segunda-feira, março 17, 2008

Putnam sobre Cavell, Wittgenstein, e a "filosofia da linguagem ordinária"

Continuando com a série "trechos que assino embaixo", transcrevo abaixo algumas afirmacões de Putnam, feitas no ótimo artigo "Philosophy as the Education of Grownups: Stanley Cavell and Skepticism" (da mesma coletânea mencionada no post anterior):

[...] Stanley Cavell is one of the great minds of our time, but he is not a founder of movements or a coiner of slogans or a trader of "isms" [...] [He is] a writer who always speaks to individuals--and that means, one at a time [...]. To read Cavell as he should be read is to enter into a conversation with him, one in which your entire sensibility and his are involved, and not only your mind and his mind. (p. 119)

Cavell (and Wittgenstein as Cavell reads him) are concerned to make us see something that troubles the skeptic, something that can and should give us a sense of "vertigo" at certain times, without causing us either to become skeptics or to find illusory comfort in over-intellectualized response. (p. 121)

Othello is, in a sense, a genuine skeptic about one other mind--Desdemona's. His problem--and this is the horror of his situation--isn't that he lacks "evidence" of Desdemona's faithfulness. It is that no evidence is good enough. And even to imagine one of the minor ordinary-language philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s saying to Othello "This is what we call conclusive evidence of Desdemona's faithfulness" (or: "This is what we having an unreasonable doubt") makes one want to vomit. That is why The Claim of Reason may be described as a defense of Wittgenstein against "ordinary-language philosophy", not a defense of Wittgenstein as an ordinary-language philosopher. (pp. 126-127)
Essa última passagem é tão espetacular que vale a pena até traduzir um trechinho, para que buscas por "filosofia da linguagem ordinária" e "vomitar" tenham chance de cair aqui :). Segue, então, minha "traducão livre"
A simples tentativa de imaginar um filósofo da linguagem ordinária menor dos anos 1950 e 1960 dizendo a Othello "Isso é o que chamamos evidência conclusiva para a fidelidade de Desdemona" [...] já nos faz querer vomitar.

Um comentário:

Anônimo disse...

Lovely passage. Vomitting is so violent! But his reaction reminded me of this in the Blue Book: "If...you realise that the chain of actual reasons has a beginning, you will no longer be revolted by the idea of a case in which there is no reason for the way you obey the order" (17).