1. Re: “Declining Decline”
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. The brevity of my references to this essay by Cavell are indeed brief, but that can be explained by two things: first, after poring over Cavell’s texts for many years I found so many other passages that confirmed my sense that what I first had sensed in the 1989 essay were indeed indicative of Cavell’s view on the nature of the self that exclusive or even primary focus on “Declining Decline” would leave out many other confirming, not to mention evocative passages; second, I had already said what I thought about that essay as an interpretation of Wittgenstein in Chapter Six of my monograph from 2011, The Fate of Wonder (which Mulhall blurbed, incidentally). As I make clear in the introduction, the present work was not intended primarily as a piece of Wittgenstein interpretation, although it could be taken as intended to be a work of applied Wittgenstein interpretation. Thus it was natural for me to focus on other works by Cavell.
2. The Stratified View of Lebensform
Mulhall writes,
Cahill declares that ‘Cavell’s description of the ethnological dimension of form of life in this essay as ‘conventionalistic’ and so merely ‘horizontal’, as opposed to the ‘biological’ and so ‘vertical’ dimension of that unified whole is deeply misleading’ (fn 70, 153); but he doesn’t explain how or why. I think that his way of formulating that declaration evinces multiple misunderstandings….Such a reading tends to view our social ties through a contractualist lens, and to think of our agreements with one another as agreements to rather than agreement in. To conflate the ethnological with the conventionalistic is thus to conflate Cavell’s conception of ‘form of life’ with what he regards as a deeply damaging misreading of it.
I think that it is Mulhall’s claim, that my reading evinces multiple misunderstandings, that evinces multiple misunderstandings.
First, let’s turn away from “Declining Decline” for a moment to a passage in The Claim of Reason, where Cavell takes up the subject of convention. He writes,
That human beings on the whole do not respond in these ways is, therefore, seriously referred to as conventional; but now we are thinking of convention not as the arrangements a particular culture has found convenient, in terms of its history and geography, for effecting the necessities of human existence, but as those forms of life which are normal to any group of creatures we call human, any 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 for certain humanly comprehensible motives. Here the array of “conventions” are not patterns of life which differentiate human being from one another, but those exigencies of conduct and feeling which all humans share. Wittgenstein’s discovery, or rediscovery, is of the depth of convention in human life; a discovery which insists not only on the conventionality of human society but, we could say, on the conventionality of human nature itself, on what Pascal meant when he said “Custom is our nature”; perhaps on what an existentialist means by saying that man has no nature. CR, 111
I have no issue with Cavell’s referring to the profound impacts on our mentality of certain common biological facts as “conventional”, if only because it would be strange to insist that facts such as walking upright, mostly being two-handed, being mostly bipedal, etc. were somehow “necessary” in any traditional philosophical sense. But consider how those conventions that are not biological are described here: “the arrangements a particular culture has found convenient, in terms of its history and geography, for effecting the necessities of human existence…” I can’t think of any thinker in whose work cultural practice plays a significant role, be it Bourdieu, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, or Wittgenstein, who would have chosen “convenient cultural arrangement” as the unqualified description for the locus of their philosophical attention. A quotation in Chapter One (pp. 24-25) from Hubert Dreyfus that addresses the practice of conversational distance-standing (a point he borrows from Bourdieu) shows, I believe, that it is superficially horizontal to ascribe conventional depth only to the biological and to characterize cultural conventions as “convenient arrangements” without further elaboration.
Mulhall also writes,
This brings us to the final element of Cahill’s misreading. He seems to picture the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Cavell’s account as distinct components of the unified whole that is some given ‘form of life’. On the one hand, we have the human animal; on the other, its various social and cultural formations over history. But for Cavell, there is no manifestation of human life that does not find expression in some form of sociality, and no form of sociality that does not give expression to human nature; and one part of reflecting on what it is to be human is reflecting on whether we have taken a contingent social arrangement as a human necessity, or allowed a human necessity to be denied by our inability to apprehend our social formation as capable of being otherwise. In Cavell’s hands, the concept of a ‘form of life’ is thus not a two-component theory of the human condition; it is a means of perspicuous representation, displaying the internal relatedness of two dimensions of variation by reference to which we might clarify and sharpen our thinking about what it is to be human.
