Hume and the Standard of Taste

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Today, we're going to discuss Hume and his views on the Senate of Taste and with this lecture.

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It's the first lecture in which we're going to be discussing beauty at great length.

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And we'll also be covering this in the Kant lecture, which I think is probably going to extend over to lectures.

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I don't think it's realistic to do a critique of judgement in just one lecture.

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So tomorrow we'll do count as well. And that will probably continue into next week.

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And a likelihood, if any of you have done ethics, particularly better ethics,

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you'll be already familiar with some of the issues that are going to arise here.

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So one of the common questions in philosophy about both moral value and aesthetic value is about the reality of it and the nature of it.

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And a lot of very well worked out positions in media ethics that you can take on these questions.

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It's worth pointing out that regarding Hume, that he is not least declaims, doubting the existence of beautiful objects of beauty.

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His claim is a claim about the nature of beauty. And so I'm going to begin with some of his background views on beauty,

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because his views on the nature of beauty are going to be important for understanding his views on the standard of taste.

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Now, whether he can maintain this view that he's not dead and the existence of reality of beauty,

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while alongside his view on its nature, is another question.

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But I think we can distinguish between three important theses that emerge in humans, other work, particularly in his essay.

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The Sceptic and in some of his moral writings and other writings.

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The first is this claim that you get stated in various ways that beauty is not equality objects have in themselves.

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Now, this is a very common view, the 18th century standard of taste.

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He doesn't even repeat in the arguments for it. He does give some arguments for it in his essay, The Sceptic.

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And if any of you are familiar with Hume's views on moral value, you'll be reminded in some ways of his take on that, in his views on beauty.

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And similarly, there are similarities between his views on beauty and his views on cause and necessity.

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He runs abbreviated versions in effect of some of the arguments he runs for those matters on beauty.

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So one of the considerations, in fact, the main consideration he really offers in sceptic is the thought that you can know or explain all of

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the qualities that a thing has without either knowing or having explained anything about its beauty.

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So he gives a number of examples of this kind.

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He talks about the circle and says Euclid has mentioned all the properties of the circle, but has said nothing of its beauty.

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The reason is evident. Beauty is not a property of the circle.

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It doesn't consist in any of the relations between the parts or anything that Euclid has picked out.

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Similarly, in his enquiry concerning the principles of morals,

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he talks about architecture and he mentions the architectural treatises written at that time which talk about

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the kinds of relations that each of the parts of the orders of architecture have to have to one another.

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And he says, if you ask Palladio or Parro, these architectural writers,

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where is the beauty in all of these relations, they'd say it's not in any of them.

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And where is it? Well, Hume says naturally it is in the sentiment of the person who looks at these things.

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So this is on the grounds that it's not until you feel a sentiment I'm looking at of things, properties that you become aware of its beauty.

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Scuse me. And therefore, as Hume puts it in various ways, beauty lies in the sentiments.

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Beauty consists in an agreeable sentiment. These are somewhat obscure ways of putting things because taken at their word,

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it sounds a bit like he's saying that it's sentiments that are beautiful, not objects, but he never draws that implication out.

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So it's a little bit difficult to understand quite how this claims to be understood.

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The claim that beauty lies in the sentiment doesn't mean beauty is a property of the sentiment.

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Somehow it consists in an agreeable sentiment. What is clear is that we don't notice that something's beautiful until we have a sentiment and

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that's supposed to be evidence in addition to the other considerations that it's not a property.

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Objects have in themselves, nevertheless.

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And this is the third. Point Hume is well aware that we think of beauty as a property that objects have in themselves.

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And this third point has to do with what is related to what he says about cause and necessity as well.

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So he phrases it a number of ways, one of which is on the back of the handout.

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So the first quotation and this from the sceptic objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves.

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They derive their worth merely from the passion who is not sensible.

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The power and glory and vengeance are not desirable of themselves,

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but derive all their value from the structure of human passions, which begets a desire towards such particular pursuits.

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But with regard to beauty, either natural or moral, the case is commonly supposed to be different.

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The agreeable quality is thought to lie in the object, not in the sentiment,

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and that merely because the sentiment is not so turbulent and violent as to distinguish itself in an evident manner from the perception of the object.

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So this is one claim he makes, partly by way of explanation of why we think that beauty is a property of the object itself,

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namely that the sentiment in which it consists is a very calm one.

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And he thinks that we're confusing that Tom sentiment with a perception of something in the object and in later work.

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He elaborates this notion, and this is in the second quotation from the enquiry,

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The distinct boundaries and offices of Reason and Taste are easily ascertained.

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The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood. The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue.

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The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature without additions and diminution.

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The other has a productive faculty and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment raises in a manner,

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a new creation. So it seems like what he's saying is that we in some sense project onto objects when we find them beautiful.

