Abstract
Taking Cavell’s personalized writing style as an exemplary form of essay writing, the author examines its underlying structure from which to draw out some important educational elements. These elements are: “voice” as a philosophical method to self-knowledge in a first-person manifestation and “text” as an independent quasi-autonomous entity by which our voice is to be drawn out and to which it is to respond. In Cavell’s writings, the presence of these two elements is widespread. and the dialectical interaction between them is distinctively audible. Attributing these characteristics of Cavell’s writing style to “the essay-form,” the author compares and associates Cavell’s writing style with Montaigne’s to see if their writing styles as the essay-form can be formulated as a practically adoptable pedagogical form of writing in which young students can experiment with their subjectivity as an act of “self-attempt” or “self-study” in the original sense of “the essay.”
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Notes
- 1.
For Rorty, philosophy after this critique is “a kind of writing” for the re-description of the world in a new way, whereas, for Derrida, philosophy is “writing about writing” for the deconstruction of “metaphysics of presence.” See Richard Rorty (1978).
- 2.
See Hartle (2003).
- 3.
The term “modernist” here is meant to be associated with “modernist art” in which, in a spirit of experimentation, the traditions and conventions of the past are no longer taken for granted. “Modernist art” usually refers to artworks produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s through to the 1970s. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and the functions of art, being highly conscious of the nature of their own practice. A salient characteristic of modern art is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form and work that draw attention to the processes and materials used. I think that the same thing can be said about the nature of what Cavell attempts to do in his practice of philosophy. We will see more of this aspect of Cavell’s philosophical project later in this chapter.
- 4.
I mean Montaigne’s words from the preface cited above as follows: “there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject.” The italics are mine.
- 5.
Montaigne says that he turns to philosophy and essay-writing “to make it (his being) appear in public a little more decent” (Montaigne 1958, p. 409).
- 6.
I described in my earlier chapter Cavell’s account of the relation of his writing to the tradition of modern philosophy in terms of two turns, “the historical and the intra-personal”.
- 7.
“Philosophical method” here can be considered as consisting of steps that are always to be taken by oneself and for oneself. Yet it is always to be re-appropriated from its point of origin, at once within and beyond its particular human inventor. I agree with Gould in saying that Cavell seems to think that there exist steps or routes to self-knowledge that are independent of particular persons and their spiritual accomplishment, even if “the steps or routes” here should not be understood as referring to the method in any conventional sense of it (Gould 1998, p. 26).
- 8.
What should be noted here is that Cavell’s emphasis on the autobiographical can also be seen as the philosophical response to metaphysics or our skeptical impulse to it. This is why Cavell says that “the necessity and openness of philosophy’s arrogance and autobiographicality is closely connected to the fact of philosophy’s humility or poverty essential in this arrogation” (Cavell 1994, p. 8). I think “philosophy’s humility or poverty” here refers to the groundlessness of our language (and knowledge) in relation to the world. This point will be further discussed later in this chapter.
- 9.
Here, we should notice that the “commonness” or “representativeness” of the autobiographical is what we are supposed to obtain through the inner journey of struggle, not to be assumed or given. This makes the concepts of “commonness” or “representativeness” distinct from the concept of “universality” in Cavell’s philosophy.
- 10.
We can describe this philosophical skepticism as pretending to be “more than a kind of writing” in Rorty’s words. See Rorty (1978).
- 11.
Gould describes this shift in Cavell as a transition from the method of ordinary language as appeals to the voice to the model of philosophy as a kind of reading (Gould 1998, p. 12). It is interesting to note that Gould thinks that this shift is made by Cavell as a response to a kind of methodological crisis or overload.
- 12.
According to Cavell, it is derived from the way we ordinary use language. In using language, we tend to conjure ourselves up with the idea of ‘an absolute relation to the world’ because the way we are attuned to criteria in using language is so intimate and absolute. This means that it tends to lead us to project our agreement in using language into our relation to the world. Thus, it is almost inevitable for us to be confused or obtrusive with words in using language in regard to our knowledge about the world. That is to say, our wish for, or obsession with, the objective or metaphysical truth is derived from the way we ordinarily use language. In this sense, what prevents us from seeing the obvious is ourselves, the way we are as embodied linguistic creatures.
- 13.
References
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Kwak, DJ. (2012). Philosophy as the Essay Form of Writing: Cavell’s Concepts of Voice, Method, and Text. In: Education for Self-transformation. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2401-3_6
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