Good For Whom? A Critical Discussion of Aesthetic Value in Music
How do we explain the huge diversity of musical taste? Why do some of us prefer Brahms, but some of us prefer the Sex Pistols? How do we, at the same time as this, explain the huge concordance of our taste? This question is one which has so far, believe it or not, been very poorly explored. My aim in this essay is to explore the two dominant sides of the debate, objectivism and relativism, and then see if a tenable synthesis may be found.
I will start with aesthetic objectivism. This seems to be the most natural beginning, as we intuitively feel, I think, that there is some ‘real’ hierarchy of value between pieces of music; i.e., we think that some pieces ‘really are’ better than others. However, as my discussion will make clear, objectivism, all its implications fully understood, is far from as intuitive as it seems. It is, in fact, an extremely strong claim, and in its purest form holds that there is a strong value-hierarchy of musical goodness between completely alien cultures, not to mention a strong value-hierarchy within them. This objectivism, in fact, is so implausible that I know of no single philosopher to hae held it; and so I shall not discuss it. There is, however, a weaker and more plausible form of objectivism: its exact scope is a matter open to personal preference, but I will discuss that objectivism, the scope of which is all members of the species, Homo sapiens.
Aesthetic relativism can be subdivided into two discrete (sets of) theories: personal relativism (or subjectivism) and cultural relativism; but they fall under the same heading because they share the opinion that there is no real, or ‘objective,’ way of judging aesthetic value. The first, aesthetic subjectivism or personal relativism, denies the validity of aesthetic reasoning and criticism, because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as they say, and what I like is just what I like. Aesthetic cultural relativism acknowledges the validity of aesthetic reasoning and criticism within a given culture, but it holds that the principles by which art is judged within the culture are essentially chosen, and have no objective (or cross-cultural) validity.
My synthesis I will refer to as that of ‘appropriateness.’ I rather like it.
Objectivism
In the introduction, I dismissed ‘pure,’ universal objectivism. But how particular (non-universal) can an objectivism be, before its name becomes a complete misnomer? I think the answer is interest-relative. If, hypothetically, in thousands of years’ time, humanity had made contact with other imaginative beings, whose artistic cultures were fundamentally different to ours, a theory of objectivism could only have the name if it tried to take into consideration all the alien cultures. By contrast, European philosophers before the discovery of America could be content to call that theory objectively valid, which applied to all of the discovered world and Ancient Greece. For our historical position, I think, such a theory would need to be applicable to all of humankind. And exactly that thesis is proposed by Immanuel Kant.
Kant
Kant’s attempt to ground an aesthetic objectivism is to be found in his Critique of Judgement of 1790. He starts by distinguishing three ways in which we can judge something pleasurable or displeasurable: “We call agreeable what GRATIFIES us, beautiful what we just LIKE, good what we ESTEEM” (§5, Ak. 210). Kant argues that the agreeable cannot be objective, because we are partial with respect to it: ‘Hunger is the best sauce,’ as they say: someone who is hungry will find any food tasty (i.e., agreeable), regardless of how tasty it ‘really’ is. Only when there is no desire or need such as this can we judge food’s taste objectively. However, when that happens, it is by definition no longer a judgement of the agreeable. The same is true for judgements of the good (by which Kant means the morally good): when there is a conflict between the moral and the aesthetically pleasing, we are no longer free to judge aesthetically, for our moral sensitivities encroach upon our aesthetic instinct. For example, we are psychologically incapable of impartiality on the aesthetics of a murder. So, in other words, only when we have no interest in the existence of something, as we do in something that may gratify us or is of moral worth, can we be impartial.
However, there are more constraints on our capacity to be impartial. Kant distinguishes between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ judgements of taste. A judgement can be impure in two ways: it can be influenced by the object’s sensory or emotional appeal (charm or emotion), or by being contingent on a certain concept’s applying to the object, so that the object is judged as beautiful qua belonging to this or that kind (i.e., we judge a three-legged dog as ugly because it is not what a dog should look like, even though it would otherwise be beautiful). Each of these ways damage the impartiality, and thus objectivity, of a judgement. For charm and emotion affect different people in different ways – the charm of a baby in a picture will affect, say, new mothers more than teenage boys – and people will subsume objects under different kinds (/concepts), depending on their experience and interests.
The key assumption behind all this, of course, is that humans all share something significant – and this assumption is by no means a hidden one. Kant’s term for what we share is sensus communis – a ‘common sense,’ and he argues for the legitimacy of this assumption in §21 and §§35-8. His thought is basically that we can assume that what we ordinarily call ‘common sense,’ viz., sound judgement in everyday matters, is shared by everyone, and hence can assume that the cognitive powers presupposed by this common understanding are shared universally as well. In other words, we all agree about colours, physical objects, etc. But our agreement on these matters presupposes the existence of the faculties of understanding and imagination. As it is these same faculties that come together to allow us to experience beauty, and because they come together in a way very similar to the way in which they come together in making judgements about colours, etc., we have reasonable grounds for speaking with a priori certainty of a sensus communis.
Kant’s objectivism is very impressive, and very elegant, but it is susceptible to criticism on many fronts. We can accept his edifice, but question whether it is relevant to music (or art more generally); or we can accept its relevance, but criticise his thought at various points, for instance, by challenging his claim that we have a ‘common sense’ to any interesting extent. I will consider these now.
Kant’s theory’s relevance to music is unclear. His theory is primarily concerned with beauty in nature; and art’s value is, in a way, derivative. He says: “the purposiveness of [fine art’s] form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (§45, Ak. 306). However, art does have a purpose; “every art presupposes rules” (§46, Ak. 307). But if these rules or purposes show through in the listener’s aesthetic perception of the work, then, according to Kant, we will judge it through concepts. To do so would be to not make a pure judgement of taste; and as we have seen above, Kant does not consider such judgements judgements of beauty, and grants them no claim to universality. To judge a symphony as good as a symphony, i.e., to judge that it accords well with the form of symphony, would be to judge the symphony as “mechanical art;” but we should only judge it as good simpliciter. Genius is the capacity that Kant considers those who successfully endow their works with this purposiveness have.
The problem with this, of course, arises if we never can judge art simpliciter, which is surely a possibility. Indeed, it is uncertain that we judge anything as beautiful simpliciter. When we see a rose, do we judge it simply as beautiful, or as a beautiful example of a rose? If we link this with another related problem, then we have laid serious doubt about the usefulness of Kant’s idea of sensus communis. This other problem is: How do we know that when we judge something as beautiful, we are unaffected by “charm or emotion”? Does the gorgeous colour in Ravel’s orchestration of his Boléro – without which the piece would just be a theme played ad infinitum – count as “charm or emotion,” or is it a formal property? In attempting to make pure judgements of taste, then, we are in a very uncomfortable position. On the one hand, our judgements can be impure by our being affected by sensuousness; on the other, they can be made impure by our having a moral opinion toward the object of judgement. Steering a clean middle way is very, very difficult, and because it is hard to even know when we are mistaking, for example, charm for beauty, even if and when we successfully make pure judgements of taste, we don’t know we are making them.