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So it's not just the claim that beauty is not a property, the object, or that it lies in the sentiment, whatever that amounts to,

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but that in addition, we sort of Project Guild or Stane objects with the colours borrowed from that sentiment.

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Now, this sort of view raised a number of questions.

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I mean, it can probably be best understood by analogy with what he says about cause and necessity.

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So he says, we often think that necessity resides in objects that stand in causal relations as well.

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Even though our idea of necessity just comes from our feeling of expectation, we get when we see an object of one kind.

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Appear that has always been followed by an object of another kind.

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When that happens, we have a tendency to imagine an object of the other kind.

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And it's this inclination or tendency,

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this feeling that we project onto the object and that accounts for our view that necessity is a property of the object.

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I take it that he thinks some sort of mechanism like that is at work here.

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And in each case, it sort of raises the question, how can you say that there is some reality to beauty in these cases?

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So it looks like he's not willing to say in the causal case that necessity is a property of a tendency, for example.

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And of course, it's not a property object, something we project onto it.

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So it doesn't seem to be a property of anything.

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And likewise with beauty, he doesn't and he shouldn't say that it's only sentiments that have the property of being beautiful.

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But he explicitly denies as well that it's objects that have the property of being beautiful.

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What is true is that there's an agreeableness to the sentiment and that kind of sentiment gets projected onto the object.

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But that's rather different from anything ending up with the property of beauty.

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So visibly, there's at least the appearance of a difficulty here.

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And it's not so clear that he can say what he does say in the third quotation, which again is from the sceptic.

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So he says, we're not afraid of appearing too philosophical.

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I should remind my reader of that famous doctrine supposed to be fully proved in modern times.

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The tastes and colours and all other sensible qualities light on in the bodies.

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But merely in the senses. The case is the same with beauty and deformity.

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Virtue invites this doctrine, however, and this is the Chebet takes off.

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No more reality from the takes off, no more from the reality of the latter qualities than from that of the former.

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No need to give any umbrage to either your critics or more or less.

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The colours were allowed to lie only in the eye with dyers or painters ever be less regarded or esteemed.

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There is insufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind to make all these qualities,

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the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners.

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And as it is certain that the discovery above mentioned in natural philosophy makes no alteration on action and conduct.

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Why should a like discovery, moral philosophy make any alteration? So this is a comparison that is going to come back to the standard of taste between

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beauty on the one hand and secondary qualities like colour and flavour on the other.

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But there's a couple of peculiarities of what he said about what he says in this passage.

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So when the quote he gives here, I don't know who it's from.

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If it from anybody that tastes in colours and all of the sensible qualities lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses.

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Locke famously described colours, flavours of secondary qualities as opposed to primary qualities.

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But Locke did not deny that objects are coloured.

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What Locke said was that the colour of objects is a power to produce an idea or might more accurately be described as a visual impression in us.

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And that visual impression has certain appearance properties that don't resemble anything in the object.

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But that's very different from saying that there's no colour in the object, because in Locke's view,

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colour in the object is a power to produce a visual impression that has certain

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appearance properties that don't themselves resemble anything in the object.

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So the thing he quotes here would not be an accurate representation of Locke's view.

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Locke's view is there's nothing resembling the quality of our visual impression in the object.

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It's not that objects aren't coloured.

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It's just that what it is for them to be coloured is for them to have the power to produce this kind of visual impression and this sort of view.

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Now, I'm not saying he has to follow Locke, obviously. Maybe he's talking about a different view of secondary qualities.

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But at least with Locke, you can point to something that is unambiguously describable as coloured with Hume.

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It's not so clear because if you don't want to say the sentiment is beautiful.

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And if you don't want to say the object is beautiful and it's not clear if you don't want it to be a beauty is in the object,

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I should say it's not quite clear how we should understand this and how he can maintain that beauty,

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that this view takes nothing off the reality of beautiful objects of beauty.

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That is OK. So this is the background to his essay on the standard of taste.

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And one reason why Hume's view on the standard of taste is attractive to a lot

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of people is that it seems to offer a way to reconcile two opposing views.

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So the first is the view that out there in the world, there's no values.

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No beauty. No goodness. Cetera. Things don't have those qualities in themselves, and yet you can get these things wrong.

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People can be wrong about what and right. That is, there can be standards about whether something is beautiful or good.

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So he seems to offer us a way which is attract a lot of people, both in aesthetics and in ethics, of having both of these positions.

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The denial of the reality of these sort of metaphysically dubious or spooky,

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according to some properties like beauty and goodness out there in the world, along with the maintenance of standards for judgements of these things.

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Now, the motivation to Hume identifies for seeking the standard of taste.

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Is the observation that people frequently disagree about the beauty of an object.

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So what it is for them to disagree, of course, is for them to have different sentiments about same object.

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And he really stresses this at the start.

