## 1. The Critique of Traditional Aesthetics




Wittgenstein's opening remark is double-barreled: he states that
the field of aesthetics is both very big and entirely misunderstood. By
"very big", I believe he means both that the aesthetic
dimension weaves itself through all of philosophy in the manner
suggested above, and that the reach of the *aesthetic* in human
affairs is very much greater than the far more restricted reach of the
*artistic*; the world is densely packed with manifestations of
the aesthetic sense or aesthetic interest, while the number of works of
art is very much smaller. There is good reason, in his discussions that
follow, to believe that he intends that any comprehensive account of
the aesthetic would acknowledge the former, and not just - as a
good number of philosophical accounts have so restricted themselves
- the latter. By "entirely misunderstood", it
emerges that he means both (1) that aesthetic questions are of a
conceptual type *very* distinct from empirical questions and the
kind of answer, or conceptual satisfaction, we want is very unlike what
we might get from an experiment in empirical psychology, and (2) that
the philosophically traditional method of essentialistic definition
- determining the essence that all members of the class
"works of art" exhibit and by virtue of which they are so
classified - will conceal from our view more than it
reveals. 


### 1.1 Properties and Essence




It is also vividly apparent from the outset of these lectures that
Wittgenstein is urging a heightened vigilance to the myriad ways in
which words can, on their grammatical surface, mislead. If, right at
the beginning of the inquiry, we see that we use the word
"beautiful" as an adjective, we may well very shortly find
ourselves asking what is the essence of the *property* beauty
that this particular example exhibits. Imagining a book of philosophy
investigating parts of speech (but very many more parts than we find
in an ordinary grammar book) where we would give very detailed and
nuanced attention to "seeing", "feeling",
along with other verbs of personal experience, and equally lengthy
studies of "all", "any", "some",
numerals, first person pronoun usages, and so forth, he suggests that
such a book would, with sufficient attention paid to the contextual
intricacies of the grammar of each usage, lay bare the confusion into
which language can lead us. Later, in his *Philosophical
Investigations* (Wittgenstein 1958), he will go on to famously
develop the analogy between tools and language as a way of breaking
the hold of the conceptual picture that words work in one way (by
naming things--including the naming of properties, as in the way
we too-quickly think of the problem of beauty above), showing the
diversity of *kind* and of *use* among the various
things we find in the tool box (e.g. hammer, glue, chisel,
matches). If we redirect our attention, away from the *idee
fixe* of the puzzle concerning the common property named by the
word "beauty" or the description "beautiful",
and look to the actual use to which our aesthetic-critical vocabulary
is put, we will see that it is not some intrinsic meaning carried
internally by the linguistic sign (Wittgenstein 1958a) that makes the
word in question function as an aesthetic or critical interjection or
expression of approval. We will, rather, be able to focus our
redirected attention on what actually does make the word in question
function aesthetically, i.e. "on the enormously complicated
situation in which the aesthetic expression has a place", and he
adds that, with such an enlarged vision, we see that "the
expression itself has almost a negligible place" (p. 2). He here
mentions (seeing aesthetic issues as interwoven with the rest of
philosophy) that if he had to identify the main mistake made in
philosophical work of his generation, it would be precisely that of,
when looking at language, focusing on the form of words, and not the
use made of the form of words. He will go on to imply, if not quite to
directly assert, that the parallel holds to the work of art: to see it
within a larger frame of reference, to see it in comparison to other
works of the artist in question and to see it juxtaposed with still
other works from its cultural context, is to see what role itplayed in
the dialogically unfolding artistic
 "language-game"[1]
 of its time and place. In using language, he says next in the
lectures, in understanding each other--and in mastering a
language initially--we do not start with a small set of words or
a single word, but rather from specific occasions and activities. Our
aesthetic engagements are occasions and activities of just this kind;
thus aesthetics, as a field of conceptual inquiry, should start not
from a presumption that the central task is to analyze the determinant
properties that are named by aesthetic predicates, but rather with a
full-blooded consideration of the *activities* of aesthetic
life.


