Passionate Speech

in

Dark Woods of a Life

I.

Caution: The appalling and needless loss of life on this mountain has been

due largely to the failure of robust trampers to realize that wintry storms

of incredible violence occur at times even during the summer months. 

Rocks become ice-coated, freezing fog blinds and suffocates, winds of

hurricane force exhaust the tramper, and when he stops to rest, a temp-

erature below freezing completes the tragedy.  If you are experiencing

difficulty, abandon your climb.  The highest wind velocities ever recorded

were attained on Mt Washington.  Since the worst is yet to come, turn

back without shame, before it's too late.1

That’s an example of passionate speech. What makes it passionate is the way it gets under my

skin; it invades my psyche in the area of my shames and prides and fears. Cavell might say it

improvises in the disorder of my desires: should I go on up the trail, not yet icy -- or turn back?

Caution counsels prudence, redirecting desire toward moderation. An invasion of passion, yes.

And more emphatically, a wild prophecy and injunction: “The Worst is Yet To Come! Turn back

without shame!”

When Cavell discusses what he dubs “passionate utterance” -- “invitations to

improvisation in the disorder of desire” – he doesn’t cite a caution posted at trailheads in White

Mountains National Forrest. That’s my piece of “found art”, or improvisation on the theme.

However, early on in his career, long before he settles on “passionate speech” as a category of

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 1

philosophical investigation, Cavell gives us a pure instance. Here is the poet-playwright Jean

Giraudoux in words Cavell uses as the epigraph to one of his first essays. It heads his signal

1962 Philosophical Review article called “The Availability of the Philosophy of the Later

Wittgenstein”:

Epochs are in accord with themselves only if the crowd comes into these

radiant confessionals which are the theaters or the arenas, and as much

as possible, . . . to listen to its own confessions of cowardice and

sacrifice, of hate and passion . . . For there is no theatre which is not

prophecy. Not this false divination which gives names and dates, but true

prophecy, that which reveals to men these surprising truths: that the

living must live, that the living must die, that autumn must follow

summer, spring follow winter, that there are four elements, that there is

happiness, that there are innumerable miseries, that life is a reality, that it

is a dream, that man lives in peace, that man lives on blood; in short,

those things they will never know.2

These two instances of passionate speech are rough and ready. When Cavell writes

extensively about what becomes his semi-formal rubric roughly 40 years later, he provides an

extremely fine-grained analysis, bringing “passionate utterance” into contact with what John

Austin (in 1955) called “performative utterance”.3 The intuitive range of “passionate

utterance” and the rationale for bringing it into focus are not hard to grasp. Saying something

about reason and passion, argument and literature, will bring some focus to Cavell’s work.

Philosophers in the mainstream have fixated on rational speech and the life of reason to

the neglect of passionate speech and the life of the passions.4 For every Schopenhauer or

Rousseau we have a Quine or Kant by the dozens – at least as the tradition get filtered down to

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 2

us. We have classes in how to think critically but none in how to feel attentively, classes in

rational decision theory but none in responsible passions or in sensitive attention to others.

Seeing better and feeling with more subtlety are part of metamorphosis of spirit and

redemption of soul -- good things, I’d think. Can refinement of spirit and passion and vision be

advanced by sharp intellectual analysis? If we need more redemptive reading, where would you

find it in a college catalogue? The worst of passions and imaginings can be deflated by rational

critique, but moral truth might emerge from another direction, as well.

The great novels of Henry James or George Eliot show sensitive conversation and

emotional exchange effecting change in self and desire. Change of self for the better is seldom

simply a matter of more intelligence. Passions and imagination must be in play, sometimes ruled

by intelligence but as likely shaped toward the better by the stirrings of alternative passions.5

Here is George Eliot, out to change perceptions:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be

like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should

die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the

quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.6

Better access to each other (and ourselves), and a revelation of ‘ordinary life‘ will come with

better seeing, imagining, and feeling. That’s knowledge to die for, isn’t it?7 Yet we’re saddled

(apparently) with a strange choice: either live quickly, contentedly while “wadded with

stupidity” -- or live slowly, with the roar of an impenetrable otherness.8

II.

Cavell focuses on “passionate utterance” in an effort to legitimate a neglected range of speech

that is neither purely descriptive, fact-stating and fodder for argument -- nor the ceremonial or

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 3

quasi-legal domain of performative utterance. To say “freezing fog blinds and suffocates”

might be construed as simple fact stating, denuded of passional force. But at a trailhead it’s a

screaming caution, informative but also pleading and warning, urgently uttered from the heart.

It’s meant to burn into the ‘tramper’s’ soul, to instill imaginative empathy with another tramper,

one caught in mortal tragedy. It improvises pleadingly in the disorder of desires.

Cavell’s teacher, John Austin, proposed in the mid-fifties that philosophers should attend

not just to statements or propositions, not just to words strung in sentences that might be true

or false. He directed his readers to word-use in the promises we make and in judicial decrees or

in public testimony. If descriptive statements aim to picture the world from this angle and that,

performative utterances aim to change it by changing we who speak. We’re changed because

words alter us in the uttering, by dint of conforming to and invoking a social practice.

When I invoke the practice of promising in making one, I am bound to another, whereas

before the promise, I wasn’t (think of a wedding promise of faithfulness, or a promise to repay a

loan). When a courtroom judge and jury declare me guilty, I become legally guilty; if I am

sentenced to jail-time, my world is changed radically through the utterance of words. Calling

speech “performative” has since Austin’s time become a quite general way to point to what

words actively do in social and political circumstances above and beyond what they may

describe or dispassionately state.

