Un Poète Maudit

Stanley Cavell and the Environmental Debate

Abstract

Images of landscapes and encounters with the natural world feature prominently throughout Stanley Cavell’s texts — so much so that Coleridge’s romantic visions of the natural environment (the cold, icy region through which the Mariner’s ship drifts) represent one of the cornerstones of Cavell’s understanding of “romanticism as working out a crisis of knowledge,” and “skepticism [as] what romantic writers are locked in struggle against.” Indeed, skepticism as an interpretation of “metaphysical finitude” as “an intellectual lack” is seen by Cavell as something that has to be overcome (and not, say, refuted); and this overcoming, at least when it comes to the external world skepticism, is envisioned as the “acceptance” of the world, or even as “the idea of a romance with the world.” The “world” romantic writers have in mind is, of course, the natural world, for we should “Let Nature be [our] teacher.” It seems, then, that overcoming of skepticism is inextricably bound up with accepting the natural world and its “gift of life.