Category: Judgment

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (2)

I left off in the last post on Danto’s book wondering just what to make of his identifying the essence of art as the material embodiment of a meaning to be communicated from artist to audience. Just what that meaning is (how an audience is supposed to grasp it) is radically context-dependent in Danto, which explains the historicism that exists side by side with his essentialism. (See my previous post, where I quote the passage on page 95 where Danto explains how he is both an essentialist and a historicist.)

Starting with the essentialist part, Danto is (as I read him) substituting an emphasis on “meaning” for any attempt to describe the material features that reveal a thing as a work of art. “Modernism,” he tells us “came to an end . . . when it became imperative to quit a materialist aesthetics in favor of an aesthetics of meaning” (77). The difference “between works of art and mere real objects could no longer be articulated in visual terms” (77).

Quoting a long passage here will provide Danto’s understanding of 1) how his essentialism and historicism co-exist and 2) how he believes art works are to be recognized as instances of art. (He doesn’t use the word “recognize,” but I think its Hegelian echo appropriate for understanding his position.)

Here’s Danto:

The difference, philosophically, between . . . Dickie and myself is not that I was an essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the art world in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the decisions form being merely fiats of arbitrary will. And in truth I felt that according the status of art to Brillo Box and to Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery. The experts really were experts in the same way in which astronomers are experts on whether something is a star. They saw that these works had meanings which their indiscernible counterparts lacked, and they saw as well the way these works embodied those meanings. These were works simply made for the end of art inasmuch as there was very little to them in terms of sensuous presentation, and a sufficient degree of what Hegel terms ‘judgment’ to license the admittedly somewhat reckless claim I sometimes made that art had nearly turned into philosophy.

There is a further consideration bearing on the institutional account, and which has played a considerable role in my thinking about art, namely, that an object precisely (or precisely enough) like one accorded the status of artwork in 1965 could not have been accorded that status in 1865 or 1765. The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed—it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history, which is part of what Wofflin may be taken to have implied in saying, ‘Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development.’ History belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art, and again with the notable exception of Hegel, virtually no philosophers have taken seriously the historical dimension of art. . . . [B]oth content and means of presentation are themselves historical concepts, though the faculty of the mind to which they answer is not perception but, once again, ‘judgment.’ (195-96, my italics).

As I complained in my last post, the “essence” seems vapid, an empty container into which the historical contents (the actual meaning and the means of its presentation) are poured. Especially since humans have multiple ways of conferring and communicating meanings, many of which ways we don’t call art and all of which arguably require “judgment” in order to be interpreted and understood. But this passage clarifies why Danto wants to be an essentialist. He wants to avoid “arbitrary” judgments and seems to think only essentialism offers such a guarantee. The historical conditions prevailing at any given moment are not enough since, obviously, such conditions can and do change. But whether such changes are “arbitrary” (surely Hegel wouldn’t find them so) and whether the fact of their existence means chaos reigns is debatable, to say the least.

But I want to focus here on the conditions that would trigger or underwrite the “judgment” that something is a work of art. The search is for what Wittgenstein would term the “criteria.” Danto it seems to me offers three candidates for those conditions.

The first is context. Here Danto goes very far in Wittgenstein’s direction, even as he tells us that his essentialism means he stands “resolutely against the Wittgensteinian tides of the time” (194). However, he embraces Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” when he comes to fleshing out what he means by context.

Here’s Danto:

The expression ‘form of life’ of course comes from Wittgenstein: he said, ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’ But the same thing must be said about art: to imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in which it plays a role. . . . I want heavily to stress a philosophical point about forms of life: a form of life is something lived and not merely known about. For art to play a role in a form of life, there has to be a fairly complex system of meanings in which it does so, and belonging to another form of life means that one can grasp the meaning of works of art from an earlier form only by reconstituting as much of the relevant system of meanings as we are able. One can without question imitate the work and the style of the work of an earlier period. What one cannot do is live the system of meanings upon which the work drew in its original form of life. Our relationship to it is altogether external, unless and until we can find a way of fitting it into our form of life. (pp. 202-203).

Not only is this position radically historicist, but we get here context on steroids. The ‘judgment’ that allows us to grasp a work’s meaning is utterly dependent on a “complex” set of background assumptions and understandings. And this complex set is not something known, but something “lived.” Meaning emanates like mist from a swamp—a swamp that is the murky (never fully cognized) water we live in.

For me, this kind of historicist rendering of “form of life” (with its hint that one form of life is incommensurable with all others) pushes me toward nominalism rather than essentialism, especially when it comes to cultural (as distinct from biological) phenomenon. If a work is to be understood as “art” in relation to the “role” it plays in a form of life, then it seems to follow that different forms of life will call something “art” in relation to different criteria. (Danto would not dispute this point; he just doesn’t think it undermines essentialism.) So, for example, (following Walter Benjamin here), things are produced for and embedded in ritual practices in certain cultures, but then cross over into being thought “art” when abstracted from their original context of production and use to be placed in a Western museum. In such cases, the effort seems less to reconstitute the system of meanings in which the object once had a role than to identify some features of “beauty” that can float free of context altogether. It is a sign of our times that such abstraction from context is now frowned upon and museums displaying such objects nowadays at least gesture toward indicating the original context.

Additionally, accepting this understanding of the holistic determinism wielded by “form of life” commits one (I think) to Wittgenstein’s insistence on “meaning as use”. Danto’s reference to the “role” a work plays points in that direction. A work’s meaning is revealed by the “use” to which it is put within a form of life. So an object being used in a ritual has a different meaning than an object placed on a museum wall. That, again, seems to me to point in a nominalist direction. The same painting displayed in a museum or displayed on the wall of the billionaire’s mansion communicates different meanings. The “essential” fact that it communicates a meaning, that it is put to some use, seems incapable of constraining its radical shape-shifting.

Although he touches on it only lightly in After the End of Art, Danto’s second criteria for art has been “the transfiguration of the commonplace.” Think here of James Joyce—and transubstantiation. What the artist does is take the ordinary (a Brillo box; life in dull, dreary Dublin) and transform it (like the priest turns wine and bread into the godhead) by some magical derring-do. Art transforms the mundane into the sacred. It reveals the divine that lurks within even the most neglected, even despised, items of everyday life. Danto (to my knowledge; I haven’t read all his work by a long shot) does not indulge himself in such transports. And what gives Joyce his dizzying edge is how we are left uncertain as to whether he celebrates such priestly powers in his art or mocks the pretension of artists to possess such power. Is Joyce stealing for the artist religion’s power, or telling us the artist has no such power–and religion never really had that power either? It’s delusion–and disillusion–all the way down.