“Passionate utterance” is neither purely descriptive nor purely performative. It does not

alter the social world, say as a promise does, by relying on a public’s explicit social ceremony or

quasi-legal convention. I can read the trailhead warning in relative solitude, letting it sink in, or

dismissing it, none-the-worse for mulling it quietly, without speaking. It has none of the force

of a ranger’s order that I must evacuate at once. If the warning succeeds – I might head back

rather than continue -- it does so by improvisation and suggestion, not by overt threat or

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 4

coercion. I’m urged (but not forced) to consider prudence. Similarly, on any given night the

world of the theater can speak to my psychological and social unknowing. Giraudoux invites me

to consider that I do and don’t’ know – my desires are disordered -- that I’m cowardly, or will

die, or that there is misery, or that man lives on blood.

Passionate utterance invokes the shifting shapes of passion and desire, of imagination

and sensibility. It prompts the mobile responsiveness of what Kierkegaard would call our

subjectivity. Arcing words in passionate utterance lift us – or they leave us indifferent. They live

or die as we receive or refuse them.

“No man is an Island . . . ”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

“the readiness is all . . . ”

“Let it be!”

“Language is the house of being . . .”

“the unexamined life is not . . . ”

“I have a dream . . . ”

The power of these words (from Hamlet, Heidegger, or elsewhere) is analogous to the power of

aesthetic judgments – the power an insightful critic might wield. I hear Hamlet’s “Let it be!” or

Donne’s “No man is an Island” and am moved to utter an iteration, with critical and furthering

comment, carrying it forward in my own voice. These words (and mine) spread exponentially,

broadening their echo and hold spatially and temporally over an ever-widening community. With

apt power, they travel from a relatively solitary provenance – a Hamlet or a John Donne or a

neighbor – to encompass a potential universal, a compendious “we”, becoming part of what

Hegel would call “objective spirit,” or perhaps the “concrete universal” -- even as they retain full

subjective force. With each passionate launch new life is added. Perhaps we voice them so.9

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 5

 III.

I’ve given some instances of passionate speech from literature, as well as from trailheads. I’d

like now to retrieve my own discovery of philosophy -- first in literature, then in a wider tradition

that seemed to tilt against literature. I came to learn about passion and its denial.

It was less love I suppose, than infatuation, or even prurience, that fed my first serious

“book affair.” In The Brothers Karamazov, I found words to carry me toward what in retrospect

is philosophy and equally literature or even, I’ve come to see, theology.10 The lyric excess, the

mad swings from spiritual ecstasy to the stink of murder, from the cool edge of argument to

back-alley debauchery, was melodrama pitched just right for adolescence. It put me in line for

further literature or philosophy. I couldn’t know it at the time, but I was reading existentialism.

And I couldn’t know that existentialism would be a style of thinking that in the last quarter of

the 20th century would be supplanted by structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism—and

then lumped unceremoniously under the label “Continental Philosophy and Theology.”

In time, I came to know that the sort of philosophy I found in Dostoevsky was not the

real thing. In college, my best philosophy instructors dismissed Dostoevsky and those writers

such as Sartre or Camus perceived to be vaguely in his camp. Novels this reason-averse did not

make the cut for serious philosophical consideration. Even “The Grand Inquisitor” was, for them,

too murky and wild. I was fed the growing split between Continental and Anglo-American

philosophy. Yet I was also fed a way to disown that split.

Wittgenstein was the single star of that decade (the 1960s). Philosophical

Investigations was the focus. But Wittgenstein’s writing—I mean its style, and what it

insinuated about its author—was clearly outside the worlds of Descartes, Hume, and Kant. It

lacked the drama of a Platonic dialogue, the expository orderliness of Aristotle, and was too

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 6

minimalist, unornamented, I thought, to be Romantic. It seemed a jungle of aphorisms and

reminders against the false clarity in the presumptions and arguments of Descartes or Kant.

Oxbridge was trying to domesticate it. Even so, against the grain, brave souls attempted to link

Wittgenstein to Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Yet how could one marry the enigmatic one-

liners of this now-British genius to the wild theological bent of Russian or Danish existentialism?

By graduate school I had rumor of a Wittgenstein read (as we’d say today) Continentally.

Cavell’s Berkeley lectures were packed. By 1964 he had published an article in Daedalus that

found Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard were, if not kindred spirits, then non-combatants: there

needn’t be a battle there. You could hear a pin drop as he put those two together in a

prestigious cultural journal. If Cavell were to be believed, the labels “Existentialism” and

“Analytical Philosophy” should no longer seem so absolute and absolutely opposed. Yet

professionally, the oppositions were only hardening into a cold war of mutual disbelief and not-

so-muffled indignation at the temerity of the other.

Dostoevsky was my earliest entry into philosophy, which placed me roughly Continental.

Yet my attraction to Cavell—based on his “Existentialist” reading of Wittgenstein—gave me an

“Analytic” base, as well. Cavell opened up affinities between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, and

more generally he displayed affinity for a personal, even “theatrical, “confessional” style for

philosophy -- the sort of thing we find in Pascal, Augustine, or Nietzsche. That attention to a

personal and passionate voice in search of peace, or a soul -- along with his willingness to jump

all disciplinary fences -- has characterized Cavell’s career over the succeeding decades.

