Meaning Schematics in Cavell's Kantian Reading of Wittgenstein

A distinctive feature of Cavell’s reading of the Philosophical Investigations is the extent to which he takes Wittgenstein’s account of language to constitute a translation of the Kantian project of laying out the conditions of possibility of experience, “so that it speaks not alone of deducing twelve categories of the understanding but of deriving – say schematizing – every word in which we speak together “(Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, p. 39). The specific inflection of the kinship between Kant and Wittgenstein established by Cavell’s reference to the doctrine of the schematism will be followed in my paper, taking it as a schema for bringing together moments of his reading of the Philosophical Investigation. Certain characteristic features associated by Kant with the schematism of concepts will be translated in my paper into moments that Cavell identifies in Wittgenstein’s investigation of the grammar of language. In particular, I take it that Cavell provides the terms in which to conceive of the central function of the imagination in the investigation of criteria as well as of the proper understanding of the dimension of life internal to our use of concepts. Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein further brings out the temporality internal to an investigation of language whose three moments I distinguish as “projection”, “presentation” and “return”.