objective features of Jones. Moreover, we may both see the same or similar
features of character in another, but understand them in different contexts
and evaluate them differently. What I take in Jones to be resolute patience,
concern for craft in intellectual work, and faithfulness to the subject rather
than to public whim, you take to be timidity, self-indulgence in private
fantasy, and failure to achieve any reputable point of view. It is not clear
that we will be able to talk this disagreement out so as to understand and feel
about Jones together, no matter how long we go on, though we may each
sometimes have something to say. (Both Scruton and Cavell note, against the
sharpness and absoluteness of Kant’s distinctions, that moral verdicts,
including for example judgments of character, are often, perhaps typically,
more like aesthetic judgments than they are wholly“objectively”determined
by moral principle and unambiguous facts.^80 Nor is it clear that“mere
gustatory”judgments arealwaysbeyond reasonable discussion.)
Thinking, among other things, about the unruly mixture of openness to
reasoned critical discussion and of a sheerly personal dimension of liking and
divergent point of view that attaches, always, to identifications and evalu-
ations of art, Ted Cohen reports that
In some cases I hold out the vain but necessary, beautiful hope that the work
will–or at leastcould–reach everyone, that it could be ourentréinto what
we desperately wish to be our universal humanity, that it could be what Kant,
in all the profound, obtuse, crystalline opacity of the optimism of the
Enlightenment thought beauty is, the mark of the“universal substrate of
humanity.”But in most cases the net of my hopes is cast less widely. This is
not a bad or limiting thing: it is essential to my location of myself...Some
works connect me with many people, including, sometimes, considerable
varieties of people. ThusThe Simpsonsand some Marx brothers movies connect
me with both very young people and some widely varying kinds of people my
own age and older. And some works connect me with very few people. Thus
some stories by I. B. Singer and some by Richard Stern seem to connect me
with only a few people, people who are much like me...HamletandThe
Marriage of Figaroconnect me with most of you, I would guess, perhaps all of
you. Elaine May’s movieIshtar, which I am very fond of, leaves me virtually
alone. That’s all fine: I need to be with you, and I need to be alone. I need to be
like you, and I need to be unlike you. A world in which you and I never(^80) See the references in note 74.
198 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art