































6

δι
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LOOKS, GESTURES, AND WORDS: 
Skepticism and the Ethical in Cavell and Levinas

BERNARDO PORTILHO ANDRADE

We know nothing of the soul 
Other than of our own; 

Those of others are looks, 
Are gestures, are words, 

And what we assume of resemblance 
At the bottom.

– Fernando Pessoa1 

A sense of separation from others often comes to the overly conscious student who 
has just ended a conversation with his much-esteemed professor: “What did he 

think of what I said?” From there arises an obsessive wish for a third-party witness, as 
if in the form of a minuscule fly or a hidden camera, allowing him to revisit later the 
conversation with his interlocutor: “If only I could remember exactly what happened, 
as if replaying a clip, I would be able to distinguish my subjective projections from 
the objective interaction!” However, even that turns out to be a futile wish, as the 
despairing student realizes that no objective recording could reveal the depths of his 
listener’s inner states. The professor’s outward expressions might be wholly distinct 
from his impressions, and nothing could grant the student such privileged access – 
for unless each lives for a moment in the other’s mind, they will stay forever separate, 
1 I am quoting my own translation of Pessoa’s untitled poem. As far as I know, no English version has been 

published. For the original Portuguese, see: 
 Pessoa, Fernando. Poesias Inéditas (1930-1935). Lisboa: Edições Atica, 1955. 



7Issue IV F Spring 2017

Looks, Gestures, and Words

forever isolated.

The problem described above – namely that my knowledge cannot seize hold of the 
other person and possess him; that I cannot enter into his eyes and grasp the inner 
workings of his soul – lies at the core of what Stanley Cavell and Emmanuel Levinas 
would call the “scandal of skepticism.” This brings up a surprising coincidence, i.e. 
that an American philosopher (with intellectual roots in the works of Emerson, 
Thoreau, Austin and Wittgenstein) and a French-Lithuanian thinker (whose 
inspiration comes from the Jewish tradition and the phenomenology of Husserl and 
Heidegger) arrive at an uncannily similar solution to a problem perceived within two 
separate historical dialogues. This paper attempts to locate and explain this point of 
agreement. In doing so, it presents the profoundly innovative view of morality that 
arises from both authors’ reflections on skepticism.

This enquiry departs from Cavell’s late collection of essays Philosophy the Day After 
Tomorrow. In the book’s sixth chapter, entitled “What is the scandal of skepticism,” 
Cavell admits his surprise when reading Levinas, in particular his astonishment at 
the eerie similarity between their solutions to other-mind skepticism.2 Encouraged 
by Cavell’s essay, I intend 1), to elucidate his notion of the “scandal of skepticism” 
and 2), to provide a short comparison between Cavell and Levinas’ solutions to that 
scandal. I will conclude that their respective analyses of skepticism both lead to the 
radical statement, attributed to Levinas, that “ethics is first philosophy.”

1. CAVELL AND THE “SCANDAL OF SKEPTICISM”
Cavell borrows his title, “the scandal of skepticism,” from Kant’s footnote in his 
preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. As Kant says:

“It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason 
that the existence of things outside us… should have to be assumed merely 
on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to 
answer him with a satisfactory proof.”3 

What Kant finds scandalous is that the philosophy of his time still has not found 
a proof of the existence of external things. He opposes the claim that one can be 
conscious only of what is in him, i.e., his representation of external things, and that 
he thus cannot know whether or not there is something outside him, corresponding 
to it.4 Kant is hence concerned with skepticism 1), as a function of knowledge (can we 
know anything?), and specifically 2), of knowledge of the external world.
2 Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 150. Cavell’s feeling of surprise came after reading Levinas’ 

collection of essays entitled Difficult Freedom, which Cavell quotes at length in the sixth chapter of his book.
3 Kant, Immanuel, Preface to the Second Edition, Critique of Pure Reason, B xl. For the specific translation 

referenced here, see Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, and Allen W. Wood, Critique of Pure Reason.
4 Berkeley presents this anti-Kantian position in his Three Dialogues, when Philonous says, “It is a great 

contradiction to talk of conceiving a thing which is unconceived… you cannot possibly conceive how any 
corporeal sensible thing should exist otherwise than in a mind.” See Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and 
Philonous, pp. 35-36.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Kant’s quotation also reflects his response to Humean skepticism. The passage works 
as a critique of Hume, who abandons his philosophical project after affirming that 
we rely on a natural belief in the external world and in its causal laws. The Humean 
notion that the mind has a habit (not a reason) that leads to beliefs about the external 
world explains why Kant uses the word “faith” when he states that it is a scandal of 
philosophy “that we should have to accept the existence of things outside us […] 
merely on faith.”5 Kant thus finds it inacceptable that Hume, as well as all thinkers 
before him, has not philosophically solved the problem of external-world skepticism.

Cavell, however, takes the “scandal of skepticism” in a different way. Following 
Wittgenstein, he embeds philosophy in ordinary language – a profound 
methodological shift that, as I will show, finally leads to the priority of the ethical. 
Unlike Kant, Cavell is not concerned with skepticism as a threat to a systematic 
science that studies the external world. Rather, he finds that skepticism is inherent 
in (ordinary) language because of the attunement of the speakers. He worries about 
the difficulties of communication; about the seeming impossibility of knowing 
whether the other person means the same as I do by the words we use. Science avoids 
skepticism by sublimating language in fixed rules of procedure and agreement, but 
our everyday use of words “is anything but invulnerable to skepticism.”6 

Cavell wonders why philosophers so often have hubristic ambitions to go beyond 
the ordinary. After all, Descartes’ Meditations starts with an isolated philosopher 
fleeing from the ordinary, trapping himself in a tiny room with some candlewax 
and not much else. Hume similarly takes the problem of skepticism to be divorced 
from ordinary life. To escape his philosophical melancholy, he dines, plays a game 
of backgammon, and has merry conversations with friends. This attitude certainly 
resonates with Hume’s maxim: “Be a philosopher, but be still a man.”7 The concerns 
that trouble the philosopher seem, for Hume, not to reach man in his concrete life. 
That is why philosophy, throughout its history, “has chronically required of itself a 
flight from the ordinary.”8 The thinker, in his search for knowledge and certainty, 
has far too often decided to escape everyday life as a means of finding theoretical 
grounding. However, to deal with skepticism solely in the abstract realm of ontology 
leaves unexplored the persistent danger of skepticism in our everyday use of language. 
For Cavell, that is the scandal.

