stanley cavell

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY

AFTER TOMORROW
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2005
Copyright 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cavell, Stanley, 1926
Philosophy the day after tomorrow / Stanley Cavell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
Contents: Something out of the ordinary The interminable Shakespearean text
Fred Astaire asserts the right to praise Henry James returns to America and to
Shakespeare Philosophy the day after tomorrow What is the scandal of
skepticism? Performative and passionate utterance The Wittgensteinian event
Thoreau thinks of ponds, Heidegger of rivers The world as things.
ISBN 0-674-01704-8 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, Modern20th century. I. Title.
B945.C271 2005
191dc22 2004046229
To my granddaughter
Elizabeth Masters Batkin
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 Something Out of the Ordinary 7
2 The Interminable Shakespearean Text 28
3 Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise 61
4 Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare 83
5 Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow 111
6 What Is the Scandal of Skepticism? 132
7 Performative and Passionate Utterance 155
8 The Wittgensteinian Event 192
9 Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers 213
10 The World as Things 236
Works Cited 283
Acknowledgments 291
Index 295
INTRODUCTION
The interactions of the themes, and perhaps disciplines, of the mem-
bers of the opening pair of the ten texts to follow are developed vari-
ously, in scope and concentration, in succeeding chapters. Both mem-
bers of that opening pair were in effect celebratory addresseswhich
meant that each allowed unusual latitude of subject and of treatment
invited for presentation in 1996. And it seems that, about once a year
since then, whatever else I have been working on, I have composed an
essay that exists within, or in response to, those latitudes.
The rst text is my Presidential Address to the American Philosophi-
cal Association, in which I take up early preoccupations of mine with
skepticism (as the opening gesture of modern philosophy, in Descartes,
continuing in Hume and in Kant) in response to, and in retrospective
preparation for, the traumaintellectual and religiousrepresented in
the success of the New Science associated with the names of Copernicus
and Newton and Galileo. My interest in the pervasiveness of the threat
of skepticism was elicited by the revolutionary philosophical practices,
in roughly the middle third of the twentieth century, of J. L. Austin and
of the later Wittgenstein, in whose appeals to the ordinary or everyday
in our speech and conduct I seemed to nd a perception that what we
call our ordinary lives, or the perspective from which we understand the
everydayness of our liveslet us say, the extraordinariness of what we
accept as the ordinaryis determined by a prior surmise of that life,
and its language, as vulnerable. Vulnerable, I would say, to skepticism,
but with the understanding that skepticism wears as many guises as the
devil.
That address goes on, in contrast to the current prominence, per-
haps dominance, in Anglo-American professional philosophy of the
naturalizing of philosophy, which means regarding philosophy as, in
Quines phrase, a chapter of science, to offer the picture of art as a chap-
ter of the history or progression of philosophy. (Quines proposal is a
late, greatly sophisticated, version of Lockes recognition that with the
advent of the New Science philosophy must no longer compete for a
place at the head of the table of knowledge.) These are not head-on
clashes of philosophical ambition; the greater contretemps would be if
they failed to touch. What is at stake is, even before the idea of knowl-
edge, the sense of how human experience is to be called to account. The
classical empiricists idea of impressions as the origin, or cause, of
ideas, like Quines check-points of experience in the service of the-
ory-building, stylizes experience.
So what? If you cut down and stylize a handy tree branch by smooth-
ing it and whittling one end to a sharp point, you may kill deer for din-
ner. Shall I say that it is the experience of the remains of my day that
concerns methe facts of hunger and stalking and aggression and cun-
ning and cooking and aroma and resting and companionship and con-
versing? These are parts of human natural history. Are they of interest to
philosophy, any more than they are to physics? But that is my question. I
might say that much of this concern would be precisely with wording
the impressions made upon me by the things and persons and events of
the world, the ways they matter to me, count for me, a capacity in the
word impression whittled away in the empiricists impressions. (And
a good thing too; remember that running deer.) Yes, but what if, when
what we used, remarkably, to call the inner man is satised, my impres-
sions of the world and of myself and others in it do not return to inter-
est and amuse me, and I am left philosophically blank to most of the
necessaries of my life?
