Category: Judgment

Percept/Concept

I tried to write a post on the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive and got completely tangled up.  So, instead, I am taking a step backward and addressing the relation between percept and concept, where I feel on surer ground.  I will follow up this post with another on fact/value.  And then, with those two pairings sorted out, I may be able to say something coherent about the cognitive/non-cognitive pairing.

So here goes.  A percept is what is offered to thought by one of the five senses.  I see or smell something.  The stimulus for the percept is, in most but not all cases, something external to myself. Let’s stick to perception of external things for the moment.  I see a tree, or smell a rose, or hear the wind whistling through the trees.  I have what Hume calls “an impression.”

I have always wanted to follow the lead of J. L. Austin in his Sense and Sensibilia.  In that little book, Austin takes on the empiricist tradition that has insisted, since Locke, that one forms a “representation” or an “idea” (that is the term Locke uses) of the perceived thing. (In the philosophical tradition, this gets called “the way of ideas.”) In other words, there is an intermediary step.  One perceives something, then forms an “idea” of it, and then is able to name, think about, or otherwise manipulate that idea.  The powers of thought and reflection depend upon this translation of the impression, of the percept, into an idea (some sort of mental entity.)  Austin, to my mind, does a good job of destroying that empiricist account, opting instead for direct perception, dispensing with the intermediary step of forming an idea–and thus appealing to some kind of “mental state” to understand perception. 

But Kevin Mitchell in Free Agents (Princeton UP, 2023) makes a fairly compelling case for raw percepts being transformed into “representations.”  First, there are the differences in perceptual capabilities from one species to another, not to mention differences among members of the same species.  If I am more far-sighted than you, I will see something different from you.  True, that doesn’t necessarily entail indirection as contrasted to direct perception.  But it does mean that the “thing itself” (the external stimuli) does not present itself in exactly the same guise to every perceiving being.  What is perceived is a co-production, created out of the interaction between perceiver and perceived.  There is no “pure” perception.  Perception is always an act that is influenced by the sensory equipment possessed by the perceiver along with the qualities of the thing being perceived. Descriptions of how human sight works makes it clear how much “work” is done upon the raw materials of perception before the “thing” is actually seen. And, of course, we know that there are colors that the color-blind cannot perceive and noises that are in most cases beyond human perceptual notice.

Second, the experiences of both memory and language speak to the existence of “representations.”  We are able to think about a perceived thing even in its absence.  To say the word “elephant” is to bring an elephant into the room even when that elephant is not physically present.  Similarly, memory represents to us things that are absent.  Thus, even if we deny that the perception of present things has an intermediary step of transforming the percept into a “representation,” it seems indubitable that we then “store” the immediate impressions in the form of representations that can be called to mind after the moment of direct impression. 

Finally, the existence of representations, of mental analogues to what has been experienced in perception, opens the door for imagination and reflection.  I can play around with what perception has offered once I have a mental representation of it.  I can, in short, think about it.  The sheer weight of facticity is sidestepped once I am inside my head instead of in direct contact with the world.  A space, a distance, is opened up between perceiver and perceived that offers the opportunity to explore options, to consider possible actions upon, manipulations of, what the world offers.  Representation provides an ability to step back from the sensory manifold and take stock.

So it would seem that Austin’s appealing attempt to dispense with the elaborate machinery of empiricist psychology won’t fly.  As accounts of how human vision works show, too much is going on to make a “direct” account of perception true to how perception actually works. Stimuli sensed by the senses are “processed” before being registered, not directly apprehended.

So the next issue is what “registering” or “apprehending” consist of.  But first a short digression.  We typically think of perception as the encounter with external things through one of the five senses.  But we can also perceive internal states, like a headache or sore muscle.  In those cases, however, perception does not seem to be tied to one of the five senses, but to some sort of ability to monitor one’s internal states.  Pain and pleasure are the crudest terms for the signals that trigger an awareness of internal states.  More broadly, I think it fair to say that the emotions in their full complex panoply are the markers of internal well-being (or its opposite or the many way stations between absolute euphoria and abject despair).  Emotions are both produced by the body (sometimes in relation to external stimuli, sometimes in relation to internal stimuli) and serve as the signal for self-conscious registering of one’s current states.  It’s as if a tree was not just a tree, but also a signal of “tree-ness.”  Anger is both the fact of anger and a signal to the self of its state of mind in response to some stimuli.  Certain things in the world or some internal state triggers an emotion—and then the emotion offers a path to self-awareness.  So there appears to be an “internal sense capacity,” ways of monitoring internal states and “apprehending” them that is parallel to the ways the five traditional senses provide for apprehending the external world. 

What, then, does it mean to “apprehend” something once the senses have provided the raw materials of an encounter with that thing?  Following Kant, apprehension requires a “determinate judgment.”  The percept is registered by the self when the percept is conceptualized.  Percept must become concept in order to be fully received.  To be concrete: I see the various visual stimuli that the tree offers, but I don’t apprehend the tree until I subsume this particular instance of a tree into the general category/concept “tree.”  I “recognize” the tree as a tree when I declare “that’s a tree.”  The tree in itself, standing there in the forest, does not know itself as a tree.  The concept “tree” is an artifact of human language and human culture.  Percepts only become occasions for knowledge when they are married to concepts.  Pure, non-conceptualized, percepts are just raw material—and cannot be used by human thought.  In other words, back to the representation notion.  Until what perception offers is transformed into a representation, it is unavailable for human apprehension, for being taken up by the human subject as part of its knowledge of the world. (Of course, famously in Kant, this yields the distinction between our representations and the “thing in itself.” The cost of “the way of ideas”–the cost that Austin was trying to overcome–is this gap in our knowledge of the world, our inability to see things independently of the limitations of human perceptual and conceptual equipment. Science attempts to overcome these limitations by using non-human instruments of perception (all those machines in our hospitals), but even science must acknowledge that what a machine registers, just like what a human registers, is a representation that is shaped by the nature of the representing apparatus.)

