Discussion

PHILOSOPHY AS TRANSLATION: DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION FROM DEWEY TO CAVELL

Naoko Saito

Graduate School of Education

Kyoto University

ABSTRACT. Dewey’s idea of ‘‘mutual national understanding’’ faces new challenges in the age of globaliza- tion, especially in education for global understanding. In this essay Naoko Saito aims to find an alterna- tive idea and language for ‘‘mutual national understanding,’’ one that is more attuned to the sensibility of our times. She argues for Stanley Cavell’s idea of philosophy as translation as such an alternative. Based upon Cavell’s rereading of Thoreau’s Walden, Saito represents Thoreau as a cross-cultural figure who transcends cultural and national boundaries. On the strength of this, she proposes a Cavellian education for global citizenship, that is, a perfectionist education for imperfect understanding in acknowledgment of alterity. Our founding of democracy must depend upon a readiness to ‘‘deconfound’’ the culture we have come from, the better to find new foundations together. The ‘‘native’’ is always in transition, by and through language, in processes of translation.

RECONSIDERING DEWEY’S DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION: BEYOND ‘‘MUTUAL NATIONAL

UNDERSTANDING’’ IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

After his visit to Japan and China in 1921, John Dewey wrote an essay on

‘‘mutual national understanding.’’ In it he noted that ‘‘travel is known to have a

broadening effect, at least if the traveler is willing to keep his mind open’’ and that

‘‘the more unlike the two [countries] are, the more opportunity there is for learn-

ing.’’ 1 This encapsulates his call for democracy as a way of life, the horizon of

which is cross-cultural, extending beyond national boundaries: according to

Dewey, democracy must begin at home, 2 but it can expand outward if we learn

from difference and learn to respect others as ‘‘friends,’’ as a source of the enrich-

ment of our own experience. 3

Today, amid the tensions and conflicts that arise among different cultures,

both within and outside of national boundaries, the relevance of Dewey’s call for

mutual national understanding has hardly dulled, especially its relevance for edu-

cation for global understanding. At the same time the situation has become more

complex than it was in Dewey’s time, for the world is ‘‘unified’’ through globaliza-

tion and national boundaries are blurred. These matters cannot but affect educa-

tion. On the one hand, education at the national level has taken, as it were, a

reactionary turn, geared toward national pride and, at its worst, toward aggressive

patriotism. On the other hand, at the global level, education is driven to success in

the global market, even at the expense of obliterating difference. The global

1. John Dewey, ‘‘Some Factors in Mutual National Understanding’’ (1921), in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1983), 262.

2. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (1927), in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1984), 368.

3. John Dewey, ‘‘Creative Democracy — The Task Before Us’’ (1939), in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1988), 368.

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network of communication often ends up reducing knowledge about others to the

various terms in an exchange of information. In both cases students and teachers

are prevented from being engaged in any deep reflection not only on other cultures

but also on their own. In light of these challenges, Dewey’s idea of, and his manner

of speaking about, learning from difference needs to be reexamined and recon-

structed, perhaps in a less optimistic way. Furthermore, we should also question

our relation with our own culture and nation while at the same time reconsidering

what it means to learn ‘‘from difference’’ as ‘‘friends’’ and envisioning an alterna-

tive mode of dialogue that addresses these cross-cultural dimensions. This requires

a rebuilding of the language of democracy and education, one attuned to the sensi-

tivity of our times.

These challenges involve three related tasks concerning democracy and educa-

tion. The first is how to represent Dewey’s idea of democracy and education so

that his American philosophy can sustain its creative and critical force from

within the home of American democracy in this age of globalization, or ‘‘Ameri-

canization’’ — a process that afflicts America itself along with the rest of the

world. 4 The second is how the foundation of education for citizenship should be

reconsidered on both national and global levels. This involves a tension between

patriotism and cosmopolitanism. 5 Third, in the dominance of a narrowly defined

sense of ‘‘practice,’’ philosophy of education faces the urgent need to acquire anew

a kind of language that enables us to reflect, criticize, and resist the totalizing ten-

dency of globalization while sustaining our hope for democracy and education.

This is especially so in times when the language of education tends to be charac-

terized by ‘‘accountability’’: everything should be measured against clearly defined

standards in order to show immediate effectiveness and impact.

In response to these tasks, this essay aims to find an alternative notion of

‘‘mutual national understanding,’’ one that shares some common ground with

Dewey’s idea of democracy and education, but that is more subtly textured and

complex. Stanley Cavell’s idea of philosophy as translation — translation in the

broader sense of encountering the strange in the familiar in order to find once again

one’s place in the world — offers such an alternative. By attending to Cavell’s

rereading of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, I shall represent Thoreau as a cross-

cultural figure who transcends cultural and national boundaries. With Cavell,

I shall argue that to treat Thoreau merely as a local writer — albeit that the locality

NAOKO SAITO is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmach, Sakyo-Ku, Kyoto 606-8501 Japan; e-mail \[email protected][. Her primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education and American philosophy.

4. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996). Readings says that ‘‘‘Americanization’ today names less a process of national imperialism than the gener- alized imposition of the rule of the cash-nexus in place of the notion of national identity as determinant of all aspects of investment in social life’’ (3).

5. Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,’’ in For Love of Country? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Penny Enslin and Patricia White, ‘‘Democratic Citizenship,’’ in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

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is no less than America and that the work is celebrated as a high point in the ach-

ievement of a literary identity for that locale — is itself ultimately a denial of

America. I shall claim, rather, that Thoreau represents an increasing hybridization

of thought, the pertinence of which becomes all the more acute in the age of glob-

alization. Cavell and Thoreau’s idea of the ‘‘politics of interpretation’’ as well as

our own reading — and indeed, translating — of their texts can provide us with a

‘‘clearing,’’ that is, a path that leads to the casting of new light on our modes of

cross-cultural dialogue. 6 On this view, the single trajectory of a ‘‘crossing’’ of bor-

ders transforms into an entanglement of inter- and intra-cultural dimensions. This,

I shall claim, points toward an alternative mode of cross-cultural dialogue as well

as a different avenue for political education, which present possibilities for democ-

racy and education in the age of globalization that must be explored. It is also my

aim to test how far Thoreau and Cavell can become critical dialogical partners for

Dewey, ones who will gradually elucidate recessive elements in the latter’s prag-

matism by eliciting what might be regarded as its muted voice — a voice that is

critically important for the finer articulation of democracy. In conclusion, I shall

propose a Cavellian alternative understanding of education for global citizenship:

perfectionist education for imperfect understanding in acknowledgment of alterity.

CAVELL’S ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY AND THE SENSES OF WALDEN

THE SENSE OF BOTTOMLESSNESS IN THE SENSES OF WALDEN

I was recently engaged in translating The Senses of Walden, Stanley Cavell’s

meditation on Thoreau’s Walden, into Japanese. This task made me acutely aware

that the act of translation is something other than a matter simply of transposing

one meaning into another. It was a process in which existing Japanese translations

of Walden were destabilized, the meanings of its sentences and words overturned.

The language of Thoreau, as well as that of Cavell, refuses to be fixed and defined.

The following quote from Walden, which Cavell cites, captures the evaporative

nature of language in both their texts: ‘‘The volatile truth of our words should con-

tinually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is translated;

its literal monument alone remains.’’ 7 In describing Thoreau as a writer, Cavell

observes that he ‘‘keeps my choices in front of me, the ones I am not making and

the ones I am. This makes me wretched and nervous.’’ 8 In The Senses of Walden

Cavell as the writer, emulating Thoreau, puts the reader through this same ‘‘trial,’’

measuring the degree of ‘‘reading, in a high sense’’ (SW, 4).

It is this sense of failure and irritation that the process of translating his text

arouses in the translator. In undertaking this task, I was struck by the absolute

limitation of translation and, at the same time, by its open-ended possibilities.

6. In his use of ‘‘clearing,’’ Thoreau clearly anticipates what will become a theme for Martin Heidegger.

7. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), XVIII.6. This work will be cited as WR (followed by roman numerals indicating chapters, and Arabic, paragraphs) in the text for all subsequent references.

8. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 49. This work will be cited as SW in the text for all subsequent references.

SAITO Philosophy as Translation 263

The process turned me back on myself, to my native language and culture, requir-

ing me to rethink them. This, in turn, raised for me the following questions: What

does it mean to be engaged in philosophy in its cross-cultural dimensions, espe-

cially as this is exemplified in the work of translation? When we see the difficulty

or impossibility of fully understanding a foreign philosophy, does that difficulty

originate simply in the foreignness of that philosophy and its language? If so, what

is the identity of that foreignness?

Cavell’s text also destabilizes our conventional idea of translation as a mere

switching from one language to another; it reminds us that there is something

more in the difficulty of translating a foreign text — more than difference in

vocabulary and grammar. The very fact that Cavell’s writing is said to be difficult

even to native speakers has a deeper implication than one might assume. In fact

Cavell implies that a purpose of writing The Senses of Walden was to make

Walden more difficult. 9 Anyone who reads Cavell’s text, whether a native speaker

of English or not, will be struck by what Walter Benn Michaels calls the sense of

‘‘bottomlessness’’ in Thoreau’s text. 10

Paradoxically, Cavell quotes from Thoreau:

‘‘There is a solid bottom everywhere’’ (WR, XVIII.14, quoted in SW, 76). The writer

challenges the apparently stable ground of language, on which the reader stands,

and the way that in reading we resort to the authority given by the text. The sense

of bottomlessness may create in the reader despair over the possibility of connect-

ing with the writer: the reader must find the bottom of words him- or herself. To a

foreign reader, this manifests itself as the impossibility of translation — skepticism

reemerging on a cross-cultural horizon.

