may be, it will fall short of bringing the reader tosee(orhear) it.^10 For seeing or
having a conviction is ultimately a nonmediated and only personally accessible
first-person action.
However, the emphasis on seeing or personal conviction in doing ordinary
language philosophy, as opposed to public persuasion or objective proof, should
not be understood as a sign of subjectivism or of the impossibility of communi-
cation. It should be rather understood as an indication of the distinctively different
way of communication that is needed in ordinary language philosophy. For, when a
person has come to see something and tries to communicate it to her interlocutor,
what it is that is to be communicated cannot be directly said, no matter how hard
she tries to convey it; she may be able only to circle around it in her words as a way
of pointing towards it. This is not because what is meant to be conveyed is in
principle something that cannot be put into words, but because, if it is put into
words, the very nature of what is meant to be conveyed—i.e.,my seeingit oryour
seeingit—will be ruined or obstructed; what matters is one’s special relation to it.
This is the very reason why Cavell says that ordinary language philosophers have
difficulty in knowing“when and how to stop philosophizing”; they can exert upon
us pressure to feel or act in a certain way, but they cannot deliver this directly to us.
I think that from this fact we can draw out two important educational implica-
tions about ordinary language philosophy as a form of educational practice. One is
that ordinary language philosophers must, in a sense, take anonauthoritative
approach in their teaching. The other is that the aim of ordinary language philos-
ophy as an educational practice is to transform the reader’s (or the interlocutor’s)
sensibility, rather than to equip him or her with a certain set of abilities and com-
petences. Understood this way, Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy can be
described as an educational practice that promotes the essay in Montaigne’s sense
as a kind of“trying-oneself-out”or“putting-oneself-to-the-test”or, in a sense,
“self-study.” Cavell as an ordinary language philosopher tends to start with
examples from literature,film or even normal everyday circumstances, but only so
as to bring the reader into a philosophical reflection on what is meant by someone
when she says a certain a thing in a particular circumstance. In doing this, he often
(^10) InA Pitch of Philosophy( 1994 ), Cavell introduces an autobiographical example that shows
vividly the way we have an access to the meaning of a work of art. According to Cavell, in his
college music class, a famous teacher, Ernest Bloch, often introduced an exercise to the students by
playing something simple at the piano, for instance, a Bach four-part chorale, with one note altered
by a half step from Bach’s rendering, and then with the Bach unaltered. Introducing these two
versions, he asked the students if they could hear the difference. And then he went on to say:“my
version is perfectly correct; but the Bach, the Bach is perfect; late sunlight burning the edges of a
cloud. Of course, I do not say you must hear this. Not at all. No. But, if you do not hear it, do not
say to yourself that you are a musician. There are many honorable trades, Shoe-making for
example (Cavell 1994 , pp. 49–50). Cavell confesses that he heard the difference, supposing that
not everybody did, and describes how thrilled he was by the drama of this teaching because it
made him interested in the understanding of what he heard as well as in the rightness and beauty of
what he heard. I think that this sense of a private triumph about what we experience is exactly what
ordinary language philosophy aspires towards for our education.
82 D.-J. Kwak