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Cavell is one of the more serious critics of modernism in Art but his reluctance to engage with ethical universalism means that even his criticism is confined firstly, to the relation to history involved in the aesthetic situation, and secondly to the transaction between modern philosophy and traditional philosophy. His arguments in this context are dialectical:
“The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic. Innovation in Philosophy has characteristically gone together with a repudiation –a specifically cast repudiation– of most of the history of the subject.”( XIX)(Cavell S., Must We Mean What We Say?” Cambridge, CUP, 1969)
Puzzlingly, Cavell then argues that Wittgenstein is not a modern Philosophy:
“But in the later Wittgenstein( and I would now add in Heidegger’s Being and Time). The repudiation of the past has a transformed significance as though containing the consciousness that history will not go away except through the perfect acknowledgement of it, and that ones own practice and ambition can be identified only against the continuous experience of the past”(XIX)
It is surprising, in the light of the above, that both Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics are not by any means perfectly acknowledged in Cavell’s own account. He curiously places Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in the same category of thinkers. He also places Dialectical Spiritualism(Hegel) Existential Phenomenology(Heidegger) and the Linguistic Philosophy of Wittgenstein in the same category as Kantian Critical Philosophy. This is, to say the very least, historically and philosophically problematic.
Cavell refers to Wittgenstein’s claim that the traditional epistemological approach in Philosophy bewitches the intellect with its uncritical use of language: words, Wittgenstein claims, need to be brought back to their everyday use, they need to be brought “home”. Kant, Hegel and Heidegger were all Professors in German Universities, and Wiittgenstein was Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge at a time when it was felt that these institutions were drifting away from the concerns of everyday life. These institutions in themselves also constituted a zone of conflict between the secular forces of cosmopolitanism, and the traditional defenders of the faith. Kant, we should recall was ordered by the Emperor not to write on Religious matters. Ever since the closure of the Philosophical schools in the 6th century AD, Universities had inherited the hopes of the Aristotelians and Society, for both defending the system of existing values and advancing knowledge in all the subject areas of the sciences. It was left to Kant to become the philosopher and the “force” that best fulfilled these hopes. Indeed, his fourth question “What can we hope for?” was a question which was asked in awe and wonder and questioned mans moral nature, as well as at his theoretical accomplishments. Unfortunately Hegel, in his own words, turned Kant and consequently this hope upside down, partly by challenging the formal principles of rationality that echoed the Aristotelian heritage: a heritage that the University-system failed to manage consistently. Hegel, when viewed from an Aristotelian and Kantian perspective, continued the Modernist movement begun by Descartes and Hobbes Both of these philosophers, (via the ancient positions of materialism and dualism), sought to deny the historical value of Aristotelian Metaphysics (First Principles). This was, to say the very least, a surprising historical development given the fact that it was Aristotle’s work that first dealt decisive philosophical blows to both these positions. Given the range of his writings, Aristotle, of course was not right about everything he reflected upon, but his hylomorphic metaphysics still contains the major decisive arguments against these positions. Recall that he founded the disciplines of Biology and Logic. Darwin in his writings felt compelled to acknowledged the achievements of Aristotle. Aristotle’s work also represented one of the first methodological approaches to psuche: a form of investigation that firstly, included dissection of dead animals in order to examine organic and tissue structure and secondly, longitudinal observations of the behaviour of these organisms in their natural habitats. Despite many claims to the contrary, Aristotle’s work in Logic has not been surpassed by modern developments in logic some of which elaborate upon Aristotles work in significant respects and some of which fall well outside Aristotle’s conception of Logic. Kant and Frege’s work fall into the former category and the work of the early Wittgenstein and Russell, the latter category(and are therefore part of the modern epistemological project). Neither Kant nor Frege’s “Logic” overwhelmed the founders principles and rules.
In volume one of this work we discussed the Gestalt of the Romans, the god of War, Janus with his four eyes and two faces: we saw in this figure a symbol of anxiety portending the times to come. In volume two we fixated instead upon the image of Ariadne’s thread leading us out of the cave of our ignorance.
The hope embodied in the institution of the university is, according to the 4 volumes of this work, that of attempting to manage the journey of the thread of philosophical tradition running from Socrates, Plato , Aristotle, Kant and possibly Wittgenstein into the future. The message of hope is the message of rationalism: a message that refuses to advance the causes of Hegel’s dialectical spiritualism, the Existential/Phenomenological denial of rationalism, the dialectical materialism of Science and Modern Economic Theory, Transactional Ethics : all of which share a project so anxious to deny rationalist metaphysics.
If Kant is correct, the thread of continuous tradition may have a one hundred thousand year journey ahead of it, and this, of course, may be a source of discontent for those “new men” who impatiently wish to leave the earth and colonise the planets of the universe. For the rest of us who are willing to undertake this Kantian journey, distractions are superfluous. On such a journey there will be change—modifications of hylomorphic and critical theory. This change in turn, will be in some respects much less dramatic than that of colonising the planets. On this journey the practice of abandoning an entire theory because there is a mistaken statement or assumption, is a modern practice which denies the value of thought and serious philosophising. The declared aim of dramatically turning another thinkers thought “upside down”(Hegel) is a declaration filled with a modern form of hubris: This practice has resulted in the inversion of the values of morality. The beginning of the “new generation of men” with Descartes and Hobbes were not yet emboldened to such an extent and these thinkers contented themselves with relatively innocuous attempted criticisms of Aristotle. Descartes and Hobbes were content to lay the foundations for modernism.
Cavell in his reasoning about modern phenomena uses his dialectical approach to problem solving in his transactional approach to Philosophical Psychology and Ethics. The question that needs to raised in the light of the above is whether the World of the Arts was also turned upside down by the activity of the “new men” of modern art. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, published in the 1920’s was a typical attempt at a final solution to all the problems in Philosophy. It is not a well known fact that he attended for a short time the same gymnasium as another final solution propagandist, namely Hitler, who believed he had found a final solution to what he called “The Jewish Problem”, until he was forced to find a final solution to the problems of his own life, namely suicide. Wittgenstein, initially one of the “new men” of the Philosophical world, provides his final solution with the publication of the Tractatus, and then promptly leaves the university world for the profession of teaching. After a period in his life that he did not feel was particularly successful and in which he was finally convinced that his earlier conception of philosophy had several serious flaws, he returned to University in an attempt , as Cavell puts it, to acknowledge history. At the point in time when he wrote the Tractatus, Wittgenstein. Like Descartes and Hobbes, was not well read in the History of Philosophy. The Wittgenstein family were amongst the richest families in Europe and upon inheriting his share of this financial empire, Ludvig gave his money away thus distancing himself from the “new men” of the economic and political arenas of the time ( e.g. Cecil Rhodes, who probably was never plagued by the kind of dream that Carazan of the Kantian era was forced to experience).
