On Ordinary Language Philosophy, or, this might help reading Cavell

Right at the beginning of "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," Cavell says that he wants to suggest "resemblances between one kind of judgment recognizable as aesthetic and the characteristic claim of Wittgenstein--and of ordinary language philosophers generally--to voice 'what we should ordinarily say'" (74).

This, I'm afraid, could be awfully opaque if you don't know what Wittgenstein's characteristic claims look like (although the brief excerpt from the Philosophical Investigations should give you a little bit of an idea), or what ordinary language philosophers do all day.

The Wikipedia entry on ordinary language philosophy is actually helpful and quite brief:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy

But I'll give it my own spin here.

When you were in college and stoned out of your brain (ok, maybe when I was in college and stoned out of my brain), it inevitably occurred to you (me) that even though your (my) friend who just passed you (me) the bong acts like your (...) friend, he secretly might really not like you, or be unbelievably annoyed by you, or hate you. That all of his apparent goodwill and his liberal sharing of his pot was just an elaborate ruse to some inscrutable, villainous end, or merely the drudgery of a sense of obligation. That what you see of him is actually a mask. The fancy word for this position is skepticism. (And it's also a form of doubt, which, if you'll recall from last time, is what Descartes was really good at, and what produced an irredeemable distance between subject and object, or what made the subject an island onto itself. And what Kant was trying to overcome in his Critiques. And it also is something like the position that what film images give us is never or cannot be the object itself.)

One response to this is, "you're stoned, you're paranoid, don't be silly." Which is sort of a flat assertion of the reality of reality, which probably won't be very convincing if you're stoned and paranoid and human faces look like masks. (Or if your sober and alienated and human faces look like masks, for that matter.) Another response would be to list all of the friendly things your friend has done, to list acts of fidelity, to accumulate evidence of his amity. And this will only be marginally more convincing, and probably only for a brief second if you've worked yourself up into a good frothy paranoia, since every item of evidence will, inside your (my) stoned little brain, always be open to doubt--that all these apparent acts and aspects of friendship are disingenuous, or false, or hypocritical, or insincere, or didn't really occur. When faced with this caustic paranoia, somebody else sitting in the room might reply (if our false friend is absent, or deaf), "wow, you know, you're probably right, he really is an awful hypocrite, and you can't ever really know what another human is feeling." In this case, the paranoia has become contagious (this is a good chunk of what Eve Sedgwick is on about in her essay for this week). (NB: My rather sophomoric example of stoned paranoia here is not meant to be [merely] sophomoric; I promise you I'm not being patronizing. One of the points I want to be making here is that this doubt is not really some dry, intellectualized, affected, obnoxious intellectual claim, but a whole emotional and affective position, that you can be inside it, that you can feel it. I think this is not an indifferent point.)

Ordinary language philosophy responds to this by picking at your words, which ends up being way more convincing against paranoia than an accumulation of evidence. It thinks of itself as a kind of therapy (I'm being literal here; Wittgenstein says that flat out). Its response would be that your claiming that "you can never really know what other people are thinking or feeling" is actually just a linguistic sleight of hand, that you're forgetting (intentionally or not, under the influence of drugs or stone cold sober) what you mean when you say "know." What could it possibly mean to say that you cannot ever really know what somebody else is feeling? You're trying to get the word "know" to be more absolute, more watertight, more pure than what it actually is. Which is to say, what it ordinarily means. Which is to say, how we in fact use the word. You're wanting it to mean something other than it does. This is the sense in which ordinary language philosophy makes appeals to "what we should ordinarily say when..." or "what we mean when we say..." This looks like: "What we should ordinarily say when we see somebody cry out and writhe in pain is that he is in pain." (Another way ordinary language philosophy makes the same point is to ask when we say that we know somebody is in pain, versus when we ordinarily would merely say that he is in pain. What would the situation be in which you would feel compelled to say not, "he is in pain," but rather "I know he is in pain"? When it is in doubt? But why should it be in doubt? When he is hiding his pain, or denying it, etc. This sort of philosophizing can go on for quite some time, and Cavell is occasionally and unforunately longwinded in collecting examples of this sort around when we should say that a paraphrase of a poem is exactly or approximately what it means, etc. I am of course always terse.)

Cavell voices it this way in "Aesthetic Problems": "we impose a demand for absoluteness... upon a concept, and then finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand, we accomodate this discrepancy as nearly as possible. Take these familiar patterns: we do not really see material objects, but only see them indirectly; we cannot be certain of any empirical proposition, but only practically certain; we cannot really know what another person is feeling, but only infer it" (77).

Ordinary language philosophy insists that what words ordinarily mean is what they mean, that philosophy has no special privilege to autocratically define words. (Seeing is seeing, we are certain of things, and we can, in fact, know what other people feel.) He points out that unless somebody questions us on our seeing/certainty/knowing, we will usually feel pretty confident in our seeing/certainty/knowing. But then somebody starts philosophizing (or passes the joint), and we find ourselves in doubt.

That is to say, for ordinary language philosophy, philosophy's contagious paranoia is something to work against, and that it is something that must be worked against. That we should work to overcome Descartes, and the isolation of the subject. I'll just reference what we said last time: Kant's aesthetics is the ground for our ability to have a community (aesthetics as the common/communal sense).

So Cavell's point here (and I'll let him make the argument the rest of the way himself) is that, if it is to be humane, philosophy needs aesthetics, and it needs art, and both of these in the service of overcoming the isolation of the subject. (And that analytical philosophy, in its willful ignorance of art, becomes somehow inhumane. But here you need not worry yourself about analytical philosophy, which is another kettle of fish.) All of which is to say, where Cavell seems particularly obscure, feel free to just move on through those sections to get to his discussion of sparkling wine from the Canary Islands.