The Life We Share in Language
In Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language by Lars Hertzberg, language is not a tool we wield from the outside but the medium in which we live. Language is not a mirror of reality; it is the social world itself—the structure through which we understand one another, agree, disagree, and coordinate our actions. From this perspective, the philosophy of language is no longer about “how words represent things,” but about “how words work within life.” We cannot step outside language to observe it from without, just as fish cannot step out of water to study water. Language is the form of our life, the way we dwell in the world, shape our relations, create togetherness, and interpret experience.
Wittgenstein shifted philosophy from representational obsession to grammatical inquiry into practice. The claim that “meaning is use” is not a slogan but an epistemological revolution. Earlier traditions, from Frege to Russell, saw language as reflecting the logical structure of the world: a sentence was meaningful if it mapped onto a fact. But Wittgenstein showed that language is far more diverse and fluid. We use it to question, command, promise, swear, joke, pray, sing, and lament. Each of these activities has its own internal rules and logic. There is no single form of “meaning” that unites them, but a family of language-games that overlap and intersect. In this sense, language is a mosaic of human practices.
Hertzberg takes up this inheritance to expose the illusion of modern representationalism—the idea that human thought operates by mapping reality into propositions. In real life, utterances are not maps but actions. When someone says “I promise,” they are not describing an inner state; they are doing something—binding themselves to a social norm. Likewise, when we say “I know,” we are not reporting what’s in our head but assuming epistemic responsibility. Every utterance involves norms of use that entail justification, correction, or proof.
This is the core of the life we live with language: meaning is always normative and public. A word has meaning because there are rules governing how it is used, and those rules can only function within a community. There is no truly “private language,” because following a rule requires the possibility of correction. If I invented a personal language for my own sensations, I would never be able to distinguish between following a rule and thinking I follow it. Without public criteria, that distinction collapses. Thus, language lives only where people correct, teach, and learn from each other.
Yet “rules” here are not rigid laws but living habits. They exist in our shared practices and customs—in what Wittgenstein called a form of life. A form of life is not a metaphysical concept but a network of practices and beliefs that make communication possible: pointing, giving examples, imitating, nodding, rejecting, trusting, doubting, affirming. We are born into a form of life before we know language, and it is within that life that language takes shape. A child learns meaning not by memorizing definitions but by participating—watching others, imitating, being corrected, and discovering when an expression counts as “right.”
Hertzberg emphasizes that to live with language is to live within norms. We do not merely utter words; we judge whether they are right, wrong, polite, honest, misleading. Every expression inhabits a web of value, because speaking always means taking a position in a social game. This makes language not merely a mechanism of information but a moral structure. Through language, we not only convey facts but also make claims that can be held accountable.
If language is a form of life, every shift in that life—technology, politics, media—reshapes our grammar. When communication moves from face-to-face to digital media, what counts as “honesty,” “politeness,” or “courage” changes. Emojis replace facial gestures, expanding the emotional grammar that once existed only in direct presence. Social media alters the norm of justification: people are no longer required to present arguments, only signals of affiliation. “I agree” no longer means “I understand your reasons,” but “I belong to your side.” In such contexts, language loses epistemic depth and becomes a badge of membership.
Hertzberg’s reflection warns us against this narrowing. Meaning cannot be reduced to signals, because meaning presupposes rational normativity—the possibility of being right or wrong. When public discourse collapses into echo chambers, language loses its corrective mechanism. To preserve the life we share with language, we must protect spaces for criticism and dialogue.
To deepen this analysis, we can draw on Robert Brandom’s inferentialism: the meaning of an expression lies in its inferential role within the space of giving and asking for reasons. When I say “the sky is cloudy,” I undertake certain commitments (“it may rain”) and grant others the right to challenge my claim. Language is a network of inferential rights and obligations. In this frame, Hertzberg’s view becomes a kind of discursive ethics: living with language means living within a structure of mutual accountability.
But there is a subtler dimension: language also includes silence, gesture, and irony. Not all meaning arises from explicit propositions. In many contexts, what is unsaid carries the strongest force. A friend’s silence in a debate may express dissent more powerfully than words. Silence, too, can be a move in a language-game—a rule-governed act. Thus, language extends into the body, the gaze, the gesture.
Here phenomenology becomes relevant: the meaning of living with language lies not only in rational propositions but in embodied experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty called this “the speaking body.” Our body is not a passive instrument but part of expression itself. When someone points, laughs, or looks away, they participate in a nonverbal grammar as powerful as speech. Living with language, then, is the life of bodies in a shared world, not a dialogue of abstract minds.
The form of life also reshapes epistemology. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein introduced the idea of “hinge propositions”: beliefs we do not doubt—not because they are proven, but because doubting them would dissolve the very game of inquiry. “The earth existed before I was born” or “everyone has a body” are not hypotheses but the hinges on which doubt turns. Hertzberg reads this as a warning against the quest for ultimate foundations: knowledge does not begin from metaphysical certainty but from trust rooted in practice. Our epistemic life is not a tower of logic but a network of habits—mutable but not all at once.
