Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Stanley Cavell

by Stanley Cavell

An autobiography in the form of a philosophical diary, Little Did I Know 's underlying motive is to describe the events of a life that produced the kind of writing associated with Stanley Cavell's name. Cavell recounts his journey from early childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, through musical studies at UC Berkeley and Julliard, his subsequent veering off into philosophy at UCLA, his Ph.D. studies at Harvard, and his half century of teaching. Influential people from various fields figure prominently or in passing over the course of this memoir. J.L. Austin, Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Lowell, Rogers Albritton, Seymour Shifrin, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, W. V. O. Quine, and Jacques Derrida are no longer with us; but Cavell also pays homage to the Michael Fried, John Harbison, Rose Mary Harbison, Kurt Fischer, Milton Babbitt, Thompson Clarke, John Hollander, Hilary Putnam, Sandra Laugier, Belle Randall, and Terrence Malick. The drift of his narrative also registers the decisiveness of the relatively unknown and the purely accidental. Cavell's life has produced a trail of some eighteen published books that range from treatments of individual writers like Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger, Shakespeare, and Beckett to studies in aesthetics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, cinema, opera, and religion.

Genres: Philosophy, Literature, Memoir

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Stanley Cavell 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.

Reviews

[James Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a memoir by a retired Harvard philosophy professor. I've never met him, but have read a few of his books. His highly cultured and literary style is not mine, but I have benefited from his work. I partly read the book with the hope of hearing stories about famous philosophers. In particular he was a good friend and colleague of Rogers Albritton, who left Harvard in 1972 to teach at UCLA, where I had him for several seminars and on my dissertation committee. It was from Rogers that we learned about Cavell's work. Last year I read an on-line blogged autobiography by another philosopher from about the same generation and an overlapping academic circle--Robert Paul Wolff. Wolff knew both men somewhat and described/contrasted them as follows:
"[Cavell] was very much a presence during the years I knew him in Cambridge, a burly, balding man with blond hair whose aura seemed to fill a good deal more space than his mere body. All of us looked forward with a slightly malicious anticipation to the moment when he and Rogers Albritton would first meet. They were equally brilliant, equally tortured and complicated, equally incapable of adopting or stating a philosophical position straight out, without doubling back on it, viewing it from an ironic distance, undercutting it, and then reaffirming it. But it was as though Rogers was Stanley turned inside out. The more Stanley expanded to fill all the available ego space, the more Rogers shrank into himself. It was a little as though Walt Whitman were to encounter Emily Dickinson."
I don't know about the accuracy of the contrast, since I don't know Cavell, but it rings true for Albritton. This comparison helps me see why I was attracted to Rogers, and suggests I would have had difficulty warming to Cavell. Cavell didn't have as much to say about Rogers as I had hoped.
Cavell chose to write this memoir as a sort of journal extending from July 2, 2003, to September 1, 2004, with dated entries ranging from a few to several pages. While this might have started with a purpose (relating the present circumstances to the past), this did not seem to operate for long. It seemed more to offer breaks to move on to other topics. It also permitted an undisciplined approach to chronology that produced more confusion and repetition than seemed necessary. The oddity of the approach came out when it became clear (he said as much) that he went back a few years later and corrected or elaborated sections, but did not change the entry dates and left the archeological evidence of the earlier version. E.g., illustrating this point as well as his writing style (p. 480): "The day before they left us, Claude visited Rene Char at his house in a neighboring village. I was about to say it was Cavaillon, but that is too big and bustling a place, where market day brought forth melons enough to sweeten the palates of parched multitudes. So is Carpentras too big. The other names that still register with me are Goult, Apt, and Bonnieux. (I have, after a happy search, just turned up the name of the reasonably neighboring village that Char was born in, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorge.)" This reminds me of an anecdote (though I'm still trying to remember the source) about a reasonably wealthy man in the past who could not find his umbrella and sent a servant to a neighbor's house with a note along the following lines:
"Dear So-and-so,
I cannot seem to find my umbrella and I have a feeling that I may have inadvertantly left it at your residence when last I visited there. If so, would you please give it to the man who delivered this note.
Many thanks,
Such-and-such.
P.S., I just found the umbrella in question, so please ignore the above request."
It was interesting to find that a tenured professor at Harvard could feel hurt that his work provoked little positive response for many years, as he tells it. I suppose these things are relative. One of the things Cavell reflects on in his work is for whom one is writing, or talking, and how we can have a claim to make the claims we do. I have recently published a book, and it is weird to await but get rather little response--as though one gave a long speech only to then notice that no one was paying attention, or that many people heard but have nothing to say in response. My wife is a preacher, and I have preached several sermons myself. In a typical mainstream Protestant church there is no response to a sermon--no vocal response during the sermon, and often no (substantive) response afterward. It can be as though no one was listening. And if one said some such things in a supposed conversation and got no reply that would be very strange. You have laid yourself bare, and others just stare. My sermons have nearly all been given in a smallish Black church where call-and-response is not automatic but is possible. And I always try to provoke such response. But there does not seem to be anything comparable in publication. So one waits. (Well, in this internet age, I do have 2 on-line reviews, 2 Goodreads reviews, and 2 Amazon reviews.)
Addendum: I finally found the anecdote about the umbrella. Well, it was actually about a razor and an Irishman--see Philip Jourdain, The Philosophy of Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll: With an Appendix of Leading Passages from Certain Other Works., p. 71.
Addendum 2: Now I see a version of the umbrella anecdote as a meme: Now it is about a cane in a note by Marcel Proust.

[Benjjmyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

comforting

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cavell quotes Emerson saying "every word they say chagrins us" and Wittgenstein saying "this is simply what I do" several times in this book, which I found soothing.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tell me another story, Grandpa!

[jeremiah]

"It is obvious enough to me that something moving me to think philosophically, more characteristically than in the case of the philosophers I have grown up with, is less an impulse to refute a text that attracts me than it is to read it differently from the way it seems to ask, but asks. This has not seemed to me to be an avoidance of the argument of the text but an alternative way of engaging it, a way of creating a future in which we both, the text and I, learn something about ourselves."