Form and experience : The given and the inherited – after Cassirer and Wittgenstein

This paper tries to build a dialogue between the notion of “form of life” that can be found in Wittgenstein’s texts, and the “symbolic form”, a concept set up by Ernst Cassirer. Bringing those two notions together aims at having another perspective about experience, and the notion of knowledge based on experience, and at determining how far this experience is itself to be integrated into “frames” (of reference, or experience) or forms, that in the same time give their structure to this experience, or is capable to be transformed. Questioning the notion of “given” as being a fixed “already there”, which is a common ground of Wittgenstein and Cassirer, is the starting point of the confrontation, which carries on with the examination of “localisation” of the forms, within three directions: what articulation are they able to provide between a specific situation and a frame of reference in which the latter is integrated? Are they to be inscribed in natural or biological constitution, or are they to be considered as social and conventional? How is this “inscription” of experience to be understood and set up, so as not to fall back into any kind of idealism, which is equally discarded by the two authors?