Stanley Cavell and the Pursuits of Happiness
Hans Sluga
1.
Human thought possesses for Stanley Cavell both a tragic and a comic dimension. It does so, moreover, inherently and indispensably because thinking is “not required of beings exempt from tragedy and comedy,” as we read in Pursuits of Happiness. (p. 259)[1] The remark provokes and is meant to do so. There exists indeed an acknowledged link between tragedy and philosophy but the connection between philosophy and comedy seems (to common perception, at least) obscure. Our whole philosophical tradition begins according to Plato with a tragic conflict between the philosopher and the polis. In examining himself and investigating his fellow citizens, Socrates has performed a critical service to his city. But the city condemns the philosopher to death and there arises a tragic alienation of philosophy from politics in which both are permanently left poorer.[2] The comic dimension of philosophical thought is, however, more difficult to acknowledge. We are likely to be reminded at first only of the unfortunate circumstance that Aristophanes’ poking fun at Socrates may have contributed to his tragic death. Philosophy will, indeed, look ridiculous to the outsider, as Plato granted, but does this establish an inner link between comedy and philosophy? Cavell perceives, however, a significant connection between all three – between philosophy, tragedy, and comedy. Philosophy, he writes, is deeply related to tragedy by beginning in wonder and just as deeply to comedy by continuing in argument. His model is here the Platonic dialogue and specifically Plato’s Parmenides in whose vision of the ideas Cavell discerns a tragic beginning while its arguments (over the idea of mud, and such) display for him a comical character. But is philosophical argument always comical in nature and is there always or essentially a comic dimension to philosophical thought?
It is certainly easier to assume an asymmetric relation between philosophy, tragedy, and comedy. Human sensibility seems to find the tragic “more elevated, more fascinating” and, hence, “more conducive to … metaphysical suggestion.” Tragedy, it appears, “not only seduces imagination and intellect, but flatters them,” while comedy lacks the appropriate gravity.[3] Only an exceptional figure like Nietzsche has been willing to lend support to the thought of a decisive link between philosophy and comedy. A great tragedian, so Nietzsche, “only reaches the final summit of his achievement when he knows how to see himself and his art beneath him – and knows how to laugh at himself.”[4] All the great teachers of a purpose, Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, have, in fact, “in the long run” been vanquished by laughter. “The short tragedy always gave way again and returned into the eternal comedy of existence.” Setting himself against the mainstream – and against the spirit of seriousness in his own earlier work – Nietzsche derides the ever-repeated sentiment that “there is something at which it is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh.” Instead, he calls for a new kind of thinking – a merry, singing, dancing, gay science. But he admits reluctantly that “for the present things are still quite different. For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself. For the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religion.” And so he concludes in a more cautiously reflective mood: “Not only laughter and gay wisdom but the tragic, too, with all its sublime unreason belongs among the means and necessities of the preservation of the species.”[5]
Cavell’s instincts in his Pursuits of Happiness seem for the most part aligned with Nietzsche’s, but this does not ultimately engender in them a common purpose. Nietzsche’s vision of the comedy of human existence will lead him on to contemplate the prospects for a “great European politics of the future” with its evident potential for tragedy. The society he seeks is, indeed, meant to uphold “the power of commanding; the sense of reverence, subservience, ability to keep silent; great passion, the great task, tragedy, cheerfulness.”[6] Cavell, too, seeks to sort out the balance by turning to political matters; but he undertakes this from the perspective of a micropolitics of everyday life. He considers for this purpose the pursuits of happiness by men and women in the America of the nineteen thirties and forties as depicted in what he calls “the Hollywood comedies of remarriage”; these comedies are meant to provide us a possible model for understanding political matters. But in focusing on the pursuit of happiness as essential to individual and political life, Cavell is led to conclude that we should not seek to burden our existence, as far as possible, by “choosing tragically to call it tragic.” (p. 238) His unusual and adventurous undertaking elicits three basic questions: what conception of politics is engendered from Cavell’s particular viewpoint? how are the issues of marriage and remarriage meant to bear on politics at the large-scale level of public life? Can Cavell deal adequately with the tragic and comic aspects of politics? In seeking to answer these questions it is useful to locate him in relation to other political thinkers. Protagoras and Aristotle, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt prove, in this context, important reference points. We may still, in the end, do no more than append an additional question mark How are we to understand the place of tragedy and comedy in thought, in politics, in life? Despite the initially intriguing affinity between Nietzsche and Cavell with respect to this question, we may end up asking which of the two has seen more deeply. Is it Nietzsche or is it Cavell?
2.
It is because of its specific concern with the everyday circumstances of American life that Pursuits of Happiness presents itself innocuously enough as a reading of seven Hollywood comedies from the 1930’s and 40’s – films that seem, to the unprepared eye, preoccupied with slight, unphilosophical, and unpolitical matters. Their heroines are, in every case, married women who have for some reason or other separated from their partners. The plot of each of the films is not to get the central pair together, as it is in traditional Old and New comedy, “but to get them back together, together again.” (p. 2) The fact of marriage is thus subjected to the fact or threat of divorce. None of this seems to bear in a major fashion on either philosophical or political matters.
Still, there is no doubt that Pursuits of Happiness seeks to rethink the nature of philosophy and, in turn, its relations to tragedy and comedy. Cavell assures us, in any case, that film in general, – including, presumably, these comedies – exists “in a state of philosophy.” (p. 13) This will admittedly sound outrageous, but Cavell adds defiantly: “Philosophy, as I understand it, is indeed outrageous.” (p. 8) And he deliberately courts such outrage further by telling us that a face-off between film and philosophy “is positively called for.” (p. 13) Only through such a confrontation will we see that film is “inherently self-reflective, takes itself as an inevitable part of its craving for speculation,” and that the specific genre of the Hollywood comedy of remarriage “demands the portrayal of philosophical conversation, hence undertakes to portray one of the causes of philosophical dispute.” (p. 13f.) By perceiving such affinities, so Cavell assures us, we are likely to attain a deeper grasp of both film and philosophy. Film is particularly useful, so Cavell, for coming to terms with philosophers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Austin, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger who seek to bring philosophy back to the ordinary condition of everyday life. Precisely this condition is depicted in film and specifically in the comedies discussed in Pursuits of Happiness. Such films can therefore serve a distinctively philosophical purpose. In providing us with richer view of the everyday, they illuminate at the same time the significance of the philosophers’ concern with the ordinary.
