him, one whose availability demands avoiding him.50 When we say that the abdication scene strains belief, we forget “the quick routes taken in one’s own rages and jealousies and brutalities,”51 or we forget that Lear’s conduct “is in fact, quite ordinary. A parent is bribing love out of his children . . . [and] wants exactly what a bribe can buy: (1) false love and (2) a public expression of love. That is, he wants something he does not have to return in kind.”52 Such is the genius of this particular drama. It sucks us into its hellish vortex. In doing so, it raises the (avoidable) suggestion that, if we are avoiding these characters, we are likely avoiding each other. In terms which have so far come out, we can say: We must learn to reveal ourselves, to allow ourselves to be seen. When we do not, when we keep ourselves in the dark, the consequence is that we convert the other into a character and make the world a stage for him. There is fictional existence with a vengeance, and there is the theatricality which theater such as King Lear must overcome, is meant to overcome, shows the tragedy in failing to overcome. The conditions of theater literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside—hiddenness, silence, isolation—hence make that existence plain. Theater does not expect us to simply stop theatricalizing; it knows that we can theatricalize its conditions as we can theatricalize any others. But in giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop.53 It gives us a chance to stop avoiding each other. But that does not mean it gives us a chance to overcome our separateness. That would just be another way of avoiding presentness. It gives us a chance to acknowledge our separateness. “Join hands here as we may, one of the hands is mine and the other is yours.”54 It gives us a chance to acknowledge our responsibility for our separateness. It lets me allow you to be other, and so to face you, to make myself present, to be in your presence. This is what Cavell means by the ordinary. In his hands, it is inextricably entwined with presentness (the opposite of theatricalization). It is a kind of attentiveness. Cavell defends the Annales school of French historians with their (particular) emphasis on social history.55 Cavell affirms Emerson’s celebration of the simple things of everyday life in distinction to “the great, the remote, the romantic.”56 Cavell celebrates the films of 1930s and ’40s pop culture. But the argument I am trying to make is that the

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ordinary is less about the object of attention than it is about the mode of attention. A failure so to perceive, to persist in missing the subject, which may amount to missing the evanescence of the subject, is ascribable only to ourselves, to failures of our character; as if to fail to guess the unseen from the seen, to fail to trace the implications of things—that is, to fail the perception that there is something to be guessed and traced, right or wrong—requires that we persistently coarsen and stupefy ourselves.57 The ordinary is not first about the common, familiar, and low. It is first about presentness. The common, familiar, and low figure prominently, but derivatively, because they are among the things it is hardest for us, or for philosophers, to be present to, and so the call for attentiveness is especially necessary here.58 But that doesn’t mean that Cavell’s ordinary excuses us from the same rigorous presentness to the “extraordinary” or the “philosophical.”59 Cavell’s ordinary calls us to the things we are most prone to avoid, and often this will be something like the common. One final point, that may so far have been obscured: it is rarely clear just what is ordinary and what is philosophical. Cavell says that he read Augustine’s Confessions before he read Philosophical Investigations and while he noticed much of philosophical interest in it, he never stopped to consider Augustine’s remarks about infant language learning as philosophically interesting.60 In other words, when he first read the lines that Wittgenstein uses to begin the Investigations, he thought them to be ordinary. Wittgenstein reveals them to be philosophical. Discovering that requires a particular kind of attentiveness, “awake when all others have fallen asleep.” Similarly with Cavell’s insistence that we “mean what we say.” It would be a grave misunderstanding to think that this is something readily available. The problem is that “[s]ometimes people do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, and that when they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, and perhaps cannot mean anything, and they are struck dumb.” The injunction to mean what we say is an injunction to find out what we are saying means.61

Husbands and Wives Was I born to become a ritual mourner?

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I want to sing of festivities, The greenwood into which Shakespeare Often took me.62 What has made the invention or reinvention of marriage necessary? When I can motivate that question with sufficient philosophical perspicuousness, it should become the question What has caused the radicalization of the threat of skepticism, such that a ceremony of single intimacy is what we have to oppose to the threatened withdrawal of the world . . .?63 The Claim of Reason ends with the image of Othello’s and Desdemona’s dead bodies lying together on their wedding sheets “knowing they are ‘gone to burning hell,’ she with a lie on her lips . . . he with her blood on him.” The reader closes the book wondering where to go next. One honorable and very American response to tragedy would find Cavell following Alceste. Huck Finn lights out for the territories alone after he is brought face to face with American absurdities. Shane rides off into the darkness after his attempt to rejoin civilization collapses, his loneliness underlined by the pursuing child calling after him. He is pushed out, reminded that there is nothing for him but withdrawal. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, one expects, have merely stayed out.64 But we do not blame them. Their America, which is called “California,” unlike Shane’s, is uninhabitable. Philip Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, lives alone like a hermit because, he says, it is the only way “to keep the shit at bay.”65 Against such a background, we can see the importance of Cavell’s choice to turn from here to comedy. Pursuits of Happiness, his study of film comedy, is the first book Cavell wrote after The Claim of Reason. Read together, it is as if Cavell, reeling from Othello, was forced to embark on a journey out from where his investigations of tragedy had left him, was forced to allow Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and George Cukor to take him to the greenwood of “Conneckticut.” If it is true that “tragedy is the working out of a response to skepticism . . . that tragedy is an interpretation of what skepticism is itself an interpretation of,”66 then there is reason to explore the possibility that comedy is an interpretation of the ordinary. “Some image of marriage, as an interpretation of domestication, in these writers [Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne.] is the fictional equivalent of what these philosophers understand to be the ordinary.”67 Not that the ordinary is the place where skepticism cannot take hold but that it is a place where skepticism is produced and confronted in a manner that is comic, not tragic; where it ends in marriage, not murder, forgiveness, not vengeance. And now it can seem that the appeal to the ordinary then becomes allied with a certain kind of appeal to pop culture, especially since

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Cavell’s most extensive work on this theme occurs in a book on 1930s and ’40s Hollywood films. It sounds like a new way of cordoning off the “data” it can appeal to. In what follows, I will expand the argument of the last section (that the ordinary is about a mode of attention, not the object of attention) to show that Cavell’s interest in the domestic is a manifestation of his interest in acknowledgment and conversation. When Cavell identifies the domestic— marriage—with the ordinary, he means that marriage, as presented in these films (which Cavell reads as allegorical of Aristotelian friendship), is a place where two people are present to each other. “Pervading each moment of the texture and mood of remarriage comedy is the mode of conversation that binds or sweeps together the principal pair. I suppose this is the feature which comes in for the greatest conceptual development in Pursuits of Happiness.”68 Marriage, as these comedies understand it, is a mode of conversation. It is a mode in which the avoidances, denials, and theatricalizations of tragedy and melodrama emerge but are overcome in what Milton called “a meet and happy conversation.” The ordinariness of what Cavell is calling the domestic, then, is not because these films are pop culture or about regular folks, but because of the kind of conversation achieved between two people. Cavell understands these comedies to be inheritors of Shakespeare’s comedies, and one of the things that interests him is “why it was only in 1934, and in America of all places, that the Shakespearean structure surfaced again” after its long absence.69 His answer notes the conjunction in the 1930s of a particular stage of feminism and at the same time the availability of actresses as remarkable as Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Irene Dunne, among others. But what interests him most are the crucially important ways these comedies transform the Shakespearean structure and what that can tell us about marriage and society. The comedies show marriage to be a perpetual willingness for remarriage, to be persistence amid disappointment, to include the ability to understand disappointment as opportunity. That is a first difference with Shakespearean comedy. There, certain obstacles stand in the way of the couple’s coming together, and they must be overcome for the marriage to occur. But in the comedies of remarriage, as the name suggests, the couple has to be brought together again. They are commonly the story of a couple, much older than the couples of Shakespearean comedy, for whom the layers of misunderstanding have led them to divorce or the brink of divorce, and they must find their way back to friendship with each other and replace a desire for vengeance with forgiveness. The obstacles are not to a particular marriage (to the occasion of a wedding) but to the endurance of marriage. The obstacle is marriage itself, whether it is still legitimate, and the end is the transformation of marriage, which shows it to be

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(a constant willingness for) remarriage, a perpetual readiness for the acknowledgment of the partner and a perpetual demand for acknowledgment. By the end of these films, “[w]e feel that these people know each other, or risk being known.”70 In doing so, these films show marriage to be an “emblem of the knowledge of others.”71 In doing so, the comedy also invokes the fantasy of the perfected human community, proposes marriage as our best emblem of this eventual community—not marriage as it is but as it may be—while at the same time it grants . . . that we cannot know that we are humanly capable of achieving that eventuality, or of so much as achieving a marriage that emblematizes it, since that may itself be achievable only as part of the eventual community.72 In these comedies, “a criterion is being proposed for the success or happiness of a society, namely that it is happy to the extent that it provides conditions that permit conversations of this character, or a moral equivalent of them, between its citizens.” (The third chapter of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome criticizes John Rawls’s Theory of Justice for actively refusing such conversations.)73 This brings us to another crucial difference between these comedies and the Shakespearean comedies that they lean on and brings us to the place where the important parallel with the end of Nicomachean Ethics becomes clearest.74 In classical comedy, the reconciliation of the individuals is also a wider reconciliation of the community. In Much Ado about Nothing, the events that lead to the (double) wedding are the same that lead to the averting of certain bloodshed. In the (quadruple) wedding which ends As You Like It, the rifts between the Duke and his brother and between Orlando and his brother are also healed. (The multiple weddings—also in Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, etc.—reinforce the point as they “suggest also the wholesale pairing off that takes place in a dance” and the entire community is drawn into the conjugal joy.)75 But in the comedy of remarriage, the reconciliation is no wider than the couple. This, Cavell suggests, is why these films so rarely end with a wedding. In the absence of festival, the couple must turn to festivity, which, according to Cavell, is what Luther was suggesting when he said, “All of life is baptism.”76 But Luther did not expect that festivity to be “unsponsored, alone,” and so these comedies are also a criticism of a society in which a “meet and happy conversation” between these couples must be conducted without its ratification, and in which such conversation is rarely, if ever, conducted among its citizens. One final difference between the comedies of remarriage and classical comedy: in a Shakespearean comedy, the obstacle to be overcome is a lack of knowledge on the part of the characters. The hero must learn that this man is

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really the woman he loves (As You Like It) or that this man he loves is really a woman (Twelfth Night)), or the heroine must learn who her real parents are (The Winter’s Tale). It is a complication overcome by a piece of information. Furthermore, that information is known to the audience. But in the remarriage comedies, no such piece of information will accomplish the resolution. These characters “have something to learn but it cannot come as news from others,”77 and we as audience cannot know what it will be until they show it to us (which, for some, like Nietzsche, is why there can be no tragedy and no comedy, since there are no longer such keys to our identity).78 In these comedies, it is not a matter of learning a hitherto unknown fact nor of “the reception of new experience but a matter of a new reception of your own experience.”79 All they have to go on is themselves and the hope that selves can change. But that is all we have ever had. The ordinary is the place where you step forward into that knowledge, where you take, or are given, space to do so without fear, or at least without paralyzing fear. And so the stakes of these comedies are raised. In what does the legitimacy of marriage consist? On what is its legitimacy founded? It is part of our understanding of our world . . . that Luther redefined the world in getting married, and Henry the Eighth . . . in getting divorced. It has since then been a more or less open secret in our world that we do not know what legitimizes either divorce or marriage.80 The overarching question of the comedies of remarriage is precisely the question of what constitutes a union, what makes these two into one, what binds, you may say what sanctifies in marriage. When is marriage an honorable estate? In raising this question these films imply not only that the church has lost its power over this authentication but that society as a whole cannot be granted it. In thus questioning the legitimacy of marriage, the question of the legitimacy of society is simultaneously raised, even allegorized.81 The remarriage comedies place a question mark over society. On one hand, the plain fact that they (the marriages) exist suggests that “in all fragility, we have it attested that our intelligibility to one another is so far a match for the heydays of chaos reaching our ears.”82 On the other, they reveal a society that leaves only grudging room for companionship, and none for community.83 Such judgment reaches a peak in the companion genre to the remarriage comedies: the melodrama of the unknown woman. Both genres tell stories of “perfectionist” women demanding to be known, in pursuit of a further self, on a journey from conformity to self-reliance. In the

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comedies, marriage provides a mutual exemplarity that enables the attainment of a further self. But in the comedies, the weight of exemplarity is off balance, revealing a “taint of villainy in men”84 which becomes explicit in the melodramas. The women of the melodramas are women whose new creation cannot happen through marriage, women for whom marriage could only be conformity. They are women who have the courage to acknowledge that. They have overcome the terror of absolute expressiveness. “The wish, in the great stars [for perfect personal expressiveness] is a function not of their beauty, such as that may be, but of their power of privacy, of knowing unknownness. It is a democratic claim for personal freedom.”85 They have accepted privacy, not as the withholding of secrets, but as the acknowledgment of separateness and finitude. Here is where male villainy emerges. In the remarriage comedies, it is the woman who is in need of an education. The man has to find it in him to provide it and the woman to accept it from him. In the melodramas, a reversal occurs in which “her (superior, exterior) knowledge becomes the object—as prize or as victim—of the man’s fantasy, who seeks to share its secrets (Now, Voyager), to be ratified by it (Letter from an Unknown Woman), to escape it (Stella Dallas), or to destroy it (Gaslight).”86 But while the unknown women are, to a significant degree, victims of patriarchy, it would be misleading to leave it at that. The failure of the men in their lives to acknowledge them should also be understood as the way the expressiveness of these women demands a commensurate acknowledgment. Their expressiveness outstrips the men’s capacity for acknowledgment.87

Widows (“Are they my poor?”) As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” —Mark 12:38–44

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This looks like two little stories: one a condemnation of the scribes and another a recommendation of the widow’s offering, of her self-sacrifice, her generosity in contrast to the greed of the scribes. But it may be just as helpful to read the account of the widow as a continuation of the condemnation of the scribes, an illustration of how the scribes “devour widows’ houses.” They aren’t bullies. They aren’t landlords evicting the widows. They aren’t bankers initiating foreclosure proceedings. But, then, how do they devour widows’ houses? How are they devouring this woman’s house? She gives her penny, all she has, her whole living, from her own free will; no one is twisting her arm. The scribes aren’t standing over her shoulder, making sure she doesn’t hold back. And why would they for a penny? I am not exactly sure how to answer or negotiate those questions. But I have an idea how Karl Marx would have answered them and so, to begin with, I offer what seems to me the most obvious reading of this story, a Marxist reading, and I hope that you will be patient with me.88 By invoking Marx, I don’t mean that this is about what liberation theologians have called “the preferential option for the poor.” I mean that this woman is a victim of what Marxists call “false consciousness,” that category which is supposed to account for the docility of the underclasses. Marx needed an explanation for why the great majority of the working classes not only did not rise up and overthrow the ruling class, but also actively supported it, an explanation for why they actually participated in their own oppression. This could only be because the poor were not conscious, or were falsely conscious, of the ways in which the system was against them. False consciousness is the oppressors’ ideology when it has taken root in the minds and hearts of the oppressed. It shows just how powerful the oppressors are. Not only are they in control over what the poor do; they control how they think and feel. The chains which Marx called for the workers to throw off were not just laws; they were habits of thinking, patterns of being. And, as everyone knows, Marx understood that religion was a very useful tool in achieving such control over how the poor think and feel, for inculcating those habits of thinking—“the sigh of the oppressed, the opiate of the people.” And isn’t this how religion functions for this widow? Years of listening to the scribes have brainwashed her into sacrificing her whole life to this dying institution that “devours widows’ houses.” She gives her penny and trudges home to die alone, confident that she has done the right thing. And we share her confidence when we affirm this deed as a model of discipleship, of self-sacrifice and generosity. (Except, we share it from a position closer to that of the scribes.) False consciousness is the reason that education was—is—so central to any revolutionary vision. And in this passage, we have a standard example of Jesus as teacher. His remarks about the widow begin with “he called his disci-

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ples and said to them.” This is a moment in their education. Not just a moment, but the opening of an entire chapter of Jesus educating the twelve. The public ministry of Jesus, which reaches its height immediately prior to this, ends here. From now on, it is, for the most part, just him and his disciples. The crowds disappear from view. Jesus watches the widow give her offering and goes on to say, just two verses later, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” We are left to think: that poor silly old woman. Not only did she give all, she gave it all for nothing. It would be different if, like Zaccheus did or like the rich young ruler was supposed to do, she gave to the poor. But now I sound like those who, a chapter later, scold the woman who anoints Jesus with “an alabaster jar of very costly ointment”: “This ointment could have been sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor.” Jesus rebukes them, saying, “She has done a good service for me. The poor you will always have with you . . . but you will not always have me.” But then I think: it would have been different if the widow had given her penny to Jesus and the disciples as this woman gave her offering to Jesus instead of to the temple. Or I think: it would have been different if, like the widow Ruth, she was doing it for someone, for Naomi, whom she loves. Or if, like the widow of Zarephath, she was giving it to Elijah. It just doesn’t seem like there is any justification for the widow’s action. Jesus never says it is a good thing. He says she gave more than they; she gave all. Perhaps you are uncomfortable with the way I have chosen to read this passage through Marxist lenses. Perhaps because it is too strange and unfamiliar a reading. Perhaps because we are, as seems pretty reasonable, suspicious of Marxism. Perhaps because we are, properly, suspicious of any time alien theories are allowed to determine, or overdetermine, the reading of scripture. Perhaps we, like many nowadays, think the very idea of false consciousness is a bad one. And it is a bad idea for a number of reasons of which I will mention only one: it makes the theorist too smart and the poor, those who are being theorized for, too dumb. (It would not hurt my intuitions here to say that it makes the theorist too much like a scribe.) The widow becomes the gullible fool, blinded by a cloud of unknowing which the middle-class revolutionary is somehow able to see through. Her voice doesn’t matter because we already know the right answer, the right revolutionary theory, before we ask her. The Hebrew word for widow literally means “the silent one.” The Marxist reading keeps her silent. But we had better be a bit uncomfortable with that as well. To say why, I want to suggest that a likely contemporary analogy for this widow’s misguided piety, her support of the system that is devouring her, is the GIs in Iraq. Those from economically deprived families and towns who, because they had so few

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options, were persuaded by the army recruiter when he came to their high school and now are and are now serving, sometimes dying, in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one of the antiwar rallies in early 2003, a Vietnam veteran said, “The Pentagon supports our troops the way agribusiness supports hogs.” But to turn around and offer the standard reading may run the same risk of silencing the widow. The fact is, we just don’t know why she does what she does or even what she does, that is, what she understands herself to be doing. For all we know, she is just a silly old woman. Or for all we know, she is like the old women I used to see in Ethiopia, gathered outside the church on Good Friday, prostrating themselves before the church hundreds of times. These are women in their old age who have been fasting all week. They have borne eight or ten children, cooked over fires, washed clothes without running water all their lives. Why would they torture their bodies like that outside churches with icons of the emperor holding a machine gun? Or, for all we know, her sacrifice is an act of protest, like one of those self-immolating Buddhist monks back in Vietnam. How will we find out? How will we be able to hear this woman? How will we put ourselves in her presence? And now it occurs to me that one of the most interesting aspects of the passage is the simple fact that Jesus even notices her. In the bustling crowd of people, Jesus’ eye picks out the widow. Do we also notice her? Of course, we have seen her: on our own streets, the “single mother,” object of so much self-satisfied middle-class contempt. We have seen her on TV, her bent back covered in rags, her thin arms holding a shivering child to her breast. She has walked hundreds of miles barefoot from Rwanda to the Congo, from the Sudan to Eritrea, in those pictures that back in the 1980s and ’90s some Mennonite Central Committee workers used to call “famine porn.” Porn because offered up to our objectifying gaze. They aren’t real people, aren’t real to us. Emerson hated this sort of thing. He wrote, notoriously: Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is

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a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.89 Emerson is despised for writing such things, which are designed to make even the most tolerant, happy liberal have a conniption. And so he is read most commonly as a teacher of selfishness. The reading goes something like this: Emerson perceives an American society pervaded by what he usually calls conformity, sometimes timidity or fear. It is a conformity which undergirds slavery, capitalism, and the dispossession of the indigenous peoples; a timidity which has prevented the American scholar from making any contribution to literature; a fear which has trapped Americans in a “silent melancholy,” or what Thoreau called “quiet desperation.” As an antidote to this conformity, Emerson suggests “self-reliance,” a radical individualism, which breaks from history and from the herd and its authority, indeed from all authority except the authority of the self. It turns out that Emerson was right about conformity, but his solution backfires. No individual, however self-reliant, is able to withstand the pressures of capitalist society. Capitalism was and is all about the creation of individuals and so Emerson’s solution unwittingly colludes, becomes a battering ram against an open door. His individuals are at best helpless dupes of liberal capitalism, at worst, agents of positive harm, far worse than the New England herds. John Updike, who despises him, says that Emerson taught a “doctrine of righteous selfishness.” Harold Bloom, who loves him, admits that it isn’t exactly Reaganism but “self-reliance translated out of the inner life and into the marketplace is difficult to distinguish from our current religion of selfishness.” That is, like too many of our contemporaries, “Emerson is more than prepared to give up on the great masses that constitute mankind.” Such is “the American religion [Emerson] founded.”90 This is all very bad. You could stop here and rest with Updike and Bloom, confident that there is nothing here worth responding to in any manner except indignation. But is there anything unique here? We can find examples of Emerson’s sentiments in widely varied sources. Abbie Hoffman, for instance, tells of his mother’s exhortation to eat all the food on his plate because of “the poor children in Africa who would be happy to have it.” To which he responded, “Ma, name one.” The “good man” and the “popular charities” refer to the sort of people and causes that, say, Dickens was always making fun of. Like Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, they commit their lives to saving Africa but remain completely blind to the poor in the streets of London and even to their own children.91 Philanthropy, wrote Karl Barth, is the refuge of “the man who at bottom has no more time for his fellow man than he has for God, who refuses to consider him.” Philanthropy

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enables him to not “have to confess this either to himself or to God.” It is a cloak for the “concealment of inhumanity.”92 Emerson knows that the reason it is a wicked dollar which should be withheld is because he gives that dollar for the same reason I do. To get out from under the gaze. And so sometimes, too, I hear Emerson as a voice of bitter anger, and want to say that only someone who has felt the gaze of the poor, understood their demand, could react with such flippancy or vehemence. And those happy liberals who despise that line are the ones who can either ignore the beggars with aplomb or think a dime is supererogatory (or both). I am haunted by his question: “Are they my poor?” Every time I give beggars money, not to be nice, not to help out, but simply to get out from under their gaze, I think with Emerson: “Are they my poor?” Well, are they? Are they yours? (Are they John Updike’s? Are rural Indian women really Martha Nussbaum’s poor?) I mean, how would I know that they are yours? How have I seen you make them yours? Or, how have we let them make us theirs?


PART I


1 Companionship and Community Cavell and MacIntyre

No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on trying the hard ones, practicing till strength and accuracy became one with the daring to leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggio or faulting the full sentence of the fugue. —And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin in the midst of the hardest movement, the one already sounding as we are born. —Adrienne Rich1 Companionship is too often overlooked in theology and moral philosophy. Perhaps it is overlooked because its goodness seems too obvious to be worth remarking upon, let alone making an argument for. I choose the word companionship advisedly and will not try to define it but rather will try to display it through, for example, Sebald in chapter 3. But I should say something about the space I want it to mark out, a space between the individual and the community. Just

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saying that should help to make clear why it seems to me overlooked. Usually communitarian or new traditionalist2 polemics against individualism jump over companionship to community. If I say little about community in this book, it is not because I am against community, but only that I wish to linger in the place others rush over. Furthermore, most often I choose to talk about companionship, not friendship. I understand companionship as an alternative to friendship (though not always or necessarily). All friendship is companionship, but not all companionship is friendship. Sometimes, it may just be “two solitudes bordering and protecting one another,” which is what Rilke called friendship, though I don’t wish to. My use of “companionship” is meant to do at least two things. First, it gives pairs of persons the attention usually reserved, at least in theology, for “community.” Second, it affirms the notion of relational or social selves, yet broadens the range of those relevant relationships to include more than just friends. Companions can be strangers, enemies, or those encountered through random chance, who may never develop into friends, but though the encounters be fleeting, bitter, angry, or joyful, somehow they end up shaping us. They can be the people met “in a shop, a lobby, a train.” They can be teachers and students, who cannot really call each other friends but who have exerted undeniable influence on each other. In choosing to linger with companions before, or without, moving toward community, I am following the lead of the novel. I can best explain what that means by turning to some remarks of Raymond Williams which guide his discussion of nineteenth-century fiction, a discussion which is of great relevance to Alasdair MacIntyre’s remarks about Jane Austen and Henry James in After Virtue. Williams writes that what emerges in the late 1840s is a “certainty that relationships, knowable relationships, so far from composing a community or a society, are the positive experience that has to be contrasted with the ordinarily negative experiences of the society. . . . Any assumption of a knowable community . . . becomes harder and harder to sustain.”3 Early in the nineteenth century, those positive, knowable relationships can still be identified with local and immediate forms of community. But even this becomes increasingly difficult as even the most cursory reading of English and American fiction from Austen to, say, Hardy or Twain or James makes clear. It is the difference between Lizzie Bennet’s marriage and Isabel Archer’s.4 The novel before the 1840s depended upon “a particular kind of social confidence and experience.”5 Austen is successful because of the narrowly restricted social space of the particular kind of landed household to which she confines her novels, the last spaces where such confidence is possible. Lizzie, Emma, and Fanny, for example, are the last great characters in which

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individual desire and the demands of the community not only coexist happily but also require each other.6 That is why MacIntyre can read Austen as part of the Aristotelian line, “the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues.”7 After Austen, this begins to change. For Williams, George Eliot represents the transitional phase of the English novel between Austen and, for example, Thomas Hardy. It is a transition from a form in which social, economic, and personal achievement are possible together and a form which “ends with a single person going away on his own, having achieved his moral growth through distancing or extrication.”8 The too-easy dismissals of this person, of W. G. Sebald’s heroes, or Isabel Archer or the unknown woman, the inability or unwillingness of moral philosophers and theologians to see this person as anything but the exception which proves the rules of community, are my concern throughout this book. Cavell, like the communitarians and new traditionalists, insists on “the torment, the sickness, the strangeness, the exile, the disappointment, the boredom, the restlessness that [he has] claimed are the terms in which Philosophical Investigations portrays the modern subject.” But he reads Emerson and Wittgenstein as never attempting to escape those conditions, as it can sometimes seem like the communitarians and new traditionalists do, but as “judg[ing] the degree to which these conditions must be borne and may be turned . . . constructively, productively, sociably.”9 Cavell offers himself up, in his writing, as a model of this modern subject struggling to bear and turn these conditions. Williams echoes, among others, Virginia Woolf (though he was often unimpressed with her criticism). She set herself the task of identifying just what it was that happened in nineteenth-century fiction. Her concern was to defend early twentieth-century innovation while still acknowledging the greatness of Austen, among others. “From what,” she asks, “arises that sense of security which gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us [when reading Sir Walter Scott or Austen]?” It is the power of their belief—their conviction, that imposes itself upon us. . . . They know the relations of human beings towards each other and towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word to say about the matter outright. But everything depends upon it. Only believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of itself. . . . To believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality. . . . So, then, our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that

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happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free of other human beings.10 Woolf is echoed also by MacIntyre when he surveys modern Western morality and discovers a pervasive and corrosive individualism. Cavell, too, introduces his first book by confessing, “When, in what follows, I feel pressed by the question of my right to speak for philosophy, I sometimes suggest that I am merely speaking for myself, and sometimes I suggest that philosophy is not mine at all—its results are true for everyman or else they are worthless. Are these suggestions both right, or are they evasions?” He goes on to write of “a legitimate confusion about the source or possession of philosophy all together, as though half believing and half fearing that its natural state is one of private persuasion.”11 MacIntyre’s response to this problem was to try to recover or create twentieth-century versions of Austen’s network of landed households, spaces that “serve as surrogates for the Greek city-state and the medieval kingdom.”12 Cavell’s response, however, is an appeal to modernism. What does that mean?

Critics, Philosophers, Modernists Cavell once wrote of John Dewey that he “was remembering something philosophy should be, but . . . the world he was responding to and responding from missed the worlds I seemed mostly to live in.”13 The remark is useful because I wish to say something similar about Alasdair MacIntyre, and though MacIntyre and Dewey are uneasy allies, it will be a start to get at what world Cavell thought Dewey was missing. Cavell went on to say that Dewey seemed to him to be “missing the heights of modernism in the arts.” The juxtaposition of modernism in the arts and philosophy’s selfquestioning recalls the foreword to Cavell’s first book, Must We Mean What We Say? and is central to understanding Cavell. As J. M. Bernstein puts it, “arguably, at the last, the specificity of Cavell’s oeuvre is its demand that philosophy too attain to the modernist condition, that it has done so already in the writings of Wittgenstein, that it recognize that only a modernist philosophy can be an authentic one here and now.”14 Must We Mean What We Say? includes, among “straight” philosophical essays on Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, several essays on music and drama. It is a concern of the book to demonstrate that the latter have just as much claim to the title “philosophy” as the former. Part of the reason for this has to do with Cavell’s suggestion that philosophy shares the dilemma in the arts called modernism, that “the relation between the present


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practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise . . . has become problematic.”15 In philosophy, just as in painting or music, “history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted.”16 It is not just that what counts as good or bad art is no longer defined by convention, but that whether or not something counts as art (or philosophy) seems to be up for grabs. To say that the relation between modernist works and their history is problematic names at least this but also that history has become a burden. Modernists are not (what Cavell calls) modernizers who, “bent merely on newness, do not have history as a problem, that is, as a commitment.” Cavell says that he learned from Austin and Wittgenstein “the possibility of making my difficulties about philosophy into topics within philosophy itself.” In other words, they showed him a way of negotiating the modernist difficulty, showed him a way of identifying his efforts with the history of the philosophical enterprise instead of declaring an end to philosophy or understanding his efforts at criticism as something nonphilosophical. But what about Austin and Wittgenstein enable him to do this? How are their procedures modernist? The answers to those questions emerge in the course of the entire book but most clearly in an essay called “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” a central thesis of which is that aesthetic judgments (when made by a good critic) model the claims made by ordinary language philosophers.17 Cavell begins the latter half of the essay with an anecdote from Don Quixote used by Hume to illuminate the nature of aesthetic judgment. Two wine tasters of great repute are called on to taste a certain barrel of wine. They both pronounce it excellent, but one picks up a slight leathery taste, the other the taste of iron. They are ridiculed for the discrepancy, but when the barrel is emptied, an iron key attached to a piece of leather is found at the bottom. Among other problems with this as an analogy for the good critic, Cavell says, “[i]t disassociates the exercise of taste from the discipline of accounting for it.”18 The wine tasters give no argument; they don’t have to account for their taste because the suggestion is that there is none to give. The work is done by time and the facts of the matter. And “this seems to put the critic’s worth at the mercy of the history of taste; whereas his value to us is that he is able to make that history part of his data.”19 Hume’s wine tasters are not good critics; they are good investment counselors, able to see what will be popular instead of helping to create the standards of what will be popular or protecting (and creating) the standards against the merely popular. Part of the reason for Hume’s failure, Cavell suggests, is because his argument is controlled by the idea of agreement. Agreement is what standards of judgment are supposed to provide, and faced with the seeming arbitrariness of taste, he tries to guarantee agreement, if only in the future. But agreement

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emerges differently in Kant’s third Critique. There, it makes its appearance “not as an empirical problem . . . but as an a priori requirement.”20 What that means becomes clearer when he distinguishes between two different kinds of aesthetic judgments: the taste of sense and the taste of reflection. The first would be something like “chocolate is pleasant.” If one were to reply, “Well, it is pleasant to you but not to me. I can’t stand sweets,” that would be a reasonable rejoinder. It makes sense not to demand an account of one’s affection for chocolate any more extensive than “It tastes good to me.” But it is different in the case of tastes of reflection, the topic of which is the beautiful. “Beautiful for me,” Kant says, is “laughable.” For example, you say, “The most beautiful Russian novels were written by Dostoevsky.” I reply, “Are you mad? He was a preacher, not a novelist; his plots are completely implausible. He never manages to achieve the subtlety and restraint which make Tolstoy, not to mention Nabokov, so lovely to read.” If you then refuse to give an account of your affection for Dostoevsky and retreat into “Well, I like his plots,” that suggests that you are incompetent as a literary critic. Novels, unlike chocolate, are arguable, and even if agreement between us is not forthcoming (and in the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky debate, it rarely is), they are still different types of judgments. But what sort of difference is this? What is laughable about “beautiful for me”? “It is not a matter of factual rectitude, nor of formal indiscretion. . . . Kant called it a transcendental difference; Wittgenstein would call it a grammatical difference. . . . Here we hit upon what is, to my mind, the most sensitive index of misunderstanding and bitterness between the positivist and post-positivist components of analytic philosophy.”21 Cavell shows Kant to be reminding us of the criteria governing the practice of making judgments and in doing so is able to distinguish between kinds of judgments. The issue for “positivists” is that what Cavell sees as criterial differences, they see as simply arbitrary, “too psychological.” Their point, however, even granting the distinction, is that agreement is just as elusive, argument just as interminable, with either kind of judgment, and rationality depends upon the assurance of forthcoming agreement. Cavell doesn’t rule out the hope of agreement but suggests that rationality is present when patterns of support and justification are present.22 In logic and science, those patterns lead to agreement, but it does not follow that the promise of agreement is what makes them rational though that is the frequently unquestioned assumption.23 Cavell suggests that we view their rationality as rooted in the patterns of argument, not necessarily in the conclusions to which they lead. Rationality, then, is exemplified by the critic who articulately refuses to retreat into “beautiful for me” but instead provides an account which is vulnerable and arguable.


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But what does the critic go on? Kant called it “essentially subjective.” Cavell says, “The problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways.”24 The same is true for the ordinary language philosopher. “Kant’s ‘universal voice’ is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher’s claims about ‘what we say.’”25 Such a philosopher does not have recourse to an empirical investigation (though the positivists insist she should) but that doesn’t mean she has only herself (though on occasion it will seem so). The good critic is the one most adept at giving reasons for Tolstoy’s superiority over Dostoevsky. She teaches how to see, gets us to see what she sees but we don’t see or don’t know we see. The difficulty of modernism is that she must do so without recourse to history and its conventions. Or, better, without the same recourse because those conventions are part of the argument. (A great critic may try to reinstruct us in that history, preach at us, train us. Cavell applauds Ruskin’s efforts in this regard and it may be one way to understand what MacIntyre is up to in moral philosophy.) It is a vulnerable position in the sense that it is open to attack, but also in the sense that it demands an honesty that leaves not just the judgment but the person making it open to attack. Which is to say that such judgments are confessions, forms of self-knowledge, and as such, invitations to further criticism. A confession is not always right. We are often wrong about ourselves. The critic is in search of self-knowledge as much as she is relying upon it. (It is important that Cavell calls ordinary language philosophy “methods for acquiring self-knowledge,”26 not for exploring it, or drawing upon it.) The philosopher/critic must be willing to put herself forward, to declare herself and risk discovering she is alone and, perhaps, how she might find companionship.27 There are some people who hide their favorite books and poems like a jealous lover, unwilling to reveal themselves by exposing how intimate those works are to them, how they seem to have been written for them alone.28 Others evangelize for their favorites in the knowledge that the sharing of art can create a space for companionship. Gide’s Alissa wrote to Jerome, “I would give nearly all of Shelley and all of Byron for Keats’s four odes which we read together last summer; just as I would give all of Hugo for a few of Baudelaire’s sonnets. . . . Oh, my brother! thank you for having taught me to understand and love these things.”29 In declaring themselves, and only in doing so, critics, like Jerome, discover that they are not alone. Furthermore, in doing so, in offering us the gift of his self-knowledge, the philosopher/critic not only invites our judgment, he invites us to test ourselves against his judgment, to study our lives to see if we agree or can come to agree and thus show that he was not relying solely on himself. “Those capable of the deepest personal confession (Augustine,

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Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Freud) were most convinced they were speaking from the most hidden knowledge of others.”30 Cavell wishes us to understand the Wittgensteinian appeal to “what we say when” as analogous to this critic. [Like the critic,] the philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him to prove something, test something, against himself. He is saying: Look and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say. . . . If we do not, then the philosopher’s remarks are irrelevant to us. Of course he doesn’t think they are irrelevant, but the implication is that philosophy, like art, is, and should be, powerless to prove its relevance; and that says something about the kind of relevance it wishes to have. All the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own. . . . I think [an] air of dogmatism is indeed present in such claims; but if that is intolerant, that is because tolerance could only mean, as in liberals it often does, that the kind of claim in question is not taken seriously.31 There is a lot in this passage, including the careful distancing of himself from liberalism; and the demand for a kind of self-examination, for a philosophy which attracts us to ourselves; the acceptance of a certain powerlessness, which he will elsewhere call passivity or patience (and which he finds powerful). That powerlessness means a refusal of modern philosophy’s quest for foundations, for leather-bound keys at the bottom of wine barrels, but it is not allowed to be a refusal which forces the philosopher to temper or dilute his claims prior to engagement. I think many of us, even (especially?) MacIntyreans, will find much to agree with here. Both Cavell and MacIntyre reserve their most bitter ire for C. L. Stevenson and emotivism and yet end up at quite different places. In what follows, I examine both of their critiques of emotivism and then set those in the context of their wider work on moral philosophy in order to discover whether Cavell’s ethics, the core of which is already very much present in the preceding discussion of the critic and the philosopher, can successfully challenge MacIntyre’s project.

Moral Philosophy in The Claim of Reason The first thing that will strike a MacIntyrean reader of Cavell is that he rarely mentions, let alone relies on, the concepts so central to MacIntyre’s thought:


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“narrative,” “community,” “tradition.” He does discuss practice, as we shall see, but mostly to point out its limitations. But what shall we make of this seeming omission? The criticism of the sort of ethical theory—deontology, emotivism, utilitarianism, etc.—that had become enshrined in the philosophical and theological academy was engendered by the worry that those theories did not adequately account for the people they supposedly addressed. Their “rightsbearers,” “autonomous rational agents,” and other figures born of the Enlightenment and stationed in “original positions” were simply not real people. Critics wanted to reintroduce the language of community and narrative in order to return ethics to particular people with concerns and commitments and backgrounds not adequately accounted for by quandary ethics. I think Cavell is usefully read within this context. He has the same enemy as the communitarians and new traditionalists. Like them, he shares a frustration with ethics as a search for universally applicable general principles. This means a turn to narrative, practice, and tradition as a way of recovering the particular individuals whose specific stories are constitutive of their identity and not extraneous to practical rationality. By now, that is an old story. Those once-lonely fringe voices are now a serious and unavoidable counterargument. But, for the most part, that argument has gone on without reference to Cavell. That is not surprising. On one hand, he has nothing but disdain for the old orthodoxies. But on the other, he resisted them without recourse to the tools preferred by MacIntyre, Taylor, et al. My suggestion is that Cavell goes a step further than MacIntyre and the communitarians by insisting that those particularities be elicited. That may be part of why he has been ignored but also may explain why he was wary of the language. He never gave us a community, never identified the relevant “traditions”32 or “inescapable frameworks” or wrote the sort of historical narrative that has become commonplace in recent philosophy and theology. But it would be a mistake to conclude from his silence here that he is uninterested in those things. On the contrary, he knows their importance, and so one way to read The Claim of Reason (all of it, not just part III) and many of his other books is as guidelines for discovering them. Here, the analogy to modernism emerges again. “The task of the modernist artist, as of the contemporary critic, is to find what it is that his art finally depends upon; it doesn’t matter that we haven’t a priori criteria for defining a painting, what matters is that we realize that the criteria are something we must discover, discover in the continuity of painting itself.”33 When Cavell says we are responsible to discover the other’s position, the other’s background of cares and commitments, that means nothing less than finding out which community the other identifies with or without or against and the narrative by which that person makes sense of his life and what has to happen between us in order for

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us to be able to share community or share isolation, the shape of which we cannot know in advance. “The appeal to ‘what we should say if . . .’ requires that we imagine an example or story.”34 My unease about MacIntyre is not because he doesn’t know this. He does: “Asking for and giving accounts itself plays in important part in constituting narratives. Asking what you did and why, saying what I did and why, pondering the differences between your account of what I did and my account of what I did, and vice versa, these are essential constituents of all but the very simplest and barest of narratives.”35 But I fear that MacIntyre’s attachment to particular accounts of tradition, community, and practice makes it impossible for him to adequately take advantage of this. To put it in the terms with which I began this chapter, he doesn’t linger here long enough to get tangled up in his rush to community. What was supposed to return ethics from unhelpful Enlightenment generality to the specific individuals with particular cares and commitments and stories ends up reproducing that generality, only now under the guise of tradition and community.

The Ordinary and the Emotive In The Claim of Reason, Cavell moves directly from a discussion of “Skepticism and the Existence of the World” (part II) to “Knowledge and the Concept of Morality” (part III), guided by the conviction that the conflict between skepticism and ordinary language philosophy has important implications for moral philosophy. In particular, ordinary language philosophy has something to say about what counts as rationality in moral judgment. What motivates Cavell is what has motivated much of moral philosophy since Euthyphro. After quoting a pivotal passage from the dialogue (“But what kind of disagreement, my friend, causes hatred and anger[?] . . . What is the question which would make us angry and enemies if we disagreed about it, and could not come to a settlement? . . . Is it not the question of the just and unjust . . .?”), Cavell asks, “What are we to learn from the fact that moral arguments differ in this way from arguments in science and mathematics?”36 Twentieth-century moral philosophy tends to suspect that because moral arguments appear to be interminable in a way that disagreements in science or math are not, then morality must be irrational. This suspicion in turn provokes a flurry of attempts to secure morality’s rationality while at the same time leads others to the conclusion that moral skepticism must ensue. What Cavell does is resituate the question in light of his earlier investigation of external world skepticism. Then, the question sounds something like this: what might a comparison of an ordinary language investigation into epistemology and a similar investigation into ethics reveal about


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them that analytic or positivist investigations conceal? Or, “We found [in part II of Claim] that in epistemological arguments not every case of the failure of knowledge contained some import about knowledge as a whole. Why should the failure of a moral argument—apparently any—seem to philosophers to have such import?” (255). It has such import because philosophers like Stevenson, Ross, Hare, and others, in their frequent comparisons between morality and science, were most impressed by the ability of science to achieve agreement and took that ability as the defining mark of rationality. But, Cavell asks, is that—the link between rationality and agreement—more than an assumption? “Suppose that it is just characteristic of moral arguments that the rationality of the antagonists is not dependent on an agreement’s emerging between them, that there is such a thing as rational disagreement about a conclusion” (254). The locus of scientific rationality, Cavell argues, is not the agreement it (often) so impressively achieves. It is the commitment to procedures which enable disagreements to be adjudicated and agreement to be achieved. “If what makes science rational is not the fact of agreement about particular propositions itself, or about the acknowledged modes of arriving at it, but the fact of a commitment to certain modes of argument whose very nature is to lead to such agreement, then morality may be rational on exactly the same ground, namely that we commit ourselves to certain modes of argument” (261–262).37 We will of course hope for agreement, but there is no need to despair of morality’s rationality if agreement is not forthcoming. Nor is agreement all we will hope for, not even the first thing to hope for from moral argument. [Moral arguments are] ones whose direct point it is to determine the positions we are assuming or are able or willing to assume responsibility for; and discussion is necessary because our responsibilities, the extensions of our cares and commitments, and the implications of our conduct, are not obvious; because the self is not obvious to the self. To the extent that that responsibility is the subject of moral argument, what makes moral argument rational is not the assumption that there is in every situation one thing which ought to be done and that this may be known, nor the assumption that we can always come to agreement about what ought to be done on the basis of rational methods. Its rationality lies in following the methods which lead to a knowledge of our own position, of where we stand; in short, to a knowledge and definition of ourselves. (312) What happens next will depend upon the case at hand. A new knowledge of ourselves may make agreement possible. It could just as well make estrangement

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necessary. What is important is that the engagement with the other lead to a knowledge of our own and the other’s positions. This gets to the crux of the matter with C. L. Stevenson and emotivism. Cavell focuses on Stevenson’s claim, central to emotivism, that “Any statement about any matter of fact which any speaker considers likely to alter attitudes may be adduced as a reason for or against an ethical judgment” (quoted, 272). The only criterion for determining the sort of reason used to support a moral judgment is that it is likely to be effective. All sorts of distinctions collapse here, notably ones between persuasion and propaganda, preacher and demagogue. And while Cavell may be right to say this seems “as paradoxical an assertion about morality as one is likely to hit upon with the unaided intellect” (274), we are all too familiar with it. It is the premise that guides every advertisement we see and every campaign speech we hear. It means that, for Stevenson, one may be treating another morally when speaking “from a position which takes account of [one’s] hearers only to the extent necessary to manipulate their feelings and conduct” (287). All I need consider, on Stevenson’s account, is the effect of my argument on another “in getting what we approve of done” (283). But what we approve of and why are not part of the discussion. My becoming exposed to another, or she to me, is ruled out. The other has been conceived of in a way which precisely protects me from any kind of exposure and protects that which I want from being challenged. This is not a new claim, Cavell reminds us. It has been made repeatedly from Thrasymachus and Callicles to Nietzsche. What is new is the “idea that the claim is itself a neutral one, taken in the service of the advanced ideas of logic and scientific method” (290). On Cavell’s account, it thereby denies the very practices which go into having a self. It not only is uninterested in moral argument leading “to a knowledge of our own position, of where we stand; in short, to a knowledge and definition of ourselves,” it guarantees its impossibility.38 Moral argument must be committed to discovering the position of the other and to revealing my position because in morality “what the ‘case’ in question is forms part of the content of the argument itself. Actions, unlike envelopes and goldfinches, do not come named for assessment” (265). In morality, description is everything, and the relevant description is of a particular individual’s actions. The necessary knowledge is of situated persons. I must take you, with your background of cares and commitments, into account, not just in deciding how to respond to what you have done, but in deciding what you have done, just as in defending my actions I must reveal my cares and commitments. In the ordinary language investigation into external world skepticism, none of that is necessary. The object under discussion—the ball of wax, the envelope—is not up for question. The skeptical argument’s overwhelming


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power comes from that very fact; the object cannot be competently brought into question. But in morality, it cannot competently not be brought into question. This “suggests that the epistemological ‘foundation’ so often sought for morality, the ‘knowledge’ which is to ‘base’ our moral conduct and judgment, is a knowledge of persons” (265).

Rawls and Rule Utilitarianism Rule utilitarianism is a very different theory than emotivism yet they converge as ways of circumventing the demand to take the other into account, as Cavell shows in a chapter on John Rawls’s early defense of it. Take, for example, the following claim.39 Rawls wants us to understand that the principle of utility is only applicable to practices as a whole, not to actions defined by practices. If someone tries to raise a utilitarian objection to such an action, it will only show that the individual is incompetent at the particular practice. As an example, Rawls suggests baseball. If, after striking out, I turn to the umpire and insist that, in this case, I really deserve four strikes, it will be clear that I don’t know much about playing baseball nor much about playing any competitive game. Rawls’s argument makes a good deal of sense until we, along with Cavell, query the choice of example. Instead of “Why can’t I have four strikes?” what if we asked, “Why didn’t you bunt?” or “Why did you try to steal second?” (304). The latter examples cannot be resolved by appealing to the rules, and questions can be raised about them in a way that doesn’t call our competence into question (and may actually confirm our competence). So Rawls’s example, by assuming an incompetent questioner and a very narrow account of the actions within a game, is undermined. Only a minority of possible actions in a game (excluding here games of chance) are determined by the rules which, given Rawls’s examples, is what “defined by practices” amounts to. It may help, then, to have a thicker account of rules. Cavell lists four categories (though he does not claim that the list is exhaustive). I reproduce them here. 1. Rules (as defining): e.g., “A bishop moves along the diagonal . . .,” “The king is said to be in ‘check’ when . . .,” etc. 2. Rules (as regulating): e.g., “When a player touches a piece, he must either . . .,” etc. 3. Principles: “Develop your pieces as early as possible. You should not initiate an attack until your defensive position is secured,” etc. 4. Maxims: “Develop knights before bishops. When your position is . . . force an exchange,” etc. (305)

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From here, Cavell goes on to show several crucial differences between the moral life and games, all of which serve to demonstrate the way the analogy shortcuts our responsibility for our actions. “No rule or principle could function in a moral context the way regulatory or defining rules function in games. It is as essential to the form of life called morality that rules so conceived be absent as it is essential to the form of life we call playing a game that they be present” (307). In games, our actions come ready-made with particular descriptions. In morality, we might say, the descriptions and arriving at descriptions are part of the game. Mastery of all four sets of rules is necessary to playing a game. The first two sets of rules can be called “must” rules. They “tell us what we in fact or must (may, have to . . . ) do in playing,” what we must do in order for action to count as playing. The other two sets can be called “ought” rules. They tell us “what we ought (would do well, would be wisest . . . ) to do” (308), but they do not rule out other possible alternatives. Important for Cavell is that the lines between must rules and ought rules is clear. Must rules can never be ought rules (e.g., the fourth strike). The beauty of a game is the way it frees us to take the must rules completely for granted and therefore concentrate on winning or playing beautifully or, like a Brazilian footballer, doing both. It is the freedom that comes with a certain kind of discipline. That is precisely what is missing in the moral life. “This choice between ‘must’ and ‘ought’ is not merely occasional in the moral life; it is essential to it” (309). (That is not to say that “must” should be stricken from the moral vocabulary, but that what we must do is under constant negotiation in a way that three strikes is not.) “Ought” implies an alternative course, but the alternatives here, the lay of the land, will be much less clearly defined in the moral life than in games. It is not clear what it would mean to be lost in a game. An ought for me here may be a must for you there. Our way is neither clear nor simple; we are often lost. What you are said to do can have the most various descriptions; under some you will know that you are doing it, under others you will not, under some your act will seem unjust to you, under others not. What alternatives we can and must take are not fixed but chosen; and thereby fix us. What is better than what else is not given, but must be created in what we care about. . . . What we are responsible for doing is, ineluctably, what in fact happens. But that will be described in as many ways as our actions themselves. (324) We may see more of this by noting that, in games, it is not as clear what counts as akrasia or that akrasia will even be a prominent feature of them.


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“What would it mean for a player to say, ‘I know the correct play was to second base, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make it’?” (311).40 For some people, the moral life seems like a game. That is, like great athletes, the virtuous make it look easy. That would not have surprised Aristotle, who said that virtuous people are invulnerable to akrasia. But is that because, for them, morality is like a game, or is it because they are very accomplished at something which is not like a game? Some of the most virtuous make it look hard. Socrates in The Apology makes it look easy, at least compared to Jesus in Gethsemane, who makes it look hard. To say that morality is analogous to games is, among other things, to say that I know what I am doing by looking at what I have in fact done. To say that the moral life is not this way is to say that I often do not know what I am doing or have done. My self-knowledge is not self-evident. I may only begin to know when I am forced to give what Cavell calls elaboratives, to answer for my actions, to take responsibility for them, when I am compelled to try to understand and describe myself in order to identify just what I have done. Moreover, I am compelled to do that in conversation with another who can challenge my account and present others. We might say, the description of my action will not be given by the practice, it will be given in the practice, the practice of discussion and argument which makes for morality’s rationality. We can bear that responsibility, or try to, because of elaboratives. We can redescribe the situation, give reasons, make excuses, ask forgiveness, give the finger, plead ignorance, or insist that the devil made me do it. In games, we will have much less use for elaboratives (though not no use as anyone who has tried to explain a botched play to an angry coach will know). The area is marked, the maps clear, unlike the dark woods of the moral life. In games, like in music, we know what it means to practice, to drill, to “begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on trying the hard ones.” But in the moral life, it is not clear what it would mean to drill. There is no practice pitch, driving range, stage rehearsal, or recital room. We will often find ourselves . . . trying to sightread what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart what we can’t even read. And yet it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi or child prodigies, there are no prodigies in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are.41 The turn to games is usually made to show what rationality morality has and to get closer to an always elusive clarity. The differences pointed out by

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Cavell, however, do not mean that morality is irrational. Rather, they help to specify just what sort of rationality we can ascribe to it. “In both games and morality, one human being confronts another in terms of that person’s position, and in a mode that acknowledges the relation he is taking towards it” (325). In games, that person’s position—and mine—are fixed by the rules of the game. My only responsibility to her is taken care of by my knowing the rules. But in morality, her position is not given in the same way, sometimes not given at all; I must find out. Neither is my position given; I must find out. It will only become clearer or less clear in the encounter, in my endeavor to find out her cares and commitments and my willingness to reveal mine. We cannot shortcut those cares and commitments without shortcutting the person. We may disagree, even despise her, but we must engage her. Our confrontation of others may not take. We may mistake someone’s cares and commitments, or they may suddenly deny us. But what then breaks down is not moral argument but moral relationship. Of course that can happen. But it does not happen because we do not feel approval of one another. What is required in confronting another person is not your liking him or her but your being willing, from whatever cause, to take his or her position into account, and bear the consequences. If the moralist is the human being who best grasps the human position, teaches us what our human position is, better than we know, in ways we cannot escape but through distraction and muddle, then our first task in subjecting ourselves to judgment is to tell the moralist from the moralizer. When Auden heard “the preacher’s loose, immodest tone”, he heard the tone of one speaking in the name of a position one does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgment. (326)

Alasdair MacIntyre and Emotivism Readers familiar with MacIntyre will already have recognized several striking similarities between him and Cavell on emotivism. Both agree that among the many problems with emotivism, the most important is the way it obliterates any distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative relationships. Both agree that, if Stevenson is right, then morality is irrational. Both agree that Stevenson only elaborated on something Nietzsche had already spotted and condemned. Both agree that it makes impossible the sort of self-knowledge


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necessary to the moral life. These similarities, however, may seem unimportant when seen alongside the great differences between them. Cavell’s account of rationality sounds rather fragile, especially alongside the power of MacIntyre’s vision, a vision of a world in which “to be just was to play one’s assigned role in the life of one’s local community. Each person’s identity derived from the person’s place in their community.”42 A central problem of morality in the modern age has been its inability to know how to submit the heterogeneity and incommensurability of various goods to rational ordering. MacIntyre knows that his moral theory demands that we place ourselves in communities in which, like in his ancient Greek polis, there is an unambiguous ordering of goods toward a supreme good and in which roles are defined such that they further the achievement of that good. In such communities, a moral disagreement between two people takes place against a background that Cavell never supplies, the background of a recognized overarching good which provides a framework for the disagreement. A moral judgment, then, means another has acted in such a way as to endanger the achievement of the good in part by distancing himself from the structured communal relationships which facilitate the achievement of the good. None of this means that agreement is guaranteed to be forthcoming, but it does mean that there is a basis, to which personal preference must be subordinated, for adjudicating that disagreement. That adjudication may mean that one or the other person turns out to have been wrong, or it may mean that the vision of the good must undergo a revision. Though if the latter is the case, it may point not to a defect in the vision of the good but to a breakdown in the community’s practices of apprenticeship.43 In the almost total absence of such communities, moral utterance will be transformed. Not only will there be more disagreement, but the mode of utterance itself will change. It will become emotivist. Moral utterance will be “nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”44 To return to Cavell’s use of Kant, there will be no recognizable difference between judgments of taste and judgments of reflection. “Abortion is wrong” has the same status as “Tofu is inedible.” The claim is not just that people talk like this all the time, a claim Cavell would readily assent to, but that when they do, we regularly fail to recognize that such judgments demonstrate incompetency as moralists, a claim Cavell still wants to resist. MacIntyre and Cavell agree that emotivist morality is no morality at all and that it turns our relationships into manipulative ones. The difference is that Cavell is less sure of the degree to which emotivism is true as a description of our culture. Here is how Mulhall puts it: “For MacIntyre the frameworks within which moral debate can be a rational and objective project have been lost and

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must be reconstructed, but for Cavell, they have merely been lost from the sight of moral philosophers.”45 Mulhall may be drawing the distinction too sharply. It is misleading to suggest that Cavell and MacIntyre share an account of rationality, because Cavell does not offer the sort of background or framework of an overarching good that MacIntyre’s account of rationality requires. While it is true that MacIntyre thinks Stevenson was a very good sociologist and Cavell won’t even grant him that, just because Cavell doesn’t want to call us all emotivists doesn’t mean he thinks we share “frameworks within which moral debate can be rational and objective.” He thinks “the case is more like an effort, along blocked paths and hysterical turnings, to hang on to a thread that leads from a lost center to a world lost.”46 “Every word they say chagrins us,” Emerson wrote, and Cavell and MacIntyre would agree. But then comes the shift in tone as Emerson confesses that he does “not know where to begin to set them right,” a confession he makes elsewhere as well: “Gladly I would solve if I could this problem of a Vocabulary.” What does it mean to say that we live in a culture in which the relationships between individuals are “necessarily manipulative”?47 I think it is clear and correct to say this of the relationship between the politician and the individual, and the corporation and the individual. Emotivism fits a presidential campaign or a marketing campaign with unnerving precision. But what does it mean to say, as a generalization about relationships with your families, friends, and companions—the people you play golf and catch trout with, with whom you cook dinner and pound nails and argue about films—that they are manipulative in ways not unlike that of the politicians and us, or the marketers at Gap and teenagers? How would you find that out? Do you generalize from the way you treat people? From the way others treat you? Perhaps you watch a lot of television and generalize from what you see there. But while Madonna is an emotivist, Thom Yorke isn’t. George Costanza and Carrie Bradshaw were emotivists, but Hawkeye Pierce and Buffy Summers weren’t. I don’t say MacIntyre is wrong. I simply have no idea how one would go about arguing for his position. That in this world there aren’t enough Milly Theales, an overwhelming majority of Merton Denshers, and far too many Kate Croys seems obvious.48 But it doesn’t seem new or surprising. MacIntyre also turns to Henry James to make a point about emotivism. According to MacIntyre, James’s achievement is to answer the question, “What would the social world look like if seen with emotivist eyes?”49 It is a world of leisured aesthetes like The Portrait of a Lady’s Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond, who exemplify the inability to recognize a distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative relationships. MacIntyre writes, “The difference between Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond is not as important to James as


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the distinction between a whole milieu in which the manipulative mode of moral instrumentalism has triumphed and one, such as the New England of The Europeans, of which this was not true.”50 Osmond is one of James’s most loathsome villains. Ralph is one of his ambiguous heroes for whom James displays a “conspicuous affection,”51 as does Isabel, whose final words to him are “Oh, my brother!” But MacIntyre is right to note that there is something that can be seen as manipulative in Ralph’s relationship to Isabel. More important, as with all our greatest novelists, it is a mark of James’s genius that there is never anything more important to him than the differences between characters such as Osmond and Ralph. They are not obstacles to social criticism nor are they sacrificed in favor of social criticism; those differences are the social criticism. MacIntyre’s remarks are instructive less for what they tells us about James and more for the way they help us understand MacIntyre. It is MacIntyre who is not interested in the differences between Osmond and Ralph. Both are simply emotivists and that is enough to render any distinctions between the two unimportant. Is such a reading advisable? James wants us to see an ambiguity in Ralph’s arranging for Isabel to receive his father’s inheritance. His father agrees to the plan: “You say you want to put wind in her sails; but aren’t you afraid of putting too much?” “I should like to see her going before the breeze!” Ralph answered. “You speak as though it were for your entertainment.” “So it is, a good deal.”52 It is a common Jamesian theme, which we could, perhaps, call spectatorship. James’s characters, whether heroes or villains, often see persons as objets d’art.53 They are, as MacIntyre says, aesthetes, relishing the beautiful at a certain remove. Ralph is described as “restricted to mere spectatorship at the game of life” because of his terminal illness. And Osmond regards Isabel as a “figure in his collection of choice objects.” Madame Merle, Osmond’s partner in crime, says, “I don’t pretend to know what people are for. I only know what I can do with them.” All three of them are spectators, delighting in the observation of others. The difference, the all-important difference for James, is that Osmond wants to turn Isabel into a work of art (and begins to hate her once he realizes that she can’t or won’t become what he wants her to be), while Ralph has no interest in changing her. He sees her as a work of art as she already is. He wants to see a ship going before the breeze. Osmond wants to see a ship mounted above his fireplace.54

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I don’t wish to deny MacIntyre’s claim that there is a kinship between Ralph and Osmond. James, however, is far more interested in their differences. There are at least three considerations here. One, Ralph is a spectator because of his illness. Two, Ralph thinks that while the inheritance may end up making Isabel prey to fortune hunters like Osmond, it could just as well, as he hopes, enable her to remain single, her expressed wish. Third, James seems to identify himself with Ralph. The language of the preface to the New York edition repeatedly suggests this. It suggests that James is as much a captivated spectator of Isabel as Ralph is. He writes that the other characters emerged to him in response to one primary question, “Well, what will she do?” In the preface, recalling the image Ralph uses for her, he calls her a “frail vessel” in which is “borne the treasure of human affection.”55 In the novel, she is a frail vessel in which the treasure of Ralph’s inheritance, as well as the treasure of his affection, is borne forward. Near the end of that preface, James points to the importance of the pivotal forty-second chapter, which closes with Isabel reflecting: It didn’t make Gilbert look better to sit for half-an-hour with Ralph. . . . It was simply that Ralph was generous and that her husband was not. There was something in Ralph’s talk, in his smile, in the mere fact of his being in Rome, that made the blasted circle around which she walked more spacious. He made her feel the good of the world; he made her feel what might have been. . . . What a mystery! what a wonder of wisdom! . . . Gilbert had never been so deep, so just.56 James presents Ralph as the figure of wisdom in the novel. Of course, he is an ambiguous figure of wisdom. (What other kind is there?) The inheritance turns out to be a mistake; he is said to have once loved Madame Merle. Yet Isabel’s journey is toward Ralph’s level of insight. The forty-second chapter is central because this is where Isabel begins to take her first decisive steps toward learning to see the world as Ralph sees it and therefore to see the difference between the two men. It is, I think it is fair to say, a fine example of the movement of the self toward another in the friendships of Emersonian perfectionism. It is this not in spite of the mistakes of judgment, pain, and betrayals on both sides, but because of them. Which is to say that it isn’t just that Ralph doesn’t matter to MacIntyre; Isabel doesn’t matter either. In his zeal to exploit James to make his point, he has to not just ignore the differences between Ralph and Osmond, he must ignore Isabel. This is a remarkable achievement. Williams would have seen it as an example of one of those “sophisticated evasion[s] of these deliberately created,


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deliberately named, places and people, situations and experiences.”57 But I point it out not only as a defense of attentive reading, but as an example, perhaps a particularly egregious example but typical nonetheless, of the way the weighty categories of emotivism or liberalism or modernity in MacIntyre end up obscuring more complex characters. It is important to note that MacIntyre knows this. At the end of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre admits that few actually “live at or even near” the extremes he has written about. Most live “betwixt and between,” sometimes drawing on liberal individualism and sometimes on “tradition-generated resources.”58 Certainly this is right, but we are left wondering how we are now to reread his work in light of this information. Left wondering why he keeps writing books about the extremes if so few actually live there, why he keeps writing books about Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle instead of about Ralph Touchett and Isabel Archer.59

“Practice” in MacIntyre We are tempted to nostalgia for a time when Christian (Catholic or Protestant) rules and practices made a clear map of the moral and spiritual life, because few of us experience it now with that sort of clarity. . . . We should like all the rules and roles to be clearer, but they seem not to be. We are all post-Luther in that sense, anyway! . . . Our first task is to trust God and not to invent ourselves as if we were to be clear-cut characters in a drama.60 I suppose MacIntyre would agree with everything Cavell says about the difference between morality and games. But he would go on to say that Cavell has, if unintentionally and unwittingly, succeeded in demonstrating just what is wrong. MacIntyre would say, “Of course, practice is a bad analogy for our debased morality, but that doesn’t mean we should go on to make a virtue out of necessity, as Cavell seems to do.” How does practice function in MacIntyre? Why does he turn to it? In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre clearly identifies his conception of practical rationality with Rawls’s elision of the distinction between must and ought rules. This comes at the close of a discussion of the practical syllogism in Aristotle. MacIntyre is concerned to show that the conclusion of a practical syllogism for Aristotle is not a decision to act but an action, that Aristotle’s prohairesis should not be confused with “choice.”61 Then he notes that this idea of rational agency is quite different from modern accounts. The difference shows the distance between the social order in which Aristotle was at home and modern social orders. Therefore:

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[I]t may be instructive to consider those contemporary social contexts in which we do still find application for something very like Aristotelian conceptions of practical rationality. A hockey player in the closing seconds of a crucial game has an opportunity to pass to another member of his or her team better placed to score a needed goal. Necessarily, we may say, if he or she has perceived and judged the situation accurately, he or she must immediately pass. What is the force of this “necessarily” and this “must”? . . . We recognize the necessity and the immediacy of rational action by someone inhabiting a structured role in a context in which the goods of some systematic form of practice are unambiguously ordered. And in doing so we apply to one part of our social life a conception which Aristotle applies to rational life as such.62 I want to say here that this example is just a rough analogy, a pedagogical aid, a heuristic tool. But that would be wishful thinking. Not just because MacIntyre makes no attempt to qualify it in any such way but also because everything moves toward emphasizing it. The hockey game isn’t simply like practical rationality or a kind of practical rationality but is very like it. The roles demanded must be structured (later, that comes to mean “well defined”) and the goods pursued unambiguous. It isn’t just any hockey game but a crucial one. But most tellingly, it is not just any moment in the game but the closing seconds with the game on the line. It also seems unlikely that we should read this as simply MacIntyre’s account of practical rationality in Aristotle as opposed to MacIntyre’s own understanding. MacIntyre usually takes great pains to make clear just what aspects of Aristotle he wants to distance himself from,63 and as far as I can tell he makes no such attempt here.64 Now perhaps we may begin to see something of what is behind MacIntyre’s refusal to acknowledge any relevant differences between Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond. When MacIntyre attempts to find contemporary analogies to the ancient polis or the medieval kingdom, his examples are the Marine Corps and the New England tuna fishery.65 And it is significant that, among the things these two communities share in common, and what MacIntyre emphasizes, is danger.66 The presence of threat is another way of turning ought rules into must rules. You can see this in Tolstoy: Here [encamped with his regiment] was none of that turmoil of the world at large in which [Nikolai Rostov] found himself out of his element and made mistakes in exercising his free will. . . . In the


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regiment everything was definite: who was lieutenant, who captain, who was a good fellow, who was not, and, above all, who was a comrade. . . . One only had to behave honorably by the standards of the Pavlograd Hussars, and when given an order carry out what was clearly, distinctly, and unmistakably commanded—and all would be well.67 Whether it is the Pavlograd Hussars, the U.S. Marine Corps, or the tuna boats, in all cases a clear and present danger demands disciplined training into clearly defined roles and hierarchies, which enable the cooperation necessary to preserve life itself. This is present not just in this particular essay’s references to the Marine Corps and commercial fishing. It is implicit in After Virtue’s recommendation of Austen’s Persuasion. For that is the novel he is referring to when he writes, “For Austen the touchstone of the virtues is a certain kind of marriage and indeed a certain kind of naval officer.”68 Persuasion, Austen’s last novel and the one most indebted to romanticism, can be helpfully read as the place where Austen finally abandons any lingering faith that the “network[s] of landed households” are still fertile regions for training in the virtues. While all of her novels are incisive criticisms of those networks, up until Persuasion spaces can still be found within those networks for a virtuous couple. But at the end of Persuasion, Anne and Wentworth are literally “at sea.”69 The only space left is on a ship. But not just any ship, a naval ship, one in which life is submitted to the rigorous discipline demanded by the constant threat of death, whether by the seas themselves or the adversary in war. When I say that this helps to account for MacIntyre’s refusal to acknowledge the differences between Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond, I mean that MacIntyre is trying to construct an enemy, a threat, against which only a polis could defend itself. If he permitted ambiguities (like the differences between Ralph and Osmond) to enter into his account of liberalism or modernity, then the threat would be lessened and the internal cohesion of the community would be lessened commensurately. Once that happens, we are back with Cavell and the dark wood of the moral life. Once that happens, our positions vis-à-vis one another, the status of our relationships, are no longer given but must undergo the sort of negotiation Cavell sees as essential to the moral life. It is no longer possible to assume, with MacIntyre, that our place in these things is self-evident. The hockey example makes it clear that, for MacIntyre, the work of confronting others in order to ascertain their position and mine is taken care of by “tradition/practice/community,” just as in Rawls it is taken care of by the rules of the game. Outside of that, in our current situation, where moral utterance becomes either adversarially emotive or tentative and

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hedging, “those of us who find both modes of utterance inappropriate will do best perhaps to fall silent.”70 What sort of silence is this? It is not the patient silence of the waiting required for the other to come to be able to reveal herself. Nor is it the patient silence demanded by the recognition that I do not know myself nor how to reveal myself. It is a silence necessitated by MacIntyre’s confidence that he knows all there is to know about us. A silence necessary because the condition of our culture “is not to be remedied by further pursuit of those recurrent and inconclusive debates between rival and alternative points of view.”71 Such debates are a distraction from the requirement of reconstructing communities of the virtues or joining existing communities of the virtues (if there are any). Silence is necessary because “to utter a moral judgment can no longer have the purpose of reminding ourselves, or others who share our moral dispositions and recognitions, of what it is that we share, when we have come to share too little.”72 I suppose it is clear by now the way such remarks reveal just how much Cavell and MacIntyre share and how deeply they are divided. It is just as important for Cavell that we have come to share too little or come to think and act as if we share too little; we have forgotten what we do share or are bereft of the ability to recognize it. But Cavell’s response is the opposite of MacIntyre’s. Precisely because we share too little, conversation is necessary, ordinary language philosophy is necessary. Perhaps to discover the shared, perhaps to forge it.

