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Wittgenstein and Aesthetics
Appelqvist, Hanne
2023-03-09
Appelqvist , H 2023 , Wittgenstein and Aesthetics . Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig

Wittgenstein , Cambridge University Press , Cambridge . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108946452
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Appelqvist
This Element argues that aesthetics, broadly conceived, plays
a significant role in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In doing so, it
draws on the interpretative tradition that emphasizes affinities
between Wittgenstein’s thought and Kant’s philosophy.
Following the chronology of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work,
this Element addresses Wittgenstein’s early equation between The Philosophy of
ethics and aesthetics, his middle-period discussion on the
normative character of aesthetic judgments and the possibility Ludwig Wittgenstein
of their justification, and his later comparison between
language and music. As a whole, it traces a continuous line of
thought pertaining to a non-conceptual form of encounter with
reality, which is developed in close conjunction with aesthetics
Wittgenstein

and contributes to Wittgenstein’s understanding of language
and the method of philosophy throughout his career.
and Aesthetics
About the Series Series Editor
This series provides concise and David G. Stern
structured introductions to all the central University of Iowa
Hanne Appelqvist
topics in the philosophy of Ludwig
Wittgenstein. The Elements are written
by distinguished senior scholars and
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108946452 Published online by Cambridge University Press

bright junior scholars with relevant
expertise, producing balanced and
comprehensive coverage of the full range
of Wittgenstein’s thought.
Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of the Austrian

philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
by Moritz Nähr, 1930 (IanDagnall Computing / Alamy
Stock Photo). ISSN 2632-7112 (online)
ISSN 2632-7104 (print)
Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
edited by
David G. Stern
University of Iowa
WITTGENSTEIN
AND AESTHETICS
Hanne Appelqvist
University of Helsinki
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Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
DOI: 10.1017/9781108946452
First published online: January 2023
Hanne Appelqvist
University of Helsinki
Author for correspondence: Hanne Appelqvist, hanne.appelqvist@helsinki.fi
Abstract: This Element argues that aesthetics, broadly conceived, plays

a significant role in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In doing so, it draws on
the interpretative tradition that emphasizes affinities between
Wittgenstein’s thought and Kant’s philosophy. Following the
chronology of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, this Element
addresses Wittgenstein’s early equation between ethics and aesthetics,
his middle-period discussion on the normative character of aesthetic
judgments and the possibility of their justification, and his later
comparison between language and music. As a whole, it traces
a continuous line of thought pertaining to a non-conceptual form of
encounter with reality, which is developed in close conjunction with
aesthetics and contributes to Wittgenstein’s understanding of
language and the method of philosophy throughout his career.
Keywords: aesthetic judgment, ineffability, Kant, normativity,

philosophical method
© Hanne Appelqvist 2023

ISBNs: 9781108931120 (PB), 9781108946452 (OC)

ISSNs: 2632-7112 (online), 2632-7104 (print)
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy 6
3 The Middle Period 19
4 From the Brown Book to the Philosophical Investigations 41
5 Aesthetics and Philosophy 58
References 65
Wittgenstein and Aesthetics 1
1 Introduction
Aesthetics is usually understood as the philosophical investigation of art,
beauty, and taste. Standard questions within the field pertain to the essence of
art, artistic and aesthetic value, aesthetic experience and judgment, and the
meaning, understanding, and interpretation of artworks. Most of these themes
figure in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writing, where, from 1915 onward, we find
observations on aesthetic contemplation, reason-giving in aesthetics, and the
nature of musical meaning and understanding. In Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, there
are also numerous remarks on composers, literary authors, poets, and, for
example, the notion of a genius, testifying to his awareness of the aesthetic
debates prevalent in his cultural milieu. Music in particular had a dominant role
in Wittgenstein’s life and thought, which is natural given his early immersion in
Viennese musical life.1
However, in addition to its narrow disciplinary sense, the term aesthetics has
a broader philosophical use. In the broad sense of the term, originating in the
work of Alexander Baumgarten and underscored by Immanuel Kant’s philo-
sophical project, aesthetics refers to the investigation of the domain of sensibil-
ity in general (Baumgarten 1954, §CXVI; CPR A21/B35–36). As such,
aesthetics is explicitly contrasted with the conceptual domain of logic.
Sensible perception, imagination, and feeling are treated as a realm independent
of and irreducible to the discursive realm of concepts, contributing to cognition
on its own terms.
The two senses of “aesthetics” have natural points of overlap, because
judgments about art and other objects of aesthetic appreciation are often treated
as paradigm examples of judgments pertaining to sensibility. Kant too ultim-

ately connects transcendental aesthetic as discussed in the Critique of Pure
Reason with his account of pure judgments of taste, in spite of his initial
hesitation to deem the latter worthy of transcendental investigation (CPR
A21/B35fn; see Guyer and Wood 2000, xiii–xiv). Nonetheless, it is possible
to address issues belonging to aesthetics in the narrow sense independently of
sensibility (as in the quest for the definition of “art”), and questions pertaining to
sensibility independently of philosophy of art and beauty (when investigating,
e.g., the nature of visual experience).
1
Wittgenstein’s family was exceptionally musical and regularly hosted musical events attended by
people like Johannes Brahms, Josef Joachim, Gustav Mahler, Josef Labor, and Richard Strauss. It
is also indicative of the family’s eminence in musical circles that when Wittgenstein’s brother, the
concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein, lost his right arm in the war, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev,
and Benjamin Britten composed music for the left hand specifically for him. On Wittgenstein’s
life and family, see Janik and Toulmin 1973; McGuinness 1988; Monk 1990; and Waugh 2008.
2 The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
The ambiguity of the term contributes to the difficulty of appreciating

Wittgenstein’s views on aesthetics and their relevance for his philosophy.
That Wittgenstein’s own usage of the term oscillates between the broad and
narrow senses adds to the difficulty. For example, in Notes Dictated to
G. E. Moore in Norway in 1914, Wittgenstein alludes to Kant’s distinction
between transcendental aesthetic and transcendental logic. In a discussion on
visual spots that may be internally related to each other either spatially or with
regard to their color, he states: “We might thus give a sense to the assertion
that logical laws are forms of thought and space and time forms of intuition”
(NB, 118). Here, space and time as “forms of intuition” are precisely what
Kant’s transcendental aesthetic treats and does so independently of aesthetics
narrowly conceived (CPR A 21–22/B 35–36).
The word “aesthetics” appears in Wittgenstein’s notes for the first time in
1916. He writes: “Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and
aesthetics are one” (NB, 77). Again, the alignment of logic and the amalgam-
ated ethics-cum-aesthetics suggests that the word is used in its broad sense. In
his later philosophy, Wittgenstein connects such experiences as observing the
lighting in a room, reading a sentence with a peculiar attention, and listening to
music to what he calls intransitive understanding, namely, the kind a kind of
understanding that cannot be discursively further explained, and even to the
question of idealism and realism. These examples similarly disclose a broader
understanding of the notion of aesthetics than the disciplinary sense of the term
accommodates.
This is not to say that one cannot read some of Wittgenstein’s remarks
against the backdrop of aesthetics in the disciplinary sense. In his lectures

on aesthetics in 1933 and 1938, Wittgenstein addresses the distinction
between the beautiful and the agreeable, the justification of aesthetic judg-
ments, the criteria of understanding the arts, and the cultural embeddedness
of artefacts. These themes correspond to discussions prevalent in the field of
aesthetics. At the same time, other topics central in mainstream aesthetics
are absent from Wittgenstein’s enquiry. For instance, while Wittgenstein
makes observations on specific works of art, the classificatory concept of art
does not inform his approach. Nor does he address the definition of the
concept “art,” central in mainstream aesthetics, even if the topic readily
lends itself to his idea of family resemblance and has been treated by
reference to it.2 Wittgenstein’s interest lies in complex and historically
developing “aesthetic systems” like music and architecture, which he claims
2
See Weitz 1956. For discussions on art in light of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, see, for example,
Wollheim 1968; Eldridge 1987; Sedivy 2016, 97–147.
should be investigated “grammatically,” in a way similar to the philosoph-

ical investigation of language (LC 9:40; LA II:18).3
A characteristic feature of Wittgenstein’s treatment of aesthetics, marking
a clear contrast with mainstream analytic aesthetics, is that he does not seem to
approach the topic in any systematic fashion. Notwithstanding his lectures
where some aesthetic questions are discussed at more length, Wittgenstein’s
remarks on aesthetics and the arts typically surface in the context of other topics
just to disappear from sight again. In this regard, his approach is closer to the
German tradition, where the arts and especially music are allied with such core
areas of philosophy as epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. In the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein refers to music at key moments of his explication of the picture
theory of language. In The Blue and Brown Books, music is connected to aspect-
seeing and the understanding of language. And in the Philosophical
Investigations, music figures again as an object of comparison for the under-
standing of language. Some scholars have treated such interconnections as
evidence of Wittgenstein’s determination to bring aesthetics to bear on broader
philosophical issues much in the same way as Kant did in his Critique of the
Power of Judgment.4 Others, by contrast, are less optimistic about relating
Wittgenstein’s remarks on aesthetics and the arts to his core concerns and lean
toward treating them as his personal musings or cultural commentary of
a nonphilosophical kind.5
This contribution to Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
strives to show that aesthetics plays an important role in Wittgenstein’s philoso-
phy throughout his career. In doing so, the Element draws on the interpretative
tradition that emphasizes affinities between Wittgenstein and Kant.6 I thus
disagree with the traditional readings according to which Wittgenstein’s
3
Edited collections dedicated to Wittgenstein’s aesthetics include Johannessen 1998; Allen and
Turvey 2001; Gibson and Huemer 2004; Lewis 2004; Majetschak and Lütterdelfs 2007; Arbo, Le
Du, and Plaud 2012; Hagberg 2017. Special issues on the theme have been published in L’Art du
Comprende 20, 2011; Aisthesis 6 (1), 2013; Ápeiron: Estudios de filosofía 10, 2019; and Estetika:
The European Journal of Aesthetics 57 (1), 2020.
4
See, for example, Cavell 1969; Bell 1987; Moore 1987, 1997, 203–206; Appelqvist 2017, 2019b;
Day 2017.
5
This view is common among the representatives of the so-called traditional reading of
Wittgenstein’s philosophy and often reflects a strictly disciplinary understanding of aesthetics
(see von Wright 1977, ixe; Hacker 1986, 101; Glock 1996, 31; Budd 2011, 775; Schroeder 2017,
612).
6
Accounts on the strength, source, and pervasiveness of Kant’s influence on Wittgenstein and the
exegetical detail in which they are explicated vary across the literature. Accordingly, any given
Kantian interpretation is Kantian to a greater or lesser degree. Some argue that the similarities
between the two can be attributed to Schopenhauer’s influence (e.g., Hacker 1986; Pears 1987;
Stern 1995; Sluga 2011). Others have read Wittgenstein more directly in light of Kant’s transcen-
dental idealism. On Kant’s influence on Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, see Stenius 1960;
Kannisto 1986; Glock 1992, 1997; Moore 1987, 2013; Appelqvist 2013, 2016. On his influence
remarks on aesthetics (and ethics) cannot be seamlessly fitted into the larger
framework of his philosophy. I also contest the resolute readings that, while
stressing the ethical and sometimes aesthetic import of Wittgenstein’s work,
reject the notion of ineffability as central for Wittgenstein’s position.7 From the
Kantian viewpoint, ineffability – the principled impossibility of conceptually
determining every aspect of our encounter with reality – is but a natural corol-
lary of the essentially nonconceptual domain of aesthetics.
Reading one enigmatic philosopher with the help of another equally challen-
ging and complex thinker has its obvious dangers. Kant’s philosophy is subject
to as much controversy as Wittgenstein’s, and appealing to Kant always
involves interpretation. Moreover, if Wittgenstein was influenced by Kant’s
views, as I argue, those views have been transformed and incorporated into
his own project. The affinities between the two also come in degrees.
Sometimes we hear but faint echoes of Kant in Wittgenstein’s writing, at
other times a remark by Wittgenstein reads almost as a paraphrase of Kant’s
text.8 Finally, the views of both Kant and Wittgenstein have been appropriated
and developed further in aesthetics and elsewhere. It is not always easy to
disentangle Wittgenstein’s own position from a “Wittgensteinian” position, and
the same applies to Kant. I have tried to stay as close as possible to the original
texts, but some of Kant’s views have become so entrenched in aesthetics that it
is occasionally more natural to talk more generally about Kantian views.
Wittgenstein is notoriously sparing with his references to other philosophers,
including Kant. It is thus difficult to determine with certainty what the exact
sources of his expressed views are. We know that Wittgenstein read The
Critique of Pure Reason in 1918 and some of his explicit references to Kant
appear already in 1914.9 He also compares Kant favorably to Schopenhauer,
and claims that Kant’s method is the “right sort of approach” in philosophy
(LWL, 73; Rhees 1981, 95). Such remarks would be surprising had Wittgenstein
not had first-hand knowledge of Kant’s philosophy. Yet, to my knowledge, there
is no direct evidence of Wittgenstein reading Kant’s Critique of the Power of
on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, see Cavell 1969, 1979; Williams 1981; Bell 1987; Garver
1994; Appelqvist 2017, 2018, 2019b; Ritter 2020.
7
The resolute reading approaches the Tractatus as a text that employs literary techniques, thereby
bringing aesthetics to bear on Wittgenstein’s work. At the same time, it rejects the interpretation
according to which the early Wittgenstein is committed to the idea of inexpressible logical,
ethical, or aesthetic knowledge or understanding. See Diamond 1983, 1988, 2000; Kremer 2001;
Conant 2002, 2005.
8
Consider, for example, TLP 2.013 vs. CPR A24/B38; TLP 5.61 and PI §435 vs. CPR A 476/B504;
PI §118–119 vs. CPR Axiii; CV, 94 [82] vs. CPR A598/B626.
9
See McGuinness 1988, 252, 270; Monk 1990, 158. Ian Proops has argued that Wittgenstein’s
earliest references to Kant betray familiarity with Kant’s Prolegomena (Proops 2004, 109; see
NB, 15; TLP 6.36111).
Judgment, although some of Wittgenstein’s ideas, such as wallpaper as an

example of beauty, strike curiously close to Kant’s text (see LC 9:16, 9:20;
CPJ 5:229). Given the inconclusiveness of the available evidence, I am reluctant
to make strong claims about the actual historical link between Kant and
Wittgenstein. It is possible that some of Wittgenstein’s Kantian commitments,
like the distinctions between the agreeable and the beautiful, between reasons
and causes, or between nature and art, have been transmitted through other
thinkers. My argument is rather that, regardless of their exact mode of transmis-
sion, the affinities between Wittgenstein and Kant are too deep and pervasive to
be ignored. Most importantly, I am convinced that only by reading
Wittgenstein’s remarks on aesthetics in light of Kant’s philosophy can
we understand their meaning and significance for Wittgenstein’s philosophy
as a whole.
The structure of this Element follows the chronological development of
Wittgenstein’s work, beginning from his early philosophy. The primary goal
of Section 2 is to cast light on Wittgenstein’s alignment of ethics and aesthetics
in the context of his early philosophy. The textual evidence of the Tractatus is
limited, but combining it with the earlier Notebooks 1914–1916 will help to
uncover central features of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the perspective that
aesthetics and ethics share. The section ends by relating this perspective to the
overall framework of the Tractatus, especially to its fundamental distinction
between saying and showing.
Section 3 explores Wittgenstein’s most sustained discussions on aesthetics,
available in the lecture notes from 1933 and 1938. Of the two sets of notes, the
1933 notes have been meticulously taken and carefully edited. The 1938 notes,
while more well-known, are less reliable in this regard.10 The key theme
figuring in both sets of lectures is the nature of aesthetic judgment and the
possibility of its justification. In 1933, Wittgenstein stresses the Kantian con-
trast between judgments of beauty and of the agreeable, arguing against the
possibility of explaining aesthetics in a naturalistic fashion. In the 1938 lectures,
the notion of aesthetic explanation, given by reference to reasons rather than
causes, is developed further. Like Kant, whose account of beauty combines
a subjective and an objective component, Wittgenstein discusses the interface
between subjective reactions to aesthetic phenomena and the communally
shared rules, conventions, and practices that are constitutive of those phenom-
ena. The argumentative goal of Section 3 is to explicate how the two sides of
10
See Anscombe’s letter to von Wright on March 14, 1984, available at the National Library of
Finland; Diamond 2005, 99.
aesthetic judgment come together in a way that anticipates Wittgenstein’s

mature discussion of rule-following.
Section 4 addresses Wittgenstein’s comparison between language and music,
a theme mentioned already in his earliest writings and becoming increasingly
prominent in his later thought. The issue at stake is the constitution of meaning
and the related question of understanding. We find early formulations of
Wittgenstein’s position in the Brown Book and more developed versions of
the same ideas in the Investigations. After contextualizing Wittgenstein’s
remarks on musical meaning against the tradition of aesthetics, the section
argues that a nonconceptual form of understanding, similar to aesthetic
judgment as Wittgenstein understands it, is evoked in the Investigations to
complement the discursive form of understanding cashed out by reference to
rule-formulations.
Section 5 addresses the broader significance of aesthetics in Wittgenstein’s
philosophy. Starting from Wittgenstein alignment between philosophical and
aesthetic investigation, it offers a preliminary analysis of the contribution of
aesthetics to his conception of the method of philosophy. A central notion in this
context is that of surveyable representation, which Wittgenstein develops in
close proximity to aesthetics. As a whole, the interpretation defended in this
Element highlights the continuities of Wittgenstein’s thought from his earliest
philosophical innovations to his mature understanding of language and
philosophy.
2 Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy

