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On Anna Boncompagni’s Wittgenstein on Forms of Life

The Human Form of Life

The Problem of the Unity of Animality and the Cultural
Meredith Williams

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1Anna Boncompagni’s Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, written for the Cambridge Elements of The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is an excellent overview of the topic and does exactly what such an Elements book should do. Most importantly, it provides a map of the leading philosophical interpretations of Wittgenstein’s use of the phrase “form of life,” and so debates of how it is best to be understood. The map consists of three interpretive axes of dispute: natural vs. cultural, one vs. many, and empirical vs. transcendental. Much of the debate is directed towards the Problem of the Unity of Animality and the Cultural. I express the problem this way because there is no doubt that Wittgenstein is concerned to understand the role of our animality within our language-games, assuming that language itself is a cultural phenomenon. How can meaningful, normatively guided language unite with our animal behavior? Whatever the solution is, we work with very few passages that contain the phrase “the form of life” and equally few references to our animality. Yet it is clear that both are important to Wittgenstein’s conception of language. How then are they to be united? That is the fundamental problem of the natural vs. the cultural. The final axis bears on this in so far as focuses on the form of life as the given: does it supply the conditions for the possibility of meaning; or does it invite empirical investigation of actual cultures?

1. Boncompagni’s Alternative: A Methodological Role for Form of Life

2Boncompagni introduces her interpretation of “form of life” by saying that “Wittgenstein never seems interested in a substantive notion of forms of life. He never defines it…” (2022: 57). Rather he tends to use it as a kind of flashlight to highlight, not the substantive object – the form of life – but “[…] the embeddedness of our linguistic activities in wider praxeological surroundings.” So the methodological role of “form of life” is to highlight what we say in a wider behavioral context, without its actually meaning that that context is the object, the form of life itself, and without “form of life” having a definition. But it must mean something if it is to play this highlighting methodological role. Consider the following simple language-game PI: 1. When the grocer reads “apples” on the order sheet, he looks to the bin labeled “apples” and takes five out. He shows his understanding of the word “apples” by performing these nonreflective actions. In this way, he realizes the unity of culture (language) and physiological response (perceptually based reaching and grasping). In this instance, what is the unity of speaking the word “apples” while reaching and grasping apples? Isn’t this unity an instance of our form of life? What makes the appeal to the form of life instantiated by the grocer and his customer a methodological use rather a substantive attribute by means of which the unity is not mere conjunction but a single activity, expressive of our form of life? The question I am raising is why is the action of the grocer does not involve an animal-like behavior in service of an intentional end, expressed and experience through language? And so, a form of life: “to imagine a language-game is to imagine a form of life” (PI: 19).

3Boncompagni gives a second way to characterize the methodological role or use of “form of life” in which she emphasizes the transcendental interpretation, showing how, it too, takes the methodological role for a substantive object. “As a methodological tool, it is an essential pointer that guides the philosopher’s gaze in the right direction and a reminder of the scope and limits of a philosophical investigation” (2022: 58). Here “form of life” is a “blind” pointer, that is, an indexical word that has no meaning but nonetheless can orient the philosopher to “the interconnectedness between our speaking a language and our being the particular animals that we are.” This was just my point in the paragraph prior to this one. How does this methodological pointer help in any way to find and understand this interconnectedness? This is the fundamental problem that the appeal to form of life is to answer. But nothing that Boncompagni has to say about this methodological tool shows how Wittgenstein answers (or not) the problem, even though “form of life” somehow points to this interconnection.

4Her final remarks on the utility of “form of life” strike me as quite problematic. The author suggests that this methodological tool can be used not only for certain specific philosophical problems, but also can be usefully applied to “political reflection and ethical/aesthetic exercises” (ibid.: 60). Here it is impossible to use the expression “form of life” to illuminate the possibility of alternative political views unless “form of life” is substantively meaningful. Boncompagni acknowledges this (ibid.: 61): “the connection between language games and forms of life (PI: 23) emphasizes that only by reference to forms of life can we grasp what our words are about.” For the form of life, especially nonhuman forms of life, to play the role of semantic standard, it must of course be meaningful or a norm if it is to play this central role in Wittgenstein’s conception of language. So how does a methodological rule, that is only a flashlight, not a substantive conception, contribute to our grasp of reference? This claim needs fuller development that keeps distinct the methodological from the substantive interpretation of “form of life.”