But to return to nominalism. (Again, perhaps Danto goes in this direction in his book on the transfiguration of the commonplace.) It seems to me the transfiguration effect is very dependent on the conditions of display. In other words, the aesthetic is a bounded sphere. Its actual boundaries at any given moment are a matter of social convention. But an object is transformed into an art work when it is moved into that sphere. Once in that sphere, the object’s possible uses (to go back to meaning as use) are also changed. You don’t put steel wool pads into Warhol’s Brillo Box even if you can. And that box is in a gallery or a museum not a grocery store. Different social conventions apply in these different spaces. Danto’s historicist point is not just that different social spheres co-exist at one time, but the same physical spaces mean very different things at different historical moments. Going to visit Santa Croce in Florence in 2025 to view the Giotto frescoes is vastly different from being in the same church in 1515.

That the boundaries and significances of various social spheres are thus susceptible to change explains much of the point of Brillo Box—and of many of the avant-garde practices from 1890 to the present. The aim is to reconfigure the space that is “art.” In some cases, as in much of avant-garde practice, the goal is to eliminate the distinction between art and other spheres (often just designated generally and vaguely as “life”) altogether. Collapsing the distinction will lead, in the most utopian visions, to a glorious transformation (for the better) of life itself. The end of art will liberate art and its users from the constraints of art’s being limited to a bounded sphere. Everything that leads us to cherish art can be brought into every moment of our lives.

A more limited ambition is to expand what gains admission to the sphere of art. That seems to me a better way of understanding Warhol. His is a protest against the exclusions that define “high art.” He is thumbing his nose at such snobbery—in a sly, ironic, and close to cynical way no doubt. It’s all a species of joke, aimed at deflating the Arnoldian “high seriousness” of the gatekeepers of culture. That a philosopher like Danto then writes volumes of philosophy spurred on by the Brillo Box can look like one of the high serious ones taking the bait. His inability to see the joke becomes a new addition to the joke.

In any case, the notion of display, and of a bounded sphere in which the art works resides and is thus recognized as an art work), points to an institutional or conventional understanding of “art.” Danto in Chapter Ten of After the End of Art has shrewd things to say about museums—and certainly understands the crisis they face under attacks about their elitism, their gate-keeping role, and their extraction of works (often stolen outright) from their original contexts. It is striking, however, how long this crisis has lasted (well nigh upon fifty years now) with no resolution. Well meaning (and sometimes well executed) efforts at “public art” aside, the effort to displace the museum as the primary site of display have not gained much traction, partly because no feasible alternative has been found, and partly because our billionaire art collectors are in love with the museum as the suitable site to display their Verblenian grandeur.

Danto’s third criteria is narrative. He seems to understand the necessity of narrative in two different ways, one fairly parochial, the other very wide-ranging. The parochial sense is easily stated. It is, Danto insists, impossible to judge the significance of Warhol’s Brillo Box unless you know how it is in conversation with abstract expressionism. In other words, to state Danto’s point in Bahktin’s idiom, every utterance is a response to a prior utterance. Words—and works of art—are not created ex nihilo, and they do not stand on their own. Danto here fully agrees with various theoretical attacks on the notion of autonomy, on the false belief that anything can stand on its own two feet, disconnected from others, from context, from institutions, from (in short) history. Hence truly understanding something means locating it within the narrative of which it is part. Most museum visitors, in Danto’s view, have no idea of what they are looking at because they lack the relevant knowledge. They don’t know the narrative.

This more specialist knowledge, however, yields to a more global claim about knowledge. Here’s the version of that large claim in relation to museum visitors. This “is knowledge of a different order altogether than art appreciation of the sort transmitted by docents, or by art historians, or by the art education curriculum. And it has little to do with learning to paint or sculpt. The experiences belong to philosophy and to religion, to the vehicles through which the meaning of life is transmitted to people in their dimension as human beings. And as this point I return to Adam Verver’s [a character in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl] conception of the thirsting millions. What they thirst for, in my view, what we all thirst for, is meaning: the kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing, or philosophy, or finally art—these being, in the tremendous vision of Hegel, the three (there are only three) moments of what he terms Absolute Spirit. I think it was the perception of artworks as fulcrums of meaning that inspired the templelike architecture of the great museums of [Henry] James’s time, and it was their affinity with religion and philosophy that was sensed as conveying knowledge. That is, art was construed as a fount rather than merely an object of knowledge” (pp. 187-88).

Although this passage mentions neither “narrative” nor “form of life,” I understand it in relation to those two concepts. Meaning for Danto, as we have already seen, only arises within the context of a form of life. And I take it that a “form of life” (given Danto’s historicist leanings) is neither static, nor of a single moment. It is dynamic and constituted (at least partially) by its history, by the unfolding of multiple relations over time. In the exalted passage just quoted, art becomes a concentrated focal point, a resonant embodiment, of a form of life’s possible meanings. The art work becomes a “fount” when it grants us insight, provides an opportunity to grasp meanings previously hidden. Art is a means for a Hegelian coming to consciousness, even to self consciousness.

I will end by saying I am deeply attracted to such an exalted view of art. Certainly, I am very inclined to see art works as instances of communication. And often what the artist wants to communicate is a fairly (or even unfairly) grandiose vision of how a form of life hangs together (or fails to hang together)—as well as a vision of how a life can be lived ethically and meaningfully within a form of life. Explaining the hold that art has over us who are addicted to it as related to the insights it affords makes sense to me.

Except. There is also another feature of the experience of art works that seems separate from, albeit not necessarily antagonistic to, a focus on the communication of meaning. That feature is the more mystical sense of participation in some fundamental, hard to describe (hence mystical) communion with forces (energies) greater than the self. Rather than providing access to meanings, there is what Nietzsche saw as the Dionysian collapse of meanings and of the self offered in ecstatic states that art provokes. Danto’s neglect of that side of art goes hand in hand with his rejection of the material, of the sensuous. His is a very intellectual understanding of art, one that drains it of some elemental powers that cannot be easily captured by or reduced to philosophy.

