Stanley Cavell s Moral Perfectionist as the Post-modern Ideal of the Educated Person

The most serious problem with Richard Rorty`s view of `the liberal ironist` as the post-modern ideal of the educated person arguably lies in the thinness of common ground for public discourse, or the thinness of public morality that it implies. Being critical of this aspect of political liberalism Rorty fully embraces, yet not going back to anti-liberal traditionalism, this paper attempts to explore a third possibility from Stanley Cavell`s philosophically not-trivial point of `the private` as a new moral source in the modern individual. Captured as a highly reflective self-awareness in the form of self-acknowledgement of one`s existential condition, Cavell`s concept of `the private` can suggest to us educators how its sensitization in education can foster a new form of subjectivity in the educated person. Cavell`s `moral perfectionist,` who substantiates this subjectivity in his/her everyday life, is someone who is capable of taking an ethically asymmetry attitude: accepting one`s responsibility for others in relation to others while confessing one`s own limitation in doing so in one`s relation to oneself. In this portrayal of Cavell`s moral perfectionist we find neither a moralizer nor an ironist, but a concerned liberal who knows how to be a liberal for moral reasons, not out of moral weakness.