### 1.2 Predicates and Rules




But the adjectival form of many--not all--critical
predicates quickly reinforces the "property-with-name"
model, and against this Wittgenstein places examples from musical and
poetical criticism, where we simply call attention to the rightness of
a transition or to the precision or aptness of an image. And it is
here that Wittgenstein reminds us that descriptions such as
"stately", "pompous", or
"melancholy" (where the latter is said of a Schubert
piece) are like giving the work a face (Shiner 1978), or we could
instead (or in further specification of such descriptions) use
 gestures.[2]
 In cases of re-construing a work (e.g. the meter of a poem) so that
we understand its rhythm and structure anew, we make gestures, facial
expressions, and non-descriptive-predicate based remarks, where
aesthetic adjectives play a diminished role or no role at all. And we
show our approval of a tailor's work not by describing the suit, but
by wearing it. Occasions and activities are fundamental, descriptive
language secondary.




Wittgenstein here turns to the subject of rules, and rule-following,
in aesthetic decision-making. This stems from his reflection on the
word "correct" in aesthetic discourse, and he mentions the
case of being drilled in harmony and counterpoint. Such rule-learning,
he claims, allows what he calls an interpretation of the rules in
particular cases, where an increasingly refined judgment comes from an
increasingly refined mastery of the rules in question. It is of
particular interest that a qualification is entered here, that such
rules in contexts of artistic creativity and aesthetic judgment,
"may be extremely explicit and taught, or not formulated at
all" (Wittgenstein 1966). This itself strongly suggests that,
in this way too, *actions* come first, where these actions may
(to invoke Kant's famous distinction) either explicitly follow from
the rule, or stand in accordance with them but (for Wittgenstein) in
an inexplicit way. The mastery of a practice can be, but need not be,
characterized as a cognitive matter of rule-following. Here we thus
find one of the points of intersection between Wittgenstein's
work in aesthetics and his work in the philosophy of language: the
rule-following considerations (Holtzman and Leich 1981 and McDowell
1998) and the debate concerning non-cognitivism (McDowell 2000) link
directly to this discussion.




Regrettably, Wittgenstein closes this matter prematurely (claiming
that this issue should not come in at this point); the linkage between
rule-following in language and in aesthetics is still to this day too
little investigated. Yet there is a sense in which Wittgenstein
extends the discussion, if only implicitly. In investigating the kinds
of things meant by aesthetic "appreciation", he does say
that "an appreciator is not shown by the interjections he
uses" but rather by his choices, selections, his actions on
specific occasions. To describe what appreciation consists in, he
claims, would prove an impossibility, for "to describe what it
consists in we would have to describe the whole environment"
(Wittgenstein 1966, 7), and he returns to the case of the
tailor--and thus implicitly to rule-following. Such rules, as we
discern them in action ranging on a continuum from the
cognitively-explicit and linguistically encapsulated to the
non-cognitively implicit and only behaviorally manifested, have a life
- have an identity as rules--within, and *only*
within, those larger contexts of engagement, those "whole
environment[s]". And those environments, those contexts, those
language-games, are not reducible to a unitary kind which we then
might analyze for essential properties: "correctness", for
example, plays a central role in some cases of aesthetic appreciation
and understanding, and it is irrelevant in others, e.g. in
garment-cutting versus Beethoven symphonies, or in domestic
architecture versus the Gothic cathedral. And he explicitly draws, if
too briefly, the analogy that emerges here between ethics and
aesthetics: he notes the difference between saying of a person that he
behaves well versus saying that a person made a great or profound
impression. Indeed, "the entire
*game* is different" (Wittgenstein 1966, 8).