Can I, must I, leave it to, say, literature, or history, or anthropology, to
2 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
articulate and preserve the richness of my experience for me? Are their
authorities in positions to word their impressions that are essentially
different from my capacities as a participant of a human culture? To
cede the understanding of my experience, trivial and crucial, to them
would require, from my point of view, a massive effort of discounting.
(But isnt that how Freud describes the ego, as forming, like a skin, a
protective shield against stimuli too massive to consider?) Taking up the
tip from Walter Benjamins conceiving of tragedy, anyway of the Ger-
man tragic play, as part of the process of philosophy, I adduce in the
opening text an apparently perfectly trivial routine of Fred Astaire as de-
manding, and rewarding, a stake in that process, as if no event of the
public street, or of the private apartment, is unworthy of philosophy.
The companion essay of the opening pair is a plenary address invited
for the 1996 Shakespeare World Congress. I had imagined that my re-
sponse would concentrate on the connection I had been following for
decades between Shakespearean tragedy and philosophical skepticism,
and it took me rather by surprise that the heart of the eventual text
turned out to concern difcultiesinternal and externalentangled in
the praise of Shakespeare. The idea remembers that the ability to praise
guards against the threat of skepticismas in religion the acceptance of
God may be attested less in the reciting of creeds than in the singing of
psalms. And if, as I allow myself to speculate, Shakespeares Sonnets are
the discovery of the problem of the existence of the other in the English-
speaking tradition of secular thinking (in philosophy from Descartes
through Kant, the skeptical problem had been focused on our knowl-
edge of the physical, not the psychical, world), and if we take in the fact
that the obsessive issue of that series of sonnets is praise and its vicissi-
tudes, then again what? How can praise be the answer to skepticism,
since praise is itself in question? We might rather ask: What is it about
praise that it should emerge as an essential topic of the examination of
our acknowledgment of the existence of others?
Then my suggestion describing the connection of the essays presented
here, that the rst pair set the main themes of the rest, becomes the sug-
gestion that the later chapters in various ways take up the capacity and
INTRODUCTION 3
the right of praise. This appears to be reasonably straightforward in the
case of the second pair, the chapters on Astaire and on Henry James.
And yet alerted by Shakespearean tragedy to the outbreaks of deranged
cursing associated with false praise (as notably in King Lear and in
Timon of Athens), we may wonder about Astaires bout with frenzy at
the center of his dance of praise that we consider. I recall a moment of
paranoia and vengefulness in the Book of Psalms: Hold not thy peace,
O God of my praise; For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the
deceitful are opened against me. Set thou a wicked man over him. Let
his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name
be blotted out. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: As he
clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into
his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones (Psalm 109). Naturally I
do not claim this register for Astaires frenzy in his dance, yet the logical/
psychological rigor relating cursing to tainted praise may prove to be no
less in play in Astaires comedic context than it is in Lears and Timons
tragic or melodramatic contexts. We might accordingly come to a sur-
mise that Astaire is bafed that a curse has been the condition, and may
be the cost, of his praise.
In the fth and sixth chapters, matters become more obviously com-
plex. It turns out that the meaning of Nietzsches speaking of the philos-
opher as the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, while it
may have seemed a continuation of the idea of the ordinary in my open-
ing chapter, contains an essential reference to an idea of praise, or ap-
praising, or appreciating, or, one might say, transference. Then in Chap-
ter 6 my interest in Levinasthat is, my interest in writing about certain
passages of his, that is, my sense that I might have something useful to
say about those passagescomes from my learning that in his work the
relation to the other can be said to begin with my knowledge of myself
as a threat to the other, one could say, my knowledge of our vulnerabil-
ity to each other, abashed by the demand to acknowledge the other. This
seemed to me a promising line of thought in view of my having arrived
at certain asymmetries between skepticism with respect to things and
skepticism with respect to persons. For example, the conclusion of the
4 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
1
SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY
It happens that I lived for the rst seven years of my life in a house
placed three or four miles from the site of this hotel, in a neighborhood
intermittently still recognizable from my childhood images of Atlanta. I
realized, in choosing the material to present on this gratifying occasion,
that I wanted it to represent some fragment of a map by which to gure
how that distance and direction into the city and to this room can have
been traveled. I want such a map, since I keep discovering that I have to
go back to collect belongings that others may not have come to care for
as I have.
