How to Do Things with a Life

In a time when memoirs by celebrities and survivors of all sorts of personal setbacks and cultural catastrophes dominate bookstores, Kindles, and Nooks, one wonders how to value the autobiography of a philosopher. The personal voice and private experience are not part of the conventional domain open to philosophy because by necessity, or so the argument goes, the personal risks being merely anecdotal, its authority or scope made suspect by the stain of subjectivity. Besides, philosophers rarely live lives that could compete with other memoirists in terms of glamor or derring-do. As intrepid and brilliant as the thinking they produce might be, the lives of philosophers tend to be interesting merely in all the ordinary ways. Yet, it should offer really no great surprise that Stanley Cavell, who has come to be one of the most influential of contemporary American philosophers, would turn, as he has done in his most recent book, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, to memoir. For decades, Cavell’s subject has been the ordinary, what Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cavell’s intellectual polestar, would call “the near, the low, the common.” Since the publication of his first book, the collection of essays entitled Must We Mean What We Say (1969) or his magisterial The Claim of Reason (1979), which was a revision and amplification of his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, Cavell has insisted on the centrality of such elements as style, voice, and the shared sense of the problematics of language as self-representation and expression as a variety of factors involved in how people think about thinking and speaking. Even his ongoing and persistent use of “I” and “we” in the pursuit of testing metaphysical concepts against personal experiences would make a memoir seem an inevitable step for this philosophical writer. And in 1994 he published Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, his initial foray—call them philosophical sketches—into thinking philosophically about autobiography, or thinking autobiographically about philosophy. In Cavell’s view, these are not disconnected activities. According to his admirers, Cavell provides compelling insights in his efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life rather than strictly within specialized discourse and strict dictates of logic. For those who are wary, if not outright suspicious, of the possibilities of the autobiographical, Cavell’s memoir may not prove persuasive. Yet, Cavell himself would say the grounds for resistance can be revelatory of how values are formed and enacted. To say why one isn’t persuaded is to be forced to articulate the assumptions of value that prevent agreeing with his conclusions or provoke dissensus. This reflection upon the mechanisms of value is itself a philosophical endeavor worth interrogating on both sides of the divide.

Throughout his career, Cavell has turned writing back upon itself so as to test the presumptions that constellate around language use and to bring out latent implications of thinking that aren’t beyond questioning even if we rarely do put pressure on them. “What hope is there in a book about a book?” asks the opening question of Stanley Cavell’s Senses of Walden (1972), his landmark book-length essay demonstrating that Henry David Thoreau provides a model for a particularly American form of philosophy, a form which is, thus, an alternative to the conventions of traditional philosophical discourse. In light of Cavell’s memoir, (and if Walden is philosophy it is also memoir) we might similarly ask, “what hope is there in a book about a philosopher’s life?” With Cavell’s original query as in this restatement in light of his memoir, there are two ways of hearing this question. In the first, it is a challenge that calls to mind the sort of wondering about first principles of criticism that largely go often unsaid and even unthought in academic circles because no sufficient skepticism enters in to put pressure. Yet, what Cavell asks isn’t the sort of question that anti-intellectually dismisses analytic processes of what we might simply call the life of the...