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Cavell, Skepticism, and the Ordinary Mind by Eric Joseph Ritter

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Cavell, Skepticism, and the Ordinary Mind by Eric Joseph Ritter Cavell, Skepticism, and the Ordinary Mind By Eric Joseph Ritter Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy August 9th, 2019 Nashville, Tennessee Copyright © 2019 by Eric Joseph Ritter All Rights Reserved ii For my friends – Not an equal part to each, but for each the whole. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Professor Larry May’s consistent feedback on this project have left both noticeable and unnoticeable traces in every chapter. His directness, support, and practical wisdom have been invaluable. At several key moments over the life of this project, Professor David Wood has renewed my conviction in philosophy as a worthwhile – if necessarily never finished – humanistic undertaking, over meals, coffee, and conversation in Nashville, Woodbury, and Berlin, Germany. I am deeply grateful to Professor Kelly Oliver for our intermittent philosophical conversations and her steady support of my work and professional success. She has made graduate school more livable for many, many students in the Vanderbilt philosophy department, including myself. My thanks to Professor Jim Conant of the University of Chicago for sponsoring my trip to the philosophy department, and the Center for German Philosophy in particular, at the University of Chicago during the spring of 2019, where I edited significant parts of this dissertation, and for his support of my work more generally. For Professor Tyler Roberts, of Grinnell College, the first professor of philosophy from whom I learned philosophy, for his feedback on the fourth chapter, for conversations this past summer, and for introducing me to Stanley Cavell in his Philosophy of Religion seminar over eight years ago at that abolitionist school in Iowa. And I am deeply grateful to Professor Stephen Mulhall, of Oxford University, UK, for his interest in this project and for joining the dissertation committee at such a late stage. His books and articles on Cavell are sources of inspiration for me and their influence is, I think, apparent. Conversations with Cathleen Cavell about her late husband’s life and work and her support of my philosophical scholarship more generally have been extremely encouraging. I hope I can do justice to Stanley Cavell’s philosophy when, from his study in Brookline this summer, Cathleen and I begin a labor of love: organizing Cavell’s texts, letters, and papers for future scholars. I am grateful to Sabeen Ahmed for her painstaking edits on several chapters and on the bibliography, as well as for her loving encouragement throughout much of this process. She has walked next to me, at her own pace, throughout this project; her thoughtfulness and influence are evident throughout. Wout Cornelissen reminded me, when I needed reminding, that I had something to say. Robert Engleman and Sarah Gorman read and gave feedback on parts of this dissertation, and Liz Fiss and Jonathan Bremer were always supportive and did much to make this possible. Chad Attenborough always listened, Julie was bright, Michael was cool, and my brother, Sam Ritter, was there for me always, including at each moment of existential panic. Ashur and Gabe did nothing, but also somehow, it seems to me, made everything happen. Finally, Professor John Lachs’s patience, practicality, and support of my individual intellectual development through dozens of phone conversations and in-person meetings over two years have sustained this project. His pedagogical world is, among other things (and like Cavell’s) a world of plurality. The best I can think of to thank Lachs, since he needs so little but has given so much, is to promise to carry some of the pedagogical gifts he has provided and pass them along to others. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION………………………………...…………………………………………………………………….v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………...…………………………………………..………vi INTRODUCTION …………………...……………………………………………..…………………..............1 Cavell’s Philosophical Biography …………………...………………………………………...............1 The Knowledge of Pain and Skepticism of Other Minds ...……………………………………. 4 Skepticism as a Human Difficulty ...……………………………………. …………………….….....10 Cavell and the Limits of Philosophical Authority………………………………………………...12 Cavell and “The New Wittgenstein” (in America) …………………………………………….....14 Framing of the Dissertation ……………………………………………………………………………...18 Brief Outline of the Chapters …………………………………………………………………..…….....20 Chapter I. Cavell, Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Use…………………………………………………..............25 Words and Tools……………………. …………………...……………………………………….............28 Conant’s Cavell on Meaning and Use ...………………………………………………………….…. 