In Vino Veritas

Another problem in the area of wine and philosophy arises at Ben Sherwin’s blog, where Ben responds to a challenge to prove that Lafite-Rothschild is better than plonk. What the challenge really is, of course, is a challenge to prove that it is intelligible to talk about wine (or anything aesthetic, as opposed to scientific) in objective terms at all, the type of debate whose temptations I haven’t succumbed to since I was an undergraduate philosophy major and convinced that the cause of human wisdom could really be advanced by such debates. In truth, it doesn’t matter at all. Nobody who understands wine will attach any value to your opinions about it if you prefer plonk to Lafite, nobody who understands music will attach any value to your opinions about it if you prefer the Beastie Boys to Beethoven, and these statements are true regardless of whether it is inscribed in the constitutional laws of the universe that Beethoven is better than the Beasties the same way it is inscribed that pi equals 3.14159265358979323846 . . . (etc.).

But maybe the truth of those statements says something objective about aesthetics, after all.

“Chacun à son goût has won out, and many people are not even aware that the argument has another side,” wrote Charles Murray, defending the other side in his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. Murray begins with two basic premises—that “people vary in their knowledge of any given field,” and that “the nature of a person's appreciation of a thing or event varies with the level of knowledge that a person brings to it.” For example,

If you know a lot about baseball, for example, you and an ignorant friend who accompanies you to the ballpark are watching different games when there is one out, runners on first and third, and the batter is ahead in the count. The things you are thinking about and looking for as the pitcher delivers the next pitch never cross your ignorant companion’s mind. Is your friend as excited by the game as you? Having as much fun? Maybe or maybe not, but that’s not the point. Your appreciation of what is happening is objectively greater. You are better able to apprehend an underlying reality inhering in the object, and it has nothing to do with your sentiments.

Interestingly, Terry Theise prints an essay on the same subject each year in his Germany catalog, and uses exactly the same example:

One evening at the ballgame I had the good fortune to sit next to one of the advance scouts who attend every game, gathering intel on the players. It was a slow night, and I asked if he could “think out loud” for me, tell me what he saw. And what he saw was an entirely different ballgame from the one I saw. I sat in admiration of his trained eye.

From those facts follows Murray’s third proposition: that “the relationship of expertise to judgment forms a basis for treating excellence in the arts as a measurable trait”:

The logic is that, by and large, the reason people who know a lot about a subject prefer A to B is because A is better than B—better in a sense that is intrinsic to the nature of the excellence in the field in question. Those who know the most about music devote so much attention to Bach because understanding Bach calls upon every bit of fine discrimination and knowledge that the expert can bring to the table. The prolonged study of Bach does not become boring, because Bach keeps presenting new facets for examination. A lesser composer does not pose the same challenges. His mysteries can be deciphered more quickly. He does not reward study as Bach does. Or to go back to my original example, the person who knows a lot about art can look at Titian’s Venus of Urbino for a long time and the looking alone—not the social context of Titian’s era, not the meaning of the female nude in the construction of gender, not what sort of person Titian was, but just the looking—absorbs the full attention of the art expert. Titian offers a lot to look at—to contemplate—for someone who knows about art. That same knowledgeable person cannot contemplate the nude painted on black velvet. He can think about its social context. He can wonder about what sort of person the artist was. But there’s not much to get out of the looking.

The argument is that people who know the most about an artistic field are drawn to certain works. The qualities that draw their attention are those that offer the biggest payoff in the aesthetics of the art, and this payoff is based on qualities distinct from subjective sentiments.

The usual counter-argument to this is to point out that experts disagree all the time, which is true, but irrelevant. Statistical outliers are a fact of life; what’s important is the depth of the consensus. Murray points out that one well-reputed musicologist dislikes Bach. So what? The arts critic Terry Teachout supplies the only appropriate response:

When I was an undergraduate, studying music criticism with the late John Haskins, who was then the music critic of the Kansas City Star, I brought in a paper for his perusal in which I declared that I didn’t like Schumann. He said, mildly, “You know, Terry, that says more about you than it does about Schumann.” As I pulled the arrow out of my forehead, I realized that I’d just learned a priceless lesson: if you’re going to express a personal prejudice in a review, one that causes you to dissent decisively from a long-standing verdict of posterity, do it ruefully, in full awareness that your inability to appreciate an obviously great artist is a failure of taste that separates you from the communion of truth.

Such dissents, it’s true, occur within the framework of general agreement on the standards for excellence in the field. An argument over whether Schumann is in the same league as Bach is a parlor game for people who understand classical music, a highbrow version of debates like who wins in a race between Superman and the Flash. They might disagree on the conclusion but don't fundamentally disagree on the standards to be applied.

Some disagreements, however, are fundamental. There are people well-schooled in their fields who think Warhol’s garish fashion statements are as important as the Sistine Chapel, that noise by John Cage is equivalent to Bach, that Spinal Tap wines like Sine Qua Non are better than La Tâche. One can either take them seriously, or ignore them as intellectual fads that will soon be consigned to the ash-heap of history by the inexorable march forward of human wisdom. That’s Murray’s approach. There is, of course, the alternative possibility.