Receptivity, possibility, and democratic politics

Abstract

In this paper I present a model of receptivity that is composed of ontological and normative dimensions, which I argue answer to the critical-diagnostic and to the possibility-disclosing needs of democratic politics. I distinguish between ‘pre-reflective receptivity,’ understood ontologically as a condition of intelligibility, and ‘reflective receptivity,’ understood normatively as a condition of disclosing new possibilities.

• receptivity
• change
• possibility
• critique
• reflective disclosure

Notes

1. I am paraphrasing a favorite line from Cavell, here, changing the grammar from the second-person singular to the first-person plural. See Stanley Cavell, ‘The Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 87.

2. See J. Habermas, The New Obscurity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989): 48–77; Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 138–73; and, Nikolas Kompridis Critique and Disclosure. Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 245–80. Recently, see, Sarah Amsler, ‘Striving for the Politics of Possibility,’ Graduate Journal of Social Science 8, no. 1 (2011).

3. Not just any future, of course. We cannot determine the future, but we can relate to it differently, rendering it more receptive to us by being more receptive to it. Under 21st century conditions of potentially catastrophic climate change the future does look bleak indeed; but why not let the bleakness of the future register as a call to the present, urging us to live differently, together and with the earth?.

4. See Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 3–13.

5. See my ‘The Idea of New Beginning: A Romantic Source of Normativity and Freedom’, Nikolas Kompridis (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism (New York: Routledge, 2006), especially: 40–47.

6. See my ‘The Priority of Receptivity to Creativity’, Critical Horizons, 13, no. 3 (2012), and ‘So we Need Something Else for Reason to Mean’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 26, no. 4 (2000).

7. See Charles Taylor's ‘Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein’, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995): 61–78.

8. Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4, no. 1 (1996): 2.

9. I am assuming most readers are aware that the critical insights and innovative methods we associate with the work of Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Taylor, even Habermas, to mention some of the most significant instances, would not have been possible without the conceptual resources of Heideggerian ontology.

10. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 29, my emphasis.

11. Charles Taylor, ‘Lichtung and Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein’, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press): 69.

12. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977): 212.

13. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989): 66, my emphasis.

14. This line of argument merges the influence of both Hegel and Emerson on my thinking, the Hegel of the Philosophy of Right and the Emerson of the essay, ‘Fate’.

15. Jennifer Nedelky bases her account of receptivity on practices of mindfulness and meditation, which she discusses in illuminating ways. However, I am not persuaded that these practices are normatively compelling examples of receptivity. As Nedelsky notes, receptivity conceived in terms of mindfulness leaves ‘mysterious and ineffable … the ways that clear seeing, freed from preconception (including about who we think we are) yields not just a freedom, but a set of commitments (to the well being of others) that one might say amount to judgments’. In other words, what is left mysterious and ineffable is how receptivity as a form of mindfulness enables us to be answerable to others. If on the other hand, one thinks about receptivity in terms of answerability, as I do, (one is not acting receptively if one is not answerable to what one has become receptive), one does not have this problem, because receptivity is already ‘built into’ our normative relationships to (human and non-human) others.

16. I discuss the shortcomings of this way of construing receptivity in an exchange with Morton Schoolman, from which some of what follows is drawn. See Morton Schoolman, ‘Situating Receptivity: From Critique to Reflective Disclosure’, and my reply to Schoolman, ‘On Critique and Disclosure: A Reply to Four Generous Critics’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 9, November, 2011, pp. 1033–142, 1063–1077. (I also reply to Amy Allen, Fred Rush, and Robert Sinnerbrink).

17. I have discussed in some detail the implications of Cavell's interpretation of A Doll’s House for clarifying the meaning of receptivity in connection with Heidegger's receptivity-based notions of care and solicitude in Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future: 199–222. For Cavell's own interpretation, see the chapter, ‘The Conversation of Justice’, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 101–26.

18. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: 114.

19. Ibid., xxxi–xxxii.

20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962): 165.

21. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: 112.

22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays. First and Second Series (New York: Vintage, 1990): 239–62.

23. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989).

24. The way that Nedelsky models the relationship between receptivity and judgment, it seems to me, still operates within the framework of the theory of knowledge in Kant's first Critique, analogously reproducing the relationship between intuition (receptivity) and concept (judgment).

25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 541.

26. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: 31.

27. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Maarshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989).