### 1.3 Culture and Complexity




The central virtue of these lectures is that Wittgenstein never loses
a sense of the *complexity* of our aesthetic engagements, our
language attending and in cases manifesting those engagements, and the
contextually embedded nature of the aesthetic actions he is working to
elucidate. Nor does he lose a sense of the relation--a relation
necessary to the meaning of the aesthetic language we use -
between the aesthetically-descriptive expressions we employ within
particular contexts and "what we call the culture of the
period" (Wittgenstein 1966, 8). Of those aesthetic words, he
says, "To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a
cultured taste, you have to describe a culture" (Wittgenstein
1966, 8). And again making the relation between his work in the
philosophy of language and his work in the philosophy of art explicit
(if again too briefly), he adds, "What belongs to a language
game is a whole culture" (Wittgenstein 1966, 8). There the link
to the irreducible character of rule-following is made again as well:
"To describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to
describe the culture of a period" (Wittgenstein 1966, 8, n. 3).
If our aesthetic engagements and the interrelated uses of our
aesthetic terms are widely divergent and context-sensitive, so are our
aesthetic actions and vocabularies context-sensitive in a larger sense
as well: comparing a cultured taste of *fin-de-siecle* Vienna
or early-twentieth-century Cambridge with the Middle Ages, he
says--implicitly referring to the radically divergent
constellations of meaning-associations from one age to the other,
"An entirely different game is played in different ages"
(Wittgenstein 1966, p. 8). Of a generic claim made about a person
that he or she appreciates a given style or genre of art, Wittgenstein
makes it clear that he would not yet know--stated in that
generic, case-transcending way--not merely whether it was true or
not, but more interestingly and more deeply, what it *meant* to
say this. The word "appreciates" is, like the rest of our
aesthetic vocabulary, not detachable from the
 particular context within which it has its
 life.[3]
 If, against this diversity or context-sensitivity, we seek to find
and then analyze what all such cases of aesthetic engagement have in
common, we might well focus on the *word*
"appreciation". But that word will not have meaning with a
bounded determinacy fixed prior to its contextualized use, which means
that we would find ourselves, because of this philosophical strategy
(the entire field "is very big and entirely
misunderstood"), in a double bind: first, we would not know the
meaning of the term upon which we were focusing; and second, we would,
in trying to locate what all cases of aesthetic engagement have in
common, leave out of view what he calls in this connection "an
immensely complicated family of cases" (Wittgenstein 1966),
blinding ourselves to nuance and complexity in the name of a
falsifying neatness and overarching generality. "In order to get
clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living. We
think we have to talk about aesthetic judgments like 'This is
beautiful', but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic
judgments we don't find these words at all, but a word used
something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated
 activity" (Wittgenstein 1966, 11).


## 2. The Critique of Scientism




Wittgenstein turns to the idea of a science of aesthetics, an idea for
which he has precious little sympathy ("almost too ridiculous
for words" [Wittgenstein 1966, 11]). But as is often the case
in Wittgenstein's philosophical work, it does not follow from
this scornful or dismissive attitude that he has no interest in the
etiology of the idea, or in excavating the hidden steps or components
of thought that have led some to this idea. In the ensuing discussion
he unearths a picture of causation that under-girds the very idea of a
scientific explanation of aesthetic judgment or preference. And in
working underground in this way, he reveals the analogies to cases of
genuine scientific explanation, where the "tracing of a
mechanism" just is the process of giving a causal account, i.e.
where the observed effect is described as the inevitable result of
prior links in the causal chain leading to it. If, to take his
example, an architect designs a door and we find ourselves in a state
of discontentment because the door, within the larger design of the
facade (within its stylistic "language-game", we
might say), is too low, we are liable to describe this on the model of
scientific explanation. Then, we make a substantive of the discontent,
see it as the causal result of the lowness of the door, and in
identifying the lowness as the cause, think ourselves able to dislodge
the inner entity, the discontent, by raising the door. But this
mischaracterizes our aesthetic reactions, or what we might call, by
analogy to moral psychology, our aesthetic psychology.


