Special Section on “Nature, Value, and Normativity”

Philosophy and Social Criticism

2020, Vol. 46(2) 115–130
Wittgenstein on ethics: ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453718810918
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Lebensformen

Juliet Floyd
Boston University, USA

Abstract
In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein conveyed the idea that ethics cannot be located in
an object or self-standing subject matter of propositional discourse, true or false. At the same
time, he took his work to have an eminently ethical purpose, and his attitude was not that of the
emotivist. The trajectory of this conception of the normativity of philosophy as it developed in his
subsequent thought is traced. It is explained that and how the notion of a ‘form of life’ (Lebensform)
emerged only in his later thought, in 1937, earmarking a significant step forward in his philosophical
method. We argue that the concept of Lebensform represents a way of domesticating logic itself,
the very idea of a claim or reason, supplementing the idea of a ‘language game’, which it deepens.
Lebensform is contrasted with the phenomenologists’ Lebenswelt through a reading of the notions
of ‘I’, ‘world’ and ‘self’ as they were treated in the Tractatus, The Blue and Brown Books and Philo-
sophical Investigations. Finally, the notion of Lebensform is shown to have replaced the notion of
culture (Kultur) in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s spring 1937 ‘domestication’ of the
nature of logic is shown to have been fully consonant with the idea that he was influenced by his
reading Alan Turing’s 1936/1937 paper, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the
Entscheidungsproblem’.

Keywords
ethics, forms of life, Lebenswelt, normativity, Turing, Wittgenstein

I Wittgenstein on ethics
In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,1 Wittgenstein conveyed the idea that ethics
cannot be located in an object or self-standing subject matter of propositional discourse,

Corresponding author:
Juliet Floyd, 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215 USA.
Email: [email protected]
116 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

true or false. At the same time, he took his work to have an eminently ethical purpose,
and his attitude was not at all that of the emotivist. In the Tractatus logic and ethics are
activities, pursued reflectively with oneself in the light of truth and feeling, rather than
theories or structures of thought representing value or facts or emotions in a psycholo-
gical sense. His conception is wider than something religious: it comprises within it
philosophical exploration that does not disrespect the teachings of religious traditions,
while not simply subscribing to their truth. The idea that logic, ethics and philosophy do
not represent the world as it is, but explore possible ways of living in the here and now –
this remains a constant in his philosophical work.
Of course Wittgenstein’s ideas developed over time, in response to his own life, as
well as his responses to the works of others to him. In his 1929 ‘Lecture on Ethics’,2 for
example, he made a public statement disassociating himself from the conception of
ethics as the propositional study of non-natural properties such as absolute good (as in
Moore); from the emotivism of Russell; and from the scientism of the Vienna positivists.
His idea was that absolute value, as opposed to instrumental or theoretical value, comes
out precisely in our running up against the limits of sense in discussing and characteriz-
ing absolute good or absolute value. We must recognize those limits in ourselves,
through reflection, deed, action and thought, not simply invoke them in a theory. In his
‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’,3 from the mid-1930s, his attitude took an anthro-
pological turn, as he used Frazer’s scientism about ‘primitive peoples’ as a foil to explore
the very concept of a ‘prejudice’ in our own minds, and so the limits of our own
perspectives. Finally, through his mature interlocutory style – expressed first in Philo-
sophical Investigations (PI)4 – he allows his reader to experience, work through and
converse about ethical aspects of life and thought with him or herself, in concert with
others, as a part of human life itself.
This working through involves the consideration of certain very general facts about
human beings – including ‘natural’ facts. But it also involves confrontations with cul-
tural norms and one’s own sense of integrity, developing an ear and eye for the local task
of formulating value judgements, assessing actions and characterizing expressions and
perceptions from a first-person point of view. This has no essence that can be captured by
describing an overarching set of relevant facts, properties, expressions or systems of
norms or values. Ethics as expressed in Wittgenstein is not an empirical inquiry, nor is it
reducible to methods of other areas of knowledge-seeking such as science or logic. Nor is
it a branch of philosophy with a special subject matter. It is instead an issue, a task, in
life. And so it is embedded in our forms of life, in ways that we act in our lives, by
interacting with others, falling out of ourselves by taking refuge in thoughtlessness or in
thoughts of others, reacting to our own actions and words, forming and facing a person-
ality and locating ourselves in our environment in flourishing or non-flourishing ways.
Ethics runs through, and is implicated by, every branch of thought and life, not merely
philosophy.
Understanding Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics requires a careful evaluation of the
notion of ‘form of life’, which for him is not an anthropological fact or given culture to
be described, but rather a norm of elucidation and of characterization. It earmarks a new
philosophical and critical method, a method which we can now see as an important
innovation in the history of philosophy in the 20th century.
Floyd 117

In section II, we consider the critical significance of this notion of ‘form of life’: Why
it is a norm of method, rather than something simply to be described as ‘given’ – as one
might mistakenly glean from Wittgenstein’s rough remark about forms of life being the
‘given’ that must be ‘accepted’ (PI PPF xi §345). Rather than passivity, Wittgenstein
sees ethics and meaning at home in activity and receptive openness, an appreciation of
the variety of forms of responsiveness, of forms of criticism and action (this might well
include silence). This does not commit him to a form of particularism, or to quietism, but
instead to the view that generalization in ethics is only possible within the perspective of
a flow of life, through appreciation of the modalities (possibilities and necessities)
pertaining to our courses of action, evinced in characterizations.5 These themselves
realize but one among many contingent realizations or expressions of life.
In section III, I argue that Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life does not imply
conventionalism. In section IV, I show how the notion of form of life is connected to
Wittgenstein’s insistence on domesticating the supposed ‘sublimity’ of logic and ethics:
the embedding of norms, including the use of words, in life. This, I argue, is a matter
brought to the fore by Alan Turing, in his analysis of the notion of a ‘formal system’ of
logic – a somewhat surprising claim, but one that tells us a great deal about Turing and
Wittgenstein. I conclude with some general remarks on the significance for ethics of
Wittgenstein’s critical contribution to philosophy.

