In life as well as in history, philosophy, as Aristotle wrote, begins in wonder. I remember lying awake, terrified, as a young boy, suddenly aware that my parents would someday die, tears pouring, totally vulnerable to the realization. It was the moment when life became a mystery, and I the investigator.
From the tremendous tomes on my dad’s shelves, anthologies of Plato through Wittgenstein, philosophy seemed like an esoteric world, filled with grand pronouncements and obscure infrastructure. I was utterly lost. But these ancient works, passed down and ubiquitous, must hold some key to solving the problem of death—not by promising immortality, but by awakening meaningfulness.
Could philosophy light a fire in one’s heart, opening the mind’s eye to the sacred dimension of the everyday? In my naive mind, philosophy, spirituality, poetry, and music were somehow connected in the physical play of public speech and action. Speak your work aloud to feel the electric shock of laughter. Fumble toward improvisatory union. Pour yourself into self-expression.
The reckless energy of passion tramples borders, not yet burdened by specialization. The young jack-of-all trades, foolish as I was, could take stands, speak gratuitously, without fear. Young wonder is consuming. But it will never be so pure. This is what the spark of philosophy can look like.
Of course, the classes I took in college while studying jazz performance with a minor in philosophy had nothing to do with all of that. At NYU, I studied philosophy under some of the most famous living analytic minds. But what I largely remember is deflation. What were these questions about the nature of consciousness in a machine? Or about whether or not we can know if we are brains in vats? Or about what reasons we do or do not have for caring about others?
We learned how to structure arguments without nurturing the ways of life in which they might make sense. What is moral reasoning without the ability to attend to the nuanced particularities of life in its tremendous complexity? Powerful analytical tools were foisted on us, as if to say: ‘Philosophy follows these rules. Learn to play the game, and you will succeed, regardless of who you are and what you care about.’
Meanwhile, in the jazz department, we were sorcerer’s apprentices. There was a trade to pass along that involved refining one’s unique voice. We had to develop into ourselves rather than become clones of our teachers. This required greater ingenuity from them to unearth the student’s real musical life, hidden beneath years of defensive tactics and clever evasions.
There was something to be taken with utmost seriousness in the world of jazz, even if there were tremendous systemic obstacles sometimes blocking the student’s way.
In the philosophy department, I was an outsider, yes, but someone who had been flirting with it his whole life. What I found was a radical difference in tactics. Voices were not cultivated, but rather their absence, as if a machine — the network of heartless rationalism — could overtake the messy dissonance of human plurality. Philosophy’s beginning in wonder was purposefully subordinated to the method of rationalistic scrutiny, like a music theory class that could not fathom the need for the student to actually play with others. Tread the well-trodden path, descending myopically until the sun’s light recedes.
The student never thought about a future for themselves as an individual in philosophy.
On the contrary, the future, the philosophers knew, belonged to artificial intelligence — the person made superfluous. Philosophy was conceived in the wake of technology, always too little, too late, nothing definitive, tentative conclusions only. I gradually realized, after trying several entry points, that wonder was not welcome. It was a nuisance, another childish thing to be put away.
But I could not stop returning to the academy, even if I was not welcome in philosophy. I stumbled into a master’s program some years later, following a vague sense that there must be more to education than this. Wonder must have a place in adult life. My conscience would not allow me to grow up.
What I found in the world of individualized study, which I freely tailored to my interests, was a welcome opportunity to engage in public discourse without sacrificing individuality. Mostly, this took the form of literature, where I was torn between analytical reflection on classics like Joyce’s Ulysses and the practical yet inaccessible world of writing for public entertainment. Novels were begun, poems ventured, and interpretations risked.
But there was still a small, inconvenient voice recalling a childhood steeped in reflective shock on death and meaning. Was there no place for it in adult life? Was there no tradition of serious rumination requiring radical ingenuity without canceling human particularity? The expressive forms of music and literature perform oneself, but they do not investigate it. I had gone back to the well only to remain thirsty.
Everything changed when I stumbled across a book by philosopher Stanley Cavell. On my way to a class, hidden from rain under an awning, I paused, dumbstruck by an essay of Cavell’s on King Lear, penned in the mid-to-late 1960s, which radically transforms into a critique of America’s tragic instigation of the Vietnam War. It was stunning, an aesthetic homecoming for philosophy, not because Cavell provided a novel interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but because Cavell turned philosophy in on itself, asking why academic writing misses what every audience member viscerally knows in the terror of watching Lear.
