lead us to see the language game in which we live, i.e., its limitation as well as its
possibility. This seems to be a kind of realization that there is nothing that grounds
our language except for our form of life, contingent though this inevitably is; and
this seems also to be a kind of realization that leads us to see that it is only I who
can decide to participate in this form of life to make sense of my life as human at
all. This self-knowledge as a human being as well as a subject is exactly what
makes the way we inhabit the world become different. And this is a self-knowledge
that is derived not so much from introspection as from attending better to the way
things are.
Why is this kind of self-knowledge-as-seeing so important for education? I think
this is because it makes us go back to our everyday life in a different spirit or as a
different being; we are different now. Let me quote the way Cavell describes this:
The more one learns, so to speak, the hang of oneself, and mounts one’s problems, the less
one is able to say what one has learned; not because you have forgotten what it was, but
because nothing you said would seem like an answer or a solution; there is no longer any
question or problem which your words would match. You have reached conviction, but not
about a proposition; and consistency, but not in a theory. You are different, what you
recognize as problems are different, your world is different. (“The world of the happy man
is a different one from that of the unhappy man”(Tractatus; 6.43).) And this is the sense,
the only sense, in which what a work of art means cannot be said. Believing it is seeing it.
(Cavell 1976 , pp. 85–86)The above passage can be read as describing what the ordinary language
philosopher aspires towards for us: a certain state of our being. Can we call it a state
of“being educated”? We may describe“a state of being educated”in various ways:
being equipped with high-level knowledge, being competent to think critically,
being developed in moral ways, and so on. But I think that this list cannot be
complete without that kind of happiness that involves a sense of being in harmony
with oneself as well as with the world, which the passage above seems to refer to.
Cavell also describes this state of being as a state in which human beings’“passion
for their lives is at one with their lives”(Cavell 1976 , p. xxviii). For Cavell, when
one has reached this state of being, philosophy is not useful any more: its job for the
moment is done.
What is noteworthy about Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy as indicated in
the above passage is that“saying”or“theory”matter less than“having conviction”
or‘seeing’aright. I think this aspect of Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy is
closely connected to his confession of the difficulty of“discovering when and how
tostopphilosophizing,”which I raised early on in my discussion. Philosophizing
consists of activities of speaking and thinking, typically taking the form of arguing,
reasoning and justifying. But what ordinary philosophers aspire towards for us is a
state of being that can be reached not by“theory”or“proposition,”but by“con-
viction”or“seeing.”Cavell makes an analogy between our way to this state of
being and our way to the meaning of an artwork. This means that, no matter how
powerful my philosophical argument for the truth of“the way we look at things”
may be, or no matter how elaborate my explication about“the note of F# minor”
5 A Role of Doing Philosophy in a Humanistic Approach to Teacher... 81