II Lebensform as elucidation
The mature thought of Wittgenstein may be seen as a critical contribution to the devel-
opment of mid-20th-century philosophy, its modernist form an expression of the deep
need for relocating dislocated selves and voices in the midst of political, ethical, tech-
nological and social revolutions. In an age of catastrophic change, turmoil and diversi-
fication, it anticipates the need to constantly rethink the location and relocation of a self
and its philosophy in everyday life. The Preface to Philosophical Investigations was
dated 1945, alluding to ‘the darkness of this time’: not only the destruction of European
life as Wittgenstein had known it but also the opening of the death camps and the
dropping of atomic weapons on civilians.
As an engineer and mathematician, Wittgenstein knew that massive forms of com-
putational power had been marshalled to achieve these things. In its own way, his mature
philosophy provides us with something remarkably prescient and relevant: a way of
confronting the meaning of what it is to be human in the midst of a computational and
technological revolution that is rapidly reshaping our manners of conducting and expres-
sing social and personal relationships and ties as well as our relationship to the earth and
our biologies. Wittgenstein intended to respond to this process, to the whirl of dislocation
in our thinking about life in an age of pervasive forms of biologicization, automation and
psychologization. With his notion of Lebensform, he meant to offer a critical counter-
response, one that maintains its philosophical relevance in our time, since it reaches deep
into historical and theoretical processes that are still ongoing.
The notion of Lebensform first appears in his writing in the years 1936–1938, when he
started drafting a manuscript which eventually resulted in the Philosophical Investiga-
tions.4 Although the notion plays a pivotal role in the Investigations, the expression
118 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

appears only five times in that work. In this section, I would like to suggest that this
discrepancy is significant: It depends on the fact that Lebensform is not an object of
investigation, but rather a norm of elucidation, that is, it earmarks his conception of
philosophical method, of what is to do justice to human life, in and out of philosophy.
One can appreciate that Lebensform plays a pivotal role in the Investigations if one
recalls Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’ (PI I,
§19). In The Blue and Brown Books,6 to imagine a language is to imagine a ‘culture’, as if
this is the locus by means of which meaning is given. In the Investigations, by contrast,
Wittgenstein does not go on to describe forms of life but to mark out a manner of
elucidation of normativity, suggesting that we elicit responses that mark the variety of
possible responses, or forms of speaking in language about language. The understanding
of language and of ethics is a task, an investigation of possibilities of significance, it is
neither primarily an empirical investigation nor the quest for a theory of meaning.
And thus the idea of rules invited by Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘language game’ is
seen in a more diffuse and complex way in his mature philosophy: not as a reduction of
meaning to linguistic rules or criteria or culture as given, but instead an invitation to try
to describe how language works, and reflect on this activity philosophicaly.6 Indeed, his
topic is not language, but possibilities of structuring human life – one’s own and others’
lives – with speech. He is thus not concerned with what is given, but with the very idea of
givenness per se. And so his remarks about the ties between a language and a form of life
are not meant to take up forms of life as objects of description. Rather, when we speak
and discuss meaning and raise philosophical questions in life, this is an activity given
through the delicate and complex problem of the embedding of speech in life, the fitting
together and the applying of words in lived situations, imagined or otherwise.
One could object that, later in the Investigations, Wittgenstein claims that ‘what is to be
accepted, the given, is – one might say – forms of life’ Lebensform (PI PPF xi §345). Aren’t
Lebensformen here treated as objects of philosophical description? – No. These later, less
polished parts of the Investigations have to be interpreted cautiously and thoughtfully, not
straightforwardly. It is clear that Wittgenstein does not mean to offer a description of the
‘given’ and to claim that Lebensformen should be taken to be this. Instead, he is reflecting
on the conundrums of givenness per se, a fundamental problem in any philosophy that
partakes of analysis, of the attempt to describe concepts, objects, properties, values and
perceptions in words, breaking down their interplay to see this more clearly.
Wittgenstein is pondering the role that any given can play in philosophical thinking.
This explains why, earlier in the Investigations, what is given is only an enumeration, a
list of undifferentiated, yet nearly universal features of human life with words: walking,
eating, drinking, playing (PI PPF §25) and also commanding and obeying, describing
objects by sight and by measurement, telling a story, guessing a riddle, telling a joke,
requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying (PI §23). This is a suggested list, not an
analysis: it sets up arenas, forms of human and animal life to explore.
A confirmation of this interpretation may be obtained if we contrast the notion of
Lebensform with an apparently similar concept, that of Lebenswelt (‘life world’) or
Umwelt. Lebenswelt is much used by phenomenologists, including during the same years
when Wittgenstein commenced writing about Lebensform. Although the idea of a
Lebenswelt is sometimes used to explicate Wittgenstein’s mature thought, the concept
Floyd 119

