Epilogue

Abstract Contemporary social life is saturated with inequality, dissensus, and competitive individualism. Life expectancy has dropped for the poorest 50% of the US population, and the richest 10% now receive 45% of the total national income. Nation-states seem unable to address political, social, or environmental collective decision problems. Schiller holds out hope that aesthetic education might undo this unhappy condition, but that hope founders on the reciprocal formations of current individual character by current institutions and current institutions by current individual character. Cavell’s tentative, invitational practices of ordinary language philosophy and critical self-scrutiny offer a better way to live with and address our continuing imperfections without despair.