40 The New York ReviewThe Hum of Humanity
Christopher Benfey
Here and There: Sites of Philosophy
by Stanley Cavell,
edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary,
and Sandra Laugier.
Harvard University Press,
326 pp., $29.95Little Did I Know:
Excerpts from Memory
by Stanley Cavell.
Stanford University Press,
557 pp., $40.00Why do certain experiences lodge in
our memories while others—more tri-
umphant perhaps, or more traumatic—
leave barely a trace? In his memoir,
Little Did I Know, the philosopher and
cultural critic Stanley Cavell records an
odd event from his childhood. His par-
ents—his mother was a gifted pianist
who played in vaudeville theaters and
accompanied silent films, his father a
Polish immigrant who worked in pawn-
shops and jewelry stores before the De-
pression—had embarked with Stanley,
their only child, on the first of three
failed attempts to establish a better life
in Sacramento, returning each time, in
defeat, to their home in Atlanta. Pok-
ing around a vacant lot behind a Sac-
ramento gas station, Cavell, nine years
old at the time, found a glass jar with a
rusted lid punched with holes, presum-
ably to keep fireflies from suffocating.
“I unscrewed the cap,” Cavell recalls,and filled the jar with one of each
different thing or creature I came
across in the field, a twig, crum-
bling leaves, assorted bugs, various
kinds of stones, perhaps a marble,
a gum or candy wrapper, a soda
bottle cap, a piece of torn tennis
ball, to which I added a penny and
a duplicate stamp from my collec-
tion, enclosed in a folded envelope,
which I found in my pocket.After stowing the jar beneath a clump
of trees, Cavell was surprised to hear
“a faint low hum as if produced by the
ground,” at a frequency he was con-
vinced he alone could hear.
“What,” Cavell wonders, “keeps
the memory of this small, isolated set
of events coming back, perhaps every
other year?” It’s a question that he
doesn’t fully answer. The jar and its
enigmatic contents may seem to sug-
gest a time capsule or, with envelope
and stamp, a message in a bottle to
Cavell’s future self. “If I say now that
I was burying my life,” he remarks,
“perhaps to preserve it for some time
in which it might be lived, or chosen, I
need not imply that these are thoughts
I could have formulated then.” But it’s
hard not to see the buried jar with its
mysterious hum as a metaphor for the
subterranean workings of memory
itself.
Unpacking such memories eventu-
ally acquired some urgency for Cavell.
Both Little Did I Know (first published
in 2010) and many of the twenty- five
relatively short essays (including trib-
utes to teachers and colleagues, re-
flections on psychoanalysis, and a
substantial clutch of writings on music)
gathered in the posthumous collection
Here and There reflect the increasinglyautobiographical turn in Cavell’s later
work, as though getting such memories
right might help elucidate his extraor-
dinarily varied philosophical interests.
Cavell, who died in 2018, was the
Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthet-
ics and the General Theory of Value
at Harvard from 1963 until his retire-
ment in 1997. Despite belonging to one
of the most prestigious philosophy de-
partments in the world, he cultivated a
posture of professional unease. “What
I do,” he remarked in a retrospective
essay in 1992, included in Here and
There, “has sometimes been denied the
title of philosophy, or deplored under
that title.” Cavell published dazzling
books on unorthodox philosophical
subjects ranging from Shakespearean
tragedy to Hollywood screwball com-
edies—a subset of which he identi-
fied, in Pursuits of Happiness (1981),
as “comedies of remarriage,” in which
women demand equal status with their
husbands. Beginning with The Senses
of Walden (1972), Cavell also sought
to promote his fellow mavericks Henry
David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson—dismissed as intellectual
lightweights among his professorial
peers—as the towering founding fig-
ures of American philosophy. That
Friedrich Nietzsche was “pervasively
indebted” to Emerson was evidence
enough, in Cavell’s view, of Emerson’s
significance in modern philosophy.