Peculiarly, however, Kant seems untroubled by all this. He writes that
Peculiar though this concession may be, especially considering the bulk of the Critique, Kant’s analysis is nonetheless valuable, and its modest conclusion is, I think, correct. He is, I believe, mistaken in how untroubled he is, because he seems to imply that mistakes are rare, and somehow peripheral, whereas in fact they damage the theory’s practical import significantly. Perhaps this is because of his eighteenth-century viewpoint. It is hard to know what part of our love of art is due to its ‘form of purposiveness,’ and what part is due to sentiment and cognition (which we can perhaps expand to include things such as our upbringing); but the latter is undeniably a large part, and, I think, much larger than Kant assumed. What I suspect are his prejudices will be brought out below in my discussion of and reply to Hume, who was more or less contemporaneous with Kant.
But he is nonetheless right that “incorrect application[s]… in no way annul[] the authority itself.” To make an analogy with his theory of reason (which he obliquely refers to in §22), the principle of a ‘pure judgement’ of taste can act as a regulative, rather than constitutive, role in our aesthetic judgements, perhaps rousing us to transcend charm, emotion, cognition, etc., when listening to music, and when appreciating beauty more generally.
Hume
Kant’s theory is objectivist because it applies to all humans; but it is surprisingly weak, and one wonders if perhaps a stronger one is to be found, that is, one that makes greater claims on the quantity of agreement demanded. Such a theory is (seemingly) presented in David Hume’s essay, On the Standard of Taste, which presents his mature view on aesthetics.
Hume certainly does seem to express a strong theory of aesthetic objectivism. He writes:
This is all very strongly put. There is an objective aesthetic value-hierarchy, and it is possible to be quite simply wrong about one’s value-judgements. In fact, Hume goes on to qualify his position so that it is even stronger: He takes an analogy from Book II of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, where Sancho Panza recounts to another squire of how some of his relatives had superb palates for wine. On tasting an allegedly fine wine of a hogshead, two of them both discerned a hint of something peculiar – one tasted iron, the other, leather. Although ridiculed initially, they were later vindicated in their judgements as the hogshead was emptied, revealing an old key attached to a leather thong at the bottom. Hume takes this example as an analogy to argue for the ‘realness’ of beauty: Beauty really exists in a work of art, whether or not we have the acumen to perceive it, just as a taste of leather in wine really is there. Even if the majority of the world does not see beauty in something, then beauty may nonetheless be there, and the majority wrong in their opinions.
But how do we know if something really is beautiful? Simply, one must possess delicacy, good sense, and be free of prejudice. These three qualities are very hard to acquire, though. To acquire them, one “must place [one]self in the same situation as the audience” to which the artwork was addressed; one must possess “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object;” One must also spend a lot of time with art, comparing artworks, to learn how to look at them; and being patient with them, instead of judging by first impressions. In short, taste is something learned, and to be really discriminating takes years of devotion.
However, near the end of his essay, almost as if an afterthought, Hume dissolves his rigid objectivism, and writes that
These two “sources of variation,” Hume insists, are not the result of a want of taste or delicacy, or the product of prejudice, and are “entirely blameless on both sides.” As such, we cannot say that some men’s humours or countries’ manners are superior or inferior to any others’. He elaborates, saying that, for example, young men will be “more sensibly touched with amorous and warm images,” than older men, who take more pleasure in “wise, philosophical reflections, concerning the conduct of life, and moderation of the passions.”
The critic might reply that these differences of humour, manner and opinion would surely be so great as to render Hume’s objectivism uninterestingly modest. Although Hume is, perhaps, overly optimistic about the potential for agreement in art, he does have a reply to this scepticism. To understand it, we must realise that Hume’s main interest, and the field from which he takes the vast majority of his examples of art, is literature. Furthermore, literature was the only art in which he was well read in other cultures’ traditions – in particular, he was very familiar with classical literature. Literature, it seems, is easily translatable to other tongues and cultures, and Hume’s favourite authors were Homer and Virgil, who lived in very different cultures to him. So it is understandable that he thought there to be a supracultural aesthetic value-hierarchy, and why he says, “the difficulty of finding… the standard of taste, is not so great as it is represented” – and this is surely broadly true for Kant, too.
However, my question is whether this can be said for music. If anything can hope to be subject to a true and meaningful supra-cultural objectivity, then it must be literature. This is because literature is representational – it represents joy and suffering and all else that is inextricably human, and the beauty of delivery (the ‘form’), which very much depends on the music of the language and other particular things, while not unimportant, is not the only important aesthetic element; the form of music, however, is the only important element. But music may well have a form that is universally appreciable; to find out, we must look at what evidence we have.
There are undoubtedly some things about our perception of music that are common to all of humanity. Take, for example, the perception of octave equivalence – i.e., our perception that all Cs (and Ds, Es, etc.) are ‘the same’ –, or our perception of melodies ‘going up’ or ‘going down’ in tonal space. But unfortunately for the objectivist, these similarities are very thin on the ground. Hermann von Helmholtz attempted to show that Western classical music’s tonal structure is somehow the most natural one, superior to other systems of organisation – but it fails. The pertinent counter-example is that we hear major triads in a very low register as more consonant than minor ninths in an upper register. According to Helmholtz’s theory, the reverse should be true. The reason for why we hear low triads as more consonant than high minor ninths is very telling: it is because we hear a low triad as ‘the same as’ a triad in a more agreeable register, and hear it as consonant for that reason. In other words, our experience of consonance and dissonance is dependent on our sensitivity to a tonal system; our perception of the harmonic structure or ‘force’ of the triad allows us to overlook its impurities.
This observation generalises. If it is true that tonal systems play a far greater role in our perception of musical sense than the direct physical properties of the sounds, then it follows that people from different cultures will hear music through different ears, ears grown used to very different tonal systems – and from this it follows that a supra-cultural principle of musical sense, beyond such things as octave equivalence, cannot be tenable.
The objectivist theories of Kant and Hume are the finest and most influential versions of objectivism there are. But in this section, I have shown that their strong theses have dissolved – in Kant, because ‘pure judgements of taste’ seem to be very rare, and because we can’t know when we’re making one – and in Hume, because his theory, to be interesting, posits an implausibly large consonance of musical taste between people of different cultures.
Theories of Aesthetic Relativism
Aesthetic relativism taken on its own is an incomplete concept. For it to make sense, it has to be a relativism of something – it needs a qualifier. Although there can be as many relativisms as there can be qualifiers, the only two qualifiers of which I’ve ever heard are ‘personal’ and ‘cultural.’ Personal relativism, or subjectivism, holds that people’s tastes are incorrigibly particular to themselves, and that artistic criticism, the giving of reasons to support one’s opinion of art, is a foolish and rationally ungrounded enterprise. Cultural relativism is in one sense the same as personal relativism, except that it operates at a much larger level. Given personal relativism, art criticism between people is silly; given cultural relativism, art criticism between cultures is silly. And just as, given personal relativism, it makes sense for any particular individual to prefer some art to other art, given cultural relativism, value-hierarchies within cultures make sense.
Subjectivism
Subjectivism is the view that holds that our aesthetic opinions differ, and that there is no way around this: no way to justify arguing for a consensus of our taste, and no reason to expect one to become prevalent in a way not explained away by fashion or aesthetically arbitrary reasons more generally. When I say, “this sculpture is good,” I am in fact saying nothing more profound than, “I like this sculpture.” There is no rational justification for my aesthetic preferences, because there is nothing objective about what I like or dislike that merits my attitude, and further, there is no rational justification for imposing my aesthetic preferences on others.