IV.

We can think of the speakers we’ve heard in this series as fulfilling at least three functions of

philosophy. 1) It looks at sentences and concepts to disambiguate them, or to place them in

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 7

argumentative structures that at their best either explain a puzzle or lead to necessary

conclusions (think of Aquinas giving proofs for God’s existence). 2) It looks at speech that

binds us to others, or frees us from others, through invoking things like promises or formal

renunciations or social contracts or rights (Nietzsche defines the human not as a truth-seeking

animal but as the promising animal). 3) Philosophers invite us to desire different things, or

frame objects of desire differently, or to alter our passions, or moods or feelings, this way or

that (think of Plato’s image of the Cave, or Nietzsche on the “Three Metamorphoses”, or Martha

Nussbaum on the nature of love, or W.E. Sebald and Thoreau on devastation and night).

David LaRocca led us through the complexities and puzzles of Emerson’s pleas for self-

reliance -- that I become what I might be, that I move beyond conformity, even beyond

conformity to the genius who asks me to move beyond conformity. He clarified and

disambiguated what self-reliance might be. We then see how self-reliance is like a promise I

make to attend to the self I might be. I answer an imperative to discovery what promises I have

made (or betrayed). (Such promises are pre-public, and so non-performative, made outside --

though modeled on -- the public sphere,)11 Third, we let David LaRocca’s passionate restaging

of Emerson’s passionate speech work on us as passionate utterance.12

Bill Day led us to Cavell’s idea of redemptive reading, and clarified how it appeared in

Cavell’s reading of a moment of terror when his father growled and lurched menacingly. Those

unloving gestures were like a refusal to promise, or a promise refused. The father promises that

the son will never know a moment of communion, as if this were a scene of excommunication.

Finally, as Professor Day suggests, this piece of Cavell’s autobiography might simultaneously

trigger our own redemptive readings of our pasts, philosophy opening toward self-culture or

metamorphosis. We let Cavell’s account read us, revealing ourselves to ourselves.13

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 8

 We are revealed to ourselves through responding to invitations to improvisation in the

disorder of our desires. This brings us, as I’ve suggested, to the natural affinity between

passionate speech and poetry, literature, and autobiography, and the affinity of these to

philosophy, especially philosophy of an autobiographical cast. Cavell’s “Excerpt from Memory” is

an instance of what he calls philosophy and autobiography being told in terms of each other --

as if his sort of philosophy, if it were ever to fly, needed to attend to the mobile self of the

teller.14 He attends to himself, his biography, the roots of his speech in his life. Likewise,

autobiography in his voice verges on philosophy, becomes philosophy, if it is to fly. His

autobiography would clarify the conditions of his life, evoke what is promised and refused in it,

and what redemptions, advances, culminations or failures are contained in that life, as he

negotiates its dark wood.

Cavell links philosophy to autobiography, making its writing an instance of passionate

speech -- not just a series of lawyer-like arguments, or analyses of social contracts, for instance

– and it carries, accordingly, the possibilities of redemption. Thus the exemplars he inherits to

model philosophy straddle literature and autobiography: Rousseau in Reveries of a Solitary

Walker, Thoreau in Walden or A Week on the Concord, Kierkegaard in The Point of View of my

Work as an Author, Montaigne in his Essays. Is this the unlikely claim that Quine, Rawls, and

Thoreau can merge? Perhaps they already have converged, in the work of Montaigne or

Rousseau or Thoreau -- or in Plato (just for a start). This means setting aside a standing

cultural anxiety. Despite being younger than poetry, philosophy needn’t always start a

begrudging quarrel with the passions – with its musical, poetic, ancestral progenitors.

Passionate speech weaves in and out of our best literature, theater, and film, (not to

mention our politics and religions and home lives) and it overlaps with readiness for

metamorphosis. Since his work on Thoreau, and then Emerson, Cavell has worked to revive a

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 9

notion of “moral perfectionism”, a place where passionate speech and philosophy cohabit.

Philosophy is after all a love story not always delivered dispassionately. Love of wisdom is love

of a certain form of life, one suited to oneself, in the light of the good. A Platonic striving for

the good appears in the 19th Century as the idea of self-culture, and is a mainstay in

contemporary writing, from Thomas Mann and Salinger to Philadelphia Story and The Graduate.

What counts here is not a preset ideal whose content can be laid out objectively. Quite the

reverse!

Perfectionism for Cavell signals our inhabitation of a dark wood and our finding, over and

over, a place of momentary light. Persons are always on the trembling edge of the unexpected.

We would shed what is less than perfect, emerge from a kind of spiritual tumult or unrest while

unfolding toward a next and better self—all this, an unending becoming, forever unfinished.

Unfolding reconfigurations of a self in drama and enigma are key for those inaugurating figures

we label “Existentialist” or “Continentalist,” -- Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Dostoevsky – even

Freud. We find figures in their texts desperately pursuing a next and better self, through crisis

after crisis. With this theme of moral perfectionism, Cavell shifts his question from Must we

mean what we say? to the question, Must we become who we are?

Such self-culture and self-striving are part of Cavell’s recovery of the romantic. The

subtitle of his City of Words is Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. This is a

tribute to Plato, but also to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Film is our

most evident contemporary vehicle for aesthetic education, and Cavell has chapters alternate

between moral philosophy’s canon and particular films that illuminate or continue its themes.15

V.

