Translation suggests that there are many ways of being good—but no sure method. A sentence in a foreign language can be translated successfully into our own by a number of different English sentences, none of which will replicate the original’s literal meaning, play of sound, or range of connotations. The number and variety of possible “good” translations, and the impossibility of making any singular perfect translation, may make us suspicious about ever placing a definite article “the” in front of “good.” Translation can be the beginning of a moral education by which we are awakened to the undeniable reality of goodness (there really is something good in good translations) and to the strangely multiple, perhaps irreconcilably diverse, forms in which goodness appears.
Although informed both by logic and the illogical codes inherited from history (such as the grammars of the languages concerned), translation is characterized by a degree of freedom—and uncertainty—for which these codes cannot provide sufficient orientation. Its success can never be secured in advance. It is, rather, similar to a set of activities such as assembling an outfit, decorating a room, or planning a party. These are operations that can go (embarrassingly and expensively!) awry, and, when they succeed, seem to have pulled off a uniquely fitting and somehow surprising match between social expectations and the personal character of the doer.
Such operations, in other words, require taste. Taste mediates apparent contradictions. It names an individual’s capacity (you might have great taste in wine) and also an object’s quality (“This wine has a great taste”). It can seem to refer to an objective, even transcendent and superior source of value, as if the good taste of a taster or thing tasted were either self-evident, or an avatar of an invisible but no less undeniable “the good.” But we also use taste to mean something like a mere whim. I might excuse myself from giving my (low) opinion of your favorite novel by saying it’s just not to my taste (de gustibus non disputandum est). And, between these two extremes, taste also can be construed as something like the family resemblance among a community of fellow enjoyers (people with, for example, the “same taste” in movies).
Perhaps because of this variety of meanings, and perhaps because we are most self-conscious about exercising it in what are often considered little pleasures not worth taking intellectually seriously, taste does not have the grandeur of significance associated with judgment, another name for the aesthetic faculty exercised in the absence of reliable logical rules or authoritative cultural norms. For the philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), particularly in the last two decades of her career, judgment referred to a mental activity distinct from what she called thinking on the one hand and willing on the other. In a series of lectures given in 1970, she argued, through a reading of Immanuel Kant’s own theory of judgment, that the way in which people talk to each other about aesthetic matters, for which there are neither preestablished authorities nor logically valid rules, reveals the basis of political and ethical activity (which likewise takes place in an often concealed normative void).
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. We know that it is possible, in the absence of authoritative voices or logical rules, to make good or bad choices and to convince others to make them with us—yet how, and on what grounds, we do this seems mysterious, if not absurd. We too often allow the mental attention that might elucidate these processes of decision and suasion to be distracted away and thereby melt into our unreflective following of public opinion composed of propaganda, glib chatter, and cliché.
While much of her work attacked these attitudes in the most catastrophic terms possible, linking them to the rise of totalitarianism and genocide, Arendt also focused, increasingly in her later years, on the way that judgment, so determinative of our collective political and individual moral fates, is also crucial in our everyday conversations and practices in regard to art, literature, and the enjoyments of culture. She seems to have decided that we can best improve our understanding of judgment by tracking its operations in the sphere of aesthetic discourse and decision-making, where the stakes seem less dire.
Arendt died shortly after writing only the first page, with two epigraphs, of what was to have been her book “Judging,” the intended third volume of her series The Life of the Mind (1978). Its initial two volumes, respectively titled Thinking andWilling, prepare the terrain for an account of judgment by distinguishing it from these two other sorts of mental activity, which Arendt suggested had been overly valued by ancient and modern philosophy. Thinking (celebrated by classical philosophers as “contemplation”) is an isolating and estranging activity that suspends an individual’s participation in the world around her. Willing, which has in modern times often been valorized by radical thinkers, is irrational, violent, and driven to impose itself on the world.
Judgment, in contrast to both, arises amid exchanges of opinion among interlocutors—it is worldly but not activist, nonlogical but not unreasonable. How exactly Arendt conceived of judgment has become, in recent years, the subject of a large and growing scholarly literature. Amid the decline of public confidence in science as a source of authoritative orientation for political and personal decision-making, and the further erosion of any national moral consensus, it is unsurprising that thinkers today should turn, as Arendt did, to judgment as a faculty that operates precisely in such uncertain situations.
It is surprising, though, that little attention has been paid to Michael Denneny, Arendt’s undergraduate and then doctoral student at the University of Chicago, who from 1968 to 1973 worked under her supervision on a dissertation on “taste.” Denneny is known to scholars of Arendt for a 1979 essay that provides one of the first, and still best, explications of her concept of judgment.11xMichael Denneny, “The Object of Taste in the Age of Reason”; Michael Denneny Papers at Brown University, passim. He is known to history otherwise for his career as a pioneering publisher of gay fiction in New York, which he began after leaving Chicago and his unfinished dissertation. The three extant chapters of the latter (held in Denneny’s papers at Brown University), along with Denneny’s correspondence with Arendt, notes from her lectures, and other materials, offer thus far unexamined sources for understanding a crucial moment in her thought—and, more importantly, for understanding the phenomena at which her thought aimed.
Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.
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