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According to Hume what does the role of an ideal art critic play in fixing the standard of taste? Should we agree with him?
David Hume's major work pertaining to art and aesthetics was On the Nature of Taste, originally published as part of Hume's Four Dissertations (1757), although he referred to the topic throughout his prolific and distinguished writing career.
He saw art and the criticism of it as part of the broader debate pertaining to reality and perception, and his theses were considered radical for the time for they challenged the existing social and philosophical mores, which were steeped in early modern tradition of class, culture and predefined notions of taste.
It should be remembered that there was no such concept of an art critic as we would understand it today in Hume's own time; rather, the discussion of art and its meaning was very much confined to the upper classes whose opinion was deemed to be the only discourse that truly mattered. Hume's greatest achievement on the matter was, therefore, to break the bonds between art and class and open up the debate to include all of humanity, embracing all of the senses and making the critique of art a subjective rather than a logical matter.
It is likewise important to understand that Hume's ideals of art, taste and aesthetics were firmly rooted in his thesis regarding philosophy in general. On the Nature of Taste must be read and interpreted in conjunction with Hume's other primary works of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature (173940), Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751); he does not divorce art and aesthetic beauty from his broader thoughts on the realities of human nature. Hume detailed early in his career that he saw art as the subconscious expression of mankind's innate passion and believed that true art cannot be contrived. Hume (1951:451) surmises his thoughts on the matter when he claimed, in the Treatise, that, reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.
The crux of the problem for Hume was identifying the genesis of the standard of taste in society and deciding upon whose judgement taste rests in the first place. To be able to conclude what makes an ideal art critic, therefore, Hume first needed to create a formula, or a set of rules, for the definition of taste. For this task, he returns again to his fundamental topic, the essence of human nature, which, according to Hume, always forms an impression based upon instinct and sentiment as opposed to reason and logic. How we formulate an idea is a key precursor to how we can formulate taste. According to Ezra Talmor (1980:136), more often than not, 'impression' is taken to be just another word for image, and Hume's insistence on the importance of feelings in the explanation of human actions and hence of the importance he attributed to the distinction between impression and idea is overlooked.
Hume concludes that humans can only accumulate knowledge via the impressions imprinted in their minds, which has an obvious consequence for the creativity behind great art and the idealistic notion of the art critic: taste and artistic character cannot be the result of anything but sentiment. The ideal art critic therefore must be in tune with the prevalent feeling and sentiment that is described and deduced in art. Yet, from where does one gain such impressionistic insight?
It is at this point that Hume departs from many philosophers who went before him when he claims that ideas are nothing but the facsimile of the impressions of the mind. What Hume is saying is, essentially, that there is no relationship between the mind and causality; that preconceptions are built by the mind as if in an ordered structure yet impressions and aesthetics are in fact nothing but a continuous stream of unconsciousness thought without beginning or end. An ideal art critic must understand this precursor to taste. This overall philosophy leads Richard Tarnas (1991:3367) to describe Hume as an empiricist who grounded all human knowledge in sense experience there was no way to ascertain what was beyond the sense impressions, spiritual or otherwise.
Hume was, in essence, a sceptic and this had a great effect on how he saw art and taste. His innate scepticism challenged the existing ideals pertaining to taste and moved criticism from a fixed cultural abode into the realms of infinite interpretation. As Passmore (1980:9) notes, the scepticism at the epicentre of Hume's work ensures that, the supposed superior objectivity of the physical sciences completely vanishes; every judgement is equally 'subjective', every belief rests on taste and sentiment.
An ideal art critic should not be reporting as if speaking matter of fact or categorically; rather they should be articulating the instincts of the transcendental impressions of the self, which are never fixed and therefore contain no one truth. The ultimate transcendence of truth is a key feature in understanding Hume's view on taste because it meant that, in rejecting the notion of true and false within the realms of art criticism, he made analysis of the subject, according to Skorupski (1993:8), free of the, original principles of moral and aesthetic, as there are of common, sense. This conclusion results in a basic paradox between attempts to formulate a fundamental logic for the evolution of taste without endorsing the views of the visionaries.
After struggling to marry these two ideological polar opposites, Hume eventually defines the nature of taste as the consensus of the true critics. He is aware of the anomalies between the skill set of one critic and another, and of the intangible nature of truth pertaining to beauty. He also concedes that no one art critic can possibly embody a universal ideal of taste to a conceptual standard, as this would contradict much of his work on human essence and causality, as Ted Gracyk (2003: University of Stanford website) points out.
Hume ultimately grants that even the best critics will fail to elicit universal agreements with their verdicts. Yet he sticks to his motivating insight, borrowed from Hutcheson, that sentiment is the essence of evaluation. Even the worst critic says nothing false in foolishly saying that one work is better than another, however prejudiced the sentiment. Yet even the best critics - those with the most refined taste - will retain some immovable preferences.
Hume acknowledges that culture and nationality must play an important role in the formulation of taste and criticism; what may be considered artistic achievement in one society might be deemed inappropriate in another. In this instance, Hume is very much a product of his time, living and writing as he was at the hub of Romanticism and at the crest of the birth of nations and the concept of the nationstate. He writes within On the Nature of Taste (1757: University of Minnesota website; the public domain) that:
Such preferences are innocent and unavoidable, and can never reasonably be the object of dispute, because there is no standard by which they can be decided. For a like reason, we are more pleased, in the course of our reading, with pictures and characters that resemble objects which are found in our own age or country, than with those which describe a different set of customs.
