Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary

by Stephen Mulhall

This is the first full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not fully appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's ordinary-language philosophy and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the skeptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn toward a species of moral perfectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies.

Genres: Philosophy

378 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 1994

Reviews

[Paul Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic introduction to Cavell. The author conveys the subtlety and depth of Cavell's explorations with great clarity, sympathy and sensitivity. Before reading it, I had never particularly liked or appreciated Cavell, but now I can see why he does what he does and how impressively he does it. The book's aim is to make you read Cavell for yourself, but its achievement is more than that, since it gives you an excellent overview of his endeavours - something that even with hours of study you might not have achieved in the same way. A city guidebook could never claim to be more interesting or more important than the city itself, but it offers not just a faster way to get to know the city but also something that can help you experience the city in a richer and deeper way.

[Mandel]

Reading Stanley Cavell carries with it a pretty hefty opportunity cost. His writing is verbose, densely allusive, and often maddeningly digressive. Over the years, I've dipped into various of his lectures and essays, and found enough insights in them to make me curious to know more. However, I just couldn't bring myself to work through the foundational works of his corpus - Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason. Doing so would, I knew, require great amounts of time and effort that I wasn't confident were worth devoting to them.

Then, last year I set myself the task of teaching Cavell's influential essay on Samuel Beckett - "Ending the Waiting Game" - in a seminar I was to teach on Beckett and philosophy. Once I put in the time to unlock this essay well enough to teach it to advanced undergrads, I found it to be an incredibly insightful take on my favorite writer. So, I decided to take another crack at Cavell's most influential works.

Mulhall's book has been my main starting point for doing so. It provides an incredibly useful overview of Cavell's work, and how the very wide range of topics it covers - Wittgenstein, Emerson, Heidegger, skepticism, literature, film, social contract theory, aesthetics, and more - all fit together into a single, coherent project. By Mulhall's own admission, the vast majority of his book is devoted to explication rather than criticism, but in this capacity it does an excellent job - a foot in the door to reading Cavell.

There are a few downsides to this book. First, Mulhall's sentences are consistently far too long and complex. For seasoned readers of philosophy, think here of the prose of other Wittgenstein-influenced Oxbridge philosophers of the late 20th century: e.g. Dummett, Pears, or Baker & Hacker. In this respect, Mulhall was channeling his subject's writing style a bit too much. Second, this is not a book that is likely to be helpful for non-philosophers, or even philosophers without a basic training in analytic philosophy. I would say that without at least an undergraduate-level background in radical skepticism, Wittgenstein, Kantian moral philosophy, meta-ethics, and Rawlsian contractarianism, this book will go over your head. Fortunately, all of these are bread and butter topics in most analytically-oriented philosophy departments, so if you were a philosophy major in such a department, you're probably well-prepared to profit from reading it.

Lastly, Mulhall only devotes the penultimate chapter of the book to criticizing Cavell, and his criticisms are fairly narrow, focusing on Cavell's inheritance of Christian thought. It was an intriguing read, and foreshadows some of Mulhall's later work, but you might be disappointed if you expect Mulhall to undertake a more comprehensive critique of Cavell's overall philosophical outlook. However, Mulhall's mastery of Cavell's corpus is pretty magisterial, so I take this only to have been a minor drawback to the book.