Determinate judgment appears to be instantaneous.  At least in the case of the encounter with most external things.  I see a tree and, without any discernible time lapse, identify it as a tree.  I have no awareness of processing the sensory signals and then coming to a judgment about what category the seen thing belongs to.  Percept and concept are cemented together.  Of course, there are some cases where I can’t at first make out what it is before me.  The lighting is bad, so I see a shape, but not enough more to determine what the thing is.  Such cases do indicate there is a distinction between percept and concept.  But in the vast majority of cases it is just about impossible to pry them apart.

For many artists from Blake on, the effort to pry the two apart is a central ambition.  The basic idea is that we see the world through our conceptual lenses—and thus fail to apprehend it in its full richness, its full sensual plenitude.  We filter out the particulars of this tree as we rush to assimilate the singular instance to the general category.  Thus painters strive to make us see things anew (cubism) or to offer ambiguous items that can’t be immediately or readily identified (surrealism).  They try to drive a wedge between percept and concept. “No ideas but in things,” proclaims William Carlos Williams—and this hostility to ideas, to their preeminence over things (over percepts), is shared by many modern artists.

One of the mysteries of the percept/concept pairing is the relative poverty of our linguistic terms to describe percepts.  We can in most cases quickly identify the tree as a tree, and we can certainly say that the tree’s leaves are green in the spring and rust-colored in the fall.  But more precise linguistic identification of colors eludes us.  We can perceive far more variations in colors than we can describe.  Hence the color chips at any hardware store, which offer 45 variants of the color we crudely call “blue” and invent fanciful names to distinguish each different shade from the rest.  The same, of course, holds for smells and for emotions.  We have a few, very crude terms for smell (pungent, sharp) but mostly can only identify smells in terms of the objects that produce such smells.  It smells flowery, or like hard boiled egg.  The same with taste.  Aside from sweet, sour, sharp, we enter the world of simile, so that descriptions of wine notoriously refer to things that are not wine. Notes of black currant, leather, and tobacco.  And when it comes to emotions we are entirely at sea—well aware that our crude generalized terms (love, anger, jealousy) get nowhere near to describing the complexities of what one feels.  Thus some artists (Updike comes to mind) specialize in elaborating on our descriptive vocabularies for physical and emotional percepts.  Thus a whole novel might be devoted to tracing the complexities of being jealous, to strive to get into words the full experience of that emotional state.

In any case, the paucity of our linguistic resources for describing various percepts, even in cases where the distinction between the percepts is obvious to us (as in the case of gradients of color), shows (I  believe) that there are ordinary cases where percept and concept are distinct.  We don’t immediately leap to judgment in every case.  Now, it is true that I conceptualize the various shades of blue as “color” and even as “blue.”  But I do not thereby deny that the various shades on the color chip are also different, even though I have no general category to which I can assign those different shades. 

Two more puzzles here.  The first is Wittgensteinian.  I had forgotten, until going through this recently with my granddaughter, how early children master color.  By 18 months, she could identify the basic colors of things.  Multiple astounding things here.  How did she know we were referring to color and not to the thing itself when we call a blue ball “blue”?  What were we pointing out to her: the color or the thing?  Yet she appeared to have no trouble with that possible confusion.  Except.  For a while she called the fruit “orange” “apples.”  It would seem that she could not wrap her head around the fact that the same word could name both a color and a thing.  She knew “orange” as a color, so would not use that word to name a thing.  Even more amazing than sorting colors from things, was her accuracy in identifying a thing’s color.  Given sky blue and navy blue, she would call both “blue.”  A little bit later on (two or three months) she learned to call one “light blue” and the other “dark blue.”  But prior to that distinction, she showed no inclination to think the two were two different colors.  And she didn’t confuse them with purple or any other adjacent color.  So how is it that quite different percepts get tossed into the same category with just about no confusion (in relation to common usage) at all? It would seem more obvious to identify sky blue and dark blue as two different colors.

The second puzzle might be called the ”good enough” conundrum.  I walk in the forest and see “trees.”  The forester sees a number of specific species—and very likely also singles out specific trees as “sick” or of a certain age.  His judgments are very, very different from mine—and do not suffer from the paucity of my categorical terms.  Similarly, the vintner may rely on an almost comical similes to describe the taste of the wine, but I do not doubt that his perceptions are more intense and more nuanced than mine.  A chicken/egg question here about whether having the concepts then sharpens the percepts—or if sharper percepts then generate a richer vocabulary to describe them.  Or the prior question: do we only perceive with the acuity required by our purposes?  My walk in the woods is pleasant enough for me without my knowing which specific types of trees and ferns I am seeing.  What we “filter out,” in other words, is not just a function of the limitations of our perceptual equipment, or the paucity of our concepts/vocabulary, but also influenced by our purposes.  We attend to what we need to notice to achieve something. 

Push this last idea just a bit and we get “pragmatism” and its revision of the empiricist account of perception and the “way of ideas.”  The pragmatist maxim says that our “conception” of a thing is our understanding of its consequences.  That is, we perceive things in relation to the futures that thing makes possible.  Concepts are always dynamic, not static.  They categorize what perception offers in terms of how one wants to position oneself in the world.  Percept/concept is relational—and at issue is the relations I wish to establish (or maintain) between myself and what is “out there” (which includes other people.) 

Back to the artists.  The repugnance many artists (as well as other people) feel toward pragmatism stems from this narrowing down of attention, of what might be perceived.  Focused (in very Darwinian fashion) upon what avails toward the organism’s well-being, the pragmatist self only perceives, only attends to, that which it can turn to account.  It thereby misses much of what is in the world out there.  The artists want to fling open the “doors of perception” (to quote Blake)—and see pragmatism as a species of utilitarianism, a philosophy that notoriously reduces the range of what “matters” to humans as well as reducing the motives for action to a simple calculus of avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure.  To categorize percepts immediately into two bins–these things might benefit me, these things are potentially harmful—is to choose to live in a diminished, perversely impoverished world.

