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Unit 20: David Hume-Of Essay Writing ...

importance. They provide insight into perennial problems and so serve as the historical foundation Notes
for subsequent attempts to defend a subjectivist aesthetic theory.
Unfortunately, numerous interpretative challenges arise from Hume’s scattered presentation, his
range of references, and his eighteenth-century assumptions about art. Like many of his
contemporaries, Hume regards “poetry and the polite authors” as the most important arts (PW 3,
19). Poetry differs from the other arts in being designed for the primary purpose of giving pleasure
(SOT, 277). When using the terms “art” and “artist,” Hume sometimes means any human artifice
and any skilled designer (in one context, an “artist” is someone who repairs a clock (EHU, 87)). In
contexts where he can only be taken to be interested in the narrower category of fine art, Hume
variously mentions painting, statuary, architecture, dance, poetry, and music. But he places poetry
among the arts of eloquent public discourse.

Eloquence includes sermons, essays, argumentative discourse, and other categories
that we today would regard as too overtly didactic to be fine art (E).

Hume assumes that every product of human labor has some definite purpose, with only a limited
subset of art being produced for the sake of pleasure alone. (He is skeptical about appeals to
teleological or final causes in nature.) Houses will be designed and built apart from any need to
satisfy our taste for beauty, and representational art will be produced in order to provide visual
information. The interesting questions are why houses and visual representations also appeal to
taste, and what this appeal tells us about the relative contributions of human nature and education
as conditions for appropriate responses to our surroundings.
So what label best summarizes Hume’s theory of moral and aesthetic taste? It may be easier to
specify which labels do not fit his theory than to attach one to it. He rejects normative realism.
(There is considerable controversy on the question of whether Hume is a realist regarding matters
of fact. Putting that issue to one side, he clearly denies that normative judgments have the same
degree of objectivity that holds for matters of fact.) Hume is equally at pains to deny that reason
provides an adequate foundation for judgments of taste. Is he therefore a subjectivist? Not if
subjectivism implies that such judgments are arbitrary. He is not a relativist, for the main point of
the essay on taste is that some judgments of taste are superior to others. Nor, in his own terms, is
he a skeptic regarding aesthetic properties and value judgments. Despite his philosophical view
that beauty is not a real property of things, Hume never questions the meaningfulness of general
practice of making aesthetic judgments. Because the verdicts of taste are sentiments, devoid of
truth-value, there is no opportunity for the conflicts and failures of reason that give rise to
philosophical skepticism.
Hume’s Terminology
Hume regards the natural capacity of taste as fundamental to the human ability to make moral
and aesthetic judgments. Like his predecessors, Hume sees an analogy between an “inner sense”
for beauty and the sense of taste for food and drink. Natural, general laws guide both. Both permit
of education and refinement and thus better and worse responses. Both produce sentiments or
feelings of approval and disapproval. But only the “mental” taste, the exercise of which is involved
in moral and aesthetic judgment, admits of refinement through “the interposition” of ideas.
Hume’s eighteenth-century terminology includes a pair of terms no longer in general use. In his
basic nomenclature, “taste in morals, eloquence, or beauty” assigns either “approbation” or
“disapprobation” (or some combination of both) to objects of taste (T, 547n). Approbation is “a

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