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Crina Prida – Forms of life (2017)

The term form of life (lebensform) emerges from continental philosophy but is mostly tied up in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein–specifically, his later work: Philosophical Investigations and, to a lesser degree, On Certainty.

It’s not at all a straightforward endeavor to explain what Wittgenstein means when he employs this term. Not because the concept itself is difficult to grasp–it’s not, it’s actually disarmingly simple; instead: it’s just that were in such a habit of thinking about things in a very proscribed way that seeing the point that Wittgenstein is making is unbelievably difficult. Probably the best way to think about it is: there is no conclusion that you’re being led toward, Wittgenstein is merely reminding us that when we philosophize we frequently mistake process for product–and that causes all kinds of difficulties.

So, in a nut shell: Wittgenstein takes aim at René Descartes–specifically Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.

That’s the one where Descartes famously pronounces cogito ergo sum, or I think, therefore I am.

There’s no arguing that Descartes was brilliant. (And it should be noted that even though Wittgenstein is disproving Descartes, the former clearly still respects the latter’s rigor as a titan of philosophy.)

Anyway, the way Descartes arrives at his monumental pronouncement is he asks himself–how do I know, I mean really know, anything?

He proceeds to test what he can doubt–and proceeds to make a ridiculously compelling argument that everything can be doubted. He does run into a little bit of a hitch, though–he cannot doubt that he’s doubting. He takes this as the bed rock upon which he builds a world view.

In extremely broad strokes, the resulting world view solidifies the centrality of the mind-body problem in western philosophical tradition.

Descartes was so convincing in his argument that this notion of two discrete worlds–the physical and the mental has become known as Cartesian dualism.

Wittgenstein’s response is implicitly focused on blowing all of Cartesian dualism out of the water but he focuses on one point in particular. In Meditations of First Philosophy, Descartes famously asks how we can know for sure that some evil genius isn’t fooling us, i.e. just because other people move like me, act like me, etc., I can’t know what’s going on in their mind so they could be automatons for all I know.

Wittgenstein calls bullshit. But he does so in a very interesting way–by encouraging his reader to think about a quote from Augustine’s Confessions:

When  they  (my  elders)   named  some  object,  and  accordingly moved towards  something, I  saw this  and I  grasped that the thing was called  by  the  sound  they  uttered  when  they  meant  to  point  it  out.Their intention was  shewn  by  their  bodily  movements,  as  it  were  the natural language  of all  peoples:  the expression  of the face,  the play  of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which  expresses  our  state  of  mind  in  seeking,  having,  rejecting,  or avoiding  something.   Thus,  as  I  heard  words  repeatedly used in  their proper  places  in  various  sentences,  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.

Wittgenstein takes Augustine at his words but encourages his reader to consider that if this is–in fact–how we acquire language, how might that proceed.

Thus, what Augustine has in mind is something not unlike the mythological naming of the animals in the Garden of Eden–as if names are labels for things. But then what about verbs and other more difficult parts of speech. Labeling doesn’t work so well for those.

To combat this it’s easy to say we point to indicate what we mean. In other words, the big lumbering animal with the rough skin and the long nose is an elephant and we know it’s the elephant we mean because we point at the elephant to our right as opposed to the large cat with the beard sitting around looking board to our left. We mean elephant and not lion.

Right now I’m sitting in my living room. There’s a coffee table. I can point to it and say: coffee table. But unless you already know something about what a coffee table is, how do you know that I’m pointing to the table and not to it’s color (brown), or it’s shape (rectangular), or what it’s constructed from (press board).

So what seemed fairly straightforward, isn’t. What we really mean by pointing out at something, we must modify if this approach is to work: by pointing I am not so much indicating the object for which the word I speak serves as a label but I’m pointing to some sort of internal experience. Some essentially mental essence that conveys coffee-table-ness.

How does that work? Are words like keys on a piano and by mashing a certain combination we summon the meaning we want?

That seems hell of problematic. I mean: what if I’m really color blind and I see the grass as red and the sky as green but because I’m taught that the sky is blue and the grass is green, I call them that without any way of knowing if what I see matches what everyone else sees?

That question makes a huge mistake by overlooking the fact that when I am speaking I don’t stop to question whether or not the grass is actually green. I accept that it’s green because green has meaning due to the fact that humanity has come to a consensus that a cloudless sky in a non-polluted environment appears to be the color we know as blue.

This is the idea that meaning isn’t labeling or pointing (externally or internally) it is instead words used in a particular context and the use in that given context is what bestows meaning upon the word(s).

I’ve glossed over one important point because it doesn’t really fit in the progression of this explanation but it is important so I’m going to jump tracks here for just a minute.

Initially Wittgenstein compares learning language to learning to play a game–specifically: chess. This is actually one of the more ingenious metaphors he uses.

I’ve taught dozens of people to play chess. And you usually start out with an empty board and you show the other person how each piece moves, i.e. the pawn can move two spaces off the line and then every other move it can move one space forward; it attacks diagonally. Whereas, the rook moves in a straight line left and right or forward and back; it can move as far in any one direction as their are open squares. The knight moves in an L-shape, etc., et al.

You can explain the objective–what check and check mate entail. But as check mate is something that is no one single set of moves (it’s contextual), you eventually have to play the game. (And whoever you are teaching is going to do very poorly their first couple of games…)

Language is like this but it’s also not like this. In chess a bishop can’t move like a rook, but in language a word can function in two different capacities simultaneously–think of puns, double entendres, etc.

Thus, the notion of a form of life. It’s a stunning metaphor because it emphasizes an anthropological perspective–what is the environment like, what are the cultural customs that inform the use of particular words, etc. But there’s also no form of life that doesn’t intersect with other forms of life–think about rabbits being introduced into Australia. Language–unlike rules to a game like chess–changes as it is used (similar to how life evolves).

So Wittgenstein’s trip is basically that when we think about how we do something as opposed to doing it in the stream of things, we are likely to over-complicate things in a way that we don’t when we’re speaking. (Consider the zen proverb that admonishes against putting a second head on top of the one you already have. That’s the other fascinating thing when you really dig into Wittgenstein is that you slowly begin to suspect he was actually a Zen master.)

It’s like Borges map that is so detailed it becomes bigger than the area it’s designed to survey. (It ends up moldering in the desert, as I recall.) We know how language means when we speak, it’s when we stop to think about how language means that we make mistakes like believing that I can doubt everything but that I’m doubting seems profoundly empirical but is, in actuality, something that tells us nothing about metaphysics or minds and instead merely reminds us that the if you’re doubting of course you can’t doubt that you’re doubting because that’s inherent in the concept already.