Aesthetic Judgment

An Aesthetic Judgment is a value judgment that ascribes an aesthetical value.

• AKA: Aesthetic Experience, Beauty Judgement.
• Context:
  • It can be analyzed by an Aesthetics.
  • It can be expressed in an Aesthetic Statement.
  • It can reference an Aesthetic Measure (based on an Aesthetic Standard or Aesthetic Rule).
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• Example(s):
  • A Layperson watching a specific sunset at Grand Canyon National Park and describing it as one of the most beautiful moments in their life.
  • …
  • An Art Critic describing Picasso's Guernica as innovative in its abstraction, elevating the formless to a new paradigm of beauty.
  • A Music Lover praising Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for its emotional crescendos that embody the sublime.
  • An Architect admiring Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia for its innovative use of natural light and intricate stonework, creating a transcendent atmosphere.
  • A Film Critic highlighting the exquisite cinematography and tight narrative structure of Christopher Nolan's Inception.
  • A Fashion Editor complimenting Alexander McQueen's 2010 collection for its bold use of geometric patterns, challenging traditional notions of elegance.
  • A Food Critic lauding a specific sushi dish at Jiro’s Sushi as a work of art, each piece carefully arranged in a display of culinary aesthetics.
  • A Poetry Critic celebrating Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 for its masterful use of iambic pentameter, conveying depth of emotion through lexical choices.
  • A Landscape Photographer commenting on Ansel Adams' Moonrise photograph, stating it captures the raw essence of nature through stark contrast and impeccable composition.
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  • A Physicist appreciating the elegance of the equations in Einstein's theory of general relativity, unifying mass, energy, and spacetime.
  • A Biologist marveling at the fractal patterns in a specific New Zealand Silver Fern, seeing beauty in its mathematical predictability.
  • An Astronomer inspired by Chandrasekhar, finding beauty in the cosmic order revealed by the Orion Nebula.
  • A Chemist finding aesthetic pleasure in the symmetrical structure of a Buckminsterfullerene molecule.
  • …
  • A Humanitarian Worker finding beauty in the specific action of distributing meals to the homeless, perceiving it as a momentary tableau of human kindness.
  • An Environmental Activist judging the action of planting trees in a deforested area as a harmonious act of collective responsibility, with an aesthetic of its own.
  • A Teacher finding aesthetic value in the action of a student standing up against bullying, seeing this as an individual act framed in moral clarity.
  • A Civil Rights Leader ascribing beauty to the act of registering African American voters in the South during the 1960s, considering it an organized pattern of social justice.
  • An Advocate for Nonviolence judging Mahatma Gandhi's act of spinning his own cloth as a beautiful demonstration of the aesthetics of self-reliance and nonviolence.
  • …
  • A Political Scientist recognizing the 1994 South African general election's peaceful transfer of power after a democratic election as beautiful for its representation of institutional stability and collective will.
  • A Political Scientist recognizing Bismarck's Realpolitik as beautiful for its cunning and effectiveness in unifying Germany.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Legal Judgement.
  • an Efficiency Judgement.
  • an Economic Judgement.
• See: Gag Reflex, Sublime (Philosophy), Awe, Moral Judgment, Artistic Jury Judgment.

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References

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aesthetics#Factors_involved_in_aesthetic_judgment Retrieved:2015-9-13.
  • Judgments of aesthetical values seem often to involve many other kinds of issues as well. Responses such as disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust can (often) be a learned or cultural issue too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may give us a reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as an increased heart rate or widened eyes. These unconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.

    Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value. In a current context, one might judge a Lamborghini to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or we might judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political or moral values.

    Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that is often what we are judging. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.

2014

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/
  • QUOTE: Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened form in the 20th century, when this part of our lives came under a sustained attack in both European and North American intellectual circles. Much of the discourse about beauty since the 18th century had deployed a notion of the “aesthetic”, and so that notion in particular came in for criticism. This disdain for the aesthetic may have roots in a broader cultural Puritanism, which fears the connection between the aesthetic and pleasure. Even to suggest, in the recent climate, that an artwork might be good because it is pleasurable, as opposed to cognitively, morally or politically beneficial, is to court derision. The 20th century was not kind to the notions of beauty or the aesthetic. Nevertheless, there were always some thinkers — philosophers, as well as others in the study of particular arts — who persisted in thinking seriously about beauty and the aesthetic. In the first part of this essay, we will look at the particularly rich account of judgments of beauty given to us by Immanuel Kant. The notion of a “judgment of taste” is central to Kant's account and also to virtually everyone working in traditional aesthetics; so we begin by examining Kant's characterization of the judgment of taste. In the second part, we look at the issues that 20th century thinkers raised. We end by drawing on Kant's account of the judgment of taste to consider whether the notion of the aesthetic is viable.

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