My words are their words; my words are mostly our words. But my life is only rarely your life, and our common language is not itself enough to reconcile how we live with how I live. I am the one who must—with my life, in my life, by living. But in living I can always avail myself of our common language; or make it more mine.

One formula for what Cavell calls philosophy, and education, and thus philosophy as 'the education of grownups', he gives as: 'to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me' (Claim, 125). The sides of this self-confrontation (which sounds very German-Idealist, in these terms) are

'… a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me'

The pair, 'words' and 'life', seems to enter in when Cavell quotes Wittgenstein's formula, 'To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life' (PI §19). In Cavell's discussion this serves to redirect a previous set of oppositions: 'When my reasons come to an end and I am thrown back upon myself, upon my nature as it has so far shown itself… I may feel that my foregone conclusions were never conclusions I had arrived at, but were merely imbibed by me, merely conventional.… I may take the occasion to throw myself back upon my culture, and ask why we do what we do, judge as we judge, how we have arrived at these crossroads. What is the natural ground of our conventions, to what are they in service?'

From me and my nature, from an 'I' whose participation in a 'we' can seem merely conventional, uncertain, hollow, to that source of conventions, 'my culture': there is an opposition here between me and them, between an 'I' opposed to 'we' and an 'I' somehow reconciled more fully (too fully?) to a reconceived 'we'; but also an opposition between, not just nature and culture, but my nature and culture. Yet Cavell moves from talking about my nature to asking about 'the natural ground of our conventions', as if in being thrown back upon my culture I am asking not just about shared conventions but a shared nature, a common, human nature which would warrant being conceived of as 'the' natural ground of our conventions. I'm thrown back on my own nature only 'as it has so far shown itself'. One thing I may find in asking about the natural ground of our conventions is that I had wrongly conceived of my own nature, for example as being more different from that of others than it really (so far) is. But I may also find that my own nature, somehow a source of that which compels me, convinces me, makes me refuse or insist—that it may strike me as all the more different from that described to me by others, or assumed for me in our shared conventions, as our common nature. This seems to be some of the reason that Cavell talks about a confrontation here.

Also a reason that, once redirected by Wittgenstein's remark, Cavell is moved to imagine the confrontation as one involving 'words and life'. My life is the place in which my nature has been fostered, or stifled, by my culture; the site of uncertainty as to whether I really stand that much apart from my culture, from others.

'I said: in art, the chances you take are your own. But of course you are inviting others to take them with you. And since they are, nevertheless, your own, and your invitation is based not on power or authority, but on attraction and promise, your invitation incurs one of the most exacting of obligations: that every risk must be shown worthwhile, and every infliction of tension lead to a resolution, and every demand on attention and passion be satisfied—that risks those who trust you can't have known they would take, will be found to yield value they can't have known existed. The creation of art, being human conduct which affects others, has the commitments any conduct has. It escapes morality; not, however, in escaping commitment, but in being free to choose only those commitments it wishes to incur. In this way art plays with one of man's fates, the fate of being accountable for everything you do and are, intended or not. It frees us to sing and dance, gives us actions to perform whose consequences, commitments, and liabilities are discharged in the act itself. The price for freedom in this choice of commitment and accountability is that of an exactitude in meeting those commitments and discharging those accounts which no mere morality can impose. You cede the possibilities of excuse, explanation, or justification for your failures; and the cost of failure is not remorse and recompense, but the loss of coherence altogether.'

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…'