The Ordinary, Romanticism, and Democracy

To “reinsert the human voice in philosophical thinking” and to draw out the ethical and political consequences of this reinsertion has been the goal of Stanley Cavell’s work (Contesting Tears 63). For Cavell, the aim of ordinary language philosophy is first to understand that language is spoken, pronounced by a human voice within a form of life, and then to move from the question of the common usage of language to the more novel, less explored question of the relationship between an individual speaker and her community. For Cavell, this new question implies a redefinition of subjectivity in language on the basis of the relationship between an individual voice and a linguistic community; that is, on the basis of the rightness or fit of agreements in language. Here, voice implies a claim: an individual voice claims universal validity and within that validity searches for the right tonality. The quest for this “rightness” [justesse¹]—for an absolute and ordinary expression that aligns the inner with the outer—combines language, politics, and ethics. It also defines romanticism, at least its legacy in America according to Cavell, Emerson, and Thoreau: a romanticism of democracy that fulfills the romantic dream of re-appropriating the ordinary world through individual expression.

To speak of our subjectivity as the route back to our conviction in reality is to speak of romanticism. Perhaps romanticism can be understood as the natural struggle between the representation and the acknowledgment of our subjectivity (between the acting out and the facing off of ourselves, as psycho-analysts would more or less say). Hence Kant, and Hegel; hence Blake secreting the world he believes in; hence Wordsworth competing with the history of poetry by writing out himself, writing himself back into the world.

(Cavell, The World Viewed 22)

The uncanniness

In order to understand this, it is necessary to perceive what Stanley Cavell calls, inspired both by Wittgenstein and Thoreau, “the uncanniness of the ordinary.” In his preface to the work of Veena Das, Life and Words, Cavell notes that the ordinary is our ordinary language in so far as we constantly render it foreign to ourselves, which invokes the Wittgensteinian image of the philosopher as explorer of a foreign tribe: in this tribe, it is we who are foreigners and strange to ourselves—“at home perhaps nowhere, perhaps anywhere.” This intersection of the familiar and the strange, shared by anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, is the first location of the ordinary:

Wittgenstein’s anthropological perspective is one puzzled in principle by anything human beings say and do, hence perhaps, at a moment, by nothing.

(Cavell, “Forward” x)

The ordinary does not exactly mean the common. We no more know what is common than what is ordinary to us. It is not determined by a web of beliefs, or of shared dispositions. Common language nevertheless defines the ordinary: between the ordinary (everyday, shared life) and ordinary language, between the proximity to ordinary life called for in American transcendentalism, and the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin, the ordinary is the search for a new land to discover and explore, then to describe. The thought of the ordinary is experiential, improvisational, demands new forms of attention to the human form of life.

I will start from transcendentalism and from the hypothesis of Cavell: that the distinctive feature of American thought, its capacity to begin philosophy again in America, is found in its invention of the ordinary. This new departure of philosophy—which has nothing of the clean slate to it, but rather, like the Hollywood remarriage comedies, it has to do with a second chance (Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness)—is a reversal of philosophy’s two inveterate tendencies: the denial of ordinary language and of our ordinariness in the philosophical pretension to go beyond them, to correct them, or again the philosophical pretension to know what we mean, what is common to us, universal. The call to the ordinary is traversed by the “uncanniness of the ordinary.” It is from this perspective that it is necessary to register Cavell’s return to Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson asserts the intellectual independence...