A relative of Wittgenstein's question about how one learns a word: given a thing, what cultivation does it call for?

The animals of Nietzsche's 'Utility and Liability' (§1) are envied because they 'disappear entirely into the present'; the human being regards the animal and desires to live like an animal, yet 'in vain, because he does not desire it in the same way as does the animal'. If an animal desires to live like an animal, the way in which it does so is presumably natural, a matter of what an animal is. When Nietzsche talks about the difference owing to which the human desire to live like an animal is a vain one, it can sound a lot like he is simply contrasting an existence with past, present, and future moments to an existence which is always and only in the present. But it is not simply, for example, that we have pasts and animals don't; it is that to have a past is to have a relation to one's past—'the human being… braces himself against the great and ever-greater burden of the past'—and animals do not have such a relation. (This would, happily leave room in which to be able to say that of course animals do have pasts, do live in a present whose experience somehow opens onto past and future, as we do; but that what matters is how they relate to this past, and this relation, whatever it might be, is so different from our own as to make the pastness of their own lives appear negligible in contrast to ours.)

There is room for some thought of necessity in §241—

'"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" – What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.'

—but it is thought of as more fragile, more contingent, than some philosophers hitherto had thought of it. Something which is the condition of our saying things that are true or false, something embodied in the language we share and expressed in how we live our lives, but also something whose importance we cannot express much more emphatically than to say that we do things the same way, we share the same language, we agree—always at risk of being doubted as to what counts as 'the same' or how much is enough to count, always exposed to questions about who exactly 'we' is.

The context of a later remark about grammar in the Investigations—'Essence is expressed by grammar' (§371)—includes a passage in which Wittgenstein talks of essences just when he seeks to substitute one question for another:

'370. One ought to ask, not what images are or what goes on when one imagines something, but how the word "imagination" is used. But that does not mean that I want to talk only about words. For the question of what imagination essentially is, is as much about the word "imagination" as my question. And I am only saying that this question is not to be clarified – neither for the person who does the imagining, nor for anyone else – by pointing; nor yet by a description of some process. The first question also asks for the clarification of a word; but it makes us expect a wrong kind of answer.'

Compare to §92, from the stretch of remarks on logic and philosophy, which also draws a contrast between questions:

'92. This finds expression in the question of the essence of language, of propositions, of thought. – For although we, in our investigations, are trying to understand the nature of language – its function, its structure – yet this is not what that question has in view. For it sees the essence of things not as something that already lies open to view, and that becomes surveyable through a process of ordering, but as something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we perceive when we see right into the thing, and which an analysis is supposed to unearth.

'The essence is hidden from us': this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: "What is language?", "What is a proposition?" And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all, and independently of any future experience.'

The oracle's response to Diogenes of Sinope: 'paracharattein to nomisma'—deface the coinage.

'… withdrew in disgust to the mountains…'

'… to refine, to clarify, to intensify…'

But then, skies, uncharacteristically blue.

... other rainy days in other cities.