1.1.CAVELLIAN SKEPTICISM  
AND WITTGENSTEINIAN CRITERIA

Cavell’s ordinary-language skepticism rests on what Wittgenstein calls criteria. Unlike 
other interpreters of Wittgenstein, Cavell does not see the Philosophical Investigation 

5 Kant, Preface to the Second Edition, Critique of Pure Reason, and B xl.
6 Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 134.
7 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “Section 1: Of the Different Species of Philosophy.”
8 Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 134



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as an attempt to refute skepticism; on the contrary, he takes Wittgenstein to show 
that skepticism is an inevitable by-product of ordinary language. In the usual view, 
criteria are presumed to rebut skepticism by establishing the existence of something 
with certainty.9 For example, against the skeptic who doubts that he can ever know 
with certainty whether or not the other is in pain,10 the philosopher can point to the 
criteria of pain (say, contorting one’s face), the presence of which necessarily entails 
that the other is in pain. John Austin embodies this approach in his famous example 
of the goldfinch.11 If one were to disagree with Austin as to whether the bird they see 
is a goldfinch, Austin would simply refer him to the rulebook (in this case, to a book 
on birdwatching), and then tell him that since the bird they see has that black stripe 
in his wing, and that yellow throat, it must be a goldfinch. In other words, these are 
the criteria that establish what it means to be a goldfinch. To disagree with Austin 
would entail that one does not know what a goldfinch is; what its criteria are.

For Cavell, on the other hand, criteria cannot settle the skeptic’s worries. Far from 
dismissing skepticism, a correct understanding of criteria shows skepticism to be 
irrefutable. Criteria belong solely to the way we agree within language, and not 
to any context-less and independently existing rulebook. No rulebook could ever 
account for the flexibility and creativity with which I employ my concepts, establish 
commitments, and make myself responsible. Nothing underlies or “governs” my 
application of concepts in judgments. Surprisingly, both Cavell and Levinas share 
this particular and highly innovative view on language. Although I am stepping 
ahead, this point of agreement becomes clear when Levinas says, in his collection of 
essays entitled Humanism of the Other, that:

Language refers to the positions of the listener and the speaker, that is, 
to the contingency of their story. To seize by inventory all the contexts of 
language and all possible positions of interlocutors is a senseless task. Every 
verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless semantic rivers.12 

The skeptic wishes to obtain the certainty that his application of concepts is based on 
something robust, solid, or fixed – a structure, a manual, an impersonal metaphysics. 
Some commentators on Cavell and Wittgenstein (such as Stephen Mulhall and Saul 
Kripke), in line with the skeptical demand for a solid foundation, often emphasize the 
idea of language as an agreed-upon framework of rules, which relieves the speakers 
of responsibility for their own words, freezing or sublimating language, emptying it 
of its on-going flexibility and creativity.13 To such ordinary-language philosophers, 

9 Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity and the Ordinary, p. 32.
10 Whether physical or emotional, I take pain to be an unpleasant private experience. The significance of the pain 

example, which will appear multiple times henceforth, is that most people take pain to be private to their owner 
in the strong sense that no one else can epistemically access the other’s pain in the way that one has access to his 
own pain.

11 Austin gives the goldfinch example, among other places, in a 1946 essay entitled “Other Minds.” See Austin, 
James Urmson, and Geoffrey Warnock, Philosophical Papers, pp. 76-116.

12 Levinas, Humanism of the Other, p. 11.
13 Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity and the Ordinary, p. 39.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

once the criteria for pain are satisfied (say, your face is contorted) the question of 
the non-existence of pain can be discarded. What more, they might ask, could one 
possibly require? This misses the point, however, that in cases of acting or feigning, 
it is precisely pain-behavior, and hence the satisfaction of the criteria of pain, that 
is being simulated. Without the possibility of simulating the satisfaction of criteria, 
acting or feigning would not exist. This shows that we are never in a position to know 
with absolute certainty that the other feels pain. The skeptic would like criteria to 
prove that someone really is in pain, but criteria give us certainty about identity, not 
existence.14 This already points to the fragility of our everyday use of words, to how 
language skeptically invites us to demand certainty of the other’s pain: I want to act 
correctly, to show concern only when you really feel pain. However, all I have are your 
looks, your gestures and your words, and they do not suffice as criteria for existence.

When it comes to my criteria regarding the other person, it seems that I am always 
acting on the basis of insufficient evidence. After all, I must respond to the other’s 
pain, to his smile or affection, and yet my criteria can never provide me with certainty 
of the existence of his inner states, only of its semblance: “he is expressing pain, or 
expressing care… but does he feel it?” A fundamental lack of knowledge permeates all 
of my relationships with others, and from this abyss comes my skeptical wish to fill 
the darkness with certainty of the other’s inner states. Ordinary-language skepticism 
thus comes from the realization of this inevitable epistemological separation between 
me and the other person: “how am I supposed to respond to him, to acknowledge 
his pain, if I cannot know for sure that he is suffering?” To refrain from doing good is 
not morally neutral; to flee from the world and avoid the other already has its moral 
charge. Such is the reason why this Cavellian skepticism stands as primarily ethical: 
the ethical trauma results from the fact that my epistemological possibilities reach 
up to a certain point, whereas my moral obligations extend beyond that point. For 
instance, I cannot know with certainty that the other is truly sad, but I must respond 
– here and now – to his crestfallen look.

