Original Manuscript

Philosophy and Social Criticism

1–19
Skepticism and Critique in ª The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permission:

Arendt and Cavell sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0191453717713806
journals.sagepub.com/home/psc

Andrew Norris
University of California, UCSB, Santa Barbara, USA

Abstract
In this article I compare and contrast Hannah Arendt’s and Stanley Cavell’s understandings of
critique, focusing in each case upon the role played in it by skepticism. Both writers are decisively
influenced by the later Heidegger’s thought that thinking as such is, first, the necessary turn to a
practice adequate to our situation and, second, something that we shun. They also share the desire
to take up this Heideggerian thought in Kantian terms: what is at stake is critical thinking. It is here,
however, that they part ways, with Arendt insisting that critique is as incompatible with skepticism
as it is with dogmatism, and Cavell insisting that skepticism is the central moment within critique.
Arendt’s attempt to ban skepticism from critique forces her into the contradictory position of at
once denying and affirming the role of dogma in critical thinking. Cavell, in contrast, is able to shed
light consistently upon the question of how citizens might best respond to the new – a task,
ironically, that is as central to Arendt’s work as it is to Cavell’s. My argument thus functions as an
immanent critique of Arendt, an attempt to demonstrate the need to read her in light of Cavell.

Keywords
authority, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, origin, thinking

At a first, or even second, glance, Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell make an unlikely
pair: the one a political theorist deeply suspicious of both liberalism and Romanticism;
the other a philosopher of the intricacies and intimacies of skepticism and ordinary
language who staked his later reputation on the public importance of Emersonian trans-
cendentalism. But, as deep as the differences between the two run – and this sketch is
only that – there are important commonalties as well. The most striking of these is the
fact that, within a two-year period in the early 1960s, both Arendt and Cavell turned their
attention to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a text that up to that point had been almost
entirely ignored in Anglophone philosophy.1 For both, what is of central interest in the
third Critique is Kant’s account of the ‘universal voice’ of aesthetic reflective

Corresponding author:
Andrew Norris, University of California, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA California 93106, USA.
Email: anorris@polsci.ucsb.edu
2 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

judgement, our ability to make ‘exemplary’, ‘public’ judgements in which we speak for
others in a manner that does not compromise their autonomy (Kant, 1989: 81, 82 and 84).
And, for both, this account needs to be understood in the context of the critical project as
a whole, a project they see themselves as developing and extending.2 Cavell, who
throughout his work draws as regularly upon the first and second Critiques as he does
the third, characterizes his perfectionism as a ‘transfiguration’ of Kant, and his magnum
opus, The Claim of Reason, as a critique of skepticism that will challenge and modify its
self-understanding by uncovering ‘the truth of skepticism’, a truth that is quite different
from the truths the skeptic takes himself to reveal (Cavell, 1990: 36 and 58 and Cavell,
1979: 37–8).3 Arendt’s own magnum opus, The Human Condition, is well read as a
critique of the grounds and limits of the western tradition of political philosophy; and her
unfinished final volume The Life of the Mind echoes the tripartite structure of Kant’s
Critiques in its division into books on Thinking, Willing and Judging. Indeed, The Life
of the Mind proceeds in its first part and what we have of its third largely by means of a
reinterpretation of Kantian arguments, the implications of which Kant himself ‘never
became fully aware’ (Arendt, 1978a: 63).4 This reinterpretation comes very close to
Cavell’s transfiguration, but never so close as to address in a sustained manner his master
theme of skepticism and the role it might play in critique. In this article, I should like to
consider why this is so, and what implications it might have for our understanding of
these figures.
Arendt tells us that two things led her to write The Life of the Mind: the first was the
Eichmann trial, and the issues this raised for her regarding the ‘banality of evil’; the
second was doubts she had about her earlier categorical distinction between activity and
passivity, specifically the activity of politics and the passivity of philosophical reflection
(Arendt, 1978a: 3 and 6). Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann’s evil as banal expresses her
judgement that his actions expressed common if excessive thoughtlessness more than
they did extraordinary wickedness. This raised the more general question for her, ‘Might
the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with
our faculty of thought?’ (Arendt, ibid.: 5).5 In his Carus lectures, Cavell poses almost
exactly the same question: ‘Is thinking – something to be called thinking – something
whose partiality or incentive is essentially moral and perhaps political?’ (Cavell, 1990:
44–5).6 For both, the question concerns thinking as such. What interests them, that is, is
not practical reasoning of either the Humean or the Aristotelian variety – not reasoning
or deliberating aimed at decisions that will directly determine good practice, or that will
culminate in such practice. Rather, they raise the question of whether precisely that
thinking that eschews such practical relevance is nonetheless crucially important to
(moral and political) practice.7
That they see this as a question that remains still to be asked reflects in part the
presence in their work of Heidegger, in this case of his later claim, ‘Most thought-
provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking’ (Heidegger,
1992: 6). Both Arendt and Cavell are decisively influenced not just by Heidegger in
general, but more particularly by 1927’s Being and Time and 1952’s What is Called
Thinking? Where the first lays out the basic understanding of our common being-in-the-
world that both Arendt and Cavell take up and use (in somewhat different forms) in their
accounts of publicity and inauthenticity, the second explores thinking – Denken – as
Norris 3

something essential to us [Was uns in unserem Wesen halt] that we nonetheless forget –
as that which must be remembered or turned back to if we would – in the words of Pindar
cited in Being and Time – become who we are (Heidegger, 1992: 3 and Heidegger, 1996:
136). ‘Memory’, Heidegger writes, ‘is the gathering of thought’ – a phrase both Arendt
and Cavell echo, Arendt when she writes that ‘thinking always implies remembrance’,
and Cavell when he writes that his ‘Perfectionism has its foundation in rethinking’
(Heidegger, 1992: 3; Arendt, 1978a: 78; Cavell, 1990: xxix and 55).
If the central thought here is a Heideggerian one, however, both Arendt and Cavell
give accounts of this forgetting that do not rest upon his authority or his words. Signif-
icantly, these accounts differ only superficially. On Cavell’s account, moral philosophers
disregard the ‘moral urgency’ of thinking because they prefer to focus on questions of the
right and the good – the principles of deontological and consequentialist moral thought,
principles that might take a general form that can be applied to particular events or
persons; for the most part they prefer not to focus on the question of the authentic or
inauthentic self, the self that is lost and might be found (Cavell, 1990: 55). This expresses
the more general human resistance to chancing oneself in one’s own experience, taking
responsibility for one’s responses or lack thereof; to our shared desire to conform. For
Arendt, too, philosophers are eager to focus not on the experience of thinking, but on its
alleged results – rules, principles, decision procedures; and, like other ordinary people,
they all too easily ‘get used to never making up their minds’, as it is more pleasant to
follow whatever the given rule or decision might be (Arendt, 1978a: 15 and Arendt,
2003: 178). In both, thinking resists the desire to forget oneself and one’s experiences by
subsuming one’s life under principles and rules, making it a series of determinant
judgements. For Arendt, following Socrates, it does so by prodding the thinker into
deliberation with herself and the experience of herself as ‘two-in-one’, and hence as a
judging agent open to the call of conscience who refuses accepted certainties and dogmas
and who must in the future live with her current response to that call (ibid.: 181–4; cf.
Plato 1961).8 For Cavell, following Emerson, it does so by averting us from and within
our conformity, and allowing us to live more autonomously and responsively than we
currently do (Cavell, 1990: 37, 45, 47; cf. Emerson, 1983).9 For both Arendt and Cavell,
these ‘personal’ benefits and achievements are central to responsible citizenship. What-
ever her politics, the responsible citizen responding to new and unpredictable circum-
stances cannot simply follow the rules dictated by past authorities; she must think, where
this means something more than intelligently applying rules and honoring principles. As
Arendt puts it:

