stanley cavell

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY

AFTER TOMORROW

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2005

Copyright 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cavell, Stanley, 1926
Philosophy the day after tomorrow / Stanley Cavell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
Contents: Something out of the ordinary The interminable Shakespearean text
Fred Astaire asserts the right to praise Henry James returns to America and to
Shakespeare Philosophy the day after tomorrow What is the scandal of
skepticism? Performative and passionate utterance The Wittgensteinian event
Thoreau thinks of ponds, Heidegger of rivers The world as things.
ISBN 0-674-01704-8 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, Modern20th century. I. Title.
B945.C271 2005
191dc22
2004046229

CONTENTS

Introduction
1 Something Out of the Ordinary

1
7

2 The Interminable Shakespearean Text

28

3 Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise

61

4 Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare

83

5 Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow

111

6 What Is the Scandal of Skepticism?

132

7 Performative and Passionate Utterance

155

8 The Wittgensteinian Event

192

9 Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers

213

10 The World as Things

236

Works Cited

283

Acknowledgments

291

Index

295

INTRODUCTION

The interactions of the themes, and perhaps disciplines, of the 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,

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

and its language, as vulnerable. Vulnerable, I would say, to skepticism,

but with the understanding that skepticism wears as many guises as the
devil.
That address goes on, in contrast to the current prominence, perhaps dominance, in Anglo-American professional philosophy of the
naturalizing of philosophy, which means regarding philosophy as, in
Quines phrase, a chapter of science, to offer the picture of art as a chapter of the history or progression of philosophy. (Quines proposal is a
late, greatly sophisticated, version of Lockes recognition that with the
advent of the New Science philosophy must no longer compete for a
place at the head of the table of knowledge.) These are not head-on
clashes of philosophical ambition; the greater contretemps would be if
they failed to touch. What is at stake is, even before the idea of knowledge, the sense of how human experience is to be called to account. The
classical empiricists idea of impressions as the origin, or cause, of
ideas, like Quines check-points of experience in the service of theory-building, stylizes experience.
So what? If you cut down and stylize a handy tree branch by smoothing it and whittling one end to a sharp point, you may kill deer for dinner. Shall I say that it is the experience of the remains of my day that
concerns methe facts of hunger and stalking and aggression and cunning and cooking and aroma and resting and companionship and conversing? These are parts of human natural history. Are they of interest to
philosophy, any more than they are to physics? But that is my question. I
might say that much of this concern would be precisely with wording
the impressions made upon me by the things and persons and events of
the world, the ways they matter to me, count for me, a capacity in the
word impression whittled away in the empiricists impressions. (And
a good thing too; remember that running deer.) Yes, but what if, when
what we used, remarkably, to call the inner man is satised, my impressions of the world and of myself and others in it do not return to interest and amuse me, and I am left philosophically blank to most of the
necessaries of my life?
Can I, must I, leave it to, say, literature, or history, or anthropology, to

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

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

the right of praise. This appears to be reasonably straightforward in the

case of the second pair, the chapters on Astaire and on Henry James.
And yet alerted by Shakespearean tragedy to the outbreaks of deranged
cursing associated with false praise (as notably in King Lear and in
Timon of Athens), we may wonder about Astaires bout with frenzy at
the center of his dance of praise that we consider. I recall a moment of
paranoia and vengefulness in the Book of Psalms: Hold not thy peace,
O God of my praise; For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the
deceitful are opened against me. Set thou a wicked man over him. Let
his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name
be blotted out. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: As he
clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into
his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones (Psalm 109). Naturally I
do not claim this register for Astaires frenzy in his dance, yet the logical/
psychological rigor relating cursing to tainted praise may prove to be no
less in play in Astaires comedic context than it is in Lears and Timons
tragic or melodramatic contexts. We might accordingly come to a surmise that Astaire is bafed that a curse has been the condition, and may
be the cost, of his praise.
In the fth and sixth chapters, matters become more obviously complex. It turns out that the meaning of Nietzsches speaking of the philosopher as the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, while it
may have seemed a continuation of the idea of the ordinary in my opening chapter, contains an essential reference to an idea of praise, or appraising, or appreciating, or, one might say, transference. Then in Chapter 6 my interest in Levinasthat is, my interest in writing about certain
passages of his, that is, my sense that I might have something useful to
say about those passagescomes from my learning that in his work the
relation to the other can be said to begin with my knowledge of myself
as a threat to the other, one could say, my knowledge of our vulnerability to each other, abashed by the demand to acknowledge the other. This
seemed to me a promising line of thought in view of my having arrived
at certain asymmetries between skepticism with respect to things and
skepticism with respect to persons. For example, the conclusion of the

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

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

way I am moved to philosophize, or wish to be moved to philosophize,

namely non-polemically or non-argumentatively. This does not mean
that I agree with everything that I nd calls for a response, but rather it
means that criticism in my writing often tends either to invoke the idea
Kant established for critique, namely articulating the conditions which
allow a coherent utterance to be made, or a purposeful action to enter
the world, or else to provide an explication or elaboration of a text
sometimes of the merest fragment, sometimes one of my ownthat accounts for, at its best increases, which is to say appreciates, my interest in
it. Elaborates it philosophically, I would say. What is that to say?
Since this collection is to give an idea of the span of things I have
been thinking about over the seven years since I retired from regular
teaching, the idea would be poorer than it needs to be if it omitted to afrm my continuing admiration of the writing of Thoreau, and not for
the rst time in considering his, to me, persistently uncanny anticipations of (hence differences with) Heidegger, as in Chapter 9; and if it
failed, as in the concluding Chapter 10, to include an instance of work
that marks in further ways distances I take from the space of the classroom, a tendency that over a lifetime of teaching and writing has been
meant to portray my understanding of the responsibilities of that space.