Cavell widens the frame of philosophy to acknowledge its human source. Even philosophers are beings with desires and emotions, fears and ambitions. We don masks, employing stylistic strategies, making political decisions in attempts to get others to pay attention to what we say. Philosophy, like all speech, arises within the complex web of human relationships that can never be wholly traced or accounted for, since the ones doing the accounting are no less tangled.
In that moment, I found a home in philosophy I had been looking for my whole life, unbeknownst to me. This home was not literature, not self-expression, though it did entail acknowledging that self-expression is unavoidable. This philosophy ruminates on the human condition without excluding the personal realm of experience that makes us uniquely complex. I did not know that philosophy could be a mirror, capturing a fuller reality than arguments about free will or the nature of consciousness ever could.
Philosophy can speak to what is most important but perilously hard to perceive in the weave of everyday relations. It can put its reflective finger on the heart we hide, questioning the unexamined pictures of rationality that undermine our ability to be present. The full self can belong to philosophy, not merely an idealized and ultimately impoverished rationalistic image of it. Instead of accepting philosophy on the technologist’s terms, we can take experience as our teacher. But only if we are trained to really look.
Love is the center of Cavell’s philosophy, not as a concept but as a practice in embracing vulnerability. Philosophy is not poetry. But what is philosophy if it cannot read our relationship with poetry as anything other than flowery pleasantries? If it cannot take art seriously? I did not see it yet, but this initiation into a human philosophy opened toward political realities that analytic methods largely cover up or systematically obscure. For Cavell, American Empire and its disastrous travails were a form of Shakespearean tragedy made far worse because our culture has long renounced the need for aesthetic insight.
Hubris, humiliation, betrayal, the suppression of shame — these are the realities of self that Cavell allows us to reawaken to within ourselves. And they are horrible. But the mechanism that disowns them by applying totalizing ideologies or emotion-excluding rational idealism is far worse because it inevitably manifests as a denial of the world and the real people in it.
For the next generation of philosophers, in our world, which increasingly takes its conceptual framework from technologies developed by eugenics-obsessed billionaires, I say: do not settle for philosophy that excludes the full human experience. Especially here, we must let our heart, intuition, judgment, attention, attunement, ear, memory, fears, failures, losses, and shame be our teachers.
Rational systems are useful. But only if they serve life rather than subjugate it. Cavell turned to Thoreau and Emerson, whose specifically philosophical legacies remain ambiguous. They are not taught in serious philosophy departments. But why would we want a philosophical landscape that is hostile to reflection on the most profound aspects of human experience — the realm of ordinary preciousness that exceeds explanatory frameworks?
There is a philosophy of wonder, permeated by the shock from which philosophy arose historically and personally as a rumination on death and meaning. But it is hidden. We must seek it and defend it.
Ross Edwards is a philosophy PhD candidate at The New School in NYC and recipient of the 2026 Robert M. Adams – Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship in Philosophy for his dissertation entitled The Horror in Evil: Moral Philosophy in the Shadow of Holocaust Literature. He is a contributor to a forthcoming Routledge book on love in Stanley Cavell's philosophy
Where should I start with Cavell?
As one of your other commenters said below, it is not the job of academia to tell students how they ought to live their lives. That is well and good, and I happen to agree. Indeed, a big part of philosophy’s value is that it gives students the tools to see through that kind of BS.
But I have more sympathy than that other commenter: after all, you are not writing here as an academic, and you don’t owe us the kind of analyses that they are demanding.
Instead, what seems to be missing from your piece is any discussion of the internal dynamics within the institutions that have brought this unfortunate situation about.
Philosophers and the departments they run at universities have sleep-walked into a situation where the strange, poujadiste mindset of business managers and petty administrators dictates their fortunes. Philosophy is not science, it ought not to be evaluated on the same metrics, of “impact” or whatever. And now, philosophy, with its frequent pretensions to “scientificity” on both sides of the continental/analytic divide, does not so much hide behind science as it disappears.
That is to say, the problem you are gesturing towards seems to be a symptom of this state of affairs. Philosophers have to justify themselves to their institutional benefactors, and they do that by pretending to be scientists. The cost has not been a small one.