Language is a medium in which firstly, pictures of states of affairs are presented and secondly, judgements composed of concepts and categories are constructed and presented as the work of knowledge or reason. The importance of this medium in Philosophy depends upon the extent to which Frege was correct in his claiming the pictorial aspect of the medium to be childish and unable to teach us anything about logic. Logic does, however use Language in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason .
In an essay entitled “Must we mean what we say?” Cavell explores the work of ordinary language philosophers and their focus upon the way in which language is used in everyday life. Ryle and Austin are discussed, and Cavell refers to the “explanation” of voluntary action:
“X(an action) is voluntary only in circumstances where one is suspicious about the performance of the action”
This is undeniably true in everyday circumstances. Saying, however, that in general a class of actions is voluntary if it meets this condition, is permissible, but we ought to note that this is an example of theoretical reasoning about a practical action, and for Aristotle all practical activities aim at the good. In practical explanations of action there is knowledge that what one is doing cannot be compelled by a cause outside ones control. The complaint one often hears about such action qualifications, is that they formalistically abstract from the particular circumstances of the action. This is not the case with the logical reasoning of the syllogism. The major premise may well abstract from particulars but it is the task of the minor premise to connect to the particulars of the circumstances e.g.
Taking someones property without their knowledge or consent is stealing
P is the property of NN
In Aristotle, as we have pointed out both propositions must be known and actively dispose the agent in the action-situation or action circumstances toward performing the action. This is necessary if one is to draw the conclusion that taking P is an act of stealing. If the agent does not know both of these propositions, then in all likelihood the agent may not be stealing if he thought he had the owners consent or alternatively did not know that P was his property. Also, if an agent removed one of your donkeys from his field to send to the slaughterhouse, believing it to be his, he could be accused of negligence (–because he did not go closer to make sure) but perhaps not of stealing.
The major premise:
All ethical action is voluntary
is a well formed proposition. So, when I say the above in support of the Aristotelian definition of what is ethical and what is voluntary, can I mean what I say? Certainly, this is what Kant meant to say. For both philosophers, logical relations existed between the above major premise and the minor premise of Jack promising Jill to pay the money back he borrowed from her. Cavell’s discussion focussed upon the relation between the circumstances in which we say something and the content of what we say. He pointed out that this cannot be a logical or a necessary relation. “Circumstance” is defined by the OED as follows:
” a fact or condition connected with or relevant to an event or an action.”
This suggests that if we are dealing with a logical condition, the relation to what we say must be logical. Similarly, if a fact, e.g. “All men are mortal”, is connected to the event of the death of Hitler, does not a statement formulating this in propositional terms, e.g. “Hitler is mortal” follow logically and necessarily from “All men are mortal “,and “Hitler is a man”,(he is surely only metaphorically a monster –he would not for example, meet the hylomorphic criteria for a monster, namely possessing different organs and a different shape)?
Cavell also discusses the pragmatic implications of an action that might possibly follow from a claim of reasoning that results in the performance of a voluntary action. It is not certain, however, that this idea of a pragmatic implication is helpful in characterising the reasoning process involved. The relation between an action that I ought to do and the reasoned conclusion that I ought to do the particular action in question, is surely something I mean to do, and it is so because I must mean what I say if my knowledge is expressed in the major and minor premisses of my reasoning about that action. Cavell agrees with this, but on the curious condition that the ought expressed in the judgements discussed are not merely expressions of private emotion or an emotional meaning(whatever that might be).
Cavell further discusses S (“When we ask whether an action is voluntary we imply that the action is fishy”). This must be a particular judgement because we are talking about a particular action, and Cavell sees no reason not to classify such a judgement in terms of the Kantian synthetic a priori. It is difficult, however, to see how pragmatic implications or emotional meanings could enter into such a discussion except in terms of causality which is a determining mechanism and not a spontaneous and free choice of an acting self. Furthermore a synthetic a priori judgement works for any particular event but it is necessary to point out that we cannot move from reasoning about a particular action to the generalisation that all actions are voluntary. There might, however, be a synthetic a priori judgement to the effect that “all ethical actions are voluntary”. Kant refers to such actions as deeds. Kant would, however, agree that a will driven by instrumental actions in accordance with an instrumental good will suffice to classify instrumental actions too, as voluntary. Whether this will suffice to regard all instrumental actions as ethical is more doubtful considering the second formulation of the categorical imperative in which we are specifically challenged not to treat persons as means to ends but only as ends in themselves.
The necessity of S, Cavell argues, resides in the fact that it is not clear what would count as a disproof of S: the question of empirical evidence for S appears to be irrelevant to its meaning. Cavell then arrives at the following position:
“There is no way to classify such statements, we do not know what they are”(P.16)
Or alternatively there is no desire on the part of Cavell to explore the possibility of all actions being voluntary. This would place him in a rationalistic position he does not wish to defend. Oliver Wendel Holmes in his work on “Common Law” (1881) considered whether there is any such thing as a voluntary act insofar as the law was concerned. His argument was based on the very astute Kantian sounding claim that “A physical movement of the muscles must be willed”, if an action is to occur. On this argument the law claims that mere states that may even be the product of illegal acts , e.g. being a drug addict because of illegal acts of taking drugs are not subject to the reach of the law. Being a drug addict is not in itself illegal, partly because there is no one identifiable act of will associated with being a drug addict and partly because in the eyes of the law one cannot take ones humanity away by any act other than an act of suicide which removes life altogether. Becoming a drug addict for Kant is a matter of the will being corrupted by ones passions: one does not voluntarily become a drug addict except perhaps as a means of committing suicide, using ones life as a means instrumentally to the taking of ones life.
