The Claim of Reason as a Study of the Human Voice

Cavell’s goal in The Claim of Reason has been to “bring the human voice back into philosophy.” For Cavell, the stakes of ordinary language philosophy (particularly Wittgenstein and Austin’s work; see Toril Moi, Avner Baz) are to make it understood that language is spoken; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. In The Claim of Reason, his aim is to shift the question of the common/shared use of language—central to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—toward the less-explored question of the definition of the subject as voice, and the re-introduction of the voice into philosophy as a redefinition of subjectivity in language.

There is indeed the case where someone later reveals his inmost heart [sein Innerstes] to me by a confession: but that this is so cannot offer me any explanation of outer and inner, for I have to give credence to the confession.
For confession is of course something exterior. 4ttgenstein's work in philosophical psychology, particularly his Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, The Inner and the Outer, invites us to shift our focus from a critique of interiority to a new conception of subjectivity defined as voice.Not 5 that Wittgenstein reverts to any form of mentalism or psychologism; rather, he is here pursuing the project started in the Tractatus of depsychologizing psychological concepts, and therefore, as Cavell memorably puts it, of undoing 'the psychologization of psychology' Wittgenstein's last works are an attempt to depsychologize subjectivity not by eliminating it but by redefining it by voice.Much work has been done to underline the importance of subjectivity in Wittgenstein's work, but it has focussed on so-called grammatical or first-person matters of his thought.The power of Cavell's reading is that it allows a redefinition of subjectivity itself by an ability or competence to expression, to meaning, conceived inseparably as an upheaval of the temptation of inexpressiveness, and of the fear of over expressiveness (being expressive beyond your means, whatever these means are).
Again, this is the topic of The Claim of Reason.Wittgenstein is traditionally read as seeking to deny the inner, or more precisely, to dementalize it; as rejecting the idea that there could be anything at all going on in the "mind" or the "soul."He is seen as challenging the mythology of the "inner process"-the "mental" process that allegedly accompanies language: Ever and again comes the thought that what we see of a sign is only the outside of something within, in which the real operations of sense and meaning go on. 6 this idea comes "ever and again," it is because-like all ideas whose obsessive presence is noted by Wittgenstein-it has its reasons: we "are inclined to say" that there .Wittgenstein, Zettel (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 100.must be an inner process accompanying speaking, we need such a process if the spoken sentence is to be more than a lifeless string of signs.Indeed, what could give life to language, make it expressive, significant, if not an inner process?Wittgenstein relentlessly exposes the many problems stemming from the notion of an inner process -what has been called the myth of the inner.But to read this as straightforward criticism or wholesale rejection of the inner and the mental-as is often done in behaviourist interpretations-is to lose sight of the radicalness of Wittgenstein's thought, which leads him, not to deny the existence of an "inner," but to rethink inner-outer dualism.When he writes: "The distinction between 'inner' and 'outer' does not interest us," Wittgenstein is not denying the importance of reflecting on the inner and the 7 outer, but what he is interested in is the way inner and outer are, grammatically speaking, articulated; that is, the way we speak of an inner only if there is an outer, and vice versa.This, as we shall see, does away with the notion of an inner as something hidden, so to speak: an inner with no outer, a private inner, unknown; as also with the notion of an inner 'on its own', immediately legible.The idea of expressing unknownness, central to Cavell's reading of film in Contesting Tears comes from this questioning in Wittgenstein.
An essential dimension of Bette Davis's power is its invitation to, and representation of, camp; an arrogation of the rights of banality and affectation and display, of the dangerous wish for perfect personal expressiveness The wish, in the great stars, is a function not of their beauty, but of their power of privacy, of a knowing unknownness. 8vell adds, on a more political note, that "It is a democratic claim for personal freedom," "something Davis shares with the greatest of the histrionic romantic stars." The point may also be the capacity, in an actor, of expressing inexpressiveness, as for example in Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) (connected to the essential and wonderful vulnerability of the Gary Cooper character and expressivity).So to understand the human nature of expression would be to understand the possibility of .Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, (CA: University of California Press, 2005), 100.7 . Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 128.
unknownness, privacy, neither as a hidden "thing," nor as "nothing" but as the privileged object of exposure.A passage from the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology is pertinent here: But if we dispose of the inner process in this way,-is the outer one now all that is left?-the language-game of description of the outer process is not all that is left: no, there is also the one whose starting point is the expression. 9 When Wittgenstein examines the grammar of expressions bearing on the inner and the outer, he is looking to challenge a kind of exaltation we have about the inner life being entirely private.This does not amount to his rejecting the idea of an inner life.
Wittgenstein contests the idea that we have privileged access to our sensations, and he suggests that we know our own pain no better, perhaps less well, than we know someone else's.But there is something misleading in these familiar, paradoxical affirmations; for, as Cavell recognized, the stake here is not so much evidence of one's access to someone else, as the difficulty (and anxiety) of accessing one's own inner life, translated into skepticism.The question is expressed in some seemingly ironic moments in Wittgenstein, in the last writings-a book he didn't get to really read closely, but which is perfect material for The Claim of Reason.