2 Scenes of Instruction Cavell and Liberalism

I think here of a . . . German professor of philosophy, master of a hundred classical philosophical texts, coming to teach at a small American college and fairly soon finding his philosophical words and passions in these classrooms becoming unintelligible to himself, not merely useless to voice but empty for thought. Those who may wish to see some potential good in this must subject themselves to serious travel.1 If Cavell is distant from MacIntyre, what is his relationship to MacIntyre’s arch-nemesis, liberalism? Liberalism is not a word Cavell uses very often. The few times he does, he is dismissive.2 In this chapter, I read Cavell alongside two prominent political liberals, Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls, in order to expose the distance between Cavell and liberalism. My discussion will center upon a prominent image in Cavell, what he calls the “scene of instruction,” referring to a famous passage in Wittgenstein: “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’ ”3 It sounds like Wittgenstein is saying that, at some point, argument must end. Difference must be silenced and the responsibility for that be displaced onto some bedrock. Is that the case? Cavell’s most extensive engagement with this passage comes in an essay on Saul Kripke’s account of Wittgenstein on following a rule. Cavell thinks Kripke ends up subtly transforming the passage into “If I have exhausted [etc.] . . . then I am licensed to say: ‘This is

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simply what I am inclined to do.’ ”4 In contrast, Cavell takes the “inclined” in Wittgenstein to suggest a hesitation which makes space for the patience necessary for the discovery of the other and for putting myself in question, for asking whether I am the bedrock. Kripke, in Cavell’s view, understands it to make permissible a certain refusal of the other in the name of some societal consensus. In what follows, however, I leave Kripke aside and turn instead to Martha Nussbaum to read the scene of instruction in her Therapy of Desire, which seems to be trying to approach something like Cavell but, I argue, fails though in ways that may help to illuminate Cavell’s achievement, in part because of her curious treatment of something she calls “ordinary belief philosophy.” Further, the way Nussbaum chooses examples from development workers in India also helps to illuminate the (potentially) radical politics which accompany Cavell’s account.

Nussbaum’s Scene of Instruction A certain constitution of the cosmopolitan might merely consist in a kind of universal provincialism, a worldwide shrinking of the spirit.5 Martha Nussbaum helps us see how the Kripke option is worked out in a more plainly political text. In the first chapter of The Therapy of Desire, she presents her own scene of instruction in order to show an advantage of “medical philosophy” (the Hellenistic schools: Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans) over Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, which are more elitist and detached. Medical philosophy, unlike its predecessors, knows how and when to go beyond rigorous, technical, logical argument in order to engage ordinary folks. It must find ways to delve into the pupil’s inner world, using gripping examples, techniques of narrative, appeals to memory and imagination—all in the service of bringing the pupil’s whole life into imagination. Imagine, for example, how workers from the rural development authority would need to speak to the woman in rural India who says she does not want more education, if they want her to take the idea seriously and care about what they have to say. Clearly, a one-shot logical argument would do nothing to engage her; such a procedure would only reinforce her conviction that education has nothing to do with her. Nor would the exchange get very far if the development worker sat down with her like Aristotle in his schoolroom and asked her a number of calm and intellectual

SCENES OF INSTRUCTION

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questions about what she thinks and says. But suppose, instead, they spent a long time with her, sharing her way of life and entering into it. Suppose, during this time, they vividly set before her stories of the ways in which the lives of women in other parts of the world have been transformed by education of various types—all the while eliciting, from careful listening over a long period of time, in an atmosphere of trust that they would need to work hard to develop, a rich sense of what she has experienced, whom she takes herself to be, what at a deeper level she believes about her own capacities and their actualization. If they did all this, and did it with the requisite sensitivity, imagination, responsiveness, and open-mindedness, they might over time, discover that she does indeed experience some frustration and anger in connection with her limited role; and she might be able to recognize and to articulate wishes and aspirations for herself that she could not have articulated to Aristotle in the classroom. In short, through narrative, memory, and friendly conversation, a more complicated view of the good might begin to emerge.6 There is much to be admired in this passage and in this book: the resistance to the ways in which philosophy has become disconnected from the needs it ought to serve; the promotion of narrative as a mode of philosophy every bit as appropriate as, say, linguistic analysis; the encouragement of imagination and sensitivity when the philosopher finds that her spade is turned; the recognition that philosophy not only can help people like rural development workers but that those workers may actually be philosophers once the term is freed from professional boundaries.7 Nevertheless, there is also something deeply troubling and even frightening about this passage. It turns out that the sensitivity, friendliness, and taking of time are in service of one thing: getting the rural Indian woman to “take the idea seriously.”8 Nussbaum may think she wants to be friends with these women, but it is friendship as a tool, not friendship for its own sake. Nussbaum’s therapeutic modes of argument may be greatly different than those of other philosophers or of development workers, but the goal—convincing the woman in rural India that she needs an education—is identical. Moreover, it is identically immune to challenge. Reading Nussbaum, you wait in vain for her to say that the philosopher or development worker, through timely conversation, might discover that the Indian woman doesn’t want a further education (because she already has one, just not the kind development workers recognize; or because she would prefer that her daughter get the education; or because what

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she really needs is a market for the baskets she makes; or because these friendly, sensitive development workers act just like the missionaries and she already has a religion; or because she is happy as she is).9 Nussbaum’s development worker is portrayed as working alone. He has no local partners who share the vision for education, or have their own homegrown vision, and so already know, because they are the Indian woman’s neighbors, everything the development worker is trying to learn. What Nussbaum’s remarks make impossible is the idea that through “entering her way of life,” the philosopher might come to see it as a challenge, one which undermines our faith in Western culture, one which reveals that it is precisely our education which makes it so hard to enter into the rural Indian woman’s way of life. The passage closes with the hope for a “more complicated view of the good.” If this means that the development worker’s account of the good is complicated and that the Indian woman’s account is also complicated, the passage is much different than I have suggested. But there is good reason to think this is not so, both in the quotation above and in the pages preceding it. Nussbaum sets up medical philosophy in contrast to both Plato and Aristotle. For the Platonists, the good is independent of human beings, and the contemplation of it can be pursued without engagement with the messy realities of this world because any connection between the good and our happiness is purely contingent. This detachment makes possible a radical critique of the culture. Aristotle, on the other hand, is praised by Nussbaum for his worldly immersion and identified as what an ordinary belief philosopher should be. Aristotelianism is better than Platonism because it is more engaged and less detached. It achieves this through detailed attention to the ordinary beliefs of the people, to phainomena. But if it views its task as “simply the recording of traditional social belief ”10 with no view beyond that, then it relinquishes any further goal than this because it begins with an assumption of social health. Philosophy is thereby deprived of its critical power. It relinquishes its task of calling for social change through radical criticism. This is why Nussbaum turns to the model of medicine, an image common in the writings of the Hellenistic philosophers and which helps to show how Hellenistic philosophy is able to combine Platonism’s critical power with Aristotelianism’s worldly immersion. It is important for the doctor to attend to the patient’s account of what is wrong, just as it is important for the Aristotelian philosopher to attend to phainomena. But the doctor, with her experience and expert training, will also be able to think critically about the patient’s own account and see things the patient cannot see. In ethics, however, in contrast to medicine, the difficulties are magnified by the fact that the “patient” may not know at all what (if anything) is wrong. The doctor, at least, must rely to a


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significant degree on what the patient says about how he is feeling. But in ethics, the patient’s illness may not be apparent to him or to the physician in the way a sick or maimed person’s problem is there to see. So the philosopher must “be even more skeptical than the medical doctor about any report made by the pupil based on her own immediate judgments and perceptions”11 because it is precisely those judgments and perceptions which are likely to be diseased. In that sense, the better analogy is psychoanalysis, but there too Nussbaum notes a difference. The medical philosopher insists on “a normative idea of the flourishing life” while psychoanalysis has generally been unwilling to provide such a normative account. On the one hand, then, the medical model is committed to trusting the patient at some level: sooner or later, the philosopher hopes that all or most patients will assent to the diagnosis and participate willingly in the cure. On the other hand, the fact that a corrupt and corrupting society may well have formed the patient’s beliefs about the good life, and even about herself, makes it necessary for the philosopher not to be too quickly trusting.12 Here, Nussbaum introduces her Indian example. The government polled groups of women in rural India about whether they thought they needed more education. Most replied that they did not need more education because they did not think it would make their lives better. For the Platonist, writes Nussbaum, the poll would be meaningless. The women’s opinion about their good would not be relevant to the question of their good. The philosopher can determine the good without reference to them. The ordinary belief philosopher, on the other hand, would simply take the poll as a given and so avoid any attempt to educate the women. But the medical philosopher “neither disregards it or trusts it” but tries to find ways to engage the women so that they learn to think about their lives in such a way that education becomes desirable. The medical philosopher’s account of the good “is in principle supposed to be an account of the judgment the pupil herself would give, were she to follow the appropriate critical procedures.”13 Like the Platonist, the medical philosopher does not give up her vision of the good in light of the poll, but unlike the Platonist, the pupil must be provided with the tools which enable her to arrive at a vision of the good that is not externally imposed. Hence, the “sensitivity,” “imagination,” and “friendliness.” A danger here is that the “appropriate critical procedures” threaten to undermine “the judgment the pupil herself would give” insofar as it seems that those critical procedures are laid down in advance by the teacher. The procedures are designed to lead to the teacher’s “normative conclusion.” Their value comes

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from their ability to get the student to the right vision of the good, the teacher’s vision, while allowing the pupil to own that vision for herself. Thus, while throughout the text, Nussbaum challenges received accounts of the nature of education, those challenges are, so to speak, external. That is, medical philosophy’s pedagogy challenges more standard pedagogies but resists internal challenges from the student to its own pedagogy. I want to be clear about my concerns with Nussbaum’s proposal. It is not that I think the doctor-patient analogy is wrong in itself. Philosophy diagnoses “illness” (and calls it captivity in a cave or transcendental illusion or language on holiday) and offers “cures.” It charts a path from ignorance to exposure and proposes itself as the guide along that path. Nor do I think the philosopher should abandon a normative idea of the flourishing life. (Though it is not clear to me what work “normative” is doing here, not clear just when a philosopher or anyone else would consent to calling their account of the good “descriptive,” for example, as opposed to normative.) Nussbaum’s basic claim—that philosophy’s (in all three forms) task is “finding out how human beings are diseased and what they need” in order to “heal them and give them what they need”—is correct. And she is right to go on to insist that everything depends upon how philosophy does that. My worry is that here she stumbles in a way that keeps her captive to old colonialist models. There is one point where she moves in a direction I find more congenial. She writes that new cases, new patients/pupils, are not “simply a scene for the application of a dogmatic theory.” Theory’s responsibility to the cases entails openness to “the possibility of discovering new symptoms—or even new insights into the nature of health.”14 This is an important concession and goes some distance in mitigating my worries about medical philosophy. Given the trajectory of the overall argument, however, it seems like an afterthought, at least to my ear. In any case, such possibilities play no defining role in Nussbaum’s account. That is, new insights may be welcomed, but they are not actively pursued. The possibility of such insight is a by-product, perhaps even a welcome by-product, of the theory but not constitutive of it. Take, for example, the moment when Nussbaum qualifies “normative” by saying it doesn’t entail “universal acceptance.” With some groups of Indian women, it may well be impossible to get them to see the need for education. It is then that the philosopher must face the reality that normative does not mean universal.15 But it is precisely here that I want Nussbaum to say that, in the engagement with such women (when the medical philosopher has reached bedrock, her spade turned), the philosopher may have to open to the possibility that she is wrong and the Indian women are right (or that both are mistaken in some way or another). Here, it is disturbing to be told, in the


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final pages, that when sensitivity, imagination, and friendliness run out, “techniques of a manipulative sort” are permissible provided “their results can generally be validated by appeal to cogent argument.”16 We may wonder if we have gotten anywhere at all. Throughout her discussion, Nussbaum refers to something called “ordinary belief philosophy.” I take it she does not use the more common “ordinary language philosophy” because she wants the term to include not just Wittgenstein and Austin but any philosopher who appeals to ordinary beliefs and intuitions as “criterial of ethical truth and rightness,”17 including utilitarians and Aristotelians. Most disturbing to her is that ordinary belief philosophy begins with an assumption of social health and so, as the example of the poll of Indian women showed, is unable to provide a radical critique. Notice here how ordinary belief philosophy is identified with polling, an argument often made by the positivists against Austin and Wittgenstein and which Cavell always resisted. (Notice also how “health,” for Nussbaum’s ordinary language philosopher—and perhaps for her—must mean an absence of conflict and disagreement.) Cavell is mentioned and his dissent from Nussbaum’s account noted. But his view is never allowed to destabilize her caricature, let alone become a possible fourth option. Showing that Cavell (and Wittgenstein) provides such an option is an aim of this chapter. What does Cavell’s “ordinary” have to do with politics? Nussbaum thinks that Aristotle provides a model of what ordinary belief philosophy might look like without the assumption of social health. Aristotle’s method uncovers discrepancies, contradictions, and ambiguities in the beliefs of ordinary people; it doesn’t hide them. Then, those various beliefs are sorted through and debated in order to discover the most indispensable ones.18 Whether or not this is an adequate account of Aristotle, it is a concise summary of Rawls on “reflective equilibrium.” But sorting out what parts of Nussbaum’s Aristotle are Aristotle and which are Rawls is not an issue I take up here. My concern is to show the difference between Cavell’s view and Nussbaum’s account of ordinary belief philosophy. The idea that Wittgenstein is some sort of conservative, protecting something called the status quo through his claim that “philosophy leaves everything as it is,”19 is a common one. Wittgenstein is seen as a conventionalist, providing a theory of meaning grounded in conventional practices which can only be sacrificed on pain of sacrificing meaning. The old philosophical universals may be abandoned, but they are replaced with communal agreements which are just as immune to criticism. The ordinary is then understood as a general term for these conventions and communal agreements, a place safe

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from radical demands for change. The ordinary is the place the conservative appeals to as a defense against change. Is that right? I hope that the preceding account of Nussbaum has at least cast suspicion on the politics of medical philosophy and that my account of the ordinary in the introduction has made clear that whatever ordinary belief philosophy is, it is not what Cavell means by ordinary language philosophy. But is there a politics here? What does it look like? Cavell tells the story of Judith Shklar saying to him, “My dear Stanley, let us say that everything you have said about Emerson is true. You will still not have told the story unless you can tell the politics of this writing.”20

Wittgenstein’s Politics The turn to convention, far from being a turn to the ordinary, is another way of avoiding the ordinary. The turn to convention becomes a form of theatricalization by letting convention displace the work of attending to the utter specificity of another. That is not to deny that Wittgenstein can sound like a spokesperson for, and defender of, current convention. It is true that he can sound like this, perhaps most clearly in his repeated use of the first-person plural in describing what we say or what our criteria are. If this is what he sounds like—an uncritical appeal to convention and also like an authoritarian claim to know what our conventions are on no basis but himself—then the conventionalist reading has a certain plausibility. To be more precise, it is plausible if, when Wittgenstein says something about “our criteria,” he is producing a generalization from what he says to what everybody says. The difficulties with that are greater than just its “conservatism.” Such claims are preposterous without the evidence that could be provided for them in, say, a poll, as positivist critics of ordinary language philosophy and Nussbaum insist. But both those difficulties begin to fade if Cavell is right that Wittgenstein’s appeals to “we” are not to be understood as generalizations, but rather as instances or samples. The “we” is an invitation for you to see whether you have such a sample, or can accept mine as a sound one. One sample does not refute or disconfirm another; if two are in disagreement they vie with one another for the same confirmation. The only source of confirmation here is ourselves. And each of us is fully authoritative in this struggle. . . . There is no appeal beyond us, or if beyond us two, then not beyond some eventual us.21


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Among many moments in the Investigations where this tracing of disappointment becomes most explicit is in the central scene of instruction. “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” Cavell imagines this as a scene between a teacher and a child, but he has no intention of confining it to a classroom, for the positions of teacher and child are positions each of us may find ourselves in. This is one of the reasons it is so important to him to insist that the many voices in Philosophical Investigations are not to be understood as one voice of rectitude—Wittgenstein’s—responding to various more or less mistaken interlocutors. Each of the many voices is Wittgenstein’s and each is ours, has been ours, or may be ours—if we have the courage or honesty or misfortune to voice them. Each of us may find ourselves baffled by another, and left speechless with (what feels like) no choice but to turn and walk away (or resort to “techniques of a manipulative sort”). The scene of instruction in Wittgenstein “isolates or dramatizes the inevitable moment of teaching and learning, and hence of communication, in which my power comes to an end in the face of the other’s separateness from me.”22 I may then wish to deny the other’s separateness or to reinforce it. Cavell emphasizes the “inclined” such that it suggests a hesitation over saying “This is what I do.” That emphasis invites us to also emphasize the when. When I am sick, cheerful, sad, hopeful, weary? And the who. When I have or have not reached bedrock in a conversation with whom? What sort of person in what circumstance does or does not count as bedrock? My girlfriend? My father? A braying high school coach? My dissertation committee? My students? An anorexic sister? An alcoholic friend? Cavell says he came to view the Investigations “as a discovery for philosophy of the problem of the other.”23 Cavell says that his uneasiness with Kripke’s “solution” stems from his sense that the scene of instruction presents itself as a certain kind of parable of the political. Cavell finds an “air of power or violence” in Kripke, one which shows both society’s power to exclude and impotence to include.24 Kripke’s option, like Nussbaum’s, closes off the possibility of undermining my inclination. It is a recipe for a static society and one which requires various and intricate forms of exclusion in order to sustain its stasis. The scene of instruction presents a crossroads, a crisis of communication and of consent brought on by unintelligibility and impotence. It is dramatized in “Swiftian proposals” like that of The Brown Book, where a child who fails to learn to properly count “is separated from the others and treated as a lunatic,”25 or like the wood sellers in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. These examples are all very disturbing. But why? What kind of crossroads is this? It is a crossroads at which I am thrown back upon myself and, potentially, exposed

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to my conformity. A crossroads at which an abyss seems to open before my feet at the place where our mutual attunement in judgments, which hitherto seemed so reliable that we didn’t even notice it, has vanished, and where the philosophical specters of skepticism, relativism, and nihilism threaten to overwhelm us. It is not just that the child (or the woodsellers) is unintelligible to us. “The cause of our anxiety is that we cannot make ourselves intelligible (to him). . . . The anxiety lies not just in the fact that my understanding has limits, but that I must draw them, on apparently no more ground than my own.”26 “If I say ‘They are crazy’ or ‘incomprehensible’ then that is not a fact but my fate for them.”27 There are options here, ways to avoid the extraordinary difficulty of the task Cavell is calling us to, modes of calling them crazy for which no one will blame you or me, at least not often. Foundationalism, tolerance, violence are all ways that I may “grant you secession . . . declare that the matter between us is at an end.” When? When, if ever, do I cede intelligibility? There is, of course, no single answer to that question, and Cavell is not concerned to find one. His purpose is to keep open, and alert us, to another option. He calls it “offering the other cheek.”28 When my reasons come to an end and I am thrown back upon myself, upon my nature as it has so far shown itself, I can, supposing I cannot shift the ground of discussion, either put the pupil out of my sight . . . or I can use the occasion to go over the ground I had hitherto thought foregone. If the topic is that of continuing a series, it may be learning enough to find that I just do; to rest upon myself as my foundation. But if the child, little or big, asks me: Why do we eat animals? or Why are some people poor and others rich? or Why do I have to go to school? or Do you love black people as much as white people? or Who owns the land? or Why is there anything at all? or How did God get here?, I may find my answers thin, I may feel run out of reasons without being willing to say “This is what I do” (what I say, what I sense, what I know), and honor that. Then I may feel that my foregone conclusions were never conclusions I arrived at, but were merely imbibed by me, merely conventional. I may blunt that realization through hypocrisy or cynicism or bullying. But I may take the occasion to throw myself back upon my culture, and ask why we do what we do, judge as we judge, how we have arrived at these crossroads. . . . This seems to me a task that warrants the name philosophy. It is also the description of something we might call education. In the face of the questions posed in Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau . . .,


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we are children; we do not know how to go on with them, what ground we may occupy. In this light, philosophy becomes the education of grownups. . . . The anxiety in teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require education. And for grownups this is not natural growth, but change. Conversion is a turning of our natural reactions; so it is symbolized as rebirth.29 Among the many important elements of this passage, I will mention just a few. First, two of the four names that warrant the title of philosopher are theologians. (The ellipsis there is Cavell’s. He is asking you to fill in your own names; he is hoping that you have some, that you are educable.) This text, which is famous for questioning the boundaries between philosophy and literature, also questions the boundaries between philosophy and theology. The second element worth noting is the strange shifting of position(s) of the “child.” She is at once the seven-year-old whose questions make our answers seem thin and who forces us, in those rare moments when we do not choose to ignore or patronize her or ask her to be quiet, to go back over ground we had thought foregone. But she is also Augustine, Luther, et al., the adults who ask the sorts of questions that put us in the same position the child does. But then, a sort of doubling occurs in which before the childlike Augustine we are all children. We do not know how to go on with these philosophers any more than our sons and daughters, nieces and nephews know how to go on with us. In order to go on with them, we will have to change. “To appeal to ordinary language is not only to be able to communicate with other humans but is to exemplify the language so that others (a new generation of the culture) may learn it of you, may come to say what you say.”30 It is to simultaneously dare to make yourself an exemplar for others and to seek out others as exemplars and to be ready for both sets of others to be the same people. Unlike in Nussbaum and Kripke, the dynamics of authority must suffer continual reversals of the sort dramatized in Philosophical Investigations, at least if we accept Cavell’s argument that all the voices are Wittgenstein’s. Third, philosophy is identified with conversion. Philosophy draws others to conversion and keeps itself open to conversion. Finally, and for all these reasons, the passage can be taken as a summary of, and introduction to, his later work on perfectionism and its intimate connection to education.

Perfectionism: Emerson v. Rawls Perfectionism is an elusive concept in Cavell, but one way to begin to understand it is as modes in which to “go over the ground I had hitherto thought

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foregone” in order to facilitate a perpetual readiness for conversion. There is no definition or theory of perfectionism in Conditions. Instead, the book offers “an open-ended thematics” of perfectionism. It is possible, however, to identify a(n) (open-ended) list of features. Among them would be perfectionism’s resistance to definition or theory. Perfectionism is a “dimension or tradition of the moral life”31 that cuts across various theories rather than being a competing theory itself. The closest thing to a definition is the vague opening of the introduction. “Some idea of being true to oneself—or to the humanity in oneself, or of the soul on a journey (upward or onward) that begins by finding oneself lost to the world, and requires a refusal of society, perhaps above all of democratic, leveling society, in the name of something called culture.”32 “Being true to oneself” sounds like pop therapy, and most self-respecting academics don’t say such things. Cavell knows this, and part of the work of this text is to reeducate us about the nature of the self and to combat “false and debased perfectionisms” in books with titles like Love Yourself or in the U.S. Army’s invitation to “Be all you can be.” Cavell distinguishes the perfectionism he learned from Emerson by highlighting a cardinal theme of Conditions. Emersonian Perfectionism requires that we become ashamed in a particular way of ourselves, of our present stance, and that the Emersonian Nietzsche requires, as a sign of consecration to the next self, that we hate ourselves, as it were, impersonally (bored with ourselves might be enough to say); and that in the television promise to be all you can be, the offer is to tell you what all you can be, most importantly, a mercenary.33 The resistance to authority in this passage is not a resistance to all forms of authority but to certain kinds of which military discipline is one. Emersonian perfectionism requires an authority figure. Socrates in The Republic or Schopenhauer and Emerson in Schopenhauer as Educator are examples. The journey of the soul cannot be undertaken alone. The call to be true to oneself is a call to friendship. “How do we become self-reliant? The worst thing we could do is rely on ourselves.”34 Mulhall is right on when he says, “This image of the older and younger friends is the anchor of Cavell’s work in every one of the intellectual fields we have discussed. The older friend is Plato’s version of the Wittgensteinian philosopher, the psychoanalytic therapist, the dramatist we call Shakespeare, the men of the remarriage comedies and the unknown women of the melodramas.”35 This is a book about education. It is noteworthy that Cavell’s most extensive foray into what gets called “political philosophy” is also his most extensive


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account of his “philosophy of education.”36 It is one in which the teacher, or the older friend, becomes exemplary by showing the pupil what is shameful about her current self and finds that she (the pupil) can change, can move on to a next self through a process of education undertaken with the teacher, a process in which education itself is under discussion. In this process, the pupil can learn to own her gifts, accept them by giving up a false humility, or discover them by leaving behind ignorance. (Anyone who has ever had such a teacher may not have had a friend, but they will know themselves to have received an extraordinary gift. There is a certain nostalgia for youth in Cavell, like in Nietzsche, and it seems to me that it has something to do with the fact that such teachers come along less often the older we get. And that, in turn, seems to me to have something to do with a loss of the capacity to be surprised, the awareness of which can produce a kind of self-loathing. That is, it isn’t that we need the older friend any less, but that we don’t know how to find her or, if we have found her, how to submit to her when we do.) This is philosophical work. It has been since Plato. It is important that when Cavell, instead of defining perfectionism, chooses to list features of it (he comes up with twenty-eight), the discussion takes the form of a magisterial, if idiosyncratic, summary of The Republic. The first feature he lists is “a mode of conversation,” a feature uniting philosophy, politics, and education. When, with Plato and Cavell, the political is not a discrete branch of study, the conversation produces what Socrates called “our city of words,” “a standing gesture toward the reader or overhearer to enter into the discussion, to determine his or her own position with respect to what is said,”37 giving ourselves the opportunity to become ashamed of ourselves as we stand. Cavell quickly notes the distance between Emerson and Plato. Plato was no democrat, and “perfectionism generally, in a world of false (and false calls for) democracy, is the discovery of the possibility of democracy, which to exist has recurrently to be (re)discovered.”38 This is not unrelated to Cavell’s further sense that Emerson replaces the relatively stable dialectical progression of Plato with “a long period of stammering, poverty, and solitude.”39 But the distance Cavell is most interested in is the distance between Emerson and John Rawls, which turns out to parallel the difference between Wittgenstein and Kripke in interesting ways and to provide an answer to Shklar’s question. Cavell’s reading of A Theory of Justice focuses on Rawls’s rejection of perfectionism, exemplified by Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator. Particularly offensive to Rawls are these lines: “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

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most valuable specimens.” These lines are a virtual transcription of Emerson, whom Nietzsche once called “the richest mind” of the nineteenth century.40 The worry, then, is that Nietzsche and Emerson advocate a version of perfectionism which is elitist in the way it divides humans into a superior minority and an inferior majority and celebrates only the former. Further, that a society should sacrifice the good of less valuable specimens by making them instrumental to the good of the most valuable. “This,” Cavell notes, “sounds bad.” A society is judged on its ability to produce the likes of Socrates and Goethe, not on its approximation of justice. It sacrifices liberty and justice to excellence and culture and seems to be clearly undemocratic. But those of us who are not entirely sure Rawls’s theory itself is democratic, just insofar as we suspect that its liberalism and constitutionalism are designed to constrain the democratic impulse, may, like Cavell, want to pause here.41 A great deal hinges on the word “specimens.” James Conant puts it this way: “Specimens are representative samples of a particular class or genus. This encourages the elitist reading of Nietzsche, which assumes that he wishes to promote the interests of a certain class of privileged individuals. . . . What the great human being is a specimen of is a genus to which we do not belong.”42 We do not belong to it because we lack the characteristics common to that genus, in this case, talent or genius. But things begin to look different if “exemplar” replaces “specimen” in the translation. (The German, after all, is Exemplare.) Conant continues, “Specimens are characterized by their traits; exemplars (in Nietzsche’s sense), by their excellence. . . .It is the whole point of an exemplar . . . that other members of the genus do not share its excellence. A specimen exhibits what is essential in order to count as a member of a genus. An exemplar exemplifies one way of excelling qua member of a genus.”43 Go back to the Nietzsche passage. “[H]ow 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 exemplars.” We may think of this as a call to a certain kind of discipleship. You cannot retain the deepest significance on your own. You must avail yourself of an exemplar who reveals to you the inadequacies of your present state while showing you what you might yet become. This is open to anyone.44 At this point in the argument, Cavell turns the tables on Rawls, moves from defense to attack by showing that not only does Rawls, appropriately, rule out the elitist reading of perfectionism, but he also rules out Cavell’s reading. That is, not only does Rawls rule out living for specimens, he is also not very interested in living for exemplars. Significantly, he positively rules out the possibility of society’s victims being exemplars. For Cavell, it is essential to democracy that society’s victims be exemplary. What does that mean?


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When Cavell refers to the conversation of justice, he means the fundamental role in A Theory of Justice of Rawls’s account of deliberation among citizens concerning justice, most obviously the conversation which takes place among eventual citizens behind the veil of ignorance and which determines the principles of justice. But also he means the conversations actual citizens must engage in to determine to what degree their institutions embody those principles. In this latter conversation, “the measure of the departure from the ideal is left importantly to intuition.”45 Cavell worries about this, but to see why we have to compare the role of intuition in the first conversation. In the original position, our intuitions check our first formulations of principles and the principles, in turn, may correct our intuitions. This balancing results in what Rawls calls “reflective equilibrium.” In the second conversation, intuition is again checked by principles, but the resolution of reflective equilibrium may not be forthcoming. And if an intuition of injustice voiced by one of the least advantaged cannot be backed up by a principle, we are free to reject it and still consider ourselves and our conduct “above reproach.” The suspicion Cavell raises is that it seems that, if my interlocutor cannot formulate his complaint in terms of principles, I am under no obligation to further the conversation and may still consider myself “above reproach.”46 On Cavell’s view, this is problematic for two intimately related reasons. First, my consent, in Rawls’s theory, is directed to the principles of justice, not the society, and that enables me to confine or proportion my consent to the society. “But my intuition is that my consent is not thus modifiable or proportionable. . . . I cannot keep consent focused on the successes or graces of society; it reaches into every corner of society’s failure or ugliness.”47 Therefore, I am compromised. Society’s failures are not ones I can deny my share in. For Rawls, however, if, in the actual citizens’ conversation of justice, I can adequately appeal to the principles, my work is done. It is not that Cavell thinks an appeal to principles should never be made but that I must take responsibility for doing so. The decision to appeal to principles in the manner Rawls suggests is my decision. If that excludes someone or silences someone, then I have excluded or silenced someone. Cavell is not denying that there may be moments when that is necessary; he is denying that my responsibility in such cases can be displaced onto the principles. As Mulhall astutely suggests, this (the sense of my consent as proportionable) makes the social contract too contractual.48 For Rawls, injustice shows the degree society has departed from the principles I consented to and, so, how far society has distanced itself from me, withdrawn itself from my consent. For Cavell, however, it reveals how much I have consented to injustice, how deeply

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I am implicated. The nature, extent, shape of my consent cannot be determined in advance the way confining it to principles established in the original position does. Doing so results from looking “upon our shared commitments and responses—as moral philosophers in our liberal tradition have come to do—as more like particular agreements than they are.”49 The range of my consent must be discovered, not assumed to be taken care of by the mythical mechanism of contract. Recognizing my complicity, the scope of my consent, is the first step toward a viable dissent. I am implicated. I do not escape, but rather deepen, that complicity by appealing to principles. The point is not just that this falsifies my position, but that it falsifies my position such that it shields me from the requirements of self-criticism, confession, acknowledgment. The social contract, on Cavell’s Wittgensteinian reading, is not an explanation of where we find ourselves in relation to society; it is a projection of the fact that we do find ourselves in some relation and a recognition that, even so, we may not know our position with respect to that fact, the shape of that relation, whether it is by consent or by force. We do not know if or how we speak for others or they speak for us. To find out, you must give voice to yourself, which means “risking the rebuff—on some occasion, perhaps once for all—of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff—on some occasion, perhaps once for all—those who claimed to be speaking for you.”50 This is how selves are formed, identities constituted. And this is what Rawls sacrifices since the role he gives to principles reaffirms a self already given prior to the democratic engagement. We have now reached the second way in which Cavell finds Rawls problematic, which has to do with responses to those voicing dissent. At the close of his discussion of the social contract in the early pages of The Claim of Reason, Cavell once again turns to the figure of Augustine and asks, “[W]hat happens if ‘my elders,’ all of them . . . , will not accept what I say and do as what they say and do? Must they? Is it only natural for them to? Is it their responsibility?”51 The third chapter of Conditions should be read as an extended answer to these questions. It finds that Rawls’s theory suggests that my elders’ responsibility to accept what I say is severely constricted in a way Wittgenstein is not. Rawls said that, in the second conversation of justice, “those who express resentment must be prepared to show why certain institutions are unjust or how others have injured them” and must do so by appealing to the principles established in the first conversation of justice. If they cannot do so, then the resentment can be disregarded and those to whom the resentment was directed and who have disregarded it can think of their conduct as beyond reproach. This is where Ibsen’s Nora makes her appearance in Cavell’s text. Cavell suspects that Rawls will have no choice but to disregard her complaints at the end


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of A Doll’s House. The exchange goes like this: Nora has given her reasons for leaving—that they have never had a serious conversation; that her husband has treated her like a doll-wife; that she has yet to become human—to which Torvald has responded by calling her “unreasonable,” “ungrateful,” “a stupid child,” saying “You’re ill” and “I almost believe you are out of your senses.” Nora has “discovered that her eminently legal marriage is not comprehensible as a marriage.”52 There is nothing wrong, and Nora doesn’t say there is anything wrong, with the rules defining the institution of marriage. Her complaint is not susceptible to formulation in terms of rules or principles. She suffers not a particular injustice but the order of the world as a whole. She is not speaking for herself but for “millions of women,” all of whom have been denied a voice by the moral consensus that Torvald represents. Like Emerson, every word they say chagrins her. She is demanding a miracle, the miracle of transformation, not the piecemeal adjustment of institutions to principles. It is this sort of demand that Cavell thinks remains unaccounted for in Rawls. Rawls and Torvald are not just refusing further conversation; they are denying that conversation has even been offered. Nora’s outcry “expresses a sense not of having lost out in an unequal yet fair struggle, but of having from the start been left out.”53 It is not a possibility Rawls sufficiently accounts for. Torvald “has managed, for the eight years of their marriage, to control her voice, dictate what it may utter and the manner in which it may utter it.”54 The demand for principles is understood by Cavell as one more way, if a rather sophisticated way, to dictate the manner in which she may speak. Is this too harsh? Rawls as Torvald? Answering that will depend upon what you think of Torvald as well as Rawls, how you are or are not able to identify with Torvald (and that will depend a great deal on whether you are male or female). But I am only interested in pushing the analogy far enough to show that Rawls’s liberals must consider Nora “unreasonable.” And as any reader of Rawls knows, “reasonable” carries an enormous amount of weight in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. A reasonable person is one who is “willing to govern their conduct by a principle from which they and others can reason in common.”55 Unreasonable people, then, are to be excluded from the conversation of justice because “they are unwilling to honor, or even to propose . . . any general principles or standards for specifying fair terms of cooperation.”56 That is to say, the liberal is not simply permitted to ignore such claims; the liberal must ignore them because once they are let in, the bedrock will begin to crack. The call of Emersonian perfectionism is a call to serious travel—“some idea of the soul on a journey that begins by finding oneself lost to the world” and there-

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fore a requirement to “go over the ground I had hitherto thought foregone.” It is a call to a life committed in hope to the pursuit of transfiguring encounters with exemplary others before whom we may become unintelligible to ourselves and find our words useless to voice and empty of thought, and in that emptiness discover the possibility of conversion, hence the possibility that such life is joyful. We are all Torvald and Rawls at some time or another, usually most of the time. Which means we all have friends like Nora, and we all find ways to refuse to listen to her. Mulhall describes Nora’s gift to Torvald by saying that “she functions as his friend by rebuking him, by expressing her outrage to him and so expressing her conviction in his moral intelligibility—thereby attracting him toward the task of discovering it.”57 Hence, in the next chapter, we turn to our greatest contemporary “travel writer” and a display of companionable listening that stands in stark contrast to both Rawls and MacIntyre

3 Private Languages Cavell and Sebald

In Wittgenstein’s work, as in skepticism, the human disappointment with human knowledge seems to take over the whole subject. While at the same time this work seems to give the impression, and often seems to some to assert, that nothing at all is wrong with the human capacity for knowledge, that there is no cause for disappointment, that our lives, and the everyday assertions sketched by them, are in order as they are. So some of Wittgenstein’s readers are made impatient, as though the fluctuating humility and arrogance of his prose were a matter of style, and style were a matter of pose, so that these poses merely repudiate, not to say undermine, one another. To me this fluctuation reads as a continuous effort at balance, or longing for it, as to leave a tightrope; it seems an expression of that struggle of despair and hope that I can understand as a motivation to philosophical writing.—I am led again to recognize, and again with no little astonishment, how at odds I find myself with those who understand Wittgenstein to begin with, or assert thesis-wise, the publicness of language, never seriously doubting it, and in that way to favor common sense. I might say that publicness is his goal. It would be like having sanity as one’s goal. Then what state would one take oneself to be in?1

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In this chapter, I bring (Cavell’s) Wittgenstein alongside the work of W. G. Sebald, in whose category-defying novels Wittgenstein occasionally appears, in order to accomplish two tasks essential to my argument. The first, more general purpose is to further develop my account of Cavell and the originality of his reading of Wittgenstein. In that regard, this chapter is an attempt to offer an answer to Cavell’s question: “Then what state would one take oneself to be in?” I argue that the narrator called “Sebald” and many of his characters have publicness and sanity as their goals, that the state they are in is one of loneliness and exile. In doing so, I will draw attention to the way two of Wittgenstein’s central preoccupations, pain and private languages, come together in Sebald and his characters in order to challenge common readings of Wittgenstein’s so-called private language argument. Those readings correctly take the argument to be an assault on the individualistic, autonomous self asserted by Descartes and his various heirs, but in doing so they treat it as if it were simply an intellectual or cognitive mistake, which can be cured by more careful thinking. I think this misses much of the point. Instead, I try to show that, in (Cavell’s) Wittgenstein, as in Sebald, the fantasy of a private language is a fantasy produced by pain and loneliness. It isn’t just a cognitive mistake but a real experience which can take hold of anyone, especially people who, for whatever reason, fear to give voice to themselves because they fear no one will listen, let alone understand. If it isn’t just an intellectual mistake, then it will not submit to a simply intellectual cure. The overcoming of loneliness, or the strength to bear it, or the capacity to understand it in another or in oneself, requires companionship, the sort of companionship Sebald offers to the characters in The Emigrants, to Austerlitz, and to many in The Rings of Saturn. I read Sebald as one of the most remarkable chroniclers of such companionship that we have. A further aspect of the argument is that the struggle against the private language fantasy in Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Sebald is a struggle with themselves. It is not that they are free of it and so are able to offer companionship to those caught up in the fantasy. They too are caught up in it. Their writing, then, is both an offer of companionship and a demand for it. “Before attempting to master my subjectivity in exemplary ways, not only do I fail to know myself and my position in the world; I also do not know others. . . . Thus my existence is unknown unless I make myself known, i.e., express myself.”2 The second purpose of this chapter is to show how the companionship that Sebald’s narrators offer to others may help us to understand the alternative Cavell provides to both MacIntyre and political liberalism in the way they engage liberalism’s victims.3 In the last chapter, we saw how Rawls is able to keep liberalism’s victims at a distance with his appeal to principles that keep the citizen above reproach. Rawls’s principles shield the “reasonable” citizen

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from the voice of the least advantaged and from an examination of his own complicity in causing the disadvantage. In their lonely rootlessness, Sebald’s characters, especially in The Rings of Saturn, embody much of what MacIntyre despises about us, yet they elicit compassion instead of contempt from Sebald. Moreover, despair about the possibility of community is not allowed to displace heroic efforts at companionship.

The Private Language Fantasy For the first time in my life, I began explaining to someone else that because of certain circumstances my origins had been unknown to me. . . . I fell into such a panic as I offered these explanations, which suddenly struck me as not just far too cursory but positively absurd, that I began to stammer and could hardly bring out a word.4 The paragraph in the so-called private language argument that has drawn the most attention, that is deemed most central for understanding the argument, is §258. Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign “S” and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.—I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated.—But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition.—How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation—and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.—But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentration of my attention; for in this way I impress upon myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.—But “I impress it upon myself ” can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion 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.”5 One standard reading goes roughly like this.6 Correct usage of a sign is established by criteria given in grammar, and grammar is public, shared.

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Private ostensive definition—concentrating inwardly on the sensation as I attach the label “S” to it—cannot provide correct usage because there are no criteria to ensure its correctness. All I have when I go to use “S” again is my memory of the sensation, and I could easily begin to doubt whether my memory serves me well.7 With a private ostensive definition, there can be no way to distinguish between being right and seeming right. Linguistic normativity is only available via the criteria provided in the communal agreement of language users. Here is another common reading. The above account is parasitic on sensation as a private object. It may correctly show the impossibility of establishing a connection between “S” and the sensation, but the Cartesian dualism implicit in that assumption—that there must be a connection—is what Wittgenstein is trying to undermine. A better account has Wittgenstein showing that our expressions are not reports or representations about private objects but manifestations or presentations of a state of mind. James Edwards puts it succinctly, “The verbal expression . . . is not, in the first instance, a report on a ghostly something—it is the thing itself, embodied. . . . [T]he two are essentially connected; rather, to put it cryptically but accurately, the two are one.”8 I offer these two readings because they seem to me fairly representative. In what follows, I do not argue with them. I present Cavell’s reading and try to highlight the differences. Cavell doesn’t take up either of these readings, though the first is in the background of his remarks. Cavell doesn’t disagree with Edwards that the assumption that there needs to be a connection between my expression and my pain is a problematic one. But he shifts the direction of the discussion by posing one central question: If this is as unintelligible as Wittgenstein thinks it is, what could make me think there needs to be a connection? Why do I think there is a gap which must be closed? Answering or responding to such a question, he suggests, is Wittgenstein’s point with the thought experiment. This has everything to do with Cavell’s understanding of skepticism. The skeptic, he insists, is not incompetent (as both standard readings suggest), and his conviction is not produced by a lack of knowledge. There is no piece of information with which we could provide him that would change his mind. But then, how are we to engage him? The suggestion which governs part IV of The Claim of Reason is that the skeptic is in the grip of certain fantasies and we had better understand them if an engagement with the skeptic is to be fruitful. Furthermore, if it is true that skepticism is not just a cognitive mistake that clearer thinking can cure, it also suggests that skepticism is not just a problem of professional philosophy but that professional philosophy is one expression of a frame of mind in which anyone may find themselves, a frame of mind for which “doubt” is only one name among others.

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Cavell contends that the so-called private language argument is not intended to show that the idea of a private language is nonsensical. He does not take Wittgenstein to be arguing against the possibility of a private language. Rather, the purpose is to “release the fantasy expressed in the denial that language is something essentially shared” (344). Go back to §258. In Cavell’s reading, the private linguist runs into trouble at the point where he decides that he must impress upon himself the connection between “S” and the sensation such that he will always get it right with certainty. He doesn’t run into trouble simply by writing “S” every time he has a particular sensation. He runs into trouble at the point where he decides he needs an ostensive definition. Wittgenstein goes on to say that “here we can’t talk about ‘right.’ ” That is where Norman Malcolm appends, as it were, “Because we can only talk about right when we have rule-governed criteria.” Instead, Cavell writes: Wittgenstein’s claim that “here we can’t talk about ‘right’ ” reaches back only three or four sentences, just to the idea of “impressing the connection on myself,” i.e., getting the sign and the sensation stamped upon one another, so that, so to speak, their faces can be seen to match quite independently of any decision of mine [my italics]. . . . What creates the sense of needing, or wanting, the special impressing? In each of Wittgenstein’s attempts to realize the fantasy of a private language, 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. In §243 this is quite explicit; in §258 the idea of formulating a definition of the sign overcomes the fact that the sign already has all the definition it needs—if, that is, I am actually employing it as I said I was. (348) Malcolm’s reading, then, suffers from the same defect as the private language itself. It, too, expects the connection between “S” and the sensation to be made “quite independently of any decision of mine.” It displaces my responsibility for what I say onto criteria. Edwards is better here, but next to Cavell his treatment is flippant. His implicit answer to Cavell’s question, “What creates the sense of needing, or wanting, the special impressing?” comes too quickly: because modern philosophy made a mistake. But what is Cavell’s answer? Why would we want to overcome expressiveness? Why would we want to deny those connections? Why do we imagine a gap where there isn’t one? “ ‘Well, I believe that this is the sensation S again.’— Perhaps you believe that you believe it! Then did the man who made the entry in the calendar make a note of nothing whatever?”9 Cavell asks: “Why are you so faint-hearted about your sensation?” And if you have so little confidence,

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“[t]hen what is that stupidly insignificant mark doing just sitting there in your diary? . . . [C]ould anything and everything a person does be doodling? Is this a fear which the fantasy of a private language is meant to conceal?” (350–351). The fantasy is produced by a fear that our expressiveness signifies either nothing or too much. We fear inexpressiveness, that not only are we unknown, but also we are powerless to make ourselves known, to reveal ourselves to others and to be understood by them. Alternatively, we fear that what we do express is beyond our control, that we are incapable of concealing ourselves, powerless to hide from the gaze of others. We have no secrets, no privacy. In one case, I cannot say enough; my words are clumsy. In the other, my silences, even my lies, are useless. “Your face, my thane, is as a book.” In the first case, we cannot be known; in the second, we have no authority over how we are known. Either way, there can be no end to our loneliness. In both cases, we may then choose to respond by turning away from speech in disappointment (there is nothing to say), or toward it in desperation (there could never be enough said), and both will be useless. A private language is one in which the necessity of expression, of writing “S,” is overcome because my private ostensive definition does all the work necessary. I do not have to give voice to myself and so I am liberated from the anxiety of others. I cannot be misunderstood, criticized, rebuked, mocked, scorned. Nor can I be loved, appreciated, commended, applauded. And if I cannot be the object of such responses, neither can anyone else be such an object for me. They too are locked in. Which means “the skeptic is not skeptical enough: the other is still left, along with his knowledge of himself; so am I along with mine” (353). So Cavell is, in a sense, more skeptical than the skeptic because he has brought self-knowledge into question. If the fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness, whether in the form of silence or meaningless babble, is true, then disconnecting my knowledge of myself from the requirement of communication and negotiation will not mean a loss of identity, will not mean the loss of self-knowledge. My knowledge of myself is guaranteed via a shortcut. It becomes achievable without the engagement of others. Moreover, I am no longer answerable for my lack of knowledge of others, no longer responsible for my misunderstanding them. The reason I am not so responsible is because I cannot be blamed for being unable to get past some other’s body. This fear and the fantasy expressed in the private language rely on a picture of the self as veiled by the body. My body is an obstacle to your knowing me and will have to be penetrated or turned aside in order to access the real me which is buried within. What Wittgenstein does is “shift the location of the thing which blocks this vision” (368). Now, instead of the body veiling the self, it reveals it. Wittgenstein’s

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duck-rabbit, in the hands of Cavell, shows that it is because the body reveals the self that the body conceals the self. The failure is a failure in the viewer, not in the other’s body. “I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this darkness upon the other” (368). This is not a failure of knowledge, as the skeptic thinks. The rabbit is not hidden from the person who sees the duck. All the “facts” are there for both the person who sees the duck and the person who sees the rabbit. There is a truth in skepticism. Though it is a mistake to see our bodies as separating ourselves, the truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated (by) something. . . . The fantasy of a private language . . . can be understood as an attempt to account for, and protect, our separateness, our unknowingness, our unwillingness or incapacity either to know or to be known. Accordingly, the failure of the fantasy signifies: that there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which language reaches; that nevertheless there is no end to our separateness. We are endlessly separate, for no reason. But then we are answerable for everything that comes between us; if not for causing it then for continuing it; if not for denying it then for affirming it; if not for it then to it. The idea of privacy expressed in the fantasy of a private language fails to express how private we are, metaphysically and practically. (369–370) How we respond to this fantasy, whether we dismiss it as primitive Cartesian anxiety or whether we tarry with it, will depend almost entirely on whether we have felt that pain and isolation and what we make of it.10 It will depend upon whether we have ever shared the fantasy or listened at length to someone in its grip (whether they knew it or not). It will depend on how well you remember all the friends you have not been able to befriend, all the bitter silences that ended in withdrawal because you could not understand, could not make yourself available to understand; the conversation with someone in fear of unknowability and whose voice steadily rose in volume and pitch and violence as you verified the fantasy with your incomprehension. Or you may have comprehended but yet still verified the fantasy by having been unable to communicate your comprehension. Whether you want to reach out for a private language spoken only by an authentic inner self which can be preserved invulnerable to exchange may depend upon how vulnerable you have been or how lonely you are, how you have been isolated or have isolated yourself. The fantasy grows commensurately, perhaps, with the difficulty in negotiating others. (It diminishes with the ease with which you deny those difficulties, with the

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way we think reading Wittgenstein releases us from dealing with such anxieties ourselves.) It may be born with fear and comes with our separateness. It is not (just) a philosophical mistake. It is one name for loneliness. It is what the skeptic (in us all) discovers.

