A metaphysics of separateness?

A METAPHYSICS OF SEPARATENESS?

By Stina Bäckström

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The Montréal Review, February 2026

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. Integral to Cahill’s argument is a recounting of an anthropological study by the Danish scholar Rane Willerslev, who did fieldwork among the Yukaghirs, an indigenous Siberian hunter culture. In Cahill’s argument Willerslev’s study plays the role of supplying a putative example of a deeply anti-Cavellian culture. According to Cahill, Willerslev’s account speaks against the “metaphysics of separateness” he finds in Cavell. Cavell is entrenched in a Western, modern, secularized conception of self and its relation to the world and others: “an ahistorical dogmatic ontology of the self that suffers from its assumption that certain features characteristic of the modern individual are universal” (Cahill, 78). Yukaghir culture allegedly provides a counterexample. A point of view from which self, other and world are not separate, but in fact deeply intertwined. And relatedly, where skepticism—here understood as a worry about an unbridgeable gap between self and world and self and other—is not a live option. Skepticism might be a possibility even for these people, Cahill concedes, but a possibility so remote that it seems preposterous, according to him, to ascribe to them an important relation to it. He writes,

[M]y main conclusion is that there is no good reason for attributing to these people [e.g. the Yukaghirs] an essential relation to skepticism as Cavell conceives of it. In fact, I find it difficult, to put it mildly, to accommodate Cavell’s vision of skepticism, tied as it is to the experience of the locked-in/locked-out self, within the contexts of these other cultures. (Cahill, 116)

I disagree with this argument, both as an interpretation of Cavell’s work and as a reading of Willerslev’s book. On account of space, I will primarily focus on the self-other relation and the issue of a metaphysics of separateness. At the end, I will briefly turn to the related issue of skepticism.

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. That I don’t find Willerslev to provide evidence against Cavell is a clear indication that Cahill and I are in a fundamental disagreement about how to read Cavell. However, it seems to me that the most interesting and fruitful way to articulate this disagreement, is to let Willerslev’s book be as much the center of attention as Cavell. I will thus develop some thoughts about how I see the relation between Cavell’s philosophical anthropology and Willerslev’s. In so doing, I will also make apparent some of the main points of disagreement between Cahill and myself.

A relational self

Willerslev’s book is deeply philosophical. It is a criticism of Cartesian ontology as a starting point for anthropology and a development of resources from phenomenology and Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe how the Yukaghirs relate to themselves, others, the animals they hunt, and the world of spirits. I want to highlight a methodological point. Willerslev investigates Yukaghir culture as a project of self-knowledge as much as of understanding another culture. No distinction is made by Willerslev between understanding Yukaghir culture and understanding what a self-other relation is as such. 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:

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)

We can notice that Willerslev here speaks of a ‘we’ in a philosophically familiar sense. It is a ‘we’ spoken from the inside and without restriction. It is an essentially first-personal ‘we’, i.e. it is not an accident that the speaker counts himself as a part of the ‘we’ in question. It is the ‘we’ used when there is no distinction between what one takes to be true about what the ‘we’ thinks or experiences and what oneself thinks is true. We can compare here with the accidentally first-personal and restricted use of ‘we’, in statements about the customs of a group of which we happen to be a member: “We Swedes still think we have a functioning welfare state”. I can say this, as a Swede, and leave it open whether we in fact have a functioning welfare state. That Willerslev uses the essentially first-personal ‘we’ in his investigation, is the first line of affinity I see between Cavell’s thought and Willerslev’s account.1

Willerslev is describing a culture with its specific and contingent customs and expressions, but this is no different from attempting to understand, from the inside, what it is to be human. This also means that the practices, in this case primarily hunting, is on the one hand attended to in their specificity and particularity, on the other hand are understood in terms of how they speak to the question of understanding humanity. When Cavell is approaching Shakespearian tragedy or Hollywood romance, it is on the one hand clear that he is describing and interpreting cultural products that bear their marks of their particular time and place in history. Hollywood comedy of the forties, for instance, are about how love, marriage and divorce are imagined and practiced at a particular historical moment (one where, e.g., women were gaining a new form of independence). And so we find there, say, incessant bicker about whether to continue working or become a housewife as in Howard Hawk’s His girl Friday. Bantering in this way about marriage belongs not to ‘us’- in the essentially first-personal and unrestricted sense, but to a historically contingent subset of ‘us’. But such bicker might still, and Cavell thinks it does, say something about us in the essentially first personal sense. And that is how Cavell pays attention to them, as local expressions that help us understand from the inside, what it is to be human.

Perhaps these points seem trivial. But I do think the point about methodology is crucial in order to think about how to respond to their accounts. Reading and responding first-personally is quite different from viewing their accounts from a position of neutrality with respect to the questions they are engaged with. However, it would be remarkable and in need of analysis if they from the same methodological starting point in fact ended up with wildly different answers to the question what it is to understand oneself as a human being. I take that to be Cahill’s view. Indeed, he thinks that Cavell endorses what he calls “metaphysical separateness” closely related to what Charles Taylor has called a “buffered conception of self”. About Taylor’s conception, Cahill says,

By ‘buffered’, Taylor means a sharp distinction between on the one hand what is taken to be ‘inside’ the mind, characterized as a subjective feeling, thought, evaluations, secondary sense qualities etc. and on the other what is regarded as the world ‘outside’ the mind, interpreted as non-mental, spatial and value neutral. (Cahill, 103)

This metaphysics, Cahill argues, is an expression of a particular historical position of individualist and secular modernity. Cahill finds this metaphysics embedded in how Cavell treats the problem of Cartesian skepticism. He 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). 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.

