British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 42, No.

3, July 2002

ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE

TREMENDOUS IN WITTGENSTEINS
AESTHETICS
Thomas Tam
Wittgensteins elliptical remark on the tremendous things in art in his 1938 Lectures
on Aesthetics has given rise to different interpretations as to the place this idea has in
his aesthetics. This paper examines the views of Peter Lewis and Benjamin Tilghman
on this issue. Both of them build their interpretations on the assumption that
Wittgenstein contrasts the response to the tremendous with appreciation. Such an
assumption, however, leads to results inconsistent with W ittgensteins basic
conception of aesthetics. For W ittgenstein, aesthetic appreciation is not a formalistic
activity, and one clear aspect of it is indeed well illustrated by the response to the
tremendous.

I
W ittgenstein says at the beginning of his 1938 Lectures on Aesthetics that the
subject (Aesthetics) is very big and entirely misunderstood as far as I can see.1
Entirely misunderstood? What are these misunderstandings and how do they
help to bring out W ittgensteins own peculiar conception of aesthetics? Peter
Lewis identifies three of them,2 which turn out ironically to be more or less
W ittgensteins own aesthetic misunderstandings. The first of these misunderstandings concerns the word beautiful in aesthetics. The word is often used as
an adjective, says W ittgenstein, and it is this linguistic form of sentences that
misleads philosophers into thinking that beauty is an objective quality in things.
Lewis questions, however, whether there are philosophers who really make such
a mistake. The obvious culprit here seems to be Plato, but Lewis reminds us that
Platos view of beauty is an instantiation of a comprehensive theory of
predication rather than a distinctively aesthetic misunderstanding (WAM, p. 20).
1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 1966), p. 1, 1. Hereafter cited as LC, followed by page
number and section number on that page.
Peter Lewis, Wittgensteins Aesthetic Misunderstandings, in K. S. Johannessen (ed.), Wittgenstein
and Aesthetics (Bergen: Universitetet i Bergen, 1997), pp. 1922 [hereafter WAM]. It has to be
pointed out that Lewis restricts his discussion mainly to the first two lectures.

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Another plausible candidate may be G. E. Moore, who in his Principia Ethica

speaks of the cognition of the beautiful qualities possessed by [an] object.3 Yet
Lewis points out that, for Moore, no set of qualities is sufficient to determine
that a thing is beautiful (WAM, p. 20), and his idea of beauty could not possibly
be reduced to such a simplistic view. In effect, as Lewis says, in the history of
modern aesthetics, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is not easy to locate
this misunderstanding (WAM, pp. 2121).
The second aesthetic misunderstanding concerns the nature of aesthetic
judgement, and there are two parts to this misunderstanding. According to
W ittgenstein, there is, first, a tendency in aesthetics to overemphasize the
aesthetic judgement of the beautiful to the detriment of other kinds of aesthetic
judgements, like that of judging the correctness or incorrectness of something,
say, an intonation, a rhythm, or an architectural proportion. Secondly, there is
also a tendency to concentrate on the aesthetic judgement itself, considering it in
isolation from other cultural phenomena and practices. Lewis rightly attributes
both of these tendencies to the influence of Kantian aesthetics. But he considers
that philosophers after Kant, such as Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Croce, and
Collingwood, tend to disparage the Kantian emphasis on the logical form of
aesthetic judgments concerning the beautiful, and he concludes that this is not a
misunderstanding shared by all aestheticians (WAM, p. 21).
The third aesthetic misunderstanding highlighted by W ittgenstein in his
lectures is that of treating aesthetics as a kind of science (LC, p. 11, 1), and
more specifically of conceiving aesthetics as a branch of psychology (LC, p. 17,
35). W ittgenstein meant by science here the strict sense of an empirical science,
that is to say, one which employs experimental method to discover causal
connections between things and which considers all explanation to be reducible
to causal explanation. On this perspective, aesthetics would be reduced to
studying how certain stimuli elicit certain responses under certain specified
conditions. Its aim would be to establish general laws based on statistical results
obtained by observing how a number of subjects reacted in a given situation.
One may wonder who could possibly have held such a view. Lewis singles out
I. A. Richards as representative of this approach, for his book The Principles of
Literary Criticism is put forward as part of a general psychological theory of value
(WAM, p. 22). I think, however, that W ittgenstein himself is a clearer exemplar.
It is a well-known fact that W ittgenstein undertook some psychological research
in 1912 and conducted some experiments on the role and importance of rhythm
in music. This was an attempt to deal with aesthetic problems using the rigorous
method of science. One may well consider the 1938 Lectures on Aesthetics as a
criticism of his earlier view.
There is one more aesthetic misunderstanding that W ittgenstein points out in
3

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1966), p. 191.