As a purely descriptive thesis, subjectivism is not particularly plausible. If it were true, it would surely predict very little suprapersonal consensus on artistic taste. However, that prediction is simply not borne out by reality. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is proof of that. But it is possible that the wide consensus of taste is due to non-aesthetic considerations, such as corporations having vested interests in people (qua consumers) having substantial similarities of taste. So a more interesting subjectivism, then, will be one that focuses on the (a)normative aspect: that demonstrates that what we normally think of as rational opinions are in fact purely subjective: matters of mere personal opinion, without rational aesthetic bases.
Such a scepticism is considered (but not, of course, endorsed) by David Hume, in the aforementioned essay On the Standard of Taste. He writes:
The weight of this argument rests on two premises: One is that beauty is “no quality in things themselves.” This is utterly plausible. Even Kant acknowledges it, and it doesn’t stop him trying to construct an objective aesthetic theory. The other, allegedly following from this, is that as our sentiments are necessarily true, to correct or improve them is incoherent – how can we improve what is right? We can change them, presumably, but surely criticism considers itself to be doing something more worthwhile than idly playing with people’s tastes?
Such a theory undermines the claim to coherence of a lot of art criticism. It is surely not implausible to suggest that one of the central aspects of art criticism is the giving of relevant reasons to support one’s aesthetic evaluation of a work. These reasons, if they are to be reasons at all, must be ones that others can accept, and they have to in some sense justify the conclusions they are allegedly supporting. A successful refutation of the validity of this reason-giving would surely engender a radical subjectivism of art (and so music). But because the thesis that criticism is irrational is so counter-intuitive, to win adherents, it needs to show why our current way of going about it is deficient in some insurmountable way; if it engendered a contradiction or an absurdity, for instance.
Colin Lyas reveals a tension in our normal understanding of taste, one that unanswered may lead to subjectivism. He tells of how two music critics, attending the same concert, reviewed one of the items on the programme (Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces) in starkly contrasting lights. One castigated it as “plinks and plonks” and “horrible sounds;” the other praised it as one of the “miracles of modernity.” Lyas writes:
Again, unless there is a procedure that will settle disagreements of taste, or more generally, aesthetic value, then no matter how unpalatable or counterintuitive, subjectivism must be accepted. And as the strongest contenders for objectivism have been dismissed, it initially seems that subjectivism is forced upon us.
So subjectivism is more robust theory than it initially seemed; however, I think that it has some fundamental and insurmountable flaws.
Cultural Relativism
The subjectivist’s attack on value, denying that there is any procedure by which we can judge some works as better than others, is best answered by positing such a procedure. As, given the arguments against objectivism, objectivist theories of music are untenable, we need another procedure. One candidate for this procedure is the popular theory of cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism (henceforth just ‘relativism’) is formally very similar to subjectivism; but because it operates on a much greater level than subjectivism, what seems implausible in subjectivism can seem plausible in relativism. For example, it is counterintuitive to suggest that there is no value-hierarchy between people, and that we should just accept what other people prefer, much like we allow differences of opinion in canary wine. However, that there is no value-hierarchy between cultures, and that we should just accept what other cultures prefer, much like how we allow differences of opinion in national flags, religions, and government, is much more in accordance with our intuitions. And that there is no supra-cultural value-hierarchy is one main thesis of cultural relativism.
Its other main thesis is that within cultures, contra subjectivism, there is an aesthetic value-hierarchy, and that rational reasons can be given for judging a piece of art good or bad. However, and importantly, these reasons acquire legitimacy from their being acceptable to those to whom the reasons are addressed, but are fundamentally chosen, and do not have anything like the same universality granted claims such as, ‘all triangles have three sides.’ The value we give music can be entirely explained away by recourse to historical events, biological make-up, etc.
Both of these highly interrelated positions need independent defences, and because they go hand in hand, if one is side of the thesis is undermined, then the whole system is undermined. I will try to show in the following, however, that both sides of relativism are deficient, either through improper emphasis, or simple factual inaccuracy.
Relativism Between Cultures
The problem with the first thesis is essentially the impossibility of a satisfactory definition of what exactly a culture is. In the above discussion of objectivism, it has been shown that there are some supra-cultural value-hierarchies. The relativist could, however, make the argument that these aesthetic values are also chosen, because we cannot expect echolocating aliens to agree with our fundamental aesthetic principles (such as the harmonic series, etc.). However, to do this, he must hold that humanity is a culture; and to do that, he must hold that there is a legitimate value-hierarchy within humanity, and he is beginning to sound an awful lot like the objectivist he is setting himself against.
A reasonable-sounding response to this is that the relativist should concede that values, within humanity, are not completely chosen, but that there is no interesting aesthetic value-hierarchy between cultures. Allowed this, he can then argue for an aesthetic hierarchy within cultures. However, just as the definition of a culture is interest-relative, such that it can be larger than the common-language understanding of the word and encompass all of humanity, so too can it be smaller. The difference between, on the one hand, a legitimate and insurmountable difference due to differing cultures, and, on the other, poor taste within a culture, may prove extremely difficult to agree upon. To see if it is, in fact, all that difficult, I shall now discuss one attempt to ground the second horn of the relativist thesis; i.e., to ground a value-hierarchy within a culture.
Objectivism Within Cultures
Let us briefly remind ourselves of the subjectivist challenge: It seems to be an incorrigible fact that informed critics will always disagree on the value of art. I gave Lyas’s example of Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, which got polarly opposed critical reviews. The relativist’s task is to posit some procedure by which disagreements of aesthetic value can be settled. In positing such a procedure successfully, they will synonymously be positing a procedure by which people can agree about the value of art. When people of a culture genuinely agree about the merit (or otherwise) of a work of art, then, to the relativist, what they like is good. Relatively good, to be sure: good for them, and not necessarily for any other culture – but the relativist doesn’t demand the latter.
Lyas suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Hume, that the grounding for relativism is to be found in education. The critic’s task is to convince others of her aesthetic judgements. In other words, her task is to give reasons that her interlocutors can accept, such that these reasons lead her interlocutors to agree with her aesthetic judgement. Of course, such ‘reasons’ are not reasons as we normally understand them. Aesthetic judgements must be based, in the end, on our own subjective experience of the aesthetic object. We must see for ourselves whether an artwork is good or bad. All the critic can do is try and make us see what she sees, by pointing out features of the work we might otherwise miss, using similes and metaphors, and so on.
Lyas does not demand that there be universal agreement for there to be a meaningful objectivity within a culture. After Hume, he notes that certain judgements may be disqualified: judgements made out of prejudice, out of being tone deaf, and so on. When these judgements are disqualified, he goes on to note, differences of opinion are actually very rare. He makes an analogy that sounds rather Kantian to ground this objectivity. When a motorist runs a red light, he is arrested. Perhaps the worst defence he could make is that it was green ‘for him.’ A red traffic light is objectively red, regardless of what the motorist thinks. If he genuinely can’t tell the difference between red and green, then he is branded quite simply wrong, because he does not see what is, objectively, there. Unless there is some reason to think that aesthetic judgements are unlike perceptual judgements, then the analogy must follow, and it must be the case that when we say that an artwork has beauty, then we are making a claim that may be true or false, depending on whether there is, in fact, beauty in the artwork.
But, having made this strong statement – which sounds more like objectivism than relativism, Lyas backs off, and says that judgements are not, in fact, completely analogous with our sense-perception. Rather, “[t]hey are affected by our culture, race, gender, traditions, education, and individual psychologies” (p. 376).
