Taste

Taste in this first sense, by which we mean the ability to correctly judge aesthetic objects and events, has a long history, but happily that history is fairly easy to trace and fairly easy to contextualize. We will start in ancient Greece. In those philosophic traditions that begin with Greece, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) is the first person who offers us a formula for beauty. If a thing possesses a certain set of properties—objective properties that anyone with working senses and a passing familiarity with those properties can easily pick out—then that thing is beautiful. Aristotle said that an object is beautiful if it is ordered, symmetrical, and definite, and if it demonstrates each of these virtues to a high degree. This analysis we call "formal," because it focuses on the presence in the object of certain aesthetic properties that have to do with the form (as distinguished from the content) of the object. If a set of criteria can be discovered, the presence of which will ensure that an object is beautiful, and the absence of which will ensure that it is not, then through this the correctness of aesthetic judgments can be established.

Formalism, as an objective approach to aesthetic judgment, has been very popular. We find in St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) a formalist account of beauty: for an object to be beautiful is for it to exhibit unity, number, equality, proportion, and order, with unity as the most basic notion. And in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274), we find a formal account of beauty, which rests on three conditions: integrity or perfection, due proportion or harmony, and brightness or clarity. We find examples of formalists in eighteenth-century Britain. The third earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713) believed that so long as one was disinterested in attitude, one's judgment that an object was beautiful was correct as long as the object exhibits "unity in multiplicity." Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) believed that, given a disinterested attitude, if an object exhibits "uniformity amongst variety," that object is beautiful. The essayist and statesman Joseph Addison (1672–1719) believed that an object was worthy of positive aesthetic judgment if it exhibited greatness and uncommonness. And jumping to the twentieth century, we find formalist accounts of aesthetic merit (though not explicitly about beauty per se) in the work of G.E. Moore (1873–1958) ("organic unity") and Clive Bell (1881–1964) ("significant form").

While theorists such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson include clear formalist elements in their theories of aesthetic merit, they also stand at the beginning of a tradition of philosophers of aesthetics sometimes referred to as "taste theorists." The taste theorists are found, generally, in eighteenth-century Britain, and they begin as a bridge between objective formalist and subjective accounts of beauty. Although individual subjectivity now begins to appear in accounts of aesthetic judgment, it is important to note that these accounts were not antirealist (antirealism being the position that judgments about aesthetic objects are neither true nor false). Quite to the contrary, theorists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson were still aesthetic realists (realism being the position that there are real answers to questions of aesthetic merit, that judgments about aesthetic objects really are true or false). In order to access the formal conditions of beauty, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson said that the attender must put himself or herself into a proper frame of mind. From this proper perspective—from the proper exercise of one's faculty of taste—one could judge correctly whether a thing is beautiful or not. The inclusion in their theories of the formal elements of "unity in multiplicity" and "uniformity amongst variety" were meant as explanations for why the exercise of one's taste would result in aesthetic enjoyment and correct judgment, but it is the exercise of taste that, in their theories, is logically prior: one exercises taste; one enjoys and judges positively; and notes subsequently that this enjoyment and positive judgment are occasioned by the presence of certain objective, formal features. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are joined in their theories—which mix objective features of objects with subjective features of judgment—by others, most notably Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Archibald Alison (1757–1839), Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696–1782), and Alexander Gerard (1728–1795).

The eighteenth-century British taste theorists are, in some sense, a product of their times. There are three items that motivate them. First, they rejected as insufficient pure formalist, objectivist theories of beauty. Second, they were inspired by empiricism, and they sought to connect knowledge with the focus on the senses as the medium through which reality was taken in. In aesthetic theory, this can been seen in the move from the Platonism apparent in theories like Shaftesbury's to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas. Theories of taste have had a long history. In ancient Greece Aristotle claimed that order and proportion contributed to beauty. Twentieth-century theorists found distinctly asymmetrical works such as those of Picasso to have visual merit as well. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS the almost physiological tone of theories such as those of Hutcheson and Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Third, with political theorists in Britain like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) came a new focus on the authority and autonomy of the individual. This celebration of the individual, his rights, and the dominion and prerogative of his judgments, can be seen in the fundamental premises upon which David Hume (1711–1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) build their theories of aesthetic judgment.

