Garry L. Hagberg

When we inquire into the nature of works of art we can see at a glance that there is a good deal of evidence against aesthetic idealism, the view that artworks are, in the final analysis, imaginary objects in the minds of their creators. We believe, for instance, that the National Gallery not only contingently but in some sense necessarily weighs more than merely the sum of the empty building, the people in it, and the assorted fixtures. This sum must also include the weight of canvases, the oils on them, carved stone and marble, and so on, all of which add up to substantially more than nothing, which is at least the approximate weight of imaginary things. We know that it takes considerably more than a verbal utterance or acoustical blast to transport an artwork, and we also know that a visit to the gallery is not going to amount to an afternoon spent with wax figures of unicorns, flying horses, present and bald kings of France or, for that matter, talking teapots. In short, intuition protests against the idealist theory that if works of art are imaginary objects, they cannot be the things we go to see in the gallery; and if they are imaginary objects then, like a waxen Peter Pan, they are surely not art. Mellon and Meinong simply have different kinds of collections

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 196-210 [Access article in PDF] On Philosophy as Therapy:Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing Garry Hagberg IN HIS LATER PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS Wittgenstein was exquisitely sensitive to the misleading implications housed within the formulations of philosophical questions. The question with which he opened the Blue Book, "What is the meaning of a word?," the question "What is thinking?," and the question "What constitutes understanding?," each put into place presumptions concerning how an answer is going to proceed: in the first, that the meaning will be an entity of some kind—likely of an ontological kind different from the acoustical or calligraphic sensory property of the word (to which we will then think the meaning attached); in the second, that thinking will be in essence a determinate mental process or event—likely one of an ontological kind different from that of speaking (to which we will then picture thinking as prior); in the third, an inner process culminating in a state that is metaphysically hidden from all things outer and that is the inner condition that lies unreachable behind what we will then call the behavior that is contingently correlated with it. It is by now no secret that each of these questions has been subjected to thorough scrutiny throughout the writings in The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Zettel, and even more extensively in the typescripts and manuscripts from which these are taken. 1 But it is still perhaps less widely realized than it might be that the very phrase "Wittgenstein's method" can easily prove as misleading as each of the above questions, and there is an aspect of irony waiting to dawn on those who reflect that the modern philosopher most concerned to maintain a philosophically relevant mindfulness about front-loaded [End Page 196] implications is perhaps too often not afforded precisely the mindfulness about his own later philosophical writings that he was most concerned to teach.The phrase "Wittgenstein's method" might well lead us to expect, in the first place, a unitary way of contending with philosophical difficulties that is employed across the board; in the second place, it might lead us to expect an acceptance of a set of perennial problems as framed by philosophers through the ages that are treated with that unitary method; and in the third place, it might lead us to expect a set of solutions to those time-honored questions providing answers formulated in a way parallel to, if different from, those worked out by Frege, Russell, Quine, or many others before and since. Indeed, such an expectation has often outlived the recognition that Wittgenstein's own writings are presented in a piecemeal way that seems not to offer any such overarching method or any such problem-accepting concisely formulated answers; some have simply assumed that, while Wittgenstein himself did not or could not provide such results, the raw material is there, and the task of interpretation, in his case, just comes to the task of argument-and-position formulation. To load a spatial metaphor into epistemology, nothing could be further from the truth. What Wittgenstein's later writings offer us is—to put the matter in a different way misleadingly briefly—a way of seeing philosophical problems that constitutes a radical departure from the approaches of Frege, Russell, Quine, and so many others. And in enacting this departure throughout his writings from the Blue Book and the Cambridge lectures of those years through to his final remarks in On Certainty, he himself, wary of too simply or too conventionally characterizing his own ways of working, appeals to the notion of therapy. This is a fitting concept for a moment in philosophy's history of radical departure and an ensuing process of radical change.It is true that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote "Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language" (4.003), and it would not be wrong to call...

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.