Aspiration Of Philosophy As Cavell example essay topic

In his opening pages, Cavell tells us that when he was writing The World Viewed he felt he was writing a "metaphysical memoir" of a period of his life, the period in which the experience of going to the movies was a normal part of his week... Not the story of a period of my life but an account of the conditions it has satisfied. A book thus philosophically motivated ought to account philosophically for the motive in writing it. What broke my natural relation to movies?

What was that relation, that its loss seemed to demand repairing, or commemorating, by taking thought? (The World Viewed, page xix) From within what Cavell calls the "natural relation to movies", film appears magically to satisfy a wish, a wish we may not even have recognized as our own: the wish for the world re-created in its own image, which is also the wish to be able to view the world unseen, free from responsibility. And by appearing to satisfy this wish, Cavell suggests, film seems to us to confirm something already true of our existence: In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world's projection explains our forms of unknown ness and our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen... makes displacement appear as our natural condition.

(The World Viewed, page 39) It is the fact that its material basis is photographic that enables film to have the power to make our displacement appear natural, Cavell proposes. A consequence of the fact that film is photographic is that film images are not representations, not signs, as "theory" insists they must be. Their relation to the world is not that of signification or reference: People and things in a photograph are not objects the photograph signifies or to which it refers, they are the photograph's subjects. The subjects of a photograph are not created by the photograph, they are, or at least were, real, really in the world. Nor is their relation to the photograph arbitrary or conventional. They are active participants in the photograph's creation.

For Cavell, the fact that photographs are "of" the world does not mean that they assure our presence or presentness to the people and things they present to us. The reality that is present to us in a photograph is also absent, is present as absent, or absent as present; in any case, we cannot possess it fully. But for us, reality itself cannot be fully possessed. Reality is present as absent, or absent as present reality already participates in the condition of photography, in effect. To speak in this way is not to deny that reality is real, it is to characterize what reality is what reality is ontologically, what "reality" is grammatically.

Reality itself, what is really in our presence, is what we are already absent from, what we have already absented ourselves from. [Film's] displacement of the world confirms, even explains, our prior estrangement from it. The 'sense of reality' provided on film is a sense of that reality, one from which we already sense a distance. Otherwise the thing it provides a sense of would not, for us, count as reality. (The World Viewed, page 226) Obviously, in speaking this way Cavell is a far cry from the figure philosophy calls the "naive realist", the naif who has never even imagined that what we call "reality" may not actually be real. Yet as far as "theory" is concerned, anyone who believes as Cavell does that reality is "in" a photograph can only be naive as naive, and for the same reasons, as anyone who believes that reality itself is real.

The truth is that "theory", as understood and practiced within academic film study, does not acknowledge even the possibility that a philosopher could speak in the way Cavell does about such matters. When it denies that reality is real, "theory" takes itself to be making a sophisticated new claim, a claim that goes beyond, and radically under- mines, anything that could be dreamed of by philosophy, not recognizing that, within philosophy, this denial is old, as old as philosophy itself. The name philosophy has given it is "skepticism". Indeed, in arguing that what we call "reality" is not real but only that which we represent to ourselves as real and hence is only a construct of our own representations, "theory" employs one of skepticism's oldest formulations. And it revises this classical formulation only minimally when it specifies that our representations are constructed in accordance with "semiological codes" or when it adds that these "codes" are "ideological" (metaphysical, logo centric, our- geo is, capitalist, patriarchal and / or phallocentric, depending on the vintage of "theory"). Ironically, the new terms employed in these revisions are so far from being perspicuous, philosophically speaking, that their effect is to weaken the classical formulation of philosophical skepticism to make it less interesting, philosophically, and less of a threat to philosophy.

When has philosophical skepticism ever been so naive as to assert, hilariously but with a straight face, that it has proved its claim with scientific certainty, proved it beyond the possibility of doubt, that is, beyond the possibility of skepticism? Cavell's work has shown us that the entire modern history of philosophy can be viewed as dominated by a fixation on what he calls the "skeptical problematic", the idea that philosophy is locked in a kill- or-be-killed conflict with the skeptic who denies that the world can be known with certainty. Cavell's philosophical practice is everywhere guided by the intuition that philosophy cannot "cure" its fixation by silencing the skeptic but only by transcending the primitive notion that skepticism is a mortal threat to philosophy. The war of words between philosophy and skepticism has been going on for centuries, but the "mother of all battles" has yet to be fought between them because and this is one of Cavell's leading intuitions each depends on the other for its identity, for its very existence.

