Premium
On Wittgenstein's Notion of Meaning‐Blindness: Its Subjective, Objective and Aesthetic Aspects
Author(s) -
Wenzel Christian Helmut
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
philosophical investigations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.172
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1467-9205
pISSN - 0190-0536
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9205.2009.01382.x
Subject(s) - meaning (existential) , blindness , feeling , hamlet (protein complex) , perspective (graphical) , aesthetics , philosophy , psychology , epistemology , literature , art , medicine , visual arts , optometry
Das Aussprechen eines Wortes ist gleichsam ein Anschlagen einer Taste auf dem Vorstellungsklavier. (Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.) (PU §6) Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words! (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2) Wittgenstein in his later years thought about experiences of meaning and aspect change. Do such experiences matter? Or would a meaning‐ or aspect‐blind person not lose much? Moreover, is this a matter of aesthetics or epistemology? To get a better perspective on these matters, I will introduce distinctions between certain subjective and objective aspects, namely feelings of our inner psychological states versus fine‐tuned objective experiences of the outer world. It seems to me that in his discussion of meaning‐blindness, Wittgenstein unhappily floats between these two extremes, the subjective and the objective. I will also introduce some notions from Kant's aesthetics, to get a better understanding of the interplay between feeling and meaning. This will shed some new light on Wittgenstein's enquiry into meaning‐ and aspect‐blindness.