The skeptic, troubled by Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein’s criteria, thus presents a 
reasonable request – namely, to act out of knowledge and not out of ignorance; to 
have his moral actions be determined by the extent of his knowledge. Such has, after 
all, been the standard approach in the history of Western philosophy. Ever since 
Plato’s Protagoras, philosophers have always taken good and virtuous actions at least 
to involve knowledge, not simply to be equated to knowledge. Socrates, for instance, 
claims that knowledge alone generates all virtues, whereas ignorance alone causes 
all vices.15 As Descartes similarly says in the Meditations: “From a great light in the 
understanding results a great propensity in the will.”16 Our will, the mover of our 
actions, must follow and obey the understanding. To demand otherwise, to request 

14 Ibid., p. 41.
15 See Plato’s Protagoras, 357b-e
16 See Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, Meditation IV, §69. I am quoting my own English translation.



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that our moral actions precede understanding, stands as a highly radical position. 
Far from being easily dismissible, the skeptic in fact embodies the spirit of Western 
philosophy when he reacts against Cavell’s reading of criteria.

In order to justify Cavell’s radical position – placing morality before knowledge and 
certainty, and thus opposing the general historical trend of Western philosophy – I 
will in the next few paragraphs further expose the ethical trauma of attempting to 
establish criteria regarding the Other on the basis of insufficient evidence. Such is the 
trauma of trying to have certainty of the Other’s inner states as an epistemological 
basis for the ethical. If I show this (skeptical) approach as inherently frustrated, as an 
attempt for the impossible, as a recipe for disaster, then I will be able to justify Cavell’s 
ethical response to the skeptic – namely, the primacy of ethics over certainty, or 
stated differently, the urgency of acknowledging the other prior to (and independently 
of ) knowing that other. At first sight, the word ‘acknowledgment’ seems to contain 
within it the word ‘knowledge,’ but, interestingly enough, the only way to leave our 
other-mind skepticism behind is to learn how to acknowledge the other without 
knowing the other with certainty.

1.2. THE ETHICAL TRAUMA OF CAVELLIAN SKEPTICISM

If criteria grant me certainty only of the identity of something and not of its existence, 
as I have already shown, both external-world and other-mind skepticism become 
possible. For just as Cavell considers how disappointment with criteria pervades 
philosophy’s quest for certainty about the existence of the external world, so does 
he take the problem of other minds to result from the wish to strip ourselves of the 
responsibilities and anxieties that mark our usage of criteria. I find it difficult both 
to know 1), whether the objects which I see as fulfilling the criteria for cars in fact 
exist and 2), whether the gestures which I see as fulfilling the criteria for sadness 
a), indeed exist and b), correspond to a real state of inner-sadness. External-world 
skepticism might lead to other-mind skepticism, but as we can see from the double 
layer of complexity in the latter case (2), it is other-mind skepticism which presents 
a greater problem. To be sure, Cavell thinks that both forms of skepticism cannot be 
easily dismissed, but he clearly devotes more time to solving the difficulties around 
other-mind skepticism.

If the objects around me fulfill the criteria for cars, I can very well assume the existence 
of those cars without any satisfactory proof, for otherwise I run the mortal risk of a 
traffic accident. But to assume facts about the other person – that is, to make claims 
about the other person and to act on those claims – can lead me to moral disaster. 
I can, of course, simply assume the overall existence of the other person without 
moral consequences (most people do), just as I did in the case of the cars. However, 
notice that I can also easily assume (without any moral consequence) that inside 
the car, I will find five seats or a big trunk, whereas I cannot assume (without moral 



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consequences) that the other loves me, cares for me, or has any interest in listening to 
my stories. Suppose that I want to settle the question and not just assume that the car 
has five seats: I could open its doors and look inside. Imagine that what I see inside 
the car does fulfill the criteria for five seats. Being a skeptic, I can of course doubt 
whether I am really seeing five seats (whether they really exist), but I am nonetheless 
directly witnessing those five seats; that is, they are still present to me as objects to 
my knowledge. I can certainly doubt the powers of my own witnessing, but that is 
as far as I can go.

The situation concerning the other person, however, seems very different. In the latter 
case, I cannot directly witness the Other’s inner states: I cannot feel your love for me, 
or your interest in my stories. I can still see your facial expressions, just as I can listen 
to your words of praise, but that alone is what I am directly witnessing. If I were to 
doubt my senses, as in the case of looking inside the car, I would analogously doubt 
whether I am correctly perceiving those facial expressions and those words of praise. If 
I were to doubt the other just as I did in the case of the car, I would doubt whether 
what I see indeed fulfills the criteria for, say, a smile. But my skepticism towards the 
other can always go further: “Is he faking? Is he merely pretending to like me? And with 
what intention?” This worry rests on the impossibility of my knowing whether you 
are enjoying my company or the food I cooked, and not on the impossibility of my 
knowing whether you are smiling at me, nodding your head, or holding my hand. 
Thus, my doubt regarding the other has two layers: a), the perception of his gestures 
and b), the correspondence of those gestures to his inner states. Whereby I suffer no 
moral consequences for suspending my worries regarding the inside of the car, I run 
the risk of deception, of betrayal, and of eventually ending up alone if I suspend my 
skeptical worries of the other’s feelings.

