Kevin Cahill’s Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture is a joy to read. It shows again why Wittgenstein’s thought remains such a font of insight and inspiration, and it also cuts to the heart of many current and pressing issues in philosophy and the humanities. I focus here on the third chapter, “Skepticism and the Human Condition.”

Cahill spends significant space engaging with ethnographic material, especially around the Yukaghir people of Siberia. In showing how their conceptions of the self, of the afterlife, and of mimetic relations to other beings differ from Western ones, Cahill takes it that “there is no good reason for attributing to these people an essential relation to skepticism as Cavell conceives of it” (116). The Yukaghir people are one example; Cahill discusses others (e.g., in Melanesia), and we could multiply his examples by examining more people throughout time and space (equally, in literature, film, and so forth). Cahill’s thought is that Cavell’s reliance on an alleged condition of separateness as a feature of our lived experience in the world and with others, and as necessitating options—at an eagle’s eye view—of avoidance or acknowledgement, is itself a historically contingent fact, not an unavoidable feature of being human. He notes that, “I am not, however, accusing Cavell of making a hasty generalization, but rather of confusing a figure as representative for humanity who is rather better thought of as representative of one culture” (121). The issue that emerges then is Cavell’s relationship to history, especially to the way in which he invokes history and the way in which he allegedly avoids acknowledging the historical nature of his own claims. Cahill sees Cavell’s account of skepticism—analyzed and philosophically unpacked in so many different contexts—as a contingent feature of a particular culture even as Cavell frames it allegedly as a feature of being human altogether. I think one could say “parochial” to describe how Cahill sees Cavell’s account of skepticism. This word, though, is mine—Cahill calls it a “dogmatic ontology of the self” (78).

Cahill does consider potential resources in Cavell’s work—Cavell’s invocations and views of history, historical development, his understanding of Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life, and his prioritization of certain historical developments like Protestantism, Shakespeare, film, and so forth—as means for responding to such a charge. But he reduces these resources to two options: for Cavell, either our modern understanding of the self represents an “uncovering of something already there” or it is a “historical phenomenon that inevitably developed out of the very logic of human thought” (137). He (rightly) rejects both options in turn, but he seems to me to fail to consider fully a way of inflecting Cavell’s remarks that do not boil down to either of these options. The former option (of something being uncovered) is the option to which he suspects “Cavell is actually committed” (138). In suggesting this is true of Cavell, Cahill imputes to him a kind of “subtraction story” (Charles Taylor), where there is an alleged feature of ourselves that’s always been there but that was covered over by something else (in Taylor’s story, the secular as something that was covered over by religious belief). In Cavell, the form is allegedly the same, where “what was there all along waiting to be liberated from the oppressive bonds of tradition was not a rational soul, but a compulsive neurotic” (140).

Cahill has a section where he cites passages in Cavell that discuss modernism in various domains and that may be read as responding to this worry. Cahill’s thought, though, is that Cavell “does not extend the same consideration to the modern understanding of the self” (135). One passage I want to highlight in this context is Cahill’s citation of a passage from The Claim of Reason where Cavell writes:

What we take to be necessary in a given period may alter. It is not logically impossible that painters should now paint in ways which outwardly resemble paintings of the Renaissance, nor logically necessary that they now paint in the ways they do. What is necessary is that, in order for us to have the form of experience we count as an experience of painting, we accept something as a painting. And we do not know a priori what we will accept as such a thing. But only someone outside such an enterprise could think of it as a manipulation or exploration of mere convention (134).1

Cahill writes that, “The combination here of a historical sensibility with the rejection of social constructivism in the last sentence is admirable. Unfortunately, Cavell extends a line of reasoning here to matters of aesthetic ontology that he withholds when it comes to the ontology of skepticism” (134). In the footnote to this claim he cites another similar passage of Cavell’s about language and again claims that “apparently, these considerations [about how language could have developed differently and us with it] do not apply to the cogito” (160).

I do not share Cahill’s assessment. In elaborating how Cavell threads the needle between historical contingency on one hand (in how, say, various aesthetic or philosophical practices and claims may develop) and necessity on the other hand (in the ways that, say, these practices and claims come to strike us unavoidable), Cahill considers too limited a set of possibilities. One option is the aforementioned idea that something is “laid bare” or “uncovered” so that what was true—and thereby necessary—was somehow covered over by something else. Once that something else is removed, then the necessity comes again into actuality (and focus). Another option is the idea that “with the right articulation we might come to regard” something as necessary and “not as a fundamentally contingent, historical, and discontinuous” (143). On this view, Cahill thinks there is either some inevitable law of historical development (and why think that?) or what’s being pursued is a kind of “propaganda” (143-144). Cahill seems also to suggest a third possibility when he notes that we may link necessity to our biology and contingency to culture (as when he suggests that “we are only required to regard skepticism as rooted in our biological nature if our conception of the role that historical ideas and practices, especially linguistic practices, play in shaping our self-understanding is a superficial one” [137]).

