Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger: The Aesthetic Road to a Sceptical Solution of the Sceptical Paradox

RESEARCH ARTICLE Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger : The Aesthetic Road to a Sceptical Solution of the Sceptical Paradox Vojtěch Kolman Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Charles University, Prague, CZ vojtech.k[email protected] Starting with Wittgenstein’s remark about his allegedly frequent visits to the performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , the paper presents Wagner’s opera – being explicitly an opera about rules and rule-following – as a possible stimulus for the later Wittgenstein’s thinking about language. Besides Wittgenstein’s systematic interest in parallels between music and language, the paper draws on the choice of terminology (such as the comparison of rules to rails) and on Wittgenstein’s own examples of rule-following. More speculatively, the phrasing as well as the solution to what Kripke called Wittgenstein’s sceptical paradox is used as a point of comparison that brings Wittgenstein’s aesthetic innuendos closer not only to mainstream philosophy of language, but due to the antithetical structure of Kripke’s argument, also to the broader philosophical and aesthetic tradition of German idealism. Keywords: Wittgenstein; rule-following; Richard Wagner; sceptical paradox; aesthetics I. Introduction According to Brian McGuiness’s account, Ludwig Wittgenstein was repeatedly heard to say that during his student years in Berlin he had attended Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at least 30 times.1 As McGuinness adds, this most certainly had to have been an exaggeration since there simply were not that many performances of the opera during that time. Two related questions suggest themselves in this connection: 1 Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life; Young Ludwig, 1889–1921 (London: Duckworth, 1988), 55. Works by Wittgenstein are abbreviated as follows: Culture and Value, 2nd ed., ed. Georg Henrik von Wright and Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), abbreviated as CV; Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), abbreviated as LC; Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), abbreviated as PI; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1995), abbreviated as TLP. Kolman, Vojtěch. ‘Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger : The Aesthetic Road to a Sceptical Solution of the Sceptical Paradox.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LVII/XIII, no.1 (2020): pp.44–63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.28 ESTETIKA THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 45 (A) Are there some deeper philosophical grounds for this obvious inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s narration? (B) Does Wittgenstein’s alleged fondness for this particular piece by Wagner have some significant philosophical background or consequences? The scholarly studies devoted to this theme have to date focused almost exclusively on question (B), answering it in relatively general – mostly biographical or cultural – terms.2 In this paper, I would like to proceed rather differently and answer both questions in a way much closer to the proper agenda of Wittgenstein scholarship, particularly the rule-following debate as set by Kripke’s influential reading of Wittgenstein.3 Given the prominent position of Kripke’s reading in mainstream philosophy of language, I leave aside the question of its overall faithfulness to Wittgenstein’s intentions (such questions are, anyway, the unavoidable epiphenomena of philosophical fruitfulness), focusing instead on its potential to reveal some important similarities between Wagner’s and Wittgenstein’s respective treatments of rules.4 In the following, one can quite easily identify the parts of argumentation that depend on Kripke’s reading (the so-called Kripkenstein) and those that are more directly connected to the given textual evidence. Taking these reservations for granted, I will argue that question (A) and question (B) are not only interconnected but related to the very core of Wittgenstein’s later thinking about meaning and understanding with its particular focus on meaning and understanding in music, that is, on the field of aesthetics and musical experience. It is, in the end, the matter of rules that Wittgenstein describes as being of aesthetic significance: ‘If I hadn’t learnt the rules, I would not be making an aesthetic judgement’ (LC, p. 5). At the same time, he puts this in contrast with the subjective conceptions of aesthetic meaning as based on mere interjections (‘This is lovely’, ‘This is grand’, and so on) and stresses the role of repetition in matters of understanding: ‘I had read this kind of stuff [Klopstock’s poetry] and had been moderately bored, but when I read it in this particular way, intensely, I smiled, said: “This is grand”, etc. But I might not have said anything. The important fact was that I read it again and again’ (LC, p. 4). The most important lead one can follow here, though, is the fact that, contrary to the standard analytical approach, Wittgenstein does not treat art as some oddity that is inferior or unrelated to other fields of spirit (such as science or logic) but as an inseparable part of the single body of human experience. In this, his philosophy is undoubtedly an heir to the great philosophical systems of German Idealism. II. Points of Comparison Let me start with a short sketch of my line of reasoning before I present a more detailed account. As for question (A), which concerns the allegedly large number of opera visits by Wittgenstein, my suggestion is that Wittgenstein’s statement primarily served the purpose of 2 This holds for McGuinness’s text as well as for Eggers in her study on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of music where the Die Meistersinger passage from McGuiness’s book is quoted and commented upon. See Katrin Eggers, Ludwig Wittgenstein als Musikphilosoph (Freiburg: Alber, 2011), 107–8. In addition, Szabados, in the most detailed contribution to the topic, compares Wagner and Wittgenstein predominately from the point of view of musical criticism and themes such as the interplay of music and language that both Wagner and Wittgenstein were interested in. See Béla Szabados, ‘Wittgenstein’s Reception of Wagner: Language, Music, and Culture’, in Wittgenstein Reading, ed. Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer, Daniel Steuer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 171–96. 3 Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 4 For a representative overview of this discussion, see Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright, eds., Rule-Following and Meaning (New York: Acumen, 2002). Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 46 roughly delimiting his general approach to aesthetics. In the Tractatus, aesthetics is treated alongside the related disciplines of logic and ethics that do not approach the world as it is but as it should be (TLP 6.421). As a result, the aesthetic judgements cannot be reduced to proclamations like ‘I like the Meistersinger’ (or ‘I am telling the truth’, or ‘I mean well’), that is, to something one can say, but rather to what shows itself on the broader horizon of what one regularly does.5 ‘We don’t start from certain words, but from certain occasions or activities’ (LC, p. 3). And ‘the aesthetic adjectives play hardly any role’ in this (LC, p. 5). In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, this approach transforms itself slowly into the closely related problem of the conditions under which one is able to ascribe to somebody the status of understanding a musical piece. According to Wittgenstein, one cannot separate matters of understanding from the behaviour of the person in question (what he or she does), and from assessments of the gestures, expressions, and moves of other people as suitable or not (see, for example, CV, p. 80; PI, § 332). This is why frequent visits to the performance of Die Meistersinger, and not the mere expression of liking the opera, are relevant in assigning it a musical value (as it is good behaviour and not just good intentions that makes a person good). If we take this proposal seriously, we might coherently proceed to question (B) and look for the reasons why Wittgenstein might have been fond of this particular piece of music. On the one hand, we know from Culture as Value that he was not exactly a Wagner fan. On the other hand, we also know that he took his cultural interests very seriously – even to the point of suggesting that they provide a key to understanding his philosophical work.6 People like Beethoven are mentioned as representatives of an intellectual world whose problems have never been tackled properly and that has, as such, gradually become unintelligible to our culture (CV, p. 11). Now, is there something in this regard that might also be applicable to the case of Wagner? The straightforward way of answering this question would be to start again with the matter of understanding music, which is a central topic of Wittgenstein’s later thought alongside the theme of rule-following. Both themes might be connected to Wagner’s deliberately trespassing the borders of tonality, that is, breaking and following its rules at the same time. Unfortunately, Die Meistersinger – unlike, say, Tristan or Parsifal – is rather conservative regarding the question of musical progress and, as such, less suitable for that purpose. The opera’s story, written by Wagner himself, deals quite explicitly with these themes to the extent of their concurrent employment in the drama and its theoretical reflection. As for the rules and their (dis)obeying, Wagner programmatically defends the middle way between the extremes of either unconditionally sticking to explicit – that is theoretically-based – rules or their plain denial. In addition to this, he generalizes these approaches and their conflict not only with respect to aesthetic norms (represented in the opera by the singing contest) but significantly also with respect to the rules of society (the peaceful and orderly city of Nuremberg) and to the norms as such. These observations provide us with the general frame against which the influence of Wagner on Wittgenstein might be analysed in a way surpassing the mere observation that 5 The Tractatus’s distinction between saying and showing (in language and in its logical form) anticipates the later distinction between saying and doing (in language and with language), particularly if one takes into account the difference between sign and symbol, the latter defined as a sign employed. See TLP 3.326–27. Both distinctions are, one might say, of a transcendental nature, differing in the very source of this transcendency, which might be either the Kantian transcendental subject (as opposed to the empirical Ego) or the Hegelian I that became We, particularly if interpreted as the whole of society together with its normative practices. 6 See Maurice O’Connor, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 112–89. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 47 both Wittgenstein and Wagner shared an interest in the problem of rule-following.7 The nontriviality of the comparison does not stem from rule-following itself but from the dialectical way it is treated, namely as something pertaining to a deeper conflict concerning the possibility of mutual understanding, whether in science, music, or in everyday life. How do I know that somebody is following a given rule (that is, understands what I mean) if I only ever have finite evidence at my disposal? At this moment, I will turn to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein. Despite its controversial nature, I believe that the links that it helps us to find not only between Wagner and Wittgenstein, but also between the history of philosophy and Wittgenstein’s work, provide a sufficient interpretative ground and might even corroborate Kripke’s argumentation in a retrospective way. As for the history of philosophy, the link based on the ‘antithetical’ reading of Hume and Kant is suggested by Kripke himself.8 I will complement it with a ‘synthetical’ link to the philosophy of Hegel. According to Kripke, Wittgenstein poses the question ‘How do I know that somebody is following a given rule?’ in the form of the so-called sceptical paradox.9 In Kripke’s reading, one first rules out the possibility of finding the answer to the question in the privacy of the subject on the one hand, and of finding it in the objective sphere outside of it on the other hand. The correct, ‘middle’ option is rather to be found in a society as the representative of normatively charged intersubjectivity. In terms of rule-following, one replaces the two extremes of rules one can follow privately (if there are any) and rules one can explicitly write down by rules which have an implicit – that is, practically and socially based – component of customs or social institutions. This insight into the social and practical employment of rules, and the ‘middle’ option based on it, is the core of what Kripke called Wittgenstein’s sceptical solution to the sceptical paradox.10 Now, in my view, Wagner’s libretto might be seen as anticipating Wittgenstein’s later position on rules, including the choice of terminology (such as the comparison of ‘rules’ to ‘rails’) and, more importantly, the phrasing as well as the solution to his sceptical paradox. In the following, this reading will be supported by a detailed analysis of several rather generic scenes dealing with rule-following. Of particular importance is the following triad: (1) The scene in the song-school and the conflict between Beckmesser, Stolzing, and Sachs concerning the possibility of rule-following (Act 1, Scene 3). (2) The dialogue between Sachs and Stolzing about the difference between the beautiful song and the master song as something which is composed according to the rules (Act 3, Scene 2). (3) Sachs’s final monologue defending the importance of rules (Act 3, Scene 5). In analogy to Wittgenstein’s solution to his rule-following paradox, this triad might be seen as representing the conflicting positions of (1) appealing to the privacy of the subject and (3) appealing to an objective standard, and their reconciliation in the ‘middle’ position of (2) intersubjectivity as providing the solution to the paradox. In the story, this middle position is portrayed as an artistic catharsis. Thus, a clear correspondence between matters of logic (resolution of the paradox) and matters of aesthetics (resolution of the dramatic conflict) will be established. Let me start with the very conflict described in the drama. 7 Unsurprisingly, such an identity of interest is certified by all of the above-mentioned authors. See ftn. 2. 8 Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules, 62. 9 Ibid., 21. 10 Ibid., 66. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 48 III. Levels of Generality The storyline of Die Meistersinger is very simple: three men love one girl, one wins, one loses, and one gives up. However, the competition is not based on brute force but on a singing contest in which the conflicting sides are legibly representing the deeper attitudes toward the rules and the competition itself. Let us describe, first, this portrayal of the basic conflict. In doing so, I suggest taking into account the different hermeneutical levels one is dealing with according to their increasing generality. I will acknowledge three of them: (i) The story level at which the classical principle of dramatic structure is implicitly followed in resolving the basic conflict by way of an artistic catharsis. (ii) The aesthetic level at which the story level is reflected upon as an example of something that has a more general, aesthetic interest. Being an opera about rules in singing, Die Meistersinger provides the possibility to follow this interest from both a textual as well as a musical point of view, discussing the ideas of artistic progress as stemming from the conflict of the established rules and the disobeying of them. (iii) The philosophical level for which the field of aesthetics serves as an ‘example’. The opera’s prospective goal is to show that understanding as a matter of rules is not a purely theoretical enterprise, but something fully clothed in a socially mediated agency. By this, the skeptical paradox – as an utmost generalization of all of the above-mentioned conflicts – should be overcome. As for levels (i) and (ii), the figure of Walther von Stolzing, a young Franconian knight, obviously stands for the naïve art of immediate impressions and inspiration. He sees a ‘fair maiden’, falls in love, and wants to marry her on the spot. The singing contest and its rules are just an obstacle to him, quite arbitrary and useless as far as his goal is concerned. Stolzing’s rival in the competition, the guild’s marker Beckmesser, epitomizes on the other hand the adherence to the established and explicitly stated rules, serving famously as a caricature of the aesthetic formalism of Wagner’s arch-enemy Hanslick, according to whom – at least in Wagner’s biased reading – the aesthetic quality of music has nothing to do with the emotional conditions of the listener or the composer but simply represents the art of ‘tönend bewegten Formen’.11 As opposed to the naïve art of Stolzing, Beckmesser thus represents the so-called academic art12 which, by following the established rules and customs, excludes all that does