A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises.

Stanley Cavell is among the very few philosophers in America to have achieved a major reputation primarily through writing on the arts, and perhaps the only one to have evolved a prose style that has something of the character of artistic expression in its own right, however exasperating it is at times to read, and however difficult it often is to extract from its involutions, its switchbacks, its arpeggios, sudden riffs, and hip-hop cadences, a thesis one can walk away with and make one's own. Although Cavell was trained as a musician and for a time aspired to become a composer--his writings at their best seem to me to have the quality of inspired improvisation, though they also, at times, read as if he were desperately noodling until inspiration struck--his main subject has been film or, more exactly, the movies, about which he writes with verve, originality, and a kind of willed outrageousness. The culmination of his serious impudence was an essay in a book devoted to the so-called Hollywood screwball comedy, in which he protracted a parallel between It Happened One Night and the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten of Immanuel Kant, which could have brought two sides of his intellectual character, film buff and metaphysical moralist, into a kind of unity had it succeeded--had it ever been thought capable of succeeding by anyone but him.

Cavell's sensibility as a thinker is thoroughly saturated by what one might call movie culture. The overall relationship in which he stands to the star philosophers in his own intellectual firmament, for example, is essentially that of a fan: he is a Wittgenstein fan, a Nietzsche fan, just as he is an Alfred Hitchcock and a Groucho Marx fan, but also, which is rarer, both for the form of the relationship and its target, a fan of Emerson and of Thoreau. His style itself is so personal, so confessional and confiding, so caught up with the history of his enthusiasms and his disaffections, that it is often difficult to segregate doctrine from autobiography. More than any philosopher I know of, Cavell requires as a condition of reading him that one relive with him the history of his philosophical and esthetic crushes, and follow the author through a maze of associations, recollections, citations of texts, by him and by others, with the result that one exits them more often with the sense that one has undergone a journey than that one has actually gotten somewhere. And my sense, though this is conjecture, is that he is less concerned to inform or instruct than to transform the reader into something like his own image.

The present small volume is a defense of philosophical autobiography. Cavell feels that he is able "to sense the child" in certain passages of Wittgenstein or Saint Augustine (as well as, no doubt, in any number of other philosophers). So, in case we have a similar ear for the child in his writing, he begins telling us about his own childhood: he tells us of his mother (a pianist) and of his father (a pawnbroker, but also a teller of drawn-out stories). He explains the changing of his name from Goldstein to Cavell. He confesses to his "anguished perplexity" at not having his mother's perfect pitch (in fact he has a damaged ear), but feels that he may possess an equivalent of that "enigmatic faculty" (hence the title of the book) in "being good at following and producing Austinian examples." The reference is to the kinds of examples the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin invented in order to make certain distinctions in ordinary language--between shooting a donkey by mistake as against shooting one by accident--which Austin then used to draw high-density maps of our discourse on actions, mishaps, misperformances, failures, excuses, and the like, for which he had a particularly acute ear. My sense is that Cavell's gifts are closer to his father's: his tale curves and wanders, picking up bits of personal, literary, and philosophical detritus as it coils through pages and pages of asides, doublings back, parentheses, by-the-ways, epicycles, digressions, purple patches, interruptions, and chunks of Walden and Ecce Homo, until he brings the reader to his semester with Austin at Harvard and to what he takes to be the discovery, through Austin's example, of the possibility of having a philosophical voice of the kind he has been displaying all along. I guess this was the beginning for him of being what he had changed his name to become.

The second of the book's three parts is much less explicitly autobiographical, though no less digressive than the first. It is devoted to Austin as a philosopher who gave Cavell "a voice, a way, a subject, a work of my own," and to a defense of Austin against an attack on his "Plea for Excuses" by none other than Jacques Derrida, a thinker to whose "voice, way, and subject" Cavell's own are so much closer (infinitely) than they are to Austin that one feels he has undertaken this defense to forestall readers from supposing that such closeness results from imitation. In fact Derrida's critique of Austin was, for him, almost transparently clear and even, in my recollection, convincing, but the reader will have a rough go in trying to reconstruct it from Cavell's defense. At least I did, and I once wrote my own account of the controversy. I surmise that he is trying to say that Derrida did not know enough about the provenance of Austin's views--their biography, so to speak--to be able to write about them effectively. But I don't in the end think he is that interested in settling scores. He is interested in the idea of voice in philosophy, even the "return of voice to philosophy," and the chapter really is about that.

My sense is that the task, now that voice has returned, is to analyze rather than exercise it, to explain what, philosophically, a distinction between voice and analysis comes to. Cavell appears to believe Austin liberated him from "the repression of voice (hence of confession, hence of autobiography)." The book then exhibits what it means in philosophy when that repression is lifted: autobiography and confession in the unmistakable voice of Stanley Cavell, saying Here is what voice is--listen! This has its pleasures, beyond question, but perhaps more for the user than for the heeder of the voice, whom it moves now and then to reflect on how sweet are the uses of repression.

There is very little art in this book, and nothing about the visual arts. The concluding chapter, though, is in some sense about opera, which Cavell endeavors to understand through film--a medium he believes "is, or was, our opera." The chapter is a kind of free association of topics dear to the author: movies, marriage, "the claim to one's own voice," Shakespeare, Kant--"the jigsaw shapes of intuition I have to propose about what singing betokens." I ended the book feeling that the shapes perhaps belonged to different puzzles, that there was no way of fitting them together into a solved puzzle of the meaning of song. Or of the meaning of voice, though the author's voice kept--keeps--ringing in my inadequately pitched ear.

Arthur Danto is the art critic for The Nation. His most recent collection of essays is Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).