Discussion

Philosophy as Education and Education as

Philosophy: Democracy and Education

from Dewey to Cavell

NAOKO SAITO

In the contemporary culture of accountability and the ‘economy’ of education this generates, pragmatism, as a philosophy for ordinary practice, needs to resist the totalising force of an ideology of practice, one that distracts us from the rich qualities of daily experience. In response to this need, and in mobilising Dewey’s pragmatism, this paper introduces another standpoint in American philosophy: Stanley Cavell’s account of the economy of living in Thoreau’s Walden. By discussing some aspects of Cavell’s The Senses of Walden that suggest both apparent similarities and radical differences between Thoreau and Dewey, I shall argue that Cavell discovers rich dimensions of practice in Thoreau’s American philosophy, ones that are overshadowed in Dewey’s pragmatism: that he demonstrates another way of ‘making a difference in practice’. Cavell, as a critical interlocutor of Dewey, from within American philosophy, offers a way of using language in resistance to the rhetoric of accountability and in service to the creation of democracy as a way of life. I shall conclude by suggesting that the enriched tradition of American philosophy from Dewey to Cavell is to be found in their promotion of philosophy as education and education as philosophy.

I A NEW DEPARTURE FROM DEWEY’S RECONSTRUCTION IN

PHILOSOPHY

In Democracy and Education, Dewey discusses what he sees as the inseparable relationship between philosophy and education:

If a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must be artificial. The educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2006

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education (Dewey, 1985, p. 338).

This captures the essence of Dewey’s pragmatism, declaring his endeavour of reconstruction in philosophy—philosophy as problem- solving, philosophy for our ordinary living and, most importantly, philosophy as education. Such a philosophy involves changes in our dispositions and ways of action: philosophy must ‘make a difference’ in practice. This includes the role of philosophy in serving democracy as a way of life—the ongoing creation of a democratic community in which the welfare of each individual is enhanced through free and equal communication, and in respect for differences, as the valuable source of mutual learning (Dewey, 1988).

Dewey marked a turning point in the history of American philosophy, but his philosophy still needs to be reconstructed in response to the demands of our times. Problems in education and the ways of solving them today challenge Dewey’s idea and language of reconstruction in philosophy, presenting new difficulties in the realisation of his ideal of democracy as a way of life. ‘Making a difference in practice’ is commonly understood today in terms of measurable outcomes and visibly clear standards, sufficient to show immediate effectiveness and impact. The language of education has come to be characterised by ‘accountability’. Within such a narrowly conceived notion of practice philosophy is considered useless, associated, so it is claimed, with ‘mere words’, with ‘abstract ideas’, and as offering nothing more than an ‘ideal model’. In the global (and, ironically, Americanised) economy of today, the gap between philosophy and practice is far wider than Dewey took it to be. This is so even within the academy: a discipline that does make a visible difference cannot, in the economy of higher education, so readily secure its funding. It is in the light of this trend that Dewey’s pragmatism, as philosophy for practice, needs to be reconsidered. Such a reconsideration must go beyond conventional notions of applying theory to practice, as the latter can surreptitiously assimilate the former to its territory. To avoid this danger pragmatism must recount its terms so that it can release us from the narrow horizons of our practical lives: it must look again at what counts in order the better to account—to offer its account and to bring things to account. Pragmatism needs to resist the totalising force of an ideology of practice, one that distracts us from the rich qualities of daily experience.

In response to this need, and in mobilising Dewey’s pragmatism, this paper introduces another standpoint in American philosophy: Stanley Cavell’s account of the economy of living in Thoreau’s Walden. By discussing some aspects of Cavell’s The Senses of Walden that suggest both apparent similarities and radical difference between Thoreau and Dewey, I shall argue that Cavell discovers rich dimensions of practice in Thoreau’s American philosophy, ones that are overshadowed in Dewey’s pragmatism: that he demonstrates another way of ‘making a difference in practice’. Cavell, as a critical interlocutor of Dewey, from within American philosophy, offers a way of using language in resistance to

346 N. Saito

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

the rhetoric of accountability and in service to the creation of democracy as a way of life. I shall conclude by suggesting that the enriched tradition of American philosophy from Dewey to Cavell is to be found in their promotion of philosophy as education and education as philosophy.

II WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO READ CAVELL’S THE SENSES OF WALDEN?