not comply with them. The first and most transparent conflict between the two attitudes is depicted in the very first act of the opera. Here, Stolzing wants to be admitted to the mastersingers’ guild in order to partake in the competition for Eva’s hand in marriage. The apprentice David explains to him the differences between a singer, a poet, and a master-singer as well as the other proprieties of the game such as the role of the marker and the meaning of the written rules (‘Tabulatur’). The master song is a song that, according to the guild rules, is controlled by the marker who, after seven mistakes, declares the singer as ‘outsung and outdone’ (‘versungen und vertan’). In his introductory address, one of the masters reads the ‘Tabulatur’, explicitly mentioning the plagiary clause (no more than four syllables are allowed to be used from another master song), and describes the ‘bar form’ of the song. Here, the ‘bar’ (stave) AAB 11 Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Barth, 1974), 45. 12 Here, and in the rest of the text, I am taking advantage of Meyer’s useful distinction. See Leonard Meyer, Emotions and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 71. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 49 should consist of two stanzas (Stollen) of the same melody A and the aftersong (Abgesang) B with a melody of its own. As Dahlhaus has pointed out,13 the interesting aspect of Walther’s subsequent song is not its unconventionality but the fact that its first stanza consists of two parts, the first being more than 160 bars long (in the usual sense of the word ‘bar’) and ending with a cadence, the second being melodically very different from the first. According to Dahlhaus, this explains why Beckmesser feels obliged to end the trial song in the middle of the second stanza, interpreting the sequence A1B1A2 as formally closed. But this is not the form of Walther’s song. Later, when Stolzing starts to sing again despite Beckmesser’s and other masters’ protests, one can hear that it is only the beginning of the more complex bar structure of A1B1A2B2C. Hence, the form of Stolzing’s song has been misunderstood though not without good grounds. It is this simple situation that allows us to proceed quite comfortably to level (iii) of the philosophical reflection by way of its comparison with the agenda of rule-following as set by Kripke’s interpretation of the given paragraphs (see, particularly, PI, §§ 143–46, 185–87). In this arrangement, the similarity between both ‘scenes’ is rather striking. I will describe the similarity in some detail anyway for the sake of argument. Let me start with some short remarks recapitulating the core features of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy relevant for my argument. The introduction of the game metaphor, together with the concept of a rule, is relevant for the problem of meaning. The game metaphor enabled Wittgenstein to look at the problems of knowledge and understanding, including those of art, as problems of rule-following. By doing so, he presents experience as something active and procedural – one has to live together with others and not only passively receive or decipher. This shift of focus particularly concerns the move away from the concept of knowledge as a mental state or a mental process (such as Plato’s recollection) into its socially and pragmatically oriented form as to whether someone manages to follow some rule. Now, how does one know that someone, for example, a child (or the dramatic persona used by Wittgenstein in § 143 and § 185 of Philosophical Investigations), has mastered a rule such as adding + 2? The suggestion is to let the child start with 2 and check if she can proceed as follows: 4, 6, 8, … The problem emerges at this point, namely, that one can never know whether, after a finite number of steps, the child will not follow with something unexpected, for example, 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012, … claiming that she thought from the beginning the rule was meant like this. Different and yet related situations are, of course, imaginable in which the envisaged rule is, in the course of the development of the series, replaced by another one, and so on. This scenario corresponds to the situation presented in Wagner’s opera where the scheme ABA is first recognized only to be 13 Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagners Musikdramen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1996), 111. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 50 replaced later by AAB. The aftermath of these observations, as Wittgenstein and Kripke point out, constitutes the very core of the paradox: How can one objectively follow some rule if everything can be made out to accord with the rule or to conflict with the rule (consider the case of adding 2 or the sequence consisting of three cats a1, a2, a3 which, appended by the instance a4 of a dog, might be read as an example of fluffiness, rabies, or mammalhood; PI, § 201). Interpreting the paradox as one of scepticism about the possibility of understanding what someone else means, Kripke suggests talking about a sceptical paradox. What is more, he does so with explicit reference to the more general and famous case of Humean scepticism about inductive reasoning, namely about how a finite number of examples can justify an infinite generalization characteristic for general laws, rules, and so on. As is well known, in his Enquiry, David Hume succumbed to this scepticism, admitting that there is no such logically valid justification and that our inferences from the singular case to the infinite case are based on mere habit or on the inclinations of the ‘flesh’ to believe that which one sees more frequently than that which one sees less frequently.14 By adopting this position, he solved the paradox in a negative way. By