Taste and Judgment in the Arts

Abstract

Since Kant's Critique of Judgment philosophical aesthetics has been beset, and continues to be beset, by a dilemma resulting from the apparent antinomy between the purported objectivity of judgment and the ultimacy of personal taste. Abandonment of either of these principles has seemed to be fraught with consequences which in their full rigor few have been prepared to regard as other than disastrous. And because of this a large part of the philosophizing done in aesthetics has been animated consciously or unconsciously by a hope to smooth over, circumvent, or obscure this conflict. First I will be a little more explicit about the reasons for the inveteracy of the two principles. The purporting objectivity of judgments was asserted by Kant on phenomenological grounds which have been accepted by most subsequent philosophers. He contrasted judgments with statements about gratification (the pleasantness of sensations) and judgments about the suitability of a thing for any function or its exemplification of a conceptual type. In this sense judgments are not merely reports on the observed presence of aesthetic properties but carry an implicit affirmation of value which purports to be right or wrong. In the field of practice a tacit assumption that judgments are objectively right or wrong underlies and bolsters all the social apparatus of art education, amelioration of public taste, selection of objects for public purchase and display in museums and galleries, and is the justification for criticism as it is practiced. For what is recognized in any