Hume on feeling and judgment
Both strong subjectivist positions such as that of Smith and strong objectivist
positions such as those of Mothersill and Savile frequently take their bearings
from a science-oriented model of objects and their properties. Following the
lead of science, they take the problem of the nature of judgments of taste to
be a version of the problem of discovery versus projection. Either artistic
values are simply there in some objects and performances, in ways that can
be determined through objective tests, as acidity of a liquid is determined by
putting a drop of it on litmus paper, or they are projected on to things from
the subjective mind and sentiment of the perceiver, just as one person likes
the taste of blackberries while another does not. Instead, however, of
attempting to assimilate identifications and evaluations of art to either
judgments that record scientific discoveries or mere recordings of subjective
reactions, we might do better to pay attention to how we live with both
objective and subjective aspects of judgments of taste.^38 Attention to the
peculiar status of artistic identifications and evaluations as subjectively
objective or objectively subjective is the great project of the two most import-
ant works on the nature of judgments of taste, Hume’s essay“Of the Stand-
ard of Taste”and the transcendental deduction of the intersubjective validity
of judgments of taste in Kant’sCritique of the Power of Judgment.
Hume begins his essay by describing what can be called the paradox of
taste: three commonplaces about the identification and evaluation of art that
win ready assent but that are inconsistent–any two entail the negation of
the third. These three commonplaces are as follows:- Judgments of taste are expressions of sentiment. That is, unlike science,
where“an explanation of the terms commonly ends the controversy,”^39 in
identifying and evaluating works of art different people feel differently,
(^38) Carolyn Korsmeyer notes that disgust–an evaluative reaction/judgment–both to some
extent has a“reactive, automatic nature”and displays“visceral powers”to move us,
especially from ingesting noxious foods, presumably for evolutionary reason,anddis-
plays“cultural plasticity,”including cases in which disgust becomes an element of
“positive savor and pleasure.”Korsmeyer,Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics
(Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 15–16, 58. While human nature and evolved reaction
propensities matter, it is also not always easy to separate nature from culture, objective
reactions to (measurable) features of objects from learned“takes”on them.
(^39) Hume,“Of the Standard of Taste,”p. 256.
182 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art