I can not observe myself as I do someone else, cannot ask myself "What is this person likely to do now?"etc. question "The apparent certainty of the first person, the uncertainty of the third." 12e separation of both questions would in any case only be an artificial one: the question of my own inaccessibility to what is going on in me being also (even if not exactly the same as) that of the other's accessibility to himself.It seems as if, towards the end, and after moments of criticism of the "self" (as in the Blue Book), Wittgenstein returns to an original question of the Tractatus (the self, mysterious), and asks again, though in a new way, the question of the nature of self.Wittgenstein continues in his attempt to define the non-psychological self, the threat of solipsism gives way to that which it masked: the anxiety of the relation to self, as translated in the myth of inexpressiveness.Here again, Cavell's analysis is powerful: the alleged unknowability of the other masks the refusal, or anguish, to know oneself, or rather to feel oneself.
It is as though Wittgenstein felt human beings in jeopardy of losing touch with their inner lives altogether, with the very idea that each person is a center of one, that each has a life. 13at Wittgenstein often says about the confusion inherent in the idea that we have no access to the other has in fact to do with this core anxiety, that of our access to our own sensations and thoughts-being unknown.Opting for this perspective lets us gauge the full extent of the problematic nature of behaviourist interpretations of Wittgenstein.What would be someone's examination of her own external reactions?
As if, it is here precisely that the threat of denial of the inner is the fear, or uncaniness, of expressivity-"I hear the words coming out of my mouth."In the Investigations, Wittgenstein repeatedly states that he is not denying the existence of inner processes; for example: "What gives the impression that we want to deny anything?"A 14 typical and misleading remark is the following, which appears to call for a behaviourist interpretation: "An 'inner process' stands in need of outward criteria."But it 15 can be interpreted differently, witness Cavell: . Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 951. 12 .Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 91.  13  .Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §305.14 .Ibid., §580.
The technique in this instance is, roughly, this: The background of the statement, to which it is a response, is that people (philosophers) are led to say that remembering or thinking or meaning, etc. are inner processes, as though that explains something.The message is that until you produce criteria on the basis of which, in a particular case, or count something as an 'inner process', you The deep problem is that once the presence of an inner process is made dependent on criteria, nothing is solved; for criteria are outer, not inner.As Cavell then notes: But the immediate context of the statement seems to convey this message: Once you produce the criteria, you will see that they are merely outward, and so the very thing they are supposed to show is threatened. 17 Wittgenstein puts the expression "inner process" in scare quotes.This should move us to be circumspect, and guess that he does not mean anything as obvious and bor- ture of inner/outer; but it is not only a matter of grammar, we have here to do with a dualism that seeps through all the uses of language, and has therefore a logical structure: "The inner is tied up with the outer not only empirically, but also logically." 18at the duality is a logical one means that for Wittgenstein the inner can only be thought (or spoken of) in relation to an outer; that we have here to do with a structure; that there is no inner without an outer, and vice versa: We judge, read, see the inner by means of the outer; and this tells us nothing about the empirical relationship between inner and outer.So we need to add to the definition of meaning by voice the idea of a confession.
There is indeed the case where someone later reveals his inmost heart (sein Innerstes) to me by a confession: but that this is so cannot offer me any explanation of outer and inner, for I have to give credence to the confession.
For confession is of course something exterior. 20ttgenstein suggests here a paradox of expression: it comes to the same thing to say something goes on in me and something outside, because that is precisely what we mean by outer (and inner).This interdependence of inner and outer is registered, put before our eyes, in film: "I see the outer and imagine an inner that fits it." When mien, gesture and circumstances are unambiguous, then the inner seems to be an outer; it is only when we cannot read the outer that the inner seems to be hidden behind it.
. Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 63.
There are inner and outer concepts, inner and outer ways of looking at a

man. […]
The inner is tied up with the outer not only empirically, but also logically.The inner is tied up with the outer logically, and not just empirically. 21re, the question is no longer about the limit between subject and world, or between outer and inner, but about the very nature of a subject, which is no longer be- If we examine the external criterion, it will only be that: external.And so, it is useless to ask of the external-the criteria-that it give more than it has, or than it is.In other words, the criterion is, by its very nature, disappointing; this is the main thesis of the first part of The Claim of Reason, but it is so only inasmuch as we started off with an erroneous interpretation of what the inner is, and what, the outer: Silent "internal" speech is not a half hidden phenomenon which is as it were seen through a veil.It is not hidden at all, but the concept may easily confuse us, for it runs over a long stretch cheek by jowl with the concept of an 'outward' process, and yet does not coincide with it. 27ttgenstein's suggestion is that only the outer gives us access to the inner.See The

Claim of Reason:
I feel: That "something or other" is in there is what "outward" says.In itself the word deprives the notion of a criterion of none of its power; and adds none to it.But a false idea of the inward produces a false idea of the outward.Wittgenstein throughout his philosophizing remains obsessed with the idea of the self and the non-coincidence between voice and identity.What, from the Notebooks to the Last Writings, obsesses Wittgenstein, is precisely this mixture of tautology and difference in use: the idea, both trivial and obscure, that the relation (connection) I have to myself is, in some way, not the same as the one I have to others.
My own relation to my words is wholly different from other people's.
I do not listen to them and thereby learn something about myself.They have a completely different relation to my actions than to the actions of others.
If I listened to the words of my mouth, I would be able to say that someone else was speaking out of my mouth.Well, it is a linguistic relationship: the subject is a subject of language; she makes use of a common language, and this use is her own, subjectivity is no longer an object but a property of what(ever) is said.We are left with a language that is no longer private but subjective.The publicity of language (its outwardness) is not opposed to its, so to speak, "intimacy" (a better term is needed here, if privacy doesn't work-intimacy is nice as it evokes a conversational tonality).
