Treatises on aesthetics

The seventeenth century was a period of literary experimentalism and innovation as well as one of great scientific breakthroughs and of new political systems (the main one being absolute monarchy); and, as one can imagine, there was a flourishing literature on these subjects. As far as poetry is concerned, we find that the discussion on Aristotle's Poetics, so intense in the sixteenth century, dies out; the only major exception may be the work of Paolo Beni (1552–1625), which is closely allied to the Aristotelianism of the late sixteenth century. The reason may be that ‘mimesis’, as a key aesthetic concept, was completely displaced by that of ‘meraviglia’ (wonder) caused by conceits and acutezze. Indeed the most innovative works in the aesthetics of the seventeenth century are those dedicated to clarifying the subtleties of the concetto and the acutezza.

The pioneer in the area is Matteo Peregrini (1595–1651) with two works, Delle acutezze che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti volgarmente si appellano (‘Concerning “Acuities”, or Witticisms, Lively Sayings and Conceits As They are Commonly Called’, 1639) and I fonti dell'ingegno ridotti ad arte (‘The Sources of Wit Explained’, 1650). For Peregrini, the concetto is not the result of logic (reason) but rather of ingenuity (ingegno), an aesthetic faculty which draws things together in a new and surprising way. The concetto is, in its essence, a daring metaphor which highlights unsuspected similarities among things in a way that shows the ‘acumen’ of the poet and which pleases the reader, who marvels at the mysteries of reality.

Non-fictional works

While the language, thematics and culture of vernacular poetry developed rapidly through competing attempts to come to terms with the powerfully suggestive, relatively unified courtly lyric of Provence, vernacular prose literature evolved much less uniformly and easily. Culturally, there was no single body of material demanding attention and admiration: instead there were many different potential models, each with its own traditions and readership. Linguistically, the situation was no more clear-cut. If French prose literature was a precocious phenomenon, it was nevertheless dwarfed by its Latin parent, even in France; Latinity in Italy was in an even more predominant position. Many of the dialects indeed had no tradition of writing at all. Learning to use Latin as a written medium was, however, a major investment in time and money, not undertaken lightly. For lawyers and clerics, the pay-off could be justified by professional opportunities and efficiency. Changing patterns of economic and political activity in the expanding communes meant that other groups, hitherto illiterate, were beginning to require records of transactions. For the unlettered who merely needed occasional written corroboration, it was better to use a notary, who could provide an instant technical translation. Increasingly, though, merchants, bankers and politicians sought regular, confidential records. There was an incentive for them to acquire the skills themselves: fragments of a Florentine bank ledger dating from 1211 clearly show a developing utilitarian jargon in the vernacular entries. The progress of mercantile literacy from book-keeping to book-writing would reach its culmination in the Trecento, when Boccaccio, a banker himself, would make his mark in both prose and epic poetry.

With the create of a unified national state, Italy entered a new cultural dimension, as the pace of industry and modernisation quickened and the nation's cultural institutions embarked on a course of extensive renewal. The unification could not be complete without the development of a national culture, which necessitated not only the general distribution of literacy (in 1861, 75% of the populace could not read or write Italian), but also the creation of a cultural tradition in which the contemporary liberal and anti-authoritarian ideologies that had fuelled the Risorgimento and supported industrial expansion could prosper. To these ends, state schools at all levels were reorganised, learned academies replenished, and new national libraries, museums and archives created. Liberal legislation guaranteed secondary schools and universities freedom of teaching and research; their structures were made uniform and their teaching staff expanded to incorporate prominent writers, scientists and intellectuals. But in spite of this new impetus to cultural activity, the project of a homogeneous national culture met with unsurmountable obstacles. The contradictions and disparities of an essentially impoverished and backward nation full of regionalisms, where traditional social, cultural and intellectual forms persisted, coupled with the ideological fragmentation among and within the various groups that fought the battles of the Risorgimento, made Italian cultural unification a difficult goal to realize.

Dramma per musica and opera buffa

For all its vitality and popularity, seventeenth-century opera had found few articulate apologists and was sustained by little in the way of intellectual or philosophical underpinning. The advent of an era of weighty theorists and historians of literature – Gravina, Muratori, Crescimbeni, Quadrio – all inspired by ideas of renovation and reform, boded ill for those who cherished opera in its Seicento guise. These men, not generally much interested in opera for its own sake, perceived its development largely, if not entirely, through the libretti, and for those of the second half of the seventeenth century they had conceived a profound contempt. Their views are vividly represented in the writings of a theorist, Stefano Arteaga, who did care for opera, and who discerned in that of the seventeenth century nothing but a ‘gross chaos, a concoction of sacred and profane, of historical and fabulous, of mythology ancient and modern, of true and allegorical, of natural and fantastic, all gathered together to the perpetual shame of art’. In an age when the Arcadians were aiming, as Muratori suggested, to reform the arts and sciences ‘for the benefit of the Catholic religion, for the glory of Italy, and for public and private profit’, opera could not escape fresh and fundamental scrutiny. Throughout the eighteenth century its development was to be conditioned by the educative ambitions of the poets and by their determination to reinstate Aristotelian aesthetics.

