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‘I heard a plaintive melody’: (Philosophical Investigations, p. 209)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Oswald Hanfling
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Extract

Asked about Wittgenstein's contribution to aesthetics, one might think first of all of his discussion of ‘family resemblance’ concepts, in which he argued that the various instances of games, for example, need not have any feature or set of features in common, in virtue of which they are all called games; the concept of a game can function perfectly well without any such set of conditions. This insight was soon applied to the much debated quest for a definition of the word ‘art’, and it was claimed that here too the various instances of art were related by way of family resemblance, so that it was futile to look for a condition or set of conditions, which works of art, and only works of art, had in common. Wittgenstein himself did not extend his argument to the concept of art. Although he was deeply interested in the arts, especially music, he wrote very little on aesthetics, his most sustained treatment of the topic being available for us only in the form of notes taken of a set of his lectures on aesthetics (LC).

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 28 , March 1990 , pp. 117 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1990

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References

1 I have preferred ‘complaint’ to ‘plaint’, as printed in the published translation. The latter has the advantage of using the same word in both sentences, as does the German original (klagend, Klage), but whereas the English ‘plaint’ is a rather unusual word, the German Klage is the straightforward word for complaint (as well as for plaint in the legal sense).

2 The example of sadness is used by Peter Kivy in his interesting discussion of the present topic, and a picture of a ‘sad’ Saint Bernard dog appears as the frontispiece of his book The Corded Shell (Kivy, 1980).Google Scholar

3 A similar example, mentioned in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, is that of a bitter food and a bitter sorrow (RPP, I, 68).Google Scholar