Aesthetic Judgment

Definition

Aesthetic judgment is the act by which a subject judges something to be beautiful or sublime. In Kant's Critique of Judgment, aesthetic judgment is "reflective" — it proceeds from the particular to the universal, seeking (but not presupposing) a universal principle. The judgment of taste is disinterested, purposive without purpose, and claims a subjective universality: I judge that this is beautiful and expect others, in principle, to agree. For architecture, aesthetic judgment names the kind of evaluation that buildings invite — evaluations that are neither purely subjective (mere taste) nor objectively demonstrable (technical performance). This positions aesthetic judgment between the technical rationality of design and the hermeneutic, historical, and social dimensions of architectural value.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — the four moments of the judgment of taste: disinterest, universality, purposiveness, necessity.
• Diane Morgan — Kant's aesthetic judgment and its architectural relevance.
• Jacques Soulillou — the judgment's social genealogy: the opposition between the free man (eleutheros) and the non-free as "a fundamental given of Western aesthetic judgement" — Kant's own categories (free beauty "not subject to the demands of a concept" vs the beauty of a building; "art is that which is realized through freedom") carrying "the age-old opposition between the free and the non-free" (pp. 317–318) — and the desert-island limit case that empties judgment of ornament altogether (2002/2006).

Related Concepts

• Beauty — the object of aesthetic judgment.
• Sublime — the judgment of the overwhelming that exceeds beauty.
• Aesthetic Experience — the encounter that aesthetic judgment evaluates and articulates.
• Free and Not-Free — the status opposition Soulillou shows encoded in the judgment of taste itself.

Source Support

Sources in this wiki that discuss this concept:

• Kant for Architects — aesthetic judgment and the critique of taste.
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the judgment's social genealogy and its ornament cases: Kant's desert island — "a man abandoned on a desert island would not enjoy the pleasures of ornamentation," confronted with "neither the inter-sexual differentiation, nor the intra-sexual differentiation of hierarchy" (p. 316) — the judgment of ornament as relational, requiring "the gaze of another"; the pure decorative at the pole of the free ("beauty is not subject to the demands of a concept, as is the case… with the beauty of a building") against Gleizes/Metzinger/Léger's space-bound decorative at the pole of the not-free (p. 318); and "when Kant says that art is that which is realized through freedom, this declaration – apparently exempt from all social considerations – carries in itself the age-old opposition between the free and the non-free" (p. 318). The source that reverses the judgment's declared neutrality: the disinterested judgment of taste as the displaced surface of a status opposition — aesthetic judgment's "universality" carrying its class-and-slavery genealogy unacknowledged. See free-and-not-free, ornamental-ground-plan.