An exploration of what made Cavell’s debut with Wittgenstein so revolutionary, not only at the time he wrote it, but in relation to themes that have continued to rise tenaciously to prominence within philosophy, especially philosophy of language and epistemology, since 1969. Rule-following and skepticism; truth, conventionalism, necessity, and creativity in meaning; the New Wittgenstein and Cavell’s overcoming of the idea of Wittgenstein as an end-of-philosophy or conservative philosopher; the transformation of Wittgenstein into a radically reformist philosopher. These are strewn throughout Must We Mean What We Say? through Cavell’s radically new redeployment of Wittgenstein in and for ordinary language philosophy conceived as a liberatory tradition, a tradition whose significance has lasted into our time.

This chapter explores the notion of a private language as a way to achieve perfect communication and defeat skepticism. Borrowing from Wittgenstein's idea of private language as interpreted by Stanley Cavell, the chapter argues that Shakespeare and Donne experiment with an elusive tongue so as to investigate the possibility of Edenic intimacy in marriage. Each imagines a sublime and transparent marital union as overcoming the problem of other minds, but each represents this in opposed ways. In “The Phoenix and Turtle” Shakespeare creates the semblance of a private language by a virtuoso tour of poetic genres. His lyric thus entertains a Wittgensteinian puzzle: namely, that genre, the most consensual of linguistic conventions, can resist signification and become an abstruse language game. In “The Ecstasy,” by contrast, Donne invents an arcane dialect for his true lovers, showing private language in action, until he turns to the body for more complete erotic communication. Shakespeare’s and Donne’s contested engagements with skepticism and with deferred or partial knowledge inform the way these two poems parry the temptations of a private language.

King Lear is structured by a surprisingly comprehensive and sustained engagement with Senecan tragedy. The play is about the collapse of society, and the antisocial nature of Senecan tragedy is its major intertextual resource for thinking about the tragic self in relation to community. The play’s first two acts draw heavily on Senecan language to imagine Lear’s furious response to his daughter’s independence. The middle portion of the play, especially the part with Lear in the storm, interrogates a style of high-flown Senecan rhetoric as the voice of a tragic brand of solipsism. The final movement of the play draws heavily on scenes of fraught and partial reconciliation in Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Phoenissae. Since the 1960s, King Lear has been celebrated as the preeminent dramatic representation of deracinated modern subjectivity, at once uplifting and corrosively skeptical. The play has come to be seen as a representative example of the type of modernist allegory Benjamin finds in Trauerspiel – as a representation of what it means to be human after having lost the ability to feel like part of any larger whole. But since Shakespeare achieves this via Seneca, it may be worth revisiting how modern the perspective actually is.