The second option comes closest to what I think is Cavell’s view, but it also minimizes or misses an important feature of his view. To bring this into focus, it is useful to cite related claims in aesthetics that animate Cavell’s claims. Central to them is his friendship and encounter with art critic and art historian Michael Fried (the two first encountered each other in the 60s as Cavell recounts in Little Did I Know). Fried develops an understanding of modernism explicitly in contrast to the art critic Clement Greenberg. For Greenberg, the art of painting had an essential and timeless quality, and the history of painting needs to be understood as the exploration of what truly is timeless and essential. Certain features come to be stripped away as unnecessary and inessential so that the essential and necessary ones can come into focus. In short, Greenberg’s is also a subtraction story.2 In contrast, Fried claims that:

[T]he modernist painter seeks to discover not the irreducible essence of all painting but rather those conventions which, at a particular moment in the history of the art, are capable of establishing his work’s nontrivial identity as painting leaves wide open (in principle though not in actuality) the question of what, should he prove successful, those conventions will turn out to be. The most that follows from my account … is that those conventions will bear a perspicuous relation to conventions operative in the most significant work of the recent past, though here it is necessary to add (the relation of perspicuousness consists precisely in this) that significant new work will inevitably transform our understanding of those prior conventions and moreover will invest the prior works themselves with a generative importance (and isn’t that to say with a measure of value and quality?) that until that moment they may not have had.3

These remarks should be compared exactly to how Cavell thinks about modernism. Think, for example, of ways in which Cavell writes about automatism in The World Viewed and how he writes about language in The Claim of Reason.4

Cavell’s conception of philosophy—and his exploration of the problem of skepticism across so many different domains—should be understood in the same vein. Cavell’s claims about the Reformation, the rise of Protestantism, and his various other historical invocations (135-136) are examples of historical developments that have altered who we are, suggesting certain possibilities while closing off others, all while equally altering our views of the past and what occurred (or didn’t). Cahill quotes The World Viewed: “So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation” (136).5 He italicizes “intensifying” to marshal it as evidence of a subtraction story: Cavell is acknowledging how something is being uncovered. As in Fried, though, we ought to inflect this (and Cavell’s similar claims) differently: once photography comes on the scene, and once its relationship to painting is properly expressed by a critic (something Fried pursues in his account of modernism, the role of Manet in modernist painting, and the ways in which painting and photography were not in competition with each other), then we are able to look backwards, telling a particular story about our current historical moment and how we got there, linking together features of the historical record that may not have previously been seen as linked (like, say, the Reformation and modernist painting). Just as the paintings of, say, Frank Stella, allow us to tell a story about the role of the beholder in painting, we can then see earlier cases of painting as already participating in this story (the importance of Manet even as Manet and Stella do not “look” alike). These are all contingent developments, though, they need not have occurred, but once they have, we situate ourselves amidst them or in relation to them.

The last two paragraphs, and Cavell himself, make a lot of the idea of “we” and “us.” And to his credit, Cahill appears to consider something like the option I’m attributing to Cavell, but he inflects in a way that I find incompatible with the sense that Cavell attributes to “we” and “us.” As noted earlier, Cahill rhetorically frames this as a sort of “propaganda” and orients it around notions of “rationality” so that Cavell might be suggesting that “reasonable” people “should” see things a certain way (143) lest they be accused of “poor intellectual pedigree” (144). But this kind of inflection is not Cavell’s. From his earliest writings, Cavell conceive all such claims as “claims to community.”6 As Cavell notes, “it may prove to be the case that I am wrong, that my conviction isolates me, from all others … the wish and search for community are the wish and search for reason.”7 This is compatible with there being multiple possibilities that are equally reasonable, equally a search for reason (or equally also not—nothing necessitates that this be the case). It may be that these possibilities speak past each other, speak to each other, or speak against each other (just to name a few options), but in every case there is a kind of invitation to see things the way in which I see them. It may be that we do not see things alike, but in such a case it is not that there has been said something “false about ‘us’” rather instead “there is no us (yet, maybe never) to say anything about” for the statement was made “to the wrong party.”8 This is why Cavell can propose the possibility of “intellectual tragedy,” and can note that “you don’t have to talk to everyone about everything.”9

This may seem like a minor quibble, since Cahill acknowledges that if “the idea that the self of skepticism is not part of our facticity, but rather one relatively recent interpretation of the human condition, then we are faced with a normative question about how we should relate to this interpretation” (145). But to the extent that Cahill refuses this option to Cavell, I do think the corrective I suggest is a sort of axial turn that leads to a kind of Copernican switch in how we view Cavell’s entire project: a suggestion and possibility of Cavell’s varied work is, by example, to give voice to our interests, to find out where we stand and about what and why, and also thereby with whom. (This is another way of saying, I think, that Cavell’s constant and varied invocations of skepticism about other minds perhaps cannot be skirted (82) nor can Cavell’s moral perfectionism be entirely ignored, as they are in Cahill’s book).

Everything will depend on the value of Cavell’s broader story to us at a particular moment in time. If I understand him correctly, it seems to me that at the end of his book, Cahill suggests that Cavell’s writings are not helpful for (or perhaps even somehow inadvertently contribute to) “our current political strife” which is anchored in an “inability or refusal to take culture seriously” (147). He laments and locates as a problem to be avoided “a culture dominated by politicized neurotics” (148), which is his shorthand for where Cavell ends up (140, 156). But my intuitions here are quite the opposite: the “self-flagellation” or “demonization” (147) that Cahill casts as our all-too-common options are well suited and fruitfully to be brought into conversation with Cavell’s varied remarks on and sites of inquiry around skepticism about other minds (more neuroticism, not less, I’d say). A deeper understanding of culture—taking it more seriously—ought to involve learning about other cultures as much as our own, and Cavell surely—if he does anything—contributes immensely to the latter, of which philosophy is a mere subset (“philosophy is the criticism a culture produces of itself”).10 At the very least we should reflect deeply on the makeup and genesis of our wishes towards avoidance or callousness, especially of other cultures; these are not merely problems of knowledge (i.e., we don’t know enough about them, although this is also true). Of course, though, this—like Cahill’s own conclusion—is a mere gesture, operating at a very high-altitude view, one that would require much more elaboration and discussion, a landing spot. It is a credit to Cahill’s book that he both allows us to take such flight and invites us also to the ground.

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Martin Shuster is the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he also founded the Philosophy and Critical Theory Lab (PaCT Lab). His wide-ranging scholarship explores the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy, with a particular focus on critical theory, genocide studies, and modern television, among others. His most recent book is Critical Theory: The Basics.

ANDREW NORRIS:

INTRODUCTION

If culture is the cultivation of nature, its relationship to nature will be a dialectical one, in the Hegelian sense of the term.  Culture can neither be simply identified with nature, as in Socrates’ noble lie, nor categorically distinguished from it, as, say, cups are distinguished from knives, or rabbits from wolves...

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STEPHEN MULHALL:

RESPONSE TO CAHILL: WHAT STANLEY CAVELL CALLS SCEPTICISM

Thirty years ago, I published a book on Stanley Cavell’s work in which I argued that his version of ordinary language philosophy was deeply rooted in the values of liberal modernity, and – using the resources of Charles Taylor’s recently published Sources of the Self – further claimed that some of the limitations of Cavell’s project could best be apprehended by appreciating its genealogical links with Christian patterns of thinking out of which that liberal modernity had grown, and by evaluating what had been lost as well as gained by the rise of that distinctively Western European mode of affirming the ordinary...

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KEVIN M. CAHILL:

RESPONSE TO MULHALL

Mulhall’s response to the third chapter of my book devotes much attention to Cavell’s 1989 essay “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture”. In particular, he notes that my references to this essay are brief, perhaps surprisingly so, despite the fact that in a footnote I point out that it was this very essay that led me further to explore Cavell’s work...

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STINA BÄCKSTRÖM:

A METAPHYSICS OF SEPARATENESS?

What is it to be a human being and to understand oneself as such? This question is at stake in Kevin Cahill’s essay 'Skepticism and the human condition'. There Cahill develops a criticism of Stanley Cavell’s thoughts on the self and the problem of skepticism. In the background of the essay, and the collection as such, is an important and difficult question, namely, how to understand the historical shift characteristic of secular Western modernity...

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KEVIN M. CAHILL:

RESPONSE TO BÄCKSTRÖM

By “queen of the sciences” I didn’t mean to assign to philosophical anthropology the position once held in some quarters by theology, in others by metaphysics. I meant instead to suggest the significance for philosophically informed anthropology or, alternatively, on anthropologically informed philosophy...

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MARTIN SHUSTER:

CAVELL’S MODERNISM

Kevin Cahill’s Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture is a joy to read. It shows again why Wittgenstein’s thought remains such a font of insight and inspiration, and it also cuts to the heart of many current and pressing issues in philosophy and the humanities...

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KEVIN M. CAHILL:

RESPONSE TO SHUSTER

Martin Shuster quotes me as stating that, with regard to Cavell’s ontology of the self, the options are two: “what was there all along waiting to be liberated from the oppressive bonds of tradition was not a rational soul, but a compulsive neurotic”...

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NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN:

CAVELL’S AHISTORICAL SELF

Post-Wittgensteinian philosophy is known for a view of language as dependent on
contextually embedded practices, and a view of philosophy as attention to the complexity of our lives with language. If we follow these threads in habitual ways, they might be expected to lead in the direction of attention to the cultural and historical contingencies of our concepts, beliefs and values...

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KEVIN M. CAHILL:

RESPONSE TO HÄMÄLÄINEN

I wouldn’t dare to compare the achievements (or aspirations) of my book to Wittgenstein’s, but I will confess to being relieved and delighted to read the response by Nora Hämäläinen, who has read my book with understanding. But my relief and delight soon evaporated and turned to worry.

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