Unit 4: Truth

Do artworks communicate truth?

            I think the answer to this question is yes, but must be qualified with a certain definition of truth and also with a description of what qualifies an artwork as an artwork. I think the kind of truth that artwork communicates is something that gives one a sense of being enlightened—of seeing something or making some connection one had never considered before, of developing understanding, of disclosing something about the experience of life, of directing thoughts towards something people generally miss or avoid, of revealing meaning in a place where one hadn’t looked before or where one had looked before but had come out empty-handed. Perhaps this is too many ways to rephrase “being enlightened,” but perhaps they can all be grouped under the concept of “understanding”. Understanding is more than just knowledge, it is knowledge about how different pieces of information relate to each other. It connects basic “facts” to one another by some sort of rule that can be universal (reveal something about how things typically/always relate) or particular (reveal something about a specific situation of relation). There are a few qualities of different types of works of art that, according to our authors, cause people to gain some sort of understanding from them.

            Aristotle talks about the imitative quality of artwork and how we as humans use imitation to learn and gain understanding. Imitation, then, in plotline or subject matter, is not inferior to experience because it is in a way “fake”; instead, imitation in art supplements experience. When Aristotle goes over what he thinks makes a particularly good tragedy (or, perhaps, a tragedy most effective in enlightening viewers in some way), he lists order and unity, which draw us in because they mean that the story in intelligible. But he also says that good tragedies produce pity and fear, which stretch our emotions in a way that we would not want in regular circumstances. Finally, good tragedies embody possibility, as opposed to what is actual or what is necessary. In this final point, we can see that what makes tragedy good art is that it draws you into it and makes itself relevant to you, then forces you to think differently about the ideas it presents by stretching your imagination and surprising you. Similarly, the ideal main character is one who strives to be good and is easy to identify with, but then must err in judgment. This motif of being able to identify with a part of an artwork at the same time as being pulled down a path of mere possibility by the art continues in Nietzsche and Heidegger.

            Nietzsche says explicitly that he thinks that art is about relieving people of the burden of “truth”, but here I think that the truth he refers to which we can never acquire is a kind of definitive version of truth instead of a constantly-reaching-for-understanding kind of truth. He says that art imitates the world in a particular way: a way that distorts the incoherent and meaningless world and makes it palatable to people. But his praise of Greek tragedies actually suggests that they uncover the tension between the desire to live, experience, find meaning, and the constant resistance in the world that continuously suggests that death always conquers life, that experience is only ever relative and insignificant, and that any meaning that might be found is artificial. I would like to suggest here, though, that while these devastating “truths” may or may not be objectively true, the very basic fact that life itself consists of this tension can be brought to our attention through art, perhaps particularly in Greek tragedy, and this seems to me to be a kind of revealed understanding of such opposition, though not a solution to it. The revealed opposition that art has the power to convey could also be discussed in the Nietzschean terms of the Apollonian desire to distance ourselves from the world and the Dionysian desire to be included in the world.

            Finally, Heidegger, too sees some sort of dual purpose in art, in that it brings together earth—the mere physicality of things which is important but conclusive—and a world—that which is built from earth but that turns into something above and beyond it in that it is open, unfixed, open to possibilities. Heidegger thinks that a certain unrevealing happens when we view something not as an object, and not as a piece of equipment, but as a work of art. When art is framed as art, it opens up interpretations and ideas unique to that kind of presentation, and when this opening up leads to feelings of enlightenment and understanding, we uphold such works as art. But if the works seem to only appeal to basic sensation or fail at being interesting or meaningful beyond mere physicality, then we just call this cheap entertainment.

Reflection 4

Do Artworks Communicate Truth?