contrast, Kant, awakened by Hume from his dogmatic slumber, provides what can be called a positive solution to the paradox: the inductive transfer is not justified per se but only on the additional basis of our reason’s ability to prescribe to the world what is ours, that is, our rules and laws.15 Put otherwise, there is no regularity in nature without our ability to see it there.16 While the paradox seems to be solved in this positive way, it is, in fact, only pushed further since reason’s activity of prescribing the explicit rules, for example, that of adding 2, does not, per se, explain why one should continue the sequence 996, 998, 1000 with 1002 rather than 1004 without referring to another rule explaining this application, in this case without explaining the relation of the explicit rule + 2 to the sequence 996, 998, 1000 …, as being in accord with it. Only by acknowledging this difficulty in the Kantian positive solution (by acknowledging the fact that it leads to an infinite regress) can we appreciate Wittgenstein’s contribution to the debate.17 A contribution that is fully conversant with Wagner’s opera. IV. The Middle Position It should not go unnoticed that the philosophical conflict described in the previous section under the title ‘sceptical paradox’ has been slightly modified. It is now presented as one arising from the tension between the Humean and the Kantian solutions to scepticism. Phrased in Wittgensteinian terms, this is the tension between the radical denial of the validity of rules in favour of an unjustified habit and the assumption that the rules exist in the fixed apriority of our minds. Seen in this light, Wittgenstein’s solution to his paradox may be seen as aiming at a reconciliation of the two alternatives by finding the missing ‘middle’ position that can be read either as the idealization of Hume or, inversely, as the naturalization of Kant. In my view, the emerging ‘middle’ position is consistent with the position adopted by Hegel.18 14 See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 32. 15 See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10. 16 Ibid., 72: ‘the understanding does not draw its (a priori) laws from nature, but prescribes them to it.’ 17 The opposition of the Kantian explicit treatment of rules and Wittgenstein’s argumentation in the Philosophical Investigations, including the reference to the infinite regress and Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein, plays an important interpretative starting point for the tradition of Brandom’s and Sellars’s inferentialism, see particularly Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 18–66. 18 Relation of Wittgenstein to Hegel is, of course, quite delicate. I reconstruct it, to a certain detail, along the given lines in Vojtěch Kolman, ‘Master, Slave and Wittgenstein: the Dialectic of Rule-Following’, in Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference, ed. Jakub Mácha and Alexander Berg (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 227–42. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 51 As for the idealization of Hume, the argument starts with the realization that habit is not something one-sidedly conditioned by nature but also comes from a mutual and active adaptation of man to world and vice versa. To give an example belonging to level (ii) of aesthetic norms, our sensitivity to the effects of Western music cannot be qualified as congenital (the phenomenon of tonality being a brand new enterprise from the evolutionary perspective) but as something children have to actively grow into. As some studies have shown,19 this process, beginning with the perception of the acoustic continuum as divided into the discrete points of our musical scales and proceeding to a familiarity with the characteristics of our tonal system and functional harmony, is substantially shaped by the frequency of the occurrences of the individual stimuli. These occurrences, such as the leading tone followed by the tonic rather than by any other tonal function (or pause), or the recognition of the piece of music as being in this rather than in that particular key, are not however purely contingent but stem from us, from the musical tradition actively shaped by us during the last four hundred years. Human habit, therefore, might be seen as playing the role given by Kant to the a priori structures of reason: it is our contribution to the rational regimentation of the world.20 Seen from the other direction, that is, from the point of view of the naturalization of Kant, one can read the same process as one in which the a priori structures of mind acquire more earthbound reading. They are not somewhere in the structures of an elusive transcendental subject but in the concrete, if also abstract, rules of the society’s normative practices. Such a naturalization is not of a mere empirical nature but rather close to the idealism of Hegel, which treats social agency as the true expression of spirit. In Wittgenstein’s thought, this view is mirrored in the very claim that to obey a rule is custom, use, or institution (PI, § 199). Wittgenstein arrives at the solution to his paradox by twisting the original question. The problem is not only ‘how do I know the child managed to follow a given rule?’ but also ‘how does the child know she has managed to follow it?’ This twist leads directly to the above-mentioned sceptical solution to the paradox as the coveted middle point. On the one hand, one does not have anything absolutely fixed or stable here such as, for example, the explicit rule or other third object that one can objectively relate to, since such a reference, or interpretation, would also have to proceed according to some rule and thus only replace one rule by another. On the other hand, the answer cannot be found in the privacy of our minds or in the habits one subjectively acquires, since to follow some rule simply by my own private resources ends up in a state in which obeying a rule coincides with thinking I am obeying a rule (PI, § 202). In Kripke’s particular reading, this amounts to what is known as Wittgenstein’s private language argument.21 Losing both the external as well as internal criteria for objectivity, one can either succumb to the weight of the dilemma (and thus ‘solve’ the paradox in a negative way) or realize with Wittgenstein that this dilemma is only an apparent one. There is still something one positively has all the time while asking the above-mentioned question, namely the relative stability of the underlying linguistic practice in which, incidentally, this question itself is also phrased. 19 See, particularly, David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 20 See my paper ‘Emotions and Understanding in Music: A Transcendental and Empirical Approach’, Idealistic Studies 11 (2014): 83–100. 21 Usually, the argument is identified with the paragraphs 243–315 of Philosophical Investigations; see, for example, Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 309. The peculiarity of Kripke’s reading consists in connecting these paragraphs with PI, § 202 concerning the rule-following paradox. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 52 Such a resolution is not a negative one since it does not dissmiss the possibility of knowing and understanding. But it is not a positive one either, since it does not provide us with some standard of knowledge besides knowledge itself. Put differently, nobody knows anything because there is nothing absolutely independent to know except knowledge itself which, however, rather than something to be shared, is the very activity of sharing. Concerning Wittgenstein’s game metaphor, think here of ballroom dancing rather than football, that is, of games where what is shared is not some external object (ball) but the activity itself.22 As for the rule-metaphor, what one has here is the transformation of opposites – the explicit rules, on the one hand, and the total lack of them, on the other – into the concept of the implicit rule as another name for the normativity of the human practices that are prior to any interpretation. From the point of view of the opera’s story (i), this reconciliation is more than legibly epitomized by the central participant of the drama, Hans Sachs. Being a poet and a cobbler in one person, Sachs is contrasted to the city clerk Beckmesser, who, contrary to other guild members, does not even have a trade of his own, and thus lives off the social contract without direct relation to the underlying practice or motivations that led to it. (The same, of course, applies mutatis mutandis to the music critic Hanslick as opposed to the active artist and theoretician Wagner.) Stolzing’s negative attitude to the rules of the mastersingers’ guild, on the other hand, is shaped by the fact that as a young aristocrat, his social status is a matter of blood heritage and thus, to a certain extent, independent of them. At the aesthetic level (ii), the academic and naïve art, as represented by Beckmesser and Stolzing, are to be unified in the traditional art of Sachs who, being a self-conscious substitute for Wagner himself, takes the tradition and its principles seriously without dogmatically insisting on the preservation of some particular set of rules. The reason is that he knows that they are rooted in the society and its customs and as such changeable according to society’s needs. In the story, as well as in historical reality, this is reflected in Sachs’s resolution to let the quality of the songs be judged not only by the masters, but also by the town citizens, as pictured in the final scene of the opera. The generalization of these insights at level (iii) is provided by an analysis of the respective textual evidence. I will come to this in the next section, which is central as far as the main thesis of the paper is concerned. V. Textual Evidence The aim of this section is to provide detailed textual grounds for the parallel reading of Wittgenstein’s sceptical paradox with its sceptical solution and the very text of Wagner’s opera. The main moment of this evidence, namely, the basic dramatic conflict that can be generalized to the interpretative levels from (i) to (iii), was already given in section III, in connection with the problem of following the bar form. Its direct connection to Wittgenstein’s problem of following the rule + 2, I hope, was made sufficiently transparent. What I now want to argue is that this basic situation is further developed against the background of the two extreme positions represented by Beckmesser and Stolzing. According to the first position, the criterion of success in rule-following is guaranteed by some objective standards, such as the explicit rules controlled by the expert-committee. Those adopting the second position think of rule-following as based on the private decisions of some individual, on his feelings or subjectively established habits. The middle position surpassing both emerges slowly but visibly within the action of Wagner’s opera. Let us come to this. 22 See Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 172, but also Robert Brandom, ‘Facts, Norms and Normative: A Reply to Habermas’, European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 363. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 59 result one-sidedly dependent on the negated position, but at the same time preserving it, which is the way to achieve a new and self-standing aesthetic position. The promoted middle point between the given extremes is not, of course, available without a certain sacrifice. In the musical or artistic case, this middle position requires giving up familiar, comfortable, and popular techniques in favour of a ‘greater good’. As Robinson has pointed out,27 it is exactly the theme of renunciation as a means of artistic progress that Wagner discusses in Die Meistersinger in connection with Sachs’s renouncement of his love to Eva in favour of Stolzing. This happens not only for the sake of their personal happiness but also for the sake of society, which, for its further functioning, needs a change in pre-established rules on the basis of new inspirations and interests. The role of implicit rules as the middle term between the primordial interest which we have as simple biological creatures and explicit rules that arose from them is interestingly developed within Sachs’s madnessmonologue from Scene 1 of Act 3. These are the relevant parts (emphasis mine): SACHS Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness! […] No one has reward or thanks for it: driven to flight, he thinks he is hunting; hears not his own cry of pain; when he digs into his own flesh he thinks he is giving himself pleasure! […] How peacefully with its staunch customs, contented in deed and work, lies, in the middle of Germany, my dear Nuremberg! […] Now let us see how Hans Sachs manages finely to guide the madness so as to perform a nobler work: for if madness won’t leave us in peace even here in Nuremberg, then let it be in the service of such works as are seldom successful in common-place activities and never so without a touch of madness. Here, the depiction of the pre-social selfish world is contrasted with the orderly city of Nuremberg with its customs and guild structure, leading to the dialectical insight that one cannot completely obviate the pre-normative, immediate attitude to the world as being based on what Wagner calls ‘madness’ – a view quite in accord with what Wittgenstein calls ‘wildness’ to be tamed within all great art (CV, p. 43). What one can do with it is to incorporate the omnipresent madness into the general normativity as its impulse and basic source. What 27 Robinson, Opera and Ideas, 234. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 60 leads to the rules and to their normativity is the ability to cultivate this original and pervasive ‘madness’ in contact with others by giving up some inclinations of the flesh in favour of a general consensus, as Sachs did by giving up Eva in favour of Stolzing and, in fact, Nuremberg. If looking for a suitable framework in which Sachs’s self-sacrifice can be placed on the hermeneutical level (iii), I suggest Hegel’s master-slave parable together with the ‘life and death fight’ in which one’s biological life is risked and normativity arises. While potentially surprising, this is not an arbitrary choice, given Hegel’s contribution to the theme of the sociality of normative reason (as opposed to the limited positions of Hume and Kant) and the topical as well as argumentative coincidence of both Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.28 Here, I will limit myself only to suggesting that the masterslave parable be read not as a loose reference to the problem of mastering the rule but as a complex epistemological argument concerning the fight of mere ‘private’ opinions resulting in the emergence of intersubjective knowledge.29 According to the examples given, the social implementation and mastering of rules arises from the mutual conditioning of the pupil and his teacher or, more generally, of two dialogue partners in the process of following a rule. What is risked there, I claim, is the certainty of one’s private opinion, which, in its aiming at objective knowledge, necessarily becomes fallible. The adequacy of this comparison might be tested against our analysis of the dialogue between Sachs and Stolzing (see section V). The idea is to look at it as an instance of the dialectic of the master and his pupil with some notable pitfalls of their relationship being stressed. So, for example, the authority of the teacher as opposed to the cognitive dependency of the student (who has to be trained, not taught at first; PI, § 5) can easily fall into a state in which the student only repeats what she thinks the teacher expects her to say, thus condemning the teacher to an aimless monologue. By not having any kind of resistance, though, the teacher becomes more and more dependent on his own rules or on what he thinks they are, thus ceasing to be a teacher as defined in his relation to the student and not primarily to himself. The student, on the other hand, by trying to figure out how to go on might achieve a certain independency of topic, making her own activity, as opposed to the idle authority of the teacher, at least a rudimentary form of understanding. It is obvious that Sachs, in his explicit reliance on both Stolzing’s own inspiration (his ‘beautiful dream’) and the teaching of the old masters, is well aware of these twists that the master-pupil relation (as a special case of the dialectic of master and slave) might involve. These prospective twists also show us why the extreme of Beckmesser is less favourable to that of Stolzing, despite their seemingly symmetrical status of ‘master without pupil’ vs. ‘pupil without master’. VII. Conclusions In this paper, I have analysed and reconstructed the factual as well as hypothetical role of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in framing the agenda of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. First, I pointed out that the opera deals with the problem of rules and their role in the life of a society at several hermeneutical levels. Second, I explored the idea that Wagner’s opera – as an example of art about art – advances the topic of self-reflection and the role that explicit rules play in human experience. In both areas I have stressed the thematic as well as structural similarity between Wittgenstein’s solution of the sceptical paradox, as represented by Kripke’s reading, and the dramatic structure of Wagner’s opera, revolving around the basic 28 They are described in Kolman, ‘Master, Slave and Wittgenstein’. 