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ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

connection with the third one just mentioned. It is, as Lewis puts it, the misunderstanding of the character of aesthetic reactions, specifically . . . the failure to
grasp the implications of the directedness or intentionality of such reactions
(WAM, p. 22). From the point of view of science, aesthetic reactions can be
accounted for by finding out the physical-physiological causes of them. For
W ittgenstein, on the contrary, it is misleading to talk about the cause of aesthetic
reactions. Not that aesthetic reactions do not have causesthey certainly
havebut that aesthetic reactions involve different language games from, say,
that surrounding pain behaviour. An aesthetic reaction is not the expression of a
feeling as such, but a feeling that is directed towards an object in the form of a
criticism (LC, p. 14, 19). In such a language game, it is pertinent to ask about
the reason for the reaction, but not its cause. Why are you disgusted [at the door]?
Because it is too high (LC, p. 14, n. 1). It is, of course, in line with ordinary usage
to say that the door, as the object to which the feeling of disgust is directed, is the
cause of the reaction. But it is misleading to say that one knows the cause of
ones reaction in this context, for one does not take the door as the object which
produces that feeling in us, but as an object of criticism. I think the corollary of this
idea is that we do not equally regard our feeling as an effect produced by a cause,
that is to say, simply as a feeling. And this is the whole idea behind W ittgensteins
criticism of Tolstoys false theorizing about art in Culture and Value.4
According to Lewis, however, W ittgenstein (along with some commentators
too) tends to neglect a very important type of aesthetic reaction, which is that of
being struck by the wonders of nature (WAM, p. 29).5 The reason is that
W ittgenstein was concerned with the judgements using words akin to right
and correct . . ., says Lewis. That concern, I maintain, distracts W ittgensteins
attention from important aspects of the appreciation of art (WAM, p. 30). For the
later W ittgenstein, however, the concept of wonders of nature does emerge as
the basis of art (see CV, p. 64). This idea connotes a sense of fascination, of
admiration and awe, before an artwork. In our appreciation of art, it is essential
that we be impressed by the work, feel enthusiastic about it. People who are
incapable of being thus impressed would be impoverished in their responses to
art. Now, this feeling of wonderment, of being dazzled, is very often conveyed by
means of superlatives, which include adjectives such as beautiful, lovely,
marvellous, and so on. It is not, therefore, as W ittgenstein says in his lectures,
that in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives . . . play
hardly any role at all (LC, p. 3, 8). Using the aesthetic superlatives, says Lewis,
is a familiar and natural way of expressing aesthetic impact (WAM, p. 35). And
4

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 67e. Hereafter cited
as CV.

Lewis acknowledges that Wittgenstein did mention one example of aesthetic reactions akin to the
reaction of wonder. It is the response to the tremendous things in Art (LC, p. 8, 23).

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this impact is constitutive of our true appreciation of art as well as a measure of

arts true significance for us.
In another paper,6 Lewis relates the aesthetic reaction of wonder to the
tremendous things in art. The tremendous is considered there as the proper
object of the reaction of wonder and marvelling (WTTA, p. 159). What distinguishes the tremendous from the non-tremendous is not so much that one is
rule-governed while the other is not. In Lewiss view, the tremendous can just as
well be rule-governed as the non-tremendous, and it certainly makes sense to talk
of a tremendous work as being correct or incorrect according to the rules. But
in so doing, one would not be having the tremendous in sight. One would be
playing a different game, that of appreciation, of evaluating works of art in
relation to various standards (WTTA, p. 155). In contradistinction to this, the tremendous cannot strictly be appreciated. It involves rather the game of expressing
reactions to works of art (WTTA, p. 155). In the face of a tremendous work, one
is overwhelmed by it, one reacts to it as if awe-struck, and it is this reaction which
constitutes the specificity of our experience of the tremendous in art. Such
response is important and indeed basic to art, for it is the capability of being thus
impressed that renders art possible. In Lewiss words, it is through the agreement
in our reactions to the tremendous that we exhibit our sharing of the concept of
art (WTTA, p. 159).
It is undeniable that both the concept of wonder and the idea of the
tremendous are of great importance to aesthetics. And it is intriguing why
W ittgenstein did not give greater attention to them in his lectures. But there is
first and foremost the question whether he would have linked the two notions
together. Is the tremendous the proper object of wonder, as Lewis would have
it? Would W ittgenstein have conceived wonder as a form of aesthetic reaction?
Does the response to the tremendous not fall under the concept of appreciation
after all, despite W ittgensteins saying that one wouldnt talk of appreciating the
tremendous things in art (LC, p. 8, 23)? All these are essential questions and
worth examining in detail. In what follows, I propose to take these questions one
by one, looking first of all at the concept of aesthetic reaction. I shall then determine its relation to the concept of wonder and the tremendous in W ittgensteins
aesthetics. Finally, I shall explicate W ittgensteins view of appreciation and its
connection to the tremendous.
II
What does W ittgenstein mean by aesthetic reaction? Could he have included
wonder in it? For W ittgensteins specific usage, we have to look for textual
evidence. In a general sense, however, one can certainly speak of wonder as a
6

Peter Lewis, Wittgenstein and The Tremendous Things in Art, in K. S. Johannessen and T.
Nordenstam (eds), Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Culture (Vienna: Hlder-Pichler-Tempsky,
1996), pp. 148161 [hereafter WTTA].

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ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

human reaction, for it is one of the ways by which human beings respond to
things in the world. Taken in this general sense, the word would also include our
interjections of approval or disapproval with regard to works of art. There is,
however, no evidence that W ittgenstein did understand the word in this way.
Throughout the whole of the first lecture in which he discusses the relevance (or
rather the irrelevance) of interjections to aesthetics, the word does not appear
once. It is introduced only in the second lecture where he examines the philosophical grammar of aesthetic feeling. Indeed, had he construed interjections as
forms of aesthetic reaction, he would not have repeatedly asserted that aesthetic
adjectives, as words of approval or disapproval, play hardly any role in aesthetics,
given the fact that he considers aesthetic reactions as Perhaps the most important
thing in connection with aesthetics (LC, p. 13, 10). In effect, W ittgenstein
seems to think only of aesthetic feeling as aesthetic reaction, but feeling here is
used in a peculiar sense. In ordinary usage, feeling refers to a mental or subjective state, to something which occurs inwardly, though it need not be regarded
as unduly private. The feeling of delight, for example, is feeling in this sense.
But so construed, this feeling is largely independent of its object, external to it,
and pertains only to the subject. Moreover, it is not specific to its object such that
we would have different kinds of delightthe delight of appreciating works of
art, of eating vanilla ice-cream, and so on (cf. LC, p. 12, 4) As mere feelings of
delight, these are all much the same, without significant qualitative differences.
And this is why it makes no sense to talk of an aesthetic feeling as if it were a
special kind of feeling.
What W ittgenstein calls aesthetic feeling must, therefore, be something
entirely different. It is not something that one feels within oneself, but something
like a reaction that is directed at an object. For W ittgenstein, there is not first a
feeling, and then ones reaction based on it. Rather, the feeling is the reaction
itself. W ittgenstein compares the feeling of discomfort as aesthetic reaction to the
drawing of ones hand away from a hot plate (cf. LC, p. 14, 15) The point of the
comparison does not reside so much in showing up the reflex character of both
these reactions. It lies rather, firstly, in the fact that feeling and reaction are
inseparable from one another in reality; and secondly, that the feeling in both
cases is directed at an object, so that the reaction constitutes a form of criticism of
that object. One could in effect consider the drawing of the hand away from the
hot stove as a criticism of the hot stove, much as our running away from the
house someone builds for us, and refusing to live in it, might count as a criticism
of the house (cf. LC, p. 13, 7). Our likes and dislikes, our delight and disgust,
have relevance to aesthetics only when they constitute such implicit criticisms in
themselves, and not simply as feelings. And these criticisms are significant to the
extent that they reflect a form of life.
Given this, there are good reasons to think that the experience of wonder
cannot be construed as an aesthetic reaction in W ittgensteins sense. In turn, this

