Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell
File:StanleyCavellBrooklineMonmouth2016.jpg Cavell in 2016
Born	Stanley Louis Goldstein (1926-09-01)September 1, 1926 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Died	Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
School	Postanalytic philosophy
Institutions	Harvard University
Main interests	Skepticism, tragedy, aesthetics, ethics, ordinary language philosophy, American transcendentalism, film theory, William Shakespeare, opera, religion
Notable ideas	Linguistic film theory, Moral perfectionism
Influences Kierkegaard, Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Austin, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Freud, Robert Warshow, Roger Sessions, Jean Renoir, André Bazin, Thomas Kuhn, Northrop Frye, Rogers Albritton, Claude Esteban
Influenced Charles Bernstein, Nikolas Kompridis, James F. Conant, Cora Diamond, Toril Moi, Shoshana Felman, Jay Cantor, Michael Fried, Paul Guyer, Alice Crary, Sandra Laugier, Arnold Davidson, Stephen Mulhall, Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, Terrence Malick, Bernard Williams, Claude Esteban, Paul W. Franks, Ross McElwee, Hent de Vries, Vicki Hearne, Marc Shell, Arnaud Desplechin, Cornel West, Robert Gardner, Nancy Bauer, David Macarthur, Rae Langton, Barbara Herman

Stanley Louis Cavell (/kəˈvɛl/; 1 September 1926 – 19 June 2018) was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.

Life

Cavell was born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother, a locally renowned pianist, trained him in music from his earliest days. During the Depression, Cavell’s parents moved several times between Atlanta and Sacramento, California. As an adolescent, Cavell played lead alto saxophone as the youngest member of a black jazz band in Sacramento. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, where, along with his lifelong friend Bob Thompson (musician), he majored in music, studying with, among others, Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch. After graduation, he studied composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, only to discover that music was not his calling.

He entered graduate school in philosophy at UCLA, and then transferred to Harvard University. As a student there he came under the influence of J. L. Austin, whose teaching and methods "knocked him off ... [his] horse." In 1954 he was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Before completing his Ph.D., he became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. Cavell's daughter by his first wife (Marcia Cavell), Rachel Lee Cavell, was born in 1957. In 1962–63 Cavell was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he befriended the British philosopher Bernard Williams. Cavell’s marriage to Marcia ended in divorce in 1961. In 1963 he returned to the Harvard Philosophy Department, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value.

In the summer of 1964, Cavell joined a group of graduate students, who taught at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Mississippi, as part of what became known as the Freedom Summer. He and Cathleen (Cohen) Cavell were married in 1967. In April 1969, during the student protests (chiefly arising from the Vietnam War), Cavell, helped by his colleague John Rawls, worked with a group of African-American students to draft language for a faculty vote to establish Harvard's Department of African and African-American Studies.

In 1976, Cavell's first son, Benjamin, was born. In 1979, along with the documentary filmmaker Robert H. Gardner, Cavell helped found the Harvard Film Archive, to preserve and present the history of film. Cavell received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. In 1996-97 Cavell was president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). In 1984, his second son, David, was born. Cavell remained on the Harvard faculty until retiring in 1997. Thereafter, he taught courses at Yale University and the University of Chicago. He also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 1998.

Cavell died in Boston, Massachusetts of heart failure on June 19, 2018, at the age of 91. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Philosophy

Although trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Cavell frequently interacted with the continental tradition. He includes film and literary study in philosophical inquiry. Cavell writes extensively on Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Martin Heidegger, as well as the American transcendentalists Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. His work was for a time frequently compared to that of Jacques Derrida, whom he met in 1970. Although their exchange was congenial, Cavell denied the full extent to which deconstruction could undermine the possibility of meaning, instead taking an explicitly ordinary language approach to language and skepticism. He writes about Wittgenstein in a fashion known as the New Wittgenstein, which according to Alice Crary interprets Wittgenstein as putting forward a positive view of philosophy as a therapeutic form. Cavell's work incorporates autobiographical elements concerning how his movement between and within these thinkers' ideas influenced his views in the arts and humanities, beyond the technical study of philosophy.

Cavell established his distinct philosophical identity with Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), which addresses topics such as language use, metaphor, skepticism, tragedy, and literary interpretation from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy, of which he is a practitioner and ardent defender. One of the essays discusses Søren Kierkegaard's work on revelation and authority, The Book on Adler, in an effort to help reintroduce the book to modern philosophical readers. In The World Viewed (1971) Cavell looks at photography, film, modernism in art and the nature of media, mentioning the influence of art critic Michael Fried on his work.

Cavell is perhaps best known for The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), which forms the centerpiece of his work and has its origins in his doctoral dissertation. In Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Cavell describes his experience of seven prominent Hollywood comedies: The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. Cavell argues that these films, from 1934–1949, form part of what he calls the genre of "The Comedy of Remarriage," and finds in them great philosophical, moral, and political significance. Specifically, Cavell argues that these comedies show that "the achievement of happiness requires not the [...] satisfaction of our needs [...] but the examination and transformation of those needs." According to Cavell, the emphasis these movies place on remarriage draws attention to the fact that, within a relationship, happiness requires "growing up" together with one's partner.