A language without inwardness would appear (outwardly) strange.When we do not know what is going on in someone else, our uncertainty, says Wittgenstein, does not refer to something going on in the inner.The hesitation concerns the expression (Ausdruck) itself: the inner finds its expression in the bodily.
Again, as we saw about what Cavell calls "the body of our expressions," the outer, the body is perceived as what gives expression to the inner.We can see that this conception of expression radicalizes the structure of the inner/outer.Here the question of subjectivity becomes a matter not of some difficulty and confusion in accessing the inner, as being private, but again of the definition of expression.that Wittgenstein does not so much seek to question the private character of the soul as the idea that the private is a matter of knowledge, and therefore of secrecy.That what someone else says to himself is hidden from me is part of the concept "saying inwardly."Only "hidden" is the wrong word here; for if it is hidden from me, it ought to be apparent to him, he would have to know it.But he does not "know" it […]. 37epticism would then be less a cognitive problem (the possibility of knowing the world, or others, or of having access to someone else's inner self) than a symptom: that of the denial or refusal of expression.The question of the knowledge of other minds acts like a mirror, or a mask, of my own accessibility (to the other, to myself).There is no secret, "nothing is hidden," not because everything is external, but because the only secrets are those we do not want to hear, and the only privacy that which we do not want to know, or refuse to give access, or expression to.We conceive of language as the (outer) expression of an (inner) state or thought, and therefore of private language as language that is somehow doomed to remain inside, not exteriorizable: "Well, there is no such thing as outer mediated and inner unmediated evidence for the inner." 38t it could just as well be said, following Cavell, and the evidence given in film, that Wittgenstein radically changes the discussion on privacy.The problem is not our inability to express or externalize what we have "inside," to think or feel The question of the secret and the private is transformed and becomes that of the fatality of meaning, or of my "condemnation" to signification.The problem is thus not meaninglessness or the impossibility of "making sense", but rather the fatality of expression.
The question, within the mood of the fantasy is: Why do we attach significance to any words and deeds, of others or of ourselves?[…] A fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness would solve a simultaneous set of metaphysical problems: it would relieve me of the responsibility for making myself known to others-as though if I were expressive that would mean continuously betraying my experiences, incessantly giving myself away; it would suggest that my responsibility for self-knowledge takes care of itself-as though the fact that others cannot know my (inner) life means that I cannot fail to. 43 understand that, as Wittgenstein said, language is our form of life means accepting the naturalness of language, the fatality of signification.This is not easy to achieve.It is from here that skepticism in its various forms is born: the impossibility of accessing the world is a mask for my own refusal to recognize it-that is to say, to bear signification, meaning, expression having a voice.From here, realism in its various form is born-my claim to know or theorize the real is a mask for my refusing contact, proximity with things.To mean, or to know what one means, would be first and foremost to place the sentence, to quote Wittgenstein, back in its "country of origin," its "natural milieu"; to recover the naturalness of language.This was the task of the ordinary language philosopher; as Wittgenstein says, "to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use." 44 The Grammar of Claim others, mine?Cavell hears the echo of these questions in the opening lines of the Philosophical Investigations (which begin with the quote from Augustine: because, says Cavell, "all my words are those of another."Language is an inherited form of 45 life).Everything we say is a claim.
Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. 46re, we find all the themes of the Investigations: language learning; community; meaning; desire.But, at the same time: the subject and voice.
In The Claim of Reason, Cavell calls into question our criteria-that is, our common agreement on, or rather in language, in "form of life" and, more precisely, the we at stake in "what we say when."All that we have is what we say, and our agreements in language.We agree not on meanings but on usages, as Wittgenstein saw.One determines the "meaning of a word" by its uses.The search for agreement (asking "what we should say when…", as Austin constantly did) is grounded on something entirely other than meanings or the determination of speakers' "common sense." For Cavell, the radical absence of foundation to the claim to "say what we say" (first discovery of his) is not the mark of some lack of logical rigor or rational certainty (a second discovery) in the procedure (ordinary language philosophy) that starts off from this claim.This is what Wittgenstein means when speaking about our "agreement in judgments" and in language: it is founded only on itself, in the we.It was already explicit in Must We Mean What We Say? in the cult passage: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts.Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals . Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 74. nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections.That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of […] of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation-all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls 'forms of life.' Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this.It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying. 47t The Claim of Reason aims to go even further.Cavell shows both the fragility and the depth of our agreements, and focuses on the very nature of the necessities that emerge from our life forms.The fact that our ordinary language is founded on lifeforms is not only a source of disquiet about the validity of what we do and say; it is the revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not want to recognize: the fact that "I" am the only possible source of such validity.
To reject this, to try to erase skepticism, amounts to reinforcing it.This is what Cavell means by his proposition in The Claim of Reason that skepticism is lived, not a theory or thesis but a form of life.This is a new understanding of the fact that language is our form of life.Acceptance of this fact-which Cavell defines as the "the absence of foundation or guarantee for creatures endowed with language and subject to its powers and weaknesses, subject to their mortal condition" -is thus not a conso 48 lation, but an acknowledgement of the everyday.It is on this condition that one can regain "lost contact with reality": the proximity to the world and words broken in skepticism.