36 Conant and Cavell on Language Idling and “Metaphysical” Uses of Language….….....44 Projection and Intersubjectivity………………………………………………..............................48 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………….……….....53 II. Towards Leading the Correspondence Theory of Meaning Back to Earth: Cavell at Criticism………………………………………………………………………..……………….………........55 Language (and) Games…………………………..……..……………………………………….............56 The Augustinian Picture of the Essence of Language ...…………..……………………….…..61 Concept Use as a Technique or Practice ….…................................................................72 Cavell at Criticism…………………………………………………………………………………..…........81 III. Cavell and the Mixed Legacy of Skepticism….…........................................................84 Affeldt and Mulhall on Linguistic Normativity …………………………..…………….............87 Cavellian Skepticism – an “Unconventional Idiom” ...…………..……………………………..91 Skepticism’s Chagrin ….….............................................................................................95 Non-Criterial Differences and Other Invitations to Skepticism……….……………..….....98 Conclusion – and Return to Mulhall/Affeldt Debate……….……………..…....................105 v IV. The Threat of Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy: Thinking with Cavell…….110 Introduction …………………………..…………….................................................................110 Setting the Skeptical Scene… ...…………..……………………………………………………………118 The “Dialectical Space” of Skepticism ........................................................................121 Hobbes’s Metaphysics of Space and Time ……….……………..……………………………......123 Conant’s Kantian and Cartesian Features of Skepticism in Hobbes’s Metaphysics About Space and Time………………………………………………………………………………127 Cause and Effect as the “Bridge” Across Kantian and Cartesian Gaps…………………..135 Concluding Thoughts……….……………..……………………………………………………….….....139 V. Conclusion: Cavell’s Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow……….……………….…….....142 REFERENCES………..……………………...............................................................................149 vi INTRODUCTION Cavell’s Philosophical Biography Stanley Cavell’s philosophical methodology and biography begins with J.L. Austin, whose work revealed to Cavell the depth and contingency of embedded practical commitments and activities within ordinary language, and in the work of the later Wittgenstein. In a lifelong, evolving, and well-known set of readings of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Cavell claimed that the Investigation’s main theme was an encounter with temptations toward skepticism or metaphysics; and that the voices or interlocutors which comprise the chorus of the Investigations are in various stages of yielding to that skeptical temptation, including acquiescing to paradox. And then there is Wittgenstein’s voice, Cavell thinks, which stands out above the rest. It is not a voice which defeats skepticism, but one which, over the course of that text, exemplifies a responsiveness to each particular temptation toward skepticism when and as it emerges from a human being, seeking “to discover the specific plight of mind and circumstance within which a human being gives voice to his condition.”1 Throughout his work, as Cavell’s philosophical writings progressed away from traditional scholarship on Wittgenstein, Austin, and ordinary language philosophy, and into deeply original philosophical essays on themes and figures unfamiliar to most philosophers, Cavell continued to foreground a Wittgensteinian responsiveness to particular skeptical or metaphysical temptations as a particular human being gives voice to them. And in this vein, Cavell gradually became frustrated, even despairing, of what 1 Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 238-266. 1 he perceived to be the tendency of academic philosophers to engage in what he came to call a chronic “flight from the ordinary.” By the late 1970s and certainly by the mid 1980s, Cavell had begun to suggest that apparently different but interrelated “areas” of philosophy such as philosophy of language, mind, and perception were permeated with what he called skepticism; and so Cavell, like Rorty, turned away from many recognizable philosophical problems. In a sense, this dissertation is an attempt to understand Cavell’s turn away from the sort of problems he thought were hopelessly entangled with skepticism, but also to understand Cavell’s return to something he thought was worth calling philosophy, a way of (philosophical) thinking that acknowledged the inescapable threat of skepticism. So, what is skepticism, for Cavell? As is well known, in the process of tackling traditional skeptical problems of other mind and external world skepticism, the concept of skepticism undergoes
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