In the previous paragraph, I advanced the notion that skeptical worries about 
the Other stand as a persistent possibility in ordinary language and everyday life. 
However, while Cavell recognizes the moral risks in completely suspending these 
worries (such as the risk of betrayal or deception), he particularly focuses on the 
danger of not suspending skeptical worries; that is, of demanding certainty of the 
other’s inner states. The wish to possess the Other, so to speak, and to grasp him 
as an object of knowledge – which reminds us of our introductory paragraph – is 
both the wish for the impossible and the birth of a tragic fate. I intend to elucidate 
both of these notions in the two following subsections. The first, dealing with 
the impossibility of knowing the other’s inner states, bases itself on Cavell’s essay 
“Knowing and Acknowledging,” from Must We Mean What We Say; the second, 
touching on the tragic fate of the skeptic, finds its roots in Cavell’s reading of King 
Lear in “The Avoidance of Love,” also in the same book.



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1.2.1. SKEPTICISM AS THE WISH FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE

My separation from others lies in the fact that, however intimate I am with some 
people, I am still myself and not them, and I can never truly be in their position; I 
can never have their feelings and thoughts, for otherwise they would be mine and not 
theirs. Such a separation does not describe an inability of mine, or a mistake to be 
corrected, but rather a general fact of the human condition. Though I can nominally 
have the same pain as you (e.g. accidentally hitting my thumb with a hammer as 
I build a treehouse), I have no means of accessing how it feels to you. I know how 
the pain feels to me, and I know what I call it, but that name might correspond 
to a completely different feeling for you. In other words, it stands as a permanent 
possibility that the hammer could have caused a wholly distinct pain in your finger, 
and my inability to have your pain stops me from either confirming or denying it. 
With regards to my pain, “I stand sealed out from others, as well as sealed in myself.”17 

In discussing the skeptical problem of “having” the other’s pain,18 Cavell defends 
Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in the Philosophical Investigations, where the author says 
that it makes no sense to want to have the other’s pain. Cavell states that the skeptic 
of the Investigations has discovered that unless he can share or swap feelings with 
the other person, he cannot know what the other is experiencing (if anything).19 
Though Cavell does not think this is a perfectly unobjectionable idea, he is far from 
confident that he knows what is objectionable about it. To be sure, it may turn out 
that the question “can I have the same feeling that he does?” is badly conceived, but 
the point of the matter, for Cavell, lies in the fact that this has not been shown in the 
Investigations.20 

In order to show that the skeptic’s question cannot be easily dismissed, Cavell 
mentions the example of a couple owning two cars of the same model (both are 
1952 MG-TD’s). To say that the cars are the same is to say that they are not different 
makes, but it cannot be denied that the husband has his car and the wife hers – that 
there are two.21 However, when it comes to colors, if the color of this notebook fits 
the same description as the color of that notebook (let us say, #250 of the Universal 
Color Chips) then the color of the notebooks is the same. And if a critic were to ask: 
“But are there not two colors, just as in the case of the cars?”, Cavell would respond that 
unless the critic means that one of them seems closer to #249 or to #251, he does not 
know what “color” or “same” means, what a color is.22 We then conclude that with 
pains, as with cars – but not with colors – we can say that in one sense there are two 
(in terms of its “numeric identity”) and in another sense there is only one (in terms 
of its “qualitative identity”). The whole issue of concern for the skeptic, however, 

17 Cavell, Must we Mean What We Say, p. 240.
18 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 293.
19 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say, p. 228.
20 Ibid.
21 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say, p. 224.
22 Ibid.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

lies precisely in the lack (or impossibility) of numeric identity, because in the case of 
pain that stands as a complete impediment to knowledge. Suppose the couple can 
have descriptively the same pain – say, again, hitting their fingers with a hammer 
while building the family’s tree house: Do they have the same particular pain? Can 
we know here and now that they do? It is as if we needed to feel a replica of their 
pains – first of the husband, then of the wife – in order to compare and confirm that 
it is the same. As Cavell states: “If this is the way things are, we do not know whether 
they have the same pain or not; we never can.” 23

The fact that the last paragraph ends with the words “We never can [know]” already 
shows why Cavell calls this form of skepticism a wish for the impossible. We demand 
knowledge precisely of what we cannot know; we want certainty with regards to the 
other’s inner states, which requires the abolition of numeric differences. If only we 
were all one single extended body with one single extended mind, without alterity, 
we would be able to acquire certainty of all inner states. 24One can already notice 
the violent nature of such a wish, the thirsting for totality or for the dissolution of 
the Other. Though I keep telling myself not to jump ahead, a reader of Levinas can 
see the incredible similarity between the two thinkers unfolding at this point. The 
skeptic of the Investigations – who, after all, is not unreasonable – whose claim is 
not easily dismissible or objectionable – has a wish for totality, a desire to encompass 
everything into sameness, into a sine fine self.25 But that is impossible: the other’s pain 
is not present to me as an object of knowledge. I am inevitably confined to knowing 
only of the other’s expressions and outward manifestations. With regards to his pain, 
I cannot know it, but simply accept it (to respond to his contorted face with care) or 
deny it (to turn away my eyes, looking out the window).

1.2.2. SKEPTICISM BEGETS A TRAGIC FATE

Cavell claims that tragedy (at least in its Shakespearean form) displays the structure 
of other-mind skepticism, a disappointment with the human finitude of criteria and 
the consequent denial of the “unknowable” other. In the final pages of the Claim of 
Reason, Cavell establishes that skepticism is intrinsically marked by its drive towards 
the tragic. Incapable of coming to terms with the limits of criteria, the skeptic 
tragically finds himself, the world, and others to be withdrawn from each other and 
devoid of significance.26 Such is the reason, as we shall see, why King Lear demands 
23 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say, p. 229.
24 What I have described in this sentence is an even more radical example than the one given by Cavell on p. 232 of 

Must We Mean What We Say. Cavell talks about two Corsican Brothers, one of whom (call him Second), suffers 
everything which happens to his brother (call him First). When you whip First, Second writhes with him – not 
in sympathy, seeing what is happening, but even miles away, not knowing what is happening to his brother. This 
is a way for Cavell to conceive of a situation in which both individuals have numerically the same pain. But as 
Cavell points out, it is not clear whether Second will express his pain by saying “I am in pain” or “He (First) is 
in pain.” In this case, problems still arise concerning our knowledge of the other because alterity, separation and 
individuation are still in place. The skeptic wishes, in a way, for the abolition of individuation, which he cannot 
achieve.

