On 
The Nature Of Judgment 
And Our Discernment Of The 
Essential, Beautiful, Ethical, Ontical, And Pragmatical
And Our Appreciation Of The Successfulness
Of Our Reflection

	Today more than ever people still see the world as flat and feel that the earth is the very center of this universe! They look out on to their materialistic vision of the world and treat this panorama of experience as if it were structured like their perception and understanding of the physical world - a flattened expanse where all things are merely objects to be picked up, perhaps used, and then disposed of. Then, the more subtle of those among us - the idealists, in another version of the same thing pride themselves that this realm of experience is a realm of appearance; a countryside constructed by mind, yet; even here, the constructs of mind are still treated as `objects' like the ripened vegetables and fruits of the fields to be picked and plucked whenever our attention wanders over them.  These objects however are represented without a true depth of being. We present to ourselves a poverty stricken melange of superficial shapes and forms and hide from ourselves their true substance. If the truth be known we have merely to attend upon these presentations properly and look and listen carefully to realize that these mono-dimensional shadows cry out to be perceived in all their existential richness as structures that penetrate an infinite variety of dimensions, phenomenal existences that are thematized through the epistemological hierarchicalization of consciousness entailed in the very processes of thought along with the interdependence and semi-autonomy located in such natural stratification. It is my contention that should you persist in assuming that the experiential process is a flat one dimensional vista that you will find yourself following a successful recipe for interminable philosophical perplexity. Although the natural person may think they are objective in their empirical demands they will in truth be exercising an intuition that belies their protestations to the contrary. Without appreciating the dimensional structure and distinctive nature of judgment there can be no clarity nor depth of discernment and in its place must rush the superficial agitation of a general confusion, a confusion that normally would escape us in a natural mode of our-being-thoughtful-in-the-world.
	Therefore in our investigation into the nature of judgment we must pay special attention to the various experiential aspects and layers that go into and produce the final constitution of this distinctive type of consciousness. Only then can we come to an appreciation that allows us to philosophically understand; in hindsight, how the mind naturally exercises its discernment and from such a position of insight let us continue on to instantiate, recognize and measure the successfulness of our reflection.
	Today people allow themselves to operate without the  benefit or belief in a natural existential authentication that can be born in and give birth to a true universal spiritual-like discrimination. As a consequence confusion, prejudice, dogmatism, and intolerance result in an over whelming sense of social chaos whose forever imminent foreboding reigns as the undisputed pontiff over us. It is even more imperative, therefore, that we take heed of this implicit warning, for if we do not exercise a correct and healthy approach in the process of our living in this world we risk, with ever growing certainty, a collapse of all value and meaningfulness which will collectively lead to the eventual destruction of civilization as we have come to enjoy it.
	Am I correct in this assessment? If it is natural to enter into processes of judgment during many moments of the day and that this faculty normally allows us to successfully operate in the world what need then do we have for philosophers and all their scandals and arguments? Their excess baggage must surely make heavy labour for us with little profit to be expected in return. For what good reason or reasons therefore can I argue the case for a philosophical awareness into the nature of judgment?
	Pseudo-philosophers; those intellects who do not subject their investigations to in depth presuppositional criticism, have taken up residence among us and their influence has disturbed the way we see the world. Their short-sighted vision has flatten the world and their tongues have painted a picture that bears little resemblance to the natural landscape. In their addiction to the superficial presentation of logic they have spun a series of myths that would truly paralyze us if were even partially able to put them into practise, the impossible has prepared a programme that no tenacity of effort could ever effect yet the simplicity of the presented campaign has bedazzled us with the prospect of a `false' success that reflects in no way upon things as they experientially stand in the world. A flat mono-dimensional world can have no meaning nor value through the lack of contrast entailed. Significance is generated through interdimensional interaction which involves relational aspects, moreover, the process of consciousness itself is hierarchically structured the same way in its production of thought thus we are forced to conclude that the content of an experiential process cannot be depicted in a pure uni-logical modality except superficially and provisionally. The world is thus dialectical in its manifestation and pluralistic in its scope and only its surface can masquerade with the semblance of one face. A flat world is an impossible world to live in yet both the empiricists and the idealists will insist on it being not otherwise. A uni-referential project has no sense however attractive a proposal it may appear to the eye of the philosophically unsuspecting. Philosophers must examine their own game and immunize us against the consequences emanating from their more visible untutored fraternity. In this task fire must fight fire lest we cripple ourselves in the  destructive consequences that this blind one-eyed mentality will have for both us and the civilization we participate in as it manifests itself psychologically and socially! The pathological preoccupations of analytical logic must be abandoned! When we work in the garden of the world we set about using the appropriate tools for the task in hand, we don't stare at our implements and expect them to work for us by themselves?! Excessive attention upon the logical tensions of dichotomous thinking, without their dialectical resolution and harmony, can only disrupt, distort and disturb the natural flow of our existence.

