WITTGENSTEIN, ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

SWANSEA STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

General Editor: D. Z. Phillips, Professor of Philosophy, University College of Swansea

Philosophy is the struggle for clarity about the contexts of human discourse we engage in. What we need is not theoretical explanation, but clarification and elucidation of what lies before us. Recent returns to theory in many fields of philosophy, involving more and more convoluted attempts to meet inevitable counter-examples to such theories, make this need all the more urgent. This series affords an opportunity for writers who share this conviction, one as relevant to logic, epistemology and the philosophy of mind, as it is to ethics, politics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. Authors will be expected to engage with the thought of influential philosophers and contemporary movements, thus making the series a focal point for lively discussion.

R. W. Beardsmore ETiflCS SINCE 1950

David Cockburn OTHER HUMAN BEINGS

John Edelman AN AUDIENCE FOR MORAL PHILOSOPHY?

Martyn Evans USTENING TO MUSIC

Raimond Gaita GOOD AND EVIL: An Absolute Conception

D. Z. Phillips INTERVENTION IN ETiflCS WITTGENSTEIN AND REUGION

B.R.Tilghman WITTGENSTEIN, ETillCS AND AESTHETICS: The View from Eternity

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Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics

The View from Eternity

B. R. Tilghman Professor of Philosophy Kansas State University

M MACMILLAN

© B. R. Tilghman 1991

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First edition 1991

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Tilghman, B. R. Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics: the view from eternity. -(Swansea studies in philosophy). 1. Visual arts. Aesthetics. Theories of Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951 1. Title II. Series 701'.1'7 ISBN 978-0-333-53187-7 ISBN 978-1-349-21174-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21174-6

Contents

List of Abbreviations vi Preface vii

1 Modernism, Modem Aesthetics and Wittgenstein 1 2 Art and Ethics: An Historical Sketch 21 3 Ethics and Aesthetics in the Tractatus 43 4 The Tractatus Re-examined 66 5 Discerning Humanity 91 6 Discerning Art 117 7 Discerning the Humanity in Art 143

Afterword 173

Notes 179 Index 190

List of Abbreviations

CV Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

LC Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Relief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

LE 'A Lecture on Ethics', Philosophical Review Oanuary 1965).

NB Notebooks 1914-1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper &: Brothers, 1%1).

OC On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969).

PI Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).

RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956).

TLP Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge&: Kegan Paul, 1961).

Z Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

vi

Preface

In that marvellously mannered final act of The Merchant of Venice where all is moonlight and music, and where grace, charm and wit have replaced the spite and greed that troubled the day, Lorenzo says

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music

(v.i.83-8)

Although I know deep down that Lorenzo's is but a poetical conceit, I would nevertheless like to believe that it is true. I would like to believe it is true not just of music, but of the arts generally. Lorenzo is doubtless inviting us to consider the contrapositive of his conceit and to entertain the supposition that any fine fellow must like music. Perhaps he is even suggesting the stronger thesis that an appreciation of the arts is a sufficient condition for a person's being all that he should be.

Alas, however, I have no reason at all to believe that there is any close connection between one's taste and appreciation in art and one's moral character. There are simply too many counter-examples to lend the thesis any plausibility. We all know numbers of good folk who are indifferent to music and the other arts, and we will always be haunted by the image of Nazis enraptured by Beethoven and Wagner as they looted the museums of Europe. But for all that there may yet be interesting connections of other sorts between music and morality, between art and ethics, and where and how some of these connections are to be found is what I want to explore.

The focus of my exploration is the philosophy of Wittgenstein,

vii

viii Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics

both the earlier work centred around the Tractatus Logico­Philosophicus and the later work of the Philosophical Investigations. More and more it is recognised that the historical picture of two Wittgensteins, a later philosopher who turned his back on and demolished the work of his earlier hand, is a false one, or at least a seriously misleading one. Despite obvious differences there is a striking continuity in his life and work from beginning to end. He was working with and puzzling over the same set of questions about language and its connection with the world from the beginning of his philosophical life to the end. And the purpose and point of trying to understand language and its connection with the world remained, so I contend, one of making clear the ethical dimension of human life.

It is not my aim in these pages to contribute to Wittgensteinian scholarship. There are others who are much better equipped than I to do that and to some of them I owe a considerable debt. My purpose, rather, is first to direct the attention of those who are interested in aesthetics and the philosophy of art to the impor­tance of Wittgenstein for their concerns - an importance that has been strangely overlooked given the frequency with which his name is invoked - and secondly to show how what we are able to learn from a close study of Wittgenstein can be used to gain a better understanding of at least some of the relations between ethics and aesthetics and, indeed, some of the important connections between art and the rest of our lives.

My undertaking of exploring these relations between art and other aspects of life is not to be confused with what is called the social history of art although the results of that social history have an undoubted relevance to what I want to do. A recent writer on the subject, Albert Boime, offers the kind of characterisation of the social history of art that helps make clear its difference from my aims.

