ESSAY — The Artistic Judgement

An Inquiry into the Possibility of a Pure Artistic Judgement

— Cornelis de Bondt

Introduction

The observation that the social significance of ‘classical’ art has increasingly come under pressure in recent decades has by now become a cliché. Nevertheless, it still seems worthwhile to me to investigate the reasons for this development. In this essay I focus primarily on Western music, and specifically on music that has in one way or another been fixed or recorded — that is, from roughly medieval vocal music up to the music of our own century. Until the beginning of the twentieth century this fixation took place by means of scores; afterwards other forms emerged as well, such as sound carriers, and electronic and digital techniques.

I use the term ‘classical’ in a broader sense, therefore not only to denote the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until well into the previous century the term ‘high art’ was commonly used for this domain, but from the second half of that century onward — especially in certain progressive circles — this concept acquired dubious connotations. This is symptomatic, in my view, of the problem that confronts us.

It does not seem necessary to provide an extensive cultural-historical exposition here; I assume one may agree with the following, admittedly rough, outline: music (in notated form) up to the French Revolution either originated in the Church or at the Courts. From the end of the eighteenth century onward culture increasingly came to be shaped by the bourgeoisie. Orchestras, amateur choirs, publishing houses, and concert halls arose, which anyone could make use of — provided, of course, that one possessed the financial means. In principle, however, art became public.

From the seventeenth century onward we see the emergence of what Giorgio Agamben has called the figure of the ‘Man of Taste’.¹ And thus also ‘good taste’, and with it ‘bad taste’. Agamben uses Rameau’s Nephew as a metaphor for the Man of Taste. This nephew — from Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau — possesses extremely refined taste, but no conscience. He understands everything about beauty, but nothing about good and evil. Moreover, the judgement of taste concerning a work of art becomes completely separated from its creation. The Man of Taste can judge art, but lacks the capacity to create it; a rift arises. The principles of taste and of creation were once connected. Agamben points to the patrons of Raphael and Michelangelo, who involved themselves at every level in the making of the artworks. Before the birth of the Man of Taste, no principled distinction was made between the works later designated as masterpieces by these men of taste and, for instance, mechanical dolls or the lavishly decorated installations filled with automata and living figures that adorned banquets for the amusement of nobles and popes. Taste, stripped of genius, turns into its opposite; it degenerates into the “very principle of perversion”. We experience the consequences of this especially in the twentieth century. For a time one could still relate to the arts by means of this concept of taste: there was ‘high art’ (recognized artists and institutions such as orchestras and museums) and ‘low art’ (folk art and light entertainment).

Today every judgement of taste is linked to an interest. For funding bodies, what seems to matter above all is the social relevance of art — by which economic and political relevance is meant. Since the end of the previous century, increasingly non-artistic conditions have been attached to the allocation of subsidies, such as cultural governance, entrepreneurship, diversity, and inclusion. Little is said anymore about artistic justification; in grant applications there is scarcely any room left for it. And this is not even to mention the generally poor artistic reasoning behind decisions to grant or deny funding.

From the side of self-proclaimed progressive influencers there has also been an attack on the notion of ‘high’ art, under the banner of decolonization. Composers such as Beethoven and Bach are dismissed as representatives of ‘white male culture’, and the significance attributed to their music for centuries is reduced to a monopoly of power held by the bourgeois elite. The concept of the ‘masterpiece’ has become suspect. The entire politics of neoliberalism and ‘pseudo-wokeness’ has resulted in a vast flattening-out: artistic mediocrity prevails. From this latter camp I have never seen a serious artistic analysis demonstrating that the art considered ‘top art’ is merely mediocre and that the proposed neo-colonial alternatives are artistically better, or at least equivalent. Conversely, the defenders of classical ‘top art’ possess no adequate analyses to substantiate their own positions either. “Beethoven is a genius. You can hear it, can’t you? End of discussion.” In this way every judgement of taste becomes a normative judgement; a universal judgement seems excluded.

And thus we arrive at the core of the issue I wish to address: the Artistic Judgement. The crux will be to detach this judgement both from power interests and from specific artistic styles and disciplines, thereby dispensing at once with the futile debate over ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The question is whether we can formulate a judgement of taste concerning artistic quality, regardless of whether it concerns ‘classical’ music (in the broad sense), pop music, jazz, or folk music. To this end, I will attempt, in a Kantian sense, to provide a transcendental critique of this judgement of taste, and I believe I have found a way out of the limitations of Kant’s ‘Antinomy of Taste’.²

After elaborating my commentary on the Kantian aspect of the judgement of taste, I will attempt to formulate criteria for a pure artistic judgement.

