David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste (2)

Albert Josef Franke (1860-1924),
Beim Antiquitätenhändler

In the ‘advertisement’ from his early Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), David Hume indicated that if the first two volumes were successful he would write a further one on ‘morals, politics and criticism’. Unfortunately for aesthetics, the Treatise sold poorly and the additional volume was not written. He shows no real interest in defining beauty or the sublime, and has no systematic theory of art. We can nonetheless find an aesthetics running through his extant writings, and not only in Of the Standard of Taste. We may also refer for example to his essays Of Tragedy, Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion  and The Sceptic, or to his discussions of morality in his longer works. In fact, if we only read Of the Standard of Taste we will underestimate Hume’s aesthetics.

Hume himself would have referred to ‘criticism’, not ‘aesthetics’ – he probably had not read Baumgarten and the term did not become widely used until the 19th century. He inhabited an interesting period when modern aesthetics was starting to be defined by philosophers like Shaftesbury, Addison and Hutcheson in Britain, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos¹ and Charles Batteux in France, and Baumgarten and Winckelmann in Germany, but had not yet been refigured by Kant’s seminal Third Critique. While Kant took aesthetics to a new level, Hume was clearly among his major influences.

In his essay Of the Standard of Taste, Hume observed that there is great variation in our judgements of taste. Taste is subjective, yet there is widespread agreement about the value of some artists and works relative to others, i.e. we assume that taste is not entirely subjective and that a standard exists.

This apparent paradox is a major controversy in aesthetics that rages to this day. Hume’s essay alone has inspired a considerable secondary literature, but he was not the only philosopher to address this problem: others of his time who wrote about taste include Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke and Alexander Gerard. Hume wanted a reliable standard for resolving disputes over aesthetic value, on whose grounds we may pronounce judgements of taste right or wrong.

Hume’s proposals on rules and judges offered a serious solution to a complex problem, and his essay is more dense and sophisticated than it might at first appear. I wrote a synopsis of the essay in my previous post. In the next few posts, let’s have look at a few of the issues it raises.

Empiricism

To understand where Hume is coming from, we must put him briefly in context. He is famously from the school of empiricism, a philosophical tendency that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in Britain, and was interested primarily in epistemology. How do we know things? What is the nature of the mind, and how does it sense the world?

The more ‘rationalist’ philosophers, such as Descartes, thought we are born with innate ideas. The empiricists disagreed, claiming that our minds acquire knowledge and ideas through our sensory experience. Our passive senses receive impressions from objects in the world, and we compare and reflect upon these impressions to build up a picture of reality. Since there are no innate ideas, our values come from the way our minds put sense impressions together, and how they register experiences such as pleasure and pain.

It is easy to see why empiricist philosophers would be much more interested in aesthetic questions of taste and imagination, since those questions play directly into their interests. The more rationalist tradition, with its preference for a priori reason over sensory impressions, had little to say about aesthetics by comparison.

We must not be misled by labels. Simply because Hume is called an ‘empiricist’ – the term came to be applied later – does not mean he has no respect or use for rationality. It’s true that in the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume talks of reason being ‘the slave of the passions’ and the passions as primary, but he later shifts his position and thinks that experience and reason (or the ‘understanding’) are complementary, as in this observation from the Moral Enquiry:

Some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance, command our affection and approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the human mind.²

The purpose of the Standard of Taste is

to mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment (§14).

And he asserts:

It seldom, or never happens, that a man of sense, who has experience in any art, cannot judge of its beauty; and it is no less rare to meet with a man who has a just taste without a sound understanding. (§22)

Both of these philosophical tendencies flow from a much broader development in society, namely the rise of a new ruling class. The bourgeoisie was beginning to formulate a materialist interpretation of the world, including an early atomic theory: given we can’t see any of those fundamental particles, can we know what the world is really like? Where do human beings and God fit in? Philosophers like Locke and Hume needed to wrestle with such problems, in the context of an anti-mystical British Protestantism. The switch of aesthetic focus from object to subject in this period reflects the bourgeois fascination with our relationship with Nature, individualism and subjective experience. Also, Hume’s attempt to create a universal taste and a uniform humanity betrays a political subtext – an underlying drive to forge a consensus behind bourgeois hegemony. In trying to claim a universal standard of taste, Hume is trying to solve the liberal’s dilemma of how to reconcile personal freedom with conformity.³

Relativism

At the beginning of the essay, Hume spends several paragraphs (until §7) summarising the relativist position. The argument is that all judgements of taste are subjective personal opinions and therefore cannot be praised or blamed.