Cavell's originality indeed lies in his reinvention of the nature of language and in the connection he establishes between this nature of language the agreement, (Übereinstimmung) in language and human nature, finitude of life.It is in this sense that the question of language agreements reformulates the question of the human condition, and it is in this sense that acceptance of this natural condition goes handin-hand with acknowledgment of these (language) agreements.
The philosophical problem raised by ordinary language philosophy is thus That is to say, for Cavell, the question of our criteria.In order to see this, let us return to his investigation of language agreements: we share criteria by which we regulate our application of concepts, means by which, in conjunction with what Wittgenstein calls grammar, we set up the shifting conditions for conversation.
According to Cavell, this explain the very particular tone of the Investigations, which have something autobiographical about them-though a curious autobiography, which would also be our own.It can seem sometimes that Wittgenstein has undertaken to voice our secrets, secrets we did not know were known, or did not know we shared.And then, whether he is right or wrong in a given instance, the very intention, or presumption, will seem to some outrageous. 49is brings us back to the voice and the question of the foundation of agreement: that is, the question of the nature of the I-of my capacity to speak, and thus, to conform to shared criteria.Indeed, for Cavell it is crucial that Wittgenstein says that we agree in and not on language.This means that we are not agents of the agreement; that language as form of life precedes this agreement as much as it is produced by it and that this circularity constitutes an irreducible element of skepticism.A solution cannot be found in conventionalism, because convention does not constitute an explanation of the functioning of language, but an essential difficulty.But convention cannot account for the real practice of language, and it serves instead to prevent us from seeing the naturality of language.To agree in language means that language produces our .Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 20.
understanding just as much as it is the product of an agreement; that in this sense it is natural to us, and that the idea of convention is there to at once mimic and mask this necessity: "Underlying the tyranny of convention is the tyranny of nature," Cavell will say later in The Claim of Reason.In the Investigations, Wittgenstein searches When I remarked that the philosophical search for our criteria is a search for community, I was in effect answering the second question I uncovered in the face of the claim to speak for "the group"-the question, namely, about how I could have been party to the establishing of criteria if I do not recognize that I have and do not know what they are.[…] to emphasize that the claim is not that one can tell a priori who is implicated by me, because one point of the particular kind of investigation Wittgenstein calls grammatical is exactly to discover who." 51 That we agree in language is certainly not the end of the problem of skepticism, and conventionalism is not an answer to the questions asked here.Indeed, for Cavell it is crucial that Wittgenstein says that we agree in and not on language.This means that we are not agents of the agreement; that language precedes this agreement as much as it is produced by it and that this circularity constitutes an irreducible element of skepticism.I am not "by definition" representative of the human.The agreement can always be broken.I can be excluded (or exclude myself) from the community, both linguistic and political.The possibility of disagreement is inherent even to the idea of agreement; from the moment I claim (with my words) my representativeness.This .Ibid., 123.50  .Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 22.
ever-possible disagreement sums up the threat of skepticism: a break in the passage, a suspension of the generalization from I to we.
Still I am not "by definition" representative of the human.The agreement can be broken.I can be excluded (or exclude myself) from the form of life, both linguistic and political.The possibility of disagreement is inherent even to the idea of agreement; from the moment I claim my representativeness, the risk is exclusion from form of life.
For Cavell, the question of the social contract underlies the question of lan- The error is to see an alternative between private and public (this is the prejudice that underlies discussions of "the private language argument").Cavell explodes this alternative.To not be public is not to be private: it is to be inexpressive."Voiceless, not even mute."If I do not speak, it is not that there is something inexpressible, but that I have nothing to say, and this is not only about sharing a life form with others, but about being alive.Our agreement (with others, with myself) is an agreement of voices: our übereinstimmen, says Wittgenstein."That a group of human beings stimmen .Ibid., 26.
in their language überein says, so to speak, that they are mutually voiced with respect to it, mutually attuned top to bottom." 53vell thus defines an agreement that is not psychological or inter-subjective, .Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §241-242.
This question only receives a response in A Pitch of Philosophy.The philosopher speaks with ordinary words, and nothing says that others will accept thesethough the philosopher claims to speak for all.By what right?
Before being a term of the political idiom, a claim is a way of expressing oneself publicly to make a claim, a request, a right or, quite simply, to make one's voice heard.This is the meaning of the term "claim," and why Cavell has made a central element of his philosophy of ordinary language.
From the old French word clamer (in Latin clamare, of the same semantic field as clarus "clear," "strong"), to claim means first of all in its first historically attested literary uses, "to call, shout, clamor" (calling loudly).Yet, to claim and the noun claim are unparalleled in French today.The current French translations of claim, "revendication, réclamation, prétention," all have a tone, if not a pejorative tone, as if the request thus expressed needed additional justification.However, claim, in its first legal or political uses, on the contrary, raises a claim as well founded, in kind if not in law, and could be adequately translated as "title," which refers to the notion of law which emerges late and from which claim (in the sense of a claim based on a need) perhaps constitutes a first form.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, claim moved from the political and legal fields to the theory of knowledge, and then generally to the philosophy of language.The notion is then a "claim to knowledge," a "thesis."This use raises the question, stemming from English empiricism and then taken up by Kant, of the legitimacy of knowledge, of the validity of my claims to know.There is a German lexical equivalent to this use (Anspruch).