¹⁾ Giorgio Agamben, L’uomo senza contenuto / The Man without Content [1994/1999]
²⁾ Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, paragrafen 56 en 57 [1790]

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The Judgement of Taste according to Kant

The first part of Kant’s third Critique begins by distinguishing three judgements of taste that are relevant to our sense of well-being: the taste for the good, the agreeable, and the beautiful. There are two principal grounds for this distinction: that of ‘interest’ and that of ‘concept’.

1. Judgements of taste concerning the agreeable and the beautiful, unlike those concerning the good, are not based on concepts. These judgements cannot be reduced to ‘determinate’ concepts; they do not concern knowledge and therefore cannot be taught. This makes it difficult to weigh the quality of such judgements against one another, since we lack rational grounds for doing so.
   
2. The judgement of taste concerning the beautiful, unlike those concerning the good and the agreeable, is not based on an interest. The agreeable involves desire: we want to possess the object of the agreeable or exercise power over it. With respect to the good there is likewise an interest. But in the case of the beautiful there is no such interest. That splendidly gleaming black cat gracefully walking along the fence — we do not desire it; we merely register its beauty. When we desire a woman or a man, it is not because of that person’s beauty, but because of their attractiveness. The difference becomes immediately clear in the following examples: I may not say, “I find this rose beautiful,” but must say, “This rose is beautiful.” Here I speak for the world. In the case of the agreeable it is otherwise: I must say, “I like beer (or dislike it),” not “Beer is pleasant (or unpleasant),” for here I cannot speak for the world.

And thus we arrive at an intriguing and complex issue: the judgement of taste concerning the beautiful is, on the one hand, subjective, owing to the absence of a conceptual apparatus, yet on the other hand it lays claim to universal validity. How is this possible? At the end of the first part of the Critique, Kant addresses this problem. It is important for us because it touches precisely the sore spot of the judgement of taste. Kant adopts a dialectical approach, which he calls “The Antinomy of Taste” (§§56, 57):

— Thesis: judgements about beauty are based on principles (otherwise there would be no difference between positive and negative judgements), in other words on determinate concepts.

— Antithese: such principles do not exist (otherwise the judgement would no longer be a matter of taste but of knowledge); yet we do dispute about them, so evidently some indeterminate concept or idea must be involved.

— Synthese: the judgement of taste is subjective but at the same time appeals to universality, which arises from a shared ’sense for the form of purposiveness without purpose’. We experience a kind of ‘intended’ coherence, even though, on the basis of rational thought, no such intention exists. We can therefore quarrel about differences in taste, but we cannot argue demonstratively, because the judgement of taste is not based on determinate concepts, but rather on an indeterminate concept (or idea), namely that of the ‘supersensible substrate of appearances’. By these ‘appearances’ Kant refers to the fact that we cannot know what underlies them, since this ground is supersensible, yet we must nevertheless assume that they rest upon something.

This solution has something unsatisfactory about it, and Kant himself acknowledges this when he writes: “Beyond resolving this conflict in the claims and counterclaims of taste we can do nothing more. […] The two principles [i.e. that of determinate concepts versus that of an indeterminate commonality of the faculty of judgement — CdB] which appeared to contradict each other are united because both can be true — and that is sufficient.”

The next step is therefore to examine to what extent we can develop this antinomy in order to arrive at a workable and verifiable judgement of taste. For this purpose we must first address, for the sake of completeness, an additional problem. When Kant speaks of the beautiful, he initially speaks of beauty in nature. Only secondarily does he turn to beauty in art — and it is precisely the latter that concerns us. For my primary concern is not the judgement of taste regarding the beautiful as such, but rather a judgement of artistic quality.

In §42, “On the Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful”, Kant distinguishes, on the one hand, the ‘purely aesthetic faculty of judgement’ — by which we can judge forms without concepts and elevate such judgements to a general rule, while experiencing pleasure in doing so (the judgement of taste) — and, on the other hand, an ‘intellectual faculty of judgement’, “which enables us to determine a priori a satisfaction that we make into a law for everyone” (the good). The judgement of taste is not based on an interest, yet it may give rise to an interest. “The pleasure or displeasure of the first is called that of taste; that of the second, the moral feeling.” In other words, the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature (for this is the primary subject here) without simultaneously taking an interest in it. And this interest has moral aspects.

