The tendency
of all … who have ever wanted
to write or talk Ethics or Religion
was to run against the boundaries of language.
This running against the walls of our cage
is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.

Ethics so far as it springs from the desire
to say something about the ultimate meaning of life,
the absolute good, the absolute valuable,
can be no science.

What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.
But it is a document
of a tendency in the human mind,
which I personally cannot help respecting deeply
and I would not for my life ridicule it.

-L. Wittgenstein, Vortrag uber die Ethik, ed. J. Schulte
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989) 18f

How am I to live a kind, decent, fulfilled life with others, in the world that we have made, with the weight of historical determination shaping language and consciousness?  It comes down to the stories that we attempt to share.  The ascendant story of capitalism is like an ill fitting garment, that fails to satisfy even the lucky.  What we need is a story that welcomes all of us to fall in love with this world, for our relatively short duration as a member of our species.

My language is inadequate, like a painter struggling with color, this residual ineptitude, not skillful yet to construct a story, to paint that combination of form and color that brings you and I together.  Practice, practice, practice!

Some of us have given up, irretrievably stuck in the mud of an ossified, stagnant story…

---

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

– excerpt Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, published 1921