While traditional art history has generally isolated its subject, treating it as an almost autonomous phenomenon, the social history of art seeks to set the artist and the work of art into a broad historical and economical context in order to ground it upon the fundamental facts of materiallife.l

Boime's book is frankly Marxist and he thinks of art as ideology, and ideology by its nature is thought always to distort reality.

Preface ix

'Artistic production', he says, 'is comprised within the general economic structure of society and serves to disguise and vindi­cate the society's basic character' (p. xxii). To assume that the view of things manifested in a work of art is always ideological and therefore a distortion of reality seems to beg important questions about the human depth and significance of that view. Nor should we allow the usurpation of the word 'reality' and its honorific employment to pass without objection. The word, after all, has many uses.

M.O'C. Drury quotes Wittgenstein as remarking that it is impossible for him to say how much music has meant to him throughout his life.2 There is little room in the mind of the social historian of art for the thought that art can be important in the life of the individual. Much scholarly effort has gone into investigating the role of the arts in the life of the Greeks or in the life of the Middle Ages and so on, but no one has bothered to ask what poetry may have meant to the obscure Leon of Salamis or sculpture to the better known Thomas of Salisbury. One major obstacle to following up such a question is lack of evidence: we just do not know enough about these individuals even to make a start. There is, however, another consideration.

In past ages the arts often played a very significant communal role in a way that they do not with us today. The Greek tragic theatre that was a focus of civic religious celebration and the altar-pieces of the late medieval church that had an important function in the ritual of worship are obvious examples. There is almost nothing like this in our culturally diverse age. Our art museums, concert halls and theatres just do not seem to be places where the hopes, fears and aspirations of the community are enacted and made manifest. One explanation of this situation may be simply that there is not enough of a community to have hopes and fears, much less aspirations. It is possible that ours is such an essentially fragmented society that art can speak only to the occasional individual and it is only to that individual that art can mean something. One of the things I want to find out is how music, or any other art form, can be important in the life of an individual and then to find out what it is that the music or art can mean to that individual.

To forestall a possible misunderstanding it must be made clear that I am not turning away from the social history of art or the sociology of art in favour of the psychology of the individual

X Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics

response to art, for my enquiry is not at all empirical, but is rather philosophical, that is conceptual, and also frankly moral.

It is now well understood that the Tractatus was written with an ethical intent. And I would have to add that the intent is aesthetic as well, for the Tractatus says that the two are one. At the time of the writing of the Tractatus Wittgenstein developed a fairly specific conception of what ethics and the good life consists in and there is no reason to believe that he ever really abandoned that conception. He also developed a corresponding view of the nature of art and aesthetics and its place in human life. The philo­sophical and conceptual resources of the Tractatus, however, did not permit him to make £ul1 sense of the notions that he developed there; the revised view of language of the Philosophical Investigations would be required for that.

The earliest writings of Wittgenstein that are available to us, apart from some letters and dictated notes, date from 1914. Among these is the first remark in Culture and Value, which reads, 'We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity in a man' (p. 1). This comment introduces a question about what it is to understand and have concern for other people, what it is to understand their thoughts, feelings, intentions and all the rest, and I propose to take it as the key to understanding Wittgenstein' s ethical concern throughout his work. By a play upon the remark it is also possible to bring atten­tion to the importance of his philosophy for art and aesthetics. In the same spirit we can ask what it is to discern the art in a work of art and then go on to ask what it is to discern the humanity in a work of art. It is through these questions that we can determine how art can mean so much in the life of a person and what it can mean in that life. And in this way we can discern, if not the oneness, at least some of the important connections between ethics and aesthetics.

There is an interesting and significant difference between the explicit moral commitment of the Tractatus and what I shall refer to as the moral dimension of the Philosophical Investigations. The Investigations contains neither an explicit account of ethics and morality nor of aesthetics or the philosophy of art; there is no account there of the nature of the good life nor of the nature and value of art. Its moral and aesthetic dimensions remain to be

Preface xi

made manifest by an examination of the material that is there and by an application of its techniques of philosophical investigation to some of the problems in ethics and aesthetics. The Tractatus offered a theory of these things and the later work, of course, does not; what it does offer is a philosophical diagnosis of tradi­tional philosophical thinking about language and about what in the broadest sense can be called psychological concepts. This traditional philosophy is shown to misrepresent the nature of our language and this in turn results in the misrepresentation of the nature of people and of our understanding both of ourselves and of others. What Wittgenstein has done is to show how it is with our language, how our language is woven into our lives and how that weave must incorporate our understanding of other people. What has not been generally realised is that this understanding of other people brings with it the possibility of moral relationships with them and opens a way that can bring art into our lives as well.

