1 - Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance

Summary

In an early essay, Stanley Cavell writes that the problem of the ordinary language philosopher – a problem from which he himself takes his bearings – is “to discover the specific plight of mind and circumstance within which a human being gives voice to his condition.” What can this mean? What is a plight of mind and circumstance? How does giving voice constitute a response and address to a general human condition that is instanced in a specific way?

Since it is a plight of mind that is in question, it is already evident that Cavell must be concerned with something more than simply a physical or biological state of being a human being, even if the mind is itself inextricably lodged in both bodily and cultural circumstances. Nor is the problem of giving voice simply that of unburdening oneself of an idiosyncratic emotion: giving voice implies not brute discharge alone, but further a making intelligible of how the human condition is present in one who has been moved to speak. Nor will just any speech do; giving voice implies an achievement of expressiveness that is beyond the communication of bits of information about the material world.

Instead, to be moved to give voice to a plight of mind and circumstance -to manage that achievement – is to express a specific sense of just how, here and now, one's human capacities for free and fluent voicing and action are somehow both enabled and inhibited by one's culture and one's life with others as they stand.