Cavell cannot see that “Wittgenstein’s certainty logically dismisses scepticism.”(Ibid.) Now, nostalgia for metaphysics is supposed to be the desire to transcend the human. Cavell is trying to place that yearning in the weave of our lives, not indulging it. Disappointment with criteria is a function of how criteria do work, their dependence, in particular, on our attunement in judgments and agreement in form of life. It does not, then, feed an “ineluctable skepticism”, as though Cavell agrees with some skeptical conclusion about the failures of certainty. That is, 1) Cavell explicitly does not accept the thesis of skepticism, that we do not know the world or other minds with certainty. Our relation to the world is not one of knowing. The truth of skepticism is not the expression of “dissatisfaction with knowledge” from some metaphysical height; rather, it points to a feature of our condition of which, presumably, the urge to transcend the human is an expression. To go further, 2) “if the fact that we share, or have established, criteria is the condition under which we can think and communicate in language, then skepticism is a natural possibility of that condition; it reveals most perfectly the standing threat to thought and communication, that they are only human, nothing more than natural to us.”(CR, 47) — Minar's paper
Criteria bring out that the thesis of skepticism – which starts life as a claim about our intellectual or epistemological limitations – transmutes into the truth, which is (again) that “our relation to the world is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain. So it is also true that we do not fail to know such things.” (CR, 45) — Minar's paper
4.2 Disappointment with criteria
The connection with Wittgenstein here is all but explicit:
If I am to have a native tongue, I have to accept what "my elders" say and do as consequential; and they have to accept, even have to applaud, what I say and do as what they say and do. We do not know in advance what the content of our mutual acceptance is, how far we may be in agreement. I do not know in advance how deep my agreement with myself is, how far responsibility for the language may run. — Minar's paper
Here Rhees underscores the importance of the kind of openness – openness that in some sense “threatens the possibility of understanding altogether”(Rhees, 13) – that I have suggested he associates with skepticism: “If language really were a technique, then…. there would be no connexion between philosophy and scepticism. You should not understand what was meant by the notion of the distrust of understanding.” — Minar's paper
One area I believe we can agree on is Wittgenstein's pointing out the importance "of natural actions and reactions that come before language and are not the result of thought."…
'You say you take care of a man who groans, because experience has taught you that you yourself groan when you feel such-and-such. but since in fact you don't make any such inference, we can abandon the argument from analogy' (Zettel, 537) — Richard B
I am a little unclear what you mean by "Wittgenstein's strange people", but based on the cited paragraph, it could mean people who you may find difficult to understand. — Richard B
How can Cavell reject the thesis of skepticism - that we do not know the world or other minds with certainty - while also claiming that skepticism is a natural possibility which results from having language? [that] the "truth of skepticism" is not a metaphysical dissatisfaction with knowledge, but is instead an expression of "the urge to transcend the human". — Luke
What does "agreement with myself" mean? — Luke
“If language really were a technique, then…. there would be no connexion between philosophy and scepticism. You should not understand what was meant by the notion of the distrust of understanding.”
— Rhees, as quoted in Minar's paper
I take the argument here to be that if language were a technique then there should be perfect understanding and no room for scepticism or doubt. — Luke
Summarizing that story, out of our fear of the other, — Antony Nickles
philosophy created an intellectual problem of doubt about them — Antony Nickles
when the skeptic is right that there is no fact of the other (or ourselves) to know that will resolve our worries. — Antony Nickles
But Wittgenstein sees that this truth is only because our relation to others (the mechanics of it, the grammar) is not through knowledge resolving our doubts about them, but that it is part of our situation as humans that we are separate, that our knowledge of the other is finite. But the implications of that are simply that the ordinary mechanics of our relation to others is not one of, here, knowing “their understanding”, but of accepting or rejecting them; that their otherness is at times a moral claim on us, to respond to them (or ignore them), to be someone for them. Thus “the urge to transcend the human”, in our ordinary lives, is to avoid exposing ourselves to the judgment of who we are in how we relate to others. In the case of understanding, by only wanting to treat what others say as information we simply need to get correct, rather than acknowledge their concerns and interests, and have ours be questioned. To put it that this is the “result of having language” is the picture of something like that what we say has a “meaning” that stands alone from who we will be judged to be in having said it, rather than it expressing us, allowing who we are to be read through it. — Antony Nickles
I think how I put this to Bano here might be a good start. — Antony Nickles
We actually are scared of the ever-present truth of our human condition: that we are separate, that there is no guarantee that we will work out our differences, or that our criteria will always be sufficient, or that we won’t be wrong even after working to (pre)determine what is right, that we might still be guilty (or lost) after following all the rules, etc. — Antony Nickles
109. [...] All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light — that is to say, its purpose — from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; but they are solved through an insight into the workings of our language, and that in such a way that these workings are recognized — despite an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with. Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language.
123. A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”
133. We don’t want to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to. — The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. — Instead, a method is now demonstrated by examples, and the series of examples can be broken off. —– Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. — Wittgenstein, PI
What I feel remains to be explored further is the process of "finding our feet with them", say, as a matter of imagining ourselves as them, getting at why one might want to judge as they do. Maybe: in taking them seriously; allowing another's reasons to be or become intelligible; respecting their interests by taking their expressions as a commitment of their self, their character as it were (what "type" of person they are). I take this not as a matter of critique, but of letting them be "strange" to us without rejection (tolerating but not assuming/resigned to difference); with open curiosity, (cultural) humility (that my interests and context are not everyone's). In a sense: understanding as empathy; understanding in the sense of: being understanding (Websters: vicariously experiencing the [interests] of another; imagining the other's attitudes as legitimate; the imaginative projection of [myself] into [the other] so that [they] appear to be infused with [me, being a person]). — Antony Nickles
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