David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste (5)

In this post I will consider the issue of... 

Elitism

Hume identifies the Standard of Taste with the joint verdict of ‘true judges’ aka ideal critics. These critics are few in number:

Under some or other of these imperfections, the generality of men labour; and hence a true judge in the finer arts is observed, even during the most polished ages, to be so rare a character (§23).

In my view there is no good reason to doubt that Hume had in mind real people, rather than some kind of ideal to aspire to (though some commentators think otherwise). Does this dependence on a small number of arbiters leave us at the mercy of elitism?

In principle there is nothing wrong with specialists. Society would grind to a halt without them. We have specialist car mechanics, historians, pedagogues, biologists etc whom we rely upon for their expert knowledge. Specialists drive forward our accumulated understanding in their field – we have been employing them since at least the Neolithic Revolution to help us better understand how things work. Why should the arts be any different? Art specialists (by which I do not mean artists, though the two may easily overlap) abound in our schools, publications, media and universities.

Subjectivity

The first issue is the thorny matter of subjective preferences. No one likes to be told they are wrong about liking what they like. They are clearly not wrong, because they like it! On Hume’s view, the rules of composition appeal to the ‘finer emotions of the mind’. Even if we accept that not everyone has the time, temperament, opportunity or training to offer the fullest critical responses to works of art, no one likes to be told they lack the ‘finer emotions of the mind’ (whatever those are). Such objections are where the mutterings against ‘experts’ begin, and help explain why arbiters of taste may be disparaged as an ‘elite’ for offending us with judgements that don’t match with what pleases us.

The difficulty is that what we like does not always accord with what is excellent. We are back to Noël Carroll’s distinction (first discussed here) between liking and assessing. Does the ideal critic have the right to tell a fan of Barbara Cartland that they are wrong to take pleasure in her work and must stop reading her? I for one would not want to say so. Carroll explains:

Hume’s critics do things like compare artworks with other artworks of the same form and genre to assess how good a candidate it is of its kind. They transcend the prejudices of their own time and place in order to approximate the frame of mind of the audience for which a given artwork was made. They exercise good sense in order to determine how well the parts of the artwork function to realise the purpose of the whole.¹

These assessments do not require the critic to love the artwork in question. They are cool, calm assessments made with reference to rules. Often our enjoyment of art does predicate upon how good it is, but there is no necessary connection. Some things we can enjoy as ‘guilty pleasures’, for various reasons, even while we acknowledge their poor quality.

This distinction has implications for the behaviour of the critical ‘elite’. What if a fan claims that Cartland is a better writer than Tolstoy? This is where the critics may perform a useful social function by opening a discussion on precisely why they think Tolstoy is the superior writer and justifying their criteria. But if they condemn us simply for enjoying Cartland more than Tolstoy, they will be guilty of snobbery.

The scandal of taste

Elitism is normally understood negatively, in the non-egalitarian sense of a minority that enjoys disproportionate wealth and/or power and excludes people it considers unworthy. On the surface, Hume’s theory is egalitarian. It asserts a universal, uniform human nature, common to all; if it weren’t for certain impediments that might be experienced by anybody, we would all share the same taste. It is difficult to reconcile this with notorious remarks of his from other works, such as ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites’ and ‘nature has given man the superiority above woman, by endowing him with greater strength both of mind and body’,² which suggest this uniformity does not extend to black people or women. To keep to Of the Standard of Taste, however, Hume lists no prejudiced demands, e.g. that ideal critics must be male, or white, or ruling class. He does routinely refer to ‘men’ rather than, say, ‘people’: this is probably just the gendered language of the day. Hume probably takes for granted that his critics will in fact be men, but from the text’s point of view his critics earn their position purely through their endowments of good sense, delicacy, practice and so on. On the face of it, Hume’s ideal critics are not inherently an ‘elite’ in a negative sense: they are simply experts in their field. Whether or not Hume shared certain prejudices, his system does not depend upon them, so we may simply cast them off.

For Hume, however, universal taste does not mean everybody can be a ideal critic. To resolve disputes over taste we need people who, as far as possible, lack or remove the impediments to correct judgement. Some of a good critic’s faculties – like practice – can be cultivated, but others cannot. Freedom from impediments in the organism is an accident of biology – e.g. a person born deaf cannot experience, let alone judge, music – and we do not normally think of a quality like ‘good sense’ as something that be learnt. In short, we don’t all have what it takes. Therefore to find our Standard of Taste we must look, without prejudice, to a particularly well-equipped group of specialists.

So far, perhaps, so good, but things get more complicated when we look below the surface. Hume appeals to the existence of a uniform human nature, and the existence of a Standard of Taste that is true for all people in all ages. In reality, taste does not and can not exist independently of society, class and history. The very idea of taste and aesthetics, in their modern senses, was conceived – as Larry Shiner has shown³ – during the ‘long eighteenth century’ of 1680-1830. If we don’t take this into account, then our theory loses touch with the dynamics of real life.

The US philosopher Richard Shusterman has argued that beneath the veneer of universality lurk some unspoken assumptions that he called the ‘scandal of taste’:

If taste is not in any significant sense socially and historically conditioned, then a culture’s entrenched aesthetic judgements, the verdicts of taste which have so far dominated it, are thus accorded the status of natural and necessary facts rather than seen as the contingent and alterable product of social dynamics and history. Taste that departs from such a standard is thus not merely different but diseased or unnatural. Historically privileged subjective preferences (essentially those of the historically socially privileged) are reified into an ahistorical, ontological standard, a necessary standard for all subjects and all times.⁴

Hume’s Standard of Taste will be defined by people from a privileged social class, who expect their own taste to be accepted as universal. In fact, the taste of a ideal critic is neither universal nor impartial but socially and historically mediated and, consciously or not, reflects a class interest – as does Hume himself. Shusterman goes on:

[Aesthetic properties] are instead a product of a social praxis, a way of living with art which informs or prestructures our aesthetic response. Thus, in effect, Hume’s good critic turns out to be not one without prejudices but simply one with the right prejudices.