After investigating the judgement of the beautiful in nature, Kant turns in the subsequent sections to art. Here he does not immediately pronounce on a direct connection between aesthetics and morality. This undoubtedly has to do with the fact that beauty in art is a human product rather than a product of nature. Natural beauty is spontaneous and immediate; artistic beauty is based on human intention, on the will, exercised in freedom. Yet at the end of the first part of the Critique Kant returns to the connection between the beautiful — now in art — and morality (§§59, 60). Beauty (including that of art) relates to the moral as a ‘symbol’.

By this ‘symbolic’ element Kant means something quite specific. He distinguishes between two forms of presentation (hypotyposis): it is either schematic or symbolic. In the first case there is a direct relation between representation and concept; thus any drawing of a triangle is a direct, schematic representation of the concept ‘triangle’. In a symbolic representation this relation is indirect and works through analogy. In musical descriptions, for example, we speak of ‘high’ and ‘low’ notes. These terms are not literally musical but are analogically borrowed from spatial experience; this is therefore a symbolic representation. In this symbolic sense the beauty of art can likewise function as an analogy for morality: the aesthetic experience does not refer directly, but symbolically, to the moral experience.

Kant thus establishes a connection between aesthetics and morality. This is important, because the artistic judgement says something not only about art, but also about the political context. I will return to this later. First, however, I will discuss the ‘artistic judgement’, employing the following dialectical approach: first (thesis), the ‘Objectively Analytical Judgement’, which claims universal validity because it is based on concepts; second (antithesis), the ‘Reflective Judgement’, which contains subjective elements not directly grounded in concepts; and finally the synthesis of both, the ‘Artistic Judgement’.

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The Objectively Analytical Judgement

For forming a pure judgement of taste, three necessary conditions and three perspectives can be formulated. The conditions are: disinterestedness, excellence, and exemplarity. The perspectives are: concept, context, and consistency. All of these perspectives and conditions are complementary rather than exclusive; they relate to one another and must therefore be considered in relation to each other.

Conditions

Disinterestedness — The creative work may not be tied to an interest. For the avoidance of doubt: this applies only to the artistic act itself, not to the artist’s need for income or the covering of expenses. Moreover, it is independent of the fact that a disinterestedly created work may nevertheless be of great importance.

Excellence — This condition derives from the ancient Greek concept of aretē, usually translated as ‘virtue’, but this term is of little use to us because of the bourgeois connotation of mere propriety that clings to it. Aretē unequivocally meant excellence, with Odysseus as a grand example: he was clever and cunning, faster than anyone else, strong — no one could string his bow — and he was also a poet and a wit.
 We call a work excellent when ‘everything fits’, that is, when the concept of the work stands in proper proportion to its structure and its material, to its context, and when it is developed consistently. I will return to this after clarifying the remaining principles.

Exemplarity — This condition is derived from Kant’s concept of genius. By ‘genius’ one should not understand the romantic figure of the troubled artist, but rather the faculty or talent by which the artist applies lawful principles within a free creative process. The word refers to the ancient Roman god Genius, who watches over life and death; words such as ‘generate’ and ‘generation’ derive from it. Genius ensures that a work of art is original and exemplary. Freedom is the capacity to deal with limitations. Choices are made in freedom. Yet it is today an all-too-comfortable misunderstanding to think of freedom as a lack — namely the lack of constraints, and thus the right to everything. Artistic laws serve free, personal choices; they serve the aesthetic process of creation. Art consists precisely in this seemingly contradictory tension between the personal and the universal. It is genius that transforms this tension into a masterpiece; here the riddle is born.

This genius is at work in pure art. It requires neither pastiche nor imitation, nor does it need to sell itself or engage in missionary work. Talent cannot be taught; it is a gift, one that can only be exercised freely. These conditions are far more useful than terms such as ‘innovative’ or ‘authentic’, notions that often provoke resistance or even aversion. This is because such terms are vague. Here we feel the lack of clear evaluative principles. ‘Innovative’ and ‘authentic’ usually refer merely to style (in a narrow sense). The notion of ‘exemplary’, by contrast, can apply within any style and any genre. An important aspect of exemplarity is that the work is irreplaceable. This does not mean unique, since uniqueness in itself says nothing about artistic quality. Irreplaceable means that no other work can take its place. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony cannot be ‘replaced’ by the one of Ferdinand Ries’s, whereas the reverse is conceivable.

