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Wittgenstein once pointed out that there is a "queer resemblance between a philosophical investigation ... and an aesthetic one".² But it is far from clear what motivated this observation. In this paper I want to look into this question to see what sort of things that he might have had in mind. The first task will then be to find out what Wittgenstein meant by "aesthetic investigation", as it is obvious that he did not mean any kind ">of philosophical investigation into aesthetic matters. That would turn his observation into a piece of nonsense. When Wittgenstein does attend to aesthetic matters, e. g. in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, it is mostly a question of making us look into the activity "in which literary, musical and art critics indulge", as Cyril Barrett has pointed out a long time ago³, or into the circumstances in which aesthetic judgments are made. It is thus our immediate traffic with art that is his main field of interest. This is the kind of context, I assume, that he had in mind when referring to "aesthetic investigations". They have to do with how we respond to works of art in various ways, how their expressiveness is accommodated in our repertoire of reactions towards them, how we get rid of aesthetic puzzlement, etc. Wittgenstein's suggestion is that the puzzlement is to be dissolved by the "grouping together of certain cases".⁴ We should note, however, that this kind of puzzlement is not restricted to our responses to finished works of art. They can also oocur when the work is still in progress. That is evident from his way of conceiving the expression of aesthetic discomfort in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics. It makes itself known in terms like: "Make it higher... too low! ... do something to this".⁵ This is a kind of reaction we all have from time to time — artist, professional critic as well as the informed layman. It "takes the form of a criticism", and the point of it is to produce a change in the subject matter commented upon. A case in point might be Wittgenstein's own notorious raising of the ceiling by three centimeters in one of the rooms in his sister's house after having completed the building of it. Here he reacts in the capacity of an architect, i.e. as a working artist; and it is not at all difficult to imagine him at work there, pointing to the ceiling in question as he exclaims "Too low". Aesthetic remarks made from the artist's point of view do, accordingly, no doubt belong to the kind of things that Wittgenstein would count as aesthetic investigations. We can therefore safely include among them his comparison between the philosopher and the draughtsman in the preface to Philosophical Investigations. The artist's way of selecting and rejecting is a ineliminable part of the production of aesthetic phenomena.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-30086-2_32

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