	The act of judgment is a process and like all processes can be seen to have three moments, namely, a pre-conditional phase, a conditional phase and a post-conditional phase. Correctly the `conditional' moment is the act of judgment qua judgmental act and is characterized by a sense of the existential but without the necessary pre-conditional preparation it cannot enter into consciousness. Judgmental consciousness is transcendental consciousness and this type of experiential activity existentially manifests itself with a sense of spontaneity, power, truthfulness, vivid reality, appropriateness, etc. It is correctly transcendental, in a philosophical sense, because the act of judgment is transcendental in its organizational structure to cognitive consciousness as it manifests itself through acts of perception and conception. However, the pre-conditional raw material for the act of judgment resides with the cognitive and its prior preparation is a necessary a priori feature for the generation of an act of judgment.
	An act of judgment involves relational comparison and relational consciousness demands the presence of those mental features that can actually interact. Various types of consciousness can therefore be ruled out as the immediate raw material for the spontaneity of the judgmental process. Motor-sensory activity is sequential in its organizational output/input. Therefore as they stand one motor/sensory act cannot be directly compared to the next let alone another. In a similar position feeling-impressions cannot interact although can accumulate or cancel each other out in their collection as a sizable component in the constitution of affect or i.e. mood. A similar conditions applies to perceptual content - one perceptual image in its concreteness cannot as a sense-image be directly compared to some other. Only in the form of concepts can acts of relational interaction be entertained through the epistemological fact that only concepts can act as virtual-force-like packages that can be added together, or subtracted,  vectorially to produce a resultant concept. Hence the pre-conditional priority of the conceptual.

	Judgment through its utilization of concepts cannot itself be a concept nor a conceptual process hence its transcendental status in respect to the cognitive.

	Judgment necessitates pre-conditional judgments, conditional judgments and post-conditional judgments, i.e. essential judgments, judgments of value and post-judgmental responses. Let us investigate in some detail these three types of judgment realizing, however, from the transcendental point of view; from the act of judgment itself, that the mechanics of the judgmental process has only one transcendental form.

	Essential judgment concerns itself with the interaction of conceptual elements in the identification of conceptual structures with other structures or structural components. In the process of identification and inter-identificational association conceptual elements can only interact in terms of their common identity, i.e. in terms of common essential properties/relations. In complex processes of interaction this essential element is that isomorphic aspect preserved in the transformational transition from one identity state to another where some form of interaction is found to occur. The presence of conceptual interaction demands essential interconnection and essential judgment concerns itself with the discovery and verification of this transformational isomorphism. Essential consciousness also concerns itself with the totality of that under investigation, the transformational resultant of the actualized conceptual interaction and this sense of essence is holistically reinvested throughout the metaphorical body of that resulting conceptual product imparting a sense of discreteness and uniqueness. Essential judgment prepares the pre-conditional groundwork for the exercise of the judgmental act and as such is a necessary a priori feature. Processes of mathematical intellection and language identification primarily utilize this modality. E.g. numbers as `numbers' can essentially interact together, moreover, sums of the same can be equated when their is an equivalence in their essential totality as when e.g. 2+4=1+5.

