Emersonian Perfectionism and Kantian Ethics

Abstract

People have often been surprised when I have told them that I worked with Cavell during my undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard, from 1965 to 1973 — not just taking Hum 5 with him (and Rogers Albritton), which a couple of thousand Harvard undergraduates would have done in those years, or one or two further courses, but writing both my senior thesis and my doctoral dissertation under his supervision. After all, my work has not looked anything like his — my conventional Kant scholarship, with all the trappings of normal scholarship, has looked nothing like Cavell’s personal, often unconventional philosophizing, using as its texts Shakespearean dramas, classic Hollywood movies, and a small group of philosophers that began with Austin and Wittgenstein and grew to include Thoreau and Emerson, although the last chiefly after my time at Harvard.