Cities of Words

CITIES OF WORDS: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. By Stanley Cavell. Harvard Univ. Press. 458 pp. $29.95

Surely no scholar has done more to bring American philosophy into the viewing room than Harvard University’s Stanley Cavell. His latest volume reads as if it were a single, pleasantly rambling essay—an integration, extension, and reunion of his earlier writings on film, particularly Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), and his writings on Ralph Waldo Emerson, particularly This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989) and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990). If the present edition is less focused than the earlier volumes, its intimate, ambulatory style is equally rewarding.

Cavell explicitly marries, or remarries, philosophy, particularly the notion of moral perfectionism, and films about remarriage. Plato gets paired with His Girl Friday, Emerson with The Philadelphia Story, John Locke with Adam’s Rib, and Sigmund Freud with The Lady Eve, among others. The philosophical basis of democracy meets what’s arguably the most democratic of art forms. Invoking Plato’s notion, taken up and transformed by Emerson, of an imaginary city of ideas distinct from the quotidian city of things, Cavell traces the migration of moral perfectionism from ancient Greece to 19th-century Concord and on to 20th-century Hollywood.

The effect is seductive in its fulfillment of a double longing: academe’s desire for public visibility and film’s desire for recognition as high art. There is a tragic, unstable inevitability to the pairing, like the union of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, the brains of philosophy meeting the beauty and glamour of motion pictures. Yet for all its tensions, the union inexplicably endures.

In line with Cavell’s vision of the social contract, his work convinces by the magnetism of its ideas rather than by the force of its rhetoric. His thinking often exemplifies the best qualities of the American ethos: its expansive, demo­cratic vision, its drive for self-determination, and its emphasis on both the personal and social dimensions of its moral imagination. For him, as for Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, democracy is tested by basic social relations. The films about remarriage, Cavell convincingly argues, require us to judge whether the marriages depicted manage to fulfill the Romantic and democratic vision of a genuine “union.”

Philosophy and film don’t need each other, but, like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, they have something to say to each other. Cinema, by depicting the existential crises of being human, fulfills moral philosophy’s need to be widely understood and applied. With its concentrated temporality, film lends itself particularly well to reflection on lived events and their consequences. And what is philosophy if not, like cinema, an elaborate way of watching ourselves? Both contribute to what Cavell calls the “kind of conversation [that] constitutes the bond that democracy . . . asks of itself.” So does this book.

—Elizabeth Willis