Today, we're going to discuss Hume and his views on the Senate of Taste and with this lecture.
It's the first lecture in which we're going to be discussing beauty at great length.
And we'll also be covering this in the Kant lecture, which I think is probably going to extend over to lectures.
I don't think it's realistic to do a critique of judgement in just one lecture.
So tomorrow we'll do count as well. And that will probably continue into next week.
And a likelihood, if any of you have done ethics, particularly better ethics,
you'll be already familiar with some of the issues that are going to arise here.
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.
And a lot of very well worked out positions in media ethics that you can take on these questions.
It's worth pointing out that regarding Hume, that he is not least declaims, doubting the existence of beautiful objects of beauty.
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,
because his views on the nature of beauty are going to be important for understanding his views on the standard of taste.
Now, whether he can maintain this view that he's not dead and the existence of reality of beauty,
while alongside his view on its nature, is another question.
But I think we can distinguish between three important theses that emerge in humans, other work, particularly in his essay.
The Sceptic and in some of his moral writings and other writings.
The first is this claim that you get stated in various ways that beauty is not equality objects have in themselves.
Now, this is a very common view, the 18th century standard of taste.
He doesn't even repeat in the arguments for it. He does give some arguments for it in his essay, The Sceptic.
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.
And similarly, there are similarities between his views on beauty and his views on cause and necessity.
He runs abbreviated versions in effect of some of the arguments he runs for those matters on beauty.
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
the qualities that a thing has without either knowing or having explained anything about its beauty.
So he gives a number of examples of this kind.
He talks about the circle and says Euclid has mentioned all the properties of the circle, but has said nothing of its beauty.
The reason is evident. Beauty is not a property of the circle.
It doesn't consist in any of the relations between the parts or anything that Euclid has picked out.
Similarly, in his enquiry concerning the principles of morals,
he talks about architecture and he mentions the architectural treatises written at that time which talk about
the kinds of relations that each of the parts of the orders of architecture have to have to one another.
And he says, if you ask Palladio or Parro, these architectural writers,
where is the beauty in all of these relations, they'd say it's not in any of them.
And where is it? Well, Hume says naturally it is in the sentiment of the person who looks at these things.
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.
Scuse me. And therefore, as Hume puts it in various ways, beauty lies in the sentiments.
Beauty consists in an agreeable sentiment. These are somewhat obscure ways of putting things because taken at their word,
it sounds a bit like he's saying that it's sentiments that are beautiful, not objects, but he never draws that implication out.
So it's a little bit difficult to understand quite how this claims to be understood.
The claim that beauty lies in the sentiment doesn't mean beauty is a property of the sentiment.
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
that's supposed to be evidence in addition to the other considerations that it's not a property.
Objects have in themselves, nevertheless.
And this is the third. Point Hume is well aware that we think of beauty as a property that objects have in themselves.
And this third point has to do with what is related to what he says about cause and necessity as well.
So he phrases it a number of ways, one of which is on the back of the handout.
So the first quotation and this from the sceptic objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves.
They derive their worth merely from the passion who is not sensible.
The power and glory and vengeance are not desirable of themselves,
but derive all their value from the structure of human passions, which begets a desire towards such particular pursuits.
But with regard to beauty, either natural or moral, the case is commonly supposed to be different.
The agreeable quality is thought to lie in the object, not in the sentiment,
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.
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,
namely that the sentiment in which it consists is a very calm one.
And he thinks that we're confusing that Tom sentiment with a perception of something in the object and in later work.
He elaborates this notion, and this is in the second quotation from the enquiry,
The distinct boundaries and offices of Reason and Taste are easily ascertained.
The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood. The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue.
The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature without additions and diminution.
The other has a productive faculty and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment raises in a manner,
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.
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,
but that in addition, we sort of Project Guild or Stane objects with the colours borrowed from that sentiment.
Now, this sort of view raised a number of questions.
I mean, it can probably be best understood by analogy with what he says about cause and necessity.
So he says, we often think that necessity resides in objects that stand in causal relations as well.