A conjunction of quotations, from texts that were I think among the
earliest I recognized as belonging to some body of work called philoso-
phy, may give an idea of what it is I want to talk about today, in impor-
tant part to reminisce about. The rst is from John Deweys Construc-
tion and Criticism, dating from 1929:
As Emerson says in his essay on Self-Reliance: A man should
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which ashes across
his mind from within, . . . else to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion
from another . . . Language does not help us at this point; rather
the habits of our vocabulary betray us . . . To know what the words
mean we have to forget the words and become aware of the occa-
sions when some idea truly our own is stirring within us and striv-
ing to come to birth.
No wonderto do a little initial ax-grindingit is commonly said, in
the recent valuable rediscoveries or reconstructions of Deweys achieve-
ments, that pragmatism is an intimate continuation of Emersonianism.
And no wonder I keep nding that what is called pragmatism so often
strikes me as an intimate negation of Emersonianism. For while Dewey
takes up the Emersonian theme of our suffocation by conformity and
the accretion of unexamined habit, he discards the power that Emerson
precisely directs against xated form, namely the power of turning our
words against our words, to make them ours (ours again, we might say,
as if things had ever been less distant). How Emersons manner in what
he calls his essays accomplishes this task, and why, in the face of my
knowledge of how grating his manner can be to contemporary philo-
sophical sensibilities, I take it to be a mode of thinking lost without tak-
ing it up as philosophy, has been an insistent theme of mine for a decade
and a half now.
The quotation I conjoin with that from Dewey is from Nietzsches
Birth of Tragedy, published about sixty years earlier, when Dewey was
some thirteen years old and Nietzsche roughly twice thirteen. Nietzsche
wrote then:
Art has never been so much talked about [by critics, journalists,
in schools, in society] and so little esteemed . . . On the other
hand, many a being more nobly and delicately endowed by nature,
though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in the
manner described, might have something to say about the unex-
pected as well as totally unintelligible effect that a successful per-
formance of Lohengrin, for example, has on himexcept that per-
haps there was no helpful interpreting hand to guide him; so the
incomprehensibly different and altogether incomparable sensation
that thrilled him remained isolated and, like a mysterious star, be-
8 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
came extinct after a short period of brilliance. But it was then that
he had an inkling of what an aesthetic listener is. (chap. 22, closing)
Nietzsches portrait of the unexpected and vanishing existence of the
aesthetic listener recalls me to an early essay in the collection that makes
up my rst book, Must We Mean What We Say?so much of which is
engaged by my need to justify an interest in what J. L. Austin and the
later Wittgenstein name the ordinaryan essay called Aesthetic Prob-
lems of Modern Philosophy, in which I propose that Kants character-
ization of the aesthetic judgment models the relevant philosophical
claim to voice what we should ordinarily say when, and what we should
mean in saying it. The moral is that while general agreement with these
claims can be imputed or demanded by philosophers, they cannot,
as in the case of more straightforward empirical judgments, postulate
this agreement (using Kants terms).
I was not able when I wrote that essay to press this intuitive connec-
tion very far, for example to surmise why there should be this connec-
tion between the arrogation of the right to speak for others about the
language we share and about works of art we cannot bear not to share. I
gestured at comparing the risk of aesthetic isolation with that of moral
or political isolation, but what I could not get at, I think now, was the
feature of the aesthetic claim, as suggested by Kants description, as a
kind of compulsion to share a pleasure, hence as tinged with an anxiety
that the claim stands to be rebuked. It is a condition of, or threat to, that
relation to things called aesthetic, that something I know and cannot
make intelligible stands to be lost to me.
Experience lost or missed is what the conjunction of my opening
quotations speaks about (Deweys of missing an original idea striving to
get formed; Nietzsches of losing the world opened in art, instanced in
opera), and they are parts of what is for each writer a fundamental criti-
cism of his present culture. This fact or fantasy of experience passing me
by is also explicitly a way in which I have wished to word my interest in
Austin and in the later Wittgenstein, especially I think when their proce-
dures present themselves as returning us to the ordinary, a place we have
SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY 9
never been. It seems that the more I might nd their instances trivial,
the more puzzled I could become that I had not realized, or could not
retain the realization of, their discoveriessuch as, in Wittgenstein,
what it is we go on in calling something a chair, or saying that someone
is expecting someone, or is walking, or why I sometimes imagine a dif-
culty over pointing to the color of an object (as opposed to pointing to
the object). To know how to tell such things, it seems, is just to know
how to speak. My oblivion of them came to strike me, intermittently,
not exactly as revealing my life to be unexamined, but as missed by me,
lost on me.