Of course, Dewey especially among the “classic” pragmatists worked hard to resist the identification of pragmatism to a joyless and bare-bones utilitarianism.  The key to this attempt is “qualia”—a term that is also central in the current philosophical debates about consciousness.  “Qualia” might be defined as the “feel of things.”  I don’t just see trees as I walk in the woods.  I also experience a particular type of pleasure—one that mixes peacefulness, the stimulus/joy of physical exertion, an apprehension of beauty, a diffuse sense of well-being etc.  “Consciousness” (as understood in everyday parlance) registers that pleasure. Consciousness entails that I not only feel the pleasure but can also say to myself that I am feeling this pleasure.  Percepts, in other words, are accompanied by specific feelings that are those percept’s “qualia.” And through consciousness we can register the fact of experiencing those feelings.

The relation of concepts to “qualia” is, I think, more complex—and leads directly to the next post on the fact/value dyad.  A concept like “fraud” does seem to me to have its own qualia.  Moral indignation is a feeling—and one very likely to be triggered by the thought of fraud.  Perhaps (I don’t know about this) only a specific instance of fraud, not just the general concept of it, is required to trigger moral indignation.  But I don’t think so.  The general idea that American financiers often deploy fraudulent practices seems to me enough to make me feel indignant.

On the other hand, the general concept of “tree” does not seem to me to generate any very specific qualia.  Perhaps a faint sense of approval.  Who doesn’t like trees?  But pretty close to neutral.  The issues, in short, are whether “neutral” percepts  or concepts are possible.  Or do all percepts and concepts generate some qualia, some feelings that can be specified?  And, secondly, are all qualia related to judgments of value?  If we mostly and instantaneously make a judgment about what category a percept belongs to (what concept covers this instance), do we also in most cases and instantaneously judge the “value” of any percept?  That’s what my next post on fact/value will try to consider.

Great Books 2: Institutions, Curators, and Partisans

I find that I have a bit more to say on the topic of “great books.” 

The scare quotes are not ironic—or even really scare quotes.  Instead, they are the proper punctuation when referring to a word as a word or a phrase as a phrase.  As in, the word “Pope” refers to the head of the Catholic Church.  The phrase “great books” enters into common parlance with University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’s establishment of a great books centered curriculum there in the 1930s.  From the Wikipedia page on Hutchins: “His most far-reaching academic reforms involved the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was retooled into a novel pedagogical system built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college.”  The University of Chicago dropped that curriculum shortly after Hutchins stepped down in the early 1950s, with St John’s College now the only undergraduate institution in the country with a full-bore great books curriculum.  Stanford and Columbia had a very great books slanted general education set of requirements for first and second year undergraduates well into the 1990s, but have greatly modified that curriculum in the 21st century.

These curricular issues are central to what I want to write about today.  “Literature,” Roland Barthes once said, “is what gets taught.”  It is very hard to even have a concept of “great books” apart from educational institutions, from what students are required to read, from what a “well-educated” person is expected to be familiar with.  As I wrote a few posts back (https://jzmcgowan.com/2023/07/31/americans-are-down-on-college/), we in the United States seem now to have lost any notion of what a “well-educated” person is or should be.  The grace notes of a passing familiarity with Shakespeare or Robert Frost are now meaningless.  The “social capital” accruing to being “cultured” (as outlined in Pierre Bourdieu’s work) has absolutely no value in contemporary America (apart, perhaps, from some very rarified circles in New York). 

I am not here to mourn that loss.  As I said in my last post, aesthetic artefacts are only “alive” if they are important to some people in a culture.  Only if some people find that consuming (apologies for the philistine word) an artistic work is fulfilling, even essential to their well-being, will that work avoid falling into oblivion, totally forgotten as most work of human hands (artistic or otherwise) is. 

Today, instead, I want to consider how it is that some works do survive.  I think, despite the desire from Hume until the present, that the intrinsic greatness of the works that survive is not a satisfactory explanation.  More striking to me is that the same small group of works (easily read within a four year education) gets called “great”—and how hard it is for newcomers to break into the list.  For all the talk of “opening up the canon,” what gets taught in America’s schools (from grade school all the way up through college) has remained remarkably stable.  People teach what they were taught.

Yes, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have become “classics”—and are widely taught.  But how many pre-1970 works have been added to the list of “greats” since 1970?  Ralph Ellison and Frederick Douglass certainly.  James Baldwin is an interesting case because he has become an increasingly important figure while none of his works of fiction has become a “classic.”  On the English side of the Atlantic, Trollope has become more important while Shelley has been drastically demoted and Tennyson’s star is dimming fast.  But no other novelist has challenged the hegemony of Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and Eliot among the Victorians, or Conrad, Joyce, Hardy, and Woolf among the modernists.  The kinds of wide-scale revaluations of writers that happened in the early years of the 20th century (the elevations on Melville and Donne, for example) have not happened again in the 100 years since.  There really hasn’t been any significant addition to the list (apart from Douglass and barring the handful of new works that get anointed) since 1930.

I don’t deny that literary scholars for the most part read more widely and write about a larger range of texts than such scholars did in the 1950s and 1960s.  (Even that assumption should be cautious.  Victorian studies is the field I know best and the older scholars in that field certainly read more of the “minor” poets of the era than anyone who got a PhD in the 1980s or later ever does.)  But the wider canon of scholars has not trickled down very much into the undergraduate curriculum.  Survey courses in both British and American literature prior to 1945 are still pretty much the same as they were fifty years ago, with perhaps one or two token non-canonical works.  More specialized upper class courses and grad courses are sometimes more wide-ranging.  Most significantly, the widening academic canon has not moved into general literate culture (if that mythical beast even exists) at all.

The one place where all bets are off is in courses on post 1945 literature.  No canon (aside from Ellison, Morrison, Rushdie, Baldwin) has been established there, so you will find Nabokov read here and Roth read there, while the growth of “genre courses” means Shirley Jackson and Philip K. Dick are probably now taught more frequently than Mailer or Updike or Bellow.  Things are not as unstable on the British side, although the slide has been toward works written in English by non-English authors (Heaney, Coetzee, various Indian novelists alongside Rushdie, Ondaatje, Ishiguro).