I think that the disanalogy is more pervasive than Lyas implies. When we say that someone has bad taste, we are attaching a value-judgement to our claim. His taste is bad, it is inferior – and what possible grounds are there for such a claim other than that his taste does not accord with what is really there? It makes sense to say that someone’s sight is bad if they cannot see well enough to find a single of the ten or so members of the People’s Front of Judaea in a small room, even when the members are hidden extremely poorly; for example, behind a curtain that doesn’t hang low enough to cover the aspiring revolutionary’s legs. The person is not seeing what is there. But given the disanalogy with sense-perception, can we really say the same of aesthetic perception? The relativist, to remain a relativist, needs to argue that because of our “culture, race, gender, traditions, education, and individual psychologies,” that yes, we can – but only insofar as all these criteria are the same, and the relativist, therefore, must hold that the latter five criteria are synonymous with the former. For if they are not, then there is no reason to believe that all people within a culture will perceive the same qualities in artworks – and if they do not perceive the same qualities, then the claim to objectivity within a culture is erroneous – and surely holding that the latter five criteria are synonymous with the former is absurd. Combined with the fact that the contention that there is a relativism between cultures is either erroneous or not relativist, depending on what you take a culture to be, the conclusion must be that the thesis of cultural relativism is mistaken.
A Third Way
I have so far kept fairly quiet about what is true in objectivism and relativism, as my aim has been to present them in opposition. But there is a lot to be said for both thesis and antithesis, and my task now is to combine these merits into a new – and better – theory. The origins of this theory, however, are not salvaged from the truth in the husks of the above-discarded ones. Rather, they are to be found in the same place as the others’ origins – simple observation.
When I first became interested in music, I listened to pop-rock; then to heavy metal; then to progressive rock; then to classical music and jazz. At all these stages of my development, the music I listened to fulfilled me in a deep way, such that I would feel euphoria in the sense that is applied to the most sublime masterpieces of high art. At each stage of my development, the stage I was at was right for me. If you were to make me listen to Schoenberg when I was sixteen, it would have ‘gone over my head;’ if you were to make me listen to pop music now, I would be entirely unmoved.
On a different level, I have since my youngest days adored Bach and Shostakovich. When exposed, I saw in Miles Davis a similar genius; and my opinion of these men has never changed. Indeed, I have almost never heard of anyone speak of these men with anything less than the highest of praise. From this, two possible conclusions present themselves: either these musicians are ‘objectively’ good; or that they are ‘appropriate’ for the sort of people from whom I hear aesthetic value-judgements. Let us consider the latter option, the former having been earlier discarded.
It suggests something that fits into none of the above theories: Some music is appropriate for sixteen-year olds; other music is appropriate for twenty-year olds; other music still for forty-year olds. So there is a sort of relativism here (though it is neither personal nor cultural) – but at the same time, some music is appropriate for people of all ages, so there is a weak sort of objectivism here. But there is more
If one were to play Schoenberg at a rock concert, it would go utterly unappreciated. It is not appropriate there. Schoenberg’s music is superb, but only within the tradition for which it was written. If you take it outside that tradition, then it becomes a cacophony. People who listen to rock music have not gotten accustomed to the tonal system of late-Romantic Germany by listening to Mahler and Wagner, and so Schoenberg sounds not like a very extreme take on that sort of tonality, but completely atonal and senseless. Those who grew up on rock music listen to music in a different way to those who grew up listening to classical music. They have not integrated the habits of picking out themes and formal structures. Conversely, those who listen to classical music all the time are not adept at picking out harmonies and melodies through the very thick distorted sounds of rock music; they look too hard for subtleties that simply aren’t there; and they haven’t integrated the dominant formal structure of popular music, and so the structure can seem forced, it may not be picked up on, or, in the case of some progressive bands, such as Yes, in which the structure is bent and stretched hugely, it can be imperceptible, and so the music seems senseless.
Music can, as well as being appropriate for certain people and social events, be appropriate for certain historical periods. Just as some music suits one’s adolescence more than one’s adulthood, so some music suits certain points in a culture’s history better than others. Take, for example, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in F# Minor. In a local newspaper, the performance was reviewed in the crime column(!), attracting such colourful pejoratives that they merit repeating.
This exact same piece is now considered a minor masterpiece.
So appropriateness can operate on personal and cultural levels, and operate on these different levels simultaneously. It operates within someone’s life and mood, and within a culture’s; it operates within counter-cultures, and between them; it operates between genders and races and economic conditions, and it allows for people with disabilities to attend to art at their own level without being branded inferior in any way. But it also operates on far grander levels. Some music may be appropriate for all human beings; some, perhaps, for all imaginative beings – and this latter is why I shun the word ‘relativism’ in explicating my position.
This last sentence is particularly important, because it is, I think, why we tend to feel that people shouldn’t listen to certain music. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Brahms is more appropriate for people in Western society than the Sex Pistols. Say, for example, that the counterpoint and melodies are good for our souls, and that his music imparts a euphoria that the Sex Pistols simply cannot. It is impossible, within a relativist framework, to reconcile this with the equally undeniable fact that the Sex Pistols are more appropriate for teenagers in punk clubs; but the reconciliation is easy in my theory. It is a complex matter as to whether it is more important that teenagers who want to listen to the Sex Pistols should listen to them or that they should listen to Brahms; that is, it is hard to know which ‘level’ of appropriateness is more important. Is the joy you get from Brahms’s Second Symphony more desirable than the catharsis that can be felt in listening to punk music? However, I think it is the case that when these teenagers’ parents say that ‘They should listen to more classical music,’ they are implicitly saying that the more universal level is the more important.
There is truth in objectivism, and there is truth in relativism. The objectivist is right to insist on the existence of good. She is right to insist that there is more to music than mere opinion; that there is a deep value in music. But the relativist is right to insist on the importance a whom: of experiencing subjects, and the huge diversity thereof. Both theses’ problems arise by their focussing on one aspect to the exclusion of the other, and both must be rejected for essentially this reason. My theory, I hope, surmounts them; it synthesises the positions into an accurate theory of aesthetic value, which gives both the good and the whom of music the appreciation they must be given, if we are to ever formulate a coherent account of what it is that is so precious in music, that we value it as dearly as we do life.
This is the one that got me 85%. I took out all the footnotes, the bibliography, and some of the more involved bits that aren't terribly exciting to read when you've only a limited amount of time and interest (because this is, after all, the internet). If you want the full version - where I give full credit to all my influences - then please ask. (I don't want to be guilty of plagiarism.) It's about half its original length; and still almost seven thousand words. Blood and sweat, you know, blood and sweat.
-James
I will start with aesthetic objectivism. This seems to be the most natural beginning, as we intuitively feel, I think, that there is some ‘real’ hierarchy of value between pieces of music; i.e., we think that some pieces ‘really are’ better than others. However, as my discussion will make clear, objectivism, all its implications fully understood, is far from as intuitive as it seems. It is, in fact, an extremely strong claim, and in its purest form holds that there is a strong value-hierarchy of musical goodness between completely alien cultures, not to mention a strong value-hierarchy within them. This objectivism, in fact, is so implausible that I know of no single philosopher to hae held it; and so I shall not discuss it. There is, however, a weaker and more plausible form of objectivism: its exact scope is a matter open to personal preference, but I will discuss that objectivism, the scope of which is all members of the species, Homo sapiens.