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 10

Let me take up the second part of my title: “The dark woods of a life”. I’m thinking of Dante,

who at the beginning of the Comedy confesses that he finds himself mid-life in the middle of a

dark wood. He’s looking for illumination, a way out of a cave. And in the dark recesses of my

imagination, I was thinking also of Cavell, Heidegger, and Thoreau. Cavell affords us moments of

redemption from suffering, and Heidegger has a “clearing” in dark woods where things stand

forth in intelligibility – as they would for those who have escaped Plato’s cave, and as Jennifer

Gurley tells us, then return to its everyday, refreshed.16 Thoreau can seem to hide the

darkness of life, but it hangs over A Week on the Concord, and emerges full-blown in The Maine

Woods.17

In his neglected first book, beneath the brightness of river travel, Thoreau keeps alive

the dark river of his brother John’s violent and protracted death. Thoreau writes A Week on The

Concord and Merrimack as a memorial to that river trip and that death. He rows with his

brother upriver towards the clarity of its source high in the White Mountains. His brother’s

later death from lockjaw haunts that book, but there are other dark woods in the journey; not

least, the darkness of Hannah Dustan who in 1697 scalped her sleeping captors and their

children to return by night by the Merrimack to her home near Haverhill. She had been

captured and made to witness her nursing infant’s brutal murder, dashed against a tree. Dark

woods, indeed!

Years later, Thoreau encounters a different darkness atop Mt Kttadn. High above any

vegetation amidst swirling fogs and boulders randomly thrown, he is attacked by dark chaos

where indifferent gods reside; he feels his spirit sucked from between his ribs. He flies down the

mountain in uncharacteristic desperation, down out of that no-man’s land. He cries “Contact,

Contact! Give me Contact! The common sense!” 18 “The common sense” Thoreau desperately

seeks is Aristotle and Kant’s sensus communis -- that which allows us to coordinate taste, sight,

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 11

touch, and hearing in a single sense of location and orientation, permitting ordinary judgments

about a shared surround. Thoreau’s plea for “contact”, and “the common sense” is a plea for

groundedness and orientation, things lost in the chaos of the bouldered peak.

Thoreau fleeing the fog of the wind-swept crest is a primal image of yearning for

orientation and respite. Spirit escaping through his ribs is a visceral correlate to darkness.

Passionate speech conveys this desperation, and if we are among those “read by” his text, we

shudder, too -- and imagine the gift of respite, a moment of sweet contact. Again, we have

philosophy as autobiography (and autobiography as philosophy), philosophy as soul-emptying

skepticism along with acknowledgment of an answer – contact, and “the common sense”, what

Cavell calls “the ordinary.”19 Love of the world supervenes on skepticism as Thoreau passes to

vivid life.20 Undergoing delight in the world, he can’t postpone bespeaking it.

There are many moments of joyful contact in Thoreau, but let me rescue one from

Rousseau. In Reveries of a Solitary Walker, we get unrivalled delight, and the bonus of

philosophy and autobiography told “in terms of each other” in a redemptive mix, as in being

reborn. Ambling on a village lane, a carriage approaches from behind, speeding recklessly. It’s

escorted in front by a huge Great Dane, announcing Royalty’s right to get by, and bearing

swiftly down on him. Jump right . . . or left? He misjudges and is knocked down; and awakens.

Night was beginning to fall. I perceived the sky, some stars, and green

leaves. This first sensation was a delicious moment. I was conscious of

myself only through this. I was being born into life in that instant, and

it seemed to me as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence.

Entirely absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing, I had

no distinct notion of my individuality, nor the slightest idea of what had

just happened to me; I didn't know who I was or where I was; I felt no

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 12

 pain, or fear, or uneasiness. I watched my blood flow just as I would

have watched a brook, without imagining that this blood belonged in

any way to me. I felt throughout my whole being a ravishing calm, and

every time I remember it I can find nothing comparable in all the activity

of familiar pleasures.21

Rousseau invites us to take in an epiphany, momentary yet lasting, infinite in pleasure and

significance -- a sublime moment of “ravishing calm”.

Moments like these ought to mitigate suffering, if anything can, as in a touch of love, or

a touch of the divine. Rousseau doesn’t tell us outright that this epiphany is salvation, but says

it’s rebirth. As Thoreau flees the stark mountaintop for contact and orientation, he’d also relish

the intense satisfaction Rousseau reports, a seamless connection with things. Rousseau’s

perceptions are not of something alien but extensions of himself, his “frail being” having flowed

outward into the world.22 There are no gaps between perceiver, perception and perceived.23

Thoreau finds that sort of serenity at Walden, where he lies in his boat looking skyward (as

Rousseau also lay in a boat alone looking upward).24 Elsewhere Thoreau lets himself flow with

the path of a fox curving across the pond’s snow covered ice.25 And we have a report from

Cavell’s Pitch of Philosophy of his mother finding seamless connection and ongoing contact as

she lets her frail being flow into the notes her piano and score provide. Cavell remembers his

mother’s uncanny sight-reading as what I’d call expressive attunement to the world.26 Her voice

in playing, her perfect musical intimacy as her fingers delivered Brahms or Schubert, left no

room for interpretative gaps: text and voice are seamlessly connected.