Much of the stability of the pre-1945 canon is institutional.  Institutions curate the art of the past—and curators are mostly conservative.  A good example is the way that the changing standards brought in by Henry James and T. S. Eliot were not allowed (finally) to lead to a wide-scale revision of the “list.”  Unity and a tight control over narrative point of view formed the basis of James’s complaints against the Victorians.  The rather comical result was that academic critics for a good thirty years (roughly 1945 to 1975) went through somersaults to show how the novels of Dickens and Melville were unified—a perverse, if delightful to witness, flying in the face of the facts.  Such critics knew that Dickens and Melville were “great,” and if unity was one feature of greatness, then, ipso facto, their novels must be unified.  Of course, the need to prove those novels were unified showed there was some sub rosa recognition that they were not.  Only F. R. Leavis had the courage of his convictions—and the consistency of thought—to try to drum Dickens out of the list of the greats.  And even Leavis eventually repented.

The curators keep chosen works in public view.  They fuss over those works, attend to their needs, keep bringing them before the public (or, at least, students).  Curators are dutiful servants—and only rarely dare to try to be taste-makers in their own right. 

I don’t think curators are enough.  The dutiful, mostly bored and certainly non-passionate, teacher is a stock figure in every Hollywood high school movie.  Such people cannot bring the works of the past alive.  For that you need partisans.  Some curators, of course, are passionate partisans.  What partisanship needs, among lots of other things, is a sense of opposition.  The partisan’s passion is engendered by the sense of others who do not care—or, even more thrilling, others who would deny the value of the work that the partisan finds essential and transcendentally good.  Yes, there are figures like Shakespeare who are beyond the need of partisans.  There is a complacent consensus about their greatness—and that’s enough.  But more marginal figures (marginal, let me emphasize, in terms of their institutional standing—how much institutional attention and time is devoted to them—not in terms of some kind of intrinsic greatness) like Laurence Sterne or Tennyson need their champions.

In short, works of art are kept alive by some people publicly, enthusiastically, and loudly displaying how their lives are enlivened by their interaction with those works.  So it is a public sphere, a communal, thing—and depends heavily on admiration for the effects displayed by the partisan.  I want to have what she is having—a joyous, enlivening aesthetic experience.  Hume, then, was not totally wrong; works are deemed great because of the pleasures (multiple and many-faceted) they yield—and those pleasures are manifested by aesthetic consumers.  But there is no reason to appeal to “experts” or “connoisseurs.” Anyone can play the role of making us think a work is worth a look, anyone whose visible pleasure has been generated by an encounter with that work.

The final point, I guess, is that aesthetic pleasure very often generates this desire to be shared.  I want others to experience my reaction to a work (to appreciate my appreciation of it.)  And aesthetic pleasure can be enhanced by sharing.  That’s why seeing a movie in the theater is different from streaming it at home.  That’s why a book group or classroom discussion can deepen my appreciation of a book, my sense of its relative strengths and weakness, my apprehension of its various dimensions. 

So long as those communal encounters with a work are happening, the work “lives.”  When there is no longer an audience for the work, it dies.  Getting labeled “great” dramatically increases the chances of a work staying alive, in large part because then the institutional artillery is rolled into place to maintain it.  But if the work no longer engages an audience in ways close to their vital concerns, no institutional effort can keep it from oblivion.

Great Books?

I am currently facilitating a reading group that began with the goal of revisiting the literary works the group members read in a “great books” course forty years ago.  The original (year long) syllabus will be familiar to anyone who knows the traditional canon of the Western literary tradition: Homer, the Bible, Sophocles, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Joyce.  Forty years ago, there was not even a token attempt to include a non-white, non-male author—and the absence of such authors went entirely unmarked, was not on the radar screen as it were, and thus was not even considered something worth noticing or contemplating.

In the course of revisiting the class all these years later, it is not surprising that the group has felt the need to supplement the original list with works by Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Sandra Cisneros, and Salman Rushdie.

In reading those works, some members of the group have declared (in certain, not all, instances) that the books don’t meet the standard of a “great book”; some of the books have been deemed interesting, informative, worth reading perhaps, but not “great.”

Which raises the vexed question of the standard for greatness—and that’s the topic of this post.

My first—and biggest—point is that I find the whole enterprise of deciding whether something is great or not unproductive.  It rest on the notion of a one size fits all, absolute standard that is more detrimental to appreciation of an aesthetic (or any other kind of) experience than helpful.

Is Italian cuisine “better” than Chinese cuisine?  I trust you see the absurdity of the question.  You certainly can’t appreciate the Italian meal you are eating if you are comparing it to a Chinese meal.  And, in the abstract, the general question of which cuisine is “better” is nonsense.  There is no proper answer to the question because it lacks all specificity.

Judgments of better or worse are always in relation to some standard, some criteria, of judgment.  In his book A Defense of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Michael Clune keeps scoring cheap points by telling us that Moby Dick is better than The Apprentice.  The examples hide the absurdity of the claim.  If he insisted instead that Moby Dick is better than The Sopranos, he would almost certainly generate the kind of objection that could lead to forcing him to justify his claim.  According to what criteria is Moby Dick superior, and in relation to what purposes.  Are there no contexts at all where I would prefer to watch The Sopranos to reading Moby Dick? Are there specific things The Sopranos does better than Moby Dick? Am I always choosing the lesser (thus revealing my debased tastes) when I watch the show?  Would the world be a richer and “better” (that word again!) place if it only had Moby Dick in it and not The Sopranos? 

I hope that makes it clear that the rank ordering of various aesthetic works is not just unhelpful, but needlessly restrictive, tending toward the puritanical.  Furthermore, it is a category error.  To respond to diversity (that there are multiple cuisines, that there are many aesthetic objects, and that they come in different genres and employ different media) by ranking all the instances it offers on one scale is to miss the pluralistic plenitude of the world.

So, the standard bearer always cries at this point, does that mean anything goes?  Are we doomed to drown in the sea of relativism? The bugbear of relativism, the contortions writers who long to be considered “serious” go through to avoid being accused of relativism, never fails to astound me.  I hope to address these fears—akin to a “moral panic” in their intensity—in a future post.  Suffice for now to say that relativism is trivially true.  You cannot aspire to be the world’s greatest baseball player if you grow up in first century CE Rome or in contemporary Malawi.  Your aspirations are relative to context.

