Stanley Cavell Research Articles

Bruce Lee and the Perfection of Martial Arts (Studies): An Exercise in Alterdisciplinarity

This essay builds from an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of Bruce Lee’s jeet kune do to an analysis of the current state of academic scholarship generally and martial arts studies scholarship specifically. For the sake of a more comprehensive understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of jeet kune do, and in particular its affinities with a philosophical tradition traced by Stanley Cavell under the heading of perfectionism, this essay brings the philosophical writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ayn Rand into contact with Lee’s writings during the time that he spent formulating his martial arts philosophy. Additionally, this essay uses the philosophical insights of Emerson, Rand, and Lee to challenge longstanding academic dogma vis-à-vis poststructuralist philosophy, the methods of academic intervention, and the nature of philosophical argumentation. Though pitched as a debate regarding the content and the status of Bruce Lee and his combative philosophy, this essay endeavors to inspire scholars to (re)examine their conceptions of Bruce Lee, martial arts, and martial arts studies.

Transcendentalism Without Escape

AbstractThis essay-review asks what transcendentalism can contribute to our sense of the present moment and our capacity to imagine more just and livable futures. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to the view that transcendentalism embraces escapism and isolating individualism. I focus on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, presuming that the present value of an idea of transcendentalism is to be discovered in their writings or nowhere. The two are centrally concerned with describing the conditions under which experience is acquired; their writing, then, evinces a wish to get closer to the world, not to escape it. What they do seek to transcend is not the world but our illusions about it, particularly those that feed egotism. The irony of calling Emerson in particular an escapist is that his writing makes escape so difficult to achieve. The process of reading Emerson—of finding a sentence suddenly captivating, just where it had been hopelessly dull—models and perhaps prompts a process of similar discovery about the mundane world. I conclude by linking transcendentalism to ideas of critical humility and naïveté suggested by Stanley Cavell, Toril Moi, Jane Bennett, and Theodor Adorno. Some form of naïveté, I speculate, might help us confront our inability to change in the midst of anthropogenic climate change and mass extinction.

Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine: A Grammatical Investigation of the Incarnation

AbstractThrough an examination of Augustine's understanding of language and an exegesis of key passages in De trinitate, this article exposits and critiques Augustine's theology of the Incarnation. It attends to the distinctions Augustine draws between the two verba—the verbum mentis and the verbum vocis—and asks if conceiving of language differently might better account for the Incarnation of the Word in terms of De trinitate’s focus on substantial and relational predication. The author maintains that Augustine's impulse to interpret the Incarnation linguistically is the right one, but argues that drawing upon the resources of a Wittgensteinian approach to language sits more soundly with the rest of the grammar of Christian theology. Deploying the work of Wittgenstein's inheritors, especially Stanley Cavell and Stephen Mulhall, this article shows that while critique is in order, the final result is something broadly in line with Augustine's own best impulses concerning language as found in De dialectica and De doctrina christiana.

Early Modern Cultural Hybridity: Bartholomew Fair as a Heterotopia of Hamlet

Abstract As a contribution to the discussion of Shakespeare’s “appropriability” (Stanley Cavell), this paper examines some aspects of the cultural position of Hamlet on the Jacobean entertainment market, as they are indicated in Ben Jonson’s comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). The metatheatrical features of Bartholomew Fair may be said to measure the play’s resistance against appropriating the unique and problematic aspects of Hamlet, such as the Ghost or The Mousetrap. These are deconstructed in Jonson’s comedy, which anticipates the Enlightenment views of the social functioning of theatre as a “moral institution”.

El cine como espejo diferido: el concepto de transferencia en André Bazin y Stanley Cavell

Este artículo rescata la visión de André Bazin para señalar su actualidad en el momento de tratar de la siempre cambiante naturaleza del cine, específicamente ante las nuevas formas cinematográficas. La teoría de Bazin se sustenta de un modo aparentemente paradójico sobre la identidad entre el modelo real y su imagen fotográfica, una premisa compleja que será desarrollada décadas más tarde por el filósofo estadounidense Stanley Cavell. En este trabajo, se indicará, primero, el sentido de esta identidad. En vistas a demarcar el alcance y las repercusiones de esta identidad ontológica en la perepción de la imagen cinematográfica, se abordará el concepto en relación con el de semejanza y con el de causalidad, para conocer la especificidad de este. A continuación, se explicará su alcance a partir del concepto de transferencia. Para llegar a una comprensión cabal de este proceso, se analizará el modo en el que aparece en los trabajos de ambos teóricos. Una de las principales conclusiones del artículo es que el realismo no es algo de lo que el sujeto deba investir a la imagen fotográfica, sino que es una propiedad de esta, en virtud de la transferencia de realidad del objeto a la imagen. Con ello, se muestra cómo el espectador de cine, frente a la pantalla, lleva a cabo un acto análogo al de la percepción cotidiana: el reconocimiento de una realidad representada en pantalla.

