Moral prejudice and aesthetic deformity: Rereading Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste"

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 59-71

  Mason, Michelle ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 48349137233     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00007     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. See Peter Jones, "Hume's Aesthetics Reassessed," The Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1976): 56.
2. All references to Hume's essays are to David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985).
3. Hereafter, I give all references to "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757) in the text, in parentheses. Other works by Hume to which I refer are the essay "Of Moral Prejudices" (1742), A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
4. and "A Dialogue" in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
5. Contemporary moralist aestheticians influenced by Hume's essay include: Noël Carroll, "Moderate Moralisin," The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 223-238,
6. and Berys Gaut, "The Ethical Criticism of Art," in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 182-203. In the works cited, Carroll and Gaut primarily are engaged in defending their own brand of moralist aesthetics.
7. For particularly insightful discussions of Hume's essay in work whose primary concern is not to defend a moralist aesthetics, see Richard Moran, "The Expression of Feeling in Imagination," Philosophical Review 103 (1994): 75-106,
8. and Kendall Walton, "Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 68 (1994): 27-50.
9. Finally, Daniel Jacobson's "In Praise of Immoral Art," Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155-199, primarily takes issue with contemporary moralist aestheticians. Where Jacobson does attempt to offer a reading of Hume's views, however, he sometimes neglects responses that Hume could make in answer to his criticisms. Such neglect reinforces my view that contemporary aestheticians need to come to terms with Hume before presuming to argue in favor of, or against, a purportedly Humean moralist aesthetics.
10. Hume, "Of Moral Prejudices," p. 539.
11. Of course, Hume also recognizes a use of "prejudice" possessing a strictly negative connotation. In the Treatise, for example, Hume refers to prejudice properly so-called. If our experience is not sufficiently broad, or we have mistaken an isolated relation of coincidence (e.g., "This Irishman is witless") for causality ("Irish origin causes witlessness"), our mistaken causal reasoning generates prejudiced beliefs, such as the belief that an Irishman cannot have wit. See A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 146.
12. See, for example, Peter Kivy, "Hume's Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle," The British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967): 62-63,
13. and The Seventh Sense (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1976), pp. 146-147.
14. I believe this is a misreading of Hume. Kivy offers a reading more sensitive to the contextualist element in Hume's essay in "Hume's Neighbor's Wife: An Essay on the Evolution of Hume's Aesthetics," The British Journal of Aesthetics 23 (1983): 206-207.
15. The passages in question specify that a critic ought "allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination," and that "when any work is addressed to the public, though I should have a friendship or enmity with the author, I must depart from this situation; and considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances." See "Of the Standard of Taste," pp. 239-240.
16. Daniel Jacobson is one recent critic who appears ready to saddle Hume with some such dilemma. See Jacobson, "In Praise of Immoral Art," especially the section headed "Moral Sensitivity: Delicacy or Prejudice?"
17. On a reading offered by Stephen Darwall, for example, Hume's moral judge remains a spectator whose "(pleasurable) approbation is not an intrinsic response to contemplating the [character] trait [being assessed], but a response generated by sympathy with other pleasurable states she or he believes likely to be caused or realized by it" in those who may actually encounter the person with the trait. For Darwall's interpretation of the moral case, see "Hume and the Invention of Utilitarian in Hume and Hume's Connections, ed. M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 58-82, p. 71. In contrast, I suggest in what follows that Hume's true aesthetic judges imaginatively adopt a point of view that enables them to experience the same type of intrinsic response to a work of art as that which would be experienced by its intended audience.
18. See, for example, Darwall, "Hume and the Invention of Utilitarianism," and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, "On Why Hume's 'General Point of View' Isn't Ideal - And Shouldn't Be," Social Philosophy and Policy 11 (1994): 202-228.
19. For a discussion of relativism in the context of Hume's ethics, see Kate Abramson, "Hume on Cultural Conflicts of Value," Philosophical Studies 94 (1999): 173-187.
