3: Taste

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

            To have good taste is similar to doing morally good acts. An amount of experiential “knowledge” makes a person more and more attuned to how to make a morally “good” decision and more and more attuned to their own feelings regarding certain arts. The more one finds oneself in a moral quandary, the more one becomes attuned to the way to make moral decisions. The more one tastes wine, the more one hones one’s skill at knowing oneself—knowing how one feels in response to certain tastes and qualities. This does not mean that one can ever have perfect taste because (1) one can never have all the relevant experiences to reach a maximum level of knowledge about oneself, and (2) even if one were to have all the relevant experiences, they do not reflect a standard law or principle that would mean one could know oneself wholly / maximally at all. As Mothersill points out, no amount of experience can help us actually predict whether or not something will evoke positive feelings, and any kind of principles which seem to govern taste turn out to be mere guidelines or tendencies and are not lawlike at all. But we can still become more aware of personal tendencies and attuned to particular qualities that were previously indiscernible to us. When we become more well-versed in taking in a kind of presentation (wine, paintings, plays, etc.), we are really just continuously modifying our own attitudes. As Hume points out, past experiences hone one’s skills and acclimate the senses to approaching each new experience in a different kind of way than if one is inexperienced.

This means that taste very personal—since it is acquired and modified from experiences which are only one’s own—and subjective—since each individual could come to have slightly different tastes regardless of similar experiences. But there is reason to assume that other people, when approaching the same kind of presentation in the same kind of way as me, will tend to have similar feelings towards the presentations as I do. This is akin to Kant’s conception of “the agreeable” in that we assume certain tendencies of people’s reactions without believing there is a steadfast rule regulating those reactions. We assume that other people like the taste of sugar or sweetness. But we do not deduce from this that everyone who eats this certain sweet thing will like it. We still, however, might assume that someone else will like the sweet thing just because most people do (and we will be mildly surprised when the person tells us they don’t like donuts or chocolate, etc.). Kant explains this with his first two moments of aesthetic judgments, which allow the possibility of agreement without an objective rule.

Kant’s fourth moment—necessity—says that a common sense about taste is presupposed by all aesthetic judgments. Though this common sense is not a reality to be derived from aesthetic judgments, we expect some sort of common sense when relaying our aesthetic experiences to others. I think this is where taste comes in. Taste is that standard that is expected—and must be expected—but is not really actualized objectively. But the subjective experience of an individual well-versed in poetry is taken to be a more respectable and more constructive feeling than the subjective experience of a novice. This only means that others genuinely interested in poetry, who also might want to be well-versed in this particular art form, will trust the “expert’s” opinion over the novice’s.

The kind of subjectivity that Hume, Kant, and Mothersill all point to as a part of aesthetic judgments is actually, I think, what makes this kind of judgment more meaningful. Objective claims are uninteresting in terms of evidence: once all the “facts” are known about an objective thing or phenomenon, a claim is deemed either true or false by everybody and the discussion can end. But with aesthetic judgments—subjective experiences which we take to be universal—there is always meaningful discussions to be had. There are always reasons that can be given for liking or disliking something, but no reason can be true or false. Taste is just how we organize this and how we rank the helpfulness and meaningfulness of people’s experiences with aesthetic entities.

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. 