2.1 Aesthetics and Ethics

In the Tractatus, ethics and aesthetics are claimed to be one (TLP 6.421).
Consistent with this claim, most of Wittgenstein’s early references to aesthetics
appear in the context of his reflection on the purpose of life. The discussion
unfolds by reference to three frameworks that, for Wittgenstein, are intimately
intertwined or even identical, namely, ethics, aesthetics, and religion.11 Indeed,
it is impossible to make sense of Wittgenstein’s early account of aesthetics
without paying attention to what he writes about ethics and religious faith.
Another caveat concerns the sources available. While Wittgenstein’s 1916 notes
contain a lot of material on the problem of life, the number of related remarks in
the Tractatus is limited. It is therefore difficult to judge whether the Tractatus’s
account of ethics and aesthetics corresponds to the one we may extrapolate from
Notebooks 1914–1916. However, since certain key features of Wittgenstein’s
11
On the interconnections, see Barrett 1991; Tilghman 1991; Gmür 2000.
conception of the aesthetic judgment survive to his latest remarks, we may

assume that the Notebooks provide a fairly reliable picture of his early approach
to aesthetics.
What Wittgenstein calls the “problem of life” arises out of the tension
between the contingent facts of the world and the possibility of happiness –
a tension equally present in Kant’s philosophical enterprise (TLP 6.521, 6.41;
CPR A814/B842; CPrR 5:113; CPJ 5:176).12 According to the Tractatus, the
world is the totality of contingent and hence valueless facts. The picture theory
of language, usually seen as the philosophical core of the Tractatus, leaves no
other role for the subject but to picture those facts; that is, to think about how
things either actually or potentially stand. The subject is a spectator of facts over
which it has no control; it “does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the
world” (TLP 5.632; see TLP 6.373). Yet, toward the end of the book
Wittgenstein suggests that, in addition to its picturing relation to the world of
facts, the subject has a will (TLP 2.1, 6.423–6.43; see NB, 72–73). In contrast to
valueless facts, the will is either good or bad, and this difference manifests itself
in the happiness or unhappiness of the subject’s world (TLP 6.423–6.43; NB,
86–87). But what does it mean for the will to be good if facts have no value?
And how is it possible to reach harmony between one’s will and the world,
which is what happiness requires?
Wittgenstein’s response to the problem is articulated by reference to
a particular perspective on the world, which is distinct from the perspective of
natural sciences yet available for the subject. Natural sciences operate within the
domain of meaningful language, where all propositions have the general form
“This is how things stand” (TLP 4.1, 4.5). Since how things stand is accidental,
the facts of the world are neither good nor bad. Accordingly, the problem of life
remains completely untouched even when all possible empirical questions
about the world have been answered (TLP 6.52). However, there is another
perspective that does not yield any thoughts or propositions. Wittgenstein calls
this perspective the view sub specie aeterni, the “view from eternity,” and
suggests that the experience of value or purpose resides in that perspective
(TLP 6.45).
The subject’s experience of value does not correspond to thoughts or pro-
positions in the technical sense of the Tractatus, because every possible thought
is about empirical facts, whether possible or actual (TLP 6.42). So instead of
characterizing the evaluative perspective or the experience emerging from it
as a thought or a proposition, Wittgenstein speaks of viewing and feeling. He
writes: “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a
12
See Moore 1987; Appelqvist and Pöykkö 2020.
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical”
(TLP 6.45). Rather than approaching the world as an aggregate of mutually
independent and contingent facts – a complete catalogue of which is provided
by the corpus of the natural sciences – the evaluative perspective takes as its
object the world viewed as a limited whole (TLP 1–1.21, 4.11). As such, the
world is viewed from a unique point of view that belongs to the subject as the
world’s limit (TLP 5.632). Accordingly, the world takes on the character of
being the subject’s life: the world is given to me as “my world,” which is to say
that, for the subject, the “world and life are one” (TLP 5.62–5.621). This insight
falls outside the bounds of meaningful language. At the same time, it is the first
step for seeing how the world of contingent facts can relate to the subject’s will
and to good and bad as predicates of that will (NB, 79).13
The perspective on the world as a unique, limited whole is equally manifest in
aesthetics, ethics, and religion. While both ethics and religion, at least ordinarily
understood, are directly related to the question of the value and purpose of life,
the connection is not as obvious in the case of aesthetics. Yet, for Wittgenstein,
aesthetics actually assumes priority over ethics and religion. This is because
what he writes about the evaluative perspective echoes features that are trad-
itionally attributed to aesthetic attitude or judgment.
Wittgenstein’s identification between ethics and aesthetics emerges for the
first time in 1916 as an elaboration of the claim that ethics “must be a condition
of the world, like logic” (NB, 77). In the Tractatus, the identification is preceded
by a characterization of ethics as “transcendental” (TLP 6.421).14 From the
viewpoint of Kant’s philosophy, there is no essential difference between the two
explications, because transcendentality just means the necessary conditions for

the possibility of judging the world (CPR A56/B86). Wittgenstein’s position
reflects this conception: neither ethics nor logic is about the world of empirical
facts, but condition that world. Logic conditions the world by grounding the
possibility of facts including propositions. Logical form makes it possible for
objects to combine together into states of affairs, and it allows thoughts and
propositions to picture those states of affairs since the necessary condition for
such picturing is a shared form between the picture and the pictured (TLP 2.033,
2.17). But how are we to understand the conditioning of ethics-cum-aesthetics?
13
For an alternative reading of “feeling the world as a limited whole,” see (Friedlander 2001, 136–
144). Friedlander acknowledges the link between Kant and Wittgenstein, but overlooks the role
of the notion of a world-whole in their respective accounts (cf. Stenius 1960, 223; Moore 2013,
253).
14
In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein calls ethics “transcendent” (NB, 77). However, his characteriza-
tion of ethics as a condition of the world implies that what he means is transcendentality rather
than transcendence. This interpretation is reinforced by the mature formulation of the same point
in TLP 6.421.
One way to approach the question is to start from the assumption that just as
meaningful thoughts or propositions must conform to the general propositional
form grounded in logic, judgments of value have a shared form (TLP 4.5).15
This proposal accords with Kant’s transcendental idealism: the forms of our
judgments condition our judgments as well as their objects, making it possible
for the two to have an internal, necessary relation (cf. TLP 2.0121; CPR A57/
B81). And indeed, Wittgenstein’s explanation of the oneness of ethics and
aesthetics emphasizes the shared perspective from which they arise: “The
work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the
world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics”
(NB, 83).
At the outset, this remark might lead us to think that aesthetics refers to the
“view from eternity” when directed to works of art, whereas ethics takes the
world or one’s life as its object. However, Wittgenstein’s elaboration on
the theme and his emphasis on the formal features of the perspective cast
doubt on a neat separation between ethics and aesthetics even at this level of
abstraction.16
Granted, Wittgenstein mentions the work of art as the aesthetic manifestation
of the sub specie aeterni perspective (NB, 83; CV, 7 [5]).17 Yet, the only
concrete example of an object of aesthetic contemplation in his 1916 discussion
is a mundane, everyday object:
If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you
know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the
matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world.
But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else
colourless by contrast with it. (NB, 83)
The ordinariness of Wittgenstein’s example serves to underscore the primacy of

the perspective over its object. Instead of starting from canonical artworks as
objects inspiring aesthetic contemplation, the example implies that any object
may be seen sub specie aeterni and thereby acquire significance for the subject.
Moreover, Wittgenstein claims the stove to be his world in the moment of
contemplation writing that “as a thing among things, each thing is equally
insignificant; as a world each one equally significant” (NB, 83). Later, in
15
See Appelqvist 2013.
16
Here, I disagree with Benjamin Tilghman, for whom Wittgenstein’s claim about the oneness of
ethics and aesthetics just indicates an “important similarity” (see Tilghman 1991, 45). For other
readings on the oneness of ethics and aesthetics, see Barrett 1984; Collinson 1985; Wilde 2004;
Janik 2007; Varga 2009.
17
Throughout this book, I use the 1998 edition of Culture and Value (CV). However, references are
cited from both the 1998 and 1980 bilingual editions. The reference to the 1980 edition is given
in square brackets.
1930, Wittgenstein notes that viewing one’s life sub specie aeterni is to view it
as a work of art (CV, 6 [4]). It thus seems that the distinction between an object
and the world is not relevant for the evaluative viewpoint, and accordingly that
there is no principled difference between ethics and aesthetics.
To understand ethics as conditioning the world is to identify it with the
perspective that shows the world of contingent facts as a limited whole and
hence as the subject’s unique life. Given that the judgments grounded in the sub
specie aeterni perspective show anything – the totality of facts, a work of art, or
a stove – as a possible “world,” the distinction between ethics and aesthetics
dissolves. It is the perspective itself that carries the entire weight of the
judgment being a judgment of value. Given Wittgenstein’s strict notion of
meaningful language as the totality of pictures of possible facts, judgments of
value cannot be discursively expressed. Their formal character as judgments
springing from the sub specie aeterni perspective just shows itself. In this
respect, transcendental ethics is similar to transcendental logic: both condition
the world as something given to the subject, albeit in different ways.
2.2 The View Sub Specie Aeterni

A striking feature of the sub specie aeterni perspective is that what Wittgenstein
says about it closely resembles aesthetic judgment, especially as understood in
the Kantian tradition. The perspective is one of disinterested contemplation,
manifest in feeling rather than thought. It does not yield knowledge about the
world, yet shows its object as unique and valuable for the subject.
These very features characterize the judgment of beauty as articulated in
Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. This work addresses the gulf between
contingent nature and the possibility of happiness associated with morality (CPJ
5:174–176). It begins from the assumption that the world may be approached
from two complementing perspectives: the discursive perspective operative in
the quest for knowledge and the reflective or intuitive perspective at work in
pure judgments of taste and teleological judgments. Kant’s argumentative goal
is to establish the legitimacy of the reflective perspective by analyzing the
judgment of beauty as a merely reflective judgment where the purposiveness
of the form of an object is felt rather than conceptually determined. Kant argues
that the reflective perspective can also be adopted toward the world as a whole.
In the First Critique, he had argued that the “world-whole” falls outside the
bounds of knowledge. However, in the Third Critique he claims that we have the
right to judge the world to be a purposive, limited whole, as long as we do not
take this judgment to yield knowledge (CPR A483–484/B511–512; CPJ 5:379).
And it is precisely the reflective viewpoint on the world that allows us to see the
possibility of harmony between contingent nature and the will bound by the
moral law.
Like Kant’s judgment of beauty, Wittgenstein’s example of the contempla-
tion of the stove explicitly contrasts the sub specie aeterni perspective with the
factual perspective that yields conceptually expressible knowledge. Since “pro-
positions can express nothing that is higher,” the perspective manifests a feature
that Kant requires of pure aesthetic judgments, namely, their nonconceptuality
(TLP 6.42; NB, 78; CPJ 5:221). It is impossible to express in language what it
means for an object to be “my world,” as anything I could possibly say about the
object will be mere statements of facts (TLP 4.1; see TLP 6.42–6.421). For
knowledge and indeed for meaningful thought in general, the stove is but
a trivial, contingent thing. However, the sub specie aeterni perspective does
not show the stove as a trivial thing among other things, “from the midst of
them” (NB, 83). Instead, the stove is seen “from outside,” not in space and time
but “together with space and time” (NB, 83).
Reading the final remark alongside the 1914 reference to space and time as
“forms of intuition” helps make more sense of the transcendental status
Wittgenstein assigns to ethics-cum-aesthetics (NB, 118). The view from eter-
nity transcends the spatiotemporally structured world not by turning away from
the world of facts toward another transcendent realm but by changing the
perspective from which those facts are seen. When the spatiotemporal order
of the world is set aside and I look at something as an object of wonder rather
than of empirical investigation, the potential conflict between contingent facts
and my will disappears. I can see that the “facts of the world are not the end of
the matter” (NB, 74). The contemplative perspective that transforms the stove
into the subject’s world also lies at the heart of the mystical feeling of the world
as a limited whole: “Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there
is what there is” (NB, 86; TLP 6.45). For knowledge, there are no miracles,
because the scientific way of looking at things is not to look at them as miracles
(LE, 11). But if we wonder at the existence of the world as a whole, then the
possibility of seeing that world as a miracle becomes available.
As Wittgenstein’s laconic remark about the world of a happy man being
different from that of an unhappy man suggests, it is something of a mystery
how the switch from the perspective of thought to that of valuation is actually
effected (TLP 6.43). What compels the subject to turn away from the spatio-
temporal order of contingent facts and contemplate them “from outside”?
Wittgenstein notes that art shows things from the right perspective
(NB, 83, 86). But while it might be easier to see beauty in a poem than in
a stove, art itself does not force any particular perspective on the viewer. It is
possible to read a novel as an exercise in a foreign language or as a source of
knowledge of a different culture, think about paintings as investments, or play

music as an energy boost while jogging. And this just means that Wittgenstein
already presupposes a specific conception of how art is to be approached,
namely, by freely contemplating it.
In addition to being disconnected from conceptual thought, the sub
specie aeterni perspective is disinterested. It focuses on the object without
relating it to its spatiotemporal context that renders the object useful for
external purposes. Accordingly, the value endowed on the object in virtue
of the perspective is not relative to any specific purpose but absolute
(LE, 5). While disinterestedness is, especially for Kantians, a common
hallmark of the aesthetic judgment, the same is not usually taken to hold
for moral judgments. Even Kant connects moral value to an interest in the
realization of the highest good, which for him, can be conceptually
expressed (CPJ 5:207; CPrR 5:110–113). Wittgenstein, however, extends
the requirements of disinterestedness and inexpressibility to ethics. This is
partly because of his conviction that facts have no value, and partly
because the will is incapable of changing those facts anyway (TLP
6.373, 6.41). For Wittgenstein, the connection between the will and the
facts of the world is as contingent as the facts themselves, and absolute
value cannot be grounded in anything contingent. Hence, the only avail-
able source for the harmony required for happiness is to accept the world
as it is and in this sense renounce all interest in it. For Wittgenstein, “The
only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of
the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate”
(NB, 81). The happy man must set aside all hope and fear, he “must have
no fear. Not even in face of death” (NB, 74). Such a disinterested stance
allows my will to be in harmony with the world, however it might be.
Arthur Schopenhauer, whose influence is visible in Wittgenstein’s early
remarks, similarly saw disinterested contemplation as the essence of the aes-
thetic attitude. Building on Kant’s requirement that pure judgments of taste be
disinterested, Schopenhauer took the aesthetic attitude to have the capacity to
liberate the subject from torments caused by their insatiable will (Schopenhauer
1969, 195–200).18 Wittgenstein’s view diverges from Schopenhauer’s in that he
does not treat all willing as categorically bad. He sides with Kant by distin-
guishing between good and bad willing (see TLP 6.43; NB, 73; cf.
Schopenhauer 1969, 197). Nevertheless, the liberating aspect of the aesthetic
perspective is present in Wittgenstein’s thought:
18
On Schopenhauer’s influence on the early Wittgenstein, see Hacker 1986, 81–104; Glock 1999;
Jacquette 2017.
Is it the essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with
a happy eye?
Life is grave, art is gay.
For there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is the beautiful.
And the beautiful is what makes happy. (NB, 86; italics in original)
It would be a mistake to conclude that the role of art is to produce happiness in

the empirical, psychological sense of the term. For Wittgenstein, the relevant
sense of happiness is an overall harmony between the subject’s will and the
world. Happiness is not a describable property, and insofar as it has any mark,
this mark can only be a “metaphysical one, a transcendent one” (NB, 78).19 The
power of the aesthetic perspective lies in its ability to overcome the facts of the
world, including one’s psychological states, by abandoning the perspective that
focuses on those facts as facts.
For Kant, the judgment of beauty serves to build a bridge between the
empirical world judged by theoretical reason and the possibility of happiness
arising from practical reason. According to him, “Beauty is the form of the
purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation
of an end” (CPJ 5:236). In other words, while the judgment of beauty does not
allow for a conceptual specification of the purpose of the object, the form of the
object is judged to be purposive. The object is seen as if a will had designed it for
some purpose, which we cannot conceptually determine. The same idea of
intentional causality underlies the possibility of seeing the deterministic world
as a purposive world-whole. We see the world as if designed for man’s moral
vocation and hence hospitable for the pursuit of the highest good, including
happiness (CPJ 5:397–400).20
On my reading, Kant’s idea of purposiveness understood by reference to

intentional causality marks a third point of contact between Wittgenstein’s early
aesthetics and Kant’s position. As noted, the starting point of Wittgenstein’s
discussion of value is the question of the purpose of life: “What do I know about
God and the purpose [Zweck] of life?” (NB, 72). As I read him, Wittgenstein’s
answer evokes the paradoxical idea of purposiveness without purpose. From the
viewpoint of knowledge, life does not have any purpose. Yet, Wittgenstein
praises Dostoevsky for correctly seeing that “the man is fulfilling the purpose of
existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live” (NB, 73).
This vision incorporates a sense of purposiveness without an objective purpose.
19
Translation altered to match the German original: “Dies Merkmal kann kein physisches, sondern
nur ein metaphysisches, ein transcendentes sein.”
20
On Kant’s notion of purposiveness and intentional causality, see Guyer 1997, 48–50; Allison
2001, 120–125.
In 1930, Wittgenstein returns to the possibility of seeing one’s life as purpos-

ive. He describes a conversation with Paul Engelmann, who momentarily sees his
own writings as glorious and worth publishing but loses all interest in doing so
when seriously considering the endeavor. According to Wittgenstein, the first
experience resembles the aesthetic experience of seeing ordinary human activ-
ities on a theater stage. Watching such activities in their everyday setting makes
no impression on us, but the aesthetic perspective renders them glorious and
“worth contemplating, as is every life & everything whatever” (CV, 6 [4]).
Referring to the sub specie aeterni perspective, Wittgenstein states that the
“work of art compels us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective,
but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other” (CV, 7 [4]). So when
Engelmann contemplates his writings from the aesthetic perspective, he is seeing
his own life as “God’s work of art” (CV, 6 [4]). Here, the contrast between art and
nature and the possibility of seeing an object of nature as if designed by God are
precisely what Kant’s reflective perspective is ultimately supposed to ground.21
In short, Wittgenstein’s early remarks on the sub specie aeterni perspective
follow Kant’s analysis of a judgment of beauty. Wittgenstein identifies
a contemplative and disinterested perspective as the essence of all judgments
of value, and suggests that this perspective bestows purpose on what, for
knowledge, is contingent facts. An essential feature of the perspective is the
principled impossibility of expressing in words the aspect of reality revealed by
the perspective. Language can express nothing but facts, but the aesthetic
perspective shows those facts not as facts but as an aesthetic miracle.
Importantly, Wittgenstein locates the aesthetic perspective in a philosophical
landscape similar to Kant’s overall framework. It is offered as a way of

overcoming the tension between the deterministic world of contingent facts
and the possibility of happiness linked to the good exercise of the will.
The proposed reading might raise a concern typically associated with moral
aestheticism: if we treat moral judgments as relevantly similar or reducible to
aesthetic judgments, then we lose the binding force of ethics and fall back on
radical subjectivism or relativism. In light of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy,
the criticism thus formulated rests on a problematic understanding of moral
judgments. The strict ineffability of ethics and the contingency of facts does not
leave room for judgments that would distinguish between good and bad actions
in the empirical domain. For Wittgenstein, and this time in contrast with Kant,
“what happens, whether it comes from a stone or from my body is neither good
nor bad” (NB, 84).22 At the same time, Wittgenstein himself treats the
21
For another reading of Wittgenstein’s remark on Engelmann, see Schulte 2020.
22
The strict inexpressibility of ethics is a major difference between Kant and Wittgenstein and might
seem to undermine the Kantianism of Wittgenstein’s early ethics (see Friedlander 2001, 127–131).
amalgamated ethics-cum-aesthetics as absolutely binding, as indicated by his

suggestion that ethics must carry the “coercive power of an absolute judge”
(LE, 7). After equating the good will and the happy life, Wittgenstein poses the
very question of the source of the binding force of ethics. But instead of
providing an explanation he just implies that this is something one ought to
immediately see:
And if I now ask myself: But why should I live happily, then this of itself
seems to me to be a tautological question; the happy life seems to be justified,
of itself, it seems that it is the only right life.
...
But we could say: The happy life seems to be in some sense more
harmonious than the unhappy. But in what sense?? (NB, 78)
I have argued that the disinterested and nonconceptual sub specie aeterni
perspective makes the harmony between the will and the contingent world
possible. In Sections 3.2 and 3.3, I will argue that such a view entails neither
subjectivism nor relativism. That proposal will draw on Wittgenstein’s later
investigation into the grounds of attributing harmony to a musical work or
performance.
2.3 Aesthetics and Logic

Above I claimed that aesthetics, broadly construed, is intertwined with
Wittgenstein’s primary philosophical concerns throughout his career. The
final point I want to make about Wittgenstein’s early philosophy concerns
a link between his notion of logical form and the Kantian account of aesthetics.
For the early Wittgenstein, logic and ethics-cum-aesthetics stand on a par by

being transcendental (TLP 6.13, 6.421). I have argued this to mean that both
concern a form conditioning the subject’s relation to the world, whether that
form is of thought or of valuation. And it is noteworthy that, just as the
essentially nonconceptual aesthetic perspective, language and thought as
described by the early Wittgenstein also involve an ineffable moment of seeing.
According to the Tractatus’s picture theory, meaningful propositions consist
of names that stand for simple elements of reality (i.e., objects as the constitu-
ents of states of affairs). Wittgenstein calls the objects the immutable “substance
of the world,” which is “form and content” (TLP 2.021, 2.024–2.025).
In my view, Wittgenstein’s position is Kantian not by following Kant’s moral philosophy to its
end, but rather by giving the judgment of beauty a pride of place in the attempt to reconcile
the morally obligated will and the world of contingent facts – a move anticipated by Kant
himself and brought to fruition by Wittgenstein’s identification between ethics and aesthetics
(see Moore 1987, 132–133).
The forms of objects allow them to combine with each other, thereby grounding
the forms of facts and ultimately the form of the entire world. This logical form
is the a priori form of any imaginable world: I could neither perceive nor
imagine any fact independently of it (TLP 2.022, 5.4731). That language and
reality have the same form makes the picturing of facts possible by allowing
names to combine together in the way in which the elements of the pictured fact
are claimed to be combined (TLP 2.151, 2.18). The referential relations between
names and objects, in turn, enable the proposition to “touch reality” and express
its empirical content unambiguously (TLP 2.1514–2.1515, 3.25).
One of Wittgenstein’s key claims is that the form shared by language and
reality cannot be expressed in language. According to him:
Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.

