Here and There: Sites of Philosophy

Abstract

As Cavell's draft preface makes clear, the title of this first posthumous volume of previously uncollected essays alludes to a metaphor by which he had attempted to express his conception of the nature of philosophy. “Here” and “there” are the near and far shores between which the “river of philosophy” has to take and modify its way. In earlier writing, he presented the near shore as marking one mode of philosophy's aspiration to perspicuity—that of logical or grammatical rigor. The farther shore represented another, literary mode—that of the aphoristic, a register of Wittgenstein's prose that exhibits clarity in a way that acknowledges the obscurity (the metaphysical seductions and self-alienations) from which philosophical clarity always emerges, and against which it measures its value.In this new collection, Cavell prefers to emphasize that the near shore embodies the ordinary domain in which we exist and from which we philosophize, whereas the far shore embodies the fervor of aspiration with and toward which we philosophize. In other words, he stresses that the river of philosophy (insofar as it differentiates the two shores and ensures their communication) both creates a distance and allows its overcoming—a distance between the actual ordinary and the eventual ordinary, between our life with words and thought as it currently announces itself, and that life re-envisaged, revitalized, remade in the name of its higher, unattained but attainable state or condition. And such self-overcoming is never concluded, any more than a river's shores can overcome their separateness without annihilating the river, which can continue to flow only if it continues to inhabit the varying distance it creates and fills between both shores, whose inconstant constancy or mutable solidity are the conditions of its own possibility.Since one would expect a metaphor to accommodate multiple meanings, Cavell's projection of his metaphor into this new context not only seems appropriate; it also invites his readers to acknowledge him by projecting it further. One might, for example, align the near and far shores with the division between Anglo-American and what are still called “continental” traditions of philosophy. Or one might view its initial introduction as itself a projection of Heraclitus's notorious remark that one cannot step into the same river twice—a projection accounting for that impossibility by suggesting that stepping into these waters is always a step away from our actual and toward our eventual condition (as the kinds of beings who can be caught up in currents of philosophizing). But if Cavell's metaphor of philosophy is in this sense pregnant (with meanings, with possibilities), then the clarity it offers is certainly of the literary kind, and so embodies a fervor of aspiration whose necessary presence in their work many philosophers would very much like to deny.