In this project I explore the contributions Stanley Cavell and Hegel make to our understanding of the practical philosophy of self-realization.
Cavell and Hegel share the »realist« ambition of orienting practical philosophy to the actual practice of modern life. Just as Hegel defends a conception of ethical life that sublates the Kantian Ought, so Cavell accepts the Wittgensteinian understanding of philosophy as therapeutic, perspicuous description that returns our self-expression and hence us from metaphysical self-denial to the everyday. For each, practical philosophy is a matter of self-recognition, of ‒ in the terms of Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode ‒ learning and becoming what one is. It is true that the logic of Absolute Spirit underwrites Hegel’s claims regarding the rectitude of second nature: the science of right does not include the deduction of the concept of right, but rather presupposes it.
But right as ethical life is not the practical application of logical rules or principles, but rather a systematic form of life that is in a deep sense self-justifying. The actual self-consciousness achieved in ethical life is at once subject and object to itself, and its ethical force is that of its being. Duty arises from self-awareness or self-feeling, and not an obligation owed to something beyond the ethical subject. Likewise, in Cavell, the focus of Emersonian Perfectionism is not the achievement of extraordinary virtue or magnanimity, but that of what he terms the eventual everyday. Ordinary life as we always already live it is oblivious to itself, and can become or achieve itself only in our conversion to it, a conversion that, because it is made within the ordinary, is a twisting within it. The deep commonality here between Hegel and Cavell cannot, however, obscure the fundamental differences between systematic idealism and a Romantic conception of ordinary language philosophy. This project explores the extent to which the differences and commonalities between the two thinkers can be drawn upon so as to develop a more satisfying account of practice as the return to self than is found in either of them. This project should shed light not only on the relation between Idealism and contemporary Romanticism, but also on the possibility of recuperating Hegelian insights within the context of a Wittgensteinian sensitivity to the limits and dangers of philosophical speech. (Andrew Norris)