“I Am Not What I Am”: Mendelssohn and Cavell on Self-Alienation and the Stakes of Skepticism

Mendelssohn and Cavell both use Shakespeare’s Othello to motivate and illustrate their thoughts about skepticism. This striking parallel, philosophically unexplored thus far, receives its first in-depth treatment in this paper. It delineates their differences and commonalities in thinking about skepticism and human self-alienation. It also brings out their joint metaphilosophical vision in opposition to a current trend. That trend casts traditional philosophical problems as artificial or unreal, and thus as avoidable. A prime example, particularly on debates about truth and skepticism, is Rortyian ironism: it proposes to move beyond such debates and towards an “ironic” outlook that privileges literature over philosophy in finding the right “vocabulary” no longer beset by skeptical doubts. Mendelssohn and Cavell conversely insist on the pervasiveness of skepticism and philosophical problems in the everyday: they see us human beings as always vulnerable to skeptical worries that render us alien unto ourselves. What is more, both agree that literature serves to bring out rather than escape these pervasive problems. The upshot of the paper is a better understanding of this Mendelssohnian-Cavellian parallel, and of the stakes of skepticism as dependent on our human vulnerability to self-alienation.