When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in,
those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and
thereby becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging com-
ponent of thinking (Socrates’ midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined
opinions and thereby destroys them – values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is
political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another faculty, the
faculty of judgment . . . the faculty that judges particulars without subsuming them under
general rules which can be taught and . . . grow into habits. (Arendt, 1978a: 192–3; cf.
Arendt, 1978b: 294–5)
4 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

Cavell, who sees modern democracy as chronically in such a condition of conformity,

likewise identifies thinking as essential ‘to withstand not [democracy’s] rigors but its
failures’ (Cavell, 1990: 56).10 For both, thinking is anti-authoritarian.
Arendt describes the thinking we shun as a ‘quest for meaning’ (Arendt, 1978a: 176).
She distinguishes this quest not just from practical reasoning or problem-solving, but
cognition in general: ‘Crucial for our enterprise [in The Life of the Mind] is Kant’s
distinction between Vernunft and Verstand . . . between two altogether different mental
activities, thinking and knowing, and two altogether different concerns, meaning, in the
first category, and cognition, in the second.’ Kant, she argues, ‘drew this distinction after
he had discovered the “scandal of reason,” that is, the fact that our mind is not capable of
certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless
cannot help thinking about’, such as ‘God, freedom, and immortality’ (ibid.: 13–14).
This is not quite what Kant says. In the preface to the B edition of the first Critique, Kant
writes: ‘[I]t always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the
existence of things outside us (from which we get after all the whole matter for our
cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith.’ And he
promises to rectify this by providing ‘a strict proof . . . of the objective reality of outer
intuition’ (Kant, 1998: Bxxxix). The needs of Vernunft and the postulates of practical
reason are not mentioned in this context; instead, there is the promise of proof of our
possible knowledge of the objective world. Such proofs are only necessary if one takes
skepticism seriously. It seems that Arendt does not.11 To my knowledge, skepticism
passes entirely unmentioned in the first two volumes of The Life of the Mind, and appears
only briefly in the lectures on judgement that were to go into the third volume.12 On
Arendt’s reading, the distinction between Vernunft and Verstand is one between two
unrelated faculties that can in principle be cleanly disentangled, like the work of two
different bodily organs, rather than two aspects of the same mind.13
It is significant that Arendt’s lone discussion of skepticism appears in conjunction
with an account of her understanding of critique, one she characterizes as being Kantian
in spirit if not in letter (Arendt, 1982: 33). For Arendt, critique is categorically opposed
to both dogmatism and skepticism: ‘It would be a great error to believe that critical
thinking stands somewhere between dogmatism and skepticism. It is actually the way to
leave these alternatives behind’ (ibid.: 32). Dogmatism and skepticism do not name
conflicting goods that must be bought into harmony or compromise, or into an ongoing
dialectical relation, but false values that must be opposed and left behind.14 On Arendt’s
account, dogmatism is the universal starting point: the acceptance of locally given norms
as obviously universally valid and ‘true’. Skepticism is the natural response to the
encounter with different norms and communities: ‘confronted with so many truths (or
rather with people, each of whom pretends to have the truth)’, one abandons the claim to
truth altogether and accepts the apparently necessary conclusion ‘that [one] may either
arbitrarily choose some dogmatic doctrine (arbitrary with regard to truth: [one’s] choice
may be prompted simply by various interests and be entirely pragmatic). Or [one] may
simply shrug [one’s] shoulders about so profitless a business’ (ibid.: 34 and 33).15 This
account follows that of Sextus Empiricus, and characterizes skepticism in the terms of
his central equipollence argument.16 According to Sextus, the skeptic’s
Norris 5

. . . initial purpose in philosophizing was to pronounce judgment on appearances. He wished

to find out which are true and which false, so as to attain mental tranquility. In doing so, he
met with contradicting alternatives of equal force. Since he could not decide between them,
he withheld judgment. Upon his suspension of judgment there followed, by chance, mental
tranquility in matters of opinion. For the person who entertains the opinion that anything is
by nature good or bad is continually disturbed. (Sextus, 1985: 41)

Rather than Berkeley’s veil of perception problem, or Hume’s problem concerning the
ground of (what Kant terms) synthetic a priori concepts such as causality that are
necessary to experience but cannot be derived from either it or the laws of reason, the
skeptical problem for Sextus and the Pyrrhonians is that equally good arguments can
always be found in support of mutually exclusive claims. Given that Arendt, too, under-
stands skepticism in these terms, it is little wonder that she traces critique to the Sophists,
as they plainly anticipate this skeptical problem.17 As she puts it, ‘the origin of critical
thought’ is the Sophists’ refinement of the Greek practice of holding statesmen to
account, making them give an account [logon didonai], ‘not to prove, but to . . . say how
one came to an opinion and for what reasons one formed it’ (Arendt, 1982: 42 and 41).
But though Arendt follows the Pyrrhonian account of the skeptical problem, her con-
clusion is not the ‘shrug of the shoulders’ of Sextus’ suspension of judgement. Nor is it
renewed dogmatism, or the Sophists’ embrace of rhetorical struggle. Instead it is to
propose a re-evaluation of the nature of truth:

The critical position . . . recommends itself by its modesty. It would say: ‘Perhaps men,
though they have a notion, an idea of truth for regulating their mental processes, are not
capable, as finite beings, of the truth. (The Socratic: “No man is wise.”) Meanwhile, they are
quite able to inquire into such human faculties as they have been given . . . Let us analyze
what we can know and what we cannot.’ (Arendt, 1982: 33)

Which is to say, on her interpretation of critique, both Verstand and Vernunft.18

