The Ironist and the Romantic

Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell

Áine Mahon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474265898
• eBook ISBN: 9781472569523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

At the time of his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was widely acclaimed as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Stanley Cavell, who has been a leading intellectual figure from the 1960s to the present, has been just as philosophically influential as Rorty though perhaps not as politically divisive. Both philosophers have developed from analytic to post-analytical thought, both move between philosophy, literature and cultural politics, and both re-establish American philosophical traditions in a new and nuanced key. The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell finds the sound of Rorty's cheerful pragmatism strikingly at odds with the anxious romanticism of Cavell. Beginning from this tonal discord, and moving through comprehensive comparative analysis on the topics of scepticism, American philosophy, literature, writing style and politics, this book presents the work of its central figures in a novel and mutually illuminating perspective. Áine Mahon's unique and original comparative reading will be of interest not only to those working on Rorty and Cavell but to anyone concerned with the current state of American philosophy.

1

Return of the Invisible Tomato

The only people who go all existential about the invisibility of the rest of the tomato are lecturers in epistemology who relieve the classroom tedium by hype.

(CP, 181)

Stanley Cavell has spent a lifetime exploring the anxieties and negotiations of philosophical scepticism. Richard Rorty dedicated a parallel 30 years persuading Cavell and his peers to simply drop the question. For Cavell, scepticism is a perennial temptation revealing fundamental philosophical truths about our human predicament. For Rorty, it is a pseudo-problem derived from confusion about the nature of knowledge; it finds its only significance for reasons of historical and disciplinary contingency. Scepticism’s relevance to everyday and cultural life and the stability of its meaning in the history of modern thought are further points of friction between the two. Influencing writing style and methods of procedure, as well as most dearly held intellectual and political commitments, it is not only a topic of disagreement between Rorty and Cavell but also a measure of their fundamental philosophical distance.

The figures’ engagements with scepticism present distinct analytical challenges. Cavell’s writings on the topic are notoriously complex, conveying both the deceptiveness and the necessity of the sceptical question. Scepticism is explored in his writings less as a philosophical problem in need of solution than as a cultural theme emergent in texts as diverse as Shakespeare’s Othello and Minnelli’s The Band Wagon. Rorty, on the other hand, tends not to engage at all with sceptical disquiet but to focus on the demystification of the broader epistemological enterprise. This project is inaugurated in his ground-breaking work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), and continued in the essays of Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) and the four volumes of his Philosophical Papers (1987–2007).

Moving from Cartesian and Kantian philosophy into the epistemology of the early and mid-twentieth century, this chapter will outline the figures and arguments that have proved most influential for Rorty and Cavell’s contemporary treatments. With subsequent attention to Rorty’s important reviews of The Claim of Reason and In Quest of the Ordinary, Rorty and Cavell’s treatments of scepticism will be examined separately and then together. In the concluding pages, the significance of their divergence on scepticism will be considered in light of the philosophers’ contrasting receptions of the later Wittgenstein.

Scepticism and modern philosophy

In the tradition of modern epistemology inaugurated by René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and continued in the writings of John Locke (1632–1704), what is fundamentally in question is the ground of our certainty. How can we be absolutely sure of our claims to knowledge? How can we be absolutely sure, to use the twentieth-century example of H. H. Price, that the tomato in front of us is not in fact a reflection, a hallucination or a cleverly painted piece of wax? Extending from external world to ‘other minds’ scepticism, how can we be absolutely sure of the existence of other people? On what rational or empirical basis do we believe that the external world (if it exists at all) is populated by other minds possessed of a complex internal life and a complex extended past? Perhaps, in fact, the ‘other minds’ to whose judgement we might appeal in radical moments of hesitation or reservation have actually more in common, metaphysically speaking, with tomatoes? Am I, in fact, a tomato?

Just like tomatoes, there are many different ways in which philosophical scepticism can be classified. In ancient philosophy, a working distinction is usually drawn between ‘moderate’ Academics (who distinguish between degrees of credibility) and more ‘radical’ Pyrrhonists (who suspend judgement on all matters ordinary and theoretical). Thanks to the extensive research of Charles B. Schmitt and Richard H. Popkin, ancient scepticism is now recognized as central to the development of early modern philosophy.¹ Complex strains of both ancient schools are inherited, though modern distinctions are more usually drawn between ‘veil of perception’ scepticism (scepticism that concerns the potential of human representations to frustrate unmediated access to the external world; this is the very paradigm of scepticism for most Anglophone philosophers) and ‘Humean’ scepticism (scepticism that concerns our ability to extract general laws from particular instances; based on the work of David Hume, this mode of scepticism has major ramifications for the philosophy of science).

