With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, [Hannah Arendt’s student Michael Denneny] observed, reality was coming to be divided between, on the one hand, a domain of objective facts explicable in terms of universally valid laws expressible in mathematical terms, and, on the other hand, domains of contingency or unknowability about which nothing rational can be said.
The faculty of taste, and the range of phenomena in which it can be found to operate, Denneny argued, revealed to early-modern thinkers a “fundamentally different kind of reality” from the reality sundered into rational science and subjective nonsense. This different reality is the one in which we still spend much of our lives, whenever we have to invoke what we sometimes call common sense to make decisions that we feel we can get right or wrong, without having rules in reference to which rightness and wrongness are defined.
What might be particular about modernity is not so much that these sorts of decisions are more salient to us than they were to our premodern ancestors but that we have a diminished capacity and altered vocabulary for describing the specific areas of reality in which such choices are made.