#stanley cavell

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of the Ordinary

The philosophy of the ordinary explores the depth, significance, and often-overlooked richness of everyday life. It challenges the idea that only abstract, extreme, or extraordinary things are worthy of philosophical attention. Instead, it asks: What does the ordinary reveal about being, language, ethics, and consciousness?

Key Questions

What counts as “ordinary”?

Is the ordinary only mundane, or does it contain hidden depth?

How do language, habit, and perception shape our understanding of everyday life?

Why do we often overlook the ordinary, and what happens when we don't?

Philosophical Background

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A central figure in the ordinary language philosophy movement.

In his later work (Philosophical Investigations), Wittgenstein emphasized that many philosophical confusions arise when we forget how language is ordinarily used.

The goal of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not to build abstract systems, but to "bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."

Stanley Cavell

Extended Wittgenstein’s thought into ethics, aesthetics, and film.

Argued that our sense of the world often comes from ordinary language, shared experiences, and daily practices—and that philosophy must grapple with these.

He saw the ordinary as fragile, easy to overlook, and always vulnerable to skepticism.

Phenomenology and the Everyday

Thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre examined the structures of everyday experience, from walking and perception to mood and habit.

Heidegger emphasized average everydayness as the background condition for authentic existence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty showed how the body moves through the world without conscious thought—demonstrating how deeply the ordinary is embedded in our being.

Themes in the Philosophy of the Ordinary

Language:

How do ordinary uses of language shape meaning, truth, and misunderstanding?

Ordinary language philosophy argues that many “deep” problems arise from misunderstood words.

Ethics and Recognition:

Moral insight often comes not from grand gestures but from small acts, like kindness, listening, or choosing not to harm.

Aesthetics of the Everyday:

Can beauty be found in mundane routines, household objects, or shared rituals?

Minimalism, wabi-sabi, and slow living reflect this interest.

Repetition and Habit:

Habit can dull awareness—but it can also offer stability, continuity, and comfort.

Repetition creates meaning, anchoring us in time and identity.

Attention and Presence:

Philosophers and mystics alike argue that paying attention to the ordinary cultivates awareness, gratitude, and philosophical clarity.

Why It Matters

In a world saturated with spectacle, distraction, and overstimulation, the philosophy of the ordinary is a radical act of slowing down, noticing, and reclaiming value in what’s already present. It reminds us that the most human truths are often found in the seemingly trivial—our conversations, routines, and shared experiences.

In Summary:

The philosophy of the ordinary invites us to think small—not to shrink our minds, but to see more clearly. By looking closely at what we usually ignore, we find not only a deeper understanding of the world but also a deeper understanding of ourselves.

[elizabethanism]

“A book is written for two audiences: the one it may create, whose conversation it invites; and the one that has created it, whose conversation it invokes."

~ Stanley Cavell,

from the preface to

“The World Viewed.”

[barofile]

The knowledge of the self as it is always takes place in the betrayal of the self as it was.

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, The Viking Press, 1971), p. 160

[alittlelessdemocracy]

One of Us

Robert B. Pippin, excerpted from After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism, 2014, University of Chicago Press, p 10-11:

...to a large extent Kant deserves his subjectivist reputation. For him aesthetic experience was essentially hedonic; it consisted in pleasure, not knowledge, given the way he understood the criteria for empirical or a priori knowledge. But this pleasure was essentially different from empirical pleasure, so different that Kant argued it ought to be regarded as that most unusual of pleasures - “disinterested” - and of a sort that allowed aesthetic judgements linked with such an experience (e.g. “This is beautiful”) to lay some sort of binding claim on others for agreement...(Were you not to agree that “this is beautiful,” and it was beautiful, you would be missing something, failing at appreciating what you ought to appreciate, even though you would not be failing to know something true about the world. One could perhaps say: you would be failing to be “one of us,” and at a level of importance crucial to our being able to be and sustain being who we are.)...See again, (Stanley) Cavell: “But this plural is still first person: it does not, to use Kant’s word, ‘postulate’ that ‘we,’ you and I and he, say and want and imagine and feel and suffer together. If we do not, then the philosopher’s remarks are irrelevant to us. Of course he doesn’t think they are irrelevant, but the implication is that philosophy, like art, is, and should be, powerless to prove its relevance; and that says something about the kind of relevance it wishes to have. All the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own” (1996)

[protoslacker]

One human need that Cavell articulated with particular poignancy was the need to speak for others (to constitute a community through one’s speech), as well as the correlative need to be spoken for by others (to find oneself in the community of another’s speech).

Byron Davies in Harvard Department of Philosophy News. Remembering Stanley Cavell

Memorial Notice for Stanley Cavell (1926-2018), Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, Harvard University

[robertsmithsonlibraryandbookclub]

Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club [Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say?, 1970] Oil paint on carved wood, 2018

[edwordsmyth]

Successful prayer is prayer for the strength to change, it is the beginning of change, and change presents itself as the dying of the self and hence the ending of the world. The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.

Stanley Cavell

[imtoopure]

Sweet Movie [is] in effect the most concentrated work I know that follows out the idea that the way to assess the state of the world is to find out how it tastes (a sense modality not notably stressed by orthodox epistemologists but rather consigned to a corner of aesthetics) – which means both to find out how it tastes to you and how it tastes you, for example, to find out whether you and the world are disgusting to one another […] The film attempts to extract hope – to claim to divine life after birth – from the very fact that we are capable of genuine disgust at the world; that our revoltedness is the chance for a cleansing revulsion; that we may purge ourselves by living rather than by killing, willing to visit hell if that is the direction to something beyond purgatory; that the fight for freedom continues to originate in the demands of our instincts, the chaotic cry of our nature, our cry to have a nature. It is a work powerful enough to encourage us to see again that the tyrant’s power continues to require our complicitous tyranny over ourselves.

Stanley Cavell, 1979