Reflection 3 - The Standard of Taste

What does it mean to have good taste, and is this a meaningful ability?
To determine what it means to have good taste, I think one has to agree that there is such a thing as universal “good taste” and “bad taste,” and after working through the readings in this unit I argue that there is no such idea or standard of taste. Because no such standard exists, the ability to determine whether someone has good taste or to claim that art is either tasteful or not is inconsequential. 
I want to begin with Mothersill because her argument, that there are no laws of taste and never can be, really resonated with me. While she does admit that principles of taste exist and that there is something normative about our ideas of taste, she stresses the fact that there is no aesthetic rule to back them up, thus they become weakened and not useful to us. She argues that because there is no blanket statement to judgements of taste that can always be personally predicted, the standard of taste fails because it has no predictive qualities. She writes :“that is to say that my powers fail at the crucial point, namely the ability to predict the accrual or non-accrual of value-quality in my own experience.” I think this passage is particularly interesting because she’s essentially saying that if we can’t predict our own taste with one hundred percent certainty then how can we say that there is a standard of taste that we can apply across the board and to other people? I really love how Mothersill uses herself as a personal example with the detective novel example. In this entire course, we’ve been questioning beauty and representation and whether objective rules exist. Many times in these discussions, we’ve felt very personal convictions about the beautiful and have used that feeling as a way to understand the possibility of objective standards when it comes to beauty and art. With the idea of taste, Mothersill employs the same comparison to self but turns it on its’ head, saying that when my own personal statements of taste can’t follow 3 simple rules (not law-like, not interesting, unbelievable), how can I expect there to be universal standards of taste? 
I think what Mothersill and other authors in this unit are trying to touch on is individual preference and how because we, as human beings, can never be completely detached from ourselves and the society, history and culture that surrounds us, we are left with no objective standard or definition of what “good taste” actually is. Hume argues that a removal of prejudice refines taste. He writes that for a critic to fully “execute” his job, he or she must preserve his mind free of all prejudice. I find this impossible. One cannot fully remove himself or herself from what they have been socialized in to thinking whether that’s in regards to a particular piece of artwork or not. For instance, Dickie reiterates this point by arguing that you can never view an artwork wholly “disinterestedly.” Whether you are an art critic or fan, you can’t separate yourself from what is around you and how that could be affecting your judgements of taste. In addition to Dickie, Hume and Mothersill, Kant reiterates the idea that there cannot be a standard of taste through his four moments of: the disinterested pleasure, subjective universality, purposiveness without purpose, and necessity arguing that a standard of taste would have to adhere to all of these rules and that it ultimately fails. It fails because there is a positive lack of explanation in an aesthetic judgement and an absence of an objective principle but rather only an explanation in the subject. I ultimately agree with Kant and all of the other authors we’ve read in this unit and find that no standard of taste can exist because what really matters in these aesthetic judgements is the subject more so than the object, and that there can be no standard of taste that can be applied to everyone’s thinking all the time. However, I will say that while I do not believe a standard of taste exists, I thoroughly enjoyed Mason’s point when mentioning Hume’s discussion of the critic. I thought his point that someone can appreciate something and affirm that it has good taste while not necessarily liking it was a point well made, and while I would like to believe that such judgements are possible, I’m not entirely convinced. 

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’?   

Reflection 3

Before doing the readings and having the class discussions for this section, I would have been the first to tell you that there is good taste, and there is bad taste. For example, one can assume its fair to say that the furnishings in houses like Graceland and Prince Mongo’s are - while entertaining due to their celebrity - not what is considered good taste. In fact, they are quite tacky, though lovable and dear to the hearts of many Memphians. In the same way, I think most people will agree that most fashion fads that died in the 80’s and 90’s - Britney and JT’s denim debacle of the late 90’s - are in fact considered to be bad taste. But is this really enough to claim that there are universal and necessary laws that dictate what is good taste and what is bad?

Hume begs this question and forces us to consider things that might prove there is no such thing as good taste, or as he calls it a standard of taste. He mentions the variety of what is considered good taste. Consider the idea that Prince Mongo can like a couch that I dislike. Or consider that Britney thought a denim dress was pretty, and I thought it to be hideous. We remember Kant’s answer to a similar concern is the idea of subjective universality. This, of course, means that although we do not all have the same opinions and aesthetic judgements, does not hinder us from the expectation that someone should have the same opinion and aesthetic judgement as we do. This is one of the four “moments” of aesthetic judgements in Kant’s writing. There is the disinterested pleasure, subjective universality, purposiveness without purpose, and necessity. ___ The bottom line here, is that for Kant, to make an aesthetic judgement, or in other words to make a good judgement of taste, you must adhere to these conditions. Otherwise you are doing something improper; you are doing something entirely different and calling it a judgement of taste. In the same way, Hume feels that achieving certain goals - unity, the fulfillment of its purpose to please, and plausibility - is the correct way to make a judgement of taste which he calls his standard of taste.