Just like Dewey, Cavell is an American philosopher who is engaged in the task of reconstruction in philosophy. Citing a passage above from Democracy and Education, Hilary Putnam acknowledges the contribution made by Dewey’s idea of education for democracy in the reconstruction of philosophy as education. It is in this context that Putnam detects a thread running from Dewey to Cavell. He writes: ‘[Dewey] anticipated Cavell’s identification of philosophy with education’ (Putnam, 1994, p. 223). More recently, Putnam has returned to Cavell’s theme of ‘philosophy as the education of grownups’ (Putnam, 2005). Here he discusses Cavell’s sustained reflection on scepticism as one that itself ‘exemplifies’, and indeed allows him and us to undergo, the process of philosophy as education. Cavell, in his Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy, transforms the sceptical question ‘Can we know other minds?’ from an epistemological question to one that relates to the ‘refusal to acknowledge the other as a person’ (p. 124). Cavell enables us to change our ways of seeing human suffering as suffering, Putnam says, by envisaging it as a ‘normal pathology’, that is, as a part of the human condition (p. 125). Discussing how he himself, in reading Cavell, came to recognise a fault in his approach to scepticism, Putnam suggests there is something in Cavell’s writing that effects a conversion in our ways of seeing by introducing a sense of ‘vertigo’ (p. 119). What Cavell says is inseparable from how he speaks, and hence: ‘To read Cavell as he should be read is to enter into a conversation with him, one in which your entire sensibility and his are involved, and not only your mind and his mind’ (p. 117).

Indeed while Dewey talks about education, education in Cavell is to be found in his manner of speaking to us, here and now in his style of writing: Cavell demonstrates an alternative way of ‘making a difference in practice’, as it were from deep within ourselves. This is tied up with the content of his philosophy, his reinterpretation of scepticism. Cavell’s reconstruction in philosophy is conducted through his resistance to philosophy’s ‘suppression of the human voice’ and through a turning of language back to the ordinary, that is, through a regaining of intimacy between our words and life (Cavell, 1983, pp. 32–33, 48). In his efforts to recover the human voice in philosophy, Cavell rediscovers in Emerson’s and Thoreau’s writings on the ordinary and the common, the rich sources of American philosophy. Thoreau and Emerson ‘underwrite’ the task of ordinary language philosophy (p. 32). In their work, Cavell finds another way of demonstrating ‘political liability’, in what he describes as ‘the politics of philosophical interpretation as a withdrawal or rejection of politics, even of society, as such’; Thoreau’s Walden is an ‘act of civil disobedience, a confrontation which takes the form of a withdrawal’

Philosophy as Education and Education as Philosophy 347

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

(Cavell, 1983, pp. 49–50). In the eyes of Deweyans, Cavell’s emphasis on reading and writing may look like an indulgence in literary and, hence, ‘apolitical’ activities. It may sound scandalous to call ‘political’ the act of reading a text in ‘withdrawal’ from society. Cavell’s writing on Thoreau thus offers interesting points not only of convergence with but of divergence from Dewey’s idea of democracy and education. What does it mean then to read Cavell’s text on Thoreau? The better understanding of practice realised by Cavell may help us to recognise the way that the charge of ‘mere words’ fatefully underestimates the inseparable connec- tion between words and life.

The Senses of Walden is not simply a reinterpretation of Thoreau’s Walden: it exemplifies Cavell’s project of reconstruction in philosophy, ‘a revision of how we conceive philosophy, specifically in its relation to what we conceive literature to be or to do’ (Cavell, 2005). His purpose of writing The Senses of Walden is in a sense to make Walden more difficult (Cavell, 2004; Standish and Saito, 2005, p. 214). As he puts this, ‘the clarity and the discoveries in Thoreau’s always surprising intense prose exemplify an intention to attend registers of experience that one will not know whether to assign to philosophy or to religion or to literature or to politics’ (Cavell, 2005). In resistance to conventional philosophy, Cavell presents, with Thoreau, an alternative style of writing in philosophy—a style that reclaims the human voice, and, that is, a distinctively American voice that America has lost in its domination by professional philosophy; this is a loss registered in the denial by that professionalisation that Emerson and Thoreau are philosophers. While criticising the fallen state of its democracy, Cavell tries also to retrieve the original ideal of the foundation of America. Cavell wrote The Senses of Walden in a period of some six weeks when the Vietnam War was nearing its denouement (Cavell, 2004; Cavell, 2005). In this sense Cavell’s writing of the book enacts the process of finding an alternative way in America’s relationship with Asia. In Thoreau, so influenced by Eastern philosophies, Cavell finds an alternative mode of thinking, sometimes of receptivity and silence. Thus writing in and for philosophy is the process of ‘criticizing democracy from within’, an alternative mode of ‘conversation in justice’ (Cavell, 1990, pp. 3, 27). This is not a matter of mere literary self-indulgence: the political is internal to the writing, and the literary activity conditions political participation (Standish and Saito, 2005, p. 220). Dewey says that democracy must begin at home (Dewey, 1984, p. 368); Cavell goes down deeper within home.

