1.

William Rothman and Marian Keane

Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film

Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2000

ISBN 0-8143-2896-2

320 pp.

Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard since 1963
and Professor Emeritus since 1997, famously began his career while still a graduate student at the
University of California at Berkeley. In 1957 he delivered a paper titled ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’
that was widely viewed as taking to school eminent Berkeley professor of logic Benson Mates's quibbles
about the availability, the ordinariness of ordinary language. His revision of that essay, and Cavell's
subsequent wide-ranging work -- ‘readings’ of Emerson, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Beckett, Kierkegaard,
among others -- attest to the contest with language he has been engaged with in the last four decades.

Cavell's second book, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, was published in 1972. A
seemingly radical departure from his first book (titled after his famous essay), Cavell's new work required
an audience able to appreciate his personal brand of late Wittgensteinian thought and Heideggerian
hermeneutics, one that might perhaps even be startled by the aptness of his choice of film (as it turned
out, the traditional, ‘Hollywood’ film) as his originating point. Further complicating matters, The World
Viewed sought that audience at the same moment feminist, semiotic and Lacanian theory were sweeping
across academia with film studies as their leading edge.

From the outset, Cavell's book was met with puzzlement. So much so that he was prompted to publish an
addendum, ‘More of The World Viewed‘, as part of an Enlarged Edition in 1979. He explained that many
friends had told him he had written ‘a difficult book, a sometimes incomprehensible book’. [1]
Nevertheless, The World Viewed has slowly found not only readers, but disciples; not the least reason
being that two chapters have been reprinted in Mast and Cohen's widely-used Film Theory and
Criticism text.

Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film, co-written by William Rothman
and Marian Keane, is a fittingly paradoxical testament to both the influence and obscurity of the book it
purports to help film students and other readers ‘read’. The Preface states that: ‘The pages that follow
present a consecutive reading of The World Viewed‘ (9). This is true enough. The introduction sets out the
plan -- a reading divided into eight sections that deal sequentially with Cavell's text and clearly and
concisely lays out the context in terms of film studies. Yet even here, the chief difficulty that plagues
Rothman and Keane's book surfaces. They offer a ‘reading’ of Cavell's book that does so by means of
Cavell's considerable philosophical/literary output, and by means of a similarly totalizing technique.

Since Cavell's own way of proceeding is determinedly totalizing, one soon notices that the Rothman/Keane
book's aim is never simple clarification where clarification might entail any narrowing of Cavell's ‘meaning’.
If Wittgenstein suggested that an explanation is what satisfies, [2] Rothman and Keane, like Cavell, are not
offering anything like ‘explanations’. Read on, read further, meanings are to be deepened and widened is
their tact. In due course, all nine of Cavell's other works, eight written subsequent to The World Viewed,
are copiously cited.

Though the authors’ reasons may be valid, more pertinent is that the clearest, most intelligible account of
Cavell's approach comes after the book concludes. In the Appendix to Rothman and Keane's book the
reader gets a more complete view as to why the authors refer to The World Viewed in their Preface as a
‘Metaphysical Memoir’.

In no sense an ‘ordinary’ ordinary language philosopher, the contortions required of Cavell in answering
Mates's deceptively naive query, as to how ordinary language philosophers had recourse to ordinary
language, set Cavell's sails early on. Rothman and Keane here provide a context for understanding
Cavell's philosophy:

‘By registering differences that elucidate the diverse roles particular words play in our lives -- the logic
underlying the ways we use these concepts, what Wittgenstein calls their ‘grammar’ -- an ordinary
language philosopher makes claims whose own grammar is closer to that of aesthetic judgments than to
ordinary empirical judgments.’ (264)

After Wittgenstein, one wants to call a person who makes aesthetic judgments about film a ‘film critic’.
Though, indeed, Cavell is not (or at least only occasionally). At other times he resembles a ‘film theorist’.
But the inadequacy of both terms leads us to see how the ‘grammar’ of Cavell's enterprise most nearly
shares a ‘grammar’, an underlying logic, with that of a work of art. It is a performance, ‘a path of
philosophy, a path of self knowledge . . . an uncharted path’ (259).

