The Self -

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” (140). He then asks, “Why think these options exhaust Cavell’s view(s)? The first view, a rational soul, what in the essay I describe as a Lockean shopkeeper, otherwise known as homo economicus, plays a central role in the just-so stories told by traditional subtraction theorists, in particular by those who are intent on making our current economic arrangements seem inevitable. This option is obviously out of the question when it comes to interpreting Cavell. So it seems it is the neurotic we are left with. Shuster asks why I saddle Cavell with the view, that, as I contentiously put it, historical change reveals merely that all along, underneath, the ideal type of Alvie Singer was waiting to spring out? I will say more about the issue of neuroticism later, but for now I want to give a partial reconstruction of Shuster’s challenge to my reading of Cavell on the self of skepticism. 

Shuster writes that he does not share my assessment. He correctly understands that I do allow for other options for Cavell: 1) the just mentioned subtraction story that I favor as an interpretation, where modernity has led to a laying bare or uncovering of a self that was always “there”, laboring away under the repressive layers of traditional culture; or because that single option does not exhaust the logical possibilities of interpretations, there is 2) the idea that “with the right articulation we might come to regard” something like the modern self as a necessary development and “not as a fundamentally contingent, historical, and discontinuous” phenomenon (143). My discussion of this interpretative option then bifurcates into two further possible branches: either I think that Cavell, in theory, could be relying on there being “some inevitable law of historical development (“and why think that?”) or what’s being pursued is a kind of “propaganda” (143-144). Shuster’s rhetorical question correctly implies that the “Hegelian” reading is a non-starter, both as a way to read Cavell and as a view that deserves to be taken seriously. As I end up attributing a kind of subtraction story to Cavell anyway and don’t explore the “propaganda” option in any detail, we can set aside that option as well. Shuster thus concludes, “The second option comes closest to what I think is Cavell’s view, but it also minimizes or misses an important feature of his view.” This is option (2) without the elaboration of bifurcation. The other option, of course, is the kind of subtraction story I end up attributing to Cavell.

Shuster proceeds to articulate what he sees as a better reading of Cavell, citing the significance of art critic Michael Fried for Cavell’s thinking on the development of modernist painting. (I found especially interesting the contrast Shuster draws between Fried and Greenberg, whom Shuster claims was a genuine subtraction theorist.) Shuster writes,

we ought to inflect this (and Cavell’s similar claims) differently: once photography comes on the scene, and once its relationship to painting is properly expressed by a critic (something Fried pursues in his account of modernism, the role of Manet in modernist painting, and the ways in which painting and photography were not in competition with each other), then we are able to look backwards, telling a particular story about our current historical moment and how we got there, linking together features of the historical record that may not have previously been seen as linked (like, say, the Reformation and modernist painting). Just as the paintings of, say, Frank Stella, allow us to tell a story about the role of the beholder in painting, we can then see earlier cases of painting as already participating in this story (the importance of Manet even as Manet and Stella do not “look” alike). These are all contingent developments, though, they need not have occurred, but once they have, we situate ourselves amidst them or in relation to them.

As Shuster notes, “The last…paragraph[,] and Cavell himself, make a lot of the idea of ‘we’ and ‘us’, adding, contrary to the possibility that Cavell engages in propaganda, “[f]rom his earliest writings, Cavell conceives all such claims as ‘claims to community.’ As Shuster makes clear, such claims are never binding for Cavell, there is no guarantee that they will garner assent: “but in every case there is a kind of invitation to see things the way in which I see them. It may be that we do not see things alike, but in such a case it is not that there has been said something ‘false about “us” rather instead ‘there is no us (yet, maybe never) to say anything about’ for the statement was made ‘to the wrong party.’” Finally, Shuster recommends that these considerations could lead away from a dogmatic reading of Cavell on the self (my reading) and towards a more invitational spirit, involving “a sort of axial turn that leads to a kind of Copernican switch in how we view Cavell’s entire project: a suggestion and possibility of Cavell’s varied work is, by example, to give voice to our interests, to find out where we stand and about what and why, and also thereby with whom.”