### 2.1 Aesthetic Reactions




The true aesthetic reaction--itself rarely described *in
situ* in terms of a proximate cause ("In these cases the
word 'cause' is hardly ever used at all"
[Wittgenstein 1966, 14]) is far more immediate, and far more
intertwined with, and related to, what we see
 in[4]
 the work of art in question. "It is a reaction analogous to my
taking my hand away from a hot plate" (Wittgenstein 1966). He
thus says:



> 
> 
> To say: "I feel discomfort and know the cause", is
> entirely misleading because "know the cause" normally
> means something quite different. How misleading it is depends on
> whether when you said: "I know the cause", you meant it to
> be an explanation or not. "I feel discomfort and know the
> cause" makes it sound as if there were two things going on in my
> soul--discomfort and knowing the cause (Wittgenstein 1966,
> 14).
> 
> 




But there is, as he next says, a "Why?" to such a case of
aesthetic discomfort, if not a cause (on the conventional scientific
model). But both the question and its multiform answers will take,
indeed, very different forms in different cases. Again, if what he
suggested before concerning the significance of context for meaning is
right, the very *meaning* of the "Why?"-question
will vary case to case. This is not a weaker thesis concerning
variation on the level of inflection, where the underlying structure
of the "Why?"-question is causal. No, here again that
unifying, model-imposing manner of proceeding would leave out a
consideration of the nuances that give the "Why?"-question
its determinate sense in the first place.




 But again, Wittgenstein's fundamental concern here is to point out
the great conceptual gulf that separates aesthetic perplexities from
the methodology of empirical psychology. To run studies of quantified
responses to controlled and isolated aesthetic stimuli, where emergent
patterns of preference, response, and judgment are recorded within a
given population's sample, is to pass by the true character of the
aesthetic issue--the actual puzzlement, such as we feel it, will
be conceptual, not empirical. And here again we see a direct link to
his work in the philosophy of psychology: the penultimate passage of
Part II of *Philosophical Investigations* (1958, sec. xiv), was
"The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have
the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and
method pass one another by" (Wittgenstein 1958, II, iv, 232).
He says, near the close of this part of his lectures on aesthetics,
"Aesthetic questions have nothing to do with psychological
experiments, but are answered in an entirely different way"
(Wittgenstein 1966, 17). A stimulus-response model adapted from
scientific psychology--what we might now call the naturalizing of
aesthetics--falsifies the genuine complexities of aesthetic
psychology through a methodologically enforced reduction to one narrow
and unitary conception of aesthetic engagement. For Wittgenstein
complexity, and not reduction to unitary essence, is the route to
conceptual clarification. Reduction to a simplified model, by
contrast, yields only the illusion of clarification in the form of
conceptual incarceration ("a picture held us
 captive").[5]


### 2.2 The "Click" of Coherence




Aesthetic satisfaction, for Wittgenstein, is an experience that is
only possible within a culture and where the reaction that constitutes
aesthetic satisfaction or justification is both more immediate, and
vastly larger and more expansive, than any simple mechanistic account
could accommodate. It is more immediate in that it is not usually
possible to specify in advance the exact conditions required to
produce the satisfaction, or, as he discusses it, the
"click" when everything falls into place. Such exacting
pre-specifications for satisfaction are possible in narrowly
restricted empirical cases where, for example, we wait for two
pointers in a vision examination to come into a position directly
opposite each other. And this, Wittgenstein says, is the kind of
simile we repeatedly use, but misleadingly, for in truth "really
there is nothing that clicks or that fits anything"
(Wittgenstein 1966, 19). The satisfaction is more immediate, then,
than the causal-mechanistic model would imply. And it is much broader
than the causal-mechanistic model implies as well: there is no direct
aesthetic analogue to the matched pointers in the case of a larger and
deeper form of aesthetic gratification. Wittgenstein does, of course,
allow that there are very narrow, isolated circumstances within a work
where we do indeed have such empirical pre-specifiable conditions for
satisfaction (e.g. where in a piece we see that we wanted to hear a
minor ninth, and not a minor seventh, chord). But, contrary to the
empirical-causal account, these will not add up, exhaustively or
without remainder, to the experience of aesthetic satisfaction. The
problem, to which Wittgenstein repeatedly returns in these lectures,
is with the *kind* of answer we want to aesthetic puzzlement as
expressed in a question like "Why do these bars give me such a
peculiar impression?" (Wittgenstein 1966, 20) In such cases,
statistical results regarding percentages of subjects who report this
peculiar impression rather than another one in precisely these
harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic circumstances are not so much
impossible as just beside the point; the *kind* of question we
have here is not met by such methods. "The sort of explanation
one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is
not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by
statistics as to how people react.... This is not what one means
or what one is driving at by an investigation into aesthetics"
(Wittgenstein 1966, 21). It is all too easy to falsify, under the
influence of explanatory models misappropriated from science, the many
and varied kinds of things that happen when, aesthetically speaking,
everything seems to click or fall into place.


