by Dwight Furrow
In an age where there is little agreement about anything, there is one assertion almost everyone agrees with—there is no disputing taste. If someone likes simple food instead of complex concoctions, who is to say that’s wrong. If I prefer bodice rippers to 19th Century Russian novels, you might say my tastes are crude and uncultured but hesitate to say one type of literary work is inherently better than the other. Aesthetic judgments are about subjective preference only. This is especially true of food and drink. Our preferences in this domain seem especially subjective. You can’t be wrong if you dislike chocolate ice cream can you?
But this view that aesthetic judgment can only be about subjective preferences misses a common experience that I imagine we all have from time to time. We experience something we acknowledge to be good, but we just don’t like it. For me, the aforementioned Russian novelists provide good examples; and don’t even mention James Joyce. Each of the several times I have tried to make it through Ulysses, I was persuaded of Joyce’s greatness in the first 20 pages while being thoroughly convinced that life is too short.
This coming apart of what we enjoy from what we deem “good” suggests that some aesthetic objects are more valuable than others. But on what grounds can we make such judgments? Today it seems as if we are more suspicious of appeals to values than we used to be. Over the past several decades, we’ve come to suspect that value judgements are too often based on illegitimate hierarchies and exclude people who don’t have the “right sort” of experience or training. No doubt, some value judgements are disguised assertions of cultural dominance. But in condemning value talk we don’t escape their grip on us. The accusation that someone is too judgmental has its own normative force. There is performative contradiction in judging someone for being too judgmental.
We can’t dispense with value judgments because we can’t avoid decisions about what is better or worse. Life is full of such decisions, and it matters to our welfare that we have some foundation for them. Some value judgments may coerce people or exclude them, but they also lend legitimacy and give weight to our choices and decisions. Values and ideals infuse decisions with meaning and importance, because they mark distinctions between what is worthy and what is not. To invoke “justice,” “fairness,” or “freedom” is to signal that what is at stake is not a mere preference. But can we say something similar about “beauty,” “complexity,” or other aesthetic values?
As much as we shy away from talk about values, we implicitly recognize that not all preferences or desires are equal and some are more important than others. In marking this distinction, Philosopher Charles Taylor helpfully distinguishes weak from strong forms of evaluation. In weak evaluation, when I judge something good, I simply mean I desire it or prefer it. I find it pleasurable or satisfying and that is sufficient to justify the judgment. If I prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream or Indian food to Mexican food, there is no further argument to be made. We all have different tastes and nothing of consequence depends on this fact. An argument about whether vanilla ice cream is objectively better than chocolate ice cream seems pointless and without foundation.
Strong evaluation, by contrast, implies a real distinction between better and worse. The important point about strong evaluation is that desires or preferences by themselves are not sufficient to render something worthwhile because we can evaluate the desires or preferences themselves as worthy or unworthy. Strong evaluation is about second-order reflection. We can intelligibly ask questions such as “Is this particular desire compatible with the kind of person I want to be?” The fact that you want something or prefer it does not entail you ought to pursue it. These second order judgments about preferences and desires are an important check on our impulses that may not always be what’s best for us to follow.
Moral values have this kind of normative force embedded in strong evaluation. Moral values are not about what I like but about whether my treatment of others is just, fair, or harmful. But in matters of aesthetics, we seem at least on the surface to want to give up strong evaluation for weak evaluation. The current dominant trend seems to be to despise hierarchies and to seek to democratize taste. It’s nobody’s business whether I prefer Jersey Shore to Proust just as it’s no one’s business that I prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream. A preference for Jersey Shore over Proust is not something to be presided over by literary experts or TV critics. I suspect we are less inclined today to take critical notice as guides to what one should like. We have become so eclectic in our tastes that we can appreciate both Jersey Shore and Proust without contradiction.