In Cities of Words (2004) Cavell traces the history of moral perfectionism, a mode of moral thinking spanning the history of Western philosophy and literature. Having used Emerson to outline the concept, the book suggests ways we might want to understand philosophy, literature, and film as preoccupied with features of perfectionism. In Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), a collection of essays, Cavell makes the case that J. L. Austin's concept of performative utterance requires the supplementary concept of passionate utterance: "A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire." The book also contains extended discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Fred Astaire, as well as familiar Cavellian subjects such as Shakespeare, Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Cavell's final book, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010), is an autobiography written in the form of a diary. In a series of consecutive, dated entries, he inquires about the origins of his philosophy by telling the story of his life.

A scholarly journal, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, engages with his philosophical work. It is edited by Sérgio Dias Branco and Amir Khan and published by the University of Ottawa.

Honorary degrees

• Doctor of Humane Letters, Kalamazoo College, 1980
• Doctor of Letters, Iona College, 1985
• Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Chicago, 1987
• Docteur, Honoris Causa, Université de Strasbourg, 1996
• Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa, Hebrew University, 1997
• Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa, University of East Anglia, 2009
• Docteur, Honoris Causa, Ecole Normale Superieure, Lyon, 2010
• Doctor of Letters, Wesleyan University, 2010
• Doctor of Theology, Institut Protestant de Théologie de Paris, 2010

Selected honors

• Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1953–56
• Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, 1962-1963
• Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1961
• Fellow, Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, 1970-1971
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1978-
• President, American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), 1996–97
• 2000 Centennial Medalist, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
• Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Professorship, 2004–05
• Member, American Philosophical Society, 2005-

Selected special lectureships

• Patricia Wise Lecture, American Film Institute, 1982
• Mrs. William Beckman Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, 1983
• Tanner Lecture, Stanford University, April 1986
• Carus Lectures, American Philosophical Association, 1988
• Plenary Address, Shakespeare World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996
• Presidential Address, American Philosophical Association, Atlanta, 1996
• Howison Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, February, 2002

Bibliography

• Must We Mean What We Say? (1969)
• The Senses of Walden (1972) Expanded edition San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
• The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971); 2nd enlarged edn. (1979)
• The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979) New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) ISBN 978-0-674-73906-2
• Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (1984)
• Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987); 2nd edn.: Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (2003)
• In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Scepticism and Romanticism (1988) Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (1988)
• Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990)
• A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1994)
• Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (1995)
• Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996)
• Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003)
• Cavell on Film (2005)
• Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004)
• Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005)
• Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010)

See also

• List of American philosophers

Further reading

Books

• Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism, Chicago U.P., 1989
• Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Bucknell U.P., 1989
• Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, Texas Tech U.P., 1993
• Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Clarendon Press, 1994
• Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell, Chicago U.P., 1998
• Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary, Polity Press/Blackwell’s, 2002
• Richard Eldridge (ed.), Stanley Cavell, Cambridge U.P., 2003
• Sandra Laugier, Une autre pensée politique américaine: La démocratie radicale d’Emerson á Stanley Cavell, Michel Houdiard Ēditeur, 2004
• Russell Goodman (ed.), Contending with Stanley Cavell, Oxford U.P., 2005.
• Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (eds.), Reading Cavell, Routledge, 2006.
• William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell's The World Viewed, 2000.
• Catherine Wheatley, Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema, 2019.
• David LaRocca (ed.), The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, 2019.

Articles

• The Stanley Cavell Special Issue: Writings and Ideas on Film Studies, An Appreciation in Six Essays, Film International, Issue 22, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006), Jeffrey Crouse, guest editor. The essays include those by Diane Stevenson, Charles Warren, Anke Brouwers and Tom Paulus, William Rothman, Morgan Bird, and George Toles.
• "Why Not Realize Your World?" Philosopher/Film Scholar William Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse" in Film International, Issue 54, Vol. 9, No. 6 (2011): 59–73.
• Special Section on Stanley Cavell. Film-Philosophy, Vol. 18 (2014): 1-171. Articles by William Rothman, Robert Sinnerbrink, David Macarthur, Richard Rushton, and Lisa Trahair.
• "In Focus: Cavell in Words," Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2016): 446-94. Three essays by, respectively, Áine Mahon and Fergal McHugh, Peter Dula, and Erika Kidd.

External links

• Harvard Philosophy Department website
• Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies
• A Philosopher Goes to the Movies: Conversation with Stanley Cavell
• Daniel Ross, Review of Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow
• A study (in French) on Cavell's idea of perfectionism
• Stanley Cavell
• PennSound page with audio and video links
• Radio interview by Charles Bernstein