Abstract
Language, for Wittgenstein, is anything but a stable and fixed set of names for things; the simple model of ostensive definition as the sole determinant of linguistic meaning does not survive the first section of Philosophical Investigations. Language, rather, is a myriad network of possible and actual actions that take place in particularized contexts, where the interconnecting relational linkages that emerge or reside within those contexts, those language-games, constitute in large part the meanings of our words and they constitute the preconditions for our verbal actions. This context-sensitivity applies to art and music as well as to language: art that we see or hear or read is in considerable part constituted by those relational interconnections. Thus the idea of a stable and fixed work of music or art, directly analogous to the model of the stable word given invariant meaning by direct reference or ostensive definition, is equally attractive to a mind seeking organized simplicity—and equally mythical.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I discuss object-constitutive relations more fully in “Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove,” New Literary History 38:1 (Winter 2007): 163–181 (Hagberg 2007).
- 2.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). I will provide the year of the remark in the text throughout this article (Wittgenstein 1980).
- 3.
- 4.
Some variants of the institutional theory of art made this error; I offer an etiology in “The Institutional Theory of Art: Theory and Anti-Theory,” Blackwell Companion to Art Theory, ed. P. Smith and C. Wilde (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 487–504 (Hagberg 2002).
- 5.
It is instructive that, while there is such a thing as a reader’s digest (that description is also its title), there is no such thing as a listener’s digest. But there are greatest hits collections of operatic arias, etc. and to hear these melodic “atoms,” stripped of their contexts, is in the relational sense being discussed here to not genuinely hear them at all. The fact that this conforms to our deep intuitions (concerning the need to hear the whole work) on the matter suggests that Wittgenstein is uncovering something deep about the nature of genuine aesthetic experience and its relational embeddedness, i.e., aesthetic experience is not the kind of thing that can be fully captured by any reductively atomistic, sensory stimulus-and-response model.
- 6.
This has been discussed in terms of intransitive aesthetic content; I present this more fully in this in Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 99–117 (Hagberg 1995).
- 7.
For a fuller discussion of this point see my paper, “The Thinker and the Draughtsman: Architecture and Philosophy as ‘Work on Oneself’,” in Philosophy as Therapeia: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 66 (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 67–81 (Hagberg 2010).
- 8.
I explore this notion in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), pp. 202–222 (Hagberg 2008).
- 9.
Ray Monk has shown how relational interconnections are centrally important in understanding persons (which can serve as a helpful model for understanding works of music and art). See his “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character,” Philosophy and Literature, Volume 31, Number 1 (April 2007): 1–40; and “Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding,” Poetics Today 28/3 (2007a): 527–570 (Monk 2007b).
- 10.
This is a kind of conceptual rupture that has not always been avoided: a series of recordings was released of Leonard Bernstein’s performances in which he allegedly identified so closely with the composition that he felt himself, in the performance, to have become the composer. The interestingly fallacious implication of this conceptual confusion was that this special identification allowed a uniquely privileged interpretation.
- 11.
For a helpful antidote, see Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (Davies 2004).
- 12.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) (Wittgenstein 1958a).
- 13.
For a lucid and compact discussion of this matter in connection with the instructive inaccuracy of attempting to offer an account of Wittgenstein’s position in behaviorist terms, see Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein (New York: Norton, 2005) (Monk 2005). See also my Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), “A Behaviorist in Disguise?”, pp. 77–88 (Hagberg 2008).
- 14.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1974) (Wittgenstein 1974).
- 15.
For a discussion of the impulses toward idealism in aesthetics and their linguist roots, see Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), Chapter 2, “Art as Thought,” pp. 31–49 (Hagberg 1995).
- 16.
This points to a methodological flaw permeating some experimental work on aesthetic reactions in empirical psychology; i.e., without the sensibility of the subject being taken into account, the stimulus one is attempting to study as cause cannot be accurately isolated or described, and once one has isolated and described the stimulus in a way inclusive of the receiver’s sensibility, the result, now particularized to that individual context, no longer carries across from one case to another.