To demonstrate these points, I shall discuss in the following sections some salient features The Senses of Walden.

III NOT MERE WORDS: THE ECONOMY OF LIVING, THE BAPTISM OF WORDS AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ORDINARY

Though there are diverse entry points to The Senses of Walden, the interconnectedness of its themes mean that there is no obvious place to

348 N. Saito

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

start. I shall highlight three main themes that suggest its common ground with and its difference from Dewey’s pragmatism: the economy of living, baptism in words and the phenomenology of ordinary experience. All these themes show that words are not mere words but essential components of practice.1

The economy of living

One of the criticisms made of the Japanese translation of The Senses of Walden—the first translation of one of Cavell’s books into Japanese—is that it is no more than a linguistic analysis of Emerson and Thoreau. This statement shows the kind of assumption that is typically made about Cavell’s writing: surely the title of its first chapter, ‘Words’, and of the second, ‘Sentences’, show the reader that this is a book on semiology. In reality The Senses of Walden presents us with a structure that transcends the kind of dichotomous thinking that hides behind the charge of ‘mere words’, a dichotomy that recurs between language and action, between thinking and practice, between mind and body, and between the inner and the outer.

‘Life’ and ‘the ordinary’ are central concepts in Dewey’s pragmatism. ‘[L]ife-situations’ or the ordinary context of living displace the foundation of philosophy. The meaning of ‘life’ ranges from such daily activities as using tools to the moral implications of democracy as a way of life. Dewey’s emphasis is on action and bringing forth social changes. On the one hand, Cavell’s American philosophy shares with Dewey this broad framework of thinking; on the other, Cavell shows dimensions of ordinary life that exceed what Dewey puts into words.

Cavell’s account of Thoreau’s economy of living provides a good starting point for thinking what that excess consists in. The first chapter of Walden is entitled ‘Economy’. It is filled with detailed descriptions of clothes—of food and the hut Thoreau builds, of Thoreau’s labour in building it, and of his hoeing of his bean field. Cavell reinterprets this as an alternative notion of accounting and of the recounting of ordinary practice. Philosophers have been engaged in questioning the necessary conditions of knowledge, its logical necessity: for Cavell and Thoreau, in contrast, the task of philosophy is to question anew the necessary conditions of life (Cavell, 2004). As Cavell remarks, ‘the truth appears to the writer, as if in a vision, a vision of true necessities, that the necessaries of life are the means of life, the ways it is lived’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 73). In Walden such economic terms as ‘account’, ‘interest’, ‘trust’, ‘means’, ‘spend’ and ‘investment’ recur. But behind their practical, economic sense, these terms hold spiritual implications (Cavell 2004; Standish and Saito 2005, p. 234). In Thoreau’s act of writing, recounting words in the context of ordinary living means producing an account in and of words— ‘a document, with each word a warning and a teaching; a deed, with each word an action’. Cavell finds Thoreau to be implying that ‘the lines [should] be complete, omitting no expense or income, and that there [should] be no mistake in the computation’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 30). As the

Philosophy as Education and Education as Philosophy 349

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

analogy of hoeing in the bean field suggests, the labour of recounting words is not simply a speculative process in the mind but is inseparable from ways of living, from the movement of our bodies: hoeing symbolises the ‘physical act of writing’ (p. 25).

