Form of life (German:Lebensform) is a term used sparingly byLudwig Wittgenstein in his posthumously published worksPhilosophical Investigations (PI),On Certainty, and parts of hisNachlass.[1] It is a term widely understood to refer to the shared background of human cultural practices, activities, and ways of living that provide the context within which language and meaning operate.
Wittgenstein in hisTractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) was concerned with the structure of language, responding toGottlob Frege andBertrand Russell. Later, Wittgenstein found the need to revise the view he held inTLP, because he had not resolved issues concerningelementary propositions. Leading up to a revised view in hisPI, Wittgenstein was still concerned with language, but he now focused on how language is used and did not insist that it has an inherent structure or set of rules.Late Wittgenstein saw language as emerging from human activity.
Italian philosopherGiorgio Agamben uses Wittgenstein's concepts in his analysis of the history of Western monasticism in order to rethink "bare life" in contemporary (bio)politics. InThe Highest Poverty – Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (2013 but originally published in Italian in 2011), he finds earlier versions of form-of-life in monastic rules, developing from 'vita vel regula', 'regula et vita', 'forma vivendi', and 'forma vitae'. Agamben looks at the emerging genre of written rules starting in the 9th century, and its development into both law and something beyond law in the Franciscan form-of-life, in which the Franciscans replaced the idea that we possess our life (or objects generally) with the concept of 'usus', that is 'use'.[2]