Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Wittgenstein on explanation and self-clarification
- 1 Information, contemplation and social life
- 2 Aesthetic explanation and aesthetic perplexity
- 3 Wittgenstein and the Fire-festivals
- 4 When do empirical methods by-pass ‘the problems which trouble us’?
- 5 Explanation, self-clarification and solace
- 6 Wittgenstein on making homeopathic magic clear
- 7 Wittgenstein and obscurantism
- 8 Wittgenstein on Freud's ‘abominable mess’
- 9 Congenital transcendentalism and ‘the loneliness which is the truth about things’
- AFTERWORD
- Index
2 - Aesthetic explanation and aesthetic perplexity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2010
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Wittgenstein on explanation and self-clarification
- 1 Information, contemplation and social life
- 2 Aesthetic explanation and aesthetic perplexity
- 3 Wittgenstein and the Fire-festivals
- 4 When do empirical methods by-pass ‘the problems which trouble us’?
- 5 Explanation, self-clarification and solace
- 6 Wittgenstein on making homeopathic magic clear
- 7 Wittgenstein and obscurantism
- 8 Wittgenstein on Freud's ‘abominable mess’
- 9 Congenital transcendentalism and ‘the loneliness which is the truth about things’
- AFTERWORD
- Index
Summary
Most of us have had addressed to us at one time or another remarks which purported to account for the impression made on us by a work, or a portion of a work of art. We have also a rough idea of what we mean by an hypothesis. How are these two things – advancing hypotheses and analysing or explaining impressions – related? Before expounding what I take to be Wittgenstein's answer to this question I want to provide some specimen aesthetic problems and solutions in the light of which the adequacy of his answer might be assessed.
Here are some examples of what it seems natural to call manifestations of aesthetic perplexity;
From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth: it was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced on my feelings an effect for which I never could account: the effect was – that it reflected back upon the murder of a peculiar awfulness and depth of solemnity … yet I never could see why it should produce such an effect … and I … set myself to study the problem.
(why was it that) in responding to Coleridge's line (‘It was an Abyssinian maid,/ And on her dulcimer she play'd,/ Singing of Mount Abora.’) I could not think of Abora as a paradisal mount …?
When I opened (Dali's Autobiography) for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations I was haunted by a resemblance I could not immediately pin down.
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- Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer , pp. 47 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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