Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated
204
Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated
204Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786602893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2017 |
| Pages: | 204 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.45(h) x 0.86(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation
The Truth Is Translated
By Paul Standish, Naoko Saito
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Paul Standish and Naoko SaitoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78660-289-3
CHAPTER 1
Philosophy as Translation and the Realism of the Obscure
Naoko Saito
The American philosophy that runs from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, and then to Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, shares the common idea of philosophy for life: It returns philosophy to the ordinary. Philosophy "must learn to reawaken," as Thoreau says, by "an infinite expectation of the dawn." It is this sense of the dawn ever to be celebrated, I shall argue, that permeates the texture of the philosophies of these American thinkers. This does not, however, mean to present a unifying view of "American philosophy," but rather tries to elucidate its internal gaps, tension, and deviation, especially between Dewey's pragmatism and Emerson's and Thoreau's transcendentalism (via Cavell).
Within this general scheme, this chapter in particular will highlight the distinctive role of Cavell in renewing the dawn of American philosophy. Cavell is known to be a philosopher of ordinary language: returning language back to the ordinary. Putnam, who otherwise highly appreciates Cavell's work, has made the following remark: "My criticism would be that Cavell depoliticizes transcendentalism [of Emerson and Thoreau]. Remember that transcendentalism was an anti-slavery movement. It was anything but apolitical." From more of an outsider's perspective, Michael Peters, in his essay "White Philosophy in/of America," identifies a failure in American philosophy, including Cavell's, in its social and political awareness, specifically in relation to questions of race. The implication here is that Cavell is too personal or too subjective to be political, too private to be public, and too individualist to be social. In reality, however, Cavell's whole endeavor in his language philosophy is to demonstrate that the fact "that language can become private needs to be acknowledged," and that "to make language public is a responsibility in each of us": and, further, that "language is not, as such, either public or private." With Emerson and Thoreau, Cavell performs his antifoundationalist mode of thinking, following Emerson's remark: "The inmost in due time becomes the outmost." In his apparently paradoxical combination of perfectionism and antifoundationalism, Cavell's mode of thinking and language exceeds Dewey's pragmatism. His American philosophy, the dawn still to come, discloses a chasm between pragmatism and transcendentalism — an internal tension within American philosophy that in itself is a dynamic source of re-creation of American philosophy, whose dawn still to come.
With this basic stance, this chapter tries to show how unique Cavell's rereading of Thoreau is in the light of ordinary language philosophy, and to introduce a perspective of "translation" as a helpful entry into his ordinary language philosophy, by reviving the latter's significance not only for personal transformation and perfection, but also for cultural renewal. After introducing Cavell's idea of philosophy as translation, I shall focus particularly on the notion of what might be called the realism of the obscure — a worldview that is elucidated in his rereading of Thoreau. I shall try to show that this distinctive realism is inseparable from Cavell's stance toward skepticism and its concomitant theme of the loss of the self. In conclusion, I shall argue that through translation as an incessant process of human's reengagement with language (symbolized by Cavell's and Thoreau's idea of the father tongue), humans are always open to a new possibility of and hope for rebirth and conversion when they are undergoing crisis. Such moments of self-transcendence are crucial components in one's understanding of other cultures.
THE ABSENCE OF THOREAU IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
The literary redemption of language is at the same time a philosophical redemption; the establishment of American literature undertaken in Walden requires not only the writing of a scripture and an epic, but a work of philosophy. ... The changes require have to be directed to the fact that is not only philosophers who have interpreted the world, but all men; that all men labor under a mistake — call it a false consciousness; and that those who learn true labor are going to be able to do something about this because they are the inheritors of philosophy, in a position to put philosophy's brags and hopes for humanity, its humanism, into practice.
The importance of me of not losing my perception of Thoreau's philosophicality, the perception, let's call it, of an American difference in philosophy (something not equivalent to what one would mean, if anything, by "an American philosophy"), is my sense of the ease with which this difference is neglected within the institutions of philosophical education, so that the writing of Emerson and of Thoreau is persistently perceived as philosophically primitive or amateurish. This is painful enough if strangers accept it, but wrenching when it causes us to mistake ourselves, for then we stand to lose the America that is in search of itself.
