Ep. 242: Stanley Cavell on Tragedy via King Lear (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: So what do we want to do next, Aaron? Did you want to lead us? I know you had something in mind. The way Cavell wraps up his reading,

0:07 Erin: he talks about scapegoats at the end, about people scapegoating each other. I don't know if we want to talk about that first and then go into the fact that he. He talks about how there are two points of hope at the end of the play. But he takes a particularly bleak view of the end of the play and says that essentially to say that Lear has success, learned empathy is not true. The problem of it is the fact that Lear doesn't learn empathy. He's still trying to hide himself. He is able to accept Cordelia's love, but only on the premise that they can carry out their love for each other in prison away from other people's eyes.

0:46 Dylan: In one way, Cavell comes back to. Well, I guess it's a theme of recognition, the theme of seeing. So, you know, the conventional thing in Lear that's sort of plainly obvious is that there's something about the play that's about seeing or in recognizing. And Cavell, his reading of it, gets to the way in which that is tied to shame and recognition of oneself, the recognition of oneself by others. And the end of the play, or as he says the very end of the section, the hope in it has to do with, on the one hand, that the truth will out. And Aaron just referred to this.

These two hideous moments. So Gloucester's blinding and Cordelia's death, so both of them are hideous moments in Gloucester's history. We found hope because while his weakness has left him open to the uses of evil, evil has to turn upon him because it cannot bear him to witness. As long as that is true, evil does not have free sway over the world. In Cordelia's death, there is hope because it shows the gods more, just more than we had hoped or wished. Lear's prayer is answered again in this. The gods are in Edgar's wonderful idea clear. Cordelia's death means that every falsehood, even every refusal of acknowledgment, will be tracked

2:06 Wes: down in the realm of spirit. Kierkegaard says there is absolute justice.

2:11 Dylan: Well, I should just read the rest of the paragraph, fortunately, because if all we had to go on were the way the world goes, we would lose the concept of justice altogether. And then human life would become unbearable. Kant banked the immortality of the soul on the fact that in this world, goodness and happiness are unaligned, a condition which, if never righted, is incompatible with moral sanity and hence with the existence of God. But immortality is not necessary for the soul's satisfaction. What is necessary is its own coherence, its ability to judge a world in which evil is successful and good are doomed. And in particular, its knowledge that while injustice may flourish, it cannot rest content. This, I take it, is what Plato's Republic is about. And it is the old theme of tragedy.

2:58 Seth: That paragraph is spectacular.

3:02 Dylan: I found it a little bit confusing, and maybe it's just worth re articulating why it is that Cordelia's death is an acknowledgement of justice as opposed to the way in which King Lear was for what, 150 years generally performed in which she lived.

3:24 Wes: How do they make that happen?

3:25 Dylan: They just didn't have her die.

3:27 Wes: Do they cut out the whole scene where he carries her in, saying how he thinks she might be alive, and then she's, oh, yeah, I am alive.

3:34 Dylan: It's a really good question.

3:35 Wes: And they live happily ever after.

3:37 Dylan: I've never read one of those versions of it. I only know that for like 150 or 200 years, the play was always performed with a happy ending in which they were reunited and she didn't die.

3:48 Erin: The Tate version, which I think is most commonly performed, though I also haven't read it, I think has Cordelia somehow marrying Edgar and reigning with Edgar, which doesn't make any sense because she's already married, but maybe she gets a quickie divorce in France.

4:03 Wes: Well, so what's the justice of her dying?

4:06 Dylan: How does it reveal cosmic justice? Right? I mean, you know that we don't like the way Cavell is saying it. Kant's wrong. We don't need immortality for soul satisfaction. We just need its coherence. And Cordelia's death reveals that coherence, the

4:22 Wes: ability to judge a world in which evil is successful and the good are doomed. So, you know, this idea that injustice may flourish, he cannot rest content. So what he's referring to there with Plato's Republic is just the idea that Those who do injustice are worse off than those who are the objects of injustice. Those who are the victims of injustice. Because your soul is deformed. So it's better to be the victim than to be the doer.

4:48 Seth: I think it has to do with Lear. If Cordelia lives, then Lear's bad behavior is not essentially addressed or punished. Cordelia's death shows that Lear is punished.

5:00 Wes: Maybe, but it's unclear to me.