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calls into question the importance Lewis attaches to the use of superlatives in
connection with wonder. What is problematic in Lewiss account is that he seems
to deflect the experience of wonder towards its emotive (and consequently, its
expressive) aspect. This is why he considers that interjections, such as Wonderful! or Marvellous!, play a crucial role in aesthetics, for these words are
expressive of an emotional state that is constitutive of a genuine response in the
appreciation of art. Referring to connoisseurs of music who are not impressed by
Pavarottis singing of Nessun Dorma, Lewis says:
But I trust that such a musical person would be prepared to say Wonderful! or
Marvellous! on hearing other singers, or other operas, or other pieces of music. . . .
If this musical person is never prepared to reach for the aesthetic superlatives, then I
have doubts that he is capable of aesthetic appreciation. He would be akin to the
people who were curious about the blossom opening out but who found nothing to
marvel at. (WAM, p. 35)

For sure, if someone is simply curious without being impressed by the blossom,
he is not really responding to it, but is adopting a scientific attitude towards it.
But the point is whether the emotional response which makes one interject
Marvellous! or Beautiful! is really essential to this experience. I would argue
that the concept of wonder, as developed in the 1947 text,7 still holds a relationship to what W ittgenstein earlier, in A Lecture on Ethics, calls the experience of
wondering at the existence of the world or of seeing the world as a miracle;8 and
this relationship should not be underestimated. The 1947 text is more tempered,
in the sense that there is no trace of metaphysical speculation la Schopenhauer,
nor any talk about seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis. But still, wonder is
essentially a way of seeing things, and through seeing, adopting a stance towards
the world, rather than an emotive response. The Look, how its opening out!
(CV, p. 64e) with regard to the blossom should be taken as a pointing to or a
showing of something, rather than a mere expressive gesture. The showing is, in
effect, essential to the concept of wonder, for what one wonders at, namely the
miracle, is beyond language and can only be shown, but not said. To the question
What is marvellous about the blossom opening?, W ittgenstein gives, by way of an
answer, not a description but an exhortationLook, how its opening out!
The German word Wunder means wonder and miracle, and these two ideas
are intimately connected in W ittgensteins thought. There is something miraculous in the blooming of a blossom, just as there is something miraculous in the
formation of a crystal, which is in strict accordance with mathematical formulae
(cf. CV, pp. 65e and 47e). Both these phenomena are miraculous to the extent
7

The text reads: The miracles of nature. We might say: art discloses the miracles of nature to us. It is
based on the concept of the miracles of nature. (The blossom, just opening out. What is marvellous
about it?) We say: Look, how its opening out! (CV, p. 64e).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 19121951 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 43.

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ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

that one does not attempt to explain them; and the miracle consists in their very
inexplicability. Yet another instance9 in Culture and Value where the word Wunder
is used with the meaning miracle is the entry dated 8.9.1946. The remark reads:
The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels & devils are portrayed.
A so-called miracle [Wunder] must be connected with this. It must be as it were a
sacred gesture. (CV, p. 57e)

