David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste (Conclusion)

In Of the Standard of Taste, Hume tries to find a standard by which we may settle aesthetic disputes. In setting out a genuine problem in aesthetics with such sophistication, he made a significant contribution to aesthetics. But these are five major problems in his account:

1. His conception of experience is mechanistic
2. He assumes there is a universal taste 
3. He makes no distinction between liking and assessing
4. His reliance on a few select critics is elitist
5. He says very little about what the Standard of Taste is

Claiming there is a sense of taste universal to all humans in all ages, Hume shows little awareness or understanding of how taste is mediated by society, class, history, gender and other forces.

Flowing from this assumption of universality, Hume assumes that his club of ideal critics will agree, or be able to change the mind of someone with a different view to the critics. This is consistent with a belief in the existence of a reliable standard, but is clearly naive. In the real world, there is no ‘joint verdict’ of critics – instead, even among the experts, there is a multitude of voices, sometimes in agreement, sometimes fiercely opposed.

It does not help that Hume makes no allowance for different art forms. All ideal critics will not be able to judge all the arts equally well. An expert in literature will not have the same authority to comment on music, and vice versa.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Scorsese’s The Godfather are both widely regarded as classics of film-making, but they are vastly different films. If there is a universal standard, it cannot lie in the culturally specific forms taken by particular masterpieces – e.g. a film must use montage, or depict Italian-American gangsters, in order to be good – but foundational organising principles from which arise all the diverse forms of film-making, and perhaps of art in general. If there is a universal aesthetic standard, we won’t find it by relying on a select group of critics who equate that standard with their own taste or the perceived taste of their culture as a whole. We are more likely to find it, if anywhere, in anthropology.

The anti-elitist could respond to the idea of art specialists with an indignant, ‘I don’t need to be told what to think – I’ll make up my own mind, thanks very much!’ Such outbreaks of righteous individualism are to be expected. But there does seem to be some common thread in humanity that enables us to admire art from different cultures and eras. How else would people in the modern world find beauty in prehistoric cave paintings, or ancient Mayan stelae, or ancient Greek or Egyptian poems? We do not want to reify one narrow opinion into a universal one, but we do not want to reduce aesthetic experience to individual preferences, either. Most people agree that standards exist. Are they right? Can we reconcile a universal human taste with the fact that culture and taste are socially and historically mediated? I won’t go into my own views for the moment. The best way to find out is through dedicated study by specialists: art historians, critics, aestheticians and other philosophers, and anyone else who can cast light on the question.

We do assume that objective standards exist. This standard may not have anything to do with specific ‘rules of composition’ and may lie instead of fundamental laws like pattern recognition. But any effective solution to problems of aesthetic value must reconcile any universal human taste with the social and historical mediation of taste.

Whatever positions we take, Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste made a hugely important and lasting contribution to aesthetics. Even in the first decades of modern aesthetics, he took one of the most difficult questions facing the discipline and laid out an intelligent analysis that is still provoking discussion two and a half centuries later.