JAMES M.

FIELDING

An Aesthetics of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein

and John Cage

abstract
Comparisons of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Cage typically focus on the “later Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical In-
vestigations. However, in this article I focus on the deep intellectual sympathy between the “early Wittgenstein” of the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—with its evocative and controversial invocation of silence at the end, the famous proposition
7: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”—and Cage’s equally evocative and controversial work on the same
theme—his “silent piece,” 4 33 . This sympathy expresses itself not only in the common aim of the two works (a mystical
appreciation for the ordinary, everyday world that surrounds us) but also in a shared methodology for bringing about this
aim (tracing the limits of language from within in order to transcend those very limits). In this sense, I argue that Cage’s work
gives a concrete, performative reality to Wittgenstein’s early conception of language as well as the mystical revelation that
lies behind it.

i. therefore be broken. As Wittgenstein notes in the

It is no longer surprising to discover comparisons
to Ludwig Wittgenstein in the literature on John
Cage; however, where references to Wittgenstein
are made in relation to the avant-garde composer,
it is by and large to the “later Wittgenstein” of the
Philosophical Investigations that they are made—
the Wittgenstein of language games, forms of life,
and strange tribes, the Wittgenstein for whom the
meaning of a word is its use in our language.1
These comparisons are illuminating, particu-
larly in relation to those works of Cage that em-
ploy semi- or even highly indeterminate nota-
tional forms (such as Imaginary Landscape No.
4, which is realized by tuning twelve radios ac-
cording to a predetermined randomizing proce-
dure). By the light of this comparison, the aim
of such an approach to composition would be to
reveal a musical “form of life” that we had pre-
viously considered to be a given, but which is in
fact flexible, a normative practice that privileges
certain sounds above others and whose rules may
Philosophical Investigations in a remark designed
to liberate the philosopher (or the composer, for
that matter) from the positivist idea that certain
concepts are absolutely the correct ones and that
having a different approach would mean, as he
says, “not realizing something that we realize”:
“Let him imagine certain very general facts of na-
ture to be different from what we are used to,
and the formation of concepts different from the
usual ones will become intelligible to him.”2 Con-
sidering the great body of Cage’s work—and the
many concepts “different from the usual” that he
helped to make intelligible to us through the em-
ployment of just such an approach—we can see
that such comparisons with the later Wittgenstein
are clearly fruitful.
However, I would like to take a different
tack here and focus rather on the early Wittgen-
stein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—
with its evocative and controversial invocation
of silence at the end, the famous proposition 7:
“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72:2 Spring 2014

C 2014 The American Society for Aesthetics
158
silent”—and John Cage’s equally evocative and
controversial work on the same theme—his “silent
piece,” 4 33 .3 What is revealed in the comparison
of these two works extends far beyond a shared
conception of how language or music function as
normative practices. What is revealed here, per-
haps surprisingly, given Wittgenstein’s otherwise
quite traditional musical tastes, is a rather deep
ethical and aesthetic sympathy. This sympathy ex-
presses itself not only in the common aim of the
two works—a heightened appreciation for the or-
dinary, everyday world that surrounds us—but
also a shared methodology for bringing that aim
about in the minds of their respective audiences.
For what sets 4 33 apart from Cage’s other works,
much like what sets Wittgenstein’s Tractatus apart
from his later works, such as the Philosophical
Investigations, is not the proliferation of non- or
semi-determinate linguistic forms, but rather its
austere, orthodox formalism.4
The features of the Tractarian methodology are
most clearly spelled out in Wittgenstein’s remarks
on logic, although the comparison with music is
not difficult to make. Wittgenstein’s discussion of
musical notation in the work is understandably
overshadowed by the more weighty remarks on
the structure of propositional language; however,
in those remarks where Wittgenstein does touch
on music, he nonetheless clearly expresses how
for him propositional language and musical nota-
tion are but two species of the same genera: the
relationship between the logical structure of rep-
resentation and the states of affairs of the world
that are represented. Both are held to the same in-
ternal laws and limited by the same boundary con-
ditions. In this sense, it matters little for Wittgen-
stein whether we consider representation from the
point of view of propositional language or musical
notation. What matters for him is that a proposi-
tion, like a musical composition, is not a chaotic
mixture of sound. They are both, in an identical
sense, articulate. As he notes: “A proposition is
not a blend of words.—(Just as a theme in music
is not a blend of notes.)” (T 3.141).
What it means to be articulate in this sense is
that a proposition (or score) gives us a clear pic-
ture of what is represented therein. Wittgenstein
admits that this idea, commonly known as his ‘pic-
ture theory of language,’ may at first seem un-
canny: “At first sight a proposition—one set out
on the printed page, for example—does not seem
to be a picture of the reality with which it is con-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
cerned. But neither do written notes seem at first
sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our
phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture
of our speech” (T 4.011). But these are, Wittgen-
stein wants to suggest, indeed pictures, “even in
the ordinary sense” (T 4.011), like a tableau vivant
to which the facts of the world can correspond,
whether as a matter of fact they do or do not.
