Wittgenstein separates the idea of a sensation with that of a word to describe it. How often, for example, have we heard someone say "I feel; your pain!" which, as Wittgenstein would be prompt to point out, is impossible. The sensations, art, aesthetics, and religion are individual sensations, with a communal linkage called "language". But, compared to one's sensations, language is the most inexact means of describing what one feels or senses.
People, as Wittgenstein theorizes, "cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behaviour, for I cannot be said to learn of them- I have them" (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 89). On the other hand, this sort of "investigation" of sensations makes Wittgenstein ask whether "sensations are private" (p. 90). And, if they are not -- if somehow, other people are attuned to how we feel pain (not feel ABOUT pain) -- then it seems that there is also the possibility that sensations like pain can be faked, simulated, as an actor in a medical TV show might. These language games are really semantics. We invent a word for something, Art, let's suppose, and then expect people to understand what it means. There is Art (Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock), and there is Art (Grandma Moses, Norman Rockwell) and there is Art (Michelangelo, Leonardo DaVinci) and there is Art (PLAYBOY centerfolds, Graffiti). Wittgenstein, in commenting on an illustration said, "We can also see the illustration now as one thing now as another - So, we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it" (Wittgenstein 193). Who is to argue that one is Art and the other is not? It may be merely Wittgenstein's idea of envisioning and interpreting. Perhaps one of the worst excuses for a higher education class is entitled "Art Appreciation" because this implies a definition for "appreciation" that the negativism in Wittgenstein would surely detest. After all, why must there be a commonality to "Appreciation"? Does it mean merely underst...