felt–when using, we suppose, common human cognitive faculties–and
then wait. Others may also then report that their cognitive faculties lead
them freely to make sense of the same objects, or they may not. Hence the
experiences of art and beauty, together with the further practice of talking
about those experiences, is a way of“deepening and enlarging the commu-
nity”^71 of free subjects. Culture is here the proleptic exploration and enact-
ment of possibilities of free assent. As Kemal puts it,“Judgments of taste
celebrate the relation of individual to community, which is ever in process,
for the individual’s autonomous judgment is always in search of a warrant
from the community, which is itself always in a process of development that
depends on assent from its members.”^72 “The more we...acknowledge
[through exploring and confirming our aesthetic responses] that our exclu-
sively private feelings arenotthe only model for subjectivity, the more we
will develop [the] moral feeling”^73 of respect for the idea of free community.
“In this context culture as discipline is theemergence of humanity–of the
individual liberated from subjugation to natural impulses and truculent
egoism and now considered as a reasoning moral end.”^74
We have, therefore, good reason to look and judge autonomously,“for
ourselves,”as best we can. When we do so, we can be wrong, in mistaking the
character of our own attention and experience. We have good reason to make
our individual verdicts public and to discuss them with others, in the hope of
establishing that we can and do freely respond to the same works–even if we
cannot provea priorithat we must do so on all occasions. Public discussion of
identifications and evaluations can sometimes help both to bring us together
in response and to make me more confident that I have not misunderstood
the basis of my own responses. Public discussion of identifications and
evaluations will rightly take the form not of proofs, but of the articulation
of elucidatory-critical understanding,^75 as we explore in the work possible
foci of our responses, shared or divergent as they may be. Since, however, the
articulation of elucidatory-critical understanding is an open-ended activity,
where shifts in foci of response may occur as a result of new comparisons
with other works and as a result of new, wider, historical-cultural and
psychological forms of understanding, the activities of identification and
evaluation will likewise be open-ended and subject to shifts.
(^71) Ibid., p. 99. (^72) Ibid. (^73) Ibid., p. 117.
(^74) Ibid., p. 120. (^75) See Chapter 6 above.
Identifying and evaluating art 195