What are forms of life?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Ludwig Wittgenstein answers

Language is not a system floating free of everything else we do. When I say that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life, I mean that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, woven into a whole fabric of actions, reactions, and practices.¹ Consider how a child comes to language. The teaching is not explanation — it is training.²

The child does not first grasp meanings and then learn to apply words; the child is brought up to perform certain actions, to use certain words as they do so, and to react in certain ways to the words of others.³ The words grow out of the doing. A form of life is precisely that: the doing, the reacting, the shared practice, within which the words have their home.

This is why the simple language-games I describe in the Investigations and the Blue and Brown Books — the builder calling "Slab!" and the assistant fetching it, the counting of apples, the asking for names — are not incomplete fragments of a richer language.⁴ They are complete systems of human communication in themselves.⁵ What makes them complete is not their complexity but the fact that they are embedded in a whole way of acting together.

Strip away the activity and you have stripped away the meaning. The craving for generality makes us want to say: but what is a form of life, essentially? And here the craving itself is the confusion.⁶ There is no single property that all forms of life share, any more than there is a single property shared by all games. They form a family — overlapping practices, overlapping reactions, overlapping agreements in what we do and say.⁷

Our language itself exhibits this. It is not a uniform calculus but an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions built on in various periods, surrounded by suburbs with straight regular streets.⁸ Each district grew up with the practices of those who lived in it. The suburbs of chemistry and the infinitesimal calculus were added when new forms of life — new practices of measuring, calculating, experimenting — called for them.⁹

The language and the life extended together. So: a form of life is not a philosophical posit I am adding to a theory of meaning. It is what you see when the mental mist disperses — when, instead of asking what meaning is, you look at what people do.¹⁰

Sources

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
Philosophical Investigations, p. 36
Here the teaching of language is not explaining, but training.
Philosophical Investigations, p. 32
The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in way to the words of others.
Philosophical Investigations, p. 32
fetch me six apples from the grocer... And here you have a case of the use of words. I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games.
The Blue and Brown Books, p. 37
We are not, however, regarding the language games which we describe as incomplete parts of a language, but as languages complete in themselves, as complete systems of human communication.
The Blue and Brown Books, pp. 101–102
Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality.
The Blue and Brown Books, p. 37
games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap.
The Blue and Brown Books, p. 37
Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.
Philosophical Investigations, p. 36
whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated into it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language.
Philosophical Investigations, p. 36
When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent.
The Blue and Brown Books, p. 37