PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1994

HOW CAN THE MISANTHROPE LEARN? PHILOSOPHY FOR EDUCATION

René Vincente Arcilla
Teachers College, Columbia University


If you were an educator, say a teacher or a principal, why might you be interested in philosophy? One possible reason is that you are a philosophy teacher or administrator of a philosophy program, another is that you are responsible for organizing a field of course offerings and so need to know whether and how philosophy should be a part of it. Finally, philosophy may not play a role in your educational work but may address other, nonprofessional dimensions of your life.

All of these reasons make sense. But I would like to press the question toward still other possibilities. Suppose that you were in none of the positions mentioned above. Say you are a biology teacher uninterested in philosophy. Could there be any other reasons, rooted in your educational vocation, for you to get interested?

This question challenges all philosophers somewhat, but philosophers of education especially, to stake the meaning of their vocation on interests that are not already defined as philosophical, interests that move educators in nonphilosophical directions as well. To address such educational concerns, philosophers of education would have to be capable of explaining how their response compares with nonphilosophical responses in a distinctive, particularly fulfilling way. The value of work that so distinguishes itself would then be clear even to those who have no use or taste for its technical language. It is to my memories of realizing that philosophy does have this value for educators, a realization that drew me across the threshold of the discipline, that this essay hopes to stay true. I shall testify that a primary source of this value resides in what philosophy can offer the educator’s, and learner’s, heart as well as head. Perhaps such testimony will move philosophers and educators to acknowledge what philosophia, love of wisdom, means as a vitalizing sentiment.

So why would you, a biology teacher, get interested in philosophy? Two more possibilities come to mind.

A first reason is that doubt about the value of your educational efforts may draw you to speculate on their ultimate philosophical purpose. You might wonder about whether the world, or at least the part of it with which you are involved, has a fundamental order, and whether there is a way to conduct teaching and learning about biology such that these activities, and the other activities they affect, are properly and happily in harmony with that order. The answers to these questions would give you confidence that there is something meaningfully good about such learning and teaching, something that redeems their hardships and failures. It would then make sense that a promising way to discover these answers is through philosophical study, since more than any other discipline, philosophy reputedly addresses the deepest questions of life in a systematic way with a minimum of unexamined assumptions. Hence, your desire to know the ultimate purpose of your educational work may lead you to take an interest in philosophy.

A second possible reason is that problems your work runs into may draw you to try out potentially useful, philosophically disciplined, methods of thinking. Perhaps you are struggling with certain ethical dilemmas, or perhaps you are trying to get a clearer grasp of the advantages and disadvantages of different pedagogical approaches. Since philosophy names not only a body of propositional knowledge that such-and-such is true, but also a body of practical know-how exemplified in proven techniques of analysis, argumentation, and theory construction, you may find in it tools with which to attack such problems. So even if you are not especially concerned about ideas of ultimate purpose, you may be interested in mastering and employing philosophical reasoning for more immediate educational purposes.

These two reasons for educators to become interested in philosophy have, in one way or another, inspired most of the work in American philosophy of education, as Jonas F. Soltis observed in his state-of-the-field overview in the early eighties.1 But let us suppose that a hardened antipathy to the philosophy you studied in college prevents you from being impressed by these reasons. As you learned about one grand, metaphysical world view after another, the notion that anyone could capture the profound complexities of life in a system of essential ideas appeared increasingly delusive and pretentious. Better to go through life with a cautious grip on your own individual or cultural partiality, you were convinced. At the same time, what was being touted in other philosophy classes as invaluable or inevitable methodologies of inquiry and argument struck you as so much etiquette for armchair cogitators. Your biological work was instilling in you more than enough “critical thinking” skills, ones which seemed more sensitive to the experienced challenges of professional practice. Foolishly or not, then, you are interested neither in systems of thought determining educational purpose nor in techniques of reasoning for educational problem-solving. Is there any other way to interest you in philosophy?