Thoreau’s economy of living in the woods trades on the origin of the term in the Greek oikos—that is, it concerns the building of a house, and metaphorically, the building of the world as the house of words. Writing for Thoreau and Cavell is in this sense an activity of rebuilding and replacing the narrow construction of economic terms, the construction that dominates our practical lives: it is an act of ‘win[ning] back from [the circling of economic terms] possession of our words’ (p. 92). The ordinariness of life involves one’s relation to clothes, food and housing as its essential ground. It is not, however, limited to the use of instruments, to learning the know-how of living, to utility. To see further what it means, we need to examine more carefully how Cavell describes the role of words in Thoreau’s economy of living.

The baptism of words

Emerson’s and Thoreau’s commitment to language suggests their prescience of what was to become the motive of the ordinary language philosophy of the 20

th century, their own inquiry into the conditions for

knowledge and for living. These are thoughts adumbrated in Cavell’s pondering of Emerson’s use of ‘condition’ (Cavell, 1990), which prompt us to understand the way that saying (-dit) things together (con-) is embedded in human condition (Standish and Saito, 2005, p. 226). What is it that Cavell understands to be so much at stake in ordinary language philosophy, in its insistence on the form of ‘When we say . . ., we mean . . .’? Such a statement is in the first person, and it is plural. Its being first person bears the weight of the individual voice—and, that is to say, the commitment—of the speaker, while its being plural testifies to member- ship of a community (p. 220). To have a relationship with words, to use them, is inseparable from ‘placing ourselves in the world’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 53).

A main theme in Cavell’s idea of language is the recovery of the ‘autonomy’ of the self and language. Its starting point is the state of loss, a state in which the self and the language conspire to lose each other. More concretely, in religion and politics this is a state in which such words as ‘God’ and ‘freedom’ are used in vain. It is a fallen condition in which ‘we do not let the words assess our lives, we do not mean what they could mean’ (p. 63). This state of loss is a relationship in which words, the self, objects and others have lost their autonomy under pressure of conformity. To acknowledge, to confront this shameful condition is the starting point in regaining the autonomy of language and the self. Hence, Walden is an attempt ‘to free us and our language of one another, to discover the autonomy of each’ (ibid.).

Cavell says that the mutual return of words and ourselves is expressed by words’ ‘literality’ (ibid.). Literality here should, however, be

350 N. Saito

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

distinguished from the ‘literary’: literality is a broad concept that connotes the physical characteristics of language as well as its relation to communication, thought and existence. To acknowledge the literality of words is to accept the dimension of words whereby not only they but also the world itself, others, constantly exceed the grasp of human knowledge. This brings us back to Cavell’s position on scepticism—as related to ‘an intimacy with existence, or an intimacy lost, that matched skepticism’s despair of the world’ (Cavell, 1983, pp. 32–33).

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’ (Thoreau, 1992, III, 3, in Cavell, 1992, p. 15).2 The idea of the father tongue is used here in contrast to the mother tongue, but it has nothing to do with notions of authoritarian fatherhood or of doctrinal dogmatism. The mother tongue is the essential starting point of one’s being initiated into the language community, and it is symbolised by immediate, intimate relationships. Precisely because of its familiarity, however, it entails the danger of a conformity of the self to language, and of the self to itself. The relationship with the father suggests a need deliberately to create a distance within familiarity. In this regard, the father tongue is associated especially with the written word. While the mother tongue, with its emphasis on speech, suggests a relation of immediacy, the written word enables a reflective, indirect relationship with what is native. This indirectness in the act of writing gives us the time to think, to deliberate and to readjust our relationship with the world. Furthermore, unlike the assertive, and perhaps even the aggressive, mode of the language of social justice and rights, Cavell’s and Thoreau’s father tongue is characterised by the receptivity, silence and patience that are modes of a reader’s relation to a text. This much is implied in words Cavell quotes from 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’ (Thoreau, 1992, XII, 11, in Cavell, 1992, p. 48). This is the essence of the politics of interpretation: in reading we subject ourselves to the words of a text; we are ‘in the gaze or hearing of the text’, ‘letting ourselves be instructed by texts’ (Cavell, 1983, pp. 52, 53). In acquiring the father tongue through the medium of the mother tongue, one can undergo the moment of a kind of rebirth. This is anything but to deny the mother: rather it is to ‘keep faith at once with the mother and the father, to unite them, and to have the word born in us’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 16). Rebirth in Walden is a baptism of words, in the book of Walden, and the water of Walden (p. 17).