Experience missed, in certain of the forms in which philosophy has
interested itself in this condition, is a theme developing itself through
various of my intellectual turns in recent years, ones I would be most
unhappy to exclude from this occasion, ones that have exacted their
costs to justify as part of a prose that claims an inheritance of philoso-
phy; yet ones that have afforded me rare pleasure and instruction and
companionshipI mean for instance my interests in Shakespeare and
in Emerson and Thoreau and in lm and, most recently in an extended
way, in opera.
To epitomize the surprising extensions of the theme, and as an exper-
iment highlighting the difculties in the way of showing and sharing the
pleasures in its discoveries, I am going toward the end of this chapter to
discuss a brief lm sequence, chosen also so as to allow some chance, on
a very small scale, of showing a difference in my approach to aesthetic
matters from that of most, of course not all, work in aesthetics in the
Anglo-American ways of philosophy, or for that matter in the practice
of Kant (though not from passages to be found in Hegel and in Nietz-
sche and, for better or worse, in Heidegger), I mean the sort of emphasis
I place on the criticism, or reading, of individual works of art. I think of
this emphasis as letting a work of art have a voice in what philosophy
says about it, and I regard that attention as a way of testing whether the
time is past in which taking seriously the philosophical bearing of a par-
ticular work of art can be a measure of the seriousness of philosophy.
The fragment of lm I have chosen readily allows itself to be dis-
10 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
missed as inconsequential; but to my mind that fact precisely ts it to be
a memorable enactment of the ordinary as what is missable. It is a rou-
tine from a Hollywood musical comedy of the early 1950s, consisting es-
sentially of a man walking along a train platform, singing a not evi-
dently demanding song to himself. The man, it happens, is Fred Astaire,
by now all but incontestably recognized throughout the world as one of
the greatest American dancers of the twentieth century. He is also in-
contestably not exactly a trained singer, so the fragment contains an
open invitation to judge the routine, and its apparently uneventful cine-
matic presentation, to be trivial. It is a taskone I welcometo try to
make such a conclusion a matter of judgment rather than one simply of
taste; as it were to challenge taste.
To give this task a decent chance of success I need to do a bit more
philosophical table-setting, and then go on to give some details of my
interest in the voice in opera along with a related interest in Austins
sense of the powers of speech.
I have rather assumed, more or less without argument, since the early
essay of mine mentioned earlier, that Kants location of the aesthetic
judgment, as claiming to record the presence of pleasure without a con-
cept, makes room for a particular form of criticism, one capable of
supplying the concepts which, after the fact of pleasure, articulate the
grounds of this experience in particular objects. The work of such criti-
cism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Some-
thing there, despite being fully opened to the senses, has been missed. I
shall claim that while it is not a fact that the Astaire routine is trivial, the
sequence can be seen to be about triviality; and to show that will require
showing how its pleasure derives from its location of formal conditions
of its art.
A further variation in the relation of the ordinary to what may be
seen as the aesthetic is taken up in a later essay in Must We Mean What
We Say? which goes back to my having responded to Wittgensteins In-
vestigations as written, however else, in recurrent response to skepticism
but not as a refutation of it; rather on the contrary, as a task to discover
the causes of philosophys disparagement of, or its disappointment with,
SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY 11
the ordinary, something I have called the truth of skepticism. In that es-
say, Knowing and Acknowledging, the ordinary is discovered not as
what is perceptually missable but as what is intellectually dismissable,
not what may be but what must be set aside if philosophys aspirations
to knowledge are to be satised. There I articulate my sense of what
happens to philosophys aspirations by saying that skepticism is not the
discovery of an incapacity in human knowing but of an insufciency in
acknowledging what in my world I think of as beyond me, or my senses;
so that when I found, in a following essay on King Lear, that Shakespear-
ean tragedy enacts the failure to acknowledge an other, hence forms a le-
thal set of attempts to deny the existence of another as essential to ones
own, I came to wonder whether Shakespeares tragedies can be under-
stood as studies of (what philosophy identies as) skepticism.