Like an epic poem or novel, or even a Hollywood movie (narrative works whose conclusions ideally ramify
back across all that has gone before), Cavell's performance withholds its fullest aspect, at once the goal
and source of the ‘obscurity of [its] promptings’, [3] until its end. Likewise, so do Rothman and Keane.
Consequently, reading their book is like reading Cavell's. The host of provisional views and judgments
offered -- that readers have found it by turns provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or just counter-intuitive --
often get no explication. More often they are amplified upon by reference to Cavell's other works.
Furthermore, Rothman and Keane are generally either tone deaf to, or uninterested in giving voice to, the
difficulties Cavell's book presents outside those difficulties Cavell's method presents to itself.

An exception that proves the rule is to be found in Section II of Reading Cavell's The World Viewed. Here,
the book treats one of the chapters reproduced in Mast and Cohen's popular Film Theory and Criticism --
Chapter 3: ‘Photograph and Screen’.

On pages 68-69 Rothman and Keane air objections philosopher Alexander Sesonske raised in a 1974
review. They were objections of enough merit to incite Cavell to respond in ‘More of The World Viewed‘.
Because this passage quotes Sesonske's review, Cavell's paraphrase of it, and the rejoinder, for clarity's
sake I've taken them separately and abbreviated them slightly. Sesonske's objection is this: ‘What is ‘the
world’ that Cavell says photographs, and therefore movies, are of? It it not clear . . . Spade and Archer
never shared an office in San Francisco; Jules and Jim never shared a girl in prewar Paris.’ [4] And
Rothman and Keane quote Cavell's reply: ‘it may seem to follow that this issue of reality is settled, that
movies are something on their own; the only things they could be recordings of . . . have simply never
taken place.’ (69) [5] Rothman and Keane then say, ‘Cavell's response in ‘More of The World Viewed‘ to
Sesonske's objection merits careful attention.’ (69) The core of what they quote from Cavell is this:

‘it does not follow that reality has played no essential role in the origin of that projection. All that follows is
that any role reality has played is not that of having been recorded. But reality is not so much as a
candidate for that role, because the projections we view on screen are not in principle aurally or visually
indistinguishable from the events of which they're projections -- what could be more distinguishable.’ (69)
[6]

‘Having disarmed the objection’, Rothman and Keane then say, ‘Cavell does not simply let it drop’ (69).
They emphasize how Cavell soldiers on, turning the objection into his own question; then quote his
assertion that: ‘I describe the role of reality as one of being photographed, projected, screened, exhibited
and viewed . . . The significance I attach to these terms can be assessed, I believe, by nothing short of my
book as a whole.’ (69) [7]

Again, Cavell asks the reader to wait for his view to be seen in total. However, has Cavell really disarmed
the objection? One would hope the authors of a ‘reading’ would closely attend to Cavell's response
themselves. They do not. Central to Cavell's view of our relationship to movies is that the world we view in
movies shares an identity with the world that provides the scene for our lives. For Cavell, it is not that there
aren't differences, it is that their likenesses, their resemblances, are so pervasive and transparent they are
missed. When Cavell's book succeeds in revealing their correspondence it provides readers with the thrill
of insight, the exhilaration of seeing something clearly obvious. It is this quality that has won him adherents
and earned him a companion reading.

But, to return to Sesonske's objection, was ‘reality’ never so much as even a candidate for what was
recorded in, say, Casablanca? Maybe not, though certainly it was at least a candidate for recording
in Battle of Algiers. It seems fair then to go on to say, as he does, that the events recorded
for Casablanca are indistinguishable from the movie. And there's no arguing Cavell's next move -- that
nothing could be more ‘distinguishable’ from ‘Casablanca’ than ‘reality’. The unvoiced argument runs
something like this: since the movie was never in competition with reality, was never something that could
be confused with it, and since reality was never put before the cameras, all it makes sense to say about
reality in terms of Casablanca is that reality wasn't what was recorded in making it.
This is a peculiar kind of language game that gives the meaning of ‘reality’ just one context, Cavell's at this
point, in the service of making a general assertion. (It is also a game that has benefited from a clever
substitution, ‘reality’ for ‘world’ -- Cavell's admitted paraphrase.) For example, might not Michael Curtiz
have maintained there was some ‘reality’ Casablanca was after in its filming? Would Curtiz have meant
something else by ‘reality’? A huge number of uses (meanings) of the word ‘reality’ could be instanced as
true statements about the ‘recording’ of the film.

Cavell's dismissal of Sesonske's objection implies that any objection about ‘reality’ in this context could be
disarmed this way. Either Cavell thinks it fair to use ‘reality’ extremely narrowly and/or, conversely, all uses
of the word share an essential thread. As an assertion the last idea is probably false. Cavell, however,
doesn't make this as an assertion and the potentially fatal objection, like many others that could be
offered along the way, must be treated as a mere cavil.