I have suggested elsewhere that Cavell’s work can clarify Arendt’s argument that
Socrates’ task was to help others ‘find the truth in their doxa’, as opposed to raising that
doxa to ‘the truth’ (Arendt, 2005: 15; Norris, 2013). Here I want to focus upon her related
account of critical thinking, insofar as this is her preferred result of the encounter first
with dogmatism and then with skepticism. For Arendt, critical thinking is epitomized in
the life of Socrates (Arendt, 1982: 36). In the section ‘The Answer of Socrates’ in the
first volume of The Life of the Mind, this is extended to thinking as such, which, as an
experience, cannot be defined, but only exemplified.19 (I take this extension to confirm
that genuine thinking is always critical; cf. ibid.: 38.) Such thinking is provoked, on
Arendt’s account, by ordinary language (or, at least, she notes, probably following
Nietzsche, ordinary Indo-European language): ‘the trouble starts with our usage of nouns
[like] happiness, courage, justice, and so on, what we now call concepts . . . These words
are part and parcel of our everyday speech, and still we can give no account of them [;
but] no speech would be possible without them’ (Arendt, 1978a: 170).20 Rather than
sticking to such Platonic examples, Arendt moves to an example of her own, that of the
word house. In contrast to actual houses, house as such is intangible and invisible; if its
6 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

meaning is its referent, no referent is to be found. This does not lead Arendt to make a
Fregean distinction between sense and reference, but to conclude that house, like justice
or happiness, is and can be only an object of aporetic reflection.21 But such reflection is
not stymied because it cannot produce cognitive results. Instead, it brings out the ori-
ginary implications of the concepts and objects of thought. Thinking is the process or
experience that pursues and considers those implications: the word house

. . . implies ‘housing somebody’ and being ‘dwelt in’ as no tent, put up today and taken
down tomorrow, could house or serve as a dwelling place. The word ‘house’ is the ‘unseen
measure,’ ‘holds the limit of all things’ pertaining to dwelling; it is a word that could not
exist unless one presupposed thinking about being housed, dwelling, having a home. As a
word, ‘house’ is shorthand for all these things, the kind of shorthand without which thinking
and its characteristic swiftness would not be possible at all. The word ‘house’ is something
like a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze whenever it wants to find out the original
meaning. (Arendt, 1978a: 171/Arendt, 2003: 172–3; original emphases)

Such unfreezing is a dissolution of accepted concepts and truths: truly thinking about
what a house is entails letting go of the everyday certainty that one already knows this,
since one can, naturally enough, identify what are the houses on one’s block and what are
the trees and what the cars.22 The same would be true – more problematically – of a
noun-concept like justice. Though in everyday life it may be easy (or hard) enough to
identify a just division of the spoils or a just verdict, when thinking about justice one
loses all assurance that these are anything but figments of popular dogma. ‘All critical
examinations must go through a stage of at least hypothetically negating accepted
opinions and “values” by searching out their implications and tacit assumptions, and
in this sense nihilism may be seen as an ever-present danger of thinking’ (Arendt, 1978a:
176). But skepticism and nihilism are avoidable if one accepts that the ‘original mean-
ing’ of the term is not a definition that might be dogmatically asserted, and that this fact
does not imply that the word is empty of all meaning.23 The knowledge of how many
houses there are on one’s block is not threatened by the admission that, while thinking,
one cannot really say what a house is, but only ponder its relation to ideas of dwelling,
being at home, and so on. Alcibiades and Critias make precisely the former, false move,
that of making dogmatic (an object of Verstand) what is only thoughtful (an object of
Vernunft): ‘they changed the non-results of the Socratic thinking examination into neg-
ative results: If we cannot decide what piety is, let us be impious’ (ibid.: 175–6). Arendt
suggests that radical post-Kantian critics of the tradition such as Nietzsche make much
the same error (ibid.: 176 and Arendt, 1982: 36).24
Note that this account completely abandons Pyrrhonian equipollence: in thinking, one
does not struggle to adjudicate between conflicting ideas of house or justice, or conflict-
ing ideas of what they imply. Indeed, there is no question about what they imply:
thinking is following a set train of thoughts, or moving back and forth along it in a more
disjointed fashion (‘searching out [the word’s] implications and tacit assumptions’). But
why is this so? Arendt’s turn to the Heideggerian notions of origin and dwelling in her
example raises significant questions. Why exactly is it true that the word house ‘could
not exist’ unless one presupposed thinking about dwelling, which on the face of it is a
Norris 7

much more arcane notion? And why can one not dwell in a tent that is ‘put up today and
taken down tomorrow’? Do (did) nomadic peoples not dwell? Do Americans who move
every year or two still dwell? If I live in a tent, or a car camper truck while traveling
about the United States with my wife’s dog Charley, am I homeless? houseless? living
without a dwelling? I do not deny that there are perfectly good (Heideggerian) reasons to
answer yes to the last 5 questions. But that does not mean that there are no reasons to
answer no. It seems perverse, for instance, to describe the celebrated Steinbeck who
wrote Travels with Charley as a ‘homeless man’, at least in contemporary California,
where I live and where homelessness is a widespread, endemic misery. And there is no
obvious reason that the original meaning of the term house, whatever that might be, and
however one might determine it, would determine the answers to these questions. It is for
us to say.25 When I was a small boy, I would have been confused if I had heard someone
use the word family to describe a group of people much different from those with whom I
lived: a mother (who did not ‘work’), a father, and a gaggle of kids. I have come to
appreciate that there are many other forms that a family can take. Am I mistaken, or in
conflict with the original meaning of the word (concept) family? My thought is, if I am,
so much the worse for the original meaning.26
If Arendt suggests otherwise, it may be because she sees a kind of authority as being
necessary to thinking; in particular, as being necessary to critical thinking’s categorical
break with skepticism, critique’s ability to leave skepticism behind. It is striking in this
regard that she describes the ‘political aspect’ of the demise of the long-standing insti-
tutional homes of thinking – religion, metaphysics, and philosophy – as that of political
authority (Arendt, 1978a: 11). In ‘What is Authority?’ she argues that such authority is a
Roman invention (albeit one based upon Platonic foundations) in which current practice
is guided by the hallowed origin: ‘The word auctoritas derives from the verb augere,
“augment,” and what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the founda-
tion . . . Authority, in contradistinction to power [potestas], had its roots in the past’
(Arendt, 1968a: 121–2). The echo of this in Arendt’s discussion of the ‘unseen measure’
of the original meaning, a meaning to which we must be faithful and can augment only in
reflection, is distinct enough; it is only further emphasized when Arendt notes that
genuinely authoritarian government always judges political matters by the transcendent
‘yardstick’ of the origin (ibid.: 110–11).27 In light of this, it is not surprising that in the
essay on authority Arendt worries about the growing tendency to allow everyone ‘the
right “to define his terms”’. This is a disturbing and dangerous development, in her eyes,
as it opens up the nihilistic possibility that

