Some Notes on Philosophy and Redemption

Adorno and Cavell

Abstract

In an earlier essay, I once drew a comparison between Theodor W. Adorno’s remark that, “philosophy, which once appeared obsolete, sustains itself because the moment for its actualization has been lost,” and Stanley Cavell’s suggestion that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Investigations can be seen as a philosophy of culture, one that relates itself to its time as a time in which the continuation of philosophy is at stake.” In this essay, I’d like to compare Adorno’s remark to a different but related remark of Cavell’s, namely his thought that “philosophy ends in a recovery from a terminable loss.” He pursues this thought in remarks on Emerson, noting that “philosophy begins in loss, in finding yourself at a loss, as Wittgenstein more or less says.” Many different traditions—Marxism, American transcendentalism, ordinary language philosophy, just to name a few—animate these thoughts. This is not the place to detail and tease out the ramifications and significances of each; instead, I want to take this very short essay merely to raise a different point of relation than I raised before (in a deep way, then, this essay—and especially its short length—may be seen as a sort of afterword to my earlier remarks).