Bring the idea back

Ok it has been a while since I have touched upon my philosophical proposal.


I was doing some research online and I was mesmerized by the fact that someone already came up with a philosophical school of thought based on circumstances.

Here is an extract:

“Stanley Cavell, Leopoldo Zea, and the Seduction of an ‘American’ Philosophy”

Cavell’s Circumstantialism

What is meant by “circumstantialism”? The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset is the best known exponent of this doctrine. In his Meditations on Quixote of 1914, Ortega writes (2000): “Man reaches his full capacity when he acquires complete consciousness of his circumstances. Through them he communicates with the universe” (p. 41), thus, “the re-absorption of circumstance is the concrete destiny of man” (p. 45). A circumstantialist approach to philosophical thinking, to philosophy, would thus emphasize the significance of either 1. the circumstances in which a particular thinking takes place, or 2. the manner in which the circumstances are absorbed by the thinking in question. An ancillary claim of this paper is that Cavell is precisely preoccupied with both 1 & 2.
Cavell has been instrumental in the induction of Emerson and Thoreau into America’s philosophical pantheon, one which boasts of such figures as James, Royce, Mead, and Pierce. It has not been an easy task. Because of their un-philosophical credentials, Cavell has had to convince the philosophical establishment that Emerson’s and Thoreau’s thinking is indeed philosophy. To do this, however, he has been “forced” to claim that Emerson and Thoreau were not just philosophers, but “American” philosophers thinking and expressing a uniquely American philosophy. He was forced to make this claim because Emerson and Thoreau themselves forced him into making this claim by being American philosophers. Consequently, in the process, Cavell’s own reflections on Emerson and Thoreau evidence the American philosophy that he has been forced into defending.
Always elusive, Cavell avoids spelling out any criteria for an American Philosophy. In The Senses of Walden, a work dedicated to unearthing the eccentricities of Thoreau’s hermetic text, Cavell (1972) is forced to ask:
Why has America never expressed itself philosophically? Or has it—in the metaphysical riot of its greatest literature? Has the impulse to philosophical speculation been absorbed, or exhausted, by speculation in territory, as in such thoughts as Manifest Destiny? Or are such questions not really intelligible?
(p. 32)

These questions are not rhetorical or by any means unintelligible. Has America been obsessed with wealth, growth, and conquest, and other positive interests, that it has forgone its opportunity to express itself philosophically? The answer is no. In fact, Thoreau’s Walden presents itself as an instance where an American concern, such as building a home by Walden pond, or tending to the soil, gives birth to philosophical speculation. Here is a case of the circumstances being absorbed by philosophical thinking, rather than philosophical thinking being absorbed, or exhausted, by the circumstance, e.g., a concern with nation-building.
Thus Cavell imagines American philosophy as a lived experience, arising from an engagement with a set of uniquely American circumstances, those he finds in Walden. But just as philosophical thinking bursts forth from one’s circumstance, it must necessarily returns to that circumstance so as to vindicate—or emancipate— the thinker, the writer, or the laborer from the guilt of tying philosophical thoughts down to particular (not universal) concerns. Hence, Cavell writes, “All our fields await emancipation—geography and places, literature and neighborhood, epistemology and eyes, anatomy and hands, metaphysics and cities” (1972, p. 80). Why would “all our fields,” including philosophy and medicine, await emancipation”? The simple answer has already been suggested: philosophy and medicine must arise and conform to the American circumstance. Just like a disease native to the American frontier would require an antidote capable of curing that particular disease, the idea is that the American existential condition likewise requires a form of philosophical thinking capable of addressing that particular condition. Hence, to consider the circumstances when thinking of America’s philosophical, medical, or literary future is already the liberating step. American philosophy would thus be a liberating, emancipating, philosophy: liberating the American mind from ancient (European) vices: a preference of the map over the field (place and geography), the novel over its characters (literature and neighborhood), universal structures of experience over what actually experiences (epistemology and eyes), science for practice (anatomy and hands), and abstraction over the everyday (metaphysics and cities). The suggestion here is that philosophy must return to the everyday, to the cities; this is what Cavell realizes “is most offensive to philosophy” (op. cit).
In The Senses of Walden, Cavell is engaged with an American writer whose immersion in the soil and spirit of America represents the undeniable relatedness of being human with that human’s circumstance. And it is, undeniably, philosophy. The reason for rejecting Thoreau’s visions as philosophical could be due to something one could call America’s inferiority complex. Cavell notes: “American culture never really believed in its capacity to produce anything of permanent value—except itself. So it forever overpraises and undervalues its achievements” (pp. 32-33). The suggestion is that—historically—America’s relative newness is to blame for its habit to “over-emphasize” and “devalue” its creations, especially its literature and philosophy. Thus Cavell insists that America take a second hard look—like the hard look taken by Thoreau and Emerson—and hear its own voice, it’s “serious speech” (1972, p. 33), which expresses its most characteristic convictions.
Cavell makes this call again in “An Emerson Mood,” pointing out the American tendency to undervalue our native philosophical insights, what he calls “visions.” He says,
our philosophies, or visions, [‘do not believe in each other’] which is why the ideal of a pluralism of philosophy, however well meant, is so often an empty hope. (2003, p. 26)

Philosophical pluralism is an “empty hope” because we are incapable of measuring our philosophical contribution with our own, so to speak, American measure. His call is to have our philosophical and our nonphilosophical visions “believe in each other.” How can they believe in each other, however, if we ourselves are conflicted as to what mood qualifies as a philosophical mood, especially when compared on an alien (i.e., European) standard? Cavell hints at a resolution to this question by equating philosophy with “vision.” America as “the land of the future,” as Hegel quipped, is a land of visions, of visionaries. These visions are uniquely American, as they relate to the future and destiny of the nations of the “New” continent. Indeed, where else could one find visionaries but in a land lacking a sense of place in the historical stage. Zea, as we will see, shares a similar intuition, proclaiming: “We feel as bastards who profit from goods to which they have no right. We feel as if we are wearing something else’s clothes: they are too big for our size” (Gracia and Zaibert, 2004, p. 222).
Reading Cavell one notes an echo of urgency—or is it desperation?—perhaps grounded on the notion that America has always expressed its “vision” in the process of its discovery and its continual re-invention. But this sense of urgency is also present in Thoreau. Cavell quotes a passage from Walden: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as a chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up” (1972, p. 35). Cavell goes on to say that Thoreau’s use of this “archetype of American folklore,” (p. 36) the chanticleer, is meant as an allusion to philosophy’s own archetypes, as in Socrates’ rooster. We could also say that for Thoreau the bothersome crow of the rooster is meant to shock his neighbors into wakefulness. Indeed, Cavell writes: “The purity of the Chanticleer’s prophesy is that he can speak only to waken and to warn” (p. 38). This statement reminds one of Marx, who writes, “So as to give them courage, we must teach the people to be shocked by themselves” (McLellan, 1987, p. 66). Thus the crow of the rooster is philosophy itself, while the rooster is Thoreau. One could argue that Cavell is pointing to a raison d’être of American philosophy, in its native or original version, namely, to instill in its audience a sense of urgency, a need for (internal or external) change. “It is a matter of taking back to yourself an authority [that] you have been compelled to invest elsewhere,” writes Cavell (2003, p. 31). Indeed, we will see how this sentiment is at the core of Zea’s thinking.