This ordinary condition of everyday life proves, however, to be also a political one. Cavell alerts us to at the start by means of the title of the book. “Pursuits of Happiness” is evidently meant to recall the American Declaration of Independence. One must take note, however, of the shift from the Declaration’s singular to the plural of Cavell’s title. Cavell means to speak not of the politically ratified pursuit of happiness, but of multiple and individualized pursuits of happiness. We can see what he has in mind by turning to his discussion of The Philadelphia Story of 1940. The film is for Cavell about the diverse kinds of happiness and unhappiness of its protagonists: Tracy Lord, C. K, Dexter Haven, Mike Macaulay Conner, George Kitted, and Liz Imbrue. But this is not meant to depoliticize the pursuit of happiness of which the Declaration of Independence speaks. Cavell intends, rather, to give the multiple pursuits depicted in The Philadelphia Story and in the other comedies discussed in the book a newly political meaning. However, this is possible only if we adopt a new and broader conception of politics. Cavell seems to be telling us then that we will not begin to understand the actual nature of our political situation unless we first grant the multiplicity of ways in which happiness is and can be pursued and hence also the multiplicity of ways in which these pursuits can be achieved or can fail. Comedy and tragedy, we might rephrase him, both have many shapes and embodiments; myth, theater, and film tell us just this in their multiple stories. Comedy and tragedy, thus understood, are at the same time political in nature – not, of course, in the sense of the great politics of states and acts of governments, of war and peace, of leaders and rulers, but in the broader sense of a politics in which individual people pursue their individual happiness and in which they together negotiate the terms of that pursuit. Cavell speaks, in this context, of a “split or doubling… between civilization and eros.” (p. 64) His films, he writes, imply “that while it is the nature of the erotic to form a stumbling block to a reasonable civilized existence, call it the political, human happiness nevertheless goes on demanding satisfaction in both realms.” (p. 64f.) Following in the steps of Thoreau, Cavell concludes that these films seek to join “the thoughts of day and night, of the public and the private” in the pursuits of happiness they depict. They seek to show that “what used to be a matter of cosmic public importance is now a private of what we call emotional difficulty.” (p. 54) The old boundaries between the public and the private are thus redrawn and with them also the boundaries of the political. What had once seemed separated by sharp divisions has now come to be joined and at this juncture appears at the same time a new understanding of the political.
Nowhere is Cavell’s intention made clearer than in his chapter on The Philadelphia Story – a film replete with political references, from its title to the portrait of George Washington in the hallway of Tracy Lord’s home. In writing on this film, Cavell proposes to weave a daydream, as he says, around the film’s conversation (which must also at once be seen as philosophical in character) “on the question of America, on whether America has achieved its new human being, its more prefect union and its domestic tranquility, its new birth of freedom, whether it has been successful in securing the pursuit of happiness, whether it is earning the conversation it demands.” (p. 152f.) The Philadelphia Story shares, in fact, together with the other Hollywood comedies under discussion, an affinity with Ibsen’s Doll House in that all of them “assemble with velocity an argument concerning forgiveness, inhabitation, conversation, happiness, playtime, becoming human, fathers and husbands, brother and sister, education, scandal, fitness for teaching, honor, becoming strangers, the miracle of change, and the metaphysics of marriage.” (p. 22) In short, all these films are concerned not with one kind of pursuit but with distinct and diverse pursuits of happiness. “Pursuits of Happiness” announces at the same time – in both title and content – a new political agenda for there is on Cavell’s view nothing more political than the right of citizens to pursue their own happiness in their own diverse ways. The political rests, in other words, on this view first and foremost at the level where fates differ and the forms of happiness (and unhappiness) multiply.
Cavell proves, thus, to be engaged in a rethinking of our classical picture of politics – a picture that has come to us all the way from Plato and Aristotle. This classical picture represents politics as a concern with the rule (arché) or government of the polis or state. Only what occurs at this upper stratum of the organization of public life is genuinely to be considered politics. The ordinary and everyday may be subject to political regulation but they lack a political character of their own. There must follow from this a sharp division between political and civic life and eventually also the modern distinction between political and individual liberty. These consequences are not yet so evident in Plato’s Republic where politics is first defined as rule because Plato envisions an all-encompassing polis in which every aspect of life is ruled by the will of the philosopher-kings. But even then, it is remarkable how little the Republic cares about the lives of ordinary people. Plato’s goal is, indeed, not to make individual citizens happy in his ideal polis but the city as a whole. In Aristotle’s Politics the distinction between political and civic life becomes even more sharply defined in the division between household and polis. The former is the sphere in which man and wife, parents and children, masters and servants interact and it is as such a thoroughly non-political sphere. Politics happens for him, rather, in the public arena where independent males take turns in governing their city. The Platonic-Aristotelian definition has survived for more than two thousand years and is still often taken for granted. We can find its traces even in such a determinedly anti-Platonic writer as Hannah Arendt. While she is eager to reject the conception of politics as rule, Arendt still considers the distinction between the public and the private to be fundamental and still holds that politics can take place only where there exists a distinctively public sphere.
Cavell, in contrast to this whole long tradition and under the influences of philosophers of the ordinary from Emerson and Thoreau to Wittgenstein, Austin, and Heidegger, proposes, in effect, a radical revisioning of politics in which the ordinary, the private, the everyday, the small scale, and the insignificantly personal can all be conceived of as political in character. There exists then not only a politics of the state, but also a politics of marriage, of the family, of friendship, and of a manifold of other human conditions. This does not or should not mean that we can altogether neglect the large-scale politics of government and the state; it involves rather a broadening of our conception of the political beyond the narrow confines of the Platonic-Aristotelian model, and it implies presumably also involves a commitment to the idea that the great politics of the public sphere is based on the politics of the ordinary and can be understood only in its terms and by means of its characteristic notions.
Cavell is thereby reviving, without perhaps realizing it, an understanding of politics first advanced by the sophist Protagoras – a conception explicitly denied in the Platonic-Aristotelian model. Protagoras, as it appears from Plato’s dialogue named after him, had a threefold insight with respect to politics. The first was that human beings are forced to engage in politics because the gods do not take care of them and they are compelled, instead, to take care of themselves. His second thought was that human beings are political because they are under-endowed by nature in this care of themselves, finding themselves “naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed” in their struggle for survival. In order to flourish, they must create their own human world, make up language, produce clothes, build houses, and obtain food. And to this Protagoras adds that human beings are not naturally organized in political institutions and that there exists no natural political order and, indeed, no naturally established human hierarchy. Human beings are, rather, naturally unqualified for political life and awkward in their relations with each other. For Protagoras it follows that they need to foster two kinds of basic skill, if they are to survive. The first are technical skills and the second political ones. While technical skills may be specialized, the political ones must, moreover, be had by all, for “a man cannot be without some share of fairness, or he would not be human.” (323c) Therefore, “when the subject is political competence, … everyone must share in this kind of virtue; otherwise the state could not exist.” (322e-323a) Protagoras adds pointedly that the Athenians agree with him in this and defer to experts when faced with technical questions because they believe that technical skills are distributed unevenly, “but when the subject of their debate involves political wisdom, … they listen to every man’s opinion.” (323a) Democracy is, thus, justified because of the pervasive human capacity for political wisdom.