I can see why considerations like these could make it seem to readers more sympathetic to Cavell that I gratuitously and uncharitably ascribe to him a blunder or oversight. One might wonder: If Cavell is sensitive enough to cultural and historical factors when it comes to the ontology of painting, as Shuster shows is revealed in Cavell’s engagement with Michael Fried on the emergence of modernist painting, why refuse him this possibility when it comes to the self of skepticism. One answer is that while awareness of issues surrounding the ontology of art run deeply indeed in Cavell’s thought, the historical and logical issues connected to the self of skepticism could simply have remained opaque to him, as unquestioned assumptions of the ontology of the self. In support of this idea, the best I can do is to refer to the prodigious amount of textual evidence I bring to bear in the essay (see esp. pp. 92-94). Here are several.

Reading tragedy back into philosophical skepticism I would variously, in various connections, characterize the skeptic as craving the emptiness of language, as ridding himself of the responsibilities of meaning, and as being drawn to annihilate externality or otherness, projects I occasionally summarize as seeking to escape the conditions of humanity, which I call the chronic human desire to achieve the inhuman, the monstrous, from above or from below. (93) [my italics]

the question of what I might call skepticism’s necessity and its pos­sibility, to its paradoxical presence within our very possession of lan­guage, glimpsed when Descartes asserts that we are misled by the ordinary word “see” into supposing that we really as it were see things of the world. (93)

. . . skepticism’s negation of the human, its denial of satisfaction in the human (here in human conditions of knowing), is an essential feature of the human, as it were its birthright. (93)

. . . I persist in thinking that to lose knowledge of the human pos­sibility of skepticism means to lose knowledge of the human . . .(94) [my italics]

The human capacity – and the drive – both to affirm and to deny our criteria constitutes the argument of the ordinary. And to trace the disappointment with criteria is to trace the aspiration to the sub­lime – the image of the skeptic’s progress. (94) [my italics]

I make the following comment in my essay:

[t]hese sorts of remarks are not isolated or idiosyncratic; other passages make it clear that Cavell views skepticism as not merely a perhaps unfor­tunate, but ultimately manageable impulse. His use of terms like “drive” and related terms warrants a reading in which he thinks it is simply part of our nature that we will in fact find ourselves overcome by unbridled fits of irrational intellectual aggression….(94)

adding later,

[w]hen he speaks about the genuine human predicament being one of metaphysi­cal isolation, he doesn’t hedge his bets on subtle issues of “seeing-as”. One finds many more flat-out assertions in his corpus about separateness being the human condition per se, than one finds pleas for seeing this condition in one way rather than another.

In sum, I don’t find much “invitational” here. Or maybe the invitation is only for those who already feel they’re invited. This is why I believe the options I lay out pretty much exhaust Cavell’s.

Skirting Other Minds Skepticism –

Above, I quoted Shuster advocating

a sort of axial turn that leads to a kind of Copernican switch in how we view Cavell’s entire project: a suggestion and possibility of Cavell’s varied work is, by example, to give voice to our interests, to find out where we stand and about what and why, and also thereby with whom.

He completes this thought by the following gloss:

This is another way of saying, I think, that Cavell’s constant and varied invocations of skepticism about other minds perhaps cannot be skirted nor can Cavell’s moral perfectionism be entirely ignored, as they are in Cahill’s book. Indeed, I would invite Cahill to say more about why and how Cavell’s “prolific dealings with other-minds skepticism” may not “add up to a coherent account at all”. Equally, I am curious also about the notion of “coherency” that such a claim invokes in this context, since it seems to me to be doing a lot of work here potentially (for example, I could imagine a quite multifaceted account, perhaps even one with tensions in it, that is still nonetheless “coherent” to the extent that it displays or addresses a reality or historical configuration that is itself potentially multifaceted or even contradictory).

I have two responses to this point. First, I confess that many of my least favorite swaths of Cavell’s writings are found in his discussions dealing with other minds. I find for example stretches of Part IV of The Claim of Reason to be frankly incomprehensible. This may sound like a disgruntled mid 1950s Oxford don, who, after struggling through a page of Heidegger derides it as “unclear”. Now it might have been unreasonable or philosophically immature on my part to have insisted on finding something like an “account” of other minds skepticism at all. I am traditional enough to insist that there be no flat-out contradictions, but tensions in a complex picture are to be expected. But I can in any case claim in good conscience that no serious philosophical work (other than what some may regard as philosophical malpractice by omission) is being intentionally performed by my wondering aloud whether Cavell’s many discussions of other-minds skepticism are in fact coherent. Reconstructing Cavell’s account of material object (“external world”) skepticism in the Claim of Reason, and its concomitant understanding of the self, seemed to me a completable task. I don’t know if the same can be said of his writings on other minds, at least for me.

But the main justification for focusing on Cavell’s discussion of material object (“external world”) skepticism is found in the following passage from CR where he notes that

One of my first expressions of my contrary intuitions about these cases was to say that at the conclusion of the material object case I was left sealed inside the circle, whereas at the end of the other minds case I was left sealed outside the circle of the other’s experiences.

I comment as follows:

Cavell describes here his “contrary intuitions” about the positionality of the self in relation to its object. Yet while his expression of a sense of reversed relationality is no doubt interesting, given my interests here, it makes sense to ignore it. This is because my focus on the anthropology of the self in Cavell’s work is concerned with the unquestioned status of the modern self’s image of itself as thus “sealable” in the first place. Whether sealed in as with material object skepticism or sealed out as with other-minds skepti­cism, we are surely dealing here with the same “punctual” self. (83)

I should point out that many of the Cavell quotations in my essay that I believe most stridently express his views of the relation between human nature and skepticism do not clearly pertain to one form of skepticism or the other. And I do not avoid quoting passages where the context suggests that other minds skepticism is most relevant. They too share the same overall perspective on the human. In the end, much rides on whether my logic is correct here, that is to say, whether “sealed inside the circle” or “sealed outside the circle” the “two selves” are two sides of the same buffered coin. The main difference is that in the case of other minds, I am, for example, sealed off from “knowing” you are in pain whereas you are sealed in, alone with your “knowledge” of your pain. In material object skepticism, on the other hand, I am merely sealed in my own consciousness from contact with the world. There is a metaphysics of buffered separateness in either case, however, that was central to my discussion.

Bombast –

My conception of the nature of philosophy is drawn primarily from my understanding of Wittgenstein, for whom I think “philosophy” exclusively denoted either metaphysics or the critique of metaphysics. The former consists, roughly, of the manifold historical attempts to construct theories of unrestricted and unqualified truths about some domain. The latter consists of attempts to show on a case by case basis why such theory construction are at the very least unclear and likely make no sense at all (presuming, naturally, that one has done one’s level best at making sense of the theory in the first place). Responding to a closing remark where assert that while I would lament a world without romantics, I would prefer that to a world run by politicized neurotics, Shuster writes,

Why locate neuroticism as a cause for disparagement? What if neuroticism is exactly what the present historical moment calls for? This would be to suggest that we can take on as a model Cahill’s rich discussions of and engagements with other cultures while also not abandoning Cavell’s equally rich discussions of our own.

Neurotics are not the only group I take the odd potshot at. I also pick on “right-minded folks in respectable humanities departments who never tire of hearing their com­mon sense views repeated back to them” and those who assume “that secular liberalism née New England Unitarianism just obviously is the view of the human condition acceptable in polite company.” The disappointing answer to Shuster’s questions about some of my more acerbic remarks is that these were (perhaps failed) extra-philosophical rhetorical flourishes. Remove them and the logic of my arguments is not at all affected, or at least this is my contention.  Similarly, substitute Goldfinches back in for Mustangs and it would make no philosophical difference. Yet, in referring to a popular American muscle car I was signaling something. 

At an earlier juncture of the essay I wrote,

The story that most philosophers have told themselves amounts to a final Victorian cover up of the awful truth: that deep down the whole time we were all Alvy Singer. So much for eschewing explanations in philosophy.

This remark seems to disparage one my favorite film characters, and to do so in the same way that I ridicule “politicized neurotics” at the end of the essay. Yet Alvy Singer (along with the likes of Nietzsche’s madman at Gay Science §125 and the narrator in Notes from Underground) is a perfectly appropriate response to modernity. Rather than withdraw my non-philosophical rhetoric, I will instead sharpen it. By “a culture dominated by politicized neurotics” I meant to refer to the prevalence of entitled, self-indulgent, hysterics who currently dominate much of the discourse on American campuses. This behavior is not what the moment calls for; it is almost never what any moment calls for. However repugnant to many, this has perhaps made clearer what I meant to be disparaging. But still, I see this as having no philosophical significance.

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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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