Claim originally referred to a claim related to the satisfaction of a physical need or the recovery of a vital asset that has been taken from you? Claim is a request to obtain a title deed to an object that already legitimately belongs to me.This use of the concept is extended during the conquest of new land by pioneers: in the US and Australia, claim refers to a parcel acquired by occupation (not granted nor inherited).
This "local" meaning of claim underlies a certain conception of the claim to property rights as fundamental rights, and perhaps also rights in general as (re)taking possession of a territory of one's own.It should be noted that a territory claimed by the Indians as the first occupants is called an Indian claim.Thus a meaning of claim to a right is clarified: I ask what is mine and has always been mine.This refers to the request for something as it is due.A claim is then made by "requirement" or "title."This raises the question of the legitimacy of the request, which is answered with the emergence, apparently later, of the term right.The legal (and philosophical) meaning of the notion then becomes more specific: "assertion of a right to something" (Oxford Dictionary); and a whole vocabulary develops around claims, as evidenced by the multiplicity of expressions (lay a claim, make a claim, enter a claim) that have penetrated ordinary language.This grammar structures Cavell's The Claim of Reason.
This claiming inherent in the notion of claim I also epistemological.The question of empiricism is that of legitimacy, of the right to know: what allows us to say that we know?Hume, examining our claim to know by reasoning from experience, wonders by what right we can say that we know anything.This question is repeated by Kant, in whom we can detect a claim equivalent: Anspruch, which refers to the claim of reason to ask questions that are beyond its power, but that are legitimate and natural.The legal meaning of a claim, which is found in the Kantian quid juris, then applies to Reason, which is conceived as a claim that is both inevitable and impossible to satisfy, and therefore intended to always remain in the state of a claim.
It is this tension between arrogance and the legitimacy of the philosophical claim to know that is at the heart of Cavell's The Claim of Reason.Cavell defines claim from the outset as a community agreement based on singular expression and common use.From this perspective, what underlies the question of the foundation of knowledge is the political and not only epistemological question of the foundation of our common use of language.For Cavell, the claim of knowledge is the mask/cover of a first claim: the claim to speak for others, and to accept from others that they speak on my behalf.
The philosophical invocation of "what we say," and the search for the criteria call for (are claims to) community.However, the community claim is always a search for the basis on which it can be, or has been, established.The legal and epistemological problems raised by the notion of claim become that of our common criteria, our agreements in language.
The question becomes that of an individual's belonging to the community of a language and his representativeness as a member of that community: where does he get this right or claim to speak for others?In this usage, claim is inseparable from the possibility of losing my representativeness, or my belonging, of being silenced: All claims about what we say go hand in hand with the awareness that others may well disagree, that a given person or group may not share our criteria (not share at all).
The political agreement is of the same nature as the language agreement: it exists only to the extent that it is claimed, claimed, invoked.Thus is defined with claim an agreement that is not psychological or intersubjective, but is based on nothing more than the validity of an individual voice that claims to be a "universal voice."We find here the first meaning of claim (clamor "shout [to] call") and also the irreducibility of the cry.The voice, but also the clamour, are thus constantly underlying the concept of the claim.Claim is what a voice does when it relies solely on itself to establish universal assent-a claim that, however exorbitant it may be, Cavell asks to formulate in an even more scandalous way, that is, without being based, as in Kant, on anything transcendental, or on any condition of reason.Reason claims itself (it is the meaning of genitive in Cavell: claim of reason).Without any outsourced warranty for the claim.
To show how the redesigned claim concept is an answer to skepticism, Cavell evokes the universality of Kant's aesthetic judgment.For him, the proximity of this approach to that of ordinary language theorists is that both of them always admit that

Claiming the Subject
To recognize the intimate connection between all these uses of the notion of claim is to recognize that the expression-in the order of knowledge as well as in the order of politics and law-is always also a voice, one that wants to be heard and demands to be heard on an equal footing with other voices.And always a matter of skepticism, because this voice must constantly be reappropriated to regain a proximity to the world.
Claim would be the acceptance of the expression as identically inner (it expresses me) and outer (it exposes me).It is in this identity that the nature of subjectivity as reinvented by Wittgenstein is revealed: the subject is indeed the subject of language, but in the sense that he is the subject of (to) expression and claim.The subject, in Wittgenstein, exists as this claim, this voice-in and through language.That it is inseparably inner and outer means that it is obviously not a voice that assures me of my identity, my thoughts, or anything else (as soon as it is a voice, it is expression, and escapes me).The subject then defines himself in this movement of reappropriation of her voice, also a way of approaching, touching reality.
Claiming is voicing.Our agreement (with others, with myself) is an agreement -Who is to say whether a man speaks for all men?
Why are we so bullied by such a question?Do we imagine that if it has a sound answer the answer must be obvious or immediate?But it is no easier to say who speaks for all men than it is to speak for all men.And why should that be easier than knowing whether a man speaks for me? 57 Here we may think of one of the stakes of Austin's work: the method of ordinary language philosophy.It is difficult not to notice that there is an "unhappy" dimension, a dimension of failure in ordinary language philosophy, which is obsessed-at least in the case of Austin-with instances where language fails, is inadequate, inexpressive.
In losophy, makes explicit an intuition from Must We Mean What We Say? about the source of skepticism: an impossibility of speaking the world that comes not from any (imaginary) distancing of the world, but from the impossibility or refusal to mean.
