From the ordinary to the everyday

Ludwig Wittgenstein posits that we must “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”. But what is this everyday use? I first examine the difficulty of determining what this ordinary use is, and the extent to which it evades us, it is lost to us. It is that very indeterminacy that defines ordinary language as the point of departure for the concept of the Ordinary, as Stanley Cavell elaborated, drawing in particular on the thinking of R. W. Emerson. This article thus proposes to question the difference between, on the one hand, the Ordinary, a core concept of the “ordinary language philosophy”, anchored in the use of the language and in the notion of form of life, and, on the other hand, the Everyday as a common theme of aesthetics and anthropology.