CAVELL’S AHISTORICAL SELF By Nora Hämäläinen *** The Montréal Review, February 2026 |
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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. Not in the form of full blown “relativism” or “historicism” as a systematic theory – this would be a very un-Wittgensteinian move – but in the form of constant attention to differences between times and places. But especially when we move toward questions of ethics, human nature or personhood, such potentially relativist and historicist impulses tend to wither away and we are left with varieties of ahistorical universalism, often conducted through attention to particular situated people (in literary or other examples). Substantial energy is invested in the singularity of persons and their situations, but the energy of the work flows in the direction of some ahistorical, decontextualized good (or evil, or truth), while historical and cultural issues are set aside. Kevin Cahill is what seems to me a rare case of Wittgensteinian today – a student of Cora Diamond, well read in the tradition that encompasses thinkers such as Peter Winch and Stanley Cavell – with a very substantial historicist sensibility, and a constant eye for the plural significances of cultural and historical context. We see this throughout his new book Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture, but it comes particularly to flower in the last of the book’s three essays “Skepticism and the Human Condition”. Here he seizes on a curious instance of the universalist, ahistorical tendency in post-Wittgensteinian thought. He argues that Stanley Cavell’s sustained work on skepticism is premised on a culturally and historically specific conception of the human, which Cavell mistakenly glosses as the human condition, unavoidable for us as linguistic beings. Cahill writes that “at the root of Cavell’s portrait of the human lies an ahistorical dogmatic ontology of the self that suffers from its assumption that certain features characteristic of the modern individual are universal. Thus, whereas Cavell has primarily intended to provide a kind of ethology of the human animal, he has instead succeeded in providing an ethnography: a compelling ethnography, but an ethnography nonetheless.” (p. 78) This may seem to be a philosophically small issue – a detail in the work of one philosopher, who in spite of a substantial and faithful following has had relatively little impact in the development of contemporary thought. I suggest, however, that we should consider Cahill’s discussion of Cavell in this essay as an important case study that goes to the heart of the question of the role of historicity and cultural context in philosophical reflection. A little bit of background is in place here. Those familiar with Cavell’s work will know that a central strand in it is concerned with rejecting epistemological attempts to overcome skepticism, while maintaining that the skeptical impulses – of doubting the reality of (or our knowledge of) the world and of other people – are important guides to our human predicament. In short, while epistemological debates over skepticism are futile, the struggles they replicate have irreducible ethical and existential validity for us. They are, in Cavell’s view, rooted in our separateness from each other and from the world, and the vicissitudes of reaching for the other and the world by means of language. Cahill’s criticism is not directed toward this ethico-existential turn of attention in Cavell’s work. To the contrary, he finds it (I think rightly) quite brilliant, if we understand it as an analysis of an aspect of a distinctive cultural setting that we may call western (secular) modernity. His critique is entirely directed at the ahistorical, universalist bent of the underlying ontology of the human. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s genealogy of the modern “bounded” and “punctual” self (contrasted to the medieval “porous self”), and in conversation with a range of anthropological works accounting for different and various ontologies of the self, Cahill seeks to show up Cavell’s conception of the self/person/individual as a product of a distinctive time and place: a representative of the modern western understanding of humans and their relations. We – as products of this understanding – may be people susceptible to the ethical and existential pangs of skepticism, but it is unlikely that people living with less bounded or punctual cultural ontologies of the self would face quite the same challenges. That is, their ethical and existential challenges would probably be substantially different. The issue is, however, complicated and made more puzzling and elusive by the many ways in which Cavell does acknowledge historical conditions and innovations throughout his work – including a connection between skepticism and modernity. Cahill gives many good examples of this. In discussing Shakespeare’s works Cavell describes his mode of tragedy as a response to the “crisis of knowledge inspired by the crisis of the unfolding of the New Science in the late 16th and early 17th centuries” and talks about “the catastrophe of the modern advent of skepticism”. His analyses of Hollywood golden age remarriage comedies and his discussions of modernism in art are similarly flanked by remarks that show a historical sensitivity that both supersedes what one may expect from an anglophone philosopher of the 20th century and stands out as substantial in the context of Wittgenstein-inspired philosophy. But, according to Cahill, the ways he talks about the human condition underlying skepticism is interestingly untouched by his historical awareness: “even when taking into account what there are of hermeneutic historical understanding in Cavell’s account, these are not enough to avoid the conclusion that a kind of essentializing (even to the point of fetishizing) of the modern conception of the self pervades his thought and that this seriously undermines his claim about the universality of the human relation to skepticism.” (p. 79) Cahill is highly aware that many of his readers will find this suggestion of an “ahistorical dogmatic ontology” in the heart of Cavells work contentious to say the least. Thus, over the 80 densely argued pages of the essay he addresses a range of potential counterarguments against his claim, including the possibilities that he has simply overlooked Cavell’s historical sensibility and that he is making some kind of category mistake in his interpretation of Cavell. He also tries out – in different ways – the suggestion that cultural variety in conceptions of persons or selves is superficial, and that deep down, or when cultural debris is cleared away, humans are at bottom distinctly separate selves prone to doubts that open up for skepticism. The discussion is very thorough, to the point that I think most people who have spontaneous objections to Cahill’s claim will at least find them addressed in the essay. I find the discussion thrilling, not just because of the thorough and perceptive argumentation, but because I immediately recognize and agree with Cahill's portrait of Cavell in this matter. I have to admit that I had never paid much attention to the ontology of the human at play in Cavell’s take on skepticism, but his manner of setting aside history and cultural specificity has caught my interest in a way that Cahill’s account captures with great precision. It is not that Cavell lacks a historicist sensibility, but rather that it does not seem to go very deep in him – that he seems so able to leave it behind when things get really interesting, like when you take off a both necessary and becoming outer garment and leave it in the wardrobe when entering the party. 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. Different readers will have a range of objections to the details of Cahill’s critique, but I at least find its central charge concerning an underlying ahistorical ontology of the self in Cavell’s work well established. The question one may want to ask is: 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. However, 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. (Others might want to suggest that in actual practice, when it comes to personhood “we have never been modern”, as Bruno Latour puts it. That is, even “our” modern western ontologies of the self or person contain much more complex and porous elements. But this is a side issue here.) For my own purposes I am more interested in how Cahill’s discussion raises wider issues concerning the roles of historical and cultural understanding in philosophical inquiry. Much could be said about this in relation to different strands of today’s philosophy, but I will limit myself here to considering this question in relation to an aspect of Wittgensteinian philosophy. 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. 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. 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. ***
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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