Fall 1998
Volume 25, Number 1

Who has never been let down? Who has not known the sadness that comes when one realizes that something or someone has failed to meet one's expectations? Who has not felt the pang of regret, the painful sense that events might have been otherwise, that somehow something else ought to have been and yet will not be? To suffer a diminished faith in others is an experience or disappointment. In the very syllables of the word--on its very surface--the plain register of its meaning appears: disappointed, removed from appointment. The train of expectation is derailed; the appointment is not kept; the meeting is missed; the friend is unable to take a stand when it matters most. We mark our losses over time, forgive and forget, and move on.

Sometimes disappointment deepens, encompasses such a wide scope that it overmatches our prior expectations, overwhelms our abilities, and threatens to shade into a more general disillusion that would stop us cold. Thus, one ethical task of critical thinking might be to steer us through our disappointment; to prevent it from turning into a permanant disillusionment; to make of our disappointment a plausable beginning, rather than a certain ending. The condition of disappointment has been expressed philosophically by Stanley Cavell as leaving us in a place he calls "Nowhere." This Nowhere is not the utopia it might seem to some, but it might be the last refuge for a kind of philosophical thinking. When Cavell suggests that a task of philosophy is to preserve the skeptical argument, it is this Nowhere he is hoping, against hope, to save. "Here my thought [is] that skepticism is a place, perhaps the central secular place, in which the human wish to deny the condition of human existence is expressed; and so long as the denial is essential to what we think of as human, skepticism cannot, or must not, be denied." 1 The place of skepticism is a place of disappointment.

To understand this place of disappointment is to become enlisted in a project concerning judgement, generally, and more particularly concerning judgements about the terms that underwrite acknowledgement and consent and the conditions under which they might be withdrawn or redrawn. When are we disappointed? That is, when do we lose our appointment and gain a sense of being out of place? What might it mean for us to evaluate occasions of rupture and loss as ordinary experiences of skepticism, circumstantial evidence of existence of an intimate relationship that conditions our lives toward a sort of truth?

The displacement that constitutes disappointment is intimately tied to the experience of resignation. The moment of disappointment is the occasion of resignation. It does not matter how happy the occasion of any resignation might be: every resignation is connected to disappointment in that every resignation marks a rupture, a quitting, the ending of something, that places someone Nowhere in respect to where they were before. We might come closer to acknowledging our skepticism (and expressing the state of our resignation) by assessing the condition of our disappointment in everyday life. Resignation is the mark of the loss of an appointment. It is an ordinary way that we express our disapointment and mark the time and place of the ongoing denial of our condition. How does resignation operate in the world?

Two Letters

A professor has been denied tenure at a university. She decides to quit her post immediately rather than stay for another terminal year. She can resign because in her field she is considered a highly valued member of the profession and because she has at least one offer from a university in hand. She wants to do so immediately because the circumstances surrounding the disposition of her case have led her to believe that she has suffered an injustice in being denied tenure and because she feels that the negative judgement of her case has placed her in an undignified position.

1. Stanley Cavell, "The Philosopher in American Life (Toward Thoreau and Emerson)," In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, 1988), p. 5. Cavell here summarizes the argument concerning skepticism that he develops in his earlier work, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979).

2. In describing how the shopkeeper who is given a slip of paper that says "five red apples" goes about his work of interpreting the meaning of those words, Wittgenstein says, "It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3d ed. [New York, 1958], 1).

Thomas L. Dumm is professor of political science at Amherst College. Among his books are Democracy and Punishment (1987), United States (1994), and A Politics of the Ordinary (1999).