How We Stand Before Things to Come: Cavell as Reader of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin

Abstract

Beneath Stanley Cavell's philosophy for the future lies a view of history and historicity expressed by the ideas of 'declining decline' and 'finding as founding'. In this article, I analyze how such ideas arise from readings of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. In his dialogues with these thinkers, Cavell engages with issues in the philosophy of history that are mostly absent from discussions of human life within the analytic tradition. I claim that Cavell's notion of the ordinary is as much inherited from this engagement as from the philosophies of language of Austin and Wittgenstein. I end by suggesting that despite Cavell's fascination with Heidegger, his philosophy for the future is in fact closer to Benjamin in the way they both conceive relations between art and the ordinary.