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

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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-

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

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

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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-

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

11

missed as inconsequential; but to my mind that fact precisely ts it to be

a memorable enactment of the ordinary as what is missable. It is a routine from a Hollywood musical comedy of the early 1950s, consisting essentially of a man walking along a train platform, singing a not evidently demanding song to himself. The man, it happens, is Fred Astaire,
by now all but incontestably recognized throughout the world as one of
the greatest American dancers of the twentieth century. He is also incontestably not exactly a trained singer, so the fragment contains an
open invitation to judge the routine, and its apparently uneventful cinematic presentation, to be trivial. It is a taskone I welcometo try to
make such a conclusion a matter of judgment rather than one simply of
taste; as it were to challenge taste.
To give this task a decent chance of success I need to do a bit more
philosophical table-setting, and then go on to give some details of my
interest in the voice in opera along with a related interest in Austins
sense of the powers of speech.
I have rather assumed, more or less without argument, since the early
essay of mine mentioned earlier, that Kants location of the aesthetic
judgment, as claiming to record the presence of pleasure without a concept, makes room for a particular form of criticism, one capable of
supplying the concepts which, after the fact of pleasure, articulate the
grounds of this experience in particular objects. The work of such criticism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Something there, despite being fully opened to the senses, has been missed. I
shall claim that while it is not a fact that the Astaire routine is trivial, the
sequence can be seen to be about triviality; and to show that will require
showing how its pleasure derives from its location of formal conditions
of its art.
A further variation in the relation of the ordinary to what may be
seen as the aesthetic is taken up in a later essay in Must We Mean What
We Say? which goes back to my having responded to Wittgensteins Investigations as written, however else, in recurrent response to skepticism
but not as a refutation of it; rather on the contrary, as a task to discover
the causes of philosophys disparagement of, or its disappointment with,

12

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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,

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

13

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-

14

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

ence can go philosophically almost nowhere (for Dewey into a hundred

abstract rejections of some patently unintelligent thesis together with its
obviously undesirable antithesis; for James into a mere surmise of transcendence).
May we think as follows? If philosophy of science can be taken to be
what philosophy is, that is because philosophy is, and is content to be,
recognizable, or practicable, as (a chapter of) science; whereas were philosophy of art to make of itself a chapter of one or more of the arts, it
would no longer be recognizable as philosophy. Without challenging
this now, what I am proposing is something rather else, following what I
construe Kants examples of the transgressions of reason, in their intersection with Shakespearean drama, to suggest (perhaps it is Hegels suggestion): that the arts, beginning with tragedy (or, in Hegels aesthetics,
ending with tragedy), may variously be seen, or claimed, as chapters of
the history, or development, of philosophy, hence perhaps of certain of
its present manifestations. I am going in a little while, as said, to extend
the thought to a polar relation of tragedy, a Hollywood musical. It is a
suggestion based on two contentions that I have argued for in various
contexts over the years. First, that in the modern period of the arts
marked variously by splits in the audience (and conception) of art between the academic and the advancedthe great arts together with
their criticism increasingly take on the self-reective condition of philosophy (teaching us, let us say, to see that King Lear is about theater as
catharsis, that Macbeth is about theater as apparition, Othello about the
treacherous theater of ocular proofs, Hamlet about what surpasses theatrical show). The second contention is that the medium of lm is such
thatfrom the time of its rst masterpieces in the second decade of its
technological establishmentit could take on the seriousness of the
modern without splitting its audience, between high and low, or between advanced and philistine.
To prepare more specically for proposing an Astaire routine as a
checkpoint, or touchstone, of experience, I want to summarize the way
it gured in the introduction to a course I gave recently on the aesthetics
of lm and opera. The idea of the course is that words and actions suffer