was never used by him. This absence is significant, if we reflect on the distinction
between the two notions, Lebenswelt versus Lebensform.
Lebenswelt refers to an actual, significant environment in which a living organism (a
human being, a non-human animal or even a kind of plant) moves, perceives and unfolds
its life.7 A Lebenswelt can become an object of description, a tangible significance-
disclosing territory that may be clarified, explicated and portrayed. This sets Lebenswelt
apart from Wittgenstein’s notion of Lebensformen. Lebensformen may elucidate and be
elucidated, but only through reflection, variation, truncation and multivalent embedding
of arguments, grammatical procedures with words and language games in imagined
snapshots of possible or actual forms of life. They are forms, that is, possibilities of
structuring in life (to adapt TLP, 2.003). As we have said, Wittgenstein uses Lebensform
very seldom, and we can see why: A Lebensform is not an object to be described but a
norm of philosophical elucidation.
In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein is developing a new philosophical method which
does not involve taking for granted fixed syntactical or grammatical rules, or even any
particular language games, but instead brings in the ‘I’ from the start, allowing different
voices to exchange perspectives, their disjointed and argumentative grapplings convey-
ing the idea that to achieve a particular self, one with integrity, is a task. This is conveyed
in the composition of the Investigations itself. In his earlier Blue and Brown Books,
Wittgenstein does not treat what he calls ‘personal experience’ at the start: the ‘I’ does
not occur until well into the discussion in The Blue Book (pp. 40 ff.). And although he
refers at the beginning of The Brown Book to Augustine’s conception of language, he
does not quote it. By contrast in Philosophical Investigations, by opening with the
passage from Augustine’s Confessions the ‘I’ is embedded directly into philosophical
method from the start. Wittgenstein gets us to reflect on cases and what they reflect, in
turn, about us. He wishes to uncover the limits of our grammar, cases in which given
grammar can hardly be relied upon. In this mature phase of his thinking, Wittgenstein is
very much a philosopher of incompleteness and undecideability, driven by the very idea
of what it is to have a particular voice in philosophy or in life: what it is to search
intelligently (or not) in a variety of circumstances, and what contingent facts we depend
upon in our discussions of what is ‘reasonable’ (as opposed to ‘rational’ in the sense of
being right-by-reason, or calculation of self-interest).
The Investigations warns us that when we are not sure how to project our words into
life, we should be careful not to mistakenly substantialize the conditions which are
required if our signs are to take on life. The typical idea is to bring in notions such as
‘consciousness’, ‘human nature’, ‘culture’, ‘norms’, ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’. Rather, the
Investigations urges us to search the variety of possible uses of words through the
employment of language games: we should consider different uses of grammatical
structures, employing these notions in order to investigate, shape, query and criticize
them.
The upshot is that Wittgenstein’s deployment of language games is not meant to give
a description of the meaning that there always already is – like the phenomenologist’s
analysis of the Umwelt – but instead to reflect critically on our lives, in particular on the
use of words that our living involves, on our reasoning and on our assertions about the
world: the possibility and the apparent necessities of sense, reference, meaning and
120 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

truth.8 Wittgenstein’ phenomenological approach to logic does not attempt at getting

behind logic, but instead at a critical domestication of it.
In this way, Wittgenstein is not really contradicting his earlier thought, but instead
inverting it. In the Philosophical Investigations, he takes up a new way of presenting his
ideas: he contrasts his present thought with the earlier Tractatus conception. In this way,
he re-embeds his previous ideas about truth, sense and meaning in a new philosophical
frame, conveying the idea that it is the plasticity and variety of forms of life, the very
‘friction’ that seems less than ideal that is precisely what our ideals of exactitude, reason
and truth in thought require to have purchase (cf. PI §107).
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that world and life are ‘one’ (TLP, 5.621) and
this expression might seem to approach the notion of Lebenswelt. Such an interpretation
of Wittgenstein’s remark would, however, be misleading. For he introduces this apparent
equation after reflecting on realism and solipsism, and after concluding that those two
notions collapse into, or eclipse one another. This occlusion follows from considerations
that are tacitly grammatical or logical. If solipsism were true, it could only be expressed
by prefacing all one’s assertions and judgements by ‘I think’. (That one should be able,
formally and synthetically, to do this was held, of course, by Kant.) Yet by means of this
formal, grammatical expression of solipsism, the ‘I’ cannot secure any sense of indivi-
duality. For it would be utterly unclear what perspective on the world was being
expressed, much less how that perspective might be compared with and differentiated
from other perspectives. Here, ‘I think that . . . ’ is equivalent to ‘it is the case that . . . ’
The expressed position thus collapses to an equivalence with pure realism or – which
would be the same – to pure idealism. In either case, ‘my world’ – that is, the solipsistic
world – would be lost (cf. TLP, 5.62 ff.).
According to this line of reasoning, realism leads inevitably to idealism (or scepticism
or solipsism), and vice versa. Realism is the inevitable result, in other words, of the
fading away of the ‘I’ as an object in the world – an essential feature of the idealist
outlook.9 Idealism and realism may then be seen as two sides of the same coin. Conse-
quently, neither the idealistic ‘I’ nor the realist world are concepts suitable for the
elucidation of the nature of thought, of the possibility of representation, and of the
essence of the logical space, these being the most basic Tractarian locales of form.
According to the Tractatus, the transcendental form of thinking manifests itself instead
in sentences which, although meeting ordinary standards of everyday grammar, turn out
to be devoid of sense, that is, are tautological [sinnlos], or nonsensical [unsinnig]. Such
transcendental form cannot be displayed by focusing on what is the case: we can only
grasp it by thinking about possibilities, by thinking through in logic, how sense, and how
the applicability of logic and mathematics to the world, manifests itself (cf. TLP, 6.13).
This line of reasoning survived the changes that occurred between the Tractatus and
the Investigations, even if it ended up being radically reframed. The demand for formal
unity in thought of a gap-free kind, Wittgenstein states in the Preface to the Investiga-
tions, was surrendered. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein has given up the Tractarian
demand for the general form of the proposition. But the schematic outlines of his earlier
thoughts about ‘personal experience’, realism and solipsism, remain. In the Investiga-
tions, the dialectic shows up more satisfactorily, inside his philosophical method right
from the start, in the emphasis he places on the difficulties of expressing, valuing and
Floyd 121