What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.
What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.
Propositions show the logical form of reality.
They display it. (TLP 4.121)
While conditioning facts, logical form itself is not a fact. Accordingly, it cannot
be expressed but rather “expresses itself ” in structured facts, whether linguistic
or nonlinguistic (TLP 4.121; see TLP 2.033, 3.14). And this just means that the
subject’s relation to the formal (internal) properties of facts, springing from
logical form, is not mediated by concepts. Instead, those properties are directly
seen in the facts. Wittgenstein suggests that we could call internal properties
features of facts “in the sense in which we speak of facial features” (TLP
4.1221). As will become clear once we turn to Wittgenstein’s work in the
1930s, these characterizations of the formal aspect of reality imply

a connection to aesthetics broadly conceived. In his later work, a similar
claim about a phenomenon resisting discursive explanation and “expressing
itself ” appears repeatedly in connection with aesthetic phenomena such as
music. Moreover, one of Wittgenstein’s main objects of comparison for the
formal features of aesthetic, sensible phenomena is that of facial features (see,
e.g., BBB 158–185; PI §§526–539).
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein illustrates internal properties by the example he
had raised already in 1914 in relation to “forms of intuition,” namely, the internal
relation between two shades of a color (NB, 118). According to him, “it is
unthinkable” that two shades of the color blue would not stand in the “internal
relation of lighter to darker” (TLP 4.123). That some judgments about colors
would have an a priori status similar to the status of logical propositions, though
consistent with his claim about space, time, and color as “forms of objects,” is
striking (TLP 2.0251, 3.02, 5.4731). So is the implication that the subject’s
relation to the internal relation between two shades of color is one of

direct seeing. We find a similar idea in Kant’s transcendental aesthetic,
specifically in his treatment of pure intuition of geometrical truths. For Kant,
the three-dimensionality of space cannot be demonstrated from concepts, nor
does it depend on the empirical content of our representations. Rather, we judge
with apodictical certainty that space is three-dimensional, based on the pure
intuition that only three lines can intersect at right angles in one point. The three-
dimensionality of space is thus something we see or “intuit” directly, without the
mediation of concepts. Put in terms of a distinction Kant evokes in Prolegomena
and later applies in the Third Critique, geometrical judgments are intuitive. The
operative contrast is discursive, which refers to empirical judgments that rely on
concepts that determine intuitions under their scope (P 4:281–286; CPJ 5:406).
In the Tractarian view, meaningful propositions display logical form, but they
also have empirical content, which calls for a comparison between what the
proposition says and how things actually stand (TLP 3.13, 4.024, 4.5).
Accordingly, when dealing with ordinary propositions, our attention is directed
to the content rather than the form of the proposition. But there are also proposi-
tions that show logical form independent of any empirical content. Tautologies do
not say anything about empirical reality, yet they show their own form and
thereby the formal properties of the world (TLP 6.1–6.12, 6.124). Moreover, to
recognize a tautology as a tautology, Wittgenstein claims, we can use an “intui-
tive method,” which consists of a pictorial presentation of the truth-combinations
of the propositions’ truth-arguments (TLP 6.1203). Wittgenstein’s main example
of tautologies is propositions of logic, but his treatment of mathematical proposi-
tions follows along the same lines. Mathematical equations are “pseudo-
propositions” rather than propositions proper, as they neither represent states of

affairs nor express thoughts (TLP 6.2–6.22). Again, the point reflects the
Tractatus’s core idea that the form of the world must be directly seen and cannot
be discursively explained in a metalanguage as Russell – to Wittgenstein’s
annoyance – optimistically suggested as a solution to the ineffability of logical
form (see TLP, xxii; TLP 2.18).
While it is difficult to know what exactly Wittgenstein has in mind by calling
his method intuitive, it is noteworthy that in the 1933 lectures he brings up the
distinction between intuitive and discursive perspectives and explains it in
a manner consistent with Kant’s usage of the terms. Discussing his novel notion
of a grammatical system, developed to overcome problems to which the
Tractatus’s atomistic conception of elementary sentences led, he notes that
meaning can be approached in two different ways. The first is an intuitive
approach that takes “something in as a whole at a glance”; the second is the
discursive way of looking at meaning as use in a calculus that can be taught to
another (LC 8:59). He also notes that the grammatical investigation of the word
“not” is not like the investigation of the physical world but more like the
investigation of the geometry of a visual field (LC 5:75). These remarks indicate
that not just objects of aesthetic contemplation and geometry but also
a grammatical system can be viewed from a nondiscursive perspective that
focuses on the formal features of the system. The seeds of this idea, I want to
claim, are already in the Tractatus, where the form of a tautology and the
internal relation between two colors can be seen but not said.
The link between logic and aesthetics is visible throughout the Tractatus also in
a concrete way, because Wittgenstein evokes music at key moments of explaining
his notion of logical form. Logical form is first introduced in relation to objects that
are form and content (TLP 2.023, 2.025). While refusing to give concrete examples
of the objects, Wittgenstein illustrates their formal essence by reference to notes.
Like objects whose forms make it possible for them to combine in states of affairs,
notes “must have some pitch” that allows them to come together as musical themes
(TLP 2.0131). The second instance of Wittgenstein’s appeal to music arises in
relation to the articulate character of a proposition. Logical form grounds the
possibility of structure, which is the hallmark of both nonlinguistic and linguistic
facts (TLP 2.033, 2.141). Wittgenstein’s explanation of this idea goes as follows:
“A proposition is not a blend of words. – (Just as a theme in music is not a blend of
notes.) A proposition is articulate” (TLP 3.141).23 Just as the internal relations
between the notes of a scale make the overall structure (shape or pattern) of the
theme possible, the structure of the proposition rests on logical form. Finally, in
explaining the isomorphism between language and reality, Wittgenstein’s example
is once again from the realm of music:
A gramophone record, the musical idea, the musical notation, and the sound-
waves, all stand to one another in the same internal depicting relation that
holds between language and the world.
They all share their logical construction. (TLP 4.014)24
On my reading, these references to music are directly related to Wittgenstein’s

contrast between saying something about the world and the form, required for
the possibility of saying, just showing itself.
The purest example of logical form showing itself is a tautology, because it
does not have any empirical content. The same is true of music. Notes do not
23
Wittgenstein uses the terms “tune” (in English), “Melodie,” and “musikalische Thema” inter-
changeably. See, for example, NB 40; NB 41 vs. TLP 3.141; BBB 166, 167; CV 54 [47];
Wittgenstein 2022, 188–197.
24
Here I use the new translation by David Stern, Joachim Schulte, and Katia Saporiti, forthcoming
from Cambridge University Press. I diverge from their translation by rendering “Notenschrift” as
“musical notation” instead of “the written music.”
refer to any objects, and musical themes do not picture states of affairs. In 1915,
Wittgenstein expresses the point explicitly. According to him, “musical themes
are in a certain sense propositions” (NB, 40). However, instead of being like
ordinary propositions that say something about the empirical world, “a tune is
a kind of tautology, it is complete in itself; it satisfies itself” (NB, 40). Like
propositions of logic that only reveal the form necessary for the possibility of
thought and reality, the tune shows its form. In this way, then, Wittgenstein’s
early references to music make the key idea of the Tractatus, namely, the idea of
seeing logical form independently of empirical content intuitively available.25
3 The Middle Period

3.1 The Transition
It is an often repeated claim that one’s philosophical conception of the nature of
aesthetic judgment reflects one’s personal aesthetic preferences. The Kantian
account in particular is seen as motivated by fondness for formalistically
oriented art over representational and emotive artistic expression. While merely
suggestive from the philosophical point of view, such a correlation is detectable
in Wittgenstein’s case. He expresses reservations about the value of
Mendelssohn’s and Mahler’s music, praises the skill and sobriety of the musical
thinking of Brahms, and tries his hand at modernist architecture.26 The aesthetic
ideal of a “certain coolness” reflected in these examples finds an equally
poignant manifestation in the Tractatus (CV, 4 [2]). A work aimed at “crystal-
line purity,” with every remark polished to aesthetic perfection even at the
expense of intelligibility, the Tractatus is a formally unified whole that “satisfies
itself” (PI §107; NB, 40). It is thus not surprising that the Tractatus has been
compared to both music and architecture.27 After completing the book,
Wittgenstein gives up philosophy for a decade.
After returning to Cambridge in 1929, Wittgenstein begins lecturing under
the title “Philosophy.” G. E. Moore’s lecture notes from 1930 to 1933 give
us a vivid picture of Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought in action during this
25
See Gmür 2000, 151–158. The interpretation I am proposing is directly opposed to that of Janik
and Toulmin, who claim that “Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the
things that matter the most in life.. . . To be concerned merely with form, like the aesthetes of the
1890s, is to pervert art. So in its own way, the Tractatus is every bit as much a condemnation of
l’art pour l’art as Tolstoy’s What is Art?” (Janik and Toulmin 1973, 197; for Wittgenstein’s own
assessment of Tolstoy’s theory, see CV 67 [58–59]). On my reading, art does not express any
truths, and what it shows is precisely concerned with form.
26
For characteristic expressions of Wittgenstein’s aesthetic preferences, see, for example, CV, 4,
18, 27, 29, 40, 43, 76–77 [2, 21, 23, 25, 35, 37–38, 67].
27
See Stenius 1960, 5; Hyman 2001, 146–151.
so-called middle period of his philosophy. The problems covered in the lectures
correspond to those he thought he had solved in the Tractatus, including
linguistic meaning, relation between thought and reality, and the nature of
philosophy. Now the questions are treated by reference to the notions of
grammar, games, and conventional uses of language, familiar from
Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy.
A central notion of Wittgenstein’s middle period, marking an important
difference with the Tractatus’s atomistic picture theory of meaning, is that of
grammatical system. A word, he now claims, has meaning only in a system
constituted by grammatical rules. While the idea may not seem different from
his early account, according to which names have meaning only in the context
of propositions, Wittgenstein’s extension of the context principle to proposi-
tions changes the picture (TLP 3.3). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had claimed
that elementary propositions are independent of one another, but now he argues
that propositions too can only be understood in the context of a grammatical
system (TLP 2.061, 4.21–4.211, 6.3751; LC 5:35). Another, related Tractarian
assumption Wittgenstein abandons is that of immutable objects as the world’s
substance. The mistake in his early requirement of a unique analysis of every
proposition, intended to reveal referential connections between names and
simple objects, was to confuse logical with a chemical analysis – a confusion
that actually violated the Tractatus’s own dictum that the method of philosophy
is qualitatively different from that of the natural sciences (TLP 3.25, 4.111; LC
5:96, 6:17).
A third point of divergence from his early account pertains to Wittgenstein’s
conception of the subject. The subject of the Tractatus is a solitary, even

solipsistic self, placed in the world as the eye in its visual field (TLP 5.62–
5.633). The willing subject is an equally solitary observer of the world, even if
the perspective of observation differs from that of propositional thought. By
adopting the “artistic way of looking at things . . . it looks at the world with
a happy eye” (NB, 86). In the 1930s, the idea of a unique point of view to which
the world is given disappears along with the related notion of a universally valid
form of any imaginable world (TLP 2.022). Gradually, the “I” of the Tractatus
gets replaced by a “we,” and the logical form given in the forms of objects gets
replaced by grammatical rules that have no other foundation except use (LC
4:30–33).
In spite of these differences, some aspects of Wittgenstein’s early position
remain intact. He still adheres to his early view that the natural sciences and
philosophy are qualitatively different kinds of enterprises (LC 5:1; see TLP
4.111). He still endorses the contrast between expressed contingencies and
logical/grammatical necessities grounding the possibility of expression:
“Language always expresses one fact as opposed to another: never expresses

what could not be otherwise – never, therefore, what is essential to the world”
(LC 5:28; see TLP 2.0121). And he still connects logic/grammar to the ineffable
“boundary of language” where “we can’t ask anything further” (LC 5:28; see
TLP 5.61). In consonance with his early view that logical form cannot be
conceptually articulated, Wittgenstein takes grammar to lie beyond the require-
ment of discursive justification. We cannot justify grammatical rules by giving
reasons, because every meaningful utterance already presupposes grammar (LC
5:54, 5:63, 5:88, 7:2; see TLP 5.473). In this respect, the autonomous status of
grammar resembles that of the Tractatus’s logical form.
Each of these points, outlined in the context of his developing account of
language, bears on Wittgenstein’s treatment of aesthetics. The lectures of May
term 1933 address aesthetics, ethics, and religion, thus bringing the 1930–3 set
of lectures to a conclusion in the same landscape that is considered on the final
pages of the Tractatus. However, in contrast with his early remarks whose focal
point was the problem of life, Wittgenstein now directs his attention to aesthetic
judgments and their justification, mentioning religion and ethics only in pass-
ing. In their stead, the formal aspect of language that lends itself to immediate
seeing without the mediation of concepts becomes more prominent. Even so, it
is still possible to see a connection between Wittgenstein’s treatment of aesthet-
ics and the “willing subject,” albeit that now the connection is cashed out by
reference to reason-giving that distinguishes intentional terminology and hence
rational agency from the causal mechanism of natural laws.
3.2 The Beautiful and the Agreeable

Wittgenstein’s first set of lectures on aesthetics opens with a reminder of his new
approach to meaning: “I stress the point of view which says: to know meaning is
to know use” (LC 8:59). The meaning of a word is neither an object nor a feeling
that the use of the word produces in us. And, while determined by grammar, the
meaning of a word is not reducible to a list of grammatical rules either. This
latter conception only arises due to our tendency to think of meaning as an entity
to which we can point. Wittgenstein mentions “God” and “soul” as expressions
easily misunderstood because of this very tendency. Rather than treating such
words as referential or statements like “The Lord is my shepherd” as expressing
facts (entailing that I am a sheep, say), we should investigate them grammat-
ically. This means that we should look at the actual uses of words and sentences
in the contexts to which they belong (LC 8:77). The contextual use of religious
expressions reveals that they are not empirical, let alone scientific. While
expressed in terms of Wittgenstein’s new approach to language, the overall
point is not far off from his early treatment of religious expressions. After all, in
the Tractatus, Wittgenstein deemed religious notions to lie outside the scope of
empirical language and in his Lecture on Ethics claimed them to be allegorical
expressions of experiences of absolute value (LE, 9).
Wittgenstein extends the rejection of the referential understanding of word
meaning to “good,” dismissing the idea of the good as a property (LC 9:2).
However, he quickly reverts to themes that are more readily understood as
belonging to aesthetics. He states: “Practically everything I say of ‘beautiful’
applies in a slightly different way to ‘good,’” thereby offering a new version of
his early alignment between ethics and aesthetics (LC 9:18; see LE, 4; LA I:1).
The bond between the two is now explained by reference to the grammar of the
words “good” and “beautiful.” According to Wittgenstein, the different ways in
which the words are used need not have anything in common any more than the
more familiar example of “game,” because the “way in which you use ‘good’ in
particular case is partly defined by the topic you’re talking of” (LC 9:3).
Similarly, it is a mistake to think of the word “beautiful” as referring to
a single property or a set of properties that all things called beautiful have in
common (LC 9:13; see LA 1:1). The role of the philosopher, then, is not to look
for essentialist definitions for these concepts, but simply describe the uses of
these words (LC 9:17, 9:19; see LA I:8, I:13). The contextual use of the words,
seen against the background of an entire culture, is what bestows them with
meaning (LC 9:2; LA I:26; PI §66; Z §164).
We might reasonably expect Wittgenstein’s new descriptive approach to
deliver empirical case studies of the diverse situations in which people talk
about the arts and other objects of aesthetic appreciation.28 However, as the
discussion of what he claims to be standard aesthetic conversations progresses,

it becomes clear that Wittgenstein’s approach is not exactly neutral when
considered against the tradition of aesthetics. It is not only that he unequivocally
rejects the project of determining the essence of beauty, irrefutably central in the
discipline of aesthetics. He also dismisses historically influential expression and
arousal theories of art, which locate the content of artworks in the emotive
mental states of the artists or the audience, respectively. Most importantly, he
discards in the strongest possible terms the naturalistic approach to aesthetics
that seeks to explain aesthetic judgments or properties by reference to psych-
ology or evolution – a position discussed in Cambridge in the 1930s and still
very influential in mainstream aesthetics (see LC, 348 fn43). According to
Wittgenstein, “In Aesthetic investigations the one thing we’re not interested
28
If this were the case, aesthetic issues would indeed “belong to art criticism, rather than philoso-
phy,” as suggested by Severin Schroeder (Schroeder 2017, 612).
in is causal connections; whereas the one thing we are interested in Psychology

is causal connections” (LC 9:22–23).
Besides, Wittgenstein’s positive contribution to aesthetics still has a clear
Kantian ring. First, the very starting point of Wittgenstein’s lectures on aesthet-
ics echoes Kant’s analysis of beauty. Kant too begins his analysis by denying
that beauty is a conceptually determinable property of objects. Although the
way in which we speak of the beautiful looks as if we attributed a property of
beauty to certain objects and thus made judgments about those objects, this
appearance is deceptive. Since the judgment of beauty does not involve
concepts – required for judgments about empirical reality – it cannot objectively
determine any empirical properties. The judgment of beauty is instead grounded
in the subject’s feeling of pleasure or displeasure in the contemplation of the
form of the object. This is what Kant means by calling the judgment of beauty
“aesthetic,” contrasting it with “cognitive” judgments that have conceptually
determined empirical content (CPJ 5:203, 5:211).
Second, given his rejection of the realist understanding of beauty as
a property shared by a specific class of objects such as artworks, it is natural
to read Wittgenstein as addressing a particular class of judgments. This inter-
pretation is corroborated by Wittgenstein’s explicit use of the notion of aesthetic
judgment in 1935 and 1938 (LA I:15; BBB, 178). Moreover, while music
especially, and to some extent literature, poetry, and architecture figure in his
remarks, Wittgenstein’s approach to potential candidates for aesthetic appreci-
ation continues to be markedly inclusive: “everything whatever” may be judged
aesthetically, as he noted already in 1930 (CV, 6 [4]). His examples include not
just artworks and fields of art but also phenomena such as the choosing of
wallpaper, tailoring, and arrangement of flowers in a flower bed (LC 9:14, 9:16,
9:20; BBB, 178; LA I:13).
Third, like Kant and in contrast to empiricist aesthetics, Wittgenstein argues
that aesthetic judgments are not mere sentiments or feelings of approbation. He
repeatedly ridicules psychological explanations of aesthetic judgments and
claims that endorsing naturalism would mean nothing short of the end of
aesthetics (LC 9:27). In 1933, Wittgenstein makes the point by reference to
the characteristically Kantian distinction between judgments of the beautiful
and of the agreeable, declaring that “‘Beautiful’ 6¼ ‘agreeable’” (LC 9:26). This
contrast originates in the Third Critique, which begins by distinguishing pure
judgments of taste from empirically conditioned judgments of the agreeable-
ness of tastes, smells, and isolated colors. For Kant, both judgment types are
“aesthetic” in the sense of pertaining to sensibility, but only pure judgments of
taste carry a legitimate claim to necessity. We do not expect others to agree with
our judgments of the agreeableness of wine or coffee, because such likings
reflect our subjective idiosyncrasies. Hence, while beauty and the agreeable
alike give rise to pleasure, the modal status of the judgments is different. The
agreeable has an actual relation to pleasure, whereas the judgment of the
beautiful claims that relation to be necessary (CPJ 5:236).29
Wittgenstein’s usage of the term agreeable [angenehm] corresponds to its
Kantian sense of being an empirically conditioned response of liking and hence
“merely subjective” (BBB, 48; see CPJ 5:206). Also, his examples of the
agreeable, such as the smell of a flower, the taste of coffee or roast beef, and
isolated colors, match those employed by Kant (LC 9:13–26; LA II:1–3; CPJ
5:212). For Kant, such features belong to the material side of the object and
elicit empirically conditioned responses in us. By contrast, the universally valid
judgment of beauty concerns features that manifest a priori forms of intuition,
such as the design of a painting or the formal structure of a musical composition
(CPJ 5:223–226).
Fourth, like Kant, Wittgenstein juxtaposes the agreeable with the formal
features of objects of aesthetic appreciation. He states:
So to say King Lear is “agreeable” is like saying a chair has a smell. King
Lear is a very complex experience, & this is about the least important thing
you could say about it.
But now you might say: Surely people who have said that the beautiful is
the agreeable, can’t have been such absolute asses as to overlook this? There
must be some truth in it.
Suppose one talks of a beautiful color. To say this has 100 meanings,
& which way we use it depends on what we’re talking about. If I say
of a flower “Isn’t this a marvellous colour?” I mean something quite
different from if I shew a painted pattern, where it may mean “is good for
a wall-paper.” (LC 9:16)
This passage confirms Kant’s analysis of the difference between the agreeable
and the beautiful. While smells and isolated colors may be pleasing, only form
opens up the possibility of free contemplation. Wittgenstein’s choice for an
example of the latter, namely, a pattern suitable for wallpaper, is all the more
striking given that Kant is famous for using the very same example and has been
ridiculed for doing so (CPJ 5:229; see LC 9:20). But if the objective is to
illustrate how form can be seen as purposive without any purpose, then it is hard
to find a better example. Absolute music, discussed extensively by Wittgenstein
and mentioned by Kant as an example of free beauty, is a similarly germane
29
Interestingly, both Henry Allison and Paul Guyer interpret Kant’s argument as an appeal to
linguistic usage, thus foreshadowing Wittgenstein’s later approach: unlike expressions of the
agreeable, the language of beauty is inherently normative (Guyer 1997, 119–123; Allison 2001,
103–104).
example of formal purposiveness that does not succumb to conceptual explan-

