Wittgenstein’s Concepts for an Aesthetics: Judgment and Understanding of Form

Abstract

My paper seeks to maintain that in Wittgenstein there is more than the simple and obvious negation of artistic quality as the property of things, and thus a criticism of any essentialism. My reasoning will connect Wittgenstein’s evaluative idea of the aesthetic with its philosophical conception of Aspekt and the self-revealing character of the form. The themes this paper deals with are: the aesthetic judgment; the sensitivity toward rules; the aesthetic judgment as an example of the understanding of meaning. Aesthetic judgments are not to be understood as a philosophical paradigm but as a case of what, for Wittgenstein, is in general the aesthetic understanding of meaning.