However, Wittgenstein is suspicious of this kind of essentialism. In Philosophical Investigations he

suggested that it helped to picture language as a rope woven of many strands none of which ran its entire
length, while Cavell avers in his book's Preface that: ‘Memories of movies are strand over strand with
memories of my life’. [8] At the heart of Cavell's metaphysical memoir, his philosophical practice, is this
curiosity: his attempting to have it both ways from a Wittgensteinian perspective. In The Blue and Brown
Books Wittgenstein writes:

‘Our craving for generality has another main source . . . the method of science. Philosophers . . . are
irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way that science does. This tendency is the real
source of metaphysics, and lead the philosopher into complete darkness . . . Instead of ‘craving for
generality’ I could also have said ‘the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case’’. [9]

For Wittgenstein, this led to a practice meant to demystify our thinking by appealing to the particular
meaning of a word in a given context. However, Rothman and Keane consistently draw our attention away
from how Cavell, in demanding adherence to his meaning in each particular case, simultaneously
appeals to our craving for generality -- how, for example, when Cavell speaks of ‘the world viewed’ he
conflates the world viewed in a movie with the world itself.

This central issue is adverted to in the very next passage. In characterizing a movie screen as a barrier,
Cavell in part states: ‘That the projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference from reality.’ (70)
[10] Perhaps recognizing the puzzlement the remark has undoubtedly engendered in film theory classes,
Rothman and Keane explore this characterization by making the following restatement with two
clarifications: ‘the projected world is separated from reality by the fact, and only the fact, that it does not
exist (now) . . . The projected world does not differ from reality by being, for example, two- rather than
three-dimensional’, and, after explaining how this is so, they focus at greater length on how Cavell
understands film temporality, how ‘his parenthetical ‘now’ may seem to suggest that in the past the
projected world really existed’. (71)

What is dumbfounding here the authors seem not to see, or are affecting not to. The far more likely
confusion Cavell's statement generates is that we ordinarily think a movie differs from reality in a host of
ways. They pretend Cavell's most startling claim -- that there is no difference between a movie and reality
besides time -- is, literally, unremarkable. But, if I stand up in front of the projector's beam don't I see my
own head in silhouette?

Either Rothman and Keane have been reading Cavell too long, or they are struggling here to preserve an
illusion of naturalness about Cavell's words. It is the loss of a similar illusion which Cavell confesses to
having been a source of his own promptings to write about cinema. But readers would have been better
served by a less faithful imitation of their model. Cavell's claim is a startling one. Acknowledging it would
have done more to advance our understanding than pretending to its transparency, which leaves the
reader, again, to discover it. Rothman and Keane could themselves have pointed out that when you stand
up in front of a projector beam you are no longer watching a movie -- but interrupting one. The spell of the
illusion is broken.

In fairness, Rothman and Keane always alert the reader. Their insights are sharp, and they are close, if
closed, readers. Where Cavell's other works are cited their allusion most often seems apposite and of a
length that allows some hope of comprehension. But the authors are much too concerned with preserving,
even weaving, his spell.

Proceeding less by explication than by quotation, restatement, and self-referral, the book tends to
apotheosize, rather than open Cavell's mysteries. (For example: his seemingly arbitrary choice of
categories from Baudelaire's The Painter Of Modern Life applied to stars and types; or his stretching
photographic ‘automatism’ to account for genres -- though here they work manfully and shed greatest light
on Cavell's over-all position.)

If The World Viewed attempts to show that movies provide a world complete without me, that is present to
me, it does so in hope of bringing the reader along to realize its fullest statement, that, as the authors
quote Cavell: ‘A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is
an importance of film -- and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world . . .’ (254) [11]

Perhaps a book that hopes to present so breathtaking a view, that so deftly invites the reader to occupy
the exact same space as its author, to assume his language as well as his vision, is doomed to hermetic
enshrinement, to be available only to those who initiate themselves by way of its difficulties. Cavell may
deserve this, but the audience for Reading Cavell's The World Viewed will in the main be his disciples.
Those who turn to it in frustration, looking for a way in to The World Viewed, will remain so.

Footnotes

1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1979), p. 162.

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, trans. A. C. Miles, ed. Rush Rhees (Atlantic
Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 2.

3. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 162.