While Protagoras thinks that everyone is endowed with political competence, this endowment is to begin with only as a basic, raw, and undeveloped capacity. A fully realized political competence is, by contrast, “not by nature or of spontaneous growth, but in whomsoever it is present the result of teaching and practice.” (323c) Only through care (epimeleia) can men develop respect for each other, a sense of fairness or justice; only through care can they learn to form bonds of friendship, and thus, in short, acquire political competence. Politics in the broad sense is, in fact, embodied in all the acts of care that develop, nurture, and maintain these qualities. Politics is, in Protagoras’ words, in effect, the care of the common, the epimeleia koinonias and this care is not merely the precondition of politics but constitutes its content and essence. Thus, even child rearing is to be thought of as a political undertaking. And the same thing must be said of the inculcating of manners in school, of instruction in writing, the reading of good poets, and the learning of inspirational poems. Even instruction in music Protagoras declares to possess a political function insofar as it teaches a student self-control and because knowledge of rhythms and harmonies makes him more civil, more cultivated “for to be more rhythmic and more harmonious is essential to speaking and acting.” (326b) The same holds for physical training; it, too, has a political purpose for it is essential “that a good mind may have a good body to serve it.” (326b) At yet a further and third stage in the process of political instruction the city compels boys to learn the laws and to use them as patterns for their own lives. “The city sets up laws devised by good lawgivers of the past, and compels citizens to rule and be ruled in accordance with them. Whoever strays outside the lines, it punishes.” (326e) The Protagorean story stops at this point, but it clearly calls for continuation as we can see when we reflect on the storyteller himself. For Protagoras, too, was a teacher and saw himself as teaching political skills to his students and as such understands himself to be serving a political function. His goal was, indeed, to teach a student “the proper counsel in his personal affairs, so that he may best manage his household, and also the city’s affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as a speaker and a man of action.” (318e) The Protagorean conception of politics can thus be called a pedagogic one. At the heart of politics lies, on this view, a cultivation of the individual that is thought necessary to make him a suitable member of the polis and this cultivation takes place at all levels of instruction. Politics is seen here not as rule or arché but as paideia and it takes place not only in the public arena but also in the privacy of the schoolhouse.
It is to this Protagorean tradition in political thought that Cavell, in effect, refers us back in Pursuits of Happiness. Like Protagoras he seeks to attain a broad understanding of the scope of politics. Like him, he allows for a politics of the everyday and the ordinary, not only for a politics of government and the state. Like Protagoras, Cavell conceives, of politics, moreover, as a paideia, hence his emphasis on films of conversation and on the affinity of these films to philosophical conversation. It is in the pedagogy of conversation that both the comedies of remarriage and philosophy acquire their political character. One must add here, however, that, in contrast to Protagoras, Cavell concerns himself with one specific aspect of such a political paideia (one, in turn, overlooked by Protagoras), that is, with “the woman’s education.” (p. 55) Cavell’s rediscovery of the Protagorean conception of politics may, in fact, be due, in the first instance, to his realization that the issues raised by feminist movements since the middle of the nineteenth century cannot be understood as genuinely political within the boundaries of the classical, Platonic-Aristotelian model of politics. We can read his book as evidence for the weakening of this classical conception over the course of the last century and a half – a process that is by no means completed but one that has already begun to undermine all our traditional philosophical conceptions of the nature of the political.
3.
What matters to Cavell and what matters to him in the comedies he examines are certainly not the great economic and political issues of the time in which these films were made and in which their stories take place. These films are preoccupied with private lives not public situations; their stories are romantic in tone and full of the entanglements and uncertainties of love. They might for that reason be easily dismissed as escapist fare, as “fairytales for the Depression.” Their stories are, moreover, typically isolated from the economic and political exigencies of their time by being set in affluent locations, often in a mythically wealthy “Connecticut” and sometimes in locations of great luxury such as the Lord estate in The Philadelphia Story. Only occasionally do we get glimpses of actual deprivation such as in It Happened One Night in “the Depression vignette of a mother on the bus fainting from what her crying child informs us is hunger.” (p. 94) But Cavell insists that all this does not single out the comedies of remarriage. He writes: “If luxurious settings and fantastic sums of money were confined to the Hollywood films of this period, and if Hollywood films of luxury and expenditure were confined to works that form the genre of remarriage, then I would be more drawn to an economic interpretation of the films I have interested myself in.” (p. 2f.) The remark dismisses the Depression, of course, too quickly as a merely economic matter and hence as not being of genuine political concern. But the decisive point for Cavell is that “the economic [or, as we might say, the public-political] issues in these films, with all their ambivalence and irresolution, are invariably tropes of spiritual issues.” (p. 5) Thus, the hunger, so prominent in It Happened One Night, should be seen as standing almost invariably for spiritual hunger. It is for this reason that public politics occupies so small a place in the world of these films. We may consider it emblematic when Cary Grant advises his newspaper editor in My Girl Friday to redo the front page, “to stick Hitler in the funny pages” and to leave the rooster story alone. “That’s human interest.” (p. 25) Newspapers generally represent the public in these films whereas the film itself “symbolizes the realm of privacy” (p. 64) and the two are formally distinct even though, as Cavell keenly aware, they intersect in peculiar ways. For we are not meant to conclude that the great political issues of the time are of no concern in these comedies. We are to understand, rather, first of all the political dimension of “human interest,” and then the fact that the foundations of what we usually call politics lie in the affairs of the ordinary and everyday.
Three issues occupy these films and occupy Cavell’s reading of these films. They are of increasingly larger scope and lead thus from what we may think of as the more private to the more public-political. There is, first of all, a concern with “the creation of a new woman;” there arises from this, second, the question of a new understanding of the union of a man and a woman and with it the need for a rethinking of marriage; from this follows, in turn, the question whether America has achieved its “more perfect union” and how we are to think still more broadly of the problem “of the perfected human community.”