Even though our idea of necessity just comes from our feeling of expectation, we get when we see an object of one kind.
Appear that has always been followed by an object of another kind.
When that happens, we have a tendency to imagine an object of the other kind.
And it's this inclination or tendency,
this feeling that we project onto the object and that accounts for our view that necessity is a property of the object.
I take it that he thinks some sort of mechanism like that is at work here.
And in each case, it sort of raises the question, how can you say that there is some reality to beauty in these cases?
So it looks like he's not willing to say in the causal case that necessity is a property of a tendency, for example.
And of course, it's not a property object, something we project onto it.
So it doesn't seem to be a property of anything.
And likewise with beauty, he doesn't and he shouldn't say that it's only sentiments that have the property of being beautiful.
But he explicitly denies as well that it's objects that have the property of being beautiful.
What is true is that there's an agreeableness to the sentiment and that kind of sentiment gets projected onto the object.
But that's rather different from anything ending up with the property of beauty.
So visibly, there's at least the appearance of a difficulty here.
And it's not so clear that he can say what he does say in the third quotation, which again is from the sceptic.
So he says, we're not afraid of appearing too philosophical.
I should remind my reader of that famous doctrine supposed to be fully proved in modern times.
The tastes and colours and all other sensible qualities light on in the bodies.
But merely in the senses. The case is the same with beauty and deformity.
Virtue invites this doctrine, however, and this is the Chebet takes off.
No more reality from the takes off, no more from the reality of the latter qualities than from that of the former.
No need to give any umbrage to either your critics or more or less.
The colours were allowed to lie only in the eye with dyers or painters ever be less regarded or esteemed.
There is insufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind to make all these qualities,
the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners.
And as it is certain that the discovery above mentioned in natural philosophy makes no alteration on action and conduct.
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
beauty on the one hand and secondary qualities like colour and flavour on the other.
But there's a couple of peculiarities of what he said about what he says in this passage.
So when the quote he gives here, I don't know who it's from.
If it from anybody that tastes in colours and all of the sensible qualities lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses.
Locke famously described colours, flavours of secondary qualities as opposed to primary qualities.
But Locke did not deny that objects are coloured.
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.
And that visual impression has certain appearance properties that don't resemble anything in the object.
But that's very different from saying that there's no colour in the object, because in Locke's view,
colour in the object is a power to produce a visual impression that has certain
appearance properties that don't themselves resemble anything in the object.
So the thing he quotes here would not be an accurate representation of Locke's view.
Locke's view is there's nothing resembling the quality of our visual impression in the object.
It's not that objects aren't coloured.
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.
Now, I'm not saying he has to follow Locke, obviously. Maybe he's talking about a different view of secondary qualities.
But at least with Locke, you can point to something that is unambiguously describable as coloured with Hume.
It's not so clear because if you don't want to say the sentiment is beautiful.
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,
I should say it's not quite clear how we should understand this and how he can maintain that beauty,
that this view takes nothing off the reality of beautiful objects of beauty.
That is OK. So this is the background to his essay on the standard of taste.
And one reason why Hume's view on the standard of taste is attractive to a lot
of people is that it seems to offer a way to reconcile two opposing views.
So the first is the view that out there in the world, there's no values.
No beauty. No goodness. Cetera. Things don't have those qualities in themselves, and yet you can get these things wrong.
People can be wrong about what and right. That is, there can be standards about whether something is beautiful or good.
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.
The denial of the reality of these sort of metaphysically dubious or spooky,
according to some properties like beauty and goodness out there in the world, along with the maintenance of standards for judgements of these things.
Now, the motivation to Hume identifies for seeking the standard of taste.
Is the observation that people frequently disagree about the beauty of an object.
So what it is for them to disagree, of course, is for them to have different sentiments about same object.
And he really stresses this at the start.
If you look across cultures and within cultures and within your own social circle, you will find widely divergent views,
very divergent sentiments about which objects are beautiful or whether some particular object is beautiful.