Aesthetic relativism can be subdivided into two discrete (sets of) theories: personal relativism (or subjectivism) and cultural relativism; but they fall under the same heading because they share the opinion that there is no real, or ‘objective,’ way of judging aesthetic value. The first, aesthetic subjectivism or personal relativism, denies the validity of aesthetic reasoning and criticism, because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as they say, and what I like is just what I like. Aesthetic cultural relativism acknowledges the validity of aesthetic reasoning and criticism within a given culture, but it holds that the principles by which art is judged within the culture are essentially chosen, and have no objective (or cross-cultural) validity.
My synthesis I will refer to as that of ‘appropriateness.’ I rather like it.
Objectivism
In the introduction, I dismissed ‘pure,’ universal objectivism. But how particular (non-universal) can an objectivism be, before its name becomes a complete misnomer? I think the answer is interest-relative. If, hypothetically, in thousands of years’ time, humanity had made contact with other imaginative beings, whose artistic cultures were fundamentally different to ours, a theory of objectivism could only have the name if it tried to take into consideration all the alien cultures. By contrast, European philosophers before the discovery of America could be content to call that theory objectively valid, which applied to all of the discovered world and Ancient Greece. For our historical position, I think, such a theory would need to be applicable to all of humankind. And exactly that thesis is proposed by Immanuel Kant.
Kant
Kant’s attempt to ground an aesthetic objectivism is to be found in his Critique of Judgement of 1790. He starts by distinguishing three ways in which we can judge something pleasurable or displeasurable: “We call agreeable what GRATIFIES us, beautiful what we just LIKE, good what we ESTEEM” (§5, Ak. 210). Kant argues that the agreeable cannot be objective, because we are partial with respect to it: ‘Hunger is the best sauce,’ as they say: someone who is hungry will find any food tasty (i.e., agreeable), regardless of how tasty it ‘really’ is. Only when there is no desire or need such as this can we judge food’s taste objectively. However, when that happens, it is by definition no longer a judgement of the agreeable. The same is true for judgements of the good (by which Kant means the morally good): when there is a conflict between the moral and the aesthetically pleasing, we are no longer free to judge aesthetically, for our moral sensitivities encroach upon our aesthetic instinct. For example, we are psychologically incapable of impartiality on the aesthetics of a murder. So, in other words, only when we have no interest in the existence of something, as we do in something that may gratify us or is of moral worth, can we be impartial.
However, there are more constraints on our capacity to be impartial. Kant distinguishes between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ judgements of taste. A judgement can be impure in two ways: it can be influenced by the object’s sensory or emotional appeal (charm or emotion), or by being contingent on a certain concept’s applying to the object, so that the object is judged as beautiful qua belonging to this or that kind (i.e., we judge a three-legged dog as ugly because it is not what a dog should look like, even though it would otherwise be beautiful). Each of these ways damage the impartiality, and thus objectivity, of a judgement. For charm and emotion affect different people in different ways – the charm of a baby in a picture will affect, say, new mothers more than teenage boys – and people will subsume objects under different kinds (/concepts), depending on their experience and interests.
The key assumption behind all this, of course, is that humans all share something significant – and this assumption is by no means a hidden one. Kant’s term for what we share is sensus communis – a ‘common sense,’ and he argues for the legitimacy of this assumption in §21 and §§35-8. His thought is basically that we can assume that what we ordinarily call ‘common sense,’ viz., sound judgement in everyday matters, is shared by everyone, and hence can assume that the cognitive powers presupposed by this common understanding are shared universally as well. In other words, we all agree about colours, physical objects, etc. But our agreement on these matters presupposes the existence of the faculties of understanding and imagination. As it is these same faculties that come together to allow us to experience beauty, and because they come together in a way very similar to the way in which they come together in making judgements about colours, etc., we have reasonable grounds for speaking with a priori certainty of a sensus communis.
Kant’s objectivism is very impressive, and very elegant, but it is susceptible to criticism on many fronts. We can accept his edifice, but question whether it is relevant to music (or art more generally); or we can accept its relevance, but criticise his thought at various points, for instance, by challenging his claim that we have a ‘common sense’ to any interesting extent. I will consider these now.
Kant’s theory’s relevance to music is unclear. His theory is primarily concerned with beauty in nature; and art’s value is, in a way, derivative. He says: “the purposiveness of [fine art’s] form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (§45, Ak. 306). However, art does have a purpose; “every art presupposes rules” (§46, Ak. 307). But if these rules or purposes show through in the listener’s aesthetic perception of the work, then, according to Kant, we will judge it through concepts. To do so would be to not make a pure judgement of taste; and as we have seen above, Kant does not consider such judgements judgements of beauty, and grants them no claim to universality. To judge a symphony as good as a symphony, i.e., to judge that it accords well with the form of symphony, would be to judge the symphony as “mechanical art;” but we should only judge it as good simpliciter. Genius is the capacity that Kant considers those who successfully endow their works with this purposiveness have.
The problem with this, of course, arises if we never can judge art simpliciter, which is surely a possibility. Indeed, it is uncertain that we judge anything as beautiful simpliciter. When we see a rose, do we judge it simply as beautiful, or as a beautiful example of a rose? If we link this with another related problem, then we have laid serious doubt about the usefulness of Kant’s idea of sensus communis. This other problem is: How do we know that when we judge something as beautiful, we are unaffected by “charm or emotion”? Does the gorgeous colour in Ravel’s orchestration of his Boléro – without which the piece would just be a theme played ad infinitum – count as “charm or emotion,” or is it a formal property? In attempting to make pure judgements of taste, then, we are in a very uncomfortable position. On the one hand, our judgements can be impure by our being affected by sensuousness; on the other, they can be made impure by our having a moral opinion toward the object of judgement. Steering a clean middle way is very, very difficult, and because it is hard to even know when we are mistaking, for example, charm for beauty, even if and when we successfully make pure judgements of taste, we don’t know we are making them.
Peculiarly, however, Kant seems untroubled by all this. He writes that
even if a mistake be made on the…point [of pure aesthetic judgement], this amounts to nothing but an incorrect application, in a particular case, of an authority given to us by law, and in no way annuls the authority itself (§38, n. 15).
Peculiar though this concession may be, especially considering the bulk of the Critique, Kant’s analysis is nonetheless valuable, and its modest conclusion is, I think, correct. He is, I believe, mistaken in how untroubled he is, because he seems to imply that mistakes are rare, and somehow peripheral, whereas in fact they damage the theory’s practical import significantly. Perhaps this is because of his eighteenth-century viewpoint. It is hard to know what part of our love of art is due to its ‘form of purposiveness,’ and what part is due to sentiment and cognition (which we can perhaps expand to include things such as our upbringing); but the latter is undeniably a large part, and, I think, much larger than Kant assumed. What I suspect are his prejudices will be brought out below in my discussion of and reply to Hume, who was more or less contemporaneous with Kant.
But he is nonetheless right that “incorrect application[s]… in no way annul[] the authority itself.” To make an analogy with his theory of reason (which he obliquely refers to in §22), the principle of a ‘pure judgement’ of taste can act as a regulative, rather than constitutive, role in our aesthetic judgements, perhaps rousing us to transcend charm, emotion, cognition, etc., when listening to music, and when appreciating beauty more generally.
Hume
Kant’s theory is objectivist because it applies to all humans; but it is surprisingly weak, and one wonders if perhaps a stronger one is to be found, that is, one that makes greater claims on the quantity of agreement demanded. Such a theory is (seemingly) presented in David Hume’s essay, On the Standard of Taste, which presents his mature view on aesthetics.
