Ludwig Wittgenstein: Aesthetics and Beauty

I disagree with Ludwig Wittgenstein when he states that aesthetics “draws one’s attention to certain features, to place things side by side so as to exhibit these features” because of the logic that gives birth to the thoughts that led to this statement. This logic questions the ability of a person to ascertain what “beauty” is, what contains the quality known as “beauty”, and the levels of beauty and how they can be measured and compared.

Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of games to illustrate his points regarding aesthetics and beauty. He reasons that the idea of a common feature or “ingredient” being common to all games is to simple and primitive an idea to accept. He states “It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties: e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we could therefore have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.” (BB 17)

Marjorie Perloff further explains Wittgenstein’s idea by stating what he meant was that “… one cannot say X is beautiful unless one has a notion of what “beauty” is in the abstract.” She shows that Wittgenstein believes that you must be able to define a quality on its own, in regards to itself only, before you can apply that quality to any other thing.

Wittgenstein goes on to explain by using the Greek ideal as a model. He says that what made this ideal was the role it played in the lives of the Greek People. This suggests that since this ideal, this standard if you will, was taught so fervently that it became the norm, and thus the ideal. Since the great scholar of the time (Aristotle) wrote with this form, and the great sculptors and artists were locked into this ideal, it was accepted as the prime example of form, and was thus accepted. To Wittgenstein, it was not the idea of “quality”, or “ideal form” that motivated the trends of people, but the models upon which these qualities were imposed. Quality itself might as well not exist, if aesthetics were not there to “draw one’s attention” to certain things.

There are certain points which could make one wonder about the validity of Wittgenstein’s ideas, however. Wittgenstein seems to think that quality does not exist by itself, that man imposes the idea of quality upon things that are deemed acceptable by the masses.