It comes, therefore, as something of a surprise that the law embraces rationalistic and metaphysical accounts of action in demanding that criminal liability is connected to a voluntary act principle, namely:
“There can be no actus reus (and thus no criminal liability) unless the defendant performed a voluntary action” ( https://law.jrank.org/pages462/Actus-Reus-voluntary-act-principle.httml)
The law recognises that voluntary acts can be both conscious and habitual. In the above article we find the use of the word “metaphysical”. The discussion is indeed Kantian and rational. Cavell, in all likelihood. would reject both the metaphysical and rational aspects of the above discussion of action. But it may well be that it is this type of discussion alone that is capable of resolving the issues of the relation of necessary judgements to particular actions or classes of actions, Synthetic a priori judgements insofar as Kant is concerned are an important part of the science of metaphysics which is not as yet a complete science but nevertheless these judgements demonstrate the important cognitive function of reason in our thinking and in our lives.
The synthetic aspect of synthetic a priori judgements requires a relation to the world which Cavell discusses in terms of the relation of Language to the world. Cavell claims that in learning what a word means, we are also learning what the thing is that we are applying the word to. He refers to the activity of looking up the meaning of the word umiak(a type of canoe) in the dictionary. Dictionary meanings tend to give us both definitions of the things concerned plus examples of how to use the word. He claims correctly, that we bring both knowledge of the world and knowledge of grammar to the dictionary. This is part of his argument designed to demonstrate that the ordinary usage of the term suggested by the definition is normative. Normative statements also describe actions, Cavell claims(P.22). What follows upon this is not a metaphysical discussion of action, but rather a phenomenological investigation into S and the most characteristic feature of action, namely, that it can go wrong. It is further claimed that if someone tells us that we ought to do something ,they are, in so doing, presupposing the existence of a norm but it is doubtful whether he means the norm of the voluntary act principle suggested earlier. This action of telling someone something obviously of itself does not constitute the norm which is clearly a metaphysical issue for a Philosopher. It is unclear from the above discussion exactly what mistake Cavell is referring to, but he does maintain that the mistake is caused by a “disastrous conception of action”(P.24). The voluntary act principle discussed above is central to both Aristotelian and Kantian thinking in this area but no arguments have been presented against such a principle: no mention is made of the kind of mistake it, and principles like it are making. Cavell does in fact refer to Kant’s Categorical Imperative and claims that although this appears to us in the form of an imperative it really has the form of what he refers to as a “Categorical Declarative”(a description rule)(P.25). He poses the question “But suppose I do not want to be moral” and makes the naturalistic error of claiming that this is an argument for the principle being unable to physically guarantee moral action. For Aristotle we recall, if the ought premises are possessed and active, it follows that we ought to do the action, whether we actually do the action, is another issue given the obvious fact that there can always be a temporal gap between the conclusion of my reasoning and the action. I might get hit by a bolt of lightning externally or a chemical or emotional storm from within. Causation can obviously cast a shadow between the will and the deed.
Cavell wishes to relate norms to rules. This is problematic because the former are more like principles. A rule, Cavell argues, guides one to do something, but a principle guides us to do something well. There is no indication of this distinction in Aristotle, Kant or the discussion of the voluntary act principle. The source of this curious discussion may lay in Cavell’s desire to connect ethics to games like the game of chess, where there are indeed rules of the game and strategies for doing well in the game. A game is a transactional activity requiring instrumental strategies of many different kinds if one desires to win over ones opponent. The whole activity reeks of dialectical logic and this form of reasoning is also present in the economically motivated models that are operating in the dilemma presented to “The Prisoner” and his self interested calculations: calculations that have nothing to do with the kind of contemplation required in moral reasoning. There is no obligation to play chess, and no duty to play it well. Here it is certainly apt to pose the question “But what if I do not want to play?” There is no possible world in which not wanting to play a game of chess constitutes a moral mistake. Rejecting the invitation to play does not in any way compromise the rationality of my judgement, or reflect upon my dignity as a person. Even if I decide to play and do not follow the rules , my opponents only recourse is to a hypothetical judgment of the form “If you have decided to play the game you ought to follow the rules!”. A hypothetical obligation has been invoked which is true only of those who have made a kind of promise to follow the rules. The consequences of not doing so stay at the limits of the game. No real King or Queen will order my execution, no Knight will pursue me for the honour of side black. I have frustrated an expectation and have compromised my rationality, if, after having decided to play, I do not follow the rules. But there are no sentences, no suspended sentences, no fines. Symbolically, frustrating someones expectation is an important matter on the transactional stage of Cavell but also on the cultural stage, where mimesis of action and circumstance initiate us into the serious business of life, provoke thought about mans fortune and fate, and perhaps prophetically suggest the end of a civilisation and the beginning of new states of affairs.
It is however, in the real tribunals of explanation/justification that the affairs of men are really settled. In these tribunals, principles and laws regulate activity and thinking. If the law is metaphysical then in the law a chain of “Why?” questions occurring in the process of a legal tribunal will end in a principle, because principles have the status of a condition of phenomena related to other conditions forming the totality we refer to as “The Law”. Given that the legal concept of a “Right” emerged from Kantian moral Philosophy, as did the idea of Human Rights it is not surprising to see some of the totality of conditions involved in metaphysical legal tribunals finding support in the Metaphysics and ethics of Aristotle. Neither for Aristotle, nor for Kant, however, is it the case that that the term “voluntary” is best analysed by describing ordinary usage of the term in a statement perhaps about a particular voluntary actions (e,g. S).Particular statements have to be related to principles and furthermore be related in terms of the conditioned to the unconditioned. Metaphysical judgements relating to the essence-specifying definition of what a thing is, will of course be an important part of what is meant by the word for the thing concerned: they will be among the “circumstances” of the judgement (as defined by the dictionary and not Cavell).