The dominant language of written literature in Germany in the early Middle Ages is Latin. Only a very small amount of writing in German has survived from the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors (from the middle of the eighth century to the early tenth), of the Ottonian emperors (the tenth century) and even of the Salians (taking us through the eleventh century). Far from making the task of presenting German literature in its earliest stages easier, however, this causes difficulties which do not arise once a vernacular literary tradition has established itself. Not only are the definitions of ‘German’ and of ‘literature’ problematic, but the more important question arises of whether German literature at this stage may be defined exclusively as literature in German. Part of the interest in the period lies in the emergence, from the eighth century onwards, of a self-conscious written tradition in German within a Christian-Latin literary and intellectual context, but the fact remains that most of the written literature in Germany in the Carolingian period is Latin, whereas material in German is for the most part not literary at all. With what little there is in German, too, the unconsidered acceptance of the idea of ‘text’ is impossible. Most of the survivals in German before 1100 exist in unique manuscripts and were affected from the start by the inferior position of the language. One of the most interesting poems of the period, the Muspilli, dealing with the destruction of the world, is written in the margins and other spaces of a Latin manuscript, causing problems of sense, structure, ordering and sometimes of decipherment.

In the annals of the Italian theatre the Seicento has been traditionally considered alow point between the two great seasons of the High Renaissance and the Settecento. Since the 1960s, however, the generation of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) and Battista Guarini (1538–1612), and the dramatists immediately following them have received more serious and fruitful consideration by scholars. The works of these playwrights, who were the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and Molière, were both read and acted, and Italian acting companies carried them to all the major capitals of Europe, so that their influence was immediately and widely felt.

The theatre system of the Seicento is better understood from the perspective of spectacle, which represented an essential aspect of the cultural and social life of the courts, the academies and the cities. Even the liturgical and devotional life of the post-Tridentine Church took on a visually spectacular character. The social and political history of centres such as Rome, Venice, Naples, Ferrara, Parma and Turin was reflected and transfigured into theatrical spectacle and the fashionable dramatic forms of the moment, from the court festa to the religious drama, from the improvised comedy to opera.

Court festivals retained the social and political significance traditionally associated with them in the Cinquecento. What changed were the frequency and the expectations with which they continued to be welcomed by the élite public and the artists involved in their production. The court festa held at Mantua in 1608 to celebrate the marriage of Francesco Gonzaga and Margherita of Savoy, and the Parma festivities of 1628, duplicated in magnificence the Medici's 1589 nuptials, but these and similar events had lost some of the ideological relevance and cultural prestige which the late Cinquecento had attached to them.

Logical necessity is one of the perennial problems of philosophy. Statements like “g = 9.81 m/sec2” or “Radioactivity causes cancer”may be physically necessary, but they are contingent: they could be false, and be refuted by new experience. By contrast, it seems that statements like“¬(p & ¬p),” 2 + 2 = 4,” and “All material objects are located in space” are logically necessary. They do not just happen to be true, since their being false is not merely extremely improbable, but inconceivable. By the same token, disciplines like logic, mathematics, and metaphysics, which seek to discover such truths, seem to be a priori, completely independent of experience.

At the turn of the century there were three accounts of this special type of truth. According to psychologistic logicians like Boole, the laws of logic describe how human beings (by and large) think, their basic mental operations, and are determined by the nature of the human mind. Against this Platonists like Frege protested that logical truths are strictly necessary and objective, and that this objectivity can only be secured by assuming that their subject matter - thoughts and their structures - are not private ideas in the minds of individuals, but abstract entities inhabiting a “third realm” beyond space and time. Finally, according to Russell, logical propositions are completely general truths about the most pervasive traits of reality, a view which is in some ways reminiscent of Mill's claim that mathematical propositions are well-corroborated empirical generalizations.

The postcontact experience of the Native peoples of the boreal forest zone has been fundamentally different from that of aboriginal groups living in all other areas of North America. The fur trade has remained important for Subarctic Natives ever since they first encountered Europeans. In most places Europeans have not pushed them off the land because extensive agriculture is not possible. Native languages continue to flourish. Apart from the fur traders, it is the missionaries and government agents who have had the greatest effect on the Native population. Yet, even these officials had little impact on the Natives before the early part of the twentieth century. This means the continuity with the recent past is very powerful in the Northern Interior. Today Native societies strongly reflect their aboriginal roots, two to four centuries of fur-trading traditions, the work of missionaries, and most recently, the impact of government programs.

