The following is submitted in a condition even more raw than usual:
I'm reading Cavell on Wittgenstein and thinking about how community, especially philosophical community-or more especially THIS community-- is constituted to the extent that we can speak WITH one another at all. By speaking with one another, I mean that some of us presume that Heidegger speaks for us, at least insofar as we presume he is not merely projecting his own way of being conscious onto ours. He presumed a similar presumption which I presume enabled him to speak for himself as a Dasein in the way that he does.
What gives Heidegger the "right" to speak of Dasein as he does-as if it's any more than a projection? More importantly, why do I trust him, give him the right, to "speak for me" at least most of the time. . . and Jud doesn't?
This is almost a "primal" matter of philosophy, one which Cavell suggests, at another level, preoccupies Wittgenstein when he argues for the impossibility of a "private language." In Cavell's words: "What is the presumption which asks us to look to ourselves to find whether we share another's secret consciousness? What gives one the right?"
He goes on to say this line of questioning is wrong for philosophy, because philosophy "ought to point away from the self not towards it." (20) But in this very pointing away, the question is preserved, for it is saying that the philosophy of which it is a part is not mere projection. I may explain other philosophizing as one kind of projection or another ( as Jud does Heidegger's) but not my own, nor those that speak for me. The presumption of those philosophies, by the very fact that it is Heidegger's presumption, mine, and perhaps yours, remains an open question--no, the open question-- which is at the core of said philosophies.
Best regards,
Allen
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