Stanley Cavell’s work focuses on the problem of skepticism and what the world looks like in its grip. One of our most important contemporary philosophers, Cavell has increasingly turned to non-philosophical sources—Emerson and Thoreau, Shakespeare, opera, films of the 1930s and ’40s—in order to think about the “dissatisfaction with one’s human powers” that drives skepticism. Raising doubts about whether I can know with certainty of the existence of the world or myself or others in it, skepticism, in its absolute demands, represents, for Cavell, a refusal to participate in finite human existence. But in its demands for certainty, he claims, it also, inadvertently, brings into focus the “haphazard, unsponsored state” we find ourselves in. Following Wittgenstein, who famously saw in the meta-physical use of words a rejection of the human and a desire to use words “apart from, and in opposition to, the natural forms of life which gave those expressions the force they have,” Cavell has sought not to defeat skepticism but to make use of it, finding in its disappointments a way back to the everyday.
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Stanford University Press
584 pages
$26.23
Film and literature are where Cavell sees these issues most profoundly and, in a way, most philosophically enacted, which accounts for the excitement with which his work has been greeted by non-philosophers. His autobiography, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, is itself a work of literature, as much a testing and investigation of voice as it is a human record. It takes him from his 1926 birth in Atlanta to the completion of the final section of his major work The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy in 1977, from which I have been quoting above. The story he tells is of finding, in philosophy, a way to talk about and think about his life—the discovery and elaboration of a voice responsive to the world and to others. The book’s form is designed to keep the issue of human finitude constantly before us. Drafted over the course of a year, the book’s entries are dated and set apart, so that we are aware, as we begin again and again, that each day’s writing, breaking the weight of silence and working its way back to one incident or another, speaks from a slightly different position and responds to slightly different pressures. Each entry is by definition incomplete or finite—a music that, while calling attention to itself stuttering and circling and stopping, also presses relentlessly forward.
Perhaps the most remarkable incident, echoed in the book’s title, occurred in 1933 when Cavell was nearly seven. Moving with his mother and father from a house shared with uncles and aunts and grandparents to a new apartment, worlds away on the other side of Atlanta, the young boy found himself caught up in a catastrophe not of his own making. Wandering that apartment on the first day, sick with its strangeness, he found, in the new living room, a familiar candy dish, filled and set out as it would have been before, when company came. Taking one of the small, chocolate-covered wafers, he remarked to his father, standing nearby, “I didn’t know we had these here,” to which his father responded, in a lurching rage, wrenching the candy from his hand, “And you still don’t know it!” Seventy years later, Cavell’s prose still recoils from the realization that his father “wanted [him] not to exist.” Back in a bedroom and crying uncontrollably, the young boy found himself crying as much for his father as for himself—for that glimpse of an “inner devastation” so extreme that he would, exposed to his son’s needy words, tear the world down around himself rather than acknowledge his own shared vulnerability and aloneness. One sees, though it is never stated directly, why Cavell would go on to spend a lifetime trying to understand and make reparation for such a denial of his humanity, trying to understand, in his own bones, where the mockingly bitter sound of such words, turned back against the one who spoke them, came from.
This dislocation put into motion ten years of upheaval which would eventually result in five moves back and forth across the country, the young boy spending so much time alone that he was in “a state of sensory deprivation,” the single child “of parents whose exchanges so often ended in silence or rage.” Years later, he would recognize his own uprootedness writ large in Wittgenstein’s “portrait of the modern subject … perpetually seeking peace, therefore endlessly homeless,” but as a child he was alone with these feelings, “abandoned to himself.”
Music, with its “proof of a world beyond me,” woke him from his coma. In one of his improvisations on his childhood, Cavell remembers going down to the basement of the house in Atlanta and striking lumps of newly-delivered coal with an axe. He uses that image to describe the effect, later on, of playing and listening to music. He was “learning how to be tapped so that the hardness in my feelings and the fixations in my mind would, if I could become ready, split open as of their own desire, the better to be consumed.” His undergraduate years at Berkeley, in which he was deeply involved in music and theater, were pivotal in this process of opening up and gaining a voice. Writing the music for a production of King Lear particularly stands out, for what came to him then, in imagining “what is said when” and “weighing with others every word in it,” was the thrill of standing in the presence of “an act demanding a response.” Taking up the wager of such works meant, he came to see, enacting within himself their “explicit and systematic exercises of imagination and articulation” and then, in return, “expressing what I could of my sense of those actions and ideas and words.” It would become a life’s work, for, in “acknowledging shared human existence itself,” Shakespeare and other great writers turned toward him rather than away. They tapped and split him open; after years of silence, they gave him back himself.
