Back to the Rough Ground
Some Notes on Nina Simone, Stanley Cavell, and the Human Form of Life
Thursday marked the birthday of the incomparable Nina Simone, who died all the way back in 2003, the year I entered college. If you are unfamiliar with her work, you could do worse than starting with this recording of “Central Park Blues,” or maybe this live performance of “Ain’t Got No.” She grew up outside of a town called Tryon, North Carolina, in Gaston County. I hear there’s an effort afoot to place her family’s house on the National Register of Historic Places. I hope that happens.
Is there a more compelling North Carolinian artist? Someone please convince me otherwise.
Last week I read a collection of essays I haven’t looked at in quite some time. It’s called This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein. The essays are written by Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who made a large impression on me in graduate school. Cavell is best known as an interpreter of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 20th-century Austrian philosopher who taught at Cambridge University from 1929 until 1947. Cavell taught in Harvard’s philosophy department for over forty years, and before his death in 2018 wrote widely on art, aesthetics, the philosophy of ordinary language, and ethics. He also wrote a book of essays on the so-called “remarriage” genre of Hollywood comedy (the essays on Adam’s Rib and His Girl Friday are superb). Some of Cavell’s best writing is on Shakespeare. There’s a famous essay on King Lear (“The Avoidance of Love”) in Must We Mean What We Say? and a long, dazzling meditation on Othello at the conclusion of Cavell’s first book, The Claim of Reason.
Ever since I encountered Cavell’s writings as an undergraduate I have felt a fondness for him. For one thing, he was born in Atlanta, Georgia. During the Depression, his family bounced back and forth between Atlanta and Sacramento, California. What other major philosopher could the American South lay claim to? After taking a post at Harvard in 1963, Cavell spent a few summers teaching at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi (my hometown).
When I have taught Cavell’s work, students typically find him very difficult to follow. His sentences can be baroque and serpentine, but his tone is genial, earnest, and never willfully obscure. He doesn’t apologize for what he takes an interest in (J.L. Austin? Frank Capra? Heidegger? Howard Hawks?). He was an iconoclast and a magpie. In reading him, I have always discovered that his brilliance finds ways to counter whatever misgiving you have about where his writing begins from. I recall hearing from someone who knew Cavell that he liked to describe writing as “tuiting [one’s] intuition”: that is, watching or attending to your intuition about something, but also making your intuition pay for your decision to follow it. I have to say that I find writing to be just like this.
Anyway, in the first essay of This New Yet Unapproachable America, Cavell describes ordinary language philosophy (hereafter OLP) as a practice that seeks deliverance from philosophical problems by returning words to their everyday use. “The antidote to illusion,” Cavell says, “is the particular and repeated humility of remembering and tracking the use of humble words, looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads” (34). As in psychoanalysis, the way out of a problem is not up, but down (“at any rate, along each chain of a day’s denial”). This is the tradition of philosophical practice he identifies with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and himself.
Cavell says that OLP tracks the insatiable craving for certainty in our lives. It asks us to pay attention to the paths we take to arrive at the different forms of certainty that govern our lives (personal, religious, social, political, scientific). It insists that the criteria for these forms of certainty are never more or less than our own shared form of life: our form of life as human beings, as talkers, as the creatures who talk to each other. “The criteria of [what counts as] pain, say, do not apply to what does not exhibit a form of life,” that is, to inorganic life. In an example Wittgenstein discusses at length in Philosophical Investigations, a man’s bodily expression of sorrow and joy alternates with the ticking of a clock. Is a person who behaves like this really experiencing sorrow and joy? What the man lacks, Wittgenstein says, is the “characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy.” His point is that human behavior is readable; it has a recognizable pattern. So do the life forms of nonhuman organic life. But the human variations on these patterns of behavior are still specific to being human. The criteria for judging patterns of behavior to be real or not isn’t genetic or biological or anything other than the shared life form of the human. That life form is irreducibly natural and cultural. Put differently, we know a human when we see one.
The problem is that we often want our criteria to be more or less than they really are. For Cavell, this desire is the source of philosophical difficulty. He usually calls this desire skepticism; its twin is idealism. Both deny the conditions of human closeness, the conditions for the achievement of human connection, which is the language (and life) that you and I might share together by talking. For the skeptic or the idealist, the ordinary is something to be overcome. The everyday is a “pervasive scene of illusion and trance and artificiality” (46). Remarkably, Cavell (and Wittgenstein) do not disagree with this. But they both argue that “the ordinary has, and alone has, to move the ordinary, to leave the human habitat habitable, the same transfigured” (47). Only the ordinary can make a difference in our lives because “everything humans do and suffer is as specific to them as are hoping or promising or calculating or smiling or waving hello or strolling or running in place or being naked or torturing.” These words or concepts describe “patterns in the weave our life,” and the patterns are as specific to our own lives as they are to anyone else’s. He goes on: “the practice of the ordinary may be thought of as the overcoming of iteration or replication or imitation by repetition, of counting by recounting, of calling by recalling” (47).
I’ve not yet put my finger on it, but something in Cavell’s account of the practice of the ordinary rhymes with my own sense of what farming is or perhaps could be, or why maybe it feels necessary to me and to so many others in this particular moment of history. After all, agriculture, like any complicated practice, belongs to the human life form. No other creature farms in order to survive. It seems to me that what motivates people to go back to the land (so to speak) is to discover what industrialization has hidden from us: not only the gigantic environmental or ecological costs of the “conveniences” it has granted us, costs that it labors every day to hide or dissemble, but also to find again (or perhaps just ask) what a human life that is decent, honorable, and ecological might look like. If there is something despairing and conspiratorial in such an impulse, so be it. But it seems obvious to me that in order to live quietly in the first quarter of the twenty-first century we have been required to swallow a host of poisonous lies about, say, the evolution of the political economy in the twentieth century, about the efficiencies of modern life and modern agriculture, about the damage and devastation that the everyday habits of modern life have inflicted on the world around us.
I want to say more about this later, but I find that I am happy to end this post by pointing to the following comment Cavell makes in reflecting on Thoreau’s Walden, another of his favorite subjects, in a book called Senses of Walden. Cavell asks how it is possible to see nature for what it is when we have done everything in our power to put nature in bondage. The answer is something like the recovery of a way of life that refuses to abstract from the everyday, that follows “each chain of day’s denial” back to the rough ground of (human) life.
Beyond the bondage to institutions, we have put nature in bondage, bound it to our uses and to our hurried capacities for sensing, rather than learning of its autonomy. And this means that an object named does not exist for us in its name. We do not know what the bottom of a pond is if we do not know, e.g., what it is to sound the bottom, vaguely imagining that it is abysmally deep. We do not literally mean that we are searching for ‘the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day’ where he sings on his twig, unless we mean him and the twig (Walden, XVII, 15). We do not know what “Walden” means unless we know what Walden is. The return of a word requires the recovery of its object for us. Senses of Walden, 64