European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

II-2 | 2010 Perfectionism and Pragmatism

Sandra Laugier and Piergiorgio Donatelli (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/886 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.886 ISSN: 2036-4091

Publisher Associazione Pragma

Electronic reference Sandra Laugier and Piergiorgio Donatelli (dir.), European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, II-2 | 2010, « Perfectionism and Pragmatism » [Online], Online since 21 December 2010, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/886 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.886

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Symposia. “Perfectionism and Pragmatism”

Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, and Perfectionism Introduction to the Symposia Piergiorgio Donatelli, Roberto Frega and Sandra Laugier

Emerson and Skepticism A Reading of “Friendship” Russell B. Goodman

Must We Do What We Say? Truth, Responsibility and the Ordinary in Ancient and Modern Perfectionism Daniele Lorenzini

Wittgenstein, the Criticism of Philosophy, and Self-Knowledge Tarek R. Dika

Cavell’s “Moral Perfectionism” or Emerson’s “Moral Sentiment”? Joseph Urbas

Emersonian Moral Perfectionism An Alternative Ethics – But in What Sense? Heikki A. Kovalainen

Internal Relations and the Possibility of Evil On Cavell and Monstrosity Martin Shuster

Perfectionism and Moral Reasoning Matteo Falomi

What Is and What Should Pragmatic Ethics Be? Some Remarks on Recent Scholarship Juan Pablo Serra

Man as the Measure of All Things Thoughts on Moral Perfection, Finitude, and Metaethics Jeremy Millington

William James on Truth and Invention in Morality Sarin Marchetti

Free Spirits Idealism and Perfectionism Sophie Djigo

The Difficulty of Moral Perfectionism Cavell and Diamond on Self-understanding, Disagreement and Nonsense in Ethics Stefano Di Brisco

Autonomy Here and Now Cavell’s Criticisms of Rawls Nadav Arviv

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Essays

Stylists in the American Grain Wallace Stevens, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty Aine Kelly

Sergio Franzese Reader of James Sarin Marchetti

Book Review

Wojcieh MALECKI, Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory Peter Lang, New York et al., 2010 Kalle Puolakka

Gemma CORRADI FIUMARA, Spontaneity. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry London and New York, Routledge, 2009 Guido Baggio

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Symposia. “Perfectionism and Pragmatism”

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Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, and Perfectionism Introduction to the Symposia

Piergiorgio Donatelli, Roberto Frega and Sandra Laugier

1 The relation between Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, and Perfectionism is both obvious and difficult, and this is what prompted us to edit the present issue of the Journal. The relation is obvious, because the history of American Philosophy is deeply textured by this relation, and the transition from Transcendentalism to Pragmatism has been historically attested. Difficult, because these traditions seem to deny one another.1 Pragmatist philosophers have often presented themselves as the founders of the American philosophical tradition, or at least of a new one; and in order to establish their philosophical and epistemological legitimacy, they have undervalued the influence of previous tradition. While this is mostly evident in the case of Ralph Emerson, similar remarks can be made for the whole American pre-pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, lovers of Transcendentalism (Stanley Cavell being the first) have vindicated Emerson’s voice by disconnecting him from Pragmatism and claiming his irreducibility to the pragmatist tradition. There has therefore been a sort of Transcendental anti-pragmatist reaction, issuing in charges to the effect that Pragmatists have been blind, or deaf, to Emerson’s influence and, consequently, to perfectionist themes.2 This question, then, seems to need some elucidation, and, moreover, seems to be at the core of any reflection on the nature and definition of American Philosophy today.

2 The recent upsurge of studies aimed at exploring the historical relationships between these traditions has not obfuscated the importance of Cavell’s voice in this debate. Indeed, his work has significantly contributed to the emergence of a specifically perfectionist dimension to this discussion, making a distinct contribution to the fashioning of the very idea of American Philosophy as a Philosophy Americana.3 Cavell, in works such as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990) and Cities of Words (2004), has worked to bring Emerson’s voice back to the heart of American philosophy. Beyond mere historical rehabilitation, Cavell has sought to establish the present-day relevance of Emerson’s thinking. He identifies the

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task of establishing Emerson as an actual philosopher with a twofold struggle: distinguishing Emerson from the Pragmatists and distinguishing himself from “neopragmatists,” i.e., those who, like Rorty, claim the inheritance of Dewey. Thus, the struggle for a new appraisal of Transcendentalist themes has turned out to be a struggle for inheritances.

3 As Cavell notes in This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), in order to establish something as American philosophy, you need to specify whom you will inherit from. The classical European tradition imported during colonial period? The native, indigenous traditions existing since time immemorial? From Emerson and the Transcendentalists? From Dewey, James, Peirce and the other Pragmatists? Or from the philosophers of the Vienna circle, who arrived during the 1930’s and 40’s? These struggles over inheritance are not merely historical quarrels: they play an essential role in establishing what the word “American” might mean for philosophy in America today. They are thus at the very heart of the making of contemporary American philosophy. In this sense, Cavell’s reappropriation of the Emersonian tradition represents but a step in the broader process through which American philosophy attempts the reappraisal of its own sources. It parallels Rorty’s re-discovery of Pragmatism at a time when Pragmatism was itself deeply marginalized within American philosophy,4 and it has been followed by a more recent but equally important reappraisal of those native and indigenous philosophical sources that shaped American culture (and therefore philosophy) prior to and independently of both Pragmatism and Transcendentalism.5 All these different philosophical strands are contributing to a significant transformation of American philosophy: if we compare what is being done in philosophy in America today to what constituted the bulk of American philosophy only three decades ago, one is simply astonished by the incredibly rich and varied spread of approaches and traditions that have come to compose it. The state of a dominantly analytical and post-positivist philosophy (later to be opposed to a post- modern philosophy hosted by literature departments) has now been replaced by a much more pluralistic and sometimes even syncretistic flourishing of philosophical traditions. Cavell is probably the most prominent among a plurality of voices in insisting that the recovery of the American tradition in philosophy should not be veiled by a generalized appeal to pragmatism and that, accordingly, there is really no point in calling “Pragmatist” anything that has been done in philosophy before the rise of analytical philosophy. Cavell’s point is that we should give room to a wider, more inclusive understanding of the American inheritance, an inheritance that is at the same time pragmatist, pre-pragmatist, and non-pragmatist. This is the historical scenario within which Cavell’s reappraisal of Emerson and, more generally, the renaissance of an Emersonian tradition today has to be understood.

4 In the context of this framework, Cavell has given himself the task – notably in his essays “What is the Emersonian Event?,” and “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” – of clearly distinguishing Emerson from Pragmatism. His strategy of demarcation is based upon a reading of Pragmatism – and notably of Deweyan Pragmatism – stressing those elements of instrumentalism and practicalism (what Dewey called ironically a “bread and butter” kind of Pragmatism) that mostly contrast with the ethical insights of the Transcendental tradition. Such a position has appeared to many to be quite unfair. One has to consider, for instance, Dewey’s many references to Emerson (see Colapietro 2004, Saito 2005, and Juan Pablo Serra this issue) as well as

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Dewey’s reflective and imaginative conception of ethical experience (see Frega 2006, Pappas 2008).

5 Given his views about the philosophical importance of the theme of inheritance, this demarcation has had a central methodological importance to Cavell. But it has also a philosophical significance of its own. Pragmatism and Perfectionism, in fact, incarnate a tension between two dimensions of moral experience whose reconciliation remains an unachieved task for moral and political thinking. On the one hand, you have the pragmatist struggle to account for human experience within the framework of a rationality immanent to experience and focused on the needs that emerge within contextual problematic situations. On the other, the perfectionist idea that at the heart of experience lies a core which is and remains irreducible to any effort at rationalization, and which escapes any reductivist attempt at accounting for it in functional, instrumental or materialist terms. This tension notwithstanding, pragmatism and perfectionism are philosophical traditions that share quite a broad basis provided by the primacy both assign to the ordinary as well as the epistemological primacy they assign to experience as a privileged starting point in philosophy. Yet they part ways, at least partially, with respect to the part of experience they decide to emphasize: its reflective and rational character in pragmatism; its stubborn irreducibility to a complete and self-transparent articulation in perfectionism.

6 Accordingly, for Cavell the reappropriation of Emerson’s true voice – the specific tone of Emerson – requires in the first instance a differentiation from Pragmatism. As Cavell says early on (this time regarding the difference between Pragmatism and Wittgenstein): It might be worth pointing out that these teachings 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 that makes all the difference. (Cavell 1969: 36; 2003: 216)

7 This tone in Emerson (that Cavell in a previous text called “mood” and, later, “pitch”), or Wittgenstein for that matter, is not a variable or psychological element: it is our capacity to speak, to stand up and speak for ourselves or for others, to take into account the fact that language is said and must be said in order to really be meant (herein lies the meaning of the title of his first text “Must We Mean What We Say?”). Here we should certainly remark that a certain priority of language which marks Cavell’s approach to philosophy is not to be found in classical pragmatism, whose philosophical stance is rather marked by the priority of experience over language.

8 This different attitude accounts for some of the distance that characterizes the relationship between pragmatism and perfectionism, or transcendentalism, although such differences should not be overemphasized. At any rate, one should distinguish the disagreement marking Cavell’s distance from classical pragmatism from the disagreement between Cavell and the neo-pragmatists. It is at this second level that the question of inheritance emerges, so that we might describe the disagreement between Rorty and Cavell as a disagreement over inheritance: it concerns the figures of American philosophy each of them promotes. Of course, Cavell, Putnam, and Rorty join forces in wishing to prompt the rediscovery of unjustly neglected American thinkers (Emerson, James, Dewey). Yet the forms and the meaning of this rediscovery are not the same. Although in keeping with a felicitous movement of reappropriation of the

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American philosophical past, the rediscovery of Pragmatism is feared by Cavell to circumvent Emerson’s originality. For Cavell, reading Emerson means rediscovering his specificity, a certain approach to the ordinary and to democracy, which is insoluble in terms of the consensual thinking on democracy that developed in America during the 20th century.

9 According to Cavell, in order to realize this, it is necessary to listen to the distinctiveness of Emerson’s voice, the difference in tone in the treatment he proposes of themes now familiar in the writing of John Dewey. In “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” Cavell distinguishes Emerson from Dewey and from Pragmatism in general by the tone of his democratic aspiration (Cavell 2003: 216). The question is therefore to decide which Emerson we wish to inherit today: the precursor of Pragmatism, who would poetically formulate some principles later to be rationalized (as the call to commonality and practicality), or the radical thinker of individualism? Cavell wants to establish a caesura between Transcendentalism and Pragmatism. As a consequence of this, Cavell’s position towards Pragmatism appears inevitably unjust, notably towards sincere defenders of democracy like Dewey, or towards philosophers like William James who claimed (certainly not without ambiguity) a part of the Emersonian legacy.

10 In any case, it is precisely in the democratic demand, however, that Cavell proposes to locate what is different in Emerson, even if we find more than an echo of Emerson in Dewey, who never ceased to refer to his debt to Emerson (Dewey 1903). Dewey, like Emerson, demanded commonality, that the ordinary or everyday life be shared by all men; and both called for an ideal community. But in the Emersonian approach to commonality, there is nothing of a consensus or a rational agreement. Cavell urges this point also against contemporary political theories of democracy, most notably against the Rawlsian conception and the long lasting tradition of contractualism. A characteristic of Emerson’s politics is his critical dimension, a perfectionist refusal of society such as it exists – a refusal to recognize it as belonging to oneself as soon as one begins searching for a better self. Hence the notes of hatred for his contemporaries that sometimes sound in his work, which are justified only by a hatred for oneself: Emersonian Perfectionism requires that we become ashamed in a particular way of ourselves, of our present stance, and the Emersonian Nietzsche requires, as a consecration of the next self, that we hate ourselves, as it were impersonally. (Cavell 1990: 16)

11 A political implication of this skeptical refusal to accept to resolve agreement in consensus is an original questioning of the relationship of the individual to the community. This is what Cavell thinks is lost in Pragmatism – but more generally in mainstream con- temporary political theory – and why, according to Cavell, Emerson’s voice is “deadened” even in 19th century American Philosophy. Still, the question remains open: maybe because Cavell’s position, as shown in a number of contributions here (Ardiv, Dika), is deeply determined by the connection between Emerson and Wittgenstein established, e.g., in Cavell (1989), and their approach to voice. The voice is precisely what is defined, at the start of “Self-Reliance,” as the very demand to trust oneself, which Cavell calls the “arrogation of voice” that leads oneself to say “We,” to speak in the name of the rest of humanity. For Cavell, the first question, then, is indeed knowing how one can speak – who, apart from me could give me the authority to speak for us? This is the question he had already asked in “Must We Mean What We Say?” where he examined the method of ordinary language philosophy, which consists in

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elucidating what we say, and which led him in turn to Austin’s defense. This question of the voice comes years before Cavell’s discovery of it in Emerson, with its themes of the acceptance of speech, of the autobiographical, and the act of (dis)possessing one’s speech as the only manner, paradoxically, of accessing representativeness. Cavell generalizes the autobiographical dimension of any speech act in the first person in clearly Emersonian terms: The autobiographical dimension of philosophy is internal to the claim that philosophy speak for the human, for all; that is its necessary arrogance. The philosophical dimension of autobiography is that the human is representative, say, imitative, that each life is exemplary of all, a parable of each; that is humanity’s commonness, which is internal to its endless denials of commonness. (Cavell 2003: 10-1)

12 The enigma of representativeness is then the central enigma of politics. How can I relinquish my voice and consider that someone represent and speak for me? Here, the connection to Dewey’s themes becomes obvious, especially if one relies on Emerson and Cavell’s call for a community and Dewey’s call for a public as the necessary and necessarily unachieved task of democracy. Cavell’s discovery of Emerson, which took place some years after the publication of The Claim of Reason, responds to problems raised very early in his philosophy. Recall that Cavell remarks, in his first texts on Emerson, that he was for a long time deaf and indifferent towards Emerson. One is thus only struck all the more by the Emersonian tone of these passages from The Claim of Reason: But since the genuine social contract is not in effect (we could know this by knowing that we are born free, and are everywhere in chains) it follows that we are not exercising our general will; and since we are not in a state of nature it follows that we are exercising our will not to the general, but to the particular, to the unequal, to private benefit to privacy. We obey the logic of conspiracy. (Cavell 1979: 26)

13 The question of the voice is thus the political question, from Plato to Rousseau to Emerson and Dewey. Cavell, when he takes it upon himself to bring Emerson’s voice back to the field of philosophy, inscribes Wittgenstein himself in the extension of the Emersonian voice. To speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them – not as a parent speaks for you, i.e. instead of you, but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e. speaks your mind. Who these others are, for whom you speak and by whom you are spoken for, is not known a priori, though it is in practice generally treated as given. (Cavell 1979: 27)

14 Democracy, for Emerson, is inseparable from Self-Reliance, that is to say, from confidence – not as hollow self-conceit or a feeling of superiority (a debased version of perfectionism, as he sometimes says), but as a refusal of conformity, of letting oneself be spoken for by others. Self-reliance is thus a political position, claiming the voice of the subject from conformism, from uses that are accepted in a non-critical way, and from dead institutions, or those no longer representative or “confiscated.” Cavell therefore brings perfectionism back to contemporary politics at a time when Rawls’ political liberalism seemed to have definitively expunged it from political theory. Rorty’s proposition, which sees in Emerson the precursor of a pragmatism whose tradition, with liberalism, continues on into the 20th century, rests, for Cavell, on a lack of understanding Emerson’s political specificity. This is the critical requirement with

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Emerson: a critique, first of all, of oneself, one that inscribes itself at the heart of the contemporary American debate on political radicalism and its legacy, a political question of individualism as a principle of the agreement to society (see Bercovitch 1993). But self-reliance only has strength or practical value if its aversion to conformism also addresses itself to oneself: So we are to remember that an aversive address may be taken toward oneself as much as toward any institution. Not thus to address the self is to harbor conformity, and I think Emerson invites us to see this as a political choice. (Cavell 2003: 190)

15 Cavell compares Dewey’s treatment of intelligence6 with what Emerson wrote in “Self- Reliance”: “To believe your own thought […] that is genius.” When Emerson evokes the genius in each person, he expresses the hope that man is one, and that he can therefore become ordinary, attain his ordinariness, and such a hope has nothing to do with the increase of knowledge or scientific progress. In attaining the ordinary and democracy by way of individual genius instead of by science and the reform of intelligence: there again is something that separates Transcendentalism from Pragmatism.

16 We could also characterize this difference by turning to science, which rendered Pragmatism more presentable in the 20th century, and thus more assimilable to analytical philosophy than Transcendentalism. Cavell thinks that there is a certain conflict between the appeal to science and the appeal to ordinary language, which has been constant since the entrance of the latter into philosophy. It is the specific difficulty in turning to ordinary language, and more generally in rediscovering what is common to us, that is forgotten in Pragmatism. We could then characterize the difference between Transcendentalism and Pragmatism as the difference between the appeal to the ordinary and the appeal to commonality – except that commonality, in Pragmatism, appears as given, while for Transcendentalism, it is an object of skepticism: The philosophical appeal to the ordinary, the words we are given in common, is inherently taken in opposition to something about my words as they stand. […] The appeal challenges our commonality in favor of a more genuine commonality (surely something that characterizes Dewey’s philosophical mission) but in the name of no expertise, no standing adherence to logic or to science, to nothing beyond genius. (Cavell 2003: 218)

17 It is for this reason that the symptom of Pragmatism’s ignorance of the ordinary is, for Cavell, its casualness regarding Skepticism, or the idea that science constitutes a response to Skepticism. Emerson’s entire work is run through, at least after Nature, with the menace of Skepticism. According to Cavell, the refusal of Skepticism is, conversely, a characteristic of Pragmatism: In contrast, neither James nor Dewey seems to take the threat of skepticism seriously. […] Pragmatism seems designed to refuse to take skepticism seriously, as it refuses – in Dewey’s, if not always in James’ case – to take metaphysical distinctions seriously. (Cavell 2003: 221)

18 Here we see probably the highest point of Cavell’s misunderstanding of pragmatism: he draws an opposition between science and the ordinary (that according to him is an opposition between science and ordinary language) where the real opposition is that taking place between a philosophy of the ordinary as experience and a philosophy of the ordinary as language. Here lies one of the enduring sources of the misunderstanding of pragmatism: its call for intelligence, for practice, for the public nature of thought are

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but appeals to the manifold and constantly changing guises of human experience. In its closeness to experience, pragmatism and perfectionism are probably closer than they are currently acknowledged to be.7 And yet, as Cavell incessantly remarks, our philosophical understanding should be sensitive to their irreducible differences, which should neither be neglected nor conceived as forms of conflict. They are, rather, as Cavell aptly acknowledges, forms of philosophical tension.8

19 This perspective makes it easier to rethink – under the guise of this philosophical tension – Dewey’s political and ethical ideas in relation to those expressed by Emerson. We all know that the democratic influence of the philosophical appeal to the ordinary is an essential question for Emerson and Dewey. Emerson and Dewey are both, although in dissimilar ways, thinkers of the community. They both praise the communal dimension of human experience, and they both call for an ethical engagement as the necessary basis of political democracy. Yet Emerson, more than Dewey, has stressed the irreducibility of the individual to the community, the political necessity of taking seriously his individual voice the moment before it vanishes into the universal vacuum of political consensus. While Dewey’s democracy at times seems to take the individual’s assent to the community too easily for granted, Emerson reminds us that human association is always on the verge of failure. Both the Emersonian and the Pragmatist tradition bring to contemporary thought voices that cannot easily be reconciled with the mainstream categories of moral and political philosophy. They are both accused to be the bearers of a currently unacceptable perfectionism and, although for different reasons, to foster oppressive political conceptions. Yet their perfectionism is not the same, and their conceptions of the individual and of the community differ at significant points. These are some of the moments of this fruitful tension that constantly unites and separates the pragmatist and the perfectionist traditions in philosophy.

20 It is with the aim of furthering the complex and rich conversation between these American traditions that many of the essays here published propose a reworking of moral perfectionism as this notion has been invented by Cavell in his specific reading of Emerson. Cavell brings his long reflection in several fields of philosophy and cultural criticism – more directly in the direction of rethinking the place and the nature of ethics – and in so doing he opens a new scene in moral and political philosophy. In Cavell’s treatment, moral perfectionism is an elaboration of the importance of the idea that one’s life is progressing towards an ideal of perfectibility, but he actually moves this notion into an entirely new space where new questions are seen and a new problematic is introduced. The idea of perfectibility and thus of a movement from the present condition to a further, better one is placed within the circumstances of a self which may find or lose herself, may find or lose confidence in herself, in her grasp of the world and of people. Cavell’s diagnosis is that the place of such movements is mainly missed by philosophical ethics nowadays, and the notion of perfectionism attempts to render this area of life visible once again. The dimension of perfectionism renders visible such movements of the self that make sense as discoveries of possibilities which require a distance from one’s present condition, and yet which are also perceived as a further stage of one’s life (see Sophie Djigo on this notion of possibility).

21 The condition of the self diagnosed by Cavell’s perfectionism speaks to issues of moral education, the importance of the philosophic notion of virtue, the importance of sentiments and motivation, and against a picture which attributes the main role to

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reasons which move in an empty space (emptied of humanity). But it does so in a way which places the idea of becoming intelligible to oneself at the center, the idea of authenticity, self-discovery, self-reliance, and thus introduces the notion of the self as something that needs to be conquered against the inclination to take it for granted as a matter of habit, of what is received passively from society, or of what is merely absorbed but never made one’s own. At this crossroad we find issues of how one comes to terms with one’s culture, of the various possibilities of inheritance, transformation or refusal (see Martin Shuster). In this perspective perfectionism rethinks what makes one’s relationship with other people, with society and with one’s beliefs something alive and meaningful, or on the contrary something disconnected from ourselves: the conditions of friendship (see Russell Goodman on this crucial notion) and of just institutions (on Rawls and Cavell, see Nadav Arviv).

22 The way in which Cavell inscribes into the notion of the self and its education this radical possibility of loss shapes moral perfectionism and its dialogue with various traditions that have placed the importance of self transformation and the test of personal life at the center of their reflections. Perfectionism encourages especially dialogue with the ancient tradition (see Daniele Lorenzini on a comparison between the ancient and the modern), with the Socratic notion of ethics as a kind of integrity with oneself, with the special place given by Aristotle to the virtue of friendship, with the Hellenistic teachings about how to take care of oneself in a way which transforms the substance of one’s self (as first given prominence by Foucault), and also with how this rich tradition gets to be re-employed by Christianity. This dialogue continues through the centuries with the difficulties and resistances offered – if we follow once again Foucault’s lesson – by both Christianity’s interest in making self-transformation invisible as a possibility open to all and by the detachment of spirituality from science, which in the end means the neglect of spirituality as an area in which knowledge requires personal transformation. A space for moral perfectionism comes to be visible from within the preoccupations of the authors whom Cavell takes as main references: Emerson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, among others (see Russell Goodman, Joseph Urbas and Heikki Kovalainen on Emerson, Tarek Dika on Wittgenstein). Our main focus is of course the connection between transcendentalism and pragmatism: some of the papers show Emerson’s influence on Dewey and James, and thereby go up against a tendency, in the promoters of American transcendentalism, to deny the very important influence of Emersonian ethics on Pragmatist ethics, which elaborates the perfectionist role of the self and of its relation to democratic society (see Sarin Marchetti on William James, Juan Pablo Serra on Peirce and Dewey). Cavell writes that his way of introducing moral perfectionism suggests that it should not be thought of “as a competing moral theory […] but as emphasizing a dimension of the moral life any theory of it may wish to accommodate” (Cavell 1990: xxxi). We may actually enlarge the comparison with the various traditional ways in which philosophic ethics is treated in the analytic language – metaethics, moral theory, applied ethics – and explore how they miss this dimension.

23 The emphasis placed by perfectionism on the self may also be read along with its emphasis on the voice with which we speak, on the words that make us intelligible to ourselves, on how we take in the things that happen, on what sorts of attention and senses of portance make these things our personal and shared world. Here perfectionism shows how traditional divisions within metaethics about the role of language and its connection with reason and the sentiments may leave this dimension of the moral life entirely out of consideration (see Jeremy Millington). The kind of

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personal weight borne by a word, which is also the weight of a whole culture, what makes a fact significant and important, may not be registered along the traditional lines of cognitivism and non-cognitivism. The traditional concern within metaethics for language has missed the importance for words as being expressive of one’s life, of one’s attachment or separation from others and from the world. This was the topic of Iris Murdoch’s writings from the 50s on, and such issues have been taken over and explored beautifully by Cora Diamond (see Stefano Di Brisco on this). This also shows how perfectionism requires an understanding of the imaginative arts, of literature and film, as places where the expressive character of words and human voice are dealt with crucially.

24 Another theme explored by Perfectionism (and on a different tone by pragmatism too) is that of the place of reasons and rationality within moral life. Perfectionist thinkers – Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond above all – have claimed that the choice offered by moral theory, especially through the false alternative between utilitarian and deontological ethics, presents moral experience in a rationalized form which does not answer the questions raised by moral perfectionism (on perfectionism and reasoning, see Matteo Falomi). The approaches which place virtue at the center may also miss the concern of perfectionism for the transformation of the self as a matter of self-discovery and intelligibility. Further, what is now discussed as applied ethics may also easily miss the concern that perfectionism elaborates for the richness of the concrete case. Applied ethics has been thought of, in the course of its main discussions, as conceptual clarification which bears on general notions and large theories, whereas perfectionism suggests bringing in reflection and generality in a different manner, that is, in the way in which a specific circumstance facing specific people can call a whole culture and way of thinking into question, and how one personally takes responsibility for this.

25 These are but some of the challenges that the articles published in this volume take on. They show to a considerable degree that Transcendentalism and Perfectionism belong to the best part of the American tradition in philosophy. They also show that the dialogue with the Pragmatist tradition is fruitful and worth pursuing as a dialogue among members of a common philosophical family.

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FREGA R., (2006), Pensée, expérience, pratique. Essai sur la théorie du jugement de John Dewey, Paris, L’Harmattan.

GOODMAN R., (1990), American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

LAUGIER S., (1999b), Recommencer la philosophie: la philosophie américaine aujourd’hui, Paris, PUF.

PAPPAS G., (2008), Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

PRATT S., (2002), Native Pragmatism, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.

RORTY R., (1980), “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 53 (6).

RORTY R., (1988), Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

SAITO N., (2005), The Gleam of Light, New York, Fordham University Press.

THOREAU H. D., (1991) Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Vintage Books, The Library of America.

WILSHIRE B., (2000), The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press.

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NOTES

1. There are, though, some considerable exceptions. See notably Goodman 1990, and Anderson 2006. 2. We owe to Naoko Saito a careful reconstruction of the philosophical kernel uniting and dividing Emerson, Dewey, and Cavell on the question of the philosophical inheritance of transcendentalist themes within pragmatism, and of pragmatist themes within contemporary perfectionist thought. See Saito 2005. 3. See Anderson 2006 for a philosophical interpretation of this notion. 4. See his important Presidential Address of the APA in 1978 (Rorty 1980), echoed some years later by that of Richard Bernstein, significantly devoted to a reconciliation in the appraisal of the common roots of the American philosophical tradition (Bernstein 1988). 5. See the reconstruction of this historical process offered by Scott Pratt 2002. See also Bunge 1984, Dunsmore 1997, and Wilshire 2000. 6. [Pragmatism] is the formation of a faith in intelligence, as the one and indispensable belief necessary to moral and social life” (Dewey 1963: 34-5). The quotation is taken from “The Development of American Pragmatism.” 7. But see Saito’s important achievement in bringing Pragmatism and Perfectionism closer. 8. See Cavell’s Foreword to Saito 2005.

AUTHORS

PIERGIORGIO DONATELLI

Sapienza Universita di Roma piergiorgio.donatelli[at]uniroma1.it

ROBERTO FREGA

CNRS-IMM Paris fregarob[at]gmail.com

SANDRA LAUGIER

Université Paris 1 Sorbonne sandra.laugier[at]univ-paris1.fr

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Emerson and Skepticism A Reading of “Friendship”

Russell B. Goodman

1 My consideration of Emerson’s “Friendship” essay is part of a broader project of trying to make sense of Emerson’s thought as a whole by delineating paths of coherence through it. These paths fall into two kinds: the consistent enunciation of a view or “master-tone” from essay to essay, and the internal linkage among these views.1 For example, the notion of process or flux finds its way into all Emerson’s essays, and plays a central role in several of his greatest. Process is more than a subject for continuing discussion in various essays, however, for it is internally linked to many of Emerson’s most important claims: that we must learn to skate over the surfaces of life, that all ethical forms are “initial,” that language is most effectively used for “conveyance” rather than for “homestead,” that “all things good are on the highway.”

2 While thinking about these paths of coherence among Emerson’s essays, I have at the same time been attending to the ways Emerson’s individual essays work: to their order, progression, argument, points of view.2 In this paper, I want to consider the “Friendship” essay in all these ways: to chart the course of its argument, to delineate its connections with other writings of Emerson’s, and to explore the conceptual connections between friendship and such other Emersonian concepts as self-reliance.

3 I begin not with the “Friendship” essay itself, but with strands of Emerson’s discussion of friendship that we find in some of his other essays. In “Spiritual Laws,” a companion essay to “Friendship” in the Essays, First Series, Emerson describes the way friendships begin. They have nothing to do with effort, worldly accomplishments, or physical beauty, he asserts, but are rather matters of attraction or affinity. When “all is done,” Emerson writes, “a person of related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another having come: we are utterly relieved and refreshed: it is a sort of joyful solitude” (CW2: 87).3 Friendships, like much of the best in life as Emerson sees it, are spontaneous and unforced.

4 Friendship appears in a rather different context in “The Divinity School Address,” where Emerson complains that Christianity has lost the essential friendliness of Jesus’s

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message, so that “the friend of man is made the injurer of man.” The language “that describes Christ to Europe and America,” Emerson complains, is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, – paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo […]. The time is coming when all men will see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow. (CW1: 82-3)

5 Jesus is the divine friend of divine men and women, Emerson holds. He is a god who is not foreign but right at hand – as close as our friends in our best moments together, when we are invited “to be and to grow.” The friendly message of Jesus, Emerson is saying, has been usurped, or as we would now say, hijacked – transformed into a message of fear, alienation, and hostility.

6 If friendship is central to Emerson’s conception of Christianity, it is equally central to his conception of art, specifically to painting. Describing his first experiences with the great paintings of Europe in the essay “Art,” Emerson writes that he “fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign won- der.” Instead, he found the paintings “famililar and sincere, […] the plain you and me I knew so well, – had left at home in so many conversations” (CW2: 214). He found Raphael’s Transfiguration, in particular, was “familiar […] as if one should meet a friend” (CW2: 215).

7 But Emerson strikes another note here in “Art” that will be crucial to my reading of “Friendship” – for it is a skeptical note. Continuing the argument we have been examining, he takes one of his characteristic dialectical turns, signaled by a new paragraph beginning with the word “yet”: Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed at and promised, not to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value of the Iliad, or the Transfiguration, is as signs of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting effort to produce […]. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. (CW2: 215)

8 Emerson’s terms for the arts he has experienced are derogatory: they are said to be “abortive births,” and to give only a “mean” idea of human resources and creativity. Yet Emerson also asserts their value as “signs of power,” as inspirations or reminders of something “aimed at and promised.” He turns against the great European painting that he has just praised because of its distance from the ideal, just as he turns from even the best books when he has his own work to do. In a similar manner and for similar reasons, he turns from his friends.

9 The final essay I wish to cite before considering “Friendship” is “Experience,” a complex assessment of human life in the context of the death of Emerson’s son Waldo. “Experience” presents what Cavell has called an “epistemology of moods,”4 according to which life is a succession of different and sometimes irreconcilable perspectives on or appreciations of things. In the passage I wish to consider, Emerson considers the different books with which he has had intense relationships: Once I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakespeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of

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them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures; each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again […]. The reason of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love. (CW3: 33)

10 This passage from “Experience” brings friendship into alignment with a tragic theme in Emerson’s thought that is often overlooked. Although we may still “cherish the genius” of the books and people we are no longer in touch with, Emerson is saying that we lose some- thing too – and that this loss is both painful and inescapable, hence tragic. We must take our leave of pictures, we must take our leave of friends, we must take our leave of books. These things that ”you shall never see […] again” are the flip side – the less pleasant face – of the surprises and flashing insights that Emerson characteristically seeks and records.

11 Emerson’s idea that our human lives with others are disappointing chimes with Stanley Cavell’s discussion of lived skepticism in The Claim of Reason. Our skepticism about others, Cavell asserts, is not an academic exercise, but as common as the jealousy of Othello, the blindness of Lear, the disappointment we feel with a conversation in which we have not expressed ourselves adequately. Cavell conceives of such lived skepticism not only as being unsure of others (as Othello is of Desdemona), but as rooted in a deep disappointment with even our best cases of knowing – as if, he writes, “we have, or have lost, some picture of what knowing another, or being known by another, would really come – 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.”5

12 Emerson’s critique is not directed at our best cases of friendship, whose satisfaction and promise he credits, but at friendships that fail to deliver on their initial promise. When he is in a glum mood about his life with his friends, he will say, as he does in one of the darker moments of the essay to which we will shortly turn: “Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed” (CW2: 116). Emerson doesn’t quite believe in his friends (he neither names nor refers to a particular friend in his essay), but he seeks and for some hours has found friendship. Cavell’s work on “skepticism about other minds,” centers on the question of our own responsibility – Lear’s responsibility, Othello’s responsibility – for failing to know others. Emerson’s focus is different, not on our failures to acknowledge others but our failures to ask the best of both others and ourselves. I take from Cavell both the idea that skepticism is lived out in our lives with others, and a set of questions: whether skepticism is inescapable and whether it reveals something about our condition; whether it is to be accommodated, yielded to, overcome, or refuted. To put my cards on the table, I think Emerson shows us that a kind of lived skepticism concerning others is a feature of our lives, but that the accomplishments of friendship are too; and that in its powerful effect on us, friendship instills the hope for something better than the best friend we have.

13 Emerson’s essay on “Friendship” begins in an unexpected place: with people “whom we scarcely speak to,” or whom we merely “see in the street.” We “warmly rejoice to be with” them, Emerson asserts. But what kind of being with is this? Emerson seems to be talking about a sense of human community and even love, which we feel even when there is no sign that it is reciprocated. No particular friend or relationship is singled out in Emerson’s statement that the “whole human family is bathed with an element of

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love like a fine ether” (113). The tone is sanguine, but the reader is left to wonder where in this picture is the friendship of one person for another.6

14 The second paragraph continues with the idea of a generalized feeling of love and companionship, what Emerson calls “emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others.” There is a hierarchy of such emotions, he now asserts, from “the lowest degree of good will,” which seems to be Emerson’s subject in these opening paragraphs, to “the highest degree of passionate love” (CW2: 113) – something he never quite manages to discuss in the essay.

15 In the third paragraph Emerson moves from these somewhat abstract and generalized remarks to a specific type of experience: our anticipation of the arrival in our house of a “commended stranger.” What is this “stranger” doing in an essay on “Friendship?” one might ask. The stranger seems to stand for the possibilities of an ideal friendship, a friendship that we seek but do not have. In this way the commended stranger “stands for humanity,” as Emerson puts it. Emerson asserts of the stranger that “He is what we wish” (CW2: 114), implying that we seek the stranger’s company because he will give or inspire in us something we now lack, what he calls in “History” our “unattained but attainable self” (CW2: 5). Continuing his generic story of the arrival of the stranger, Emerson writes that the “house is dusted” and among its residents the stranger’s “arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him” (CW2: 113). After all the preparation and anticipation the stranger’s visit at first goes very well. We speak better than we are accustomed to, so that “our own kinsfolk and acquaintance […] feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers.” However, as the visit continues, the stranger turns out to be not as commendable as we had supposed, and the friend we had sought something still to be wished for. For the stranger begins “to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation,” and then: it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and the best, he will ever hear from us […]. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, – but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more. (CW2: 114)

16 What does this have to say about friendship? Not much, it might seem. There is no friend here, but mostly vulgar “old acquaintances” who don’t show us the best of themselves and who do not elicit the best in us. It is this normal condition that we had hoped to escape and for a while did escape, with the commended stranger. The stranger awakens our always present desire for “the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the soul,” for a humanity of the future. But he also disappoints us.

17 Emerson’s little drama is a paradigm of lived skepticism in the following sense: it shows that our doubts about friendship are justified by the course of our experience. The stranger’s arrival excites us with the hope of genius – his and ours – and he seems for some moments to be the ideal we seek. Emerson generalizes the point in “Experience” not just to commended strangers but to our friends. Our friends, he writes, “appear to us as representatives of certain ideas” (CW3: 251), but there is “an optical illusion” about them. Each turns out to have boundaries that are never passed, so that what seemed spontaneous and lively “in the year, in the lifetime, […] turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play” (CW3: 249). Emerson’s “Friendship” essay is a meditation or set of variations on this theme of hope and disappointment in our lives with others. His initial drama includes several moods: the “throbbing heart” of anticipation, and the “fear” of the meeting with the

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stranger, the expansive elation in the beginnings of conversation when our own powers surprise those who know us, the mood of disappointment and resignation as we return from elated conversation to become once again the “dumb devil” who greets tedious old acquaintances. If, as Emerson says in “Experience,” our life is “a train of moods like a string of beads” each showing “only what lies in its focus,” then Emerson’s friendship essay records the moods of our lives with others.

18 Let us return now to the course of Emerson’s essay. As if beginning afresh, Emerson moves in paragraphs four and five to a discussion of the pleasures and advantages of friendship, which he now describes as “an encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling” (CW2: 114). Yet amidst this praise for the overcoming of the boundaries between individuals comes the suggestion that those boundaries remain: “I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded as from time to time they pass my gate.” This is an image of friendship, or perhaps just admiration, at a distance, and recalls the opening paragraph’s cool pleasure in the people to whom one does not speak.

19 The sixth paragraph returns to the impending visit of a stranger, but now (as if in a new key) in the first person singular rather than the first person plural. “A new person is to me a great event,” Emerson confesses, “and hinders me from sleep.” Again he strikes a skeptical note: “I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day: it yields no fruit” (CW2: 115). Here it is not a disappointment with our criteria as such that is at issue, but a disappointment that reasonable criteria of friendship – which have been met in our best moments with our friends – are not met by this new visitor. Emerson oscillates between an appreciation of and skepticism about his friend: “I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine,” he states; but also: “We overestimate the conscience of our friend” (CW2: 115). Do we idolize our friends and they us, or do we accurately read each other’s reality and promise?

20 Emerson begins the lengthy seventh paragraph with a series of skeptical observations and conclusions about belief and knowledge: Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. (CW2: 116)

21 In Emerson’s other essays, surprises bring joy and expansion, a new and fuller perspective on life. Here however, we are surprised to find that our friend is more limited than we thought, that we project virtues onto her that are not really there. Rather than an underlying, living unity, Emerson now holds up “an Egyptian skull at our banquet” – “an infinite remoteness” between persons.

22 From that remoteness Emerson turns to himself, to the self-reliant thought that a “man who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself.” Even if I do not fully feel my own wealth, he adds, “I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth.” The friend, he continues, is not “Being,” not “my soul,” but only “a picture or effigy.” And this brings Emerson to a thought that he elaborates throughout the essay: that our friends are for us to grow with and use, rather than components of a stable, unchanging relationship. The soul “puts forth friends,” he writes, “as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf” (CW2: 116). Our friends, the metaphor says, are forms of our

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growth, but they are not essential to us. They are abandoned for new friends, new shoots and leaves.

23 The soul’s growth, as Emerson sees it, is an alternation between states of society and solitude, each of which induces the opposite. “The soul environs itself with friends,” he continues, that it may into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship […]. (CW2: 117)

24 Emerson’s “instinct of affection” takes the form of a sample letter he writes to each new candidate for his friendship. The letter is couched in terms of certainty and doubt: the letter writer is not “sure” of his friend, cannot “presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me,” but acknowledges that the desire for knowledge of and by the friend is “a delicious torment.”

25 If Emerson turns against an easy acceptance of what passes for friendship, he also begins to turn against skepticism about friendship at the beginning of the ninth paragraph, a turn again announced by the word “yet”: “Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for life. They are not to be indulged.” Life, Emerson is saying, offers us possibilities, glimpses, and hours of something better, and our doubts and disappointments should not deflect us from pursuing and appreciating them. We should not aim at “a swift and petty benefit” from our friends, but have the patience to allow them to be themselves. But after this pragmatic counsel of patience, the paragraph gravitates away from the possibilities of friendship back to a dire portrayal of society: Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! (CW2: 117)

26 But as if paragraph nine introduces a theme that is then taken up more strongly in paragraphs eleven and twelve, Emerson now turns toward the claim that ideal friendship is also “real,” something found, however impermanently, in our experience. “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily,” Emerson states, “but with roughest courage. When [friendships] are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know” (CW2: 118-9). Skepticism recedes as Emerson advances the epistemological claim that we know our friends, at least as well as anything else we know. Reprising themes of his opening paragraph, he speaks of the “sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul […]. Happy is the house that shelters a friend!”

27 Midway in the immense thirteenth paragraph, Emerson develops a conceptual analysis of friendship, as composed of Truth or Sincerity on the one hand, and Tenderness on the other (CW2: 120). Sincerity is a noble virtue, a “luxury,” he states, “allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto” (CW2: 119). Sincerity resembles the straight talk and honest judgments of the “nonchalant boys, […] sure of their dinner” in “Self-Reliance,” who “would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one” (CW 2: 29).

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28 Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance” that “we are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other” (CW2: 43). In the “Friendship” essay this fear is depicted as insincerity: “We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs” (CW 2: 119). For their part, our fellow men and women avoid the little we have to say or give by requiring that we humor them: each person, Emerson complains, “has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him” (CW 2: 120).

29 With a real friend, in contrast, one may be perfectly sincere, as one is with oneself. The friend is thus “a sort of paradox in nature,” Emerson argues, because although a) “every man alone is sincere,” and b) “at the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins,” c) the true friend is an other with whom I may be as sincere as I am with myself. Emerson gives this paradox a metaphysical slant, and recalls the “idealism” that runs as a leitmotiv through his writing, as he ends the paragraph. He states: I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. (CW2: 120)

30 This is one of many moments in Emerson’s texts where along with his confrontation of an essential self, he also finds an other – sometimes in nature, sometimes in the words of a poet, sometimes, as here, in a friend. The setting of the encounter with the ideal friend is one of pleasure and spectacle. As Emerson puts it in one of his seeming knockoff lines: “My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part” (CW2: 120).

31 Emerson has distinguished two elements of friendship: sincerity and tenderness. In paragraph fourteen, he addresses tenderness, beginning with the tender anxiety we feel in the face of another person to whom we are drawn: “we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love.” But he undercuts this tenderness when he states: “I […] tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted” (CW2: 120). The lesson seems to be: devotion yes, tenderness not so much. Emerson’s critique (but not abandonment) of tenderness relies on the previous paragraph’s discussion of sincerity and self-reliance. An excess of tenderness or a false idea of tenderness – humoring someone, or following someone’s stipulations – is the death of friendship, precisely because it conflicts with following one’s own path.

32 Emerson thus sketches a reformed tenderness, blending “the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity” with a dose of the extraordinary or new. Friendship is to “dignify to each other the daily needs and offices” of our lives, but it should avoid degenerating into “something usual and settled.” Friends “should be alert and inventive” (CW2: 121).7

33 In paragraphs fifteen and sixteen Emerson discusses numbers: can more than two persons achieve the high conversation that is the form friendship often takes? What he calls the “law of one to one” is essential for “conversation,” and conversation is “the practice and consummation of friendship.” The presence of two people is necessary for friendship, but not sufficient, for conversation is a matter of “affinity,” not of will. A man reputed to be a great conversationalist, Emerson explains, does not therefore necessarily have “a word [for] his cousin or uncle” (CW2: 122).

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34 The argument begun in paragraph thirteen, concerning truth, tenderness, and the encounter with one’s majestic semblance, is interwoven with themes of distance, reception, patience, and self-reliance. Emerson rewrites a lesson of “The Divinity School Address,” where he advises the graduates not to be “too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish,” but to make their occasional visits count: “when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; […] let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; […]” (CW1: 90). Now in “Friendship” Emerson writes that we should not “desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them.” The friend is great enough to be revered, but reverence requires distance. “Treat your friend as a spectacle,” Emerson advises. “Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand” (CW2: 123). The closeness of friendship requires a certain distance. This closeness is not physical: “You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.” It is a matter not of will but of what Emerson calls “the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them: then shall we meet as water with water […]” (CW2: 123-4).

35 Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance”: “do your work and I shall know you.” The condition of being known is to do your own work. Friends have more than just knowledge of each other, for they constitute a unity. All this is being said in “Friendship” when Emerson writes: “There must be very two, before there can be very one. 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” (CW 2:123).

36 In “The Divinity School Address” Emerson contrasts the friendly message of Jesus with the fearful message of the church. Here the friend inspires awe and even fear. Fear of what? Not divine punishment from a wrathful god, but condescension as she rises to new heights.8 Friends are equals who spur each other to greater efforts, and greater deeds. Readers of Nietzsche will find anticipations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s chapter “On the Friend” in the passage from “Friendship” just quoted, and in Emerson’s continuation, which goes as follows: That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance […]. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untameable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. (CW 2:123-4)

37 One turns from the friend who no longer does us any good, but not from the friend with whom we beautifully contends. We want to enhance and preserve the friend as beautiful enemy. This friend is to be with us “forever.”

38 In a remarkably similar passage in in Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: In a friend one should still honor the enemy. Can you go close to your friend without going over to him? In a friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him. […] Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine for your friend? […] Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.9

39 Nietzsche’s tyrant corresponds to Emerson’s overly tender or solicitous “friend,” who wants us to humor him. We who humor him are his slaves. Friends for both Nietzsche

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and Emerson preserve and enhance both their own freedom and power and that of their friend. As Emerson puts it in the last sentence of his essay, friendship “treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.”

40 Emerson’s essay progresses from a diffuse friendship at a distance, to our disappointments with our friends, to the reality of friendship in our lives and its promise of something better than any friendship we have yet achieved. The essay concludes with the repeated warning that much of what we accept as friendship is not the real thing. The concluding tone is set in paragraph twenty-two, which opens in a slightly world-weary fashion: “The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables” (CW 2: 125).

41 In our impatience for companionship, Emerson goes on to say, we settle for friendship of a lower type: for “rash and foolish alliances,” “false relations,” and “leagues of friendship with cheap persons” (CW 2:125). Reprising the themes of affinity and patience, he counsels his readers not to reach for others who do not belong to them by nature, but to persist in their own paths. Not by will, but only by the attraction of their character will they be able to “draw” to themselves “the first-born of the world.”

42 Echoing earlier passages about the virtue of domestic poverty versus the allure of foreign wealth, Emerson now states: We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’ (125-6; my italics)

43 We beg, when we should look at home for what we need. Those from whom we beg are also beggars. Emerson calls our begging practice “idolatry.” We mistake another beggar for a god. Idols are made of stone, whereas divinity lies in the power of thought and transition, in, for example, the conversations and confrontations of great friends.

44 In the essay’s penultimate paragraph, Emerson confesses that in his “languid moods” he fails to follow the advice he has given. He occupies himself with “foreign objects” rather than his own development, and settles for the “household joy” and “warm sympathies” that constitute so much of what ordinarily passes for friendship. Yet he also testifies to his turnings from such friendships, a policy of aversion that runs parallel to the relation to books he recommends in “The American Scholar.” For while books are a great part of the scholar’s education, their true purpose is to inspire the scholar’s own thought. This is why “books are for the scholar’s idle times” (CW 1: 57). It is not that when you are reading you are not doing anything, but that reading is secondary to your own life. As with books, so with friends: I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. […] I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. […] Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. (CW 2:126)

45 As the “Friendship” essay comes to its end, the themes of self-reliance and an extreme if benign separation from others come to the fore. Emerson ends the penultimate paragraph with the thought that he will meet with his friends “as though we met not,

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and part as though we parted not.” He returns to the idea of friendship at a distance in the essay’s final paragraph: “It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly on one side, without due correspondence on the other.” But he immediately undercuts the alleged advantages or virtues of such a friendship when he states: “Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust” (127). Where does this leave us?

46 Looking back on the “Friendship” essay, we can see that Emerson offers a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies, conversational brilliance and expansion, a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived, a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak, the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend, the disappointment of a friend outgrown. The gift of our best friends, Emerson holds, like the gifts of art or literature, is a sense of our own power and prospects.

47 If I were to register any criticism of Emerson’s essay it would be for something he leaves out, namely the death of a friend. No doubt I am particularly sensitive to the issue, as I have lost a dear friend in the past year. It is not as if Emerson knew nothing of such loss, for by the time he published Nature in 1836, he had lost his wife Ellen and his younger brother, Charles. Indeed he brings up the subject of a friend’s death in the plaintive and somewhat abrupt end to the first chapter of Nature. After praising nature for her comforts, and recording an ecstatic experience “in snow puddles, at twilight,” Emerson ends the chapter as follows: Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under a calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. (CW 1: 10-1)

48 Here the world as a whole loses significance: we are in the domain of what Wittgenstein calls the “world” of “the unhappy man.”10

49 There is another form the loss of a friend takes in our lives, in which it is not the world as a whole that loses its worth or significance, but a part of oneself that is threatened. Emerson sets us in the right direction for appreciating this point when he writes in “Spiritual Laws”: “That mood into which a friend can bring us is his dominion over us” (CW 2:84). The word “dominion” means control or lordship, and also the lands or domains of a lord. Putting these senses together we can understand Emerson as saying that our friend allows us to live in a domain that we enter only in the mood into which he can bring us. Now when the friend dies, the mood into which he can bring us, the domain in which we lived together under his authority, dies with him. I think of this as a shrinkage of the self, a loss of that part of us that shows itself only with this friend.11 Emerson suggests a different view in “Experience” when he considers the loss of his child and finds, to his surprise and dismay, not a loss of self but a self still intact, though unable to absorb or process the events of its life.

50 Emerson’s skepticism about friendship is part of his critique of the lower, conforming forms that human life mostly takes. His account of friendship shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others –; but an equally intense awareness of what he calls “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.”

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NOTES

1. Emerson uses the term in “Culture” (CW 6: 72, where it is written “mastertones”), but I am following Cavell’s adaptation of the term in understanding it name main themes of his work. See Stanley Cavell (2004), “Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s ‘Experience’,” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Stanford University Press, 117. 2. “The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self,” “Emerson’s Mystical Empiricism,” “Paths of Coherence Through Emerson’s Philosophy: A Reading of ‘Nominalist and Realist’.” 3. Textual references are to The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971-), Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 4. Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” in Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. 5. Cavell (1979), The Claim of Reason, Oxford University Press, 440. 6. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, reciprocity is a necessary condition for friendship. 7. This blend of the daily and the inventive matches up nicely with Cavell’s descriptions of “remarriage comedy” in Pursuits of Happiness, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 8. Cf. Emerson’s statement that “virtue is Height” (CW2: 40). 9. Portable Nietzsche, 168-9. Nietzsche reread Emerson’s essays during the summer before he composed Thus Spoke Zarathustra. See Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to The Gay Science, and my “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 43, vols. 1-4, 1997, 159-80. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1963), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, paragraph 6.43. 11. William James (1983), The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 280-2.

ABSTRACTS

Recent conversations with friends and students about Emerson’s essay on friendship lead me to suspect that at least some of you will find Emerson’s views so strange or radical as not to be about friendship at all. Others will be struck by his anticipations of Nietzsche, whose name I introduce here because like Nietzsche, who read him carefully, Emerson is a genealogist and refashioner of morals. When Emerson criticizes our normal friendships by writing that we mostly “descend to meet,” he is recording the possibility, indeed with the word “mostly,” the actuality, of something better than what normally passes for friendship. If Emerson finds our friendships disappointing, that is because he thinks that friendship is a high, demanding virtue. In its best actualizations, it carries “the world for me,” as he puts it, “to new and noble depths, and enlarge[s] the meaning of all my thoughts.” It has the capacity to break down the barriers between people, canceling “the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance.” Friendship is thus a great unifier, a servant of what Emerson calls the “Over-Soul” or “Unity” (CW 2:115). But, as Emerson says in his essay on “Montaigne: or the Skeptic,” “there are doubts.” These doubts about friendships are my main subject in the following essay.

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Must We Do What We Say? Truth, Responsibility and the Ordinary in Ancient and Modern Perfectionism

Daniele Lorenzini

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.” R. W. Emerson, Self-Reliance

I. Ancient Perfectionism

“All That Concerns Me” is My Everyday Life

1 My central argument in this paper will be that moral perfectionism cannot be understood in its radical philosophical, ethical and political dimensions unless we trace its tradition back to the ancient Greek conception of philosophy as a way of life. Hence, to begin, I will argue that the Emersonian maxim quoted above, “what I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think,”1 far from being simply a Romantic, self- centered claim of the uniqueness and value of the individual, constitutes on the contrary the reactivation of a more ancient principle, which resides at the very basis of the Western philosophical tradition. Ancient philosophy is in fact entirely traversed by the imperative of separating carefully what does concern us, because it is in our power, from what does not, precisely because it is not in our power. It is the well-known ancient struggle of man against the unpredictability of Fate (Tyche), which takes the form of a series of typical couples of opposites – soul versus body, inward goods versus outward goods, knowledge versus opinion, wise man versus common man, etc. The purpose of these pairs of opposites is clear: defining, within the framework of human life, a space that is separate from the dominance of Fate, in which man can consequently find his ‘truth’ (what is essential to him), his autonomy and his freedom – in a word, the place of human happiness. Ancient philosophy, then, is a matter of what

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matters, a matter of knowing what matters for me and being able to construct my conduct and life on this basis.

2 This fundamental feature of ancient philosophy is particularly evident in Stoic philosophy, founded – as it is well known – on a preliminary distinction between what is in our power and what is not. A theoretical distinction that the Stoics translate immediately into a practical rule: what matters for us, because it is in our power, is only moral good or evil – that is, doing the (moral) good and avoiding to do the (moral) evil. Everything else, strictly speaking, does not matter for us (because it is not in our power), and so it must be considered indifferent. The opening chapter of the Manual of Epictetus is very explicit on this: Of things, some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are: discernment, impulsion to act, desire, aversion and, in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, public offices and, in a word, whatever are not our own acts. And the things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint, nor hindrance; but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, in the control of others. Remember then that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered in your action, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men. On the contrary, if you think that only which is your own to be your own, and if you think that what is another’s, as it really is, belongs to another, no man will ever compel you, no man will hinder you, you will never blame anyone, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy – for you will not suffer any harm.2

3 Manifestly, it is not just a matter of theoretical knowledge. On the contrary, Stoic philosophy incites men to learn and memorize a set of essential principles, which aim to govern in detail the practice of their everyday life. Therefore, these rational principles of behaviour do not have to remain at the level of logos, of pure discourse, but rather (to use Michel Foucault’s words) they have to be “subjectivated” through a series of specific “ascetic techniques,”3 in order to make them coincide with the ethos of the subject – that is, in order to orient his practical conduct.4 Hence, following Pierre Hadot, we shall conceive ancient philosophy essentially as a choice and a way of life, rather than a theoretical discourse. Or better, in ancient philosophy, theoretical discourse is never considered an end in itself, but it is always clearly and decidedly put in the service of practice, i.e. of a certain way of living and being.5 Ancient philosophy is “an exercise of the thought, will, and the totality of one’s being,” it is “a method of spiritual progress,” which demands “a radical conversion and transformation of the individual’s way of being.” Its goal is the achievement of a definite existential state: wisdom.6 Following these suggestions, in the first lecture of L’herméneutique du sujet, Foucault defines ‘spirituality’ (as opposed to ‘philosophy’) as “the search, practice and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth”7 or, as he says in an later interview, to have access to a certain mode of being.8 Hence, Foucault speaks of ‘spirituality’ when it is the life of man – not in its biological sense (zoé), but rather in its ethical, political and social sense (bios) – that becomes the main object of his care (epimeleia), as well as the real stake (enjeu) of his work of transformation and transfiguration practiced on himself.

4 This is why the ancient philosopher is someone who, despite what other people think and do (and ergo, despite the risk of being considered odd), does not miss the importance of his everyday life. On the contrary, he cares for his life – for every single, low and

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apparently meaningless detail of it – because his life is precisely what concerns him, what matters for him, what deserves all his attention and ethical work. As Emerson says, the (arduous) application of this distinction between what concerns me and what the people think allows us to discriminate “between greatness and meanness,” that is, between philosophers – who take seriously the fundamental question of ancient ethics, “How ought I to live?”9 – and other people, who fail to notice the importance and practical consequences of such a question. This rule, according to Emerson, is so arduous to apply because “it is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion,” as it is easy “in solitude to live after our own”; but “the great man” is only “he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”10 – a solitude that, consequently, “must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.”11 In other words, and to bring this rule to its utmost consequences: since the social virtue most requested is conformity, “whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”12 Which is also the coherent conclusion of ancient philosophy understood as ‘spirituality’ (i.e. a way of life), as Foucault clearly shows in his 1984 lectures at the Collège de France, dedicated to the figure of Socrates and, later, to ancient Cynicism.

On the (Perfectionist) Relation Between Words and Deeds

5 Plato’s Laches is the fundamental text to consider if we want to understand how Socrates’ philosophical discourse, his practice of truth-telling (parrhesia), can be combined with his effort to care for the meanest details of his everyday life. In fact, the “style of life,” the “form that we give to life,” constitute the essential object of Socratic parrhesia:13 as Nicias explains, in the Laches, Socrates’ interlocutor is always “led by the Socratic logos into ‘giving an account’ (didonai logon) of ‘himself, of the manner in which he now spends his days, and of the kind of life he has lived hitherto’.”14 ‘Giving an account’ of ourselves means, then, ‘giving an account’ of the way we live and, in order to do it, “submitting” our life “to a touchstone, to a test (épreuve) which enables us to distinguish the good we have done from the evil we have done, in the course of our existence.”15 In this way, it is possible to examine and determine the true nature of the relation between words (logoi) and life (bios), since Socrates asks his interlocutor to demonstrate precisely whether he is able to show the harmony between the rational discourse he uses and the way in which he lives. Here, the touchstone (basanos) to test such a harmony, i.e. “the degree of accord between a person’s life and its principle of intelligibility,”16 is not constituted by the homologia understood as agreement between the discourses (logoi) of two or more interlocutors – as in the Gorgias.17 The basanos is rather represented by Socrates himself, who manifests through his way of living a perfectly harmonic relation, a perfect homologia, between his words and his deeds: Socrates is able to use rational, ethically valuable, fine, and beautiful discourse; but unlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords exactly with what he thinks, and what he thinks accords exactly with what he does.18

6 We are confronted, here, with a twofold principle of harmony: Socrates is fully responsible for his words and his deeds, because both accord perfectly with what he thinks. Hence, the way of life emerges in Socratic parrhesia as something we have to take care of, but which we have to submit, during the entire course of our existence, to a test, to a touch-stone that enables us to discriminate between good and evil. Indeed,

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the principle of homologia exposed in the Laches is based on the “harmony,” on the “symphony”19 – established within the (practical) framework of a style of life – between logos and ethos, logos and bios. This harmony constitutes also the sign, the mark that makes Socrates’ parrhesia possible, allowing him to speak frankly and to call into question the existence, the way of life of his fellow citizens – that is to say: this harmony between logos and ethos has a value which is, at the same time, ethical and political. It is not by chance that, during an interview at Berkeley, Foucault claims that what interests him, what matters for him, is “politics as an ethics” – as an ethos, a way of life. I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding, prudent, ‘experimental’ attitude is necessary; at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. […] The key to the personal politic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos.20

7 To sum up, the ancient paradigm of (ethical and political) responsibility consists in the endless work of oneself on oneself, in the endless task of forging a harmonic relation between the words we ordinarily use and our everyday life – and Socrates is the key figure that embodies this paradigm. In particular, according to Foucault, the Laches is to be considered the starting point of “a whole philosophical practice and activity, and Cynicism is obviously the main example of it.”21 However, as I have already shown elsewhere,22 the Cynic philosopher radicalizes the Socratic relation between logos and bios, and builds up his life in the form of a paradoxical transfiguration of the traditional philosophical life – that is, in the form of a “life other” (vie autre), which continuously calls into question the lives of others, using the weapon of a scandalous ethos, instead of a parrhesiastic discourse.23 Thus, with Cynicism the ‘nonconformist side’ of the Socratic principle of harmony breaks out, and the philosophical life fully becomes a “manifestation of the truth.”24 This manifestation of the truth is not abstract, it does not take place in the realm of pure theory, but rather within the everyday life of the Cynic philosopher, through his ordinary choices and the way he dresses and speaks: To live philosophically is to show the truth through the ethos (the way one lives), the way one reacts (to a situation, a scene, when confronted with a particular situation), and obviously the doctrine one teaches; it is to show the truth in all these aspects and through these vehicles (ethos of the scene, kairos of the situation, and doctrine).25

8 However, in order to transfigure his life into such a manifestation of the truth (alèthurgie), in order to denounce and attack the common life of conformity and transform it into a “true life” (vraie vie), the Cynic philosopher has to undertake an endless ethical practice on himself, on his words and deeds, on every single detail of his way of life. Hence, the Cynic manifestation of the truth is nothing more – but nothing less! – than a courageous, scandalous and public manifestation of his (extra)ordinary way of life. Through this ethical work, the Cynic philosopher learns how to assume his ordinary gestures and words, even the smallest and apparently meaningless ones, as the real object of his attention and care. In this way, he builds up his everyday life as a touchstone for the lives of others, who claim the same theoretical principles (logoi), but do not allow them to forge (and be embodied in) their very ethos. [Cynicism] transforms the form of existence in an essential condition of truth- telling. It transforms the form of existence in the reducing practice (pratique réductrice) which will leave room for truth-telling. It finally transforms the form of

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existence in a way of showing, in the gestures, in the body, in the way of dressing, in the way of behaving (se conduire) and living, truth itself.26

9 Thus, with Cynicism, we really come across the paradigm of a radical form of resistance. The Cynic philosopher, in fact, does not limit himself to the valorisation of his everyday life and the (consequent) reversal of common values; on the contrary, he builds up his everyday life as a “militant” practice of opposition to the existing established power. He transfigures the everyday of his life, he makes it the site of perpetual risk (the risk of truth-telling, or truth-living) and the core of his radical criticism of every form of social conformity. As Foucault says baldly, Cynic (true) life is a form of “explicit, voluntary and constant aggression towards humanity in general,” aiming “to change it,” to change its “moral attitude (its ethos)” but, at the same time, to change also “its habits, its customs, its ways of living.”27 It is an aggression towards society (and world) as they are, in order to give rise to a society (and a world) “other.” Cynicism is then the matrix of a form of life that does not aim merely “to show what the world is in its truth,” but rather “to show that the world will not reach its truth, will not transfigure and become other to attain what it is in its truth, unless through a change, a complete alteration – that is, the change and complete alteration in the relation of oneself with oneself.”28

10 Indeed, as Foucault claims in La vie des hommes infâmes,29 if we must consider our everyday life important, it is precisely because it constitutes the main field of struggle – always uncertain and unsteady – between “power relations” and “practices of resistance.” In other words, ancient perfectionism shows us something still relevant: our everyday life matters not only in an ethical, but also in a political sense, and the work of oneself on oneself, applied even to the meanest details of the ordinary dimension of our words and deeds, really forms the fundamental core of every social and political practice of resistance that aims to be effective.

‘Truth’ as an Event and a Practice

11 Before considering modern perfectionism, however, we might ask what kind of truth we are facing, when we consider ancient philosophy in its perfectionist task of ethical self- transformation and radical struggle against conformity. According to Foucault, in fact, it is possible to identify a significant rupture that took place between ancient and modern conceptions of truth: It would be interesting to compare Greek parrhesia with the modern (Cartesian) conception of evidence. For since Descartes, the coincidence between belief and truth is obtained in a certain (mental) evidential experience. For the Greeks, however, the coincidence between belief and truth does not take place in a (mental) experience, but in a verbal activity, namely, parrhesia.30

12 Since the epistemological model of evidence plays a fundamental (and founding) role within the framework of modern philosophical inquiry, these words mean also that, according to Foucault, there is a discontinuity between ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy itself. Stanley Cavell expresses almost the same idea when he writes that “after a millennium or so in which philosophy, as established in Greece, carried on the idea of philosophy as a way of life, constituted in view of the (perfectionist) task of caring for the self,” there has been “another millennium or so in which philosophy has seemed prepared to discard this piece of its mission.”31 We can find a very similar historical description also in the works of Hadot, in particular where he marks the

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difference between “philosophical discourse” and “philosophy.” According to him, the essential turning point of this history is represented by Medieval Scholasticism and by the inclusion of philosophy in the cursus studiorum of the (recently born) universities: as a result of such an inclusion, in fact, philosophy becomes an institutional discipline to be taught, locked-up in the realm of theoretical abstraction, without any connection with what it has been in the ancient world – namely, a concrete attitude, an actual choice of existence, an ascetic work of self-transformation, a way of seeing the world and acting in it.32 To use (again) a Foucauldian vocabulary, after Scholasticism and the “Cartesian moment,” philosophy – which, in the ancient world, had always been linked with the task of ‘spirituality’ – accepted and adopted the epistemological structure of science, claiming that the subject can have access to truth through a simple act of knowledge, which no longer has to do with his mode of being.33 Thus, the epistemological truth became the model for philosophical truth-telling, which in turn became a truthtelling on science – “telling the truth of truth” (dire-vrai du vrai) – more and more detached from ordinary language and everyday life, and from the ethical techniques that ancient philosophers used to shape (and transfigure) them.34

13 Indeed, in ancient world, truth was closer to a model that Foucault calls “truth-event,” as opposed precisely to “truth-demonstration” – that is, to the modern epistemological conception of truth. Whereas the latter is “ubiquitous” (the question of truth is a question it is always possible to pose, and in relation to everything) and “universally accessible” (because, in principle, “no one is exclusively qualified” and no one is a priori disqualified “to state the truth”),35 the former is a “dispersed, discontinuous, interrupted truth which will only speak or appear from time to time, where it wishes to, in certain places” – a truth which has “its favorable moments, its propitious places, its privileged agents and bearers.” In other words, it is a truth that emerges as an “event.”36 We have, then, two series in the Western history of truth. The series of constant, constituted, demonstrated, discovered truth, and then a different series of the truth which does not belong to the order of what is, but to the order of what happens, a truth, therefore, which is not given in the form of discovery, but in the form of the event.37

14 As we have seen, according to Foucault, the ancient conception of truth cannot be associated with any particular mental state of the subject – and, therefore, it is not a truth- demonstration. It is rather conceived as an event, emerging from the agreement among the logoi of different interlocutors (Plato’s Gorgias), or from the harmony established and concretely showed, by an individual, between his logos and his ethos (Socratic parrhesia), or – directly and paradoxically – from the way of life itself (Cynicism). Anyhow, if we consider ancient philosophy in the light of our perfectionist work on ourselves and our ordinary words and life, it becomes manifest that, in such a framework, truth is not an epistemological concept based on the modern criterion of evidence, but an ethical practice which takes place in the course of human experience. Indeed, in ancient Greece, to be a philosopher means to give importance to everyday life and to pay attention to the details of common language and behaviour, in order to actively transform oneself and one’s relationship to others and to the world. Moreover, such an ethico-political transformation of the self marks a sharp distinction between philosophical life and the lives of other people, since it can be achieved only through a series of specific techniques that we may call ‘techniques of the ordinary’ – in order to

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emphasize that they take ordinary language and life of man as the essential object of their philosophical gaze and work of transfiguration.38

15 As we have already observed, this way of conceiving truth and practicing philosophy has been somehow put aside in modern times. Nevertheless, in what follows I will argue that the attention to the ordinary and to truth as a practice has survived in the form of a hidden tradition, and it has been renewed during the last two centuries, primarily but not exclusively thanks to the transcendental American philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau.

II. Modern Perfectionism

The Struggle against Conformity

16 The fundamental question of ancient ethics significantly re-emerges at the beginning of Emerson’s essay Fate, and thus it attests a (renewed) perfectionist will not to miss the importance of the practical question of our way of life: To me […] the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?39

17 Indeed, for modern (as for ancient) perfectionism, each moral choice concerns the kind of life we are willing to live and the meaning and value we are ready to attribute to it. Besides, this is not the sole element of continuity: the theme of criticism, of the struggle against social customs and conformity, which is at the core of ancient (Socratic and Cynic) perfectionism, also plays a central role within the framework of modern perfectionism. In fact, as Emerson shows in Self-Reliance, conformity is still perceived as one of the main obstacles along the path of perfectionism, precisely since it prevents the individual to be self-reliant and to undertake the quest for his better or higher self. According to Emerson, [s]ociety is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.40 This is why, as already quoted, whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist – that is, he must believe his own thought and, above all, he must believe that what is true for him in his private heart is true for all men.41 Here, in this demanding claim that our own private ‘voice,’ if it is expressed on the basis of self-reliance, should become a public (and even a universal) voice, it is possible to find the eminently political dimension of Emersonian perfectionism.42 To one in the state Emerson names self-reliance, every word urged from one in the state of conformity causes chagrin, violates the expression of our nature by pressing upon us an empty voice, hence would deprive us of participation in the conversation of justice.43

18 Likewise, Emerson claims that our “genuine” action – the action undertaken on the basis of self-reliance – will explain itself and our other genuine actions, but that, on the contrary, our conformity “explains nothing.”44 Hence, our genuine action is supposed to operate a transition from the realm of private intelligibility to a universal dimension. We are not so far from Socratic parrhesia, which courageously claims its truth by relying on the harmony established between Socrates’ thoughts and his words and deeds. In Socrates too the main question is the question of expression, of finding our voice in the public, political conversation – not the conversation of Athens’ democratic assembly of citizens, but the ordinary, everyday conversation of justice, which

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represents the true political dimension of the poli.45 Socratic parrhesia, as we have seen, aims to criticize conformity and to awaken the interlocutor to the necessity of finding his personal (non-mimetic) voice within democratic conversation, of caring for himself and of practicing virtue – as a result of an actual exercise of attention towards ordinary language and everyday life. According to Cavell, the aim of Self-Reliance is the same: Emerson’s writing constitutes an analogon of Socrates’ truth-telling, since it aspires to fight against “society’s demand for conformity,” through the expression of a person’s thought as “the imperative to an incessant conversion or refiguration of society’s incessant demands for his consent – his conforming himself – to its doings.” This is why Emerson’s writing too has to be “the object of aversion to society’s consciousness.”46 Or better, on the one hand, it must be the outset of an ethical conversion and transformation, courageously47 operated on ourselves and our life, since “we must become averse to this conformity, which means convert away from it, which means transform our conformity, as if we are to be born (again).”48 On the other, it must function as the propellant for a real revolution, for a transfiguration of others, of society and the entire world, which is very close to Cynic revolution (as Foucault describes it): It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.49

19 Emerson’s self-reliance is an attitude all at once ethical and political, which does not consist in the (unlikely) discovery of ‘the self’ as the ultimate place for us to rest and feel safe, but rather in the creation of a new relation of ourselves to ourselves, the others and the entire world. This attitude is exercised through the attention to the words of our ordinary life,50 through the importance we must recognize in them and, consequently, through a “self-transformation” that aims to attain “the further or higher self of each” (an infinite, never concluded task).51 At the same time, this attitude is traversed by the contrast between imitation (conformity) and the exercise of individuality. “Insist on yourself; never imitate”52 is, indeed, the essential corollary of Emersonian self-reliance. This is why it is perhaps possible to consider the work of John Stuart Mill as a part of the modern perfectionist tradition – and I am thinking especially of On Liberty’s third chapter, centered, as it is well known, on individuality, originality and even eccentricity as fundamental ingredients of human happiness. In fact, according to Mill, “unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinion, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good.” This diversity must function not only at the level of opinions, but also and above all in relation to our everyday life: As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them.53

20 For, where the rule of conduct is not the person’s own character, but social traditions or customs, “there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.” Thus, against the “yoke” of conformity, we must always encourage the free development of individuality, and a wider exercise of spontaneity and originality: in a society where a very limited (and fixed) set of accepted models of life exists, indeed, people “should do absolutely nothing but copy one another” – and, according to Mill (and to Emerson), “he who lets

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the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” On the contrary, “he who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties”: he beautifies and perfects himself, since human nature “is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed to it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”54 Consequently, there is no reason that “all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns,” but rather – Mill argues – “different people should be allowed to lead different lives,” since a person’s own mode of laying out his existence is the best, “not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.”55 Therefore, in a sense, “the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service,” also if it does not propose a better way of living, but merely a different one.

21 Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.56

22 Hence, exercising individuality means daring to take our way of life itself as the object of a positive transformation, in order to find our voice and engage ourselves in a (perfectionist) effort of self-improvement. Moreover, as in the case of Cynicism, this effort of self-improvement and transformation is not ‘individualistic’ – if we mean, by this word, ‘selfish,’ ‘narcissistic.’ On the contrary, it has essentially to do with other people and with the possibility of building up something like a new “shared” world57 – since it is the weapon we must use to fight against social conformity, and endlessly call into question the others, their empty words and their lives of quiet desperation. This is why the “philosophical mission” of Mill’s writing, as in the case of Emerson’s, is precisely “to awaken us to the question he poses,”58 that is to say: it is a critical mission, very close to the older Cynic one. Indeed, according to Emerson, the fundamental task of thinking is the reversal of our way of life and the perpetual struggle with (and within) the present, characterized by the tension between society “as it stands” and society “as it may become.”59 Such a twofold ethico-political “pattern of disappointment and desire” is considered by Cavell as one of (or perhaps the) essential feature of moral perfectionism: The very conception of a divided self and a doubled world, providing a perspective of judgement upon the world as it is, measured against the world as it may be, tends to express disappointment with the world as it is, as the scene of human activity and prospects, and perhaps to lodge the demand or desire for a reform or transfiguration of the world.60

Exemplarity, Responsibility and the Ordinary

23 This struggle for the ethical transfiguration of oneself, which acquires at once a social and political dimension and which has ancient Cynicism as its (theoretical and practical) matrix, can also be discovered at work in some of the most important European revolutionary movements, or more precisely – as Foucault claims in Le courage de la vérité – in modern “militancy” (militantisme), understood as a specific form

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of life.61 In particular, the figure of the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, among others, can help us to analyse more deeply this close relation between (personal) ethical subjectivation and the emergence of a shared movement of resistance that aims to transform society and the world concretely.

24 As it is known, Durruti was one of the protagonists of the Catalan revolt and the conquest of Barcelona; more generally he is considered the real anarchic “hero” of the Spanish civil war. He was not an intellectual, but a metal-worker who did not write anything, who did not leave (almost) anything material after his death. Therefore, in his (peculiar) biography of Durruti, Hans Magnus Enzensberger states clearly that we are confronted with the task of reconstructing the life of a man “whose patrimony consisted in ‘a change of underwear, two guns, a binoculars and a pair of sunglasses’.”62 That is to say, Durruti’s life did not express itself in the accumulation of material things, but rather in his deeds – and, as a direct consequence, for others, it became ‘exemplary.’63 Indeed, if so many Spanish workers followed and spontaneously obeyed Durruti, this was precisely because he did construct and present his (ordinary) life in the form of an example – of an exemplary life. As the Italian socialist Carlo Rosselli writes, the revolutionary hero is neither chief nor myth, but rather a man who tries to help the work of social renewal “through the exemplary renewal of himself.”64 It is not by chance, then, that we are assured that Durruti “lived a life absolutely consonant with his principles,” that he “lived for what he believed” (in fact, “his ideas were not a hobby for him; on the contrary, he wanted to translate them into action”), and that we must not look for his “heroism” within the pages of newspapers, but rather “in his everyday life.”65 For all these reasons, people considered him as the embodiment of that “faith in a new society” which was deeply rooted in their hearts too66 – in short, they recognized in him, in his words and life, their own “rejected thoughts.”67

25 Therefore, through this notion of exemplarity,68 we can concretely link the perfectionist transformation of ourselves and our everyday life to the struggle aiming to change and transfigure others, society and the entire world. In the construction of his life as an exemplary life, in fact, Durruti did not suggest that the same construction was useless for others, he did not prevent others from experiencing such a (personal and always unique) ethical transformation. On the contrary, he emphasized its necessity and urgency, its value as a preliminary step for every further perfectionist effort of revolution: the first struggle we have to combat is the struggle within ourselves, because “no one has the reason for this revolution if each of us has not.”69 Indeed, the function of the exemplary and (extra)ordinary life of Durruti was to show (rather than ‘to teach’) practically that nothing is necessary as such, nothing is ‘natural’ in human society, and that everything is important – every ordinary word and gesture has an ethical and political value. Durruti assumed the responsibility for his words and deeds precisely through the creation of an (already Socratic) harmony between thoughts, words and life70 – and in this harmony resides, ultimately, his exemplarity. The construction of a shared world (of struggle, of resistance) and the perfectionist transformation of ourselves are then nothing but the two sides of the same coin: Huge amounts of money passed by the hands of Durruti, and nevertheless I used to repair his shoe soles with patches, because he did not have enough money to bring them to the cobbler. […] We used to go to his house, and he was often wearing an apron, to peel the potatoes: his wife was working. […] The next day, he took his gun and came down in the street, to face a world of social repression.71

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26 Paying attention to the everyday of our words and lives allows us to return to an ordinary that is not the place of final rest, of absolute peace, but rather that has to be conceived as a propellant for the perfectionist transformation of ourselves, society and the entire world. Such an attention can produce, evidently, different consequences, and encourage different kinds of conduct – but it is essentially the same attention exercised by Thoreau in refusing to pay his poll taxes to a government that still accepted slavery and was waging war on Mexico. Indeed, in his famous essay on Civil Disobedience,72 Thoreau makes it plain that his act of resistance is rooted in his capability to pay attention to the details of ordinary life, and in his will not to miss their ethico-political value. In a democracy (it could be said), we can easily use many other legal methods to express our dissent and try to change things; but this easiness is only an illusion.73 We need to see that every word we speak and every action we accomplish compromises us, and so requires always a choice – since, through it, we daily express our consent or dissent to our democratic government. It is not a matter of seeing something hidden, but rather of being able to see what is under our eyes, what is so difficult to perceive precisely because of its plainness: We have long known that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but to render visible what precisely is visible, which is to say, to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately tied to ourselves that, as a consequence, we do not perceive it.74

27 This capability to see what is visible, i.e. to pay attention to it, is not natural, but rather a competence to be acquired through a specific education. Therefore, a work of ethical (re)construction of ourselves and reshaping of our lives turns out to be necessary to meet an ordinary which always precedes us, but can never be directly grasped. It is “a task to come to see the world as it is.”75 Such a task, such work on ourselves, leaves room for the emergence of the ordinary as an event (as something important for us, something that matters) and, consequently, for experience itself – for our possibility of having an experience.76 What is at stake here is the construction of an ‘ethics of the ordinary,’ which is only the other face of a “politics of the ordinary.”77 Indeed, for Thoreau, it is a question of (political) responsibility: he cannot accept that his government acts unjustly, he feels compromised, since in a democracy each of us is responsible for each decision of our government – ergo, each of us must always keep the possibility to express dissent open and alive.78 [I]n an encounter over justice, there are sides, or positions, and while there may in the moment be nothing to do, and nothing further to say, there is still something to show: say consent or dissent. Responsibility remains a task of responsiveness.79

28 Responsibility (and disobedience) remains a task of responsiveness through which Thoreau tries to find his voice – since “finding my voice consists not in finding an agreement with everybody, but in making a claim (revendication).”80 But responsibility (and disobedience) is also a matter of way of life. Indeed, as it clearly emerges in his essay, it is not (only) his conscience that Thoreau opposes to his government, but rather – and directly – his life itself. He asks: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today?” As we can see, such a question concerns essentially the kind of man one wants to be, and the kind of man Thoreau wants to be – he claims – cannot be “associated” to a government which is “the slave’s government also.”81 Hence, as a result of this question, which I take to be the perfectionist question of Civil Disobedience, a renewed and higher ideal of democracy emerges: ‘democracy’ does not mean to vote, when we have to, for what we think is right, and then leave the task of

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managing it to the majority. On the contrary, ‘democracy’ means to take care of the right, to be “vitally concerned that that right should prevail,” since “even voting for the right is doing nothing for it.”82 Therefore, “the mission of 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.”83 It is through the touchstone of this ‘democratic’ way of life that the actions of our democratic government have to be tested, as Thoreau claims clearly: injustice can be considered a part of “the necessary friction of the machine of government,” but “if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”84

29 Here again we can see the legacy of the ancient (perfectionist) idea of the harmony to be established between what we say and what we do, between logos and ethos. In other words, Thoreau is saying that, if it is necessary to find our voice within the democratic discourse and to claim our personal voice publicly, we must always remember that this voice can never be dissociated from the practicing of what we claim within the framework of our everyday life: The question of democracy is really the question of voice. I must have a voice in my history, and I must recognize myself in what my society says or shows and therefore, somehow, give it my voice, accept that it speaks in my name. Disobedience is the necessary solution when there is dissonance: I do not hear myself any longer, in a discourse that sounds false – an experience that each of us can daily have.85

30 The question of democracy, then, is the question of the (harmonic or dissonant) relation between my voice and political discourse. And the perfectionist touchstone of this relation is represented by my capability of assuming the responsibility for my voice, which is possible only if I am able to establish a homologia between my voice and my everyday life – in order to transfigure the latter,86 and make it the highest practical example of the correct (true) use of the former. In this way, I will no longer feel the temptation to speak by quoting the words of others, hiding behind imitation: “Man is timid and apologetic; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.”87 Conformity will be overcome only as a result of our ethical work on ourselves, which implies the establishment of a critical relation to others and the world (as it is). This is why, according to Cavell, civil disobedience is how Thoreau names the “power to demand the change of the world as a whole.”88

III. Conclusion

31 I hope to have shown in this paper how modern perfectionism re-invented ancient perfectionism, through the re-activation of the imperative to pay attention to our ordinary words and everyday life (and to their harmonic relation), linked to a truth always meant as a practice. Indeed, in modern perfectionism too, truth does not represent the final and absolute goal of human destiny, nor it is placed within the (mental) framework of Cartesian evidence. On the contrary, like in ancient perfectionism, truth emerges from the practical relation we are able to establish between our words and our deeds: it is an ethical, rather than an epistemological truth – a truth-event that, to be grasped (if ever such a thing is possible), requires the endless task of the work of oneself on oneself. Hence, ancient and modern perfectionisms

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advocate the practice of a series of specific ethical techniques, in order not to miss the importance of our ordinary words and life.