This is a moment when interpretation does not “go all the way down,” where there is

precisely no space between notes read and their utterance. And with no space for

interpretation, there is room only for love of the notes, love of the world, suspension of doubts

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 13

-- a moment when the affliction of migraine, for example, might recede. He proposes, as Bill

Day reminds us, a “theology of reading” and “redemptive reading.27 Redemption lies in moments

of seamless connection, as we become the mind of racing notes, or flow into perceptions of a

scampering fox, or (with Rousseau) into “the sky, some stars, and green leaves” in a moment

of “ravishing calm”. These are moments of the highest imaginable pleasure in communion with

others and the world. As we reread our pasts in their light, we are afforded access to our own

moments of seamlessness – such as they might be. And are these matters of grace alone?

Let me return to Bill Day’s finely wrought paper on Cavell’s memory of a thwarted

communion – an excommunication. His father wished he did not exist. Now if Cavell’s writing is

redemptive, what does he need redemption from? Philosophy cannot say the word “sin”, Cavell

declares, so it can’t be sin he’s redeemed from.28 There are other things we might be saved

from: social evils, embarrassment or shame (but Cavell, unlike Augustine, doesn't seem to

obsess on moments of shame). Or we might be saved from the hurt of knowing we (he) will

never have a perfect musical ear; or saved from the burden of things like the curse of a father --

so that our lives might have the "innocent flow" of a mother who finds in the unfolding of notes

a way for her heart and imagination to be more free, say freer from migraine. Or we might seek

the sort of redemption philosophy has almost always promised, finding intelligibility.29

Philosophy overlaps literature and also scripture. Cavell takes Thoreau to be writing

sacred text, which from a literary point of view means he must adopt a

form that comprehends creation, fall, judgment, and redemption; within

it he will have discretion over how much poetry to include, and the

extent of the moral code he prescribes; and there is room in it for an

indefinite amount of history and for a smaller epic or two.30

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 14

Thoreau writes philosophy as scripture as redemptive. How are Cavell’s essays redemptive

(when they are)? His “prose arias,” as one insightful commentator calls them, invite a reader

not only to thrill or shudder at the music heard, its rendering, or even rebirth in performance.31

They prepare one to walk away with a mood and melody still vibrant, singing still in

commemoration, and in one’s own voice. What rubs off from his performances is permission to

hear the texts in one’s own voice, in a register of emotion, uncertainty, and conviction somehow

attuned to his own. To the extent that he redeems sense and passion in the world, I may follow

him (or not). Can philosophy redeem the way playing the piano effortlessly can? At the least,

it can redeem by opening a domain of matchless intelligibility (and darkness) beyond the critical,

schooled intelligibility that comes with disambiguating a sentence or constructing an argument.

Thoughtful autobiography honors moments having the clarity of a memory retrieved when we

see that intelligibility rests in streaming with life with others, linguistically, but also non-

linguistically. That recognition is a moment of deep philosophical illumination.

Cavell is afflicted by waves of desolation at being forced out of a happy family when he

was all of seven, a memory interlaced with suffering a father’s curse. Yet he also remembered

moments of flowing notes, harkened to them as exemplary of what it is to be granted peace,

and so granted redemption by grace. If we thus attained peace it would be on quite a different

order than writing clear argument. Can an instant shaft of light in wood find a life redeemed?

VI.

A piece of writing that bears squarely on the question of redemption – literature and

redemption – is found in W.E. Sebald’s Campo Santo. Here are excerpts from the end of his

book:

Why can I not get such episodes out of my mind? Why, when I take the

S-Bahn toward Stuttgart city center, do I think every time we reach

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 15

 Feuersee Station that the fires are still blazing above us, and since the

terrors of the last war years, even though we have rebuilt our surroundings

so wonderfully well, we have been living in a kind of underground zone?

Why did it seem to the traveler on a winter night . . . that the network of

lights [from the new administrative complex] glittered in the darkness like

a constellation of stars spreading all over the world, so that these

Stuttgart stars are visible not only in the cities of Europe, the boulevards

of Beverly Hills and Buenos Aires, but wherever columns of trucks with

their cargoes of refugees move along the dusty roads, obviously never

stopping, in the zones of devastation that are always spreading

somewhere, in the Sudan, Kosovo, Eritrea, or Afghanistan?

So what is literature good for? Am I, Hölderlin asked himself, to fare

like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding

and love, but were seized by the avenging Fates on a drunken day,

secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too

sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where

they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises

immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of death

presented by the poet . . . is both overshadowed and illuminated,

however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was

done. There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can

there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of

facts, and over and above scholarship.32

What is literature – or philosophy -- in a time of mass death – in Haiti, Rwanda, or Auschwitz?

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 16

Can it effect a kind of restitution of the human? Can Cavell’s narrative, or Sebald’s, or

Thoreau’s do this?  In the background is the terrifying thought that after mass-extinctions of

the sort that Germans and Rwandans and others have endured, no human being is possible. 

Perhaps gutting the soul of the German and Jewish landscape is gutting the possibility -- making

it impossible -- that any future Jew or German can have a soul to revive in narration. 

** **

A Henry James's story ends with a writer confessing:

We work in the dark -- we do what we can –

we give what we have.

Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.33

We read in the dark when we read Sebald or Rousseau or certain passages from George Eliot. Or

when we read Cavell on the lurching growl of a father or the lyrical poise of a mother. Or when

we read certain passages from Thoreau in train with a fox. Half of the dark is not knowing how,

or whether, that dark can illuminate our own dark woods -- not knowing how much the passion

of these words will rearrange our passions, if they do at all.