Furthermore, it's not just that we differ, but that we argue. So we are inclined to condemn sentiments that disagree with our own.
And this naturally makes us wonder or at least makes them more reflective amongst us.
Wonder if there is some way of justifying our sentiment.
If there's some way, some grounds for condemning sentiments that differ from our own.
And this is what Hume attempts to provide. What he says a standard of taste is, is the following.
He says it is a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled.
At least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment and condemning another.
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.
That's the ambition. Now, it's worth noting here that he's not saying I'm trying to define beauty.
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.
That is at least the thing that he's going to go on to say.
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.
All you need, then, all you'd need for that was some reliable detector of beauty or of condemnable sentiment.
Some criterion by which you can tell that one side is wrong, the other side is right.
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,
but what he explicitly says is that it's a way of reconciling these views,
a way of finding a way to condemn certain sentiments,
confirm others that can be important at certain points when we're thinking about what kinds of criticisms him is subject to.
OK, well, immediately having presented this possibility, he then considers an objection to the very possibility of finding a standard of taste.
And he says this is an objection drawn from common sense. In fact, it's drawn from a number of philosophical considerations as well.
And it's worth when you're thinking about this objection, being aware of which parts of it.
Hume accepts and which parts he does not. People often read this as misread this as something that Hume accepts wholesale.
He accepts a lot of it, but not all of it. Now, the objection basically is that it's not possible to condemn sentiments.
This rule that's supposed to enable us to do this therefore can't be found.
And the reasons given. I think you can identify at least three in this passage.
The first of which is that sentiment's cannot be condemned for misrepresenting the world.
So sentiment's online judgements don't represent the world as being a certain way.
So if you judge that the cat is on the mat, that represents the world's being a certain way.
And if the cat's not on the mat, it misrepresents the world. But sentiments aren't like that.
Sentiments aren't representational. So they can't misrepresent the world and therefore they can't be condemned for misrepresenting the world.
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.
So although sentiments don't represent the way things are, they do mark or signal,
as he puts it, a relation or conformity between the mind and the object.
But of course, if the sentiment occurs at all, then that relation exists.
And so they can't mark a relation in this way. That's not actually there.
And so you can't condemn them for marking a relation. That's not actually there.
Now, those two points are true of sentiments, generally,
sentiments of beauty in particular cannot be condemned for occurring in the absence of beauty in the object.
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.
And moreover, beauty exists in a sentiment.
And so it's not a bad thing that all these sentiments of beauty occur in the absence of beauty in the object.
They can't be condemned for occurring in the absence of beauty in the object.
So they can't be condemned on those grounds either. So it seems like it's not possible at all to condemn sentiments.
Now, as I say, Huma represents this as a sort of objection from common sense.
It's the view that Taste's can't be disputed about.
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.
And he argues from some famous examples here. He says, Anybody who would think that the miners,
Scottish poet John Ogleby and the 17th century English puritan John Bunyan were as good as Joseph Addison and John Milton,
or indeed who preferred them to those guys would have ridiculous and absurd sentiments.
And that's at least as clear, he thinks, as the considerations advanced in the objection.
Now, he's not denying a lot of what the objection sets, as I mentioned at the start.
So he agrees that sentiments can't be condemned on any of the grounds mentioned in the objection.
So he's not going to go there, even adds something.
He adds that it may be that when objects are nearly equal in value and people's sentiments diverge,
then we can't say that one side is right and one side is wrong.
But he says it's at least clear that at least some sentiments can be condemned like these once.
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.
Now, famously, the standard he states is that standard of taste is the joint verdict and a verdict.
Here is again, something based on sentiment of all critics who are free of certain obstructions.
And we'll get into what those obstructions are in a moment. But that's the general shape of it.
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.
And conformity with that sentiment is or lack of conformity with that sentiment.
More to the point is what enables sentiments to be condemned. That's not exactly transparent, what his argument for this view is.
I think you can identify two for this general view.
And then he goes on to argue in particular for what the obstructions are.
But the first, I think, is what I've described in the handout as the argument from Beauty's capacity to please universally.