The Northern Interior has what outsiders perceive to be a hostile climate, where extremes, not averages, govern life. Summers are fleeting; winters are severe. The boreal forest extends from near the Labrador coast west-northwest almost 5,500 kilometers into central Alaska. However, it is by no means an unbroken forest. The eastern two-thirds of the region is the land of the rocky Canadian Shield, where continental glaciers stripped vast portions of the uplands bare of soil so they do not support extensive tree growth. In this Shield country, forests primarily grow in the sheltered lowlands beside the countless lakes, rivers, and streams. Here is where Indians found most of theit large game, chiefly woodland caribou and moose, small prey and fur bearers, and waterfowl. Here fish also abounded, the key staple species being white fish, sturgeon, and lake trout. Toward the northern limits of the forested Shield, barren ground caribou in small herds seek shelter during the winter from the frigid, wind-swept barren lands.

To the northwest, the landscape of the sprawling Mackenzie River drainage basin has a very different appearance from that of the Shield. Mostly this is a poorly drained lowland, covered with glacial and river deposits mantled by a heavy forest. The same animal species found in the Shield region are present here also, but moose were once particularly abundant in the southern sections toward the Athabasca and Peace Rivers. The whole basin teams with beaver and muskrat. Toward the delta Arctic fox are plentiful.

INTRODUCTION

In this essay I shall try to describe the central features of Wittgenstein's critique of traditional philosophy as they appear in their most mature form in the Philosophical Investigations and in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The leading idea can be stated quite simply: Philosophers are led into confusion because they are antecedently disposed to view various uses of language in ways inappropriate to them. This is not usually (or simply) a matter of reasoning from false premises about language but is, instead, a tendency to view language from a skewed or disoriented perspective. The proper task of philosophy-indeed, its whole task-is to induce us to abandon such improper perspectives.

Wittgenstein uses various similes and metaphors to indicate how we can be captured by an inappropriate orientation: “It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off” (PI, 103). Notice that this passage does not suggest that we exchange our glasses for a better pair. We should simply take them off, for our “uncorrected” way of viewing the world was adequate to begin with.

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

How is it possible for signs to point? How is it possible for signs to point to what is not there? These questions are extremely general ones about intentionality, the property of “aboutness” or “ofness” whereby one part of the world (a sign such as the words “the stoplight” or “The stoplight is red”) represents some other part of the world (e.g., an object such as a particular traffic signal or a state of affairs such as the traffic signal's being red).

How is it possible for signs to point? The obvious fact that signs point to something other than themselves is puzzling because it is difficult to see how to avoid a threatened regress of interpretations: an ordinary sign, for example, the linguistic sign “plus” or “Playful,” can be interpreted in various possible ways. Linguistic signs, after all, are arbitrary. The linguistic sign “Playful,” as uttered by me on a particular occasion, may be interpreted by my hearer as the name of a particular gray cat or as an attribution of the quality of playfulness to the creature in front of me or even (nonstandardly) as a sign for the color gray. Once we notice this, we feel the need to find something that will single out just one of the possible alternative interpretations in order for signs to succeed in pointing to something beyond themselves.

The recent history of Native Americans is both complex and controversial. Complex because of the rapid cultural change that has occurred in the twentieth century, particularly in the last half of the century; controversial because both Indians and non-Indians perceive that change differently. The perception of the status of Native Americans as the twentieth century comes to a close is like the classic perception of a glass half full of water. Some see it half full; some see it half empty. Some Native Americans, and some non-Native Americans, focus on the negative side (the empty half of the glass) and see what is missing rather than what has been gained. Indeed, as Native Americans achieve more, there are many who emphasize, with increasing vehemence, what they have not achieved. An example is the question of tribal self-government. In 1991 Native American leaders, in a meeting with President Bush, urged that the right of tribal governments in the United States to have jurisdiction over non-Indians and over Indians not members of the tribe claiming jurisdiction be “restored,” ignoring the fact that the Supreme Court decisions that mandated those restrictions did not claim to take such powers away, but ruled that they did not in fact exist. Indian leaders sought to overturn these Supreme Court decisions by urging the introduction of bills in Congress to “restore” those powers. The fact that they assumed that such bills would pass an overwhelmingly non-Indian Congress is a measure of the growing confidence that Native Americans possessed in the second half of the twentieth century. Their confidence was partially justified. While unwilling to recognize tribal power to prosecute non-Indians, Congress did recognize tribal authority to criminally prosecute non-member Indians. Even more indicative of the changing character of relations between Indians and non-Indians in the late twentieth century is the fact that, responding to the negative reaction of Indian peoples, the U.S. government moved deci sively away from a “termination policy” in the 1950s, a policy that threatened the very existence of tribal governments, to what Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton have all termed a “government-to-government” relationship among tribal, state, and federal governments.