This is a complicated to answer because different people have different interpretations of what “truth” is. If there is no sole definition or even understanding of what one means by “truth” then it is most certainly hard to answer a question that ponders about the relationship between artworks and truth. That being said, I think it wise to first accept that there is more than one kind of truth, both of which involve different sources of information. In Heidegger’s essay he makes a distinction between what is true and false, and what is true and untrue, “By truth is usually meant this or that particular truth. That means: something true. A cognition articulated in a proposition can be of this sort…Truth means the nature of the true. We think this nature in recollecting the Greek word aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings” (Cahn & Meskin 354). I think that, simplified, that propositional sort of truth can be called fact-based truth: the real world/historical truth of an object/being; and knowledge-based truth: a sort of logical understanding about an object/being. Heidegger believes that the nature of art is to show us knowledge-based truth, and it does so by revealing the whole of the object/being, not merely its qualities and functional uses. To use an example that Heidegger uses himself, we can consider the painting of a pair of shows by Van Gogh. The factual truth behind the shows is that he bought the shoes in a market and for some reason could not wear them, so he painted them. This is fact-based truth and it tells us nothing but how the artwork came to be, nothing that is philosophically interesting. It is the case that when one looks at the painting they see more than how they came to be. They may generate ideas about the time period the shoes existed in, the occupation and gender of the owner, the kind of location the shoes are in and much more. This is knowledge-based truth being unconcealed, truth that encapsulates more than the shoes themselves can present. This is the case because if one is presented the real shoes they will merely focus on the qualities the shoes possess and the equipmental uses of the shoes. The presentation of the shoes in a work of art allows one to look past those things and see a broader truth about the shoes that is unconcealed through its presentation as a work of art.

If we are to say that artworks communicate truth then it is such the case that they only communicate knowledge-based truth, even though there is fact-based truths that exists for the work of art. This; however, is not to suggest that the artwork itself contains truth. If this were the case then when people looked at a work of art there would be a great deal of uniformity in what kinds of things are seen in a particular work of art. Artworks reveal truth to the viewer, but what is revealed is potentially different between individuals. This phenomena is addressed by Aristotle and Nietzsche’s treatment of the genre of tragedy. Both philosophers regard tragedy as the full potential of art and, to my belief, come to a similar conclusion about what it is that tragedy does. Nietzsche specifically believes that truth something ugly because humans innately want to express their will to live but the world is a place that suppresses that will and is hostile and inhospitable. Art is the strategy used to distort the way in which the world is presented to us. Tragedy, thus, is the best form of art that accomplishes this. Aristotle believes artworks communicate a diluted truth; however, artworks refer/remind us of the “real” truths. Tragedy does this best because it presents characters that are better than actual humans in such a length that the viewer can consider the entire tragic play (making it better than epic poetry).

The agreement between Aristotle and Nietzsche is here: tragedies present an intelligible order to the viewer which deals with some topic or other. The viewer is then drawn into the events because the tragedy evokes immersive feelings within the viewer. After the events are played out the viewer is then set free from the emotions experienced and able to refer back to truth presented in the tragedy. Aristotle explains this by describing what makes a good tragedy in a play while Nietzsche explains the relationship between the Apollinian and Dionesian aspects within tragedy. In Aristotle’s analysis of good tragedies he says that the plot is presented in a reasonable and believable order while simultaneously producing feelings of pity and fear. Nietzsche’s analysis relates the Apollinian to a feeling of joy which gives way to reflection while the Dionesian is related to a feeling of ecstasy and absorbs the viewer into the object/being. Both philosophers claim that it is the fusion of these elements that make tragedies so great: presenting an object/being in an intelligible order while at the same time immersing us in feeling and emotion. Aristotle says that through catharsis, the release of the feelings, we are able to reflect and think about the truth presented in tragedy. Nietzsche claims that this distortion of the real world allows us to accept the world, or in other words take in the truths while avoiding the hostile nature of the world. What Heidegger, Aristotle, and Nietzsche all show is that it is not the artwork itself that contains the truth, but through art we are reminded and able to contemplate the truths of the world that are revealed to us through the presentation of beings and objects in works of art. 

Response 4 - Art as a Means to Truth

Do artworks communicate truth?

            On this subject, there is no question that artworks do not communicate truth in the sense of communicating facts. Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all agree with Plato that what is presented in a work of art is not factually true. However, as Heidegger notes, this is a very limited (and perhaps even almost trivial) notion of what truth is. To this extent then, before we can try and determine whether or not artworks communicate truth, we have to ascertain a definition of truth robust enough to try and accommodate what is shown in artworks.

