May 12, 2022 41And there came a late afternoon,
not more than six or seven weeks
after beginning classes for the
spring semester, an ending of the
Juilliard school day still turning
dark by six o’clock, on which I
formed the thought—I remem-
ber marking the moment by star-
ing upward, as I was standing on
a crowded Broadway bus headed
downtown after a late afternoon
class, at the chipped and scorched
plastic cover of one in the two rows
of lights extending the length of
the sides of the low ceiling of the
bus—that I would not be returning
to Juilliard.Downtown meant the movie theaters
where Cavell was discovering an art
form he could believe in. The bus ride
as he describes it has a distinctly cine-
matic feel, like the bus that represents
freedom for a runaway bride in It
Happened One Night, one of the films
about personal declarations of inde-
pendence that he discussed in Pursuits
of Happiness.After leaving Juilliard “a lost young
musician,” and combing through
Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psy-
choanalysis to try to find a way out of
his emotional crisis, Cavell returned to
California to resume his studies before
entering graduate school in philosophy
at Harvard. In the spring of 1955, he at-
tended Austin’s seminar on excuses (the
basis for Austin’s celebrated essay “A
Plea for Excuses”). Listening to Aus-
tin, who happened to be an amateur
violinist, tease out “the difference be-
tween doing something by mistake and
by accident and the difference between
a sheer or mere or pure or simple mis-
take or accident,” Cavell experienced
“a sense of revelation.”^2 The intellectual
exercises in Austin’s classes, meant to
reveal the precision built into ordinaryspoken language, “acquired the serious-
ness and playfulness—the continuous
mutuality—that I had counted on in
musical performance.”
The ways that ordinary language can
shed light on our everyday lives struck
Cavell as having a particular relevance
for the arts. The music he had com-
posed for a Berkeley production of King
Lear paled for him when compared to
the expressive impact of Shakespeare’s
text, with Lear’s shocking demand for
proof of his daughters’ love. The re-
sult was Cavell’s landmark essay “The
Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King
Lear.” Cavell argued that certainty of
the kind that Lear, a mouthpiece for
skepticism, asks of his daughters, or
Othello of his wife, is not available in
human affairs, and that demands for
certainty lead inevitably to tragedy. As
an alternative, Cavell offered what he
called acknowledgment, our everyday,
trusting substitute for certainty. He
later summed up the distinction in an
aphorism: “The eye teaches skepticism;
the eyelid teaches faith.”
In essays on six of Shakespeare’s
plays, collected in Disowning Knowl-
edge (1987), Cavell took his prompt-
ings from the words on the page,
puzzling out the various ways in which
Shakespeare examined doubt and cer-
tainty. Cavell insisted that he was not
enlisting the plays as illustrations of
familiar philosophical ideas. “The mis-
understanding of my attitude that most
concerned me,” he wrote,was to take my project as the ap-
plication of some philosophically
independent problematic of skep-
ticism to a fragmentary parade of
Shakespearean texts, impressing
those texts into the service of illus-
trating philosophical conclusions
known in advance.In Cavell’s experience, this was pre-
cisely how philosophers tended to ap-
proach works of art. In Here and There,
he laments that the questions that “the
Anglo- American dispensation of phi-
losophy... characteristically addresses
to artistic entities neither arise from
nor are answered by passages of inter-
pretation of those entities.” In Little
Did I Know, he singles out John Dew-
ey’s Art as Experience as a typical ex-
ample of aesthetic cluelessness, asking
why “it so often seems that philosophi-
cal treatments of the fact and of objects
of art... were so often less interesting,
philosophically and aesthetically, than
the objects they were about.” The best
criticism should aspire to the status of
art, Cavell claimed: “Describing one’s
experience of art is itself a form of art.”
It was in the best film journalism
(James Agee, André Bazin) and in
the New Criticism that Cavell found
the interpretive energies he was look-
ing for. What literary critics like Wil-
liam Empson and Kenneth Burke were
doing, he wrote, “remained to my mind
incomparably more interesting, and in-
deed intellectually more accurate, than
the competing provisions of analytical
philosophy.” In a foreword (included
in Here and There) to a new edition of
Northrop Frye’s A Natural Perspective:
The Development of Shakespearean
Comedy and Romance, a decisive in-
fluence on his own work on comedies
of remarriage, Cavell recounts his first
encounter with Frye’s Anatomy of Crit-
icism, and his conviction—ultimately
disappointed—that Frye’s brilliant workon literary genres and modes would
“have some unanticipated perspective
on those presentations of writing held to
do the work of philosophy.”
Cavell’s writing about art is grounded
in his sheer gratitude for its existence.
Calling it “a fruitful aesthetic tip,”
he quoted Wittgenstein’s injunction:
“Don’t take it as a matter of course, but
as a remarkable fact, that pictures and
fictitious narratives give us pleasure,
occupy our minds.” In an early essay on
atonal music, he stressed our intimacy
with works of art:Objects of art not merely interest
and absorb, they move us; we are
not merely involved with them,
but concerned with them, and care
about them; we treat them in spe-
cial ways, invest them with a value
which normal people otherwise re-
serve only for other people—and
with the same kind of scorn and
outrage. They mean something to
us, not just the way statements do,
but the way people do.Cavell rarely succumbed to scorn.
When he did, as in his withering assess-
ment of a scene in the film version of
Goodbye, Columbus, the context—in
this case the use of slow motion—was
often one of celebration:It may not have needed Leni
Riefenstahl to discover the sheer
objective beauty in drifting a diver
through thin air, but her combina-
t ion of t hat w it h a ser ie s of c ut s sy n-
copated on the rising arc of many
dives, against the sun, took inspi-
ration.... You’d think everybody
would have the trick in his bag by
now: for a fast touch of lyricism,
throw in a slow- motion shot of a
body in free fall. But as recently as
Goodbye Columbus, the trick was
blown: we are given slow motion of
Ali MacGraw swimming. But ordi-
nary swimming is already in slow
motion, and to slow it further and
indiscriminately only thickens it.