Perspectives

Concept — This perspective concerns the artistic point of departure of the work, its basic idea. If the concept is unclear, the work will most likely fail. This does not mean that the concept must be clear to the artist from the outset; often clarity only emerges during the process of making. But at some point this clarity must reveal itself. Only then can the work be brought to completion. All the material then ‘falls into place’, and much will often have to be discarded; not all material (or sub-ideas), however beautiful or interesting in themselves, will prove usable for the optimal expression of the concept. The concept determines the structure and the style (in a broad sense) of the work.

Context — By ‘context’ we mean the relations of the work on various levels: within the work itself — how different materials relate to one another and to the concept — and outside it — how the work relates to other works (including the artist’s own), and how it relates to the past, whether in terms of period, style, or genre. The social context also belongs here: historical, economic, and political meanings and interests, as well as reputation and influence.

Consistentie — This perspective concerns the optimal use of materials (including ideas at a subordinate level), the relation of the material to the concept, and an awareness of the context. An important sub-principle is derived from the so-called “Occam’s razor”. Paraphrased for the artwork, it might read as follows: The number of distinct material forms should serve the optimal expression of the overarching concept of the work. In most cases this means using as few distinguishable material forms as possible. For example, sonata form has two themes: this is the optimal number to express the dialectical concept of the form — the opposition of themes, their development and transformation, and their eventual synthesis. A fugue, by contrast, ideally has a single theme. Its overarching concept may be described in terms of the ‘optimal yield’ mentioned above: the fugue is about extracting the maximum possible yield from this one theme. One theme is therefore optimal. The opposite, incidentally, is also conceivable: not a minimum of material forms but the use of as much different material as possible. In that case, however, the overarching concept must be precisely this excess itself. Consistency therefore applies not only to the perspective of concept but also to that of context.

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The Reflective Judgement

At the end of Part I of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, in §60, Kant states that with respect to taste no doctrine of method is possible, because taste is not based on a conceptual apparatus. No algorithm or system of rules can exist that would lead someone to correct judgements of taste, since the judgement of taste is disinterested and grounded in a ‘free harmony of the faculties’, and therefore not in concepts that can be taught. Yet Kant does not exclude the possibility that taste can be cultivated. On the contrary, he frequently speaks of the Bildung des Geschmacks. Taste can be formed through exposure to good examples, through discussion with others, through sharpening one’s capacity to judge. And for this, methodologies do exist within the arts, for instance at conservatories and academies of fine art. Students learn technical skills, become acquainted with the repertoire, learn to listen, to look, to compare, to argue. The methods are therefore aimed at the formation and development of the power of judgement, not at deriving universal rules for beauty. One cannot teach someone good taste by means of rules, but one can, through practice and examples, learn to develop and refine one’s taste.

The ‘Objectively Analytical Judgement’ has certain characteristics of a method, by means of which the techniques employed by the artist can be mapped out. In music, this requires various techniques and forms of knowledge, such as the ability to read a score, and knowledge of harmony, counterpoint, instrumentation, and music history. But alongside all this knowledge, room must also be left for what Kant calls the ‘taste of the agreeable’. Let us first examine this taste (from a musical perspective).

In the vast majority of evaluation committees of which I have been a member — mostly examinations and grant allocations — the quality of judgement is inconsistent. Most comments are based on personal taste. One hears qualifications such as “this is a beautiful chord”, “the tension is not sustained”, “the form is weak”, “the transition doesn’t work”, “it starts well but then collapses”, “nice groove”, “imaginative”, and the seemingly unavoidable “the piece is too long”. (As absurd as claiming that a painting is “too large”.) Rarely is any connection made between that ‘beautiful chord’ and the concept of the work. Terms such as ‘form’ and ‘content’ are used as though they were unproblematic notions. The qualifications are not related to one another, nor are they connected to the three perspectives outlined earlier. The level of evaluation is low and based on a continuously repeated, uncritical practice in which everyone supposedly knows ‘what is meant’. Whenever someone says “we know what is meant”, you can be certain that something is fundamentally wrong. Apparently one cannot formulate precisely what is specifically meant, and so one hides behind an all-too-comfortable culture of chatter. ‘Cosiness knows no time.’ [From Dutch: Gezelligheid kent geen tijd.]

