ABSTRACT
The text to follow is companion to one that includes a sketch of my indebtedness to Wittgenstein’s later work, specifically to his Philosophical Investigations, touching on ideas of instruction, hence of the child, and ideas of the ordinary as a field of the incessant risk of pointlessness and of isolation, and perhaps of transfiguration, and follows such possibilities into the novels of two of the greatest observers of the life, or economy, of everyday, recurrent human existence, Jane Austen and George Eliot; it also at least mentions the new difficulty within the strange ease of Wittgenstein’s later language, created in part by the pressure on his prose of renouncing reliance on technical philosophical terms.1
Even terms immediately associated with Wittgenstein’s philosophizing, such as “grammar” and “criteria” and “language games,” are inventions or extensions that rely on their ordinary senses, as if any and every word in our language might be pressed into, or slip into, theoretical service. The present text is meant to fill in details of the shape that my debt, in particular to the writing of Philosophical Investigations, has taken for me, to the extent that I understand the debt and that book.
