ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THETREMENDOUS IN WITTGENSTEIN’S

AESTHETICSThomas Tam

Wittgenstein’s elliptical remark on ‘the tremendous things in art’ in his 1938 ‘Lectureson Aesthetics’ has given rise to different interpretations as to the place this idea has inhis aesthetics. This paper examines the views of Peter Lewis and Benjamin Tilghmanon this issue. Both of them build their interpretations on the assumption thatWittgenstein contrasts the response to the tremendous with appreciation. Such anassumption, however, leads to results inconsistent with Wittgenstein’s basicconception of aesthetics. For Wittgenstein, aesthetic appreciation is not a formalisticactivity, and one clear aspect of it is indeed well illustrated by the response to thetremendous.

I

Wittgenstein says at the beginning of his 1938 ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ that ‘thesubject (Aesthetics) is very big and entirely misunderstood as far as I can see’.1

Entirely misunderstood? What are these misunderstandings and how do theyhelp to bring out Wittgenstein’s own peculiar conception of aesthetics? PeterLewis identifies three of them,2 which turn out ironically to be more or lessWittgenstein’s own aesthetic misunderstandings. The first of these misunder-standings concerns the word ‘beautiful’ in aesthetics. The word is often used asan adjective, says Wittgenstein, and it is this ‘linguistic form of sentences’ thatmisleads philosophers into thinking that beauty is an objective quality in things.Lewis questions, however, whether there are philosophers who really make sucha mistake. The obvious culprit here seems to be Plato, but Lewis reminds us that‘Plato’s view of beauty is an instantiation of a comprehensive theory ofpredication rather than a distinctively aesthetic misunderstanding’ (WAM, p. 20).

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1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley,California: University of California Press, 1966), p. 1, §1. Hereafter cited as LC, followed by pagenumber and section number on that page.

2 Peter Lewis, ‘Wittgenstein’s Aesthetic Misunderstandings’, in K. S. Johannessen (ed.), Wittgensteinand Aesthetics (Bergen: Universitetet i Bergen, 1997), pp. 19–22 [hereafter WAM]. It has to bepointed out that Lewis restricts his discussion mainly to the first two lectures.

Another plausible candidate may be G. E. Moore, who in his Principia Ethicaspeaks of ‘the cognition of the beautiful qualities possessed by [an] object’.3 YetLewis points out that, for Moore, ‘no set of qualities is sufficient to determinethat a thing is beautiful’ (WAM, p. 20), and his idea of beauty could not possiblybe reduced to such a simplistic view. In effect, as Lewis says, ‘in the history ofmodern aesthetics, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is not easy to locatethis misunderstanding’ (WAM, pp. 21–21).

The second aesthetic misunderstanding concerns the nature of aestheticjudgement, and there are two parts to this misunderstanding. According toWittgenstein, there is, first, a tendency in aesthetics to overemphasize theaesthetic judgement of the beautiful to the detriment of other kinds of aestheticjudgements, like that of judging the correctness or incorrectness of something,say, an intonation, a rhythm, or an architectural proportion. Secondly, there isalso a tendency to concentrate on the aesthetic judgement itself, considering it inisolation from other cultural phenomena and practices. Lewis rightly attributesboth of these tendencies to the influence of Kantian aesthetics. But he considersthat philosophers after Kant, such as Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Croce, andCollingwood, tend ‘to disparage the Kantian emphasis on the logical form ofaesthetic judgments concerning the beautiful’, and he concludes that ‘this is not amisunderstanding shared by all aestheticians’ (WAM, p. 21).

The third aesthetic misunderstanding highlighted by Wittgenstein in hislectures is that of treating aesthetics as ‘a kind of science’ (LC, p. 11, §1), andmore specifically of conceiving aesthetics as ‘a branch of psychology’ (LC, p. 17,§35). Wittgenstein meant by ‘science’ here the strict sense of an empirical science,that is to say, one which employs experimental method to discover causalconnections between things and which considers all explanation to be reducibleto causal explanation. On this perspective, aesthetics would be reduced tostudying how certain stimuli elicit certain responses under certain specifiedconditions. Its aim would be to establish general laws based on statistical resultsobtained by observing how a number of subjects reacted in a given situation.One may wonder who could possibly have held such a view. Lewis singles outI. A. Richards as representative of this approach, for his book The Principles ofLiterary Criticism is put forward ‘as part of a general psychological theory of value’(WAM, p. 22). I think, however, that Wittgenstein himself is a clearer exemplar.It is a well-known fact that Wittgenstein undertook some psychological researchin 1912 and conducted some experiments on the role and importance of rhythmin music. This was an attempt to deal with aesthetic problems using the rigorousmethod of science. One may well consider the 1938 ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ as acriticism of his earlier view.

