→ a most comprehensive prolegomenon to date into the post-disciplinary thinking, adding new value to the current disciplinary research under the aegis of Taste studies

→ novel focal points in the observation of the cross-lingual, -cultural and -disciplinary origins of the discourses from which the majority of the humanistic disciplinary perspectives originated

→ the simultaneous covering of two thinking traditions (analytic and synthetic/continental)

→ the simultaneous covering of the systematic (philosophic), historic (of aesthetic, culture, education, epistemology, psychology) and actual

(cultural-social and political-economic as well as medial) aspects of Taste.

→ the simultaneous covering of the English, German and French language realms

Volume one. Logic of Taste

Saggital dimension: Systematics and differentiations

Introduction

Actuality and popularity – Systematic and historicity – Methodological considerations – Structure of the study1. Taste concept

1.1 Giving reasons §1. Insufficient reason – §2. Concept and difference – §3. Preference and reference

1.2 Thinking, perceiving and judging §4. Judgment and categories – §5. Faculties and ressources – §6. Analysis and synthesis – §7. Aesthetic concepts – §8. Aesthetic difference – §9. Aesthetic categories

2. Taste and cognition

2.1 Cognitivism and conceptualism §10. The art of invention – §11. Taste as a critical instance of logical knowledge

2.2 Universalism and realism §12. Aspects of realism – §13. Truth makers – §14. Conceptual truth

2.3 Particularism and anti-realism §15. Aspects of anti-realism – §16. Correlationism and coherentism

2.4 Aesthetic objectivism and -subjectivism §17. Relativism and non-relativism – §18. Relativism and contextualism – §19. Faultless disagreement – §20. Simplicity – §21. Taste-judgment and aesthetical judgment – §22. Assesment sensitivity – §23. Concept engineering – §24. Aesthetic realism and -relativism

2.5 Aesthetic conceptualism and -empiricism §25. Aspects of aesthetic conceptualism – §26. Reflective concepts – §27. Aspects of aesthetic empiricism – §28. Conditions of cognition

3. Taste and faculties

3.1 Making sense of the faculties §29. Herder´s sagacity – §30 Deleuze´s indeterminate accord of the faculties

3.2 Witty judgment §31. Inventio and iudicium – §32.Gracián´s ingenio and genio – §33. Ingenio and genio in further contexts – §34. Kant´s disguised reconstruction of inventio-iudicium complex – §35. – Taste of comparison – §36. Taste of genius

4. Taste and value theories

4.1 Taste, criticism and criteria of value §37. Taste as agency of value theory – §38. Epistemic models of aesthetic valuation – §39. Analytic theories of aesthetic value – §40. Default theory of aesthetic value – §41. Digression 1. Synthetic theories of aesthetic value: intuition and expression – §42. Digression 2. Synthetic practices of aesthetic value: modernist art criticism

4.2 Aesthetic truth §43. Facts and values – §44. Aesthetic preferentialism

4.3 Immanentism and invitationalism §45. Picturing Taste – §46. Imagining Taste – §47. Rhetoric of invitationalism

4.4 Aesthetic experience §48. Truth and synthetic experience – §49. Value and analytic experience – §50. Aesthetic value and aesthetic innovation

Volume two. Pathology of Taste

Vertical dimension: Historicity

5. Taste judgment

5.1 Tacit Taste. Philosophy and rhetoric §51. Optitudes and the historicity of Taste – §52. Fragments of forerunners – §53. From Gorgias to Plato – §54. From Plato to Aristoteles – §55. Cicero – §56. From Plotinus to Boetius – §57. Isidore of Seville – §58. Alcuin

5.2 Tacit Taste. Rhetoric, theology and psychology §59. Medieval reinventing inventio – §60. Avicenna´s estimative sense – §61. Latin middle ages. Sensus, honestus, decorum

5.3 Tacit Taste. Art theory and poetics §62. Nizolius – §63. Humanists and anti-humanists – §64. Digression 3. Reinventing inventio and ingenium