In Kant and Scepticism, Michael Forster distinguishes between ‘veil of perception’, ‘Humean’ and ‘Pyrrhonian’ scepticism, each mode of scepticism of varying importance for Kant’s critical project.² Forster’s schema illustrates the difficulty of drawing any strict and final distinctions between scepticism in the ancient and scepticism in the modern sense. Modern writers are varyingly influenced by ancient schools of thought, themselves increasingly diversified and modified by modern dissemination and interpretation. Considering the contemporary understanding of the term, analytical lines are even more blurred. As James Conant writes, ‘ “scepticism” refers not just to one particular philosophical position but rather to the wider dialectical space within which philosophers occupying a range of apparently opposed philosophical positions (realism, idealism, coherentism etc.) engage one another, while seeking a stable way to answer the sceptic’s question in the affirmative rather than (as the sceptic himself does) in the negative.’³ Conant himself delineates two varieties of modern scepticism – ‘Cartesian’ and ‘Kantian’ – in order to better illuminate contemporary debates (98). I offer in this section a brief outline of the arguments (pertaining directly to scepticism) of Descartes and Locke; of H. H. Price and G. E. Moore; of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. It is these arguments that have had the most impact on Rorty’s and Cavell’s contemporary engagement.

With the broad outlines of his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) familiar to most, Descartes uses scepticism as a method to dismiss its own existence. Systematically doubting that any of his beliefs are true (e.g. that he is not actually sitting in his chair, that he is not actually perceiving a piece of wax), he strips his belief system to the absolutely indubitable. Attempting to doubt his own existence, he finds that the statement ‘I exist’ is impossible to doubt and is therefore absolutely certain. Proceeding to establish the existence of God, Descartes rebuilds his belief system on absolutely certain foundations. This system of certain belief includes the existence of an external world and the dualistic distinction of the immaterial mind from the material body.

Locke rejects scepticism by a detailed empirical excavation of our mental faculties. Working on a similar dualism to Descartes’, his monumental Essay Concerning Human Understanding outlines the mind’s ability to abstract non-material ideas from a material reality. Such ideas are caused by and represent the objects that cause them. Locke thus holds a representational theory of perception. Given the ambition of his project, it is striking that Locke does not account for this causal relation in any great detail. He focuses rather on the general machinery of ideas and their formation in the mind: ideas can be simple or complex and can be arrived at either by sensation or by reflection.

Though his project emphasizes the limits of human understanding (what we can in good faith claim to know as well as what we cannot), Locke rejects scepticism as an all-encompassing concept. It is perhaps unsurprising, however, that later interpreters attribute to Locke a sceptical stance. Most famously, Bishop George Berkeley assigns to Locke the ‘veil of perception’ thesis (where the perception of ideas blocks or at least mediates human perception of the external world). For Berkeley, mind-independent material objects are impossible and unknowable.

David Hume proceeded to carry both Locke and Berkeley’s empiricism to the logical extreme of radical scepticism, calling into question even more of our common-sense beliefs about the source and support of our sense perceptions. Repudiating completely the possibility of certain knowledge, Hume argued convincingly that cause and effect in the natural world is not a matter of certainty but a habit of thinking based upon repeated observation. This so-called ‘problem of induction’ is the cornerstone of his epistemology. Kant asserted that it was an encounter with Hume’s sceptical puzzlings that awoke him from his own ‘dogmatic slumbers’, reframing the sceptical debate by distinguishing between the realm of noumena (things in themselves) and the realm of phenomena (things as they appear). In his scheme of ‘transcendental idealism’, we have cognitive access to phenomena but not to noumena. Existing as it does outside space, time and our categories of understanding, the world of noumena is not so much unknown as unknowable.

Moving into the early twentieth century, G. E. Moore opened his most famous paper, ‘Proof of an External World’ (1939), with a quotation from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: ‘It still remains a scandal to philosophy . . . that the existence of things outside of us . . . must be accepted merely on faith, and that, if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.’⁴ Like Kant, Moore sought to demonstrate the existence of external objects. While retaining the force of the sceptical challenge, he sought to retain our commonsense understanding of our epistemic relationship to the world. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was Moore’s common-sense approach that was reconfigured by philosophers of ordinary language (most notably by Norman Malcolm and Alice Ambrose), though the ordinary language interpretation was vigorously repudiated by Moore himself. His common-sense philosophy was the main influence, however, on J. L. Austin. In Sense and Sensibilia, Austin criticized the sense-data theory of perception, the doctrine that we never directly perceive material objects but only sense-data. Austin further argued that an inquiry into the sources of the sceptical conclusion was ‘a matter of unpicking, one by one, a mass of seductive (mainly verbal) fallacies, or exposing a wide variety of concealed motives – an operation which leaves us, in a sense, just where we began’.⁵ In his article ‘Other Minds’, Austin attempted to illustrate how the standard philosophical inquiry deviates from our normal practices.

Traditional sceptical recitals are also critically examined by the later Wittgenstein, who suggests their persuasive force and momentum as nothing more than a bewitchment of the intelligence. Questioning whether I am in fact a tomato is just the sort of metaphysical bewilderment we find ourselves in, Wittgenstein urges, when entering into an abnormal linguistic practice and reflecting upon our existence at a remove from ordinary contexts. Philosophical problems such as the problem of scepticism arise, Wittgenstein urges, ‘when language goes on holiday’.⁶ In place of a competing philosophical theory, Wittgenstein counsels instead for the idea of philosophy as therapy – an approach meant not to refute the sceptical dilemma, exactly, but to free us from its grip. What is in point here is our everyday ways of using language, everyday ways from which philosophy has consistently deviated.

