Abstract
It is natural to think that Wittgenstein does not have room for the purported privacy of experience, that ‘inner processes’ stand in need of ‘outer criteria’. He does of course say that, but nevertheless I do not think Wittgenstein has a view that can be summed up so neatly. I cook up from Wittgenstein’s own ingredients a template for the experience of music that in a certain sense allows the privacy of musical experience.
Works by Wittgenstein are noted in the text and notes as follows (full references are listed at the end of the chapter). Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1951). Noted as PI. References to this work are to section numbers in Part I, and page numbers with paragraphs in the case of Part II. The Blue and Brown Books (Wittgenstein 1958). Noted as BB. References to this work are to page numbers. Zettel (Wittgenstein 1967). Noted as Z. References to this work are to section numbers. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Wittgenstein 1966). Noted as LA. References to this work are to its various parts, followed by paragraph numbers. Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1980a). Noted as CV. References to this work are to section numbers. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I (Wittgenstein 1980b). Noted as RPPI.
References to this work are to section numbers. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II (Wittgenstein 1980c). Noted as RPPII. References to this work are to section numbers. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I (Wittgenstein 1982). Noted as LWI. References to this work are to section numbers. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II (Wittgenstein 1992). Noted as LWII. References to this work are to page numbers followed by paragraph numbers.
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Notes
- 1.
The word ‘aesthetic’ is carrying a lot of weight in this paper; this is unfortunate, because in my view it is frightfully vague. However, that is another subject; for this paper it will have to do.
- 2.
In saying this, I am of course aware that Wittgenstein held that ‘the experience’ cannot be conceived atomistically; it is kind of ‘optical illusion’ to suppose that the aesthetic significance of listening to Ashkenazy playing two bars of Beethoven were encapsulated in the time he took to play them (Z 173). However, more is given on this below.
- 3.
- 4.
M. Budd (1989) Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (London: Routledge), pp. 78–9 (Budd 1989).
- 5.
Mulhall (1990, 2001) takes ‘continuous aspect seeing’ for our normal human attitude not only towards language and the human form but also, for example, towards cutlery, thereby allying it with Heidegger’s concept of ‘ready-to-hand’ (but without the metaphysics). As for Wittgenstein exegesis, this will call for special interpretation of PI I 195b, 206b, 210h; RPPI 1028; LWI 478, 518, 534–6, 686, 692, among others. (Mulhall faces the issue on pp. 126–37; I should say that the vision Mulhall’s book offers is largely independent of its success as Wittgenstein scholarship.) See note 10, and see Baz (2000, 2010, 2016) for further discussion.
- 6.
McFee (1999), Wittgenstein on Art and Aspects, Philosophical Investigation 22:3 p. 262–84 (McFee 1999), is an example (p. 275). McFee does point to a place at which Wittgenstein appears to require ambiguity:
And if I never read the figure as anything but ‘F’, never considered what it might be, then we shall say that I see it as in an F; if, that is, we know that it can also be seen differently. (RPPI 1)
However, to be pernickety, this mentions only a sufficient condition, not a necessary condition. In any case, certainly not all the cases Wittgenstein mentions admit – at least not to a normal perceiver – of multiple aspects. See PI II 193b, 195d, 196c, 198i, 201f, 204c-f, RPPI 207, 316, 379; RPPII 398, 487, 513; LWI 598. A defender of McFee’s interpretation might look to PI II 195i.
- 7.
It is plausible that by optical cases he means ones that are to be accounted for strictly in terms of colour and shape, or colour, shape and depth; so, for example, the Muller-Lyer illusion would be an optical case, as would Rothko’s paintings. For a remark about aspect perception’s relation to illusion see PI II 208a.
- 8.
Obviously there are other interpretations. It is not easy to do in a short space, but I am trying not to stray from Baz’s interpretation (Baz 2000, 2016). There is some evidence that Wittgenstein himself was not satisfied with this way putting it (see RPPI 526, 528, and 532). There is just one place in which Wittgenstein speaks of ‘continuous aspect-perception’ (PI II 194b), and later (PI II 205b) is open to calling the attitude we take normally towards portraits as ‘regarding-as’ (as the subject of the portrait). He does not explicitly identify the two, but I think it important that both examples – seeing the rabbit but not the duck, and one’s habitual attitude towards portraits – are contrasted with aspect perception. Instead, in the first case at any rate, the continuous case is assimilated to ordinary perception, ‘just if I had said “I see a red circle over there”’ (PI I 194f). Still that leaves it uncertain exactly how Wittgenstein envisaged the relation between them. I do not know whether this is simply due to the unfinished status of these writings, or whether it was intentional, due to the character of the phenomenon’s shifting as we consider slightly different examples (see PI II 198h, 203a, 206d, 205c, 207c; RPPI 23, 31, 54, 156, 190, 316, 207, 379, 411; LWI 580, 583, 588, 697).
- 9.
Chris Belshaw is unpersuaded; I thank him for many conversations over the years on these topics.
- 10.
