Examples of Perfectionism

1. Two Kinds of Examples

Two claims stand behind my title. I will argue first that, if we read Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy the way I do, in which rationality is the means to the end of human freedom rather than being an end in itself, then Kant offers a fuller example of what Stanley Cavell calls Emersonian perfectionism, but which I will call Cavell’s own perfectionism, than Cavell himself has recognized even in his most sympathetic account of Kant, and can help us see the full power of such perfectionism. Second, I will argue that there is a deep affinity between the views of moral education with which Kant and Cavell accompany their examples of moral perfectionism, in that each thinks that examples of the possibility of actually living a moral life in the face of the inexorable imperfection of the human condition play a central role in moral education. This claim may seem even more surprising than the first, since Kant seems to focus on the moral education of children by their elders, while Cavell focuses on the education of grown-ups,¹ and, for Kant, moral education seems to take place primarily in the nursery and classroom, while, for Cavell, it can seem to take place primarily in the theater, whether that presents live actors or flickering images on a screen. But I will argue that there are not only similarities between their images of what moral education must teach but also the similarity that Kant too, like a true moral perfectionist, is clear that the process of moral education is never ending and never ended.

2. Cavellian Perfectionism

I will base my interpretation of Cavell’s perfectionism on the account he offers in his second magnum opus, Cities of Words, since, for someone like me, who took “Hum 5” as a freshman in 1965–66, read Cavell’s first work on film as it appeared while I was still at Harvard in graduate school, but then, having left to start my own career, followed Cavell’s turn to Emerson from a greater distance, that book is very special, both a souvenir of my own youth but also a time-lapse film, in which we can see in a few hundred pages how Cavell’s whole career of thinking flowered from seeds planted in those early lectures. And, for me at least, Cavell’s characterization of perfectionism in the introduction to Cities of Words, “In the Place of the Classroom,” is the clearest he has offered, its very title reminding us of one of the central educational themes of perfectionism, one that we might trace all the way back to Plato’s Seventh Letter, that education ultimately takes place in a relation between person and person, not in a relation between a person and a printed page.

Although Cavell does not use such academic language, on the basis of this text, I understand perfectionism as comprising both a metaethics and a normative ethics. By the metaethics of Cavell’s perfectionism, I mean his general account of moral thinking as taking the form of holding ourselves up to the idea of a better world and a better existence than we currently enjoy, one that we know that we can to some degree attain but at the same time know we can never fully attain, for perfectionism “specifically sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfection”² (why I have previously written that, if it were not so ugly, we might better call Cavellian perfectionism “perfectingism”).³ Cavell expresses this first point by saying that, in every “variation” of perfectionism, “the way in which we now hold the world is contrasted with, reformed into, a future way we could help it become” (Cities of Words, 1); more fully,

Each of these variations provides a position from which the present state of human existence can be judged and a future state achieved, or else the present judged to be better than the cost of achieving it. The very conception of a divided self and a doubled world, providing a perspective of judgment upon the world as it is, measured...