For our country's aesthetics circles, Wittgenstein is one of the most familiar figures; yet his aesthetic thought has rarely been deeply understood, and its theoretical value rarely valued. Apart from a few scattered notions—"language-game," "family resemblance," and "the limits of language are the limits of the world"—that scholars mouth without reflection, the profound, meticulous thinking Wittgenstein devoted to aesthetics is often neglected. This is, to be sure, related to Chinese scholars' unfamiliarity with the rigorous philosophizing of linguistic analysis; but a very important reason lies in Wittgenstein's distinctive way of thinking and expression: he always seizes on fragmentary, ordinary phenomena of life, points them out plainly, and now and then adds an extremely terse comment, never affecting startling utterances—so that the reader is almost unable to notice the thought deeply buried between the lines, and the things behind those words slip away unnoticed from under one's very eyes. Wang Feng's Aesthetic Grammar is an exception. It not only meticulously expounds Wittgenstein's philosophical and aesthetic thought but, taking this as its theoretical starting point, performs a deep diagnosis and treatment of aesthetic theory, cleaning up the various errors that have long entangled aesthetics, and points out a quite inspiring new path for the reconstruction of aesthetics.
Ever since Plato proposed that "beauty lies in the Idea," the search for the essence of beauty became a knot the successors could not untie, and they set about, one after another, prescribing this or that determination for "beauty." Wittgenstein, however, held that this search is itself an error. He clearly pointed out: there exists no determinate fact of beauty, nor any so-called Idea of beauty. This is a misuse of language, a manipulation of a "super-concept," together with the supposition that there exists a corresponding super-fact. In fact, "beauty" was originally only an interjection, bound up with the action and expression of liking, and gradually came to substitute for that action and expression; later "beauty" was treated as an adjective, used to express a certain quality of the admired object; and then it was regarded as a noun. Thus "beauty" became a super-concept and was mistakenly supposed to refer to certain facts possessing a specific quality. When all the various efforts to find a common quality ended in failure, this hidden, unmanifest essence became extremely mysterious. Beauty was always out of reach.
It is in the language-game that the human forms the super-concept "beauty." For example, when someone aptly expresses his mood, you will say his way of expressing it is "so beautiful!"; and when you eat the vanilla ice cream you like, you will also exclaim, "so beautiful!" Two situations are expressed in the same way, "beautiful," as if they had a common essence. In fact, this is merely a "big word" manufactured by the language-game, a super-concept. The super-concept lumps different situations together, while the facts are wholly different, and there exists no common essence at all. Therefore beauty is not a substance, not the attribute of a substance, nor the common sense (sensus communis) Kant spoke of; it is only a conceptual misuse produced by the language-game. Not only beauty: others, such as the self, the noumenon, mind, consciousness, art, and so on, are all super-concepts. "You do not have this super-fact, yet you are tempted to use a super-expression." (1)
Historicism, in order to avoid metaphysics, stresses the importance of historical context and tries, through concrete contextual analysis, to clarify the differences and the fluid changes among various things. But Wang Feng, following Wittgenstein's basic line of thought, points out: this approach still has not escaped the metaphysical trap; it has only superficially expelled metaphysical essentialism. When historicism traces the origin of beauty, it in fact recalls metaphysics again, merely exiling that "essence" into the distant past. Freud's psychoanalysis is likewise so. Freud regarded the sexual instinct in the unconscious as the source of the sense of beauty, explained the cause of Hamlet's tragedy from latent sexual desire, and treated the artistic process as the sublimation of unconscious desire—which differs in no essential way from the line of historicism: one places the cause in the past, in history; the other hides the cause in the unconscious deep within. "Psychoanalytic interpretation is precisely the making of the sexual in the unconscious into the source of the sense of beauty; in fact, 'aesthetic interpretation is not causal interpretation.'" (2) These are all the result of being influenced by linear logical thinking until thought is hardened; it forcibly stuffs the crisscrossing, juxtaposed, infinitely complex connections among things into a logical framework, manufacturing false causal relations. Even deconstruction's critique of metaphysics is not thorough. Derrida used the arbitrariness of the signifier–signified relation and contextual displacement to dissolve the marriage between signifier and signified; yet once signifier and signified are separated, the appearance of the original meaning is deferred without limit, and the essence is naturally out of reach. Regrettably, this approach only suspends the problem in doubt and has not yet cracked the problem itself.