In a later essay entitled “Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” Cavell compares Kant’s remarks on the Deduction of the Categories with Wittgenstein’s characterisation of his own investigation, as being directed:
“not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, toward the possibilities of pheneomena” (Philosophical Investigations , §50)
Cavell also quotes the following:
“We remind ourselves, that is, to say of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena…Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one:”(PI §90)
Cavell then points to what he believes to be the fundamental difference between Kant and Wittgenstein:
“For Wittgenstein it would be an illusion not only that we do know things in themselves but equally that we do not.” (PI P.65)
It is clear for Kant that although the thing in itself cannot be known via the faculty of Sensibility, it can nevertheless be thought, as an ideal. A quick perusal of Kant’s discussions of this matter in his First Critique, reveals that it is usually in the context of the role of intuition/Sensibility, that Kant argues the appearances of objects have only a metaphysical relation and not an epistemological relation to things in themselves. Indeed over 90% of ca 40 references to things in themselves is in relation to appearances: challenging us not take appearances as things in themselves. The type of relation Kant is suggesting here, is very similar to that suggested by Aristotle between a principle and the content it applies to. It would, of course, be logically problematic to take the content for the principle. The relation of Sensibility to the world does not, however, preclude the fact that we can think about things in themselves. This limitation placed by Kant upon the significance of appearances and phenomena also motivates the distinction between noumena and phenomena, because this limitation of a determining reference of noumena by phenomena locates noumena in a realm of thought and objective reality.(Critique of Pure Reason, P.266f). The world of senses provides us with phenomena and the world of the understanding provides us with the “possibilities” of phenomena (the conceptualisation of phenomena) in categorical terms which is just another way of expressing the general fact that we are able to think about phenomena. In this process of thinking about phenomena, if I subtract everything phenomenal from this process, I am still left with the externality of space and spatial relations between things. All this I can know by understanding what is claimed in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Thought, according to the Transcendental Analytic, on the other hand, is a logical function, that takes no account of Sensibility and Intuition. The “I” of the “I think” is neither that of substance or cause. The consciousness of the I in terms of pure thought is a form of existence that is a corresponding internal form to that external form Kant discussed earlier. This form of consciousness is a consciousness of itself, and this is especially transparent in the spontaneity of the reasoning faculty: an a priori form of intellectual activity.
For Wittgenstein, the I is mysterious and the question thus arises whether the many methods Wittgenstein uses can adequately capture the Kantian “I think”. Cavell, claims that Wittgenstein would believe that reasoning about the “I think”, as was done above, is illusory. A Kantian response to this objection would consist in pointing out the metaphysical difference between the phenomenal I and the noumenal I( revealed, for example, in practical reasoning). Only metaphysical inquiry could reveal this difference between the I that appears and the I that spontaneously thinks. The Wittgensteinian practice of imagining or constructing a language-game does not take us into this realm of being. Similarly, finding or inventing intermediate cases , inventing fictitious natural history, investigating a grammatically related expression, will all be useful for remedying confusions of various kinds. Yet it must be pointed out that these different “therapies” do not appeal to principles of reason or logic in the way that Aristotles metaphysics of the Philosophy of first principles do. Describing the possible different uses of language can only investigate the possibilities of phenomena to a limited extent, if one has already methodologically decided to exclude all forms of Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysical reasoning.
Cavell claims that self-knowledge is a major concern of the work of Wittgenstein. He claims that this topic has been almost systematically neglected in the works of Bacon, Locke and Descartes, but he fails to mention those two philosophers that have reflected the most about this topic, namely Aristotle and Kant. He claims that classical epistemology has been concentrating upon the knowledge of objects at the expense of the knowledge of persons.
The method of comparing and contrasting individual particular cases may be a good method of constructing concepts but this may not be very relevant to the combining of concepts to form judgements about persons. If actions are by necessity voluntary, as was suggested above, then making the statement :”When we ask whether an action was voluntary we imply that the action is fishy”(S) will not take us into reasoning about principles such as the voluntary act principle. Having doubts about exactly how to categorise a particular action does not take us into the philosophical realms Aristotle or Kant highlighted as important. The kind of doubt that ought to be raised about particular actions is expressed in the question”Was the physical movement we witnessed willed or not?”. If whilst standing in a queue, a man pushes into me, deliberation about whether he willed the movement is deliberation about whether he acted intentionally. If it turned out to be the case that he was in turn pushed willfully by the man behind him in the queue, then we are only dealing with his movement under the category of something that happened to him and not something he had done. We are not. that is, dealing with an act of will– there is no action here, not according to Wendel Holmes. Kant’s ontology of willful action is clear. What we are dealing with in this case is a matter of something just happening to someone whether it be a question of external causation-a push–or internal causation-the passions dragging reason about like a slave. Apart from the initial willed action, what we see is not a chain of actions but rather a chain of events.
Knowledge of persons and Culture is contained in the account given by Wittgenstein. Many of Cavell’s essays aim at claiming that Wittgensteinian methods aim largely at the modern epistemological project of analytical Philosophy(P74). These methods serve as diagnoses of the “disease” of bewitchment of the intellect by extraordinary uses of language. Given Cavell’s chosen perspective upon the work of Wittgenstein, it remains an open question whether the work is as much of a positive influence upon the History of Philosophy as we have maintained in this work. The Wittgensteinian “attack” on Analytical Philosophy (Logical positivism, logical atomism etc ), and by implication, his attacks on naturalism, pragmatism, existentialism and phenomenology are in the name of his methods and the attempt to bring language “home” to its ordinary use. None of these methods have metaphysical intent.
Cavell is particularly concerned with Aesthetic issues. In a famous essay entitled “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”, the issue of the translatability of metaphor is discussed. He points out that, even though the meanings of metaphor are bound up with the words used in the metaphor, it is nevertheless obviously possible to paraphrase metaphors.Earlier in this work (volume 2) we discussed the particular metaphor, “Man is a wolf”, and settled upon an analysis in terms of the conceptual components of the claim which includes the essence-specifying definition of man (rational animal capable of discourse). The above particular metaphor suggests or “uses” the animal essence of man to express the deep truth formulated by Aristotle, namely that man can be both the best of the animals and the worst of the animals. The essential relation between the concepts of man and wolf is that we therefore share some essential characteristics, but our essences are not identical: wolves are neither capable of discourse nor rational beings.
There are metaphors that are less hylomorphic, and perhaps more empirically inclined, e.g. “Juliet is the sun”: if, that is , one accepts Cavell’s paraphrase. Even this metaphor can be “deepened” if one considers the sun Platonically or hylomorphically, i.e. as a principle (Aristotle) or condition (Kant)of all earthly forms of existence. The paraphrase would then run as follows: “Juliet is the principle or condition of Romeo’s existence.” This paraphrase is largely borne out by the events of the Shakespearean play “Romeo and Juliet”.
Kant’s Anthropology is all about the metaphysics and political psychology involved in “being a person”.
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all the other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all the changes that happen to him, one and the same person–i.e. through rank and dignity and entirely different being from things such as irrational animals.”(P.15)
The grammatical form of the “I” is in fact very Kantian. The first person form in the statement “I promise” is relating an action to a particular being. Kant broadens this account into the more general role of a person in the culture they inhabit:
“The sum total of pragmatic anthropology in respect to the vocation of the human being and the characteristic of his formation, is the following. The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilise himself and to moralise himself by means of the arts and the sciences. No matter how great his animal tendency may be to give himself passively to the impulses of comfort and good living, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacles that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature.”(P229-230?