The first and most specific concern of these films is for Cavell a feminist one. This genre of film, Cavell writes, “is bound up with a phase in the history of the consciousness of women.” (p. 16) But in this phase in the development of the consciousness of women is no longer that of the old political struggle that began with the Seneca Falls of Convention of 1848 and culminated in the winning of the vote for women in 1920. The acknowledged leaders of that earlier women’s movement – Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Margaret Sanger – are, indeed, entirely absent from these films. And so are all mother figures. Cavell writes: “Socially, it seems to me, the absence of the woman’s mother in these films of the thirties betokens a guilt, or anyway, puzzlement, toward the generation of women preceding the generation of the central woman of our films – the generation that won the right to vote without at the same time winning the issues in terms of which voting mattered enough.” (p. 57f.) The heroines of the comedies of remarriage are not public figures; they live for the most outside the political spotlight; they are played, moreover, by actresses recognizable in their own rights but not necessarily as feminist leaders. Still, for all that, the comedies of remarriage represent to Cavell “a phase of feminism.” (p. 19)
This new phase in the history of feminism is for him characterized by its preoccupation with “the creation of a new woman or the new creation of a woman.” (p. 16, p. 64, and p. 140) Cavell’s repetitions of this formula make clear how central it is for his understanding of the comedies of remarriage for these films are said by him to be playing a peculiarly double role in this phase of feminism. They set out to create the new woman by means of the female roles in their stories but at the same time also through the leading actresses who perform these roles (Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Barbara Sandwich). While the cinematic narrative focuses on the heroine’s identity, the cinematic medium emphasizes the physical and photographic presence of the actress herself playing the part. In using the new medium of the sound film and the capacity of film to allow an easy shifting of focus between the film’s narrative and its physical reality itself, these comedies engage both in the creation of a new woman and a new kind of creative process, a new creation of woman. In their narrative content they can be said to be concerned with the one and in their reality as films with the other task.
Looked at in either way, these films can be said to have an educational meaning. Certainly, “an essential goal of the narrative is the education of the woman.” (p. 84) And here we discover a direct connection between the Protagorean and the Cavellian understanding of politics in that both see it as a pedagogic exercise. Even in these comedies it is, as Cavell points out, once again the men who assign to themselves the task of undertaking this education, hence their frequent, admonishing lectures in these films. But what is new (and could never have been contemplated in the Protagorean tradition) is that women themselves “might attempt this direction” (p. 65) and take an active hand in their own education. The effect is a new kind of interaction between men and women. The concern with the creation of a new woman becomes thus at the same time a concern with the union of the two, that is, with marriage, and beyond that with the union between human beings in general. At stake is, in other words, “the problem and the concept of identity – either in the form of what becomes of an individual, or of what has become of two individuals.” (p. 55) Cavell observes that in The Philadelphia Story the narrative’s attention is paradigmatically directed towards this question of identity by asking “whether the heroine is a goddess made of stone or of bronze, or whether a woman of flesh and blood.” (p. 140) And the symbolic death of the heroine as goddess and her rebirth as human is brought about through her engagement with the men who surround her. The transformation involves, in particular, the woman’s acceptance of herself as an embodied, sexual being (as well as our acceptance of her as such). While physical virginity is no longer an issue in this connection, a new, spiritual virginity still is and with it the possibility of a new understanding of sexual union and marriage.
The question of the new woman, of a new identity thus forces us to examine what constitutes a union. “The overarching question of the comedies of remarriage is precisely the question what constitutes a union, what makes these two into one, what binds, you may say what sanctifies the marriage.” (p. 53) It is taken for granted that the church has lost its power to authenticate the institution of marriage. Divorce is conceived as a legitimate way out of a failed relation. Since the couple is depicted as previously married, virginity is, in one sense, no longer a condition for the new union, nor are children present in these films for they, too, no longer authenticate marriage. The couple itself is rather seen to attain a new innocence in re-establishing their bond and in doing so they often recover a childlike innocence. With such radical changes in the conception of marriage the nature of its legitimacy is certainly now open to question and so is, as Cavell sees it, “the question of the legitimacy of society.” (p. 53) The old assumption that the man is or should be the active partner in the relationship and the woman the passive one is equally overthrown. The new union assumes rather that both parts are equal in their ability to engage in a conversation in which their union is always at issue. Thus, “a willingness for marriage entails a certain willingness for bickering.” (p. 86) While this may not be exactly a mark of absolute bliss, it expresses a sense of caring and in consequence of the fact that in their search for a new union “the battle of men and women for recognition of one another” (p. 18) is both continued and renewed. Cavell emphasizes that for all these reasons the comedy of remarriage can also be called “the comedy of equality.” (p. 122) For, “we are permanently in doubt who the hero is, that is, whether it is the male or the female, who is the active partner, which of them is in quest, who is following whom.” (p. 122) The couple must rather work out a mutual understanding of what their union is to consist in. Cavell writes therefore: “The overarching question of comedies of remarriage is precisely the question of what constitutes a union.” (p. 53) In searching for such an understanding of their union the couple will typically have to overcome numerous obstacles. Pursuits of Happiness begins accordingly by noting that both old and new comedy “show a young pair overcoming individual and social obstacles to their happiness, figured as a concluding marriage that achieves individual and social reconciliations.” (p. 1) Cavell grants that “the principal pair in this structure will normally draw the conclusion on their own, isolated within society, not backed by it” (p. 123), but for all that he does not assume an abyss between the couple and society at large. Every such union is, rather, formed on this view by recognizing continuities with society through “the inheritance of certain conditions, procedures, and subjects and goals.” (p. 28f.) Cavell is also ready to recognize that the constitution of a union (including a political union) typically involves an overcoming of obstacles and that it may even involve the battling against an adversary, as in the founding of the American republic, we need not hold that every union between a man and a woman requires an antagonist and the same is presumably meant to hold true at the national and political level. The validation of marriage is found under these conditions, as Cavell formulates in a deliberately paradoxical manner, in “the willingness for repetition, the willingness for remarriage.” (p. 126f.) And he makes sure that we do not forget this important conclusion, first drawn in the discussion of Bringing Up Baby, by reaffirming it in his chapter on The Philadelphia Story where he writes: “Our genre emphasizes the mystery of marriage by finding that neither law nor sexuality (nor, by implication, progeny) is sufficient to ensure marriage and suggesting that what provides legitimacy is the mutual willingness for remarriage, for a sort of continuous affirmation.” (p. 142)
These considerations lead Cavell immediately to his third and most far-ranging and most explicitly political topic. Our summary reproduction of his argument so far may well have produced the impression that we have stretched the concept of the political unduly when we applied it to Cavell’s reading of the comedies of remarriage and to these comedies themselves. For it may still be thought at this point that these films are mostly concerned with petty quarrels and reconciliations, with the overcoming of minor obstacles, and indeed with all the parochial twists and turns that make for comedy. What gives us reason to call these maneuverings political? Why speak here of a micropolitics of everyday life? Is it simply because we recognize similarities between these stories and the events that constitute what we usually call political? Who would deny these such correspondences and parallels? Still, do they justify the non-metaphorical use of the term “political” in characterizing the comedies of remarriage? We can respond to these questions by arguing, first, that the common description of politics as rule of the state singles out only some aspects of political life, that the micropolitics of everyday life is as much part of political life as the high business of government, and that this is obscured only by our unreasoned adherence to the narrow Platonic-Aristotelian characterization of politics as government. If we follow the broader and older account of politics advanced by Protagoras, according to which politics is the care of the common, we can see that different forms of tending the web of human common are related to one another both causally and historically. I have noted already that the idea of a micropolitics of everyday life has come to acquire legitimacy in our thinking over the course of the last century because the legitimacy of governmental politics has become increasingly doubtful to us. We find ourselves, for that reason, forced to go back behind the Platonic-Aristotelian formula to the broader (and, perhaps, deeper) Protagorean conception of politics. This conception allows us to see, moreover, that all governmental politics must ultimately emerge from micropolitical conditions. For cities and states and their governance must have evolved at some time from micropolitical forms of human existence. By attending to the micropolitics of modern life, we are thus recovering a level of politics that lies historically underneath the steely frame of modern, governmental politics and since we are no longer sure of the latter, we may find it necessary to attend once again to these underlying strata.