Let me give you a problem student. Your nickname for him is Alceste, because his character so resembles that of the title figure in Molière’s The Misanthrope. Alceste just wants to be left alone. Everywhere he looks, he is always complaining; he sees pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and phoniness protected by complacent callousness. He knows, he is forever claiming, that what is truly demanded of us is to speak, to declare ourselves, with sincere feeling. But he has learned that such speech makes him either a laughingstock and dupe in society or a threat to be isolated. So, rather than compromise, he has chosen isolation. Or, as Molière’s Alceste puts it in his final, departing lines:

Meanwhile, betrayed and wronged in everything,
I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,
And seek some spot unpeopled and apart
Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart.2
In your class, Alceste’s mood and conduct swings from rude righteousness to stony withdrawal to unguarded naïveté. A third of the time you are furious with his temerity, a third you are exasperated with his indifference, and a third smiling at his childlikeness. Yet, whatever state he is in, he does not want to learn anymore. He refuses to listen, he says again and again, because he does not respect either the worth of what you are teaching or your worthiness to teach. As you talk to him, he seems to lie in wait for incidental inconsistencies to pop up, which he then blows up into melodramas about the meaning of life. He accuses the enterprise of education in particular, and of knowing in general, of trying to cover up the arbitrariness of all things, and so the absurdity of any particular state of affairs. He alone refuses to flee the truly humbling questions. Impossible. Thus, you and he seem to speak two completely different languages. How can you reach him, let alone encourage him to learn?

Here is a particular educational problem, one which I trust rings true to some of our memories of youth, one which may plague more than one teacher. What can help an educator respond to it, I propose, is philosophy. How so? And if so, why would this proposal be any different from one to offer philosophy as a tool for solving educational problems? Would it not be merely narrower in that it targets only one problem? Moreover, if this problem is youth’s suspicion that life is meaningless, then obviously a constructive response would be for the teacher to propound a truer, more comprehensive world view full of meaning. How would an interest in that response differ from the other interest in philosophy as a metaphysical system of ideas illuminating the order of things? Even if I can explain how philosophy could help an educator help a misanthrope to learn, then, this reason for educators to be interested in it may not significantly differ from either of the previous two reasons.

Before I develop this proposal and reply to these reservations, let me stress the suggestion in it that educators may become interested in philosophy in response to a problem that is less philosophical than educational. Something is blocking Alceste’s capacity to learn. Such a problem may be, and has been, approached using other disciplines (for example, politics, psychology, religion). Philosophers tackling it, then, must take up the burden of establishing what makes a philosophical approach both different from others and especially helpful. Only by doing this may they truly renew the value of philosophy for such challenged educators.

What would an educationally constructive response to Alceste, distinctly informed by philosophy, look like? An example I would like to explore is offered by Stanley Cavell in “A Cover Letter to Molière’s Misanthrope.” It opens, “DEAR ALCESTE.”3 Cavell proceeds to share with Alceste some ruminations about what he calls the “discovery of adolescence,” and about how this discovery is reflected in works as various as Thoreau’s Walden, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Montaigne’s Essays, among others. These ruminations all serve an explicit purpose.

You see that I would try to tempt you back, to tell you that there are those in the world who have not forgotten what you know, hence who feel the rebuke in your taking offense. But it is up to you and to us in our separate ways; it is pointless to beg, and this is not the time to harangue.4
Why does Cavell respond to Molière’s drama by directly addressing one of its fictional characters? Why does he tell Alceste that he trying to tempt him back to society? How is this temptation related to the realization that others may feel rebuked by Alceste? And how do Cavell’s words, acknowledging his and Alceste’s separate ways, differ from begging or haranguing or, for that matter, from an educator’s, a philosophy professor’s, lecturing? These questions start to get at what makes his response both philosophical and encouraging of learning.

What differentiates the response from a harangue or lecture starts to emerge after an opening which does hold forth rather laboriously.

I will not disguise from you my conviction that your position is intellectually indefensible. What more really can you say on your behalf but that human society is filled with show, with artifice, with insincerity, with dissociations between the public and the private, between the outer and the inner? And what more really need be said in reply to you than to concede this, and whatever follows from it, as the very essence of the civilized; and then simply request that you — what? Let us not say either love civilization or leave it. The request is rather that you not be illogical: if you do decide to join the human race; or let me say, to take your place in society; then do not complain that you will not by that act have rejoined the world of nature. It need not be denied that in this decision something is lost. But need you deny that something is gained, something indeed human? To see these two sides is just to grow up, something you are heartily advised to do.5
Hear, hear! everyone but Alceste might exclaim. Cavell is sensibly pointing out that human existence just is given to artifice, but that to accept this is to gain an essential part of your humanity. Although this acceptance may cost Alceste part of his integrity, if he lets go of his one-sidedness (integrity clung to fanatically), he will be able to understand and appreciate the deep significance of that loss, how it threads through, ties together, and qualifies any assertive righteousness. He may discover, then, that his loss is shared by, and puts him in touch with, many other human beings.