5:02 Erin: I think this is in his idea of the scapegoat. Which I'm sort of haunted by. Because I don't entirely understand that either. But. But he says that if there is a Christ figure in this. First he talks about Edgar's sort of Christian sensibility. Which I also sort of don't totally understand. But then he says that Christ is basically every human scapegoat. Is reflected Christ. And that Cordelia bears the greatest reflection of Christ. And that she is bearing Lear's distortion and rejection, I believe, are the two words he uses. So she is the one who has to pay the price for what Lear has done.

5:38 Wes: So we know in this world bad people get away with doing bad things. It's not like there's any sort of cosmic justice in that sense. But there's something redemptive in the idea that we can somehow become a. Well, he says, its own coherence, its ability to judge a world. You know, maybe there's something elevating about our. Is it our ability to. What does he mean, ability to judge a world. In which evil is successful and the good are doomed? So what does he mean by injustice cannot rest content? I guess it's the idea that it can't remain invisible. And that's something that Its consequences. Cordelia's scapegoating or her death, at least it makes injustice visible and subject to judgment. It makes it something that just doesn't sneak around.

6:29 Seth: I feel as though what he's saying here. If somebody needs to be punished. Or if you feel the need. If there's the need to silence a person. Or blind a person. Or to punish someone. Then they must have meaning. They must stand for something. They must have some significance. And so if evil has to turn upon Gloucester. Because it cannot bear him to witness. It means there's still hope. Because it means he still has power. And it means that evil can't afford to be indifferent to him. And in the same way, I don't know how this is going to stretch.

But in Gloucester's case, the harm is visited upon him. In Cordelia's case, she represents something For Lear, she doesn't exist really for herself. So you could think of Cordelia's death as the equivalent of Gloucester's eyes. I think, in some respect, since Gloucester and Lear are doubles. That was one of the things, actually, that I think disturbed me most about watching the dramatization was just, okay, so there's a lot of tragedy and a lot of death. But it's three women and two old men and one young guy. And to see the two sisters, you know, they're heaped upon each other.

I was going down a rat hole there. Anyway, I think I made my point

7:42 Wes: the very last paragraph, right? So he gets into this idea that it shows that the reason consequences furiously hunt us down is not merely that we are half blind and unfortunate, but that we go on doing the same thing which produced these consequences in the first place. What we need is not rebirth or salvation, but the courage or plain prudence to see and to stop, to abdicate. But what do we need in order to do that? It would be salvation.

8:09 Dylan: In that understanding, we would also look back at Lear. Lear doesn't, in the end, abdicate ever. And that the death of Cordelia is a reflection of that.

8:20 Erin: We can take Cordelia's death almost as being Lear's spiritual death as well. But this is sort of maybe Lear's torment after death. The fact that Cordelia dies. Maybe it's because I'm Catholic and I read everything this way. But, you know, the spirit world that he talks about or that Kierkegaard talks about, but that Cavell references, fortunately. Because if all we had to go on were the way the world goes, we would lose the concept of joy, justice altogether. And then human life would become unbearable. Kant banked the immortality of the soul on the fact that in this world goodness and happiness are unaligned.

A condition which, if never righted, is incompatible with moral sanity and hence with the existence of God. I know there's an overlap there, but the spirit world, then, presumably, is the next world. So how I read this was the injustices that you visited on someone in this world you may never receive punishment for, but you will eventually get punishment for it in the next world. And so how I understood this, which could be totally wrong, is that somehow those two worlds are, like, flattened on top of each other in the last scene. And that Lear is sort of experiencing punishment for what he's done in this world with Cordelia having died and left him.

9:35 Seth: Cavell explicitly points to what you were just saying where he talks about the Christian interpretation of the play. And Cordelia is a Christ figure. And this invoking the afterlife, he's explicitly kind of playing to that potential interpretation. But there's a legitimate and long standing interpretive framework from the Old Testament and, you know, the Judaic tradition about punishment in this life, the realization of forgiveness and retribution and all that in this lived experience in this life. And I wouldn't be surprised. I think that's somewhere underneath here as well.

So he's mentioning the Christian interpretive framework here, but I don't think he wants to ultimately assign Cordelia that Christ figure responsibility and to suggest that the reconciliation for Lear is going to come in the afterlife instead. What I think he's saying is if Cordelia lives, Lear does not suffer the consequences of the bad decisions that he makes, which tells us that there's hope, that we don't have to wait for the afterlife, that it's not just completely random or that it's not just completely evil. That bad decisions, bad judgments, bad people get their just desserts.

