ABSTRACT
Since his earliest publications in defense of the ordinary-language procedures of Austin and Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell has repeatedly characterized those procedures in Kantian terms.1 In the opening essays collected in Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell compares those procedures to the transcendental logic of the Critique of Pure Reason,2 then to the categorical imperatives of the Critique of Practical Reason,3 and then to the judgments made in the universal voice thematized in the Critique of Judgment.4 But this proliferation of Kantian terms should already alert us to the fact that Cavell is no orthodox Kantian. By drawing on all three Critiques, Cavell seems to transgress the boundaries that Kant sought to delineate among the realms of science, morality, and art. And Cavell’s transgressions recall those of the first post-Kantians – Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte – who undertook to articulate the unity underlying Kant’s three Critiques and soon found themselves opposing the letter of Kant’s philosophy in the name of its spirit.