So, for Kant too, man can be the best or the worst of animals and his destiny hinges upon his rational capacity, which in turn depends upon a capacity for active discourse. Culture ennobles man, Kant argues, (P.230). For Wittgenstein on the other hand it appears that the capacity for discourse is the primary consideration:
“the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life”(§23,PI)
The reference to a form of life does, however, suggest Aristotelian hylomorphic theory but whether Wittgenstein wants to attach his argument for the importance of logic to rationality is not clear. Cavell in his essay on “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”, makes the claim that Wittgenstein’s work brings us back to more natural forms of life and puts the souls back into our bodies (P.84). For Aristotle, the only way for our souls to be in our bodies that makes sense, is in the form of a principle responsible for all its forms of movement, and this would appear also to be the case for the positive articulation of Kant’s Philosophical Psychology.
Modern Art , Cavell argues, involves us accustoming ourselves to a new and different form of life, and a “new world”( P.84). The question left hanging in the air in relation to these remarks is whether this new world requires “new men” or an attempt to transform ourselves into these new men? Is, one can wonder, Modern Art, part of a wider process of expected transformation, a process that created the new men named Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau and Hegel?
The following were the major “tools” of the transformational process:
The changes in the form of operation of consciousness noted by Jaynes earlier in this work,
The dismantling of the influence of hylomorphic metaphysics,
The diminishing influence of sound(rational) religious belief(of the kind referred to by Kant in his work “Religions within the bounds of mere reason”),
The colonisation of all forms of discourse by the method and materialistic assumptions of Science,
Analytic Philosophy with its transformation of Ethics into a game of persuasion and its distaste for metaphysics of all forms
The waning influence of classical art forms.
Rationalistic counter-influences included the persisting influence of Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy and
The political discourse supporting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(based on a concept of Right derived from Kant’s moral philosophy.
The influence of the law and its rationalistic argumentation for principles and laws.
The growing political awareness amongst the masses of the importance of freedom and knowledgeable politicians.
Wittgenstein’s declared wish was to provide us with a perspicuous representation which enables the disappearance of both philosophical problems and the problems of life. Cavell claims that this is Wittgenstein’s re-conception of the world. The fundamental question is whether this re-conception requires the understanding of “new men”, or whether his therapies and methods are designed to treat the bewitched thinking of the new men. We know in the cases of Descartes and Hobbes, the soul was taken out of the body in different ways and the ancient assumptions of materialism and dualism emerged with renewed vigour.
In his essay “Aesthetic Problems” Cavell provides us with a story from the work of Cervantes that establishes the role of the context of exploration/discovery in the “test for taste”:
“Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of good vintage. One of them tastes it: considers it; and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine, but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgement. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leather thing attached to it.”(In Humes “Of the Standard of Taste)
Here is a transactional account of Judgement if there ever was one. Both experts are in a sense right, and in a sense wrong and the synthesis of their correctness reveals itself at the moment of “discovery”, at the end of the exploratory tale. Taste related to sense, for Kant, could not be defended with a universal voice and always needed to await the “discovery” of something particular. Sensation in the taste of sense is not coupled to conceptualisation. Modern wine critics would, of course, seek to connect their experience to concepts via reference to origins of the grapes and the “body” of the wine. Cavell appears to recognise the Kantian distinction between reflective aesthetic judgements and judgements related to the “taste of the senses”. He claims that the latter are merely “pleasant”(P.88) and the former judgements are connected to the mode of “speaking with a universal voice”. Cavell does not, however, refer to the role of conceptualisation in this more universal response, fixating instead upon the synthetic event of “agreement”. Such agreement may well be presupposed when we speak with a universal voice but only because of the essence- specifying definition of a concept which Wittgenstein himself indirectly acknowledges when he admits that concepts are for use on more than one occasion. Wittgenstein also comments on universality of the concept in the following quote:
“What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance of a concept, are often extremely general facts of nature; such facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality.”(P. 56e)
The world is changing all the time (the wine is ageing and perhaps souring), but as Wittgenstein points out, if lumps of cheese put on scales were to increase and decrease in size whilst being weighed, the institution of weighing cheese would lose its purpose or point. Indeed, if all entities behaved in this way, our language-games over a broad area of activity would lose their purpose and point. Enduring entities over change is a principle of Aristotelian metaphysics. The conclusion we draw from this discussion is that there is often more to Wittgensteinian Philosophy than meets Cavells aesthetically-oriented eye.
In an essay entitled “Music Discomposed” Cavell discusses the issues of “New criticism” and “New Critics” who apparently suggest that criticism should confine its attention to the object itself (P.181). The poem, painting, building, statue itself should be examined and not the intentions behind the object, it is argued. If a work is the product of a voluntary act, as presumably it must be, then on Oliver Wendel Holmes’ account, it must have been willed. If it has been willed, then on Kant’s account , it must be intentional. Elisabeth Anscombe defines intention in terms of the question “Why did X do A?” and the answer given being a reason for, rather than a cause of, the action A. Reasons are not evidence, Anscombe argues, which entails that no inspection of the object of the action (even if it is a material object) can produce the reason. On this account one refuses any answer to the question “Why?” which entails that the movements at issue (being pushed in the queue) were happening to the man being pushed. Consciousness as such is not defining of intention, because the man being pushed can be fully conscious of what is happening to him. The man also, moreover, has to know that he has not willed this movement of his body. This knowledge, on Freud’s theory, need not be conscious, but is rather a function of what he called the Preconscious system of our minds (where knowledge and the meanings of words are “located”). The kind of knowledge we are talking about here is characterised by Anscombe as non-observational. Given that observation is the only route we have to the discovery of evidence, it is clear that evidence cannot be relevant to the intentionality involved in the activity of the artist, (and the object produced as a result of it). Yet this activity requires the agents awareness of what he is doing, a non-observational awareness of the kind we can encounter in the intentional activity of speaking (in which I am aware of what I have just said, am saying, and am going to say).