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If you look across cultures and within cultures and within your own social circle, you will find widely divergent views,

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very divergent sentiments about which objects are beautiful or whether some particular object is beautiful.

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Furthermore, it's not just that we differ, but that we argue. So we are inclined to condemn sentiments that disagree with our own.

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And this naturally makes us wonder or at least makes them more reflective amongst us.

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Wonder if there is some way of justifying our sentiment.

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If there's some way, some grounds for condemning sentiments that differ from our own.

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And this is what Hume attempts to provide. What he says a standard of taste is, is the following.

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He says it is a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled.

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At least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment and condemning another.

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So ideally, it's a way of ending these disputes. At minimum, it should be a way of figuring out who's right in each of them.

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That's the ambition. Now, it's worth noting here that he's not saying I'm trying to define beauty.

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Now, I don't mean that he wouldn't accept this as his definition of beauty or say that this is what it is for something to be beautiful.

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That is at least the thing that he's going to go on to say.

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But it's worth noting that he wouldn't need to do that in order to get this thing a rule enabling us to figure out who is right.

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All you need, then, all you'd need for that was some reliable detector of beauty or of condemnable sentiment.

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Some criterion by which you can tell that one side is wrong, the other side is right.

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Not something as ambitious as a definition of beauty as again, I'm not saying this is not a definition of beauty in his view,

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but what he explicitly says is that it's a way of reconciling these views,

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a way of finding a way to condemn certain sentiments,

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confirm others that can be important at certain points when we're thinking about what kinds of criticisms him is subject to.

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OK, well, immediately having presented this possibility, he then considers an objection to the very possibility of finding a standard of taste.

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And he says this is an objection drawn from common sense. In fact, it's drawn from a number of philosophical considerations as well.

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And it's worth when you're thinking about this objection, being aware of which parts of it.

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Hume accepts and which parts he does not. People often read this as misread this as something that Hume accepts wholesale.

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He accepts a lot of it, but not all of it. Now, the objection basically is that it's not possible to condemn sentiments.

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This rule that's supposed to enable us to do this therefore can't be found.

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And the reasons given. I think you can identify at least three in this passage.

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The first of which is that sentiment's cannot be condemned for misrepresenting the world.

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So sentiment's online judgements don't represent the world as being a certain way.

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So if you judge that the cat is on the mat, that represents the world's being a certain way.

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And if the cat's not on the mat, it misrepresents the world. But sentiments aren't like that.

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Sentiments aren't representational. So they can't misrepresent the world and therefore they can't be condemned for misrepresenting the world.

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Another reason they can't be condemned is they cannot be condemned for marking a relation between the mind and the object that's not there.

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So although sentiments don't represent the way things are, they do mark or signal,

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as he puts it, a relation or conformity between the mind and the object.

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But of course, if the sentiment occurs at all, then that relation exists.

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And so they can't mark a relation in this way. That's not actually there.

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And so you can't condemn them for marking a relation. That's not actually there.

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Now, those two points are true of sentiments, generally,

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sentiments of beauty in particular cannot be condemned for occurring in the absence of beauty in the object.

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Because beauty doesn't exist in the objects as we discuss. So all sentiments of beauty occur in the absence of beauty and the object.

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And moreover, beauty exists in a sentiment.

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And so it's not a bad thing that all these sentiments of beauty occur in the absence of beauty in the object.

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They can't be condemned for occurring in the absence of beauty in the object.

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So they can't be condemned on those grounds either. So it seems like it's not possible at all to condemn sentiments.

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Now, as I say, Huma represents this as a sort of objection from common sense.

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It's the view that Taste's can't be disputed about.

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But his reply is that it's as least as well supported by common sense to suppose that at least some sentiments can be condemned.

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And he argues from some famous examples here. He says, Anybody who would think that the miners,

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Scottish poet John Ogleby and the 17th century English puritan John Bunyan were as good as Joseph Addison and John Milton,

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or indeed who preferred them to those guys would have ridiculous and absurd sentiments.

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And that's at least as clear, he thinks, as the considerations advanced in the objection.

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Now, he's not denying a lot of what the objection sets, as I mentioned at the start.

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So he agrees that sentiments can't be condemned on any of the grounds mentioned in the objection.

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So he's not going to go there, even adds something.

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He adds that it may be that when objects are nearly equal in value and people's sentiments diverge,

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then we can't say that one side is right and one side is wrong.

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But he says it's at least clear that at least some sentiments can be condemned like these once.

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And that's at least as clear as anything presented in the objection. And so the hunt is on for a standard enabling us to do this.

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Now, famously, the standard he states is that standard of taste is the joint verdict and a verdict.

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Here is again, something based on sentiment of all critics who are free of certain obstructions.

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And we'll get into what those obstructions are in a moment. But that's the general shape of it.