5The thought that the methodological notion of “form of life” (a flashlight) has nonphilosophical uses is an additional reason for Boncompagni to give up on the attempt to find a satisfactory substantive notion. In particular, it can make political reflection possible through the (methodological) use of the (substantive) idea of forms of life because the latter “translates into an attitude of conceptual openness that instead of judging other ways of living based on given meanings, uses other (real or imagined) ways of living for a rethinking of meanings” (2022: 1). Why this detour through the methodological use of “form of life” when all the work is done by a substantive notion? Further, there is no reason to think that that attitude of openness would result only in benign political forms of life. Indeed, we know that our current political world is not so restricted. As an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of “form of life,” Wittgenstein himself raises important philosophical objections to the use of imagination to play such a role. At PI: 250, he cites a case of how imagination can easily outstrip what the limits of meaningfulness are:

Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to how on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behavior to be real simulation are missing. (PI: 250)

6Imagination cannot be the source of right kind of openness to possible forms of life without including the nonsensical, like talking chairs and foxes who defy gravity, which are of course acceptable to children, or mistaking grammatical propositions like “every rod has a length” (PI: 251) for an empirical proposition. In On Certainty, he makes an additional point about the acceptability of alien forms of life. In this we are to consider

[…] a tribe of people […] who believe it is possible [to get to the moon] and that it sometimes happens […]. And let them be never so sure of their belief – they are wrong and we know it. If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far. (OC: 286)

7Evidentially we cannot accept certain imagined forms of life as worth consideration. The point here is that not any kind of “openness” is warranted merely by recognizing the possibility of imagined “forms of life.” It also invites the question, just what is a form of life? This is the very question that Boncompagni sought to avoid by holding that the phrase “form of life” doesn’t denote anything substantive, but is a methodological tool only.

2. Representational Structure

8Given that Wittgenstein has rejected any formalist account of language or meaning, and has argued in favor of holistic and contextualist language-games, we cannot begin with the idea that the propositional calculus, algorithmic rules, and semantic truth conditions are what we must start with to understand the fundamental structure of language. Use of language is embedded in human activities shared among individuals in pursuing certain ends. To understand the human form of life is to understand what is indispensable to the realization of such language-games. There are three components that are necessary: Representational structure, techniques and procedures for using words and rules, and the early acquisition of language. What is striking about all of these components is that, as I like to put it, all involve features that are blind to us. We are unaware and unreflective about the structure of representation, how the techniques by which rules are followed and realized, and what is really going on in initiate first-language learning. A characterization of each of these components, what they are and why we are blind to them, and yet members of a community agree with certainty in their actions and judgments expressive of our human form of life (cf. PI: 241).

9First, representational structure. The classical idea is that individual words name objects thereby securing a referential connection between the name and the object which anchors language to the world semantically. “Apple” names apples; “slab” names slabs, so if I ask for an apple, I won’t be brought a slab or an orange or a ball. One of the chronic problems, philosophically, is the conflation of the object of representation, namely, the apple, and the means of representation, namely, the word “apple.” It is the one-to-one relationship that encourages that mistake. Wittgenstein’s understanding of the referential relationship is that it is much more complicated than that simple correlation. It involves a background to the correlation, which is necessary for the functioning of the representation as well as to the identity of the object. One form of representation that is especially helpful in bringing out the structure of representation is measurement, not naming. The example he uses is the standard meter stick preserved in a vault in Paris:

There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris. – But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule. (PI: 50)

10The standard metre-stick in Paris is not something that is represented as being one-metre long, but is the means whereby a different object can be measured to be one metre long. It is a means of representation. To be a means of representing length, the metre-stick itself must have certain properties: Material or physical properties of a certain kind; susceptibility to calibration; and a normative role, namely, it is the standard for being one metre long. The metre stick itself must be made of hard wood or metal. It cannot subject to bending, shrinking or stretching or in any other manner distorting or changing its length because its length just is the one metre length. To perform its role, it must be physically unchanging or fixed. “[…] what we call ‘measuring’ is partly determined by a certain constancy in results of measurement” (PI: 242). That constancy is physically determined by the material of the metre stick.