Wittgenstein’s point here is that, no matter
whether a particular proposition turns out to be
true or false, the state of affairs that it describes
remains the same in either case. “It is important,”
Wittgenstein writes, “that saying ‘p’ and ‘p’ can
say the same thing. . . . The propositions ‘p’ and
‘p’ have the opposite sense, but there corre-
sponds to them one and the same reality” (T
4.0621). The propositions ‘p’ and ‘p’ correspond
to the same reality, Wittgenstein argues here, sim-
ply because the objects within these propositions
are combined in a like manner. Despite their ap-
parent differences in form, for example, the tilde
sign in the second proposition, they both give us
the same picture of reality. They describe the same
state of affairs, only in the first this arrangement
is affirmed and in the second it is denied.
It is because such apparent irregularities do not
impede the understanding of a phrase that various
notational forms, as well as the translations be-
tween them, are possible. As Wittgenstein notes
in regard to musical notation: “And if we pene-
trate into the essence of this pictorial character,
we see that it is not impaired by apparent irregu-
larities (such as the use of  and  in musical no-
tation). For even these irregularities depict what
they are intended to express; only they do it in a
different way” (T 4.013). He expresses this idea in
the Tractatus as follows: “In a proposition there
must be exactly as many distinguishable parts as
in the situation it represents. // The two must pos-
sess the same logical (mathematical) multiplicity.
(Compare Hertz’s Mechanics on dynamic mod-
els.)” (T 4.04). Drawing on the comparison with
Hertz here, we can see clearly how Wittgenstein’s
understanding of “logical multiplicity” is indeed
just that—logical, and not, for example, what we
might traditionally, and mistakenly from the point
of view of the Tractatus, consider to belong to do-
main ontology. Hertz expresses his understanding
of “dynamical model” thus:
A material system is said to be a dynamical model of a
second system when the connections of the first can be
Fielding An Aesthetics of the Ordinary
expressed by such coordinates as to satisfy the following
conditions: (1) That the number of co-ordinates of the
first system is equal to the number of the second. (2)
That with a suitable arrangement of the co-ordinates
for both systems the same equations of condition exist.
(3) That by this arrangement of the co-ordinates the
expression for the magnitude of a displacement agrees
in both systems.5
On Wittgenstein’s account, it is precisely this
logical isomorphism that allows something—such
as a proposition or score—to serve as a model of
something else at all. In terms of the comparison
with Hertz, the most important aspect of that rela-
tion is given by Hertz’s requirement that, for one
system to serve as a model for another, both sys-
tems must have the same “degree of freedom.” In
other words, even if it is not possible to find an
equivalent of each and every component, it must
nonetheless be possible for all of the salient com-
ponents to be mapped one to one. We need not
consider here, as Wittgenstein himself did, any-
thing more exotic than the courtroom reproduc-
tion of a car accident with model cars: despite the
irregularities between the model and the real thing
represented (ontological questions of scale, mate-
rial, and so on), it is not difficult to see how for any
number of purposes the model will serve as well
as, if not better than, the original.6 But it can do
so only insofar as all the salient components may
be mapped one to one.
Wittgenstein clearly recognized, however, that
in order for a picture to be determinate it re-
quired a frame—a “logical scaffolding,” as he calls
it (T 3.42)—upon which it is mounted and held
fast, so to speak. In the Tractatus these are tau-
tologies and contradictions. Tautologies and con-
tradictions represent for him the two extreme
poles of language, which thus provide the space
wherein the form of the picture is articulated but
which do not themselves partake in what is repre-
sented there: “Contradiction, one might say, van-
ishes outside all propositions: tautologies vanish
inside them” (T 5.143). Though they are valid
propositions, formed according to rules of forma-
tion, these “limit case” propositions do not rep-
resent states of affairs within the world. They are
not about anything in particular, and thus they
are not sensical (sinnig, in Wittgenstein’s original
German). Nor, however, do they fail to touch the
world completely, and thus neither are they non-
sensical (unsinig): “They are,” he writes, “part of
159
the symbolism, much as ‘0’ is part of the symbol-
ism in mathematics” (T 4.4611). They are rather
senseless (sinnlos), like logical placeholders, which
mark the limits of logical space and do not form a
substantial point within it. They are not, in other
words, meaningful.
In this sense, the tautologies and contradictions
of logic form the extreme limits of a kind of rule—
which Wittgenstein calls a “method” or “law of
projection”—according to which it is possible for
language to be compared to reality at all. In terms
of musical notation, Wittgenstein expresses this
idea like so:
There is a general rule by means of which the mu-
sician can obtain the symphony from the score, and
which makes it possible to derive the symphony from
the groove on the gramophone record, and using the
first rule, to derive the score again. That is what con-
stitutes the inner similarity between these things which
seem to be constructed in such entirely different ways.
And that rule is the law of projection which projects the
symphony into the language of musical notation. It is
the rule for translating this language into the language
of gramophone records. (T 4.0141)
This is possible, he says, because the “gramophone
record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the
sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same
internal relation of depicting that holds between
language and world. They are constructed accord-
ing to a common logical pattern” (T 4.014).
