Intra- and Interindividual Aesthetic Disagreement: A Response to Tooming

This paper extends the reach of the concept of aesthetic personality, as utilized by Uku Tooming in a recent article, ‘Aesthetic Disagreement with Oneself as Another’, published in Estetika (2023). Tooming invokes this concept as part of his solution to a philosophical puzzle concerning aesthetic disagreement with one’s past self. I argue that equivalence (or approximate equivalence) of aesthetic personality in cases in which one disagrees with an aesthetic peer or peers on an aesthetic judgement licenses the revision of one’s aesthetic judgement. This relates to both intra- and interindividual aesthetic peer disagreements. Interestingly, equivalence of aesthetic personality can, at least in certain cases, undermine the appeal of the autonomy principle, which holds that one must exercise one’s own evaluative capacities in producing a legitimate aesthetic judgement, and which Tooming considers a promising ground for not budging in cases of interindividual aesthetic disagreement.