It is thrilling to think – to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep. (Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me').

This paper addresses the possibility of using the Wittgensteinian conception of “forms of life” (“_Lebensformen_”) as a potentially transformative philosophical framework that responds to contemporary challenges. These challenges can be understood as resulting from parallel discourses of “ends”: that of “nature” and that of the “human”. These challenges are relevant, especially, for a Cavellian interpretation of Wittgensteinian _Lebensformen_ as an expression of cultural and natural factors. My purpose is to show how Cavell’s elaboration of Wittgensteinian _Lebensformen_ can be maintained against (...) the critical pressures exerted by prevailing discourses of ends. (shrink)

“Despair and a sense of loss are not static conditions but goads to our continuous labor” (Senses 70). This is the way Stanley Cavell describes one of the fundamental lessons of skepticism, the fam...