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The Rule of Art: On Kant with Wittgenstein

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Éric Méchoulan
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I do not propose to compare the esthetics of Kant and Wittgenstein or to show the sometimes very Kantian basis of some of Wittgenstein's reflections. I do not intend to take up the history of philosophy here (I will not, therefore, attempt to expound upon the relationship in Kant of the esthetic to the teleological or the moral, for example, or the relationship of art to ordinary language in Wittgenstein). That would not be without interest; quite the contrary, but I would prefer to compare the remarks of the one to those of the other in order to respond to a specific question: why is it said that there can be no rules for art, or more precisely, that the only rule is that there must be no rules? What authorizes art to play with the rules?

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 40 , Issue 157 , March 1992 , pp. 113 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

Footnotes

*

I want to thank Vincent Descombes for his attentive reading of these remarks.

References

1. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press 1988, p. 70-71.

2. This is exactly the interpretation that he rejects: empirically one thinks that there is a wide agreement on esthetic judgments "not because one imagines that behind this accord there is some a priori principle, "the correct solution," but because (like the taste for the palace) subjects are by chance arranged in a uniform way" which is, he says, a "subterfuge." (§57). Emmanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, K. Vorlander, (ed.) Hamburg, F. Meiner 1974 (trans. A. Philonenko: Critique de la faculté de juger, Paris, Vrin 1984; I sometimes modify the translations).

3. Barbara Hernstein-Smith brings out this discursive interest, but discounts it under the pretext that "the historicity of linguistic convention (and, thereby, of lin guistic ‘intuition’) and the contingency of usage deprive such observations of any epistemic authority of axiological force." If that were the case, then all Mrs. Herrnstein-Smith's discussion - which affirms, however, forcefully, the value of the contingent and the fact that it in no way prevents pronouncements with a value of truth, with epistemological authority and axiological (historic) force - would be reduced to nothing.

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fiches, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. J. Fauve, Paris, Gallimard 1971, § 430.

5. For a presentation of the skeptical problem of the rule, see Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press 1982; against this position and that of an empirical consensus, Baker, Gorden and Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language, Oxford, Blackwell 1984.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), trans. G. Blanquis, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne 1978, § 11 (translation modified by author).

7. Jacques Bouveresse, La Force de la Règle: Wittgenstein et l'invention de la nécessité, Paris, Minuit 1987, p. 89.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie (Remarks on Philosophy and Psychology (I), ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G. Granel, Mauvezin, Trans-Europ-Repress 1989, § 622.

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen uber die Farben (Remarks on Colors), ed. G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G. Granel, Mauvezin, T.E.R. 1984, 1, § 32.

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, De la certitude, trans. J. Fauve, Paris, Gallimard 1982, § 210-211.

11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schriften I: Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tagebücher 1914-916, Philosophische Untersuchungen (abridged PU), Frankfort: Suhrkamp 1969, § 241 (author's translation).

12. It is important to keep the idea of comprehension (verstehen) and of under standing (Verstand) at the same time as that of agreement.

13. Joseph Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology, New York, Books for Libraries 1971, (reprinted from the 1901 edition).

14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen, (Remarques mêlées), ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. G. Granel, Mauvezin, T.E.R. 1984, p. 20 (abridged VB).

15. Jacques Bouveresse, La Rime et la Raison, Paris, Minuit 1973, p. 203.

16. The question of the identification of the reader with characters, for example, should be thought of in this way: I do not identify so much with Lucien Leuwen or James Bond as much as with their worlds. When Alice goes through the looking glass, she does not identify with the Queen of Spades or with the cat's smile, but with this astounding new world.

17. Georges Bataille, "La Part maudite," in Oeuvres completes, VII, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 21.

18. Charles S. Peirce, Existential Graphs, quoted by Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du roman, La Haye, Mouton 1976, p. 34.

19. Cf. Emile Cioran, Précis de décomposition, Paris, Gallimard 1978, p. 159-160.

20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leçons et conversations sur l'esthétique, la psychologic et la croyance religieuse, trans. J. Fauve, Paris, Gallimard 1982, III, 8 (abridged LC).

21. See Jacques Derrida, Psyché, Paris, Galilee 1988, p. 11-61; in the Invention de l'autre Derrida starts his reflections from Paul de Man's ideas on time, and in partic ular, on the two sides of the same temporal predicament that are irony in its instanta neity and allegory in its length; we find there the same two tenets of time that Kant found in taste and the sublime: it is not by chance that starting from there Derrida comes to discuss the whole question of invention, beginning with the ideas of calcu lation and time.