Stanley Cavell at Amherst College

In February of 2000, Stanley Cavell came to Amherst College to present two public lectures as the John C. McCloy ’16 Professor of American Institutions. (I had nominated him for the lectureship the previous year, and he had been approved by a College committee and the president of the College at the time, Tom Gerety, who was himself a legal philosopher.)
 It was a big deal. In the fall, the lecturer had been Ronald Dworkin. Others who had lectured through these early years of the lecture included such luminaries as Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb. (The first McCloy lecturer had been Fred Korematsu, who had unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government during World War II to end the Japanese internment program. Korematsu’s invitation had been a sort of historical reparation, since John McCloy, for whom the professorship had been named, had directed the internment camp program for FDR, famously saying, when asked about its constitutionality, “Compared to my country, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.”)

Continuing Education with Stanley Cavell

How many times in my life have I re-encountered my teacher, Stanley Cavell? The most memorable, the first encounter with him was in the winter of 1996 at Harvard—the image still vivid in my memory, the snow falling outside the window of his room, with me sitting in front of Stanley. At the suggestions of a teaching assistant of Hilary Putnam, who had read my term paper, I made an appointment with Stanley and introduced myself along with my abiding question regarding American philosophy. When I presented this as my being “torn” between Emerson and Dewey, Stanley reacted immediately and expressed his sense of sympathy with me. That was the beginning of a kind of continuing education for me and of the lifelong task I consider myself to have shared with him.

Stanley Cavell, with Time

Let me start by saying how significant it is for me to take part in this conference commemorating and celebrating Stanley Cavell. I am grateful to Cathleen Cavell and Richard Moran for this opportunity, not only to speak, but mainly to listen to dear friends, friends whose companionship was indelibly marked by our common love for Stanley, by the admiration for his thinking, and by the inspiration and sustenance he provided for our own work.
 What I will say will be inflected by the way Stanley touched my life and work. I must apologize therefore for having to speak, in the short and precious time I have, also a bit about myself. As I wrote these remarks I thought that I will most likely not be the only one to choose to speak of the ideal, the paradigm of the unity of person and thought that is Stanley Cavell. It is what was so striking to me when I first encountered him; it also became central to my dissertation project with him, and it remains to this day that through which I think of his continuous presence in my concerns with philosophy.

Remembering Stanley Cavell

This memorial notice for Stanley Cavell was first published on the Harvard Philosophy Department website on June 25, 2018 and appears here with the department’s permission.
 For over four decades one of the most distinctive and original contributors to American letters—and one of the world’s most significant proponents of what philosophy could learn from the arts—was a member of the community of Emerson Hall. But so long as Stanley Cavell is best known just as a philosopher who wrote about Shakespeare and movies (as he was first introduced to me), and even if his unassailable institutional legacy is as the advisor of generations of accomplished philosophers (and film and literary scholars), the task for philosophers memorializing Cavell is to communicate what he taught us, and in particular what he taught us to do.

Cavell as Mentor

I was a Grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but intense period of time, I tried to take as many courses offered by Stanley Cavell as possible. In my last year, I asked him to be a member of my dissertation committee. Looking back I’m still flooded with gratitude (and astonishment) by the fact that he said yes.

Encountering Cavell

I first came across Stanley Cavell’s writing in the fall of 1974 in a senior seminar in the philosophy of mind at Middlebury College, co-taught by Stanley Bates and Timothy Gould. We spent most of the term reading Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and P. F. Strawson’s Individuals—books that at that time, before the widespread reception of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, Putnam-style functionalism, and central state identity theory, still counted as contemporary philosophy of mind. It was then felt by Bates and Gould, I conjecture, that something more lively and something having to do with subjectivity might be order. Both of them had been Ph.D. students with Cavell at Harvard, and so we turned to “Knowing and Acknowledging.”

Undoing the Psychologizing of the Psychological

In “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” first published in 1965, and later collected in Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell wrote:
 We know the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the “psychologizing” of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives.
 Frege, of course, insisted on distinguishing between what is thought in any act of thinking, the content of thought, which he conceived of as having a propositional form, and the thinking of it. A thought is what can be common to different acts of thinking, whether of one’s own or of another. It is thus essentially public, essentially shareable, unowned. By contrast the thinking of a thought is necessarily someone’s, necessarily owned, and so in that sense private. Frege depsychologized logic, by excluding the psychological from it. The logical must bear no trace of the psychological, for if that were not so, there would be nothing that could be true or false—and so no judgment, no belief, no propositional attitude, as thoughts have subsequently come to be called. There would be in Thomas Rickett’s memorable words, merely “mooing.” The first person is consequently banished from the logical order, for a first person thought is constituted by the thinking of it. But in depsychologizing logic as he did, Frege seemed to have psychologized psychology. Thus, in speaking of the Investigations as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, I take it, Stanley meant that it seeks to undo what Frege did. However, this doesn’t mean undoing what Frege undid, that is, erasing the sharp boundary between the logical and the psychological, but rather to not cede the psychological to psychology: what the PI calls for is to further what Frege began, but, as it were, against Frege. In other words, Stanley saw Wittgenstein as reintroducing the first person as essential to the logical order, the order of what we think.