            Under the Aristotelian account of artworks (or at least of tragedy), artworks do communicate truth, and they do so in a way that is much more palatable for humanity than history. History only lists events of the past; tragedy allows the viewer to witness the events in their entirety. Aristotle grants that the actions performed on the stage are not true, both because the characters are not historically real and because they are not really there on the stage, only actors are. However, in the presentation of the tragedy, these factical concerns are not important. Aristotle stresses that the best tragedies are plausible; within the framework of the tragedy, the characters act in a manner that make sense, and the plot proceeds according to circumstances which are internally coherent, even if they are only fantasy in reality. Behind the effect of plausibility, Aristotle sees a profound teaching tool in tragedy. In present plausible persons performing plausible actions with plausible consequences, tragedy provides us with lessons concerning morality. The truth of the tragedy is not what is represented, but the notion of causality and the moral repercussions of actions which underpin these representations.

            Heidegger, through his analysis of the varying degrees of thing-being, comes to a similar though more general notion of what artistic truth is. For Heidegger, the truth in artwork is ἀλήθεια, an “unconcealedness” of being. In interacting with an artwork, we become aware of the being of things in a new and profound way which is unavailable by other means. For example, in using a basket, we are unaware of what it is that makes it a basket, for this is only unconsciously supplied since we are using it. When we look at a basket, we cease to see it as a basket and approach it as a brute thing which holds physical properties, but nothing which denotes “basket-ness”. However, in looking at a painting of a basket, we become aware of the nature of the basket and what it means for that thing to be a basket. In the work of art, the construct of the world is held together with the brute matter of earth for both to be examined together at the same time. This duality of nature, the one transcendent and the other factical, is the unconcealedness that art reveals.

            Nietzsche’s analysis of art has a similar dichotomy of a constructed, virtual reality and an unveiled reality, which he places under the headings of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian, on the one hand, is the joyous expression of dreams; it creates a world on top of reality. The Dionysian is ecstasy in the most literal sense, for it allows one to step outside of one’s self and become part of the world once again. The conjunction of these tendencies are what constitutes art for Nietzsche, but these are not tendencies towards truth. Rather, these impulses seek to conceal the brutal fact of humanity’s homelessness in the world. Through the Apollonian, the individual seeks to create a pleasant, illusory order in place of the hostile natural one, and through the Dionysian she seeks to lose herself in the greater unity of the world. In this sense, Nietzsche’s conception of art is the opposite of Heidegger’s: rather than revealing the truth of being, it seeks to hide it.

            However, Nietzsche’s notion of the artwork concealing truth seems to be more of a statement of how the artwork creates a unity in itself. The artwork does provide an order beyond that of the actual world, but the recognition of the artwork as an artwork seems to justify Heidegger’s point. The nature of the artwork, as having some sort of internal structure to itself, presents a dichotomy between the mere matter that composes the artwork and the constructed world which the artwork invites the perceiver into. Nietzsche’s distinction of the artwork as untrue falls more on the side of facts about the world at large, since he views the artwork as an attempt to insulate humanity from the meaningless of the world. In as much as truth is ἀλήθεια, however, the artwork still serves to expose the transcendent world and the factical earth and is thus still capable of communicating truth. In any case, art has the power to communicate the nature of the being of the world in a way which is inaccessible to our day-to-day lives. 

2.2Reflection Paper (L) && 3.0Reflection Paper (SL)

Nancun Yu

PR. Kyle Grady

PHIL 330: Aesthetics

23^th, Sept. 2014

2.2Reflection Paper (L)

     As I had mentioned in the previous short reflection paper, I had objected both claim that beauty is a real property of objects and beauty is “in the eye of the beholder.” I made my claim that there must be a form of beauty according to the fact that people always tend to argue or discuss what they think are beautiful. From my understanding, people can only discuss if both sides share basic similar understanding on the subject they discuss. In example, people who think sunshine is orange can hardly discuss the use of sunshine with other who think the sunshine is red. The basic understanding is required as the bridges connect words’ meaning. Thus, its appeal can only be logical if there is a “form of beauty” that people shared understanding of. However, after reading several essays I found Kant’s theory in his Critiques of Judgments have a better explanation that perfect fit with my view.  (Even know I might misunderstand him)

            Kant’s system perfectly answers several question that what make people feel beautiful and how people determines one work is beautiful or not. Instead of saying there is a form of “Beauty”. Kant argues that there is subjective universality when people make their judgment. And instead of saying beauty is “In the eye of the beholders” Kant argues beauty is a matter of taste, it is nothing else than a subjective judgment people make based on the pleasure and the displeasure people (the subject) immediate feels that are affected by the artworks.