NOT MERE WORDS: THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION

Considering some key features of Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy and

how these play out in The Senses of Walden may help us reflect upon the complex

relation between the native and the foreign in his text as well as the sources of the

sense of bottomlessness. The main task of his ordinary language philosophy is to

return language to its ordinary context, to forms of life. This is conducted in resist-

ance to philosophy’s suppression of the human voice and with the intention of

regaining intimacy between our words and life. In Thoreau’s and Ralph Waldo

Emerson’s writings on ‘‘the ordinary’’ and ‘‘the common,’’ Cavell rediscovers the

rich sources of American philosophy as those that ‘‘underwrite’’ ordinary language

philosophy. 11

Works by Emerson and Thoreau are assigned reading for school stu-

dents, but ‘‘then [they are] outgrown, as if [their] aspirations, however much they

continue to elicit a general sense of admiration, were rather an embarrassment to

9. Stanley Cavell, interview by the author, July 6, 2004; Paul Standish and Naoko Saito, ‘‘Stanley Cavell to Woruden no Sekai: Nihon no Dokusha he no Izanai’’ [Stanley Cavell’s Walden: An Introduction for Japanese Readers], in Sensu obu Woruden (the Japanese translation of The Senses of Walden), trans. Naoko Saito (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 2005), 214.

10. Walter Benn Michaels, ‘‘Walden’s False Bottom,’’ in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 417.

11. Stanley Cavell, ‘‘The Politics of Interpretation (Politics as Opposed to What?),’’ in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 32.

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the demands of a grownup existence.’’ 12

The denial of them as philosophers, he

writes, is America’s loss, and simultaneously philosophy’s loss. Against this back-

ground Cavell reclaims their writings as philosophical masterpieces that America

should be proud of. Thus Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy is inseparable from

his search for an authentic Americanness — inseparable from his attempt to

redeem the best asset of American culture and the originality of its founding of a

new nation.

In Walden and The Senses of Walden, words are not mere words, but are insep-

arable from the work of ‘‘placing ourselves in the world’’ (SW, 53). The first chapter

of Walden, entitled ‘‘Economy,’’ illustrates exactly this. It is filled with detailed

descriptions of mundane practice in ordinary life — of clothes and food, of the hut

Thoreau builds and his labor in building it, and of his hoeing of his bean field.

Cavell reads these accounts of ordinary practices as allegorizing questions about

the economy of our lives through what Thoreau advertised as his ‘‘experiment in

living.’’ Philosophers have been engaged in questioning the necessary conditions of

knowledge, its logical necessity; in contrast, for Cavell and Thoreau the task of

philosophy is to question the necessary conditions of life. Such apparently finan-

cial terms as ‘‘account,’’ ‘‘interest,’’ ‘‘trust,’’ ‘‘means,’’ ‘‘spend,’’ and ‘‘investment’’

can rightfully speak about economies of living that extend even to spiritual impli-

cations. 13

Furthermore, the labor of recounting words is not simply a speculative

process in the mind: as the analogy of hoeing in the bean field suggests, it symbol-

izes the physical labor of writing.

One of the main themes in Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy is its

reclaiming of the autonomy of the self and language. It starts with the state of their

loss, one in which ‘‘we do not let the words assess our lives, we do not mean what

they could mean’’ (SW, 63), or in which the intimacy of words and life are lost. 14 A

turning point from loss to recovery is to be found in the notion of the ‘‘father

tongue’’ — ‘‘a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear,

which we must be born again in order to speak’’ (WR, III.3, quoted in SW, 15). The

idea of the father tongue is used here in contrast to the mother tongue — the sym-

bol of the native, the natural, and the familiar. The mother tongue is the essential

starting point of one’s being initiated into the language community, being symbol-

ized by immediate, intimate relations. The idea of the father here, however, has

nothing to do with notions of authoritarianism or of doctrinal dogmatism. The

relation with the father suggests a need deliberately to create a distance within

familiarity, and this, in the process, registers the extent to which the lives of

human beings are natural, yet at the same time something other than natural. In

this regard, the father tongue is associated especially with writing. While the

mother tongue, with its emphasis on speech, suggests a relation of immediacy, the

12. Stanley Cavell, ‘‘Introduction to the Japanese translation of The Senses of Walden,’’ in Sensu obu Woruden, trans. Naoko Saito (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 2005), ix.

13. Cavell, interview; and Standish and Saito, ‘‘Stanley Cavell’s Walden,’’ 234.

14. Cavell, ‘‘The Politics of Interpretation,’’ 32–33.

SAITO Philosophy as Translation 265

written word enables a reflective, indirect relation with what is native. This indi-

rectness in the act of writing gives us the time to think, to deliberate, and to read-

just our relation with the world. In other words, the father tongue is language that,

as it were, stops you in your tracks. The characteristic indirectness of the father

tongue means that it is associated especially with writing, but obviously thought-

ful speech can acquire this quality also. 15

Furthermore, unlike the assertive, perhaps even aggressive, mode of language

in its transactional functionality, Cavell and Thoreau’s father tongue is character-

ized by the receptivity, silence, and patience that are modes of a reader’s relation

to a text. Cavell cites Thoreau’s observation in Walden: ‘‘You only need sit still

long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may

exhibit themselves to you by turns’’ (WR XII.11, quoted in SW, 48). The receptive

element here indicates a feminine aspect of the father tongue — an unexpected

combination or fusion or interweaving suggestive, deconstructively, of the father’s

femininity. It destabilizes the schematic (or even antagonistic) division between

masculinity and femininity. Emphasis on the father is anything but denial of the

mother: what is required, rather, is that we ‘‘keep faith at once with the mother

and the father, to unite them, and to have the word born in us’’ (SW, 16). Fur-

thermore, the relation between mother and father here is not simply a matter of

developmental stages: the mother tongue is not to be understood as some primitive

state of language, for it is already conditioned by the father tongue, and this some-

times breaks through; we need both mother and father to experience the world in

its full-blown form. In acquiring the father tongue through the medium of the

mother tongue, one can undergo the moment of rebirth. Rebirth in Walden is fig-

ured in forms of baptism: in daily bathing in the water of Walden Pond and in the

reader’s immersion in the words of Walden (SW, 17). Transformation of the self

through language, then, involves a process of translation.