If in being drawn to the skeptical surmise Descartes reaches a point of
astonishment that opens him to a fear of madness, and the young Hume
a point that presents itself to him as his suffering an incurable malady
from the knowledge of which he seeks to protect his (non-philosophi-
cal) acquaintances, a point that to Kant represents a scandal to philoso-
phys quest for reason, then can the great literature of the West not have
responded to whatever in history has caused this convulsion in the con-
ditions of human existence? Or were the philosophers not to have been
taken quite seriously in their airs of melodramatic crisis? Yet might it
not well haunt us, as philosophers, that in King Lear doubt as to a lov-
ing daughters expressions of love, or in Othello doubt cast as jealousy
and terror of a wifes satisfaction, or in Macbeth doubt manifested as a
question about the stability of a wifes humanity (in connection with
witches), leads to a mans repudiation or annihilation of the world that
is linked with a loss of the power of or the conviction in speech?
Or, again, should we consider rather that philosophy has indeed
properly drawn the moral of tragedy, namely that since we all already
know that skepticism is some species of intellectual tragedy, or folly, we
are advised that the rational response to it is not to revel in it or culti-
vate its allure, but to seek to avoid it. To take a celebrated instance, when
Quine implicitly blocks skepticism out of the court of epistemology,
12 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
that is, naturalizes epistemology, by (as in Pursuit of Truth) repu-
diat[ing] the Cartesian dream and enrolling philosophy as a chapter of
the science of an antecedently acknowledged external world, he cites
as a normative point of philosophys self-inclusion in science that it
[warns] us against telepaths and soothsayers (p. 19). The year that
book of Quines was published I was giving a lecture about Macbeth in
which I articulated the terror Macbeth seeks refuge from as an interac-
tion of telepathy and soothsaying. I spelled them differently, namely as
mind-reading and prophecy. Take them as terms of criticism naming
enemies of reason, and link them with the list of philosophys irrational
competitors identied in Kants Religion within the Limits of Reason
Alone, which he names as fanaticism, superstition, delusion, and sorcery.
This budget of favorite enemies of the Enlightenment also constitutes a
fair set of dimensions of the events in Macbeth, and indeed, in different
economies, of those in the other great tragedies of Shakespeare. So I
have also in effect suggested that Shakespeares tragedies are themselves
something like warnings against the craving for telepathy and soothsay-
ing, and I do not know that they and their kin have been less effective in
their warnings than scientic philosophy has in its, nor that to choose
one against the other is safe.
In Quines construal of philosophys ambitions for empirical knowl-
edgewhat he calls the construction of a unied system of the
worldthe only, but indispensable, role of experience is to provide for
such a system its checkpoints in sensory prediction. It is, I suppose, in
response to such an idea that, for example, William James and John
Dewey complain of other empiricisms that they have a poor view of ex-
perience. The richer experience Dewey champions he tends to call aes-
thetic; James most famously documents varieties of the religious. Even if
you disagree with Quines view of epistemology you can enjoy the dem-
onstration of the power, even the beauty, of science in showing how far
a little experience can go. Whereas you have to agree with James and
Dewey further than I doand I mean to grant all honor to their efforts
to save experience from its stiing by unresponsive institutionsin or-
der not to feel sometimes that they demonstrate how a mass of experi-
SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY 13
ence can go philosophically almost nowhere (for Dewey into a hundred
abstract rejections of some patently unintelligent thesis together with its
obviously undesirable antithesis; for James into a mere surmise of tran-
scendence).
May we think as follows? If philosophy of science can be taken to be
what philosophy is, that is because philosophy is, and is content to be,
recognizable, or practicable, as (a chapter of) science; whereas were phi-
losophy of art to make of itself a chapter of one or more of the arts, it
would no longer be recognizable as philosophy. Without challenging
this now, what I am proposing is something rather else, following what I
construe Kants examples of the transgressions of reason, in their inter-
section with Shakespearean drama, to suggest (perhaps it is Hegels sug-
gestion): that the arts, beginning with tragedy (or, in Hegels aesthetics,
ending with tragedy), may variously be seen, or claimed, as chapters of
the history, or development, of philosophy, hence perhaps of certain of
its present manifestations. I am going in a little while, as said, to extend
the thought to a polar relation of tragedy, a Hollywood musical. It is a
suggestion based on two contentions that I have argued for in various
contexts over the years. First, that in the modern period of the arts
marked variously by splits in the audience (and conception) of art be-
tween the academic and the advancedthe great arts together with
their criticism increasingly take on the self-reective condition of phi-
losophy (teaching us, let us say, to see that King Lear is about theater as
catharsis, that Macbeth is about theater as apparition, Othello about the
treacherous theater of ocular proofs, Hamlet about what surpasses the-
atrical show). The second contention is that the medium of lm is such
thatfrom the time of its rst masterpieces in the second decade of its
technological establishmentit could take on the seriousness of the
modern without splitting its audience, between high and low, or be-
tween advanced and philistine.
