The appreciation of Art, and beauty in general, is all about the making of, debate about, and arguments for & against, various aesthetic judgments.
In order to answer the question: Are aesthetic judgments subjective or objective ? I wish to reply "Neither". In the course of this essay, I will argue that aesthetic judgments - judgments of taste are neither one nor the other, they can be both subjective and objective.
However, this leaves us with a problem, for almost all other judgments can be placed into one of two camps: they are either subjective - decided on personal feeling alone or they are objective - referable to an outside authority; normative: either right or wrong.
Furthermore, these two camps are mutually exclusive: a judgment is either of one or of the other. The interesting thing is, that concerning aesthetic judgments, one seems justified in holding that they can be both subjective and objective; as Robert Shiner surmises in Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste, "both lines of arguments have intuition on their side" - I wish to demonstrate this in the course of the essay.
The trouble is this: on one hand aesthetic judgments are based on feeling - when we view a piece of art or listen to a piece of music we are moved by it, it arouses feelings in us and it elicits an emotional response. Viewing a beautiful impressionist painting can be uplifting listening to an intense concerto can be vibrant and exciting; an contemplating a work of brash modern art can be shocking.
In his Critique of Judgment, Kant spells out the significance of the fact that pleasure is essential to the experience which grounds an aesthetic judgment. Pleasure is a feeling not a cognitive mental state: Kant writes that pleasure, designates nothing whatsoever in the object.
Thus emotional response is necessary for, and not merely a contingent accompaniment to, aesthetic response.
A slightly different line of thought argues that feelings are not normative: an emotion is "always real whenever a man is conscious of it". Feelings cannot be proved wrong or right - feelings just are; a corollary of this surely is, that judgments based on feeling also cannot be right or wrong, as Hume writes: All sentiment is right because sentiment has reference to nothing beyond itself.
The aesthetic objectivist may have a reply to this assertion - but I will return to this later.
Although some art is more moving than others, art in general can evoke the whole spectrum of emotions. But the important point is this: art is emotive; it would not do for me to listen to a description of a piece of art- 'it has graceful curves; a peaceful, serene balance of colours; a smooth and elegant form; etc....' - and then claim that I have appreciated the piece, having not actually seen it. In order to respond to an aesthetic object I must experience it, and respond to it, at first hand; a description will not do.
The above goes to show how important an emotional response is in the appreciation of art; however, there are some occasions when we are tempted to say that some responses to art are just wrong.
Hume employs the example of someone who would claim that the poetry of Ogilby is of "an equality of genius and elegance" with Milton. Hume claims this assertion is as wrong as claiming a mole-hill is as high as Tenerife, or a pond is as large as an ocean - we pronounce, without scruple, the sentiment of these pretend critics to be absurd and ridiculous.
It can be claimed that some aesthetic judgments are simply wrong - however, we needn't go this far: all that is needed to show that artistic appreciation is not based entirely on subjective feelings, is for us to recognise that people can dispute certain aesthetic judgments. If one protested that feelings are not right or wrong - they just are, hence judgments based on feelings cannot be examined normatively; then we would have rendered the whole business of art criticism ridiculous and redundant. Moreover it is not a particularly sound philosophical method to resort to a kind of table-thumping argument, which merely asserts: I feel this way -therefore, I'm right.
In review, aesthetic objectivism is the doctrine that aesthetic qualities - such as beauty, grace, elegance, harmony, etc. - are genuine properties which inhere in objects independently of the subject's awareness.
Aesthetic subjectivism asserts that in appreciating a piece of art I am affected by the object - furthermore, my response is more than just perception of its aesthetic properties. It is true that in order to have this response, I must have a reaction to certain formal features of the aesthetic object, but these properties are merely what causes the response - the response is something over and above a perception of those properties. In his essay Of a Standard of Taste, Hume wrote that beauty: is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
According to the summary by Sebastian Gardner, in Philosophy A. C. Grayling (Ed.), both Hume and Kant, as well as affirming that aesthetic judgments presuppose taste, rejected the view that aesthetic qualities are objective.