What is missing is the relation of any specific qualification to the whole, thereby generating an overarching view — something we can achieve through the perspectives described above. The claim that a certain chord is “beautiful”, or that “the tension is not sustained”, “the form is weak”, or “a transition does not work”, can only be established if all these qualifications are related to one another and to the concept and the context, and if inconsistencies are identified.

To consider one of these examples more closely: the qualification ‘beautiful chord’ is insufficient for a pure judgement; it is merely a judgement of the agreeable. In a pure judgement the following questions must be asked: Is it about the chord itself? or: Is it about the (harmonic) context of the chord? Suppose we hear a chord that is striking in itself and that we find ‘beautiful’. What further conclusion can we draw from this? Why should that necessarily count as a positive qualification? Are ‘beautiful chords’ in themselves a virtue? Are ‘ugly chords’ then a flaw? Those who judge solely on the basis of personal taste — and whose taste is often poorly developed, and there are many — will undoubtedly think so. This was already evident in the reactions, around the middle of the twentieth century, to the music of the Second Viennese School, especially Webern, and somewhat later to the composers around Darmstadt. Around the 1990s a new wave of critics emerged who opposed what they considered ‘ugly’ music, with the British philosopher Scruton as their principal advocate. At least professional critics still understood the technical background of the qualification ‘ugly’, namely that it referred to dissonance. The plea by the ‘Viennese’ and ‘Darmstadt’ composers for the ‘emancipation’ of dissonance is itself problematic — particularly when detached from the overarching concept of their compositional style. Yet, a thorough contextual analysis is required to clarify the issues surrounding that plea.

Another example: in 2011 Scott Rickard gave a TED talk entitled The World’s Ugliest Music (easily found online). Rickard argued that repetition is essential to the creation of beauty. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony served as his principal example. As a counterexample he presented a piano piece containing no repetition whatsoever: each note sounds only once, each duration is unique, and the sequence contains no repeated patterns, neither in pitch nor in duration. The mathematical principle of sonar systems, such as those used by submarines, was employed to generate the material. This, Rickard claimed, resulted in the ugliest piece of music ever. Here he made a crucial conceptual error. He assumed that Beethoven elevates repetition to a principle, while failing to understand that in the ‘ugliest piece in the world’ non-repetition is itself elevated to a principle. As he explains, this principle is not based on chance but on an extremely consistent mathematical formula. That, too, is an articulation of beauty. Repetition is not the criterion for artistic quality; but consistency is.

The taste of the agreeable is, by definition, subject to erosion. Indeed, this erosion is its very driving force, the reason why we develop or change this taste. Most children prefer sweet flavours; salty or bitter tastes are learned through the eating habits imposed by their parents. Most people must grow accustomed to the taste of coffee or beer. This is a natural process. The same holds for music. The first time I heard Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps as a sixteen-year-old, during a school concert by the Residentie Orchestra, I mainly found it strange music, though with several moments that affected me deeply. So I bought a record and listened to the work countless times. In this way I developed that taste.

A major problem within the taste of the agreeable is the evaluation of a surprising moment, purely in isolation; it is understood merely as an ‘effect’. By an ‘effect’ in a composition I mean a striking moment with great impact but a short memory; an effect has little yield and can only be used sparingly. The famous timpani stroke in Haydn’s symphony that bears this nickname occurs only once. It is like the punchline of a joke: you can tell it once; repetition is fatal. If a moment that initially functions as an effect is connected to the concept of the work and thereby acquires a deeper significance, it can become an affect. Affects are repeatable. I have by now heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony countless times. I can dream it note for note; every surprise in listening has disappeared. The ‘agreeable’ has worn away. Yet despite this, I can still hear its beauty each time, the masterly manner in which the work is composed. Taste (that of the beautiful) is not subject to erosion.

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The Artistic Judgement

In which domains is an artistic judgement rendered? The most important judgements take place in grant applications of cultural institutions, and within educational settings and orchestras or ensembles. In addition — though to my mind less fundamentally — they occur in reviews and in the awarding of prizes.

In music there are two kinds of judgements. First, judgements concerning art that comes into being at the moment of evaluation, such as auditions or performance examinations; here the issue is performance itself. Second, judgements concerning already existing work, most often completed compositions. The latter is necessary when applying for subsidies for new work — which cannot yet be evaluated — but also for establishing the very ‘right to exist’ of an orchestra or ensemble.