	Once the relevant essentials are established in pre-conditional judgment acts of value judgment can be entered into. Whereas in essential interaction the relationship is purely between conceptualized structures in acts of valuation the interaction involves the sense of the agent as well. When the emphasis in this type of interaction is placed upon the conceptual structures themselves the mind comes to attend to the aesthetic merit of the situation. On the other hand when this emphasis is placed upon the agental involvement the mind comes to attend to the ethical merit of the situation. Thirdly, when this emphasis is placed upon the totality of the situation vis a vis the totality of our entire psychic background as the world of our experience the mind comes to attend to the ontical merit of the situation, i.e. reflect upon and discover what is thought to have existence in this world of intersubjective experience, intersubjectivity being established transcendentally through the common inheritance of a vocabulary of relevant context dependent essential structures subject to effectively identical processes of reflective judgment. `Relevance' being established by the degree to which the presence or absence of an essential structural component effects the judgmental process under investigation. Thus in this manner value judgments are naturally differentiated as being either aesthetical, ethical or ontical in scope. Let us now attend to these three types of value judgment individually.

	Aesthetic reflection investigates the degree of the presence, or absence, of aesthetical harmony in and between the essential structures that compose the object-state under investigation. In this the mind intuitively assesses the intrinsic beauty of that object-state situation under investigation. Harmony is the ongoing resolution of dissonance where `dissonance' is those differences that psychically appear to oppose the object-state in its overall presentation in itself and through its contextual background. Those features common to the overall presentation of the object-state in itself and with respect to its relationship to its context of presentation constitute the essential structures that considered collectively form a psychic background of consonance. It is against this background that features in opposition to its general semblance of consonance project a sense of dissonance. The relationship that engages these two relative aspects in their experiential simulation and reception generates the transcendental intuition of the aesthetical, the degree of successful ongoing resolution constituting the degree of harmony entered into by the object-state under aesthetical investigation. In this recipe for the instatiation of the beautiful we can note that in relative terms of reference too much consonance is as aesthetically unproductive as too much dissonance the former imbalance being too static and the latter being too disruptive of the overall object-state. Like baking a loaf of bread there must be the right amount of dough and and the right amount of yeast!
	In aesthetic appreciation we intuitively investigate the successful degree of ongoing resolution between those features that characterize each other as either relatively consonant of relatively dissonant. This process of resolution is experienced from the transcendental point of view as existential. Aesthetic reflection necessitates an aesthetic concentration of our interest and this investment of our attention is met in states of high aesthetic merit with a return that well exceeds the initial investment capital. This dividend reinvested in the body of the object-state under investigation inducing a more effortless appreciation of the same.
	Cognitively we are absorbed in the object-state being investigated yet simultaneously we are transcendentally detached from the same. Like going to a tragic play we find ourselves feeling the suffering of the hero or heroine yet for all the apparent reality of the drama we transcendent-ally know it is also a simulation of reality and not the real thing. Simultaneously we perceive the illusion of reality and the reality of the illusion and this tension among others is born in and resolved through the disinterested interest of transcendental detachment.

	Ethical appreciation is effectively aesthetical reflection with an emphasis upon agental participation. This participation can be the involvement of an agent with respect to them self in either possible or actual modes of activity, or, the interaction between a number of agents either enumerated or collectivized again entering into possible or actual modes of activity. In ethical evaluation a particular essentially relevant course of action or inaction is investigated consequentially either in a prospective or retrospective mode. In inter-ethical examination various essentially relevant courses of action or inaction are comparatively investigated consequentially. From an act of ethical reflection an intuition of ethical harmony is intuited. Without ethical reflection and instantiation there could be no ongoing integrity of individual or corporate identity.

	Ontical reflection involves the relationship of an apparently real object-state with the reality of the totality of our experience as an agent in the world. In this interaction we come to discern the reality of that under investigation realizing what ontological categories are probalistically involved in the expression of that object-state as it is able to enter into experience. All experience is real in the sense that it is a presentation to consciousness, however, the coherence of that object-state reality with respect to the background of our entire ontical experience under normal circumstances gives us the natural intuition of that which is accepted as existentially real, the experience of ontical reality being just as much a transcendentally structured existential experience. In experience the introduction of the tentatively beautiful, good and real all present themselves with a degree of vividness that inclines us to accept or reject such apparent self-evaluation.

	Transcendental reflection correctly involves no mere passive appreciation of the world of our experience but is also an equal partner in instantiating its presence through the power of the transcendental experience. This `power' is derived from the cognitive channeling of the affective under the spontaneous control of the transcendental. Although treated as post-conditional it is correctly conditioned by the evaluational processes of the judgmental act itself. When derived from the essential structures of the investigation the transcendental has the power to instantiate essentially relevant and correctly appropriate behaviour hence its ability to be pragmatically practical. It could be said therefore that the beautiful can create beauty, that goodness can promote the good, that reality can establish the real.

	Allowing the mind to establish the transcendental point of view allows us to discern and establish the essential, the beautiful, the ethical, the ontical and the pragmatical. Because the transcendental experience is transcognitive in its epistemological structure and generation the sense of the existential manifests itself with a different sense of space, time, causality and self. Spatial properties become relativized and holistically treated allowing the experiential essence to permeate the totality of the relevant experiential field. Temporal properties are reperceived as of the eternal ongoing moment with all the spontaneity of creativity entailed therein. Physical causality itself appears to be transcended producing an experience of freedom that transcends the limitations of the cognitive. Development of the transcendental point of view also allows us to transcend the egoism of the cognitive sense of self making room for the entrance of the intersubjective and objective yet preserving the subjective uniqueness of the individual. Through the totality of the whole exceeding the summation of its parts the transcendental experience has the power to critically allow us to transcend cognitive limitations. Recognition of these hallmarks, among others, allows us to recognize the presence of the transcendentally existential.

	Once a judgmental process has been effected it can be retrospectively reflected upon in cognitive terms of reference. Again new processes of judgment can be entered into and intuition of the successfulness of a judgmental act can be allowed to inform us of its provisional degree of successfulness.

	In our natural ability to discern the essential, the beautiful, the ethical, the ontical and the pragmatical our insight into the nature of the world allows us to exercise a greater degree of freedom. Such insight is not only valuable in itself but also gives value. All true value is existentially realized hence the importance of our recognizing this experiential fact. 

	Because the transcendental nature of judgment has but one form and one form only; from the transcendental point of view, we are now in a position to formulate a tentative theory of truth for that by right is the very substance of judgment. My argument for this is not novel but the nature of my approach for doing this is an expression of the manner in which I have attempted to unify the miscellany of attempts in this field that appear to have some degree of merit. Much profit can be gained from a careful philosophical unification of this field preserving in this process the natural intuitive insights of a number of theoretical approaches such as , for example, those theories centered in correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, valuation, semantic transformation, etc. In this systematization and harmonization of this controversial field of philosophical endeavour rather than let these partial views continually criticize each other in a mutually destructive manner, as has been the history of their interaction, let us engage ourselves in the expansion of our terms of reference in order to understand why in the first place these many proposals should find such persistent favour. In this task we have already shown how the correspondence of essences, the coherence of valuation and the natural pragmatic utility of post-conditional judgment follow upon each other. That being the case it is now left for us to show how these various aspects possess the same transcendental form and in this task I shall adopt and adapt a semantic approach and thereby unify this theory of truth.
Briefly this consists in a recognition that judgment involves the engagement of relationships expressed in essentially conceptualized propositional structures that in their transformation from one aspect of the interactional equation to another preserve some measure of isomorphic invariance. In regard to this invariant region the discovery of its presence allows us to confer the seal of verification with respect to those interactional aspects found to maintain such an essential area of stability. Five fingers on one hand and five fingers on the other when added up produce the total of ten because between the numerical level of identity and the presence of fingers on our two hands in the mind's transformational movement from a numerical mode to a perceptual modality there is preserved an isomorphic region of ten-likeness.
	The transcendental form of essential, valuational and pragmatical judgments has the same semantic expression, namely, that in the propositional expression P; i.e. S is p, the same is true if its meta-propositional examination preserves the same essential properties/relations that constitute p-ness, the nature of that isomorphic region characterizing the manner in which truthfulness is expressed; whether it be a truth of logical form, value and fact or utility. The successfulness of our judgmental process can also be propositionally treated in the same fashion although the intuition of transcendental success is correctly discerned trans-transcendentally in the psychic background that appreciates the exercise of judgmental activity.

