Cavell-Who Disappoints Whom

Who Disappoints Whom?Author(s): Stanley CavellSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), pp. 606-610Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343656 .

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Who Disappoints Whom?

Stanley Cavell

Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom's view of America and the American university that he hasn't already heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in which Bloom's experience and mine differ systematically that are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in the intellectual economy we were presented with in the two decades prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness (in Emerson's sense, which includes illustrativeness) of the university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the irre-

placeability of Great Books-what Thoreau calls scriptures-in (let's call it) a humanistic education; a third concerns the unaware imbibing of

European thought by a chronically unprepared American constitution- a condition that is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was

founding American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism (Bloom speaks of the longing

Read 8 December 1988 at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on the occasion of a lecture by Allan Bloom entitled "The Attack on Reason."

Critical Inquiry 15 (Spring 1989) ? 1989 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/89/1503-0010$01.00. All rights reserved.

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Critical Inquiry Spring 1989 607

for completeness, Emerson speaks instead of a capacity for partiality, and of the courage to become-both see in the goal a desire for the world's human possibilities, and both are aware that the aspiration is always threatening to turn into debased narcissism or foolish imitation); a fifth sense of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom's book (manifestly the product of a lifetime of reading and of a devotion to teaching), is becoming unintelligible to the culture that has produced it, and not alone to the young (in my experience, less to them than to others).

The first region of difference I cite is that of our experience on entering the university in the 1940s and then teaching in the 1950s. Bloom describes his first look at the "popularization of German philosophy in the United States"-yielding, for example, ideas of value relativism and value positing-as follows:

When I came to the University of Chicago in the mid-forties, ... terms like "value judgment" were fresh, confined to an elite and promising special insight. There were great expectations in the social sciences that a new era was beginning in which man and society would be understood better than they had ever been understood before. The academic character of the philosophy departments, with their tired and tiresome methodology and positivism, had caused people interested in the perennial and live questions about man to migrate to the social sciences. There were two writers who dominated and generated real enthusiasm-Freud and Weber.'

Entering comparable philosophy departments in the late forties, after an undergraduate major in music, I seemed to see something quite different-that the popularization of German-speaking positivism (linking up with certain strains in native pragmatism) was absorbing the intellectual conscience of a significant face of social science (as well as of academic psychology, along with absorbing thinking about morality and religion and the arts), creating a climate in which the question is not whether value positing can express a dedication to the life of the mind, but whether judgments of value can be said to have any intellectual content at all;

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987), p. 148; hereafter cited by page number.

Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Witt- genstein.



608 Stanley Cavell Who Disappoints Whom?

and in which intelligence is expressed not in discussing which the most interesting writers are and how most strongly to be challenged by them, but in which the reading of texts-any writing, great books or small- has something like the status of a hobby in comparison with the serious business of analyzing and solving problems.

But that is philosophy too, however unhappy certain dimensions of this version of it. The distrust of reading is half of the philosophical spirit. A devotion to thinking by reading-however great the books in question-will not count, in my corner of things, as a philosophical devotion, unless it knows at each moment how to distrust reading. Emerson's and Thoreau's cautions against the reading of books reveals no intellectual innocence but their philosophical seasoning. The highest instance of this half of the philosophical spirit in the opening half of the present century is Wittgenstein, Heidegger's exact contemporary and I suppose his philosophical equal, at least. The fact of this division of the philosophical spirit-roughly equatable with the split between the English-speaking and the German-speaking traditions of philosophy-is for me the dominant condition of the possibility of philosophy now, the signal opportunity of

philosophizing in this nation in particular. It is a mark of the tradition

represented in Heidegger's thought that it functions according to the

myth of having read essentially everything; in that of Wittgenstein's thought, according to the myth of having read essentially nothing.

I do not say that a philosophical distrust of reading is the same as the refusal or incomprehension of reading, which Bloom so deplores in recent American students. What I suggest is that the persistent unwill-

ingness of American culture to recognize the split in the spirit of philosophy has incomparably more to do with the present failings of the American university than anything our students did in the 1960s. (Some I knew best were indeed taking it upon themselves to bridge or splint this split. They still are.)

