Crisis and Rebirth: Stanley Cavell and American Transcendentalism

• In Event: Transcendence and Education

Abstract

The third paper of our panel strive to destabilize risk management mentality. In order to live beyond the risk society, there is a need to cultivate the power of critical thinking – not in the kind advocated by Michael Sandel for developing deliberative democracy, but a Cavellian-Emersonian mode of receptive-responsive mode of thinking (Standish 2012a), one that is called for urgently in contemporary education under the auspices of risk management discourse. We need to cultivate an alternative mode of critical thinking that makes possible self-transcendence, to convert the risk to crisis – crisis as a chance, the momentum of conversion to celebrate “a second birth” or “rebirth” (Cavell 1992; Thoreau 1992). This asks us, teachers and researchers, to reconsider the precondition of critical thinking – say, “from the inmost to the outmost,” in Emerson’s words (“Self-Reliance”). This calls for the cultivation of the resilient self along the line of Emerson’s idea of “Man Thinking”– a kind of the self that is receptive to chance, and is yet can convert, through thinking, fate to power. (Emerson, “Fate”).
The third paper in our panel attempts to critically reconsider the potential of Dewey’s pragmatist idea of security without foundation as a way of living in the risk society (Dewey 1984; 1988). Not only to live with the risk society, there is some potential in his American philosophy to live beyond the risk society, transcending its dystopia and converting despair to hope. Such transcendence in Dewey’s case is made possible through the cultivation of critical thinking – typically adapted, for example, by Michael Sandel for his own discourse on deliberative democracy and justice. I will argue Deweyan critical thinking needs to be further reconstructed, and even to be destabilized so that it can exercise its best possible power of transcendence in the common. I will explore an alternative way of enhancing the possibility of the idea of security without foundation from within American philosophy by way of the mediation of Stanley Cavell’s rereading of Emerson and Thoreau’s American transcendentalism. They help us show an alternative sense of transcendence in the ordinary. Cavell’s American transcendentalism directs us downward (as “transcendence down” [Standish 2012b, p. 25]), to the ordinary, on the one hand, and upwards, onto the horizon of an excess beyond reciprocity and mutuality, that of “extra-vagance,” in Thoreau’s word (Thoreau 1992, p. 216).

Author

• Naoko Saito, Kyoto University