From the Ordinary to the Everyday

This is a new English translation of “De l’ordinaire au quotidien,” originally published in French in 2023. In paragraph 116 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein seems to outline the fundamental goal of his philosophy: “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” The everyday use to which Wittgenstein constantly refers is far from self-evident: it is just as elusive and indeterminate as our forms of life. The project of Philosophical Investigations is not to replace disqualified logic with the study of use, finding therein a new foundation or new convictions, even purely practical ones. The study of everyday language use presents new problems, arduous in a different way from those of logical analysis, as J. L. Austin and the Oxford School later showed—the same school that, in coining the term Ordinary language philosophy, formalized the Ordinary rather than the Everyday as a central concept. The present article considers several reasons for returning to the concept of the Everyday, Wittgenstein’s point of departure, in the philosophy of language.