There is one more aesthetic misunderstanding that Wittgenstein points out in

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3 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1966), p. 191.

connection with the third one just mentioned. It is, as Lewis puts it, the ‘mis-understanding of the character of aesthetic reactions, specifically . . . the failure tograsp the implications of the directedness or intentionality of such reactions’(WAM, p. 22). From the point of view of science, aesthetic reactions can beaccounted for by finding out the physical-physiological causes of them. ForWittgenstein, on the contrary, it is misleading to talk about the ‘cause’ of aestheticreactions. Not that aesthetic reactions do not have causes—they certainlyhave—but that aesthetic reactions involve different language games from, say,that surrounding pain behaviour. An aesthetic reaction is not the expression of afeeling as such, but a feeling that is directed towards an object in ‘the form of acriticism’ (LC, p. 14, §19). In such a language game, it is pertinent to ask aboutthe reason for the reaction, but not its cause. ‘Why are you disgusted [at the door]?Because it is too high’ (LC, p. 14, n. 1). It is, of course, in line with ordinary usageto say that the door, as the object to which the feeling of disgust is directed, is the‘cause’ of the reaction. But it is misleading to say that one ‘knows the cause’ ofone’s reaction in this context, for one does not take the door as the object whichproduces that feeling in us, but as an object of criticism. I think the corollary of thisidea is that we do not equally regard our feeling as an effect produced by a cause,that is to say, simply as a feeling. And this is the whole idea behind Wittgenstein’scriticism of ‘Tolstoy’s false theorizing’ about art in Culture and Value.4

According to Lewis, however, Wittgenstein (along with some commentatorstoo) tends to neglect a very important type of aesthetic reaction, which is that ofbeing ‘struck by the wonders of nature’ (WAM, p. 29).5 The reason is thatWittgenstein was concerned ‘with the judgements using words akin to “right”and “correct” . . .’, says Lewis. ‘That concern, I maintain, distracts Wittgenstein’sattention from important aspects of the appreciation of art’ (WAM, p. 30). For thelater Wittgenstein, however, the concept of ‘wonders of nature’ does emerge asthe basis of art (see CV, p. 64). This idea connotes a sense of fascination, ofadmiration and awe, before an artwork. In our appreciation of art, it is essentialthat we be impressed by the work, feel enthusiastic about it. People who areincapable of being thus impressed would be impoverished in their responses toart. Now, this feeling of wonderment, of being dazzled, is very often conveyed bymeans of superlatives, which include adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘lovely’,‘marvellous’, and so on. It is not, therefore, as Wittgenstein says in his lectures,that ‘in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives . . . playhardly any role at all’ (LC, p. 3, §8). ‘Using the aesthetic superlatives’, says Lewis,‘is a familiar and natural way of expressing aesthetic impact’ (WAM, p. 35). And

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4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 67e. Hereafter citedas CV.

5 Lewis acknowledges that Wittgenstein did mention one example of aesthetic reactions akin to thereaction of wonder. It is the response to ‘the tremendous things in Art’ (LC, p. 8, §23).

this impact is constitutive of our true appreciation of art as well as a measure ofart’s true significance for us.

In another paper,6 Lewis relates the aesthetic reaction of wonder to ‘thetremendous things in art’. The ‘tremendous’ is considered there as the ‘properobject’ of the reaction of wonder and marvelling (WTTA, p. 159). What dis-tinguishes the tremendous from the non-tremendous is not so much that one isrule-governed while the other is not. In Lewis’s view, the tremendous can just aswell be rule-governed as the non-tremendous, and it certainly makes sense to talkof a tremendous work as being ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ according to the rules. Butin so doing, one would not be having the tremendous in sight. One would beplaying a different game, that of appreciation, ‘of evaluating works of art inrelation to various standards’ (WTTA, p. 155). In contradistinction to this, the tre-mendous cannot strictly be appreciated. It involves rather ‘the game of expressingreactions to works of art’ (WTTA, p. 155). In the face of a tremendous work, oneis overwhelmed by it, one reacts to it as if awe-struck, and it is this reaction whichconstitutes the specificity of our experience of the tremendous in art. Suchresponse is important and indeed basic to art, for it is the capability of being thusimpressed that renders art possible. In Lewis’s words, ‘it is through the agreementin our reactions to the tremendous that we exhibit our sharing of the concept ofart’ (WTTA, p. 159).