The comedies of remarriage are, in any case, in Cavell’s eyes, concerned not only with the creation of a new woman and the redefinition of her union with a man, they are equally occupied with the question of a perfected human community and they, indeed, “propose marriage as our best emblem of this eventually community.” (p. 152) Being concerned with the creation of a new woman these films deal, at the same time, with “a new creation of the human.” (p. 16) They must thus be seen as parables for a new phase in “the development of consciousness” and a part of a “struggle for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a man and a woman.” (p. 17) Marriage is, in this manner, to be seen as “an emblem of the knowledge of others not solely becauyse of its implication of reciprocity but because it implies a devotion in repetition, to dailyness.” (p. 241) In rethinking the nature of marriage, these films set out at the same time to rethink the nature of political union. That Cavell is actually proposing such a move from the level of the private to that of the public is made evident in his treatment of The Philadelphia Story. The film’s narrative concerning the marriage of Tracy Lord and C. K. Dexter Haven becomes for him, accordingly, the occasion of a dream “about people convening for a covenant in or near Philadelphia and debating the nature and the relation of the classes from which they come.” (p. 153) The question of their marriage is, thus, elevated to “national importance.” (p. 147) The debate Cavell envisages in his daydream is about “the rights of the sensuous or erotic side of human nature” against the claims of the necessary and the utilitarian. (p. 155) It is for Cavell a debate also about “whether America will produce and recognize in human beings something to call natural aristocracy.” (p. 155) It is a debate furthermore about the “balance between Western culture’s two forces of authority [the Hellenic and the Hebraic] so that American mankind can refind its object, its dedication to a more perfect union, toward the perfected human community, its right to the pursuit of happiness.” (p.158) Cavell’s suggestions are certainly enticing but remain difficult to assess without fuller elaboration. Of undoubted importance, however, is his thought that the comedies of remarriage reveal all genuine unions to be always re-unions and that the true form of marriage is re-marriage. It follows from this politically that America cannot rest on the historical fact of having once established a union, but must by necessity seek constantly to “refind its object.” And what holds for this particular political union holds, presumably, is meant to hold equally also for any other one.
That may prove an important lesson to remember for our own political situation. That situation is, of course, different from that of the period in which the Hollywood comedies of remarriage were made. It is different also from the conditions under which Cavell wrote his book on these comedies. For we realize today that we are facing a global society and we understand, for that reason, the need to establish some kind of global community – since otherwise our species is not likely to endure much longer. But what can such a global union look like? If we follow Cavell’s line of thought, we can say, first of all, that we who contemplate such a global union will have to become in a sense new beings, that we must learn to acquire a new identity, learn to be and learn to see ourselves in new ways – yet in ways that do not obliterate who we have been before, in ways that do not make us forget where we came from and what pains we have gone though. Such a global union will have to be, furthermore, a re-union. In order to establish it, we will need, to use Cavell’s words, “the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival; the achievement of a new perspective on existence.” (p. 19) The many parties that make up global society today must learn to see themselves as the same and yet also as different, as responsible for what has occurred before and yet ready to take a new turn. How is a global politics of the future to proceed without such reconciliation, forgiveness, and forgetting, without the alternation between responsibility and renewal? We can see, perhaps, some of these processes already at work – for instance in the establishment of the European Union or in the South African commissions for truth and reconciliation. But we can also see how much is still needed to achieve a true union and re-union at a global level. Such a process would have to include Arabs and Jews, rich and poor, men and women, all races and classes, all the nations and tribes and offer them a part in that greater union which alone today can guarantee human survival and the pursuit of happiness.
We must ask ourselves, however, whether Cavell’s comedies and his discussion of these comedies offer us sufficient means for understanding the challenge of a new global politics and a new kind of political union. It might be objected both these films and Cavell in discussing them are too pre-occupied with American conditions, that the depiction of the relation of man and woman in these comedies refers us only to a distinctively American context and that, more generally speaking, Philadelphia will never mean as much to the world community as it has meant and perhaps still means for Americans. But this is not, in fact, the most severe problem with these comedies or with Cavell’s treatment. That problem is, rather, that the union of man and woman may not be able to serve as an appropriate model of political union. The issues of feminism in the nineteen thirties or, for that matter, of feminism in the nineteen eighties may prove too specific for understanding political unions. The Hollywood comedies speak, in effect, of only one kind of union in the face of a global reality in which there have always existed multiple forms of union and in the face also of global transformations of the various types of bond that unite us and the dissolution of some of these bonds conjoined to the creation of new ones. At the time when the Hollywood comedies of remarriage concerned themselves so exclusively with the union of men and women, other types of union were being imagined or invented around the globe: the new identities of as yet colonialized states, new or renewed forms of nationhood (such as the state of Israel), renewed religious communities (Islamic, Judaic, Christian), commonalities of exile and refuge, even, outrageously, a new Aryan or Communist man. Following the lead of his comedies, Cavell insists, however, on marriage as being of unique importance for understanding the nature of social and political union and “not merely an analogy of the social bond, or a comment upon it.” (p. 182) “The integrity of society,” he summarizes accordingly the lessons of Adam’s Rib and the other comedies of remarriage, “is a function of the integrity of marriage, and vice versa.” (p. 194)
But this is surely insufficient to account for the actually existing social diversity. To make sense of that one must, perhaps, turn all the way back to Aristotle and his examination of the many-facetted nature of friendship (philia). Friendship is for Aristotle most broadly speaking that bond of mutual goodwill that makes human beings desire to live and act together. As such this bond has numerous and distinct forms. In one of its forms it is the bond that unites men and women in marriage, in another quite different form it maintains the unity of political bodies. Understood as civic concord and trust, philia “would seem to hold cities together,” as Aristotle writes in his Nicomachean Ethics (1155a), and in his Politics he calls it once more “the greatest good for cities.” (1262b) But this bond of political friendship is for Aristotle profoundly different from the friendship that obtains in marriage and these two must once again be distinguished from other types of philia such as the one that exist between a father and a son or between a lover and his beloved or that which unites comrades and fellow-travelers, or that which must hold between those doing business together. There is, on Aristotle, even a form of philia that it is desirable and possible to have to one self – self-respect, in other words, a capacity to live with oneself, a “good conscience” we might say in our post-Christian terminology. Some of these forms of philia are, according to Aristotle, utilitarian in character, others are motivated by pleasure, yet others by our appreciation of the other person for what his or her actual worth. Some forms of philia are relationships between equals, others between unequals. Some are by their nature very close such as the bond of erotic love which makes the lovers wish to become one; other bonds of friendship are casual in nature like the friendship of young people who share their occasional pleasures with each other. Political friendship is by nature one of the less intense forms of philia “for a city naturally consists of a certain multitude” and “not only of a number of people, but of people of different kinds.” (Politics, 1261a) The relations between fellow-citizens must, for that reason, be of a distinctive kind. If they become too close, the city looses its political character and becomes either a household or an individual. “Even if someone could achieve this, it should not be done, since it will destroy the city-state.” (1261a) In order to maintain the diversity appropriate for city-life political friendship must then be less tight than the erotic kind. Aristotle blames Plato, in fact, for having failed to appreciate these differences and for having therefore obscured the differences between individual and political life. It is clear then that Aristotle, in contrast to Cavell, would not be willing to conceive of the question of political union on the model of the union between a man and a woman and in this he appears to have common sense on his side.