In my opinion, if we admit beauty serve as a property of an object, people should eventually come to an equal conclusion, what appeal to be not correct. Moreover, if we think about the process of creating an artwork. Although artists express their emotions into a physical subject, however, emotional expression is not the process, assign “beautiful” into the artworks. I would rather say that the artist hardly created beautiful since they usually tend to be objectively interested about their own work. The quality of “beautiful” can only be judged by the viewer base on their immediate reaction.

In Kant’s system, even know him describe the aesthetic judgment as subjective judgment, Kant adds specific promises that people can only make judgments on their dis-interest subject. Moreover, people should not involve any emotion or background information other than the work itself appeals. It seems little odd that why people want to make judgments toward an object they are not interested about.  It relevantly reflects many situations when people misused the term beautiful.  For example, people tend to think the natural world is beautiful without making judgment. There is a difference between natural beauty and artificial beauty. Although it seems to recommend a fact that the natural world contains a property of beautiful. However, the “good” people receive from the natural world are more of a moderately good. Many things in the natural world are “good” by being useful, i.e. woods, sun (heat), ground (farmland), etc. What I am saying is not natural world are not appreciable and cannot be beautiful. Granted, that natural world can affect human emotions in many ways. However, there are many reasons why people can easily miscalled natural world beautiful without going through the process of judgment. One the one hand, people tend to live closer to the natural environment (what I mean here is not the forest kind of total natural theme but sunshine, cloud, sky). On the other hand, believe on natural world being “Beautiful” had been highly built in with our common values. Therefore, when a theme become common it can easily causing ignorance.

            In addition, Kant’s system have hand over a great power to the viewer by let them making their own judgment. It so allows people called anything to be art by saying they are pleased what can hardly prove. In this light, Kant proposed subjective universality. By that, Kant had not only complete the whole system but also protected the radical strange work become art. The subjective universality allows people to share their different teste and by share it will automatic average the contemporary view and reflect it back to the universality believes.

               

Nancun Yu

PR. Kyle Grady

PHIL 330: Aesthetics

08^th, Oct. 2014

3.0Reflection Paper (SL)

In previous papers I had classifies that beauty is simply a subjective judgment people make based upon their first reactions. Granted by Hume, Kant had also described the Aesthetic judgments as a test. However, just like Mothersill said, if we accept the regular consequence of taste, (that can only be individually judged) the art become meaningless that does not worth to have any discussion. Because without a “standard”, a prior guiding principles, the discussion about beauty will totally about individual taste, the question will shift to self-preference but left none aesthetically knowledge. Furthermore, if “taste” are totally independently without any concept, the argument about taste can kept going forever about both side convincing each other. Overall, we can make a conclusion that if there are no prior – concept people should not spend time practice discussion beautiful. Identically, in reality, people discussing beautiful things and sharing their taste, therefore, it seems there are already some prior “quality” that people had already admitted.  

Albeit, Hume stated that there are neither good taste nor bad taste about any particular taste if it only stand for itself. He also claimed that there cannot be any standard or prior quality because aesthetic judgment can only be subjective. Granted that taste is only a personal matter, but being subjective does not deny the possibility for people to have a compromised agreement on taste. My idea about having a “good taste” does not mean to have a measurement that separate text into different categories (good or bad). It means to learn what is the majority accepted beautiful. It mendaciously fulfil Kant’s claimed subjective universality. However, in difference with “taste”, the subjective judgment people made. To learn the “good taste” do not involve in the process of making aesthetic judgments, because it does not distinctly any personal taste at all. It is simply a knowledge people should be learning, but does not have to pay attention when they making their own judgment about taste. From my sight, that is how taste actually functions. There definitely are some pre-existed universality agreements people had already subconsciously learned.