It is undeniable that both the concept of wonder and the idea of thetremendous are of great importance to aesthetics. And it is intriguing whyWittgenstein did not give greater attention to them in his lectures. But there isfirst and foremost the question whether he would have linked the two notionstogether. Is the tremendous the ‘proper object’ of wonder, as Lewis would haveit? Would Wittgenstein have conceived wonder as a form of aesthetic reaction?Does the response to the tremendous not fall under the concept of appreciationafter all, despite Wittgenstein’s saying that ‘one wouldn’t talk of appreciating thetremendous things in art’ (LC, p. 8, §23)? All these are essential questions andworth examining in detail. In what follows, I propose to take these questions oneby one, looking first of all at the concept of aesthetic reaction. I shall then deter-mine its relation to the concept of wonder and the tremendous in Wittgenstein’saesthetics. Finally, I shall explicate Wittgenstein’s view of appreciation and itsconnection to the tremendous.

II

What does Wittgenstein mean by ‘aesthetic reaction’? Could he have includedwonder in it? For Wittgenstein’s specific usage, we have to look for textualevidence. In a general sense, however, one can certainly speak of wonder as a

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6 Peter Lewis, ‘Wittgenstein and “The Tremendous Things in Art”’, in K. S. Johannessen and T.Nordenstam (eds), Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Culture (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky,1996), pp. 148–161 [hereafter WTTA].

human reaction, for it is one of the ways by which human beings respond tothings in the world. Taken in this general sense, the word would also include ourinterjections of approval or disapproval with regard to works of art. There is,however, no evidence that Wittgenstein did understand the word in this way.Throughout the whole of the first lecture in which he discusses the relevance (orrather the irrelevance) of interjections to aesthetics, the word does not appearonce. It is introduced only in the second lecture where he examines the phil-osophical grammar of ‘aesthetic feeling’. Indeed, had he construed interjections asforms of aesthetic reaction, he would not have repeatedly asserted that aestheticadjectives, as words of approval or disapproval, play hardly any role in aesthetics,given the fact that he considers aesthetic reactions as ‘Perhaps the most importantthing in connection with aesthetics’ (LC, p. 13, §10). In effect, Wittgensteinseems to think only of aesthetic feeling as aesthetic reaction, but ‘feeling’ here isused in a peculiar sense. In ordinary usage, ‘feeling’ refers to a mental or sub-jective state, to something which occurs inwardly, though it need not be regardedas unduly ‘private’. The feeling of delight, for example, is ‘feeling’ in this sense.But so construed, this feeling is largely independent of its object, external to it,and pertains only to the subject. Moreover, it is not specific to its object such thatwe would have different kinds of delight—the delight of appreciating works ofart, of eating vanilla ice-cream, and so on (cf. LC, p. 12, §4) As mere feelings ofdelight, these are all much the same, without significant qualitative differences.And this is why it makes no sense to talk of an ‘aesthetic’ feeling as if it were aspecial kind of feeling.

What Wittgenstein calls ‘aesthetic feeling’ must, therefore, be somethingentirely different. It is not something that one feels within oneself, but somethinglike a reaction that is directed at an object. For Wittgenstein, there is not first afeeling, and then one’s reaction based on it. Rather, the feeling is the reactionitself. Wittgenstein compares the feeling of discomfort as aesthetic reaction to thedrawing of one’s hand away from a hot plate (cf. LC, p. 14, §15) The point of thecomparison does not reside so much in showing up the reflex character of boththese reactions. It lies rather, firstly, in the fact that feeling and reaction areinseparable from one another in reality; and secondly, that the feeling in bothcases is directed at an object, so that the reaction constitutes a form of criticism ofthat object. One could in effect consider the drawing of the hand away from thehot stove as a ‘criticism’ of the hot stove, much as our running away from thehouse someone builds for us, and refusing to live in it, might count as a ‘criticism’of the house (cf. LC, p. 13, §7). Our likes and dislikes, our delight and disgust,have relevance to aesthetics only when they constitute such implicit criticisms inthemselves, and not simply as feelings. And these criticisms are significant to theextent that they reflect a form of life.

