6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Rawls, July 22, 2004
This review is from: Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Paperback)
The title includes the prominent thinkers with which Cavell is engaged in this book, which is based on a series of lectures. It is worthwhile noting that the lectures and the resulting book are intended for professional philosophers or advanced students, and I don't recommend non-academic readers or beginning undergraduates to start reading Cavell here. For that purpose, "Must we mean what we say?" for example is much more accesible, in my opinion.
As for the contents of the book, it contains three lectures whose common theme is perfectionism and the American tradition in philosophy which Cavell wishes to re-establish, starting among others in Emerson's perfectionism. One of the primary interests of Cavell is to establish that Emerson's perfectionism, as well as that of Nietzsche which some say was influenced by Emerson, is not incongruent with democracy and does not necessarily entail exclusive elitism. To this purpose the first and third lectures focus on how to understand perfectionism and how this meshes with liberal theory, especially Rawls' seminal Theory of Justice.
To briefly summarize: The first lecture discusses Emerson, Heidegger and Wittgenstein on literature and philosophy. Its style is very "Heideggerian": that is, I wouldn't recommend it unless you feel comfortable with the style in which e.g. "Being and Time" or most of Derrida's work is written.
The second lecture is mostly devoted to a closer reading of Wittgenstein, and in it Cavell engages with Kripke's famous reading of Wittgenstein on rules and rule-following. While Kripke sought to establish a sceptical conclusion, Cavell wishes to show that this is not the only reading, and that another possible (and better) reading exists, which emphasizes rather the common human element of the shared form of life which generates the criteria behind our language games, in the lines of Wittgenstein's "On Certainty". For those interested in the philosophy of language, especially Wittgenstein, rule-following etc. - this lecture alone makes the book worthwhile.
To sum up, this is a very good philosophy book but certainly not for everyone.
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
kinds of perfectionism, July 14, 2011
This review is from: Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Paperback)
I have not been tickled much by American philosophy, but a recent interest in the romance of individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche tricked me into thinking that I might pick up something from Stanley Cavell's lectures on Emersonian perfectionism. Nietzsche and five of his books are mentioned frequently enough to convince me that Cavell knows a tremendous amount about what he is saying, but at this point in the life of American culture, I think being saturated with words like a mudslide joining a river of turbulence with tree snakes rippling upward in your bong water is the kind of mindfulness we can hardly stand anymore, if we ever could, which is not very likely.
The joke that gets tossed around by Cavell is associated with Kant in my understanding of Nietzsche hopping all over Europe while Kant stuck to a way of life that kept him at a single university. Kant lived in a city with active trade and culture, but his thinking was so transcendental that Nietzsche tried to parody his set of beliefs as pointed out in the Introduction by Stanley Cavell in connection with:
Thoreau's interpretation of nextness
contains a parody of what detractors
of Transcendentalism understand its
interest to amount to in a world
beyond this one, an afterworld,
available for the musing.
(something of the sort
is parodied along the same lines
in the third section of the first part
of Zarathustra, in Nietzsche's punning title
Von den Hinterweltlern,
meaning afterworldsmen,
sounding like backwoodsmen,
suggesting that only hicks
believe there is some other place.)
What is in Thoreauvian nextness
to us is part of this world,
a way of being in it,
a curb of it
we forever chafe against. (p. 9).
Our ideas have formed in our infancy, when the difference between people who were important to us and the rest of the world in a society of spectacle that expects something on TV to be over with so quickly that we can see something else when we want to. Entertainment values fulfill the needs expressed by Zarathustra:
From their bodies
and this earth
they imagined themselves
transported,
these ingrates.
Yet to what did they owe
the spasms and raptures of their transports?
To their bodies and to this earth. (Translated by Graham Parkes, 2005, p. 29).
Books have produced some history, but people rarely find themselves in books as religion based on antiquities is another tough nut to crack, even if it is just as hollow as the jokes that keep people expecting some new form of infancy. I should keep reading until I manage to get through the first lecture:
Aversive Thinking
Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche,
but I am not expecting the ordinary, a conversation of justice, or the drama of consent in the remaining parts of the book to teach me much about a society that forgets to read the instruction manual when it tells people to avoid water.
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