Form of Life
Wittgenstein said little about forms of life, even though they played a large role in his thinking. So there is an inevitable amount of conjecture in how we fill out this notion. I would say that people share a form of life when they find it natural to go on in the same ways. The pupil who continues the series 2, 4, 6, 8, … 1000, 1004, 1008, … might be said not to find it natural to go on with the series in the way we do. In this sense, the person may (to that extent) not share our form of life.
Here are some illustrations that might seem more familiar. A child learns to look where you are pointing. A dog never does—a dog will only look at the end of your finger. A child finds it natural to attend to something you point at; a dog does not. To that extent, they do not share a form of life. A dog will generally learn to fetch; a cat will not. What dogs find natural to do, cats sometimes do not (and vice versa). What about humans? People generally learn to attend to and react to social cues from other people, but some people with autism do not naturally attend to or react to these cues. Perhaps we could say that they do not share a form of life in that respect.
In broad terms, I would say that sharing a form of life means being able to engage with one another and find common ground in ways that facilitate shared understanding and behavior. To engage in a language game together, it is essential to share a form of life. “The word ‘language-game’ is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (PI §23). But we cannot identify or distinguish forms of life as we might identify or distinguish species of animals by inspecting them. “Form of life” is not a category so much as it is a tool for thinking about engagement with one another. Wittgenstein famously remarked: “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it” (PI, p. 235). Presumably, this is because we wouldn’t share a form of life with the lion. Asserting that you share a form of life with another is essentially predicting that you will be able to engage productively over some range of activities.
The student mentioned above who incorrectly added 2 beyond 1000 got it wrong—not because there is a transcendent number line laid out in heaven, but because the pupil did not go on as we do. That is what makes us able to call such things right and wrong, according to Wittgenstein. A voice in the Investigations says: “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” (PI §241). Of course, Wittgenstein did not want to say this, since it makes math sound arbitrary. He continued: “What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.” The objectivity of math comes not from a transcendent number line laid up in heaven, it comes from our sharing a form of life that allows for agreement when we do math. So, he went on to say that “odd as it may sound, agreement in judgements…is required” (PI §242).
We can only sustain ideas of true and false, right and wrong, in a context in which there is general agreement about issues. And while such contexts of agreement usually also allow for common understandings of what constitutes reasons and justifications, if someone (like a 2-year-old) refuses to accept them and insists on asking “why?” then “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’ ” (PI §217). (I wish Wittgenstein had made his point here by saying, “This is what we do.”)
Conversely, where we do not find a good deal of agreement in our reactions and judgments about a topic, we would not be able to sustain the notions of true and false, right and wrong. This implies that such notions are not appropriate in cases where there is significant ethical disagreement.
Communication and Community
Given Wittgenstein’s emphasis on social context and community of agreement, it is interesting to examine what his own experiences were of communities in his life. He lived in many different settings. He grew up in a large close-knit family in turn-of-the-century Vienna, being schooled at home. In his mid-teens, he was sent to study at the Realschule in Linz for three years. And we have already mentioned his travels from there to Cambridge and, later, back to Cambridge.
When one talks of the “community,” or what “we” would say, or how “we” would do it, it is natural to suppose that there is some single, well-defined group that is to be taken as the community, or who we are. But Wittgenstein’s life did not seem to conform to that assumption. He lived in many communities, serially and sometimes alternately. But even if we focus on one of them, it was nearly always the case that he was “in” the community, but not “of the community. He often lived as a stranger in a strange land. The community of agreement that plays a central role in his philosophical thinking seems largely lacking in his own experience of life.
The only setting that Wittgenstein seemed to consider a success was his life in Norway. He lived there, mostly in the village of Skjolden, for periods varying from a few weeks to several months at a time in 1913-14, 1921, 1931, 1936-37, and 1950, for a total of perhaps two years altogether. During the war, he had a small cabin built there for him so that he could easily return. (Though the cabin had been dismantled, its site can still be visited.) While living there for the longest stretch he wrote in his diary (October 16, 1937):
Life here is on the one hand terrible for me, on the other hand it is something beautiful and friendly. In a sense I love my house and my food; I also feel a certain affection for the people here, who are always pleasant and friendly towards me. I get on well with them. I think it would be a bit sad for them if I left.
This is quite in contrast to his experiences with fellow soldiers in the war, with residents in the villages where he taught after the war, and with fellow academics in Cambridge. If Wittgenstein found community anywhere in his life, it was in Norway.