Sebald’s Tightrope Walkers What interests me most are the countless glossy black stag beetles in the Windheim woods. I track their crooked wanderings with a patient eye. At times it looks as if something has shocked them, physically, and it seems as if they have fainted. They lie there motionless, and it feels as if the world’s heart had stopped. Only when you hold your own breath do they return from death to life, only then does time begin to pass again. Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay’s feather in her hand? —The Emigrants The preceding discussion will, I hope, have provided the background necessary to a reading of the unpredictable and ghostlike appearances of Wittgenstein in the novels of W. G. Sebald. One of the pairs of eyes on page 5 of Austerlitz is Wittgenstein’s.11 Just a few pages later, the image of Austerlitz himself, walking with his rucksack, brings Wittgenstein to mind. “I recollect that before approaching him I had been thinking at some length about his personal similarity to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the horror-stricken expression on both their faces. I believe it was mainly the rucksack . . . which put into my head what on the surface was the rather outlandish idea of a certain physical likeness between him and the philosopher.”12 At the end of The Emigrants, we learn that, when Max Ferber first arrived in Manchester, he lived in the same house in which Wittgenstein had lived during his stay in Manchester. Paul Bereyter, shortly before his death, becomes obsessed with Wittgenstein’s work as well as the work of other Germans who either committed suicide or came close to doing so. Bereyter’s teaching methods also occasionally bear an uncanny resemblance to Wittgenstein’s in rural Austria. And perhaps most significant, all of Sebald’s “artists” write, paint, sew, and build in the same hesitant, methodical way as Wittgenstein wrote (a point to which I will return). It is the failure to understand the ways in which the failures or successes of language are failures or successes at creating bonds across our separateness

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which leads to some common misunderstandings of Sebald’s work. Take, for example, Michiko Kakutani writing about Austerlitz. It is never quite clear why Mr. Sebald decided to use the device of a narrator to frame Austerlitz’s story, for this personage remains oddly passive throughout the book, sympathetically listening to Austerlitz, while contributing few comments of his own. At times he seems like an alter ego to Austerlitz, another displaced person, given to melancholy and doubt. At other times he seems like a stand-in for the reader, a silent witness to Austerlitz’s search for his identity.13 Kakutani comes close to something helpful here. Most of this is right. “Sebald” is a sort of alter ego, a sympathetic listener, a silent witness. Moreover, Kakutani’s question, “Why a narrator?” is important. She seems to think that the narrator’s passivity is a problem. More precisely, she seems to think that listening is passive. Therefore, the narrator is expendable. I, however, think the narrator’s “passivity” is essential because the search for the self cannot be undertaken alone. We need help finding words to trust. Margo Jefferson, also writing in the New York Times, seems even more frustrated with Sebald’s narrator when she says in exasperation at Sebald’s gloominess, “You must wake up and go on now.”14 Who must wake up and go on now? Sebald? The narrator called “Sebald”? The writer’s characters? The readers caught up with the characters? And go where? It is the narrator’s virtue that he doesn’t wake up and go on. Which is to say that he both doesn’t stop listening and doesn’t stop witnessing to what he has heard. But that is to say that he is “going on” but in a way that Jefferson doesn’t recognize. He is waiting for them, going with them, allowing them to set the pace.15 So Jefferson is also mistaken if she means to suggest that Sebald’s texts are not hopeful enough. For that underestimates the importance of the fact that these are stories of people finding listeners and therefore, sometimes, finding voice. They are bottles washing up on land. But who are these people so in need of a listener? Lost, disoriented, lonely people, almost invariably trauma survivors or those close to trauma survivors and almost invariably exiled from their homes. They exemplify the search for publicness, the journey toward companionship, the quest for sanity. Turning to Sebald helps us to move closer to a thicker description of Cavell’s “what state would one take oneself to be in?” They are people crushed by the weight of memory. People who, looking back over their lives, are driven to say things like, “Memory often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the

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earth from a great height.”16 Those lines end the third part of The Emigrants, the story of great-uncle Ambrose Adelwarth. This dumbness will drive Adelwarth to madness and death in an Ithaca sanatorium. It is also a dumbness accompanied by paralysis. Just before he checks into the sanatorium, “he fell into such a deep depression that, although he plainly felt a great need to talk, he could no longer shape a single sentence, nor utter a single word, or any sound at all” (Emigrants, 103). So with Austerlitz in Sebald’s last novel. “Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with terror.”17 The narrators in all four of Sebald’s novels repeatedly find themselves in such states, confined to a fear-induced silence and paralysis. On the first page of The Rings of Saturn: “A year to the day after I began my [walking tour of England’s eastern coast], I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility.”18 In the following pages, various images of paralysis emerge. Flaubert, we learn, was so preoccupied with “fear of the false” that he would be “confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways” (Rings, 7). And so images of dumbness and paralysis pile up, but they are not all telling us the same thing. Austerlitz will move on from his tightrope to recover his past and his voice. Here, forgetfulness or, more precisely, submerged memory is the dumbness. Recovered memory is the possibility of voice. But the journal of Max Ferber’s mother, Luisa, at the end of The Emigrants is more typical of Sebald. Written in the months immediately prior to her internment and just after they were able to get Ferber to safety in England, it is a beautiful and detailed recollection of her childhood. Memory, or certain memories, becomes a place to flee to, not from. Luisa can tell us that the neighborhood fish-seller’s coffeepot was white with a cobalt-blue knob, but can recall nothing of what she and her fiancé talked about nor reveal her fears about the impending horror. Paul Bereyter tells Mme. Landau all the smells of his father’s emporium—mothballs and lily-of-the-valley soap, felted wool and loden cloth, herrings and linseed oil—but not a word of Helen’s departure. Ferber no longer remembers the last thing his mother or father said to him, or even if they embraced at the train station on that day in 1939. But with “fearful precision” and “painful clarity,” he can recall the details of his new school in England. “The colossal oak stairwell, the coldness of the room, the smell of coal, the incessant cooing of the pigeons” (Emigrants, 189). Yet there is not a word about the momentous changes overtaking Germany. Ferber’s recollection of the days before his departure are filled with phrases of dumbness: “[t]he scene is always a silent one”; “[m]y parents never talked about the new order”; “we simply said

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nothing”; “relatives remained largely silent”; “the silence was thickening.” The present and the future, too, provoke a kind of dumbness. We get expert at suppressing the traces of pain, better than at suppressing smiles or laughter, which somehow ought to be easier; or than at stopping ourselves from scratching, which seems trivial by comparison. We are told to live with pain, and we have to stand it (like what? like a trial, or like ground before an enemy?). It is a presence, and yet it is not present to me, so it seems an absence, a void; it affects everything and nothing.19 That may go some distance toward explaining why many of these characters talk so much, why it is no paradox that Adelwarth’s remark about memory and dumbness comes at the end of a lengthy journal. When the memories have succeeded in crippling you, reducing your life to one brilliant point of pain, then you may go toward either paralysis or restless activity, silence or volubility. Both make sense. So Sebald’s characters may talk all night or they may be silent and immobile, alone for days shivering on hotel beds, in both cases powerless to make themselves known even to themselves. It is a kind of dumbness. That which most needs to be talked about cannot be. All their stories are told indirectly, as if the telling is the way to not tell. The stories circulate around but do not, cannot, approach what is most important. It is the glaringly present absence. As with these stories, so with these individuals. They are selves with no narrative continuity, stories with gaping silences, books salvaged from flames, whole chapters charred beyond repair. Adelwarth’s view from “one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds” is vertiginous because there is no self between him and the ground: “I can scarcely believe I am the same person” (Emigrants, 129). Or Luisa: “Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay’s feather in her hand?” (Emigrants, 207). These are people in pieces, unmoored, unhinged, and their stories are cries—for what? For help? But what would that mean? What don’t they know, and how could they find out? We could say they don’t know who they are, but that is too imprecise. It may be better to say that their memories have been sabotaged such that they are unable to find any narrative continuity between what they are and what they were. “We believe we can remember,” says Michael Hamburger. “But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable. If I now look back to Berlin . . . all I see is a darkened background with a grey smudge in it” (Rings, 177). The problem here is one of identity. As James Wood puts it, “Their pain is that they do not know themselves and cannot be known by

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the reader because they are apparently incapable of revealing themselves.” And, “We are defined by the terrible abundance of our lacunae.”20 Compare Wood’s claim with this remark of Charles Taylor’s: “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”21 It is this that is unavailable to Sebald’s characters. Their “frame or horizon” has been shattered. Because of that, they throw a new light on Derek Parfit, Taylor’s central target in this section of Sources of the Self. Parfit denies the necessity of unitary selfhood over an entire life. Instead, he sees no reason that I, like Luisa, couldn’t consider my adolescent self to be another person than the person I am now. For Taylor, such a view is rooted in an impoverished Lockean account of selfhood in which self-consciousness is the only constitutive property of the self. That is, selfhood abstracted from all relationship, which is not a self at all, on Taylor’s account. But this isn’t really a serious issue for Taylor, and he dismisses it in a few terse paragraphs. But what happens if, with Sebald, we make it an issue? I don’t mean to take Parfit’s side. Taylor is right to reject it, and my concern is not with wayward philosophers. Instead, I mean to ask, “What about those lost, disoriented, damaged, mutilated selves (or partial selves)?” What if people to whom it seems that their childhood selves are different persons were relevant to moral philosophy as more than just the exceptions which prove Taylor’s rules? What would that mean? What if lostness and disorientation were interesting as more than just philosophical mistakes? What if, as Cavell suspects, they fuel philosophical mistakes? The problem for both Taylor and Sebald is self-knowledge and the inability to achieve it alone. We may be lost, disoriented. For Taylor, this can take two shapes. We may not know the lay of the land or, if we do, if someone gives us a map, we may not know where to place ourselves on it. Who we are is what we have become and are becoming. “The self is what the past is doing now.”22 What we might be or do is projected from the basis of where we are in the present. My actions, like words, are not self-evident but take on meaning only in relationship, relationship to past and future (and present) actions. But to say, as Taylor does, that narrative is “a basic condition of making sense of ourselves” is not yet to say very much. How shall we make sense of that claim in light of, say, Paul Bereyter?23 Narrative just as well displays the way our selves do not make sense, reveals our disorientation. It may then also help us to become oriented, and we will have no chance of becoming oriented without the narrative. But while narrative is a necessary condition of orienta-

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tion, it is hardly a sufficient one. It may do nothing more than show, if it’s a good narrative, my lostness, my helplessness. What if, for example, you are suddenly cut off from all those people who once reflected yourself back to you? I don’t mean that you simply lose contact with those people, but rather that you are rejected by them, cast out, such that it becomes clear that what they had reflected back to you was a lie. Then, you must forge a new self from the shards that are left to you and with new others. Finding new others may now be difficult. This is the position Bereyter finds himself in. The chapter begins with Sebald’s hearing, in 1984, of his primary school teacher’s suicide. The newspaper obituary does not mention that he took his own life nor that he did so by lying down in front of a train. It only says that he was a gifted teacher, fond of children and music. “Almost by way of an aside” and with no explanation, it also mentions that, in the late 1930s, he had been prevented from teaching. This curious fact leads Sebald to try to maneuver around his own memories and the “presumptuous” emotions they kindle in him. Sebald’s family had moved to S in 1952, and Sebald immediately joined Paul’s class as a third-grader. Paul had a reputation as an eccentric, partly because of his hatred of Catholicism and his “intellectual infirmity” in general—and partly because his lessons ranged far from the syllabus. He preferred old fairy tales to the “ridiculous and hypocritical” curricular textbooks, and field trips and long walks in the mountains to the classroom. He whistled continuously when he walked, whole Brahms sonatas or arias from Bellini operas. When they stopped to rest, he would pull out his clarinet and teach the class contemplative songs. When listening to music and at other unpredictable times, “in the middle of a lesson, at break, or on one of our outings—he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, who was always in such good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself ” (42). Sebald only begins to understand that desolation years after Paul’s death, when he meets Lucy Landau. She was Paul’s closest friend in his final years, probably the only close friend he had since the war. It was the summer of 1971. Mme. Landau was reading Speak, Memory24 on a park bench in the French Jura when Paul walked by and commented on her reading “with a courtesy that bordered on the extravagant” (43). From that moment, a deeply intimate friendship developed. She had known many men, she said, who were utter boors because so enamored with themselves. But Paul, “who was almost consumed by the loneliness within him, was the most considerate and entertaining companion one could wish for” (44). This despite his openness about his increasing claustrophobia, which made him unable to teach and made him see

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the children he once loved as “contemptible and repulsive,” and about his suicidal tendencies and fear of insanity. Sebald soon discovers from Mme. Landau that Paul was long familiar with the French Jura because he was a house tutor there from 1935 to 1939. She offers no explanation of this fact but instead shows him a large photo album, many of the pictures in which are reproduced in the pages that follow and which make it seem to Sebald that “the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them” (46). The album covers almost the whole of Bereyter’s life: the happy childhood in S; the “teacher processing factory” which he survived “only because he was so absolute and unconditional an idealist” (47); his student teaching in 1934–1935 in S, where he met Helen Hollaender, who was visiting from Vienna. Helen came as a “veritable revelation” to Paul. She was an “independent-spirited, clever woman, and furthermore her waters ran deep. And in those waters Paul liked to see his own reflection” (48). Helen returned to Vienna at the end of that summer, and Paul took up his first teaching post. But he had barely begun when he was informed that “because of the new laws” he would not be allowed to continue. It was then that he went to the Jura as a tutor. No one knows exactly what happened to Helen. But there is little doubt that she was “in one of those special trains that left Vienna at dawn” (49–50). Despite all his years in S, in Paul’s classroom and Paul’s hometown, Sebald never knew that Paul was only three-quarters Aryan. This doesn’t surprise Mme. Landau. It is a result, she says, “of the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget. . . . It does not surprise me at all, since that is inherent in the logic of the whole wretched course of events” (50). But even Paul could not bring himself to broaden his meager knowledge of the events that transpired in his homeland while he was in France, helpless to come to the aid of his beleaguered family. His father died on Palm Sunday 1936, supposedly of heart failure but in fact, Mme. Landau says, of fury and fear. Bizarrely, Paul went to Berlin in 1939 and joined the army, where he spent the next six years. It was only in the last decade of his life, the decade in which he was living with Mme. Landau, that he began to spend days in the archives, trying to correct his patchy knowledge of the past. At the same time, he spent his nights reading the work of Koestler, Wittgenstein, Trakl, Zweig, Benjamin, and many others “as if gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S” (59). On a visit to S, ostensibly to give up the

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apartment Paul had kept there for years despite his residence in France, Mme. Landau awakened to find that Paul was gone, wearing the jacket that had hung in the hall for forty years. “He was a German to the marrow” (57) but cast out. “Always . . . one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away— but from where?—and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract” (56). What kind of story is this? We seem to be able to draw fairly clear lines from A to B, find clear reasons for Paul’s suicide. But then why does Mme. Landau say, “In the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of. Yes, it is very hard. . . . one really doesn’t know” (61–62)? We don’t get easy answers, or answers at all. Take the stories of Selwyn and Adelwarth, which lie on either side of the Bereyter story. Why do they go mad? Of all the characters in The Emigrants, they are the least connected to 1930s and ’40s Germany. Do they go mad because they were gay in an uncomprehending society? European Jews in the twentieth century? Perhaps, but both things, their Jewishness and their homosexuality (two more crucial connections with Wittgenstein), let alone any connection between those things and their madness, are conveyed with the most reticent indirection. That indirection creates the sense that any of the seemingly haphazard, random, and insignificant details swirling in Sebald’s texts could be just as responsible for their madness. What else are we to make of Mme. Landau’s strange remarks made immediately after she says that it is hard to know what one dies of? She says that, as a child, Paul was fascinated by trains. He would become so absorbed in watching the trains go by that he would miss meals, prompting his uncle to say that, one day, he would “end up on the railways” (62). “For Sebald, the facts are indecipherable and therefore quite tragic,” writes Wood.25 But that misses the point and misunderstands the nature of tragedy. In tragedy, the facts are decipherable; it is that the deciphering comes too late. Comedy is when the deciphering comes in time. What is it called when the deciphering never comes at all? “It is one thing, and tragic, that we can learn only through suffering. It is something else that we have nothing to learn from it.”26 It would be a mistake to leave the claim about indecipherability unqualified. What Wood means, and what the example of Bereyter demonstrates, is that the facts are indecipherable for the person imprisoned by his pain. The great triumph of Sebald’s work is his creation of a form which is faithful to that indecipherability. One which, like Beckett’s, refuses to “help” the victim overcome it. Sebald refuses the role of the omniscient narrator filling in the gaps of his characters’ stories.27

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Sisyphean Method Skepticism about the knowledge of others is usually accompanied by complacency about knowledge of ourselves. . . . Whereas those capable of the deepest personal confession (Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Freud) were most convinced they were speaking from the most hidden knowledge of others. . . . What happens if this conviction slackens? As in Kafka and Beckett; as thematically in Thoreau and Marx and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; as sometimes in Rousseau; as in Descartes when he recognizes that voicing his doubts may put him in with lunatics and fools. In such straits, perhaps you write for everybody and nobody; for an all but unimaginable future; in pseudonyms, for the anonymous; in an album, which is haunted by pictures and peopled with voices. But what happens if you are not a writer; if you lack that way of embodying, accounting for, a slackened conviction in a community, and of staking your own . . .? What happens if all you want to do is talk, and words fail you?28 In Sebald’s texts, the towns are always deserted, the hotel rooms’ furniture covered in dust, their curtains faded. Buildings are crumbling, the people anxious and hollow-eyed, the skies and seas leaden-grey. Mist-shrouded landscapes turn into labyrinths and everywhere is a curious silence. The numerous enigmatic photographs are grainy, sometimes washed-out. Everywhere, signs of decay and death. “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes” (Rings, 31). This unrelenting despair prompts even as thoughtful a reviewer as Andre Aciman to a frustrated, “We get it, we get it.”29 But, of course, we don’t get it, don’t get it at all. Not only do we fail to get that “we are standing on a mountain of death” (Rings, 125), it isn’t even clear what it would mean to get it. And Sebald seems to suggest that we can’t. Instead, what we do is try to find ways to go on, ways to “say” the unsayable or, as Cavell would put it, ways to “live our skepticism” where that means acknowledging “unsurveyable entanglement” without turning it into “an impression of fixed, intransigent limitation.”30 That is why so many of Sebald’s characters are artists of some sort or another. Sebald scrutinizes annihilation for signs of the mysterious capacity for endurance and beauty and finds himself writing about particular artists resisting oblivion in particular ways, leaving behind their strange creations amid the bones and ashes. He writes about people who turn

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to art because they can no longer trust their voices and so turn to their hands, to their bodies. It is important here that Sebald emphasizes the physicality of writing. Wittgenstein (Emigrants, 166–167), Ferber (Emigrants, 172), Michael Hamburger (Rings, 182), Conrad (Rings, 108), Sebald (Emigrants, 31; Rings, 182), and scholars and writers in general (Rings, 283) are described as “bent over” their work.31 Sebald is interested not simply in art but in a particular way of doing art. Call it the Sisyphean method. Max Ferber repeatedly erases what he has drawn, rejecting as many as forty attempts, often finishing his portraits only through weariness (Emigrants, 162). The Ashbury sisters sew but mostly undo what they have sewn, rarely sparing any work an unstitching even though their things were “so colorful and of such intricacy that . . . at the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory” (Rings, 212). Thomas Abrams has been working on a matchstick model of the temple of Jerusalem for twenty years, but repeatedly tears down sections of what he has built and begins again, sometimes from scratch (Rings, 245). Austerlitz’s dissertation proliferates “into endless preliminary sketches” (Austerlitz, 33). These people, like the melancholic scholars and silk weavers of the final chapter of Rings, live in fear “that they have got hold of the wrong thread” (Rings, 283). Not having got hold of the wrong thread but the fear of doing so, the anxiety of doubt, the sense that something of incomparable beauty is being lost. They are perpetually stalled in approaching the unapproachable. That which must be known is shrouded, not illuminated, by the mist and fog of memory. Or perhaps, they work this way because the point is not the result. The point is escape, escape from one unbearable world to another (unbearable?) world. “All of us are fantasists,” says Mrs. Ashbury, “ill-equipped for life” (Rings, 220). Abrams “immersed himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world” (Rings, 244).32 It is a sort of stammering, a symptom of the loss of voice. “As if to write toward self-knowledge is to war with words, to battle for the very weapons with which you fight.”33 I have pointed out the elusive, indirect character of Sebald’s work. But here I want to add that the writing is portrayed as a process. The product (the finished text) simply reflects the method which Sebald shares with Ferber and the Ashbury sisters. Nietzsche wrote, “We possess art lest we perish from the truth.” Sebald, it seems, is saying, “We make art lest we perish from the truth.” The Rings of Saturn is a long meditation on our fear of death and the ways we hope to protect ourselves from it. To draw out the connection with Thomas Browne’s “Urn Burial,” which plays a central role in Rings, Sebald is concerned with art as the urns we make for ourselves in hopes of staving off oblivion. Think of art as the fragile urns of Browne’s essay; Sebald’s writing, like Chateaubriand’s, “the

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tomb that his memoirs represent” (Rings, 257). Then think of the stately mansions and the absurd defense policies (Rings, 157, 230ff.; Austerlitz, 14ff.) and colonial empire (Rings, 122) as the “pyramids, sepulchres and obelisks.” All of it seems to lead to a sort of madness. Art, like Browne’s urns, possesses the surprising ability to survive the ravages of time. This durability stands in stark contrast to the decaying old towns and mansions of Suffolk County. Reading old shipping logs in the Sailor’s Reading Room in Southwold, Sebald reflects on “the mysterious survival of the written word,” saying, “every time I decipher one of these entries I am astounded that a trail that has long since vanished from the air or water remains visible on paper” (Rings, 93). Visiting Max Ferber in 1989, with a twenty-year interval since their last meeting, Ferber gestures toward the Rembrandt print on the wall and says, “Only he doesn’t seem to be getting any older” (Emigrants, 180). The most extensive discussion of art’s resistance comes in the first and tone-setting chapter of Rings. Sebald is writing about a colleague of his, Janine Dakyns, a scholar of the nineteenth-century French novel. [She] had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he [had] written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies. . . . The source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he [had] observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head. It was (so supposedly once he said) as if one was sinking into sand. This was probably the reason, she said, that sand possessed such significance in all of Flaubert’s works. Sand conquered all. (Rings, 7–8) But in Janine’s office, it is not sand that conquers all; it is paper—books, lecture notes, letters, memoranda, all emanating from her desk. “A virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys” hiding the carpet and beginning to climb up the walls. What looked like chaos “represented in reality a perfect kind of order.”34 I don’t think it is inappropriate to say that Sebald is trying to achieve something like this in his work.35 What looks like chaos (especially in Rings)36 is actually “a perfect kind of order” or is trying to be. Sebald places his texts, like the old log books in the Sailor’s Reading Room, against the shattered civilization he sees everywhere around him and against the various ways we have tried

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to protect ourselves from that shattering—most clearly, in Rings, imperialism and capitalism, and in Austerlitz, the haunting history of military defense policy spiraling out of control. A fragile, even silly, resistance, to say the least. That seems obvious and true; Sebald doesn’t try to make us think such resistance isn’t silly and fragile. It is. But he does insist that all you have to do is spend a few weeks walking along the shore of England’s once-magnificent Suffolk County to realize that its imperial glory, once grand and seemingly invulnerable, was not only fragile and silly but immensely destructive of natural (human and otherwise) life. All decays and dies, and “the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy” and “in vain do individuals hope for Immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the Moon.” “Pyramids, Arches, Obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory.”37 Sebald’s is not simply a relentless chronicling of decay and loss. His work is about the decay and loss of pyramids, arches, obelisks, and a careful, detailed turn to the urns of paper landscapes and matchstick temples. Outsiders, when they don’t simply dismiss them, may often misunderstand paper landscapes. So when Jefferson says, it is time to “wake up and go on now,” or Aciman says, “We get it, we get it,” a plausible response is that Sebald isn’t trying to convince you of anything. He isn’t arguing for the decline of the West or the nihilism of postmodernity; he is writing simply because that is all he knows to do. Sebald’s work is also created by the stammering Sisyphean method employed by his companions. “By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘final version’ seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched” (Emigrants, 230–231).38 Can we call his writing, the Ashbury sisters’ sewing, Ferber’s painting, Abrams’ temple, like Wittgenstein’s philosophy, claims to community? Community is too big a word for what is happening in these texts, if it means something bigger than two, if the companionship of one does not count. The Sisyphean nature of it suggests their difficulty, their deep fear that they will not be heard, listened to. That there will be no other for their voices. It confirms, “There is a natural problem of making such experiences known, not merely because behavior as a whole may seem irrelevant (or too dumb, or gross) at such times, but because one hasn’t forms of words at one’s command to realize those feelings, and hasn’t anyone else whose interest in helping to find the words one trusts.”39 It also suggests that they are caught, helplessly, between an eventual us and the loss of a prior us. Caught between hope for a future community and fear of betraying a past community. We feel helpless before these stories, this art. We haven’t the strength or will to hear.

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But if we did, how would we honor these stories? We would not honor them by treating them as exceptions which prove the rules of moral philosophy. We would not honor them with therapeutic remonstration against forgetting. It is not that I don’t think remembering is important or don’t think Sebald thinks so. I have no wish for remonstrations for forgetting any more than against forgetting. But what Sebald makes inescapable is the ways in which remembering and forgetting are not always choices. The people who need most to remember cannot do so. Paul Bereyter couldn’t decide to remember any more than he decided to forget. It is not a coincidence, but rather the point, that he is only able to try after he meets Mme. Landau. Even then, remembering destroys him. Austerlitz is unique in Sebald’s oeuvre in his ability to recover his memory but that is not because of anything Sebald does differently than with the less fortunate others. We would not honor them by insisting that all the stories end with the hopefulness of Austerlitz. But neither do we honor them by leaving them to their loneliness, conceding their despair. We honor them by closely, intently attending to their voices, trying to be land for their sea-borne bottles; by listening just the way Sebald does, by refusing to “wake up and go on now” if that means wake up and go on without them; by offering them the possibility of an eventual us. We honor them the way we honor anyone else.

4 Fugitive Ecclesia

We must always be ready to change sides, like justice, the eternal fugitive from the camp of the victors. —Simone Weil The more I live, the more I think two people together is a miracle. —Adrienne Rich1 In an essay on Jeffrey Stout, Stanley Hauerwas and Philip Kenneson worried that critiques of MacIntyre like that of Stout tended to assume that “things aren’t as bad as they seem.”2 But if Cavell’s turn to companionship is at all appropriate, then it seems that things are worse than even MacIntyre imagines. That is, MacIntyre and the theologians most influenced by him, such as Hauerwas and the proponents of radical orthodoxy, are optimistic enough to hold out hope for community, whereas Cavell only “promises us, not the re-assembly of community, but personal relationship unsponsored by that community; not the overcoming of our isolation, but the sharing of that isolation.”3 MacIntyre and his followers have failed to see that we have reached a point where no such community as he envisions is possible. Or at least it seems that they are still holding out hope for community. In this chapter, I venture the suggestion that such optimism about the possibility of community is largely rhetorical,

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thinly masking uncertainties as deep as Cavell’s. To do so, I will engage another contemporary political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, one of political liberalism’s most articulate critics, who provides another compelling alternative to MacIntyre and to Rawls/Nussbaum. In 1996, Wolin published an essay entitled “Fugitive Democracy.” It was, according to William Connolly, pervaded by a “mood of disappointment,” a despair about the possibility of democracy. Throughout history, but especially in the modern world, not least in those countries, mostly in the West, which claim to be democratic, democracy can only be momentary, occasional, sporadic, and evanescent, to use just a few of the words Wolin and those commenting on the essay have used to describe it. Wolin wrote: I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well being of the collectivity. Politics refers to the legitimized public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless. In contrast, the political is episodic, rare.4 Among the more commonly noted examples of the political are the 1989 revolution, Poland’s Solidarity movement, and the Charter 77 dissidents. Looking past those, the antiwar movement and the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s would also be examples of the political. All these movements share several things in common. Most important among those things is that their power sprang from the grassroots; they were diverse coalitions; they were not political actors coming together but individuals formed into political actors through their common deliberation; and the moments at which they achieved “the political” were fleeting, fugitive. Not only were they fugitive, they often, perhaps most clearly in the case of Poland, degenerated into something authoritarian and reactionary. The argument of this chapter is that Wolin’s “political” bears a striking resemblance to much contemporary political theology’s “church.” I refer not only to the occasional radically democratic elements5 in some theologies or to the reconception of the political which refuses to confine it to statecraft, but to its fugitivity. It seems that the trajectory of the argument in theologians such as John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and other radical orthodox theologians, like William Cavanaugh and Daniel Bell, moves toward what we might call fugitive ecclesia. Often, however, they seem reticent about

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saying so explicitly. They seem caught between the inescapability of the fugitive and the promise to Peter. To put it as bluntly, if a bit crudely, as possible, theology is faced with the unbearable suggestion that modernity/late capitalism/ postmodernity/the secular/neo-neo-neo-Constantinianism, pick your epithet, is tantamount to the gates of hell. That the church is fugitive for these theologians isn’t hard to see.6 Yoder has to look back to the sixteenth century to find his ecclesia.7 Milbank has to go even further, to the eleventh century.8 William Cavanaugh and Dan Bell travel both temporally and spatially. In Cavanaugh’s case, the eleventh century and Chile;9 in Bell’s, twelfth-century Cistercians or Latin American base communities.10 Yoder’s Anabaptism managed to be “church” for at most a generation or two. Milbank’s church was helpless to resist even the faintest birth pangs of modernity. Cavanaugh’s is co-extensive with the Pinochet persecution and, like Solidarity or the German Confessing Church, seems unlikely to survive “normalcy.” Bell’s base communities seem to be more durable, but he is unable to give a very thick description of them so we have reason to be skeptical.11 There is an unmistakable note of desperation in such traveling. It is as if the theologians are duplicating the role of the colonial anthropologists who found themselves having to go farther and farther upriver, deeper and deeper into the jungle, in order to find the pristine, the pure, the traditional. There may be several reasons for this. One, I think, is simply a profound disappointment in North American and European churches’ inability to live up to any kind of radical mandate. Such traveling is provoked by an anxious “it’s got to be somewhere.” That sort of pressure results in a demand to see what we want to see, what we need to see if we are not to lose hope. It is not that we might lose hope, but that we must lose hope. “Either the Church enacts the vision of paradisal community . . . or else it promotes a hellish society beyond any terrors known to antiquity.”12 The all-or-nothing here, the refusal of any sort of middle ground, sounds the note of desperation. For all these thinkers, everything hangs on church being what they say it is. Without church, the gospel isn’t true. I do not wish to contest the convictions which lead to this account of church. I share many of them. But, if we only have a fugitive ecclesia, is that enough to support the weight that we have hung on the church’s witness? What happens to claims like “the meanings of the word ‘God’ are to be discovered by watching what this community does,” or “the church is the organized form of Jesus’ story,”13 when the only thing that might count as that community is episodic, evanescent, fugitive? Just as Wolin recognizes that the space for democracy is severely constricted, all these theologians recognize that church is in a similar situation. But unlike Wolin, they never go on to declare it fugitive and be, if not happy

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with it, at least resigned to it. Fugitive ecclesia, while abundantly attested to in their writings, is a second best. The guiding assumption of their writing, partly because so many of them are attached to a particular (Roman or AngloCatholic) account of tradition, seems to be that something more consistent is possible and that the current fugitivity is something that we should expect to overcome if only we properly understand the nature of the enemy and then grit our teeth, yank on our bootstraps, and summon up the will to surmount our current apathy. But that possibility is assumed more than it is argued. A rather bleak account of modernity is essential to their ecclesiology. Their churches are described and to some degree, and not improperly, determined by their cultural studies–driven accounts of “world.” So-called liberals such as Jeffrey Stout are criticized for implying that things aren’t as bad as they seem. But the irony, which turns into a trap, is that things have to be bad enough to justify the rigid church-world dualism but not so bad as to make church impossible. It is tempting to force a choice: either church is possible and therefore things are not so bad, or things are every bit as ugly as they often seem and therefore we should give up hope for anything more than fugitive ecclesia. Milbank and Yoder are (very different) exceptions here in that they both have accepted the fugitive with at least some degree of clarity. Milbank says things like “We are forced to admit that it [church as he understands it] can only have been present intermittently during the Christian centuries.”14 He accepts the choice and takes the latter option. But he doesn’t say if this is just a distant second best or if it is the best that we can achieve within modernity’s constraints. Yoder, however, complicates forcing such a choice. First, his account of world has always been more ambivalent than the others’. To borrow terms from Stout, Yoder takes a more stereoscopic and ambivalent view of modernity and liberalism.15 Second, it has been argued that Yoder is uninterested in diachronic accounts of church in ways that undermine an account of tradition, that is, in ways that acknowledge and accept the fugitive. My earlier claim—that Yoder’s church only lasted a generation or two—was misleading. He seems happy to say, in ways that make some Catholics shudder, that throughout history the Holy Spirit has been active in bringing forth, if only briefly, faithful communities of witness to Christ’s Lordship—the Waldensians, the Czech Brethren, the Anabaptists, the Society of Friends, the restoration movement, the Kimbanguists, the Mukyokai, etc.—and that, despite the unpredictability of such emergences, there is no reason to think that they will not continue. Moreover, he steadfastly resists drawing genetic connections between these movements in ways which would grant the traditionalists what they need. “Democracy,” Wolin writes, “has no continuous history.”16 Yoder, it seems,

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would say the same about church. Moreover, for Wolin, as for Yoder, this is a good thing in the sense that it demonstrates the extent of the democrat’s and the Christian’s reluctance to clutch at the good, and its capacity for dispossession. “The experience of which democracy is the witness is the realization that the political mode of existence is such that it can be, and is, periodically lost.”17 The argument in this chapter will proceed in three sections. First, I will summarize what Wolin meant by fugitive democracy and look at some (friendly) critics of the idea. After that, I will return to theology and draw out some parallels and some odd discrepancies between Wolin and the theologians of fugitivity. In the last section, I will draw out some possible implications and directions of ecclesial fugitivity. I intend my readings of these various thinkers to be brief but as faithful as possible to their work. The argument is not with their texts individually but with them when brought under the rubric of fugitivity. Any claims made in this chapter are not about the adequacy of these theologians’ accounts of church. At no point do I argue that they are right or wrong. Rather, I try to follow the trajectory of their arguments just far enough to pose the question: “Given what we have learned from these theologians, what do we need to go on to say about the fugitivity of the church, and what should or may follow from that?” Often, it turns out that these are questions the theologians should have been more attentive to. My hope is that “fugitivity” does something, if not much, to ease the tension which seems to me to have become unbearable: the tension between, say, vision and reality, dream and practice, theology and church. But I fear it may only make it worse.

Fugitive Democracy and Its Critics Let me hazard an all-too-brief description of democracy by unpacking one of Wolin’s most succinct accounts of it. The idea of democracy that I employ runs roughly like this. Democracy should not depend on the elites making a one-time gift to the demos of a predesigned framework of equal rights. This does not mean that rights do not matter a great deal, but rights in a democracy depend on the demos winning them, extending them substantively, and, in the process, acquiring experience of the political, that is, of participating in power, reflecting on the consequences of its exercise, and struggling to sort out the common well-being amid cultural differences and socioeconomic disparities. The presence of democracy is not signified by paying deference to a formal principle of popular

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sovereignty by ensuring continuing political education, nor is democracy nurtured by stipulating that reasonable principles of justice be in place from the beginning. Democracy requires that the experiences of justice and injustice serve as moments for the demos to think, to reflect, perchance to construct themselves as actors. Democracy is about the continuing self-fashioning of the demos.18 These brief remarks show that, as Wolin has written elsewhere, “First, democracy means participation.”19 But participation is never just voting or office holding. Participation, or what Wolin here calls “experience of the political,” is when persons negotiate their conflicting interests instead of leaving it to the bureaucrats and managerial elites. But that doesn’t quite say enough. It is misleading if it suggests that such deliberation simply replaces what the bureaucrats do. Rather, it creates new tasks, foments new conflict. Democracy is a way of “constituting power.”20 It is the “self-fashioning of the demos.” Democracy isn’t just sitting there, waiting to be seized by some person or another, one group or another. It must be created. It follows that democracy is also a way of constituting individuals. “Democracy is committed to the claim that experience with, and access to, power is essential to the development of the capacities of ordinary persons because power is crucial to human dignity and realization.”21 The democratic citizen is one who, in the practices of democratic negotiation, of agonistic dialogue, is forged into a political being. She is truthful, vulnerable, and accountable (for her actions and to others). That means each person’s (or group’s) account of the good must take shape the same way. Democracy is deliberation about what constitutes the good and how to achieve it, not about how to achieve a good known in advance through strategies known in advance. It requires attentive and receptive listening to different others and a willingness to give undiluted voice to my own self-interest. Just as I must not silence others, I must not silence myself. Democracy encourages the voicing of differences. It welcomes and demands dissent from the most unruly corners of the demos. But it is never difference for the sake of difference, nor unruliness for its own sake. As Rowan Williams puts it in an essay Wolin would have appreciated, the task is to “find the way in which the goals of individuals and groups might be seen as interdependent, interwoven. A social vision is what makes it possible to connect different sorts of need or want,” which suggests that my needs or wants cannot be discovered or understood in isolation from yours.22 Now, we can begin to see at least one reason or cluster of reasons that democracy is fugitive. When, through such deliberation, a collective good emerges and is then achieved, it all too quickly becomes a “common good.”

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That is, it is allowed to be the sort of good which overrules emerging conflicts. This is the attempt to possess the good, to refuse to see it as provisional. It is the democrats themselves who allow this to happen and understandably so. Precisely because of the magnitude of the achievement and the intensity of the struggle, they are unwilling to entrust the achievement to the process which made it possible. Often, this takes the form of constitutionalism. For this reason, Wolin reads Plato and even Aristotle as anti-democratic theorists. They are the first examples of the perennial resistance to the always transgressive political. It must either be destroyed or contained. For Wolin, the principal agent of containment is a constitution, and Plato and Aristotle “invented constitutionalism.”23 Constitutional democracy is the taming and restraining of the demos when the principles it articulates turn into ways of shortcutting the democratic process. This much is essential to Wolin’s account. Democracy always invites resistance, creates its own enemies. The various other agents of containment we find today—the modern state and the market—are in many ways unprecedented, but the fact that democracy is always resisted is as old as Athens. As soon as the democratic moment tries to stretch itself into permanence, as soon as it becomes institutionalized, it loses its transgressive energy. As George Kateb puts it, summarizing Wolin, “Unless form killed the spirit, the spirit would kill it. The spirit wants to kill it forever, but cannot.”24 It should be pointed out that what is fugitive here seems to be the moments when diverse coalitions achieve the political at the national level. At times, Wolin grants the name democracy to local, small-scale movements and seems to think that they are not fugitive (democracy but without the political). He writes, “Surprisingly, despite the attenuation of democracy at the level of national politics, there still exists a highly flourishing archaic political culture that is democratic, participatory, localist, and, overall, more egalitarian than elitist in ideology. . . . They can be bigoted, provincial, myopic and anti-intellectual. Yet their archaism represents the main, perhaps the only, democratic counterthrust to statism.”25 But, at other times, he emphasizes the “limitations” of localism, which can only be surmounted “by seeking out the evanescent homogeneity of a broader political.”26 That it so rarely does so is simply evidence of the contemporary containment of democracy. The modern state can tolerate the local so long as it remains local. “Localism is that state-sponsored Potemkin Village in the age of Wolfahrtsstaaträson.”27 That said, it remains true that any attainment of the political will depend upon and grow out of such local participatory democracies. But the worry is that even democratic localism is now momentary and fugitive. Wolin is driven to this latter mood of skepticism about the local because of the power of what he calls the megastate. Briefly, the megastate is Wolin’s way

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of attending to the manner in which political power is now far too diffuse to be confined to the specific institutions of the state apparatus and instead reaches into all levels of civil society. There are similarities to Foucault here, but Wolin’s central debt seems to be to Weber, where the role of the corporation in the megastate is emphasized far more than in Foucault. Important for my purposes is that Wolin’s account of the megastate helps to explain why he reserves the title “the political” for the level of the entire collectivity. The local may be democratic, but it can’t be the political because only a movement as broad as the collectivity itself can present a challenge to the enormous power of the megastate, can escape the mutual colonization of public and private into one massive economic polity. Many of the essays in the 2001 festschrift for Wolin, Democracy and Vision, are preoccupied with “Fugitive Democracy” (far more than with Politics and Vision or The Presence of the Past). The responses to the essay are multiple, but I want to focus on three of them, those by Nicholas Xenos, Peter Euben, and Stephen White, all of which concur with Wolin’s invocation of the 1989 revolution in Eastern Europe as a stellar example of the political. Xenos takes the fugitive character of democracy for granted and, unlike Connolly, thinks that Wolin’s argument is “without nostalgia or despair.” Xenos’s essay closes by reflecting on Timothy Garton Ash’s account of the central voice of Czechoslovakia’s resistance, the Civic Forum. According to Ash, the Civic Forum defied the categories of political theory: “A political scientist would be hard pressed to find a term to describe” the Civic Forum. It was, in Xenos’s words, a “democratic moment that cannot be understood in terms of a preexisting entity.” It was ad hoc and spontaneous. Ash is tempted to call it politics in a “pure” form. It is not a formal, centralized party. It lacks “a legitimating structure to under gird its claim to being representative,” yet it is unmistakably the voice of the demos. In Václav Havel’s words, it is “infused with enthusiasm for a particular purpose and disappearing when that purpose has been achieved.” Havel’s presidency, then, is the end, not the beginning of the political. That is the democratic moment. “Democracy eludes definition because it has a protean nature, but it is not unrecognizable. It is transformative, but it leaves no institutional product. It exists in the moment when we open ourselves and our communities to the unfamiliar and the unsettling, then dissolves when a new familiarity and a new settlement take place.”28 It is invariably “unsustainable, episodic, unpredictable, and rare.”29 For Xenos, this provokes no disappointment at all. The political simply is fugitive, and since there is no reason to expect that it might be anything more than that, there is no reason to be disappointed in its lack of sustainability.

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Peter Euben doesn’t directly engage Xenos or “Fugitive Democracy” and is less interested than Xenos in an exegesis of Wolin. The bulk of his essay is concerned with describing Athenian democracy and the Stoic reaction to its collapse, and an incisive critique of Martha Nussbaum’s espousal of an updated Stoicism. He ends his essay with an attempt to retrieve, in contrast to Nussbaum, a democratic ethos inspired by Athens but cognizant of the great historical chasm separating the globalized world from the polis. Here, his remarks become pertinent to my discussion. His interest is in how to cultivate a radical democratic politics in the context of globalization without underestimating the importance of place. To that end, he invokes those spaces in civil society where participatory opportunities exist. He finds a great many such places, and they parallel what Wolin calls the “archaic” or the local. Any such place may be called a parallel polis, the term used to describe the engine of the 1989 revolution. He argues that the parallel polis “is an ever present possibility even under the most inhospitable conditions.”30 It remains possible even under conditions as inhospitable as the megastate, which Euben says we must “acknowledge,” but he doesn’t think that means we must abandon the state–civil society distinction. If the parallel polis could work in Eastern Europe, it can also work elsewhere. According to Euben, Havel “argued that the situations [that the parallel polis] was meant to combat . . . [were] present in the Western democracies as well.”31 The controversial nature of that final claim is brought out in a thoughtful essay by Stephen White. He writes: It is difficult, at least for someone like me, not to find Wolin’s radical democratic conception of the political inspiring. And yet, the more I ponder its trajectory and ethos, the more I find it to be tailored to what is too extraordinary, too heroic, at least in regard to the realities of late modern democratic life. No doubt, Wolin intends moments of forging commonality to be extraordinary in some senses. But I think his conception of the political is extraordinary in ways that make it too remote from the ongoing expression of democratic energies, which is something he does not intend.32 Like Xenos and Euben, the example Wolin appeals to in “Fugitive Democracy” is from Eastern Europe, specifically Poland’s Solidarity movement. White asks, “Would it make sense to expect such a Solidarity movement in Poland today?” The democratic achievement of Solidarity, he argues, was “deeply bound up with the clarity, intensity, and extensiveness of the oppression in Communist Poland. The extremity of the injustice called forth an extraordinary response.”33 For White, Wolin’s democracy becomes a possibility

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only in response to particular circumstances. Wolin’s vision is “appropriate primarily for situations ripe for revolutionary transformation.” Such situations are ones in which there is a “relatively monolithic source of injustice that can become a clear and steady target or foe.”34 In the absence of such moral clarity, or in the absence of a clearly identifiable “enemy,” the political will be much less likely. White thinks Wolin’s account is inadequate in a way that Xenos doesn’t. There is a certain agreement between the two about where and when democracy is possible. The difference is that this worries White and not Xenos. But White also thinks that episodes like the 1989 revolution cannot be invoked as easily as Euben does. One way to describe what White is doing is to say that he shifts the question from “What makes it impossible to achieve anything more than a fugitive political?” to “What makes it possible to achieve it at all?”

Church and Society in Radical Orthodoxy A central target of Bell’s and Cavanaugh’s critiques35 is the claim that civil society politics (grassroots social movements, for example) provides a way to influence the state apparatus for the better without taking hold of the reins of the state itself. This is problematic first of all because this type of politics is still wedded to politics as statecraft. It may not want to occupy Caesar’s throne or be the ruling party, but it will not allow any such activity to be an end in itself or political in itself. Its value is not intrinsic but comes from the influence it can have on the state, which is still seen as the political actor par excellence. But second, Bell and Cavanaugh argue that the distinction itself is no longer useful.36 Here, they follow a reading of Foucault and Deleuze articulated most clearly by Michael Hardt.37 Instead of the state and civil society, we now have what Foucault called “governmentality.” The state is no longer the sole agency of disciplinary power but is part of a diffuse network of such agencies. The institutions of what was once called civil society—the factory, school, church, hospital—are part of this network.38 Civil society is not a free space from which to contest state power, it is part of the network of normalization and is so in such a way that makes a distinction between it and the state impossible. The failure to realize this is a failure to offer any real resistance to governmentality. Hardt goes on from here to show how Deleuze moves one step beyond Foucault: from the disciplinary society to the society of control. The disciplinary society is made up of clearly defined institutions, each with relatively distinct logics. The society of control is the collapsing of these distinctions into a generalized logic of control and the passage from what Marx called the formal subsumption of labor to the real subsumption.39

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The problem is that neither Bell nor Cavanaugh is clear about how it is that their churches of choice manage to escape governmentality in a way that Hardt’s proletariat does not. In the case of Bell’s base communities, that may be easier to imagine. But Cavanaugh (in Torture and Eucharist) consistently has in mind the entire Chilean Catholic community. (To put it in Wolin’s terms, Bell’s base communities, unlike Cavanaugh’s church, are examples of local democracies that do not achieve the political.) I mention this to bring to light the crucial and instructive difference with Wolin. While he does not make explicit use of Foucault’s governmentality, his “megastate” functions to make a similar point about the usefulness of civil society as a space in which to locate resistance.40 It is precisely this which makes him fear that the political will be episodic at best. It doesn’t occur to him to suggest a withdrawal from civil society in order to get something more than the episodic, because it is not at all clear what such a withdrawal could possibly mean. Governmentality or the megastate is not something you withdraw from or transcend or escape or elude. The whole point is that there is nowhere to go. If there is an outside, than it is not the megastate or governmentality or the society of control.41 In Bell and Cavanaugh, there is a curious sleight of hand by which the church, unlike Hardt’s proletariat, somehow manages to escape but in a way that is not accounted for. I am not quarreling with their visions of what church can be: a disciplined body formed by particular practices which understands itself as a politics in its own right, a politics that does not have to influence the state in order for its politics to come to fruition. I simply do not understand how this gains a privilege over or outside the society of control. Hardt’s account allows for two ways of making an argument for some kind of outside. Since his account begins with Hegel, concrete labor still counts as an outside to civil society. For Hegel, civil society is the organization of abstract labor, the taming of the “unruly and savage beast” of concrete labor, and, for Hegel, the peasant’s labor is paradigmatic. Second, the move from civil society to the society of control is marked by the passage from the formal subsumption of labor to its real subsumption. For Marx, formal subsumption means capital’s ability to incorporate, or abstract, already existing labor, labor born prior to and outside of capital’s demands. Real subsumption means that capital creates its own labor. It no longer has to incorporate the external, but instead labor is born internally. Therefore, pockets of labor which are still prior to real subsumption would constitute an outside to the society of control, a civil society that could be thought of on Gramsci’s terms instead of Foucault’s. Bell and Cavanaugh don’t attempt any arguments for such pockets of labor. This is not surprising. It is not clear that they can be made, and Hardt himself only gestures toward the latter. But the point is simply that at least Hardt acknowledges

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the space he is in and the difficulty of escaping it. Bell and Cavanaugh are not as careful. Alternatively, if this vision of church is achieved, as they argue it is in the base communities and in the Chilean Catholic community and as they seem to think it can be in North America, then there is space to entertain the argument that maybe Hardt and Negri et al. have overstated their claims about the withering of civil society. They might at least acknowledge that some grassroots social movements or civil society organizations may also occasionally become free spaces instead of relentlessly trying to preserve the church’s uniqueness.42 I do not mean to insist, with Hardt and Negri, that there is and can be no outside. My claim is only that, if there is, it must be accounted for, not simply asserted. Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist is surely one of the finest works of political theology in recent decades. Nevertheless, it seems to me that much of its persuasive power comes from a sleight of hand. His focus on Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) is, of course, appropriate. But to make the argument about civil society, he would have had to also deal with the more prosaic, mundane functions of the state in Chile. His refusal of the state–civil society distinction should lead him to also discuss all the institutions to which, for example, Foucault gave so much attention. But the Pinochet regime’s extensive reliance on torture allows Cavanaugh to avoid all of Foucault’s institutions (school, hospital, factory, etc.) except the prison. The book succeeds brilliantly as an argument for ecclesial resistance to the modern state (understood on preFoucault lines) but barely begins the argument with governmentality. In a later book, Cavanaugh does make that argument, extending his critique of civil society and adding significant detail to the argument in Torture and Eucharist. Theopolitical Imagination makes many important criticisms of civil society organizations and grassroots social movements, criticisms I often find to be appropriate. But I remain baffled by the way weaknesses and failures in social movements are taken to be essential to the movements, while the same weaknesses and failures in the church are somehow accidental. Moreover, I remain baffled by the way Cavanaugh’s critique of civil society doesn’t lead him to consider varieties of politics recommended by non-church thinkers who are just as critical of the concept of civil society—for example, Wolin or Hardt and Negri. Of course, Hardt and Negri play a foundational role in the critique, but their proposals for a radical politics are never allowed either to be potential allies for Cavanaugh’s church or to complicate Cavanaugh’s theory of the church. It becomes entirely too easy to forget that the animating vision of the believer is not a holy church; it is creation restored. (Better put, it becomes entirely too possible to see these as mutually exclusive.)43 Rowan Williams writes:

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Christians in general and theologians in particular are thus going to be involved as best they can in those enterprises in their culture that seek to create or recover a sense of shared discourse and common purpose in human society. This can mean various things. The most obvious is some sort of critical identification with whatever political groupings speak for a serious and humane resistance to consumer pluralism and the administered society.44 He goes on to note as examples the movements around ecological issues, feminism, civil rights, and peace. It is not clear that Cavanaugh or Bell would disagree with this (but not clear enough that they would). But what is clear is that, first, they rarely if ever acknowledge such enterprises or political groupings, and second, their account of civil society makes it unlikely that they could even if they wanted to. In contrast to Bell and Cavanaugh, Milbank seems to have learned this from his recent attention to Hardt and Negri. Where he once said things like “[e]ither the Church enacts the vision of paradisal community . . . or else it promotes a hellish society beyond any terrors known to antiquity,” his more recent work has some nuance. “How is the Church to evaluate these circumstances [of postmodernity]? . . . Our attitude is bound to be a complex one. Not outright refusal, nor outright acceptance.”45 Unlike Bell and Cavanaugh, Hardt and Negri seem to have taught Milbank that the old spaces of purity, whether named church or proletariat, are no longer to be found. It is not yet clear what that may mean for how we read some of Milbank’s earlier work. For example, he once wrote, “Our given historical circumstances limit the chances we have of behaving ethically. . . . the nature of our present historical condition is such that we are faced with tragic dilemmas in which it is impossible to avoid complicity in evil.”46 We “can only decide and act ethically within the way of arranging, picturing and speaking of the world” that society provides us with. Our “moral capacity is extra-ethically constrained.” Some of the language here is troubling, i.e., it is not at all clear what the unlimited, the unconstrained, or “extra-ethical” could possibly or intelligibly be, and “tragic” is in desperate need of explication. Against Hauerwas’s pacifism, Milbank writes that in “extreme market liberalism . . . the church is simply robbed of certain possibilities of realizing certain practices which should define its nature.”47 Here, again, it is certainly fair to say that “extreme market liberalism” may make certain desirable ecclesial practices impossible. But for the moment, the question is simply this: if violence is to be permitted under the

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guise of tragedy and historical conditions, what is it about modern Christian (non)practice that doesn’t get the same absolution? Milbank must tell us what possibilities he doesn’t think we are robbed of under liberalism. He must help us distinguish between possibilities and impossibilities, between the opportunities squandered by our unfaithfulness and the opportunities closed off by liberalism. Take, for example, an essay like “Can Morality Be Christian?” Surely, much of what is suggested here is, like pacifism, an ideal which liberalism has robbed us of. How much does he expect us to be faithful to, and how much can we ignore in light of “extreme market liberalism”? We need to know why we can ignore pacifism, but not the suggestions in “Can Morality Be Christian?” Milbank owes us such distinctions if we are to know how to read him. To frame the issue in the terms of this chapter, does Milbank think we are robbed of even the fugitive possibility of a nonmoral Christian ethic? Yoder doesn’t engage in the sort of cultural criticism that the rest devote so much attention to. On one hand, that is one of the most refreshing things about him, the ability to do theology well in the manner Barth suggested, “as if nothing had happened.” He does not allow his vision of church to become dialectically overdetermined by world. But, on the other hand, it means that he leaves us without a diagnosis of why church is fugitive. The implicit suggestion that church was no easier in the Middle Ages is certainly true. But we still need some account of the particular circumstances that presently make for fugitivity. Without that, we are left to think that church is fugitive because we just aren’t trying hard enough. By contrast, Hauerwas does provide an account of the circumstances that make it difficult to embody church. But there, too, it is sometimes hard to avoid the impression that the message is “if only Christians would quit selling out to liberalism, then we could recover a faithful witness.” The church is criticized for selling out as if it were something it had a choice about, which is odd, to say the least, given how much Hauerwas resists the language of choice: as if there is a certain freedom to maneuver that, due to a lack of will or conviction or commitment, we just aren’t taking advantage of.48 You could never get that impression from Wolin, whose emphasis is on the increasing unavailability of such spaces of maneuverability. Instead, you get something like those unpredictable moments in which, Seamus Heaney says, “the tidal wave/ of justice can rise up/ and hope and history rhyme.” That doesn’t mean Wolin is pessimistic. (And it surely doesn’t mean he is apathetic or cynical, sitting on his hands waiting for the tidal wave.) It means he is more relentless in pursuing the conclusions implied by the critique. It is never clear to Wolin just what we might do. Of course, he knows that we must quit thinking of politics as statecraft. He knows that “democracy needs

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to be reconceived as something other than a form of government: as a mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility so long as the memory of the political survives.”49 Not only is the political impossible to institutionalize or to sustain for very long, its emergence is also impossible to predict. We may try to cultivate a readiness for its appearance, even to foment its appearance (by active participation in grassroots social movements, by actively encouraging such movements to be democratic), but when and where we will succeed are impossible to know in advance. All the odds are stacked against us. We can’t just suck it up and will ourselves out of it. That will mean one thing for Wolin and another for theologians. Wolin doesn’t have the same kind of weight hanging on the embodiment. For the theologian, what is at stake is the validity of the church’s witness. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”50

Friendship and Fugitivity There are many possible paths that might be taken from here, few of which are mutually exclusive. To conclude this chapter, I will sketch some of them, most of which would require their own books. In the rest of this book, I will pursue just the final one, the one that seems to me most Cavellian. 1. We could just give it all up. If it is true that “either the Church enacts the vision of paradisal community . . . or else it promotes a hellish society beyond any terrors known to antiquity” and also true that the church has been promoting a hellish society since at least the eleventh century, then it is not at all clear why any of us would maintain any affection for it. On the contrary, we are surely obligated to decisively abandon it. 2. We may want to simply accept it, even heighten it. Then, we would say that the possibility of church in the culture of the late capitalist West is now something like the possibility in, say, India or Saudi Arabia, where the Christian presence is very small and missionary efforts almost negligible. That is in contrast to the premodern era, when the West was more like contemporary Africa, where Christianity swept across the continent in a matter of decades. There is, however, the important difference that we are post-Christian. Now, instead of fertile soil for the flower of Christian faith to grow, we have a sort of postnuclear ash in which the church cannot take root any more than other

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robust forms of democratic community can. This is simply the way it is, and therefore we should celebrate the moments of fugitivity rather than mourn that this is all there is. It could happen that the more we stress this, the less culpable we are, hence, the more lethargic. Pessimism breeds apathy. But it could also happen that we learn to joyfully cultivate a readiness for the episodic ecclesial moment. 3. Another option would be to say that our expectations are simply too high and should be scaled back, be made more “realistic.” But it is hard to see how a faith rooted in the example of Christ can have expectations that are too high without sacrificing the priority of that example. The inadequacies of Niebuhr’s Christology make the point. Moreover, that is what we have. It is the problem that, in one way or another, all theologians are wrestling with; it is not a solution. 4. We could, like Karl Barth, refuse to make the church bear so much weight. Barth is as fond of the word “only” as Milbank. But, for Barth, it modifies “Jesus Christ” not “the church.” The Barthian option maintains the high expectations and standards, but doesn’t pin so much on meeting them. Better, doesn’t have to pin so much on the church meeting them because Jesus Christ met them on the cross and everything is pinned on that event. While “the world would be lost without Jesus Christ and His Word and work . . . the world would not necessarily be lost if there were no Church.”51 It is not clear, but I think it is highly doubtful that any of the theologians I have been concerned with would agree with this claim of Barth’s. But it is this which enables such radical dispossession on Barth’s part and his openness to outsiders. It also makes an acceptance of the fugitive possible, even necessary. Milbank accepts fugitivity because he must in light of his understanding of the secular. Barth accepts it because he must in light of his understanding of the primacy of Christ. He adamantly refuses the temporal traveling of radical orthodoxy. “It is not in any sense strange that the world is secular. This is simply to say that the world is the world. It was always secular, there is no greater error than to imagine that this was not the case in the much-vaunted Middle Ages.”52 From the perspective of fugitive ecclesia, the common criticism is that Barth’s ecclesiology sacrifices concreteness, loses some of its force. (This criticism is articulately laid out in an essay by Reinhard Hütter.53 Hütter argues that Luther shows the way past Barth because “instead of pointing as witnesses to the Holy Spirit’s activity [as they— merely?—do for Barth] these practices [the marks of the church] rather

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embody the Holy Spirit’s work.” The question then, and I don’t insist that it is necessarily a Barthian question, is, “What do we do when churches bearing those marks become fugitive?”) For Barth, as with Yoder, this makes defenselessness possible. If we accept the fugitive, then the recourse to authoritarian models of leadership (exemplified in Milbank and, occasionally, Hauerwas) becomes not just pointless, but unfaithful. 5. Another option, to which Hauerwas comes closest and from which Milbank and Yoder remain distant, would be to say that we lack the necessary skills and capacities for seeing the ways in which we might actually already be meeting those expectations.54 That means we must confess that we may be blinded by certain habits of vision, blind to our successes as much as our failures. Of course, here, too, it may be that the more we accept fugitivity, the less confident we can be of our ability to unlearn those habits. But there may be reason to hope that, if we can unlearn those habits, possibilities might emerge for perceiving new shapes of faithfulness. I say might because the point is that, until we unlearn those habits, we will never know if and how we are faithful or if and how we are not being faithful. Earlier, I alluded to the colonial anthropologist and the salvage expedition. If that analogy works at all, then it means at least two things. Not only does the non-fugitive begin to look different, we may also begin to be suspicious of the fugitive. We may begin to think that perhaps it wasn’t all that great, that it included elements of violence which, in our eagerness to find the fugitive, we were all too willing to overlook. Ethnographers didn’t become wary of the “salvage and redemption” of the primitive and pristine because they could no longer find them, but because they started to realize there were no such things. 6. This might also suggest the importance of a certain renewed interest in what is going on outside the church, in other religious groups, in various social movements. If it is true that we need to try harder, then outsiders may be able to teach us how and to clarify what for. Instead of, or along with, being driven to such great distances to find the fugitive ecclesia, we might look more intently for what Barth called “secular parables” of the church (not that they are any less fugitive), for ways of being in the world which may witness to Christ’s Lordship, if not in name. “Once some who affirm the name deny or pervert its historic content, the door is also open for others, if they want to affirm the content, to do it without the name.”55 Am I mistaken in thinking

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that, with the exception of Yoder and Williams, the search for the fugitive ecclesia has created a defensiveness, a resistance to doing so? As if what is now most needed is a defense of the church, which precludes finding joy outside it even though it can’t find joy inside it? In Cavanaugh and Bell, this becomes ominously explicit as everything but their churches get consigned to civil society. 7. It could also create the space for, even demand, a defense of what Emerson called “self-reliance.” If church is as rare as these theologians think, then all their reflections on the church, while important, also make room for greater attention to the individual. That (seemingly) most impertinent of statements about “the theologian alone”56 may actually be onto something important. A robust individualism (which is not what the communitarians think it is) becomes just as reasonable an option as a church and will be necessary for those trying to remain faithful in the absence of church. We may even want to revive the long-discredited epithet “organized religion.” To return, finally, to Cavell, we may then talk as much about pairs (for Cavell’s Emerson, individualism will always require at least one other) as we do about communities, may suggest that all we can hope for is the occasional intimacy of two or three. Is the latter really a theological option? I don’t know, but in an effort to find out, it is something like this option that I pursue, with Cavell as my guide, in the following pages. I hope I will be believed when I insist that my choice of this option is experimental, that I do not mean that it is the best option or the only option. I mean to suggest directions to be taken if it is given primacy for a provisional, experimental moment. I meant it when I said that not all of these options are mutually exclusive and hopefully that will be clear in what follows. I take my cue here not just from Cavell, but from Aristotle. I mean to shift the weight of discussion from “community” to what I call “companionship,” which is something like what Aristotle called “friendship.” But, with a few exceptions, Sparta is the only state in which the lawgiver seems to have paid attention to upbringing and pursuits. In most states such matters are utterly neglected, and each man lives as he pleases, “dealing out law to his children and his wife” as the Cyclopes do. Now, the best thing would be to make the correct care of these matters a common concern. But if the community neglects them, it would seem to be incumbent upon every man to help his children and friends attain virtue. This he will be capable of doing, or at least intend to do.57

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Hauerwas and Pinches gloss this with “Thus friendship becomes for Aristotle the ground of a true polity. Further, if a state fails to achieve this polity, the only available resource of virtue is, again, the association among friends.”58 They hear in these lines a sadness and poignancy produced by Aristotle’s awareness that he writes amid failures to achieve this polity, just as we do. His turn to friendship, however, is not an abandonment of the polis in favor of friendship because it carries with it the hope that friendship is the seed of the polis. “The failure of the political represents a failure in political friendship, the only recourse after the failure being a narrower friendship that begins the pursuit of virtue over again at a much reduced level.”59 This seems right to me. Hauerwas and Pinches are on to something important when they write, “The only political alternative we have [given the modern state] is friendship.” But they go on to add, “particularly the friendship we call ‘church.’ ”60 So, as one last way of describing the claims of this chapter and introducing what is to follow, I mean to say that a proper acknowledgment of fugitivity suggests that friendship is an alternative not just to the collapse of the polis, or to the war machine of the modern state, but also to the church when it has become fugitive, or when theologians realize that it has always been fugitive. This is not an alternative which abandons the church or the polis (or even the state, but that has to be said carefully), but one which, as Hauerwas and Pinches put it, begins over again at a narrower, reduced level. Cavell’s focus on companionship instead of community is precisely the move of Hauerwas and Pinches, without the turn to church. Cavell puts it this way in an essay on Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “To this [Emerson’s] way of thinking, politics ought to have provided the conditions for companionship, call it fraternity; but the price of companionship has been the suppression, not the affirmation of otherness. . . . A mission of Emerson’s thinking is never to let politics forget this.”61 Emerson’s way of not letting politics forget this is self-reliance. “The virtue most in request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.” That is, self-reliance is the refusal to let the suppression of otherness—conformity—be the price of community. Instead, it suffers (a hopefully provisional) loneliness. I declare myself, show myself, open myself, to being known. I refuse to let my otherness be suppressed. But since so many of my others seem locked into a timid conformity, it is all too likely that they will respond by leaving me alone. But if they do not, if I am acknowledged, then, and only then, there is the possibility of companionship and, hence, community.


PART II


5 The Claim of Reason’s Apophatic Anthropology

The landscape through which the journey [for authority in one’s speech] progresses will present itself as something distant, gone. The issue is one of inhabitation, placing yourself. But placing a lost self in a land that is gone is an exercise of mourning. . . . I would like to accept the idea that I have revealed a secret planet in revealing myself [in The Claim of Reason], a certain errant wholeness, with the proviso that no one’s planet contains anything anyone else’s may not contain, or does not have the equivalent of; and that their contents are commonplaces, including an aspiration toward the better possibility, which I might call the life of philosophy.1 Part I of this book was an argument for allowing Cavell’s account of companionship to slow us down on our rush to community. But my account of Cavell thus far has left out a significant portion of the broader philosophical background to the ideas presented in part I. Therefore, in this chapter, I will step back and look more closely at the heart of Cavell’s work, The Claim of Reason, one of the great achievements of twentieth-century philosophy. I do so with two questions in mind, one looking backward to part I and the other looking forward to chapter 6. First, what is it Cavell discovered about skepticism and about other minds that made the turn to companionship necessary? Second, what is it about those discoveries that invite a theological engagement?