4. Alexander Sesonske, Review of The World Viewed, Georgia Review, vol. 28, 1974, p. 561.

5. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 182.

6. Ibid., p. 183.

7. Ibid., p. 184.

8. Ibid., p. xix.

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 18.

10. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 24.

11. Ibid., p. 160.

Craig Tepper, ‘The Cavell Cavil’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 12, June 2002 <http://www.film-
philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n12tepper>.
2.

Craig Tepper

‘The Cavell Cavil’

Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 12, June 2002

http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n12tepper

In his review of Reading Cavell's The World Viewed, Craig Tepper allows that the quality of The World
Viewed's writing earns it a companion volume, and does not deny that we have valid reasons for
proceeding in our reading the way we do. He judges our reading to be ‘close’ and ‘alert’, our insights
‘sharp’, our references to Cavell's other writings ‘apposite’. And he finds the philosophical view at the heart
of The World Viewed, as our book helps bring it into focus, to be breathtaking.

By Tepper's own reckoning, then, our book -- and The World Viewed, of course -- must be judged to be, at
the least, a considerable achievement. But does he reflect even for a moment on our achievement, much
less Cavell's? No. All he does is harp on what he takes to be the ‘chief difficulty’ that ‘plagues’ both books,
the ‘totalizing technique’, as he calls it, he takes them to share.

According to Tepper, Cavell withholds explanations, deferring them to the end, and thus all the views and
judgments he presents in the course of the book are ‘provisional’. And our book's aim, Tepper asserts, ‘is
never simple clarification where clarification might entail any narrowing of Cavell's ‘meaning’’. Tepper goes
on: ‘If Wittgenstein suggested that an explanation is what satisfies, Rothman and Keane, like Cavell, are
not offering anything like ‘explanations’. Read on, read further, meanings are to be deepened and widened
is their tact [sic]. In due course, all nine of Cavell's other works’ -- actually, Cavell has published not nine
books but thirteen by latest count, with more on the way -- ‘eight written subsequent to The World Viewed,
are copiously cited’.

It is simply not the case, though, that Cavell keeps saying (or implying), in effect, ‘Wait until later’. On every
page of The World Viewed, he enters claims and offers explanations. He never takes them back; they are
not ‘provisional’. To be sure, if we follow his thinking, our understanding does deepen as we read on. But
that is not because Cavell employs what Tepper disparagingly calls ‘totalizing technique’. As we read The
World Viewed, following his thinking, our perspective changes.

When Tepper says that The World Viewed ‘withholds its fullest aspect’ until the end and that we do so as
well, hence that reading our book is like reading Cavell's, the word ‘withholds’ implies, erroneously, that
Cavell deliberately refrains from saying until the end what he could just as well have said at the outset -- as
if there were some other, more direct, path to the perspective of self-knowledge that is in our view at once
the book's philosophical aspiration and achievement. Of course, Cavell places certain of his claims and
explanations at the end of the book, but that doesn't mean that until then he withholds them. Certain of his
claims and explanations, certain of his thoughts, are not possible for him to express, or for us to grasp,
without following the book's thinking to its conclusion, that is, without achieving the perspective that is the
book's conclusion, its conclusive achievement. Again, that is not because Cavell employs ‘totalizing
technique’, but because the writing of The World Viewed is ‘under its own question’, as Cavell sometimes
puts it. What The World Viewed is about cannot be separated from what the book is. That is part of what
makes it philosophy, in Cavell's view.

On every page of our book, we, too, enter claims and offer explanations. Except for a handful of
exceptions, our claims, too, are not ‘provisional’. And, of course, we mean our explanations to be
satisfying. They satisfy us.

Tepper is right, however, that our aim is not what he calls ‘simple clarification’, where ‘clarification might
entail any narrowing of Cavell's meaning’. Why should we aim to ‘narrow’ Cavell's meaning? Our aim is to
hone in on it. Innumerable times in our book, this requires us to run through a range of possible readings
of particular passages, commit ourselves to one (or sometimes more than one, if two or more aspects are
equally in play), and explain our reasons for making these choices. And we are forever paraphrasing
Cavell's words and/or amplifying on them by referring to his other writings. But that is as it should be, given
that our goal is to read The World Viewed in a way that follows its thinking. Cavell is a major philosopher,
after all, one who is committed, on philosophical principle, to saying what he means, to finding words he
can stand behind to make his thoughts intelligible to himself and others. Reading Cavell's words, we are
committed, on philosophical principle, to being open to what they say and mean. Our reading is close, as
Tepper recognizes. But it is not closed, as he charges. That honor belongs to him.

