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Reviewed by:
  • Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory
  • R. M. Berry
Stanley Cavell. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. 584 pp.

Stanley Cavell’s autobiography, Little Did I Know, will appeal differently to different audiences and will do so in different stretches of its nearly 590 pages. To become deeply engaged by the first seven of its fourteen parts, almost its first half, one must either be engaged already by Cavell’s work, making the story of his relations with his musical mother and disappointed father a fulfillment of promises scattered throughout his philosophical and critical writings, or one must be convinced of his life’s representativeness, its version of the American artist and intellectual’s journey from bewilderment to self-founding. As an exemplary tale of rebirths, false starts, and continual returnings, the account of how Atlanta-born jazz musician Stan Goldstein gradually becomes UCLA philosophy student Stanley Cavell comprises a romance as capacious and improbable as those found in classic American fiction, and so readers not otherwise engaged by Cavell’s philosophy or criticism should still feel its, or find their own, grip.

However, with Cavell’s 1951 arrival at Harvard in part 8, engagement with his story only requires curiosity about the major cultural developments of the late twentieth century. This second half of his autobiography, already sketched in Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason, recounts [End Page 387] how Cavell found himself struggling to write a scholarly dissertation on Kant’s theory of action, claimed by but out of sync with analytic philosophy’s austere reductions, when J. L. Austin arrived at Harvard in the spring of 1955. By this point in the text, Cavell’s abrupt digressions, in both his life and narrative, have become integral, if not quite commonplace, so his struggle to re-conceive himself yet again while an assistant professor at Berkeley in the late fifties, slowly finding expression for the qualities of Austin’s writing that had made other contemporary philosophy seem stale, is hardly a shock. However, this new beginning differs from its predecessors, not only because all to follow will follow from it, making it Cavell’s beginning in truth, but also because it will lead, if not at once, then inevitably, to Little Did I Know, comprising his philosophical path as that of autobiography: “Like linguistics and poetry, Austin’s philosophizing, I felt, allowed me—demanded of me I would say—the use of myself as the source of its evidence or the measure of its effect” (322). Or as Cavell almost says, one answer to the question of what comprises the problem of philosophy would be, “I am I” (364), if one knew when to say it, or who could, or what saying it means (cf. Claim of Reason, 389–90).

Moving from Harvard to Berkeley to Harvard in the fifties and sixties, Cavell’s story includes Robert Lowell, Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, W.V.O. Quine, John Rawls, Terrence Malick, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, often in brief, but sometimes extended and vivid, episodes. Its principal setting, the urban landscapes of northern California and Cambridge and the contemporary social and cultural scenes on each coast, provides background for Cavell’s intellectual companionship with Thomas Kuhn, decisive meeting with Michael Fried, musical conversations with John and Rose Mary Harbison, and eventual discovery with Thompson Clark of “the truth of skepticism.” But its overarching theme is the struggle to write, to give fit expression to Cavell’s transformation, first by Austin’s, but decisively by Wittgenstein’s, philosophy. One often receives the impression, explicit in Cavell’s meditative asides and self-reflections, that the time of his writing, the history contemporary with it, has had a very complicated, at times contentious, relationship with its chronology.

In part 8, Cavell recounts how he was forever changed when, at age thirty-seven in the summer of 1964, he participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer at Tugaloo College outside of Jackson. Having been rejected for military service in World War II due to an ear injury, he felt that he had missed the formative experience of his generation, that...

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