32 Only within such a framework, I think, is the following claim by Emerson intelligible: This conformity makes [most men] not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.89

33 Both Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond stress the fundamental role played by the work of attention in our moral life, which is not “something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices,” but rather “something that goes on continually.” What is crucial is precisely “what happens in between such choices,” and it is here, at this very level, that we can fully understand the importance of moral attention (and the risk of moral inattention), since “I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.”90 When it is a matter of our moral life, to give importance to attention, and to improvisation, means to give importance to our capability of seeing the details, the particulars,91 and “to struggle to make sense” of them. Indeed, moral thought does not take place “in a situation with fixed, given possibilities”: on the contrary, through the work of attention and improvisation, through “the exercise of creative imagination,” a moral agent discovers himself capable of transforming the situation he thought to be necessary in an adventure of personality.92

34 This is precisely what is at stake in (ancient and modern) moral perfectionism. The necessity of acquiring a specific competence, which enables us to see an ordinary always under our eyes, on the one hand, entails the transformation of our perception of things as a result of the exercise of our creative imagination; on the other, it indicates our need for someone who, thanks to his creative imagination, is able to show us things in a different light – like Socrates in the Crito (Diamond), but also like the Cynics, like Thoreau and Durruti, through their practical examples of ordinary resistance. In fact, though philosophy tries always to break with the ordinary understood as the (illusory) natural attitude of common sense, as the place of habits, prejudices and conformity par excellence,93 such a rupture is never a mere refusal. It rather takes the (paradoxical) form of a militant acceptance, since the ordinary is the ‘real’ of philosophy only when and if it is transformed, transfigured by it, by its gaze and its practices.94 The (perfectionist) philosopher always tries not to miss what matters, i.e. the ordinary dimension of his language and life; he tries to become responsible for it, assuming it as the real object of his reflection and action – a hard task, as we have seen, always traversed by the ambiguity and the uncanniness of the ordinary and, as a consequence, by the (necessary) menace of skepticism.95

35 Thus, the perfectionist philosopher establishes his relation to ordinary language and life as a relation of restlessness and alterity; and through the transformation of himself, of his way of seeing and saying the world, and of his conduct, he constantly aims to use the valorisation of the ordinary as the essential propellant for a positive transfiguration of the ordinary itself. This transfiguration takes the form of the creation of a higher self, of a new personal and social intelligibility, and of a world that is new and radically other.96 It is what Cavell calls “the practice of the ordinary”: Sharing the intuition that human existence stands in need not of reform but of reformation, of a change that has the structure of a transfiguration, Wittgenstein’s

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insight is that the ordinary has, and alone has, the power to move the ordinary, to leave the human habitat habitable, the same transfigured.97

36 This is why moral perfectionism can be conceived and still practiced, today, as an ethics and politics of responsibility, of attention to and care for the ordinary, engaged in an “endless” but fully human struggle against skepticism – that is, against the temptation of “empty[ing] out my contribution to words, so that language itself, as if beyond me, exclusively takes over the responsibility for meaning.”98 Perfectionism, understood as an ethicopolitical exercise of transfiguration of oneself, others and the entire world, aims to bring together and harmonize words and life: thus, it incites us to courageously and openly assume the responsibility for our words, in the double sense of meaning and doing what we say. It is this twofold challenge – difficult, experimental and always to be renewed – that characterizes “perfectionism’s moral urgency” in both its ancient and its modern form: In Emerson’s way of speaking, “one day” (“Each philosopher […] has only done, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself”) always also means today; the life he urgently speaks for is one he forever says is not to be postponed. It is today that you are to take the self on; today that you are to awaken and to consecrate yourself to culture, specifically, to domesticate it gradually, which means bring it home, as part, now, of your everyday life.99

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NOTES

1. Emerson (1841: 143). 2. Epictetus (1991: 11) (translation partially revised). 3. Foucault uses this expression to point at the “more or less coordinated set of exercises that are available, recommended and even obligatory, and anyway utilizable by individuals in a moral, philosophical and religious system in order to achieve a definitive spiritual objective,” i.e. “a certain transformation, a certain transfiguration of themselves as subjects,” (Foucault 1981-82: 398 (416-7)). 4. Cf. (Ibid.: 318 (334)). See also Foucault (1984b: 1532). 5. Cf. Hadot (1995: 271 (60)). 6. “La philosophie apparaissait ainsi comme un exercice de la pensée, de la volonté, de tout l’être, pour essayer de parvenir à un état, la sagesse, qui était d’ailleurs presque inaccessible à l’homme. La philosophie était une méthode de progrès spirituel qui exigeait une conversion radicale, une transformation radicale de la manière d’être,” (Ibid.: 290 (265)). 7. Foucault (1981-82: 16 (15)). 8. Cf. Foucault (1984b: 1541). 9. Annas (1995: 27). 10. Emerson (1841: 143) (emphasis added). 11. Ibid.: 154. 12. Ibid.: 141. 13. Cf. Foucault (1984a: 134). 14. Foucault (1983a: 96). 15. Foucault (1984a: 134; my translation). 16. Foucault (1983a: 97). 17. Cf. Plato, Gorgias, 487E. 18. Foucault (1983a: 101). 19. Cf. Foucault (1984a: 138). 20. “Je n’en conclus pas qu’on peut dire n’importe quoi dans l’ordre de la théorie ; mais, au contraire, qu’il faut avoir une attitude exigeante, prudente, ‘expérimentale’; il faut à chaque instant, pas à pas, confronter ce qu’on pense et ce qu’on dit à ce qu’on fait et ce qu’on est. […] La clef de l’attitude politique personnelle d’un philosophe, ce n’est pas à ses idées qu’il faut la demander, comme si elle pouvait s’en déduire, c’est à sa philosophie, comme vie, c’est à sa vie philosophique, c’est à son ethos,” (Foucault 1983b: 1404-5 (374-5)). 21. Foucault (1984a: 119; my translation). 22. Cf. Lorenzini (2008: 83-8; 2010b: 475-80). 23. Cf. Foucault (1984a: 226, 247-8). 24. Foucault (1982-83: 315 (343)).

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25. “Vivre philosophiquement, c’est faire en sorte – par l’ethos (la manière dont on vit), la manière dont on réagit (à telle situation, dans telle ou telle scène, quand on est confronté à telle ou telle situation) et évidemment la doctrine que l’on enseigne – [de] montrer, sous tous ces aspects et par ces trois véhicules (l’ethos de la scène, le kairos de la situation et puis la doctrine), ce qu’est la vérité,” (Ibid.: 316 (344)). 26. “[Le cynisme] fait de la forme de l’existence une condition essentielle pour le dire-vrai. Il fait de la forme de l’existence la pratique réductrice qui va laisser place au dire-vrai. Il fait enfin de la forme de l’existence une façon de rendre visible, dans les gestes, dans le corps, dans la manière de s’habiller, dans la manière de se conduire et de vivre, la vérité elle-même” (Foucault 1984a: 159; my translation). 27. “Le combat cynique est un combat, une agression explicite, volontaire et constante qui s’adresse à l’humanité en général, à l’humanité dans sa vie réelle avec comme horizon ou objectif de la changer, la changer dans son attitude morale (son ethos) mais, en même temps et par là- même, la changer dans ses habitudes, ses conventions, ses manières de vivre” (Ibid.: 258; my translation). 28. “[C]ette pratique de la vérité caractérisant la vie cynique n’a pas pour but simplement de dire et de montrer ce qu’est le monde en sa vérité. Mais elle a pour but, et pour but final, de montrer que le monde ne pourra rejoindre sa vérité, ne pourra se transfigurer et devenir autre pour rejoindre ce qu’il est dans sa vérité, qu’au prix d’un changement, d’une altération complète, le changement et l’altération complète dans le rapport qu’on a à soi,” (Ibid.: 288-9; my translation). Stanley Cavell claims that Emerson and Nietzsche’s moral perfectionism is characterized by “an expression of disgust with or a disdain for the present state of things so complete as to require not merely reform, but a call for a transformation of things, and before all a transformation of the self,” (Cavell 1990: 46). 29. Cf. Foucault (1997: 248-9). 30. Foucault (1983a: 14). 31. Cavell (2004: 237). 32. Cf. Hadot (1995: 71-2, 297-9 (107-8, 270-1)). 33. Cf. Foucault (1981-82: 16-20 (15-19)). For a discussion of what I propose to call “Descartes function,” see Lorenzini (2010a: 11-3). 34. Cf. Foucault (1982-83: 211 (228-9)). 35. Foucault (1973-74: 235-6 (236)). 36. Ibid.: 236-7 (236-7). 37. “L’on a donc deux séries dans l’histoire occidentale de la vérité. La série de la vérité découverte, constante, constituée, démontrée, et puis une autre série, qui est la série de la vérité qui n’est pas de l’ordre de ce qui est, mais qui est de l’ordre de ce qui arrive, une vérité, donc, non pas donnée dans la forme de la découverte mais dans la forme de l’événement” (Ibid.: 237 (237)). 38. Cf. Lorenzini (2010b: 486-7). 39. Emerson (1860: 346). 40. Emerson (1841: 141). 41. Ibid.: 138. 42. Cf. Laugier (2010: 77-93). 43. Cavell (1990: xxxvii). 44. Emerson (1841: 146). 45. Cf. Plato, The Apology of Socrates, 36B-E. 46. Cavell (1990: 37). 47. In modern perfectionism too, like in ancient perfectionism, we can find a sharp attention towards the kairos (the ‘opportune moment’), linked to the practice of courageously taking a risk. In Self-Reliance, Emerson suggests that, in order to answer adequately to our “genius” when it calls us, we must be prepared to accept the risk of breaking with our conformist and familiar

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everyday – even to the point of risking to lose it forever. Hence, we must be prepared to risk everything, without any certainty for the future, without any certainty that what we are doing is something different from a mere whim: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation” (Emerson 1841: 142). The same sharp attention to the (perfectionist) kairos and to the risk rooted in it, can be found in Cavell’s analysis of the comedies of remarriage and melodramas. I am deeply indebted to Arnold I. Davidson for pointing out this line of reflection. 48. Cavell (1990: 47). “Emerson’s authorship enacts […] a relationship with his reader of moral perfectionism in which the friend permits one to advance toward oneself, which may present itself, using another formulation of Emerson, as attaining our unattained self” (Cavell 1995: 202). 49. Emerson (1841: 157; emphasis added). 50. Cf. Cavell (1995: 193). 51. Cavell (1990: 53). 52. Emerson (1841: 160). 53. Mill (1859: 120; emphasis added). 54. Ibid.: 120-3. Here, Mill explicitly refers to the ancient “Greek ideal of self-development,” (Ibid.: 127). 55. Ibid.: 128, 132-3. 56. Ibid.: 132 (emphasis added). 57. Cf. Halais (2008: 259). 58. Cavell (2004: 97). 59. Ibid.: 141. 60. Ibid.: 2. 61. Cf. Foucault (1984a: 169). 62. Enzensberger (1972: 14; my translation). 63. Cf. Ibid.: 257-60. 64. C. Rosselli (1935), “Quaderni di GL,” n. 12, gennaio 1935, p. 7, cit. in Miglietti (2010: 163) (my translation). 65. Enzensberger (1972: 286, 289-92; my translation, emphasis added). 66. Ibid.: 86, 285 (my translation). 67. Emerson (1841: 139). Thus it is possible to say, following Nietzsche, that “the rare and most valuable exemplar” is not another person, but one’s own “higher self,” cf. Cavell (2004: 200). 68. Cf. Halais (2008: 137-63). 69. Cavell (1990: 55; emphasis added). 70. A harmony that has obviously nothing to do with the idea of truth as an improbable “correspondence” (mise en correspondance) of our thoughts or words with an external reality, cf. Laugier (2009: 172). 71. “Durch Durrutis Hände sind Millionen gegangen, und doch habe ich ihn die Brandsohlen seiner Schuhe zusammenflicken sehen, weil er kein Geld hatte, um sie zum Schuster zu geben. […] Wenn man zu ihm kam, hatte er oft eine Schürze um, weil er gerade beim Kartoffelschälen war. Seine Frau arbeitete. […] Am andern Tag nahm er die Pistole und ging auf die Straße, um es mit einer Welt der sozialen Repression aufzunehmen,” F. Pellicer, cit. in Enzensberger (1972: 289; my translation). 72. Cf. Thoreau 1849. 73. “In a democracy the speaking of public thoughts is apt to seem, in its open possibility, the easiest way to speak; for Emerson it is the most necessary and the hardest” (Cavell 1990: 31). 74. “Il y a longtemps qu’on sait que le rôle de la philosophie n’est pas de découvrir ce qui est caché, mais de rendre visible ce qui précisément est visible, c'est-à-dire de faire apparaître ce qui

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est si proche, ce qui est si immédiat, ce qui est si intimement lié à nous-mêmes qu’à cause de cela nous ne le percevons pas” (Foucault 1978: 540-1; my translation). See also Cavell (2004: 33). 75. Murdoch (1970: 91). 76. On the relation between self-reliance, experience and education, see Laugier 2006. 77. Cf. Laugier (2010: 141-59). 78. Cf. Ogien & Laugier (2010: 28). 79. Cavell (1990: 25). 80. Laugier (2010: 89; my translation). 81. Thoreau (1849: 238; emphasis added). 82. Ibid.: 240. 83. Cavell (1990: 16-7). 84. Thoreau (1849: 243; emphasis added). 85. “La question de la démocratie est bien celle de la voix. Je dois avoir une voix dans mon histoire, et me reconnaître dans ce qui est dit ou montré par ma société, et ainsi, en quelque sorte, lui donner ma voix, accepter qu’elle parle en mon nom. La désobéissance est la solution qui s’impose lorsqu’il y a dissonance: je ne m’entends plus, dans un discours qui sonne faux, dont chacun de nous peut faire l’expérience quotidienne” (Laugier 2010: 90; my translation, emphasis added). 86. Cf. Hadot (1995: 342). 87. Emerson (1841: 151). 88. Cavell (1989: 115). 89. Emerson (1841: 144; emphasis added). 90. Murdoch (1970: 37). 91. Cf. Laugier (2010: 193-226). 92. Diamond (1991: 312-3). 93. Cf. Cavell (1989: 46); Hadot (1995: 381-2). 94. Cf. Lorenzini (2010b: 482-3). 95. “[I]t seem[s] to me […] work for an ambitious philosophy to attempt to keep philosophy open to the threat or temptation to skepticism” (Cavell 1990: 35). 96. “Is the idea of a new world intelligible to mere philosophy? Philosophy can accept the existence of other worlds, of various similarities to our own, I mean to this one. But new? That at once seems to speak of something like a break with this one, or a transformation or conversion of it” (Cavell 1989: 94). “Perfectionism, as I think of it, is not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul, a dimension that places tremendous burdens on personal relationships and on the possibility or necessity of the transforming of one- self and of one’s society” (Cavell 1990: 2). 97. Cavell (1989: 46-7). 98. Ibid.: 57. 99. Cavell (1990: 54-5).

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ABSTRACTS

The central argument of this paper is that moral perfectionism cannot be understood in its radical philosophical, ethical and political dimensions unless we trace its tradition back to the ancient Greek conception of philosophy as a way of life. Indeed, in ancient Greece, to be a philosopher meant to give importance to everyday life and to pay attention to the details of common language and behaviour, in order to actively transform oneself and one’s relationship to others and to the world. Truth itself was conceived as an event emerging from the agreement among the logoi of different people, or from the harmony established by an individual between his words and his deeds (e.g. Socrates, the Cynics). But this way of conceiving truth and practicing philosophy has been somehow put aside in modern times, and it has been renewed only during the last two centuries, primarily thanks to the transcendental American philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to show how modern perfectionism re-invented ancient perfectionism, through the re-activation of the imperative to pay attention to our ordinary words and everyday life (and to their harmonic relation), linked to a truth always meant as a practice. My conclusion will be that moral perfectionism can be conceived and still practiced, today, as an ethics and politics of responsibility, i.e. of attention to and care for the ordinary.

AUTHOR

DANIELE LORENZINI d.lorenzini[at]email.com

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Wittgenstein, the Criticism of Philosophy, and Self-Knowledge

Tarek R. Dika

In philosophy we do not draw conclusions. “But it must be like this!” is not a philosophical proposition. Philosophy only states what everyone admits. Philosophical Investigations, § 599 Being unable – when we surrender ourselves to philosophical thought – to help saying such-and- such; being irresistably inclined to say it – does not mean being forced into an assumption, or having an immediate perception or knowledge of a state of affairs. Philosophical Investigations, § 299 Make some arbitrary doodle on a bit of paper. – And now make a copy next to it, let yourself be guided by it. – I should like to say: “Sure enough, I was guided here. But as for what was characteristic in what happened – if I say what happened, I no longer find it characteristic.” But now notice this: while I am being guided everything is quite simple, I notice nothing special; but afterwards, when I ask myself what it was that happened, it seems to have been something indescribable. Afterwards no description satisfies me. It’s as if I couldn’t believe that I merely looked, made such-and-such a face, and drew a line. – But don’t I remember anything else? No; and yet I feel as if there must have been something else; in particular when I say “guidance,” “influence,” and other such words

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to myself. “For surely,” I tell myself, “I was being guided.” Only then does the idea of that ethereal, intangible influence arise. Philosophical Investigations, § 175 Each morning you have to break through the dead rubble afresh so as to reach the living warm seed. Culture and Value

1 In Philosophical Investigations § 89, Wittgenstein remarks that: […] it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand. Augustine says in the Confessions “quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quarenti explicare, nescio.” – This could not be said about a question of natural science (“What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?” for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself of).1

2 Something we all know when no one asks us is something I can be said to know so long as I do not ask myself. That I might seem no longer to know what I thought I once knew does not mean that I do not know; it means, rather, that my concept of what it means to know something, together with my understanding of the question posed, leads me in a certain direction. The question does not “in itself” dictate the course of this direction, for how I understand the content of the question is not a function of the question itself. It is a function of my concept of what it means to know something, for it is this concept that determines the form of account I take the question to require. The various possible forms of account determine the various possibilities of direction and understanding. Thus, from the fact that a certain direction might lead me to think that I do not know, it does not necessarily follow that I do not know.

3 Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to a difficulty, a philosophical predicament of mind. It is not the fact that Augustine does not know, but rather the sense that he does not know, that most interests Wittgenstein, its source. With Augustine, reasons have not come to an end, rather they have not yet so much as begun, and it is not at all clear where he might go about looking for them. Wittgenstein takes this to be an indication of what the difficulty of philosophical investigation might be said to consist in.

4 Philosophy has always been understood as the accounting-for of what is. The sense that I might not know what I thought I could not have failed to know need not be understood to emerge on the basis of a fact – the fact that I do not know – for if the form of account I take the question to require is itself misguided, the absence of an account becomes a function of the misguided form itself, not the absence of knowledge. I might then return to the question without hearing in it the form of account I once thought it to require. Let us return to the passage from the Confessions: What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.2

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5 The final sentence expresses the peculiar predicament of mind that is brought about, not by an ordinary question (e.g., “What time is it?”), but rather by a uniquely philosophical question (“What is time?”), a question regarding the nature or essence of time as such and in general. What happens in the space of this question is a matter that merits patient reflection, for our understanding of a philosophical question regarding the nature of a certain phenomenon determines our subsequent understanding of the phenomenon itself, and this affects the kinds of things we are inclined to philosophically claim with respect to the phenomenon in question. This relation between the form of account we take a philosophical question to require and the kinds of things we are inclined to claim with respect to the phenomenon in question can be described.

6 In order to set up the required contrast between ordinary discourse and the requirements of philosophy, Augustine recalls to mind the fact that “in our familiar everyday conversation” we speak of nothing more than time, and that we “surely know what we mean when we speak of it.” Time is not the explicit theme of our familiar, everyday conversation, rather it constitutes the non-thematized “horizon” of our discourse insofar as that discourse is and cannot but be, from a grammatical standpoint, temporally inflected. Thus, it is only insofar as time remains buried in “our familiar everyday conversation” that “we surely know what we mean when we speak of it.” Once it gets “lifted” from out of this dimension and “taken up” as the thematic object of a general philosophical account, the sense that we know what we mean when we speak of it seems to elude us, and this marks the emergence of a kind of conflict between our familiar discourse and our philosophical requirement. I should like to trace the origin and genesis of this sense of conflict.

7 Once a phenomenon becomes the object of a philosophical account, our understanding comportment toward this phenomenon undergoes a certain modification. I describe this modification in terms of a shift from phenomenon to object, that is, from the pre- theoretical absorption in the phenomenon to the theoretical determination of the phenomenon qua thematic object of a form of philosophical account as it enters the philosophical claim-context. This distinction between phenomenon and object is Heideggerean in spirit, if not in letter, and in it lies the secret to understanding the genesis and structure of the objects of philosophical reflection and their relation to our pre-theoretical understanding of the relevant phenomena (see §II).

8 That the sense of conflict produced in the course of philosophical reflection on the form of account required by the philosophical question gets interpreted as a kind of intellectual lack is itself something that should be taken into consideration as itself a function of the form of account required by the question, not the present state of our knowledge. What we lack is not knowledge, but understanding. For Wittgenstein, the problem is not that there exists a genuine absence of knowledge, for as far as the materials required for responding to philosophical questions are concerned, we already know everything we need to know.

9 In what sense, then, do we already know everything we need to know? This is certainly not self-evident; it even seems to contradict all our intuitions regarding the nature of the philosophical enterprise. We have already indicated the extent to which these intuitions are themselves the product of a certain kind of understanding of the form of account a philosophical question is taken to require. Our question could thus be posed as follows: how does it so much as come about that we feel ourselves to lack

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knowledge? This sounds odd: we do not tend to understand the sense that we lack knowledge to be something that comes about as the result of something else, but rather as the default situation or pre-given background against which all philosophical inquiry takes place and from which it seeks to free itself. For Wittgenstein, however, this sense of lack is itself constituted – it belongs much more of the order of accomplishment than to the order of the merely given. We might say that it has certain conditions of possibility, and that these conditions, once described, allow us to actually see how the sense of lack is in fact accomplished. The difficulty encountered in articulating or expressing our knowledge might then be understood to simulate a gap in our knowledge only under certain conditions, and the description of these conditions casts light on the fact that this difficulty expresses something anterior to the order of mere ignorance. We can only sense that we lack knowledge of a phenomenon on the basis of a certain conception of what we think knowing that phenomenon “must be” in order to be knowledge of that phenomenon at all.

10 That one might understand the sense of intellectual lack to be an indication of ignorance is itself a precondition to a certain form of philosophical questioning, a form which presupposes a certain interpretation of the difficulty it seeks, through philosophy, to surmount, and which, as such, it neither explicitly avows nor defends, which it takes as a matter of course. An entire philosophical Weltanschaung is condensed into this silent, unavowed gesture. That one might interpret this difficulty as a gap in our knowledge means that one is committed to the notion that it must be filled by something other than what we already know.

11 None of what we have said so far does full justice to Wittgenstein’s remark on Augustine. Wittgenstein is pointing to a difficulty involved in reminding ourselves of what is already in plain view. What we want to understand are the conditions under which such a difficulty is possible, for there is clearly a sense in which what is already in plain view is not visible to us. Something, then, must be obscuring our vision.

⁂

12 In Philosophical Investigations § 109, Wittgenstein reminds us that our investigation “gets its light from the philosophical problems.” Understanding what this does and does not mean requires some meditation, for we do not as yet understand in anything other than an intuitive sense what Wittgenstein takes a “philosophical problem” to be, how “philosophical problems” come about, why our investigation is said to “get its light” there from, nor yet what the relation between “philosophical problems” and the difficulty involved in reminding ourselves of what is “in plain view” consists in, supposing there to be a relation at all. And it is only by coming to greater clarity about these questions that we might be in a position to understand why it can be so difficult to remind ourselves of what is already in plain view.

13 The key to understanding what Wittgenstein might mean by “philosophical problem” lies in understanding the source of the philosophical anxieties expressed by his interlocutor throughout Philosophical Investigations. In §§ 156-171, Wittgenstein turns to a brief description of the use of the word “reading” in our language in order to clarify his earlier remarks on understanding. Wittgenstein’s interlocutor insists that the criterion for (whether someone is) “reading” is to be found in the mental process that accompanies the actual “act” of reading; that that is what reading is. Wittgenstein

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proceeds to consider a series of cases, reminding his interlocutor of the things he already knows: viz., that the criteria for the application of this word are different under different circumstances, that there is no one thing we call “reading” (§ 156), that different modes of reading (e.g., reading printed words off a page, listening to morse code, feeling along the surface of braille) do not on the face of it appear to exhibit the “same mental process” (supposing there to be criteria for identity here), and yet are each instances of “reading” (§ 167), that the alleged “characteristic sensations” of reading may be present (this often happens in dreams, for example), and nevertheless not yield an instance of reading (§ 160). Wittgenstein concludes that there is no sense in searching for the criterion for this word in a special sort of mental process that may or may not accompany the actual act of reading, for there is no single “act” that is (what we call) “reading” – the lesson to be learned here is not simply that our words have a variety of uses in a variety of contexts (the usual platitude about “family resemblances”), but that they do not permit (i.e., cannot be made the objects of) a certain form of philosophical account: Wittgenstein is drawing our attention not only to the complex life of our language, but to how certain forms of philosophical account can affect our understanding of that life.

14 “But surely – we should like to say – reading is a quite particular process!” (§ 165). Here, Wittgenstein’s interlocutor is expressing a requirement: reading “must be” a particular process in order to be “reading” at all – for something rather definite takes place here, something that must underlie all our acts of reading, something that is perhaps not yet well understood by us, but might be better understood in the future as a problem for natural science or philosophical psychology (§ 158). Here, Wittgenstein’s interlocutor expresses the sense of intellectual lack the origin and genesis of which we have already attempted to trace in broad outline.

15 What he refuses to accept – what he needs to be reminded of – is “what we should say when” we talk about a certain phenomenon (here, “reading”), for only then can he open himself to the fact that, despite the pretensions of our educated, scientific culture, the criteria for our words do not in the first place derive from the place a possible philosophical psychology or natural science might go about looking for them; they are not the kind of thing psychology, be it mentalist or materialist, requires them to be in order to be the proper objects of psychological research: our words do not fit their paradigm or form of philosophical or scientific object.

16 What, then, is the source of this anxiety? Wittgenstein’s interlocutor is dismayed at the conflict between his requirement, which anticipates the form of his object, and the pretheoretical modes of the phenomenon as these modes are expressed in our language. His requirement has misled him into searching for the phenomenon there where it cannot be, overlooking it, meanwhile, there where it already is. We are now in a better position to appreciate the way in which the sense of intellectual lack is in fact constituted by the form of account our understanding takes a philosophical question to require.

17 Our requirement gives rise to a form of conflict, for our language does not “fit” our requirement. This form raises significant questions regarding the relation between philosophical requirement, the possibility of the objects of philosophical reflection, and the generation of philosophical problems. Our requirement institutes contraints on what the phenomenon under consideration “must be” in order to be the phenomenon that it is; it constrains us to see the matter in a certain way. It “mediates” our relation

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to the phenomenon, furnishes the prism through which the phenomenon is seen, understood. Our understanding of the phenomenon becomes a function of our requirement. This suggests that the objects of philosophical reflection are not simply given. The objects of philosophical reflection might then be understood as the constituted products or accomplishments of the specific philosophical requirements “mediating” our relation to the phenomena under consideration. The objects of philosophical reflection are constituted in accordance with our requirements, and should our requirements require something of the phenomenon that contradicts the facts of language, a conflict emerges: our language resists our requirement, does not furnish the proper form of object. The transition from our pre-theoretical understanding of a particular phenomenon to the theoretically determined understanding of that phenomenon cannot in this case be made without generating a conflict between the phenomenon and the object of philosophical or theoretical reflection. Understanding philosophical requirement means understanding, not only its role with respect to the entering of concrete claims, but, and perhaps more importantly, understanding its role with respect to the constitution of the objects of those claims. In this case, “assembling reminders” has the force of undermining the paradigm of object specific to philosophical psychology as constituted by the institutive requirement of that science.

18 Our language denies us our requirements, and our requirements render us blind to the facts of our language. Our requirements, then, obscure our vision, prevent us from seeing what is in plain view, for what is in plain view, what we cannot have failed to know, does not conform, or only imperfectly conforms, to our requirement, and thus cannot be pertinent to us, since “pertinence” has itself become a function of our requirement. What enters our field of vision in philosophy is not and must not be taken to be the undisturbed calm of the phenomena of our world, but our world as seen through a prism the form of which oftentimes forces upon us a certain blindness with respect to the facts of our language. What does and does not enter our field of vision when we are doing philosophy must itself become a problem for philosophy, for that the objects of philosophical reflection might be the constituted products of the requirements guiding that reflection, bearing little or no resemblance to the phenomena reflected upon, means that the significance of philosophy might be lost on us.

19 Every genuine philosophical requirement has the force of something not chosen, some- thing demanded by the phenomena themselves, something philosophers have a special ear for. But phenomena do not demand anything, they rest in silence. We are ourselves the elsewhere that we hear. And yet we do not have complete control over what, within us, compels us, nor do we always recognize ourselves to be thinking at the behest of a requirement. What appears to be a necessary state of affairs can be recognized as a requirement only after another path of thinking has been laid down. This other path opens us onto an hitherto unheard of possibility of thinking, a possibility that takes responsibility for the requirement and makes of it an object of criticism. The requirements that have emerged in the course of the history of philosophy – metaphysical, epistemological, logical, ethical – are so deeply our own that they have oftentimes appeared to possess a necessity wholly independent of all human being. We project our requirements onto the phenomena themselves and proceed to investigate them on that basis.

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20 The “moral perfection” of thought consists, then, in occasioning within ourselves the disposition to understand things not beyond but, as it were, before our requirements determine the field of thinking, and this despite an urge to misunderstand, despite the force of our requirements.3 Requirements compel conviction, they exercise a certain power, they haunt us, and our wanting to avail ourselves of them and their effects in no way secures us against their imminent return. To question a requirement is to take on the enormous task of rearrangement for the sake of undoing, within the space rearranged, the conviction that requirement compels. But the life of words is stubborn, and our attempts at leading them back does not guarantee that they will stay for any longer than a night. There is always the morning drift, the hold of a requirement, the return of the must, and the daily labor of breaking free.

NOTES

1. Wittgenstein L., (1953), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York, The Macmillan Company, § 89. 2. St. Augustine, (1998), Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 230. 3. Wittgenstein L., (1953), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York, The Macmillan Company, 190: “Don’t look at it as a matter of course, but as the most remarkable thing, that verbs like ‘believe,’ ‘wish,’ ‘will’ display all the inflexions possessed by ‘cut,’ ‘chew,’ ‘run’.”

ABSTRACTS

The Philosophical Investigations can be read as a sustained meditation on the metaphysical effects philosophical requirements have on our understanding of the phenomena of philosophical inquiry. The present essay proposes the basic outlines such a reading might take by attending to Wittgenstein’s distinctive form of philosophical criticism, a form that interrogates the theoretical and moral integrity of our requirements and the claims we enter on their behalf. On this reading, the moral perfection of thought can be said to consist in the criticism of the requirements that emerge in the course of philosophical inquiry or, in Kantian terms, the critique of the dialectical requirements of reason.

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Cavell’s “Moral Perfectionism” or Emerson’s “Moral Sentiment”?

Joseph Urbas

1 As I have argued elsewhere (Urbas 2009), what Stanley Cavell gives us is an Emerson recast in a form more congenial to postmodern sensibilities. And nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in his representation of Emersonian selfhood as detached from any metaphysical ground. In the preface to Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, for example, Cavell cautions his readers against “attaching any fixed, metaphysical interpretation of the idea of a self in [his] understanding of Emersonian Perfectionism” (1990: xxxi). In Quest of the Ordinary asserts, similarly, that the Emersonian self is essentially free-floating: [T]he idea of relying in Emerson’s word self-reliance knows its relation to the idea of binding or bonding in the word religion, so that the self’s (perpetual, step-wise, circle-wise) construction of the self, say in “Self-Reliance,” has to pass through an idea of the self’s alliance with and rallying of itself, its self-authorizations, as on a path, or succession, in the aftermath of religion’s dominance. (Cavell 1988: xii)

2 Cavell further asserts that Emerson abandoned any hope of a “resubstantializing the self, the hope for which Hume and Kant, let us say, had shattered” (ibid.).1 It should be noted too that the same strong aversion to metaphysics (“metaphysical suggestions I say I want no part of”) and to the very idea of foundation (“an old thought for an old world”) leads Cavell to exaggerate the power of skepticism and “groundlessness” in Emerson’s thought (Cavell 1990: 13; 1989: 109; 1988: 5).

3 The overall result, though in perfect keeping with the footloose, nomadic, open-ended spirit of an age that prefers “finding” to “founding” (Cavell 1989: 77-118) and writes its own obituary to ontology (Putnam 2004: 71-85), is blatantly inconsistent with Emerson’s own writings.

4 Whether we like it or not, the Emersonian ethical self does have a secure metaphysical ground. In Emerson, the causality we share with nature is the foundation of autonomous selfhood. Thus, very explicitly, “Self-Reliance”: We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the

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fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.37; my emphasis)

5 Quaint though such a doctrine may seem to us, Emerson’s conception of moral selfhood is inseparable from his ontology; it is firmly grounded in what he calls “the moral cause of the world” (“Morals,” Emerson 1859; 2001: 2.133). This same causal ground is the “universal reliance” upon which Emersonian self-reliance is based. The “aboriginal Self” into which the essay “Self-Reliance” inquires – “the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded” – is “Supreme Cause” (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.37, 40). Causality is the ultimate basis of selfhood for Emerson: “Only Cause can say I” (Emerson 1959-72: 2.248). The permanent enabling background of selfhood and ethical action is our secure place in the causal and ontological continuum. As Emerson puts it in “The Over-Soul,” there is “no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away.” (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.161). In the early as in the late Emerson, ethical empowerment presupposes not a dualism but rather a deep continuity or alignment of self and world: “the true man in every act has the Universe at his back” (Emerson 1835 1960-82: 5.48); “whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature” (“Divinity School Address,” Emerson 1838; 1971-2007: 1.79); “all power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world” (“Power,” Emerson 1860; 1971-2007: 6.30).

6 It is the Emersonian “moral sentiment” that substantiates this continuity and shared causality with the world. The moral sentiment “speaks to every man the law after which the Universe was made” (Emerson 1903-04: 11.486). It is “all we know of the Cause of Causes” (Emerson 1959-72: 2.352). As our felt, vital link to Being, the moral sentiment makes us at home in the universe and secures our universality as moral selves: “It puts us in place. It centres, it concentrates us. It puts us at the heart of nature, where we belong; in the cabinet of Science and of Causes; there, where all the wires terminate which hold the world in magnetic communication, and so converts us into universal beings” (“Morals,” Emerson 2001: 2.133). Emerson’s ethical doctrine thus finds its metaphysical foundation in his causal monism (thereby providing a perfect illustration of Hilary Putnam’s thesis, in Ethics without Ontology, that an ethics with ontology entails a commitment to monism, Putnam 2004: 18-9). To quote the conclusion of the late lecture on “Morals” (which contains, as we shall see, Emerson’s revision of Kant): “You will see the results of inquiry into the moral nature: it is the same fact existing as sentiment and as will in the mind, which works in nature as irresistible law, exerting influence in nations, intelligent beings, or down in the kingdoms of brute or of chemical nature” (Emerson 2001: 2.139; my emphasis). As this quotation shows, Emerson sees the universe as a causal and moral continuum. The moral sentiment is not limited to human nature or individual psychology; on the contrary, as a manifestation of universal causality, it has ontological status. Which is why Emerson uses the term indifferently to designate both the sentiment within and the law without. For him the two are ultimately one. This fundamental causal and moral continuity of inside and outside, self and world, is something Emerson emphasized consistently throughout his career. Here is an early expression of it, from Essays: First Series (1841): All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. (“Compensation,” 1971-2007: 2.60)

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7 And now, two decades later, “Worship” (The Conduct of Life, 1860): Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see, that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, – but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in. As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. But, in the human mind, this tie of fate is made alive. The law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is inspiration; out there in Nature, we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment. (1971-2007: 6.117; emphasis added)

8 The Emersonian law of compensation rules a universal order that is moral as well as causal. “Emerson equated ethics with being” (Van Cromphout 1999: 35). The essay “Compensation,” where Emerson defines virtue as an “influx” from “the aboriginal abyss of real Being,” makes this equation quite explicit: “In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous action I add to the world.” Likewise, “Self-Reliance” identifies virtue with reality and causal substance: “Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain” (1971-2007: 2.70, 71, 40). 2 “Spiritual Laws” makes the equation still more explicit, if that were possible: “Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM” (2.92).

9 Clearly, then, Emerson’s ethics is firmly grounded in his ontology. The moral sentiment provides a metaphysical foundation for ethical selfhood and assures us – notwithstanding recurrent bouts of skepticism – that we are fundamentally at home in a world governed by universal moral and causal law, a world where relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always.

10 What is especially problematic in the Cavellian thematics of “Emersonian Perfectionism” is the blithe disregard for the core doctrine of the moral sentiment, which David M. Robinson has rightly called Emerson’s “bedrock of consistency” and “the most important point of continuity in his thinking from first to last” (Robinson 1993: 7, 195). The moral sentiment, Emerson insists at the close of his essay on the “representative skeptic,” “never forfeits its supremacy” (“Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 1971-2007: 4.103). It gives ethical selfhood a secure metaphysical ground in “the moral cause of the world” and provides what Emerson himself identifies unequivocally, in the same essay, as the “solution” to skepticism – a problem which is not, as Cavell would have it (Cavell 1989: 79), “unsolvable” in the later writings. The paragraph from “Worship” quoted above, which begins by defining skepticism as “unbelief in cause and effect” and ends on a bold assertion of the “fatal strength” of the moral sentiment, confirms this idea a decade later. And as Emerson insisted yet again in “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (1878): “The commanding fact which I never do not see, is the sufficiency of the moral sentiment” (1903-04: 10.212).

11 The consequence of this centrality would appear obvious, and may be stated simply: When it comes to Emerson’s ethics and his vision of human perfectibility,3 reference to the moral sentiment is not optional, even if we find the doctrine dissatisfactory (e.g. Van Cromphout 1999, 34-5, 47, 57). We cannot speak of Emerson’s “moral perfectionism,”

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much less of its constitution (Cavell 1990), without considering his core metaphysical doctrine. Here is the fatal flaw in Cavell’s account, his fundamental departure from Emerson, and the source of a number of unfortunate confusions.

12 First among these I would cite Cavell’s overemphasis on skepticism, and on the “loss of ground” or “sense of groundlessness” that is its “truth” (Cavell 1990: 61; 1988: 5). Abandoning what he considers an illusory resubstantialization of the subject, Cavell seeks to preserve skepticism (one of philosophy’s principal “tasks,” Cavell 1988: 5), to privilege finding over founding or abandonment over inhabitation (Cavell 1981: 137-8) – in a word, to enlist Emerson into this perfectionist program. “Metaphysical suggestions” are something that Cavell says he wants “no part of” (Cavell 1990: 13). Hence if “founding” there is, it “reaches no farther than each issue of finding.” Or as he puts it elsewhere in the landmark lecture “Finding as Founding”: “The existence of one of these worlds of life depends on our finding ourselves there. They have no foundation otherwise” (Cavell 1989: 114, 96-7). With Cavell, this much seems clear, then: no metaphysics. Where Emerson himself is concerned, however, there is a major problem, for the whole point of his particularly emphatic reminder in “Self-Reliance” is to insist that though we “forget” its existence, a secure ground for selfhood in our shared causality with nature is always ready to hand: Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Thoreau concludes similarly in Walden – itself an earnest metaphysical search for a “hard bottom” or “point d’appui” – that “there is a solid bottom every where” (1971: 98, 330).4 The movement known as Transcendentalism was a quest for permanent grounds for being, selfhood, and religious faith. Its distinctive “ontological turn” was one of the things that made the movement “new.”

13 A second and related confusion lies in the identification of the metaphysical ground with fixity. Over and against this, Cavell proposes an anti-metaphysical alternative in the Emersonian principle of onwardness. As appealing as the choice may seem, especially for the “open-ended thematics” of perfectionism (Cavell 1990: 4), the terms of the opposition, as presented, do not apply to Emerson’s philosophy. The onwardness that Cavell celebrates at the end of “Thinking of Emerson” as proof of a bold abandonment of the “metaphysical fixture” is in reality an ontological necessity – “the necessity of progression or onwardness in each creature,” as Emerson calls it in an 1845 Journal entry (Emerson 1960-82: 9.301).5 In “Experience” Emerson dubs this the “onward trick of nature” (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.32), which Cavell, in a piece of hedging characteristic of his approach, “guesses” is not realism exactly” (1981: 126-7).6 Of course it is. Realism is exactly what it is. Onwardness is a trick of nature. It is evidence of the “flowing law” of causality that rules throughout the universe, the law that is not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always, the universal law to which even the skeptic must finally submit (Emerson 1960-82: 9.295), since the moral sentiment never forfeits its supremacy. What Emerson’s dynamic, causationist metaphysics provides is precisely the sort of philosophy he called for in the “Montaigne” essay – “one of fluxions and mobility” (Emerson 1971-2007: 4.91). The same philosophy informs the later essay “Power,” which makes wordplay do the serious work of metaphysics by defining self-reliance, “original action,” and success in life as our ability, when faced with a world moving at a dizzying pace, to “enter cordially into the game, and whirl with the whirling world.”7 Nearly two decades earlier “The Transcendentalist” had decribed the world as “spinning away” like a “wild balloon” (1.202). But in the midst of all the furious agitation Emerson discerns order, in the figure of Law – “Law riding sure through wild and prodigious motion” (1959-72: 3.28). No false problem of “fixtures”

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here, but rather a permanent foundation for selfhood and an ever-present source of power and movement. In Emerson the metaphysical ground is not synonymous with fixity. Emerson agreed with his friend Cyrus Bartol, who put the idea nicely when he said, “God, who is my Cause, is my Causeway” (Bartol 1872: 406). Small wonder, then, that Emerson should conclude “Self-Reliance” on an exhortation to deal exclusively with “Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God,” or that his considered response to the skeptic should be: “Truth or the connection of cause and effect alone interests us” (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.50, 4.96). Emerson’s philosophy overcomes the opposition between the “fixed” metaphysical foundation and the principle of movement by making causation the ultimate ground of being and selfhood. Universal causation thus embodies “home” and “onwardness” at the same time. “Let us sit at home with the cause,” says Emerson in “Self-Reliance” (2.41). We find our home in “that which affirms itself to be the Cause of all” (Emerson 1959-72: 3.29).

14 These last quotations point to a third misunderstanding, here again concerning the metaphysical ground. Perfectionism expresses Cavell’s conviction that the very idea of a “ground” has to be somewhow rethought, or made “more human” (Cavell 1989: 9). Cavell appears to think that to posit a ground for selfhood elsewhere than in the task of onwardness itself is somehow to imperil our humanity. This position, whatever its pertinence to Cavell’s own philosophy, makes no sense as a commentary on Emerson. The Emersonian moral subject is fundamentally at home in the world, and in this particular regard there is – Cavell’s claims notwithstanding (Cavell 1989: 79) – no fundamental difference between Nature and a later essay like “Experience.” Both emphasize man’s close kinship with “dearest nature, strong and kind,” to quote a line from the motto to this last essay (Emerson 1971-2007: 3.25). Emerson’s critique of idealism in Nature, for example, should be understood to include not only the Berkeleian denial of the existence of matter – the obvious target – but also the Kantian opposition of mind and nature: “Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it” (1.38). This “consanguinity” or shared life is what Emerson will later identify in “Self-Reliance” as shared causality. The causal ground of universal reliance is not felt by Emerson to be a threat to his humanity or selfhood but rather their very condition. Thus Emerson, in an 1837 journal entry: “A certain wandering light comes to me which I instantly perceive to be the Cause of Causes. It transcends all proving. It is itself the ground of being; and I see that it is not one & I another, but this is the life of my life” (Emerson 1960-82: 5.337). As the “Montaigne” essay shows, the moral sentiment – the “solution” to the “superficial” problem of skepticism – bears witness to this consanguinity by allowing us to feel our kinship to the thought that is “parent of the universe” and dynamic principle of all being: The final solution in which Skepticism is lost, is, in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts and take those superficial views which we call Skepticism but I know that they will presently appear to me in that order which makes Skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow. (4.103)

15 A final difficulty centers on the Emersonian theme of “nextness.” Cavell misdescribes both this and onwardness as “tasks” (Cavell 2005: 228-9; 1981: 138). Tasks for

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perfectionism, no doubt, but not for Emerson. Like onwardness, nextness characterizes our spontaneous life and being, our natural place in the causal continuum; it is not, strictly speaking, an object of effort. We are always at home with the cause, whether we realize it or not, even though the powers immediately available to us have been concealed by familiarity and conformism (“wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom,” Emerson 1971-2007: 3.167), even though we live and move among appearances and “forget” that we share “the life by which things exist.” To make nextness or onwardness a task, as Cavell suggests, would be quite literally to make work for oneself, in an act of willfulness, of needless meddling in the natural order of things. Emerson, by contrast, is a stern and consistent critic of voluntarism in matters ethical and political. To those who would “represent virtue as a struggle,” he replies: “there is no merit in the matter” (2.78). Political reform movements commit a similar voluntarist error – an error that Cavell himself identifies at the end of “Experience” (Cavell 1990: 20; 2004: 139, 141) but without acknowledging that the very basis of Emerson’s critique is his belief that the true source of empowerment and realization lies in the world, not in an individual subject seen, through the skeptic’s eyes, as divorced from it (Cavell 1989: 95). As Emerson remarks wryly in “New England Reformers” (a lecture that closes, like “Experience,” with fitting emphasis on our empowering position in the causal continuum): “we need not assist the administration of the universe” (3.166). In “Spiritual Laws,” which insists likewise that “our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will” and points to “the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life,” Emerson denounces voluntarist meddling as interference in the natural order of things: The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need for struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature, for, whenever we get this vantage ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the pre- sent, we are able to discern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves. (1971-2007: 2.78, 79; emphasis added)

16 As “The American Scholar” had famously declared, “the highest spiritual cause” is always nearby, lurking everywhere – in “the common,” “the familiar,” and “the low,” in the “suburbs and extremities of nature,” in the merest “trifle” (1.67-68). Thus, also, Walden: Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. (Thoreau 1971: 134)

17 Nextness is not a task, then, any more than onwardness is. Cavellian perfectionism sees as requiring work that which requires, in reality, a form of obedience or passiveness.8 It is no accident that one of Emerson’s favorite lines from Bacon is Imperat parendo: “Command by obeying” (Emerson 1990-94: 2.332; 2001: 1.182). Here the attitude is not one of voluntarism but of piety: “By piety alone, by conversing with the cause of nature, is [man] safe and commands it” (“The Method of Nature,” Emerson 1971-2007: 1.131). It is not nextness that requires effort but what Emerson stigmatizes as “roving” – a form of private willfulness, of resistance or opposition to the Supreme Will. Thus the “Divinity School Address,” in a passage where Emerson also develops his causal monist doctrine of the moral sentiment:

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[T]he world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and […] one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere baulked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise […] All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. (1971-2007: 1.78-79)

18 Willfulness throws us out of our natural home, out of our “parallelism to the course of thought” (2.79), out of our alignment with the causal power of nature. “My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving,” Emerson declares in “Self-Reliance.” Hence the subsequent exhortation, in the same essay: “let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause” (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.37, 41). The essay “Spiritual Laws” is right: our life might indeed be much easier and simpler than we make it: “We need only obey” (2.81). The successful man is a conduit for the causal force, a “conductor of the causative influence” (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, a favorite among the Transcendentalists, 1993: 267). In Emerson he is a “visible conductor”; his object, “to suffer the law to traverse his whole being without obstruction” (Emerson 1971-2007: 2.79, 93). We are here, as Emerson says at the close of the Montaigne essay, “not to work, but to be worked upon” (4.105). With “our miserable interferences” (2.82), we have already taken on far too many needless “tasks.” Why multiply them, when it is not positive, painstaking effort but simple alignment that is needed? All we need to do is to sit at home with the cause, to go with the flow, to “whirl with the whirling world”: Why need you choose so painfully your place, and occupation, and associates, and modes of action, and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. (“Spiritual Laws,” 2.81; emphasis added)

19 Ontological alignment, as it turns out, is the key to Emerson’s revision of Kantian moral philosophy. Here again, Cavell’s dogged refusal of metaphysics leads to distortions. Much the best summary of Cavell’s view of the relation between the two thinkers appears in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The doubleness in Kant’s two standpoints, or two worlds, that the human takes upon itself, or lives in, is, I think, understandable as a projection of reflexiveness. The intelligible world would be the scene of human activeness, the sensuous world that of human passiveness. Then Kant’s moral imperative, his “ought,” which the doubleness of human habitation is meant to explain, or picture, is also an explanation, or shows the place for one, of the self’s identity, that it is the same self that is active and passive. […] My reading of Emerson takes him […] as looking everywhere to inherit Kant’s insight without his architectonic (he isn’t the only one); to account, for example, for “constraint” without the conditions of the imperative “ought” and so without Kant’s fixed differences between the intelligible and the sensous realms, between the imposition of the categories and the receptions of their intuitions – departures from Kant that will require Emerson to find freedom and knowledge as much in the passive (patience, passion) as in the active dimensions of selfhood. (Cavell 1990: xxxv-xxxvi)

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20 There is frankly much to admire here in the way of philosophical insight, particularly in the conclusion, but Emerson’s differences with Kant need to be stated more perspicuously. Whether or not Emerson had Kant specifically in mind in the closing paragraph of “Experience” (I am not convinced he did), Cavell is certainly right to see him as rejecting the “fixed differences” between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. But, we need to be clear about the reason for the rejection. If in Emerson the worlds “of nature and understanding” are not “perennially, ineluctably in metaphysical combat” (Cavell 2004: 141), it is not because he has abandoned metaphysics for perfectionism, it is because he is a causal monist. For him there are not “two worlds.” Cavell portrays Emerson as seeking to transform the Kantian idea of constraint into a perfectionist notion of onwardness: “this Emersonian constraint is precisely not expressed as an ’ought.’ Rather it is as like a desire as like a law; Emerson figures it as a form of attraction, as if to my further self” (Cavell 2004: 140, my emphasis; cf. also 32). By contrast, the “true” or “grounded” self – “a fixed, metaphysical interpretation of the idea of a self” – is one that Cavell has dismissed consistently for over two decades, from “Thinking of Emerson” and Conditions to Cities of Words, as “beyond desire, beyond change” (Cavell 1981: 137-8; 1990: xxxi, xxxiv; 2004: 140) – as excluding, in other words, any principle of onwardness. But the constraint of Emersonian onwardness is not as like a desire as like a law. We can dispense with the circumlocutions: it is a law – a law of being, a law that grounds an ethics with ontology.

21 Cavell cites the Kantian Categorical Imperative in a discussion of what he calls “constitutional judgment” in the essay “Fate” (Cavell 1995: 35-6), declaring vaguely and unhelpfully that Emerson is appealing to “something of the kind” when he speaks of the “insight” that “throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as others” (Emerson 1971-2007: 6:14). The insight in question is in fact nothing of the kind, simply because, as yet another expression of the moral sentiment (which Emerson discusses three paragraphs later in the essay), Kant would have considered it heteronomous (Van Cromphout 1999: 47). But it is less to “Fate” than to the late lecture “Morals” that we should turn for Emerson’s most explicit revision of Kant. The ontological origin – our first sharing of “the life by which things exist” – also turns out to be a moral end in Emerson’s recasting of the Categorical Imperative. Only individuals acting in accordance with “central and constitutional reason,” only individuals who embody virtue – that is to say, who substitute being for seeming – may be called real: I choose to will with reason, the right of all souls, and not for the pleasure of me. So deep is our sense of the necessity of resting on nature and of universal motives, that, we call such, real men; – whilst men acting for by-ends, or not from central and constitutional reason, false and superficial. This acting after your constitution and for that which is always the same, as, justice goodness, human freedom, and benefit, – we call reality. (2001: 2.134)

22 For Emerson, universal ends are not formulated by an isolated, sovereign subject, in the exercise of its noumenal freedom; they are an integral part of nature. Hence the crucial pairing of necessities – and, even more crucially, their specific order: resting on nature and universal motives. Our dependence on nature, on the causal ground of selfhood, is prior. Nature and the universal ends—the ends which constitute the “strict” moral counterpart of “universal material force” (Emerson’s term, 2001: 2.133) – are the ontological ground of all moral action, and secure our reality as moral beings. What Emerson calls above the “central and constitutional reason” is not Kant’s pure practical

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reason; rather, it is the individual’s precise point of alignment “with the axis of things”: “There is somewhat constitutional to him to do, somewhat which he does with joy, and with the consent of all men and things, and which nature backs him in doing” (Emerson 2001: 2:133, 134). Resolving the conundrum of how to make the pure reason practical (Cavell 1989: 95; 2004: 139) is irrelevant to Emerson, a causal monist and champion of the moral sentiment. As “a man of thought,” he feels his immediate kinship to the empowering thought that is “parent of the universe.” As an ethical philosopher, Emerson is not interested in a Kantian “contracausal autonomy” (Schneewind 1998: 3) – there can be no such thing in his philosophy – but rather in the precise point of coincidence or alignment with the axis of things that gives human action its efficacy, its substance or grounding in reality. “Acting for by-ends” – roving, in other words – is not only a violation of some abstract, universal principle of morality or reason; it robs us of part of our being: “we become less and less, a mote, a point,” to recall the words of “The Divinity School Address” quoted above. By ignoring universality of motive and acting willfully, simply “for the pleasure of me,” I have less of a purchase on reality be- cause I myself have less substance; and as a result (since for Emerson substance is cause), I also have less freedom: “Reality rules Destiny. They may well fear fate who have any infirmity of habit and aim. But he who rests on what he is, has a destiny above destiny, and can make mouths at fortune” (Emerson 2001: 2.133).

23 Moral autonomy in Emerson is resting or relying on what we are, on the reality of our individual being as it meshes with the causal power of material and spiritual being as a whole. Morality for Emerson is thus action “according to nature.” Consequently, our moral freedom is not noumenal in the Kantian sense, in the sense that it stands in opposition to the necessity of the causal order, but is always grounded in and continuous with the powers of nature. The Emersonian moral subject must have this direct grounding in “universal force,” without which virtue is otiose and “goodness dies in wishes” (Emerson 1971-2007: 6.16). Thus Emersonian autonomy is not “contracausal” but on the contrary firmly rooted in his causal monist metaphysics. Self-reliance is grounded in “universal reliance” on the Cause. It is, we might say, however paradoxical it sounds, a “morality as self-governance” based on a “morality as obedience” (Schneewind 1998: 4).9 Emerson saw no contradiction between the two. If in the motto to “Experience” the weak, unprepossessing figure of “little man” turns out to be the “founder” who rules over “the lords of life,” that is because his reliable guide – “dearest nature, strong and kind” – declares him such (Emerson 1971-2007: 3.25). Power is always a “sharing of the nature of the world” (6.30).

24 Onwardness, nextness, preserving skepticism, humanizing the ground, transforming the idea of constraint – these may be “tasks” for perfectionism; they are not for Emerson. At the end of the day, it is perfectionism’s resolutely anti-metaphysical vocation that makes it peculiarly un-Emersonian. One might argue that when Cavell is philosophizing “after” Emerson – or even openly “fantasizing for” him (Emerson 1989: 107), the approximations, hedgings, and circumlocutions – the I guesses, the not exactlys, the as likes, the something of the kinds – are not only expressions of prudence or uncertainty but also ways of avoiding the disagreeable fact of Emerson’s strong metaphysical commitment. The conceptual consequences of this avoidance are a misrepresentation of Emersonian selfhood as free- floating, a persistent mislocation of the effort of the moral subject, and a marked tendency to substitute the social (or linguistic) for the metaphysical, as a possible though of course “unfixed” ground for

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onwardness. Thus, on this last point, Cities of Words: “In Emerson’s words mankind is still pictured as living in two worlds, but the worlds now are not those of nature and of understanding, perennially, ineluctably in metaphysical combat, but those of society as it stands and as it may become – hidden in, in struggle with, the present” (Cavell 2004: 141).10 Cavell’s aversion to metaphysics also explains the glaring inconsistency noted in passing above – on the one hand, his superb insight into “the power of passiveness”; on the other, his stubborn refusal to see exactly the same power at work in a passage he considers a locus classicus of perfectionism, the conclusion of “Experience,” which defines practical empowerment as a shifting of the burden of realization onto a world that is here to assist us, not we it.11 Here is the true romance of practical power that Emerson continued to celebrate in his late lecture “Perpetual Forces” (1862): “Like the hero in our nursery tale, who has one servant who eats slices of granite rocks, and another who can hear the grass grow, and a third who can run to Babylon in half an hour, so man in Nature is surrounded by a gang of friendly giants who can do harder stints than these” (Emerson 2001: 2.289). No wonder Emerson loved the poet George Herbert’s lines, “More servants wait on man/Than he’ll take notice of” (Nature, Emerson 1971-2007: 1.41; “Perpetual Forces,” 2001:2.289). Power always means sharing the nature of the world, “borrowing the might of the elements” (Emerson 1903-04: 7.14).

25 Whether we like it or not, Emerson is a strong – Putnam would say “inflationary” (Putnam 2004: 17-22) – ontologist who proposes an ethics akin to rational intuitionism, an ethics with ontology, an ethics which sees moral action as necessarily rooted in “the nature of things” (“Ethics,” Emerson 1959-72: 2.144). Whether we like it or not – even if we consider, here again with Putnam, that “monism is a bad outlook in every area of human life” (1990: 131), Emerson’s core doctrine of the moral sentiment is indeed rooted in a causal monism. This is the Emerson we must clearly acknowledge before claiming him as one of our own.

26 The real question for us, then, is which will it be? Cavell’s “moral perfectionism” or Emerson’s “moral sentiment”? We cannot have both.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARTOL C.A., (1872), Radical Problems, Boston, Roberts.

BATES S., (2003), “Stanley Cavell and Ethics,” in Eldridge R. (ed.), Stanley Cavell, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

CAVELL S., (1981), The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition, San Francisco, North Point Press.

CAVELL S., (1988), In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

CAVELL S., (1989), This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, Albuquerque, Living Batch Press.

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CAVELL S., (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

CAVELL S., (1994), A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

CAVELL S., (1995), Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Cambridge, Blackwell.

CAVELL S., (2004), Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

CAVELL S., (2005), Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

CHANNING W. E., (1896), The Works of William E. Channing, D.D., Boston, American Unitarian Association.

COLERIDGE S. T., (1993), Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, London, Routledge.

EMERSON R. W., (1903-04), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Centenary Edition], ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

EMERSON R. W., (1959-72), The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols., Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

EMERSON R. W., (1960-82), The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols., Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

EMERSON R. W., (1971-2007), The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joseph Slater et al., 7 vols. to date, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

EMERSON R. W., (1989-92), The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Albert J. von Frank et al., 4 vols., Columbia, University of Missouri Press.

EMERSON R. W., (1990-94), The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Orth et al., 3 vols., Columbia, University of Missouri Press.

EMERSON R. W., (2001), The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, 2 vols., Athens, University of Georgia Press.

GOULD T., (1998), Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writings of Stanley Cavell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

GREENHAM D., (2007), “The Skeptical Deduction: Reading Kant and Cavell in Emerson’s ‘Self- Reliance’,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 53, 253-81.

HAMMER E., (2002), Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary, Cambridge, Polity.

MONTAIGNE, (1892), The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt, New York, A.L. Burt.

MULHALL S., (1994), Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

MULHALL S., (1996), The Cavell Reader, Cambridge, Blackwell.

PUTNAM H., (1992), Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

PUTNAM H., (2004), Ethics without Ontology, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

ROBINSON D., (1993), Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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SCHNEEWIND J. B., (1998), The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

THOREAU H. D., (1971), Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

URBAS J., (2009), “‘True Romance’: Emerson’s Realism,” Southwest Philosophy Review 25.2.

VAN CROMPHOUT G., (1999), Emerson’s Ethics, Columbia, University of Missouri Press.

NOTES

1. Gould describes perfectionist selfhood as “a continual undermining of a false ideal of wholeness” (Gould 1998: 104). See also Mulhall’s summary of the perfectionist self “as ineluctably split or doubled,” as “conditioned by an ineliminable internal doubleness,” with “attained” and “unattained but attainable” sides (Mulhall 1996: 13-4; cf. also Mulhall 1994: 256-7, 298-9). 2. The equation was by no means new to Emerson, who identified virtue in an early (1829) sermon as “of the very nature and substance of God Himself” (1989-92: 2.90). Self-reliance may be described as the best resemblance we have, as creatures lower down the scale of being, to the self-existence that characterizes the Supreme Cause. 3. Though perhaps a useful distinction from our late perspective, one of Cavell’s stated reasons for adopting the word perfectionism – that, unlike perfectibility, it embraces onwardness and refuses a final state for selfhood (Cavell 1990: 3, 12-3; 2004: 445-7; 2005: 121) – is a distinction without a difference for Emerson’s Unitarian cultural milieu, where the ideal of perfection carried no hint of a term to the ongoing process of self-development. Emerson’s teacher William Ellery Channing described the path leading “onward to perfection” as properly “interminable” (Channing 1896: 965); his Transcendentalist friend Cyrus Bartol, who declared “the essence of faith” to be “advance,” put it more trenchantly: “The infidel is he that asserts finality anywhere, makes a term of any achievement or conception, sees or puts a block in the eternal road. To affirm any stop or period is unbelief” (Bartol 1872: 73, 223). For a critique of Cavell’s “aversion” to Christianity, see Mulhall (1994: 282-312); on religion, see also Hammer (Hammer 2002: 145-6). 4. Cavell writes off Thoreau’s search for foundations as mere joking (Cavell 1989: 109). 5. This journal entry is part of a series of notations on skepticism that constitute Emerson’s preparatory work for the Montaigne lecture. 6. For another example of hedging, due to a similar reluctance to acknowledge Emerson’s realism, see the treatment of the closing paragraph of “Experience” (a locus classicus of perfectionism), and in particular the last line (“the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power,” Emerson 1971-2007: 3.49, my emphasis), which according to Cavell “does not exactly shift the burden from the genius onto the world” (Cavell 1989: 95, my emphasis; cf. also 1990: 13; 1989: 10). Here I would reply: of course it does. The shift is precisely what makes the romance true. See also the rather telling omission of the crucial adjective in the same passage of “Thinking of Emerson” where Cavell eschews the “metaphysical fixture” (1981:128), as well as in Conditions (Cavell 1990: xxi). 7. Emerson (1971-2007: 6.29; cf. also 1990-94: 1.50). The second paragraph of “Power,” which builds up to the vision of the “whirling world,” is an excellent illustration of Emerson’s causal monism: “All successful men have agreed in one thing; – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connexion between every pulse-beat and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing, – characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one” (Emerson 1971-2007: 6.28-29; see also “The American Scholar,”

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written over two decades earlier, 1.67-68). It is worth re-emphasizing that though Emerson’s is a “whirling world,” where “everything tilts and rocks” (“The Method of Nature,” 1.121), it is governed “not by luck, but by law.” And therein lies Emerson’s optimistic, causationist response to Montaigne’s melancholy vision of the world as a branloire pérenne (a world that “eternally turns round,” in Emerson’s favorite Cotton translation of the Essais, 1892: 2.268). Emerson responds to Montaigne’s famous declaration that we have “no communication with Being” (1.617) by appealing to the moral sentiment – that is to say, to “that Thought through which we communicate with absolute nature” (“The Transcendentalist,” 1971-2007: 1.182). 8. This confusion is rather surprising, in light of Cavell’s superb insight into what he calls “the power of passiveness” in Emerson (Cavell 1989: 114-5). I return to this inconsistency in my conclusion. 9. It should be noted, however, that roughly from the Divinity School Address onward, Emersonian “morality as obedience” detaches itself from the idea of a personal God. For the definitive expression of Emerson’s controversial doctrine of impersonality, which set the Unitarian establishment against him, see the conclusion of “Fate,” where he pleads for a new form of worship: “Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity” (Emerson 1971-2007: 6.26). 10. In a similar move, Stanley Bates’s useful description of the “internal dialectic” of perfectionist selfhood opens out onto a form of loose and presumably non-binding social determination: “What perfectionism wants is the possibility of self-transformation according to an ideal that is internal to the self’s constitution rather than one that comes from without. However, we need to remember that what is ‘internal’ and what comes ‘from without’ are themselves not fixed and permanent categories. If the transfiguration of any particular state of the self is to be possible, then these categories will be capable of transformation. Of course, part of every state of my self is how I relate to the society that has helped to form me” (Bates 2003: 42). This seems consistent with Cavell’s own writings, which emphasize the social dimension and “the importance to perfectionism of the friend” (Cavell 1990: xxxii). On language as ground, see Greenham’s Cavellian reading of “Self-Reliance” as “an attempt to found the self on words” (Greenham 2007: 277). To a large extent, it seems, the “work” of onwardness is to be performed in or through language and writing – in Emerson, through the essay. To quote “Finding as Founding”: “The step I am taking here is to receive the work of ‘Experience’ as transforming or replacing founding with finding and to ask what our lives would look like if the work is realized” (Cavell 1989: 109). 11. In Cavell’s view, by contrast, the closing line of “Experience” expresses the “unsolvability” of skepticism and “says the world exists as it were for its own reasons” (Cavell 1989: 79).

ABSTRACTS

What is properly Emersonian about moral perfectionism? Perhaps the best answer is: not much. Stanley Cavell’s signature concept, which claims close kinship to Emerson’s ethical philosophy, seems upon careful examination to be rather far removed from it. Once we get past the broad, unproblematic appeals to Emerson’s “unattained but attainable self,” and consider the specific content and implications of perfectionism, the differences between the two thinkers become too substantive – and too fraught with serious misunderstandings – to be ignored. It is above all Cavell’s complete disregard for the Emersonian “moral sentiment” that jeopardizes his claim to be a continuator of Emerson’s legacy in ethical philosophy. I would not deny that Cavell’s own

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work stands as an extrordinary contribution to contemporary ethics. Nor would I dispute his title as the living philosopher who has done more than any other to restore Emerson to his rightful place in the history of American philosophy, as a thinker worthy of the highest consideration. Still less would I discount the boldness and originality of Cavell’s readings of Emerson. What I am contesting, rather, is the propriety of attaching the label “Emersonian” to the notion of perfectionism, especially in view of its strong anti-metaphysical bias. The Emerson canon provides ample grounds for rejecting Cavell’s claim as largely unsubstantiated and in a number of crucial ways inconsistent with the moral sentiment’s firm grounding of ethics in ontology.

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Emersonian Moral Perfectionism An Alternative Ethics – But in What Sense?

Heikki A. Kovalainen

1 What Stanley Cavell has famously dubbed Emersonian moral perfectionism – or simply Emersonian perfectionism – is not a compete theory of moral philosophy alongside utilitarianism or deontology. Emersonian perfectionism, rather, seeks to get a grip of a dimension in any moral thinking, less a hierarchy of what to value most in life, more a sketch on how we come to value anything in the first place – probing the everyday quality of my life and the state of my soul, the very rudiments of what it means to be a moral subject. As a term, Emersonian perfectionism is misleading, inasmuch as it may conjure up false connotations, first, of perfectionism in the everyday sense of the word, and second, of moral perfectionism in the standard meaning of the term.1 Among other things, to be sure, Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism is a re-interpretation of the standard tradition of moral perfectionism, but the differences are so remarkable as to make it somewhat misleading to stress this terminological connection. A fresh vision on the hidden potentiality of human life, seeking its ultimate goal not in a perfection of society to be understood as a telos, but in the perpetual goallessness of this-worldly life itself, Emersonian perfectionism strives for perfection only in the simple sense of endless perfectibility of each and every particular moment of our existence.

2 In addition to the difference of teleology, the thematic emphases in Emersonian perfectionism are divergent from the traditional ethical theories; instead of front-page moral dilemmas often discussed in conjunction with traditional theories, what is at stake are questions such as interpersonal recognition, and the related difficulty of moral conversion – seeing myself in another person, ready to take on the challenge of change, relying on the exemplary friend to help me overcome my current self. First and foremost, Cavell intends his outlook as a way into discovering the philosophical uniqueness of Emersonian thought; he asks us to take very seriously what Emerson has to say on the self and its coming to itself. Emersonian perfectionism endeavors to make sense of what it means to be a self, and to do this it cannot stay solely within the conventional sub-disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. Indeed, the view resists any sharp dichotomies in philosophy, a splitting of the field into ethics and ontology, for the question concerning the fundamental elements of our self belongs in some ways to

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both – or perhaps ultimately to neither. Given the intertwinement of such thematics, it becomes apparent how Cavell’s reading of perfectionism is not confined to the narrow framework of a particular author, essayist or a poet, and Cavell is more than keen on discovering related topics in works of art as diverse as Ibsen’s Doll House and the poetry of Whitman, philosophers as seemingly distant as Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

3 In what follows, my objective is to provide an overview of Emersonian moral perfectionism, primarily with the help of Cavell, and secondarily with the help of Emerson and other classical and contemporary philosophers pertaining to the matter. I will begin with introductory remarks as to how to position perfectionism with respect to other philosophical thematics. Thereafter I will outline the senses in which Emersonian perfectionism is not a competing ethical theory, how it differs from the standard versions of moral perfectionism, and why it resists divisions of the field of philosophy into sub-branches. How Emersonian perfectionism relates to its chief philosophical source, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), will be my concern increasingly towards the end of my article. To be sure, perfectionism is not the only interpretation of Emerson by Cavell, but it is in many respects more important than his other views, finding its original formulation in his Carus lectures from 1988, and published under the title Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990). The book and its various strands of perfectionist thought have a fairly complicated, even a convoluted structure, and one must thus be cautious with any attempts at treating the contents of the book systematically and in a structured way – something I will to some extent attempt in this article.2 Throughout my discussion, particular accents will fall on the perfectionist notion of truthfulness to oneself, the related necessity to change, and how this may not be done without the help of another human being. Finally, I will be adding some critical reflections on Cavell’s stripe of Emersonian moral perfectionism.

Clearing the Path: The Place of Ethics

4 Since the very idea of a perfectionist ethics may be somewhat difficult to digest – the way in which it should be kept separate from ethics conventionally conceived – it is appropriate to begin the discussion of Emersonian perfectionism with introductory notes. To be precise about the terms, Cavell nowhere explicitly states that his version of perfectionism would even constitute an ethics, strictly speaking, at least not of the traditional stripe, and while the outlook has high ethical relevance, one should try to explain how perfectionism finds its place in relation to the other realms of philosophy. Let me begin with a couple of remarks on the relationship between perfectionism and Cavell’s whimsical interpretation of skepticism – both of these among his key philosophical terms. To start with, skepticism in the Cavellian framework amounts to the human tendency to reject the inherent finitude of the human condition, in a word, as the human denial of the human, or in another formulation, an argument of the self with itself (Cavell 1990: 64-100). In Cavell’s own writings, the projects of making sense of skepticism and sketching moral perfectionism remain unfortunately separate from one another, though there are occasional attempts to bridge the gap. Permit me here to briefly outline, then, my own interpretation of their intertwinement – mentioned here to highlight the coherence of Cavell’s project, at times hidden from himself.3

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5 In my interpretation, then, Cavellian skepticism and Emersonian moral perfectionism are ultimately two complementary aspects of the same set of issues, one wearing the face of tragedy, the other the face of opportunity. Adding to the above characterization of skepticism as the human denial of the human, another central notion for Cavell, the ordinary,4 provides the everyday context-bound criteria for putting up with skepticism – though they cannot provide a definitive solution against it, as Cavell takes Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to show. Moral perfectionism, in turn, consists in a redemption or a recovery from this inherent split within the self, a real possibility of transcending it with the help of a human friend, through an affirmation of the ordinary. To content ourselves with a general manner of speaking here, skepticism appears thus to be a negative way of framing the inherent duality of human existence, while perfectionism explicates a positive side to the tragedy, a feasible means of withstanding our human frailty.

6 To further facilitate the entry into the thematics of perfectionism, important comparative insights might be garnered from the two great classics of the last century close to Cavell’s heart: Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Why the two? Whereas Wittgenstein’s centrality to the Cavellian project stems from his very early interest in the Austrian philosopher; Heidegger’s appearance in this particular context may at first appear slightly arbitrary, and Cavell (1979: 131) himself calls the association somewhat of a coincidence. But the apologetic remark may cloud the sense in which thinkers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger are essential to the perfectionist project. In short, without denying any of their decisive differences, they do stand in a somewhat similar situation regarding their respective stances toward philosophical ethics. What I have in mind is that neither one of them had much to say on ethics by way of explicit commentary, yet both of them have given rise to a host of reasonable studies in ethics, following them. Thus philosophers like Cora Diamond or Iris Murdoch have made their name drafting a new kind of ethics, sometimes bluntly dubbed Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and authors like Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Luc-Nancy have done the same in the Heideggerian footsteps, drawing attention to his “originary ethics.”5

7 I am using this admittedly superficial observation on the history of contemporary philosophy attempting to make sense of the way in which Cavell frames his perfectionist ethics. I am not implying that Heideggerian original ethics and Wittgensteinian moral philosophy would somehow be one and the same project; only that there are reasonable strands of genuine ethics left out in numerous contemporary conversations on the theme, and that perhaps both projects try to snap onto the deficiency. The key issue regarding both, and arguably Emersonian ethics, is that they speak to ethical issues without explicitly addressing ethics; they touch on something crucial to our ethical conduct without laying out ethical norms. They are not so much interested in the normativity of ethics in the first place, for they seem to grasp that ethics has to do with something more fundamental, perhaps something like an original encounter with the being of the world, a genuine attentiveness to the particularity of our experience, rendering ethics possible in the first place.

8 Such an outlook on morality may not be unambiguously called ethics, at least not as something separate from epistemology and ontology.6 Cavell notes the presence of “something like moral (or religious) urgency” throughout Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and Heidegger’s Being and Time and What is Called Thinking?, yet he finds it crucial that the ethical in these works is not “accorded the standing of a separate field

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of philosophical study” (Cavell 1989: 10-1). In the Carus lectures, one finds a somewhat stronger expression: “a tone of continual moral urgency or religious or artistic pathos” in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Emerson, and Cavell again underscores the inseparability of the theme from intersecting areas of philosophical concerns (Cavell 1990: 61).

9 While the notion that the different areas of philosophy are ultimately entwined goes to the heart of Cavell’s understanding of perfectionism, he is not very careful to spell out what such an entwinement exactly means. Regarding epistemology and aesthetics, with his versatile references to skepticism and the arts, a connection is strongly suggested, but his ties to ontology – in this narrow sense Cavell may have been a victim of the Anglo-American legacy of Wittgenstein7 – remain somewhat vague. A similar vagueness plagues his allusions to the “moral or religious urgency” in Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and particularly the religious aspect is left to very little elucidation. Regarding the latter, Cavell’s remarks are mostly confined to noting the surface similarity between the Emersonian striving for the authentic life and the Heideggerian distinction between authentic (eigentlich) and inauthentic (uneigentlich) existence drawn in Being and Time (Cavell 1990: 2; Heidegger 1927: 126-30).8

10 Whereas a comparison between Emerson and Heidegger dwelling exclusively on this famous pair of concepts remains ultimately somewhat superficial, it is useful for stressing the sense in which the two thinkers are approaching ethical questions through forays into different comportments and ways of being in the world – rather than trying to fashion prescriptive moral theories in the traditional sense.9 But the Heideggerian entwinement of ethics and ontology allows us to go further than Cavell here. In so far as Being and Time seeks to get to the heart of fundamental ontology understood as the encounter of Dasein with primordial being, it is neither “ethics” nor “ontology” narrowly conceived, for it precedes divisions of the field of philosophy into such sub-disciplines. His later texts commenting on Being and Time, for instance the Letter on Humanism, can be very explicit on subdisciplinary divisions in philosophy resulting in a loss of original thinking (Heidegger 1946: 7-8). If the question of being (Sein) is ultimately connected with our inhabiting a world (Dasein), it becomes clear that ethical-existential matters are omnipresent in ontology, or to use a more radical formulation, are ontological concerns (Heidegger 1927). But Cavell goes no further than to suggest that the distinction between authentic and inauthentic being opens up for its reader a possibility for genuinely authentic being in the world.

11 Speaking of Wittgenstein’s perfectionism, Cavell is a little more explicit, but here too, the final interpretation is left to the reader. Cavell refers to a remark recounted by Wittgenstein’s friend, doctor Drury, according to which the problems treated in Philosophical Investigations are “being seen from a religious point of view” (Cavell 1989: 40). This somewhat vague comment may be supplemented by some fairly recent studies verging on a perfectionist reading of the later Wittgenstein.10 For Cavell, Wittgenstein’s later thought provides an exemplary case of the argument of the self with itself: the soliloquizing philosophical narrator constantly questioning and seeking to make better sense of his own philosophical suggestions (Cavell 1990: 64-100). To supplement this, we may suggest that the Wittgensteinian refusal to present definitive theses in his later philosophy may be understood as a quasi-ethical striving for keeping the mind constantly clear and fresh for a perspicuous examination of the surrounding world.11

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12 With his allusions to Wittgensteinian perfectionism Cavell seems to be getting at something similar, but it is not entirely clear what he means with the “religious” aspect here. What is “religious” about the view is perhaps the seriousness and a certain unconditionality with which Wittgenstein approaches the problems, an uncompromising insistence on keeping our seeing clear and attentive. Cavell himself has read Philosophical Investigations as a case of confessional literature, where the author is continuously struggling with problems bewitching him – in a manner somewhat similar to St. Augustine in the Confessions or Kierkegaard in his religious writings (Cavell 1958: 70-2; 1964: 217). The juxtaposition is not as arbitrary as it may at first sound, if we factor in the incessant striving for self-clarification and complete sincerity omnipresent in Wittgenstein’s book – and his profound admiration for authors such as St. Augustine and Kierkegaard.

13 As in the case of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, a perfectionist ethics does not constitute a separate branch of thought in the case of Emerson either (Cavell 1990: xxix; 1995: 28). Like Heidegger, Emerson views the problem of ethics not as a question concerning our ability to follow preordained norms, but as an existential issue going to the very heart of how we should attend to our existence in the world; and like Wittgenstein, he is very uncompromising in what he will say or abstain from saying regarding the proper conduct and the level of attention directed at the world around us. For Emerson, the decisive question in ethics is not how to justify my ethical actions, but quite simply: How shall I live? (CW 6: f1860, 1).12 In Cavell’s formulation, Emerson differs from other philosophers in asking “the philosophical mood so purely, so incessantly, giving one little other intellectual amusement or eloquence or information, little other argument or narrative […] save the importance of philosophy, of thinking itself” (Cavell 1980: 152). I like this formulation were it not for the somewhat excessive emphasis on the importance of philosophy understood as thinking: philosophy for Emerson, to the contrary, is always entwined with the concrete reality of life, and stressing the importance of thinking may unnecessarily deemphasize this aspect.13

14 In Emersonian philosophy, “the importance of thinking” means incessant striving for honesty and sincerity, such that life would become real here and now. “To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom” (CW 3: exp 1844, 35). Each moment of human life is an ethical one, because each moment we can see or fail to see. To borrow an expression from the later Wittgenstein (1953: §1), also evoked by Cavell, the explanations in Emerson’s philosophy “come to an end,” ideally at each moment (Cavell 1989: 116). When a philosopher places emphasis on ordinary experiences, the ultimate implication is that all experiences will become philosophically and morally significant. “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine” (CW 2: hist 1841, 8). This sentence from Emerson’s “History” provided the motto for the first edition of Nietzsche’s Gay Science – though he was careful to efface the word ‘saint’ (Nietzsche 1882: 343; Kaufmann 1974: 7-8) – and we may take the aphorism as emblematic for much of what is essential to Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s ethico-ontological thought.

15 The question of ethics and ethical conduct, then, finds a somewhat unconventional orientation in Emersonian perfectionism. In a sense, Cavell’s project abandons the traditional notion of ethics, at least conventionally understood, and in doing this it deliberately blends the boundaries between ethics and other fields of philosophy. In

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such a reading, the domain of ethics crucially overlaps not only the fields of aesthetics and epistemology, but also Cavell’s views on language and thinking, our incessant need to clarify our words, which is in itself an ethical act since it has to do with our personal stake at the words we use and speak. Thus philosophical thinking as such appears in some important ways ineliminably ethical, and in his book Cities of Words Cavell goes so far as to call perfectionism “the moral calling of philosophy” (Cavell 2004: 2). This implies that we have a quasi-ethical stake at any philosophical words we use. Cavell’s later book is explicit in linking his views on perfectionism with his philosophy of the ordinary, suggesting that Emersonian perfectionism ultimately renders possible an altered relationship to the world as manifested by the ordinary phenomena of our lives (Cavell 2004). Cavell (1990: 46) stresses how such philosophical concerns are somewhat removed not only from ethics understood as moral theories but also reasoning understood as argumentation. What he calls Emersonian moral perfectionism is thus his response to the above quoted Emersonian notion of “wisdom, or living the greatest number of good hours, as finding the journey’s end in every step of the road (a description at once of a good way of life and of thinking – philosophy as journey)” (Cavell 1989: 10-1, 114).