Thus, from the tenor of his philosophical remarks on the importance of agreement about how we do things, one would expect that here he would accept the practices and customs of the community, and be guided by the norms of his neighbors. Yet, based on research into specific interactions with others in the community of Skjolden, often the opposite occurred:
Our oral sources…contribute an opposite shading to the portrait: that of a highly demanding and unusual figure. The aspect of conflict was…not absent. The fact that he wished to dictate the terms of social contact did occasionally lead to friction. We know of several examples where this is the case. The people in the village described him as “austere and dominating, meticulous and determined.” On one occasion a local worker was asked to tar Wittgenstein’s cottage [roof]. The man arrived five minutes late for the appointment at which they were to discuss the work. Wittgenstein turned out to be very offended by this, and exclaimed that anyone capable of such a thing ought to have his head chopped off. (WN, p. 30)
And:
Among those Wittgenstein was well acquainted with in Skjolden was…a figure known as “Old Galde”…. Ola and Ludwig are reputed to have taken a walk together every Sunday. On a number of these walks Galde became irritated at Wittgenstein’s tendency to swear, and one day said: “You, Wittgenstein, who are a fairly decent man, have to stop this cursing! It simply doesn’t become you.” Wittgenstein replied: “It’s a way of getting rid of the devilry you have inside. You ought to swear more yourself.”…. The locals winced at what Wittgenstein dared say to him. It simply wasn’t what they were used to. (WN, p. 26)
It is not that incidents like these are unfamiliar to students of Wittgenstein’s life—they are all too familiar. But they illustrate that even in the rare context in which Wittgenstein felt himself to be at home, he still did not consider his fellow human beings or their behavior as any sort of standard or norm for himself. The fact that they had customs, such as not swearing, or being lax about appointments, had no relevance to him or his view of things.
A Norwegian acquaintance from much later in Wittgenstein’s life said (WN, p. 173): “He could in many ways be au
thoritarian…. He had a remarkable ability to be independent. Other people are often dependent on their consciousness of the traditions they live in.” But not Wittgenstein.
If he was not part of a real human community in Skjolden, then he didn’t belong to any community during his lifetime. A student recalled: “Above all, his judgments were given with a directness and authority seldom met with, and with complete disregard of current intellectual, aesthetic, or moral fashions.” So, how did the notion of community and agreement gain such a prominent place in Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks? How do we place his own authoritarian, anti-communal tendencies in relations to his remarks? What do we make of Wittgenstein’s own unwillingness to defer to how “we” do things? These are not easy questions to answer.
Philosophy
Wittgenstein’s views about the nature of philosophy did not change significantly over time, but he brought to bear some of the new tools that he had developed. At the time of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein warned about pseudo-propositions that looked like empirical propositions about the world but were not. In his later philosophy, he warned about the use of terms outside of the language games that were their homes.
In an introductory philosophy class, it is common for students to read Descartes’ Meditations. In the first meditation, Descartes described a series of increasingly thoroughgoing ways in which we might be mistaken about the world around us—our perceptions might mislead us, we might be crazy and have delusions, we might be asleep and dreaming, or we might be fooled by an evil power (along the lines of the movie “The Matrix”). In light of these possibilities, it seems that we can’t know anything for sure. Descartes used a notion of knowledge that requires absolute certainty. And given these possibilities, it seems that we can’t be certain about anything—so we don’t really know. It is the job of the philosophy instructor to get the students to take this standard of knowledge seriously and to make them think that this is the real standard of knowledge.
The reason this is difficult is that we don’t use this standard when we discuss knowledge. The concept of knowledge does have a place in many of our language games, but when it does, it comes with a set of (possibly vague and implicit) standards that allow us to judge when we do and when we do not know something. In the language games of the courtroom or the science lab the standards are much higher than in the language game of texting between friends. But in each of these contexts, we have an understanding of when we do and do not know something. And even if we are unsure, we have a sense of what it would take or how we could find out.
In the philosophy classroom, the implication of Descartes’ scenarios is supposed to be that we could never know something (for sure), but that this is a kind of knowledge worth striving for. But Descartes and the philosophy instructor are using the word “know” with a sense that it does not have. There is no language game in which “know” has that grammar. Wittgenstein wrote, “When philosophers use a word—‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, … —and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home?—What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI §116).
Wittgenstein’s thoughts about meaning illuminate the problem: If meaning is something internal—a feeling or an intention—then we could take a word and mean it as we like, in any sense and in any context, as long as we, the users, have the right internal something. The philosopher’s question is meaningful as long as the words have the right feeling behind them. It is as though the words carry the meaning with them. Wittgenstein said: “I am told: ‘You understand this expression, don’t you? Well then—I’m using it with the meaning you’re familiar with.’ As if the meaning were an aura the word brings along with it and retains in every kind of use” (PI §117). But if the meaning of a word is its use, then it can’t be separated from that use and be expected to retain its meaning.