Hume still feels that he has to separate his true critic from an impostor. For this he attempts to lay down rules to what he terms vulgarity, which he sees as the antithesis to the tasteful idealised art critic. He rejects proponents of vulgarity because he views these critics as using art as a means to achieve a sense of notoriety, going against the grain of subconscious thought motivated by sentiment and basic human nature, instead to be inspired by a sense of pre-determined logic. Passmore (2000:165) details the extent of Hume's separation of the vulgar from what he calls the 'wise man' to see how this affected his view of the idealistic notion of the art critic.
He distinguishes between the behaviour of the 'wise man' and 'the vulgar'. The 'wise man', he then says, will reject all beliefs, however vivid and forceful they may be which are not traceable back to constant conjunctions. A 'wise man' he indeed tells us, 'proportions his belief to the evidence.' After all, Hume was a doughty opponent of what he calls 'superstition' and he has to show himself some way of showing what is wrong with superstitious beliefs - which, he would have to grant, are often held very firmly. The sceptic and the critic make awkward bed fellows.
Clearly, this evaluation was something that Hume was not empirically satisfied with. He returned to the topic of disagreeable emotions and vulgarity during Of Tragedy (1757), which used negative emotions as a positive force in the formulation of tragic art. However, solely in terms of the concept of the ideal art critic, the appreciation of aesthetics and artistic beauty must come first and foremost, for these are the sentiments that the mind will naturally wish to accumulate ahead of vulgarity, which can only exist within both the critic and the artist as a result of preconceived ideals of distaste.
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Conclusion
Analysing Hume's ideas on art, aesthetics and the ideal critic is a notoriously difficult task; as a philosopher he is especially troublesome to ideologically locate in terms of deduction, and one of the most consistent themes discernible when examining the entire body of his work is, paradoxically, his theoretical inconsistency, especially when veering into the realms of scepticism, for which he is best known and which is the driving force behind his conclusions regarding art critique, as Scruton (1995:116) details.
When faced with a sceptical conclusion, Hume often appears to retreat from it, informing the reader that he has merely been discussing the operations of the human mind and not criticising the beliefs that spontaneously arise in us. However, his ironical style and the barely discernible twinkle in his eye as he proposes his sceptical conclusions make it difficult to be sure of his intentions.
Ultimately, Hume does not separate moral philosophy from aesthetic judgement and therefore concludes that the two are interdependent upon one another. For example, a painting might be the work of fiction and art but the sentiment it inspires will induce a moral response to the work which is beyond the study of mere aesthetic beauty. The centrality of sentiment over reason remains the key to understanding Hume's position concerning the art critic and the formulation of taste. He sees art and taste as objective - neither can be the result of one universally profound and true opinion. His ideal art critic reasons without a rule, even though this is what the mind is predisposed towards; the critic's role in fixing a standard of taste is at last supreme.
Hume should be praised for his analysis and for his embracement of a wide variety of stimuli. Writing at a time when art was considered to be of the interest of the upper classes only, Hume expresses an essentially egalitarian viewpoint that is still very much in evidence today and has influenced generations of artists and critics alike. As Jacob Golomb (1995:10) correctly attests, David Hume is one of those who use the term 'authenticity' in the sense of genuineness, of things being what they profess in origin or authorship.
Although it should be remembered that Hume was trying to fit his thesis on tastes, art and art criticism into his broader views relating to human nature, thought, impression and consciousness, his insights ought to be seen in a favourable light today. By questioning the validity of critics and the concept of a true critic Hume opened the way for contemporary philosophical explorations such as the June 2005 book written by John Carey of Oxford University entitled, What good are the arts?
Carey concludes, as Hume might have done, that art is this: a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art. Stripping the role of the art critic to such a base sentiment is exactly what Hume had in mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
D. Appelbaum, The Vision of Hume (Element; Rockport, Mass., 1996)
A.J. Ayer, Hume (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1980)
J. Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: from Klerkegaard to Camus (Routledge; London & New York, 1995)
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1951)
D.G.C. MacNabb, David Hume: His Theory of Knowledge and Morality (Basil Blackwell; Oxford, 1966)
B. Magee, The Great Philosophers: an Introduction to Western Philosophy (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 2000)
J. Passmore, Hume's Intentions: Third Edition (Duckworth; London, 1980)
R. Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy: from Descartes to Wittgenstein (Routledge; London & New York, 1995)
J. Skorupski, English Language Philosophy, 17501945 (Oxford University Press; Oxford & New York, 1993)
E. Talmor, Descartes and Hume (Pergamon; Oxford, 1980)
R. Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: understanding the Ideas that have shaped our world (Pimlico; London, 1991)
J. Passmore, Hume, quoted in, B. Magee, The Great Philosophers: an Introduction to Western Philosophy (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 2000)
D. Hume, On the Standard of Taste (1757), in, University of Minnesota website; http://www.mnstate/edu.gracyk/courses/phillofart/humeontaste.htm
T. Gracyk, Hume's Aesthetics (2003), in, University of Stanford website;
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-aesthetics
J. Carey, Do the art Matter? quoted in, The Observer: Review Section (Sunday 8 May, 2005)
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