. . . such terms as ‘tyranny,’ ‘authority,’ ‘totalitarianism’ have simply lost their common
meaning, or that we have ceased to live in a common world where the words we have in
common possess as unquestionable meaningfulness, so that, short of being condemned to
live verbally in an altogether meaningless world, we grant each other the right to retreat into
our own worlds of meaning. (Arendt, 1968a: 96–7)28

If this threat is to be warded off, there must be an ‘original meaning’, one of ‘unques-
tionable meaningfulness’, that is authoritative for all speakers. Appreciating this feature
8 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

of Arendt’s thought allows us to detect an ambiguity or irony in a widely cited passage

from Arendt’s 1953 essay ‘Understanding and Politics’. Arendt writes:

Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to
subsume the particular, a being whose essence is beginning may have enough of origin
within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set
of customary rules which is morality. (Arendt, 1994: 321)

This passage is commonly and rightly taken as alluding to the contemporary ‘crisis in
authority’, the fact that thinking and the political judgement it makes possible must
proceed today without the authoritative guidance of rules or ‘bannisters’ (e.g. Villa,
1996: 164, 162; cf. Arendt, 1978a: 192 and Arendt, 1979a: 336–7). But how radical
is this crisis? It certainly goes all the way to the roots if one understands the phrase
‘enough of origin within [the] self’ to refer to what Arendt terms natality, the human
capacity to begin or originate reflection or action (Arendt, 1958: 9). But Arendt’s
remarks in ‘What is Authority?’ suggest that this phrase should instead be taken to refer
to the speaker’s knowledge of the authoritative ‘original meaning’, the ‘unseen measure’
that guides his speech and thinking. As Arendt herself puts it, the origin that makes
possible understanding and judgement is not in his action, it is within him.29
This needs to be balanced, no doubt, by the recognition that Arendt emphasizes that
Kant’s understanding of judgement – which we have seen she favors – is anti-
authoritarian in nature (Arendt 1968a, 110–11); and, as we have noted, Arendt strongly
suggests that living according to a rule (or yardstick or bannister) is precisely not to truly
(critically) live, at least in the modern world. In the Lectures, she argues that ancient
philosophical schools and sects are ‘unenlightened (in Kantian parlance) because they
depend on the doctrines of their founders’. The ‘appeal to the authority of the founder’
(e.g. Pythagoras) is nothing more than ‘unthinking dogmatism’, which is countered by
‘the art of critical thinking’, an art which ‘always has political implications’ precisely
because it is anti-authoritarian (Arendt, 1982: 38). This does not involve Arendt in a
simple contradiction, as the original meaning of a word like house or justice is not an
object of knowledge, and hence cannot itself be an actual dogma. It will nonetheless
preclude some dogmas and some sayings. In Arendt’s example, thinking about the
meaning of house – experiencing the meaning of house – is a process of reflection in
which one loses one’s grip on one’s ordinary, day-to-day confidence in the use of the
term. But though this dissolution applies to all such uses, and hence to all ‘houses’, when
the process of thinking is over, the Bedouin’s tent is found to be incompatible with the
implications of the original meaning of house and is thereby deemed not to be a house –
unlike, say, the mountain hut in the Schwarzwald. Implications are not mere associa-
tions.30 As I have already indicated, I am myself unwilling to attribute even this quasi-
dogmatic force to the original meaning of house or any other term (again, whatever that
meaning might be). This is because I do not accept what I see as a straightforward if
unspoken dogma in Arendt’s account, and that is that there are identifiable original
meanings of the terms we think about, and that those meanings have quasi-dogmatic
authority. And here I think Arendt’s position is self-contradictory, for a critical theorist is
supposed to oppose all dogmas, and not just dogmas about justice and housing; and the
Norris 9

idea that the original meaning is authoritative is itself dogmatic. If Arendt does not
acknowledge this, I suspect it is because, though she opposes critique to both dogmatism
and skepticism, of the two, skepticism is the trickier and more dangerous opponent.
Without the quasi-dogmatic authority of the ‘unseen measure’ of the original meaning,
critical thinking threatens to collapse into a skepticism that makes it impossible ‘to live
in a common world’ (or, in her other phrase, ‘condemns us to live in an altogether
meaningless world’). Hence, for the sake of critique, and of language, and of the world,
skepticism needs to be ‘left behind’ as soon and as completely as possible.
But what if it cannot be left behind? It is here that Cavell’s understanding of skepti-
cism is relevant. On Cavell’s account, language as such is open-ended, and not governed
by a set of rules that either ordinary people or privileged philosophers might articulate
and follow. Speaking or writing as such entails projecting familiar words into new
contexts, often in ways that modify or transform the meanings of those words (such
as when we ‘surf the web’). This is true for all words, not just the nouns upon which
Arendt focuses. Some projections will be accepted, and some will not. Cavell gives the
wonderful example of someone complaining that not all of the cigarette has been smoked
because the filter has not been smoked (Cavell, 1979: 178). This is a funny idea because
there is a kind of sense to it – not all of the thing you got out of the pack of Marlboros and
gave to me has gone up in smoke – but it is nonetheless crazy. It is crazy not because the
original meaning of smoking a filter cigarette implies leaving the filter unsmoked, or
because the original meaning of filter is incompatible with being smoked, but because we
find it crazy. A word’s or phrase’s possible uses reflect our lives and responses – it
expresses them – and not those of the origin; put otherwise, insofar as one determines the
other, the meaning is determined by the use, and not vice versa (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958: §
43). This may seem to amount to ‘letting everyone define his terms’ as Arendt puts it,
with all of the terrible consequences which she sees as following.31 Cavell himself grants
and even emphasizes that language as he understands it leaves us vulnerable to that
collapse of meaning and the shared world meaning manifests. More, he agrees that
skepticism is a good name for this threat. Skepticism is a constant threat to the ‘common
world of meaning’ that Arendt and Cavell both seek to shelter.32 But this threat is not
realized until we act and speak in a skeptical manner; that is to say, in a manner in which
the meanings we give or find in our terms no longer agree, until we fall out of what
Cavell terms our attunement with one another. It is that relation that is decisive, not that
to the origin.
We fall out of our attunement with one another when one or more of us repudiates the
(historically evolving) criteria of our terms (Cavell, 1979: 46). David Macarthur gives a
good example of such repudiation in his analysis of Peter Unger’s proposal that a surface
is flat ‘only if there is no surface that is flatter’ (Macarthur, 2014: 13). This is a projection
of the term flat that is not obviously mistaken – Peter Unger is not a stupid or thoughtless
philosopher, and his mastery of the English language is unquestioned – but it leaves us
unable to use the word or concept flat as we have thus far in our day-to-day life: there is
no longer anything in that life that might be said to be flat. This ‘subliming’ of our
language, as Wittgenstein puts it, empties it out (Wittgenstein, 1958: § 38). This is not a
failure of an ‘objective’ test that Cavell believes new usages must pass; his criteria are
not like those that a judge uses to grade a performance (like, in one of Cavell’s examples,
10 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

