Thursday, August 23, 2018
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID
I receive the Harvard alumni/ae magazine every two months or so, and always turn to the back to see who has died. In my most recent copy, which got misdirected and finally showed up, there was news that Stanley Cavell had passed away last June. Stanley and I were at Harvard at the same time, in the late '50s. I have written about him in my autobiography, and shan't repeat any of the stories here. But he was a presence at Harvard and in Anglo-American philosophy, and I thought I should note his passing. Stanley was older than I. He died at the age of 91.
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"We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of significance and feeling, modes of response, sense of humor, and of significance and fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation — all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls 'forms of life.' Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (because it is) terrifying."
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