While anyone familiar with the literature would not hesitate to acknowledge the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the development of twentieth-century aesthetics, fewer perhaps would regard him as having made a substantive contribution to the tradition in his own right. On a personal level, Wittgenstein was engaged intensely with matters artistic and aesthetic, especially music, references to which occur throughout his writings. His father Karl was a prominent patron of the arts, and as a member of a prominent family the young Ludwig grew up at the heart of Viennese cultural life, the world of Gustav Klimt (who painted the wedding portrait of Wittgenstein’s sister, Margaret), Johannes Brahms, and Gustav Mahler (both of whom regularly gave concerts in the music rooms of the Palais Wittgenstein); Maurice Ravel, famously, composed the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand for Wittgenstein’s older brother Paul, who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in World War I. The thought that Wittgenstein’s cultural biography might not have translated into a decipherable philosophical aesthetics is due to the fact that his influence in the field is felt not primarily from anything he said about aesthetic matters per se, but through central concepts drawn by others from his philosophy of language more generally: as we shall see in the latter part of this chapter, his view of “rule following” and the concepts of “seeing as,” “language games,” and “family resemblances” inspired major, even landmark contributions to the field.

That the official influence of Wittgenstein should have taken this form is hardly surprising given that the only work he dedicated explicitly to the subject, although in limited circulation before, was not widely available until its publication in 1967: the eponymous “Lectures on Aesthetics,” transcriptions of notes taken by students in a small private seminar Wittgenstein gave at Cambridge in the summer of 1938. As a result, aestheticians working in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy looked to insights developed in the course of pursuing extraaesthetic matters, and this is reflected in the work that was done in his name.