Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

The Aesthetic Turn: Wittgenstein, Cavell and “Therapy"
reading of Kant which is applied fairly directly to the workings of Wittgenstein's
philosophy. First, therefore, on Kant, Cavell's focus concentrates on the two chief
aspects of the aesthetic judgment of beauty which already have been all too briefly
mentioned. The beauty of all things beautiful is judged by us without recourse to rules
which settle the presence or absence of beauty in an object or appearance, and upon
this judgment is conferred the status of a judgment with universal validity. On these
issues Cavell is clear though swift (all his citations are drawn from sections seven and
eight of the third Critique): our lack of rules renders these aesthetic judgments of beauty,
for Kant, no longer 'objective' but 'subjective' in their basis, while at the same time these
judgments distinguish themselves for claiming universal agreement and not mere
rightness for me (Cavell 88-89). Cavell expresses interest in exploring most especially
the second of these two aspects of our judgments of beauty, that of the place for
universal agreement as an actual demand or requirement accompanying our judgment,
throughout his subsequent remarks. Though Kant takes it that we demand such
universality of agreement for those 'objectively' based judgments for which decisive rules
are available, our continued demand in more 'subjective' contexts of grounding for just
such universality draws Cavell's attention (Cavell 89). We go on claiming and
demanding the agreement of everyone to judgments for which we do not have rules to
which to appeal in our own support. That this universal voice continues even into
contexts from which decisive rules are absent constitutes a vital feature of Kant's
conception of aesthetic judgment of the beautiful for Cavell. This enduring place for a
universal voice calls Cavell further to explore this feature of the Kantian position he
outlines.
In a subtle turn of the philosophical pen, Cavell presents a reading of Kant that
bases Kant's defense of his own position on the universal voice in our aesthetic
judgment of beauty in what looks to be a form of judgment itself stamped from the
aesthetic mold. The basis for Kant's attribution of universal voice to aesthetic judgments
of beauty is not in any rules that Cavell can find, but rather in reflection which appears
to fit the model of aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, the very
model it is helping to defend for judgments of beauty themselves. In short, this is a
critique of judgment in both available senses. Cavell citing Kantian examples of
disputed beauty: "What are these examples supposed to show? That using a form of
expression in one context is all right, and using it in another in not all right. But what I
wish to focus upon is the kind of rightness and wrongness invoked: it is not a matter of
factual rectitude, nor of formal indiscretion but of saying something laughable, or which
would be folly" (Cavell 90). Cavell finds Kant's strategy in defending his position on the
aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, in its commitment to the continued place of universal
voice in such judgments, to be a strategy based not on the adversion to decisive rules
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