In the evaluation of existing repertoire for subsidy applications, whether recent or canonical, the taste of the agreeable plays a certain role, but so do economic and political arguments. I am certainly not opposed to such factors playing a role in cultural policy: after all, public money is involved, and the government not only has the right but also the duty to let criteria relating to these interests play a part. The question, however, is to what extent this should be the case.

With respect to the act of judging as such, the perspectives and conditions mentioned earlier apply just as much as they do to the object of that judgement — the artwork itself. There is always a specific context. The criterion of ‘entrepreneurship’, for instance, should apply only to productions or works in which a financial or economic interest constitutes an essential element. Large audiences, multiple performances, or high record sales are then relevant. But a work that is not aimed at the size of its audience, because its essence lies in inventing or developing something specific, should by definition not be assessed according to this criterion, but exclusively according to its artistic importance.

Political interests, likewise, should only apply to applications in which they play a fundamental role. The letter once sent to the Schönberg String Quartet — then specialized in music around Schönberg and Webern — by the state secretary Van der Ploeg, instructing them that when replacing a member they should consider hiring an ‘allochthonous’ musician (at the time the term had not yet been subjected to sensitivity readers), was ridiculous given the ensemble’s repertoire. Integrating groups from other cultures is of course a laudable goal, but it must be addressed on another level.

What matters here is the concept of the artwork in question and the consistency with which that concept and its context are assessed. For similar reasons, different criteria should apply to an individual artist or small-scale group than to large institutions.

Thus the question arises whether popular art, which can easily sustain itself commercially, should qualify for public support at all. Twenty years ago the former state secretary Plasterk reversed this logic: if the Rolling Stones did not need subsidies, then the Dutch National Opera should at least generate twenty percent of its own income — and the other institutions likewise. This too is a matter that ought to be judged within the perspective of context.

Furthermore, when judging the subsidization of orchestras, their programming as a whole should be included in the contextual analysis. A legitimate question would be whether support should continue to focus almost exclusively on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European classical repertoire, leaving very limited resources for music from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and contemporary music. A critical analysis of our musical-cultural heritage is entirely lacking. I am referring here to the so-called BIS scheme [‘Basic Infra Structure’], through which in The Netherlands large institutions — especially major museums, orchestras, and opera companies — receive structural subsidies. In my view this system should be completely revised. I previously developed a plan for this, entitled Opera Aperta, in which I formulated general principles and proposed procedures for evaluation (for both existing and new work), including a practical assessment table, all based on the categories and perspectives outlined above. I also elaborated the organizational structure of the Opera Aperta body. But neither the government nor the ensembles showed any interest. One’s own shop always comes first, and political power structures are fortresses not easily taken. This is regrettable, for we currently witness countless endless ‘debates’ in the media about the role art should or should not play in the disastrous state of our world. All the criteria that truly matter are absent; everyone shouts along with the spirit of the day.

The synthesis between the two judgements of taste — the pure, objective criteria and those of the taste of the agreeable — yields a judgement of taste that is entirely conceptually grounded, while the subjective reflective elements are incorporated into the perspectives of context, concept, and consistency.

We can then not only demonstrate why the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is so masterfully constructed, but also explain why Schubert’s Symphony in B minor, D 759 (the so-called Unfinished), fails in its application of sonata form. An analysis of the first movement shows clearly how the song composer Schubert struggles with this typically instrumental form; it is used as an ‘object’. The ‘unfinished’ aspect lies not in the fact that the work consists of only two movements, but in the ‘imperfect’ quality of the first movement. A composer of songs requires text as the underlying structure, as he does magnificently in his cycle Winterreise; that work fully coincides with who Schubert is as a composer. It is ‘subjectwise’. (I omit my detailed analyses here for reasons of space.)

When we compare two versions of Leonard Cohen’s magnificent song ‘Avalanche’ — the official studio version and the (presumably original) concert performance in Tel Aviv in 1972 — we notice that in the official version an additional string layer has been added which contributes nothing to the song. It is improper. This too is an ‘objectwise’ application.

Occasionally media discussions arise about music used for meditation (or as a sleep aid), for which the questionable term ‘neoclassical’ is employed. In these discussions, the conceptual mistake is constantly made of comparing such pieces — often written for solo piano — with, for example, Chopin. Inevitably they fail the comparison. But their context is ignored: they are not intended as concert music, not as an alternative to Chopin, but rather as a form of muzak. This type of music relates extremely poorly to Chopin or other classical composers, although its presentation deliberately suggests otherwise, through concerts in prestigious halls and releases on reputable labels. There is therefore an element of falsity attached to it, and I suspect that this is what provokes resentment.