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Almost everything Cavell has written has been in response to and in dialogue with the sort of skepticism that emerges with Shakespeare and Descartes. Cavell is not alone here. Skepticism has been the defining preoccupation of all epistemology since Descartes. But Cavell differs from what he once called traditional epistemology in his insistence that Wittgenstein created a space in which philosophy no longer has to take sides in the struggle between skeptic and antiskeptic but is able to diagnose the frame of mind or condition which demands such debate. Cavell resists both a refutation of skepticism as well as an acquiescence to it. Wittgenstein, he argues, did neither, but he also never lost sight of the importance of skepticism, of what Cavell calls the “truth of skepticism.” Wittgenstein’s teaching is everywhere controlled by a response to skepticism. . . . the skeptic’s denial of our criteria is a denial to which criteria must be open. If the fact that we share, or have established, criteria is the condition under which we can think and communicate in language, then skepticism is a natural possibility of that condition; it reveals most perfectly the standing threat to thought and communication. . . . One misses the drive of Wittgenstein if one is not . . . sufficiently open to the threat of skepticism (i.e., to the skeptic in oneself ); or if one takes Wittgenstein . . . to deny the truth of skepticism. (47) So, Cavell’s argument opens up two fronts. On one hand, there is skepticism, understood to include anyone who takes the existence of the world to be a problem of knowledge, both skeptics and those who think skepticism demands a refutation.2 The importance of Wittgenstein is not that he brilliantly refuted skepticism. He didn’t. His importance comes from his refusal to take sides in the argument and instead to explore its roots. Cavell asks us to understand all of the multiple voices in Philosophical Investigations as Wittgenstein’s voice(s), instead of as a bunch of more or less mistaken interlocutors and one voice of rectitude, Wittgenstein’s. All the voices express positions (places, pictures) he finds himself in (or finds in himself ). “A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.” “One person can be a complete enigma to another.” The disorienting and the enigmatic are not things for which the Investigations is trying to provide a final solution. That would mean an end to the human as we know it. They are a “standing threat to thought and communication.” Wittgenstein, in Cavell’s hands, is trying not to dissolve or remove the threat but to transform it into opportunity. But it is important to not confuse Cavell with those who not only don’t think skepticism needs a refutation but also don’t think it needs a response. They want to change the subject and bring an end to philosophy. In other

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words, they are not sufficiently open to the threat. Call this the pragmatist option and let Richard Rorty stand in for it.3 There are a number of points of contention between Cavell and Rorty. Here, I only pick out one, which Rorty shares with skepticism’s refuters: the hurried dismissal of the sorts of questions Cavell is so preoccupied with.4 What Cavell wants to do is slow us down at precisely these points in order to “allow the question to gather depth.”5 He insists that we linger on these questions before answering them, to tarry with our disappointment and anxiety. The force of Wittgenstein’s critique of traditional epistemology is something like this: “To say ‘We don’t ordinarily ask, in such cases as the philosopher asks, whether we really know’ has this significance: it makes us, or should make us, want to know why the question has arisen, how it can arise” (135; Cavell’s italics). It doesn’t prompt a dismissive answer, whether a refutation or a refusal; it provokes another question. Such questions lead Cavell to the discovery of the lengths to which skepticism reaches. The seemingly bizarre parlor games of the philosopher are now understood as covers for, interpretations of, rather common, everyday experiences. The usual examples come to mind: How do you know you are not dreaming or hallucinating? How do you know that your spouse is not an automaton? How do you know we are not just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl? etc. 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. . . . It is, as I might put it, a response which expresses a natural experience of a creature complicated or burdened enough to possess language at all. (140) Cavell wants us to understand these Philosophy 101 thought experiments as other ways of talking about more easily recognizable experiences. For example: “Where do we find ourselves? . . . We wake and find ourselves on a stair” (Emerson); “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself. / In dark woods, the right road lost” (Dante); “Last night I dreamed that I was a child / Out where the pines grow wild and tall” (Springsteen). What looks like Descartes’ silliness (and Descartes knew that, knew he might be taken as mad) becomes a matter of utmost gravity when Descartes’ doubt begins to fade into Emerson’s grief, Dante’s disorientation, Othello’s jealousy, Lear’s shame. Philosophical mistakes have less of a chance of withering away with a wave of the Rortian hand when they are seen as interpretations of grief, disorientation, and jealousy. They will be constant reminders of the “standing threat to thought and

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communication.” And, as Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Being John Malkovich, The Truman Show, and The Matrix demonstrate, will be readily translated into the categories more often associated with eighteenth-century epistemology.6 So what does a response, as opposed to a refutation, to skepticism sound like? In order to show that, in this chapter I will offer a reading of parts I and IV of The Claim of Reason.7 I will read it as carefully as I can, but also try to remain as brief as possible. Part IV is as exhilarating (and enigmatic) a stretch of prose as I know. It is difficult to determine if it is what he is saying or how he says it that is so compelling. The blurring of such distinctions is, of course, the point.8

Criteria and Skepticism Part I of The Claim of Reason is an investigation of Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria. It aims to set out what Wittgenstein means by criteria and what role they play in the Investigations. More specifically, Cavell is concerned to show that criteria in Wittgenstein do not and are not meant to refute the skeptic. That means setting out the limits of criteria, showing how they can be disappointing, especially, but not only, if they are expected to provide the kind of certainty that will silence the skeptic once and for all. Furthermore, his reading of Wittgenstein on criteria is meant to show “why we wish to, and how we can, repudiate the knowledge our criteria provide, that is to say, how we can be tempted to skepticism, what its possibility is.”9 Cavell identifies three ways that criteria are disappointing. The first two are what he calls retaining the concept and withholding the concept, both of which are cases in which the criteria are met. The third is the cases in which I have not yet settled the criteria for myself. Together, they demonstrate that Wittgenstein does not negate the concluding thesis of skepticism, that we do not know with certainty the existence of the external world (or of other minds). On the contrary, Wittgenstein, as I read him, rather affirms that thesis, or rather takes it as undeniable, and so shifts its weight. What the thesis now means is something like: Our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain. (45) That is the truth of skepticism. Criteria do not go all the way. They cannot provide certainty. The point is not to turn us all into skeptics but to get at skepticism’s self-understanding. The point is not to affirm the skeptical thesis and then provide a way to negotiate that, but to problematize the skeptic’s picture of


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our condition. “Our relation to the world and others is not one of knowing” does not mean it is one of not knowing, a failure of knowledge.10

Retaining the Concept We can get at what Cavell means by “retaining the concept” by comparing criteria with symptoms. What is the difference between the two? What is the difference in the kinds of evidence they provide? Say that a red patch on your cheek is a symptom of a toothache and your wincing or groaning when my hand approaches your face is a criterion. How do they function differently? What happens when each fails? Which is to say, what happens when I discover that, despite the red patch on your cheek, you do not in fact have a toothache, as compared to when I discover that, despite all your wincing and groaning, you do not have a toothache? If I discover that the red patch is not accompanied by a toothache, that means that the red patch is not accompanied by the criteria of a toothache. (The red patch is obvious, but you are eating hard candy with evident pleasure.) But if I discover that your wincing or groaning is not accompanied by a toothache, then what happens? What if all the criteria for pain are obviously present, but the person is not in pain, is feigning, or rehearsing? When Norman Malcolm and Rogers Albritton talk about criteria, they make a distinction between a criterion’s presence and satisfaction. They speak of a criterion’s being satisfied or not satisfied. This enables them to say that if, in the presence of the criteria of a toothache, it still turns out not to have been a toothache (you were faking it), then “[t]he criteria were only seemingly satisfied.” This is because “[g]roaning, etc., is a criteria [sic] of pain (i.e., is pain behavior) only in certain circumstances” (43). For Malcolm, that means that groaning is not a criterion of pain, it is not expressive of pain, when it is mock pain behavior or feigned pain behavior or whenever it is not accompanied by pain. In some cases, this may be true. That groaning sound you are making may just be the way you clear your throat, in which case it is not a criterion of pain but a criterion of having something stuck in the throat. But if you are feigning pain or practicing the last scene of your role as Desdemona, that groaning is a criterion of pain. We will want to say that it is fake pain behavior or rehearsed pain behavior, but the important point is that the concept pain, the application of which criteria govern, is retained. It is still pain that you are feigning. In the case of the failed symptom, pain drops out. It is no longer at issue. In the case of failed criteria, it doesn’t. But then, it is not clear what it means to say that criteria have failed. Or, it is clear only if we expect criteria to establish the existence of a thing, if we expect them to show us the difference

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between actual and fake, real and imaginary. So, criteria cannot refute the skeptic. They do not do what he wants. They cannot establish a thing’s existence with certainty. As Cavell puts it, criteria cannot determine a thing’s being so, but rather its being so. Or, as Cavell will sometimes, more hesitantly, say, criteria determine identity, not existence. Here, we come across a difference between Austin and Wittgenstein. While both agree that criteria establish what a thing is, not that a thing is, they invariably choose different examples. Austin’s examples are objects which require some expertise to identify, a kind of bird, for example. The problem is one of correct description, of knowing the difference between a finch and a bittern. Wittgenstein’s object, like the skeptic’s, however, is always one whose recognition requires little or no expertise (a chair, a ball of wax, a cherry, an envelope). Cavell calls these generic objects and Austin’s, specific objects. The question of what a generic object is cannot arise. It is something that any competent speaker can obviously recognize. But with a specific object, questions of identification arise quite naturally. If I fail to properly recognize that bird as a finch and not a bittern, my competence as a birder is called into question. But I cannot just fail to recognize that that is a chair (if it is a clear day, and the chair is in full view, and I am relatively sober and mentally whole). That is why generic objects are useful to the skeptic. The skeptic needs a “best case,” one which, if it fails, everything must fall out in its wake. With a specific object, the failure is mine; it points to a specific inadequacy in me, my lack of expertise. With a generic object, we might be tempted to say, the failure is with knowledge. There is nothing I can do, no piece of information I lack, no position I can take which will provide certainty. If you do not know the (non-grammatical) criteria of an Austinian object (can’t identify it, name it) then you lack a piece of information, a bit of knowledge, and you can be told its name, told what it is, told what it is (officially) called. But if you do not know the grammatical criteria of Wittgensteinian objects, then you lack, as it were, not only a piece of information or knowledge, but the possibility of acquiring any information about such objects überhaupt; you cannot be told the name of that object, because there is as yet no object of that kind for you to attach a forthcoming name to: the possibility of finding out what it is officially called is not yet open to you. (77) Now, Austin knows this and thinks that the skeptic picks objects which allow his incessant and annoying questions. Austin’s point is to combat the skeptic’s “silly” and “outrageous” impulse to insist that I must consider every possibility, raise the sorts of questions guiding Descartes’ first few Meditations, in pursuit of


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“certainty.” While we may be sympathetic with Austin here, he is evading the skeptic, dismissing his anxiety. But, for Cavell, that means Austin does not understand the ordinary, does not understand the way skepticism “is a shadow that the ordinary cannot avoid casting.”11 All the criteria are met by a hologram chair or a dreamed ball of wax or a hallucinated table. All the criteria are met by someone’s feigning pain. If I doubt that that is really a chair or that that is pain, I do not doubt criteria. Criteria govern the application of a concept and, in the case of the chair, I retain the concept. Criteria make pretense possible.

Withholding the Concept There is a second way that criteria are disappointing. Imagine a case in which all the criteria for pain are present, and it is clear that the person is not feigning pain or clearing his throat. Even here, “the still, small voice: Is it one? Is he having one?” (69) can insert itself. Even here, the skeptic’s doubt emerges. How? Alternatively, if you think that here the skeptic is silly—you and he are both watching the patient in the chair and the dentist is out of painkillers but is still yanking on his tooth and the patient is sweating and screaming—the question is, why? What is the difference between you and the skeptic? The skeptic will concede that it is exceedingly likely that the patient has a toothache, but it is not certain. It is not certain because all that wincing and groaning don’t get us to the pain itself. The pain itself is in there, somewhere, but the criteria cannot reach that far. They stop at the body. We are stopped by the body. But we left something inexplicit. . . . I left out my responses to the criteria as they emerge. . . .—We left inexplicit the call such knowledge imposes upon me for comforting, succoring, healing; to make the fabric whole again which the pain tore through, or to know that this is impossible. That is knowing what pain is. (81–82) All this makes it seem that the philosophical problem of knowledge is something I impose on these matters; that I am the philosophical problem. I am. It is in me that the circuit of communication is cut; I am the stone on which the wheel breaks. What is disappointing about criteria? There is something they do not do; it can seem the essential. I have to know what they are for; I have to accept them, use them. (83) In the previous section, we saw how criteria are disappointing when they cannot distinguish between real and imaginary, when the concept is retained.

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Here, we see that criteria can also be disappointing because it is in our power to refuse the call they make upon us. We can withhold from others or hedge our concepts of psychological states, refuse to accept and use criteria to apply concepts on the grounds that the criteria are not the pain itself, do not reach all the way in. This is a withholding of the concept, “specifically to withhold the source of my idea that living beings are things that feel” (83).12 But it is also a withholding of myself, a withdrawal from my responsibility for reaching out to the one in pain. To describe this condition as one in which I do not know (am not certain) of the existence of other minds, is empty. There is now nothing there, of the right kind, to be known. There is nothing to be read from that body, nothing the body is of ; it does not go beyond itself, it expresses nothing; it does not so much as behave. . . . It is not dead, but inanimate; it hides nothing, but is absolutely at my disposal. (83–84) Once again, the skeptic is right. There are things criteria cannot do. While criteria can govern the applicability of concepts of psychological states or of the inner, there are no criteria to tell me which creatures I should so treat. The skeptic is right but not vindicated. She knows the truth of skepticism but does not know what to do with it, does not know what that truth means. The philosopher’s knowledge, wedded as it is to certainty, is a knowledge without acknowledgment and so, on Cavell’s view, a truncated understanding of what it means to know. It is a reduction of knowledge to intellectual awareness. Both the skeptic and Cavell give a “skeptical” reading of criteria. The skeptic discovers that knowledge is not enough and so despairs. Cavell discovers that the skeptic relies on an impoverished account of knowledge and then argues that knowledge includes my responsiveness.

Unsettled Criteria There is a third way in which criteria are disappointing. There are situations in which “either I haven’t settled the criteria for myself . . . or in which the instance is not a clear one” (87). We can call these questions of foreignness and questions of assessment. The latter is a sort of borderline case: is that mist in the air, fog, or light drizzle? The criteria for fog or drizzle are clear, we just don’t know how they apply in this case. But in the case of foreignness—“I don’t see how they can be meaning what I would mean if I called it a chair”; “It certainly is not what I would call a chair, but then I don’t know why I call the things I call chairs chairs” (87)—it is not even clear that we should call it a borderline case. It is


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clear to me that it isn’t a chair and clear to them that it is. It might become a borderline case, but as yet, it is just confusion. Imagine, Cavell suggests, the following scenario: He is in the dentist chair, wringing his hands, perspiring, screaming. The dentist stops for a moment and begins to prepare another syringe of Novocain[e]. The patient stops him and says, “It wasn’t hurting, I was just calling my hamsters.” The dentist looks as if he had swallowed Novocain[e] and the patient says, “Open the door for them.” And when the door is opened two hamsters trot into the room and climb onto the patient’s lap. So we have more than his word for it. And when later, in the middle of a walk in the country, we see this man wring his hands, perspire and scream and then look around for his hamsters, whom, trotting up, he greets affectionately, then we had better acknowledge that this is the way he calls his hamsters. (88–89) This is not a case of feigning or rehearsing. The concept is not retained. We won’t call this simulated pain behavior or any kind of pain behavior. But the skeptic has raised the stakes of the argument because we will also not likely give up or modify our notion of pain behavior in light of it. We will most likely agree that “we may rule this man out of our world of pain. In this respect he will not exist for us” (89). Our concept of pain and our criteria for it remain intact but at the price of excluding such persons. It is possible to imagine that there are or could be such persons. They express anguish by giggling, feel the lash of a whip as a caress. And with some effort, we can come up with contexts for them (i.e., some may joke about their pain, like Kent joking with Gloucester about his bastard son in the opening scene of King Lear, or some may enjoy sadomasochistic sexual practices). But Cavell is asking us to think of such things outside of the obvious contexts for them. He is asking if it is possible to imagine, with the skeptic, a person “for whom suffering and comfort are entirely independent of what we mean by ‘pain’ and ‘pity.’ We cannot really know what someone else’s experience is; why couldn’t it be like that?” (89–90). That is, why couldn’t it be that, here, we have reason to withhold our concepts of psychological states? When we were speaking of withholding concepts in the previous section, we had in mind an optimal case of pain behavior. There, withholding our concepts did not suggest that the person we withheld them from was unique in any way. Here, it does. We withhold our concepts because we consider this person abnormal, in a different world. At least, that is the option before us if we can’t find a way to understand just his pain behavior, not him, as abnormal. The skeptic is forcing us to return

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to the question of criteria and existence. The skeptical fear is that, since criteria do not establish existence, Wittgenstein (and Cavell) must simply assume existence. We can’t say “he is in pain,” or “that is pain.” At most, we can say “that is what we call pain,” or “on our set-up that is pain; but I never really know that what he’s got is what I’ve got; nor do I know that he’s got what I say he’s got” (91). We saw this before; it sounds like withholding concepts. Except now, it is dramatized by the specter of conceptual deviance. It isn’t that “we may be faced with a dissimulating human being, and not that we may be faced with a creature simulating humanness”13 but that the differences among humans run too deep and too wide. That is, unlike the earlier case of withholding concepts, it can’t be blamed on me (at least not as quickly) because this is not an optimal case. The differences between me and her, us and them, are too radical. To put it another way, say the skeptic admits that Cavell was right in the earlier case of withholding concepts. He was right to say that, once a person is described as “in pain,” then certain responses must be forthcoming. Then what happens when I do as Cavell suggests and reach out to that person in pity and comfort and that person responds, not with a sigh of relief or even “Ha! I fooled you again,” but by exhibiting even more intense pain, or growling and snarling, or attacking me? Now, the identity-existence distinction seems superfluous. Here, criteria can’t even get me identity, and so the skeptic finds a new way to force us back to the distinction he has been pushing all along—between inner and outer. The skeptic has raised a serious issue. But, Cavell insists, the skeptic has raised a serious practical issue. His mistake is trying to turn it into a metaphysical issue. Here, we come upon one of the most baffling and fascinating stretches of The Claim of Reason. It is baffling because Cavell will say that such a person as we have imagined is “abnormal” from “our” (meaning, us “normal” people’s) perspective. He will also identify the normal with the natural and the natural with the conventional. Our criteria for pain and pity, hope and fear are fixed by convention, but that doesn’t mean by custom or contract but by “the nature of human life itself, the human fix itself . . . by . . . very general facts of human nature” (110). So, Cavell sounds like he is setting out a theory of normality and moreover one well suited to function as a mechanism of exclusion. But then he keeps undermining himself, or seems to, with his insistence that this is a practical difficulty, not a metaphysical one, as the skeptic keeps insisting. For example, discussing the criteria for love: We have a choice. Either it’s love, or else he will be treated as abnormal: that’s the way he “loves,” but that isn’t love, isn’t what is meant by “love.” And is it always clear which alternative we shall take? (Jesus is said to have loved, but that isn’t the way we love.


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Dostoevsky thought he was right and that we are wrong and sinful and perhaps incapable of love, and therefore are in hell. Nietzsche thought he was wrong, or right only about himself, and hence that he taught us a new stratagem for sinning undiscovered, and thereby made hell attractive.) (107) It is not natural to feel a whip as a caress; it is not normal to sit on a chair of nails. This seems reasonable. But it is still uncomfortable. It is uncomfortably close to “it is not natural to take same-sex partners”; “normal people don’t say that all children are female until they have killed someone.”14 It is in response to this that Fanon commanded the colonized to “[l]eave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them.”15 Is Cavell just a sophisticated spokesperson for that Europe, another defender of “Man”? I don’t think so. But just what is he doing? The first point to make is that, regardless of what we conclude about Cavell, skepticism is no alternative. Skepticism simply reifies otherness. It assures that the other will always be completely other, that there is no possibility of communication, dialogue, or conflict because there is nothing to communicate, nothing to conflict over. By guaranteeing the other’s inevitable distance, skepticism vindicates, even insists upon, my inability, my unwillingness to try to somehow traverse the distance. “In making the knowledge of others a metaphysical difficulty, philosophers deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s gaze, or bear of it. Doubtless such denials are part of the motive which sustains metaphysical difficulties” (90). Second, it is important to keep in mind that this is still “just” an argument about what criteria do vis-à-vis skepticism. It is still part of Cavell’s argument with those who think criteria refute skepticism by providing us with certainty and so still part of Cavell’s attempt to remain open to the threat of skepticism, to acknowledge the other’s separateness without giving up the possibility of my responsibility for that separateness. So it has this much in common with the case of the withholding of concepts: when criteria fail, when they can go no further, that does not mean there is no further to go, does not mean there is nothing left but skepticism. There is something left—me. The normal or natural can never, for Cavell, usurp the place of my responsibility. Assuming that it can is to grant the adequacy of the skeptic’s self-characterization and hence to miss the central thrust of Cavell’s work. But then, what is this normal, this natural? It is easier to say what it isn’t. While he will occasionally talk about human nature, he doesn’t understand it as a ground or foundation, at least not in any common epistemological sense.

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Our ability to communicate with him [one of the children from The Brown Book, who is separated out as a lunatic because he continually fails to learn how to continue a series] depends upon his “natural understanding,” his “natural reaction,” to our directions and our gestures. It depends upon our mutual attunements in judgments. It is astonishing how far this takes us in understanding one another, but it has limits. . . . And when these limits are reached, when our attunements are dissonant, I cannot get below them to firmer ground. . . . For not only does he not receive me, because his natural reactions are not mine; but my own understanding is found to go no further than my own natural reactions can bear it. I am thrown back upon myself; I as it were turn my palms outward, as if to exhibit the kind of creature I am, and declare my ground occupied, only mine, ceding yours. When? (115) There are two levels at which this “When?” can be invoked. When do our differences over what counts as continuing a series or expressing pain or fear or hope incline us to turn our palms outward? When, that is, are your fears and hopes so different from mine that I must turn and walk away or find in myself reserves of imagination and patience I did not know I had? Second, when is what you call fear or hope (as opposed to the objects you fear or hope for) so radically strange that we cannot even begin to talk about fear or hope? I take it that the natural is some kind of response to this second case. That is, “natural” does not designate specific things to be hoped for or feared. The natural is back a step, at what counts as fearing or hoping or pain or pity. The appeal to the natural does not say that only certain kinds of pain behavior are natural but that suffering and comfort are dependent on what we mean by pain and pity. “One group may hope for a different future, fear a different region or past. . . . But hope will still be grammatically related to satisfaction and disappointment, fear will still be grammatically related to some object and reason for fear, which, though it may not be one we in fact are affected by, we can understand as such a reason” (111). Further, the claim is not that hoping, fearing, etc., are natural where that means everyone does them. Maybe there are idyllic places where there is nothing to fear, or hideous places where there is nothing to hope for. That does not mean we must turn our palms outward. We will not be able to talk about our fears and hopes with the people in those places, but we may be able to find other things to talk about. But if such people in such places come to a point where they do hope and fear, then only certain things will count as hoping and


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fearing. That only certain things will count as hoping and fearing is “in the nature of things.” That means that human nature, not just human society, is conventional. Such a definition should register as irony. (Especially when he adds that perhaps this is what some existentialists mean by saying humans have no nature; 111.) But it isn’t merely conventional. It isn’t arbitrary. It is merely conventional that, in baseball, the home team takes the field first and that the umpire stands behind the catcher, not the pitcher. It is merely conventional that brides wear white and grooms wear black, that the bride enters the sanctuary after the groom. But it is not merely conventional that batters only get three strikes or that the bases are 90 feet apart. And it is not merely conventional that Christian marriages, until yesterday, happened in church or, until yesterday, were between men and women. That such things can change shows that human nature (as Cavell understands it) can change. Changes in the former, in the merely conventional, would not be changes in nature. The merely conventional are things that we can adopt at will to serve some purpose but can be replaced with anything else which serves the purpose. Baseball would still be baseball if the home team batted first. Would it still be if we made the bases 180 feet apart and gave batters five strikes? Is it still marriage if not done in church, as a sacrament? If it is between two persons of the same sex? For some people, those questions are settled. Is modernist art still art? Not if you ask an Orthodox iconographer. Is Protestantism Christian? Not if you ask some Orthodox priests. And this question was hardly easy for anyone to answer five centuries ago. A lot of Protestants still don’t think Catholicism or Orthodoxy is Christian. John Damascene didn’t think Islam was another religion. He thought it was a Christian heresy. The first Christians thought they were Jews, and the Jews thought they were too. Caught in the spaces between, convention seems tyrannical. And one may be tempted to escape that tyranny by understanding all conventions to be mere conventions. (Which only makes them more tyrannical. Tyranny is arbitrary.) Cavell does not say that it is easy to tell which is which. “The internal tyranny of convention is that only a slave of it can know how it may be changed for the better, or know why it should be eradicated. . . . This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history” (121). So Jesus revolutionized Judaism. So the Anabaptists revolutionized Christianity. So the abstract expressionists revolutionized what we call art. “Perhaps the idea of a new historical period is an idea of a generation whose natural reactions—not merely whose ideas or mores— diverge from the old; it is the idea of a new (human) nature. And different historical periods may exist side by side, over long stretches, and within one human breast” (121). Those natural reactions, while they are natural, will also be

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necessary. “But it should not be surprising that what is necessary is contingent upon something. Necessaries are means” (120). We can put it this way: just what is necessary may change, but the concept of necessity will be retained. The suggestion is that there are no situations in which hope is not “grammatically related to satisfaction and disappointment,” fear “grammatically related to an object and reason for fear,” suffering and comfort not dependent upon what we mean by pain and pity (111). At least, if there are, they must be shown to us and then it is up to us what we do with them. There is no theory that can guarantee our proper response to such situations any more than there is a theory that can guarantee that there are no such situations or that we should reject them if there are. Further, thinking there are such situations means a lack of imagination, which produces a confusion between such scenarios and scenarios in which the object of another’s hope seems bizarre, bizarre enough to suggest that what they call hope, we don’t. Then, the function of the natural is to suggest the possibility that that is a confusion due to our lack of imagination. “It seems safe to suppose that if you can describe any behavior which I can recognize as that of human beings, I can give you an explanation which will make that behavior coherent, i.e., show it to be imaginable in terms of natural responses and practicalities” (118).16 So there cannot, after all, be radical difference, where that means conceptual deviance. Is this reassuring? To whom? It is not skepticism’s reassurance. The warning here is that the skeptic has a vested interest in converting difference into radical difference, in understanding others as having escaped the natural in order to justify his escape, his withdrawal from the other. That withdrawal is a withdrawal from what Wittgenstein called “forms of life.” The natural and the forms of life do not designate patterns which may vary from culture to culture (though Wittgenstein is often read this way). Hoping, fearing, calculating are what make up forms of life.17 It is part of forms of life that “realization of intention requires action, that action requires movement, that movement involves consequences we had not intended, that our knowledge (and ignorance) of ourselves and of others depends upon the way our minds are expressed (and distorted) in word and deed and passion; that actions and passions have histories.” But now we can see another side of skepticism. It is not just the wish to declare the other radically different, but to declare oneself to be. (This will come up later as “passive skepticism.”) The coincidence of soul and body, and of mind (language) and world überhaupt, are the issues to which Wittgenstein’s notion[s] of grammar and criteria are meant to speak. . . . The gap, or distorted


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relation, between intention (or wish or feeling) and its execution, and between execution and consequence, is what the sense of “absurdity” [in modern literature and certain existentialisms] is a response to. But then how does the gap or distortion appear, and how can it be closed? In Wittgenstein’s view the gap between mind and world is closed, or the distortion between them straightened, in the appreciation and acceptance of particular human forms of life, human “convention.” This implies that the sense of a gap originates in an attempt, or wish, to escape (to remain a “stranger” to, “alienated” from) those shared forms of life, to give up the responsibility of their maintenance. (Is this always a fault? Is there no way of becoming responsible for that? What does a moral or intellectual hero do?) (109) There is one final thing to discuss here. It has been implicit all along but is worth making explicit. For Cavell, the strangeness of the other works to reveal the strangeness of ourselves. Look at the following lines: We should not call anything they do “sacrificing,” “atoning,” “placating,” etc. unless we understand how what they do could count as (grammatically be) sacrificing, atoning, placating, etc. Can they placate a monkey or a man dead and buried? Can they make sacrifices and pray to a piece of carved wood? But we do equally strange and familiar things. Is it less strange to pray to, or curse, a President? Strange not just to outsiders, but to us, come to think of it. (111) Imagining this [a “certain tribe” from The Brown Book, which separates out children as lunatics if they fail, after a time, to properly continue a series] makes me rather anxious. I feel: These people are in a great hurry to separate out lunatics. . . . And their evidence for lunacy is so slim. . . . But then I feel: What is ample evidence for lunacy? Not being able to keep up in school over a period of years? We may not call it lunacy, our gradations are not so crude; but children are treated differently because of it, and set apart. (112) These examples [Wittgenstein’s “primitive tribes”] are all very upsetting. Is it because these people are not really intelligible to us? No doubt we cannot communicate with them—at least in certain areas. But that is not an unfamiliar fact, even with our friends. (114) Part of the difficulty in treating psychotics is the inability one has in appreciating their world, and hence in honoring them as persons; the

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other part of the difficulty comes in facing how close our world is (at times; in dreams) to theirs. (90) We must be careful here. Edward Said is just around the corner—“the Oriental is always like some aspect of the West.”18 He would add to the last quote above that a third part of the difficulty is the way the first two difficulties threaten to undermine each other. One may claim closeness, likeness, as a way of avoiding confrontation with difference. This can be done by focusing too singularly on similarities, or it can be done by diluting difference, turning differences into superficial similarities.19 One may claim difference as a way of denying similarity, in order to ensure that the other stays at arm’s length. There is no way out of this circle, no way to resolve the tension. There are only more and less graceful ways of negotiating it. Cavell’s manner of negotiating it adds at least two things worth mentioning. First, he insists that the problem of finding ways to receptively engage different others cannot be confined to discussions of “culture.” The differences between cultures are important, but Cavell will never let them be used to screen out the differences within cultures, between neighbors, spouses, siblings. Second, he reiterates the theme of our responsibility, a theme which has been present all along but emerges with increasing insistence in part IV.20

Acknowledgment: The Claim of Reason, Part IV The preceding account of Cavell’s reading of Wittgensteinian criteria hopefully did a few things. First, it showed why Cavell doesn’t think criteria can refute skepticism; and second, it began to show the ways in which skepticism is not to be understood as a philosophical mistake but as a frame of mind, one which cannot be overcome once and for all but must be diagnosed (so that it may be overcome daily). Finally, and most explicit in the last few paragraphs, it introduced the central theme of The Claim of Reason and of the entire Cavell corpus. Cavell writes, “The wish underlying this fantasy [of a private language] covers a wish that underlies skepticism, a wish for the connection between my claims of knowledge and the objects upon which the claims are to fall to occur without my intervention, apart from my agreements” (351–352; my italics).21 The theme emerges at several points and plays an important role in all four parts of Claim, most obviously in the preceding section with regard to the inability of criteria to get all the way to “the pain itself,” to which Cavell responded, “But we left something inexplicit. . . . I left out my responses to the criteria as they emerge. . . . We left inexplicit the call such knowledge imposes on me for comforting, succoring,


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healing” (81). Skepticism is revealed as a withholding of the self, a refusal to acknowledge made in the name of knowledge. The skeptic, realizing that criteria don’t go all the way to the pain itself feels stranded, handcuffed, unable to respond. But it is often the case that skepticism serves as a philosophical cover story for the resistance to response, the resistance to responsibility for the other. It emerges from the wish to preserve oneself invulnerable (or one’s society—this is a political issue) to the destabilizing encounter with the other’s pain or the destabilizing exposure of one’s own pain. The skeptic’s refusal of knowledge is a refusal of commitment. “It is as though we try to get the world to provide answers in a way which is independent of our responsibility for choice” (216). “To know the subject, that it is pain, is to respond to it” (82). This commitment and responsibility are what is entailed by acknowledgment. The truth of skepticism is that our relationship to the world is not one of knowing, where that is construed as certainty, the overcoming of Cartesian doubt, but is one of acknowledgment, acceptance, and embodied response. The skeptic, we might say, exploits the possibility of doubt to justify abdicating rather than exposing herself to the challenge of the other. Skepticism, understood broadly, is the wish for knowledge to take the place of our responsibility; it is the presentation of “metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.”22

Skepticism and the Problem of Others: The Outsider The skeptic’s worry about other minds is that “there may be something, or something can be imagined, that looks, feels, be broken and perhaps healed like a human being that is nevertheless not a human being. What are we imagining? It seems that we are back to the idea that something humanoid or anthropomorphic lacks something, that one could have all the characteristics of a human being save one” (403). At this point, Cavell embarks on a long story about perfecting an automaton. You are taking a walk in a garden with the craftsman and his friend, when the craftsman points to his friend and says, “We’re making more progress than you think. Take my friend here. He’s one” (403). You are surprised. You had no idea that the friend was not a real human. But the craftsman bids him sit down and raises his pant leg to show you the metal underneath. He knocks the friend’s hat off to reveal a mannequin’s head, which he then twists 360 degrees. You are convinced. As the years go by, every few months, if there is a noticeable improvement, the craftsman invites you back. You stroll in the garden together. His friend (or, perhaps, “friend”) becomes your friend. The legs are no longer obviously metal; the head looks

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great, even with the hat off. One day, the craftsman opens the friend’s chest and you see the insides of a human being or something indistinguishable. The craftsman is delighted by the look of shock on your face, but admits that it still isn’t perfect, especially the nervous system. “The pain responses are too—how shall I say?—on and off. . . . But the genuine issue is how to get the pain itself so that it gets better prepared and fades better” (404). How do you respond? Do you find yourself wanting to ask the “friend” how he feels about the way you both are treating him? Should you ask to look inside the head, too, just to make sure? Should you ask what the craftsman means by “the pain itself”? One day, the craftsman phones you and is obviously excited. You go over and once again he goes through all the procedures. It is really astonishing. It is like the friend is human. Then the craftsman knocks off the hat to reveal what is for all the world a human head, intact. He rotates it through about 45 degrees and then stops himself with an embarrassed smile. The head turns back to its original position, but now its eyes turn toward mine. Then the knife is produced. As it approaches the friend’s side he suddenly leaps up, as if threatened, and starts grappling with the craftsman. They both grunt, and they are yelling. The friend is producing these words: “No more. It hurts. It hurts too much. I’m sick of being a human guinea pig, I mean a guinea pig human.” Do I [you] intervene? On whose behalf ? (405) How might the story go on? It could be that, noticing your alarm, on a signal from the craftsman they both stop struggling, and the friend sits back down, crosses his legs, lights a cigarette. The craftsman is obviously pleased with himself and explains, “It’s all built in.” Does that satisfy you? Or do you respond, “‘You fool! You’ve built in too much! You’ve built in the passions as well as the movements and vocables of revolt! You’ve given this artificial body a real soul.’ (That is, a soul; there are no artificial souls—none, anyway, that are not real souls)” (406–407). Or, imagine another day in the garden. The friend grabs your arms from behind and holds them tight. You are helpless as the craftsman rips your shirt and opens your chest. You look down to see some elegant clockwork. Now, do you know the friend is human, or do you doubt that you are? The craftsman has his knife at your throat, demanding that you decide. “Now I am being asked whether I do or do not share the life of suffering with this other, and at the same time I am shown that I do not know whether I am observing or leading that life” (408). What do you know about yourself ? That you have pains, not “pains,” artificial automaton pains? What if you accepted that, after all, all you really


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have are “pains”? Then, presumably, you would have to stop thinking of yourself as human. But then, what would you be? An automaton whose memory of being constructed was wiped out or has faded? You will want to keep this a secret. Bribe the craftsman and the friend not to say anything. But if they guessed it, couldn’t anyone? And couldn’t anyone be harboring the same secret? This is silly. What secret? You feel pain, that is, pain not “pain.” Maybe the friend is thinking the same thing. Is that silly too? One of the lessons of Cavell’s story is that, when criteria run out, there is no privileged position to turn to. Not just you and the friend, but the craftsman is also ruled out. There is nothing he can tell us. “Whatever can be specified, as a test of automatonity, can be built in to fail. Criteria come to an end” (412). But is there someone or something (call it the Outsider) who can tell us? Sometimes, in horror movies, a dog is the only one who can sniff out the difference in the humanoid thing which is about to go on a rampage. But a dog is free of human nature and so is free of the need and the ability to question itself as you had to when it occurred to you that perhaps all you have are “pains.” What is it that we might want an Outsider to tell us? With external world skepticism, the Outsider could tell us what our “ideas” are copies of (per Locke), if anything. Or whether we are awake or dreaming. The Outsider tells us whether an antecedently clear distinction obtains. We know what a copy is and what an original is, what a dream is and what waking is. Our question is, “Which is which?” With other mind skepticism, the Outsider would function the same way if what we wanted to know was whether the other was human or not. But our stroll in the craftsman’s garden showed us that we don’t know what counts as human and what does not. The Outsider has “to know something I do not know about how to tell, about what the difference is between human beings and non-human beings or human non-beings. I do not expect the Outsider with respect to me and the external world to know something I do not know about the difference between sleeping and waking, or about whether one thing is a copy of another” (417). What if we found such an Outsider? And what if, in his sorting out of humans and otherwise, he sorted me out? “That is not the question I imagined myself to invoke him in order to answer. With that question, my interest in the status of others vanishes. There is only me and the Outsider” (417). Or, imagine asking the Outsider to compare what I see when I see the color red and what another sees. If there is a difference, we may want to ask the Outsider who is right, but we would not be too troubled by the answer. But what if the comparison is between what I feel when I feel pain and what another feels? “I cannot tolerate the idea that the other might be right and I not. What I feel, when I feel pain, is pain. So I am putting a restriction on what the Outsider can

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know. He can know something about another’s pain that I cannot know, but not something about mine. He is not really an Outsider to me. If he exists, he is in me” (418). Cavell’s discussion of the craftsman and the Outsider suggests some important preliminary conclusions about other mind skepticism. First, we are beginning to see why Cavell is going to insist that skepticism is not a problem of knowledge. It is not produced by a weakness in our position as knowers. We will see more of what this means in the following pages, but for now we can at least note that the idea that there is something we are missing due to our position prompts the thought that there must be a better position from which to know, a position from which a piece of information unavailable to us in our current position is available. Cavell’s discussion of the Outsider is an attempt to imagine such a position. Its failure suggests that the problem of other mind skepticism is something other than a problem of knowledge, a misunderstanding of what knowledge is. “My ignorance of the existence of others is not the fate of my natural condition as a human knower, but my way of inhabiting that condition” (432). Second, we have begun to see how our conception of ourselves is bound to our conception of others and vice versa. This comes out in more detail as Cavell moves to the active and passive skeptical recitals.

The Active Skeptical Recital Skepticism about the external world and skepticism about others are two different things. How they are different and how they are not is a central topic of part IV of The Claim of Reason. In external world skepticism, the “skeptical recital” takes the following form:23 (1) There is a request for a basis for a claim to knowledge, such as “How do I know there is a table here?” (2) A basis is given: “Because I see it.” (3) A ground for doubt is then raised: “But how do you know you are not hallucinating or that the chair is not a hologram?” (4) The conclusion of this is, “Well, I don’t really know that there is a table here.” (5) The moral is, “I can never know. The senses are not enough to ground our knowledge of the world.” And then comes the inevitable realization that, if I cannot know that a table is there, I can’t know anything. The world drops out. What happens when we try to produce a skeptical recital with respect to other minds?24 Certain complexities will emerge as Cavell does this. We can note at the outset that skepticism with regard to others does not mean we just duplicate the external world skeptical recital only now inserting “human being” where we had “table.” If this were so, we wouldn’t even get started. The fact that there are two different species of skepticism alerts us to the notion that there is


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something we want to know about humans that isn’t reducible to the senses, something invisible which makes a human a human and not just something that looks like a human. (Confused talk about “the inner” can sometimes suggest that what we want to know is sensible: “there must also be something boiling in the pictured pot.”25 But since there is no way of getting it within reach of our senses, we appeal to the Outsider, whose “senses” it is within reach of.) That is, in the skeptical recital with regard to others, the basis will have to be formulated differently than with external world skepticism, where the basis was “Because I see it.” Here is Cavell’s version of the skeptical recital with regard to others. Among the things we claim to know the existence of, some are human beings. . . . And we claim to know very particular things about particular human beings, for example that they are in pain or are angry. Each of you here in this room would certainly say that you know that there are now other human beings in this room with you. . . . And I, for one, am prepared to say that I know that no one of you—you for instance—is now in excruciating pain. But how do I know this? For all I know, you may be. But if I imagine that you are in excruciating pain then naturally I must imagine that you are keeping it from me, suppressing its manifestations. If you are successful in this, then everything would seem to me just as it does now, that you are calm, and attentive to what I am saying. . . . But to be able to imagine that you are in excruciating pain only if you are keeping it from me is to imagine that even though I do not know of your pain, you certainly know. And this is to imagine, or rather assume, that you have sentience, or rather consciousness, or rather self-consciousness, as I have; that you are, as I am, a human being; that I have correctly identified you as a human being. What justifies this assumption? (420–421) In external world skepticism, this question was not raised. “Because I see it” was fairly straightforward. No such assumption had to be made with the table. A ground for doubt such as “but do you see all of it?” may question the adequacy of my position with respect to the object but not my capacity for sight. Here, however, a question arises about the very basis of my claim to knowledge, not the adequacy of the basis but of the sense of the basis itself. Where does the assumption that another has self-consciousness come from? “From some such fact as that my identification of you as a human being is not merely an identification of you but with you. This is something more than merely seeing you. Call it empathic projection” (421). Empathic projection is a crucial, if

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elusive, concept in Cavell. We might think of it as the answer to “What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?”26 It is, as Cavell will later describe it, “little more than a dummy concept for something that must be the basis of my claims to read the other” (440). The skeptical recital continues by saying that any of my empathic projections can go wrong. There is nothing to keep me from empathically projecting onto a mutant or an android. Our time with the craftsman has shown that figuring out which is which will be a lot more problematic than figuring out if that table is a hologram. (It showed us, for example, that it won’t do any good to take it apart.) But does this produce skepticism? Not yet. For we saw that, when my knowledge of the table’s existence was doubted, the whole world dropped out in its wake. But here, it seems that, if I am wrong about another, if I empathically project onto a zombie, then I am wrong about that other, and I will reasonably conclude that I may be wrong about any other. But I will not conclude that I must be wrong, that there are no human others. Empathic projection affixes a seam into experience. Another way to say it is that we have not yet discovered a best case with regard to others, a case like the generic object, the doubting of which means we must doubt everything. But can there be? Notice another difference between external world skepticism and other mind skepticism. In external world skepticism, there is no better position to know than the one I am in (excluding, of course, the possibility of the Outsider). We are all in the same boat with regard to material objects. Part of its power comes from this aspect of the skeptic’s argument; it insists upon a best position—it isn’t foggy; you didn’t inhale; there isn’t a tree blocking the view; you have your glasses on—as well as a best case. But with regard to knowing another, there does seem to be an obviously better position—the other’s. There was a point in the recital at which we said: I cannot know if another is in pain if the other is suppressing her pain behavior. But if she is suppressing it, then she knows. And if she knows, then surely she exists. “This seems a limited version of skepticism, or a version of limited skepticism. Its moral seems to be that skepticism with respect to other minds cannot be skeptical enough. Is this philosophically reassuring? Has it mastered the worst that can befall me?” (426, cf. 353). Has this helped us to conclude that there is no skepticism with respect to others? This seems to say that, with the exception of the other herself, no other could be in a better position to know her, and no other could be a better test of my knowledge of her. Can she step out of her confinement from me? Skepticism says that I am sealed off. With respect to the external world, I am sealed into my experience, cannot get out of it to compare my experience with reality. With respect to the other, I am sealed out. The other’s body seals me out, and there is no way to


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compare what I experience of her with her set of experiences. I am sealed out; is she sealed in? If this is a reasonable continuation from the recital, it alerts us to something important. It suggests to Cavell that the question should be phrased in terms of acknowledgment, not of knowledge. Is it possible to generate a best case if we change the question from “Is empathic projection a sufficient basis for knowledge of the other?” to “Is it a sufficient basis for acknowledging the other?” Acknowledgment is a crucial concept in Cavell. It “‘goes beyond’ knowledge, not in the order, or as a feat, of cognition, but in the call upon me to express the knowledge at its core, to recognize what I know, to do something in the light of it, apart from which this knowledge remains without expression, hence perhaps without possession.”27 I may know I am late to our meeting but not admit it, or may know that I have hurt you but not apologize, or know that I am acquainted with you but duck out a side door when I see you coming. So, acknowledgment is something like confession. Further, acknowledgment demands not just the recognition of the other, but the recognition of my relation to the other, which entails a recognition of the way I may have distorted that relation. Phrased in terms of acknowledgment, we can begin to account for my sense of being sealed in, my sense of being unable to step outside of my empathic projections. To avoid acknowledgment by refusing this call upon me would create the sense of the sense it makes to say that I cannot step outside (“go beyond”) my feat of cognition. . . . Acknowledgment of another calls for the recognition of the other’s specific relation to oneself, and . . . this entails the revelation of oneself as having denied or distorted that relation. . . . To avoid acknowledgment by refusing the call upon me to recognize this relation and my denial of it would create the sense of the sense it makes to feel the question is open whether others can step outside their confinement from me. (428) That is, the senses of confinement are created by trying to understand other mind skepticism with an impoverished understanding of knowledge, one that excludes acknowledgment. Cavell creates the space for recognizing this as soon as he points out the simple fact that our understanding of others, unlike material objects, entails specific and mobile relationships to those people.28 A further implication of this direction is that, even if the concept of acknowledgment is granted here, it is not at all clear what it would mean to acknowledge someone simply as a human being. Lear’s acknowledgment of Cordelia as his unjustly banished daughter entails acknowledging himself as her unjust and banishing father. But what would it be to acknowledge the sheer humanity

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of another? Here I am, empathically projecting her humanity. What could go beyond that? What relation do I bear to her? How could I reveal myself to her as having denied or distorted our relation? But now if these are the questions left unsettled by the skeptical recital, then we have found some structure in its very inconclusiveness. It is a structure in which the question “Who, or what, is this other?” (or the question “Is this in fact an other?”) is tied to the question “Who, or what, am I, that I should be called upon to testify to such a question?” How and why, am I thrown back upon myself ?——I notice, looking back over the skeptical recital, that it contains the following, so far unexamined, feature: that the moment at which I singled out my stranger was the moment at which I also singled out myself. (“I, for one, am prepared to say that I know that no one of you—you for instance . . .”) (429) The question has been transfigured. From “What, if anything, is a best case for knowing an other?” to “What, if anything, is a best case for acknowledging an other?” to, finally, showing that the latter may helpfully be stated as “What, if anything, is a best case for acknowledging my relation to an other?” “Is there, in particular, a case in which my (outsider’s) position is sufficiently good to produce the force of the skeptic’s best case with respect to the external world, namely that if I know anything, I know this?” (429). What sort of other would that be? Like the generic object, it would have to be an other which “compresses within himself or herself my view of psychic reality as a whole” (430). It would be an other who exemplifies humanity for me, upon the acknowledgment of whom “I stake my capacity for acknowledgment altogether, that is to say, my capacity at once for acknowledging the existence of others and for revealing my existence in relation to others” (430). It is a specific and particular other, and a specific and particular relationship. It remains true that, even if there were such an other, the case would not generalize. “No one else is in my position with respect to this other.” But, “if it fails, the remainder of the world and of my capacities in it have become irrelevant. That there are others, and others perhaps in my position in relation to them, are matters not beyond my knowledge but past my caring. I am not removed from the world; it is dead for me. All for me is but toys; there is for me no new tomorrow; my chaos is come (again?). I shut my eyes to others” (430). The skeptic pictures our knowledge as confined (by our experience, to our experience, etc.). Skepticism shows us to be limited and our knowledge confined by our limits. But now, faced with the possibility of this best case, our sense is not one of confinement, but of exposure. This is a new development


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and a frightening one. (The object of our fright is tragedy; Desdemona was Othello’s best case.) We are exposed on two fronts. First, we are exposed to the possibility of such a best case. “It is, accordingly, to be expected that we will not willingly subject ourselves to the best case of acknowledgment, indeed that we will avoid the best if we can, to avoid the worst” (430). Second, not only will we avoid the best, we will avoid knowing that a given case is the best. Cavell calls it avoiding exposure to the concept of the best, a denial of my capacity, or a demonstration of my unwillingness, to apply the concept. So the second front of exposure and avoidance is, in a way, myself. “Being exposed to my concept of the other is being exposed to my assurance in applying it. I mean to the fact that this assurance is mine, comes only from me” (433). No one, no thing, is going to apply the concept for me or guarantee the success of the application. And nothing can tell me when I have reached the limit of my responsibility, limits on the perspective I can have on others and on myself. The absence of the best case shows that our relations are restricted. The presence of the best case will show that our lack of restriction is limited to one another. . . . Is there an upper limit on humanity? If there is, how would I know that I had reached it? How would I know that I had gone in myself not merely to my limitations for acknowledgment but to the limitations of the humanly acknowledgeable? (434) That says something important about the role of “limits”—that, among other things, they are part of the skeptic’s self-portrait—but it also says something else. It says that this question is about me, my limits. To move closer: in external world skepticism, I make the choice to live with doubts “for practical purposes,” and in doing so I accommodate myself to a universal human condition. But with others, this is not, at least not first of all, a remark about the human condition but about me. It is as a general alternative to skeptical doubt that Austin was moved to say that, in substantiating my claims to know, “enough is enough”; I must have said enough to rule out other reasonable, competing possibilities. But how much is enough when it comes to knowing and acknowledging the humanity of another? How many times, and about just which matters, must I pity another, help another, accept another’s excuses, before concluding that enough is enough? “Give me another day; another moment; another dollar; another chance. . . .” If I do not answer such appeals, is this because I have found the other, this other, not to be worth it, or entitled to it, or myself not to be up to it? (438)

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There is no alternative to such questioning, to such doubts. Specifically, no possibility of “enough is enough” for which I may not be culpable. There is no possibility of forgetting or ignoring or bypassing skeptical doubts the way Hume does when he emerges from his study. “To accommodate myself to my restrictions of acknowledgment would be to compromise my integrity, or perhaps to constitute it, such as it is” (438). With material objects, we “forget” our skepticism. With others, we “remember” it. Cavell expresses the idea that there is no alternative to saying “I live my skepticism,” a thought he follows with these haunting lines: Our position is not, so far as we know, the best.——But mightn’t it be? Mightn’t it be that just this haphazard, unsponsored state of the world, just this radiation of relationships, of my cares and commitments, provides the milieu in which my knowledge of others can best be expressed? Just this—say expecting someone to tea; or returning a favor; waving goodbye; reluctantly or happily laying in groceries for a friend with a cold; feeling rebuked, and feeling it would be humiliating to admit the feeling; pretending not to understand that the other has taken my expression, with a certain justice, as meaning more than I sincerely wished it to mean; hiding inside a marriage; hiding outside a marriage—just such things are perhaps the most that knowing others comes to, or has come to for me.——Is there more for it to come to; more that it must come to? (439–440) Cavell’s insistence that we must “live our skepticism” amounts to a refusal to close off the question of my limits.29 It is a refusal of a definition of a limit which would release the self from questioning. But this also raises the question of what counts as intimacy, as knowing another. Saying that we must live our skepticism is not to be understood as “we should or ought to live our skepticism.” It is a description meant to register our ignorance about our everyday position with others, a description that follows from knowing we are prone to avoid the best and the concept of the best. It registers not just our ignorance but our disappointment with the everyday encounters with others. “There is a skepticism which is produced not by a doubt about whether we can know but by disappointment over knowledge itself ” (440).

The Passive Skeptical Recital We have so far put this in terms of knowing the other. But perhaps some clarity is gained if instead we ask, “What would it mean to be known by another?”


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At what point do you say, I am known (enough)? “The question about other minds is exactly as much a question about me as about anyone else. If anyone is another mind, I am one—i.e., I am an other to the others (and of course others are then I’s to me). Then the question is: Do others know of my existence?” (442). This seems a more promising possibility of a best case because, surely, I know I exist. If we can answer what it is to be known, then we will have a handle on what we want to know of others. It may not be within reach, but we will at least know the shape of our lack.30 Cavell calls this the passive skeptical recital. It begins like this: What do you really know of me? You see a humanish something of a certain height and age and gender and color and physiognomy, emitting vocables in a certain style. . . . Much more than this you do not know. Some you could guess at, but not in very great detail. But then I am a stranger to you. What does anyone know of me? All anyone knows or could know is what I am able to show them of myself. . . . And how much can I really show? (443) I can show you that I am in pain and, hopefully, you will respond with comfort. But what have I shown you, and what do you know? Maybe you just responded instinctually, not on the basis of any knowledge. Do you know how I feel? “I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’ ”31 You know my chest hurts, but it is not clear that you know just how it hurts. We know enough to be suspicious of those people who say “I know how you feel.” But can we be anything more than suspicious? It is not clear that we can say that we are not known, nor is it yet clear what would constitute being known. Just what is it I want to be assured of in being known? The problem so far in the passive skeptical recital is that it is too active or, better, wrongly active. [It has] by-passed the real, the special requirement of passivity in being known, the thing I have sometimes described as letting oneself be known, and as waiting to be known. . . . My recital, that is, assumed activity only in making myself known, not allowing an activity in, so to speak, becoming passive. But activity just here may well prove to constitute knowing oneself. It is the ability to make oneself an other to oneself, to learn of oneself something one did not already know. Hence this is the focus at which knowledge of oneself and of others meet. I should think a sensible axiom of the knowledge of persons

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would be this: that one can see others only to the extent that one can take oneself as an other. (459) This sort of passivity is better known as patience. It is a demand for relinquishing final authority over oneself; allowing oneself to be seen (and so relinquishing the desire to hide); granting authority to what is seen; letting the perceptions of others become part of one’s self-perception. We are back to acknowledgment. That term contains the ways in which self-knowledge is bound up with knowledge of others. Acknowledging someone as employer, teacher, parent, Creator just is acknowledging oneself as employee, student, child, creature, as having an identity inextricably tangled up with others. It is only from others that I learn who I am. Which means I do not know, not on my own, and the knowledge I receive from others is never final, never complete. Part of me remains strange, in process; I am other to myself. So it was misleading to suggest at the beginning of the passive skeptical recital that I know myself. Self-knowledge is, of course, a difficult thing. But selfignorance isn’t exactly simple. You cannot just not know yourself the way you can just not know someone with whom you have no relationship. I am fated to stand in some relation to myself, and so “[i]gnorance of myself is something I must work at; it is something studied, like a dead language” (385). Dead languages do not change; the passive skeptic does not admit of the possibility of further knowledge of herself. And it was misleading in the active skeptical recital to say “Even though I do not know of your pain, you certainly know.” Doubts about our ability to know others may be revelations of our doubts about others’ ability to know us. Doubts about others’ ability to know us may be doubts about our capacity to give expression to ourselves. It’s something like: if others make such persistent and egregious failures in their knowledge of me, in their readings of my expressions, then it stands to reason that such expressions, regardless of who makes them, are unreliable. Such a claim seems reasonable enough; others often fail in their readings of me. But Cavell’s point is that it is not easy to tell when it is the other’s failure to read me well, or when it is my failure to make myself available and when I am denying the other’s success in reading me, denying the possibility that “I may know better than you how it is with you.”32 That means, I must be able to turn over my authority over how I am known to others. In an age when the individual is constantly being reassured of his powers even as they are being taken from him, nothing is more important than to be reminded that the self is not transparent to the self. Nothing except, perhaps, reconfiguring the individual’s authority as patience. There is a certain account of passivity in which “to make oneself known, to present oneself for knowledge, were inevitably to distort oneself ” (459). It relies on a particular


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mind-body disjunction. Call that Cartesian or Kantian or just modern. Whatever the correct identification, Wittgenstein is resisting it when he writes that “the human body is the best picture of the soul.” Short of that (or because of that), “my self-consciousness comes between my consciousness and my expression of it, so that my expressions are embarrassed” (477). Then, I am apt to suspect that my expressions will produce the wrong responses in the other, responses directed to the wrong thing, to my enacted, theatricalized self. It is as an alternative to the wish to produce the response in the other that I claimed you must let yourself matter to the other. (There is a very good reason to not do so. You may discover that you do not matter.) Take this as advice to Hamlet.—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. (382–383)33 Accepting that would be accepting that my body is relevantly expressive, that even my embarrassed, overly self-conscious expressions, even my expressions of concealment—the laughter hiding sorrow, the slouch covering tension, the protestations denying guilt—are mine. “Whatever in me I have to conceal I may betray exactly by the way in which I conceal it. Just that is what is concealed; the concealment of what it is up to me to express is a perfect expression of it” (459). Patience means “letting oneself be known, waiting to be known.”34 It is a patience with the self and with others, a patience which is required by the fact that nothing can absolve me of my responsibility for saying what I mean, and a patience which enables me to resist grasping for such guarantees. If I think I must make myself known, then I may think I know what needs to be known and can show it, or fail in the trying. Patience suggests that I do not know all that needs to be known about myself and so can’t simply make it known. This does not deny that my body gives expression to myself. It only denies that how it does is straightforward. If I think I must make myself known, then I may think I know what needs to be known. But the “may” is important. I may also choose to give expression to myself because I am not sure I know what needs to be known. That is, I must put my expressions out there to reveal what I think needs to be known in order

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for others to tell me if I am wrong or not. My refusal to express myself, to declare myself, can be a way of preserving myself from being corrected. (This a way to summarize how Cavell will come to read Emerson’s injunction to self-reliance though Cavell would insist, rightly, that the previous paragraph is also Emersonian.)35 “The fantasy of aloneness in the world may be read as saying that the step out of aloneness, or self-absorption, has to come without the assurance of others. (Not, perhaps, without their help.) ‘No one comes’ is a tragedy for a child. For a grown-up it means the time has come to be the one who goes first (to offer oneself, allow oneself, to be, let us say, known).”36 It should not be surprising that it will often be difficult to tell when such a person is passive or when she is patient. And so while Cavell wants to promote this kind of patience, he is unwilling to simply dismiss the passive skeptic (446), the one who “singles oneself out for unknowableness . . . , interprets one’s separateness as isolation and then finds a cause for it” (461),37 the one Wittgenstein dramatized as striking himself on the breast, insisting that another could not have this pain. The understanding the Investigations provides of this possibility is worked out in The Claim of Reason with the question, “Does Wittgenstein provide an understanding of Rousseau?” Rousseau, like Molière’s Alceste, may stand as a representative of one version of a type of passive skeptic, the narcissistic type. Cavell is willing to call it a version of adolescence, only he wants to resist the “naughty implication that such a one just ought to grow up” (464). [R]omanticism generally may be said to have discovered the fact of adolescence, the task of wanting and choosing adulthood, along with the impossibility of this task. The necessity of the task is the choice of finitude, which for us (even after God) means the acknowledgment of the existence of finite others, which is to say, the choice of community, of autonomous moral existence. The impossibility lies in the options of community that the older grownups have left, which no one could want, not with a whole heart. So romantics dream revolution, and break their hearts. And so adolescents and adults agree on this one point, that to become adult is to grow up from your dreams. You needn’t be Martin Heidegger to count the achievement of modern individual existence as beginning with its eclipse in modern society and then graduating in its increasingly distant refinement of singularity. John Stuart Mill a hundred years earlier, and for the sake of similar perceptions, accepts the fact, or fate, that the only proof of liberty lies in idiosyncrasy. The problem completes itself when we no longer know whether we are idiosyncratic or not,


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which differences between us count, whether we have others.—After such community, what privacy? (464) Rousseau did not think himself essentially unknowable, but he did think he had to create the audience that could know him or care to know him and that he would be dead before that happened. Wittgenstein, it seems, thought the same thing. (Rousseau and Wittgenstein are different than the people who appear daily on television talk shows. There, it seems, the point is not knowledge but entertainment. It is as if there is no risk of being known so no reason to hide. “The very capacity for intimacy measures the fact of isolation” [465]. Declaring yourself is a skill which must be cultivated. Not just any declaration will do. Cavell is not calling for more talk TV any more than he is calling for free verse or nude beaches.) It may be that the narcissistic and the adolescent here merge with the prophetic—“the singular knowledge of an unquestionable truth which others are fated not to believe”—though Cavell does “not ask for conviction in the notion” (447).

Othello: Skepticism and Tragedy The final fifteen pages of The Claim of Reason are a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello which works out Cavell’s surmise (in the Lear essay) that “not only was tragedy obedient to a skeptical structure but contrariwise, that skepticism already bore its own marks of a tragic structure.”38 By the end of The Claim of Reason, the connection between skepticism and tragedy has become even tighter. Tragedy is the working out of a response to skepticism . . . an interpretation of what skepticism is itself an interpretation of; that, for example, Lear’s “avoidance” of Cordelia is an instance of the annihilation inherent in the skeptical problematic, that skepticism’s “doubt” is motivated not by (not even where it is expressed as) a (misguided) intellectual scrupulousness but by a (displaced) denial, by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge.39 The same elements are there: the all-or-nothing stakes (“my life upon her faith”; “when I love her not / Chaos is come again”); the precipitousness of Othello’s loss of faith like the precipitousness of the skeptic’s fall from doubting one simple object to world-denying despair; the demand for “ocular proof ” (the handkerchief ), which leads to catastrophe. Perhaps most important, the insistent doubting of what must surely be known, in this case, Desdemona’s love.