We will get to Cavell and separateness. But first, what does Willerslev in fact say about the Yukaghir conception of self? First of all, separateness, or “the otherness of the world”, is something they too contend with. They don’t see a complete and seamless continuity or identification between themselves and others, the world, or other animals. Indeed, as Willerslev also highlights, how could they? Rather, Willerslev 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)

I will not evaluate this claim as an interpretation of Lacan, nor will I try to unpack it very much on its own terms. Rather, I want two highlight two thoughts in it that at least in a structural form is central to Cavell’s analysis of the self-other relation. The first claim is that the self is constituted in relation to others. No other, no self. The second claim is that this relation is of a special sort—one that is not merely given but requires somehow a form of active engagement. Willerslev calls it rivalry. Cavell’s term for it is acknowledgment. At the end of the essay “Knowing and acknowledging”, Cavell says “To know you are in pain is to acknowledge it, or to withhold the acknowledgment. —I know your pain the way you do.” (Cavell 1969, 266) Here Cavell is saying that knowledge of another, as well as knowledge of self, has the form of a mutual and active engagement. That relation has this form is shown by the fact that “the concept of acknowledgment is evidenced equally by its failure as by its success” and that it is a “category in terms of which a given response is evaluated” (ibid, 263). To ignore people, avoid them, or meet them with silence, is to withhold or deny them acknowledgment. It is not simply, as Cavell puts it, mere ignorance, it is the presence of something, such as callousness or exhaustion. Now, to show in what sense more precisely, Cavell’s articulation of the self-other grammar in terms of acknowledgment shows that he takes the grammar of self to be relational would of course require more work, and work of a kind that I do not have space for here.2 I wanted merely to bring out some aspects of the concept that should unsettle the thought that Cavell endorses a metaphysics of separateness.

Acknowledgment is not absent from Cahill’s account of Cavell. But Cahill takes acknowledgement to be a redeeming concept – something that functions as a comfort in the face of metaphysical isolation. He says,

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)

To tie back to my discussion above of the different uses of ‘we’, we can note that Cahill is here not using the essentially first-personal ‘we’ in this quote. Here it functions like the “We Swedes…” example above. Cahill himself is not endorsing the thought that acknowledgment is redeeming, he is merely describing the thought system of a group of which he happens to be a part. This enables Cahill to say that given a different system of thought, the concept is redundant. Had he used the essentially first-personal and unrestricted ‘we’, his thought would not have made sense. But I think this also prevents Cahill from even facing the question of how acknowledgment speaks (or not) to the question what it is for us to understand ourselves as humans.

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. I would rather see it as a potential resource to add to the Lacanian and phenomenological frameworks, in order to try to capture the special nature of the constitutive dependence between self- and other. More specifically, I think that the concept of acknowledgment can help us see that the term Willerslev uses for the relation, namely rivalry, has its potential pitfalls. For active opposition is one way in which we acknowledge others, one mode of acknowledgement. Others are possible, although I think a case could be made for rivalry being an indispensable mode.

Skepticism and the human condition

Cahill’s essay is as much about skepticism as it is about the self. I will therefore briefly indicate a few thoughts I have on skepticism in relation to what I have just discussed.

First, 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.3 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. It requires Cahill to reconstruct acknowledgment as something it clearly isn’t and cannot possibly be, namely something that saves us from being “completely at the mercy of our separateness” (Cahill 2021, 98). However, Cahill is right in that Cavell is taking there to be some important insight in the idea that skepticism belongs to the human condition. What is that insight?

As Cahill points out, Cavell sometimes describes skepticism in affective terms as a disappointment with the human—and in the context of this paper we can understand what this means specifically as disappointment with acknowledgment being the structure of the constitutive self-other relation—and sometimes in active terms as a denial of the human. And he often describes living with the possibility of disappointment and denial as a struggle – a struggle that obviously can express itself in various ways. Now, how can we decide whether such a struggle is indeed a part of the human condition, or rather a deeply entrenched malady of Western modernity? First, I think the most important point here is conceded, or at least not denied, by Cahill, namely that skepticism is a possibility inherent in the human condition. How important is this possibility and how does it express itself? Here we come back to the methodological point. It seems to me that how or whether a culture is contending with skepticism cannot be decided from a position of neutrality with respect to the question what it means for us to be human. Leaving neutrality behind, I indeed saw traces of such a struggle in Willerslev’s book. Here is a passage that Cahill also highlights:

[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.)

This is not a Cartesian anxiety of separateness and isolation. But I would be inclined to think that it is its mirror image—where the primary fantasy is not that of complete isolation but its flip side, which is maybe even more daunting—namely complete identification. An anxiety that I think the Western culture also grapples with, perhaps most tellingly in how it imagines love.

I agree with Cahill that Cavell has his archive and his starting points. And those are distinctively Western and mostly modern in the sense of post-Cartesian. And it would be surprising if that did not bring with it certain limitations and blind spots. It seems to me however, that a fruitful criticism of those limitations ought to be pursued, in Willerslev’s and Cavell’s spirit, from the inside of an attempt to understand what it means, for us, to be human.

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Stina Bäckström is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm, where her research focuses on the philosophy of mind, action, and the ethics of practical knowledge. Drawing on the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, her scholarship explores the intricacies of human expression, self-consciousness, and the nature of social skills. In addition to her academic papers, she is the author of Om humor, a 2024 collection of essays that examines the philosophical and existential dimensions of what makes something—or someone—funny.

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