Hume certainly does seem to express a strong theory of aesthetic objectivism. He writes:
The same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory. Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator; but his reputation will never be durable or general. When his compositions are examined by posterity or by foreigners, the enchantment is dissipated, and his faults appear in their true colours. On the contrary, a real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration he meets with… In each creature there is a sound and defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment. (On the Standard of Taste)
This is all very strongly put. There is an objective aesthetic value-hierarchy, and it is possible to be quite simply wrong about one’s value-judgements. In fact, Hume goes on to qualify his position so that it is even stronger: He takes an analogy from Book II of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, where Sancho Panza recounts to another squire of how some of his relatives had superb palates for wine. On tasting an allegedly fine wine of a hogshead, two of them both discerned a hint of something peculiar – one tasted iron, the other, leather. Although ridiculed initially, they were later vindicated in their judgements as the hogshead was emptied, revealing an old key attached to a leather thong at the bottom. Hume takes this example as an analogy to argue for the ‘realness’ of beauty: Beauty really exists in a work of art, whether or not we have the acumen to perceive it, just as a taste of leather in wine really is there. Even if the majority of the world does not see beauty in something, then beauty may nonetheless be there, and the majority wrong in their opinions.
But how do we know if something really is beautiful? Simply, one must possess delicacy, good sense, and be free of prejudice. These three qualities are very hard to acquire, though. To acquire them, one “must place [one]self in the same situation as the audience” to which the artwork was addressed; one must possess “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object;” One must also spend a lot of time with art, comparing artworks, to learn how to look at them; and being patient with them, instead of judging by first impressions. In short, taste is something learned, and to be really discriminating takes years of devotion.
However, near the end of his essay, almost as if an afterthought, Hume dissolves his rigid objectivism, and writes that
notwithstanding all our endeavours to fix a standard of taste, and reconcile the discordant apprehensions of men, there still remain two sources of variation, which are not sufficient indeed to confound all the boundaries of beauty and deformity, but will often serve to produce a difference in the degrees of our approbation or blame. The one is the different humours of particular men; the other, the particular manners and opinions of our age and country.
These two “sources of variation,” Hume insists, are not the result of a want of taste or delicacy, or the product of prejudice, and are “entirely blameless on both sides.” As such, we cannot say that some men’s humours or countries’ manners are superior or inferior to any others’. He elaborates, saying that, for example, young men will be “more sensibly touched with amorous and warm images,” than older men, who take more pleasure in “wise, philosophical reflections, concerning the conduct of life, and moderation of the passions.”
The critic might reply that these differences of humour, manner and opinion would surely be so great as to render Hume’s objectivism uninterestingly modest. Although Hume is, perhaps, overly optimistic about the potential for agreement in art, he does have a reply to this scepticism. To understand it, we must realise that Hume’s main interest, and the field from which he takes the vast majority of his examples of art, is literature. Furthermore, literature was the only art in which he was well read in other cultures’ traditions – in particular, he was very familiar with classical literature. Literature, it seems, is easily translatable to other tongues and cultures, and Hume’s favourite authors were Homer and Virgil, who lived in very different cultures to him. So it is understandable that he thought there to be a supracultural aesthetic value-hierarchy, and why he says, “the difficulty of finding… the standard of taste, is not so great as it is represented” – and this is surely broadly true for Kant, too.
However, my question is whether this can be said for music. If anything can hope to be subject to a true and meaningful supra-cultural objectivity, then it must be literature. This is because literature is representational – it represents joy and suffering and all else that is inextricably human, and the beauty of delivery (the ‘form’), which very much depends on the music of the language and other particular things, while not unimportant, is not the only important aesthetic element; the form of music, however, is the only important element. But music may well have a form that is universally appreciable; to find out, we must look at what evidence we have.
There are undoubtedly some things about our perception of music that are common to all of humanity. Take, for example, the perception of octave equivalence – i.e., our perception that all Cs (and Ds, Es, etc.) are ‘the same’ –, or our perception of melodies ‘going up’ or ‘going down’ in tonal space. But unfortunately for the objectivist, these similarities are very thin on the ground. Hermann von Helmholtz attempted to show that Western classical music’s tonal structure is somehow the most natural one, superior to other systems of organisation – but it fails. The pertinent counter-example is that we hear major triads in a very low register as more consonant than minor ninths in an upper register. According to Helmholtz’s theory, the reverse should be true. The reason for why we hear low triads as more consonant than high minor ninths is very telling: it is because we hear a low triad as ‘the same as’ a triad in a more agreeable register, and hear it as consonant for that reason. In other words, our experience of consonance and dissonance is dependent on our sensitivity to a tonal system; our perception of the harmonic structure or ‘force’ of the triad allows us to overlook its impurities.
This observation generalises. If it is true that tonal systems play a far greater role in our perception of musical sense than the direct physical properties of the sounds, then it follows that people from different cultures will hear music through different ears, ears grown used to very different tonal systems – and from this it follows that a supra-cultural principle of musical sense, beyond such things as octave equivalence, cannot be tenable.
The objectivist theories of Kant and Hume are the finest and most influential versions of objectivism there are. But in this section, I have shown that their strong theses have dissolved – in Kant, because ‘pure judgements of taste’ seem to be very rare, and because we can’t know when we’re making one – and in Hume, because his theory, to be interesting, posits an implausibly large consonance of musical taste between people of different cultures.
Theories of Aesthetic Relativism
Aesthetic relativism taken on its own is an incomplete concept. For it to make sense, it has to be a relativism of something – it needs a qualifier. Although there can be as many relativisms as there can be qualifiers, the only two qualifiers of which I’ve ever heard are ‘personal’ and ‘cultural.’ Personal relativism, or subjectivism, holds that people’s tastes are incorrigibly particular to themselves, and that artistic criticism, the giving of reasons to support one’s opinion of art, is a foolish and rationally ungrounded enterprise. Cultural relativism is in one sense the same as personal relativism, except that it operates at a much larger level. Given personal relativism, art criticism between people is silly; given cultural relativism, art criticism between cultures is silly. And just as, given personal relativism, it makes sense for any particular individual to prefer some art to other art, given cultural relativism, value-hierarchies within cultures make sense.
Subjectivism
Subjectivism is the view that holds that our aesthetic opinions differ, and that there is no way around this: no way to justify arguing for a consensus of our taste, and no reason to expect one to become prevalent in a way not explained away by fashion or aesthetically arbitrary reasons more generally. When I say, “this sculpture is good,” I am in fact saying nothing more profound than, “I like this sculpture.” There is no rational justification for my aesthetic preferences, because there is nothing objective about what I like or dislike that merits my attitude, and further, there is no rational justification for imposing my aesthetic preferences on others.
As a purely descriptive thesis, subjectivism is not particularly plausible. If it were true, it would surely predict very little suprapersonal consensus on artistic taste. However, that prediction is simply not borne out by reality. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is proof of that. But it is possible that the wide consensus of taste is due to non-aesthetic considerations, such as corporations having vested interests in people (qua consumers) having substantial similarities of taste. So a more interesting subjectivism, then, will be one that focuses on the (a)normative aspect: that demonstrates that what we normally think of as rational opinions are in fact purely subjective: matters of mere personal opinion, without rational aesthetic bases.
