Abstract
Stanley Cavell is one of very few philosophers who systematically reflect on the impact and influence of autobiographical detail, experience, and preferences on their philosophical work. The aim of this essay is to show how Cavell’s use of autobiographical exploration is rooted in his early aesthetic theory, in particular his view of the similarities between philosophy and aesthetic criticism. Cavell argues that criticism starts by exploiting and incorporating a subjective vantage point, eventually bringing the reader to test the significance of a work on herself. In his ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, Cavell states exactly this form of appeal to the ‘We’ of author and reader as the basic move of his own version of ‘ordinary language philosophy’. It is because of the connections Cavell sees between criticism and philosophy that his aesthetic diagnosis harks back on his overall critical style of thinking.
Highlights
Stanley Cavell is one of very few philosophers who systematically reflect on the impact and influence of autobiographical detail, experience, and preferences on their philosophical work
Cavell argues that criticism starts by exploiting and incorporating a subjective vantage point, eventually bringing the reader to test the significance of a work on herself
Just like Benjamin is interested in autobiographical writing not for its own sake, but as a means to obtain truths from the ephemerous and exemplary, from memory and its forms of focusing and neglecting, Cavell’s interest, maintains a simultaneous focus on the style and method of philosophical reflection
Summary
Stanley Cavell is one of very few philosophers who systematically reflect on the impact and influence of autobiographical detail, experience, and preferences on their philosophical work. I will briefly summarize Cavell’s ideas concerning the overall connection between ordinary language, philosophy, and autobiography, and argue for how his defence of autobiographical methods in philosophy is shaped by his views about art and criticism as well as his emphasis on philosophical style, or voice.
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