Now my first reaction to this is to point out that claiming in the same breath that on the one hand for Cavell the biological (the humanly necessary) and the cultural are not factorizable, because always inextricably intertwined, and that on the other hand, we may always risk taking a contingent social arrangement, i.e. those “convenient arrangements” mentioned above, for a human necessity, seems a hard thing to make sense of. Of course, presumably some features of any cultural constellation are contingent; regarding every feature as necessary seems untenable. And even cultural practices and sensitivities connected to so-called “hinge propositions” can be reflected on and critiqued in a piecemeal fashion. But I worry that Mulhall’s way of putting things threatens to reintroduce the factorizability of a stratified story by suggesting that we have some kind of culture-neutral grasp on the very concept of the humanly necessary, which we risk denying to members of some group. On the other hand, it might presume that any constitution of “convenient arrangements” (except our favored one, naturally) is contingent and thus always revisable in light of further reflection (or is it badgering?). This begs the question as to whether it is always conceivable, even on “reflection”, to regard the ethnological (“theirs”, not “ours” naturally) as lacking necessity. But this is precisely one of the main points at issue here. Unless, that is, we regard ourselves as having some handle on what it would be to glimpse the endpoint of bio-cultural articulation (the end of history?) in some arrangement (a future version of our own?), where the natives come up short (again) and where we might see the “really” human truly revealed.
It's a pity that Mulhall does not make use of my discussion of related questions from Chapter Two of my book, which addresses the question of relativism. In particular I refer there to a pair of concepts coined some years back by Sabina Lovibond. The first, “transcendental parochialism” denotes an ideal state of affairs where a society’s critical resources for reform are fully extended, yet where the language or discourse so arrived at would still be a recognizably human one. Lovibond contrasted this with “empirical parochialism”, which she characterized in effect as the parochialism of repressive conservatism. I quote a relevant passage at length:
One might wish that this pair of concepts could be of some help in the context of our current discussion about the nature of a possible extension of each of our two imagined group’s grammars into uncharted logical space. The idea could be that the side willing to explore the extension of its grammar into new logical spaces would be overcoming empirical parochialism and striving towards a more enlightened transcendental parochialism, while the other side would be seen as failing in such a task. Unless, however, one wants to take on what I regard as some fairly substantial metaphysical baggage about the nature of rationality, I don’t think this terminology gets us any further. If we are not just dealing here with a self-righteous and logically unmotivated call for permanent linguistic revolution, where the aim seems to be change for the sake of change, we might wonder how one ever knows whether one is being transcendentally parochial or merely empirically parochial.
How, relatedly, does one determine that the other side is being empirically parochial? More to the present point, where comes the certainty in the kind of conflict we are envisaging, that either group is guilty of empirical parochialism, should the conflict about whether to explore the new logical space go unresolved? Maybe there could be any number of concrete conceptual logjams, stable configurations of unresolved conflicts consistent with neither side’s being guilty of “empirical parochialism”.
Is it always reasonable to suspect bigotry or ignorance if a group of speakers simply does not respond to a particular “invitation” to extend or change its practices? Does this always call for some special explanation or justification in terms of something like repression that accounts for their withholding an extension of their concepts? There is a difference between, on the one hand, making the merely abstract grammatical point that any given parochial view could, at least in theory, be extended at a particular point, and on the other hand, saying that people must always push the limit at that point on pain of being an irrational reactionaries. Prima facie, someone or some peoples not projecting some of their concepts into new logical spaces no more needs a special explanation than does our willingness (or is it now an insistence?) on doing so. If this is true, then it may not always be clear whether lack of assent must be regarded as a failure or refusal to project one’s concepts into new logical spaces, so much as being regarded as something that just never seemed apt to some people. Naturally, language users may sometimes actively resist changes. And in such cases, there may well be some background story which explains what happens: some ethical or social sensitivity or hope or worry. But we don’t have to look at everything through the lenses of a Weltanschauung that seduces us into regarding every such case as a result of what some imagined clan of old, conservative elders forbids. Allowing the projection of criteria implicates us no less than preventing such projection implicates others. Both are equally signs of a value commitment. We may call the new space a result of an appropriate extension of the same grammar. They may not even have so much of an idea of this space. To insist on attributing bad faith to those who resist exploring new logical spaces, not to mention those to whom doing so doesn’t show up as a live option, is just political metaphysics. pp. 64-65