The State of my Soul

16 In order to gain a closer perspective into Emersonian moral perfectionism, the next task confronting us is to make sense of the way in which perfectionism is not a competing moral theory in ethics. In various introductory books on moral philosophy, we are accustomed to finding a host of different theories, such as utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and libertarian ethics, and their advantages and disadvantages weighed in and discussed. The common feature shared by many of these theories is that they take some things, for example, the consequences of our actions, as the most relevant factor deciding the morality of those actions, while placing less weight on some other things, emphasized in turn by other theories. But before we can properly explain why Emersonian perfectionism does not neatly align with such theories, we must brush one possible misunderstanding aside: that perfectionism might mistakenly be taken for a theory in ethics alongside other theories. Indeed, one of the reasons why Cavell wants to hang onto the term ‘perfectionism’ is that he wants to reinterpret the tradition of moral perfectionism, which in the standard sense would refer to an ethical theory, and such a standard interpretation of perfectionism forms the general background to which he is responding with his work on perfectionism.

17 Among various other matters, Cavell’s lectures on perfectionism constitute a counterargument against John Rawls’s discussion of perfectionism in his contemporary classic Theory of Justice, where the author in one late chapter takes up varieties of perfectionism, arguing against their compatibility with democracy (Rawls 1971: 325-32; Cavell 1990: 3-4). The chapter distinguishes between a moderate and a strong version of perfectionism, and since a rejection of the former suffices for the rejection of the latter, it will be enough for my purposes as well: “the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science and culture” (Rawls 1971: 325).14 According to this view, perfectionism is a theory alongside other theories in ethics, singling out the maximization of human excellence as the

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decisive factor in making moral decisions. It is precisely such an understanding of perfectionism that the Cavellian-Emersonian version resists, on at least three fronts.

18 To mention the clearest point of difference first, Cavell vehemently opposes the interpretation of perfectionism as something inherently elitist; on the contrary, the opening question of his lectures (to which he will respond negatively) is directed at Rawls: “Is Moral Perfectionism inherently elitist?” (Cavell 1990: 1). In contrast to the Rawlsian critique of perfectionism, Cavell strives to show that Emersonian perfectionism is compatible with democracy, and in bringing throughout his lectures Emersonian perfectionism closer to the Nietzschean version in his Untimely Meditations – Rawls’s paradigm example of elitist perfectionism – he goes against the hotly debated issue of Nietzsche allegedly defending the elitist idea of human individuals living but for the production of great geniuses.15 The Emersonian perfectionist pays attention to the state of soul of an individual, and this perspective makes up an essential component of democracy. For there to be genuine democracy, society must be composed of human beings, with their own distinctive voices, own selves, and thus Emersonian perfectionism, so far as it functions as an internal critique of democracy, enables rather than disables democracy.16 Furthermore, as an outlook on life Emersonian perfectionism is open to each and everyone of us: all people may lead an Emersonian- perfectionist life.

19 More importantly, Emersonian perfectionism stands apart from the standard meaning of moral perfectionism in not being a teleological theory (Cavell 1990: 48; 2004: 222). This is to say that perfection is not a final state or a goal waiting to be realized somewhere in the future, not a fixed telos orienting all our attempts to come closer to it: a crucial component of the perfectionist life is its goallessness (Cavell 2004: 3, 13; Saito 2001: 395). Thus we may not say that Emersonian perfectionism is concerned with human excellence, or such-like values singled out from others; what matters is the particularity of the moral situations we find ourselves in, and this will decide what to value in each case. Emersonian perfectionism appears again sharply distinct from perfectionism in the everyday sense of the word: whereas a perfectionist, say, in singing may realistically hope to attain perfect pitch through rigorous practice, such a notion of absolute perfection makes no sense in perfectionist ethics.17

20 If there is no teleology whatsoever involved, then every particular moment is an end in itself; goallessness, as it were, turns into a goal in itself; “each state of the self is, so to speak, final,” or using elsewhere a different formulation in conjunction with the word “perfect,” “each state constitutes a world” (Cavell 1990: 3, 12). At each particular moment the self experiences not only a particular perspective into the world, but the world as it were in its entirety, so far as the world appears to the self. In a way, this is a logical consequence of the ethical notion of the endless perfectibility of each particular moment. Perfectibility confronts us as an endless task, the same one over and over again: that each moment be perfect. Thus the Emersonian perfectionist has only one goal, to manage to live on amidst the goallessness of life itself; when each moment of life is already complete in itself, there are no reasons for aspiring after goals transcendent to life itself.18

21 Thirdly, to push the distinction between the two versions of perfectionism one step further, we may elucidate the sense in which Emersonian perfectionism is not really an ethical theory at all. Aside the obvious point that Cavell’s version of perfectionism is not intended to be set alongside competing theories in moral philosophy, let me now

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explain what its not being a theory might mean. One possible answer would be that there is no closed list of characteristics, let alone premises, arguments or conclusions, that would make up the outlook of Emersonian perfectionism; indeed, as Cavell himself repeatedly insists, his stripe of perfectionism is open to revision (Cavell 1990: 4-5; 2004: 14). Another line of answer might set out from the view that Emersonian perfectionism is not a fictional model of how we might theoretically construe our being a self in the world; rather, it amounts to a description of the fundamental aspects of our existence that cannot be done away with.

22 But different arguments may be presented against the latter view at the outset; we might retort that any (no matter how allegedly foundational) description of the fundamental aspects of our existence will be normatively charged and value-laden, for any description will have to make choices as to which terms to prefer over other terms, which things to highlight over other things. Furthermore, Emersonian perfectionism itself toys with the notion of utopia, another fictional world towards which our being in the real world aspires after, thus indirectly amounting to something more than a mere description. In a word, no purely realistic description of our being a self in the world is possible; any description is also a utopia, an expression of an ideal.

23 I am mentioning the two possible ways of resisting being called a theory (the open- endedness and the descriptive character of Emersonian perfectionism) because I think Cavell oscillates somewhere between the two options. At any rate, he seems to consider his version of moral perfectionism of such decisive importance that any moral theory must take it into account. He considers the focus of perfectionism on the everyday quality of human life to be more primary than the various factors esteemed in competing moral theories. Like many a reasonable critic of contemporary moral philosophy, he opposes the tendency of philosophers to spend disproportionately much time in discussing what he calls “front-page moral dilemmas” (Cavell 2004: 11), such as euthanasia or abortion, forgetting one of the most fundamental questions in ethics, concerning the quality of our everyday lives. For Cavell, the latter question deserves a place in any moral theory, and he notes the pertinence of the matter in the long history of philosophy (Cavell 1990: 62; 2004: 11, 24).

24 Emersonian perfectionism, then, is “something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul” (Cavell 1990: 2). Such a call for critical self-scrutiny perhaps partly explains why Cavell sees perfectionism not as an ethical theory but as a precondition for ethics to begin with.19 The idea, we may suppose, is that philosophy as such contains within itself an ethical challenge: it calls on us to examine ourselves, and to change the course of our lives if needed. A certain responsiveness transcending specific allegiances to morally charged ways of prioritizing certain things over others is needed before an authentic ethical life becomes possible in the first place.

25 And here I reach the occasion for my first serious criticism against Cavell: if the perfectionist project concerns before all my life, my coming to myself, how could it really count as a full-fledged ethics, which first and foremost should make much of our responsibilities for one another?20 This is one of the problematic issues at the heart of Emersonian perfectionism. Before proceeding to give a more detailed answer with the help of Cavell’s reading of Emerson, let me suggest some general pathways as to how one might get closer to finding an answer. In the first place, the weight of our responsibility for ourselves is not ultimately contingent on our ability or inability to

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genuinely attend to the suffering of others, since genuine empathy presupposes a certain minimum of self-love – in line with the classical view of Aristotle’s Ethics of the friend as “another myself”21 – while the reverse (that loving ourselves would presuppose loving others) may not hold. Cavell appears to think, indeed, that our obligations towards ourselves are in some important ways more fundamental than those towards others; thus truthfulness towards oneself unveils itself as perhaps the most essential single feature of perfectionism (Cavell 1990: 1).

26 Such a view may be criticized on the grounds that it misses the dialectical nature of self-love, how self-recognition is not possible without recognition from others, seeming to grasp only one side of the matter. Thus somewhere along the lines of the Hegelian understanding of the fundamental reciprocity of human recognition, we might insist that our being self-conscious subjects is not possible in the first place without a mirroring relationship with another self-consciousness.22 Of course, such a notion runs in a circle, though hopefully not in a vicious one: our being able to give recognition to others presupposes our being moral subjects, which in turn presupposes recognition from others… Here we are facing what might be termed the paradox of our being with others, and pressed to take a stance one way or another, I would incline toward a Hegelian rather than a Cavellian view on the matter. Permit me next to have a look at the issue in the light of Emerson’s essays.

Self against World

27 In my sketch so far, the most essential characteristics of perfectionism have turned out to be the individual responsibility for one’s self, and the related necessity to change our lives if needed. At times Cavell will take the truthfulness towards oneself to consist in responsiveness to the humanity in oneself; thus he is keen on quoting Emerson’s simple statement “I will stand here for humanity” (CW 2: sr 1841, 35) as exemplifying both the realization of one’s humanity within and standing for such a feat before others (Cavell 1990: 1, 9). It is remarkable, then, that Cavell’s version of perfectionism captures at once the high classical ideal of being and becoming human, as well as the versatile and less flattering obstacles that such a project inevitably comes up against in the modern world of confusion and constraint. It must not be forgotten, indeed, that besides being a positive outlook on life, Cavellian perfectionism diagnoses some of the most persistent threats before our journey for self-realization: the looming adulthood cynicism, our internal resistance to change, the inescapable fear of being ashamed of our own condition and frailty, and the leveling tendency of human society and culture. “Why is this perpetual pain preferred to the pain of turning?” (Cavell 1990: xxxi) – this is one of Cavell’s most moving rhetorical questions touching upon the ethically important problem of moral sloppiness. But the pain delivers a promise. “It is today that you are to […] waken and to consecrate yourself to culture, […] to domesticate it gradually, which means bring it home, as part, now, of your everyday life” (Cavell 1990: 55).

28 Thus we find at the core of perfectionism a two-fold relationship to the world around us: At best, the intersubjective reality of human relationships is not only the ultimate reserve of beauty in our lives but also our primary impetus for self-overcoming; at worst, it is precisely what keeps us from changing, or at least makes it more difficult for us to see the real possibility of conversion. Cavell expresses this by suggesting that our

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quarrel with the world need not be settled: “It is a condition in which you can at once want the world and want it to change” (Cavell 2004: 18). In Emerson’s essays, such ambivalence towards the surrounding world comes across with particular force in “The American Scholar” – one of Cavell’s central points of reference in his discussion of perfectionism – where the word “culture” ceases to be the emblem for our inability to ever become ourselves, transforming itself into the very engine of our personal revolution. Emerson calls on us at once to try and appropriate as much as possible in the world, yet use the resources provided by the world and our own private lives to fashion a revolution, not a mere remaking of the existent order. “This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man” (CW 1: ams 1837, 65). The word upbuilding, as Cavell (1989: 8-9) perceptively notes, virtually rhymes the German epitome for self-culture, Bildung, which thus becomes nearly synonymous with Cavell’s perfectionist project.

29 But as the citations from Cavell indicate, his notion of Bildung is more radical than many an Enlightenment aesthetic ideal would allow for: oftentimes the very project of self- culture begins with our very admitting of having gone astray, and we use our being lost as the impetus for real self-reliance. Indeed, the impulse for genuine culture is often stronger than the imperatives of society, and if society threatens to suffocate human culture, we must turn against society. Perfectionism envisages “the soul as 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 often called culture” (Cavell 1990: 1).

30 While Cavell will find such a thematics of getting lost as a precondition for genuine change in works as versatile as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Cavell 1990: 5), its attentive articulation and extensive thematization is perhaps one of the most original features of his own whimsical version of perfectionism. As regards Emerson, I am not fully convinced that Cavell’s reference to the beginning of “Experience,” “Where do we find ourselves?” (CW 3: exp 1844, 27), would itself constitute a substantial argument for him having had a similar idea, though other Emersonian texts omitted by Cavell may perhaps provide more support for the view.23 Regarding the theme, I am more impressed by his allusions, say, to the Hollywood genre of remarriage, and in particular The Philadelphia Story (1940) – the female protagonist Tracy Lord’s journey into finding herself and the genuine love for her husband through an impressive display of first losing hold of herself, then coming to understand her own frailty, itself a theme that Mrs. Lord will learn to appreciate only after losing her way in the course of the film.24 The general implication is incisive: we should trust ourselves not only when we have a strong hold of who we feel to be, but also and perhaps particularly when our selves seem to be abandoning us, plunging us into the darkness of well-nigh self-betrayal.

31 As a reading of Emerson, Cavell’s references to his primary source are somewhat scanty and often selective, but the references he makes are usually perceptive enough to allow for idiosyncratic omissions amidst his versatile associations elsewhere. The central text in Emersonian perfectionism is the essay “History,” the opening piece of Essays: First Series, sketching the rudiments of his philosophy of history that exerted a direct influence on Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (Nietzsche 1874b). Emersonian maxims such as “What [the mind] does not see,

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what it does not live, it will not know” (CW 2: hist 1841, 6) are taken for granted by Nietzsche’s meditation, where “knowledge presupposes life” (Nietzsche 1874b: 331). In “History,” Emerson essentially deals with the question as to how we should relate to the words of others in our cultural tradition, how we should read works of history such that they would bear maximum meaning for our lives. Cavell wraps his perfectionist reading of Emerson around the following passages (I quote at somewhat greater length than he does, to make the context of the text plain): All that Shakspeare [sic] says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; – because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded. We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. (CW 2 hist 1841, 5.)

32 The phrase unattained but attainable self provides Cavell with a key to Emersonian perfectionism. According to the interpretation, Emerson refers to himself by the phrase the modern essayist, thus claiming to be “a path to one’s unattained self” (Cavell 1990: 8-9). Note that we are here concerned not with Emerson’s self but with that of the reader; thus what we find in the text through Cavell is effectively an example of Socratic birth-giving. History and philosophy are not written for the mere leisure of collecting facts about our past; rather, they provide representative examples of what we might do in a similar situation; thus the great events of history take place, in the Emersonian hyperbole, for us.

33 Here we may sketch a Cavellian-Emersonian solution to the philosophical problem of the self versus other, and their respective weights in ethical situations: there need not be an insoluble tension between the two, for giving voice to oneself, say, in a written text – being truthful to oneself rather than others – may help others, the readers of the text, discover themselves in turn. Perhaps one difference between Socratic midwifery and Emersonian exemplarity would be that Emerson has no qualms about speaking of himself, while Socrates was more insistent on drawing out only that which is implicit in his addressees. But the implication is similar; even Emerson’s speaking of himself will at its best only draw out what is to be found in his reader.

34 Thus Emersonian perfectionism lays essential emphasis on friendship, the importance of another human being, an exemplar, who helps me find myself.25 In this interpretation, Emerson himself provides an example of another human being for the reader, a representative self, and elsewhere Cavell will aptly note that our perfectionist relationship to a text is emblematic of our relationships to one another (Cavell 1990: xxix). Someone looking for himself might indeed discover, say, in a philosophical classic another human being who represents to him his own unattained self, in a sense “is” more him than he himself (Cavell 1990: 26). Of course, such a phenomenon is most famously encapsulated in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” in whose opening paragraph in “every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, and they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty” (CW 2: sr 1841, 27). In another perfectionist passage from “The Poet” brought up by Cavell, “the great poet makes us feel our own

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wealth, and then we think less of his compositions, and his best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done” (CW 3: pt 1844, 4; Cavell 1990: 26).

35 Two important conclusions ensue from Cavell’s observations. The first is the quintessential Emersonian ideal of representativeness, a position multifarious enough to carry connotations both private and political. Indeed, the notion of individuals being representative for one another is one important sense in which Cavell sees Emersonian perfectionism aligning with democracy, and it is apparent that the word “representative” is used deliberately not so much to dwell uncritically on the political familiarity of the notion, as to deconstruct the very term, trying to get to the heart of what democracy might mean in real human interaction. Thus a person becomes representative for and of others not by virtue of the mere fact that she has been chosen to speak for others through a democratic decision-making process, but only on the precondition that she discovers her own voice in and ever after the process. Both Emerson and Cavell seem to be experimenting with the ambiguity of the word ‘represent’, and indeed delving into some later passages by Emerson on the matter (something Cavell would not do) makes it plain how representing humanity for one another means also re-presenting for other people the real events taking place in the world, translating them into lively metaphors exemplifying our ideals.26 Ethico-political authority or exemplarity is thus gained only on the grounds of full acquaintance with the world; we might say that ethics and ontology appear intertwined. Cavell underscores repeatedly how Emersonian perfectionism is about finding one’s voice, and only after finding such a language speaking at once for myself and for the world can we become representative.

36 Dealing with Emersonian-Cavellian representativeness in the political sense, second, we must keep in mind how the phenomenon is by no means confined to a limited class of individuals, but rather evinces something that all human beings in a genuinely democratic society are constantly engaged in. Cavell seems to think, indeed, that we are all educations for one another; in each one of you there is something further and foreign for me to yet attain and become familiar with, as if we were all invitations for each other to something greater than our current selves (Cavell 1990: 9). It is axiomatic in Cavell’s version of perfectionism that people cannot renew and change themselves without the help of an Other: it is another human being, a friend or a beloved, who gives me the wings to flutter over the yawning gulf between my current and future self. 27 In many cases change begins with an encounter and a conversation: as Cavell wittily remarks, conversion often presupposes conversation.28

37 In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for example, counted by Cavell among the exemplary perfectionist works, Nora and Helmer have never “had a serious conversation,” have “never sat down in earnest together to get at the bottom of anything” before their turn-taking encounter near the end of the piece. Once they finally confront one another and speak, Nora becomes aware of her “[d]uties to myself” (Ibsen 1879: 105, 108). In his Emersonian perfectionism, Cavell is impressively perceptive in drawing attention to theme, yet he could have been more attentive in appealing to the various passages where Emerson underscores the importance of not only friendship but also love. “Thus love reduces the unjust inequalities between different people, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and my brother is me” (CW 2: comp 1841, 72). Many of these texts are not to be found in Emerson’s essays “Friendship” and

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“Love,” and many of them remarkably blend in a Christian spirit the boundaries between me and you – something that Cavell, perhaps more indirectly, strives to do as well. Let me now turn to my concluding section with an eye on elucidating perfectionism with the help of related discussions by other authors.

Positioning Perfectionism: Critical Reflections

38 I have been discussing the thematics of Emersonian perfectionism first with the help of a Cavellian prelude comparing Emerson with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, then with a commentary on the way in which Cavell frames his perfectionist ethics, with particular emphasis on self and Other, and on the bind between the self and the world. Having explained the chief aspects of what I think is fruitful in Cavell’s interpretation, let me now move onto critical reflections. Before doing this, let me however stress that I consider Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism not only one of the best philosophical interpretations of Emerson by any author, but a distinctively original ethical outlook in its own right.

39 Let me begin, then, by mentioning my three main lines of criticism concerning the way in which Emersonian perfectionism relates to Emerson’s original texts. First, Cavell’s quoting of his chief source is selective, and does not always amount to a balanced reading of the original texts. In conversation, Cavell has no trouble acknowledging that he is not interested in a scholarly reading of Emerson; while the confession is admirable in its honesty, perhaps even conferring him a certain degree of freedom in what he has to say on the essayist, it must be taken as an invitation to further scholarly work that it is.29 Second, Cavell lays too little weight on nature as a source of Emersonian perfectionist conversions. If a version of perfectionism is to set forth from Emerson’s texts – as Cavell’s obviously does – then one ought to attend more fully than Cavell to the ways in which the human self-overcoming is often decisively sparked by the constant and organic tendency of nature to renew itself. To put the point bluntly, for Emerson the human perfectionism is often subordinate to nature’s “perfectionism” rather than vice versa.

40 Third, despite passing references, Cavell ultimately shies away from the religious element in Emersonian thought, whose importance, though difficult to articulate clearly, is undeniable and most essential. Cavell’s hesitation to follow the glimpses of divinity in Emerson’s writing, indeed, is perhaps the most serious shortcoming of his perfectionist reading, partly for the very reason that he variously hints at it, yet falls short from spelling out what the allusions exactly mean.30 The mystery of the religious element suggests more fundamental worries concerning the nature of perfectionism: if the outlook deliberately blends the boundaries of literature and philosophy, ethics and ontology, we may reasonably raise the question as to how one should ultimately position perfectionism. Is it an ethico-ontological theory on the fundaments of ethical conduct in the world, or perhaps a synthetic interpretation of versatile themes not only in philosophical but also literary texts, or both of these in equal terms? Here the question concerning the relationship between Emersonian perfectionism and Emerson’s original essays becomes again pressing, since there are times when Emersonian perfectionism should perhaps be considered Cavell’s rather than Emerson’s outlook.31

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41 To mention two further problems in positioning perfectionism, we might ask how Emersonian perfectionism stands with respect to contemporary moral philosophy. First, how is Cavell’s perfectionism different from, say, Iris Murdoch’s version of perfectionism in her book The Sovereignty of Good, and particularly its first chapter, “The Idea of Perfection”? Murdoch is a reasonable exemplar for comparison not only because Cavell himself mentions her book as one of the related discussions in his introductory notes to lectures on perfectionism, but also because the more general bearings of her book stand in an intriguing relation to the perfectionist endeavors of Cavell.32 As regards his own positioning, Cavell admits his proximity to Murdoch, but refuses particularly to count Murdoch’s well-known example of an inner conversion of a person for a case of moral perfectionism, for that for Cavell would have to do with a fundamental change of the self rather than a temporary overcoming of snobbery.33 But a critical reader might wonder how we may distinguish between a fundamental and a temporary change in the context of Emersonian-Cavellian perfectionism, if we are giving up the very notion of a solid self, as Cavell himself insists.

42 A more substantial difference between the two philosophers may be found in their respective stances towards the history of perfectionist philosophy: while neither has much trouble admitting their far-reaching debts to the tradition, Cavell is perhaps trying to rewrite the tradition, while Murdoch is often very forthcoming as to how her project is but an interpretation of classical philosophy, in particular Platonism. To speak in more philosophical terms, it seems to me that the particular brand of ethics exemplified by Murdoch is more willing to admit its ties to ontology, while Cavell’s attitude to ontology – not to mention metaphysics, which in the Anglo-American world often sounds like the very scapegoat of philosophy – seems to be somewhat ambivalent, to say the least. Both philosophers are in some sense Wittgensteinians, but Cavell seems to inherit more of the quasi-Wittgensteinian repulsion to metaphysics, while Murdoch’s views on ontology are, again, influenced by her Platonism. But in the Cavellian framework, such a resistance easily lands in a contradiction, since the very project of trying to ground ethics in something more fundamental than conventional moral philosophy easily turns into an ethico-ontological project. In this regard, it is no coincidence that Cavell’s perfectionist writings abound with references to Heidegger’s Being and Time, though oftentimes somewhat apologetically, as if Cavell were aware of the connection but had trouble admitting the full extent of it.

43 Finally, we may meditate on the relationship of Cavell’s project to the other classical texts pertaining to perfectionism throughout the history of philosophy. Here one must be careful to keep Emersonian and standard versions of moral perfectionism apart: while it is obvious that moral perfectionism has a long tradition, the ties of Emersonian perfectionism to the history of philosophy are more complicated. The standard perfectionist idea about truthfulness to oneself and of taking up the challenge of authentic existence can naturally be found in very diverse works, from Plato’s Republic to Heidegger’s Being and Time and G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion, as Cavell emphatically points out (1990: 1). While introducing the reader to Emersonian perfectionism, mapping out its intellectual background, Cavell presents a list of works containing related ideas; the list is open to revision, and among many of the works listed only a small portion, say, one chapter or just a few passages, pertain to perfectionism (Cavell 1990: 5-6). He prepares his reader for the list by imagining that there is “an outlook […] sketched out […] in some imaginary interplay among [certain] texts” (Cavell 1990: 4). After this

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Cavell lists 66 works; I will mention here a truncated selection of those bearing most directly on my discussion of perfectionism, without losing sight of the list’s versatility: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, The Gospel according to St. Matthew, Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mill’s On Liberty, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience,” Nietzsche’s third Untimely Meditation “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Dewey’s Experience and Nature, Heidegger’s Being and Time, “On the Origin of the Work of Art” and What is Called Thinking?, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and finally the movies The Philadelphia Story and Now, Voyager.34

44 The works listed here make up approximately one half of the texts listed by Cavell, yet the list is versatile enough to arouse some perplexity. In addition to philosophers, there are works by psychologists, prosaists, poets, as well as two movies. On what grounds does Cavell list, say, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams or William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience? Arguably, both books deal with the “state of the soul.” Freud’s book aims at delving into the depths of human psyche by interpreting dreams; in James’s book there is a chapter called “Conversion,” which pictures a turning of “a sick soul” towards religious experience (James 1902: 157-77, 178-209). Cavell himself mentions as an example 28 perfectionist features from Plato’s Republic (Cavell 1990: 6-7; 2004: 445-7).

45 Cavell justifies his listing through a desire to bring together works that have some bearing on how we lead our lives, saying in essence that he wants “to call to mind a fraction of the play of voices left out (‘forgotten?’) in characteristic philosophical discussions about how we might live, voices that will enter other conversations more urgent ones to my mind, about how we do live” (Cavell 1990: 5-6). This leads me back to the initial motivation behind Emersonian perfectionism: we seek to find in philosophy a way of addressing ethical matters so as to make their urgency and pertinence fully visible to non-philosophers and non-specialists as well as to philosophers. What speaks to us most profoundly ethically, may not be ethics in the customary sense of the word. Cavell’s eclectic and perfectionist mapping of works takes up the Emersonian challenge to appropriate and bring to life as many works in our cultural tradition as possible, to harness culture into a resource for life. In striving to introduce weighty moral questions into philosophical discussions, Cavell takes part, in an Emersonian spirit, in the classical quest for the good life with the help of philosophy.

Coda: Self as Other

46 Forming an authentic relation to the surrounding world, to our cultural heritage, means appropriating it: becoming what one is, a human being whose thoughts have been thought by others. It is intriguing to note how such a thematics figures in versatile authors, while perhaps not being one of the key concerns of classical philosophers. Take Goethe’s Faust: “If you would own the things your forebears left you,/you first must earn and merit their possession.”35 T. S. Eliot writes: “Tradition […] cannot be inherited […] if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (Eliot 1919: 4). In Cavell’s words, “I suppose one inherits in philosophy only what one must recognize as one’s own” (Cavell 1980: 143). These authors are addressing in a constructive vein what Harold Bloom (1975) terms “anxiety of influence.” But such a phrase misses the

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sense in which influence could also be a blessing, a revelation, an in-flux of novel insights from a hitherto unknown source. It is one of the unique merits of Emersonian moral perfectionism that it brings to the fore the dilemma between the self and the other, without suggesting that caring for my soul would in any way contradict my caring for the Other.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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BLOOM H., (1975), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, London, Oxford University Press.

CAVELL S., (1958), The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated Edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 44-72.

CAVELL S., (1964), Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy, in Themes out of School: Effects and Causes, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984, 195-234.

CAVELL S., (1979), Thinking of Emerson, in The Senses of Walden. An Expanded Edition, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 1992, 121-38.

CAVELL S., (1980), An Emerson Mood, in The Senses of Walden. An Expanded Edition, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 1992, 139-60.

CAVELL S., (1987), Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment, in Critical Inquiry 13, 386-93.

CAVELL S., (1989), This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, Albuquerque, Living Batch Press.

CAVELL S., (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press.

CAVELL S., (1994), A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Cambridge-London, Harvard University Press.

CAVELL S., (1995), Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading “Fate,” in Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers, 12-41.

CAVELL S., (2004), Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge-London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

CAVELL S., (2008), Interview with Stanley Cavell by H. A. Kovalainen, partly published in Finnish translation by the interviewer in niin & näin 4, 8-15.

CONANT J., (1997), “Emerson as Educator,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance: Emerson / Nietzsche [special issue, published in 1998], 43 (1-4), 181-206.

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CONANT J., (2001), “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’,” in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsches Postmoralism. Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophys Future, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 181-257.

CUKOR G., (1940), The Philadelphia Story, Warner Bros (DVD), 2005.

DIAMOND C., (1991), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

ELIOT T.S., (1964 [1919]), Tradition and Individual Talent, in Selected Essays, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World.

EMERSON R.W., (1971-), The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Complete Works, vol. 1-8], 8 vols., ed. by R.E. Spiller et al., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

GOETHE J. W.V. (1808), Faust. Eine Tragödie. [Erster Theil.], Goethes Werke [Weimarer Ausgabe, W.A.], I Abtheilung (Literarische Werke 1749-1832), 14. Band. Translated as Faust I by Stuart Atkins (Cambridge, MA, Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers Boston, 1984).

GOODMAN R. B., (1997), Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche, in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance: Emerson / Nietzsche [special issue, published in 1998], 43 (1-4), 159-80.

HEGEL G. W. F., (1970 [1807]), Phänomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. Trans. as Phenomenology of Spirit by A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977.

HEIDEGGER M., (1993 [1927]), Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag. Trans. as Being and Time by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York, Harper & Row, 1962.

HEIDEGGER M., (2000 [1946]), Brief über den “Humanismus” in Wegmarken, translated as Letter on Humanism by F.A. Capuzzi, Pathmarks, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

HURKA T., (1993), Perfectionism, New York-Oxford, Oxford University Press.

HURKA T., (1998), Perfectionism, in Craig E. (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (CD-ROM), London, Routledge.

IBSEN H., (2009 [1879]), A Doll’s House, Rockville, Serenity Publishers.

JAMES W., (1985 [1902]), The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

KATEB G., (1995), Emerson and Self-Reliance, Thousand Oaks-London-New Delhi, Sage Publications.

KAUFMANN W., (1974), Translator’s Introduction, in Nietzsche F., The Gay Science, transl. Walter KAUFMANN, New York-Toronto, Vintage Books.

KOJÈVE A., (1947), Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Leçons sur la Phénomenologie de l’Esprit professes de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des Hautes Études réunies et publiées par Raymond Queneau, Paris, Gallimard. Translated as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990.

KUUSELA O., (2008), The Struggle against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press.

LAUGIER S., (2002), Emerson: Penser l’ordinaire, Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 91 (1), 43-60.

LEVINAS E., (1989), The Levinas Reader, edited by S. Hand, Oxford, Blackwell.

MULHALL S., (1994), Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

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MULHALL S., (1996a), Introduction, in Mulhall, S. (ed.), The Cavell Reader, Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers, 1-21.

MULHALL S., (1996b), Moral Perfectionism, in Mulhall S. (ed.), The Cavell Reader, Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers, 353-4.

MURDOCH I., (2001 [1970]), The Sovereignty of Good, London, Routledge.

NANCY J.-L., (1996), L’‘éthique originaire’ de Heidegger in La pensée dérobée, Paris, Galilée, 2001, 85-113. Translated as Heidegger’s “Originary Ethics” by D. Large, Studies in Practical Philosophy, 1 (1), 1999, 12-35.

NEIMAN A., (1999), “Logic and Sin: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Education at the Limits of Language,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 18, 339-349.

NIETZSCHE F., (1874a), Schopenhauer als Erzieher. In Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung III, Band 1 der Kritischen Studienausgabe, 1999, 335-427.

NIETZSCHE F., (1999 [1874b]), Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, in Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung II, Band 1 der Kritischen Studienausgabe, 243-334.

NIETZSCHE F., (1999 [1882]), Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Neue Ausgabe mit einem Anhange: Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei (Band 3 der Kritischen Studienausgabe).

RAÏD L., (2002), “Self-Reliance et L’Éthique de Wittgenstein,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 91 (1), 87-96.

RAWLS J., (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

SAITO N., (2001), “Reconstructing Deweyan Pragmatism in Dialogue with Emerson and Cavell,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 37 (3), 389-406.

SAITO N., (2004), The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson, New York, Fordham University Press.

STIEVERMANN J., (2007), Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons, Paperborn, Schönigh.

VAN CROMPHOUT G., (1999), Emerson’s Ethics, Columbia-London, University of Missouri Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1997 [1953]), Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe (German-English Edition), Oxford, Blackwell Publischers.

NOTES

1. Throughout my discussion, the term ‘perfectionism,’ unless otherwise mentioned, refers to Emersonian moral perfectionism as opposed to perfectionism in the everyday sense (or the standard meaning of moral perfectionism, which will be discussed in the second section below). The expression ‘Emersonian perfectionism’ is used as another shortcut for Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism. 2. In addition to the three lectures dealing with perfectionism from various points of view, the book contains a thirty-page introduction and a thirty-page (!) preface, and curiously enough, many of the most important insights are expressed in these introductory chapters. 3. What I will be suggesting in this paragraph, then, goes beyond what Cavell himself explicitly says. In an interview of his philosophy, however, I had a chance to test the claims I will be making, instigating Cavell to comment: I think that’s very fair, I think that’s an awfully good way to

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think about it. The interview (2008) is largely unpublished; see the bibliography for additional information. 4. The concept of the ordinary, as used by Cavell, designates generally things belonging to ordinary life: ordinary language, ordinary activities, the “commonness” of life. In this light, Stephen Mulhall’s book on Cavell, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (1994), is appropriately named. 5. For accessible general works, see particularly Murdoch 1970; Levinas 1989; Diamond 1991; Nancy 1996. In what follows, however, my remarks will be mostly confined to Cavell, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, thus hoping to avoid excessive swelling of my subject. 6. This raises the question concerning the relationship between Emersonian perfectionism and the problem of normativity: if perfectionism refuses to call itself an ethics, how might it have normative bearing in the first place? The short answer is that we are interested in morality rather than moralism (see Bates 2003). I will come back to this; let me now only mention that Cavell highlights often and in various ways the inseparability of different branches of philosophy; see, in particular Cavell (1990: xxix, 2, 5, 7, 46, 61; 1989: 10-1, 40; 1995: 28). 7. I will come back to this in the final section below. 8. Stephen Mulhall (1996a: 14) is right, I think, in making the general observation that Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism is centrally indebted to Heidegger. 9. Heidegger repeatedly underscores that he does not wish to make value judgments as to which kind of life, an authentic or an inauthentic one, would be better or more worthwhile (Heidegger 1927: 113-30); and in fact, the authentic life is an “existentiell modification” of the inauthentic life, and not vice versa (Heidegger 1927: 130). This can be linked to his general emphasis on phenomenology’s dealing not with the “what” but the “how” of experience (Heidegger 1927: 27). 10. See, for instance, Mulhall 1994; Neiman 1999; Laugier 2002; Raïd 2002. 11. Such a reading comes close to that developed by Oskari Kuusela, who argues that the resistance of the later Wittgenstein to presenting philosophical theses has essentially to do with his struggle to keep philosophy free from dogmatism (Kuusela 2008). 12. My procedure for citing Emerson is to name the volume of the Collected (or Complete) Works, followed by an abbreviation of the essay title cited, and the page number(s). 13. While I sympathize with a perfectionist interpretation of Emerson, I am by no means among those (such as Cavell) thinking that we should downplay the proto-pragmatistic strains in Emerson. My PhD dissertation Self as World – The New Emerson (due for publication as a book in the near future) contains an elaborate discussion of both Emersonian perfectionism and Emersonian pragmatism; for another persuasive synthesis, consult Saito 2004. 14. In his analysis Rawls abandons moderate perfectionism and hence perfectionism in general as being incompatible with democracy (Rawls 1971: 325-30). For critical commentary, consult Cavell (1990: 1-32, 48); Hurka 1993; Mulhall (1994: 268-9); Goodman 1997; Conant 2001. 15. See Nietzsche (1874a: 384-5); Cavell (1990: 48-53); Mulhall (1994: 268-9). In the case of Nietzsche, we may indeed raise the question as to what extent he is – forgetting the stereotypes – really an elitist thinker. For example Conant (2001) and Goodman (1997) persuasively argue that Nietzsche’s perfectionism is not nearly as elitist as has often been suggested. 16. For various commentaries on the relationship between Emersonian perfectionism and democracy, see Cavell (1990: 3); Conant (1997: 184); Saito (2001: 396-7); Mulhall (1994: 268-70); Goodman (1997: 174-7). For a fruitful approach on related themes not directly related to perfectionism, consult Kateb 1995. 17. Although Cavell draws himself apart from the standard definition of perfectionism, his perfectionism maintains some important ties to non-Emersonian perfectionism. According to Hurka, perfectionism in the standard sense of the term lays emphasis not only our duties towards others but also towards ourselves, and perfectionism is the foundation of all ethics (Hurka 1993: 5, 190; 1998).

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18. The denial of Emersonian moral perfectionism’s being a teleological theory leaves out, so a critic might argue, the possibility that the “perfection” envisaged in perfectionism amounts not to a lack of telos whatsoever, but only a telos that would be attainable. I note in passing that certain religiously inclined thinkers may regard the very striving for an unattainable telos as the ultimate meaning of human existence. If this makes sense, then Cavellian perfectionism may be seen as somewhat akin to religious perfectionism, which Cavell himself never explicitly denies. 19. See Cavell (1990: xxxi, 2, 62; 1994: 142). Good commentaries are Mulhall (1994: 279-82; 1996b: 353); Saito 2004. 20. Cavell faces the question in (1990: 2). 21. Aristotle uses the phrase (or to be precise, the phrase “another himself”) a couple of times in the Book IX of Nicomachean Ethics. See Aristotle, Ethics, 1166a, 1170b. 22. In my view – though I cannot take up the subject in any detail here – Emerson’s affinity with Hegel (and arguably Fichte and Schelling) could be crucial for a better understanding of his stripe of perfectionism. Indirect evidence for this is provided by the observation that some of the French followers of Hegel, most famously Alexandre Kojève, deal with topics a Cavellian philosopher will easily recognize as (also) Emersonian-perfectionist. I mention as examples the recognition of oneself in an Other, and the related desire to transform one’s particularity into universality, what ultimately amounts to the meaning of life. (See Kojève, in particular, 1939: 11-34.) For Hegel’s theory of recognition, see Hegel 1807; for some observations on Emerson’s Hegelian strands, consult Stievermann (2007: 315-9). 23. As perhaps the best candidates for Emersonian texts stressing the importance of rapture and losing one’s self, I might mention “Circles” (CW 2: circ 1841, 177-90) and “Inspiration” (CW 8: insp 1875, 267-97). Cavell’s references to the former are scanty, to the latter nonexistent. 24. See The Philadelphia Story (Cukor 1940). 25. See Cavell (1995: 26, 1990: xxxii, 59; 2004: 15-6, 27); Saito (2001: 395). 26. This can be seen, for instance, in the following text from the later essay “Education”: “In some sort the end of life is that the man should take up the universe into himself, or out of that quarry leave nothing unrepresented. Yonder mountain must migrate into his mind” (CW 10: ed 1884, 131; emphasis added). 27. Thus Stephen Mulhall (1994: 338) appropriately characterizes Emersonian perfectionism as a notion of a “conception of the self as inherently divided between its attained and attainable states and in need of an Exemplar” – a friend or a favorite author – “to help it manage the shift from the former to the latter.” 28. I have to admit to being unable to find the reference for this admirable pun (though I still recall it comes from Cavell). Cavell’s lectures on perfectionism (1990) make the point in broader brush strokes. 29. In an interview with Cavell by the current author, he formulated the matter as follows: “In some awful way, I have to confess, I don’t care if I have to distinguish between what I can in a scholarly way prove Emerson meant and what I feel I can get out of it if I mean it. I’m philosophizing reading Emerson, and I think he wants me to, and when I find work that leaves the thing sort of dead for me on the page, again I know I cringe from this.” This part of the interview is unpublished (cf. Cavell 2008). 30. My reading of Cavell’s non-religiosity stands in an intriguing tension with Stephen Mulhall’s interpretation that the question of religion is, for Cavell, ultimately “the most fundamental and so the most revealing of his preoccupations” (Mulhall 1994: 285). While Mulhall is, of course, well aware of Cavell’s own proclivity to acquiescence with respect to religion, he stresses the more than arbitrary parallels between the Cavellian philosophical project and Christianity. This makes it even more ironic, indeed, that Cavell has so little to say on religion in his forays into Emerson. 31. Yet a further subsidiary question concerns the therapeutic aspect of Emersonian perfectionism, evidenced by Cavell’s paramount references to Freud in his dealings with perfectionism (see the lecture “Freud” in Cavell’s second book on perfectionism (2004: 282-300);

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see also Cavell 1987). Cavell seems to be worried by Freud’s refusal to see his project of psychoanalytic therapy as intimately related to philosophy – perhaps a worry Cavell himself would identify with, for he might well feel related concerns – or, in the framework of Cavell’s own project, by his philosophy possibly lacking the therapeutic weight it ought to carry. 32. Indeed, Murdoch’s book is thematically perhaps closer to Cavell’s work than any other text known to me; it is also the work that Cavell mentions first, while drawing attention to texts related to his own project, in his preface to the lectures on perfectionism (Cavell 1990). The other authors he mentions are Annette Baier, G. E. M. Anscombe, Cora Diamond, Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and Peter Winch. 33. See Cavell (1990: xviii-xvxix). For the original version of the story, consult Murdoch 1970. 34. For the original list in its entirety, see Cavell (1990: 5). 35. “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.” (Goethe 1808 / W.A. I 14., 39.) For central Emerson commentators dealing with the matters discussed in this paragraph, see Cavell (1990: 1-32); Conant 1997; Goodman 1997; Van Cromphout 1999; Stievermann 2007.

ABSTRACTS

Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism is not a compete theory of moral philosophy alongside utilitarianism or deontology; it seeks to get a grip of a dimension in any moral thinking, less of a hierarchy of what to value most in life and more a sketch on how we come to value anything in the first place. Emersonian perfectionism tries to understand what it means to be a moral subject, an authentic self, and to do this it cannot stay solely within the conventional sub- disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. First and foremost, Cavell intends his outlook as a way of discovering the philosophical uniqueness of Emersonian thought; he asks us to take very seriously what Emerson has to say on the self and its coming to itself. But such themes are never confined within the narrow framework of a particular author, essayist or a poet, and Cavell traces related topics in works of art as diverse as Ibsen’s Doll House and the poetry of Whitman, philosophers as seemingly distant as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. While Cavell is oftentimes suggestive rather than elaborate on the relevance of Wittgenstein and Heidegger for his version of moral perfectionism, a critical reader ought to spell out the senses in which the two thinkers are essential to the perfectionist project. In brief, neither one of them had much to say on ethics by way of explicit commentary, yet both of them have given rise to a host of reasonable studies in ethics, following them. Thus philosophers like Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch have made their name drafting a new kind of ethics, sometimes bluntly dubbed Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and authors such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Luc-Nancy have done the same in the Heideggerian footsteps, drawing attention to his “originary ethics.” The key issue regarding the aforementioned exemplars in moral philosophy, and arguably Emersonian ethics, is that they speak to ethical issues without explicitly addressing ethics; they touch on something crucial to our ethical conduct without laying out ethical norms. They are not so much interested in the normativity of ethics in the first place. They seem to grasp that ethics has to do with something more fundamental, perhaps something like an original encounter with the being of the world, a genuine attentiveness to the particularity of our experience, rendering ethics possible in the first place. Such an outlook on morality may not be unambiguously called ethics, at least not as something separate from epistemology and ontology, yet its affinities with contemporary moral philosophy are wide-ranging, in particular, with the work of Iris Murdoch.

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Internal Relations and the Possibility of Evil On Cavell and Monstrosity

Martin Shuster

I. Introduction

1 In a suggestive and seemingly commonplace claim Cavell points out that “mere morality is not designed to evaluate the behavior and interactions of monsters” (CR 265).1 I say suggestive and commonplace because such a thought recurs at crucial points in The Claim of Reason. Indeed, ultimately, Cavell writes in a parenthetical that: To understand Nazism, whatever that will mean, will be to understand it as a human possibility; monstrous, unforgiveable, but not therefore the conduct of monsters. Monsters are not unforgiveable, and not forgiveable. We do not bear the right internal relation to them for forgiveness to apply. (CR 378)

2 Now, as far as I can tell this line of thinking raises two distinct questions, the first lexicographic, the other theoretical. Starting with the former, it is important to understand what Cavell means by “internal relation.” On the point of the latter, there is the age-old, perhaps even tired question about the nature of evil. Roughly, the question centers on whether we take evil to be a distinct something (e.g. a malum metaphysicum) or whether we take it to be a lack or privation of something (i.e. a nothing) like “the good,” or more neutrally, e.g., existence.2 To return to the prior point about internal relations, I think it is especially significant to take stock of this term and its connection to Cavell’s moral perfectionism because it allows us to see that the notion of internal relations is not something that Cavell simply tacks onto his moral perfectionism, but rather the notion of internal relations fundamentally expressed his moral perfectionism.

3 Ultimately, my argument here will be that not only does (1) Cavell’s moral perfectionism present a more interesting (or perhaps even novel) answer to the question of evil, but that it does so by (2) fundamentally undermining the basis through

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which the question of whether evil is a privation or a positive force or object can arise in the first place.

II. Internal Relations

4 We can begin to elaborate these points by making sense of what Cavell means by “internal relation.” This term occurs seven times in the Claim. I quote all but one of them here:3 What he [a conservative in a debate about abortion] wants is for the embryo to be seen as a human being: he wants the internal relation between human embryos and human beings to strike you. (CR 373) He [the slave-owner] is rather missing something about himself, or rather something about his connection with these people, his internal relation with them, so to speak. (CR 376) He [again, the slave-owner] means, indefinitely, that there are kinds of humans. (It is, I take it, to deny just this that Marx […] speaks of man as a species-being. To be human is to be one of humankind, to bear an internal relation to all others). (CR 376) Whether I am struck by likeness or difference, however, the basis of the surprise is the stability of the human frame, as it were, under countless inflections – the internal relation between each body and each other. (CR 395) The logical space is so vast between kinds of objects […] Whereas human beings, by contrast, are all alike; each bears an internal relation to all others. (CR 442) You do not claim […] 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 […]. (CR 453)

5 Now, the employment of this term here is initially puzzling. As G. E. Moore had pointed out roughly sixty years prior with his attack on Bradley, “it is by no means easy to make out” what may be meant by the notion of an internal relation.4 Of course, ‘internal relations’ have an elaborate, perhaps even sordid, philosophical history. Most prominently, I am thinking exactly of the aforementioned revolt by Russell and Moore against Bradley and Green on the point of internal relations.5 To best understand Cavell’s employment of internal relations, however, I think we can focus on Wittgenstein’s use of the term in reaction to Russell’s and Moore’s use of it. Indeed, given Cavell’s relationship to Wittgenstein, I don’t think it is implausible to suggest that the Wittgensteinian heritage is the one most relevant.

6 Dropping our anchor here, however, proves not to be entirely easy, since Wittgenstein uses the notion as early as the Tractatus and recent Wittgenstein interpretation has been divided on how to understand Wittgenstein on the notion of internal relations in the Tractatus.6 Without entering into this debate, I do want to pick out one striking formulation from the Tractatus. There, Wittgenstein writes that: 4.123: A property is internal if it is unthinkable that its object should not possess it (This shade of blue and that one stand, eo ipso, in the internal relation of lighter to darker. It is unthinkable that these two objects should not stand in this relation).7

7 Skipping to Wittgenstein’s later work, the term ‘internal relation’ occurs only once in the Investigations; there Wittgenstein writes: The colour of the visual impression corresponds to the colour of the object (this blotting paper looks pink to me, and is pink) – the shape of the visual impression to the shape of the object (it looks rectangular to me, and is rectangular) – but what I

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perceive in the dawning of an aspect (Aspekt) is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects.8

8 On the next page, Wittgenstein points out: The concept of an aspect is akin (verwandt) to the concept of an image (Vorstellung) […] Seeing an aspect and imagining are subject to the will (Wille). There is such an order as “Imagine this,” and also: “Now see the figure like this”; but not: “Now see this leaf green.”9

9 We can see from these quotations that there is a certain continuity in Wittgenstein’s understanding of internal relations – at least on this point – namely that the notion of internal relations, at least as far as it can best be illustrated, is always closely linked to the perception of colors. An internal relation is understood in such a way that in order to understand one concept (e.g. red), I must understand another (e.g. pink), and vice versa.

III. Forms of Life

10 A particular sort of holism (perhaps even idealism) is certainly what underwrites Wittgenstein’s later thinking on the matter (and this later thought is the one that carries the most significance for Cavell). This Wittgensteinian backdrop, although a sort of holism, is not however, at least on the point of internal relations, one that succumbs to the criticisms that Russell launched against Bradley’s holistic idealism. Russell had argued that a doctrine of internal relations commits one to holding “that every relation is really constituted by the natures of the terms or of the whole which they compose, or merely that every relation has a ground in these natures.”10

11 Wittgenstein’s point – certainly by the time of the Investigations – is that the picture behind Russell’s critique is one that itself must be abandoned. It is not that there is some ontological whole that stands behind relations constituting or grounding them (i.e. Bradley, on Russell’s view), nor is it the case that relations are entirely contingent (as Russell’s doctrine of external relations argued). Rather, the picture that makes either of these positions plausible is itself precisely undermined by Wittgenstein’s entire later philosophical outlook. While relations are ultimately conceptual, our concepts are neither defined solely by something like an outside (e.g. reality), nor solely by something like an inside (e.g. mind), nor even by some relation between the two.11 Instead, as Cavell points out, for Wittgenstein, 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’” (CR 109). To begin to understand this point, we can remind ourselves that Wittgenstein claims that: “An internal relation is never a relation between two objects, but you might call it a relation between two concepts. And a sentence asserting an internal relation between two objects, such as a mathematical sentence, is not describing objects but constructing concepts.”12 Concept construction, in turn, according to Wittgenstein, is not something that occurs merely in reaction to some “external” reality, nor merely by some “frictionless spinning in a void.”13 Our concepts owe themselves to our forms of life.14 (As Wittgenstein puts the point: “The person who cannot play this game does not have this concept.”15)

12 To return to the discussion of an aspect, we can get a better grasp on what Wittgenstein’s notion of internal relations may signify for Cavell by asking what it

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would mean to have ‘aspect blindness,’ to have an ignorance of an internal relation. On this point, Wittgenstein proposes that we could indeed imagine someone having a sort of “aspect blindness”: “The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something – and what would that be like?”16 Framed in this way, it is explicit that this entire Wittgensteinian theme is meant to connect to Cavell’s discussion of “soul-blindness” (CR 378 – a point Cavell himself makes on CR 355).

13 In elaborating ‘aspect blindness,’ Wittgenstein points out that “the ‘aspect-blind’ will have an altogether different relationship to pictures from ours.”17 In turn, Wittgenstein draws an analogy between having a ‘musical ear’ and aspect blindness. He asks us to imagine what it means to ‘experience’ words. What I take Wittgenstein to be after with these suggestions is that ‘aspect-blindness’ is, as he states, in part, subject to the will (albeit with an important caveat to the notion of will, elaborated below): I can take this picture as a picture of this or of that (e.g. the duck or the rabbit), but my will is also subject to the form of life that I inhabit (e.g. if I have no notion of a duck because no such creatures exist, then that aspect is unavailable to me). As Wittgenstein will state at the end of this discussion: “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life.”18

14 Before getting a grip on how forms of life is being employed here, and before returning to Cavell, it is important to highlight several characteristics of ‘soul-blindness’ over and beyond ‘aspect-blindness.’ Most fundamentally, Wittgenstein points out that: “‘I cannot know what is going on in him’ is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.”19 The point, as far as Cavell is concerned (i.e. as far as Cavell’s Wittgenstein is concerned), is that in the case of ‘soul-blindness’ it is simply not possible, as an agent, for me to lack others, to be entirely alone. I take this point to be, at least in part, another consequence of the way in which Cavell interprets Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Cavell writes: I think one moral of the Investigations as a whole can be drawn as follows: The fact, and the state, of your (inner) life cannot take its importance from anything special in it. However far you have gone with it, you will find that what is common is there before you are. The state of your life may be, and may be all that is, worth your infinite interest. But then that can only exist along with a complete disinterest toward it. The soul is impersonal. (CR 361)

15 My own self is intimately dependent on others: it is in this sense that Cavell means the “soul is impersonal.” Not impersonal in the sense that it is not mine, but impersonal in the sense that it can only belong to me in and through a relation to others. More specifically, the argument here and elsewhere is that, through and through, my innermost private thoughts and moments are always already inflected through and saturated by language, namely a language that is always fundamentally inherited (perhaps even stolen, as Cavell proposes in places). There is and can be nothing of, in, or through the self that is not in this way configured: privacy is itself always a function of the common heritage of language and thereby our relation not only to language, but to others (whether overtly in the form of word projection and its success and/or failure or covertly in the contours of our world.) So, where in the case of ‘aspect blindness,’ it is possible to lack certain particulars, it is impossible in the case of ‘soul blindness’ to lack particular others.

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16 Such an argument about language, ourselves, and others, however, raises all of the various complex questions about how to conceive of such a relation and how such a relation (as much to language as to others) works (and fails to work), both philosophically and in lived experience.20 The answers to such questions are, at least in rubric, found in Cavell’s elaboration of Wittgenstein’s notion of a form of life. Who I am is defined as much by the various social claims, motivations, and influences (among other things) that congeal into what Wittgenstein calls a “practice,”21 as it is defined by who I take myself to be in response to such practices. In turn, these practices are more than mere agreements within a community or individual interpretations,22 they are something we are already always engaged in, immersed in, and in the midst of. Agreement is already always continually negotiated, perhaps and often at levels too complex to perceive, while interpretation itself cannot exist outside of the practices of a community: it is also already always dependent on our practices. We can think here precisely of what Cavell had in an earlier essay called the “whirl of organism.”23 Not only are these practices constantly shifting in the ways in which we do and do not negotiate our linguistic and social boundaries, but they are impacted as much by simple brute facts like that we will die, we require food, we have sex, we excrete, we need to breathe, we get sick, and so forth.24

17 There is, then, a seamless interpenetration between our particular surroundings and the ways in which we see the things in and of those surroundings. Wittgenstein is explicit about this point when he writes that: “Something is ‘grey’ or ‘white’ only in a particular surrounding (Umgebung).”25 In turn, forms of life, surroundings, and our practices are all mutually implicated within one another. A forceful example is presented in §250 of the Investigations, when Wittgenstein asks: Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing.26

18 Our surroundings, our forms of life, indeed we (i.e. I) require an other.27 According to Cavell, someone who is ‘soul-blind’ wants to deny or overlook this aspect of herself. She willfully proposes a picture of herself that excludes the other, that promotes a fantasy of radical independence. Or, she is incapable of seeing a picture in which the other appears. This is what I take Cavell to mean when he writes that: The block to my vision of the other is not the other’s body but my incapacity or unwillingness to interpret or to judge it accurately, to draw the right connections. The suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this darkness upon the other […] Aspect-blindness is something in me failing to dawn. (CR 368-369)

19 Cavell continues, drawing the aforementioned connection to the duck-rabbit, by pointing out that: “We may say that the rabbit-aspect is hidden from us when we fail to see it. But what hides it is then obviously not the picture (that reveals it), but our (prior) way of taking it, namely in its duck-aspect” (CR 369). Cavell’s point is that in the case of ‘soul-blindness’ it is impossible, unless one has actively willed it (and this must be qualified in a very important way shortly), for an other or others to be missing (as opposed to, e.g., in the case where a duck-aspect may be missing in a world without ducks – i.e., in a world without the obvious possibility of a duck aspect). The point is that I am who I am always only in relation to an other (whereas I could easily be who I

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am in a world that lacked ducks or rabbits, or even both). One explicit moment (among countless others) where Cavell makes this point is when he writes: I do not know in advance how deep my agreement with myself is, how far responsibility for the language may run. But if I am to have my own voice in it, I must be speaking for others and allow others to speak for me. The alternative to speaking for myself representatively (for someone else’s consent) is not: speaking for myself privately. The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute. (CR 28)

20 How to “cash out” this proposal (whether, e.g., to understand it dialectically or non- dialectically or how to understand the mechanics and nature of Cavellian acknowledgment or the proposal of community and communal politics that it entails) is a complex question that I simply cannot pursue here. The only point I want to stress is that Cavell wants to invoke precisely the idea that who I am owes itself to my relation to an other (again, at this point taken neither dialectically nor non-dialectically).28

21 Now, when I say that soul-blindness can only exist because of a process of will, whereas aspect blindness can exist by a process of will or by the contingencies of affairs, I believe that it is crucial to understand that will here is not some simple mechanism of choice. Rather, owing to the picture of agency that I sketched above (that the notion of forms of life proposes), the notion of will itself begins to look radically different. One way to understand this point is to grasp that, owing to the saturation between inside and outside, the relationship between our vision of the world and our choices within the world becomes reconfigured. This is what I take to be the import of Wittgenstein’s point that: “Seeing an aspect and imagining are subject to will. There is such an order as ‘Imagine this,’ and also: ‘Now see the figure like this’; but not: ‘Now see this leaf green’.”29 Much in the same way that we do not have an option of seeing in color (unless we are color-blind, in which case we do not have the option of seeing in black and white), so we also do not have the option of being who we are without others. We can however (and certainly, oftentimes unfortunately, and all-too-easily do) train or allow ourselves (whether intentionally or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly) to see not only a duck instead of a rabbit, but a slave instead of a person, or an object instead of a subject. The relationship between our vision and our moral commitments, then, is such that we need not (indeed cannot) choose, theoretically, between a demurral to treat someone as other than a slave owing to an incapability of seeing them as more than a slave and an incapacity to see them as more than a slave owing to a demurral to treat them as more than a slave. The two are one and the same. This is what Cavell means when he writes that: “What he [the slave-owner] really believes is not that slaves are not human beings, but that some human beings are slaves […] this man sees certain human beings as slaves, takes them for slaves” (CR 375).30 When Wittgenstein states that seeing an aspect is subject (unterstehen) to will, he has in mind not that our seeing of aspects is always a matter of willing to see it a certain way, but only that it can so be subject, as the German suggests, it can be subordinate to or under the control of our will.

22 The reason, among other things, that it may often be more difficult to change one’s view (let alone someone else’s view) of someone from a slave to a non-slave is that such a vision is always bound up with intricate and varied sets of other beliefs, ranging in scope and weight from anything to religion (e.g. manifest destiny or the Curse of Ham) to science (e.g. racial anthropology) to aesthetics (e.g. the “Caucasian” skull of Backenbach) to politics (e.g. secessionism), and so forth. The vision between a duck and

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a rabbit, although potentially subject to similar sorts of inputs is inflected differently, carrying a different sort of importance and urgency (although it need not).31 This is what I take to be the implied suggestion in a very a striking passage towards the end of The Claim of Reason: Then I might put the question “Is there such a thing as soul-blindness?” in the following way: Is this [our form of civilization] […] form of civilization being replaced by another? In particular, is it being replaced by one in which nothing that happens any longer strikes us as the objectification of subjectivity, as the act of an answerable agent, as the expression and satisfaction of human freedom, of human intention and desire? What has a beginning can have an end. If this future (civilization?) were effected its members would not be dissatisfied. They would have lost the concept of satisfaction. Then nothing would (any longer) give them the idea that living beings, human beings, could feel. So they would not (any longer) be human. They would not, for example, be frightened upon meeting others – except in the sense, or under circumstances, in which they would be frightened upon encountering bears or storms, circumstances under which bears would be frightened. And of course particular forms of laughter and of amazement would also no longer be possible, ones which depend upon clear breaks between, say, machines and creatures (CR 468).

23 Cavell’s picture here is so striking because it precisely draws out the stakes of what it would mean to see all others as devoid of agency: it would ultimately involve seeing ourselves as entirely devoid of agency; it shows the contours of what it would mean to affirm radical independence: namely, it would precisely require us to no longer see ourselves as agents.32 To see all others as devoid of agency – truly to see such a thing – would require us to abrogate a variety of other highlights and lowlights in our moral- visual spectrum; indeed, it would require us to abrogate a particular view of ourselves. In the same way, incapacity and refusal to see certain others as like me (or as truly human or as more than a slave) merge together exactly because they are subject to countless other inflections and inputs, both individual and communal. This is what Cavell has in mind when he states that in seeing someone as a slave, the slave-owner can mean nothing “definite” (CR 376). The slave-owner, rather, appeals to a whole form of life, and all that such an appeal entails.

24 What I take Cavell to be implicitly stressing, then, when he writes that the slave-owner is “rather missing something about himself, or rather something about his connection with these people [slaves], his internal relation with them,” is that the slave-owner illustrates the practical fragility of such internal relations and the theoretical complexity of how to understand this practical vulnerability: the myriad ways in which we can and do ignore, overlook, or devalue each other and the plethora of methods by which we attempt to justify, constitute, or fail to acknowledge such projects and claims. The interest (or promise) that Cavell’s moral perfectionism holds for us is that it attempts to work within the framework of such failures (whether of reasons or acknowledgment, of institutions or individuals); Cavell’s moral perfectionism should be understood as the means of navigating this fragility, not as a means of proposing it.33 This is what I take Cavell to mean when he writes in the introductory remarks to Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, that “if there is a perfectionism not only compatible with democracy but necessary to it, it lies not in excusing democracy for its inevitable failure, or looking to rise above them, but in teaching how to respond to those failures, and to one’s compromise by them, otherwise than by excuse or withdrawal.”34

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IV. Conclusion: Cavell and Evil

25 What significance, does this have for Cavell’s understanding of evil, or in Cavell’s terms, monstrosity? When Cavell says that to understand Nazism would mean to understand it as a “human possibility; monstrous, unforgiveable, but not therefore the conduct of monsters” and that we do not “bear the right internal relation” to monsters, I believe he has in mind the idea that monstrosity or pure evil would not – indeed could not – be a part our form of life (CR 378). In making this argument for Cavell, I do not intend to suggest that Cavell would (or that we should) deny the existence of evil or evils, as he makes clear in the quote above (Nazism is monstrous), rather the denial is of evil as anything over and beyond a human possibility (i.e. pure evil or evil as a distinct, metaphysical force). On this argument, evils are always embedded in particular forms of life and thereby they are always anchored to fundamentally human, fundamentally understandable motives. This is not to say, of course, that we can always and immediately understand such motives – no more than we can understand any other particular motives. It is often the case that our own motives, or the motives of others may be unavailable to us, whether because of a fundamental insensitivity to their origins or grounds or because of their complexity, or because of a variety of other possible factors. The only point I want to stress here is that potentially they are always available in the sense that they only exist through a complex framework of forms of life: of various materially saturated norms that themselves are interlaced with conceptions of good and evil, of human and inhuman, of monstrous and angelic, and so forth.35

26 When Cavell states that, “mere morality is not designed to evaluate the behavior and interactions of monsters,” he should be understood as making the same point that Hegel makes in his Lectures on Aesthetics. There, Hegel writes that: “evil in the abstract has no truth in itself and is of no interest.”36 Contra Schelling and those would view evil as some sort of cosmic force, Hegel wants to argue that evil is really always a particular evil,37 embedded in a particular shape of spirit (indeed, it would not be too much to say “form of life” here),38 and answering to, evaluated by, and existing through a robust spiritual (geistige) backdrop. In this sense, to speak of evil as such would be akin to describing the act of a Hutu interhamawe or Khmer Rouge perpetrator of genocide as a force of nature: inscrutable, malevolent, and utterly inhuman. It would be precisely the picture that Cavell sketched above: where such things would no longer strike us as “the objectification of subjectivity.” Indeed, they would ultimately be actions no longer attributable to subjects (in the same way that earthquakes or other natural disasters are not attributable to subjects), not because they are inhuman, but because they are not human.39 Cavell’s moral perfectionism, then, on one hand, shares with privation theories of evil the idea that evil is not some cosmic force standing over and beyond or apart from our forms of life. On the other hand, in opposition to such privation theories, it does posit evil as a genuine opposition to the good, but it is an opposition that is itself always staked, judged, delineated, and negotiated in light of a particular, concrete form of life. In short, then, evil has a genuine existence, but it is one that is perpetually responsive to our “whirl of organism” and which must be evaluated by a process that is somewhere between “natural science” and “natural history.”40

27 To conclude, I want briefly to acknowledge that all of this is not to say that various perpetrators through the course of history have not desired or aspired to see

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themselves as precisely not human (whether as more than human or fundamentally as a force of nature, but in either case, here opposed to inhuman). Indeed, Hannah Arendt famously argued that (at least some, if not many of) the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide saw themselves as superfluous as their victims. As she wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism: “The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born.”41 I would take Cavell to be quite sympathetic to Arendt’s line of argument,42 with the understanding that this fantasy of superfluousness must always be understood as a human possibility, one with a distinct historical axis, whether ideological, material, or some combination of these or a host of others, others which are and, again, can only be human, all-too-human.

28 Indeed, Cavell’s moral perfectionism precisely bars the means by which the question of whether evil is a privation or a positive force tends to arise in the first place. Evil on such a view, is a human possibility, akin to justice or vengeance or respect: it is a sort of claim that we make to, for, and perhaps in opposition to others. It is, then, like a variety of other sorts of claims: a claim to reason and part of the search for reason. On such a proposal, then, seeing it as a privation looks especially useless, since it no more makes sense to see evil as a privation than it does to see any of our other claims as a privation. (A privation of what? The only privation that could exist on such a picture would be the empty, hollow silence of the lack of agency that Cavell describes.) Similarly, seeing it as a positive object also makes no more sense than seeing any other claims as distinctly positive. (It is no more and no less a positive object than the object of any other claim: always open to revision and negotiated by our forms of life.) Either picture would be a picture that would present ourselves to ourselves as more than human; it would somehow erase the fact of our humanity, our finitude, by making us either too evil or not evil enough.

NOTES

1. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979). Cited as CR in the body of the text. 2. An emblematic representation of the former is F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Buffalo, State University of New York Press, 2007). A quintessential example of the latter is Augustine, Confessions (London, Penguin, 1961) 3. One occurrence (CR 370), which I don’t bother quoting is itself a quote from Wittgenstein; I will turn to the significance of this shortly. 4. G.E. Moore, “External and Internal Relations,” Proceedings of the Aristotlean Society 20 (1919), 40. 5. As Russell will write: “The doctrine of internal relations held that every relation between two terms expresses, primarily, intrinsic properties of the two terms, and, in ultimate analysis, a property of the whole which the two compose.” See Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London, Unwin Hyman, 1995), 54. For an account of this period, see Peter Hylton, Russell,

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Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Ronald Jager, The Development of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy (London, Routledge, 2004), 61-87. 6. For an overview, see Marie McGinn, “Wittgenstein and Internal Relations,” European Journal of Philosophy (2009). Roughly, the debate is over what sort of understanding of “internal relations” Wittgenstein is committed to in the early work. I don’t enter into this discussion except in order to elaborate Wittgenstein’s understanding of the notion in his later work, which is the work that holds the most significance for Cavell. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. B. F. McGuinness and D. F. Pears (London, Routledge, 1974), 127. It may or may not be that this issue is related to the so called “color-exclusion” problem. For an argument to this effect, see Don Sievert, “Another Look at Wittgenstein on Color Exclusion,” Synthese 78, no. 3 (1989). 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Upper Sadle, Prentice Hall, 1958), 212e. 9. Ibid., 213e. 10. Bertrand Russell, “On the Nature of Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotlean Society 7 (1906-07), 38. 11. Cf. Terry Pinkard, “Innen, Aussen und Lebensformen: Hegel und Wittgenstein,” in Hegels Erbe (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2004), 267. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. Cora Diamond (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1976), 73. 13. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996), 11. 14. I will elaborate Cavell’s understanding of this notion shortly. A valuable place to look is in Cavell’s brief discussion in Stanley Cavell, This New yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, Living Batch Press, 1989), 40-5. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Color, trans. Linda McAlister and Margerete Schattle (Oxford, Blackwell, 1977). Quoted in Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (Buffalo, State University of New York Press, 1981), 86. Gier’s chapter (“Holism and Internal Relations”) makes, from a different perspective, the same point I have been developing here. 16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 213e. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 214e. 18. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 214e. 19. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 214e. 20. I say “all of the” because it would not be too implausible to view the history of a certain brand of post- Kantian philosophy (importantly one to which Cavell himself belongs) as centering on such issues. On this point, see Paul W. Franks, “The Discovery of the Other: Cavell, Fichte, and Skepticism,” Common Knowledge 5, no. 2 (1996). 21. For an explicit connection between “practices” and “forms of life,” see Jeffrey Thomas Price, Language and Being in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (New York: Walter De Gruyter Inc, 1973), 83. 22. For an elaboration of this point, see The Claim of Reason and (particularly the second essay in) Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See also John McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998). 23. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 52. 24. There arises here, I believe an interesting question about what sorts of things we can and cannot say about how our forms of life change. This question pushes us towards manifestly Hegelian sorts of question. For an elabo- ration of what is at stake between Wittgenstein (Cavell) and Hegel on this point, see Pinkard, “Innen, Aussen und Lebensformen: Hegel und Wittgenstein.” For an elaboration of the sorts of questions I have in mind, see especially the

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conclusion of Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008). 25. Wittgenstein, On Color, 46. 26. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 90e. Cf. CR 379: “For surely nothing other than a human being, or something awfully like a human being, could simulate human responses?” 27. And, again, although there are many more questions about the mechanics of this relationship, what must be stressed is that this is not the mere agreements of a community. On this point, see footnote 22. 28. What I mean here is the question is whether one should read Cavell along a more “Levinasian” direction, where acknowledgment of the other is understood in a non-dialectical fashion, or where he is to be understood in a more, e.g., Fichtean (Hegelian) understanding where it is understood as a dialectical one. Derrida raises this issue vis-à-vis the other most forcefully with his discussion of Lévinas and Husserl on the other in Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 1978). 29. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 213e. 30. Iris Murdoch elaborates a very similar vision of morality in Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Existentialists and Mystics (New York, Penguin, 1997). See especially the concluding pages of her essay. 31. I am reminded here of a poignant scene in Robert Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), where the Nazi, Lessing, is obsessed with finding an answer to a riddle as opposed to seeing Guido as more than the possibility of an answer to the riddle. 32. Although I do not pursue it here, I think the picture that Cavell presents here has much in common with the picture that Horkheimer and Adorno present in the first essay of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophical Fragments, ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002). Cavell’s comments at the end of this section about myth are in this proposed analogue especially suggestive. 33. This is what I had meant in my introduction when I said that I believe Cavell’s moral perfectionism follows from his notion of internal relations, not the other way around. I take this to be significant because it is not the case that Cavell’s moral perfectionism is moralizing in that proscribes a particular epistemology, but rather the epistemology calls for a certain type of morality. 34. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 18. 35. This is what I take Cavell explicitly to refer to in the third essay of Ibid. As Cavell points out that Marquis (of The Marquis of O) states to the Count that he ultimately “would not have looked like a devil to her (when he appeared as the father of the child) if he had not seemed like an angel to her at his first appearance.” Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 118. 36. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975), 2, 1212. 37. Cf. Robert B. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 412. 38. On this point, see Terry Pinkard, “What Is a Shape of Spirit?,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Dean Moyar and Michael Quante (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008). 39. Cavell, then, initially appears to be uninterested in extreme evils like the Nazi genocide not because they are limit cases which are uninteresting, but precisely because they are often taken to be limit cases which display a fundamental lack of humanity (as opposed to a presence of inhumanity). Cavell’s point is that such cases are of no interest precisely if they are taken to be limit cases, because they are pushed beyond the realm of human action (and would be of no more interest to the account of The Claim of Reason than natural disasters). They are not, however, uninteresting intrinsically.

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40. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 230e. 41. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, André Deutsch, 1986), 459. Note that Arendt’s argument is not that because Nazi actors viewed themselves in this way, their motives are fundamentally not understandable as human ones. Rather, her argument is that totalitarianism presents new sort of human possibility. Put another way, Arendt’s debate with Kant is not on the point that all motives are comprehensible, but on the point that Kant’s choice between either the categorical imperative (morality) or self-interest/self-love (immortality) does not cover all the options. 42. Indeed, I don’t think it would be too difficult to map Cavell’s skeptical recital onto Arendt’s framework in “Total Domination” – but that would be a project for another essay.

ABSTRACTS

In this article, I examine Cavell’s understanding and deployment of the categories of ‘evil’ and the ‘monstrous’ in The Claim of Reason. Arguing that these notions cannot be understood apart from Cavell’s reliance on the notion of an ‘internal relation,’ I trace this notion to its Wittgensteinian roots. Ultimately, I show that Cavell’s view of evil allows us to navigate between two horns of a classic dilemma in thinking about evil: it allows us to see evil as neither a privation nor as a positive force with supra-human potency.

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Perfectionism and Moral Reasoning

Matteo Falomi

1 Since the late eighties, Stanley Cavell has begun presenting his reflections on ethics under the heading of Moral Perfectionism.1 Cavell’s way of using the notion of perfectionism, though, considerably departs from the meaning the term has acquired in contemporary moral philosophy. In current debate, the word “perfectionism” usually names a certain kind of teleological theory, one that aims (as Rawls put it) at maximizing the good of “human excellence in art, science, and culture.”2 In Cavell’s understanding, instead, perfectionism should not be seen “as a competing moral theory […] but as emphasizing a dimension of the moral life any theory of it may wish to accommodate.”3 One might provisionally articulate the difference between Cavell’s notion of perfectionism and the homonymous moral theory by saying that perfectionism, in Cavell’s interpretation of it, focuses on a kind of moral difficulty that diverges from the ones usually considered in normative theories: while these theories try to answer questions about action, perfectionism concentrates on what Cavell variously describes as difficulties of “self-knowledge”4 of “becoming intelligible to oneself,”5 of “being true to oneself,”6 of “being lost to oneself” and “finding one’s way,”7 of “[becoming] the one I am.”8 To put the contrast more sharply, one might say that while moral theories tries to answer questions of the form “What ought I to do?,” perfectionism concerns itself with questions of the form “Who am I?”

2 Attention to this latter sort of difficulties requires, according to Cavell’s account, modes of moral reasoning that deviate from the ones privileged in canonical moral theories:9 when one is confronted with difficulties of self-understanding, appeals to utilitarian calculations of consequences or Kantian generalizations of maxims may fail to make contact with one’s actual concerns.10 Cavell, on the other hand, eschews any general characterization of the mode of thinking he associates with perfectionism: any version of perfectionism, in Cavell’s view, will provide its own specific concepts and methods of self-understanding; the lineaments of perfectionist reasoning are therefore indicated by Cavell through an enumeration of examples of perfectionist texts, rather than fixed through a theoretical description.11 For this reason, it is hard to convey in a few lines the breadth and flexibility of Cavell’s conception of perfectionism; in order to give at

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least a rough sense of what Cavell is prepared to count as an instance of perfectionist reasoning, I will list here a few examples that are relevant to Cavell’s discussion: 1. Emerson’s characterization of the reading of a “work of genius” as enabling us to “recognize our own rejected thoughts” coming back to us “with a certain alienated majesty.”12 2. Kierkegaard’s strategies of indirect communication, as allowing us to realize that “we have lost the capacity, for subjectivity, for inwardness, and therewith the capacity for Christianity.”13 3. Freud’s methods of free association and dream interpretation, putting the patient in a position to recognize the elements of his inner life whose repression has led to psychological disorders.14 4. Rousseau’s appeals to the idea of a social contract, as facilitating the acknowledgement that we have consented to “the specific inequalities, lacks of freedom and absence of fraternity”15 that characterize our society as it stands. 5. Wittgenstein’s methods of bringing words back to their everyday use, as enabling us to become aware that, in philosophy, we do not know what we mean by our words and that we are attracted by these nonsensical words because we want to refuse our human form of life. 16

3 As it will be apparent even from this brief (and somewhat arbitrary) list, not only the methods of self-knowledge that Cavell deems relevant for perfectionism are extremely diverse, but each of these methods presupposes a different idea of self-knowledge: the kind of self-understanding delivered by Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations, for instance, will diverge from the one provided by Freudian therapies, and so on. Any attempt to characterize perfectionist self-knowledge in general is then bound to be partial or misleading. If one is nonetheless to indicate a pattern, one might say that all these authors respond, in different ways, to a peculiar kind of confusion about our conception of ourselves: we incur in such a confusion when we think that our present mode of life (or some feature of it) is really expressive of who we are, when in fact this is not the case. Emerson’s reader, for instance, is imagined to be in a state of conformity, in which he believes that his present thoughts and tastes are his own, while he is actually imitating someone else; Kierkegaard’s believer takes himself to be a Christian, and therefore lives under the illusion that “such thing as Christendom exists, that one can be a Christian simply by being born in a Christian state, by Christian parents, and by being given a Christian name and nomenclature”;17 Freud’s patient is affected by systematic delusions over the real object of his desires; Rousseau’s citizen hallucinates the real object of his consent; Wittgenstein’s philosopher, who believes that in putting forward metaphysical propositions he is describing how things stand with an unprejudiced eye, turns out to be possessed by a refusal of the human.

4 All these methods of self-knowledge, in other words, may be said to exploit the idea of a mismatch between our present description of ourselves and our actual situation; they all respond to the sense that, as Nietzsche put the point in Schopenhauer as Educator, “all you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”18 The perfectionist quest for self-knowledge may be said to begin, in this perspective, with the acknowledgement that our present mode of life is not really ours; the different modes of reasoning that Cavell associates with the perfectionist tradition will then provide ways to come to terms with this acknowledgement.

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5 This admittedly crude sketch of perfectionism as a mode of moral reasoning is meant to prepare the ground for, and give some substance to, the question that I will consider in the rest of this paper. Even if one is willing to concede that the modes of reasoning indicated by Cavell can aptly be described as methods of self-knowledge, and even if (what is likely to be even more problematic) one is willing to see such methods as modes of reasoning, one might still wonder why Cavell insists to call these methods modes of moral reasoning. Moral reasoning, at least in a canonical understanding of it, is associated with the idea of an exchange of moral reasons for or against a certain course of action. What kind of connection can be drawn between this mode of discourse and the methods of self-understanding indicated by Cavell? It is not immediately evident, indeed, why one should count Freudian analysis or Wittgensteinian grammatical investigations as forms of moral reasoning. The sense that such methods are not relevant for moral thinking is registered, as Cavell himself notes, in the fact that most of the authors he associates with the perfectionist tradition are not normally included in the canon of moral philosophy (the claim holds also for the names mentioned in our brief inventory of perfectionist methods; other authors that Cavell includes in the perfectionist genre, and that are not generally seen as moral philosophers, are for instance Shakespeare, Schlegel, Thoreau, Ibsen, Marx, Heidegger, Beckett, etc.).19

6 The exclusion of perfectionism from moral philosophy might be motivated by the sense that the perfectionist questioning of the self is too private or too idiosyncratic to count as proper moral reasoning. But the perfectionist pursuit of self-knowledge may also invite more specific forms of resistance: one might think, for instance, that the concentration on the self that characterizes perfectionism is not simply irrelevant to morality, but rather actively opposed to its aspirations. In this perspective, as Cavell writes, perfectionism “may appear not to have arrived at the idea, or to disdain it, of other persons as counting in moral judgement with the same weight as oneself, hence to lack the concept of morality altogether.”20

7 A version of this concern emerges in Cavell’s short discussion, in the preface to Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, of the figure of the “scoundrel.” With this term, Cavell wishes to designate those who “find their nature expressed in unshared and unshareable principles”21 (the term itself harks back to Rawls’ response to an objection Sidgwick raised against Kant’s moral philosophy: in Sidgwick’s perspective, both the saint and the scoundrel are expressing their rational nature in their lives, if those lives are the outcome of their free choice). The possibility of such a figure, of course, may cast doubts on perfectionism’s claim to the status of moral reasoning. The scoundrel, indeed, has a commitment to self-knowledge and self-realization, but this very commitment leads him to immorality: the scoundrel’s concentration on his own self, in other words, elicits in him a disdain for the idea that others count as him in moral judgement. This suggests that a dedication to self-knowledge is at least independent from a commitment to morality, when it is not positively in conflict with it: and this, in turn, may make it hard to see how the methods of self-knowledge Cavell associates with perfectionism may count as instances of moral reasoning.

8 In this paper, I will provide an interpretation of Cavell’s claim that perfectionism constitutes a mode of moral reasoning. As I will try to show, in Cavell’s perspective,

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perfectionism not only contributes to moral thinking, but is also vital to it. While Cavell does not offer a sustained and explicit argument to back these claims, I believe that, by rearranging certain themes that recur in his writings on morality, one might reconstruct Cavell’s line of reasoning on this point. In doing so I will focus, in particular, on Cavell’s account of moral reasoning in Part 3 of The Claim of Reason: even if this account precedes the explicit introduction of the notion of perfectionism, some features of it may shed light on Cavell’s understanding of the relation between moral reasoning and perfectionism (in adopting this approach, I will expand a parenthetical suggestion that Cavell enters in the Preface to Condition Handsome and Unhandsome, where he remarks that his writings on perfectionism are “however unpredictably, something of a continuation of the chapters in moral philosophy that constitutes Part 3 of The Claim of Reason”).22 My aims in this paper will be mainly exegetical: in what follows I will not critically assess the conception of moral reasoning that Cavell puts forward, nor will I discuss the merits of his elaboration of perfectionism. What I hope to do is only to make available an underlying connection between these two regions of Cavell’s thinking, and to clarify, thereby, the sense in which Cavell’s work on perfectionism may constitute a contribution to moral philosophy.

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9 One might follow many paths in Cavell’s intricate discussion of moral reasoning in Part 3 of The Claim of Reason. For my present purposes, I will organize Cavell’s remarks around the following question: What is the point of moral reasoning? Why we engage in the activity of asking and giving reasons, when discussing about a particular action, judgement or character?

