In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote,

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure.

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. There appears to be so little daylight between Hämäläinen’s perspective and my own that it was unclear just what sort of response to her response I should write. Here goes.

Honey and Vertigo –

There are passages in Hämäläinen’s response that I wish I had written myself. Here are two of them:

Iris Murodch has noted that “in philosophy we go where the honey is”, highly aware that it is not in the same place for all. For Cavell, the honey is not in historical change and cultural difference, although he is extensively, learnedly and politely aware of the importance of these. The honey is in bringing back thoughts from philosophical abstraction to the rough ground of lived reality. He is captured by how the lived reality of skepticism is emotional, ethical and ethical rather than rational or epistemic. Since historical and cultural specificity are not key aspects of this analysis, they slip out of sight at key moments. The unlucky consequence is that something distinctively modern and western – once again – comes to represent all humanity, all times and all places.

The idea of a human tendency to skepticism is interwoven with Cavell’s thought about linguistic community. As linguistic beings we share and apply criteria of meaningfulness in conversation with others, and yet these criteria are not supported by anything beyond this community. We address each other without securities, and awareness of this makes us vulnerable to skeptical doubts. As Cahill puts it, “there is something Sartrean about Cavell’s understanding of our individual responsibility for the application of criteria. It is reminiscent of Sartre’s description of the responsibility one constantly exercises for ‘choosing not to jump’ from a steep precipice as one traverses a narrow mountain path.” (p. 133) This is to say that his imagination is captured by an existential predicament of groundlessness, diverting at the same time attention away from the quite substantial grounding that our acts of meaning have in shared life and historically formed community. Staying closer to the latter would, perhaps, show up the existential predicament itself as a historical rather than universally human one.

I was pleased that Hämäläinen picked up on this theme and want to say something about this idea of there being something “Sartrean” about Cavell’s understanding of individual responsibility. In a deservedly famous passage from his early essay “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, Cavell describes a sort of vertigo that comes from an awareness that

Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying. (Must We Mean What We Say?, 52)

What I describe as a “Sartrean” strain in Cavell’s thought is shown in the pervasiveness of his concern with occasions of personal misunderstanding. This has suggested to me more than once that he himself may be subject to a different terror, viz. that most of the time, let’s say zunächst und zumeist, our public criteria “apply themselves”, thus producing a terror of immersion in public meaning rather than a terror of failed isolation from it. A question for Cavell, and I think it is also a question Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) can pose to Sartre, is whether this issue of individual responsibility for the application of criteria can so much as get off the ground if it comes to predominate in our sense of the ordinary workings of language. (I take this up at footnote 94 of “Skepticism and the Human Condition”, where I comment on the profound misunderstanding shown in Cavell’s Sartrean/Cartesian reading of wonder and anxiety in Heidegger.) 

Hämäläinen asks,

Does Cavell need to be saved from this critique? I do not think he does. In fact, none of the charm and philosophical poignancy of his analysis of skepticism is lost if we concede that it is a philosophical “ethnography” rather than a philosophical “ethology”. His discussions of skepticism lack substantial transcultural and transhistorical ambitions, and can do their philosophical work even if we concede that their relative ahistoricism is an error. The challenge for readers, then, is to learn from this error and avoid repeating it.

Once more, I agree. As I note in the essay, I consider Cavell’s analyses to amount to a best case for regarding skepticism as a natural part of human life. That in the end they “lack substantial and transhistorical ambitions and can do their philosophical work” doesn’t deny that they contain much that is brilliant even if the range of their range turns out to be more restricted than many readers have assumed. 