But maybe there is a kind of restitution through writing, through thinking, that can

uncover remnants of soul even in the telling of its destruction.  That would be part of a writer's

and thinker’s vocation, and perhaps give a haunting sense of what a survivor might be true to --

how that survivor could live beyond curses, lurching, and ashes, and so let the passionate

speech of literature and philosophy rescue a truth worth living (and dying) for.

Feb. 25, 2010

Edward F. Mooney

NOTES [incomplete]

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 17

1
Appalachian Mountain Club Guide, 1976, p. 3.

2
“The Availability” is reprinted in Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays, Cambridge
University Press, 1976, Ch 2.

** It helps to reread this early ’62 essay in a continental, even theological, vein. The tone set by the
epigraph is operatic and also prophetic. At the time, many must have found it offensive to their
philosophical sensibilities. We can now hear it as an invitation to read Philosophical Investigations as if it
mattered, as confession, as theater or prophecy; as responsive to the crowd; as showing what we can’t
help but know (yet will never know)—that we are mortal; that we can have or lose a voice; that one can
fall in love with the world (or out of love with it) -- and so forth. Two years later Kierkegaard and
Wittgenstein are given equal and equally respectful time in “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy.”
(Daedalus, 1964), reprinted as the final chapter in Themes out of School: Effects and Causes, University of
Chicago, 1984. See my discussions in Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy
from Thoreau to Cavell, Continuum, 2009, Chapters 6 and 7; the subtitle of the latter is “Cavell as a
Religious Continental Thinker.”

** Cavell’s figures his own sense of philosophy in a way that sets him apart from typical Anglophone
professional philosophy in declaring that he ses philosophy as a

willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings
think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary
human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to
them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape... Such
thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow questions
for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. Cynics about philosophy, and
perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty;
dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers; philosphers after my heart will
rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to
such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways
to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.
Themes Out of School, p. 9.

3
Cavell contrasts “passionate utterance” with what Austin comes to distinguish as the “illocutionary” and
“perlocutionary” force of utterances in his essay “Passionate and Performative Utterance,” Contending
with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell Goodman, Oxford 2005, Ch 10, espc. 192-3. Austin’s now-celebrated
investigation of “performatives” begins with his 1955 William James Lectures published as How to do
things with words, Oxford, 1962, 2nd edition, Harvard,1972.

4
With characteristic hyperbole, Nietzsche writes in a note from 1872, “Art is more powerful than
knowledge, because it desires life whereas knowledge attains as its final goal only – annihilation.”

George Pattison affirms a not altogether different sentiment: “Beyond the question of knowledge are
poetry, madness, love – but if these are not and cannot be knowledge, they may yet be best of all”, A
Short Course in the Philosophy of Religion, London: SCM, Press, 2001, p. 142.

5
I argue that one passion can temper of correct another -- that is, that it is not just Reason that
disciplines unruly passions -- in Lost Intimacy, Ch. 5.

6
Middlemarch, Ch 20. For reasons of space, I have omitted the sentence from Eliot introducing this
passage. Here is the fuller passage:

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 18

 That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet
wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could
hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human
life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we
should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest
of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

George Levine takes this as his epigraph for a wonderful discussion of communion with, and
distance from, plants, things and animals: “The heartbeat of the squirrel,” George Levine,
Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science, Cambridge,
Cambridge, 2008, chapter 9.

7
George Levine has provocative remarks on early modern philosophy’s leading to a kind of death in Dying
to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England, Chicago, 2002, introductory chapter,
and Ch. 9, “I think therefore I’m doomed”.

8
Eliot exemplifies a hope shared by Cavell’s ‘moral perfectionism’: ethics not only can tell us how to
restrain the bad but, as importantly, what might release the good – as imaginative vision might. See
Stanley Bates, “Stanley Cavell and Ethics”, Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge, Cambridge, 2003, Chapt. 2.

** Bates remarks that the tradition of moral philosophy as “an exploration of human living aimed at seeing
and living it better” more or less dies in Anglophone philosophy with the academic specialization of sub-
fields in the early part of the 20th Century. In his attention to Emerson and Thoreau, but also to
Shakespeare and the movies (for instance), Cavell attempts (broadly speaking) to revive an older tradition
exemplified in Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and Montaigne, and in 19th Century European philosophy, in
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Moral philosophy as providing visions of different and better lives escapes the
extreme of abstruse professional debate (say about formal justification of moral principles, a project that
easily becomes arcane to those outside professional philosophy), and equally escapes petty moralism, or
preachy ‘does and don’ts’, and ideological rant.

9
See my “Preservative Care: Saving Intimate Voice in the Humanities”, Soundings, Fall/Winter, 2008,
reprinted in Lost Intimacy, Continuum 2010.

10
I borrow some sentences here from p. 114, Lost Intimacy.

11
** We learn promises first as a way that we are bound to parents and siblings, for instance. Then, as a
child grows, differentiates, and reconfigures itself, one part of “the self” can make promises to another.
Say one vows or promises oneself to be a better violinist or listener. Cavell puts it epigrammatically: “the
‘having’ of a self is being the other to one’s self, calling upon it with the words of others.’ A ‘promise’ is
made to the “other self’ calling upon the promising self. See Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages,
Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Wiley-Blackwell, 1995, p. 102.

12
David LaRocca, “Not Following Emerson”.

13
William Day, “A Soteriology of Reading: Cavell’s Excerpts from Memory”, to appear in Stanley Cavell,
Literature, and Criticism, ed. Andrew Taylor, Manchester, forthcoming.

