Abstract

Stanley Cavell's new book challenges professional philosophers in the United States with his attempt to rehabilitate Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers and to enlarge everyone's vision of the humanities, so that we might keep our eyes on the connections among the disciplines of romanticism, philosophy, and film. Call this eye positioning non-pathological strabismus. From Cavell's viewpoint, professional philosophers keep Emerson and Thoreau out of the philosophical curriculum, because the two are like the Elephant Men of philosophy, oddities that are fine in side-shows like literature departments, but two who would be embarrassments to any philosophers who might claim the two as their own. "Emerson and Thoreau," Cavell says, "are as much threats, or say embarrassments, to what we have learned to call philosophy as they are to what we call religion, as though philosophy had, and has, an interest in its own behalf in looking upon them as amateurs, an interest, I think I might say, in repressing them". Cavell recognizes that he too is an oddity, but perhaps not an oddity who is trying to get even, to exact revenge. This talk of oddness comes from Cavell's essay called "Being Odd, Getting Even: Descartes, Emerson, Poe," one of seven lectures that appears in In Quest of the Ordinary.