stating how things appear to those ‘I’s’ who engage in evaluations, that is, in a reflective
life of and with words, aiming to put them to work in the world. The old dialectic
between realism and idealism is now embedded in a new method, a method which is
built on first person expression imbricated from the beginning in the vying of voices with
one another (cf. (PI §§24, 402)).
The careful attention paid to words that are put to work and go astray in our engage-
ment with one another and with the world allows these philosophical movements of
thought to draw out and express the distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ – but
not as if it is a hard metaphysical distinction between something imperceptible and
hidden, and something exterior and bare.10 Instead, what is ‘inner’ exhibits itself in
speech, just as in music the inner emotional core of a piece may be drawn out in
performance. The ‘I’ is no longer extruded as a single point of view, forced outside the
world, but it finds its place in its antagonisms and points of contact with the ‘I’ and the
‘you’ and the ‘we’, in the various modes of searching and finding and failing to find
ourselves in our forms of life. In this way, philosophy and ethics is ubiquitous, at stake in
nearly all attempts to communicate and understand each other. As Cavell first pointed
out, this is the core feature of Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s methods of appealing to what
we ordinarily would be inclined to say in such and such a circumstance.11
This development in Wittgenstein’s thinking about the relation between ‘I’ and world
brings us to the core of his notion of Lebensform. The language which allows us to define
the limits between the I and the world may be regarded as a calculus, that is, as a
mechanizable procedure with rules governing the possibilities of expression. That notion
of ‘calculus’ or ‘calculation’, a human being working step-by-step according to a rule in
a disciplined and ‘unintelligent’ manner, is one aspect of the human form of life. But it
must nevertheless, according to the later Wittgenstein, ultimately be conceived as
embedded in a Lebensform, a part of human activities of searching, of attempts at
distinguishing an ‘I’ from a ‘you’, a ‘me’ from a ‘we’, a this from a that and so on.
Informal representation is the life blood of formal representation, however complex and
difficult its vagaries and contingencies and fragilities may be.
It has been suggested in a series of papers published elsewhere that Lebensform fulfils
a logical task for Wittgenstein.12 By means of a kind of analytical regression to what is
most basic, his analysis of analysis ends here: It finds what is simple (i.e., the elementary
that the Tractatus was after) in what is acknowledged as simple or obvious in our
ordinary responses – something always contestable, something evolving, difficult to
accept and move on from. The simple must be domesticated in the later Wittgenstein,
turned from something ‘sublime’ to something ‘that is an important form of presentation,
but with homespun [hausgebackener] application’ (MS 152, p. 96). What is perceived as
natural by us is to be worked through. Philosophy thereby becomes a task in life.

III Lebensformen versus Kultur

We can gain a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein’s notion of Lebensform if we
contrast it with his handling of the notion of culture (Kultur). As far as we know,
Wittgenstein used the word Lebensform for the first time in his writing in 1936. It
appears during the months in fall 1936 when he tried to revise The Brown Book, which
122 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

had been dictated to Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose in 1934–1935, in hopes of
transforming the dictation into a manuscript.13 The work was unsatisfying for Wittgen-
stein, and hence the attempted revision failed, signified by his drawing a line through his
Manuscript 115 at MS 115, page 118 and writing ‘this whole attempted revision is
worthless.’
One of the problems that Wittgenstein faced here was his problematic and unconvin-
cing use of the concept of culture (Kultur) to elucidate the notion of language. The Brown
Book is a step-by-step presentation of language games, arranged in linear form, sugges-
tion a quasi-evolutionary, additive, anthropological perspective on meaning. In The
Brown Book to imagine a language is to imagine a culture, and this is how Wittgenstein
conceived of his efforts to elucidate meaning through an investigation of the uses of
language. This suggested that he wanted to claim that we can only make sense of a use of
language against the background of a culture, with its rules and social habits.
But Wittgenstein soon realized that cultures are not ready-made objects liable to be
defined by or given to us unproblematically. Culture already presupposes the complex
forms of life that make specific structurings of meaning possible. We can imagine a use
of language, indeed a language game, only in the context of a ‘Lebensform/Form des
Lebens’ (MS 115, pp. 237–9). At this point, Wittgenstein drops the concept of culture
(Kultur) altogether – it never appears in the manuscript of Philosophical Investigations
again. He substitutes for it the notion of Lebensform. The idea that to imagine a language
or language game is to imagine a form of life is the conception that will survive in the
mature philosophy.14
An important line of continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought is thus his aim to analyse the
whole idea of philosophical analysis itself, a reflective task achieved by exploring the
limits of our world and the contingencies of our thinking against the backdrop of con-
tingencies and alternative points of view. This kind of philosophy is not meant to offer
further theoretical explanations, but rather, it seeks to stop and explore what is taken to
be simple for and by us. It can only be conducted through analogy, metaphors and
elucidation – just as Frege had held about his primitive logical notions (such as ‘concept’
and ‘object’15). In 1936 Wittgenstein abandoned the hope that a notion of ‘culture’ can
elucidate his reflections on meaning, language and logic. He recognizes instead that
cultures have to be subject to his critical method and analysed in terms of something
more fundamental and simpler for us, an everyday relation to words in our immediate
environment.16 Hence, in the Investigations logic is seen as the spelling out of necessities
and possibilities, just as it was in the Tractatus, but its purchase depends on feasible
human ways of going on ‘in the same way’ from where we are now. This places the
emphasis on the triangulation between our language, our mutual interactions and our
activities within the world: words and their evolving structures embedded within human
forms of life – subject to biological as well as cultural necessities – are part of reality.
Possible ways of going on are sharable and yet always liable to criticism.
An upshot of this line of interpretation, which builds on ideas of Cavell, is that
Wittgenstein does not use the notion of forms of life to suggest that language is merely
a social, conventional and artificial construction, as is often believed. According to
Cavell,17 in the Investigations, ‘forms of life’ evince both a horizontal axis, the etholo-
gical and the conventional, and also a vertical, evolutionary and biological axis. ‘Forms
Floyd 123

