‘The Ordinary’ in Cavell, Zen and Nishida: With Reference to the Quotidian in French, Japanese & American Cinema

This essay discusses Stanley Cavell’s view of Emerson, Thoreau and American transcendentalism in relation to Asian philosophy, including aspects of Indian and Japanese thought. Especially I refer to Cavell’s essay ‘Walden in Tokyo’ as a springboard to analyse his key problem of countering scepticism by return to the ordinary as extraordinary in American transcendentalism as related to Zen and the modern Japanese philosophy of Nishida Kitarō. Furthermore, I develop Cavell’s thematization of ‘the ordinary’ in critical response to what has come to be known in the Franco-German tradition as ‘everyday life cultural studies’, which proclaims le quotidien or ‘the quotidian’ to be the fundamental category of human existence, including its creative expression in French art, literature, and film. This European tradition of everyday life cultural theory also makes the claim that while ‘the quotidian’ has been discovered and explored by the French, it has not yet been grasped by American thought and culture. Against the Eurocentric claims of this French tradition, however, I will demonstrate how ‘the ordinary’ has also been established as the fundamental category in the contemporary American philosophical scheme of Stanley Cavell, including his philosophy of art in general, and film aesthetics in particular. It is discussed how both Cavell and French everyday life cultural theorists hold that cinema reveals the poetry of the ordinary as extraordinary. From the Eastern perspective I then demonstrate how this thematization of the quotidian is central to Japanese philosophical thought, including its depiction in traditional Zen aestheticism and its modern expression in Japanese cinema. In such a manner, then, I will examine Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism as a unifying transcultural framework for elucidating the quotidian world of ordinary, everyday life in a global perspective encompassing both Eastern and Western modes of thought.