ations (CPJ 5:229).30
In general, Wittgenstein’s remarks on art draw attention to the shapes,
patterns, rhythms, and tempo of music and poetry (LC 9:16; LA I:12, II:9).31
Juxtaposing the smell of a flower with the color patterns of a flower arrange-
ment, he argues that only the latter allows for a more elaborate aesthetic
discussion. Although both may cause a “pleasant sensation,” only in the latter
case do “you enjoy a shape, in the sense in which the shape enters into the
enjoyment” (LC 9:13–14; see BBB, 178; LA II:3). In this regard, the aesthetic
judgment of the flower arrangement behaves like the expression of fear. We may
experientially corroborate that the cause of my fear is overtiredness, but it is not
the overtiredness that I fear. The intentional object of my fear, to which I refer as
my reason for fear, is something entirely different, like a thunderstorm or
a virus. Just as the intentional object of fear is partly constitutive of my fear,
the shape of the flower arrangement is constitutive of the judgment of its beauty.
It is important to notice that the sharp contrast between the beautiful and the
agreeable does not tally with empiricist aesthetics. For the empiricists, aesthetic
judgments are instinctive and natural, if cultivable, responses to objects of
aesthetic appreciation. So although the judgments of the Humean good critic
are meant to rely on practice and an unprejudiced mind, empiricists have no
resources to draw a principled difference between culinary judgments, on the
one hand, and beauty, on the other. For them, both eventually rely on our natural
capacity of taste. By contrast, Kantians deny that the validity of judgments of
beauty could rest on an empirical regularity in our responses. They also deny
that experts have the final say in matters of aesthetic value. Unlike empirical
judgments, where communal agreement or the testimonies of epistemic peers

may suffice for warranting a belief, the judgment of beauty is autonomous. It is
free in the negative sense of being independent of external, empirical causes, but
also in the positive sense of relying on the subjects’ aesthetic self-determination
and ability to judge for themselves (CPJ 5:281–284). I cannot make a judgment
of beauty by imitating others, for I have to rely on my own subjectively felt
pleasure or displeasure in judging the object (CPJ 5:212–213, 287).
Yet, while grounded in my subjective response to something particular, Kant
argues that the judgment of beauty has universal validity. For insofar as my
30
Neither Kant nor Wittgenstein uses the term “absolute music” (i.e., music without text or
program). However, Kant’s text clearly indicates that he refers to music without extramusical
subject matter. Wittgenstein, in turn, expresses reservations about the possibility of smoothly
uniting the text with the musical form and focuses on the formal features of music (see RPP1
§545; Wittgenstein 2022, 90).
31
The centrality of formal features of art for Wittgenstein has been discussed in, for example,
Schroeder 2001; Schulte 2004; Appelqvist 2019a.
judgment is based on the disinterested contemplation of the form of the object,

I have eliminated all material and merely subjective grounds of the judgment.
Kant stresses that when making a judgment of beauty, I am not predicting that
others will agree. The claim that others, too, will feel pleasure in the contem-
plation of the form is rather a normative demand (CPJ 5:212–213). These
Kantian assumptions, I argue, motivate Wittgenstein’s remarks on aesthetics
since the 1930s and are relevant for his later account of language and
philosophy.
Harold Ursell, a mathematician who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures,
apparently suggested that since the only method of deciding whether
something is beautiful is by experiencing the object, the issue must have
something to do with psychology. Wittgenstein is quick to reject the
proposal. According to him, the situation in aesthetics is “more like
solving a mathematics problem” (LC 9:29). Granted, we may collect
statistical data of people’s preferences and produce an empirical account
thereof, perhaps similar to the account Wittgenstein himself pursued with
his empirical experiments on the effects of rhythm in music in 1912–13.32
But even at their best, such experiments only yield statistical generaliza-
tions of causal connections between sets of notes and subjective feelings.
At worst, the results are idiosyncratic associations, like “it makes me feel
like a butterfly with a pin through me” or “it reminds me of my grand-
mother” (LC 9:40). In both cases, the connection between music and its
effect remains external, not relevantly related to music. In conformity with
his early view that appeals to the Kantian insight of beauty’s formal
purposiveness without a conceptually determinable purpose, Wittgenstein

rejects all external explanations of aesthetic value. He notes: “Suppose you
find a bass too heavy – that it moves too much; you aren’t saying: If it
moves less, it will be more agreeable to me. That is [sic] should be quieter
is an end in itself, not a means to [an] end” (LC 9:20).
As indicated by his alignment between aesthetics and mathematics,
Wittgenstein underscores the normativity of aesthetics. He states:
The question of Aesthetics is not: Do you like it? But, if you do, why do you?
Is “This bass moves too much” a psychological statement? Is it about
human beings?
If we ever we come to: I like this; I don’t, there is an end of Aesthetics; &
then comes psychology. (LC 9:27)
Rather than making a statement of actual fact, my aesthetic judgment of the bass
line makes a normative claim about how the base line should be constructed.
32
On Wittgenstein’s empirical experiments with rhythm, see Guter 2020.
In addition to warranting the question “Why?” and hence a demand of justifica-

tion, it also demands agreement from others: “When I say ‘This bass moves too
much’ I don’t mean merely ‘It gives me such & such an impression,’ because if
I did I should have to be content with the answer ‘It doesn’t give me that
impression’” (LC 9:28). In aesthetics, Wittgenstein argues, we are not content
with such an answer. In the culinary domain, we accept differences of taste
without thinking more about them. But if you fail to recognize the aesthetically
troubling feature in the bass line, there is more at stake. I take my judgment to
carry a force different from a mere personal preference and feel the pressure to
justify my judgment. This is to say, fifth, that Wittgenstein’s reasons for
emphasizing the difference between the beautiful and the agreeable align with
Kant’s argument that there are judgments about the sensible domain that make
a legitimate claim to necessity and hence, with right, demand consent from
others.
So even though aesthetic judgments involve personal experiences, they cannot
be explained by means of psychology. According to Wittgenstein, “If this were
all, Aesthetics would be a matter of taste” (LC 9:26). In this context, a “matter of
taste” signifies merely subjective feelings of liking and disliking with no compel-
ling force to make others consider them worth adopting. In the Blue Book,
Wittgenstein uses the expression in this very sense. Noting that knowledge
based on personal experiences seems to lack reliability and solidity, he points
out that we are inclined to treat it as “subjective” in a derogatory sense, “as when
we say that an opinion is merely subjective, a matter of taste” (BBB, 48).
However, he argues, the conclusion that personal experience cannot have any
authority rests on a misleading analogy arising from our language, similar to the
case of thinking that the floor on which we stand is not solid because it consists of
electrons. Contrary to the received view of Wittgenstein’s later thought, personal
experiences need not be merely subjective. This is, of course, the very point of
Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. While both are
grounded in personal experiences, the former are merely subjective, whereas
the latter are universally valid in spite of their subjective ground in virtue of being
grounded in disinterested contemplation of form.
Despite the fact that the notion of the beautiful fades into the background in
Wittgenstein’s later remarks on aesthetics, he never abandons his critical stance
on the reduction of the aesthetic to agreeableness. As late as in 1947, he writes:
The “necessity” with which the second thought succeeds the first. (Overture
to Figaro.) Nothing could be more idiotic than to say it is “agreeable” to hear
one after the other. – But the paradigm according to which all this is right is
certainly obscure. “It is the natural development.” You gesture with your
hand, would like to say: “of course!” (CV, 65 [57]; translation altered)
As implied by Wittgenstein’s verdict on the idiocy of the appeal to the agree-

able, merely subjective feelings of pleasure fail to account for the normativity of
aesthetic judgment marked by the terms “necessity” and “right.” At the same
time, we are at a loss about the paradigm or norm that would ground the
normativity involved. The aesthetic judgment suggests that there must be
a standard of judgment, but when trying to pin that standard down, we hit
a wall (BBB, 166; see LC 9:33; LA III:5).33 So if we are neither talking about
our merely subjective feelings of liking nor have an objectively established
paradigm of aesthetic correctness at hand, then how can we account for the
normativity of aesthetics? – A question not unlike the question of why I should
live happily (NB, 78).
3.3 Aesthetic Normativity

Even granting that aesthetic judgments’ reliance on personal experience does
not threaten their validity, provided they are properly formed, we may still
wonder how such judgments relate to problem-solving in mathematics. What
could possibly be the relevant similarity between mathematical and aesthetic
investigation?34 Here, Wittgenstein’s notion of a grammatical system becomes
especially relevant. A grammatical system consists of rules that govern the uses
of words and sentences (LC 6:8). It is an ordered whole that one grasps in
understanding the roles that the different parts of the system have within it (LC
5:33). The notion of a system is equally central in Wittgenstein’s understanding
of aesthetics. Referring to his own empirical experiments with rhythm, he
declares them “useless” precisely because they failed to yield what he was
looking for, namely, “utterances inside an aesthetic system” (LC 9:40). For just
as words and sentences become meaningful only within the grammatical system
to which they belong, aesthetic problems and solutions thereof emerge only
within an aesthetic system. This is because there are grammatical and hence
normative relations within such a system, similar to the relations that hold
between questions and answers, judgments and their justifications, and fear or
hope, say, and their intentional objects. Grammatical relations are necessary
in that they could not fail to obtain: a question is in part constituted by the range
of possible answers, a judgment by the reasons one can evoke to support it,
and so on.
The alignment between grammatical and aesthetic systems is particularly
salient in Wittgenstein’s treatment of his favorite aesthetic example, music. Like
numbers that do not refer to any mathematical objects, musical notes and chords
33
On Kant’s quest for such a standard for judgment in general, see Floyd 1998.
34
On Wittgenstein’s conception of mathematical investigation, see Floyd 2000 and Säätelä 2011.
do not stand in a referential relation to nonmusical objects. Nor do cadences,

melodies, or musical works represent facts or events. Rather, they become
meaningful in virtue of having a rule-governed use in the musical system to
which they belong (see BBB, 1–5). In accordance with the inherent normativity
of a grammatical system, Wittgenstein claims that a book of harmony does not
contain any references to psychology, but makes normative statements such as
“you mustn’t make this transition” (LC 9:15). And the aesthetic judgments we
make about music employ words such as “correct,” “right,” “wrong,” and even
“necessary,” thus marking the normative force attached to these judgments (LC
9:19, 9: 39; see LA I:8, I:17). So the pressing question is, what counts as the
criterion of correctness to which musicians in Wittgenstein’s opinion refer?
What kinds of reasons can one evoke to justify such claims as “This bass moves
too much” or that “This note is absolutely necessary”? (see LC 9:28, 9:39).
Thinking of our ordinary understanding of mathematical problem-solving,
a ready answer to the question of justification in aesthetics would appeal to the
rules constitutive of the relevant aesthetic system. In music, such rules include
the rules of harmony and counterpoint, mentioned repeatedly by Wittgenstein.
Hence, we might say, for example, that not closing a cadence on the tonic chord
is a mistake or that using notes that belong to the scale in which the melody is
written is according to the rules, thus appealing to the conventional uses of
musical elements in the context of Western tonal music. However, a closer look
at Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar in general, and of aesthetic judgment in
particular, shows that the situation is not as straightforward. In fact, it may be
less straightforward in mathematics as well, as Wittgenstein’s discussion of the
student learning a mathematical series suggests (PI §§143–155). While it is

undeniable that Wittgenstein gives pride of place for rules in the quest for
a justification of an aesthetic judgment, the rule-formulations of harmony
textbooks do not resolve the issue exhaustively. The reasons for this arise
from Wittgenstein’s conception of the rules themselves, but also from the
contribution of the subject to the judgment. The latter, I will argue, is indispens-
able for understanding the nature of aesthetic judgments.
Already in 1933, Wittgenstein notes that the rules of language can be changed
and abandoned along the way, albeit that “if we change them, we can’t use them
in this way” (LC 5:88; see LC 9:1). The rules need not be explicitly formulated
to serve the function of constituting meaning. Nor do we have to explicitly think
of the rules governing the use of words to use them successfully (LC 8:41–42).
Most importantly, every chain of justifications by reference to rule-formulations
ultimately comes to an end, as Wittgenstein repeatedly reminds us, calling that
end of discursive justifications a “great event” (LC 5:28). These points apply to
and are even more visible in aesthetics. I will follow Wittgenstein’s lead in using
music as my primary example of aesthetic normativity, but his remarks on

poetry and architecture are consistent with the emerging picture (see, e.g., LC
9:23, 9:45–46; LA I:12, 17).
The first thing to note is that, like rules of grammar in general, the rules of
a musical system are not laws of nature but develop and change in musical
practices as a result of human activity. Mentioning examples from different
periods of the Western tradition from modal to romantic music, Wittgenstein
acknowledges the potential difficulty of understanding music from a different
culture or period. Given that the use of musical elements, like chords and
cadences, takes place in a historically situated musical system, the possibility
of understanding and appreciating music presupposes familiarity with that
system (LC 9:27, 9:39, 9:41; LA I:15). The rules of music are not fixed rule-
formulations that would determine all and only correct applications thereof.
Rather, the musical practices themselves sustain and transmit the rules that are
given in the concrete applications thereof.
The rules of music are not regulative in that they would dictate what counts as
acceptable or good music. Unlike traffic rules regulating driving that can be
done without following those rules, the rules of music constitute the very
domain of musical expression. Without a system, no expression, whether
linguistic or musical, would have a role or function and hence no meaning to
speak of. It would be “anything, or nothing” or, as Kant put it, “original
nonsense” (PI §6, CPJ 5:308). Like the rules of grammar that allow us to
express original thoughts in language and, for example, answer a given question
in a number of different way, so too the rules of music open up a space of
different expressive opportunities.

As an illustration of the scope of musical expression, Wittgenstein tells
a history of Brahms, who rejected Josef Joachim’s suggestion to change the
beginning of his Fourth Symphony. Wittgenstein asks: “What reason could be
given for rejecting it?,” and offers what he sees as a viable answer:
You misunderstand me: I know why you suggested that; you think this is what
I meant to say, but it wasn’t.
It’s not: this does not produce feeling I want to produce. (LC 9:30)
That Brahms’s response is given in intentional terms (i.e., in terms of what he

meant to say), should not lead us into thinking that the composer’s intentions are
independent of music. The possibility of expressing anything in music arises
together with the musical system, and the musical intentions are musical from
the beginning, not conceptual thoughts or emotions translated into the musical
medium. Again, the operative thought pertains to the internal connection that
Wittgenstein takes to obtain not just between the aesthetic judgment and its
object but also between intentions and their expressions, whether linguistic or
musical.
That music is constituted by rules does not entail that those rules determine
the specific content of musical expressions or aesthetic judgments about music.
In fact, it entails the exact opposite. This is because Wittgenstein’s reason
for underscoring the notion of a rule – both in philosophy of language and
aesthetics – is intended as a guard against naturalistic explanations of meaning
and understanding. If the aesthetic choices made by the composer in writing
music, the musician in performing it, or the listener in judging it aesthetically
reflected empirical regularities, then the aesthetic domain would be closer to
a natural mechanism. But since aesthetic choices are made within a system of
conventional rules, we can treat those choices as grounded in reasons and in that
sense intentional rather than mechanistic. In other words, the sort of normativity
that lies at the core of Wittgenstein’s approach and is expressed by reference to
the notion of a rule goes hand in hand with intentionality and hence freedom, at
least when freedom is understood in the Kantian sense of responsiveness to
reasons we give to ourselves (see Allison 1986; Allison 1990, 204–207). But
this just means that the Kantian contrast between nature and freedom, which
I argued to underpin Wittgenstein’s early ethics, is still discernible in his middle
period. Now the contrast emerges in Wittgenstein’s distinction between the
normatively laden beautiful over the causally induced agreeable and in his
emphasis on reasons over causes in aesthetic explanations.
As indicated by the disagreement between Brahms and Joachim,
Wittgenstein is open to the possibility of genuine aesthetic disagreements.
Although the rules of an aesthetic system ground the possibility of aesthetic

expression and aesthetic judgments, not all aesthetic disagreements can be
resolved by appeal to rules. People disagree on the value of Mahler’s music
or Shakespeare’s drama, prefer one way of stressing the rhythm of Klopstock’s
poetry over another, and make such fine-grained aesthetic judgments as “That
doesn’t look quite right yet” or “This bass ought to be quieter” (LC 9:19, 9:22;
LA I:12).35 The attempt to justify such judgments by reference to rule-
formulations only takes us so far. To be sure, a teacher of counterpoint can
correct a student’s mistake in a voice-leading exercise by pointing out that her
attempt does not conform to the rules of counterpoint as formulated in
a harmony textbook. But it is unlikely that either Brahms’s or Joachim’s
preferred opening for the Fourth Symphony includes a mistake in this sense.
Both alternatives likely conform to the rules constitutive of Western romantic
35
These examples relate to Wittgenstein’s reflections on his own aesthetic judgments. On
Wittgenstein’s puzzlement with Shakespeare’s high reputation, see Schulte 2013 and Huemer
2013; on his distaste of Mahler’s music, see Guter 2015, 433–435.
music but aim at realizing different expressive possibilities that lie within the
musical system. This implies that, in addition to the aesthetic system providing
the necessary framework for aesthetic judgments, those judgments incorporate
a personal element – a moment of endorsement, as it were, that reveals some-
thing about the musical thinking of its maker. As Wittgenstein says: “Every
artist has been influenced by others & shows (the) traces of that influence in his
works; but what we get from him is all the same only his own personality” (CV,
27 [23]).
For Wittgenstein, aesthetic discussions like the one between Brahms and
Joachim may reveal “something which might be called a difference of taste:
e.g., Yes, you always prefer slightly stronger contrasts, I always prefer slightly
weaker” (LC 9:4). Importantly, such a “difference of taste needn’t be as simple
as ‘I like this,’ ‘You like that,’” as it is in the case of the agreeableness of tastes
and smells (LC 9:4). In explaining the personal aspect involved in aesthetic
disagreements, Wittgenstein refers to aesthetic “ideals” (LC 9:18–22, 31–34).36
This notion, just like the notion of an aesthetic “paradigm,” functions as
a placeholder for the standard against which aesthetic judgments are made
and disagreements assessed. It is “like a norm of judgment,” as Joachim
Schulte notes (Schulte 2018, 227). Yet, Wittgenstein repeatedly states that it is
impossible to pin down what that ideal or paradigm actually is without turning
back to the aesthetic phenomenon itself (see LC 9:22; LA III:5; PI §537):
And the idea suggests itself that there must be a paradigm somewhere in our
mind, and that we have adjusted the tempo to conform to that paradigm. But
in most cases if someone asked me “How do you think this melody should be
played?” I will, as an answer, just whistle it in a particular way, and nothing

will have been present to my mind but the tune actually whistled (not an
image of that). (BBB, 166)
Getting closer to a given ideal takes place within an aesthetic system, which
includes the different aesthetic alternatives as possible moves one can make: “to
find what ideal we’re directed to, you must look at what we do” (LC 9:22).
Hence, aesthetic investigation is not unlike mathematical problem-solving. In
1941, Wittgenstein still writes:
Take a theme like that of Haydn’s (St. Antony Chorale), take the part of one of
Brahms’s variations corresponding to the first part of the theme, and set the
task of constructing the second part of the variation in the style of the first
part. That is a problem of the same kind as mathematical problems are. If the
36
Aesthetic ideals may be culturally shared, like the “ideal of Greek Sculpture,” but they may also
be personal (LC 9:24). When Wittgenstein states that “my ideal is a certain coolness,” he is not
talking about shared cultural norms but articulating his own aesthetic preference, albeit one
developed relation to the shared domain of the arts (CV, 4 [2]).
solution is found, say as Brahms gives it, then one has no doubt; – that is the
solution.
We are agreed on this route. And yet, it is obvious here that there may
easily be different routes, on each of which we can be in agreement, each of
which we might call consistent. (RFM VII §11)
By connecting the personal ideals to the shared aesthetic system,