The miracle this time is connected with art. What is miraculous is the way angels
and devils are portrayed. More precisely, the miraculous lies in the uncanniness
of the representation of the devil, which is purely corporeal, in contradistinction
to that of the angel, which is spiritual. That the uncanniness of the devil comes
through the representation of the purely corporeal is almost like a miracle. It is
not explicable in human terms, but must be regarded as a gesture of God.
If the later W ittgenstein says that art is based on the concept of the wonders/
miracles of nature, it is not to make the experience of wonder a foundational
experience underlying all other aesthetic experiences. W ittgensteins thinking
seems opposed to such architecturing of thought into a system. If art is something
of a miracle, it is because art is essentially inexplicable and every experience of art
must sooner or later encounter the inexplicability of the that-it-is of the world. If
a man started to see the miracle as a problem and tried to explain it, then his
admiration will have suffered a rupture (CV, p. 65e). He will no longer be seeing
the thatness of things. In a sense, the idea of inexplicability replaces the nonsensicality of the paradox of absolute experience which W ittgenstein considers as
the essence of art in A Lecture on Ethics. Art is not so much a non-sense as a
sense which turns out to be an enigma.
III
What place does the tremendous have in W ittgensteins aesthetics? What
importance could we assign to this idea? The word is scarcely mentioned in his
Lectures on Aesthetics, or indeed in the entire corpus of his work. And what he
says about the tremendous in those lectures looks like a singular and spontaneous
remark which informs us more about his view of appreciation than about any
views he may have had about the tremendous itself. The well-known passage in
which the word appears is 23 of the first of his Lectures on Aesthetics. The
passage reads:
We talked of correctness. A good cutter wont use any words like Too long, All right.
When we talk of a Symphony of Beethoven we dont talk of correctness. Entirely
different things enter. One wouldnt talk of appreciating the tremendous things in Art.
In certain styles in Architecture a door is correct, and the thing is you appreciate it.
9

The only other one, if we discount its use in such expressions as kein Wunder.

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317

But in the case of a Gothic Cathedral what we do is not at all to find it correctit
plays an entirely different role with us. The entire game is different. It is as different
as to judge a human being and on the one hand to say He behaves well and on the
other hand He made a great impression on me. (LC, pp. 78)

In this passage, W ittgenstein seems to contrast the tremendous to the correct.

There are certain things that one appreciates and finds correct, like tailored
clothes or buildings of certain architectural styles. But there are other things in
connection with which one would not talk of appreciating their correctness, like
a symphony of Beethoven or a Gothic cathedraland this, seemingly, because
they are tremendous. The difference between the correct and the tremendous is
like saying of someone that He behaves well and that He made a great impression on me. In the former case, one is on a par with the person appreciated,
and one can exercise ones faculty of judgement; in the latter case, one is overawed by him; and it requires a different kind of response from that of evaluating
the correctness of his behaviour.
This is how Benjamin Tilghman understands the passage. In his book Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics, Tilghman contrasts the tremendous with the correct and
the response to the tremendous with appreciation.10 There are two points in
particular that are worth noting in Tilghmans interpretation. First, he seems to
assume that an object can be correct or incorrect only when it is rule-governed.
One can judge the correctness of an object only according to rules. Now, in art,
rules are laid down to establish the conventions of a style. The Neo-Gothic style,
for example, is such a convention. It has its rules derived from Gothic art; and it
is for this reason that one can judge a nineteenth-century revival building to be
correct or incorrect. But the original Gothic cathedral itself is tremendous, and
there are no such rules established prior to its making. It creates its own rules
rather than being bound by them. The tremendous, therefore, contrasts with the
correct in that it is not rule-governed and should not be judged in accordance
with rules.
Secondly, Tilghman compares the distinction between the response to the
tremendous and appreciation roughly to that between art and the aesthetic. The
comparison aims to bring out the difference between the two types of response.
For Tilghman, aesthetic refers to the formal properties of an object, like lines,
shapes, colours, and the designs and arrangements that can be created out of
them (WEA, p. 87). It is these formal properties that constitute the object of
appreciation. In contrast to this, the tremendous requires something more than
just attention paid to the formal qualities. It demands, namely, our response to
the vision and meanings embodied in the object, to the depth of those meanings
and the significance of its vision.
10

B. R. Tilghman, Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity (London: Macmillan, 1991),
pp. 8690 [hereafter WEA].