the US government’s fourfold criteria for the stability of governments such as that of the
Republic of Vietnam) (Cavell, 1979: 8). We are the only judges here, and each of us must
determine for ourself whether the new projection is in line with our understanding of the
words in question and the situation in which we find ourselves. In high school geometry
we all learned to speak of geometric lines, even as we were taught that nothing we saw or
drew was a proper line. There were reasons for this usage that we learned and accepted,
and those reasons were not skeptical in nature; they did not entail the repudiation of our
criteria. What are the reasons for Unger’s usage? We must, as Wittgenstein puts it, look
and see. When we do so we might note a difference between the two cases: flat is an
adjective we use to characterize objects in the world; line names, among other things, an
object in abstract geometric space, not in the world; and straight, in geometry, charac-
terizes that non-worldly object. Is a worldly object a botched attempt at a figure in
abstract geometric space?33
In a passage from ‘Aversive Thinking’ in which he is explicating his own under-
standing of thinking, Cavell writes: ‘My thought is that a certain relation to words (as an
allegory of my relation to my life) is inseparable from a certain moral-like relation to
thinking’ (Cavell, 1990: 46). As in Arendt, thinking is first and foremost a pondering of
‘everyday speech’. In Cavell such reflection entails self-examination as much as it does
the examination of concepts and words. Cavell writes in this regard of ‘consulting one’s
experience and . . . subjecting it to examination’, a process that requires

. . . momentarily stopping, turning yourself away from whatever your preoccupation and
turning your experience away from its expected, habitual track, to find itself, its own track:
coming to attention. The moral of this practice is to educate your experience sufficiently so
that it is worthy of trust. The philosophical catch would then be that education cannot be
achieved in advance of the trusting.

This trust, he concludes, is ‘expressed as a willingness to find words for one’s

experience’ (Cavell, 1981b: 12). Finding words for one’s experience is the flip side of
finding whether one’s words truly match or express one’s experience. Such reflection –
such critical thought – is necessary not because I am confused in the absence of a
tangible referent for a noun, but because I am not sure of what I would say, if this is
what I truly mean to say. The question in the title of Cavell’s first book, Must We Mean
What We Say?, is properly answered, no; in fact, failing to mean what we say is the most
common thing in the world, and this is not because the world is populated by hypocrites
or liars.34 If use (often) determines meaning (Wittgenstein, 1958: § 43), it always
remains to be seen whether the usage in question is truly mine, or yours. The ‘rethinking’
that we have seen Cavell identifies with Emersonian perfectionism is not a recollection
of the original meanings of the past, but a rethinking of one’s projection into the future.35
Cavell’s understanding of critique emphasizes, like Arendt’s, the vulnerability of our
language and our common world. But, by the same stroke, it also emphasizes the
potential of the speakers of that language who inhabit that world to grow and change.
Arendt casts the thinker as one pondering the origin, Cavell as one responding to the new
usage, the new event, the change in her life that calls for further projections of her terms
(perhaps projections made by others).36 If these projections constantly run the risk of
Norris 11

skepticism, it is also possible that they manifest growth. In one of his few references to
Arendt, Cavell cites her encomium of Karl Jaspers as one who, under all of the pressure
of the Nazi era, retained his integrity. As she puts it, ‘what is so magnificent about
Jaspers is that he renews himself because he remains unchanged’ (Cavell, 1990: xxii,
citing Arendt, 1968b: 78). While granting the nobility of such perseverance in the face of
social cataclysm, Cavell notes that this kind of integrity is not that sought by Emersonian
perfectionism; for what perfectionism seeks is always transformation, change, passage to
the new self.37 Indeed, for Cavell the self properly understood is nothing but this passage
(Cavell, 1990: 12). Far from holding true to the origin, what his perfectionism demands
of us is openness to the new – not just the new circumstances and the new companions,
but the new self. It is precisely this that is forgotten and must be remembered in thinking
and in critique – the self of growth and change; that is, one’s self.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jörg Volbers and the Freie Universität, Berlin for providing me support in the
summer of 2016 to write this article. I am also grateful for helpful comments I received on earlier
drafts of this article from Lisa Disch, David Owen, Martin Shuster, Tracy Strong, an anonymous
reader for this journal, and audiences at the 2016 conventions of the American Political Science
Association and the Northeast Political Science Association.

Notes
1. Cavell’s 1965 essay, ‘Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy’, was written in 1962–3
(Cavell, 1969a: xi); Arendt’s posthumously published lectures on Kant were initially pre-
sented in 1964 (Arendt, 1982: vii).
2. In Cavell’s case, this is evident in his constant references to Kant, none of which observe the
standard scholarly respect for the boundaries separating the different Critiques and their
subject matter. On this point, see Franks (2006: 166). For Arendt, see Arendt (1982: 31):
‘If I am right that there exists a political philosophy in Kant but that, in contrast to other
philosophers, he never wrote it, then it seems obvious that we should be able to find it, if we
can find it at all, in his whole work.’
3. While the phrase ‘the truth of skepticism’ has an Hegelian origin, as Cavell acknowledges
(Cavell, 2004a: 289), Kant’s first Critique too modifies the self-understanding of (the practi-
tioners of) reason, showing it to have different limits and a different relation to our lives and
the world than it had taken itself to have.
4. Arendt moves, she says, ‘beyond Kant’s self-interpretation’ (Arendt, 1982: 33). The most
obvious effect of her reinterpretation is the dismissal of all concern with the question of how to
properly do metaphysics.
5. Compare her formulation in the earlier lecture, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’: ‘Is our
ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of
thought?’ (Arendt, 2003: 160). The Life of the Mind repeats much of this early lecture word for
word, particularly in the material I will emphasize here, its discussions of Kant in the Introduc-
tion and of Socrates in Thinking. I take this as confirmation of Arendt’s deep commitment to the
positions she adopts in these texts. Significantly, Arendt first presented this material at the same
point in the early 1960s that she first developed her account of Kant’s reflective judgement.
12 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