Wittgenstein’s account of aesthetic judgment overcomes both aesthetic object-
ivism and subjectivism. In trying to get the accompaniment right, we are not
“trying to discover a truth” that is out there independently of our own activity
(LC 9:22). Aesthetic judgments do not rest on merely subjective feelings either,
because the very development of aesthetic ideals requires a grasp of the
possibilities available in the aesthetic system in question. Accordingly, there
is room for aesthetic disagreements that are neither like disagreements on the
agreeableness of tastes or smells nor like disagreements on statements about
empirical reality.
The personal endorsement involved in an aesthetic judgment entails that
justifications given by reference to rule-formulations do not exhaustively settle
the case. Wittgenstein, keenly aware of this, gives the following example of an
aesthetic explanation: “‘Why is this note absolutely necessary?’ Explanation
would look like this: If you wrote out the tune in chords, you would see to which
chord the note belongs. I.e. it hints at placing side by side with the tune a certain
chorale” (LC 9:39). This sketch of an explanation of the note’s necessity appeals
to the rules of harmony and counterpoint. Resembling a basic exercise in
chorale writing where one is asked to write a chord for each note of the melody,
Wittgenstein’s recommended course of action would reveal the role of the note
within the hierarchical structure of the scale. One would notice, for example,
that the note – the sixth of the scale, say – belongs to the subdominant chord and
hence takes the melody to a point of relative stability before it moves on to the
dominant or, alternatively, to the tonic.37 But importantly, the ultimate force of
the explanation resides in Wittgenstein’s claim that, if you did this exercise,
“you would see to which note the chord belongs” (LC 9:39). That is, you would
see (or hear) the place of the note within the system. Moreover, you would see
37
I deliberately talk about the scale (such as the major or the minor scale) rather than key (such as
G major). In my view, Wittgenstein’s musical examples are best understood in terms of the tonal
functions of the different scale degrees. These functions remain the same regardless of the
specific key in which the tune is written, as they reflect the overall shape of the scale that may be
transposed to any given key. Hence, when Wittgenstein says that “you would see to which chord
the note belongs,” he is not talking about, for example, the C major chord. Instead, he is drawing
attention to the harmonic function of the chord as, for example, the subdominant chord and
thereby to the tonal function of the individual, “necessary” note. It is possible to hear that
function, just as it is possible to hear whether the tune is in major or minor, without knowing the
specific key in which the tune is performed.
(or hear) that, unlike some other notes that one could dispense without too much
damage to the overall shape of the tune, the note in question fulfills a function
without which the tune would be incomplete.
In Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, seeing was the mode of grasping that
aspect of language and reality which cannot be said. While we can express every
imaginable fact in language, we cannot express the form that makes linguistic
expression possible. Instead, we see the form directly in propositions of logic,
mathematical equations, and – as I suggested – in musical themes. The same
insight still informs Wittgenstein’s discussion in 1933, even if the focus now is
on aesthetic systems instead of an isolated tune resembling a tautology.38 The
moment of grasping the tonal function of the note within the scale, and hence
grasping the tune as an “organized whole” to which the note belongs, is the
moment where discursive justifications come to an end (LW1 §677). After the
exercise of writing the tune in chords, I must rely on my ability to see the note’s
necessity. Likewise, if I try to justify my aesthetic judgment of the note’s
necessity to others, I must appeal to their ability to see it for themselves. And
if, for some reason, you fail to see the note’s necessity and thus disagree with my
judgment, no rule-formulation will be sufficient to convince you. In aesthetics,
“A solution must speak for itself. If when I’ve made you see what I see, it
doesn’t appeal to you, there is an end” (LC 9:31).
3.4 The Objective and the Subjective Moments of Aesthetic

Judgment
Aesthetic systems are shared, historically transmitted, and normatively struc-
tured practices. In addition to the grammatical relations between the elements of

the systems, the normativity carries over to our aesthetic judgments, which
employ notions of correctness, rightness, and wrongness. We also hold those
making aesthetic judgments countable. We expect reasons for their judgments
and “distinguish between a person who knows what he is talking about and
a person who doesn’t” (LA I:17). The arts in particular rest on convention and
the sort of communal agreement that Wittgenstein takes to be essential for
language (PI §§242, 355).
In the 1938 lectures on aesthetics, the contrast between the beautiful and the
agreeable as kinds of judgments recedes to the background, giving way to the
equally Kantian contrast between reasons and causes as modes of explanation
(see G 4:412; CPJ 5:387). Wittgenstein claims that in real life “aesthetic
38
Here, I disagree with Peter Hacker, according to whom the later Wittgenstein abandons his early
distinction between saying and showing, treats ethics and religion “naturalistically or anthropo-
logically as forms of life,” and presumes that “there is nothing ineffable about ethics, aesthetics
and religion” (Hacker 2001, 39).
adjectives such as ‘beautiful,’ ‘fine,’ etc., play hardly any role at all” and repeats
the view that the word “beautiful” is all too easily misunderstood as a name of
a property (LA I:8,1; see LC 9:19). In spite of this heightened caution about the
term, the main insight motivating Wittgenstein’s earlier contrast between the
beautiful and the agreeable continues to dominate his discussion.39 He still
states: “I see roughly this – there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you
taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is the realm of Art
which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you
hear a piece of music as when you taste good food” (LA II:3). The two types of
judgments pertaining to sensibility are sharply contrasted despite the overlap in
their manifest expressions. Moreover, the key difference still resides in the
accountability of the judging subject, whose reasons for the judgment ought to
be relevantly related to the judgment and transparent to the subject. Connecting
aesthetic accountability to intentional action, Wittgenstein notes: “In a law-
court you are asked the motive of your action and you are supposed to know
it.. . . You are not supposed to know the laws by which your body and mind are
governed” (LA III:12; see LC 9:32; PI II §262). To know one’s motives does not
require introspective access to the contents of one’s mind. Rather, just as
grammar grounds the internal connections between motive and action, desire
and its fulfillment, or fear and its intentional object, aesthetic reasons arise
within the context to which the judgment belongs.
Given that aesthetic systems are autonomous and cannot be explained by
reference to another domain, the relevant kinds of reasons “are in the nature of
further descriptions” (LC 9:31). Sometimes, the explanations take the form of
comparisons between the aesthetic object and something else. One may find an
object of comparison from dance, gestures, facial expressions, or the realm of

language as when comparing a musical phrase to a conclusion, question, or an
answer (LC 9:31; LA III:1; BBB, 166; CV, 79–81 [69–70]). Sometimes the
explanations aim at placing an artwork in its cultural context by connecting it to
other works by the same artist or by comparing it with the works of someone
else. For example, “by making a person hear lots of different pieces by Brahms,
you can make him see what he’s driving at” (LC 9:31). Even explanations given
by reference to rule-formulations, like Wittgenstein’s own explanation of the
similarity of musical works by Palestrina and Brahms, namely, that “they start
from tonic, go to dominant, & return to tonic,” could be understood as descrip-
tions rather than explanations in the scientific sense, because what is explained
39
Before the 2016 publication of Moore’s full notes from 1933, the notes from 1938 were the main
source on Wittgenstein’s aesthetics. This contributed, for example, to the mistaken view that
Wittgenstein rejected the notion of the beautiful altogether and hence took Kant’s aesthetics to
rest on a misunderstanding (see Lewis 1998, 21).
is not subsumed under an independently established law or principle but simply

characterized in terms of the tonal functions manifest in and upheld by the
works themselves (LC 9:33). In each case, the aesthetic “explanation” aims at
directing attention to the object of aesthetic appreciation within its context. In
this respect, Wittgenstein claims, aesthetic investigation is similar to grammat-
ical investigation (LA II:17–18, 38; III:12; LC 9:32).
That the arts and crafts are historically developing and culturally variable
phenomena means that the mastery of any given field requires initiation into its
conventions by practice and drilling. It also means that, once initiated, individ-
uals can make a mark on those practices, at least within certain boundaries. In
comparison to the romantic idea of a genius who creates ex nihilo guided by
nothing but inspiration, Wittgenstein’s stance on artistic creativity is cautious,
even conservative.40 According to him, “all the greatest composers wrote in
accordance with [the rules of harmony]” (LA I:16). When someone in class
objects to the view, probably appealing to creativity and originality as essential
features of art, Wittgenstein responds: “You can say that every composer
changed the rules, but the variation was very slight; not all the rules were
changed. The music was still good by a great many of the old rules” (LA
I:16). Given Wittgenstein’s rule-based conception of language and his align-
ment of grammatical and aesthetic systems, it is important for him to emphasize
the gradual and slow change of musical rules. This is because only a relatively
stable musical system is capable of supporting the communal agreement in the
rules that allows for meaningful artistic expression and for the possibility of
understanding it (see PI §§199, 240–242).
At the same time, the conservatism of Wittgenstein’s position should not be

exaggerated. His conception of rules is flexible enough to accommodate a great
variety of artistic styles and has resources to explain the kinds of changes that
are often treated as evidence of the arts’ inherent creativity. Yet, as the motto of
the Investigations underscores, progress often looks greater than it really is
(PI, 2). This is especially true when originality is treated as a supreme value and
hence underscored at the expense of tradition, as it often is in the art world and
theory of art. When Wagner or Schoenberg transform the musical vocabulary of
the Western tradition and do so in ways often regarded as revolutionary, they do
not begin from scratch, as John Cage perhaps did in “composing” his 4’33.
Wagner’s and Schoenberg’s music may still be understood and appreciated
against the background of what came before. That some shared background is
necessary for the possibility of understanding is evident in Wittgenstein’s
40
On Wittgenstein’s relation to conservatism in general, see, for example, Nyiri 1982 and Janik
1989, 40–58.
remarks on modal music. Its difference from later Western music is vast enough
to prevent understanding; yet, pointing to similarities between the modal and
modern keys may help one understand the former (LC 9:41; PI §535; RPP1
§639).
Another measure against an overly conservative conception of the arts
emerges in Wittgenstein’s remarks on artistic masterpieces and the notion of
a genius. According to him, we do not apply the terminology of correctness to
Beethoven’s music or Gothic Cathedrals, because these aesthetic phenomena
strike us as “tremendous” or “grand.”41 For Wittgenstein, Mozart and
Beethoven are the “actual sons of God,” and he does not shy away from passing
judgment on other composers (and thinkers) for their lack of genius (CC, 19).
Yet, in contrast with most romantic aestheticians, who took freedom from
conventions to be the essential mark of the genius, Wittgenstein has a more
balanced view of the relation between conventions and originality in art.
Distinguishing between character and talent, he claims that while those we
call genius have both, the role of character in them is more dominant: “Genius is
not ‘talent and character,’ but character manifesting itself in the form of
a special talent” (CV, 40 [35]; see CV, 41, 49–50, 75 [43, 65]).
One can find echoes of Schopenhauer’s as well as Otto Weininger’s ideas in
Wittgenstein’s notion of genius (cf. Weininger 1906, 103–113; Schopenhauer
1969, 184–195). Especially Schopenhauer was influenced by Kant, and Kant’s
conception of the works of genius (if not exactly his notion of genius itself)
carries over to Wittgenstein’s remarks. This is especially true regarding the
balance that both seek to find between artistic conventions and originality. For
Kant, the genius provides original sensuous material for art, but that material
must be cultivated by taste, which is “the discipline (or corrective) of genius,
clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished” (CPJ 5:319; see
5:310). This is because if the artist did not adhere to the rules of artistic
practices, his works would be unintelligible to others (CPJ 5:307–308).
This idea may be seen as prefiguring Wittgenstein’s later argument about
communally shared rules grounding the possibility of communication (PI
§§240–242).42
So when introduced to a given aesthetic field, be that poetry, tailoring, or
music, one must learn the rules constitutive of the practice. The possibility of
making and refining aesthetic judgments arises only via such immersion into
our shared form of life. At the same time, aesthetic judgments involve an
irreducibly subjective moment of seeing for oneself. Kant argued that there
41
On the “tremendous things in art,” see Schulte 1989; Tilghman 1991, 86–87; Lewis 1996; Tam
2002.
42
On Kant and Wittgenstein on genius, see Lewis 2005.
cannot be objective (i.e., conceptually determinable), rules of taste that we

could apply to determine what is beautiful. Nor can we make pure judgments
of taste by imitating others. Taste requires that one can judge the model itself
and do so by relying on one’s own feeling (CPJ 5:231–232). In the same vein,
while emphasizing familiarity with conventional, shared rules of art as
a prerequisite of aesthetic judgment, Wittgenstein denies the possibility of
discursively establishing the validity aesthetic judgments. Like Kant, he refers
to feeling as a central component of aesthetic judgment, mentioning “seeing”
and “feeling” as “verbs describing personal experience” relevant for aesthetic
judgments (LA I:3; see BBB, 48; CV, 83–84 [73]).
In the Brown Book, dictated in 1934–5, Wittgenstein examines a series of
examples of experiences of sensuous phenomena. One is that of being
impressed by a particular way of reading a sentence:
I have read a line with a peculiar attention; I am impressed by the reading, and
this makes me say that I have observed something besides the mere seeing
of the written signs and the speaking of words. I have also expressed it by
saying that I have noticed a particular atmosphere round the seeing and
speaking. (BBB, 177)
What the peculiar attention with which the line is read brings to focus is not the
words themselves or the propositional content they express. What is brought to
focus instead is the “atmosphere” round the sentence. Another metaphor he uses
is facial features. As noted, the metaphor of facial features appears already in the
Tractatus as an illustration of internal properties that show themselves but
cannot be said (TLP 4.1221). I do not think it is a coincidence that
Wittgenstein concludes his remarks on the experience of reading by reference

to the Tractatus’s distinction between saying and showing. When read with that
peculiar attention, “the sentence has shown me something, . . . I have noticed
something in it” (BBB, 178). What I notice does not render itself to a discursive
explanation, but depends on turning my attention away from the discursive
content to the aesthetic “surface” of the sentence.
Wittgenstein aligns the case of reading with other examples drawn from the
aesthetic domain broadly construed. He mentions observing the lighting
of a room, being impressed by the color patterns of flowers, and listening to
a piece of music (BBB, 175, 178). In such cases, he says, we are tempted to ask
what it is that these phenomena convey. However, looking for a determinate
answer is in vain, for what we are impressed by lies in the sensuous features or
patterns of the phenomenon. According to him, “We wish to avoid any form of
expression which would seem to refer to an effect produced by an object on
a subject. (Here we are bordering on the problem of idealism and realism and on
the problem whether statements of aesthetics are subjective or objective)”

(BBB, 178). Here, I take idealism to be the view according to which the beauty
of an aesthetic phenomenon, say, rests solely on personal experience, whereas
realism is the view according to which beauty resides in the properties of the
object. These positions naturally go hand in hand with subjectivism and object-
ivism about aesthetic judgments. For subjectivists, the judgment is “merely
subjective, a matter of taste” (BBB, 48). For objectivists, the judgment is about
the object itself and either true or false. I have argued that, while Wittgenstein
rejects the sort of subjectivism that takes aesthetic judgments to be merely
subjective, he does not fall back on aesthetic objectivism. For him, just as for
Kant, aesthetic judgments include both an objective and a subjective compo-
nent. This, in turn, points to a possible way of overcoming both dogmatic
idealism and dogmatic realism – just as it does for Kant.
In 1938, Wittgenstein describes the interplay between the conventional,
objective side and the subjective side of aesthetic judgments as the development
of taste:
In the case of the word “correct” you have a variety of related cases. There is
first the case in which you learn the rules. The cutter learns how long a coat is
to be, how wide the sleeve must be, etc. He learns the rules – he is drilled – as
in music you are drilled in harmony and counterpoint. Suppose I went in for
tailoring and I first learnt all the rules, I might have, on the whole, two sorts of
attitude. (1) Lewy says: “This is too short.” I say: “No. It is right. It is
according to the rules.” (2) I develop a feeling for the rules. I interpret the
rules. I might say: “No. It isn’t right. It isn’t according to the rules.” Here
I would be making an aesthetic judgment about the thing which is according
to the rules in sense (1). On the other hand, if I hadn’t learnt the rules,
I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgment. In learning the rules you
get a more and more refined judgment. Learning the rules actually changes
your judgment. (LA I:15)
The first stage of aesthetic development is an immersion into the conventions of

a given field, resembling Wittgenstein’s mature account of the learning of
language (see, e.g., PI §§143–184). I am drilled in the rules constitutive of the
game and learn to discriminate between correct and incorrect moves in that
game. However, even if we could explain artistic creativity by appeal to the
constitutive character of the rules, possible differences in taste are not accounted
for by rules only, as the disagreement between Brahms and Joachim shows.
Hence, Wittgenstein claims, in the second stage of my aesthetic development,
I “develop a feeling for the rules” (LA I:15). In taking a stance on the rules
themselves, in “interpreting” the rules, and in disagreeing with a basically
correct but for me aesthetically dissatisfying solution, I am first and foremost
relying on my personal, subjectively felt experience of the phenomenon in

question (LA I:15,17).
The importance that Wittgenstein assigns to the subjective side of aesthetic
judgment is evident in his statement: “Perhaps the most important thing in
connection with aesthetics is what may be called aesthetic reactions, e.g.
discontent, disgust, discomfort” (LA II:10).43 Such aesthetic reactions are
personal responses to particular aesthetic phenomena, evoked in relation to
what Wittgenstein calls aesthetic puzzles. His examples of such puzzles include
the design of a door in an architectural context and a musical performance that is
not quite satisfying from the viewer’s or listener’s perspective. The puzzles
concern the possibility of mending the object so that it meets the viewer’s or
listener’s aesthetic ideal: perhaps the door should be higher or the bass line in
the musical performance stronger. In contrast to Kant and a number of other
aestheticians who emphasize pleasure derived from the arts and other objects of
aesthetic appreciation like nature as a sine qua non of aesthetic experience,
Wittgenstein highlights negative responses.44 Unlike the state of equilibrium
I may experience when listening to a perfectly balanced musical performance,
aesthetic dissatisfaction or puzzlement forces me to look for a solution, thereby
making me fully aware of the aesthetic puzzle and the call to judge the
phenomenon aesthetically.
Another kind of aesthetic puzzle is exemplified by Wittgenstein’s repeated
quest for finding the right object of comparison for a musical theme or a phrase.
Even if there is no aesthetic flaw in the theme, one may still feel a puzzlement:
“One asks such a question as ‘What does this remind me of?’ or one says of
a piece of music: ‘This is like some sentence, but what sentence is it like?’” (LA
III:1). When an apt object of comparison is found, one experiences a “click”: all
of a sudden the theme, seen in light of the comparison, makes sense (LA III:1).
A similar “click” of aesthetic satisfaction arises when a disturbing feature is
amended by finding the right rhythm, tempo, or accentuation for
a performance – when the aesthetic object is as it “should” be (LA II:9–10).
Yet, Wittgenstein notes,
What does it mean to say ‘It’s right’? Can I prove to anyone that it is?
You might say it means: I’m now satisfied; I’m in a state of equilibrium, not of
tension.
This may be a good metaphor, but there isn’t one feeling which character-
izes the thousand different cases of equilibrium. (LC 9:30–31)
43
On Wittgenstein’s notion of aesthetic reactions, see, for example, Lewis 1998; Säätelä 2002; Tam
2002.
44
One should not forget that Kant, too, mentions displeasure as an equally relevant response to an
aesthetically contemplated form (see CPJ FI 20:224).
Why should we care about the subjective side aesthetic judgment? Why
does Wittgenstein claim that the aesthetic reactions of discontent, disgust,
or discomfort are perhaps the most important thing about aesthetics?
And why does he repeatedly bring up personal experiences such as the
“click” or “equilibrium” of aesthetic satisfaction as central for
aesthetic investigation, elsewhere compared to grammatical investigation?
Is not such a personal experience just a “wheel that can be turned though
nothing else moves with it” or a “beetle” in a box that “doesn’t belong to
the language game at all; not even as a Something” (PI §§271, 293; see
Makkai 2021, 56)? In Section 4.2, I will return to this question and argue
that this is not the case.
4 From the Brown Book to the Philosophical Investigations

