Kant, Cavell, and the Circumstances of Philosophy

It is a pleasure to respond to Paul Guyer’s rich, imaginative, and sound paper on perfectionist themes in Kant and Cavell in relation to moral and aesthetic education, just as it was instructive and pleasurable to read it. Overall, it is one of the best and most useful things I have read on Cavell, especially in deepening and enriching the insights of both Kant and Cavell by juxtaposing them against each other, rather than simply repeating the terminology of either alone. I am going to do two things in response. First, I am going to survey, expand on, and endorse Guyer’s major claims. Second, while not denying the deep and important affinities between Kant and Cavell on which Guyer dwells, I am going to point to some passages in Cavell that suggest some disaffinities in their conceptions of the task of philosophy and of its cultural and personal occasioning circumstances. I will raise some questions, then, about what, exactly, calls for philosophizing or gets it started for Kant and Cavell and about what getting on with it well looks like. Finally, tracking their somewhat different senses of this will then help us to think about why Kant and Cavell write in ways that sound so different from one another and about the reasons that lie behind the quite different and distinctive sounds of their prose styles, reasons that have to do with contrasting conceptions of the human subject and of maturity.

Guyer urges two main claims: (1) Kant offers an example of moral perfectionism, a fuller one than Cavell himself has seen in Kant and one that helps us to see perfectionism’s power, and (2) for both Kant and Cavell, examples play an important role in moral education. Perfectionism is centrally a matter of seeking both self-unity and reciprocity as normatively necessary aims of human action. In Kant’s terms that Guyer cites, “I must seek ‘a conformity of [my] free choice with itself and others.”¹ This terminology is interesting in at least two respects. First, it suggests that, unless and until I have achieved this conformity of my free choice with itself, I have not yet fully acted. My action remains, that is to say, marked by a kind of residue of happenstance, in which I have to some extent simply been pulled or pushed this way or that. Yes, I chose to do what I did—spend another hour practicing the cello, say—and I took and take responsibility for doing this. But that choice may well not be either in conformity with itself or with the choices and actions of others. To the extent that it is not in conformity with itself, it results still, in part, from my just happening to find myself wanting or inclining to do this or that among other things. It does not have a place in a fully integrated, self-transparent life, with others and with oneself over time that is comprehensively organized according to reason (if such a thing is possible). And to that extent, it is not fully an action but also in part a mere event. (Here I am drawing on Timothy Gould’s tracing out of a difference according to Cavell between mere action and full action, with full action exemplified, according to Cavell, so far as it is possible, in Beethoven’s acts of extended composition, where every revision over time contributes to a more comprehensively organized whole.² The passage from Kant’s Lectures on Ethics makes it clear that Kant holds a similar view.) Second, likewise for reciprocity. If my action is not yet endorsable by others as done for good reasons, then it is in some sense not experienced by them (or by me) as a full action. It is to some extent something that has just happened (even though I chose to do it and did it) rather than something that ought to have taken place as, say, a contribution to joint life according to reason or jointly meaningful life. Importantly, this picture of jointly developed, maintained, and endorsable life according to reason makes...