Perhaps it is possible to mute the mysticism of the prior paragraph by returning to Danto’s insistence that a form of life is something lived not merely know about p. 203, quoted above). If that is the case, and if art works provide a focal point for experiencing a form of life, then an emphasis on what knowledge the art work conveys somehow misses the point. Such an emphasis sustains too great a distance between art work and audience. What we want to capture is the immersion in the work that is the experience of encountering it, not some nugget of insight we extract from it. New Criticism’s “heresy of paraphrase” is not just about trying to convey the art work’s meaning in terms different from those of the work itself, but also about standing apart from a work instead of leaping into it, which may be a way of saying one has prioritized “judgment” over experience.

LINKS

Blogging has been pretty much non-existent for me over the past year. I won’t make any promises about the future. If my silence goes on much longer, I will very likely just close down this site altogether.

But I have written a few things over the past months, and here at the links for anyone who might be interested.

First, a review of John Guillory’s recent short book on “close reading.”

https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/37/3/919/8259478

Second, a review of Alexandre LeFebevre’s book, Liberalism as a Way of Life.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/liberalism-as-a-way-of-life-by-alexandre-lefebvre-princeton-nj-princeton-university-press-2024-285p/8A0FBBBFBD5842764650B966930B9EEF

Third, an essay on Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment that considers its deficiencies as a solution to the failure to construct a “common world” within a political and/or social community.

https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.58.1.0040

This last link is only to an abstract of the essay. Contact me at mcgowanjohn74@gmail.com if you would like me to send you a copy of the whole essay. I also have a pdf of the entire special issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in which the essay appears. Happy to send that along to anyone who is interested.

The Strong Programme: Issues of Method and Advocacy in Presenting Intellectual and Political Positions

This post is a follow-up to the previous one: https://jzmcgowan.com/2025/03/11/moral-renewal/

In particular, I am intrigued by Alexandre Lefebvre’s desire to write a description of illiberal thought that does not verve immediately (or even eventually) into a critique of that thought. Instead, the idea is to describe illiberal thought on its own terms. With the pay-off being 1) a better understanding of illiberal views (because not biased, not looking out for “gotchas” as that thought is described) and 2) a way of understanding how illiberal views are appealing to illiberalism’s followers. Since illiberalism obviously makes sense to millions of people now, it is better not to disparage its followers or insist that they are misinformed, stupid, malicious etc. Is it possible, in other words, to be illiberal in good faith? And what would an outsider’s account of illiberalism look like if good faith on the part of its adherents was assumed?

I am trying to think through the implications of this approach to the thinking of writers/activists/politicians with whom I deeply disagree. For starters, I am entirely on board with the desire to stop preaching to the choir, i.e. to the endless conversations among progressives (for lack of a better term) about the horrors of the right wing. I have become notorious among my friends for calling a halt to conversations in which we all sit around tut-tutting about the latest Trump outrages. Such conversations follow completely predictable lines and feel smug, like the Pharisee in the gospel, to me. Not to mention that it is incredibly rare for anything new or interesting to be said.

On the positive side, I am perplexed by the appeal of these anti-liberal guys to half the American populace. (Russia and China didn’t get to vote for their anti-liberal overlords; Modi’s India is perhaps closer to the US in that regard, i.e. in having secured popular support.) So, yes, trying to provide an unbiased, straight up account of what these guys have to say for themselves is an incredibly worthwhile project.

But I would want to couple that account with some more speculative thinking about why people buy into that worldview. What about it resonates with them? We all know the familiar memes that try to answer that question. Status loss; owning the libs; resentment against cultural elites; feeling disrespected by those elites; loss of solid blue collar jobs to deindustrialization; the rise of women and people of color. All true enough, but why would these erstwhile new deal democrats turn their backs on the social democratic regulations and institutions that produced a large middle class? Why fail to see that the attack on social democracy, and on unions, was orchestrated and bank-rolled by those who were determined to redistribute wealth upwards? Why, in short, do the ideals and actual achievements of social democracy now inspire hostility more than loyalty?

All that’s familiar territory—and, it would seem, territory Lefebvre does not want to traverse since it is well-trodden. Fair enough. He wants to attempt something different: to enter into the mindset of various anti-liberals without any prejudice as to the truth or validity of those mindsets.

His project resonates with the “strong programme” in sociology (it had its heyday in the 80s and 90s). Its practitioners tried to achieve “epistemic symmetry”; that is, they wanted to approach all webs of belief as equivalent and contingent. In other words, they wanted to avoid the starting premise that my beliefs are true, but the other guy’s are false. Instead, the starting premise should be that the other guy is as rational or irrational as I am, that he has “reasons” for his beliefs just as I do for mine. So in attempting to describe and understand his beliefs I should evaluate them along exactly the same lines that I would evaluate my own.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the strong programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_programme

And here’s a long quote from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that lays out the basic idea. (From Belief and Resistance, Harvard UP, 1997, p. xvi, Smith’s italics).

“If what I believe is true, then how is the other fellow’s skepticism or different belief possible? The stability of every contested belief depends on a stable explanation for the resistance to that belief and, with it, a more or less coherent account of how beliefs generally are formed and validated, that is, an epistemology (though not necessarily a formal one). The two favored solutions to the puzzle just posed seem to be demonology and, so to speak, dementology: that is, the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow . . . is either a devil or a fool—or, in more enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/or intellect: ignorance, innate incapacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on. Both solutions reflect a more general tendency of some significance here, namely ‘epistemic self-privileging’ or ‘epistemic asymmetry’: that is, our inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do because there is something the matter with those people. . . .

[What would it mean/entail] to maintain ‘symmetry’ in analyses of scientific and other beliefs, those beliefs currently seen as absurd and wrong as well as those generally accepted as true? Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, this commitment to methodological symmetry is not equivalent to maintaining that all beliefs are equally valid (objectively? subjectively?) Such a claim would have to be, from a constructivist perspective, either vacuous (constructivism, by definition, rejects classic ideas of objective validity) or tautologous (to say all beliefs are equally subjectively valid is just to say that people really believe what they believe). That commitment is equivalent, however, to maintaining that the credibility of all beliefs, including those currently regarded as true, reasonable, self-evident, and so forth, is equally contingent: equally the product, in other words, of conditions (experiential, contextual, institutional, and so forth) that are fundamentally variable and always to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable.”