So a key premise for Hume is that beautiful objects can please anyone, at least have the capacity to please anyone.
Not that they always do, in fact, but they at least have that capacity.
And he gives a number of considerations in support of this. So one is kind of quaint.
But I talked about the rules of composition.
So the rules by which writing can be guided, the rules if you follow, which will enable you to write beautifully.
He says these rules are just observations about what has pleased at all times and in all periods of history.
In fact, if you find something, that's if you find a counterexample to them, then you have to revise the rules,
because what they're aiming at is to get at what has pleased, you know, at all times and in all periods of history.
That's one consideration that's supposed to suggest that beauty at least has the capacity to please universally.
Another consideration is from examples such as Homer.
It's one of his examples pointing out that genuinely beautiful objects have, in fact, pleased in a wide diversity of ages and cultures.
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.
He's got to face the fact, of course, that they don't.
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.
And the thought is.
So his next point is that it's just obvious that many obstructions prevent beautiful works from actually actualising this capacity.
And again, he gives a number of points in favour of this.
So one of them is he considers what it is that we do when we try to determine that an object is beautiful.
It says we try and get into the right state of mind. We try and be calm.
Pay attention to the object. Seems like we have to do a lot to prepare in order to judge an object accurately.
That's supposed to suggest that there's loads of possible obstructions in place and we have to make sure that they're absent.
Another reason of the view that there are lots of obstructions preventing beauty from pleasing everyone.
Is based on the test of time.
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.
And he thinks the reason we do this, at least this is how I read this passage,
is to see whether it still pleases once fashion, prejudice and authority fallen away.
That's why the test of time is a good test of beauty, is that it's a test to see whether it pleases,
even when these various obstructions have fallen away.
That, again, seems to imply that there are lots of obstructions to beauteous capacity to please everyone.
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,
because everyone who is free of these obstructions will like it can please everyone, but only provided they're free from the obstructions.
Now, the second argument that I detect in this essay is based on further comparison with secondary qualities in the essay,
particularly colours and flavours. So this I take it to be an argument by analogy, colours and flavours.
He says, if you think about it, are in all relevant respects, similar to beauty.
So as we saw, colours and flavours are not qualities that objects have in themselves.
That's a key thing. Colours and flavours are in the mind.
And this is particularly important. Some people are not qualified to give verdicts about colours and flavours despite
the fact that they're not in the object and that they're only in the mind.
Examples. Someone with jaundice. Not in a position to judge concerning colours.
Someone with a fever. Not in a position to judge concerning flavours in these relevantly similar cases.
The standard of judgement is the response of a person free of certain obstructions.
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.
Now, it's interesting question how much weight he's putting on this analogy. As I say, he's not so explicit about it.
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,
the object, but rather in the mind. And yet there are standards.
What are the standard? Could there be. Except the response of a person of a particularly specified kind.
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.
And then he argues for what these obstructions are in the case of taste.
Number one, lack of what he calls delicacy and delicacy appears to be the ability to detect features that are hard to detect.
So subtle features of an artwork. And this is relevant.
Lack of delicacy is an obstruction because beautiful works often.
Please. In virtue of hard to detect features.
That's interesting why he thinks this. So again, he appeals to something that is a little bit a little bit quaint again.
So he said he takes it to explain why it's possible to use general principles to
convince somebody that something's beautiful when they didn't initially like it.
So what he imagines is going on here is that we show a person some feature which is known to please universally.
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.
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.
And he says it wouldn't be possible,
implies that is wouldn't be possible for this procedure to work or to be convincing if delicacy weren't needed to perceive beauty.
You get the appropriate sentiment.
As I say, this is a little quaint because he's so confident that you can argue somebody into agreeing with you about.
About the beauty of an object. And as we'll see tomorrow, Kant explicitly denies this.
And it's been a sort of one of the main questions in aesthetics is whether you can establish
that something is beautiful by any means other than seeing it and feeling something,
whether an argument could actually be used to justify the view or even to prove the view that something's beautiful.