Given this, there are good reasons to think that the experience of wondercannot be construed as an aesthetic reaction in Wittgenstein’s sense. In turn, this

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calls into question the importance Lewis attaches to the use of superlatives inconnection with wonder. What is problematic in Lewis’s account is that he seemsto deflect the experience of wonder towards its emotive (and consequently, itsexpressive) aspect. This is why he considers that interjections, such as ‘Wonder-ful!’ or ‘Marvellous!’, play a crucial role in aesthetics, for these words areexpressive of an emotional state that is constitutive of a genuine response in theappreciation of art. Referring to connoisseurs of music who are not impressed byPavarotti’s singing of ‘Nessun Dorma’, Lewis says:

But I trust that such a musical person would be prepared to say ‘Wonderful!’ or‘Marvellous!’ on hearing other singers, or other operas, or other pieces of music. . . .If this musical person is never prepared to reach for the aesthetic superlatives, then Ihave doubts that he is capable of aesthetic appreciation. He would be akin to thepeople who were curious about the blossom opening out but who found nothing tomarvel at. (WAM, p. 35)

For sure, if someone is simply curious without being impressed by the blossom,he is not really responding to it, but is adopting a scientific attitude towards it.But the point is whether the emotional response which makes one interject‘Marvellous!’ or ‘Beautiful!’ is really essential to this experience. I would arguethat the concept of wonder, as developed in the 1947 text,7 still holds a relation-ship to what Wittgenstein earlier, in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, calls ‘the experience ofwondering at the existence of the world’ or ‘of seeing the world as a miracle’;8 andthis relationship should not be underestimated. The 1947 text is more ‘tempered’,in the sense that there is no trace of metaphysical speculation à la Schopenhauer,nor any talk about seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis. But still, wonder isessentially a way of seeing things, and through seeing, adopting a stance towardsthe world, rather than an emotive response. The ‘Look, how it’s opening out!’(CV, p. 64e) with regard to the blossom should be taken as a pointing to or ashowing of something, rather than a mere expressive gesture. The showing is, ineffect, essential to the concept of wonder, for what one wonders at, namely themiracle, is beyond language and can only be shown, but not said. To the question‘What is marvellous about the blossom opening?’, Wittgenstein gives, by way of ananswer, not a description but an exhortation—‘Look, how it’s opening out!’

The German word Wunder means ‘wonder’ and ‘miracle’, and these two ideasare intimately connected in Wittgenstein’s thought. There is something miracu-lous in the blooming of a blossom, just as there is something miraculous in theformation of a crystal, which is in strict accordance with mathematical formulae(cf. CV, pp. 65e and 47e). Both these phenomena are miraculous to the extent

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7 The text reads: ‘The miracles of nature. We might say: art discloses the miracles of nature to us. It isbased on the concept of the miracles of nature. (The blossom, just opening out. What is marvellousabout it?) We say: “Look, how it’s opening out!”’ (CV, p. 64e).

8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 43.

that one does not attempt to explain them; and the miracle consists in their veryinexplicability. Yet another instance9 in Culture and Value where the word Wunderis used with the meaning ‘miracle’ is the entry dated 8.9.1946. The remark reads:

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels & devils are portrayed.A so-called ‘miracle’ [Wunder] must be connected with this. It must be as it were asacred gesture. (CV, p. 57e)

The miracle this time is connected with art. What is miraculous is the way angelsand devils are portrayed. More precisely, the miraculous lies in the uncanninessof the representation of the devil, which is purely corporeal, in contradistinctionto that of the angel, which is spiritual. That the uncanniness of the devil comesthrough the representation of the purely corporeal is almost like a miracle. It isnot explicable in human terms, but must be regarded as a gesture of God.

