Seven Types of Unintelligibility: Guyer on Cavell on Making Sense of Yourself

I want to acknowledge Paul Guyer’s accomplishment in his essay “Examples of Perfectionism,” which opens this volume, impressive in its scope and detail and at the same time pioneering in its treatment of Stanley Cavell. Among other useful features of his account, Guyer takes notice of the fact that the writing of Cities of Words, a principal text of Cavell’s perfectionism, began as lectures. This reminds us that the exchanges between reader and writer begin as exchanges between living persons. At least in the hands of certain writers, these exchanges remain representative of precisely such other exchanges. Without the possibility of such exchanges, nothing like a perfectionist education, and, indeed, nothing like Cavell’s methods of philosophizing, could occur. Cavell’s perfectionism moves us from the struggles of actual teachers and students to the contentiousness of writers and readers and their hopes of mutual resolution.

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Of the various questions that Guyer puts forward, the primary issue I want to explore is the issue of intelligibility. It seems to me that not only is there more than one form of intelligibility to be achieved, but there is more than one form of unintelligibility that must be overcome.

Out of unintelligibility, the self must emerge into clarity. Some of these forms of unintelligibility are forms of skepticism, especially about others. Other types will have different origins, and there will be as many types of therapies as there are different methods for bringing these unclarities to light.

In the background of my response, there is also a desire to take further this idea of a separate and, to some extent, integral dimension or register of the moral life. Guyer proposes to discuss Cavell’s perfectionism as containing both a metaethics and a normative ethics. He acknowledges that Cavell does not use such academic language but finds that the distinction is nevertheless supported by Cavell’s text.

By the metaethics of Cavell’s perfectionism, I mean his general account of moral thinking as taking the form of holding ourselves up to the idea of a better world and a better existence than we currently enjoy, one that we know that we can to some degree attain but at the same time know we can never fully attain, for perfectionism “specifically sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfectionism.” Cavell expresses this first point by saying that, in every “variation” of perfectionism, “the way in which we now hold the world is contrasted with, reformed into, a future way we could help it become.”¹

Each of these variations provides a position from which the present state of human existence can be judged and a future state achieved, or else the present judged to be better than the cost of achieving the future. The very conception of a divided self and of a doubled world, providing a perspective of judgment on the world as it is, measured against the world as it may be, tends to express disappointment with the world as it is, as the scene of human activity and prospects, and perhaps to lodge the demand or desire for a reform or transfiguration of the world (Guyer, “Examples of Perfectionism,” 6–7).

Guyer ascribes to Cavell the discovery of a largely neglected dimension or register of the moral life. This dimension is not exactly on a par with the canonical classifications of moral views dubbed deontological and consequentialist. Presumably, these views have become canonical, however anachronistically, because they make for a tidy dichotomy between a morality that aims to achieve the right and a morality that aims at the good and, indeed, at maximizing it.

It is admittedly more difficult to say what it is that perfectionism aims at. It does not really become less difficult if we follow Guyer’s interpretation of Cavell’s claim that perfectionism rejects an ultimate achievement of perfection or indeed of perfectionism. Can we still say that perfectionism aims at perfection? Or must we rather insert the idea of transience and transition as the forms of human wholeness, hence of a human perfection. (The relation of...