10:57 Wes: See, this is where I think I have a difference from you on this. So I think he's saying precisely that bad people usually don't get their just deserts right. A world in which evil is successful and the good are doomed in general, that's not what we can expect from the world. That's Kant's kingdom of ends, I guess, in which everyone gets what they deserve. But in this world, almost no one gets what they deserve, or at least not all the time.

11:21 Seth: What are you talking about? That's what Shakespearean tragedy is about.

11:24 Wes: Evil does flourish.

11:25 Seth: It's a everybody getting what they deserve. And it's always death or banishment or blindness or maiming or.

11:34 Wes: The concept here is not one of retribution. It's not that something was balanced and put right because someone who did something wrong here is getting his comeuppance. I think that's precisely the view that's being rejected. And to reject that view is the same thing as to reject the idea of an afterlife in which, you know, there's heaven and hell and good people go one place and bad people. That's not the sort of redemption we get here. What we get is this whole idea that, you know, while injustice may flourish, it cannot rest content or every falsehood, every refusal, acknowledgment will be tracked down.

And the redemptive thing is, you know, what he calls the soul's coherence, which is the ability to track these things down. It's the ability to see these things for what they are, which, again, the Whole point of. He talked earlier about evil trying to hide itself. I think the redemptive thing here is that it can't do that. Whatever evil gets away with, it's not ever going to remain hidden. The truth will out.

12:37 Seth: So what is the thing? What's the mechanism that's going to track it down, that's going to will it out? How does that happen? Is it shame? Is it the fact that being a perpetrator of evil and not being able to live with yourself. Because that's not what it sounds like when he's talking about the externalities of having your eyes gouged out or being hanged.

12:57 Erin: I think it has to be God. I mean, that's why I take that reading sort of personally or something. And why maybe I'm thinking about the fact that the immediate consequences of Cordelia as being like a punishment is almost as if the two worlds, you know, the spirit world or maybe the life after death and the current world, world, world are sort of collapsed on each other in that moment. Perhaps it's because it's a pre Christian play. There is no sense of the afterlife in the play. And therefore, in order to sort of paradoxically on Shakespeare's part, show a world which has the God's retribution happening within it, one has to then show people getting their comeuppance in the moment.

Reminds me sort of of the story of Job. Even just the distinction between the, the Judaic and the Christian viewpoints here, like with Job as the Judaic story, I mean, everything taken away from him, there's death, there's boils, there's destruction and all of this terrible stuff. But then in the end he gets everything back in this world. The difference then in this sort of the Christian reading would be you could say, okay, well maybe if we imagine a Christian Job, he's someone who has everything taken away from him. But we say, hey, he gets to go to heaven, so it all is returned to him in the end in the spirit world.

I think this is kind of like as being pre Christian, it's sort of on the same plane as Job, only Job kept the faith and so everything is returned to him. But Lear never experiences what he needs to experience. He never makes this accommodation and therefore death is returned to him.

14:28 Dylan: The commonality there is just balance. The idea that that's where the justice part comes into that he's referring to that in the end, the cosmic justice that is there is a moral balance in the world. That here, as you point out, Aaron isn't a balance that includes heaven or afterlife or anything like that. It's just that the world is balanced. In fact, the world is balanced in this tragedy within the lifetime of the perpetrators.

14:55 Wes: I think I'm going to have to agree to disagree on this because I don't think the balance is between events and actions within the world. Again, I don't think people. It would be very, you know, Old Testament for Cordelia's death to be thought of as a kind of justice for Lear. Right. Because it's unjust to her. It's not a Christian or post Christian way of thinking about justice. So.

15:15 Seth: But she's not really. She's not really a character. It's called King Lear, not Princess Cordelia.

15:22 Wes: The balance is between what he calls coherence of soul and everything else that happens. A world in which injustice may flourish. The balancing redemptive thing is coherence of soul at some relation of acknowledgment to all of that injustice.

15:42 Dylan: Cavell seems pretty clear to me that prior to Lear walking out with Cordelia's body in his arms, putting aside what happens after that, but before then, Lear is, despite everything, is an incoherent soul.

16:02 Seth: Imbalanced.

16:03 Dylan: Imbalanced soul.

