conclusion 387it has to be enacted, performed, ‘given’, for it to be what it is, hence its
frequent connection to music in both religious and secular contexts.
Cavell presents Shakespeare’sKing Learin particular as a paradigm of
the ‘threat of scepticism’.^11 Central to this status is Lear’s ‘preoccupa-
tion with the choice and the value of words, with the inability to be
either satisfied with what is said or reconciled to what cannot be said’
(ibid.: 53 ). Cavell cites Emerson’s view that Shakespearean language
liberates us from the effects of scepticism, such as solipsistic mistrust of
the other, by demonstrating ‘for the first time... “the possibility of the
translation of things into song”’. Emerson elsewhere speaks of this pos-
sibility in terms of ‘“transferring the inmost truth of things into music or
verse”’ (ibid.: 51 ). Cavell talks of the idea of language as ‘a matter...
of learning how to let objects become impressive to us, matter to us
(something to sing about, or speak about)’ (ibid.), without language
becoming predominantly or exclusively a means for mastering objects.
The idea of language as mastery generates doubts about that mastery:
Descartes’ combination of the wish to be ‘lord and master of nature’ is
inseparable from fears about scepticism and all that ensues from it in
modern philosophy. However, music is not presented as fundamental
to what Cavell develops from this idea of language as what lets things
matter. We encountered a similar, but more extreme, elision of music
in Heidegger’s later view of language, to which Cavell also refers in this
context.
Cavell is seeking to get away from ‘an idea of language... as a matter
of registering what empiricists variously picture as ideas derived from
impressions that “enter” the mind’ (ibid.), i.e. the idea of language as
representation. This idea, he thinks, constitutively excludes the sense of
language as ‘expressive’: in our terms, it fails to incorporate the world-
disclosive, world-constituting dimensions of language, which entangle
it with music. Cavell does take account of music when he undertakes
his extension of Austin’s theory of ‘speech as action’, by linking what
he has to say to opera, whose emergence is contemporaneous with ‘the
great tragedies of Shakespeare’. He describes opera as ‘music’s explo-
ration of its affinities with expressive or passionate utterance’ (ibid.:
15 ), as though these were primarily attributes of language that music
needed the voice to explore. One can, though, also see this the other11 Even if one finds Cavell’s overall interpretation ofLearunconvincing, there is no doubt
that the concern with language and scepticism which he finds in it is essential to the
early stages of modernity.