Wang Feng holds that it is precisely Wittgenstein who most thoroughly critiques metaphysics; using linguistic analysis, he gives aesthetics a deep diagnosis and treatment, thoroughly digging out this wart parasitic on the body of aesthetics. For once "beauty" is only a super-concept created out of nothing, metaphysics is thereby eradicated. Yet, although Wittgenstein banished metaphysics from aesthetics, he did not banish aesthetics; he in fact regarded aesthetics as an "aesthetics of action": "What he opposes is the ontological line of thought that uses super-concepts without reflection; what he advocates is a notion we may provisionally call an aesthetics of action." (3)
When the field of aesthetics has been thoroughly cleaned up, when essentialism has been dug out by the roots, what it leaves for us to do is the art-game. In the art-game, we establish various rules (grammar) according to mutual contracts among ourselves, and engage in different artistic activities according to different rules, carrying out artistic creation and appreciation. Rules let us create works more skillfully and understand works more deeply. "Suppose a Russian who does not understand English is bowled over by a sonnet acknowledged to be a masterpiece; we would say that he has not understood its essentials at all. Likewise, if a person knows nothing of meter yet is overwhelmed by it, we say that he is fundamentally talking Zen at the gate." (4)
Beauty has no essence, and art too has no essence; it is only an art-game following various different rules, and the rules are merely contracts negotiated and established by people in artistic practice. Different rules are in turn mutually connected and interwoven, so that art itself becomes a large family of similar countenance. The mode of connection of this kinship is multidirectional, with no fixed direction; the games it constitutes are random, their boundaries changing and contingent. Just like the resemblances among the members of a family—of build, or features, or eye color, or gait, or temperament, and so on—there exist all sorts of resemblances, the various traits intertwined like tangled roots. One may say that only after deeply critiquing the essentialism of art can we truly understand the phenomenon of family resemblance that Wittgenstein spoke of.
Since art has no essence, it has no boundary either. Wang Feng goes on to point out: art has no "large boundary," only "small boundaries"—that is, the boundaries of art-types—and he takes art-type as a substitute for the nature of art. Clearly, once the essence of art is abolished, the large boundary is thrown open and the boundary vanishes; yet artistic rules in turn make small boundaries possible, because we can entirely distinguish different art-types according to different rules. Therefore, after carrying out a Wittgensteinian analysis, Wang Feng attempts to expound the "aesthetic grammar" he has discovered, deeply exploring the problems of art-type, contract and rule, and literary truth and fiction, and offering extremely profound and valuable reflection toward a new aesthetic construction.
Yet the problem is that the various types of art—such as drama, painting, music, literature…—are also "big words," "super-concepts"; they too have no essence, and therefore no boundary either, not even a "small boundary." Wang Feng has obviously already sensed the paradox in this. In demarcating the small boundary, he repeatedly stresses the relativity of types: the boundary exists only comparatively and is changeable. He even gives up using artistic rules as the criterion for distinguishing types and retreats, step by step, to the carrier (medium) of art. He says: "The range of the boundary proposed here will be limited to the carrier; different carriers, different art-types." (5) The carrier seems to be a relatively hard substance, and classifying on its basis seems also to avoid the indeterminacy of the boundary. But can the carrier really serve as the basis for distinguishing art-types? Take painting: its carrier may be paper, canvas, a porcelain vase, a wall, rock… or any other material. When the mode of carving on rock changes and bas-relief appears, it has already transitioned toward sculpture, and the small boundary no longer exists. Once we abolish the essence, the small boundary of art-type loses its basis of legitimacy at the same time.
