Judgment—in the sense of evaluating and ranking—is not optional. It saturates intellectual, artistic, social and intimate life. Attempts to eliminate it produce not a world without judgment, but one in which judgment becomes hidden, unexamined, and therefore often more arbitrary.
Immanuel Kant’s distinction in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790) between determining (bestimmend) judgment, which applies a general rule to a particular case, and reflective (reflektierend) judgment, which starts from the particular and works toward the universal, remains the most useful entry point. Kant confined reflective judgment largely to natural beauty and art; my concern extends it to the full range of human evaluative life.
This essay offers not a theory of judgment but a series of contributions to its practice as an art. That art is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic: the same principles illuminate the scrutiny of a philosophical argument, a wine, a piece of music, and a person. It is a form of phronēsis (practical wisdom), a concept developed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics—which cannot be reduced to technē (skill or technique) because it operates on the irreducibly particular. It cannot be learned from a rulebook, only from sustained exposure to the act of evaluating itself.
Jean-François Lyotard, in La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979), thought that established aestheticism inhibited artistic experimentation, and characterized postmodern culture instead in terms of eclecticism: “one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games”. But Lyotard himself provided the rejoinder, a line often omitted by his admirers: “this realism of the ‘anything goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield”. A world without judgment is, under present conditions, one in which all know—in the formulation of Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington— “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. The development of the art of judgment is one alternative to that consumerist world.
Intersubjectivity and the Partial Objectivity of Judgment
Judgment is not merely subjective. At the most basic level, this can be demonstrated empirically. Experimental studies—on responses to Mondrian’s proportional structure, on the perception of colours perceived as natural, on architectural symmetry, on the kinematics of dance, on musical parameters’ relation to basic emotions, on the aesthetic appeal of poetic vividness, on literary criteria, or on forms of harmony in distinct aesthetic contexts—consistently show that some evaluative responses track features of objects that are not simply invented by the beholder. There is a non-trivial degree of convergence that cannot be attributed simply to idiosyncrasy or private whim. This does not dissolve subjectivity, nor the role of culture, training and biography; but it does make it much harder to sustain claims that all evaluation is essentially arbitrary.
Judgment is not merely subjective.
Something structurally analogous holds in the domain of attraction: a large body of research on facial attractiveness, symmetry, visible health cues and conversational intelligence has shown meaningful cross-cultural convergence in evaluative response. This—while potentially uncomfortable—does not imply desire is fully objective, nor that those disadvantaged by such findings need reconcile themselves to being second best. There are nuancing factors I will return to below. The point is that evaluative responses to people are not exhausted by subjectivism.
This is also visible in the grammar of evaluative utterance. When someone says to another “she is beautiful”, “this music is heartstopping”, "that film is riveting from beginning to end”, “he has a magnetism about him”, or “that speech contained penetrating insights”, the form of the claim reaches beyond “I happen to respond to X”. Such utterances are offered to others as in principle shareable, discussable and contestable. Kant gave this its classic formulation: the agreeable is personal (“a violet colour is to one soft and lovely, but to another dull and faded”), but judgments of the beautiful speak with a “universal voice” and “demand the assent of everyone”. To call someone “magnetic” is not merely to register a preference but to present that person as possessing a kind of socially intelligible appeal. David Hume, in Of the Standard of Taste (1757), resisted the slide from variation to arbitrariness by locating the standard in the “joint verdict” of qualified critics—marked by “strong sense”, “delicate sentiment”, practice, comparison, and freedom from prejudice. Neither Kant nor Hume imagines that beauty can be deduced algorithmically; both insist that some judgments carry a genuine claim upon others.