But who’s to say any of this holds weight? Who’s to say that these standards and goals to meet when making an aesthetic judgement of taste hold any significance? Afterall, they are simply something that has been theorized about and thought up by these philosophers. In fact, the fact that they differ in what makes this standard or what makes good taste could be proof in its very significance. In fact, the next philosopher to come into our conversation essentially says this. Dickie takes all the distinctions between and separation from the good and agreeable and the useful and the moral and erases it. Dickie says that there is, in fact, no difference between an aesthetic judgement of taste and a moral or cognitive judgement. He thinks that the aesthetic judgement is simply a mystification of judgements of what is and what should be, that is cognitive and moral judgements. Similarly, Mothersill challenges us to find an aesthetic judgement that is law like, interesting, and something we actually believe. She seems to think this is something we are in capable of. In any case, these two philosophers stray away from Kant and Hume’s ideas that there can be a clear cut standard of good taste and that it would be useful. Dickie’s claims especially seemed to resonate with me, in thinking about how in this day and age of science and neuroscience specifically, that it would make sense to relate all aesthetic judgements back to more easily explicable judgements. I would not say I could fully agree with any of these individuals, but I will say that I do fall most closely to Kant. The main selling point for me, is the 4 moments, particularly the first two. The idea of the independent and disinterested pleasure - inexplicable by normal means of the good and agreeable resonates with the way in which aesthetic judgements seem to me to be inexplicable on some level. Subjective universality seems to explain very clearly our irrational expectation that other people should agree with our aesthetic judgements of taste. Whether or not it is useful, I couldn’t say I feel strongly about in either direction. I wasn’t truly convinced of any sort of usefulness in “good taste”.

Reflection 3: Good Taste

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

            In order to be able to make a claim about whether or not someone’s artistic taste is good, we have to have some sort of standard of taste against which we can measure his or her claims. However, the nature of the beautiful, as shown through Hume, Kant, Dickie, and Mothersill, is such that it affects us each on an individual basis. Thus, with such a subjective basis for the judgment of beauty, it would appear that there can be no standard of taste. However, as Kant distinguishes, the judgments concerning the “beautiful” and the “good” are of two different kinds, and thus it may be possible to have a standard of good taste in such a manner that it is based not entirely on aesthetic judgment alone, but also in the application of reason.

            On the subjective nature of the beautiful, there seems to be little doubt among aestheticians. In typical empiricist fashion, Hume notes that I can only know what I find beautiful when I react to a beautiful object, and this alone cannot amount to evidence of my having good or bad taste. Someone whom society deems has “good taste”, i.e. a music critic, may react very positively to a trashy popular song and may loathe a particular symphony of Tchaikovsky’s, while someone who is deemed without taste may hate the pop song and love the symphony on first listen. All that we can know from these situations is that two people like different things; we are not entitled to draw a judgment about their taste from this evidence.

            Dickie hits upon this point when he attacks the notion that a ‘disinterested’ viewing is required to approach an artwork. He posits that there is always some ulterior motive or interest in the background of the viewing subject’s mind, whether it be an intent to view something considered art or to analyze the historicity of a particular work or to please a friend by going to a show. To the extent then that no viewer is truly disinterested when approaching artworks, the art critic is placed on the same level of judgment as the general public when confronted with art. And, if this is the case, then the critic’s judgments concerning artworks are as valid at face value as those of general viewers, and all of these judgments can only reflect the preferences of individuals.

            Mothersill, in her work, goes on to prove how there can be no laws formulated on the basis of aesthetic judgments because any law given either has no predictive value or it is entirely trivial. For instance, if I were to posit as a law of taste (admittedly mostly for myself) “All songs featuring Phil Collins are amazing,” then I would be expected to like any track presented to me which features Phil Collins. However, if I were to listen to a particular song from his latest album, I would most likely prove my law false. Alternatively, I could formulate my law such as to ensure truth, but this would come out in the circular fashion “All of Phil Collins’ songs that are like ‘In The Air Tonight’ are songs that I will like.” This defines the quality of the thing that I like about the song as the song itself, and thus my law only really says “I like Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight.’”

            On the grounds of purely aesthetic judgments, the standard of taste is impossible to find. However, the problem with aesthetic judgments is that they are always particular. As Kant notes, the beautiful is always a reaction to something that precedes other forms of judgment about that thing. All that can be legitimately said in an aesthetic judgment is “This is beautiful.” Any attempt to classify the “this” would require some movement of the understanding to combine the sensible intuition under a concept. The reaction to a beautiful painting precedes the recognition of the painting qua painting. Thus, if we make the statement “This is a beautiful painting,” then there is some conceptual notion of what a painting is which has been coupled with our recognition of some beautiful thing.

