RESPONSE TO CAHILL: WHAT STANLEY CAVELL CALLS SCEPTICISM By Stephen Mulhall *** The Montréal Review, February 2026 |
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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 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. So Kevin Cahill might reasonably expect me to respond sympathetically to his own criticism of Cavell’s treatment of scepticism, which also deploys Taylor’s historical narrative to argue that Cavell’s settled tendency to regard vulnerability to scepticism as an aspect of the human condition depends upon conflating that condition with a conception of it that is rooted in Western European modernity, and thereby displays an insufficient awareness (to say the least of it) of the cultural heterogeneity of humanity. I find, however, that I am presently inclined to respond otherwise – not, I hope, unsympathetically, but certainly to resist the suggestion that this tendency of Cavell’s is as settled, or as unqualified, or as uncomplicated as Cahill seeks to make it appear. In fact, I think that a more sympathetic response to Cavell would have disclosed him as a potential ally in Cahill’s over-arching project of developing a non-dogmatic and philosophically useful concept of culture. I want to begin with Cavell’s 1989 essay ‘Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture’ (1989), which is a key text for elucidating Cavell’s understanding of Wittgenstein’s conception of culture, and of its constitutive role in human life. Cahill states that ‘it was my encounter many years ago with the claims made by Cavell in that essay that set me on the course to write the present essay’ (fn 70, p 153); but his references to it in his discussion are brief, suggesting only that he regards it as confirming his hypothesis 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’ (p 78). I think otherwise, so I want to characterize Cavell’s conception of Wittgenstein’s signature concept ‘form of life’ in more detail. It is uncontroversially central to Cavell’s account that we distinguish between an ethnological or horizontal sense of the term, and a biological or vertical sense. What is at issue in the former are eg the differences between coronations and inaugurations, or between promising and fully intending; what is at issue in the latter are eg the differences between poking at your food with a fork, and pawing at it or pecking at it. The former are differences within the plane or horizon of the social, distinguishing one human form of life from another; the latter manifest differences between human and other forms of life. 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. To begin with, Cavell never refers to the ethnological dimension of the concept as merely horizontal; and neither does he characterize the ethnological as inherently ‘conventionalistic’. Rather, he claims that readers of Wittgenstein typically emphasize the ethnological or social dimension in a way that occludes Wittgenstein’s equal interest in what one might call the natural or biological; and he suggests that this occlusion generates an excessively conventionalistic reading of the social dimension, and thereby of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’ as such. 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. The obvious way to avert us from that misreading is to emphasize the dimension of ‘form of life’ that it occludes; and Cavell accordingly here emphasizes the many occasions on which Wittgenstein does his philosophical work by recalling the natural or biological or vertical dimension of our forms of life – by emphasizing that they are forms of life. But this is a context-specific response to a particular philosophical confusion or disorientation; it is not a general declaration that the vertical trumps the merely horizontal, and hence that the notion of ‘forms of life’ should always bear a vertical emphasis because both Wittgenstein and Cavell endorse a metaphysics of the human that renders ethnological variation ontologically secondary. For in other contexts, in response to other forms of philosophical confusion, it might prove necessary to emphasize that human forms of life are also forms of life – that any natural or biological human impulse can find many and various forms of social and individual expression, that the social is natural to the human. 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. It offers a mode of acknowledging the ethnological that does not occlude the biological, and vice versa – thereby countering unbalanced philosophical accounts of either dimension; and it encourages us to explore our own and others’ forms of life in order to work out whether and how far our social arrangements give expression to our humanity and how far they might deny it, to determine what we are willing to regard as changeable in our common lives (and so in ourselves) and what we are not. And it regards our answers to those questions not as always already given by some ahistorical metaphysics, but as to be determined in the process of engaging with dialogue with others about concrete instances of features of our own and others’ forms of living. 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. As a denizen of late trans-Atlantic modernity, Cavell naturally begins with the cultural expression of scepticism with which he is most at-home – its articulation in terms of knowledge and certainty within modern Western European philosophy. 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). But even within this horizontal register, Cavell spends a lot of time distinguishing (and so relating) expressions of scepticism in philosophy and its expressions in Shakespearean tragic drama, Romantic poetry, Freudian psychoanalysis, Golden Age Hollywood movies and Minimalist art installations. There are many specific reasons for his doing so, each provided by a specific context of dialogue and argument; but one is certainly to counter the idea (widespread among Wittgensteinians, and many other contemporary philosophers) that modern philosophical scepticism is an artefact of simple misunderstandings and confusions whose dissolution would license scepticism’s flat dismissal. Suppose 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. In this way, Cavell’s intra-ethnological expansion of the range of reference of the term ‘scepticism’ naturally leads into his exploring its intersection with the vertical dimension of human forms of life. 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. In Cavell’s terms, we would be evaluating whether these contexts invite the projection of the concept of ‘scepticism’, which means assessing which criteria for its use could be retained, and which might have to be modified or abandoned, in order to accept the invitation; and we would thereby disclose further reaches of significance of both the term and the context. Take Cahill’s fascinating discussion of Yukaghir culture (in north-eastern Siberia). Anthropologists have described what they understand of that culture as expressive of the view that part of being a person is the ability to take on the appearance and viewpoint of another being; and Cahill takes this to pose a considerable challenge to those inclined to believe that the separateness of one person from another is intrinsic to personhood. But he 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. The crucial point is not how one eventually decides to discriminate cultural specificity from human constant in Yukaghir (or any particular form of) life; the point is that the matter is open to exploration, and conditioned (but not determined) by our best (but revisable) understanding of what has to be in place if we are to recognize another (real or imagined) form of life as human at all. As with our projections of the concept of scepticism, this process too is a matter of judging whether a given context invites the projection of the concept ‘human being’, whether and how our criteria must shift to secure that projection, and what that would reveal about our conception of what it is to be human; and there is no ontological a priori that can do that job for us. Here Cavell is in fact in complete agreement with Taylor rather than writing against his grain. For in a long passage that Cahill quotes, but only partially (pp 132-33), 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 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. ***
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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