After a post-Berkeley year at Julliard, Cavell’s interest in composition waned, with philosophy eventually taking its place and showing him another way forward. Little Did I Know traces Cavell’s development of a philosophical voice in intricate detail. Moving back and forth between degrees and teaching appointments at UCLA and Berkeley and Harvard, working his way into and out of dead ends, being richly blessed with intellectual companions and challenging (often overwhelming) teaching opportunities, Cavell went his own way, developing a sometimes soaring, sometimes circling responsiveness to a series of texts in which he heard himself most deeply and most intimately addressed. His style edges towards poetry, though poetry of a particular sort—what Wallace Stevens calls “the mind in the act of finding what will suffice,” handling certain phrases and moments over and over again, listening to them, listening to his own responses, drawing them out and testing them again and again, in an almost-musical series of variations.
Eventually, Cavell found in the work of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin an approach to language and the ordinary that unlocked his own linguistic crises and silences. In a sense, they gave him the tools to understand what lay behind his father’s words those many years before, a connection the book does not make explicit but invites us to consider, if we have ears to hear. It might go like this. In saying that he didn’t know that they had the candy wafers there, in the new apartment, the young Cavell was in fact offering his father a discovery—something he had just stumbled upon. There was some sort of continuity between their old world and the new one, the boy had discovered, a continuity someone had marked with a special, readable-within-the-family gesture. It is testimony to our embeddedness within the rhythms of lived life that each of us understands, immediately, the boy’s wonder and relief. In wrenching the dish away and insisting that now he knew no such thing, Cavell’s father was acting as if his son’s discovery and exclamation was somehow strange, unreadable, open to debate. More than that—he was declaring that the vulnerability expressed in his son’s words was not to stand.
Austin gave Cavell a way to listen to such words, and Wittgenstein gave him a path to make sense of their motivation. Wittgenstein’s insistence on returning words from their metaphysical to their everyday use, Cavell writes, is an acknowledgment that there is in all of us a restless longing to step aside from the plain, if sometimes vulnerable, implications of our language. In seeking a way out from under his son’s words, from the implication that they were, all of them, lost, bereft, marooned, his father had exiled himself from his son and from the everyday comforts of a shared world. Philosophy, in one of its guises, does the same thing, Cavell argues. We all do. “Seek[ing] a transcendental rescue in, or from, our words,” we step beyond the ordinary, giving in to the temptation to “live in exile from our words, turned from them, from the implications of our lives, strangers to ourselves, … shunning ourselves.” Wittgenstein and Austin taught Cavell to diagnose this in himself, thereby returning him, and now his readers, to our shared, finite world—be it the words of one’s seven-year-old self or the heart-splitting power of literature, film, or music, those bright-edged axes of the everyday. Philosophy, as Cavell would practice it, seems more a matter of listening to the everyday than of moving abstractly beyond it. It is a way of enacting and responding to a witness already there: “And haven’t I repeatedly discovered that the writing I care about most can be understood as letting death into the room?—in other words, letting each sentence bear what finitude can bring to it then and there, and await developments.” He means both his own writing and the texts he has centered his life on. In each of them, one listens in and allows each sentence to have its full say, acknowledging its full humanity by waiting to see what inner chord it will strike.
As I have noted, Cavell’s work has had a significant impact outside of philosophy in film and literary studies. A field still to respond fully to his work is theology. Let me mention two writers who are applying the ideas I have sketched here in important ways. Stephen Mulhall, in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (1994) and in a chapter in a book entitled Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, edited by D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (2001), has argued that Cavell’s unfolding of “the human desire to transcend finitude, to deny the human,” has much in common with the notion of Original Sin. It is an ineradicable impulse, basic to who we are, an impulse we are unable to break free of on our own. Cavell’s Wittgenstein gives us a way to see it for what it is: “The human desire to speak outside language games is an inflection of the prideful human craving to be God, and Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice aims not so much to eradicate this ineradicable hubris but to diagnose it and track down the causes of its specific eruptions.” Philip Dula, in Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (2011), has extended this idea, arguing that the attempt, in Cavell’s words, “to turn metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack” has a great deal to tell us about arguments made about the unknowability of God. Think about Jesus standing before Pilate in John 18. “What is truth?” he asks. Now think of Cavell’s father turning away from his son’s words in a similar refusal to acknowledge his own need and brokenness. The connections are quite rich. Cavell’s diagnoses, Dula writes, open us up to “the interrogation of the cross,” making it clear that an “insistence on the unknowability of God is not a claim about intellectual lack” but is rather “a disappointment, even a horror, over the success of the revelation of the word made flesh.” What Cavell gives us is a way to hear what we already know, but refuse to face. Little Did I Know makes it clear that we already know more than enough. Our problem is a refusal to acknowledge it.
Thomas Gardner is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech. His most recent book is John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination (Baylor Univ. Press). His collection of lyric meditations, Poverty Creek Journal, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2014.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