25 The skeptical wish for the abolition of numeric differences and of otherness is the wish for a self “without end,” 
echoing the Latin expression “Imperium sine fine,” “The Empire without end,” which refers to Rome.

26 Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary, p. 77.



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of his daughters, so to speak, a certificate of love. Lear wants a statement of love that 
fixates, grounds and establishes that which can only exist in in the fragile and too-
human realm of ordinary language.

A disappointment with the limits of criteria and the consequent denial of the other 
mark Cavell’s reading of King Lear in his essay entitled “The Avoidance of Love.” As 
the title suggests, avoidance permeates the whole play: Gloucester refuses to recognize 
Edmund as his illegitimate son; Cornwall blinds Gloucester so as not to be seen by 
him; Lear does not reveal himself to Gloucester after the latter’s blinding; and most 
importantly, Lear denies his love for Cordelia in the abdication scene in Act I. What 
Cavell finds interesting in this fateful scene from Act I is that, while desperately 
wanting Cordelia’s love, Lear sees the demand that her love makes upon him as 
threatening. The realization that love involves dependence strikes Lear as incompatible 
with his position of power and authority as king. Threatened by the fear of exposing 
these feelings (and thus by the fear of the dependence that these feelings entail), Lear 
arranges for his daughters to publicly declare their love for him, and in return he 
agrees to distribute his lands to each of them. Lear thus asks his daughters to make 
him look like a loved father, but without having to return in kind.

Cordelia, however, who loves her father, cannot accept this. Rather than giving a 
lofty and elevated speech of praise, offering false love in return for Lear’s rewards, 
she chooses to remain silent. Only by refusing the dissimulated expression of love 
that Lear expects of her – that is, by keeping her love secret – can Cordelia continue 
to be responsive to her own true feelings.27 Lear’s subsequent fury and ruthlessness 
comes not from his doubts as to whether Cordelia really loves him, but rather from 
his having to accept their mutual love and dependence on one another, which requires 
that he reveals himself to Cordelia. By failing to expose his dependence, Lear rejects 
both the one he loves and her love for him.28 In other words, by wanting to possess 
Cordelia’s love as one possesses a material object (owning it while not being owned 
by it) Lear ends up losing what he already had: a loving relationship.

This interpretation touches on a fundamental aspect of acknowledgment according 
to Cavell – namely, that acknowledging entails revealing oneself to the other, making 
oneself known, handing oneself over to the other to be either accepted or rejected. To 
acknowledge Cordelia’s love Lear must reveal himself as desiring that love, as loving 
her back, as being weakened by love and thus vulnerable to his beloved. Cavell’s ethical 
response to skepticism thus arises as one of revealing oneself to the other, of being 
determined by that other, which is the very opposite of self-determination.

Lear’s failure to acknowledge leads to tragedy, for after banishing Cordelia from his 
kingdom, Lear must now reveal not only his feelings towards her, but he must also 
recognize that he has distorted their relationship. As Cavell puts it, Lear must reveal 

27 Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity and the Ordinary, p. 79.
28 Ibid.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

“that he is her unjust banishing father.”29 It is out of his failure to reveal himself as her 
unjust father that Cordelia dies, which Cavell takes to mean that “every falsehood, 
every refusal of acknowledgment, will be tracked down. In the realm of spirit… 
there is absolute justice.”30 Lear knows that his frustration does not in fact come 
from uncertainty as to whether Cordelia loves him or not. Instead, he is incapable 
of coming to terms with his human condition – with the fact that he loves her, and 
is thus dependent on a finite and fragile being, so finite and so fragile as to die in his 
hands by the end of the play. But in the fashion of a good skeptic, Lear converts this 
human condition into a riddle, into an intellectual lack: “Can I know that she loves 
me?” And yet, as I have said in the previous sections, the inner states of the other 
human being are not up to proof; they exist beyond the scope of scientific evidence, 
of ocular testimony, of certificates and contracts. Behind the skeptic’s demanding 
rationality, therefore, stands an unbearable fear of disappointment with the other’s 
too-human finitude, which gets converted into an impossible intellectual demand. In 
our narcissism, we wish to be grand, which means hiding from the finite other, for to 
acknowledge him entails joining his kind. Shakespearean theatre thus shows us that 
theatricality must be defeated.

2. LEVINAS, CAVELL AND THE PRIMACY  
OF THE ETHICAL
I have so far exposed Cavell’s views on the ethical danger of ordinary-language 
skepticism, that is, the danger of reducing the other person to a philosophical puzzle 
or an intellectual lack. This attitude becomes one of domination or possession, for 
the skeptic wishes to contain the other within the limits of his knowledge. Lear 
wants, as was said, a certificate of love from Cordelia, so that all of Cordelia’s being 
is in there, and nothing is outside; Cordelia would then become completely known, 
thoroughly revealed, like an aircraft to a Boeing engineer. The skeptic’s tragic fate 
comes from placing epistemology first and ethics second, that is, from wanting to 
know before acknowledging.