‘Rothman and Keane’, Tepper writes (in a sentence that is as ungraceful as it is ungracious), ‘are generally
tone deaf to’ -- can one be ‘tone deaf’ to unvoiced difficulties? -- ‘or uninterested in giving voice to, the
difficulties Cavell's book presents outside those difficulties Cavell's method presents to itself’. Because of
our totalizing technique, Tepper suggests, we offer no explication for ‘the host of provisional views and
judgments offered’ that ‘readers have found by turns provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or just counter-
intuitive’.

What are the views and judgments he has in mind? He doesn't say. He goes on to give virtually no
examples other than the one he addresses at length, which he considers, in any case, to be ‘an exception
that proves the rule’. What readers have found Cavell's views and judgments to be ‘provocative, wrong-
headed, odd, or just counter-intuitive’? How does he know this is how readers find them? Again, he doesn't
say.

Tepper's language here seems deliberately designed to convey the impression that the film study literature
has already done the job of identifying the host of views and judgments in The World Viewed that allegedly
strike readers this way, and has clearly articulated what seems so provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or just
counter-intuitive about them. That is anything but the case. Within film study, Cavell's writing, when
referred to at all, is routinely dismissed as vague, impressionistic, self-indulgent, unrigorous, but this
charge is never backed up with specific examples. Several philosophers -- Alexander Sesonske, Douglas
Lackey, and Noel Carroll among them -- have been more forthcoming, presenting arguments intended to
counter several of Cavell claims. Our book addresses and contests a number of these arguments

But even if these philosophers’ arguments were accepted at face value, they would hardly validate
Tepper's blanket assertion that all readers -- all readers who are not Cavell's disciples, that is -- find The
World Viewed to be chock full of judgments that are provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or just counter-
intuitive. As it stands, Tepper's assertion is as unsupported and pernicious as those dismissals of Cavell's
writing by smug self-styled ‘theorists’, untutored in philosophy, that are so prevalent within the field of film
study.

Marian Keane and I, personally, do not feel that any of Cavell's views and judgments in The World
Viewed are counter-intuitive, odd, or wrong-headed. (Some are provocative, perhaps, but it must be kept
in mind that Cavell is not a philosopher whose aim is to provoke.) We hope, and believe, that most readers
of our book, as they follow Cavell's thinking with us, will feel that way as well.

The only example Tepper offers is our treatment of Cavell's response to Alexander Sesonske's response
to The World Viewed. Except for the condescending phrase ‘soldiers on’, we have no major problem with
Tepper's summary of Sesonske's objection, and Cavell's reply, as we summarize them in our book. Tepper
questions whether Cavell succeeds in disarming Sesonske's objection, as we claim he does, simply by
pointing out that Sesonske errs in assuming that Cavell believes movies to be recordings of reality.
Cavell's point, which Sesonske misses, is that movies are projections, not recordings, of reality. Tepper
launches into several paragraphs that have all the earmarks of dense argument, except for the fact that
they are complete nonsequiturs. The more he babbles on, erroneously charging Cavell with a kind of
essentialism that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations teaches us to distrust, the clearer it becomes
that Tepper has completely missed the point of Cavell's rejoinder to Sesonske, which is that movies are
not recordings at all. And the clearer it becomes that Tepper does not really have a clue who Stanley
Cavell is, nor how deep a reader of Wittgenstein he is, as evidenced by his philosophical masterwork The
Claim of Reason, and later books, among them This New Yet Unapproachable America and Philosophical
Passages (Tepper's cluelessness is never more obvious than when, early in his review, he sums up
Cavell's philosophical enterprise as a ‘contest with language’.)

Chiding us for failing to attend closely enough to Cavell's response to Sesonske, the ‘evidence’ of our
alleged inattentiveness that Tepper presents is an out-of-left-field claim that what is ‘central to Cavell's
view of our relationship to movies’ is that ‘the world we view in movies shares an identity’ -- what does that
mean? -- ‘with the world that provides the scene for our lives’. Tepper goes on:

‘For Cavell, it is not that there aren't differences, it is that their likenesses, their resemblances, are so
pervasive and transparent that they are missed. When Cavell's book succeeds in revealing their
correspondence it provides readers with the thrill of insight, the exhilaration of seeing something clearly
obvious. It is this quality that has won him adherents and earned him a companion reading.’
As an interpretation of The World Viewed, this strikes us, frankly, as not only out-of-left-field, but also off-
the-wall. On what grounds does he make these claims as to what is ‘central’ to Cavell's view of our
relationship to movies, and what ‘quality’ the writing of The World Viewed possesses that has ‘won him
adherents and earned him a companion volume’? What evidence does he provide? None. On what
grounds does he claim to know what it is that ‘adherents’ -- elsewhere, he denigrates them as ‘disciples’ --
value in the book? He doesn't say. What evidence does he provide? None.

