Reflection 3

What does it mean to have “good taste”, and is this a meaningful ability?

To begin this inquiry it is necessary to understand what is meant by taste. In his work, “The Critique of Judgment”, Kant desires to understand and discuss the nature of aesthetic judgment in a philosophical context. He defines taste as one’s ability to make an aesthetic judgment; therefore, one way to address this question is by asking what does it mean to make a good aesthetic judgment. For Kant and also for David Hume this is answered fairly simply: when one makes an aesthetic judgment, or rather a claim that something is beautiful, they are making a subjective claim about what the object evokes in themselves, not an objective claim about the property of the object in question. So from this it stands to say that a good aesthetic judgment is one that is recognized as subjective and is not taken as a universal. This is a very limited understanding of how taste actually seems to function where taste is given a universality which Kant addresses when he defines the four moments of aesthetic judgment.

The first moment that Kant describes is that to make a pure aesthetic judgment, a judgment that is not contaminated by one’s interest in an object or the object’s usefulness, one must have a disinterested pleasure in the object. This complicates the subjectivity of taste because when one makes a pure judgment they believe their judgment to be a universal one, that anyone who like themselves reached a point of disinterested pleasure could (or rather would) make the same aesthetic judgment as themselves. This way of thinking about our own judgments of taste have given rise to the belief that there exists some standard of taste by which one can adhere to. It must be said that any standard of taste must adhere to some objective principle or else be called only a normative standard (which would then make it ultimately wrong to call any account of taste good or bad). Kant clearly rejects this possibility by saying of people that make judgments “For the determining ground of their judgment they are not able to look to the force of demonstrations, but only to the reflection of the Subject upon his own state” (Cahn and Meskin 146). Hume similarly says that “Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them…” (Cahn and Meskin 104). These both of these statements reinforce the claim that taste is a subjective experience and from that we must admit that there are no grounds in which a standard of taste (an ability to differentiate good taste from bad taste) can function properly.

These two philosophers have spoken against the existence of a standard of taste; however, we seem to seek out some sort of standard. Returning to Kant he says that in the fourth moment of aesthetic judgment we establish the subjective feeling as a sort of common sense. We believe that there is something about what we see as beautiful to have some sort of quality that any rational person can identify. Personally I think this may be our attempt to explain what we otherwise have a hard time explaining. When we see an object and judge it as beautiful there is no rule or principle we can look at to say why the object is beautiful, so we are then compelled to believe that our judgment comes from a natural intuition which others should also have. Another philosopher, Mary Mothersill, agrees extensively with Kant that there are no laws of taste. She does so in a different way than Kant who claims there is an a priori explanation and instead gives us examples. The most powerful example she gives is her thought experiment to create a law of one’s own preference and then ask if it is interesting and if it is believed. Her example shows that such a generalization would fail on either one or all three of the criteria. In her discussion she then claims that it follows that since there are no laws of taste, principles of taste would be “arbitrary” and without relevant meaning.

The contributions of Mothersill along with these other philosophers assist in answering the overarching question. To have “good taste” is not philosophically compelling for it is a subjective experience of the viewer and there exists no standard of taste which one can refer to. With this there is no meaning to having good taste because one cannot compare the taste of one individual to another for they simply have different taste. This, again, is complicated by the fact that we commonly try to appeal to principles that govern taste, as is the way of experts and critics. These principles, as Mothersill claims, are arbitrary and in reality have no bearing on the actual experience of taste. It does present the issue of normativity in taste in that what a majority of people have agreed upon has become a false “standard” of taste. This is troublesome in a psychological way because we know that people, especially children, are heavily influenced by the opinions of others and so this leads to many people basing their judgments of beauty on the basis of another person’s taste, which typically are the particular tastes of experts and critics. When taken in this sense, having good taste is only meaningful in that you can align yourself to the majority consensus, and that, in itself, lacks any philosophical meaning.