4.
Cavell’s concentration on the union of a man and a woman as a model for a more perfected social and political union has as further consequence an inability to account adequately for the sources of social conflict and, hence, for the potentially tragic aspects of politics. There are three such sources to be distinguished. The first is captured in what we may call Freud’s (or also Nietzsche’s) observation that apparently opposite values are, in fact, joined together like Siamese twins and that therefore also all philia, all friendship, every social union and bond contain within them an antagonistic, disruptive moment. This is not an insight to be found in Aristotle but it can help to explain the evident instability of all human relationships, of all social arrangements, and the always present though often suppressed potential for human hostility. The second source of social conflict is captured in Carl Schmitt’s observation that that all specifically political concepts and distinctions are based on the duality of a friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt means to say that there exists no political grouping without a potential adversary and that all politics, therefore, has an adversarial character. This has disturbing implications for our own political situation since it denies the possibility of a pacified political world and of a global system of political order. Extrapolating from Schmitt we can ask, moreover, whether it is not the case that forms of friendship, political or otherwise, are not built on a friend-enemy duality. If so, it would follow that all friendship implies the possibility of a conflict with those who are not friends. A third source of social conflict derives from the fact that human beings are at all times joined together by multiple social bonds and unions and that these impose on them different and potentially conflicting demands. I will call this Max Weber’s observation, for reasons that will become shortly apparent. Pursuits of Happiness is certainly not unaware of the possibility of conflict, but it appears to assign to it only a secondary role. Social unions at any level and of any kind are rather said to be established and maintained “through a sort of affirmation,” and this may be insufficient to explain the prevalence and intensity of social conflicts and with that of the tragic character of a great deal of human interaction.
Given the starting-point of Cavell’s whole discussion – his unqualified recognition of the double character of philosophy as both tragic and comic and the implication that the same duality must hold for film and politics – it is surprising to discover that Pursuits of Happiness eventually loses sight of the tragic aspect of political life. It is not that Cavell is altogether blind to the tragic potential of his films. A tragic moment suggests itself for him in the fact that it necessarily remains always uncertain to what degree these films will actually help us to navigate rapids of our political existence. Cavell recognizes, in fact, a mythological and even Utopian element in these movies and the myths and Utopias they describe may forever remain just that. Acknowledging this “Utopian cast,” Cavell writes, indeed, of his films: “They harbor a vision which they know cannot fully be domesticated, inhabited in the world we know. They are romances. Showing us our fantasies, they express the inner agenda of a nation that conceives Utopian longings and commitments for itself.” (p. 18) From the perspective of the twenty-first century we may even conclude that these films have, in fact, failed to provide us with the lessons that Cavell has sought to extract from them. Against his hopes, these films have, in fact, not become the common possession of our culture. For many contemporary viewers they have, instead, become so dated that they have turned unwatchable. They have become curiosities in the local video library and have been replaced as public icons by more violent, more disruptive, and altogether darker myths.
Cavell’s films still envisage the possibility of a reconciliation of social solidarity and personal sweetness. Still, we may ask what happens, if the two fail to be reconciled. Cavell replies: “When sweetness and social solidarity conflict there may be tragedy, and in this world they will conflict.” (p. 4) There is, in this sense, then always tragedy in the offing. In discussing His Girl Friday, Cavell, indeed, draws our attention to the darkness and “heartlessness” of the world in which the film is set. Looking back from this film to the other comedies of remarriage he detects in each of them “a glimpse of the failure of civilization to, let me say, make human beings civil.” (p. 184) Love, marriage, or more generally the union of a man and a woman will prove inevitably threatened under such conditions. Even so, Cavell is keen to downplay the tragic consequences. He sees the comedies of remarriage, instead, in a more positive light, as offering us “the possibility of reprieve, a real, if in each case temporary, relief from the pain of the world.” (p. 183) And he ends this discussion drawing on Montaigne’s sentiment: “Life is hard, but then let us not burden it further by choosing tragically to call it tragic, where we are free to choose otherwise.” When experience is forced upon us and we are made to learn from it, there may be tragedy, but there is also hope for comedy when there is the possibility of experiencing and learning “in good time.” Cavell interprets this conclusion as the achievement of “a gay and sociable wisdom.” (p. 238) We seem to have returned at this point to Nietzsche’s Gay Science with its determination to vanquish tragedy with laughter, but Cavell shies away, so it seems, at the end from Nietzsche’s insight that “not only laughter and gay wisdom, but the tragic, too, … belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species.”
