The Tasteful Balancing Act

If good taste is a real thing, it might easily be confused for a kind of subject-preference chauvinism—‘tastes’ are more than just subjective, they are good or bad, which implies a sort of ‘correctness’ about them. How could taste be judged good or bad if it is not objectively validated? Kant offers a compellingly original approach to this problem: he denies an empirical, objective basis for judgments of taste, and instead grounds them in a mental state that is, in principle, universally accessible to all subjects. In that case, people who fail to recognize something as beautiful are encountering some sort of block that prevents them from experiencing that mental state. This would in turn lead to them having ‘bad taste,’ particularly if they mistakenly called non-beautiful things beautiful.

            What sorts of things might constitute blocks? Recalling some previous readings, we might argue that cultural expectations could prevent us from making an appropriately tasteful judgment. For example, tribal art may not come across as beautiful to those unfamiliar with it; there is a certain degree of understanding that needs to be present for one to judge something beautiful—Kant, I think, recognized this, and that’s why he placed the experience of beauty somewhere between pure sensory experience and pure mental reasoning, requiring components of both, but emphasizing a ‘whole’ that is more than the sum of those parts. Hume agreed with Kant in certain respects. He did not believe beauty to be objective, although he recognized that taste was related to sensory ‘organs.’ To Hume, if taste was solely dependent on the sensory organs, there could be no dispute about its quality, no standard to which it could be held. But Hume believed that there was such a thing as good taste, and only through the combination of reason and sentiment could one make a judgment commensurate with it. In order to get better taste, one would have to practice combining these faculties, but that practice could indeed improve one’s taste. For Hume, like Kant, good taste was a synthesis of faculties directed towards an object.

So what if people combined their faculties and were still wrong? And how does one go about combining the mental and the sensory, or achieving something in between them, anyway? I have no answer for how one combines these faculties. After all, unlike Hume, I have learned the hard way that practice does not make perfect—perfect practice makes perfect. If a person does not know what the source of their ‘block’ is, or why they do not have good taste, or even that they lack good taste, they cannot improve it by practice. Still, it stands to reason that if one is to improve one’s taste, one must improve either the sensory or the rational component. These improvements might include common aids,  like glasses or hearing aids (if Kant and Hume are right, those who are color-blind or tone-deaf might well be incapable of having taste as good as someone else, if good taste is measured by how many ‘beautiful’ or ‘tasteful’ things you can successfully recognize. We might solve this problem by likening this measurement to two tests scored out of different maximum numbers. The non-color-blind person has a higher maximum numbers of things they can recognize as beautiful, while we simply exclude those from the list relating to the taste of the color-blind person).

Mental improvements, however, are by far the most common, and generally require the sensory organs. Dickie, who criticizes the aesthetic sense, lends credence to this suggestion in his discussion of criticism, in which he suggests that, far from reducing their appreciation by interacting with greater quantities of knowledge when viewing objects, critics find more ways of appreciating them, and may have a deeper appreciation because of their increased understanding. Examples of such understanding and its physical component might include recognizing types of brush strokes, specific chords and progressions in music, literary tropes, kinds of camera shots or angles, etc. All of these require both mental knowledge and sensory training—a linkage between knowledge and what is perceived. The key is to strike a balance—to appreciate an object of art for itself, and to only allow the technical knowledge and sensory charms of a thing to add to our amalgamated experience of it. As Kant warns, we can move outside of the frame of viewing if we judge an object too much on technical merits and not enough on the experience as a whole; Dickie acknowledges that this is true, too. Good taste, then, would be the possession of one who could balance knowledge and natural appetites in order to enter that frame of mind from which we can recognize the beautiful (or the artistically worthy; for as Dickie points out, aesthetics no longer views all good art as ‘beautiful’). We have come full circle to Kant. The question now becomes: can we train people to strike that balance necessary to make judgments in  ‘good taste’?