Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
3, 2006
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N. Saito
Though there are diverse entry points to The Senses of Walden, the
interconnectedness of its themes mean that there is no obvious place to
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start. I shall highlight three main themes that suggest its common ground
with and its difference from Deweys pragmatism: the economy of living,
baptism in words and the phenomenology of ordinary experience. All
these themes show that words are not mere words but essential
components of practice.1
The economy of living
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The economy of living and the baptism of words thus illuminate the
unique features of Cavells politics of interpretation, ones that mark a
sharp contrast to (or at least a deviation from) Deweys notion of practice.
Cavell suggests that practice exceeds visible, actual change. It involves, as
Paul Standish puts this, an economy of excess (Standish, 2005). The
subtle nature of that excess is narrated in The Senses of Walden in what
might be called a phenomenology of ordinary experiencea description
of the internal transformation of the self through the economy of living
and the baptism of words. Cavells text itself exacts this awakening,
whether one reads it or tries to translate it. This, as Putnam suggests, is the
task of philosophy for Cavell. According to Cavell, Thoreau transforms
conventional philosophys treatment of a sceptical problem as one of
knowing into a matter of solving the mystery of looking through each
others eyes (Cavell, 2005). This is Thoreaus revisioning of philosophy.
Thoreaus mystery is not some ethereal mystery beyond the grasp of
human knowledge; instead it is the kind of mystery one encounters in
ones sense of strangeness within the familiar and the common, within the
here and now. This is Cavells Emersonian and Thoreauvian theme of
experiencing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
The reencounter with the world for Cavell and Thoreau is the
achievement of outsideness or outwardness (Cavell, 1992, p. 55).
Cavell says that Walden provides Kants transcendental deduction of the
categories. While Kant left unarticulated an essential feature (category)
of objectivity itself, viz., that of a world apart from me in which objects
are met, Thoreau articulates the externality of the world as its nextness to
me (pp. 106107). He says that [o]ur imagination, or our capacity for
images, and for the meaning or phenomenology of our images . . . are as a
priori as our other forms of knowledge of the world (p. 103). Cavell thus
finds in Thoreau a clue to the imaginative power of human beings that can
reveal the reality of the world outside, starting from within consciousness.
With reference to this point, Russell Goodman states that, in his idea of the
marriage of the self and the world, Cavell gives a poetic and
philosophical response to Kants intellectual dilemma: the answer that
you can experience the world as world, things as things, face to face as it
were, call this the life of things (Cavell, 1986, in Goodman, 1990, p. 14).
Deweys idea of experience, especially in his later aesthetic writings,
presents this commerce between the self and the world, overcoming the
dichotomy of the subject and the object. In contrast to Dewey, however,
who talks about the structure of experience, Cavell in his phenomenological account of the ordinary recounts how such commerce can be
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achieved from within our experience, how the outsideness can be created
from within the inside, and how strangeness can be discovered from
within the familiar. In short, the phenomenology of ordinary experience is
an attempt to show a route from the inmost to the outmost.
A more detailed landscape for this route can be found in Cavells
phenomenological account of the selfs nextness to the world in his
recounting of Thoreaus idea of the double, the state of being beside
ourselves in a sane sense (Thoreau, 1992, V 11, in Cavell, 1992, p. 102).
Cavell refers to this consciousness of self, and of the selfs standing,
beyond self-consciousness (Cavell, 1992, p. 102) and to the sense of
distance from self as a relationship of a perpetual nextness (pp. 107
108). The double as a state of distance acquired within the self is related to
the theme of leaving in Walden. With reference to the influence of
Eastern thought on Thoreau (for instance, in the idea of detachment in
the Baghavad Gita), Cavell says that a significant difference between
Thoreau and Heidegger is that the achievement of the human requires not
inhabitation and settlement but abrogating, leaving (p. 138). At the very
end of The Senses of Walden, leaving acquires the connotation of
bequeathing.
To allow the world to change, and to learn change from it, to permit it
strangers, accepting its own strangeness, are conditions of knowing it now
. . . [The writer] is bequeathing it to us in his will, the place of the book
and the book of the place. He leaves us in one anothers keeping (p. 119).
Walden as a place and Walden as a book constitute the place for Thoreau
to leave, as a writer and as a sojourner. We, the readers of his text, are left
with the text, with the task of conjecturing the meaning of his words for
each other.
In the phenomenology of ordinary experience, the discovery of the
intimacy between the self and the world is achieved through leaving. It is
the act of building the relationship of neighbourhood both inside and
outside of the self. This is not merely a relationship of union or
identification but rather, through and through, the relationship of being
next to one another. It is an acknowledgment of the truth in scepticism that
separation, the gap between the self and the world, is an unavoidable facet
of experience. Goodman points out that it is this gap that is missing from
Deweys marriage of the self and the world (Goodman, 1990, p. 113).
The experience of mystery for Thoreau and Cavell involves a
reencountering of the familiar in the ordinary as the strange othereven,
that is, within the most familiar identity of the self. In this sense the
transcendence of the self can be achieved not through any kind of selfforgetting meditation but through the act of reading, thinking and, hence,
philosophising. The politics of interpretation is the exercise of detaching
oneself from attachment to any fixed frame of mind; it involves the
readers (the students) learning to leave the authority of the author (the
teacher) and achieving freedom from the person of the author (Cavell,
1983, pp. 5253), in order to find her own voice.
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N. Saito
The central theme of The Senses of Walden is, in a broad sense, education as
rebirth, conversion and awakening, which is simultaneously the task of
philosophy. Education for Cavell is, first of all, the education of the self
through language, and its existential task involves the finding of oneself
through loss. In discovering the bottom of Walden Pond, such finding
cannot start with solid ground: There is a solid bottom everywhere. But
how are we going to weigh toward it, arrive at confident conclusions from
which we can reverse direction? (italics added) (p. 76). Cavells answer
refers us to the idea of carrying weight, by your force of character and
in your words, to allowing yourself to undergo the weight of the world,
to lifting the thing that keeps you anchored, and sailing out (p. 72).
Foundation is something to be achieved. It also becomes a point of
departure. To accept and then to turn awaythis is the idea of education in
Thoreau, captured in his reference to educations having a point dappui
(p. 71). The process of achieving outwardness involves a rediscovery of
ones interest in the worldanother economic term that frequently
appears in Thoreaus and Cavells texts. It is in regaining true interests in
the world and the self that we undergo the morning after mourning, in
Thoreaus celebrated pun, and so can speak in a waking moment, to men in
their waking moments (Thoreau, 1992, XVIII, 6, in Cavell, 1992, p. 34).
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NOTES
1. For a relevant recent discussion of Cavells text, see Paul Standishs Uncommon Schools: Stanley
Cavell and the Teaching of Walden (Standish, 2006).
2. In accordance with the system that Cavell uses in The Senses of Walden, chapter references in
Thoreaus Walden are shown in roman numerals while arabic numerals refer to the paragraph
within the chapter.
3. The original version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of
Education Society at Great Britain (March 31, 2006). I am grateful to those present for their
comments.
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N. Saito
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