16:05 Wes: Yeah. What's happening to tragic figures in the end isn't about comeuppance, Right. It's not about retribution. It's about self recognition.

16:14 Dylan: Okay, so it's a different kind of balance, right. If we don't want to have some ham fisted balance of retribution, we still have a balance of self recognition.

16:24 Seth: Right.

16:25 Dylan: That there's a transformation that happens and I mean, makes sense. If you want to have that be a more subtle and less ham fisted, then Cordelia's death is Lear's punishment. But it still seems like Cordelia's death is the mechanism of that recognition, at least according to Cavell.

16:46 Erin: Well, I take Seth's point that Cordelia almost, I think she is a character, but I think she also is just a mechanism. I think that in the same way, not to keep harping on on this, but in the same way that Job, when he loses his family, everyone in his family dies, including all of his in laws and everybody. They also are not really characters. It's about Job. So the idea that they're sort of sacrificed, plot wise, sort of for the redemption or not the redemption of the main character is again to me just this pre Christian idea that because we don't have maybe an afterlife or even just the concept of purgation in an afterlife, we have to experience that here and then that's also related to the idea of tragedy. Maybe tragedy is not about the fact that all men are mortal.

17:30 Wes: Yeah, so that's page 341.

17:34 Seth: At the point of that quote, he's already inside the whole discussion, isn't he, of what it's like to have the experience of being in the theater. How like attendance at a tragedy is not a substitute for attendance at a funeral.

17:45 Wes: Tragedy is about a particular death or set of deaths, and specifically about a death which is neither natural nor. Or accidental. The death is inflicted. There's a punishment or an expiation.

17:56 Seth: At that point, he's talking about the mechanism of tragedy around the process of you see a particular death on stage that. That a death that's inflicted which suggests that it need not have happened, but in reality it has a necessity about it precisely because it cannot be. You have no power to impact it. And that the actors will never act any differently when they do it, and that. That's a bizarre experience. But the segue that Aaron's comments were suggesting to me was not so much to get into talking about the experience of watching a tragedy in the theater, but more that the notion of the personal and the political.

We're talking about Lear as a character, as a tragic figure, and talking about the relationship that these other characters have to Lear and how actions result, you know, whether he's being punished or not. And what are the mechanisms for that punishment. Is that the function of understanding that it has to do with who Lear is as a figure? Cavell makes a point that nobody would write King Lear today, but at the same time, you know, nobody would have written Death of a salesman in 1689 or whatever, whatever the year is, that Lear's figure is a canvas on which tragedy makes sense for Shakespeare and for that particular time, because he represents the body politic, the kings, the princes, the queens, the princesses and what have you.

They function in a way that they don't function now because we're not meant to identify with them as individuals, to share. It's not pathos or empathy that drives our experience of this kind of tragedy in the way that it may very well with more modern tragedies.

19:48 Wes: Is that Cavell is that.

19:50 Seth: It's Cavell in the sense that Cavell talks about. Why is it always the figure of the prince or the king? And why does nobody write tragedies about princes and kings anymore? Like there's a certain point at which in history, it doesn't make sense to have royal or noble figures at the center of your tragedies.

20:08 Erin: Because of the idea that the royal figure contains an entire community.

20:12 Seth: The tragedy of Lear is not just the tragedy of an individual family. It's the tragedy of England. The breaking up of the unified kingdom into three or multiple different parts. There's going to be, you know, the warfare, the lack of leadership. There's an understanding that Lear's failure of leadership in his abdication, his failure to establish an appropriate lineage and path to succession, results in suffering for everybody. The entire kingdom will suffer. And that story can't be written, you know, in a post feudal industrial world. We need different kinds of tragedy. And the tragedy of the modern age is the tragedy of the individual, the nondescript, the person we can identify with, as opposed to the person who embodies the body politic.

20:57 Erin: And Edgar puts it in a. In a literal way when he says that the state has been gored, the gored state sustain. So the idea that his continuing on ruling in England, that's been put on life support or something. And Cavell constantly mentioning the crossroads at which Shakespeare is writing and the burgeoning skepticism, it almost makes me think that the gored state is Shakespeare's state. And that the idea that we can't come back to this country that has a king, you know, England is gored, and as a result we have the birth of the individual or something, the

21:27 Dylan: end of monarchy, the birth of republicanism.