The Child’s Claim to the Transmission of Language

Sandra Laugier describes Stanley Cavell’s contribution to philosophy as the bringing back of the human voice into central consideration: “For Cavell, the stakes of ordinary language philosophy (particularly Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s work) are to make it understood that language is spoken; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life.” How can I then express my own voice when all of my expressions are those of others? In other words, how is it that a child becomes part of her or his form of life? How does she or he claim her or his own voice? Presenting the transmission of language this way implies another way of seeing what language is, what learning language is, and finally what subjectivity in language is.

For My Teacher, Stanley Cavell

I AM HONORED TO BE HERE, with members of the Cavell family, with friends and with colleagues, to celebrate the life and work of Stanley Cavell, to whom I owe inestimably large debts of gratitude and whom I remember with the greatest affection and admiration.
 Cavell’s role in my life was that of a philosophical parent. He is well known to have held that “philosophy is the education of grownups,” and the sort of parenting I am talking about involved opening the door of philosophy for my young adult self. This was not a matter of induction into a theoretical research program of the type that then already dominated academic philosophy. Cavell’s way was to prompt students to confront and interrogate our own intellectual responses, leading us to ask “why we do what we do, judge as we judge,” and positioning us to think for ourselves. This is a demanding pedagogical enterprise, and Cavell devoted singular amounts of time and energy to supporting the young thinkers around him. What I am going to recount is the story of two extraordinary things that he did as my teacher, circumstances all the more arresting in that I was not officially his student.

Editorial Comment

A year has elapsed since Stanley Cavell died, and in that time those who knew him and read his work, have been coming to terms with his permanent departure. For many it has not been easy, and part of this difficulty includes trying to say something in writing about what the loss has meant, or might entail, or perhaps better, what it stirs in us.

In Pursuit of 'Pursuits of Happiness'

A year after the publication in 1969 of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell observes in the elegant Preface he wrote for the 2001 edition, the effect on him, as he put it, “of putting the book behind me, or perhaps I should say, of having it to stand behind, freed me for I suppose the most productive, or palpably so, nine months of my life, in which I recast the salvageable and necessary material of my Ph.D. dissertation as the opening three parts of what would become The Claim of Reason and completed small books on film (The World Viewed) and Thoreau (The Senses of Walden). I consider those small books to form a trio with Must We Mean What We Say?, different paths leading from the same desire for philosophy.” If those three books form a trio, I take the fourth part of The Claim of Reason, completed in 1978, and Pursuits of Happiness, which in 1978 he was already writing, to form a duo—not, I would say, different paths leading from the same desire for philosophy, but from the trio’s achievement of philosophy.

Encountering Cavell in the College Classroom

When I received the invitation from David LaRocca to contribute to this special issue of Conversations, to commemorate and celebrate Stanley Cavell’s life and thought, I felt flummoxed, overwhelmed by the possibilities. There are so many different reasons I feel gratitude, deep gratitude, for Stanley, so many ways his writings and voice have left a profound mark on my intellectual development and career and even daily life. What text or moment or effect should I single out? Where to begin? Indeed, if I had not stumbled across Must We Mean What We Say? three years into graduate school, despairing, as I was at that time, of ever feeling at home in the academic world of literary studies (this was in the late ’90s in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where New Historicism was very much enjoying its heyday), I think there’s a good chance that I would never have finished my Ph.D. I had great respect for my teachers and peers, but as hard as I tried (and I did try very hard; after all, it felt like the very possibility of a career was at stake), I could not see myself reflected in their scholarly interests or outlooks.

Endlessly Responsible: Ethics as First Philosophy in Stanley Cavell’s Invocation of Literature

This essay aims to give an overview of the topic ethics and literature in Stanley Cavell’s complete oeuvre. It argues that Cavell’s preoccupation with literature is, from beginning to end, primarily ethical, even though he takes his point of departure in epistemological skepticism. Recent research on the affinities between Cavell’s early writing on Shakespearean tragedy and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas has helped to establish this but the question of how this part of Cavell’s work is related to his later development of Emersonian perfectionism is rarely touched upon. Consequently, this essay further argues that skepticism and perfectionism in Cavell’s thinking are two sides of one and the same ethics, which are bound together by the genre of romanticism. While Cavell’s work on skepticism is primarily concerned with the other, his work on perfectionism is primarily concerned with the self. Finally, this essay marks the point where Cavell’s and Levinas’ overall thinking part ways due to the fact that Cavell embraces Emersonian perfectionism.

Todd Haynes’ Melodramas of the Unknown Woman: Far From Heaven, Mildred Pierce, and Carol, and Stanley Cavell’s Film Ethics

On June 19, 2018, Stanley Cavell died; he was born September 1, 1926. His work on philosophy and film will remain relevant for a long time to come. The present essay, discussing Todd Haynes’ melodr...

Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.