To prepare more specically for proposing an Astaire routine as a
checkpoint, or touchstone, of experience, I want to summarize the way
it gured in the introduction to a course I gave recently on the aesthetics
of lm and opera. The idea of the course is that words and actions suffer
14 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
transguration in opera (the art which replaces speaking by singing)
that bears comparison with their transformation on lm (the art which
replaces living human beings by photographic shadows of themselves).
So my summary must begin to specify in which philosophical forma-
tion lm and opera form chapters that measure some particular condi-
tions of these arts, or call them media.
Here I should simply confess that my interest in opera is tied to a con-
viction that matches yet one further way I have formulated an interest in
the work of Austin and the later Wittgenstein. Their sense of returning
words from their metaphysical to their everyday use is driven by a sense
of a human dissatisfaction with words (not as it were solely a philosoph-
ical dissatisfaction) in which an effort to transcend or to purify speech
ends by depriving the human speaker of a voice in what becomes his (or,
differently, her) fantasy of knowledge, a characterization I have given of
what happens in skepticism. In Wittgensteins case of a man striking
himself on the breast and insisting Only I can have this sensation! we
are to witness a speaker abandoned by his words, or abandoned to mere
words. Now opera is the Western institution in whichbeginning in the
same decade as the composition of the great tragedies of Shakespeare
the human voice is given its fullest acknowledgment, generally in the
course of showing that its highest forms of expression are apt not to be
expressive enough to avoid catastrophe, especially for women.
If we provisionally characterize the medium of opera as musics ex-
ploration of its afnities with expressive or passionate utterance, then
one specic response it invites from the recent present of philosophy as
represented in Austins work is to determine how his theory of speech as
action may be extended, in a sense re-begun, in order to articulate a the-
ory of speech as passion that can propose an orderly study of the effects
of the voice raised in opera; but this must in return allow the study of
opera to inspire philosophys interest in passionate speech. To sketch the
progress of my thoughts in this project will not exactly prepare for the
use to which I wish to put the Astaire sequence, but it will share the bur-
den of signicance I load it with, and help to specify why I press it into
service.
SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY 15
The examples which initially I ask a theory of passionate speech to il-
luminate are in part from the operas I assigned in my course. It is im-
portant for my purposes that all are warhorses of the medium and that
they still, or again, inspire new productions: The Marriage of Figaro,
Don Giovanni, Carmen, Tannhuser, Otello, La Bohme, and scenes from
Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, and Lucia di Lammermoor. I want also to be
guided by the warhorse examples from emotive or expressive utterance
that were the rage in moral philosophy, and in so-called value theory
more generally, when I was in graduate school. I recall the list from
chapter 4 of A. J. Ayers Language, Truth, and Logic: You acted wrongly
in stealing that money, Tolerance is a virtue, You ought to tell the
truth, and, most delightfully, I am bored. Ayer characterizes the ex-
pressions of moral judgment, famously, by denying that they say any-
thing and claiming that they are rather pure expressions of feeling, and
are calculated to provoke different responses, and as such do not come
under the category of truth and falsehood (p. 108), they are not in the
literal sense signicant (p. 103).
Now the claim that certain familiar human utterances are compro-
mised in their meaningfulness on the ground that they do not come
under the category of truth and falsehood is precisely the thesis to
which Austin, in his theory of speech acts (presented in his How to Do
Things with Words), provides massive classes of counterexamples. Austin
opens with the examples I do (take this woman, and so on), I bet
you . . ., I name this ship . . ., I give and bequeath . . ., and says of
them: It seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appro-
priate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be
said in so uttering to be doing . . . : it is to do it. None of the utterances
cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it
(p. 6). But the philosophical kick of the examples rests on two of Aus-
tins earlier introductory remarks about which he is prepared to say that
he asserts them as obvious: that the type of utterance we are to con-
sider is not, of course, in general a type of non-sense, and that they fall
into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of state-
ments (p. 4).
