Stanley Cavell

where the characteristics which unite and divide us range from the relatively innocuous, e.g. fierce team loyalties in sport, to extremely consequential ones, as in religion, ethnicity, nationality, etc., We find solidarity and a sense of belonging in such affiliations, which often promote feelings of identification and empathy with fellow group members.

But there is a cost in terms of a complimentary sense of othering and the absence of empathy across group differences, sometimes to the point of what the writer Stanley Cavell termed soul blindness.

These components are often intertwined in practice.

The strength of our convictions and attitudes is reinforced in the, quote, epistemic bubbles or echo chambers of fellow group members.

Can you expand on that and talk about this concept of soul blindness and what the implications are?

Cavell came to the concept soul blindness, calling upon a Wittgensteinian idea, the idea of aspect blindness, which again starts with a pretty banal set of examples.

What does it mean to see something as something? So see a drawing, three lines on a page as a smiley face and see that as a smiling face or see...

a word written on a page and be able to see it as the word.

Wittgenstein, again, doesn't speak to in his work the political implications of what would it mean for someone to not be able to see something as something.

So this is my sort of jumping off point.

Where Wittgenstein talks about aspect blindness and the not being able to see something as something, Cavell, also kind of following the injunction to take some liberatory reads of Wittgenstein, talks about soul blindness to think about what it means for people to not be able to see other humans as fully human.

So in his example of the slave owner, an extreme example, the slave owner who watches an enslaved woman be torn from her child to be sold at auction.

things on the teeth, it keeps you up at night.

You're like, what the hell? And so we have to suffer this condition where, I mean, this is one thing, a place I like Stanley Cavell and the ordinary language tradition is like, so not only do we, you know, you have to read the context in order to read the the statements or the expressions or whatever, but also like you're always moving forward into new contexts.

Every moment, almost, you know, we're moving into a slightly different place and you're encountering something slightly different.

And so we, we try, we read it and we try to like place words or symbols or signifiers of any kind, you know, out there, flags, et cetera.

Mm

... what is this? And I wandered over to the philosophy department, and I took a class, and I had this wild first class from, now I realize, I was very lucky to take from a legend in the philosophy of art, Stanley Cavell, and he just, like, took my mind apart.

It w- it was a class about how opera and musicals express the spirit of, like, being unable to express yourself, and he, it was, like, a class about all these plot lines in opera about how a woman who sings then dies of consumption, and, like, trying to understand what the social commentary was in that.

And I just was like, "This is it, man.