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Is that standard is going to be not the mere occurrence of a sentiment, but the occurrence of a sentiment in the right kinds of people.

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And conformity with that sentiment is or lack of conformity with that sentiment.

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More to the point is what enables sentiments to be condemned. That's not exactly transparent, what his argument for this view is.

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I think you can identify two for this general view.

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And then he goes on to argue in particular for what the obstructions are.

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But the first, I think, is what I've described in the handout as the argument from Beauty's capacity to please universally.

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So a key premise for Hume is that beautiful objects can please anyone, at least have the capacity to please anyone.

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Not that they always do, in fact, but they at least have that capacity.

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And he gives a number of considerations in support of this. So one is kind of quaint.

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But I talked about the rules of composition.

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So the rules by which writing can be guided, the rules if you follow, which will enable you to write beautifully.

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He says these rules are just observations about what has pleased at all times and in all periods of history.

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In fact, if you find something, that's if you find a counterexample to them, then you have to revise the rules,

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because what they're aiming at is to get at what has pleased, you know, at all times and in all periods of history.

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That's one consideration that's supposed to suggest that beauty at least has the capacity to please universally.

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Another consideration is from examples such as Homer.

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It's one of his examples pointing out that genuinely beautiful objects have, in fact, pleased in a wide diversity of ages and cultures.

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Homer being example. And I think it's on this basis that he is convinced that beautiful works at least have this capacity to please everyone.

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He's got to face the fact, of course, that they don't.

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In fact, the very fact that he stressed at the beginning, a lot of the time, genuinely beautiful objects don't please everyone who sees them.

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And the thought is.

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So his next point is that it's just obvious that many obstructions prevent beautiful works from actually actualising this capacity.

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And again, he gives a number of points in favour of this.

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So one of them is he considers what it is that we do when we try to determine that an object is beautiful.

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It says we try and get into the right state of mind. We try and be calm.

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Pay attention to the object. Seems like we have to do a lot to prepare in order to judge an object accurately.

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That's supposed to suggest that there's loads of possible obstructions in place and we have to make sure that they're absent.

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Another reason of the view that there are lots of obstructions preventing beauty from pleasing everyone.

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Is based on the test of time.

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So we often points to the fact that the work has survived and been enjoyed in all kinds of areas as evidence that it is beautiful.

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And he thinks the reason we do this, at least this is how I read this passage,

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is to see whether it still pleases once fashion, prejudice and authority fallen away.

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That's why the test of time is a good test of beauty, is that it's a test to see whether it pleases,

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even when these various obstructions have fallen away.

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That, again, seems to imply that there are lots of obstructions to beauteous capacity to please everyone.

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And so I think that it's on this basis that he concludes the standard of taste has got to be the sentiment of everyone free of certain obstructions,

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because everyone who is free of these obstructions will like it can please everyone, but only provided they're free from the obstructions.

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Now, the second argument that I detect in this essay is based on further comparison with secondary qualities in the essay,

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particularly colours and flavours. So this I take it to be an argument by analogy, colours and flavours.

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He says, if you think about it, are in all relevant respects, similar to beauty.

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So as we saw, colours and flavours are not qualities that objects have in themselves.

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That's a key thing. Colours and flavours are in the mind.

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And this is particularly important. Some people are not qualified to give verdicts about colours and flavours despite

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the fact that they're not in the object and that they're only in the mind.

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Examples. Someone with jaundice. Not in a position to judge concerning colours.

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Someone with a fever. Not in a position to judge concerning flavours in these relevantly similar cases.

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The standard of judgement is the response of a person free of certain obstructions.

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So with healthy eyes, healthy palate. And that's I take it it's supposed to support the view that the case is similar with beauty.

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Now, it's interesting question how much weight he's putting on this analogy. As I say, he's not so explicit about it.

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The implication may be that, well, what other standard could there be if there's a standard at all when you've got something that's not a property,

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the object, but rather in the mind. And yet there are standards.

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What are the standard? Could there be. Except the response of a person of a particularly specified kind.

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That may be the implication, as I say. So this is the thought that that's going to be the general shape of the standard of tastes.

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And then he argues for what these obstructions are in the case of taste.

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Number one, lack of what he calls delicacy and delicacy appears to be the ability to detect features that are hard to detect.

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So subtle features of an artwork. And this is relevant.

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Lack of delicacy is an obstruction because beautiful works often.

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Please. In virtue of hard to detect features.

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That's interesting why he thinks this. So again, he appeals to something that is a little bit a little bit quaint again.

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So he said he takes it to explain why it's possible to use general principles to

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convince somebody that something's beautiful when they didn't initially like it.

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So what he imagines is going on here is that we show a person some feature which is known to please universally.

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So there's a principle that says anything with this feature, please universally and which pleases him when it's present in a high degree.