Our acquiring of the father tongue is manifested in our reading by the fact that any anticipation of the writer’s authority as the solid foundation of the text is destabilised. As its example, Cavell’s text presents us with words that refuse to be fixed or defined: this ‘tests’ us, putting us, as readers, on trial. While conventional philosophy has been searching for the foundation of the truth in secure knowledge, Cavell converts the task of philosophy into putting the reader into a state of ‘conviction’. The reader is ‘convicted’ by the text in that she encounters the truth in the

Philosophy as Education and Education as Philosophy 351

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

process of being tested by the text; she is caught in a position of responsibility by the text (p. 34). Reading in this sense is the process of the reader and the writer being engaged in a cooperative task of ‘conjectur- ing’—that is, of testing the criteria of meaning, of sustaining the search for truth.

The phenomenology of ordinary experience

The economy of living and the baptism of words thus illuminate the unique features of Cavell’s politics of interpretation, ones that mark a sharp contrast to (or at least a deviation from) Dewey’s notion of practice. Cavell suggests that practice exceeds visible, actual change. It involves, as Paul Standish puts this, an ‘economy of excess’ (Standish, 2005). The subtle nature of that excess is narrated in The Senses of Walden in what might be called a phenomenology of ordinary experience—a description of the internal transformation of the self through the economy of living and the baptism of words. Cavell’s text itself exacts this awakening, whether one reads it or tries to translate it. This, as Putnam suggests, is the task of philosophy for Cavell. According to Cavell, Thoreau transforms conventional philosophy’s treatment of a sceptical problem as one of knowing into ‘a matter of solving the mystery of looking through each other’s eyes’ (Cavell, 2005). This is Thoreau’s revisioning of philosophy. Thoreau’s ‘mystery’ is not some ethereal mystery beyond the grasp of human knowledge; instead it is the kind of mystery one encounters in one’s sense of strangeness within the familiar and the common, within the here and now. This is Cavell’s Emersonian and Thoreauvian theme of experiencing the extraordinary in the ordinary.

The reencounter with the world for Cavell and Thoreau is the achievement of ‘outsideness’ or ‘outwardness’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 55). Cavell says that Walden provides Kant’s ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. While Kant left ‘unarticulated an essential feature (category) of objectivity itself, viz., that of a world apart from me in which objects are met,’ Thoreau articulates the ‘externality of the world as its nextness to me’ (pp. 106–107). He says that ‘[o]ur imagination, or our capacity for images, and for the meaning or phenomenology of our images . . . are as a priori as our other forms of knowledge of the world’ (p. 103). Cavell thus finds in Thoreau a clue to the imaginative power of human beings that can reveal the reality of the world outside, starting from within consciousness. With reference to this point, Russell Goodman states that, in his idea of the ‘marriage of the self and the world’, Cavell gives a poetic and philosophical response to Kant’s intellectual dilemma: the answer that ‘you can experience the world as world, things as things, face to face as it were, call this the life of things’ (Cavell, 1986, in Goodman, 1990, p. 14). Dewey’s idea of experience, especially in his later aesthetic writings, presents this commerce between the self and the world, overcoming the dichotomy of the subject and the object. In contrast to Dewey, however, who talks about the structure of experience, Cavell in his phenomen- ological account of the ordinary recounts how such commerce can be

352 N. Saito

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

achieved from within our experience, how the outsideness can be created from within the inside, and how strangeness can be discovered from within the familiar. In short, the phenomenology of ordinary experience is an attempt to show a route from the inmost to the outmost.

A more detailed landscape for this route can be found in Cavell’s phenomenological account of the self’s ‘nextness’ to the world in his recounting of Thoreau’s idea of the ‘double’, the state of being ‘beside ourselves in a sane sense’ (Thoreau, 1992, V 11, in Cavell, 1992, p. 102). Cavell refers to this ‘consciousness of self, and of the self’s standing, beyond self-consciousness’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 102) and to the ‘sense of distance from self’ as a relationship of a ‘perpetual nextness’ (pp. 107– 108). The double as a state of distance acquired within the self is related to the theme of ‘leaving’ in Walden. With reference to the influence of Eastern thought on Thoreau (for instance, in the idea of ‘detachment’ in the Baghavad Gita), 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’ (p. 138). At the very end of The Senses of Walden, leaving acquires the connotation of bequeathing.