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When Cavell comments on his reading of Othello in Disowning Knowledge, much of the burden of his remarks is to show how those pages work out his earlier sense that “my discoveries in the regions of the skeptical problem of the other are, rightly understood, further characterizations of (material object) skepticism” (451). To get at what that means, I need to, finally, give a brief account of part II of The Claim of Reason. The argument in part II is just as much with ordinary language philosophy as it is with traditional epistemology. Cavell does not take up the more common position of the ordinary language philosopher, a position which suggests that, in order to dismiss the traditional epistemologist, it is enough to show that he is abusing language by taking words out of their ordinary or natural context. But Cavell cannot take that route, partly because he thinks skepticism is ordinary. “It (in one or another of its versions) is a response to, or expression of, a real experience which takes hold of human beings . . . a response which expresses a natural experience of a creature complicated or burdened enough to possess language at all” (140). Partly because he realizes that “the traditional philosopher can be said to know everything the ordinary language philosopher wishes to teach him” (145). The ordinary language philosopher forgets, or neglects, the extent to which language is malleable, fluid, and there are no universals which can be called upon to ensure the appropriate projection of a word into a new context or to limit in advance inappropriate projection. Cavell agrees with the ordinary language philosopher that the traditional epistemologist’s projections of the words “know” and “world” are rather awkward, but the same is true of any innovative projection of a word. “A new projection, though not at first obviously appropriate, may be made appropriate by giving relevant explanations of how it is to be taken, how the new context is an instance of the old concept. If we are to communicate, we mustn’t leap too far; but how far is too far?” (192). So, Cavell takes a different tack than the ordinary language philosopher.40 He agrees that the traditional epistemologist’s use of language is not fully natural, but, he insists, it is not fully unnatural. His concern is to show not that the traditional epistemologist’s words are meaningless but that they are meaningful only in a(n) (imagined) context which distorts our relation to the world. The example Cavell works with is a common skeptical ground for doubt—“But do you see all of it?”—from which it is supposed to follow that, if you don’t see the back half or the inside, then you cannot really be sure you have seen the object. As the ordinary language philosopher would be quick to say, this sounds rather silly. It is not our ordinary use of “see.” But we know what it means. We know, for example, what a trompe l’oeil is. The skeptic’s ground for doubt isn’t fully unnatural. But it isn’t fully natural insofar as, in our ordinary usage, I know what this means now, at this particular moment, in light of where I am


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currently positioned or where the object is positioned. In an ordinary case, there will be readily available answers to why I can’t see all of it. But the skeptic’s use doesn’t grant this. The skeptic constructs a context in which I never could be in a position to see all of it. The skeptic constructs a context “in which all our objects are moons. . . . In which, at any rate, our position with respect to significant objects is rooted. . . . This suggests that what the philosophers call the ‘senses’ are themselves conceived in terms of this idea of a geometrically fixed position, disconnected from the fact of their possession and use by a creature who must act” (202). (This disconnection follows quite readily, if not necessarily, from the vision of mind and body bequeathed to us by Descartes.) Cavell reaches a similar conclusion when he turns his attention from the ground for doubt to the initiating claim of knowledge. Here, his concern is to call into question the skeptical recital’s claims about generic objects by showing how they arise in a “non-claim context.” The skeptic’s claim—“I know these are my hands” (Moore) or “I know there is a green jar of pencils on the desk in front of me”—is not false. But the skeptic is asking it to be more than true; the claim must also be a basis and “ ‘[b]ecause it is true’ is not a reason or a basis for saying anything” (206). There has to be a reason for making the claim in the first place. We have to be able to understand why the philosopher thinks there is any point to making his claim to knowledge of a generic object. This is an appeal to the ordinary, but not the sort usually made by the ordinary language philosopher. “The emphasis is less on the ordinariness of an expression . . . than on the fact that they are said (or, of course, written) by human beings, to human beings, in definite contexts” (206). The philosopher’s claim provides no definite context, no reason for asserting knowledge of the presence of the jar of pencils on the desk, no account of “how his or my knowledge of that fact is relevant to what he or I am doing” (215).41 Cavell will say that the philosopher’s example is made in a non-claim context. The force of Cavell’s argument is that, as soon as the philosopher provides a claim context, then doubt, while reasonable, will not generalize. It remains a claim about the specific context of an object. If he doesn’t, he insists on speaking “without the commitments speech exacts.” In philosophizing we come to be dissatisfied with answers which depend upon our meaning something by an expression, as though what we meant by it were more or less arbitrary. . . . It is as though we try to get the world to provide answers in a way which is independent of our responsibility for claiming something to be so (to get God to tell us what we must do in a way which is independent of our responsibility for choice); and we fix the world so that it can do this. We construct “parts” of objects which have no parts; “senses” which

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have no guiding function. . . . And we take what we have fixed or constructed to be discoveries about the world, and take this fixation to reveal the human condition rather than our escape or denial of this condition through the rejection of the human conditions of knowledge and action and the substitution of fantasy. (215–216) Such a summary of part II is not enough to get at all the nuance and detail of Cavell’s discussion. But, hopefully, it is enough to make sense of how Othello’s relationship to Desdemona is not relevant just to other mind skepticism but also to external world skepticism. In particular, the background is necessary to make sense of Cavell’s claim that the turn to literature shifts the philosophical balance by uncovering “the animism, so to speak, in the philosophical idea of doubt itself.”42 Cavell begins to unpack this with what amounts to a summary of part II. Doubt, like belief, in its ordinary sense, in a claim context, is most often directed to speakers. But after the philosopher has “fixed the world” so that it can be coherently doubted (in a non-claim context), it is as if “the philosopher turns the world into, or puts it in the position of, a speaker, lodging its claims upon us, claims to which, as it turns out, the philosopher cannot listen.”43 In the philosophers’ accounts of objects in their skeptical recitals (Descartes before his fire, Moore holding up his hands), they are “as it were looking for a response from the object, perhaps a shining.”44 Cavell is concerned to show that his readings of Shakespeare do not just use the plays to provide illustrations of things he already knows from philosophy.45 Philosophy, he has repeatedly tried to show, misunderstands itself. Literature provides the closest thing we have to the Outsider’s knowledge (476) and so helps us to see how philosophy misunderstands itself. One aspect of this misunderstanding is that philosophy is not likely to accept Cavell’s intuition that it puts the world into the position of a speaker. Cavell has learned this not by reading the modern skeptics, but by reading Shakespearean tragedy in conversation with skepticism. But just how does Othello suggest this? Othello’s treatment of Desdemona directs Cavell’s attention to the philosopher’s treatment of the generic object. This is one of the most original aspects of part II of Claim. While the anti-skeptic tends to concentrate almost exclusively on the skeptic’s ground for doubt, Cavell reaches back a step to the claim (regarding the generic object) itself. There, it is as if the philosopher has turned himself into stone. What Othello alerts us to is the transformation, in the skeptic’s imagination, of the object. But it is unclear whether the philosopher has put the object in the position of a speaker (which cannot be listened to) or has found the object in such a position and had to silence it. The reading of Othello suggests the latter.46


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In the closing pages of The Claim of Reason, his concern is in (what seems to be) a different, opposite direction. Instead of the way philosophical skepticism demands, against itself, a certain animation of the material object, hence romanticism, the concern is with the way Othello demands, against himself, a de-animation of another, Desdemona. “The consequence for the man’s refusal of his other is an imagination of stone” (481–482).47 He must imagine her as incapable of response. The most obvious way Othello turns Desdemona into stone, or the most obvious manifestation of his imagination of her as stone, is that Othello never confronts Desdemona, never asks for her confirmation or denial of Iago’s rumor-mongering. (In the final scene, his course is set; he has not come to question her.) Where the traditional epistemologist puts the object in the position of a speaker he cannot listen to, Othello puts a speaker in the position of an object in order to not have to listen to her. She can have no say, and what she has said and done is not important. Better, it is so important that it takes all of Iago’s cunning rumoring to provide reasons to forget, or repress, or cover what she has said and done. For what Othello, like the skeptic, “seeks is a possession that is not in opposition to another’s claim or desire but one that establishes an absolute or inalienable bonding to himself, to which no claim or desire could be opposed, could conceivably count.”48 Put another way, he seeks “a metaphysically desperate degree of private bonding,” fulfilling “the wish to become undispossessable.”49 Of course, there is no such bond, and the wish to become undispossessable cannot be fulfilled. The consequences of the fantasy and its attempted fulfillment are traced in Othello. What happens in this play? How can he shift his trust from Desdemona to Iago? Cavell suggests that the question is misleading. “It is not conceivable that Othello believes Iago and not Desdemona. Iago, we might say, offers to Othello an opportunity to believe something, something to oppose to something else he knows. What does he know?” (484). He knows Desdemona loves him, knows she would not abandon his bed for Cassio’s. The suggestion is not that he doesn’t know this but that he knows it and must deny it. Why? Why is Desdemona’s faithfulness more terrible than her faithlessness? I think of him . . . as having been surprised by her, at what he has elicited from her; at, so to speak, a success rather than a failure. It is the dimension of her that shows itself in that difficult and dirty banter with Iago as they await Othello on Cyprus. Rather than imagine himself to have elicited that, or solicited it, Othello would imagine it elicited by anyone and everyone else.——Surprised, let me say, to find that she is flesh and blood. It was the one thing he could not imagine for himself. For if she is flesh and blood then, since they are one, so is he. (491)

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The legendary warrior, commander of armies, conqueror of whole cities, finds himself brought up short by a love and a sexuality which do not admit of conquest and command. Love that reveals him as partial, dependent upon her, incomplete without her, love that cracks the mirror of his narcissism. It shows him that union comes through separateness, not through an overcoming of separateness but through its acceptance. That the problem (call it the mystery) of marriage is that “two becoming one is just half the problem; the other half is how one becomes two.”50 That knowledge, unwanted, unbearable, becomes the soil, cultivated by Iago, of doubt and arouses Othello’s murderous impotence. As if what was not achieved that interrupted wedding night can only be achieved in a maddened, darkened (“Put out the light and then put out the light”), tranced reenactment of it in the final scene, on a different bed but with the same wedding sheets. Is this convincing as a reading of Othello? As an account of skepticism? The questions intertwine, and their answers will depend upon how skepticism is conceived. Cavell is not saying that Shakespeare is taking up a theme he learned from the philosophers (anyway, he predates Descartes) and dressing it up as literature, as if we know what skepticism is and know what counts as knowing prior to reading Othello. When Cavell says that tragedy and philosophy are interpretations of the same thing, he means to register this. But he does not mean to say that there is something out there called skepticism that exists as something independent of and prior to both and against which we might evaluate their competing interpretations. If we already know what skepticism is, then it will be easier for us to see Cavell as manipulating the text. And if we think we know what Cavell thinks skepticism is, we will also run into problems. The Claim of Reason shows the skeptic’s self-portrait. But it does not affirm that portrait; it undermines it. And it also does not go on to offer a stable alternative portrait. Cavell imagines the following challenge: “But Othello surely knows that Desdemona exists! . . . So what has his more or less interesting condition to do with skepticism?” He responds: In what spirit do you ask that question? I too am raising it. I wish to keep suspicion cast on what it is we take to express skepticism, and here especially by casting suspicion on whether we know what it means to know that another exists. Nothing could be more certain to Othello than that Desdemona exists; is flesh and blood; is separate from him; other. This is precisely the possibility that tortures him. (492) Does this strain credulity? Can we actually be tortured by another’s separateness from us to the point of destroying them? Can we resent our dependence


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and incompleteness that much? We know, of course, that jealousy does go to these lengths of violence (and not only when it has legitimate reason to be jealous). That is not the problem. The difficulty in accepting Cavell’s reading is that it is this man, Othello, not, say, some guy in a bluegrass murder ballad. If it can happen to Othello, then surely it can happen to any of us. Of course, it doesn’t have to end in violence. I will more likely find other ways to deny that other, retreat, shut my eyes to her. (And, then, what reconciliation? Acknowledging her will mean acknowledging my prior denial, our history.) Cavell is reaching back a few dozen pages to his remarks about avoiding the best case and avoiding the concept of the best. In my relationships to any other, how do I know when I have reached the limits of the humanly acknowledgeable, and when I have reached only my limits? It was with such questions in mind that Cavell said we “live our skepticism.” He was not saying that we never or even ordinarily are in best case scenarios, but “that we are rather disappointed in our occasions for knowing, as though we have, or have lost, some picture of what knowing another, or being known by another, would really come to—a harmony, a concord, a union, a transparence, a governance, a power— against which our actual successes at knowing, and being known, are poor things” (440). He doesn’t quite say that such a picture is an illusion. He does say that it becomes an illusion when knowing is understood as it has been since the Enlightenment. Then, we lose even the possibility that “just this haphazard, unsponsored state of the world, just this radiation of relationships . . . just such things are perhaps the most that knowing others comes to, or has come to for me.—Is there more for it to come to; more that it must come to?” (439–440). Othello’s problem is his insistence on this “more,” or his insistence on a particular vision of what would count as more, his sense that only an impossible exclusiveness would actually count as the best. But then, where are you and I? What do we want from another? Am I prepared to acknowledge Desdemona as a best case? Are you prepared to acknowledge that the one(s) you are living with or without, or hiding from, may be your Desdemona? (Am I prepared to be another’s Desdemona? Do I know whether or not I already am?) You are not going to murder her. Is it enough to say that? You do not claim, I believe, to go around every day in roughly Othello’s frame of mind?——Not exactly. But I claim to see how his life figures mine, how mine has the makings of his, that we bear an internal relation to one another; how my happiness depends upon living touched but not struck by his problems, or struck but not stricken; problems of trust and betrayal, of false isolation and false company, of the desire and the fear of both privacy and union. (453)

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We are like Othello insofar as we are daily disappointed in our occasions for knowing another, as if our expectations are too high, or just too different. Countless marriages—and friendships and congregations—have come to grief here and without discovering, as we may suppose Othello did, that the problem was the expectations, not the spouse. Or, without discovering whether it was the expectations or the spouse. Skepticism here is “produced not by a doubt about whether we can know but by a disappointment over knowledge itself ” (440). The failure of knowledge to live up to our expectations does not mean it has not succeeded. How is this an answer, and to what? Maybe it is not an answer at all. Is Cavell saying “change the way you relate to others,” or “change the way you view your relationships with others”? Is that a distinction worth making? It is not clear how to do one without the other. But the question—how would accepting that “just this haphazard, unsponsored state of the world, just this radiation of relationships, of my cares and commitments, provides the milieu in which my knowledge of others can best be expressed” change that milieu?—is still open. In particular, it is open to the response that accepting just this as the best is giving up or caving in. As when Margaret Fuller said, “I accept the universe,” and Carlyle responded, “By Gad, she’d better.”51 The juxtaposition of Fuller and Carlyle should at least serve to suggest that “I accept the universe” can mean very different things depending on who says it. Imagine, because it is so difficult, Fuller’s words in the mouth of a character from a Sebald novel. (Is it harder than reading Zagajewski’s injunction to “try to praise the mutilated world”?) Sebald’s traumatized exiles cannot find their feet anywhere, not at home, not in England. So they become “fantasists, ill-equipped for life,” and create worlds of their own out of paint, thread, matchsticks, words, though even here they still seem lost. Or, can we imagine the words in the mouth of Alceste, who finds the world uninhabitable and wishes to withdraw from it with Célimène, so disgusted by the world around him, he wants to find the world in her and wants to be the world, the whole world, for her. Here, maybe always, misanthropy takes the form of narcissism.

6 “Can We Believe All This?” Cavell’s Annexation of Theology

To choose between Judaism and Christianity is, I suppose, still a live issue for me.1 Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers; philosophers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.2 “It may be that the claim upon the reader that I have pointed to . . . may be thought of as a romantic demand for, or promise of, redemption, say self-recovery. But in all philosophical seriousness, a recovery from what? Philosophy cannot say sin. Let us speak of a recovery from skepticism . . . from a drive to the inhuman.”3 Here is one way to read this. Of course, philosophy can say sin. Better to say that philosophy won’t say sin. If an essay on Bringing Up Baby can be philosophy, then philosophy can surely say sin. It is a disappointment and a surprise, then, that Cavell chooses here to withdraw from responsibility for his words by blaming “philosophy,” withdrawing onto ground he has been relentlessly undermining for decades. Moreover, he effectively excludes theologians from the conversation and becomes one more example of modern philosophy denying the difference upon which it is founded.

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Here is another way. He writes, “Philosophy cannot say sin.” But of course it can; Cavell has just said it. In doing so, he calls attention to one of philosophy’s silences. The important point is not that philosophy will not answer the question “recovery from what?” with “sin.” The important point is that philosophy isn’t even asking Cavell’s question. That means philosophy will not only not say sin, it will also not say “recovery from skepticism.” It has almost invariably chosen to speak in terms of an overcoming or refutation of skepticism. Skepticism is a mistake, not an illness or condition or frame of mind. Why is the sentence—“Philosophy cannot say sin”—even there? The paragraph would read seamlessly without it. With it, the paragraph is disrupted. What does the disruption add? I read it as suggesting that, if philosophy were to start asking his questions, it would become increasingly difficult for philosophy to perpetuate its myth,4 based as it is on denying sin as a possible answer, as a possible interpretation of skepticism, or as a candidate for what skepticism is an interpretation of. If philosophy were to learn, with Cavell and Wittgenstein, to speak of a recovery from skepticism and to understand skepticism as a “denial of the human,” then it would find itself, like Cavell, once again getting tripped up, tangled up, sometimes buoyed up, by theology. This example, like the others that follow, should give some sense of the curious space Cavell inhabits between or beyond the conventional hostilities between philosophy and theology. In his essay on His Girl Friday, Cavell declares it to be “a work meant to challenge the words and moods of popular romance, hence to invoke those words and moods at every turn.”5 That is one way to understand his relationship to Christianity: invoking its words and moods at every turn in order to challenge it. Or, elsewhere: “Christianity is something in its very presence that is to be expected, that exists only in expectation, say faith. Then the absence or refusal of Christianity is a constant offer of its possibility or presence.”6 This is a specific claim about Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. But, like so many of Cavell’s words, it is also a selfcharacterization. That means it is an invitation to see how the absences and refusals of Christianity in his work are a “constant offer of its possibility or presence,” and to see Christianity present in that. One way to describe this book you are reading is as my acceptance of that invitation. It would be saying too much to say of Cavell what Barth said of Overbeck: some try to be theologians and fail. Others (like Overbeck) try not to be theologians and end up being very good ones. Yet it is true that Cavell is fascinated by Christianity in a way that few contemporary philosophers are. On the other hand, unlike philosophers like MacIntyre, who identifies himself with Christianity, or Zizek, Badiou, and Vattimo, who have explicitly and extensively (if idiosyncratically) taken up Christian themes, Cavell retains an

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ambivalence, saying, “to choose between Judaism and Christianity is . . . still a live issue for me.” Perhaps Jeffrey Stout, who has made dialogue with theology central to his work, is closest to Cavell in this regard. But reading Stout, you never get the sense that Christianity is a live issue for him. (It is of great importance to me, though I am as yet unable to account for it, that Cavell says it is the choice between Judaism and Christianity that remains a live issue with him and not, say, the choice between philosophy and religion, which would make more sense given the sorts of contrasts he has drawn between the two.) The strangeness of the space Cavell inhabits is not just a motivation for this book but its topic. Cavell is a philosopher, not a theologian, and a Jew, not a Christian. I offer this book as a theologian’s reading, realizing that this means that my reading may be dispensed with by the “philosophers,” but hopefully it is not one that will be dispensed with by philosophers captivated by Cavell. I offer it as a conversation between Cavell and theology, a conversation in which I am often not sure which side I am on and just as often not sure how to draw the line. That may, I suppose, be taken as pointing to a lack of conviction on my part, an example of what John Milbank calls the “false humility” of the theologian. But I intend, perhaps not very humbly, to make the reader also unsure and to root that lack of surety in Cavell’s achievement (and theology’s various underachievements). I think it is a conversation which, on one hand, illuminates crucially important yet neglected aspects of Cavell’s work and, on the other, reveals to theology paths untaken or insufficiently followed. I do not offer my reading as a Barthian “annexation of Canaan.”7 Barth meant that the offerings of pagan philosophy could be appropriated by Christian theology, turned to theology’s purposes, instead of ignored; hammered into a usable shape, instead of discarded. I think Barth had the right idea here, even if it was a clumsy metaphor. But I am more interested in Cavell’s annexation of theology. I hope to show, first, that it is Christianity he is annexing; and second, that it is indeed an annexation. Those two tasks will necessarily overlap. In the process, some answers may emerge to the question, “Why does Christianity need to be annexed?” Why not simply adopted or rejected?

Annexing Theology Here is a passage from Cavell’s Lear essay, addressing the issue of whether or not Cordelia can be considered a Christ figure. It is one of the most explicitly “Christian” passages in Cavell’s work.

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The play can be said to be Christian—not because it shows us redemption (it does not) but because it throws our redemption into question, and leaves it up to us. But there is no suggestion that we can take it up only through Christ. On the contrary, there is reason to take this drama as an alternative to the Christian one. In the first place, Christianity, like every other vision of the play, is not opted for, but tested. Specifically . . . in its suggestion that all appeals to gods are distractions or excuses, because the imagination uses them to wish for complete, for final solutions, when what is needed is at hand, or nowhere. But isn’t this what Christ meant? And isn’t this what Lear fails to see in wishing to be God’s spy before he is God’s subject? Cordelia is further proof of this: Her grace is shown by the absence in her of any unearthly experiences; she is the only good character whose attention is wholly on earth, on the person nearest her.8 The twists and turns of this passage are revealing. The play doesn’t show us redemption, it calls it into question, but it is Christian to do so. King Lear throws us back upon ourselves instead of offering guarantees, but so does Christianity. The play suggests that redemption may be found outside of Christ and so presents an invitation for a Cavellian annexation of Christianity, a Cavellian alternative to Christianity, one that tests it at every point where its proponents turn God into a distraction or a final solution. But Lear tests Christianity on its own criteria—“what Christ meant”—which is that we were created to be human, and that means the ordinary. One of the other explicitly Christian passages in Cavell’s work is the single line, “The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.” He is rephrasing Wittgenstein’s “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” At the heart of the finest stretch of writing Cavell ever produced (part IV of The Claim of Reason), at the heart of his account of acknowledgment, an argument that is indispensable to everything he has ever said about skepticism, Cavell inserts Jesus. He will spend much more time with Cordelia and Desdemona as examples of victims of failures of acknowledgment, with, we might say, Shakespeare’s annexation of Christianity. But he will not call them the “best” pictures of such failures. Instead, like in the Lear passage, he will judge them by this standard.9 So why must Christianity be annexed, and what does that annexation look like? Why is Christianity something he admires and rejoices in but is unable to share?10 A first clue emerges in the ways Cavell occasionally contrasts philosophy and religion. For example, arguing in support of Emerson’s claim to philosophy, he writes of the “commitment to subject every word of itself to

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criticism, endlessly, with nothing held safe, that is the blessing or the curse of philosophy—it is not a commitment religion may make, sometimes to its credit, sometimes not.”11 Is that true? And even before that question, what does it mean? It means next to nothing without an account of how philosophy (I take it that, here, Cavell doesn’t mean the tradition of Western philosophy since Plato, but philosophy as he learned it from Wittgenstein and Emerson) manifests that commitment. Moreover, the point of the Lear passage seemed to be that “what Christ meant” is that Christianity doesn’t have to keep something safe. (A gap starts to emerge between Christ and Christianity, one that looks something like Barth’s gap between faith and religion.) Perhaps more to the point is Cavell’s occasional insistence that religion is simply no longer a live option in the modern world, which emerges in comments like the following: “Detailed dependence on God” of the sort exhibited in Descartes is “no longer natural to the human spiritual repertory.”12 Or, “satisfaction is no longer imaginable within what we understand as religion.”13 Or, “Respectable further theologizing of the world has, I gather, ceased.”14 Taken to say that “God is unintelligible to the modern mind,” the argument is at best strange (after all, Cavell says that Christianity is still a live issue for him), at worst offensive, given the way it ignores the millions who do find it natural, especially, but not only, outside of the West. But the first remark is just as easily taken as a specific argument with Descartes’ theism, especially in light of Cavell’s nod to Pascal’s suggestion that Descartes’ God was a “philosopher’s God.”15 Similarly, a claim like “[r]espectable further theologizing of the world has, I gather, ceased” can sound like Richard Rorty at his most smug,16 but in Cavell’s voice, such claims are more ambiguous. Theologians have made similar claims. Perhaps most famously, Bonhoeffer in his letter to his godson.17 Closer to Cavell, it is arguable that he learned to question the respectability of theology and of Christianity from a theologian, Kierkegaard.18 I suppose one way to say it is, “God is dead.” Cavell often suggests as much. For example, in a reading of Rosemary’s Baby, Cavell alights on the moment in the film when Rosemary picks up a copy of an old Time magazine whose cover reads “Is God Dead?” and reminds us: Nietzsche predicts in The Joyful Wisdom that the news of God’s death will take a century to reach our ears. The century is now about finished, and the news has reached our ears. Only it has come as news, i.e., as gossip, and in that form the knowledge Nietzsche speaks of cannot come to us at all, is further from us than ever. For his intelligence was about us, that we have killed

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God, and not to know that is no longer an absence of information but the absence of conscience, of so much as the possibility of self-knowledge.19 Like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Cavell knows that Christianity is a set of practices, not a set of propositions, and the worry expressed in remarks like “satisfaction is no longer imaginable within what we understand as religion” is not a worry about whether God exists but about whether Christianity is living up to that fact. Something like this is at work on the closing page of “Ending the Waiting Game” when he writes, as a way of answering whether Beckett’s vision can be encompassed by Eliot’s: We could re-understand the sense in which redemption is impossible, and possible: impossible only so long . . . as we think that an event near 2,000 years ago relieves us of responsibility rather than nails us to it—so long, that is, as we live in magic instead of faith. . . . But can we really believe all this, or must these explanations be given in bad faith, blinding us to what we do believe? . . . It is not everyone’s problem; but it may be anyone’s.20 The last line is a clear echo of Nietzsche and Emerson, both of whom claimed to write for everyone and no one, which meant that they wrote for part of each of our split selves, for the self we could be and to the self we are, which holds us back from the higher self.21 This is not everyone’s problem. But it may be anyone’s. Can we really believe all this? (Do we even know what it means?) Cavell’s questions are rarely rhetorical ones. (This is one of the hardest things about learning to read him. Like in the Investigations, each question is to be paused over, tarried with, allowed to gather depth, not skimmed over to get to an answer. It may not be there, and if it is, it will be at the end of a long and twisted road.) Cavell can’t really believe all this. But neither can he disbelieve it. More precisely, he can’t let go of the question. He does not ask, “Do we believe all this?” It is as obvious to Cavell as it was to the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters that we don’t. The “we” here includes Christians who haven’t shown Cavell that they can really believe all this, not just say it. But he does not turn that into a reason to abandon hope that we might, that recovering the ability to believe all this might be the reasonable aspiration of a lifetime. He can be placed within his own description of the positions of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as “embattled because [they] find the words of the Christian to be the right words. It is the way he means them that is empty or enfeebling.”22 So finding a way to say those words without them being empty or enfeebling is their task, their goal.

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Both are well known for insisting that Christianity is a set of practices. So Cavell’s “Can we believe all this?” does not mean “Can we assent to this set of propositions?” It means: [W]e have not mastered, or we have forgotten, or we have distorted, or learned through fragmented models, the forms of life which could make utterances like “God exists” or “God is dead” or “I love you” or “I cannot do otherwise” or “Beauty is but the beginning of terror” bear all the weight they could carry, express all they could take from us. We do not know the meaning of the words. We look away and leap around.23 I need to try to draw some conclusions from what may seem like a confusing barrage of enigmatic quotations that do nothing except demonstrate typically Cavellian elusiveness. But it is important to me that all these lines are there and that they show Cavell can’t let go of the issue of faith, that Christianity and Judaism are still live issues for him. Why? The answers may not be that surprising. First, someone who is so preoccupied with the question of external world and other mind skepticism is apt to be generous toward the question of the existence of God. Atheist philosophers typically don’t share his conviction in the worthiness of questions about balls of wax, cherries, envelopes, and other minds. I think it is fair to say that Cavell, if pressed, would say that the question of skepticism with regard to God is a very similar question to the one about others. That is to say only that God is as much a matter of acknowledgment as others are. That God is not to be known by proofs any more than Desdemona is.24 That, in the Gospels, this is “no less a literary than a philosophical problem.”25 Moreover, his interest in Christianity is due to the way that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus make that parallel possible. It suggests that Christianity is, or can be, open to the threat of skepticism (about God and others) and that such openness is constitutive of faith. Accordingly, I wish to emphasize the way Cavell makes Christianity’s problem his own. Writing of Fear and Trembling, Cavell says, “While we are stripped of Abraham’s faith and of his clarity, it is still his position we find ourselves in.”26 Without being a Christian himself, he takes on Christianity’s burden, translating it into words he hopes are not enfeebling. This comes out in several places. Here is one: Our place in society has become unknown to us. . . . Knowledge of the self is acquired only together with knowledge of the self ’s society, of its stand in society—as though what is “unconscious” in an adult is not merely his psychic past but his social present, equally

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painful and difficult to recognize—and that just as having a self requires taking a stand upon the self, so having a social place means assuming that place. In this condition, self-consciousness, for the foreseeable future, will start, and mostly continue as embarrassment. For the discovery of modern society, whether in Machiavelli, in Rousseau, or in Marx, is the discovery of modern individuality, whether as isolated, as homeless, or as dispossessed. But we are as incapable of knowing our individuality, or accepting the individuality of another, as we are of becoming Christ to one another.27 Does it seem bizarre to speak of Christianity’s problem and to identify knowing our individuality and the individuality of others with becoming Christ to one another? Cavell does not say that this is impossible, but that modernity makes it difficult. And Cavell, to be sure, finds Emerson and Wittgenstein to be more helpful than Jesus in negotiating our individuality, in becoming Christ to one another. But is that theologically more interesting than the fact that he identifies negotiating our individuality (this is just shorthand for the kind of acknowledgment spelled out at length in the previous chapter) with being Christ for one another? Like in The Claim of Reason—“The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul”—and in the Lear essay, Cavell places Christ at the center of his understanding of acknowledgment. He knows what a lot of theologians do not, that “the Gospel saves not because of what it says but because of who it is who has said it.”28 I mean to point out the importance of Cavell’s insistence that Cordelia is not a Christ figure. The moment of his death is the moment when Christ . . . finally takes the human condition fully into himself. ( . . . [A]nd perhaps why it is so important to the Christ story that it begins with birth and infancy.) It is in his acceptance of this condition that we are to resemble him. If Cordelia resembles Christ, it is by having become fully human, by knowing her separateness. . . . As Christ receives reflection in every form of human scapegoating, every way in which one man bears the brunt of another’s distortion and rejection. For us the reflection is brightest in Cordelia.29 We have something to learn from Cordelia about what Christ meant, but Cordelia remains a reflection. Here, we see the same pattern as in the lines from The World Viewed: the same identification of (Cavell’s version of ) philosophy with theology; the same realization that what he is calling for has already been called for in the Gospels; the same offer, despite all that, of an alternative to Christianity.

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A cluster of bewildering contradictions has emerged. Christianity is no longer a live issue in the modern world. But it is a live issue for Cavell. Christianity relieves us of responsibility. But it is supposed to nail us to it. Christianity appeals to God for a complete and final solution. But Christ meant that what is needed is at hand, or nowhere. Christianity seeks to hold too much safe. Yet Christ did not. Christianity teaches us to deny our finitude. But Christ shows us how to accept it. There is one pointed objection I haven’t yet mentioned. It comes toward the end of The Claim of Reason: Can a human being be free of human nature? (The doctrine of Original Sin can be taken as a reminder that, with one or rather two exceptions humankind cannot be thus free. Yet Saint Paul asks us to put off our (old) nature. What is repellent in Christianity is the way it seems to imagine both our necessary bondage to human nature and our possible freedom from it.)30 Even though Christianity, or an aspect of it, is here called “repellent,” the passage seems to me far more ambiguous about Paul’s demand to put off our old nature than it is taken to be by readers like Mulhall31 and Fergus Kerr.32 Cavell is not only acknowledging Catholic and Orthodox accounts of Mary, but also flagging the possibility that there is more than one account of original sin. If I am right in my reading of “[p]hilosophy cannot say sin,” then there is no reason to suppose that Cavell has any particular animus against original sin. He will be worried about particular accounts of original sin, but in that he is no different from a theologian. More important is the fact that “way” is italicized. What is repellent is not Paul’s demand, not that it asks us to put off our old nature. And what is repellent is not that it imagines a necessary bondage along with the possibility of freedom, but the way in which it imagines that. The right way, presumably, is Cavell’s. But what is that? His aphorisms about “nothing is more human than the wish to deny the human” register the same sense of paradoxical entrapment, a trap from which there is no escape into something beyond the human. I take it, any Christian theology worth the name takes it, that the incarnation registers something like this. The difference is that Cavell missteps here in his characterization of Christianity. Christianity does not imagine a bondage to human nature. Christianity imagines a bondage to sin and understands human nature as freedom, freedom for human nature. (That, surely, is the thrust of Cavell’s remarks on Christ in the Lear essay.) I might say that what is repellent (to the Christian) is a particular formulation of the nature-grace

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distinction. What is repellent is grace as superadded. Cavell isn’t the only one who finds this repellent. Barth and de Lubac do also. De Lubac’s now-famous argument33 is that Catholic theology after Aquinas and spurred on by the battle with the Reformers had driven an unhelpful wedge between nature and grace. Catholic theologians ended up conceding too much to Protestant accounts of depravity. On this view, humans could be understood as having a purely natural destiny into which grace may then intervene to fit us for a supernatural destiny added on top of the natural. De Lubac shows how this made a travesty of the Christian theology of creation in which nature is always already graced and humans are created for a supernatural end, that our supernatural end is natural. The effect of the new teaching was to grant a purely natural realm, to hand over the understanding of the person to the new science. Theology loses any voice in the first tier of nature. Moreover, since grace is now external to nature, nature can be downgraded. A “repellent” space opens up. I imagine that Cavell would find Barth and de Lubac appealing and affirming of his sense of affinity to Christianity. But I don’t imagine that this would change his mind about the need for an alternative. The issue goes back to the reference to Ash Wednesday in the Beckett essay: “Can we believe all this?” Not, “is Eliot better than Beckett?” (whatever that could possibly mean). Cavell has said that, if we could believe all this, the vision of Ash Wednesday could “encompass Beckett.” Not, “is it true?” because “in art—as now in politics, as formerly in religion, as in personal relations—finding the right to speak the truth is as difficult as finding the truth. One could say that the right to speak, in these arenas, is gone.”34 The right is gone because Christianity now relieves us of responsibility rather than nailing us to it. Cavell believes that as much as the theologians of the fugitive ecclesia do. And so he asks them, us, “Can we really believe all this, or must these explanations be given in bad faith, blinding us to what we do believe? . . . It is not everyone’s problem, but it may be anyone’s.” Roughly speaking, contemporary academic theology can be divided into two camps. On one hand are those who can’t believe all this and so try to make Christian doctrine more believable by adjusting it to something called “the modern mind.” These theologians are sometimes called “liberals.” At one point in the early 1990s, they were called “revisionists.” Cavell, I think, would level at them the same rebuke he says Kierkegaard leveled at their earlier versions, “a rebuke to theologians for not attending to their job of defending the faith, in the categories of the faith, but instead [they] help deliver it bound and gagged into the hands of philosophy.”35 On the other are those who pit Christianity directly against the modern (or postmodern) mind, reversing the binary and insisting that we must believe all this or else nihilism will ensue. This latter group includes the fugitive ecclesiocrats, where the effect of the tension bet-

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ween the world they converse with in the cities and the farms and the world they think makes it seem as if, because we can’t believe all this, we must. The first group is on the defensive these days. No one seems to read Gordon Kaufman or Schubert Ogden any more. The second is well established in the academy, though its anxiety over the church’s self-preservation in the face of (post)modernity is increasingly shrill. Cavell inhabits a third camp. While remaining fascinated by Christianity on some level, he can’t share in it even, or especially, in its liberal forms. But if I am right that the existence of God is a matter of acknowledgment, then the question becomes, “Is Cavell’s position a failure of acknowledgment or an example of it?” “The existence of divinity, whatever its further intellectual problems, is no more a hypothesis than the existence of my neighbor is, though I might deny, or hedge, either.”36 Is Cavell denying and hedging here? Looking away and leaping around? Is he shutting his eyes to our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul? Or, should we read Cavell’s repeated references to Christ precisely as forms of acknowledgment, the only acknowledgment he is capable of ? Acknowledgment that takes the form of a series of questions like, “What Dewey calls for, other disciplines [he means the sciences] can do as well, maybe better, than philosophy. What Emerson calls for is something we do not want to hear, something about the necessity of patience or suffering in allowing ourselves to change. What discipline will call for this if philosophy does not?”37 Or questions like, “Isn’t this what Christ meant?” “Can we believe all this?” “Must these explanations be given in bad faith?” If we cannot believe all this, if these explanations must be given in bad faith, that is because Christianity no longer nails us to responsibility but instead relieves us of it. But does Christianity, in all of its instantiations, now relieve us of responsibility rather than nailing us to it? (How many saints would there have to be for this question to matter? Abraham—in Genesis 18—has a desperate exchange with God over a similar issue.) Are such generalizations useful here? Or is Cavell missing something? Is he failing to be “one of those people on whom nothing is lost”?38 Our failures of perception, he has told us, are “ascribable only to ourselves, to failures of our character; as if to fail to guess the unseen from the seen, to fail to trace the implications of things—that is, to fail the perception that there is something to be guessed and traced, right or wrong— requires that we persistently coarsen and stupefy ourselves.”39 I hope this is true. But it is not clear what sort of theological judgment of Cavell that is, because if it is lost on Cavell, the same thing is lost on some of the best that theology has managed to produce in my lifetime, postliberalism’s and radical orthodoxy’s fugitive ecclesiocrats. Hence my inability to take sides, or to create sides, or adequately to perceive sides on the question of Cavell and theology. And I have,

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in what follows, little to offer to undermine his generalizations. I do not wish to hide the implication that this may just reveal my coarseness and stupidity. But there is one of Cavell’s generalizations with regard to religion that I do wish to challenge, the one that says, “Respectable further theologizing of the world has, I gather, ceased.” The evidence that such theologizing has not ceased is in the work of Rowan Williams. I suppose also that the turn to Williams will show that “Can we believe all this?” may not be the right question. The question rather is, “Is learning, or trying or coming to, directions toward belief worth the time of a life to discover?” Finally, it is not clear to me whether, in what follows, I am trying to reconquer territory annexed by Cavell, or suggesting that he has not annexed enough. I turn to Williams for at least three reasons. First, I think it is uncontroversial to count him as one of the finest living theologians; and, second, as the archbishop of Canterbury, he can stand in as plausibly as anyone as a representative of Christianity. But I also turn to him because he seems to me the most Cavellian of theologians. Anyone who has read both Williams and Cavell cannot help but be struck by their similarities. To put it most simply, but not inaccurately, the point of contact between the two is their relentless preoccupation with “How is the self brought into question?” This, of course, means exploring the many ways we guard ourselves from questioning. Both affirm the acknowledgment of finitude not as limit, but as gift. Both see most modern accounts of selfhood, the too easy distinctions between inner and outer, as ways of evading such responsibility. Both see such evasions as institutionalized by liberal political structures. Yet both leave themselves open to being labeled as liberals “if that term embraces, as I suppose it should, a starting point in the subjective.”40 Both pity our loneliness as much as they despise our narcissism. Both agree that “[t]he crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.” Both think that religion, more often than not, uses God to evade God’s judgment. Both reject the attempt to turn metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack so that we are relieved of responsibility for our failures of acknowledgment, relieved of the demand for confession and repentance. It is this last claim which may seem most dubious and which I will pursue in the rest of this chapter.

Intellectual Lack and the Unknowable God Can theology be “fully self-critical”?41 Can philosophy? Can anything? What work is the word “fully” doing here? Cavell writes, “[D]isciplines which live on criticism—call them the philosophical disciplines—understand themselves as

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subject only to particular terms and forms of criticism, and at the same time as providing universal criticisms of other disciplines.”42 Is philosophy therefore not fully self-critical because it insists on particular terms and forms? Or is that insistence a condition of possibility for the self-criticism it is capable of ? In any case, my argument will not be that Christianity is “fully self-critical.” I only mean to show that Rowan Williams argues that a self-criticism that is much like Cavell’s in its manner and intensity can be understood to mark much of the long history of Christian theology. I think of it this way: the tradition of the via negativa in theology means remaining open to the threat of skepticism. Herbert McCabe, as usual, puts the point of Aquinas’s Five Ways with admirable brevity. The Five Ways are not “proofs,” and they tell us nothing about the nature of God. They “show that a certain kind of question about the world and ourselves is valid: ‘Why the world, instead of nothing at all?’ . . . Aquinas wishes to say two things: (1) that here we have a valid question, and (2) that we do not know how to answer it.”43 For my purposes, it is important to point out that, here, Aquinas’s argument opens up, vis-à-vis God, the same two fronts as Cavell’s argument vis-à-vis other minds and the external world. Cavell’s argument is against, on one hand, the pragmatists who don’t think the skeptic’s question is a valid one and, on the other, the skeptics who think it is an answerable question. Williams’s addition to this is in how he repeatedly gestures toward the way an apophatic theology suggests an apophatic anthropology.

Finitude and Intellectual Lack The question of skepticism is a question about the human. In his response to skepticism, Cavell continually circles back to the question of human nature and repeatedly identifies skepticism with a “denial of the human.”44 He will also say that “only a God, or the son of God, could bear being human.”45 And it is an indispensable part of his response that he never answers the question of skepticism, or that he answers it only in provisional, tentative, unstable ways. In a later book, he offers what amounts to a three-sentence summary of The Claim of Reason that makes this clear. “Wittgenstein discovers the threat or the temptation of skepticism in such a way that efforts to solve it continue its work of denial. The question is what the denial is of. Sometimes I say it is of finitude, sometimes of the human.” He adds, “These are hardly final responses.”46 At the end of The Claim of Reason, Cavell reminds us of the nature of that denial: “[w]hat I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism—the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an

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intellectual difficulty. . . . To interpret a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.”47 This is Othello’s problem, and it leads to his downfall. “He allows himself to be completely preoccupied by his sense of the presence of a limit—that something is sealing her [Desdemona] out (and sealing him in).”48 The mistake in reading Cavell is to think that Cavell shows how Othello fails to accept the limits of knowledge. The mistake is to think that acknowledgment of our finitude means acknowledging that there is something there that we cannot reach (“the pain itself ” or “things in themselves”), a barrier between us and something else. Cavell’s hesitancy, his tentativeness, is not of this kind. Such a reading suggests that the “therapy” Othello needs is Kant’s first Critique, not Philosophical Investigations or The Claim of Reason. Othello’s failure is a failure to acknowledge this particular woman, Desdemona, not a failure to acknowledge, and be appropriately humble before, an uncrossable line sealing her in and him out. Othello’s sense of an uncrossable line, of knowledge as transgression, is his cover for his refusal to acknowledge. As long as he can maintain his sense of a limit, as long as he can convert his finitude into intellectual lack, he is released from acknowledgment. In other words, such misreadings of Cavell fail to recognize that acknowledgment is not an alternative to knowledge, “for the point of forgoing knowledge [in favor of acknowledgment] is, of course, to know.”49 That is, Cavell is not simply saying that we can know but is also challenging the terms themselves. The point is not to register an inability, a petering out, on the part of knowledge, but rather an inability on the part of such concepts (“categories”) to gain a foothold here: I am not able to be either able or unable (to know, epistemologically possess, the Other). . . . The point is not that I have a coherent demand here that must go unfulfilled . . . but rather that there is no coherent demand that I am either able or unable to fulfill.50 For Kant, it is reason’s misguided attempts to cross the line that cause skepticism. For Cavell, the very drawing of the line is the beginning of skepticism. Wittgenstein and Kant agree that the drive toward metaphysical speculation is intrinsic to the human. Kant thinks the drive can be controlled through his mapping of the boundaries of cognition. By demonstrating our confinement to our experiences and categories, he defines the necessary conditions of knowledge. For Wittgenstein, however, no system of philosophy can ever bring metaphysical speculation to an end once and for all. It is brought to an end moment by moment. Cavell will say it is brought to an end daily. This is in part due to Wittgenstein’s sense that we cannot tell in advance what is metaphysically speculative. It has to be tested. Furthermore, it is not open to Wittgenstein

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to describe metaphysical speculation as a transgressing of limits. The idea of limits “must remain merely a ‘picture,’ however significant.” It remains a picture which the Wittgensteinian philosopher must constantly test with questions like, “Is this really confinement? Is our freedom checked? From what are we withheld?”51 But then, what is this finitude that isn’t intellectual lack? I read the following lines as a brief account of what Cavell means by finitude. “The truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated (by something); that we are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each of us is this one and not that, each here and not there, each now and not then.”52 All of these things—our embodiment, timefulness, locatedness, etc.—are limitations. But they are not limitations in the sense of marking off an inaccessible beyond. We are embodied, period. That is all there will ever be of us. There is nothing else that we might be. They are also not limitations in that Cavell is cautious about what sort of status to give them. In particular, as I suppose is clear by now, he will not give them the sort of status that absolves us of responsibility for our separateness. “If something separates us, comes between us, that can only be a particular aspect or stance of the mind itself, a particular way in which we relate, or are related (by birth, by law, by force, in love) to one another—our positions, our attitudes, with reference to one another.” Cavell is repeatedly reminding us that, if there are limits, they are ones that we have set.53 If Cavell were to settle on an account of the human, a precise mapping of limits, then he would provide just another fertile breeding ground for skepticism. Being open to the threat of skepticism isn’t just a concession made faute de mieux; it is part of the struggle against skepticism just insofar as the refusal to be open to it requires closure to the question of the human, and such closures create the routes into skepticism. “The beginning of skepticism is the insinuation of absence, of a line, or limitation.”54 The problem created by, or reflected in, modern philosophy is that it takes our moral and practical and political failures and finds there intellectual lack, thereby excusing those failures by displacing our responsibility onto a reified gap between mind and world. That displacement is accomplished whether that gap is left empty or whether it is filled by God or universals, anything but us. Care is required here. Cavell is not denying that we often feel confined nor denying the importance of that feeling. For there is some kind of beyond (otherwise, there would be no such thing as hope), it is just that it is not marked off by a line, anyway not by a line we haven’t drawn. “The ideal of knowledge implied by skepticism with respect to other minds—of unlimited genuineness and effectiveness in the acknowledgment of oneself and others—haunts our ordinary days, as if it were the substance of our hopes.”55 Cavell’s challenge to

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the philosophers’ displacement of responsibility is not meant to suggest that others are completely knowable, but to challenge notions of completeness fueled by “the inner” or of the world as a whole as one rather large object. “Why do we feel we cannot know something in a situation in which there is nothing it makes sense to say we do not know?”56 The goal of his challenge is to reinstate a sense of the complexity and mysteriousness of each other, a complexity and mysteriousness which is inescapably part of the fact that we are always selves in motion. The danger that most preoccupies Cavell, or one of them, is the way this elusiveness produces what Thoreau called “quiet desperation,” what Emerson called “silent melancholy,” and what Cavell will describe as a “sense of life as missed possibility, of its passing as in a dream.”57

The Unknowable God Care is required not just on Cavell’s terms but on Christianity’s. How, for example, are we to read the closing chapters of the book of Job if not as the drawing of a line? Christian faith insists upon not just a line, but a massive chasm between God and human or, more precisely, a massive chasm between God and us, but a basic unity between God and human. For Karl Barth, that line is drawn in plainly Kantian terms. “Human cognition is fulfilled in views and concepts. Views are the images in which we perceive objects as such. Concepts are the counter-images with which we make these images of perception our own by thinking them, i.e., arranging them. . . . But our viewing and conceiving are not at all capable of grasping God.”58 But immediately after this reference to Kant, Barth protests, “Nothing can be more misleading than the opinion that the theological statement of the hiddenness of God says roughly the same thing as the Platonic or Kantian statement.” It may seem (for good reason) that he is protesting too much, but the distinction he wants to make is twofold. First, God has breached the Kantian limit in the word made flesh and so become part of our “viewing and conceiving.” Second, that means that, for Barth, our knowledge of God’s hiddenness is a product of our knowledge of God’s self-disclosure, not a product of a careful survey of our cognitive faculties. Both of those conditions are important, more important for now than wondering if Barth actually met them. Here, we enter one of the densest and most entangling areas of Christian thought. Even, or especially, such a brief account of Barth is controversial.59 In what follows, I will give only a brief and impressionistic survey of some of the issues because my purposes are modest; I want to challenge one of Cavell’s claims about theology. He writes of philosophy’s “commitment to subject every

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word of itself to criticism, endlessly, with nothing held safe, that is the blessing or the curse of philosophy—it is not a commitment religion may make, sometimes to its credit, sometimes not.”60 I take it that “philosophy” here means philosophy as he learned it from Emerson and Wittgenstein, not traditional epistemology, since he understands that project as a quest for safety.61 I have tried in the preceding chapters to provide a detailed account of the sort of dispossession to which the Cavellian philosopher is committed. Central to that dispossession is the refusal of skeptical accounts of intellectual lack. “But since self-scrutiny, the full examination and defense of one’s own position, has always been part of the impulse to philosophy, Wittgenstein’s originality lies not in the creation of the impulse, but in finding ways to prevent it from defeating itself so easily.” It defeats itself so easily because the impulse runs aground on skeptical accounts of intellectual lack. So Cavell seems to suggest that, if theology cannot follow him here, it will pay the price, sometimes to its credit, sometimes not, of withdrawing from criticism into the safety of an appeal to authority. What I want to show, or at least gesture toward the possibility of, is that theology’s insistence on the unknowability of God is not a claim about intellectual lack. Rather, theology is a long argument about whether it is intellectual lack and, if so, of what sort. “The problem of the other was always known, or surmised, not to be a problem of knowledge, or rather to result not from a disappointment over a failure of knowledge but from a disappointment over its success (even, a horror of its success).”62 Substitute “God” for “the other” and we have a clue to the nature of theology’s long argument with everything from gnosticism to theism. Skepticism (remembering that, for Cavell, skepticism includes both “skeptics” and “anti-skeptics”) about God is a disappointment, even a horror, over the success of the revelation of the word made flesh. The dogmatic arguments over “truly God, truly human” are arguments about how to best articulate the success of that revelation. Moreover, as Williams repeatedly insists, the church’s dogmatic utterances are “not a theoretical construct, but the abiding stimulus to certain kinds of theoretical question.”63 Dogma must enable us to tell the story of Jesus in such a way that his life reveals and judges the ways we are implicated and responsible for the world’s violence and to demand conversion in light of that life. To put it slightly differently, the doctrine of the incarnation is a product of the confrontation with the risen Christ. The Acts sermons attest to the risen Christ as the “judge judged in our place” and affirm his continuing presence in the church (“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”). Any theology of the incarnation will have to enable that sort of judgment to happen. “The question ‘Do you believe in “the Incarnation”?’ is a quite futile one in itself unless it has something to do with

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the serious question ‘How do you proclaim, and how do you hear proclaimed, the judgement of Christ?’”64 As soon as the incarnation becomes a stamp of approval for a particular group (most commonly, the church or nation), then regardless of how “orthodox” the particular words are, they are doing the exact opposite of what they ought to do. Cavell’s fear is that, in modernity, this is what they must do. Williams’s hope is that, instead of being solutions providing closure, hiding us from the interrogation of the cross, they open us up to it. The point for Williams is theology’s “commitment to subject every word of itself to criticism, endlessly, with nothing held safe.” Can the doctrine of the incarnation enable this? If so, what does it say that does this? It says that God becomes human. That God fully enters into every aspect of humanity in all its messiness. “Precisely [Jesus’] speech, breathing, walking, his hunger, eating, thirst, drinking, sleeping, crying, anguish is the particularized place of appearing of what is divine. . . . In so far as that which is characteristically human is lived out, in that much God appears.”65 For the church fathers, this doesn’t mean providing a proposition that we are all supposed to “believe.” It means providing a set of guidelines for reading the scriptures which rule out certain ways of talking about the incarnation as distorting the significance of Jesus’ life. One of the central complications in doing so is holding together the human life of Jesus with the unknowability of God, the latter being essential to both the Jewish and Platonic inheritances of the church. One way to read the great controversies culminating in Nicaea/ Constantinople and Chalcedon is as the story of discovering that God’s hiddenness and revelation in Christ are to be said, and an argument, not yet ended, over how they must be said. The church fathers’ primary questions were, “How do we account for the universal significance of this particular man, Jesus?” and “What must be said about this man which does justice to the scriptural and liturgical claim that he brings salvation?” The answers rejected and accepted to such questions are entwined with questions about the knowability of God.66 The hiddenness and unknowability of God could not be the kind derived from a prior account of transcendence (the available account, that of neo-Platonism, created obvious difficulties for understanding the incarnation), but are revealed in the incarnation itself. The struggle of the early church with Platonism and gnosticism was the struggle to articulate that God is revealed in the suffering and death of a particular, historical figure. God’s work, therefore, is bound up with particularity and contingency, not distilled out of it. By radically devaluing the bodily, gnosticism made the humanity of Jesus, as well as ours, expendable. The humanity of Jesus is at best the accidental shell of eternal truths or God’s concession to human epistemological inadequacy, at worst a barrier to such

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truths. The reaction to gnosticism, then, has to both recover the importance of the bodily without compromising the distinction between Creator and creature, and retrieve the soul from the gnostic identification of it with the divine. Closely related is a refusal of the gnostic account of salvation as enlightenment and sin as ignorance. Overly Platonist accounts of the Christian life (Williams refers to Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Evagrius of Pontus)67 are motivated by a fear of contingency, which results in a retreat from the full affirmation of the human made possible in Christ to a “metaphysical harbour” wherein the human is subject to a reduction. Variations on this suspicion of or embarrassment over the bodily, the concern to keep the transcendent God safe from history and the body, circulated throughout the early centuries of the church and continue to do so. The Reformation debates between the Lutherans and Calvinists over the communicatio idiomatum and the extra Calvinisticum are cases in point. Closer to the present day, Williams has some pointed questions to ask Barth about the way he “seems to revive the distinction between a substantial and eternal truth and its accidental and temporal clothing.”68 In what follows, I will explicate Williams’s argument. I do so not so much to press a case against Barth, but to provide an example of the ongoing argument about the hidden and revealed in Christ. The claim is that the Barth of Church Dogmatics I/1 is so concerned to guard against various forms of liberalism (natural theology, anthropologydriven theology, Hegelian identifications of revelation with history) that he ends up driving a wedge between revelation and history. God uses history, but that use is arbitrary, accidental, or, as Barth would prefer, freely elected. There is no “internal, substantial union”69 between revelation and history, content and form. God acts through, not in, history though not in or as a man (173) because to do so would be to compromise God’s sovereign freedom. Williams contrasts this with Luther’s “almost monophysite understanding of the communicatio idiomatum” (154) in which God is revealed on the cross, revealed as hidden. God is present in, not just “with and under” as the extra Calvinisticum had it. Barth sides with Calvinism, which is more amenable to “saying that we can only hear the Word in its secular form as this says nothing (as it stands) about the Word’s relation to its form” (155). Barth gets into these difficulties because of his understanding of revelation and the position of revelation in his dogmatics. It is well known that Barth vigorously refuses any notion of a human capacity to hear God’s word. Anthropologically speaking, it is impossible for humans to hear God’s word and, moreover, impossible for them to know that it is impossible to hear. Yet, God’s word is heard, and this is the starting point for theology. It is God’s

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decision to make himself heard and, therefore, our hearing is entirely independent of anything we possess and entirely dependent upon God’s decision to reveal. The theological question is not about our hearing but about God’s speaking. The doctrine of the Trinity arises out of analysis of God’s self-revelation. The Trinity is the answer to “What must be said of God given the way that God has revealed himself ?” The Trinity is an interpretation of the fact that revelation has occurred and is occurring in Christ, scripture, and preaching. So, if Barth has revelation wrong, then he will have the Trinity wrong. And if Barth has revelation wrong, he will have God in Christ wrong. This, in any case, is Williams’s suspicion. Williams argues that it is this prior account of revelation which fuels Barth’s fear that a unity of form and content would put God at our disposal, that forces him to insist, “God does not give himself into our hands, but keeps us in his” (155). But it is precisely that giving, that radical self-dispossession, that the New Testament witnesses to, as Barth discovers when he gets to volume IV. One way to put this argument is that Barth should have begun with salvation, not revelation. Better, Barth should have begun with the activity of God, not human ignorance.70 Barth insists that Christ, not nature or anthropology, is the answer to the question about the source for ultimate truth. That is a great improvement over nineteenth-century liberal theology, but wouldn’t it have been better to simply refuse this question as the starting point for theology? Doesn’t there remain a sense in which Barth is anthropocentric in precisely the way he doesn’t want to be just insofar as the modern epistemological worries take center stage? In I/1, the incarnation is essentially manifestation and sin is essentially ignorance. “‘Revelation’ stands in the place where ‘justification’ or ‘forgiveness of sins,’ i.e., the gospel in the essential meaning of that word, ought to stand.”71 The scriptures begin to sound like the story of God’s struggle against ignorance instead of God’s struggle against evil.72 The I/1 account of revelation “is most simply and basically the utterance of a subject (the Father) about himself: in Christ this utterance is projected outwards to man” (180). The assumption behind this is of a model of God and world separated by a gulf which Christ bridges, but in such a way “that the understanding of God as such is not affected by the bridge-concept: the latter is instrumental to solving a problem which has two clear starting points.”73 As soon as Christ’s humanity is taken with the seriousness it deserves, all understandings of God have to be transformed and linear schemes of Trinitarian revelation begin to break down into a plurality of agencies. Williams puts it this way: “The conclusion suggested to all this is that as soon as the history of Jesus, in a fairly simple sense, the detail of a human life and death, is allowed a place of genuine salvific import, the unity, clarity, and security of

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a scheme based upon a single and compelling act or event of revelation is put in question” (176). It becomes possible to see the incarnation as God putting himself at risk.74 For Williams, it is von Balthasar who has dared to go further than anyone else here, who shows us just how far Church Dogmatics IV takes us away from I/1. The kenosis of Christ all the way to hell “is no arbitrary expression of the nature of God: this is what the life of the Trinity is, translated into the world” (177). This point is made with equal clarity by Herbert McCabe when he writes, “The whole set of stories narrated by the Bible is nothing other than the interior life of the triune God visible (to the eyes of faith) in our history.”75 For McCabe, this point depends upon the rejection of what Barth calls the logos asarkos76 and what McCabe simply refers to as the (“nineteenth-century invention” of the) preexistent Christ. It was meant to account for the eternal procession of the Son prior to the incarnation but ended up with a hidden logos behind the incarnate word, a logos asarkos behind the logos ensarkos. For McCabe, no such account is necessary, and the very idea leads to a God we either think we can know elsewhere or not at all. It is a sort of escape clause, an empty concept which we fill with ways to avoid the incarnate Christ. For McCabe, the mistake happens when we forget that God is eternal or, more precisely, forget that eternity isn’t a stretch of time, even a limitless stretch. “It is not time at all. . . . Eternity is timeless because it totally transcends time. To be eternal is just to be God. God’s life is neither past nor present.”77 The hiddenness of God and the unknowability of God’s nature are not behind God’s activity in the world. They are not behind Jesus. They are in Jesus or of Jesus. That it is so easy to think of that hiddenness as something left over after the incarnation is paralleled by the notion that what Christ reveals is something higher, something glimpsed through the transparent shell of the human Jesus. In both cases—something hidden behind Jesus or something revealed behind Jesus—the same mistake has been made. But theology doesn’t need Cavell to know that this isn’t just a cognitive mistake.78 But perhaps we do need Cavell to remind us that the mystery of Christ isn’t just something that arises with this particular person. It arises with all people. I don’t mean to elide important distinctions here, but I do mean to rid us of the notion that understanding and knowing ourselves and others is a straightforward process with a foreseeable end, while knowing the Son of God is something special. The latter is true but is it, or how is it, true in a way different from knowing another? And might not the insistence on the difference be a cover for an unwillingness to know both Jesus and others, denying the difficulty of knowing each other and creating new difficulties in knowing Jesus? I don’t intend to answer those questions here. I hope only to demonstrate their importance.

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Something like this seems to be suggested throughout John’s Gospel, perhaps most clearly in the fourteenth chapter.79 “Lord,” says Thomas, “we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus responds, “If you know me, you will know my Father.” Philip joins in, asking, “Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” Jesus’ response is even sharper, “Have I been with you all this time Philip and you still do not know me? Whosoever has seen me has seen the Father.” The problem here is not knowing the Father through Jesus, as if the Father were behind Jesus. The problem is knowing this particular person with whom they have lived and worked and walked and eaten for a year now. Call it an apophatic Christology. (I will return to this in the next chapter.) And it leads to an apophatic anthropology. There is nothing strange, or nothing uniquely strange, about the difficulty of knowing Jesus. It is the substance of our lives with others, with our friends, spouses, children, parents, neighbors, enemies, as it is the substance of the disciples’ lives with each other, not just with their leader. Jesus is not saying, “You have succeeded in knowing me, but you need to take a further step or perform some further act of cognition to know the Father also.” He is saying, “You do not know me.” He is declaring himself unknown.80 In saying this, he is not saying that the disciples have failed to acquire a piece of information (i.e., the information that the Father is in him and he in the Father). A claim is being made about the nature of knowing. “I am the way, the truth and the life.” And a sort of similarity between knowing God and knowing others is posited. Denys Turner says that he started his work on the medieval mystics intending to write about negative theology and the unknowability of God. But he discovered that he couldn’t write about the problem of the knowledge of God without writing about the problem of the self. “For in these authors may be found what I have called an ‘apophatic anthropology’ as radical as their apophatic theology.”81 Williams says something quite similar in some remarks on Vladimir Lossky. The theme that came to the forefront in reading Lossky was his increasing concern with the ineffability of the human person. To sum up his position, talking about the person is as difficult as talking about God. If you want to talk about human beings in the image of God, it may be in that difficulty and elusiveness that the centrally human is to be located, not in any quality that we and God have in common. . . . Lossky’s great concern with negative theology and apophatic theology applied to humanity as well as divinity. . . . When we’re talking about the human, we occupy the same edge of difficulty that we occupy talking about God. . . . The personal in us is not an item

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among others: it is the strangeness and difficulty, the irreducibility, within any relation.82 It is important not to say too much here, especially, as Williams notes, not to try to point to any quality we have in common with God. “He is indeed a strange God, a hidden God, who does not uncover his will in a straight line of development, but fully enters into a world of confusion and ambiguity, and works in contradictions.”83 God’s hiddenness is partly because God deigns to occupy the same spaces of confusion and ambiguity that we occupy. The difference, of course, is that Jesus, though presented in the Gospels as one human among others, is the manifestation of God. We are not. Or are we? This may be the place for a reminder that we—and not just us, but all of creation— reveal God. Williams puts it this way: How . . . do we talk about divine action or particular providence? [If not on the model of divine actions as punctiliar interventions, reactions to events in the world, a model which makes God determined by the world.] The answer can only be in terms of the character of the finite system as a whole. If there are moments when the act of God is recognized more plainly than it is in others, or when the subject senses a closeness to the underlying act of God that has the effect of prompting, warning, reassuring, or guiding, we are not to think of the fabric of the finite order being interrupted, but rather of the world being such that, given certain configurations of finite agencies, the texture of the environment is more clearly transparent to the simple act of divine self-communication. It is as if, to use a rather faulty metaphor, the created order is a texture of uneven thickness. The flaw in the metaphor is that it could be taken as meaning that the created environment is a kind of obstacle between the spiritual subject and God.84 Williams is resisting the tendency to see “the world as a regrettable barrier” between God and us. The difference between Jesus and us is that his life is supremely “transparent to the simple act of divine self-communication,” and our lives are not. Or, ours are only so fleetingly, given certain configurations of finite agencies, the only totally transparent one of which was the life of Christ. Usually for Williams, this configuration is forgiveness and reconciliation, which is one way of saying that the unknowability of God is not due to intellectual lack. It is, theology can say, due to sin.


7 Evidence of Habitation

[Job’s comforters] are unquestionably good, earnest, and religious. And in marked contrast to the violent utterances of Job, which border at times on blasphemy and the denial of God, they unquestionably speak good, earnest, and religious words. Indeed, at certain points their words are golden, being incomparably better adapted for instructional, pastoral, liturgical and homiletical use than those of the one whom God finally confirmed as His servant and recognized and visibly established as a witness to His truth.1 The second half of the preceding chapter addressed the question of the relationship of theology’s self-criticism to philosophy’s. In Williams’s work, theology not only has a defense against the charge that theology is not sufficiently self-critical, it can also plausibly claim that the incarnation makes it more self-critical than philosophy is. That the word became flesh, dwelt among us, and was crucified by us means that theology has (or should have, or could have) defenselessness at its heart. But there is another point to the rivalry between Christian theology and Cavell, the question of authority and autonomy, a question that Stephen Mulhall has forcefully raised. These issues—self-criticism and autonomy—are related. For liberalism, only the rejection of external authority that comes with autonomy can create the space for “full” self-criticism. Mulhall writes that Christianity’s “idea of human inadequacy and dependence upon

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the grace of God . . . amounts in Cavell’s eyes to a denial of human selfsufficiency . . . a radical libel against human integrity and autonomy.”2 He goes on to say: [Cavell’s] work constitutes an affirmation of just the conception of human autonomy that religion fails to honor. In particular, religion’s unwillingness or inability to be fully self-critical, the fundamentally constrained relation in which this body of thought stands to itself, “is not what one demands of a work of philosophy, certainly not what the Investigations expects of its relation to itself, its incessant turnings upon itself.”3 Mulhall’s remarks here are not necessarily a description of his own understanding of Cavell and Christianity. I understand him to be describing one common reading of Cavell on Christianity, one with which he is sympathetic yet goes on to complicate and criticize.4 The rest of this book will continue the task of complicating and, hopefully, dissolving this reading. While it is true that Cavell worries about religion’s ability to be self-critical, this reading mislocates the reason for Cavell’s uncertainty (it isn’t because Cavell is an advocate of autonomy); it leaves the binary (self-critical philosophy and authoritarian Christianity) undisturbed; and it assumes the liberal account of the relationship between liberal autonomy and self-criticism. In each case, the originality of Cavell’s achievement is lost as it gets forced back into tired categories, like autonomy, that Cavell takes such great care to transcend. This chapter uses Cavell to tease out some underappreciated aspects of theology. Picking up on themes first addressed in chapter 1, I will try to breathe some Emersonian fresh air into communitarian ecclesiology. The point is not to pick sides between the two but to show that Emerson and Wittgenstein (in Cavell’s hands) understand individual and communal flourishing to be mutually reinforcing, something theology occasionally forgets in its defensiveness against liberalism. The next chapter will use theology to tease out some themes in Cavell that I think deserve more emphasis than he gives them. Mulhall rightly notes that central to Cavell’s philosophy is “a mode of conversation between (older and younger) friends, one of whom is intellectually authoritative because his life is somehow exemplary.” He goes on to helpfully point out that “this image of older and younger friends [in Plato’s Republic] is the anchor of Cavell’s work in every one of the intellectual fields we have discussed.”5 That is, Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Emerson, the psychoanalyst, the teacher, the men of the remarriage comedies, the unknown women of the melodramas, all become candidates for this kind of Socratic older friend. But even more important to realize

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about Cavell is his sensitivity to role reversals within these relationships where “the exhaustion of justifications, the sense of something unacceptable, is reached first by the one out of authority, the position of pupil or say victim.”6 In the next chapter I will turn once again to Rowan Williams to provide Cavell with resources to further strengthen his sense of the victim as exemplar. In the last several decades, ecclesiology has played an increasingly significant role in Christian theology. Ecclesiology has always been a central part of Catholic and Mennonite theology, but it has now also become a central part of mainline Protestant theology. There are various reasons for this, but at least one is the increasing awareness of pervasive individualism in Western cultures. Books like Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah and his colleagues, Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, and MacIntyre’s After Virtue have done much to teach us this. But more than providing us with knowledge we didn’t have, they seem to have said out loud what many were already sensing. The question of robust community in such cultures is one that theologians cannot afford to ignore, and so theology has found in such writers support for this emphasis on ecclesiology. This gives theology a dual role: one task is to promote church as an alternative to the “culture of narcissism”; another is the criticism of that culture which justifies the need for specific accounts of ecclesiology. This is often a welcome development, but my sense is that, by writing so much about the importance of community and the failure of culture, theology has forgotten how to speak articulately about the individuals in those cultures. This is not just a problem with theology or philosophy. It is a problem that pervades literature, a problem that has been a central theme in James Wood’s criticism. His discussion of the issue may help to illuminate some of my concerns. Zadie Smith, a celebrated young novelist, is representative of the problem Wood sees when she says that it is not the writer’s job “to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.”7 Smith goes on to praise writers like David Eggers in this regard. Wood adds Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney and sees them all as the progeny of DeLillo (and Pynchon and Rushdie), “imitating his tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture, to be a great analyst of systems, crowds, paranoia, politics; to work on the biggest level possible.” One sign that novelists want to be this “kind of Frankfurt School entertainer”8 is that they seem to know everything and seem to think that everything they know should be paraded in their books. Readers mistake this for serious fiction. The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes.

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Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result—in America at least—is novels of immense selfconsciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very “brilliant” books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.9 MacIntyre, for example, is no DeLillo. The unmistakable theological counterpart to the DeLilloan novelist is radical orthodoxy, whose flickering strobes of French theorists and church fathers are continually mistaken for evidence of habitation. But MacIntyre falls into the trap of the reviewers Wood is chastising when, as I showed in chapter 2, he decides to read The Portrait of a Lady as “pinning down an entire writhing culture” and so cannot acknowledge the human beings with which James populated the novel. Unlike with DeLillo, it takes a great deal of effort and imagination to read James that way. As is often the case, Wood’s concerns parallel Cavell’s. In a critique of Jean-Luc Godard, Cavell writes, “One reads the distance from and between his characters as one does in reality, as the inability to feel; and we attribute our distance from the filmed events, because of their force upon us, to Godard’s position toward them.” “How do you distinguish the world’s dehumanizing of its inhabitants from your depersonalizing of them?”10 One way to state the concern of this chapter is to say that, first, too many theologians have read Wittgenstein the way MacIntyre reads James. But my concern is not just with Wittgensteinian theologians. It is with any who react to mid-century moral philosophy by recovering tradition and community without recovering the individual. For Cavell, the problem with both utilitarianism and Kantianism is that, for them, the individual does not exist.11 Whether the good is ascertained through a utilitarian calculus or derived from the categorical imperative, “if an act is bad or wrong, then it is bad or wrong period; that is, no matter who you are.”12 All of us, from the perspective of mid-century moral philosophy where ethics becomes case studies of quandaries, are little more than choosing wills. Nothing else about us has to be known. Others do not have to be consulted. The individual dissolves, leaving an empty space between principles and quandaries for the philosopher to bridge without asking us. MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and many others react by insisting on a thicker account of the human. The individual does not admit of the reductions forced upon her by the ethicists. We are social selves, tangled up in and shaped by culture, history, tradition. But is that enough to reinstate the individual? Is that enough for acknowledgment? For Cavell, there is no acknowledgment without self-revelation. There is no acknowledgment of another that is not an acknowledgment of my relation


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to the other. But this is what makes acknowledgment so difficult. For Lear to acknowledge Cordelia, he has to acknowledge her as the one whom he banished. The self is implicated and must be recognized. It is not always easy to tell the difference between acknowledgment and individualism. It is not always easy to tell the difference between the evasion of acknowledgment and communitarianism. That, in any case, is what I hope to push in this chapter. I will begin, in what amounts to about the first half of the chapter, with some criticisms of recent accounts of the individual and community. The purpose is not to win any arguments, but to create space for an unwelcome guest, Emerson. I should make clear at the outset that I am not sure this is an argument with the “communitarians” or “new traditionalists,” so much as it is a supplement. But they will have to decide that.

Ecclesiology, the Self, and Cavell’s Augustine What is Wittgenstein supposed to have done for theology? What has he done for Cavell? To the first question, briefly, Wittgenstein saves theology from having to rely on foundationalist defenses of Christian faith and practice, whether in “cognitive-propositionalist” or “experiential-expressivist” forms. In particular, the old liberal reliance on the individual’s self-authenticating religious experience, which depended upon a Cartesian account of selfhood, is dismantled. With the rise of modern science, so the story goes, theology was forced to concede any authority in matters of “fact.” Its only province became interiority. Experience was the essence of religion. Doctrine and worship and anything else which differentiates one religion from another were diverse ways of thematizing a universal core religious experience. Here, we are all like the child Augustine who opens the Investigations. There is something inside us, which is already fully formed, but still struggling to express itself, to make itself public. Wittgenstein famously showed how poorly Augustine understood the acquiring of a language and was able to show that we are constituted by language, that acquiring a language includes a great deal more than ostensive definition. It includes learning an entire set of skills (like naming and pointing). Further, unlike the case of Augustine, language shapes our subjectivity rather than being a vehicle for an already shaped subjectivity. The basic postliberal move was to say the same thing about religion by showing how experiential expressivism repeated Augustine’s mistake, only now in the context of religion understood as a cultural/linguistic practice. The experiences of the saints or of William James’s heroes were not pre-religious but were dependent upon, shaped by, the practice in which the person was immersed.

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Another, related appeal to experience can be found in “correlationist” accounts of theology, such as that of Tillich. For Tillich or Tracy, theology was tested by appeals to experience and found to be wanting in many respects because doctrinal claims were often unintelligible to the experience of someone called “modern man.” To this, the Wittgensteinian theologian learned to simply respond, “Of course they will find much of this unintelligible. Religion is a ‘form of life,’ distinct from the form of life called ‘modernity’ or ‘liberalism’ and so it should not be surprising that it is, as yet, unintelligible to them. In fact it is a testimony to Christian distinctiveness.” Experiential expressivism’s failure to properly attend to such distinctions was a denial of the human. The particularities that are constitutive of each of us were made to disappear into the universal Cartesian self. This prompted renewed attention to the church and to liturgy. Fergus Kerr doesn’t say a great deal about church in Theology after Wittgenstein, but his reading displays the kind of move that made the turn to church possible. For example, Kerr repeatedly says things like, Wittgenstein shows that “there is nothing inside one’s head that does not owe its existence to one’s collaboration in a historical community.” Or, “Wittgenstein reminds us of our dependence upon the community.” “The point of the private language fantasy is . . . to reaffirm the indispensability of belonging to a community.”13 Insert “church” where Kerr has “community” and you have the great usefulness of Wittgenstein to theologians (like George Lindbeck and Hauerwas) who are trying to recover a thicker ecclesiology. The church is the community in which a distinct set of practices making up a form of life is learned and taught. This was possible because many of these theologians assumed that a Wittgensteinian account of a social self entailed some variety of communitarianism. So James McClendon, for example, thinks he must find a community (his students) for Wittgenstein, who was famous for his isolated, solitary lifestyle,14 as if the appeal to a social self were some kind of imperative to extroversion. For these theologians, religions or cultures just obviously qualify as forms of life. And so the difficulties of understanding each other (within a supposed form of life), which so haunt the Investigations, tend to become obscured by the difficulties of cross-“cultural” understanding. More precisely, they are set aside in order to continue the war with the liberals. So much for “what does Wittgenstein do for theology?” What does he do for Cavell? At this point, specifically in contrast to the theologians’ reading? That the contrast will be significant is signaled by Cavell’s frequent pairing of Wittgenstein with Emerson. For many readers of Wittgenstein, especially theological readers, this conjunction comes as a shock. For those Wittgensteinians, Emerson is the arch-individualist and Wittgenstein a significant part of the


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philosophical underpinning of communitarianism. Wittgenstein represents the public and shared, Emerson the private and selfish. For them, the question is, “What kind of community could possibly survive self-reliance?” For Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Emerson, however, the question is, “What kind of community could survive without it?” For Emerson, community without self-reliance is called a herd. It is a community of fear, a community in which the members are afraid to give voice to themselves and afraid to listen to others’ voices. Both fears are mutually reinforcing. Here, the crucial point of connection with Wittgenstein emerges. What Emerson understood as timidity and conformity, Wittgenstein understood as the private language fantasy. By turning Wittgenstein into a proto-communitarian, they fail to grasp the work done by Wittgenstein’s account of the private language fantasy. I will return to Emerson shortly, but first I will attend to two aspects of Cavell’s reading which make clear the ways in which Wittgenstein and Emerson can be seen as allies: the first with regard to forms of life, the second with regard to Augustine. Cavell has been suspicious of readings of forms of life that focus on the “ethnographical” to the neglect of the natural or the biological.15 He doesn’t want to appeal to the natural or the biological as some sort of guarantee. He wants to keep forms of life from becoming a new “non-foundationalist” way of relieving us of our responsibility for attention to the other and to ourselves. “ ‘The group’ which forms [Wittgenstein’s] ‘authority’ is always, apparently, the human group as such, the human being generally.”16 I take this to mean that Wittgenstein’s frequent uses of “tribes” are not meant to be (only) examples of forms of life but varieties of a problem we see repeatedly even among our closest friends.17 Here is Cavell commenting on one of Wittgenstein’s examples of an unintelligible culture: “These examples are all very upsetting. Is it because these people are not really intelligible to us? No doubt we cannot communicate with them—at least in certain areas. But that is not an unfamiliar fact, even with our friends.”18 The foreign cannot be “merely” other. The domestic cannot be the same. Second, the striking thing, for Cavell, about the opening of the Investigations is that it begins with a child. More specifically, with an adult, Augustine, remembering his childhood. That child, Cavell claims against the more common reading, is not just a springboard for reflections that end up leaving him behind. The child remains present throughout the entire text. Cavell writes: The child reads to me, among other ways, as the witness of its elders’ lives, an image of children as beneficiaries and victims of an unclear world we have to leave to them. The rest of the Investigations is then a record of our discovering the capacity to come specifically, concretely,

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patiently, to their aid in clarifying it, something not perfectly distinguishable from coming to ourselves.19 Wittgenstein chooses to open a book whose fundamental preoccupation is catechesis with a “scene of instruction,” one that displays its difficulties. “Haunting the entire Investigations, the opening scene and its figure of a child signals that the question ‘Where did you learn—what is the home of—a concept?’ may at any time arise.”20 And not just for children: “At any time I may find myself isolated.”21 That sense of loneliness, the “hint of permanence in the child’s isolation”22 in the passage from The Confessions is one thing that the investigation of the ordinary discovers. Picture the child. Perhaps, as Cavell suggests, as someone you might come across in a Beckett play. If you notice how his elders don’t help him at all, if you notice that they pay no attention to him, then, like Cavell, you may begin to sense the deep anxiety, even sadness, with which Wittgenstein announces his project. Just as important is how attentive the child is, a fact made inescapable by the juxtaposition with his elders’ inattentiveness. The child, teachers at least will notice, is a model student: observant, perceptive, independent, curious. “The scene portrays language as an inheritance but also as one that has, as it were, to be stolen, anyway in which the capacity and perhaps the motivation to take it is all together greater than the capacity and perhaps the motivation to give it.”23 We are impressed and saddened by the distance between the child and his elders. He is not one of them. He must struggle to understand them. They cannot understand him. It is “as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language” (Investigations, §32). He becomes, appropriately, the hero of a book about finding one’s voice amid others who often seem strange and who make it seem as if it is up to us alone. “I trained my mouth.” Commentators on the opening of the Investigations have generally focused on unpacking Wittgenstein’s argument with Augustine’s vision of language. They explicate how Wittgenstein shows the multiple ways in which Augustine was wrong: the problematic account of the inner, prelinguistic self (which foreshadows the private language argument); the reliance on ostensive definition; the mistaken way Augustine generalizes from one sort of word to all of language; the idea that learning a language is a matter of learning the names of things, etc. Furthermore, Kerr and others see Wittgenstein’s use of Augustine as a way of “intervening in a centuries-long tradition”24 which reaches a peak in Descartes and continues to the present day, and of which Augustine can be seen as a starting point.25 By reaching as far back as he does, Wittgenstein both identifies a tradition of thought and shows its enormous power.


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Cavell’s account is significantly different. He understands Wittgenstein’s use of Augustine to suggest a range of skepticism’s power that is not confinable to a tradition of thought. That doesn’t mean it is traditionless but that it is present in a variety of traditions of thought. The anxieties present in Augustine’s remarks are anxieties that can overcome any “creature complicated or burdened enough to possess language at all.”26 But in order to say that, to say that Augustine is expressing anxieties, not just describing infant language learning, Cavell pushes us to ask, “Is Augustine really talking about his infancy?” Might he be talking about his adulthood, projecting the anxieties of confessing back onto his infancy? I find encouragement toward such a line of questioning throughout The Confessions. For example: What agonizing birth-pangs tore my heart, what groans it uttered, O my God! And there, unknown to me, were your hearkening ears, for as I labored hard in my silent search the mute sufferings of my mind reached your mercy as loud cries. You alone knew my pain, no one else; for how little of it could I express in words to my closest friends! Could their ears have caught all the tumult that raged in my soul, when even I had neither time enough nor eloquence to articulate it?27 Wittgenstein understands this sort of loneliness. His insight into the skeptic’s loneliness issues from the fact that he shares it. Of course, Wittgenstein knows that it is and that it is not up to us alone. All my speaking is speaking for others, and their speaking is speaking for me. Wittgenstein’s source of authority never wavers. It is always “we.” If that were not true, there could be no such thing as the Philosophical Investigations. The only alternative to speaking for others is not speaking for myself but rather to be “voiceless, not even mute.”28 The problem that moves Wittgenstein to philosophy is that I may not know who the we is, or what counts as a we. I may not know that I am implicated by them and they by me. I may not know when I am speaking nonsense, may not know just how far my agreement with others reaches. I may not know at all, may have forgotten, may fear I have no choice but to speak for myself alone. In Wittgenstein, such fear fuels the eliciting of criteria. And without it (the fear), too, there could be no Philosophical Investigations. I cannot know in advance just who is implicated by my voice, how I am implicated by the voices of others. I must ask and be asked. I must speak and be listened to. As it turns out, there is an astonishingly wide range of agreement, of attunement in judgments. Wittgenstein, at least, is evidently astonished by it, and it is part of his task to make us also astonished by it. But it is also precisely this which makes our frequent lack of attunement so debilitating, like a betrayal. (One way of stating Cavell’s difference, and it seems to me an enormous

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difference, with the Wittgensteinian theologians is that, while they share his astonishment at our ability to communicate, they fail to properly register his disappointment at our failures of communication.) It is one reason that the child’s loneliness cuts so deeply. Another is that we are responsible for his loneliness. Here, the skeptic is overwhelmed. Here, Cavell’s Wittgenstein does (a kind of) philosophy. What does theology do?

Theology and Self-knowledge If contemporary theology is any guide, the quest for self-knowledge is not a welcome topic, so much that the following lines, from a Cavell essay on Wittgenstein, are suspect. If what little I have said makes plausible the idea that the question “How do we know what we say (intended to say, wish to say)?” is one aspect of the general question “What is the nature of selfknowledge?” then we will realize that Wittgenstein has not first “accepted” or “adopted” a method and then accepted its results, for the nature of self-knowledge—and therewith the nature of the self—is one of the great subjects of the Investigations as a whole. It is also one of the hardest regions of the Investigations to settle with any comfort. One reason for that, I think, is that so astonishingly little exploring of the nature of self-knowledge has been attempted in philosophical writing since Bacon and Locke and Descartes prepared the habitation of the new science. Classical epistemology has concentrated on the knowledge of objects (and, of course, mathematics), not on the knowledge of persons. That is, surely, one of the striking facts of modern philosophy as a whole. . . . Our intellectual problems (to say no more) are set by the very success of those deeds, by the plain fact that the measures which soak up knowledge of the world leave us dryly ignorant of ourselves.29 There may be something of a(n) (initial) confusion here since it has seemed to many readers that Wittgenstein’s relentless interrogation of the “inner” suggests that he isn’t interested in self-knowledge. Whereas it should suggest, if Cavell is right, that he wants to redefine what we call the inner and thereby make self-knowledge possible. He wants to free us from accounts of the inner that block or deny the possibility of self-knowledge. That means challenging the identification of the “true” or “authentic” self with the inner (and therefore challenging most accounts of true and authentic selves), an identification


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learned from Descartes and one that Wittgenstein seems to find in Augustine. As Kerr puts it, the lines from The Confessions which open the Investigations seem “very much tied up with the idea of a self-transparent and autonomous subject.”30 For theology after the Enlightenment, the subject was its subject. It, understood as the stripped-down solitary ego, was all modern philosophy left it with. The turn to Wittgenstein, not just in Kerr but elsewhere, opens the possibility of freeing theology from the cage left to it by modern philosophy. Yet academic theology—even, or especially, its postliberal or radical orthodox forms— remains nervous about talk of self-knowledge, perhaps because it is unsure how to capitalize on Wittgenstein’s achievement without being mistaken for a hyper-evangelical account of the personal and without being just another voice in the “triumph of the therapeutic.” Or, perhaps, because academic theologians do not recognize this aspect of Wittgenstein’s work and instead think that Wittgenstein, with his emphasis on publicness, outward criteria, and language shared, frees us to talk about those things without talking about the self. “Spirituality” and “interiority” become words steadfastly avoided because they are identified with liberalism. We would much rather talk about “community.” Take, for example, Oliver O’Donovan’s 2003 comment about Williams, which was quoted in the previous chapter. Williams is the great exception to postliberal and radical orthodox reticence about the self and that leads O’Donovan to write, “He is a ‘liberal,’ if that term embraces, as I suppose it should, a starting point in the subjective.”31 I don’t think O’Donovan is alone in his curious inability to recognize that liberalism means beginning with a particular account of subjectivity, one very different from Williams’s account. A difference which is in part demonstrated by the fact that, once subjectivity is understood as Williams (and Cavell) understand it, it becomes much more difficult to talk about “beginning” there. This is “one of the hardest regions of the Investigations to settle with any comfort.” In Cavell, this is because modern epistemology has not left us with the tools to do so. But in O’Donovan and others like him, it is also because the battle with liberal theology has left theology overdetermined by its enemy. Instead of reclaiming that ground, it is abandoned. Robert Jenson’s remarks on human personhood in his Systematic Theology may be taken as typical here. The argument, unsurprisingly, is concerned to displace “the modern” understanding of the self with a Christian one. He develops, with help from Blondel, an understanding of the self “by which we are kept from premature identity with ourselves.”32 There is, he writes, “a structure of deferral built into personhood” such that we are never fully transparent to ourselves, even (or especially) in self-introspection, as William James, Jenson’s central interlocutor

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here, hoped to show. He traces James’s failure through modernist and postmodernist art as “one long demonstration of . . . disintegration” whose only outcome can be schizophrenia, that “specifically modern form of madness.”33 Fortunately for Jenson: Christian theology has no need for such despair or acrobatics. . . . Each of the rest of us may identify her- or himself as one of those for whom this one lived and died and lives, and who is particular within this community as the self seen and offered by this community and by others that “recognize” him or her. Thus the structures of the communities within which individuals have their transcendental focus and from which they receive their Egos shape the structure of their personhood.34 This, I think, is less objectionable than it is hollow. What problem has been solved? What problem should have been solved? What work does the by now all-too-common turn to community do? “The self seen and offered by this community” is the self seen and offered and differently refracted by all those different individuals in this community (and those without but that just complicates things) who may often fail to “recognize” that self.35 Selfhood as presented in modern epistemology is not the problem; it is a (misleading) response to the problem, a symptom mistaking itself for the cure. Jenson mistakes the symptom for the illness itself. How are we to understand why Jenson’s advice cannot be taken by many who may be most in need of it? Because they are “liberals,” “modernists,” “schizophrenics,” “secularists,” and “nihilists”? Right when we need him most, right when the real difficulties emerge, Jenson blithely continues kicking the corpse of liberalism at his feet. “His recommendations come too fast, with too little attention to the particular problem for which we have gone to him, we feel that instead of thoughtful advice we have been given a form letter.”36 There is a point where Jenson approaches Cavell. Immediately prior to his discussion of James, he writes, “What brings my experience, in Kant’s sense, together to be my experience is nothing I am by myself. . . . It is the coherence of the narrative to which I belong and it is the justice of the community of that narrative.”37 This is an important move, and it opens Jenson to Cavellian concerns. Given what we know about church, this means that my experience is never (at least on this side of heaven) completely brought together (something Augustine knew). Put another way, it means that skepticism will remain a standing threat. But Jenson cannot take the path he has opened. Instead, he goes on to say, “I can, to be sure, pretend I am self-existent, the condition of my own hypostasis. And I can actually try to live by that pretense. . . . A great deal of


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Western epistemology is simply Eve’s and Adam’s error.”38 The injustice of the community is never acknowledged, let alone the fact that it is that injustice, not the foolishness of Western philosophers, that creates the possibility of skepticism which Jenson dismisses. The plainest way of making the point is via one of the most important passages in The Claim of Reason. The fantasy of a private language can be understood as an attempt to account for, and protect, our separateness, our unknowingness, our unwillingness or incapacity either to know or to be known. Accordingly, the failure of the fantasy signifies: that there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which language reaches; that nevertheless there is no end to our separateness. We are endlessly separate, for no reason. But then we are answerable for everything that comes between us; if not for causing it then for continuing it; if not for denying it then for affirming it; if not for it then to it. The idea of privacy expressed in the fantasy of a private language fails to express how private we are, metaphysically and practically.39 We looked at this passage before in the chapter on Sebald. For now, I am concerned only to point out that theological appropriations of Wittgenstein have eloquently and importantly argued that Wittgenstein’s private language argument shows “that there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which language reaches.” But that is where they have stopped. They have not gone on with Cavell to say that the failure of the fantasy also shows “that nevertheless there is no end to our separateness.” In fact, like Jenson, who is no Wittgensteinian, they sometimes come close to doing quite the opposite. Then, it sounds something like, “there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which language reaches; therefore there is an end to our separateness.”

Theological Anthropology: Individualist Relational Selves We are now told, over and over again, in theology that we are “relational” selves. The old liberal, modern self as an autonomous, self-sufficient, rational bearer of rights is a Promethean deception. To be human is to be with others. I want to say that this must be right, but I am not sure if we know what it means. I am not sure that the question that the relational self is supposed to be answering is the right one. I take it that the question is, “How can we recreate fraternity or community in a culture of individualists?” The answer given on this account is, to put it briefly, to stop being individualists and to recognize that the self is not

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self-contained and self-sustaining but requires others for its well-being. Liberal theory sold us all a lie, and the evident lack of community is the result. The first thing to do, then, is overturn liberal theory and its understanding of selfhood. Alternatively, one might suggest that the difficulty of negotiating our relations with others is not a consequence of liberal theory. It isn’t a consequence of anything except being born.40 Liberalism is a response, an escapist response, to a question put plainly by Philip Roth: “And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people.”41 It is escapist because it ends up providing a sophisticated rational for avoiding other people. But relationality itself is not yet much help. It doesn’t yet respond to what liberalism is responding to. It just gets us back to where liberalism started. But no matter how that is sorted out, Cavell can only seem annoying and impertinent when he murmurs from the edges of these debates, “How can we know whether we know there are others until we know what we want to know, what there is to know?” The relational self begs Cavell’s question. You can’t say that to be human is to be with others until you know that there are others. And if you don’t know that, then you don’t know if you are an other. The question “Are there other minds?” is a question as much about my existence as about the existence of others, for if anyone is another mind, I am. But other to whom? The question “Do I know that another is human (and not an automaton, or a zombie, etc.)?” means that the question of my existence depends upon my being known as human by another. And am I known? If I am, if I can answer yes, then I know what it is that I want to know about others (and if others can know it of me, then my knowing it of them is not outside the realm of possibility). But what do I mean when I answer yes? What counts as being known? In any case, answering no is not unheard of.

A terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death.42 I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. . . . You’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you exist in the real world, that you’re part of all the sound and anguish, and


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you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And alas, it’s seldom successful.43 Among the many works of theological anthropology promoting a relational self, one of the best is by John O’Callaghan.44 I turn to it here because of the way, at least as I read him, he closes the book by opening it to the threat of skepticism, to the sorts of questions that preoccupy Cavell. O’Callaghan tries to close the gap between mind and world by filling it with a Thomist anthropology. Or, it might be better to say, once the anthropology has done its work, there is no gap left. It does not have to be filled because it disappears. But then one might ask, if this is who we are, if a vital contact between knower and world comes along with being human, how did the gap ever emerge in the first place? One answer, the obvious one, is that the gap emerged when we forgot what it meant to be human. But when and how was that? And how should we understand what we then became, what we perhaps still are? If we say, provisionally, that the gap emerges when the common conviction in a Platonic hierarchy of being, which is an essential background to Aquinas’s anthropology, gives way to a mechanistic, Newtonian conviction, then must recovering Aquinas’s anthropology mean recovering Platonic hierarchy? That it does has been a central claim of the movement in theology known as radical orthodoxy, and in doing so that movement can seem to be asking too much, straining credulity. We are, after all, moderns. O’Callaghan may think something like that because, though he has the opportunity, he chooses to ignore questions of hierarchy and appears uninterested in the question of whether a Thomist anthropology can really be abstracted from its background. In part, I suppose, this may be because he finds in Wittgenstein a modern anthropology quite similar to Aquinas’s. This is a fortuitous conjunction, but one result may be that any theological claims sound flimsy. Why drag in Aquinas if all we need to do is read Wittgenstein well? That is an obvious question to want to put to O’Callaghan but not necessarily a good one, at least insofar as it suggests that in any comparative study there must be a winner, that theology always has to win. But then, why the polemical reference to John McDowell’s remarks about “medieval superstition” and “enchantment”? For all of McDowell’s rigor in showing that mind and world meet because our mental lives take place where our lives take place, he cannot go as far as O’Callaghan thinks Aquinas can because he remains indebted to a lingering Kantian division between a natural, determined world and a rational, free one, a division that is present in the self as well as in the world. The attendant subject-object dualism, for O’Callaghan, ends up undermining his claim that our mental lives take place where our lives take place. McDowell defends this

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by invoking medieval superstition and enchantment, something we are apparently supposed to not want, or we are supposed to realize is impossible whether we want it or not. But it is not clear to me just what O’Callaghan’s response to this is. If he is interested in recovering something like medieval superstition and enchantment, why does he not take the obvious path of invoking participation and hierarchy, as radical orthodoxy has? Why does he leave himself open to charges that he has simply reduced Aquinas to Wittgenstein? I don’t know how O’Callaghan would answer such questions and don’t know how to answer them for him. But I do have an idea about the more interesting issue of how Cavell might intervene here in regard to the issue of enchantment. What will emerge is the way that, despite Cavell’s and O’Callaghan’s similar concerns and despite their equal debt to Wittgenstein, they end up going in different directions. At least it seems so, though I will also try to show how O’Callaghan ends his book by opening himself up to some of Cavell’s preoccupations. In an essay on Coleridge and Kant, Cavell quotes a passage from Biographia Literaria in which Coleridge is caught up with some of the issues vexing McDowell and O’Callaghan. He says there that his encounter with the writings of the mystics “contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring, and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH.”45 Cavell responds: I interpret the death, of which the reflective faculty partakes, as of the world made in our image, or rather through our categories, by Kant’s faculty of the Understanding, namely that very world which was meant to remove the skeptic’s anxieties about the existence of objects outside us. Here is extreme testimony that what both the world and the faculty of the world need redeeming from is felt to be at once skepticism and the answer to skepticism provided in the Critique of Pure Reason. And I think the feeling or intuition can be expressed by saying: since the categories of the 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.46 Call this the romantic dissatisfaction with Kant, the sense that the price of Kant’s settlement—the ceding of any knowledge of the thing in itself—is too high. But there is also a romantic satisfaction with Kant, in particular with his portrait of the human (which, to O’Callaghan’s chagrin, can still be seen in McDowell) as living in two worlds, one determined, the other free. What Cavell means by “satisfaction” is that it accounts


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for the human being’s dissatisfaction with, as it were, itself. It appreciates the ambivalence in Kant’s central idea of limitation, that we simultaneously crave its comfort and crave escape from its comfort, that we want unappeasably to be lawfully wedded to the world and at the same time illicitly intimate with it. . . . Another romantic use for this idea of our two worlds is its offer of a formulation of our ambivalence toward Kant’s ambivalent settlement, or a further insight into whatever that settlement was a settlement of—an insight that the human being now lives in neither world, that we are, as it is said, between worlds.47 (You do not, it seems to me, need to be a romantic to share such satisfaction, appreciation, ambivalence, about Kant. Does O’Callaghan share it? It is a recognition that something is lost. Cavell names that loss “our old absorption in the world,”48 and it is what McDowell and O’Callaghan are trying to recover.) The romantics will call for poetry to resuscitate the world. In doing so, they will be drawn toward what can be called animism. They may therefore seem to McDowell just as “superstitious” as the medievals. But if it is superstitious, it is also a response begged by skepticism. As Cavell puts it, the modern epistemologist typically “turns the world into, or puts it in the position of, a speaker, lodging its claims upon us, claims to which, it turns out, the philosopher cannot listen. . . . [Romanticism is] a struggle to bring the world back to life from the death dealt it in philosophy.”49 This is a struggle that leads Cavell to understand Wittgenstein as continuing romanticism’s mission.50 What that means comes out in Cavell’s reading of the little parable in Investigations about the skeptic insisting that another person can’t have his pains. I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: “But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!”—The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word “this.” Rather, what the emphasis does is to suggest the case in which we are conversant with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it.51 Wittgenstein wants us to notice our uncertainty about whether we are known, about what it would mean to be known. Our intelligibility is threatened by the unintelligibility of others and vice versa. We must let ourselves be known, wait to be known. And whose fault is our unknownness? Mine? Yours? Theirs? Ours? Is this only a post-Cartesian possibility? The fantasy of a private language emerges here. Since you can’t know this (or, striking myself on the

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breast, “you can’t have THIS pain”), at least a part of me is interpretable only by me. Here, at least, at last, I will be safe. “One singles oneself out for unknowableness. One interprets one’s separateness as isolation and then finds a cause for it.”52 Even granting that to do this is contrary to the very spirit of the Investigations, Cavell still wants to know, “does the Investigations provide an understanding of this possibility?”53 Think of the person who is striking his breast as declaring himself exceptional and unknown. In striking my breast, I say, “We are not there yet. You and I are not yet an us. You do not know me.” But, I do not have to say this is because I am essentially unknowable. It is “a parable of our separateness, no doubt. And doubtless a reminder that you are you.—Why is one so impatient with this? Has such a one never felt his or her existence slighted, presented to blindness; never felt like insisting upon it, declaring it?”54 Here, Cavell suggests that the impatience is a failure to acknowledge our own sense of our existence as slighted. Elsewhere, he will suggest that the impatience is due to our sense that we are being found guilty for not knowing the other, for leaving them alone. Both may be true. One point of all this is that it is by no means clear when the declaration of unknowableness is a declaration of mind-body dualism, a cognitive mistake, an assertion of the modern self, and when it is a demand for acknowledgment, the confession that you and I have not yet reached attunement in judgments, or what exactly all these differences are. But we had better be open to the latter possibility and open to that as judgment. This is the weakness of too many of the appeals to community. Almost invariably, the hero of Wittgenstein’s parable is seen as a threat to community and is told to get in line. The functional equivalent of an essential self is posited since it withdraws us from the conflict which constructs us. Think of Cavell’s Wittgenstein and Emerson (“Insist on yourself ”) as fomenting that conflict instead of withdrawing from it. But let Cavell say it. The parable is to teach not just the fact of my existence, but the fact that to possess it I must declare it, as if taking it upon myself. Before this, there are no others for me. . . . Human beings do not naturally desire isolation and incomprehension, but union or reunion, call it community. It is in faithfulness to that desire that one declares oneself unknown. . . . The wish to be extraordinary, exceptional, unique, thus reveals the wish to be ordinary, everyday. . . . So both the wish for the exceptional and for the everyday are foci of romanticism. One can think of romanticism as the discovery that the everyday is an exceptional achievement. Call it the achievement of the human. . . . Think of the spectacle of the likes of Rousseau and Thoreau and Kierkegaard and Tolstoy and Wittgenstein going around


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hoping to be ordinary, preaching the everyday as the locale of the sublime! Only the madness of their egotism, the monstrousness of it, requires such vaults of relief! Only sinners so crave sanctity!—Quite right. Quite right. The everyday is everyday, the ordinary is ordinary, or you haven’t found it.—How true that is. How very true. And yet if what those monsters of egotism and of vision saw is there, then your assurance is as egotistical as theirs, merely less instructive; or else you are as cynical as you evidently are complacent.55 Must this sound like individualism to a relational theological anthropology? For Cavell, the gap that McDowell inherits from Kant and that so worries O’Callaghan must be closed (or bridged?) every day. No anthropology is going to regain it for us permanently. The response to the epistemological problem of skepticism is ethics, where that means showing that the problem of skepticism is, as Cavell would put it, a practical not a metaphysical issue, that ethics and epistemology are not separate things. I understand O’Callaghan’s decision to close his discussion with a particular citation from Andre Dubus as evidence for this. Dubus writes: We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of sacraments between man and woman, that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: we are, we are, we are.56 In part, O’Callaghan is using these lines to make a point about “the priority of understanding over linguistic expression” without a retreat into modern privacy. But I take it that O’Callaghan’s use of these lines also demonstrates that he knows that the anthropology he is forwarding must be achieved; that, short of the sort of gestures Dubus adumbrates, we will live with the old distance between mind and world; that the vital contact between knower and known is not achieved in the winning of philosophical debates alone, not as long as “philosophy” is construed as it is in most curriculums; and it will never be achieved once and for all. “The world must be regained every day, in repetition, regained as gone,”57 through attention to things as ordinary as two glasses of wine, five scrambled eggs, “the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body.”58 The question begged in arguments about anthropology, arguments

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like O’Callaghan’s, is, “If this is what it means to be human, what are we if and when we are not this?” Are we less than human? Inhuman? Simply mistaken humans? In The Philadelphia Story, Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn that she will never be a “first-class human being” until she learns to have some regard for human frailty. And later in the film, she tells James Stewart that he is an intellectual snob (much to his annoyance, she keeps calling him “professor”) and not a “first-rate human being” for the same reasons. (We sense a certain justice here, but at the same time the language of class alerts us to dangers.) The Dubus lines push this even further. If such gestures say “we are,” then what does our lack of intimacy say? What do our all-but-pervasive failures with others declare? Not exactly, perhaps, that we are not, but, Cavell would say, that we haunt the world. That the gap bemoaned by O’Callaghan (and a host of others) must be taken seriously. What does it mean to take that gap seriously? Traditional philosophy . . . fails to take this gap seriously as a real, a practical problem. It has either filled it with God or bridged it with universals which insure the mind’s collusion with the world; or else it has denied, on theoretical grounds, that it could be filled or bridged at all. I think this is something Nietzsche meant when he ridiculed philosophers for regarding life “as a riddle, as a problem of knowledge,” implying that we question what we cannot fail to know in order not to seek what it would be painful to find out. This, of course, does not suggest that skepticism is trivial; on the contrary it shows just how profound a position of the mind it is. Nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s humanity, or to assert it at the expense of others. But if that is what skepticism entails, it cannot be combated through simple “refutations.”59 Common to varieties of skepticism (whether the denial that we can know or the refutation of that denial) is that I am displaced. I become irrelevant, either because I am declared helpless to know or because my responsibility for knowing is displaced onto God or universals. “In making the knowledge of others a metaphysical difficulty, philosophers deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s gaze, or bear of it. Doubtless such denials are part of the motive which sustains metaphysical difficulties.”60 The danger of theological anthropology is that it will perform the same displacement of God or universals as does much of modern philosophy.61 The gap can indeed be filled, but only by me. I must step into the gap, over and over again. Short of that, I haunt the


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world. In the terms of Wittgensteinian romanticism, I fail to declare myself and therefore fail to enact my existence. We tend to think that Descartes discovered that the existence of the individual must be proved. Cavell picks up on a reading advanced by Emerson, and given support by Jaakko Hintikka and Bernard Williams, that Descartes discovered that my existence must be declared. If I am to exist, I must declare my existence, acknowledge it. Descartes said that I exist if and only if I think it and thereby concluded that I am always thinking. Emerson denied the conclusion and argued that I mostly do not think and so “the skeptical possibility is realized—that I do not exist, that I, as it were, haunt the world.”62 Descartes explicitly appears midway through “Self-Reliance” when Emerson writes, “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.” In the second Meditation, Descartes wrote, “I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time that I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind.” Emerson is asking, “What happens when I do not say it?” The question may seem “merely” literary. Pronouncing or conceiving “I am, I exist” has, at most, to do with whether I know my existence, not with existence itself. But if that is true, it is a problem for Descartes as much as Emerson. After his introduction of the cogito, Descartes speculates, in a very literary manner, “I am, I exist—that is certain; but for how long do I exist? For as long as I think; for it might perhaps happen, if I totally ceased thinking, that I would at the same time completely cease to be.” Emerson also takes up the question (of “what I am, now that I know that I am”) and responds, “I am a being who to exist must say I exist, or must acknowledge my existence, claim it, stake it, enact it.” (Is it helpful to say that Emerson wonders if I think more than if I think?)63 Emerson is diagnosing the human condition as it presents itself to him as one of poor posture. Emerson surrounds that with other imagery: skulking up and down “with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him.”64 Such imagery leads Cavell to speak of Emerson’s view of the world as one “in which human life appears as a continuous loss of individual possibility in the face of some overpowering competitor.”65 It is a picture of ourselves in relationship to the world, or society, or God, as like a bastard, an interloper. It is as if the world is not ours, as if it were made for creatures other than us. Immediately after describing the one who is no longer upright, Emerson describes him as “ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. . . . they are for what they are; they exist with God today.” (It would be entirely in keeping with Emerson’s thought to have Matthew 6 in mind here. As different as Emily Dickinson is, she is Emerson when she writes,

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“Consider the lilies is the only commandment I have ever obeyed.”) We are in a constant losing battle with the world, producing this poor posture. I think it is commonly assumed that Emerson is here taking a typical Enlightenment position. He is asking us to stand up straight and take the fight to them, to gather ourselves and triumph over the traditions and authorities that have treated us like illegitimate children. The command “Never quote, only say” recommends the sheer self-creation of the autonomous will. But tempting as that is, it misses the subtlety of the essay. It misses the little Emersonian joke embedded in “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.” As Emerson rebukes our quoting as signs of bad posture, he is, of course, quoting Descartes and thereby acknowledging, “Language is an inheritance. Words are before I am.”66 Whether any given utterance is saying or quoting, self-reliant or conformist, is not self-evident and may only be known retrospectively and may only be known in conversation. (Emerson is demanding to be among the conversation partners.) What appears to be an act of Promethean selfassertion is really an act of submission. Cavell calls it “subjecting yourself to intelligibility,” “subject[ing] your desire to words,” or “allow[ing] yourself to be known.”67 The problem, of course, is that there may be no others who will take you up on it. (For Cavell, recalling part IV of The Claim of Reason, this means that there may be no others.) Another problem is that you may not be an other. You may not be one to allow others to allow themselves to be known. “The matter of authority [of self-reliance] is as much one of hearing as it is one of uttering.”68 Emerson presents his text as a test case: are you able to read “Self-Reliance,” to subject yourself to its words, to be obedient to them, to acknowledge that you are known by this text? Not agreeing with it, but submitting to it, as a discipline, being confronted by it. We are to find in Emerson’s investment in words the courage to use words despite recognition of the fact that words are what put us in bonds, that with each word we utter we emit stipulations, agreements we do not know and do not want to know we have entered, agreements we were always in, that were in effect before our participation in them. Our relation to our language—to the fact that we are subject to expression and comprehension, victims of meaning—is accordingly a key to our sense of our distance from our lives, of our sense of the alien, of ourselves as alien to ourselves, thus alienated.69 I have not forgotten O’Callaghan and Dubus. I am attempting to write Emerson into O’Callaghan’s text, trying to show how he provides the conditions


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for “that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: we are, we are, we are.”70 I am supposing that the ability to share that meal, that bottle of wine, that jog, that bed, such that it becomes a “sacrament” means subjecting your desire, not exactly to words, but to intelligibility. O’Callaghan says as much: “We can deliberately choose to cut words and deed[s] short of their completion of fulfillment. When we do so, we choose not to flourish as human beings. We choose a less perfect form of human existence.”71 We haunt the world.

Hauerwas, Narrative, Church I have made some general criticisms of “communitarians,” “Wittgensteinian theologians,” and others writing on ecclesiology and anthropology. It is time to engage one of them in more detail: Stanley Hauerwas. While perhaps his most obvious debts are to MacIntyre and Yoder, Aristotle and Aquinas, it is also true that Wittgenstein is in the background of all of Hauerwas’s work. Furthermore, the Wittgenstein who influences Hauerwas would seem to be the protocommunitarian Wittgenstein. In closing this chapter, I will try to drive a wedge through Hauerwas’s work, to identify a split between, on one hand, the well-known MacIntyrean emphasis on community and, on the other, a Wittgensteinian/Emersonian self-reliance. Instead of showing, as Jeffrey Stout has tried to do, that Emerson talks about character and virtue, I will try to show that Hauerwas talks about self-reliance.72 I will work primarily with three Hauerwas essays, two of which seem to me to display these aspects of Hauerwas’s work as well as the tension between them, and one which illustrates both aspects but succeeds at unifying them. The power and appeal of Hauerwas’s work comes from his uncanny ability to give voice to the readers’ secrets. Hauerwas is most compelling, most irresistible, when, for example, he goes into confessional mode: the story of the time spent with his friend Bob after Bob’s mother had committed suicide and his (Hauerwas’s) resistance to having to share another’s pain, from which he launches into some of the most affective pages on pain outside of Cavell. Or the story of receiving a gift of a handcrafted rifle from his father, which he rejects with the words “Of course, you realize that it will not be long before we as a society are going to have to take all these things away from you people.”73 From there, he launches into a criticism of conventional ethical theory (on which grounds, there was nothing wrong with his reaction) and the importance of character and shows how writing, honest writing, like Emerson’s writing, doesn’t just record moral growth but is constitutive of it.

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Or, to use another kind of example, Hauerwas is most compelling when his aphorisms capture our rejected thoughts. “We assume death only happens to other people” (178). “Pain isolates us not only from one another, but even from ourselves” (549). “Patience comes not just from our inability to have the other do our will; more profoundly, it arises with the love that the presence of the other can and does create in us” (365). “[Spiritual] growth requires a betrayal of a relationship dependent upon my being ‘true to my past self ’ ” (229).74 In such moments, Hauerwas writes under the guise of what Cavell calls the Wittgensteinian myth of the philosopher who has read nothing (as opposed to the Heideggerian myth of the philosopher who has read everything). Hauerwas knows what no one could fail to know. Like with Cavell and his heroes, the virtue here is attentiveness, not some kind of bookish brilliance. It is the display of something like what Hauerwas calls “the skill of saying.” The problem, however, is that too often this attentiveness gets sacrificed in order to promote the ecclesiological project. I might put the issue this way. One always knows where a Hauerwas essay is going. It is going to end with an appeal to church. “It is my thesis that the development of a sexual ethic and practice appropriate to basic Christian convictions must be part of a broader political understanding of the church” (483). Or, “if medicine can be rightly understood as an activity that trains some to know how to be present to those in pain, then something very much like a church is needed to sustain that presence day in and day out” (542).75 None of this is exactly wrong. But I fear the answers come too quickly. I fear that the thesis—that, for every issue that confronts the ethicist, church is the answer—skips over some things that ought to be tarried with. At least some of the time, all we need is friends. Hauerwas is on to something when he says, in an essay on sexuality, that “the ‘good’ that constitutes the church is served only by our learning to love and serve our neighbors as we find them in our mates and children. The sexual exclusiveness traditionally associated with the Christian understanding of marriage is but a form of the church’s commitment to support exclusive relationships.” It is not clear why this doesn’t just say “love and serve our neighbors” or at least add friends to mates and children, but if it did, I think this would be exactly right.76 But too often Hauerwas skips over these relationships in his hurry to get to “church.” He is too convinced that church makes friendship possible, instead of the other way around. (It may be better to say that there is no need to force a choice here.) There are two essays in which this seems clearest to me; the first that I will discuss is an early essay on narrative, written with David Burrell and called “Self-Deception and Autobiography.” Here, Hauerwas and Burrell combine the same sort of uncanny insight into the nature of self-deception with a turn to a Hauerwas keyword: story.


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Hauerwas and Burrell begin by describing consciousness as the skill of articulating a particular engagement with the world. It is the ability to step back from oneself—Thoreau calls it being beside oneself in a sane sense—and describe what one is doing or experiencing. Most of the time, in our daily routines, we don’t do this and don’t need to, but in some situations this will be necessary. The self-deceptive person is one who is not just unable to do this, but unwilling. Self-deceptive people avoid spelling out their engagements with the world and others in it: the mother who avoids consciousness of her son’s waywardness by blaming it on the school; the teacher who avoids consciousness of his pedagogical inadequacy by blaming it on the students. (This is the controlling theme of HBO’s The Sopranos, where both Tony and Carmela careen back and forth between flashes of startling confession and well-honed mechanisms of denial within lives of utter self-deception.) We avoid acknowledging such things because we’re afraid of what they would tell us about ourselves and those we love, and afraid of the change such acknowledgment would demand. This helps to show why self-deception can become so pervasive. We have to maintain the deceptive self in the face of others. “We systematically delude ourselves in order to maintain the story that has hitherto assured our identity” (206). Societal roles reinforce and demand self-deception. A person may identify herself completely with a particular role or vocation such that she loses any perspective from which to question the decisions she makes within that role, loses any ability to step back from identification with that role. Hauerwas and Burrell’s claims grow out of a reading of Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, which makes up the middle third of the essay.77 They ask the question, “How could a man of such apparent intelligence, integrity and sincerity become the second most powerful man in Hitler’s Germany?” Speer writes that he got to the point where he “deliberately blinded himself ” and “could see no moral ground outside the system on which to take a stand.” But how did he get to that point, or what placed him irreversibly on the path that led to that point? His answer, in a letter to his daughter, is that he considered himself to be, above all, an architect. His whole identity was bound up with his work. What Hitler offered him was “the most exciting prospects an architect can dream of ” (212). “His self-deception began when he assumed that ‘being above all an architect’ was a story sufficient to constitute his self. He had to experience the solitude of prison to realize that becoming a human being requires stories and images a good deal richer than professional ones, if we are to be equipped to deal with the powers of this world” (213). And so Hauerwas and Burrell conclude that, if we are to counter self-deception, “the story that sustains our life must give us the ability to spell out in advance the limits of the various roles we will undertake in our lives” (207). We need a story, in other

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words, that provides a place from which to gain a critical perspective on the identity we have constructed for ourselves, and that reveals if and how that identity is a cover for self-deception. This is a larger and more important claim than the basic one that, since actions, like words and selves, are only intelligible when set next to past and future actions, they need a narrative to make sense. Speer’s problem isn’t the lack of a narrative, but the lack of an adequate one, one that would enable him to gain critical leverage on himself, to find a space from which to see what he has blinded himself to and place him within a more truthful rendering of his life. Truthful narrative, Hauerwas and Burrell are saying, is one that provides judgment. There is nothing exactly wrong with this essay. But I am struck by what it leaves out. There is virtually nothing about companionship. Nothing about the sorts of confrontations with others that Cavell spells out in part III of The Claim of Reason.78 We are left with no idea about where this narrative is supposed to come from, how it is constructed, whether it is achieved or given. We are not told about the ways all stories can serve self-deception if not subjected to the constant interrogation of their tellers and hearers in dialogue. It should be obvious that I find this essay disconcerting in part because it is so close to being right, so strikingly reminiscent of what Cavell and Emerson might say. The fears that lie behind our self-deceptions are fears Emerson lists under the term “conformity.” The claim that self-awareness is a skill of saying has much in common with what Emerson calls “self-reliance,” what Cavell calls “subjecting yourself to intelligibility.” But the crucial difference is that, for Cavell and Emerson, our self-deception will only be overcome through acknowledgment, the sort of attention to the friend, companion, spouse, brother, acquaintance that is sometimes repentant, sometimes accusatory, that Cavell insists over and over again is absent from Hauerwas and Burrell’s essay. Instead, we get a “story.” The problem is not with the appeal to story itself. The problem is that acknowledgment is not explicitly understood as constitutive of stories. They are too often appealed to without also acknowledging the importance of acknowledgment. And in doing so, too often “story” or “tradition” or “community” function to displace responsibility from myself to them. The obvious response to such criticism is that Hauerwas and Burrell think we need a story that will make us capable of acknowledgment. That is right. But, first, it needs to be said. Second, it would need to be said in a way that recognizes that story and acknowledgment are mutually implicated. It does no good to put one or the other first. It is well known that Hauerwas moved beyond his early emphasis on narrative to insist on the narrative of the church, not just scripture but scripture as


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read in the church, given sense within this particular community with its particular practices. The pioneering turn to narrative in the late ’60s and ’70s quickly came to be seen as just another general category under which various communal instantiations could be subsumed. Hauerwas resisted this by insisting on the particularity of the church and its reading. “Narrative” could do no work unless the specificity of the who and how of reading was made plain. As Hauerwas put it, “[Hans] Frei’s appeal to the church as the subject of the narrative as well as the agent of the narrative is a reminder that the narrative does not refer but rather people do” (158). This was a significant improvement and suggested that the gaps in the “Self-Deception” essay would be filled. But then comes the (non-Cavellian) turn to Wittgenstein. Hauerwas makes this turn to church by turning to Wittgenstein mediated through Janet Martin Soskice. Soskice argues, rightly, that words have no meaning outside of the role they play in particular utterances made by particular persons. This means further that “the notion of membership in a linguistic community is a crucial feature of such a theory of reference” (159). Hauerwas doesn’t quite skip over the speakers in the community to the community itself. Instead, he turns to the sermon, “the communal action whereby Christians are formed to use their language rightly. . . . The preached word’s power is its capacity to create a people receptive to being formed by that word” (159). At least two things are worth noting here, two things that I think Cavell would be quick to point out. To the latter claim, that the sermon creates a people, it is not clear how useful this level of generalization is. Some texts do this work. For example, some of Hauerwas’s texts. Some particular sermons and some particular preachers and authors do this work. But why say it about the sermon in general? (I am sure there are conversations in Protestant, and particularly Reformed, theology that I am missing here.) Second, is the sermon really the communal action whereby Christians are formed to use their language rightly? Nowhere is Hauerwas more forgetful of John Howard Yoder than in claims such as this. For Yoder, it is “the rule of Paul” or the “universality of charisma” that forms individuals to use their language rightly. The worry is that, here, Hauerwas is the sort of bad Wittgensteinian I wrote of earlier. Let us turn now to a 1985 essay on medical ethics called “Salvation and Health.” There, Hauerwas argues that the fundamental commitment of physicians is being present to those in pain and that medicine is the practice that trains persons in the ability to be present. Prescribing drugs and doing surgery are, of course, essential, but the physician’s gift is the patient skill of standing alongside the sufferer. To illustrate this, or the failure of this, Hauerwas tells a story (to which I alluded earlier) of a friendship from his youth. One day, his friend Bob finds his mother dead. She had committed

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suicide. Bob calls Hauerwas to come and be with him. Despite his reluctance to be faced with that kind of pain (a reluctance he describes with Cavellian precision), Hauerwas spends the day and night with Bob, crying, walking, talking. “I did not know how to help him start sorting out such a horrible event so that he could go on. All I could do was be present.” But while the occasion created a deep bond between them, Hauerwas also says that it finally led to them slipping apart. “We had shared a pain so intense that for a short period we had become closer than we knew, but now the very pain that created that sharing stood in the way of the development of our friendship. . . . So we went our separate ways” (541). The essay goes on to make the case that church is the place where we learn the habits and practices necessary to not go our separate ways. And, further, that medicine needs the church as a resource for such habits and practices. The first claim is surely right. But it is also wrong. Saying how is difficult, but I can get at my discomfort by turning to some other central characters in the essay, Job’s comforters. Hauerwas insists on the crucial but oft-forgotten point that Job’s comforters sit with him in silence for seven days before they speak. In doing so, they exemplify the habits and practices of presence. They wail and weep and tear their clothes, and for a full week they say nothing. Though they are severely chastised for what they do end up saying, they deserve our admiration for their patience before speaking, for resisting the pressure, so common in such situations, to “do something.” But they don’t stay silent. They have to speak, and what makes them so interesting is that there is nothing wrong with what Job’s comforters say.79 They are devout and religious men, formed in the habits and practices of community. They speak no heresy, deny no doctrine. Job’s disagreement with them is not over the content of their claims. What, then, is the issue? Why does every word they say chagrin Job? It is their failure to be present to him, to put themselves in his presence. They exhibit their doctrines in abstraction, like “cut flowers,” to use Barth’s words. They present a theological system with no evidence of habitation. They proclaim timeless truths whereas Job witnesses to his agonistic confrontation with the free and living God. The truth becomes falsehood in their mouths because “they speak as those who are totally unaffected by the despairing struggle for the knowledge of God into which Job finds himself plunged.”80 (The pain they are avoiding, Barth is suggesting, is not just the pain of Job’s illness or the sorrow at the loss of loved ones; it is also the pain of Job’s encounter with God.) They are not so much interested in Job as they are interested in guarding themselves, their theology, and their community from the unsettling challenge that his witness presents. Their “well-worn formulae and sacred clichés” displace their responsibility for his pain onto their doctrine.


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I intend few immediate criticisms of “Salvation and Health” from this. While Hauerwas’s attention to the silence of Job’s comforters is salutary, it is not clear that they show us the importance of “the question of the kind of community necessary to sustain the long-term care of the ill” (548). In light of Barth’s reading, they show something like the opposite. They show that even the most robust communities may be obstacles to presentness. But that tells us nothing that “Salvation and Health” doesn’t already know. My real worry is the final turn to the well-worn formula of church. It displaces another option, silence. Like Job’s comforters should have done, Hauerwas should have found a way (a Sebaldian way) to wait. I am looking for, and missing, in these two essays something like the ironies that break up Emerson’s “Never quote, only say.” I find them in another Hauerwas essay, which I regret is less well known: “Peacemaking: The Virtue of the Church.” Here, it is the practice of fraternal admonition, not the sermon, that forms Christians to use their language rightly. And here, it is impossible to forget that church is the interlocking of individuals in conversation and argument. Here, “particular utterances made by particular persons” are tarried with on the way to “the notion of membership in a linguistic community.” Here, we have Emersonian self-declaration in service of reconciliation. Without it, there can be no such thing as confession. One way to describe it is to say that there is something missing from the Dubus lines. In those lines, the possibility of such companionship seems to emerge from nowhere at all. What is missing is the sometimes painful daily work of acknowledgment that makes possible “that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: we are, we are, we are.” Among the sacraments between people is what John Paul Lederach calls “conflict transformed.” Transformed from something destructive into something creative, from obstacle to opportunity. Such are the topics of “Peacemaking: The Virtue of the Church.” The essay is a reading of Matthew 18:15–22 (“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault”). Hauerwas’s purpose in his reading is to explain the central oddity of the passage, namely, “the text does not seem to be about peacemaking, but about conflict making” (318). That this seems odd is only evidence of how little we know about peace, how we much prefer the absence of overt conflict to reconciliation. We prefer to wait out our disagreements until they are forgotten, or to avoid the ones we are at odds with until time can smooth things over with no effort on our part. We don’t want to look like persons who are easily offended. We may refuse to believe we have been wronged, preferring instead to blame ourselves. We may like the sense of selfrighteousness that comes with having been wronged and having an object to despise. “It may be painful to be wronged, but at least such wrongs give me a

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history of resentment that, in fact, constitutes who I am” (321). Like Jonah, we may fear the very possibility that the other will repent, depriving us of our object of contempt. Perhaps most important, we may discover, in the course of confrontation, that we were mistaken in thinking we were wronged. Not only that we haven’t been wronged, but that we have wronged the other. The conversation may require change on our part. “The truth seems to be the last thing we want to know about ourselves” (322). It should be clear that this diagnosis of the things which hold us back from confrontation overlaps a great deal with the diagnosis of self-deception. But here, Hauerwas makes no turn to story. There is only the patient demand for friends who are nettles in our sides instead of echoes.

8 Truly Human

If I ask myself why I remain in some sense a Christian, it is because of the questions set to me by the person of Christ.1 What we call Christianity is supposed to [be] a kind of school the purpose of whose pedagogy is to foster the conditions in which dependence might be relearned as friendship . . . to be pledged in labor towards the kind of “heaven and earth” in which our human work might be the finite form of God’s.2 The reader may by now be asking, “Is that really Emerson?” I am asking the same thing. At most, I am willing to claim that it is really Cavell’s Emerson, though I want to be careful how I say that. I do not mean that Cavell’s Emerson is like Rorty’s Dewey, a “hypothetical playmate.” What I do mean will only emerge in the pages to come. Cavell provides clues to the difference between Emerson and his Wittgensteinian Emerson in the only two places I know of where he expresses his disappointment in Emerson. In Philosophical Passages, he writes, “There are things I wish he would do better. I sometimes don’t see in him enough concrete presence of the other for himself.”3 Elsewhere, he chastises both Emerson and Thoreau for the “cowardice of imagination” that led them to turn to nature instead of an other.4 Considered in light of the centrality of the remarriage comedies to Cavell’s work, it is hard to imagine a harsher criticism. I am interested, then, in the lines that precede the criticism in

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Philosophical Passages. Cavell writes, “At the present stage of my understanding, my discoveries of limitations in Emerson could not, I believe, present themselves to me as causes, or excuses, for condescension.” It sounds like this softens the judgment on Emerson. But, to my ear, it heightens it because of the way it recalls some famous lines of Emerson’s. “Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him.”5 Instead of softening the judgment, then, Cavell’s remarks intensify it by granting to Emerson and his limitations a patience Emerson will not grant to others, the same patience exemplified by the partners in the remarriage comedies and by half a lifetime’s attention to one writer. It is hard for me to believe that the similarities of language here are coincidental, that our greatest reader of Emerson wasn’t aware of the allusion to “Circles” in his remarks. Cavell has long argued against the conventional reading that Emerson lacks any sense of the tragic, has argued that Emerson’s emphasis on raising and cheering us is not because he is a stranger to despair, but is part of his lifelong war against despair,6 against the way despair relieves us of responsibility for the hard work and imagination hope demands of us. I find that I differ with Cavell, though from the opposite direction. It isn’t that Emerson is no stranger to despair, but that he has succumbed to despair. The lack of a concrete other in Emerson is a kind of despair, here at the most important place of all. And it isn’t just cowardice of the imagination. It is cowardice, period. But then, this is a standing threat to any Cavellian thinker: “Had I had faith I should have remained with Regine.”7 When Emerson does have an other, it is “the great man,” or the work of genius (remembering that “there are no common men”).8 To review some things I went over in chapter 2, for Emerson, as with Nietzsche, genius is not something confined to an elite. Genius is something we all have when we attend to our “rejected thoughts.” “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”9 Emerson insists that we are all capable of this. But we will only learn to trust our genius, to stop dismissing the gleaming thoughts flashing across our minds, through the example of others who have done it. That is one of the “uses of great men.” In his book of that title, Emerson shows us his exemplars. And in every essay he writes, he offers himself as an exemplar to us. An Emerson essay “recalls and enacts a scene of a certain humbling, or chastening, or shaming, in particular of being humbled by the words of someone else,”10 who can therefore

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be called an exemplar. Emerson presents himself as our exemplar, as a genius, but identifies his genius with our rejected thoughts, insisting that he knows nothing we do not also know. Only that he acknowledges what we avoid. “The virtue most in request in society is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.” Emerson presents his writing as such a self-reliant aversion. As such, it is a turning away from society, turning his back on conformity. But, at the same time, it is a turning toward society, offering it the example of his aversion and insisting it is no more than we would do ourselves. We are presented with a choice: we can persist in our conformity, deny Emerson’s claim upon us; we can choose to heed Emerson’s call and become ashamed of our shame; we can learn to live with our shame; or we can even give an account of it, defend it. Emerson seems to assume that we share his sense of lostness, or that we will, after a few pages. “Every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.” Cavell suggests that the opening of Aristotle’s Politics is the most plausible inspiration for this line. Aristotle said that it is the gift of language that fits and fates humans for political association. In which case, Emerson is saying, political association in America chagrins him. As Cavell puts it, ever mindful of the strain of the mythological in Emerson’s use of the word “America”: “America has not yet been discovered.”11 The problem is that the only words Emerson has to begin to set them right are the same as “every word they say.” Cavell once wrote that “the writing of those who have some acquaintance with the topic of self-knowledge—Thoreau, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for example—takes the form . . . of obsessive and antic paradox and pun, above all of maddening irony. As if to write toward self-knowledge is to war with words, to battle for the very weapons with which you fight.”12 Now it turns out that this is also true of writing toward the political. To say that Emerson, and we, have no words but all those words we have in common, the current use of which chagrins us, is to deny once again the claim that Emerson is the conventional individualist of liberal philosophy. For Emerson, the social is everywhere. “In Emerson, as in Wittgenstein, I encounter the social in every utterance and in each silence. Sometimes this means that I find in myself nothing but social, dictated thoughts (the condition Emerson opposes as ‘conformity,’ what philosophy has forever called the unexamined life); sometimes it means that I find in the social nothing but chaos.”13 Sometimes, it means I find companionship. But an apparent dilemma arises. If our conformity makes us “not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars,”14 how could we even recognize genius? A way out of the dilemma emerges with the claim, again as much Nietzsche’s as Emerson’s, that we are each of us split selves. “For Emerson we are divided not alone between intellect and sense, for we can

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say that each of these halves is itself split. We are halved not only horizontally but vertically—as that other myth of the original dividing of the human pictures it—as in Plato’s Symposium, the form of it picked up in Freud, each of us seeking that of which we were originally half, with which we were partial.”15 Cavell calls the “vertical” split the split between the attained self and the attainable self, the deaf conformist self and the self that is capable of hearing and desiring the exemplar and thereby turning. For Emerson, there can be no turning, no aversion, without the exemplar.16 It is not something a person can do on his own. With this reading, Cavell is making a move toward the Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle’s famous claim that the friend is “another myself.” And now we can also see why one of Emerson’s terms for the friend is “beautiful enemy.”17 What is beautiful to my unattained but attainable self is the enemy of my attained self. Cavell goes on from this to identify the Emersonian essay-as-exemplar and the Emersonian great man with the older friend exemplified by Socrates and with each of the partners in the remarriage comedies. That is, Cavell finds here resources for his own quite rigorous account of authority and his own redefinition of the human. Picking up on a theme developed by Sebastian Moore and taken up by Rowan Williams, I want to sketch the way this repeated progression from attained self to attainable self takes place in relation to the victim. I also want to take up another issue with regard to Cavell’s use or misuse of Emerson. Emerson provides an ontology for his variety of perfectionism, which he calls “the ground of my hope.” “Man is one” (66). Cavell returns again and again to the many times Emerson says something like, “The deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true” (64). It is true, as Cavell argues, that this (and the similar remarks in the opening paragraph of “SelfReliance”) is Emerson’s response to the private language fantasy. And it is true that, without something like this, there can be no reconciliation between persons. You must “insist on yourself,” as Emerson commands, if you and not the mask you are presenting to the world is to be transformed. And Cavell is right to warn that, in “subjecting yourself to intelligibility,” there can be no assurance that others will take you up on it. But Emerson’s conviction that man is one, a conviction ignored by Cavell, seems to me to be just such an assurance, if a distant one. Well, not quite ignored. Cavell says: It is true that when I hear Emerson saying (in “Self-Reliance”), “We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence, which makes us receivers

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of its truth and organs of its activity,” I know that others will take this intelligence to be an allusion to God or to the Over-Soul and a little condescend to it. I take it as an allusion to, or fantasy of, our shared language, and I aspire to descend to it. (I do not deny that the directions are linked.)18 I don’t want to condescend to it, though I do want to reinterpret it. Where Emerson offers “the lap of an immense intelligence,” Christianity offers the love of the Father, of which Jesus was utterly certain. We are one in our rebellion against our Father, in the squandering of this certainty. Hence, our inhumanity is the squandering of the assurance that, in the cross and resurrection, the worst we can do is taken up. If humans are one, we are one in the fact that we are all children of one Father. Jesus is “the first born among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). The prayer we are commanded to pray begins “Our Father,” not “My Father.” And so every failure of acknowledgment, every avoidance and evasion of another is an avoidance and evasion of a child of that same Father. Every adequate acknowledgment is an expression of love for the Father.