14
The initial chapter appears in Critical Inquiry, Summer 2006; the full book, Little Did I Know: Excerpts
from Memory (560 pages), is promised from Stanford, August, 2010. Espen Hammer writes in a
prepublication review: it is “more than a philosopher's story of his life: it is itself a piece of philosophy."

15
City of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Harvard, 2005.

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 19

16
See Jennifer Gurley’s brilliant account of this return to the shadowed world of the cave, now seen
better: “Platonic Paideia”, Philosophy in Literature, 1999. Marcia Robinson informs me that in the era of
slave plantations, “the clearing” was that special opening in woods where slaves would worship when
owners, to suppress congregation, denied them a church. Tony Morrison invokes “the clearing” in this
sense in her novel, Beloved.
17
The Maine Woods was not published in Thoreau’s lifetime. A Week was written from the cabin on
Walden Pond, but never sold, and has been overshadowed down to the present day by Walden.
18
See “Ktaadn”, Lewis Hyde, The Collected Essays of Henry D Thoreau, North Point Press, 2002, p. 113.
[also found in “Ktaadn” in The Maine Woods, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961, p. 93.]

** Aristotle has sensus communis refer to the human capacity to unify inputs from the various sense
organs. I suspect Thoreau has this in mind, too, as he pleads for “contact” and “the common sense.” From
rudimentary orientation and contact flowers a delight in nature and a sense of aliveness available to
persons equally apart from class or education or local knowledge. It would include the (nearly universal)
capacity to appreciate sunsets, for example, the practical awareness shared by aristocrats and peasants as
they handled horses or money. It would also include the highly modulated sense of aliveness found in
Rousseau’s roadside epiphany, about to be discussed. Sensus communis plays a crucial roel in Kant’s
account in the Third Critique of judgments of taste. The English "the common sense" is misleadingly
shallow; its philosophical pedigree is rich, and would include Aquinas and Vico as well as Kant and the
Romantics. See John D. Schaeffer’s fine study, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of
Relativism, Duke University Press, 1990.

19
See note 2, above, where Cavell attests to philosophy as a "willingness to think not about something
other than what ordinary human beings think about. . .“ and “a willingness to allow questions for itself
which it cannot answer with satisfaction. . . , ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to
discover.’ Themes Out of School, p. 9.

20
See my discussions of Cavell’s quite extraordinary claims that “the only correct blindness is love” and
that in “love of the world” -- not in anti-skeptical arguments -- one finds rest from wholesale philosophical
doubts: Lost Intimacy, pp. 118, 127, 185.

21
Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, II, Penguin, 1980.

22
I suspect that when George Eliot warns that too close contact with the otherness of things will be an
unbearable roar, she may be giving voice to the fear that the moment when perception and perceived
become as one can be a moment of terror as well as joy: a frighteningly ravishing calm.

23
** There is no simple way to describe what happens as the gap between perceiver and perceived closes
up in a seamlessness. Rousseau first chooses the idiom of the perceiver flowing out, reaching out the
world. As he puts it, his “frail being flowed out”. Immersion is initiated from the side of the perceiver, who
enveolpes the perceived. But a closing of the gap might be depicted through an idiom that reverses the
locus of initiative, the world (as it were) flowing in to flood the perceiving self. The perceiver is drenched
by incoming significance and so disappears, is nothing but the world. In truth, the directionality of idiom,
from inside out or from outside in will drop out entirely from a third perspective that pictures the gap-
closure as complete in a dynamic interconnectedness or synergy in which directionality drops out. The
coldness of the stream into which one plunges one’s hand becomes the coldness of the hand enveloped by
a freezing stream. Coldness, hand, and stream then become an experientially undifferentiated plenum.
Just so, Rousseau perceives the tree even as he flows into it, becoming its greenness; and the tree is
there, entering his awareness and flooding out any Jean Jacques apart from its presence. Some aspects of
Emerson’s famous passage toward becoming a “transparent eyeball’ – where he is what appears and what

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 20

appears is he – can be understood along similar lines. See Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall, Continuum,
1982, pp. 79-82.

24
Walden, “The Ponds”, Ch 9. and Rousseau, Reveries, V.

Journals, January 30, 1841. I discuss such attunement in “Wonder and Affliction: Thoreau’s Dionysian
25

World”, Thoreau as Philosopher, ed. Rick Anthony Furtak, Indiana, 2010.

26
Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, Autobiographical Exercises, Harvard, 1994, p. 17–19.

27
In Ratio Verae Theologiae, (reasoning concerning the true theology) Erasmus speaks of good literature
as a way of redeeming the soul from the darkness consequent on ingesting bad literature. Again, thanks
to Marcia Robinson.

28
** Why not use the word “sin”? Perhaps its impermissibility is this: sin cuts off from good knowing and
good passion a priori (as it were), and in a way philosophy cannot countenance. It would infect the core of
the task of becoming ‘our next (better) self’. It would wrap us as an if in an iron cage, draining the
ordeals of a life of meaning. It strips an autobiographical-philosophical narrative of dramatic forcel. Cavell
suggests that philosophy can redeem us from the deflations of skepticism. But “Excerpts from Memory”
tells us much else that Cavell’s writing might redeem him from. See In Quest of the Ordinary, Lines of
Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago, 1988, p. 26.