21:30 Seth: The quote here is, and Edgar is the ruler at the end of the play, Lear's successor, man who must, in Albany's charge, the gored state, sustain a very equivocal charge, containing no assurance that its body may be nursed back to health, but simply nursed.

21:44 Erin: And when it dies, presumably there would be nothing to supplant it.

21:48 Dylan: So there's sort of an open question mark on the future of the state that's interesting.

21:52 Seth: In that same paragraph, he says Edgar's is the most Christian sensibility in the play, as Edmunds is the most Machiavellian. If the Machiavellian fails in the end, he very nearly succeeds. And if the Christian succeeds, his success is deeply compromised. And it points back to, I'm going to try to tie this all together. I don't know if I'll be successful. So the full extent of the tragedy here is that the entire kingdom of England, the state, if you will, is invested in the body, the person of Lear. And insofar as Lear is the leader, the figure that binds the kingdom together by virtue of just will, force of personality, very being, existence as the ruler the greatest task is then to secure that legacy.

And we see this over and over again in history. Alexander, Napoleon, all these different people who manage to secure the body politic by force of arms, by dint of some extraordinary feature of their personality, and then fail to secure that legacy, which results ultimately in the complete undoing of everything that they've built up. And usually worse, right? Or oftentimes worse. Like almost as if to say that if your goal is to bring peace or unity or leadership, and you can't secure that legacy after you're dead, then it's as if you've done nothing at all.

To some extent, that's what we see in King Lear. When they come together in the opening scene, they're expecting the same kind of what we must assume of the figure of Lear. Some kind of strong leadership in establishing what the role of succession, who's going to be in charge of what, how it's going to work out. And when he fails to deliver that, all the rest of the stuff plays out as a individual melodrama. But in reality, it's the unwinding of the state. And what Cavell points at when he talks about our experience of tragedy in this sense is that we're witness to this.

We recognize that there appears to be contingency, that there appears to be a way to alter the course of events, but there's a necessity to it that all we can do is bear witness to. We can't get up and change it. The characters can't change it. We can't change it. All we can do is be present for it happening.

24:22 Erin: That's related to the example he gives of the desire that we as audience members perhaps have to intervene in the action of the play and maybe the suspension of disbelief or something that we have to go through as audience members. His discussion of how we as audience members are morally implicated in everything that's happening on stage is really fascinating to me. The idea that we can't be onlookers. I'm not sure how to say this. It's better to read it. This is the idea, like how we should be responding to the events on stage.

24:53 Seth: If I do nothing because I am distracted by the pleasures of witnessing this folly, or out of my knowledge of the proprieties of the place I am in, or because I think there will be some more appropriate time in which to act, or because I feel helpless to undo events of such proportion, then I continue my sponsorship of evil in the world, its sway. Waiting upon these forms of inaction, I exit running. But if I do nothing, because there is nothing to do, where that means I have given over the time and space in which action is mine, and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our

25:35 Erin: condition provides a justification for all of the many hours I have spent in a theater or watching movies. The idea that I'm somehow participating in my own, dare I say, sanctification by bearing witness. Well, you know, ideally, not that I'm doing this perfectly, because Cavell says that we're maybe not that I'm acknowledging their separateness by sitting in the audience and realizing that there is nothing I can do. I've had that feeling before while watching Aliens, usually.

26:03 Seth: This is an amazing and fascinating part of the essay. I think this is where Cavell bridges something, what we would traditionally consider like aesthetics or some kind of philosophy of art or experience, in a way, with epistemology. Because he makes an analogy. Well, it's a double analogy. The first analogy is he talks about epistemology and skepticism with respect to the external world. So he talks about Hume and Descartes, and he says that the misinterpretation of skeptics is that skepticism about the existence of objects outside of ourselves or the external world doesn't mean that we cease to believe that they exist.

That you go to immediately that it's solipsism and it's all in my head. It's just simply that the mechanism of knowledge whereby you understand and comprehend and intuit those things has to be suspended with respect to the quote, unquote, absolute existence of things outside of my sensory perception. And that he says, you just have to accept it. So skepticism doesn't mean that you deny that the external world exist. It's that you deny that you can come to terms with it rationally. And you just have to acknowledge and accept it. And he then extends that to the problem of other minds.