Anscombe insists that this idea of intention is very complex and provides us with an example of a man pumping water into a house and poisoning the inhabitants. She cites Wittgenstein and refers to what she calls the history of the circumstances of the case, which of course would be an appropriate thing to do if the case was to land in a legal tribunal. Anscombe divides the case up analytically into the following possible forms, each moment progressively widening the circumstances:
- Moving my arm up and down with my fingers around the pump handle
- operating the pump
- replenishing the water supply of the house
- poisoning the inhabitants of the house
We have here 4 descriptions. The first is an intuitive description of a muscles being contracted by an act of will. The next level moves to a conceptual description of what is being willed, which as a matter of fact is an answer to the question “Why?”, being asked as a response to witnessing the first willed movement, e.g. “Why are you moving your arm up and down and…?” The next level, 3, conceptualises the case in terms of widening circumstances, and is also an answer to the question”Why are you operating the pump?”. The journey of the water into the house widens the circumstances still further and the final end or telos of the action is given in description number 4. It would, of course, be impossible to agree to the description “poisoning the inhabitants of the house”, if one did not agree to the descriptions of what one was doing in moments 1-3. The first three act-descriptions are means to an end, and for Kant instrumental reasoning governs the shift between these different moments. This instrumental reasoning process is governed by the principle: “to will the end is to will the means”. This indicates that the connection of the means to the end must be conceptual or logical (practical logic). “Poisoning the inhabitants” is an end that is described in the following way by Anscombe:
“Thus when we speak of four intentions, we are speaking of the character of being intentional that belongs to the act in each of the four descriptions: but when we speak of being one intention we are speaking of intention with which: the last term we give in such a series gives the intention with which the act in each of its other act descriptions was done, and this intention, so to speak, swallows up all the preceding intentions with which earlier members of the series were done.”(Anscombe, G., E., M.,(Oxford, Blackwell, 1972, P.46)
It is, Anscombe argues, an error to characterise the content of the intention only in terms of the initial intuition of the contraction of ones muscles because concepts are already conceptualising this intuitive knowledge. Anscombe cites Aristotle:
“In general, as Aristotle says,, one does not deliberate about an acquired skill; the description of what one is doing, which one completely understands, is at a distance from the details of ones movements, which one does not consider at all.”(P54 Intention)
This was a point Wittgenstein made in relation to the sensation of pain, namely that the feeling of pain (this detail) is playing no role in the language game related to pain. The agents description is a dispositional piece of knowledge rather than a detail. The material details of the case (the intuition of muscle contraction)would not normally be decisive in a legal case relating to the poisoning of the inhabitants of the house. Imagine that in the course of the legal process relating to the above example, it was discovered that there was poison in the water, but the water for some reason did not reach the house (there was a leak in the pipe). Circumstances such as knowing the water was poisoned would suffice under the law for a charge of attempted murder. This charge is based on the last three descriptions. Anscombe discusses this possibility in terms of a mistake occurring in action (P.57), and not in any of the descriptive statements. We still use the intention to characterise the action. The man was not just operating the pump or replenishing the water supply of the house: he was poisoning the inhabitants. Anscombe elaborates upon this in the following way:
“Can it be that there is something that modern philosophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge? Certainly in modern philosophy we have an incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge. Knowledge must be something that is judged as such by being in accordance with the facts. The facts, reality, are prior and dictate what is to be saved, if it is knowledge. And this is the explanation of the utter darkness in which we find ourselves.”(P.57)
One can wonder whether Anscombe meant that we are generally in the dark with Practical Philosophical issues or just in this particular case. She certainly felt us moderns to be in the dark about the concept of life, and the abortion of a foetus. If the tribunal of legal proceedings were driven solely by the facts rather than the conceptualisation of the facts, in terms that is, of our intentions, it would suffice for the man accused of attempted murder to point to the hole in the pipe and thereby be acquitted of the charge. This in spite of the fact that he knows he willed the destruction of the inhabitants (politicians) of the house. If the proceedings of the trial can recreate a sufficiently complex picture of the circumstances, we and the jury can also know what the mans intention was—the will is not a mysterious inner phenomenon. Anscombe also cites with approval Aristotle’s normative reasoning pattern resulting in the conclusion “I ought to do X”(e.g. Keep my promise). As is the case with all Aristotelian logical reasoning the conclusion of the argument rests upon the truth of the premises (so the facts might play some role) and this in turn rests on the relation of the concepts that constitute the premises.
Anscombe believes that practical syllogisms involving ethical principles and concepts can only be sustained if supported by a philosophical psychology that can explain, for example, Why we ought to keep our promises (Major premise). Surprisingly, Anscombe makes no mention of Kant’s Philosophical Psychology, so we do not know whether she regards Kant’s system of principles and concepts as fulfilling the function she proposes. People must want to do their duty she argues. Given the Aristotelian claim which Kant accepts, rationality is a potentiality that is a long way from being actualised in the species, so it is not clear whether Anscombe’s claim fully understands the Kantian logical force of the ought. Kant, for example, maintains that practical conceptual knowledge is the cause (in an Aristotelian sense) of what its possessor understands. In this state of affairs the intention is the cause of both the object and the action.
Considering the above reflections it is indeed questionable if it is possible to carry out the program of “new criticism” to attend only to the object itself. As Cavell rightly points out it would be problematic to use a theoretical view of intention that attempts to study intention in terms of the contents of the artists mind (it is, according to Aristotle and Kant, the principles we are searching for.) Cavell focuses instead on the idea of meaning and claims that he is sure that we are meant to notice some aspects of the material work rather than others. He cites two scenes in Macbeth in which there is a knocking on a door directly after the murder of Duncan. This idea of Shakespeare necessarily meaning or intending this conjunction of scenes enables us to understand the play without consulting Shakespeare about his particular intentions.