20. I would want to develop this reading in such a way that it could allow for a gap between occurrent sentiments and judgments in particular cases while maintaining that true judges ideally judge a work beautiful in response to pleasurable feelings elicited in them by the work itself. For discussion of how the gap between occurrent sentiments and judgments is treated in the moral case, see Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, "On Why Hume's 'General Point of View' Isn't Ideal - And Shouldn't Be," and Elizabeth Radcliffe, "Hume on Motivating Sentiments, the General Point of View and the Inculcation of Morality," Hume Studies 20 (1994): 37-58. Note, however, that if my reading of Hume's aesthetic point of view is correct, Sayre-McCord is too quick in claiming, "The general point of view, as it describes a standard of taste in morals, parallels to an extraordinary degree the point of view of a qualified critic" (p. 220). Rather than attempting to assimilate Hume's aesthetic and moral points of view, I believe that we do well to attend to their differences and, most importantly, to subject to greater philosophical scrutiny the very idea of a "point of view."
21. If simulation theories of the mind are correct, however, this imaginative feat is not in fact so difficult; rather, we engage in it all the time. For a discussion of such simulation theories, see Martin Davies and Tony Stone, eds., Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995).
22. Noël Carroll, "Hume's Standard of Taste," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1984): 193, note 28.
23. Criticisms such as Carroll's in fact dogged the essay from the start. For example, Peter Kivy reports that shortly after its publication, an anonymous reviewer wrote: "Instead of fixing and ascertaining the standard of taste, as we expected, our author only leaves us in the same uncertainty as he found us: and concludes with the philosophers of old, that all we know is, that we know nothing." See Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense, p. 149. In response to a version of this paper read at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Carroll noted that he no longer endorses his earlier reading of Hume. To the best of my knowledge, none of Carroll's later published writings provides an answer to the problem I pursue here.
24. Christopher MacLachlan, "Hume and the Standard of Taste," Hume Studies 12 (1986): 31.
25. George Dickie, too, initially is ready to ascribe a form of relativism to Hume. Commenting on the "But notwithstanding ..." passage, he writes: "Through the bulk of his essay Hume combats relativism on the cognitive front, but at the end of the essay, when he turns his attention to affective matters, he quickly gives in to relativism. Why does Hume capitulate and should he?" Dickie, Evaluating Art (Temple University Press, 1988), p. 147.
26. Hume's attempt to avoid relativist conclusions in other writings, particularly in A Dialogue and in his correspondence, makes this clear. See, for example, Hume's letter of March 1753 to James Balfour. There, Hume chides Balfour for attributing to him the skeptical views of Palamedes (who argues that moral determinations depend not on human nature but on "fashion, vogue, custom, and law") in A Dialogue: "I must only complain of you a little for ascribing to me the sentiments which I have put into the mouth of the Sceptic in the Dialogue. I have surely endeavored to refute the Sceptic with all the force of which I am master; and my refutation must be allowed sincere, because drawn from the capital principles of my system." The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 173.
27. By a categorical judgment I simply mean a judgment that places a work in one of two categories: beautiful/good of its kind or ugly/bad of its kind. Peter Jones likewise interprets the distinctions Hume here mentions as "residual variations within otherwise agreed judgments," and George Dickie similarly regards them as impacting only rankings of the value of different positive aesthetic properties. See Peter Jones, "Hume's Literary and Aesthetic Theory," The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. Fate Norton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 273,
28. and George Dickie, Evaluating Art, pp. 150-151.
29. Ted Cohen has suggested that analyzing "It's good but I don't like it" is reminiscent of working on Moore's paradox. See Ted Cohen, "On Consistency in One's Personal Aesthetics," in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection.
30. Daniel Jacobson, "In Praise of Immoral Art," pp. 187-188.
31. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a somewhat hackneyed example of a work whose moral deficiencies constitute aesthetic flaws, according to moralist aestheticians. Here, I offer the example of a work that has for a long time occupied my own thoughts about the relevance of moral considerations to aesthetic assessment. Some people, no doubt, will think I have misread Chaplin. Those who do will find an able ally in Andre Bazin, "The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux," in his What Is Cinema? vol. 2 (University of California Press, 1971),pp. 102-123.
32. For an excellent discussion of imaginative resistance, with reference to Hume's essay, see Moran, "The Expression of Feeling in Imagination."