4.1 Form and Content
A central question in aesthetics concerns the meaning and the understanding of
art. Traditional answers to these closely related questions resemble those given
in philosophy of language. Throughout the history of aesthetics, we find
representational theories of artistic meaning, such as Plato’s view of art as the
imitation of appearances; expression theories, such as Collingwood’s account of
art as the expression of the artist’s intentions; and arousal theories that treat the
feelings aroused by art in the audience as art’s content. The latter two are
sometimes, as in Tolstoy’s What is Art?, combined. The artist’s intention,
which, especially in the Romantic era, was taken to be emotive, gives rise to
a work of art. The work itself is an external sign designed for the purpose of
communicating that intention. The audience, in turn, is supposed to grasp the

work’s content by interpreting the artist’s intention based on the work’s
properties.
In each case, the meaning of the artwork resides somewhere beyond the work
itself, whether in the represented reality or in the private mind of the artist. To
understand the work, the audience must either grasp the represented or
expressed content or find themselves in an emotive state that matches the one
expressed, intended, or imitated by the work. Especially representational theor-
ies give rise to the additional question of truth: If the work has cognitive content,
we may ask how faithfully that content matches reality and hence whether the
work is capable of giving us knowledge about the world. We may also ask
whether the represented, expressed, or aroused content, whether emotional or
other, is beneficial or morally worthy. Such considerations led Plato and Tolstoy
to recommend censorship, as they took certain emotions to be harmful for the
audience and for the society as a whole.
Kantians and other formalists have been apprehensive about the traditional
theories, because those theories seem to assign a subservient role to the specif-
ically artistic and aesthetic features of art, thereby undermining art’s autonomy.
For them, it is a mistake to assimilate the reception of the arts to the discursive
model of propositional knowledge. Art should be treated as an end in itself, and
the highest gains of art are taken to depend on art’s specifically artistic, formal,
or sensuous features. Nevertheless, Kant himself argues that pure judgments of
taste can contribute to cognition, but only and precisely in virtue of being
nonconceptual (CPJ 5:217, 5:287). That the formal features of art are capable
of revealing something essential about reality appears repeatedly in subsequent
German philosophy. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Friedrich
Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, as
well as the Austrian formalist Eduard Hanslick all imply, in their respective
ways, that art and especially music discloses something essential about the
world by its specifically artistic forms.
The notion of art’s extra-artistic content, which motivates the traditional
theories of artistic meaning and is still discussed by aestheticians, albeit in
a more specialized and fine-grained fashion, fits awkwardly with Wittgenstein’s
commitment to aesthetic autonomy. It is thus no surprise that he is critical of
each of the traditional accounts. Commenting on Tolstoy’s What is Art?, he
writes:
There is much that could be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing that the
work of art conveys “a feeling.” – And you really might call it, if not the
expression of a feeling, an expression of feeling, or a felt expression. And you
might say too that people who understand it to that extent “resonate” with it,
respond to it. You might say: The work of art does not seek to convey
something else, just itself.. . .
And it does start to be really absurd, to say, the artist wishes that, what he
feels when writing, the other should feel when reading. Presumably I can
think I understand a poem (e.g.), understand it in the way its author
would wish, – but what he may have felt in writing it, that doesn’t concern
me at all. (CV, 67 [58–59])
The absurdity of treating the artist’s private feelings as the content of their art
lies in the fact that the two are only externally related to one another. We do
speak about understanding a poem as its author intended, but just as “it is only in
a language that I can mean something by something,” artistic intentions are not
independent of the medium of their expression (PI, 22, see PI §§243–248). As
explained above, for Wittgenstein, the musician’s intentions, thoughts, and
ideas are musical from the very beginning, related to music as the meaning of
“If it doesn’t rain, I shall go for walk” relates to the sentence (PI, 22; see PPF
§§35–51 [PI, vi]; LW1 §§373–382).45 Insofar as the intention is not captured by
its expression, it drops out of the picture as superfluous.
Wittgenstein’s remarks on the arousal theory similarly target the contingency
of the link between the work and aroused feelings:
It has sometimes been said that what music conveys to us are feelings of
joyfulness, melancholy, triumph, etc, etc. and what repels us in this account is
that it seems to say that music is an instrument for producing in us sequences
of feelings. And from this one might gather that any other means of producing
such feelings would do for us instead of music. – To such an account we are
tempted to reply “Music conveys to us itself !” (BBB, 178)
Like his criticism of confusing the beautiful with the agreeable, Wittgenstein’s
stance on the arousal theory has an almost ethical undertone. The failure to
appreciate art for its own sake in favor of merely subjective sensuous effects is
to subsume art to a mechanistic, causal model. If art is treated as a mere
instrument of producing effects – which is of course possible – then it becomes
redundant. Such effects could equally well be drawn from other resources. The
same argument may be extended to aesthetic cognitivism, according to which
art has both the ability and the purpose to provide propositional knowledge
about the world. While ostensibly nobler than sensuous pleasure or emotional
rush, potential cognitive gains of art could also be acquired by other and
probably more efficient means.
Wittgenstein’s arguments against the expression and arousal theories accord
with his later account of language, which similarly attacks the explanation of
meaning by reference to the mental acts, states, processes, or dispositions of the
speaker or the listener (e.g., BBB, 21–22, 64; PR §§12–22; PI §§143–184, 437–
440). Wittgenstein is usually credited for questioning the relevance of mental
states for the constitution of meaning, but similar views can be found in the
history of aesthetics. The alignment of artistic intentions and their expressions
figures in Kant’s emphasis on the communicability of art and his characteriza-
tion of the artist’s “aesthetic ideas” as sensible representations of the imagin-
ation which “no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (CPJ 5:314; see
CPJ 5:307–308). The point is formulated even more sharply by Hanslick, who
rejects the expression theory of music by arguing that whatever “does not
become outwardly apparent is, so far as music is concerned, altogether nonex-
istent, but whatever has become apparent has ceased to be mere intention”
(Hanslick 1986, 36).
45
I use the 2009 edition of the Philosophical Investigations throughout this book. References to
“Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment” (PPF), which used to be known as Part II of
Philosophical Investigations, are cited from both the 2009 and 1958 editions. References to
the latter are given in square brackets.
The dismissal of the causal model of art’s reception is equally typical in the
Kantian tradition. Kant notes that if empirically conditioned pleasure “were all
that is at stake, then it would be foolish to be scrupulous with regard to the
means for providing ourselves with it” (CPJ 5:208). Wittgenstein makes the
same observation: “If we have a certain arrangement of colours & say it is
beautiful, & you suggest that what this means is that it gives us pleasure. I ask:
Why should we use so many different means to get pleasure?” (LC 9:18–19).
Hanslick reprimands listeners who voluntarily subject themselves to music’s
empirically conditioned effects and as a result ignore the specifically musical.
Such listeners treat musical works like “products of nature,” on a par with a fine
cigar or a spicy delicacy, and could equally well resort to using sulfuric ether
and chloroform (Hanslick 1986, 60; see BBB, 178; LC 9:20; LA II:2–3). Even
animals are influenced by music, but we do not treat their reactions as signs of
aesthetic understanding (Hanslick 1986, 61–62; see CPJ 5:210). Wittgenstein
uses the same illustrations. Juxtaposing art with nature, he notes that to seek
emotional effects from music is to treat music as a drug (BBB, 178). And he
distinguishes the understanding of music from its causal effects by reference to
animals: “We use the phrase ‘A man is musical’ not so as to call a man musical if
he says ‘Ah!’ when a piece of music is played, any more than we call a dog
musical if it wags its tail when music is played” (LA I:17).
It has been argued that Wittgenstein’s reasons for rejecting the expression and
arousal theories are exhausted by his rejection of reductionism and his anti-
Cartesian “anxiety” and that he should be open to other explanations of art’s
extra-artistic content.46 It has also been argued, originally by appealing to the
Tractatus’s idea of structural isomorphism between propositions and facts, that

the resemblances between music and emotions serve to ground the expressive
content of music (see Langer 1942, 221–245). The argument is not successful
by the Tractatus’s lights, as it overlooks the requirement of referential relations
between names and objects for the determinacy of sense (TLP 2.1513–2.1515).
Nor does it fit with the position of the later Wittgenstein, who adamantly denies
the conclusion. As late as in 1948, he writes:
Understanding & explaining a musical phrase. – The simplest explanation is

sometimes a gesture; another might be a dance step, or words describing
a dance. – But isn’t our understanding of the phrase an experience we have
while hearing it? & what function, in that case, has the explanation? Are we
supposed to think of it while we hear music? Are we supposed to imagine the
dance, or whatever it may be, as we listen? And supposing we do, – why
should that be called hearing the music with understanding?? If seeing the
46
For proposals on how Wittgenstein’s later view could be combined with art’s emotive content,
see Scruton 2004 and Hagberg 1995, 99–109.
dance is what matters, it would be better that, rather than the music, were
performed. But that is all a misunderstanding. (CV, 79 [69])
This reduction, once again, gives the musical phrase a sovereign identity by
insisting that the content of music cannot be translated into another medium
without loss. Even if music resembles other phenomena, like gestures, facial
expressions, or dance steps, such resemblances do not warrant the ascription of
extramusical content to musical phrases or themes.47
That the content of music cannot be expressed in another medium without
loss is the core thesis of musical formalism. Hanslick, the main proponent of the
view, argues that while music resembles the dynamic of human emotions, it
does not have any specific extramusical subject matter. Instead, “the content of
music is tonally moving forms” (Hanslick 1986, 29). Hence, the use of emotive
terminology in our descriptions of music should not be read literally (30).
A similar view follows from Wittgenstein’s later conception of language.48 If
the meaning of words and sentences is their use within a linguistic context, then,
mutatis mutandis, musical notes, chords, cadences, and tunes acquire their
meaning from the role they have within the musical system. This is why it is
impossible to translate them it into pictures or words. For the same reason, in
order to explain the content of music, I can either describe the roles of the
musical elements within the system (“This is the dominant,” etc.), resort to
indirect descriptions or comparisons that aim at illuminating the musical phrase,
or else just whistle the tune.
In Section 3.2, I noted that just as the content of fear is partly constituted by its
intentional object, aesthetic judgments are internally related or “directed” to the
object of aesthetic appreciation (LA II:18). In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein

refines the picture by making a move similar to his early shift from the
comparison between a musical theme and a proposition to the comparison
between the theme and a tautology (NB, 40). He introduces the idea of fear
without any specific object of fear and calls such a feeling “intransitive”
(BBB, 22). We may also talk about transitive and intransitive uses of words
and sentences. The former warrants the question “What did you mean by that
sentence?” to be answered by a discursive explanation or a paraphrase of the
sentence, whilst the latter does not. In the intransitive case, the question is
47
Oswald Hanfling aptly describes the experience as a “hearing-as-if” experience (Hanfling 2004,
152).
48
Here, I disagree with Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin who call Hanslick the “voice of medioc-
rity” (Janik and Toulmin 1973, 35) and with Béla Szabados who contrasts Wittgenstein’s later
account of music with Hanslick’s formalism (Szabados 2014, 59–72, 87–97). On my reading, the
similarities between the two Viennese greats surpass the differences and reflect their shared
background in the Kantian tradition (see Appelqvist 2019a).
rather: “What sentence is formed by this sequence of words?” (BBB, 161). At

this point, it should be no surprise that the phenomena Wittgenstein mentions to
exemplify intransitive meaning are from the aesthetic domain broadly
conceived:
The same strange illusion which we are under when we seem to seek
something which a face expresses whereas, in reality, we are giving ourselves
up to the features before us – that same illusion possesses us even more
strongly if repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression
on us, we say “This tune says something,” and it is as though I had to find
what it says. And yet I know that it doesn’t say anything such that I might
express in words or pictures what it says. And if, recognizing this, I resign
myself to saying “It just expresses a musical thought,” this would mean no
more that saying “It expresses itself.” (BBB, 166)
Since intransitive meaning resides in the structure of the sentence, in the exact
choice of its words and their order, it cannot be explained by any other means
except by repeating the sentence – a feature of language that Wittgenstein in
1931 connects with “the Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy” (CV,
13 [10]). Intransitive meaning thus has a role analogous to Wittgenstein’s early
logical form, whose inexpressibility he illustrated by reference to facial features
and music (TLP 4.014, 4.1221).49
Art’s autonomy and the inadequacy of our discursive resources for explaining
the content of art are common commitments among Kantians and other formal-
ists. What is less common, though, is the extension of the idea to language,
typically treated as a means of communicating extralinguistic facts. While the
later Wittgenstein is famous for emphasizing the uses of language, he is also
highly sensitive to the specifically linguistic, formal features of language. In his

early view, the form of language, which is independent of empirical content, is the
necessary condition for the possibility of sense. In his later period, while dismiss-
ing the formal unity of language envisioned in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein still
talks about language as a “family of structures” (PI §108). He calls such structures
“language-games” – a notion which becomes more prominent from 1932 onward
and eventually replaces that of a grammatical system (see LC 7:21, 7:92–95;
BBB, 81; PI §§7, 23–24). And for Wittgenstein, grammar is autonomous: “the
rules of grammar may be called ‘arbitrary,’ if that is to mean that the purpose of
grammar is nothing but that of language” (PI §497). What makes Wittgenstein’s
inquiry grammatical is that the inquiry is not directed toward empirical
49
For discussions on intransitive meaning and aesthetics, see Johannessen 1990; Hagberg 1995,
99–117; Escalera 2012.
phenomena, but toward the possibilities of phenomena, those possibilities being

grounded in grammar (PI §§89–90; cf. TLP 2.0121).
A commitment to aesthetic autonomy does not mean that one takes art to be
isolated from other aspects of the human form of life, any more than grammar is
detached from practical purposes and endeavors. But the nature of that relation
calls for a more delicate analysis than the traditional accounts of art afford.
I take it to be undeniable that the specifically artistic forms of different aesthetic
systems have a central place in Wittgenstein’s conception of aesthetics. But he
also points out, especially in 1938 and after, that the investigation into aesthetics
does not begin “from certain words, but from certain occasions or activities”
(LA I:6). In order to describe what aesthetic appreciation consists in, “we would
have to describe the whole environment,” “culture,” or “ways of living” (LA
I:20, 25, 35). According to him,
What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical

taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do
or whether men only give them, etc., etc. In aristocratic circles in Vienna
people had [such and such] a taste, then it came into bourgeois circles and
women joined choirs, etc. This is an example of tradition in music. (LA I:26)
It is hard to see how the observation of women joining choirs in a bourgeois

society could serve as a solution to the kinds of puzzles Wittgenstein himself
describes as central to aesthetics. So what is the role of such observations in
Wittgenstein’s overall understanding of aesthetics and the arts? What is it in his
mature philosophy of language?
The word “language-game” is meant to underscore that the speaking of
language belongs to an activity. But this does not mean that we could
reductively explain language by reference to language-independent uses or
purposes (PI §§23, 496; see PI II §365). The activities, customs, institu-
tions, and our biological and social constitution, which together make up
our human form of life, are irreducibly intertwined with language from the
beginning. The objects we encounter, the thoughts we entertain, and the
actions we perform are all shaped by grammar. Besides, keeping in mind
the differences across the family of language-games, including artistic
ways of using language, we should not assume that in each case we will
find the sort of use that is characteristic of factual statements. As
Wittgenstein reminds us: “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is
composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game
of giving information” (Z §160). Considering such creative and artistic
uses of language as making up stories, acting in a play, guessing riddles,
cracking jokes, solving arithmetic problems, cursing, or praying – all
examples featured in Wittgenstein’s famous list of language-games – gives

an idea of the expressive range that language actually has (see PI §23).
The sort of dichotomy between art and reality that typically underlies the
traditional accounts of art and is presupposed by aesthetic cognitivism reflects
an inflated emphasis on one function of language, namely, the communication
of information. Moreover, it rests on a failure to acknowledge that whatever we
call reality is already shaped by our forms of expression and thus belongs to the
scope of language as understood by the later Wittgenstein. A similar embed-
dedness in our form of life shaped by language characterizes the arts. Instead of
being translatable into words and sentences, music “interacts” with our lan-
guage: “Does the theme point to nothing beyond itself? Oh yes! But that
means: – The impression it makes on me is connected with things in its
surroundings – e.g.: with the existence of the German language & of its
intonation, but that means with the whole field of our language games” (CV,
59 [51–52]). Musical phrases resemble conclusions, questions, and answers.
The musician’s phrasing of a melody may accord with the intonation of a given
language. And the performance of a string quartet is like a conversation between
different voices. The works of a given composer are musically related to those
of other composers, but they are also related to other fields of art like literature,
poetry, or painting of the same period. And attentive listening to a musical
performance and the listeners’ understanding of the movement therein may be
shown in their accompanying gestures or facial expressions of surprise, disgust,
or delight.50
But it just does not follow from such connections and resemblances between
music and something else that this “something else” gets closer to the content of
music than what we hear in music itself (CV, 67 [58].). Besides, there is no
reason to think that specifically artistic forms of expression could not be part of
our expressive resources on their own terms: “If a theme, a phrase, suddenly
means something to you, you don’t have to be able to explain it. Just this gesture
has been made accessible to you” (Z §158).
4.2 Meaning and Understanding

