Aesthetics and Wittgenstein

For Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, there is a point at which philosophy turns into poetry, and it is this moment of transition that interests Kathrin Stengel in her Winter 2004 article in Poetics Today. However, it might be better to say that there is a point at which one realizes that philosophy, or much of what we call philosophy, is always already poetry. One thing is certain: Value, whether ethical or aesthetic, can never be treated successfully as a science, and the philosophy that tries to be scientific must necessarily fail precisely here. There is a limit to what words can say, and the limitation that language imposes upon us determines how ethics and aesthetics are to be approached. It isn’t simply a matter of the fact that whatever words I employ I cannot put the taste of chocolate in your mouth. To know what chocolate tastes like, you are going to have to eat it. This does seem to be a limitation of language, certainly, but Wittgenstein’s point is of another order altogether. There are no words that can contain the value of life, set it forth in a set of propositions, and this is because life is fundamentally a poetic affair, not a question of the referents or conceptual underpinnings of propositions, but of what Wittgenstein calls style. The ultimate work of art is the life of the individual, and this expresses itself in a style that goes well beyond theoretical formulations in that it is grounded in life and this grounding is always prior and beyond formulation, at once the source of value and that which posits value.
For obvious reasons, Wittgenstein did not see himself as proposing yet one more theory of value. In his view, the theoretical approach to value is precisely the wrong one. By way of illustration, the theorist typically approaches questions of value by looking at select cases within certain contexts and then attempting to generalize across all contexts. Thus, we have the evolution of counter-examples in an attempt to refute a given theory and, given the imagined strength of these counter-examples, the theory in question either loses acceptance or undergoes modification to accommodate the previously foreign instances. Now, it might seem like a perfectly good approach, this theoretical one, if the subject matter in issue is motion, the movement of bodies, for there has been at least the appearance of progress as the context in which motion was understood expanded from the earthly (as in Aristotle) to the cosmic (as in Newton). However, this objectifying, scientific approach to value is doomed to failure in that it is life and value itself which are always already initiating the action, including that of the theorist, and because by no stretch of the imagination is value a fact or state of affairs. Value is prior to any formulation in that it is life that chooses and choice only transpires with respect to value; value goes beyond any given formulation in that the formulation has no referent or signified within the world. Indeed, value is that which takes up a position with respect to all possible propositions and all possible states of affairs, so it cannot reach around to “grasp” itself through them. For this reason, among others, Wittgenstein borrowed from Spinoza and spoke of the need to behold value from the perspective of eternity. Fortunately, philosophy is not neutral with respect to value; it is not amoral and it is not the non-aesthetic (the things science pretends to be at its most fraudulent). The world that a proposition attempts to describe gets objectified in the attempt, but it does not stand over and against life; it can only be made to seem to. Things in the world only matter in terms of life, and life only matters against the horizon of the world. However, the atomistic, analytic approach to value, rather than revealing anything at all, only masks the integration that sustains it.
There is obviously something destructive, trivializing, dehumanizing, and insufferably elitist about, for instance, the Humean conception of value. In terms of value, the case can at least be made that what matters is not whether we appreciate Shakespeare as his contemporaries would have or whether Shakespeare is timeless or whether a standard is possible by which we can establish the superiority of one aesthetic palate over another—who is most hyper-refined. The central question in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, for example, is how the world stands forth, how it shows itself—but not for some elect or chosen few, but in this time, this age, among this people—or, as Wittgenstein would say, for this life-form. And on this point Wittgenstein and Stevens are in accordance: Value is that which shows itself. The ultimate ethical and aesthetic task for philosophy is not the anatomy of a value which has been sufficiently chloroformed in advance, sufficiently decontextualized and atomized, sufficiently deadened and denuded of its living world; it is rather the business of allowing that which shows itself to show itself for what it is. And it is this consideration that prompts Wittgenstein to speak of happiness and the “happy life.”
The happy life is not one in which aesthetic appreciation is consigned to some few, the suitably qualified, as if value were somehow involved in the absurd business of sufficiently detecting the taste of iron or leather in one’s wine. The happy life is one in which the world stands forth in a certain way, one in which the world matters in a clear and vibrant (not propositional) sense. To lose oneself in discussions of the relative merits of Homer and Milton, Mozart and Bach, is to fiddle while Rome burns. The threat that faces not the select few, not the impossible Humean elite, but everyone is the loss of value—nihilism. But nihilism is not a fact or states of affairs in the world. Neither is it a feature of a peculiar psychology. It is a mode of dwelling in the world that is valueless. To actually fritter away one’s time studying the inanities of a Carroll or a Railton or a Gaut (and, yes, a Hume) without catching sight of the truly fundamental dimensions of the issue at stake (value) is little short of a moral outrage. To live in value is not to “grasp” the world as it is, but to make it into what it needs to be, what it ought to be. Thus, the only philosophy that could possibly be relevant would be that which apprehends its own poetic character. It is for this reason that in his “Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein said, “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolutely valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.” Wittgenstein is four-square with his anti-Platonism, and he truly triumphs over Plato and the Platonists of today by refusing, quite rightly, to offer any alternative theory whatever. Indeed, if he had done so the result would have been sheer incoherence. It is only Wittgenstein’s opponents who create a straw man by fabricating a Wittgensteinian theory so that it may be attacked, but by doing so they reveal only that they cannot read Wittgenstein.
His concern in the years after the Tractatus was not that we have new thoughts but that we acquire a new style of thinking. A new set of thoughts will not make us know value, and it will not save us from nihilism. However, a new style of thinking will set the world forth entirely differently, will allow us to dwell in the world with a new intensity and directness, and it is for this reason that Wittgenstein speaks of value as stylistic rather than propositional. Opposed to this is the danger of setting value off and apart, of localizing it, of bowing before it in the alienated form of the works of some supposed eternal “masters.” Indeed, this danger is allowed to show itself in innumerable works of contemporary art (the readymade art of Duchamp comes immediately to mind). To read the genuinely uninspired and decidedly insipid remarks of Noel Carroll on this subject is enough, to borrow from Mark Twain, to make a body ashamed of the human race (and to quail before the future). This quintessentially irrelevant theorist writes:

Duchamp’s readymades are perceptually indiscernible from their ordinary,
real-world counterparts. Yet we classify Duchamp’s artworks and their
ordinary, perceptually indiscernible, real-world counterparts in terms of
radically different categories, and this has important consequences. We
do not stand before ordinary urinals contemplating their meaning, nor do
we store the snow shovels in our garage with velvet ropes around them….
Why not?...Because Duchamp’s readymades are artworks, whereas ordinary
urinals and snow shovels are not….[The artworks] possess aboutness,
whereas their ordinary, perceptually indiscernible, real-world counterparts
do not….Ordinary urinals and snow shovels are not about anything; they have
no semantic content; they are mute—meaningless (The Philosophy of Art).

Alas! To be a poor mortal in Noel Carroll’s ordinary world of the meaningless! There are naturally questions one might raise here: Does Noel Carroll actually know anything about Duchamp or contemporary art? Did he take the trouble to acquaint himself with the subject before sending up wreaths of pipe smoke with a straight owlish face? Isn’t it perfectly obvious that the propositional attitude, with its emphasis upon semantics and aboutness, is what, as Wittgenstein claims, informs this profoundly misguided brand of criticism? Can anyone, however dizzy and lightheaded, look at what Carroll has written and find it itself valuable? Insightful? Important? Interesting? And what is one to make of the miserably meaningless urinals and snow shovels? They do not look especially meaningless to me, and I take it as Duchamp’s point exactly that they are not and should not be seen as meaningless. Do recent trends in contemporary art mean anything at all if they do not include a rejection of the kinds of assumptions that Carroll so incontinently heaps upon his readers’ heads? Isn’t much of recent art an attempt not to be “about” the artistic value of the “ordinary” (read: value for life) but to allow this to be shown? Isn’t that the way, say, painting and sculpture work, by allowing something to be shown that very precisely cannot be said? Isn’t it for this reason that a facile mouthful of propositions cannot be substituted for a work of art, for Michelangelo’s Pieta? Could anyone with a sound mind read what Carroll has written above and take anything he has to say on the subject of value seriously?

Patrick McCarty

A Syllogism for You

The syllogism below shouldn't pose great problems for you. However, give it some thought and indicate what is wrong with it, if anything.

Nothing is better than complete happiness.
A tomato sandwich is better than nothing.
A tomato sandwich is better than complete happiness.

Certainty

Think of what certainty was for Descartes. He wanted it more than anything else, and ended up with a slice of it for science and another for the Church. It is hard not to suspect that the still-present craving for certainty is a vestige of the religious past. Granted, the object was faith, but one had better be certain about it. The dangers of falling into error were extremely grave, and there was a forest for lighting up heretics. Perhaps there is something to what William James had to say on this subject, that our mistakes need not be occasions for so much horror, even if one is a philosopher. But one does wonder, whether the quest for the Truth is not still fundamentally a religious one, if the terrors of our ancestors still ring through us. I am always struck in this regard by the religious who insist upon proofs of the existence of God--as first or final cause, the ontological proof, etc. Faith seems so clearly to be about doubt, having faith despite the fact that God does not visit us for tea, having faith because things like the Trinity are well beyond proof. Now, the whole idea of whether such a faith involves choice is another kettle of fish altogether.