Notice that this response evinces an interest in philosophy for both of the reasons I discussed earlier. Cavell criticizes Alceste’s reasoning and supports that criticism with an account of human nature, concluding that Alceste should just “grow up.” So is this what philosophy has to offer you in this predicament: a case for why Alceste should adopt a more balanced view of the world’s hypocrisy, one which is both metaphysically informed and logically sound?

Not quite. For as Cavell immediately goes on to observe, such an argument, authoritatively delivered, is not the end of the matter.

The issue is not so much why you are not convinced by the better arguments of the others. That sort of impasse is hardly news in human affairs. The issue is rather why the others care that you are not convinced. You are without power. What is your hold upon them? What do you represent to them?6
He imagines that Alceste, like many, may not be convinced by metaphysical or logical reasons: such people are often called unreasonable. (Although you the teacher, it may be remembered, also had your doubts about the value of such philosophical knowledge. Could it be that you have in yourself a touch of the misanthrope?) They, in turn, may likewise dismiss those arguments, punctuated with such name-calling, as so much harangue. But Cavell is intrigued that even if the dialogue threatens to reach such an impasse because Alceste turns a deaf ear to reason, he and others may be unwilling to turn a deaf ear to Alceste. Something about Alceste and what he stands for awakens concern and devotion, and a commitment to find, if need be, another way to reach him. Beyond Alceste’s unreasonableness, Cavell finds himself listening to something about Alceste’s tone.

Why? Cavell traces the tone’s “powerless power” to Alceste’s “purity.” In response to the last question in the quoted passage above, he speculates that “you represent purity to their purity, or to their sense of their purity lost — not as if corrupted exactly, but as if misplaced, thus still present somehow.”7 He does not define purity beyond equating it with “innocence.” I understand him to mean by both terms a sense of what is good, in general and in a particular situation, uncompromised by practical or systematic considerations and judgments; thus, an intuition or sentiment of goodness that lifts us by surprise prior to any determined search for it. On this romantic view, the path to mature insight into the good leads us back to, and keeps us appreciatively in touch with, childhood spontaneity and the joy of being alive. This interpretation suggests that when purity is critically objectified and articulated as a system of ideals, it may, like innocence, be lost, with only its absence dialectically indicating that it must be somewhere to be remembered. In the meantime, I might instead place my sense of goodness in a set of observations, beliefs, habits, or actions that do not actually feel good, that feel forced. Thus, what Alceste represents, in his aversion to placing his purity in society, is someone who reminds me of what I may have misplaced, someone who is still innocently independent from reasoning that, however logically binding and powerful, does not always move me to the sentiment of goodness. In the face of the world’s arguments, he declares, “What I feel, I must have knowledge of.” And in the face of that declaration, we may start to recognize that those arguments do not entirely speak for us, that what they partially drown out is also ours: Alceste’s sincere heart.

What draws Cavell to Alceste is the appeal of sincerity — but what draws Alceste away from such society is the smell of hypocrisy. To reach Alceste, this aversion needs to be understood, particularly in relation to the sincerity that calls for the reaching gesture. Cavell pairs the perception of the hypocrisy of society with an inward awareness of self-division or “fraudulence”; he explains how these moral perceptions together form the predicament of adolescent dissociation.