It is well known, however, that Wittgenstein’s
aim in this work was not purely descriptive, in the
sense that he did not seek merely to describe the
logical isomorphism of language and the world
for the sake of itself. He sought rather to em-
ploy this theory of language in order to solve
(definitively, so he claims) the problems of phi-
losophy, a practice which in his estimation tor-
ments itself by posing questions that cannot, in
principle, be answered. By tracing the limits of
language from within, Wittgenstein thus aimed to
demonstrate that “the deepest problems [of phi-
losophy] are in fact not problems at all” (T 4.003;
cf. pp. 3–4). Having overstepped the limits of lan-
guage, such propositions—“whether the good is
more or less identical than the beautiful” is the
example Wittgenstein proposes here at 4.003, in a
conscious parody of Platonic reasoning—descend
into a kind of indeterminate nonsense that fails to
refer to anything at all, and, therefore, can have no
160
solution. “The riddle does not exist,” he notes. “If
a question can be framed at all, it is also possible
to answer it” (T 6.5).
Beyond questions of the true, the good, and the
beautiful, which are familiar from the history of
philosophy, questions about the existence of the
world, the meaning of life, or ethical imperatives
are also examples of such nonsense by this ac-
count. According to the famous conclusion of the
work, this “nonsense”—because it does not par-
take of the world, because it does not belong to
the sphere of facts but rather values—must be
passed over silence. The value of the world, in
other words, must be allowed to show itself. It
cannot itself be put into words. As Wittgenstein
noted in regard to the Tractatus, in a letter sent to
the Viennese publisher Ludwig von Ficker upon
the completion of the manuscript:
The book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to in-
clude in the preface perhaps the key to the work for you.
What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists
of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have
not written. And it is precisely this second part that is
the important point. My book draws the limits to the
sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am
convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing
those limits. In short, I believe that where many others
today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put
everything firmly into place by being silent about it.7
This reflection on the ethical part of the work—the
important one—concludes with the following sug-
gestion: “For the time being, I’d recommend that
you read the foreword and the conclusion since
these express the point most directly.”8 The con-
clusion, of course, is the most forceful expression
of Wittgenstein’s ethical and spiritual quietism:
“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be
silent.” Though his ethical stance remains unex-
pressed in the pages of the book, it is not absent for
all that. Rather, because it remains unexpressed,
it is capable of permeating the entire work as a
whole.
Turning toward John Cage’s 4 33 , we can begin
to see how such an understanding of logic is also
at work in his “silent piece.” Like Wittgenstein’s
“logical space,” Cage’s score is conceived in terms
of an open space of possibility that frames the
music articulated within it, though it does not itself
substantially partake in it. In the dependence of
sound upon silence, silence is not to be thought of
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
in negative terms for Cage. It is not an absence of
sound, like an empty box within which sound may
be placed. A box is still something in the world
that can be perceived with the senses. Silence, on
the other hand, cannot be heard in the ordinary
sense of the word—as Cage makes clear: there is
no such thing as silence; however, silence is there.9
And it can be attended to:
What interests me far more than anything that happens
is the fact of how it would be if nothing were happening.
Now, I want things that happen to not erase the spirit that
was already there without anything happening. Now, this
thing that I mean when I say not anything happening is
what I call silence, that is to say, a state of affairs free of
intention, because we always have sounds, for instance.
Therefore we don’t have any silence available in the
world. We’re in a world of sounds. We call it silence, when
we don’t feel a direct connection with the intentions that
produce sounds. We say that it’s quiet, when, due to our
non-intention, there don’t seem to us to be many sounds.
When there seem to us to be many, we say that it’s noisy.
But there is no real essential difference between a noisy
silence and a quiet silence. The thing that runs through
from the quietness to the noise is a state of non-intention,
and it is this state that interests me.10
In this sense, silence is not just another sound, like
one extreme end of the scale ranging from ‘quiet’
to ‘loud.’ It is rather a state or ‘spirit,’ a relation to
the world in which the listener attends to sounds
without forming a musical intention. Cage thus
conceives of silence not in terms of volume but
in terms of the open space of possibility in which
sounds may arise and fall away on their own ac-
cord, without our intervention. The task of the
composer who would seek not to erase this spirit
is then to construct a work that allows one’s atten-
tion to be turned toward all sounds, without excep-
tion, so that the space of music may be revealed for
what it is in itself rather than for what it contains:
“The prized or sought-for something (that is noth-
ing) is obtained. And that something—generating
nothing—that is obtained is that each something
is really what it is.”11 Being confronted by sounds
in a new way, we attend to qualities—in the world,
certainly, but also in ourselves—that had previ-
ously gone unnoticed. In the ordinariness of the
world with which we are confronted anew, an ef-
faced and forgotten realm of value resurges. As
Cage notes: “A performance of this piece would
be a measure—as accurate as a mirror—of one’s
Fielding An Aesthetics of the Ordinary
‘poverty of spirit,’ without which, incidentally, one
loses the kingdom of heaven.”12
The aim of Cage’s work is not therefore only
aesthetic but also ethical. Its aim, like that of the
Zen Buddhism that inspired it, is to bring about
a renewed relation to being that is no longer dis-
torted by fear or neurosis. Cage recognized that
such a feat would only be possible if silence can
be recognized for being pregnant with sound—as
we know, silence can be filled with an abundance
of sound, or even be quite noisy—so that “not
one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it,”
as he says.13 The religious overtones are apparent
here.14 But it is not a conventional religiosity, for
the possibility of redemption rests not in an eter-
nal salvation beyond the grave but in the present
moment, where one can free oneself from self-
interested moral and aesthetic judgments, achiev-
ing an appreciation of the world as it is rather than
as it ought to be.