Thus, language is a social organism—flexible yet stable. It can evolve through analogy, metaphor, or new technology, but not all change is permissible. Every form of life has its hard joints, the points that sustain shared meaning. When technology forces change too rapidly, as with automated communication, we risk losing these normative anchors. If machines produce utterances without accountability, we lose our public mechanism for correction.
Hence, the question of AI is not whether machines can “think,” but whether they can “follow rules” in the normative sense. Following a rule means not just reproducing statistical patterns but understanding when an application counts as right or wrong in a public context. It demands awareness of error and a commitment to correction. As long as systems lack a place within the structure of giving and asking for reasons, they remain outsiders to language-games.
Yet this reflection opens a new paradox. If meaning arises only within a form of life, then new digital forms of life are emerging—co-writing with machines, algorithmic dialogue, data-based decision-making. Does this mean our grammar itself is changing? Perhaps. We are creating a form of life in which non-human agents participate. What must remain intact, however, is normativity—the principle that communication still means giving reasons, not merely triggering responses.
Hertzberg’s analysis can also be extended to ethics and politics. Language is a medium of power and responsibility. When a leader speaks, their words create realities: decisions, orders, laws. To understand language is to understand how norms of society are shaped and enforced. Philosophy of language, therefore, is never neutral; it concerns how societies decide what may be said, who may speak, and who will be heard. Living together in language is always also living together under power.
Philosophy’s role is to reveal how power operates through grammar. When “national security” is invoked to silence criticism, political grammar shifts: “safety” begins to mean “obedience.” Thus philosophy meets hermeneutics: its task is not to invent new theories but to interpret how words change meaning within shifting forms of life.
Hertzberg rejects the notion that philosophy can find eternal foundations for meaning. Philosophy, for him, is a reflective activity within everyday life—re-examining rules, observing shifts, refining our understanding of words. Philosophy adds no new information; it transforms perception. It works like therapy: dissolving confusions born of our own linguistic misunderstandings.
To live with language, then, is to keep learning the rules we follow without realizing it. In conversation, debate, and writing, we do not merely exchange information; we renew the life we share. Every time we change how we speak—about love, justice, truth, or knowledge—we change how we live.
Language is the history of human life condensed into words. It carries our traumas, habits, and discoveries. When someone says “I believe,” they inherit the whole history of belief—from religious faith to social contract. So too with words like “freedom,” “dignity,” “rationality”: each bears layers of collective experience. Studying language, therefore, is excavating an archaeology of meaning—tracing how words were shaped by human life.
In this way, Hertzberg’s thought leads to a hermeneutic ethics: the responsibility to treat language not as a dead instrument but as a living organism. Language can decay—when standardized, manipulated, or severed from life. It heals when used honestly, openly, reflectively.
If we see the world through language, then preserving the honesty of language means preserving reality itself. When language is distorted by propaganda, reality blurs. When technical jargon hides moral responsibility, we lose ethical orientation. Thus, maintaining the life we share through language is both a political and moral duty.
In the modern world, language faces two opposite dangers: inflation and impoverishment. On one side, words are overused until they lose weight—every idea reduced to a slogan. On the other, digital systems demand extreme simplification: words measured by clicks rather than depth. Hertzberg’s philosophy offers a quiet resistance to both trends: it restores our attention to context, to the subtleties of use, to the complexity of meaning that cannot be compressed into data.
Language, when thought deeply, is not an instrument. It is the way humans hold the world together. It shapes social reality as law shapes political order. We call something “false” or “true” because there is a normative grammar we share, and that grammar survives only through healthy communicative practices.
Ultimately, to live with language is to embrace both limitation and plurality. Not everyone speaks within the same grammar, but that diversity is not an obstacle—it is the source of meaning. Meaning emerges from negotiation across differences: through listening, adjustment, and shared invention. Philosophy of language teaches us to listen before we respond, to understand before we judge.
Living with language also requires the willingness to be silent. Not all meaning must be spoken; silence is sometimes the highest form of respect for complexity. In silence, language prepares itself for renewal.
When we realize that language is the home of life, we become more careful with words. Every utterance becomes an act that shapes the world. Every word can heal or harm. Language is not a thing—it is a responsibility.
Hertzberg helps us see that this responsibility is not heroic or grand. It grows in everyday acts: how we question, respond, listen, give reasons. In these small gestures, the world of language is renewed.
To understand the life we live with language is to see ourselves as caretakers of social grammar—not as police of meaning but as its stewards. We must resist both reduction and relativism: resist the fantasy that meaning can be frozen in a single definition, and resist the cynicism that says all meanings are equal. Wittgenstein’s legacy shows the middle path: meaning is historical and social, yet normative; it can change, but not arbitrarily.
This awareness brings us to an ethics of interpretation: the responsibility to speak and read in fidelity to life itself. Language is the meeting place of self and world. There, truth is not mechanical correspondence but an honest encounter between words and lived reality.
Meaning is never finished; it grows with life. As long as humans keep speaking, acting, and creating, the grammar of the world will evolve, but its spirit remains: language is the life we live together.
And perhaps this is Hertzberg’s deepest insight: we do not live in a world made of things, but in a world built of words. The world is not only what we see—it is what we say together. To live with language is to live within the web of meanings we weave every day, with our hands, our voices, and our shared awareness that every utterance is part of the common fate of humankind.