It’s about the only thing you can do
to good swimming to make it ugly.Cavell wrote about film, theater,
television, literature, and photography.
Only rarely did he write about music,
the art form he knew best. And then—
after twenty years in which, as he put
it, he “avoided the issue,” presumably
because of the trauma associated with
quitting Juilliard—he suddenly took it
up again. “The group [of texts] whose
emergence most surprised me,” he
wrote in a draft preface for Here and
There in 2001, when he had tentatively
selected most of pieces included in the
volume,^3 “is that of the four pieces on
music.” These essays (a fifth was added
later) are short but they are not slight.
They aim to be “proposals,” “alterna-
tive routes of response” and “suggested
line[s] of investigation” for nothing less
than a new philosophy of music, “a way
to envision what a philosophy of music
should be, one which is itself illumi-
nated by musical procedure.”
What it shouldn’t be, Cavell makes
clear, is a philosophy that replicatesthe weird split between math and meta-
physics, close technical analysis and
broad cultural or ideological back-
ground, that one finds in too much
writing about music, “as though music
has never quite become one of the facts
of life.” Having spent so many years
listening for shifts of tone and pitch in
ordinary language, Cavell found inspi-
ration in Wittgenstein’s remark, quoted
repeatedly in Here and There, that “un-
derstanding a sentence is much more
akin to understanding a theme in music
than one may think.”
Cavell is particularly impatient with
Theodor Adorno’s work, which he
finds insufficiently responsive to actual
musical experience. He concedes that
Adorno is, “like it or not, the thinker of
his generation, extending to the pres-
ent, who has most successfully made a
claim to have presented a philosophy
of music,” but finds Adorno’s claims
about particular pieces unconvincing.
He is puzzled by Adorno’s histrionic
assertion, for example, that the first
movement of Mahler’s Ninth Sym-
phony combines in some unspecified
way a sense of “constricted breath-
ing” with the movement of “a coffin in
a slow cortège.” How exactly, Cavell
asks, “does the connection of a diffi-
culty in breathing with the gait of a fu-
neral march capture the experience” of
listening to Mahler’s music?
In order to develop a satisfactory
philosophy of music, Cavell remarks,
“musicians and philosophers will have
to spend considerably more time to-
gether than they have become used
to.” He resists any philosophical in-
tervention that precedes actually lis-
tening to the music, whether it is one
of Adorno’s sweeping generalizations
about Schoenberg (“the decline of art
in a false order is itself false”) or the
musicologist Peter Kivy’s claim that
unless one is familiar with Descartes’s
theory of the emotions, Mozart’s Ido-
meneo will seem “out of tune with our
psychological reality.” To Cavell, this
is no more useful than researching the
four humors in order to understand the
emotions expressed in Othello. Listen-
ing to a quartet of voices from Mozart’s
opera, Cavell comments, “Surely I am
not alone in finding its projection of
isolation even in the grip of common
suffering... to be drop- dead convinc-
ing.” To Cavell’s ear, a particular “rage
aria to end all rages” in Idomeneo is ac-
tually “far ahead of” Descartes in the
way it links, by an unexpected plunge
below the expected tonic, the emotions
of rage and melancholy.As he explored new ways of thinking
about music and the other arts, Cavell
was also experimenting with alterna-
tive ways of writing. In his later prose,
two voices, two styles, are seemingly
in conflict. One is a cascading, self-
referential river of clauses, most notori-
ously in the nearly page- long question
that opens The Claim of Reason:If not at the beginning of Wittgen-
stein’s later philosophy, since what
starts philosophy is no more to be
known at the outset than how to
make an end of it; and if not at the
opening of Philosophical Investi-
gations, since its opening is not to
be confused with the starting of the
philosophy it expresses, and since
the terms in which that opening
might be understood can hardly bethat Cavell had studied with the com-
poser Roger Sessions, one of the orig-
inal Pontigny participants, I invited
him to draw on his own memories of
Sessions, which he charmingly did in
recalling a disaster averted when, with
Sessions conducting his first opera,
The Trial of Lucullus, set to a Bertolt
Brecht text, Cavell “overcame a crisis
in the middle of the opening night’s
performance, transposing an English
horn solo on the clarinet when the
English horn suddenly broke down.”
Cavell’s essay on Stevens, another Pon-
tigny participant, turns on the theme of
anticipation in Stevens’s work, with a
nod toward Thoreau. Stevens’s famous
poem “Anecdote of the Jar” is in the
background, I believe, of his own anec-
dote of a buried jar.(^2) A famous footnote from “A Plea for
Excuses” turns on this distinction:
“You have a donkey, so have I, and they
graze in the same field. The day comes
when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go
to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the
brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the
victim, and find to my horror that it is
your donkey. I appear on your door-
step with the remains and say—what?
‘I say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry, etc.,
I’ve shot your donkey by accident’? Or
‘by mistake’? Then again, I go to shoot
my donkey as before, draw a bead on
it, fire—but as I do so, the beasts move,
and to my horror yours falls. Again the
scene on the doorstep—what do I say?
‘By mistake’? Or ‘by accident’?”
(^3) The editors added a few “thematically
congenial pieces written after 2001”
while omitting texts Cavell subse-
quently published in other books.
Benfey 40 42 .indd 41 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 20 PM