The Mood of the World

The phrase, “epistemology of moods,” appears in Stanley Cavell’s writings in the late 1970’s, as The Claim of Reason is published and Cavell begins the direct engagement with Emerson around which his work will pivot for the rest of his career. Indeed, it is as an “epistemologist of moods” that Emerson first appeals to Cavell in his own right, and not as merely a “second-hand Thoreau.” The phrase is an odd one. Most of us would not think that knowledge and mood are connected in the way it suggests: my foul mood may make it difficult for me to concentrate on, say, my taxes, but it does not appear to otherwise affect my ability to know how much or how little I owe—and the same could be said of Sextus’ honey, Descartes’ ball of wax, Price’s tomato, and Clarke’s block of cheese. The oddity of the phrase is, if anything, even more marked when coming from Cavell: though Cavell is deeply interested in questions of self-knowledge, and of our ability to speak for one another and in that sense know one another, he is not an epistemologist; and when he writes of epistemology he often uses phrases like traditional epistemology or classical epistemology that distance him from it. Cavell does not share the traditional epistemologist’s interest in determining what, if anything, might warrant our claims to knowledge of the empirical world or the existence of “other minds”; and “the truth of skepticism” that he announces and explores is not the truth of the claims of the epistemological skeptic regarding such matters. While the epistemologist seeks to assure himself of the certainty of his knowledge, Cavell seeks to understand our disappointment with the knowledge we have. What, then, does Cavell mean by this phrase? What is the epistemology of moods?