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ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

Lewis, however, queries both of these points. He points out, firstly, that a
tremendous work of art can also be rule-governed. He writes:
It is commonplace to say of a great work that it is great in spite of flouting or failing
to conform to the established rules. This is how Samuel Johnson defended
Shakespeares plays when they were criticized for breaking the classical rules
governing the unities of time and place in drama. But if we do talk of a tremendous
work as being incorrect in some respects, then surely it must make sense sometimes
to say that in some respects it is correct. (WTTA, p. 151)

Nor is a tremendous work, according to Lewis, necessary or sufficient to set

standards of correctness. It is not necessary, because standards of correctness are
derivable from any work which artists and society take as model or exemplar
(WTTA, p. 151). It is not sufficient, since a tremendous work need not be taken
as establishing a new school or genre to which subsequent artists need to
conform (WTTA, p. 151). Lewis gives the example of Beethovens Ninth as not
setting the standard for subsequent symphonic writings. If the tremendous is
opposed to the correct, therefore, it is not in virtue of being, or not being,
rule-governed.
Secondly, the way Tilghman distinguishes between art and the aesthetic seems
to suggest that it is closely related to a distinction between content and form. For,
in Tilghmans view, the aesthetic concerns the formal properties of an object,
whereas art concerns the meaning and significance of a work. If this is the case,
then the distinction cannot be used to account for the contrast between the
response to the tremendous and appreciation. For, as Lewis points out, one can
certainly talk of appreciating the content of a work. This helps determine whether
the work is a good one, and separates it from the merely correct. In other words,
the distinction between art and the aesthetic is more like a distinction between
goodness and (mere) correctness. Lewis says:
Tilghmans view supports only a contrast between the correct and the good rather than
what Im calling the contrast between the good and the great or tremendous. W ith
respect to a good, though non-tremendous, painting or play or poem, we could
distinguish between finding it correct in virtue of its aesthetic properties and finding
it to be a good painting or play or poem; and in finding it to be good we take into
account its contentits ideas, themes, arguments, meaning, and so forthin addition
to its various formal features. We appreciate itit is good, perhaps very good, but it is
not great or tremendous. (WTTA, p. 153)

What Lewis calls the tremendous is therefore not a question of more or less deep
appreciation, but that of a quite different kind of response. The tremendous is
something that wrings from us a reaction, something which forces our admiration in spite of ourselves, something which calls forth within us a total response.
And this is why using superlatives is the most direct and natural way to express
our reaction to its impact. Lewis compares, in effect, the tremendous to the

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Kantian sublime in that it is something that seems to shatter us and set our mind
in motion (WTTA, p. 156). It differs from appreciation in much the same way as
the feeling of the sublime, involving fearfulness and thus pain, differs from the
pleasurable calm contemplation of the beautiful.
Both Tilghman and Lewis think it appropriate to contrast the response to the
tremendous with appreciation. I would argue that, in setting up this contrast,
there is a danger of missing the point that W ittgenstein is making in those
lectures about appreciation. No doubt, the contrast seems justified if one
construes LC 23 in isolation. Yet, this text appears in the course of a discussion
on appreciation, and W ittgenstein is there drawing attention to the vast variety of
cases that appreciation encompasses. The tremendousness of a Beethoven
symphony or a Gothic cathedral enters the picture because they help to widen the
range of possibilities of aesthetic appreciation. W ittgensteins point is to argue
against the eighteenth-century philosophical concept of appreciation, which
concerns itself exclusively with the beauty or formal qualities of an object. And
there are important reasons for this. First of all, the concept of appreciation, for
W ittgenstein, is not something determinable purely philosophically. He says:
It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To
describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment. (LC,
p. 7, 20)

W ittgenstein is here obviously stressing the interrelatedness of appreciation and

