Hume on the Standard of Taste

when it comes to judging art we often recognize that there are a variety of tastes what somebody likes might not be the same kind of art that I like people have various opinions on Art due to

their different tastes and they disagree on what is beautiful David Hume suggests that there is more to this story than meets the eye I'm philosophy professor and co-host of

overthink podcast Ellie Anderson and I'm sharing some ideas today from David Humes of the standard of taste this work from 1757 the excerpt that I'm using is from this Aesthetics Anthology which is

what I have used in the past when teaching philosophy of Art says that in order to be able to judge between different tastes we need a standard of taste

and he begins the argument by thinking about the difference between judgment on the one hand and sentiment or feeling on the other hand

judgment's Hume says have references to what are Beyond themselves to real matters of fact if I say Sacramento is

the capital of California I am making a judgment I am making a claim to something that actually exists outside in the world and which I hope corresponds to reality not all judgments are right of course

some of my judgments can be wrong I could say Los Angeles is the capital of California that would still be a judgment it would just be a bad judgment judgments are objective by virtue of the

fact that they have applications to real world matters of fact and so when we say that they're objective I think sometimes that word gets really

misunderstood misconstrued we're not saying that they are permanent immutable Eternal whatever what we are saying is that judgments

have to do with objects with things that are out there in the world the reason that I can be wrong in about a judgment in saying that Los Angeles is the capital of California is because that

judgment is about something objective it is about this like object Los Angeles this object capital of California now this is different from sentiments Hume says have reference to nothing

Beyond themselves as such they can actually never be disputed nobody can tell me that a sentiment is wrong in the way that they

can tell me that a judgment is wrong sentiments also don't represent anything actual in the object thus they are subjective and this also

means for Hume that sentiments are all right we can't have a distinction between a false and a true sentiment the way that we can have a distinction between a false and a true judgment this

I think can be seen in contemporary purlins when people say things like oh well you can't argue against feelings right because feelings just aren't something to argue for against they

aren't making judgments about states of Affairs in the world as a result according to this distinction between judgment and sentiment that Hume has laid out

those that say that taste is only about sentiment claim that there can be no standard of taste right that I can't argue against somebody else's taste

according to this view taste is subjective and so we can have different opinions about who the greatest living artists or greatest living musician specifically is and we can't argue against one another's tastes because

those things are subjective they can't be wrong and Hugh thinks that this is a pretty Common Sense View and I think this is absolutely right I hear all the time from my students that uh art is

subjective which it's literally not I mean art has to do with objects in the world but what I think people mean when they say art is subjective is that artistic judgments are subjective or

artistic taste is subjective and Hume says that yes that is a very very common view there's this weird thing that also

coexists in common sense which is a view that is very much in tension with the notion that taste is subjective and this is the claim that some art is

good and some is bad the example that I love to use with my students for this maybe it's a little bit dated at this point is Rebecca Black's song Friday you can look it up now and pause the video

if you want to if you haven't heard of it Rebecca Black was a teenager who uh came up with this song that is just like universally recognized as bad or at

least was when it first came out and this is why it became a meme and lots of people teased it and so it seems like it's kind of in tension with the common sense view that taste is

subjective to recognize that some works of art are actually bad the common Hallmark for this in film is the film The Room which is considered by many to

be the worst film of all time so how do reconcile the fact that Common Sense on the one hand says that taste is subjective rooted in what Hume calls sentiment while also on the other hand

espousing the idea that in fact we can and do make judgments about what good and bad art are all the time Hume wants to posit that a standard of taste can be

a way to adjudicate these opinions that are seemingly intention and where humans to go with this is the idea that there are Universal principles of taste that

are if not exactly the same among everyone that at least nearly the same he points out a few exceptions in the piece but that few are qualified to

judge art because these principles of taste haven't been developed in everyone in order to develop your own Taste and to recognize the principles of taste in

your perceptions of artworks you have to practice you have to refine your taste I want to draw attention to what he says some of the reasons are behind why we don't recognize that some artworks are

better than others the first that he identifies is what he calls delicacy we often lack a delicacy of the imagination even though Beauty

according to Hume belongs to sentiment there are he says certain qualities and objects that are fitted by nature to

produce sentiments to develop a delicacy of taste involves attuning ourselves to these qualities and gaining a

sensibility to the finer emotions there are going to be valences of emotions that we don't recognize before we become attuned through uh developing our taste

an example you might think about here although it's a bit of a borderline case whether you would call this artistic or not is uh that of wine tasting when you're first learning to taste wine

you're not going to be able to identify very many flavors but over time you can learn to identify more and more and have a much greater delicacy I also want to briefly interject here on this point

about wine and say that when Hume is talking about taste he's not talking about our literal sense of taste I think you've probably gather that from the context of this video but he's talking about taste in the aesthetic sense there's some really interesting research

some of which we've talked about on the podcast we have an episode on taste about this and then we also have a couple of YouTube videos that pertain to this as well that put pressure on the

idea that our literal sense of taste is distinct from the aesthetic sense of taste but Hume certainly uh seems to think that they are this is something Carolyn korzmeyer has written about so I'll leave it at that the second reason

that we fail to recognize that there are Universal principles of taste for Hume is a lack of practice right and so we have to practice to refine our delicacy we have to be

exposed to a work of art multiple times we can't just have a snap judgment about it and the more that we are exposed to a particular work of art we cultivate our

sense of refined taste and so we're cultivating not only exposure to that particular work of art but we're also learning how to see works of art more generally the third is comparison Hume

thinks that if we don't have different artworks to compare a work to we won't be able to identify whether it is good or not and so we learn how to praise or

blame an artwork through comparison so here what you can already see I'm only halfway done with the list is that for Hume the solution the the way that

we're going to overcome this impasse whereby we don't recognize the universal principles of taste is going to be through cultivating something that we currently lack so far we have

delicacy practice and comparison now the fourth is Prejudice Prejudice really gets in the way of our being able to recognize what a good versus bad work

of art is so Hume says that the critic must preserve his mind free from all Prejudice and he notes that this also goes for different works of art that come from different cultures or

different time periods in order to properly judge that work of art he says we have to have all of these circumstances the circumstances in which the artwork was created in mind and

place ourselves in the same situation as the audience we should also try to remove judging an artwork on the basis of judging its artist because perhaps my judgment will

be clouded if I am friends with that artist and I'm like oh everything they create is amazing or if I hate the artist then I'm going to be inclined to more negatively judge their work Hume thinks that we need to bracket that out

which also raises some really interesting questions about the separation of the art from the artist um which I think you see raging in debates today

is Good Sense Hume thinks that when we lack Good Sense we're not able to assess the Merit of a work of art he says that good sense is what allows us to discern

the beauties of design and reasoning for and goodsense thus helps keep in check the effect for instance of prejudice in

summary he combines these five elements that we've been discussing and says the following strong sense which here is a good 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 to be found is the true standard of taste and Beauty so

the standard of taste according to Hume is the result of these five elements Good Sense delicacy practice comparison and the

absence of prejudice It Is by means of developing these that our very organs of internal sensation which Hume says are imperfect and sometimes produce the wrong sentiments

will be corrected and allow us to understand what beautiful art is granted he does note a few exceptions here which you can read about in of the standard of taste if you're interested in more videos like

this check out our Channel especially the philosophy of art playlist and I would also recommend listening to the podcast overthink because we talk a lot about philosophy of art there and share our opinions rather than summarize the

views of other folks