11For more refined measurements, the stick must be subject to calibration. That too sets the standards for smaller units of length. Lastly, and most importantly for fixing the first two features of the metre-stick is its role as the standard for what counts as the one metre length. That is a normative role that itself must have a procedure or technique of use, one that must be learned before one can successfully use it. The technique of use must accommodate certain features of the human body: the flexibility of the human hand, the coordination of hand and eye, the capacity to bend the body over. The physical feature of the metre-stick must fit the human body. So we find that the means of representation implicate physical properties and human bodily processes. This of itself guarantees something of the unity between the animal and the cultural. But this is not thought to capture the animality of language, that its foundation is something animal-like or cultural. It is possible to argue that the language-game of measuring with the standard metre-stick is cultural at its foundation. The physical-behavioral elements are in the service of the point in having the metre-stick, for architectural reasons or tailoring reasons and so on. These are cultural considerations. This is correct, yet it is important to remind us all that the use of representations cannot be a disembodied use, certainly not at the primitive level. We will return to this issue later.

3. Techniques and Procedures for Rule Following

12Secondly, we need to focus on the indispensable role played by the techniques and procedures of use of representations, this time focusing on rules. All language-games have a temporal dimension, and so can said to follow a rule. But Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following opens with a simple example in which each step in following the rule seems fully determined, and that is the natural number sequence. This differs from symbols like “ball” or “stone” or “L. Wittgenstein,” which function more like names attached to their objects. For a mathematical sequence the name “1” just looks like the number 1 so whether we are representing the numeral in the sequence we write down or we are writing down the numerals themselves is irrelevant. Either way the symbol or the numeral must follow a certain way. What kind of underlying technique fixes the infinite extension of the number sequence and how do we finite beings understand it?

13Wittgenstein uses the idea of a machine (which we can recognizing as a computing machine) “[…] as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine – I might say at first – seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? – If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined” (PI: 193). This is the ideal machine whose sequences seem fixed and complete from the outset. Only in this way can the ideal machine determine what the movements of the real machine must be. But we forget the possibility of the real machine breaking down, needing to be debugged, making mistakes, and so on. The determinacy thus does not hold for physical machines, and so cannot explain how they must operate correctly. All rules suffer from this deficiency: They create the illusion that they must be followed in a particular way and yet in use they are subject to error and failure to be used in the correct way. In holding that the idealized rule determines action, one has conflated the idealized symbol with the actual movements or activities taken in following a rule.

14An obvious alternative explanation is given by interpretation. Wittgenstein’s objection to this is one of his best-known passages:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. […] What this shows is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying a rule” and “going against it” in actual cases. (PI: 201)

15A rule is not followed by being interpretable. And it does not lead by determining what the next step is. Wittgenstein’s answer is that there is only one place to look for the explanation that is required. And that is the context in which one learned or was trained into the use of the rule. The rule without the background technique or procedure for using it is empty. Just the structure of representation, as a form of measurement, requires a context of use and a learned technique of applying the symbol correctly. Using representations and following rules are intimately involved with bodily activity as well as cultural goals. Nobody would deny this fact, but many would hold that the bodily realization of techniques is irrelevant to our human form of life. Part of the reason that this can seem plausible is because techniques are physically realized to serve a normative role. The techniques are shaped by the normative goal, but techniques are not norms themselves except by their relation to our goals. There is a further reason for ignoring the physical side that underwrites our action: in rejecting interpretation, we acknowledge that there is a way of grasping a rule which is exhibited in “obeying a rule,” where that phrase does not bring with it any description of the technique by which we obey a rule. We just obey as we can just reach for a towel. Obeying a rule and reaching for a towel are cultural actions underwritten by a procedure or a technique both of which are hidden by the facility with which we engage in the activity.