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And we point out that it's present in a small degree in the work that he doesn't like him, thinks he's got to agree that the thing is beautiful.

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And he says it wouldn't be possible,

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implies that is wouldn't be possible for this procedure to work or to be convincing if delicacy weren't needed to perceive beauty.

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You get the appropriate sentiment.

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As I say, this is a little quaint because he's so confident that you can argue somebody into agreeing with you about.

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About the beauty of an object. And as we'll see tomorrow, Kant explicitly denies this.

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And it's been a sort of one of the main questions in aesthetics is whether you can establish

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that something is beautiful by any means other than seeing it and feeling something,

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whether an argument could actually be used to justify the view or even to prove the view that something's beautiful.

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As we'll see, Kant is going to deny this. Hume, again, strangely enough, take that for granted.

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In the course of trying to show the delicacy is relevant, next, obstruction is lack of practise.

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So practise here has two aspects. First of all, the critic needs practise contemplating other artworks of the same kind.

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And as he puts it, other species of the same kind of beauty.

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And he says, if we don't have this, then our sentiments will be obscure and confused.

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We won't perceive the works merits. We won't know what kinds of merits they are.

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And we won't know how great merit each one is. All of this you can only detect if you have experience in other work artworks of that kind.

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That's one aspect of practise. As I say, another aspect is repeatedly perusing the work that you are attempting to judge.

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We don't do that, he says. You may not perceive the work's merits clearly.

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And an interesting passage, he says there is a flutter or hurry of thought that attends the first perusal of work.

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And he says that makes the sentiment a bit obscure. So you have to look at it repeatedly to stop.

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You thought from fluttering, I guess.

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But at least the thought is that your going to be better enabled to perceive the work's merits much more clearly.

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And furthermore, you can make sure that the beauty is not a superficial kind. Some kinds of beauty, please, at first viewing, but not at others.

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And again, if one of the marks of a genuinely beautiful object is that a campus,

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please, at different times and ages, that's going to be quite relevant.

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And into the mix, he throws the consideration that practise is the best way to acquire delicacy,

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which is one of the as we established necessary traits of a critic.

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So a third thing is what he describes as comparison.

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So if you're unable to compare a work with many others, then inferior works often see much better than they are.

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This is a bit similar to John Stewart Mills discussion of higher pleasures.

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This is how can you tell between two pleasures, whether one is higher than another, intrinsically better than another?

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The only way is to ask somebody who's experienced both and ask them which they prefer.

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And if they all agree that A is better than B than A is a higher pleasure and B, very similar thing going on here in this qualification of comparison.

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Fourthly, prejudice is an obstruction and prejudice is, he understands and a kind of idiosyncratic way.

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So he thinks that beautiful works can cause the appropriate sentiments only in people who

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put themselves in the mindset of the audience that the work was originally addressing.

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So give the example of oratory. So a speech in ancient times at any time, but particularly thinking of ancient orders,

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is addressed to a particular audience and for a particular purpose.

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And you won't be able to tell whether it's beautiful unless you put yourself in their shoes.

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That's what will enable the appropriate sentiment of beauty to come about.

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And more generally works addressed to other ages or cultures.

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He thinks you have to put yourself into the shoes of the people in those ages and cultures before you can

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tell whether the genuinely beautiful you test to see whether it pleases once you adopt their mindset.

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And interestingly as well, and this prefigures another thing in Kant, he thinks any work address to the public as opposed to,

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I guess, particular subset of the public is such that you must forget all things that are unique to you.

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And as he puts it, consider yourself as a man in general and see if it pleases you then.

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So his examples are if you're friends with the author or enemies of the author, forget that.

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Got to leave that aside and see if the work causes the sentiment of beauty.

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And you then it doesn't just scream so that things must read universally.

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Well, remember this. And this is one of the obstructions that keeps them from placing the claim earlier

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was only that they had the capacity to please universally and they will please.

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Conversely, if you're free of these obstructions and one of the obstructions is not putting

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yourself in the shoes of a man in general or the audience originally dressed,

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does that make sense? Wait, you're not supposed to put yourself in my shoes.

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I may be using a double negative here. Not putting yourself in those shoes isn't obstruction.

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So prejudice is an obstruction.

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What you ought to do is put yourself in the shoes of that person and that's how you get that'll be the appropriate test there.

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Does that make sense? Yeah. OK. Yeah.

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Surance. Yeah.

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So it would imply along with that, that over time, everyone can put themselves in the shoes of the original audience.

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When you put those two plans together. Well, that's right. And isn't consciously putting themselves in.

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Somebody should be somebody ready to move and just read it. And still enjoys it.

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She's not saying it can't. Please. If you don't do this. But that's not the standard of taste.

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To the standard of taste is if it does, please, when you do, put yourself in their shoes.

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The other kinds of pleasure are not really relevant to determine whether it's beautiful.

