The Role of the Form of Life

Moving from one form of life to another is not a matter of rational argumentation. The rational reasoning is only possible within the framework of a certain form of life. Wittgenstein says that such movement from a form of life, A, to another one, B, can only happen through some kind of persuasion (von Wright 1972, 14; Wittgenstein 1969, 156, 519).

This connects my conception of language and the notion of form of life to the conventionalist ontology. A shared form of life is the final foundation that makes it possible to have shared beliefs. It also proves the idea that the question is not about any kinds of “contracts” made by people. The basis of “conventions” is located deep in the lives of men. One who joins it is not a contracting party but a participant. For example, one might think of a person withdrawing from society and deciding to live his life “alone”. This is obviously possible, but it does not isolate that person from the shared form of life. Every individual must take part in at least some part of it in order to stay alive.

Conventionalism adapts extremely well to the role Aleksander Peczenik has given to coherence in legal thought (Peczenik 1990a, 275). Coherence deals with forming the largest possible compatible group of propositions. In order for that group to have relevance in a given community it has to be a part of shared beliefs, for it is only these that function as the bearers of the community's ontological commitments. Shared beliefs can focus on the foundation of existence (primary states of affairs) or on the way life is evaluated. Thus communal ethics and morality are, as we will see, also dependant on shared beliefs.

Let us assume that persons A and B belong to the same form of life, L. They have the same shared meanings. Thus a shared language makes it possible for A and B to understand each other. Still, the form of life L allows many different variations, fragments of the form of life. Let there be two of these - that is, F1 and F2. A frag­ment like this corresponds exactly to the world-view - in this case there being two, W1 and W2. There are two different language-games played within the framework of the world-views.

The choices between W1 and W2 can be called basic choices. For their part, they constitute a fragment of the form of life (F₁/ F₂) and the world-view that corresponds to it. In this way, as noticed by Henry Le Roy Finch, it seems to be possible to say that choices are immanent to the concept of the form of life (Finch 1977, 93; Taylor 1976, 228). If we are participants in a language-game, we have to make certain basic choices. This, in turn, means that we cannot accept a world-view based on different basic choices, even though we can understand the other choices due to a shared form of life (L). We understand them because we have a sufficient amount of shared notions. As distinct from this, moving from one world-view to another is always an irrational matter. This, too, is a choice that cannot be explained.

Still, belonging to a certain fragment of a form of life (F1/F2) is not a matter of simple choice. We participate in it just as we take part in an inherited background, to put it in Wittgenstein’s terms. Complex social mechanisms connect man to a certain form of life. In many ways, these processes are subconscious and thus outside our choice. There is no single foundation for explaining why different individuals have a shared fragment of a form of life, a shared world-view.

From the philosophical point of view, a shared form of life provides an explana­tion for the inter-subjectivity of judgements, and makes comprehensible why values are not individual in an arbitrary way. It also makes the foundations of a legal com­munity understandable. The normative commitments gain their inter-subjectivity in a form of life and only in that. Further, the form of life is always a shared matter, at least to some degree. This is also the key as far as the legal community is concerned. In the end, it is based on a form of life. In this regard, Neil MacCormick has used the term “satisfactory form of life”. That term helps a great deal in understanding the reasons why a certain form of life connects lawyers and the legal scholars among them to a common language and a common culture. Let me elucidate by using a story about what happened in the hotel Forum in Warsaw in the late 1970s. I was there waiting for Jerzy Wroblewski before continuing my trip to Lodz. The story goes as follows:

I sat at a table and looked for a waiter to take my order. In the same room, a few tables away, sat a dark-skinned man wearing a beautifully ornamented African ceremonial outfit, with a fur hat on his head. He obviously could not speak a word of Polish, and likely not even English, which the waiter could understand with some difficulty. As time passed, I got my stroganoff while my neighbour got a fish soup. I do not know if he had ordered it. Once he had eaten the soup, he took a pipe and some matches from his pocket and lit a match. At that moment, as the flame flared, I realised that we belonged to the same form of life and shared the same beliefs.

Through these primitive actions, the form of life gathers layers, becoming more abstract until we arrive at the question of the “existence” of a legal norm.

Primitive actions, like a smile as an expression of friendliness, form a complex network of social relationships and the shared beliefs that belong to them. Therefore, these primitive actions are finally the foundation for our shared beliefs, as well as for the basic social conventions from the viewpoint of law. For these reasons, the final foundations cannot be expressed in the ontology, they are only shown. This also stands for law, which is one and, as such, a very important layer of the vast network of silent societal commitments.

Summing up, the task of DSL is, in the end, interlocked with the deep structure of law. What can be kept as certain is based on many-layered beliefs in the norms, concepts and systems of both of them.