Chapter 9 - If an Artwork Could Speak: Aesthetic Understanding After Wittgenstein

Summary

Prologue

‘I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him’, writes Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (CV, 84e). This is not because he understands Shakespeare but has no instrumental use for him. Rather, Shakespeare does not speak to him any more than a talking lion would (see Chapters 1 and 4.) Whatever is happening in Shakespeare, Wittgenstein claims to not really get it. The confession is not a criticism of either Shakespeare or himself but a statement of aesthetic alienation:

I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers. The misfortune is, I believe, that he stands by himself, at least on the culture of the west, so that one can only place him by placing him wrongly (CV, 84e).

The study of Shakespeare and his cultural milieu has progressed significantly since Wittgenstein's time, but to the modern Austrian philosopher the Elizabethan playwright was nothing less than an enigma. The failure to understand Shakespeare qua artist is akin (but by no means identical) to the failure to understand him qua person. Mutatis mutandis, the failure to understand an artist's works is akin to the failure to understand a person's actions. This is not because artworks are actions but because both are things that we produce intentionally, with varying degrees of success.

What – if anything at all – is it to understand a play, a symphony, a sculpture or (pace Barr 2016) an event? What does getting it or not getting it amount to? The failure to grasp something is not a matter of being left out of knowing some kind of secret fact (phenomenological or otherwise), as in Wrede's The Messianic Secret (Wrede 1901). Rather, it is like the tortoise's failure to understand what it is for one thing to logically follow another. ‘Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down’, says the Tortoise to Achilles (Carroll 1895). Yet, his understanding of whatever Achilles writes down falls perilously short of understanding what is going on when he does so.