10 As I will try to show, being clear about Cavell’s conception of the point of moral reasoning may enable us to understand why Cavell is prepared to draw a connection between moral reasoning and self-knowledge.

11 Cavell’s immediate interest in the question of the point of moral reasoning is generated by the sceptical threat that Charles Stevenson levels against the idea of moral rationality: Stevenson’s account implies, indeed, that there is no such thing as moral reasoning, if by that we mean a form of discourse in which reasons are related normatively (then only psychologically) to the judgement they support; moral exchanges, in the emotivist perspective Stevenson defends, are nothing more than attempts to influence one’s interlocutor attitude.23

12 Cavell, in replying to Stevenson, is led to examine a series of assumptions about moral reasoning – assumptions that shapes Stevenson’s outlook and make his conclusions apparently irresistible.24 Some of these assumptions bear on Stevenson’s implied conception of the point of moral reasoning: Stevenson presupposes, among other things, that the aim of reasoning in general is to reach an agreement over a certain conclusion; moral exchanges, therefore, may be said to be rational only insofar as they are capable of producing convergence on a given judgement. The fact that moral arguments are characterized by persistent and irresolvable disagreements may then lead one to accept some version of Stevenson’s picture: moral arguments only appear to be rational, but they are nothing more than a clash of conflicting attitudes. As Cavell observes: “some philosophers have taken the fact of moral disagreement to show the

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inherent irrationality of moral argument – show it essentially to be a matter of which side has the greater power, political, rhetorical, psychological, economic.”25

13 Cavell’s strategy, in Part 3 of The Claim of Reason, consists in contesting this picture of moral rationality by questioning the assumptions that make the picture apparently compulsory. With respect to the assumption just mentioned, Cavell begins his rejoinder by noting that part of its force depends on the idea that science should be seen as the model of every rational enterprise. The connection between rationality and agreement, in fact, seems to be a characteristic feature of scientific discourse: scientific arguments are designed to bring, through the articulation of reasons every practitioner might recognize, to a conclusion every practitioner must accept. Cavell’s attack on the assumption is here twofold. On the one hand Cavell observes that, even if the description just given characterizes accurately the kind of rationality that belongs to science, it is not clear why we should assume that the rationality of science is paradigmatic for rationality in general. On the other hand, and more importantly, Cavell argues that this account of rationality does not offer a faithful description of the kind of rationality science actually has. The point emerges, for instance, in the following passage: But are we any longer quite so willing to take that Aristotelian who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope in order to “see” the valleys of the moon, as a comic and irrational figure? If now a man refused to accept the evidence of telescopes as telling us of the nature of the moon, he would either be (we would regard him as) irrational or else incompetent in science. That man is no scientist, given the procedures or canons of science which now constitute that institution. Or again: what he says will not count for or against any proposition of science. Once these procedures and canons are established, then agreement is reached in familiar ways; but that simply means: agreement (or absence of disagreement) about what constitutes science, scientific procedure, and scientific evidence, is what permits particular disagreement to be resolved in certain ways. Being a scientist just is having a commitment to, and being competent at, these modes of resolution.26

14 Cavell is here distinguishing between two levels of agreement: the agreement that those who are committed to science may reach on a particular conclusion, and the agreement that these people have in being committed to science – namely, in finding the methods of science useful, interesting, valuable, and so on. Cavell, in this passage, proposes to connect the rationality of science with this second level of agreement: if someone, now that the methods of science are established, refused to follow them, he would count as irrational not because of his rejection of a particular conclusion, but because of his inability or unwillingness to see the importance of those methods. What makes this person irrational, in other words, is his refusal of the kind of interests and values that sustain our commitment to the procedures of science.

15 As Cavell notes, the dislocation of the connection between rationality and agreement in the case of science may help us to see the rationality of ethical discourse in a different light: 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 natures 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, but now ones which do not lead, in the same ways, and sometimes not at all, to agreement (about a conclusion).27

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16 In this perspective, the fact of moral disagreement cannot be taken anymore as an evidence of the inherent irrationality of moral arguments. While it is true that there might be irresolvable moral disagreement on conclusions, morality (like science) is characterized by the fact that people agree in being committed to certain modes of argument – and the rationality of a given area of discourse is a function, in Cavell’s view, of this second dimension of agreement. The difference between ethics and science, on this account, is not adequately expressed by the idea that the former is rational (because it is capable of producing agreement on conclusion) while the latter is not (because it is afflicted by interminable disagreements). What characterizes ethics is rather a peculiar economy of agreement and disagreement: in order to be morally rational, one must agree with others in being committed to certain modes of discussion; but these modes of discussions themselves are not necessarily aiming at producing a convergence on a given proposition. Here lies, in Cavell’s view, the difference with science: in science, indeed, the modes of resolution to which we are committed lead an to agreement on a conclusion.

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17 One might still want, at this point, to resist Cavell’s description of rationality, or question it from a different point of view. It would be possible to object, for instance, that our commitment to the methods of science is not independent from its ability to produce convergence on a conclusion. The activity of giving and asking for reasons for a particular judgement, indeed, is valued just because it produces a convergence on a certain judgement: the fact that those who are involved in science can proceed from reasons everyone can recognize to conclusion everyone must accept ensures that the judgement thus reached is not influenced by imperfect information, arbitrary tastes, relations of powers, and so on. Our valuing this kind of result explains the point of our engaging in scientific reasoning: the importance of agreement on conclusions is the importance we attach to the achievement of a point of view that does not resent from any kind of idiosyncrasy or bias. On the other hand, it is not easy to see the purpose of engaging in a form of reasoning that does not lead to such an agreed conclusion: what could be the point of providing reasons in support of a judgement, if the exchange of reasons does not aim to show to our interlocutor that he must accept the judgement, independently from the interests, the desires, the values she may happen to have? In order to give substance to his hypothesis that the rationality of moral arguments does not necessarily involves convergence on a conclusion, Cavell must provide an alternative account of the point that such a mode of reasoning may have.

18 While Cavell does not explicitly address the issue in these terms, his answer to this concern might be reconstructed by looking at the comparison he draws between moral reasoning and ordinary epistemological reasoning (a study of this latter form of assessment, as Cavell notes, may illustrate our conception of rationality as clearly as reflection on scientific procedures).28 At a certain juncture of the comparison, Cavell contrasts the point of ordinary epistemological reasoning with the point of moral reasoning: Questioning a claim to knowledge takes the form of asking “How do you know?” or “Why do you believe that?,” and assessing the claim is, we could say, a matter of assessing whether your position (as Austin put it, your “credential and facts,” your learning and perception) is adequate to the claim. Questioning a claim to moral

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rightness (whether of any action or any judgement) takes the form of asking “Why are you doing that?,” “How can you do that?,” “What are you doing?,” “Have you really considered what you’re saying?,” “Do you know what this means?”; and assessing the claim is, as we might now say, to determine what your position is and to challenge the position itself, to question whether the position you take is adequate to the claim you have entered. The point of the assessment is not to determine whether it is adequate, where what will be adequate is itself given by the form of assessment itself; the point is to determine what position you are taking, that is to say, what position you are taking responsibility for – and whether it is one I can respect. What is at stake in such discussions is not, or not exactly, whether you know our world, but whether, or to what extent, we are to live in the same moral universe. What is at stake in such examples as we’ve so far noticed is not the validity of morality as a whole, but the nature or quality of our relationship to one another.29

19 In this passage, the difference between empirical and ethical reasoning is represented as a difference in their point or aim: while in the empirical case the point of the assessment is “to determine whether [your position] is adequate, where what will be adequate is itself given by the form of assessment itself,” in the moral case “the point is to determine what position you are taking, that is to say, what position you are taking responsibility for – and whether it is one I can respect.” How should one understand this contrast?

20 The idea of “position,” in this context, can roughly be taken to indicate the sort of normative responsibilities that are associated with a certain role: someone’s position specifies, as Cavell writes a few pages later, “what he is doing and must do and ought to do.”30 These responsibilities, in the case of ordinary factual reasoning, involve among other things a commitment to reply to all the grounds of doubts competently entered: if someone claims to know that there is a goldfinch in the garden, but then she is not able to answer the doubts raised by her interlocutors, she cannot insist that she knows that there is a goldfinch in the garden (if she does, she will be regarded as irrational or incompetent).31

21 Cavell writes in this sense that the normative commitments associated with this kind of epistemic position are established in advance by the form of the assessment itself: what you have to do, in order to occupy legitimately the relevant position, is already determined (you must, for instance, be able to reply satisfactorily to your interlocutors doubts); and the point of the exchange of reasons, in this context, is one of assessing whether you do in fact occupy the position to which your claim to know commits you.

22 This point marks, for Cavell, a crucial difference between empirical and moral reasoning. To use one of Cavell’s own examples, if someone says that her brother must be buried, and her interlocutor replies that “he is an enemy of the state,” the person can refuse to answer this ground for doubt without resulting irrational or incompetent: she might reply, in this situation, that she does not care that her brother is an enemy of the state, and insist in asserting that he must be buried.32 It is important to note that this possibility does not have a parallel in the empirical case: if someone has defied competently your conviction that there is a goldfinch in the garden and you have not adequately answered the doubt, then you cannot insist that you know that there is a goldfinch in the garden (without being considered irrational).

23 This suggests that, in a moral argument, the relevant normative commitments are not established in advance by the form of the assessment itself. In the moral case, as Cavell notes, whether you must accept a certain reason as relevant to your claim is itself part of

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the moral conversation; while in the empirical case you cannot decide whether a reason adduced competently is relevant to the judgement at issue. In ethics, therefore, the point of the exchange of reasons cannot be to determine whether you actually comply with certain already defined requirements (since there are no such requirements). The point of moral reasoning is rather, as Cavell suggests, one of defining the kind of “cares and commitments” that we are prepared to recognize: the aim, in other words, is to define which normative commitments (which “position”) you are acknowledging, not to assess whether the certain normative commitments known in advance are adequately met. To go back to Cavell’s example, Antigone, by refusing to be shaken in her conviction by Creon’s reasons, shows that she values family relations over the honour of the polis: in this sense, one might say that she is defining her cares and commitments to her interlocutor.

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24 Cavell’s discussion of the difference between factual and moral reasoning contains then a first indication on the point that the practice of giving and asking for reason might have in a moral context: such a practice aims to define your cares and commitments, the kind of things that “you do, you ought to do and you must do.” The indication, though, should be regarded as incomplete and transitional, for Cavell clearly does not want to say that moral reasoning has the sole purpose of indicating one’s cares and commitments to one’s interlocutors. Such a formulation, indeed, might give the impression that moral reasoning, for Cavell, has an expressive function at best: moral arguments, in this perspective, would not involve the possibility of criticizing one’s loyalties and attachments. But, as Cavell makes clear, in expressing the kind of reasons that qualify your position, you are also enabling your interlocutors to “to challenge the position itself, to question whether the position you take is adequate to the claim you have entered.” In the course of moral conversations, your cares and commitments are not only declared, but also questioned.

25 The questioning of your position may happen in a variety of ways. The remark just quoted, for instance, suggests that one may criticize your position by assessing whether your professed concern for the honour of the polis expresses faithfully your position, or if your adherence to such values conceals others kinds of cares and commitments (say, a desire for power) of which you are unaware, or all too aware (in such a case, the position you are actually taking, involving for instance a commitment to power, would not be “adequate to the claim you have entered,” say the claim that someone is an enemy of the state). The exchange of reasons might also show you how your professed position has implications that you have not considered, and that you might be unwilling to accept; or again, your interlocutor might question the appropriateness of the cares and commitments you are taking responsibility for, and urge you to change them.

26 It is in the course of such investigations that we might determine whether we can, as Cavell writes, “respect” the position of our interlocutors: a clarification of the respective moral position may enable us to see, for instance, that our interlocutor fully accepts the kind of responsibility that his professed position implies, or that such a position derives from a sincere commitment to the moral life, and not from an attempt to bypass or deny its requirements. In such cases, we might realize that we respect our

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interlocutor’s position, even if we cannot share the particular moral judgement she entered.

27 In this sense, Cavell writes that in moral reasoning what is at stake is not “whether you know our world,” but rather “the nature and the quality of our relationship with one another.” The point of the exchange of reasons is not here, as in the epistemic case, one of attesting your competence over a certain fragment of reality, in order to get your interlocutors to converge on your judgement. The point of giving and asking for reasons is rather one of making yourself intelligible, in order to enable your interlocutors to decide whether, and how, they can continue their relationship with you in the face of your present disagreement. This account provides then an aspect of Cavell’s description of the point of moral reasoning: the exchange of moral reasons may enable us to maintain relationships, when the divergences of our cares and commitments threaten their continuation. Cavell writes: Morality […] provides one possibility of settling conflict, a way of encompassing conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationships against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments, loyalties, interests and needs, a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self in opposition to itself and to others […] Morality […] provides a door through which someone, alienated or in danger of alienation from another through his action, can return by the offering and the acceptance of explanation, excuses and justifications, or by the respect one human being will show another who sees and can accept the responsibility for a position which he himself would not adopt.33

⁂

28 The idea that moral reasoning involves a questioning of our position has, however, another implication – one that, for the purposes of the present discussion, it is particularly important to highlight. In the course of moral arguments, it is not only our interlocutor that gets to know better our cares and commitments: this is true for us as well. As we have already said, in exposing ourselves to moral reasoning, we might recognize a conflict among our cares and commitments of which we were unaware; or we might come to see that our cares and commitments have implications we are not prepared to accept; or again we might recognize that the description we give of our cares and commitments just masks our real attachments and needs, and so on. In all these cases, our understanding of our position is deepened and articulated by our participation in a moral exchange of reasons.

29 This suggests a further way of accounting for the point of moral reasoning, alongside the purpose of elaborating conflicts with others: when we engage in moral reasoning, we also aim to clarify the nature of our cares and commitments to ourselves; we aim, in short, at self-knowledge. As Stephen Mulhall has written, “more is at stake than the laudable and valuable attempt to maintain one’s regard for and relationship with others when one engages in moral debate with someone; Cavell’s claim is that participation in such debates is essential for self-understanding – for discovering and maintaining one’s relationship with oneself.”34 The point emerges very clearly, for instance, in the following passage from The Claim of Reason: I have described moral arguments as ones whose direct point is to determine the positions we are assuming or are able or are willing to assume responsibility for; and this discussion is necessary because our responsibilities, the extension of our

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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 that ought to be done and 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 position, of where we stand; in short, to a knowledge and definition of ourselves.35

30 The passage implicitly revolves around the question: why is moral discussion “necessary”? Why do we engage in it at all? Cavell is here adding another element to the answer we have begun to expound: the point of moral arguments is not just one of encompassing conflicts; such arguments, in fact, allows us to clarify our understanding of ourselves. Since “The self is not obvious to the self,” we have an interest in a mode of reasoning that enable us to understand more clearly the content of our cares and commitments, and the relation we have with them.

31 Cavell goes on to connect this account of the aim of moral reasoning with his description of the rationality of moral arguments. Cavell’s implicit argument might be reconstructed as follows: since what makes us rational (in a given area of discourse) is not our converging on certain conclusions, but our being committed to the aims of the mode of discourse at issue; and since one of the aims of moral reasoning is self- knowledge; then what makes us morally rational is (in part) our commitment to self- knowledge or self understanding, our willingness to follow “the methods that lead to knowledge and definition of the self.”

32 Cavell’s suggestion is here that someone who is not committed to the methods of self- knowledge might be irrational from the moral point of view, just like someone who is not committed to the aims and procedures of science (someone that, for instance, does not see the point of gathering evidence on heavenly bodies by looking through a telescope) counts as irrational or incompetent in science. We might gain a better understanding of this point by considering a possible continuation of Cavell’s fictional dialogue between Antigone and Creon. One can imagine, for instance, that Antigone may reply to Creon’s protestation that Polyneices is an enemy of the state and therefore must not be buried by saying: “If you care so much about the honour of the state, then you won’t want to make it responsible for such an inhuman deed.” Here Antigone is questioning the nature of Creon’s attachment to the polis, hence querying a fragment of his cares and commitments: the force of Antigone’s moral reason, therefore, relies in this case on Creon’s willingness to understand better his own cares and commitments. If Creon, on the other hand, is not committed to self-knowledge, then the sort of moral reason adduced by Antigone may not get a grip on him. In this sense Cavell remarks that one’s moral rationality depends on one’s commitment to methods of self-knowledge: someone who does not share an interest in self- understanding would not be, in this perspective, exposed to the force of moral reasons.

33 If Creon did not share that commitment he could, for instance, refuse to give any weight to Antigone’s reason: he would not see, in this case, that the incoherence in his attachments indicated by Antigone requires him to redefine his position in some way (for instance, by retorting that his proposal is not inhuman, or by arguing that the honour of the state exactly requires to give merciless treatment to traitors, and so on). In this case, his attitude would be one of ignoring the relevance of Antigone’s doubts.

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But this sort of stance is exactly what Cavell associates to the idea of being morally irrational, or incompetent: What I cannot do, and yet maintain my position as morally competent, is to deny the relevance of your doubts […], fail to see that they require a determination by me. 36

34 This form of moral irrationality, as the example we have been discussing shows, might be elicited by a lack of interest in self-knowledge.

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35 We are now in the position to sum up the results of our discussions of Part 3 of The Claim of Reason, and connect them to our original question: why is Cavell prepared to assert that perfectionism provides a form of moral reasoning? As we have seen, Cavell associates the point of moral reasoning with two different, but closely interrelated, kinds of aim: moral reasoning on the one hand aims to permit the continuation of human relationships when moral conflicts threaten their survival, and on the other wishes to provide ways to achieve a deeper understanding of one’s position, of one’s cares and commitments. Cavell also adds, relying on his discussion of the difference between moral and epistemic rationality, that the aspiration to self-knowledge is what makes moral reasoning rational: our commitment to self-knowledge, in this perspective, is what makes us exposed to the force of moral reasons in the first place. As these remarks already indicate, the idea of self-knowledge, which plays a crucial role both in moral reasoning and in perfectionism, may be pivotal for conjoining the two notions. Here is how Cavell spells out the connection in a couple of passage extracted from his writings on perfectionism: Any [moral] theory must, I suppose, regard the moral creature as one that demands and recognizes the intelligibility of others to himself or herself, and of himself or herself to others; so moral conduct can be said to be based on reasons, and philosophers will sometimes gloss this as the idea that moral conduct is subject to questions whose answers take the form of giving reasons. Moral perfectionism’s contribution to thinking about the moral necessity of making oneself intelligible (one’s actions, one’s sufferings, one’s position) is, I think it can be said, its emphasis before all on becoming intelligible to oneself, as if the threat to one’s moral coherence comes most insistently from that quarter, from one’s sense of obscurity to oneself, as if we are subject to demands we cannot formulate, leaving us unjustified, as if our lives condemn themselves. Perfectionism’s emphasis on culture and cultivation is, to my mind, to be understood in connection with this search for intelligibility, or say search this search for direction in what seems a scene of moral chaos, the scene of a dark place in which one has lost one’s way.37 [moral perfectionism] focuses […] on the worth of a way of life, of my way of life, which has come to a crossroads demanding self-questioning, a pause or crisis in which I must assess what has been characterized as my being true to myself, something the romantics […] articulated as the imperative to become the one I am. The claim of this field of concern to the status of morality is that the conversation required to assess my life […] is one designed to make myself intelligible (to others, by way of making myself intelligible to myself).38

36 On the background of this set of remarks, it is possible to understand why Cavell claims that perfectionism counts as, or provides an interpretation of, moral reasoning. These passages hark back, implicitly but tangibly, to Cavell’s discussion of moral reasoning in Part 3 of The Claim of Reason. Cavell describes here the point of moral reasoning in

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general as a matter of “making oneself intelligible.” The description conveys in a single formula the two accounts of the aim of moral reasoning that can be extracted from The Claim of Reason: “making oneself intelligible” may mean in fact making oneself intelligible to others (thus managing to encompass otherwise irresolvable conflicts), but also making oneself intelligible to oneself (thus achieving a deeper understanding of one’s own cares and commitments).

37 Now, perfectionism counts as a form of moral reasoning because it is a further articulation of the “moral necessity of making oneself intelligible”: as Cavell puts the point, “the claim of [perfectionism] to the status of morality is that the conversation required to assess my life… is one designed to make myself intelligible.” While the kind of moral arguments examined in The Claim of Reason were directed at making the self intelligible both to others and to oneself, perfectionism puts its “emphasis before all on becoming intelligible to oneself.” One might say, in this perspective, that perfectionism is isolating and giving prominence to a register that is already present in ordinary exchanges of moral reasons over a certain action: it is this focus on self-understanding that ensures perfectionism’s relevance to the project of making oneself intelligible, hence to the practice of moral reasoning. Since self-knowledge counts as an inflection of the idea of making oneself intelligible, and perfectionism provides methods of self- knowledge, then perfectionism counts as a mode of moral reasoning.

38 It is important to stress that the line of reasoning we have just sketched accounts not only for perfectionism’s relevance to moral reasoning, but also shows why, in Cavell’s perspective, an acknowledgement of perfectionism is vital for moral reasoning. In order to see this, one must take into account that while perfectionism focuses primarily on self-knowledge, this dimension of moral thinking is crucial for moral arguments about actions as well: as we have already said, part of the point of such arguments is provided by the aspiration to self-knowledge, and it is a commitment to this very aspiration that makes us morally rational. If one excludes perfectionism from the sphere of moral reasoning, then one will be inclined to miss the dimension of self- knowledge that characterize, according to Cavell’s account, also moral arguments about actions: this will result, accordingly, in a impoverishment or distortion of one’s view of moral reasoning. One might be drawn, for instance, to overlook the fact that the articulation of moral reasons aims at the clarification of one’s cares and commitments. This, in turn, may induce to think that the point of moral reasoning is not articulating one’s position, but proving that one’s position is adequate, and that therefore one’s judgement must be accepted. In this perspective, the aims of moral reasoning are assimilated to those that characterize ordinary factual arguments. This tendency, elicited by an exclusion of the concern for self-knowledge from the area of moral thinking, is described by Cavell as a form of “moralization” of morality: It is my impression that in established academic moral philosophy the question of moral standing, if it comes up at all, is grounded in one’s conviction that one knows what is good or right for the other to do, so that the philosophical issue is essentially how to provide convincing, rational reasons for one’s conviction; put otherwise, the point of the conversation is getting the other to agree, or to do, something. This is one feature of what I sometimes refer to as the risk of moralizing moral morality. The point accordingly assigned to moral conversation is that of rationally persuading the other to agree to, or to do, something that you are, independently of the conversation, persuaded that she ought to do.39

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39 The question of moral standing, as Cavell explains elsewhere, is the question of the position from which you confront your interlocutor in a moral conversation: the very fact that you engage in a moral conversation with someone commits you to ask yourself what is the nature of your cares and commitments with respect to your interlocutor; as Cavell puts the point: “if you tell me ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’, or ‘To thine own self be true’, you had better have some standing with me from which you confront my life, from which my life matters to you, and matters to me that it matters to you.”40 Such questions, being questions of self-knowledge, are “pushed at the center of the stage in perfectionism.”41

40 But if we exclude this sort of concern from our view of moral reasoning, then the very quality of our participation to moral reasoning will be significantly impaired. We might think, as Cavell suggests, that what licenses us to confront our interlocutors is just the fact the we are right “independently of the conversation,” and that our only aim is to get our interlocutors to agree. One might see why such an attitude may count as moralistic: we are using morality, in this perspective, for aims that are not themselves examined from a moral point of view. If our attitude is marked by such a refusal of self- knowledge, the reasons that our interlocutors will put forward in the course of a moral conversation – reasons pointing at conflicts and opacities in our cares and commitments – will not probably get a grip on us. In this sense, the omission of the register of self-knowledge results in a failure in moral reasoning: since our willingness to understand ourselves is what makes us morally rational, an avoidance of self- knowledge will impoverish or obliterate our responsiveness to moral reasons. These remarks may accordingly illuminate why Cavell repeatedly asserts that perfectionism “emphasizes a dimension of moral life any theory of it may wish to accommodate,”42 and that without such an account “moral reasoning runs the danger of moralism.”43

41 One might sum up the relation between perfectionism and moral arguments by saying that both these modes of discourse, in Cavell’s view, have a common source: they both depend on, and are a manifestation of, one’s dedication to self-knowledge. In this perspective, if someone is committed to moral reasoning, then she must also have an interest in perfectionist methods of self-understanding. This coordination of commitments illuminates why the perfectionist dimension is not only relevant to moral reasoning, but also necessary to it: the omission of perfectionism, indeed, may encourage a representation of moral arguments (and a practice of them) that prescinds from their relation with self-knowledge.

42 I would like to note, in concluding, that the connection I have just stated can also be read the other way round: if someone is committed to perfectionism, then she must also be committed to moral reasoning. This provides an indication on how one might approach, in Cavell’s perspective, the issue of the scoundrel. The scoundrel, as we have seen, finds his true self expressed in unacceptable principles: one might say, in this sense, that the scoundrel is dedicated to the perfectionist quest for one’s real self, but that on the other hand he is not committed to moral reasoning; reflection on such a character may accordingly invite to represent the sphere of morality as radically independent from the one of self-knowledge.

43 Cavell does not wish to deny the possibility of such a figure: what Cavell’s arguments suggest is rather that we should question the genuineness of the scoundrel’s commitment to self-knowledge. Such a commitment, as we have seen, implies a responsiveness to moral reasons: someone who is interested in expressing one’s nature

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(and therefore in understanding oneself) must also be receptive to moral reasons; these reasons indicate, in fact, conflicts, omissions and opacities in one’s cares and commitment. The scoundrel, in this perspective, appears as someone who lays claim to the expression of his real self, but who on the other hand is not willing to accept the kind of contribution to his self-understanding that may be provided (in the form of moral reasons) by his interlocutors in a moral argument. If this is the case, the scoundrel is criticisable not only from the point of view of morality, but also from the perspective of perfectionism. If morality derives from a commitment to intelligibility, then intelligibility to others and intelligibility to oneself are not separate tasks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAVELL S., (1979), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

CAVELL S., (1981), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

CAVELL S., (1984), Themes out of School: Effects and Causes, San Francisco, North Point Press.

CAVELL S., (1989), This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, Albuquerque, Living Batch Press.

CAVELL S., (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

CAVELL S., (2004), Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of a Moral Life, Cambridge, MA – London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

CONANT J., (2001), “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

DAVIDSON A. I., (1994), “Ethics as Ascetics,” in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

FOUCAULT M., (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject, New York, Palgrave MacMillan.

HURKA T., (1993), Perfectionism, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

MULHALL S., (1994), Stanley Cavell, Philosophy’s Recounting of The Ordinary, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

NIETZSCHE F., (1983), Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Mediations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RAWLS J., (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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NOTES

1. Cavell’s account of perfectionism is mainly developed in Cavell 1990 and 2004, though remarks on perfectionism are scattered all over his more recent output. 2. Rawls (1971: 286). An alternative definition of perfectionism identifies the good in the realization of human essence: in this perspective, the goods mentioned in Rawls’ definition are valuable because they promote human flourishing; for this latter account of perfectionism, see for instance Hurka 1993. 3. Cavell (1990: xxxi). 4. Cavell (2004: 13, 17). 5. See for instance Cavell (1990: xxxi); see also Cavell (2004: 42). 6. Cavell (1990: 1). 7. Cavell (1990: 21); see also Cavell (1990: xxxii, 55). 8. Cavell (2004: 49). 9. See for instance Cavell (2004: 32, 42). 10. For a vivid exemplification of this point, see Cavell ’s discussion of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Cavell (2004: 247-64); see also Cavell (1990: xxxi, 55). 11. This way of defining the notion of perfectionism harks back to Cavell’s discussion of the notion of genre, but I cannot follow the details of Cavell’s account here; on Cavell’s discussion of genre, see for instance Cavell (1981: 23-34); on the application of this notion to Moral Perfectionism, see Cavell (1990: 4-8; 2004: 445-7). 12. See for instance Cavell (1990: 57-8). The quotations are extracted from Emerson’s essay Self- Reliance. Emerson is undoubtedly the central case for Cavell’s treatment of perfectionism: on Cavell’s reading of Emerson as a perfectionist author, see Cavell 1990. 13. Cavell (1984: 218). Cavell’s writings on Kierkegaard precede the explicit introduction of the notion of moral perfectionism, but Cavell mentions Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript in his list of perfectionist works (Cavell 1990: 5). 14. On Freud’s relation to perfectionism, Cavell (2004: 282-300). 15. Cavell (1979: 24). Cavell’s discussion of Rousseau is mainly contained in a set of remarks about the social contract that Cavell presents in The Claim of Reason (1979: 22-8). While Cavell does not mention The Social Contract in his list of perfectionist texts (his choice falls rather on The Reveries of a Solitary Walker), many features of Cavell’s reading of Rousseau’s text clearly prefigure his elaboration of perfectionism. 16. The pertinence of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to perfectionism is repeatedly asserted by Cavell (1990: 2). The most sustained discussion of perfectionist themes in the Investigations is probably to be found in Cavell’s “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” collected in Cavell 1989. 17. Cavell (1984: 217). 18. Nietzsche (1983: 127). Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator counts as another central instance of moral perfectionism; see for instance Cavell’s discussion of this text in Cities of Words (Cavell 2004: 208-26). Another reading of Nietzsche as a perfectionist, explicitly related with Cavell’s, is offered by J. Conant 2001. 19. Cavell provides a list of perfectionist texts in Cavell (1990: 5). On the exclusion of perfectionist authors from the canon of moral philosophy, see Cavell (1990: 5-6; 2004: 5, 13). It is important to note that Cavell includes in the perfectionist genre also authors and texts whose relevance for moral philosophy is uncontroversial (such as, for instance, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mill’s On Liberty). 20. Compare with Foucault’s discussion of modern distrust of care for the self: Foucault connects the negative association that the idea of caring for the self has for us with the sense that such outlook involves a form of egoistic concentration on the self (Foucault 2005: 12-3). Cavell, in Cities

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of Words, explicitly connect his work on perfectionism with Foucault’s notion of caring for the self (Cavell 2004: 11). On the relation between Cavell’s elaboration of perfectionism and Foucault’s notion of the care for the self, see Davidson 1994. 21. Cavell (1990: xxxvi); see also Cavell (2004: 24-5). 22. Cavell (1990: xx). 23. For Cavell’s discussion of Stevenson’s Ethics and Language, see Cavell (1979: 247-91). 24. See Cavell (1979: 260). 25. Cavell (2004: 25). 26. Cavell (1979: 261). 27. Cavell (1979: 261-2). 28. Cavell (1979: 264). 29. Cavell (1979: 268). 30. Cavell (1979: 325). 31. See Cavell (1979: 267). 32. See Cavell (1979: 267-8). 33. Cavell (1979: 269). 34. Mulhall (1994: 43). 35. Cavell (1979: 312). 36. Cavell (1979: 267). 37. Cavell (1990: xxxi-xxxii). 38. Cavell (2004: 49). 39. Cavell (2004: 235). 40. Cavell (2004: 50). 41. Cavell (2004: 50). 42. Cavell (1990: xxxi). 43. Cavell (2004: 316).

ABSTRACTS

Stanley Cavell presents Moral Perfectionism as a set of methods of self-knowledge, aiming at the clarification of one’s understanding of oneself. Cavell also claims that Moral Perfectionism is a form or a dimension of moral reasoning. One might wonder, in this perspective, what relation can be drawn between perfectionist methods of self-knowledge and the practice of providing moral reasons for a certain action. In this paper, I propose to understand this connection on the background of Cavell’s account of moral reasoning in Part 3 of The Claim of Reason. Cavell here contrasts the rationality of moral discourse with arguments that recur in epistemological and scientific contexts. While in these latter areas of investigation, the activity of giving and asking for reasons serves to establish one’s position (i.e. one’s authority to enter a given claim), in morality the aim is rather one of making one’s position (that is, one’s cares and commitments) intelligible, both to others and to oneself. I argue that this account may enable us to clarify to sense in which, in Cavell’s perspective, perfectionism is both pertinent and vital for moral reasoning: since a dedication to self-knowledge is constitutive of moral discourse, the avoidance of such a dimension may impoverish and distort our conception of moral rationality.

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What Is and What Should Pragmatic Ethics Be? Some Remarks on Recent Scholarship

Juan Pablo Serra

1 At the beginning of the last decade, Richard Bernstein (1992) wrote about the resurgence of pragmatism in the Anglo-American academic world; since that time, it has become almost a cliché to note the significance that American philosophical thought has acquired in areas of culture as diverse as sociology, law, political science, literature and philosophy itself. Furthermore, this rediscovery has given pragmatism back its status as the ‘perennial American philosophy,’ because of the central role it attributes to experimentation, reflecting the typically American preference for action over reflection, for facts over theories and, above all, for results (Dickstein 1998: 7, 16).

2 This new recognition is due in large part to the exhaustion of analytical philosophy, the materialist tendencies of logical positivism, the nihilistic sunset of hermeneutical philosophy and the dead-end of postmodernity. In response to this context in recent years, various philosophers – both in Europe and America – have revitalized philosophical reflection on the basis of a rigorous reconstruction of the pragmatist legacy. Yet, it would appear that work remains to be done in reconstructing the moral philosophy of pragmatism. Part of this deficiency resides in the diversity existing amongst pragmatist thinkers, which prompted F. C. S. Schiller to claim that there were as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. While it is possible to trace a certain common method in their approaches to examining moral experience, it is also the case that the first impression that one receives on studying this field is that of a debate between mutually opposed positions, rather than a unified and homogenous discourse.

3 With the intention of contributing to this task, in what follows I will offer a summary of what, de facto, the work of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey contributes to ethical reflection. Finally, in concluding, I will describe the synthesis that several authors have proposed as to what a pragmatist ethics ought to mean.1

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Peirce: The Importance Of Habits

I. The Theory-Practice Divide

4 Peirce insists on the separation of theory and practice (CP 1.618, 1.642, 1898),2 and emphasizes that ethics is a science worth studying only if it is not a matter of vital importance for he who studies it (CP 1.669, 1898). The practical man doesn’t need to put his assertions to the test nor does he test his beliefs. Unlike him, the man of science accepts that reasoning and experimentation are analogous – both are inquiries into the sense of something, in both can the unexpected occur – and also admits that only experimental results can have a direct effect on human conduct.

5 This separation of theory and practice runs parallel to another split, namely, that of ethics and morals or, better put, of ethical theory and moral practice. Peirce denies that morality is subject to rationality and thinks that ethics is valuable as a science in a broad sense. But he also regards ethics as a science which bears on human conduct only indirectly, through the examination of past actions and the self-correction of the self in view of future action. In addition, ethics would be a normative knowledge only in so far as it analyzes the adjustment of actions to ends and in so far as it studies the general way in which a good life can be lived.

6 In morals Peirce appeals to instinct and sentiment, and in ethics he recommends the use of logical thinking – just as scientists do. However, even within the framework of his system, it’s not obvious that scientists may so easily set aside their instincts – in fact, instinct (or ‘rational instinct’ as he called it in 1908) plays a significant role in the economy of research. Moreover, the statement that in moral issues there may be no possibility of carrying out an inquiry that is truth-oriented is not an uncontroversial one. After all, moral inquiry is performed in a deliberative way, weighing up argumentations, beliefs and principles, and comparing them either with their probable or conceivable consequences or with lived as well as possible experiences that can be forceful or impinge upon the deliberative subject in such a way as to acquire the compulsory resistance due to reality. As Misak puts it succintly, “the practice of moral deliberation is responsive to experience, reason, argument, and thought experiments […] Such responsiveness is part of what it is to make a moral decision and part of what it is to try to live a moral life” (2000: 52).3 Likewise, this same deliberative activity implies an effort to acquire habits, beliefs and principles that contribute to a truly free deliberation which, in turn, can result in creative conclusions. For Peirce, as you get more habit-governed, you become more creative and free, and your selfhood acquires plasticity and receptiveness to experience.4

7 Vincent Colapietro has referred to Peirce’s description of human reason in terms of a deliberative rationality (1999: 24). Also, in another place he has explained that deliberation for Peirce is a process of preparation for future action which has to do with the checking of previous acts, the rehearsal in imagination of different roads to be followed by possible conduct and the nurturing of ideals (Colapietro 1997: 270, 281). It is precisely this experiment carried out within imagination that generates habits, because, as Peirce says in “A Survey of Pragmaticism,” “it is not the muscular action but the accompanying inward efforts, the acts of imagination, that produce the habit” (CP 5.479, 1907).

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8 Habits are regular ways of thinking, perceiving and interpreting that generate actions. As such, habits have a huge influence on human behavior, manifest themselves in the concrete things we do and, at the same time, are formed within those same activities. Even more, according to Peirce, the activity takes the form of experimentation in the inner world; and the conclusion (if it comes to a definite conclusion), is that under given conditions, the interpreter will have formed the habit of acting in a given way whenever he may desire a given kind of result. The real and living logical conclusion is that habit. (CP 5.491, 1907)

9 Much more evidence could be given to support the view that habits are virtually decided (CP 2.435, c.1893) and also that intelligence comprises inward or potential actions that influence the formation of habits (CP 6.286, 1893). Suffice it to say that, according to Peirce, deliberation is a function of the imagination, and that imagination is in itself an experiment which may have unexpected consequences that impose themselves upon the deliberative subject.

II. Ethics as a Normative Science

10 Although for a long time Peirce did not regard ethics as a subject worthy of serious study, he came to change his mind, especially at the turn of the century, when he tried out several classifications of the sciences and he assigned ethics to its place as one of the three normative sciences.

11 I’ll spare you the details of Peirce’s classification of the sciences. Let’s just say for the moment that, because of its being part of philosophy, normative science is observational and based on ordinary experience. It studies phenomena in relation to ends, that is, phenomena as dyadic. Also, as a part of philosophy, the normative sciences derive their principles from mathematics, that is, they make claims about how certain things ‘ought’ to be or happen hypothetically. In this sense, they don’t describe but prescribe “that if you want goodness in action, then […],” “if you want beauty in feeling, then […],” “if you want truth in thinking, then […].”

12 In the case of ethics, if you want to obtain goodness in action then you should restrain your acts in certain ways (De Waal 2001: 19). For Peirce, this means that you should adjust your life to an ideal, namely, to the development of concrete reasonableness, to make a more intelligible world with our actions and thoughts. Ethics is not in charge of discovering this ultimate end, which is supplied by aesthetics, the science that defines the summum bonum which guides all actions. Ethics, then, would be merely the theory of the conformity of an action to that ideal. The ideal doesn’t cause any action but prompts the revision of past actions and the judgment of future actions. The judgment that compares the action with the ideal gives rise to an influence on habits that, together with the consequences of past actions, modifies the future action.

13 Therefore, for Peirce, every deliberate conduct implies the following: some ideal, an action, the subsequent comparison of the act with the ideal and, finally, a judgment concerning future conduct. Deliberate action is synonymous with free action, the kind of action that ethics can study, but in order to be a morally good action it has to be consistent with an ultimate end.

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III. Adjustment of Conduct to an Ideal

14 Ethics for Peirce consists in rational deliberation about how to act in order to shape our lives to an ideal. This ideal is neither a socially inculcated one nor a historically or traditionally fixed one. Acting on such an ideal is not bad or wrong, it’s simply not- moral, because you don’t freely choose that end. Peirce has a lot of respect for tradition, instincts and inherited feelings because, even though they are not reflexive, they rule our conduct in a safe way and seek to preserve the community over the individual (Mayorga 2007). Parker has stressed that in this expansion of the range of driving forces for action Peirce succeeds in undoing the rationalistic dream of an ethical conduct completely ruled by reason. In fact, for Peirce, there’s no need to reason about every single action – it is neither possible nor even desirable to do so – because ‘individual ratiocination is highly fallible in matters of ‘vital importance’’. Moreover, “compared to the errors of limited reason, instinct and sentiment are ‘practically infallible’ guides to ordinary affairs” (Parker 2003: 40-1).

15 So, again, what exactly is this ultimate end of conduct? Ethics can only point to some features of this end, but cannot say exactly which one it is. Indeed, in this regard “Peirce’s definition of an ultimate ideal is obtained by a logical analysis of what is required for an ideal to be ultimate” (Sullivan 1977: 189). As a result, he concludes that a good end must be assumable and possible to achieve on a constant basis. In this sense, the rationalizationf the universe is the only ultimate end that clarifies and gives sense to all our activities – that includes thinking – because for the human being it is “the chance to understand himself and everything surrounding him” (Barrena & Nubiola 2007: 53) and, according to this, the chance to appropriate his own life.

16 The development of reasonableness also entails, in part, the development of habits, on the part of the world and of ourselves – that the world is evolving towards a more habitruled and ordered world is evident for Peirce; that we human beings can contribute to that evolution is also noticeable for him. The task of finding order in the world is in itself a part of making the world more intelligible. But this order isn’t easy to see. As Fontrodona wrote, since the ideal is the growth in concrete reasonableness, and this, in turn, is the development of habits, it follows that the perception of the world will depend on the habits held by the individual […] Thus, the conclusion is reached that good is what appears as attractive to the sufficiently matured agent. (2002: 188)

17 So, as long as you become more refined, sensitive and responsive to experiencing habits you get to see more and more reasonableness everywhere.

Dewey: Experience and Deliberation

18 I’ll try to be even more succinct in outlining John Dewey’s moral philosophy, a robust piece of philosophical thinking sufficiently detailed in several scholarly books. Dewey begins his ethical reflection by claiming that morally problematic situations arise when there are “ends so discrepant, so incompatible, as to require selection of one and rejection of the other” (MW 5: 194, 1908).5 Moral experience is bound to not knowing what to do among several demands. When one considers the incompatibility of ends that are presented in experience, then experience enters the moral realm. As Hildebrand puts it, for Dewey a moral experience is linked with reflective thought in a “

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situation saturated by conflicting elements which demands that engaged agents determine reflectively what to value and what ends to pursue” (2008: 67).

19 According to Gregory Pappas, Dewey understands that a typical moral inquiry is constituted by three main stages: an agent that finds himself in a morally problematic situation, the same agent that engages in a process of moral deliberation and, finally, the moment in which he arrives at a judgment that results in a choice (Pappas 1998: 108). As far as this brief presentation is concerned, on the second phase of the moral inquiry Dewey writes that Deliberation is a process of active, suppressed, rehearsal; of imaginative dramatic performance of various deeds carrying to their appropriate issues the various tendencies which we feel stirring within us […] We give way, in our mind, to some impulse; we try, in our mind, some plan. Following its career through various steps, we find ourselves in imagination in the presence of the consequences that would follow; and as we then like and approve, or dislike or disapprove, these consequences, we find the original impulse or plan good or bad. Deliberation is dramatic and active, not mathematical and impersonal. (MW 5: 292-3, 1908)

20 Note that choice or decision is something that can be arrived at either personally or socially. That is so, because for Dewey deliberation isn’t just a ‘cephalocentric’ soliloquy but also a communicative and socially engaged act (Fesmire 2003: 70-1, 82). Also, in deliberating we not only imagine and reflect on the consequences for ourselves but also try to figure out the responses of others. To sum up, as Hildebrand explains, By trying out various courses of action in imagination, we not only map out logical possibilities, we also evoke and make explicit our reaction; we test how we would feel if we did an action – what sort of person we would become. And while deliberation connotes a solitary act, much deliberation is actually social. (2008: 78)

21 Taken as a whole, Dewey’s reconstruction of moral experience also relies on the following features (Pappas 2008: 181-3): a) it is social and affective, that is, transactional and qualitative. For Dewey there are no isolated moral subjects, but societies wherein agents interact. Also, moral qualities are experienced and can affect any person in a given situation, since these qualities belong to the situation as it is presented in experience and, in fact, they are objective features of such situation. Undoubtedly, ‘moral qualities, traits, or values are sometimes experienced as objects of knowledge, but before this they are experienced as had, felt, or suffered.’ (Pappas 1997: 541) b) it is situational and contextual. The context of a unique situation is what is truly ‘given’ at any time in experience and each situation constitutes a unique context (Pappas 1997: 534, 537). Therefore, Dewey’s moral epistemology aims to solve the problem encountered in this situation (Anderson 2008), for ‘in’ a situation the agent is participator. It is in this sense that moral experience may turn into an effort to ameliorate situations and to bring new goods into existence. c) habits are the stable part of moral experience and also ‘are largely responsible for the continuity of conduct’ (Hildebrand 2008: 67). Habits embody the traits of a person’s character and also tend to become fixed features of the self. That’s why it’s so important to instill – by means of education – habits of independent thought, critical inquiry, observation, experimentation, foresight, and imagination, including sympathy for others (Anderson 2008). The proper cultivation of one’s character is the best way to establish a moral order, provided that one’s moral intelligence is constituted by habits such as sensitivity, conscientiousness, sympathy and open-mindedness. d) it acknowledges the importance of using ideals, principles and habits intelligently. To be precise, for Dewey an ethical theory should serve as ‘an instrument for rendering deliberation more effective and hence choice more intelligent’ because,

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as he conceives it, it should ‘enlighten and guide choice and action by revealing alternatives […] [including] what is entailed when we choose one alternative rather than another.’ (LW 7: 316, 1932) e) it traces a distinction between immediate experience of value and reflective endorsement of it. ’Valuing is immediate – value is felt as present in experience. Evaluating (also called ‘valuation’ by Dewey) is mediate or reflective – value is indeterminate and inquiry must endeavor to clarify the situation’ (Hildebrand 2008: 80). This latter operation of appraising is the one that makes the agent conscious of moral goodness, as ‘a truly moral (or right) act is one which is intelligent in an emphatic and peculiar sense; it is a reasonable act. It is not merely one which is thought of, and thought of as good, at the moment of action, but one which will continue to be thought of as ‘good’ in the most alert and persistent reflection.’ (MW 5: 278-9, 1908)

22 Finally, let me say three more things about Dewey’s moral philosophy. First, the important task to be done by educators in trying to foster habits that entail an intelligent reinforcement of the best practices and not mere repetition of unreflective customs. Second, for Dewey there may be nothing wrong in taking tradition into account, if we make an intelligent use of it as a tool and provided that this same tradition does not lose its moral sensitivity towards unexpected situations and, therefore, render the improvement of its contents impossible. Third, Dewey does not reject the existence and effectiveness of ideals and ultimate ends altogether. He only denies that these are static or fixed ones. Indeed, in A Common Faith he stressed that ideals exist as ends in an operative way: they exist in character, in personality and action (LW 9: 33, 1934). True, Dewey’s ethics copes with an everchanging environment, but still uses a broad moral criterion which is ‘growth.’ The end is […] the active process of transforming the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim in living. Honesty, industry, temperance, justice, like health, wealth and learning, are not goods to be possessed as they would be if they expressed fixed ends to be attained. They are directions of change in the quality of experience. Growth itself is the only moral ‘end.’ (MW 12: 181, 1920)

23 As Gouinlock puts it, “the end of human nature is growth – an integrated, socially responsible, ongoing development of the varying potentialities that emerge in the course of life […] The good life is one of intelligent participation in processes of change” (1992: 260). As democracy is that way of life that encourages the arising of human potentialities, “a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature,” and which task “is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and contribute” (LW 14: 226, 230, 1939), it takes little to say that democracy as a way of life is a moral ideal worth achieving. Although, to be sure, Dewey does not outline how this ideal must be specified in particular institutions and customs beyond some general recommendations.6

The Significance Of A Pragmatist Ethics

24 In addressing the question of what exactly pragmatist ethics is, the first thing that we note is that there is still no accepted consensus concerning this potential ethical theory. In fact, discussion is still ongoing concerning the very possibility of a pragmatist ethical theory, since pragmatism is not based upon antecedent principles (it is not a doctrine that is deduced after establishing a set of foundations) and, further, there is no single independent and explicitly formulated pragmatist ethical theory as

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such. The most that seems deducible, on the basis of a superficial approach to pragmatism, is that there are as many ethical theories as there are particular experiences, since any “meaningful theory cannot exist apart from practice’ and ‘theorizing is not prior to or independent of experience, but [rather] grows out and is part of experience” (LaFollette 2000: 418). This explains why, instead of proposing a specific theory, pragmatism describes itself as a method for understanding better – or reconstructing – already existing theories, and more generally, as a method that enables greater awareness of our actual moral life.

25 Hence, it can be posited that the key concepts of pragmatism in ethics are the notions of habit and deliberation, elements which are also present in the real moral life of every person, and which other ethical theories have studied under other names (virtue, custom, tendency, disposition, dilemma, decision). This signifies, at the very least, that “any theorizing […] begins from current wisdom, as embodied in our habits” (LaFollette 2000: 418, emphasis added). Since, however, there are no pre-established principles for pragmatism, but only experience, the norms of acting are established by each person thanks to the activity of deliberation – of making a ‘dramatic rehearsal’ (MW 5: 292-3, 1908) of the possible consequences of each course of action – and also thanks to the capacity to adopt as one's own certain determined habits or dispositions for action. In this respect, Peirce is a most radical thinker, since for him concepts, beliefs, associations of ideas – and, it might be added, norms – are not created by us beforehand, but rather are caused by our experiences. Our life experiences determine our concepts and, as a result, we eventually arrive at our beliefs concerning reality, since the ‘course of life’ or totality of our experience is more or less homogenous. Life, in sum, forces the creation of our mental habits, since experience always influences our way of thinking and acting.

26 In addition, pragmatists include projection (Faerna 1996: 92) within the ambit of experience; that is to say, experience has value not only as a starting point for our concepts, but also, above all, as that which makes possible new courses of action. “True reality,” as Nubiola has written, “is, then, the field of projection of experience which the members of society share via their communicative activities” (Nubiola 1996: 1141). We access projected experience in an indirect fashion, but it nevertheless has a real status, because it can be shared, communicated, brought about, and can be the impetus for concrete actions. Thus, it is integrated into general experience, being experience a contact with something that imposes itself upon me despite myself, and which I am forced to accept prior to theorizing (Pappas 2007: 329). Reality itself is a ‘field of projection,’ which causes reflection, deliberation, communication and prediction to become fundamental activities for practical life, in interaction with the world, since they are activities derived from experience, and which project onto experience the various options available in acting or thinking.

27 Nevertheless, despite this shared emphasis on the value of habits and deliberation, the differences in approach between the various pragmatist authors are clear and well- known. As a result, the most typical strategy among scholars has been to base themselves upon one or another pragmatist author, and from that perspective develop a general ethical theory which is sufficiently broad and plausible that it can take into account the thought of the other thinkers in the pragmatist school. For this reason, the bibliography available up to the present has been based primarily on the thought of Dewey or the social psychology of Mead, although it at times mentions James and

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Peirce. The descriptions of the thought of these authors are generally more or less accurate, but their characterization of ‘pragmatist ethics’ tends to be vague and minimal. Nevertheless, there are indisputable points of agreement between these pragmatists, in particular the consideration of ethics as a science which is characterized by objectivity, cognitivism, teleology and naturalism.

I. Experience as an Objective and Cognitive Starting Point

28 Thus, for example, Tiles has identified a series of components of the ethical philosophy of pragmatism, decanting it from the general characteristics of pragmatist thought (Tiles 1998: 640). These characteristics are, first of all, the rejection of certainty in the search for precepts and moral principles, and therefore the rejection of moral absolutes. Certainly, this characteristic is connatural to pragmatism and to Peirce, since, indeed, certainty or subjective assurance concerning a scientific hypothesis, or, in this case, a moral precept, does not add anything whatsoever to its truth or goodness. The fact that pragmatism rejects the possibility of moral absolutes means, first of all, that it rejects the possibility of moral principles which are not connected to experience. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that pragmatism succumbs to relativism, since, as Ruth Anna Putnam has stated, “all evaluations are firmly rooted in and are correctible by experience” (Putnam 1992: 1105). Experience corroborates assessments and valuations because it is objective and general, i.e., it is uniform, common to everyone, social and shared.7 In the case of ethics – where we do not always know with certainty the consequences of our decisions, judgments and moral hypotheses – one must frequently recur to imagination, memory and thought as clues to experience,8 but there is also something objective here, given that imagination is also experiential and shared; i.e. we all more or less imagine in the same way.

29 In conjunction with this, in second place, is the affirmation that we are dealing with a finalist ethics, which requires self-control in view of an end. This characteristic derives from the deference which pragmatism normally shows to the scientific method, and, more generally, from the conception of thought as an activity with an end, where the obtaining of any cognitive objective (such as that of truth) inevitably brings with it the requirement of refining the control which we exercise over our actions. Science itself, for Peirce, is a cognitive disposition, since it consists principally in the desire to learn (Cantens 2006: 94-5). According to Tiles, pragmatism employs scientific research as a model of how to respond to moral problems, and therefore it demands the same virtues of ‘reasonableness’ and ‘impartiality’ (which characterize the scientific researcher) in order to reach moral judgments (1998: 640).9 Both in science and in ethics, the search for truth demands a behavior characterized by openness to error and refutation. This ultimately means that ethics is a field of knowledge that seeks objectivity; that is, ethical propositions are objective because they can be mistaken (Lynch 2004: 11, 22, 34). Further, this implies that ethics carries with it a certain type of cognitivism, in the sense that moral statements express propositions and beliefs, and therefore may be judged true or false (Van Roojen 2005). If, in the context of Peirce’s philosophy, we were to go further, uniting this cognitive disposition to the disposition to learn – that is, of proposing hypotheses that can be corrected by experience – ethics would then be a fully rational science, since it would follow the first rule of reason, which is the desire to learn (CP 1.135, 1898).

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30 Up to this point, therefore – as González-Castán has summarized the issue – a pragmatist ethics is recognizable by its insistence on the agent's point of view, and that reality remains to be brought about; by its emphasis on the fact that moral conflict demands imaginative solutions; and by its avoidance of relativism through its appeal to the experience accumulated by the community. A further distinction of pragmatist ethics is its claim that desires and necessities are not something given and unchangeable, but that they are instead created (González-Castán 2001: 220-1, 226, 231, 235). The final characteristic of pragmatist ethics, as identified by Tiles, is along the same lines: it is a naturalistic ethics “in which claims about human nature function as norms” (Tiles 1998: 640) but in which it is not assumed that human desires are fixed, and in which, finally, the solutions proposed to moral conflicts must be evaluated by their consequences.

II. How to Describe and Prescribe a Certain Behavior

31 Nevertheless, this does not make pragmatist ethics a consequentialist theory, but rather – as Liszka has demonstrated – a teleological one. Consequentialist ethics, in fact, does not imply movement towards an end, but rather the maximization of a certain or of certain consequences. Pragmatist ethics is teleological, but in a special sense, where the end which is valued is neither imposed from without nor comes from within, but rather is discovered and developed in process (Lizska 2005), in the human practices which constitute the moral life.

32 It is, further, a teleological ethics molded by habits and norms which are corrected by experience, and thus, “even if the capacity for a habit is immanent to an organism, habits are not. They are formed in the interstices between organism and its habitat” (Lizska 2005). Habits, therefore, are not simply the revealing of an inherent nature, but rather the result of a process of interaction and learning. Further, that which legitimates a normative claim (of the kind ‘I should…’) is not that its derivation from some human essence, but rather the fact that it leads to the desired end in a reliable manner (Lizska 2007).

33 The approaches of Liszka and Tiles coincide in adopting the model of successful scientific research as the way of developing a pragmatist ethics. Inspired by this option, – which appears to reconcile the perspectives of Dewey and Peirce – Liszka has proposed that pragmatist ethics is at once descriptive and normative. On the one hand, following Peirce (CP 1.409, c.1890), it would be a theory that recognizes the fact that all phenomena tend to self-regulate, that in all things there is a tendency to acquire habits, to behave in a regular manner. Translated to the sphere of ethics, this means that moral habits tend to acquire the form of laws or norms for the individual. In fact, moral habits can be seen as a repertory of inherited actions and behaviors which permit the person to confront the moral life, and which are only questioned when they are unable to help the person to handle new situations and internal or external conflicts (it is then that genuine moral deliberation begins, and new habits can arise) (Lizska 2005). In addition, self-regulation is complemented by a second descriptive aspect, i.e. that norms derive from the struggles of communities of moral agents to choose the best norms (or correct existing norms).

34 Nevertheless, certain criteria of evaluation are necessary, in order to judge the moral norms and new habits which may arise as a result of conflict and deliberation.

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Following the scheme of ‘fixation of habits’ suggested by Liszka, the fact that a norm may be dominant or resistant is no guarantee that it is correct to adopt it; rather, it is necessary that it be fixed in accordance with certain criteria. Drawing a parallel between the fixation of beliefs and the fixation of moral habits, it can be concluded that those habits which become fixed due to exclusion, authoritarian domination or dogmatic legislation allow us to discard certain dominant norms. In addition, as in science, a norm can be discarded if ‘the sample’ is small, i.e. if it does not include or draw together a significant quantity of experiences. Therefore, “the more inclusive the norming process [is], the more likely the results will be the right norm” (Lizska 2005). In this sense, a norm is not legitimated because it is conceptually consistent, but rather because it functions in practice, that is, because it can be translated into practice and have consequences (Lizska 2007).

35 It is true, however, that these affirmations are not strictly Peircean. On the one hand, as Misak has shown, a norm is not discarded because it is applicable only in a small number of cases, but rather because it encounters opposition nearly every time it is applied. Doing A, therefore, is correct if, in the long term, it is the option which brings about the least surprise (Misak 2004: 110). Further, on the other hand, from a Peircean perspective, the legitimacy of a norm does not derive from its practical equivalencies, but rather from its capacity to promote habits in the long term. The variety of practical consequences will be realized, in any case, in the different ways in which, in his behavior, the human person incarnates the ultimate ideal which should orient all his actions (Barrena & Nubiola 2007: 54).

III. On the Role of Ends in Pragmatist Ethics

36 Therefore, by asserting that norms are valid if they are translatable into practice, Liszka borders on a functionalism very similar to the thesis of Dewey, which – far from discrediting his proposal – shows how difficult it is to shed the Deweyian legacy when discussing pragmatist ethics. Peirce never went into such detail in the few texts he wrote on ethics; indeed, in order to acquire the status of a science, for Peirce ethics would have to be ‘antethics’ (CP 1.573, 1906), i.e. that which is prior to ethics as it is normally understood, and which studies merely the conformity of the action to an ideal (the determination of this ideal is not the ethicist's task). Nevertheless, if this ideal of action is regarded as something fixed and ‘final,’ it would appear that, once it is achieved, action would come to an end. But the moral life teaches us that ends, rather than constituting goals which put an end to action, perform the function of orienting it and giving it meaning; they make action intelligible, and at the same time, are the principle of new actions.10 Therefore, if (as was stated earlier) pragmatist ethics attempts to treat of our actual moral life, it is not in the discovery and clarification of ends that the essence of pragmatist ethics is to be discovered; rather, such ethics pays attention to any voluntary action and, more generally, to all courses of action which pursue an end in a consistent way over a prolonged period of time – as Peirce wrote (CP 5.135, 1903).

37 This occurs in this way because, in our actual moral life, our objectives can always be achieved in a more full way; we can always improve the way in which we carry out our actions. LaFollette similarly blurs the line between ends and means, and emphasizes how, on many occasions, actions which are normally regarded as merely means to an

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end already constitute that end, since they are realizing that end (LaFollette 2000: 410-2). For him, pragmatist ethics has four essential characteristics. In the first place, it is an ethics which employs criteria without being criteriological; that is, it does not maintain that moral criteria are logically anterior, nor that they are fixed, complete and directly applicable (LaFollette 2000: 400-1). It may use other ethical theories as criteria, but the vital issue for pragmatist ethics is deliberation. In second place, pragmatist ethics is objective without being absolute; that is, it recognizes that some moral habits are better than others, but at the same time it admits that we are fallible, because we do not always know which moral habit is better (LaFollette 2000: 415) and, therefore, we seek objectivity by comparing our actions with our acquired habits and our experience (LaFollette 2000: 409-10).11 In third place, for LaFollette, pragmatist ethics recognizes that ethical judgments are relative, because they derive from the interests of the agent and from the educational and instructional process which produces the morality of each person. But, at the same time, it is not relativist, because it admits that virtually any behavior can affect the interests of others, and that therefore there are better and worse habits (LaFollette 2000: 407). Finally, pragmatist ethics is pluralist without being indecisive. It tolerates and welcomes certain moral differences because it admits that, on certain occasions, various habits may appear to be equally good and, if there is disagreement, the best way to resolve it is to put these habits to the test in an environment which encourages open discussion (LaFollette 2000: 416-7).

By Way Of Conclusion

38 As LaFollette presents it, the key to understanding pragmatist ethics is that it is not an ethical theory per se, but rather it is an anthropology, a way of understanding the human being and his moral action. Therefore, pragmatist ethics in reality does not propose a new ethical theory, but rather “reconstructs” through a new prism the basic intuitions of the best ethical theories. The fundamental element on which the attention of pragmatist ethics centers is deliberation. Deliberation is not directly responsible for directing action, but only does so indirectly, by means of a critique of past actions, the effort to correct or reinforce certain habits and mental experiments that each actor performs in order to determine his own future conduct, and even to determine in a general manner the way in which one wishes to live one’s life (or, what amounts to the same thing, the type of person one wishes to be). The task of a pragmatist ethics, therefore, is not to provide final solutions, but rather to indicate that it is only via the testing and communication of experiences that the superiority of one moral idea over another can be demonstrated. In this sense, one of the principal missions of any given version of pragmatist ethics is to indicate some general manner in which habits can be acquired which, later, will facilitate personal deliberation – both internal and external – in the broad variety of circumstances which make up the moral life.

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GOUINLOCK J., (1992), Dewey, John (1859-1952), in L. Becker & C. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, vol. 1, 259-62, New York, Garland.

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HILDEBRAND D., (2008a), Dewey: A Beginners Guide, Oxford, Oneworld.

HILDEBRAND D., (2008b), Review of A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (R. Talisse), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, [ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13965] [accessed April 2nd 2010].

LAFOLLETTE H., (2000), Pragmatic Ethics, in H. LaFollette (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Malden, Blackwell, 400-19.

LYNCH M., (2004), True to Life: Why Truth Matters, Cambridge, MIT Press.

LISZKA J., (2005), “What is Pragmatic Ethics?,” Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 32th Annual Meeting, [american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2005/ Liszka.htm] [accessed April 2nd 2010].

LISZKA J., (2007), “Pragmatic Ethics and Normative Naturalism,” Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 34th Annual Meeting, [philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SAAP/USC/TP25.html] [accessed April 2nd, 2010].

MAYORGA R., (2007), “Peirce’s Moral ‘Realicism’,” American and European Values Conference III, Poland, University of Opole (proceedings forthcoming).

MISAK C., (2000), Truth, Politics, Morality, London, Routledge.

MISAK C., (2004), Truth and the End of Inquiry, 2nd ed. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

NUBIOLA J., (1996), Realidad, ficción y creatividad en Peirce, in J. M. Pozuelo & F. Vicente (eds.), Mundos de ficción, vol. II, Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de Murcia, 1139-45.

PAPPAS G., (1997), “Dewey’s Moral Theory: Experience as Method,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 33 (3), 520-56.

PAPPAS G., (1998), Dewey’s Ethics: Morality as Experience, in L. Hickman (ed.), Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 100-23.

PAPPAS G., (2007), ‘El punto de partida de la filosofía en Risieri Frondizi y el pragmatismo,’ Anuario Filosófico 40, 319-42.

PAPPAS G., (2008), Dewey, John: Ethics, in J. Lachs & R. Talisse (eds.), American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, New York, Routledge, 181-3.

PARKER K., (2003), “Reconstructing the Normative Sciences,” Cognitio, 4 (1), 27-45.

PEIRCE C. S., (1931-58), The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. W. Burks (eds.), Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

PUTNAM R. A., (1992), Pragmatism, in L. Becker & C. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, vol. II, New York, Garland, 1002-5

SULLIVAN D. F., (1977), “Peirce and the Truth of Moral Propositions,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 51, 183-92.

TILES J. E., (1998), Pragmatism in Ethics, in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, London, Routledge, 640-5.

VAN ROOJEN M., (2005), Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition [plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries/ moral-cognitivism/] [accessed April 2nd, 2010].

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NOTES

1. The terms ‘pragmatic’ and ‘pragmatist’ are used interchangeably here. Small differences between them could be pointed out, but since their use in ordinary language is almost equivalent, I will not pay attention to their nuances. 2. Reference to Peirce’s papers are given as CP followed by volume, paragraph number, and the year written. See Peirce (1931-58). 3. Moral discussion is also comprised of experiences, examples, arguments and thought experiments which may be as compelling as compulsory and, therefore, may well account for the truth of the ethical hypothesis discussed (Misak 2000: 94). 4. In a certain sense, habits release time that can be employed in using imagination, which is the heart of creativity. Moreover, as Barrena (2001) says, “the creative power […] rests in the capacity of exerting control over one-self, of being rational, of integrating everything under reason through the development of habits. By means of habits, the human being makes all things rational, and submits the universe to his control in the case of science, his feelings in the case of art, or his own life in general [in the case of ethics]; that is, he adds reasonableness.” 5. References to Dewey’s works follow the critical edition and use the following abbreviations: EW (The Early Works), MW (The Middle Works), and LW (The Later Works), followed by volume, page number, and the year written. 6. This invalidates much of Robert Talisse’s criticism of a supposed totalitarian or anti-pluralistic current in Dewey’s views. See Hildebrand 2008b. 7. Indeed, although sometimes it is presented as a changing reality, “experience is the constant, persistent and trustworthy basis of evidence in any philosophical investigation which is empirical” (Pappas 2007: 327). 8. This is not to say that the issues discussed in ethics are abstract or indefinite, but only that ‘moral judgments require more collateral information,’ which sometimes can consist in a certain experience or specific background knowledge (Misak 2000: 92, 82-3). 9. In a passage from Peirce’s later works, he approaches a similar position when he explains that the attitude of the scientist, and his particular task, does not consist in confirming his prior beliefs, but rather in seeking out the errors and insufficiencies in them. The logic which is employed by the person reasoning in scientific research is, therefore, irrevocably linked to a concrete interior attitude, and to an ethics of ‘justice’ and ‘impartiality’ with regard to evidence and new arguments which may go counter to previously held beliefs (CP 6.3, 1898). 10. In fact, it is hard to determine what kind of action a ‘final’ action would be. Even in a specific course of action, it is difficult to point out which single deed would be the one that brings the whole action to an end. This is so because, as British writer G. K. Chesterton rightly saw, ‘all we do is preparations.’ That is, every action is always preliminary to something else, each act always gives way to several other deeds, and no single act in itself coincides with the end of a given action. Perhaps, as Chesterton wrote on several occasions, the only acts that bring action to an end (metaphorically speaking, as we in fact are always acting) are the ones based on unreflective custom, such as those belonging to madmen and lunatics (Chesterton 2004: 295-6). 11. In the same way, when discussing values and evaluating them, Misak has emphasized that we do not begin from an abstract definition, but rather from our experience of them (Misak 2000: 81).

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ABSTRACTS

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a summary compilation of the main achievements in recent scholarship on the issue of pragmatic ethics – underlining the lack of consensus, but also showing basic agreement about the key features of the ethical philosophy of pragmatism. Second, it focus on two strands of pragmatism: the one spearheaded by Charles S. Peirce, which stresses the importance of habits, and the tendency of things (including human beings) to become habit-governed as the key to the development of ‘concrete reasonableness,’ the ultimate end by which human action ought to be guided; and the one led by John Dewey, which stresses the importance of deliberative activity – a ‘dramatic rehearsal’ of the possible consequences of every course of action – and the central role of educational work in developing the ‘growth’ of human nature, in itself the highest ethical ideal – an ideal that manifests itself in the ‘reconstruction’ of a new and more democratic society.

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Man as the Measure of All Things Thoughts on Moral Perfection, Finitude, and Metaethics

Jeremy Millington

1 W. H. Auden stated that “the only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public.”1 Following a similar metacritical theme, he goes on to remark that the way to educate a man about his poor eating habits is not to tell him his diet is poor, but to provide him with a healthier alternative. Such metacritical advice moves against the grain of some contemporary philosophic practice, which seems to revolve around philosophic meals starting to grow rot.

2 The metaethical field, in particular, can feel something like this. Its original purpose, so far as I can tell, was to produce a systematic understanding of what goes on in ethical theory such that ethics might produce fruit. I have in mind here something like G. E. Moore’s science of ethics found in the Principia Ethica: the place a number of contemporary ethical readers begin.2 Perhaps, however, this is already claiming too much for metaethics as it now stands; perhaps its goal is more distantly connected to ethical practice and moral issues. But should such a distancing between practice, theory, and meta-theory cause concern? On the one hand, the narrowness of metaethical work aims to produce a genuine philosophic understanding without conflating its subject or method with that of ethical theory and practice. On the other hand, whether or not we have theories to justify or illuminate such practices, they carry on nonetheless. That is, the exercise of moral and ethical practice imposes itself upon life, in the way that hunger does. Has metaethics fed our moral-theoretical hunger?

3 I am sympathetic to Auden’s critical methodology, but there is a certain professional responsibility that demands addressing current trends in ethical debate (i.e. the metaethical debate), as well as their genealogy. I am inclined at once to participate in this exchange of criticism encompassed by the metaethical narrative and to abandon it altogether for alternative pictures. Given this tension, I propose a sort of conversation that brings into the fold some notions borrowed from the debate in metaethics along

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with those outside it – some contemporary and some classical, some philosophic and some poetic.

4 Admittedly, such a conversation will feel foreign to the analytic-argumentative styles found in (at least) some metaethical debate. It will have its own inherent limitations, as well: a certain informality and a long line of contingent propositions, in particular. However, I hope such a strategy will provide a framework for identifying some weak genes in the metaethical lineage, while simultaneously offering a more diverse, and thus a healthier, partner for the moral theorizing.

5 The structure of the discussion will follow these very broad lines, starting with Protagoras’ notion of man as the measure of all things: If man is the measure of all things, we must consider what man is. Amongst other things, man is flux in a finite world, which means that he3 changes as a measuring stick (evolves, if you like). If man is the measure of all things, including moral questions, which picture can we use to orient ourselves? One intuition is that developing a moral practice in light of man’s shifting horizon demands a similar flexibility, one that adapts. What are the conditions and criteria for adjusting practice then? My suggestion is that moral perfection, which is what adjustments to practice seek to accommodate, comes from exemplary figures, to the degree to which such figures embody an ideal, fixed standard without transcending so far beyond the reality of a finite, evolving existence as to alienate man from himself. Moral perfection bears what may be called a family resemblance to Cavell’s notion of moral perfectionism, which itself grows out of an Emersonian picture – an unattained but attainable self. Aristotle is, likewise, perhaps a family member a couple steps removed, but certainly part of the lineage. But, like all family resemblances, there are important differences.

6 At least initially, this line of thought bears only a loose connection to the metaethical debate. The fundamental difference here is between the question of moral properties, which dominates metaethics in many ways, and that of moral character. The two relate in important ways: neglecting one at the expense of the other would diminish the project as a whole and on either side of the divide.

A Foot

7 If it is true, as Protagoras seems to have claimed, that man is the measure of all things, we might ask, how does one use such a measuring tool? All measurements depend upon a relation, a stretch of space from beginning to end, from lowest to highest, and from one to another. As we survey man as measure, we consider all things, but we also consider the measuring stick itself. What sort of measuring stick is man? As a ruler, it may be useful to consider the history of the instrument – a Ruler – as a sort of analogous narrative. It is in- structive, however mythical, to consider the notion of a foot, in particular, as the most basic measuring tool. The foot is that point at which the human makes firm contact with the world. We might even mythologize such a development further along evolutionary lines, by which the rise of bipedal man eliminated the unity (or conflict?) between hand and foot, leaving only the latter as the surest useful measure of earthly space. The distance from be- ginning to end thus becomes the distance from heel to toe. As a standard of measurement, its objectivity fluctuates in accordance with that of the ruler – the imperial footprint, as one legend suggests. Such a scale may strike us as irrational elitism, but its principle remains: man,

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as an embodied measure, reveals no consistent, uniformly objective standard – he has many sized feet.

8 If man embodies no easy, fixed and reliable rule by which to measure all things, to measure reality, reality will appear similarly dynamic. Locke states, “The obvious portions of Extension, that affect our Senses, carry with them into the Mind the Idea of Finite.”4 The finite is a concept easily grasped and seen in the world, as it dominates our experience. It is also perhaps unsurprising that we should seek to tame and order such a world: conceptually, scientifically, politically, militaristically, philosophically, and so forth. The world becomes an ultimately threatening place to inhabit. Its beauty and mystery are admirable and aweinspiring but poised for consumption, for remission into the individual – beauty leaves the world and retreats into the eye of the beholder. The world must be possessed and dominated in some way. The move towards concreteness becomes literally and figuratively real – the garden of Eden is paved over. If we cannot provide some fixed standard, perhaps reality and nature can do the job for us (e.g. the laws of nature, via physics, Romanticism, Thoreau). We can then graft ourselves onto this permanence – live lives free of change, free of risk, free of mystery.

9 So many projects rest upon this tension between the fixed and the unfixed (objectivity and subjectivity, transcendence and immanence, infinitude and finitude). The tension between the two is a major thread of Hegel’s unfolding of the concept of Spirit, as well as Kant’s understanding of God, reason and faith. Reconciling such tensions is certainly a philosophical project, if not a moral and religious one, too.

10 There is more to be explored in man as the measure of all things, room to inject some further qualifications. What could this look like? If we survey the great historical immensity that constitutes man, we come away with a frameless picture: contradictory, confusing, and complex in a variety of ways. It resembles something like a monumental Rothko painting with its foggy fields of color. The closer I stand to such a picture, the more in touch I am with its physical presence, its rich texture, its concrete reality. A stage of determinable but indeterminate action presents itself. Paradoxically, the closer I get, the more I distance myself from its boundaries, from the possibility of measurement, of a certain kind of understanding. Man, or as he should be called (in line with the maxim as originally written), humanity, presents a similar puzzle – of distance and measurement, of subjectivity and finitude. Humanity’s history demonstrates both tremendous destructive and violent possibilities and acts of exceptional love and empathy, as well as complex moments that seem to question such a distinction altogether. If we are to measure all things – humanity included – by such a standard, what picture of humanity are we to work with? It would seem naïve at best and dangerous at worst to exclude some picture or another, however extreme. I am suggesting, ultimately, one take into account both the foot of the king and the sole of the people.

Some Questions of Finitude

11 Before considering how moral questions relate to finite, fluctuating existence, it will be of some use to consider the notion of finitude more generally. What does it mean to say that human beings and the world they occupy is a finite one? Is it a finite world? And if it is, what role does infinity play, if any?

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12 Zeno’s dichotomy paradox describes a story along the following lines according to Aristotle’s account. Imagine that a hundred yards away, there is a bus you must catch. Being a fast runner, you catch the bus just in time. It seems clear enough that in the act of catching the bus, you passed a halfway point between the starting point and the bus. Between that halfway point and your starting position, we can imagine another halfway point – a quarter of the full distance. Between the quarter distance and your start point lies another halfway point. If we carry this process out, halving each half, there seems to be a potentially infinite number of halfway points between your starting position and the bus. This suggests that you crossed an infinite distance in order to reach the bus since the number of half way points can be measured indefinitely. How can one cross an infinite amount of measurable space? One can no more count to infinity than traverse such a distance. To count, to measure, is to posit a finitude.

13 There are a variety of solutions and conclusions one can draw from this illustration. Zeno suggests that motion is an illusion – we never actually move anywhere or traverse any distance. Conversely, the illustration might suggest that the world, the material world at least, is not an ideal realm, in the way that numbers are. So long as the world is measurable, it is finite. The ideal, the perfect, the infinite, belongs to another realm.

14 Locke covers similar territory in contrasting a “positive” versus a “negative” idea of the infinite: We can, I think, have no positive Idea of any Space or Duration, which is not made up of, and commensurate to repeated Numbers of Feet or Yards, or Days and Years. And therefore, since an Idea of infinite Space or Duration must needs be made up of infinite Parts, it can have no other Infinity, than that of Number capable of still farther Addition; but not an actual positive Idea of a Number infinite. For, I think, it is evident, that the Addition of finite things together […] can never otherwise produce the Idea infinite […].5

15 Locke thus demonstrates the discrepancy between “extensions” of actual infinite duration and those merely moving toward it, the latter being only a negative idea of infinity. Returning to the bus illustration, imagine measuring the distance covered in order to compare your speed to others’. The distance measures out to a number of stick lengths – 12.5 sticks. Does ‘12.5’ describe the distance ideally, or “positively” in the Lockean sense? If it were exactly 12.5 sticks, then the same problem as before emerges. Within ‘12.5’, there are an infinite number of halves, which must be measured.

16 The numbers that such measurements rely upon are descriptive of the distance but not perfectly equivalent. Zeno’s paradox points to a discrepancy between those numbers and the physical reality to which they point. Numbers, used in this way, work as a sort of theoretical model, an approximation. Does this cease to make them useful? Measuring the distance at 12.5 sticks allows for comparisons, such as the amount of time it takes one to run 12.5 sticks under various conditions. The numerical values provide a certain framework for understanding. They are approximations of a physical reality.

17 William James made an analogous observation early in his development of pragmatism. He stated that “as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations.”6 Furthermore, we might say that some approximations are better than others.

18 Numbers, like other theoretical tools, are useful in a sort of reverse sense as well. Rather than merely corresponding descriptively to some physical phenomenon, they

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help reveal possibilities (e.g. practical, technological, etc.). In sports, athletes and coaches, use measurements to assess the success of training programs. By measuring the time it takes a player to run some particular distance down to a tenth of a second, a coach will know if that player is capable of racing past the opposition.

19 However, there is a point at which the exactness of distinctions ceases to have value. It is possible to measure a sprint down to the trillionth of a second. But in the context of a game, it is in the tenths of a second that significant differences occur. This is not an inherent feature of sprint times. It is contingent upon the structure of the game and the ways in which players play it. It could be otherwise, depending on the game.

20 Physics provides a number of examples in which such long and incomprehensible measurements do matter. They mark the difference between life on Earth and no Earth at all. The Earth must be a particular distance from the sun and be of a particular mass in relation to the sun, such that the atmosphere will produce and hold oxygen and gravity will be not too strong or too weak. It must be a sufficiently safe distance from other planets. It must have a makeup of particular atmospheric gases and surface rock. All of these measurements, some argue, come down to degrees of incredible precision and interconnection.

21 To measure is to fall short, for there is always a higher number. A challenge of ethical theory, as such, is to account for the discrepancy between the finite and the infinite. Stanley Cavell describes this discrepancy, between “the world of sense” and the intelligible world, as a “disappointment with the world.”7 In cases of law, or “ultimate perfection,”8 the standard becomes incommensurable. Embracing approximations seems equally unsatisfying, however. So either the standard – the law – transcends too far beyond the reality of finite being or it remains finite and ephemeral. The task becomes the discovery of useful measuring tools and an appropriate standard of perfection that reconciles the two in some sensible fashion.

Methods for Morals and Objectivity

“The difference between verse and prose is self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a definition of the difference between poetry and prose.”9

22 In the above quotation, I take Auden to be expressing what G. E. Moore expresses in the debate over the definability of ‘good’. Moore argues that good is not definable, though we can know what it is.10 The mistake that philosophers have made up to the time of his writing, Moore says, is that they mistake ‘good’ for some other, natural property, like pleasure.

23 If systematic, philosophical ethics stands any chance, pleasure must be allowed to be pleasure, and ‘good’ good. In response, critics ask, how do we know that the words we use distinctly for ‘good’ and ‘pleasure’ are not actually referring to the same thing, be it natural or non-natural? How do we determine the difference without either assuming it or denying it from the beginning?

24 Moore’s essay sparked a series of papers concerned with moral properties and definability. Consequently, some of the debate in metaethical theory focuses on the moral realm as a sort of quasi-naturalized science (or fully naturalized in some cases),11 in which the philosopher qua scientist looks for moral properties, either literally in the physical world or as non-natural properties, floating about the metaphysical realm waiting for minds to apprehend them.12 Essentially two sides emerge from this debate,

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one motivated by attempts to show that morality is fixed (imposed from without), the other motivated by attempts to show that morality is relative, the product of preference or whim (created from within) – and never the twain shall meet.13

25 The first side in the moral properties debate tries to proclaim objectivity and the latter subjectivity. These terms carry a lot of baggage. They have (at least) two possible meanings. In the first sense, objectivity and subjectivity are contrasted in terms of truth. Something is true objectively if it is true independent of human thought and experience. It is objectively true, for example, that General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California’s Sequoia National Park, is the largest tree in the world. In contrast, something is subjective if it is contingent upon a subject. The experience of color is thought to be subjective (though the subjective experience itself can then be objectified; the experience is the object in that case, not the actual color). Subjectivity may be called relative in that the correct answer to a question is thought to be relative to individual subjects; correspondingly, objectivity may be called universal. So if you want to prepare the best meal for a world leader (president, prime minister, etc.), there is no flatly universal, ‘best’ meal; the best meal is relative to the individual leader.

26 The question of what is true independent of human thought and experience presents some complications. Contingency commonly allies itself with subjectivity. If something is thought to be dependent on certain conditions, then it is not universal in an absolute sense. In moral questions, such an alliance poses a great deal of confusion. Because something could be different says nothing about whether or not it is. Objectivity, in the sense just out- lined, need not necessarily feel threatened by contingency.

27 The second sense in which objectivity and subjectivity occur is closely related though perhaps more slippery. If something is objective in this sense, it has a real, material presence – something that is potentially accessible to independent subjects under certain pre-conditions (e.g. functioning sensory organs). Moral realists typically fall into the category of moral objectivists, though the manner in which moral properties exist objectively varies from one realist to the next. Moore is a realist, and thus objective about moral properties, though not in the material sense. Others adopt a quasi-realist stance, though this ultimately proves to fall flat on the real issues at stake.