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it.

Judgements of taste are based upon our sentiments or feelings, and a feeling cannot be declared wrong: if we feel it, it exists. But if two people regard the same work of art, and one thinks it beautiful and the other thinks it ugly, the two claims are contradictory. Surely they cannot both be right?⁴ The relativist says, yes, they can both be right, because they are simply reporting their feelings. There can be as many sentiments as people in the audience. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Hume accepts some aspects of the relativist position – he agrees with the analogy with morals, and later confirms it is ‘certain’ that beauty belongs ‘entirely to the sentiment’ (§16) – but he does not endorse relativism overall. He describes it as ‘a species of philosophy, which cuts off all hope of success’ of establishing a Standard of Taste, whereas the purpose of his essay is to offer precisely such a hope. He points out the other ‘common sense’ view that some artworks are better than others and acknowledges the ‘paradox’ that results (§8).

If the relativist view says that ‘all sentiment is right’, Hume’s account says that sentiments can be pronounced right or wrong. Again:

It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another. (§6)

Hume’s view

So: what is Hume’s position?

Hume argues there are rules of artistic composition that can be discovered through observation of great works that have passed the test of time. Such rules are ‘general observations, concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages’ – they are techniques that can be proven by years of empirical testing to effect certain responses in the audience. Artworks do not have to scientifically conform to fact, but they do need to conform to the rules of composition.

Like a good Enlightenment philosopher, Hume makes a mechanical analogy: art sets off the ‘springs’ of our ‘machine’ (§10). When the machine is working, through a deterministic process we experience pleasure in the object’s beauty and accordingly praise the work. Artworks will, when experienced under ideal conditions, create an equivalent pleasure in everyone. Philosophers call this ‘intersubjectivity’: the shared psychological and physiological makeup common to all humans which forms the basis of sympathy. Therefore ‘the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature’ (§28) and there is a ‘catholic and universal beauty’ (§10). Hume compares aesthetic responses to bodily responses, like tasting sugar or seeing colours.

The ideal conditions are important. The ‘least exterior hindrance’ to the ‘finer emotions of the mind’ disturbs the effect. We must choose the right time and place, have serenity of mind, focus our attention, and be free of relevant defects of the organism (e.g. we cannot judge music if we can’t hear it). In practice, it is rare to achieve these ideal conditions, and the mechanical beauty response goes out of whack. This is why we get diversity in taste. Otherwise people’s opinions would broadly agree (apart from natural variations in individuals and customs, as considered in §28-36).

For this reason, to settle aesthetic disputes we must turn to the people best-equipped to experience art – people equipped with ‘strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice’ (§23). These critics suffer the least impediments to correct sentiment and may therefore best judge how well the rules of composition have been applied by the artist. Their joint verdict gives us our Standard of Taste. If we learn from them, we too may be able to experience the artwork without hindrance, get the appropriate sentiment, and uphold the general verdict of right or wrong.

What are the critics experiencing? They are experiencing a subject-object mechanism. Beauty is subjective, because it is a feeling in the human subject, but it is caused by something specific in the arrangement of the object. ‘Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease’ (§12). The artist creates the art object in accordance with the rules of composition so that its ‘particular forms and qualities’ are those that will induce the desired response. Such works mechanically induce pleasure in an audience when experienced under ideal conditions. The rules are not arbitrary qualities, but are empirically confirmed to work the same way for all people everywhere, like Newton’s equations of gravity.

Hume ends however on a cautionary note: thanks to variability of individuals and customs, ‘a certain degree of diversity in judgment is unavoidable’, i.e. the Standard of Taste will sometimes fail. Some opinions can’t be rated as inferior and superior, and really are just different.

Notes

1. Alternatively spelt Dubos or DuBos, depending on whom you consult.
2. Hume, Section I of An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals (1751/1777)
3. See Richard Shusterman, ‘Of the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant’, The Philosophical Forum (1989).
4. In my view two contradictory things can in fact be true at the same time, but this is not a view Hume or his century would endorse.