The question of the secret and the private is transformed and becomes that of the fatality of meaning, or of my "condemnation" to signification.The problem is thus not meaninglessness or the impossibility of "making sense," but rather the fatality of expression.The tension between the singular and the common, between the "arrogance" and legitimacy of the philosophical claim is developed in Cavell at the political level.What underlies the question of the foundation of knowledge is the (political and not only epistemological) question of the foundation of our common use of language.
For Cavell, the claim to knowledge is the mask of a prior claim: the claim to speak for others, and to accept that others speak in my name.
The philosophical appeal to what we say, and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community.And the claim to community is always a search for the basis upon which it can or has been established. 58vell transforms the juridical and epistemological questions raised by claim into the question of our shared criteria, our agreements in language.
When I remarked that the philosophical search for our criteria is a search for community, I was in effect answering the second question I uncovered in the face of the claim to speak for "the group"-the question, namely, about how I The radical critique of conformism is not simply a calling into question of consent to society.To the contrary, it defines the condition of ordinary democratic morality.Questions of justice and injustice do not only concern those who do not speak-those who, for structural reasons, cannot speak (who have been definitively "excluded" from the conversation of justice)-but also those who could speak yet run up against the inadequacy of speech as it is given to them.It is in this inadequacy and misunderstanding that the political subject is defined-not in a new foundation of the subject through his or her speech, but in the suffocation and claim of his or her own voice.
A speech claims a voice.The subject is not a foundation; it is eternally claimed, absent, demanded.What must be brought out is not only the subject's fragility or plurality or obscurity, but also essential passivity: the subject must support the voice, The subjectivity of language is then the impossible adequacy between a speaker and his or her voice or voices.Here the terror of absolute inexpressiveness AND of absolute expressiveness, of total exposure, come together as two extreme states of voicelessness.(imaginary) distancing of the world, but from the refusal to mean.Our (deliberate) distance from the world creates a fantasy: the fantasy of the private, of inexpressiveness-which becomes the very anxiety of the weight of expression.
The question of privacy is transformed and becomes that of the fatality of meaning, or of my "fatedness" to signification.The problem is thus not meaninglessness or the impossibility of "making sense", but rather the fatality of expression.
The question, within the mood of the fantasy is: Why do we attach significance to any words and deeds, of others or of ourselves?[…] A fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness would solve a simultaneous set of metaphysical problems: it would relieve me of the responsibility for making myself known to others-as though if I were expressive that would mean continuously betraying my experiences, incessantly giving myself away; it would suggest that my responsibility for self-knowledge takes care of itself-as though the fact that others cannot know my (inner) life means that I cannot fail to. 66 understand that, as Wittgenstein said, language is a lifeform means accepting the naturalness of language, the fatality of signification.This is not easy to achieve.
It is from here that skepticism in its various forms is born: the impossibility of accessing the world is a mask for my own refusal to bear signification, meaning, expression.From here, realism in its various form is born-my claim to know or theorize the real is a mask for my refusing agency, contact, proximity with things.To mean, or to know what one means, would be first and foremost to place the sentence, to quote Wittgenstein, back in its "country of origin," its "natural milieu"; to recover the naturalness of language.This was the task of the ordinary language philosopher; as Wittgenstein says, "to bring words back from their metaphysical to .Ibid.
double.First: by what right do we base ourselves on what we ordinarily say?And next: on what, or on whom do we base ourselves to determine what we ordinarily say?But-and this is the genius of Cavell's arguments in Must We Mean What We Say? and in The Claim of Reason-these two questions are but one: the question of the connection of the I (my words) to the real (our world).
50 out and determines our criteria, which govern what we say.But who is he to claim to know such things?It is this absence of any foundation to the claim to know what we say that underlies the idea of criteria and defines a claim.The central enigma of rationality and the community is thus the possibility for me to speak in the name of others.It is not enough to invoke the community; it remains to be seen what authorizes me (gives me title) to refer to it.
and which is founded on nothing other than the pure validity of a voice: my individual voice claims to be, is, a "universal voice."Claiming is what a voice does when it founds itself on itself alone in order to establish universal agreement-a claim that, as exorbitant as it already is, Cavell asks us to formulate in a yet more exorbitant manner: in place and stead of any condition of reason or understanding.In Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell posed the question of the foundation of language in the Kantian terms of "universal voice," showing the proximity of Wittgenstein and Austin's methods to a paradox inherent to aesthetic judgment: basing oneself on I in order to say what we say.Cavell refers to the well-known passage in §8 of the Critique of Judgment.In aesthetic judgment, Kant leads us to discover "a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis would have remained unknown"; the "claim to universality" proper to judgments of taste, which make us "ascribe the satisfaction in an object to everyone."Kant distinguishes the agreeable from the 54 beautiful (which claims universal agreement) in terms of private versus public judgment.How can a judgment with all the characteristics of being private claim to be public, to be valid for all?Kant himself noted the strange, "disconcerting" nature of this fact, whose strangeness Wittgenstein took to the limit.The judgment of taste demands universal agreement, "and in fact everyone supposes this assent (agreement, Einstimmung)."What Kant calls the universal voice (allgemeine Stimme) supports such a claim.We hear this "voice" in the idea of agreement, übereinstimmen, the verb used by Wittgenstein when he speaks of our agreement in language.The 55 universal voice expresses our agreement and thus our claim to speak in the name of others-to speak, tout court.The question of the universal voice is the question of the voice itself and its arrogation-an individual voice claiming to speak in the name of others.What is, then, the status of the voice? .Ibid., 32 53 .Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed.Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 54 2000), 99.
