Page 209 - DENG502_PROSE

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

proved, systems in physics may be controverted; but the harmony of verse, the tenderness of Notes
passion, the brilliancy of wit, must give immediate pleasure (EPM, 171).
We do not infer that a sunset is beautiful and so deserving of approbation. We see the sunset, and
the visual impressions please us. If we have the proper point of view, we are justified in saying
that the sunset is beautiful. This verdict is more than a report or expression of the sentiment, yet
the sentiment is an irreplaceable element of the judgment. A parallel claim is made of moral
discrimination. “Pleasure and pain,” he insists, are the “essence” of beauty and deformity (T, 299).
But how does a a literary work “give immediate pleasure”?

Taste is the capacity to respond with approbation and disapprobation. But how
does taste relate to Hume’s various remarks about “perceptions” and “discernments”
of beauty, of our “judging” a work, and of critics who “give judgment” and who
“give” or “pronounce” a “verdict” or “recommendation” (SOT, passim)?

One of Hume’s most puzzling claims is that taste is an “immediate” response. In his extended
treatment of the passions and emotions in the Treatise, Hume says that “immediate” feelings are
ones that do not involve the “interposition” of ideas (T, 275). Some pleasures and pains are
“immediate” in the sense that they are impressions that immediately accompany other impressions
(e.g., the experience of a very hot flame is accompanied by an experience of pain). How does a
literary work “give immediate pleasure”? Taken literally, Hume appears to claim that literary
works are beautiful independent of the audience’s ability to assign ideas or meanings to the
words. But this is certainly not Hume’s position. The solution is that that there is “mental, as well
as bodily taste” (SOT, 274). Moral and aesthetic discrimination depend on mental taste. The requisite
sentiments are spontaneous products of the mind, but they are not uninformed responses.
Mental taste normally requires some intervening thought process. So the pleasures and pains of
aesthetic judgment are not immediate in being direct responses to other impressions.
Some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance, command our
affection and approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to
redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of
beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel
the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection.
There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and
demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the
human mind (EPM, 173).
Mental taste arises in response to ideas that arise in response to impressions (e.g., viewing a
photograph occasions thoughts about the place pictured, leading to thoughts about experiences
one had or might have there, and the thoughts arising in this imaginative process are pleasurable
or painful). Hume regards this “immediacy” of taste as entirely compatible with the influence of
intellectual and imaginative faculties.
Taste is immediate and spontaneous, yet the application of “good sense” and “reason” improves
it (SOT, 277). Taste is not improved by reasoning from a priori normative principles. Moral and
aesthetic discriminations “are not conclusions of reason” (T, 457). Neither results from a mere
“comparing of ideas” (T, 463). However, taste can be influenced by consultation of “general rules
of art” or “rules” that “are founded only on experience and observation” (SOT, 270). Mental taste
involves reason in the sense of “sound understanding,” which ultimately depends on imaginative
associations of ideas. So taste involves imaginative pleasure, as Addison proposed. This doctrine of
imaginative pleasure has no special connection with creativity or with the capacity to produce art.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 203