16 PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
Notably absent, it appears, from the types of utterances Austin goes
on to investigate are those warhorse examples of Ayers, or their descen-
dants, that Austins theory is designed to challenge. This may have been
a tactical decision, meant to shift a new argument onto philosophically
fresh ground (a new site for eld work, Austin would call it). But there
is reason to think that Austins experience had been xated by the way
he re-begins his theory to include the perlocutionary effect in distinc-
tion from the illocutionary force of speech acts. When he is led to say
clearly any or almost any perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off,
in sufciently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without cal-
culation, of any utterance whatsoever, (p. 110), he is evidently in the ter-
ritory in which Ayer was tying ethical words both to the different feel-
ings they are ordinarily taken to express, and also [to] the different
responses which they are calculated to provoke: Here Austin distin-
guishes between ordering someone to stop (illocutionary) and getting
someone to stop by saying or doing something alarming or intimidating
(perlocutionary), but he then seems unable to do much with the eld of
the perlocutionary comparable to his mapping of that of the illocution-
ary. It is from here that I am suggesting Austins theory must re-begin
againgoing back again to the fact of speaking itself, or I might say, to
the fact of the expressiveness and responsiveness of speech as such.
How?
Lets reformulate slightly and say that in a passionate utterance the
feelings and actions I wish to provoke (Ayer) or bring off (Austin) are
ones I can acknowledge, or specically refuse to acknowledge, as appro-
priate responses to my expressions of feeling. This is presumably true
even of Ayers I am bored, which, if it is said to you by a child, is per-
haps an appeal for an interesting suggestion or offer of amusement, and
if by a friend (romantic or not) is apt still to be an appeal and still to set
a stake on some piece of your future together. You had in either case
better answer, and carefully. Again, Ayer observes that if I say to some-
one, You acted wrongly in stealing that money, I am stating no more
than if I had simply said, You stole that money . . . [and] evincing my
moral disapproval of it (p. 107). So presumably I could equally have
SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY 17
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The title I have given this volume is derivedby a route I explain in
Chapter 5, which bears the same titlefrom a phrase used prominently
and repeatedly by Nietzsche in the second half of the 1880s to announce,
or to characterize, ambiguously, the philosophy of the future: does he
mean the future as seen (now) by philosophy or a future as it will be in-
habited by a (new) philosophy, or conceivably both at once (if ever)?
The phrase speaks of the philosopher as the man of tomorrow and the
day after tomorrow. I was so enamored of my understanding of this
phrase, or idea, that I repeatedly alluded to it over the years for talks
having in common only, or mostly, my explication of Nietzsches phrase.
My idea of it rst appeared in an essay written for a colloquium entitled
The Future Today, sponsored by Le Monde in the autumn of 1994 in Le
Mans, and published in The London Review of Books under the title
Time after Time: The Future Today.
Chapter 1, Something Out of the Ordinary is reprinted from Pro-
ceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, volume
71, no. 2, November 1997.
A shorter version of Chapter 2, The Interminable Shakespearean
Text, was read at the 1996 Shakespeare World Congress under the title
Skepticism as Iconoclasm, and printed in Shakespeare in the Twentieth
Century, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl (University
of Delaware Press, 1998).
Early versions of Chapters 3 and 4 (Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to
Praise and Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare)
were delivered in Amsterdam as part of my duties as Visiting Spinoza
Professor at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 1998. The ma-
terial of the former was broached in a talk in 1999 at the invitation of
Professor Jane Bennett, on behalf of The Foundations of Political
Thought, a section of the American Political Science Association. Both
texts are published here for the rst time. Vigorous issue with my read-
ings of the Astaire routines is taken by Professor Robert Gooding-Wil-
liams in the essay he has contributed to a volume entitled The Claim to
Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Theory, edited by An-
drew Norris, forthcoming from Stanford University Press, which also
contains responses by me to each of the essays. The reading I include in
Chapter 3 of Jamess late story The Birthplace is adapted from its oc-
currence in Henry James Reading Emerson Reading Shakespeare,
which appears in my Emersons Transcendental Essays, published in 2003
by Harvard University Press.
