There is a sort of self-understanding that goes back-and-forth between the other and ourselves, and fundamentally, it is a questioning of culture’s criteria, and our words and life: its ultimately a self-questioning.
“Then I may feel that my foregone conclusions were never conclusions / had arrived at, but were merely imbibed by me, merely conventional. I may blunt that realization through hypocrisy or cynicism or bullying. But I may take the occasion to throw myself back upon my culture, and ask why we do what we do, judge as we judge, how we have arrived at these crossroads. What is the natural ground of our conventions, to what are they in service? It is inconveni-ent to question a convention; that makes it unserviceable, it no longer allows me to proceed as a matter of course; the paths of action, the paths of words, are blocked. “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (cf. §19). In philosophizing, I have to bring my own language and life into imagination. What I require is a convening of my culture’s criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me.This seems to me a task that warrants the name of philosophy” Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 125.
I read Cavell’s text to imply that, if the task of philosophy is a confrontation between our culture’s criteria and our words and life, to confront culture with itself; then I must ask just what are these criteria and words, these lives, which meet in me; what are they: for and against; what do they do? Why do I (or we) feel they are necessities? I claim that dialectic is inherent in ordinary language, its criteria, and that they reveal mutual recognition (or acknowledgment) and misrecognition between others and ourselves. But then to question these, a kind of rejection or refusal to acknowledge, is a self-questioning: the condition of self-knowledge.
fragments of philosophy 