Sean,
I find the use of comparisons of Wittgenstein with "God", talk of "higher" and "lower" planes and of giants and "Lilliputians"
, and similar metaphors to be counterproductive. (I do not say "incorrect"!
) It is (unnecessarily?
) contentious and potentially invidious to put things in these terms, amking them quite unhelpful in the present context and potentially even harmful in the wider discussion.
I'm not (obviously) not above saying contentious and even invidious things (quite gratuitously sometimes!) but I wonder if your points could be salvaged from these problems?
Why am I bothering if I don't think what you're saying is actually incorrect?
That Wittgensteinians pass off hagiography as genuine scholarship or that we are a cult of blind hero-worship with no relevance to the mainstream of philosophy are common enough accusations. And of course, people who say that sort of thing are liable to do so whatever we do. But why make it easy for them?
And why say things that would seem to the curious onlooker to confirm that propaganda?
What follows is a statement of my own take on these matters, where my views seem to mesh with your own. If they do not, I welcome clarification.
There are more and less serious ways of appreciating paintings. And by "serious", I do not mean to suggest that the appreciation of a dilettante is any less sincere, any less genuine. But for someone who has immersed herself in an epoch, assimilated its systems of representation, its norms of _expression_, its design sensibilities, its precedents, its paradigms, a painter's work is a record of a way of seeing, of deliberate decisions, of problems and solutions. She can recognize better and worse specimens of works belonging to the style. She can identify innovative and banal solutions to the problems of representation and design belonging to such works. And she can recognize mistakes.
But this sort of insight does not always translate into a similar appreciation of work from another period. In fact, where her dilettante friend may readily find beauty in Rubens as well as Raphael, she may see only excess, ugliness, thoughtlessness, and chaos in Rubens.
She could learn as well to see Baroque paintings as they should be seen. Or perhaps to "switch off" her finely cultivated judgment where it does not apply, so that she can at least enjoy Rubens as her less erudite friend does.
But what about Cezanne? There is a reason that he is often called "the painter's painter" (as Wittgenstein is "the philosopher'
s philosopher"
). Cezanne's work doesn't fit into previously existing conceptions of painting, not even Impressionism. Cezanne seems to be struggling with something more fundamental than a style and its problems, something like, "What is this business of applying colored material to a two-dimensional substrate to 'represent' reality?" And he doesn't reject the idea, as many later painters would do, but he struggles with it in various ways. And it requires the same questioning from us to understand what he's doing, why he breaks so many "rules".
Understanding Cezanne requires understanding his problems. And this starts from understanding - or perhaps taking on trust - that his "mistakes" are no such thing.
Or rather: it is difficult to imagine, once we know not to try to judge him according to the prevailing style of a period, what we should count as a "mistake".
This is not to say that Cezanne is "higher" than us or "higher" than Rubens or Raphael. Only that seriousness requires we show care in what assumptions and expectations we bring to each.
Now, philosophy is not painting. Nor yet music. Such analogies can be easily strained past the point of breaking. But something like this captures some of the difficulty with which Wittgenstein'
s works present us.
JPDeMouy
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