Here we see the contradiction and perplexity that Aesthetic Grammar raises—which is precisely Wittgenstein's contradiction and perplexity, rooted in Wittgenstein's contradictory attitude toward artistic rules. On one hand, Wittgenstein recognized that artistic rules are produced from artistic practice, are contracts established in the art-game, cannot be abstracted out of artistic activity, cannot be detached from artistic activity and context, and must be fused into one with artistic practice in a concrete context—which is to say, rules are not abstract and cannot be summed up into words and articles. On the other hand, when speaking of artistic rules, he is always continually referring to some abstract rule. By comparison, Wang Feng has already sensed the danger latent in this; he deliberately stresses that rules are not one or a few but a related "cluster." But even a cluster is already something summed up and abstracted, only that what is abstracted is not just one or a few but a cluster. The crux lies precisely here. Artistic activity, as a kind of behavior, has behavioral conventions that simply cannot be abstracted and expressed in linguistic concepts; concepts and diction will only cut living behavior into fragmentary, dead pieces and cannot restore behavior itself. Therefore one can only acquire them through ceaseless artistic practice, accumulated day by day—just as Xiang-ling learns poetry, learning to write poems in the process of repeatedly chanting them. The conventions contained in the poetic exemplar are comprehended in this process. As for those rules that can be abstracted, such as meter, they are relatively secondary to poetry itself; though they prescribe the features of metrical verse, they are in fact continually remolded and broken. Without meter, it can still be good poetry. Whatever rules can be abstracted are not the most important thing in art; art does not depend on these rules. What is most important are the conventions that cannot be abstracted.
From this angle, for artistic activity, "game" is a clumsy metaphor. The game especially stresses abstract rules; one might almost say it is the rules that determine the game and distinguish the categories of games. This metaphor also misleads art, as if art likewise depended on this or that rule; whereas in fact abstract rules are precisely the unimportant thing and are often temporary, able at any time to be changed and discarded by artistic practice. What is indispensable to artistic activity is convention—that artistic convention closely bound up with artistic behavior. Convention endows artistic activity with communicability and intelligibility, making artistic behavior a kind of "artistic language" in the broad sense. Abandon convention, and art becomes something no one can understand or appreciate, degenerating in the end into private murmuring, an empty groaning without an ailment.
If we go one layer deeper, we will find another of Wittgenstein's contradictions and perplexities—namely, his understanding of language itself. On one hand, Wittgenstein already views language in the broad sense. He says: "What we call 'language' is, first of all, the institution of our ordinary language, the institution of word-language; only then comes other things similar to this institution, or things comparable to such similar things." (6) Speaking of language-learning, he says: "If you go to a foreign tribe whose language you do not understand at all, yet you want to know which words correspond to 'good' and 'fine,' what will you observe? You will observe smiles, gestures, food, toys." (7) Clearly, Wittgenstein has already broadened the extension of the concept of language, using "language" to encompass the "quasi-language" or "broad language" beyond ordinary language—naturally including behavior-language. Wittgenstein also greatly values the foundational role of behavior-language, using behavior-language (smiles, gestures) to help learn ordinary language (good, fine)—which is to say, behavior-language has almost become a "meta-language," a language that helps interpret ordinary language. Yet, once it comes to concrete artistic analysis, Wittgenstein is usually always directed at ordinary language or artistic rules (that is, abstracted techniques such as meter, harmony, counterpoint, texture), while excluding other types of language, especially behavior-language. This is precisely the reason he simply negates "inner language" and Freud's theory of the unconscious.
The greatest difference between behavior-language and ordinary language is this: the former is non-conceptual, while the latter is inseparable from and dependent on concepts. It is precisely because of this feature that human behavior and its conventions are often acquired unconsciously in the practice of life. Behavioral conventions persist within tradition, within everyday life-activity. The human's conscious activity mainly involves activity bearing on linguistic concepts, while the human's unconscious is mainly constituted by the memory of behavior-language. The two languages are both connected and incommensurable. Even pictorial language and musical language are so; between them and behavior-language there exists a difficult relation of conversion and translation. Only the language of dance is closest to everyday behavior-language—though it too must remold and intensify the formal sense and aesthetic sense of everyday behavior, stylize it, and thereby become another kind of language. What people call "inner language" and "the unconscious" is, to a great extent, the memory of behavior-language; because it cannot be directly expressed in ordinary language and is hard to translate fully into ordinary language, it is stored in the unconscious and regarded as "inner language"—although the expression "inner language" is unscientific. And it is precisely in this sense that the unconscious possesses a linguistic structure.
Wang Feng's Aesthetic Grammar not only earnestly cleans up aesthetic theory and makes a plan for reconstructing aesthetics but goes on to raise contradictions and perplexities; at the same time, it implies the answers to resolving those contradictions and perplexities—for when linguistic analysis continually deepens its rigorous, meticulous thinking and pushes theoretical thought to the extreme, it inevitably brings the contradictions and perplexities into relief, and this also foretells the path to resolving them. The most important contribution of an excellent theoretical work lies not in how many so-called truths it proposes; more important is what problems it raises, and to what degree it inspires the reader to continue exploring.