### 2.3 The Charm of Reduction




In the next passages of Wittgenstein's lectures he turns to a fairly
detailed examination of the distinct charm, for some, of
psycho-analytic explanation, and he interweaves this with the
distinction between scientific-causal explanation of an action versus
motive-based (or personally-generated) explanations of that action. It
is easy, but mistaken, to read these passages as simply
subject-switching anticipations of his lectures on Freud to
follow. His fundamental interest here lies with the powerful charm, a
kind of conceptual magnetism, of reductive explanations that promise a
brief, compact, and propositionally-encapsulated account of what some
much larger field of thought or action "really" is. (He
cites the example of boiling Redpath, one of his auditors, down to
ashes, etc., and then saying "This is all Redpath really
is", adding the remark "Saying this might have a certain
charm, but would be misleading to say the least" (Wittgenstein
1966, 24). "To say the least" indeed: the example is
striking precisely because one can feel the attraction of an
encapsulating and simplifying reduction of the bewildering and
monumental complexity of a human being, while at the same time
feeling, as a human being, that any such reduction to a few physical
elements would hardly capture the essence of a person. This, he
observes, is an explanation of the "This is only really
this" form. Reductive causal explanations function in just the
same way in aesthetics, and this links directly to the problems in
philosophical methodology that he adumbrated in the *Blue and Brown
Books* (1958a, 17-19), particularly where he discusses what
he there calls "craving for generality" and the attendant
"contemptuous attitude toward the particular case". If the
paradigm of the sciences (which themselves, as he observes in passing,
carry an imprimatur of epistemic prestige and the image of
incontrovertibility) is Newtonian mechanics, and we then implant that
model under our subsequent thinking about psychology, we will almost
immediately arrive at an idea of a science of the mind, where that
science would progress through the gradual accumulation of
psychological laws. (This would constitute, as he memorably puts it, a
"mechanics of the soul" [Wittgenstein 1966, 29]). We then
dream of a psychological science of aesthetics, where--although
"we'd not thereby have solved what we feel to be aesthetic
puzzlement" (Wittgenstein 1966, 29)--we may find ourselves
able to predict (borrowing the criterion of predictive power from
science) what effect a given line of poetry, or a given musical
phrase, may have on a certain person whose reaction patterns we have
studied. But aesthetic puzzlement, again, is of a different
*kind*, and--here he takes a major step forward, from the
critical, to the constructive, phase of his lectures. He writes,
"What we really want, to solve aesthetic puzzlements, is certain
comparisons--grouping together of certain cases"
(Wittgenstein 1966, 29). Such a method, such an approach, would never
so much as occur to us were we to remain both dazzled by the
misappropriated model of mechanics and contemptuous of the particular
case.


## 3. The Comparative Approach




Comparison, and the intricate process of grouping together certain
cases--where such comparative juxtaposition usually casts certain
significant features of the work or works in question in higher
relief, where it leads to the emergence of an organizational
 gestalt,[6]
 where it shows the evolution of a style, or where it shows what is
strikingly original about a work, among many other things--also
focuses our attention on the particular case in another way. In
leading our scrutiny to critically and interpretatively relevant
particularities, it leads us away from the aesthetically blinding
presumption that it is the *effect*, brought about by the
"cause" of that particular work, that matters (so that any
minuet that gives a certain feeling or awakens certain images would do
as well as any other).