	In art judgments of beauty are made by the artist and by the audience. In this type of judgment we can ask ourselves the question as to whether matters of truthfulness have any application in this field of endeavour? In a painting what truth can we find when such imagery found present there can never be any thing more than what it is, i.e. marks made upon some paper, canvas or silk or some other medium?
	Let us unpack this question and realize that judgment has three fundamental aspects of the essential, valuational and the pragmatical and that art is primarily concerned with the valuational. In matters of aesthetic valuation judgment concerns itself with questions of artistic intent, the aesthetic merit of such intent and the successfulness of their instantiation. All three of these factors interrelate and must be considered together. On a fundamental level the artist must essentialize their artistic concept, construct it with an intrinsic aesthetic merit and successfully instantiate its communication. The essential aspect is that component of the artwork that is relevant to its totality and it is through the successful extraction of essence that an audience can intersubjectively realize the objectivity of an artwork, i.e. realize the intersubjective-objectivity intended by the artist. This does not mean that an artwork has a definitive definition in terms of essence in a logical mode but that its essential components are effectively recognizable both individually and through their totality, the latter aspect realizing the intersubjective-objective merit of that artwork. When we look at the face of another human being we do not perceive nor remember all its faults, blemishes, wrinkles, etc. Instead we extract an ideal version of the same (hence the concept of `pragnatz') and in this manner find ourselves able to remember this particular face, recognize its reoccurrence in our visual field of perception. A recognition of the essential assisted by the artistry of the artist allows us to realize the effective intentions of the artist. We may have no direct access to any or all of their intentions we do possess however, albeit indirectly, an effective entry to the same. Questions of aesthetic truth therefore must apply, through the necessary precondition of the essential, to the structure of those essential features, the aesthetic merit of their aesthetic interaction and the successfulness of their apparently intended instantiation. Verification of the degree to which these three facets are present and the successfulness of their interaction establishing an intuition of overall aesthetic merit. An artist therefore must establish an essentialization of their ideas, arrange them in a consonant-dissonant fashion that induces a high degree of aesthetic resolution and invest this aesthetic richness in the crafted body of their artwork. Thus it is in this manner we can ask the rather strange questions "can there be truth in art, can we find truthfulness in aesthetic judgment, in what way can truth enter into the aesthetic process both in its induction and reception"? Of course those aesthetic intentions that have no crafted essential instantiation play no role in the artwork as an artwork and their evocation for the artist is purely incidental.

	In this essay I have attempted to show that the nature of judgment is amenable to a fruitful analysis. In my polemics against the flat mono-dimensional mentality of the empiricist and the idealist I have attempted to show something of the natural dialectical richness of phenomenal experience. Although judgment has many types of cognitive  applications it possesses only one transcendental form hence the science of our subject. Recognition that there can be a definitive epistemology and that the existential character of the transcendental point of view is able to realize its own ongoing critically allows us to realize the art of our discipline, thence the discernment of the essential, beautiful, ethical, ontical and the pragmatical along with the critical ability to realize the overall successfulness of our judgmental endeavours!

					    Noël Tointon in Sydney, 1/1/87.