As we'll see, Kant is going to deny this. Hume, again, strangely enough, take that for granted.
In the course of trying to show the delicacy is relevant, next, obstruction is lack of practise.
So practise here has two aspects. First of all, the critic needs practise contemplating other artworks of the same kind.
And as he puts it, other species of the same kind of beauty.
And he says, if we don't have this, then our sentiments will be obscure and confused.
We won't perceive the works merits. We won't know what kinds of merits they are.
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.
That's one aspect of practise. As I say, another aspect is repeatedly perusing the work that you are attempting to judge.
We don't do that, he says. You may not perceive the work's merits clearly.
And an interesting passage, he says there is a flutter or hurry of thought that attends the first perusal of work.
And he says that makes the sentiment a bit obscure. So you have to look at it repeatedly to stop.
You thought from fluttering, I guess.
But at least the thought is that your going to be better enabled to perceive the work's merits much more clearly.
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.
And again, if one of the marks of a genuinely beautiful object is that a campus,
please, at different times and ages, that's going to be quite relevant.
And into the mix, he throws the consideration that practise is the best way to acquire delicacy,
which is one of the as we established necessary traits of a critic.
So a third thing is what he describes as comparison.
So if you're unable to compare a work with many others, then inferior works often see much better than they are.
This is a bit similar to John Stewart Mills discussion of higher pleasures.
This is how can you tell between two pleasures, whether one is higher than another, intrinsically better than another?
The only way is to ask somebody who's experienced both and ask them which they prefer.
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.
Fourthly, prejudice is an obstruction and prejudice is, he understands and a kind of idiosyncratic way.
So he thinks that beautiful works can cause the appropriate sentiments only in people who
put themselves in the mindset of the audience that the work was originally addressing.
So give the example of oratory. So a speech in ancient times at any time, but particularly thinking of ancient orders,
is addressed to a particular audience and for a particular purpose.
And you won't be able to tell whether it's beautiful unless you put yourself in their shoes.
That's what will enable the appropriate sentiment of beauty to come about.
And more generally works addressed to other ages or cultures.
He thinks you have to put yourself into the shoes of the people in those ages and cultures before you can
tell whether the genuinely beautiful you test to see whether it pleases once you adopt their mindset.
And interestingly as well, and this prefigures another thing in Kant, he thinks any work address to the public as opposed to,
I guess, particular subset of the public is such that you must forget all things that are unique to you.
And as he puts it, consider yourself as a man in general and see if it pleases you then.
So his examples are if you're friends with the author or enemies of the author, forget that.
Got to leave that aside and see if the work causes the sentiment of beauty.
And you then it doesn't just scream so that things must read universally.
Well, remember this. And this is one of the obstructions that keeps them from placing the claim earlier
was only that they had the capacity to please universally and they will please.
Conversely, if you're free of these obstructions and one of the obstructions is not putting
yourself in the shoes of a man in general or the audience originally dressed,
does that make sense? Wait, you're not supposed to put yourself in my shoes.
I may be using a double negative here. Not putting yourself in those shoes isn't obstruction.
So prejudice is an obstruction.
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.
Does that make sense? Yeah. OK. Yeah.
Surance. Yeah.
So it would imply along with that, that over time, everyone can put themselves in the shoes of the original audience.
When you put those two plans together. Well, that's right. And isn't consciously putting themselves in.
Somebody should be somebody ready to move and just read it. And still enjoys it.
She's not saying it can't. Please. If you don't do this. But that's not the standard of taste.
To the standard of taste is if it does, please, when you do, put yourself in their shoes.
The other kinds of pleasure are not really relevant to determine whether it's beautiful.
And other questions can be intended.
Why? Well, that's a good point.
I mean, I don't think it relies on the claim that every but no work of art is written for the world.
It does rely on the claim that at least some works of art are not written for the whole world.
They're written for some particular bit of it, and it's them.
You have to relate to that case.
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,
contemporary works, as opposed to more distant ones like that.
I mean, this view prefigures. What was the intent?
The view that it's about disinterested pleasure, what he's going to describe as a disinterested pleasure.