Shared by mystics of all stripes, it is not sur-
prising to find a common ethical aim in Cage’s
4 33 and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For Wittgen-
stein too would note—immediately preceding his
admission that “ethics and aesthetics are one and
the same” (T 6.421)—that:
the sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the
world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it
does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it
would have no value.
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie
outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the
case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
(T 6.41)
What is surprising, however, is the manner in
which the two seek to bring about this mys-
tical experience of value. Recall that Wittgen-
stein sought to trace the limits of language from
within in order to demonstrate that the ques-
tions of philosophers—concerning, for example,
the meaning of life, the good and the bad exercise
of the will, and so on—are an unnecessary source
of frustration. Redemption resides in giving one-
self over to the present moment. As Wittgenstein
remarked in the preparatory notebooks to the
Tractatus: “Only a man who lives not in time but in
the present is happy. For life in the present there is
no death.”15 Not in time, but in the present? In the
pages of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein explains: “If
161
we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal du-
ration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs
to those who live in the present” (T 6.4311). This
sentiment is repeated shortly thereafter in a re-
mark that ties this redemptive sense of eternal life
in the present moment together with an apprecia-
tion of the givenness of the world that surrounds
us: “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to
view it as a whole—a limited whole. // Feeling the
world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical”
(T 6.45).
It is in the mystical experience that the world ex-
ists, not in a description of how, that one renounces
intention. Wittgenstein thus arrives at this conclu-
sion by moving from sensical language about very
worldly facts to the “senseless” limits of sense—
tautology and contradiction—only to find that at
the end of that road, redemption lies in an ac-
knowledgment of the meaninglessness of the task
itself. The work, as Wittgenstein makes clear in the
penultimate section of the Tractatus, is the “last
rung of the ladder” to be cast aside in order to see
the world aright:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following
way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes
them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—
to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw
away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) . . . He must
transcend these propositions, and then he will see the
world aright. (T 6.54)
In this sense, Cage too sought to create a piece of
music that would trace the limits of music “from
within,” employing formal notions reminiscent of
those of tautology (the empty score, which ad-
mits all sound and excludes none) and contradic-
tion (its ‘performance,’ by a pianist who plays the
piece by precisely not playing). And like tautolo-
gies and contradictions in the Tractatus, though
4 33 is constructed according to the valid rules
of musical composition, it remains senseless from
this formal perspective. Cage’s work thus gives
a concrete, performative reality to Wittgenstein’s
understanding of the limits of language: “A tautol-
ogy leaves open to reality the whole—the infinite
whole—of logical space: a contradiction fills the
whole of logical space leaving no point of it for re-
ality. Thus neither of them can determine reality
in any way” (T 4.463). If Cage has claimed that
4 33 is “meaningless,” it may be thought of as so
in this sense and not because meaning had been
162
figure 1. Sebastian Virdung’s O heylige onbeflecte (1511) in its original notation.
figure 2. Opening of Virdung’s O heylige onbeflecte, showing in modern notation the change between alto and tenor registers,
which by the standards of modern notation is irregular.
defined too narrowly in the conventional aesthetic
of the time, as has been argued. It is rather because
meaning, by its nature, must be about something.
And 4 33 is not about anything whereof one can
speak.
ii.
Two cases can be brought to bear on this account
of meaning that may help to make its central fea-
tures more clear: one from the history of mu-
sical notation and the other from within Cage’s
own avant-garde context. Recall that for Wittgen-
stein, what is essential in propositional language,
in other words what allows a propositional model
to go proxy for what is represented there, is that
the right logical multiplicity be incorporated into
the representation. As Wittgenstein notes in the
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
case of music, this allows not only for a score to
go proxy for the piece itself or the gramophone
recording to go proxy for the score and so on but
it also allows for the translation between nota-
tional forms. In this sense, having the correct logi-
cal multiplicity allows for the translation from one
language to another.
If we consider, for example, the historical de-
velopment of musical notation, we can see from
the translation of a renaissance score into modern
notation in Figures 1 and 2 that the logical mul-
tiplicity is in this sense indeed sufficient to effec-
tively transpose the one into the other—despite
any apparent irregularities, such as the unusual
‘cross-bars’ that represent here the shift of the
alto and tenor voices into the vocal register of
the other, which would have no place in the origi-
nal because of the manner in which that notation
symbolizes. The point is that these irregularities
Fielding An Aesthetics of the Ordinary
figure 3. John Cage’s 4 33 , transcribed in the notation of Virdung.
do not, in fact, mar the meaning of the original
phrase or its translation; each is as articulate as
the other, though it expresses what it is intended
to express in a different way.