Mulhall does not accuse me of actually subscribing to the stratified view of Lebensform. That would have been clearly wrong, since it would have disregarded my approving quotation of a thought from Clifford Geertz that appears in my essay on Cavell:
The notion that unless a cultural phenomenon is empirically universal it cannot reflect anything about the nature of man is about as logical as the notion that because sickle-cell anemia if, fortunately, not universal, it cannot tell us anything about human genetic processes.1 P. 121
But once more, the neglect of other parts of the book are regrettable in this context. In Chapter One, after employing what I find useful in Hubert Dreyfus’ essay “Holism and Hermeneutics” in arguing against Quinean naturalism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, I go on to criticize Dreyfus himself for subscribing to a different but related type of stratified view and I do this from the integrated view of the conceptual and the biological articulated by John McDowell in his well known debate with Dreyfus from several years back. These facts merely make it evident that I am cognizant of the weaknesses of the stratified view of Lebensform. They do not decide whether my apparent ascription of it to Cavell is mistaken. Nevertheless, I think Mulhall has to engage in some pretty deft interpretative footwork to try to make it believable, not that his argument might be available to Cavell on a very charitable reading, but that it is actually a good interpretation of Cavell’s thought given the overall textual evidence.
3. Finitude and the Sense (Sinn) of Skepticism
Mulhall asks,
In the light of this conception of culture, how might we expect Cavell’s treatment of scepticism to proceed? We would certainly not expect it to provide a single, definitive yes-or-no answer to the question: ‘Is scepticism an artefact of Western European modernity, or an ahistorical feature of the ontology of the human?’ We would rather expect him to approach scepticism as a phenomenon of our lives which will exhibit both a horizontal and a vertical dimension – – hence something whose expression will always have an ethnologically specific form, but about which it will always be legitimate to ask how far it thereby gives expression to a recurrent aspect of distinctively human life-forms…
I can only refer to the numerous passages quoted in my essay where Cavell makes claims about “the human” with little or no gesture at any sort of cultural or historical inflection on the drives that lead us to skepticism. The reader can then decide for herself.
Mulhall goes on,
The long passage from The Claim of Reason (pp 141-2) that Cahill uses most frequently to indict Cavell on the charge of cultural chauvinism – one in which he recalls experiences of feeling sealed off from others and from the external world – are part of his exploration of the late stages of this philosophical tradition in the company of his contemporary readers (not some direct phenomenological proof that any human creature must be vulnerable to such experiences regardless of context)…
I never make any claim about proof, phenomenological or otherwise, but only imply that Cavell is speaking here in a characteristically unqualified way of “the philosopher’s originating question” as “a response to, or expression of, a real experience which takes hold of human beings.”
Next, Mulhall proposes that
we accept Cavell’s invitation to regard these culturally specific phenomena as analogically related; it’s then surely natural to ask how far their multiplicity and pervasiveness indicate that what modernity interprets as scepticism might give expression to impulses and tendencies that are not merely characteristic of modernity, but go deep into anything we’re willing to recognize as a human form of life. [my italics]
Unless one is equating an actual invitation to imagine the cultural analog Mulhall refers to here with the bare logical possibility that this idea is latent in Cavell’s writing, I confess to finding no such invitation(s) by Cavell to explore how the “intra-ethnological expansion of the range of reference of the term ‘skepticism’ naturally leads into his exploring its intersection with the vertical dimension of human forms of life”. I find instead a rather ingenious, but willful and repeated finding of the same phenomenon: skepticism as a result of an ahistorical drive.
Mulhall states further that,
To test the validity of such an intuition, we’d need a characterization of scepticism that does not tie it too tightly either to its articulations in modern philosophy or to its non-philosophical articulations in modernity more generally. So Cavell shifts register: he moves from characterizations in terms of knowledge, tragedy and melodrama to formulations that invoke human anxieties about our embodiment, our separateness (from others and from the world we inhabit), and our finitude. If we can understand expressions of scepticism in modernity as inflections of such higher-level or deeper (less ethnologically specific) anxieties, then we might be able to see that what finds expression in modernity as scepticism finds analogous expression in non-modern, non-Western cultures in very different, ethnologically specific ways.