On the face of it, The Senses of Walden may read like an exercise in linguis-

tics. All the features of Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy discussed previously,

however, suggest that reading and writing involve the readjusting and rebuilding of

one’s relation with one’s native language and culture — and one’s nation — as well

as of the relation with oneself and other selves. While conventional philosophy has

been searching for the foundation of the truth in secure knowledge, Cavell con-

verts philosophy’s task to that of putting the reader into a state of ‘‘conviction.’’

Readers are ‘‘convicted’’ by the text (SW, 34 and 48) when they are caught in a posi-

tion of responsibility — specifically, responsibility for their response to the text

that they are reading. In this sense reading is the process by which the reader and

the writer engage in a cooperative task of ‘‘conjecturing’’ — that is, of testing the

criteria of meaning, of a continuous quest for the truth. This is at the heart of

15. In this sense, Cavell would perhaps be opposed to the subordination of speech to writing that one finds in the work of Derrida. As his A Pitch of Philosophy exemplifies, finding ourselves in our words and our world being a city of words is a central theme in Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy. See Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1994).

E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y VOLUME 57 j NUMBER 3 j 2007266

Cavell’s politics of interpretation. He considers Emerson and Thoreau’s ‘‘inter-

pretation of what you might call the politics of philosophical interpretation as a

withdrawal or rejection of politics, even of society, as such.’’ Walden in itself is ‘‘an

act of civil disobedience’’ — disobedience through ‘‘silence.’’ 16 The central question

of the politics of interpretation is ‘‘whether the voice I lend in recognizing a society

as mine, as speaking for me, is my voice, my own’’; it is a question of how we can

enter into ‘‘the conversation of justice.’’ 17

Political participation and action are

inseparable from ‘‘my’’ voice and from where this ‘‘I’’ stands in the world. This is

why Cavell interprets Walden as outlining ‘‘an epistemology of conscience’’ (SW,

88). Conscience here is not something fully encapsulated in the private realm, but

the crucial beginning of public participation from within, a significant source of

internal as well as social transformation, and such participation requires an ini-

tiation into and resistance against the language community. Against the stereo-

typical reading of Thoreau as an individualist taking a stand against society or as a

recluse, Cavell repositions Thoreau as one who shows how we learn to become

‘‘social’’ and ‘‘public,’’ starting at home but without passing over or covering up

what happens within the private realm.

LEAVING — TRANSCENDENCE IN THE ORDINARY

More thematically, The Senses of Walden ponders the transcendence in the

ordinary. It depicts what might be called a phenomenology of ordinary experience,

a description of the internal transformation of the self awakened through language.

Cavell’s text itself exacts this awakening. The reencounter with the world for

Cavell and Thoreau is the achievement of ‘‘outsideness’’ or ‘‘outwardness’’ (SW, 55).

Cavell says that Thoreau articulates the ‘‘externality of the world [as] its nextness to

me’’ (SW, 107). He finds in Thoreau a clue to the imaginative power of human being

that can reveal the reality of the world outside, starting from within one’s conscious-

ness. Cavell and Thoreau rebuild, even overturn, the relation between the inside and

the outside, not as two separate realms of experience, but as the interaction of the

two achieved in the process of transformation. The overturning of the inner and the

outer is crucial to understanding the sense of strangeness in Cavell’s text. The idea

of the ‘‘double’’ — the state of being ‘‘beside ourselves in a sane sense’’ (WR, V.11,

quoted in SW, 102) — reiterates the achievement of the outside inside, with the

‘‘sense of distance from self.’’ This is an encounter with the strange within the famil-

iar in what Cavell calls the ‘‘perpetual nextness’’ of the self (SW, 107 and 108). This

might be seen as the transcending of the self.

A state of distance acquired within the self is in turn related to the theme of

‘‘leaving’’ in Walden. As Cavell puts this, the point of the experiment at Walden is

‘‘not to learn that life at Walden was marvelous, but to learn to leave it’’ (SW, 45);

and later, ‘‘Leaving Walden, like leaving Walden, is as hard, is perhaps the same, as

entering it’’ (SW, 116). Three senses of leaving are implied here. The first and

16. Cavell, ‘‘The Politics of Interpretation,’’ 49–50.

17. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfec- tionism (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1990), 27.

SAITO Philosophy as Translation 267

obvious sense is leaving as departure and relinquishing. Cavell says that Thoreau’s

word, ‘‘resolution,’’ has a double meaning, that of ‘‘hardening and melting,’’ sym-

bolizing winter and spring, determination and relaxation. Both are ‘‘matters of

leaving, anticipations of departure,’’ as they involve a turning point in one’s life,

the moment when ‘‘one relinquishes the world one has constructed’’ (SW, 109 and

110). This suggests the critical moment of leaving the existing state of the self, and

its educational implication is this: ‘‘It is a gain to grow, but humanly it is always a

loss of something, a departure’’ (SW, 51). The second is a more passive sense:

‘‘Leaving things to themselves, but at the same time letting them happen to you.’’ 18

As has been pointed out, this receptive mode is characterized by the reading of a

text, by receiving it in passion, patience, and silence. To undergo this moment,

Cavell suggests, we must withdraw. Letting things be is a route to ‘‘unattachment’’

— an Eastern concept that Thoreau takes from the Bhaghavad Gita (SW, 117).

