Cultivating Standards of Taste: "Aisthesis" in Liberal Arts and Science Pedagogy

In Of the Standard of Taste, David Hume retells a story lifted from Cervantes's Don Quixote Sancho Panza, it is revealed, comes from a family with an excellent capacity for discernment in wine; it is a "quality hereditary" in his line. Indeed, Pancho declares, two of his kinsman on his father's side—the finest tasters in la Mancha!—were once asked to bear judgement upon a hogshead of a particularly fine vintage. While these master tasters did not leave unimpressed, they each independently identified two unexpected flavors: in one instance, the faint taste of leather, and in the other, the metallic tang of iron. Hume writes, "You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom an old key with a leathern thong tied to it."¹

Hume's metaphor points to the discriminatory capacity that comes with experience in a domain. More direct to our thesis, Pancho's two kinsmen were able to discern that something was not quite right with the wine. We suggest that educators also want their students to be able to discern when something is not quite right. Educators seek to supplant students' raw or naive intuitions with more refined intuitions about a particular domain—tasting the leather and the iron in the wine, so to speak. Educators want students, and people more generally, to recognize when ideas, frameworks, and processes don't "look right." Consequent to this recognition may be attempts to fill in knowledge gaps and learn new problem-solving approaches. When we know that something does not look right, sound right, or feel right, we investigate further. We dub this faculty for recognition "aisthesis."

The decision to call this faculty "aisthesis" rather than "aesthesis" is intentional. Whereas aesthesis tends to refer to either the qualitative, conscious dimension of experience (in Kant), or to the refinement and cultivation of preferences (in Schiller), what we mean by aisthesis is something rather more fundamental: the intuitive capacity to recognize and identify incoherence. We say "intuitive" because coherence is not by any means as circumscribed as more determinate concepts, such as "chair," or "gross domestic product." Indeed, it cannot be; there is no set of analytically necessary and eternally sufficient conditions for coherence, as Barry Allen observes.² Knowledge and skill sets may cohere—viz., they may be internally consistent—in many ways.

However, simply because coherence is intuitive does not mean that coherence is something that humans acquire naively; it does not come along for free. On the contrary, the capacity to discern coherence—in other words, aisthesis—is something that requires gentle nurturing and cultivation—a patient coaxing, as if convincing a stubborn houseplant to express flowers. Furthermore, acquiring this skill is itself a precondition for recognizing and using determinate concepts in a competent manner. While it might be the case that a student without a sense of aisthesis can speak intelligently on the internal features of a given determinate concept, asking that same student to make sense of how that determinate concept might relate with other determinate concepts in a given context is impossible without aisthesis. Indeed, it is only through the cultivation of aisthesis that human beings develop the requisite "prelogical preference, prelinguistic sensitivity to felt differences, an aesthetic comprehension of objective, synthetic, constructed coherence."³

We would like to stress that simply because aisthesis is itself "aesthetic" by no means implies that it is relevant only for disciplines on the "literature" side of the union between literature and the sciences. To the contrary, this cultivated sensitivity to coherence is relevant to scholars across all disciplinary domains, irrespective of method or subject matter. Not only is this purported and much-ballyhooed distinction between magisteria likely premised upon a category error—as J. E. Gordon observed, "Ship design differs from the creation of poetry only in its numerate content"—but to imagine that scientific enterprises themselves do not benefit from a cultivated sensitivity to coherence is fundamentally misguided; indeed...