I worry that this stretches the meaning of the term “skepticism” beyond recognition. More importantly, I make something very much like this very point in the book twice. In the Introduction I write,
Can we think of the “truth of skepticism” as merely one way of presenting what I take to be the facts to which it refers, that is, certain facts of human finitude? To put it another way: must an engagement with these facts be mediated by epistemological concerns to the degree Cavell assumes is compulsory? Or are there other ways of being in touch with the concrete reality of this truth, ways which are not mediated by the concerns with knowledge that we find in the exclusively modern works of philosophy, literature, and film that Cavell discusses? I believe there are and I will argue that Cavell’s conception of the human arises from the inadequate consideration he gives to the possibility that humans within different historical cultures may have sufficiently different conceptions of the self than the one he takes for granted. Attention to the possibility of such differences makes it unrealistic to assume that the problems that Cavell locates in the sphere of the human must inevitably arise (or inevitably be repressed, which is in effect the same). Pp. 78-79 [my italics]
In “Skepticism and the Human Condition” itself I write,
Since I have gone to great lengths to undermine the universality of Cavell’s portrait of the human self, it might therefore seem as though I were denying that there is anything like a human condition at all or that there are genuine problems of human finitude. In truth, I am merely questioning whether a certain subset of these problems ought to be ascribed to the human condition. Although many modern Westerners and others whose formation has been substantially marked by Western modernity may respond to finitude by fleeing into skepticisms of various stripes, there is more than one manner of responding to human finitude. This, in fact, is one of the most important and fascinating lessons that studying the world’s cultures, especially their religions, teaches. It is simply not given that this includes living with a relationship to skepticism in anything but the thinnest of senses. Human finitude, I want to say, reaches deeper into the human than the possibility of skepticism. As I see it, it’s better to think of “finitude” as working more like a proper name, whereas “separateness” works only like a contingently associated description that indicates one mode of presentation for how finitude gets worked out or experienced, i.e. in the modern West and its cultural satellites. Pp. 144-145
All in all, while it would be ridiculous to expect the same sorts of articulation of the matter that one finds for example in McDowell or Geertz, I find no indication in Cavell’s work, whether in “Declining Decline” or elsewhere, that he holds something like an integrated picture of Second Nature or Bildung, in which a transformative view of conceptuality (the ethnological) goes “all the way down” so to speak. Rather than finding a nuanced view of skepticism in Cavell’s work as evolving through different historical periods and philosophical and artistic media, I think Cavell is in fact rather closer to Freud, a subtractionist if there ever was one. So I reject Mulhall’s claim that I have misread Cavell on this point. I have a different reading.
4. “Separateness” as Universal
It appears to me, moreover, that a lesson Mulhall draws from part of my discussion of the Yukaghir is based on a misunderstanding of what that discussion actually shows.
[Cahill] also notes that anthropologists have identified a fear of self-dissolution among the Yukaghir, one that is particularly salient in the context of hunting (which requires the hunter to take on the identity of their prey) – a risk of othering beyond recovery that shadows their capacity for self-externalization or self-ecstasis. This material certainly shows that some features of Western European conceptions of individuality or selfhood (many of which arise from its economic and political arrangements, as when we treat pains as a kind of private property) are culturally specific; but it also seems to show that a basic sense of (and consequent anxieties about) the separateness of human beings, from one another and from other beings, is more widely shared.
As far as I can see, the example shows that the Yukaghir are anxious about losing their separateness, not about experiencing it. Although separateness is involved in both the Western European and Yukaghir cases, the directionality of the phenomena are opposite. Mulhall tries to support this argument by referring to a point made by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. Anticipating incredulity that any talk of different conceptions of the self like the medieval porous one, for example, must fly in the face of common sense, Taylor counters that,
In those days when a Paleolithic hunting group was closing in on a mammoth, when the plan went awry and the beast was lunging towards hunter A, something similar to the thought ‘Now I’m for it’ crossed A’s mind. And when at the last moment, the terrifying animal lurched to the left and crushed B’s head instead, a sense of relief mingled with grief for poor B was what A experienced. In other words, the members of the group must have had very much the same sense that we would in their place: here is one person, and there is another, and which one survives/flourished depends on which person/body is run over by that mammoth. P. 133
I don’t doubt whether the Paleolithic had something like the thought “now I’m for it” when facing immanent death. I do question whether that alone is an expression of the recognition of the instantiation of a universal concept of “separateness” as that concept figures in Cavell’s writing. I see no reason to understand the hunter’s thought in such a hyperbolic manner.
