Carus Lectures Research Articles

Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On the Ethics of Beckett’s Endgame

This essay explores the ethical dimensions of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame , in spite of—indeed, because of—the play’s apparent negation of all positive talk of human value and community. In the first part of the paper, I examine Stanley Cavell’s suggestion, put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988, that Beckett’s play can be read as a work that embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. In part two, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell’s ethical outlook, I then ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form, something that I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett’s play. While retaining some important features of Cavell’s “thematics of perfectionism,” this approach aims at the same time to move beyond it in order to grasp how Endgame might, in Beckett’s own words, provide “an inkling of the terms in which our [human] condition is to be thought again.”

Cavell and Rawls on the Conversation of Justice: Moral versus Political Perfectionism

A primary concern of Stanley Cavell’s Carus Lectures is to respond to the question posed in the first sentence of the Introduction: “Is Moral Perfectionism inherently elitist?” By elitist, he means undemocratic. While there are senses in which he would not want to deny that Moral Perfectionism is elitist, and while he admits that there are perfectionisms that do not require democracy, neither of these are Cavell’s concern. Rather, he wants to showcase his preferred version of perfectionism, variously named Moral, Emersonian and Nietzschean perfectionism.

Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism

In what follows I will sketch an approach to understanding improvised music-one that discovers in certain outstanding jazz improvisations an emblem of what Emerson typically calls self-trust and Stanley Cavell, in recent years, has called moral perfectionism. Thus perhaps the greatest burden of these pages is to show how a way of attending to improvised music might reveal a form of knowledge that is essentially moral. By extending this general claim to moral perfectionism, I will be joining my discussion to a broader philosophical project-as well as to a tradition of thinking-to which the present occasion permits only the briefest of introductions. Moral perfectionism is best characterized not as a set of moral axioms or principles, as though it stood in competition with the dominant theories of morality (Utilitarianism and Kantianism), but as a kind of thinking that begins after or beyond such theories. It is a thinking whose distinctive features are a commitment to speaking and acting true to oneself, combined with a thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with oneself as one now stands. One might summarize these features by saying that they identify a way of living set against a life of conformity and a lifeless consistency. It is in his essay "Self-Reliance" that Emerson famously describes our human tendency to nullify ourselves in the face of our craving for conformity and consistency. The way out of this danger to the self is what Emerson means by selftrust or self-reliance; he speaks in similar contexts of heeding one's genius. There are of course trivial as well as arrogant ways to take up Emerson's call, exactly as many as there are trivial and arrogant ways of reading. ' But that it can be read as belonging to a tradition of thinking inherited from such figures as Plato and Pascal, and continued in such figures as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, was perhaps the most fertile conclusion of Stanley Cavell's 1988 Carus Lectures published as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome.2 The central concern of those lectures, beyond that they identify this tradition of thinking, was to argue that the necessarily unending commitment to perfecting the self is not only in harmony with the equally unending or ongoing political commitment to democracy, but it is, in fact, democracy's precondition, even its fullest meaning. The feature of interest to me here, however, as I set out to suggest some connections between moral perfectionism and the work of some exemplary jazz improvisers, is the understanding that emerges from this tradition of how we manage to do anything new or different or original at all: to check our habitual responses to the world-for example, our reliance, when improvising a jazz solo, on familiar solutions to a pattern of chord changes-in favor of newly discovered or newly charted desires. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first section, I offer a critique of standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed or preconceived, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from and importantly at play in our everyday actions. The second section turns to a pair of discussions of artistic genius and originality: Kant's account of artistic genius in Critique of Judgment ??46-503 and especially Emerson's concluding essay in Essays: First Series-the one he calls "Art."4 My intent in this section is twofold: to show the extent to which Emerson's essay is written in response to

Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism

In what follows I will sketch an approach to understanding improvised music-one that discovers in certain outstanding jazz improvisations an emblem of what Emerson typically calls self-trust and Stanley Cavell, in recent years, has called moral perfectionism. Thus perhaps the greatest burden of these pages is to show how a way of attending to improvised music might reveal a form of knowledge that is essentially moral. By extending this general claim to moral perfectionism, I will be joining my discussion to a broader philosophical project-as well as to a tradition of thinking-to which the present occasion permits only the briefest of introductions. Moral perfectionism is best characterized not as a set of moral axioms or principles, as though it stood in competition with the dominant theories of morality (Utilitarianism and Kantianism), but as a kind of thinking that begins after or beyond such theories. It is a thinking whose distinctive features are a commitment to speaking and acting true to oneself, combined with a thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with oneself as one now stands. One might summarize these features by saying that they identify a way of living set against a life of conformity and a lifeless consistency. It is in his essay Self-Reliance that Emerson famously describes our human tendency to nullify ourselves in the face of our craving for conformity and consistency. The way out of this danger to the self is what Emerson means by selftrust or self-reliance; he speaks in similar contexts of heeding one's genius. There are of course trivial as well as arrogant ways to take up Emerson's call, exactly as many as there are trivial and arrogant ways of reading. ' But that it can be read as belonging to a tradition of thinking inherited from such figures as Plato and Pascal, and continued in such figures as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, was perhaps the most fertile conclusion of Stanley Cavell's 1988 Carus Lectures published as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome.2 The central concern of those lectures, beyond that they identify this tradition of thinking, was to argue that the necessarily unending commitment to perfecting the self is not only in harmony with the equally unending or ongoing political commitment to democracy, but it is, in fact, democracy's precondition, even its fullest meaning. The feature of interest to me here, however, as I set out to suggest some connections between moral perfectionism and the work of some exemplary jazz improvisers, is the understanding that emerges from this tradition of how we manage to do anything new or different or original at all: to check our habitual responses to the world-for example, our reliance, when improvising a jazz solo, on familiar solutions to a pattern of chord changes-in favor of newly discovered or newly charted desires. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first section, I offer a critique of standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed or preconceived, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from and importantly at play in our everyday actions. The second section turns to a pair of discussions of artistic genius and originality: Kant's account of artistic genius in Critique of Judgment ??46-503 and especially Emerson's concluding essay in Essays: First Series-the one he calls Art.4 My intent in this section is twofold: to show the extent to which Emerson's essay is written in response to

The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason and Morality.

This book propounds a theory of reason and a theory of morality, advanced by Professor Baier in his APA presidential address and his Carus Lectures. Our possession of reason and our ability to reason depend on our having grown up in a rational order: a social order which engages in the enterprise of reason and, through socialisation, passes on from one generation to the next the knowledge of the recognised general principles of reasoning, the ability to apply them to particular cases, and the methods for further improvement. Two kinds of practical reason can be distinguished, the self-anchored and the society-anchored, the second being by its nature paramount over the first. Much of this is also true of morality because, Baier argues in detail, the moral enterprise is the same as that of society-anchored reason. The Rational and the Moral Order sets out original arguments for a number of controversial claims. Moral directives imply that they are themselves sound, and therefore pass a certain test, and can be said to be true or false. Purported conceptions of morality are genuine only if they construe moral judgements as capable of being sound or unsound. Sound moralities are society-relative, and it can be shown that sound moral reasons are always paramount over reasons of self-interest.

THE USES OF EMERSON

Stanley Cavell. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. xxxix + 151 pp. Len Gougeon. Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. xiii + 408 pp. Albert J. von Frank, ed. The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 1. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. 415 pp. Teresa Toulouse and Andrew Delbanco, eds. The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. xv + 413 pp. Eleanor M. Tilton, ed. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VU. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. xviii + 623 pp. To his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, the Carus Lectures of 1988, Stanley Cavell appends an address of 1985 titled "Hope against Hope." There Cavell speaks of two "unhappy things": the issue of nuclear war (a matter held "in common with every thinking person on earth"); and the somewhat obscure matter of "the inability of our American culture to listen to the words, to possess them in common, of one of the founding thinkers of our culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson . . ." (129). Emerson's detractors (John Updike is one) refuse him the title of philosopher, as does his supporter Harold Bloom, who praises Emerson, not so much for the wrong reason, as for what Cavell terms "a stinted reason." Bloom's form of praise, Cavell says, "helps to keep condescension towards [Emerson] in respectable orbit. It helps to keep our culture, unlike any other in the West, from possessing any founding thinker as a common basis for its considerations" (133). Our current estimate of Emerson, according to Cavell, depends on an "endlessly repeated rumor that Emerson was not much of a thinker." And he adds parenthetically: "How eager his culture has been, top to bottom, to nourish this rumor! What's in it?" (138).

