Ordinary life integrates within itself functionally and meaningfully everything there is but depends upon nothing in particular. Thus ordinary life is both rich and essential at the same time. It is not just the life of ordinary men and women – both its infinite richness and essentialness make it all pervasive. Life pre-supposes ordinary life. This means that wherever there is life, there is ordinary life, and the absence of the latter amounts not only to merely the absence of any other forms of life but to situations or conditions in which it makes no sense to talk of human life. Changes unleashed by information technology and bioengineering are leading to the imagining of such forms of life in future as are devoid of ordinary life. This involves a contradiction, for no life is imaginable without ordinary life. Just as you can have formal or technical languages for specific and well-defined tasks but not as a substitute for ordinary language, and just as you necessarily require o...

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