However, these democratized, eclectic tastes do not mean that strong evaluation should disappear. We can appreciate a summer beach song for what it is while recognizing that a work by Bob Dylan (or Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead etc.) offers us a richer, and more interesting experience. Of course, even in this democratized taste environment, some people have to make aesthetic judgements that aspire to a degree of objectivity. Curators must curate. Art and literature professors must choose what to teach. Journalists must choose what to write about. For a film or literary work to enter the canon of great works, it’s not enough that it be gripping, fast paced, or exhilarating. It must have aesthetic complexity or ethical ambiguity or render a time, place, or character profoundly vivid. With weak evaluation if a literary work fails to capture and sustain my attention it’s the fault of the book; with strong evaluation it may be my deficiencies that explain my lack of engagement. (See the aforementioned reference to Ulysses.)
But today we can easily ignore these authorities if we wish. Cultural experts have influence, but their authority is weak and they compete with traditions and friend networks, often losing out in that battle for influence. We now study rock and hip hop in university courses. But rock and hip hop were central to culture long before they were taken up by these academic institutions and their accompanying prestige.
Our preferences are inherently selective. We cannot care about everything equally. And the criteria by which we choose to care about something are varied and continuously shifting. Your literature professor might constantly bang on about the virtue of finely crafted sentences, but literary critics might pay more attention to how well put together the narrative is or how vividly the characters are rendered. By contrast, your friends may focus on the skill with which suspense is generated. Aesthetics can’t be reduced to a single dimension. It’s not only about complexity and depth. Spectacle, awe, and infinite gradations of emotional resonance also provide frameworks within which works can be assessed and will produce different evaluative conclusions depending on which framework for evaluation one chooses. From the fact that value judgments are necessary, it does not follow they are simple or one-dimensional.
The issue in strong evaluation is not what we like but the degree and tenor of our liking. Is it worth spending time with and if so how much? Is it worth using as an occasion of self-reflection? Is it worth recommending to others and on what basis? In other words, we don’t simply take pleasure in something. We have the ability and inclination to assess that pleasure.
So here is my question. If the point of beauty (or other source of aesthetic pleasure) is to savor life, what difference does strong evaluation make? If I like something, why bother reflecting on whether that preference is warranted? I think the best kind of answer to these questions is that savoring life is not as straightforward as it seems. If our aesthetic lives were simple and straightforward, the disappointments and surprises, the boredom, fascinations, obsessions, the friends lost and recovered, would not figure so prominently in our sense of how life goes. Passive pleasures are one thing; taking pleasure in one’s activity, in expressing one’s capacities is quite another. When left to chance, our aesthetic lives flounder, yet when not open to chance they stagnate. We cannot afford to ignore where we stand on that continuum.
Strong evaluation is not primarily about prescribing what kinds of responses someone ought to have to a work. It is, more importantly, about identifying the various uses that aesthetic objects have which helps determine whether a response is justified or not. People want lots of different things from the arts. Pleasure, yes, but also knowledge, moral growth, mood regulation, emotional catharsis, a sense of community, and political vision are among the reasons why we choose which aesthetic objects to attend to, and evaluation must take these reasons into consideration. Whether a work contributes to any of these is always an open question.
But more importantly, all these considerations figure in the development of one’s personal style. We tend to think of style as something that is not terribly important when compared to “substance.” But if you subtract aesthetic evaluation from what makes you “you,” what is left over is a threadbare, feeble thing. Yes, moral character matters but aesthetic judgements about who we interact with, what we say, what we wear, what we eat, and which objects populate our lives matter as well. We don’t just experience aesthetic objects as pleasure devices and move on. We become attached to and begin to care about them. They permeate the physical and social atmosphere in which we live. The manner in which we approach the intimate details of everyday life is persistently and comprehensively guided by aesthetic judgement. This increases the stakes of aesthetic evaluation. Perhaps the stakes are never so high that we need to devote much attention to castigating people for their tastes. But taste does matter, especially one’s own.
The things we take pleasure in are not incidental to more important matters. Pleasure and pain are at the foundation of our motivational states and mistakes about such matters deeply harm our pursuit of well-being. Thus, strong evaluation has a place in our aesthetic lives. It enables us to ask questions about what is worthy of our attention and resources and how they regulate our emotional and intellectual lives.
If our aim is experience in all its vivacity and wonder, then we should ask whether our current preferences provide such nourishment. To take pleasure at face value as an inert, static thing is to miss its crucial role in human flourishing.