28 Which things are genuinely subjective and which things are genuinely objective is difficult to parse out, and often at the heart of the ethical and metaethical debate: are moral properties objective or subjective, universal, absolute or relative? Perhaps this is not an either/or question, though. An illustration about flowers may demonstrate some of the complexities involved, while hopefully unloading some of the baggage that comes with specifically moral questions.

29 How much is ‘a lot’? If I need a lot of flowers, is it clear how many flowers I am looking for? Is ‘a lot’ objective or subjective? Imagine a series of circumstances in which you request ‘a lot’ of flowers. In the first case, you are planning a wedding with a thousand guests. The ceremony will take place in a monumental and sparsely decorated space. In the second case, you made some unfortunate comment that insulted a dear friend, and you would like to make amends. In the third and final case, you are a botanist looking to discover some particular feature that distinguishes the Mexican poppy flower from the California poppy flower. What counts as ‘a lot’? Is it the same in each case? The first case seems to demand more than second case clearly enough. Though, we can imagine more specific circumstances that could threaten that assumption, too. If the offended friend was a figure of some tremendous sensitivity and, furthermore, particularly

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immune to gestures of apology that demand little investment of time and money, then only the most extravagant effort would truly make amends. In conjunction, if the bride and groom in the first scenario lived lives of urban isolation, having made few if any trips to the florally rich countryside, ‘a lot’ might mean something different. Does this mean that just any amount meets the standard for ‘a lot’? Or that ‘a lot’ is not objective in some way? Yes and no. In terms of ‘a lot’ counting as objective in some strict, material sense, that seems to have little promise: what counts as ‘a lot’ is relative to particular situations. Similarly, it is contingent upon specific details.

30 Does contingency rule out objectivity in the softer sense? In each of these scenarios, there is a sense in which ‘a lot’ is contingent upon some greater purpose and set of details. Not every detail matters but some do, which must be worked out in individual cases. For the botanist, as for the wedding planner and offending friend, there will be particular amounts of flowers that will not sufficiently qualify as ‘a lot.’ One will not be enough and two likely will not suffice either. If we try to reduce the amount that counts as ‘a lot’ to some rigid material quantity (i.e. ‘a thousand’), we lose the point. For the botanist, one flower will not suffice, but it is not clear that fifty or fifty-one will generate much discrepancy (both are closer to a lot than one). Will six, fifteen, or twenty-seven count? We can recognize the difference in extremes possibly, but measuring the precise moment where a quantity changes to ‘a lot’ is difficult to pin down without some further set of qualifications.

31 Objectivity seems to be threatened here. But imagine a further situation. What if I show the botanist the case of the offending friend and the wedding planner and say: “Look, a lot of different quantities can count as ‘a lot,’ so any amount I give you could count as ‘a lot.’ Take these three flowers and be on your way.” The botanist may walk away perplexed and offended, possibly eliciting another complicated situation demanding the assessment of ‘a lot’ – a lot of explaining and apologizing. In the given situation, a lot of flowers meant something quite specific and certainly concrete: not just any number would do.

32 When thinking about moral objectivity and subjectivity, I suggest we follow similar lines, a line of thought that, not coincidently, also appears in Emerson. He states: There is a man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non- appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, – as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.14

33 This passage follows another passage in which Emerson states that “good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.”15 On the surface, such a proclamation may seem to suggest that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not objective in either sense outlined. Good and bad fluidly and arbitrarily fix and unfasten themselves. However, comparing these two passages together with a later one clarifies his position in line with a softer objectivity. He states: “Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”16 Character manifests good and bad, it places it in the world. So what counts as moral cannot rigidly or blindly be reduced to some material action or property. Hume, a paragon of the empiricist model, provides valuable insight here. In moral matters, he states: “The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly;

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and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still considered as signs.”17

34 One of the gaps in Moore’s theory, and subsequent papers responding both positively and critically to his position, is the ability to generate some method for identifying moral properties. Moore suggests bringing ‘good’ before the mind. An admirable suggestion, I think, but limited in its ability to generate the sort of systematic understanding of ethical practice he envisioned. And presumably the goal of this would be to aid theories of ethical practice so that decisions warranting ethical deliberation could be subject to some kind of test: does this object, act, thing, etc., possess the property of goodness, thus conferring moral worth? If the metaethical debate rests on the identification of moral properties – their real, emotive, natural or non-natural existence – but fails to generate a method for identification, perhaps alternative strategies offer something more substantive. It is, after all, not the cataloging of specific quantities of flowers that constitute ‘a lot’ in various cases that tells me how much ‘a lot’ will be in future cases.

Questions of Perfection

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd.18

35 It will help to recount the course of the discussion thus far to see how the pieces fit together. First, we take the premise that human beings are the measure of all things, which means that ethical questions ought to be considered in light of what humans are (and how they change). Second, humans are, amongst other things, finite beings in a finite world, which means they are not a fixed, complete thing. A shortcoming of much metaethical debate stems from its emphasis upon objectivity and subjectivity in terms of moral properties. Such an emphasis on moral properties leaves out the human element, failing to generate methods that inform practice. Part of that failure, I contend, arises from neglecting how a finite being operates in relation to ideals, which are of a different, perfect nature. Rather than searching for moral properties outside human being (in the infinite), or dismissing them altogether (reducing them to the finite), perhaps we can look for models that reconcile the two. I further suggest that such a model is better conceived in terms of character rather than properties: exemplars of moral character can generate a practice that accommodates fluctuations in experience and human being as they take on evolving shapes.

36 In Cities of Words, Cavell explores the idea of moral perfectionism, tracing its appearance and evolution through Emerson, Plato, and American film, amongst other strange bedfellows. The idea of moral perfectionism, he claims, begins with a sense of disappointment about the world, a difference between the world “I converse with” and the world I think, in Emerson’s words.19 He then poses the following question: “But if the world is disappointing and the world is malleable and hence we fell ourselves called upon for change, where does change begin, with the individual (with myself) or with the collection of those who make up my (social, political) world?”20 This represents a subtle shift toward questions of moral character and away from questions of moral properties. I have suggested that questions of moral properties are embedded in a moral discourse that emphasizes a sort of quasi-scientific or empirical search for

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properties in particular actions and objects, while the former demands an acknowledgement of what generates their appearance in actions and objects. Interestingly, the moral-property discourse develops out of a practice tangentially connected to discourse, while the latter, as Cavell notes, makes discourse the cornerstone. When Cavell begins to discuss The Philadelphia Story (Cukor 1939), he observes: I said of moral perfectionism […] that the issues it assesses are typically not front- page news, not, for example, issues like abortion, euthanasia, capital punishments, whistle-blowing, plagiarism, informing, bribery, greed, scapegoat, torture, treason, rape, spousal abuse, child neglect, genital mutilation, and so on. But not every fateful moral choice, every judgment of good and bad or right and wrong, is a matter for public debate.21

37 His suggestion is that such issues become moral issues as they develop out of the lives of people. The public/private divide has an obvious correlate in the sense of media coverage (in the context of the film), but it also conceptually corresponds with a divide between the ideal world and one that is manifest in the finite world: what gets worked out internally, within the realm of character, comes out into the world embodied and measured. This is not to say that the actions that spring forth out of character, like abortion, euthanasia, etc., do not come to possess either objective or subjective moral properties in the end, but such questions are secondary to the primary question of what sort of person one wishes to be, that one is capable of being.

38 Cavell claims that the Kantian project attempts to manage this divide between a sensuous world (the finite, the imminent), in which we are bound, and the intelligible world (the infinite, the transcendent), in which we are free.22 The failure of Kant, according to Cavell, is to make the intelligible world an overbearing task master that asks me to abandon or ignore the sensuous world, which he identifies with inclination. It creates a standard of action beyond what the measured, finite self is capable of achieving.

39 Earlier in the book, Cavell suggests that Emersonian perfectionism “specifically sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfection.”23 He goes on to state further, “To live a moral life should not require that we become Socrateses or Buddhas or Christs, all but unprovokable.”24 This is itself too harsh, however. It denies each of these figures a dynamic reality – a humanity – and signals a departure too far in the opposite direction. He is right to absolve us of the demand for some ultimate perfection, but only with certain qualifications not offered in his reading. If Kant’s position is too heavily rooted in the external, the public, and what the transcendent (the infinite) demands, Cavell’s position is perhaps overly rooted in the internal, the private, and what the subjective (the individual, the finite) demands.

40 Bridging the divide between Kant’s position and Cavell’s, Stephen Mulhall points to a profoundly important development in the transcendent conception of God after Kant. In putting God “in his place” – that is, removed from the finite world – a genuine frame of reference for human character is eliminated.25 Nietzsche and Kierkegaard inherit the consequences of this divide. Mulhall points out, “What is at stake is a matter of orientation, of the acknowledgement or denial of a frame of reference or horizon of significance capable of informing the course of a human life.”26

41 Following the lead of Kant, and perhaps more significantly, Hegel, we might take the figure of Christ as an exemplar for the concept of ethical character established thus far,

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conceptually and practically. I leave open the possibility of alternative exemplars of a similar character, however. The example of Christ, as such, will be just that, an example.

42 Picking up this thread, Mulhall draws us back to a reconciled image of Christ that makes moral perfection not an impossibly abstract, transcendent law, either imposed upon humanity or far removed from it, but a means for correcting and developing moral character. He states: Christ is the presentation of the infinite in the finite; he is not a finite messenger or natural proxy for an essentially transcendent Being, but rather transcendence incarnate. The fact of his existence tells us that God’s transcendence is such that it is not only able but willing – even that it deeply desires – fully to inhabit finitude. And this utterly changes our sense of what transcendence (hence finitude, and hence moral existence) might be.27

43 What this further suggests is that the finite nature of Christ is essential to making the reality of his character attainable for human being.

44 One of the problems of metaethics I belabored early in this paper is its failure to generate reasonable guidelines for ethical practice, or even an understanding of it. In one of the prominent threads in metaethics, Richard T. Garner outlines J. L. Mackie’s position in initiating his own conversation about ethics, “[Mackie] described a ‘second order moral view’ as a ‘view about the status of moral values and the nature of moral valuing, about where and how they fit into the world’” (my emphasis).28 The orientation with which Garner starts his paper already frames the moral picture in favor of a view that makes the grounding of moral questions dependent upon the discovery of moral properties in the world. The philosophic dialogue then proceeds along somewhat expected lines in which some fail to find moral values (or properties) while others do. The disconnect between this particular philosophic horizon and ethical practice may seem surprising at first, but it is less so in light of the prescribed narrative, which, we might say, focuses on falling apples instead of gravity.

45 The model of Christ is one I think needs some recovering, such that we are no longer focused just on the laws of gravity or the apples it fells. We are inclined to imagine, as we do with most saintly figures – the Socrateses, Buddhas, and Christs – that their achievement says nothing as to what is possible for human beings generally.

Answerable Questions

46 It might be of some use to consider what it is that moral questions ask of us, and how we might go about answering the call of morality. That is, more generally, what sort of questions are genuinely answerable? Some questions in mathematics, for example, seem solvable under certain conditions that we can intelligibly articulate. Some other questions seem solvable or answerable though perhaps with less obvious rigor. This range of questions may vary from more complicated math problems to, say, solving a crime, like ‘who stole the baker’s truck?’ The methods for solving both have been developed through particular social and cultural histories. These methods for answering questions develop out of a tradition and a practice. How do these practices develop? What faculties do we make use of in accommodating alterations in our methods? Such changes are, firstly, motivated by the goal in question (e.g. to solve the equation or crime). If a practice or method fails to generate the actual culprit of a crime

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or at least a line-up of likely suspects, we adjust the method. Such an adjustment requires an understanding of what good answers look like and that some grounds are available for re-orienting our method to produce such answers. If we deny the ability to sense the ground, there is no use speculating about its location or features. Of course, it does not seem clear that one can deny such an ability without appealing to one. What we come to discover in, say, science is indeed of a different character in some important way from what we might come across in moral deliberation. That we are using fundamentally different mental faculties in science and ethical question answering is not clear: reason, rationality, experience, memory, intuition, observation, thought, etc.

47 The same reasons offered for discounting the conditions for moral knowledge are equally incriminating toward empirical-sense experience. That questions of science have become answerable in productive ways says nothing of the relatively recent development of particular practices, and even less of the degree to which such knowledge generating systems are limited and likely subject to substantial future correction. Our approximations will change and, preferably, improve. Small gains, which current scientific practices achieve, will only come to seem smaller and more limited, or partial, as the practice grows and adjusts in accordance with the questions it fails to answer, which are infinitely more abundant than the range of questions seemingly answered.

48 Moral questions proceed along somewhat analogous lines, I believe. The development of character is something that demands a perpetual process of education from one generation to the next. Or, as Cavell notes in Pursuits of Happiness, from one individual to the next.29 We are all in need of conversational partners that educate us. Dewey demonstrates something along these lines in terms of the very survival and continuation of a society. All communities and the individuals that constitute them rely upon a set of practices that a community (family, state, tribe, church) must share.30 Answering moral questions in terms of specific acts is something like trying to achieve complete scientific knowledge outside of a practice that offers grounds for correcting the practice which generates such knowledge in the first place. A good scientific practice is capable of going about answering any questions within a certain range with a particular set of skills that lead to promising answers. Ethical deliberations and related actions will not make sense divorced from the ability to evaluate methods for answering moral questions.

49 If you adopt the knowledge of science and its system without understanding how that system works – why it has developed along the lines it has, the spirit of that system – you forfeit the ability to identify facts and features of reality in future cases. What I think exemplary human characters offer us in the development of ethical theory is a grounding for what is possible for guiding practice, as well as a picture of the relation between the world of the infinite, which is indeed free, and that of the finite, which is measurable and bounded. Subsequently, metaethical theory may benefit from a slightly more liberal pragmatic approach. Pragmatic in the sense of identifying the reality of human being and the need to accommodate fluctuations in experience.

50 Moral practice in the sense outlined here is not some special activity engaged in from time to time, but it is what orients our lives as a whole, even in the moments when we engage in activities of a different nature: creative, political, philosophic, or otherwise.

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Echoing Emerson again, we must see “that the virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”31

NOTES

1. W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, New York, Vintage (1989), 10. 2. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Mineola, NY, Dover Publications (2004). 3. I will move away from gender specific pronouns, though, for the moment, I would like to preserve something of the poetic, alliterative quality in the phrasing as a gesture toward the paper’s orientation. 4. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, New York, Oxford UP (2008), 126. 5. Locke, op. cit., 129-30. 6. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge, Belknap of Harvard UP (2004), 1-2. 7. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge, Belknap of Harvard UP (2004), 1-2. 8. Ibid., p. 3. 9. Auden, op. cit., 23. 10. See Andrew Fisher & Simon Kirchin, Arguing about Metaethics, Oxon, Routledge (2006). 11. See John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, MIT (1994). 12. See Dallas Willard, “Naturalism’s Incapacity to Capture the Good Will,” The Nature of Nature: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Naturalism in Science, Baylor University, Waco, TX (April 2000). 13. There are nuances to these positions that bear genuine significance but are, in the end, gradients on the same spectrum. See Fisher & Kirchin 2008. 14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, New York, Penguin (2003), 180. 15. Ibid., 179. 16. Ibid., 184. 17. This point was brought to my attention in Willard’s “Naturalism’s Incapacity to Capture the Good Will” (see note 12 above). David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Sioux Falls, SD, NuVision Publications (2008), 341. 18. Auden, op. cit., 4. 19. Cavell (2004: 18). 20. Ibid., 3. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. Ibid., 32. 23. Ibid., 3. 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Stephen Mulhall, “‘The Presentation of the Infinite in the Finite’: The Place of God in Post- Kantian Philosophy,” The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, eds. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen, Oxford, Oxford UP (2007), 504. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 497.

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28. Richard T. Garner, “On the genuine queerness of moral properties and facts,” Arguing About Metaethics, eds. Andrew Fisher and Simon Kirchin, Oxon, Routledge (2006), 97. 29. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Harvard UP (2003). 30. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, Charleston, SC, Forgotten (2009). 31. Emerson, 184.

ABSTRACTS

What is the purpose of metaethics in relation to ethical theory and ethical practice in contemporary philosophical practice? Metaethics is preoccupied with (at least) three particularly fundamental concepts: (1) moral properties, (2) systematization (in Moore’s sense, but also in the sense of law), and (3) the finite – this latter concept may only be evident incidentally but is fatally neglected. What is needed for a rounder philosophical picture is an account of three complementary concepts: (1) moral character, (2) the spirit of law, and (3) the infinite. Streams of thought are emerging from neglected traditions, particularly those of pragmatism and early American transcendentalism, that offer a means for reconciling these two sides. This paper brings together elements of these traditions in a sort of initiatory conversation, one that takes seriously the need for an integrated conceptual framework. This process of reconciliation allows for a liberal narrative that begins with Protagoras’ notion of man as the measure of all things and ends with a quasi-Cavellian notion of moral perfection.

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William James on Truth and Invention in Morality

Sarin Marchetti

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am grateful to Richard J. Bernstein, Akeel Bilgrami, and Russell B. Goodman for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the essay, and to the organizers and participants of the talks at The University of New Mexico, The New York Pragmatist Society, The New School of Social Research and Université de Picardie Jules Verne, where parts of it have been presented. [T]he moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas. The Principles of Psychology vol. II, 547

1 In what follows I shall investigate how the notions of truth and invention inform our moral life. In particular, I will show how this idea has been explored by William James in his seminal essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (MPML), by far his most clear-cut piece of moral philosophy. I will claim that the dialectics of the essay cannot be apprehended independently from the understanding of the moral psychology and epistemology James elaborates in his writings on pragmatism and the philosophy of mind. In fact, once framed in the relevant perspective, the essay conveys a very different and more radical position that the one usually acknowledged. In MPML James engages in an inquiry into the nature of moral thought and its ability to meet the difficulties of the moral life it should address. The essay criticizes a certain image of moral reflection by questioning its underlying assumptions about the nature of mindedness and the place of truth in the moral life. I shall thus articulate the discussion of James’ essay along two directions, one methodological and one

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substantive. They are, respectively, the anti-foundational and anti-theoretical character of moral reflection, and the rethinking of the relationship we have with our interiority that is relevant for ethics as informed by the notion of truth.

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2 MPML is at the same time the most quoted and yet the most misunderstood of James’ papers – a record it shares with The Will to Believe. My critical target is a received view of James’ moral philosophy as a piece of utilitarian moral theory. Such a reading is the result of a superficial analysis of the rhetoric of the essay, together with a reductive and unimaginative understanding of James’ theory of truth underlying it. It is my ambition to show that, once viewed in the proper light, the dialectic of the essay will reveal its real stakes: namely, an exercise of conceptual criticism of the very image of moral reflection aimed at showing the dangerousness of conceiving ethics ‘in the old- fashioned absolute sense,’ that is as ‘dogmatically made up in advance’ in splendid isolation from the human beings inhabiting it. James is neither interested in advancing any theory of morality whatsoever, nor in individuating the principles of human nature on which such an ethics should be erected. His interest is rather that of showing the shape moral reflection should take to meet the difficulties of the moral life it should address instead of castling itself behind a moral theory or some metaphysical picture of human beings. Moral reflection, according to James, should have an exhortative character, its point being that of gesturing toward the varieties of ways in which we can be – or fail to be – touched by situations that prompt our sensibility and understanding to respond ethically. In MPML James explores the various aspects of our moral life, and shows how a deceptive picture of moral psychology and epistemology hinders us from resolving some of its difficulties. Consequently, if moral reflection aspires to have a genuine grasp of the moral life, it should rethink its very credentials and investigate in the first instance what relationship it should entertain with the varieties of moral experiences articulating our moral life.

3 Placing James’ considerations in the wider context of his conception of truth and mindedness will allow us to see the richness of this text as well as to appreciate its anti- foundational inspirations. I will be very selective in my use of James, although these themes pervade his whole philosophy and find their most distinctive voice in his masterpiece The Principle of Psychology, which will linger in the background of my investigations. In his writings on pragmatism and the mind James struggles to articulate his insights about the interconnectedness of a refutation of a theoretical – as opposed to a practical – understanding of our mental lives with a refutation of a picture of truth as copying and representation. These two insights are pivotal for the understanding of James’ moral philosophy as a whole, and the essay under examination in particular, since in it James complains about the narrow understanding of moral reflection as driven by a distorted intellectualistic characterization of our mindedness and worldliness. My claim will be that, if we frame MPML in this broader context, a much richer image of moral thought – one very instructive for the contemporary debate – will emerge.

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4 James wrote MPML in 1891 as an address to the Yale Philosophical Club. Given the academic setting of the lecture, James’ interest was that of showing the limits and point of a philosophical account of morality. The aim of the lecture-essay is not in fact the advancement of any moral theory, but the investigation into its very possibility. This point has been surprisingly overlooked in the critical literature on James. A notable exception is the book by Sergio Franzese on James’ moral philosophy, in which the author advances a reading of MPML on these lines, that is, as a critical inquiry into the very nature and feasibility of moral reflection. Franzese traces back the deceiving interpretation of the essay to the popular account that Ralph Barton Perry gave of James’ moral philosophy in his monumental The Thought and Character of William James, in which James’ protégée, by failing to appreciate the leitmotiv of the essay, advanced a very biased reading of his mentor’s moral thought. Franzese argues that a more attentive inquiry will reveal how [t]he essay of 1891 does not work as an outline of a moral theory because it was certainly not intended to be one. On the contrary, it was intended to show the futility of that traditional philosophical task, which is perhaps why philosophers have intended not to read it too closely […] [t]he ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’ is a critical analysis of the validity of any moral theory, in the terms of its relation to the moral philosopher, rather than presenting another specific moral theory.1

5 According to Franzese, MPML has been variously read as a moral system advancing a theory of goods and values, whereas James was interested in showing the futility of such an approach to moral reflection and its prescriptive pretensions. Franzese proceeds in tracing the roots of James’ innovative inquiry in the Wundtian school of psychology and its bearings for the debate about the axiological crisis that characterized the end of XIX century and invested the discourse about the statute of philosophical accounts of morality. Alternatively, here I want to explore at some depth the philosophical motives internal to James’ thought that prompted such a characterization. Once freed from these misplaced attributions and returned to its proper fieldwork, an opposite picture of moral reflection will be revealed through the lines of the essay. I shall claim that the reading of James’ moral thought as a defense of utilitarianism commits a categorical mistake, since not only is James very critical of utilitarianism2 – as regards both its underlying moral psychology (an untenable atomistic picture of experiencing and a related narrow conception of consequence), and its teleological aspirations (the sublimation of utility or pleasure as the only criteria of goodness) –, but he is also skeptical about the very possibility of moral theory, be it utilitarian or not. In MPML James is interested in showing if, how, and to what extent our moral life can be pictured and understood by means of moral reflection. For this reason MPML represents a key text for the assessment of James’ whole moral philosophy: in it we can find the instructions that will tell us how to read the ethical investigations pervading James’ writings. A misreading of MPML will thus convey a paltry understanding of the whole of James’s moral philosophy. A good understanding of James’ moral philosophy will thus require the proper understanding of the place of MPML in respect to the widespread moral instructions.

6 James articulates in his other writings. However, it is not easy to characterize the connection between James’ methodological considerations on the nature of morality as presented in MPML and the moral ideas as they are explored in his other works. As the vast majority of commentators have suggested, the character of James’ investigation

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was deeply ethical, so that most of his discussions about the mind, the world and the varieties of encounters between the two were driven by ethical concerns. Even metaphysical discussions were for James au fond urged by moral constraints and permeated by moral interests. His assertion that the very question between monism and pluralism cannot be settled independently from considerations about the importance of the two options for one’s moral life is well known. It is thus difficult to tell the difference between MPML, widely acknowledged as either his only or his clearest work in moral philosophy, and the widespread references to morality pervading his other writings.3

7 A fistful of authors4 have strived for the understanding of this connection, but the majority of the interpretations failed to appreciate the point due to their misreading of the tone and the aims of the essay altogether, since even if they rightly acknowledge the importance of the essay for the understanding of James’ moral philosophy, still they stuck with a reading of it as a defense of a peculiar moral theory. Since I am impatient to present my own reading, in the next section I will briefly sketch the essential structure of the two main families of readings so as to place my own understanding of James’ moral philosophy in context.

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8 As I have been arguing, a good reading of MPML represents the necessary conditions to grasp James’ conception of ethics, and either this essay has not been recognized as special at all, or its distinctiveness has been misplaced. Ralph Burton Perry’s account falls into the first case. Perry, in his monumental work on James, does not appreciate the peculiarity of the essay and melts James’ writings together, losing in this way the asymmetry holding between MPML and his other writings containing his moral ideas. In chapters LXV and LXVI of the book he insists on the moralistic and militant character of James’ moral reflection. Perry seems to acknowledge the distinctiveness of MPML by saying that the essay is James’ only published discussion of theoretical ethics. He claims that in it James addressed the question, raised a couple of years before in his essay titled The Sentiment of Rationality, ‘What does the moral enthusiasm care for philosophical ethics?’ This question, raised in a paper in which James – among other things – investigates the peculiar frame of mind that prompts us to crave for rationality in our philosophical investigations, seems to fit suitably the purposes of MPML. In fact, it conveys the sense of the problematization James addresses in his characterization of the relationship between one’s own moral ideas – or ‘enthusiasm’ – and a reflective – or ‘philosophical’ – ethics. However, although very encouraging, Perry’s account wastes its promises by reducing the reflective discourse about morality to the discussion of the character of individual interests and demands and their relation with the social life in which their bearers partake. Moreover, Perry presents this discourse, which he characterizes as the center of vision of James’ conception of ethics, as a fallout of his personal biography. He writes [t]here is an undeniable moral accent in the life as well as in the thought of William James. In view of the fact that he subordinated thought to action, and therefore in principle accepted the Kantian doctrine of the “primacy of practical reason,” it is surprisingly that he wrote so little on moral philosophy. But this comparative inattention to the traditional problems and theories of ethics was offset by the

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strength of his moral convictions. His total expression was infused with moral zeal – his personal code was rigorous and unmistakable.5

9 The quotation is very perspicacious. Instead of exposing the arguments given in MPML Perry engages in a very captivating survey of James’ moral ideas, as they are discussed by James in his other writings. Even if the texts and ideas he presents are of the utmost importance and are deeply pertinent for the understanding of the themes tacked in MPML, Perry makes two related mistakes at once: he conflates the reflective with the purely descriptive, and characterizes both as the outcome of James’ eclectic personae. Even if the effort to show the deep entanglement of biography and philosophy in James is nothing but praise-worthy, since it is an aspect of his thought that should be remarked with great emphasis, Perry’s account went so far as to reduce James’ philosophy to his biography, losing in this way the most interesting reflective dimension of his discourse.6 It is my claim that if we take James’ philosophical insights in their own terms, and try to understand them as the result of reflective investigations, the very connection with the experiences from which such investigations at the same time spring and get transformed will be illuminated. These two aspects – namely, biography and philosophy – must be kept in contrastive tension, since the subordination of one to the other will bring us either to an aprioristic conception of philosophy or to the very opposite annihilation of it, a flattening of one on the other will obscure the nature of their connection. In the case we are examining, that is James’ moral philosophy, this tension is built into the very dialectic of MPML. In the essay James pictures the relationship between moral reflection and moral life neither as one of derivation nor of reduction, but rather of mutual definition. Moral reflection emerges from our internal understanding of the practical contingencies of our moral life, but cannot be reduced to them. Moral reflection makes sense on the background of some shared practices and ideas, and the rationality it expresses is internal to such practices and ideas. At the same time, by means of moral reflection we investigate the very conceivability of a certain moral idea or experience, so that its role is not merely descriptive. I will go back to this characterization in the next section. Let me now move to the other family of readings, namely the ones which misplace the distinctive voice of MPML.

10 Richard Gale’s book The Divided Self of William James, whose interpretation of James is remarkable in several ways, represents a good example of a reading mindful of the distinctive place of MPML in James’ moral philosophy, but inattentive to its anti- theoretical inspiration. Gale tackles the question directly, arguing for a radical distance between James’ ethical theory and his normative moral ideas. Let me quote the passage in its entirety, since it is very rich and eloquent. He writes [J]ames’ only published effort to develop an ethical theory is his 1891 essay on “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” […] [T]hat James never felt the need to publish anything further on ethical theory, either before or after 1891, is strong evidence that he accepted its position throughout, especially as there is nothing in his unpublished writings indicating any doubts or reservations, only further corroborations of the 1891 essay. The word theory is italicized so as to emphasize the contrast with the moralizing espousal of normative propositions, something that James did in profusion throughout his career. John Dewey failed to make this distinction when he said that ‘William James did not need to write a separate treatise on ethics, because in its larger sense he was everywhere and always the moralist.’ It will be seen that some of his moralizing had a distinctively deontological tone that clashed with his maximizing ethical theory.7

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11 Such a reading, although having the merit of pointing to the special character of MPML, portrays MPML as advancing a utilitarian moral theory that would be at odds with the deontological principles suffusing his other moral writings. I contend that Gale’s reading of James’ moral philosophy as driven by an alleged clash between normative deontological propositions with maximizing ethical principles is the fallout of his reading of the underlying conception of truth and its bearings for ethics. The difference in our respective reading amounts thus to a difference in our different reading of his conception of truth. While Gale reads James as equating truth with usefulness, pushing him toward an utilitarian teleology whose chief principle says “we are always morally obliged to act in a manner that maximises desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction among the actions available to us,”8 I read James as portraying truth as a peculiar state of mind – an inventive one – whose grounding lies in the relationship of interest our mind establishes with the world. ‘Interest’ is for James a technical term, and unlike usefulness it has a normative grounding in how things are in the world, and not only in how we would like them to be. Its direction of fit is from the world to the mind, and yet the world that is relevant for ethics is one of our ordinary practices and shared values. Truth consists in what is interesting to notice, what is worth (and not merely useful) having and requires an active endorsement on the part of the subject, who must pay attention to its moral experiencing as it is embedded in his ordinary practices of truth- and value-giving. Being grounded in this conception of truth, ethical values do not need any teleological justification, and James’ discussion in MPML of the nature of values is not intended as a foundation but rather an elucidation of their place in our practices. This aspect is connected with the refutation of Gale’s reading of MPML as James’ moral system: if read as a moral theory, MPML would appear rather incoherent since in it James holds a number of statements that at first blush seem incompatible. Gale would thus be right in claiming that James’ self was (morally) divided between a promethean pragmatist holding a maximizing principle of optimization of goods and an anti-promethean mystic struggling to make religious and spirituals ideals respectable again in a disenchanted world. However, the alleged moral aporias contained in MPML can be met by refusing to read James’ claims at face value, and investigating the rhetoric in which they are articulated. From such a reading it will emerge that James’ interest is not that of grounding values anywhere, but rather that of portraying how our understanding of them is vitiated by misconceptions about our mindedness and its bearings for our moral life. Through such an investigation, we could also re-interpret Gale’s claim that in other writings James employs deontological principles that are not explicitly discussed in MPML, since it will emerge in which sense James’ moral instructions in the essay are directed precisely against the attempts to moralize morality and reduce moral reflection to the defense of a narrow and well- characterized picture of what counts as a moral experience.

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12 I will argue, contra Perry, that it is not true that James was uninterested in the traditional problems and theories of ethics, since his interest was precisely a critique of their understanding. His goal was that of showing the shortcomings and difficulties of characterizing the aim of moral reflection as the achievement of a normative moral system. However, this critique makes space for another conception of moral reflection sketched in MPML, one that has a distinctive reflective status that must not to be

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conflated with the moral ideas pervading his other works, even if it entertains a close relationship with them. Instead, contra Gale, I will argue that in MPML James canvasses a precise picture of the entanglement between moral reflection and moral life that is neither one of mutual incompatibility nor one of reduction – one that does not lead to any utilitarian moral theory. In order to understand the nature of such an entanglement we must decrypt James’ assertion that the aim of moral reflection is the clarification, and not the foundation, of our moral life. As James argues, an ethics must be hortatory rather than prescriptive: it must convey the unsatisfactoriness or the adequacy of a certain moral idea or conduct, and the means by which it should do that is not by pointing to some alleged principle they violate or honor, but rather by describing the assumptions on which their endorsement rests and inviting us to challenge its validity. Moral reflection should thus be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and it should be articulated along the experiences and experimentations human beings endorse in their ordinary practices. This does not mean however that moral reflection consists in a descriptions devoid of any normative element; in fact the dichotomy between the merely descriptive and normative, as well as that between facts and values, is refuted by James as a residuum of a Cartesian framework, inherited and developed in opposite directions but with same unsatisfactory results by both British empiricism and German rationalism. This refutation, whose articulation falls outside the scope of the present essay,9 allows James to portray moral reflection as an activity that is at the same time descriptive of our moral life and normatively inspired.10 The kind of descriptions James has in mind picture human beings as agents and their moral ideas as emerging from their experiences and practices. James is describing not what human beings are, but rather what human beings do. Furthermore, he is describing not what they do according to some principle of aiming at some result, but what they do of themselves when following a certain idea or responding to a certain experience.

13 James’ criticism of moral theories as pieces of moral reasoning attached from the outside to the concrete life of human beings is precisely directed against the ‘illusory comfort of an external standpoint’11 from which to assess our moral life. Moral reflection aims at the understanding of our moral experiences as they are displayed in our ordinary practices, and thus it must be as tentative and experimental as the moral life in which those practices take place. The criticism of a moral position cannot be made from a standpoint that is external to the moral life in which it is embedded, but only from the internal, as a failure to meet its own standards of rationality. However, far from being a concession to relativism, this is a point about the kind or realism James is canvassing. Claiming that in order to criticize a certain moral position you must be embedded in a certain form of life, that is be able to see things in a certain way, does not commit us to picture moral criticism as beyond the limit of rational discourse, since being embedded in a certain form of life is precisely what our moral criticism is about. The inability to engage in this form of criticism is what James calls ‘moral blindness,’ and it is connected with James’ characterization of how we picture the attainment of truth in morality. So its full articulation must wait till section 8, when the stage will be set with all the necessary elements.

14 A first indication into the anti-foundational motif of the essay is traceable in James’ few but significant considerations about moral skepticism. In the second paragraph of MPML he writes that moral skepticism, or rather the ethical skeptic, is not an acceptable moral position which we can discuss at a reflective level, since by denying

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the very existence of a shared moral reality it cuts itself off from moral discourse altogether. He writes [f]irst of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He will not be a sceptic; therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into an unity of a stable system, and make the world what one may call a genuine universe from the ethical point of view.12

15 Although James will characterize at more depth this provisional definition of ethical philosophy – what here I am calling moral reflection – in the course of the essay, here he is claiming that the appreciation of a shared moral life is a precondition on which moral reflection bears, and thus that moral skepticism falls outside of the scope of the aims of MPML. The moral skeptic avoids his responsibility to take part in the moral community, and thus his attitude raises other kinds of questions and considerations than those tackled in MPML.13 In fact, in the essay James is interested in carving out what moral reflection could look like from the very inside of its exercise, wary of the commonest mistakes committed by those philosopher who understand their own reflective activity as the imposition of some order of values –whatever their nature– on reality. He continues by saying that [t]he subject matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of getting them into a certain form.14

16 The two ideals, the one(s) guiding moral reflection –and the moral philosopher beyond it– and the one(s) guiding the moral life –and the moral subjects animating it– are of different kinds, and thus the relationship between the two cannot be symmetrical. If in fact we were to throw the ideal of moral reflection inside those of the moral life it would suffocate them, smothering the moral life itself. Abstract principles of systematization, such as those expressed in moral principles, violate the very tentative nature of moral facts and experiences, as they are articulated in our ordinary moral lives. Robert Talisse and Micah Hester have beautifully put this point. While discussing James’ conception of ‘moral fact,’ they write [J]ames’ commitment to lived experience brings with it a series of philosophical implications […] The principal objective of radical empirical philosophy is to “return to life”; that is, to bring philosophical ideas and habits consciously to bear on our lives. Among the irreducible components of our lived experience is what we shall call ‘moral experience.’ That is, our daily transactions with others and the world features a decidedly moral dimension. Just as the world forces us to hold beliefs and thus to act, we are likewise compelled to make judgments, and the elements of experience that compel them, are as real as any other aspect of experience. Hence your visual experience of the ink spot on this page which comprise this very sentence is, on the view of the radical empiricist, on a par with your judgment that your favorite painting is a work of beauty, your feeling or regret at the remembrance of a missed opportunity to do good, and your repulsion to the idea of the unnecessary suffering of innocents. Unlike traditional philosophical systems, which attempt either to reduce moral experience to something more scientifically manageable such as pleasure and pain, or to elevate moral experience to something other-worldly, supernatural, and as such inexplicable, the radical empiricist bids us to confront the facts of experience

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directly and on their own terms. This follows from the basic tenets of radical empiricism.15

17 The authors continue by showing how it is this peculiar understanding of moral facts that allows James to portray ethics in anti-foundational terms, as an ongoing activity of rethinking our practices rather than one of trying to fix them by inscribing their possibility into some moral principle. What is at stake in moral reflection is our very perspective on those facts articulating our moral experiencing, and thus it should have a character that is as open as the facts it tries to account for. They write [e]xperience is too complex and the universe is too rich and varied to allow capture by a few philosophical maxims. James rejection of the traditional philosophical aspiration for a comprehensive moral theory, however, does not constitute an abandoning of the fundamental question, How ought we to live? In fact, on James’ view this question becomes all the more vital precisely because we cannot rely upon tidy philosophical theories for quick-fix solutions to moral dilemmas. We must act in the absence of moral certainty; thus, the question of how to live becomes crucial. So, how does James approach the question of how we ought to live? To answer this, it is important to recognize that James’ rejection of traditional moral theory is in essence a refusal to see the fundamental concern of moral philosophy primarily upon individual acts […] [T]he principal focus of Jamesian moral philosophy is life, not merely individual actions, and actions are on James’ view the expression or manifestation of our habits, and our habits are formed from our more general attitude toward life, not towards specific events. This attitude is what James sometimes refers to as our ‘mood.’16

18 A major outcome of this understanding of the entanglement of moral reflection and the moral life is that the focus of ethics must be the whole life of human beings: their visions and attitudes, and not only their preferences that they express at the moment of choice.17 Given that this is so, the relationship moral reflection should entertain with the moral life cannot be one of foundation. According to James a piece of moral philosophy must be suggestive rather than prescriptive: it must conveys the depths and the trivialities of our moral experiences, rather than prescribing which course of action should be appropriate accordingly to some alleged moral principle. As James writes in the introduction of Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals [t]he science of logic never made a man reason rightly and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such science can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticize ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.18

19 A philosophical account of morality aims at questioning the grounds of our moral practices by describing the way and the conditions through which we endorse or reject such practices. When doing moral philosophy we do something different from offering theories: we try to make sense of the practices surrounding our judgment of values and our attribution of significance. In the next section I shall venture into the very dialectic of MPML, in order to present its structure and arguments. Once read resolutely19 – and in the light of James’ considerations about the nature of truth and mindedness that he explores in his writings on pragmatism and the philosophy of mind – the essay conveys a precise picture of the shape morality should take in order to entertain a profitable relationship with the moral life it should address.

⁂

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20 James was suspicious about theories, because of their tendency to force the varieties of experiences under a single and often misleading category. What is interesting in theories is rather what lies beneath them: that is, facts. This internal resistance of facts to theories is even more significant in the ethical domain, where the ‘trail of the human serpent’ is more than ever pronounced. In On Some Hegelism James writes [i]n the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability.20

21 The language of theories (‘our formulas’) is inadequate to account for the facts of life, and James denounces the ‘standing temptation’ to give up taking those facts in their own terms, and take refuge in words that could capture such a variety. This insight acquires the utmost importance in the ethical discourse, where moral theories have the presumption to regulate the varieties of moral facts from the outside, missing in this way the tentative character of the moral experiences in which they are embedded. MPML opens with the opposite auspice that there will be no ethical theory, and thus no ethical truth, until there will be human experiencing. Theories of morality tend to prescribe which facts are relevant for moral assessment, and how to individuate them.21 James contends that this violates our very moral phenomenology: we do not experience values as filling or fitting some pre-experiential order, and their truth responds only to human standards as they are set in the course of our practices. James writes in the opening of the essay [t]he main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that “say” shall be.22

22 Since morality, in order to specify its very contents, has to wait on experience, moral reflection will take its course from the analysis of such experiences as they are lived in the course of the moral lives in which they are lodged. According to James in ethics there are three questions that must be kept apart, and thus three kinds of investigations can be addressed in respect to our moral life: the psychological question about the origin of our moral ideas, the metaphysical question about the meaning of our moral words, and the casuistic question about the measure of goods which human beings recognize. In order to start appreciating the anti-foundational character of James’ essay, it is important to notice that all these different investigations are raised about our common moral practices and not from sideways-on: these investigations make sense only because our moral life is shaped in a certain way. Had we been different from how we actually are, different questions would have arisen.23 Moral reflection will thus take its course from the inside of our moral life in order to assess its strategies, presuppositions and shortcomings. Read in this way, the central parts of the essay present various aspects of our moral life, with an overview of the difficulties peculiar to each aspect of it. The role of the moral philosopher is a descriptive one, and consists in accounting at a reflective level how we fail to appreciate this variety if we portray our moral life as the establishment of moral principles independently from our activities of endorsement and valuing the relevant moral experiences. Franzese, in the book

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mentioned in note 1, shares a similar anti-foundational reading of James’ moral philosophy, but develops this intuition in a different direction since he reads the essay in totally negative terms, while I read it as containing both negative and positive instructions. Our disagreement, at bottom, is about the method of MPML: while agreeing that James meant it not to be read as an advancement of a moral theory, Franzese reads the central sections of the essay as the demonstration of the unavoidable ‘dead ends’ characterizing any metaphysical, and casuistic foundation of morality – since, as the dialectic of those sections would show, each of the principles advanced is doomed to failure due to their clash with the a-posteriori character of our moral life – I, on the other hand, read them as the discussion of the different aspects of our moral life deserving a special attention. Both Franzese and myself agree that in the essay James is critical of a certain way of doing moral philosophy as the advancement of philosophical requirements on our very moral phenomenology from the above, but while I take those sections as together an exploration and a rescue of some aspects of our moral life from a deceived way of looking at them, Franzese takes them as the exposition of three variations of the foundational project James wants to debunk. Although attractive, Franzese’s reading expunges any interesting role for moral reflection, while I think that the whole point of the essay is precisely that of carving out an understanding of moral reflection that, once it has lost its foundational aspirations, is congenial to the character of our moral lives.24 I shall now sketch how James accomplishes that in the essay.

23 The psychological question examines the nature of our moral ideas, whereas under this label James groups both our moral perceptions and our moral sensibility. This question has been explored in depth by both the intuitionist and the evolutionist school. James pays tribute to the associationist tradition for its emphasis on the empirical roots of our moral distinctions, however criticizing the idea that the mechanism of association exhaust all there is to say about the nature of moral ideas. There are, in fact, many ideas that cannot be described in terms of mere association between states of affairs and simple sensation of pleasure or pain. James writes that, [t]he more minutely psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulse in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all the pure empiricism can admit.25

24 The same could be said of our moral perceptions, whose importance in James’ ethics cannot be underestimated: “[a] vast number of our moral perceptions […] deal with directly felt fitness between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the pre-possessions of habit and presumptions of utility.”26 James is claiming that our moral ideas and perceptions have a special cognitive character that cannot be reduced to considerations of utility assessed on the basis of past experiences. Moral ideals bring with them an element of novelty, because it is only through embracing them that we envision the distinctive character of a certain situation. For example, betrayal, from a detached description, would include both the facts involved and their consequences – in terms of pleasure and pain – on the subjects involved, but not, for example, its character of seriousness. What has gone missing is the distinctive contribution that our endorsement of such an idea or perception confers on their moral character. The examples of these secondary perceptions given by James are diverse, spanning from ‘the sense for abstract justice, the passion for higher philosophical consistencies, the

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feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes and of the essential vulgarity of others.’ James writes [t]he nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. “Experience” of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar?27

25 That one state of affairs (or an action) is wicked or wrong can be told just by looking at the consequences of its happening, while that something is mean or vulgar can be told only by looking at how that situation appears to someone with a certain character – one who can taste its ignobility. This distinction between the evaluation we can give of a certain state of affairs (or an action) on the basis of its consequences, and the one we can give according to the character of the agent has immediate ethical consequences: while in the first case we refer to states of things or actions (roughly: outcomes) and their relationship with some alleged principle (of goodness or rightness), in the second case we refer to what the subject envisions and how he pictures the situation in hand or the action. James portrays this contrast as one between the evaluation of how things or action are – in terms of their consequences – and how one sees them – in terms of the involvement the subject has with the situation or the action in hand. In the one case we merely describe how things are arranged or which actions are undergone and evaluate them according to some principle (as for example the association of such states of affairs or actions and sensations of pleasure and pain felt in past experiences), while in the other we describe how a person arranges things together or which action is expressive of one’s stance in respect to the relevant situation. According to James, the importance of these thick28 ethical concepts consists not only in their being descriptive, but rather in the kind of description they provide of a certain situation or action. Ethical concepts do not merely mirror some past experiences, but rather their endorsement helps create the peculiar moral character of the situation under description. To take the case of courage: by picturing a certain conduct as courageous we do not merely describe what a courageous person ought to do in a certain situation, but also the very stance that person has on the relevant facts, which determines their worth. By being courageous an agent establishes the truth conditions of a certain moral evaluation, since it is only when a courageous stance is actively endorsed that the moral salience of a certain situation become assessable. It is this very agential description that is out of view from a detached perspective in which what we describe are merely the consequences of a certain idea and their relation with the past experiences in which that idea has been realized in order to assess its value.

26 James is claiming two things at once: he is both claiming that all consequences can tell us is how present experiences relate with past ones while instead moral ideas are also future oriented, and that, in virtue of this fact, moral ideas or perceptions are not merely copies of past experiences, but rather they are more the expression of the peculiar stance we can take on future experiences. James articulates these points by saying that [p]urely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideas are revolutionary. They represent themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.29

27 For our discourse it is important to note how James shifts the terms of the psychological question from those in which it has been framed in modern moral philosophy: the opposition is not one between experiences and intuitions, but rather

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one between different genealogies about how values are grasped within experience. According to both classical empiricism and intuitionism this aspect of morality is portrayed in terms of discovery, that is by showing how our moral notions results either from how facts are arranged together, or from some alleged special sense through which we grasp their character. On the other hand, according to James’ radical empiricism this aspect of morality is portrayed in terms of invention, that is by showing how our moral notions represent the kind of stance we can take toward certain facts. James claims that the proper source of moral value lies within one’s capacity to take a peculiar stance toward the relevant aspects of the world. Here James, as it will become clearer later in the essay, is not claiming that we are the sources of values – as the majority of readers misleadingly interpreted him –, but rather that the capacity to grasp values depends on us. It is by acting in the relevant ways that we pay tribute to the values of certain aspects of the world, which but for such an active endorsement would be idle. According to James, values, like facts, are in the world, but it is only when a peculiar engaged stance is endorsed that their reality is fully in place. Actions and agency are not internal happenings, but rather they are factive bearings on the world. Thus, the moral proprieties to which we refer when making moral judgments and performing moral actions do not take their value from some internal happenings – such as a projection of our sentiments or feelings on a brute world –, but rather their exercise in the world creates the conditions of moral value. James portrays this agential stance as inventive, and contrasts it with an unengaged one according to which the origin of our moral ideas is portrayed as an instance of discovery.30 Why this stance has to be inventive, and how it relates with the truth of the facts experienced, is addressed later in James’ essay within the discussion of the other two aspects of moral reflection. Let me now pass to the exposition of the second aspect: the metaphysics of moral words.

28 The importance of words and language in morality has been the main preoccupation of moral philosophers working in the analytic tradition, especially in its first fifty years of life. A major theme running through this tradition is the idea that by investigating the ways in which we talk and the words we use it could be possible to understand the character of our moral ideas. The leading idea beyond the so-called linguist turn was that philosophical problems were at bottom linguistic problems, so that by investigating moral language – intended as a peculiar strand of the larger linguistic discourse – we could unravel the nature of our moral life.31 James shares the concern for the way in which our words and language shape our philosophical inquiries and our lives. In the Principles James claims that the reason beyond a distorted comprehension of our mental phenomena lies in the use of an inappropriate language to describe it. Since the language we employ in describing both ourselves and our experiences is dominated by nouns and refers primarily to objects, we have a distorted perception of both. James’ diffidence toward language springs from its inability to account for the personal and fringe character of experience; in fact both our subjective states and the description we use to refer to our practices of knowledge are expressed in a language that hides their nature, a language which, by resembling the middle-sized objects of the outer world, is at risk of jeopardizing the very nature of our experiencing. James complains that “[i]t is hard to focus our attention on the nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in the descriptive parts of most psychologies.”32 The empiricist tradition is responsible for the idea according to which for every discrete mental state there is a word corresponding for it; so conceived, language would form a

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comprehensive description of our inner life. However, this conception of language overlooks the fact that introspection reveals a stream of sensations and thoughts that are not reducible to what James calls ‘an atomist, brickbat plan of construction of the mental.’ Regarding the vocabulary we use to describe our inner states the problem is that, as Gerald Myers wrote: [t]he lack of a descriptive word can cause us unwittingly to overlook what is subjectively present, thus neglecting what may be familiar to all of us if we had grown up with the appropriate words.33

29 I want to argue that James was well aware that in the moral case we have an analogous complication, and in the discussion of what he calls the metaphysical question he tackles directly this theme concerning moral language. James’ treatment is pivotal for the understanding of his conception of moral though as the clarification of our moral life. Our words and language are in fact revelatory of our moral life, and there is a sense in which our life with words itself is a moral issue. This theme is approached by James in two steps: first by showing the metaphysics underlying our moral terms, and then by discussing its plausibility. James begins by noticing how the words obligation, good and ill ‘have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists’; such words are empty and meaningless in a world without any ‘interested spectator.’ I want to remark that James’ emphasis here is not on mere sensitivities, as the vast majority of scholars have argued, but on activity itself. In a world without human beings there could be no moral notions since nobody would exercise them. Moral sensibilities are important but only in their very exercise and realization. James claims [g]oodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic “nature of things” can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.34

30 In this quotation there are listed all the ingredients of James’ metaphysics of values, which, far from being a ‘metaphysics’ in the traditional acceptation of the term, is rather a metaphysics ex parte subiecti. James in fact argues for his view by means of a series of thought experiments – which many commentators have seen as close to the ones Wittgenstein made in the sections of the Investigations discussing the ‘private language argument’ – which, instead of laying down some theoretical principle of meaningfulness for our moral words, indicates how we come to give moral significance to them, and how those words are revealing of our moral life. James claims that moral words have meaning only when there is an activity of evaluation lying beneath them; that is only when human beings exercise their sensibilities by responding to the relevant aspects of the world animating them. According to James the truth of moral ideas is not independent from our thinking them under certain conditions. Furthermore, his interpretation of the Peircean conception of belief as willingness to act is consistent with the idea that it is only by actively endorsing a certain value that we establish its reality and truth conditions.35 This amounts to the claim that the foundation of the metaphysics of values lies in our being agents. However, this conclusion is not the result of a transcendental argument. This is clear as we move to the second step of James’ argument, which assess the plausibility of this achievement by showing its grounding in our concrete moral life.

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31 Once it is argued that moral words have a metaphysical footing in the exercise of our sensibility, James wants to show that this does not commit one to epistemological and moral solipsism. To do so James, introduces the other key word in our moral vocabulary: namely, obligation. Once again, his method for assessing its meaning is that of exhibiting its place and weight in our practices. He asks us to imagine a universe inhabited by only one human being, and wonders whether in this scenario moral relations would hold or not. His answer is peremptory: [i]n such an universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill are good or not. Truth supposes a standard outside the thinker to which he must conform.36

32 This statement could sound untuned, given what has been said so far. Is James inconsistent here with his previous thoughts, as many commentators have noted while reading this passage? How is it possible to claim at the same time that we help establish the reality of moral notions, and that their truth also requires a standard outside the thinker to which they must conform? The answer to these questions is built into the second part of the though experiment, in which James goes on by asking us to imagine another universe, now with two human beings – but the same will hold for any n+1 universe. Now if they ignore each other by being indifferent to their respective attitudes we would have a ‘moral dualism’ in which ‘no one objective truth, but only a multitude of subjective opinions, can be found.’ However, this is a quite unsatisfactory situation as well, since as in the solipsistic scenario, there would be no morality in a robust sense at all. So far our situation is the following: on the one hand we have established that moral relations depend on the exercise of our sensibilities, and on the other we have admitted that such a metaphysical grounding is not sufficient per se to the achievement of a moral community. James’ solution to this puzzle lies in the characterization of obligation as a concrete feature of reality realized in our lives, as contrasted to an abstract principle ‘floating in the atmosphere.’ We fall into the above inconsistency only if we picture morality in theoretical terms, as the abstract comparison between the worth of different states of affairs. If otherwise we conceive moral obligation in practical terms, that is as the expression of the claims actually made by human beings, we can hold together the idea that the exercise of our sensibilities is the source of moral notions and that their truth conditions are not exhausted in their abstract conceivability or desiderability. James writes, [l]ike positive attributes good and bad, the comparatives ones better or worse must be realized in order to be real. If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in someone’s actual perception […] Its esse is percipi, like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it obtains.37

33 Here James is refuting a deceptive picture of morality whose a priori character clashes with the a posteriori character of our concrete moral lives. In order to grasp the nature of moral claims we must look to the way persons actually hold their moral notions and question those of others. However, James acknowledges the existence of some impediments that endanger our comprehension of the nature of our attribution of values – some of which are of a linguistic nature. In this direction James writes that [t]here is an inevitable tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately reflected in his own

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ideas that in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant is backed by this over-arching abstract order that we think the other should submit.38

34 This human tendency can be contrasted by an accurate description of the way in which such attitudes arise. According to James there is a close correspondence between moral claims and obligations, since [t]he moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim […]. Every de facto claim in so far forth? an obligation.39

35 However, it is hard to realize such an identity since we tend to reverse the order of logical priority between a claim and its obligatory weight. In fact we are prone to think that before advancing a claim we have to assess the conditions of its moral legitimacy, but this means picturing the validity of the claim, and thus its obligatory character, as depending on something additional to its mere existence. But what else, James asks, could count as an obligation if not something actually desired? The point here is metaphysical: before something is actually claimed, there is nothing on which obligation can intervene. According to James’ moral psychology, it is interest and not desires or pleasure that lies at the cornerstone of our moral psychology: interests denote the activity of attention to those facts which fit our mental structure and so arouse positive feelings of adequacy between mind and world. It is because there are certain facts in the world prompting one’s sensibility (through the mechanisms of selective interest plus attention) that one acts in a certain way and feels the relevant pleasure. According to this picture morality will thus consists in acquiring the relevant ideas by being attentive to the relevant facts. In such an understanding moral objectivity, a “standard outside the thinker,” will arise only if there is a demand for it. And such a demand will arise only if the sentient beings in the universe, rather than being indifferent to one another, respond to their respective demands. James writes [t]he only force of appeal to us, which either a living God or an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the “everlasting ruby values” of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim […] Wherever [actually living] minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features .40

36 Goods are constituted by demands, and moral objectivity is a matter of taking account of such demands by being responsive to them. James argues that to ask for an external legitimacy of objectivity means missing the very point of advancing a claim: the only thing that could hinder the endorsement of a claim is another claim. This brings us straight to the casuistic question, whose subject matter is the analysis of our ways of weighting claims and goods.

37 It is by discussing this aspect of morality that James’ criticism of moral theory appears more clearly. His dissatisfaction with ethics conceived ‘in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term’ is due to its theoretical, as opposed to practical, inspiration. In this section James reflects on the role of the moral philosopher in facing the moral disagreements spreading in our societies. James observes that the philosopher’s aim is that of getting ‘a system of truth’ among moral ideas. Given the multiplicity of values claimed in our pluralistic societies, James concludes that the most acceptable moral principle is that whose endorsement could satisfy as many demands as possible at the least cost. This utilitarian inspired conclusion, however, seems a dead end as an answer to the casuistic question, unless we characterize what kind of moral principle it

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provides. James takes into consideration the strategies adopted by the most important schools of philosophy, and claims that they share an underlying principles: they think that the solution to the casuistic question can be resolved by reducing the varieties of goods claimed to some more simple categories, since, in this scenario, if [i]t were found that all goods quâ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness, and order could be quickly made.41

38 James finds this solution – variously advanced by intuitionism, hedonism, divine law, and even Darwinism – quite unsatisfactory because of their common description of a society whose morality is already inscribed in some abstract principle to which our mind ought to aim – this being what we intuitively grasp, what would pleasure us, what the divinity we are committed to command us, or what fits best for our survival. However, according to James this is a paltry description of the place of truth in our moral lives, since it pictures the truth of our moral claims as grounded on something outside experience, conferring on it a normative character. Further, it contrasts with our very moral phenomenology, which, given the varieties of claims expressed in our moral experiences, can barely accept the existence of a single scale of evaluation. James writes [t]he elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those of physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart from the fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be so used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.42

39 James claims that a way out of the casuistic dilemma can be envisioned only by getting rid of this image of morality as the struggling for an abstract principle of goodness. The casuistic question is ‘tragically practical’ – since, as James notes, if it was only a theoretical problem about ‘imaginable systems of goods’ it would hardly have been raised at all, and thus its resolution should be practical as well. However, James argues that what hinders us from pursuing this resolution is the fact that [w]e are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher’s task by the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely ordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, everyone applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.43

40 Moral principles, when we think of them as the outcome of a society whose values are already fixed outside experiencing, lead to moralism and parochialism, which are the two extremes of the very same intellectualistic and foundational conception of morality. It is in this context that James advances the alleged utilitarian principle of maximization, which, uncritically taken, is displayed as James’ grounding moral principle. James actually claims that [s]ince everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principles for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? That act must be the best act, accordingly which makes for the best whole in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfaction. In the casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number are destroyed.44

41 However, this principle is useless if we do not grasp the implications James draws from it. James’ suggestion is that we have to rethink our relation to this moral principle as an

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inventive one, in which the truth of our moral ideas is established by inventing the conditions for their actual realization. He writes [t]he course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from generation to generation to find more and more inclusive order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands – that and that only is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science.45

42 Ethics requires experimentations, and like physical science it has an a-posteriori character. However, unlike scientific discourses,46 its advancements consist in the questioning of past empirical results and the way in which they were understood by the subjects involved. What matters in the formation of our moral ideas is precisely the way in which our interiority responds to their emergence or decline. He writes [t]he presumption […] always is that the vulgarly accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which public opinion believes […] Every now and then, however, someone is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruits […] He may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain practice, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than would have followed had the rules been kept.47

43 Our moral life is articulated along moments of critique and rupture with established experiences and ideas. James’ emphasis here is on the novelty of our moral ideas, which he pictures as the criterion of the good life due to the kind of stance that the subject entertaining them must take on experiences. James writes that “[t]he highest ethical life – however few may be called to bear its burden – consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.”48 James’ claim that novelty and invention lie at the bottom of one’s ethical life is not derived as a metaphysical feature of our human nature, but rather as the fallout of a certain conception of truth and its place in ethics. This way of thinking about moral reflection is in fact the result of the description of our moral life as an inventive practice in which the establishment of moral truths depends on the exercise of our sensibilities, and not as the recognition of values established independently from it.49 I will now explore the psychology and epistemology built into such practices, which represent the philosophical integrations informing the relationship between ethics and truth that will allow us to appreciate the austere anti-foundational inspiration and motif in MPML. I will thus come back later to the essay with all the necessary tools to give it a final assessment.

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44 In MPML James has pictured the kind of stance we must take toward moral ideas as an inventive one. His conception of truth, far from being at odds with this characterization, can be understood as an elaboration of the insight that in order to apprehend something as true we must take an inventive and engaged stance. On the psychological question James claimed that moral notions are more the expression of new ways of seeing things than the fruit of past experiences, on the metaphysical question he argued that moral words have meaning only when there is an activity of endorsement lying beneath them, while on the casuistic question he stressed the dangerousness of conceiving the truth of our moral experiences as lying outside our experiencing itself. In his 1907 Lowell lectures James dedicates most of his exposition to the discussion of the notion of truth and its relation to experiencing. In it we can find

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explored the very epistemology and psychology James had started elaborating at the beginning of his career at Harvard as a professor of comparative physiology. The leading thread that is relevant for our discussion is the characterization of truth as a state of mind in which we are inventively engaged in experiencing.50

45 In the first lecture of Pragmatism we find the groundbreaking assertion that advancing a philosophical position means committing to the truth of a certain world-view, that is, to the truth of a certain way of seeing things and being dissatisfied with opposite visions. This claim, made in the context of James’ investigation of the role of truth in the articulation of philosophical reflection, can be very instructive for understanding the place of the notion of truth in our moral lives. Truth here refers to the kind of stance we can take toward experiencing altogether, one in which we actively commit to the reality of a certain experience due its capacity to bring us into a satisfactory relation with the world. Given this first characterization of truth, James goes on to investigate the way in which such a satisfactory relation can be realized, and the very psychology of the agents involved. The picture he is resisting is one in which truth stands for the static property of our thoughts to represent reality as we find it independently of our human interests, demands and cravings. He writes [t]ruth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its ’prescription,’ and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men’s regard by sheer antiquity.51

46 Against this characterization James advances a picture in which truth is the very expression of our interests, demands and cravings. He contends that ideas become true insofar as they are endorsed and lived by. There is a plasticity in our experiencing in which new and old truths fight as opposed working values that we advance to get a satisfactory image of reality. The identification of truths with goods is dictated by the very nature of true ideas: truth stands for the active commerce between particular thoughts and experience, whose nature is not one of usefulness but rather one of satisfaction. James writes [t]ruth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it […] [i]n this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life’s practical struggles. 52 [t]he truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons […] [I]f there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashes with other greater vital benefits.53

47 These are among the passages that have been most fiercely attacked by James’ critics, who have read into them the identification of truth with mere usefulness, laying down in this way the foundation for the reading of his moral philosophy as a defense of a hedonistic variant of utilitarianism. Since true ideas are those which we are pleased to believe, they say, moral truths consist in what we found pleasant to gain. However, only a few lines below we found James saying something that undermines such an interpretation and opens the way for more imaginative reading of his position. James

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recognizes that his position could appear rather awkward, but only if truths are taken in the abstract sense, as a hypothesis not grounded in our concrete claims to experience. But ‘it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete, that complicates the situation’; in fact, when truths are made flesh the biggest hindrance they could encounter are other truths resisting them, truths claimed by other human beings or by ourselves at earlier times. In fact vindicating the human trail on our practices of truth does not to commit James to any idealistic epistemology, since he presents the footing of truths as always grounded in our concrete experiencing. James characterizes true ideas as those that we can ‘assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify’: “[t]ruth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.”54 According to this picture of truth, our mind is always engaged in the attainment of truth. Our attitude toward truth is not the static one of mirroring evidences, but rather that of questioning their ‘cash-value in experiential terms.’ We ask not ‘given these evidences, am I justified in calling them true?,’ but rather [g]rant an idea or belief to be true […] what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?55

48 The contrast I am interested in stressing is between a live as opposed to a dead stance we can take toward experience and thus toward truth. James portrays this contrast by saying that the reasons for the establishment and recognition of a certain truth are always reason for action as guided by truth. Our agency is expressive of the truths we help establishing, since we use such and such truths as the very background for our practices. As James writes, “[o]ur duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a ‘stunt’ self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons.56 We have truths because we find some objects or idea important and worth having; truths are expressive of our interests and cravings, and there is no point of calling a certain idea true if we were insensible and unconcerned for its reality. To this extent truths are the result of the peculiar posture that our minds can take on reality, and their establishment is set by an act of endorsement that in its turn is shaped according to our practical needs. James makes the point by saying that “[b]y our inclusions and omissions we trace the field’s extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that.”57 In The Meaning of Truth James explores this idea by showing in which sense the practical stance from which we assess truths is inventive. James quarrels about the meaning of the expression ‘agreement with reality,’ which is proposed by his opponents as the key to understanding the nature of truth. He accepts it but widens the boundaries of what ‘agreement’ amounts to in a direction that is congenial to our discourse. He claims that truth is not merely duplicative of reality, since the copy of reality is only one among many of our interests. What is at stake in our experiencing is the attainment of a fruitful relation with reality, be it one of copying or not. That of agreement is a wider notion than both empiricists and rationalists were ready to admit. The problem with both empiricism and rationalism is that they tried to “weed out the human contribution” from the process of agreement, picturing it either as the passive exposition of our senses to facts or as the exemplification of an extra-empirical and necessary accordance between our minds and Reality. If we get rid of the picture of truth as a relation between our mind and a non-human – rational or brute – reality, in favor of one in which it is the outcome of

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our active commerce with reality, we will achieve the possibility to see how those truths are at the same time the expression of our subjectivity, and objectively assessable by reference to reality. Our claims of truth are the expression of our point of view on experience and their validity must be assessed from within experiencing itself, resisting the temptation of postulating any external guarantee for their validity. James claims that [m]y universe is more essentially epistemological. I start with two things, the objective facts and the [truth] claims, and indicate which claims, the facts being there, will work successfully as the latter’s substitutes and which will not. I call the former claims true.58

49 James is not denying that reality is independent from us, but denying that truth is, since it depends on the very stance we take toward reality. It is our interests and visions that direct our investigations and determine the truth of certain ideas. There is no outside standard of truth we ought to follow except that which we establish ourselves in the course of experiencing. This practice is an inventive one since through experiencing we re-arrange facts in different and before unimagined ways according to our interests. We invent new truths by noticing overlooked similarities between situations and discriminating differences among the things that were unnoticed before. According to this picture [r]eality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for ‘truth’ in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible.59

50 The only resistance possible to this process is an internal one, and is represented by previous truths and those held by other human beings. This theme has been explored by James in different directions,60 but what interests me here are the ethical consequences of this characterization of truth as invention. This inventive conception of truth is relevant for ethics since its denial leads to what James has called moral blindness.

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51 This characterization of truth as invention stands in opposition to blindness intended as a state of mind in which we are unable to establish a meaningful contact with the world and with other fellow humans due to our unengaged stance. In the essay On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings James argues that our judgment concerning the worth of things depends on their hold on our sensibility, and denounces the dangerousness of such a recognition, which brings with it the incapacity to enter imaginatively in alien visions and values. This moral blindness consists in a conative as well as in a cognitive failure, since when we are morally blind toward others’ needs, values and truths we are not only unable to make sense of their visions and struggles but also of the realities these attitudes generate. We are blind toward pieces of reality itself, those envisioned by the truth claims of other human beings. This has tremendous ethical consequences. James remarks [h]ence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.61

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52 This failure is presented by James as a failure to occupy an engaged point of view toward the experiencing of others, and toward our own as well. In fact, when we portray a certain experience without questioning the meaning that that very experience has for the subject having it, we miss its very truth and significance. The spectator’s disengaged stance toward a certain experience condemns her to miss the truth expressed in that experience. According to James there is a deep entanglement between knowing truths and feeling experiences, since in order to make an experience come alive in our mind we have to imagine what it means to endorse it as truth. In order to mark a contrast between an engaged and a detached stance towards truths, James says [t]he spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.62

53 We are morally blind when we fail to see how the sources of truth are nested in the very meaning those experiences have for those who have them. When we fail to realize this fact, our perception of reality itself is poor and our judgment about it restricted. The essay presents a series of examples taken from literature and personal records in which there is a failing in grasping the nature of truth claims caused by a unengaged or dead stance toward alien experiences and meanings, and in the conclusion James draws a lesson of method which echoes the very closing of MPML. Let me quote both: [h]ands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands […] [I]t is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.63 [b]ooks on ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic – I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they never can be final.64

54 Both quotations warn us to beware of unimaginative and narrow understandings of the way in which our moral life is animated by the notion of truth. The conclusion of On a Certain Blindness invites us to pay attention to the varieties and plurality of ways in which experiences speaks to us, while the closing of MPML, given this characterization of moral truths, stresses the anti-foundational and elucidative character of moral reflection. In the essay What Makes a Life Significant James brings even tighter these two instructions by opposing the inventive stance of truth to the one of intolerance characterizing moral blindness: an epistemological failure amounts to a moral failure, and vice versa. The opening of the essay is trenchant: [i]n my previous talk, ‘On a Certain Blindness,’ I tried to make you feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political.65

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55 A vivid way to make this point is James’ example of the lover’s perception of his beloved: when we do not appreciate the beauty that a lover sees in his beloved, James argues, we fail to appreciate something that is true. Our failing consists in the inability to grasp the reality of a state of affairs that is claimed and endorsed as true by someone, who responds to the truth of his ideas by taking them seriously. Our blindness is a failure to understand the way in which truths are recognized, endorsed, and lived by. In the second part of the essay, after another round of scenes of instruction about a variety of different conducts of life taken from personal experiences and literary works, James suggests we read such conducts as expressive of moral truths. The different lives of human beings are guided by different moral truths, which James here calls ‘ideals.’ Ideals are what prompt our agency to commitment, and their perception prompts us to appraise them and legitimate their validity. To understand an ideal means to understand a person’s vision, and make sense of his actions and experiences. James’ characterization of ideals is twofold: [a]n ideal […] must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we ’have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal, – novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another.66

56 These two features of ideals represent the two poles around which all the dialectics of MPML turns: ideals and truths are states of mind that must be actively endorsed in order to exist, and their grasp requires novelty and invention. Ideals express the kind of engagement we take in our experiencing, and characterize our intellectual as well as our affective life. Ideals are novel in the sense that their establishment consists in a creative act, and the failure to commit to the reality of ideals denotes a deficiency in one’s moral life. Such a deficiency is not merely sentimental, but also cognitive, because in being blind toward the reality of ideals we are blind toward aspects of the world whose significance requires our active engagement. Ruth Anna Putnam, in stressing the cognitive character of the novelty of ideals and its relevance for the ethical life, writes that “[o]ne’s ideals may contain novelty in a second sense; one may envisage changing the world, changing the way the world would go without one’s intervention.67

57 By actively endorsing some ideals, and the truths they convey, we help to shape the values circulating in the world. Without such an active endorsement such values would be frustrated. The establishment of the truth of a certain moral idea(l) requires one’s taking an active stance toward the relevant experiences, and James’ instruction, far from being a prescription about what kind of idea(l)s to promote, is rather an exhortation to acknowledge their grounding in the pragmatic conception of truth as invention. By endorsing some values over others we make a choice that is of ethical significance, and the role of moral reflection is precisely that of indicating the inventive character of such an endorsement in order to dissolve the difficulties arising when we unwittingly portray it as a move that does not involve a personal contribution on our part.

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58 In the former two paragraphs I’ve sketched the dialectic of MPML and James’ theory of truth animating it, claiming their deep intertwinement. In this paragraph I will try to show in which way the anti-theoretical inspiration of the essay is entangled with the idea of truth as an inventive state of mind that involves the active engagement of one’s interiority. Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, both in their individual works and in their joint articles on James, have stressed this intertwinement and portrayed it as James’ major concern and most important achievement. In an interesting essay on some of James’ philosophical ideas, they write that “[e]arly and late, James’ motivation […] was ultimately ethical, and his essays […] particularly “MPML,” can play a key role in understanding both his pragmatism and his radical empiricism.”68 In the essay they draw a compelling picture of how James’ pragmatism informs his moral philosophy, and present it by saying [J]ames (as well as Dewey) takes the same approach to ethics as he does to common sense and science. Here too, he thinks, there are procedures which can be imperfectly characterized and which might be improved in the course of ethical inquiry itself. What is not available is a set of final ethical truths or a method by which they can be discovered. He tries to change our philosophical sensibility, rather than to replace one foundationalist ethical project with another, on the one hand, or to convince us that ethics is “non-cognitive,” on the other.69

59 The authors refuse a foundational reading of MPML, and suggest that what James is trying to do is not to convince us about the validity of one theoretical option over another, but rather he is trying to change our philosophical – and, most precisely, our ethical – sensibility and expectations, in order to understand ‘how best to proceed in ethical inquiry.’ It has been my contention that the way he suggests we proceed is by unraveling our biased assumptions about our mindedness and worldliness, that is investigating how our moral life is informed by the notion of truth as an inventive mental state. Here I want to spell out at some greater length the more substantive aspects of this claim; namely, the idea that our interiority is touched and changed by the ways in which we pursue truths, and consequently its bearing for ethics.

60 James dedicates many pages of the Principles to the discussion of how our mental – or inner – life is profoundly affected by the experiences we undergo and the ideas we entertain. In the texts discussed James insistently returns to this idea by claiming that the ethical question ‘how ought I live?’ does not merely – nor principally – ask which particular actions one should entertain, but rather ‘what mental perspective on the facts should I take?,’ or ‘which truths should I consider as the background of my experiencing?’ Such questionings do involve a re-description of our mental life as a move directly relevant for the articulation of one’s ethical life. James once remarked in this direction that ‘thinking is the fundamental moral act’ since ‘a moral act is one which follows from the acquisition and possession of adequate ideas.’70 For James, holding something as true requires the exercise of one’s sensibility and understanding, and in moral discourse, as the dialectic of MPML shows clearly, this entanglement is presented as the condition of possibility of seeing moral reflection as a form of clarification of our moral life through a clarification of our life with our moral truths. Ethics deals with truth since it is expressed in how we perceive and describe ourselves, in how attentive and faithful we are to our visions and reactions. Registering what appears as valuable requires in the first instance a kind of re-appropriation of the space of subjectivity. Our life with truths, more than truth itself, is the primary concern of James, and in MPML this theme is articulated through the idea that the proper target of

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moral reflection is our very understanding of the way in which we represent the truths informing our moral lives – for examples, those concerning the metaphysical status of our moral ideas or the kind of relationship we entertain with some moral principles. James claims that we are accustomed to a superstitious view we must get rid of; he writes [o]ur ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true “in themselves,” is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction […] [w]e inveterately think that something which we call the ‘validity’ of the claim is what gives to it its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside of the claim’s mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much upon the steel of the compassion-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from the starry heavens.71

61 The aim of moral reflection is that of ridding ourselves of this and related superstitious views, and the companion foundational anxieties according to which the moral life is exemplified in a series of moral principles that we can either fail or succeed in respecting. By claiming that what must change is our very attitude or sensibility, James re-orients the whole purpose of moral reflection, shifting the center of interest from moral theory to the self’s relationship with morality itself. The pragmatic underpinning of this picture of moral reflection grounds unsurprisingly on the kind of relationship we establish with the values and truths articulating our moral lives. This image of philosophy and of the attainment of truth as animated by our moral concern brings to the fore the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘ethics’ in all its tension: in James’ thought a conception of ethics as the inquiry into what is valuable – that however is not limited to the expression of what we would naturally conceive as moral judgments – coexists with a conception of the peculiar engaged stance we should assume toward experience as a whole, as opposed, for example, to the detached stance of science. The two meanings are deeply intertwined for James, since being value-blind is a direct consequence of occupying the wrong stance or attitude towards experience. This polysemy of the term ethics conveys a conception of moral reflection as involving a change from a detached to an engaged perspective toward ourselves and the world, a recovering from blindness, and the acknowledgement of the importance of the cultivation of one’s attention and scrutiny of the truths animating the ideas we find ourselves living by. Values are to be found in experience, but their perception depends on the kind of stance we take toward experiencing itself. Our inability to register the importance of a situation, the meaning of a certain discourse or the truth of a certain world-view is due to our inability to take the right stance toward those situations, meanings and truths, one from which they appear desirable and alive for us or those who live them.

62 According to James, we are constantly on the verge of losing this grasp on reality for a variety of reasons: because of our depicting the pursuit of truth and meanings as an activity that doesn’t require the involvement of our personal sensibilities, because of our inability to acknowledge that ideals, truths and values are the result of the particular description we make ourselves of reality, and because of the very nature of language which distorts the image we have of our inner life; in James’ words, because of our tendency of ‘taking the usual for granted.’ However, once we have abandoned a picture of moral values and moral truths as the correspondence of our sensibilities to something brute or transcendental, in favor of a picture of them in terms of the

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inventive character of our experiencing – one which requires a personal inventive experimentation –, a very different picture of moral reflection, one long neglected in the recent history of philosophy, will be again regarded as respectable. It is in this sense that the moral psychology of human beings is directly relevant for the understanding of the character of moral reflection. The achievement of a description of reality that makes values hospitable in the world requires in the first instance a description of human experiencing as the very source of truth and values. This is a recurrent theme in James’ philosophy, which he explores in depth in many occurrences of his intellectual biography, and it finds its most distinctive voice in MPML. After his 1891 address he never came back to the theme in these terms, perhaps due to the very poor reaction it generated, and tried instead to re-affirm its main tenets by following other paths. Although his later ethical writings were characterized by companion concerns, MPML remains the only theoretical treatment of this theme, and thus, as such, we ought to read it as a prolegomenon to the various moral inquiries it suggests we undertake. We should value the relative silence of the essay over the contents that should characterize moral discourse, since its point is precisely that of warning us against constricting ourselves in one or another narrow moral possibility, concentrating instead on the form moral reflection should take. This point, gone utterly unnoticed in the secondary literature, represents in my opinion the key to understanding both MPML and his later moral investigations. Despite its apparent abstractness, this indication has the most tremendous practical consequences, as the essays on moral blindness I briefly quoted testify. These are not the only possible ones, but the point of MPML is precisely that of indicating the path along which to proceed in doing moral philosophy, and not that of exhausting its possibilities.

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63 In this article I have argued that the notions of truth and invention represent the key to understanding the dialectic of MPML and its instructions about the point and shape of moral reflection. Once truth is seen as the peculiar engaged stance we can take toward experiencing, one whose character is inventive rather than passive, the internal tensions displayed in the discussion of the psychological, the metaphysical and the casuistic question cease to appear as such. In MPML James has struggled to present the complexities featuring the relationship between our moral life and moral thought, and the discussion of its underlying conception of truth has helped us in finding a key to understanding its dialectics. By resisting a certain picture of truth as ungrounded in our practices of experiencing we dismiss altogether certain difficulties haunting the characterization of our moral lives. If read as a piece of moral theory, MPML could appear rather unsatisfying, but if this paper has at least partially achieved its ambition of challenging the grounds of such a reading, then the project of shaping moral reflection along foundational lines will appear as less appealing. On closer inspection, James’ essay conveys an interesting conception of moral reflection, whose greatest value consists in its capacity to shed light on the varieties of experiences surrounding our moral life. Its point, beyond doubt a Wittgenstenian one, rather than being that of telling what morality is, is that of showing how to grasp, understand and live with it.

