Wittgenstein, LudwigVeena DasA fundamental theoretical idea of Wittgenstein that forms of life in which humans are embedded are to be understood as appropriate only for the kind of beings who have life in language is yet to be fully absorbed in social theory. Many scholars assume that the main contribution of the concept of forms of life is to point to the social character of human beings in Wittgenstein: but, if we were to allow the argument to rest at this point there would be nothing particularly original in Wittgensteins philosophizing on the human. In order to do any justice to the complicated and even unnerving issues that Wittgenstein brings up under this concept we must learn to pay attention to the two poles that of form and that of life. In order to unpack some of the ideas that seem to me to be brimming in the later texts of Wittgenstein, especially Philosophical Investigations (PI) and the notes from a file box compiled in Zettel, I offer my reflections under two main topics. First, what does Wittgenstein mean by the notion that human beings are the kinds of beings who have a life in language? Second, how do the social and the natural, absorb each other and what picture of culture does this generate? To Have a Life in LanguageThe notion of life has recently reemerged in sociological and anthropological thought often under pressure from new developments in the biological sciences. For Wittgenstein, though, the notion of life is not limited to biological or natural life though it absorbs these notions of life. The fundamental question for him seems to be: what can we say about the kinds of creatures we are, given that we have a life in language. Consider the following remarks: There is nothing astonishing about certain concepts only being applicable to a being that e.g. possesses language. (Zettel, 520)The dog means something by wagging his tail. What grounds would one give for saying that? does one also say : By dropping its leaves, the plant means that it needs water? - (Zettel, 521) (emphasis in original).The intuition here seems to be that not everything that can be interpreted as a sign is necessarily imbued with meaning. For Wittgenstein, meaning occurs within a form of life in which intentions and expressions, the inner and the outer, the soul and the body are stitched or lined with each other. Thus, while we can imagine such expressions as oh, the plant is dropping its leaves, it is asking for water, this construction of the natural is evidence of how the natural might be absorbed in the social it is not evidence of plants intending to convey a meaning to us. Two crucial aspects of our life with language follow. First, for Wittgenstein words themselves have lives and can be robbed or emptied of life - becoming frozen, numb, lifeless. Second, one indication that words have life is that they can be projected into new situations. Among the many citations one could give in support of these two ideas, I offer the following two remarks.We might say: in all cases, what one means by thought is what is alive in the sentence. That without which it is dead, a mere sequence of sounds or written shapes. (Zettel 143) (emphasis in original)Or suppose we were to speak of a something that distinguishes paper money from mere printed slips of paper and gives it its meaning, its life (Zettel 143). Further, we might take the following passage on projection.It looks as if a sentence with e.g. the word ball in it already contained the shadow of other uses of this word. That is to say, the possibility of forming those other sentences. To whom does it look like that? And, under what circumstances? (Zettel 138)The notion that words have life then relates to my acknowledgement of the presence of the other ( to whom does it look like that?) who must be able to receive my words and of a context that is in place (under what circumstances?). Words become dead when the contexts in which they could be received disappear. I might utter the words but life has been drained out of them. Elsewhere I have explored how narration of events after deadly violence might carry precisely this affect of words becoming frozen slides.Consider now the importance of projection for understanding our life with or in language. In his book entitled, Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell offers the example of the word feed. I might feed the cat, feed the lion but I might also feed the meter or feed your pride. What allows me to project the word in this manner? What does Wittgenstein mean when he says that shadows of other uses of a word are already contained in its first, (literal?) use. The thought here is that such projections allow, first, contexts to be stitched together and second, they embody our grammatical sense of what a machine or an emotion might be. When I say, it is not easy to feed his pride, I give expression to the idea that pride is the kind of emotion that can be made to grow by flattery. This is a grammatical statement in the Wittgensteinian framework in that it lays out the criteria for such emotions as pride. While other languages might not have the same verb and noun combination, the idea that some emotions can grow might be expressed through other grammatical forms such as those of duration and physiognomy of emotions. Thus one might say that grammar tells us what kind of object something like an emotion is. This, for Wittgenstein, is the difference between philosophical grammar and linguistic grammar.If words have variance in their use, they also have internal constancy. This internal constancy is achieved within forms of life and not by some mechanical application of rules. It rests on collective and individual imagination, creativity, as well as natural dispositions. Thus, for instance, one would not say light as a stone