OF THE STANDARD OF TASTE

Hume starts us off with a few words on language. While men of the same language must agree on word
meaning and most agree on what is blameworthy or praiseworthy, the particulars vary wildly. Language makes
certain virtues and vices self-evident in terms of whether or not they are virtue or vice. Of course temperance,
honesty, kindness, etc are good things—they are denominated virtues: “whoever recommends any moral
virtues, really does no more than is implied in the terms themselves” (5). Virtues at large are easy to point out,
but when a particular character is considered, such as Ulysses, it is much harder to pronounce the actions of a
single agent virtuous.

Word meanings actually influence human behavior much more than positive laws by attaching a virtue to a
person’s actions and defining precepts to live by. For example, it would be more desirable to be considered
wise than law-abiding, for wisdom is a virtue in itself and “law-abiding,” while not in general un-virtuous,
introduces a species of relativity and is not usually considered an end in itself.

Taste in art might be relative to the individual, but on the whole, it is not arbitrary. Public sentiment admits of
clear divisions between what is aesthetically valuable and what is not. There are rules to art, discoverable
through experience. Art is never lauded for transgressing these standards, but it flourishes in spite of the
transgression if its other merits are high—and if it does please through its faults, these must be inaccurately
denominated “faults.”

Art cannot be accurately judged in a particular situation or by a particular man. Particular instances admit of
too much external or internal variation. Art is best judged by its anointed place in canon and the longevity of its
approbation by the public. From this, we can assume there are certain objective qualities that an artwork must
possess in order to attain this historically consistent praise.

When it comes to individual art appreciation, a certain delicacy is necessary to perceive beauty. As the
anecdote from Cervantes illustrates, even men of respectable judgment may differ in taste (sometimes quite
literally), not because of an objective quality in the work, but because of a lacking perception of subtlety. While
beauty and deformity are qualities the mind ascribes to objects, the objects themselves must possess something
that excites these ideas, in greater or lesser proportion. To understand what it is in the objects themselves that
excites the idea of beauty, we must empty the hogshead, so to speak, and study the established forms of art that
should necessarily entice a truly subtle observer by conforming to his taste. This will also enable us to remove
pretenders to the throne of delicacy and use the art canon to determine those who are worthy of our artistic and
critical approbation.

When it comes to aesthetic judgment, practice makes perfect. Multiple viewings can only aid in our
discernment of the value of an artwork.

Comparison of artworks is helpful and impossible to avoid, but retaining some (situational and artistic)
objectivity is valuable to the viewer. Undue prejudice is to be avoided at all costs.

The purpose of the work is something to have in mind when evaluating its success. Whatever the work seeks to
represent, the viewer must attempt to gauge its truth and clarity. Only the experienced and learned are capable
of this: “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared
of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they
are found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (17).
Again, we return to the question of particulars—of course these are admirable qualities, but how to discern them
in individuals? Hume tells us that it is enough to have shown that there are qualities that can and should
manifest themselves in responsible and erudite critics. It is not so difficult as it might be assumed to find good
critics.

Hume turns again to his considerations regarding the universal quality of good art, juxtaposing its criterions
with those of other human endeavors. In many cases of philosophy, ideas become outmoded, but style and
substance can be separated in posterity, and the former may still retain some valuation. (To take a rather banal
example, Aristotle thought that women had fewer teeth than men, but for all his sundry minute inconsistencies
and inaccuracies, we hardly deny him his place in the western philosophical canon. A less trite example would
be Ezra Pound, a man who articulated many terrible opinions, but is nevertheless still considered, stylistically at
least, an important literary figure—more on this later.) In the course of historical development, particular ideas
may be transitory and are often disposable, artistic merit and intellectual achievement, on the whole, is not.

Variations in approbation of art can also come from one or both of two places: “the different humors of
particular men; the other, the particular manners and opinions of our age and country” (19). In these cases,
diversity of judgment is inescapable and blameless. People and whole societies have artistic preferences, which
is unavoidable. Objectivity in the learned critic is again cited as a way out of customary and limiting modes of
thinking, but there is a critical mass with regard to cultural preferences and man cannot ever be wholly not of
his own century.

The learned critic must make allowances for cultural changes, but where there are real moral flaws depicted in
the art and not disparaged in some way, this is a problem for the artwork’s aesthetic validity. The author may
be excused as a product of his era, but this is not to say that the contemporary quality of the work may remain
undiminished. Moral principles change over time, but this is not to say that the viewer can be expected to
entirely divest himself of long-held opinions of virtue and vice. We must forgive speculative errors, such as
those of religion, unless they enter into the realm of morality and are offensive to our sensibilities.

Ruminations and interesting things:

--Hauser mentions Plato as a conservative thinker that takes advantage of a new mode of artistic representation
via the dialogue. We have read Plato’s own views on censorship and the appropriate moral virtues to be
represented by the artists of the Republic. Hume’s account of Plato’s canonization might be predicated on three
grounds: the actual artistic form of the work, the idea/philosophy of inculcating and codifying certain moral
virtues while condemning others, and the importance and relevance of the virtues themselves to be represented.
In Hume’s essay, would the Republic be able to stand as a work of art on the virtues of these three elements, or
must some be discarded? For Hume, would any particulars in Plato’s dialogue diminish it as a whole? The
speculative element of the Republic seems to the strongest rationale for its continued classroom success, but for
Hume, this element might be largely disposable—it is interesting that the Republic might be said to stand on the
very idea of artistic representation and moral philosophy that Hume both validates but also allows is a culturally
transitory thing. However, Hume seems to agree with Plato in terms of what kind of things (specifically,
virtues) ought to be represented, so it is interesting to note that Plato’s ideas about representation (at least
politically and socially, hard to say from this reading what Hume might say about the Forms, save for in a
cultural context) find in Hume a sort of kinship and an artistic validation of sorts.

--It might be tempting to read this essay as an exultation of the exquisite taste of dead white men, coming to us
by way of a dead white man, though I would argue that Hume is remarkably clear-headed on the issue of a
critic’s objectivity and the problems of one’s cultural prejudices. In fact, much of what he says about the worth
of an artwork is also found in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In her essay on female authors, Woolf is
concerned with the material conditions of female authors no less than she is with the subjectivity and
universality of their intellectual and artistic proclivities. A problem with Hume’s essay that she might point out,
however, is that content has played a large role in keeping women out of the Western literary canon—Jane
Austen et al. primarily write on domestic subjects, and that has precluded many critics from understanding a
larger universality to their work (it would, of course, be ludicrous to say that every female artist’s work has
been inadequately lauded or that every female artist has work worth lauding—this is currently a topic of some
controversy). Both Hume and Woolf would say that there is something required in the critic to be able to
appreciate the subtlety and particular quality of an artwork—to use Woolf’s word (pilfered from Coleridge), a
sort of “androgynous” sensitivity to the parts that constitute the universality of the whole.