Abstract

The article examines the issue of aesthetic judgment. Why do people find some things beautiful and others not, and how are differences in taste formed? The main problem with making a judgment about taste is the ambiguity of the axiological conditions under which it is made. A number of aesthetic theories fail to build a strict and comprehensive aesthetic axiology, either because of an insufficient description of the taste formation process itself, or because of the arbitrariness of putting forward criteria that are unable to explain the variety of forms that are evaluated as beautiful. The common shortcoming of the approaches used in building aesthetic axiology is the idea of a predetermined judgmental relationship as an expression of some sensory relationship to an aesthetic object. The article shows that the activity of feeling with the passivity of the expression of feeling, the idea of their strictly fixed and unidirectional form of influence, is untenable, as it does not correspond to many everyday aesthetic situations. It is demonstrated that the sign and expression are in a situation of mirror exchange and the subject-object relationship cannot act as a principle of aesthetic theory. Instead, the concept of intensity of experience is introduced as the force of the image for representation, which constitutes the basis of the subject's aesthetic practice. As an alternative to this approach, it is proposed to replace the evaluative category of aesthetic judgment with the non-evaluative category of aesthetic experience, which affirms the fundamental axiological neutrality of the aesthetic sphere. The article also provides recommendations for building new theories of aesthetic axiology based on the primacy of aesthetic experience.