Viewed from a Wittgensteinian perspective, Tepper argues, Cavell attempts to have it both ways, attending
to the particular case while also following that ‘craving for generality’ that, according to Wittgenstein, leads
philosophers astray. Tepper writes:

‘Rothman and Keane consistently draw our attention away from how Cavell, in demanding adherence to
his meaning in each ‘particular case’, simultaneously appeals to ‘our craving for generality’ -- how, for
example, when Cavell speaks of ‘the world viewed’ he conflates the world viewed in a movie with the world
itself.’

How do we ‘consistently draw’ attention away from this? Tepper doesn't say. How does ‘conflating’ the
world on film and ‘the world itself’ exemplify Cavell's appealing to our craving for generality? Yet again, he
doesn't say.

Rest assured, in any case, that Cavell is not guilty as charged. Nor are we. Cavell does not conflate the
world on film and ‘the world itself’. The world projected on the movie screen, in his view, is the world
transformed or transfigured by film. What that transformation is, what it comes to, is a central issue in The
World Viewed.

Tepper professes to find it dumbfounding that we ‘seem not to see, or are affecting not to’, that Cavell's
assertion that ‘the fact that the projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference from reality’ --
significantly, Tepper omits Cavell's parenthetical ‘Existence is not a predicate’, a link with the
understanding of Wittgenstein's concept of ‘criterion’ that Cavell works out in The Claim of Reason -- is
likely to generate confusion because ‘we ordinarily think a movie differs from reality’ (note the slippage
from ‘projected world’ to ‘movie’) in ‘a host of ways’. But when we say: ‘The projected world does not differ
from reality by being, for example, two- rather than three-dimensional’, we are acknowledging that we want
to say -- as Tepper wants to say -- that there is a host of ways in which the projected world differs from
reality. And yet, it is incontrovertible that if the projected world did exist now, it would not be separated
from reality at all; it would be real.

When we go on to reflect on Cavell's understanding of the temporality of film, we are acknowledging how
remarkable it is that the world projected on the screen is at once present and absent, like the world of our
memories. Cavell's claim does not seem provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or counter-intuitive so long as
we keep in mind, as The World Viewed calls upon us to do, that film is something so strange, so singular,
that we do not know how to place it ontologically. What is remarkable, in other words, is film's mode of
existence itself, not Cavell's claim that ‘the fact that the projected world does not exist (now) is its only
difference from reality’.

What is truly dumbfounding is Tepper's belief that by saying ‘If I stand up in front of the projector's beam
don't I see my own head in silhouette?’ he can expose us as benighted souls who have been reading
Cavell too long. On the one hand, Tepper is astonished that we don't consider this supposed objection to
Cavell's view. On the other hand, he points out how easily we could have dismissed it. Evidently, he
doesn't deem it a formidable objection. Why does he imagine that any reader would? If not, why should we
consider it?

Tepper opines that in ‘pretending’ that Cavell's claim is ‘transparent’, we are ‘struggling to preserve an
illusion of naturalness about Cavell's words. It is the loss of a similar illusion which Cavell confesses to
having been a source of his own promptings to write about cinema.’ First, Cavell specifically does not say
that in the decades that he -- along with countless millions of others -- enjoyed what he calls a ‘natural
relation’ to movies, he was in the grip of some kind of illusion. The world projected on the movie screen is
not an illusion, in Cavell's view.

Awakening to the realization that going to the movies was no longer a normal part of his week, his
experience of movies, and the movies in his experience, Cavell began for the first time to think
philosophically about film. Writing The World Viewed closed the book on his natural relation to movies.
And our book, far from asserting that The World Viewed is ‘transparent’, far from trying to preserve ‘an
illusion of naturalness’ about Cavell's words, insists from first page to last that without thinking, thinking for
oneself, it is not possible to read The World Viewed in a way that follows its thinking. The writing of that
book was a great achievement. And the writing of our book, our reading of The World Viewed, is an
achievement as well (if a modest one by comparison).

