Aesthetics by Bence Nanay

Author:Bence Nanay [Nanay, Bence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192561268
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Why judgements?

In order to shift the emphasis of aesthetic theory from aesthetic judgement to the temporal unfolding of aesthetic engagement, we need to understand why aestheticians are obsessed with aesthetic judgements to begin with.

One reason is clearly historical. The key concept of ‘Western’ aesthetics has always been that of aesthetic judgement, at least since David Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757)—which was published more than 250 years ago.

Hume (1711–76), whose influence on Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics is difficult to overstate, explicitly talks about the differences between the ways two different people make judgements of taste. He gives the following story as an illustration (borrowed from Don Quixote). Two people drink from the same wine and are asked to judge its quality. One of them says it has a discernible odd leathery taste. The other one thinks it has an unpleasant metallic note. The punchline of Hume’s story is that while we might think that at least one of these judgements is just plain wrong, when the wine was inspected, they discovered a small key with a leather thong attached. So they were both right.

I will come back to this story in Chapter 5. But what matters for us now is that although Hume clearly stresses the importance of perceptual discrimination here, what he mainly cares about is the aesthetic judgement of these two wine connoisseurs. It does not matter for them how their experience of wine unfolded through time (although a lot can be said about how the experience of wine unfolds over time). The only thing that matters is the aesthetic judgement they came up with—and how the two judgements are related to one another.

As we shall see in Chapter 5, there are important philosophical reasons why Hume was focusing on judgements, but the strength of his influence on the field of aesthetics meant that his assumption that the central concern of aesthetics is understanding aesthetic judgements went unquestioned.

Another important historical reason for the dominance of judgements in aesthetics has to do with the strong influence of philosophy of language on philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular. Aesthetic judgements are statements (that we make to ourselves or to others) that philosophy of language has a lot to say about. So aesthetic judgement is a familiar subject for aestheticians with strong philosophy of language training. Experiences, in contrast, are not so easy to analyse using the conceptual toolkit of philosophy of language.

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