Chapter 5, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, also published here
for the rst time, was given at Bucknell University in February 2003, and
adapted as one of my Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Lectures at Harvard in
October of 2004.
Chapter 6, What Is the Scandal of Skepticism? was invited for a
conference in the summer of 2000 at Amsterdam, organized by James
Conant and Andrea Kern, and is to appear in the volume of the confer-
ence proceedings edited by them.
Chapter 7, Performative and Passionate Utterance, was invited by
the Pompidou Center in Paris as part of a series of papers delivered un-
der the collective title Philosophy for the Twenty-rst Century. A rst ver-
sion of the text appears, translated into French, in the museums publi-
cation of the series. A somewhat later version is to appear in the
collection of papers on my work, with responses by me, edited by Rus-
sell Goodman under the title Contending with Cavell, forthcoming from
the Oxford University Press.
Chapter 8, The Wittgensteinian Event, was written for two celebra-
292 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
tions of the ftieth anniversary, in 2001, of Wittgensteins death, one in
Kirchberg, Austria, the other in Delphi, Greece. Versions of it were pre-
sented the following year as part of the Howison Lectures at Berkeley in
2002, and of the Donnellan Lectures at Trinity University, Dublin.
Chapter 9, Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers, is a revi-
sion of a text that was prepared for a conference on Heidegger organized
by James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall and that originally ap-
peared (under the title Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau) in the
proceedings of the conference edited by them entitled Appropriating
Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2000). It was given as the
Roland Altherr Memorial Lecture at Haverford College in 1999.
The thought of composing a text on philosophy and collecting, re-
sulting in Chapter 10, came from the organizers of the joint exhibition
whose catalogue, in which this piece was rst published, gives its name
and mission: Rendevous: Masterpieces from the Centre Georges
Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums, copyright 1998 by The Solo-
mon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
I am grateful to the various publishers for their permissions to re-
print, and to the respective institutions for the honor of the invitations
to prepare and to present, the material of these texts. As with so much
of what I publish, conversations with friends, real and imaginary con-
versations, echo across my pages. Much of Chapter 1 sketches work de-
veloped in a late aesthetics course of mine given at Harvard in the 1990s,
on opera in relation to lm. I had had a number of discussions about
opera with Michal Grover-Friedlander, discussions not infrequently
joined in, here and elsewhere, by Eli Friedlander, and I was indispens-
ably assisted in every phase of the course, intellectually and practically,
by Steven Affeldt. For what I see as the companion, succeeding chapter
on Shakespeare, I asked, at a critical moment of loss of direction, a
group of friends to listen to a draft of what I had. I remain grateful for
that day, among many other days, to Affeldt again, and to Norton
Batkin, Nancy Bauer, William Flesch, Paul Franks, and Hindy Najman. I
remember with pleasure and gratitude the introduction to my lectures
in Amsterdam, Chapters 3 and 4 here, given by Hent de Vries, whose
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 293
comments also during the good discussions there were helpful to me in
arriving at reasonably stable texts. James Conant shared responsibilities
of the Spinoza Professorship with me, and his responses and sugges-
tions, here as elsewhere, continue to leave their mark on what I have
done. The original draft of Performative and Passionate Utterance was
distinctly improved by comments on it given me by Ted Cohen. His pa-
per Illocutions and Perlocutions and Timothy Goulds The Unhappy
Performative are part of the background of what was moving me in
this intervention. Further thanks are due to Norton Batkin for reading,
and suggesting welcome alterations in, the nal chapter, on collecting
and exhibiting. Many of the ideas in these as in other texts of mine have
been topics of discussions with Sandra Laugier, not infrequently as part
of the preparation of translations of them into French.
Not for the rst time, I am grateful to Lindsay Waters, Executive Edi-
tor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press, for his powers of
attention and his insistence on calling a book over when its over. And
again it is a pleasure to thank Camille Smith for her seemingly tire-
less editorial ear and amiable good sense in preparing a presentable
manuscript. And yet again David LaRocca, happily for me, undertook
to construct an index and gather together a bibliography to make the
book handier.
294 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS