Emerson, Kant, Cavell

Hopefully this is just part one, but the idea is to do a series of posts on Cavell and Emerson. Here I just begin with Cavell's notion of skepticism.

Stanley Cavell, in Emerson, Coleridge, Kant:

Philosophy's essential business has become the response to skepticism, as if philosophy's business has essentially become the question of its own existence [here we might add to Cavell's statement a rejoinder from Luhmann that the business of all systems is their autopoietic reproduction];...that in philosophy the task is associated with the overcoming, or say critique, of metaphysics, and in literature with the domestication of the fantastic and the transcendentalizing of the domestic, call these movements the internalization, or subjectivizing, or democratizing, of philosophy; and that this communication between philosophy and literature, or the refusal of communication, is something that causes romanticism.

To understand Cavell you have to understand what he calls the "settlement" with skepticism that he finds in Kant. Thankfully, Cavell provides a 5 point summary of the entire Critique of Pure Reason:

(1)Experience is constituted by appearances. (2) Appearances are of something else, which accordingly cannot itself appear. (3) All and only functions of experience can be known; these are our categories of the understanding. (4) It follows that the something else--that of which appearances are appearances, whose existence we must grant--cannot be known. In discovering this limitation of reason, reason proves its power to itself, over itself. (5) Moreover, since it is unavoidable for our reason to be drawn to think about this unknowable ground of appearance, reason reveals itself to itself in this necessity also.

This settlement with skepticism has the effect of dividing us from the world, cutting us off from the ordinary, as Cavell might say, or encasing us in a "prison of glass" as Emerson would say. But by splitting the world in two like this, a third world is created, one of the middle. (I am reminded of Heidegger's remark in Being and Time that Dasein is in its ontic constitution an ontological being.) Cavell writes:

The dissatisfaction with such a settlement as Kant's is relatively easy to state. To settle with skepticism, to assure us that we do know the existence of the world or, rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves. You don't--do you?--have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about that settlement: Thanks for nothing.

"Freedom is necessary," Emerson writes in Fate. The antinomies are absolutely irresolvable, and yet they stand. Kant's vision is of two worlds,

"one of which is necessary to the satisfaction of human Understanding, the other to the satisfaction of human Reason. One romantic use for this idea of two worlds lies in its accounting for the human being's dissatisfaction with, as it were, itself. [Which perhaps reaches one of its highpoints in Schopenhauer, and, in a reverse fashion, Nietzsche.] It appreciates the ambivalence in Kant's central idea of limitation, that we simultaneously crave its comfort and crave escape from its comfort..as if the best proof of human existence were its power to yearn, as if for its better, or other, existence.

So the desire is concomitant with that desire's impossible satisfaction: to know the world. To know it sexually? Yes, in a literal and metaphoric sense. To know it as Hamlet and Othello wanted to know it, and as Lear was unwilling to face the illusions of his knowledge. Only Hamlet escapes his desire ("Let be"), but not his death.

The settlement with skepticism makes us homeless. Cavell memorably calls the philosopher the "hobo of thought." I like this line because of its humility. Philosophers are not wandering kings, but beggars. But the question that faces the skeptic, as it faced Shakespeare's protagonists, is how to face the world when it has hollowed itself out, when it becomes a dream, when I become a ghost that cannot but pass through the objects I wish to touch. What Cavell wishes to accomplish through philosophy is to place the question of your redemption (the possibility, the impossibility, of "knowing," in all the senses of that word, the world) before you. What he will ask of you is not an aversion, an active deferral (a deconstruction?), of the world, but its relinquishment. A passivity (Gelassenheit?) towards the world that, at bottom, and we must be frank here, accepts death. Perhaps we cannot seize hold of death (one interpretation of Heidegger) but we can be given it indirectly through a willingness to let our life pass away.

The question I'll try to turn to next time (if there is one) is what the stakes are in Cavell's attempt to retrieve Emerson for philosophy, and just what philosophy becomes under these conditions, a question that ultimately becomes about Wittgenstein's "outside language games" and their impossibility. There is no language of the outside, but can the outside be included as a necessary part of the inside language? The paradox of philosophy: you cannot indicate an "outside" and have it remain outside. But what if you suggest that outsides are a function of any number of particular insides? Could one system observe another and see the outside of that sytem? That's Luhmann's gambit.