Stanley Cavell: The exercise of philosophical authority
Michael J Zilles, Boston College

Date: 2004

Abstract

In 1990 Stanley Cavell published Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome , in which he investigates the implications of Moral Perfectionism for political philosophy through an engagement with and critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice and Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language . I argue that Cavell's critique of Rawls and Kripke unmasks what I call a political mythology of politics as enforcement that underwrites the role that Rawls and Kripke allow rules to play in their accounts, respectively, of the "conversation of justice," what citizens in a democracy can say to one another regarding the justice of their society and its institutions, and the "argument of the ordinary," what we can say to one another regarding how language words the world. For both Rawls and Kripke the central philosophical question concerns the conditions under which we can justify rules or principles that can then be legitimately enforced. On Cavell's reading, in both Rawls and Kripke there is a mythologizing of rules that hands them a power in our lives that we cannot responsibly allow them, a mythology he links with Wittgenstein's notion of the subliming of the mathematical--a wish for perfection that frees us from responsibility for what we say or do, much as a mathematical rule frees us from responsibility for the inferences it makes possible. Cavell's method is to draw his readers back to our ordinary or actual conversations: in the case of justice, to when, confronted by a cry of justice, our consent to our actual society and its present injustices becomes a question for us; in the case of language, to the scenes of instruction in which we are initiated into our community's life with words. This puts pressure on writing and its powers of exemplification and raises questions concerning the sources of philosophical conviction and authority. Hence the subtitle of my dissertation, which turns on the idea of authoring as exercising authority, and of philosophy as enacting (or acting upon) a (vision of) politics.

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