In the first essay of Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture, “Lost in the Ancient City: Pluralist Naturalism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences”, I claim that,

Astonishing (or perplexing) as this may sound, I am trying to articulate a perspective from which the ongoing critical project of Philo­sophical Anthropology, informed by and informing anthropology, can be regarded as the “queen of the sciences”. P. 42

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. Whichever descriptor one chooses, the denotation is the hermeneutic project of achieving what Charles Taylor calls a “language of perspicuous contrast”, which lays out and seeks to expand our perspective on the rich possibilities and limits of human consciousness, neither giving absolute priority to our own ontology (scientific or other) nor imagining that these can be dispensed with willy nilly.1 I see this as a Wittgensteinian project of comparative grammar. 

In her response to my essay on Cavell, Stina Bäckström writes,

In my view, Cavell and Willerslev do not have radically different points of view of the self and its relation to the world and others. I don’t think they exactly arrive at the same position, but their positions are at least structurally analogous. The differences between them, I think, is more a matter of philosophical articulation, than in the anthropological evidence itself. [my italics]

Bäckström goes on to argue that both Cavell and the Yukaghir hunters (as described by Rane Willerslev) see the self as fundamentally relational. Consequently, my arguments that Cavell subscribes to a dogmatic ontology of the separate, “punctilious” self that differs fundamentally from the Yukaghir are either outright wrong or at any rate overblown. Now one reason for my general suspicion of structural arguments is that, however fascinating structural similarities might be in some cases, they often risk masking what turn out to be crucial differences in grammar. I believe that this is so in the present case. Despite their superficial similarity, we’ll see that their respective grammars of the self show that the relationality of the Yukaghir and of Cavellian moderns is importantly different.

Relationality of the self –

Bäckström thinks that there is a philosophically significant structural analogy between Willerslev’s (Yukaghir) and Cavell’s respective conceptions of the self. She locates this in the fact that for each of them the self is fundamentally relational. She quotes Willerslev approvingly:

The truth is that the ontological structure of our being is such that the otherness of the world, our difference from it, is part of the meaning the world has for us at the most primordial levels of experience. (Willerslev 2007, 188)  

She adds,

[W]illerslev develops a version of the thought that self is relational. In Yukaghir culture, but also full stop. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the Yukaghir self, Willerslev says:

For Lacan, as for the Yukaghirs, the self cannot be understood as a bounded and unitary entity because it is developed and constituted only in and through a rivalry with otherness—a rivalry that in fact is never reconciled but continue to trouble us through our lives. (Willerslev 2007, 72)

She goes on to point to what she regards as a structural similarity between Cavell’s view of the self and that of the Yukaghir according to Willerslev, namely that “the self is constituted in relation to others. No other, no self.” If this is true, then it would seem that my contention that Cavell’s take on skepticism assumes a metaphysics of separateness must be wrong.

Bäckström on Cavell on Acknowledgement and the Self’s Relationality:

Bäckström further elaborates her case against my interpretation of Cavell on the self by pointing to what she reads as my misunderstanding of the role played by the concept of acknowledgement (as distinct from knowledge) in Cavell’s thought on skepticism. She quotes a passage where I assert,

In the context of these other systems of thought [such as Yukaghir culture], the for us apparently redeeming concepts of acknowledgment and acceptance seem frankly redundant and out of place. (Cahill, p. 117)

She comments,

On my view acknowledgment is not a redeeming concept in Cavell. Its role is not to bridge some gap between self and other, or self and world. It is not a comforting thought in the face of some inescapable metaphysical separation. Rather, it is Cavell’s way of understanding the specific way in which self is relational, or, in more Wittgensteinian terms, Cavell’s articulation of the self-other grammar. As such, it is in no way obviously redundant as a resource for thinking about Yukaghir conceptions of self-other relations. [my italics]

I don’t feel particularly wedded to my use of “redeeming” in the quoted passage, especially since I no longer am sure what lay behind that thought. Perhaps it was something like what Bäckström describes as the idea that acknowledgement might be a “comforting thought”, not in any absolute sense, but in the context of the skeptical dialectic. But that might make it seem as though I meant to suggest that acknowledgement was somehow conceptually second rate when compared to the epistemologist’s aim of certain knowledge of the world and of others. I don’t believe that this can be right, either philosophically or exegetically. At any rate, I am prepared to drop this formulation, whatever the original thought was that lay behind it. The main point that I will defend, however, is that acknowledgement as Cavell employs the term is basically redundant for the Yukaghir because “the other” is hardly forgettable for them. I will explain this in more detail below.

The “Psychopathology” of the Non-buffered Self –

Before I get to my main point, there are a couple of things in Bäckström’s response that, while not central here, I nevertheless found confusing.

