Where Are Our Words?

A Mythic Reply to Cavell’s Mythology

Abstract

This essay aims to offer a response to Cavell and his invitation for just such responses, as I read him. It offers a reading of later Wittgenstein based on a different mythology than Cavell’s modernist mythological one. Specifically, I aim to provide a myth that sees words in their metaphysical uses not as in exile, as a cast out of the garden of the everyday by the machinations of serpentine philosophers. Instead, I offer a myth that sees the metaphysical use as a holiday for our words, a form of unrestrained playfulness that is a facet of how we learn our ways about with them. In turn, this optimistic myth casts a philosopher not as an individual engaged in a tragically heroic, but ultimately futile, seeking of the “kingdom of the everyday” but as a person who has come to understand the axis of our real needs. I shall unfold such a myth later and hope to show that it gives us a means to dance. Pursuant to this, my mythology casts metaphysics not as an inherent flaw, a manifestation of our inability to live with our finitude, but as a playful response to it.