they must rely on me to say what we say.To understand this connection, we must refer to what ordinary language philosophers mean by "what we say when": The aesthetic judgment serves as a model for the kind of affirmation (claim) produces by ordinary language philosophers.How can Kant be considered a thinker of claim?The idea of a universal agreement based on my singular voice appears in the famous §8 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment.With aesthetic judgment, Kant makes us "discover a property of our ability to know": "the claim (Anspruch) to universality (Allgemeingültigkeit)" specific to the judgment of taste, which makes us "attribute to everyone the satisfaction brought by an object."We remember that Kant distinguishes the pleasant from 56 the beautiful (which claims universal consent) in terms of private judgment against public judgment.How can a judgment that has all the characteristics of a private one .Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 99.claim to be public?That is the problem with the claim.The judgment of taste requires and requires universal assent, "and, in fact, everyone assumes this assent, without the subjects who judge opposing each other on the possibility of such a claim (Anspruch)."What supports such a claim is what Kant calls a "universal voice" (allgemeine Stimme).This is the "voice" we hear in übereinstimmen, the verb used by Wittgenstein about our agreement "in language."The proximity between the universal Kantian voice and the theses of the philosophy of ordinary language appears with this ultimate meaning of claim, both Anspruch and Stimme: a claim, empirically unfounded, therefore threatened and raised by scepticism, to speak for all.In his analysis of the concept of claim, Cavell identified the different strata (legal, political, epistemic, expressive) on which the acceptable uses of the verb to claim are developed.The ordinary grammar he proposes suggests that our affirmations or theses (claims) are always based on an agreement in language, on a claim of my representativeness, therefore on the legitimacy of my voice as singular and universal.
of voices: our übereinstimmen, says Wittgenstein.The question of the universal voice is the question of the voice itself and its arrogation-an individual voice claiming to speak in the name of others.What is, then, the status of the philosophical voice?This question only receives a response in A Pitch of Philosophy.The philosopher speaks with ordinary words, and nothing says that others will accept these-though the philosopher claims to speak for all.By what right?
could have been party to the establishing of criteria if I do not recognize that I have and do not know what they are.59It is a question of my representativeness: where does this right or this claim to speak for others come to me from?This is the question that the philosophers of ordinary language, Austin and Wittgenstein ask according to Cavell.The meaning of claim is inseparable from the possibility of my losing my representativeness, or my belonging-of being reduced to silence.. Cavell, The Claim ofReason, 22.These are themes Cavell takes from Emerson and Thoreau: everyone is worth the same, and an individual voice claims generality: this is the principle of Emersonian self-reliance.(It is this possibility of a claim through the voice that makes it possible to extend the model of civil disobedience today.)Those they defend-Native Americans and slaves-do not have rights (they do not have a voice in their history, Cavell says).Instead of making claims in their place, and thus, keeping them in silence, Emerson and Thoreau prefer to claim the only rights that they can defendtheir own: their right to have a government that speaks and acts in their name, that they recognize and to which they give their consent and voice.Thus the concept of democratic conversation: for a government to be legitimate, everyone must have, or find, his or her voice in it, be able to stake a claim The right to withdraw one's voice from society is based on Emersonian self-reliance.My private voice will be "the universal feeling, for what is most intimate always ends up becoming the most public."Toensure that my private voice always be public: this is the definition of a claim and the political translation of Wittgenstein's "critique" of private language.In both moral agreements and political claims I am brought back to myself, to the search for my position and my voice.The question of democracy is indeed the question of voice.I must have a voice in my history, and recognize myself in what is said or shown by my society, and thus, in a way, give my voice to it, accepting that it speak in my name.

"
I am led to stress the condition of the terror of absolute inexpressiveness, suffocation, which at the same time reveals itself as a terror of absolute expressiveness, unconditioned exposure; they are the extreme states of voicelessness."This dissoci 63 ation/dislocation of the voice is also at the heart of Cavell's autobiographical project, in Little Did I Know and it is a matter of claim.This second analyst and I eventually spent some time analyzing more or less informally my own writings.The simultaneous fear of inexpressiveness and of over-expressiveness is a recurrent topic in the material I had just decided to put aside as eluding completion by me, in its thesis form called The Claim to Rationality, in its revised and doubled form published as The Claim of Reason.64    -Who is to say whether a man speaks for all men? 65 This is why in defining, as Cavell does, ordinary language by voice-the voice of the I who speaks in the name of all others, in this arrogation of the voice that is the mark of all human expression-one does not reconstitute a new subject, subject of speech, nor makes physical voice the mark of the human.Cavell rejects the idea of a metaphysics of presence in the concept of voice or speech.I am no more present in my voice than in my other works, actions, or possessions, and the human voice, like ordinary language, is suffused with the skepticism of The Claim of Reason.I am more possessed by language than I possess it.This point, expressed in A Pitch of Philosophy, makes explicit an intuition from The Claim of Reason about the source of skepticism: an impossibility of speaking the world that comes not from any .Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, IL: Uni 63 versity of Chicago Press, 1997), 43. .Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 110.64 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xl.