It is tempting to describe what Wittgenstein is doing in Kantian fashion as showing how it is possible to understand other people and, by implication, how moral relationships and ethical considerations are possible and, of course, as showing how artistic understanding is possible and how art can enter into our lives in important ways. When we have learned from Wittgenstein, however, the Kantian 'How is it possible?' question should strike us as odd in this context. So often that form of question serves as an expression of astonishment: 'How is it possible that she is up and about and dancing (when just the other day she was in hospital with a broken leg)?' I think the question retains some of that flavour when it enters philosophy. We could adapt Aristotle's remark that philosophy begins in wonder to this matter of human understanding. We wonder that something could be in the face of apparently serious difficulties to its being. There is something of this in Wittgenstein when he said

Don't look at it as a matter of course, but as a most remarkable thing, that the verbs 'believe', 'wish', 'will' display all the in­flexions possessed by 'cut', 'chew', 'run'. (PI, p. 190)

The use of these two groups of words is so different that we should be astonished that they have the same surface grammar. Wonder and astonishment would seem to have a

xii Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics

place only where there are difficulties in the way of things being so.

Should we be astonished that there is such a thing as human understanding and then look for some device or mechanism that allows it to be brought off as we look for the new medical procedure that has the broken leg up and dancing in such short order? What are the obstacles that stand in its way? There are, to be sure, practical obstacles aplenty to understanding this person in these circumstances, but the Kantian, the transcendental, question has never been addressed to particulars. If there is some general and theoretical obstacle that stands in the way it is surely the mind/body problem together with the other minds problem of traditional philosophy.

Wittgenstein is not showing how human understanding, and, a fortiori, art and ethics, is possible as if there really were serious difficulties standing in the way. He is, rather, clearing away those philosophical theories that if taken seriously would lead us to believe that all understanding of human matters - be they ethical, artistic or what you will - is impossible. There is no place for astonishment at the fact of human understanding. lt is the most ordinary thing in the world and we should not wonder at it any more than we wonder at any other fact of the world. What we need is the reminder that of course we can understand people and that whatever theoretical problems we suspected about human understanding were the result of one or another philosophical view that prevented us from seeing the world and ourselves aright.

It is not only the spectrum of theories that has dominated philosophical aesthetics in this century that has stood in the way of realising the human significance that art can have, but in addition there are quite separate considerations growing out of art history and criticism as well as artistic practice itself. These latter stem from certain tendencies resulting from changes in the status of art and the development of a new kind of aesthetic theorising that grew out of the eighteenth century and led to the idea that the aesthetic is a unique species of value that must be sharply distinguished from all other kinds such as moral and religious values. While there may well be conceptual confusion in the theoretical elaboration of this position, the objections to it are not primarily philosophical, but are artistic and moral. The things that Wittgenstein has to say about art and the passionate intensity

Preface xiii

with which he regarded art nevertheless do help us to realise the emptiness that sometimes can attend both those practices and those ways of theorising about them.

The topics briefly indicated here are taken up in the chapters that follow. Chapter 1 begins with some remarks about modem art and its criticism and then offers a survey of the development of the analytical philosophy of art that has dominated aesthetics in the English-speaking world since the middle of the century. Although Wittgenstein' s Philosophical Investigations had consider­able influence on that development, both the spirit and ultimate purpose of his work was quite misunderstood by the movement. Chapter 2 is a brief historical survey of some of the ways that the relation between ethics and aesthetics has been considered in philosophical thinking about the arts. Chapters 3 and 4 explain and discuss Wittgenstein' s views about ethics and aesthetics at the time of the Tractatus. Chapter 5 examines the question of what it is to discern the humanity in a man from the later viewpoint of the Philosophical Investigations. Chapter 6 and 7 investigate in tum what it is to discern the art in a work of art and what it is to discern the humanity in a work of art, and these investigations in their tum lead to some conclusions about the importance of art in a person's life.

Some of the material in this book has appeared in print previously. Part of chapter 5 appeared as 'The Moral Dimension of the Philosophical Investigations', in Philosophical Investigations, vol. 10 (April 1987). Some of the substance of chapter 6 first saw the light as 'Understanding People and Understanding Art', Proceedings of the 8th International Wittgenstein Symposium, vol. 10, Part 1 (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1984). Portions of chapter 7 first appeared as 'Picture Space and Moral Space', in The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 28 (Autumn 1988), and is reproduced by permission of the editor and Oxford University Press.

I have received much help and encouragement from con­versations and discussions with my departmental colleagues James Hamilton and Richard Scheer, from Norman Malcolm, Peter Winch, Cyril Barrett, Allan Janik and Tore Nordenstam. Very special thanks go to Kjell S. Johannessen.

I wish to thank the College of Arts and Sciences of Kansas State University for a summer research appointment in 1987 and the University for sabbatical leave during the academic

xiv Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics

year 1987--8. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding me a Fellowship for College Teachers for 1987--8 and to the Norwegian Marshall Fund for a grant that made possible a fruitful stay at the University of Bergen in the spring of 1988.