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And other questions can be intended.

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Why? Well, that's a good point.

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I mean, I don't think it relies on the claim that every but no work of art is written for the world.

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It does rely on the claim that at least some works of art are not written for the whole world.

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They're written for some particular bit of it, and it's them.

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You have to relate to that case.

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Yes, the audience in general, in that case, he talks about the public and he seems to have in mind when he talks about a man in general,

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contemporary works, as opposed to more distant ones like that.

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I mean, this view prefigures. What was the intent?

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The view that it's about disinterested pleasure, what he's going to describe as a disinterested pleasure.

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It's not exactly the same as this, but it's going to prove to be an extremely influential view.

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And the final abstraction is lack of good sense.

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Kind of unsurprisingly, good sense is needed to discern the pleasing relations between the parts of the work.

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To see how well the work is fitted for its purpose and also to understand any reasoning

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that work contains good sense here just seems to be kind of a general intelligence.

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Here, it's also needed to free oneself from prejudice.

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He thinks this is another reason why you need it.

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So the thought is the standard of taste is the joint verdict of critics with these five characteristics,

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good sense, freedom from prejudice, comparison, practise and delicacy.

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Now, question arises. Here is how many disputes can this standard settle?

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Or is it supposed to settle? And he raised a number of considerations that are relevant to this.

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So. Obviously, we can only use this standard if we can identify critics who have these five characteristics.

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And he says maybe that'll be a problem.

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And that would not be so good because that would defeat the purpose of this whole project.

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But he says an advantage here is that whereas questions about the things, beauty, our questions of sentiment,

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the question of whether a person has these characteristics is a question of fact.

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So we don't determine whether somebody has these characteristics by having a sentiment.

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We determine it in the ordinary way or ways that we determine other questions of fact by assembling evidence, arguing about it.

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These sorts of things. So the great advantage we've ended up with is that we seem to be on firm ground again.

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Is you first identifying the standard way? Who has these characteristics and then find out what their verdict is.

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Then you can find out which things are genuinely beautiful and you think there's a number of ways of identifying them.

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So the soundness of their understanding, as he puts it, shows their good sense.

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So you can tell whether somebody is generally intelligent, quite apart from questions about beauty.

353
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So to if they point out some subtle features of a work that you didn't notice before and help you enjoy them,

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then you can tell while they're evidently have greater delicacy than I do.

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And he also, interestingly, talks about the ascendent which they acquire in society.

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So the lasting influence they have on society's tastes now,

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I think the reason he thinks that this is a way of telling who is a true critic relates

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to what he says before about how great works of art will last for a long time.

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So he says superficial work of art won't stay in favour for too too long, at least, as he puts it, in a civilised society.

360
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If a critic, then it's preferred certain works of art and those preferences stay durable.

361
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We can tell that guy was a true critic because his preferences wouldn't have stayed in favour if he had hit on bad works of art.

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He's got he's got good taste because his preferences have endured amongst society.

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So that's the thought about identifying them.

364
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But another point, and this is often misunderstood, is that there are some differences in sentiment that the standard can't be used to resolve.

365
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And then Hume is perfectly upfront about them, not about it not being able to be used for this purpose.

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So in particular, what happens if true critics differ in their sentiments about the same work?

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And Hume even thinks that this is bound to happen because he thinks that we can't help preferring an author who is similar to us,

368
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nor can we help referring works that portray customs that are familiar to us.

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And so he thinks the true critic won't be able to help, preferring works like this.

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And so you'll get to critics of different tent temperaments or from different cultures ranking the works differently.

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So one preferring his famous example of it to Tacitus, because he's a young man and his passions are warm and obied right.

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Love writes love poetry. Tacitus is a desiccated old historian, whereas 50 year old man prefers Tacitus.

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Now, the bit about this that's I say is often misunderstood is that and what's often not often remarked is that Hume is explicit,

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that he thinks differences of these kinds are only differences in the degree of

375
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pleasure that you can get that these true critics get from different works.

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So they're not cases of one true critic liking the work and another not liking the work.

377
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So it's not that the old guy doesn't like all of it at all.

378
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He gets the sentiment of beauty from Obied, but less intensely than he used to.

379
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So that's a very important qualification,

380
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because what it means is that the standard of taste is still perfectly good as a standard for determining which objects are beautiful.

381
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If he was right and his concession here isn't only that it doesn't always tell us or give an answer to how beautiful it is relative to another work.

382
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So there is no answer. There's no fact of the matter about in this case, whether it is better than Tacitus or vice versa.

383
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And the last feature of the essay that's again confuse a number of people is the discussion at the very end.

384
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So I think what he's doing here is providing examples of controversies that he thinks the standard of taste can settle.

385
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So amongst them, representing strange customs, he thinks if we accept the standard,

386
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we can show that representing strange or unfamiliar customs does not diminish the work's beauty.

387
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And the reason for that is that it doesn't stop a true critic from enjoying it, because remember the true critic free from prejudice.

388
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Now, why might somebody think that it does? I'm not really sure.

389
00:46:26,700 --> 00:46:34,980
But he, in connexion with this, refers to what was then called the dispute over the ancients versus the moderns,

390
00:46:34,980 --> 00:46:45,900
which was a dispute over whether modern learning had exceeded ancient learning, whether we knew more now than the Romans did or the Greeks.

391
00:46:45,900 --> 00:46:50,430
That was, again, very live dispute at the time.

392
00:46:50,430 --> 00:46:58,050
And so he thinks that his standard can shed some light on that kind of thing with that example.

393
00:46:58,050 --> 00:47:01,980
However, there's limits to this.

394
00:47:01,980 --> 00:47:10,590
So he thinks this standard also shows that immorality in a work does diminish its beauty.

395
00:47:10,590 --> 00:47:15,810
So at least if it is portrayed without condemning it.

396
00:47:15,810 --> 00:47:26,280
And the reason for that is that immorality, at least if you're a critic recognising recognise it cannot please the true critic.

397
00:47:26,280 --> 00:47:31,890
It can't cause a pleasurable sentiment in the true critic.

398
00:47:31,890 --> 00:47:44,330
And this is something that's puzzling a lot of people. This phenomenon, which has been called the puzzle of imaginative resistance.

399
00:47:44,330 --> 00:47:51,230
Why is it that artwork's can ask us to imagine that time travel is possible or

400
00:47:51,230 --> 00:47:56,360
that Alice went down the rabbit hole and had all kinds of these adventures?

401
00:47:56,360 --> 00:48:07,040
But we won't accept a world. We won't accept being asked to imagine a world in which genocide is OK or wanton cruelty is great.

402
00:48:07,040 --> 00:48:19,280
We don't seem to accept the request to imagine a world in which moral truths are radically different from what they are.

403
00:48:19,280 --> 00:48:26,090
So that's it's something that humans picked up on. And I think the point of mentioning it is to say that because of this one,

404
00:48:26,090 --> 00:48:33,230
please, that you're a critic and that shows that immorality diminishes beauty.

405
00:48:33,230 --> 00:48:43,070
And he closes by considering error, speculative errors. So he thinks errors, for example, in religion, with certain striking exceptions,

406
00:48:43,070 --> 00:48:48,530
don't diminish the work's beauty because everybody makes mistakes in religion and in philosophy.

407
00:48:48,530 --> 00:48:53,600
And it's not hard for a true critic to put himself in the shoes of somebody who's made those mistakes.

408
00:48:53,600 --> 00:49:02,600
So those mistakes don't diminish, don't prevent them from feeling pleasure with the one exception of superstition.

409
00:49:02,600 --> 00:49:08,840
He thinks superstition is particularly ridiculous or galling type of error,

410
00:49:08,840 --> 00:49:14,690
that the true critic won't be able to put his self into the mind set up or won't be able to get over.

411
00:49:14,690 --> 00:49:26,300
And I think he compared he closes by saying how ridiculous it is that Boccaccio thanks God and the ladies for protecting him,

412
00:49:26,300 --> 00:49:30,170
offering them their protection. That sort of thing.

413
00:49:30,170 --> 00:49:36,430
He thinks the trick critic just won't be able to get over. All right.

414
00:49:36,430 --> 00:49:45,950
So those are, I think, the main points that he makes here in the little time we have left.

415
00:49:45,950 --> 00:49:54,990
I'd like to mention just a few of the objections that have often been raised to this.

416
00:49:54,990 --> 00:49:58,290
One obvious objection is how does he know?

417
00:49:58,290 --> 00:50:13,200
And what kind of evidence has he given us that beautiful objects will please everybody with these five characteristics?

418
00:50:13,200 --> 00:50:26,770
Similarly, but this is a distinct point. How does he know the beautiful objects have the capacity to please everyone?

419
00:50:26,770 --> 00:50:39,970
Is that an empirical claim supported by experience or is it part of what it is to be beautiful, that it has the capacity to please everyone?

420
00:50:39,970 --> 00:50:51,460
As we'll see tomorrow? Thinks that it's the latter, that it's not an empirical claim that beautiful works have the capacity to please everyone.

421
00:50:51,460 --> 00:50:57,040
It's just part of what it is for something to be beautiful, that it has this capacity.

422
00:50:57,040 --> 00:51:04,390
Nothing could count as beautiful if it didn't have this capacity. So that raise an interesting question.

423
00:51:04,390 --> 00:51:16,150
How does Hume conceive of this claim? If you need to go now, you can, but I'm just going to mention one last objection,

424
00:51:16,150 --> 00:51:24,970
which is a pretty standard one, and that's the claim that the standard of taste is circular.

425
00:51:24,970 --> 00:51:34,570
So the objection goes that if indeed this is supposed to help us identify the beautiful objects,

426
00:51:34,570 --> 00:51:40,570
then to claim seems to be to identify beautiful objects. We need to identify true critics.

427
00:51:40,570 --> 00:51:48,220
But how do we identify your critics? They just seem to be the ones who, well, identify the beautiful objects correctly.

428
00:51:48,220 --> 00:51:58,070
So we've got to know that they've they've identified the beautiful objects correctly to know that they're the true critics.

429
00:51:58,070 --> 00:52:04,340
But that's what we wanted to find out in the first place, namely which objects are the beautiful objects.

430
00:52:04,340 --> 00:52:08,060
So we need to know that already before we can find out who's a true critic.

431
00:52:08,060 --> 00:52:15,740
Knowing who is a true critic is not going to help us find out which objects are beautiful.

432
00:52:15,740 --> 00:52:23,540
Now, Peter Kivi has written a well-known response to this objection, so he grants part of it.

433
00:52:23,540 --> 00:52:32,510
He thinks that we can't determine whether critics have practise or have comparison and have the ability to compare works,

434
00:52:32,510 --> 00:52:38,180
at least in the way Hume describes these characteristics, unless we already know which objects are beautiful.

435
00:52:38,180 --> 00:52:45,680
And that's because, Hume says practise involves contemplating other species of beauty and comparing a work with the

436
00:52:45,680 --> 00:52:52,340
several species of excellence that they've seen and to know whether they've seen those things.

437
00:52:52,340 --> 00:52:59,870
We've got to know whether those things are those things that they've seen are beautiful.

438
00:52:59,870 --> 00:53:03,440
However, the other three characteristics are not like this.

439
00:53:03,440 --> 00:53:12,560
So delicacy and Hume effectively makes this point something we can determine whether somebody is got whether we know what's beautiful or not.

440
00:53:12,560 --> 00:53:19,670
Good sense. Freedom from prejudice similarly seemed to avoid the circularity.

441
00:53:19,670 --> 00:53:27,320
Now, I myself don't really think the objection or Kev's response to it are successful.

442
00:53:27,320 --> 00:53:37,490
So take Kev's response. What it seems to require is that Hume drop the requirement of practise and comparison in good critics,

443
00:53:37,490 --> 00:53:45,620
and then he's left with the claim that beautiful objects will please anyone who has good sense,

444
00:53:45,620 --> 00:53:52,010
delicacy and is free from prejudice, regardless of how much practise they have with artworks,

445
00:53:52,010 --> 00:53:57,860
regardless of how much experience they have with works of art. And so that doesn't seem plausible.

446
00:53:57,860 --> 00:54:04,970
And if he were to adjust its position in that way, he would just end up with a new problem.

447
00:54:04,970 --> 00:54:10,520
He'd avoid the circularity objection. But he'd end up with the implausible claim that anybody delicate enough,

448
00:54:10,520 --> 00:54:18,080
intelligent enough and free from prejudice will be a standard of taste, will be a true critic.

449
00:54:18,080 --> 00:54:21,230
And that just doesn't seem plausible. You do need experience with artworks.

450
00:54:21,230 --> 00:54:28,580
A lot of the time in order to figure out which ones are good, if you can figure out which ones are good at all.

451
00:54:28,580 --> 00:54:34,520
However, I don't think that the circularity objection is a good objection either.

452
00:54:34,520 --> 00:54:47,270
So Hume doesn't assume that we can't identify any beautiful objects until we have the standard of taste.

453
00:54:47,270 --> 00:54:52,760
In fact, he assumes that we already know a number of examples which objects are beautiful.

454
00:54:52,760 --> 00:55:01,010
So he assumes that we can. We do know that Homer is beautiful and that Milton and Addison are superior.

455
00:55:01,010 --> 00:55:11,420
The objection represents him as saying that we're totally in the dark about which objects are beautiful until we get the standard of taste.

456
00:55:11,420 --> 00:55:16,550
But if we know that Homer is beautiful, Milton's beautiful Addison, it's beautiful.

457
00:55:16,550 --> 00:55:23,220
All of these things that we can tell whether a critic has practise as he read Homer, as he read Milton, as he read Addison.

458
00:55:23,220 --> 00:55:31,640
OK, well, that's good because we know that they're beautiful. What I think we have to return to is what he says about what a standard of taste is.

459
00:55:31,640 --> 00:55:44,960
It's a rule for resolving disputes. Hard cases in which we're not sure which of the two things are beautiful.

460
00:55:44,960 --> 00:55:58,819
It doesn't seem to be and it doesn't seem to be sold as a rule for determining which things, including the uncontroversial cases, are beautiful.