Aesthetic Justification

Abstract

Abstract ONE OF the central questions in aesthetics is whether aesthetic descriptions and evaluations can be rationally justified. A number of people, both inside and outside of philosophy, believe that aesthetic remarks are “subjective” in the sense that they are simply reports of individual preferences. But if this were true, there would be no more point to saying that a work of art is good or bad than there would be to saying that one does or does not like liver. Immanuel Kant is justifiably famous for his attempt to reconcile two conflicting intuitions: aesthetic statements, on the one hand, are expressions of the individual pleasure or pain a person feels with respect to something, and on the other hand these statements imply something about how others will react to the same objects. Indeed, he argued, though aesthetic judgments are statements about individual pleasure, they are also universal, for when one says, for instance, “That rose is beautiful;’ one implies that everyone ought to find it so1.