«Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists»

Ludwig Wittgenstein's views on ethics and aesthetics have made very little impact, largely no doubt because it is so hard to determine what they are, itself a result of his reluctance to spell them out at any length. The most striking contrast between morality and art, as they are studied from a contemporary philosophical viewpoint, is the place that evaluation is often thought to occupy in relation to them. The sheer fact that morality is necessary because of a conflict between what we would like to do and what we ought to do is enough to demonstrate that sincerity, though a crucial concept in ethics isn't one that can be invoked in a straightforward sense. If one takes 'sincerity' in the most naive way, as a congruence between the inner and the outer life, it is precisely what we do not require much of the time.

Early analytic philosophy is known for its logical rigor that seems to leave no place for non-rational sources of knowledge such as mystical experiences. The following paper shows on the example of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein that despite of this early analytic philosophy was interested in mysticism and it also shows the roots of this interest. For Russell an application of logical methods to solving philosophical puzzled was an expression of a more fundamental striving – to know the world as it is, sub specie aeternitatis – which is mystical in nature. In turn early Wittgenstein’s philosophy sets the limits of meaningful propositions and provides the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown and what manifests itself in the world. The latter belongs to the realm of the mystical.

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are ‘mock thoughts’ (Schiengedanken). The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model (‘picture’) states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis (1961, 83). By the early 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model (picture) the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful (gelungene) or ‘good’ works of art (ibid.), in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’ (1980, 36).

ABSTRACTIn 1931 Wittgenstein wrote: ‘the limit of language manifests itself in the impossibility of describing the fact that corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence without simply repeating the sentence’. Here, Wittgenstein claims, ‘we are involved … with the Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy’. This paper shows how this remark fits with Wittgenstein's early account of the substance of the world, his account of logic, and ultimately his view of philosophy. By contrast to the currently influential resolute reading of the Tractatus, the paper argues that the early Wittgenstein did not aim at destroying the idea of a limit of language, but that the notion lies at the very heart of Wittgenstein's early view. In doing so, the paper employs and defends the Kantian interpretation of Wittgenstein's early philosophy.