Many people might like to ask the question that if there truly is such universal agreement, why people still easily run into disagreement when they discuss their taste with one another. Granted that the unanimity of taste is real, But, as Hume wrote in his essay that people usually misunderstand because the nature of language. It is likely that people end up misunderstand each other and that become the distinction when we communicate. By Kant, in chapter XIII of his “critique of judgment” that “judgments so influenced can either lay no claim at all to any universally valid delight.” Thus, it is understandable that people who got influenced so much by their taste’s substance emotions and denied their agreement on society’s “good taste”. For me, the problem of good people cannot control their emotion have no intention to question whether there is a knowledge about taste. Is just like the fact that people might learned some fact, but they might not remember and practice it all the time. On the other hand it is also allowed that people can always critique the pre-learned knowledge, it also applies to the knowledge about “good taste”.

It is also likely that people would want to ask why they should spend time study the majority people’s taste. There are many reasons for that, first of all, the individuals can use the “good taste” as a fiduciary object to identify how difference is their own taste in comparison with what the society been most accepted. And by aware their own difference it helps each individual when they critique their own taste and others. Secondly, the society standard of taste created a universal similarity in taste that allow people to discuss what they think is beautiful. It allows people other than artist to involve more with art. Thirdly, to learn the “good taste” help people live better. It is a common knowledge that human beings must live in a very close community to survive. Thus, there are many common agreement people must agree to in order to keep the community system running. Identically disagreement can usually end up with violence, whereas to have a “good taste” decrease the chance to have a disagreement with others. Last, by admitted to the standard called “good taste”. The society has partially declared a guideline that prevents artist create an extreme strange art work. Just like Socrates had mentioned, art can be dangerous. Thus, by present a society standard, it limited the path of the artist and keeps art in a safe position.

Objections to Kant's Undue Restriction of the Aesthetic Experience

Prior to these readings, I’d never given much thought to what makes taste “good” or “bad,” instead believing, like Mothersill seems to, that if judgements of beauty don’t adhere to a priori principles, there being no such principles, taste would be a wildly subjective concept and not worth much to anyone. Presumably, what is good or what is beautiful would not be discernible through the lens of taste, taste being only a matter of preference, tied more to considerations of pleasure than of appreciation (however linked these may in fact be). I likewise was of the opinion, like Margolis as cited by Mothersill, that “it is altogether conceivable that one likes what one judges to be artistically poor or fails to appreciate what one knows to be excellent”- that taste was the unimportant matter of me liking “The Room” (which I find to be a terrible work of art), and disliking “Lost in Translation,” (which I found to be quite a strong work of art, all together). But this formulation of the definition of taste it appears was misguided and undeveloped, for after clarification, I’ve come to the conclusion that philosophers critical of some of Kant’s widely accepted aesthetic claims (such as Dickie) have more enlightening and useful ideas to offer.

Dickie’s opposition to the notion of “aesthetic attitude” opens up the realm of meaningful art appreciation to more than just critics or the highly trained, breaking down barriers of elitism which have subjugated ordinary people in their attempts to identify with or come into more respected relations with artwork. If the aesthetic attitude is only a misconception which can only really be called focused attention, then anyone can engage in it. However, this could be seen as devaluing the attention paid to an artwork, since if anyone can engage it, some psychic results will be “lesser” (consider the example of the poem and the rugby forward). Dickie can account for these “lesser” interpretations of artwork while still retaining the egalitarian stance he has adopted by claiming that though anyone can engage an artwork in with focused attention, indubitably there will be those who are distracted without knowledge of their own distraction, leading to subjects who describe their own experience as focused attention incorrectly. Taste to Dickie is then not a sliding scale of bad and good taste, but in its normative identity residing only in the non-distracted judgements of an artwork, and I believe this to be quite hopeful.

