Get the latest tech news
Translation and Taste
Taste became one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking.
Especially in our contemporary era, she argued, when we can neither rely on a generally binding cultural inheritance for orientation nor hope that the rationalizing methods of science can liberate us from the confusions of human decision, we must attend with new clarity to what judgment, most visibly at work in our deliberations regarding aesthetic choices, shows us about the real but pluriform and incompletely conceptualizable character of goodness. Writing in non-systematic modes of aphorism, fiction, dialogue, and essay, the thinkers grouped by Denneny around the problematic of taste, including Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713), modeled the kind of mental activity he, and Arendt, took to be capable of avoiding the unworldly isolation of “thinking” or the violent certitudes of “willing.” But it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the aesthetic thinking of the early-modern period as irrelevant to our own concerns, and misremember it as having been preoccupied either with arbitrary rules or uncritical adoration of “the Ancients.” Bouhours and his contemporaries were, in fact, the first of “we moderns.” As Denneny argued, they developed a novel (and perhaps inadequate) vocabulary to make sense of an important part of human experience that was in danger of becoming incomprehensible.
Or read this on Hacker News