- 17.
See for example Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) (Cooke 1959). Any empirical psychological study that would isolate stimuli to determine their atomistic emotive effects would thus be similarly methodologically flawed. (Wittgenstein’s deep antipathy to empirical methods in aesthetics can be better understood in this light; this antipathy is not merely a matter of taste for one type of explanation over another.)
- 18.
This is a point that fans out along a number of lines of significance. This is not the place to pursue these lines at length, but some (of particular relevance to what we might call the logic of our critical language) would be: (1) what constitutes what we call “the same” in expressive content is not a matter of invariant stimuli across cases—we might well identify what we call the same expression or expressive content where this sameness does not require identical stimuli; (2) a generic question concerning the criteria for correctness in the description of expressive content is similarly not invariant across cases; (3) evidence-based articulated knowledge need not underwrite correct description of expressive content (learning to look and see, or to listen and hear, in the same way is not a function of evidence or deductive argumentation); and (4) more generally, the competent use of our critical descriptive concepts is not a theory-grounded activity (a point developed at some length in the writings of Frank Sibley; see his Approach to Aesthetics, ed. John Benson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) (Sibley 2001).
- 19.
A full examination of the interrogative character of Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” would show these observations at critical work and in some detail (this would require a separate music-analytical article). It is of interest that, as the piece progresses, the question posed by the trumpet is asked with greater and greater urgency, although each actual iteration of the questioning theme is, strictly sonically speaking, identical or nearly so to its predecessor. The answers following each trumpet statement of the question, by contrast, do change as variations on a musically mimetic theme, i.e., a portrayal of an increasingly felt desperation to provide an answer where none is or ever will be forthcoming. (See notes 5, 16, and 33 on the instructive limits of the stimulus-isolation model in this connection.)
- 20.
Examples function rather powerfully as part of the argument here: imagine (to think of a few cases with the melodic movement described here) fragments of Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament,” Miles Davis’s “My Funny Valentine,” and John Coltrane’s “Impressions” being analyzed down to their bare melodic contour and thus regarded as having the same basic meaning. This would be the musical equivalent of identifying the sameness of bodily movement in differing contexts of persons waving their arms from across a field; they may have the bodily movement in common, but the meaning will never be located there, and what such an analysis leaves out is far more important in interpreting the gesture than what it includes (e.g., as though waving to show where the picnic is, or to warn of land mines, or to warmly greet, etc. is only contingently added atop what is wrongly regarded as the genuine bearer of meaning, the basic bodily movement.)
- 21.
Leon Botstein, ed. The Compleat Brahms (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 309 (Botstein 1999).
- 22.
Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 301 (Rosen 2000).
- 23.
For the classic discussion see Knud Jeppesen, Counterpoint, trans. Glen Haydon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1939) (Jeppesen 1939); for a particularly helpful introduction to the subject as discussed here see his Chapter I: “Outline History of Contrapuntal Theory,” pp. 3–53.
- 24.
On this matter see the analysis and discussion of Bach’s two-part inventions in W. Christ, R. DeLone, V. Kliewer, L. Rowell, and W. Thompson, Materials and Structure of Music, Vol. II, Chapter 6: “Thematic Development in Two-Voice Counterpoint” (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), pp. 120–145 (Christ et al. 1967).
- 25.
For an example of breathtaking musical intelligence of this kind see first the fugue subject at the top of the score excerpt and then follow along the score while listening to any performance of J. S. Bach, Contrapunctus IX, from The Art of the Fugue, in Charles Burkhart, Anthology for Musical Analysis, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), pp. 114–119 (Bach 1972).
- 26.
