In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism

45–47.

At Berkeley:

THE MRS. WILLIAM BECKMAN LECTURES (1983)

1

The Philosopher in American Life

(Toward Thoreau and Emerson)

WHEN IN ACCEPTING THE INVITATION to deliver a set of Beckman Lectures I asked what expectations are placed on such occasions, and I was assured by my hosts that they would be interested in whatever I wanted to talk about, I wasn’t certain whether I was being answered or humored. It is true that since the time I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the forties, and an assistant professor here (and movie-goer) in the fifties and early sixties, there have been at this university more members of its faculty from whom I have learned more about more things—from the art of music to Shakespeare and from skepticism to transcendentalism—than have been together at any other place. So I have the uncanny feeling that I could say anything here and be understood completely. But I will try not to press my luck.

I will not even explore the urgency of the wish to be understood completely, for example trace the source of the wish in my intermittent sense that no utterance of mine could be acceptable simultaneously to all those by whom I desire understanding, say by the primarily philosophical and by the primarily literary. Some may accuse me of trying to reconcile my father and my mother. But if these terms (I mean philosophy and literature) name halves of my own mind, it is perhaps all the more immediately urgent for me to see that they keep in touch.

What I have done for these lectures, wishing to take the occasion of old memories and aspirations to form some measure of my progress, is to propose as their primary business the reading of a set of texts that represent the oldest and the newest of my interests, placing them in a loosely woven net of concepts. The point of the loose weave is to register that I am as interested in the weaving together of these texts as I am in their individual textures, and that I wish to leave open, or keep open usefully, how it is one gets from one to another of them.

One set of these connections forms perhaps the most pervasive, yet all but inexplicit, thought in these lectures: that the sense of the ordinary that my work derives from the practice of the later Wittgenstein and from J. L. Austin, in their attention to the language of ordinary or everyday life, is underwritten by Emerson and Thoreau in their devotion to the thing they call the common, the familiar, the near, the low. The connection means that I see both developments—ordinary language philosophy and American transcendentalism—as responses to skepticism, to that anxiety about our human capacities as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes, interpreted by that philosophy as our human subjection to doubt. My route to the connection lay at once in my tracing both the ordinary language philosophers as well as the American transcendentalists to the Kantian insight that Reason dictates what we mean by a world, as well as in my feeling that the ordinariness in question speaks of an intimacy with existence, and of an intimacy lost, that matches skepticism’s despair of the world. These routes from, say, Emerson to Wittgenstein are anticipated in a thought I have put many ways over the years, never effectively enough—the thought that ordinary language philosophy is not a defense of what may present itself as certain fundamental, cherished beliefs we hold about the world and the creatures in it, but, among other things, a contesting of that presentation, for, as it were, the prize of the ordinary. So that epistemologists who think to refute skepticism by undertaking a defense of ordinary beliefs, perhaps suggesting that there is a sense in which they are certain, or sufficiently probable for human purposes, have already given in to skepticism, they are living it.

But this thought of mine virtually says of itself that it must be ineffective, as well as abusive. For think of it this way. What it comes to is the claim that such an expression as The world exists and I and others in it does not express a belief about the world; or in other words it comes to the claim that belief is not the name of my relation to the existence of the world and I and others in it; and that to insist otherwise is at variance with our ordinary word belief. But if that is so, one who has arrived at the surmise that perhaps the world and I and others do not exist, or anyway that we cannot know with certainty that they do, must simply feel, So much the worse for our ordinary words, and for whatever you imagine that other relation to the world might have been.

After enough repetitions and variations of this pattern of inconsequence or irresolution—or put otherwise, after some five hundred pages of a belated doctoral dissertation on the subject—I concluded that the argument between the skeptic and the antiskeptic had no satisfactory conclusion, or that I would search for none. This left me at a place I called Nowhere, or more specifically it left me disappointed. I mean that as I began to think and to write my way out of my nowhere, what I found I was writing about was disappointment, the life-consuming disappointments in Shakespearean tragedy, but also the philosophy-consuming disappointments with knowledge as expressed in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It was in following out these paths, with some reason to believe that their crossings were definitive for my philosophical direction, that I came to the idea that philosophy’s task was not so much to defeat the skeptical argument as to preserve it, as though the philosophical profit of the argument would be to show not how it might end but why it must begin and why it must have no end, at least none within philosophy, or what we think of as philosophy.