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NOTES

1. Franzese (2008: 3). Although I wholeheartedly agree with the above claim by Franzese, our readings of MPML diverge in one important aspect: while for him the essay has only a negative aspiration – namely, that of showing how all foundational projects are doomed to fail – I think that it conveys a more positive message. Our disagreement amounts to the reading of the method of the essay. I will come back on this disagreement later in section 6. 2. It is important to notice that James was very critical of the Benthamite version of utilitarianism, while much more sympathetic to John Stuart Mill’s version, which was more attentive to the qualitative distinction between lower and higher pleasures. James’ debt to Mill runs deep into his intellectual biography, and is acknowledged in the dedication of his most important work Pragmatism to him. 3. As an aside, whose full articulation would require much more investigation than I can pursue in the space of this essay, I would like to remark that the matter is even more complicated, given the presence of an interesting entanglement internal to James’ own rhetoric about the nature of morality between the relationship of moral reflection with the moral life it should address and the relationship of MPML with the moral investigations pervading his other writings. That is, James’ discourse in MPML about the nature of moral thought in respect to the moral life fosters the very same questionings about the place of this essay in the corpus of his writings. The very same intellectualistic understanding of the connection between moral reflection and the moral life affects also the understanding of the connection between MPML and the moral instructions suffused in his other works. James was deeply upset about the poor response to his lecture essay, and the reason for this lies in his readers’ – and listeners’ – misunderstanding of both these entanglements. He lamented such a misreading with the very same force with which he

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complained about the misunderstandings of his conception of truth as he portrays it in his Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. I suspect that, in his replies to these latter misunderstandings, James tried to give some instructions to remedy also the former misreading, and this is precisely because in order to appreciate the arguments advanced in MPML what is needed is a correct grasp of the picture of truth built into it. This shows, at least, how systematic and precise James’ reflection was, and how misled are those detractors who portray his philosophy as lacking of rigor in his thinking. The difficulty of appreciating James’ deep philosophical sensibility and precision is due to its contrast with the elusiveness of the material worked on. The sharp mind and arguments of James look watered down by the nature of their very objects of inquiry, which are by their nature as variegated, fuzzy and motley as the lives in which they are experienced. Therefore, James’ chief, self-proclaimed goal, that is ‘the re- instatement of the vague [and inarticulate] to its proper place in our mental life’ (James 1890a: 254), requires a work that is as much accurate as sophisticated, one easy to miss due to the flamboyant character of the trail it must follow to chase its raw materials. This lesson holds both for his treatment of ethics, and for the understanding of his overall conception of philosophical activity. A resourceful reading of James’ philosophical project that is attentive to these questionings is C. H. Seigfried (1990), in which the author engages in a thoughtful analysis of James’ claims to systematicity, of their difficulties, shortcomings and misunderstandings. 4. A rough list of which numbers – in addition to the literature discussed or quoted along the essay – J. K. Roth 1965, M. R. Slater 2009, B. Brennan 1961, A. Edel 1976, E. K. Suckiel 1982, G. H. Bird 1997, and J. Campbell 1981. 5. Perry (1935: 250). 6. An analogous move is made by some recent accounts of James’ philosophy. See, for example, L. Gunnarsson 2010, and D. W. Bjork 1988. Although very interesting both in their general point and for their insights into James’ conception of philosophy as therapy, without doubt a major theme in James’ intellectual biography, these readings tend to portray James’ reflective discourse to a mere outcome of his personal strivings and idiosyncrasies. Even though I think that a detailed acquaintance with James’ life represents a necessary element for the understanding of many of his ideas, I resist the reduction of the latter to the former. At least, some distinctions must be traced. In a nutshell, James’ broader considerations about the nature of philosophy and the motives for philosophizing – the idea that one’s temperament is a major factor in one’s philosophical investigations – recalls an immediate connection between biography and philosophy, so that it is fair to say that when he speaks about them it is not only the philosopher James speaking, but the very man – and, moreover, he is not speaking only to philosophers, but to the flesh and blood human beings beneath them animating their thoughts. However, such anxieties are philosophical anxieties bearings on our lives and thus their discussion should proceed at a reflective level, even if their objects are the human beings with their questionings as they are expressed in their lives and practices. As regards James’ (slightly) more limited considerations about the nature of morality, mindedness and worldliness the connection between biography and philosophy must be complicated, and although it is fair to say that some happenings in James’ life prompted him to some reflections and shaped his way of seeing things, I resist this as merely the last thing to say about them. There is an activity of reflective underpinning that is beyond the discussion of morality or the nature of the mind, which is both instigated by, and bears on, our concrete lives and biographies, but whose dialectic and investigations are philosophical through and through. Russell B. Goodman puts this idea beautifully by saying that James’ complaint that he was ‘unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being’ is itself “of course […] a philosophical statement” (Goodman 1990: 58). A similar concern is voiced by James Conant and Piergiorgio Donatelli about the understanding of

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the connection between biography and philosophy in Wittgenstein and in other great authors. See Conant 2001, and Donatelli (1998: 179-85). It was Wittgenstein himself who, speaking with Maurice Drury about good philosophical works, responded to Drury’s comment that ‘I always enjoy reading William James. He is such a human person,’ by remarking ‘Yes, that is what makes him a good philosopher; he was a real human being’ (Drury 1984: 121). 7. Gale (1999: 26). 8. Gale (1999: 32). Gale mounts a very elegant and elaborate ‘ladder argument,’ running through nearly half his book, in which several variants of this principle are given as he brings into his initial ‘practical syllogism’ different elements of James’ thought. I can’t do justice to the complexity of his argument here, although I will indirectly go back to it later while presenting at more length my own reading of James’ characterization of truth. I will save a detailed analysis and confrontation with Gale’s powerful reading of James for another occasion, and I would like to thank prof. Gale for his very thoughtful advices and guidance during some very stimulating conversations on our disagreements. 9. For a discussion of this theme see Bernstein 1983, Rorty 1982, Putnam 1995, and Margolis 20072. 10. It is my interpretative claim that James has in mind the kind of normative descriptions Kant made of human beings in his Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht. There are some historical evidences for this claim – collected by Perry in his masterwork on James’ life and thought – according to which James began reading Kant in his late twenties and early thirties, and the Anthropologie was the very first book of Kant he read. The first to remark James’ (and Peirce’s) debt to Kant was Dewey (1908a, 1925). Whereas Pierce’s debt to Kant is much more widespread and documented, James’ relationship with Kant is more difficult to ascertain and characterize, especially given James’ harsh criticism of Kant in his published works. However, as many biographers have documented, Kant’s Anthropologie was a book James admired, and which was very helpful in his early struggles for the elaboration of his own pragmatic conception of human beings. A very interesting examination of James’ engagements with Kantian themes is given by T. Carlson 1997. 11. Borrowing the expression used by Alice Crary and Rupert Read to describe Wittgenstein’s attitude toward the possibility of external elucidations of our human practices. 12. James (1897: 141). 13. Here James has in mind skepticism as it is has been conceived in the modern, Cartesian, tradition. However, there are some interesting connections also with Cavell’s characterization of skepticism. These are addressed by Russell Goodman (1990: ch. 1 & 3). 14. James (1897: 142). 15. Talisse & Hester (2004: 57). The authors present this conception as a result of James’ philosophical method of radical empiricism, whose connection with his pragmatism is the object of many investigations. Here I carry out my argument by using resources internal to James’ pragmatism, making no reference to his radical empiricism, although a parallel point could be made by exploring James’ conception of experience and experiencing as he pictures it in his writing on radical empiricism. 16. Talisse & Hester (2004: 68). 17. This point has been raised in a slightly different way by Ruth Anna Putnam in her discussion of how to read James’ insights about the role of character in our moral life. She writes “The title of William James’ only systematic essay in moral philosophy – “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” – suggests that a serious systematic thought about morality needs to focus on a whole life” (Putnam 1990: 68). 18. James (1899: 5). 19. The resoluteness is about the kind of reading James requires one to engage in while reading MPML. I use the term resolute as a reference to the reading that James Conant and Cora Diamond,

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among others, gave of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A resolute reading is one which beware us how to read a certain text, and in particular how to read its statements in order to get the significance that the phrasing in which they are expressed tries to convey. For this reason, using the word resolute does not indicate a kind of interpretation of the text, but rather it points to a program of comprehension of the text: not what the author is saying, but rather what is he doing. While in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, as the authors cited have brilliantly showed us, this methodological instruction is explicit and self-standing, in James’ MPML the instruction emerging from the dialectic of the essay can be fully apprehended only in the light of his general conception of philosophical problems that he fully explores in other text. It is thus my interpretative claim that in order to understand the kind of work James is doing in MPML one must look to his understanding of the nature of philosophical inquiries –and in particular to its characterization of the place of truth in morality. 20. James (1897: 204). 21. Cora Diamond wrote extensively on the dangerousness of what she calls ‘a moralization of morality,’ reading James as an author whose philosophy was driven by similar concerns. See in particular, Diamond 1997. 22. James (1897: 141). 23. This conception of the philosophical inquiry as the clarification of our activities and forms of life from the within has been explored at depth by Wittgenstein, who was a reader of James and praised him for stressing the importance of such an aspect. See Wittgenstein (1959: § 350) and Wittgenstein (20094: II § 366). For a detailed analysis of Wittgenstein’s debts to James, see Goodman 2002. The expression ‘sideways on’ is taken from John McDowell 1979, whose use of it is inspired by his resourceful reading of Wittgenstein (and Aristotle). 24. For a critical assessment of the book by Franzese, see Marchetti 2011 where I spell out in more detail our disagreements as well as our like-mindedness on both this point and the wider reading of the whole of James’ moral philosophy. 25. James (1897: 143). 26. James (1897: 143). 27. James (1897: 134). 28. The characterization of thick ethical concepts – and their difference from thin ones – is spelled out by Bernard Williams 1985. The distinction James is drawing here is close to the one Williams is interested in defending, and also its critical purposes are not unlike, although it is embedded in a very different conceptual apparatus. 29. James (1897: 134). 30. My terminological choices could be misleading, since by speaking of ‘invention’ – and contrasting it with ‘discovery’ – I could suggest the idea that here James is claiming that we ‘create’ values. However, I keep the world ‘invention’ because it is the one James uses in these passages, and here I’m trying to show how James uses it in reference to the stance we can take toward facts, one from which their values emerge. I would like to thank Akeel Bilgrami, who raised some perplexities on my use of ‘invention’ and gave me some useful suggestions to clarify my own thoughts on the matter. In my understanding of James’ conception of moral values I have been inspired by Bilgrami’s writings on enlightenment and enchantment, in which he portrays with great clarity and insight the contrast between an enchanted and a disenchanted conception of values. See, in particular, Bilgrami 2010. 31. For a survey of these themes, together with an interesting proposal of an alternative genealogy of their emergence, see Donatelli 2005. 32. James (1890a: 195). 33. Myers (1986: 70). 34. James (1897: 145).

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35. This is what Russell B. Goodman, referring to Emerson and the American transcendentalist movement, has called a ‘voluntaristic picture of knowledge,’ according to which ‘to know something […] one must do something, taking a special attitude or stance’ (Goodman 1990: 56). ‘According to James a precondition for certain kinds of knowing or “communication with the nature of things” is an act or attitude of the knowing subject’ (Goodman 2002: 70). 36. James (1897: 146). 37. James (1897: 147). 38. James (1897: 148). 39. James (1897: 148). 40. James (1897: 149-50). 41. James (1897: 152). 42. James (1897: 153). 43. James (1897: 154). 44. James (1897: 155). 45. James (1897: 155-6). 46. James, quite reasonably indeed, even relying on a very liberal conception of scientific inquiry, had a pre-Kuhnian conception of scientific discourse. However, I guess that, accordingly to some of his own innovative reflections on the character of psychological science and its developments in the nineteen century, he would have praised the guiding lines of Kuhn’s insights about paradigm changes and the value ladenness of observations as pragmatic ideas. For a brilliant inquiry into James’ conception of scientific discourse, see Bordogna 2008. 47. James (1897: 157-8). 48. James (1897: 158). The passage continues “[w]e should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocations is the strongest for the moral life.” This latter remark is surely tempted by utilitarian concerns about the inclusiveness of moral ideas, but again these normative concerns are re-interpreted by James along non-foundational lines, as exhortations rather than as principles. 49. MPML has a last section in which James quarrels about the difference that the existence of god would make for his discourse on the nature of ethics. He asks whether, given his characterization of the relationship between moral reflection and the moral life, the postulation of some divine spectator would make some difference in our way of portraying it. I tend to downplay the importance of this section in the architecture of essay, not because it is uninteresting, but rather because there James tackles a question that, despite its pertinence, is external to James’ main line of argumentation and does not add anything to the main argument of the essay. In fact, there James discusses some important issues that are more in the line of continuity with his other well-known essay The Will to Believe, which are but an integration of the discourse of MPML. The two essays share many point of contact in some crucial aspects, but I think that, for their proper understanding, it is better to keep them separated and read them as two arrows pointing in the same direction rather than as two strings of the very same argumentation sharing many of their materials. I cannot pursue the analogy further here. 50. Rivers of ink has been spilled over James’ notion of truth. At the risk of appearing ingenuous, here I will not discuss any of the relevant literature – since that would go beyond the scope of the present essay –, and will proceed straight to a very personal survey of Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth in order to sort out those central insights of James’ position that are congenial to the larger point I am making in the present essay. Still, I think that the ‘ethical path’ through which I articulate James’ notion of truth represents a major strand in his overall conception. 51. James (1907: 37). 52. James (1907: 42).

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53. James (1907: 42). 54. James (1907: 104). 55. James (1907: 97). 56. James (1907: 97). 57. James (1907: 119). 58. James (1909: 5). 59. James (1909: 43). 60. For example, in metaphysical terms, as the opposition between Monism vs. Pluralism. For a discussion on these lines, one relevant for the ethical discourse, see Bernstein 1977, 2010; Goodman (forthcoming); and O’Shea 2000. 61. James (1899a: 132). 62. James (1899a: 133). 63. James (1899a: 149). 64. James (1897: 159). 65. James (1899b: 150). 66. James (1899b: 163). 67. Putnam (1997a: 293). 68. Putnam (1994: 217). 69. Putnam (1994: 223). Hilary Putnam has reinstated this point in Putnam 2004. Ruth Anna Putnam has elaborated this insight in Putnam 1985, 1987, and 1998. 70. James (1890b: 565-6). 71. James (1897: 148).

ABSTRACTS

In what follows I shall investigate how the notions of truth and invention inform our moral life. William James explored at depth this theme in his seminal essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (MPML). I will claim that the dialectics of the essay cannot be apprehended independently from the understanding of the moral psychology and epistemology James elaborates in his writings on pragmatism and the philosophy of mind. In fact, once framed in the relevant perspective, the essay conveys a very different and more radical position that the one usually acknowledged. In MPML James engages in an inquiry into the nature of moral thought and its ability to meet the difficulties of the moral life it should address. The essay criticizes a certain image of moral reflection by questioning its underlying assumptions about the nature of mindedness and the place of truth in the moral life. I shall thus articulate the discussion of James’ essay along two directions, one methodological and one substantive. They are, respectively, the anti-foundational and anti-theoretical character of moral reflection, and the rethinking of the relationship we have with our interiority that is relevant for ethics as informed by the notion of truth.

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AUTHOR

SARIN MARCHETTI

Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy sarin.marchetti[at]gmail.com

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Free Spirits Idealism and Perfectionism

Sophie Djigo

Introduction

1 The current interest in moral perfectionism owes much to Stanley Cavell’s works on the constitution of Emersonian perfectionism. If perfectionism can be considered as an ethical dimension already present in Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical quest for good life, it is important to underline the link between studies flourishing today on this issue and what one may call the “Emerson revival.” I am struck by the similarities between this current revival and the “Emerson boom” that happened in the German- speaking world and the fin de siècle Austria, about a century ago. Comparing these two Emerson waves should lead us to a better understanding of the European affiliation with moral perfectionism, which is reflected in the importance Cavell attaches to Nietzsche.

2 In his introduction of This New Yet Unapproachable America, Cavell includes two texts, the first one from Nietzsche and the second from Emerson, and develops paths of philosophical “circulation.” He continues with comments on an excerpt from the beginning of Genealogy of Morals, saying that he is first and foremost interested in the kind of reorientation that Nietzsche inflicts on moral philosophy. That is: Nietzsche does not so much wonder who we are (since we are strangers to ourselves), as where we may find ourselves – if at all. “What chance” Nietzsche asks, “do we have of finding ourselves one day?” For Cavell, this question appears like an echo of Emerson’s essay “Experience,” which starts precisely with the question: “Where do we find ourselves?”1

3 The similarity between Emerson and the greatest European immoralist shows the ethical influence of Emerson’s works, especially as a moral experimenter, “an endless seeker” as he depicts himself in “Circles.” That ethics supposes a quest, and not a set of given principles or values; that it implies that one ought to look for one’s own path, for a personal way of living and for a way of inheriting a common culture; that we are unceasingly trying to reach a better self, a possible self – all these elements are shared

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by Emerson as well as his German reader Nietzsche and also his Austrian admirer, Robert Musil. By looking more closely at the influence the American minister had on Nietzsche and Musil, as well as at their ways of re-appropriating Emerson’s legacy, we can come to outline the idea of a certain version of moral perfectionism, which would be a kind of ethics peculiar to free spirits.

4 My goal for this paper is twofold. First, I want to point out congruencies between these three thinkers, (congruencies that are ultimately based on Emerson’s influence on both European thinkers) and to give an account of moral perfectionism on the basis of the figure of “the free spirit” (freier Geist), which appears to play a crucial role in the ethical reflections of all three of them. Secondly, I will focus on the tension between idealism and pragmatism and the way in which it is affecting the ethics of the free spirit. Roughly speaking, the free spirit is characterized by his or her ability to think for him – or herself – an autonomy which also constitutes a moral deed. There is thus an ethical demand for thoughts we are personally convinced of, rather than for thinking something because everybody does so. Considering that expressing one’s conviction is in itself an ethical demand, and in this regard perfectionism tends toward pragmatism. However, a further question arises: if the personal quest for a better self is at the heart of moral perfectionism, are we not in need of an ideal of what this better self should look like? In other words, does moral perfectionism imply at least the temptation of idealism (if not idealism at all)? And is there not a contradiction between the practical nature of self-affirmation and the attainment of moral ideals?

5 This question is all the more worth posing since, as we know, Emerson is usually presented as a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement, which is a version of idealism. Nietzsche’s view of moral values has likewise been defined as “philological idealism,”2 and Musil’s reflections on ethics are torn between a sharp criticism of idealism and the constant insistence on the need for ideals in moral life. I will argue that, if the free spirit is to be considered as a figure of moral perfectionism, we should neither take it to be an idealist nor an anti-idealist pragmatist notion. In order to grasp the originality and the point of moral perfectionism as a pursuit of a better future self, it is necessary to analyze the complex role ideals play in moral practices. And I think it is very important to differentiate anti-idealism and a complete rejection of moral ideals. I will argue that the free spirit, while anti-idealist, remains attached to ideals that can guide one’s attempt to personal improvement.

I. The Free Spirit and Moral Perfectionism

6 My point in this first section is not to give any definition of what moral perfectionism is or should be, as I am convinced that any such attempt would be reductive regarding this ethical dimension of our lives. I would rather propose an image of what it means to be perfectionist in the sense of the free spirit. This figure embodies the exploration of creativity in morality, and its freedom is not a natural or anthropological property, but the result of a process of liberation. Thus, the freedom of the free spirit is never acquired, it always remains to be achieved to such an extent that action is interwoven in a dynamic ethics. Here, a parallel can be made between this idea of a freedom we are always looking for and the Emersonian “unattained but attainable self.”

7 We know this famous expression, according to a moral action must be seen as a renunciation of who we already are. To be an ethical agent requires that we give up our

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often comfortable and secure place, our ready-made or realized self, in the hope of another self, which is possible (attainable). There is a strong recommendation in these words of leaving reality to discover a possible self and a possible way of living, at the risk of loosing oneself. This preference for possibility is also at stake in a passage Cavell quotes from Nietzsche about a call for the unknown, for leaving our place in order to try to find ourselves. The free spirit has the strength to abandon his habits, his social and moral inherited values. It is not a matter of bringing a new foundation or of replacing an older order by a new one; the point is rather to abandon the very idea of grounds and to re-appropriate one’s culture in a critical and personal way. This is the very challenge of the free spirit: not to rebuild morality, but rather to learn to think on one’s own.

8 It is this capacity that defines the free spirit in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, when he says : We call ‘free spirit’ the one who thinks in a different way from what he is expected to do regarding his origin, his milieu, his condition and his position, or regarding the prevailing opinions of his time.3

9 The autonomy of one’s thought presupposes the difference between the real and the possible, hence the capacity to be able to see what is possible beyond what is real, beyond social conventions and external determinations. The thing is that, according to Nietzsche, most of us are used to thinking in a realistic way, whereby “realistic” means a poor dependence on the already-made. To be realistic, in this sense, means to be conservative and to avoid doing something different if it runs the risk of not fitting into our real world, or of remaining too far removed from ordinary life. This kind of inertia is the opposite of the feeling of self-dissatisfaction that drives the free spirit. The free spirit is motivated by the conviction that a better world and a better self are possible. Thus, the free spirit is accurately defined by Musil as the man of possibility.

10 Indeed, Musil’s anthropological typology is rooted in the Enlightenment’s traditional interest in possibility and utopia. I shall discuss the link between idealism and this sense of possibility in the next sections. What I want to point out now is the distinction Musil makes in his novel between two types of men: the man of reality and the man of possibility. Regarding this second type, he writes in The Man without Qualities: The man who is endowed with [the sense of possibility] won’t say, for instance: here happened, will happen, must happen such and such things; but he’ll imagine: here could, should happen such and such things; and when he’s told that a thing is just like it is, he thinks that it could be just as well different. Then, we could simply define the sense of possibility as the faculty to think everything that could be “as well,” and not to attach more importance to what is than to what is not.4

11 It is striking that Musil uses Emerson’s characterization of the free spirit to describe this man of possibility (who is also the man without qualities after whom the novel is named). Plenty of commentators have underlined the proximity of Musil’s man of possibility (named Ulrich in the novel) and Nietzche’s freier Geist, without, however, taking the next step, which would lead to Emerson. The connection with Nietzsche appears explicitly in the novel, in a passage in which Ulrich is having a conversation on morality with his sister Agathe. This is an amazing moment when the couple reflects on Ulrich’s suggestion of the “ethics of the next step.” This conception takes ethics to be a dynamic process, stressing the morality of the agent rather than that of the action and taking account of his motives rather than the practical results of his actions. In this ethical perspective, rules are not the determinants of action, because they are too

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general to be operative in every particular case. There is no social or stable criterion for acting, so that Ulrich is advocating for “moral robbers,” who are defying social morality in order to defend their sense of truthfulness and their convictions. Suppressing the double constraint of coherence and social conformity, what matters is the next step; not what has been done or real past deeds are decisive, but a possible future action is the real concern.

12 It is in this context that Ulrich refers to Nietzsche’s freier Geist.5 From what has just been said, one could think that Nietzsche’s immoralism should be invoked in order to sustain the ethics of the next step as a morality without external groundings. In a startling reversal, this invocation is introduced as an answer and, moreover, as a way of limiting Agathe’s boldness when she discusses the ethics of the next step. Taking her brother at his words, and testing his sympathy for “moral robbers” and Dostoievskyan criminals, she asks “What if it was me committing a murder?” In asking this question, she points out the idealistic tendency of her brother’s notion of ethical possibility in a very subtle way. Thus, she brings their moral concerns back to reality in a very pragmatic way: What if she were killing her husband?

13 In this attempt to test the practicability of immoralism, Agathe compels her brother to reconsider his own discourse on ethics. Here, the reference to Nietzsche will help him to defend a more pragmatic vision of the free spirit: “Nietzsche himself,” Ulrich says, “enjoins free spirits to observe certain outward rules for the sake of their inner freedom.”6 In this scene, Nietzsche becomes the guarantor of moral order! The difficulty is to reach such a compromise between outward social morality and inner personal creative ethics, or, in other words, to imagine new possibilities of acting in the limits of social agreement. It is another way of expressing the tension I have already evoked between the ideal and the real, since the sense of possibility appears as an idealistic movement of thought whereas social rules embody the reality of our social practices.

14 In another conversation between brother and sister, which is described a few pages before this scene, Ulrich had already quoted Emerson, without mentioning his name, in order to show the difficulty of immoralism and his demand that immoralism should be another morality, a stronger one and not relativism. The quotation is in fact from “Circles,” where Emerson writes: “The virtues of society are vices of the saint.”7

15 This statement distinguishes between social values and a higher morality which is an ideal horizon at this point of the reflection. When Agathe speaks of killing her husband, she tries to rely on Emerson’s quotation, and her justification consists in considering her murder as an antisocial action, not an immoral one. In order to ward off Agathe’s appeal to murder, Ulrich feels the need to defends himself by distancing himself from Emerson: “I didn’t say that the vices of society were virtues of the saint!”

16 This reversal proves his sensibility to moral limits and the refusal to (mis-)understand immoralism as a complete reversal of traditional values. Being a free spirit does not mean that one should think murder is good. A mere reversal would be far too easy and lead to absurdities. True immoralism does not consist in rejecting all actual values, but in being able to re-appropriate these values through a critical reflection and to envision a higher morality, free from compromises. In this sense, the free spirit is also able to account for the personal conflict between, on the one hand, his inner conviction

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and its demand for truthfulness and, on the other, conformity and its propensity to obey moral and social rules.

17 To go deeper into the filiation between Musil, Nietzsche and Emerson, we must also relate Nietzsche’s notion of the freier Geist to Emerson, who is the first to employ the notion of the free spirit. Indeed, I am convinced that Nietzsche’s idea of freier Geist was modeled on and is a refinement of Emerson’s original conception of the “free spirit,” which, Emerson tells us, “sympathizes not only with the actual form, but with the power or possible forms.”

18 This is, I think, the very key to our understanding of the link between ethics and the sense of possibility in Nietzsche and Musil, who appear to have taken this sentence seriously and to have developed it in personal and remarkable ways. Other passages support this idea of the existence of two types of men, one of which is feeble-minded, corresponding to Nietzsche’s slave and Musil’s man of reality, while the other is gifted with moral strength and power, like Nietzsche’s master or Musil’s man of possibility. Thus, Emerson writes also in his essay Power: “The feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms.”8

19 This again suggests that Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche and Musil’s conception of immoralism as an ethical implementation of the powerful sense of possibility is not to be underrated. Immoralism is neither conceived as moral relativism nor as cruelty or a total absence of morality. Instead, it is “proving us,” as Musil has it, “that life works also differently.”9 It is in this denial of an absolute approach to any existing morality that the sense of possibility constitutes an ethical power. It is the power to change the real in order to reach the “unattained, but attainable self.”

II. Emerson: “The Ideal is the Real”

20 According to Emerson, the capacity to think on one’s own corresponds to what he calls “self-reliance,” the power to rely on what one is and thinks. Thus, Emerson exhorts us in his essay entitled Self-Reliance: “Trust thyself! Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”10

21 To trust oneself requires that one frees oneself from social conformity and that one is capable of relying on one’s imagination of possible ways of living. This exhortation is made possible by the discovery of the very nature of reality. Reality is not a constraining prison, as Emerson seems to depict it in his essay Fate. If we are helpless in the face of natural forces that constitute our destiny, we can recover power and freedom only by adopting another conception of the real. Indeed, Emerson already wrote in his early lectures: “The Ideal is the Real. The Actual is but the apparent and the Temporary.”11

22 This identity between the ideal and the real is surprising in many ways. First, it seems to obscure the deep hiatus between ideality and reality in so far as the proper definition of ideality supposes that it is not sensible, that it does not belong to our perceptual world. Shall we read this identification as a sign of Emerson’s idealism, a landmark concept expressing his wish to order and conceive reality according to ideals? One has to acknowledge that Emerson’s resort to the ideal is very subtle and has to be distinguished from philosophical idealism such as Kant’s or Hegel’s. If we link this

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quotation to several essays written in the 1840s, for instance Experience or Nominalist and Realist, we can take Emerson to be saying that the real is never given, that it is always to be looked for, but not only as part of a quest for truth about the world. His point is rather to arouse our attention to the fact that the real, since it is never given, might be shaped by us – shaped by our ideals.

23 Far from defending a kind of Platonic metaphysical realism, then, Emerson is tackling the idea that immediate experience is more important than possible experience. We seem to prefer an ontology of the actual to one of the possible. Emerson shows that the important difference to be made is not between the real and the possible, but rather between the actual reality and the possible one. From this point of view, the role of the ideal is neither to move us away from reality nor to cast reality in an idealistic mold, but to revive the power of our imagination by proposing ideas of a possible world (and of a possible self). Thus, the point is not to choose between an ideal world and a real one, but to find how to realize ideals in our practical life.

24 Indeed, the representation of an ideal world different from the one we inhabit is explicitly rejected by Emerson in his late works. In his journals, for example, he evokes one of his conversation with his friend Sampson Reed: In town I also talked with Sampson Reed, of Swedenborg and the rest. “It is not so in your experience, but it is so in the other world.” “Other world?” I reply, “there is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact […]”12

25 This refusal to confine ideals in a second other world indicates an evolution in Emerson’s thought from transcendentalism to pragmatism. If it makes sense to hold on to ideals within a pragmatic context, it is only to the extent that they have an effect on our world. The purpose seems in fact to transform reality through ideals; Emerson speaks in this regard of “the transformation of genius into a practical power.”13 Likewise, the “true romance which the world exists to realize” refers to the imagination of possibility, in the Emersonian version of idealism. This transformation is not obvious. Indeed, not all our ideals can be carried out, and too often, theoretical boldness leads to ideals which are deprived of the slightest practical value. The idealist must also be a realist, otherwise ideals will remain empty dreams.

26 This transformation requires experimentation and expression. Experimentation is needed to explore the imaginative area of possibilities. The renunciation of secure certitudes is not necessarily painful, since it also constitutes a liberation and opens onto new possibilities. In Circles Emerson depicts himself as an experimenter, saying: I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.14

27 Ethics appears in this quotation as an endless quest, bringing morals into play unceasingly, confronting ideals with particular contexts. Like the real, ethics is never given, never acquired, always to seek and to find through attention and imagination. In this sense, ethics is itself an experimentation without the purpose of reaching absolute principles. The fact that no virtue should be taken as definitive is not something negative, since it makes it possible to imagine different possibilities without being censored by sacred moral values.

28 This idea is also related to one of the elements which constitutes Emerson’s skepticism : the uncertainty of our perception of reality, and therefore, our lack of knowledge of reality. This issue has been brilliantly developed by David Robinson. Commenting on Emerson’s Experience, he argues:

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The problem of not knowing, stated earlier as threatened perception, has become the solution of not knowing, stated now as ‘inscrutinable possibility.’15

29 This indicates that our relationship to the world is problematic in two ways: first, because our attachment to reality through habits prevents us from imagining how to change and to improve reality; second, because our lack of knowledge of reality is also an obstacle to our capacity of acting in a blurred and uncertain world. The limits of our knowledge, instead of sustaining skepticism, is also a means to overcome our deficient link to reality by the sense of possibility, even if skepticism persists through this sense insofar as it tackles ideals and their articulation to our practices.

30 To go further, we can assert that the difficulty of this sense of possibility relies on the fact that the imagination of new possibilities of living can only develop from real experiences, because of the risk of abandoning the real ground. It is not easy to get free from social conventions and actual habits, and at the same time to keep a sense of what is realizable. The aim of the Emersonian free spirit must not be confounded with “manipular attempts to realize the world of thought”16 which would be an expression of idealism proper. Instead of elaborating a theoretical yet unattainable world (idealism), the free spirit uses his culture and his past as a springboard to imagine possibilities which will not be disconnected from reality. Emerson’s criticism of idealism can also be grasped in his descriptions of contemporary utopian experimentations such as Fruitlands or Brook Farm. When he comments on his friends’ Lane and Alcott plan to establish a communitarian farm, Emerson elaborates on the very problem of idealism. Indeed, idealism is initially presented as a hypocritical attitude replacing action and the courage to act by beautiful speeches and theories. But this is not exactly the problem. Let us remember what Emerson says when he confesses his own withdrawal in Fruitlands project: “I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.”17

31 Emerson’s insincerity must not be seen as a betrayal of his ideals, but rather as the expression of his skepticism towards ideals which seem far too theoretical and disconnected from reality. Mistrusting theory also as a flipside, namely that one puts one’s trust in the evanescent experience. Attention to experience and its changes results in a change in mood, say when enthusiasm is replaced by skepticism. Theories are often too general and unable to fit into the particularity of changing experience. Because Lane’s and Alcott’s utopia appears as too theoretical, it is doomed to fail. It was already the case with Brook Farm. In Experience, Emerson goes back over this failed reformation attempt and indicates to what extent skeptical doubt is necessary for the pursuit of ideals, insofar as it reminds the demand for practicability: If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry.18

32 Emerson’s insincerity thus sheds a light on the initial identity between the ideal and the real. This identification must be understood through the skeptical imperative that ideals should be attached to practical values and can be realized in our world. Insincerity is not a renunciation to ideals, but a refusal of pure theories unable to deal with our world. In this perspective, the ideal and the real are strongly interlinked, since the first is necessary to change the second, and the second is the only world we live in, which includes limits that the sense of possibility must take into account.

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III. Nietzsche, Self-Knowledge and Idealism

33 While thinking of self-improvement as a central element of moral perfectionism, one could evoke Nietzsche’s superman (Übermensch) which seems to provide such an image of a better self. Consider on the one hand, the implication of the concept of melioration in the “superman,” and on the other hand, Cavell’s references to Nietzsche as a figure of moral perfectionism that gives rise to controversy about the potentially elitist nature of perfectionism. I shall consider whether Nietzsche’s free spirit corresponds to the elitist image of the superman. I would argue that the free spirit is another, more accessible figure than the mysterious superman and that it would be misleading to confound these two different images. To spur the traces of Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson, is particularly fruitful in order to grasp the place of the free spirit in his philosophy. It also helps explain his continuous challenge to articulate ideals and practices and his rejection of the dualist opposition (distinction) between theory and practice.

34 The free spirit appears most explicitly in Human, All Too Human, a book dedicated to “free spirits.”19 Commenting on this work in Ecce Homo, he writes : Human, All Too Human is the monument reminding a crisis. It is entitled a book for free spirits: almost each of its sentences expresses a victory – by it, I’ve freed myself from what is not involved in my nature. Is not involved, for instance, idealism.20

35 This remark calls attention to the fact that, in order to understand what a free spirit is, one should connect it with the criticism of idealism rather than with the idea of excellence and the promotion of virtues which are at stake in the superman’s figure. Furthermore, Cavell’s quotation in its turn refers to this issue of idealism, insofar as it begins like that: “We are strangers to ourselves.” Indeed, this estrangement reveals the contradiction between the need for knowledge, which is also typical of the philosopher, and a lack of self-knowledge. How can we claim truth and knowledge whereas we do not even possess this primary knowledge of ourselves? This paradox is one possible way of making the free spirit emerge, since he appears as the bearer of the quest for self-knowledge.

36 Self-knowledge is the purpose of the free spirit, which is to say that he is not as concerned with truth as with probity and truthfulness. He is interested in being aware of his own ideas, conceptions, preferences, and his problem is to develop them without being influenced by prevailing opinions and social norms. Nietzsche’s analysis of the philosophical knowledge impulse shows that philosophers aim at gathering the variety of experiences, in all their multiplicity and evanescence, in an ideal unity. And they are doing this by building systems which sort out elements of reality, abandoning those elements which resist being integrated in the system. In other words, the philosophical task consists in reducing the unknown to the already-known. This is the proper task of idealism: it reduces reality to an ideal order, a product of thought.

37 Thus, idealism is an attempt to flee from reality, to ignore the unknown and to reject what Nietzsche also calls the tragic dimension of life: the conflict between contradictory impulses which resist unification. Unlike the idealist philosopher, the free spirit is the one who is able to recognize both this conflict and its passionate nature. Moreover, he is looking for the unknown, accepting the multiplicity of experience beyond the frame of our concepts and the possibility of different conceptual perspectives. This open-mindedness leads him to surpass himself; a movement which

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characterizes perfectionism and presupposes the experience of loosing the realized self in order to look for the possible, still unknown self. On this point, Nietzsche is very close to Emersonian perfectionism, a moral quest based on the discovery of unimagined aspects of one’s personality.

38 Thus, the free spirit is defined as a realist. Instead of looking for an ideal perfection, or the achievement of his best qualities and virtues, he is focusing on the reality of his own tendencies and plurality of affects. By doing this, he stops avoiding life. The emphasis on life prevents us from an idealistic understanding of perfectionism here: if there is a demand for self improvement, it does not consist in the elaboration on an ideal of perfection and the subsequent attempt to reach it. On the contrary, the fundamental issue concerns the gap between thought and life, between the ideal and the real, and the aim of the free spirit is to bridge it. Now, according to Nietzsche, life is engaging our body and a range of passions and interlinked and conflicting affects.

39 Idealism is precisely the tendency to forget this bodily dimension of ours while it is in fact the very origin of our ideals and of our ways of thinking. In the genealogical perspective, ideals are “the distorted expressions of our body’s desire,”21 a form of our affective impulses which aims at the same time at making this bodily origin disappear. To the extent that these impulses are anchored in personal preferences and subjectivity, one can understand why Nietzsche also considers ideals as values: they constitute various evaluations, and evaluation is in itself a way of affirming one’s preference, the expression of one’s prevailing relationship of one’s body with life. The link between ideals and practices is reinforced in this conception of ideals as expressive of evaluations originated in our corporal dimension. As Nietzsche writes: Then comes the upper stage: the attempt to create an ideal (ein Ideal dichten). This precedes even the upper stage: precisely to live this ideal.22

40 The tragic aspect of our condition not only consists in the tension between different impulses at the basis of our thinking about the world, but also in the tension between thought (ideal) and life. At his point, the criticism against idealism opens up onto a strong double demand: first, the demand that life should be thought, grasped by our concepts and our language; second, the demand that ideals should be lived in practice. In my view, Nietzsche is not totally rejecting idealism (or philosophy); he is rather advocating a reciprocal conversion of thought and body (actions and affects). In this view, we can remember Nietzsche’s definition of ideals as “the coded language of affects” (Zeichnensprache der Affekte).23

41 If we sum up Nietzsche’s criticism against idealism, we can see that it is, on the one hand, very forcefully acting against metaphysics and systematization in philosophy, but also, on the other hand, involved in the movement of perfectionism as a quest related to self-knowledge. Indeed, by underlining the affective origin of ideals and of everyone’s perspective, Nietzsche is also propagating a form of soul-searching. His own point of view is anchored in a personal impulse. The power of his analysis is this deep lucidity, the acceptance of the link between his own way of thinking and his affects, from which results a deep self-reliance, the capacity to trust one’s body, preferences, and experiences, while acknowledging that these elements are not absolute and universal producers of truth.

42 In face of this modesty and self-awareness of Nietzsche, Heinz Wismann suggested to refer to his notion of idealism as a “philological idealism” in order to account for both Nietzsche’s sharp criticism of idealism and his recognition of the status of his own

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assertions: these are also rooted in an idiosyncratic life of affects, biased by this instinctive ground, irremediably subjective. That is why the issue of idealism leads him to re-evaluate the priority given to “truth” in regards of truthfulness. The need for truth corresponds to a certain impulse and a particular (reductionist) relation to reality, whereas truthfulness indicates the relation to one’s own preferences and probity, which do not require us to reject ideals, but instead to live them, to realize them in our life. The issues of truth and objectivity do not disappear, but they are not the topics Nietzsche is most interested in. He is concerned instead with our way of being truthful to our affective motives, like the free spirit who has been able to free himself from his own impulses by accepting them and the tendency to ignore them.

43 This perceptiveness is the ground of the next step to experiment, The example of free spirits offered by Nietzsche is Christopher Columbus, the great symbol of the quest for the unknown. The experiment (Versuch) characterizes the way of living like a free spirit. The genealogical approach continues its work of mining culture and prejudices, and allows the free spirit to explore step by step the unknown without preconceived ideas, being open to adventure and new discoveries. The experimental method is also a return to reality, to the solid world of our Erlebnisse. The scientific metaphor is not innocent: it expresses Nietzsche’s attachment and admiration for science as model of intellectual probity and truthfulness.

44 Nietzsche’s philosophy of exploration and his criticism of idealism are two sides of the same conception of ethics, understood as intellectual integrity and a search for ourselves. The purpose is still the attainment of knowledge, but in the specific form of self-knowledge that requires us to overcome the dualism opposing ideal and life. Self- knowledge implies the exploration of oneself, including one’s body, and to acknowledge one’s preferences and concerns. It involves a certain way of thinking by elaborating ideals conceived as being anchored in passions, and a certain way of living by trying to realize these ideals or to imagine other ones. In this view, exploring reality overlaps with imagining possibility. Free spirits find their own paths by relying on their past experiences as well as by being open to the adventure into the unknown.

IV. Musil, “An Idealist Without Idealism”

45 Robert Musil, who had no shame in confessing that he had strongly been influenced by both Emerson and Nietzsche, developed a version of the free spirit which tries to overcome the hiatus between the ideal and the real. My argument is that in the third section of the novel, Musil’s main character Ulrich represents the free spirit and that his story offers an image of moral perfectionism. In The Man without Qualities, the mathematician Ulrich is confronted with a painful experience: the failure of the successive utopia he has imagined. So, at the end of the second section of the novel, he is increasingly concerned with the urgency to bridge the gap between ideals and reality, the failure of which continues to threaten the possibility of action and of improvement. The plot can be summarized as follows: Ulrich wishes that human beings would act more fairly and to the purpose of a better life. But this desire comes up against the unrealizable nature of many ideals of a good life, or, on the contrary, against a lack of ideals in our practical lives From then on, the aim of the moralist Ulrich is to find ideals which are compatible with reality. This is the role of the sense of possibility.

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46 Trying to satisfy this requisite, Ulrich does not suggest an ideal system which would be better than the others. His change is not of a theoretical nature, but of a practical one: he adopts another attitude. This attitude consists in being open to the unexpected, to the unknown, and in acting step by step. The meeting with his sister brings an end to the theoretical moment of his life. He concludes that if he wants a fairer life, he has to find one himself: to find a personal way of being which is based on conviction. Here again, we can read Musil’s interest in conviction as being closely related to his reading of Emerson’s self-reliance. The ideal we are thus offered is to do only what we are convinced of, to stop doing anything which would be insignificant for us. In other words, Musil’s motto could be “Never act without conviction.”

47 The notion of conviction not only concerns our actions, but also our relation to ourselves. To act convincingly presupposes that we know ourselves well enough to be sure of the motives and meanings of our actions. Furthermore, this self-knowledge includes dissatisfaction with these motives and meanings: it is because I am not satisfied with what I did, wished or said, that I am trying to be different and to change myself by exploring ways of being myself which could be more compatible with my own changing idea of this “better self.”

48 From this point of view we can examine Musil’s rejection of idealism as the other side of his development of moral perfectionism. Indeed, Musil criticizes idealism insofar as idealism constitutes a metaphysical flight from reality. Idealism suggests ideals that are always unattainable and to which we can only aspire. Instead of living our ideals, we live for ideals which remain confined in the world of our thought. Musil employs the term “pragmatism” to refer to the cynical activism which is only concerned with the results, the performance of action, rather than its motives, its value. It is a kind of rough consequentialism.

49 A more positive notion of pragmatism emerges in the novel when Ulrich appears as a perfectionist concerned with the question how to live. The rejection of idealism opens up the ideal of motivation or conviction. This ideal is not unrealizable and it is rooted in the subjective and affective dimension of individual morality. Self-improvement is depicted as a search for what is important and makes sense. Self-transformation thus implies an exploration of this personal universe of motives and of our capacity to make sense of anything. That is why we can gain motivation only step by step, according to our capacity to be aware of reality, to make sense of our experience, to imagine possible motives and meanings. In the novel, this attempt to act with conviction is realized step by step through Ulrich’s conversations with Agathe, through their mutual trust, friendship and love. This itinerary to find who one can be includes a part of experiments and failures, which are inseparable from our practices. It must be pursued in the constant renewing of conviction. In Ulrich’s words: “Faith must not be an hour old!”24

50 Ideals, then, are nothing less than the representations of the self we could and would like to be. They are necessary for self-transformation since they constitute the temporary step to reach. If one needs self-knowledge in order to make clear who one wants to be or where to be in regard of the previous generation and of one’s culture, self-transformation is also sustaining this knowledge. Abandoning ideals would mean abandoning self-improvement and remaining the same, keeping one’s realized self. It is because he cannot bear this idea of moral stagnation and conservatism that Musil calls for self-transformation through conviction and re-appropriates the romantic and

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Nietzschean motto: “Become who you are!” His character in the novel is finally depicted as “an idealist without idealism,”25 a device which expresses that the reject of metaphysical idealism is accompanied by the attachment to ideals as representations of a possible better self.

V. Conclusion

51 The underestimated filiation between Emerson, Nietzsche, and Musil is peculiarly fruitful when it comes to the issue of moral perfectionism and its place in the debate opposing idealism and pragmatism in the 21th century. As the image of a peculiar type of man, the free spirit constitutes a way of depicting what moral perfectionism could look like and how it is related to ideals. The common ground of these three versions of the free spirit consists essentially in the notion of possibility. Possibility, usually seen as a logical concept in philosophy, is given an ethical importance. As such, it indicates a certain moral strength – call it self-reliance, probity, or conviction – which allows the individual to explore even the most obscure parts him or her-self, to be critical of oneself, and to accept the adventure of leaving this unsatisfied self and to search for a possible better one.

52 In this view, the sense of possibility is rather an ethical faculty than a purely intellectual power, since it involves self-criticism, accuracy, and imagination. But it makes sense only if it has practical effect, especially the effect of leading one to become who one is. Yet the ability to think on one’s own, while already conceived by our three thinkers as a moral act, is not in itself sufficient; their very purpose is not only the autonomy of one’s thought, but the power to act according to one’s own thought. This point allows us to argue that moral perfectionism is pragmatic insofar as it demands practical effects and actions. But this pragmatist orientation, because it is threatened by cynical activism or conformity, must be guided by personal ideals conveying the image of a better “unattained, but attainable” self.

NOTES

1. Emerson R.W., (1984), Experience, in J. Porte (ed.), Essays & Lectures, New York, Cambridge, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 471. 2. Cf. Wismann H. & Bollack M. (eds.), (1983), Philologie et herméneutique au XIXe siècle 2, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 3. Nietzsche F., (2000), Human, All Too Human, I, §255, trans. by G. Handwerk, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 155. 4. Musil R., (1978), Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,I, 4, in Gesammelte Werke, I, 9 Bänden, hrsg von Adolf Frisé, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlag, I, 4. My translation. I will refer to this novel by the abbreviation MoE. 5. In a brilliant paper, David Midgley is commenting on this passage and the connection between Musil and Nietzcshe on morality. Cf. Midgley D., (2003), Experiments of a Free Spirit: Musil’s

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Explorations of Creative Morality in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, in R. Görner & D. Large (eds.), Ecce Opus: Nietzsche-Revisionen im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 111-24. 6. MoE, II, 15. 7. Emerson R. W., Circles, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 411; MoE, II, 10. 8. Emerson R.W., Power, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 974. 9. MoE, II, 30. 10. Emerson R.W., Self-reliance, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 260. 11. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by R. E. Spiller, S. E. Whocher, and W. E. Williams, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1959, vol. 2, 227. 12. The Journal and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by W.H. Gilman et al., Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-82, vol.8, 182-3. 13. Emerson R. W., Experience, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 492. 14. Emerson R. W., Circles, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 412. 15. Robinson D. M., (1993), Emerson and the Conduct of Life. Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 61. 16. Emerson R. W., Experience, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 492. 17. Emerson R. W., Nominalist and Realist, in Essays and Lectures, cit., 587. 18. Ibid., 478. 19. We can read on this point the remarkable study by Wotling P., (2008), La philosophie de l’esprit libre, Introduction à Nietzsche, Paris, Champs Flammarion. 20. Nietzsche F., (2004), Ecce Homo, III, §1, trans. by A. M. Ludovici, Edinburgh and London, Courier Dover Publications, 82-3. 21. Blondel E., (1986), Nietzsche, le corps et la culture. La philosophie comme généalogie philologique, Paris, PUF, 85. 22. Nietzsche F., Posthumous Fragments, spring-autumn 1881, 11, [258], digital critical edition: [nietzschesource.org/texts/eKGWB]. 23. Nietzsche F., (2008), Beyond Good and Evil, §187, trans. by H. Zimmern, Radford, Wilder Publications, 60. 24. MoE, II, 12. 25. Musil R., (2009), Nachlass, NM VII/15/19 : “Ein Idealist ohne Idealismus,” Klagenfurter Ausgabe, Kommentierte digitale Edition sämtlicher Werke, Briefe und nachgelassener Schriften. Mit Transkriptionen und Faksimiles aller Handschriften. Hrsg von W. Fanta, K. Amann und K. Corino, Klagenfurt, Robert Musil-Institut der Universität Klagenfurt, DVD-Version.

ABSTRACTS

My goal for this paper is twofold. First, I want to point out congruencies between these three thinkers: Emerson, Nietzsche and Musil. Such congruencies are ultimately based on Emerson’s influence on both European thinkers and lead to an account of moral perfectionism based on the figure of “the free spirit” (freier Geist), which appears to play a crucial role in the ethical reflections of all three of them. Secondly, I will focus on the tension between idealism and pragmatism and the way in which it is affecting the ethics of the free spirit.

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The Difficulty of Moral Perfectionism Cavell and Diamond on Self-understanding, Disagreement and Nonsense in Ethics

Stefano Di Brisco

1 In what follows I want to consider a kind of inexpressiveness that can characterize our moral experience. The acknowledgement of the possibility of failure in trying to word the world – in finding adequate means of expression for our condition – deeply informs Cora Diamond’s conception of language and moral thought as well as her philosophical method. In particular, in her paper The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy (hereafter DRDP), Diamond is concerned with: […] experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present that kind of difficulty, of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one’s mind around. (DRDP: 99)

2 A difficulty of reality in Diamond’s sense is thus a resistance by reality to one’s ordinary modes of thinking and talking, the feeling of a mismatch between concepts and experience in which it is the nature of experience itself that deprives one of the words suitable to contain it. Importantly, this kind of difficulty may lead to a philosophical inadequacy to think these aspects of experience.

3 In this paper I want to show how a particular kind of moral conflict can be perspicuously described as a difficulty of reality. This conflict occurs when we lose the ability to conceive the moral world we inhabit as ours, when, that is, our self- conceptions clash with the requirements of morality and we find ourselves in the position of not being able to say what “morality” means for us anymore.

4 Stanley Cavell speaks in this vicinity of the possibility of repudiating morality when it threatens our integrity (Cavell 1979: 269). This distance between the subject and the world, the self and morality, which, in Cavell’s account of perfectionism, is a precondition for the development of an authentic moral perspective, is nonetheless neglected by meta-ethical analyses in which the prominent occurrences of ethical

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disagreements pertain principally to the correct application of evaluative terms. Indeed, if we construct a picture of disagreement according to which what morally opposes us is the assessment of a fact – Is death a just punishment for a prisoner? – or a judgment about a course of action – Is it courageous to commit suicide in the name of an ideal? –, there is no space for a question about the sources of the interest we may take in morality on the whole.

5 I begin by sketching Cavell’s analysis of disagreement in the light of his discussion of moral rationality. Then I will connect the topic with Diamond’s notion of the “difficulty of reality,” developing the link between Diamond’s and Cavell’s thought by using as an example a dialogue taken from Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road.

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6 In part III of The Claim of Reason Cavell criticizes the philosophical conception according to which the persistence of disagreement in some moral disputes compromises the possibility of considering moral thought as fully rational. According to Cavell, the need to anchor the rationality of moral discourse and thought in the resolution of every disagreement is a philosophical requirement laid down on the ground of an assumption about the nature of rationality and the role of moral argument. In particular, Cavell holds that a non-cognitivist analysis of disagreement rests upon the assumption that what renders an argument rational is its capacity to generate a shared conclusion from valid premises, and so that the aim of moral argument is to lead the parties towards the acceptance of such a conclusion (Cavell 1979: 254). This picture of moral rationality originates in an interest in comparing moral judgments with scientific ones, where the interest is informed by an empiricist conception of language as a neutral vehicle of contents – a conception that borrows from science and logic the epistemological standards of knowledge and objectivity (Cavell 1979: 173, 253).1 Cavell writes that:

7 If you begin by being struck with the peculiarity of ethical arguments as perhaps unsettleable, and struck with how different other questions are, then you will pick up examples from science which illustrate its capacity for agreement, and you will then have the idea, or illusion, that you know that, and why, science is rational and morality not (Cavell 1979: 263).

8 This is intended as a warning that the model of explanation we use determines the form of the problem under investigation. But it is not only a methodological reminder, for the empiricist picture of language also implies a stipulative conception of meaning, according to which the meanings of words are determined by the set of rules settled on the uses of the community of speakers. But if the meanings of the words we use were always already available, then there could not be any problem concerning the possibility of expression, or a difficulty in the way we use our words. So it is already possible to trace a link between Cavell’s and Diamond’s thought at this stage, since that conception of language has also been strongly resisted by Diamond. She writes that: Empiricism makes it appear as if we could not help having whatever words we needed for our experience: words which were at least adequate to represent it to ourselves, because whenever words for a kind of experience are lacking there is no difficulty in coining new ones. The only problem there might be would lie in communication with others, and would come from our ignorance for the standard use of some words. (Diamond 1988: 270)

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9 In order to resist this instrumental picture of language, Cavell offers examples of arguments whose conclusion is characterized by rational disagreement: his aim is to show that what meta-ethics considers a lack of rationality is just a fact of ordinary language. According to Cavell, a philosophical assessment of moral rationality should begin with ordinary examples of moral discourse, taken from a real human context. Having these examples in view, we are in the position of seeing that the philosophical theses that deny the rationality of morality (because it does not present certain features of what is considered as paradigmatic of rationality, namely logic and science) depends itself upon an assumption about the concept of rationality and morality.

10 Against the idea of rationality as the capacity of arriving at a shared conclusion, Cavell points to competence as the fundamental feature of a conversation. It is our competence as speakers indeed that is questioned in a moral conversation, and not the rationality of ethics on the whole. This notion of competence is tied to the idea of meaning as depending on our capacity to master ordinary language. Cavell writes that in moral disagreements: The point is to determine what position you are taking, that is to say, what position you are taking responsibility for – and whether it is one I can respect. What is at stake in such discussions is not, or not exactly whether you know our world, but whether, or to what extent, we are to live in the same moral universe. What is at stake in such examples […] is not the validity of morality as a whole, but the nature or quality of our relationship to one another. (Cavell 1979: 268)

11 Cavell holds that it is crucial, in moral conversations, to leave open the possibility of disagreement: the presumed lack of rationality of moral discourse turns out to be our permanent possibility of questioning the practices and the concepts we share. That is, this possibility is constitutive of the kind of rationality proper to moral discourse, and has a central role in the process of coming to know ourselves and others. Cavell goes on to say that: 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. (Cavell 1979: 312)

12 In moral disagreements we face the problem of knowing ourselves and others. From this point of view a moral conversation is a way to assess the status of a relationship (with myself or others): in it we verify if and to what extent we can recognize each other as members of the same moral community, if we can go on speaking, and so on. But this problem is eluded by moral theories which focus on a conception of language as an enclosed space of given activities, a perimeter of fixed rules in which the application of concepts is not something we do, but a set of predetermined possibilities that we select in accordance with the contingencies of conversation. Cavell holds that this conception of language hides precisely the responsibility for the moral position we take.

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13 At this point it might be useful to connect this analysis of disagreement to Cavell’s diagnosis of the relationship between philosophy and skepticism. In Natural and Conventional, Cavell writes: 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. (Cavell 1979: 90)

14 According to Cavell, skepticism about other minds emerges from the sense of separateness and limitation we may experience with respect to the knowledge of others. The kind of response philosophy of mind has traditionally offered to this skepticism is deflected in so far as it eludes the problem of the limitation of our knowledge, by attempting to show that skeptical experience is empty. This is reflected, again, in a conception of language and of the use of concepts as a set of fixed rules that we simply apply, and beyond which there is nothing. That is to say that philosophy tries to face skepticism by denying the very possibility of experiencing the limitation of our knowledge, by denying in that way what we may call the “truth of skepticism.” Similarly, ethical theories, which see in the fact of disagreement the impossibility of a fully rational moral thought, elude the difficulty of experiencing the limitation of morality. What is at stake in moral discourse and in moral thought is the responsibility for the position we take, and the possibility of calling into question such a position in a disagreement defines the kind of rationality we have. The philosophical requirement of a moral rationality, that must be capable of settling every disagreement, reflects the wish to avoid a responsibility we do not want. As Cavell puts it: Morality must leave itself open to repudiation; it provides one possibility of settling conflict, a way of encompassing conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationship against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments, loyalties, interests and needs, a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self in opposition to itself or others. Other ways of settling or encompassing conflict are provided by politics, religion, love and forgiveness, rebellion and withdrawal. (Cavell 1979: 269)

15 The possibility of seeing morality as limited is a crucial point for Cavell. Moral theories express the desire of a final assessment of every action and conflict: they represent an attempt to establish once and for all what we regard as right and important, and what is not. In this way, it seems that every limitation or inapplicability of an ethical theory means the failure of morality as a whole. But, according to Cavell, this is a moralization of morality, that is, the tendency to understand – through the distinctions and the intellectual instruments of moral theories – every situation and every human context, taking for granted both that they belong to the domain of morality and a certain concept of morality. A non-moralistic conception of morality must instead admit the possibility of seeing it as limited, but also that its domain is not limitable in advance – that its domain is not given – because there is no principle or rule that establishes what is important or of value for us. This is the reason why Cavell affirms the possibility of: a position whose excellence we cannot deny, taken by persons we are not willing or able to dismiss, but which, morally, would have to be called wrong. And this has provided a major theme of modern literature: the salvation of the self through the repudiation of morality. (Cavell 1979: 269)

16 I think in this passage is adumbrated the theme of moral perfectionism, that Cavell developed in his works after The Claim of Reason. Indeed, it is only by acknowledging the

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limitation of morality that we can see the possibility of a conflict between our self- conception and the requirements of morality.

17 In pointing to an apparent irresolvable conflict or a deep tension between the requirements of morality and the self-understanding that conditions them, the idea of “repudiation” might suggest a kind of skepticism concerning the reality of moral values and the normativity of moral thought. For if morality were something that could be repudiated when it conflicts with other, non-moral considerations or reasons, then one’s assent to it would be just a matter of conventions and habits. This is the reason why Raimond Gaita criticizes Cavell’s talking of “repudiation.” Gaita says: Situations which might prompt someone to say that morality finds its limits are various and they do not instantiate a single concept, ‘the limits of morality.’ Nothing, I think, that anyone might seriously mean by it need lead us, under pain of superficiality or naivety, to acknowledge that there are things that human beings do that are above or below the conceptual reach of a sober remorse. But is that not to deny that morality must leave itself open to repudiation? (Gaita 1991: 240)

18 The answer to Gaita’s question depends on what we takes ‘morality’ to mean when we say that it can be repudiated. I think that Gaita is right about Cavell’s lack of clarity on this theme, but I also think that it is possible to understand Cavell’s talking of the ‘limits of morality’ and to accommodate it to Gaita’s warning if we see it as a conflict within (what Bernard Williams would call) ‘the ethical.’ What can be repudiated by a person “whose excellence we cannot deny” is not the reality of values or the seriousness of remorse, but the conventional acceptance of the standards imposed by a culture. Anyway, for my purpose here it is not important to introduce the distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics.’ What matters to me is to make clear that Cavell’s point is about the importance of the relation between ethics and conceptions of the self, where a question about one’s assent to the moral form of life is understood as a precondition for the development of a non-conformist moral perspective. Once we have recognized this, we can nonetheless accept Gaita’s criticism that talking in general of the ‘limits of morality’ is not anything clear, because “whether [one] can be rightly judged to be morally serious will depend on the details of the example” (Gaita 1991: 242).

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19 Following Cavell, I have characterized the meta-ethical analysis of disagreement in terms of deflection. This notion is used to specify a precise philosophical strategy: it does not mean simply to misdescribe a reality. It means to turn a certain kind of practical difficulty, which we want to elude, into an intellectual difficulty. Now, which is the practical difficulty in question? What kind of difficulty may we encounter in our ordinary moral life, which prompts us to intellectualize it? After all, Cavell claims that moral disagreement is a fact of our ordinary language, and that it does not compromise the rationality of morality. But there is a difficulty internal to our moral life, which is part of the experience we have of certain disagreements, and which is eclipsed in the way metathics has treated disagreement – that is, as a problem. To verify the plausibility of this position it is necessary to specify the notion of ‘difficulty of reality,’ and to provide an example of the kind of disagreement I have in mind.

20 In DRDP Diamond considers the “experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something that it encounters.” She takes her examples of difficulty of reality from

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literature and poetry. These are various and complex examples, which refer to experiences of beauty and altruism, or of deep desperation and horror. I cannot dwell upon the details of these examples, but they all concern circumstances in our life that we are unable to describe, situations in which we experience a gulf between reality and our capacity to understand it. Such a difficulty may turn on a difficulty of philosophy too, which could contribute in hiding that reality, bringing us to consider a problem which is only similar to the one we were concerned with. Part of Diamond’s concern is to show that the argumentative technique of analytic philosophy does not allow one to see that kind of difficulty, and so it deflects from reality, transferring the problem to the secure and controlled path of argumentation. Following one of Diamond’s examples, we can see the deflection in the way Peter Singer turns Elizabeth Costello’s sense of horror for our relationship with animals into a technical question about animal rights. The way in which Singer understands the question eclipses the fact that Costello’s sense of horror arises from her perception of animals as lives of bodies exposed to death. By reducing the corporeity of animals to a fact analyzable in terms of objective features, Singer hides precisely Costello’s source of interest in animals.

21 Let us go back to disagreement. We have seen that according to Cavell in a moral conversation we express our overall moral vision, for which we are responsible. The rationality of moral discourse lies in fact in the methods which lead us to a definition and to a better knowledge of ourselves and of others. Now, in what sense is the problem of knowledge of ourselves a difficulty which, in philosophy, we tend to deflect from? I want to suggest an example of moral conversation quoting a dialogue between the two protagonists of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road.

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22 Revolutionary Road is the story of April and Frank Wheeler, a young married couple living in the residential neighborhood of Revolutionary Hill, in Connecticut. Frank is a young office-worker for the Knox Company, April, an actress manquée, is a housewife and the mother of two children. Although they’re perceived by their neighbors as a non conformist couple, their life flows as a suburban middle-class cliché. But Frank and April are dissatisfied with their condition, they recognize how oppressive and false their life is, and try to find a way to imagine their future. April, in particular, feels the burden of the “enormous, obscene delusion: the idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have a family,” and so she thinks up a solution for her uneasiness and that of Frank. She thinks they have to sell their house in Revolutionary Road and move to Paris, where she would work as a secretary at NATO and where Frank, free from work, would take his time to “find his way.” The project takes form, and they start putting up the house for sale. But an unexpected pregnancy, together with Frank’s prospect of a job promotion, make things more complicated. Frank, who has never really believed in the project, sees in the pregnancy (still unwanted) the opportunity to keep his family in Revolutionary Hill; April, on the contrary, is ready to have an abortion in order to chase her new life. There begins a period of constant quarreling, creating a distance between them that cannot be closed. Eventually the project is abandoned. April’s attempt to construe an authentic life begins to vanish gradually, then rapidly, violently, and tragically in the end. April dies, in her attempt to have the abortion.

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23 In the following passage Frank and April are considering the possibility of having the abortion: “You really are a much more moral person than I am, Frank. I suppose that’s why I admire you.” But she didn’t look or sound admiring. He tried to dismiss it with a careful shrug as he took a seat across from her. “I don’t know about that. I don’t see what any of this has to do with being ‘moral.’ I mean – you know, not in any sense of conventional morality.” She seemed to think this over for a long time as she lay back allowing one knee to sway from side to side, rocking it on the swivel of her ankle. Then: “Is there any other kind?” she asked. “Don’t ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” He could have hit her in the face. Of all the insinuating, treacherous little – Christ! And in any other month of his married life he would have been on his feet and shouting: “Christ, when are you going to get over this damn Noël Coward, nineteen- twenties way of denigrating every halfway decent human value with some cute, brittle, snobbish little thing to say? Listen!” he would have raged at her. “Listen! Maybe that’s the way your parents lived; maybe that’s the kind of chic, titillating crap you were raised on, but it’s about time you figured out it doesn’t have a God damned thing to do with the real world.” It was his knowledge of the calendar that stopped his mouth. There were twelve days to go. He couldn’t afford to take any chances now, and so instead of shouting those things he held his jaws shut and stared at his glass, which he gripped until it nearly spilled with trembling. Without even trying, he had given his most memorable facial performance to date. When the spasm was over he said, very quietly: “Baby, I know you’re tired. We shouldn’t be talking about it now. I know you know better than that. Let’s skip it.” “Skip what? You know I know better than what?” “You know. This business about ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’.” “But I don’t know the difference.” She had come earnestly forward on the sofa, had drawn her sneakers back under it and was leaning toward him with both tense forearms on her knees. Her face was so innocently confused that he couldn’t look at it. “Don’t you see, Frank? I really don’t know the difference. Other people seem to; you do; I just don’t, that’s all, and I don’t think I ever really have.” “Look,” he said. “First place, ‘moral’ was your word, not mine. I don’t think I’ve ever held any brief for this thing on moral grounds, conventional or otherwise. I’ve simply said that under these particular circumstances, it seems pretty obvious that the only mature thing to do is go ahead and have the –” “But there we are again,” she said. “You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn’t that amazing? He really does think that way; these words really do mean something to him. Sometimes it seems I’ve been watching people talk and thinking that all my life” – her voice was becoming unsteady – “and maybe it means there’s something awful the matter with me, but it’s true. Oh no, stay there. Please don’t come and kiss me or anything, or we’ll just end up in a big steaming heap and we won’t get anything settled. Please stay sitting there, and let’s just sort of try to talk. Okay?” “Okay.” And he stayed sitting there. But trying to talk was something else again; all they could do was look at each other, heavy and weak and bright-eyed in the heat. “All I know,” she said at last, “is what I feel, and I know what I feel I’ve got to do.” (Yates 2000: 222-3)

24 I take April to be (unsuccessfully) trying to reach what Cavell calls “the salvation of the self through the repudiation of morality.” The idea that morality can be repudiated reflects a noncoercive conception of rationality that allows for the possibility of seeing morality as limited, but it also imply that its limits cannot be traced in advance. As we

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have seen, Cavell introduces that idea of repudiation in the context of a discussion of moral disagreement in which he radically criticizes the non-cognitivist claim that the persistence of disagreement in ethical disputes is a sign of the irrationality of morality. If I understand Cavell’s point, to recognize the limits of morality means in this respect that there are circumstances in which a rational resolution of moral disagreement is attained by an agreement to disagree. That is to say that rational resolution is not always a matter of bringing others around to one’s own moral convictions; it is sometimes a matter of agreeing to disagree. But pertaining to the sphere of first-person conflict, the idea of repudiation suggests a further way of understanding the ‘limits of morality.’ It suggests that an authentic assent to the moral form of life is never just a matter of sharing the conventions and the practices we inherited through upbringing, but also depends on a preliminary questioning and challenging those conventions and practices. The limits of morality are in this sense not traceable in advance, that is, independently of personal contribution and imaginative effort. But as the example above shows, questioning our assent to morality may lead to a non-ordinary experience of conceptual inadequacy, or inexpressibility. April is in fact trying to break the conventions of her moral community, because she feels that she cannot be herself (or become the person she wants to be) and carry on favoring the standards imposed on her by that community. Yates is effective in describing the difficulty of assuming the responsibility for the moral position we take. In trying to do so, April exposes herself to the risk of losing reality as graspable: her personal transformation puts her in the condition of not recognizing anymore reality as her reality. Her experience can be understood as a difficulty of reality in Diamond’s sense because she feels that she can no longer speak within the ordinary language games of her community. Indeed, in losing the capacity to distinguish between “moral” and “conventional,” April encounters a particular difficulty with words that discloses reality as essentially resistant to her ways of thinking and talking about it, as at once inexplicable and isolating.

25 Now I want to focus on the disagreement between April and Frank. In the quoted dialogue the disagreement marks the beginning of a tragedy: the distance between Frank and April is not simply a question about the legitimacy of abortion as a practical solution in view of moving to Paris, but it has to do with a radical difference of vision, which exposes April to an experience of separateness and isolation that becomes critical as the story unfolds. Frank thinks that the “the only mature thing to do” is to have the baby and give up the idea of leaving: his feigned resoluteness is due to opportunism and hypocrisy (he has already accepted the new job), but his opposition to abortion is the outcome of a conception of values as fixed principles that determine in advance the possibilities for personal articulation and imaginative understanding of the moral life. We can see how Frank uses the question of abortion to deflect from the real problem that distances him from his wife: a very different conception of life. What is for him a space of determined possibilities, is for April an adventure, in which the possibilities are still in a large part to be determined. April and Frank disagree in the way they perceive the relevance of abortion: whereas for Frank there’s a principle one needs to conform to (having an abortion is against nature), April lives the tragedy of feeling the option of having the abortion as a natural necessity, that is, as a necessity of her nature. Since deciding to move to Paris, April engaged in a path of knowledge which will lead her to isolation from her moral community: this sense of separateness is

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reflected in the fact that the concepts which defined that community (family, abortion, job, maturity, etc.) have for her no sense anymore, nor do they grasp reality.

26 In Diamond’s terminology, we encounter a difficulty of reality when we live an experience that puts into question our ordinary way of speaking. In the kind of disagreement which divides the Wheelers we can see the difficulty internal to the problem of the knowledge of ourselves: April experiences the radical impoverishment of her conceptual horizon, the inability to express her own vision and to grasp the world with her own voice. Frank’s response to such an extreme loss is precisely a denial of April’s experience: in deflecting towards the question of abortion and in centering only on that problem, he treats April’s tragedy as a childish whim, or worse, he sees in it the symptom of a disease of personality. The dialogue quoted goes on with Frank inviting April to “rationalize” her position: “Look,” he was saying, “this may sound as if I think there is something ‘awful’ the matter with you; the fact is I don’t. I do think, though, that there’s one or two aspects to this thing we haven’t really touched on yet, and I think we ought to. For instance, I wonder if your real motives here are quite as simple as you think. I mean isn’t it possible there are forces at work here that you’re not entirely aware of? That you’re not recognizing?” She didn’t answer, and in the darkness he could only guess at whether she was listening or not. He took a deep breath. “I mean things that have nothing to do with Europe,” he said, “or with me. I mean things within yourself, things that have their origin in your own childhood – your own upbringing and so on. Emotional things.” There was a long silence before she said, in a pointedly neutral tone: “You mean I’m emotionally disturbed.” “I didn’t say that!” But in the next hour, as his voice went on and on, he managed to say it several times in several different ways. Wasn’t it likely, after all, that a girl who’d known nothing but parental rejection from the time of her birth might develop an abiding reluctance to bear children? “I mean it’s always been a wonder to me that you could survive a childhood like that,” he said at one point, “let alone come out of it without any damage to your – you know, your ego and everything.” She herself, he reminded her, had suggested the presence of something “neurotic” in her wish to abort the first pregnancy, on Bethune Street – and all right, all right, of course the circumstances were different this time. But wasn’t it just possible that something of the same confusion might still exist in her attitude? Oh, he wasn’t saying this was the whole story – “I’m not qualified to say that” – but he did feel it was a line of reasoning that ought to be very carefully explored. “But I’ve had two children,” she said. “Doesn’t that count in my favor?” He let these words reverberate in the darkness for a while. “The very fact that you put it that way is kind of significant,” he said quietly, “don’t you think? As if having children were a kind of punishment? As if having two of them could ‘count in your favor’ as a credit against any obligation to have another? And the way you said it, too – all defensive, all ready to fight. Jesus, April, if you want to talk that way I can come right back at you with another statistic: you’ve had three pregnancies and you’ve wanted to abort two of them. What kind of a record is that? Oh, look.” He made his voice very gentle, as if he were talking to Jennifer. “Look, baby. All I’m trying to suggest is that you don’t seem to be entirely rational about this thing. I just wish you’d think about it a little, that’s all.” “All right,” her voice said bleakly. “All right, suppose all this is true. Suppose I’m acting out a compulsive behavior pattern, or whatever they call it. So what? I still can’t help what I feel, can I? I mean what’re we supposed to do about it? How am I supposed to get over it? Am I just supposed to Face Up to my Problems and start being a different person tomorrow morning, or what?” “Oh, baby,” he said. “It’s so simple. I mean assuming you are in some kind of

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emotional difficulty, assuming there is a problem of this sort, don’t you see there is something we can do about it? Something very logical and sensible that we ought to do about it?” He was weary of the sound of his own voice; he felt he had been talking for years. He licked his lips, which tasted as foreign as the flesh of a dentist’s finger in his mouth (“Open wide, now!”), and then he said it. “We ought to have you see a psychoanalyst.” (Yates: 2000: 224)

27 I think Frank’s response is a kind of deflection aiming at denying the radical experience of isolation that characterizes April’s relationship with the world. He turns April’s practical difficulty into an intellectual dispute about the legitimacy of abortion. In fact he invites April to hesitate, he asks her to think about “the real motives” which make her desire the abortion, and puts forward a psychological explanation of the problem, in order to convince April to talk with an analyst. And it is this hesitation, the instilled suspicion of a neurosis as an explanation for her condition, that will make the hope of a change definitively collapse. (I find it noteworthy that Yates represents Frank as experiencing his own words “as foreign as the flesh of a dentist’s finger in his mouth”: by endorsing the values of the community in an uncritical way, he becomes alienated to himself, and the very sound of his voice becomes strange to him, but that strangeness is not experienced by him as a difficulty in Diamond’s sense, and rather it shows an ‘absence of morality’).

28 But what would it mean to understand April’s position in a non-deflected way? At the end of DRDP Diamond asks in a similar vein: “Can there be such a thing as philosophy that is not deflected from such realities?,” that is, a philosophy capable of staying at the level of the difficulties of reality? And which is the level of the difficulties of reality? Is that something we can understand as a determinate point of view on the world, a perspective that can be occupied by a person finding herself in particular conditions? Or is it rather an apparent position from which no intelligible representation of the world can be satisfying? According to Diamond, the answer to such questions is related to Wittgenstein’s aim of bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. In the second section of this paper I discussed Cavell’s idea that disagreement is a fact of our ordinary language, that this fact is part of our natural modes of responsiveness; so now, following Diamond and Cavell, the question might be put this way: What can the difficulty be, then, of bringing or leading words back? What is the everyday, if it is so hard to achieve? It is within the everyday that there lie the forms and varieties of repudiation of our language-games and distance from them, the possibility of being tormented by the hiddenness, the separateness, the otherness of others. (Cavell, Declining Decline, quoted in DRDP: 113)

29 We have seen that April’s encounter with a difficulty of reality has the form of a dissatisfaction with the ordinary language-games that articulate the moral life of her community. In finding the ‘limits of morality’, she cannot reach a meaningful description that could accommodate her attitude towards the world. From this point of view, to acknowledge her position without deflecting means to follow her in the impossibility to give a determinate sense to words such as ‘moral’ and ‘conventional.’ Indeed, as we have seen in Frank’s response, to try to make sense of April’s position by treating it as an ordinary matter (by, for example, offering a psychological explanation of “the real motives” of her behavior, or talking about the problem of abortion) means precisely to deny those qualities of her experience that make it difficult in the relevant way. The only way to acknowledge the difficulty of reality here is to imaginatively participate in the ‘sideways-on’ perspective from which April looks at the world, in the

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very same way in which, according to Diamond, the reader of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is required to enter imaginatively into the nonsensical sentences that make up the book.2 If this is true, Diamond’s commitment to what she calls “the realistic spirit” in philosophy requires, at least when confronting with a difficulty of reality, an understanding of “the ordinary” as the locus in which our life with words may become problematic and strange, not the quietistic achievement of a condition in which our problems disappear.

⁂

30 I picked up the example of April and Frank Wheeler because it shows us a kind of distance between human beings in which what is at stake is not a judgment about the rightness of an action, or the legitimacy of a choice. Meta-ethical analyses, because of their comparing moral judgments with factual or scientific ones, tend to conceive moral disagreements only as disagreements about how things are in the world. But April and Frank Wheeler do not disagree about particular judgments, they are divided in the way they respond to life, in the way they use their concepts to structure their life and understand others. What divides them has not the aspect of a factual disagreement. In the example the situation is complicated by the fact that April experiences a sense of separateness that flings her away from her own mode of thinking and talking, and this represents a kind of difficulty that philosophy should be able to account for without deflecting.

31 I want to conclude with some brief remarks about the consequences of the conception of moral discourse and thought favored here for the problem of objectivity in ethics. Both Diamond and Cavell have drawn from Wittgenstein a conception of rationality and of language as a range of possibilities in which the application of concepts is not fixed by external rules and independently from personal contribution. One of the possibilities we have is that of calling into question our conceptual horizon, that is the possibility of feeling that our words have lost their grasp on the world, and this define the kind of difficulty I have been concerned with.

32 It may seem, though, that if we follow Cavell and Diamond in thinking that a non- moralistic conception of morality should allow for the possibility of seeing morality as limited, then we must recognize that ethics is just a matter of subjective articulation. But this conclusion seems inevitable only on the ground of a widespread assumption about the concept of objectivity that excludes the subjective (that is perceptual and affective) endowments we draw on in thinking about the world because they tend to distort our view of reality. Alice Crary calls this conception the “narrow conception of objectivity” (Crary 2007: 18-29), which is the result of a philosophical requirement that any inquiry aiming at calling itself objective must establish that there is a reliable connection between its conceptual space and some realm independent of it. In this paper I tried to show that the idea of the ‘limits of morality’ “does not instantiate a single concept,” where this means that persons find different ways of articulating their moral views that cannot be determined a priori. We just do not know what people will find important and worthy of value, and so we should resist the deflecting effort to construct a theory of moral disagreement or objectivity.

33 In the light of Diamond’s conception I have sketched above, that morality be objective can plausibly mean that the aspirations to deepen our moral views and resolving our

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conflicts are rational. But as Cavell urges, the rationality of morality does not relieve us of responsibility for the position we take. A realistic philosophical task would be then that of looking at the various ways in which people articulate their moral experience, even when they generate idiosyncratic visions as in the example of April Wheeler. It would make headway in understanding morality as an intensely human affair.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAVELL S., (1979), The Claim of Reason, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.

CRARY A., (2007), Beyond Moral Judgment, Cambridge (MA) and London (UK), Harvard University Press.

DIAMOND C., (1988), “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics 98, 255-77.

DIAMOND C., (1991), “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the ‘Tractatus’,” in R. Heinrich & H. Vetter (eds.), Bilder der Philosophie. Reflexionen über das Bildliche und die Phantasie, Wien, Oldenburg.

DIAMOND C., (2008), “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in C. Wolfe & I. Hacking (eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life, New York, Columbia University Press.

GAITA R., (1991), Good and Evil. An Absolute Conception, Routledge, London and New York.

MCDOWELL J., (1998), Mind, Value and Reality, Cambridge (MA) and London (UK), Harvard University Press.

PUTNAM H., (2002), The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, Cambridge (MA) and London (UK), Harvard University Press.

YATES R., (2000), Revolutionary Road, New York, Vintage Contemporaries.

NOTES

1. In Part Three of The Claim of Reason Cavell is primarily concerned with criticizing Stevenson’s emotivism. Although Stevenson seems hopelessly crude to contemporary and more sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism (e. g. error-theories, expressivism, prescriptivism and quasi- realism), I think that what renders Cavell's point on the limitations of non-cognitivist theories still timely is his understanding of the discontinuity between ethics and science in a way that does not depend on a metaphysical distinction between facts and values. Another important difference is that Cavell does not conceive ethical meaning as a feature (neither a logical one, like in Hare’s prescriptivism, nor a psychological one, like in various forms of expressivism) of ethical sentences. Cavell (like Diamond) inherited from Wittgenstein the idea that a sentence is meaningless not because it does not show some logical feature or syntactical form, but because we failed to give meaning to one or more of its components. Contemporary non-cognitivism has been criticized in a way that can accommodate Cavell’s point also by John McDowell and Hilary Putnam. For a radical criticism of the distinction between facts and values see Putnam 2002; for a

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criticism of the “disentangling manoeuvre” in accounting for the meaning of ethical concepts, see McDowell 1998. 2. On this point see Diamond 1991.

ABSTRACTS

In this paper I want to consider a kind of inexpressiveness that can characterize our moral experience. The acknowledgement of the possibility of failure in trying to word the world – to find adequate means of expression for our condition – deeply informs Cora Diamond’s conception of language and moral thought as well as her philosophical method. In particular, in her paper The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy Diamond is concerned with a resistance by reality to one’s ordinary modes of thinking and talking, the feeling of a mismatch between concepts and experience in which it is the nature of experience itself that deprives one of the words suitable to contain it. In this paper I want to show how a particular kind of moral conflict can be perspicuously described as a difficulty of reality. This conflict occurs when we lose the ability to conceive the moral world we inhabit as ours, when, that is, our self-conceptions clash with the requirements of morality and we find ourselves in the position of not being able to say what “morality” means for us anymore. Stanley Cavell speaks in this vicinity of the possibility of repudiating morality when it threatens our integrity. This distance between the subject and the world, the self and morality, which, in Cavell’s account of perfectionism, is a precondition for the development of an authentic moral perspective, is nonetheless neglected by metathical analyses in which the prominent occurrences of ethical disagreements pertain principally to the correct application of evaluative terms. I sketch Cavell’s analysis of disagreement in the light of his discussion of moral rationality. Then I connect the topic with Diamond’s notion of the “difficulty of reality,” developing the link between Diamonds and Cavell’s thought by using an example taken from Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road. My aim will be twofold: the focus on Cavell’s conception of moral rationality, on the one hand, is intended to show how the traditional meta-ethical debate about disagreement is deflected in that it cannot acknowledge this kind of conflict; on the other hand, to speak of a difficulty of reality in the context of a perfectionist account of moral life is a way to give content to the idea of morality as “limited,” a way of understanding morality as of human origin.

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Autonomy Here and Now Cavell’s Criticisms of Rawls

Nadav Arviv

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This paper is inspired by, and substantially draws on, the work of Eli Friedlander and Steven Affeldt. In their Doctoral dissertations they appropriate Cavell’s criticisms of Rawls and incorporate other Cavellian themes in developing their respective, original interpretations of Rousseau (Friedlander Eli, Expressions of Judgment, Harvard University Dissertation (UMI), 1992 esp. chapter 3 “Before the Law,” 225-68; Affeldt Steven, Constituting Mutuality, Harvard University Dissertation (UMI), 1996 esp. chapter 1, “The Citizen as Legislator,” 1-178). I thank Eli Friedlander in particular for showing me the way to and around Cavell. I am also indebted to Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Lear, whose insights into Kantian Ethics and its difficulties inform this paper to a great extent.

1 According to Christine Korsgaard, one very important merit of the constitutive move is that it meets skeptical challenges “with ease.”1 She thinks Rawls enacts such a move: And [The principles of Justice], Rawls might say, just are the principles of justice for a liberal society. To see why, we need only compare the problem faced by a liberal society with the content of Rawls’s two principles of justice. Echoing Rousseau, we might say that the problem faced in the original position is this: to find a conception of justice which enables every member of society to pursue his or her conception of the good as effectively as possible while leaving each member as free as he or she was before. The content of Rawls’s two principles simply reflects this conception of the problem. So Rawls’s two principles simply describe what a liberal society must do in order to be a liberal society... Rawls’s principles are derived from the idea of liberalism itself... The normative force of the conception is established in this way. If you recognize the problem to be real, to be yours, to be one you have to solve, and the solution to be the only or the best one, then the solution is binding upon you.2

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2 The constitutive move takes on the challenge of a practical skeptic. The skeptic undertakes a certain activity but rejects a guiding principle of that activity, a principle for which normative authority is claimed. Supposedly, upon being shown that the principle is constitutive of the activity he undertakes, the skeptic is silenced. He now cannot reject the suggested principle, because the principle is an internal condition of an activity he himself undertakes.

3 The constitutive move is sometimes traced back to Rawls’s seminal paper “Two Concepts of Rules.” Already with respect to that paper, Stanley Cavell offers a thought provoking criticism that, while sympathetic to the general foundationalist thrust of the move, points to a certain problematic. The problematic arises when, let me say, the mood of the constitutive move is carried into the metaethical task of understanding of the workings of moral encounter.

