Aesthetic Judgment

The eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of taste (or sentimentalists) was
primarily a debate over the immediacy thesis, i.e., over whether we judge objects to be beautiful
by applying principles of beauty to them. It was not primarily a debate over the existence of
principles of beauty, a matter over which theorists of taste might disagree. Kant denied that there
are any such principles (Kant 1790, 101), but both Hutcheson and Hume affirmed their
existence: they maintained that although judgments of beauty are judgments of taste and not of
reason, taste nevertheless operates according to general principles, which might be discovered
through empirical investigation (Hutcheson 1725, 2835; Hume 1757, 231233).
It is tempting to think of recent debate in aesthetics between particularists and generalists as a
revival of the eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of taste. But the
accuracy of this thought is difficult to gauge. One reason is that it is often unclear whether
particularists and generalists take themselves merely to be debating the existence of aesthetic
principles or to be debating their employment in aesthetic judgment. Another is that, to the
degree particularists and generalists take themselves to be debating the employment of aesthetic
principles in aesthetic judgment, it is hard to know what they can be meaning by aesthetic
judgment. If aesthetic still carries its eighteenth-century implication of immediacy, then the
question under debate is whether judgment that is immediate is immediate. If aesthetic no
longer carries that implication, then it is hard to know what question is under debate because it is
hard to know what aesthetic judgment could be. It may be tempting to think that we can simply
re-define aesthetic judgment such that it refers to any judgment in which an aesthetic property
is predicated of an object. But this requires being able to say what an aesthetic property is
without reference to its being immediately graspable, something no one seems to have done. It
may seem that we can simply re-define aesthetic judgment such that it refers to any judgment
in which any property of the class exemplified by beauty is predicated of an object. But which
class is this? The classes exemplified by beauty are presumably endless, and the difficulty is to
specify the relevant class without reference to the immediate graspability of its members, and
that is what no one seems to have done.
However we are to sort out the particularist/genealist debate, important contributions to it
include, on the side of particularism, Arnold Isenberg's Critical Communication (1949) Frank
Sibley's Aesthetic Concepts (in Sibley 2001) and Mary Mothersill's Beauty Restored (1984)
and, on the side of generalism, Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics (1958) and On the Generality of
Critical Reasons (1962), Sibley's General Reasons and Criteria in Aesthetics (in Sibley
2001), George Dickie's Evaluating Art (1987) and John Bender's General but Defeasible
Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: The Generalist/Particularist Dispute (1995). Of these, the
papers by Isenberg and Sibley have arguably enjoyed the greatest influence.
Isenberg concedes that we often appeal to descriptive features of works in support of our
judgments of their value, and he allows that this may make it seem as if we must be appealing to
principles in making those judgments. If in support of a favorable judgment of some painting a
critic appeals to the wavelike contour formed by the figures clustered in its foreground, it may
seem as if his judgment must involve tacit appeal to the principle that any painting having such a
contour is so much the better. But Isenberg argues that this cannot be, since no one agrees to any
such principle:
There is not in all the world's criticism a single purely descriptive statement concerning which
one is prepared to say beforehand, If it is true, I shall like that work so much the better
(Isenberg 1949, 338).

But if in appealing to the descriptive features of a work we are not acknowledging tacit appeals
to principles linking those features to aesthetic value, what are we doing? Isenberg believes we
are offering directions for perceiving the work, i.e., by singling out certain its features, we are
narrow[ing] down the field of possible visual orientations and thereby guiding others in the
discrimination of details, the organization of parts, the grouping of discrete objects into patterns
(Isenberg 1949, 336). In this way we get others to see what we have seen, rather than getting
them to infer from principle what we have so inferred.
That Sibley advances a variety of particularism in one paper and a variety of generalism in
another will give the appearance of inconsistency where there is none: Sibley is a particularist of
one sort, and with respect to one distinction, and a generalist of another sort with respect to
another distinction. Isenberg, as noted, is a particularist with respect to the distinction between
descriptions and verdicts, i.e., he maintains that there are no principles by which we may infer
from value-neutral descriptions of works to judgments of their overall value. Sibley's
particularism and generalism, by contrast, both have to do with judgments falling in between
descriptions and verdicts. With respect to a distinction between descriptions and a set of
judgments intermediate between descriptions and verdicts, Sibley is straightforwardly
particularist. With respect to a distinction between a set of judgments intermediate between
descriptions and verdicts and verdicts, Sibley is a kind of generalist and describes himself as
such.
Sibley's generalism, as set forth in General Reasons and Criteria in Aesthetics, begins with the
observation that the properties to which we appeal in justification of favorable verdicts are not
all descriptive or value-neutral. We also appeal to properties that are inherently positive, such as
grace, balance, dramatic intensity, or comicality. To say that a property is inherently positive is
not to say that any work having it is so much the better, but rather that its tout court attribution
implies value. So although a work may be made worse on account of its comical elements, the
simple claim that a work is good because comical is intelligible in a way that the simple claims
that a work is good because yellow, or because it lasts twelve minutes, or because it contains
many puns, are not. But if the simple claim that a work is good because comical is thus
intelligible, comicality is a general criterion for aesthetic value, and the principle that articulates
that generality is true. But none of this casts any doubt on the immediacy thesis, as Sibley
himself observes:
I have argued elsewhere that there are no sure-fire rules by which, referring to the neutral and
non-aesthetic qualities of things, one can infer that something is balanced, tragic, comic, joyous,
and so on. One has to look and see. Here, equally, at a different level, I am saying that there are
no sure-fire mechanical rules or procedures for deciding which qualities are actual defects in the
work; one has to judge for oneself. (Sibley 2001, 107108)
The elsewhere referred to in the first sentence is Sibley's earlier paper, Aesthetic Concepts,
which argues that the application of concepts such as balanced, tragic, comic, or joyous is
not a matter of determining whether the descriptive (i.e., non-aesthetic) conditions for their
application are met, but is rather a matter of taste. Hence aesthetic judgments are immediate in
something like the way that judgments of color, or of flavor, are:
We see that a book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea is sweet by tasting it. So too, it
might be said, we just see (or fail to see) that things are delicate, balanced, and the like. This
kind of comparison between the exercise of taste and the use of the five senses is indeed
familiar; our use of the word taste itself shows that the comparison is age-old and very natural
(Sibley 2001, 1314).
But Sibley recognizesas his eighteenth-century forebears did and his formalist contemporaries
did notthat important differences remain between the exercise of taste and the use of the five

senses. Central among these is that we offer reasons, or something like them, in support of our
aesthetic judgments: by talkingin particular, by appealing to the descriptive properties on
which the aesthetic properties dependwe justify aesthetic judgments by bringing others to see
what we have seen (Sibley 2001, 1419).
It is unclear to what degree Sibley, beyond seeking to establish that the application of aesthetic
concepts is not condition-governed, seeks also to define the term aesthetic in terms of their not
being so. It is clearer, perhaps, that he does not succeed in defining the term this way, whatever
his intentions. Aesthetic concepts are not alone in being non-condition-governed, as Sibley
himself recognizes in comparing them with color concepts. But there is also no reason to think
them alone in being non-condition-governed while also being reason-supportable, since moral
concepts, to give one example, at least arguably also have both these features. Isolating the
aesthetic requires something more than immediacy, as Kant saw. It requires something like the
Kantian notion of disinterest, or at least something to play the role played by that notion in
Kant's theory.