Reading Silence

[excerpt from 'Skepticism and Redemption: The Political Enactments of Stanley Cavell']

Abstract

Stanley Cavell roams across a wide range of fields in his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? most obviously those of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. But nowhere in the book’s ten essays does he advance an explicit political theory. Still, this book, published in 1969 and written over the course of the preceding decade, quietly poses persistent political questions, even in essays on such topics as skepticism and King Lear, Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler and Beckett’s Endgame, atonal music and ordinary language philosophy. Just who is the “we” spoken of in the book’s title (we philosophers? we Americans? we human beings?)? Is there any relationship between democratic equality and the philosophical appeal to our everyday language, as described in the book’s eponymous essay? 1 Does the account that Cavell offers in his piece on Wittgenstein of practices and behaviors shared across cultures—the “whirl of organism” of our forms of life—suggest a nascent theory of human solidarity? Our freedom in language and the responsibility we bear for meaning, topics of the book’s opening essays, raise the question of what we might owe to one another and how we might offer—or withhold—it in our choices of words. Is this the beginning of a theory of justice? The concept of acknowledgment, described in the book’s final essays as a response to the challenge of skepticism, shifts the problem from what I can know to what I might do. Is this a theory of moral or political action (or both)?