As Wittgenstein notes, “A proposition can de-
termine only one place in logical space: never-
theless the whole of logical space must already
be given by it” (T 3.42). Sebastian Virdung’s O
heylige onbeflecte is, in this sense, a singular logical
point regardless of the notational form employed.
It occupies a particular place in the whole space of
musical possibility. And any space of musical pos-
sibility will therefore be able to accommodate it.
“A picture can represent any reality whose form
it has,” Wittgenstein notes: “A spatial picture can
depict anything spatial, a coloured one anything
coloured, etc.” (T 2.171), and naturally, we might
add, a musical picture anything musical.
What is interesting about this example is the
manner in which Cage’s 4 33 at once admits such
a formal notion of translation and goes beyond
it. We might consider here, for example, how the
score from Cage’s 4 33 (composed, for all in-
tents and purposes, in modern notation) is equally
transferable to the renaissance notational stan-
dards of Virdung (see Figure 3).
This should not surprise us, for we have already
seen that the content of renaissance music can be
articulated in modern musical notation without
any significant loss. Given this, it is not surpris-
ing that the same applies in the reverse direction.
However, what is noteworthy about the “empty
163
score” is that it is not only musical notation within
which Cage’s 4 33 can be translated.
It would certainly be impossible to translate
Virdung’s O heylige onbeflecte into the logical
space of color or of geometry in any determinate
way. The necessary logical multiplicity would not
be met. The “degrees of freedom” would not al-
low for the salient components to be mapped one
to one. However, for 4 33 , which has no content
whatsoever, there is no necessary degree of logi-
cal multiplicity that must be met. For indeed, any
space will suffice; any notational system can, in
principle, be empty. Finding its home at the limits
of language—in which case, it matters not whether
the language is the “language of music” or some-
thing else, for, as Wittgenstein makes clear, the
limits are identical in every case—Cage’s 4 33 is
revealed as a logical picture existing beyond the
relatively constrained multiplicity of a strictly mu-
sical form. As Wittgenstein notes, the propositions
of logic are all equivalent, for “all the proposi-
tions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing”
(T 5.43).
Leaving aside the difficult ontological ques-
tions of an artwork’s identity, we see that per-
haps Cage had good reason to note of Robert
Rauschenberg’s White Paintings that “the white
paintings came first, my silent piece second.”16 If
Cage felt obliged to acknowledge that Rauschen-
berg’s White Paintings came first, it can thus be
argued that this is not merely an acknowledg-
ment of the historically situated development of
164
avant-garde aesthetics. Rather, if it is necessary
for Cage to acknowledge Rauschenberg’s “silent
piece” in reference to his own, it is perhaps also
because they are, in this formal sense, the same
work. In other words, both works say the same
thing: to wit, nothing.17
In Rauschenberg’s White Paintings—which
Cage described as “airports of lights, shadows,
and particles”—Cage recognized an emptiness
in which the unintentional play of shadow and
light would become, would be, the work, just as
the unintentional atmospheric sounds would be
4 33 .18 As Cage noted, fusing the significance of
Rauschenberg’s work with his own in a manifesto
that describes precisely the sought-after “aesthet-
ics of the ordinary,” which would transcend the
traditionally hierarchical order of art and every-
day life: “The way to test modern painting is
this: If it is not destroyed by the action of shad-
ows it is a genuine oil painting. A cough or a
baby cry will not ruin a good piece of modern
music.”19
Regardless of the ontological qualities that al-
low what we would traditionally consider to be
Cage’s 4 33 to be recorded on a gramophone
record and Rauschenberg’s White Paintings to be
reprinted in a magazine, they are in the logical
sense outlined here identical (analogous, for ex-
ample, to an audio recording of speech and its
typewritten transcript). Each serves as a perfect
model for the other, for they are constructed
according to a common logical pattern. As we
may translate Virdung’s work from renaissance to
modern notation and recognize in it the same work
regardless of the surface irregularities, also be-
tween these two works nothing essential is either
gained or lost in the translation. It is for this same
reason, furthermore, that Cage was able to pro-
duce a third version of 4 33 , which consisted only
of three Roman numerals indicating the move-
ments of the piece and the word ‘TACET’ after
each one (this being the word used in orchestra-
tion to indicate that a particular instrument should
remain silent during the movement).20 Words spo-
ken or written, paint, sound: a great gulf may be
said to separate them ontologically. And the same
might be said from the perspective of a traditional
aesthetics, for certainly the faculties of the human
body that each are consequently able to engage
differ greatly. However, from the logical point of
view of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, these are but su-
perficial irregularities.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
But like Wittgenstein, Cage ultimately recog-
nized that the empty score would not in itself suf-
fice to ensure that the final rung of the ladder had
been cast aside. It is for this reason that, in silenc-
ing the performer, it is essential that the performer
be a virtuoso pianist and likewise that the audience
members be seasoned concert goers, knowledge-
able of the aesthetic context in which the work
is being produced. For the self-repudiating ges-
ture is only appropriate to the silence it intends
to reveal if the practice being repudiated is one
that has already been mastered.21 Like Wittgen-
stein, Cage was obliged to lead the listener along a
path that would begin by entertaining one’s expec-
tations, precisely so that those very expectations
could later be revealed for what they are in and