29
** Intelligibility is not justification. Ethics might be seeking the light and bettering imagination as much
as proving a case in the interest of justification.

30
Senses of Walden, Expanded Edition, North Point Press, 1981, p. 14f.

31
Garrett Stewart, “The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell”, in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell B.
Goodman, Oxford 2005.

32
Sebald, Campo Santo, “An Attempt at Restitution”, Modern Library, 2005.

33
James, “The Middle Years,'' (the short story), 1893, in The Tales of Henry James, Edward Wagenknecht,
Frederick Ungar, 1984). After “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task”, the quote continues,
“The rest is the madness of art."

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 21

Handout Passionate Speech in Dark Woods of a Life
Ed Mooney
Syracuse and LeMoyne
Cavelleria Siracusa, March 4, 2010

Passionate utterance: “an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire” (Cavell) -- through
which selves and cities are transformed.

Caution: The appalling and needless loss of life on this mountain has been due largely to the failure
of robust trampers to realize that wintry storms of incredible violence occur at times even during the
summer months.  Rocks become ice-coated, freezing fog blinds and suffocates, winds of hurricane force
exhaust the tramper, and when he stops to rest, a temperature below freezing completes the tragedy.  If
you are experiencing difficulty, abandon your climb.  The highest wind velocities ever recorded were
attained on Mt Washington.  Since the worst is yet to come, turn back without shame, before it's too late.
-- Appalachian Mountain Club Guide, 1976

Epochs are in accord with themselves only if the crowd comes into these radiant confessionals
which are the theaters or the arenas, and as much as possible, . . . to listen to its own confessions of
cowardice and sacrifice, of hate and passion . . . For there is no theatre which is not prophecy. Not this
false divination which gives names and dates, but true prophecy, that which reveals to men these
surprising truths: that the living must live, that the living must die, that autumn must follow summer,
spring follow winter, that there are four elements, that there is happiness, that there are innumerable
miseries, that life is a reality, that it is a dream, that man lives in peace, that man lives on blood; in short,
those things they will never know.
-- Jean Giraudoux, epigraph to Cavell’s “The Availability of the Philosophy
of the Later Wittgenstein”, Phil Rev ’62

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into
the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen
vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart
beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk
about well wadded with stupidity. --George Eliot, Middlemarch, Ch 20

Night was beginning to fall. I perceived the sky, some stars, and green leaves. This first sensation
was a delicious moment. I was conscious of myself only through this. I was being born into life in that
instant, and it seemed to me as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed in the
present moment, I remembered nothing, I had no distinct notion of my individuality, nor the slightest idea
of what had just happened to me; I didn't know who I was or where I was; I felt no pain, or fear, or
uneasiness. I watched my blood flow just as I would have watched a brook, without imagining that this
blood belonged in any way to me. I felt throughout my whole being, a ravishing calm, and every time I
remember it I can find nothing comparable in all the activity of familiar pleasures.
--Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, II

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 22

 Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. -- Henry James, “The Middle Years”

Why can I not get such episodes out of my mind? Why, when I take the S-Bahn toward Stuttgart city
center, do I think every time we reach Feuersee Station that the fires are still blazing above us, and since
the terrors of the last war years, even though we have rebuilt our surroundings so wonderfully well, we
have been living in a kind of underground zone? Why did it seem to the traveler on a winter night . . . that
the network of lights [from the new administrative complex] glittered in the darkness like a constellation
of stars spreading all over the world, so that these Stuttgart stars are visible not only in the cities of
Europe, the boulevards of Beverly Hills and Buenos Aries, but wherever columns of trucks with their
cargoes of refugees move along the dusty roads, obviously never stopping, in the zones of devastation
that are always spreading somewhere, in the Sudan, Kosovo, Eritrea, or Afghanistan?
So what is literature good for? Am I, Hölderlin asked himself, to fare like the thousands who in their
springtime days lived in both foreboding and love, but were seized by the avenging Fates on a drunken
day, secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild
confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still
praises immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of death presented by the poet . .
. is both overshadowed and illuminated, however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice
was done. There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at
restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship.
--W. E. Sebald, Campo Santo, pp. 201-203

** ** **
. . . the ‘having’ of a self is being the other to one’s self, calling upon it with the words of others.
– Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages

. . . in a sense, to write your own words, to write your own inner voice, is philosophy. But the
discipline most opposed to writing, and to life, is analytic philosophy.
— Cavell, in The American Philosopher, p. 126

. . . our whole lives may have the character of finding that anthem which would be native to our
own tongue, and which alone can be the true answer for each of us to the questioning, the calling, the
demand for ultimate reckoning which devolves upon us.
—Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning

When I think of the muskrat gnawing off his leg,

it is as the plectrum on the harp or the bow upon the viol,
drawing forth a majestic strain or psalm,
which immeasurably dignifies our common fate.
--Henry David Thoreau - Journals, VI, pp. 98-99

Incomparable as well as peerless, Little Did I Know makes powerful contributions to the art of
writing, especially that of autobiography. It will contribute to how we understand the lives of philosophers
and will be read with pleasure and utility for decades and centuries to come.
—Marc Shell, on Little Did I Know: Excerpts: from Memory

[Philosophy is a] willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings
think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot
help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a
flash across a landscape... Such thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 23

questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about
humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at
answers; philosphers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no
satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways
to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.
-- Cavell, Themes out of School, p. 9

Passionate Speech, Mooney 3/5/10 24