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Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics and the Limits of Language
Beauty beyond words
Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow sold for over $86M, but the artist would argue that doesn’t reflect the painting’s value. Rothko the true value of his works resides in how they capture emotions. “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” This idea echoes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about the limitations of language to describe aesthetics.
In , Wittgenstein examined language’s boundaries. He proposed that language operates by creating “pictures” of reality, where sentences represent facts in the world. For example, “The sun is shining” succeeds because it mirrors a specific state of affairs. However, he insisted that ethics and aesthetics exist outside this representational framework. “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental,” Wittgenstein observed. Here, “transcendental” suggests that ethics and aesthetics reflect values rather than factual descriptions, existing beyond the logical realm of language.
Art provides a great example of this. Unlike a map, which provides a factual representation, a painting communicates a message through its form and composition. Mark Rothko’s abstract works, for instance, move me emotionally with their…
