We began class by tinkering with our schedule a bit: our next reading is Kant. In particular, I had intended to have you read an excerpt from his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and while I do indeed have a brief excerpt available, I asked if you wouldn’t like to read the whole thing. The entire work is relatively short (sixty-six pages in the Cambridge edition), and this is one of the most important (if not the most important) works in the history of moral philosophy. In previous iterations of this course, reading the whole work was not appropriate (in one case, because it was a seminar for students of all majors and not an actual philosophy course, and in the other case, because it was an introduction course and the Groundwork is too much for an introductory course in philosophy). However, given that this is an upper-level course cross-listed as philosophy, and given that many of you are philosophy minors, and given that most of you have not encountered this text, the most reasonable conclusion is that we must read the whole thing. Otherwise, I leave you chained by your errors.
The text is available as an ebook through Reese Library. It can also be purchased on Amazon.
As a brief aside, here are some dates and periodizations for you with respect to the philosophers we have so far encountered:
· Plato’s Politeia (ca. 370s bce)
o Classical Greece (a period running from 510 (the fall of the last Athenian tyrant and the institution of democracy in Athens) to 323 bce (the death of Alexander the Great))
· Locke’s The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690)
o Neoclassicism (Enlightenment) (a period running from about 1687 to either 1789 or 1804)
· Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
o Neoclassicism (Enlightenment) (although there are clear Romantic characteristics in Kant’s work)
· Mill’s On Liberty (1859)
o Romanticism (this period has its origins in the 1780s, and it starts to give way to modernity by the end of the 1850s)
As for the films, they all take place between 1934 and 1949 during a period called “the Golden Age of Hollywood” (which runs from the late 1920s (the end of the Silent Era) to the late 1950s):
· It Happened One Night Frank Capra 1934 Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert
· Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Frank Capra 1936 Gary Cooper, Jean Arhtur
· The Awful Truth Leo McCarey 1937 Cary Grant, Irene Dunne
· His Girl Friday Howard Hawks 1940 Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell
· The Philadelphia Story George Cukor 1940 Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn
· The Lady Eve Preston Sturges 1941 Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda
· Woman of the Year George Stevens 1942 Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy
· Gaslight George Cukor 1944 Ingrid Bergman
· Adam’s Rib George Cukor 1949 Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy
We spent the majority of class investigating His Girl Friday. We ended with a brief and rough introduction to Kant’s moral philosophy, with an emphasis on some points that connect with HGF, although we didn’t have a chance to spell out those connections.
I began by reminding us of the distinction Cavell makes between ‘genre-as-medium’ and ‘genre-as-cycle.’ The idea of a genre as a medium applies to those genres in which the genre is not the point of the film but rather the medium in which the ‘film’ thinks and/or expresses its thought. (I put ‘film’ in quotations because it is, of course, odd to think of the film as the thing that thinks; rather, people think. However, the film is rarely the expression of a single person in the way a text of philosophy or literature is. It just now occurs to me that, in this respect, film is more like a society than either philosophy or literature.) Furthermore, the instances within a genre-as-medium resist conformity to the medium (whereas such conformity defines instances of a genre-as-cycle), and this is shown by violations of the list of generic features that constitute the genre. (This raises the interesting question of how one comes up with a list of features for a group constituted by members that all contain violations of that supposed list. For Wittgenstein students, the answer should be clear: you need a ‘family resemblance’ view of concepts (and not an essentialist/representationalist view).) Cavell claims that the Hollywood remarriage comedy is a ‘genre-as-medium.’
In order to understand the violations, we will need a list, and we will induce a list as we go. I don’t have one at present – or at least I didn’t until I wrote this blog post; you will find the initial list down below; most of it comes from Cavell. Cavell introduces the genre of the remarriage comedy by way of contrast with classic romantic comedies in which “the problem of the drama is to get a young pair past the obstacle of an older figure, usually a father, and see them married”; in the remarriage comedies, the focus is on “getting a somewhat older pair who are already together past some inner obstacle between them and hence together again, back together” (Cities of Words 10). He then lists the following features, which he claims are generated out of the essential difference with classic romantic comedies (without ever explaining or justifying this claim):
1. The woman of the principal pair is never a mother.
2. The woman is never shown to have a mother. (one exception)
3. The father of the woman is always on the side of her desire, not the law.
4. The narrative opens in the city and ends in the country (the “green world”). (This seems to me to not be a true generic feature.)
5. The principal pair seems to speak – even invent – their own language.
6. The principal pair is a mystery to the world around them.
7. Some element of melodrama appears – but does not shatter the com(ed)ic universe. (10)
8. The news plays a role. (This is a point that he makes later in the book.)
9. We begin either in media res or with an explicit exposition. (This point is also made elsewhere; I believe it’s at the start of the chapter on IHON.)
10. There is some element of manipulation or duplicity – something that goes beyond self-deceit. (This is my addition to the list.)
Cavell claims that each film must ‘make up’ for its violation by contributing something new to the genre. I would go further and say that the violation is the key to unlocking the rebellious, perfectionist thought of the film.
We spent a bit of time talking about the potential violation(s) of HGF (and I wonder if (a) there must be one and (b) if there may be more than one). We looked at Cavell’s own claim: the violation is that the film takes place entirely in the “black world,” which he equates with the Cave, and never moves to the “green world,” which is a utopian place in which the ideal is realized (at least temporarily). HGF even seems to make a point of this violation, as it makes clear that the couple is headed to Albany, where they will cover a strike as part of their honeymoon. We raised two other possible violations, which were perhaps a matter of degree rather than the absence or presence of something: the amount of action (including the rapidity of the speech) and the outright-ness of the manipulation.
As I write, a fourth possibility occurs to me: the newspaper is here not intrusive (as such) but is in fact integral to the authenticity of the perfectionist pair and the expression of consent. And it further strikes me that this bears on the general theme of the private/public that runs throughout these films. The theme has some irony: there is a problem of making things explicit (expressed), and this is what the press tries to do; however, this causes problems of some kind for the perfectionist couples (even Walter and Hildy). Yet the problem is not that the couple resists making things explicit; rather, there is a problem with how the press goes about doing it. Tied to this is a point that Cavell makes about the absolute, which I think will become relevant as we look at Kant: the demand for an absolute (in any field of thought, be it political, religious, philosophical, or so on) leads to privacy – to what, in Platonic terms, we might think of as the ineffable communion with the intelligible (with the Good understoodd as something that we can see but ultimately not say). Thus, the demand for the absolute leads to privacy, to silence, to a distance between people. The alternative to this demand is the “the acceptance of finitude,” i.e., of human limits beyond which I cannot go. One might note that, paradoxically, the demand for the absolute is an attempt to transcend human limits that in fact draws those limits too narrowly. It often reinforces this by demanding conformity to that absolute. And this is the connection with the press: the demand is for the absolute truth about a person, but this is cast in terms of isolated factual (often prurient) details, and these end up falling for short of the person. Tracy realized this. Peter eventually realized this. And Hildy realizes it. Yet Hildy differs insofar as she sees the better possible ‘self’ of the press. (Note that, like Peter, she can actually write – and Walter implies that she is the only one on his staff who can actually write; the men in the press room seem to second this, reinforcing the idea that she is the only one among them who can write – that she alone can bring some truth to the Cave.)
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