Carlos Silva

We want to show the importance of the later Wittgensteinian's reflexions in "Remarks on Colour", in order to consider the manifestations of what is unsay able. First, we begin remarking the critical nature of Wittgenstein's logic and we point out the various limitations of language starting with the views exposed in the Tractatus up to those of the Philosophical Investigations. We establish a relationship between this process and the one used by Kant in his philosophy commenting on the limits of the unspeakable. What is unsayable is negatively characterized and as a mystical element, both in the outskirts of language and in its inner center and mainly through the hermeneutic moment. The importance of language in its expressive dimension is remarkable. Secondly we point out the critical limits of the Aesthetics, considered as an Axiology, and in analogy with Ethics. Meanwhile, further to the expressiveness of assertions, we remark the aesthetic experience in its sensitive dimension. The negative, unsayable or colourless remainings of the logical language, seem to point out precisely to that aesthetic experience also in a negative sense. Finally, we intend to recover those remainings of a sensitive language, especially the language of colours, in order to build a grammar of colours. After mentioning various writings of Wittgenstein's, all through his life, concerning the aesthetic nature of colours, an especial attention is called to the basic character of the "Remarks on Colour". In this work Wittgenstein makes a deeper analysis of the conditions that make the grammar of colours possible as a non-uniform language and of the apparently steady character of a qualitative grammar. And we are directed even though paradoxically from the unsayable character of colour to the supposed expression of the unsayable as colour of the unexpressible, linking this expression with what is symbolized by white light. This unexpressible is not something indifferent and uniform used for solving all that is said. On the contrary, it appears as the difference which is denied starting from each specific form of language. In the same way, within the grammar of colours, white should not be presented as the synthetis of all the other colours. It should rather be the intersticial and colourless element of all the others. If logic objects are colourless, the unexpressible however has the colour which expresses the lucidity of a fundamental experience. What is sought is to see in the last Wittgenstein a complement to his first period and emphasyze that the impossibility of the aesthetic, as an Aesthetics of silence, reveal another more fundamental "language", such as the 'language of colours' and, generally speaking, the language of sensitivity.