The third and the most distinctive sense is leaving as bequeathing. Thoreau as

the writer and the teacher does not simply leave the reader behind. As Cavell says,

he ‘‘is bequeathing it to us in his will, the place of the book and the book of the

place. He leaves us in one another’s keeping’’ (SW, 119). The writer is departing

with a hint of death, though we are not left with the nostalgic remembrance of the

past, as ‘‘nostalgia is an inability to open the past to the future.’’ 19

Walden as a

place and Walden as a book together constitute the place that Thoreau must leave,

as a writer and as a sojourner. We, the readers of his text, are left with the text,

with the task of conjecturing the meaning of his words for each other, and ulti-

mately with the task of ourselves moving on. In all of these senses, Cavell says that

a significant difference between Thoreau and Heidegger is that ‘‘the achievement

of the human requires not inhabitation and settlement but abrogating, leaving’’

(SW, 138).

Through the idea of leaving, Cavell and Thoreau reconstruct the concept of

home. Walden is a place where Thoreau once found his home, but this is not an

eternal home. Walden does not represent Thoreau’s place to settle down; rather, it

is the place where he learned ‘‘how to sojourn, i.e., spend his day’’ (SW, 52).

Walden teaches us that we must learn how to make the best use of our day, here

and now, and how then to leave it. Home is the place where you learn to reestablish

your relation with the familiar and the native, and it is a place that you leave.

Cavell’s feminized approach to home contrasts sharply with Nel Noddings’s femi-

nist engagement of this theme — one that is tied up with the ‘‘sense of belonging,’’

being ‘‘sheltered,’’ and feeling ‘‘part of it,’’ all of which suggest an orientation

toward stability and settlement. 20

18. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 227.

19. Ibid., 218.

20. Nel Noddings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 150, 154, 165, and 174.

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PHILOSOPHY AS TRANSLATION: CAVELL AND THOREAU AS CROSS-CULTURAL PHILOSOPHERS

Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy has further implications for democracy

and education: it can open our eyes to diverse cross-cultural dimensions. In

Thoreau, so influenced by Eastern philosophies, Cavell finds an alternative way of

thinking, one characterized by receptivity and silence. Beyond a simple juxtaposi-

tion of East and West, however, Cavell suggests another dimension of being cross-

cultural, or even trans-cultural, in Walden. By enhancing this implication of

Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, we can see how Cavell represents Thoreau

not only as the American writer, but also as a cross-cultural figure who trans-

gresses the borders of — in effect, transcends — America. Similarly, in opposition

to ‘‘Americanist readings of Emerson,’’ Lawrence Buell emphasizes his ‘‘cosmopol-

itan’’ or ‘‘cross-cultural’’ resonances. He suggests that Emerson’s thought, for

‘‘whatever culture, whatever gender,’’ has a universal appeal — to ‘‘man,’’ not just

to the ‘‘American’’ — and that this appeal is not bound by a ‘‘particularistic cul-

tural context.’’ 21 Cavell’s ‘‘cross-cultural’’ approach to Thoreau and Emerson, how-

ever, differs from Buell’s, specifically from his implicit tendency to assimilate

cultural specificities to oneness. Cavell shows us how the bearing one takes from

one’s home, native culture, and country is itself conditioned by what is beyond,

and hence is in some sense global.

In ‘‘Walden in Tokyo,’’ once again avoiding the received reading of Walden,

Cavell shows how Thoreau can have both an American and a cross-cultural impor-

tance. The Senses of Walden was written at a time when the Vietnam War was

nearing its denouement. In this respect the book can be seen as a pondering of

America’s relation with Asia. 22

Cavell’s writing of The Senses of Walden is then

weighted with a sense of shame toward culture and nation for the degeneration of

the original ideal of America, which was the founding of a new nation. The book

searches for a way of transcending America from within America, as a task of ‘‘this

new yet unapproachable America,’’ that of ‘‘finding as founding.’’ 23

This is not to

negate the idea of foundation, or to avoid foundation as one’s origin; rather, it is the

reconstruction or rediscovery of foundation as a point of departure, ‘‘a point

d’appui’’ (WR, II.22, quoted in SW, 71). In other words, broaching the question of

how to reestablish one’s relation with one’s own foundation is in itself a way

beyond foundation. Thus Cavell’s engagement with America as a culture and

nation already entails the origin of cross-cultural encounter — en-counter as the

confrontation with another culture within one’s own. Such internal criticism is

made possible by the teachings of other cultures, whose force is realized in a sense

of the other both beyond and within one’s own experience — within, that is, one’s

own culture. A mere incorporation of those ‘‘outside’’ sources into the native cul-

ture, however, does not create the moment of that teaching; neither does a simple

21. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2003), 49 and 55.

