Wittgenstein and Aesthetic Education

Abstract

In the Tractatus, it is clear that the aesthetic along with the related notions of the ethical and ‘the riddle of life’, pose a major challenge to that work’s bleak atomistic metaphysics. In a world that is no more than “the totality of facts” (TLP, # 1.1) and where the only kind of ‘necessity’ is a logical one (TLP, # 6.37) the apparent power of the aesthetic to ‘shape up’ the contingent material of the world into expressive configurations revealing their own kind of ‘necessity’ must remain quite obscure — for what could one say, from the Tractatus point of view, about Van Gogh’s chair, Hokusai’s wave or Monet’s poplars? Only such aesthetically unenlightening facts as that they picture a pipe and some tobacco resting on the artist’s chair, a giant wave about to engulf a fishing boat and an avenue of poplar trees by a river.