It's not exactly the same as this, but it's going to prove to be an extremely influential view.
And the final abstraction is lack of good sense.
Kind of unsurprisingly, good sense is needed to discern the pleasing relations between the parts of the work.
To see how well the work is fitted for its purpose and also to understand any reasoning
that work contains good sense here just seems to be kind of a general intelligence.
Here, it's also needed to free oneself from prejudice.
He thinks this is another reason why you need it.
So the thought is the standard of taste is the joint verdict of critics with these five characteristics,
good sense, freedom from prejudice, comparison, practise and delicacy.
Now, question arises. Here is how many disputes can this standard settle?
Or is it supposed to settle? And he raised a number of considerations that are relevant to this.
So. Obviously, we can only use this standard if we can identify critics who have these five characteristics.
And he says maybe that'll be a problem.
And that would not be so good because that would defeat the purpose of this whole project.
But he says an advantage here is that whereas questions about the things, beauty, our questions of sentiment,
the question of whether a person has these characteristics is a question of fact.
So we don't determine whether somebody has these characteristics by having a sentiment.
We determine it in the ordinary way or ways that we determine other questions of fact by assembling evidence, arguing about it.
These sorts of things. So the great advantage we've ended up with is that we seem to be on firm ground again.
Is you first identifying the standard way? Who has these characteristics and then find out what their verdict is.
Then you can find out which things are genuinely beautiful and you think there's a number of ways of identifying them.
So the soundness of their understanding, as he puts it, shows their good sense.
So you can tell whether somebody is generally intelligent, quite apart from questions about beauty.
So to if they point out some subtle features of a work that you didn't notice before and help you enjoy them,
then you can tell while they're evidently have greater delicacy than I do.
And he also, interestingly, talks about the ascendent which they acquire in society.
So the lasting influence they have on society's tastes now,
I think the reason he thinks that this is a way of telling who is a true critic relates
to what he says before about how great works of art will last for a long time.
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.
If a critic, then it's preferred certain works of art and those preferences stay durable.
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.
He's got he's got good taste because his preferences have endured amongst society.
So that's the thought about identifying them.
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.
And then Hume is perfectly upfront about them, not about it not being able to be used for this purpose.
So in particular, what happens if true critics differ in their sentiments about the same work?
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,
nor can we help referring works that portray customs that are familiar to us.
And so he thinks the true critic won't be able to help, preferring works like this.
And so you'll get to critics of different tent temperaments or from different cultures ranking the works differently.
So one preferring his famous example of it to Tacitus, because he's a young man and his passions are warm and obied right.
Love writes love poetry. Tacitus is a desiccated old historian, whereas 50 year old man prefers Tacitus.
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,
that he thinks differences of these kinds are only differences in the degree of
pleasure that you can get that these true critics get from different works.
So they're not cases of one true critic liking the work and another not liking the work.
So it's not that the old guy doesn't like all of it at all.
He gets the sentiment of beauty from Obied, but less intensely than he used to.
So that's a very important qualification,
because what it means is that the standard of taste is still perfectly good as a standard for determining which objects are beautiful.
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.
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.
And the last feature of the essay that's again confuse a number of people is the discussion at the very end.
So I think what he's doing here is providing examples of controversies that he thinks the standard of taste can settle.
So amongst them, representing strange customs, he thinks if we accept the standard,
we can show that representing strange or unfamiliar customs does not diminish the work's beauty.
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.
Now, why might somebody think that it does? I'm not really sure.
But he, in connexion with this, refers to what was then called the dispute over the ancients versus the moderns,
which was a dispute over whether modern learning had exceeded ancient learning, whether we knew more now than the Romans did or the Greeks.
That was, again, very live dispute at the time.
And so he thinks that his standard can shed some light on that kind of thing with that example.
However, there's limits to this.
So he thinks this standard also shows that immorality in a work does diminish its beauty.
So at least if it is portrayed without condemning it.
And the reason for that is that immorality, at least if you're a critic recognising recognise it cannot please the true critic.
