Garry L. Hagberg

The philosophy of literature, a topic on which we publish numerous articles, concerns what we at the journal take to be engaging and interestingly intricate issues; these include the ontology of fictional characters and the precise nature of our emotional responses to fiction. Philosophy as literature, although we perhaps publish fewer works of this kind, considers philosophical writing from a literary standpoint; issues here include the varying stylistics of philosophical writing over the ages and the role of figurative or metaphorical language in the writing of philosophy, as well as the settled tropes those practices have collectively engendered. Philosophy and literature—perhaps our most frequently published...

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] exists, according to Nicholas Wolterstorff in this deeply engaging and exemplary study, a Grand Narrative that runs through much of our thinking about art. That narrative, emerging from and solidified since the eighteenth century, is in essence that art is created for, and remains in museums and galleries as occasions for, abstract and transcendent contemplation of a kind disconnected from life and from the rather messy social practices and embodied interactions that lie far beneath that lofty aesthetic realm. It is Wolterstorff’s chosen task here to identify that narrative, root it out, and rid us of it once and for all. He reports that his moment of realization that art needed...

Puzzlement about how feelings can be put into and expressed by objects has generated expression theories of art. These theories rely upon an analogy between art and language; I examine the ways in which this analogy can be spelled out, discussing both theories of art and corresponding theories of language. ;I begin by considering Locke's view of language and Ducasse's parallel theory of art. On Locke's view the meaning of a word is an idea in the mind which gives life to the signs with which we arbitrarily associate them. The meaning of an artwork is similarly construed by Ducasse. However, upon investigation these ideas and signs, in language and in art, are conspicuously absent. ;I next discuss Collingwood's aesthetic and the notion that language and art share a common origin and that they are both externalizations of "imaginary objects." But imagination, it appears, enters into art--and language--in ways incompatible with and unaccountable by the theory. Moreover, the metaphysics supporting the common-origin view cannot withstand scrutiny. ;A parallel is esbtablished next between a theory of the meaning of emotion-words involving inner ostensive definition and a certain picture of "the creative process." The examination of this parallel includes a review and application of some of Wittgenstein's work on privacy. ;Langer's account of artistic meaning is taken up, and the atomistic referential theory of meaning she relies upon proves unequal to the task of explaining meaning, in art and in language. The relation between symbol and feeling, the content of the symbol itself, the connection between form and feeling, and the requisite special perceptual mode all resist an intelligible formulation. ; Lastly I dicuss the problem of the artist's intentions in connection with the role of the medium. I consider the parallel problem of intention in language: No more do words make preexistent thoughts in a speaker's mind tangible than artworks clothe preexistent images in the artist's mind. ;Throughout the work I find insights from Wittgenstein on the philosophy of language illuminating when considered in connection with aesthetic problems