The model here would be Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987), which attempts to lay out all those variables that combine to make a scientific theory or a scientific “fact” acquire widespread consent.

I am very attracted to a project that aspires to methodological symmetry. And want to cheer on any and all attempts to overcome the temptations to demonology or dementology. I think such a project is very, very difficult to pull off—all the more reason to try it.

The Herrnstein Smith description of the enterprise is not, however, to provide a simple recapitulation of some one’s views. Rather, she is describing what might be called a “transcendent” account of a view—if we take “transcendent” in its Kantian sense. She wants also to delineate the underlying “conditions” (or factors) that combine to make a viewpoint plausible, credible, attract a substantial number of adherents. It’s the William James point: truth is made; it only comes into existence through a process; it is not an inert, pre-existing, self-evident thing.

Since I spent my whole writing life basically describing and assessing the views of other writers, I was pushed to think about how my own practice over the years aligns with the “Strong programme”—and with what I take to be Lefebvre’s project. The most obvious thing to say is that I have never come close to (and have never really undertaken) a “transcendent” analysis. I have not considered the material, societal, institutional, and political bases that leads ideas or beliefs to be formulated, disseminated, and endorsed by various social groups. I have speculated some on the professional proclivities of intellectuals and on the nature of their institutional base: the university. But generally in that work [certain essays, and in Democracy’s Children (Cornell UP, 2002)] I don’t consider how their social positioning affects the actual ideas articulated or the belief/nonbelief attached to particular views.

Instead, I have (as philosophers tend to do) tried to 1) lay out what a certain writer thinks, 2) make sense of that thought in the places where it seems hard to understand, and 3) evaluate the plausibility of the thinking in relation to canons of consistency and rationality (very generally construed in terms of what renders an argument convincing) and what can roughly be categorized as “reflective equilibrium.” That is, do the presented ideas make sense in relation to other things we know about the world, where those “other things” come from experience, from alternative views presented by other writers than the one being examined, and from a sense of what kinds of claims “hang together” as opposed to negating one another. (One key issue here is the role of “intuitions.” How much does my judgment of a writer’s positions depend on whether they align with my pre-rational, originary, intuitions about how the world works and what is right. William James leads us to suspect that a basic sensibility, a basic orientation to others and the world, comes first–and our ideas, our articulated viewpoints, only come second. Those viewpoints exist as after the fact attempts to rationalize, to make seem reasonable, convictions that aren’t based on reason at all. I think he is right about the grounding of our convictions in the pre-rational, but also think that the process of having to articulate reasons for our views–often in response to others who challenge those views–can lead to revisions of our beliefs and commitments.)

Granting that I have not done the work of a “transcendent” account, I still think my work can be seen as occupying four different registers of philosophical presentation. 1. In Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP, 1992), I did offer overviews of various writers (Derrida, Foucault, Said as well as short sections on Kant, Hegel etc.) that could serve as introductions to people not familiar with their work. However, my overviews were biased in relation to an overarching argument about the nature of postmodern thought generally. Thus, I was at pains to show what these writers shared—and how they understood and used the work of their 19^th century predecessors (hence the sections on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche). So my descriptions of any writer’s work was “motivated”—and their work was evaluated (even as it was explained) within the framework of a contrast between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” In short, an introduction (to postmodern thought) with an attitude. I was not an unbiased explicator, but I was trying to be a trustworthy one even as I acknowledged my biases. So I was trying to accomplish a two-sided goal. I wanted my readers to better understand the postmodern thinkers I discussed, but I also wanted to convince them of the political deficiencies of postmodern thinking.

2) In my book on Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) I took the more standard route of attempting to provide a synthetic overview of a writer’s whole career (although I will eternally regret that I didn’t include her book on totalitarianism in my account, an omission that made no sense at the time and much less sense now). But the book is not mere description of what Arendt thought because 1) it strives to make sense of things in Arendt that are perplexing (such as her hostility to the “social” and the puzzle about what the content of political action could actually be given her views); that is, I try to put together the most plausible reconstructive accounts that would explain moments in her text that are particularly hard to make sense of. And 2) I do evaluate her thinking, allowing myself to explain where I think she gets things wrong or makes assertions that are dubious or that contradict what she asserts elsewhere. All of this, however, sticks closely to the logic and arguments of Arendt’s own writing, with very little (really, almost none) attention to the “conditions” in which Arendt wrote or under which her work circulated and found adherents/critics.

3) My work on the headnotes for the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition 2001; third edition 2018) was much more straightforward textbook work. The idea was to offer a short summary of a writer’s characteristic concerns and ideas, with a look at how that writer’s work responded to or was aligned with various traditions (or schools) in the field, and a very short synapses of some objections other writers had raised to the work of the writer in question. The first person was strictly absent. I was not evaluating this writer’s views. I was simply explaining what they believed and how they were located in the field and what some responses to their work had been. All judgment was left to the reader—or, perhaps, to the field.

I don’t think Lefebvre is necessarily looking for this kind of textbook impersonality in his project. But this does approach the suspension of judgment (along with eschewing any temptation to debunking or critique or moral condemnation) that he seems to aspire to. One trouble, of course, is that textbooks are boring. The “view from nowhere” style (neither an advocate, or even in sympathy, with the views examined, nor a critic of those views) can prove unreadable after a while. Advocacy yields piquancy. On the other hand, the Olympian style of all-seeing and impartial Homer has a sublimity of its own to recommend it. So non-advocacy can have its own style, its own sources of interest. I think they are hard for a writer to access/deploy, but hardly impossible. I don’t think anyone would really want to read the over 150 headnotes in our Norton anthology one right after the other.

4) I had one final mode that was pretty much present in all my books, but was absolutely to the fore both in American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). These works were very much in line with a certain kind of philosophic practice—one that would be called (mostly by those hostile to it) “idealist” and “presentist.” My goal in both books was to present a particular understanding of what “liberalism” and “democracy” “mean” in normative (or ideal) terms. To what does an adherence to liberalism or democracy commit a person if those two ideals are understood in the way that I present? So the books argue for a certain understanding of liberalism and democracy, attempt to lay out the consequences of accepting that the presented understanding of these terms is normative and desirable, and to then consider how actual conditions in 21^st century America fall short of the ideal.