4. Triangulation: The Initiation of Language Learning

16The initiation of language learning is the most illuminating for the problem at hand. My own position is that our animality cannot be separated from our mastery of language. We have already seen two cases of that interconnect: The structure of representation (and so reference) and the necessity for techniques for using words and rules. Naturalism focuses on our being animals with language. But a better way of thinking of this, and the way Wittgenstein puts this point in one of his most quoted passages, is the animality, not the animal way, of way performing certain activities. Animality refers to our linguistified blind techniques. The preferred interpretation is the one that shows an intimate and necessary connection between the body and mastery of language. The second axis is between one and many forms of life. Again, there are both. The more important is what is meant by holding that there is only one human form of life – that is that every aspect of human life is linguistified. If language is a mark of culture, every aspect of human life is enculturated. Yet there are many differing cultural and social lives that human beings live, and so there are many forms of life in this less profound sense. Philosophically it is the singular form of life that is important.

  • 1 See Williams 1990, where I develop a critique of the Kantian reading of the later Wittgenstein.

17The third axis – empirical vs. transcendental – is the most difficult. How do we discover and justify what is called “the human form of life”? Boncompagni describes an empirical approach to forms of life as investigating and describing actual societies, cultures, conventions and the like. The sort of work done by sociologists and anthropologists. It is not really a philosophical task. If this is aligned with Culture in the first axis, then the problem of the unity of the animality and the cultural simply disappears, or at least it is no longer of interest to those taking one of these positions. This seems to leave Transcendentalism alone as the means to address this problem. But it too is a position that completely sidesteps the physical side of our lives in favor of a metaphysical solution to the problem of how forms of life can be the given in different language-games. The transcendental solution to this problem is to provide the conditions of possibility of meaning and linguistic practices.1 This approach is simply alien to Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysical solutions to problems. The problem being addressed here is a real one, but the solution must be found within actual human life. Wittgenstein is interested in the conditions for the possibility of meaning. However, he does not reach this by external conditions but, in what will concern here, the identity of objects to which we must secure a referential link to a word.

18One of the most fruitful ways to examine the referential link is in the context of initiate language learning (cf. PI: 1-10; 244-6). This is a strategy that Wittgenstein uses repeatedly to draw attention to our first primitive form of language and how it is acquired. I shall use it to the same end. The early set of passages PI: 1-10 are directed against the view that the referential relation between a word and its object is achieved by ostensive definition which is a means for naming the object. Naming, it is suggested, is more than mere association between a label and an object. It carries semantic weight. The arguments Wittgenstein constructs, using both the initiate learning context and his early language-games of the grocer and the builder, are directed against the naming hypothesis of reference. Mere labeling an object does not enable one to identify the object or property nor whether it signifies one object or object of a kind. Naming, unless associated with some special properties, like the occurrence of an image as an intermediary between the name and the object, is neutral with respect to which object or property, individual or kind, is picked out by ostensive pointing. It is an idle undertaking unless it is supplemented by something more. That addition is the use which the word has in a mature language-game which consists of “[…] language and the actions into which it is woven” (PI: 7). Wittgenstein points out that he will also use the expression “language-game” to refer to his primitive languages, such as the builders game. Further, “(w)e can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language.” He concludes this line of thought as follows: “It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle […] And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (PI: 19). So we have our first introduction of the phase “form of life.” It comes at the end of his critique of the positivist conception of reference and the beginning of his use conception of meaning in which language and action are interwoven. It is a way of saying that the claims he makes about language and the method he uses for showing this are reflective of a human form of life, a form of life in which language is intertwined with action. What gives that weight is that how we learn language is so clearly tied to what mature language is.