Cavell and scepticism

In a philosophical career dating from the 1950s to the present, and in disciplinary engagements with romantic and modernist poetry in addition to Shakespearean tragedy and Hollywood film, the single most pressing concern for Stanley Cavell is the shape and range of philosophical scepticism. As he writes in direct response to Rorty, ‘My sense of what I want from my writing is the registration at all times of what I have called the threat, or menace, of scepticism.’⁷ Cavell’s earliest paper, ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’ (1962), challenged the interpretation of David Pole presenting Wittgenstein as a refuter of the sceptical paradox. ‘The Avoidance of Love’ (1967), written under the shadow of the Vietnam War, confirmed Cavell’s preoccupation with sceptical themes as it gestured to the development of an increasingly idiosyncratic philosophical voice. These essays (later collected, together with pieces on Beckett and aesthetics in Must We Mean What We Say?) were followed in 1979 with The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality and Tragedy, a reworking of Cavell’s doctoral thesis. The Claim of Reason stands to this day as Cavell’s most extended attempt to come to terms with the threats and ongoing temptations of scepticism. Central to his procedures is an excursus on the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein.

In Part II of The Claim of Reason, Cavell’s interpretations of Wittgenstein and Austin dovetail with a detailed critique of traditional epistemology. In comparison with Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, what is striking is Cavell’s more diagnostic approach. Cavell’s is a critique less focused on individual figures and arguments of the tradition than on the spirit in which such a tradition proceeds. He does mention Descartes, at points, quoting at length from the First and Second Meditations, but his discussion explores in most detail the divergence between the ‘traditional’ epistemological philosopher and the philosopher of ordinary language. Mindful of the pitfalls of uncritical acceptance, Cavell is at pains to track the precise nature and extent of this divergence. Distinctive of his procedures is a continuing desire to give both the sceptic (construed as the philosopher of traditional epistemology) and the anti-sceptic (construed as the philosopher of ordinary language) a sympathetic hearing.

There are at least two aspects of traditional epistemology that Cavell is fundamentally at odds with:

1. that the failure of a particular claim to knowledge can cast suspicion on knowledge as a whole;
2. that generic objects are always the object of investigation.

With respect to the first aspect, Cavell draws attention to everyday cases of epistemological unreliability. Here, claims to knowledge of a particular fact (that a jazz band on the radio is in fact ‘Goodman’s band from around 1939’) or the particular significance of a phone message (that its number is definitely that of a friend’s hotel) turn out to be, in retrospect, mistaken. Cavell urges that in such cases of mistaken inference or assumption we certainly draw the moral of our own fallibility (‘maybe I shouldn’t leap so quickly to conclusions’, ‘maybe I just don’t know that musical genre as well as I used to’, ‘maybe I should stop taking things for granted’). However, it would be peculiar in these cases to draw the moral of radical or metaphysical scepticism. It would be peculiar to conclude that the failure of knowledge in a particular case leads to the failure or impossibility of knowledge in general. It is for this reason that Cavell characterizes the epistemological recitals of Descartes, Moore et al. as ‘phenomenologically unfaithful’ (CR, 142). These recitals simply do not align with everyday experiences of claims to knowledge and their limitation, a limitation more accurately characterized as disappointed acquiescence rather than radical despair.

Specifically in his discussion of the emphasis on generic objects in traditional epistemology (point 2 above), Cavell finds in Austin a companion critique. In place of those items historically summoned by the sceptic’s recital – tables, chairs, envelopes, pencils, pieces of wax, tomatoes – Austin focuses on the claim to knowledge entered in the case of a specific example: ‘there is a goldfinch in the garden’. In the case of identifying the goldfinch in the garden, Austin argues, it is clear that one’s failure to know for certain carries no implications for knowledge as a whole. Such failure would at most indicate either a personal lack of specialist knowledge (my inability to differentiate between a goldfinch and, for example, a robin) or a lack of optimal viewing conditions (my own poor eyesight or my distance from the bird). The crucial point is that we can describe quite easily the particular factors that would have made knowledge possible or at least more likely. As Cavell parenthetically lists, ‘the bird could have been closer, stood more still, stayed longer; the light could have been higher, or more even; I could have been better trained etc.’ (CR, 134).

Contrastingly, in the case of generic objects, no such additional descriptions or improved situations will help. Appealing to the case of ‘a tomato’, ‘a table’ or ‘an envelope’, we simply do not know what would count as proof of these objects’ existence. Questions of reality, as Cavell writes elsewhere, are simply not settled in the same m...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Return of the Invisible Tomato
• 2 What’s the Use of Calling Cavell a Pragmatist?
• 3 The Turn to Literature
• 4 Stylists of the Philosophical
• 5 The Personal and the Political
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright