Quiet desperation, secret melancholy: polemos and passion in citizenship education

Abstract

Contemporary scenes of democracy and education exemplify a real scepticism about the point of political participation, and by implication about one's place in society in relation to others. What is called for is a recovery of desire per se – of people's desire to say what they want to say and their desire to participate in the creation of the public. In response, this article examines Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. The way he reconstructs philosophy from the perspective of ordinary language provides us with an alternative route to citizenship. Cavell's philosophy is turned towards our existential need to recover political passion, the mainspring of a desire to think that affirms humanity as necessarily political. And in the end this existential need dovetails with the need of the polis: that people speak in their own voice. That, I shall conclude, must be the basis of education for citizenship and political literacy.

Keywords:

• Stanley Cavell
• ordinary language philosophy
• Emersonian moral perfectionism
• citizenship education
• democracy
• polemos
• political emotion
• conversation
• moral encounter
• acknowledgment

Notes

1. Mulhall says on this point that though our relationship to the world is ‘fundamentally criterial, it cannot intelligibly be assessed in terms of truth and falsity’ (Mulhall 1996, 7). His expression ‘criterial foundation’ (15), however, suggests an essentialist trace in his interpretation of Cavell's stance on criteria.

2. In discussing the political implication of Cavell's philosophy, Andrew Norris highlights the idea of conversation. In Norris’ view, the value of conversation is to acquire ‘more eyes, different eyes’, to change our perspectives, and hence this involves ‘a conversion or exchange of views’ (Norris 2006, 93). He then associates ‘conversion’ with ‘a figure for a turning in which we aim toward rather than away from our real need (the sun, the Good, God) so that we can see (betrachten) the truth’ (93, emphasis added). As much as this is a part of an aspect of conversation and conversion, Cavell's idea of acknowledgment is suggestive, in my view, of a more dynamic and subtle relationship between conversion and aversion (or even to say, aversion as a part of conversion) than this converging picture of conversion might convey.

3. Cavell says: ‘The point of the proof in saying “I think” is not alone that it must be said, or thought, in taking it upon myself, but also that no one else can, that is, no one can say it for me’ (Cavell 2004, 202–3).

4. Norris sees Cavell's philosophy ‘as existential politics’ (Norris 2006, 91) and claims that, on Cavell's view, ‘the individual soul's conversion is political in its origin’ (95). What matters for Cavell in my view, however, is not so much whether existential conversion is already ‘political’ or not (as if the ‘political’ were already there), but the way one learns to become political while at the same time destabilising the existing form of the political. In this sense, I would say that our existential conversion is educational before being political.

5. Cavell says: ‘my idea of passionate utterance turns out to be a concern with performance after all’ (Cavell 2005, 187).