Here my thought was that skepticism is a place, perhaps the central secular place, in which the human wish to deny the condition of human existence is expressed; and so long as the denial is essential to what we think of as the human, skepticism cannot, or must not, be denied. This makes skepticism an argument internal to the individual, or separate, human creature, as it were an argument of the self with itself (over its finitude). That this is expressed as a kind of argument of language with itself (over its essence) is how it came to look to me as I worked out the thought that Wittgenstein’s Investigations is not written—as it had in my experience uniformly been taken—as a refutation of skepticism (as if the problem of skepticism were expressed by a thesis) but as a response to what I have come to call the truth of skepticism (as if the problem of skepticism is expressed by its threat, or temptation, by our sense of groundlessness). The way I work this out in relation to the Investigations starts from the thought that we share criteria by means of which we regulate our application of concepts, means by which, in conjunction with what Wittgenstein calls grammar, we set up the shifting conditions for conversation; in particular from the thought that the explanatory power of Wittgenstein’s idea depends on recognizing that criteria, for all their necessity, are open to our repudiation, or dissatisfaction (hence they lead to, as well as lead from, skepticism); that our capacity for disappointment by them is essential to the way we possess language, in perhaps the way that Descartes found our capacity for error to be essential to our possession of the freedom of the will. (If we could not repudiate them they would not be ours, in the way we discover them to be; they would not be our responsibility.) The record of this work is given in the first and especially in the fourth and last part of The Claim of Reason, the middle two parts of which consist essentially of the dissertation that some twenty years earlier had led to my nowhere.

The lead I wish to follow in these lectures is something that kept pressing for attention in the fourth part of that book, the outcropping of moments and lines of romanticism. While I tried at each of these outbreaks to give expression to this pressure (for future reference, so to speak) I felt it was threatening the end of my story, if for no other reason than that I did not know enough, or how, to accept it. But my ignorance has become a luxury I can no longer afford to excuse, because the pressures to make a beginning, consecutive to the book, at uncovering the connection with romanticism have become irresistible. A signal of these pressures is my having marked my sense of the underwriting of ordinary language philosophy in the work of Emerson and Thoreau by speaking of an intimacy with existence, or intimacy lost—a signal recognizing the claim that the transcendentalism established in their pages is what became of romanticism in America.

Accordingly, given my interest in putting Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s preoccupation with the ordinary and the everyday together with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s emphasis on the common, the near, and the low, it is understandable that I would eventually want to understand more about Wordsworth’s notorious dedication of his poetic powers, in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, to [making] the incidents of common life interesting, and his choosing for that purpose low and rustic life together with the language of such men as lead that life, which he calls a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets. My concern with Coleridge more or less follows, but it has special features which will come forward when I read him in a certain detail in succeeding lectures. What I mean by romantic is meant to find its evidence—beyond the writing of Emerson and Thoreau—in the texts of Wordsworth and Coleridge that I explicitly consider. If what I say about romanticism is false to these texts, then for my purposes here it is false of romanticism, period. If what I say is true but confined to just the texts I consider, I shall be surprised but not abashed; I know very well that there is in any case work ahead of me. I have chosen to talk about war-horses not only because I want my evidence, if narrow, to be as widely shared as possible, but also because I am not concerned here with subtleties of definition or with history. What I say about romantic exemplifications can only be useful if it is obvious—as obvious as the other examples philosophers use. (Here I am siding with philosophers for whom the obvious is the subject of philosophy, as for example, Wittgenstein, and partially, Heidegger.)

But look for a moment, before coming back to America, at the magnitude of the claim in wishing to make the incidents of common life interesting. Beyond the word common take the words make and interesting. Wordsworth’s modest statement first of all carries on its face its competition with other conceptions of poetry, since the verb to make is forever being cited as what the word poetry declares itself to take on. Presumably this is meant to call attention to the fact that poems are made, invented, that they are created, hence by creators; this would be confirmed in such a remark as Auden’s, that poetry makes nothing happen. What the words make interesting say is that poetry is to make something happen—in a certain way—to the one to whom it speaks; something inside, if you like. That what is to happen to that one is that he or she become interested in something, aligns the goal with what I have taken as the explicit presiding ambition of Walden, and with the enterprises of such philosophers as Wittgenstein and Austin. They perceive us as uninterested, in a condition of boredom, which they regard as, among other things, a sign of intellectual suicide. (So metaphysics would be seen as one more of the false or fantastic excitements that boredom craves. So may be the activities appealed to in refuting or replacing metaphysics, for example, appeals to logic or to play.) This is what Wittgenstein has against metaphysics, not just that it produces meaningless propositions—that, even in the sense in which it is true, would be only a derivative of its trouble. His diagnosis of it is rather that it is empty, empty of interest, as though philosophy were there motivated by a will to emptiness. When Austin says of philosophical examples that they are jejune (Sense and Sensibilia, p. 3), he is using a common room word to name, with all due differences of sensibility, the Nietzschean void. What worse term of criticism does he have? (As if J. P. Morgan were to say of a business’s collateral that it is