Skepticism is "other" to philosophy, but its voice is also internal to philosophy. Philosophy's true interest is not in silencing skepticism but in acknowledging its voice, acknowledging the ways this voice motivates, and is motivated by, philosophy. In aligning his own philosophical aspiration with the attainment of such an acknowledgment, Cavell claims continuity with Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Austin, among others philosophers who have been dispossessed by the academic field of philosophy as it has been constituted, or constituted itself, in America. Cavell's aspiration is to claim the inheritance of this philosophical tradition, to claim it for philosophy, to enable philo so- phy to claim it as its own. To claim this inheritance, philosophy has to attain a new perspective it is also an old perspective on it-self. As Cavell envisions it, what is called for from philosophy is not a new piece of knowledge but an acknowledgment.

In calling upon the field of philosophy to acknowledge his philosophical voice, to acknowledge this voice as a voice of philosophy, Cavell is calling upon philosophy, philosophy is calling upon itself, to take a stand on its own identity. (It is part of the grammar of the concept of "self", part of what a self is ontologically, if you will, that, as Cavell puts it, "Having a self requires taking a stand upon the self". ) In the reflections that comprise The World Viewed, then, as in his subsequent writing about film, Cavell is not naively oblivious of the claims of "theory", he is rejecting those claims. But in rejecting them, he is taking their motivations seriously. And he is not taking the opposing side, philosophy's traditional side in its age-old quarrel with skepticism (although he is taking that side's motivations seriously as well).

Speaking in his own philosophical voice, Cavell is demonstrating, exemplifying, a philosophical alternative a way of thinking philosophically, a philosophical perspective, whose possibility is not acknowledged either by "theory", as we have seen, nor by any practice of philosophy that remains fixated on silencing the skeptic. When film study dismisses philosophy as naive, illegitimate, and in any case irrelevant to the aspirations of the field, and does so solely by appeal to "theory", which it recognizes as a higher authority, philosophy has a right to protest. On the other hand, we also would not wish for film study to anoint philosophy, rather than "theory", as the higher authority to which it is to defer. The aspiration of philosophy, as Cavell understands and practices it, is not to be a higher authority to any other field or to itself. By denying the aspirations of philosophy, film study is also denying its own philosophical aspirations, its own aspirations to philosophy. It is denying philosophy's aspirations for studying film.

If the field of film study must stop excluding philosophy, stop denying philosophy's claims out of hand, so the field of philosophy must acknowledge film as a legitimate, indeed necessary, subject for philosophy. Of course, as I have said, Cavell believes that the academic field of philosophy, too, including the branch we call "aesthetics", has a history of denying the aspirations of philosophy as he understands them a history of denying the perspective on its own identity that it is philosophy's identity to seek, in Cavell's view, a history of repressing the tradition within philosophy with which Cavell's writing claims continuity. Cavell's aspiration as a philosopher is to enable philosophy to free itself, to awaken, from its history of repression its repression of an aspect of its own identity, its repression of his philosophical perspective, his way of thinking philosophically. ("In order to have a self, it is necessary for the self to take a stand on the self".

) When film study turned away from philosophy to embrace "theory", the field understood itself to be attaining freedom from the bondage of "ideology", from a tyranny that Derrida takes to have its source in what he calls the "metaphysics of presence". For Derrida, what is most repressive in the tradition of philosophy is a function of its supposed promotion of voice over writing. For Cavell, who sees matters very differently, "It is evident that the reign of repressive philosophical systematizing... has depended upon the suppression of the human voice". Cavell's implication is not that all human beings, or individual human beings, speak or ought to speak in one voice. There can never be only one human voice: voices are always in conversation.

But conversation can always be refused. When a voice is lost to itself or to other voices, or silenced, it can only be "recovered" by conversation, not by silencing other voices. Conversation requires points of convergence or agreement between speakers and a common language, but conversation also requires that voices be separate, different from each other. "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life", what we might call a culture. But what is a culture, a language, a form of life, a voice, a human being? And what has the study of film, and what has philosophy, to teach us about such matters?

In Cavell's view, film study has been entranced, not freed, by what the field calls "theory". Like the field of philosophy, film study must awaken from its "trance of thinking" if it is to fully acknowledge its own subject, if it is to recover its own voice.