Aesthetic judgement beyond good and evil: Of morality, taste, common sense, and critique

Abstract

The expulsion of the notion of literary value from literary theory in late modernity belies the connection between morality and art, morality and beauty, morality and aesthetic judgement that has been formative and transformative of aesthetic theory in the wake of reflexive modernity. In this paper, I would like to trace the formations and transformations wrought in the relations between notions of taste, morality, and aesthetic judgement. And I will attempt to show how literary value is integrally bound up with aesthetic judgement and critique, not only at the inception of the practice of literary criticism in the eighteenth century, but at the point of its expulsion in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion of literary and artistic value, I will argue, coincides with the inclusion of the negation of art in the definition of the modernist work of art itself, which thereby becomes assimilated to philosophical inquiry.