Seeing Selves and Imagining Others

Aesthetic Interpretation and the Claim to Community in Cavell

Abstract

From his early childhood, Stanley Cavell learned to tread carefully the intervening space between twin pillars: of aesthetic sensibility on the one hand, and political belonging on the other. Early in his memoir Little Did I Know, Cavell establishes a set of differences between his mother and father that far exceed both gender and age (his father was ten years older than his mother), as he notes the starkly contrasting dispensations of their respective families:

The artistic temperament of my mother’s family, the Segals, left them on the whole, with the exception of my mother and her baby brother, Mendel, doubtfully suited to an orderly, successful existence in the new world; the orthodox, religious sensibility of my father’s family, the Goldsteins, produced a second generation—some twenty-two first cousins of mine—whose solidarity and severity of expectation produced successful dentists, lawyers, and doctors, pillars of the Jewish community, and almost without exception attaining local, some of them national, some even a certain international, prominence.

From his mother’s family, Cavell would inherit the musical sensibility that, had he not ventured into the world of academic philosophy, might have led him towards a career as a musician or in music. In his father’s family Cavell observes a religious belonging that, in the decades in which Cavell is raised, becomes morally inseparable from political belonging, as the rise of European anti-Semitism and the threat of Hitler’s ascent to power would drastically alter the political significance of Jewish religious identification.