6. Touching, telling and true Taste

6.1 Touching Taste §65 Beginnings of the Taste discussion in Italy and France– §66. Academization of Taste – §67 De Piles and Boileau – §68. From Querelle to Du Bos – §69. From Crousaz to Du Bos – §70. Batteaux – §71. Philosophes in the Temple of Taste – §72. Gracián and France. Bouhours – §73. From de Méré to La Rochefoucauld – §74. Digression 4. In the mirror of Taste

6.2 Telling Taste §75. Aspects of Taste and common sense in Britain – §76. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid – §77. Addison, Hume, Burke – §78. Home, Gerard, Alison – §79. Digression 5. Capitalizing on Taste

6.3 True Taste §80. Apects of true Taste. Leibniz – §81. From Leibniz to Thomasius – §82. From Thomasius to Wolff – §83. Wolff – §84. König – §85. Quarrel of poets in the German-spoken countries – §86. From Gottsched to Bodmer – §87. From Bodmer to Breitinger – §88. From Nicolai to Gellert – §89. From Klopstock to Schlegels

7. The science of Taste

7.1 Aesthetics §90 Vico – §91. From Vico to Baumgarten – §92. Baumgarten – §93. From Baumgarten to Meier – §94. Sulzer

7.2 Beautiful sciences §95. Aspects of beautiful sciences – §96. Winckelmann – §97. Mendelssohn – §98. Lessing

8. Taming Taste

8.1 Kant´s Taste §99 Aspects of Kant´s Taste – §100. Refractive judgment

8.2 Taste and idealism §101. Fichte and Schelling – §102. From Schelling to Hegel

8.3 Terminating Taste: classicism and early romanticism §103. Herder on Taste – §104. From Goethe to Schiller – §105. From Wieland to Hamann – §106. Möser, Hertz, Moritz, Garve

8.4 Taste and emotions §107. Functionalist and humanist approaches – §108. Systematic and historicity of emotions

8.5 Tyranny of Taste §109. Distaste for Taste – §110. Digression 6. Culture as capital and the traps of Taste

Volume three. Ethology of Taste

Horizontal dimension: Actuality and popularity

9. Taste conclusion

9.1 Antirhetoric, aetiology, politics §111. Rehabilitating Taste – §112. Telling Taste: Towards a rehabilitation of the concept – §113. From Gracián to Velázquez

9.2 Ideological valences of Taste §114. Aspects of ideological valences of Taste – §115. Epistemological (im-) mediacy of Taste – §116. Taste, aesthetics and ideology

9.3 Retrieving rhetoric §117. Aspects of retrieving rhetoric – §118 Birth of Taste from the spirit of rhetoric – §119. Taste and credibility – §120. Taste and its rhetoric “gentrification”

9.4 Taste, culture and society §121. Gadamer on Taste – §122. Taste and “critical aesthetics” – §123. Bourdieu on Taste

10. Enlightening Taste

10.1 Taste and prejudice §124. Aspects of Taste and prejudice – §125. Digression7. From Vico to Kittler – §126. Sapere aude

10.2 Enlightenments §127. Aspects of religious Enlightenment – §128. Enlightenment´s emotionalism – §129. Aspects of “radical” and “moderate” Enlightenment – §130. Aspects of “counter”-Enlightenment – §131. Theology of Taste

10.3 Play of the faculties: pro and counter Kant §132. Baeumler and the logic of individuality – §133. Baeumler and the logic of Taste – §134. From Baeumler to Gadamer: Coopting irrationalism – §135. From Beiser to Gadamer: Coopting rationalism – §136. Dickie, Eagleton, Žižek: Coopting ideology-critique – §137. Bourdieu: Distinction and division of play and labor

10.4 Labor of the disciplines: disciplining Taste §138. Provenances and perspectives of discourses and disciplines – §139. From “moral journalism” and “science of Man” to ethics and social sciences – §140. From poetics and rhetoric to psychology and art philosophy – §141. From amateurs and connoisseurs to criticism – §142. Digression 8. From amateurs and connoisseurs to archaeology and art history