6. The ‘incentive’ here is not the intended aim, but the ground of the activity. ‘If thinking were
solving problems, the incentive would be the problems or could be attached to the solutions.’
Since thinking is not problem-solving, its ground is different: its ground is our ‘partiality’, our
being not whole and being inclined – in a manner we resist – to a wholeness that we achieve
only with others (Cavell, 1990: 43 and 41).
7. That is to say, they question the distinction between the activity of politics and the passivity of
philosophical reflection. On this, see Cavell (1990: 39 and 43). The centrality of this to
Cavell’s work is discussed at length in the fifth chapter of Norris (2017).
8. Margaret Canovan argues perceptively that Arendt’s confidence in this moral function of
thought is broken when she turns from Socrates to Heidegger, who infamously embraced
Nazi politics. Canovan focuses on the possibility that, had Arendt lived longer, ‘she would
have concluded that philosophical thinking has two sides to it, and is a mixed blessing from a
political point of view’. Perhaps, however, it is not a matter of the single project of ‘philo-
sophical thinking’ having two sides, but of two quite different ways of thinking (as opposed, in
each case, to cognizing or calculating). In this regard it is striking that the Heidegger whom
both Arendt and (more pointedly) Cavell follow on this question is that of the 1951–2 What is
Called Thinking?, and not that of 1927’s Being and Time. Whatever else it is, the former’s
Denken is not the same as the latter’s fundamental ontology. Canovan may be hinting at this in
referring in this context not simply to Heidegger but to ‘the Heidegger of Being and Time’
(Canovan, 1995: 273). Seyla Benhabib suggests that, however the thinking under consider-
ation is understood, ‘Arendt was too quick in assuming that out of the self’s desire for unity
and consistency a principled moral standpoint could emerge’. Benhabib cites in this regard
Walt Whitman’s famous lines, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I
am large, I contain multitudes’ (Benhabib, 2000: 190). But lines that express unconcern with
consistency would appear to be quite irrelevant to any consideration of the implications of ‘the
self’s desire for consistency’. At most they would demonstrate that sometimes (say, when
writing great epic poetry) the self does not desire to be consistent. But even here, the various
lines of ‘Song of Myself’ are not meant to cancel one another out; and they express, moreover,
a ‘self’ that is repeatedly and expressly contrasted with the ‘multitudes’ of discrete selves of
moral and political life. See, e.g., Whitman (1996: 42): ‘I am of old and young, of the foolish
as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as
paternal . . . ’
9. Significantly, as in Arendt’s two-in-one, there is a doubling of the self here, a submission of
the self to ‘the next or further self’ (Cavell, 1990: 31).
10. Though space does not allow me to pursue this here, the relation between these disappoint-
ments and the rise of authoritarians such as Trump and Erdoğan is obviously a burning one in
our time, as are the details of the role thinking might play in resisting and redirecting this.
11. Note, though, her discussion of Kant on the philosophical need for doubt (Arendt, 2003: 166).
Martin Shuster argues that Arendt’s account of loneliness is ‘formally analogous’ not just to
skepticism, but to ‘Cavell’s skepticism’. Shuster’s analysis is a suggestive one that points to
real and important commonalities, but it does not establish (or try to establish) that Arendt
herself understood loneliness in these terms. Moreover, Shuster’s brief discussion of skepti-
cism in Cavell hurries past all questions of knowledge, and addresses only acknowledgment:
‘Our being or not being alone – our world having or not having others in it, is a factor of our
acknowledgment of the other and the other’s acknowledgment of us’ (Shuster, 2012: 487). But
Norris 13

for Cavell the two cannot be separated, as acknowledgment is not a matter of mere respect or
agreement: ‘I do not propose the idea of acknowledgement as an alternative to knowing but
rather as an interpretation of it, as I take the word “acknowledge,” containing “knowledge,”
itself to suggest (or perhaps it suggests that knowing is an interpretation of acknowledging)’
(Cavell, 1988: 8); and acknowledgment of the other must be matched by acceptance of the
world: ‘what skepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness
to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other
minds is not to be known, but acknowledged’ (Cavell, 1969b: 324). That said, Shuster is surely
right to emphasize Cavell’s focus on ‘the inherent fragility in all of our linguistic discourse’,
the fact that language requires that we are able to project familiar words into new contexts in
ways that others will find intelligible, and that there is nothing beyond such responses that
guarantees that a projection (an utterance) will be found intelligible (Shuster, 2012: 487). But
more must be said about how skepticism, as a way of figuring the role of knowledge claims
and criteria in our relation to the world and to one another, affects such projections and
responses.
12. Arendt does discuss Cartesian skepticism in the final section of The Human Condition;
but while her attempt to reduce such doubt to an epiphenomenon of scientific advances
(in particular, the development of the telescope) is consistent with her desire to trace ideas
to actual experiences, it assumes that there is no intellectual, skeptical experience (Arendt,
1958: 274). Cavell, in contrast, argues that ‘the philosopher’s originating [skeptical]
question . . . is a response to, or expression of, a real experience that takes hold of human
beings’ (Cavell, 1979: 140).
13. Arendt writes: ‘The only Kant interpretation I know of which could be quoted in support of my
own understanding of Kant’s distinction between reason and intellect [Verstand] is Eric
Weil’s’ (Arendt, 1978a: 222). While there is a sense in which this may be true, she is surely
influenced by Heidegger’s judgement, ‘The Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with a
“theory of knowledge”’ (Heidegger, 1962: 21). As Christopher Macann notes, this judgement
amounts to ‘a quasi-total rejection of almost everything that has ever been written on the
Critique’ (Macann, 1996: 110).
14. ‘The word critique, finally and most importantly, stands in twofold opposition to dogmatic
metaphysics on the one hand, to skepticism on the other’ (Arendt, 1982: 32).
15. I note in passing Arendt’s assumption (which I think mistaken) that pragmatism is simply a
matter of pursuing one’s interests, and has nothing to add to a chastened conception of truth of
the sort she advocates. It is noteworthy in this regard that Dewey, in his admiring 1897 lectures
on Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, finds the same three-stage development of dogmatic thought,
skepticism and criticism in Hegel (Dewey, 2010: 106–7).
16. It does not follow Kant, who explicitly and repeatedly notes in his prefaces to the first Critique
that critique is necessary in part to prepare the way for a healthy and necessary dogmatism. As
Arendt quotes heavily from the prefaces, it is hard to imagine that she could overlook this. It is
true that, in a draft of an essay on the progress made by modern metaphysics, Kant depicts that
progress as moving through the three stages of dogmatism, skepticism and critique. But the
skepticism here is that of the antimonies of pure reason as laid out in the first Critique, and the
third stage of critique is identified with the ‘Practical-Dogmatic Transition to the Super-
Sensible’, which Kant discusses in terms of the practical postulates of freedom, God and
immortality (Kuehn, 2001: 377). This is plainly quite different from Arendt’s Socratism. That
14 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

