The Threat of Solipsism: Wittgenstein and Cavell on Meaning, Skepticism, and Finitude by Jônadas Techio (review)

Jônadas Techio has written a lucid, careful, imaginative, and deeply felt survey and defense of Cavellian-Wittgensteinian understandings of the human person and of the nature of philosophy. He aims at overturning the picture of philosophy as nothing but “disinterested argumentative activity aiming at general truth,” a picture of philosophy that has epistemology at its center and is addressed to subjects as pure intelligence. Instead, he favors a picture of philosophy as “an expression of existential difficulties” experienced by limited, embodied agents entangled in skeins of responsibility that they all too often seek to evade or escape. Philosophical writing is better understood as the enactment of the thinking through of fraught practical difficulties in which the reader is to participate imaginatively than as detached defense and refutation of individual claims. Hence philosophy rightly understood, while treating fundamental issues about meaning and value, is more akin to literature and psychoanalysis than to mathematics and the sciences.

Techio develops this stance in seven chapters on, respectively, (1) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (2) Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks, (3) Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, (4) Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, (5) Wittgenstein and Cavell on other minds, (6) Cavell and Barry Stroud on skepticism, and (7) Cavellian moral perfectionism. In each case a central idea is that solipsism is a tempting but mistaken sublimation and intellectualization of the genuine and frightening difficulties of accepting limits on knowledge, of acknowledging the separateness of persons, of responding to others where mutual intelligibility is never guaranteed, and of coming to terms with the continual exposure of one’s values, character, and identity in one’s speech and actions. Sublimating intellectualization is an especially tempting stance in modernity, where religious scripts of human purpose have largely been lost and where the extensively ramified division of labor leaves many subjects prima facie opaque to one another and caught up in drift and alienation. In this situation, beginning from one’s own utter isolation and taking on the problem of proving the existence of the external world can seem like the path of intellectual honesty. Solipsism itself might provide a kind of comfort in freeing one from the burdens of risk and responsibility in one’s life with others. Skepticism, as Cavell understands it, registers the truth of existential experiences of separateness and groundlessness as well as the fact that intellectual refutations of experienced isolation––epistemological proofs that we possess certain knowledge––are bootless. The way out of this condition (if it is even correct to speak of a way) is through genuine conversational and practical engagement with others, where possibilities of mutual intelligibility and endorsement are explored and tested but never grounded in anything exterior to such engagement.

It is especially welcome that Techio tracks these ideas throughout the full range of Wittgenstein’s writings. His approach commits him to defending the so-called resolute reading of the Tractatus, due to Cora Diamond and James Conant, according to which there is no metaphysics on offer there: It really is all nonsense (with a therapeutic aim). He traces Wittgenstein’s turn in Philosophical Remarks away from any kind of phenomenological analysis of meaning rules––a stance Wittgenstein flirted with after the Tractatus––and to piecemeal analysis: “there is no external standard for the meaningfulness of our signs” and no possible “extraordinary feat” of discovering one. Techio takes The Blue Book not to argue for a nonreferential or avowal theory of expressions of the form “I think, feel, believe, wish ” but instead to point to a range of uses of “I” from the comparatively objective (“I weigh 160 pounds”) to the comparatively subjective (“I hope it will rain soon”). We should drop “the craving for a single explanation of ‘I.’” Techio holds that Kripke is right to see that Philosophical Investigations argues against the existence of objective meaning facts, but (unlike Cavell) he errs in seeing meaning as somehow fixed by firm consensus. Strawson usefully...