Could there be a genuine critical procedure devoted to that enterprise of providing objective grounds for subjective preferences? This question is integrally connected to another that we have already discussed: the question of the value of aesthetic experience. If aesthetic experience is valueless, or if it has no more value than attaches to idle enjoyment, then it becomes implausible to insist on the existence of objective evaluation.
Modern considerations of this exceedingly difficult question tend to concentrate on the criticism of art and on the role of critics of art. What are critics doing when they discuss a work of art, what do they look for, and with what purpose? It might be said that critics should first of all study the artist’s intention, since this will show the real meaning of the artwork, the real content that the artist is trying to communicate. The American critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, however, argued that there is a fallacy (the so-called intentional fallacy) involved in this approach. What is to be interpreted is the work of art itself, not the intentions of the artist, which are hidden from us and no subject for our concern. If judgment is to be aesthetic, it must concern itself with the given object, and the meanings that we attribute to the object are those that we see in it, whatever the artist intended.
The existence of an intentional fallacy has been doubted. Some argue, for example, that Wimsatt and Beardsley make too sharp a distinction between an intention and the act that expresses it, assuming the intention to be a kind of private mental episode forever hidden from an observer rather than a revealed order in the work itself. But when critics refer to the artistic intention, it is not clear whether they mean anything more than the general purposiveness of the work of art, which can be interpreted by critics without supposing there to be some intention beyond that of producing the precise work before them. (Indeed, in Kant’s view, there can be purposiveness without purpose, and this phenomenon provides the central object of aesthetic interest, whether in art or in nature.) The dispute here is tortuous and obscure. Nevertheless, the move away from intentionalism, as it is called, has been regarded as imperative by most modern critics, who tend to see the role of criticism in either one of two ways: (1) criticism is devoted to the study and interpretation of the aesthetic object rather than of the artist or the recipient, and (2) criticism is devoted to the articulation of a response to the work of art and to the justification of a particular way of seeing it.
Underlying both these conceptions is the fashionable preoccupation with art as the principal object of critical judgment. Nevertheless, in suggesting that the choice which lies before the critic is between the aesthetic object and the experience that it arouses, the two views ensure that the artist is kept hidden. As a consequence, it is not difficult to adapt them to a wider view of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic experience—to a view that makes room for natural beauty and for the aesthetics of everyday life, as it is manifested in dress, manners, decoration, and the other useful arts.
It might be thought that only the first of the two conceptions can give rise to an objective critical procedure, since it alone requires that criticism focus on an object whose existence and nature is independent of the critic. The most important contemporary defense of an objective criticism, that of the British literary critic F.R. Leavis, relied heavily on the second idea, however. In a celebrated controversy with his American counterpart, René Wellek, Leavis argued that it is precisely because criticism is devoted to the individual response that it may achieve objectivity. Although there may be objectivity in the scientific explanation of the aesthetic object—i.e., in the classification and description of its typology, structure, and semiotic status—this is not, according to Leavis, the kind of objectivity that matters, for it will never lead to a value judgment and will therefore never amount to an objective criticism. Value judgments arise out of, and are validated by, the direct confrontation in experience between the critical intelligence and the aesthetic object, the first being informed by a moral awareness that provides the only possible ground for objective evaluation.
If criticism were confined to the study of nature, it would look very peculiar. It is only because of the development of artistic and decorative traditions that the habit of aesthetic judgment becomes established. Accordingly, contemporary attempts to provide a defense of aesthetic judgment concentrate almost exclusively on the criticism of art and endeavour to find principles whereby the separate works of art may be ordered according to their merit, or at least characterized in evaluative terms. Leavis’s “objective” criticism is expressly confined to the evaluation of literary works taken from a single tradition. The reason for this narrowness can be put paradoxically as follows: criticism can be objective only when it is based in subjectivity. Criticism is the justification of a response, and such justification requires a frame of reference that both critics and their readers can readily recognize. The successful communication and justification of a response are possible only by reference to the canon of works accepted within a common culture. The canonical works—what Matthew Arnold called the touchstones of criticism—provide the context of relevant comparisons, without which no amount of detailed analysis could convey the quality of the individual work. Critical reasoning is an attempt to place works of art in relation to one another, so that the perceived greatness of the one will provide the standard of measurement for the other. At the same time, the individual quality of feeling in each work must be elicited and discussed exactly as we might discuss the quality of feeling in everyday life, praising it for its intensity, exactness, and generosity, and criticizing it for its sentimentality, obscurity, or lack of seriousness. All of the moral categories that we apply to human feeling and character we may therefore apply equally to art, and the basis of an objective criticism will be no different from the basis (whatever it might be) for an objective morality. The value of art, on this account, resides partly in the fact that it gives exemplary expression to human feeling and character, and so enables us to measure our own lives and aspirations against their imaginary counterparts.
These ideas are vague and have been frequently criticized for their moralistic overtones as well as for the seeming narrowness of their application. Even if they apply to the criticism of literature, what do we say about the criticism of music, of architecture, of dress and decor, of natural beauty? In the nonliterary arts much criticism is directed first to form, style, and workmanship and only secondly to the moral content of the works under consideration. There are exceptions to this rule, and once again the principal exception is English—namely, John Ruskin’s profoundly moralized criticism of architecture. Nevertheless, the extreme difficulty experienced in extending the Leavisite procedures of practical criticism (in which the reader’s response becomes the principal focus of critical attention) to the nonliterary arts has given sustenance to the view that this “moralized” criticism is really only one kind of criticism and not necessarily the most widely applicable or the most important. If such is the case, it cannot really claim to have discovered a basis for the objective exercise of taste. The development of Western aesthetics The contributions of the ancient Greeks