What does that say about aesthetic standards?  First (again, trivially true) is that such standards shift over time.  Until 1920, general opinion was that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a better book than Moby Dick.  From 1920 to 1980, you would have been considered a complete philistine to prefer Stowe’s novel to Melville’s.  Currently, a more pluralistic ethos prevails.  If you are considering a novel that successfully moves an audience to tears and outrage about a social injustice, then Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the ticket.  For more abstract musings on the meaning of life, Moby Dick is a better bet.  If you want a “tight,” well structured, gem of a more minimalist nature, not one of the “loose baggy monsters” that Henry James disparaged, than neither Stowe nor Melville is going to fit the bill.

Judgment, then, of a work’s quality will be relative to the standard you are applying to the work.  And also relative to the purpose for which the work was written and the purpose for which the consumer is coming to the work.  When making up a syllabus of 19th century American literature, excluding Stowe (and, for that matter, Frederick Douglass), as was standard practice for well over fifty years, is to offer a very truncated vision of the American scene from 1840 to 1870.  Allowing some vague, unspecified, notion of “better” justify the inclusion of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, along with the exclusion of Stowe and Douglass, is not only to miss important cultural works, but also to renege on the intellectual responsibility to be self-conscious about the standards that govern one’s judgments (and the choices that follow from those judgments, along with the consequences of those choices).

OK.  Let me try to get concrete.  The whole “great books” thing, with its (most likely inevitably futile) attempt to impose “standards” on the benighted tastes of one’s contemporaries, always arises in moments of what we nowadays call “culture wars.”  One famous instance is the quarrel between “the ancients and the moderns” of the late 17th and early 18th century.  More relevant to us today is the modernist revolt against the Romantics and the Victorians.  T. S. Eliot was a central figure here, promulgating a “classicist” aesthetic standard that valued austere, non-sentimental, tightly formed, stringently intellectual (and hence non-emotional and non-personal) works over what he deemed the sloppy, sentimental, and overly rhetorical (i.e. trying to persuade the audience of some moral or political or otherwise sententious “truth’) of the art of the 19th century.  That the works Eliot championed were “difficult” was a feature not a bug.  The world was awash in easy, popular art—and “high art” had to be protected from danger of being dragged into that swamp. 

What Eliot was trying to produce was nothing less than a sea change in sensibility.  He wanted to change what audiences liked, how they responded to aesthetic objects.  Henry James (as we have already seen) was engaged in the same enterprise.  The modernist painters offer a particularly clear case of this enterprise.  Works that in 1870 were deemed “barbarous” were declared masterpieces by 1910.  (Van Gogh, who sold only one painting in his lifetime, unhappily did not live to bask in this radical revaluation, this shift in criteria of judgment, in the world of visual art.  Cezanne, to a somewhat lesser extent, also died a few years too early.)

The shift in sensibility was wonderfully summed up (in his usual pithy manner) by Oscar Wilde when he said “it would take a heart of stone to not laugh at the death of Little Nell.” (Translation: the death of little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop –which gets dragged out over numerous pages—famously moved readers to tears on both sides of the Atlantic.)

So, in short, we do have a set of aesthetic standards promulgated by the modernists that lead to the elevation of Melville over Stowe (among many over revaluations) and which can be specified (especially when considered as negations of some of the prevailing features of “popular art”—works which, like loose women, are castigated for being “too easy.”)

A list of great books, then, can be a destroyer of diversity.  (“Eleanor Rigby” along criteria of profundity and musical complexity is a “greater” song than “When I’m 64,” but don’t we want a world in which both exist and in which we listen to both?)  And such a list relies on a fairly one-dimensional set of criteria that belies the imaginative plenitude that the arts provide.  When this narrowing work is combined with the notion that all judges of any taste know instinctively what a great work looks and tastes like, without any need to spell out the grounds for their judgment, we have a specific sensibility parading as universal.  (Which, not surprisingly, mirrors the objection of women and people of color about their experiences in “unmarked,” male-shaped spaces.  There are unwritten, even unconscious, norms of behavior in such spaces that are not seen as one alternative manner among others, as not universal.)

Does this mean all judgments of “better” or “worse” are off the table? No.  It simply means that an aesthetic work (or a meal in a Chinese restaurant for that matter) should be judged according to the criteria that guided its making.  I will admit that I find much politically motivated visual art deeply flawed.  But that is not because I have some aestheticist notion that art is always ruined by being political (another of the modernist shibboleths).  I reject any such absolute, universalist standard that says art can only do this and not that.  Rather, I think it is particularly difficult for the visual arts to make statements; they don’t have the same resources for statement-making available to novelists, poets, and film-makers (to name only three). 

Does this mean that visual artists should all eschew making works that aim at some political point? No.  Successfully doing something that is very difficult is often the hallmark of an important artist, one worth paying attention to.  The role of the audience is, in this view, to grasp what the artist is trying to accomplish—and to judge how successfully the artist accomplished that goal. Given similar goals, some artists do better work than other artists–relative to that goal.

Two last points and I am done.

The first relates to acquired taste.  An aesthetic education is always a process of learning how to appreciate, in the best case scenario to enjoy, aesthetic objects that, at first encounter, are too different, difficult, foreign, unfamiliar to grasp.  This process of education is mid-wived by others (friends, lovers, teachers) who deeply appreciate some works of art and long to convey that appreciation to another.  The means to that sharing is a heightened apprehension of the particular features of the particular work.  The mentor guides the neophyte toward “seeing” what is there.  The one who appreciates illuminates the work, shows what it contains that is to be valued, to the newcomer.  People who are especially good at this work of illumination are the truly gifted teachers and critics. 

In my ideal English department (for example), the staff would include a medievalist to whom the works of that period are endlessly fascinating and enjoyable—and that professor would be a success if she communicated that enthusiasm, that appreciation, to students who entered college with no idea that there was a vastly rich repository of medieval literature to encounter and learn to love. There would be no need to disparage some works as inferior in order to champion some as deeply pleasurable and worth reading along any number of criterial dimensions. 

