Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity

208 Pages·1991·21.47 MB·English

by  B. R. Tilghman (auth.)

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
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© 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 Logico
Philosophicus 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 impor
tance 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 vindi
cate 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