Teaching the Art of Judgment

JOHN McGOWAN is Hanes Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of six books, including Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, and is on the editorial team of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. As a teacher, I have no right to tell my students how to vote or what religion to practice. I don’t see that telling them to prefer Mrs. Dalloway to The Da Vinci Code is any different. My job is to enhance my students’ abilities to judge, not present authoritative judgments to them. Any student, even one in kindergarten, has already developed preferences, even if the reasons for those preferences are mostly inchoate. Articulating those reasons—submitting them to scrutiny through public conversation—should be one aim of aesthetic education. In this essay, I consider what teaching the art of judgment entails. Working from and through the example of an aesthetic object is particularly effective in leading students to understand the processes of judgment formation and to consider the bases of their own judgments. Traditionally, judgment names the ability to recognize the full nature and import of something encountered in experience. Thus, the teacher is aiming to enhance powers of apprehension. But apprehension bleeds inevitably into selection. One chooses to spend time with this object, experience, or person, not that one. Criticism, the articulated response to the encounter with an aesthetic object, is often thought to invariably involve a judgment about whether that object is any good. Statements like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is better than Moby-Dick” litter works of aesthetic theory from David Hume on despite being just about meaningless absent the specification of criteria. Particular qualities, contexts of use, and purposes must underwrite any judgments of worth—and those criteria simply are assumed to be held in common with others when blanket statements of value are offered. That readers in 1856 would have preferred Stowe’s novel to Melville’s, while “settled opinion” by 1956 gave the palm to Moby-Dick, tells us about revaluations of sentimentalism, of direct versus indirect political rhetorics, and of melodrama, not