It can't cause a pleasurable sentiment in the true critic.
And this is something that's puzzling a lot of people. This phenomenon, which has been called the puzzle of imaginative resistance.
Why is it that artwork's can ask us to imagine that time travel is possible or
that Alice went down the rabbit hole and had all kinds of these adventures?
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.
We don't seem to accept the request to imagine a world in which moral truths are radically different from what they are.
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,
please, that you're a critic and that shows that immorality diminishes beauty.
And he closes by considering error, speculative errors. So he thinks errors, for example, in religion, with certain striking exceptions,
don't diminish the work's beauty because everybody makes mistakes in religion and in philosophy.
And it's not hard for a true critic to put himself in the shoes of somebody who's made those mistakes.
So those mistakes don't diminish, don't prevent them from feeling pleasure with the one exception of superstition.
He thinks superstition is particularly ridiculous or galling type of error,
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.
And I think he compared he closes by saying how ridiculous it is that Boccaccio thanks God and the ladies for protecting him,
offering them their protection. That sort of thing.
He thinks the trick critic just won't be able to get over. All right.
So those are, I think, the main points that he makes here in the little time we have left.
I'd like to mention just a few of the objections that have often been raised to this.
One obvious objection is how does he know?
And what kind of evidence has he given us that beautiful objects will please everybody with these five characteristics?
Similarly, but this is a distinct point. How does he know the beautiful objects have the capacity to please everyone?
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?
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.
It's just part of what it is for something to be beautiful, that it has this capacity.
Nothing could count as beautiful if it didn't have this capacity. So that raise an interesting question.
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,
which is a pretty standard one, and that's the claim that the standard of taste is circular.
So the objection goes that if indeed this is supposed to help us identify the beautiful objects,
then to claim seems to be to identify beautiful objects. We need to identify true critics.
But how do we identify your critics? They just seem to be the ones who, well, identify the beautiful objects correctly.
So we've got to know that they've they've identified the beautiful objects correctly to know that they're the true critics.
But that's what we wanted to find out in the first place, namely which objects are the beautiful objects.
So we need to know that already before we can find out who's a true critic.
Knowing who is a true critic is not going to help us find out which objects are beautiful.
Now, Peter Kivi has written a well-known response to this objection, so he grants part of it.
He thinks that we can't determine whether critics have practise or have comparison and have the ability to compare works,
at least in the way Hume describes these characteristics, unless we already know which objects are beautiful.
And that's because, Hume says practise involves contemplating other species of beauty and comparing a work with the
several species of excellence that they've seen and to know whether they've seen those things.
We've got to know whether those things are those things that they've seen are beautiful.
However, the other three characteristics are not like this.
So delicacy and Hume effectively makes this point something we can determine whether somebody is got whether we know what's beautiful or not.
Good sense. Freedom from prejudice similarly seemed to avoid the circularity.
Now, I myself don't really think the objection or Kev's response to it are successful.
So take Kev's response. What it seems to require is that Hume drop the requirement of practise and comparison in good critics,
and then he's left with the claim that beautiful objects will please anyone who has good sense,
delicacy and is free from prejudice, regardless of how much practise they have with artworks,
regardless of how much experience they have with works of art. And so that doesn't seem plausible.
And if he were to adjust its position in that way, he would just end up with a new problem.
He'd avoid the circularity objection. But he'd end up with the implausible claim that anybody delicate enough,
intelligent enough and free from prejudice will be a standard of taste, will be a true critic.
And that just doesn't seem plausible. You do need experience with artworks.
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.
However, I don't think that the circularity objection is a good objection either.
So Hume doesn't assume that we can't identify any beautiful objects until we have the standard of taste.
In fact, he assumes that we already know a number of examples which objects are beautiful.
So he assumes that we can. We do know that Homer is beautiful and that Milton and Addison are superior.
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.
But if we know that Homer is beautiful, Milton's beautiful Addison, it's beautiful.
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.
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.
It's a rule for resolving disputes. Hard cases in which we're not sure which of the two things are beautiful.
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.