INTRODUCTION By Andrew Norris *** The Montréal Review, February 2026 |
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If culture is the cultivation of nature,1 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. The negative or contradictory relation between the two is not only “internal,” it is a generative or productive one: it is the way culture brings itself into being.2 Conversely, there are no natural human beings who have not cultivated their nature, and there is no human nature that does not appear as culture. That it so appears, however, is what gives culture its depth and mystery. Culture is not just an assemblage or aggregation of arbitrary choices and responses and practices. This thought is central to Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgensteinian forms of life. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell frames it in terms of convention:
The conventions to which Wittgenstein draws our attention are not the conventions with which a particular culture responds to “the necessities of human existence”—say, its cuisine or its mating rituals or its mode of dress; such things together make up “patterns of life which differentiate human beings from one another.” But neither are they universal features of undifferentiated human life—the need, say, for nourishment and sex and comfort. Rather, they are or express “those exigencies of conduct and feeling which all humans share.” The exigency or need (necessity) is not for the object of a desire, the fulfillment of which (helps to) allow for continued existence, but for a way of desiring, of feeling and conducting oneself. And that way will always, of necessity, be particular to a “group of creatures we call human,” a “group about which we will say, for example, that they have a past to which they respond, or a geographical environment which they manipulate or exploit in certain ways.”3 If “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life [eine Lebensform]” (Wittgenstein 2001, §19), to explore the conventions of a form of life means to imagine a particular group’s way of feeling and mode of conduct, where the particularity of the group is defined by its language and all that that language entails. The difference here is in part one of emphasis or focus. Wittgenstein’s immediate concern may not, on Cavell’s account, be with what distinguishes one group from another, but neither will it disregard that, either. There is no generic form of life. In This New Yet Unapproachable America Cavell pursues the thought that Philosophical Investigations can and is to be seen “as a philosophy of culture” (Cavell 1989, 72-3).4 Here he distinguishes between two “idea[s] of the idea” of a form of life. One of these emphasizes the social; the other emphasizes the natural. In line with what we have already noted, Cavell does not simply contrast the natural to the social, but rather to “the typical emphasis upon the social,” an emphasis that is not his, one that “eclipses . . . the natural” (Cavell 1989, 41) rather than implying it. Cavell characterizes these two ideas of the idea of a form of life as, respectively, horizontal and vertical “senses” of the term--a characterization that, again, resists our temptation to dissociate and categorically contrast the two. The vertical and the horizontal are two dimensions of one (two dimensional) object—say, a map—and not two different (kinds of) objects.5 Put otherwise, social and natural do not correspond to the opposition Cavell makes in The Claim of Reason between “the arrangements a particular culture has found convenient” and “those forms of life which are normal to any group of creatures we call human.” Rather, they are two dimensions of the latter. They are two “ideas of” Wittgenstein’s idea of convention, of form of life. This idea is central to Cavell’s own philosophy, one that he also characterizes in terms of culture:
This is a picture of philosophy as internal to cultural life, not, as philosophy is so often presented, as an objective, transhistorical, transcultural view from nowhere. As an ordinary language philosopher, or one building upon his early education in ordinary language philosophy, Cavell takes philosophy to be a hermeneutic, reflexive enterprise, one in which the critique of culture transpires from within and words are brought “back from their metaphysical to their everyday use,” to their home or Heimat (Wittgenstein 2001, §116). However, as Kevin Cahill argues in Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture: Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism (London: Routledge, 2021), Cavell also makes a number of claims about philosophy and the skepticism that is his special object of concern in terms that seem to fit more easily with a traditional view of the subject. Cahill is particular struck by Cavell’s description of the experience to which the skeptic responds as one of “being sealed off from the world’ (Cavell 1979, 144; cited in Cahill 2021, 97) and his repeated characterization of skepticism as expressing something about the human as such (cited in Cahill 2021, 92-4). Here Cavell seems to disregard the historical and contemporary variety of culture and with it the variety of ways of being human, some which do not seem to fit Cavell’s descriptions of a self that experiences itself as (at crucial moments at least) isolated and sealed off. Cavell’s “human” is in the end Charles Taylor’s “punctual self” (Cahill 2021, 83; Taylor 1989, 159f.), but as seen as an a priori given and not, as in Taylor, a contingent historical product that sharply distinguishes itself from its forebearers. If this is right, Cavell’s philosophy of culture betrays an “inability or refusal to take culture seriously” (Cahill 2021, 147), and Cavell is guilty of drawing metaphysical conclusions from what purports to be a critique of metaphysics.6 On this account, the relation of the cultural to the natural turns out, in Cavell, to be not a dialectical one, but rather one of subordination. For those who find Cavell’s inheritance of Wittgenstein and his philosophy of culture to be among the most profound we have, these are serious charges; and they are of interest and import to anyone interested in the methodology of philosophical reflection on the human in a pluralistic world. I am deeply grateful to four accomplished philosophers and students of Wittgenstein and Cavell (Stina Bäckström, Nora Hämäläinen, Stephen Mulhall, and Martin Shuster) for agreeing to participate in this symposium and to help evaluate Cahill’s charges. I am also grateful to Cahill himself for agreeing to respond to their evaluations. ***
ANDREW NORRIS: 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... 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... KEVIN M. CAHILL: 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... 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... KEVIN M. CAHILL: 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... MARTIN SHUSTER: 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... KEVIN M. CAHILL: 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”... NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN: Post-Wittgensteinian philosophy is known for a view of language as dependent on KEVIN M. CAHILL: 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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