ABSTRACT
Over a span of nearly five decades, American philosopher Stanley Cavell generated an impressive body of writings at the intersection of philosophy, drama, film, art, and music. Throughout his corpus, Cavell repeatedly articulated the idea that a temptation to skepticism in various forms is a constitutive part of the human condition. This chapter contests that claim. After reconstructing Cavell’s diagnosis of skepticism in his most important work, The Claim of Reason, the chapter lays out the “anthropology” of the modern self that runs through Cavell’s authorship and that frames much of his thought around skepticism. Once this background is in place, Cavell’s understanding of the modern self is challenged by reference to intellectual historical work of Charles Taylor and to numerous ethnographic sources. Possible complications connected to the use of these sources are addressed along the way. It is then argued that the historical and ethnographic record strongly suggest that Cavell’s claim about the nature of the self and its essential relation to skepticism presuppose unsupported essentialist and ahistorical assumptions. This historicist conclusion does not entail, however, that moderns could easily replace their predominantly individualistic self-understanding with a less atomistic one, or even that doing so would necessarily be desirable. But it does mean that there is no good reason to regard what Taylor has called the dominant Western “punctual” understanding of the self as akin to a natural kind. Rather, the conception of the modern self is better regarded as emerging within a particular historical and cultural context that include specific value commitments.
