‘The World Viewed’ at 50: New volume explores the legacy of philosopher Stanley Cavell

What do we mean when we say “that’s me” as we point at a photograph? Do we know the characters in the eighth season of our favorite TV series better than our real-life friends? Is fake news any worse than “real animation”? What is the nature of our virtual existence?

Those are some of the thought-provoking questions addressed in Binghamton University Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Jeroen Gerrits’ edited volume Cavell’s Ontology of Film: ’The World Viewed’ After Half a Century. All of them root in the work of Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, who wrote one of the first books combining philosophy and film.

Cavell had just published his first collection of philosophical essays when his self-declared “little book about film” came out in 1971, published by a popular, non-academic press. The World Viewed was revolutionary for its time — but initially met a poor reception from scholars working in the then-emerging field of film studies.

Back in the 1960s, film wasn’t a topic that philosophers typically discussed. Inspired primarily by J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cavell was interested in “ordinary language philosophy,” Gerrits explained.

“Cavell also took an interest in the category of the ordinary more broadly: He cared about his own life and about the world he grew up in,” Gerrits said. “That’s how he got interested in film. Going to the movies was an ordinary thing he would do growing up, and continued to do as an adult and professional philosopher.”

The title of Cavell’s book alludes to the German term Weltanschauung, or “worldview,” popularized by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In the hushed environment of the movie theater, Cavell recognized a problem often explored by philosophers: skepticism.

“Simply put, it’s the fact that we can’t know that what we think about the world and about one another is true,” Gerrits explained. “Radical skeptics may conclude that if I can be mistaken once — if it turned out I hallucinated or dreamed something I was convinced was real — the world and other people may, for all I know, not exist at all.”

Skepticism creates a distance between us and the world. This distance becomes impossible to overcome in film. The screen both shows us reality and withholds that reality at the same time; viewers can only look on from the outside, which is the core of The World Viewed.

In 1979, an expanded version was released by Harvard University Press; it included a new foreword and an additional essay in response to the initial criticism. In the intervening years, film studies became integrated into the humanities curriculum at American universities.

Why the lack of popularity? Early film theorists were more interested in ideology-based criticism, and suspicious of concepts such as “the ordinary,” “reality” and “the world,” claiming that they defended the status quo — although Cavell himself wouldn’t agree with that assessment. However, interest in The World Viewed has since grown in the last 25 years, even after Cavell’s death in 2018.

“Only decades later, when film turned digital, and it became less clear whether what we see on screen has anything to do with reality at all, did the interest in The World Viewed return,” Gerrits said.

Understanding contemporary experience

The media world has changed since 1971; with the advent of television and home entertainment, movies are more likely to be viewed in privacy at home or even on a phone, rather than “projected and screened” in a set-apart space. And with the advent of digital film technology and now AI, we can no longer be sure if it’s “our world” that’s being shown, Gerrits pointed out.

“These are the questions Cavell’s Ontology of Film deals with: it asks to what extent Cavell’s work still provides a relevant framework for understanding the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary film experience. But that’s also to say: contemporary experience, period,” he said.

The edited volume features nine essays from internationally renowned scholars specializing in Cavell’s thought; based in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, their fields of expertise span philosophy, cinema, television, art, literature and political science.

Almost all of the authors visited Binghamton in 2022, when Gerrits organized an international conference on Cavell. Both the conference and the book received support from the Harpur Dean’s office.

“I taught a grad seminar on Cavell at the same time, so the students participated and met with the scholars whose work they had studied. It was an amazing exchange,” Gerrits said.

The essays are grouped into four topical groups: beyond modernism, beyond analog, beyond genre and medium, and beyond the Anthropocene. Like The World Viewed itself, Gerrits’ volume strives to speak to both academic audience and serious fans of television and film.

“What I would love for people to discover is that this is not so much a book about some philosopher they should know, or about some movies they might love, but about someone they may think they know: themselves,” Gerrits said.