If the later Wittgenstein says that art ‘is based on the concept of the wonders/miracles of nature’, it is not to make the experience of wonder a foundationalexperience underlying all other aesthetic experiences. Wittgenstein’s thinkingseems opposed to such architecturing of thought into a system. If art is somethingof a miracle, it is because art is essentially inexplicable and every experience of artmust sooner or later encounter the inexplicability of the that-it-is of the world. Ifa man started to see the miracle as a problem and tried to explain it, then ‘hisadmiration will have suffered a rupture’ (CV, p. 65e). He will no longer be seeingthe thatness of things. In a sense, the idea of inexplicability replaces the non-sensicality of the paradox of absolute experience which Wittgenstein considers asthe essence of art in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’. Art is not so much a non-sense as asense which turns out to be an enigma.

III

What place does the tremendous have in Wittgenstein’s aesthetics? Whatimportance could we assign to this idea? The word is scarcely mentioned in his‘Lectures on Aesthetics’, or indeed in the entire corpus of his work. And what hesays about the tremendous in those lectures looks like a singular and spontaneousremark which informs us more about his view of appreciation than about anyviews he may have had about the tremendous itself. The well-known passage inwhich the word appears is §23 of the first of his ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’. Thepassage reads:

We talked of correctness. A good cutter won’t use any words like ‘Too long’, ‘All right’.When we talk of a Symphony of Beethoven we don’t talk of correctness. Entirelydifferent things enter. One wouldn’t talk of appreciating the tremendous things in Art.In certain styles in Architecture a door is correct, and the thing is you appreciate it.

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9 The only other one, if we discount its use in such expressions as ‘kein Wunder’.

But in the case of a Gothic Cathedral what we do is not at all to find it correct—itplays an entirely different role with us. The entire game is different. It is as differentas to judge a human being and on the one hand to say ‘He behaves well’ and on theother hand ‘He made a great impression on me’. (LC, pp. 7–8)

In this passage, Wittgenstein seems to contrast the tremendous to the correct.There are certain things that one appreciates and finds correct, like tailoredclothes or buildings of certain architectural styles. But there are other things inconnection with which one would not talk of appreciating their correctness, likea symphony of Beethoven or a Gothic cathedral—and this, seemingly, becausethey are tremendous. The difference between the correct and the tremendous islike saying of someone that ‘He behaves well’ and that ‘He made a great im-pression on me’. In the former case, one is on a par with the person appreciated,and one can exercise one’s faculty of judgement; in the latter case, one is over-awed by him; and it requires a different kind of response from that of evaluatingthe correctness of his behaviour.

This is how Benjamin Tilghman understands the passage. In his book Wittgen-stein, Ethics and Aesthetics, Tilghman contrasts the tremendous with the correct andthe response to the tremendous with appreciation.10 There are two points inparticular that are worth noting in Tilghman’s interpretation. First, he seems toassume that an object can be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ only when it is rule-governed.One can judge the correctness of an object only according to rules. Now, in art,rules are laid down to establish the conventions of a style. The Neo-Gothic style,for example, is such a convention. It has its rules derived from Gothic art; and itis for this reason that one can judge a nineteenth-century revival building to becorrect or incorrect. But the original Gothic cathedral itself is tremendous, andthere are no such rules established prior to its making. It creates its own rulesrather than being bound by them. The tremendous, therefore, contrasts with thecorrect in that it is not rule-governed and should not be judged in accordancewith rules.

Secondly, Tilghman compares the distinction between the response to thetremendous and appreciation roughly to that between art and the aesthetic. Thecomparison aims to bring out the difference between the two types of response.For Tilghman, ‘aesthetic’ refers to the formal properties of an object, like ‘lines,shapes, colours, and the designs and arrangements that can be created out ofthem’ (WEA, p. 87). It is these formal properties that constitute the object ofappreciation. In contrast to this, the tremendous requires something more thanjust attention paid to the formal qualities. It demands, namely, our response tothe vision and meanings embodied in the object, to the depth of those meaningsand the significance of its vision.

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10 B. R. Tilghman, Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity (London: Macmillan, 1991),pp. 86–90 [hereafter WEA].