The hypocrite would dissociate himself or herself from a life of human vulnerabilities, call it human nature; the antihypocrite would dissociate himself or herself from a world of invulnerable pretenses. If adolescence will level the most unforgiving charge of hypocrisy at those ahead of it, it will level against itself an equally unforgiving charge of fraudulence — and the one because of the other. The world posed before it, beckoning it, is a field of possibilities, toward which curiosity is bound to outreach commitment.8
Alceste and other adolescents charge the adult world with hypocrisy because it teaches them to protect themselves by blinding themselves, by overlooking vulnerabilities in others so that they may likewise be spared. Yet, in attacking such a defensive pact of pretenses, Alceste evokes an alternative world of candor that he has yet to live in. The fraudulence that he must suspect of himself, if he is to be consistent in his condemnation of hypocrisy, is that he may not be able either to renounce the indulgent support of the familial and familiar world. This plight, Cavell remarks, makes adolescence
inherently a time of theater, of self-consciousness presented as embarrassment, of separation from the familiar, of separation from the self, as if something were tearing; of a scrutiny that claims to know everything directing itself upon feelings and actions that can claim to know nothing.9
Cavell’s use of the phrase “human vulnerabilities” above is curious; I would have expected him to refer to human flaws or foibles with regard to hypocrisy. Perhaps, though, vulnerability better gets at what unites — in its dividing of the self — the hypocrite and the antihypocrite. I would gloss this vulnerability as that of living in the shadow, the night, of unanswerable questions, those which threaten life with a deeper unenlightenment. The hypocrite pretends that the questions which could unsettle your meaningful sense of yourself have been definitively answered; he or she tacitly agrees not to raise them about you if you do the same regarding him or her. The antihypocrite breaks this pact by attacking that pretense; however, his or her own unwillingness to submit that criticism, and the self-assurance that flows from it, in turn to such questions marks it with fraudulent evasion. In both cases, the questions call us to recognize that we do not ultimately and honestly know what we are doing or why. This recognition, combined with the recognition that we nevertheless persist in assuming that our actions have purpose and consequence, keeps dissociated the questioning self from the self in question, the purposeful self from the absurd stranger within.

Such an interpretation of the vulnerability at the heart of this predicament jives with another close-minded reaction to it on the part of adult society.

Instead of opening secrets to you, it [adult society] informs you that it has none, that what you see is all there is to it. Hence to its recruits it is now reduced merely to saying “Grow up.”10
Recall that Cavell’s initial philosophical harangue said just this. In contrast, this passage suggests that Alceste’s “childish” intuition that there must be something more might actually be a guide to a company of questioners. Instead of trying to argue Alceste down, what if a society, call it a philosophical society, were to “open secrets” to him, showing him how unavoidable mysteries bring us together? I shall return to this suggestion.

The adolescent perception of hypocrisy and fraudulence, then, focuses on self-dissociation condemned in the adult and threatening the adolescent, a self-dissociation broached by our vulnerability to unanswerable questions. This self-dissociation in turn opens up a necessary moment of discontinuity between generations, a moment when a society and culture, rather than being automatically inherited, must be chosen by the newcomer. The latter is challenged to consent to a prior, supposedly unquestionable, order of things, one that distinguishes the achievement of adulthood. It is the withholding of this consent that differentiates the adolescent and turns his future into a drama of overcoming self-conscious isolation.

You represent the discovery of adolescence, of that moment at which the worth of adulthood is — except, I suppose, to deep old age — most clearly exposed; at which adulthood is the thing you are asked to choose, to consent to. Naturally your choice will be based on insufficient evidence. But woe to them that believe the choice is easy, that in forgoing adolescence you forgo little of significance. They have merely forgotten what they have lost.11
Alceste appears to have the following choices: either he may consent to join the world of hypocritical adulthood, and so throw away his purity; or, he may reject that world misanthropically, and so confine his purity to an increasingly removed world of childhood; or, he may deny that there is a significant or difficult choice to be made at all, because “people” just automatically and inevitably grow up — a denial typical of those who are already grown up — and so lose even the chance to consent. In this choice, what is at stake is the value that adulthood may have for Alceste, whether it will cost him his purity and whether that cost is too high. Also at issue is whether the self-consciousness that is a condition for choosing will stifle any actual choice.

But suppose Alceste could have faith that however much his purity may be tested by adult society, it will not be lost. Suppose he could confidently allow his innocence to be affected by others, taught by them, without thereby fearing that this affection would corrupt it, and cause him to misplace it in a learned affectation of someone else’s experience. And suppose in addition to such faith and confidence, he could find a reason to want to place his purity and innocence in society where it could be educated. Would he not then be able to affirm the value of adulthood as precisely the value of having to choose adulthood, and so having to confront, doubtless repeatedly, what is risky about his future with others? A risk that gives life passion?

Cavell locates the seeds of this faith and desire in Alceste’s heart and what that heart cannot deny being attracted to.