Coronado’s despairing report in the 1540s that no gold and no fabulous cities of wealth existed to the north of New Spain led to the first realistic image the Spanish had of the Greater Southwest. Coronado and subsequent Spanish travelers to what would later become New Mexico described a land of village-dwelling agricultural Indians. These villages were surrounded by nomadic hunting and raiding Indians whose domain covered a vast area from present-day Texas to Arizona. By all Spanish accounts, it was a harsh, arid land which provided only limited means of subsistence for those living there.

Such reports discouraged the Spanish authorities from formally occupying any lands north of the present-day United States–Mexico border until 1598, when Juan de Ofiate received a royal patent to settle New Mexico. Nevertheless, scores of Spanish prospectors periodically penetrated the region, hoping to find the Eldorado that Cortez had chanced upon in central Mexico and Pizarro had discovered in Peru. This dream was kept alive by the very real discovery of rich silver deposits in Zacatecas far to the north of Mexico City in 1546.

Accompanying and often preceding this mining frontier were Catholic missionaries who engaged in the ambitious task of converting and “civilizing” Native Americans. Missionaries not only sought to change native beliefs, but also gathered Indians into villages around the missions where they were urged to live, to some degree, as Spaniards. Other settlers saw New Spain’s northern frontier as the site of future farms and ranches on which local Indians would serve as laborers. Likewise, the dream of mineral wealth which first brought Spanish to the north was based on the assumption that Indians would work, as they had farther south, to extract that wealth. Even though most Spanish saw Indians as inferior, often treating them as actual or near slaves, these Europeans generally sought to include Indians, if possible, in the wider scheme of things.

Early Spanish-Indian relations in America were in some ways fundamentally different from later Anglo-Indian relations. In most instances Spanish Indian policy was not genocidal, nor did it require complete cultural assimilation. As a result, many Indian groups of the Greater Southwest survived centuries of European encroachment before the United States gained control over the Southwest in the 1850s. To the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers, the Native Southwest presented an astonishing variety of lifestyles, cultures, and languages.

The notion of “family resemblance” concepts seems to have particularly impressed itself on Wittgenstein in connection with historical and cultural categories. In describing, say, religions or ideologies, we find we cannot delineate them by giving clear, necessary, and sufficient conditions. The same applies to schools of thought such as “materialism” or “idealism” or “naturalism.” These labels are family resemblance concepts: we use them to refer to something that is many-faceted and historically evolving. When we try to locate Wittgenstein within existing philosophical traditions we need to remember this exercise, too, will involve our using just such a variety of crisscrossing similarities, some general and some specific (PI, 66). We must not assume a similarity in one respect will be accompanied by similarities in others, or that any inconsistency or defect in the comparison is necessarily indicated by this. The value of these comparisons is to be assessed pragmatically, by their power to illuminate the structural features of his difficult arguments.

How does Wittgenstein's later thought bear on moral philosophy? Wittgenstein himself having said so little about this, philosophers have been free to take his ideas and methods to have the most various implications for ethics. I shall in this essay be concerned with Wittgenstein's ideas about mathematics and some possible ways of seeing their suggestiveness for ethics. I shall bring those ideas into critical contact with a rich and thoughtful treatment of ethics, that of Sabina Lovibond in Realism and Imagination in Ethics. She defends a form of moral realism which she takes to be derived from Wittgenstein (RIE, p. 25); and her work is thus of great interest if we are concerned not only with questions about how Wittgenstein's work bears on ethics but also with questions about the relation between his thought and debates about realism. Wittgenstein is misread, I think, when taken either as a philosophical realist or as an antirealist. Elsewhere I have argued against antirealist readings. One aim of this present essay is to trace to its sources a realist reading of Wittgenstein - its sources in the difficulty of looking at, and taking in, the use of our words.

The clearest unchanging feature of the course over the decades was the opening question: How does the Investigations begin? Against even the brief, varying introductory remarks I would provide - all omitted here - concerning Wittgenstein's life and his place in twentieth- century philosophy, in which I emphasized the remarkable look and sound of Wittgenstein's text and related this to issues of modernism in the major arts, the opening question was meant to invoke the question: How does philosophy begin? And how does the Investigationsaccount for its beginning (hence philosophy's) as it does? And since this is supposed to be a work of philosophy (but how do we tell this?), how does it (and must it? but can it?) account for its look and sound?