### 3.1 Critical Reasoning




These foregoing matters together lead to what is to my mind central to
Wittgenstein's thoughts on aesthetics. In observing that on one
hearing of a minuet we may get a lot out of it and on the next hearing
nothing, he is showing how easy it can be to take conceptual missteps
in our aesthetic thought from which it can prove difficult to
recover. From such a difference, against how we can all too easily
model the matter, it does not follow that what we get out of the
minuet is *independent* of the minuet. That would constitute an
imposition of a Cartesian dualism between the two ontologies of mind
and matter, but in its aesthetic guise. And that would lead in turn to
theories of aesthetic content of a mental kind, where the materials of
the art form (materials we would then call "external"
materials) only serve to carry the real, internal or non-physical
content. Criticism would thus be a process of arguing inferentially
from outward evidence back to inward content; creation would be a
process of finding outward correlates or carriers for that prior
inward content; and artistic intention would be articulated as a full
mental pre-conception of the contingently finished (or
"externalized", as we would then call it) work. It is no
accident that Wittgenstein immediately moves to the analogy to
language and our all-too-easy misconception of linguistic meaning,
where we make "the mistake of thinking that the meaning or
thought is just an accompaniment of the word, and the word doesn't
matter" (Wittgenstein 1966, 25). This indeed would prove
sufficient to motivate contempt for the particular case in aesthetic
considerations, by misleadingly modeling a dualistic vision of art
upon an equally misleading dualistic model of language (Hagberg
1995). "The sense of a proposition", he says, "is
very similar to the business of an appreciation of art"
(Wittgenstein 1966, 29). This might also be called a subtractive
model, and Wittgenstein captures this perfectly with a question:
"A man may sing a song with expression and without
expression. Then why not leave out the song--could you have the
expression then?" (Wittgenstein 1966, 32 editorial note and
footnote) Such a model corresponds, again, to mind-matter Cartesian
dualism, which is a conceptual template that also, as we have just
seen above, manifests itself in the philosophy of language where we
would picture the thought as an inner event and the external word or
sign to which it is arbitrarily attached as that inner event's
outward corresponding physicalization. It is no surprise that, in this
lecture, he turns directly to false and imprisoning pictures of this
dualism in linguistic meaning, and then back to the aesthetic
case. When we contemplate the expression of a drawn face, it is deeply
misleading--or deeply misled, if the dualistic picture of
language stands behind this template-conforming thought--to ask
for the expression to be given without the face. "The
expression"--now linking this discussion back to the
previous causal considerations--"is not an *effect*
of the face". The template of cause-and-effect, and of a dualism
of material and expressive content (on the subtractive model), and the
construal of the material work of art as a *means* to the
production of a separately-identifiable intangible, experiential
*end,* are all out of place here. All of the examples
Wittgenstein gives throughout these lectures combat these pictures,
each in their own way.




But then Wittgenstein's examples also work in concert: they
together argue against a form of aesthetic reductionism that would
pretend that our reactions to aesthetic objects are isolable, that they
can be isolated as variables within a controlled experiment, that they
can be hermetically sealed as the experienced effects of isolatable
causes. He discusses our aesthetic reactions to subtle
differences between differently drawn faces, and our equally subtle
reactions to the height or design of a door (he is known to have had
the ceiling in an entire room of the house in Vienna he designed for
his sister moved only a few inches when the builders failed to realize
his plan with sufficient exactitude). The enormous subtlety, and the
enormous complexity, of these reactions, are a part of--and as
complicated as--our natural history. He gives as an example the
error, or the crudeness, of someone responding to a complaint
concerning the depiction of a human smile (specifically, that the smile
did not seem genuine), with the reply that, after all, the lips are
only parted one one-thousandths of an inch too much: such differences,
however small in *measure*, in truth matter enormously.