10.5 Contest of the faculties §143. Kant´s contest of the faculties and his anthropology – §144. Secularization and settlement

10.6 Archives of Taste §145. Archiving appraisals – §146. Foucault´s archives – §147. Foucault: genealogy, structure, subject

11. Cosmopolitan Taste

11.1 Charting cosmopolitanism §148. Cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment – §149. Cosmopolitanism and anthropology after Kant – §150. Cosmopolitanism and teleology after Kant – §151. Cosmopolitanism and universal history after Kant – §152. Cosmopolitanism and universal geography after Kant – §153. Varieties of cosmopolitanism

11.2 Disciplining cosmopolitanism §154. Herder and cosmopolitanism – §155. Nietzsche and Taste – §156. Sociological cosmopolitanism – §157. Ethical and political cosmopolitanism – §158. Cosmopolitanisms´ contested taxonomies

11.3 Aesthetic of cosmopolitanism §159. Systematization – §160. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan aesthetic – §161. Cosmopolitan imagination and cosmopolitan imaginary

11.4 Aesthetic of capitalism §162. Stoic sensibility – §163. Faculties-idealism and resource-materialism – §164. Taste and industry – §165. Taste rewind to the future – §166. Contemporary artist as subject of Taste – §167. Political economy of Taste

12. Actuality of Taste

12.1 Taste and valuating practices §168. The high, the low and the (neo-) avant-garde – §169. Apocryphal Adorno – §170. Culturalism and philistinism

12.2 Practices of choosing and theories of practice §171. Cultivating, taming, domestication – §172. Digression 9. Choose Life – §173 Popular Taste

12.3 Likeminded §174. Popularization of Taste – §175 Retrieving sensus communis – §176 Taste taboo and cultural canon – §177 Populist Taste

12.4 After Taste §178. Time for Taste – §179. Digression 10. Taste and immediation – §180. “It is good”

Introduction

The introduction presents the significance of the non-literal or figurative Taste for academic and popular discourse. It describes the complexity of the subject matter, which requires a simultaneous focus on Taste’s actuality and popularity as well as on its historicity and classification. Out of this, the double-edged conclusion of the study is derived: The historical Taste discourse was the root cause for the emergence of the diversified and dynamic research context from which today’s Taste has emerged as an integrated study subject in its own right. The structure of the study is addressed, showing that it covers the prescriptive, ascriptive and descriptive aspects of Taste that appear as both a result of and a resource for interpreting of its various notions, functions and actualities. In addition to transdisciplinary methodological considerations, six auxiliary concepts used throughout the study are briefly introduced: Insufficient reason, the invention-judgment complex, optitude, refractive judgment, cosmopolitanism and immediation.

Keywords: Taste, aesthetic judgment, liking, rating, ranking, comparing, invention, influencer, co-optation.

1. Taste concept
Chapter one opens the systematic part of the study by introducing the major notions and philosophical contexts that define the concept of Taste. The first area of focus is on the possible reasons for supporting aesthetic evaluations. Kant's categorial conceptualism and transcendental idealism is then countered by Deleuze's differential denial and transcendental empiricism before the consideration of Frege's hypothetical conceptualism as a candidate for an access to Taste, discernment and judgment corresponding to the dynamics of perception, preference and reference in generating meaning. The synthetic and analytic functions of invention and judgment are presented in the epistemic context of categories and the psychological context of faculties along with a brief introduction to the basic positions of realists and anti-realists. Sibley's aesthetic concepts are addressed in the context of Taste as evaluative judgment and the central “aesthetic categories” ( “aesthetic ideas”, “aesthetic principles”, “aesthetic judgments”, “aesthetic attitudes” and “aesthetic properties” or “-qualities”) are briefly introduced.

Keywords: Insufficient reason, cognition, valuation, discernment, difference, sense, reference, preference, analytic / synthetic philosophy, Kant, Frege, Beardsley, Sibley, Deleuze.