Wittgenstein compares language with music throughout his career, and the
questions of meaning and understanding lie at the heart of the comparison. In
1915, he aligns musical tunes with tautologies and claims that “knowledge of
the nature of logic will for this reason lead to knowledge of the nature of music”
(NB, 40). The comparison between musical tunes and sentences surfaces again
in the 1930s. Despite the changes in Wittgenstein’s conception of language, the
50
On such interconnections, see, for example, Schulte 1993, 37–44; Guter 2017.
point of the comparison still lies in the ineffability of the tune’s meaning (LC
8:66). Moreover, the linguistic objects of comparison for music are still formal
in character: a feature of a melody may be explained by comparing it with
a colon or by characterizing a musical phrase as an answer to what came before
(BBB, 166). However, in the Brown Book, the direction of the analogy between
language and music has reversed. When the 1915 remark promises that know-
ledge of logic will shed light on music, Wittgenstein now states:
What we call “understanding a sentence” has, in many cases, a much greater

similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to
think. But I don’t mean that understanding a musical theme is more like the
picture which one tends to make oneself of understanding a sentence; but
rather that this picture is wrong, and that understanding a sentence is much
more like what really happens when we understand a tune than at first
sight appears. For understanding a sentence, we say, points to a reality
outside the sentence. Whereas one might say “Understanding a sentence
means getting hold of its content; and the content of the sentence is in the
sentence.” (BBB, 167)
What is remarkable about this statement, which later appears slightly reformu-
lated in the Investigations, is the suggestion that a proper grasp of musical
understanding will illuminate the key theme of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy,
the understanding of language (see PI §527).
In the Investigations, the question of understanding is formulated as
a question of following a rule. If linguistic meaning is best treated as the rule-
governed use of a word or a sentence within the context of a language-game,
then under what criteria am I entitled to say that I understand that meaning (PI
§43)? It is not sufficient that my behavior conforms to the rule that is constitu-
tive of the game providing the context of the use. If I understand, then my
behavior ought to be internally related to the rule so that I can appeal to the rule
in explaining my application thereof. The rule is, as the traditional interpretation
notes, “involved in [my] activity as a reason or part of a reason for acting thus-
and-so” (Baker and Hacker 2009, 138). Otherwise it would make no sense to
talk about understanding, which is a normative notion standing in need of
a criterion to distinguish it from misunderstanding.
Setting aside the seeming dissimilarity between the outwardly passive music
listener and the speaker of language, the way in which the rule-following
problem is formulated closely resembles the case of aesthetic judgments and
their justification, discussed in Section 3.3.51 On what grounds am I entitled to
51
As indicated by his example of whistling a theme as an answer to the question of how it should be
played, Wittgenstein’s own take on the understanding of art includes a performative aspect (see
BBB, 166; LC I:12; CV, 80 [70]; PI II §178; Hanfling 2004, 157–160).
say that I understand a musical phrase? A mere exclamation of pleasure is not

enough to show that I understand because, as we have seen, pleasure may be
only contingently related to music (LA I:17). Nor is it enough that I simply
imitate the judgments of others by repeating the opinions of established experts
and art critics. We do not attribute musical understanding to others unless we
hear reasons for their judgments. We also expect those reasons to be relevantly
related to music and transparent to the maker of the judgment, as Wittgenstein’s
analogy between an aesthetic discussion and a court-of-law illustrates (LC 9:32;
LA III:12).
The rule-following discussion of the Investigations presents similar
requirements for the understanding of language. If the question about my
ability to follow a rule is “not a question about causes, then it is about the
justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule” (PI
§217). And up to a point I can offer justifications. If I use an unusual word
in conversation and someone asks what I mean, I can define the word. And
I can explain the definition by substituting alternative expressions for the
original ones. These are legitimate justifications for my use of the word,
exhibiting my mastery of the grammar of the word. Moreover, they are –
or so I argue – similar in kind to an explanation I give of Brahms’s
“wobbly” syncopated rhythm when I point out that the rhythm is 3 against
4 (LA III:10).
However, what I have accomplished by such justifications is new formula-
tions of the original rule, whose application similarly stands in need of justifi-
cation. In my quest for an ultimate justification for the application of the rule,
I thus face an infinite regress of rule-formulations on rule-formulations, new

interpretations of the rule that show my action to be in conformity with the
original rule. Accordingly, the discussion culminates in the famous rule-
following paradox and the following conclusion:
That there is a misunderstanding here is shown by the mere fact that in this
chain of reasoning we place one interpretation behind another, as if each one
contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another lying
behind it. For what we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping
a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of
application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going
against it.” (PI §201)
By “interpretation” Wittgenstein means a rule-formulation, namely, an explicit,

conceptual expression of the rule: “One should speak of interpretation only
when one expression of a rule is substituted for another” (PI §201). Such rule-
formulations do not fix unequivocally the norm of application, because, just like
aesthetic reasons, “they are in the nature of further descriptions” of the original
rule (LC 9:30).
So if the mistake underlying the paradox is to equate understanding with an
interpretation, available to the speaker in the form of an explicit rule-
formulation, then what else is left? What does it mean to grasp the rule in
a way that is not an interpretation but not mere empirical regularity of behavior
either? Wittgenstein’s initial reply is formulated by reference to the notion of
a practice: “That’s why ‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is
following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to follow
a rule ‘privately’; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule would be the
same thing as following it” (PI §202). However, without further explication, the
appeal to practice is open to various interpretations ranging from a reduction of
linguistic norms to practical utility to Kripke’s skeptical solution, namely, that
there is no norm beyond the consensus of the community upholding assert-
ability conditions (Kripke 1982, 74–79). Yet, neither language-independent
practices, nor communal consensus will explain the notion of understanding.
Consensus is an empirical, statistical notion, whereas understanding is
a normative one (PI §241).
Unlike causes, the chains of which continue indefinitely, reasons come to an
end. According to Wittgenstein, “Once I have exhausted the justifications,
I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say:
‘This is simply what I do’” (PI §217; see PI §§326, 482, 485). While there is
a scope of justifications available both in aesthetics and in language, these will
soon run out. In a way reminiscent of the Tractatus’s imagery of logic as the
ineffable limit of language, Wittgenstein characterizes the end of justifications

as a boundary: “A reason can only be given within a game. The links of a chain
of reasons come to an end, at the boundary of the game.” (PG, 97; see PI §§119,
499). At the boundary of the game there is no further justification to be found,
nor any room to meaningfully question whether one ought to follow the rule.
Instead, “when I follow the rule, I do not choose. I follow the rule blindly” (PI
§219). So what should we make of this bedrock, where my grasp of the rule
takes a form other than interpretation, where I follow the rule but do so blindly?
We have encountered a similar boundary of justifications in Wittgenstein’s
discussion on aesthetic judgments. I can give reasons for my judgment by
comparisons and further descriptions of the aesthetic phenomenon; some justi-
fications are closer to a calculation, as the case of demonstrating the necessity of
a note by writing out the tune in chords (LC 9:39; BBB, 15; LA II:13). But as
argued here, after such explanations are given, they must “appeal to you,”
“satisfy you,” “click” for you – you must see the note’s necessity, say, for
yourself (LC 9:31; LA III:1–4, 10). For the explanation to become a reason for
you in the sense in which we are expected to know our motives for action, you
must personally endorse it (LC 9:31; LA III:12). The “appeal” in question is not
a psychological notion, but already incorporates a normative pull: you “try to
clear up circumstances; & in the end what you say will appeal to the judge” (LC
9:32). But if, in spite of my efforts to demonstrate the note’s necessity, “it does
not appeal to you, there is an end” (LC 9:31). Taking my lead from
Wittgenstein’s statement that the understanding of a sentence is like the under-
standing of a musical tune, I want to suggest that this “end” of aesthetic reasons
gives us the most viable model for what he means by blind rule-following.
Wittgenstein is not the first to ask how it is possible to apply a rule to
a particular case. Nor is he the first to connect the moment of blind rule-
following (i.e. rule-following without a conceptually formulated justification),
to practice and to aesthetic judgment. We find a version of the rule-following
problem already in Kant’s First Critique (CPR A132–136/B171–175).
Moreover, as some commentators have noted, Wittgenstein’s rule-following
paradox resembles Kant’s treatment of the problem.52 Indeed, the theme is as
central for Kant as it is for Wittgenstein. This is because, in every cognitive
judgment, a general rule, which for Kant is typically a concept, is applied to
a sensible intuition. Without intuitions, concepts are empty, and without con-
cepts, intuitions remain blind, as he famously states (CPR B75). Understanding
as the faculty of rules is not yet capable of applying those rules to concrete
particulars, because to justify the application of a rule by reference to a further
rule will only lead to an infinite regress (CPR A133). Hence, Kant claims, in
order to apply the rules in concreto and to distinguish which particulars fall
under their scope, understanding needs help from the power of judgment,
which, in the First Critique, is introduced as the faculty of subsuming intuitions
under conceptual rules. The power of judgment is developed by concrete
training and by means of examples. But while training and the imitation of
others can provide a “limited understanding of the rules,” ultimately “the
faculty of making use of them correctly must belong to the student himself”
(CPR A133).
Now consider the student in the Investigations, learning the rule governing
the series of natural numbers. Wittgenstein writes: “At first, perhaps, we guide
his hand in writing out the series 0 to 9; but then the possibility of communica-
tion will depend on his going on to write it down by himself” (PI §143). He
continues: “Let us suppose that after some efforts on the teacher’s part
he continues the series correctly, that is, as we do it. So now we can say that
52
See Cavell 1969, 88–96; Bell 1987; Glock 1996, 326; Haugeland 1998, fn 4; Eldridge 2004;
McDowell 2009, 110; Baz 2016.
he has mastered the system.” (PI §145) Wittgenstein’s characterization of rule-

following as a practical ability and his emphasis on training reflect Kant’s
portrayal of the role of the power of judgment in the First Critique (PI §§6,
150). And, like Kant, Wittgenstein gives examples an indispensable role in the
transmission of rules: “If a person has not yet got the concepts, I’ll teach him to
use the words by means of examples and by exercises. – And when I do this, I do
not communicate less to him than I know myself” (PI §208).
What makes the parallel between Kant and Wittgenstein significant is that
Kant’s mature treatment of his rule-following problem is intertwined with his
account of the judgment of beauty. In Kant’s First Critique, the power of
judgment is given just a supporting if necessary role in the formation of
cognitive judgments. In the Third Critique, a work dedicated to the faculty
that is supposed to bridge the gap between the conceptual rule and its particular
instance, Kant returns to the rule-following problem (CPJ 5:168–169).
Describing the typical use of the power of judgment in which a particular
intuition is subsumed under a known rule as determining, he notes that, in
addition to its determining use, the power of judgment can be used reflectively.
This is the case when our judgment begins from the particular without having
a conceptual rule ready at hand, and yet sees the particular as a unified whole.
Judgments of beauty have a special place among reflective judgments, because
they are “blind” in the exact sense of neither presupposing nor leading to
concepts (CPR B75; CPJ 5:221). It is precisely for this reason that the judgment
of beauty escapes the lurking regress of conceptual justification for the applica-
tion of a conceptual rule that cognitive judgments face.
At this point, one might object that escaping the regress of conceptual
justifications is not much comfort if we fall back on something as foggy as
aesthetic judgment. Surely such a move must undermine Wittgenstein’s core
commitment to the normativity of grammar, not to mention conflict with his
rejection of a private language. The concern would indeed be warranted if
Wittgenstein’s account of aesthetic judgment were empiricist, reducing the
aesthetic judgment to mere feelings of approbation. However, as argued in
Section 3.2, Wittgenstein rejects just such a view in favor of the Kantian
conception of aesthetic judgment, which assumes that pure aesthetic judgments
are universally valid and make a justified claim to necessity in spite of relying
on feeling. Even without an established conceptual rule, the judgment of beauty
is offered “as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce” in the
form of an explicit rule-formulation (CPJ 5:237).
What Kant is ultimately after in the Third Critique is reassurance of our right
to think of “the particular as contained under the universal” when the fit between
the general conceptual rule and the sensible particular cannot be justified by
appeal to further concepts (CPJ 5:179). Cognitive judgments need not remain
paralyzed in the face of the infinite regress of rules on the application of rules,
because the particular intuition and the concept are united by a feeling of
appropriateness – a feeling that finds its paradigmatic manifestation in
a judgment of beauty. This is why Kant claims that in a judgment of beauty
we find something that is “requisite for possible cognitions in general” (CPJ
5:290; see CPJ 5:286–287).53
A point that often goes unnoticed is that the sections usually treated as
Wittgenstein’s discussion of how the rule can determine its correct application
are immediately preceded by a remark on music (PI §§185–242). In section 184,
Wittgenstein gives a musical version of the more well-known mathematical
example of the rule-following problem (PI §§143–149). He writes:
I want to remember a tune, and it escapes me; suddenly I say “Now I know it,”
and I sing it. What was it like suddenly to know it? Surely it can’t have
occurred to me in its entirety in that moment! – Perhaps you will say: “It’s
a particular feeling, as if it were now there” – but is it now there? Suppose
I then begin to sing it and get stuck? – But may I not have been certain at that
moment that I knew it? So in some sense or other it was there after all! – But
in what sense? Perhaps you would say that the tune was there if, for example,
someone sang it through, or rehearsed it in his imagination from beginning to
end. I am not, of course, denying that the statement that the tune is there can
also be given a quite different sense – for example, that I have a bit of paper on
which it is written. (PI §184)
The challenge of knowing the tune is in many ways like that of grasping the rule
determining the series of natural numbers (PI §143). Individual performances of
the tune are, as it were, applications of the rule that determines whether
a particular performance counts as a performance of that tune (just as the
rule constituting the use of the word “table” determines what particular things
are correctly called tables). Also Wittgenstein candidates for the criterion of
knowing the tune – a particular feeling, performance, a mental image, etc. – to
be rejected as unsuccessful, correspond to the mathematical example (see PI
§§147–155).
But importantly, the example of the tune immediately evokes the moment at
which justifications given by rule-formulations come to an end. For what would
a rephrase or an alternative expression of the tune, given as an interpretation of
the original, look like? While I can try and justify my claim to knowledge of the
tune by writing it down on the bit of paper Wittgenstein mentions or by
analyzing the tune in terms of tonal functions, such explanations capture the
53
On the contribution of reflective judgment in cognition, see, for example, Bell 1987; Ginsborg
1997; Allison 2001, 150–155, 176–177.
tune in a “quite different sense” (PI §184). For to know a tune is also to have
a hold of its internal, purposive unity, to have a grasp of the “completeness of the
tune” (NB, 40).
Later in the text, Wittgenstein returns to the parallel between understanding
a sentence and a musical tune, offering a revised version of the Brown Book
remark:
Understanding a sentence in language is much more akin to understanding

a theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding
a spoken sentence is closer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called
understanding a musical theme. Why is just this the pattern of variation in
intensity and tempo? One would like to say “Because I know what it all
means.” But what does it mean? I’d not be able to say. As an “explanation,”
I could compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean
the same pattern). (PI §527)
The import of the remark is threefold. First, music and language alike are
systems constituted by autonomous rules that cannot be justified by reference
to something external to those systems. Second, my understanding of a specific
expression (a chord, cadence, tune, word, or sentence) requires mastery of those
rules. Without such mastery, my responses will be like those of a dog that “wags
its tail when music is played” (LA I:17). And yet, third, that understanding
cannot be exhaustively explained by explicit rule-formulations, nor derived
from them. In language and music alike, I will reach a point where explanations
come to an end, where “I’d not be able to say” (PI §527; emphasis added). After
the explanations, examples, and exercises that are part of my immersion into the
rules of grammar have been exhausted, my ability to judge requires that

I “develop a feeling for the rules” (LA I:15). I must learn to feel how the general
rule fits the particular case just as I “learn to feel the ending of a church mode as
an ending” (PI §535; see PI §292). This feeling is indispensable for my ability to
hear the musical tune as a complete whole, whose parts “click” into place and
become a meaningful pattern for me. What I am suggesting, then, is that here we
have a case of understanding (i.e. of grasping a rule), that is not an interpretation
if by interpretation we mean an explicit, conceptual rule-formulation.
As argued by David Bell, Wittgenstein’s appeal to music in relation to the
rule-following paradox is not incidental, but intended to do work similar to that
Kant assigns to reflective judgment.54 This is to say that the resolution to the
rule-following problem appeals to the two perspectives introduced and elabor-
ated in Kant’s Third Critique, the determining (discursive, transitive) and the
reflective (intuitive, intransitive) perspective. In Section 2.3, I argued that these
54
Bell 1987, 239–244; see also Moore 2007 and 2011.
two perspectives are present already in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. In his

later philosophy, they resurface in his distinction between the two uses of the
word “understanding” that, according to him, “make up my concept of under-
standing” (PI §532):
We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced

by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be
replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by
another.)
In the one case, the thought in the sentence is what is common to different
sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in
these positions. (Understanding a poem.) (PI §531)
The first, transitive case of understanding corresponds to the case of having an

explicit explanation of the meaning of the sentence ready at hand, to be given as
an interpretation. In Kantian terms, my understanding stems from the determin-
ing use of the power of judgment which subsumes a particular instance under
a known conceptual rule. In the second, intransitive case I have exhausted such
explanations and follow the rule without a further conceptual justification. This
type of understanding arises from the reflective use of the power of judgment
that shows its object – in this case a sentence – as a meaningful, purposive whole
in spite of my inability to further explain what that meaning or purpose is, any
more than I can explain what a musical theme or a poem, which I experience as
meaningful, really means (see CPJ 5:405–410).
Katalin Makkai has recently argued that Bell is mistaken to assume that Kant
and Wittgenstein take a feeling for the applicability of a rule to a particular to
end the regress of rules. Claiming that the feeling thus postulated is not a proper
act of judging but an “object of fantasy,” she argues that Bell’s interpretation
leads to an illusory notion of self-determining rules (Makkai 2021, 54). Without
a “separate explanation or elaboration,” an immediate act of seeing or feeling
cannot “bear the explanatory weight for which it is invoked,” which is what
Wittgenstein, on Makkai’s reading, aims to expose (56).55 In my view,
Wittgenstein’s attention to aesthetic judgment, and especially its difference
from merely subjective feelings, is meant to provide just the sort of separate
explanation of the validity of a judgment grounded in a feeling that Makkai
finds missing. Makkai’s argument relies on the claim that the feeling of the
applicability of a rule is not a proper act of judging (54). But the aesthetic
judgment is an act of judging, albeit one that involves no concepts and hence is
“blind” in Kant’s sense of the term. Moreover, since aesthetic judgment
55
For another critical take on Bell’s argument, see Sullivan 2011.
involves reasons which I must personally endorse, blind rule-following does not
entail that “I am relieved of responsibility” as Makkai suggests (60).
Just as an aesthetic judgment is not detached from their object, intransitive
understanding of a sentence, manifest in seeing or feeling the form of the
sentence, is not detached from the rules of grammar. It is not a causally induced
response to the sentence, where no norms are involved (PI §289). The point is
rather that, at the boundary of the game, I do not look for yet another justifica-
tion, but rely on my feeling of the formal purposiveness of the rule-governed
language-game as a whole. It makes no sense to ask for a justification for the
grammatical proposition “Every rod has a length,” as this is what I must take for
granted in the game of measuring (PI §251). Yet I may experience the clicking
together of the parts of that game and come to see how the grammatical
proposition is, as it were, the missing piece of the puzzle. It makes the game
complete in a way that allows for the realization of various purposes within the
game, in spite of having no purpose to be established from without. The
situation is like grasping the necessity of the note as part of a melody. While
I must see or hear that necessity, this can only happen by turning my attention to
the formal features of the melody made possible by the rules of the musical
system. This formalistic emphasis on shared rules is vital for the possibility of
communication. And while there is more room for disagreement in the domain
of aesthetics in comparison to measuring, say, we must accept something as
a given in both cases. If you fail to see the unshakeable certainty of “Every rod
has a length” or refuse to accept that “This is where the cadence comes to an
end,” our possibility of understanding one another soon comes to an end.56
To sum up, if understanding is a normative notion, then the rules constitutive

of the meaning of a sentence must be part of my reason for using the sentence in
a particular way. But in my attempt to justify my application of the rule by
reference to new expression of the rule, I face an infinite regress of rule-
formulations. In order to stop that regress, we need a “way of grasping a rule
which is not an interpretation,” but is not a merely subjective reaction either (PI
§ 201). Without such blind rule-following, we will either launch on the afore-
mentioned regress or else fall back on a naturalistic model of understanding that
is unacceptable for Wittgenstein. I have argued that in aesthetic judgment we
find precisely the kind of grasp of a rule which is not an interpretation, and
which brings together the rule and in its application in a nonconceptual yet
normative manner. The “necessity” we experience when hearing one musical
thought following another or a particular note as an indispensable element of
56
Cavell has argued that this “given” could be seen as playing a role similar to what Kant, in the
Third Critique, assigns to “common sense” as the prerequisite of “universal communicability”
(CPJ 5:238–239; see Cavell 1969, 88–96; 1979, 30–32).
a melody is not reducible to facts of nature. Nor can it be reduced to practical

utility. Rather, the necessity arises out of the system as a whole, which I cannot
prescribe from without but can simply describe and illuminate by comparisons.
Ultimately, though, you must see it for yourself.
5 Aesthetics and Philosophy