Once a pure judgement has been rendered about a particular work, a reflective judgement can then determine whether (the performance of) that work should be supported. There is obviously no objection to supporting the performance of Schubert’s symphony on historical, educational, or entertaining grounds, provided that these additional interests are consistently incorporated into the context of the judgement. Likewise, support for the magnificent Fifth Symphony should not be automatic — for instance merely because of yet another anniversary of the composer’s birth or death — but should be based on an additional artistic reason, such as addressing the problem of historically informed performance.

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In Conclusion: Forward without Forgetting

If we were to dismiss the possibility of a pure artistic judgement as impossible — or even undesirable — then the law of the strongest would prevail, and we would have no grounds to reproach those who reduce science to ‘just having an opinion’. As I argued above, a connection can be drawn between art and morality. Not in a crude or direct sense, as in the old adage of the ‘edification of the people’, but in the way indicated by Kant and, following in his wake, Susan Sontag.³ Both speak in this context of the will. Kant links the experience of the beautiful to the symbolic operation of the moral. It is the “free harmony of imagination and understanding” that reminds us of the freedom of the will in moral action. In other words, the beautiful exerts no coercive moral effect, but symbolizes the very possibility of moral freedom. Sontag likewise connects aesthetic experience with the will, though on a more existential level: the will is not merely energy or attention, but an ‘attitude of the subject toward the world’. Art activates this attitude; it nourishes a conscious, engaged way of being in the world. For Sontag, as for Kant, the issue concerns art as such, not aesthetic expression in isolation.

Another aspect of the connection between art and morality is that not only the appreciation of art bears an analogy to the moral, but that learning to judge on the basis of the perspectives and conditions outlined above can teach us how to deal with inconsistent judgements; in addition, we may learn something from art that is consistent. And this always demands effort. Great art always contains something uncomfortable. The recurring call for ‘beauty’ that has been heard ever more frequently since the end of the last century is, in fact, a call for comfort, as Harnoncourt already observed in a text from 1980.⁴

This dream — or vision — of a pure artistic judgement is oriented forward, on the way toward our own Zoar. ‘Do not look back,’ for looking back is dangerous, as Lot’s wife discovered at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Orpheus when he left Hades with Eurydice.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin, via a poem by his friend and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem, refers to Paul Klee’s watercolor Angelus Novus. Benjamin calls this angel the Angel of History. Its face is turned toward the past; its wings catch the irresistible wind blowing out of Paradise. “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows sky-high. What we call progress is this storm.”

In The Man without Content, Giorgio Agamben refers to this text by Benjamin. He then compares Klee’s painting with Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. If Klee’s angel is the Angel of History, then Dürer’s is the Angel of Art. Whereas the former is driven backward into the future, the latter remains in place, in a melancholic, timeless dimension in which the fatal advance of history seems frozen. While the Angel of History looks back upon the ruins, the everyday attributes of human life lie scattered uselessly around the Angel of Art; they form a riddle comparable to the indecipherable ruins of history. Through their estrangement these attributes generate the very aesthetics that art derives from them. The two angels are inseparably linked in the nostalgia for a reality that can only be appropriated by rendering it unreal.

And as long as humanity has found no other way, individually and collectively, to resolve the conflict between old and new and thus to appropriate its own historicity, a transcendence of aesthetics that would not merely magnify the rift running through it seems unlikely.⁵

In other words, if we continue to treat history uncritically, purely from the standpoint of entertainment, we will remain stuck in a superficial aesthetics which, as a nostalgic binding agent, offers no genuine point of contact between present and past. That point of contact never transcends illusion; it remains confined to an objectwise mode of perception. It is time for another approach — a subjectwise one — which, in my view, is the only approach that can prove meaningful for a fundamental mode of expression and thought concerning what we experience as true in our lives. With head held high, facing forward, and mirrors at hand to survey and understand in full the context of what lies behind us — in relation both to the French notion of le futur, what we expect or wish for, and to l’avenir: that which actually comes toward us.

— Bonnemort, 4 February 2026

³⁾ Susan Sontag, On Style [1969]

⁴⁾ Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Die Musik in unserem Leben [1980]

⁵⁾ Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content § 10 [1994/1999]