Endlessly Responsible: Ethics as First Philosophy in Stanley Cavell’s Invocation of Literature

Mette Blok

doi:10.3390/h8020114

Abstract

This essay aims to give an overview of the topic ethics and literature in Stanley Cavell’s complete oeuvre. It argues that Cavell’s preoccupation with literature is, from beginning to end, primarily ethical, even though he takes his point of departure in epistemological skepticism. Recent research on the affinities between Cavell’s early writing on Shakespearean tragedy and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas has helped to establish this but the question of how this part of Cavell’s work is related to his later development of Emersonian perfectionism is rarely touched upon. Consequently, this essay further argues that skepticism and perfectionism in Cavell’s thinking are two sides of one and the same ethics, which are bound together by the genre of romanticism. While Cavell’s work on skepticism is primarily concerned with the other, his work on perfectionism is primarily concerned with the self. Finally, this essay marks the point where Cavell’s and Levinas’ overall thinking part ways due to the fact that Cavell embraces Emersonian perfectionism.

Highlights

The death of Stanley Cavell last summer makes it appropriate to say something overall about the relation between ethics and literature in his work and about the surprisingly strong unity of his oeuvre
Cavell’s occupation with literature can be divided roughly into three internally related and partly overlapping phases, an early one focusing on skepticism in Shakespeare, a middle one focusing on romanticism primarily in Thoreau, Emerson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and a late one focusing on moral perfectionism in a very broad range of works spanning the whole of the Western literary and filmic tradition1
Cavell’s occupation with traditional philosophical ethics shows a similar but not quite overlapping structure: In The Claim of Reason Part III, he criticizes 20th century analytical moral philosophy from the perspective of ordinary language philosophy; from the 1990s onwards he develops his moral perfectionism, and late in his career he has an essay on his relation to Levinas, What is the Scandal of Skepticism? In this essay, he tries, as if in hindsight, to place his early thinking about acknowledgment and avoidance, developed in two essays of Must We Mean

Summary

Introduction

The death of Stanley Cavell last summer makes it appropriate to say something overall about the relation between ethics and literature in his work and about the surprisingly strong unity of his oeuvre. Cavell’s occupation with literature can be divided roughly into three internally related and partly overlapping phases, an early one focusing on skepticism in Shakespeare, a middle one focusing on romanticism primarily in Thoreau, Emerson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and a late one focusing on moral perfectionism in a very broad range of works spanning the whole of the Western literary and filmic tradition. Cavell’s occupation with traditional philosophical ethics shows a similar but not quite overlapping structure: In The Claim of Reason Part III, he criticizes 20th century analytical moral philosophy from the perspective of ordinary language philosophy; from the 1990s onwards he develops his moral perfectionism, and late in his career he has an essay on his relation to Levinas, What is the Scandal of Skepticism? This essay presents the argument that Cavell’s treatment of skepticism and perfectionism are two necessary sides of the same ethics: while the concepts of acknowledgment and avoidance stress our relation to the other, perfectionism highlights our relation to ourselves and our endless responsibility for ourselves

Skepticism

Romanticism

Perfectionism

A Doll’s House

Levinas or Emerson?