Dickie also allows for artwork to encompass a moral element, something which imbues artwork with more meaning, instead of less. While Kant would preclude a fully realized artwork from being seen as art if there is moral interest in it, Dickie makes the compelling case that an artwork can still be evaluated as an artwork even after considerable intellection. According to him,(channelling Pole), the aesthetic experience extends beyond the mere moment of recognition. This is certainly a more tenable idea when considering more thematically complex works such as films or novels. In order to be stricken by the beauty of a well constructed novel, one must contemplate it. When I finished McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I was not immediately stricken by a sense of beauty- in fact, it ends horrifically with the hero defiled and the villain triumphant- but after days of thinking endlessly of the implications of its plot and themes I have no doubt that it is the most beautiful novel I’ve ever read. According to Kant, this aesthetic experience of mine is illegitimate, and the object of that experience unworthy of being called beautiful. Dickie, by allowing that our initial experience is not complete until full contemplation has occurred, allows for more complex works of art (works which I find incredibly compelling) to be allowed into the artistic fold, and he does this by allowing Kant’s realm of the good to necessarily enter into our considerations. The allowance of considerations of the good also can help us appreciate less complex works, such as paintings of songs. The beauty of Rage Against the Machine’s “On Rodeo” (controversial, I know) can come not only from the form of the song and the relation of its parts, but from the political, social, and ethical messages of the song as well, making our experience of the beautiful all the richer.

"Good Taste"

“Good Taste”

Good taste is a specious concept which, if to be taken as something which exists beyond the nominal, requires not merely a standard of taste but a normativity based on this rule which would seem to be able to decisively state whether or not a particular individual makes good use of the standard or not. Despite the guise of some kind of universality of an object’s beauty, or ugliness, which seems to allow for such normative claims to be rendered as meaningful, as noted by Kant, aesthetic judgments are themselves produced out a “disinterested interest” which occurs in absence of an appeal to a concept or any other feeling of pleasure derived from it. This creates an unprejudiced judgment but, in contrast to Hume’s thesis, this lack of prejudice exists completely separate of the education of the observer of the art object. This is not to say that an educated taste cannot be applied to an aesthetic judgment but that it is after the fact and ad hoc. The art object appealed to the observer’s taste before a requirement of the object to be of “good” taste entered into the equation (“good” taste here means any sort of normative claim or standard against which the art object is contrasted – what is considered using a “critical eye”). The thing appeals to the observer before a concept is attached to it. The object is simply “this,” and “this thing is beautiful” or “this thing is ugly” (or some degree thereof) are the immediate judgments which are made and can then be extrapolated to establish a particular pattern which we may call an individual’s particular “taste.” This is why is it that even those critics who are said to have the most refined and sophisticated senses of taste, due either to a natural talent or education, within their field can maintain “guilty pleasures” which they know to be completely outside the realm of “good” taste but nonetheless enjoy as appealing to their own taste.

Even in light of the adoption of Hume’s notion that taste, specifically “good taste”, is a composite of the preferences and predispositions exposited by qualified critics, there are repeated occurrences of objects which are otherwise un-notable being pleasurable to a majority of observers even when it is known that the object does not qualify as being particularly tasteful (this is not an occurrence in which a particular thing has fallen out of fashion or is anachronistic as Hume himself provides an account for the changing of taste based in cultural and time contexts, but regards actual objects seated within their time and place which still fall into this category). The attractiveness, then, of the application of a sort of principle of taste is due to the sense of the normative character of aesthetic judgments; there is some feeling that others should share in the purely subjective judgments which are made about an art, or aesthetic, object. Further, authority is placed in those who have the highest degree of exposure and education in particular domains because there is a sense they are much more qualified to make aesthetic judgments which would be true if there were, in fact, a real principle or law of taste which could discern good taste from bad. However, without such a principle, appeals to critics due to their experience is a sort of surrendering of agency to another – an attempt to have them inform a subjective judgment by placing it into a quasi-objective realm – instantiated in something such as a review – where the merits (e.g. being produced using good technique or effectively making a certain reference in a clever way) of an aesthetic object render whether the object is appealing or not almost entirely regardless of subjective experience.

            In the face of this relativistic understanding of taste it is difficult to argue whether the discernment of taste is a meaningful ability, and arguably, it is not in of itself. For one to have an understanding of their own preferences is a desirable quality in both others and oneself but it does not have a meaningful input, in of itself, into the world because each individual has their own taste which is only truly curated by them (which is why it can be so exciting to meet someone who seems to share in the same taste – it is not simply confirmation but a feeling of finding oneself in another). The discernment of taste, then, is given meaning through socio-cultural constructs which place certain individuals as authorities of taste, and more encompassingly, inform not merely what objects in that particular context are in “good” taste (i.e. in fashion) but how taste should be conceived of altogether. There is an inter-subjective agreement brought about by cultural conditioning. This is what causes so much wonder about individuals who defy these cultural conditions and seem to operate under an entirely different understanding of the world, at least aesthetically, as a result. Similarly, these same sort of constraints are what causes aesthetic objects which transcend multiple socio-cultural contexts (constantly being regarded as beautiful) to seem so powerful and impressive (it may even provide further momentum to this transcendent ability and perpetuate the ability outside of the object’s own power – the wonder that it has made it this far disposes observers to lift it up so it may go farther).

