Abstract

The article discusses Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Ralph Waldo Emerson with a focus on the concepts of individuality, self-acknowledgment, and Bildung as one’s education through reading, called “the education of grownups”. Beginning with Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”, his critique of Descartes’ cogito is examined and the Emersonian alternative vision of acquiring individual existence is reconstructed. In this depiction, a solipsistic Cartesian account of man is replaced with a vision of the grammatical self, which is at the same time social, linguistic, and, as a result, literary. Creating the self proceeds through a critical discussion with the extant tradition and, besides self-acknowledgment, aims at contributing to the founding of a particular form of life (within a nation, a community). The two goals of creating the self—the individual and the social one—constitute for Emerson the core of the Bildung construed as the forming of a particular person. In this context, the Emersonian phrase of “new yet unapproachable America” is placed against the educational background, in which neither the individual self nor the communal we are ever completely grasped. The distinctive feature of such Bildung is that it is not confined to the process of one’s growing up, but extends to the life of adults and, as a result, finds its realisation within “the education of grownups”. Accordingly, the process of education assumes that one individual needs another as a teacher—who paradigmatically speaks to her via a literary text—to constantly be open to some unknown, possible direction of her development. For Cavell, mutual education, i.e. one’s being a teacher or/and a learner, is a precondition of democratic society.

摘要

这篇文章讨论了斯坦利·卡维尔（Stanley Cavell）对拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson）的解释，重点关注个性，自我认可和Bildung作为通过阅读进行的个人教育的概念，即“大人的教育”。从艾默生的论文“自力更生”开始，他对笛卡尔的构想的批判进行了研究，并重建了获得个人存在的艾默生式替代视野。在此描绘中，人的纯粹的笛卡尔式叙述被语法自我的视野所取代，而该语法自我又是社会的，语言的，因而是文学的。通过与现存传统的批判性讨论来创造自我，除自我认可外，其目的还在于有助于建立一种特定形式的生活（在一个国家，一个社区内）。创造自我的两个目标-个人和社会的目标-为艾默生构成了Bildung的核心解释为特定人的形成。在这种情况下，艾默生式的“新的却不可接近的美国”被置于教育背景之下，在这种背景下，个人自身和我们的共同体都没有被完全掌握。这种Bildung的独特之处在于它不仅仅局限于一个人的成长过程，而是延伸到成年人的生活，因此，它在“成人教育”中得到了实现。因此，教育过程假设一个人需要另一个人作为老师（他通过文学作品对他说话）不断地对她的未知的，可能的发展方向敞开大门。对于卡维尔来说，相互教育，即成为一名教师或/和一名学习者，是民主社会的前提。