But more importantly, he brings it into this context of aesthetic experience in the theater, where he essentially says, our relationship to the actors on stage, to the experience of being in a theater, is very similar to our phenomenological experience with the external world or with other minds. We can't ever rationally get there. So all we can do is accept and acknowledge and that it's better if we do that than if we somehow try to find a way to overcome acceptance and acknowledgement in the service of some kind of rationalization or some kind of rational grasping.

And I think what he's saying when he says, like, well, should I intervene? Should I empathize? Should I do all these things? These are all rational modalities that just ignore this skeptical challenge to knowledge about things in themselves or the world in itself.

28:27 Dylan: He gets to some of this at the beginning of this section, which, if we're sort of laying out our favorite sections, this one is mine. So it's towards the beginning of section two where he starts talking about drama. And there's just a couple of quotes that, to me, just tied together. He asked the question on page 313, which is at the beginning of section two, there's the second startable start section. But it says, what is the medium of this drama? How does it do its work upon us? The medium is one which keeps all significance continuously before our senses.

So that when it comes over us that we have missed it. This discovery will reveal our ignorance to have been willful, complicious, a refusal to see. And he builds on this idea, which I think is ultimately linked with what both Aaron and Seth were talking about, that the medium of drama is doing its work on us as an experience. He calls it in the next, later on in the paragraph, that this recognition, these experiences are associated with a thrill of recognition and access of intimacy, not with a particular sense of exposure. The progress from ignorance to exposure.

I mean, the treatment of an ignorance which is not to be cured by information. So this kind of thing that the skeptic is criticizing in the world, which is what's the answer? The cure for that is not. And the response to that is not more information, not going further down the rabbit hole. But there is a treatment for your skepticism which won't be in fact cured by more knowledge. He links this up with philosophy on page 316 in saying that the essential response of both philosophy and tragedy is that of wonder. And that wonder is supplanted by experience.

And then at the end of that section on page 317 and 318, this is all to do with the way in which we experience those figures, like ourselves, as being free but constrained. So these characters are directly false to our experience, which is that they are all. For all their hidden manipulation by circumstance or passion, these figures are radically and continuously free, operating under their own power at every moment, choosing their destruction later on. In a word, men. Our liabilities in responding to them are nothing other than our liabilities in responding to any man.

Rejection, brutality, sentimentality, indifference, the relief and the terror in finding courage, the ironies of human wishes. It is not wrong to read the sense of inevitability in terms of the chain of cause and effect, the sense of inevitability about what happens to these characters. What is wrong, what becomes insufficient to explain our lives, was to read this chain as if its first link lay in the past, and hence as if the present were the scene of its ineluctable effects in the face of which we must learn suffering. With Kant, because of Luther and then Hegel and Nietzsche, not to say Freud, we become responsible for the meaning of the suffering itself, indeed, for the very fact that the world is to be comprehended under the rule of causation at all.

What has become inevitable is the fact of endless causation itself, together with the fact of incessant freedom.

31:45 Seth: And what has become the tragic fact is that we cannot or will not tell the which is which.

31:52 Wes: All right, are we ready to wrap it up?

31:54 Seth: I'm ready to not over commit to the next podcast. I mean this is. This is as dense, readable, not at all interpretively challenging, not obscure, not even with all the references, kind of like beyond the Pale, but just so many ideas crammed into such a short. So it's not that short. And there's two or three other additional layers we could easily have spent time on. I do want to circle back. Maybe Wes, this is my closing. There is this aspect that he brings. Part of the criticism at the beginning, talking about the new critics is to say, no, we do need to talk about the characters and their motivations, which in his case is also to talk about the characters and their knowledge or self knowledge or lack thereof.

And he later on in the essay talks about our knowledge and self knowledge with respect to our experience of tragedy and what kind of obligations and responsibilities and relationship that puts us in with respect to the characters. And he then talks more generally about. He uses a framework of epistemology to set the stage for knowing versus acknowledging or acceptance, you know, a certain kind of phenomenological knowledge versus sort of phenomenological experience of things. And I think he's trying to weave all that together. And I think early on you had asked, you know, how did the first and second parts relate or how does the whole thing hang together?

And it's somehow around that. But I'm not prepared after just one reading and one conversation to say exactly how that might cash itself out.

33:43 Wes: Dylan and Aaron, do you want to give final thoughts?

33:46 Dylan: I found myself just not liking the play.