And of course in the evolution of contrapuntal practices there are cases where understanding depends on our seeing of how the setting aside of some of the rules of strict counterpoint opened the way to the new possibilities of free counterpoint in the late nineteenth century, and then how this in turn opened the way to the linear counterpoint of the twentieth century (in this connection consider the famous example of Stravinsky’s Octet of 1923) in which no harmonic considerations whatsoever are allowed to disturb the integrity of the subjects, the melodies. Still more extreme, Schoenberg’s dissonant counterpoint deliberately set out to discover new sonorities, new accidental or unexpectedly emergent relations between pitches vertically. With linear and dissonant counterpoint in mind, it is perhaps not overly fanciful to see a similarity here to what Wittgenstein said about his initial and utterly failed attempt to put his philosophical ideas into a continuous conventional presentation (rather than numbered remarks that seemed to demand their autonomy) and how they seemed to die there. Or: an understanding of the ways those rules of counterpoint were developed, evolved, and systematically broken can cast unexpected light on, and indeed deepen our way of seeing, Wittgenstein’s achievement.
- 27.
Philosophical Investigations, “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (former Part II), Sec. xi, remark 261.
- 28.
Philosophical Investigations, “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (former Part II), Sec. xi, remark 260.
- 29.
Philosophical Investigations, “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (former Part II), Sec. xi, remark 254.
- 30.
For discussions of the role of aspect-perception as it runs throughout Wittgenstein’s philosophy, see Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, ed. W. Day and V. Krebs (Cambridge University Press, 2010) (W. Day and V. Krebs, 2010).
- 31.
For a helpful succinct discussion of this see Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 208–211 (Apel 1969).
- 32.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 5 (Wittgenstein 1958).
- 33.
The experience of hearing and understanding variations can be particularly instructive here (and in connection with the issues discussed in connection with counterpoint above): often in understanding the content of a variation we hear the variation in question not only against its predecessor-theme, and not only against its predecessor variation(s), but also hearing, in the musical imagination, what it is not, i.e., the variation may have what we might call subtractive content (where it is only a skeleton or reduction of what preceded it). In such cases, such meaning-content is clearly indispensable and yet sonically inaudible, so the isolation of what is heard as a stimulus in sensory terms systematically leaves out as much as it captures.
- 34.
An earlier and shorter version of this chapter was published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy XXI, Fall 2014: 23–40; I am grateful for permission to include that material here.
References
Bach, J. S. Contrapunctus IX, from The Art of the Fugue, in Burkhart, Charles. 1972. Anthology for Musical Analysis, 2nd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Baxandall, Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Botstein, Leon. ed. 1999. The Compleat Brahms. New York: Norton.
Christ, W., R. DeLone, V. Kliewer, L. Rowell, and W. Thompson. 1967. Materials and Structure of Music, Vol. II. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Cooke, Deryck. 1959. The Language of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davies, Stephen. 2004. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hagberg, Garry L. 1995. Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hagberg, Garry L. 2002. The Institutional Theory of Art: Theory and Anti-Theory. In Blackwell Companion to Art Theory, ed. P. Smith and C. Wilde, 487–504. Blackwell.
Hagberg, Garry L. 2007. Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove. New Literary History 38(1): 163–181.
Hagberg, Garry L. 2008. Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hagberg, Garry L. 2010. The Thinker and the Draughtsman: Architecture and Philosophy as ‘Work on Oneself’. In Philosophy as Therapeia: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 66, 67–81. Cambridge University Press.
Jeppesen, Knud. 1939. Counterpoint, trans. Glen Haydon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Monk, Ray. 2005. How to Read Wittgenstein. New York: Norton.
Monk, Ray. 2007a. Life Without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding. Poetics Today 28(3), 527–570.
Monk, Ray. 2007b. This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character. Philosophy and Literature, 31(1), 1–40.
Rosen, Charles. 2000. Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sibley, Frank. 2001. Approach to Aesthetics, ed. John Benson et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Treitler, Leo. 1989. Music and the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Willi Apel, 1969. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958a. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958b. The Blue and Brown Books Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
W. Day and V. Krebs, eds. 2010. Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hagberg, G.L. (2017). Wittgenstein, Music, and the Philosophy of Culture. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40909-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40910-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)