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  • Perfectionist Philosophy as a (an Untaken) Way of Life
  • Viktor Johansson (bio)

1. Introduction

I am honored to respond to Paul Guyer’s elaboration on the role of examples of perfectionism in Cavell’s and Kant’s philosophies. Guyer’s appeal to Kant’s notion of freedom opens the way for suggestive readings of Cavell’s work on moral perfectionism but also, as I will show, for controversy.

There are salient aspects of both Kant’s and Cavell’s philosophy that are crucial to understanding perfectionism and, let me call it, perfectionist education, that I wish to emphasize in response to Guyer. In responding to Guyer’s text, I shall do three things. First, I shall explain why I think it is misleading to speak of Cavell’s view that moral perfectionism is involved in a struggle to make oneself intelligible to oneself and others in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for moral perfection. Rather, I will suggest that the constant work on oneself that is at the core of Cavell’s moral perfectionism is a constant work for intelligibility. Second, I shall recall a feature of Cavell’s perfectionism that Guyer does not explicitly speak of: the idea that perfectionism is a theme, “outlook or dimension of thought embodied and developed in a set of texts.” Or, as Cavell goes on to say, “there is a place in mind where good books are in conversation. … [W]hat they often talk about … is how they can be, or sound, so much better than the people that compose them.”1 This involves what I would call a perfectionist conception of the history of philosophy and the kinds of texts we take to belong to such [End Page 58] history. Third, I shall sketch out how the struggle for intelligibility and a perfectionist view of engagement with texts and philosophy can lead to a view of philosophy as a form of education in itself.

In concluding these three “criticisms,” I reach a position that I think is quite close to Guyer’s, but with a slightly shifted emphasis on what it means to read Kant and Cavell from a perfectionist point of view.

2. Perfectionism and Intelligibility

In “Examples of Perfectionism,” the leading essay in this issue, Guyer rightly identifies making oneself intelligible to be at the heart of moral perfectionism. He also underlines Cavell’s saying that moral perfectionism is not to be understood as an alternative to other positions in ethics. However, Guyer then goes on to add that the reason perfectionism cannot be an alternative to other ethical positions is that making oneself intelligible “presupposes some additional goal beyond intelligibility as such: to understand our actions and to justify them … we have to understand what they are aimed at” (“Examples of Perfectionism,” 7). It would seem then that moral perfectionism, at least its focus on intelligibility, is in service of another position, such as Kantian moral theory, and that that is the reason that perfectionism is not an alternative to such positions. As I read Cavell, however, I take it to be the other way around. Kantianism, utilitarianism, even virtue ethics, are, insofar as they are compatible, in the service of the perfectionist struggle for intelligibility. Moreover, the scope of perfectionism is greater than any single moral theory since, according to Cavell, perfectionism is “the province not of those who oppose justice and benevolent calculation, but of those who feel left out of their sway, who feel that most people have been left, or leave themselves out, of their sway.”2

Let me start with The Claim of Reason, and how Cavell rethinks the categorical imperative, to expand on what I mean by turning upside down Guyer’s assumption that perfectionism’s focus on intelligibility is in service of other moral aims. In his critique of John Rawls’s analysis of morality as a form of reasoning within rule-governed practices such as games, Cavell suggests that there are “actions which are for us categorically imperative.”3 The action, the thought, the word, becomes an expression of “your will.” But it is not enough to say that our thoughts, words, and actions are self-imposed. If an action...

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