art,^5 and he devotes some space to an account of this term. According to Cavell, the
essential feature of“the modern”lies in“the fact that the relation between the
present practice of an enterprise and the history of the enterprise”has become
problematic (Cavell 1976 , p. xix). Here he formulates the problem of“the modern”
in relation to his philosophical practice in two ways. First, anyone committed to the
enterprise tends to be placed in aparadoxicalposition in which he or she needs to
repudiatethe history, and yet his or her practice and ambition within the enterprise
can be identified only against the continuous experience of the past. Second, the
past here does not refer merely to the historical past, but“to one’s own past, to what
is past, or what has passed, within oneself”. Cavell adds:“in a modernist situation
‘past’loses its temporal accent and means anything‘not present’(Cavell 1976 ,
p. xix).”Thus, for Cavell,“the modern”means that“what one says becomes a
matter of making one’s sense present to oneself.”I would call thefirst element of
the modern“the historical turn”and the second element of it“the intra-personal
turn.”Cavellfinally announces that Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice and J.L.
Austin’s philosophical teaching are exactly what taught him how to do philosophy
in thismodernistsense, incorporating these two turnings. This is why Cavell
describes his philosophy as“ordinary language philosophy, following the spirit of
these two philosophers. We can also notice here that Cavell’s ordinary language
philosophy is a form of philosophy that has come out of serious confrontations with
two elements: one’s tradition and one’s self.
How, then, should we understand Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy in this
modernist sense? How can it be characterized? What is its distinctive philosophical
procedure? Cavell takes pains throughout the book to show the main characteristics
of ordinary language philosophy. He sometimes complains about his teacher
Austin’s not giving an accurate account of his philosophical procedures; at other
times, he ponders the thought that Austin’s apparent reluctance to do this may itself
be a way of saying something about ordinary language philosophy. For example, in
the middle of discussingKing Lear, Cavell suddenly mentions the difficulty of
“discovering when and how to stop philosophizing”(Cavell 1976 , p. 269). It seems
that Cavell writes in this way aboutKing Learas if to show the nature of his
ordinary language philosophy. In this sense, we may even say that Cavell’s entire
texts are designed to make our reading of them challenging and demanding, to
remind us constantly asreadersof this difficulty of“discovering when and how to
stop philosophizing”.
(^5) The term‘modern art’is usually associated with art in which, in a spirit of experimentation, the
traditions and conventions of the past are no longer taken for granted, and it refers to artworks
produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s through to the 1970s. Modern artists
experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about thenatureof materials and the
functions of art, being highly conscious of the nature of their own practice. A salient characteristic
of modern art is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form and work that draw
attention to the processes and materials used. I think that the same thing can be said about the
nature of what Cavell attempts to do in his practice of philosophy.
5 A Role of Doing Philosophy in a Humanistic Approach to Teacher... 73