Wollheim, R. (1980) ‘Seeing-as, seeing-in, and pictorial representation’, in Art and Its Objects, Second edition with six supplementary essays. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 205–26 (Wollheim 1980); Wollheim, R. (1993) The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 169–80 and pp. 190–5 (Wollheim 1993), and Wollheim R (1987) Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 46–51 (Wollheim 1987). For criticism, see G. Kemp and G. Mras, eds. (2016) Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in (London: Routledge).(Kemp and Mras 2016)
- 11.
See Budd, M. Chap. 5, and Block, N. (1981) Imagery. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) (Block 1981). In the Philosophical Investigations Part II, section iii (177), Wittgenstein says that if you (visually) imagine someone, its being an image of that person is not determined by inspecting it (RPPI 262; LWI 314, 317). He is especially interested in finding interconnections (or lack of them) between mental images and belief, meaning, remembering, aspect perception, mental calculation, expecting, intending and so on. What is less clear is how – if at all – we are to think of the images themselves, that is, of what sorts of things they are. See PI 370; PI II ii-iii (175–6), 207b, 213c; RPPI 248, 360, 390, 726, 760, 848, 885, 900, 1001, 1014; RPPII 63, 69–75, 78–100 (especially), 109–147, 543; LWI 177, 452, 483, 733, 794, 843.
- 12.
By speaking of ‘facts’ here, I mean only that ‘now he understands’ is sometimes true. So, I do not accept Kripke’s interpretation (1982), according to which those sorts of claims do not admit of truth value (roughly: truth can never assume that much weight in Wittgenstein’s thought). I favour the interpretation whereby to follow a rule is to grasp something in a manner that is not an interpretation, and the involvement of the community is the necessary background against which claims of understanding have sense (PI I 201, BB 143). See Kripke, S. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell) (Kripke 1982); McGinn, M. (1997) Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. (London: Routledge), Chap. 3 (McGinn 1997); R. Fogelin (2010) Taking Wittgenstein at his Word (Princeton: Princeton University Press); and Budd (1989) Chaps. 2–3. (Fogelin 2010)
- 13.
- 14.
For further details on the music/language analogy – except, strangely enough, my point that few listeners play whereas all language users speak – see the excellent article by Hanfling, O. (2004) ‘Wittgenstein on Music and Language’, in Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Philosophy, ed. by P. Lewis (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing) (Hanfling 2004). I am mostly in agreement with it, except when he says the natural response would be puzzlement to the question ‘Did you understand the tune of the National Anthem?’, thereby showing the limits of the notion of musical understanding – I think it would be puzzling only in the way that ‘Do you understand “It’s raining”?’ would be puzzling. However, this is not important, as I do not want to rest anything on my use (or his) of ‘understanding’. There is a hint of my main argument at p. 160.
- 15.
Scruton, R. (2004) Wittgenstein and the Understanding of Music. The British Journal of Aesthetics 44:1, pp. 1–9. (Scruton 2004)
- 16.
- 17.
For a detailed analysis of these remarks, which I think judges them well, see Sharpe, R. (2004) ‘Wittgenstein’s Music’, in Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Philosophy, ed. by P. Lewis (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing) (Sharpe 2004). Like Hanfling, he hints at my argument at pp. 144–5. Another fascinating attempt in addition to Mulhall’s to show that these are something more than analogies – that they indicate something like the essence of intentionality as such, if that is not putting too strongly – is in Bar-Elli, G. (2006) ‘Wittgenstein on the Experience of Meaning and the Meaning of Music’. Philosophical Investigations 29:3 pp. 217–49. (Bar-Elli 2006)
Ultimately, I think Bar-Elli is too much of a realist about these things, suggesting there could be a Wittgenstein-inspired theory of them, which might surprise us with what it finds. And in particular, I do not think it is true, or that Wittgenstein thought, that the understanding of music is ‘criterially revealed by grasping it under an aspect, which is manifested in our ability to make relevant comparisons’ (p. 247; for another example see Worth, S. (1997) ‘Wittgenstein’s Musical Understanding’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 37:2 pp. 158–66) (Worth 1997). I do not think that inevitably there will be criteria (even in the Wittgenstein sense whereby they are in some sense defeasible). There can, at most, be signs (and that is only because the notion of ‘signs’ is vague). However, the paper is first-rate, and explores several of the deeper avenues in Wittgenstein’s thought that have seldom been travelled before. For someone who makes what I think is the opposite mistake of seeing too many distinctions, see McFee (1999). For example, he denies that someone saying ‘Now at last it’s a dance’ is expressing an aspect (p. 278–9), but merely something ‘like that of aspect-perception’. However, RPPI 1 (also PI II 206k) directly contradicts this claim (I quote this because McFee does too):
For how have we arrived at the concept of ‘seeing this as this’?…Where, for example, what is in question is a phrasing by eye or ear. We say ‘You must hear this bar as an introduction’.
- 18.
I would like to thank Chris Belshaw and Jim Edwards, who read and discussed. Malcom Budd in his (1995) Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London: Penguin) (Budd 1995) says that the (aesthetic) value of a work of art is the intrinsic value of the experience of one who perceives it with understanding. I think that, together with my conclusion, this means that the aesthetic value of a work of music is only contingently publicly manifest, though it is generally intersubjectively available.
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Kemp, G. (2017). Wittgenstein and the Inner Character of Musical Experience. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_8
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