Cavell’s recognition of the tragic moment in philosophy, film, and politics remains thus altogether underdeveloped. We can confront him, in this respect, with Max Weber for whom the tragic element in politics was of foremost importance. Weber declared in 1918 that politics demands a “knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven.” (PV, 115)[7] Politics fails, indeed, according to him when this is forgotten. On Weber’s account, politics is inherently tragic because it exposes us to radically conflicting demands, to the pull of fundamentally different kinds of obligation. One of these is an “ethic of ultimate ends,” the other an “ethic of responsibility.” Anyone guided by absolute moral ideals and by these alone will feel responsible only “for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not squelched.” In the worldly arena of politics, however, even the noblest ends are generally attainable only through dubious means. (PV, 121) And that is so because politics is forced to rely on the use of power, force, and ultimately physical violence. The modern state is, indeed, to be understood through its claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. The peculiar ethical problem of all politics and the one that provides it with its distinctively tragic character is thus the problem of “the specific means of legitimate violence.” We must admit that “whosoever contracts with violent means for whatever ends – and every politician does – is exposed to its specific consequences.” (PV, 124) Such violence will, however, always and inevitably appear as problematic from the demanding viewpoint of an ethic of ultimate ends. It follows that the proponent of such an ethic “cannot stand up under the ethical irrationality of the world.” (PV, p. 122) Anyone who feels called to politics must, on the other hand, accept that there are unavoidable ethical paradoxes in this field. He must let himself in for “the diabolic forces lurking in all violence” and he must know that he is responsible “for what may become of him under the impact of these paradoxes.” (PV, 125-126)
These quandaries are, however, not likely to be understood by the power politician. Among that type is for Weber in particular “the parvenu-like braggart” with power. Given his “shoddy and superficially blasé attitude toward the meaning of human conduct” such a figure is not likely appreciate the tragic dimension of politics. (PV, 114-115) This character type with his admixture of vanity and irresponsibility arises, so Weber, most naturally under conditions of populist politics when “the demagogue is compelled to count upon ‘effect.’” The populist politician is, for that reason, “constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes.” He strives, above all, “for the glamorous semblance of power,” “the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se.” Behind his boastful but empty gestures hides, in fact, “inner weakness and impotence.” The “power politician” may achieve strong temporary effects, “but actually his work leads nowhere.” (PV, 114) Deceived as he is by the attractions of power and devoid of any sense of tragedy, he appears in Weber’s description as himself an ultimately tragic figure. Dazzled by the glamorous semblance of power, he is blind to the nature of politics and drawn for that reason into a realm of moral darkness. His blindness is so profound that it achieves itself once again a tragic dimension. The denial of the tragic nature of politics by the power politician confirms in the end the truth of the tragic insight.
How is one to weigh Weber’s tragic conception of politics against Cavell’s comic one? Pursuits of Happiness would suggest that Weber has got hold at best of half a truth. While he is strongly (perhaps too strongly) attuned to the tragic potential of politics, he lacks an ear, so it seems, for its comic side. We must agree with Cavell that tragedy makes sense finally only as failed happiness. But that insight proves, in turn, deleterious for Cavell for it leads him to neglect the tragic dimension of politics which Weber recognizes so clearly. The right conclusion to draw from their respective considerations is, presumably, that tragedy and comedy are, in fact, complementary characteristics of all politics. They originate from two ways of looking at ourselves which are both indispensable and yet also incompatible. Tragedy arises from looking behind ourselves and discovering that the suffering of the present is the inevitable consequence of past happenings, of long-forgotten errors, and of hidden crimes. “The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom,” Antigone concludes.[8] In other words, we typically discover the causes of our misery only in hindsight and such knowledge generally comes too late to avert disaster. Comedy adds to this a very different insight because it looks forward towards new possibilities; it perceives the present in terms of the promises it contains; it recognizes that happiness is never completely achieved but that the pursuit of happiness is always a possibility. Comedy tells us also that the miseries depicted by tragedy loose significance, if we cannot conceive of alternatives, if there is not even a glimmer of hope, if the pursuit of happiness is inconceivable. The tears of tragedy move us, in fact, only because there is always the possibility of laughter. Tragedy, thus, calls for completion through comedy and gains it’s meaning only in this connection. The Greeks certainly understood this and alternated performances of their tragedies with comedies and satyr plays. Weber is, no doubt, right in saying that anyone lacking knowledge of tragedy will also lack a proper grasp of the nature of politics, but we must add that the same holds true of anyone lacking a proper knowledge of comedy. It is such knowledge Stanley Cavell seeks to attain in his Pursuits of Happiness.
But this alerts us to Cavell’s complementary shortcoming. Where Weber is inattentive to the comic aspects of politics, Cavell seems bent on erasing its tragic ones. This difference may be due to the circumstances under which they were writing: Weber under the impact of the First World War and the consequent political turmoil in Germany, Cavell in an age of American prosperity and political stability. These differences may have led Weber and Cavell, in turn, to focus on different aspects of political life. Where Weber was forced to consider the large perspective of a great politics, Cavell had the leisure to concern himself with the micropolitics of everyday life and it may, indeed, prove easier to discern comedy in the latter than in the former – even though both may deserve to be looked at under both aspects. One is, however, reminded of Schopenhauer’s remark that life as a whole and in general is “really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of comedy.” Schopenhauer, the pessimist, concluded, of course, that this showed only that “fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence,” and grimly concluded that “our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy.”[9] One need not follow him down that path and may instead say with Nietzsche that both the tragic and the comic aspects of life are worth celebrating. In this attitude Nietzsche certainly represents the exact antipode to Schopenhauer; still, both of them hold that the tragic and the comic come inevitably together in life and not least so in politics, and in this respect both seem ahead of Weber and Cavell,
It is a second consequence of Weber’s spirit of seriousness that he disdains the theatrical aspects of politics, whereas Cavell’s comic vision allows him to recognize the political power of the theatrical imagination. This disagreement may be, once again, due to the different parts of political life the two are considering. Weber is considering situations in which politics itself becomes theater and is thereby stripped of its seriousness and, hence, also of its tragic character. Such a theatricalizing of politics appeared to him the outcome of the historical transformations he sought to describe in “Politics as a Vocation”: the professionalization of modern politics, its increasing use of the apparatuses of modern technology, and the need for charismatic leaders to make themselves known, accepted, and legitimated to the masses. Adolf Hitler was soon to emerge as the protagonist of this new form of theatrical politics and it is tempting to think now that Weber was speaking of Hitler as the paradigmatic parvenu braggart with power. But his lecture was delivered too early for that to be possible. Still, Hitler’s figure looms for us as one of the pioneers of a new kind of theatricalized politics. This sought to exploit all the resources of the new media, it drew consciously on the insights of mass psychology and the techniques of the advertising industry, it organized rallies designed to empower followers and to dishearten opponents, it bedazzled with flags, uniforms, and parades; it instituted politics as a spectacle. Hitler’s theatrical techniques have been tested since then under various political conditions, sometimes by politicians who have transformed themselves into actors, at other times by actors who have turned themselves into politicians. In all cases the consequences have been problematic.
