The Aesthetic: James Joyce and Wittgenstein

Extract

Any reader of Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with the slightest interest in beauty, the arts and literature must remember the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and the fatuous fathead, Lynch, on aesthetics, with special reference to the definition of beauty by St Thomas Aquinas. In this short piece I shall compare Stephen's interpretation of Aquinas's definition and succinct analysis with some notes on the aesthetic from Wittgenstein's Notebooks 1914-1916.

Aquinas's definition - Pulchra sunt quae visa placent - defies elegant direct translation. Literally it means ‘Those things are beautiful which give pleasure [merely on being] seen'. Joyce’s translation (which involves interpretation) is as good as any: ‘that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases'. He expands the notion of visa from the visual to, as he (Stephen/Joyce) puts it: ‘aesthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension.’ This would include the beauty of floral smells, the taste of fruit, the taste of an imaginative cuisine, the feel of a hot bath in winter or a cool pool in summer. In Joyce’s view all these would be, on his interpretation of Aquinas, aesthetic apprehensions.

There follows a good deal about aesthetics which is Joyce's own. Then he returns to Aquinas and his threefold analysis of beauty: Ad pulcritudinem tria requirunlur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. This Joyce translates for his own purposes as: ‘Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.’ In his original and personal interpretation—none the worse for the that—Stephen draws Lynch's attention to a basket which a butcher's boy ‘had slung inverted on his head'!