Abstract
This essay offers a response to Chap. 16 by Smeyers (2017), entitled: “This is simply what I do.” On the relevance of Wittgenstein’s alleged conservatism and the debate about Cavell’s legacy for children and grown-ups. It answers to Smeyers’ critique of what he identifies as a trend in the reception of Stanley Cavell’s work in the philosophy of education , especially in terms of the bearing this has on the understanding of Wittgenstein . Through their preoccupation with the themes of practising freedom differently and departure, and through unrealistic characterisations of the relationship between adults and children , Smeyers claims, authors such as Naomi Hodgson, Stefan Ramaekers, Naoko Saito, and Paul Standish have generated confusions that do justice neither to Wittgenstein nor to Cavell . In particular, they have failed to understand the nature and importance of cultural initiation . The present response takes issue with these claims. It agrees with Smeyers about the importance of cultural initiation but—revisiting questions of authority , training , childhood , and community—argues for a reading of Wittgenstein , in part informed by Cavell , that more accurately accounts for the relationships involved. It also indicates ways in which Cavell moves beyond Wittgenstein and thereby revisits the question of what it is to be a grown-up.
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Notes
- 1.
Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (CV = Culture and Value, PI = Philosophical Investigations , OC = On Certainty), with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials in the References.
- 2.
Cavell wrote The Senses of Walden (1972) in a period of some six weeks in the summer of 1971, roughly at a mid-point in the sixteen years that it took him to produce The Claim of Reason. Written in part in disgust at the US involvement in the Vietnam War, it is a book that follows Thoreau in asking, in effect: where do we find ourselves? It is a book that ponders the significance of the USA into which he has been initiated and what it is that the USA has become.
- 3.
Thoreau writes: “The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to” (Thoreau 1983, p. 149). The implications of these remarks can be updated so that the target would be the kind of professionalised philosophy with which both Wittgenstein and Cavell have found themselves at odds. The alternative is an engagement in which one finds oneself continually challenged and stretched.
- 4.
Smeyers takes me to task for my endorsement of Cavell’s remark that the routes of initiation are never closed. In a salient passage in The Claim of Reason, Cavell describes statements in ordinary language philosophy along the lines of “When we say … we are implying …” as “statements of initiation” (Cavell 1979, p. 179). I take this to be wholly other than an arbitrary, deliberative, or legislative move: it is not predicting or even exactly prescribing this or that performance. The philosopher is trying to find herself in relation to the language into which she has been initiated, the place she has come from: in this sense, it is a retrieval of that language , an acknowledgement of that place—in a sense, a continuing initiation . But that language is and always was projective, as we shall shortly see. This is there in the dialogue of the films to which Cavell gives such careful attention.
- 5.
In the Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need” (PI §108). And in On Certainty : “I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility” (OC §152).
- 6.
“Working in philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects from them.)” (CV, p. 16).
- 7.
Cavell’s memoir, as he prefers to call it, Little Did I Know (2010), uses a double-time scheme. The text is written as a series of diary entries spanning the years during which the book was written, and contemporary details—say, about medical appointments or the difficulties of getting to sleep the previous night—intersect with recollections and reflections on the past.
- 8.
Questions of degree do apply.
- 9.
With regard to Wittgenstein , it is true that his use of the word Abrichten (training ) suggests techniques that would overlap with the training of animals. It is also notoriously the case that in his own career as a teacher, he was sometimes brutal in his treatment of children. This is hardly sufficient to suggest, however, that he had formulated such approaches in anything like an explicit pedagogy ! Nor should it be surprising that the training of young children, at least, should have overlaps with the training of animals, as some of my examples perhaps help to show. The young child needs to be initiated into the language game , and in some cases, this will involve a guiding of the body and a correction of its movements. The model holds in some degree, literally and metaphorically, for more sophisticated kinds of practice . But this does not explain exactly how this should be done. Hirst also is at pains to say that the “logic ” of education that he describes carries no necessary prescriptions as to how this should be carried out (see, e.g. Hirst and Peters 1970). Once again, it is likely to be the case that context is all important.
- 10.
- 11.
Jeff Stickney is thanked for very helpful comments and suggestions.
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Standish, P. (2017). This Is Simply What I Do Too: A Response to Paul Smeyers. In: Peters, M., Stickney, J. (eds) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3136-6_17
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