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…[O]nly slovenly souls abandon what once made an absolute impression upon them. (CUP 590)
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Notes
See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 5. Hereafter CHU.
Walden (V, 2), cited in Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 1994a), p. 256.
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking, 1972), pp. 51–2.
David Owen, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice: Reading Cavell on Political Voice and the Expression of Consent’, in Political Theory, vol. 27 no. 5 (1999), p. 581.
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938); hereafter PA.
Aaron Ridley, R. G. Collingwood: a Philosophy of Art (London: Phoenix, 1998), p. 7. The quotation from PA is on p. 216.
Kierkegaard’s main discussion of the ‘crowd’ or ‘public’ is in Two Ages. For a discussion that compares Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on this point, see Merold Westphal, ‘Kierkegaard’s Sociology’, in his Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, (paperback edn) (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 43–59.
See PA, especially ch. 2. Ridley provides a good summary on pp. 10–17. See also Christopher Janaway, ‘Arts and Crafts in Plato and Collingwood’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 50 (1992), pp. 1–23.
Compare here Wittgenstein’s comment on philosophy’s ‘decline’ into a subject with a ‘method’: ‘The nimbus of philosophy has been lost. For we now have a method of doing philosophy, and can speak of skilful philosophers … But once a method has been found the opportunities for the expression of personality are correspondingly restricted’ (Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 21).
Hereafter SE. In what follows, I use the same translation used by Conant: that found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Conant’s article, Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of “Schopenhauer as Educator”’ (hereafter NP), is forthcoming in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (Cambridge University Press). My citations are from page numbers in unpublished manuscript form. I am grateful to Stephen Mulhall and Michael Weston for bringing this article to my attention.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), sect. 162.
Ibid.
Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 148. Gould adds that this feature ‘points most directly toward the analogy of reading with psychoanalytic therapy’ (ibid.), but there is obviously no reason why the idea of ‘being read by’ a text need necessarily go in the direction of psychoanalysis.
For an interesting discussion of this, see George Pattison, `If Kierkegaard is right about reading, why read Kierkegaard?’, in Niels Jergen Cappelarn and Jon Stewart (eds), Kierkegaard Revisited (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 291–309, esp. pp. 299–301.
Edward F. Mooney, ‘Exemplars, Inwardness, and Belief: Kierkegaard on Indirect Communication’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1997), p. 143.
Pia Ssltof t, ‘The Unhappy Lover of Subjectivity: Is the Pseudonym Johannes Climacus an Unequivocal Figure?’, trans. M. G. Piety, in Niels Jtergen Cappelern and Hermann Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1996 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p. 259.
Several recent commentators have written on the social dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought, much of this work taking to task the common stereotype of Kierkegaard as asocial individualist. See, for example, George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (eds), Kierkegaard: The Self in Society (London: Macmillan, 1998).
For a recent argument which, although it makes no reference to Climacus, proceeds to the same conclusion, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), ch. 3.
I borrow this phrase from David Cain: see his ‘Treasure in Earthen Vessels: Johannes Climacus on Humor and Faith’, in Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulova Thulstrup (eds), Irony and Humor in SOren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1988), p. 77.
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Lippitt, J. (2000). Moral Perfectionism and Exemplars. In: Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598652_3
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