Ethical and Political Implications –

Hämäläinen claims that,

the real interest of Cahill’s critique overflows such exegetical discussions. In the introductory remarks to the discussion Cahill promises to return at the end to the wider ethical and political implications of his analysis, but this section is left quite short. Its most useful point has to do with the future. If the self prone to painful skeptic (neurotic) doubts is indeed a historical and cultural phenomenon, it is also one we may overcome – with time and effort. This possibility raises the question of whether it is something we indeed should try to overcome, to the benefit of some perhaps more connected conception of ourselves in the world. Many people answer this question today with an enthusiastic yes. The bounded, punctual notion of human beings has over the past few decades been under persistent renegotiation, not least because it is seen as a key villain in humanity's destructive relation to its environments and to other species.

I hope Hämäläinen is correct here that the real interest of my critique “overflows” the exegetical discussions, even if exegesis occupies the lion’s share of the essay and even if the section where I promise to take up the ethical and political implications of my analysis is in fact quite short. She does do me the favor of connecting an upshot of my essay to one of the great questions of our day: environmental degradation. But my own remarks are not altogether disconnected from the political moment either.

An explanation for the brevity of the section where I had promised to take up the wider ethical and political implications of my analysis likely concerns my understanding of the nature of philosophy (Cf. “Bombast” in “Response to Shuster”). On that understanding, while the conclusion of philosophical analysis is by no means the end of intelligent conversation, it does mean that philosophy gives way to different kinds of discourse, polemic, for example. My aim in the essay on Cavell was to show that there was no good reason for thinking that a relation to skepticism, mediated by a metaphysical understanding of separateness, was part of our affective nature. Against the background of my use of material from cultural anthropology, it was a different issue from the environmental crisis that was beneath the surface of my essay: cultural conflict. I write in this vein,

It is not my aim here to evaluate the relative merits of secular modernity, but I do think that the uncritical adoption of this picture, however commonsensical for many, is not only intel­lectually dubious, but practically disastrous when it gets unconsciously (or at this point is it willfully?) imposed on people who are not quite the buffered in-the-world individuals one takes them for. This confu­sion often ends up either in self-flagellation on the one hand, blaming ourselves when “they” don’t display the common sense habits of good buffered moderns, or demonization on the other, viewing “them” as somehow inherently defective. It seems to me that no small amount of our current political strife is due to the inability or refusal to take culture seriously. 146-147  

While much more can be said here, because Cavell is in my view largely blind to a deep understanding of culture, cultural conflict seems to me to be precisely a place where his writings cannot do “their philosophical work”, or at least do it on their own. 

Lynxes and Invitations –

Each of the respondents brought up the topic of the “invitational” nature of Cavell’s work. They must have surely noticed that “invitation” and its derivatives does not appear in my essay on skepticism (although it does appear in a relevant passage, quoted above, in my essay on relativism.) Hämäläinen remarks in this regard:

Cavell, like many fellow philosophers drawing on Wittgenstein, writes in the key of the unbounded, invitational philosophical “we”. Thus when he writes that “we” do this and are prone to that, it is not – cannot be – a reference to a definite group, because it is intended to work as an invitation to all those who in fact recognize the situations or predicament described as their own. It opens up for the discovery of community, rather than drawing circles around pre-existing communities. Some would say that it is indeed a category mistake to interpret this invitational “we” as an ethnographic entity, as Cahill does.

I am aware of the importance when reading Wittgenstein’s later writings of paying close attention to his frequent use of phrases such as “I would like to say” or “I am tempted to say”. Such phrases are I assume connected to what Hämäläinen means in referring to the invitational nature of that work. But it is worth pointing out that Wittgenstein is actively flagging this feature of his remarks with such constructions. That these signals have been frequently overlooked by many commentators is regrettable and perhaps even inexcusable. But I simply do not find this to be the case with Cavell, as I state above in my responses to Mulhall and Shuster, I find instead declarations that strike me as explanatory glosses. The occluded nature of the invitational in Cavell is no doubt why at one point in the essay I raise the question of propaganda (144) (See also footnote 236)

Much to her credit, no sooner does Hämäläinen raise the possibility that I have neglected the invitational nature of much of Cavell’s writing, then she goes on to point out that, even if true, this point alone will not do as an unqualified defense against my critique:

But the uses of this “we” cannot be disconnected from awareness of who our likely peers are and who we might be excluding: its uses are shot through with cultural assumption, presumption and prejudice that the modus of invitation cannot take away.

