As mentioned in class last Tuesday, I’m considering writing my final thesis on the topic of philosophical taste. (I know this is my third consecutive post on the subject taste, so please bear with me one more time as this particular subject is currently motivating my philosophical interests.) Overall, taste bears much relevance to the “aesthetic experience”. Hence I’m interest in understanding what qualifies our encounter with the “beautiful” object, via the aesthetic experience, as something that can be subjectively experienced, but universally supported. To put the question in broader terms, I guess you could say I’m interested in discovering how/why we makes claims about beauty, particular in the area of fine art (i.e. theater, music, etc..).
Luckily, Kant wrote his senior thesis on this subject as well. Kant argues that we cannot make judgments about beauty unless be do so from good taste. Hence the only way we can go about creating/understanding “beauty” in art is through our faculty of taste. In order to make judgments from good taste, however, we must first have a necessary “skill” or “talent” for doing so. This “skill” is what Kant calls genius. While genius enables the artist to acknowledge her obligation to making aesthetic judgment from good taste, it is taste itself which “disciplines” our genius.
Moreover, Genius equips the artist with an ability to create art that does not depend upon an a prior concept of beauty itself. This makes our encounter with the “beautiful” object subjectively possible. Thus genius and taste go hand-in-hand throughout the “aesthetic experience”.
Perhaps a brief analogy will present the connection between genius an taste more fully in light of our aesthetic experience. Take, for example, the artist who finds inspiration from another work of art. The artist finds beauty in that particular work of art and wishes to recreate what she finds “beautiful” from that work of art in her own work. This is an example of bad taste. If the artist applies what she finds “beautiful” from the already existing work of art to her own composition, then she lacks the genius to create purely original art. Thus her creative process for making art originated from bad taste.
The same is also true of bad taste when an artist tries to convey beauty in an overly abstract way. Perhaps this is because the artist is without the necessary skill or talent that is required for her genius to prevail. Instead, the artist compensates for her lack of genius by creating art that in no way communicates beauty as something desirable. In both cases the viewer is “turned off” by the art, either because the art lacks creativity, or because the artist has produced the art in a way that is virtually incommunicable to the listener.
This is where I’d like to commence with my study of taste. I find it fascinating how taste can support a subjective encounter with the “beautiful”, while at the same time making that encounter “universally understood”.
How would desire play into this? I read the Symposium recently and it talks about the desire for the beautiful. Is that a (necessary?) part of the aesthetic experience, in your opinion?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't remember much about the Critique of Judgment, so can you maybe remind me whether there is a standard for measuring good from bad taste, what it is, and how we know it?
I went along the same lines earlier in another post but i feel i must point out some of the same things here.
ReplyDeleteFirst according to Kant there would be a universal standard for what is beautiful in art, if we all act in good taste that is. However in the real worldthat often is not the case, people cannot seperate themselves from prior concepts of beauty. For example western painting are not considered to be great art in places like China or Japan, and often times the West has the same opinion of their art. If this were the case we would all have a consensus on what is beautiful, and it would usually be an original piece of art. (For example "Garfield a Tale of Two Kitties" is one of the highest grossing films in China. Granted Kant can get out of this by simply saying that most of us are acting in bad taste, however i find that to be a copout. Things that were original would be considered good as long as they had some idea of Beauty that was in good Taste. I do not think Garfield would qualify. I find there to a problem with the idea that it is universally understood. One would have to argue that the faculties to judge art is something we are born with and have a constant understanding of. It could not therefore be something that was empirical. Which is something I believe is not possible, (but granted I like pragmatism).
I am with Austin.. I haven't done a lot of work on Kant recently and don't have too much to add in those regards. I did have a question referring to "bad taste." You have clearly stated what it means to be in bad taste, yet I don't understand then how you can create something without referencing some sort of past idea, thought, or experience. So in that sense, how do you create something uniquely your own or new to the world? Art seems to be cultivated through time. You can see how artists utilize previous artists as inspiration to create something new while still resembling in some sense the artists they may have viewed or critiqued. So my question is how does one create something not in bad taste?
ReplyDeleteYou explain that "genius" (the skill or talent necessary for making judgments about works of art) and "taste" (the faculty of that allows individuals to create and explain works of art) are inherent within the "aesthetic experience." Are these two requirements available to all individuals? Are these powers established within the individual, or must the individual cultivate them in order to make aesthetic claims? It seems as though the individual who has either more knowledge of art or who has created art would have a better sense of what "beauty" is and where it is found (art, however, is not my forte so that could be a completely ignorant statement). Are you sticking with Kant, or do you plan on using other philosophers?
ReplyDelete