Must We Mean What We Say?: On Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell, born in 1926 and now 86 years old, is one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century. He was also something of a musical prodigy and like many prodigies his accomplishments struck him as a matter of fraud.
Cavell’s response to all of logical positivism: to demand that we only speak about what is absolutely true and false, that about that which we cannot speak with certainty, we must be silent, is to demand that we not speak at all—or else that we lie to ourselves about the ambiguity inherent in even the most carefully defined language.
Cavell’s larger argument is this: If we must bring the world with us to understand a definition, then we cannot define away the ambiguity in words, for the world we bring with us is already hopelessly ambiguous.
A philosopher who limits the meaning of her words to carefully set out definitions, attempting to root out all ambiguity, in effect says, “I say, and you should hear, only what I mean.”
Cavell insists that language cannot be limited in this way. Language, to Cavell, is ambiguous not because it is imperfect, awaiting precise definition, but because we do not all see in the same way; it is a reflection of our basic predicament as distinct human beings. Thus, we must dare to
mean what we say, take responsibility for all the meanings our words might be taken to have—even if those meanings go beyond what we understand as our intentions—because in our unintentional (though perhaps meaningful) slips, and the misapprehensions, mistakes, and insights of those with whom we speak, we bring together not just words but worldviews.
More striking, Cavell finds in classic Hollywood comedies like
The Awful Truth,
The Philadelphia Story and
Adam’s Rib (discussed in
Pursuits of Happiness [1981]) perhaps the best available examples of how to actually deal with skepticism.
Given the rise of writers like Slavoj Zizek such claims about the importance of film to philosophy may seem unoriginal. But Cavell was among the first philosophers to take film seriously (his half-crazed 1971 book
The World Viewed partly founded the philosophy of film), and he has set an example that others might more profitably follow.
Cavell found in Emerson and Thoreau the idea not of the “best self,” which we always look up at from below, but of what he calls, somewhat jocularly, the “next self”—the self we cannot help but see from wherever we happen to be standing. Whether more ordinary or extraordinary than ourselves at present, this self draws us on, makes us skeptical of our current selves, ashamed of them, as if we were nothing but frauds.
“The worst thing we could do is rely on ourselves as we stand,” Cavell writes, channeling Emerson.
“We must become averse to this conformity, which means convert from it,. . . .as if we are to be born (again).” And the self we are born into is, obviously, not in any sense our “best self”; it is by no means final; it is only our “next self.”
As Emerson himself puts it: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”
Democracy is the greatest trick the elites ever played on the masses. 
"Christianity
offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing
it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage. The craving for
religious faith being largely an outcome of fear, the advocates of faith
tend to think that certain kinds of fear are not to be deprecated. In
this, to my mind, they are gravely mistaken. To allow oneself to
entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live in
the best way.
Playfulness is what makes us human. 
“To
lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the
courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being
drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man
can't live without some reason for living.”
"In philosophy, philosophical problems are often taken to their logical extremes. In madness, real-life issues are taken to their logical consequences and acted upon. So is madness simply an extension of philosophical reasoning? And if so, could it be that philosophy and madness are somehow inextricably linked?" 
"Protest organisers (should) consider different approaches such as making events more like festivals or carnivals instead of inciting anger or hatred against others."