First, Bäckström says of the Yukaghir, “They don’t see a complete and seamless continuity or identification between themselves and others, the world, or other animals.” And she asks, “Indeed, as Willerslev also highlights, how could they?” This seems to be a rhetorical question. If that is right, I find it hard to square this with a passage from Willerslev she quotes  towards the end of her response in which he seems to describe the risk they perceive of precisely such identification:

[E]veryday practical life demands a kind of “depth reflexivity” as a form of defense mechanism against the dissolution of the self, which faces a real risk that identification with the world of other bodies, things and people will become so complete that all the differences will appear to vanish and an irreversible metamorphosis will occur. (Willerslev 2007, 25, cited in Cahill 2021, 111.)

I address this issue further on pp 111-112 of my essay, including a long quotation from Willerslev that ends with the following assertion:

(H)unters consider it necessary to assume the identity of their prey in order to kill it. However, if the hunter loses sight of his own human self in this pro­cess and surrenders to the single perspective of the animal, he will undergo an irreversible metamorphosis and transform into the ani­mal imitated. In this case, then, confusion between analogy and iden­tity does not lead to madness as such, but instead to something just as dreadful, namely “othering” beyond recovery.

Secondly and relatedly, Bäckström states the following later in her response:

For instance, when Willerslev is discussing the animism of Yukaghir culture, e.g. how during hunting the hunters experience how the animals take on human qualities, and themselves as taking on animal qualities, he explicitly distances himself from others who have understood animism as implying some kind of conflation between self and other, or fusion between them:

Bäckström is correct that Willerslev wants to distance himself from how many Western anthropologists have handled the issue of animism. But given what we’ve just seen Willerslev claim about the threat of metamorphosis, I don’t see how she can be right here. I understand Willerslev’s distance to much of the anthropological tradition as part of his overall approach of taking seriously what people say about their lives and actions, as opposed to assuming with much of the tradition that because their stated beliefs sound crazy or irrational (or as indications of psychosis, as we’ll see Spiro describes it below) from a Western perspective, they can’t possibly mean what they say.2

Bäckström’s overall main argument, however, is that both the Yukaghir according to Willerslev and Cavell according to Bäckström understand the self as relational and so contrary to my claim, acknowledgement is not redundant in the former case. Rather, its possibility is part and parcel of what it is to be human. Yet despite their superficial, structural similarity, we’ll see now that their grammars of the self demonstrate that the relationality of the Yukaghir and of Cavellian moderns is crucially different.

At one point in “Skepticism and the Human Condition”, I provide an extended discussion of a paper by psychoanalytic cultural anthropologist Melford Spiro, a paper to which Willerslev refers with (in my opinion, wrong-minded) approval in a footnote. The background for the footnote is Willerslev’s dissatisfaction with what he regards as a shopworn, misleading one-dimensional distinction between a so-called “Western self” and a supposedly monolithic “non-Western” self. The main target of Spiro’s paper is Clifford Geertz’s interpretivist anthropology in general, as well as a couple of well-known Geertz-aligned interpretivist social psychologists, Markus and Kitayama, in particular. With regard to Markus and Kitayama, Spiro bluntly maintains that their

statement that in non-Western societies “others are included within the boundaries of the self” would mean that an individual’s other-representations are located within his self-representation, and such a condition (according to modern psychiatry) is a sign of rather severe psychopathology. 126 [my italics]

After recounting Spiro’s arguments against what he calls “the regnant theory of wholesale cultural determinism” of interpretivists such as Geertz, Markus, and Kitayama (p. 125), including his evaluation of the significance of the work of the anthropologist Unni Wikan in Bali, I conclude that Spiro has misunderstood the relevance of Wikan’s work because he has failed to grasp the nature of Geertz’s claims about the distinctive features of the modern Western conception of the self in the first place. Ironically, the very Balinese material that Spiro believes demonstrates that interpretivists like Geertz are wrongminded, shows something closer to the opposite: Balinese concern with their individual physical and mental health does not evince a bounded, buffered, self-understanding. On the contrary, their worries about the sorcery of others penetrating their consciousness or their own evil thoughts inflicting harm on others shows how they do not understand themselves as buffered at all. (See pp. 122-130) I write,

Far from aligning with the depiction of the Western conception offered by Geertz and others, the Balinese examples Spiro cites against it serve instead to reveal people who understand themselves as living in direct epistemological, semantic, moral, and causal contact with a “normatively structured” world.” (pp. 130-131)

This practically meets the very definition of non-buffered (and even perhaps of Taylor’s more specific term describing medieval Europeans, “porous”). Similarly while both grammars are “relational” at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, the grammars of the Yukaghir and of the modern Westerner are profoundly different, even though perhaps in structurally parallel.  