2. Taste and cognition

Chapter two focuses on the causal nexus of Taste and cognition. The commonalities between logics and aesthetics are addressed, while the vocabulary of the analytic tradition is used to give an account of Taste as a critical instance of logical knowledge. The dynamics and relations between universalism and particularism, realism and anti-realism, objectivism and subjectivism as well as correlationism and coherentism are described. Mostly contemporary cases are examined to prepare for the examination of the tensions existing between (Kantian) “aesthetic conceptualism” and (Deleuzian) “aesthetic empiricism”. Comments on proposals of ways to lead out of such impasses are discussed, while noting how these reflect the assumed split between analytic and synthetic philosophy, observed at the intersection of Taste's quasi-ambiguity between its inventive and a judging moments. The potential of Taste an alleged species of “reflective concepts” or as a practical form of ideality is then examined as a potential mediator between total determinism and radical perspectivism.

Keywords: Realism, anti-realism, assessment sensitivity, faultless disagreement, reflective concepts, concept engineering, aesthetic conceptualism, Michael Dummett, James O. Young, John MacFarlane, Hannah Ginsborg, Henry Allison.

3. Taste and faculties

Chapter three opens with Herder's psychological, epistemological, ethical and social use of the term “faculties” and focuses thereafter on the systematic implications of the doctrine of faculties with the Taste at their epicentre. The focus on faculties serves as a point of departure for a structured review of Taste's tacit systematics both before and after the Kantian systematization of the faculties nearly obscured Taste's composite, historical and generative character. A case for Deleuze's transcendental empiricism is made as derived from his reading of Kant's critical philosophy as the doctrine of faculties. The complementarity of inventio and iudicium is analogized with the Kantian operations of synthesis and analysis. Some commonalities and ambivalences between inventio and iudicium are discussed in a reference to Baltasar Gracián before Kant's reflective judgments are examined and presented as “Kant's disguised reconstruction of the inventio-iudicium complex”. To conclude, inventio is cross-referenced with contemporary reflections upon the “Taste of comparison” and “Taste of genius”.

Keywords: Faculty, inventio and iudicium, ingenio and genio, Taste of comparison, genius, Herder, Gracián, Kant, Deleuze.

4. Taste and value theories

Chapter four concludes the systematic part of the study with an expanded discussion of Taste's application as an agency of value theory. Are matters of Taste matters of fact or matters of value? An analytic, “meta-aesthetic” case of “reasonable objectivism” qua “aesthetic psychology” is presented (Schellekens) as an attempt “to weaken the traditional distinctions between facts and values, reason and emotion”. The “aesthetic experience” is then described as a response to the alleged elitism of value, as seeded in both the analytic (Beardsley, Kivy, Crowther, Levinson and Shusterman) and synthetic (Jørgensen) traditions as well in a reaction to the postmodernist synthetic anti-elitism elaborated in a “post-analytic phenomenological” canon of artistic value (Crowther). Analytic (Beardsley, Sibley, Goodman, Dickie, Shelley) and synthetic theories of aesthetic value (Croce's non-relativistic theory of value) are presented and exemplified in two extended digressions on intuition and expression as well as on modernist art criticism (Fiedler, Wölfflin, Venturi).

Keywords: Value theory, axiology, aesthetic value, value judgment, intrinsic / extrinsic values, preference judgment, aesthetic experience, aesthetic innovation, immanentism, invitationalism.

5. Taste judgment

Chapter five opens the second, historiographical part of the study with the focus on the philosophical, rhetorical, artistic and poetic applications of the Taste concept. After a brief report on certain early philosophical and rhetorical fragments (tacit Taste), the Sophistic, Stoic, (Neo-) Aristotelian and (Neo-) Platonic legacies are addressed. Influential medieval concepts including sensus, honestus, decorum and Avicenna's “estimative sense” are examined and some contemporary commentaries on them presented (Carruthers, Black, Talon-Hugon). Subsequently the transformation process towards a transdisciplinary study of Taste that includes theology, medieval and cultural studies is addressed. Further conceptual developments in the fields of art theory and poetics as well as in the contexts of the humanists and anti-humanists (Nizolius, Gracián) are presented as well. It is suggested that the realms of Taste, aesthetic and art continually overlapped and outreached each other, while the “reinventions” of inventio and ingenium witnessed and reflected the “brittle continuities” throughout Taste's early conceptual history.
 

Keywords: Tacit Taste, optitude, inventio, ingenium, honestus, estimative sense, Gorgias, Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, the Latin Middle Ages.

6. Touching, telling and true Taste

Chapter six covers a survey of the Taste discourse throughout eighteenth-century Europe. Three subchapters, organized according to language realms, address a complex and dynamic terminology as well as the conceptual developments between “touching” (Italian, Spanish and French), “telling” (British) and “true” (German) Taste. By following the major strands of Taste's rise and fall in the eighteenth century (including fifty of the most important authors), the chapter reports on how the Taste discourse led from the margins to the middle of aesthetic discussions and eventually to the disciplinary teachings devoted to sensual cognition, where the newly-established discipline of aesthetics was but one of them. One of two included digressions entitled “Capitalizing on Taste” demonstrates, additionally, the potential of constructive comparative case studies that include conceptual, class-related, capitalistic-entrepreneurial, commercial, cultural and colonial aspects.

Keywords: Boileau, Du Bos, Batteux, Diderot, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Gerard, Leibniz, Thomasius, Wolff, König, Gottsched, Bodmer, Schlegel.

7. The science of Taste

Chapter seven deals with the emergence of philosophical aesthetics as the “science of Taste”, followed by the context of the “beautiful sciences” or belles-lettres, in which the Taste discourse perpetuated into the nineteenth century. The major German protagonists of this process are addressed – Baumgarten, Meier, Sulzer, Winckelmann, Mendelssohn and Lessing – preceded by Giambattista Vico, whose designation as the actual founder of aesthetics is examined. Baumgarten's pioneering of the term “aesthetics” for the “science of sensitive cognition” or the art of thinking beautifully is described as a fundamentally cognitive conception of (the science of) Taste – a concept that was changed with Meier's psychology of temper and transferred gradually into the term and context of “beautiful sciences”. Sulzer's psychology of enjoyment and Winckelmann's Taste as the skill “to know the beautiful” are additionally presented in the context of the empowering of the figure of the emancipated, bourgeois connoisseur, or ideal entrepreneur.

Keywords: Analogon rationis, felix aestheticus, ut pictura poesis, aesthetics, sensitive cognition, beautiful sciences, belles-lettres, connoisseur.

8. Taming Taste

Chapter eight begins with three subchapters on the preliminary “taming” and “terminating” of the concept of Taste. A discussion on Kant's sensus communis and Taste as “reflective judgment” is followed by a review of philosophical idealism and of German literary classicism and early romanticism with their “meta”- critique of Enlightenment and concluded by looking at the idea of Taste as a kind of refractive judgment. The two closing subchapters focus on the systematics and historicity of research on emotions and Taste as well as on some rather reserved contemporary attitudes towards the concept of Taste and the aesthetical discourse. Important historical parallels between the inquiries into Taste and emotions in the eighteenth century and today are drawn, supported by the recent results of research in the regional historiography of emotions. The historicizing of the Taste concept and the role of emotions in the various research contexts are addressed as the contested field of inquiry requiring a transdisciplinary approach.

Keywords: Sensus communis, pleasure, reflective / refractive judgment, idealism, Sturm und Drang, popular philosophy, Gemüt, emotion, affect, distaste, culture as capital, Duchamp.

