Voice as Form of Life and Life Form

Abstract

This paper studies the concept of form of life as central to ordinary language philosophy (as understood in Wittgenstein’s, Austin’s and Stanley Cavell’s work): philosophy of our language as spoken; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. Such an approach to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shifts the question of the common use of language – central to Wittgenstein’s Investigations – to the definition of the subject as voice, and to the reinvention of subjectivity in language. The voice is both a subjective and common expression: it is what makes it possible for my individual voice, or claim, to become shared and for our forms of life to be intertwined with a lifeform.