            In summation, “good” taste is a socially derived concept which exploits an appeal to authority in attempt to be meaningful. Unfortunately, taste is, in of itself, a relative trait which differs from each individual to the next and is only able to find any semblance of uniformity in the conformity to socio-cultural contexts. However, in closing, this does not mean that tastes do not have an emotional component. Hume touched on the sentimental component which informs taste, and this is where taste may find its meaning – not as an informed, critical appreciation but as a sort of social-emotional bond (at the very least a very real set of predispositions which could be, though most likely not fully, evaluated by inquiry into their relations with one another and in reference to other people). And so, taste may not be meaningful in law-like way but it may still have meaning as a very real concept which is impactful upon people. 

Blog 3 - Can there be a subjective universality?

Taste as I see it is a means or standard for one to judge an object. In order to have good taste, one must have multiple experiences with similar objects. ‘Good’ in this case can also mean refined. If one experiences an object for the first time and thinks that it is particularly good, beautiful, etc. and then one experiences a similar object and thinks that it is better than the first, then one starts to establish a standard of taste. As one builds on the experiences of similar objects, one creates more points of reference in determining the quality of an object.

Taste of course can be broken down into smaller segments. For instance, I may like action films more than any other kind of movie. This does not mean, however, that action films are the best type of movie. What is required of an action movie in order to make it a good action movie is different than the standard with which we judge other genres of movies or even films qua films like cinematography, music, acting, etc. We can judge objects both as a representative type of object like a movie, but also in smaller categories like an action movie. Arguing about taste, therefore, needs restriction and focus in order for it to be worthy of debate.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that there are four moments to an aesthetic judgment: disinterested pleasure, purposiveness without purpose, subjective universality, and necessity. When discussing the subjective universality, Kant argues that the beautiful comes from a subjective standpoint because it is in the realm of feeling. Despite the fact that it is subjective, the claim seems to necessitate agreement from others. When we make a claim about the beautiful we have a feeling that everyone should agree with us, almost as if we are appealing to a rule or law. This state, Kant supposes, is universalizable because we are appealing to a form that exists in objects. If perhaps we were able to obtain this universal state from which we could all judge the same object, then maybe we could come to a universal determination about taste.

Arguably, however, taste cannot become universal in the sense that it will forever stay the same. As we have seen over the centuries, what each culture decides fits the standard of good taste differs tremendously. This does not mean that there is no such thing as taste, but rather that taste changes based on the subjective culture of the time. Not only has the taste of each culture changed, but also each culture remains biased to some degree. It would be wrong to try and rank cultures and say that one culture’s standard of taste is better than another, and it would also be wrong to argue that we know what culture looks like from a non-masculine-dominated perspective. As we have learned so far from the course, males, white males in particular, have dominated much of aesthetic history. An overwhelming majority of ‘good’ artists were white males, and not only that, but white males predominated the positions with which to judge art as well.

It is hard to know exactly if we are able to reach the unbiased judgment that Kant argues for. So much of what has been defined as ‘good’ comes from biased sources. For instance, wealth plays an important role in determining taste. People will often select the more expensive item and call it good because they know that they are supposed to because it is more expensive. I do not think this means that there is no way to distinguish between better objects of the same kind, but it certainly becomes harder when things like wealth, status, race, and gender have so greatly influenced the terms we use to distinguish between good and bad objects.

When discussing Hume’s understanding of taste in class we asked the question, “why might there be a standard of taste?” The answer was that Homer has lasted over the centuries, but many other poets have fallen by the waste side. Certainly there are elements of Homer that make his work stand out, but that does not mean that the influences of his culture and every subsequent culture make it so that we understand Homeric poetry as ‘good’ poetry. There may have been several poets that wrote great poetry but we do not know it because women wrote it or because the people at the time did not find it to be of any worth.