Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
2005
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Something Out of the Ordinary
1
7
28
61
83
111
132
155
192
213
236
Works Cited
283
Acknowledgments
291
Index
295
INTRODUCTION
The interactions of the themes, and perhaps disciplines, of the members of the opening pair of the ten texts to follow are developed variously, in scope and concentration, in succeeding chapters. Both members 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 Philosophical 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,
INTRODUCTION
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 German tragic play, as part of the process of philosophy, I adduce in the
opening text an apparently perfectly trivial routine of Fred Astaire as demanding, 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 response 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 Englishspeaking tradition of secular thinking (in philosophy from Descartes
through Kant, the skeptical problem had been focused on our knowledge 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 vicissitudes, 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 suggestion that the later chapters in various ways take up the capacity and
INTRODUCTION
former is my becoming aware, to my astonishment, of my radical ignorance of things; the conclusion of the latter is my becoming aware, to
my horror, of my annihilation of the otherit may happen in as small a
thing as my slighting an expectation, or withholding praise, or perhaps
out of the human failing of ingratitude.
The pertinence of the seventh and eighth chapters to the others
need not have passed through the concept of praise, since Austin and
Wittgenstein are essential to the investigation of the ordinary, and hence
represent a deepening of a main topic broached in the rst chapter and
threaded through the rest. But praise is in fact also implied in this pair.
The development of what I call passionate utterance, out of what Austin
calls performative utterance, requires an elaboration that Austin for
some reason did not make of his idea of perlocutionary effect. This development is sketched in my opening chapter, addressed to a professional body of philosophers, for whom its philosophical context, especially with respect to logical positivisms doctrine of emotive meaning as
characterizing ethical, aesthetic, and religious utterances, denying to
them cognitive and scientic meaning, could be more or less taken for
granted. In Chapter 7, I wish to open those initial thoughts to a more
general intellectual public, since in any case Austins work is, I believe,
more often cited, in contemporary academic life, in literary and cultural
theory than in professional philosophy. This means that certain sentences or formulations from the rst chapter are repeated in the greatly
expanded version of the material in the seventh.
Passionate utterance is just one form in which perlocutionary effect
structures itself: moralistic abusiveness is another; hate speech another;
political oratory another. Praising, as well as cursing or denouncing,
must t somewhere here. It obviously is placed in question in one of the
sublime, not to say sacred, moments in American history, when Abraham Lincoln questions whether he or we are in a position to dedicate,
consecrate, and hallow the ground which holds honored deadwhich,
in the context of the Gettysburg funeral oration, implies precisely the
act of praising them.
As for Chapter 8, on Wittgenstein, its mode is characteristic of the
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 philosophy, may give an idea of what it is I want to talk about today, in important part to reminisce about. The rst is from John Deweys Construction 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 occasions when some idea truly our own is stirring within us and striving to come to birth.
No wonderto do a little initial ax-grindingit is commonly said, in
the recent valuable rediscoveries or reconstructions of Deweys achievements, 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 philosophical sensibilities, I take it to be a mode of thinking lost without taking 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 unexpected as well as totally unintelligible effect that a successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, has on himexcept that perhaps 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-
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 Problems of Modern Philosophy, in which I propose that Kants characterization 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 connection very far, for example to surmise why there should be this connection 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 criticism 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 procedures present themselves as returning us to the ordinary, a place we have
10
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 difculty 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 philosophy; 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 experiment 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 Nietzsche 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 particular 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-
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12
the ordinary, something I have called the truth of skepticism. In that essay, 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 Shakespearean tragedy enacts the failure to acknowledge an other, hence forms a lethal set of attempts to deny the existence of another as essential to ones
own, I came to wonder whether Shakespeares tragedies can be understood 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-philosophical) acquaintances, a point that to Kant represents a scandal to philosophys quest for reason, then can the great literature of the West not have
responded to whatever in history has caused this convulsion in the conditions 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 loving 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 cultivate its allure, but to seek to avoid it. To take a celebrated instance, when
Quine implicitly blocks skepticism out of the court of epistemology,
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that is, naturalizes epistemology, by (as in Pursuit of Truth) repudiat[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 interaction 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 soothsaying, 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 knowledgewhat 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 experience. The richer experience Dewey champions he tends to call aesthetic; James most famously documents varieties of the religious. Even if
you disagree with Quines view of epistemology you can enjoy the demonstration 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 order not to feel sometimes that they demonstrate how a mass of experi-
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15
16
The examples which initially I ask a theory of passionate speech to illuminate are in part from the operas I assigned in my course. It is important 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 expressions of moral judgment, famously, by denying that they say anything 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 compromised 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 appropriate 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 Austins earlier introductory remarks about which he is prepared to say that
he asserts them as obvious: that the type of utterance we are to consider is not, of course, in general a type of non-sense, and that they fall
into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of statements (p. 4).
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said Why did you take that money? which species that I am questioning your conduct, and I suppose more drastically staking our future.
This would be clearer if Ayer had observed, more explicitly to the moral
point, that saying to someone You acted wrongly in stealing is saying
(not no more than but) no less than that you stole it and is (not just simply but) distinctly expressing disapproval. Ayers insistence that that is all
I am stating suggests there might be more. But having confronted you,
questioned you, faced you with your conduct, what more is there, except
in the same veinprepared as I may be to reason, depending upon your
responsefor me to say?
I propose that something corresponding to what Austin lists as the six
necessary conditions (he sometimes calls them rules) for the felicity of
performative utterance holds for passionate utterance. Austins are (l)
there must exist a conventional procedure for uttering certain words in
certain contexts, (2) the particular persons and circumstances must be
appropriate for the invocation of the procedure, (3) the procedure must
be executed correctly and (4) completely, (5) where the procedure requires certain thoughts or feelings or intentions for the inauguration of
consequential conduct, the parties must have those feelings or thoughts
and intend so to conduct themselves, and further (6) actually so conduct themselves subsequently. Now in the case of passionate speech, in
questioning or confronting you with your conduct, all this is overturned, but specically and in detail.
There is (as Austin notes) no conventional procedure for appealing to
you to act in response to my expression of passion (of outrage at your
treachery or callousness, of jealousy over your attentions, of hurt over
your slights of recognition). Call this absence of convention the rst
condition of passionate utterance; and lets go further. Whether, then, I
have the standing to appeal to or to question youto single you out as
the object of my passionis part of the argument to ensue. Call standing and singling out the second and third conditions of passionate utterance. These conditions for felicity, or say appropriateness, are not
given a priori but are to be discovered or rened, or else the effort to articulate it is to be denied. There is no question therefore of executing a
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procedure correctly and completely, but there are the further unshiftable
demands, or rules, that (fourth) the one uttering a passion must have
the passion, and (fth) the one singled out must respond now and here,
and (sixth) respond in kind, that is to say, be moved to respond, or else
resist the demand.
Austin observes that The I who is doing the action [while not always explicit] does . . . come essentially into the picture (p. 61). In the
case of performative utterance, failures to identify the correct procedures are characteristically reparable: The purser should not have undertaken to marry us, but here is the captain; you may convince a professional gambler (once) that your striking the table with your knuckles
was not meant as taking up his bet, or refuse a gift as premature or excessive; but failure to have singled you out appropriately in passionate
utterance characteristically puts the future of our relationship, as part of
my sense of my existence, on the line. One can say: The you singled
out does come essentially into the picture.
A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of
law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to
improvisation in the disorders of desire.
Here a certain relation to opera, using the representative examples I
mentioned, should become manifest. Lets begin with Carmen since her
singling out of Don Jos notably produces his Flower Song as his most
articulated response to her. This in effect acknowledges opera as the
scene of passionate utterance since here a set aria is directed to Carmen
as to an audience, one with the freedom to resist it, judge it, as inappropriate or ineffective (which she does). Then there is Donna Elvira, a perfect type of the abandoned woman, who receives a perfectly conventional response from the man, Don Giovanni, as she charges him with
being a monster, a felon, and a deceiver: He asks her to be reasonable
and to give him a chance to speak, and then contrives to slip away, leaving Leporello to cover his tracks. There is here no being moved to respond, only a move to avoid response. Tannhuser is singled out by each
of two women, or by each of two moods of one woman, each time because of what it is they avow that his voice has done to them. His re-
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sponse to Venus is three times to declare his love and each time to ask
for his freedom; his response to Elizabeth is to respond as if to Venus
and thus to cause his expulsion from the place he has imagined was
the eld for his freedom. Lucias aria of madness is the recognition,
or absence of recognition, that the one she has singled out has been
silenced. The extremity of demand of the Queen of the Night for vengeance is in a sense matchedthat is, turned asideby the metaphysical claim to spiritual purity by Sarastro. Almavivas Countess is answered by Almaviva at the denouement of Figaro in a two-word plea for
forgiveness, attracting Mozart to provide him with a Shakespearean
height of understatement, one whose appropriateness, or sincerity, it is
also for us to divine. For Ilia, in Idomeneo, there is no acceptable or appropriate response possible from the man her love has singled out, since
she is at the same time committed to hate him as the captor of her and
her people; only the Gods canand dorespond. With Otello the man
takes on the position of the abandoned one, as if to deny that his isolation has been lifted, and suffocates the possibility of response, no form
of which is bearable for him. By the time of Puccini and La Bohme,
there is no singling out by passion, no specic response to what has become a general emotionality, as if the power of specic expression is as
such becoming a thing of memory.
I have shared the sense that the idea of language as expression is unlikely to get very far as a theory of language in part because human beings have so few natural expressions. But this seems to me to underestimate what happens when creatures of a certain species fall into the
possession of language and become humans. As I read Wittgenstein, as
well as Freud, what happens is that they become victims of expression
readabletheir every word and gesture ready to betray their meaning.
In the conjunction of Austins appeal to the ordinary, and specically
its power to reveal the action of speech, with the passion of abandonment in the raised speech of opera, I can provisionally locate the pertinence I attach to the scene of Astaire singing and dancing. Each of my
claims of singling out and of response in the operas requires a judgment
of the music with which they are elicited. With what condence do I
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place such judgments, especially since, for all the fact that I was trained
as a musician, my dominating musical experience is of a culture that
does not compete with the operatic cultures of Italy and Germany and
France? (I claim, for example, that when Carmen rejects Joss Flower
Song as a response to her singling him out, saying, in triple piano, No,
you do not love me, she is responding truly, as it were objectively, to
something she hears in his music, or say his tone. But every other description I know of that moment takes her to be continuing to taunt the
man and to seduce him into coming away into her life.) My condence
lies in recognizing that the traditions of jazz and of American musical
comedy represent, for some of us, comparable contributions to world
art, and that if these can be taken as bearing on the experience of opera
(and indeed, as I will wish to note, on the issue of the ordinary) then I
will have what aesthetic reassurance I can claim, since I ought to be able
to know and to experience just about everything there is to get out of
such a ninety-second sequence of lm.
It is the opening number from one of the last, not perhaps the best
known, but among the most critically admired, of the classical Hollywood musicals adapted from a Broadway original, called The Bandwagon, from 1953, directed by Vincente Minnelli, with Cyd Charisse as
Astaires partner. The judgment I make in discussing the sequence here
expresses my pleasure and sense of value in it and awaits your agreement upon this. Now of course this particular experiment stands to be
compromised (beyond questions of my tact in choosing the particular
object) by the remarkably persistent air of exoticism in presenting a
piece of lm in service of serious intellectual intentions, especially a
popular lm. But I do not see that the initial mild indecorousness that
this risks should be more disturbing, come to think of it, than holding a
philosophical lecture in a hotel ballroom.
Let me set the scene. The occasion of the number is that the character
played by Astairea song-and-dance man whose star has faded in Hollywood and who is returning apprehensively to New York to try a comeback on Broadwayexits from the train that has returned him, mistakenly takes the awaiting reporters and photographers to have come to
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