“Our Best Picture of the Unacknowledged Human Soul” “The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.” I think it is possible to hang too much on this sentence, and perhaps in what follows, I am culpable. But it is just as worrisome to ignore it as a throwaway line, which as far as I can tell, is what almost all Cavell commentators do. Cavell places this sentence at the heart of one of the most crucial arguments of The Claim of Reason, an argument around which much else circles. In what follows, I want to explore, via Williams, Moore, and McCabe,19 what it means to be present to the crucified body, to acknowledge it. To speak of the presence to us of the crucified Jesus is to speak of the resurrection. A theology of resurrection means thinking through “what it meant and means to say that Jesus who was deserted and executed is alive with God and also present to his followers.”20 Resurrection finds that the stories in the Gospels and in Acts of the risen Christ’s appearances to his followers are stories of acknowledgment. This is obvious already on the second page. “The resurrection must be shown to be good news to Paul as a persecutor, Peter as a betrayer, Mary simply as a lost and grieving human being.”21 Paul as, Peter as, Mary as. It is a central feature of Cavell’s account of acknowledgment that it involves self-recognition. It “calls for recognition of the other’s specific relation to oneself, and that entails the revelation of oneself as having denied or distorted that relationship.”22 Another central

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feature is that acknowledgment means that I must do something about what I know. I must give my knowledge expression. I must have the courage for self-reliance. To get at what this means, before turning to Williams, it is helpful to return to the passage in Cavell. It appears at the end of Cavell’s account of the best case for knowledge of others. If there really was another [who was a best case], and the case failed me, still the other knows of his or her existence; he or she remains. But this knowledge has come to me too late. Because now the other remains as unacknowledged, that is, as denied. I have shut my eyes to this other. And this is now part of the other’s knowledge. To acknowledge him now would be to know this. To deny him now would be to deny this, deny this denial of him: to shut his eyes to me. Either way I implicate myself in his existence. There is the problem of the other.—The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul. It is, accordingly, to be expected that we will not willingly subject ourselves to the best case of acknowledgment, indeed that we will avoid the best if we can, to avoid the worst. (We will have to be singled out. By what? By whom?) What is the nature of this avoidance? The answer to that question should contribute to answering the question: What is the nature of our everyday knowledge of the other?23 The last line of the first paragraph is, at the least, a summary and interpretation of what surrounds it. It says, “if you want to see the display of what I am trying to say, look here, at these stories.” I understand Rowan Williams to have done just that in Resurrection, tracing the ways the risen Jesus’ eyes are not shut to us, the ways the risen Jesus singles out Paul, Peter, Mary. This would not surprise Cavell. He knows, like Barth, that though “the Devil deals in pacts and bargains, and we must call him up; God’s medium is the covenant, or promise, and he calls us, and comes upon us, unbidden.”24 Resurrection is, in some ways, simply a rewriting of Moore’s The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger. Moore’s argument can be stated fairly simply despite the fact that it is a very difficult book. Jesus must be understood, first, as victim, as our victim. At the same time, the cross shows not just Jesus as our victim, but ourselves as our victims. In the contemplation of the crucified Jesus, we see ourselves as crucifiers and ourselves as crucified. Our lives are characterized by “an unconscious refusal,” “a stopping short.” We are powered by “a nameless and pervasive fear.” What we refuse in fear is nothing less than the fullness of

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life, “some unbearable personhood . . . something that at root we are, a self that is persistently ignored.” According to Moore, the crucified Jesus is that refused self. With this recognition comes the possibility of forgiveness and hence the possibility of moving into the self which we chose to crucify. But this is not a single occasion. It is a diurnal occurrence in the life of the believer, who is “forever passing back and forth” between crucifier and crucified. But this is understood not just in our mystical contemplation of Jesus, but in every encounter with our victims.25 Williams’s Resurrection explores this pattern as it works itself out in the Gospels and in Acts. When he sets out upon his reading of the resurrection, he begins, quite properly, with the Acts sermons. There, he finds that the central claim of those sermons is the simple, oft-repeated statement, “You crucified him.” The Acts preachers confront their audiences by identifying them as responsible and guilty participants in the death of this man, Jesus. In doing so, they enact a reversal. They are placing the former judges into the position of the judged, and their victim, Jesus, is proclaimed as judge. But it isn’t left at that level, at a tug-of-war for power. For in this victim-as-judge lies the only hope of the audience. With his condemnation, as proclaimed by the Acts preachers, comes promise, hope. The Lord who judges is also the Lord who saves. Salvation is to be found here and only here, in this crucified and risen body. “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Attempts to mitigate the sharp exclusivism forget that the exclusivism “must be read strictly in this light: grace is released only in confrontation with the victim.”26 Grace will be released to these audiences only in their acknowledgment of Jesus as their victim. Not only are the audiences accused of an isolated instance of crucifixion in the recent past, their persecution and rejection of the emerging church is also part of the verdict, but not as something additional, a separate charge. When Paul is confronted on the Damascus Road, he knows enough to properly address his challenger as “Lord.” But this initial act of acknowledgment is not enough. In his reply, the Lord identifies himself as “Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” That is, as the Jesus embodied in the particular sect of Jews which Paul is ruthlessly victimizing. From this, Williams suggests a “provisional definition of the primary stage in the preaching of the resurrection as an invitation to recognize one’s victim as one’s hope.”27 Not, he quickly points out, an abstract victim, but our victim. The subject of the Acts sermons is not presented as “this Jesus who was crucified,” but “this Jesus whom you crucified.” Acknowledgment of the other is always acknowledgment of myself because it requires an acknowledgment of my relation to the other. The abstract victim obviates the need for acknowledgment,

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makes unnecessary, and unimaginable, my need for confession, repentance, conversion. It makes it impossible to recognize that it is not just the victim who has been diminished, but also myself. “I am my own victim, no less than the one I judge, and that is why I need salvation, rescue from the trap of judge-victim relationship, the gift of a relationship which is not of this kind.”28 This much, Williams quickly points out, has a deceptive clarity. The problem, however, is the fluidity of boundaries in any human relationship. The world doesn’t divide neatly into oppressors and victims, judges and judged. It is not just that in one relationship I am a victim and in another an oppressor, but that I can be both within one relationship. (In King Lear, for example, Edgar and Edmund, like many other characters in the play, are both victims and oppressors of each other, and both are victims and oppressors of Gloucester.) The claim of the Gospels is that only Jesus is a “pure victim.” Only he was never an oppressor. That is what enables our turning to him in hope and without fear that his judgment bears not promise, but what Fanon called the “trampoline of resistance,” the precarious exchanges of affirmation and denial, acknowledgment and avoidance that expose our relationships as petty struggles for power over each other. The tradition made it clear that Jesus offered no “violence” to any who turned to him in hope: he accepts, he does not condemn, resist or exclude. His life is defined as embodying an unconditional and universal acceptance, untrammeled by social, ritual or racial exclusiveness (the woman, the Samaritan, the leper, the collaborator, the sexually delinquent, the Roman soldier, all receive grace and fellowship in Jesus). And the tradition also recorded Jesus’ silent resignation at his trial. Out of this, John weaves his rich fabric: Jesus is indeed the world’s judge because he is “Son of Man” (John 5:27).29 This is Jesus’ power and his glory. He is not judge in spite of being victim, but because of it, a point made repeatedly in the New Testament, most eloquently in Philippians 2, and fundamental to all Christian conviction. His condescension is his exaltation. This servant is Lord and this Lord is servant. Which means his humanity does not come at the expense of his divinity, a claim perhaps more difficult to fathom though it is what makes all the other claims intelligible. Williams goes on from this to make a crucial expansion of the claim that in this victim, Jesus, lies our hope. [This] [d]oes also imply something about God’s attitude to any and every victim. If God’s love is shown in the pure victim, it is

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shown . . . as opposition to violence: so it is impossible to conceive of the Christian God identified with the oppressor in any relationship of violence. The powerless sufferer, whether “innocent” or “guilty,” is the one who belongs with God, simply in virtue of being a victim; so that the saving presence of God is always to be sought and found with the victim. Conversion is always turning to my victim—even in circumstances where it is important for me to believe in the rightness of my cause. . . . What is at issue is simply the transaction which leads to exclusion, to the severance of any relation of reciprocity. It may be unconscious, it may be deliberate and wilfully damaging, it may appear unavoidable; but as soon as such a transaction has occurred, God is with the powerless, the excluded. And our hope is that he is to be found as we return to our victims seeking reconciliation, seeking to find in renewed encounter with them the merciful and transforming judgement of Jesus, the “absolute” victim.30 Is this true? And if it is, how is it true? We have been taught, in the twentieth century especially by Barth and his great heir, Hans Frei, to insist on the utter uniqueness of Jesus, on his “unsubstitutability.” Of course, Williams thinks that too, hence Jesus as the only pure victim, the only one “who can ‘carry’ the divine love,”31 and the awareness that all other victims will speak to us in a more or less “distorted accent, of the Lamb of God.” But there is a reason to push why he thinks that Jesus is both unique and available in the victim.32 For it is not clear why this doesn’t take us right back to the “fluidity” between oppressor and victim that Williams earlier identified. The turn to Jesus as “pure victim” was to contrast with that fluidity. The claim was that, if there were a pure victim, “such would be the one victim whose judgment might be more than a reversal of roles: such a person could never merely assume the place of the condemner over against myself as the new victim. And so there would be the possibility of [a] transformed rather than an inverted relationship.”33 But now, just three pages later, we are being told that “any and every victim” offers that. So why wasn’t the turn to Jesus as pure victim an unnecessary detour? And given the fluidity, why not just say that any and every person offers the possibility of a transformed rather than inverted relationship? (He does say that—“We are all of us, in some measure, shut off from each other: our own individual options for violence fade into an overall background of endemic violence”34—but, carefully, he doesn’t allow it to absolve us or distract us from our responsibility. Perhaps Cavell would say he doesn’t allow it to become theatricalization, a concept which is important in handling the easy sentimentality of much talk about victims.) And Williams also says, “Neither

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I nor anyone else except the crucified God is a pure victim.”35 But can he say both? Can he have both the uniqueness of Jesus and “the saving presence of God is always to be sought and found with the victim”? This is, after all, a specific Jewish carpenter: incarnate Son of a specific Father who was and is Israel’s God; obedient to the task given him to reconcile the world unto himself; killed for specific reasons—sedition and/or blasphemy—by a coalition of two particular groups of people, the Jewish authorities and the Roman state; and raised from the dead by that same Father at whose right hand he now rules in judgment over all things visible and invisible. An answer to this question emerges in The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger, particularly in Moore’s reading of the parable of the unforgiving servant. The story is of a servant who is forgiven a large debt by his master, but refuses to forgive a small debt owed to him by one of his fellow servants. Moore suggests that it is a mistake to read the judgment here as simply exposing the fact that “[a]lthough I have been let off a huge debt, I won’t even let someone else off a small debt.” It goes deeper than that; it reveals that “because I see no reason to remit my brother’s debt, the forgiveness of God has no serious meaning for me.”36 The parable implicates me. Just insofar as I think the unforgiving servant’s action is manifestly outrageous, I fail to see it in my own life. I repeat the servant’s denial. I fail to see how my failures of acknowledgment are obstacles to God’s forgiveness. Not to God forgiving me, but to my reception of that forgiveness. What happens when someone is forgiven by another? What happens when the other receives that forgiveness? The forgiven person is a split self. Split between, on one hand, the self that hears the other’s forgiveness, which communicates that “in spite of what you have done, you are still loved, still lovable,” and, on the other, the self that remains guilty of the wrong that has been done and so experiences itself as unlovable. We can make sense of the contradiction, according to Moore, through the recognition that, in hurting the other, we are also hurting ourselves, that my diminution of the other is also a diminution of myself. The friend takes the glib “I’m sorry” and says “For what?” She becomes the beautiful enemy by forcing you to face what you have done, by turning your apology back on you, forcing the acknowledgment of self, creating the possibility of moving on to the unattained self, which can only happen by passing through, not around, the self-defeat of victimization. The friend can do this because she has your trust. That means you trust that her love for you is stronger and more enduring than her resentment for a wrong. She grants you permission to be yourself, to be your split self. But she will have limits and so will you. Cavell is repeatedly reminding us to not mistake the limits of our acknowledgments for the limits of the humanly

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acknowledgeable. “The opposite of terror is the calm of safety; the opposite of horror would be the bliss of salvation. Is there this opposite? Is there an upper limit on humanity? If there is, how would I know that I had reached it? How would I know that I had gone in myself not merely to my limitations for acknowledgment, but to the limitations of the humanly acknowledgeable?”37 Central to the argument in Moore and Williams is that the cross shows that there are no limits, not even death. The worst we can do is taken up here. This acknowledgment is not only an acknowledgment of the victim as denied, hurt. And not only an acknowledgment of my responsibility. It is an acknowledgment of what Cavell calls my unattained self, the self I could have been but decided against in my acts of victimizing others. The unacknowledged soul that the crucified body is the best picture of is not just the unacknowledged other, but also my unacknowledged attainable self. Williams, following Moore, digs still deeper here: it is not just the nonvictimizing self I have rejected, but the penitential self denied by my refusal of acknowledgment. My failures of acknowledgment of any and every victim for whom I am responsible are failures to acknowledge Jesus. Jesus is present in every occasion of reconciliation. “The presence of Jesus may be encountered . . . wherever authentic and creative forgiveness occurs and is seen to occur.”38 We do not find God in the victim; we find God through the victim, through the process of reconciliation. God “is there as ‘the unfinishedness’ of our relation to the criminal, as the muted question, the half-heard cry for some unimaginable qualitative leap into reconciliation.”39 The believer’s “violence is violence offered to Jesus. All their betrayals are to be understood as betrayals of him.”40 Moore says that the believer comes to understand the attained self as crucifier and the attainable self as crucified. The attained self crucifying the attainable self. Forgiveness is the occasion at which this becomes most plain. As the reader will probably expect by now, it is also the place at which the terror of expressiveness becomes plain. For Cavell, of course, the terror of expressiveness is also a terror of inexpressiveness. Both emerge in the choice of silence or tirade instead of apology or asking for an apology, or instead of granting forgiveness or asking forgiveness. For McCabe, as for Cavell, this is the denial of the human. For McCabe, as for Williams and Moore, this is also the denial of Christ. I noted earlier that the line “the crucified body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul” is set at a crucial place in Cavell’s discussion of the best case. Perhaps an argument could be made for why Jesus should be considered as the one who “compresses within himself or herself my view of psychic reality as a whole; a given other who exemplifies all others for me,

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humanity as such; a given other upon whom I stake my capacity for acknowledgment altogether.” But I do not know how to make that case, nor do I particularly want to. I do, however, want to suggest that the incarnation provides an affirmative answer to one of Cavell’s central questions. “Our position is not, so far as we know, the best.—But mightn’t it be? Mightn’t it be that just this haphazard, unsponsored state of the world, just this radiation of relationships, of my cares and commitments, provide[s] the milieu in which my knowledge of others can best be expressed?”41 It is also the answer Cavell gives when he says about Cordelia, “Isn’t that what Christ meant?” “So my thesis is that Jesus died of being human,” McCabe writes in an essay on the atonement.42 Jesus didn’t die because the Father wanted him to. Jesus didn’t die to make restitution for our sins. He didn’t die as a ransom to the devil. These images may all have limited metaphorical usefulness, but not if they blind us to the fact that he ”refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world.”43 But what does that mean? Two things govern McCabe’s account of the human. The first is friendship. The second is communication. “The aim of human life is to live in friendship.”44 This is what people are for. It is because we are communicative creatures that this is possible and that it is so hard. The reason we are so bad at friendship is because the human is “the animal that has not come to terms with its new kind of animality.”45 We are not simply instinctual creatures of nature; we are animals that use language, the animal that “can express the world, and express itself, symbolically” and that “to some extent stands over against nature and stand[s] over against even its own nature.”46 We are not just capable of communicating, we must communicate. Every word and deed reveals us. Every word and deed is a self-giving, a relinquishing of control. So to be a communicative creature is to be exposed in this way, to be part of an unsurveyable landscape of risk, populated with threat, opportunity, hope, fear, joy, terror. The failure to be human, according to McCabe, is the failure to see threat as opportunity, fear transformable into hope. “Mostly we settle for what we are, what we have made of ourselves. We settle for the person that we have achieved or constructed; we settle for our own self-image because we are afraid of being in the image of God. This failure to respond to the summons into life, this failure of faith, is called sin.”47 The contradiction of “our way of being human” is that the capacity to communicate creates both the possibility of friendship and the possibility of deeply destructive violence. Put simply, friendship is the dispossession of the self in hopeful anticipation in the face of risk. Violence is the protective mechanism produced by fearful expectation. Instead of allowing us to share life with each other, they become ways of taking life from each other. The contradiction is at

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the heart of Emerson’s great essay “Experience”: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch the hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.”48 It is not the evanescence and lubricity of objects that are unhandsome. It is the way we clutch at objects, the way we opt for possession over dispossession. (This is just another of his many rewritings of the Gospels.) The most vulnerable in such conditions are the ones most fully human, the ones who leave themselves exposed in the perpetual movement from each attained self to each unattained self. The claim that Jesus was fully human and died because of it is the claim that “he put up on barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world.”49 “The communication he offers is unmixed with domination or exclusiveness.”50 The rejection of Jesus, then, is the rejection of the possibility of such communication, the rejection of humanness. Theological refusals of anthropology, usually inspired by Barth, begin here. Since we are not yet human, turning to us to discover human nature will be a clutching, self-defeating enterprise. Any faithful theological anthropology must begin with Jesus Christ, where “begin” means that this particular firstcentury Jew, promised messiah of Israel, son of Israel’s God, crucified by Pontius Pilate and raised on the third day, this man is our best picture of what it means to be human. The attempt to learn what it means to be human by looking to ourselves may be occasionally useful, may provide important insights, but can be no substitute for Christ. Only Christ fully reveals the human condition to us. This is the importance, and the mystery, of Chalcedon’s claim that Christ was fully human. It is an all-too-common mistake to think that “fully divine” is obscure and mysterious, while “fully human” is not. We fall into the trap of thinking we must know what that means because we know what we are. We know we are human and know what that means. Hence the confusion over how Christ can be said to be fully human and yet sinless, because one of the things we know about ourselves is that we sin. But the point of the dogma is that the claim that Christ is fully human throws our humanity radically into question. It makes us wonder, or should, if we are human. It does so only if we realize that Chalcedon does not begin with a category “human” and a category “deity” and then conclude that Christ fits both. Rather, the incarnation provides the only possible descriptions of both terms. It has become something of a truism to say that the scandal for the ancients was God’s humanity, while for moderns the scandal is Jesus’ divinity. While recognizing the general point of such statements, I doubt that Jesus’ humanity is any more acceptable to us than Jesus’ divinity. We “wouldn’t mind being divine but are very frightened of being human.”51 There are many ways to

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deny humanness: the wrong kind of acceptance as well as the wrong kind of transcendence. Barth writes: The first thing which has to be said about human nature in Jesus is that in Him an effective protest is lodged against our selfcontradiction and all the self-deception in which we try to conceal it. . . . The human nature of Jesus spares and forbids us our own. Thus it is our justification. And because it is this, it is the judgment on our own humanity. It is the revelation of the complete impossibility of explaining, exculpating or justifying it of ourselves, and therefore the revelation of the end of the illusion or the lack of thought in which we might hope to affirm our humanity and the beginning of the genuine, pure and open unrest about our nature.52 Jesus’ human nature is a protest and a judgment. As Williams might put it, Jesus is not the answer; he is the question. The constant and living question put to all our human achievement, the place from which all is judged. All our systems of meaning, our pretensions to power and control and self-sufficiency must be exposed to the light of this life and there alone be brought under the judgment that is always simultaneously grace and mercy. “The finality of Jesus’ authority is simply this, that all must ultimately come to this light and this presence for their final place or destiny to be known.”53 Of course, with Barth, there is always a second thing. In this case, a second thing without which we would veer too close to docetism. After all, what kind of human did Jesus become if not our kind? Here, McCabe is again helpful. “When we encounter Jesus, in whatever way we encounter him, he strikes a chord in us; we resonate to him because he shows the humanity that lies more hidden in us.”54 It has become a worn-out trope of some versions of spirituality that there is a “divine spark” in each of us. I read McCabe, and Cavell, as saying that this view is missing the point, even evading the point. For McCabe, there is a human spark in us that is hidden, denied, avoided, suppressed, and that slips through our impotent fingers when we clutch the hardest.

Conclusion

Here is a way of finding out what you, in your heart, really believe: As the drama of the Florida recount unfolds according to the logic of a Kafka story . . . how do you react? Do you, like the politicians, just continue devotedly—while paying lip service to Justice—to make your ministrations to the goddess of Victory? Or do you, like the traveler in the penal colony, whisper to yourself—as only the detached observer can—“Thank God this isn’t my country!” Or do you, like the officer of the penal colony, conclude that there is plenty of hope—no end of hope—only not for us? Or do you, like the officials of the court, pacify yourself with the thought that the Law is—what else could it be?—whatever the courts have revealed it to be? Or do you, at some point, like Karl Rossman—when he arrives in America, with his heart bent on settling there—burst into tears?1 Why Cavell? Answers are scattered throughout this text, sometimes, I guess, skidding off the pages. But in closing, let me focus on one reason. Call it confession (which, for Cavell, as for Barth, is another word for protest). Cavell has claimed that one kind of philosophy, the kind that Wittgenstein does, is part of the genre known as confession. But confession of what? In philosophizing, I have to bring my own language and life into imagination. What I require is a convening of my

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culture’s criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines which it meets in me. This seems to me a task that warrants the name of philosophy.2 And what happens when I find myself horrified by the knowledge of my culture’s criteria, when the life my culture imagines for me is one in which I am lashed to an existence of fear by the coils of the PATRIOT Act and whose only version of redemption is perpetual war, built upon mendacity, against an unspecifiable enemy? When the discourse of the politicians is as hollow as the greeting cards their listeners still count on to express themselves?3 When my words and my life as I pursue them provide a challenge to that culture only in my thoughts and dreams? When all that is left is stammering because we know not where to begin to set them right? We do not want to read Wittgenstein as stammering. We want one voice of philosophical rectitude to which we can conform, and one voice of metaphysical nonsense we can dismiss. Cavell’s insistence that there are many voices in the Investigations, not just two, and all of them Wittgenstein’s, all of them placing Wittgenstein within, instead of exempting him from, “the torment, the sickness, the strangeness, the exile, the disappointment, the boredom, the restlessness”4 of the modern subject, remains unreceived. We want to portray Wittgenstein the way MacIntyre portrays himself in the opening pages of After Virtue, or Milbank in the opening pages of The Word Made Strange, the exempt lonely prophet possessed of an obscure gnosis revealed only to the few, with all the power that entails. In theologizing, like philosophizing, I have to do more than convene my culture’s criteria. I must bring my own language and life into imagination. (There had better be a difference, in order to discover if there is a difference, in order to discover the extent of my conformity.) I can’t skip over that step. But the temptation is there to do so and the fact that Cavell does not is, like all honest confession, indicative of his courage to refuse his own exemption. Emerson calls it self-reliance, and I hope we can see that one reason he is hated for it is the same reason everyone hates confession. I have to confront my culture with my life as I pursue it and as I imagine it could be. I know “the world I converse with in the cities and the farms is not the world I think.”5 In doing philosophy, there is the city as I know it and the city of words, my life as I live it and my life as I dream it. In that confrontation, I am forced to the question of my consent to society. I am forced to give voice to my dissent as well as to own my complicity. This is,

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perhaps, achievement enough; surely, few others have been as clear as Cavell on this point. But does Cavell go far enough? Isn’t there another step? When I have acknowledged my complicity, I have to go on to explore what I am complicit with. That acknowledgment should lead Cavell to attend more closely to Marx, Weber, Foucault, or Said. (Though there is what seems to me an even more egregious failure in those followers of such thinkers who do not at some point make plain their complicity.) Power is not absent from Cavell’s account. It is to his credit that it is essential to acknowledgment that what is acknowledged is my relation to the other, and often that will mean acknowledging a power imbalance between myself and the other. But the broader mechanisms of power’s operation are left unexplored. Take, for example, a criticism he makes of Shaw. Shaw raises “the idea that police powers are required to enforce proper speech as well as to keep those within it in their proper places. But nothing comes of that perception.”6 Nothing comes of it in Cavell either.7 But without it, have I really convened my culture’s criteria? I am asking if Cavell’s city of words is big enough. Offering us the cities of words of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges can read like a cruel and absurd joke. Then the question arises, “At what level does this mistake, if it is a mistake, occur?” I mean, how much of his account of skepticism does this call into question? Cavell wrote, “What has made the invention or reinvention of marriage necessary? When I can motivate that question with sufficient philosophical perspicuousness, it should become the question What has caused the radicalization of the threat of skepticism, such that a ceremony of single intimacy is what we have to oppose to the threatened withdrawal of the world . . .?”8 Is that all we have to oppose to the threatened withdrawal of the world? The passage doesn’t say that. But it isn’t hard to get that impression, especially when coupled with a later comment: “Marriage looked at from this perspective would be the name of some new way in which men and women require of one another that they bear the brunt of one another’s subjectivity, in relative isolation from the larger world of politics and religion, which (for now at least) has rejected this subjectivity, or let it loose.”9 The skepticism of Austerlitz and the Invisible Man introduces violence and politics. Ralph Ellison’s skeptic is unintelligible without the background of racist America; Sebald’s skeptics are unintelligible without the background of Nazi Germany. But it isn’t just those obvious institutional forms of violence. The meta-critiques of Foucault and others circulate throughout Sebald’s texts. The accounts of companionship on the road to voice are set against the backdrop of intricate and subtle yet unforgettable evocations of not only Nazi Germany, but of various modern technologies of control, such as colonialism and capitalism. But Cavell doesn’t take this sort of thing into account. Perhaps because he thinks there is “good enough justice.” That conviction suggests two

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things: that Cavell is talking to the wrong victims, concerned with only a narrow portion of skeptics, a portion that excludes Austerlitz and the Invisible Man; and that anyone who wants to criticize Cavell for thinking the justice we have is good enough needs to do more than argue it. They need to show it. Is it useful here to zero in on one aspect of the background to Cavell’s writing? I mean, the war in Vietnam and that reviled and romanticized period called the ’60s. In the foreword to the second edition of Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell recalls that he received his first printed copies from the publisher on the day the students at Harvard occupied the administration building. In Themes Out of School, he keeps taking us back to that war and those students. He tried “defiantly if unsuccessfully” to close his great Lear essay with what he would come to call “a love letter to America, though its anguish at the tragedy of America might have struck some to whom it was addressed as written out of hatred.” “Evidently I was going around in those days, as one did, subject to fits of hearing screams in my ears. Others sometimes may have thought me mad; I sometimes thought they were driving me mad.”10 Something happened to some of those 1960s versions of Alceste. They began by finding ways to combine rage and hope, what Cavell calls “white-hot hatred and seraphic ardor.” The religious sects of the ’70s retained the seraphic ardor, but what happened to the white-hot hatred? “Could Richard Nixon really have absorbed it all and carried it away into the California desert?”11 Cavell wants both, and he looks for it in writing. “Only connect the monk and the beast, the prose and the passion.”12 But what if there is no passion (replaced, perhaps, by exhaustion)? “Suppose you believe at most in the merely human carry of your words.”13 Where does that thought come from? No one has shown how hard it is to believe in that as Cavell has. In the Lear essay, America becomes Lear: the youth in the streets, the banished daughter, the middle-aged professor, the audience that has to ask, as the audience of a tragedy does, “I know there is inexplicable pain and death everywhere, and now if I ask myself why I do nothing the answer must be, I choose not to.” Unlike in the theater, however, doing nothing no longer has a place insured by ceremony; it is the thing I am doing. And it requires the same energy, the same expense of cunning and avoidance, that tragic activity used to have to itself. Tragedy, could it now be written, would not show us that we are helpless—it never did, and we are not. It would show us, what it always did, why we (as audience) are helpless. Classically the reason was that pain and death were in our presence when we were not in theirs. Now the reason is that we absent ourselves from them.14

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From whom? Whose presence are we supposed to be in? The drama of King Lear shows us a cluster of avoidances: Lear avoiding Cordelia, Lear avoiding Gloucester, Edgar avoiding Gloucester. The play implicates us as audience in those avoidances. In doing so, it begs us to ask whom we are avoiding outside the theater, perhaps by theatricalizing them (always the temptation of the meta-critics). When we ask that question now as inhabitants of a country waging two wars, what do we learn? That history is repeating itself as farce? What did Cavell learn, asking it in 1967, when it was almost possible to think of America as tragic? He struggled to answer, in part because “we no longer know what is and is not a political act.”15 But he went on to say, in the closest we get to an answer, “We had hardly expected, what now is apparently coming to be the case, that the ordinary citizen’s ordinary faithfulness to his children may become a radical political act”; or “the intention to serious art can itself become a political act.”16 Do these sound hollow? Like passionless prose? Cavell doesn’t suggest that he succeeded in connecting the prose and the passion. If anything, he tells us that he failed. The students took over the administration building at Harvard in the spring of 1969, a day after “the largest and most thoroughly democratic meeting of its kind I have ever witnessed” in which the majority voted not to occupy the building. When police numbering in the hundreds showed up to forcibly remove them, they may not have known that half the students were there to argue the other half into leaving. That semester, Cavell was teaching a course in which they were reading Luther, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Locke, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Beckett. “Did my beautiful list of readings for my course contain terms in which to think this over?” Did it contain terms common to students in favor of occupation and students against it, as well as administrators and professors? “If not, what does it mean to call a place a university?”17 Later that spring, there was a week-long strike of classes. One of the teaching fellows, one of the most fervent supporters of the strike, insisted that Cavell’s class should not be struck “because its reading had suddenly become amazingly relevant.” The teacher’s heart in me sank. I said something to the effect that I had been assigning roughly the same texts since the beginning of my involvement with the course, half a dozen years earlier, that these texts had always been relevant to our lives, as relevant as thinking about our lives, and that our present events did not serve to show that the world and these texts may illuminate one another but rather that they may eclipse one another.

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Now I add that my heart had sunk under a sense of hopelessness of ever really connecting the prose and the passion, the idea of our history with our history as we are making it, of ever having a voice in our history. So our ideas and our histories, separated, fragmented, each eclipse us. We remain essentially uneducated.18 Are we any more educable now? One way to begin to answer the question “What are we absenting ourselves from?” would be to ask, “What are we failing to recognize we are consenting to?” Stanley Hauerwas likes to refer to what he calls “the Tonto principle.” The Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves surrounded by a large band of hostile Indians. In desperation, the Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and asks, “What do we do now?” Tonto calmly replies, “What do you mean ‘we’ white man?”19 The story is meant to suggest the proper attitude of the church with regard to the nation-state. So when the president appeals to “we Americans,” the church knows better than to identify itself with his we. The church is called out of the world as a holy nation of resident aliens whose confession of Christ’s Lordship creates a new we, one in tension with America’s idolatrous self-image. As such, the parable, which I often find myself using, is a compelling image of a quite radical resistance to the claims of the nation-state, a resistance enacted every time, for example, a Mennonite family forbids its children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or join the Boy Scouts. Hauerwas offers the story as a parable of the church’s distinction from the world. I am offering it as a parable of the failure of the fugitive ecclesiocrats to own consent. The story undermines itself, placing its teller in a position not unlike Kafka’s traveler. It is hard to believe that Tonto will survive the raid any more than the Lone Ranger will. He is, after all, riding with the Lone Ranger and, as a traitor, may be the object of greater wrath than the Lone Ranger himself. His attempt to claim a different we seems like the grossest sort of selfdeception. This would be true even if he wasn’t the Lone Ranger’s friend and partner and had just happened to be along for the ride. His complicity with the white gunman has created a new we and betrayed the old we. Or, better, exposed the old we as self-deception. By suggesting that Tonto is not complicit, it frees us from properly confronting our own complicity with America and with the war on terrorism. That we pay taxes and drive cars. Simple facts. [Tragedy] knows that, to make us practical, our status as audience will have to be defeated. . . . Hence it knows that theater must be defeated, inside and out. It knows that we do not have to be goaded into action, but, being actors, to be given occasion to stop—in our case, to stop choosing silence and hiddenness and paralysis. . . . It knows that this requires that we reveal ourselves and that, as always, this is not

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occasioned by showing me that something happening is relevant to me—that is inescapably the case—but by showing me something to which I am relevant, or irrelevant.20 Think of it as a retreating path from the student radicals, say, from the “most thoroughly democratic meeting of its kind” to the Weathermen, to the religious communes, to friendship and the lonely writer trying to keep the shit at bay. Theology took a similar if less circuitous path. At least if it is right to suggest, and I think it is, that the warm welcome granted to postliberalism and radical orthodoxy is directly connected to the collapse of confidence in the Left. I don’t mean to say that these theologians advocate sectarianism, but they have given up the hope of cultivating alliances. (What is the difference? And if there is one, which is worse?) So this book may be read as simply the last step in the retreat. What kind of retreat is this in which it seems that the task is not to tempt Alceste back, but to shake the dust from your feet and follow him? Is it more like the retreat from Dunkirk, or more like Kutuzov’s abandonment of Smolensk? And what, then, shall we make of the unmistakably Emersonian question Adrienne Rich is asking herself in the seventh of her “21 Love Poems”? What kind of beast would turn its life into words? What atonement is this all about? —and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living. Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals, that modulated cantata of the wild? or, when away from you I try to create you in words, am I simply using you, like a river or a war? And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all— not the crimes of others, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?21


Notes

PREFACE

1. Rorty’s remark is on the back cover of Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary. 2. Cavell, “Interview,” in The American Philosopher, 136. 3. The latter term is Jeffrey Stout’s. He uses it to describe Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Milbank. See Stout, Democracy and Tradition. 4. The Claim of Reason, 90. 5. Ibid., 493. 6. Ibid., 430. 7. Ibid., 352. 8. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 285. 9. See also Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 10. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 131. 11. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), vii.

INTRODUCTION

1. McHugh, Hinge and Sign, xv. 2. Themes Out of School, 97. Originally published in Daedalus (Summer 1979). All further references to this work will be noted parenthetically in the text. 3. Shklar’s essay “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical” preceded Cavell’s in Daedalus (Summer 1979): 1–25.

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4. Ibid., 17, 18. The embedded quotes are from Alceste. 5. Disowning Knowledge, 29. Writing of the gap between soul and body, mind and world, intention and execution, Cavell writes: In Wittgenstein’s view the gap between mind and world is closed, or the distortion between them straightened, in the appreciation and acceptance of particular human forms of life, human “convention.” This implies that the sense of a gap originates in an attempt, or wish, to escape (to remain a “stranger” to, “alienated” from) those shared forms of life, to give up the responsibility of their maintenance. (Is this always a fault? Is there no way of becoming responsible for that? What does a moral or intellectual hero do?) (The Claim of Reason, 109) 6. Hans Urs von Balthasar knew this as well as anyone, writing of the child “learning that radical protest is useless, the heart is finally overpowered by their crushing weight. The world of the adults is right, and wrongness is obviously an integral part of this world. And I myself am moving towards this world of adulthood, and therefore must come to terms with injustice” (Man in History, 50). 7. I think I know by now what the man of fifty finds distasteful that made the boy of sixteen or seventeen ecstatic. It is an idea that Emerson and any romantic would be lost without, that the world could be—or could have been—so remade, or I in it, that I could want it, as it would be, or I in it. In time the idea is apt to become maddening if kept green (certainly it makes one’s grown up acquaintances impatient), a continuous rebuke to the way we live, compared to which, a settled despair of the world, or cynicism, is luxurious. (Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 135–136) 8. Shklar, “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical,” 24. 9. Disowning Knowledge, 9. 10. Later in Themes Out of School (255), Cavell will find occasion to praise television game show hosts along lines such as these. I am struck by the plain fact that on each of the game shows I have watched, new sets of contestants are introduced to us. What strikes me is not that we are interested in identifying with these ordinary people, but simply that we are introduced to them. The hardest part of conversation, or the scariest part, that of improvising the conventional phrases of meeting someone and starting to talk, is all there is time for on these formats; and it is repeated endlessly, and without the scary anticipations of consequences in presenting the self that meetings in reality exact. 11. Ibid., 141. 12. Must We Mean What We Say? xxviii. 13. “The philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him to prove something, test something, against himself. He is saying: Look and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say.” Must We Mean What We Say? 95–96. 14. Cavell, Contesting Tears, 12. It is also a giving of friendship, a response to the demand, in this case, a granting of friendship to Molière.

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15. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 259. Later in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes, “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one is the healthy attitude of human nature.” This is the precise opposite of the strategizing of Ben Franklin, who may be said to represent what Emerson hated: “The man is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with éclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy of the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this” (261). 16. Again, from “Self-Reliance,” 259: “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.” It should be obvious but usually isn’t that this line insists on a definition of genius which is available to all, not just an intellectual or creative elite. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you have the courage to do this, you live up to your genius. I add here that this opening paragraph of “Self-Reliance” introduces the essay as a refusal of what Wittgenstein will later come to understand as the private language fantasy. 17. Pursuits of Happiness, 238. 18. The Claim of Reason, 494. 19. Quoted in Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 1. 20. “Alasdair MacIntyre on the Claims of Philosophy,” 16. 21. Michael Fischer gathered these criticisms in his Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism, 3–5 and 144–145n6. 22. Wood, “One Mo’ Time,” 29. 23. Quoted in Fischer, Stanley Cavell, 4. I am reminded here of James Wood’s comments on the jacket of the British paperback edition of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which are an uncanny parallel with Danto’s remarks about Cavell. “This, novel, so vast and so amiably peopled, is a long, sweet, sleepless pilgrimage to life. . . . Such writing reminds us that there are secrets beyond technique, beyond even style, which have to do with a quality of soul on the part of the writer, a giving of oneself. . . . His novel deserves thousands of long marriages and suitable readers.” 24. Must We Mean What We Say? 36n31. 25. The Claim of Reason, 91. I think of James Wood again, this time on Ian McEwan: Ian McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . The cost has been high, however. McEwan’s work is very controlled, but its reality is somewhat stifled. More often than not, one emerges from his stories as if from a vault, happy to breathe a more accidental air. In his careful, excessively managed universes, in which everything is made to fit together, the reader is offered many of the true pleasures of fiction, but sometimes starved of its true difficulties. (Wood, “The Trick of Truth”) Most philosophers, like Kenny and MacIntyre, write like McEwan. Wittgenstein and Cavell, Nietzsche and Emerson, do not.

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26. “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche,” in Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche, 142. 27. Emerson: “We should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries. . . . Lovers should guard their strangeness” (“Manners,” in Essays and Lectures, 522). A page earlier, he had written, “Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to impose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?” (521). Emerson is often accused, sometimes rightly, of contradicting himself; some love him for it, some don’t. But this is no contradiction, no paradox. The denial of strangeness is a strategy of our sly, elusive nature. I should point out here that Emerson would find travel lust, which leads so many to find their strangeness in the exotic and foreign, to be the same sort of strategy of our sly, elusive nature, a failure to see the strange and foreign next door. 28. Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” 47. 29. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 433. 30. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 5. 31. “Experience,” 479. 32. Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 1. 33. The World Viewed, 92. 34. For example, Mark Kingwell wrote of Cavell, “He is that silliest of intellectual figures, the ordinary-language philosopher who writes incomprehensibly.” Marginalia: A Cultural Reader (London: Penguin, 1999), 217. 35. Disowning Knowledge, 42. Michael Wood neatly summarizes Cavell on ordinary language by calling it “a reminder not that people say things, but that people say things.” Wood, “One Mo’ Time,” 29. 36. Disowning Knowledge, 41. 37. Alpers, “King Lear and the Theory of the ‘Sight Pattern,’ ” 133–152. 38. D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, quoted ibid., 137. 39. Disowning Knowledge, 44. 40. Ibid., 47. 41. Ibid. 42. Gloucester is ashamed of a particular illicit act, of having fathered an illegitimate child. He recognizes the moral claim upon himself, as he says twice, to “acknowledge” his bastard; but all this means to him is that he acknowledge that he has a bastard for a son. He does not acknowledge him, as a son or a person, with his feelings of illegitimacy and being cast out. That is something Gloucester ought to be ashamed of; his shame is itself more shameful than his one piece of licentiousness. This is one of the inconveniences of shame, that it is generally inaccurate, attaches to the wrong thing. (ibid., 48) 43. Ibid., 49. 44. Ibid., 49–50. Cavell’s essay shows the dramatic justification of a great many scenes in Lear which have been viewed as problematic by critics as great as Bradley

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who, in Shakespearean Tragedy, 256–258, presses a long list of “improbabilities” and “inconsistencies,” many of which Cavell takes up. 45. Disowning Knowledge, 42. 46. Ibid., 51. 47. I think Rowan Williams misreads the reference to God’s spies in Christ on Trial when he says Lear and Cordelia “will nurture in their cells . . . a perception of how the world is that is free from intrigue and ambition” (108). Cavell calls it an “astonishing image [that] stays beyond me but in part it contains the final emphasis on looking without being seen; and it cites an intimacy which requires no reciprocity with real men” (69). That is, Lear is now able to love Cordelia not in spite of being in prison, but because of it. “He has found a way to have what he has wanted from the beginning. . . . Because we are hidden together we can love. He has come to accept his love, not by making room in the world for it, but by denying its relevance to the world. He does not renounce the world in going to prison, but flees from it” (ibid.). 48. Disowning Knowledge, 72. 49. Ibid., 84–85. 50. G. Wilson Knight manages to turn even Cordelia into an abstraction. Writing of Lear’s reunion with her, he says, “Now the healing balm of uttermost humility and love. He humbles himself, not to Cordelia, but to the love now royally enthroned in his heart erstwhile usurped.” The Wheel of Fire, quoted in Alpers, “King Lear and the Theory of the ‘Sight Pattern,’”152–153 (my italics). 51. Disowning Knowledge, 87. 52. Ibid., 60–61. Of course, the abdication scene does strain belief. The characters present (Kent, France, Gloucester, etc.) are shocked by what they must witness. Cavell’s point is that the manner in which it strains belief is not one which should cause us to question Shakespeare’s plotting, to write it off as requiring a temporary suspension of disbelief. It is that sense of incredulity which implicates us. 53. Ibid., 104. 54. Ibid., 110. 55. See “The Ordinary as the Uneventful,” in Themes Out of School, 184–194. 56. I am referring to some lines from “The American Scholar” which Cavell frequently quotes: I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body;—show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature. 57. Themes Out of School, 14.

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58. One is bound to admit that most people see the closest things of all very badly and very rarely pay heed to them. . . . [B]eing unknowledgeable in the smallest and most everyday things and failing to keep an eye on them—this it is that transforms the earth for so many into a vale of tears. Let it not be said that, here as everywhere, it is a question of human lack of understanding: on the contrary—there exists enough, and more than enough, understanding, only it is employed in the wrong direction and artificially directed away from these smallest and closest things. (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, II:1.6, quoted in Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,” 238) 59. Cavell’s attentiveness to the philosophical in part II of The Claim of Reason exemplifies this. 60. Philosophical Passages, 129. 61. This works itself out well in Rowan Williams’s essay “The Judgment of the World,” in his On Christian Theology, 31. There, he argues that, by attentiveness to Wilfred Owen’s poem juxtaposing Abraham and Isaac with World War I, the church “will have found out what it is itself saying.” Finding out requires an outsider, an agnostic’s “savage transformation” of the story. 62. Czeslaw Milosz, “In Warsaw,” in Collected Poems. 63. Disowning Knowledge, 19. 64. The World Viewed, 56. 65. Roth, American Pastoral, 64. Cavell will go on, in Contesting Tears, to take up and reposition one strand or one version of this alternative, the unknown woman. 66. Disowning Knowledge, 5–6. 67. In Quest of the Ordinary, 129–130. 68. Contesting Tears, 5. 69. Pursuits of Happiness, 19. 70. Contesting Tears, 116. 71. Pursuits of Happiness, 241. This means that we learn what knowledge of others is by watching these people. Watching them is not a confirmation of something we already know about the knowledge of others. 72. Ibid., 152. 73. Ibid., 32. I take up Cavell’s criticism of Rawls in chapter 3. 74. I discuss Aristotle at the end of chapter 4. 75. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 164. 76. Pursuits of Happiness, 239. 77. Ibid., 240. 78. The Claim of Reason, 393. 79. Pursuits of Happiness, 240. 80. Ibid., 141–142. 81. Ibid., 53. 82. Contesting Tears, 45. 83. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life ends with the community banding together, each with their individual contributions, to save James Stewart from ruin. The close of the film has all of them inside his house, as if they are his family, as if the good society has to come to the good person, to where he has withdrawn. The World Viewed, 190.

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84. Contesting Tears, 116. 85. Ibid., 128. 86. Ibid., 13–14. 87. Ludger Viefhues-Bailey provides a remarkable account of Cavell’s treatment of the unknown women in the context of Cavell’s work as a whole as well as in relation to gender theory and religious studies. See his Beyond the Philosopher’s Fear: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Origin and Religion in Modern Skepticism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 88. Here, I follow Addison G. Wright, “The Widow’s Mite,” 256–265. 89. “Self-Reliance,” 262–263. 90. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 134–135. 91. One may express the knowledge that others are outcasts through one’s humanitarianism. Thinkers such as Thoreau and Dickens were perhaps sometimes too hard on the ordinary shows of such an instinct, but what they saw in these humanitarian shows was a wish to convert the outcast into a social role, or into a kind of class of being—in any case, a wish to view outcasts as beings different from oneself, about whose good they themselves did not require consulting. . . . And they perceived this view or attitude as compromising the humanitarian’s own humanity. The hand handing out its alms can look like a fist. The problem of the humanitarian is not merely that his acts of acknowledgment are too thin, mere assuagings of guilt; but that they are apt, even bound, to confusion. His intention is to acknowledge the outcast as a human being; but his effect is to treat the human being as an outcast. (The Claim of Reason, 436–437) Or Barth: “It is not at all self-evident that when I am actually occupied with a cause of this kind I have concretely in mind the other, the fellow-man, the neighbor and brother” (Church Dogmatics IV/2, 438). Philanthropy is exercised “with zeal and devotion without taking even a single step away from the safe stronghold of being without our fellow-man, but in a deeper withdrawal into our shell. . . . We merely imagine him as the object of the love which we have to exercise, and in this way master and use him” (ibid., 440). 92. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 440.

CHAPTER

1

1. Rich, “Transcendental Etude,” in The Fact of a Doorframe, 265. 2. “New traditionalist” is Jeffrey Stout’s term. By it, he means primarily Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Milbank. See his Democracy and Tradition. 3. Williams, The English Novel, 14–15. 4. Cavell will contrast the different ways the novel and the film find their societies “unliveable” in The World Viewed, 214–215. 5. Williams, The English Novel, 14. 6. While this is basically right, it should not be forgotten that, most obviously in Pride and Prejudice, Austen employs a highly sophisticated use of irony. As Lilian Furst reminds us, we would be reading rather poorly if, in our joy for Lizzie and Darcy (and

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Jane and Bingley), we forget that Austen has surrounded them with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Charlotte and Mr. Collins, the Hursts, and Lydia and Wickham. (The Philipses, Gardiners, and Lucases seem to have decent marriages, but we know too little about them to make a judgment call.) Happy endings may not mean happily ever after, and Austen herself stayed single for good reason. See Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 49–67. 7. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 240. 8. Williams, The Country and the City, 175. Richard Poirier’s essay on Emma and Huckleberry Finn, “Transatlantic Configurations: Mark Twain and Jane Austen” in his The World Elsewhere, is the finest essay I know on this transition, though in Poirier the relevant contrast is England and America, not early nineteenth-century England and late. 9. Cities of Words, 329. 10. “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 358–359. 11. “Foreword: An Audience for Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? xxv–xxvi. 12. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 240. 13. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 13. 14. Bernstein, “Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature,” in Eldridge, Stanley Cavell, 110. 15. Must We Mean What We Say? xix. 16. Ibid., xxii. 17. There is reason to think that Wittgenstein himself found this analogy helpful. 18. Must We Mean What We Say? 87. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 88. 21. Ibid., 90. 22. These patterns are never described in any detail, I think because they cannot be. That is, all Cavell means by patterns is whatever distinguishes judgments of reflection from judgments of taste. Put differently, whatever it is that William Hazlitt, Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner, and James Wood do. 23. And the point of commonality between analytic philosophy and MacIntyre. 24. Must We Mean What We Say? 94. Joseph Brodsky, not just a great poet but also a great critic, put it this way (speaking of people who have “good taste in literature”—by which he meant people who read poetry): They have no illusions about the objectivity of the views they put forth; on the contrary, they insist on their unpardonable subjectivity right from the threshold. They act in this fashion, however, not for the purpose of shielding themselves from possible attack: as a rule, they are fully aware of the vulnerability pertinent to their views and the positions they defend. Yet— taking the stance somewhat opposite to Darwinian—they consider vulnerability the primary trait of living matter. This, I must add, has less to do with masochistic tendencies, nowadays attributed to almost every man of letters, than with their instinctive, often first-hand knowledge that extreme

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subjectivity, prejudice, and indeed, idiosyncrasy are what help art to avoid cliché. And the resistance to cliché is what distinguishes art from life. (On Grief and Reason, 100) 25. Must We Mean What We Say? 94. 26. Ibid., 66. 27. Elsewhere, Cavell writes, “You must let yourself matter to the other. (This is a very good reason not to do so. You may discover that you do not matter.)” And, I might add, it is not always pleasant to discover the various ways that you do matter. The Claim of Reason, 382–383. 28. This is Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, 12. 29. Gide, Strait Is the Gate, 77–78. 30. The Claim of Reason, 109. Rowan Williams shares something of Cavell’s intuitions here when he writes: It is a popular but fallacious opinion that “meaningfulness” is primarily an individual matter, and that therefore the artist can say no more than, “This means something to me.” Significance, however, is a venture into the public sphere. Instead of the “this is good” or, “I like this,” of individual meaningfulness, the artist says, “Here is a world under judgement, a revaluation of my history, which I offer to you as a possible aid in the revaluation of yours.” It is not a presentation of the world in terms of my consciousness, but a presentation of myself and my world in terms of something not yet fully realized or grasped, a statement of the incompleteness of myself and my world which I make available to you insofar as we share a world or a language. (“Poetic and Religious Imagination,” 180) 31. Must We Mean What We Say? 95–96. 32. And he resists doing so. Whereas in his early work, he refers to the line of philosophy from Descartes to the present as “traditional epistemology” or “traditional philosophy,” he later says, “As I came to recognize that I did not know what a tradition is, nor what it takes to overcome a tradition, I stopped speaking so, anyway so lightly” (Philosophical Passages, 148). I take it that the claim, rather, the confession here is that Cavell is no longer so confident that he has “escaped” the tradition. And if that is so, then drawing its boundaries becomes much more difficult than when it was clear to him that ordinary language philosophy was something clearly “outside” of traditional epistemology. 33. Must We Mean What We Say? 219. 34. Ibid., 95. 35. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 218. 36. The Claim of Reason, 253. For the remainder of this chapter, references to this book will be noted parenthetically in the text. 37. Cavell will go on to raise questions about science’s agreements and to suggest that philosophers like Stevenson, Ross, Prichard, etc., painted a misleading picture of scientific success.

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38. Private persuasion (or personal appeal) is not the paradigm of ethical utterance, but represents the breakdown (or the transcending) of moral interaction. We can, too obviously, become morally inaccessible to one another; but to tell us that these are the moments which really constitute the moral life will only add confusion to the pain. (Must We Mean What We Say? 23) 39. Cavell’s argument is with Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” 3–32. 40. Cavell does not say there is no room for akrasia in games. Kevin Costner’s film Tin Cup dramatized an amusing and (for golfers) distressing example of athletic incontinence. But, in this case, we have an example of the exception which proves the rule. Those who haven’t seen the film may take the more common example of the clean-up hitter who knows a bunt is the smart play but can’t resist swinging for the fence. 41. Rich, “Transcendental Etude,” 266. 42. “An Interview with Giovanna Borradori,” in The MacIntyre Reader, 255. 43. MacIntyre, “The Recovery of Moral Agency,” 10. 44. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 12. 45. “Liberalism, Morality and Rationality: MacIntyre, Rawls and Cavell,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 217. Cf. Jeffrey Stout: [Hauerwas and MacIntyre] assume that the theoretical defenses of modern ethical discourse put forth by the ethical theorist are at least expressively accurate, that the ethical theorists adequately reflect the ethical discourse of the age. I want to suggest another possibility—that the ethical theorists have drastically oversimplified what modern ethical discourse has been like. (Democracy and Tradition, 163) 46. The World Viewed, 110. 47. MacIntyre, “The Claims of After Virtue,” in The MacIntyre Reader, 70. 48. Cavell uses Kate Croy, from Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, as a paradigmatic example of the sort of manipulation the emotivist is helpless to criticize. See The Claim of Reason, 287–288. 49. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 24. 50. Ibid. 51. The phrase is Richard Poirier’s. See The World Elsewhere, 101. 52. Portrait of a Lady, 235. 53. In what follows, I am indebted to Tony Tanner, “The Fearful Self,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Peter Buitenhuis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 67–82, esp. 78–79. 54. “But where Osmond is a false aesthete, Ralph has the true artistic instincts. Osmond wants to turn Isabel into a work of art (we see her at his home ‘framed in the gilded doorway’ already adjusting to her status as a portrait); Ralph appreciates her living qualities artistically.” Tanner, “The Fearful Self,” 79. 55. The line is George Eliot’s. James uses it to refer to heroines from Portia to Maggie Tolliver and his own Isabel (Portrait of a Lady, 48).

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56. Ibid., 483. 57. Williams, The English Novel, 145. 58. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 397. Cf. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 131–132. 59. I will add here that, if we want a book about emotivism, then Austen’s Mansfield Park is as good an option as The Portrait of a Lady. Virtually all the characters, aside from Fanny, Edmund, and Sir Thomas, are textbook examples of emotivism: Henry and Mary Crawford, the Bertram sisters, Tom until his illness, Mrs. Norris, and Lady Bertram. And by the end of the novel, we will have reason to think that it was only sheer luck which kept Mansfield Park from collapsing. In the same way that it was sheer luck that brought Sir Thomas home before the play could be performed, and sheer luck that Henry’s true character resurfaced in time, before Fanny could be persuaded to marry him, a real possibility as Austen makes clear, the result of which would have placed her in a position not unlike that of Isabel. I might add that Emma is also announced as an emotivist in the first pages of Emma, when she tells Mr. Knightley that “match-making is the greatest amusement of all.” 60. Rowan Williams, Ray of Darkness, 177–178. Italics in original. 61. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 135–141. 62. Ibid., 140–141. 63. For example, Aristotle’s vision of the “magnanimous man” as the model of virtue; his understanding of the self-sufficiency of will; his metaphysical biology; his treatment of non-Greeks, women, and slaves. 64. I do not mean my argument with MacIntyre to be an argument with Aristotle because I suspect MacIntyre is wrong about Aristotle. The sort of social structure demanded by this example as well as other places in MacIntyre sound to me a lot more like Homer than Aristotle. 65. MacIntyre, “The Recovery of Moral Agency,” 8–10. 66. I first heard the significance of this emphasized in a lecture on MacIntyre given by Romand Coles in the spring of 2000 at Duke University. Cavell writes of the tendency of film to project the idea of community in the form of male comradeship, as though the sense of belonging together as citizens could only appear as an intimacy of discipline, and only after the nation had been threatened (as by war) or exercised its rejections (as by prisons). (Work can provide pools of comradeship if it has an internal drama and involves the adventure of danger.) (The World Viewed, 190) 67. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 462–463. More recently, see Wolff, Back in the World, 113. 68. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 186. Tony Tanner’s essay is indispensable here. See his Jane Austen, 208–249. He writes: What Jane Austen does offer as a potential source of new values, new bondings, is the navy. . . . They [the naval officers returning from the Napoleonic wars] bring back with them a wholly different scheme of values, and a potentially new model of an alternative society or community, alive and functioning where the traditional land society seemed to be moribund. (228)

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69. Ibid., 245. 70. MacIntyre, “The Recovery of Moral Agency,” 10. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid.

CHAPTER

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1. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 7. 2. For example, “A fashionable liberalism has difficulty telling the difference between seriousness and bigotry” (Must We Mean What We Say? 312); or “Perhaps we feel the foundations of language to be shaky when we look for, and miss, foundations of a particular sort, and look upon our shared commitments and responses—as moral philosophers in our liberal tradition have come to do—as more like particular agreements than they are” (The Claim of Reason, 179). 3. Philosophical Investigations, §217. Also included among Cavell’s scenes of instruction are the opening quotation from Augustine, the parables in The Brown Book about excluded children, and the wood sellers in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. 4. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 70. 5. Cavell, “An Emerson Mood,” in his Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 25. 6. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 35–36. 7. I will add that it is not clear to me that other ancient models of philosophy, the Platonic and Aristotelian, are as guilty as Nussbaum suggests. But it is not hard to get the sense that underneath her remarks about ancient philosophy runs an argument with contemporary analytic philosophy, one which seems plausible to me. 8. That this sounds strikingly similar to the way Cavell and MacIntyre understand emotivism is, of course, of great importance. 9. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t think poor, rural Indian women need education. I think they do. The point, however, is to cast suspicion on what I think. Further, Nussbaum never tells us what kind of education she has in mind. 10. Nussbaum, Therapy, 24. 11. Ibid., 26. 12. Ibid., 26–27. 13. Ibid., 28. 14. Ibid., 34. 15. Ibid., 28. 16. Ibid., 489. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Her account of this is ibid., 64–65. 19. Philosophical Investigations, §124. 20. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 183–184. 21. The Claim of Reason, 19. 22. Ibid., 122. 23. Ibid., xvii. 24. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 76.

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25. The Claim of Reason, 112. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. Ibid., 118. 28. Ibid., 124. 29. Ibid., 124–125. 30. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 24. 31. Ibid., 2. 32. Ibid., 1. 33. Ibid., 16. 34. Ibid., 47. 35. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 266. 36. Which is as it should be. “There is no revolutionary social vision which does not include a new vision of education; and contrariwise.” Must We Mean What We Say? xxv. 37. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 8. 38. Ibid., 16–17. 39. Ibid., 9–10. 40. Nietzsche also wrote, “Emerson—never have I felt so at home with a mind, my home. I cannot praise him; he is too close to me.” Quoted in Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,” 233. 41. Cavell writes that, in his conversations with Rawls concerning the lectures that constitute Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, “the topic that interested both of us was whether A Theory of Justice denies anything I say” (xxii). But Cavell goes on to say that “it seems to me that he [Rawls] must deny [my central claim]” (xxiv). A number of essays have taken up the issue. See Mulhall’s “Promising, Consent, and Citizenship”; and David Owen’s “Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice.” I take them as encouragement for my attempt to push the differences between Cavell and Rawls as far as I can. 42. Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,” 194. 43. Ibid., 195. 44. Among the many relevant Emerson essays, see “Uses of Great Men.” The essay opens his series of essays on “representative men” (in Essays and Lectures), which includes essays on Shakespeare, Plato, Napoleon, etc., a list which supports the elitist reading of Rawls. But in the introductory essay, Emerson is at great pains to insist that the status of exemplar is open to anyone. 45. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xxiv. 46. Ibid., xxiv. Quoting from Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 422. 47. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 107. 48. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 275. This is the connection with the Rawls of The Claim of Reason. There, Cavell wrote, “My worry [about Rawls’s account of the utilitarian defense of promising] is that it makes promises more like legal contracts than they are. . . . This, however, involves a whole way of looking at society, one in which all human relationships are pictured as contractual rather than personal” (299). 49. The Claim of Reason, 179.

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72–85

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. Pursuits of Happiness, 22. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xxxviii. Ibid., xxxvi. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 49n1. Ibid., 49. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 279–280.

CHAPTER

3

1. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 44. All further references to this book in the first section of the chapter will be noted parenthetically in the text. 2. Hammer, Stanley Cavell, 19. 3. Readers of Sebald will be quick to point out that only the characters in Rings of Saturn are properly understood as liberalism’s victims, whereas in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, Sebald’s characters are the victims of Nazism. In this chapter, I tend to run the three books together. Not because, like some of our more rabid critics, I think liberal capitalism is totalitarian, but because Sebald runs together not the experiences of the characters, but the virtues required of those who wish to accompany them. 4. Sebald, Austerlitz, 147–148. 5. Philosophical Investigations, §258. 6. This reading owes much to Norman Malcolm. 7. Cf. Philosophical Investigations, §§207, 265. 8. Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy, 198. 9. Philosophical Investigations, §260. 10. That is to say, Cavell has no interest in trying to persuade you of this. At most, Cavell is reminding you. Either you have felt it and therefore recognize it, or you haven’t, or have and have repressed it and so you don’t, can’t, recognize it. 11. It is plate 50, “Wittgenstein in Swansea,” in Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. 12. Austerlitz, 40. He goes on, “And now, whenever I see a photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Austerlitz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him the disconsolate philosopher” (41). 13. “In a No Man’s Land of Memories and Loss,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2001. 14. “Writing in the Shadows,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2001. 15. Sebald (or “Sebald”) isn’t always the firsthand listener. In many cases, he is the secondhand listener, retrieving the story from the only person the subject ever trusted (so, Bereyter through Mme. Landau or Adelwarth through Aunt Fini). 16. The Emigrants, 145. 17. Austerlitz, 122. 18. Rings of Saturn, 3. 19. The Claim of Reason, 80.