In pursuing that goal, I raid writers for whatever ideas or arguments are useful to my making my case. (The subtitle of the pragmatist book is “making the case for liberal democracy.”) So I am not 1) offering an examination or explication of the various writers I do discuss and 2) am very partial in what I take from those writers—partial in both senses of the word. I am biased in what I choose to focus on in their work and incomplete in my engagement with their work. So, for example, I offer a very secular view of William James, ignoring all his mystical yearnings and interest in the para-normal. I announce in my preface that I have no investment in offering an “accurate” reading of James’s work or of any of the other pragmatist writers (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty). I am just stealing from them ideas and arguments I find help me toward articulating my own position. Thus, in sharp distinction from my postmodernism book, in making my argument in these two later books, a charge of inaccuracy in my portrayal of various writers would be beside the point. But in the postmodernism book, my whole argument would fall apart if what I had to say about Derrida or Foucault was not “true” in the sense of being a very plausible account of what they have to say. Accuracy matters in the postmodernism case, but not in the other one. The two latter books stand or fall on the basis of how convincing my “case” is, not on whether I have gotten James or Dewey “right.”

OK. So where does Lefebvre’s project fit amidst all these ways of skinning the cat. I don’t know, but I think he wants to get as close as possible to neutral, non-judgmental description.

Is pure, neutral distillation possible—in the manner of an introduction for those unfamiliar with the terrain? Lefebvre would do the hard work for us of reading/listening to various right-wing voices and then present us with an overview of their thinking, their commitments, and their beliefs. The audience consists of people with only vague and incomplete ideas about the right-wing world view and right-wing aspirations. So now, after reading his (projected) book, I know more about the right-wingers.

But . . . How much does it advance our understanding of those views if Lefebvre eschews any analysis or evaluation of them? Wouldn’t he need, at the very least, to identify the “perks” of becoming the kind of person the right-wing perfectionists want you to be? In other words, the right-wing views have their negative side (a critique of the liberal world “we” all swim in, where “we” hardly includes the majority of the world’s population) and their positive side (the blessings they say will accrue to people living in illiberal societies). But those blessings are not very well articulated (at least in right-wing American discourse). Only vague promises of more economic prosperity and retrieval of lost status are offered; their vision of illiberal man (akin to Lefebvre vision of liberal personhood in his liberalism book [Liberalism as a Way of Life, Princeton UP, 2024]) needs to be fleshed out since it is only hinted at. Does Lefebvre just let these silences sit unnoticed as he offers his overview of their thinking? In other words, his liberalism book draws out the implications of liberalism as a “comprehensive doctrine” even where those implications have rarely been noted or highlighted. The implications are a neglected feature of liberalism. Wouldn’t a writer be called upon to do the same in an exposition of right-wing views? (I have written a review of Lefebvre liberalism book that I will post in the next few days.)

Once a writer begins articulating unexpressed implications, it is very hard to avoid evaluation. As Herrnstein Smith says, all positions engage in demonology—and that is what Lefebvre is striving mightily to avoid. But the right-wing is addicted to telling lies about its opponents and to identifying scapegoats to explain current dysfunctions. Muslims for Modi; Uighurs and Tibetans for the Chinese; Mexican rapists and drug dealing immigrants for Trump etc. This isn’t a side-note for right wing views; it’s explicitly and persistently built in. So Lefebvre is going to need a strategy for addressing those claims about the enemies within—and perhaps he is also going to need to do some kind of Latourian analysis in order to avoid arm-chair psychologizing and/or his own version of demonology/dementology. In short, the goal of symmetrical epistemology is to not pathologize the right-wing views he describes. So he has to show how right-wing beliefs do make sense within a broad experiential and institutional context; but that shouldn’t mean (in my view) that he can’t point to the huge effort right-wingers make to disseminate lies and to foster animosities.

Similarly, I don’t see how Lefebvre can sidestep the fact that calls to violence are a feature, not a bug, of right-wing views. Not pathologizing such views does not entail ignoring their real world consequences. To understand why some people believe that some other people need to be deported, jailed, censored, or killed is not to condone such beliefs. But that’s a line that will be fuzzy (I think) if repudiation of violence is not made explicit. In other words, pure description of right-wing views would necessarily include accounts of right-wing hate mongering. I guess one could just lay out the fact of such hate-mongering and leave it to the reader to pass judgment. But that’s not a position (i.e. neutral and non-judgmental about violent repudiation of demonized groups of people) I would want to occupy. So, for example, can a writer just report the claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio without also doing some fact-checking?

Maybe the easiest way to say all this is that right-wing views double down on the ”closed Society” that Lebrvre describes in his Bergson book [Human Rights as a Way of Life, Stanford UP, 2014.] For my synapsis of this book, see https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/27/alexandre-lefebvres-human-rights-as-a-way-of-life-on-bergsons-political-philosophy/

The right-wingers are stalwart opponents of “open societies”—their whole world view is built on the conviction that open societies are soul-destroying, depriving individuals of grounded communities, and upsetting the unanimity, the untroubled consensus in values and beliefs, enjoyed by tight-knit, closed groups. Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes must lie, must strive to replace the real world with a fictional one, precisely because there is no unity in the real world—never was and never will be. Plurality is a fundamental, inescapable fact about “the human condition.” And her hopeful belief was that totalitarian fictions must inevitably collapse in the face of the fundamental fact of plurality. That’s probably too optimistic; totalitarian fictions, underwritten by violence (by terror) wielded by the state can last a very long time. Historical examples abound. What such totalitarian regimes can never achieve is the moment of conflict-free harmony they claim to aspire to. Instead, the violence is unending as ever new enemies (the ones responsible for harmony not arriving) are identified.