When Bäckström writes “No other, no self”, suggesting thereby that this provides a relevant link between Willserslev’s Lacanian interpretation of the Yukaghir’s relational understanding of the self and Cavell’s understanding of the self, she overlooks that there is an enormous difference between, on the one hand, a grammar whereby, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, “an inner self is in need of an outer criterion” for its conceptual intelligibility and, on the other hand, a grammar whereby “the other and the world” are, so to speak, “already in one’s head” in a rather more direct, causal, non-buffered way, supposed “psychopathology” notwithstanding. Returning to what Bäckström writes on acknowledgement, we saw above that she speaks of Cavell’s articulation of the self-other grammar. She thus claims that I am prevented “from even facing the question of how acknowledgment speaks (or not) to the question what it is for us to understand ourselves as humans.” But this begs precisely the question at issue here: whether the structural parallel she finds between Cavell on the one hand and the Yukaghir according to Willerslev on the other actually shows the same grammar.  My idea that acknowledgement is redundant in the case of the Yukaghir (and implicitly for many of the other peoples I mention) rests largely on this very question: whether we can assume that Cavell articulates the self-other grammar.

Dogma –

Bäckström claims that I find a metaphysics of separateness “embedded in how Cavell treats the problem of Cartesian skepticism.” She continues,

He [me] considers how Cavell, in The Claim of Reason, describes himself as experiencing Cartesian skeptical doubt with a sense of “being sealed off from the world” in his own “endless succession of experiences” (Cavell 1979, 141-142, quoted in Cahill 2021, 97). Cahill then argues that Cavell thinks that this experience reveals “that in some sense he really is separate, cut off from the world.” (Cahill, 97). Cahill does not elaborate further on the caveat “in some sense” here. Rather, he moves forward with an understanding that Cavell pretty much straightforwardly thinks of the self as enclosed within its experiences, utterly alone, and cut off from the world, and that we moreover “cannot stand being the kinds of creatures we are” (ibid, 99).

Bäckström may be correct to point out that on Cavell’s articulation, the self is not inherently separate, because, as she understands that articulation, we are only intelligible to ourselves only in so far as we are related to others. But as I argued above, this is a conceptual point about the self’s intelligibility to itself. It does not undermine the point that, when understood in terms of the grammar of the Yukaghir and of many of the other peoples described throughout my essay, Cavell’s articulation of the Western self has us ontologically separate. This is the sense in which I think Cavell understands his experience as revealing that he really is separate. To put this in terms of mode of presentation and reference, “separateness” (even if this includes the grammar of mutual intelligibility) is the only mode of presentation of our finitude considered by Cavell. As I read, him he thinks that even if the skeptical thesis and refutations of it are empty, the grammar of relationality is not enough to quell our flights into skeptical madness, because this tendency belongs to our human nature, not qua modern Westerner, but qua separate human beings for whom conceptual relatedness is not enough. 

Taking this into consideration allows me to address another aspect of Bäckström’s response. She writes,

Cahill’s attribution of a metaphysics of separateness to Cavell rests, in my view, on a conflation between the skeptic’s position and Cavell’s position when he is articulating the self-other grammar. How to understand the relation between the two positions is complex. But taking Cavell to be “in some sense” accepting skepticism, either in its familiar denial of our knowledge of the world and others, or in the form of a metaphysical position designed to ensure that we can bridge the skeptic’s gap, seems a clear misreading to me. 

I never attribute the “skeptic’s position” to Cavell, if by that one means the skeptic’s philosophical thesis. Nor do I say that acknowledgement in Cavell is supposed to “bridge the skeptic’s gap”, if by that phrase one means perform the intellectual feat that epistemology never could pull off. When he recites what he calls his “major claim about the philosopher’s originating question”, I think Cavell is clearly identifying himself, even if only temporarily, not with the skeptic’s intellectual position, but the with skeptic’s existential psychological predicament. What I believe Cavell does accept, is that we are fated to succumb to skeptical madness because we cannot live with the “truth of skepticism”, viz. that our relation to the world is not one of knowing.

Finally, Bäckström states that, 

Cavell’s anthropology, Cahill argues, bears (half unwittingly) the marks of a Western modern secular position, not so unlike the Cartesianism Willerslev thinks we need to get rid of in order both to get it right and understand the Yukaghirs.

It is true that I accuse Cavell of subscribing to a “dogmatic ontology of the self” (p. 78). But this doesn’t entail that I read Cavell as intentionally operating with such a dogmatic ontology. Rather, the dogmatism I think permeates Cavell’s work can usefully be compared with the dogmatism that was embedded in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The type of dogmatism I am referring to here is not explicit in doctrines of the Tractatus, but rather in the assumptions concerning the essential nature of logic and language that drive its whole method, a method which ironically purported to overcome doctrines in philosophy. (Cf. Chapter 3 of my Fate of Wonder). I believe a very closely analogous (cultural) dogmatism informs most of Cavell’s work, especially those that touch on skepticism, whether directly or indirectly (which is a great deal of it).

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Kevin Cahill is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, where his research focuses on the intersections of Wittgenstein’s thought, the philosophy of the social sciences, and the problem of skepticism. He is the author of The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein's Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity and more recently Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture, which explores what it means to be human through the lens of relativism and naturalism. His work is distinguished by an original integration of historical and ethnographic material, mounting a timely defense of the interpretivist tradition in contemporary philosophical inquiry.

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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