Monday, March 4, 2013

Wittgenstein on aesthetics

What I think of as Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics are actually just notes taken by students, but they are pretty good notes, and the material is rich. There are some useful quotes here and a nice account of the lectures here.

The part that most interests me at the moment is this (edited) passage (my emboldening):
5. One thing we always do when discussing a word is to ask how we were taught it. Doing this on the one hand destroys a variety of misconceptions, on the other hand gives you a primitive language in which the word is used. Although this language is not what you talk when you are twenty, you get a rough approximation to what kind of language game is going to be played. Cf. How did we learn ‘I dreamt so and so’? The interesting point is that we didn’t learn it by being shown a dream. If you ask yourself how a child learns ‘beautiful’, ‘fine’, etc., you find it learns them roughly as interjections. (‘Beautiful’ is an odd word to talk about because it’s hardly ever used.) A child generally applies a word like ‘good’ first to food. One thing that is immensely important in teaching is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. The word is taught as a substitute for a facial expression or a gesture. The gestures, tones of voice, etc., in this case are expressions of approval. What makes the word an interjection of approval? {2.1} It is the game it appears in, not the form of words. (If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation, including Moore, I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words.) 
6. If you came to a foreign tribe, whose language you didn’t know at all and you wished to know what words corresponded to ‘good’, ‘fine’, etc., what would you look for? You would look for smiles, gestures, food, toys. ([Reply to objection:] If you went to Mars and men were spheres with sticks coming out, you wouldn’t know what to look for. Or if you went to a tribe where noises made with the mouth were just breathing or making music, and language was made with the ears. Cf. “When you see trees swaying about they are talking to one another.” (“Everything has a soul.”) You compare the branches with arms. Certainly we must interpret the gestures of the tribe on the analogy of ours.) How far this takes us from normal aesthetics [and ethics—T]. We don’t start from certain words, but from certain occasions or activities.
8. It is remarkable that in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘fine’, etc., play hardly any role at all. Are aesthetic adjectives used in a musical criticism? You say: “Look at this transition”, {3.2} or [Rhees] “The passage here is incoherent”. Or you say, in a poetical criticism, [Taylor]: “His use of images is precise”. The words you use are more akin to ‘right’ and ‘correct’ (as these words are used in ordinary speech) than to ‘beautiful’ and ‘lovely’. {3.3}
And here's another bit:
23. We talked of correctness. A good cutter won’t use any words except words like ‘Too long’, ‘All right’. When we talk of a Symphony of Beethoven we don’t talk of correctness. Entirely different things enter. One wouldn’t talk of appreciating the tremendous things in Art. In certain styles in Architecture a door is correct, and the thing is you appreciate it. But in the case of a Gothic Cathedral what we do is not at all to find it correct—it plays an entirely different role with us. {8.1}  The entire game is different. It is as different as to judge a human being and on the one hand to say ‘He behaves well’ and on the other hand ‘He made a great impression on me’. 
Two things that strike me are the difference between articulate appreciation and just saying "Ah!", for one thing, and the difference between art that gets things right and art that is tremendous, for another. I think Wittgenstein has a similar distinction in mind when he says that "the house I built for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, and expression of great understanding... But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open - that is lacking." Culture and Value (1980 edition, p. 38e, from 1940). He also says somewhere that really good architecture is like a gesture, like someone saying something. Speaking (in this sense) is then quite different from following rules, which is perhaps not what one would expect to find Wittgenstein saying. And it is not what he says, it's my gloss, but he comes interestingly close to it.

Why does it matter that a child first uses the word 'good' in connection with food or toys or something of the sort? We no longer speak the language of our childhood, and yet there is a sense, an obvious sense, in which we do. We do still use the word 'good' and it is the same word, even if we now use it in more sophisticated ways. It makes little sense to say, "This food is good, but I don't want to eat it," or "This music is good but I don't like it." Those sentences can make sense, of course, but the latter sounds as though it perhaps means, "I know I'm supposed to like this stuff, but I just don't." The word 'good' is in quotation marks. Which suggests that a question like "Why be good?" really makes no sense. The real question is what do we actually regard as good, not why we should pursue what we so regard. Although even that might not be much of a question, since we know pretty well what we regard as good. The challenge, or one challenge, is, so to speak, maximizing the good. This sounds too consequentialist to be quite right, but I mean making sure that we act consistently with our priorities. For instance, I like money but if my pursuit of money costs me things that I love even more (my family, the local wildlife, etc.) then I have behaved foolishly. This is obvious, but I think it's quite difficult in practice to avoid this kind of folly. Another challenge, if I can call it that, would be to do the tremendous. Socrates in the Crito might be an example of this. 

I'll be returning to this. I think there could be a lot to think about in connection with ethics that I haven't really thought about before.      


  1. "My emboldening": It looks as though you also did some embiggening.

  2. I based 'emboldening' on the verb 'to embiggen', but I did not intend to do any embiggening. I'll see if I can fix that.

  3. Fixed it, I think. And here's the origin of 'embiggen', for any puzzled etymologists: The Simpsons

  4. Hi Duncan. No sure if you are interested, but the book I sent you has some stuff about these lectures (chapter 7). I see them as being about the philosophy of insight. There's some stuff on p. 93 about the relationship between "following rules" and being a connoisseur (comparing Dworkin, quoting remark 15). There's a quote in PI (somewhere) on the same point that I missed. Both support the same idea: aesthetical judgments are made by one who has become a master of the rules, so to speak. It's not that rules are not there for this person, of course, it is that the aspect sight is so good for this particular thing, that he or she knows when or what to violate (or change) concerning them -- the result being that what they serve or do is, paradoxically, enhanced. The relationship between these lectures and aspect-sight and imponderable evidence, etc., are very strong. (Not sure if this is at all what you were driving at).

  5. Thanks, Sean. I'm very interested, and still looking forward to reading your book. It doesn't perhaps reflect very well on me, but I find Wittgenstein's examples of going to a tailor especially helpful. That is, I can relate more to the experience of buying a pair of jeans than I can to assessing the performance of some piece of classical music, where I'm much more likely to say "Ah!" or "How charming!" than anything very knowledgeable. And in something like that (buying jeans, getting a haircut) there both are and are not rules, it seems to me. You might know that you want regular fit, for instance, rather than loose or boot cut, but you probably also care about the shade of blue (or maybe black), the uniformity of the color, the acceptability or not of some distress, and so on and so on. Some people just don't care about these details, others care enormously. The relevant details can be articulated to some extent (I'm this size, I like these brands, I want this kind of style) but only to a limited extent. At some point you know what's wrong or right when you see it, and there's not much more you can say. Not that there's nothing you can say: you might identify some as too dorky, some as too trendy, etc. But it might well be hard or impossible to specify the relevant criteria. I think this is where the whole culture comes in. What, after all, does 'dorky' mean? Why is it bad? What would it mean to say that a pair of pants was too young for a 46-year old to wear? Etc. A connoisseur of jeans understands all these things without having to think about them, perhaps even without being able to think about them in any explicit or fully-spelled-out way. And the more of a connoisseur you are the less you probably use explicit rules and the less you are probably able to explain to others how you distinguish the right things from the wrong, or less good. You could explain to another connoisseur, perhaps, if you had to, but not to someone way below you in understanding. They juts wouldn't get it. (Which is not to deny that they might become a connoisseur with your help. But it would take time.)

    It would be fascinating to try to relate all this to ethics, law, aspect-seeing, etc., etc. Or to read someone else's work on that kind of project.