Such a scepticism is considered (but not, of course, endorsed) by David Hume, in the aforementioned essay On the Standard of Taste. He writes:
All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it… [A] thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right; because no sentiment represents what is really in the object… Beauty is no quality in things themselves… To seek the real beauty, or the real deformity, is as fruitless an inquiry, as to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter[.]
The weight of this argument rests on two premises: One is that beauty is “no quality in things themselves.” This is utterly plausible. Even Kant acknowledges it, and it doesn’t stop him trying to construct an objective aesthetic theory. The other, allegedly following from this, is that as our sentiments are necessarily true, to correct or improve them is incoherent – how can we improve what is right? We can change them, presumably, but surely criticism considers itself to be doing something more worthwhile than idly playing with people’s tastes?
Such a theory undermines the claim to coherence of a lot of art criticism. It is surely not implausible to suggest that one of the central aspects of art criticism is the giving of relevant reasons to support one’s aesthetic evaluation of a work. These reasons, if they are to be reasons at all, must be ones that others can accept, and they have to in some sense justify the conclusions they are allegedly supporting. A successful refutation of the validity of this reason-giving would surely engender a radical subjectivism of art (and so music). But because the thesis that criticism is irrational is so counter-intuitive, to win adherents, it needs to show why our current way of going about it is deficient in some insurmountable way; if it engendered a contradiction or an absurdity, for instance.
Colin Lyas reveals a tension in our normal understanding of taste, one that unanswered may lead to subjectivism. He tells of how two music critics, attending the same concert, reviewed one of the items on the programme (Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces) in starkly contrasting lights. One castigated it as “plinks and plonks” and “horrible sounds;” the other praised it as one of the “miracles of modernity.” Lyas writes:
Here there is a disagreement between informed critics, and the temptation is to suppose that unless one critic can be proved to be right and the other wrong all the two critics can be doing is expressing their own personal likes and dislikes. Without a procedure that will settle such disagreements, criticism seems to be an entirely subjective matter. (‘The Evaluation of Art,’ in Hanfling (ed.): Philosophical Aesthetics, p. 352)
Again, unless there is a procedure that will settle disagreements of taste, or more generally, aesthetic value, then no matter how unpalatable or counterintuitive, subjectivism must be accepted. And as the strongest contenders for objectivism have been dismissed, it initially seems that subjectivism is forced upon us.
So subjectivism is more robust theory than it initially seemed; however, I think that it has some fundamental and insurmountable flaws.
Cultural Relativism
The subjectivist’s attack on value, denying that there is any procedure by which we can judge some works as better than others, is best answered by positing such a procedure. As, given the arguments against objectivism, objectivist theories of music are untenable, we need another procedure. One candidate for this procedure is the popular theory of cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism (henceforth just ‘relativism’) is formally very similar to subjectivism; but because it operates on a much greater level than subjectivism, what seems implausible in subjectivism can seem plausible in relativism. For example, it is counterintuitive to suggest that there is no value-hierarchy between people, and that we should just accept what other people prefer, much like we allow differences of opinion in canary wine. However, that there is no value-hierarchy between cultures, and that we should just accept what other cultures prefer, much like how we allow differences of opinion in national flags, religions, and government, is much more in accordance with our intuitions. And that there is no supra-cultural value-hierarchy is one main thesis of cultural relativism.
Its other main thesis is that within cultures, contra subjectivism, there is an aesthetic value-hierarchy, and that rational reasons can be given for judging a piece of art good or bad. However, and importantly, these reasons acquire legitimacy from their being acceptable to those to whom the reasons are addressed, but are fundamentally chosen, and do not have anything like the same universality granted claims such as, ‘all triangles have three sides.’ The value we give music can be entirely explained away by recourse to historical events, biological make-up, etc.
Both of these highly interrelated positions need independent defences, and because they go hand in hand, if one is side of the thesis is undermined, then the whole system is undermined. I will try to show in the following, however, that both sides of relativism are deficient, either through improper emphasis, or simple factual inaccuracy.
Relativism Between Cultures
The problem with the first thesis is essentially the impossibility of a satisfactory definition of what exactly a culture is. In the above discussion of objectivism, it has been shown that there are some supra-cultural value-hierarchies. The relativist could, however, make the argument that these aesthetic values are also chosen, because we cannot expect echolocating aliens to agree with our fundamental aesthetic principles (such as the harmonic series, etc.). However, to do this, he must hold that humanity is a culture; and to do that, he must hold that there is a legitimate value-hierarchy within humanity, and he is beginning to sound an awful lot like the objectivist he is setting himself against.
A reasonable-sounding response to this is that the relativist should concede that values, within humanity, are not completely chosen, but that there is no interesting aesthetic value-hierarchy between cultures. Allowed this, he can then argue for an aesthetic hierarchy within cultures. However, just as the definition of a culture is interest-relative, such that it can be larger than the common-language understanding of the word and encompass all of humanity, so too can it be smaller. The difference between, on the one hand, a legitimate and insurmountable difference due to differing cultures, and, on the other, poor taste within a culture, may prove extremely difficult to agree upon. To see if it is, in fact, all that difficult, I shall now discuss one attempt to ground the second horn of the relativist thesis; i.e., to ground a value-hierarchy within a culture.
Objectivism Within Cultures
Let us briefly remind ourselves of the subjectivist challenge: It seems to be an incorrigible fact that informed critics will always disagree on the value of art. I gave Lyas’s example of Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, which got polarly opposed critical reviews. The relativist’s task is to posit some procedure by which disagreements of aesthetic value can be settled. In positing such a procedure successfully, they will synonymously be positing a procedure by which people can agree about the value of art. When people of a culture genuinely agree about the merit (or otherwise) of a work of art, then, to the relativist, what they like is good. Relatively good, to be sure: good for them, and not necessarily for any other culture – but the relativist doesn’t demand the latter.
Lyas suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Hume, that the grounding for relativism is to be found in education. The critic’s task is to convince others of her aesthetic judgements. In other words, her task is to give reasons that her interlocutors can accept, such that these reasons lead her interlocutors to agree with her aesthetic judgement. Of course, such ‘reasons’ are not reasons as we normally understand them. Aesthetic judgements must be based, in the end, on our own subjective experience of the aesthetic object. We must see for ourselves whether an artwork is good or bad. All the critic can do is try and make us see what she sees, by pointing out features of the work we might otherwise miss, using similes and metaphors, and so on.
Lyas does not demand that there be universal agreement for there to be a meaningful objectivity within a culture. After Hume, he notes that certain judgements may be disqualified: judgements made out of prejudice, out of being tone deaf, and so on. When these judgements are disqualified, he goes on to note, differences of opinion are actually very rare. He makes an analogy that sounds rather Kantian to ground this objectivity. When a motorist runs a red light, he is arrested. Perhaps the worst defence he could make is that it was green ‘for him.’ A red traffic light is objectively red, regardless of what the motorist thinks. If he genuinely can’t tell the difference between red and green, then he is branded quite simply wrong, because he does not see what is, objectively, there. Unless there is some reason to think that aesthetic judgements are unlike perceptual judgements, then the analogy must follow, and it must be the case that when we say that an artwork has beauty, then we are making a claim that may be true or false, depending on whether there is, in fact, beauty in the artwork.
But, having made this strong statement – which sounds more like objectivism than relativism, Lyas backs off, and says that judgements are not, in fact, completely analogous with our sense-perception. Rather, “[t]hey are affected by our culture, race, gender, traditions, education, and individual psychologies” (p. 376).