            Perhaps, then, this is the realm in which the standard of taste can exist. Hume notes this when he says that critics should have a full experience of the world in order to be able to judge works, and that the judgment of the worth of an artwork is of a different from the critics’ personal response to it. In the example of the critic who likes the pop song, the critic, as a well informed and well cultured individual, will have experienced many songs and will be able to form a judgment about what constitutes a “good” song, i.e. what best encapsulates the idea of music, and thus would be able to appreciate the Tchaikovsky while not necessarily liking it. Admittedly, the standard of taste still has a measure of subjectivity, but this is hard to escape since all communities have some measure of fluidity. At any rate, the standard of taste as appreciation for and criticism of the ‘essence’ of certain art forms provides a more intersubjective, and thus more real, standard of taste than the purely subjective reaction that is the aesthetic response.

In Light of the Validity of the Subjectivity Hypothesis, Possible Windows for Objectivity

In my initial response to the question of whether or not beauty is a property of objects or whether it is merely constituent of a subjective experience I leaned toward the later because of lack of evidence for the former. However, instances arose while reading the texts assigned within the last few weeks when the obviousness of this choice was clouded. Although some of the following theories may be far-fetched, I feel that investigation into the possibility of beauty being an objective matter is important because the discovery of such a fact would be widely beneficial. If beauty is in the object than a universal principle might be discoverable whereby beautiful things could proliferate and our lives would be much more enjoyable (and arguably more meaningful). This only serves as motivation to attempt to offer alternatives to accepted norms, however, not to ignore the voracity of those norms, in this case, beauty as subjective. Wollheim’s account of the nature of artworks serves as a good starting place.

Wollheim’s classification of art as not either particulars or general entities such as classes or universals but as types which are expressed through tokens brought up some interesting arguments in favor of beauty being more a property of the object than of the subject’s experience of an object. For example, considering that we only experience through our sensible faculties tokens of a particular artwork’s type, all of the properties of an artwork are not immediately available to us, as would be the case were we to adhere to most other aesthetic theories. If not all of the properties of an artwork were sensible to us, it could mean that beauty could be (in terms of a Lockeian primary/secondary distinction) a true property of an object. This confusing move requires the following elucidation: given that we experience beauty and the properties of an artwork may constitute more than the properties of that artwork’s tokens, if beauty were a property of the artwork, it would be a secondary property because it is something sensible to us that must be caused by a primary property insensible to us. Whether this property exists or not is currently beside the point, for all that matters is that Wollheim’s definition of art allows, contrary to most streams of modern aesthetic thought, that beauty could be a property of objects rather than merely subjective experience.

Whereas Wollheim’s account allowed for the possibility of objective beauty, Kant’s account outright precludes it. However, if one takes Devereaux’s indirect objection to Kant seriously, that aesthetic judgements are necessarily political and cannot be divorced from interest, then Kant’s categorization of pleasures could allow questions of taste to intermingle with questions of goodness, opinion to bridge over to logic, and aesthetic judgements to be rendered in accordance with objective principles. By accepting the feminist claim that art must be experienced through a political lens, we must collapse Kant’s category of taste-based pleasure. This does not mean that considerations of beauty disappear, but that they can be applied to considerations of good-based pleasure (accepting that ethical and political ideas correspond to considerations of the good). In this formulation of the schema, an artwork is beautiful partly in virtue of its adherence to our precognitive intuitions of what is good. This does not mean of course that all good things are beautiful, just that all beautiful things are good. In being good, they give themselves up to intellectual contemplation and through this (though perhaps no adequate process has yet been carried out in this manner) the reason for why something is beautiful, in as much as it is first good, could be found. In lieu of these theories being compelling though, there’s always the astounded appeal to our brute experience, which according to Kant “demands” that beauty (our subjective experience of beauty) be recognized as objectively beautiful, so without further ado, as evidence of the objectivity of beauty, the entirety of In Rainbows: