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?

Stanley Cavell, Philosopher Untamed

Why not use the word “star,” Stanley asked in his breakthrough book on movies, The World Viewed, why not “the more beautiful and more accurate word,” rather than actor or actress? In philosophy he was a Hepburn, a Brando, a Dean, a Bacall, stars into whose souls he gave us entryways. I always thought of him and Hilary Putnam as the “glimmer twins.” Time was on their side, for so many decades, thank the lord. And on ours, too!

In Memoriam

I remember distinctly the moment I learned that David Lewis had died. It was during my years as a postdoctoral fellow, when I was more than a little isolated, and so it turned out to have been some time—months, maybe—since the event. I recall thinking: the world in which I thought I was living, during those months, turned out not to be the actual world, and so I turned out not to be the person I thought I was, but merely a counterpart of that person. And thus arose the half-formed thought (still only half-formed now, alas) that therein lay some insight into what is actually at stake in the conflict between counterpart theory and transworld identity.

At the Feet of the Familiar

My first substantive conversation with Stanley concerned Emerson. Having come to his work through my interests in Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, and skepticism, I arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in the mid-1980s hoping to work with him on these kinds of concerns—the concerns that had guided much of my undergraduate studies at Berkeley. Since I had read Part Four of The Claim of Reason, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that the center of Stanley’s philosophical concerns had shifted somewhat away from Wittgenstein and toward Romanticism (as well as, at that point, Hollywood melodrama). But I was surprised, and that surprise turned to disappointment and distress upon attending the first few meetings of a lecture course on Emerson that he offered early in my time as a student. While I found Stanley’s lectures interesting enough, I found Emerson all but entirely unreadable— often impenetrably obscure and, where not, ridiculously musty, pretentious, and overwrought. Since I wasn’t generally given to condemning authors I’d only begun to read—the philosophical virtue of the principle of charity had been deeply inculcated in me at Berkeley—I’m certain that my hasty and confident condemnation of Emerson was, whatever else, an expression of the kind of dismissiveness toward American philosophical thought that Stanley has diagnosed. Our first substantive conversation, then, consisted in his patiently responding to my embarrassingly uninformed, but firmly expressed, exasperation with Emerson. I can still hear Stanley’s voice as he assured me that he knew Emerson could be “hard to take.”

Contributors

Steven G. Affeldt (Le Moyne College)Isabel Andrade (Yachay Wasi)Stephanie Brown (Williams College)Alice Crary (University of Oxford/The New School)Byron Davies (National Autonomous University of Mexico)Thomas Dumm (Amherst College)Richard Eldridge (Swarthmore College)Yves Erard (University of Lausanne)Eli Friedlander (Tel Aviv University)Alonso Gamarra (McGill University)Paul Grimstad (Columbia University)Arata Hamawaki (Auburn University)Louisa Kania (Williams College)Nelly Lin-Schweitzer (Williams College)Richard Moran (Harvard University)Sianne Ngai (Stanford University)Bernie Rhie (Williams College)Lawrence Rhu (University of South Carolina)Eric Ritter (Vanderbilt University)William Rothman (University of Miami)Naoko Saito (Kyoto University)Don Selby (College of Staten Island, The City University of New York)P. Adams Sitney (Princeton University)Abraham D. Stone (University of California, Santa Cruz)Nicholas F. Stang (University of Toronto)Lindsay Waters (Harvard University Press)Kay Young (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Cavell’s Importance for Philosophical Aesthetics

Stanley Cavell was a prolific writer—the author of seventeen books and countless essays—and a famously stimulating teacher, but it would be impossible to convey in a short piece like this what made his writing and teaching inimitable. Instead, I will limit myself to trying to explain a bit of what I think is so important about Cavell’s work in aesthetics.

Thinking with Cavell about (His) Death

I am grateful to David LaRocca for inviting contributors to this special commemorative issue on the life and thought of Stanley Cavell. What follows is a brief philosophical reflection on what it means to think through the death of someone like Cavell, whose life and work continue to live on in so many respects and within so many people, as both this special issue and my experience in Stanley Cavell’s study bear witness to. I would argue that it is difficult to think through Cavell's death adequately (that is, to get the right sort of concepts in play). The cause of this difficulty is a productive tension within the extraordinary ordinariness of the concept of death itself: between the fact of cessation of biological life and the various respects in which Cavell has not ceased to exist, especially within the hearts and minds of so many. I aim in this piece to think with Cavell— that is, using tools he has provided—about (his own) death, thus performing the very productive tension which is the subject of the essay. I interweave some anecdotes from the past year spent working with the Cavell family to inventory and organize Cavell’s papers at the family’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

"Stay on Your Path, Young Man"

Almost ten years ago I participated in the conference whose proceedings would become the volume Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism. Stanley sat directly in front of me and listened attentively to my talk, thrilling and scary, not to say awkward, reading out “Cavell writes...” and “Cavell says...” with the man right there. After the Q and A, someone, I don't remember who, brought me over and introduced us. Stanley shook my hand and with the other patted my shoulder and said, with a broad smile, “Stay on your path, young man.”

Form of Life, Buddhism, and Human Rights

Stanley Cavell took up anthropological works for consideration in a way that we might characterize as staccato, and has informed anthropological work in increasing and increasingly sustained ways. As these works show, it is difficult to lift, so to speak, a single concept—say, the ordinary—out of Cavell’s work, and treat it as if it were discrete, unentangled with neighboring concepts like language, or the uncanny, or nextness, to suggest only a few candidates. Still, what I will do here is highlight the fertility of Cavell’s elaboration on Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ for my ethnographic work on human rights in Thailand. I set out to show that were we to attend only to the register of cultural forms (more or less specifiable sets of customs, traditions, norms, values, habituated practices), as human rights debates that hew to cultural relativisim or ‘Asian values’ do, we would develop a partial view of how human rights emerged in the progressive, democratic moment surrounding and following the 1997 Thai constitution. More narrowly, the case I make, the case that one cannot make if one only takes form of life in the conventional sense of describing only social conventions, is that a central line of thought in the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand about what human rights were turned not on the nature of rights, but on a picture of the human. The picture at issue was one importantly inscribed within a certain, controversial school of Buddhist thinking. This paper will examine specific contests within Buddhism over what a human being is, with the particular claims to rights that flow from different pictures of the human. That is, it will take these debates, as they appeared in struggles over human rights, as pitching irreconcilable notions of the human form of life against one another. First, though, it is necessary to provide some orientation for readers unfamiliar with Thailand.

Thinking (America) After Cavell

I read Stanley Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America for the first time over a two-day bus ride from Montreal to Chicago. This happened a little bit more than a year ago, in March 2018, when I came back to the US, where I grew up undocumented.The following essay tries to respond to that reading from both a deep attachment to Cavell’s writing and a wish to learn how to think after his picture of American thinking. Alternatively, I can also say that this essay is an attempt at sitting with an irresolvable pull between the unapproachability of things, and the need of confronting the world with itself along the lines in which it meets in a series of topics and a place.