of themselves and thus loosen their grip.22 For en-
tering into this new relationship with the world
requires a genuine acknowledgment of the extent
to which the old relationships—with their well-
entrenched divisions between music and “mere
sound,” for example, or between right and wrong,
between our likes and our dislikes—permeate ev-
erything we see, hear, or say. Then and only then,
if indeed such a state of nonintention can indeed
emerge, will the final rung of the ladder have been
cast aside. The work itself will no longer be impor-
tant. As Cage would later joke—and we might
recall here that it was Wittgenstein who would
famously remark that a perfectly good work of
philosophy could be written consisting of nothing
but jokes—“No day goes by without my making
use of that piece in my life and my work. I listen
to it everyday.”23
The humor inherent in Cage’s remark may
tempt us to view his use of silence as ironic; how-
ever, this temptation should be avoided. In his
work, as in Wittgenstein’s, it is not the silence that
is ironic. It is rather his use of language that is
ironic. It is the self-repudiating gesture: the empty
score, the mute performer, the claim that every-
thing that has led up to this moment in the work
is so much nonsense. But that is only the first part
of the work, the part written down, recorded and
reprinted, stored in libraries, performed in concert
halls. Dependent on the normative rules of forma-
tion, the expectations of the audience or reader,
the historical tradition that has been handed down
to us, it is only this part that is ironic. If the work
itself is the final rung of the ladder, which must
be cast aside in order to see the world aright—
that is, to see the world as it is, simply there,
Fielding An Aesthetics of the Ordinary
ordinary and ultimately indifferent to our expec-
tations and evaluations—it is into the silence that
it is thrown. The difficulty is to realize that this
second part, the important one, is always there
waiting to receive it.
iii.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein famously claimed
“to have found, on all essential points, the fi-
nal solution to the problems [of philosophy].”24
Looking back, we know that this confidence would
not be long-lived. Upon Wittgenstein’s return to
philosophy in the 1930s, after a decade-long hia-
tus following the publication of the Tractatus, his
approach to philosophy had radically changed.
He recognized “grave mistakes” in his earlier
work.25 Where he had previously sought to trace
the transcendental limits of language from within,
Wittgenstein later sought a higher vantage point,
what he described as a “synoptic view” or “per-
spicuous representation” (Übersichtliche Darstel-
lung). In the place of “the general form of the
proposition” outlined in the Tractatus, he later
sought (as did Cage) to experiment with a com-
plex collage of phenomena on the basis of lived
experience.
With this movement toward a plurality of lin-
guistic forms, the notion of a singular and sta-
ble limit to language had to be abandoned for
Wittgenstein, and so—it would appear—would
the silence that had lain beyond that limit in
his earlier work. Cage, however, who nonethe-
less consistently employed a technique very rem-
iniscent of the “second Wittgenstein” throughout
his career, considered 4 33 to be among his best
works. To what might we attribute this different
attitude toward the silence that both thinkers had
once invoked as the final step on the journey
back from theoretical abstraction to the ordinary
world?
In order to begin answering such a question we
must not forget that Wittgenstein wished above
all for his philosophy to be critical. “All philos-
ophy,” he writes in the Tractatus, “is a critique
of language (Sprachkritik)” (T 4.0031). Despite
the great differences in form and content between
the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the
later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations,
if there is a single thread that runs throughout his
work, it is very likely this. While the manner in
165
which the notions at the heart of this critique con-
tinued to evolve in the later work—which prob-
lematize certain aspects of the characterization to
follow, specifically, concerning the role of proposi-
tions of natural science, but this need not concern
us here—this antiphilosophical task nonetheless
finds its clearest expression in the final pages of
Wittgenstein’s earliest work:
The correct method in philosophy would really be the
following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e.
propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has
nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever
someone else wanted to say something metaphysical,
to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a mean-
ing to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would
not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have
the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this
method would be the only strictly correct one. (T 6.53)
Undoubtedly the question of the continuity or dis-
continuity of Wittgenstein’s thought is a difficult
one, and perhaps no definitive answer will ever
be found. However, from out of the comparison
presented here, one possibility worth considering
presents itself: as Cage makes abundantly clear, in
renouncing intention, one renounces the capac-
ity to be critical of the world and of anything that
happens within it; we might wonder, then, whether
Wittgenstein rejected the doctrines of the Tracta-
tus, which similarly professes to advocate such a
state of nonintention, so that the critical faculties
of his Sprachkritik could be preserved.
Whether or not this is indeed the case is a mat-
ter of dispute, and for good reason; however, from
this we can nonetheless see that, despite their
many great similarities, there is at least one fun-
damental difference between the Wittgenstein of
the Tractatus and the Cage of 4 33 . Wittgenstein
wanted to abolish the problems of philosophy by
showing that, at bottom, they are not problems
at all. Cage, on the other hand, would not have
wanted to ‘abolish’ music in any sense of the word.
