Scepticism In Stanley Cavell's Argument

It is obvious, therefore, that the conception of the subject that emerges from Wittgenstein's vision of language and the mind immediately displaces the exclusiveness of the cognitive ego and demands not merely potencies that are foreign to it, but also the recognition of realities that are inaccessible without the cooperation of other modes of knowing that cannot be found in reason alone. But the modern self defines itself as a rational thinking consciousness, and as the organizing and constitutive center of the subject that can only preserve its predominance and sovereignty by denying all reality that escapes the powers of reason, as well as eliminations from our conception of the subject any element that is not reducible to that function. …show more content…
Stanley Cavell refers to it as scepticism, which means: the intellectual suspicion of a reality that refuses to submit to our will, and the denial of intimacy with the world because it is invisible to reason. But we are not referring here to philosophical scepticism only, but also, and perhaps especially, to scepticism as an existential attitude which we see every day — in the various ways in which we transform the world into a more efficient, more manageable, more docile, and user friendly place. For instance, in the growing automatization of our daily life, in the massive production of replicas of everything natural — from the plants and flowers that adorn our offices, to our very food —, in the preference for the mechanical instead of the human, and in the implicit argument in its favor that is fast becoming the social standard in the main cities of the world; in the invasion of our public spaces by TV screens that are eternally ON; in the constant and unstoppable flux of information that forces and overwhelms us through the electronic highways; in the enthusiasm that gives unconditional welcome to the advent of virtual reality, and to the titanic prospects of genetic …show more content…
What is being criticized is not intellectual, nor scientific knowledge per se, not even the advances of technology that it has produced, but instead the polarity and partiality of thinking, and in particular, what I would call the loss of soul that they seem to foster at the cultural as much as the personal level.

In this situation we can understand Wittgenstein's redefinition of philosophy as a cultural therapy that fights that attitude and the exclusivist and autocratic thinking that supports it, attempting to re-animate in us that capacity which has been exiled in our culture, that mode of thinking that I want to call of the soul. For Wittgenstein our identification with the cognitive ego causes a blindness or an insensitivity to those other levels of consciousness that are active in all our practices — and in particular in our linguistic practices — that is tantamount to a denial of our own