Cavell as Halted Traveler

Abstract In a late, posthumously published essay, Cavell describes the importance of music as he experienced it to its ability simultaneously to liberate constructive energies in the listening (and composing and performing) subject and to bind those energies to temporally unfolding development. Here his description echoes both Wordsworth’s poetics and his own earlier account of ordinary language philosophy. Music, Wordsworthian poetry, and ordinary language philosophy each afford possibilities of awakening to fuller meaningfulness within life in time, through unfoldings of developments in media, without either escapism or tyranny. In doing this, they both model and advance the proper work of philosophy itself in its elucidations of concepts.