Thoreau's voice has been neglected in America and in American philosophy. This might be called the phenomenon of the absence of Thoreau in American philosophy. Dewey's silence about Thoreau is symbolic; Rorty and Putnam scarcely mention Thoreau. For Cavell this absence itself prompts questions concerning the philosopher's self-knowledge and about the suppression of the voice of American transcendentalism by American culture itself. For Cavell, the absence of Thoreau in philosophy in general and in American philosophy is the manifestation of America's "refusal to discover America" as Thoreau with Emerson perceive the "state of unawakenedness, or spiritual imprisonment ... in an American way and place." Cavell reclaims the voice of Thoreau as a philosopher who responds to America's own skepticism.
Cavell, through his experiment in reading Thoreau's Walden (1845) in his book, The Senses of Walden (1992), elucidates this blindness to and the suppression of voice in American philosophy. "Thoreau ... takes his Walden as revealing the ways America fails to become itself, say to find its language." The whole of Walden is a "work of philosophy" and it is a "text about crisis and transformation, or metamorphosis." The original portion of the book was written in the summer of 1971 with his (as an American) sense of shame toward the debased state of America during the time of Vietnam War. This has not only literary and philosophical implications, but it also has political implications. By shifting the framework of interpreting Thoreau's "private sea" (Walden, 214) as personal, private, or individualistic, Cavell's rereading of Thoreau enables us to find in Walden the running thread in American philosophy of "democracy [as] a way of life." Cavell does not depoliticize transcendentalism; rather, transcendentalism permeates the political dimension and this requires self-transcendence via language.
In contrast to a stereotypical reading of Thoreau's Walden as a eulogy to nature or an environmentalist manifesto, or as the evocation of some kind of mystic experience in the woods, Cavell reads the book through something more like ordinary language philosophy. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of "leading words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use," Cavell says that "Emerson's and Thoreau's transcendentalism underwrites the philosophy of ordinary language." Returning language back to the ordinary does not mean to replace philosophy's language by mundane ordinary words; rather, it means to find something uncommon in the common by being reengaged with language. Participation in language community means to "offer [one's] assertion as exemplary in some way, testing this against the responses of others, and testing her own responses against what those others themselves say."
PHILOSOPHY AS TRANSLATION
The idea of translation, or to put it more correctly, of philosophy as translation helps us enter into Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. In this, the idea of translation plays a crucial role, internal to the very nature of language, as the way in which we engage in the world, and how it involves the whole process of human transformation. By elucidating this inseparable relationship between ordinary language and translation, Cavell's rereading of Thoreau's Walden illustrates not only the nature of language as translation but also the life of human beings as always being translated (and hence, in immigrancy): "The self is always to be found" (Senses, 52). He does this by representing Thoreau as a mediator who stands on "tiptoe" between borders.
Heaven is under our feet as well as our heads. (Walden, 188; Senses, 101)
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. (Walden, 11; Senses, 9)
Thoreau lives here and now on an intersection between the natural, the spiritual, and the political dimensions of human life, and between the past and the future. This makes him a translator who lives on borders, in transience, while at the same time attesting to the transfiguration of life. Cavell is in tune with this sense of translation that permeates Walden as follows: "Thoreau's book on Walden can be taken as a whole to be precisely about the problem of translation, call it the transfiguration from one form of life to another." Translation is a perspective through which to elucidate the antifoundationalist and perfectionist thought of Cavell and Thoreau. Cavell shows that translation is not simply an interaction between different language systems; rather, as part of language's intrinsic nature, translation permeates our life as a form of human transformation. Via language we are open to the possibility of undergoing the experience of transcendence in the ordinary.
Thoreau himself expresses this sense of translation with this phrasing: Truth refuses to be finally fixed; it is "instantly translated" (Walden, 217; Senses, 27). His antirepresentationalist and antifoundationalist view of language is characterized by transitivity and volatility. The idea of translation is most distinctively captured by Thoreau and Cavell's idea of the "father tongue" —"a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak" (Walden, 69; Senses, 15). Reengagement with the father tongue is a way of sustaining the space of what Cavell calls "the daily, insistent split in the self that being human cannot ... escape." While Cavell says that the father and the mother are united (Senses, 16), their relationship is neither reciprocal nor complementary nor symmetrical. There is no "pure" original state in which they are united in a perfect fit. Rather, it symbolizes our dual relation to language.