19We need to examine two cases of a child first learning some basic words of objects that are familiar to the child: “ball,” “chair,” “red,” “pain.” Whereas the naming theory of reference could be used by the individual child him or herself to construct an individual, if not private, language. Sometimes a child can do that, say, naming his pacifier “wawa,” for example. But this can be done only by a very small and select number of cases; the rest of what is learned depends upon the presence and speaking of an adult. The child in other words must be in a social context to acquire language. This necessary feature of language learning is best played through triangulation. On this model, the adult occupies one angle of the base of the triangle while child occupies the second angle of the base. The adult points to the ball at the apex, saying “ball.” The child looks at the ball, and then looks at the adult and says “ball.” It is a triangulation because both adult and child must look at the ball, and they must look at each other while saying “ball.” Two important points must be made about this familiar form of training. First, the adult, to identify this object correctly for the child, must have a complicated array of a background for the use of this expression. Further, the child is supported to his use of the word “ball,” not because he has the background necessary for this concept, but because he is supported by the already competent adults (or older children) who use their competence to enrich the child’s ability to name the object.

20The second point is a novel point that is more strongly supported by the second triangulation argument. But it holds for this first example as well. Wittgenstein holds that it is appropriate to say of the child that “[…] the learner names the objects; that is, he utters the word when the teacher points to the stone” (PI: 7). In this philosophical context, it sounds like the child has labeled the object, that he has associated a word with the object, such that the word and the object are distinct. Labels or names are distinct from the object so-called. This is a crucial mistake. The child, just acquiring language, does not thereby acquire the distinction between the means for representing the object and the object of representation itself. He does not have the conceptual wherewithal to make this distinction, and so avoid conflating the two. What are the consequences of this? The child cannot distinguish between a label and the object. He is not learning a label as the adult may think; he is learning what the object is. It is a ball, not an object named “ball,” but being a ball is the identity of the object itself. Again, the child cannot distinguish the difference between the representation and the object so represented. The linguistic name is melded into the object itself. For the adult, eliding the distinction between name and object is the fallacy of conflation, and it is a fairly easy mistake to make even among philosophers. The child is acquiring, through learning his native language, a simple ontology of ordinary objects, ordinary properties, and ordinary sensations, like apples and oranges, balls and trucks, red and blue, hunger and pain. Every aspect of our lives is linguistified beginning with the primitive ontology of early first language. Given that we all acquire this simple ontology in learning language, we live with the ontology of our first language throughout our lives. In no aspect of our lives can the ontology of our first language ever be successfully replaced by a theoretical ontology of a different sort. Ordinary language is the given of our language games (PI: 226). It is our human form of life.

21This feature of initiate learning, that is, the acquisition of the identity of what is real, including what philosophers since Descartes have taken to be private inner episodes. Ordinary language of the most primitive sort is the given of all our language-games. It is the linguistified human life in all its forms, whether a ball or a booboo, a color image or a measured length. When we talk of these, we cannot but take ourselves to talk of the objects directly and immediately. No mediation by representations. This is the human form of life. It is not our second nature. It is our first nature.

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Bibliography

Boncompagni Anna, (2022), Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Elements).

Williams Meredith, (1990), “Wittgenstein, Kant and ‘the Metaphysics of Experience’,” Kant-Studien, 81(1), 69-88.

Wittgenstein Ludwig, (1969), On Certainty, ed. by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe & Georg Henrik von Wright, trans. by Denis Paul & Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell. [OC].

Wittgenstein Ludwig, (2009), Philosophical Investigations, German text with an English translation by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Peter Michael Stephan Hacker & Joachim Schulte, revised 4th edition by Peter Michael Stephan Hacker & Joachim Schulte, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell. [PI].

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Notes

1 See Williams 1990, where I develop a critique of the Kantian reading of the later Wittgenstein.

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References

Electronic reference

Meredith Williams, “The Human Form of Life”European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XVI-2 | 2024, Online since 19 December 2024, connection on 24 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/4493; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12yvz

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About the author

Meredith Williams

Johns Hopkins University
mwill[at]jhu.edu

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