Wittgenstein Two

One cannot read Wittgenstein today without thinking how his philosophizing belongs to a certain time and place. So much thought has been given to language since that it is sometimes hard to appreciate the esteem in which Wittgenstein was held. Often, his observations seem naïve to an extreme. Consider #28 of Philosophical Investigations: “The definition of the number two, ‘That is called “two”’—pointing to two nuts—is perfectly exact.—But how can two be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn’t know what one wants to call ‘two’; he will suppose that ‘two’ is the name given to this group of nuts!...That is to say: an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case.” Yes and no. It is surprising that for Witt, who so frequently draws upon his experience as a grade-school teacher, didn’t draw upon it here and, thereby, draw a rather different, more nuanced conclusion. A child learns the meaning of the word “ball” by experiencing its range of application: yellow and blue balls, big and small balls, etc. In an isolated instance, naturally, there is no interpretive control. However, the “grammar” of language is such that it has absolutely nothing whatever to say about isolated one-time-only employments. The number “two” can only be understood by establishing something about its range of application (which is to say that our understanding of “two” and “ball” are grounded in the imagination). I would have to say, “There are two nuts,” “There are two balls,” “There are two people,” etc. Only in this fashion can the word “two” be first understood. The really interesting question, it seems to me, concerns the nature of what I have called the range of application. This range belongs to the imagination, and it is what enables me to call any appropriate pairing of objects “two.” However, this range is not itself conceptual. It is rather a field of permissibility, and the mind has this entire field (and more) in view upon any given encounter.

The Kantian X

Kant must be right in at least one respect. There is a sound outside the window in the street. I experience it immediately as a human voice and the sounds as discrete words. There would seem to be a sense-datum X that is of such a kind that my mind knows in advance how to experience it. The mind knows something about this X that I do not. There is something to this X which allows it to be processed correctly (as a human voice, as language). However, how is one to determine what it is about this X that permits the successful processing of it? The sense-datum is a sensation that falls within a range in the imagination as to what counts as a human voice. There is a something that falls within this range. This something comes to me within its identifiability. Is it possible to experience this X as X or does the X actually (somehow) in itself lie outside of experience? Is experience only possible as interpretation? The X would then lie outside of experience, but not necessarily in a realm of things-in-themselves. The X would lie in a realm of undecidability. Thus we cannot know the world as it opens before our senses; we can only know it as it has been appropriated in thought.

Aristotle's Empiricism

Aristotle writes, “From memory men can get experience; for by often remembering the same thing they acquire the power of unified experience.” This is Aristotle’s empirical rejection of Platonic rationalism. At some point in time I behold an X that is unfamiliar. When I behold this X again, at some future time, it is no longer unfamiliar. But is this familiarization what created a unified experience? Don’t I somehow have to make sense of what I am beholding? There is nothing in X itself that endows it with meaning for me. That is, it is not enough for X to be present; X also has to be accessible to me in some way. What is prior to unified experience, as Aristotle calls it, is the accessibility of the object as a meaningful thing to the subject. That means that the subject, or something prior to both the subject and the object, creates a field of intelligibility by which access is possible, by which subject and object commune.

My Father

The spiritual domain was not one that interested him much. It was, instead, an inconvenience—as when that familiar panic gripped his heart. Then it was something to be thrown off if possible, and the only way to do that was by having work to do. Work was a cure for everything. While he would not have phrased it this way, work (however trivial and slavish) gave meaning to his entire existence. There was some frustration continually churning within him, and when it grew too intense he would strike out, rage, curse God. But he had no more idea what it was about than he had about nuclear energy. These were things that happened to him, and he never went in search of an explanation. It wouldn’t be entirely right to say that he was a hard man, though hard enough; it was rather his misfortune to be in agony very often. Physical pains didn’t bother him much. A drill bit once shot back from a slab of concrete and tore the corner of his eye. He quietly went on working. The blood appeared on his face and he wiped it away and onto his free hand. At such times he was a wonder of sorts, the man staring half-blindly into the concrete slab. Explanations might have come to those on the periphery easily enough. He had wanted to be loved, and he wasn’t—or at least not sufficiently. He had wanted the approval of other people, and he didn’t get it. These were really the things that made him the man he was, yet he never would have guessed. The subjects of liking and loving were not ones he spoke of except with derision. A man didn’t care about such childish things. A man, that was what he held himself to be above all. If some philosopher had descended and explained to him that he was only living out a role, some wholly local conception of masculinity, some media generated phantom, he would have dismissed it with a wave of the hand. He didn’t care. That was his freedom. He didn’t have to care. The world was a place in which he had never found acceptance, and he was free to return its indifference with interest. What he cared about most, he hated. And his hate worked its way so throughout his system that he became quite blind and violently irrational. He always understood that the world meant him ill, and he always perceived more of this malevolent intention than could be justified to any third party. In his own mind he had become a center of attention, had won a sort of esteem. He was hated, and he had to be on guard at all times. These chaotic feelings, all coursing strong and at cross-purposes, guided his thinking, made it what it was more completely than in any other human being I have ever known. Perhaps it is this way with all men, I don’t know. His beliefs, the ones he cared to share, as seldom as this happened, were all exactly apiece with his emotional constitution. He hated all men, but not all men equally. I dedicated one of my books to him—because he had died, because he didn’t know himself what he was doing, because he was my father.