He wanted rather to expand the possibilities of
music, to open them up to the whole world of
sounds—intentional as well as nonintentional. As
Cage notes, his 4 33 would not be ruined by a
baby’s cry. Likewise, neither would it be ruined by
a classical symphony performed in the next hall
over. As the example of Virdung’s O heylige on-
beflecte makes clear, such traditional forms of mu-
sical composition are not capable of effacing the
166
ordinary world that Cage sought to deliver us unto
in 4 33 —if they are listened to in the right spirit.
For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, there is no
such spirit in which the nonsense he sought to
quiet—which is to say, metaphysical speculation—
may be embraced without effacing the ordinary,
nonmetaphysical world. For him, philosophical
discourse can in no way become just another part
of the world, something that “happens within it,”
a state of affairs to be embraced along with all
the others. If Wittgenstein later rejected the strict,
formal framework of the Tractatus, where Cage
exalted 4 33 as his best work, perhaps it is then
for this reason. The silence in Cage’s 4 33 is called
upon not in order to abolish music but in order to
transcend the hierarchical order of aesthetic judg-
ment that separates music and nonmusic, our likes
from our dislikes, and—in the end—sense from
nonsense. It is difficult to imagine that Wittgen-
stein would have been willing to walk such a
path.
JAMES M. FIELDING
Université Paris I Sorbonne
Paris, France
internet: James.Fielding@malix.univparis1.fr
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Most notably, it
is Marjorie Perloff who has engaged both Wittgenstein and
John Cage, referencing Wittgenstein widely in the context
of Cage’s work and in the context of avant-garde aesthetics
more generally. (Compare Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of
Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage [Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1981], and Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language
and the Strangeness of the Ordinary [University of Chicago
Press, 1996].) However, Perloff herself admits that she had
misunderstood proposition 7 of the Tractatus in her ear-
lier work, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, and subsequently
makes no attempt to reexamine the question (Wittgenstein’s
Ladder, p. xii).
2. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 230.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1922), p. 155. All further references to the
principal text of the Tractatus will be to Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness
(London and New York: Routledge, 1974), and indicated
by T, followed by the proposition number.
4. There is a growing body of literature on the pre-
cise contours of the similarities and differences between the
Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, out of which has
developed two conflicting readings: the more traditional one
that assumes a “Wittgenstein I” and “Wittgenstein II” and
the other a greater or lesser “mono-Wittgensteinianism,”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
which claims that only the form of the expression has
changed while the message of his philosophy remains es-
sentially the same. In what follows, I assume a modest “two
Wittgensteins” view and hope that this will highlight the fe-
cundity of the traditional reading. For more on the debate
surrounding this issue, see Alice Crary and Rupert Read,
eds., The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000).
5. Heinrich Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics Pre-
sented in a New Form, trans. D. E. Jones and J. T. Wal-
ley (London, 1899; reprint, New York: Dover, 1956), §418,
p. 175.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G.
H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 7.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prototractatus: An Early Ver-
sion of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. B. F. McGuin-
ness, T. Nyberg, and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. F. Pears
and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1971), p. 16.
8. Wittgenstein, Prototractatus, p. 16.
9. I owe this formulation to Kyle Gann’s superb mono-
graph No Such Thing as Silence, in which he notes the in-
accurate characterization of 4 33 as Cage’s “silent piece”:
“4 33 is often mischaracterized as Cage’s ‘Silent Sonata,’
but the point is that it is not silent, that there is no such thing
as silence; ‘Unintended Noise Sonata’ would come closer
to the truth” (No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4 33
[Yale University Press, 2010], p. 163).
10. John Cage, “Interview with R. Smalley and D.
Sylvester,” British Broadcasting Corporation, December
1966; partial transcription available as “John Cage (1966),”
in Interviews with American Artists, ed. David Sylvester
(Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 107–129, at p. 123.
11. John Cage, “Lecture on Something,” in Silence: Lec-
tures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp.
128–145, at p. 141.
12. John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and
Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 9. An ex-
cellent illustration of this ethical dimension of the silence
invoked by Cage can be found in Arthur Danto’s reply to
Lydia Goehr. (See Goehr, “For the Birds / Against the Birds:
Modernist Narratives of Danto and Adorno (and Cage),”
in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto,
ed. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly [Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2007], pp. 43–73, 79–81, and Danto, “Response,”
in Action, Art, History, pp. 73–79.) Regarding the tension be-
tween the optimism and pessimism that Danto and Adorno
feel, respectively, in the face of avant-garde works such as
Cage’s 4 33 , Danto notes: “[Adorno’s] was a deep pes-
simism, with settled dispositions, and he was something of a
scold. Mine, by contrast, was a deep optimism. Wittgenstein
said that the worlds of the happy and the unhappy differ,
but Adorno’s world and mine differed actually, and I don’t
know that my optimism would have survived, living through
what he did” (Danto, “Response,” p. 76).
Danto is referring here to a remark in the Tractatus: “If
the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world,
it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not
what can be expressed by means of language. // In short
the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different
world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. //
The world of the happy man is a different one from that
of the unhappy man” (T 6.43). Danto’s remark suggests a
Fielding An Aesthetics of the Ordinary
misunderstanding of the formal aspects of the Tractatus—
in whose terms Danto and Adorno precisely do live in the
same world (of facts), so that if one hears beauty where the
other hears terror, this reflects rather a shift in the limits of
their respective worlds in terms of value (and not the facts
that make up its substance).
