Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

2 looking away
ine would happen if these philosophers spoke more openly? Who, indeed,
is hating whom?
We hardly need Nietzsche’s indignation to remind us how thoroughly
the language of appearance is taken personally, in actual exchanges and in
philosophers’ fantasies of them. Stanley Cavell’s work has made the psychology
of this strain a philosophical subject, focusing especially on one
figure, the person usually referred to in the lonely singular as “the skeptic,”
who seems to care inordinately about appearance and reality. Interpreting
the mutually irritable conversation between the skeptic and her or
his—almost always, his—interlocutors, Cavell explains that the skeptic is
perceived as wanting something fundamentally unreasonable, something
more than conditions on our planet can provide. Cavell interprets the
skeptic’s language as a request for social acknowledgment in the guise of a
failed epistemic statement. In his account, skeptical scruples about appearance
and reality transmit fears and desires about interpersonal understanding:
“acceptance in relation to objects” corresponds to “acknowledgment in
relation to others.” 1 I’ll return to Cavell, since I share his emphasis on the
infusion of the problem of appearance and reality with value judgments
and psychological needs. Like Cavell in The Claim of Reason, I am interested
in how one might feel about aspects of existence that, in their exigency
and impersonality, transcend feelings. Such exigencies are often
called “facts.” The notion of the “given” in the Kantian sense, meaning appearances
that present themselves and the laws and limits that produce
them, is another such figure of exigency, and the “given world” can function
as a figure of the largest fact—not directly perceivable, but knowable
through Kantian critique. 2 Nietzsche is outraged that anyone could imagine
liking or disliking a necessity as powerful as “this world.” That he can
be suggests that fact perceptions are normative, not only of actions, but of
likes and dislikes, thoughts and feelings. We must not only take fact perceptions
into account when navigating reality, but our feelings about them
1. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1979), 454; Cavell refers as well here to his own “Avoidance of Love: A Reading of
King Lear,” inMust We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1969), 267–353, p. 324.
2. I’ll always use “given” in this sense, not the pre-Kantian one of the surfaces of
things.