Living Philosophically: Stanley Cavell, Moral Perfectionism, and Spiritual Exercises Daniele Lorenzini Introduction Stanley Cavell’s ground-breaking oeuvre, developed between the late 1960s and the early 2000s, was characterized by two main quests. On the one hand, the quest for the ordinary, originated by his insatiable fascination with its uncanny and extraordinary aspects. On the other, the quest for a specifically American philosophical tradition, distinct from the mainstream analytic one. These two long-lasting quests define Cavell’s unique philosophical voice and his attempt to redefine the practice of philosophy itself. Far from being (solely) an academic discipline, for Cavell philosophy consists in an effort to make sense of our ordinary words, practices, and forms of life—an effort that requires “education” and entails a radical transformation of the self (CR 125). In this chapter, I focus on Cavell’s conception of moral perfectionism, which in my view bridges the two quests I just mentioned: his attention to the ordinary dimension of our language and life, and his revaluation of the transcendentalist strand of American philosophy—namely, the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. To this end, I shall also discuss Pierre Hadot’s writings on spiritual exercises and the Socratic-Platonic dialogue, and Michel Foucault’s notion of techniques of the self and his analysis of ancient parrēsia. Indeed, I consider Hadot and Foucault as two crucial (albeit indirect) interlocutors for Cavell, and their respective works will allow me to better emphasize the specificities of moral perfectionism as well as Cavell’s original redefinition of the practice of philosophy. Although Cavell never addresses Hadot’s or Foucault’s works in detail, toward the end of his life he makes it clear that he admires them and that he conceives of them as complementary to his own. In 1993, during a seminar held at Bucknell University, Cavell raises the problem of the