### 3.2 Seeing Connections




Beneath Wittgenstein's examples, as developed throughout these
lectures, lies another interest (which presses its way to the surface
and becomes explicit on occasion): he is eager to show the
significance of making connections in our perception and understanding
of art works--connections between the style of a poet and that of
a composer (e.g. Keller and Brahms), between one musical theme and
another, between one expressive facial depiction and another, between
one period of an artist's work and another. Such connections--we
might, reviving a term from first-generation Wittgensteinians, refer
to the kind of work undertaken to identify and articulate such
connections as "connective analysis"--are, for
Wittgenstein, at the heart of aesthetic experience and aesthetic
contemplation. And they again are of the kind that reductive causal
explanation would systematically miss. In attempting to describe
someone's feelings, could we do better than to imitate the way the
person actually said the phrase we found emotionally revelatory,
Wittgenstein pointedly asks? The disorientation we would feel in
trying to describe the person's feeling with subtlety and precision
*without* any possibility of imitating his precise expressive
utterance--"the way he said it" - shows how
very far the dualistic or subtractive conceptual template is from our
human experience, our natural history.




Connections, of the kind alluded to here--a web of
variously-activated relations between the particular aspect of the
work to which we are presently attending and other aspects, other
parts of the work, or other works, groups of works, or other artists,
genres, styles, or other human experiences in all their
particularity--may include what we call associations awakened by
the work, but connections are not reducible to them only (and
certainly not to undisciplined, random, highly subjective, or free
 associations).[7]
 The impossibility of the simplifying subtractive template emerges
here as well: "Suppose [someone says]: 'Associations are
what matter--change it slightly and it no longer has the same
associations'. But can you separate the associations from the
picture, and have the same thing?" The answer is clearly, again
like the case of the singing with and then without expression above,
negative: "You can't say: 'That's just as good as the
other: it gives me the same associations'" (Wittgenstein
1966, 34). Here again, Wittgenstein shows the great gulf that
separates what we actually do with, what we actually say about, works
of art, and how we would speak of them *if* the conceptual
pictures and templates with which he has been doing battle were
correct. To extend one of Wittgenstein's examples, we would very
much doubt the aesthetic discernment, and indeed the sympathetic
imagination and the human connectedness, of a person who said of two
poems (each of which reminded him of death) that either will do as
well as the other to a bereaved friend, that they would do the same
thing (where this is uttered in a manner dismissive of nuance, or as
though it is being said of two detergents). Poetry, Wittgenstein is
showing, does not play that kind of role in our lives, as the nature
and character of our critical verbal interactions about it
indicate. And he ascends, momentarily, to a remark that characterizes
his underlying philosophical methodology (or one dimension of it) in
the philosophy of language that is being put to use here within the
context of his lectures on aesthetics: "If someone talks bosh,
imagine the case in which it is not bosh. The moment you imagine it,
you see at once it is not like that in our case" (Wittgenstein
1966, 34). The gulf that separates what we should say if the
generalizing templates were accurate from what we in actual
particularized cases do say could further call into question not only
the applicability or accuracy, but indeed the very intelligibility, of
the language used to express those templates, those explanatory
pictures. Wittgenstein leaves that more aggressive, and ultimately
more clarifying and conceptually liberating, critique for his work on
language and mind in *Philosophical Investigations* (1958) and
other writings, but one can see from these lectures alone how such an
aggressive critique might be undertaken.