There is an inconsistency in Hume’s position. He claims aesthetic sentiment is natural and universal. Yet he designs his argument to ensure that adjudicating taste requires people who are, Shusterman points out, ‘thoroughly educated, socially trained, and culturally conditioned’. Hume imagines these judges as an elect few, distinct from the masses: for example, in §31 he says a ‘man of learning and reflection’ can make allowances for different customs but that a ‘common audience’ cannot do so. He thinks it a matter of fact that his critics are acknowledged by ‘universal sentiment’ to possess superior faculties (§27), and it is no accident that their virtues of talent, education and industry are precisely the virtues beloved by the liberal bourgeoisie to which Hume belonged. Shusterman spots the underlying intent:

No longer will taste in art be determined by the individual tyranny of patron king, nobleman or bishop, but by the collective tyranny of the educated burghers.

Shusterman argues that Hume was looking for a ‘normative stability’, a liberal bourgeois consensus that could balance personal freedom with conformity. He notes the obvious parallel between the common people 1) submitting their aesthetic disputes to a select body of arbiters and 2) consenting to a bourgeois parliament with, in Hume’s day, a tiny franchise. Hume allows some room for dissent, based upon variation in personalities and customs, but only within the select group.

Most of us agree that there can be glaring differences in quality between artworks, so it is legitimate to ask what the standards are, and finding an answer to that question requires specialists. The question then is, under what conditions are the specialists created, identified and appointed? Of the Standard of Taste does not demand that ideal critics must be white, male and ruling class. But in the reality of Hume’s Britain, they would, in practice, have been white, male and ruling class, because only that section of the population would have enjoyed the education, opportunity, time and resources to acquire the necessary skills. The situation today is better, but only comparatively. However sincerely the critics try to be unprejudiced, their verdicts will be the product of a privileged minority. This is the problem of elitism that confronts Hume’s account: it assumes that a tiny number of bourgeois men may speak for everybody else in the world. Treating their verdicts as authoritative entrenches the ideology and privilege of their class – and, as Shusterman rightly observes, the working class lack the education and resources to challenge those verdicts.

Not canon – Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player,
1615–17

Similarly, one of the main ways of identifying an ideal critic is that s/he liked works that, it turns out, have endured. But who decides which works endure? Quality is not the sole criterion of long-term esteem. Hume is taking a naive view of canon formation, which traditionally vets works on other criteria such as ideology and the sex of the artist. The woman artist Artemisia Gentileschi, for example, is no less deserving of attention than other Baroque painters of her day, but until recently has largely been ignored by art history: should the critic who recognised the quality of her work be refused the status of ‘true judge’ because his or her judgement did not align with the canon of the time?

There may well be a universal aspect to human aesthetic sentiment, but Hume’s method is not best placed to find it. His explicit readiness to allow modern critics to judge the works of other ages and cultures according to bourgeois moral standards (§33) is a case in point.

One response to this elitism might be: why not let everyone be a critic? While critics need not be as rare as Hume claims, this proposal is unrealistic. Of course everyone has the right to express opinions and judgements. But some people are better than others at certain things. Even in a society that invested in a high level of universal education and had equal opportunity for everybody, it is hard to see how highly trained arts specialists (academics, critics, art historians etc) would not still be necessary. Even a literate and well-informed public cannot normally match the skills of a specialist who has spent seven to ten years learning their field, and perhaps taught and researched for many years more. There is no shame in looking to specialists for the highest level of analysis, as in any other field. The question is, how we appoint them.

Another response might be: why do we even care what a bunch of critics says? This is the closing point, for example, of Noël Carroll in his essay⁵. The answer here is straightforward. We do assume that some works are better than others, i.e. that standards exist. This poses a genuine philosophical problem, and we are never going to solve it by letting every individual go their own way. Again, the question needs investigation, and, as in any other area of investigation, that requires specialists with time, resources and expertise.

A Marxist response to the tension of elitism and specialists might argue that in a society run by the proletariat instead of the bourgeoisie, our ideal critics would be drawn from a class that represents the global majority rather than a tiny vested interest. This would be a massive advance against elitism. However, this advance would need to be global to realise its potential. In the meantime, we in capitalist countries must look for more immediately achievable ways forward.

Given that there is no realistic prospect of scrapping specialism, how do we overcome the problems of elitism? Surely, by widening the discussion to be global and inclusive. By hearing the perspectives of aestheticians outside the Western world, of women, of minorities, and from outside a narrowly right-wing range of ‘acceptable’ opinion. Keeping specialists in touch with a continual global discussion beyond the confines of academia, through technology, education and democracy, would help dismantle that exclusive club.

Notes

1. Noël Carroll, ‘Hume’s Standard of Taste’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1984).
2. The first is in a footnote to ‘Of National Characters’ (1742, footnote added to 1753 edition). The second is from ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1742).
3. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001).
4. Richard Shusterman, ‘Of the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant’, The Philosophical Forum (1989).
5. Carroll, op. cit. ‘What do I care for critics?’ says Carroll. ‘I’ll do it myself.’ As ‘one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art’ (Wikipedia), Professor Carroll is far better equipped to do this than most of us.