In his Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein illustrates “the subject matter of Ethics” through the effect of Galton’s composite photography, just as he experimented with it years before in the composite photograph of his sisters and himself:
“My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica. He says: ‘Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good.’ Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics. And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos of different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the picture of the typical features they all had in common. And as by showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the typical – say – Chinese face; so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of Ethics.”
Here we have at the same time a first indication of his later concept of Familienähnlichkeit (family resemblance): “the family of structures more or less related to one another.-” (Philosophical Investigations I, paragraph 108) and this also relates it to the notion of Lebensform (form of life) as in paragraph 23: “But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? – There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term “‘language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” But it is important to remember that Wittgenstein uses Lebensform not as a philosophical terminus technicus as he warns in paragraph 116:
“When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”
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