ABSTRACT
Do we today inhabit an “emergent form of life”? The term form of life was made most famous in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but my use of it is hardly a rigorous application of Wittgenstein’s argument. By a “form of life,” I simply mean to point to the rules and premises for “behaving ourselves,” for conducting a life; that is to say, the ways in which our forms of conduct are linked to ways in which we understand ourselves and others; to our sense of what we can hope for or what we must fear; to our ways of judging right and wrong, desirable and undesirable; and also to our conceptions of our obligations toward others and toward ourselves. I also like the term forms of life because it links this reference to the ways in which one may conduct one’s life, to another sense-that implied by the idea of a “life form.” That is to say, it relates to the question of what we are today, as creatures, as life forms or living beings. In this essay, I want to suggest that there are some intriguing new links between our forms of life and our sense of ourselves as particular life forms. In identifying such links, I do not mean to imply that there is a simple causal connection between, say, new biomedical or genetic concepts and new ways of living. This is why I use the term emergence. The idea of emergence has become popular with the increasing interest in “complexity theory,” but once more I use the term rather loosely, simply to refer to something new, which arises not from a single event or discovery, but often unexpectedly and contingently at the intersection of multiple pathways. I like the term emergence because it stresses that there are no necessary relations between the different pathways which happen to coincide at a specifi c point. Something new arises when a series of often quite distinct developments intersect, interact, crash into one another, combine, and redivide, and so on. Sometimes, not always, something novel takes shape as a result. That is the kind of image that I am trying to convey in this term emergent forms of life.