And that brings me to my second—and last—point.  There is absolutely no doubt that various works have been aided in the perpetual effort to escape oblivion by institutional support and inertia.  Wordsworth becomes part of the curriculum—and I teach and research about Wordsworth because of the institutional stamp of value.  Literary institutions, like all assemblages of power, work to sustain themselves.  It takes a long time for values to shift in the academy—a shorter time in the market (as witnessed by the shift in taste in painting between 1870 and 1914).  The larger point is that judgments of value do not occur in a vacuum.  There are institutional hierarchies that protect prevailing judgments and only slowly adopt re-valuations.  

Still, institutions are not omnipotent—and they tend to ossification if not drawing revitalizing energies from some other source.  All of which is to say that “great books” only remain alive to the extent that some people somewhere still find them of interest, importance, worth devoting some time to.  Here’s the last reappearance of relativism in this discussion.  A book can be as “great” as you want to claim it is, but none of its intrinsic features will ensure its survival, its still being read, its not falling into the oblivion that engulfs 99% of the artistic works ever produced.  It will only still command attention while some audience finds it worthy of attention.  And that worthiness rests, in part, on the work having institutional prestige and enthusiastic champions, but also (crucially) on an encounter with it being experienced by at least some people as part of living a full and satisfying life.  The work’s survival is relative to an audience that keeps it alive.   

Teaching the Art of Judgment

Here’s the text of a short essay of mine published in the most recent issue of PMLA. (My apologies for some of the funky formatting.)

As a teacher, I have no right to tell my students how to vote or what
religion to practice. I don’t see that telling them to prefer Mrs.
Dalloway to The Da Vinci Code is any different. My job is to enhance
my students’ abilities to judge, not present authoritative judgments to
them.(1) Any student, even one in kindergarten, has already developed
preferences, even if the reasons for those preferences are mostly
inchoate. Articulating those reasons—submitting them to scrutiny
through public conversation—should be one aim of aesthetic educa-
tion. In this essay, I consider what teaching the art of judgment
entails. Working from and through the example of an aesthetic object
is particularly effective in leading students to understand the processes
of judgment formation and to consider the bases of their own
judgments.


Traditionally, judgment names the ability to recognize the full
nature and import of something encountered in experience. Thus,
the teacher is aiming to enhance powers of apprehension. But appre-
hension bleeds inevitably into selection. One chooses to spend time
with this object, experience, or person, not that one. Criticism, the
articulated response to the encounter with an aesthetic object, is
often thought to invariably involve a judgment about whether that
object is any good. Statements like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is better
than Moby-Dick” litter works of aesthetic theory from David Hume
on despite being just about meaningless absent the specification of
criteria. Particular qualities, contexts of use, and purposes must
underwrite any judgments of worth—and those criteria simply are
assumed to be held in common with others when blanket statements
of value are offered. That readers in 1856 would have preferred
Stowe’s novel to Melville’s, while “settled opinion” by 1956 gave the
palm to Moby-Dick, tells us about revaluations of sentimentalism,
of direct versus indirect political rhetorics, and of melodrama, not about something eternally true.

So it is not a question of reaching the right judgments of value, but
of understanding what underwrites particular judgments of value.


Crucial to any evaluation of an object is the ability to discern its features and its relation to me and
others who encounter it. Just what is this thing and how does it move its potential audiences? Judgment
thus names both the power of discernment, the capacity to apprehend the thing in all its multitudi-
nous variety and complexity, and a similar capacity to discern the complexities of my responses to it—
and the responses of others. Following Hannah Arendt’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of
Judgment, I want to emphasize this last bit (hearing and understanding the responses of others)—and
take it as the foundation stone for aesthetic education.


Like Kant, Arendt distinguishes between determinative and reflexive judgments. Determinative
judgments are noncontroversial and simply involve determining the category to which something
belongs. Speakers of the same language rarely dispute whether something is a chair or a sofa.
Judging whether this thing I sit on is one or the other is obvious. Reflexive judgments, however,
are disputable. What a chair indicates about the personality of its owner is not immediately apparent—
and will generate varying judgments. A case will have to be made to my interlocutors about the
owner’s love of luxury or, alternatively, the owner’s austere puritanism. Even more dramatically, my
encounter with the chair and my articulation of its relation to personality may lead to my re-forming
my understanding of the very category of personality and its entanglements with objects. Kant’s pri-
mary example of a category that can be re-formed in this way is “beauty.” One might argue that a pain-
ter like Vincent van Gogh transformed the category of “beauty” in Western art.

That Van Gogh did not live to see that transformation indicates the crucial fact that categories
are communal and intersubjective, not personal. Only in the dialogue with others do judgments
acquire any stability. This fact underwrites Arendt’s distinctive understanding of “the world.” Judgment involves an assertion of what a thing is, of what it can be seen as, but also what its singular character-
istics are. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby-Dick are both novels that revise our sense of what novels
can be and do. They are also distinctive individual works that call for detailed descriptions of their sin-
gularity. Judgment is much less about seeing one as “better” than the other than about understanding
each novel’s peculiar characteristics and virtues—and the distinctive ways they have moved some
readers and failed to interest other readers at all.


Such categorizations and characterizations become significant, constituting a world of things
and situations that transcends the self, only when ratified in conversation with others. We constitute
a world that becomes our “common sense” (Kant’s sensus communis).

Arendt writes:


[N]o one can adequately grasp the objective world in
its full reality all on his own, because the world
always shows and reveals itself to him from only
one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint
in the world and is determined by it. If someone
wants to see and experience the world as it “really”
is, he can do so only by understanding it as some-
thing that is shared by many people, lies between
them, separates and links them, showing itself differ-
ently to each and comprehensible only to the extent
that many people can talk about it and exchange
their opinions and perspectives with one another,
over against one another. Only in the freedom of
our speaking with one another does the world, as
that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity
and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world
and speaking with one another about it are basically
one and the same. . . . (“Introduction” 128–29).


