Wittgenstein and Scientism by Jonathan Beale Ian James Kidd & Ian James Kidd

Author:Jonathan Beale,Ian James Kidd & Ian James Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

7 ‘Too ridiculous for words’

Wittgenstein on scientific aesthetics

Severin Schroeder

1.

In one of his lectures in 1938, Wittgenstein comments on the idea of a science of aesthetics:

You might think that Aesthetics is a science telling us what’s beautiful—almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well.

(LC 11)

The idea of such a ‘science of aesthetics’ goes back to the nineteenth century, when Gustav Theodor Fechner in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1876) studied people’s preferences for certain shapes and colours in the hope of ultimately reaching a psychological understanding of complex aesthetic experiences. Such hopes are much more widespread today when empirical psychology has been joined by neuroscience as a provider of systematic research in order to resolve questions in aesthetics. In the introduction to a recent interdisciplinary book on ‘Aesthetic Science’, Arthur Shimamura appears to confirm Wittgenstein’s contemptuous suspicion that the envisaged science would also be regarded as responsible for pronouncing on the taste of coffee, as he defines ‘aesthetics’ as ‘any “hedonic” response to a sensory experience’ (Shimamura 2011, 4). Shimamura distinguishes six questions for scientific aesthetics (Shimamura 2011, 2, 4), selecting only the last three as the focus of his edited collection:

[1] What is art?

[2] Why do humans make art?

[3] What is art’s function in modern society?

[4] What happens when we experience a work of art?

[5] What does it mean to have an aesthetic experience?

[6] Can science help us derive general principles about aesthetics, or is there really ‘no accounting for taste’?

Scientific answers to question [1], the question of the nature of art, have been suggested by neuroscientists. Thus, in 1999 V. S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein claimed to have discovered ‘what art really is’ – namely caricature, an exaggerated representation of things able ‘to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object’ (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999, 16–17). An example of this is Indian sculptures of women with uncommonly big breasts (ibid., 18).

John Hyman called this the Baywatch Theory of Art, and argued convincingly that it is painfully inadequate. In fact, it is not really a theory about art at all, since (as Hyman puts it) it fails to ‘distinguish between a sculpture that represents a woman with big breasts and a woman with big breasts’, ignoring the basic point that artistic representations are essentially intended to be perceived as representations, from a certain point of view, ‘produced with specific tools, materials and techniques’ (Hyman 2010, 248–51).

Like Shimamura, I have nothing to say on questions [2] and [3]:

[2] Why do humans make art?

[3] What is art’s function in modern society?

These are obviously questions outside the scope of philosophical aesthetics and art criticism, requiring empirical research in evolutionary biology, psychology or sociology (e.g. Pinker 2002, ch.20; Chatterjee 2013; cf. Rowe 2003). There can also be no objection to a psychological or neuroscientific approach to question [4]:

[4] What happens when we experience a work of art?

Just as it is interesting to investigate what happens in the brain

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