The many faces of realism: the Paul Carus lectures

The many faces of realism: the Paul Carus lectures

A Defence of Sellars

There have recently been a number of attacks on the philosophy of perception developed by Wilfrid Sellars. Matters have come to a head largely because of Sellars' series of Carus Lectures,' in which he showed himself, not only unrepentant in his commitment to sensings, but prepared to discourse upon them with some confidence. In two subsequent articles' he shows no sign of retreat. Sellars is among that very small group of philosophers who espouse a theory postulating representing media; there is an even smaller number who share with him the claim that it is possible to reconcile the existence of such media with a physical account of reality without committing oneself to any form of dualism. Most philosophers today, according to R. E. Tully, inclined to think sense-datum theory no longer needs autopsy but only embalmment.' As a result, any representational theory is seen by many to have been laid to rest, and they may take it as an anomaly that Sellars continues to concern himself with what is no longer a live topic. According to his critics, what seems so patently old-fashioned in his view are the following theses:

The Place of Color in the Scheme of Things

Sellars's views on the Myth of the Given and the ontological status of secondary qualities, one would have thought, are well-known, even if not always well-understood. One would not have expected his Carus Lectures, then, to offer anything radically new and exciting. ground that they cover is, after all, familiar?from Empiricism and the of Mind (1956), from Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man (1962), from The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem (1965), and from the ensuing debates with Cornman (Science, Sense Impressions, and Sensa: A Reply to Cornman, 1971) and with Firth (Givenness and Explanatory Coherence, 1973). One would not really have anticipated many surprises. But one would have been wrong. Sellars's Carus Lectures, in fact, engender a sense of shock. What has become of ultimate homogeneity and the notorious Grain Argument over which so much ink has been spilled? Where is the Strong Principle of Reducibility which played such a central role in Sellars's reply to Cornman? What are we to make of the new distinction between the mind-body problem and the sensorium-body problem? And why has an ontology of absolute processes?hitherto always merely mentioned, more or less as a postscript?suddenly assumed such extraordinary prominence, becoming, in deed, the centerpiece of Sellars's lectures and evidently the linchpin upon which their story turns? Is it possible that, after more than twenty years, we had not yet quite understood what Sellars was up to all along? (What have you done with the real Wilfrid Sellars? asked a participant in a symposium at which Sellars presented portions of the Carus Lecture materials.) Yes, curiously enough, it is possible. It is even possible that Sellars has only recently fully understood just what he has been up to for more than twenty years. For while the story Sellars tells in the Carus Lectures is not, I think, radically new and different from that told in his earlier works, it is in those earlier works, I am tempted to say (Sellarsianly) only as the mature oak tree is in the acorn. One thing which it would be useful to have, then, would be some tools for seeing the acorn in the oak, and that, in fact, is what I intend to provide here. I do not, that is, propose here to engage Sellars's story critical ly, argumentatively, or evaluatively, but rather to attempt to command a clear view of what his project and his story in fact are (and, in the sense in dicated, indeed always have been)?a clear view which is a prolegomenon to

Limitations of the Moral Point of View

Professor Frankena's Carus Lectures exhibit analytical acumen and probing intelligence we have long come to expect from his writings. The dis tinctions he draws, questions he raises, and answers he suggests all serve powerfully to advance philosophical thought. While I shall have criticisms to make of some of his central doctrines, this must not be allowed to obscure real indebtedness one feels for enlightening and stimulating effect of his work as a whole. In following critical examination of Frankena's Lectures I shall con sider three main questions. First, how tenable is distinction he draws between 'poietic' and 'nonpoietic' conceptions of morality, together with preference he evinces for latter conception? Second, does he succeed in showing that it is rational to take or accept the moral point of view? Third, how adequate is his conception of moral justification, including use he makes of moral point of view for justifying moral principles?

