Richard Eldridge

These chapters describe and defend Cavell’s philosophical anthropology and critical-aesthetic practice. They situate that practice as both a response to and a furthering of an image of America as a site of futural freedom always to be achieved, and they extend Cavell’s practice into new readings of works of poetry, film, and music. In doing so, they show us how we might live with our shared modern condition more productively, through engagement with the affordances of art. Cavell’s own writing in turn both describes and re-enacts this achievement, thus itself manifesting the powers of art in response to modern life and serving as a model of ‘knowing how to go on’ within its ambit.

This essay surveys and assesses Hegel’s general account of the role of crises in the formation of a culture of lived freedom. Ultimate resolution of crisis, according to Hegel, depends on a superintending divine agency that resolves the fractures, alienation, and competitive individualism of modern Enlightenment culture – a view that cannot be supported. Hegel’s specific analysis of that culture in the Phenomenology appears in the section on “Culturally Educated Spirit,” which includes his reading of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, I argue that there is no straightforward general way for human agents to avoid succumbing at least in part to Lui’s self-professed mercenary individualism. The result is a culture of generalized alienation and dissatisfaction, in which crises of opposition are all at once universal, irresolvable, and insignificant in playing no role in the achievement of meaningful freedom. Modern self-making is important, but its polymorphic and mutually opaque varieties threaten to overwhelm any possibilities of involvement in joint, meaningful activity. (In Sartre’s terms, hell is other people.) Despite this bleak diagnosis, however, I gesture, drawing on Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, to possibilities of developing the skill of mutual appreciation, as an immanent teleology makes itself locally manifest within a relationship, surprisingly and in the face of crises of misunderstanding rooted in competitive-acquisitive individualism.

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth.Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hölderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires.By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism and waywardness. And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are.