4 This paper suggests that, and spells out the way in which, this early criticism is essentially a precursor of a later more mature criticism Cavell launches against Rawls’s conception, in TJ, of (what Cavell calls) The Conversation of Justice. Mature, because it is informed by, and put to the service of Cavell’s own positive contribution to moral thinking, namely, Emersonian Moral Perfectionism. I hope that in relating the latter more difficult, “Cavellian” criticism to the former more accessible, let us say, disciplined critical stance, light will be shed on some prominent issues in Moral Perfectionism. Particularly, the constitutive move is closely related to the notion of autonomy. For it is essential to the move to show that the skeptic somehow identifies with the rules he, in this case, seeks to reject. It will be a prominent task of this paper to show that the notion of autonomy the move utilizes is not only unsuited for the description of the goings on in ordinary moral judgment - unsuited to show how autonomy manifests in judging over and above the fact that the judgment accords with autonomous rules – but that this notion encourages a conception of judging whereby a place for autonomy in this sense is precisely denied.

The Criticism of “Two Concepts of Rules”

5 In “Two Concepts of Rules” Rawls distinguishes between justifying a practice and justifying an action falling under it. He elaborates the distinction by showing how it helps to fend off an eminent objection3 to utilitarianism. The objection is that in the end utilitarianism cannot account for the obligation to keep a particular promise: applying the utilitarian principle to decide whether one should keep or break a promise essentially dissolves the binding of the commitment made in promising, and thereby offends our intuitions about the kind of obligation making a promise is.

6 Rawls shows that once the logical distinction between justifying a practice and justifying an action falling under it is in place, it is open to the utilitarian to contend that while the utilitarian principle applies to the former, it does not, and indeed the very nature of the practice at stake will not allow it to, apply to the latter. Thus anti- utilitarian arguments, Rawls says, take it for granted that the promisor... is entitled without restriction to bring utilitarian considerations to bear in deciding whether to keep his promise. But if one considers what the practice of promising is one will see, I think, that it is such as not to allow this sort of general discretion to the promisor. Indeed, the point of the practice is to abdicate one’s title to act in accordance with

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utilitarian and prudential considerations in order that the future may be tied down and plans coordinated in advance. There are obvious utilitarian ad- vantages in having a practice which denies the promisor, as a defense, any general appeal to the utilitarian principle in accordance with which the practice itself may be justified.4

7 There is a distinctive kind of illegitimacy involved in entertaining utilitarian considerations when deliberating the breaking of a particular promise, which is directly related to what Korsgaard means by saying that constitutive standards help meet skeptical challenges “with ease.” By showing the skeptic, who challenges the rule of a practice he nevertheless participates in, that the rule is constitutive of the practice, we essentially obviate the room for so much the raising of the question. The constitutive move remaps the alternatives in such a way that questioning the rules is not open to the participant of the practice. It’s a kind of “my way or the highway”: you cannot both participate in the practice and disobey its rules. The skeptic realizes questioning the authority of the rules trumps responsibilities he had already, participating in the practice, taken upon himself. He is thus more silenced than answered. For he is shown not why he should, here and now, as it were get himself to obey the rule, but rather, why he, in a sense, cannot but obey it, why, in a sense, it is not up to him whether he does or not. How is it exactly that we achieve this in the case of promising? And what is the skeptic’s ensuing silence like?

8 The nature of the illegitimacy involved in the appeal to the utilitarian principle to excuse the breaking of a promise is better understood when we distinguish two kinds of rule: Summary Rules and Practice Rules. Summary Rules essentially sum up or record in the form of a rule a certain pattern of past decisions. Looking back, similarities in cases and decisions are recognized, and based on past patterns rules are established to facilitate decisions in the future. This means of course that the relevant cases and decisions are describable independently of the rules. Since rules are but guides and aids for decisions whose basis is independent of the rules, we can say that such decisions are “logically prior”5 to the rules. Thus, one is always entitled to reconsider and overturn the rule’s precept, and there is room to question the rule’s normative authority in a particular case, or indeed, at all.

9 In contrast with that, Practice Rules “define a practice.”6 They thus are “logically prior” to particular cases and decisions, since “there cannot be a particular case of an action falling under the rule of a practice unless there is the practice.”7 The idea is that the concept of a practice essentially involves people obeying or following the rules, calling it the manifestation of a “capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws”:8 The rules cannot be taken as simply describing how those engaged in the practice in fact behave: it is not simply that they act as if they were obeying the rules. Thus it is essential to the notion of a practice that the rules are publicly known and understood as definitive; and it is essential also that the rules of a practice can be taught and can be acted upon to yield a coherent practice.9

10 Whereas Summary Rules formulate a regularity the occurrence of which is in principle independent of such rules’ being formulated, the formulation and dissemination of Practice Rules – i.e., there being a practice – is responsible not just to the observed regularity of cases falling under these rules, but also to there being such a phenomenon überhaupt, to the possibility there being such a thing as a case that falls under the rule of a practice.

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11 Compare: if I disturb your peace by playing loud music all hours of the night, and a law to the contrary is in place, I may properly be said to be breaking the law. It is clear that nothing in the description of the case hangs on the existence of such a law. Indeed, the common recurrence of such neighborly disputes might be thought to have induced the relevant legislation, “bottom up” legislation, as it were. Furthermore, were someone’s routine conduct to suddenly count, under a newly passed bill, as breaking the law, they wouldn’t by that be offending a constitutive standard of what they were doing: they would be doing the same thing as before, only now there is a law to the contrary. Now consider the case of promising. Supposedly it is a law of the practice of promising that you are not to appeal to the utilitarian principle to excuse the breaking of the promise. In contrast to the former example, in this case you (logically) can’t break the law, since for the case to be a case of breaking a promise, for your activity to so much as be described as that of the breaking a promise, a practice of promising with its rules – rules defining, among other things, forms of admissible excuses, forms of breaking a promise – must already be in place. The logical priority of Practice Rules, the sense in which rules of a practice are constitutive, means that were you to fail to act in accordance with them, you will simply not count as participating in the practice.

12 We can therefore distinguish two categories of violation of rules: breaking a Summary Rule is perpetrating an action that the law, it so happens, forbids, while breaking a Practice Rule amounts to failing to participate in the activity that the rule (partly) defines. What’s important here is a sense in which one cannot break the Practice Rules: in so far as those rules are constitutive of the activity they define one either falls in or out: either partaking in the activity so defined and thus abiding by the rules of the practice or doing something different altogether. This is in line with the fact that our reaction to someone’s actually appealing to the utilitarian principle to break a promise is one of failing to understand (or “taking it as a joke”) rather than one of reproach or rebuke.

13 Stephen Mulhal has offered a review of Cavell's various criticisms of Rawls.10 It will help my analysis of Cavell’s attitude towards the constitutive move to see what Mulhal thinks the locus of Cavell’s criticism is. Here is what Mulhal says: To think of human commitments to which human speech and action gives rise as fixed by a system of defining rules insures that those commitments are limited in advance, and limited in impersonal ways; to think of human relationships as exhaustively determined by out occupation of socially defined roles limits in advance the range and depth of their claims upon us as persons. On Cavell's view, the reality is that the reach of such commitments and relationships is always in the course of being determined, and so must in fact be fixed by us. So Rawls’s vision of the moral life effectively makes the self’s commitments and relationships less fluid and more evident than they really are, and thereby conjures up a fantasy of a self that is more fixed, more invulnerable and more transparent to itself than it really is.11

14 I think it is important to see that the ‘de-rigidifying’ current Mulhal is pointing out, while no doubt present, hinges on another criticism, a criticism directed at the constitutive move, and whose consequence is, in a sense, the deepening of that move. It is important to see that Cavell’s criticism proceeds in two stages: first, there is the suggestion that the depth of the notion of the practice funding the constitutive move is not fully thought out, and secondly, building on that first insight, that there is a failure on the side of Rawls to properly register the form of moral discussions. I am insisting on slicing the criticism this way for at least one important reason. Thinking of Cavell as

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‘de-rigidifying’ Rawls’s account might lead us to suppose that Cavell disagrees with Rawls about the shape and content of our commitments, that he gives a picture of their nature that results in conceiving them as either more lax (say, that he is more tolerant) or more up to us (say, that he is more relativistic) than Rawls does. I do not think that that is the case. In fact, Cavell iterates, in laying out his criticism, much sympathy with the constitutive move and what it accomplishes, and in the later, perfectionist, criticism he never tires of applauding Rawls’s accomplishment in giving a systematic account of the nature and ground of justice (showing “the justice of justice,”12 as he puts it). Rather than replacing Rawls’s picture of the way we are bound by the nature of our practice, Cavell is interested in, I would say, articulating the way in which the mode of philosophizing typical to such a foundationalistic enterprise tends to overstep its bounds. By spelling out first the criticism that operates at the foundational level of the constitutive move, and then seeing how this criticism links to the second criticism, the criticism about the nature of moral conversation, I hope to come to a better grip of the nature of this overstepping of bounds. But we will have to go into some detail first.

15 I said that Cavell is highly sympathetic to the constitutive move as it appears in Rawls’s treatment of promising. It is his “complete agreement” with Rawls’s basic strategy of defending the utilitarian which prompts Cavell to “articulate as well as [he] can” where Rawls’s account falls short. Rawls’s own insight, so Cavell’s, that “it is part of the concept of promising that one does not keep or break particular promises on general utilitarian grounds” is stopped short by his failure to appreciate how fundamental the practice that funds promising really is.13

16 Register, for starters, Cavell’s “concept of a promise” instead of Rawls’s “practice of promising.” Cavell hones in on the following from Rawls, quoted above: “There are obvious utilitarian advantages in having a practice which denies the promisor, as a defense, any general appeal to the utilitarian principle in accordance with which the practice itself may be justified.” Cavell objects: [I]t must be wondered whether that is, literally, a comprehensible statement... Since there would be no promise apart from a knowledge of that fact about the concept of promising (that one does not coherently keep or break them on general utilitarian grounds) it is not comprehensible to justify actions falling under that concept by appealing to such fact.14

17 Rawls is found unawares of just how deep the notion of practice that supports the constitutive move runs. For on top of suggesting that the distinction he draws helps the utilitarian fend off the accusation that applying the utilitarian principle to a particular case offends our moral sensibilities, he suggests that the utilitarian can use the distinction to locate the place where the utilitarian principle may indeed be used, namely, the justification of the practice as a whole. According to Cavell, however, in so far as one thinks of promising as the kind of practice the rules of which are, in any ordinary sense, justifiable one misses a fundamental aspect of the kind of practice it is. This is the aspect that is registered by replacing “practice” with “concept”; it is an aspect that the earlier chapters of The Claim of Reason, following Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, are interested to work out: [Rawls] cannot mean merely what Wittgenstein means by referring to “obeying a rule” or “making a report” as “institutions” or practices (Investigations § 199, § 202) […] [W]hat[Wittgenstein] means, roughly, is that there are ways of doing all of these things, that not just anything you do will be competently performing them, that, in a word, they have a grammar, and in that sense are conventional, and in

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that sense social. He does not... mean that they are conventional or social in the way institutions which characterize particular societies are conventional. But it is in the latter sense that Rawls is, or must be, thinking of practices, anyway so far as his concept of the practice is to show how a utilitarian can, in ways consistent with his position, justify the practice […] [W]hat might it mean to urge a reform of the practice of promising? In the Wittgensteinian use of “practice” that would be no more, and no less sensible than urging a reform in the way we obey rules (not: a particular mode of obedience to some particular rule), or in the way we point to objects.15

18 There is a certain depth, a certain, let us say, inveterateness, to the relevant notion of a practice, whereby it is intolerant to the idea of reform in a way that Rawls’s notion of a practice seems not to accommodate. Rawls’s use of the analogy with games helps Cavell make the point palpable. For Rawls compares the inadmissibility of rejecting the authority of the rule denying breaking promises on utilitarian considerations to the inadmissibility of rejecting the authority of the principle determining that three strikes constitute striking out. But, Cavell points out, while it is comprehensible, and indeed one could make a case for it, to think of the concept of striking out in baseball as allowing four strikes, the concept of a promise cannot stand the corresponding revision.

19 But if this is right, what sense can we make Rawls’s suggestion that the practice may be justified along utilitarian lines? Rawls says that the point of the practice of promising is “to abdicate one’s title to act in accordance with utilitarian and prudential considerations so that the future may be tied down and plans coordinated in advance” and adds that “there are obvious utilitarian advantages” in having such a practice.16 But, so understood, there is not much between promising and making any commitment whatsoever. Cavell responds: “Indeed there are [obvious advantages to the practice making promises, so understood]. Doesn’t one feel that they are too obvious? The very existence of human society, and the coherence of one’s own conduct depend upon it […] [So understood], promising is not an institution but the precondition of any institutions among persons at all.”17

20 The ‘inveterateness’ of which I speak is developed in earlier parts of The Claim of Reason through an exploration of Wittgenstein’s notion of a form of life. A major hindrance to a proper understanding of this notion is a certain way of taking the idea of convention. In trying to account for the “conventionality” of certain basic modes of response typical of human beings we are tempted to understand them as the agreed upon arrangements a particular culture has found convenient or beneficial to pursue because of conditions particular to its history or environment. This way understanding the conventionality of our practices seems to be present in Rawls’s various formulations, and it is clearly the background when Rawls suggests that “there are obvious advantages in having a practice [of promising].”18 Cavell, by contrast, proposes to think of conventions in that context as those forms of life which are normal to any group of creatures we call human […] Here the array of “conventions” are not patterns of life which differentiate human beings from one another but those exigencies of conduct and feeling which all humans share. Wittgenstein’s discovery, or rediscovery, is of the depth of convention in human life, a discovery which insists on only of the conventionality of human society but, we could say, on the conventionality of human nature itself.19

21 This is consequential to the way we should conceive of the constitutive move, because the two ways of understanding convention set up differently one’s relation to the practice

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whose rules one questions. We can say that under Rawls’s understanding there is room for someone giving or withholding consent to the practice itself, whereas in Cavell the moment of consecration to a practice is dealt with in terms of initiation whose point is precisely to problematize a straightforward notion of consent or agreement to a practice.

22 The primal moment where the question of the relation to the practice is taken up by Cavell is his exploration of what he calls the Wittgensteinian scene of instruction. The scene is threaded throughout the Philosophical Investigations, revealing an anxiety that is inherent questioning about one’s relation to one’s practice, precisely because one recognizes that neither justification nor identification here proceed in an ordinary manner. Cavell would agree with Rawls that one cannot appeal to the utilitarian principle to justify breaking a promise since one thereby trumps the conditions of the very activity one purports at the same time to be involved in. And, both Cavell and Rawls conceive of the moment as displaying some kind of incompetence. But while in Rawls the incompetence is related to the problematic of signing off on something one at the same time disavows, in Cavell the inveterateness of the practice sheds new light on the kind of incompetence at stake: it is a lack of mastery of a deep and broad set of capacities, capacities that account for the possibility of proper maturation to human society.

23 This is what I meant when I said that Cavell’s criticism deepens constitutive move. Under Cavell’s picture, we are implicated by the practice of promising in more fundamental and incorrigible a way than Rawls’s conception of Practice Rules of seems to allow. The identification with the practice that figures in the constitutive move is not to be thought of in terms of giving consent to, or taking up of, or entering into, a proposed set of conventions; it is not to be thought of, that is, in terms of affirming a practice. Rather, the inveterateness of the practice and the kind of capacities that fund the possibility of partaking in it, imply that the problem of identification here is, let us say, a metaphysical problem; jeopardizing these practices is not jeopardizing something with which we identify. These rules are not external to us in the way that the rules of this or that chessboard game, this or that institution, are. Rather in questioning our identification with these rules there is a sense in which we question our identity itself: “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 […]”20

24 Now, quite the contrary from trying to relativize or make more tolerant our view of these practices, Cavell, precisely in appreciating their depth and the inalienable way in which they implicate us, precisely, if you will, in emphasizing their rigidity, paves the way for a proper charting out of the form of moral discussions. First, connecting the notion of a practice to fundamental capacities acquired through initiation helps to see that moral discussions proceed from, and assume as unproblematic, mastery of the relevant capacities and identification with the rules: It is perfectly true that in learning what a promise is we learn what defenses it is appropriate or competent to enter, and where, should we not keep it. But these are just the defenses we learn in learning to defend any of our conduct which comes to grief: those excuses, explanations, justifications (I will call them, as a whole, elaboratives) which make up the bulk of moral defense.21

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25 In discussing a case of breaking a promise, then, we are not going to focus on the defining rules of the practice, but rather, taking them for granted concern ourselves with such questions as whether what you said was (tantamount to) a (serious) promise, whether you were really prevented from keeping it (or perhaps only succumbed to temptation or intimidation), whether, knowing what was likely to happen you ought to have made it, whether you did what was possible to alleviate the consequences of the promise. 22

26 The point is a general one, and concerns a vitiation of the point and purpose of moral conversation that Rawls’ focus on defining rules of a practice is prone to. The appeal to rules as a response to a moral challenge amounts to, as the dynamics of the constitutive move reveals, silencing that challenge, showing that it cannot arise. And this makes it seem as though in moral discussions we set each other straight, point out how the interlocutor, incompetently, violated a rule unawares. But, A moral reason can never be a flat answer to the competent demand for justification. If a moral question is competently raised then a moral response must allow a discussion whose conclusion will be the fuller articulation of the position in question […] One may, of course, refer to the rules of an institution in one’s defense; the effect of that is to refuse to allow a moral question to be raised. And that is itself a moral position, for which one must accept responsibility.23

27 Secondly, and analogously, the rigidity of Practice Rules – their peculiar intolerance to violation – is flashed out in Rawls through the analogy with games. But, precisely in demonstrating this rigidity, there is demonstrated also the inadequacy of the Practice Rules model to reflect the dynamics of moral discussions, specifically, the resolution of moral conflict. For starters note that it is essential to games that what counts as a violation of the rules will be conclusively settled, and games are set in such a way as to avoid ambiguities and disagreements with respect to that. But there are no moral umpires, and, as we have seen with promising, moral conversation is set in an evaluative key to the resolution of, among other things, the question whether a rule was violated.

28 Furthermore, in games there is a clear cut demarcation of what must be done (what the rules do not leave open for the player’s judgment) from what ought to be done (strategic recommendations for playing the game well). The principles for playing well may be codified as rules, narrowing down the alternatives, but this must be settled prior to the game or else the game cannot be practiced. In morality, however, the demarcation of a border between ‘playing’ and ‘playing well,’ the establishing of the balance between must and ought, is precisely the starting point deliberation. Moral discussion starts where a choice presents itself between two or more morally problematic actions. It is when my ‘must’ meets your ‘ought not’ that we begin deliberation. Obviously, I say, I would not offend this poor man if I did not have to help my sister. Obviously, you say, you ought to help your sister, but at the price of offending that man, you ought not to. Cavell points out that the philosopher’s, in this case Rawls’s, dwelling on “You ought to do X” vs. “You ought not to do X” obscures this mode of conversing. Moral discussions treat mastery of Practice Rules, or elaboratives, as given, but nonetheless engage the details of the situation at hand to flash out what the interlocutors take responsibility for, what their positions are. [U]nlike the case of games, what is and is not an alternative open to you is not fixed. Actions are not moves, and courses of actions are not plays. What you say you must

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(have to, are compelled to...) do, another will feel you ought to do, generally speaking, other things being equal, etc., but that here you ought (would do better) not to... What you say you must do is not “defined by a practice,” for there is no such practice until you make it one, make it yours. We might say, such a declaration defines you, establishes your position.24

29 Appreciating how deeply ingrained Practice Rules are, how, in a sense, inalienable they are, should help us locate better their role in ordinary moral discussions. When engaged in moral conversation, we are not invoking a pre-inculcated set of conceptual relations, institutional rules that then go on, without our intervention as it were, to settle the dispute. Rather, the complexity of moral life calls for the deliberation and assessment of choices that are, to use Cavell’s term, elaboratively loaded. Choices that call for moral discussion involve the entertainment of a whole host of Practice Rules. They are, as it were, the building blocks of our discussion. The discussion concomitant to these loaded choices makes clear, to ourselves and others, the significance for us of the various considerations that bear on the choice, considerations the intelligibility of which can only come to view for someone initiated into the use of elaboratives, someone who knows the Practice Rules (what’s the value of keeping my word to mean to someone who knows not what giving one’s word is?) Our choices manifest the position we take vis-a-vis these various considerations, and, more often than not, we respect one set of considerations at the peril of another. But since we are responsible, and are held responsible, for such choices, moral discussions are of the form of creating our practice. Finding where our musts end and oughts begin is ours, rather than Practice Rules’, to do.

30 We get an extremely interesting result: Cavell’s analysis and criticism of Rawls’s constitutive move brings to the fore something like a sublation of this move. The constitutive move has the skeptic realizes that he attempts to reject a constitutive part of a practice with which he identifies. Cavell, we have seen, puts pressure on the nature of this identification through the exploration of the notion of convention that funds it. 25 The interesting result is that in pressing this idea of identification with a practice, resources are revealed that allow Cavell to sharpen and lay bare the contours of moral life in such a way that another notion of identification becomes apparent. This new notion of identification, albeit located at a level logically posterior to the one Rawls engages, is of immediate practical significance: it pertains to the agent’s actual practical involvements. Rather than in the way of a philosopher’s invoking a logically antecedent “convention” (either in Rawls’s or Cavell’s sense) to which the skeptic is supposedly committed, identification in this sublated sense arises when an interlocutor addresses a competent challenge to an agent’s doing, goading him to assess, to determine his position from within the very real details of his involvement in the case: the particular considerations the case elicits provide the material for the delineation of a position he can live with, and bid the interlocutor to respect.

31 See also that this notion of identification introduces two elements that are essential to the act of taking responsibility, the act that gives moral discussion its shape, as it were: confrontation and expression. Practical identification takes place amidst the elaboration of a moral position; it is the act of taking responsibility for such a position. As such, identification is as a task for which confronting another’s challenge is essential. At this level, then, you cannot be your own judge because the very space in which judgment unfolds is the space of elaboratives, of responses to an inquiry, to a competent challenge. Assuming a position, taking responsibility, is an expressive task set and

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enabled by the interlocutor whom you confront, a task that, at this level, might be called the task of constitution of practical identity; for it is only in carrying it out that the content of a morally loaded choice appears, here and now, as something to identify with. This brings out one last important point. We can now see that, since to respond to a moral challenge by deferring to Practice Rules is to essentially delegitimize the interlocutor, render him incompetent, by responding in such a way we deprive ourselves of the conditions of moral judgment. This point will be further developed in Cavell's criticism of TJ, to which I now turn.

The Criticism of TJ

32 Already in the preface to Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome Cavell himself hints at the possibility of linking his meta-ethical excurses in the third part of The Claim to his lectures on Emersonian Moral Perfectionism, and particularly with the criticism against moments in Rawls’s TJ.26 Emersonian Perfectionism is not offering a formulation of a competing, perfectionist, principle of justice, nor challenges Rawls’s principles as they stand. Actually, the eschewal of codification, which is a key feature of Moral Perfectionism, is important for Cavell, among other things, precisely for keeping in critical conversation with theories of justice from either Teleological or Deontological camps. Yet this very eschewal makes for a difficulty in pinpointing the level at which this “outlook or dimension of thought”27 represents a viable criticism of these theories, and even raises the more perturbing question as to whether there is room for fruitful conversation at all between the enterprises. I leave this philosophical question aside and, convinced that there is, take my cue from the earlier meta-ethical criticism just surveyed.

33 Call democratic judgments the various forms of evaluation that citizens in societies of “good enough justice”28 engage in with respect to their own conduct as members of such societies and with respect to the form and conduct of their society’s institutions. Understand a “society of good enough justice” to be a society like our own, a liberal society that, while not yet a well ordered society is nevertheless committed to the furthering of assimilation and implementation of the principles of justice. Understand also “conduct as members of such a society” to mean not only one’s conduct vis à vis the institutions of one’s society but rather, taking into account the pervasiveness of the political, one’s conduct in so far as that is guided by one’s attempts to answer the question “how to live?” or how “to be useful in the world?”29 Democratic judgment in this broad sense covers a wide territory indeed, from high flown and abstract engagement with a legislative motions or constitutional chapters, to intimate explorations of career choice or the fate of a marriage.

34 But now consider that our earlier reflections about the nature of moral conversation may be pertinent to democratic judgments, in so far as the question of identification is raised in these judgments in its highest pitch. And indeed Cavell thinks that actual judgments about what to do in particular cases, judgments such as we discuss in ordinary moral encounters, are essentially linked to the level of engagement typical of democratic judgment. Moral Perfectionism amplifies this level of engagement and investigates it, as it were, as a topic all on its own: Of course one will feel that in each case of moral conflict... persons are deciding what kind of life they wish to lead, what kind of persons they mean to be. But that is

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the point. One might say that in our remarriage comedies and in their derived melodramas, this is all that is being decided, that our interest in these relatively privileged couples is their pure enactment of the fact that in each moral decision of our lives, our senses of ourselves, and of what, and whom, we are prepared to consent to, are at stake. Emerson will put such an idea [saying]: “Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue and vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue and vice emit a breath every moment.”30

35 This helps locate Cavell’s discomfort with TJ. In the early criticism Cavell tried to fend off the tendency to have the foundationalist thrust of the constitutive move play a role in the adumbration of the nature and dynamics of moral conversation. In TJ, Rawls’s accomplishment in flashing out the intelligibility of justice – in “mak[ing] perspicuous how the justice of justice is to be assessed”31 – is given a definitive role in the portrayal of the form of our commitments to one another as citizens of a democratic society.32 This, I will show, results in a Cavellian criticism that essentially apes the structure of the criticism in The Claim. TJ tries for a delineation of the limits of our responsibilities according to a conception of justice whose resources fit the foundationalist animus of the book. TJ’s depiction of the form of democratic judgment – a judgment that is, after all, made from the perspective of an agent deliberating here and now – is therefore inescapably vitiated.

36 According to Rawls, a well ordered society is one that could originate by way of a fair contract between the parties in the OP. In this procedure rational agents, conceived as representatives of citizens in a liberal democratic society, select principles of justice to regulate the basic structure of society. The principles and the form of a well ordered society are thereby both derived and justified. Go back to Korsgaard’s characterization of Rawls’s constructivism. The OP models the conditions of a problem that we, citizens of a present and less than perfect liberal democratic society, face, namely, the problem of distributive justice. Since this is our problem, and the OP models it, the solution arrived at via this procedure is one we ought to accept. Now it is clear that the critical moment for a constitutive move reading such as Korsgaard’s turns on the relation between our problem and the way the OP models it. The question is whether we acknowledge the problem that the OP models as our own, whether we identify with it, whether the OP retains the point and purpose of our initial preoccupation.

37 It is important, in order to properly engage that question, to clearly distinguish between our standpoint here and now as citizens of this society, and the standpoint of the agents of construction, inhabiting a well ordered society, presumably a society (forever) not (yet) our own. The OP is a mediating conception that serves to get us from conceptions that we endorse – conceptions supposedly prevalent in our culture (as per the notion of public reason) and implicit in our considered judgments (as per the notion of reflective equilibrium) – namely, the conception of persons as free and equal and the conception of society as a fair system of corporation over time, and towards the principles of justice as they define a conception of a well ordered society. The challenge to Rawls’s theory, so far as Korsgaard’s reading of the constitutive move into it is concerned, lies then in accounting for the identification with those conceptions that provide the materials of construction.

38 One problem from the quarters of identification could be this: in so far as the conceptions of the moral person and of society as a fair cooperative system restrict parties in the OP in ways which they themselves do not, upon reflection, approve of, the results of the construction lose their legitimacy. I do not think, however, that this

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problem poses a fundamental criticism to Rawls’s theory. Because TJ wants to get at principles that embody autonomy and part of its methodology is therefore to consider such criticisms, if successful, as like extensions of its own enterprise. Those criticisms are not only welcome, they are invited. The OP and reflective equilibrium, and later on the idea of public reason, all reflect a commitment to testing the identification at stake, to ensuring that the principles do properly represent our considered judgments. Moreover, TJ is working out the suggested principles, considering them against other alternatives, having the various suggestions compete, so to speak. So criticisms about the content of the principles merely suggest that TJ does not accomplish what it sets out to do, but nothing about what it sets out to do and even the way it does it is threatened. The problem is, merely, one of execution.

39 The identification problem as I understand Cavell to raise it is, however, one that survives any perfecting of execution. In fact Cavell on many occasions professes both admiration for Rawls’s accomplished and systematic execution, and agreement with the content of the principles. I want to ask how Rawls’s account is exposed to a problem with respect to the possibility of viewing oneself as the source of the law, of identifying with the law – a problem, call it, with his conception of what autonomy comes to in moral life – whatever the final content of the principles of justice may turn out to be. Put the question this way: Suppose that the principles of justice do describe the content of our sense of justice, just as the rules of the practice of promising properly describe the concept of promising. Is there still a problem in what Rawls wants from his project, a problem akin to the problem I have explicated, in the case of promising, with the place Rawls’s constitutive move assumes in moral life? The content of the principles thus put aside, we might call such a problem, after Cavell, a problem of relating to what we know.

40 Cavell acknowledges that a shift of critical focus from the content of the principles to, let us say, the mode of entertaining them or relating to them in societies of good enough justice, leaves one somewhat vulnerable to the charge of neglecting the more pressing matters of political justice. Nevertheless, he insists on articulating a threat to democracy originating not in the particular faults of this or that system of laws – which he is happy to a admit is indeed a prior concern, even a condition to his own undertaking33 – but rather a threat jeopardizing systems of rules as such, a danger originating not in the content of the rules but in their form, in their nature as rules.

41 What is problematic in our relation to rules? Rousseau is clearly in the background here. Consider from The Geneva Manuscript the suggestion that the will cannot be obligated, say, “tied down in advance.” Autonomy seems to be here subject to a temporal requirement: […] it is contrary to the nature of will, which has no dominion over itself, to engage itself for the future. One can obligate oneself to do, but not to will; and there is a great difference between executing what one has promised because one has promised it, and continuing to will it, even when one has not previously promised to do so [You could call this the difference between consent and freedom] .34

42 In both promising and principles of justice we have taken the force of the constitutive move to be somehow attributed to a logically prior act of identification. By describing the case as one of promising, you demonstrate a commitment to the rules of the practice; seeking to solve the problem of justice, where that problem is formulated in terms of the conceptions of the moral person and of the well ordered society, you avow commitment to the best solution to be found. But the identification befitting the

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foundationalist thrust of the constitutive move is not located in a temporal space. This is because it addresses a skeptical worry of a particular shape. In Cavell’s terms I would describe this shape as the temptation to reject our criteria. The constitutive move is but the laying out for the skeptic to see that his doubts are inconsistent with commitments he himself is prepared to assume. Yet this assumption, both in the case of the appeal to the nature of the practice and in the case of the OP, represents a level of identification far removed from the agent’s temporal situatedness, from the weave of cares and commitments pertinent to a particular, temporally situated choice. I am not here assessing the satisfactoriness of the constitutive move itself. All I am pointing out now is that since the skeptic does not raise his question from any particular point in time, the answer he is given in principle does not draw on resources pertaining to any particular temporal investment.

43 Democratic judgment is a form of evaluation governing our interactions as agents always from a particular perspective, a circle of cares and commitments, a weave of attachments, attractions, obligations and necessities. In so far as Rawls’ TJ aspires for the principles of justice to inform those judgments he runs the risk of neglecting to pay heed to the temporal requirement of autonomy Rousseau insists on. This is because the foundationalist thrust that goes into the development of the principles keeps the level of identification operative in the account divested of the agent’s particular determinations. And, in so far as democratic judgments are an essential part of democratic life – in so far, that is, that they are part of democracy’s inner workings – to misrepresent their form in this way is to misrepresent the conditions of democracy. That is why Cavell’s criticism is fundamental: the problem it flashes out, no amount of tinkering can mend since it concerns no particular detail of the theory. It is the theory’s application to democratic life that is at stake. I want to say, it is the theory’s conception of itself as something to be applied that is the problem. And for a theory that harbors practical aspirations and that enjoys such success – I would say even, practical prestige – as A Theory of Justice does, a problem here is not to be over-looked.

44 To start assessing Cavell’s discomfort let us call up a place in TJ where Rawls clarifies, by way of “intuitive considerations,”35 the sense in which the difference principle is egalitarian. To do so, Rawls attempts to flash out the way the difference principle is compatible with the principle of redress. While the difference principle does not adjure the eradication of undeserved inequalities – like “the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance” – it does command that we use the resources pooled from these inescapable contingencies in such a way that the fortunate “gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.”36 Thus, to my mind in one of the most exhilarating passages, Rawls goes on to offer a rebuttal of the thought that the impossibility of perfect redress excuses ignoring injustice, “as if the refusal to acquiesce in injustice is on a par with being unable to accept death”:37 the natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that people are born society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. The basic structure of [Aristocratic and cast] societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to share one another’s fate. In designing institutions they undertake to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common

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benefit […] and while no doubt imperfect in other ways, the institutions which satisfy [the two] principles are just.38

45 Now I do not purport to object to the content of Rawls’s reply. I am interested in the role given the words “men agree to share one another’s fate,” a phrase Cavell picks up on to interpret the book’s practical ambitions. Notice the kind of muddle affecting the embittered egalitarian. His intolerance to inequality renders him inapt to properly distinguish the limits of our responsibilities: he considers things that are out of our hands, hard inescapable natural facts, unjust. Rawls sets him straight. Our agreement to share each other’s fate is invoked to make the embittered egalitarian re-appreciate the boundaries of the dominion of justice, to have him see what is ours to mend and what is ours to bear. Cavell recognizes a tone of “elegaicism”39 running through the book. I take this paragraph to be representative of such a tone. Note the conclusiveness of our impotence, the hard facticity of nature that sets the limits to what fits our hands. And then the sharing of the coping with what the inescapable conditions of human existence have left us with, and the suggestion that the principles of justice exhaust what there is to do with what is thus left, and the sense of sublimated pride that goes into bearing this forlorn recognition.

46 What is useful to me here appears not a paragraph later, when Rawls considers an objection to the effect that “those better situated deserve their greater advantages whether or not they are to the benefit of others.”40 To answer that objection Rawls invokes a distinction between the level of the choice of the principles of justice – that is the level of his response to the embittered egalitarian – and the level of implementing those principles in an already just society. What I want you to gain a sense of, and in that way help bring out what is for Cavell the brunt of the problem, is the way the finality of the demarcation of our responsibilities which we gauged in the former level, trickles down to the latter: It is perfectly true that given a just system of cooperation as a scheme of public rules and the expectations set up by it, those who, with the prospect of improving their condition, have done what the system announces that it will reward are entitled to their advantages. In this sense the more fortunate have a claim to their better situation; their claims are legitimate expectations established by social institutions, and the community is obligated to meet them. But this sense of desert presupposes the existence of a cooperative scheme; it is irrelevant to the question of whether in the first place the scheme is to be designed in accordance with the difference principle or some other criterion.41

47 Again, I do not object here to what Rawls says. Of course the distinction is valid and the notions of legitimacy, claims upon and obligations of a community, and entitlement to deserts play such role as Rawls describes. I want, rather, following Cavell, to question Rawls’s picture of the interaction between the levels. What does Rawls mean by “presupposes” in “this sense of desert presupposes the existence of a cooperative scheme”? What becomes of our “agreement to share one another’s fate” at the level of living with our institutions and with one another rather than designing the institutions and laws? Grant that our claims, entitlements and obligations in the second level presuppose this first level agreement. Is this to mean that securing identification with the first level design amounts to doing all that we can, all that fits our hands, in justice? What is the form of a challenge to the application of the principles? Grant that the embittered egalitarian is confused about the limits of our responsibilities at the first level. Are challenges arising from the second level of the form of such muddle as well? Recall the four strikes example. There, it is only at the level of instituting the practice

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that considerations of utility are of use. If we think of the agreement to share our life together as governing standards of justice, like in the example the principle of utility governs standards for the practice of baseball, are we then to conclude that, in the same way appeal to the governing principle is debarred once the practice is instantiated in the case of games, it is likewise debarred in the case of justice? What then can we appeal to?

48 Cavell identifies this ‘trickling down’ to be present in various moments of expression in TJ, moments covering both dimensions of the democratic judgment – the appraisal of the conduct and form of society and of one another. In these moments of expression the OP and its consents are made pertinent to our responsibilities here and now, forming the book’s conception of what Cavell dubs “The Conversation of Justice.”42 Such is, for example, the moment of responding (“there are many things to say”43) to someone failing to see a reason to abide by their moral sentiments, sentiments of, after all, psychological origins. Or, a yet more fundamental moment, where at stake is the public acceptance of the principles, and the sense in which members of society may be said to be autonomous and its scheme voluntary (“whenever social institutions satisfy [the principles of justice] those engaged in them can say to one another that they are cooperating on terms to which they all would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with respect to one another were fair”44).

49 Let us focus on a moment of expression where at stake is the assessment of each other’s conduct in the broad sense characteristic of (one aspect of) the democratic judgment. The trickling down is manifest, according to Cavell, when Rawls discusses a rational person’s “plan of life”: A rational person may regret his pursuing a subjectively rational plan, but not because he thinks his choice is in any way open to criticism. For he does what seems best at the time, and if his beliefs later prove to be mistaken with untoward results, it is through no fault of his own. There is no cause for self reproach.45

50 Formulated in a normative key this reads: [A] rational individual is always to act so that he needs never blame himself no matter how his plans finally work out […] [He] can say that at each moment of his life he has done what the balance of reasons required, or at least permitted.46

51 Admittedly, the chapter on “Deliberative Rationality,” where this quote is extracted from, pertains to highly abstract features of rationality and does not specifically address decisions in a moral key. Yet the fact that those principles are to govern the choosing of a plan of life, means that they pervade considerations typical of democratic judgment.47 Furthermore, Rawls refers to texts by Thomas Nagel and Charles Fried, and the discussions there do involve the moral aspect of life plan considerations. Moreover still, consider the comparison Rawls makes between the guiding principle of a plan of life and the principle of right: the principle of responsibility to self resembles a principle of right: the claims of the self at different times are to be so adjusted that the self at each time can affirm the plan that has been and is being followed. The person at one time, so to speak, must not be able to complain about actions of the person at another time.48

52 The principle of deliberative rationality is important for Cavell because it makes manifest TJ’s conception of moments of expression: they are similar in form to the incompetence response, the deference to Practice Rules, that we have encountered “Two Concepts of Rules.” In that, so Cavell, the conception represents a rejection of Moral Perfectionism.

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Understanding Emersonian Perfectionism as an interpretation of Rousseau’s and Kant’s idea of freedom as autonomy means understanding it as questioning what or who the self is that commands and obeys itself and what an obedience consists in that is inseparable from mastery. Rousseau’s criticism of society in these terms is that we are not expressed in the laws we give ourselves, that the public does not exist, that the social will is partial (conspiratorial). Kant […] [asks] whether our obedience is partial, that is heteronomous, taken on the part of incentives not internal to the law. Emerson’s turn is to make my partiality itself the sign and incentive of my siding with the next or further self, which means siding against my attained perfection (or conformity), sidings which require the recognition of an other – the acknowledgment of a relationship – in which this sign is manifest.49

53 What pains Cavell in the Rawlsian conversation of justice is a form of expression which defers to a moment of identification far removed from the agent’s concerns here and now. We have already observed the role this moment plays in the constitutive move, the role it plays in rebutting a certain kind of skeptic. And we have also seen that the worries and considerations characteristic of ordinary moral conversation are of a different sort than those of the skeptic, and that hence a different way to conceive of identification is appropriate in the relevant logical level. Now I do not think, here too, that Cavell suggests that there is anything wrong with the grounding TJ offers to the principles of justice. His concern is with the way the OP is open to the present, to the conversation of justice going on here and now; his concern, that is, is with the way the foundationalist animus appropriate to the ‘first level’ – the level where we meet challenges like that of the embittered egalitarian – keeps functioning after, as it were, the skeptics typical of that level have been silenced.

54 Both the “above reproach” passage and the “two senses of desert” passage suggest that Rawls thinks of this opening to the present through the notion of legitimacy. And there are two main difficulties with putting that notion to work in the context of the conversation of justice, difficulties that touch the heart of what Cavell wants from a conception of autonomy subject to a temporal requirement. First, there is the vitiation of the form of democratic judgment. Cavell says: When the conversation of justice is directed to the constitution of the original position […] [it] comes to an end in a state of reflective equilibrium. To prove that […] there is an optimal resolution to this conversation (a set of principles whose choice will receive optimal agreement) is one of Rawls’s notable achievements […] It seems to me that Rawls is taking encouragement from the proof concerning the resolution for the original position, to regard “above reproach” as a rational response to the question of affirming a plan of life in our actual society. Whereas this bottom line is not a response but a refusal of further conversation.50

55 Granted, the conversation ends, but why is it not a response? The problem is that to conceive of questions directed at one’s plan of life in terms of legitimacy is to focus, so to speak, on the wrong part of the judgment: It is, I surmise, because a moral judgment of a state of affairs (not [yet] issuing in a judgment as to the action imperative in the face of this state) has a perceptual dimension and assesses pleasure and pain, and because it is informed by sensibilities in various stages of perceptiveness or impressionability, that moral judgment is sometimes held to have an aesthetic dimension. Perfectionists, judging the world and themselves in it, may seem to dwell in this dimension. Rawls has shown why this dimension must not affect the moral necessity of reflective equilibrium (the fact of matching between judgments and principles) expressed in the joint choice in the original position of the principles of justice. But this should not compromise the moral necessity of reflective judgment (the demand for and

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exposure to, the matching of one’s judgment by the judgment of others) in measuring the degree of one’s life’s, hence of one’s society, departures from compliance with those principles.51

56 The invocation of Kant’s idea of reflective judgment is meant, I take it, to mark a shift of emphasis similar to the one we have marked moving from an account grounding the authority of the rules of a practice to an account of the mode of discussion that morality is. The assessments of one’s life plan treat the principles of justice like the assessment of the worthiness of an act treats the central concepts of our moral economy. When thinking about what we do when we assess the compliance of our life plan with those principles, Cavell points out, we should wear the notion of legitimacy. This is because it makes us conceive of the subject matter of assessment, the life plan (or the act), as already clearly articulated, ready for determination under the principles or concepts in our possession, which themselves are without difficulty culled. It is a picture of simple application. The skeptic that questions the authority of the practice haunts us and so we problematize what in these assessments is unproblematic and thereby thwart their form. Just like the notion of position was invoked to alert us to the different kind of evaluation at stake, so is the notion of reflective judgment invoked now. “Above reproach” represents precisely the kind of response that stifles the nature of this mode of conversation, the kind that the appeal to Practice Rules represented in the case of ordinary moral conversation. Cavell indeed calls up the analogy with games to make his point here, too: My criticism of the analogy was that no rule can function in the moral life as the three strikes rule functions in its game. One who asks for four strikes in a game of baseball is incompetent at the game and can perhaps be taught what it is. In the moral life the equivalent finality is carried not by a rule but by a judgment of moral finality, one that may be competently opposed, whose content may then enter into moral argument, one whose resolution is not to be settled by appeal to a rule defining institution; a judgment, hence, that carries consequences unforeseen or forsworn in games.52

57 What is crucial for my purposes here is the thought that in holding fast to the notion of legitimacy, in failing to judge democratically, we manifest a failure of autonomy as well. This is exemplified through the examination of an extreme example – Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Her rebuke induces Torvald to respond in a manner similar to what we hear in Rawls’s “above reproach” – an appeal to rules that takes them to carry a finality that precisely replaces the work of judgment that Nora seeks. Cavell thinks Torvald’s response, beyond (and because of) the fact that it serves to delegitimize, make incompetent, Nora’s challenge, betrays moral incompetence on Torvald’s part: Torvald’s judgment, “You’re talking like a child” is of Nora’s incompetence as a moral agent; his judgment condemns him while the legal rules are perhaps on his side... Torvald’s road back begins […] in recognizing his former valuing of Nora was not based on his judging for himself, and bearing responsiveness to his judgment, but on the imagination of rules that, as it were, replaced his judgment. (As rules do […] in games. This is something that allows games to be practiced and played, their intentions to be shaped, their consequences to be confined, scored. The limits of responsiveness are known – contract like – in advance).”53

58 It is here that we see most clearly how Rawls’s understanding of the conversation of justice in terms of legitimacy runs counter to what Moral Perfectionism wants from it. The problematic of conformity, embodying the threat to democracy Emersonian Perfectionism is most interested to combat, is not only left untreated in the Rawlsian account, but there is a current in that account which actually promotes it. What we find

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here is that, so to speak, autonomy is not enough. Or, if you will, that you can be autonomous in one sense without being autonomous in another. Presumably the laws embody Torvald’s identification in the way Rawls’s account of the OP wants them to. In that sense Torvald can be said to be autonomous. In that sense, as well, since the constitutive move goes through for both Torvald and Nora, legitimacy may be invoked, Torvald is not wrong to invoke it. But in another sense autonomy is precisely what Torvald’s response lacks.

59 It is against the backdrop of the perfectionist call for understanding autonomy in a temporal key that we should hear Cavell’s early, seemingly superficial, criticism of the appeal to rules: If my remarks […] are right, then a suggestion emerges about why philosophers appeal to rules in theorizing about morality, and about how rules are then conceived. The appeal is an attempt to explain why such an action as promising is binding upon us. But if you need an explanation for that, if there is any sense that something more than personal commitment is necessary, then the appeal to rules comes too late.54

60 If my explorations are on the right track, then there is a reading of these lines whereby what is being criticized here is not the constitutive move itself, not the attempt to show the normativity of the laws per se, but rather the tendency to have that move overstep its bounds, play itself out at a level where normativity is to be unpacked in terms of “personal commitment.” The democratic judgment invokes the agent’s identification here and now, with respect to the particulars of his life plan, its specific motivations and attractions; the compromises and sacrifices considered; the managing of constraints, and the reactions to unexpected turns of events; the irreversible consequences, already felt and not yet arrived at, etc. The outlay of one’s cares and commitments cannot be flashed out, hence cannot be endorsed, identified with, besides thus entertaining the substantive details of one’s determinations, an exploration of considerations in light of the complexity that surrounds such determinations. And the crux of the matter for Cavell is that this sort of exploration, because of its “aesthetic dimension”55 – the essential evaluative component inseparable from such issues – essentially proceeds from a recognition of partiality by way of conversation among peers.56

61 Interestingly, this result with respect to identification rehearses the sublation of the constitutive move we have encountered with respect to the concept of practice. Cavell says: “the question of whether morality has its foundation in reason is given the following slant of answer in Emerson: perfectionism has its foundation in rethinking.”57 The ingenuity of Emersonian Perfectionism lies in the insight that concrete moral self legislation, as taking place always in the present and from its complex and sensitivity laden perspective, both issues from and utilizes a state in which we find ourselves and with which we are somehow dissatisfied, a state Cavell calls the “attained state of the self”58 (or society, as I promptly discuss). The fact that the possibility of autonomy thus presupposes the recognition of partiality, suggests that the occasion of self legislation contains an irreducible element of criticism, and hence an essential public register, a concrete role for the other, figured as a friend. For a critical examination of the sort democratic judgment calls for there has to be a challenge to one’s determinations as they stand, a shaming awakening to a shortcoming of one’s “attained self,” of one’s sensibilities as they cope, have unto now coped, with the complexity of this expansive

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evaluative task. This kingdom of ends is entered into in companionship; here and now autonomy is a task that cannot be accomplished alone.

62 I have limited the discussion up to now only to one aspect of the democratic judgment, namely, where it is concerned with evaluating one’s conduct or plan of life. But in that I never registered the way Moral Perfectionism conceives the two aspects of the judgment – that of evaluating one’s self and that of evaluating one’s society – to be interwoven. For Cavell, “[M]easuring the degree of one’s society’s distance from strict compliance with the principles of justice is a function of taking the measure of one’s sense of compromise with injustice or rather with imperfect justice in one's life within actual institutions.”59 Thus all I have said about the shape of the judgment of a life plan equally applies to the shape of the assessment of the departure of the institutions of one’s society from the ideal. Cavell likes to refer to this aspect of the judgment as the moment where justice “takes up its sword.”60 It is the moment where conclusions from the ideal part of the theory make claims on our society, a society less than well ordered. Rawls says that in non ideal cases “our judgment is guided by the priority indicated by the lexical ordering [of the principles].” Still recognizing the abstract nature of the principles he says: Thus as far as circumstances permit, we have a natural duty to remove any injustices, beginning with the most grievous as identified by the extent of the deviation from perfect justice. Of course, this idea is extremely rough. The measure of departures from the ideal is left importantly to intuition.61

63 Cavell takes issue with this phrasing from Rawls most of all. He asks “What else is left?” Not only is there the impression formed that not much is left, but the very suggestion that measuring is left – now that the foundationalist work of setting the principles is done – suggest the very permeating of foundationalist thrust into the here and now. The lack of stipulation of the way this measuring is supposed to go suggests that Rawls is thinking of intuition here along lines similar to those offered when intuition assumed significant role at the most crucial foundationalist local of the book, namely, the process of reflective equilibrium. The idea at play there is that our considered judgments, intuitively made, are both checked by and provide a test for the principles the theory offers. Cavell worries that in leaving democratic judgment “importantly to intuition,” there is “concealed the assumption, or picture, or premiss, that intuition can only be checked, or rationalized, or brought into reflective equilibrium, by principles.”62 Invoking the model of reflective judgment once more, Cavell then reiterates the kind of vitiation democratic judgment is subject to, illicitly inheriting as it does features originating in a project foundationalistically oriented: [T]he matching of principles with considered judgments yielding reflective equilibrium does not describe the process of bringing a present perception (say, of constitution of intolerable inequality or discrimination) under what Kant describes in the Critique of Judgment as reflective judgment […] In arriving at reflective equilibrium the picture is that judgment finds its derivation in a principle, something more universal, rational, objective, say a standard, from which it achieves justification or grounding […] In reflective judgment, rather, the idea is of the expression of a conviction whose grounding remains subjective – say myself – but which expects or claims justification from the (universal) concurrence of other subjectivities, on reflection; call this the acknowledgment of matching.63

64 The work of grounding is not annulled when moving to the level of practice. What Cavell wants us to recognize, though, is that the structure of justification when assuming the

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perspective of the present, when measuring departure from the ideal, is different than that fitting the work of establishing the ideal. Grounding, here and now, is sublated.

65 The vitiation of the form of judgment as it pertains estimating society’s departure from the ideal raises the issue of consent to or identification with society. For the idea of consent as it is offered in TJ goes only so far as identifying with the principles of justice is concerned. Rawls’s carrying social contract theory’s conception of justice to a “higher level of abstraction”64 manages to avoid the violent moment that preoccupied classic contract theories, the moment where actual society makes one party to injustices of which one does not approve. The price to pay, however, is that, despite the fact that the account proceeds from conceptions originating in actual society, consent is hedged – it is limited to the principles these conceptions ground, and so it is left, in the final account, removed from actual society. This is yet another form of putting the basic thought this paper wishes to track, namely, that in pushing identification to the level of the constitution of the practice, one is liable to misconstrue the relation between that level and the level of engaging the practice. For if identification is taken care of at a level preceding actual participation in the life of society, one comes to think that merely following society’s “kosher” rules, assuming they are that, already embodies all there is to ask from autonomy. And, more to the present concern, one might think of assessing one’s society as the measuring of its departure from what one has given one’s consent to.

66 But first, this is not the right way to picture consent, because it pays no tribute to the fact that we are members of the society we assess: The idea of directing consent to the principles […] seems to lead to an effort to imagine confining or proportioning our consent – to imagine that […] the contract might specify how far I may reduce my consent (in scope or degree) as justice is reduced (legislatively or judicially). But my intuition is that my consent is not thus modifiable or proportionable (psychological exile is not exile) […] it reaches into every corner of society’s failure or ugliness. Between a society approaching strict compliance with the principles of justice and one approaching causes of civil disobedience, there is the ground on which existent constitutional democracies circumscribe everyday lives […] Consent to society is neither unrestricted nor restricted; its content is part of the conversation of justice.65

67 Secondly, in a democratic judgment that assesses one’s society, it is precisely by having that picture of “proportionable” consent that an “above reproach” like response, a response stifling the conversation of justice, is encouraged. A response such as this we find in a moment of expression in Rawls’s discussion of envy. Rawls attempts to isolate a moral component sometimes accompanying envy, namely, resentment. Resentment arises when we attribute the good fortune of others to some injustice. Therefore, Rawls thinks, “Those who express resentment must be prepared to show why certain institutions are unjust or how others have injured them.”66 This means that Rawls continues to conceive of the pertinent moments of expression as continuing the foundationalist work, albeit now utilizing certain evidence from personal grievance to help the task. And so when no constructive evidence of the sort is brought up, when pain is voiced but a finger is not, or not firmly, pointed, society can claim to be above reproach, discussion cannot even begin. And this is the problem. It is not exactly that society is not above reproach in those cases. Rather, what bothers Cavell is what we are imagining these moments of expression to look like. Just like my saying that I am above reproach to someone who challenges my conduct or life plan was shown to stifle the kind of expressive work essential for my autonomy (in a temporal key), so too my

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demanding that someone shows what laws or institutions are inconsistent with the principles of justice stifles the expression of my consent to my society, offends the possibility of my identification with my society – rather than its principles. To ask to point to injustice of laws and institutions is to immediately defer the complaint raised from within the practice to the level of the constitution of the practice. It is to deal with the complaint through the notion of legitimacy. But determining the legitimacy of laws and institutions is not what these moments of expression are about. It is again in immerging oneself in an exploration of the sources of the other’s complaint, the other’s pain, and offering your response to them, one by one, one on one, that one manages to give consent to society, to truly become its member.

68 Cavell contests Rawls’s dismissal of envy unaccompanied by specific claim of injustice by suggesting an analysis of pictures of “envious” confrontation as they appear in the comedies of remarriage. Confrontation, conversation, of this sort is shown to contribute to the felicity of democracy by way of making room for consent to a state of society implicated in injustice that is not surveyed by society’s rules or the form of its institutions. How I respond […] to your […] resentment and indignation is fateful to what I want of my society, to its democratic aspirations. To say something to the effect that “I am above reproach” is to end my relation with this other, and to that extent injure the texture of my society […] [In the comedies of remarriage] the [couple’s] responsiveness to others, on which the films insist, means that their response to a charge of unbearable discrepancy between their position and those of the mass of society would, in effect, be to take it seriously, which means to consider that the charge comes from a competent agent, one who know the rules of their shared institutions as well as they do. It means, consequently, to let the questioning of their fortune cause them to ask whether they wish to confirm their consent to a society in which their favored position has depended, however much they feel they have earned or deserved it, too much on their social connections, on their genetic and developed powers of quickness and charm, and on luck. So they are forced to become conscious, as it were to taste the fact, that their society is in some measure at best in partial compliance with the principles of justice […] [T]hey will all, out of different perspectives in different cases, affirm their consent to their society […] But now they consent in the consciousness that their society’s partiality compromises them in relation to justice, implicates them in some measure of injustice […].67

Conclusion

69 While expatiating the Kantian interpretation to TJ Rawls says that “to express one’s nature as a being of a particular kind is to act on the principles that would be chosen if this nature were the decisive determining element.”68 But this gives the impression, as I guess dates back to Kant, that acting on principles is a matter of unproblematic application of them to an already clearly articulated conception of the situation. And already with respect to Kant Cavell says: What is the maxim of your action now, that is, what are you doing and why are you doing it? Are you sitting quietly in a classroom or studying philosophy or satisfying a requirement or testing whether your interest in literature or theology cab be taken where it wants to go without a detour into philosophy, and are you doing any of these things, and countless others, out of self love, or self punishment, or to please your parents, or to delay a career in the law, or to win a bet, or out of sheer joy? This indefiniteness in the description of an action alerts us to the task of

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locating Kant's apparent ease in selecting a maxim […] [in Kant] a person is pictured as being stopped from acting by asking himself a question, namely whether the maxim can be universalized, willed as a universal law.69

70 Thus Kant’s picture of the prohibitive role of the Categorical Imperative presents us with a person already impressed by a sense of transgression, say temptation, which induces the testing of the maxim. But this suggests that the description and sources of one’s action, here and now, are laid bare to the one testing them, and it was this, we saw, that Cavell attempted to criticize saying that “rules come too late.” It is when the rules (of the categorical imperative, or of justice, or of the practice of promising) are conceived in such a way as to exempt you of the responsibility to articulate your position, articulate what is that you, here and now, are taking responsibility for, that we find that autonomy in Kant’s sense becomes the enemy of autonomy, say, in Emerson’s and Rousseau’s sense.

71 Cavell thinks that Rawls’s handling of the moments of expression in TJ makes expressing one’s nature by “acting on the principles that would be chosen if this nature were the decisive element” take over – replace, Cavell says – expressing one’s nature, to borrow from Rousseau, as a being against nature. That is, whereas the task of constitution of the practice is met in such a way that the content of the rules expresses our nature as free and equal, there is still the question of how acting on those principles is to be construed, how freedom is to be exercised. And Rawls is “encouraged” by the way the constitutive move resolves skeptical quandaries, silences the skeptic, at the foundational level, to a similar form of response to challenges raised at the practical level, the level of the democratic judgment. However, An early lesson of democracy is that one is not to legislate his or her tastes or opinions, but only the good of all […] this early lesson is not just one among the lessons of a democracy: any may have to bear the burden of showing that a certainty of moral position may be based merely on taste or opinion – not inevitably, but in a given case. A philosopher will naturally think that the other has to be argued from his position, which is apt to seem hopeless. But suppose the issue is not to win an argument but to manifest for the other another way. The trial may end soon, your spade turned. But that is not, for perfectionism, the end of the confrontation, since its point was not argument. (let’s hope there’s no law against your cultivating with your spade just there). It becomes the perfectionist moment, where one begins showing how to manage individuation, its economy, the power that goes into passiveness […] In a democracy the speaking of public thoughts seems, in its open possibility, the easiest way to speak. For Emerson it is the most necessary and the hardest. The distinction between private and public, subjective and objective, a feast for metaphysical and moral dispute, becomes the daily fare of democracy.70

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAVELL S., (1979), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press (CR).

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CAVELL S., (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press (CHU).

CAVELL S., (2004), Cities of Words, Cambridge, Harvard University Press (CW).

KANT I., (1997), Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals (ed. Mary Gregor), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

KORSGAARD C., (2008), “Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth Century Moral Philosophy,” in The Constitution of Agency, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 302-26.

KORSGAARD C., (2009), Self Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

MULHALL S., (1997), “Promising, Consent, and Citizenship,” Political Theory, 25 (2), 171-92.

RAWLS J., (1955), “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review 64, 3-32.

RAWLS J., (1971), Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

THOMPSON M., (2004), “What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” Reason and Value: Themes from The Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

NOTES

1. Korsgaard goes further, actually. She says: “But the importance of the [constitutive move] is deeper than that, for I believe – and I know this is more controversial – that the only way to establish the authority of any purported normative principle is to establish that it is constitutive of something to which the person whom it governs is committed – something that she either is doing or has to do” (Korsgaard 2009: 57). 2. Korsgaard (2008: 322). 3. Another objection rebutted is the objection that utilitarianism may end up justifying the punishing of the innocent. Cavell actually addresses both of Rawls’s rebuttals in tandem in his criticism. See CR 293-303. 4. Rawls (1955: 16). 5. Rawls (1955: 22). 6. Rawls (1955: 24). 7. Rawls (1955: 25). 8. Kant (1997: 24). 9. Rawls (1955: 24). 10. Mulhall 1997. 11. Mulhall (1997: 180). 12. CHU 25. 13. CR 295. 14. CR 295. 15. CR 294. 16. Rawls (1955: 16). 17. CR 298. 18. As when he says: “In a practice there are rules setting up offices, specifying certain forms of action appropriate to various offices, establishing penalties for the breach of rules, and so on. We may think of the rules of a practice as defining offices, moves, and offenses” (“Two Concepts of Rules,” 25). It is worth mentioning that this conception of the conventionality of the practice of promising appears also in TJ. See for instance TJ 344.

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19. CR 111. 20. CR 115. 21. CR 296. 22. CR 297. 23. CR 303. 24. CR 309. 25. It is worth mentioning that the rejection of Practice Rules of the sort that govern moral discourse, or moral criteria, receives treatment in quite a different philosophical trajectory in the fourth part of the Claim of Reason, through a philosophical diagnosis of skepticism of other minds. It seems to me that this extremely difficult and obscure part of the book is owed much more attention than it has received. Not the least of reasons is that it raises a connection, not yet sufficiently explored, between foundationalist aspirations in morality and a Wittgensteinian conception of the nature of philosophical enterprises. 26. CHU xx. 27. CHU 4. 28. CHH 3. 29. CW 36. 30. CW 39. 31. CHU 25. It does so by providing “tests of institutions according to the ability to mitigate [the] burdens of both natural and social orders.” 32. Another criticism focusing on this issue, albeit in a different register, still also anchored in the test case of promising, is found in Thompson 2004. 33. CHU xx. 34. Rousseau J.J., Geneva Manuscript, II, ii, 10. 35. TJ 102. 36. TJ 101. 37. TJ 102. 38. TJ 102. 39. CHU 29. 40. TJ 103. 41. TJ 103. 42. This term provides also the title of the chapter of Conditions where the criticism of TJ is expatiated. CHU 101. 43. TJ 514. 44. TJ 13. 45. TJ 422. 46. TJ 422. 47. In Cities of Words Cavell elucidates: “I suppose [Rawls means one need not blame oneself] for such decisions as having made what turns out to be a bad investment, or having refused a particular offer of marriage, or not having had children, or having taken a job that seemed lucrative instead of staying in school, and so on” (CW 177). 48. TJ 423 (my italics). 49. CHU 31. 50. CHU xxv. 51. CHU xxvi-ii. CHU 113. 52. CHU xxv. 53. CHU 114-5. 54. CR 307. 55. See CHU xxvi-ii. 56. See CHU 31.

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57. CHU xxix. 58. CHU 12. 59. CHU xxvii. 60. CHU xxiv. 61. TJ 246. 62. CHU xxv. 63. CHU xxvi. 64. TJ 3, 11. 65. CHU 107-8. 66. TJ 533. 67. CW 180, 183-4. 68. TJ 253. 69. CW 136. 70. CHU, 31.

ABSTRACTS

The paper links Cavell's early criticism of Rawls's “Two Concepts of Rules” to the later criticism of TJ. In his early paper, Rawls enacts a certain type of foundationalist response to the practical skeptic, commonly referred to nowadays as the constitutive move. While sympathetic to the move itself, Cavell's criticism targets a conception of the nature of moral discussion that arises when the move is as it were read into ordinary moral encounters. Cavell's later criticism rehearses the structure of its precursor. In TJ, the conversation of justice takes the shape of seeking legitimacy, aiming at a level where the limits of our responsibility are predetermined and clearly marked. But this shape stifles the possibility of the kind of conversation whose point is to assess, here and now, what our identification with our society amounts to and what the significance of the choices we make as members of this society exactly is. Having the structure of the earlier criticism in view furthers the understanding of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism, and sheds light on some of its enigmatic features, such as the relevance of Kant's notion of reflective judgment to moral thinking and the essentiality of the friend to perfectionist assent.

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Essays

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Stylists in the American Grain Wallace Stevens, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty

Aine Kelly

If there is now a tradition of American literature, it starts from penury of circumstance and achieves, at enormous personal cost, a style never secure in the possession of itself, but always pursuing its best and most difficult self.1

1 According to Denis Donoghue, the characteristic American style emerges from conditions amounting to failure. Achieving vitality by a conscientious labour to transform failure into success, its creativity proceeds not from abundance but from destitution, “converting penury in substance to plenitude in the realized form” (Style: 109). Like Richard Poirier, Donoghue locates this failure in the peculiarly American experience of a radical separation of imagination and reality, a rift between consciousness and experience.2 Both critics find in the American imagination a “desperate metaphysic,” a failure to find proper sustenance in the given world. American writing, Donoghue finally contends, “is characterized by the precarious achievement of style”; it emerges most habitually “in conditions nearly desperate and against all the odds” (Style: 125).

2 Donoghue, of course, speaks for American literature before American philosophy. His essay draws on Henry James, Henry Adams and Allen Tate before turning to Wallace Stevens’ late poetry and prose. Is it possible, however, that this “style of failure” might speak to the thinkers and writers of a specifically American philosophical tradition? Donoghue’s hypothesizing, in the same extract, is more than a feature of his eloquent writing style and still questions, even as late as 1976, whether there is a tradition of American literature to speak of in the first place. Those wishing to make a claim for “American philosophy,” not to mention the infinitely more specific and contentious claims for a characteristically American philosophical style, have a much tougher task than Donoghue’s seminal essay, and significantly less firmer footing.

3 This in mind, I propose an unlikely trio of American writers – the modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, the contemporary philosophers, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty – as touch-stones for this debate, re-describers of its central thesis, as Rorty might say.

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Stevens, Cavell and Rorty have always been noted for philosophical commitment as well as stylistic flair. Most obviously united by a shared ability to inspire philosophical interest and passion, the writings of Cavell and Rorty provide a welcome addition to a professionalized discourse (that of contemporary analytic philosophy) too often marked by aridity and over-specialisation, while Stevens’ epistemological promptings have long been considered an inspiring addition to philosophical schools as diverse as Husserlian phenomenology and Jamesian pragmatism. Encouraging a hearing between American literature and philosophy, all three writers highlight the issue and importance of philosophy’s writing, as they work to find a place for literature in the philosophical conversation.

⁂

4 It is an accepted fact of philosophical and literary scholarship that the writing style of Stanley Cavell is difficult. Challenging, complex, intricate, intractable, obstinate, testing and tough – and that’s for the reader with more than a passing familiarity with the writings of Cavell’s chosen philosophical forbears: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Friederich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Langshaw Austin. There’s a profound sense of struggle in Cavell’s writing, of intellectual labours enacted directly and unflinchingly in his reader’s presence. Consider the passage from In Quest of the Ordinary where Cavell discusses the Wordsworth poem, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”: “In this poem, about recovering from the loss of childhood by recovering something of, or in childhood (in particular, recovering its forms of recovery), we are to recover it, participate in it, by imitating it, as it imitated us (so imitating its endless readiness for imitation).”3

5 The phrasing here is endlessly refracted and recursive, as Cavell urges the recording of minute distinctions and clarifications, the murmuring of repetitions and variations, the parenthetic asides within clauses within asides. Typifying a writing practice that has a frustrating tendency to turn back on itself, and to do so just at the moment when it might begin to satisfy or even to progress, Cavell’s sentence style refuses not just argument but the very promise of logical progression, of intellectual resolution, of cadence.

6 The self-conscious difficulty of Cavell’s style is a feature he recognises in his own philosophical forbears, and one he relates specifically to the writing of philosophy in America. Cavell pictures Emerson’s language as continuously struggling with itself, “as if he is having to translate, in his American idiom, English into English.”4 There is an obvious frustration here, an inherited disappointment with the potentialities of American expression. Adding further weight to this Emersonian burden, and a further condition to which Cavell holds his writing responsive, is his sense of philosophy as now existing in a modernist state. As early as 1967, in “A Matter of Meaning It,” Cavell had argued that all modernist art works (his examples ranged from Pop Art to the theatre of Beckett to the music of John Cage) are characterized by “the possibility of fraudulence.”5 And just as there is no standing discourse that explains or justifies what modern art is, there is no standing discourse that accounts for the practice of philosophy. The implicit suggestion is that philosophy must continuously place into question and affirm its own identity; because of its vulnerability to “false seriousness,”

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it must work to manage continuity with itself. “The writing of philosophy,” Cavell affirms, “is difficult in a new way” (MWM: xxiii).

7 Even more than this, however, Cavell’s writing is intimately tied to the moral outlook he wishes to defend, that of moral perfectionism. Moral perfectionism is founded on the idea that there is an unattained but attainable self that one ought to strive to reach, an idea Cavell traces from Emerson to Nietzsche to John Stuart Mill, and detects traces of in Rousseau and Kant. Ironically, what critics sometimes interpret as an aversiveness in Cavell’s style is partly explained by this perfectionism, this idea that we must continually fight towards expressiveness, that we are morally responsible for making ourselves understood by each other. Writing, then, cannot merely signify the clear formulation of texts and ideas but must enact a deeply personal work of self-critique and self-transformation. It is a challenging, a stretching, of one’s actual self.

8 The burdens of self-expression weigh heavily on Cavell. His writing places extraordinary pressure on itself to describe, undistractedly and specifically, the processes of mind and the allusiveness of thought. This labour testifies not only to Cavell’s modernism, to his perfectionism, but to his life-long wish to involve his writing in the procedures of ordinary language philosophy. Following Wittgenstein, Cavell recognizes the limited and limiting nature of our human utterances, the gap between our world and how we describe it, the frailty, in general, of our “forms of life.” He speaks obsessively of Wittgenstein’s call to bring words back “from their metaphysical to their everyday use,” as if our words have long been estranged from us, meaningless, distant; and it might be the task of a modernist philosophy to “improvise a sense for them.”6 Regaining lost intimacy, strangely, is a key intention of Cavell’s difficult prose.

9 In ways that are simultaneously fascinating and frustrating, Wallace Stevens’ poetry may be said to reflect this awareness, to record a comparable struggle. Stevens’ scepticism about the external world (or, more precisely, his scepticism about the relation between imagination and reality) lies at the heart of his poetic investigations. Time and again, Stevens observes how reality is ultimately unreachable in thought and writing, how language never fully manages to overlap with the world of the senses. His poetry demonstrates a marked tendency to seek out the difficulties of the human experience of the world, to court the attendant frustrations of the relationship between thought and language. “The Snow Man,” from Stevens’ first collection Harmonium (1923), is a typical example: The Snow Man One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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10 Dramatizing the possibility of a truth without human perspective, a reality devoid of imaginative correspondence, “The Snow Man” is the most frequently cited of Stevens’ early poems of epistemology. The poem’s overarching mood is one of aridity and coldness. Instead of deprivation, however, the guiding sense is of enabling freshness, of stark purity, the possibility of clearest perception. Through simple diction and concrete imagery (as a Pound or Williams might, Stevens captures the specificities of a cold, clear January), the poem lulls its reader through a single sentence, drawn out over five oddly rhymed tercets, before culminating in its infamous, seemingly paradoxical, closure. In a description that might apply just as accurately to himself, Cavell calls Stevens “this strange, wondrous, often excrutiatingly difficult writer.”7 “The Snow Man,” certainly, is both strange and difficult. Looking ahead to the disquieting reserve of “The Plain Sense of Things,” the bleak detachment of “Not Ideas About The Thing But the Thing Itself” and the unsettling austerity of “The Course of a Particular,” the poem introduces Stevens’ essential philosophical voice as one of abstraction, impersonality, reserve.

11 This esotericism continues to Stevens’ later verse, where the frameworks of human thought and language are unflinchingly studied, and found lacking. We see this in “The Poems of Our Climate” and “The Plain Sense of Things” but also, and perhaps even more starkly, in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Here the poet writes, “We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form,” highlighting not only “the difficulty of the visible” but our own engagement with this difficulty: We keep coming back and coming back To the real […] We seek The poem of pure reality, untouched By trope or deviation, straight to the word, Straight to the transfixing object, to the object At the exactest point at which it is itself.

12 There is perhaps a tension here between Stevens’ wish to investigate the limits of language and his desire to transcend language altogether, to write “the poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation.” We might relate this to the desire expressed both in “The Man With The Blue Guitar” (“Throw away the lights, the definitions, […] // But do not use the rotted names”) and “Credences of Summer” (“let’s see the very thing and nothing else / Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight”). The linking suggestion is that such a relation to the thing-in-itself (Kant’s noumenal realm, though Stevens’ is more likely to use the term “reality”) is simply impossible, that reality must always be transfigured by the human imagination, and by language. As Helen Vendler has noted, Stevens’ is a poetry of “enacted mental process.”8 A “reflexive intelligence” (Music: 77), one that cannot evade a knowledge of its own processes, is forever fore-grounded as the subject of his poems.

13 Stevens and Cavell both understand that there is something both disquieting and essential about the way we possess language, that the ordinary possibilities of human communication and encounter are disappointing. As Cavell acknowledges the frailty of our agreements and encourages a greater investigation of our language use, Stevens observes, time and again, how reality is ultimately unreachable in thought and writing, how language never fully manages to overlap with the world of the senses. Its “flawed words” and “stubborn sounds” will always create a barrier between subject and object; in the central terms of his work, reality will always “resist” the imagination. For both

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philosopher and poet, the job is to maintain the world, to maintain language, against the corroding onslaught of scepticism.

14 Sharply at odds with these anxious rehearsals, Richard Rorty would gladly “slough off” epistemological concern, would gladly picture language as unproblematic, or instrumental. Rorty’s hunch that pragmatism is best elaborated using a Darwinian vocabulary leads to his conception of words as “tools,” naturally evolved for coping with the world rather than representing it. Although he recognises the contingency of language (together with the contingency of self and community) this contingency induces in Rorty no sceptical anxiety. Rather, he seeks to alter our whole philosophical approach to language so that we are less inclined to worry about the association between it and any extra-linguistic considerations, less inclined to use language as a quasi-technical means of “bootstrapping” ourselves out of all our philosophical troubles. Rorty would prefer us to enlarge our linguistic frame of reference, to reflect on the historical fate of whole vocabularies.

15 The question of style, still, is fundamental. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that the quest for knowledge and epistemological certitude had always been captive to its own engrossing metaphors (chief among these, famously, is that of the mind as mirror, the “glassy essence” of the soul, wherein all the representations of external reality are to be found). It thus became the task of philosophy to legitimate this picture of its work by forgetting the swerve into metaphor which first produced, and still sustains, its discourse. It became the task of philosophy, in other words, to ignore the salient fact of its textual (or rhetorical) constitution. For pragmatists and poststructuralists alike, Rorty contends, philosophy amounts to nothing more (or nothing less) than a style of writing, a literary genre and language practice. On this model, there is simply no discipline or method capable of transcending its own discourse, no way of getting beneath language to the thought it expresses, nothing to free us from the contingency of our vocabularies.

16 Like Derrida, Rorty thus rejects the protocols of orthodox linguistic philosophy in favour of a conscious, even artful, play with stylistic possibilities. At the same time, he implies that it is not just a matter of choosing one’s tradition, siding (say) with Nietzsche and Heidegger as against the normative regime of stylistic oppression. Rather, it is a question of seeing that both these options come down to a choice of philosophical style, a commitment to certain operative metaphors and modes of representation.

17 Skilfully embodying the larger intellectual and moral attitudes he is recommending, Rorty speaks in an informal, “down home,” American idiom, a self-consciously pragmatist cultivation that is intended to undercut more portentous vocabularies and return human purposes to the centre of the stage. Rorty’s writing has always been accented by a pacy colloquialism, a style of address that is most pronounced in the third and fourth volumes of his Philosophical Papers (1997 and 2007, respectively) and in Philosophy and Social Hope (1998), what Rorty terms “a collection of more occasional pieces.”9 These books are replete with Americanisms: “it didn’t pan out,” “put a different spin on it,” “gee-whizz,” “gypped,” “jump-started,” “pretty much,” “handy ways,” “pin down,” “lay my cards on the table,” “earn their keep,” “boondoggle,” “gotten some,”10 to mention but a few.

18 Rorty’s reliance on the colloquial and idiomatic highlights the importance of American vernacular in his writing, a rhetoric he sees as singularly appropriate for the

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pragmatist intellectual. He writes with self-effacing charm, a quick and biting wit and a dizzying capacity for broad analogies. As his thought has changed (from analytic to non-analytic), so has his style moved increasingly from an argumentative to a narrative and “re-descriptive” mode. Re-description amounts to a general recognition of the contingency of language, a recognition that there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a “meta-vocabulary” which takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling. All we can ever claim is that “it would be better to say.” A historicist and nominalist culture of the sort Rorty envisages would settle for this claim, for narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other.

19 The refreshing simplicity of Rorty’s prose is punctuated by moments of humour and irreverence. Deflating the time-honoured distinctions within professional philosophy, for example, he writes: “So if one’s teachers at Michigan assure one that Derrida is a charlatan, or if one’s teachers at Tübingen suggest that formal semantics is just a mystification and cognitive science just a boondoggle, one may well believe these propositions for the rest of one’s life.”11 The buoyancy of this prose, together with its tongue-in-cheek depiction of academic orthodoxies, suggests a loosening of professional ties. Its seeming lack of deference indicates a philosopher both sure of his own professional contribution and his life-long regard for the discipline. This stylistic license is typical, also, of a philosopher nearing the end of his career, but it is anticipated at several brilliant moments in Rorty’s oeuvre. Consider, for example, the opening paragraph of his essay “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition” which concludes Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3: “In the actual world Nietzsche was a twitchy, irresolute, nomadic nerd who never got a life outside literature. But consider the possible world in which Nietzsche got lucky early on, and wound up a happy, affectionate, suburban paterfamilias” (PP3: 327). In this alternative world, Rorty continues, The Birth of Tragedy enjoyed a European vogue and Nietzsche’s U.S. lecture tours eclipsed those of Dickens, inspiring fan mail from Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken. Instead of breaking down at forty five, Rorty irreverently speculates, Nietzsche kept right on writing, joyously and prolifically, “having a great time” (PP3: 327). This paragraph culminates with the light-hearted suggestion that “success, sanity and suburbia” might have ruined Friedrich Nietzsche. Later in that same essay, Rorty muses on the equally whimsical possibility that Hegel identified the synthesis of Being and Nothingness, not as Becoming, but as “Time or Ambivalence or Sex or Fudge Ripple” (PP3: 339).

20 Rorty has always written with rhetorical flair and colourful elegance, prompting Harold Bloom to describe him as “the most interesting philosopher in the world”12 and Ian Hacking to review his most recent book as “so blissfully right or infuriatingly wrong.”13 Few philosophers are as engaging to read as Rorty, and few can boast his happy knack for presenting radical views (among them, his outright rejection of truth and objectivity) as an easy and agreeable shift of one’s current perspective. A voice that is urbane, witty, lively and eloquent, and characteristically inflected by American cadence and idiom, Rorty’s prose style is one of his supreme philosophical achievements.

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21 Exploring the philosophical affinities between Stevens, Cavell and Rorty, what emerges most clearly is a common idea of disciplinary critique. Questioning the essence of philosophy (its status as a written discourse, its relationship to poetry and other aesthetic practices, its modernist condition, its political and social role), the trio are united, most noticeably, by a shared resistance to philosophical convention, by a willingness to challenge its time-honoured subjects and styles. We might say that each figure is encouraged by the “metaphilosophical,” though Cavell would undoubtedly dispute such a term.14 That each figure recognises the inability of language to record or reflect the world is evident. All three would trouble the ideal of philosophical writing as transparent, as they would complicate the traditional boundaries between philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose. There is a profound sense, in the writings of all three, of the contingency of words, of the bankruptcy of language, of the deepening need to re- work existing phrases, metaphors and vocabularies.

22 Returning, then, to our opening epigraph, might we recognize in our philosophical trio the penury and precariousness, the desperate insecurity, that Donoghue characterises as peculiarly American? Certainly, the pursuit of one’s “best and most difficult self” anticipates Cavell’s modernist moment as it bespeaks his perfectionist ambition. His Emersonian desire to win through to an authentic mode of philosophical expression recognises this mode as never secure and never static, a continual striving towards one’s unattained yet attainable self. Cavell, as the title of his book proclaims, is “in quest of the ordinary.” We might suggest that the desperate conditions of Donoghue’s stylist, “the immense strain required to make the work declare itself” (Style: 125), find their philosophical expression in Cavell’s perfectionist writings, in their characteristic mood (of intensity) and momentum (of quest).

23 Stevens’ idea of the poem as enacted mental process registers his own experience of “precariousness,” his sense that the mind (or imagination) is not a mirror of nature, his profound disappointment with language, and even profounder desire to test the boundaries of human expression. In the poet’s exertion of his imagination “upon situations amounting to failure” (Style: 120), Donoghue finds an affinity between Stevens and Henry James. Stevens’ method, he argues, “is extensive rather than intensive” and his favoured form of theme and variation works by redeeming the blank singularity of objects. “It is a relief for Stevens,” Donoghue writes, “to have thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” (Style: 140).

24 Taking up Donoghue’s idea, we might return to the earlier contention that Stevens’ scepticism about the external world (or, more precisely, his scepticism about the relation between imagination and reality) extends to and is involved with a scepticism about language. The key point here is that Stevens’ disappointment essentially proves productive; his poetry emerges most habitually from the dual resources of desire and limitation. Stevens is never settled in his poetic expression, never exactly secure. In its constant striving towards this security and stillness, however, his verse quite possibly achieves its peculiar momentum and edge, a voice that is unflinchingly “Stevens.” Like Cavell, Stevens certainly exhibits touches of this characteristic, this characteristically American, “style of failure.” The awareness of language’s finitude leads to a struggle with language, a war with words. In both writers, and again attempting a gloss on Donoghue, conditions of desperation and struggle prove generative.

25 The compromises, exertions and self-defeats that Cavell and Stevens take care to register align them with a strain of American writing that wrests creativity from

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struggle, and style from failure. What brings poet and philosopher closest together is a shared sense of precarious involvement, a willingness to test the very boundaries of human experience and expression. These “signs of risk and strain” (Style: 125), however, are simply not to be found in the writings of Rorty. It is a mark of Rorty’s neo- pragmatism that he chooses the shadow side (or maybe the happy side) of Stevens’ and Cavell’s acknowledgement. His own recognition of contingency leads to a celebration of language as liberating and creative, and to a companion emphasis on self-creation and play. Rorty is sprightly before he is anxious. Indeed, given the charges of flippancy and carelessness often levelled against him, Rorty is possibly too secure in the possession of his style. The cheerful ease of Rorty’s prose reveals that he is simply untroubled by those meanings that might emerge as accidental or unintended.