It is only through talk with others that anyone can achieve the “enlarged” or “broadened” viewpoint
that Kant recommends in his discussion of “sensus communis”: “a power to judge that in reflecting
takes account in our thought of everyone else’s way of presenting” something (442). Judgment,
Arendt insists, is social through and through. “One judges always as a member of a community”
(Lectures 75), and the practice of judgment estab-
lishes the “sociality” that Kant calls humanity’s “highest end” (73). The key Kantian concept here is
“communicability”: “Communicability obviously depends on the enlarged mentality; one can com-
municate only if one is able to think from the other person’s standpoint; otherwise one will
never meet him, never speak in such a way that he understands” (74). Sensus communis, our living in
a world of shared objects, is constituted through communication.


Aesthetic objects offer an almost perfect laboratory for experimenting with communicating one’s
opinions and discernments with others who aredoing the same. Sociological phenomena, historical
events, and philosophical arguments can also serve to develop powers of judgment through practice.
The advantage of using the aesthetic object as an example to teach judgment is its materiality (it can
be physically present to all participants in the dialogue) and its relative boundedness compared with
other possible examined objects. Most importantly, the aesthetic object (almost invariably) is itself a
communicative act. It is already trying to get its audience to see things in a certain way, to direct
the audience’s attention in a particular direction. Thus, students all have their eyes turned toward an
object that confronts each of them—and that is directly aiming to elicit a response from them. The
students can be immediately set the task of describing what this thing is—and learn together just how
differently an object can be viewed and just how detailed a comprehensive description (of an object
and of responses to it) can be. In this way, the encounter with aesthetic objects dramatizes the whole
process of judgment. Students have a particular response (intense or not) to an object—and then
test that response in dialogue with others’ responses to the same object. Examples get the whole operation
moving; they are, Arendt translates Kant as saying, “the go-carts of judgment” (Lectures 84).


The teacher, familiar with the history of responses to particular works and knowledgeable
about the kinds of questions that get asked about aesthetic objects, guides the dialogue, pushing stu-
dents to become more aware of and more articulate about their somewhat inchoate responses. Students
are being led on the “taste journeys” that MarkWollaeger describes as part of his classroom
practice.


The student is called upon “‘to give an account’—not to prove, but to be able to say how
one came to an opinion and for what reasons one formed it” (Arendt, Lectures 41). In this give-and-
take of asking for responses and reasons or grounds for those responses, one cannot compel agreement.
As Arendt puts it, “one can only ‘woo’ or ‘court’ the agreement” of others (72). Reciprocally, others’
comments may lead one to see aspects of the object or experience that had been missed. Superb critics
light up something, make us apprehend it in new ways that feel enlarging, enriching, and enlighten-
ing. The world emerges, moves from black and white into color, through these dialogic exchanges.


Arendt’s link between the dialogic practices of judgment and a robust democratic polity has been
most full explored by Linda M. G. Zerilli. She presents judging “as a democratic world-building prac-
tice that creates and sustains . . . the common space in which shared objects of judgment can appear in
the first place” (xiii). Following Arendt, Zerilli adopts a language of “loss” to describe our contem-
porary predicament. We are witnessing “the radical shrinkage of a public space in which various per-
spectives can attest to the existence of a common object” (36). I subscribe to the notion that the
dialogic classroom provides a model for the kinds of exchanges essential for a vibrant democracy. But
our current inability to create a common world—exemplified by the drastically different perspectives
on the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election—seems less the result of a shrunken public sphere than the consequence of more voices being included. It is easy to have a common world
emerge when all the communicants are mostly cut from the same cloth.


It would be naive to believe that developing powers of judgment through dialogue could close
the rifts in a deeply divided society. The question of how much members of a society must agree on
to avoid civil war has an empirical answer. But a peaceful transition of power (to take just one
charged example) relies on some consensus about the legitimacy of the rules of the game. Zerilli is, I

think, right when she says that “to bring someone to share my judgment . . . must be a matter of getting
the person to see what I see, to share, that is, my affective response” (54). Arendt’s gambit is that par-
ticipation in processes of judgment will foster a particular sensibility—one that recognizes that I live
with others and that both my individuality and the world itself emerge and flourish through association
and communication with those others. Absent that sensibility, democracy is in peril. Linking aesthetic
education to democracy means hoping that the practice of judgments fosters such a sensibility.
Hope comes with no guarantees, but the absence of dialogic habits spells trouble.


The dialogic classroom stands as an example of a democratic way of being in the world, and the aes-
thetic object provides an occasion for practicing judgment. It is worth considering why working
through examples is a useful way to teach the art of judgment.


First, examples avoid the abstraction and generality of giving reasons for judgment. The example
gets us into the territory of affective response, of detailed engagement with the object. It is fairly com-
mon to link the aesthetic to the particular; aesthetic objects (at least since 1750 in the West, an important
qualification) aspire to originality, to uniqueness. To discern the features of an aesthetic object—and
the qualities of my response to it—means paying attention to the fine-grained details of this experi-
ence in all its dimensions. When my experience of the object shifts because of hearing others’ responses
to it or under the pressure of articulating my own responses, the holism that a word like sensibility
evokes comes into play. How the object “moves” me is the question, not simply how to describe its
defining features. It is that holism that advocates of aesthetic education often think justifies its place
in the curriculum.


The second reason to resort to examples leads to difficult issues about the relation of autonomy to
sociality in democratic polities. The route to one’s formed sensibility (of course never fully formed,
but still more solidly established and resistant to change at thirty than at sixteen) is, as Arendt’s
account of judgment would suggest, through one’s relation to others. Humans are imitative creatures.
Especially at first, we adopt the attitudes, tastes, habits, and beliefs of those we admire, of those
who seem to be the beings we would like to be ourselves. Other humans stand as examples to us of
ways of being in the world. The teacher (or peers) probably influences us more by the persona they
project than by any reasons offered up in dialogue. I came (at least at first) to love classical music less
through its intrinsic qualities and virtues than because certain people I admired clearly thought
there was something to it. Reasons are not utterly negligible, but we risk missing the full dynamic of
judgments of taste if we neglect questions of charisma, of admiration, of a desire to be more like
someone else. Perhaps judgment is clouded when influenced by others one admires, but any account
of judgment is deficient if it doesn’t take such influences into account.


