Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Wittgenstein, Cavell, and the Fall of Philosophy
Thomas Meyer, Temple University, USA
Over the past fifteen years of his interpretive writing,
Stanley Cavell has returned on numerous occasions to an
articulation of the Emersonian themes of our fall and
recovery, themes he finds animating the later years of
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical work. On Cavell’s
account, the notion of a fall from out of the dynamic and
engaged condition of our participation in our cultural
discourses and practices, a notion Ralph Waldo Emerson
explores in the essays at the heart of his contribution to
romanticism, captures a series of dynamics that
accompany the manner of descent into philosophy which
Wittgenstein carefully describes in his later writings. For
Cavell, this striking and, as of his earlier The Claim of
Reason, rather unanticipated interpretive turn, carries a
number of consequences for the proper reading of
Wittgenstein’s engagement with the philosophical tradition.
Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of a cycle of collapse into
philosophical nonsense offers, for Cavell, a prospect of a
return, however fleeting, to the everyday, a return from our
avoidance and abandonment, and a turn towards the
attunements and criteria of our meaning and
understanding. In portraying Emerson and Wittgenstein’s
analogous projects in philosophy, Cavell strikingly locates
in Wittgenstein’s work a conception of culture, and of its
distinctive philosophical modes of variation, that links
Wittgenstein to a broad range of figures writing as it were
in the philosophy of culture. Wittgenstein, along with
Emerson, diagnoses a pattern of cultural decline and
sundering from our meaningful engagement, to which his
own work provides a distinctive form of response.
Throughout Cavell’s discussion, however, neither
Emerson’s conception of the dynamism of the laws of our
intellect, nor Wittgenstein’s treatment of the Weltbild
manifest in our practice, modify the return as Cavell has
rendered it. Indeed, both Emerson and Wittgenstein may
be able to contribute to a more detailed presentation of the
cultural participation to which we return, through their
writing, one that reestablishes a layer of engagement
between the individual and the universal, that of the
immanence of engaged participation, which Cavell seeks
to describe. As we recover from the fall into philosophy, for
Wittgenstein, we return properly not only to criteria but also
to a picture of the world from which we have been
sundered, one animating our practices, inhabiting our
ways of acting, and engaging us with the commitments
and beliefs that sustain us.
Cavell’s argument for an analogy between
Wittgenstein and Emerson conceives of their shared
philosophical task as one of restoring their readers to a
participation in a common cultural enterprise from which
they have fallen, a common to which they are unable
otherwise to return. On Cavell’s account, the details of this
fall and reconstitution concern the loss of engagement in
meaningful discourses or practices, primarily evidenced for
Emerson in a stagnant culture of conformity, and for
Wittgenstein in the emptiness of disengaged assertion that
accompanies the degradation of philosophical discourse
into nonsense. Cavell sees the alternate sides of this
phenomenon registering their presence in a parallel
development:
In Emerson’s terms, the sides may be called those of
self-reliance and conformity; in Wittgenstein’s terms,
those of the privacy and emptiness of assertion he calls
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metaphysical, and the dispersal of this empty
assertiveness by what he calls leading words home, his
image of thinking (Cavell [1995] 28).
To Cavell, the contrast of static conformity in
Emerson’s account with the dynamism of self-reliance
provides a framework within which to place the moments
and movement of Wittgenstein’s later work. Wittgenstein,
as Cavell renders his writing, draws philosophers away
from the disengaged machinations of skepticism or
metaphysics, and back towards meaning in a setting of
mutual attunement. Both thinkers find their readers adrift
from practical or discursive engagement, and fallen into
exile.
Wittgenstein’s promise of “peace” or “rest” after
restlessness is, in his practice, something lost almost as
soon as it is found, not a promise that projects a realm of
refuge, so his philosophical stance of contradiction and
dissatisfaction in effect assumes an independence from
whatever world this imperfect one turns out to be (Cavell
[2005] 202).
Wittgenstein’s treatments of philosophy trace the
wrong turnings he finds in the tradition, and directs us
onward toward a reengagement, however momentary, in
an ordinary that still may be fraught with further
philosophical movements. Cavell sees the perspicuity of
Wittgenstein’s contributions as emanating from a form of
engagement that can be representative for the experience
of others, enacting himself a process of return from
philosophical entanglement in which Wittgenstein stands
for humanity itself. Cavell includes himself, along with
Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and even Emerson, among the
practitioners of philosophical autobiography.
Philosophers who proceed as Austin suggests will not
be much interested to poll others for their opinion about
such crossroads. Then why do such philosophers say
“we” instead of “I”? … Their basis is autobiographical,
but they evidently take what they do and say to be
representative or exemplary of the human condition as
such. … Can it be seen that each of us is everyone and
no one? Emerson famously stakes the oscillation: “I am
God in nature; I am a weed by the wall” (“Circles”)
(Cavell [1994] 8-9).
On Cavell’s model, we are drawn back to
engagement in the discourses and practices of our culture
through the work of a philosophical autobiography that
stakes itself in its own engagement rather than an edifying
metaphysics. What may seem a hopelessly individual
process of confession takes on a universal validity, and
draws us to be exemplars of engagement and meaning
likewise ourselves. Cavell therefore offers us a return in
which we regain individual meaningfulness and the
possibility of representative universality.
As his reading of Emerson stands, Cavell at times appears
to conflate two understandings of the departure from
conformity Emerson often is careful to distinguish. Merely
passing over into episodes of enlightenment strikes
Emerson as an incomplete, and sometimes perfunctory
gesture of recovery from our fall, when what Emerson calls
us towards rather is a dynamic alignment with the flow of
nature through which our engagement with the discourses
and practices of our culture is maintained. Oscillating