Disowning Knowledge

"Stanley Cavell is a philosopher who has written a series of essays in this book on plays written by Shakespeare. At the centre of the book is an essay on King Lear called ‘The Avoidance of Love’. What I find so compelling about it is that it offers a reading of that play which really strikes at the core of everyday experience. He says the reason that King Lear rejects Cordelia in the first scene is not because she’s failed to give him the kind of showy demonstration of love that her sisters did, but that, in fact, she showed him real affection by being honest and clear. What he can’t stand is the evidence of someone’s actual love and actual call to intimacy. The evil that is at work is the inability to tolerate another person’s recognition of one’s own humanity and mortality. He prefers the false coin of Regan and Goneril’s affections. I think that this is a compelling reading of the play. Cavell also explains why Edmund doesn’t reveal his identity to Gloucester while he is leading his blind father across the heath. To be recognised by his father at that moment would make clear his own lack of trust in him, having not gone to him at the outset of the play to ask about Edmund’s claims about their father. Yes, there is a lot in the book about people who are avoiding being recognised by each other. They are not literally in disguise but intimacy is difficult to receive and when it is offered it is sometimes more of a threat than something which people can readily accept."

"Cavell is an American philosopher in his mid-eighties who taught for many years at Harvard. We met in 1962 and became close friends when he began teaching there a year later. I’m not alone in finding his books and essays the most profound and helpful works we have on Wittgenstein , arguably the deepest philosopher of the 20th century. My own work has a close connection to both thinkers. I could have selected Cavell’s philosophical masterpiece, The Claim of Reason , but I chose the Shakespeare book because it has a bearing on my thinking in The Moment of Caravaggio . Shakespeare and Caravaggio were almost exact contemporaries. The great tragedies date from the 1590s and early 1600s, and Caravaggio’s art comes from this period. He died in 1610. Different as the two men and their cultures were, it makes perfect sense to think of them as contemporaries. Their respective visions are, in a certain sense, complementary, because certain philosophical issues are at stake in their bodies of work. The most important is scepticism. Cavell’s key insight into Shakespearean tragedy is that it expresses the prevalence of a sceptical worldview – we cannot truly know what’s in someone else’s mind. This, Cavell suggests, is why Othello falls prey so easily to Iago. Othello is startled by the sexual feelings he has awakened in Desdemona and is appalled not to know everything she’s thinking. Has she really been unfaithful? How can he be certain? This is also why Leontes in The Winter’s Tale conceives the insane idea that his wife has been unfaithful with his best friend, and that his son – his spitting image – is not, in fact, his son. Cavell detects a philosophical underside to such jealousy, the demand that another person – typically a loved person – be entirely transparent to one’s own, not quite sane, desire for absolute knowledge. All this connects closely with Cavell’s understanding of Wittgenstein and with an emphasis on what Cavell calls ‘acknowledgment in place of knowledge’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In Caravaggio, we have something very different – the emergence of a new and powerful convention in painting that I call ‘absorption’. There’s a painting of a young woman sitting on a low chair, looking down, with her hands crossed in her lap. A single tear glistens on her face but she isn’t otherwise in a state of obvious distress. But we know she represents the Magdalene reflecting on her past. The critical rhetoric of the painting testifies to its ability to persuade viewers that the young woman is deeply moved. Too deeply, we might say, for outward expression of her feelings. This is, I would claim, the magic of absorption. As viewers, we are somehow led to project into the painting the intense feeling that we think we find there. Put this alongside Shakespeare and it can seem they are antithetical. No one is actually there in the Caravaggio: it’s just a depiction. But we’re led to attribute great emotional depth to the figure. It’s as if we’ve been given unimpeded access to the contents of her mind. In other words, we have an extraordinary situation. Radical scepticism leads to stupendous tragedy in England, and the ‘invention of absorption’ holds scepticism at bay in contemporary Rome. The fact that these two major artistic achievements took place at the same time is deeply interesting."