Lewis, however, queries both of these points. He points out, firstly, that atremendous work of art can also be rule-governed. He writes:

It is commonplace to say of a great work that it is great in spite of flouting or failingto conform to the established rules. This is how Samuel Johnson defendedShakespeare’s plays when they were criticized for breaking the classical rulesgoverning the unities of time and place in drama. But if we do talk of a tremendouswork as being incorrect in some respects, then surely it must make sense sometimesto say that in some respects it is correct. (WTTA, p. 151)

Nor is a tremendous work, according to Lewis, necessary or sufficient to setstandards of correctness. It is not necessary, because ‘standards of correctness arederivable from any work which artists and society take as model or exemplar’(WTTA, p. 151). It is not sufficient, ‘since a tremendous work need not be takenas establishing a new school or genre to which subsequent artists need toconform’ (WTTA, p. 151). Lewis gives the example of Beethoven’s Ninth as notsetting the standard for subsequent symphonic writings. If the tremendous isopposed to the correct, therefore, it is not in virtue of being, or not being,rule-governed.

Secondly, the way Tilghman distinguishes between art and the aesthetic seemsto suggest that it is closely related to a distinction between content and form. For,in Tilghman’s view, the ‘aesthetic’ concerns the formal properties of an object,whereas ‘art’ concerns the meaning and significance of a work. If this is the case,then the distinction cannot be used to account for the contrast between theresponse to the tremendous and appreciation. For, as Lewis points out, one cancertainly talk of appreciating the content of a work. This helps determine whetherthe work is a good one, and separates it from the merely correct. In other words,the distinction between art and the aesthetic is more like a distinction betweengoodness and (mere) correctness. Lewis says:

Tilghman’s view supports only a contrast between the correct and the good rather thanwhat I’m calling the contrast between the good and the great or tremendous. Withrespect to a good, though non-tremendous, painting or play or poem, we coulddistinguish between finding it correct in virtue of its aesthetic properties and findingit to be a good painting or play or poem; and in finding it to be good we take intoaccount its content—its ideas, themes, arguments, meaning, and so forth—in additionto its various formal features. We appreciate it—it is good, perhaps very good, but it isnot great or tremendous. (WTTA, p. 153)

What Lewis calls the tremendous is therefore not a question of more or less deepappreciation, but that of a quite different kind of response. The tremendous issomething that wrings from us a reaction, something which forces our admir-ation in spite of ourselves, something which calls forth within us a total response.And this is why using superlatives is the most direct and natural way to expressour reaction to its impact. Lewis compares, in effect, the tremendous to the

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Kantian sublime in that it is something that seems to shatter us and set our mindin motion (WTTA, p. 156). It differs from appreciation in much the same way asthe feeling of the sublime, involving fearfulness and thus pain, differs from thepleasurable calm contemplation of the beautiful.

Both Tilghman and Lewis think it appropriate to contrast the response to thetremendous with appreciation. I would argue that, in setting up this contrast,there is a danger of missing the point that Wittgenstein is making in thoselectures about appreciation. No doubt, the contrast seems justified if oneconstrues LC §23 in isolation. Yet, this text appears in the course of a discussionon appreciation, and Wittgenstein is there drawing attention to the vast variety ofcases that appreciation encompasses. The tremendousness of a Beethovensymphony or a Gothic cathedral enters the picture because they help to widen therange of possibilities of aesthetic appreciation. Wittgenstein’s point is to argueagainst the eighteenth-century philosophical concept of appreciation, whichconcerns itself exclusively with the beauty or formal qualities of an object. Andthere are important reasons for this. First of all, the concept of appreciation, forWittgenstein, is not something determinable purely philosophically. He says:

It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. Todescribe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment. (LC,p. 7, §20)