Cavell also interestingly places the movement of the successive styles of art in a larger cultural context. He asks the important Kantian question of whether we can detect in this succession of events any progress. Cavell claims that this is certainly true of certain stretches of the succession:
“And a new style not merely replaces an older one, it may change the significance of any earlier style “(P.184)
In the above case one could interpret the above succession of styles in terms of the subsumption of one style under another, and one can also regard such a relation in practical logical terms-perhaps even in terms of the kind of intentional subsumption that occurred in the above individual chain of intentional descriptions–a chain proceeding from an action and toward a telos that might land in court. Without a commitment to rationalism, however, Cavell has no foundation for explaining or justifying the subsumption of one style under another. Cavell’s remark, however, does allow for an explanation of regressive ages such as the Age of Romanticism that succeeded the Classical era. The rationality of the classical age was temporarily subsumed under the emotional passionate age of Romanticism, and the criticism of this age focussed upon criticising the rationally based tradition of criticism. The classical tradition prized, for example, the sometimes lifetime history of an artists apprenticeship in his medium. This was an important qualification for becoming an artist and building a reputation. “Modern Art”, “New Art” for the “New Men” like Duchamps, required no apprenticeship in a medium, required only minimal work on “ready-made” objects (e.g. displaying a urinal in a museum) and a decoupling of artistic intention in favour of a revolutionary intention that begins with the focussing of attention on these “ready-made” objects. This “revolution” continues with a shift of attention away from the object, and toward the revolutionary posed question”Is this object an art-object?”Fortunately in view of the minimal work involved on the part of the artist in producing the object, the question was not formulated in terms of the “work of art”. The question, however, is clearly an open ended exploratory question with no clear answer. The overarching philosophical question, which Cavell does not raise in this context, is whether Modern Art is a continuation of the art of the Romantic period, where the focus was on feeling and passion(which Kant regarded as pathological). Whatever the answer to this question, it is clear that Modern Art promotes both an anti-rational and anti metaphysical position. Cavell attempts to steer a middle path between rationalism and romanticism by focusing on judgment and language, rather than understanding and reason, in an attempt to situate the philosophical judgement at the intersection between intuition and concept rather that at the more overarching intersection between intuition-concept-reason. Urinals, empty canvases called “space”, and “pieces” of music entitled “4 minute 33 second silence”, are hardly in any sense transitional objects in relation to classical depictions of the human figure, building, walls and paintings that symbolise forms of life in accordance with what Kant called the form of finality of the object. The artist from the classical era of art is focussed not on the matter of sensation, but its form. Adrian Stokes is a critic of classical art. In his critical writings he speaks about the mass-effect of the stone of a building upon an appreciator. This is an intended global effect of the material on the sensibility of the appreciator.
Kant would not have regarded an object such as Duchamps urinal as a work of art. It is even doubtful whether he would have regarded it as handicraft, if it was a mass produced object. The activity of those involved in producing such an object is a mechanical type of rule following, and this places this type of object , for Kant, in the realm of agreeable sensation. The appreciation of an art-object, on the other hand, according to Kant, does not occur at the level of the sensation. The act of appreciation is rather connected to estimating both the beauty of the object and the artists intention. The attempt of modern art, some have suggested, is not to invoke agreeable sensations but rather to invoke a disagreeable “shock” and thus provoke a pseudo-philosophical discussion about Art. If this was the intention of the Modern Artists, it is certainly “sensational” in more senses than one. Controversy was the inevitable result even amongst those artists that were firmly committed “Romantic period” artists, but especially amongst those artists inspired by the classical era. This world of shock and controversy was a far cry from the calm mass-effect of QuattroCento architecture, Giorgiones calm rendition of a Tempesta, and the contemplative mood of Michelangelo’s “Times of the Day sculpture. The appearance of a urinal in the company of such objects encourages the accusation of “Fraud!” which Cavell points to as a typical reaction in this “new” form of life. Kant claims that production of fine art is the work of genius which is designed to produce a work of appreciation (not a sensational response or a response to a sensation, or a philosophical discussion). The work of genius often takes place in a medium and consists of an original use of that medium—consists that is, in a way of presenting an object that depends upon appreciating the original use of that medium. Kant describes this process in the following way:
“…..the artist having practiced and corrected his taste by a variety of examples from nature or art, controls his work, and after many, and often laborious attempts to satisfy taste, finds the form which commends itself to him. Hence, this form is not, as it were, a matter of inspiration, or of a free swing of the mental powers, but rather of a slow and even painful process of improvement, directed toward making the form adequate to his thought without prejudice to the freedom in the play of these powers.”(P.)
This is a perfect description of the process involved in the creation of a classical art object. The idea, suggested by Cavell, of viewing the Classical period through the eyes, assumptions, and world-view of the Romantic period is indeed problematic, very like repression on the cultural level. The idea, that we should use the assumptions of Modern Art (are there any?) to criticise or characterise Classical Art is absurd. We have elsewhere in this work argued that what is called by some the “Modern Age” really has no historical credentials to be entitled to the term “Age”, containing as it does the following battles of the giants: Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Three of the contests of importance are, Kant v Hegel, Freud v Science, Analytical Philosophy v the work of the later Wittgenstein. It is namely, the case that it is not clear what the philosophical landscape will look like when these battles are over–whether for example, as we have proposed–the figures of Aristotle and Kant will emerge from the smoke of battle, or whether the destruction of classical norms and values will be completed and other figures emerge to install other world views, ideas and assumptions. The so called technological achievements of science of this Modern Period, including as they do the landing of men on the moon and the construction and use of atomic bombs on civilian populations, do not qualify as achievements for any premature naming of the age in which we live. Much can happen in one hundred thousand years, the period Kant claimed was necessary to actualise the potentiality of rationality in the species of man.
Cavell in the essay “Music Discomposed” claims that one line of aesthetic investigation is to attempt to make sense of the idea of the role of feeling in Art. Whether he meant sensation or intuition here is irrelevant: sensations are situated in a causal network leading to a causal end that is difficult to conceptualise (cf. the earlier discussion of the sensation or detail of pain). Intuitions that cannot be conceptualised are blind (Kant). At the end of the essay Cavell , in a final attempt at the justification of the spirit of modernism characterises the quality of sincerity in art as a feeling and the following bewildering claim is made:
“But I haven’t suggested that sincerity proves anything in particular–it can prove madness or evil as well as purity or authenticity. What I have suggested is that it shows what kind of stake the stake in modern art is, that it explains why ones reactions to it can be so violent…” (P.)
This is the risk of dialectical reasoning. One may be taken in by the thesis or the antithesis, however much the one position accuses the other of fraud: this battle to achieve a synthesis in a concept is not a battle of the giants but rather a battle of the dwarves on a smaller cultural stage.
