Abstract
Stanley Cavell’s writings have been influential in many fields including philosophy, literature, and film studies. This is the first collection of essays to explore the theme of education in his work, even though, according to the editors, Cavell himself “has sometimes been struck by the thought that this, in one way or another, is what his work is always about” (p. 2). The collected essays are intended to be of interest to those working in both philosophy and education, though the balance is more toward the former in the style and interests represented.
The title of the collection of essays is taken from Cavell’s The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (1979):
In the face of the questions posed in Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau . . . we are children; we do not know how to go on with them, what ground we may occupy. In this light, philosophy becomes the education of grownups. It is as though it must seek perspective upon a natural fact which is all but inevitably misinterpreted—that at an early point in a life the normal body reaches its full strength and height. Why do we take it that because we then must put away childish things, we must put away the prospect of growth and the memory of childhood? The anxiety in teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require education. And for grownups this is not natural growth, but change. Conversion is a turning of our natural reactions; it is symbolized as rebirth. (pp. 1-2)
Many of Cavell’s preoccupations are evident here, not least an emphasis on philosophy as “a kind of reading, say a kind of responsiveness” (p. 32). Yet it also clear that these themes could be related to the education of grownups more widely than in philosophy, as an activity in which there is enormous scope for the teacher to be educated by his or her students and in which the struggle encountered by the student is often that of refining or redefining assumptions or habits.
The book begins with a thoughtful contribution from Cavell himself, which explores his view that “in our exchanges with each other we are incessantly teachers of each other, good or bad, strong or bland, assaulting or liberating” and that it is important to articulate “ways in which the possibility of education is destroyed or missed or frozen” (p. 25). The book is divided into three parts. The first includes an autobiographical account of Encountering Cavell by Russell B. Goodman and a fascinating essay by Hilary Putnam in which he remarks on how entangled “facts” and “values” may be, reminding us of the importance of continually reeducating ourselves.
Part 2 is titled Skepticism and Language, with contributions from Paul Standish and Gordon C. F. Bearn. Bearn highlights “aesthetic education” to balance the increasing emphasis on “specialist intellectual training” (p. 91). Standish, meanwhile, compares education’s emphasis on “indicators of performance and economies of exchange” with King Lear, about which Cavell has written an influential essay, “The Avoidance of Love.” Part 3 is the most diverse, with an emphasis on “the relationship between initiation into culture and deviation from it” (p. 15). Vincent Colapietro draws on Cavell’s autobiographical writings and his interest in jazz in an insightful essay that uneasily mimics Cavell’s style; Rene V Arcilla explores the role of self-understanding in education, as Cavell conceives it; Naoko Saiko takes an original look at the role of prophesy; while Steve Odin finds a relationship between Cavell’s writings and Zen in their responses to skepticism.
These essays should open space for more work on ideas about education in Cavell’s writings and also in Wittgenstein, whose work he has done much to interpret. In a lecture about Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Warren Goldfarb (n.d.) repeats an anecdote (“perhaps apocryphal”) about its author:
A child having learned that the earth is round, asks, “Why don’t the Australians fall off?” A scientific answer will talk about gravity [. . .] Wittgenstein, in the anecdote, was said to dismiss these sorts of explanations, and to replace them with the following: he draws a picture of the earth with British people on top and Australians on bottom, inverts it, and says, “Now we fall into space.”
Goldfarb uses this anecdote to characterize Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy. It is a story about the education not only of the child, who has “learned” that the earth is round, but also of the adults who answer the question. There is a risk that in presenting a child with an accepted theory, we will miss the nature of the question that he or she has asked. As this illuminating collection reminds us, the education of grownups often involves learning to ask again questions that we might have thought resolved; it can make us—in every respect—less sure of where we stand.