Wittgenstein is here obviously stressing the interrelatedness of appreciation andother cultural practices. Appreciation is a concept culturally determined and his-torically specific. It is the whole culture of a period that renders possible a certainform of appreciation and gives it meaning. Wittgenstein observes, for example,with regard to Buffon, that he made very fine distinctions between words like‘correctly’, ‘charmingly’, ‘finely’, and so on, distinctions which, he says, can onlybe understood vaguely nowadays ‘but which [Buffon] didn’t mean vaguely’ (LC,p. 8, §24). The fact is that these nuances are possible and meaningful only withinthe culture in which Buffon lived. It is a period where there is what is called a‘cultured taste’ (LC, p. 8, §25). Such a form of appreciation differs from what onemight find as appreciation in the Middle Ages, and it differs again from whatexisted in Wittgenstein’s time, which he often spoke of as a deterioration of taste(see LC, p. 7, §21). Throughout his lectures, Wittgenstein gives numerousexamples of the embeddedness of appreciation in culture, and all this to show thatappreciation is essentially to be thought of as a form of life. This is why he says: ‘Inorder to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living’ (LC,p. 11, §35), And elsewhere, more succinctly: ‘Appreciating music is a manifes-tation of human life’ (CV, p. 80e). We might say that, for Wittgenstein, aestheticappreciation meshes with life. And this idea means not only that appreciation isessentially embedded in the culture of a period, in the complicated structure ofcommunal activities or in a social formation, but that art enters into one’s life

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through appreciation and forms part of it. In effect, one cannot truly appreciate awork of art without assuming the form of life embodied in the culture of that work.As Wittgenstein puts it:

I think that, in order to enjoy a poet, you have to like the culture to which he belongsas well. If you are indifferent to this or repelled by it, your admiration cools off. (CV,p. 96e)

Now, the way Tilghman conceives of appreciation seems precisely to make anabstraction from ‘the whole environment’ that, Wittgenstein insists, should enterinto our understanding of appreciation. Tilghman’s identification of the aestheticwith the formal properties of lines, shapes and colours, and so on, is essentiallyderived from eighteenth-century philosophical theories, which set the aestheticapart from both the cognitive and the moral. Certainly, Tilghman cautions againstthe danger in such theories of entering ‘a wedge between humanity and art’(WEA, p. 177), and he concedes that art and the aesthetic ‘intertwine with oneanother in ways that are impossible sometimes to disentangle’ (WEA, p. 87). Heendeavours to show this with respect to music and abstract painting, that they toocan have meaning and human significance (see WEA, pp. 168–172). Nevertheless,I think Tilghman could not really do away with the distinction between art andthe aesthetic (and any correlative distinction between content and form), becausehe is committed to a ‘humanistic’ conception of art. For him, what counts asmeaning and significance in an artwork is, in the final analysis, the ‘intentions,emotions, character or the like’ (WEA, p. 166) of a human being, in short,psychological and moral depth. This is apparent from his discussion of pictorial space.Referring to the Renaissance invention of perspective, Tilghman says:

The interest in space, I suggest, is really an interest in moral space, that is a pictorialspace designed to represent human beings in the fullness of their psychological natureand in their dramatic interactions with one another. (WEA, p. 152)

In Tilghman’s view, therefore, treating ‘space for space’s sake’ (WEA, p. 167), ashe thinks Frank Stella and other modernist painters do, will not have any humansignificance in it. Indeed, one can see that there is a great concern for the humanin Wittgenstein’s numerous remarks on art, yet those remarks seem more oftento dig out less the psychological depth of an artist than the personality hidden inevery great work of art that is expressive of a form of life. Thus, Wittgenstein writes ofMendelssohn:

Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed.Not, e.g., in Mendelssohn. All great art has primitive human drives as its ground

bass. They are not the melody (as they are, perhaps, in Wagner), but they are what givesthe melody depth & power.

In this sense one may call Mendelssohn a ‘reproductive’ artist. (CV, p. 43e)

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The ‘human’ in Wittgenstein’s thought seems to have a wider extension than inTilghman’s.

There is one more reason why Wittgenstein might not accept Tilghman’s ideaof the aesthetic, and consequently, his distinction between the aesthetic and art. Itis because, for Wittgenstein, one cannot talk of appreciating the beauty of anobject as if it were all there is to it. Commenting on Grillparzer’s remark on Mozart,Wittgenstein gives a penetrating rejoinder:

When Grillparzer says Mozart countenanced only the ‘beautiful” in music, that means,I think, that he did not countenance the distorted, frightful, that there is nothing inhis music corresponding to this. . . . Grillparzer’s attitude involves a certain in-gratitude. . . . The concept of ‘the beautiful’ has done a lot of mischief here too. (CV,p. 63e)

Other than the fact that the word ‘beautiful’ is not used unequivocally,11 and otherthan the fact that an object requires the complementation of the ‘setting’ in which itoriginally existed to enhance its beauty,12 there is also a deep understanding of themeaning of the beauty of an object. The beauty of Mozart’s music is not merely thepleasing or the enjoyable taken as an end in itself. Rather, it is understood as a form oflife (or a language) in which the distorted or the frightful does not make itsappearance. One can say with Wittgenstein that beauty is not to be circumscribed bythe aesthetic, and the aesthetic cannot constitute itself as a realm.