33:49 Wes: My God, what? And sacrilege

33:55 Dylan: so maybe I'm a little ashamed of the fact that I didn't like it, but I realized when I was going through it that I don't really like it. And one of the reasons I don't like it, or maybe I have to work myself around to seeing things in it. And maybe Cavell helped me with that in terms of thinking about tragedy, is even though I get and maybe am very sympathetic with Cavell's reading, in some ways, it makes me maybe like it a little bit better, is just that despite seeing the motivations there, I find almost no one in it. Sympathetic in any way, and not just not sympathetic is almost unbelievable, even after Cavell's thing, I mean.

So anyway, I don't like it, but I did enjoy Cavell's article and I'm finding myself just thinking more about the way in which literature and plays, they do something that is hard for philosophy to do, which is manifest something like wonder, or manifest the things in between and give them meaning without destroying them by pointing at them. And there's a kind of destruction that happens in articulation that is avoided in a play or piece of literature that's able to talk about something without wrecking it. And I guess that's the thing that I was most reminded of and found myself thinking about the most in reading Cavell.

The way in which works of literature and art are as philosophical as philosophy in some ways captures things ineffable that reading philosophy doesn't.

35:38 Wes: Aaron, do you have any final thoughts?

35:42 Erin: One of the most intriguing questions, I think, in the entire essay is when Cavell asks, why do I choose to subject myself to this suffering? Why do I deliberately confront a situation which fills me with a pity and terror I know are ineffective? And then he says there are two answers that are familiar to us. That he's dissatisfied with the cathartic effect and the aesthetic counterpart, you might say, but he's dissatisfied with both of them. And then he, a couple pages later, says, the perception or attitude demanded in following this drama is one which demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time.

I think of it as an experience of continuous presentness. Its demands are as rigorous as those of any spiritual exercise. To let the past go and to let the future take its time, so that we not allow the past to determine the meaning of what is now happening. Something else may have come of it and that we not anticipate what will come of what has come. Not that anything is possible, though it is, but that we do not know what is and is not next. I suppose my final thought is that he doesn't really answer why we should read this play or why we should suffer along with these characters, except perhaps the idea is a spiritual one, that being present and simply bearing the present moment with these characters, maybe somehow I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I can imagine perhaps he means that it.

It increases our own empathy, our own ability to bear the sufferings of others, but also just that we have this experience of the present which is in itself painful. And it's sort of drawing attention to that. I don't want to say that in gaining empathy that Cavell is trying to be instructive, because I think he's kind of morally instructive anyway, because I think he's deliberately avoiding that. He likes telling us what isn't rather than what is. But I don't know. I mean, that's very suggestive to me, the idea that maybe by being in the present, by bearing the present moment, we're going through our own suffering, our own confrontation, which is the opposite of this avoidance.

37:51 Wes: Very well put. And a good segue to. Next time on the Partially Examined Life, we will be discussing Aristotle's Poetics, learning what tragedy definitively is, maybe even definitionally is. He's going to tell us what catharsis is. He's going to tell us more about some of the very ideas that we've been discussing today. And so, yeah, look for more information on the partiallyexaminedlife.com go to our Twitter feed or Facebook page, our Patreon account if you want to support us. And get episodes ad free.

38:23 Mark: And this is Mark budding in after the fact here to remind you that a way you can support the Partially Examined Life at no additional cost to you is by using our Amazon affiliate status, which means if you go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and click the Amazon button in the right hand margin, then anything you buy in that session, a percentage of what you pay will go to us. So if you make a habit of that, it'll really help us out in the long term. I know you're ordering a lot of stuff remotely in lockdown, so thanks so much. If you do that, we can't tell who has made what purchase, so we can't even thank you after the fact.

As a closing song here, I have picked one that struck me as somewhat relevant to what was just said. It's called out of your hands by Gretchen's wheel, which is the project by Lindsay Murray, whom I interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 81. Find that@nakedly ExaminedMusic.com Good night.

39:12 Seth: Good night.

39:13 Dylan: Good night.

39:14 Erin: Good night.

39:24 Unknown speaker: There's never a time when winter isn't coming? In a world that never won't turn around? Will you ever find the beast for which you're looking? Is it even better to be found? Is it even there to be? Be found? Nothing. Of your time? While you can? You figure out what we're grown? Vision is blur? Fingers start crossing? You think by now they be strong? You think by now they be strong? Nothing went like you plan? Sam? Out of your? Why? When.