In his lectures on aesthetics, Wittgenstein dedicates most of his attention to
aesthetic judgments and explanations. He argues that aesthetic explanations are
not causal. They do not appeal to the artist’s or the audience’s mental states, nor
do they explain the arts by reference to nature, art’s cognitive gains, or practical
utility. The relevant kinds of explanations are further descriptions of the object
of aesthetic appreciation or comparisons between the object and something else.
Such descriptions and comparisons aim at drawing attention to the features of
the object itself. They aim at showing it from a perspective that makes the
features of the object “click,” even when we cannot explain what it is that
“clicks” and why (LA III:5).
In spite of maintaining that there is no objective, discursively explicable
paradigm to serve as the ultimate criterion of aesthetic “correctness,”
Wittgenstein uses normative terminology throughout his remarks on aesthetics.
He describes aesthetic systems as being constituted by rules and hence meriting
“grammatical” investigation. And he claims that our aesthetic judgments com-
mit us: they are not mere expressions of subjective feelings but call for justifi-
cation. The justifications have the character of reasons and they are given to
compel another to see the aesthetic phenomenon in a particular way. Finally, for
the explanation to appeal to you and to become a reason for you, you must see or
feel the “click” between a particular feature and the system. In this respect, the
grasp of the “necessity,” “rightness,” or “wrongness” of an aesthetic feature
involves an irreducibly subjective moment of endorsement.
In 1933, Wittgenstein asks: “Are the same sort of reasons given elsewhere
except in Ethics?” His answer is: “Yes; in philosophy” (LC 9:32). The obvious
similarity between aesthetics and philosophy is that for Wittgenstein, just as for
Kant, both are qualitatively different from natural sciences. Both Kant and
Wittgenstein argue that philosophical illusions, manifest most notably in meta-
physics, arise from our failure to properly distinguish between factual state-
ments and the conditions of those statements (BBB, 18; RPP I:949; Z §458; PI
§90; CPR A295–302/B352–359). For the early Wittgenstein, this means
a failure to distinguish between the form and content of language; for the later
Wittgenstein, between what people say and the grammar that makes
saying something possible (TLP 3.323–3.33, 4.113–4.1212; PI §240–242).
That philosophy does not aim at establishing new facts but turns to reflect the
possibility of that which we already know is one of Wittgenstein’s most firmly
held beliefs from the very beginning. In the Tractatus, he states that “philosophy
is not a body of doctrine, but an activity”; it “does not result in ‘philosophical
propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions” (TLP 4.112; see
TLP 4.0031; CPR A11–12/B24–26). And he reaffirms the correctness of his
view in the Investigations, noting that “It was correct to say that our consider-
ations must not be scientific ones.. . . All explanation must disappear, and
description alone must take its place” (PI §109; see TLP 4.111; LWL, 73–74;
PI §§124–128).
As in aesthetics, where the investigation begins from an aesthetic puzzle like
“Why is this note absolutely necessary?,” a philosophical puzzle arises from our
failure to grasp the “forms of language” (PI §111). A description of the musical
context of the note or of the language-game to which a word belongs allows us
to see how the note or the word contributes to the overall structure of that
organized whole (PI §§23, 43, 108). And just as in aesthetics, where an apt
comparison allows us to see how the pieces of the aesthetic puzzle fit together,
so too in philosophy the right object of comparison may reveal the source of our
philosophical confusion (PI §§130–131). The perspective or “overview” we
acquire from grammatical investigation reveals the similarities and differences
between language-games, but also the difference between what people say and
what they take for granted (PI §§122, 241–242). Instead of giving a reductionist
explanation of language, the resulting “surveyable representation produces
precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’”
(PI §122). This sort of understanding we have, of course, encountered in

Wittgenstein’s treatment of aesthetic judgment.57
One of the first commentators to draw attention to the “queer resemblance
between a philosophical investigation . . . and one in aesthetics” was Stanley
Cavell (CV, 29 [25]).58 In his seminal “Aesthetic Problems of Modern
Philosophy,” Cavell argues that the claims of ordinary language philosophers,
who for him represent the followers of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, should
be seen against the model of aesthetic judgment as understood by Kant. Instead
of resting on conclusive arguments, philosophical claims about language are
invitations to see the object of investigation in a certain way. As such, they
appeal to a kind of attunement between us. This attunement, that is, our
57
On the connection between aesthetics and the descriptive method, see, for example, Kuusela
2017; Schulte 2018; Moyal-Sharrock 2020.
58
Cavell’s work has heavily influenced the reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and aesthetics
especially in North America. See, for example, Gibson and Huemer, 2004; Friedlander 2011a;
Hagberg 2008, 2018; Hagberg 2017; Sedivy 2016; Makkai 2021.
“agreement in definitions [and] judgments that is required for communication,”

Cavell connects to Kant’s “universal communicability” (PI §242; see Cavell
1969, 88–96; Cavell 1979, 30–32; CPJ 5:239).
It is important to notice that the consequences of Cavell’s proposal look quite
different if the parallel between aesthetics and philosophy is not read in light of
Kant’s aesthetics. If we overlook Kant’s emphasis on form as the shared object
of aesthetic attention, the importance of “seeing for oneself” may look like an
invitation to consider only the “musicality of language” at the expense of its
“systematicity and normativity” (see Day 2017, 23). This, in turn, may lead to
the view that grammatical relations are not “established or grounded by any-
thing beyond the experience of connection itself,” in other words, that rules and
their applications are not internally related in the strict sense of the word (19; see
5fn 2, 19fn19). But, as I have argued, not every instance of rule-following is
fruitfully illuminated by reference to aesthetics. Intransitive understanding,
modelled after aesthetic judgment, becomes pertinent in quite specific cases,
the most prominent being philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, mathematics, and
religion – a list reminiscent of the Tractarian ineffabilia. I do not find it
incidental that Cavell himself focuses on the claims of ordinary language
philosophers. If one treats grammatical investigation as a form of transcenden-
tal investigation, as Cavell does, then one is unlikely to overlook the difference
between philosophical and ordinary, empirical claims (Cavell 1969, 64, 90).
Without due attention to the nonconceptuality of aesthetic judgment, in turn,
we open the door to the infinite regress of conceptually formulated rules. This is
the risk in equating aesthetic judgment too directly with aspect-seeing. Granted,
aesthetics and aspect-seeing appear in close proximity in Wittgenstein’s work

and have significant points of overlap.59 Like beauty, an aspect is not
a “property of an object” (PPF §247 [PI, xi, 212]). Both are a matter of seeing
rather than knowing, and both have the capacity to “put our attunement with
other people to the test” (Baz 2000, 99). Finally, an aesthetic judgment may
sometimes presuppose something like seeing an aspect, as when we hear a few
bars of music as an introduction to what follows or when we find the right
accentuation for reading a poem (PPF §§178, 209 [PI, xi, pp. 202, 206]; LA
I:12).60 Yet, I would be cautious to equate the two. Seeing the duck in the duck–
rabbit picture need not be satisfying in the way in which finding the right tempo
for a musical performance is. And it would be odd to say that when the right
tempo is found, we have found an aspect of the performance that we can then
change at will, which is what aspect-seeing allows (PPF §256 [PI, xi, 213]).
59
See, for example, BBB, 162ff; PPF §§111–364 [PI, xi]; RPP1 §§507, 545–546, 1130.
60
On aesthetics and aspect-seeing, see Baz 2000; Rowe 2004; Schulte 2004; Batkin 2010; Kemp
and Mras 2016.
Unlike the duck–rabbit picture, which stays the same while my impression of it
changes, the musical performance itself changes together with its tempo (PPF
§§130–131, 152 [PI, xi, pp. 196, 199]).
Drawing on Cavell, Avner Baz has explored Wittgenstein’s aspect-seeing as
a model for bringing together a concept and a particular. While acknowledging
the parallel, he argues that to expand Kant’s account of beauty to aspect-seeing
would be to “aestheticize . . . our ordinary and normal relation to our world”
(Baz 2016, 619). I agree, but on grounds different from Baz’s. Unlike Baz, who
denies the conceptuality of aspects, I take at least some aspects to be dependent
on the conceptual (see Baz 2020, 10–19). As Wittgenstein notes, “Sometimes
the conceptual is dominant in an aspect” (LW1 §582; see RPP1 §§70–74; PPF
§§139–140, 144 [PI, xi, 197]). However, this need not render the perception of
an aspect “objective,” at least if we take our lead from Kant as Baz does. This is
because the judgment of beauty is not, pace Baz, the only judgment Kant takes
to fall between objective empirical judgments and merely subjective likings (cf.
Baz 2016, 612). Teleological judgments are not objective in the sense of
determining particulars under given concepts. Yet, they involve concepts as
they attribute purposes to natural organisms. But for Kant, purposes are not
objective properties: it looks as if the purpose of the heart is to pump blood, but
from the viewpoint of theoretical reason we cannot claim to know this (CPJ
5:360–361; 5:370). This “as if” quality of teleological judgments and their
unique relation to concepts, might make them a more suitable point of compari-
son for Wittgenstein’s aspects as an “intermediate link” between aesthetic
judgments and ordinary empirical judgments (PI §122).
On my reading, the roots of the parallel between philosophy and aesthetics

and accordingly of the notion of a surveyable representation lie in
Wittgenstein’s early idea of the sub specie aeterni perspective that shows its
object as a limited whole. In 1930, Wittgenstein connects the sub specie aeterni
perspective to a mode of thought, characterized in a way reminiscent of
surveyable representation:
But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another
through which the world may be captured sub specie aeterni. It is – as
I believe – the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and
leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight. (CV, 7 [5])
In 1933, Wittgenstein claims that philosophy aims at providing a “synopsis of

many trivialities,” which “enables you to overlook a system at a glance” (LC
5:29; 9:38). And he distinguishes the intuitive perspective that “takes something
in as a whole at a glance” from a discursive perspective that treats language as
an explicable calculus (LC 8:58). Here, too, Wittgenstein connects the intuitive
perspective to aesthetics explicitly. According to him, “There’s no such thing as

an immediate recognition of an hypothesis as an hypothesis; but there is an
immediate pleasure in seeing a neat way of representation” (LC 9:38). This is
because our “aesthetic craving for an explanation is not satisfied by
a hypothesis,” but only by a surveyable representation provided by
a description of the system (LC 9:39). Hence, instead of explaining phenomena
by reference to new facts or hypotheses, “in Mathematics, Ethics, Aesthetics,
Philosophy, answer to a puzzle is to make a synopsis possible” (LC 9:39).
I argued in Section 2.3 that, in the Tractatus, the grasp of language involves
an inexpressible moment of seeing the form shared by language and reality and
connected this idea to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic. As I read it,
Wittgenstein’s later notion of blind rule-following hits the same chord. Once
we have exhausted our discursive resources of justification, we must “look and
see” how our language-games hang together (PI §66). When discussing the
pupil learning the series of natural numbers, Wittgenstein notes that “here too,
our pupil’s ability to learn may come to an end” (PI §143). He asks himself:
“What do I mean when I say ‘the pupil’s ability to learn may come to an end
here’?” (PI §144). The answer Wittgenstein gives to this question may be read
as a testimony of the character of grammatical investigation in philosophy and
of the way in which the resulting synopsis does philosophical work:
Do I report it from my own experience? Of course not. (Even if I have had

such experience.) Then what am I doing with that remark? After all, I’d like
you to say: “Yes, it’s true, one could imagine that too, that might happen
too!” – But was I trying to draw someone’s attention to the fact that he is able
to imagine that? – I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance
of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case
differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have
changed his way of looking at things. (Indian mathematicians: “Look at
this!”) (PI §144)
So it is not just in aesthetics where the goal of descriptions and comparisons is to

try to get another to see the object of investigation from an illuminating
perspective. The synoptic overview of grammar provided by philosophy simi-
larly aims at changing our way of looking at things. In this respect,
Wittgenstein’s later conception of our relation to grammar is not all that differ-
ent from his early approach to logical form.61
At this point, it is instructive to return to the significance of the distinction
between the discursive and the intuitive perspectives for Kant’s philosophical
enterprise. According to Kant, the discursive perspective yields empirical
61
See, for example, TLP 4.023, 6.1221, 6.2321; PI §§37, 66, 72–74, 122, 340, 401, 483, 490, 578.
knowledge by determining sensible intuitions under concepts. Such judgments

belong to a causal explanation of the world, which presents the world as
a mechanistic aggregate of facts (CPJ 20:217). By contrast, the intuitive per-
spective, manifest in reflective judgments, shows nature as a purposive whole
and its organisms as functional systems. It judges them from a teleological point
of view. This perspective is indispensable also for making sense of human
action, intentional states, and artefacts, because these too presuppose the notion
of a purpose (CPJ 5:220, 5:395–399; 5:406). Kant is careful to stress that,
objectively speaking, there are no purposes in nature. Nor does the reflective
perspective yield knowledge or warrant scientific explanation of nature. Given
that the reflective perspective relies on the power of judgment’s own principle of
“formal purposiveness,” also called the principle of the “lawfulness of the
contingent as such,” the resulting perspective only warrants the description
[Beschreibung] of nature (CPJ 20:217, 5:181, 5:417).
I have argued that Kant’s idea of the intuitive perspective that allows one to
see formal purposiveness in the world is reflected in Wittgenstein’s philosophy
throughout his career. In his early work, it surfaces in the idea of
a contemplation of the world as a limited whole and in the comparison between
a tautology and a musical theme, which is “complete in itself” in virtue of its
own form (NB, 40). In the middle period, it appears in his idea of a synoptic
overview and in the idea of an aesthetic paradigm that cannot be formulated
(BBB, 166; LC 9:33; LA III:5; CV, 65 [57]). However, while Kant’s account
accommodates the tabulation of a fixed set of a priori concepts and the formu-
lation of a moral law, applicable to empirical reality, Wittgenstein denies the
availability of such expressible truths and does so from the very beginning. At
the same time, he acknowledges necessities we endorse as self-evident, such as
the superiority of living in harmony with the contingent facts of the world, the
necessity of a note having some pitch, or the unshakeable certainty of a rod
having some length (NB, 78; TLP 2.0131; PI §251; RFM III §39). These
necessities are formal. They are not statements about empirical reality, but
features of our way of encountering the world to be uncovered by turning to
look at what lies in front of our eyes.62 In this respect, the weight Wittgenstein
gives to the reflective perspective actually surpasses its role in Kant’s
philosophy.
Referring to Goethe’s study of plants – which in Goethe’s own judgment is
“entirely in the spirit of [Kant’s] ideas” (Cassirer 1945, 61) – Wittgenstein
writes:
62
On the relation between necessity and contingency in Wittgenstein and the difference with Kant,
see Moore 1997, 126–136.
Goethe in Metamorphose der Pflanzen, suggests that all plants are variations
on a theme. What is the theme?
Goethe says “They all point to a hidden law.” But you wouldn’t ask: What
is the law? That they point, is all there is to it. (LC 9:33)
The final remark accords with Kant’s principle of the “lawfulness of the contin-
gent as such.” The lawfulness we see in beauty and in plants and other organisms
of nature cannot be explained by reference to empirical facts, as it essentially
depends on our own activity of looking at the phenomenon from the right
perspective. Returning to Goethe in 1947, Wittgenstein contrasts philosophical
investigation with factual investigation. Once again he highlights descriptions
and comparisons as essential for philosophy, and claims that Goethe aimed at
something similar. In his description of plants, Goethe aimed at showing “analo-
gies in their structure” and thereby established a “new order among these
descriptions” (RPP I §950; see PI §§73, 90, 132; PO, 133). Instead of explaining,
he is just describing and “saying: ‘Look at it like this’” (RPP I §950).63
For Wittgenstein, looking and seeing are not philosophically innocent
notions. Drawn from the aesthetic domain broadly conceived, they signify
a mode of grasping reality that cannot be pinned down by discursive explan-
ations. Yet, as Wittgenstein’s repeated instruction for philosophers to look and
see demonstrates, the kind of understanding they offer is vital for our grasp of
logical form and, later, grammar. This is why we cannot afford to dismiss
Wittgenstein’s interest in aesthetics as a secondary preoccupation, unrelated
to the philosophical core of his work. What he has to say about aesthetics,
understood as an investigation of the domain of sensibility in general, is
indispensable for understanding the development of his conception of language

and philosophy.
63
On the affinities between Wittgenstein and Goethe, see Rowe 1991; Schulte 2003; Friedlander
2011b.
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The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
David G. Stern
University of Iowa
David G. Stern is Professor of Philosophy and Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences at the University of Iowa. His research interests include history of analytic
philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. He is
the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge
University Press, 2004) and Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (Oxford University Press,
1995), as well as more than 50 journal articles and book chapters. He is the editor of
Wittgenstein in the 1930s: Between the ‘Tractatus’ and the ‘Investigations’ (Cambridge
University Press, 2018) and a co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to
Wittgenstein (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2018), Wittgenstein: Lectures,
Cambridge 1930–1933, from the Notes of G. E. Moore (Cambridge University Press, 2016),
and Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
About the Series

This series provides concise and structured introductions to all the central topics in the
philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Elements are written by distinguished senior
scholars and bright junior scholars with relevant expertise, producing balanced and
comprehensive coverage of the full range of Wittgenstein’s thought.
The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Elements in the Series

Wittgenstein’s Heirs and Editors
Christian Erbacher
Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception
Avner Baz
Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Mauro Luiz Engelmann
Wittgenstein on Logic and Philosophical Method
Oskari Kuusela
Wittgenstein on Sense and Grammar
Silver Bronzo
Wittgenstein on Forms of Life
Anna Boncompagni
Wittgenstein on Criteria and Practices
Lars Hertzberg
Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
Genia Schönbaumsfeld
Hanne Appelqvist
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EPLW


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Wittgenstein and Aesthetics

Appelqvist , H 2023 , Wittgenstein and Aesthetics . Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig

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Wittgenstein and Aesthetics

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108946452 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of the Austrian

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

ISSN 2632-7104 (print)

Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Abstract: This Element argues that aesthetics, broadly conceived, plays

Keywords: aesthetic judgment, ineﬀability, Kant, normativity,

© Hanne Appelqvist 2023

ISBNs: 9781108931120 (PB), 9781108946452 (OC)

2 Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy 6

3 The Middle Period 19

4 From the Brown Book to the Philosophical Investigations 41

5 Aesthetics and Philosophy 58

as paradigm examples of judgments pertaining to sensibility. Kant too ultim-

The ambiguity of the term contributes to the difﬁculty of appreciating

against the backdrop of aesthetics in the disciplinary sense. In his lectures

should be investigated “grammatically,” in a way similar to the philosoph-

disagree with the traditional readings according to which Wittgenstein’s

Judgment, although some of Wittgenstein’s ideas, such as wallpaper as an

aesthetic judgment come together in a way that anticipates Wittgenstein’s

2 Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy

2.1 Aesthetics and Ethics

conception of the aesthetic judgment survive to his latest remarks, we may

explications, because transcendentality just means the necessary conditions for

The ordinariness of Wittgenstein’s example serves to underscore the primacy of

2.2 The View Sub Specie Aeterni

knowledge of a different culture, think about paintings as investments, or play

It would be a mistake to conclude that the role of art is to produce happiness in

On my reading, Kant’s idea of purposiveness understood by reference to

In 1930, Wittgenstein returns to the possibility of seeing one’s life as purpos-

landscape similar to Kant’s overall framework. It is offered as a way of

amalgamated ethics-cum-aesthetics as absolutely binding, as indicated by his

2.3 Aesthetics and Logic

For the early Wittgenstein, logic and ethics-cum-aesthetics stand on a par by

Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.

1930s, these characterizations of the formal aspect of reality imply

relation to the internal relation between two shades of color is one of

propositions” rather than propositions proper, as they neither represent states of

is once again from the realm of music:

On my reading, these references to music are directly related to Wittgenstein’s

3 The Middle Period

conception of the subject. The subject of the Tractatus is a solitary, even

“Language always expresses one fact as opposed to another: never expresses

3.2 The Beautiful and the Agreeable

discussion of what he claims to be standard aesthetic conversations progresses,

in is causal connections; whereas the one thing we are interested in Psychology

example of formal purposiveness that does not succumb to conceptual explan-

judgments, where communal agreement or the testimonies of epistemic peers

judgment is based on the disinterested contemplation of the form of the object,

purposiveness without a conceptually determinable purpose, Wittgenstein

In addition to warranting the question “Why?” and hence a demand of justiﬁca-

As implied by Wittgenstein’s verdict on the idiocy of the appeal to the agree-

3.3 Aesthetic Normativity

do not stand in a referential relation to nonmusical objects. Nor do cadences,