We must relinquish any idea that translation is to be taken as a metaphor; rather, it is a "metonym" of our lives. Undergoing the experience of translation means to experience the strange in the familiar. Again, Cavell captures this sense as below: "I consider that it is an essential moment in the work of philosophy to make human existence, or show it to be, strange to itself." The scenes of translation in Walden that are revivified by Cavell's words convey to the reader (whose language is translated in the process of reading Walden with Cavell as a translator) that the act of reading and writing is to be engaged in the transient phenomenon of life in resistance to stability and fixation.
A symbolic image that captures this antifoundationalist sense is the idea of bottom or, to put it more correctly, the sense of bottomlessness in Walden: "While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless" (Walden, 190). "There is a solid bottom everywhere" (Walden, 220; Senses, 76). In the process of translation, it is the responsibility of a reader (or a translator) to weigh toward this and to find where to stand — to "stand on tiptoe" as if alert on a precarious border (Walden, 71). In Thoreau's idea of bottomlessness, this is not the complete negation of the ground or fixation. The task of Thoreau as a translator is to respond to this question: "How are we going to weigh toward [a solid bottom], arrive at confident conclusions from which we can reverse direction, spring an arch, choose our lives, and go about our business?" (Senses, 6). In Walden and The Senses of Walden, words are not mere words but are inseparable from the work of "placing ourselves in the world" (Senses, 53). In order to have "no particular home, but [to be] equally at home everywhere," one must acquire the art of sauntering, as a "Sainte-Terre," being sans terre, "without land." Thoreau is "at home" at Walden Pond, but only in the sense that "he learned there how to sojourn, i.e., spend his day" (Senses, 52).
THE REALISM OF THE OBSCURE
In the process of translation attested in Walden, the inner and the outer are always in translation. Thoreau quotes from the poem of William Habington: "Direct you eye right inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered" (quoted in Walden, 213). He also quotes a maxim of "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" (Walden, 47; Senses, 91). Cavell pays particular attention to this relationship between the inner and the outer and says that the task of Thoreau as a "watchman of the private sea" is to be alert to one's relation to "outward condition or circumstances in this world" (Senses, 55). The inward and the outward, however, never close their chasm. The relationship is not that of unification, but is always to be achieved as that of "neighboring": "Unity between these aspects is viewed not as a mutual absorption, but as a perpetual nextness, an act of neighboring or befriending" (Senses, 108). Undergoing this sense of gap within and without the self is the very experience of translation. A translator must keep standing on border between the inner and the outer always with the sense of the vague, the ambiguous, or in Cavell's words, "being on some boundary or threshold, as between the impossible and the possible." Thoreau as a translator stands on a border between the heaven and the earth, the inner and the outer: "The self is always to be found" (Senses,53). The experience of translation is to keep carrying the fated duality and gap of the self and between selves and the self and the world. This is how he was "at home" in Walden, and yet learning "how to sojourn" (Senses,52).
It is the idea of obscurity that has crucial relevance to the idea of translation and the way of living on a "threshold."
I desire to speak somewhere without bound; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments. For I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. ... In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. (Walden, 216–17)
The experience of translation accompanies and requires the sense of the obscure, the indefinite, and yet, paradoxically that is the condition of achieving a "true" expression.
Indeed the obscure is an essential component of Thoreau's realism. Thoreau's Walden is filled with realistic observation of the facts of nature and daily life. It is permeated by a sense of embodiment, his feet gravitating toward the ground. His realism, however, is not a matter of the exact representation of a "reality out there." A symbolic image that permeates Walden and The Senses of Walden is that of the obscure.
You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's. (Walden, 11)
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity. ... The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. (Walden, 217)
Realism in Thoreau's Walden might be called the realism of the obscure — of a reality of the world that cannot be fully illuminated under light. The state of purity is to be obtained through obscurity: The obscure is the condition for achieving the rigor of thinking.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation by Paul Standish, Naoko Saito. Copyright © 2017 Paul Standish and Naoko Saito. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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