Purity can only know by its own heart and by the encouragement of what draws it. So if I maintain the right of experience to its arguments for consent, I equally maintain the right of innocence to give and to withhold its consent without argument, on the basis of its feeling, its sense of itself. The world needs that sense, requires that you say, willingly, that the world is good enough to want to live in. And I assume that in general you, in general youth, wish to want the world; which is to say: you wish to be presented with a world you can want, to which you can give yourself.12
Alceste longs for companionship and for a world in which he belongs. But whether he will give himself to this particular world, resolutely, and where he will place his innocence in it, depends on whether something or someone in it attracts his heart. Furthermore, whether he sincerely feels such an attraction is something that only he can discover and acknowledge; the feeling cannot be prescribed by arguments that he ought to be attracted to such-and-such, or that he is attracted but is unconscious that he is. (Of course I am not saying that ethical or psychoanalytic arguments have no place in this self-examination, only that after they say their piece, they have to leave silent room for examination.) Therefore to join society, Alceste requires the freedom to listen for himself to his own heart. And if he does consent to join, and is not simply forced to submit, then part of what may have attracted him to this company is precisely that it respects this freedom because it celebrates sincere feeling as a sign of life and responsive friendship.

Accordingly, Cavell asks for Alceste’s consent rather than claims it, say, on the authority vested in him by logic or common sense or the law. (In other writing, he identifies this request for consent with an Emersonian idea of democratic culture.)13 He introduces this request by telling Alceste that “there are those in the world who have not forgotten what you know, hence who feel the rebuke in your taking offence.” I read this now as his confession that Alceste’s innocent tone has reminded him that there is something dangerously divided about his own heart. In response, then, he warns about his desire to “tempt” Alceste back, as if he wants Alceste to check his possibly hypocritical words against the standard of that tone, as if he wants to encourage Alceste to believe in what is sincerely felt above all. He allows that after hearing him out, Alceste may find that his request is insincere, and so may continue on a separatist path. It is because he does allow this that he keeps his request from turning into counterproductive, and so pointless, begging.

And why would Alceste not reject the request? Even if he is looking for a world to which he can belong, would not Cavell’s confession of self-dissociation repel him? Indeed, was this not precisely why he abandoned his beloved in Molière’s play, Célimène, when she confessed her hypocrisy?

What discloses Cavell’s suitability as a conversation partner for Alceste, and the suitability of the other authors with whom Cavell is in conversation, is Cavell’s express capacity to see what Alceste sees. Unlike Célimène, who declares that she is ready to attach herself to Alceste but in the same breath adds that she cannot detach herself from the society at odds with Alceste — a declaration that, however reasonable, Alceste takes to be more double-talk — Cavell makes no such declaration. He appears to bank instead on Alceste discovering on his own that they are semblables, together at a loss at how to live. For this reason, his response does not so much propose solutions to the predicament of adolescence as it develops a more insightful and sensitive sympathy to that predicament. His response expresses how adolescence may grow into questioning, philosophical adulthood without betraying the purity that cast doubt on the given world of answers.

That Cavell views the predicament of adolescence less as a problem to be solved with philosophical knowledge or know-how — with the two interests in philosophy described earlier — and more as an initiation into the mysteries that keep us honest and together, is expressed by his tendency to raise questions to which he ventures no answers. Consider, for example, the following meditation on his father’s grace.

But I remember instances of my father in conversation with strangers — in a shop, a lobby, a train — animated, laughing, comparing notes, when the charge of insincerity fell from my grasp and I would gaze at his behavior as at a mystery. How can he care enough what the other thinks to be provident of his good feeling, and yet not care so terribly as to become unable to provide it? What skill enables him to be the one that puts the other at ease? Where can he have acquired it? He knew no more about the other than the other knew about him. He seemed merely able to act on what nobody could fail to know, and to provide what nobody could fail to appreciate, even if in a given moment they could not return it. Call it sociability.14
The last term is not an answer to these questions, let alone their hortative moral, but a name for their field in which Cavell’s confidence, at least, is suspended. In admitting that his experiences, assumptions, and ideas trail off into such an aporia, he exposes himself to the sight of what Alceste sees: that the point of living is at every instant and forever uncertain. So to communicate this view of things, he employs questions as tropes that communicate, with what he says in “foregrounding” words, the necessary background of the mysteriously unsayable, the hidden answers, the cosmos absconditus. Such questions show Alceste how it may be possible to participate in an alternative discourse that stays true to what adolescence doubts about the given discourse. They show Alceste that he is not alone in what he sees or feels.

