Wittgenstein on "Beautiful" and "The Beautiful"

In his Lectures on Aesthetics (1938) Wittgenstein notices how unimportant the role played by the adjective “beautiful” is when aesthetic judgments are made (cf. LA, I, 8). In a remark from 1946 he goes far beyond and talks of the mischief done by the concept of “the beautiful” (CV, 55e). This may appear puzzling, if compared to a note from his Notebooks 1914-16 where – maybe a bit out of tune with the Zeitgeist – he states that «there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is the beautiful» (NB, 21.10.16). The obvious explanation of the tension among these statements would be to connect it to the change of the views that Wittgenstein held in his early work, and to suppose that in his Cambridge lectures he distanced himself from his previous claim about a relation between art and beauty. I would like to sketch a different picture, and try to highlight an element of continuity in Wittgenstein’s views on art and beauty amid the profound changes his philosophical conceptions underwent. Roughly said, what explains this continuity is the fact that Wittgenstein’s ideas on art and beauty reflect more an attitude towards life than a theoretical view, an attitude that presumably did not substantially change in later years, while many of his early conceptions changed instead. The paper is divided into five parts. In the first part I will comment on the Notebooks entry and suggest that it expresses the young Wittgenstein’s ideas on the value of art, while – as we will see in the third part – the view presented in the Lectures addresses the question of aesthetic appreciation. In the second part there is an excursus on Dutch painting. In the fourth part I will say something on the possibility that Wittgenstein had acknowledged the historical character of a certain conception of beauty, and in this way I hope to offer a context for understanding his observation on the mischief done by the concept of “the beautiful”. Finally, in the fifth part I will try to show that Wittgenstein saves a sense for talking about beauty in relation to the experience of art.