Still, the relations between politics and theater are more complex than Weber allows for and here Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness can provide us with a more adequate picture. For Weber the theatrical form of politics inevitably obscures its tragic foundations. Politics and theater are, however, in reality joined in more than one way. First of all, politics always borrows from theater because it is itself a theatrical art. This is, perhaps, most evident in the pomp and circumstance of royal regimes but even the most austere form of democracy has its dramatic qualities just as the lowliest Quaker hall has its aesthetics. One is, indeed, struck by the fact that even Weber cannot avoid speaking of politics in theatrical terms. For what else does it mean when he speaks of politics as tragic in nature? Second, theater often borrows its themes from politics and can thus help to reveal the truth in and about politics; it can also preserve political memory, and it can envisage new forms of political existence. For the same reasons it can also of course serve the ends of political distortion, disinformation, and propaganda. Politics is, no doubt, always in danger of turning itself into mere theater. It becomes then a place for semblance and illusion. But this does not detract from the fact that all politics, not just the demagogic variety, is, in fact, theatrical in character. This is insufficiently realized by Weber who seems to think only of the non-tragic form of politics as theatrical in character. In contrast to Weber, Cavell certainly recognizes the powerful, persuasive, and productive political effect of theatrical myths. We may call in this context also on Hannah Arendt who wrote: “The Greek polis once was precisely that ‘form of government’ which provided men with a space of appearances where they could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear.”[10] In The Human Condition she spoke even more strongly of theater as “the political art par excellence” since only in theater “is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.”[11]
Cavell can help us also to identify a third shortcoming in Weber’s tragic interpretation of politics – but one that has, once again, a counterpart in Cavell’s comical reading. In delineating his tragic conception, Weber calls on Machiavelli as a witness but one suspects that he was, in fact, drawing more extensively on lessons he had extracted from ancient Greek tragedy in accordance with a classical formula. According to this formula Greek tragedy is concerned precisely with the conflict between power and ultimate ends. In Sophocles’ Antigone the conflict, so defined, seems to take attain its most striking form, for Antigone appears to be standing so unquestioningly for the singular pursuit of an ethic of ultimate ends whereas Kreon seems, in an equally obvious way, to be driven by his sense of responsibility for his city. But one may wonder whether this characterization is adequate for Antigone and more generally for Greek tragedy. Its terms appear, in fact, to be Christian rather than Greek. Ethical paradoxes arise for the Greeks of the tragic age not from a conflict between worldly responsibility and ultimate and unworldly ends but from a diverse range of the competing and conflicting claims on the actors. These may concern the different demands put on us by the living and the dead, the chthonic and the Olympian gods, the family and polis, civic order and Dionysian rapture, or the tension between intention and fate. Greek drama offers thus a multiplicity of accounts of the sources of tragedy where Christian and post-Christian thought offers just one. For Greek drama there is, in other words, not just one tragic situation but tragedy multiplies continuously and appears therefore in ever new guises.
For Weber, by contrast, tragedy results always and only from the conflicting demands of a non-worldly ethic of ultimate ends and a worldly ethic of responsibility. For the true Christian the ethical paradoxes produced by this duality are, of course, always finally resolved through the work of divine justice. In the Last Judgment all ethical contradictions are overcome. There can, therefore, be no such thing as a Christian tragedy. Weber, on the other hand, relies on the Christian characterization of moral paradox but no longer assumes its ultimate resolution. His understanding of the situation is, thus, post-Christian and he can, therefore, acknowledge the possibility of a genuinely tragic condition in politics. But Greek tragedy, understood in its own terms and not in terms of the reductive oppositions of the Christian worldview, shows us that there are other possible sources of irresolvable moral, social, and political conflict.
This is a lesson we can learn from Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness. The conflicts in which his couples are embroiled are never the product of an ethic of ultimate ends or of worldly responsibility. His couples are, in fact, never concerned with ultimate ends but with the variable and contingent conditions of their own happiness. Conflict and hence tragedy have, thus, not only one possible source. But having drawn this lesson from Cavell’s discussion we must also acknowledge that just like Weber fails to appreciate the full range of differing social obligations and bonds and their capacity for generating conflict and possibly tragedy.
5.
I have been speaking here in suggestive words and must reserve their elaboration for another moment. There is, in the mean time, another important lesson still to be extracted from Cavell’s discussion of Hollywood comedy. It concerns philosophy’s role in relation to politics and specifically in relation to the global political issues at hand. Our tradition has always seen political thought as an effort to provide formulas for human coexistence, foundations for the state, and apriori principles of political action and political judgment. Cavell speaks differently and this is greatly to his credit. He understands his own philosophical purpose not as aiming at absolute normative truths but as bringing “into question the issue of our common cultural inheritance.” (p. 9), as an effort to test “the limits or the density of what we may call our common cultural inheritance.” (Ibid.) Philosophy, he writes, (and he must mean here philosophy properly, that is philosophically, understood) “seeks to disquiet the foundations of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself.” (p. 8f.) It is this attitude, above all, that separates Cavell most clearly from those political thinkers for whom political philosophy is the search for absolutely binding standards. It is not obvious from Cavell’s viewpoint that there could be such standards. We must rather assume that those engaged in actual politics, those concerned with defining, establishing, and maintaining their social union will have to work such principles out for themselves. It follows then that no philosopher can formulate such principles in advance. It follows then also that politics cannot be conceived as simply a matter of applying abstract principles, formulas, or rules. It follows, in particular, that politics cannot be simply a matter of justice (assuming that justice can be laid down in some formula) but that it requires just as much qualities that cannot be given formulaic expression, such as the capacity to accept guilt, to offer forgiveness, and to bring about reconciliation. Third, philosophy cannot carry the burden of laying foundations for our common existence. It is at best a disquieting force, a gadfly that can stir us on, a critical and destructive force.
To raise these questions that Cavell has sought to address means at the same time to raise questions about the scope and meaning of political philosophy. Cavell’s most fundamental thought in Pursuits of Happiness is, perhaps, that political philosophy must turn its disquieting power on itself, that it must question, critique, and destruct what it has become over time, that it must learn to see that it has two (only two) fundamental concerns and that these are: what is politics and what philosophy?
Notes
[1] Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness,. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Harvard U. P., Cambridge, MA 1981. All page references without further identification are to this text.
[2] Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research,
[3] George Steiner, “Tragedy, Pure and Simple,” in Tragedy and the Tragic. Greek Theatre and Beyond,” ed. by M. S. Silk, Clarendon Pr., Oxford 1996, p. 534.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 3, section 4, transl. by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994, p. 74.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, transl. by W. Kaufmann, book 1, section 1.
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by W. Kaufmann, 936.
[7] “PV” refers here and subsequently to Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” p. 115.
[8] Sophocles, Antigone, transl. by Robert Fagles, lines 1468-70.
[9] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, transl. by E.F.J Payne, Dover Books, New York 1969, vol. 1, p. 322.
[10] Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom” in Between Past and Future, p. 154.
[11] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 188.
