Forms of life

A form of life is the whole fabric of shared human activity in which a language lives: the ways we eat together, greet each other, count, make promises, mourn and joke. Wittgenstein's claim is that words do not get their meaning from a private act of the mind or from a link to abstract objects. They get it from the place they hold in that fabric. To understand a language, you have to be able to find your way around the life it belongs to.

The term is rare in his work. It turns up only a handful of times in the Philosophical Investigations, yet it carries a lot of weight, because it marks the point where explanation stops. When every justification has been given, what remains is not another reason but a way of living that we share.

In the animation above, a web of shared practices connects a group of people: eating together, mourning, joking, promising, counting, greeting. Words travel along the threads of that web and arrive with their meaning intact. Outside the web sits a lion. It speaks words we recognise, yet nothing gets through. The image comes from one of Wittgenstein's most quoted remarks.

Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen.

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

PI II xi, p. 223 / PPF §327

On numbering: older books cite this as PI Part II, section xi (p. 223). The fourth edition (2009), revised by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, renamed Part II "Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment" and numbered its remarks, so the lion is now PPF §327.

Where does the idea appear?

The first mention comes early, in the discussion of the simple builders' language that opens the book. Wittgenstein says that we can easily imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle, or only of questions and yes/no answers, and then adds:

Und eine Sprache vorstellen heißt, sich eine Lebensform vorstellen.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

PI §19

A few remarks later he writes that the word language game is meant to bring out that speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life (PI §23).

The most important passage comes in the discussion of rule-following. Someone objects that, on Wittgenstein's view, human agreement would decide what is true and what is false. His answer:

Richtig und falsch ist, was Menschen sagen; und in der Sprache stimmen die Menschen überein. Dies ist keine Übereinstimmung der Meinungen, sondern der Lebensform.

True and false is what people say; and in language people agree. That is not an agreement in opinions but in form of life.

PI §241

The point is subtle. We do not vote on whether 2 + 2 = 4. But the fact that we all go on in the same way when we count, without discussing it, is the background against which counting can be right or wrong at all. Later, in the same part as the lion, he says that what has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life (PI II xi, p. 226 / PPF §345).

Why could we not understand the lion?

The lion's words would not be noise. We might even recognise every one of them. The problem lies elsewhere: a lion's life shares too little with ours. Words such as "tomorrow", "sorry", "I promise" or "that's funny" only mean something against a background of practices: keeping appointments, feeling guilt, expecting someone to keep their word, laughing together. A creature that hunts, sleeps and lives the way a lion does has none of those practices, so its "I promise" would hang in the air.

Wittgenstein makes the same point about people. Just before the lion, he notes that one human being can be a complete enigma to another, for instance in a foreign country with entirely strange traditions. Even if you master the language, you may not be able to find your feet with the people (PPF §325). Understanding is not decoding sentences. It is being at home in a way of living.

Not everyone accepts the lion remark. Critics point out that we share a great deal with lions: hunger, fear, pain, care for the young. Perhaps we would understand a talking lion quite well when it said it was hungry. Others reply that this is exactly Wittgenstein's point: we would understand it to the extent that its life overlaps with ours, and no further.

One human form of life, or many?

Scholars disagree about what "form of life" refers to, and the texts allow more than one reading, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes.

• A biological reading. There is basically one human form of life, rooted in our nature. Wittgenstein supports this when he writes that commanding, questioning, recounting and chatting are as much part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking and playing (PI §25). Newton Garver defended this view.
• A cultural reading. There are many forms of life, as many as there are cultures or ways of living. Peter Winch used this idea in The Idea of a Social Science (1958) to argue that we must understand another society from within its own practices.

The cultural reading raises the worry of relativism: is every culture sealed off, its truths valid only inside? Wittgenstein never says so. Many readers take a middle path: the shared human background makes translation and contact possible, while cultural differences explain why it can be hard.

An everyday example

Think of how a child learns the word "promise". Nobody gives a definition first. The child is promised things, is disappointed when a promise is broken, is told off for breaking one, and slowly learns what the word does. The meaning is not a mental image stored in the head. It is the child's growing part in the practice of promising. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way: a different form of life would mean a different language, with different concepts.

Why it matters

The idea closes a chain of reasoning in the later Wittgenstein. Meaning is use; use belongs to language games; language games are woven into forms of life; and there the demand for further grounds runs out. As he puts it in another passage, when I have exhausted the justifications I reach bedrock and my spade is turned, and I am inclined to say: this is simply what I do (PI §217). His last notes on certainty, with their hinge propositions, push the same thought further.