My point is that recognizing how seductive narratives of a return to lost idylls of unity can be is very different from refusing to say how the consequences of those narratives are catastrophic. Right-wing visions must, like every world view, be disseminated through various channels that aim to persuade others of their validity, their desirability. Lefebvre’s liberalism book is an attempt to contribute to the dissemination of liberalism. His current project, it would seem, wants to stand above or beside any persuasive motive or effect. He is just going to present what right-wingers believe, without prejudicing his account by taking a negative stance toward those beliefs. No demonology, no pathologizing. As I have said, the attempt intrigues me even as I see problems with it.

Judgment: Quality, Qualities, and Qualia

I have been noodling on about judgment on this blog for quite some time now (years!). And I have written about judgment in Kant and Hannah Arendt in published work, including a forthcoming essay on Arendt that I will post on this blog sometime in the near future.

Still, judgment is a very capacious term and it is often unclear what various thinkers—or me—actually is using the term to designate. So this post will be an attempt to list a variety of ways the term judgment gets used (Wittgenstein: a word’s meaning is its use) and to see if the various uses are tied to one another or are separate (and better left separate). Quality, Qualities, and Qualia as a title is meant to outline the territory to be covered although I am afraid those three terms won’t quite do the whole trick. Complexities will creep in. But let’s start.

Quality.

This is mostly the easy one. Judgment is very commonly tied to an evaluation of something. I judge whether something is good or bad. I am, then, considering what is the “quality” of the item in question. Aristotle thought such judgments were based on a prior conception of the item’s purpose. A good knife is one that cuts well since cutting is a knife’s purpose. Judgments in such cases may be absolute (to cut well is to be a good knife), but in practice tend to be comparative. This knife is better than that knife because this knife cuts better. It requires a Platonic ideal of good cutting to make an absolute judgment about a particular knife. In practice, we usually have something rougher in mind: this knife is “good enough” because it gets the job done. Whether it is the ne plus ultra of knives doesn’t concern us. We are dealing with the knives available to us in the here and now, not the whole range of all existing and possible knives. We make our judgment, we choose, among the alternatives we actually have access to.

Judgments, however, can proceed along different axes. We can judge the knife aesthetically. In that case, its qualities (first appearance of my second term in the title) as a cutter are subordinated to other qualities (its shape, its color, its weight). Aesthetic qualities are ones that please the senses (the root meaning of the word “aesthetic”) and are only tangentially related to function, if at all. Aristotle’s focus on “purpose” is functionalist, whereas the aesthetic is usually only tangential to function, and can be in overt hostility to function. An aesthetic judgment, then, considers an item’s quality in relation to a different set of criteria than a functional judgment does. Notoriously, aesthetic judgments seem squishy as compared to functional ones—and generate much more confusion and controversy over what the criteria for judgment are. Even where there is some agreement and clarity about the criteria being invoked in an aesthetic judgment, disagreement in actual judgments remains very common.

The lack of such disagreements in functional judgments is connected to the use to which the object is being put. If I am using the knife to cut something, then the degree to which it aids or hampers that effort provides the ground for judgment. If I am trying to use the knife to punch a hole in leather or paper, the fact that the knife proves a poor tool for that endeavor indicates I am using it for a purpose it cannot do well. With aesthetic objects, however, their purpose is less clear cut. Do I value the painting because it is pleasing to the eye, because it fills up an empty space on the wall, because it reflects upon a certain tradition in painting, because it indicates my wealth, status, education, and taste? All of these are possibilities and none of them necessarily excludes the others. Aesthetic objects have multiple uses, while seemingly not tied to any specific use. Hence the fuzziness of aesthetic judgments, which vary according to the objective criteria being applied and according to the subjective taste of the one who judges.

The term “value” snuck into last paragraph. A judgment is an evaluation. It makes a determination as to the “quality” of some thing—and such judgments seem inevitably tied to an assessment of that thing’s “value.” A knife that cuts well is more valuable than one that does not. I would rather possess (and use) the good knife than the poor one. (Again, comparative in relation to the possible.) We value things in relation to whether their qualities are desirable and are conducive to advancing our own purposes.

To pragmatic (purpose oriented) and aesthetic judgments, we must add moral judgments. The criteria in moral judgments is not exclusively whether an action furthers achievement of a purpose or if the action is “pleasing” to witness or contemplate. These two bases for judgement need not be excluded in making a moral judgment, but they are neither necessary nor (crucially) sufficient. A moral judgment must involve a further consideration: the quality of the action in relation to specifically moral criteria. Identifying moral criteria has proved just about as tricky and ambiguous as identifying aesthetic criteria. The ongoing debates between Kantians and utilitarians is just one instance of the inability to designate criteria for moral judgments that convince everyone. Such debates often end up appealing to “moral intuitions” to make their case (Wittgenstein: here my spade turns; I can say no more). It’s as if “I know a moral action when I see one” for moral judgments crops up alongside the “I know what I like when I see it” explanation of aesthetic judgments. Moral judgments seem to be endemic—and necessary!—to human social life. But disputes over moral judgments are as frequent as (and seem much more consequential than) disputes over aesthetic judgments.

To sum up before moving on to qualities: judgments are evaluations of the “quality” of something (an object, an action, even of a person). Such judgments, at the crudest level, decide whether something is good or bad. A good knife, a good painting, a good action, a good person as contrasted to ones that are less good or even positively bad. And we in most cases value good instances of things over bad instances. There are notable exceptions to this last statement. We perverse humans can find all sorts of reasons to make the bad our good (to quote Milton’s Satan).

OK. Right now, we are in the land of endless and irresolvable disputes over aesthetic and moral judgments. One common response to that problem has been to say the fact of disagreement can be wildly exaggerated. Do we really disagree over whether the sexual abuse of a child is good or bad? Is there anyone out there insisting that Love Story is a better novel than Middlemarch? Of course there are difficult cases for making moral and aesthetic judgments, but there are many more cases where there is widespread, close to universal, agreement. It’s only philosophers who agonize over the hard cases. For the rest of us, we have “good enough” consensus and learn to live with the instances where consensus cannot be reached. Yes, some disputes lead to serious conflict since human beings are an argumentative and aggressive lot. But humans have also instituted procedures for conflict resolution—and when we are persistent and lucky such institutions do their job and bloodshed is avoided.

