insecurity—an insecurity that is the price we pay for our newly acquired freedom,
in a world with nofixed points of support.^4
In this chapter, I shall explore whether this original sense of the essay can be
recovered for the purpose of cultivating a humanistic orientation in our
student-teachers. I will take here Stanley Cavell’s notion of ordinary language
philosophy as an exemplary case of the essay-form of writing and thinking, and
examine its underlying method and aspiration to see if it can be developed into a
humanistic approach to teacher education. Here I will focus on whether his ordinary
language philosophy is a plausible way of recovering the aspiration of the classical
relation of philosophy to life, at the same time considering how far its method
realizes the modernist sensibility. This will, I hope, pave the way for a rich response
to the relevance-question raised by student-teachers, addressed at the beginning of
this introduction.
5.2 The Methodological Characteristics of Cavell’s
Ordinary Language Philosophy
In the introduction to his workMust We Mean What We Say?(Cavell 1976 ), Cavell
attempts to articulate the beliefs underlying his way of philosophizing and explain
why it takes such a form. While acknowledging that different aspects of his writing
can be categorized under such different headings as philosophy, literature or criti-
cism, Cavell confesses his wish to call them allphilosophicalworks. I take this as
saying that what he does, across different genres of writing, is always“philo-
sophical”in a different sense from that in which we normally understand the word.
But then what does he mean by“philosophy”or“the philosophical”? It seems to
take the whole book for him to explain the kind of philosophy he does. In fact, what
he seems to intend is not to explain this directly but rather toshowit through
different styles of his writings, with sporadic comments about it; in other words, the
way he explains it is very allusive and elusive, turning a number of corners and
taking many detours. This means that it is not easy for readers to grasp the nature of
his philosophical work in a systematic way. So let me reconstruct his account of the
kind of philosophy he is doing, mainly drawing upon his bookMust We Mean What
We Say?since this early work does seem to give a more or less explicit account of
what he is doing.
Cavell makes it clear from the beginning that he does not see philosophy as a
form of science. I think this can be read as a way of distancing himself from the
tradition of analytic philosophy in which he was academically trained. In fact,
Cavell tries to describe his complex relationship with this analytic tradition in terms
of what he calls“the modern,”similar to the problem of the modern in the modern
(^4) Emphasizing this modernist aspect of Montaigne’s philosophy, Hartle calls it‘accidental phi-
losophy’, implying the radically contingent and created order of the world (Hartle 2003 , pp. 3–27).
72 D.-J. Kwak