their everyday use."Cavell makes more precise in A Pitch of Philosophy what was 67 sketched out at the end of The Claim of Reason concerning the essential passivity of the relation to the voice. 28 dismantles standard interpretations of Wittgenstein by showing how the Investigations in various ways explore the idea of an outer confinement.The skeptical problem is transformed: no longer a skepticism about other minds, or about knowledge of others, but about access to others, for which the obstacle is not otherness or privacy, but the impossibility for oneself to access one's self: "If I take the space I am in to be outer, I have to imagine for the other an inner space which I could not possibly enter.Which nobody could possibly enter; for he didn't enter it."29ForWittgenstein and Cavell, false conceptions of inner and outer mutually engender and comfort each other.Cavell notes that "the correct relation between inner . Cavell, The Claim ofReason, 99.  25  .Ibid., 99.  26.Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 220.27 .Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 99-100.Cavell and outer, between the soul and its society, is the theme of the Investigations as a whole."This corrective labour gives birth to a conception of subjectivity as voice, 30 which we shall now attempt to unravel.If the subject is neither within, nor a mere limit, where/what is it?
is an attitude towards a soul.I am not of the opinion that he has a soul."And34 the following, less familiar, passage: "Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same.All our reactions are different."35AsCavellnotes:"his teaching on this point[is]rather that what is accurate in the philosophical or metaphysical idea of privacy is not captured, or is made unrecognizable, by the idea of secrecy."The idea of being alive is somehow more impor 36 tant.What is private is not inaccessible: my private life (or a private conversation, or a private joke) is perfectly accessible to those who I want to give access to it.Film gives us access to the private lives of their characters, Recall his criticism of a conception of the self as something hidden inside, as if meaning were mythologically hidden in the sentence: there is nothing other than what you see (don't you see the whole sentence?).But just as the sentence means, with nothing hidden; is not a string of dead signs, but not because something hidden (or added, or supposed) gives it life; the outer expresses without anything being hidden.Recall the passage in which one might listen to the words of one's mouth.But my relation to 33 myself is not one of knowledge.It is not even, as Wittgenstein's vocabulary indicates, a relation (this would be highly obscure, if not nonsensical): more an attitude-Einstellung, or (in an ordinary, nontechnical sense), a disposition."My attitude towards .Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 9 and Philosophical Investigations, 33 192.him without being able to say it; the problem is the reverse: to not being able mean what I am saying.Here, we might be uncovering one of the sources of the notion of a private language: not a difficulty to know but a refusal-or terror-to mean, or to expose oneself to the outside.We would rather believe that our private self is secret, lose touch with ourselves, than recognize the true nature of that private self, which is that it is entangled in a structure and fatality of expression.Such is the nature of the outer/inner relation: "That an actor can represent grief shows the uncertainty of evidence, but that he can represent grief also shows the reality of evidence."This remarkable passage is connected to the .Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 178.34.Ibid., §284.35.Cavell, The Claim ofReason, 330.36.Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 220-221and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psy 37 chology, §880. .Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 67.something 39 whole discussion on pretence which runs through the last writings.Cases of pretence or make-believe are put forward to show the inadequacy of outer to inner; whereas, for Wittgenstein, the possibility of pretence shows precisely the adequacy-the fact that the exterior does indeed express the interior.Austin's Pretending is not far...We can only simulate ordinary behaviour; and to simulate means to imitate the inner, so to say, just as much as the outer ("This shews us what we go by in judging inner processes"). 40Actors, as we all know from cop shows, can simulate hiding something, lying, pretending.Again, it is the very possibility of expression (linguistic or bodily) that defines subjectivity.Here, the myth of the private gives way to, or perhaps, as Cavell has it, becomes, the myth of inexpressiveness.The idea of inexpressiveness turns out to be the very anxiety of expression, the anxiety of the naturalness and fatality of the passage from inner to outer, anxiety of exposure: "What reason have we for calling 'S' the sign for a sensation?[…]-So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound."As if the passage 41 outward were precisely a loss of control of what I mean, and therefore, as if, ultimately, an inexpressive sound were preferable to a meaningful expression: .Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 67.39 .Wittgenstein, Zettel, §340.40 .Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §261.41 .Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 351.
The philosophical interest of turning to "what we say" appears when we ask ourselves not only what it is to say, but what this we is.How do I, myself, know what we say in such or such circumstance?In what way is the language that I speak, inherited from .Ibid., 351.43 .Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §116.
guage agreements, as his analysis of Rousseau at the beginning of The Claim of Reason shows.If I am representative I must have my voice in the common conversation.
If my society is my expression it should also allow me to find my voice.If others stifle my voice, speak for me, I will always seem to consent.One does not have a voice, one's own voice: it must be found so as to speak in the name of others and to let others speak in one's name.For if others do not accept my words, I lose more than language: I lose my voice.We do not know in advance what the content of our mutual acceptance is, how far we may be in agreement.I do not know in advance how deep my agreement with myself is, how far responsibility for the language may run.But if I am to have my own voice in it, I must be speaking for others and allow others to speak for me.The alternative to speaking for myself representatively (for someone else's consent) is not: speaking for myself privately.The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute.52 Must We Mean What We Say, Cavell asked how to mean ("mean": which also means to think, signify) what I say?Cavell reverses radically the examination of "private language."The problem is not being able to express what I have "in me"thinking or feeling something without being able to say it (a problem definitively dealt with by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus: there is the ineffable, but it most certain- tions.This means above all that it is possible for me to not "mean what I say."I am more possessed by language than I possess it.This point, expressed in A Pitch of Phi-.Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xl.