8 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not really an impressive attempt at a clear mission statement., February 16, 2009
This review is from: Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Paperback)
Disclaimer: I've only read chapters 1, 5, 7 & 10 for a philosophy course. That said, I can't say I've come away with many new insights after reading them.
As a few preliminary points, his writing style is rather verbose, and he generally does not seem to feel the need to argue many of the points he makes: as a rule he does not seem to do so, preferring to give his 'thoughts' on whatever topic came to his mind, but at those times that he does seem to be 'arguing' for a position he generally annoyed me, this because the argumentation was either inconclusive or well as fairly obviously incomplete (which is troublesome and/or bad form if you're stating something that is not immediately apparent or controversial). He writes from a first person storyteller point of view, which someone on the back of the book calls "seductively conversational". His writing style, however, took me nearly 2 chapters to 'get into' at all, and even then did not impress me overly much, mostly because of the apparent randomness with which he developes any given chapter.
The basic premise of the book is that "classic" philosophy is dead, and a more literary (and/or 'therapeutic') philosophy must take its place. To that end, Cavell starts with an introductory chapter in which he "goes" from Nietzsche to Astaire, as the editorial blurb says, but that (in my opinion) unfairly ignores the fact that the link he lays between the two is tenuous at best.
With regard to Nietzsche (and Emerson) he creates a dichotomy that is supposed to leave you befuddled about the fact that there are no Great Truths (that is, that everything is context-bound), but because of the way he presents this idea I came away more annoyed than impressed at this insight - which, by the way, can also be found in Nietzsche, (Emerson), Heidegger, Adorno, Wittgenstein and many others, and expressed far more clearly without making the point any less poignant. Regardless, after pointing out there are no overarching Truths, he continues to (unclearly) argue the point that we thus must embrace this particularity.
He mentions Astaire as one of his "pop culture" representors/heroes of people who "live" a life that, as it is a fully instantiated life, theoretically would leave no questions unanswered as you consider it as an answer to the question "how to live." He supposedly does this by explaining/giving his thoughts on a specific film sequence that accentuates a number of the points he wants to make, but aside from the un-obviousness of some of the interpretations of the scenes, the overall point he is making seems a fairly trivial one to me, namely that 'form' can also convey information/opinion.
In chapter 5, which carries the same title as the book itself, Cavell first discusses Wittgenstein, and elaborates on the point he makes that philosophical 'being' or thinking is not something that can ultimately be defended to be useful, that the truth-concerned philosophy of the logical positivists is dead (especially 'after' Post-modernism), and that philosophy should be more (or ideally, now only) concerned with developing itself as an ethos (way of life), and should give more credence to literary and filmic attempts to convey (ethical) views upon others. To this end, he mentions Jane Austen novels and old (Gable/Colbert/Fonda/Grant/Hepburn) movies, which in his eyes make 'ethics' (as the discipline supposedly only concerned with Absolute Imperatives, Utility Calculations, and other 'concerns' far removed from every-day experience) come alive, as those movies are not about abstract things like being pro/contra abortion/suicide/euthanasia, but about 'character development'. Aside from the fact that I personally find it ridiculous to suggest that hollywood movies are about 'real' emotions (it seems to me akin to saying that soap series or "dr." Phil talk about "real life"), I also have trouble recognizing contemporary ethics in the picture he paints. While it may have been true 15 years ago (Mainstream) ethics only talked about those Kantian worries, the virtue-ethical discourse was always much more about personal development and character development than about the things Cavell refers to. Further, in other disciplines like developmental economics, global justice, and the like, there is a large amount of attention paid to people like Amartya Sen and Nussbaum, which started well before Cavell wrote this book.
Anyway, he then says something similar about the continued relevance of Jane Austen novels, and the fact that they look at the world through a far more realistic, down-to-earth perspective (in which all women really care about getting married, as that was the only way to stay alive back then), which is all well and good, but which in my opinion lacks some of the reflectiveness necessary for making considered judgments.
In Chapter 7 he tries to convince us that J.L. Austin (of How to do things with Words), another Ordinary Language Philosopher, was remiss in not exploring his speech act theory (specifically how perlocutions worked), and tries to do this "for him". While I agree with Cavell that there is certainly more that can be said about how they work, I am not sure that these effects, and the conditions necessary for felicitous uptake of the perlocutionary effects of utterances can be systematized, and if it can, there needs to be a very large section devoted to (moral) psychology, so as to be able to explain the enormous variety of responses possible to any given statement, as it is unclear to me how one should on the basis of the theory be able to predict whether someone will respond violently, morosely, indifferently, or happily, to the news that his wife is cheating on him, and the amount of personal information needed to predict how a specific person will react to any given statement would seem to make any systematic discussion of "perlocutionary effects" (as emotive utterances) impossible.
Lastly, chapter 10: About this chapter I cannot say much, other than that it is written in a semi-aphoristic form. It is mostly about the relationship between collections of things and the people owning them, and our tendency to (organize things into) collect(ions). That said, I found this literary experiment awkward to read and almost impossible to get through. Specifically the section where he mentions Citizen Kane, and where he makes the point that you can never guess by looking at the things a person has collected what a person will really (emotionally) hold dear I found trivial to the point of being childish, and in general I did not get the feeling that there was a forward movement through the different sections. If you like Aphorisms, go for Nietzsche, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, or Theodor Adorno (say, Negative Dialectics) in stead. they're much more rewarding.
Anyway, to conclude: while I agree with his main point that more could and should be done to make philosophy more relevant to today's experience, there are far more interesting books to be found on this topic than this one, written by people with more pleasant writing styles than Cavell's.
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