Personal and/versus discussable: Isenberg, Scruton,
and Cohen on taste
Are judgments of taste–identifications and evaluations of works of art–then,
in the end objective? Hume is right to emphasize the facts of continuing
disagreements in judgments of taste and of shifts in our own personal verdicts
over time. He is right that it is both natural, as a means of seeking reassurance
about oneself, and reasonable, in light of a command of greater powers of
sense and discernment and a greater command of relevant comparisons,
sometimes to defer to the verdicts of authorities in criticism, at least to take
seriously the possibility that they might be right. Yet Hume is wrong to insist
that the joint verdict of acknowledged authorities entirely constitutes a stand-
ard of taste. We do not and should not always defer to it. Acknowledged adepts
in critical understanding and in identification and evaluation sometimes
disagree with one another, and their verdicts–individual and joint–are no
more (though no less) stable and shared than their eludicatory-critical under-
standings. Kant is right, therefore, to emphasize the importance of looking
and seeking for oneself, of exploring the work imaginatively, in pursuit of
elucidatory-critical understanding that rightly figures in identification and
evaluation. Such exploration of the work, by both novices and the well prac-
ticed, can be motivated by the hope of agreement in identification and evalu-
ation. But it cannot be guaranteed through the use of any method or by appeal
to any standard that that hope will be fulfilled. Understandings, identifica-
tions, and evaluations remain reasonably discussable through“pointing out”
features of a work that are relevant to understanding it and to identifying it
and evaluating it as art, but not provable independently of exercises of“free”
sensibility. As Arnold Isenberg poignantly puts it,
It is a function of criticism to bring about communication at the level of the
senses; that is, to induce a sameness of vision, of experienced content. If this is
accomplished, itmay or may notbe followed by agreement, or what is called
“communion”–a community of feeling which expresses itself in identical value
judgments.^76
Following the lead of Kant and Isenberg, we can usefully distinguish at some
level mere gustatory judgments of personal sensory liking (“I like pistachio(^76) Isenberg,“Critical Communication,”p. 367; emphasis added.
196 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art