Space, Time and Falsifiability Critical Exposition and Reply to “A Panel Discussion of Grünbaum's Philosophy of Science”

Prompted by the “Panel Discussion of Grünbaum's Philosophy of Science” (Philosophy of Science 36, December, 1969) and other recent literature, this essay ranges over major issues in the philosophy of space, time and space-time as well as over problems in the logic of ascertaining the falsity of a scientific hypothesis.The author's philosophy of geometry has recently been challenged along three main distinct lines as follows : (i) The Panel article by G. J. Massey calls for a more precise and more coherent account of the Riemannian conception of an intrinsic as opposed to an extrinsic metric, which the author has invoked as his basis for the distinction between non-conventional and convention-laden ascriptions of metrical equality and inequality; (ii) the latter distinction has been claimed to suffer from the liabilities of the so-called “standard conception” of scientific theories [36]; and (iii) pursuant to H. Putnam's “An Examination of Grünbaum's Philosophy of Geometry” [56], J. Earman [16, 17] and R. Swinburne [65] have contended that the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic metrics is scientifically unilluminating, and that the associated distinction between non-conventional and convention-laden metrical comparisons does not have the kind of relevance to extant scientific theories that the author has claimed for it.The essay consists of two installments. The present installment, comprising the Introduction and Part A, is devoted to the clarification, correction and further development of the author's prior writings on the philosophy of geometry. Its main objective is constructive elaboration rather than offering polemics. But rebuttals to Earman, [16, 17], Swinburne [65] and Demopoulos [13] are included, because their inclusion conduced to clarity in giving the new exposition. Part B is to appear in a subsequent issue and will be devoted to replies to critiques contained in the Panel Discussion and in other recent literature. It will range over issues in the philosophy of geometry and in the logic of ascertaining the falsity of a scientific hypothesis.By way of merely elliptical anticipation of much more precise statements given in Part A, section 3(ii), the Introduction dissociates the notion of convention-ladenness developed in Part A from the quite different notion integral to the so-called “standard conception” of scientific theories. Thereby, the Introduction prepares the ground for seeing, as a corollary to Part A, section 3(ii), that the notion advocated in the present essay has nothing to fear from the following fact, noted by C. G. Hempel ([36]; cf. also his 1970 Carus Lectures): “even though a sentence may originally be introduced as true by stipulation, it soon joins the club of all other member-statements of the theory and becomes subject to revision in response to further empirical findings and theoretical developments.”Part A, which begins with a fairly detailed table of contents, endeavors to meet the aforementioned three-fold challenge to the author's philosophy of geometry. Massey's call for the provision of clear and detailed characterizations of intrinsic and extrinsic metrics is answered with the invaluable aid rendered personally by Massey himself. These characterizations are shown to permit a precise explication of the portions of Riemann's Inaugural Dissertation relevant to (1) Riemann's brilliant anticipation of Einstein's dynamical conception of physical geometry, and (2) the author's philosophical characterization of the metrics and geometries of space, time, and space-time {section 2(c)}.A byproduct of the analysis is to raise two major philosophical doubts concerning Clifford's sketch of a so-called “space-theory of matter” as elaborated in J. A. Wheeler's relativistic geometrodynamics. That theory's vision of understanding matter as a manifestation of empty curved space is questioned in regard to (1) the existence of an intra-geometrodynamic basis for individuating the metrically homogeneous world points of its space-time manifold {section 1(a)}, and (2) the compatibility of the theory with the Riemannian metrical philosophy apparently espoused by its proponents {section 2(c) (i)}.

The Meaning of Human History

IT is not well to give an affirmative answer without examining the meaning of the question and making some necessary distinctions. Such prudence in dealing with vague concepts of the meaning of human history, with the numerous alleged 'laws' and explanations of the growth of human society, was very much in the character of the late Morris Cohen's writing. Lucid, careful in distinguishing, ready to postpone acceptance of a solution of a problem if it had no more to commend itself than that it solved part of the problem, these were the intellectual merits manifested in all his writing ; and they are manifested in these posthumously published Carus Lectures. The Meaning of Human History By Morris R. Cohen (Paul Carus Lectures, Sixth Series, 1944.) Pp. ix+304. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1947.) 4 dollars.

Clarence Irving Lewis. An analysis of knowledge and valuation. The Paul Carus lectures, seventh series, 1945. The Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Ill., 1946, xxi + 567 pp.

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Fourth Series of Carus Lectures

Fourth Series of Carus Lectures