of life’ imply ‘natural reactions’ (PI §185), the uses of ‘fictitious natural history’ (PI PPF
§365; cf. PI §524, discussed in Floyd18) and ‘the common behavior of mankind’ (PI
§§204–6, 272), as well as reflections on what joins us to and separates us from non-
human forms of life. The notion of form of life allows us to focus on the spectrum of
possible realizations that our life as talking animals can take (on animals and our animal
nature, cf. PI §§203, 372, 493, 647, 650, PPF I §1). Lebensformen are elucidated by way
of comparisons (Vergleichsobjekte; cf. PI §§130) and philosophical investigations: They
are not items or ultimate facts to be described, but are drawn out through the reflective
philosophical activity of reshaping and reconfiguring our sense of possibility, of our
dealings with one another, with language and with the world. The important point here is
that reconfigurations of our uses of words are not reconfigurations of what is merely
social or conventional but reconfigurations of life. And such transfigurations can occur
through philosophical reflection on imagined necessities and possibilities.
Wittgenstein explores the significance of this point in what was originally published
as the second part of the Investigations. That part is now called ‘Philosophy of Psychol-
ogy: A Fragment’ (PPF), but the title can be misleading. Following Frege, Wittgenstein
is still trying to respect the distinction between logic and psychology even as he explores
psychological experiences of sense and meaning. In section xi, PPF §§111–5, Wittgen-
stein introduces a notion of ‘aspect seeing’:

111. Two uses of the word ‘see’.

The one: ‘What do you see there?’ – ‘I see this’ (and then a description, a drawing, a
copy). The other: ‘I see a likeness in these two faces’ – let the man to whom I tell this be
seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself.
What is important is the categorial difference between the two ‘objects’ of sight.
112. The one man might make an accurate drawing of the two faces, and the other notice in
the drawing the likeness which the former did not see.
113. I observe a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not
changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’.
114. Its causes are of interest to psychologists.
115. We are interested in the concept and its place among the concepts of experience.

Wittgenstein suggests that in ‘noticing an aspect’, we do not merely represent a

property of an object, but we spot a comparative ‘likeness’ which is there to be seen,
a feature, and not one merely stipulated: we bring an experience or response into view,
making sense of things, thereby ‘seeing’ and realizing a possibility. In seeing a ‘likeness
between two faces’, we respond by shaping and determining a relation of ‘sameness’
between different cases through an experience, but one which is both active and passive.
For example, it might be pointed out that a stranger’s face strongly resembles that of
one’s mother. One could come to be struck by this and be surprised by it, coming to share
the way of experiencing the two faces in something like the way we may come to share in
an aesthetic response to a particular work of art. We do not directly apply a concept (e.g.
the concept sad or mother or happy) to various objects in such cases, simply sorting.19
124 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

What matters here is the fact that we gather two particular faces and link them with a
remoulding of the concept same and see how our words and concepts reach into a new
context.
A comparison with ratios may help. 5/15 and 4/12 are the same ratio, even if 5 and 4
are not the same, and neither are 15 and 12. The procedures for using methods of division
according to these different ratios are very different. In order to see the two ratios as the
same we need a mode of resemblance: in a mathematical case, this takes the form of rules
of calculation which set criteria determining when two ratios are ‘the same’ and when
they ‘differ’. The substratum of our experience here is the mastery of a technique of
reckoning (cf. PI PPF xi, §222).
Similarly, we can only claim that two faces are alike if we have a way of comparing
them which allows us the activity of clarifying what kind of ‘sameness’ is at issue.
Unlike in a mathematical case, however, the way of comparing cannot depend upon
techniques of calculation to play the role of scaffolding. The analogy with mathematics
could lead us astray here, as sometimes happens.20 For the recognition of sameness
grounds reasoning about possibilities and modalities. One could claim that two faces
that look very different to me are nevertheless similar in one or another way, and that
could lead us to many discussions and arguments concerning the respects in which they
are similar and different. Weighing and balancing techniques can matter when it comes
to responses to a claim or situation or person. Sameness, like human behaviour, comes in
many different degrees.
It is part of the point of logic and ethics – of philosophy as Wittgenstein conceives it –
to spell out our modes of comparison and reflect on how we discuss the spelling out
itself. Here, we should mention the ethics of care and the work that literature can help us
do. Both stress the practical importance of careful and thoughtful attention to particulars,
meticulous assembling of ways we use words to respond to, differentiate and group
together people and things. This is not a kind of restrictive ‘particularism’, since it
involves generalizations and the recognition that within experience itself are already
many dimensions of generality and conceptualization. Instead it is the recognition that
value is to be found and measured in our ways of inhabiting and responding to
Lebensformen.
In portraying similarities and differences, we bring to bear our responsiveness to our
own judgements – even when, following Wittgenstein, we make a kind of ‘anthropolo-
gical move’ to explore how things are to one whom we deem ‘other’. This process cannot
be neutral. Our responses depend on our values, our interests, our experiences. Wittgen-
stein ultimately needed the notion of Lebensformen to embed his idea of proceeding with
language games in life. We need to attend to the variety of possible ways of structuring
living if we want to avoid a philosophy in which ‘the problems of life remain completely
untouched’ (TLP, 6.52).