22. Stanley Cavell, ‘‘Walden in Tokyo’’ (paper presented at a colloquium on Cavell’s work, Harvard Uni- versity, October 28, 2006), 3.

23. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, New Mexico: Living Batch Press, 1989).

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juxtaposition or comparison of the foreign with the native. In its most intense form

of encounter, the native is destabilized by the foreign. Cavell’s attempt to overturn

the relation between the inner and the outer through converting the familiar into

the strange makes possible the moment of this intense cross-cultural encounter.

His writing suggests the intricacy of the relation between inter- and intra-cultural

dimensions.

The entanglement of the inter- and intra-cultural is realized with particular

acuteness in reading and translating a foreign text. For the translator, Cavell’s text

itself arouses this sense of the strange, and this not simply because it is written in

a foreign language and about a foreign culture. For the foreign reader, it constitutes

the experience of a (foreign) writer’s (Cavell’s) encounter with his own culture and

native language (with America and with the English language). Even when the text

does not directly speak about cross-cultural dialogue, the reader, as foreigner, can

experience the process of translating the native into the foreign — through the

refraction of the writer’s internal criticism of his own culture and native language.

Can we say, then, that the reader is always a foreigner in some sense? There is a

foreignness within culture, rightly conceived, that good reading enacts. This can

be understood as an occasion for mutual reflection between different cultures,

where the value of the mirror lies not just in the image’s clarity but in its clouding,

which is a sign of life. 24

Mutual reflection should be distinguished from mutual understanding, espe-

cially if the latter is associated with the idea of a direct ‘‘face-to-face’’ dialogue. In

mutual reflection the relation is indirect — symbolized by a relation through the

father tongue, by the opacity of written words. Written words are not simply the

transparent medium of communication. In observing the way that the other con-

fronts his own culture and language, one is turned back upon her own culture and

language, now as a stranger. The idea of mutual reflection suggests that ‘‘mutual

understanding’’ can be blocked not only by difference in its inter-cultural dimen-

sion, but also by blindness to difference in its intra-cultural dimension — the read-

er’s and the translator’s inability to confront their own native language and culture

and sometimes, perhaps, a naı̈ve trust in their understanding the familiar. This

brings forth a further cross-cultural implication of the various translations identi-

fied in Cavell’s rereading of Thoreau’s Walden. By transfiguring and broadening the

concept of translation, Cavell presents us with the idea of philosophy as trans-

lation. 25

This represents his idea of philosophy as the ‘‘education of grownups,’’

which answers to the need to undergo moments of ‘‘conversion’’ throughout one’s

life: 26 ‘‘for the child to grow he requires family and familiarity, but for a grownup to

grow he requires strangeness and transformation, i.e., birth’’ (SW, 60). Cavell

24. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 101.

25. Cavell uses this phrase in his paper, ‘‘Walden in Tokyo.’’ My treatment of the theme of philosophy as translation is partly inspired by that text.

26. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 125.

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suggests that the identifications of Thoreau as a merely local product of America or, in

reaction, as a universalist, both constitute our negation of Thoreau as a philosopher.

TOWARD PERFECTIONIST EDUCATION: DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION FROM DEWEY TO CAVELL

After opening with a brief account of Dewey’s approach to mutual under-

standing, this essay has shown the significance of Cavell’s rereading of Thoreau’s

work as a hybridization of thought, East and West, and as an alternative way to

conceive of mutual understanding in the age of globalization. In conclusion, I

would like to explore the implications of this discursive shift from Dewey to

Cavell for democracy and education (one that represents a departure from overly

familiar conceptions of America as a home for democracy) and to illustrate the

significance of Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy in ‘‘political’’ education

today.

As noted at the outset, Dewey asserted that ‘‘democracy must begin at home.’’

If we do not start by learning the meaning of ‘‘love’’ at home, we cannot love or

understand ‘‘distant peoples,’’ or ‘‘the people of foreign lands,’’ as ‘‘our next door

neighbors.’’ Dewey’s words point toward a passage from the local to the global,

from the inside to the outside: ‘‘The local is the ultimate universal.’’ 27 His idea of

friendship is based upon the notion of ‘‘face-to-face relationships by means of

direct give and take.’’ 28

To realize such a form of relation, of ‘‘a fraternally shared

experience,’’ communication is crucial, with ‘‘signs and symbols, language’’ as its

means. Dewey’s emphasis here is on spoken language. The indirect form of com-

munication through written words, according to Dewey, is not sufficient to recon-

struct a democratic community composed of vital bonds. As he said, ‘‘the winged

words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the

fixed and frozen words of written speech.’’ 29

Cavell’s idea of mutual reflection, with its emphasis on the indirectness of

written words, provides a standpoint from which it is possible critically to be

aware of the pitfalls in Dewey’s — and perhaps our own — language and ways of

thinking: the danger of the unconscious assimilation of the different into the same

and the possibility of blindness to the foreign in the native. These might be

thought of as dangers that grow out of our trust in immediacy and directness, the

underside of our fear of separation from the other. Cavell awakens us to the illu-

sion of the knowability of the immediate, releasing the voice of the different,

which eternally escapes our full grasp. Building a relation of neighborhood (in

Cavell’s sense of ‘‘befriending’’ [SW, 108]) and understanding other cultures are not

matters simply of developing the relation between the same (we) and the different

(they): they have rather to do with the intricate relation of difference beyond and

within the same.

27. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 368–369.

28. Ibid., 371 (emphasis added).

29. Ibid.

SAITO Philosophy as Translation 271

This also has implications for a kind of education for citizenship, especially

perhaps for the existential dimension of global citizenship. The politics of interpre-

tation is not simply a matter of classroom reading or scholarship, nor is it focused

on the practicalities of how to cultivate the knowledge and skills for becoming a

good citizen. In resistance to the kind of binary thinking that assumes that we

have theory, on the one hand, to be applied to classroom practice, on the other, the

Emersonian and Thoreauvian route from the inmost to the outmost helps us see

another possibility for political participation. 30

Cavell explicitly says that Walden

is a book on ‘‘education for citizenship,’’ one that ‘‘identifies citizens as ‘neigh-

bors.’’’ Unlike Dewey, however, Cavell does not seek immediate bonds or com-

monality, but rather sees ‘‘isolation’’ as the sincerest way of building neighborhood

with others (SW, 85–86). This is emphatically to represent Thoreau neither as the

radical individualist nor as the hermit who seeks escape from society. Instead, both

Cavell and Thoreau are searching for ‘‘a common origin’’ (SW, 160), an origin not in

the beginning but one that is to be achieved in the end: ‘‘We have yet ‘to get our

living together’ (WR, I.100), to be whole, and to be one community’’ (SW, 79). With-

out starting with an acknowledgment of isolation, and without having the sense

that ‘‘what is most intimate is what is furthest away’’ (SW, 54) — the sense of eter-

nal distance from the other (within and without one’s own self) — the common

will always be implicated with the danger of an assimilation of difference into

totality. 31 In resistance to the discourse of social inclusion, Cavell and Thoreau pro-

pose what might be called citizenship without inclusion, envisioning the good

society as one in which a necessary condition for living ‘‘together’’ is a degree of

irritability. Their politics of interpretation is an alternative avenue for political

education: it implies an education that resists the closure of politics and that awak-

ens us to the existentially hidden dimension of the political. Thoreau satirized the

kind of community that confronted him, which was defensively concentric and

immune to risky elements: ‘‘the village was literally a com-munity, a league for

mutual defense, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying

without a medicine chest’’ (WR, VI.17). Thoreauvian and Cavellian community

demands of us an eye to the distant and the foreign within home — an orientation

toward alterity. And so we may find ourselves to be not at home. Paradoxically,

then, it is their apparently individualistic but mediated, indirect position — more

radical than Dewey’s communal, immediate stance — that enables us to transcend

ourselves and move toward the common that is yet to come.

Such a Cavellian approach simultaneously points us toward education for

national citizenship in the sense that it endorses a hope for the best of one’s

own culture, and so perhaps shares with Dewey some sense of the need to start

at home. But emphasis is perhaps on a home-run continually to be sought,

30. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘Self-Reliance,’’ in Ralph Waldo Emerson, 131. Thoreau also refers in Walden to a phrase, ‘‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’’ (WR, I.95).

31. In his emphasis on ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘distance’’ as essential conditions for achieving the common, Cavell’s approach differs both from Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition, a politics based upon the notion of mutual recognition, and from Nel Noddings’s ethic of care, an ethic that would perhaps identify isolation as a cause for the suffering of our times.

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sometimes to be achieved; a home always to be left in further excursions; and the

native to be destabilized from within. Cavell would roundly resist patriotism in

any aggressive sense, a kind of love that cannot tolerate irritation, that cannot face

(self-)criticism, and that allows the self to slumber in its mother tongue and native

culture without awakening it to its necessary translation. Though one of the tasks

of Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy is ‘‘placing ourselves in the world,’’ this

does not mean either that we must find a fixed place and settle down there perma-

nently or that we are to become homeless; rather, we must learn to be at home in

transition. 32 The third way beyond home and homelessness suggests the possibility

of an art of living in the borderless age of globalization.

In resistance to the humanistic discourse of cosmopolitanism, 33 Cavellian edu-

cation for citizenship is provocative: it requires ‘‘shunning the cosmopolitan and

embracing the immigrant in yourself’’ (SW, 158). This is no simple affirmation of

national citizenship, however: it is instead a restatement of his reading of Thoreau

neither simply as an American writer nor as a cosmopolitan. Starting at home is

the condition for becoming global, for moving beyond cultural particularism and

universal cosmopolitanism; it is the particularity of one’s commitment to one’s

own native culture, penetrated and perpetuated by a continual immigrancy of

thought, that prepares the way for transcending cultural limits and national boun-

daries. It would be tempting at this point to claim that the flowering of a just

national citizenship necessarily includes the stirrings of global citizenship, and

maybe there would be some truth in this. This would be a global citizenship

through inter-/intra-cultural dialogue. But to commit oneself too much to such a

thought would be to yield to a rhetorical impulse toward the global that translation

teaches us to keep at bay. And it would be simultaneously to misconceive the

nature and the demands of citizenship. It is against the implications of unification,

assimilation, and cosmopolitanism, or of a confluence of ways of life and thought,

that a different sense of the global needs to be achieved from within the current

understanding of ‘‘globalization,’’ and this must be a sense that finds space for the

indirectness of deviation, given that culture is always in the process of transition.