other cultural practices. Appreciation is a concept culturally determined and historically specific. It is the whole culture of a period that renders possible a certain
form of appreciation and gives it meaning. W ittgenstein observes, for example,
with regard to Buffon, that he made very fine distinctions between words like
correctly, charmingly, finely, and so on, distinctions which, he says, can only
be understood vaguely nowadays but which [Buffon] didnt mean vaguely (LC,
p. 8, 24). The fact is that these nuances are possible and meaningful only within
the culture in which Buffon lived. It is a period where there is what is called a
cultured taste (LC, p. 8, 25). Such a form of appreciation differs from what one
might find as appreciation in the Middle Ages, and it differs again from what
existed in W ittgensteins time, which he often spoke of as a deterioration of taste
(see LC, p. 7, 21). Throughout his lectures, W ittgenstein gives numerous
examples of the embeddedness of appreciation in culture, and all this to show that
appreciation is essentially to be thought of as a form of life. This is why he says: In
order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living (LC,
p. 11, 35), And elsewhere, more succinctly: Appreciating music is a manifestation of human life (CV, p. 80e). We might say that, for W ittgenstein, aesthetic
appreciation meshes with life. And this idea means not only that appreciation is
essentially embedded in the culture of a period, in the complicated structure of
communal activities or in a social formation, but that art enters into ones life

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ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

through appreciation and forms part of it. In effect, one cannot truly appreciate a
work of art without assuming the form of life embodied in the culture of that work.
As W ittgenstein puts it:
I think that, in order to enjoy a poet, you have to like the culture to which he belongs
as well. If you are indifferent to this or repelled by it, your admiration cools off. (CV,
p. 96e)

Now, the way Tilghman conceives of appreciation seems precisely to make an

abstraction from the whole environment that, W ittgenstein insists, should enter
into our understanding of appreciation. Tilghmans identification of the aesthetic
with the formal properties of lines, shapes and colours, and so on, is essentially
derived from eighteenth-century philosophical theories, which set the aesthetic
apart from both the cognitive and the moral. Certainly, Tilghman cautions against
the danger in such theories of entering a wedge between humanity and art
(WEA, p. 177), and he concedes that art and the aesthetic intertwine with one
another in ways that are impossible sometimes to disentangle (WEA, p. 87). He
endeavours to show this with respect to music and abstract painting, that they too
can have meaning and human significance (see WEA, pp. 168172). Nevertheless,
I think Tilghman could not really do away with the distinction between art and
the aesthetic (and any correlative distinction between content and form), because
he is committed to a humanistic conception of art. For him, what counts as
meaning and significance in an artwork is, in the final analysis, the intentions,
emotions, character or the like (WEA, p. 166) of a human being, in short,
psychological and moral depth. This is apparent from his discussion of pictorial space.
Referring to the Renaissance invention of perspective, Tilghman says:
The interest in space, I suggest, is really an interest in moral space, that is a pictorial
space designed to represent human beings in the fullness of their psychological nature
and in their dramatic interactions with one another. (WEA, p. 152)

In Tilghmans view, therefore, treating space for spaces sake (WEA, p. 167), as
he thinks Frank Stella and other modernist painters do, will not have any human
significance in it. Indeed, one can see that there is a great concern for the human
in W ittgensteins numerous remarks on art, yet those remarks seem more often
to dig out less the psychological depth of an artist than the personality hidden in
every great work of art that is expressive of a form of life. Thus, W ittgenstein writes of
Mendelssohn:
Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed.
Not, e.g., in Mendelssohn. All great art has primitive human drives as its ground
bass. They are not the melody (as they are, perhaps, in Wagner), but they are what gives
the melody depth & power.
In this sense one may call Mendelssohn a reproductive artist. (CV, p. 43e)

THOMAS TAM

321

The human in W ittgensteins thought seems to have a wider extension than in

Tilghmans.
There is one more reason why W ittgenstein might not accept Tilghmans idea
of the aesthetic, and consequently, his distinction between the aesthetic and art. It
is because, for W ittgenstein, one cannot talk of appreciating the beauty of an
object as if it were all there is to it. Commenting on Grillparzers remark on Mozart,
W ittgenstein gives a penetrating rejoinder:
When Grillparzer says Mozart countenanced only the beautiful in music, that means,
I think, that he did not countenance the distorted, frightful, that there is nothing in
his music corresponding to this. . . . Grillparzers attitude involves a certain ingratitude. . . . The concept of the beautiful has done a lot of mischief here too. (CV,
p. 63e)

