Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Page 2:
6 The anthropologist Stanley Tambiah makes a similar point. He distinguishes two possible orientations toward the world, which we can find, to varying degrees, in all cultures. Tambiah calls them "causality" and "participation." With causality he describes an attitude toward the world characterized by a logic of opposition. "Causality," Tambiah writes, "is quintessentially represented by the categories, rules and methodology of positive sciences and discursive mathematico-logical reason. The scientific focus involves a particular kind of distancing, affective neutrality and abstraction to events in the world" (105). Individuals in all cultures are capable of relating to the world in this manner, yet modern western science has made this the dominant orientation in western contexts. Tambiah contrasts this way of relating oneself to the world and others with one that he labels "participation." Here we find language of "solidarity, unity, holism, and continuity in space and time" (109). The Ego is not positioned in opposition to the world but seen deeply intertwined with it.
7 I mention these anthropological observations to strengthen the claim that the specific epistemic position that the skeptic imagines is not simply the result of linguistic or metaphysical structures. Rather, the skeptical desire for context-independent certainty reflects a specific attitude toward the world and society — one of distantiation writ large, in which the world in its totality is ideally completely exposed to the skeptic's desire to know. In the skeptical imagination the causal attitude toward the world becomes free floating, disconnected from the concrete practices of scientific cultures of knowledge production. The skeptic's pose moreover is reminiscent of "a modern scene of existence as controlled by a spectator at once impossible and divine who organizes everything without ever acting or participating," to use the words of Stefanos Geroulanos's reading of Foucault (649). Conversely, we can understand Cavell as arguing that the skeptic is motivated by a fearful rejection of what Tambiah called the participatory orientation toward world and society. The skeptic fears an epistemic position where not abstract rules but relationships determine the meaning of our words. And this is indeed the point that Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein wants to highlight: Our words have meaning only within the context of a shared life. Fully acknowledging this point however leads to an anxiety over what we can say about ourselves and over who counts as "we."
Sharing Words is Risky
8 Wittgenstein argues, according to Cavell, that the skeptical move from a concrete act of doubting to doubting in-and-of-itself is made possible because the skeptic is, as it were, bewitched, by language.[3]Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and G. E. M. Anscombe. <em>Philosophical Investigations</em>. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997. §115. In the following <em>PI</em>. Our language is pliable and depends for its creativity on our ability to project a word into a new context.[4]For a more technical discussion of this point see the second chapter of my <em>Beyond the Philosopher's Fear</em> as well as Pears' formulation that, according to Wittgenstein, meaning resides in linguistic techniques" (26). The skeptic thinks however that this ability for projection must be governed by a system of rules. After all, we regularly produce projections of words into new contexts that others recognize and can understand. It is an "astonishing fact," writes Cavell, "that language is shared, that the forms I rely upon in making sense are human forms, that they impose human limits upon me, that when I say what we 'can' and 'cannot' say I am indeed voicing necessities which others recognize, i.e., obey (consciously or not); and that our uses of language are pervasively, almost unimaginably, systematic" (Claim 29). If not linguistic rules, what else could account for this "systematicity" of language?
9 Wittgenstein cautions against thinking that syntactic rules can account for the regularity with which we understand each other's words, even in new contexts. For example, with regards to the truths of logic, Wittgenstein writes, "it has often been put in the form of an assertion that the truths of logic are determined by a consensus of opinions. Is this what I am saying? No. There is no opinion at all; it is not a question of opinion. They are determined by a consensus of action: a consensus of doing the same thing, reacting in the same way" (Mathematics 183-84). The meaning of words is not controlled by a system of rules outside of our acts of speaking and living together.
10 In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein makes this point by reminding us of the analogy between speaking a language and playing a game. We can easily imagine, he writes, people "playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball [. . .] and so on. And now someone says: The whole time they are playing a ball-game and following definite rules at every throw" (PI §83). Importantly, Wittgenstein adds: "And is there not also the case where we play and — make up the rules as we go along. And there is even one where we alter them — as we go along" (PI §83).