When Tepper says that acknowledging how startling Cavell's claim (‘The fact that the projected world does
not exist (now) is its only difference from reality’) is ‘would have done more to advance our understanding
than pretending to its transparency’, he does not deign to say what this would have done to advance our
understanding. In any case, his use of the word ‘our’ here is quite disingenuous. Throughout, his know-it-
all tone (all too familiar among academic philosophers!) is meant to project an image -- here we have a
real illusion! -- of a philosopher who knows perfectly well what Cavell's philosophical practice comes to,
what quality has won it adherents, what is central to his views. Does his writing give us any grounds for
believing that he possesses such knowledge? No.

Tepper ends by quoting what he takes to be The World Viewed's ‘fullest statement’, that: ‘A world
complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is an importance of film --
and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world.’ He calls this a ‘breathtaking’ view -- the one
and only moment he acknowledges the grandeur of the book's aspiration. But does he say, on the basis of
his experience, what makes this view so breathtaking? No. Instead, he writes:

‘Perhaps a book that hopes to present so breathtaking a view, that so deftly invites the reader to occupy
the exact same space as its author, to assume his language as well as his vision, is doomed to hermetic
enshrinement, to be available only to those who initiate themselves by way of its difficulties.’

Is it really the case that The World Viewed invites the reader to occupy the exact same space as its
author? Of course not. Reading The World Viewed isn't the same as writing it. Once these words are in the
world, they are open to being read. To read these words the way we do, to follow their thinking, is not to
‘assume’ Cavell's language, to claim possession of it or take it for granted. Reading The World Viewed in a
way that follows its thinking requires questioning its words, interrogating them, checking them against our
own experience.

It is perhaps fair to say that The World Viewed -- and perhaps our book as well -- is only ‘available to those
who initiate themselves by way of its difficulties’. That is, it is available only to readers who follow the
book's thinking. Is that the same thing as saying that such a book is ‘doomed to hermetic enshrinement’?
Is ‘hermetic enshrinement’ a just characterization of our book? Of course not. Marian and I don't
worship The World Viewed, we read it. We are readers of Cavell, not his ‘disciples’, if that is taken to mean
-- Tepper takes it this way -- that our close relationship to Cavell's thought in general, or our close reading
of The World Viewed in particular, deprives us of the power to think for ourselves. On the contrary, we find
it enabling. We try in our book to help readers to realize how liberating Cavell's understanding and practice
of philosophy can be.

In Reading Cavell's The World Viewed we do not hide the fact -- it is hardly something to be ashamed of --
that Stanley Cavell is a cherished friend. Nor the fact that we have both had the good fortune of having
been his students (we still are, if ‘student’ is understood in Emerson's sense). Cavell is a great teacher of
philosophy, and for him philosophy is not a game of one-upmanship, as it is for Tepper. In the classroom
as well as in his published writings, what Cavell teaches above all is the necessity of thinking for oneself,
of checking one's own words, and those of others, against one's experience (and vice versa).

Tepper predicts that ‘the audience for Reading Cavell's The World Viewed will in the main be [Cavell's]
disciples’, adding: ‘Those who turn to it in frustration, looking for a way in to The World Viewed, will remain
so.’ Do we accept Tepper's view that our potential readers can be divided between Cavell's disciples, on
the one hand, and, on the other, readers of The World Viewed who are frustrated, and will remain
frustrated, because they are unable to find a way in? Again, our answer is: of course not. We know many
readers, in and out of the field of philosophy -- potentially, there are far more -- who are in no sense
Cavell's disciples but who find his writings, as we do, to be enabling, indeed inspiring, but challenging.

In our experience, most of the people in the field of film study who have dismissed The World
Viewed cannot accurately be described as ‘frustrated’. They haven't tried, but failed, to find a way ‘in’.
Mostly, they haven't tried. Even more objectionable, though, is Tepper's studied ambiguity as to his own
relation to The World Viewed. Is he one of those frustrated readers, poor souls, whose pain he claims to
feel? He denies it, for he makes a point of showing -- or, rather, pretending -- that he is really ‘in’, indeed
more ‘in’ than we are. Then how can he be so sure that he speaks for all readers who are not Cavell's
disciples? How can he be so sure that they are frustrated? And how can he so sure that our book will not,
cannot, speak to them?