I think that the disanalogy is more pervasive than Lyas implies. When we say that someone has bad taste, we are attaching a value-judgement to our claim. His taste is bad, it is inferior – and what possible grounds are there for such a claim other than that his taste does not accord with what is really there? It makes sense to say that someone’s sight is bad if they cannot see well enough to find a single of the ten or so members of the People’s Front of Judaea in a small room, even when the members are hidden extremely poorly; for example, behind a curtain that doesn’t hang low enough to cover the aspiring revolutionary’s legs. The person is not seeing what is there. But given the disanalogy with sense-perception, can we really say the same of aesthetic perception? The relativist, to remain a relativist, needs to argue that because of our “culture, race, gender, traditions, education, and individual psychologies,” that yes, we can – but only insofar as all these criteria are the same, and the relativist, therefore, must hold that the latter five criteria are synonymous with the former. For if they are not, then there is no reason to believe that all people within a culture will perceive the same qualities in artworks – and if they do not perceive the same qualities, then the claim to objectivity within a culture is erroneous – and surely holding that the latter five criteria are synonymous with the former is absurd. Combined with the fact that the contention that there is a relativism between cultures is either erroneous or not relativist, depending on what you take a culture to be, the conclusion must be that the thesis of cultural relativism is mistaken.
A Third Way
I have so far kept fairly quiet about what is true in objectivism and relativism, as my aim has been to present them in opposition. But there is a lot to be said for both thesis and antithesis, and my task now is to combine these merits into a new – and better – theory. The origins of this theory, however, are not salvaged from the truth in the husks of the above-discarded ones. Rather, they are to be found in the same place as the others’ origins – simple observation.
When I first became interested in music, I listened to pop-rock; then to heavy metal; then to progressive rock; then to classical music and jazz. At all these stages of my development, the music I listened to fulfilled me in a deep way, such that I would feel euphoria in the sense that is applied to the most sublime masterpieces of high art. At each stage of my development, the stage I was at was right for me. If you were to make me listen to Schoenberg when I was sixteen, it would have ‘gone over my head;’ if you were to make me listen to pop music now, I would be entirely unmoved.
On a different level, I have since my youngest days adored Bach and Shostakovich. When exposed, I saw in Miles Davis a similar genius; and my opinion of these men has never changed. Indeed, I have almost never heard of anyone speak of these men with anything less than the highest of praise. From this, two possible conclusions present themselves: either these musicians are ‘objectively’ good; or that they are ‘appropriate’ for the sort of people from whom I hear aesthetic value-judgements. Let us consider the latter option, the former having been earlier discarded.
It suggests something that fits into none of the above theories: Some music is appropriate for sixteen-year olds; other music is appropriate for twenty-year olds; other music still for forty-year olds. So there is a sort of relativism here (though it is neither personal nor cultural) – but at the same time, some music is appropriate for people of all ages, so there is a weak sort of objectivism here. But there is more
If one were to play Schoenberg at a rock concert, it would go utterly unappreciated. It is not appropriate there. Schoenberg’s music is superb, but only within the tradition for which it was written. If you take it outside that tradition, then it becomes a cacophony. People who listen to rock music have not gotten accustomed to the tonal system of late-Romantic Germany by listening to Mahler and Wagner, and so Schoenberg sounds not like a very extreme take on that sort of tonality, but completely atonal and senseless. Those who grew up on rock music listen to music in a different way to those who grew up listening to classical music. They have not integrated the habits of picking out themes and formal structures. Conversely, those who listen to classical music all the time are not adept at picking out harmonies and melodies through the very thick distorted sounds of rock music; they look too hard for subtleties that simply aren’t there; and they haven’t integrated the dominant formal structure of popular music, and so the structure can seem forced, it may not be picked up on, or, in the case of some progressive bands, such as Yes, in which the structure is bent and stretched hugely, it can be imperceptible, and so the music seems senseless.
Music can, as well as being appropriate for certain people and social events, be appropriate for certain historical periods. Just as some music suits one’s adolescence more than one’s adulthood, so some music suits certain points in a culture’s history better than others. Take, for example, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in F# Minor. In a local newspaper, the performance was reviewed in the crime column(!), attracting such colourful pejoratives that they merit repeating.
[A]nxious to make the acquaintance of the composer Arnold Schoenberg at last, we were completely cured by a String Quartet by that gentleman, allegedly in F sharp minor… The caterwauling turned what would have been an artistic event into an event of quite another nature, by provoking an unparalleled scandal; similarly, the composition is not an aesthetic but a pathological case. Out of respect for the composer we will assume he is tone-deaf and thus musically non compos… otherwise the Quartet would have to be declared a public nuisance, and its author brought to trial by the Department of Health. We cannot imagine in what way the subscribers of the Rosé Quartet concerts had sinned, to cause the leader of that group to programme such a worthless assault on their ears. The members of the Quartet and Frau Gutheil-Schoder, who affixed to the fiddled abomination two sung ones with turgid texts by Stephan [sic] George, have been punished enough.
This exact same piece is now considered a minor masterpiece.
So appropriateness can operate on personal and cultural levels, and operate on these different levels simultaneously. It operates within someone’s life and mood, and within a culture’s; it operates within counter-cultures, and between them; it operates between genders and races and economic conditions, and it allows for people with disabilities to attend to art at their own level without being branded inferior in any way. But it also operates on far grander levels. Some music may be appropriate for all human beings; some, perhaps, for all imaginative beings – and this latter is why I shun the word ‘relativism’ in explicating my position.
This last sentence is particularly important, because it is, I think, why we tend to feel that people shouldn’t listen to certain music. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Brahms is more appropriate for people in Western society than the Sex Pistols. Say, for example, that the counterpoint and melodies are good for our souls, and that his music imparts a euphoria that the Sex Pistols simply cannot. It is impossible, within a relativist framework, to reconcile this with the equally undeniable fact that the Sex Pistols are more appropriate for teenagers in punk clubs; but the reconciliation is easy in my theory. It is a complex matter as to whether it is more important that teenagers who want to listen to the Sex Pistols should listen to them or that they should listen to Brahms; that is, it is hard to know which ‘level’ of appropriateness is more important. Is the joy you get from Brahms’s Second Symphony more desirable than the catharsis that can be felt in listening to punk music? However, I think it is the case that when these teenagers’ parents say that ‘They should listen to more classical music,’ they are implicitly saying that the more universal level is the more important.
There is truth in objectivism, and there is truth in relativism. The objectivist is right to insist on the existence of good. She is right to insist that there is more to music than mere opinion; that there is a deep value in music. But the relativist is right to insist on the importance a whom: of experiencing subjects, and the huge diversity thereof. Both theses’ problems arise by their focussing on one aspect to the exclusion of the other, and both must be rejected for essentially this reason. My theory, I hope, surmounts them; it synthesises the positions into an accurate theory of aesthetic value, which gives both the good and the whom of music the appreciation they must be given, if we are to ever formulate a coherent account of what it is that is so precious in music, that we value it as dearly as we do life.
This is the one that got me 85%. I took out all the footnotes, the bibliography, and some of the more involved bits that aren't terribly exciting to read when you've only a limited amount of time and interest (because this is, after all, the internet). If you want the full version - where I give full credit to all my influences - then please ask. (I don't want to be guilty of plagiarism.) It's about half its original length; and still almost seven thousand words. Blood and sweat, you know, blood and sweat.
-James