29 The epistemic interpretation of the master-slave dialectic can be found, for example, in Pirmin StekelerWeithofer, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 1, Gewissheit und Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner, 2014). Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 61 triad of the opera’s important scenes. Retrospectively, as far as the argument goes, these scenes adopted the following functions: (1) The scene in the song-school introduces the sceptical paradox and the insufficiency of the explicit rules (‘Tabulatur’ of the masters’ guild) in solving it. (2) The dialog of Sachs and Stolzing serves as a critique of the paradox’s private solution based on the mere negation of the explicit rules and the belief that one can relate to others only on the grounds of primordial desire (‘madness’). (3) Sachs’s final monologue defends the essential nature of explicit rules in the life of society and its practices. The social and practical dimension of rules is developed in all of these scenes, leading to the concept of an implicit rule as a sceptical solution to the paradox. This particularly holds for Scene (2), where the rule-mastering is described as a dialogical enterprise of mutual control and encouragement with the occasional help of inherited explicit rules and instructions. The additional scenes mentioned in the paper might be seen as supporting this reading in the following respects: (1’) The scene in which – as a result of Beckmesser’s misconceived, though formally correct, song – social disorder breaks out is a negative corollary to Scene (1). (2’) Sachs’s madness monologue, in which the problem of establishing and preserving the social order is dealt with, serves as an introduction to (2). As such, its goal is to elucidate the relation between the role of explicit rules and primordial madness. This madness (or wildness) might be interpreted as our immediate attitude to the world that is to be further nurtured and cultivated in the social interaction by means of both implicit and explicit rules. (3’) In the final scene, particularly in the reformation song preceding Sachs’s speech mentioned in (3), the joined need for both collective agreement and expert decisions is advocated. The unity of the community expressed in the choir stands in vital contrast to the social disarray as described in the scene (1’).30 To sum up, this schematization allows for both vertical and horizontal reading. In the vertical one, scenes (1) and (3), as well as (1’) and (3’), are looked at as epitomizing the extreme positions concerning the nature of rules to be sublated in the material of scenes (2) and (2’). In the horizontal reading, the corresponding scenes (x) and (x’) are elaborating on the same topic from different sides. As a result, the paradox’s solution and the resolution of the opera’s conflict are interlinked even more tightly, thus demonstrating one specific role that aesthetics might have in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. As the discussion in Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief indicates, aesthetics is not a discipline sui generis, separated from epistemological or other issues of understanding, but a complex enterprise devoted to the selfconscious appreciation of rules and their role in the life of a society. As such, it seems to cover both the practical appreciation of their fit (‘We are again and again using this simile of something clicking or fitting, when really there is nothing that clicks or fits’; LC, p. 19), as well as the theoretical reflection of their change and plurality (‘You can say that every composer 30 This observation is also due to Robinson, see Robinson, Opera and Ideas, 233. Kolman: Wittgenstein and Die Meistersinger 62 changed the rules, but the variations were very slight; not all the rules were changed’; LC, p. 6). Both of these themes are explicitly treated in Wagner’s opera. From this point of view, Wittgenstein’s frequent visits to performances of Die Meistersinger serve, first, as an example of aesthetically proper behaviour, and, second, as a reflection of the opera’s plot. The joint solution to questions (A) and (B) is based on this, and prospectively covers the announced relation to the aesthetics of German idealism and its roots in the respective theory of judgement. Not only is it impossible to make any judgement without establishing some rule or regularity (‘The important fact was that I read it again and again’; LC, p. 6), but, in making the judgement, one is both applying the rules and also changing them by this very application. (‘In learning the rules you get more and more refined judgements. Learning the rules actually changes your judgement’; LC, p. 5.) This shows the epistemic importance of art and makes it, as far as the matter of rule-following is concerned, into one of the most paradigmatic language-games. Acknowledgement The work has been supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (No. CZ.02. 1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734) and by the Programme PROGRES Q14 at Charles University. The author would like to thank the anonymous referees for valuable comments. Competing Interests The author has no competing interests to declare. References Brandom, Robert. ‘Facts, Norms and Normative: A Reply to Habermas.’ European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 356–74. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0378.00115 ––––––. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Dahlhaus, Carl. Richard Wagners Musikdramen. Leipzig: Reclam, 1996. Eggers, Katrin. Ludwig Wittgenstein als Musikphilosoph. Freiburg: Abler, 2011. Glock, Hans-Johann. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 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