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20. Wood, “Sebald’s Uncertainty,” in his The Broken Estate, 275, 280. I am unsure of the way Wood moves from Sebald’s texts to “we.” 21. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 27. 22. Williams, Resurrection, 29. 23. Bereyter’s story is the second chapter of The Emigrants, 25–64. 24. The figure of Nabokov, another brilliant exile, appears in each section of The Emigrants, usually with his butterfly net. The most instructive difference between Nabokov and Sebald can be summed up in a few lines from Speak, Memory: “The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free” (275). Nabokov portrays his life as such a spiral and casts it in a Hegelian manner: Russia as the thesis, Europe as the antithesis, and America as the synthesis which eludes viciousness. That is precisely what eludes Sebald’s characters. But it would be a mistake to make too much of this difference. (As Andre Aciman, “Out of Novemberland,” seems to do, remarking on the cheerfulness of Nabokov. There is a cheerfulness to Speak, Memory, but it is an effect achieved through a great effort of will, and the cracks in it are plain and turn from cracks to canyons on close reading.) Speak, Memory ends in Europe. Speak On, Memory was never written. Nabokov’s autobiography, moreover, parallels Sebald in the way it circles around but only glances at, or off, what most needs to be said but cannot be. In this case, it is the assassination of Nabokov’s father which haunts and even defines the text. One might then wish to think of Luisa’s journal as the most precise analogue of Speak, Memory. Both are evocations of a beautiful, timeless world in which “everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will die” (Speak, Memory, 77). But here, another difference emerges. While the story of Luisa’s two courtships are central to the journal, in Speak, Memory there is no mention of the story of Nabokov’s courtship of and marriage to Vera. So, for Nabokov, both the most joyful and the most painful, the salvific and the destructive, must elude “the zoo of words.” Finally, another similarity: the search for quincunx-like patterns guides the writing of both Speak, Memory and all of Sebald’s work, not just Rings of Saturn. 25. Wood, “Sebald’s Uncertainty,” 275. 26. Must We Mean What We Say? 340. 27. For another remarkable, but very different, example of this in recent fiction, see Byler, Searching for Intruders. 28. The Claim of Reason, 109–110. 29. Aciman, “Out of Novemberland,” 8. 30. Contesting Tears, 40. 31. Cf. Jacques Derrida: “Writing is first and always something over which one bends.” “Force and Signification,” in his Writing and Difference, 29. 32. Michael Hamburger tells Sebald: For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say if one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair, or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we

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all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life. (Rings of Saturn, 181–182) 33. The Claim of Reason, 352. 34. Austerlitz’s office is the same way. Austerlitz, 32. 35. As is Cavell. He calls it a “city of words” or a “map of my planet.” 36. See Aciman, “Out of Novemberland.” 37. Browne, “Hydriotophia, Urne-Buriall,” in his Religio Medici and Other Writings, 179, 181, 183. 38. And, according to Monk, Wittgenstein wrote the same way. 39. Must We Mean What We Say? 265.

CHAP TER

4

1. Rich, “21 Love Poems” (poem XVIII), in The Fact of a Doorframe, 245. 2. Hauerwas (with Phil Kenneson), “Flight from Foundationalism; or, Things Aren’t as Bad as They Seem,” in his Wilderness Wanderings. 3. Must We Mean What We Say? 229. 4. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 31. 5. “Occasional” should be stressed. With the exception of Yoder and Williams, all the theologians I refer to in this essay demonstrate a striking lack of interest in democracy and the negotiation of difference. I don’t say they don’t care about these things but that they do not spend much or any time reflecting on them. 6. I ignore Hauerwas for the moment because he is more complex. He doesn’t travel the way these others do. Sometimes, he points not to churches in general (the Mennonites or the Catholics) but to specific practices of Christians, such as caring for the sick or the mentally handicapped. He also occasionally points to contemporary groups like the Mennonites or Catholics or his own congregation. But it is difficult to know how to read such essays. Mennonites and Catholics often find their communities unrecognizably idealized in his descriptions. And it is never clear to the reader just how to read the accounts of his congregation alongside his denunciations of the rest of middle-class American Christianity. Do they contradict each other? Is he just being nice to his friends? Should he revise his conclusions about most liberal capitalist Americans as “shitty people”—Cornel West quotes Hauerwas as saying this in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic, 1999), 409—in light of those he goes to church with? Or, perhaps, he is simply marking out a reachable goal for other churches, a first step as it were? Or are they deliberate misrepresentations yet ones that may inspire those churches he claims to be representing to attain his vision for them? Then what he is doing is asking them to learn to see themselves through his eyes and therein find ways to be more faithful. I think this is what he is getting at by comparing himself to Everett Chance from David James Duncan’s The Brothers K in

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the introduction to Hauerwas, In Good Company (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1995). 7. He has also, though rarely, pointed to more recent communities, such as the Congo Kimbanguists or the Mukyokai of Japan, but has never done more than mention them in passing. 8. “Once there was no secular . . . but the invention of the secular began at least in the eleventh century.” Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 432. 9. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist. 10. Bell, Liberation Theology. See also Cavanaugh, “The Ecclesiologies of Medellín.” 11. See Bell, Liberation Theology, 199n84, where he explains why “it is not possible to display the technologies enacted by the church of the poor in the same detail that attends an account of the Cistercians.” 12. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 433. To be fair, Milbank’s more recent work is more nuanced. “How is the Church to evaluate these circumstances [of postmodernity]? . . . Our attitude is bound to be a complex one. Not outright refusal, nor outright acceptance.” “The Gospel of Affinity,” 8–9. 13. The first quote is from Williams, On Christian Theology, xii. The second is from Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 50. 14. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 432. 15. See, for example, his claim that Hauerwas’s account of modern pluralism is “too simple.” Yoder, “Meaning after Babble.” 16. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 42. 17. Ibid., 43. 18. Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide,” 98. 19. Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 150. 20. Ibid., 154. 21. Ibid. 22. Williams, “Christian Resources for the Renewal of Vision,” 2. 23. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 37. 24. Kateb, “Wolin as a Critic of Democracy,” 49. 25. Wolin, “Archaism, Modernity and Democracy in America,” in his The Presence of the Past, 81. 26. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 44. 27. Wolin, “Democracy and the Welfare State,” in his The Presence of the Past, 179. 28. Xenos, “Momentary Democracy,” in Botwinick and Connolly, Democracy and Vision, 36. 29. Ibid., 34. 30. Euben, “The Polis, Globalization, and the Politics of Place,” 258. 31. Ibid., 282. 32. White, “Three Conceptions of the Political: The Real World of Late Modern Democracy,” 177. I understand White’s questions for Wolin’s democracy to be similar to Jeffrey Stout’s questions for the new traditionalist church. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 178.

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35. See Bell, Liberation Theology; Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist; and Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination. 36. It is not clear to me if this second step means that they therefore have no interest in grassroots social movements or if they do so long as the movements are properly understood as political in themselves. 37. Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” 27–44. 38. The shift from civil society and grassroots social movements to factory, school, etc., goes unaccounted for. 39. Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” 37–40. By formal subsumption, Marx meant capital’s subordination of a labor which was born independently of it. As Hardt puts it, “capital subsumes labor as it finds it” (38). With the real subsumption, “labor processes themselves are born within capital and . . . labor is incorporated not as an external, but an internal force, proper to capital itself.” The movement from formal to real subsumption, a potential source of resistance, is tamed. 40. See, for example, Wolin, “Collective Identity and Constitutional Power,” “Democracy and the Welfare State,” and “Democracy without the Citizen,” in his The Presence of the Past. 41. The point has been deftly made in Hardt and Negri, Empire. As they insist, it was clear long before them in Foucault: “It seems to me that power is ‘always already there,’ that one is never ‘outside’ it, that there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the system to gambol in.” Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 141. 42. In other words, I don’t understand why Cavanaugh and Bell don’t take the path chosen by Romand Coles. He writes in an essay on the Industrial Areas Foundation: Following a period in the 1980s and 1990s during which students of politics too often uncritically celebrated a cure-all notion of civil society, many are beginning to articulate more nuanced perspectives. On the one hand, civil society harbors emergent democratic associations, fosters broader grassroots participation, spawns movements that offer resistance in the face of corporate markets and state bureaucracies, and is a site of various forms of “micro-politics” that tend to transform our sensibilities and practices in more-pluralizing and more-egalitarian directions. On the other hand, when one examines associational life in terms of things like resources, membership, access, norms of identity/difference, circuits of power, and capacities, one sees it is often colonized by corporations and bureaucracies, is the abode of myriad fundamentalist movements, and tends to manifest racial, class, gender, and other biases. Given this messy complexity, there is a growing sense that our analyses of civil society must be more subtle and variegated. (Beyond Gated Politics, 213–214) 43. As usual, Rowan Williams puts it well, reminding us of the church’s “vocation to join in God’s creation of a world imaging his own life.” Williams, Resurrection, 50. 44. Williams, On Christian Theology, 37.

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45. Milbank, “The Gospel of Affinity,” 8–9. 46. Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 234. 47. Ibid., 30. 48. This may be because Hauerwas never pushes his critique of liberalism to the Deleuzean distances that Bell and Cavanaugh do and therefore feels more confident in civil society. But I doubt it. 49. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 43. 50. John 13:35. 51. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3, 826. 52. Ibid., IV/2, 668 (my italics). 53. Hütter, “Karl Barth’s ‘Dialectical Catholicity.’” 54. Obviously, Bell and Cavanaugh are doing this, but I mean doing so without traveling. 55. Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, 259–260. 56. Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 1. 57. Nicomachean Ethics, 1180a25ff. 58. Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians among the Virtues, 38. 59. Ibid., 37–38. Elsewhere, Hauerwas addresses the same passage from Aristotle, writing: It is well known that Aristotle thought “ethics” to be primarily a branch of politics, since “becoming good” ultimately depended on the existence of a good politics. Yet Aristotle was by no means ready to despair at the possibility of producing morally decent people if such a polity did not exist. . . . Friendship thus becomes the crucial relationship for Aristotle, since, in the absence of good polities, it provides the context necessary for the training of virtue. It is certainly not too far-fetched to suggest that Aristotle’s description of his social situation is not that different from our own. (The Hauerwas Reader, 236–237n24) 60. Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians among the Virtues, 186n4. Paul Wadell in his fine book Friendship and the Moral Life also makes this passage central to the need for a defense of friendship in a world not that different (in this respect) from Aristotle’s Athens. But, like in Hauerwas and Pinches, “friendship” is immediately assimilated to church. 61. In Quest of the Ordinary, 119.

CHAPTER

5

1. Themes Out of School, 143–144. 2. “I do not, that is, confine the term [‘skepticism’] to philosophers who wind up denying that we can ever know; I apply it to any view which takes the existence of the world to be a problem of knowledge” (46). In what follows, I occasionally refer to skeptics and anti-skeptics but always with this in mind.

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3. See Rorty’s “Cavell on Skepticism.” Cavell wrote, “It might be worth pointing out that these teachings [Wittgenstein’s on privacy and on the ‘functions and contexts of language’] are fundamental to American pragmatism; but then we must keep in mind how different their arguments sound, and admit that in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference” (Must We Mean What We Say? 36n31). One point of contention between Cavell and Rorty is that, as Cavell says here, “skepticism is a natural possibility of that condition; it reveals most perfectly the standing threat to thought and communication.” But Cavell never does more than hint at the reasons for the emergence of what we know as skepticism in the modern period. 4. For example (from Claim of Reason): “What is the wonder which eliciting criteria satisfies?” (29)

“I might say that publicness is [Wittgenstein’s] goal. It would be like having sanity as one’s goal. Then what state would one take oneself to be in?” (44) “What is disappointing about criteria?” (81) “What do we wish to deny in the face of Wittgenstein’s teaching when we feel we must protect the privacy of the soul against him?” (329) “Could anything and everything a person does be doodling? Is this a fear which the fantasy of the private language is meant to conceal? An anxiety that our expressions might at any time signify nothing? Or too much?” (350–351) “But can philosophy become literature and still know itself ?” (495) 5. I owe this apt phrase to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 42. 6. I realize this is not yet an argument with Rorty. Cavell is right that the skeptical experience is rather common even now, but the pragmatist would have no trouble granting that. It is not enough for Cavell to say that many, in Philosophy 101, feel a sense of recognition when the professor is trying to convince them of the need for epistemology, that movies like Being John Malkovich or The Matrix and songs like “Wish You Were Here” demonstrate how such issues remain live ones. Cavell needs to establish the further claim that such experiences should be taken seriously, that they need philosophy, that our sense that they do isn’t rather like the anxious first-time parent calling the doctor every time the child has a sniffle. This, of course, is an argument about what constitutes philosophy. A tempting way of phrasing the question might be, “Does Rorty want to be as dismissive about Emerson’s grief and Othello’s jealousy as about Descartes’ ball of wax?” But that would miss Rorty’s point. It is that connection which Rorty is denying. Rorty is deeply appreciative of Cavell’s work on romantic and existentialist varieties of skepticism. But, he asks, why does Cavell think that, in order to address such issues, he has to drag us back through Moore, Price, Lewis, Berkeley, Hume? All you really need (to understand Blake and Sartre, etc.) is Kant. This gets tricky. On one hand, I applaud Cavell’s interest in keeping the lines of communication open, or trying to get them open, between Anglo-American analytic philosophy and literature and between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. His patience and generosity with analytic philosophy are constitutive of his project. On

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the other hand, I confess that I tend to read him like Rorty does. That is, among Cavell’s many interlocutors, I find that I almost invariably choose to read (or view) Thoreau, Emerson, the romantics, Freud, and films and almost never Moore et al., and my writing on him reflects that. (My relative lack of attention to part II of The Claim of Reason is—for many Cavell readers—damning evidence of this.) Last, I note the irony, or curiosity, that it is Rorty whose writing remains preoccupied with contemporary analytic philosophy even if antagonistically, while Cavell’s work, beginning with the fourth part of The Claim of Reason, seems less and less interested in the analytic tradition. In that sense, it is Cavell’s great student James Conant, not Cavell, who most actively works at bridge building and conversation creation with the analytic tradition. 7. Readers of Cavell will be disappointed that I all but skip part II of The Claim of Reason. (I attended to part III in the chapter on Alasdair MacIntyre.) My only excuse is that one purpose of this chapter is to be a springboard to issues of theological anthropology, and so my concern with other mind skepticism overwhelms my concern with external world skepticism. 8. Others writing on Cavell have reflected on this: Cavell’s writing places extraordinary pressure on itself to describe, undistractedly and specifically, the forces of the mind. This is one reason why one inclines to quotation in discussing his writing. Any paraphrase that even slightly misinflects his descriptions runs the risk of near-total distortion. If one feels that one’s sensibility has been truly captured by a phrase or a conjunction of adjectives, then no substitute will do. (Davidson, “Beginning Cavell,” 234–235) 9. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 24. 10. James Conant puts it this way: “Our (ordinary) concept of knowledge cannot find a natural foothold here (in relation to ‘the world as such’), that there is no obvious ordinary sense to be made of the words know and world here.” “On Bruns, on Cavell,” 627. 11. Mulhall, “Stanley Cavell’s Vision,” 79. 12. “What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?” Philosophical Investigations, §283. 13. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 114. 14. Wilfred Thesiger reports that, among the Danakil (Afar) of northeastern Ethiopia, a young boy is only recognized as male after he has killed an enemy. Before that, “he” is a girl. The Danakil Diaries: Journeys through Abyssinia 1930–34 (London: HarperCollins, 1996). 15. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 311. 16. This claim comes after Cavell’s lengthy and remarkable attempt to render coherent Wittgenstein’s wood sellers, “people who sell wood not according to what we call ‘the amount of wood’ in a pile but according to the amount of ground covered by the pile, regardless of its height.” 17. Here what is at issue are not alone differences between promising and fully intending, or between coronations and inaugurations, or between barter and a credit

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system; these are differences within the plane, the horizon, of the social, of human society. The biological or vertical sense of forms 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, and pawing at it, or pecking at it. . . . Wittgenstein seems to court a confusion over the emphasis as between social and natural. (This New Yet Unapproachable America, 41–42) 18. Said, Orientalism, 67. 19. Wittgenstein: “No, I don’t think I would get on with Hegel. Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things that look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different” (quoted in William Desmond, “A Second Primavera,” in Eldridge, Stanley Cavell, 169). 20. Cavell does not, so far as I know, ever write at much length about the issues explored in this section and throughout Claim in relation to animals. That task is taken up brilliantly by Vicki Hearne in her book Adam’s Task, which, she notes in the introduction, could never have been written without The Claim of Reason. 21. To anticipate chapter 7, I note here that these lines and the rest of this paragraph are a way of explicating what Emerson meant by “self-reliance” and why Cavell understands “conformity”—ceding my responsibility for intervention and agreement to the herd—in Emerson to be a name for a variety of skepticism. “How do we become self-reliant?” asks Cavell. “The worst thing we could do [according to Emerson] is rely on ourselves” (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 47). There is also a certain reading of Wittgenstein in which “convention” or “forms of life” allows me to cede my responsibility. Such readers are not exactly conformists, but they will tend to find Emerson annoying. 22. Must We Mean What We Say? 263. 23. See The Claim of Reason, 144. 24. “Other mind skepticism” is convenient philosophical shorthand. But it is misleading and, though Cavell will occasionally use it, he prefers something like “skepticism with respect to knowledge of others.” 25. Philosophical Investigations, §297. 26. Ibid., §283. 27. The Claim of Reason, 428. Cf. Must We Mean What We Say? 257. Acknowledgment is not a substitute or replacement for knowledge. Such readings take Cavell to be affirming the skeptical thesis and then offering an alternative way out. Acknowledgment, we might say, is constitutive of knowledge and undermines the skeptic’s understanding of knowledge rather than affirming it. 28. Cavell will go on to problematize this account of material objects: “It would not hurt my intuitions, to anticipate further than this book actually goes, were someone to be able to show that my discoveries in the regions of the skeptical problem of the other are, rightly understood, further characterizations of (material object) skepticism, of skepticism as such” (451). Aware that, so far, it sounds like empathic projection makes knowing others “too special a project from the beginning, as if the knowing of objects could take care of itself, whereas what goes into the

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knowing of others is everything that goes into the knowing of objects plus something else, something that, as it were, animates the object” (441). Maybe, he suggests, that has it backward. Maybe there is a way of seeing, a way worth cultivating, which sees material objects as animated as well. Cavell had argued that empathic projection “seams” our experience, affixes a seam between humans and all other material objects. But now he asks, what if our experience is endlessly, continuously seamed such that “for each link in the Great Chain of Being there is an appropriate hook of response” (ibid.)? At this point, all he says is, “Some of this, most of it, I would like to see worked out. I am interested, for example, in the perception or vision of how different different things are from one another” (442). Later, in In Quest of the Ordinary, Cavell takes on part of the task of working this out in connection with his increasing interest in romanticism. For a fine account, see Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 142–181. 29. Hence Cavell’s claim that “the subject of self-knowledge, both as a phenomenon and as a source of philosophical knowledge, has been blocked or denied in modern philosophy” (The Claim of Reason, 146). 30. Cavell goes on to add, with his characteristic and tantalizing obscurity, “And it would account for the intermittent emptiness in attempts to prove, or disprove, our knowledge of the existence of others. Proofs for God’s existence, and criticisms of these proofs, are apt to be empty intermittently for people whose conviction is that they are known by God, or to God, or not.” The suggestion is that knowing the self and knowing others go together, an important point that recurs centrally on 459ff. 31. Philosophical Investigations, §253. 32. Must We Mean What We Say? 266. 33. Rowan Williams is echoing Cavell when he writes that we have lost the skills necessary for “being present for and in an other. . . . It sounds odd, I suspect, to talk of a ‘skill’ of being seen; but there is such a thing as a habit of relinquishing controlled self-presentation; or of that attentive stillness which is somehow bound up with being attended to” (Lost Icons, 175). 34. The only way to get a handle on Cavellian patience is to read him. Just in case, as is all too likely, my writing cannot duplicate it, I call attention to his patience with Rousseau and Alceste, his patience with the wood sellers (115–117), his patience with analytic philosophers like Moore. 35. My refusal to declare myself may also result in losing touch with myself. “To say that behavior is expressive is not to say that a man impaled upon his sensation must express it in his behavior; it is to say that in order not to express it he must suppress the behavior, or twist it. And if he twists it far or often enough, he may lose possession of the region of the mind which that behavior is expressing.” Must We Mean What We Say? 264. 36. In Quest of the Ordinary, 119. 37. The passive skeptic is the private linguist. 38. Disowning Knowledge, 5. 39. Ibid., 5–6.

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40. Which is why he will sometimes say, “Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy” instead of simply counting Wittgenstein as an ordinary language philosopher on the model of Austin or Ryle. 41. There are important distinctions to be made here which I am passing over except to say that this gets us into the thick of the debates over how to read Wittgenstein’s “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Philosophical Investigations, §43). For a careful and lucid account of Wittgenstein and Cavell on these issues, see Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 222–250. 42. Disowning Knowledge, 7. 43. Ibid., 8. 44. It is from here that Cavell’s fascination with romanticism makes sense. Romanticism is the attempt to listen to the claims objects make upon us (from the position the skeptic has put the object in), to reanimate the world, resuscitate it from the death dealt it by Kant. 45. This does not mean that the reader should turn to the Othello section expecting “literary” revisions of the (“philosophical”) conclusions that preceded it. The Othello section is the confirmation of the journey preceding it, but only if we realize that that journey began as much from the Lear essay as from philosophy. “That link [between skepticism and tragedy in Lear] has more than any other single event set the course of my writing since then” (Conant, “An Interview with Stanley Cavell,” 62). So when, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre complains that, in the Othello pages, “Cavell has projected his own philosophical preoccupations onto the play. Consequently, the philosophy does not seem to arise from the doubts and perplexities expressed in the play but rather from Cavell’s professional concerns” (“Alasdair MacIntyre on the Claims of Philosophy,” 16), he fails to realize that Cavell’s preoccupations and concerns in The Claim of Reason have already been formed and informed by tragedy long before the sustained discussion of Othello. I claim something similar for myself in response to theological readers who may think that the theology in the pages that follow projects “philosophical concerns” onto theology in a deleterious manner. That is, I wish to say that my affection for Cavell proceeded from a theological education, that my attachment to him is because of that education and part of it, not in spite of it or as an alternative to it. 46. As does his earlier suggestion that “[i]t makes equal sense—at least equal—to suppose that the natural . . . condition of human perception is of (outward) things, whether objects or persons, as animated; so that it is the seeing of objects as objects (i.e., seeing them objectively, as non-animated that is the sophisticated development” (441). 47. “whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth, as monumental alabaster” (V.ii.4–5). 48. Disowning Knowledge, 9. 49. Ibid., 10. 50. The whole passage goes like this: This is the sense—is it not?—of the passage from Genesis in which theology has taken marriage to be legitimized, in which the origin of marriage is presented as the creation of the woman from the man. It is how they are one

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flesh. Then let us emphasize that this ceremony of union takes the form of a ceremony of separation, thus declaring that the question of two becoming one is just half the problem; the other half is how one becomes two. (Disowning Knowledge, 220) 51. Quoted in Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance, 152: “[Fuller] was announcing her intention not to quit the contest, while acknowledging the conditions in which she was obliged to work. Carlyle, it seems, took her to be showing a polite condescension to the universe; and his reply . . . was aimed at the paltriness of the human conceit that we have any choice in the matter.” I don’t mean to dismiss Carlyle here. It is worth asking, “What kind of people can even imagine an option here?” I suppose there are many to whom it does not occur that they have a choice. How we think about this will depend upon a great many things.

CHAPTER

6

1. Cavell, “Interview,” in The American Philosopher, 136. 2. Themes Out of School, 9. 3. In Quest of the Ordinary, 25–26. The lines close an essay on Emerson and Thoreau called “The Philosopher in American Life.” So I take it that “philosophy” here means philosophy as taught in American philosophy departments: heavily analytical, suspicious of literature, and dismissive of theology. 4. “Pieces of the myth of philosophy keep cropping up; here, the part about its battle with theology” (The Claim of Reason, 366). The myth says that theology is myth and that philosophy has unmasked it, i.e., is not myth. 5. Pursuits of Happiness, 169. 6. Disowning Knowledge, 21. 7. Church Dogmatics II/2, 518. 8. Disowning Knowledge, 74. 9. I take this line up in more detail in chapter 8. 10. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 131. Christianity is something “I am not in a position to share, but to admire and rejoice in.” 11. Ibid., 137. 12. Disowning Knowledge, 198. 13. The use of the word “satisfaction” comes from Hegel and the claim that “the right of the subject’s particularity, his right to be satisfied or in other words the right of subjective freedom” is “the pivot and center of difference between antiquity and modern times” and that “this right in its infinity is given expression in Christianity” (The Claim of Reason, 467–468, and Disowning Knowledge, 27, quoting from Philosophy of Right). 14. Disowning Knowledge, 36n. 15. The Claim of Reason, 241. 16. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 288. 17. Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship—all these

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things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. That is our own fault. Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison [London: SCM, 1971], 300) 18. See his Kierkegaard essays: “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in Must We Mean What We Say? and “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy,” in Themes Out of School. 19. The World Viewed, 88. 20. Must We Mean What We Say? 162. Mulhall is not as impressed with this ambivalence as I am because he thinks that, in his later work, Cavell’s remarks about Christianity become increasingly less ambivalent. That may be true. Both these lines and the lines from the Lear essay are from Cavell’s first book. The epigraph in this chapter, however, is from the mid-1990s. 21. See Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome; and Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism.” 22. The Claim of Reason, 352. 23. Ibid., 172–173. 24. There is a remarkable, if gnomic, statement toward the end of The Claim of Reason that sets up the reading of Othello: “As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn’t the other suffer the fate of God? . . . I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God” (470). 25. The Claim of Reason, 456. 26. Must We Mean What We Say? 179. 27. The World Viewed, 93. 28. Must We Mean What We Say? 174. 29. Disowning Knowledge, 73, 80. 30. The Claim of Reason, 416. 31. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 289–290. 32. Kerr, “Stanley Cavell and the Truth of Skepticism,” in his Immortal Longings, 128–129. 33. De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural. 34. The World Viewed, 98. Cf. Rowan Williams: “The right to be heard speaking about God must be earned” (On Christian Theology, 40). 35. Must We Mean What We Say? 175. 36. Cities of Words, 17. Cf. The Claim of Reason, 371–372. 37. Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” 79–80. 38. Cavell is fond of this line from Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.” See Themes Out of School, 6, and Cities of Words, xiii. 39. Themes Out of School, 14.

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40. O’Donovan, “Rowan Williams: The New Archbishop of Canterbury,” 6. Later, I will have occasion to insist that, once subjectivity is understood as Williams (and Cavell) understands it, there is no “starting point.” To be fair, I want to emphasize the tone of hesitation in O’Donovan. Mulhall says virtually the same thing about Cavell: “The element of his thought which stubbornly links it with liberalism is precisely its overriding concern with the enactment and realization of human individuality.” Stanley Cavell, 310. 41. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 292. 42. The Claim of Reason, xxi. 43. McCabe, God Matters, 40. 44. “Nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s humanity, or to assert it at the expense of others” (The Claim of Reason, 109). “[Wittgenstein] never, I think, underestimated the power of the motive to reject the human: nothing could be more human” (ibid., 207). “Philosophy concerns those necessities we cannot, being human, fail to know. Except that nothing is more human than to deny them” (Must We Mean What We Say? 96). “A mark of the natural in natural language is its capacity to repudiate itself” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 48). “It is natural to the human to wish to escape the human” (ibid., 59). Barth’s way of stating it is to say that humans make themselves impossible (Church Dogmatics III/2, 26), or choose their own impossibility (136). Pascal’s is “Christianity is strange; it bids man to recognize that he is vile and even abominable, and bids him to want to be like God” (Pensées, no. 351). 45. The Claim of Reason, 399. 46. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 23. 47. The Claim of Reason, 493. 48. Conant, “On Bruns, on Cavell,” is responding to a common misreading made by Gerald Bruns (“Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry 16 [Spring 1990]: 612–632).His essay takes issue with this reading in an exemplary manner to which I am indebted in what follows. 49. Disowning Knowledge, 96. 50. Conant, “On Bruns, on Cavell,” 629–630n17. 51. Pursuits of Happiness, 77–78. 52. The Claim of Reason, 369. 53. In being asked to accept [the human form of life], or suffer it, as given for ourselves, we are not asked to accept, let us say, private property, but separateness; not a particular fact of power but the fact that I am a man, therefore of this (range or scale of ) capacity for work, for pleasure, for endurance, for appeal, for command, for understanding, for wish, for will, for teaching, for suffering. The precise range or scale is not knowable a priori, any more than the precise range or scale of a word is to be known a priori. Of course, you can fix the range; so can you confine a man or woman, and not all the ways and senses of confinement are knowable a priori. (This New Yet Unapproachable America, 44) 54. In Quest of the Ordinary, 51. 55. The Claim of Reason, 454. 56. Must We Mean What We Say? 65.

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57. Themes Out of School, 15. 58. Church Dogmatics II/1, 181, 182. 59. It is, I suppose, least controversial if confined to an account of Church Dogmatics IV, most controversial if an account of Church Dogmatics I. 60. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 137. 61. “Emerson and Thoreau are as much threats, or say embarrassments, to what we have learned to call philosophy as they are to what we call religion” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 14). 62. The Claim of Reason, 476. 63. Williams, On Christian Theology, 80. 64. Ibid., 85. 65. Hans Urs von Balthasar, quoted in McIntosh, Christology from Within, 143–144. 66. “The Nicene faith as interpreted by its greatest defenders thus alters the nature of our reflection on apophatic theology. The unknowability of God ceases to be simply the inaccessibility of a kind of divine ‘hinterland,’ the mysteriousness of an indefinite source of divinity.” Williams, Arius, 242. 67. Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 31–46. 68. Ibid., 31. 69. Williams, “Barth on the Triune God,” 153. Further references to this source will be noted parenthetically in the text. 70. A point also made about Barth by Kathryn Tanner, “Jesus Christ.” 71. “Barth on the Triune God,” 173. Here, Williams is quoting Gustaf Wingren, Theology in Conflict, 28–29. 72. It is this suspicion that leads Williams to mention Barth at the beginning of his remarks on Clement and Origen in Williams, Wound of Knowledge. 73. Williams, On Christian Theology, 110. 74. Williams is influenced here by von Balthasar and Donald MacKinnon, who wrote of “the most searching and disturbing of all von Balthasar’s suggestions: namely his raising the question whether the inscription in human history of the humility of God in his relation to himself as well as to his creatures, upon the Cross did not put the very divine unity itself at risk.” See MacKinnon’s introduction to von Balthasar’s Engagement with God, trans. John Halliburton (London: SPCK, 1975), 15–16. 75. McCabe, God Matters, 51. 76. Williams rightly points to this argument as an improvement, already in Church Dogmatics II and developed in IV, over the Barth of I/1, and further notes the resemblance to von Balthasar (and Luther’s theologia crucis). “Barth on the Triune God,” 178–181. 77. McCabe, God Matters, 49. (Williams approvingly cites this McCabe essay in Arius, 346n24.) Cf. Church Dogmatics III/2, 526: “[Eternity] is the simultaneity and coinherence of past, present and future.” It is important to note, however, that while McCabe and Barth take up similar positions with regard to the preexistence logos, Barth, so far as I can tell, does not make the argument with reference to eternity as McCabe does. For a helpful overview of Barth on these issues, see Cunningham, What Is Theological Exegesis? 19–49.

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The danger inherent in the argument against the logos asarkos is that the historical Jesus is swallowed up into the eternal life in such a way as to suggest docetism. Barth, aware of this, allows a minimalist use of the concept when he gets to volume IV of Church Dogmatics. 78. “The genuineness of Lessing’s question [how can the contingent truths of history become the universal truths of reason?] cannot be disputed in that it springs from a very genuine need: the need to hide ourselves (like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden) from Jesus Christ as He makes Himself present and mediates Himself to us” (Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 292). Or: The particularity of the incarnation is the universality of the good. There is no road but the low road. The truth has come to our side of the ditch. But then my assigned problem was not the real problem, but a screen. The real issue is not whether Jesus can make sense in a world far from Galilee, but whether—when he meets us in our world, as he does in fact—we want to follow him. We don’t have to, as they didn’t then. That we don’t have to is the profoundest proof of his condescension, and thereby of his glory. (Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom, 62) 79. Bultmann can frequently sound like Cavell. For example, “They use their knowledge, which in itself is perfectly correct, to conceal the very thing which it is important to know. Their knowledge serves only to prevent them from recognizing Jesus.” The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 297. 80. I remain unsure of the way Williams repeatedly insists on the risen Jesus as a stranger, to the exclusion of the strangeness of the life of Jesus. He writes, “A theology of the risen Jesus will always be, to a greater or lesser degree, a negative theology” (Williams, Resurrection, 91). Here, in the fourteenth chapter of John, and, as Frank Kermode has most famously shown, in Mark, Jesus is always a stranger. 81. Turner, The Darkness of God, 6. 82. Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation: A Conversation with Rowan Williams,” 307–308. 83. Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 4. 84. Williams, “Redeeming Sorrows,” 144.

CHAPTER

7

1. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3, 453. 2. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 290. 3. Ibid., 291, quoting Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 40. 4. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 296–301. 5. Ibid., 266, quoting from Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 6. 6. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 112. 7. Smith, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” Guardian, Oct. 6, 2001. [Online] Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/06/fiction. A revised and expanded version of this essay later appeared in Wood, The Irresponsible Self.

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8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. Emerson says of a preacher he once heard: He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. . . . Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. (“The Divinity School Address,” in Essays and Lectures, 85) 10. The World Viewed, 97, 99. 11. Cities of Words, 43. 12. Ibid., 50. 13. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 76, 85, 89–90. 14. McClendon, Systematic Theology: Witness. Kerr is better on this. He simply says that the best way to understand Wittgenstein is as a “lapsed Catholic” and that trying to make him a practicing Christian is a red herring. Kerr also insists, rightly, that “it is difficult to maintain that Wittgenstein wants us to snap out of our illusory self-containedness and accept our status as happy little social constructs. He certainly does not rest the self upon the speaking community” (Theology after Wittgenstein, 210). But even if we were to grant McClendon’s speculations, it remains problematic that the fact that Wittgenstein was a member of no church is not allowed to challenge the demand for a far more robust account of community. 15. Aside from The Claim of Reason, 86–125, this is most explicit in This New Yet Unapproachable America. There, he writes: The idea [of forms of life] is, I believe, typically taken to emphasize the social nature of human language and conduct, as if Wittgenstein’s mission is to rebuke philosophy for concentrating too much on isolated individuals. . . . Surely this idea is not wrong, and nothing is more important. But the typical emphasis on the social eclipses the twin preoccupation of the Investigations, call this the natural [here, Cavell cites Philosophical Investigations, §§185, 206, and 230]. The partial eclipse of the natural makes the teaching of the Investigations much too, let me say, conventionalist. (41) The crucial word here is “twin,” which prepares us for the fact that “sometimes Wittgenstein seems to court a confusion” over the two or that there is a “mutual absorption” of the two and that such absorption creates the confusion and is not (necessarily) a bad thing; we will often not know how to separate them. “Art,” as Burke put it, “is man’s nature.” 16. The Claim of Reason, 18. 17. Again, Kerr is instructive here. See Theology after Wittgenstein, 209. 18. The Claim of Reason, 114 (my italics). I take Williams’s criticisms of “the territorial cast of the imagery” in Lindbeck to be a recognition of this point and

NOTES TO PAGES

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therefore a more faithfully Wittgensteinian line of questioning. Williams, On Christian Theology, 29. 19. Cities of Words, 443. 20. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 99. 21. Ibid., 100. 22. Philosophical Passages, 170. 23. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 98–99. 24. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 39. 25. Kerr never quite says that. Charles Taylor does. 26. The Claim of Reason, 140. 27. Confessions, XII.7, 11 (130). I don’t suppose I am the only one who understands the opening of Rilke’s Duino Elegies—“Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”—to be responding to The Confessions. 28. The Claim of Reason, 28. 29. Must We Mean What We Say? 68. 30. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 42. 31. O’Donovan, “Rowan Williams,” 6. 32. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God, 100. 33. Ibid., 103, 104. 34. Ibid., 104. 35. Cavell puts it this way: “All [the child] knows . . . is what he or she has learned, and all that they have learned will be part of what they are. . . . What we learn is not just what we have studied; and what we have been taught is not just what we were intended to learn. What we have in our memories is not just what we have memorized” (The Claim of Reason, 177). 36. Must We Mean What We Say? 41. Here, again, Williams is significantly different. He too insists, as Jenson would, that “the self that must be discovered is a self already involved in this kind of community, in relation to this kind of God.” This means that the question “What should I do?” cannot be answered independently of the church. “I am to act in such a way that my action becomes something given into the life of the community.” So far, so good, and so banal. What distinguishes Williams is that this is not a stopping point but a starting point. He does not shirk the task of going on to say that because such actions offered to the community must be received by the community, recognized as contributing to the glory of God, “this is where the pain and tension arises of Christian disagreement.” See Williams, “Making Moral Decisions,” 7–8. 37. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 99. 38. Ibid. (my italics). 39. The Claim of Reason, 369. 40. “It has taken a very long time for the realization to dawn that the experience of birth itself may be the primary and traumatic deprivation.” Williams, Resurrection, 24, here echoes a theme explored by Hamlet, Adrienne Rich, Rilke, and Emerson, among others. 41. Roth, American Pastoral, 35. 42. Sebald, Austerlitz, 137.

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193–200

43. Ellison, The Invisible Man, 7. 44. O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn. 45. In Quest of the Ordinary, 44. Cavell cites Biographia, chap. 9, para. 6 46. Ibid., 44. 47. Ibid., 32. 48. Disowning Knowledge, 94. 49. Ibid., 7–8. 50. Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” 521. 51. Philosophical Investigations, §253. 52. The Claim of Reason, 461. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 462. 55. Ibid., 462–463. 56. “On Charon’s Wharf,” from Broken Vessels, Broken Vessels (Boston: Godine, 1991), 82. Quoted in O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn, 296–297. 57. In Quest of the Ordinary, 172. 58. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures, 69. 59. The Claim of Reason, 109. 60. Ibid., 90. 61. I am suggesting that O’Callaghan’s use of Dubus means that we should not read his anthropology as a similar displacement, but also that suggests that he has misread McDowell. 62. In Quest of the Ordinary, 108. 63. Cavell knows that such an idea “skirts the edge of metaphysical nonsense” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 110). It suggests not just that some of my thoughts and actions may not be mine (an action, say, done against my will), but that none is mine. This skirts the edge of metaphysical nonsense in the same pattern as the skeptic uses. The path it follows is analogous to the path from “I can’t see all of it” to external world skepticism. 64. “Self-Reliance,” 267. Though it is not explicit, it is fair to say that imagery like “poor posture” links up in Cavell’s world with the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations and the persons with the four-word language—“slab,” “beam,” “block,” “pillar.” “I find that I imagine them moving sluggishly, as if dull-witted . . . like cave men” (Philosophical Passages, 146). In my world, it also links up with Nabokov’s description of the people whom the reading primers confine to three-letter words: “Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools (‘Ben has an axe’), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory” (Speak, Memory, 80). 65. In Quest of the Ordinary, 111. 66. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 92. It is worth mentioning that Emerson also said, “By necessity, by proclivity—and by delight, we all quote.” Quoted in Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,” 235. 67. In Quest of the Ordinary, 115, 114, 119. 68. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 31. 69. In Quest of the Ordinary, 40.

NOTES TO PAGES

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70. Dubus does not say that he is talking of marriage. But it is no accident that he, like Cavell, invokes “some image of marriage, as an interpretation of domesticity” as a response to skepticism. 71. O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn, 298. 72. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, chapter 1. 73. The Hauerwas Reader, 247. Throughout, I will rely on this volume, and all subsequent references to it will be noted parenthetically in the text. 74. Compare Cavell: “As things stand, love is always the betrayal of love, if it is honest. It is why the path of self-knowledge is so ugly, hence so rarely taken, whatever its reputed beauties. The knowledge of the self as it is always takes place in the betrayal of the self as it was. That is the form of self-revelation, until the self is wholly won” (The World Viewed, 160). 75. The “very much like” is important here. 76. To be fair, in this and the pages that follow I am working only with The Hauerwas Reader, which excludes his more extensive discussions of friendship which may or may not complicate the picture I draw. 77. It would be fascinating to see a similar essay written replacing Inside the Third Reich with Errol Morris’s documentary about Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. 78. Any shortcomings in this essay that I note should not be understood as attributable to Hauerwas and Burrell. Both have moved on from this work, which was written early in their careers, to thicker accounts of narrative and friendship which address some of the concerns I will express. 79. In what follows, I am indebted to Barth’s reflections on Job’s comforters and “the falsehood of man” in Church Dogmatics IV/3, 453–461. 80. Ibid., 458.

CHAPTER

8

1. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, 26. 2. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 54. 3. Philosophical Passages, 99. 4. Cavell, “Two Cheers for Romance,” 91. 5. Emerson, “Circles,” in Essays and Lectures, 406. 6. Throughout his work, but especially in “Hope against Hope,” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 129–138. 7. Kierkegaard, Journals, quoted in Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 43. 8. Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” in Essays and Lectures, 630. 9. “Self-Reliance,” 259. 10. Cities of Words, 19. 11. Ibid., 24. 12. The Claim of Reason, 352. 13. Cities of Words, 4. 14. “Self-Reliance,” 264. 15. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 59.

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16. “There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us” (“Uses of Great Men,” 621). 17. Emerson, “Friendship,” in Essays and Lectures, 351. 18. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 140. I can’t resist comparing Emerson’s remark to something Williams says about Aquinas: “[God’s] self-gift in grace is a gift to human beings in their awareness and responsiveness” (Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 125). 19. It is of great interest to me that, while Cavell is one of the most selfconsciously American thinkers, it is theologians from the United Kingdom (aside from these three, Kerr and Lash could be included) who seem to me most akin to him. This has something to do with Donald MacKinnon. 20. Williams, Resurrection, 1. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. The Claim of Reason, 428. 23. Ibid., 430. 24. The World Viewed, 89. 25. All quotes in the paragraph are from x–xi. 26. Williams, Resurrection, 10. 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Ibid., 12. 29. There is an apparent confusion here. Jesus does condemn the Pharisees and other Jewish authorities. That may be why Williams qualifies the claim with those “who turned to him in hope.” Or, better, it may mean that Williams does not mean for us to confuse condemnation with honest confrontation and therefore to recognize the ways in which the refusal of such confrontation is also a refusal of reconciliation. 30. Williams, Resurrection, 15–16. 31. Ibid., 15. 32. As noted, Williams also finds Christ to be available in his church, but it is of great interest to me that, though he begins with that identification, his move in this chapter is most strenuously toward the victim. 33. Williams, Resurrection, 13. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 81. 36. Moore, The Crucified Jesus, 82. 37. The Claim of Reason, 434. 38. Williams, Resurrection, 62. 39. Ibid., 19. 40. Ibid., 68. 41. The Claim of Reason, 439. 42. McCabe, God Matters, 97. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 93. 45. Ibid., 97–98.

NOTES TO PAGES

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46. Ibid., 93–94. 47. Ibid., 94. 48. “Experience,” 473. 49. McCabe, God Matters, 97. 50. McCabe, What Is Ethics All About? 129. 51. McCabe, God Still Matters, 104. 52. Church Dogmatics III/2, 47. 53. Williams, On Christian Theology, 81. It is easy to read such claims as imperialist and triumphalist recommendations of Christianity. But it is, as we shall see, a central concern of Williams to avoid that. The judgment of Christ is not the judgment of the church. The church is just as much, if not more, under judgment as anything else. 54. McCabe, God Matters, 93.

CONCLUSION

1. Conant, “In the Electoral Colony,” 701–702. 2. The Claim of Reason, 125. 3. The World Viewed, 245n62. In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), there is a communications corporation called Saprogenic Greetings. Its slogan is: “When you care enough to let a professional say it for you” (1047n269). 4. Cities of Words, 329. 5. “Experience,” 491. 6. Cities of Words, 412. 7. A similar thing happens with his criticisms of Kierkegaard in Must We Mean What We Say? 174–175. 8. Disowning Knowledge, 19. 9. “Two Cheers for Romance,” 91. 10. Themes Out of School, 104. 11. Ibid., 149. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Disowning Knowledge, 117. 15. Does the fact that this question is so hard to answer, so much harder than identifying the various avoidances in Lear, suggest that Cavell is wrong about the relationship of tragedy to our lives? Or does it show just how tragic our lives are? Or that we are no longer tragic, perhaps because no longer great, or because we lack conviction? 16. Disowning Knowledge, 118. 17. Themes Out of School, 150. 18. Ibid., 151. 19. Hauerwas, “The Tonto Principle,” Sojourners, Jan-Feb. 2002, 30.

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20. Disowning Knowledge, 119. These lines could serve as an epigraph to The Fog of War. Errol Morris acknowledges Robert McNamara by offering him a chance to reveal himself, to stop hiding. Offering, as one commentator put it, the Flying Dutchman a place to rest. Part of the great interest of the film is not just that McNamara can’t take advantage of the opportunity, but that it is so hard to blame him. If you are not of an age to remember the time when McNamara was among the most despised men in America, you may even find him appealing. If you are that young, the film clues you in. You discover that he was called “a machine with legs,” “an arrogant dictator,” a “con-man,” “Mac the knife,” “Mr. I-have-all-the-answers-McNamara.” This all comes as a surprise, because the man before us is likable. He is smart, articulate. He seems honest. He tells us that he was the youngest professor at Harvard, and the first person outside of the family to ever be president of Ford Motor Company, but it doesn’t sound like arrogance so much as just part of the story. Just like informing us that, if the United States had lost to the Japanese in the Second World War, he would have been tried as a war criminal for the firebombings of Japanese cities. It is a fascinating exchange, the first of several opportunities (which multiply at the close of the film) Morris gives McNamara to confess. He doesn’t flinch from telling us that 100,000 civilians were “burned to death” in one night when Tokyo was firebombed. “Were you aware,” Morris asks him, “this was going to happen?” “Well . . . I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it.” McNamara was the statistician who informed Colonel Curtis LeMay how to increase the efficiency of the bombing campaign. “Not more efficient in the sense of killing more, but in weakening the adversary.” He goes on to pose a question to himself, “McNamara, do you mean to say that instead of burning to death 100,000 people in one night, we should have had our soldiers go in and be slaughtered in the tens of thousands, is that what you’re proposing?” He doesn’t answer his own question but instead says that proportionality must be a guideline in war. He asks, “Is that proportional?” He says they were behaving as war criminals. The screen flashes the names of the Japanese cities bombed and the percentage of their people killed along with their American equivalents (New York City, 51%; Los Angeles, 40%; etc.). “I don’t fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. It was a brutal war.” “You can’t change human nature.” “Stuff happens.” “Freedom’s untidy.” 21. Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, 239–240.

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Index

acknowledgment, 11, 48, 72, 132, 139, 166, 182–183,196, 203, 204, 207, 213, 225, 237n.91 of God, 161, 165 knowledge and, 124, 133, 168, 252n.27 marriage and, 21, 22, 24 in New Testament, 213–215 other mind skepticism and, 139–142, 144, 146, 158, 162 of victims, 215–219 adolescence, 5, 146–147. See also youth aesthetic judgment, 37–39 Albritton, Rogers, 121 Alceste, 3–9, 12, 20, 146, 226, 229 America, 182, 211, 223, 225–228 Aristotle, 47, 101, 211, 249 Alasdair MacIntyre on, 53–54 on friendship, 112–113 Martha Nussbaum on, 58–60, 63 Augustine, 19, 39, 66, 67, 72, 89, 183, 185–189, 190, 242n.3 Austen, Jane, 34–36, 55, 237n.6, 241n.68

Austin, J. L., 13, 36, 37, 63, 141, 254n.40 criteria in, 122–123 autonomy, 179–180 avoidance, 21, 141, 213–214, 216, 226–227 in King Lear, 14, 17, 147, 265n.15 Barth, Karl, 28, 108, 110–111, 156–157, 159, 164, 214, 217, 223, 237n.91, 258n.77 Job and, 206–207 Kant and, 170 theological anthropology of, 221–222, 257n.44 Williams on, 173–175 Beckett, Samuel, 160, 164, 186 Bell, Daniel, 96–97, 104–107, 112 Bernstein, J. M., 36 best case for acknowledgment, 138–141, 143, 153 Jesus as, 214, 219 for knowledge, 122 Bloom, Harold, 28 Bringing Up Baby, 155

276

INDEX

Browne, Thomas, 91 Burrell, David, 202–204 Capra, Frank, 225, 236n.83 Cavanaugh, William, 96–97, 104–107, 112 Chalcedon, 172, 221 children (in Wittgenstein), 65–67, 128, 131, 185, 186, 242n.3 Christianity, xi, 155–167, 170, 179–180, 212, 213 church, 12, 23, 109–113, 165, 181, 184, 190 fugitive, 96–99, in Hauerwas, 108, 201–207, 228 in radical orthodoxy, 104–107 in Yoder, 108. See also ecclesiology comedies of,remarriage, 11, 20–24, 68, 150, 209, 210, 212 communitarianism, x, 35, 41, 112, 183–185 community, 4, 6, 22, 27, 77, 90, 93, 146–147, 192, 196, 236n.83, 241n.66, 260n.14, 261n.36 companionship and, 33–34, 112, 113, 117 ecclesiology and, x, 95, 97, 107, 109–110,181–185, 189–191, 204–207 MacIntyre and, 34–35, 41–42, 49, 55 companionship, 6, 23, 33–34, 39, 95, 204, 207, 211 community and, 48, 112–113, 117 Sebald and, 76–77, 83, 93, 225 complicity, 72, 76, 107, 224, 225, 228 Conant, James, 70, 223 confession, 39, 50, 72, 89, 139, 166, 196, 201, 203, 207, 216, 223–224, 228 conformity, 3, 23–24, 28, 66, 113, 185, 204, 211, 224, 252n.21 Connolly, William, 96, 102 consent, 3, 5, 6, 8, 65, 224, 228 Rawls and, 71–72 convention, 13, 37, 39, 63–64, 66, 126, 129, 131, 232, 252n.21, 260n.15

conversion, 67–68, 74, 216–217, 171 Cordelia, 17, 147, 157–158, 162, 183, 220, 227, 235n.47, 235n.50 criteria, 38, 41, 63, 64, 77–79, 118, 120–127, 132, 133, 135, 187, 189, 224, 225 Danto, Arthur, 10–11 Delillo, Don, 181–182 democracy, 4, 69, 70 fugitive, 96–104, 109 Descartes, 76, 119, 122, 149, 150, 188, 239n.32, 250n.6 Augustine and, 186, 189 Emerson and, 199–200 God and, 159 Shakespeare and, 118, 152 Desdemona, 6, 20, 121, 141, 147, 150–153, 158, 161, 168 Dubus, Andre, 197–198, 200, 207 ecclesiology, 98, 110, 180–181, 184, 201. See also church education, 24, 25–26, 58–62, 66–69, 242n.9, 243n.36 Ellison, Ralph, 192–193, 225 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 8, 12, 13, 18, 20, 35, 50, 64, 112–113, 119, 146, 148, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 170, 171, 180, 201, 204, 207, 209–213, 229, 232n.7 “Divinity School Address,” 260n.9 “Experience,” 221 individualism of, 183–185, 196, 199–201, 211–212 “Manners,” 234n.27 Nietzsche and, 243n.40 perfectionism and, 67–70, 73 philanthropy and, 27–29 “Self-Reliance,” 28, 113, 200, 224, 233n.15 “Uses of Great Men,” 243n.44 emotivism, 40, 41, 42–45, 48–53 Austen and, 241n.59

INDEX

empathic projection, 137–139, 252n.28 Euben, Peter, 102–104 external world skepticism, 42, 44, 120, 150, 161, 167, 251n.7, 262n.63 compared to other mind skepticism, 135–138, 140–141 Fanon, Frantz, 127, 216 forgiveness, 20, 21, 47, 174, 177, 215, 218, 219 forms of life, 130–131, 184–185, 232n.5, 251n.17, 252n.21, 260n.15 Frei, Hans, 205, 217 friendship, 112–113 God, 28, 53, 66, 97, 146, 149, 158, 163, 166, 180, 187, 198, 199, 206, 209, 213, 214, 220, 221 death of, 159 existence of, 160, 161, 165, 253n.30, 256n.24 the Father, 213 identification with the victim, 216–219 Trinity, 174–175 unknowability of, 166, 170–177, 258n.66 Godard, Jean-Luc, 182 Hamlet, 5, 145, 261n.40 Hardt, Michael, 104–107, 248n.39 Hauerwas, Stanley, 95, 96, 107, 108, 111, 113, 182, 184, 201–208, 228, 246n.6, 249nn.60, 61 Heller, Erich, 11 His Girl Friday, 156 Hume, David, 37, 142 Iago, 151–152 Ibsen, Henrik (A Doll’s House), 72–73 individualism, 28, 34, 36, 53, 112, 181, 183, 197 isolation, 8, 18, 42, 81, 95, 100, 146, 147, 153, 162, 186, 196, 225

277

James, Henry, 34, 240n.48 The Portrait of a Lady, 50–53, 182, 240n.55 James, William, 183, 189–190 Jenson, Robert, 189–191 Jesus Christ, 25, 27, 47, 97, 110, 126, 129, 158, 161, 162, 165, 171–177, 213–222 Job, 170, 179, 206–207 Kafka, Franz, 223, 228 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 38–39, 49, 190, 197, 227 Barth and, 170 Romanticism and, 195–195, 254n.44 Wittgenstein and, 168 Kateb, George, 101 Kenneson, Philip, 95 Kenny, Anthony, 9, 10 Kerr, Fergus, 163, 184, 186, 189, 260n.14, 264n.19 Kierkegaard, Soren, 159–160, 164 King Lear, 12, 14–18, 125, 158, 216, 227 Kripke, Saul, 57, 58, 65, 69 Lash, Nicholas, 209, 264n.19 Lederach, John Paul, 207 liberalism, 40, 57–58, 96, 98, 179, 192, 242n.2, 257n.40 Hauerwas and, 108, 249n.48 MacIntyre and, 53, 55, 57 Milbank and, 107–108 Rawls and, 70, 73, 76 theological, 164, 173, 180, 184, 189, 190 victims of 70, 76, 244n.3 Lindbeck, George, 184, 260n.18 Luther, Martin, 22–23, 53, 66, 67, 89, 110, 173 MacIntyre, Aladair, 9, 34–36, 40–42, 57, 74, 76, 95, 156, 181, 182, 201, 224 and emotivism, 48–52 and practice, 53–55

278

INDEX

Malcolm, Norman, 79, 121 marriage, 4, 20, 21, 24, 34, 55, 73, 125, 142, 152, 154, 202, 225, 237–238n.6, 254n.30, 263n.70 Marx, Karl, 25–26, 104–105, 162, 225, 248n.39 McCabe, Herbert, 167, 175, 213, 219, 220, 222, 258n.77 McClendon, James, 184, 260n.14 McDowell, John, 193–195, 197, 262n.61 Milbank, John, 96–98, 107–108, 110–111, 157, 224, 247n.12 Milosz, Czeslaw, 19–20 modernism, 36–37, 39, 41 Moliere, Misanthrope. See Alceste Montaigne, 6–7, 9, 11 Moore, Sebastian, 212–215, 218–219 Mulhall, Stephen, 49–50, 68, 71, 74, 163, 179–180, 256n.20, 257n.40 Nabokov, Vladimir, 5, 38, 245n.24, 262n.64 narcissism, 3, 4, 152, 154, 166, 181 natural, the, 126–130 Negri, Antonio, 106, 107 New Traditionalism, 34, 35, 41, 183, 247n.32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 44, 48, 69–70, 91, 127, 198, 210, 236n.38 Christianity and, 159–160 Emerson and, 68, 70, 160, 211, 243n.40 Nussbaum, Martha, 57–64, 103, 242n.7 O’Callaghan, John, 193–195, 197–198, 200–201 O’Donovan, Oliver, 189, 257n.40 ordinary, the, 13–21, 23, 63–64, 123, 149, 158, 186, 197 ordinary language philosophy, 8, 37, 39, 42, 56, 63, 64, 67, 148–149, 234n.34, 239n.32, 254n.40 Othello, 6, 20, 147, 148, 150, 152, 254n.45 Othello, 6, 20, 119, 141, 147, 150–154, 168, 250n.6

other mind skepticism, 117, 120, 124, 133, 139, 143, 150, 161, 167, 169, 192, 252n.24 compared to external world skepticism, 135–138, 140–141 pain, 76, 78, 84–85, 89, 134–138, 143, 144, 146, 187, 195–196, 201–202, 205–206 criteria and, 121–126, 128, 130, 132, 133 Pascal, Blaise, 11, 12, 159, 257 patience, 40, 58, 128, 144–146, 165, 202, 206, 210, 253n.34 Paul, 163, 213, 214, 215 perfectionism, 52, 67–70, 73, 212 Philadelphia Story, The, 198 Plato, 68–69 Platonism, 60, 172 postliberalism, 165, 189, 229 private language fantasy, 77–81, 132, 184, 185, 186, 191, 195, 212, 250n.4 Emerson and, 212, 233n.16 radical orthodoxy, 95, 110, 165, 182, 193–194, 229. See also Milbank, John Rawls, John, 22, 63, 243n.41 and liberalism, 57, 69–74, 76 and rule utilitarianism, 45, 53, 55, 243n.48 resurrection, 213–215 Rich, Adrienne, 33, 47, 95, 229 Romanticism, 55, 146, 151, 199, 253n.28, 254n.44 Kant and, 194–196 Rorty, Richard, ix, 11, 119, 159, 209, 250nn.3, 6 Roth, Philip, 20, 192 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 146–147, 196 Sebald, W. G., 33, 35, 75–76, 82–94, 154, 225, 244n.15, 245n.24 self-knowledge, 39, 47, 48, 80, 86, 91, 144, 160, 188–189, 211

INDEX

self-reliance, 23, 28, 112–113, 146, 185, 200, 201, 204, 214, 224, 252n.21 separateness, 6, 65, 81, 82, 146, 152, 162, 169, 191, 196, 257n.53 acknowledgment of, 11, 18, 24, 127 Shklar, Judith, 4, 5, 64, 69 sin, 127, 155, 156, 163, 173, 174, 177, 210, 220, 221 skepticism, 3, 66, 75, 78, 117–154, 155–156, 158, 167–170, 187, 191, 194, 195, 198, 225, 249n.2, 250n.6, 252n.28, 265n.70 criteria and, 120–132 existence of God and, 161, 171 moral, 42 narcissism and, 4 ordinary and, 20, 42, 119 threat of, 3, 20, 118, 127, 190, 193, 250n.3 tragedy and, 20, 147–154, 254n.45 truth of, 81, 118, 120, 124, 133 see also external world skepticism, other mind skepticism Smith, Zadie, 181 Socrates, 8, 12, 47, 70 city of words and, 8, 69 older friend as, 68, 212 Soskice, Janet Martin, 205 Stevenson, C. L., 40, 44–45, 48 Stout, Jeffrey, 95, 98, 157, 201 Sturges, Preston, 20, 225 Taylor, Charles, 85–86 theater, 18, 226–227 theology, 12, 41, 96, 97, 99, 106, 163–165,170–177, 189, 206, 213, 254n.45, 255n.3, 255n.4 anthropology and, 191, 193 companionship and, 33–34 ecclesiology, 181 negative, 167, 176–177, 258n.66, 259n.80 philosophy and, 67, 156–157, 159, 162

279

self-criticism and, 166–167, 170–172, 179–180 self-knowledge and, 188–190 Wittgenstein and, 183–184 Thoreau, Henry David, 170, 203, 209, 237n.91 tragedy, 6, 17–18, 20, 21, 23, 89, 108, 141, 226, 228, 265n.15 skepticism and, 20, 147, 150, 152, 254n.45 Turner, Denys, 176 unknown woman, 23–24, 35, 68, 180, 236n.65 Updike, John, 28 victims, 70, 158, 181, 185, 200, 212, 214–219, 226 Vietnam War, 7, 27, 226 violence, 3, 65, 66, 107, 153, 171, 216–217, 219, 220, 225 Weil, Simone, 95 White, Stephen, 102–104 Williams, Raymond, 34–35, 52 Williams, Rowan, 106, 112, 176–177, 181, 189, 212–219, 222, 235n.47, 236n.61, 239n.30, 253n.33, 256n.34, 257n.40, 260n.18, 261n.36, 264n.18, 264n.19, 264n.32, 265n.53 apophaticism (negative theology), 167, 176, 258n.66, 259n.80 Barth and, 173–175 democracy and, 100 dogma and, 171–172 similarity to Cavell, 166–167 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 35, 40, 93, 118, 145, 147, 158, 159, 162, 171, 180, 182, 193, 194, 211, 223, 250n.3, 252n.19 Augustine and, 19, 183, 185–187 criteria and, 120, 122, 126, 130 forms of life, 130–131, 184–185, 251n.17, 252n.21, 260n.15

280

INDEX

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (continued) grammar and, 38, 130 Hauerwas and, 201, 205 Kant, 168–169 modernism and, 36–37 ordinary language philosophy and, 13, 63 Philosophical Investigations, 35 politics of, 63–64, 69, 72 private language fantasy, 76, 78–81, 191, 233n.16 romanticism and, 195–196, 199 scene of instruction in, 57–58, 65, 186 Sebald and, 82, 88, 89 self-knowledge and, 188–189 skepticism in, 75, 118–119, 131, 146, 156

theology and, 182–188 voices in, 65, 67, 224 writing of, 9–10, 11, 90, 246n.38 Wolin, Sheldon, 96, 99–104, 108–109 Wood, James, 85, 89, 181, 233 Wood, Michael, 10–11, 234 Woolf, Virginia, 35–36 writing, 7–9, 12–13, 35, 76, 90–93, 201, 211, 226, 229, 245nn.31, 32, 251n.8 Xenos, Nicholas, 102–104 Yoder, John Howard, 96–99, 108, 111, 112, 201, 205, 246n.5, 259n.78 youth, 3, 69, 226. See also adolescence

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