On the Developmental Stages of Aesthetic Judgment

Audio Essay: Evolution of Aesthetic Judgment

This will be a short study of aesthetics. Of how aesthetic judgment can tell us more than ethical (moral) judgment, and how, unlike ethical judgment, it is not really subject to lying, or at least not to the same extent.

Nietzsche says:

“Beauty will save the world.”

He also says:

“All of life is a weighing of tastes.”

I have noticed that people are prone to lying when it comes to ethical judgment. Very often they lie, or speak from the position of a projected image of what they would like to be. This is understandable, since we all strive for ethical self-improvement, and the same is true of ethical judgment, which develops and refines itself within us. On the other hand, aesthetic judgment is different. The aesthetic standard is something we begin to accumulate very early, and the aesthetic frame of reference we build during adolescence and post-adolescence very often remains unchanged.

While, on the one hand, we all know, or think we know, the difference between good and evil, the difference between the beautiful and the ugly belongs to the realm of “subjective opinion,” and as such is much more sincere, because it gives the individual the possibility of finding something that his soul recognizes as “beautiful.” However, we also know that beauty has its gradations. Words such as kitsch and schund are not inventions of social constructivism, but definitions of temporal beauty — beauty that loses its value over time and is forgotten. The impermanence of trends through time points directly to their relative “beauty,” which is valid only from a particular perspective of time and space.

On the other hand, enduring beauty is something that has survived the tooth of time and still contains aesthetic values that resonate with the observer regardless of temporal or spatial context. Thus, for example, Faust or The Lord of the Rings resonate with audiences many years after their creation and still provide aesthetic consolation.

In what follows, I will try to define the progression of aesthetic judgment as I see it, and as I believe it has transformed through time and through the needs of the soul.

In early childhood, aesthetic judgment is defined through immediate aesthetics, that is, through taste. Children prefer one ice cream or another, one juice or another, one kind of food or another. As the ego and the self-image mature, this judgment expands to clothing and to the impression we give off in the world. During the school years, we begin to care about how we appear to others, and this is the second stage of transformation, one that for many remains in place for the rest of life. Alongside this immediate taste, we also begin to develop a taste for cartoons, which is a higher level of complexity than immediate taste, since it includes the theoretical senses (sight and hearing), although it usually begins with sight, as the first theoretical sense.

As childhood progresses and our interests grow, we move from cartoons to live-action films. This is the next level of complexity, one that necessarily includes the second theoretical sense, hearing, since plot — that is, what happens — becomes the central focus of our interest. Parallel with this interest in “artistic events,” our need for objective events also grows; hence, going out begins. Going out is the next level of complexity, and our aesthetic judgment then usually takes the form of comparing which party is better than another, or how the next party relates to the previous one. This is most pronounced during adolescence.

At a certain point, events in the form of nights out begin to feel repetitive, and we find ourselves searching for the next level of complexity. At that point, literature usually enters the scene. Although artistic in character, literature offers a stereotyping of events and characters. Characters are drawn into their purest stereotypes, while situations are translated into stereotypical patterns present in frequent social mechanics. Literature represents the first leap into true abstraction. When I say “true abstraction,” I mean the truth of reality that is not empirically visible, but can be understood and recognized exclusively through the intellect. Film, music, painting, theater, opera, ballet, and so on also offer this stereotyping, but in my view it remains most visible in literature. The additional mechanical act of “reading text” is somehow fundamental for the faculty that translates one sign into another — a word or a letter into an idea. This is, among other things, the first aesthetic leap between the young mind and the mature one. The collective, for the most part, never makes this leap and remains for life within the domain of aesthetic trend.

Once stereotypes become intelligible as autonomous wholes, we arrive at a point where we need a higher pattern that will bind stereotypes together, or at least connect similar groups of stereotypes. Here we come to the final aesthetic leap: the leap from stereotype to archetype. From story into religion, philosophy, and myth. Into impersonal collective events that we may call the symbolic image of the world.

Aesthetic judgment matures from the completely personal and immediate — the sense of taste — into a fully abstract, impersonal ideational configuration. From the individual toward the universal.