It is at this point that we find the unexpected similarity between Cavell and 
Levinas. Both philosophers converge on the Levinasian maxim that “ethics is first 
philosophy.” Cavell criticizes ordinary-language philosophers for wanting criteria to 
cover the full depths of the other person’s being. Levinas, in his turn, similarly attacks 
phenomenology – the philosophical tradition he has inherited from Husserl and 
Heidegger – for reducing the other to a term within language, to a phenomenon 
within the world of consciousness. In the following part of my essay, I will first 
introduce Levinas’ critique of phenomenology, and then compare the two thinkers. 
Such a comparison is as tempting as it is unexplored. Despite having mentioned his 
surprise with Levinas late in his career, Cavell has not himself devoted the time to 

29 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 429.
30  Cavell, Must we Mean What We Say, p. 309. 



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studying Levinas extensively. What follows is, I believe, much needed – and just as 
with anything done for the first time, it might require successive attempts.

2.1. A SKETCH OF LEVINASIAN PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology is the descriptive study of what appears, of what is being (re-)presented 
to consciousness. However, to appear as phenomena, beings must be identified as this 
or that (I see this as a chair). In the absence of any identification, there would only be 
a rustling of a totally anonymous and shapeless “there is” (il y a) in which everything 
gets confused with everything else. The identity of a phenomenon as this or that is 
its thematization: “Being manifests itself by becoming a theme,”31 that is, by being 
gathered, centered and posited as this or that. Levinas emphasizes the lack of a pure 
receptivity in the way that consciousness “takes” or posits something as something 
else. The commentator Adriaan Peperzak says that “there is a sort of sovereignty in this 
way of getting in touch with the given. Consciousness leads the game and determines 
the positions of the pawns.”32 The logos overcomes the pre-phenomenal chaos and 
establishes an order in the anonymous rustling of Being. Every phenomenon thus 
becomes a Said (un Dit); that is, the thematic presentation of a being, the gathering 
of an identification that consciousness imposes on the “there is” (il y a).

According to Levinas, the whole history of Western philosophy has been dominated 
by the idea that beings and Being show themselves when expressed in speech or 
writing, when put in the Said. Levinas, however, criticizes the entire tradition by 
pointing to a simple fact: a discourse is always said by someone to one or more others 
(or to oneself as listener or reader).33 The saying of a said (le Dire d’un Dit) stands as 
one of the most ordinary and basic events of everyday life, as well as the root of 
the whole enterprise of civilization, unfolding itself in communication and social 
institutions. Why has philosophy failed to ignore the Saying (le Dire), concentrating 
exclusively on the Said (le Dit)? Language is not only and not primarily enunciation 
or expression, but rather communication – in talking or writing I always address 
my words (and myself ) to someone. I expect someone to hear me. In speaking or 
writing to him, I initiate a relation between myself and him. One way of hiding this 
relation (the Saying) in the history of Western philosophy has been by treating it 
as a phenomenon comparable to other phenomena. However, the other person to 
whom I speak is not there before me as a phenomenon that I can observe, study, and 
analyze, but as someone to whom I offer something that I have felt, heard, studied, 
written, or said. To be sure, I can look at the color of somebody’s eyes or contemplate 
someone’s beauty, which I can describe in a generic phenomenology, but my relation 
to the other does not have a phenomenological structure. By treating or observing 
another in the way that would be appropriate to a phenomenon, I prevent myself 
from having an encounter with this person. In order to face someone who looks back 

31 Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, p. 56.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p. 61.



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at me, I must separate myself from the identifying and thematizing attitude described 
earlier, for if I were to see the Other as an interesting phenomenon (as someone with 
green eyes or a sweet voice), I would reduce the Other’s otherness to an element of 
my thematic universe: the Other consequently would become absent. As Peperzak 
phrases it, in contrast to the phenomena that I can observe, the Other whom I meet 
as Other is invisible.34 Or in the words of Levinas, the Other is not a phenomenon, 
but rather an enigma.35 

The theoretical intention is thus essentially incapable of taking one of the most 
ordinary experiences of everyday life seriously: it cannot do justice to the fact 
that my words are addressed to someone. The problem with philosophy – and the 
temptation which Levinas constantly tries to evade – is that, as soon as I want to 
concentrate on this experience, I betray it by making it into a theme. By becoming a 
theme, an address loses its very moment of Saying, that by which its signification is 
communicative, and thus it loses its orientation towards an actual or possible hearer. 
The “to” has changed into an “in front of” or “before” of an object that is present 
before consciousness. Levinas wants to convey, through his innovative writing (as 
if through an epiphany), the vocative in our language, the irreducible relation to 
the addressee, which is present in every sentence and every message (saying “Here I 
am!”, “Me voici!”). Levinas’ writing also attempts to reveal the inherent transcendence 
of communication, the fact that to speak is not comparable to noetico-noematic 
correlations,36 but rather to my offering the whole of my identifying acts – that is, the 
whole of my world – to someone who is not a part or moment or event within that 
whole. You, as the Other, are not to be found in my world – for you come from afar 
– and my response to your facing me precedes, and is more fundamental than, the 
domain of phenomenal beings. All of my themes and identifications are meant first 
and foremost to be given to you for your acknowledgement or denial. In my contact 
or proximity to you there is the mark of “the one-for-the-other,” as Levinas says.37 I 
give you my words – and myself – saying “See me, here and now,” and, in doing so, 
I am in the accusative case: for it is up to you to accept or deny my words, to accept 
or deny myself.38 I thus find myself in a position of a “passivity beyond passivity.” 
My obligations and responsibilities to you do not stem from any decision or contract 
originating in my will, for before I could even think, thematize, and freely choose, I 
have become responsible to you. Every thematization and every thought of mine is 
given and addressed to you; on the hither side of every Said of mine lies a Saying filled 
with responsibility for you.