This point is illustrated by Wittgenstein’s famous example: “It is as if I were to say, ‘You surely know what “It’s 5 o’clock here” means; so you also know what “It’s 5 o’clock on the sun” means. It means simply that it is just the same time there as it is here when it is 5 o’clock’ ” (PI §350). Well, a time of day is relative to the orientation of the Earth with respect to the Sun. So then to attempt to talk about the time of day on the sun is to attempt to use the notion without that relative orientation. The meaning of a word is relative to the language game in which it is used. To try to use the word outside that language game is to imagine that it carries its meaning with it independently of its home usage. This is what leads to philosophical confusions: “For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (PI §38). Language goes on holiday when it is set free from the work that it does in its home language game.
Another example of Wittgenstein’s treatment of a philosophical problem might be the question whether our actions are ever free. In many ordinary contexts, we can discuss whether one has acted freely or not. We may not be acting freely if the wind blows at us uncontrollably, or we are threatened with death, or we are blackmailed. In these various contexts, we can discuss whether our action was free or constrained. But a philosopher tries to ask whether any of our actions are ever free. Or, whether we are truly free. Phrases like “truly free” and “really know,” said with strong emphasis, are a warning that the discussion has transcended any ordinary language game. “The confusions which occupy us arise when language is, as it were, idling, not when it is doing work” (PI §132). Wittgenstein did not answer the question, but he did diagnose why it is misleading.
Wittgenstein's Applications
The discussions of freedom of religion, terrorist attacks on 9-11, and the Confederate flag introduced examples that Wittgenstein did not consider to illustrate how his thoughts about meaning could apply to familiar cases. But he did offer other examples. In each case, we can see how his tools and ways of thinking can be brought to bear on interesting topics.
The Inverted Spectrum
It is not uncommon to wonder whether other people see things the way you do. Of course, we know they often have different viewpoints on various issues, but in those cases, they can tell us so. Are there cases that go deeper? Could it be that the color I see when I look at a fire truck and call it “red” is really the color you see when you look at the sky and call it “blue”? When we both look at the fire truck, we both call it red. But couldn’t my private experience—the reason I am calling the truck red—be different from your own experience, even though you too call it red? Maybe it’s what I would call blue if I had it. How could we know?
The possibility of this sort of spectral inversion seems first to have been raised, rather briefly, in Plato’s Theaetetus (153e-154a):
Socrates: Let us follow what we stated a moment ago, and posit that there is nothing which is, in itself, one thing. According to this theory, black or white or any other color will turn out to have come into being through the impact of the eye upon the appropriate motion; and what we naturally call a particular color is neither that which impinges nor that which is impinged upon, but something which has come into being between the two, and which is private to the individual percipient.—Or would you be prepared to insist that every color appears to a dog, or to any other animal, the same as it appears to you?
Theaetetus: No, I most certainly shouldn’t.
Socrates: Well, and do you even feel sure that anything appears to another human being like it appears to you? Wouldn’t you be much more disposed to hold that it doesn’t appear the same even to yourself because you never remain like yourself?
Theaetetus: Yes, that seems to me nearer the truth than the other.
Wittgenstein was certainly familiar with this passage.
Here is the puzzle of the inverted spectrum—could your private color experience of the world be the inverse of mine? (Imagine the colors on a color wheel switched with the colors opposite t
hem.) The puzzle is imagined to be unanswerable because there seems to be no way to test it—for all we know, my color experience of the world could be very different from yours. “The essential thing about private experience is really…that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one visual impression of red, and another section another” (PI §272).
Although I have put this passage in quotation marks because I was quoting it, Wittgenstein did not put it in quotation marks. If he had, it would have been a clear sign that it was a “voice” he was considering—but not necessarily his own view. Yet, in this case, he did not wish to endorse this passage. He was merely laying out a view that he thought was common but misguided.
While the inverted spectrum may be the form of the puzzle that is most commonly discussed, Wittgenstein had more to say about another version of the puzzle: whether your pain is the same as mine. What various versions of the puzzle have in common is that they all propose to consider an aspect of experience that we can’t describe or characterize in any way—we can only have it. This is why it is called a “private” experience. Philosophers also sometimes call these private experiences “qualia.”
Doctors and hospitals have tried to deal with this problem by introducing a “pain scale,” where patients are asked to rate their pain from zero to 10, where zero means no pain and 10 means “the worst pain you can imagine.” This scale is sometimes presented as a chart with cartoon faces with various increasingly pained expressions correlated with the numbers between zero and 10. But this in no way solves the problem described above. It only makes it more concrete—How do I know if “my” 6 is the same as “your” 6? When I call a pain “severe,” do I mean the same as you when you call a pain “severe”? In general terms, this is what economists call the problem of “interpersonal comparison.”
Simply Wittgenstein Page 9