4. Charles Taylor
I make substantial use of the work of Charles Taylor, both Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, in my critique of Cavell. In particular I argue that a pair of correlative concepts that Taylor introduces, the “buffered self” of modernity and the “porous self” of the medieval world, can help to introduce the historical sensibility that I go on to explore in my discussions of ethnographic work as a contrast to the more ahistorical attitude I attribute to Cavell. Mulhall, however, states that “Cavell is in fact in complete agreement with Taylor rather than writing against his grain.” He first adduces the example of the separateness of the Paleolithic hunter, with which I just dealt. He then adds,
Taylor accepts that human universals can be distinguished from historical constellations, admits that there is no general formula for doing so, which rather requires exercising right judgement [See “empirical” vs. “transcendental” above] from case to concrete case, and acknowledges that the embodied separateness of persons looks much more like a human constant than an artefact of the Enlightenment punctual self. So if Taylor’s work represents for Cahill a flawed but empowering example of how philosophy might be informed by a non-dogmatic conception of culture, then it’s hard to see why Cavell couldn’t and shouldn’t be treated in the same way.
I greatly admire Taylor’s work, in particular the much greater sensitivity to historical context that he shows when compared with Cavell. But my discussion of Taylor also makes it clear that I have a serious disagreement with him too, on the very issue that is relevant to Mulhall’s charge of unfairness to Cavell. In his criticism of Winch’s relativism, Taylor rightly objects that Winch’s own position actually depends on the anachronistic imposition of a modern sharp fact-value distinction onto systems of thought where the factual and expressive were not clearly distinguished. I comment,
Taylor does not stop there, however. He goes on to claim that modern science can score “objective points” against the Azande or the Renaissance magus, since the modern scientist can clearly provide a superior account of disenchanted nature. I find it strange for Taylor to make this argument just here, since it involves a move that at least looks structurally identical to the one for which he criticizes Winch. This is because making the judgement that the modern scientific descriptions of nature are better simpliciter involves a prior commitment to the overall legitimacy of a fact value distinction. Obviously, once that prior distinction is accepted, then certainly modern science can be judged to be superior to the enchanted understanding. In general, if one wishes to compare two substantially different conceptual systems in some respect, the more discontinuity that one can disregard, the easier it becomes to imagine the comparison between them as being truth apt; it is easier to articulate continuity and commensurability if there already is some taken-for-granted continuity and commensurability. Yet as Taylor himself argues, fact and value were not understood as sharply separated before the modern period, and so his claim that modern science explains the world more successfully than could the Renaissance magician, while true, seems to presume that we can already see the disenchanted understanding of nature as implicit in and continuous with the renaissance worldview. And this in turn requires that we are able to see the two aspects for ourselves as already factored even before they became factorized for us. But this is in essence precisely what Taylor rejects in his criticism of Winch’s argument from incommensurability. More peculiar still, Taylor explicitly denies the very idea of the overall “global superiority” of the modern fact/value distinction over the pre-modern integrated view, which is precisely what assuming the objective superiority of the results of disenchantment would seem to require. The upshot is that connecting Taylor’s articulation of realism in thinking about natural kinds across conceptual and historical differences won’t make the case for realism about the self in Cavell’s work any stronger. Pp. 140-141
So I don’t extend a generosity to Taylor that I deny to Cavell. Because Taylor is generally much more historical in this thinking than is Cavell, his work was extremely useful as a source of ideas, especially the buffered and non-buffered self. But the essay was not on him but on Cavell. Had my focus been on Taylor I would have pointed out that his thinking becomes metaphysical at just this juncture. By the way, this is not relativism on my part, but, as Geertz aptly put it, “anti-anti relativism”. 
***
1 Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 44. Geertz writes in the same essay,
[T]he notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive to this people or that is a prejudice we are not necessarily obliged to share. P. 43
***
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...
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:
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...
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:
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...
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...
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”...
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...
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.
***