### 3.3 The Attitude Toward the Work of Art




Near the end of his lectures Wittgenstein turns to the question of the
attitude we take toward the work of art. He employs the case of seeing
the very slight change (of the kind mentioned above) in the depiction
of a smile within a picture of a monk looking at a vision of the
Virgin Mary. Where the slight and subtle change of line yields a
transformation of the smile of the monk from a kindly to an ironic
one, our attitude in viewing might similarly change from one in which
for some we are almost in prayer to one that would for some be
blasphemous, where we are almost leering. He then gives voice to his
imagined reductive interlocutor, who says, "Well there you
are. It is all in the attitude" (Wittgenstein 1966, 35), where
we would then focus, to the exclusion of all of the rest of the
intricate, layered, and complex human dimensions of our reactions to
works, solely on an analysis of the attitude of the spectator and the
isolable causal elements in the work that determine it. But that,
again, is only to give voice to a reductive impulse, and in the brief
ensuing discussion he shows, once again, that in some cases, an
attitude of this kind may emerge as particularly salient. But in other
cases, not. And he shows, here intertwining a number of his themes
from these lectures, that the very idea of "a description of an
attitude" is itself no simple thing. Full-blooded human beings,
and not stimulus-response-governed automata, have aesthetic
experience, and that experience is as complex a part of our natural
history as any other.




Wittgenstein ends the lectures discussing a simple heading: "the
craving for simplicity" (Wittgenstein 1966, 36). To such a mind,
he says, if an explanation is complicated, it is disagreeable for that
very reason. A certain kind of mind will insist on seeking out the
single, unitary essence of the matter, where--much like Russell's
atomistic search for the essence of the logic of language beneath what
he regarded as its misleadingly and distractingly variegated
surface--the reductive impulse would be given free
reign. Wittgenstein's early work in the *Tractatus* (1961)
followed in that vein. But in these lectures, given in 1938, we see a
mind well into a transition away from those simplifying templates,
those conceptual pictures. Here, examples *themselves* do a
good deal of philosophical work, and their significance is that they
*give*, rather than merely illustrate, the philosophical point
at hand. He said, earlier in the lectures, that he is trying to teach
a new way of thinking about aesthetics (and indeed about philosophy
itself).


## 4. Conclusion




The subject, as he said in his opening line, is very big and entirely
misunderstood. It is very big in its scope--in the reach of the
aesthetic dimension throughout human life.




But we can now, at the end of his lectures, see that it is a big
subject in other senses too: aesthetics is conceptually expansive in
its important linkages to the philosophy of language, to the
philosophy of mind, to ethics, and to other areas of philosophy, and
it resists encapsulation into a single, unifying problem. It is a
multi-faceted, multi-aspected human cultural phenomenon where
connections, of diverging kinds, are more in play than causal
relations. The form of explanation we find truly satisfying will thus
strikingly diverge from the form of explanation in science - the
models of explanation in *Naturwissenschaften* are misapplied
in *Geisteswissenschaften,* and the viewing of the latter
through the lens of the former will yield reduction, exclusion, and
ultimately distortion. The humanities are thus, for Wittgenstein, in
this sense autonomous.




All of this, along with the impoverishing and blinding superimposition
of conceptual models, templates, and pictures onto the extraordinarily
rich world of aesthetic engagement, also now, at the end of his
lectures, gives content to what Wittgenstein meant at the beginning
with the words "entirely misunderstood". For now, at this
stage of Wittgenstein's development, where the complexity-accepting
stance of the later *Philosophical Investigations* (1958) and
other work is unearthing and uprooting the philosophical
presuppositions of the simplification-seeking earlier work, examples
themselves have priority as indispensable instruments in the struggle
to free ourselves of misconception in the aesthetic realm. And these
examples, given due and detailed attention, will exhibit a
context-sensitive particularity that makes generalized pronouncements
hovering high above the ground of that detail look otiose,
inattentive, or, more bluntly, just a plain falsification of
experience. What remains is not, then--and this is an idea
Wittgenstein's auditors must themselves have struggled with in those
rooms in Cambridge, as many still do today--another theory built
upon now stronger foundations, but rather a clear view of our
multiform aesthetic practices. Wittgenstein, in his mature, later
work, did not generate a theory of language, of mind, or of
mathematics. He generated, rather, a vast body of work perhaps united
only in its therapeutic and intricately labored search for conceptual
clarification. One sees the same philosophical aspiration driving his
foray into aesthetics.