In the following essay entitled “A Matter of Meaning It” Cavell responds to criticisms from Analytical Philosophy: criticisms relating to his previous remarks on the nature of Modern Art. He sees no problem in the objection to his position that modern art works need to be worked. Indeed he sees in modern art objects something novel that is of interest. He discusses Cato’s sculpted “works” and claims that his coloured beams of iron are “placed”: the colour of the beams disguises their mass, it is argued, leaving us with a particular sensation of “weightlessness”. Cavell claims in the context of this discussion that these pieces of iron are no longer things. He is in no doubt that this is a modern work of sculpture, in spite of the curious admission that he no longer knows what sculpture is. He claims the following:
“It is a statement of the fact of life—the metaphysical fact one could say—that apart from ones experience, there is nothing to be known about it, no way of knowing that what you know is relevant, for what else is there to rely on but my experience?”(P.218)
In the above example of Cato’s “weightless” pieces of iron, the placing and the painting of the beams is decoupled from the work of the sculptor that intends to explore the properties of his material and the medium his material is a part of. Cavell mentions Monroe Beardsley’s criticism of his concept of intention, which Beardsley finds obscure. We encounter once again a dialectical argument in which a thesis is confronting an antithesis. Berdsleys” thesis” is that the concept of intention takes us outside the work and Cavell opposes this with his antithesis that the intention takes us further into the work. Given the reluctance, however, of Cavell to connect sincerity with the intention of a genius that lies behind the originally created art-work as well as the rejection of the classical concept of form, the focus inevitably rests upon “facts”of various kinds. What Cavell refers to as the facts of life/art are now:
“disgust, embarassment, impatience, partisanship, excitement without release, silence without serenity.”(P.)
Added to the above must be grammatical facts that define this new “form of life”. Cavell continues this discussion with a transactional description of situations in which an agents intentions are obscure due to a lack of adequate knowledge of the circumstances– an important element of understanding and establishing the agents intention. Cavell is concerned here to highlight what he calls the “acknowledgement of intention”(P.233) a more psychological account compared with that kind of logical account we find in Anscombe’s work on Intention. We find, for example, the following curious statement in Cavell’s account:
“To say that works of art are intentional is not to say that each bit of them, as it were, is separately intended; any more than to say a human action is intentional is to say that each physical concomitant of it is separately intended, e.g. the grass crushed where I have stood”(P.236)
Surely the artist has responsibility for every part of the art work: failing to unintentionally paint a piece of sky on ones canvass, is to be the artist of an unfinished work. Cavell wishes to replace intention with a notion of “meaning”. In the above case the artist did not mean to leave a part of the sky unpainted and it is this “fact” that is the basis for declaring this work to be incomplete. This is a complex substitution which is not sufficiently argued for. There is again, toward the end of this essay, a confusing reference to games where Cavell claims intentions do not count. Games are transactional and what happens occurs in relation to rules. The only way to understand these elaborations is to see in them some kind of account of the new “form of life” that is being created by Modern Art and art activity. Different kinds of rules are being followed and thus a different kind of game is being played compared to that “game”( a term that would be too transactional for a classical critic) of classical art.
We can, without doubt, agree to the proposition that Modern Art is “dramatic”(this is an argument for modern art being a consequential development of Romanticism). The Wittgensteinian question is whether the participation of a part of a community in the modern game (involving a group of people that has culturally lost its way) is sufficient to give the activity validity. It does not yet allow us to see a path of progress from the classical to the “modern”. At best this latter era, if it returns to the commitments of rationalism, might be seen as a period of transition rather than a straightforward regression.
In his work “The World Viewed” Cavell considers film to be the last bastion of traditional art: the only form that has not as yet succumbed to the self questioning attitude of Modernism. Cavell poses the interesting question, “What happens to reality when it is projected and screened?”. He argues that just as photographs present us with things themselves as evidenced by what we say in relation to them, e.g. “That is your grandfather”, film with its photographic base shares some of the characteristics of photographs. Cavell also points to other larger issues such as :
“The unhinging of consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity becomes what is present to us, individuality becomes isolation.”(The World Viewed(Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971, P.22)
This is, Cavell argues, a goal of romanticism, to restore reality and a sense of selfhood. He ties three historical events to this process:The Protestant Revolution, Shakespearean Theatre, and Cartesian Philosophy. These are, according to Cavell, cataclysmic changes mobilising forces that seek to escape the isolation of subjectivity. Cavells response to this scenario of the terror of isolation is to seek a transactional self seeking acknowledgement.
The photographic base of film is a part of the medium those that work with film have to take into account. Cavell argues that the automatism involved in the processes of projecting and screening “accepts” the absence of subjectivity. Human agency has been removed from these automatic processes. Human agency does however help to shape the product via the creative activities of preparing for the filming (the writing of the script for the director).
The objects and the people projected upon our screen are real even if they are not in our presence. The World we see, Cavell claims, is a world past, and this ties the mode of narration we are witnessing closer to myth than to fiction. The human somethings that appear on the screen of this historical imagination are not the characters we find in the theatre (Macbeth, Richard II) but rather types such as “The Dandy”, The Tramp”, “The Villain”, “The family man” etc. We are faced then with a historical imaginative recreated magical world. We sit and view this world in the dark, unseen. This, argues Cavell is expressive of the metaphysical isolation we all now experience. Objects like trains and cars are dramatised in the presentation of them on film: Cavell names this process, photogenesis. This is a name for the process that transforms the reality of everything, including that of humans to human “somethings”. Cavell calls these human somethings types but a better term for them might be in terms of the Aristotelian concept of “forms of life”. The genre of the “Western” attracted such attention because it suggested an origin to the form of life we know as civilisation, manifesting as it did the tragic costs of the building of our societies, not through discourse and rationality but through the violence of the form of life we call heroic.
Cavell’s psychological notion of acknowledgement is the modernist equivalent to Hegelian “Recognition”, embedded in a transactional dialectical discourse and its telos. For Cavell, all knowledge is a mode of acknowledgement. The camera, being a machine and not a form of life interacting in the context of the world is rather a kind of mechanical origin of experience (like the eye) that lies at the boundary of the world. The camera is to the world presented on film as the eye is to the visual field. We recall from volume one, the Cartesian fascination for magical automated beings that moved hydraulically. We recalled also the mechanical dissections of living unaesthetised animals by Descartes who did not seem to respond to their cries of pain. There seems a clear line of transformation from this scenario to that in which the camera(God’s eye) is the source of everything in the world of film. This suggests that even God has become a machine, providing the means for the metaphysical solipsist to explore all the dimensions of loneliness. For Cavell, as we suggested earlier there is nothing beyond experience, no thinking form of life as construed by Aristotle and Kant. There is only a machine that may eventually pass the Turing test for being God.
I am so grateful for your blog. Fantastic.