Sense and sensibility: Stanley Cavell's philosophy of moral manners

In this essay, Emily Miller Budick sets out to explore narrative in the manner that it appears in Stanley Cavell's writings, as a way of exploring the human condition. Storytelling can be in service of didactic or moralistic argument or principles. But those dimensions of human experience—in ethics, epistemology, politics, metaphysics—coexist and are co-dependent on human minds that perceive and live these matters. ‘Suppose', Cavell writes in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, ‘the issue is not to win an argument, but to manifest for the other another way.' Stories, and critical reflection upon them, can open the possibility of other ways of thinking and other ways of being. In the light of references to Jane Austen and to Emerson's ‘aversion to conformity', the essay reflects on aspects of Cavell's autobiographical writings, especially on the significance of his recollections of his friend, the philosopher Kurt Fischer. It goes on to focus on questions of race and antisemitism, in the light of close attention to J. M. Coetzee’s novels, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello.