Summary And Analysis Of David Hume’s "Of The Standard Of Taste"
Hume starts us off with a few words on language. While men of the same language must agree on wordmeaning 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 moralvirtues, really does no mor e than is implied in the terms themselves”.
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 asingle 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 consideredwise 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, discoverablethrough experience. Art is never lauded for transgressing these standards, but it flourishes in spite of thetransgression if its other merits are high — and if it does please through its faults, these must be inaccuratelydenominated“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 itsapprobation 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 theanecdote from Cervantes illustrates, even men of respectable judgment may differ in taste (sometimes quiteliterally), 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 andcritical 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 torepresent, the viewer must attempt to gauge its truth and clarity. Only the experienced and learned are capableof this: “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and clearedof all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever theyare found, is the true standard of taste and beauty”. Again, we return to the question of particulars — of course these are admirable qualities, but how to discern themin individuals? Hume tells us that it is enough to have shown that there are qualities that can and shouldmanifest themselves in responsible and erudite critics. It is not so difficult as it might be assumed to find goodcritics. Hume turns again to his considerations regarding the universal quality of good art, juxtaposing its criterionswith those of other human endeavors. In many cases of philosophy, ideas become outmoded, but style andsubstance 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 inconsistenciesand 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 atleast, 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. In these cases, diversity of judgment is inescapable and blameless. People and whole societies have artistic preferences, whichis 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 inthe 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 remainundiminished. Moral principles change over time, but this is not to say that the viewer can be expected toentirely divest himself of long-held opinions of virtue and vice. We must forgive speculative errors, such asthose of religion, unless they enter into the realm of morality and are offensive to our sensibilities.
Hauser mentions Plato as a conservative thinker that takes advantage of a new mode of artistic representationvia the dialogue. We have read Plato’s own views on censorship and the appropriate moral virtues to berepresented by the artists of the Republic. Hume’s account of Plato’s canonization might be predicated on threegrounds: the actual artistic form of the work, the idea/philosophy of inculcating and codifying certain moralvirtues while condemning others, and the importance and relevance of the virtues themselves to be represented. In Hume’s essay, would the Republicbe 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 Republicseems to the strongest rationale for its continued classroom success, but for Hume, this element might be largely disposable — it is interesting that the Republicmight be said to stand on thevery idea of artistic representation and moral philosophy that Hume both validates but also allows is a culturallytransitory 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 acultural 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 worthof an artwork is also found inVirginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In her essay on female authors, Woolf isconcerned with the material conditions of female authors no less than she is with the subjectivity anduniversality 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 alarger 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 somecontroversy). Both Hume and Woolf would say that there is something required in the critic to be able toappreciate the subtlety and particular quality of an artwork — to use Woolf’s word (pilfered from Coleridge).