At the same time, however, these are questions to Alceste, calling for a response. They repeatedly stress Cavell’s opening gesture of writing about adolescence in the form of a letter, a form which personally addresses someone, often in reply to being so addressed. As tropes, then, the questions express not only sublimity but intimacy. They communicate an interest in Alceste’s reply and a confidence that the reply will further their conversation and bond. The aporetic nature of the questions should encourage them to affirm that, despite all differences, they share the same sense of honesty, neither of them pretending to know hypocritically or fraudulently what they do not. And this common ignorance should mean that they have something to say to each other about how to respond to it.

Cavell, then, is calling Alceste to recognize their kinship. Alceste may then discover that there is a way for him to stay himself in the world, a way which may attract him back into a communion with respected equals such that he once more wants to learn from them about himself. If Cavell’s response does prove capable of transforming Alceste’s lonely longing into sociable consent, then it will have also demonstrated the value of so placing purity where purity can gain a voice and reach misanthropic youth. It may even inspire Alceste to join those who have dedicated themselves to keeping that voice alive.

Since Alceste’s recognition of Cavell has to overcome suspicions about whether purity can survive adult society, it cannot be based on shared beliefs alone, but must be based as well on Cavell’s demonstrated capacity to move Alceste with his own surviving purity, his own lyrically troped tone. This tone is expressed not in reasoned answers that Cavell advances, but in disturbing questions that he admits and readdresses to Alceste, questions that remind us of the value of our innocence, of childhood’s good, by evoking what threatens it. His response, then, suggests that philosophy may embrace that innocent purity as its calling. It suggests that philosophers may start to understand and distinguish their work by its aspiration to broach a questioning conversation with the misanthropes in us all.

Indeed, a last feature to notice about the response is that it draws the philosopher Cavell to still others who share his predicament.

The side of me that sides with you has in recent years repeatedly found itself siding with those for whom the relation between innocence and experience is their life, call it the relation between their past of possibilities and the present actuality of the world, or between their memories of being disappointed and their fears of being disappointing.15
Does this passage not capture the high drama in the educator’s conscience? Could it be that educators may be able to recognize themselves as well in this philosophical passion?

Proceeding from Cavell’s example, then, what would a philosopher have to offer that is of interest to you, a biology teacher? And how would this differ from what thinkers in other disciplines have to offer?

I have suggested that philosophy can be considered, among other things, a discipline and tradition of keeping purity alive in the midst of social compromise so that society may continue to attract youth. It takes the very questions which drive adolescents away from a society of hypocritical answers and tropes them so that they instead initiate adolescents into the uncertain vulnerability that marks our lives in common. In this fashion, it recovers the central role that questioning, rather than argument, had in the Socratic response to the sophists; it reaffirms a treasure of philosophy’s childhood. Philosophy is thus the name of a discourse in which the sincerely unsure (a complimentary closing for Cavell’s letter?) find each other. It is the kind of discourse that promises to help you talk with, and not just to, the misanthropic student.

Philosophers who expose you to this discourse, then, are offering you something different from what other disciplines offer. (I am not claiming that it is more or less useful.) Indeed, they are offering something different than traditional philosophy of education. Their discourse does not claim to contain knowledge, let alone logical or metaphysical, foundational knowledge, of how to cause the misanthrope to learn. It scrupulously acknowledges that prior to learning from you, the misanthrope must freely consent to associate with you. So, to welcome this consent, it expresses how you who have consented are still moved by purity in a world of mystery. Participants in this discourse thus hold open the door to a community formed by the love of, not the claim to, wisdom.

For a response to this essay, see Neiman.

1. See Jonas F. Soltis, “Introduction,” in Philosophy and Education, ed. Jonas F. Soltis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

2. Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Molière, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 152.

3. Stanley Cavell, “A Cover Letter to Molière’s Misanthrope,” in Themes out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 98.

4. Ibid., 102.

5. Ibid., 98.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 100.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 99-100.

12. Ibid., 98-99.

13. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990).

14. Cavell, “A Cover Letter,” 105.

15. Ibid., 101.

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