The philosopher Richard Rorty
called Cavell “the least defended, the
gutsiest, the most vulnerable” of phi-
losophy professors. “He sticks his neck
out farther than any of the rest of us”
in questioning the foundations of phi-
losophy and the motivations of phi-losophers. Recalling “the old saw that
philosophers kick up dust and then
complain that they cannot see,” Rorty
said that Cavell’s work asks:What compels them to kick up all
that dust?... Why do philosophers
go in for skepticism? Why do they
ask whether the table is really
there, whether you might turn
out to be a robot, whether you see
what I see when we simultaneously
remark the deep vermilion in the
rose?Cavell risked his reputation not only
in his adventurous scholarship, but in
his support of students demanding a
black studies program at Harvard in- Five years earlier, he had partic-
ipated in the Freedom Summer drive
for voting rights, teaching at Tougaloo
College in Mississippi, which he called
a “transfiguring moment in my experi-
ence.” He was also a cofounder of the
Harvard Film Archive in 1979, at a time
when the academic study of film had a
low profile in American universities.
Born Stanley Goldstein in Atlanta
in 1926—as a teenager he adopted an
Anglicized version of his family’s Pol-
ish name of Kavelieruskii— Cavell re-
sembled in certain ways his brilliant
contemporaries William H. Gass and
Susan Sontag. All three were trained in
academic philosophy during the 1950s,
the heyday of the rivalry between the
more humanistic “continental” phi-
losophy (centered in Germany and
France) and the more scientific “ana-
lytic” philosophy in the US and GreatBritain. All three came under the in-
fluence of “ordinary language” philos-
ophy, the conviction, derived from the
Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin and
the later phase of Ludwig Wittgen-
stein’s work, that a promising way to
address such traditional philosophical
problems as the nature of justice or
how we know that another person is in
pain is to examine the ways in which
we habitually talk about such things.
Gass studied briefly with Wittgenstein
at Cornell; Sontag attended Austin’s
lectures at Oxford; Cavell described
working with Austin at Harvard as a
“conversion experience.”
A deeper bond is that all three as-
piring philosophers were practicing
artists. Gass and Sontag wrote ambi-
tious fiction alongside their unortho-
dox philosophical treatments of, say,
the color blue (Gass) or photography
(Sontag). Cavell, by contrast, tried to
bring the arts into philosophy, not only
as a subject but as a mode of writing. “I
have wished to understand philosophy
not as a set of problems but as a set of
texts,” he wrote on the opening page
of his magisterial The Claim of Rea-
son, a book that incorporates much of
his Ph.D. dissertation on Wittgenstein.
In treating Wittgenstein and Austin,
Emerson and Thoreau, Nietzsche and
Martin Heidegger more as “creative
thinker[s]” than as solvers of prob-
lems, Cavell acknowledged, dryly, that
“both historians and non- historians
of the subject are given to suppose
otherwise.”
Music, which he considered “as old
among my cultural practices as read-
ing words or telling time,” was the art
form Cavell knew best, even as his own
musical life was laced with trauma:
he believed that his mother had given
up a concert career to raise him, and
the piano lessons he took as a child
were interrupted (as he revealed in
Little Did I Know) when he was sex-
ually molested by a male teacher. As
a teenager, he gravitated to the clar-
inet and saxophone, playing in swing
bands to make money. He enrolled
at Berkeley at sixteen to study music,
then pursued a degree in composition
at Juilliard, submitting with his appli-
cation a clarinet sonata and incidental
music for a campus production of King
Lear.
Changing his name—“declaring the
search for a life I could want, not merely
endure, in America”—was one step to-
ward independence; another was aban-
doning music. His original work “had
its moments,” he realized, “but on the
whole I did not love it; it said next to
nothing I could, or wished to, believe.”
In what he called “the major intellec-
tual, or spiritual, crisis of my life,” he
decided that his career as a musician
was over^1 :Stanley Cavell; illustration by Oliver Munday(^1) The phrase is from “Reflections on
Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke.”
The essay was written at my invitation,
for a 2003 symposium commemorating
the sixtieth anniversary of the wartime
gatherings, known as “Pontigny- en-
Amérique,” when European artists
and intellectuals in exile met with their
American counterparts on the Mount
Holyoke College campus. Knowing
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