34 Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, p. 63.
35 Ibid.
36 In Husserl’s terminology, the noetic content is the mental act (say, an act of liking, of judging, or of 

remembering), which is directed towards an intentionally held object, “noema” (say, a book, a landscape, or one’s 
childhood home).

37 Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, p. 67.
38 The expressions “See me, here and now,” “Here I am,” “I am in the accusative case,” and then later “a passivity 

beyond passivity” all comprise the Levinasian terminology present throughout Otherwise than Being.



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2.2. SOME POINTS OF AGREEMENT

The position of ultimate passivity that I find myself in my ethical relation points to 
Levinas’ maxim that “I am a hostage to the Other.” As we have seen, Lear’s wish to have 
a certificate of love from Cordelia (a Said) in exchange for land stands as a desperate 
attempt to avoid the ethical reality of ordinary language, to reduce the Other to a 
theme or a term in a contract, to mask one’s existence as hostage to the finite Other. 
By setting up rulebooks and contracts that take you and I as signatories, I avoid an 
ethical engagement. Such was Lear’s wish, but such was also Saul Kripke and John 
Austin’s attempt to ground language on a rulebook (be it a manual on birdwatching), 
on something more “robust” and “independent” than the too-human Other. Kripke 
speaks of an “eerie feeling” when he realizes that “nothing ensures” that the other 
person will make the same mathematical projections as he has done in the past, for 
“there is no reason” we act and agree in language (or in mathematical functions) as 
we do.39 It as if, Kripke says, “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”40 
Cavell correctly responds by saying that something has vanished, but that in other 
ways it seems that language is “solider than ever.”41 Suppose someone invites me to 
tea and lays out the toy tea set that belongs to his child’s doll, and then proceeds to 
pour. I might not be able to reason with him, but I have choices beyond breaking 
with him or going away: I might try to humor him, or show him my trustworthiness 
by sipping from the toy cup, or I might serve the tea to my doll.42 Any Said that we 
might agree upon (a theme in the rulebook) has vanished, but the “signifyingness” 
(to use Levinas’ expression), the Saying, the “one-for-the-other,” the communicative 
and vocative element of language remains. It is in this sense that, prior to and more 
fundamental than my certainty or knowledge that we employ the same terms in the 
same way, I have an ethical responsibility for you, as my Other. Such an idea unites 
Cavell and Levinas, turning both into outcasts in the drama of Western philosophy.

We can also find this sense of passivity, and of the purely vocative aspect of language, 
in Cavell’s mention of Rousseau in the final pages of The Claim of Reason. Cavell takes 
as paradigmatic of the discovery and acknowledgment of the Other the following 
“mythic” or “pre-historical” moment in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language:

Upon meeting others, a savage man will initially be frightened. Because of 
his fear he sees the other as bigger and stronger than himself. He calls them 
giants… That is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, 
when our gaze is held in passionate fascination. 43

The first naming of the Other is characterized by Rousseau in the form of an 
exclamation: upon meeting the Other, the savage man has an experience on the basis 

39 Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 135.
40 Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p. 22.
41 Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 136.
42 Ibid.
43 See Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language, in the section entitled “That the first language had  

to be figurative.”



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of which “he calls something out, something is called forth from him.”44 From the 
Other’s sheer otherness comes the fright and fascination which Rousseau defines in 
his mythic or pre-historic account as our exclamation and fascination with the other 
human being. Levinas, in a most similar fashion, says that “the face is the fact that 
a being affects me not in the indicative, but in the imperative,”45 that the Other is a 
thick moral presence to me, a giant, commanding me from a position of height. The 
one moment in which Cavell distances himself from Levinas – and this might be the 
biggest distinction between the two thinkers – is when he emphasizes that the Other 
is ultimately not stronger or “higher” than the self. Rousseau says that:

After many experiences, the savage recognizes that these so-called giants 
are neither bigger nor stronger than he. Their stature does not approach 
the idea he had initially attached to the word giant. So he invents another 
name common to them and to him, such as the name man, for example, 
and leaves giant to the fictitious object that had impressed him during his 
illusion.46 

Cavell follows Rousseau’s reasoning by claiming that after the first frightful meeting 
with the Other, the savage decides, on the basis of noticing the empirical analogies 
between himself and others, to displace the first name called forth from him (“giant”) 
in favor of another (“man”).47 It is crucial for Cavell to recognize this no-more-than-
human status of the other person, because the realization of the beloved’s finitude 
lies at the center of his interpretation of King Lear. If the Other is weak and finite, 
I am just as weak and finite for being dependent, through love, on that Other. For 
Levinas, however, the Other always remains a giant, so to speak, for “the face, still a 
thing among things, breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it.”48 The face 
is a physical entity, a thing among others, and yet it expresses the infinite, breaking 
through its finite form. The Other presents me with an ungraspable infinity, for I 
cannot encompass him in my thoughts and theories, in my themes and categories. 
The Other forever stays “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign.”49 

If the Other is my equal – and Lear’s drama for Cavell is the admission that he is just 
as equal, just as finite as the Other – then my task is to accept my human condition 
and not hide in theatricality or deny acknowledgement. But if the Other is my 
superior – and the philosopher’s drama for Levinas is the admission that the Other is 
not a theme in the phenomenal world – then my task is to renounce my autonomy 
and recognize my passivity towards the Other. In both cases, there is a lowering: Lear 
thinks of himself too highly and must now accept the lower condition of being just as 
human as Cordelia; the philosopher wants to place the Other among his themes and 
44 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 466.
45 Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 21.
46 See Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language, in the section entitled “That the first language had to be 

figurative.”
47 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 466.
48 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 197.
49 Ibid.



