Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

The Aesthetic Turn: Wittgenstein, Cavell and “Therapy"
laughter can seem a precarious basis for asserting a position on some topic which I take
to be right not only for me but for everyone, which I hold as universally valid, which I
pronounce with a universal voice. In the dynamic Cavell articulates, I take myself to be
right and I demand your agreement ("we would say p" and "you must see"), and yet I
accept a distressing feature of my position, namely, that it is not decisively settled by
rules; you grit your teeth and I stare back powerless to sooth the source of your
aggravation: this is the predicament of Wittgensteinian philosophy Cavell has found
recurring through its practice, the predicament of speaking with a universal voice. We
can find if we search a precedent for Wittgensteinian philosophy in the work of Kant, or
at least so it seems.
The game of Wittgensteinian philosophy is far from being everywhere bounded by
rules to guide its reasoning. "I take it to be a phenomenological fact about philosophizing
from everyday language that one feels empirical evidence about one's language to be
irrelevant to one's claims. ...[I]f we find we disagree about what we should say, it would
make no obvious sense to attempt to confirm or disconfirm one or other of our responses
by collecting data to show which of us is in fact right.
...The philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to
convince him without proof but to get him to prove something, test something, against
himself. He is saying: Look and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say
what I wish to say" (Cavell 94-96). Though he does not develop this defense with the
degree of detail for which we might have hoped, Cavell reminds us of the lack of a
decisive role for evidence or judgments about what speakers did and do say in our
assessment of the correctness of our first-person plural confessions about language. I
judge that we would say p, but audio tapes of your having said not-p yesterday, even
boxes of such tapes, do not decide the correctness of my judgment--at least, says
Cavell, we do not "feel" them to do so. I offer my judgment without proof, but I do not
try to force your agreement all the while hiding from you the paucity of argument
available in my defense; rather I offer my judgment and demand from you an agreement
which I nevertheless cannot "to use Kant's word, 'postulate'" (Cavell 96) for you any
more than I can postulate it for myself. I lack rules, to be sure, but so do you, and still
we dispute with one another like we do not over what is merely agreeable. This is the
dynamic into which we ascend or fall when Wittgensteinian philosophizing begins, the
dynamic of universal voice without objective validity.
Cavell's treatment of this analogy between Kant and Wittgenstein sets for us rather
a large project if we were to wish to assess its accuracy, let alone its significance for
philosophy more generally. In some ways Cavell's later work takes up elements of this
project as they connect with the issues of skepticism and perfectionism. Even so, there
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