Language is not an autonomous system created by an idealistically minded theoretician and strictly bound to the world structure. It was formed in the process of culture development and bears the influence of every historical personality that ever existed. Bearing in mind the experience of cultural and anthropological studies, Wittgenstein defined language as a "form of life". This became the starting point of an alternative conception of meaning developed by him, which, unlike the classical theory of meaning based on the idea of truth as something corresponding to a true fact, is characterized by pragmatic understanding of meaning as a method consisting in applying certain rules governing human activity in one sphere or another. Wittgenstein was fortunate in finding the "game" metaphor, as the rules of a game are not normally subject to discussion and need not be justified, but are merely applied more or less successfully. Language as a "form of life" is a specific semiotic process, where signs do not represent any pre- or extralinguistic reality, but where signs simply denote signs. Thus life is no longer defined as a certain "natural", "basic", "fundamental" way of exploring the world as soon as it becomes a semiotic game.

What is life in Wittgenstein's sense? Is it related to life philosophy, existence or the Diltheyan "life experience as a form of life itself", or the Heideggerian notion of "care" and "being brought to nothingness in death" or "hermeneutic discourse" which, according to Gadamer, is a fortunate combination of theory and everyday-life practice? Of course, Wittgenstein's understanding of everyday-life practice formally does not answer any of the above-mentioned definitions. On the one hand, his approach to it is purely instrumental: he even uses the word "training" when talking of language teaching. Adults do not need to prove anything when they teach children to speak a language; they either act in an imperative manner as "initiators" or they might say, "do this; when you grow up you will know why this is so". On the other hand, these "foundations" function as rituals for adults. This gives us the ground for regarding even scholarly communities as something like the ancient tribes with their customs.

Wittgenstein's approach has been classified by modern researchers as "sociocultural". One can, however, regard "the principle of following the rule" as an individual action of repetition. What Kierkegaard and Nietzsche describe in their works probably comes close to the notion of human fate or destiny. A comparison between Gadamer's terminology and Wittgenstein's idea of "training" reveals an important difference between them. In Gadamer's view, it is "the meaning of being" which reveals itself through the existential experience of Dasein, that is subject to repetition, whereas, according to Wittgenstein's theory, there are no rules which could exist independently of any repetitions. Gadamer's phenomenological background makes him assume the existence of some virtual substance, which he, being Heidegger's follower, proposes to "grasp" not with the help of "eidetic intuition" but through existential experience, which he understands as reciprocal openness of the world and the human being. In the light of M. Foucault's views Wittgenstein's definition of a rule as an institution or a form of life could receive a different interpretation. The essence of this new interpretation is that it is the society that determines what should be considered as "right" or "wrong". In this way, Wittgenstein's understanding of the idea of "everyday-life practices" has greatly contributed to such key notions as Foucault's and Habermas's "discourse" as well as G. Derrida's deconstruction technique.

In order to answer the question about the relationship between life and analytical philosophy one would have to carefully examine the possibilities of the above-mentioned projects. In our view, analytical philosophy is making am attempt to answer the challenge of "life" and the "human world". The originality of Wittgenstein's treatment of "meaning" consists in his considering certain non-linguistic acts, such as order, promise, etc., which are, however, expressed in the language as performatives or speech acts and which synthesize the discourse and the non-discourse, as an "interpretation criterion". And this answer, in spite of all the bottlenecks of the speech act theory, is certainly comparable with the answer given within the framework of hermeneutics, discourse and deconstruction theory.