13. Cage, “45 for a Speaker,” in Silence, pp. 146–192,
at p. 173.
14. In this respect, it is no coincidence that Cage’s
first reference to the work in “A Composer’s Confession,”
four years before 4 33 was completed, was entitled “A
Silent Prayer” (“A Composer’s Confession,” in John Cage,
Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, ed. Richard Koste-
lanetz [New York: Limelight Editions, 1993], pp. 27–44, at
p. 43). It is difficult not to recall here the well-known tale
of Bertrand Russell’s, concerning one of the frequent ex-
changes he had with the young Wittgenstein at the time he
was composing the Tractatus: “He used to come to see me ev-
ery evening at midnight, and pace up and down the room like
a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said
to him: ‘Are you thinking about logic, or about your sins?’
‘Both,’ he replied, and continued his pacing” (Bertrand
Russell, Autobiography [London: Routledge, 1988], p. 330).
15. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 74.
16. John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and
His Work,” in Silence, pp. 98–108, at p. 98.
17. In this sense we need not see any tension, as Danto
appears to, between Cage’s approach to the indeterminacy
of a work and Rauschenberg’s: “It is widely known that
4 33 was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s white paint-
ings, done when he was at Black Mountain College in 1951.
Cage said that he saw them as ‘airports for shadows and
dust’—or ‘mirrors for air.’ The deep point was that they were
no more empty than his own 1952 composition was silent.
The panels themselves collaborated, one might say, with the
environment, so that the ambient lights and shadows be-
came a part of the art, instead of being aesthetically erased
in order to allow a response to the pure, unsullied blank.
If a wayward pigeon dropped shat on the white, that would
be part of the work, at least in Cage’s view. (Rauschen-
berg, on the other hand, stipulated that the panels be re-
painted, to keep them fresh)” (Arthur C. Danto, “Upper
West Side Buddhism,” in Buddha Mind in Contemporary
Art, ed. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob [University
of California Press, 2004], pp. 49–59, at p. 56). By the account
presented here, we can see that Rauschenberg had to make
such a stipulation; however, this was not in order to keep
the work “ontologically pure” but logically pure, in order to
avoid, for example, the work becoming about something in
the world—such as the onto-genetic history of layered pi-
geon shit, and so on. As Cage notes about his own work, dis-
cussed above, it was necessary to construct a space in which
“not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it” (“45
for a Speaker,” p. 173). Nor, in Rauschenberg’s case, the
167
white that erases any accidental visual trace the work comes
to bare.
18. Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” p. 98.
19. Cage, “45 for a Speaker,” p. 161.
20. Similarly, we might add, not even is duration—often
considered, for good reason, to be the minimal ontological
substratum for a musical work—a salient part of the work;
for Cage admitted that he was unsure of the proper duration
and that perhaps he made a mistake in addition, and further
entitled the second version of the work 0 00 (in a reference
to Christian Wolff’s “zero time”).
21. Daniel Herwitz expresses the significance of this
performative gesture well when he notes: “First performed
by David Tudor in Woodstock, New York in 1952, 4 33
was inspired by an ‘artwork’ by Robert Rauschenberg, who
erased a fine drawing by Willem de Kooning (de Kooning
agreed to this erasure on condition that it be a first-class
work of his that would be erased). Similarly, 4 33 ‘erases’
music (or, as the French would say, places it sous-rature): it
consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.
. . . A gesture of silencing the performer (who does nothing
but turn the pages of the score), it is important that the per-
former be a pianist, that he or she be very good at playing
musical notes; for then, like a good de Kooning drawing, the
musician’s gesture is truly one of dropping a practice that
he or she has already mastered—of dropping it in the name
of entering into a new relation to music and sound. In this
breaking down of the very distinction between sound and
music, what is at stake is the capacity to hear in a way that
is open to the unexpected, the ordinary, the not so fancy”
(Daniel Herwitz, “John Cage,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthet-
ics, Vol. I, ed. Michael Kelly [Oxford University Press, 1998],
pp. 325–327, at p. 326).
22. It is in this sense that if, as discussed above, Danto
experiences a deep sense of optimism at the emancipation of
art from philosophy in the works of the avant-garde, where
Adorno experiences only pessimism and doubt, this too be-
longs to the logic of the work. As Wittgenstein would note
in the Tractatus: “The subject does not belong to the world:
rather, it is a limit of the world” (T 5.632). It is only in our
reaction to the work that this realm of value reveals itself,
and in works such as 4 33 or Rauschenberg’s White Paint-
ings this value is revealed purely in and of itself, for there is
nothing in the work about which we might form a particular
intention; it is only presenting the everyday world that is
always already there. At the limit, confronted by the world
in its totality, without exception, one only confronts oneself.
23. Quoted in William Duckworth, “Anything I Say
Will Be Misunderstood: An Interview with John Cage,” in
John Cage at Seventy-Five, ed. Richard Fleming and William
Duckworth (Bucknell University Press, 1989), pp. 15–33, at
p. 21.
24. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 4.
25. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. x.