It is, I think, Bloom's dismissal of the importance of the American

university's drastic reception of positivism, and his neglect of Wittgenstein's counterpoise at once to positivism and to Heidegger's achievement, that allows Bloom to burlesque the significance of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Kuhn's book-whatever its shortcomings (say in providing an epistemology for the concept of a world and of the change of a world), and however much its fame has overshadowed its teaching (so that it is cited as in support of relativism and even of irrationality)-did more than any other text to weaken the hold of a positivist/pragmatist verificationist picture of scientific progress on the academic imagination. And whatever one's

misgivings about Rawls' book (for example, in its treatment of Moral Perfectionism), Bloom's idea of Rawls as "writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone" (p. 30) is too wild for fun. Rawls is trying



Critical Inquiry Spring 1989 609

to make plain and common-I do not doubt that Bloom recognizes this, but then what is at stake in denying it?-the proposition that our despising someone is not a ground for depriving him of liberty or of his deal of equality. It is a proposition Utilitarianism was unable to make plain; and in doing more than any other work to challenge the reign of Utilitarianism in academic moral philosophy, Rawls at the same time has made the reading of what Bloom calls old books imperative for moral philosophers.

It would not become one with my commitments to fail to mention a second region of difference between Bloom's experience and mine, that containing phenomena of movie-viewing and of music as vehicles of or challenges to philosophy in these years. I confine myself to one of Bloom's passing observations: "In the Soviet Union they are dependent on operas from the bad old days, because tyranny prevents artistic expres- sion; we are dependent on the same operas, because the thirsts that produced artistic need have been slaked" (p. 233). As elsewhere I am uncertain of the attitude in these words. Is Bloom claiming that no significant operas have been or are being composed in America, or that the recognized masterpieces in this medium written, say, since 1917, receive too few performances on these shores? Apart from citing details, this apparent call for more culture, or for more genuine culture, sounds like a general grudge against the modern-something confirmed in Bloom's remarks about abstract painting (p. 63); and in his description of Louis Armstrong "belt[ing] out" Kurt Weill (p. 151) (a description that accords Armstrong none of his virtuosic irony nor any capacity to com- prehend and challenge Weill's pathos); and in those pages in which he takes Woody Allen's Zelig to represent the world of cinema and then reads the film as a popularization of German philosophy rather than recognizing it as a direct engagement with Emerson's madly underin- terpreted problematic of conformity and self-reliance, against which Allen proposes a study of the relation between character and actor in the medium of film.

No doubt there has been a shift in our institutions of performance; in part this is a function of the American university's having become a center and sustainer of the arts. Let us grant that opera does not play the social role it did in the bad old days. On what ground does Bloom regret this-if he does? He cites Plato's theory of music to lament the young's absorption of rock music. But I do not have to remind the translator of Rousseau as well as of Plato that Plato's theory of music would at least as surely condemn the representations of Don Giovanni and of Falstaff

I wonder what Bloom would think of the proposition-justified theoretically to my mind and suggested thematically in movies from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936 to last year's Moonstruck-that opera has not mostly died, but mostly has become film, that film is our opera. That the majority of films are largely worthless is irrelevant-so are the majority



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of books. That no film is as good as Don Giovanni or Falstaff is also irrelevant-very little of anything is that good. The point of this speculation is that the relation between low and high culture-their access to one another-is definitively different in America from their relation in Europe, a fact ungraspable by, for example, Theodor Adorno. As is the difference in America in the relation between philosophy and literature. These can

seem-they can be-vulgar confusions. I find them also, and increasingly, untold encouragements.

A parting word about Bloom's vision of the young with their Walkmans on, which he reads as deafening them to "what the great tradition has to say" (p. 81). It may be so. But maybe it is to be read as their blocking out our opinions and explanations of what they listen to. I do not, on the whole, share their pleasures here. I take it that I am, on the whole, not meant to, meant not to. The young, on this reading, feel that there are times and places in which, in their solitude, they are not answerable to others. Just like us.



Cavell-Who Disappoints Whom

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