said, the influence of Pyrrhonian skepticism is apparent in the Antimonies of Pure Reason, and
may play a greater role in the genesis of the first Critique than is commonly recognized; cf.
Forster (2008).
17. As Guthrie notes:
There was . . . one art which all the Sophists taught, namely rhetoric, and one episte-
mological standpoint which all shared, namely a skepticism according to which knowl-
edge could only be relative to the perceiving subject . . . It was part of rhetorical
instruction to teach the pupil to argue with equal success on both sides of a question.
As Protagoras said, ‘On every topic there are two arguments contrary to each other.’ He
aimed at training his pupils to praise and blame the same things, and in particular to
bolster up the weaker argument so that it appeared the stronger. Rhetorical teaching was
not confined to form and style, but dealt also with the substance of what was said. How
could it fail to inculcate the belief that all truth was relative and no one knew anything
for certain? Truth was individual and temporary, not universal and lasting, for the truth
for any man was simply what he could be persuaded of, and it was possible to persuade
anyone that black was white. There can be belief, but never knowledge. (Guthrie, 1971:
50–1)
For Arendt this belief would correspond to a doxa that in principle was not open to being made
‘more true’ by means of Socratic elenchus.
18. This critical analysis thus has two aspects: the attempt to develop an alternative conception of
truth opposed to that shared by dogmatists and skeptics, according to which the truth ‘by
definition excludes all other truths’; and the self-analysis of Reason and Intellect (Arendt,
1982: 34).
19. ‘The best, in fact the only way I can think of to get hold of the question [What makes us think?]
is to look for a model, an example of a thinker . . . I am thinking of Socrates’ (Arendt, 1978a:
167–8 and 166; cf. 15). This reliance on the exemplar follows from the fact that genuine
thinking is ‘sheer performance, sheer activity’ (Arendt, 1982: 37). Cavell also puts great
weight upon the Socratic example; and he emphasizes too that thinking must be exemplified,
and cannot be defined. His exemplar of thought is Emerson.
20. Note the parallel to causality, the paradigm of Kant’s synthetic a priori concepts; and see
Arendt’s discussion of house in her discussion of the schematism (Arendt, 1982: 80). Arendt
argues that Chinese language(s) has (have) a radically different relation to conceptual abstrac-
tion; see Arendt (1978a: 101): ‘what for us is “abstract” and invisible, is for the Chinese
emblematically concrete and visibly given in their script.’
21. Similarly, though Arendt refers to Wittgenstein numerous times in Thinking, she does not take
up his criticism of the idea that words other than logical connectives function like names. If
she did, she might be less willing to emphasize the idea that nouns like house inspire thought
because they lack tangible referents.
22. Arendt often draws silently upon Hegel, and she may do so here as well, as Hegel’s account of
Socrates also emphasizes the necessary moment of dissolution or evaporation in Socratic
reflection; cf. Norris (2011). Note that the unfreezing of the frozen thought that reveals the
‘original meaning’ of a word like house or justice is quite distinct from the dissolution of a
speculative philosophical term into its original context to which Arendt refers earlier in The
Life of the Mind: ‘All philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose
true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into its original context, which must
Norris 15

have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it’ (Arendt, 1978a: 104). As we
have noted, Arendt recognizes that a word like justice is ‘part and parcel of our everyday
speech’. In contrast, the philosophical terms Arendt considers in this earlier discussion are
speculative, metaphysical terms (ibid.: 103 and 104); and the ‘original context’ is not the
context of the metaphysician’s own speculations or discussions, but that of the everyday
speech from which he takes his terms:
When Plato introduced the everyday words ‘soul’ and idea’ into philosophical language
– connecting an invisible organ in man, the soul, with something invisible present in the
world of invisibles, the ideas – he still must have heard the words as they were used in
ordinary pre-philosophical language. Psyche is the ‘breath of life’ exhaled by the dying,
and idea or eidos is the shape or blueprint the craftsman must have in front of his mind’s
eye before he begins his work. (Arendt, 1978a: 104)
To ‘dissolve the term into its original context’ is thus to understand the implications that the
term had for the philosopher who first used it (what he ‘must have heard’). A Platonic idea on
this account is not just the abstract concept of a thing, as many readers of Plato assume, but a
craftsman’s abstract concept, one that is specifically geared towards the practice of his craft.
See in this regard Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition that ‘the Platonic desire to
substitute making for acting . . . becomes most apparent where it touches the very center of his
philosophy, the doctrine of ideas’ (Arendt, 1958: 225). In contrast, the ‘unfreezing’ of a word
like ‘house’ is not a return to an original non-philosophical context and a recollection of the
analogy or analogies that allowed for the shift from that context to speculative metaphysics;
rather, it is a recollection of and a pondering of the ideas and practices for which the word is, as
Arendt puts it, ‘shorthand’. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this journal for suggest-
ing that these two quite different things might be confused.
23. Arendt wrote:
Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the
so-called positive values, to which it remains bound . . . But that danger does not arise
out of the Socratic conviction that an unexamined life is not worth living, but, on the
contrary, out of the desire to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary.
(Arendt, 1978a: 176)
As Arendt makes clear (and see Arendt, 1982: 33), nihilism as she understands it is the
dogmatic form of skepticism, where that form is either consciously assumed or attributed
by virtue of the skeptic to say what he means by his skepticism.
24. Arendt’s nihilist is in effect a dogmatic as opposed to a (temporary) Pyrrhonian skeptic.
25. For whatever it is worth, when I consider the house example and ask what I would say, I find I
would say that the Bedouin’s tent might be a home in which he dwells, but not a house. But I
do not think this is set in stone. Thoreau said he could make a house out of a box. Before the
age of industrialized total war began with the American Civil War, few would have considered
it an act of war to destroy the enemy’s food supply and firebomb their cities. (What Rome did
to Carthage was never normal.) That has changed, and even the fact that many people can no
longer say what is and is not an act of war would not have been predicted by many in the early
18th century.
26. Compare Arendt’s comment in On Violence that a parent who argues with her child loses her
authority as a parent (Arendt, 1970: 45). As a parent, I find this both outmoded and unhelpful.
16 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