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

15

transguration in opera (the art which replaces speaking by singing)

that bears comparison with their transformation on lm (the art which
replaces living human beings by photographic shadows of themselves).
So my summary must begin to specify in which philosophical formation lm and opera form chapters that measure some particular conditions of these arts, or call them media.
Here I should simply confess that my interest in opera is tied to a conviction that matches yet one further way I have formulated an interest in
the work of Austin and the later Wittgenstein. Their sense of returning
words from their metaphysical to their everyday use is driven by a sense
of a human dissatisfaction with words (not as it were solely a philosophical dissatisfaction) in which an effort to transcend or to purify speech
ends by depriving the human speaker of a voice in what becomes his (or,
differently, her) fantasy of knowledge, a characterization I have given of
what happens in skepticism. In Wittgensteins case of a man striking
himself on the breast and insisting Only I can have this sensation! we
are to witness a speaker abandoned by his words, or abandoned to mere
words. Now opera is the Western institution in whichbeginning in the
same decade as the composition of the great tragedies of Shakespeare
the human voice is given its fullest acknowledgment, generally in the
course of showing that its highest forms of expression are apt not to be
expressive enough to avoid catastrophe, especially for women.
If we provisionally characterize the medium of opera as musics exploration of its afnities with expressive or passionate utterance, then
one specic response it invites from the recent present of philosophy as
represented in Austins work is to determine how his theory of speech as
action may be extended, in a sense re-begun, in order to articulate a theory of speech as passion that can propose an orderly study of the effects
of the voice raised in opera; but this must in return allow the study of
opera to inspire philosophys interest in passionate speech. To sketch the
progress of my thoughts in this project will not exactly prepare for the
use to which I wish to put the Astaire sequence, but it will share the burden of signicance I load it with, and help to specify why I press it into
service.

16

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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).

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

17

Notably absent, it appears, from the types of utterances Austin goes

on to investigate are those warhorse examples of Ayers, or their descendants, that Austins theory is designed to challenge. This may have been
a tactical decision, meant to shift a new argument onto philosophically
fresh ground (a new site for eld work, Austin would call it). But there
is reason to think that Austins experience had been xated by the way
he re-begins his theory to include the perlocutionary effect in distinction from the illocutionary force of speech acts. When he is led to say
clearly any or almost any perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off,
in sufciently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without calculation, of any utterance whatsoever, (p. 110), he is evidently in the territory in which Ayer was tying ethical words both to the different feelings they are ordinarily taken to express, and also [to] the different
responses which they are calculated to provoke: Here Austin distinguishes between ordering someone to stop (illocutionary) and getting
someone to stop by saying or doing something alarming or intimidating
(perlocutionary), but he then seems unable to do much with the eld of
the perlocutionary comparable to his mapping of that of the illocutionary. It is from here that I am suggesting Austins theory must re-begin
againgoing back again to the fact of speaking itself, or I might say, to
the fact of the expressiveness and responsiveness of speech as such.
How?
Lets reformulate slightly and say that in a passionate utterance the
feelings and actions I wish to provoke (Ayer) or bring off (Austin) are
ones I can acknowledge, or specically refuse to acknowledge, as appropriate responses to my expressions of feeling. This is presumably true
even of Ayers I am bored, which, if it is said to you by a child, is perhaps an appeal for an interesting suggestion or offer of amusement, and
if by a friend (romantic or not) is apt still to be an appeal and still to set
a stake on some piece of your future together. You had in either case
better answer, and carefully. Again, Ayer observes that if I say to someone, You acted wrongly in stealing that money, I am stating no more
than if I had simply said, You stole that money . . . [and] evincing my
moral disapproval of it (p. 107). So presumably I could equally have

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PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

19

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-

20

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

21

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

22

PHILOSOPHY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

interview him, and is rudely awakened to reality as a still-vivid star steps

out of the adjacent car and the newshounds ock to her (Ava Gardner
in a cameo appearance). As our hero walks away ruefully, a porter offers
a remark to him on the rigors of publicity to which stardom subjects a
person, and upon answering Yes, I dont know how they stand it,
Astaire arrives at his song, entitled By Myself.
Lets begin uncontroversially. From a baggage cart to a gate, the camera leads the man down the length of a train platform in one continuous shot; at the end of the singing, the camera stops as he does and then,
as it were, watches him leave through the gate; we then cut to a view
from within the station and see the man continue his walk toward us,
humming the same tune, then pause, and shift nervously, as if expecting
someone. If this were theater, the routine would clearly end with the exit
through the gate. As it is a lm, the entrance into the station may count
as part of the song. Overall it seems as nearly uneventful as a photographed song can be. Astaire had begun singing with a little self-conscious laugh, magnied by its producing a palpable cloud of cigarette
smoke. It is a self-reexive response to the fact that in him thinking
(manifest here, classically, as melancholy) is about to become singing. I
report that when I recall Astaires delivery of By Myself, it brings with
it a sense of emotional hovering, not so much a feeling of suspense as
one of being in suspension, a spiritual bracketing.
I cite two pairs of facts to begin to sketch an account of this touchstone of experience, one pair concerning the song, the other concerning
the presentation, or representation, of the person Astaire.
About the song. Here I merely assert two features that it would be impractical to try to verify now, though I would love to. First, I was led to
it, or conrmed in its suitability, by an essay of the great Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in which he announces his discovery of a tradition of arias in classical Italian melodrama (meaning the tradition of
opera exemplied at its highest by Verdi), one that uses a quatrain
formthe phrases occurring in the pattern AABA, with the emotional
crescendo peaking in the third, or B phrase. Now an AABA form is the
basic form of song in the so-called Golden Age of the American musical

When is a walk not a walk?

To whom are these moves visible and this song audible?

The shod feet come into view

The song recedes into a repeated syllable