Qualities

The informal, non-institutionalized, form of conflict resolution is talking things over and through. And this is where “qualities” enter the picture. We disagree over the quality of a painting. To talk through that disagreement, the best strategy (it seems to me) is to step back from the judgment and to instead focus on describing the painting to one another. Are the colors vibrant or muted? Do they harmonize or clash? How is the space of the canvas allotted? Are the figures representational or abstract (or some blend of the two)? Et cetera. Judgment relies upon, is based on, a discernment of qualities. Various writers, Hannah Arendt among them, wrap this discernment function into the very notion of judgment.

Arguably, Kant does as well. A Kantian determinate judgment is an act of apprehension. For Kant, we apprehend the qualities of a thing—and then judge what kind of thing it is. We very rarely disagree as to whether something is a knife, not a spoon, fork, or kettle. So the most basic judgment is what kind of thing a thing is. And the “kind” is supplied to us by culture, by our language. We don’t invent a new category, or word, or kind, to identify this knife as “a knife.” We use the term our language has already given to us. In this way, we occupy a common world.

Judgment understood this way is non-individual. It is the way that individuals participate in a shared universe. Individuals re-affirm their deep connection to others as they make these mundane (automatic, rarely reflective) judgments constantly. Solipsism is a boogy-man. It is impossible to be a solipsist so long as you use the common language. I read Wittgenstein’s claim that a private language is impossible as saying that the individual cannot construct a world to occupy on his or her own. The world only achieves solidity through its being “worded” by an ensemble of selves. Kant’s determinate judgments refer to specific instances where we encounter some thing and need to identify it. But there is no individual ability to make determinate judgments based on a completely individual set of “categories” or “kinds” or “concepts” (to go back to my earlier posts on percept/concept).

It is, I am suggesting, just a further refinement on judgment as discernment to dive down into the “qualities” of things. There is the crude first determination: that is a knife. But now we can appeal to other culturally provided descriptors to be more detailed. The knife has a certain shape, a certain weight, a certain size. Again, agreement about these features should not be hard to achieve. Evaluation of these features is likely to be more various. I might prefer a knife of a certain heft, while you find it too heavy. I might find a certain shape of its handle comfortable and thus a way to make it better for me to use—while that may not be the case for you. But we have narrowed down, specified more concretely, why your evaluative judgment of the knife differs from mine.

We can take the same approach to aesthetic disputes. If we can agree that the work’s colors are vibrant and non-harmonious, we can then understand if we disagree about whether such an effect is pleasing or not. Aesthetic objects, however, are complex. What we value in certain critics is their ability to draw our attention to features of the aesthetic object that we had not noticed. Here we recognize that some people, in relation to some kinds of objects, have greater powers of discernment. These people apprehend more—and have a talent for articulating what they apprehend. When we read a superb critic of a literary work (for example), we see things in the work that we missed. Judgment as discernment highlights “qualities” and appeals to others to acknowledge the presence of those qualities. It enriches the experience of encountering a thing. Taking a hike with a naturalist is analogous. I am alerted to features of the forest that I miss when hiking by myself.

It is still an open question how to evaluate those features. I may find them boring and wish the naturalist wouldn’t bang on about this or that. But I am not inclined to disagree about whether the features actually are present in the forest. Again, when it comes to aesthetic objects, matters can be more complicated. Since a certain form of literary criticism highly values “unity,” we find critics who work very hard to “prove” that Moby Dick or Ulysses are unified works, whereas I find those two books wildly incoherent, manic in their throwing together of disparate materials and thought. But, then again, I don’t rate “unity” as such a valuable criteria for aesthetic judgment as many others do. A conversation about such matters can make at least some progress by clarifying what features (qualities) I think a work has and what criteria I employ to judge its quality. My interlocutor and I can at least see where we agree, where disagree.

Another way to say this is that our stake in making evaluations generates our powers of discernment. That is why judgment comes to encompass both evaluation and discernment. I have increased powers of discernment where something is of value, of particular interest, to me. If I don’t care much about the differences between oaks and spruces or between different varieties of ferns, then I am much more likely not to notice those differences. Where I am engaged, I can discern more. And that’s why we turn to “experts,” to people who have a command of the relevant terms and features that allow more discerning and detailed descriptions of particular things. Those are the people whose judgment about a thing’s “qualities” we have come to trust. I think this is what we mean when we talk of an “informed judgment.” Someone able to apprehend the “qualities” of something in rich detail is more informed about that thing and, thus, has more information on which to base a judgment of its quality.

Pragmatic Judgment

This lead me (before I get to qualia) to another common way to use the term “judgment”—a way not quite consonant with my quality, qualities, qualia rubric. This meaning of judgment is pragmatic, and connected with the Aristotelean term “phronesis” (often translated as “practical wisdom.”) The colloquial usage here is to characterize a person as having “good judgment.” Judgment in this case involves evaluating what is possible and/or desirable to do in this particular set of circumstances. It requires (so the thinking goes) an excellent discernment of the actual features of the situation plus an ability to discern what the situation affords plus a clear sense of one’s own needs/desires plus a sensible prioritizing among those needs/desires in relation to what is possible here and now. Phronesis is both very specific (tied to this situation and to my purposes) and very holistic (it sees the situation in its full complexity). Quality and qualities are intertwined here. I must discern the features of the situation even as I aim to act in ways that enhance the quality of my position. Embedded in the world, I have the meliorist (William James) goal of bettering my position at every turn, fending off threats to well-being even as I also try to improve that well-being. Good judgment leads to success in that endeavor—a fact brought home by witnessing how often human actions are counter-productive, make things worse instead of better. Good judgment is hard and fairly rare, hence its being awarded the honorific term of “wisdom.”

One version of good judgment is to be a “good judge of character.” Since one of the most crucial wild cards in judging any situation is how much I can rely on the other people who occupy the world alongside me, it is very important to assess accurately the talents and trustworthiness of others. I can only expect help from people capable of providing that help (I don’t expect a doctor to fix my clogged pipes) and can only enlist that help from people who will be willing to provide it. So I must make a judgment before the fact as to whether this or that person will actually do what I need them to do. Relying on someone who lets me down is a failure of judgment, of phronesis.

