In Pursuit of 'Pursuits of Happiness'

Abstract

A year after the publication in 1969 of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell observes in the elegant Preface he wrote for the 2001 edition, the effect on him, as he put it, “of putting the book behind me, or perhaps I should say, of having it to stand behind, freed me for I suppose the most productive, or palpably so, nine months of my life, in which I recast the salvageable and necessary material of my Ph.D. dissertation as the opening three parts of what would become The Claim of Reason and completed small books on film (The World Viewed) and Thoreau (The Senses of Walden). I consider those small books to form a trio with Must We Mean What We Say?, different paths leading from the same desire for philosophy.” If those three books form a trio, I take the fourth part of The Claim of Reason, completed in 1978, and Pursuits of Happiness, which in 1978 he was already writing, to form a duo—not, I would say, different paths leading from the same desire for philosophy, but from the trio’s achievement of philosophy.