Although formalist accounts persist into the twentieth century, they reach a point of diminished popularity at the end of the eighteenth century when mixed objective-subjective accounts, such as those offered by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, are replaced in popularity by more purely subjective accounts offered by, to name the two most influential, Hume and Kant. Instead of focusing on the aesthetic object, both of these theorists focus on the aesthetic attender. Instead of offering objective-criteria formulae for what makes an object aesthetically good or beautiful, they focus exclusively on the qualities of the attender that make him or her a good judge.

Hume believed in the indisputability of particular taste and the sovereignty of the individual judge, but he also believed that "amidst all the variety and caprice of tastes, there are certain general principles of approbation and blame." For Hume, an object is beautiful if and only if it provokes aesthetic sentiment in appropriately disposed competent critics, which he calls "true judges." True judges have the following traits: (1) serenity of mind (mentioned earlier than the other five), (2) delicacy of taste, (3) they are well practiced, (4) they are versed in comparison between objects, (5) they are free from prejudice, and (6) they have good sense (i.e., their senses work very well).

Kant's focus was similar, although the theoretical details are rather different. Kant's means of establishing the worthiness of aesthetic judgment focuses somewhat less on the individual than Hume's, and more on what is common about judgment. It is from the dual vantage point of the authority of the subject's judgment and the call to universality of judgment—that we expect and even demand commonality in judgment—that Kant develops his view. Kant thought that the key to securing this universality was twofold: first, we recognize that each person has basically the same "common sense" for recognizing beauty in objects, and that aesthetic judgment is not merely a matter of sentiment but a matter of free play between the understanding and the imagination. Second, it is important for the judge to be properly disposed to making a correct judgment, and the proper disposition is for the judge to be disinterested—to consider the object/event for its own sake alone, without regard for any relation it bears to anything else, including personal interests. Given disinterest on the part of the judge, and given that we all have similar faculties for understanding the world—particularly, the formal structures and purposefulness of the phenomenal world—we would all judge similarly, at least with regard to individual, particular aesthetic judgments.

Hume and Kant opened the door for other subjective accounts of aesthetic goodness, but the real investment in subjective accounts came in the twentieth century and was provided by an assortment of aestheticians, Frank Sibley (1923–1996) being perhaps the most famous, who argue that reductions of evaluative aesthetic claims will never result in arrangements of objective properties. Sibley first identified aesthetic concepts and aesthetic terms as ones that necessarily include taste in their application. In justifying the use of aesthetic terms, however, we naturally seek out a basis that does not refer to taste. We look for the objective basis for our use of such terms, and we commonly expect to find such bases. Unfortunately, this only flows in one direction. While we may naturally look to non-aesthetic features to ground our ascriptions of aesthetic ones, we cannot, no matter how full an account we offer, ever say that, due to the presence of given nonaesthetic features an aesthetic feature must certainly be present. We would, says Sibley, be suspicious of anyone who says that we can create a rule that states that a certain aesthetic feature can be created by inserting certain nonaesthetic ones. We would say that such a person is not exercising taste and, moreover, did not really understand the aesthetic term at issue unless he could correctly apply it in instances where citing the rule was not an option.

This movement, first begun in the latter eighteenth century, but really brought to bloom in the twentieth—twentieth-century formalists notwithstanding—through the work of Sibley and others, is a movement from objective accounts of beauty to subjective ones. The subjective accounts focus on taste, on the attenders or audience members (1) exercising their ability to judge correctly from an aesthetic point of view and (2) finding enjoyment in attending to those aesthetic qualities that properly should ground such enjoyment.