If the art/aesthetic distinction cannot be sustained, there is no way of seekingthe tremendous solely on the side of ‘art’, that is, in the ‘human’ narrowlyconceived. Is it more plausible to think of the tremendous as something thatgreatly impresses us and provokes a reaction in us, such that the response to itstands opposed to appreciation, as Lewis suggests? Wittgenstein does not seem tohave made this contrast in his lectures. In fact, he includes among the cases ofappreciation one in which a person responds to a work of art because it ‘makes aprofound impression on him’ (LC, p. 9, §30). It is thus inapt to restrict Wittgen-stein’s idea of appreciation to the judging of correctness. As we have seen earlier,Lewis’ distinction between appreciation and the response to the tremendous aimsat highlighting the part played by emotions in the response to art. For him, theemotional response constitutes a more fundamental element than the critical orevaluative attitude in art appreciation. Indeed, Lewis is right to point out that artcritics and connoisseurs (and not least, Wittgenstein himself) often do useaesthetic superlatives to express their ‘reactions’ to art. Yet, for Wittgenstein,notwithstanding his practice in real life, there is abundant evidence in ‘Lectureson Aesthetics’ that he dismisses pure (as it were, unreflective) emotive responses

THOMAS TAM 321

11 Cf. CV, pp. 27e–28e. Wittgenstein says: ‘I shall not even want to compare the beauty of expressionin a pair of eyes with the beauty in the shape of a nose.’

12 Cf. CV, pp. 90e–91e. The ‘setting’ is like a lighting on an object.

as having much centrality in aesthetics or art appreciation. The reason is that,despite the diversity of its form, aesthetic appreciation requires first and foremostthe learning of rules. Learning the rules constitutes a necessary, though notsufficient, condition for art appreciation, without which one would not beknowing what one is talking about. This is why Wittgenstein gives this analogy:

Suppose that a Russian who doesn’t know English is overwhelmed by a sonnet admittedto be good. We would say that he does not know what is in it at all. Similarly, of aperson who doesn’t know metres but who is overwhelmed, we would say that he doesn’tknow what’s in it. In music this is more pronounced. . . . We use the phrase ‘A manis musical’ not so as to call a man musical if he says ‘Ah!’ when a piece of music isplayed, any more than we call a dog musical if it wags its tail when music is played.(LC, p. 6, §17, my italics)

Learning the rules provides a basic understanding of the arts, and it is thisunderstanding that Wittgenstein considers as more fundamental than any kind ofspontaneous emotional response. Naturally, it does not mean that emotionalaffect, as we find in Lewis’s argument, has no part to play in aesthetics, but that itshould not be constituted as a totally different realm of response that stands inopposition to, far less is elevated above, appreciation. Nor should it serve tocharacterize the specific kind of response proper to the tremendous things in art.

Coming back to the idea of the tremendous, I would like to suggest, by way ofspeculation, that the tremendous too has to be seen against some kind of rules. Itcould very well be that a tremendous thing is tremendous just because it breaksthe rules, but understanding the rules, as in all cases of appreciation, is aprerequisite for any real response to the tremendous. I would like to conclude bygiving an example of a case of appreciation of the tremendous in art. It is in thenotes that accompany Rosalyn Tureck’s recent re-recording of Bach’s GoldbergVariations. In talking about Variation 15, Tureck writes :

The principle of inversion that Bach maintains throughout the entire composition isnowhere placed in a more sublime setting than in the last measure of this Variation.With the bars descending, the soprano ascends and becomes inactive at the dominantnote. The ending on the single note, ascending to the dominant, seems to continuebeyond sound, conveying an image of moving into a region of intangibility wherethere is no sense of end. This is one of the most magical moments in this greatcomposition.13

Thomas Tam, Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

322 ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

13 Deutsche Grammophon, 1999I would like to thank Professor Peter Lamarque and Professor Stein Haugom Olsen for their

valuable comments on the first draft of this paper.

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