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ideas, all of which are his creations, but the Other stands outside as the receiving end 
and final destination of the philosopher’s thematization. The distinction between 1), 
the Other being my finite equal and 2), the Other being entirely outside my world, 
being “what I myself am not,”50 however, renders an important difference between 
Cavell and Levinas. Since the Cavellian Other is as finite as I am, I might burden him 
by “placing infinite demands on finite sources,”51 and the Other might similarly place 
monstrous burdens on me, in which case I can say “No,” I can choose not to engage 
(for in this scenario, either myself or the Other has not acknowledged our common 
human finitude). For Levinas, however, since the Other is an infinity beyond grasp – 
not a part of my world of themes and ideas – my obligations and responsibilities to 
him stem from a most passive position, before any thought and thematization, and 
thus before any decision of my will. I have no choice but to say “Yes” to the Other if 
he approaches me with his nude face, without theatricality.52 

Although in no way do I expect to exhaust all possible comparisons between these 
highly complex thinkers, in general, we might state that each of them reacts to the 
dominance of scientific positivism, of the social sciences, of categorization, that is, 
of taking the human as a term in a language, instead of recognizing that individuals 
address and are addressed by one another. In admitting this fact of (ordinary) language, 
both thinkers equally envision the supremacy of ethics, and its indispensable primacy 
over all other intellectual pursuits. Skepticism tries to sublimate language by reducing 
its very communicative element, its “signifyingness” to a term within the language. 
Ethics would then be governed according to social contracts, legal books, societal 
norms, moral codes – anything that can be fixed and established. But as I have 
shown, that is both impossible and tragic. Levinas and Cavell both try to return 
us to the ethical, to its inescapable presence in ordinary life. If the title of “first 
philosophy” once belonged to metaphysics (with Aristotle), then being transferred 
to epistemology (with Descartes), we can now safely say that, for Levinas and Cavell, 
ethics is prima philosophia.

As a concluding thought, I will end this investigation on Levinas and Cavell – the first 
of many others – with an aesthetic comparison. Kant’s notion of the mathematical 
sublime might serve to describe the encounter with the Levinasian Other, which is an 
encounter with an infinite otherness that I cannot grasp (greifen).53 This mathematical 

50 Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 83.
51 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 470.
52 I include the conditional as a way to respond to the problem of hostages, which permeates Levinasian 

scholarship. The British philosopher Simon Critchley, for instance, has touched on this issue. As he explains, 
the Holocaust survivors who had invited him to speak in their London synagogue could not accept Levinas’ 
command of being responsible for their persecutor. Their reaction, which strongly invokes the remembrance 
of National Socialism, made Critchley think that Levinas had gone too far, or become too “masochistic.” One 
way to avoid this problem is to say that the Nazi guard does not present his face, in its destitution, nudity and 
vulnerability, but rather hides himself in the theatricality of cruelty. If there is a genuine human interaction, the 
ethical forcefulness of the Other’s face commands me to say “Yes.”

53 I have previously discussed this comparison between Levinas’ ethics and Kant’s aesthetics in an essay entitled 
“The Epiphany of the Face: Levinas and the Ethical-Religious Attitude,” which I presented at the 5th Annual 
Graduate and Undergraduate Student Conference in Philosophy, at San Diego State University, on October 



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sublime arises when we are confronted with something so large that it overwhelms 
our sensory capacity, when we cannot apprehend the magnitude of a given object. 
Looking at the starry night sky, for instance, with its multitude of galaxies and 
constellations, our senses reach up to a certain point, but reason can go further and 
conceive the idea of infinity, which exceeds any possible faculty of the imagination. 
Analogously, the face of the Other communicates an otherness which cannot possibly 
be grasped by sameness: “It cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. The 
Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign.”54 Just as what lies beyond 
the stars, the Other cannot receive a place in my phenomenal world, cannot be 
categorized in my sameness or apprehended and understood by my intelligence. A 
vision of the Other is at most an epiphany, or ekstasis (“stepping outside”). For Kant, 
the mathematical sublime contrasts, in its turn, with the dynamic sublime, and just 
as the first belongs to Levinas, so would the second correspond to Cavell. In Kant’s 
words, the dynamic sublime is when nature creates a fearfulness “without us being 
afraid of it.”55 Looking at immensely powerful waves hitting the rocks in the coast, we 
know they can annihilate us, wipe us out with one hit, and yet their awesome power 
does not give us a sense of threat from afar. Analogously to Cavell, you might not 
follow the same rules as I do, we might not mean the same by what we say, but rather 
than assuming the skeptical position of demanding conformity, I turn my spade 
expressing patience. My rulebooks might vanish into thin air, my Kripkean wishes 
can be destroyed with a single hit, and yet I accommodate myself to the Other; 
communication might threaten to break down in a second, but that opens for us the 
ethical realm of language without rules. F

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin, John L., James Urmson and Geoffrey Warnock. “Other Minds” Philosophical 
Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. 

Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. New York: Liberal 
Arts, 1954. 

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1976. 

——— Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard 
University Press, 2005. 

14th, 2015. For more information regarding Kant’s mathematical sublime, see Ginsborg, “Kant’s Aesthetics and 
Teleology” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For the full website, see Ginsborg in the bibliography.

54 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 194.
55 Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 28



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——— The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: 
Clarendon, 1979. 

Descartes, René. Meditationes De Prima Philosophia. Translated by Artur Buchenau, 
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———Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh: Duquesne 
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——— Time and the Other: And Additional Essays. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. 
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——— Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Dordrecht, The Netherlands: 
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——— Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
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——— Otherwise than Being, Or, Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne 
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Pessoa, Fernando. Poesias Inéditas (1930-1935). Lisboa: Edições Atica. Plato, and 
Nicholas Denyer. Protagoras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.



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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essay on the Origin of Languages. Translated by Johann 
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English Translation. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.