except in irony because our experience of the natural is woven into the forms of life we lead with language. Forms of LifeTwo passages of crucial importance on the concept of form of life for our discussion are as follows: So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false? It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. This is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (PI 241) (emphasis in original). What determines our judgment, our concepts, and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action but the whole hurly burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action. (Zettel 567). As these citations formulate it - human forms of life are defined by the fact that they are forms created by and for those who are in possession of language. Yet, we must ask what does Wittgenstein mean by agreement being agreement in form of life and not simply an agreement in opinions? Let us take as our guide, Stanley Cavell who suggests a distinction between what he calls the ethnological or horizontal sense of form of life emphasizing form and its vertical or "biological" sense, emphasizing life. The first captures the notion of human diversity- the fact that social institutions, such as marriage and property, vary across societies. The second refers to the distinctions captured in language itself between so-called 'lower' or 'higher' forms of life, between say poking at your food, perhaps with a fork, and pawing at it or pecking at it. However, it is important to understand that the biological is not taken here as something given, rather we show our agreements of what might be considered natural from within our form of life by not only what we say but how we say it. The limits of the human body or the human voice are not given in advance but neither is it purely a matter of opinion as to whether a slave is human , or whether a man committing acts of atrocity is human or machine. Cavell expresses this thought as follows:When he wants to be served at table by a black hand, he would not be satisfied to be served by a black paw. When he rapes a slave he does not feel that he has by that fact itself, embraced sodomy. When he tips a black taxi driver it does not occur to him that he might more appropriately have patted the creature fondly on the side of the neck. (Claim of Reason: 377)I would argue, then, that what Cavells understanding of the concept of form of life shows is not simply that we are socially conditioned but that criteria go deeper than official representations of who counts as person, who counts as a slave. The injustices and oppression that are inflicted by the social order through its laws or its commercial practices do not completely socialize one into those forms, which, is what makes possible for criticism to emerge. The point is that the source of criticism, as the above citation shows, lies not simply in rational deliberative forms but also in the manner in which a certain history of the natural leads me to treat that person as one to whom I relate as a human being. This view of forms of life has a significant impact on what we might call Wittgensteins picture of culture.If one were to take away the nuances that come from a step by step development of the idea of culture in Wittgenstein, I would simply and boldly state that culture is not given once and for all but is rather continuously made in the act of one trying to imagine the paths of his or her own life in the light of the life that the words and concepts and practices of ones culture lead one into. Philosophical Investigations opens with a paragraph from Augustine in which he describes how a child learns what is the proper use of language. When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved toward something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. The signal importance of these opening lines in Wittgenstein lies in the fact that he gestures toward the idea of culture as the scene of both inheritance and of education. The figure of the child that haunts this text and the various scenes of instruction (of learning to read, of learning to project numbers) show the limits of thinking of culture as simply a set of rules or of shared values that have to be imbibed they gesture powerfully toward the processes through which I learn to make words of my culture my own but also to confront what I regard as my culture, with what is my imagination of my words and my life. There are other passages one could evoke but the essential point here is to see that for Wittgenstein, the process of coming to own ones experience is neither a simple act of resistance to the norms of ones culture nor an act of simple acceptance rather it is through an education that one learns what is going to be the shape of agreements and attunements to ones culture. It follows that against the claims that Wittgenstein was a conservative, a deeper reading of Philosophical Investigations suggests that claims to ones culture rest on being able to find ones voice within it both as a gift and also a rebuke.

Suggested ReadingsCavell, Stanley. 1976. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford University Press, New York. 1989. Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture in This New Yet Unapproachable America : Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein, Chicago University Press, Chicago , pp. 29-77.Das, Veena 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, University of California Press, Los Angeles.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, (tr. G.E.M. Anscombe), Macmillan Publishing Company, London.. 1967. Zettel (ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright and tr. G.E.M.Anscombe) Basil Blackwell, London.

Acessado em 1/8/2014, https://johnshopkins.academia.edu/VeenaDas