Experience shows us that reason is efficacious, in the long run. We accumulate facts, refine hypotheses, develop theories, and gradually know more about the world, and show it by being able to infer an unknown from a known, for later confirmation, or by employing our understanding to construct ever more refined "tools for living".
Is evaluation equally efficacious? Can we make progress in being able to discriminate about beauty and goodness? Are beauty and goodness in some sense qualities inhering in things, about which we can be more or less accurate?
When we talk about the color blue, we are referring to something which has a basis in the object, but is only experienced "as such" within the framework of our sensory apparatus. It has what one might call a subjective element, and yet it is grounded in the way we are constructed to experience certain things.
In the same way, beauty seems to be a quality belonging to objects as we experience them. It is a commonplace of connoisseurship that greater experience with art tends towards a convergence of taste, even if disagreement still remains. Taste is not subject to definitive criteria, and yet it seems to be capable of refinement and even meaningful discussion.
Is the perception of goodness also a matter of experience and reflection, and also a response to objective features as experienced by creatures such as we?
(Second section) |
