Stressing this conceptual and historical framework can allow us to bring a couple of issues into view. First, note that our shared abilities in language suggest two sites where silence persists, indeed must persist, as an option. As Stanley Cavell notes, the possibility of “word projection”—our ability to project old and current words into new contexts, where such contexts are true forms of novelty, presently inexpressible, but because linked to and dependent for their projection on an entire form of life, capable of being understood, even if entirely new—is essential to language. Its possibility, in turn, is absolutely and everywhere dependent exactly on a shared language. As Cavell puts it in his In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism:

Language puts us in bonds, that with each word we utter we emit stipulation, agreements we do not know and do not want to know we have entered, agreements we were always in, that were in effect before our participation in them. Our relation to our language—to the fact that we are subject to expression, victims of meaning—is accordingly a key to our sense of our distance from our lives, of our sense of the alien, of ourselves as alien to ourselves, thus alienated. (40)

The broader form of life in which we are embedded allows for our language, its parameters never entirely within our grasp, our abilities in language never to be known in advance. In part, this is because such parameters are not entirely up to us: the threat of skepticism in all of its guises just is a perpetual worry (the possibility of someone ignoring, refusing, or misunderstanding me, or of me misunderstanding another or myself, just to name a few options). In another part, these parameters are themselves historically evolving; we thus feel “alien to ourselves”, “alienated”, as Cavell stresses. If there is something unsayable here, it depends on history: the history of the human form of life as well as the language that animates and accompanies it; and such a history is forever closed off to us (even despite our best efforts at history and historiography). History is closed off here because the silence that arises is one tied neither to our epistemological capacities nor to any sort of metaphysical realism: history is not the sort of thing that is knowable in this way, its meaning exactly always is incomplete, because the meaning of history depends both on how it is understood by us, and on how it is always underdetermined, leaving out some perspective or other.

To bring out one important significance of this last point, take an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s work. What’s crucial for Benjamin–speaking again from a very high altitude view–is that history is written by one group of people (the victors). Any such history, however, necessarily neglects the equally important views of another group (the vanquished). This is one way to understand Benjamin’s critique of Hegel’s procedure as a historian, notably in the Phenomenology of Spirit). In many ways, Hegel’s historicism is commendable to the extent that it allows for the (alleged) solution to many philosophical problems by showing how they originate due to particular times and places, i.e., are historical. Furthermore, Hegel’s historicism is essential to his project, there is a reason that Hegel changes the title of his book from the Science of the Experience of Consciousness (a sort of ‘transcendental’ procedure about conditions of possibility) to the Phenomenology of Spirit: he truly believes that philosophical problems are themselves historical, a focus on the ‘spiritual’ exactly suggests that history and sociality are essential to any proper understanding of human consciousness. But if that is the case, then that history can always be disputed, and therefore the project of the Phenomenology is continually capable of refinement, indeed problematization