Hegel and Cavell on Meaning and Sublation

Hegel is not an author who plays a starring role in Cavell’s work like that of Austin, Wittgenstein, or Emerson. Cavell mentions him rarely, and almost always in passing. This is hardly surprising. Given that Cavell draws as heavily as he does upon Kant, whom Hegel regularly attacks, and Kierkegaard, who regularly attacks Hegel, one might expect that Hegel’s more important claims and ideas would be uncongenial to Cavell, and incompatible with the main lines of his work. Moreover, Cavell’s early and lasting embrace of Romanticism would seem to preclude the embrace of an author who lambasts the leading Jena Romantic Friedrich von Schlegel as the purveyor of a corrosive amoral subjectivism. Appearances, however, can be deceiving, and in the essay that follows I demonstrate that there are good reasons to believe that Hegel has influenced Cavell considerably more than one might suppose.