In the classroom, I think it prudent to make the effects of charisma explicit—not to purge them (an
impossible task) but to highlight the extent to which one’s judgments entail attachments to certain ways of
being in the world. Judgments are invariably about value; discernment involves assessments of whether
this object, person, desire, ambition is worthy of sustained attention or is to be left aside in favor of
other pursuits. The teacher’s job is to give students the capacity to make such judgments by opening
up the terrain on which judgments are made—and providing as detailed a map of that territory as
feasible.


Respecting and attempting to foster my students’ autonomy seem to me absolute responsibili-
ties. Democracy rests on the assertion that each person has the right to make judgments on their
own. The tricky part is to fully acknowledge (as I have been arguing) that judgment requires partici-
pation in a community, where reasons are offered, opinions expressed, and ways of being in the world
(living out one’s beliefs and tastes and moral sensibility) displayed. But one’s judgments are not to be
dictated by authoritative leaders or some kind of majority rule. Arendt’s entire attempt to work out
an account of judgment was a response to her experience of totalitarian society. Arendt had witnessed

a world in which a set of shared moral convictions about murder and decency “collapsed almost over-
night, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original sense of the word, as
a set of mores, customs, and manners, which might be exchanged for another set with hardly more trou-
ble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people” (“Some Questions” 50).
The process of forming a judgment cannot become simply an adoption of prevailing beliefs or preju-
dices, or parroting the views of others. It should aim instead to establish one’s own convictions,
one’s own way of living in the world.


But autonomy, Arendt always insists, must be tempered with the recognition that I live in a world
also occupied by others. To learn that I am not alone in the world is an important lesson, absolutely nec-
essary, and as such underwrites the requirements to take the viewpoints of others into consideration
when forming my own convictions. And the ethics of sociality require communicability, of explaining
myself to myself and to others. There remain, however, duties to the self, ones Arendt saw dissolve in
front of her eyes in the 1930s. Balancing these two sets of responsibilities is no easy task, with no set
formulas or methods for success. But continual engagement in dialogue with others seems essential
to any effort to cultivate both. Democratic education (and this essay tries to enlist aesthetic education to
that cause) fosters the realization that individual style and opinions develop in association with oth-
ers, not in opposition to them. This does not take the sting out of various disagreements, but it does
provide a basic acknowledgment not only that others have an equal right to be here but that there is
no world and no self unless those others are here. We might call this “the democratic demand,” the
ethical imperative embedded in efforts to teach the art of judgment.


The example stands as a singular instance even as it also indicates possible ways forward, offering an
instantiation of certain choices guided by judgment.(2) As such it bridges singularity and sociality.
Kant’s comments on the use of examples in teaching capture the tricky balancing act in question. In the
arts (as contrasted to the sciences), what we want the student to learn “cannot be couched in a formula
and serve as a precept. . . . Rather, the rule must be abstracted from what the artist has done, i.e. from
the product, which others may use to test their own talent, letting it serve them as their model,
not to be copied but to be imitated. How that is possible is difficult to explain” (177). No kidding. That’s
why aesthetic educators are always on the defensivein a world determined to devise pedagogical
methods and measures. In the biology lab, you want students to produce exactly the same results.
In the literature classroom, you want students to produce their own distinctive responses to the works
they read, not to find their way to exactly the same conclusions. Aesthetic educators are not offering
recipes that result in a standardized product, but are (instead) trying to activate the distinctive talents
and sensibilities of each of their students. Seeing how others have done it provides a model, an
example. But imitating the model (to use Kant’s distinction between copying and imitating) entails
grasping the point of the enterprise (an engagement with the materials and situation at hand and a will to
communicate the particulars of that engagement to others) and attempting a similar enterprise on one’s
own behalf.


I think Kant’s emphasis on “abstracting a rule” from the example is misguided, but it highlights the
tensions at play. Not anything goes. “Since nonsense too can be original, the products of genius must also
be models, i.e. they must be exemplary” (175). The example communicates; it is not utterly trapped
in idiosyncratic, ineffable singularity, but speaks to others, displays a sensibility and its encounter with
the nonself. The aesthetic educator is trying to foster some kind of individual autonomy through
the examination of individual responses to what the world offers, responses tested against the ability
to communicate them. Autonomy and sociality develop as I see how others respond to my views
and also how those others respond to encounters with similar (or even identical) objects or situations.


Aesthetic education, in particular, seems suited to this effort to help students come into their own, to
discover their own voices and convictions, while remaining in touch with others. The means are the

public (through dialogue) testing of attitudes and beliefs. The thoroughness and persuasiveness with
which students communicate their views are the criteria of assessment—and what the teacher sets out to
cultivate—not specific content. Examples can give a sense of what can be accomplished in communication,
in a thorough and spirited presentation to others.


NOTES
1. See Clune for a spirited argument that “expert aesthetic judg-
ment” (2) deployed in the classroom can “carve out a space beyond
the reach of market valuation” (3) in such a way that “aesthetic edu-
cation sets up a material barrier to market totalitarianism” (4). My
account of judgment in this essay both overlaps and disagrees with
Clune’s work in ways too complex to detail in this short space.


2. See Klinger for a detailed account of how judgment works in
the production of the individual instance.


WORKS CITED


Arendt, Hannah. “Introduction into Politics.” The Promise of
Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn, Schocken Books, 2005, pp.
93–200.

———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. U of Chicago P,
1982.
———. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” Responsibility and
Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, Schocken Books, 2003, pp.
49–146.


Clune, Michael W. A Defense of Judgment. U of Chicago P, 2021.


Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by by Werner
S. Pluhar, Hackett, 1987.


Klinger, Florian. “To Make That Judgment: The Pragmatism of
Gerhard Richter.” Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a
History, edited by Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau,
Northwestern UP, 2018, pp. 239–68.


Wollaeger, Mark. “Taste, Value, and Literary Aesthetics.”American Comparative Literature Association conference,
2021.


Zerilli, Linda M. G. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. U of Chicago P. 2016.