IV Domesticating the sublimity of logic

As we ne noted, Wittgenstein’s philosophical method always implied a search for what is
taken to be simple in philosophical analysis, in the step to characterize the philosophical
significance of an experience, concept or thing. It is in this spirit that in 1937 he revisited
Floyd 125

the question of the nature of logic and attempted to domesticate it, bringing it down to
earth. As he saw things, in the Tractatus simple objects and names had been taken in a
‘sublime’ way, as ultimate indefinables. Now his concern is to show that instead this idea
of a simple object or name is ‘an important form of representation but [one] with home-
spun application’ (MS 152, p. 96).21 Lebensform is relevant to this juncture in his
development. As we have seen in section I, this is a notion which belongs to philoso-
phical method and modes of elucidation. It constitutes an aptly fundamental way of
thinking about ways of conceiving and regarding logic, language, life, value, meaning
and experience as activities that are pursued together, in everyday life.
For the later Wittgenstein, the simple is not absolute, as the Tractatus had it, nor
merely conventional. Nor is it relative to a Satzsystem, as he held in his so-called middle
period (c. 1929–1933). The simple does not reveal itself in language games, traditions or
cultures, as The Blue and Brown Books already make clear in rejecting the idea of an
‘indefinable’. According to the mature Wittgenstein, the ‘simple’ inhabits ‘ordinary
life’: is always immanent in analyses and in following rules, although it is always
contestable, transportable into new situations, capable of being reframed. What we take
to be simple shows itself in our valuations of premises, suggestions ‘to go on’ in
particular ways, refusal to begin at particular points and so on. All simples are inserted
in life-structurings; they are fluid, meaningful parts of our traffic in meaningful response
to and in life. This is not nihilism. For we can surely swim, if we deliberately shape our
movements properly and orchestrate within our environs.
Hence in Wittgenstein’s view, Lebensform includes the Umwelt but does not reduce to
it. His notion frames the Umwelt in a larger activity of questioning and criticizing, one
which investigates a multiplicity of seeming modalities (possibilities and necessities) in
an array of language-involving structurings of life. This links Lebensform to logic: as the
Tractatus had already stated, ‘form is the possibility of structure’ (2.033), ‘the structure
of a fact consists of the structures of states of affairs’ (2.034) and ‘the totality of existing
states of affairs is the world’ (2.04). But ‘the world and life are one’ (5.621). Hence, the
consideration of the modalities of life forms clarifies the logical scaffolding that shows
itself in our life with language.
This represents a tremendous contribution to philosophy by Wittgenstein. It marks a
departure from the traditional view that the modalities of life and meaning are to be taken
to be inherent in organic wholes (biological organisms, kinds, societies). It steps forward
toward a new, evolutionary, modular, fragmented, varied, constructed, manifold, proce-
dural and dynamic conception of concepts that are in play in partial procedures. On this
view, modalities depend on our engagement in life, in logic, in language, in experience
and even in philosophy, as we compare and contrast and refine the ways in which we use
words and techniques of describing and reflecting on events in life. The traditional
concept of form acquires a new significance, which highlights the role of regularities
and norms in life (Regelmässigkeiten). Cultures and societies are not objects ready for
analysis or passively given data. Instead, they are forms of life which can only be
characterized through engagement, as they are lived through, queried, pursued and
shaped by words, which in turn are shaped by them.
A consequence of this conception of philosophical procedure is that divergences and
tensions among our judgements and evaluations should not be taken as rationally
126 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

intractable or as giving us reason to morally criticize or judge our opponents straight-

away (cf. PI §§2, 7, 194, 554). Instead, divergences and tensions can be brought out,
spelled out, recognized, set and reflected upon in our lives. As Diamond has written,
exploring Murdoch’s conception of ethics, we are all ‘perpetually moral’, but this can be
reflected upon in philosophy, which may allow us to see other ‘forms’, or possible
structurings, of and in life.22 In this way, what is simple and obvious to us is brought
out so that it can be experienced and, if need be, readjusted or recast in our lives.
Focusing on Lebensformen is a way of investigating and characterizing, if sometimes
criticizing or upholding, what seems most obvious or right or terrible to us.
Thus, Lebensformen are not cultures or systems of norms. They are not moral systems
that may be described and offered as justifications or criteria for evaluation. They are
rather possibilities of human life forms (or animal or ecological life forms, if we are
discussing these): modes of living carrying with them, in our case, schemes of thinking,
desiring and acting. To see a possibility of living is not to see a whole life, but to see
something that may be analogically applied to cases which are relevantly similar to one
other, forms that may be put at work to shed light on families of difficulties. Logic and
philosophy do not represent what is the case, or hold up the building of our judgements.
Instead, they give us scaffolding: something modular and piecewise connected, needing
to be tailored to the context at hand; raised up, put down and raised up again somewhere
else; transported and brought in as needed to deal with particular problems for which
they may be used. Scaffolding forms of life is essential for humans to be able to build
structures (cultures, values) that will stand and form places to inhabit (cf. PI §240).
Since Lebensformen are not the Umwelt and they are not cultures or systems of
norms, they are not exactly objects of description but fields of philosophical explora-
tion. In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy ideals of simplicity, unlike in the Tractatus, are
not constituted by elementary objects but inhabit what Cavell calls ‘the ordinary’, a
field of exploration of dailiness which we inhabit dynamically as we conduct our lives
with others with words, claims and judgements.23 Here, is it important to note that in
the Investigations, an ‘anthropological moment’ survives. For Lebensformen are found
in very natural and wholly general human activities: we tell stories, we eat, we drink,
we play (PI §25), we interact linguistically (PI §242), we hope and grieve (PI PPF §1).
Wittgenstein seeks the sublime in the ordinary ‘rags and dust’ of our lives with words
(PI §52).
The domestication of logic through Lebensformen is linked to another theme which
emerged around the same time in Wittgenstein’s thinking: that of Regelmässigkeit. In the
summer of 1937 Wittgenstein was working on drafts of the Investigations and discussed
them in Cambridge with Moore, Turing and Alister Watson.24 His exchanges with
Turing, who had (partly under the influence of The Blue Book) developed the idea of
analysing the idea of a formal system in terms of that of a human calculator (the idea of
the Turing machine25) a year earlier 1936. Their discussions with Watson triggered
significant responses in Wittgenstein’s writing about the possibility of a machine that
can symbolize its own actions (cf. PI §§193 ff.). A ‘Turing machine’ is a mathematical,
abstract object, the blueprint of the modern concept of the stored program computer (one
that can modify its own commands). It characterizes the ancient notion of an algorithm.
But in Turing’s way of conceiving it, a Turing Machine is also a ‘language game’: a list
Floyd 127

of instructions that can be grasped and prompt actual human behaviour in reality. In
order to bear on reality, then, the abstract object must be seen by us as a series of
instructions or commands that have a normative force, giving us criteria setting standards
of correct and incorrect behaviour. Wittgenstein ultimately argues that we can see the
algorithm as such if and only if it has the right kind of significance in our lives, can be
embedded in Lebensformen. This is entailed by Turing’s move of making the notion of a
partial function, and not a total function, the basic and not the derived notion.
Depending on how an algorithm is embedded in life, it can bear different under-
standings and modes of significance. As an abstract object, an algorithm is neutral and
impersonal, but when we give life to it, this is no longer so. This conception informed
Turing’s analysis from the beginning, and this is why Wittgenstein responded to Turing’s
work at length. We can also see the traces of Wittgenstein’s ideas about language games
in Turing’s proof that there can be no general decision procedure in logic (his negative
resolution of the famous Entscheidungsproblem).26 As has been shown elsewhere,27 this
proof struck Wittgenstein deeply. It proceeds in a special way, showing the idea that the
limits of logic lie in what we can make sense of as meaningful requests or commands,
rather than in any properties or features of a gap-free mathematical or formal theory.
Within the framework of logic, Turing showed that an order can only be followed in a
context. Wittgenstein spells out in his later philosophy the idea that Regelmässigkeit only
makes sense in the context of a Lebensform.

V Concluding remarks
For Wittgenstein, ethics shows itself in our embeddings of words and actions in life, in
the ‘grammars’ of our lives with words. Living involves selecting, looking at possibi-
lities and necessities and projecting received uses of words and grammars into new
contexts. This in turn relies on our ability to criticize received uses in light of contin-
gencies of life, discovering new possibilities and experimenting with new ways of fail-
ing, suffering, negotiating, succeeding and so on. A form of life is a field of valence,
ethnological and biological, into which our words and actions are embedded. Here, we
must re-evaluate necessities and contingencies over and over again. Our choices are
carried out through ‘passionate utterance’ (cf. Cavell28), engaged always in evolving
processes of positioning, renegotiating, responding, reflecting – with more or less atten-
tion to thoughtfulness and emotional response.
This is not a form of conventionalism, since the binding force of a demand or
command is a plea for a necessity or need in life, given always against a backdrop of
forms and structurings of life, possibilities and necessities. It is not merely the decision of
a group or a consensus. It is not metaphysical particularism, since the responses of agents
must involve dimensions of generalization that are involved in the critical deployment of
concepts with which modalities of situations are considered, imagined, judged and
shared. The later Wittgenstein situates ethics in nature, in a sense; but here ‘nature’ is
not a given structure of the world described by physical science, but is taken to involve a
process of unfolding human forms of life that includes our constant claims to judge: the
words and our social temperaments and responses that are part of reality. The thoroughly
128 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

epideictic qualities of our uses of words involve us in having always to consider con-
tingencies and necessities of human life: Lebensformen.

ORCID iD
Juliet Floyd https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2916-4178

Notes
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). Translated by C. K. Ogden,
International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. (London/New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1921] 1981). First German edition in Annalen der Naturphiloso-
phie, Wilhelm Ostwald (ed.), 14, 1921: 12262. Reprint, Second impression with a few correc-
tions, 1931. Republished 1981.
2. L. Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics” The Philosophical Review 74, (January 1965): 3–12.
Lecture from 1929. Reprinted in Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions, 36–44.
3. Cf. Juliet Floyd, “Aspects of Aspects,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, eds.
Hans Sluga and David Stern. 2nd ed. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 361–88.
4. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen ¼ Philosophical Investigations, trans.
GEM Anscombe, PMS Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Revised 4th ed. (Chichester, West
Sussex, UK/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Second part, “Philosophy of Psychology:
A Fragment” (PPF), formerly known as “Part II.” (PI). Manuscripts of this work in Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Kritisch-Genetische Edition., eds. J. Schulte,
H. Nyman, E. von Savigny, G.H. von Wright (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2001).
Manuscript and page number references to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass manuscripts are to Lud-
wig Wittgenstein. The Published Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Bergen Electronic Edi-
tion. (Intelex Corporation, Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. L. Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical
Occasions 1912–1951, eds. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1993), 118–55.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’: Generally
Known as the Blue and Brown Books. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). Revision in
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Das Blaue Buch, Eine Philosophische Betrachtung (Das Braune Buch).
Translation of The Blue Book and enlargement and editing of The Brown Book revision (MS
115) (1969). Translation by Petra von Morstein. Ed. Rush Rhees. Vol. 5 of Wittgenstein
Werkausgabe. 8 vols. Frankfurt am Main/Oxford: Suhrkamp/Basil Blackwell. The manuscript
is also available in The Published Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Bergen Electronic
Edition.
7. The locus classicus for a critique of the idea that in Philosophical Investigations meaning is
constituted by rules is Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,”
in S. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Revised edition. (Cambridge,
UK/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 44–72.
8. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible
Worlds and A Theory of Meaning. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil, Posthuman Ties, vol. 12.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Original publication Streifzüge durch die
Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, (1934) Verlag von Julius Springer.
Floyd 129

9. Cf. Juliet Floyd, “Chains of Life: Turing, Lebensform, and the Emergence of Wittgenstein’s
Later Style,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5, no. 2 (2016): 7–89; Floyd, “Aspects of Aspects”;
Sebastian Sunday Grève, “Logic and Philosophy of Logic in Wittgenstein,” Australasian
Journal of Philosophy 96, 1 (2017): 1–15; Oskari Kuusela, “Logic and Ideality: Wittgenstein’s
Way beyond Apriorism, Empiricism and Conventionalism in the Philosophy of Logic,” in The
Textual Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, ed. Nuno Venturinha (New
York and London: Routledge, 2013), 93–119.
10. There are many other byways and complexities in the development of Wittgenstein’s thinking
about how to overcome the idea of a complex soul, and solipsism. Two helpful treatments are
David Stern, “Private Language,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, eds. Oskari
Kuusela and Marie McGinn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 333–50; Hans Sluga,
“From Moore’s Lecture Notes to Wittgenstein’s Blue Book,” in Wittgenstein in the 1930s:
Between the Tractatus and the Investigations, ed. David Stern (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2018), 125–40.
11. Cf. Sandra Laugier, “The Myth of the Outer: Wittgenstein’s Redefinition of Subjectivity,”
in Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology, ed.
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 151–73; Sandra Laugier,
“Voice as Form of Life and Life Form,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4 (October 2015):
63–81.
12. Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Cavell, Must We Mean What
We Say?, 73–96.
13. This is articulated more fully in Floyd, “Chains of Life”; Juliet Floyd, “Lebensformen: Living
Logic,” in Language, Form(s) of Life, and Logic. Investigations after Wittgenstein, ed. Chris-
tian Martin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 59–92.
14. See Floyd, “Chains of Life” and Floyd, “Lebensformen”.
15. G. Frege, “On Concept and Object,” in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philo-
sophy, ed. B. McGuinness (New York, Basil Blackwell, 1984), 182–94. Reprinted in The
Frege Reader, ed. by Michael Beaney (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 181–93.
16. Cf. Stanley Cavell. “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” Inquiry
31, no. 3 (1988): 253–64. Reprinted in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures
after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 29–77.
References are to the reprint edition.
17. Cavell. “Declining Decline”.
18. Juliet Floyd, “On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception, Logic and Math-
ematics,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect Seeing, eds. V. Krebs, and
W. Day (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 314–37.
19. Cf. Cora Diamond, “The Face of Necessity,” in C. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgen-
stein, Philosophy and the Mind, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 243–66; Juliet Floyd,
“Aspects of Aspects;” Juliet Floyd, “Lebensformen.”
20. Cf. Neal Koblitz, “A Tale of Three Equations; Or The Emperors Have No Clothes.” The
Mathematical Intelligencer 10, no. 1 (1988): 4–10; Herbert Simon, “Replies to Koblitz,” The
Mathematical Intelligencer 10, no. 1–2 (1988): 11–14, 10–12, a famous controversy over
the mathematicization of social processes which was contested as affording little traction
with relevant samenesses and differences.
21. Cf. Floyd, “Chains of Life”; Floyd, “Lebensformen,” for further discussion.
130 Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(2)

22. Cora Diamond, “‘We are Perpetually Moralists’: Iris Murdoch, Fact and Value,” in Iris
Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Maria Antonaccio, and William Schwei-
ker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 79–109.
23. Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy.”
24. Cf. J. Floyd, “Prose Versus Proof: Wittgenstein on Gödel, Tarski and Truth,” Philosophia Math-
ematica 3, no. 9 (2001): 280–307; J. Floyd, “Turing on ‘Common Sense’: Cambridge
Resonances,” in Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing—Turing 100, eds.
Juliet Floyd, and Alisa Bokulich (New York: Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, 2017), 103–52.
25. Floyd, “Chains of Life”; Floyd, “Turing on ‘Common Sense’.”
26. Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Decision Problem,”
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, no. 42 (1936/7): 230–65. Corrections,
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2 (42) (1937), 544–6.
27. Juliet Floyd, “Wittgenstein’s Diagonal Argument: A Variation on Cantor and Turing,” in
Epistemology Versus Ontology, Logic, Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Per Martin-Löf,
eds. Peter Dybjer, S. Lindström, and E. Palmgren (Dordrecht: Springer ScienceþBusiness
Media, 2012), 25–44; Floyd, “Turing on ‘Common Sense’.”
28. S. Cavell, “Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of an Encounter,” in Contending
with Stanley Cavell, eds. S. Cavell, and R. B. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 177–98.