Early in this essay I stated that it was my aim to test how far Thoreau and

Cavell can become critical dialogical partners for Dewey. Thoreau, Cavell, and

Dewey may complement one another and, in so doing, mutually amplify the

potential of American philosophy to realize democracy as a way of life — in resist-

ance to political cynicism, urbane perhaps in its private irony, and in resistance to

any naı̈ve, sentimental seclusion in private life, the kind of life that shies away

from and ceases to profess the good of society. To say ‘‘from Dewey to Cavell’’ is

neither to deny the voice of Dewey nor simply to transfer allegiance to Cavell; still

less is it to assimilate Cavell to the broad terms of Deweyan democracy and educa-

tion. Along these lines, then, this essay might be taken to suggest that Dewey and

32. The phrase ‘‘home in transition’’ was suggested by Michael Peters in response to the presentation of a previous version of this paper (February 2, 2006).

33. Nussbaum, ‘‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.’’

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Cavell, perhaps, provide intersecting horizons of our lives in democracy and educa-

tion, and that in this sense they can complement each other since they are them-

selves engaged in ‘‘cross-cultural’’ dialogue. But such a reading would be too

comfortable by far, and it would in fact relapse into precisely that assimilative dis-

course, that notion of the complementarity of parts, against which the effects of

translation are to be weighed. As a measure of this weight, think for a second of the

ink that has been spent in philosophy of education, in students’ dissertations and

in scholarly articles, that has settled comfortably within the register of Dewey’s

prose. And think also of the very different timbre that one finds in Cavell, and of

the pressure that his stylistic originality places on an ear too attuned to Dewey’s

words. These thoughts must lead to the recognition that one cannot simply

position Dewey and Cavell as dialogical partners in a common enterprise. But part-

nership does not necessarily imply complementarity. Dewey’s is an eloquent,

American, democratic voice, but the familiar discourse of American democracy

needs itself to be destabilized and deconfounded in reading and translating Dewey

through Cavell. One cannot in good conscience simply go back to Dewey, and nei-

ther, surely, would Dewey have wanted this. My project here has been to open the

idiom of Dewey’s thought to the Cavellian immigrant discourse of an America still

to come and by implication to identify a Dewey yet to be reached.

Any good reading realizes a difference to which a text is always already open, a

perfectionist text perhaps most richly of all. Hence in a sense the translation that I

have thematized in this essay is itself inevitably a kind of deconstruction, a draw-

ing out of recessive elements that themselves transfigure the profile that text has

come to assume. This is what I meant when, at the start of this essay, I spoke of

reviving Dewey’s ‘‘muted voice.’’ That this is not merely an ‘‘academic’’ matter is

evident if we recall Cavell’s Emersonian emphasis on finding as founding. Else-

where he speaks of this as a process of deconfounding, a term whose multiple

valences suggest that our founding of democracy must depend upon a readiness to

confound the culture we have come from, the better to find new foundations

together. And culture, let it be remembered, is neither unitary nor stable, nor is it

to be identified with the ‘‘native’’; rather, it is always in transition, by and through

language, in processes, as I have tried to show, of translation.

My discussion has also elucidated a distinctive role for the philosopher of edu-

cation in inter-/intra-cultural dialogue: like Thoreau who lives as a ‘‘visible saint,’’

‘‘within a mile’’ of his neighbors in the town of Concord, she can be as a prophet

on the edge of her own culture and language, in her profession of philosophy. This

requires that she work in the gap between cultures, in the interstices of a culture,

without settling in any fixed space. She plays translator by converting the mother

tongue into, as it were, a ‘‘foreign’’ father tongue, by seeking the indirectness and

separation that is the means of a common still to be achieved. And, most impor-

tant, in the very way she is engaged with her own culture and language in her writ-

ing, she offers a mirror to the eye of an outsider, both native and foreign, so that he

also can be engaged in the criticism of his culture. This is the task of the philoso-

pher of education as a cultural critic: one who, like a prophet, professes a kind of

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language that awakens us to the rebuilding of our relation to words and life as a

crucial beginning of political action. This, as must be plain, is to move beyond the

terms of philosophy of education as an institutionalized discipline, where philoso-

phy is ‘‘applied’’ to education; it is to think instead of philosophy as a way of life,

whose intimate connections with education are realized in the phrase deployed by

both Cavell and Dewey: philosophy as education. Understood this way, philosophy

can be seen to play a distinctive role in cultivating an art of thinking, an art of self-

transcendence, toward alterity, on the strength of an alterity already within

ourselves. The foremost task of the cultural critic I envisage is not to hand down

the authority of her writing to her students, but to reveal within its exercise

her acknowledgment of opacities and rifts within the culture and to leave the stu-

dents with the very task of finding their own authority. This much at least is sug-

gested, I believe, by Cavell’s idea of philosophy as translation, as ‘‘the education of

grownups.’’

IN REVISING THIS ESSAY, I benefited from valuable comments from Nicholas Burbules and an anony- mous reviewer. The essay is also the result of collaborative research I have been conducting with Paul Standish. I thank him and Stanley Cavell for inspiring conversations.

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