To Imagine a Form of Life

Book excerpt: My aim is to show that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." It is an investigation of the world of secret affinities between language and life throughout Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings. In so doing, I am not limiting myself to his later philosophy, where the above statement appears. Instead, I look at his work as a whole. My Introduction is therefore set to sketch this holistic view by paying particular attention to his earlier assertion that "the world and life are one." I also need to note that while it is hard to miss my indebtedness to a few philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition like Stanly Cavell, Cora Diamond and James Conant, who revolutionized the way by which we think about Wittgenstein, my conversation here is situated in a wider, more Continental, context. The Epilogue is thus searching for the ways by which the notion of form of life could outlive Wittgenstein's own thought, as it does in the work of Giorgio Agamben. In between, these and other questions arise: Can logic, the form of language, reflect not only the form of the world, but also the form of life (Chapter One)? Does the picture that held us captive in respect to language still captivate our lives (Chapter Two)? Would a comprehension of the meaning of language help us to come to terms with the meaning of life (Chapter Three)? But how could one translate an austere view of language into an austere view of life ( Chapter Four)? And how should we approach the idea of a private language, or a private form of life (Chapter Five)? Finally, what are we to make of the claim that "what has to be accepted, the given, is---so one could say---forms of life" (Chapter Six)? My hope, then, is that these remarks on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language point towards a new philosophy of life, and help us, indeed, to imagine a form of life.