This Objective Realism is found in classical aesthetics and the aesthetics of rationalists; Baumgarten, Kant's immediate precursor, defined aesthetics as "the science of the beautiful" and also discussed the idea of "rules constituting beauty. Specific rules for aesthetic judgment appear in many places in the history of aesthetics, Gardner offers Joshua Reynold's Seventh Discourse on Art (797) as a 'prime example".
Perhaps the trend for establishing such rules should not be too surprising - for in other matters, one often wishes for a basis to work from: some criteria to refer to.
However, the absence of aesthetic rules is also not too hard to appreciate - one can spot a marked difference in conceptions of beauty, both within a particular culture, and also quite perspicuously, between different cultures. It also seems quite counter intuitive to force someone to relinquish their aesthetic judgment on the grounds that it conflicts with some aesthetic rule. Furthermore, is it not almost logically impossible to try to translate certain aesthetic features of a piece of art into fixed aesthetic rules?
The case for aesthetic subjectivism seems strong - it is philosophically cogent and has intuition and common sense on its side; however, I believe that it is undone by a quite unwelcome implication. As Hume pointed out, sometimes an aesthetic judgment is just wrong - if we take a strong subjectivist line, there is nothing to prevent the same object from being viewed as beautiful by one observer and ugly by another. In following this unqualified subjectivist line we have reduced aesthetic taste to gustatory taste - Sebastian Gardner claims that A.J. Ayer, an emotivist, sees aesthetic judgments as equivalent to avowals of like or dislike: [for Ayer] they have no richer meaning than exclamations like"boo!" and 'hurrah!'.
Art encourages debate; it is right that aesthetic objects should provoke discussion, but this denies the possibility that artistic appreciation is based on subjective feelings alone.
On the other hand, we should not jump to the other extreme and insist that there is some ultimate, metaphysical Right or Wrong: aesthetic judgments are not entirely objective.
These two points constitute the Antinomy of Taste - our responses to art is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. We must find a way of reconciling the two.
Bibliography
David Hume "Of the Standard of Taste" from Essays, Moral, Political and Literary
Immanuel Kant "The analytic of the Beautiful" from Critique of Judgment
[both in Neill and Ridley's The Philosophy of Art - Readings Ancient and Modem]
Robert Shiner Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste
Peter Kivy Hume's Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle
A. C. Grayling (Ed.) Philosophy: A guide through the subject
Oxford University Press: 1995
Some useful terms
Aesthetic Judgments: broadly speaking, these are judgments about the "beauty" of an object. They often contain terms such as 'exquisite, 'elegant', 'graceful', 'unified', 'balanced', 'lifeless', 'dynamic', 'powerful', 'vivid', 'moving', 'sentimental', 'tragic', etc.
Aesthetic Object: the object which is being described or evaluated using aesthetic judgments. An aesthetic object can be a painting, sculpture or piece of music - or it could be something of natural beauty for example, a waterfall, mountain landscape or pretty face.
The Antinomy of Taste: a term (coined I think by David Hume in his Essays: Moral, Political and Literary 1740) which describes the difficulty presented by aesthetic judgments in that they appear to be both partly subjective and partly objective.
Subjective: based on personal feeling alone.
Objective: the opposite of the above - referable to some outside authority, ie: not based solely on one's emotions.
Normative: either right or wrong. The answer to: Who won the FA Cup in 1991? is normative - someone saying Tottenham Hotspur will be right (they beat Nottingham Forest in the final), someone saying Liverpool will be wrong. However, an answer to the question: How did you feel when Spurs won the cup in 1991? will never be normative - the answer would be a statement of an individual emotional reaction to a particular event.
NB Almost all judgments are either subjective or objective/normative; the two categories are mutually exclusive something cannot, by definition, be both subjective and objective.
Or can it ? ... this is the crux of the debate: does the issue have to be decided one way or another; or can it, as I suggest, be resolved by saying that aesthetic judgments are partly subjective and partly objective ?
The Mission
The mission of this meeting of the Decimus Society is twofold: to engage with the difficulties thrown up by the above, and, to try to solve the Antinomy of Taste.