To allow the world to change, and to learn change from it, to permit it strangers, accepting its own strangeness, are conditions of knowing it now . . . [The writer] 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 (p. 119).

Walden as a place and Walden as a book constitute the place for Thoreau to 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.

In the phenomenology of ordinary experience, the discovery of the intimacy between the self and the world is achieved through leaving. It is the act of building the relationship of ‘neighbourhood’ both inside and outside of the self. This is not merely a relationship of union or identification but rather, through and through, the relationship of being next to one another. It is an acknowledgment of the truth in scepticism that separation, the gap between the self and the world, is an unavoidable facet of experience. Goodman points out that it is this gap that is missing from Dewey’s ‘marriage of the self and the world’ (Goodman, 1990, p. 113). The experience of mystery for Thoreau and Cavell involves a reencountering of the familiar in the ordinary as the strange other—even, that is, within the most familiar identity of the self. In this sense the transcendence of the self can be achieved not through any kind of self- forgetting meditation but through the act of reading, thinking and, hence, philosophising. The politics of interpretation is the exercise of detaching oneself from ‘attachment’ to any fixed frame of mind; it involves the reader’s (the student’s) learning to leave the authority of the author (the teacher) and achieving ‘freedom from the person of the author’ (Cavell, 1983, pp. 52–53), in order to find her own voice.

Philosophy as Education and Education as Philosophy 353

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

IV PHILOSOPHY AS EDUCATION AND EDUCATION AS PHILOSOPHY

FROM DEWEY TO CAVELL

Cavell’s account of Thoreau’s Walden thus shows how the economy of living can enlarge our horizon of practice and open possibilities of language. While Dewey, Thoreau and Cavell share as American philosophers some common ground, especially in their common endeavour to reconstruct philosophy in such a way as to serve ordinary life, close examination of what Cavell says and how he says it illuminates a significant shift from Dewey to Cavell. The language in Thoreau and Cavell sheds light on the transformation of the self, from the inmost to the outmost. Reading and writing in this sense are original and essential components of political participation, of critical reconstruction of democracy as a way of life. This internal perspective is something that is missing from Dewey’s language. Furthermore, in their common yet contrasting theme of the ‘marriage of the self and the world’, Cavell elucidates dimensions of human experience that are hidden by other points of emphasis in Dewey—the moment of leaving the familiar, of acquiring the sense of strangeness within the ordinary, or, say, of radical departure from within home. It is this feature that most clearly distinguishes Cavell’s idea of philosophy as education from Dewey’s. Cavell writes:

The first step in attending to our education is to observe the strangeness of our lives, our estrangement from ourselves, the lack of necessity in what we profess to be necessary. The second step is to grasp the true necessity of human strangeness as such, the opportunity of outwardness (Cavell, 1992, p. 55).

The central theme of The Senses of Walden is, in a broad sense, education as rebirth, conversion and awakening, which is simultaneously the task of philosophy. Education for Cavell is, first of all, the education of the self through language, and its existential task involves the finding of oneself through loss. In discovering the bottom of Walden Pond, such finding cannot start with solid ground: ‘There is a solid bottom everywhere. But how are we going to weigh toward it, arrive at confident conclusions from which we can reverse direction?’ (italics added) (p. 76). Cavell’s answer refers us to the idea of ‘carrying weight, by your force of character and in your words’, to allowing yourself to undergo the weight of the world, to ‘lifting the thing that keeps you anchored, and sailing out’ (p. 72). Foundation is something to be achieved. It also becomes a point of departure. To accept and then to turn away—this is the idea of education in Thoreau, captured in his reference to education’s having a ‘point d’appui’ (p. 71). The process of achieving outwardness involves a rediscovery of one’s ‘interest’ in the world—another economic term that frequently appears in Thoreau’s and Cavell’s texts. It is in regaining true interests in the world and the self that we undergo the morning after mourning, in Thoreau’s celebrated pun, and so can speak ‘in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments’ (Thoreau, 1992, XVIII, 6, in Cavell, 1992, p. 34).

