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PARTISAN REVIEW
as though your choices betrayed good or bad intentions. This is why what's
called
odium aestheticum
(literally, "esthetic hatefulness") abounds, why
people invest disagreements about art with so much personal rancor. Yet it
remains that you yourself no more choose to like or not like an art work
than you choose to see the sun as bright or the night as dark. All intuitive
reactions, whether primary or esthetic, are involuntary (for that matter, so
are all rational or intelligent ones) . They are given, not taken. All that's
taken or willed or decided when it comes to esthetic experience is the
directing and focusing of attention (and about what happens with atten–
tion, no discipline of knowledge, whether psychological or philosophical,
has yet been able to say much that's useful). To put it another way: esthet–
ic judgments, being indissoluble from, inseparable and indistinguishable
from esthetic experience itself; being in fact constitutive of that kind of
experience-esthetic judgments, being all that, are reflexive, automatic.
They are not arrived at by being deliberately reflected upon, weighed, pon–
dered, or decided; they are-once again-given, given because they are
inherent in esthetic experience itself, because they
are
that experience. And
because they are given, they are received.
(Of course, there is, and has been, much dishonesty on the reporting
of esthetic reactions. There's no one, probably, who professes an interest in
art who's not been guilty of this kind of dishonesty at one time or anoth–
er. There's the person who looks at the nameplate on a painting before
deciding how to look at the painting itself. There's the person who prefers
the Beatles to Mozart but doesn't dare admit it, even to himself. It
depends, of course, on what circles you frequent. There's also the person
who lets nonesthetic interests or fixed ideas interfere with his reactions.
Here it's less a question of dishonesty than of disloyalty- disloyalty to art.
But whether it's one or the other, it's still bad faith in the context of the
esthetic. And it may be the prevalence of bad faith that accounts for a lot
of
odium aestheticum.
But it has to be allowed at the same time that bad faith
of this or any other kind is prevalent in society at large.)
Immanuel Kant (who had more insights into the nature of esthetic
experience than anyone else I'm aware of) held that the "judgment of
taste" always "precedes" the "pleasure" gained from the esthetic "object."
It's not necessary here to go into the reasons he gave for asserting this. I'd
rather deal with the reasons my own experience provides for agreeing with
it. His assertion in itself points up-once again-how integral the
"moment" of judgment is to esthetic experience as such. My surmise is
that the very involuntariness of the intuition which
is an esthetic judgment
enables you to
commit
yourself to the "pleasure"-or "dys-pleasure"- of
the intuition itself. That the judgment is received rather than taken makes
it a necessary one as it were, and its necessity frees you, surrenders you, to
