Abstract
Stanley Cavell’s “ontology of film” is his way of expressing that in our experience of movies, we are both aware that we are perceiving nothing but flickering light on a screen yet also respond intellectually and emotionally as if we are experiencing real people, although in a world in which we cannot intervene. In his discussions of “comedies of remarriage” and “the melodrama of the unknown woman,” he argues that these movies are about what it is to grow into adult human beings who are free to love and who can accept the risks of loving another free human being.
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Notes
- 1.
Deborah Solomon, “Yet Another Shift in Perspective,” New York Times, Sunday, September 10, 2017, Arts and Leisure section, p. 84. The misplaced “not” is that of the author and the New York Times. I had settled on the title for this chapter before I came across D.N. Rodowick’s statement that “Cavell asks … what becomes of things (or people) on film”; see Rodowick, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 208. My point will be that what Cavell has to say about what becomes of things on film is only a way of leading up to what he has to say about what becomes of people in film.
- 2.
However, Cavell makes no claim that these are the only genres of movies that are worthy of such attention.
- 3.
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971); enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
- 4.
William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), Introduction, p. xiv.
- 5.
See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art: Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1984, Bollingen Series XXXV.33 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
- 6.
Moses Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody” (1761), in Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 131–68, at pp. 138–9; Adam Smith, “On the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the Imitative Arts,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1790), ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 176–213, e.g., p. 183.
- 7.
Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edition, p. 166.
- 8.
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, sixth edition [1785], ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Chapter II, vol. 1, p. 69.
- 9.
Cavell describes his own history of movie-going in the Preface and first chapter of The World Viewed and in his autobiography Little Did I Know (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
- 10.
For White’s own account of this period, see Morton G. White, A Philosopher’s Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
- 11.
Several of Cavell’s earliest papers concerned pragmatism, but he never republished these. When I once asked him why, he said to me that pragmatism had no sense of the tragic, a view that he later expressed in the Introduction to Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) by writing that “for my taste pragmatism misses the depth of human restiveness, or say misses the daily, insistent split in the self that being human cannot, without harm to itself (beyond moments of ecstasy) escape, and so pragmatism’s encouragement for me, while essential, is limited” (p. 5). In other words, pragmatism proceeds as if every problem can be solved, rather than recognizing that the insolubility of certain problems is a necessary condition of human life that cannot be successfully suppressed. What Cavell came to call “Emersonian perfectionism” is in this sense an alternative to the American pragmatist tradition exemplified by John Dewey.
- 12.
New York: Oxford University Press.
- 13.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; reprinted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
- 14.
Both New York: Viking.
- 15.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
- 16.
Albuquerque: Living Batch.
- 17.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 18.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 19.
For a brief but penetrating account of Cavell’s stance toward skepticism, see Timothy Gould, “Stanley Cavell: Survey of Thought,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 27–33, at pp. 27–8.
- 20.
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 168.
- 21.
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 28.
- 22.
See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 486, 491.
- 23.
In the contemporary typology of moral theories, if Cavell’s perfectionism is a version of neither utilitarianism or Kantianism, it must be a form of “virtue theory” or of “moral particularism.” But they too tend to assume that there is a right way to behave in every situation, even if that cannot be derived from a rule. Cavell’s perfectionism does not assume that.
- 24.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 13.
- 25.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 2.
- 26.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 3.
- 27.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 22.
- 28.
Cavell, The World Viewed, pp. 72–3.
- 29.
See Cavell, “Crossing Paths,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 361–82, at pp. 371–2. For a comment on auteur theory, see The World Viewed, p. 9.
- 30.
See Cavell, Contesting Tears, pp. 210–16, and Cities of Words, pp. 270, 275, 279.
- 31.
Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 102.
- 32.
Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912): 87–118, reprinted in his Æsthetics, ed. E.M. Wilkinson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957); the example is found there at pp. 93–4.
- 33.
See Boullough, “‘Psychical Distance’,” in Æsthetics, pp. 97–8.
- 34.
Edward Bullough, “The Modern Conception of Æsthetics,” in Æsthetics, pp. 87–9. For a more extended discussion of Bullough’s view, see Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. 3, pp. 150–7.
- 35.
Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 27.
- 36.
Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 28.
- 37.
Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 29.
- 38.
I owe this point in particular to Pamela Foa.
- 39.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 42.
- 40.
Cavell, Cities of Words, pp. 377–8.
- 41.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 381.
- 42.
Cavell, Contesting Tears, pp. 211–12.
- 43.
Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 281.
- 44.
See William Rothman, “Cavell and Film,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), vol. 2, pp. 33–9, at p. 35.
- 45.
My discussion on the risks inherent in freedom or what Cavell calls being or becoming human has been aided by analyses of The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth, and Othello by my wife Pamela Foa. I am also grateful for her careful reading of the whole chapter.
Bibliography
Books by Stanley Cavell
A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. 1994. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cavell on Film. 2003. Edited with an introduction by William Rothman. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. 2004. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. 1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. 1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. 1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; updated edition, In Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. 2003. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. 1988. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Little Did I Know. 2010. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Must We Mean What We Say? 1969. New York: Scribner’s Sons.
Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. 1995. Oxford: Blackwell.
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. 2005. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. 1981. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy. 1979. New York: Oxford University Press.
The Senses of Walden. 1972. New York: Viking; expanded edition. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. 1971. New York: Viking; enlarged edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. 1984. San Francisco: North Point Press.
This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. 1989. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press.
Secondary Sources
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2009. Stanley Cavell zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag.
Crary, Alice, and Stanford Shieh, eds. 2006. Reading Cavell. London: Routledge.
Eldridge, Richard, ed. 2003. Stanley Cavell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eldridge, Richard, and Bernard Rhie, eds. 1989. Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Fischer, Michael. 1989. Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fleming, Richard. 1993. The State of Philosophy: An Invitation to a Reading in Three Parts of Stanley Cavell’s the Claim of Reason. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Goodman, Russell, ed. 2005. Contending with Cavell. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gould, Timothy. 1998. Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2014. Stanley Cavell: Survey of Thought. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, vol. 6, 2nd ed., 27–33. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Mulhall, Stephen. 1994. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Rodowick, D[avid] N[orman]. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2015. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rothman, William. 2014. Cavell and Film. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics ed. Michael Kelly, 2nd ed., 6 vols, vol. 2, 33–9. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Guyer, P. (2019). Stanley Cavell: What Becomes of People on Film?. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_15
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