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leporello's QuestionGarry L. HagbergOne finds in the later philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein an articulation of the distinctive attitude we bring to the perception of human beings. This attitude, called by Wittgenstein "Eine Einstellung zur Seele," an attitude towards a soul, is irreducible—it cannot be analyzed into any more basic constituent parts—and it is the precondition for our sympathetic and imaginative understanding of others. It serves at the same time as the precondition for human selfhood. Stated succinctly, this unique attitude, marking the contrast between our perception of a human being and our perception of anything else animate or inanimate, is constitutive of who and what we are. And while this irreducible facet of the human situation is expressly articulated in philosophy—that is, it is therein said—it is shown in myriad places and ways. Viewed through the lens of Wittgenstein's fundamental concern with this ineliminable human attitude, Mozart and da Ponte's Don Giovanni reveals considerable insight into the content of humane acknowledgment, and the very concept of selfhood upon which that acknowledgment is based.IIt is just after voicing his aspirations to become a gentleman himself that Leporello, outside the palace of the Commendatore, provides the [End Page 180] interpretive clue to the philosophical significance of the entire opera. Thinking that he hears someone coming, he puts into play within the opening line of Don Giovanni the intertwined themes of concealment, of person-perception, and of the underlying desire for human avoidance that motivates the particular act of concealment in question: "I don't want to be seen, ah, I don't want to be seen, I don't want to be seen, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to be seen" (p. 86).1 However, the deepest clue to the philosophical significance—and the one that resonates most clearly throughout the opera—is given by Don Giovanni himself and comes in his very first line: "You shall not know who I am" (p. 86). He repeats this morally significant epistemic limit a moment later to secure this limitation on person-perception with an emphatic denial (to Donna Anna): "You scream in vain, you shall not know who I am, no" (p. 86).If we are then to see Don Giovanni as an opera that houses considerable insight—and an instructive object-lesson—about what Wittgenstein and others have discussed as the preconditions of selfhood, of inner human content, that make the distinctive—and as I have discussed elsewhere, instructively irreducible—attitude or stance we take towards other persons so much as possible, we must investigate how the opera serves to frame Giovanni.2 That is, we must comparatively situate him in relation to the other characters, as a person lacking precisely that human content, that interiority, which makes the distinctive and remarkable attitude, the essence of person-perception, possible. But before I proceed with the attempt to sketch the philosophical content to which both Leporello's and Giovanni's first words provide clues, let us consider some preliminary details in the libretto that point out the interpretive direction we will take.As early as the fatal wounding of the Commendatore, a telling contrast emerges. With the Commendatore dying, Leporello exclaims "What a tragedy! What a crime!" and then, having made these morally-engaged judgments, he describes his inner state with "I feel my heart pounding with fear in my breast." Then, in humanly-engaged reaction to the scene, he exclaims with increasing urgency (owing to his moral perception of the magnitude of the profound human loss presently occurring at Giovanni's hand) that he does not know what to say or to do. Showing in his words, his actions, and his felt urgency, his attitude towards the person of the Commendatore, Leporello stands in striking contrast to the humanly disengaged language and posture of Giovanni—a posture or stance that displays only a refusal to acknowledge the [End Page 181] humane loss he is presently causing. Giovanni provides the cold description of a detached eyewitness—one without a trace of imaginative sympathy for the victim—that approximates the outwardly descriptive language of a dehumanized behaviorist: "already...

This book investigates the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for aesthetic understanding. Focusing on the aesthetic elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking and the illuminating power of Wittgenstein’s philosophy when considered in connection with the interpretation of specific works of literature, music, and the arts. Taken together, the chapters presented here show what aesthetic understanding consists of and the ways we achieve it, how it might be articulated, and why it is important. At a time of strong renewal of interest in Wittgenstein’s contributions to the philosophy of mind and language, this book offers insight into the connections between philosophical-psychological and linguistic issues and the understanding of the arts.

We often think of works of art as possessors of meaning, and we think of museums as places where that meaning can be exhibited and encountered. But it is precisely at this first step of thinking about artistic meaning that we too easily import a conceptually entrenched model or picture of linguistic meaning that then constrains our appreciation of artistic meaning and what museum exhibitions actually do. That model of linguistic meaning is atomism: the notion that the single, self-contained word is the ultimate building block of meaning. This picture was excavated with exacting precision in Wittgenstein's sustained reflections on the nature of meaning, and the new way of seeing linguistic meaning that those reflections usher in holds direct significance for our understanding of artistic meaning, as we see here in examples from Rembrandt, Rietveld, and others. A more complete understanding of a dynamic, interactive, contextual, and use-based conception of language better reveals what actually happens in museums and the nature of the meaning we find there.

Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity, one dimension of which is ethical content. This striking collection of new essays pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content. These aspects are: the question of character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; literature's distinctive role in self-identity and self-understanding; patterns of moral growth and change that emerge from the philosophical reading of literature; and the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature. The volume engages with literary work from Homer to J. M. Coetzee, Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace, and explores the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and others. This rich collection presents some of the best new thinking about the ethical content that lies within literature, and it shows why our reflective absorption in literature is the humane--and humanizing--experience many of us have long taken it to be.

: This paper argues that Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground makes a fundamental point that runs directly counter to the received popular image of the work; i.e. the understanding that Notes describes a consciousness reflecting on itself, hermetically sealed within its own Cartesian interior. In truth, a closer reading shows that the mind depicted therein is profoundly relational and situated in a particularized context, and that this discursive mind characterizes what Wittgenstein says about mental privacy in the context of the private language argument. The upshot is that language is not secondary, not an afterthought, and thus not posterior to pure subjectivity of the kind that many who celebrate "inferiority" take as a given human experience