Qualia

OK. Now let me turn to qualia. In the literature on consciousness, the term “qualia” names the “sensation” that accompanies any experience. It feels like something to see a Matisse painting. There is the perception of the painting—and there is the feeling that the perception produces. An organism can be conscious of something; it is only when that consciousness of something is accompanied by consciousness of an internal feeling (some state of being for the perceiving consciousness) that we have “sensation” as well as “perception.” (I am following Nicholas Humphrey here, from his book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023), but Humphrey’s usage is fairly standard in the literature. Only “fairly standard,” of course, because there is disagreement about everything relating to these matters among those who consider them.) “Phenomenal consciousness” is the term deployed to designate the experience of a “feeling,” a sensation (an awareness) of an internal state of being.

Quick aside: the “hard problem” in consciousness studies is how to explain the fact of phenomenal consciousness. Current science can do a good job of explaining the physiological processes that enable one to see the Matisse painting, but we have no remotely adequate account of the processes that would generate the “feeling” that accompanies that perception. The holy grail of consciousness studies is to explain phenomenal consciousness. The “mysterians” say we will never get that explanation; the hard-core materialists say phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, not a real thing that needs to be explained. But most writers accept that phenomenal consciousness is real—and that we lack a good account of its reality.

Back to qualia. What has they got to do with judgment? Everything if we adopt the James-Lange theory of emotions. Basically, that theory says that our bodies react immediately to the environmental circumstances one confronts in any situation. (And situations keep unfolding, keep popping up, because the world we inhabit is much more one of constant change than one of stasis.) Living things are reactive—finely tuned to apprehend the environment and to adjust to the circumstances. For James-Lange, feelings (sensations) follow from that bodily adjustment/attunement. The sensation is how we come to realize what our body’s reaction is. Feelings are informational; they inform us of how our body has responded to what the world is throwing at it.

If this theory is correct, then judgment is instantaneous. Our body both judges what the circumstances are (picking out especially what is most relevant to its most important concerns) and judges (acts upon) what an appropriate response to those circumstances are. Qualia (our sensation or feeling) registers for our conscious selves the judgment that has already been made on an unconscious, bodily level.

There are various ways one can argue that it’s evolutionary useful for organisms to acquire an ability to be consciously aware of these unconscious bodily responses. If we know what our body is doing, we can monitor and even (possibly) revise its responses. I return here to the recurrent notion that consciousness introduces a pause into the processes of stimulus/response. The body (in the James-Lange theory) responds immediately and automatically, without any involvement on the part of consciousness. The bodily judgment is direct; it does not pass through consciousness. But the ability to pick up the signal that informs consciousness of what that response is provides the possibility of assessing it and revising it. I.e. there is now a second moment of judgment superimposed on the first, automatic one. This seems similar to the “thinking fast and slow” that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced into the social sciences. (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011]). And it chimes with the work of Martha Nussbaum and others on the cognitive function of the emotions. (Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [Cambridge UP, 2003].) We know about things, about our environment, through our emotional responses to things. But we are not ruled entirely by our emotions if consciousness allows for us to examine them, to consider if they are appropriate responses to the situations that elicited them.

What, then, of the discernment judgement calls forth (as described in my thoughts on “qualities.”) For James, efforts to explain a judgment always come after the fact. We strive to “rationalize,” to provide reasons for, the judgments our body has already made. We want to “justify” a decision after the fact. Deliberation, we might say, comes after, not before, action. Still, this desire to justify can hone attention, can make us more discerning. And that training of apprehension can then influence future instances of immediate, bodily judgment. Organisms learn. Feedback from one instance gets incorporated (in the literal sense of that word: taken into the body) in ways that manifest themselves in future interactions.

The desire to justify points us toward the communal pressures upon judgment that Kant (and Arendt in her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment) emphasizes. Others demand of us an explanation of our judgments and the actions based upon them. Why do you think Picasso a lesser artist than Matisse? Why did you do that? In answering such questions, we are very likely to point toward features of the paintings or features of the situation we faced as explaining why made the choices we made. Even if these explanations are “rationalizations” in the negative sense of being excuses for judgments or actions actually made unthinkingly, they do heighten consciousness about our own proclivities and about the complexities (the manifold details) of worldly things and situations. Because we are called upon to give an account of our judgments and actions, we develop our powers of discernment.

Arendt translates Kant as saying that our attempts at justification “woo the consent of the other.” There are no absolutely compelling justifications; they are always contestable. But we want to stand in the good graces of others, so we try to get them to see it our way (as Paul McCartney puts it).

For Nicholas Humphrey, this need to justify ourselves provides an evolutionary reason for the emergence of phenomenal consciousness. Because we are social animals, humans must find a way to “work it out” (to quote McCartney again). And we can only do that, Humphrey thinks, if we have some sense of what others think and feel. How can we know what “reasons” others will find convincing as we strive to get them to accept our excuses, our ex post facto explanations? The self-consciousness that phenomenal consciousness enables allows us to imagine how our fellow humans take things, what their sensations are in response to different situations. Judgment moves from being the purely individual response to the environment toward an always already socially-inflected response. Our need for, dependence on, others means that their responses to our judgments (and the actions those judgments will inspire) influence the judgments from the start. Another way to say this: the environment humans face always includes other humans and maintaining desirable relations to those humans is a high priority in any assessment of appropriate responses/adaptations to the environment. Our learning includes a big dose of learning how other humans respond to us when we make this or that judgment, take this or that action. We “norm” our taste to fit the groups to which we want to remain members in good standing.

The changing musical tastes of college students offer a good illustration of that last point. Students will abandon old favorites in favor of more ”sophisticated” ones as they learn new codes of distinction. Is the music they now listen to “better” than the music they abandon? Hard to say. Depends on the criteria applied. But they will almost certainly acquire a richer vocabulary in which to describe and justify their tastes, while also learning what counts as compelling justifications of taste judgments to the people whose consent they are trying to “woo.” And they will learn what musical tastes are deemed outside the pale.

I will end by saying that the entanglement of judgment with “sociality” (to invoke Arendt on Kant again) is where much of my interest lies. I want to nail down (and feel I have yet to do so to my satisfaction) the way that judgments are not just influenced by, but are only possible within, intersubjective relations. Relevant factors are the non-private languages in which judgments are articulated/communicated and the pressure to explain/justify our judgments. But I still feel like something is missing here, some key piece to the puzzle of how what seems individually located (the response of my body to a situation and my subsequent conscious awareness of that response) is not very individual at all.