More important still, even if I do not explicitly address the relevance of the invitational in Cavell, I do take up an issue pretty damn close to it.

I can imagine, however, howls of protest coming from other quarters to the effect that my critique of Cavell, drawing as it does on history and anthropology, completely misses its mark precisely because it construes him as making something like a universal empirical claim. The complaint might run like this: What you are in effect accusing Cavell of doing is making a hasty generalization. You are, that is, saying that he draws a false empirical generalization about the human condition from an inadequate data set. But that is not at all the kind of reasoning in which Cavell is engaged. He is taking himself and characters such as Lear and Othello as representatives of humanity, in the way in which an ethologist might say “the Canada lynx has long ear tufts, flared facial ruff, and short, bobbed tail with a completely black tip. It has unusually large paws that act like snowshoes in very deep snow, thick fur and long legs and feeds primarily on the snowshoe hare”. It would hardly be to the point, this line of counter-argument would continue, for you to assert that this statement was false because I had found a Canada lynx who didn’t eat meat. That would misunderstand the nature of the statement, which describes what is typical or representative of the Canada lynx. My attempt to refute the statement by pointing to our supposed vegetarian would merely reveal that I did not understand the grammar of such state­ments in the first place.

This point continues a few lines further down.

Well and good. 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. If lots of our vegetarian lynxes start showing up in peoples’ vegetable patches in Alberta, we would have ample reason to rethink the worth of the ethologist’s original claim about lynx diet, however we wish to regard its grammatical status. Claims of what is typical of this or that kind of living creature are, to be sure, not the same as universal generalizations. But neither are they immune against observable facts. (121)

Hämäläinen final remarks seem spot on in this context.

The methodology of the invitational “we” is also prone to a kind of thoughtless universalizing. “We” talk about things that we not just recognize as something we have in common, but also think of as having a validity that transcends us. In the absence of balancing historicist and contextualist impulses, this is easily taken as a validity that encompasses all of us, all humans. And before you know the humble invitation to sharing a perspective has produced, not just shared convictions, but quite confident, dogmatic, universalist, timeless “truths”.

To avoid this, the use of the invitational “we” should never be used as a reason to sidestep questions of historical and cultural nature. It should rather be used with a particularly high awareness of the historical and cultural differences (in concepts, ontology, values, practices) that may bring us together or keep us apart. It seems to me that the encounter with such contextual awareness is currently causing unnecessary friction in the post-Wittgensteinian camp, much because the current role models (such as Cavell) exhibit distinctive limitations in this respect. So, here is a task for the current generation.

Amen to all that. 

Conclusion

I would first like to thank Stephen Mulhall, Stina Bäckström, Martin Shuster, and Nora Hämäläinen for taking the time to read my work and for composing their provocative responses. I do wish there had been more attention paid to the other two essays in the book, as I think this might have avoided some misunderstandings in the discussion of the essay on Cavell. Be that as it may, each response forced me to revisit that essay and to attempt to rethink complex issues. Much has happened since February, 2021 when the book was published. In a few cases rereading the text provoked the usual “What the hell was I thinking when I said that!” That, for me, was an uncomfortable if not unfamiliar experience. Issues of memory aside, even after I was able to sort out my various authorial intentions from 4 years ago, revisiting my arguments in light of the various critical points was not exactly enjoyable, either. As with aerobic exercise, it required my overcoming enormous inertia: in general I would prefer not to. But it’s part of the life I’ve chosen, and, as with physical exercise, one is (mostly) afterwards glad that one did it. Finally, I also would like to express my thanks to Andrew Norris for first suggesting that I engage in this exercise and for his work in making it possible.

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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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