“It seems to me that, if the question was still posed with such zeal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is due to a lingering sense that beauty is in fact something important, more than the mere turning of a screw in our mental machinery. If this is true, then the fact that people today seem less inclined to fight about judgments of taste, and show little interest in persuading others about what is beautiful, or learning to make good judgments, educating and forming their tastes, is something that should cause us great alarm. Our alarm ought to grow exponentially if it is in fact true that the way we experience and interpret beauty reveals an understanding of or disposition towards reality in general. In this case, to lose a sense of beauty’s connection to reality is, I suggest, to lose a sense of the reality of reality tout court.”