Taste

The recent understanding of taste (as closer to personal taste and away from the more traditional, realist sense of the word) can still be seen as pointing toward greater authority of the judgment of the individual that was one of the motivators of the original taste theorists. If there is ultimately no way to reasonably, authoritatively, or meaningfully adjudicate among divergent particular judgments or among divergent personal tastes as sets of matters of choice, then the eighteenth-century move toward a fuller respect for individual autonomy in aesthetic judgment has brought us to a point where taste gives way to personal taste. If one believes that Hume failed in his attempt to render consistent the authority of the individual with the call to commonality in judgment, and if one rejects Kant's attempt to solve the antinomy of taste ("taste is at the same time subjective and individual yet also universal") and save aesthetic realism where perhaps Hume was unable to, one may believe that, in these failures, the realist version of a singular, correct definition of taste is rightly abandoned. We may see as continuous with the decision between vanilla and chocolate ice cream a preference for Pink Floyd over Beethoven, Albee over Shakespeare, and Pollock over Rembrandt. Still, the recognition of this continuity is not a cause for surrender to the philosophy of "anything goes." As individuals may reasonably be expected to pursue those experiences that they find rewarding, and to make their investments of aesthetic attention based on predictions derived from patterns of past reward, we will continue to see some degree of commonality in personal judgment. The degree to which we see this—however modestly or subtly—will continue to advance culture positively.