...critic, who had been judging Whistler's work during an opening: "You must never say this painting is good or that bad. Good and bad are not terms to be used by you. But you may say 'I like this' or 'I don't like that,' and you will be within your rights. Now come and have a whisky: you re sure to like that."

I am interested in what happens to me when I say to myself that something is beautiful and not merely that I like it. It seems to be, but it is not the conclusion of an interpretation -- that is why the judgment of taste, as Kant claimed (although he did not see what that implied), does not follow from any description of its object: no reasons for it can be given. It is more like hearing something call me, a guess or a hope that if that thing were part of my life it would somehow make it more worthwhile. But when I find something beautiful, even when I speak only to myself, I expect others to join me and make that beautiful thing part of their own lives as well.

Whistler did not just put Ward down; he also asked a real question: Does anyone have the right to such an expectation? Or does such an expectation amount to an ugly kind of selfishness?

These questions are raised by the fact that if the judgment of taste expresses something more than a purely private preference, it seems to demand nothing less than universal agreement. Yet how can we expect anyone to accept a judgment for which we can give no reasons? And what of the brute fact that such a demand has never been met?

Kant thought that everyone who judges something to be beautiful speaks with "a universal voice," but all that clamor sounds to me no stronger than the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Universality, at any rate, comes at a very high price, a vague echo in the third Critique, but clear and definite among contemporary Kantians.

For if the judgment of taste is a genuine judgment, then, as Mary Mothersill argues, it is either true or false; if it is true, then everyone should accept it; if they do not, then there is something wrong with them. Since we all believe our judgments are true (whether or not they really are), we must feel, Mothersill claims, that everyone whose taste differs from ours is "slightly defective -- as if something blocked his perception or impaired his sensibility." (1)

Can this be right? I would probably consider defective all those who refused to acknowledge that they are holding a copy of Daedalus in their hands as they are reading this sentence (unless, of course, they were making a philosophical point!). I might possibly, in certain circumstances, consider defective some of those who, unable to understand some more complex idea, were also unwilling to learn what it took to see that it was true -- defective intellectually or defective in character, defects of which I am aware in myself. I would find fault, under very specific conditions, with someone who disputed some particular aesthetic judgment of mine -- perhaps a friend from whom I expected better, or someone whose disagreement was based purely on what I considered ignorance or prejudice. But I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to consider defective everyone who disputed my particular taste in painting, literature, or television. I can't even imagine I would have that reaction toward everyone who fou nd, say, my taste for television in general an error (the same would be true of my taste for lyric poetry).

C. S. Peirce held that a true belief is one that is fated to be believed by everyone who engages in scientific investigation. He envisioned an ideal world -- a world he thought to be supremely beautiful -- in which scientific inquiry had come to an end. Kantianism, from which Peirce drew much of his inspiration, has a similar dream about aesthetics: it dreams of a world where aesthetic disagreements have come to an end, and, since the judgment of taste is a conclusion regarding the aesthetic features of things, everyone's reasons for making the same judgments as everyone else would also be the same as everyone else's.

Is that a dream or a nightmare?

I think that a world where everyone liked, or loved, the same things would be a desolate, desperate world -- as devoid of pleasure and interest as the most frightful dystopia of those who believe (quite wrongly) that the popular media are inevitably producing a depressingly, disconsolately uniform world culture. And although I say this with serious discomfort, a world in which everyone liked Shakespeare, or Titian, or Bach for the same reasons -- if such a world were possible -- appears to me no better than a world where everyone tuned in to Baywatch or listened to the worst pop music at the same time.

What to me is truly frightful is not the quality of what everyone agrees on, but the very fact of universal agreement. Even the idea of two individuals whose aesthetic judgments are absolutely identical sends shivers down my spine. In a minute I will try to suggest why.

If the Kantian view is right, then in the less than ideal situation in which we are bound to live, where no one agrees completely on aesthetic issues with anyone else, whoever attaches importance to such issues will certainly end up finding everyone else defective. No doubt everyone feels that way about some people, but I wonder if that is the right way to feel about everyone else in the world. If the idea that the judgment of taste is a genuine judgment implies that our species should be held together by bonds of mutual contempt, then something is wrong with that idea.

Rejecting Kantianism does not mean accepting a puerile relativism, in which aesthetic judgments express purely private preferences, devoid of any logic at all. We need some shared ground for our aesthetic judgments to rest upon, for they are much more consequential than we commonly imagine.

After all, I do not go through my own...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Daedalus
On a danger of deliberative democracy.(group polarization), September 22, 2002
On fear, uncertainty & scientific progress., September 22, 2002
On policy initiatives for children.(education), September 22, 2002
Buying the world., September 22, 2002
The Elgin Marbles, romanticism & the waning of 'ideal beauty'., September 22, 2002

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