What happens when Wittgensteinian criteria (the grammar of what we say) are canceled? When we deny our criteria, what are the philosophical and aesthetic ramifications? Is that what we say is “inhuman” or “monstrous”? The political ramifications above, “to (politically) have nothing to say.”
Acknowledgment or refusal: What is ”human” all too human is what we say when—our language games (alluding to Nietzsche).
I agree with Cavell, that “Wittgenstein’s view” is that the philosophical gap between mind and world is opened, in our attempt to go outside language-games—like our alienation, or separateness, from culture’s criteria or words or human forms of life.
Moreover, Cavell registers:
It seems to me that growing up (in modern culture? in capitalist culture? [I might add “postmodern culture,” “hypermonder culture” as inversion or rever-sal, or “cancel culture”]) is learning that most of what is said is only more or less meant — as if words were stuffs of fabric and we saw no difference between shirts and sails and ribbons and rags. This could be because we have too little of something or too much, or because we are either slobs or saints. Driven by philosophy outside language-games, and in this way repudiating our criteria, is a different way to live. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 59.
Then philosophy becomes a way of life—a practice for and against practices.
Thus, Cavell insinuates that “the gap originates in an attempt, or wish, to escape (to remain a “stranger” to, “alienated” from) those shared forms of life, to give up the responsibility of their maintenance,” therefore, our response (as responsibility), is closing that gap.
I take this to mean self-alienation, what Wittgenstein records: “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher.”
To philosophize is a wish to escape from only to return into the world.
But then the philosopher must imagine citizenship inside a community—”to imagine a form of life.” That is why, Cavell claims, “the gap between mind and the world is closed, or the distortion between them straightened, in the apprecia-tion and acceptance of particular human forms of life, human “convention” CR, 61-62.
We are always already inside language-games.
But how does philosophizing itself do that? We bring ourselves back into grammar.
fragments of philosophy 