Other than the fact that the word beautiful is not used unequivocally,11 and other
than the fact that an object requires the complementation of the setting in which it
originally existed to enhance its beauty,12 there is also a deep understanding of the
meaning of the beauty of an object. The beauty of Mozarts music is not merely the
pleasing or the enjoyable taken as an end in itself. Rather, it is understood as a form of
life (or a language) in which the distorted or the frightful does not make its
appearance. One can say with Wittgenstein that beauty is not to be circumscribed by
the aesthetic, and the aesthetic cannot constitute itself as a realm.
If the art/aesthetic distinction cannot be sustained, there is no way of seeking
the tremendous solely on the side of art, that is, in the human narrowly
conceived. Is it more plausible to think of the tremendous as something that
greatly impresses us and provokes a reaction in us, such that the response to it
stands opposed to appreciation, as Lewis suggests? W ittgenstein does not seem to
have made this contrast in his lectures. In fact, he includes among the cases of
appreciation one in which a person responds to a work of art because it makes a
profound impression on him (LC, p. 9, 30). It is thus inapt to restrict W ittgensteins idea of appreciation to the judging of correctness. As we have seen earlier,
Lewis distinction between appreciation and the response to the tremendous aims
at highlighting the part played by emotions in the response to art. For him, the
emotional response constitutes a more fundamental element than the critical or
evaluative attitude in art appreciation. Indeed, Lewis is right to point out that art
critics and connoisseurs (and not least, W ittgenstein himself) often do use
aesthetic superlatives to express their reactions to art. Yet, for W ittgenstein,
notwithstanding his practice in real life, there is abundant evidence in Lectures
on Aesthetics that he dismisses pure (as it were, unreflective) emotive responses
11

Cf. CV, pp. 27e28e. Wittgenstein says: I shall not even want to compare the beauty of expression
in a pair of eyes with the beauty in the shape of a nose.

12

Cf. CV, pp. 90e91e. The setting is like a lighting on an object.

322

ON WONDER, APPRECIATION, AND THE TREMENDOUS

as having much centrality in aesthetics or art appreciation. The reason is that,

despite the diversity of its form, aesthetic appreciation requires first and foremost
the learning of rules. Learning the rules constitutes a necessary, though not
sufficient, condition for art appreciation, without which one would not be
knowing what one is talking about. This is why W ittgenstein gives this analogy:
Suppose that a Russian who doesnt know English is overwhelmed by a sonnet admitted
to be good. We would say that he does not know what is in it at all. Similarly, of a
person who doesnt know metres but who is overwhelmed, we would say that he doesnt
know whats in it. In music this is more pronounced. . . . We use the phrase A man
is musical not so as to call a man musical if he says Ah! when a piece of music is
played, any more than we call a dog musical if it wags its tail when music is played.
(LC, p. 6, 17, my italics)

Learning the rules provides a basic understanding of the arts, and it is this
understanding that W ittgenstein considers as more fundamental than any kind of
spontaneous emotional response. Naturally, it does not mean that emotional
affect, as we find in Lewiss argument, has no part to play in aesthetics, but that it
should not be constituted as a totally different realm of response that stands in
opposition to, far less is elevated above, appreciation. Nor should it serve to
characterize the specific kind of response proper to the tremendous things in art.
Coming back to the idea of the tremendous, I would like to suggest, by way of
speculation, that the tremendous too has to be seen against some kind of rules. It
could very well be that a tremendous thing is tremendous just because it breaks
the rules, but understanding the rules, as in all cases of appreciation, is a
prerequisite for any real response to the tremendous. I would like to conclude by
giving an example of a case of appreciation of the tremendous in art. It is in the
notes that accompany Rosalyn Turecks recent re-recording of Bachs Goldberg
Variations. In talking about Variation 15, Tureck writes :
The principle of inversion that Bach maintains throughout the entire composition is
nowhere placed in a more sublime setting than in the last measure of this Variation.
With the bars descending, the soprano ascends and becomes inactive at the dominant
note. The ending on the single note, ascending to the dominant, seems to continue
beyond sound, conveying an image of moving into a region of intangibility where
there is no sense of end. This is one of the most magical moments in this great
composition.13
Thomas Tam, Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

13

Deutsche Grammophon, 1999

I would like to thank Professor Peter Lamarque and Professor Stein Haugom Olsen for their
valuable comments on the first draft of this paper.

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