Translation and Taste
3 days ago
- #judgment
- #aesthetics
- #translation
- Translation reveals multiple valid interpretations without a single perfect version, highlighting the diversity of goodness.
- Taste mediates contradictions, acting as both an individual capacity and an object's quality, bridging personal whim and objective value.
- Hannah Arendt distinguished judgment from thinking and willing, emphasizing its role in aesthetic and political discourse amid normative uncertainty.
- Michael Denneny explored taste as a historical concept, linking it to pleasure, embodiment, and ethical decision-making beyond rigid rules.
- Early-modern thinkers like Bouhours used translation and dialogue to cultivate taste, modeling ethical and political wisdom through aesthetic education.
- The 'je ne sais quoi' reflects an objective yet indefinable quality in taste, resisting reduction to either pure subjectivity or universal rationality.
- Translation and tact are ethical acts, requiring consideration of context and audience to bridge cultural and temporal divides.
- Modernity struggles to articulate the reality of taste, often dismissing it as mere common sense or irrational preference.
- Denneny and Arendt saw aesthetic judgment as a template for navigating uncertainty in ethics and politics, emphasizing exemplars over rules.