If language is never simply given to the theoretical...

If language is never simply given to the theoretical reflection that would reveal its overall structure, and if the theoretical projects that have pursued it have ended by eliciting the inadequacy of their own explanatory modes, then our everyday access to language becomes all the more mysterious.

The specific critical results of the tradition’s envisioning of language are then visible as linguistic epiphanies of the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the strangeness of what is most familiar, the puzzling and uncanny possibility of our everyday access to language, and of the ordinary language that ceaselessly inscribes this access, from its first word, in the circumstances and practices of our lives.[^428] For the philosophical discourse that counted a turn to the analysis of language as the essence of its revolutionary break with the philosophical past, the question of the bearing of language on a human life could never count simply as one problem among others.[^429] The progress of the tradition, in particular with its determinative discovery of the problems of the relationship of “meaning” to “use” or “practice” and the projects and results that evinced the ineliminable interdependence of the “syntax” and “semantics” of meaning with the “pragmatics” of the actions and goals of human practice, moved to liberate this problem from the obscurity in which it was initially cloaked.

At the same time, the explanatory assumptions of those theories that formulated one or another theory of “meaning” in terms of “use” or “practices” tended to obscure the problem once again, dissimulating it at the point of its fundamental threat to the intelligibility of a human life.

Thus the problem of the existence of language, although visible within a larger history as the basis of analytic philosophy’s own most significant critical innovations, has repeatedly been disavowed or forgotten within the tradition whose own methods and modes it continues to structure. The disavowal is itself, as we shall see in this final chapter, rooted in a recurrent tendency of the tradition to hide its own most central problems.