9. Taste conclusion

Chapter nine opens the third part of the study, which substantializes the hypothesis that the concept of Taste became the fundament, legitimation and the catalyst for the emerging division of labour, faculties and disciplines in the eighteenth century. The rehabilitation of the category of Taste is examined as an “aesthetical épistémè” which cumulatively transgresses the possibility within a particular epoch and operates as a scientific or ideological apparatus for separating the aesthetically true and false. It is argued that allegedly “post-ideological” contextualizations oversimplify or oversee the process of “disciplining” and local-national institutionalizations of Taste. They reproduce the methods of “cultural co-optation” which led to the decline of the functionality of Taste as an “aesthetical épistémè”. The concept of Taste as being subject to intellectual co-optation has, as it is claimed, ipso facto no intrinsic ideological valence and is as such presented as a methodological tool for the detection, diagnosis and tracking of the theories and practices of co-optation themselves.

Keywords: Ideology, Gracián, Velázquez, immediacy, rhetoric, anti-rhetoric, Gadamer, hermeneutics, Bourdieu, sociology.

10. Enlightening Taste
Chapter ten integrates the conceptualizations of counter-, radical-, moderate and religious Enlightenments in the process of the “disciplining” Taste in order to make the “trans-discipline” of Taste productive for current research and popular usage. Various implicit equations of Taste and ideology are addressed as cases of “absolute structural co-optation” and a junction between “pre-“ and “post-ideological” standpoints (Gadamer, Beiser, Eagleton, Dickie, Žižek). One point of focus is set on the advancing “division of labour”, which transformed the Taste discourse into the emerging disciplinary divisions. A discernment is made between recent studies on the genealogies of the academic disciplines and the present attempt to trace, substantiate and actualize the process of emergence of the system of disciplines out of the Taste discourse. It is argued that the latter process functions at best when the foci of the respective disciplines remain methodologically “out of focus.”

Keywords: Enlightenment, faculties, rationalism, irrationalism, sapere aude, Pietism, Thomasius, Jonathan Israel, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Alfred Baeumler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Frederick Beiser, Terry Eagleton.

11. Cosmopolitan Taste

Chapter eleven focuses on the taxonomy of cosmopolitanism and its relevance to contemporary Taste studies. Their shared treatment of Taste and ethical, sociological, political, cultural and aesthetic cosmopolitanism beyond current disciplinary boundaries is addressed as a tool to reengage the Taste concept in current theory and practice. Under the label the “aesthetics of cosmopolitanism”, the currently contested field of “cultural” and “artistic” cosmopolitanism is taken into consideration in order to better locate the patterns of cosmopolitism's historicisation and theorisation relevant to the future study of Taste. A perspective of the latter is then discussed with reference to the “aesthetics of capitalism” in the sense of overcoming the implied identifications of culture as capital and nature as resource. The economicability, politicability, culturalibility and sociability of Taste are described as four moments that may discharge the “Man of Taste” of the late eighteenth century criticized as a product of the hypostatized idealism of faculties.

Keywords: Cosmopolitanism, teleology, micro-humanistic, idealism of faculties, resource materialism, aesthetics of capitalism, Delanty, Waldron, Miller, Nussbaum, Appiah.

12. Actuality of Taste

Chapter 12 begins with an account of the transformation of the valuating practices of high and low culture, by using Benjamin and Adorno as backgrounds for a treatment of late-twentieth-century controversies including “culturalism”, “philistinism” and “New Aestheticism”. A discussion of contemporary positions towards the Kantian sensus communis aestheticus prepare a focus on “populist” Taste contextualized in political theories. The chapter implies in particular the temporal dimension of Taste involved in the processes of “exercising Taste” across epochs and in the contemporary impact of practices related to of media developments, behaviours, institutional, legal and political discussions. The structural epistemological (im-) mediacy of Taste was accepted by most positions, which seems to exhibit more than weak parallels to the anchoring of today’s media usage in the “ultimate” here and now. The extended field of Taste studies is observed as acquainted with “micro-humanities”, indicating a locus between “pre-“ and “post-“.

Keywords: Cultural hegemony, populist reason, immediation, ideology, cultural studies, micro-humanities, populism, Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Laclau, Kant, Aristoteles