354 N. Saito

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

The Senses of Walden appeals to its readers to ‘become essentially students’ (Thoreau, 1992, III, 1, in Cavell, 1992, p. 48). This refers to the achieving of something that is not exactly childhood but rather a process that might extend throughout our lives. ‘[F]or the child to grow he requires family and familiarity, but for a grownup to grow he requires strangeness and transformation, i.e., birth’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 60). This is Cavell’s idea of philosophy as education for grownups. It is an endless process of perfection, the process of undergoing the strangeness in the ordinary. Rebirth is not once and for all, as in Christianity, but a ‘continuous activity’ in the here and now (p. 53). ‘Change’ in Walden is described as a natural ‘crisis’ comparable to the moulting of a bird; at the same time, it is the distinctively human crisis that is mediated by language (p. 43). And the theme of leaving suggests that education of grownups is a continuous process of departure from one’s own self and from the other as the teacher, a process that involves the act of bequeathing.

The idea of philosophy as education in American philosophy helps to release us from the narrow concept of practice that is dominant. In the current economy of education and life as a whole, we forget the rich excess of ordinary experience. This obliteration is the very crisis of nihilism produced by the depletion of American democracy—a state in which a facile notion of practice promotes contempt for ‘mere words’ in an unreflective subjugation to the native use of language. Complementing Dewey’s pragmatism, Cavell rediscovers a forgotten excess in the ordinary, the experience of the strange in the familiar, as a part of our daily practice of teaching and learning. Furthermore, by releasing us as philosophers of education from our compulsion to apply theory to practice—that is, by adding ‘educational implications’ to our theoretical accounts after the event—the Cavellian perspective helps us acquire the courage to take a step beyond the dichotomous view of theory and practice, and to be receptive to the senses of a holistic economy of living as a spring of authentic thinking. It is then that philosophy turns into a form of practice.3

Correspondence: Naoko Saito, Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto-shi, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan. Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1. For a relevant recent discussion of Cavell’s text, see Paul Standish’s ‘Uncommon Schools: Stanley

Cavell and the Teaching of Walden’ (Standish, 2006).

2. In accordance with the system that Cavell uses in The Senses of Walden, chapter references in

Thoreau’s Walden are shown in roman numerals while arabic numerals refer to the paragraph

within the chapter.

3. The original version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of

Education Society at Great Britain (March 31, 2006). I am grateful to those present for their

comments.

Philosophy as Education and Education as Philosophy 355

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

REFERENCES

Cavell, S. (1983) The Politics of Interpretation (Politics as Opposed to What?), in: Themes Out of

School: Effects and Causes (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press).

Cavell, S. (1986) In Quest of the Ordinary, in: M. Eaves and M. Fischer (eds) Romanticism and

Contemporary Criticism (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press).

Cavell, S. (1990) Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian

Perfectionism (La Salle, IL, Open Court).

Cavell, S. (1992) The Senses of Walden (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press).

Cavell, S. (2004) Interview with Stanley Cavell by Naoko Saito (July 6).

Cavell, S. (2005) Walden in Tokyo (unpublished paper).

Dewey, J. (1985) Democracy and Education, in: The Middle Works of John Dewey, Vol. 9, ed. J.

A. Boydston (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press).

Dewey, J. (1984) The Public and its Problems, in: The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 2, ed. J.

A. Boydston (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press).

Dewey, J. (1988) ‘Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us’, in: The Later Works of John

Dewey, Vol. 14, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press).

Goodman, R. B. (1990) American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press).

Putnam, H. (1994) Words and Life (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

Putnam, H. (2005) Philosophy as the Education of Grownups: Stanley Cavell and Skepticism,

in: A. Crary and S. Shieh (eds) Reading Cavell (London, Routledge).

Standish, P. (2005) Towards an Economy of Higher Education, Critical Quarterly, 47.1–2,

pp. 53–71.

Standish, P. (2006) ‘Uncommon Schools: Stanley Cavell and the Teaching of Walden’, Studies in

Philosophy and Education, 25.1–2, pp. 145–157.

Standish, P. and Saito, N. (2005) Stanley Cavell to Walden no Sekai—Nihon no Dokusha he no

Izanai (Stanley Cavell’s Walden—An invitation to Japanese Readers), in: Sense obu Walden

(The Japanese translation of The Senses of Walden) (Tokyo, Hosei University Press).

Thoreau, H. D. (1992) Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. W. Rossi (New York,

W. W. Norton & Company).

356 N. Saito

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain