Wittgenstein on Forms of Life and the Immediacy of Habit

Though Wittgenstein conceived of forms of life as the given that has to be accepted, his analyses are not what we might expect: they are not descriptions of empirical facts. On the contrary, they are grammatical investigations, primarily concerned with the normative dimension of our concepts. In this paper I elaborate on the notion of the given, trying to show that it includes linguistic habits characterized by the immediacy (or blindness) of rule following. This allows the philosopher to conceive of language-acquired habits as "having become nature to us", thus as a constitutive part of the given, without eliminating the normative dimension of linguistic habits by reducing them to non-linguistic entities, whether physical or mental. The last point highlights the difference between Wittgenstein’s and William James's conception of the role of experience (Erlebnis) in concept formation.