26 Given this profound disparity, it seems misguided to extract from the present consideration of philosophical styles (offering Stevens, Cavell and Rorty, in a certain sense, as “case studies” or “examples”) any levelling claims about philosophical writing in general. Stevens’ status as a poet, of course, would itself postpone any such attempts at overview or generalization. The resonance of Donoghue’s depiction of American literary style (with Cavell and Stevens, at least, though it is certainly more difficult to hear in Rorty), not to mention the figures’ own desire to situate themselves within a native tradition, still encourages a consideration of the figures’ essential Americanness, and hints, moreover, at a further avenue of inquiry: What, if anything, is to be gained by juxtaposing America’s philosophical poetry with its philosophical prose? Is there a characteristically American philosophical style?

27 In comparing the styles of American and French philosophical writing, James Conant has recently noted the characteristic “diffidence” of writers like Thoreau when compared to the characteristic “brilliance” of intellectuals like Derrida.15 Conant provocatively suggests that this Parisian brilliance most typically registers “what is now taken as the sound of philosophy.” “The sound of much of the language in Thoreau’s Walden,” he continues, “is apt to strike a reader – at least on a first encounter – as not particularly philosophical at all, as not even trying to sound like philosophy” (America: 60).

28 In comparing the sound of Emerson, James and Stevens with that of Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, Poirier makes a similar point: “it should be apparent by now,” he writes, “that in presenting their case, the Americans simply sound different. They sound altogether less rhetorically embattled, less culturally ambitious, than do any of these European cousins.”16 Rorty, interestingly, is quick to defend Anglo-American prose against the French. French philosophers, he urges, specialize in inventing new vocabularies. While this speciality accords nicely with his own desire to move from argument to re-description, Rorty still maintains that adopting a new vocabulary only makes sense if you can move back and forth, dialectically, between the old and the new. He writes: “It seems to us as if our French colleagues are too willing to find, or make, a linguistic islet and then invite people to move onto it, and not interested enough in building causeways between such islets and the mainland.”17

29 The sound of Anglo-American philosophy, of course, is a central preoccupation of Cavell’s. “About my own sound,” he writes, “it may help to say that while I may often leave ideas in what seems a more literary state, sometimes in a more psychoanalytic state, than a philosopher might wish […] I mean to leave everything I will say, or have, I guess, ever said, as in a sense provisional, the sense that it is to be gone on from.”18

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Certainly, Cavell’s style owes just as much to psychoanalysis as it does to philosophy, emphasizing the temptations and anxieties of the speaking self, employing language as a form of therapy. In conceding Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the functions and contexts of language as fundamental to American pragmatism, furthermore, Cavell is more concerned to stress how different their arguments sound. “And in philosophy,” he writes, “it is the sound which makes all the difference” (MMW: 36 fn31). As a student of Cavell’s, Conant would be well aware of this centrality, not only in Cavell’s desire to maintain his distance from pragmatism, but in his broader philosophical project. Aside from noting the “diffident” and “non-philosophical” sound of Thoreau, however, Conant doesn’t push further on what a characteristically American philosophical writing might sound like.

30 Diffidence, surely, is rarely audible in Rorty. Though his style is unaffected, and his ambitious claims presented with disarming modesty, he is more likely to give the impression of self-assurance (his harshest critics would say “brashness”) than timidity or reserve. Interestingly, his colleagues have always drawn attention to the curious disparity between his spoken and written tone. Rorty’s voice, as Daniel Dennett notes, “is sort of striking – those firebrand views delivered in the manner of Eeyore.” Of Rorty’s mode of presentation, the British philosopher Jonathan Rée says, “There’s a tremendous kind of melancholy about it. He tries to be a gay Nietzschean, but it’s an effort for him.” For Conant, hearing Rorty speak for the first time was something of a revelation. “It’s easy to read his writings in a register of excitement and a heightened breathless voice,” he explains. “But the note that I heard when he was reading these sentences in his own cadence and rhythm was – for want of a better word – depression. I thought, this is the voice of a man who feels as if he’s been let down or betrayed by philosophy.” Jürgen Habermas similarly concurs that Rorty’s antiphilosophy “seems to spring from the melancholy of a disappointed metaphysician.”19

31 The disparity between Rorty’s written and spoken voice contrasts interestingly with Cavell, whose audiences have always commented on their striking continuity. Paul Jenner has traced this correspondence to Cavell’s training in music, to the philosopher’s avowed desire to return the human voice to philosophy.20 Jenner writes: “At odds with the prevailing philosophical fashion, with Derrida’s post-structuralist and deconstructive wish to unpick the dominance of the voice (understood in opposition to a denigrated “writing”) within the philosophical canon, Cavell’s appeal to the voice is manifest in Austin and Wittgenstein’s appeal to the ordinary or everyday in language. The appeal to the voice, in this sense, need not be understood as an instance of Derrida’s metaphysics of presence; it is more suggestive of fracture and failure, of a habitual distance in our relations to self, others, world and language.”21

32 Conant’s suggestion of American writing as diffident is further troubled, of course, by the curiously non-Thoreauvian pitch of Cavell. Cavell has always sought, as Jenner and others point out, to distance himself from the institutional dominance of deconstruction, taking care to present himself as an American writer inheriting a specifically American tradition. His misgivings toward deconstruction, however, are to be sharply distinguished from his evaluation of Derrida as a philosopher. There is, for Cavell, notable affinities between his own writing and that of Derrida; most importantly, the philosophers share a sense of the necessity in questioning the grounds of their own philosophy and discourse.22

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33 In many ways, Cavell comes closer to Derrida than Rorty, even though it is Rorty who has consistently championed Derrida as the ultimate writer of philosophy, the ultimate strong poet, the ultimate “maker of the new.” This leads to a paradoxical situation, and again frustrates any easy generalizations about native philosophical style. Rorty sounds like an American, certainly, but more the gaudy American of cultural stereotype than the diffident figure at Walden. Meanwhile, the quiet gentilities of Cavell’s prose can surely remember Thoreau, but their spiralling self-consciousness can just as easily recall the indirections (less sympathetic critics would say the “indulgences”) of Derrida.

34 In a remarkable 1980 review of The Claim of Reason, John Hollander argued that Cavell’s book charted “a poetico-philosophical no-man’s land” and, by doing so, that it occupied “the buffer zone between poetry and philosophy in a unique and perhaps uniquely American way.”23 In responding to Hollander’s review, Cavell wrote: “It is greatly heartening to me that Hollander finds a weight for ‘poetic’ with which my philosophizing may be found poetic. I believe Hollander is right in finding my mode essentially American.”24 That Hollander, himself a highly regarded philosopher and poet, considers Cavell’s “poetico-philosophical” expression distinctively American is suggestive. Cavell’s gracious response is anticipated by his own desire to hear the romanticist redemption of philosophy by poetry in his own writing, together with his desire to view America in general as the place that promises romanticism, that promises to heal the wound between philosophy and literature that has been festering since Plato’s Republic.25

35 Equally suggestive, and certainly more surprising, is the companion attention to this poetico-philosophical “no-man’s land” or “buffer zone” encouraged, albeit indirectly, by the pragmatist philosopher, Cornel West. In The American Evasion of Philosophy, in seeking to consolidate Emerson’s status as America’s proto-pragmatist, West quotes Dewey, who in turn quotes Emerson: “[Emerson] would work, he says, by art, not metaphysics, finding truth “in the sonnet and the play.” ‘I am,’ to quote him again, ‘in all my theories, ethics and politics, a poet,’ and we may, I think, safely take his word for it that he meant to be a maker rather than a reflector. His own preference was to be ranked with the seers rather than with the reasoners of the race.”26 Dewey understands Emerson’s evasion of philosophy, West argues, as neither a simple replacement of philosophy by poetry nor a rekindling of the Platonic quarrel. Instead, this evasion is to be understood as “a situating of philosophical reflection and poetic creation in the midst of quotidian struggles for meaning” (Evasion: 73). This Emersonian evasion, which West proposes to extend to all of American philosophy, views poetry and philosophy neither as identical nor as antagonistic, but “as different metaphor- deploying activities to achieve specific aims” (Evasion: 73).

36 In West’s formulation, American pragmatism can be understood as what happens to the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centred philosophy when forced to justify itself within the professional perimeters of academic philosophy. Whereas Peirce applies the Emersonian themes of contingency and revisability to the scientific method, West argues, James extends them to our personal and moral lives. The emphasis on poetry and art, “on the seers rather than the reasoners of the race,” that he extracts from Dewey’s reading of Emerson is duly translated into West’s own pragmatist programme, into his emphasis on the centrality of “metaphor-deploying activities.” This latter phrase would certainly resonate with Rorty. Priding themselves on evading philosophy,

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both Rorty and West would extend the meaning of “metaphor-deploying activities,” from “poetic creation” to “cultural criticism,” and so define the ambitions of pragmatism in general.

37 Cavell, of course, has long registered both his discomfort with pragmatism, and the related efforts, of West and Rorty among others, to establish pragmatism as the essentially American philosophical voice. The proposed assimilation of Emerson to pragmatism, according to Cavell, “unfailingly blunts the particularity, the achievement, of Emerson’s language.”27 The Emerson with whom he seeks to affiliate his own work differs significantly from the proto-pragmatist posited by West as the chief source of this line of American thought. Cavell wants to demonstrate an Emerson to whom others have condescended or who they have simply ruled out: an Emerson well aware of the power of evil, the potential of tragedy, and the full weight of scepticism; an Emerson as receptive as he is assertive, and much closer to Wallace Stevens than he is to Dewey or to Quine.

38 This existentialist Emerson, surely, could just as easily be aligned with the strain of American literature identified by Donoghue. His own “desperate scepticism” might be registered by the indirections and meanderings of his prose, the formal feature that brings Emerson closest to Cavell. Both Emerson and Cavell demonstrate a willingness to follow through on idea or example unsure of the final destination or upshot, letting ideas “find their weight” in their individual emergences. Captured in their emphasis on the sound of the prevailing philosophical vocabulary, furthermore, is the alternative sense of sound as measurement. Cavell, for one, would certainly welcome a comparison between his and Emerson’s “sounding” of the depths of language and Thoreau’s activities at Walden. Sounding and weighing are activities that require patience, and Cavell follows the transcendentalists in continually counselling persistence, waiting, resourcefulness and hope, “in the face of discouraging odds and the inevitability of disappointment.”28 Wishing to stay faithful to their own volatility and instinct, Emerson and Cavell proceed always by indirection and improvisation, following Donoghue’s traditional American stylist “who does not rush upon it – he delays, allowing the forms to do their best work” (Style: 103).29

39 Returning to The American Evasion of Philosophy, we might identify certain aesthetic strands that emerge from West’s account that exceed the scope and intention of his own book. These strands, in turn, might yet conciliate those philosophers who find in American philosophy alternative resonances to pragmatism. West writes of “poetic creation” as a “metaphor-deploying activity,” one that exemplifies the heights of human intelligence at work, “the best of conscious and reflective human activity” (Evasion: 73). Poetic creation, in this sense, is taken from poetry’s etymological root, “poeisis,” meaning the creative production of meaning. It is undoubtedly this sense of poetry that allows Rorty to align such diverse figures as Galileo and Yeats, Francis Bacon and John Milton.30 Choosing the more traditional sense of “poetic creation,” however, we are lead to more formal implications, to an idea of writing that privileges not just the contingent and the revisable, but the figural and the logically evasive: more poetry than poeisis, to put it simply.

40 Speculating further, we might weave these aesthetic strands into an alternative narrative of American philosophy. On this re-description, “evasion” might not signal a traditionally American avoidance of problems of knowledge or criteria of certainty. Donoghue and Poirier, certainly, find these problems consistently taken up by

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American literature, as they go to the very heart of the philosophical life of Emerson, of Stevens, and of Cavell. “Evasion,” rather, if understood in its literary critical sense of “ambiguity” or “vagueness,” might gesture towards the kind of writing that even neo- pragmatism is keen to encourage, if not always to enact. In Rorty’s own terms, this form of philosophical expression is suggestive and multialent, “funnier, more allusive, sexier and, above all, more ‘written’.”31

41 Finding in West’s narrative this alternative story of American philosophy, we are reminded of the “poetico-philosophical no-man’s land” that Hollander once pictured as uniquely American. Such a region, Hollander wrote, might offer a distinctively American way of mediating between analytic and continental traditions.32 With these American evasions and mediations in mind, an alternative sense and significance for “poetic creation” in the story of American philosophy emerges. On this model, philosophical expression is prized for aesthetic and evocative qualities as well as transparency. Alternative conceptions of lucidity and completeness, alternative ways of being precise, are entertained. Emerson’s central status, in turn, might be founded less on his metaphor-deploying activity, and more on the curious indirections of his prose. He might emerge as the philosophical predecessor not only of Dewey, Quine and Rorty, but of Santayana, Stevens and Cavell. These latter figures undoubtedly inhabit the poeticohilosophical “no-man’s land” and return us, finally, to the possibility of a distinctively American philosophical style: a style that opens to the evasive, the excessive and the ‘written,’ that answers to America’s poets as well as her pragmatists.

NOTES

1. D. Donoghue (1976), “The American Style of Failure,” in The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination, California, University of California Press, 126; hereafter abbreviated Style. 2. Tony Tanner makes a similar point, noting the American writer’s “dread of all conditioning forces” and his “general self-consciousness about the strange relationship between words and things.” T. Tanner (1971), City of Words American Fiction, 1950-1970, London, Cape, 16. 3. S. Cavell (1989), In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 73; hereafter abbreviated IQO. 4. S. Cavell (2005), Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, New York, Harvard University Press, 8. 5. S. Cavell (1976), Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 213-27; hereafter abbreviated MWM. 6. Paul Jenner (2002), “The Philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Its Context and Early Development” (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham), 34. 7. S. Cavell (2006), “Reflections on Wallace Stevens,” in C. Benfey and K. Remmler, (eds.), Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 61. 8. H. Vendler (1988), The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 77; hereafter abbreviated Music. 9. R. Rorty (2009), Philosophy And Social Hope, London, Penguin Books, v.

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10. This phrase is used in Rorty’s playful “re-imagining” of Nietzsche’s biography. He writes: “Could [Nietzsche] have written so well against resentment if he had experienced it less often? Could he have written The Will to Power if he had gotten some? Maybe not.” Rorty (1998), Truth and Progress, in Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 327; hereafter abbreviated PP3. 11. R. Rorty (2007), Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers Volume 4, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 121. 12. H. Bloom (1989), book jacket of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 13. I. Hacking, book jacket of Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4, op. cit.. 14. In the foreword to Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell writes: “If I deny a distinction, it is the still fashionable distinction between philosophy and meta-philosophy, the philosophy of philosophy. The remarks I make about philosophy (for example, about certain of its differences from other subjects) are, where accurate and useful, nothing more or less than philosophical remarks, on a par with remarks I make about acknowledgement or about mistakes or about metaphor. I would regard this fact – that philosophy is one of its own normal topics – as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do” (MWM: xviii). 15. J. Conant (2005), Cavell and the Concept of America, in R. Goodman (ed.), Contending with Stanley Cavell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 60; hereafter abbreviated America. 16. R. Poirier (1992), Poetry and Pragmatism, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 155; hereafter abbreviated Poetry. 17. R. Rorty (1991), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 221. 18. S. Cavell (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 33. 19. R. Rorty & E. Mendieta (2006), Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 15-6. 20. Paul Jenner, “The Philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Its Context and Early Development” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham, 2002). 21. Ibid.: 98. 22. Ibid.: 115. 23. J. Hollander (1980), “Stanley Cavell and The Claim of Reason,” Critical Inquiry, Summer, 575-8. 24. S. Cavell (1980), “A Reply to John Hollander,” Critical Inquiry, Summer, 589-91. 25. As Cavell writes in “The Philosopher in American Life,” “In the New World, philosophy and literature do not exist in separation” (IQO: 82). 26. C. West (1989), The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison, University of Wis- consin Press, 73; hereafter abbreviated Evasion. 27. S. Cavell (2003), Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 7. 28. Paul Jenner (2002), “The Philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Its Context and Early Development” (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham,), 89. 29. This tendency towards improvisation, interestingly, is central to the tradition of American reading and writing highlighted by Poirier in Poetry and Pragmatism, op. cit. “Emerson is not writing theatrically,” Poirier argues, “not dramatizing an argument already made in his head. Instead, he is exploring his language as it emerges, disco- vering the dense and terrifying implications of his way of thinking and of his way with words” (Poetry: 57). 30. These are the central figures that Rorty will label, in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, as “strong poets,” thinkers that successfully redescribe outworn vocabularies. 31. R. Rorty (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-80, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 93.

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32. This mediation, interestingly, is a central concern of both Cavell and Rorty. Perhaps it is announced most explicitly by their common willingness to find moments of intersection in the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

ABSTRACTS

Writing on the death of Jean Baudrillard in March 2007, Julian Baggini dismissed Anglo-American philosophy (as compared to its French counterpart) as utterly without style, as “the literary equivalent of Alan Partridge’s sports-casual fashion collection.” A damning indictment, indeed. Contesting Baggini’s claim, this article proposes an American poet and two American philosophers – Wallace Stevens, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty – as supreme stylists of the philosophical. Combining elegance and verve with an edifying mix of philosophical dedication and critique, the chosen trio are philosophical stylists in the best sense of the term. With due attendance to their inheritance of the transcendentalist and pragmatist legacies, I propose an engagement with their writing styles as opening instructively to a broader consideration of philosophical writing in America, including the possibility of a distinctively American philosophical style.

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Sergio Franzese Reader of James

Sarin Marchetti

1 Sergio Franzese (1963-2010) has been one among the most active and interesting scholars of William James in Europe. His intellectual biography is in fact shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the thought and writings of James, which guided both his incursions into the work of Nietzsche as well as the examinations of the conversations between pragmatism, Darwinism and phenomenology. Besides many fine books – both authored and edited – on James, he was also the translator and editor of the Italian edition of three volumes by James: Pragmatism (Torino, Aragno, 2007), Essays in Radical Empiricism (Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1994; and Macerata, Quodlibet 2009) and Great Men and Their Environment (Pisa, ETS 1995). In what follows I shall try to canvass his personal stroll with James by reviewing his two most recent authored books. In particular, what I would like to do is conveying both the importance and the novelty of his work for the understanding of some intriguing neglected paths in James’ works, an inquiry abruptly interrupted by Sergio’s premature death.

2 The leitmotiv of Franzese’s earlier and later work on James is the investigation of his philosophical anthropology and its bearings for ethics. Carving out James’ anthropological considerations from his writings on psychology, religion and pragmatism requires both a confident mastery of James’ impressive corpus of writings, and, most importantly, a precise insight into James’ own ideas about the very shape such an anthropology should take. Franzese’s books exhibit both, since they cover a great amount of material maintaining a stringent interpretative hypothesis on the way such material gathers together. The author handles with confidence a vast array of writings, suggesting how we should orientate through them by combining together accurate historical reconstructions and suggestive theoretical speculation.

3 In The Ethics of Energy. William James’s Moral Philosophy in Focus (Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag, 2008), Franzese explores with both great accuracy and insight James’ inquiry into the nature of moral philosophy. This book represents the foremost and brightest account of this topic, and it also constitutes, in our opinion, the finest product among Franzese’s writings. Furthermore, this theme represents an interest permeating Franzese’s other writings, whose investigations brought him to engage in the reading of Nietzsche as well as of the American transcendentalists. In the book the author

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sketches James’ philosophical anthropology and investigates the intricate conception of ethics emerging from it. Drawing from some materials already explored in his L’Uomo Indeterminato. Saggio su William James (Roma, D’Anselmi Editore, 2000) Franzese argues for a deep entanglement between James’ pragmatic image of the self and his anti- foundational understanding of ethics. It is in fact James’ widespread contention that the acknowledgement of the nature of one’s mindedness and worldliness is a necessary condition for the investigation of what morality altogether could and should look like. There are a variety of ways in which James explores this entanglement, and Franzese accounts for it by contesting the readings that the commentators gave to some pivotal texts of James in which it surfaces. In particular, a major text in which James tackles the question of the nature of morality is The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. This essay is very important since in it we can find both the essence of James’ understanding of moral philosophy and the defense of a precise outline of his philosophical anthropology. Despite being widely recognized by the vast majority of the secondary literature as the presentation of James’ moral theory, most notably after Ralph Burton Perry’s commentary of it in his monumental The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, Brown and Little, 1935), this text questions the very possibility of a theoretical account of morality. According to the author, the image that James is resisting is precisely that of moral reflection as the advancement of a normative system of principles and goods, and he reads the dialectic of the essay as debunking the very possibility of any foundation of morality – being it psychological, metaphysical or casuistic. The book proceeds from a detailed analysis of the essay and traces the seeds for such a deceived reading in the very misunderstanding of James’ underlying philosophical anthropology. He claims in fact that an attentive look at James’ companion writings on the practical nature of our mental life uncovers some aspects of James’ philosophical anthropology laying on the background of his ethical writings, whose grasping would re-orient the very reading of these texts as theoretical accounts of moral principles and goods. In this direction Franzese draws a comparison between James’ experimental science, according to which ethics deals with the human attempts to organize their own energies in order to make sense of the ‘emotional involvement in the values to be exalted’ (p. 45), and Lotze’s value-laden microcosmic view. Both views share the primacy of action and practical considerations in the very description of the mind’s pursuit of truth and meanings, and this leads in James’ case to the characterization of moral reflection as a descriptive inquiry into the very psychology of the agents involved.

4 In this context Franzese’s detailed analysis of James’ critique of the associationist school, and of utilitarianism in the specific (22-6, 106-19) is particularly useful. According to Franzese, in fact, the moral psychology implicit in this school reveals the kind of veiled foundational anxieties haunting the (Newtonian) British empiricist tradition in its craving for the discovery of an unique psychological mechanism for the explanation of our moral life, being it that of pleasure association in the benthamite understanding, or that of habitual internalization of social emotions à la Bain. Even if the discussion – both James’ and Franzese’s – of this tradition is sometimes superficial – it is in fact a shame that James so abruptly dismissed Hume’s or Mill’s subtle treatments of the matter, and that Franzese didn’t take in consideration the fine work on those authors that has been produced in the last twenty years – still the general point sounds interesting and worth investigating. James is in fact critical of the empiricist tradition for the way it characterized the entanglement between psychology and ethics, even if

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he pays tribute for its accomplishments and inscribes himself in that very tradition. It is well know his characterization of his own empiricism as radical, and Franzese traces the radicality of James’ position into its very description of the mental life. If the late Essays on Radical Empiricism represents James’ most technical and refined treatment of such an empiricism, the seeds of his position can be traced into his earlier writings on the nature of experience and experiencing, and also in the moral writings allegedly pictured as presenting a normative defense of a moral theory. In particular, the discussion of the psychological, metaphysical and casuistic questions in The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life aims at debunking the traditional image of moral reflection as the search of a normative principle for the explanation of our moral practices. According to James, the empiricist tradition misplaced the role of the philosopher in respect to the moral experiences he should investigate, and Franzese claims that the real stakes of the essay is precisely that of showing the shortcomings of such a misplacement (p. 35-40).

5 The author claims that, according to James, the proper field where moral thought should be investigated is that of philosophical anthropology; that is, the moral philosopher should be a keen observer of human nature in order to describe its features and limitations, both physiological and cultural. However, being such an anthropology barely explicit in James’ writings, Franzese carves it out from the very details of James’ treatment of mindedness and worldliness. In the second chapter of the book he discusses the nature of James’ pragmatic anthropology and assess its stakes in respect to others anthropological positions (49-81). He uses in particular The Principles of Psychology and Talks to Teachers, in which James presents his philosophy of mind in a pragmatic mood. Franzese notices that these works are suffused with moral instructions, or, rather, that James’ pragmatic anthropology is moved by moral concerns, and thus he concentrates in particular on its expression in James’ treatment of habit and its bearings for ethics. It is by discussing this aspect of James’ work that the author sketches an interpretative reconstruction of his pragmatic anthropology, in which physiological, psychological and teleological considerations merge into a pragmatic account of the self as a center of storing, organizing and controlling of energy. According to this provocative reading, James’ scattered but widespread remarks on the energies of men represent the cornerstone for understanding his anthropological image, which from its part calls for ‘an ethics of energy,’ as the book titles. According to Franzese, the most distinctive move James operates in this direction is that of re-orienting the whole discussion of habit, rescuing it from the mechanicistic shoals in which it has been placed by the empiricist tradition and portraying it as the brightest expression of the practical character of our minds. By defining the character in terms of the will, and in its turn the will in terms of habit, James establishes a robust connection between the shaping of one’s own character with the care of one’s habit through the education of one’s will. This moral psychology marks a deep discontinuity with the tradition James inherited, since it inscribes practical considerations into the very heart of the simples mental activities, reverting the usual link between ethics and psychology: it is not that practical considerations supervene on psychological ones, but rather psychological descriptions are already value laden, since according to James our psychological constitution is directly relevant for the articulation of our moral life.

6 The author presents this aspect of James’ thought insisting on the deep entanglement between ethical constitution and psychological constitution. He writes that “hortatory ethics is almost the only relevant aspect of moral philosophy about which we can

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soundly speak, and such an ethics has its most power ally in the knowledge of the physiological constitution of human beings. The aim of such an ethics is, of course, some sort of ‘good’” (129). And after quoting James’ most provocative claim according to which the way we take care of our mental life is the utmost important ethical act, he comments that according to James, ethics allies with physiology in showing the way to the good life, which consists above all in a well structured and well disposed personality’ (ibid.). This is the very background against which Franzese proceeds in his presentation of the ethics of energy originating from such a pragmatic anthropology. As Franzese recognizes in the first place, the reconstruction of such an ethics is highly speculative for two order of considerations: firstly because James himself was very tentative in the elaboration of such a project, and secondly – and most importantly – because of the very character of such an ethics. If in fact James criticizes the conception of moral reflection as the advancement of moral theories, then it is no surprise that his ethics doesn’t resemble to standard moral theory. The last two chapters of the book are dedicated to the presentation of the very physiognomy of this energetic ethics; while the fourth explores the theme of energy in its metaphysical and anthropological dimensions, the fifth presents the way in which James understands energy and how this conception is relevant for the articulation of the moral discourse. Through an attentive analysis of some passages from The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which James explicitly suggests the deep connection between a description of human beings in terms of their energetic temperament – the strenuous as opposed to the genial mood– and their ethical constitution – the ethics of heroism as opposed to the ethics of spirituality, Franzese carves out a picture of human beings as torn between nature and culture, where these two terms are pragmatically re-interpreted to converge in the ‘human anomaly’ (164-79).

7 In his collection of essays Darwinismo e Pragmatismo (Milano, Mimesis, 2009) Franzese explicitly addresses the question of James’ pragmatic anthropology by assessing the place of the Darwinian revolution in James’ intellectual development. The continuity with the previous work is explicit, and in the essays constituting the book the author tackles the very same connection from different perspectives. The first four chapters deal in fact with the varieties of relationships that James’ anthropology establishes with both Darwinism and American transcendentalism. The title essay traces the influences of Darwinism on pragmatism, from the birth of the Metaphysical Club to the later developments of the American movement. In particular, the section on James’ engagement with Darwinism concentrates on the kind of interest Darwinism exercised on James. If in fact James was a Darwinian, he was not a Darwinist. We have a direct – and somewhat intimate – testimony of James’ relationship with Darwin himself in a 1883 letter wrote to Darwin’s son Erasmus, translated with a short commentary by the author in the book under discussion. The letter consists in a response to Erasmus’ request to James to have some elucidations about the relationship between his father’s moral ideas and Francis Abbot’s. Given the great friendship running between James and Erasmus, the tone of the letter is charming, but its contents are not for this reason less rigorous. As Franzese notices, James’ response is revealing of the kind of reading James gave of Darwin, and its bearings on his own philosophical position. What kept James’ imagination is not Darwin’s theory of evolution per se, but rather its anthropological and ethical consequences: the Darwinian temperament expressed from such a theory, more than its principles by themselves. According to James, as we can also read in the letter quoted, the importance of Darwin has been that of liberating our minds from a

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frame of thought picturing the human being as a product of necessities overcoming its own chances and contingencies, debunking in a single stroke the whole metaphysical tradition rooted in western philosophy. As the author notices, James’ radicality is exhibited by his early philosophical production and is concerned with a defense of human spontaneity from the threads of Spencerian evolutionism, which represented at that time a ground-breaking philosophical application of this anti-metaphysical theme. What James founds unsatisfactory in Spencer’s conception of the mind as the adaptation of inner with outer happenings for the sake of surviving are its ethical consequences; namely, the negation of the personal contribute to our experiencing which escapes from this monistic teleology. By nestling interests and selective attention into the very mechanisms of our human minds James resists the mechanistic variation of evolutionism in favor of the Darwinian accent of chance variation and generative selection. Franzese traces this trajectory in James’ production pointing in particular to his two essays The Great Men and their Environment and The Importance of Individuals, in which James defends Darwin’s idea that the environmental setting is only a conservative and not a productive cause of the variation of individuals. Franzese tackles this theme in the second essay of the book, in which such a Darwinian influence is presented together with the other source of inspiration which characterized James’ early education: that is his own reading of the transcendentalism of Emerson and Caryle. According to the author, it is fair to describe James’ anthropological views as informed by the double source of American transcendentalism and Darwinism, which finds in his thought a virtuous synthesis. In his 1903 address to the centenary of Emerson’s birth James praised the man for his service paid to the valorization of personal experiences and experimentations for the cultivation of one’s self, according to which ‘imitation is suicide’ and ‘the day is good in which we have the most perceptions.’ Even if the two traditions of Darwinism and transcendentalism hardly found any robust direct historical connections, still they both inform the American life at the turn of the century, and James, after Franzese, can be read as a thinker who tried to balance both these irruptive conceptions of the self.

8 The author, in the ninth piece, titled Il Pragmatismo è un Umanesimo. Anti-Filosofia e Filosofia dell’Esperienza, presents pragmatism itself as driven by concerns expressed by both traditions. By gathering together a variety of authors as different as Nietzsche and Peirce – to which the author dedicated the edited volume Nietzsche e l’America (Pisa: Ets 2005) – the author depicts James’ pragmatism as a distinctive voice that is however echoed in a general attitude to the treatment of philosophical questions. The author moves from the characterization of pragmatism as engaged in the elaboration of a philosophical anthropology to the characterization of pragmatism as a method for the resolution of philosophical disputes and themes. However the shift is only apparent, since the two characterizations are deeply intertwined and illuminates each other. A sample of this intertwinement is given by the compelling characterization of James’ pragmatic conception of truth. He writes: “agency determines the horizon of meaningfulness of language by discriminating what is meaningful from what is not. This has immediate bearings for the question of truth. The task is not that of deciding about the ways and criteria according to which we arrive at truths – a task fulfilled by epistemology – but rather that of understanding what does it mean to speak of truth. That is, what is the stance we take toward truth itself. Truth is not thus a vague metaphysical term, but rather it acquires sense on the background of an agential landscape. In such a perspective, for the pragmatist the contrary of truth is not falsity

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but rather what is irrelevant; that is, that to which it doesn’t correspond any concrete practice” (207). By portraying agency as the condition of meaningfulness of our practices of truth and truth as a goal which requires the very exercise of our agency, James draws a close connection between a pragmatic anthropological image of human beings as agents and a pragmatic conception of “truth as leading”. Such a connection, which represents a major theme in James’ works, is presented by Franzese as the clearest expression of the pragmatic temperament guiding his philosophy. It is on the background of this connection that the ethical question should be addressed.

9 James’ scholarship, less alive if compared with that of other figures of classical pragmatism such as Peirce and Dewey, is presently growing, thanks also to the work of historians and psychology scholars. Sergio’s work represents a precious endowment for those interested in contributing to this field. It egregiously accomplishes two difficult tasks at once: it both conveys a compelling picture of James’ philosophical anthropology and stimulates further reflections for our present debate about the nature of morality and its relationship with philosophical anthropology.

AUTHOR

SARIN MARCHETTI

Sapienza Università di Roma and Columbia University sarin.marchetti[at]gmail.com

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Book Review

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Wojcieh MALECKI, Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory Peter Lang, New York et al., 2010

Kalle Puolakka

REFERENCES

Wojcieh MALECKI, Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory, Peter Lang, New York et al., 2010

1 Though hints of increasing interest can be discerned here and there within contemporary aesthetic theory, as a whole, pragmatist aesthetics is still very much situated at the outskirts of philosophical aesthetics. Richard Shusterman is basically the only figure who has tried to develop a more systematic aesthetic theory based on pragmatist ideas, and while his work has been addressed and its value acknowledged in various parts of contemporary theory, its impact on what could be called the hard-core of philosophical aesthetics has remained rather small, and the amount of trembling Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics (first edition 1992) caused in analytic aesthetics pales desperately in comparison with the shockwaves the publication of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature initially caused in general philosophy some thirty years back.

2 Apart from Shusterman’s books, current work on pragmatist aesthetics has mostly appeared as individual articles and texts, which focus on some particular subfield of aesthetics, such as popular culture, environment and the body, without attempting to build a general pragmatist outlook on aesthetic questions. Thus, any book-length study focusing on pragmatist aesthetics is bound to raise anticipation in anyone interested in this field. Wojcieh Malecki’s book Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory, however, meets these anticipations only in part. Its main value lies in its providing an accessible and well-informed introduction to the main threads of

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Shusterman’s aesthetic theory and to the discussion revolving around it, but the positive ideas Malecki himself presents in the book on the basis of the critical remarks he makes on Shusterman’s theory are sadly so underdeveloped that the book does not evolve into an original contribution to pragmatist aesthetics in its own right. Malecki considers Shusterman one of “the most interesting voices” (12) in contemporary pragmatism and he is in general agreement with, for example, “Shusterman’s plea for the rehabilitation of aesthetic experience in philosophy and art” (62) and the pluralistic attitude characterizing Shusterman’s interpretation theory (101). However, the criticism of Shusterman’s views Malecki presents is scattered around different parts of the book, usually collected in the conclusions of each individual chapter. This makes it hard to build a detailed picture of Malecki’s own position and the direction he thinks pragmatist aesthetics should take and how that differs from the path Shusterman suggests.

3 Malecki’s book falls into four chapters each of which is devoted to one particular part of Shusterman’s aesthetics. Chapter one discusses Shusterman’s pragmatist conception of experience and aesthetic experience in particular, chapter two considers Shusterman’s views on the interpretation of literature, while the two last chapters are devoted respectively to Shusterman’s defence of popular culture, something which, as Malecki correctly observes, has won Shusterman “wide international recognition and popularity” (20), and to somaesthetics, a field of aesthetics Shusterman has recently put a lot of effort on developing.

4 Malecki begins with a careful examination of Shusterman’s position within contemporary pragmatism. For him, a key factor of Shusterman’s pragmatism that separates it from the views of some other important representatives of neopragmatism is in the attitude it takes towards language. In the introduction to the book, Malecki presents a mapping of contemporary pragmatism and contrasts Shusterman’s pragmatism with a form, which, in his words, emphasizes the essential “linguistic dimension of human existence” (15). Malecki singles out Rorty as the main representative of this line of thought and the investigation of Shusterman’s views he presents in the early parts of the book are characterized by an attempt to distance Shusterman’s work from Rorty’s. The most important difference Malecki sees in them is in the way they approach the corporeal side of human life and the kinds of immediate and unconceptualized experiences it involves. According to Malecki, Rorty is highly sceptical towards their philosophical relevance, an attitude which, in Malecki’s view, is reflected in Rorty’s criticism of Dewey’s conception of experience. In this, he follows Shusterman’s interpretation of Rorty. Shusterman’s main goal is, in turn, precisely to raise the bodily “rootedness” of our existence into the centre of philosophical reflection and to show not only the philosophical importance of nondiscursive forms of experience, but to provide a detailed analysis of their impact on human life. This is the distinctive feature of Shusterman’s pragmatism which the title of Malecki’s book, Embodying Pragmatism, is intended to capture, and the contrast the title tries to establish between Shusterman’s and Rorty’s forms of neopragmatism serves as a kind of guiding spirit of the book.

5 In chapter one, Malecki further elaborates the importance of experience for Shusterman’s theory by discussing Shusterman’s account of aesthetic experience that he draws from John Dewey, as well as the position it has in Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics. Malecki is right in pointing out that some of the important threads of

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Shusterman’s aesthetic theory such as his criticism of analytic aesthetics and the defence of popular culture he presents build heavily upon Dewey’s notion. While devoting a lot of attention on tracking the influence of Dewey, Malecki is equally keen on pointing out those aspects of Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience Shusterman does not fully buy into. This part of Shusterman’s reception of Dewey is less often emphasized, and Malecki’s careful examination of the points over which Shusterman’s view of aesthetic experience depart from Dewey’s account is one good example of how his book manages to give a previously more detailed picture of Shusterman’s theory.

6 However, despite this merit, a central problem of the first parts of Malecki’s book is that he does not always take an appropriate critical stance towards the figures and conceptions Shusterman engages with. A good example of this deficiency is Malecki’s investigation of Shusterman’s relationship to Rorty’s neopragmatism. Malecki evidently has wide knowledge of Rorty’s work and, in his investigation, he takes into account the short, but rather spiteful response Rorty has made to Shusterman’s criticism1 (30-1), something which I have not seen Shusterman to have done himself properly. Despite of this, Malecki overlooks certain parts of Rorty’s work which are arguably relevant to an assessment of Shusterman’s reading of Rorty. By criticising Rorty for what Malecki calls “textualizing human subjects” (15) and by contrasting, in his defence of nondiscurive forms of experience, his own approach with Rorty’s neopragmatism, Shusterman seems to associate Rorty’s views with a metaphysical doctrine known as “linguistic idealism,” that is, a view which sees reality as essentially language constructed. This kind of understanding of Rorty’s neopragmatism, however, has in recent commentary literature been seen to provide a highly misguided view of the philosophical undercurrents of Rorty’s neopragmatism.2 This is a body of literature that Malecki does not take into consideration in his investigation of Shusterman’s work, which is a shame, for I believe it provides new insight on the aptness of Shusterman’s criticism of Rorty.

7 The significance of these alternative understandings of the philosophical underpinnings of Rorty’s neopragmatism is that they reveal the connections Rorty’s work bear to the tradition of naturalistic philosophy, an aspect of the background of Rorty’s views, which has been basically totally overlooked in the reception of Rorty’s work within aesthetics and philosophy of literature, including Malecki’s book. Central for this naturalism is to insist that there are no relationships of representation between mind and world, but that the relationship between the two is purely causal by nature. This alternate picture of mind’s relationship to the surrounding world forms the core of Rorty’s criticism of empiricist epistemology, which calls into question the idea that the kinds of elements of experience upon which empiricists try to establish knowledge cannot, ultimately, serve the role they presume. Instead, in Rorty’s view, the justification of beliefs is a social affair, and, thus, essentially bound to language. In this respect, Rorty’s neopragmatism, indeed, seems to involve a discrediting of experience in favour of language.

8 However, taking the naturalistic aspects of Rorty’s work into account provides new insight on the position of language in his views, for, as I see it, an essential part of Rorty’s naturalism is that, in his hands, it turns into a purely negative thesis in the sense that it rejects certain traditional ways of thinking about reality and knowledge, like empiricism, without offering positive metaphysical theses in their place. This is to

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say that given the disbelief towards metaphysical views accompanying Rorty’s naturalism, it is arguable that he would have troubles of even making sense of the theses Shusterman and Malecki attribute to him, such as “all experience is linguistic,” and what it would mean to make a distinction between experiences which are linguistic and those which are not permeated by language. This is what I think Rorty is, in fact, aiming at in his short response to Shusterman’s criticism referred to above.

9 Malecki does shortly raise similar cautionary factors in his investigation of Shusterman’s criticism of Rorty (35). He, nevertheless, ultimately sides with Shusterman, finding Shusterman’s criticism of Rorty’s alleged textualism and the conception of experience with which Shusterman challenges that approach “seminal” (36). However, I think the strength of this conclusion is somewhat undermined by Malecki’s slightly one-sided account of Rorty’s work. Malecki’s failing to come into terms with the naturalistic underpinnings of Rorty’s neopragmatism weakens his investigation of Shusterman’s pragmatism, for by calling the textualist reading of Rorty’s work Malecki inherits from Shusterman into question, it makes harder to see where the difference central for Malecki’s book between Shusterman’s “embodied pragmatism,” which is supposed to overthrow the dominance of language-centred forms of neopragmatism, and Rorty’s pragmatism ultimately lies.

10 There is also another important background factor of Rorty’s work that Malecki does not consider, which I would like to take up shortly here due to its apparent relevance for the critical line Malecki takes towards Rorty in the book. This is the effect that Donald Davidson’s view of metaphor had on Rorty’s philosophy of literature. Observing Davidson’s influence on Rorty’s thinking on literature actually shows instant problems in readings which consider Rorty a strong textualist. This is because the decisive feature which separates Davidson’s approach to metaphor from other influential accounts is that it does not seek to explain the work of metaphor by assuming metaphorical expressions possess, in addition to their literal meaning, a kind of second or ideal level of meaning. Instead, Davidson unpacks the mystery of metaphors by concentrating on the effects metaphorical uses of language cause. This is, in other words, to say that in the Davidsonian scheme, the work of metaphor is not primarily explained in linguistic terms. This is also shown by Rorty’s understanding of Davidson’s approach, for he compares the effects metaphors are described as having on conversations in the Davidsonian model with the effects such phenomena as slapping on one’s interlocutor’s face or kissing him have in similar situations.3 Rorty, in fact, explicitly calls the phenomena the effect of which bear a likeness to the effects of metaphors “non-linguistic.”4

11 Davidson’s view of metaphor and the naturalism characterizing Rorty’s neopragmatism are not isolated parts of Rorty’s work, but, in his philosophy of literature, he combines them into an intriguing explanation of art’s significance. The ultimate value of Davidson’s theory for Rorty precisely lies in its providing an apt framework for explaining the value of literature, art and other like phenomena in the context of naturalistic philosophy. Davidson’s view of metaphor, in other words, shows that “a proper acknowledgement of the cultural role of imaginative literature (and, more generally, of art, myth, and religion – all the ‘higher’ things) is [not] incompatible with a naturalistic philosophy.”5 This is a side of Rorty’s thinking on aesthetics and philosophy of literature which Malecki overlooks completely and, at least in my eyes, this inattentiveness weakens the general value of his book.

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12 The second chapter of Malecki’s book is a highly thorough examination of Shusterman’s work in the philosophy of literature and interpretation. As Malecki correctly notes, Shusterman’s principal contribution to these areas are from the earlier phases of his career, dating back to the times when his work was still very much in the spirit of analytic aesthetics. Shusterman’s philosophy of interpretation can be divided into three interrelated parts. 1) His rejection of a conception known as “hermeneutic universalism.” 2) A pluralist view of the logic of interpretation. 3) A critical engagement with other pragmatist views of interpretation (Knapp & Michaels, Fish, and Rorty). Malecki again presents detailed and informative accounts of all these parts of Shusterman’s conception and of the views against which Shusterman develops his position. Malecki’s presentation is at its best in his investigation of Shusterman’s engagement with other forms of pragmatist philosophy of interpretation. As Malecki correctly points out, despite the evident differences between the figures Shusterman considers, his criticism of their views is united by an attempt to show that they all contain features which are ultimately rather alien to the spirit of pragmatism. First, Knapp and Michael’s approach in which textual meaning is seen determined by the author’s intentions squares rather badly with the interpretative pluralism pragmatism endorses. Second, while Shusterman is in general agreement with the emphasis on the communal side of interpretation involved in Fish’s literary theory, he, nevertheless, considers the one-sided identification of genuine literary criticism with academic criticism apparent in Fish’s view as an unfounded and unneeded consent to professionalism, something Malecki names “a perversion of professionalism,” which Shusterman considers a rather unsuited match to the kind of pluralism he sees lying at the heart of pragmatism. Rorty’s view of the liberal ironist is plagued by similar drawbacks. For the liberal ironist, literary works are important sources of innovative redescriptions which allow her to self-enlarge and enrich herself and even to create a self that is entirely unique. The main problem with Rorty’s view of literature building on the notion of the liberal ironist is that, to put in Malecki’s words, it “implies a denigration of everyday, unprofessional readings and those who engage in them” (95), a conclusion that, again, is hard to reconcile with some ideas Shusterman, and Malecki following him, find central to pragmatism.

13 The value of Malecki’s investigation concerning this side of Shusterman’s work lies especially in the good use he makes of his vast knowledge of literary theory, which allows him to reveal some compelling problems in Shusterman’s critical reading of hermeneutic universalism, as well as in Shusterman’s understanding of pragmatist philosophy of interpretation.

14 The most serious trouble of Malecki’s presentation again, however, lies in his account of Rorty’s views. Though having many original things to say, Malecki is in general too faithful to Shusterman’s approach to Rorty’s philosophy of literature and he overlooks some important aspects of Rorty’s work that are significant for the assessment of its relevance in the context of philosophy of literature. Malecki arguably subscribes to the common view of Rorty’s liberal ironist as some form of “private aestheticism” in which the needs and feelings of a community are replaced by the individual subject’s quest for self-perfection and self-enlargement and in which precisely those aspects of life which serve to separate an individual from her surrounding community are seen as the source of life’s aesthetic significance. The interpretation of Rorty’s work Shusterman offers

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has no doubt played an important part in the formation of this picture in people’s minds, and Malecki does virtually nothing to overthrow it.

15 There is an apparent social side in Rorty’s work on literature and aesthetics which both Shusterman and Malecki do not give proper attention to. This is revealed by observing the role Rorty ascribes to metaphors and narrative literature in the enhancement of the value, which he sees as central to liberalist societies, namely the feeling of solidarity. It seems that the role metaphors have in building solidarity is in the end two-fold. On the one hand, by making people attend to some unnoticed likenesses between different people in some particular context, an individual metaphor can prove profitable with regard to the enhancement of solidarity in some specific context. However, the role of metaphors can be understood in a more wide-ranging sense as well, for engagements with metaphors seem to require capacities similar to those Rorty finds central to solidarity, that is, such capacities as alertness to contextual detail. What these capacities seem to have in common is that they are all somehow related to the notion of imagination. Like metaphors imagination, too, tries to show the world in a new light and to reveal novel aspects in one’s environment. In fact, in some of his later works, Rorty explicitly addresses these themes through the notion of imagination and he ascribes to that faculty the same kind of cultural role that he in his earlier works, most importantly in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, assigned to metaphors.6

16 Malecki devotes no attention to the communal role Rorty assigns to these aesthetic phenomena and how his thinking on them developed in the course of his career. This is a significant drawback, for, as in the case of naturalism and metaphors, this oversight undermines the credibility of Malecki’s evaluation of Shusterman’s criticism of Rorty, as well as the positive contribution Malecki tries to make to pragmatist philosophy of literature and interpretation. For once Rorty’s philosophy of literature is addressed through the significant cultural position he sketches for metaphors and imagination, its implications look very different than in the account taking the received understanding of Rorty’s model of the liberal ironist as a basis. In fact, I do not believe that Rorty’s philosophy of literature is ultimately at tandem with what Malecki sees as pragmatist aesthetics’ fundamental idea of the function of art and that he thinks Rorty is unable to embrace, namely “uniting the society” (95).

17 In the third chapter, Malecki presents Shusterman’s defence of popular culture which is famously centred on an attempt to show the aesthetic value of rap music. As Malecki correctly points out, the main goal of Shusterman’s defence is to show, against Adorno and other like figures, that there is no intrinsic property that would render all forms of popular culture necessarily unworthy of more deep and sustained aesthetic reflection. That is, wider popularity does not necessarily go hand in hand with aesthetic shallowness.

18 This, again, is among the better parts of Malecki’s book and he develops a well- organized critical line. Malecki is clearly well-informed in rap music and uses his good knowledge of the genre to call the enthusiasm Shusterman’s earlier work exhibits towards rap into question. He, for example, cites some more recent developments in rap music to show that it has partly lost the critical edge which initially inspired Shusterman to single it out as a highly promising form of popular art.

19 In the final, fourth chapter of the book we finally arrive at the main focus point of Shusterman’s work of recent years, somaesthetics, which investigates the different aspects of our bodily existence. Malecki goes carefully through the different variants of

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somaesthetics Shusterman singles out. Somaesthetics is divided into three categories, 1) analytic somaesthetics examining the nature of our bodily perceptions, 2) pragmatic somaesthetics, which focuses on the bodily practices of different cultures and assesses their value for “the quality of our embodied lives,” and 3) practical somaesthetics trying to push philosophers to participate in different bodily practices, which Shusterman believes might afford them new insight into their research on human embodiment (144). Malecki also gives a highly informative account of Shusterman’s critical engagement with other influential views of human’s bodily existence, such as those of Foucault and Beauvoir.

20 Now, I have no quandary with the themes relevant to somaesthetics as such and, I further believe that an aesthetic approach to the body of the kind Shusterman develops may indeed contribute to critical analyses focusing on narrow and superficial conceptions of body’s aesthetics. (The chapter actually begins with a rather grotesque story about breast implant surgeries and their advertising [142].) Where my doubts concerning somaesthetics lie is that I have troubles seeing why it should be considered a philosophical discipline. Shusterman seems to go so far as to claim that better bodily awareness will result in better philosophizing, that is, that the body itself can be a tool of philosophizing (166). Actually, when writing this my leg hurts quite a lot (which I hope is just a result of too excessive jogging in a cool Finnish autumn night and not a sign of embolus) that distracts me a bit and I am sure that once the pain has passed, I will be able to concentrate on my work better, and perhaps even to do better philosophy (whatever that means). But it is quite a long way from claiming that a passing of pain from one’s leg allows one to focus on one’s work better to claiming that an improved body’s functioning improves once philosophizing in some more general sense. In this respect the scepticism Malecki reserves for the goals of practical somaesthetics with regard to improved philosophizing at the end of the chapter is, I believe, highly sensible (167-72). Somaesthetics is a young developing discipline with ambitious interdisciplinary goals and a growing literature has begun to develop around it. It remains to be seen, whether Shusterman can cash out the high prospects he assigns to it.

21 Malecki’s book ends with a short comparison of Rorty’s and Shusterman’s views on cultural politics, which, however, remains rather disconnected from the previous chapters of the book. What I really miss in Malecki’s book is the developing of some original idea that would raise the work from a mere exegetical study of Shusterman’s pragmatism into a more substantial contribution to the tradition of pragmatist aesthetics. To be sure, in the course of his book, Malecki does present a substantial amount of critical comments towards Shusterman’s views. However, as already said, the critical comments Malecki presents do not evolve into the kind of thoroughness and detail of argumentation that would allow them to establish some new areas of research for contemporary pragmatist aesthetics. When reading these critical remarks one gets the impression of a constantly bursting volcano which is too fired up to concentrate on developing the ideas bursting out into more consistent and forceful streams of lava. If there is some unifying critical line in Malecki’s book, which binds together the almost overpowering amount of different and, to my mind, hasty and underdeveloped critical remarks he presents to Shusterman at the end of each chapter, I am afraid it eluded me.

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22 Malecki’s book is recommended reading to anybody wanting a concise and informative introduction to Shusterman’s aesthetic theory and to its intellectual background and goals. To the development of pragmatist aesthetics it, however, offers very little.

NOTES

1. Richard Rorty (2001), “Response to Richard Shusterman,” in M. Festenstein & S. Thompson (eds.), Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, Cambridge, Clarendon Press, 153-7. 2. See, for example, Robert Brandom (2000), “Vocabularies and Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in R. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 156-83 and James TarJames Tartaglia (2007), Rorty and the Mirror Nature, London and New York, Routledge, 126. 3. Richard Rorty (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 18. 4. Richard Rorty (1991), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 167. 5. Ibid.: 124. 6. See especially Richard Rorty (2007), Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, chapter five.

AUTHORS

KALLE PUOLAKKA

Palmenia Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland

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Gemma CORRADI FIUMARA, Spontaneity. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry London and New York, Routledge, 2009

Guido Baggio

REFERENCES

Gemma CORRADI FIUMARA, Spontaneity. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry, London and New York, Routledge, 2009

1 Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s Spontaneity. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry can be considered a claim for authentic life through a psycho-philosophical approach as well as an essential contribution to the question of human spontaneity and the related conceptions of authenticity and creativity.1

2 The book seeks to introduce the notion of spontaneity into a deterministic and causal psychoanalytic approach which might sound at first as an exotic feature in a scientific context, where the ability to evaluate the effects of a cause in strictly concrete terms is supposed to play a primary role.2 As the Author stresses in the first pages, spontaneity is nevertheless to be regarded as a fundamental thrust that should be taken into account in any quest for human psychic life: “Though it may not often seem so, each of us is already in the midst of a life of passionate, personal quests. Although these pursuits may only be expressed in a rudimentary way, they nonetheless inspire our inner lives: if you want to do something badly enough, you just do it and worry later” (2). Her work then can be thought of as an attempt to establish spontaneity as a paradoxical substratum to action, an essential non-rationalistic and ‘non-rational’ character of human being which should not be looked at as a negation of rationality but as an important element for a creative authentic self-formation, since his early states. According to the Author the deterministic point of view of current psychoanalytic

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literature assumes that the genesis of pathological narcissism depends on the early relational vicissitudes in which the child has no active role in self-formation. Corradi Fiumara nevertheless engages in providing a finer balance between outer and inner causes in self-formation, pathology and health, arguing that such affective a balance is possible if spontaneity is held as a function operating already in the child and not only in the adult human being. In order to attain this, she suggests to consider the child’s activity as a pretheoretical and pre-conceptual expression of spontaneity. She admits in the child’s psychic elaboration the existence of a subjective zone that cannot be rationalized, where some motivational reasons to act, “not comprehensible in causal terms” (9), have their basis. Hence, in this way, the active role in which spontaneity consists, takes the shape of a ‘non-passivity’ in the receptivity (14), where the emotional pre-theoretical elaboration of life events occurs.3 That does not imply a rejection of the Freudian supposedly deterministic outlook. On the contrary, the Author strives to display in Freud’s thought a number of hints that should possibly allow her to claim a firm rooting of her findings on authenticity in the classical psychoanalytic ground. She catches in Freud’s description of “transference-love as both real and unreal” a glimpse of a paradox – although the positivistically-inclined Freud admittedly would have had a hard time naming it in such a way; moreover she sustains that Freud would have implicitly postulated the necessary active reconstruction of primitive states of imitation in the mature states of the self (15).4

3 Besides making sure that a strict compatibility with Freudian psychoanalysis is maintained, Corradi Fiumara’s work seeks to bring in it a new way to psychic unconscious phenomena that compensates the lack of deterministic reductionism, the latter being perceived by her as unfit to account for freedom and intentionality (7). She is faced here with two interlocking approaches: on one hand she seeks to delineate the process of allowing the ‘I’ to emerge in the personality; on the other hand she strives to understand spontaneity, pointing out that its elusive character should not be considered as a failure of theory. Rather, it is a sign “of what spontaneity is: an essential and perhaps most important quality of psychic life, sustaining all forms of creativity” (4). However, as spontaneity has been considered traditionally an insubstantial mental feature, Corradi Fiumara needs also to recast the method in order to shape again the concept, an effort which ends up in the Author reaching the more general question of authenticity in psychic life. Assuming that spontaneity is far from being easily comprehensible, she suggests that we can make a step towards spontaneity only if we became able to get along with our problems, instead of aiming to a ‘perfectionist’ approach to life where everything has to be rationalized. In other words, the Author says, we ought to begin to accept our limits and problems as the Norma of our life to become aware that spontaneity is the character of authenticity, and suffering a chance to stop the search for anaesthetizing the phobia of distress and pain (16).

4 In the second chapter Corradi Fiumara focuses on the ego’s active propensity to transform and influence the internalized psychic objects through its previous attributions and intentional responses. As is well known the process of ‘internalization’ is at the basis of self-formation. In this process fantasy would be the element allowing that the exchange between inner and outer world occurs determining psychic growth. However, the suspect with which classic methodology surrounds the idea of such an active role of the subject has much to do with the obscurity of some active internal processes. As noted by the Author, also “the term ‘fantasy’ commonly carries the sense

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of something unreal, whereas action in fantasy is real psychological activity; it is activity that affects the emotional processes within the subject” (12-3). This does not mean that fantasy works to escape from a strangling mechanism of identification: the individual sets himself up through a creative elaboration of his experiences and it seems that in such elaboration there are some pristine filtering functions at work that determine which outer objects and in which way they should be internalized.

5 According to Corradi Fiumara, we can theoretically define two ways of internalization: the passive/mechanical way, in which the introjection of outer objects inhibits the subject personality; and the active way, where the subject works on re-creating the objects and then acts for governing mental events. Hence, the psychoanalytic problem must be restated in this way: how could the outer mechanically incorporated object become autonomous and may rule us from within? The work of active internalization has to confront primitive identifications of osmosis and contagion, the first stages of identity construction of the self. Here the individual has a passive relationship to the outer world and often goes through a period of intense submission, which is also at the basis of a narcissistic condition. If these phases were not actively reconstructed in the subsequent states of maturity, there could be not a self. A mere imitation of the other, following a work of active introjection badly carried out, would cause the formation of a mind-like agent, whose actions cannot be deemed authentic.

6 The ability to recognize narcissistic currents is of great importance also for analysts who are often too imbued with abstract concepts to observe the other’s intrapersonal vicissitudes. Frequently an analyst fails to identify inner mind-like agents, which can cause narcissistic confusion for him and the patient. In these situations, Corradi Fiumara remarks, a ‘shift’ is necessary to confront the patient, because his subjective experience “cannot be properly expressed in our ordinary vocabulary. It has to be noted in the successful analysands, felt, attended to and allowed to show itself; it is, moreover, an experience that ranges from being totally pleasing to being severely painful” (14). The therapist ought to begin to act spontaneously toward the mechanisms of reaction of the analysand to understand him correctly, and this is possible only if the therapist is aware of his own self.5

7 Corradi Fiumara tackles the notion of ‘paradox’ in the third chapter (with a specific reference to Winnicott’s thought – a reference actually showing throughout the entire book), and stresses its positive function for the psychoanalytic process: “the psychological use of the term perhaps indicates the converse, or the other side of paradox – namely the fact that something that seems absurd, inconceivable, incredible turns out to be maturational, beneficial or enlightening” (25). Even though it is a notion not sufficiently defined in psychoanalysis, we may nevertheless find a precursor of the paradox in the transitional phenomena, as they represent an attempt to actively link diverging elements in the child. From this point of view, the wrong assumptions and principles at the basis of paradoxical reasoning may also be fruitfully involved to form the integrity of the self, because of the capability of psychoanalytic paradox to strain our minds. Thus, in a psychopoietic process where inner forces sustain psychological self-formation, the challenge of considering paradox an opportunity instead of a mere conflict situation should be accepted, and self-integration be regarded not as a synthesis but as the ability to tolerate every new paradox arising within the self. As Jung had already assumed about the role of complexes in psyche and Mead had argued concerning the self as a creative role-taking in the game of life, we are not an ideal

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unity, our integration does not imply “a fictional Cartesian unity, but rather, the growing ability to benevolently call those voices ‘I’, and not to disidentify with any one of them” (31). In this way, the plurivocity of the “I” becomes a richness of the self giving voice to a spontaneous self which comprehends its dividedness.

8 The fourth chapter resumes and further extends some observations on subjective agency the Author already made in her previous Mind’s Affective Life.6 According to her, the creative subjective agency was implicitly assumed as one of the roots of classical psychoanalytic theory, but at the same time the fact that such a presupposition remained unexpressed reveals the incoherence of the theoretical background of psychoanalysis. Corradi Fiumara emphasizes the necessity that the human being is conceived as a compound of determination and agency. Moving from that assumption, a question arises about the option between constriction and spontaneity: either we suppose some inner principle of subjective agency or, on the contrary, we have to admit our determinations through the influence of “our nature/nurture constraints” (37). The subject’s active valuation and orientation is the only inner possibility for spontaneity, based firstly on the subject’s emotional activity, which in turn determines the relation of the self to the world and to others, firstly to its caretakers. If good parenting lacks, the self might recede to a sense of narcissistic passivity, that “can be silently interwoven with any sorts of language games (or jeux de massacre) and forms of life (or ways to extinction)” (38). A particular care should be paid to the possibility of a passive and inertial way of life. Narcissistic passivity in fact causes a kind of ‘psychic deadness’, the absence of any emotionally creative centre. In this regard, according to Corradi Fiumara psychoanalysis can be used not only as a way to enforce caring, but also as a means to handle a lack of active responses towards outer stimuli. Since it results in a process of ‘decreation’ of the psyche, psychoanalysis might allow the subject to regain its authentic self, in a way that the ‘I’ would eventually fulfill features of its own like initiative and intentionality. Certainly, this sort of ‘birth’ can only derive from a “serious inner experience of the individual who dares to be born” (43), and that is not simple. It might happen that the subject gets in touch with its feelings without focusing them properly, i.e. without perceiving a psyche that moves it ahead in the path of its psychic growth. The fear of change, of abandoning, of losing something, could push the subject to resist new illuminating insights, preferring a passive ‘epistemology’ to what Corradi Fiumara had called in her Mind’s Affective Life, ‘epistemophily’ – a desire of thinking and knowing (44).7 But knowledge per se does not allow us to live authentically. Only a process which helps us to give voice to the desire of re-elaborating our life experiences over and over again may consent to develop an authentic self. Corradi Fiumara argues that in a healing process the therapist must pay attention to the risk that an external object ends up acting as a source of mimetic subjection. The mechanism of transfert opens the door to the possibility that the analysands abandon their passion for their profound identity “in order to create spurious harmony with the theorizing that they most admire” (46). This is a risk in which a therapist too like-minded with the authorial authorities of psychoanalysis may be entangled: passivity may endanger him as well, since his profession requires to maintain a number of standards, settled by norms which can turn out to be a cause of stiffness – such norms will always present themselves as already accomplished answers to whatever questions may be under discussion. To overcome this danger the therapist has to become aware that he is a person, and that his profession too is a particular way “to being alive” (47), in the sense that two tendencies are paradoxically at stake, one

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being the necessity that the therapist refers to the general principles of theory and to the clinical technique, and the other the need that the individual person emerges properly. And it is only in this paradoxical circumstance that the therapist can help the psychic growth of analysand.

9 Corradi Fiumara, then, raises the question about how, from the perspective of the pathological problem of entitlement and its psychoanalytic remedies, the subject can be spontaneous in spite of the historical circumstances or a mental illness. A subject is entitled to narcissistic compensations because of an early inadequate care by parents causing traumatic vicissitudes. He establishes that the others have had loving cares he has not, thus motivating the fact that he is an ‘exception.’ With the excuse to have suffered enough in the past, the subject is pathologically overdependent on a privileged position which prevents any development of spontaneity. In such people the need for compensation takes many forms; one of the most striking is an apparent absence of guilt and the absolute conviction of being privileged. Moreover, Corradi Fiumara stresses, in this kind of self-righteous individual “there seems to be an ongoing pleasure that is even drawn from emotionally destructive and sadistic currents” (59) in a way that his relationships tend to become critical, for the other is drawn into the subject’s narcissistic outlook. Compensation may produce pseudo-actions instead of authentic actions. Pseudo-agency is in fact related to compensation in narcissistic subjects, i.e. to a number of ways of exerting psychic influence as a consequence of failed attempts to get over passivity through the modification of their behaviour or their principles. Between principles, which shape one’s way of perceiving actions, and the life experiences, potentially capable of reshaping principles, there is a gap where one can turn out be either a potential agent or a subject entitled to exert control, incorporation and extortion on account of all frustrations endured. Pseudo-actions may produce some pathological benefits because, paraphrasing Corradi Fiumara, a subject firmly convinced that he deserves what he wants is usually more ‘successful’ in obtaining it (63). However, by doing this the subject asphyxiates subjective agency. Facing the problem of entitlement sometimes means being confronted with a further aspect, the feeling of hatred – usually the unavoidable result of the subject having previously been hated. Corradi Fiumara restates that the analyst should seek a chance to break that vicious chain by gaining an insight in the self’s entanglement, which can be achieved expressing interest for the subject’s ongoing internal dialectic processes, stimulating the emersion of a negativistic, self-pitying, vengeful mentality, and avoiding at the same time to express any judgment: a therapist’s active and sympathetic role is essential to overcome the ‘bad infinity’ of narcissistic compensations.

10 The three brief but crucial following chapters tackle three essential steps for restoring self’s spontaneity: the function of actions instead of reactions, the question of forgiveness and the quest for responsibility. In the sixth chapter Corradi Fiumara argues that the hindrance to understand the nature of others’ actions/reactions and reactions/actions lies in the fact that there are two ways we can look at those activities. In fact, however right it may be that reaction is commonly seen in pure causal terms, on the other hand it would not make sense to look at ‘actions’ in terms of a mere cause-effect model; rather, it is much more sensible to imply something like teleology of an action or final causes. From a ‘non-scientific’ point of view like this, we can better understand the subjective role of desires and intentions, as well as the subject’s perception of a situation as positive or negative in view of his integrity and to carry out mindful

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actions. “Thus – Corradi Fiumara stresses –, cognition and desire could ultimately be defined in terms of human acting, in the sense that cognition serves action by processing information, and desire signifies the point and motive of it all”, cognition and desire being “interwoven aspects of one process” (70-1). Anger too may appear, in this context, as a necessary aspect of creation: if it is metabolized through psychoanalytic work, anger might contribute to make the necessary energy available to act creatively.

11 However, in order to act spontaneously through the purely destructive force of anger without being overwhelmed by it, we need to be capable of forgiveness. According to the Author forgiveness is the “constitutive of subjectivity as understood in a new and more realistic/pragmatic way” (77), which means considering the subject’s act of forgiving as, paraphrasing Arendt, the only reaction that acts anew retaining something of action.8 Corradi Fiumara does not accept those psychoanalytic models which postulate the conflict between individual and social order as constitutive of subjectivity. Rather, she emphasizes the human capacity to generate relationships as one of the most relevant expressions of creative genius – a ‘genius’ being the inner attitude of doing extraordinary minimal things beyond the customary realms of patriarchal cultures and standardizations. She distinguishes between a ‘vast’ inner space of powerful members and a ‘deep’ inner space of powerless members of a community, arguing that the geniuses of spontaneity and healing “have less to do with the amplitude of our minds and more to do with the potential for depths, for seeking our unknown, unthinkable resources, such as even the ultimate capacity to pity one’s oppressors and to forgive neglect and abuse” (78). The genius of forgiveness may thus become able to express his aggressive desires through social-cultural codes. Aggressive desires, feelings of revolt belong normally in the range of unuttered experience because of the impossibility to express them in a viable public knowledge; in such circumstances the genius may provide “the inspiration that allows ordinary people to speak, even through the degrading clichés of a culture” (79).

12 The question of forgiveness is strictly related to the quest for responsibility, as forgiveness and responsibility are in fact two sides of the same evolutionary pathway of the subject: if on the one hand forgiveness is a ‘deep’ dimension of spontaneity, on the other responsibility is the expression of an integrated self, whereas ignorance of responsibility results from a subject detached from himself. One part of the explanation for such a detachment lies – as Corradi Fiumara had argued in The Mind’s Affective Life – in western epistemological tradition, in that it assumes ‘true’ rationality as separated from the subject’s personal affective life. This leads to a misrepresentation of the ideas of freedom and responsibility, as in the case of freedom only regarded as a detachment from any sort of oppression like anger or illness: in this way the achievement of individuation, creativity and responsibility, in short freedom to do something, is staved off. From this perspective, the ultimate value of the therapeutic process rests in the appraisal of an ‘unobservational insight’ instead of a ‘rationalistic,’ more objective representation of the self. To support this, Corradi Fiumara goes beyond the classical psychoanalytic Oedipus myth and highlights the Aeschylus’ myth of Orestes, where she finds the expression of a multidimensional explanation of the subject’s owning up of active responsibility. Corradi Fiumara suggests that there is nothing like a subject’s taking responsibility in Oedipus, except his potential admission of a sexual desire. On the contrary, when Orestes avenges his father’s murder, he owns up to his actions before the assembly of the community, thus claiming courageously accountability for

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his own actions and humbly acknowledging the authority of the community. These actions – Corradi Fiumara goes on – are more revealing than the oedipal simple identification with the father, in that Orestes’ acceptance of his own responsibility requires also an interpersonal forgiving background: “The act of assuming responsibility – she stresses –, of recognizing subjective agency, and the community’s attitude of forgiveness appear the key to maturation and development; it is the transformation of a maddening vicious circle into a cumbersome but therapeutic virtuous circle. This makes life difficult for everybody, but also makes for a richer human life” (90-1). Hence, making a decision of spontaneity is also an ethical act through which the subject recognizes the community’s normative role.

13 As much as forgiveness can be hard to conceptualize – this the conclusion of eighth chapter –, Corradi Fiumara goes on in ninth chapter to suggest that it is nonetheless in its roots that a comprehension of our personal affective life as well as the acceptance of the existence of a bond to our actions may be grasped. Thus, recognizing the richness in other people’s ‘foreignness’ may be a way to come to terms with the difficulty of that concept. Such a recognition can prove useful to accept our limits and develop the spontaneity we need for a responsible maturation of ourselves through empathy with the others. In this regard, Corradi Fiumara makes a distinction between ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy.’ Though these concepts are often used as synonymous (the term ‘empathy’ has probably a more recent history), the Author mentions Black’s and Gaddini’s psychoanalytic works and Stein’s illuminating phenomenological analysis on the matter to suggest that these terms do not indicate the same phenomenon: sympathy refers to a process of one’s affection for the same feeling of another, while ‘empathy’ helps us, as already Freud implicitly argued, to understand “what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people” (94). Hence, “empathy is largely unpredictable and also tends to expand our relational field in a creative way” (94); on the contrary, sympathy could be considered as a compulsory “natural mechanism” where also most narcissistic perversions are rooted. The narcissistic drive limits therefore the acceptability of psychic experiences, since it is not aimed at interdependency, but at sympathetic manipulated relations where the subject strives to satisfy his infinite need.9 The everyday mechanism of identification shows how easily we sympathize with those who are like us: there is no psychic labour for sympathy, even though such psychically low- cost implies a bigger pathological price, lacking responsible maturation of the self, lacking spontaneity and autonomy of the personhood. A solution for this would be that the one whom the narcissist wants to dominate, firstly the therapist, might spontaneously resist domination and break the narcissistic vicious circle, opening the way for the narcissist to think of himself as a separate being. However, even in this case the therapist would not be immune from a pathological sympathetic mechanism, as a risk arises that the therapist succumbs to a stereotyped idea of ‘emphatic’ connection, fueling a ‘relation’ that includes only minimal areas of the other’s personality, and results in a delusion of convergence and homogenization. The same risk of homogenization is easily found in transitional experiences, where the sympathetic attitude of the authorial authority with infants may stifle their psychic life. This is the case when it is not possible to empathize with childrens’ emotions and psychic states, and their expressions are denied. However, Corradi Fiumara notes, “in order to develop one’s spontaneity, we may have to migrate in search of novel linguistic communities that allow for new styles of psychic survival and creative action” (100). Whenever “superior managers of language and culture” take over the exploration of our inner

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world they atrophy our inner life. On the contrary, what makes us authentic selves is our capacity to develop new forms of interrelation and new points of view about the community and the possibility of acquiring new knowledge. It is then necessary to promote the formation of new metaphors for us to see and say what we want to pursue. In order to attain this, a more empathic inclination should be developed that unlike sympathy and immediate fulfillment, seeks a wider grasp of the relation, reaching the differences as well as the complex connections between us and other’s independent self. Empathy requires a work which implies a willingness to open ourselves to something beyond us, beyond our sympathetic ‘certainty’: “We could say – Corradi Fiumara writes – that the way any two, or more, interlocutors know that they have entered real empathy, and that it is distinct from the more usual exchanges of sympathy, is that these experiences, paradoxically, may even appear unfamiliar, unexpected in their specific form and timing, or ‘strange’; it may even be confusing as to what is happening or what should be done. And yet the contact becomes very intense subjectively, as in the more transformational moments of truth” (104-5).

14 In the last chapter Corradi Fiumara points out a psychic attitude that is also necessary for cultivating spontaneity: self-decreation. As for self-formation and self-preservation, care should be paid that such a decreation is properly developed for the sake of the self’s health. However, that is not simple. The belief that the Ego has to be fortified through a “logocentric, logocratic society” casts discredit on the values related to inner spontaneity by denying its existence. Such a ‘rationalistic’ misunderstanding of the human being considers self-decreation as an Ego’s debility, whereas, as already noted in The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, Corradi Fiumara makes the point that at the basis of our culture there is an erroneous use of the notions of power and strength,10 and that “it is a lack of inner strength that in fact is trying to regain its balance through a search, as secret as it is unrestrainable, for power or for some link with power. The most archaic interactions seem to dominate in a culture as a result of the insufficient strength of powerful egos, however admirable they may be in their expressive discourses” (114). From this perspective, the psychoanalytic process might be a precious opportunity to overcome the old oppressive way of life. This can occur on condition that both the analyst and the analysand become capable of self-decreation, the latter in that he “gradually come to struggle to relinquish parts of his own self for the sake of a more rewarding adaptation,” the former by striving “to let go of his view of things for the sake of a new insight into the confrontation” (115).

15 In Spontaneity. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry Corradi Fiumara sketches a new perspective where to look at human agency from, moving back and forth between psychoanalytic theories and philosophical reflections, conjoining analytical, etymological and theoretical concepts thanks to fruitful intuitions. Therefore this book is suitable to both the analyst and the philosopher. The analyst will find useful suggestions to avoid the risk of acting on the narcissistic belief that he has ‘the’ right therapeutic solution, and other hints that will help him to realize whether he is making use of outer authorial authorities preventing proper contacts with analysand’s authentic self. Recovering from a pathological condition means in fact that the therapist understands the crucial role of a ‘spontaneous’ listening as a way to gain a constructive point of view from which to see the relation with the analysand. On the other hand, this book is also suited to the philosopher because it may prove useful to prevent the risk of sticking too tightly to disciplinary boundaries, which might end up vitiating the sense for vitality he needs to confront this matter.11 Corradi Fiumara shows the possibility that a critical

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engagement along with self-acting and social practice is developed through an authentic philosophical liveliness. Her pluralistic approach to psychoanalytic questions, a proof of her pragmatic mood, contemplates the value of the individual’s active inner life in relation to the surrounding world. On the one hand the psychoanalytic point of view is necessary to change the balance of the subject’s internal forces – rational and non-rational – in order to remove the inner conditions that block a healthy relationship towards the surrounding environment and the others; on the other hand this changing must also consider environmental conditions, and in particular the inescapable interrelation of human beings. Only through an active acknowledgment of social and cultural conditions for self-formation and the community’s attitude of forgiveness, a more human, flexible and compassionate form of psychic exploration can be reached, that enables the self to get rid (at least partly) of dominant culture imagery.

16 However, a couple of questions remain about how a subject can begin to act spontaneously in spite of a mental illness, in other words how he can engage himself in a serious inner process; and, secondly, how a subject can become able to accept his own limits in a social environment that strongly urges individuals to overcome every limit that might restrain them, in Corradi Fiumara’s words how we can decolonize our psyches. As noted by the Author, Freud had already suggested that, as much as it is the psychoanalyst who analyzes the patient, the patient is the one who has to synthesize the analysis. However, she argues, though Freud himself had put forth the question about how the subject can achieve the synthesis and why he may fail to reach it, this is a crucial question which is really rarely asked by psychoanalysis theorists. This book tries to provide an answer through the perspective of the therapeutic process, pointing out also the limits and risks in which the analyst can fall. Nonetheless, it should be added that for any attempt to achieve a synthesis, be it to overcome pathological dynamics or simply to start considering one’s own reactions in order to restore his spontaneity, a spontaneous primitive choice is the prerequisite, something that any theory or therapeutic process has to admit as an assumption, without which they cannot work. By growing aware of the responsibility for our psychic life, we learn to become capable of actions instead of reactions and we learn the capability of forgiveness. However, before this may occur, an act of acceptance is required, since self-acceptance appears to be the primary creative attitude. Accepting our self means first of all making a choice that brings out the primary paradox: we have to choose spontaneously to start the path towards spontaneity. The difference between acting spontaneously or as a like-minded agent is rooted in this first action. In other words, to seek spontaneity is first of all, deciding to face “a challenge, a ‘play’ that is both creatively playful and extremely serious” (28). Creatively playful because we ‘play to create’ ourselves, extremely serious because the first step to spontaneity relates to its consequences, the most important of which is the acceptance of our responsibility to face the outer world.12 Making a decision for spontaneity is, as Calcaterra stresses about authenticity in human action, “to assume the responsibility for everything that these engagements imply.”13 As we have seen, to assume responsibility is to recognize the authority of the community. However, a subject’s responsibility is strictly related to the community’s attitude of forgiveness, i.e. the community’s capability to help self-development. As a consequence, a last question remains, maybe more ethical than psychoanalytical, about how the community’s attitude of forgiveness can be increased, how the cultural value of forgiveness can be fueled, specially in the face of a model of society that promotes

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indifference to the others instead of forgiveness, the phobia of ‘foreignness’ instead of its empathic connections. As we have seen here, it is not possible to escape from the limits of community’s environment, i.e. from the influence of others, such limits expressing the normative character of social environment. Even our will of innovation must face community’s rules.14 It seems, then, that we ought to find out reasons to ‘engage ourselves’ in our ‘very environment.’ And in order to attain this, we need to assume the ethical value of public dimension as the basis of our acting, but at the same time “a cultural atmosphere of forgiveness” (79) is required. Hence, the quest for spontaneity seems to be also a question about the ethical values our communities ought to encourage. However, this is an ethical question that cannot be taken up in this review.

NOTES

1. In the last number of EJPAP, Rosa M. Calcaterra stressed the importance to restore a reflection on the notion of ‘authenticity,’ “in order to clarify the basic structure of that relationship to one’s self through which, in concrete experience, one constructs self-understanding and the image of oneself to offer to others” (Rosa M. Calcaterra (2010), “Epistemology of the self in a pragmatic mood,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, II (1), 13). Moreover, in the first number of the EJPAP Vincent Colapietro dealt with Hans Joas’s The Creativity of Action (V. Colapietro (2009), “A Revised Portrait of Human Agency,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, I (1), 1-24). 2. Corradi Fiumara has already dealt with the question of self-formation and self-expression through the analysis of different ‘uses’ and limits of language and their roles on the process of personhood development. She stressed the necessity for an active and more authentic subject’s interpretation of the world and the others strictly interrelated to the crucial role of emotions (Cf. G. C. Fiumara (2001), The Mind’s Affective Life. A Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Inquiry, Brunner- Routledge, East Sussex; (1995), The Metaphoric Process. Connetions between Language and Life, London, Routledge, (part. ch. X). See also (2005), La funzione del linguaggio nella costituzione del sé, in R. M. Calcaterra (ed.), Semiotica e fenomenologia del sé, Torino, Nino Aragno, 69-89). 3. Corradi Fiumara mainly refers to Winnicott on the topic, as well as to Modell’s theory about the need of a private self also in the infant: “alongside an infant’s need for relatedness there is, in fact, the need for a private space” (43). The recognition of “the active propensity of the early ego” and the intentional response of the infant to life events has been already developed in Klein’s theory on the development of conscience in the child. According to Corradi Fiumara, Symington too suggests that both the trauma and the individual’s response to it cause narcissistic pathologies (11-3). 4. She refers to the Freudian quasi-theory of Nachträglichkeit, as expressed in a letter to Fliess in which Freud argued that between two successive epochs of life “a translation of the psychic material must take place” (Letters to Fliess dated 6 December 1896, cited in Spontaneity, p. 122n). The subject’s translation of the psychic material plays a fundamental role in the self-formation. However, the psychological and philosophical implications of the concept of Nachträglichkeit as it is conceived in Freud’s theories of pathogenesis and of psychotherapy present difficulties and confusions in Freud’s works as well as in post-freudian renditions of the notion (see between

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others H. Thomä & N. Cheshire (1991), “Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Strachey’s ‘Deferred Action’: Trauma, Constructions and the Direction of Causality,” The International Review of Psychoanalysis 18, 407-29; J. Laplanche (1999), “Notes sur l’après-coup,” in Entre séduction et inspiration: l’homme, Paris, PUF. See also the voice “Nachträglichkeit,” in J. Laplanche & J.- B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychoanalyse, Paris, PUF, 1967). 5. She writes: “[o]nly the development of awareness, in the sense that we are cognizant of our own representation of ourselves, can aid in the direction of integrated internal relations […]. Integrity of the self could be achieved when virtually all parts of the personality are encircled by creative acts of awareness and acceptance” (19). 6. In The Mind’s Affective Life. A Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Inquiry Corradi Fiumara dealt with human ‘emotion’ and its correlation to the formation of human activity and knowledge as a crucial question for both psychoanalysis theories and philosophic inquiries, arguing the necessity of a interrelation between objective epistemology and heterogeneous epistemophily. 7. The desire of knowing is expressed in terms “of exploring diversity, complexity and spontaneity,” that is to look at other creatures as sources of richness (47). 8. H. Arendt (1998), The Human Condition, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 241 (cit. in Spontaneity: 77). 9. Corradi Fiumara hypothesizes that as sympathy is considered a “natural mechanism,” it could be also related to ‘mirror neurons,’ through which sympathy could be explained as derived from the soma automatic reactions. 10. She noted the ambiguous uses of power and strength, in stressing that the power is connected with the subordination of other’s will to one own’s will, the strength is connected with an ability to do something. 11. Cf. V. Colapietro, A Revised Portrait of Human Agency, 1. 12. As she writes, “acting spontaneously involves endurance and responsibility” (74). 13. R. M. Calcaterra, Epistemology of the Self in a Pragmatic Mood, 22. Calcaterra refers here to Larmore’s theory on ‘authenticity’ through an ethical approach (see C. Larmore (2004), Les pratiques du moi, Paris, PUF. English translation, Practices of the Self, Chicago, University Press of Chicago, 2010). 14. George Herbert Mead defined the community’s rules as the “generalized other,” that is the mechanism by which the community gains control “over the conduct of its individual members” (G. H. Mead (1967 [1934]), Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 155).

AUTHORS

GUIDO BAGGIO

University of Roma Tre Italy guido.baggio[at]uniroma3.it

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