Wittgenstein, Ludwig [addendum 2]

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Although aesthetics was a subject of deep and lifelong importance to Ludwig Wittgenstein, he wrote very little directly on the topic. He did, however, write remarks on the visual arts, literature and poetry, architecture, and especially music throughout his multifarious writings on the philosophies of language, mind, mathematics, psychology, and philosophical method. A number of these remarks, including some from his more personal notebooks, are collected in Culture and Value, and scholars have the collected notes from a course of lectures he gave in Cambridge in 1938. In those lectures Wittgenstein was quick to differentiate between types of questions, particularly between questions of empirical psychology and aesthetic questions (he said that, while he was interested in scientific issues, only conceptual and aesthetic issues could truly grip him).

He also looked, with at the time unprecedented detail, into the nuances of humankind's actual critically descriptive aesthetic language, showing how remote such context-specific articulations are from questions of the highest level of aesthetic generality, e.g. "What is Beauty?" He also showed how particularized aesthetic judgments can be supported by reasons as they emerge within a particularized context of aesthetic perception and evaluation, but without recourse to a more general theory that underwrites the judgment. Wittgenstein also investigated, and underscored the importance of, the contextual backdrop and the artistic tradition from which a work emerges; aesthetic reasoning, he suggested, very often proceeds by comparative juxtaposition, not by a form of deductive argumentation from general principles (and yet it is, in a full-blooded sense, reasoning nonetheless).

Scholars also have the record by G. E. Moore of Wittgenstein's lectures of 1930–1933, a document that has been of particular value to those working in the philosophy of criticism. In them, Wittgenstein made one link between the philosophies of language and of art explicit, developing a similarity between the meaning of the word "game" and the word "art." Like the class of all games, he suggested, art has no single essence, common property, or unitary feature present in all cases and by virtue of which the object in question is justifiably characterized as a work of art. This thought, along with the writings in his Philosophical Investigations concerning "family resemblance" concepts, i.e. concepts or classes whose members may exhibit some overlapping characteristics but no one defining feature in common, generated the view (articulated in the writings in the 1950s of Morris Weitz, William Kennick, and others) that art is itself an "open concept."

As such, it would prove intrinsically resistant to any traditional or essence-capturing definition; writers on aesthetics of the period frequently endorsed an "anti-essentialism" on these grounds. But this led, in turn, to the counter-argument (beginning with Maurice Mandelbaum) that the defining feature making essentialistic definition possible after all may not be an exhibited property, specifically that it may be relational in nature (just as it is a relational, ascertainable, and category-membership-determining fact about a person that she is or is not a grandmother, but this will not be a visually discernible or "exhibited" property). This was followed in turn by institutional theories of art (developed, in very different ways, by Arthur Danto and George Dickie, among others) designed to capture art's essence, the single property that at bottom makes it what it is. Debate about the viability, the general applicability, and the degree of illumination provided by such accounts, continues to the present.

Other strands of Wittgenstein's philosophy as they relate to aesthetic considerations have also been taken up since the 1950s and 1960s and continue into the early twenty-first century. These include studies in the 1970s and 1980s of the significance of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-perception and "seeing-as" in connection with problems of the visual discernment of representational content in a marked surface (by Richard Wollheim, who amended the concept to that of "seeing-in," and by others) and in connection with the perception of expressive properties and the use of expressive predicates (by Benjamin Tilghman and others). Others have continued to explore areas that extend well beyond the quite narrow issue of definition versus anti-essentialism (mistakenly, and ironically, regarded by many as the essence of the significance of Wittgenstein's later philosophical writings for aesthetic understanding). These include studies, in the 1990s to the 2000s, of the significance of Wittgenstein's remarks on "language-games" and a "form of life" in his philosophy of language for literary language as well as, conversely, the value of literary cases for work in the philosophy of language, studies of his remarks on music, studies of the complex interrelations between philosophical conceptions of linguistic meaning and aesthetic theory, studies of the relations between ethical and aesthetic values, studies of the legacy of romanticism in relation to Wittgenstein's later thought, studies of Wittgenstein's writings on self-reference and self-description for questions concerning autobiographical language and self-knowledge, and assessments of Wittgenstein's writings for literary aesthetics. Taken as a whole, late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century work on Wittgenstein's aesthetics has shown that the focus on definition was only one aspect among many.

Aesthetics, History Of; Art, Expression In; Art, Representation In; Danto, Arthur; Moore, George Edward; Visual Arts, Theory of The; Wollheim, Richard.

Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Blackwell, 1968.

Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Allen, Richard, and Malcolm Turvey, eds. Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Dauber, Kenneth, and Walter Jost, eds. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Eldridge, Richard. Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Elton, William, ed. Aesthetics and Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954.

Hagberg, Garry L. Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Hagberg, Garry L. Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Kennick, William E. "Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?" Mind 67 (3) (July 1958): 317–334.

Lewis, Peter B., ed. Wittgenstein, Aesthetics, and Philosophy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

Mandelbaum, Maurice. "Family Resemblances and Generalization concerning the Arts." American Philosophical Quarterly 12 (3) (1965): 219–228.

Moore, George Edward. "Wittgenstein's Lectures, 1930–1933." In Philosophical Papers, 252–324. London: Allen & Uwin, 1959.

Tilghman, B. R. But Is It Art? The Value of Art and the Temptation of Theory. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Tilghman, B. R. Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Weitz, Morris. "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1) (September 1956): 27–35.

Wollheim, Richard. Arts and Its Objects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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