How can my daughter learn to address problems by appealing to reason and justice if I refuse
to join her in doing so? And how better can I maintain my authority with her than by earning
her respect in these areas? The point, however, as Arendt would say, is that authority (or
parent, or discipline) can be well understood in a variety of ways, none of which are deter-
mined by the ‘original meaning’.
27. In emphasizing the similarity between the yardstick of the political origin and the measure of
the original meaning, I do not deny the difference between them. As I will put it, where the
first can assume dogmatic force, the second assumes only a quasi-dogmatic authority.
28. To appreciate the extent of this danger, recall that Arendt closes The Origins of Totalitarian-
ism by reflecting on totalitarianism’s ability to destroy our ‘common sense’ and plunge us into
a loneliness in which we cease to belong to the common world (Arendt, 1979b: 475).
29. Compare the discussion of Arendt (1978a: 175) in the next note, below. It is striking that in
‘Understanding and Politics’ Arendt takes as exemplary Augustine’s characterization of the
human being as the creature or created thing that begins (and hence does not begin absolutely),
and writes: ‘[T]he birth of individual men, being new beginnings, reaffirms the original
character of man in such a way that the origin can never become entirely a thing of the past’
(Arendt, 1994: 321; second emphasis added; on Augustine and natality, compare Arendt,
1958: 177). The origin is here, as in ‘What is Authority?’, primarily a thing of the past. This
is obviously not to suggest that natality (the fact that our ‘essence is beginning’) is irrelevant
here.
30. ‘To take again the example of the frozen thought inherent in the word “house” once you have
thought about its implied meaning – dwelling, having a home, being housed – you are no
longer as likely to accept for your own whatever the fashion of the time may prescribe’
(Arendt, 1978a: 175). Note that the implied or original meaning of the term allows one to
deny in particular ‘the fashion of the time’, which is to say, current practice. Note as well that
this reference to the implied meaning of the term appears immediately after Arendt writes that
‘no general rules of conduct . . . can withstand the wind of thought’. The implied or original
meaning is not a rule of conduct, and is as such not destroyed by thought, but rather made the
object and measure of philosophical reflection. I am grateful to Martin Shuster for alerting me
to the fact that this crucial distinction is easily missed.
31. Arendt is brusquely dismissive of the ‘Oxford school of criticism’ (Arendt, 1978a: 45, 52), and
does not recognize that Austin and the other members of this loose-knit ‘school’ (and, of
course, Cavell) are deeply concerned with this false conception of our freedom in language.
See, for example, Cavell (1981a: 63): ‘we have a choice over our words, but not their meaning.
Their meaning is in their language; and our possession of the language is the way we live it.’
32. In this constancy it resembles the threat of death that is so central to Da-sein’s authentic
experience of itself in Being and Time: ‘what is peculiar to the certainty of death [is] that it is
possible in every moment’, and not just ‘sometime later’ (Heidegger, 1996: 238).
33. This example indicates another point of commonality between Arendt and Cavell: the defense
of the world as a concrete, public space essentially constituted by speech as well as material
and institutions, a space from which we in modernity are chronically alienated.
34. Cf. Cavell’s account of Heidegger’s dictum regarding our not thinking (Cavell, 1990: 37).
35. Etymologically, to remember (from L re- þ LL memorari) is to be mindful.
36. On this topic, see Kompridis (2006) and Norris (2017).
Norris 17

37. An anonymous reader for this journal has reminded me that the line Cavell quotes continues,
‘– as linked with the world as ever and following current events with unchanging keenness and
capacity for concern’. It is certainly true that here, as throughout the Laudatio, Arendt
emphasizes Jasper’s responsiveness; and it is also true that ‘philosophy’s first virtue’, for
Cavell, ‘is responsiveness’ (Cavell, 2004b: 324). But I do not think that this undermines
Cavell’s contrast, as Arendt repeatedly emphasizes that in his responses Jaspers himself
remains ‘inviolable, untemptable, unswayable’, possessed of ‘unerring certainty of judgment
and sovereignty of mind’ (Arendt, 1968b: 76–7). As admirable as this is, it is far from the
failure, doubt and need for change essential to Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism. Compare
Cavell (1990: xxx): ‘A call for change [such as that central to Emersonian perfectionism] will
not be expressed as a particular imperative when what is problematic in your life (as of now) is
not the fact that between alternative courses of action the right has become hard to find, but
that in the course of your life you have lost your way.’

References
Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, Hannah (1968a) ‘What is Authority?’, in her Between Past and Future. New York:
Penguin, pp. 91–141.
Arendt, Hannah (1968b) ‘Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio’, in her Men in Dark Times. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 71–80.
Arendt, Hannah (1970) On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, Hannah (1978a) The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, Hannah (1978b) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York:
Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah (1979a) ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of
the Public World. New York: St Martin’s.
Arendt, Hannah (1979b) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, Hannah (1982) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Arendt, Hannah (1994) ‘Understanding and Politics’, in her Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954,
ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, pp. 307–27.
Arendt, Hannah (2003) ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, in her Responsibility and Judgment,
ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, pp. 159–89.
Arendt, Hannah (2005) ‘Socrates’, in her The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York:
Schocken, pp. 5–39.
Benhabib, Seyla (2000) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Canovan, Margaret (1995) Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavell, Stanley (1969a) ‘Acknowledgments’, in his Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cavell, Stanley (1969b) ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in Must We Mean
What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 267–353.
Cavell, Stanley (1979) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.
New York: Oxford University Press.
18 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

Cavell, Stanley (1981a) The Senses of Walden, expanded edition. San Francisco: North Point Press.
Cavell, Stanley (1981b) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. London:
Harvard Film Studies.
Cavell, Stanley (1988) ‘The Philosopher in American Life (Toward Thoreau and Emerson)’, in his
In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Cavell, Stanley (1990) Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago, IL: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Cavell, Stanley (2004a) ‘Reply to Four Chapters’, in D. McManus (ed.) Wittgenstein and Skepti-
cism. New York: Routledge, pp. 278–90.
Cavell, Stanley (2004b) Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Dewey, John (2010) John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, ed. John
Shook and James Good. New York: Fordham University Press.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983) ‘Self-Reliance’, in his Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of
America, pp. 257–82.
Empiricus: see Sextus.
Forster, Michael (2008) Kant and Scepticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Franks, Paul (2006) ‘Cavell, Fichte, and Skepticism’, in Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (eds)
Reading Cavell. New York: Routledge, pp. 166–203.
Guthrie, W. K. C. (1971) The Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1992) Was heißt Denken? [What Is Called Thinking?]. Stuttgart: Philipp
Reclam.
Heidegger, Martin (1996) Being and Time. SUNY Press: New York.
Kant, Immanuel (1989) Critique of Judgment, trans. J. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kant, Immanuel (1990) Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment]. Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag.
Kant, Immanuel (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kompridis, Nicholas (2006) Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kuehn, Manfred (2001) Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Macann, Christopher (1996) ‘Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation’, in Critical Heidegger. New York:
Routledge, pp. 97–120.
Macarthur, David (2014) ‘Cavell on Skepticism and the Importance of Not-Knowing’, Conversa-
tions 2: 2–23.
Norris, Andrew (2011) ‘Wollen und Entscheiden: Hegel über Ironie, das Böse und die souveräne
Ausnahme’ [Will and Decision: Hegel on Irony, Evil, and the Sovereign Exception], in Juliane
Rebentisch and Dirk Setton (eds) Willkür: Freiheit und Gesetz [Arbitrary Will: Freedom and
Law], vol. II. Berlin: August Verlag.
Norris, Andrew (2013) ‘On Public Action: Rhetoric, Opinion, and Glory in Hannah Arendt’s The
Human Condition’, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 14(2): 200–24.
Norris, Andrew (2017) Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of
Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Norris 19

Plato (1961) ‘Apology’, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, pp. 3–25.
Sextus Empiricus (1985) Selections from the Major Writings on Scepticism, Man, and God.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Shuster, Martin (2012) ‘Language and Loneliness: Arendt, Cavell, and Modernity’, International
Journal of Philosophical Studies 20(4): 473–97.
Villa, Dana (1996) Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Whitman, Walt (1996) ‘Leaves of Grass (1855)’, in Whitman: Poetry and Prose. New York:
Library of America.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York:
Macmillan.