Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume

Timothy M Costelloe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135197872
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The book has two aims. First, to examine the extent and significance of the connection between Hume's aesthetics and his moral philosophy; and, second, to consider how, in light of the connection, his moral philosophy answers central questions in ethics.

The first aim is realized in chapters 1-4. Chapter 1 examines Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" to understand his search for a "standard" and how this affects the scope of his aesthetics. Chapter 2 establishes that he treats beauty in nature and art and moral beauty as similar in kind, and applies the conclusions about his aesthetics to his moral thought. Chapter 3 solves a puzzle to which this gives rise, namely, how individuals both accept general standards that they also contravene in the course of aesthetic and moral activity. Chapter 4 takes up the normative aspect of Hume's approach by understanding moral character through his view of moral beauty.

The second aim of the book is realized in chapters 5-7 by entertaining three objections against Hume's moral philosophy. First, if morality is an immediate reaction to the beauty of vice and the deformity of virtue, why is perfect virtue not the general condition of every human individual? Second, if morality consists of sentiments that arise in the subject, how can moral judgments be objective and claim universal validity? And third, if one can talk of "general standards" governing conduct, how does one account for the diversity of moral systems and their change over time? The first is answered by showing that like good taste in aesthetics, 'right taste' in morals requires that the sentiments are educated; the second, by arguing against the view that Hume is a subjectivist and a relativist, and the third (chapter 6), by showing that his approach contains a view of progress left untouched by any personal prejudices Hume himself might harbor. The book concludes in chapter 7 by showing how Hume's view of philosophy affects the scope of any normative ethics.

1 General rules and “Of the Standard of Taste”

The goal of this first chapter is to examine Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” with a view to understanding what he means by the term “standard,” the function it performs in “regulating” aesthetic judgment, and, subsequently, the role he assigns to the critic or “true judge” in matters of taste. This interpretation has important implications for understanding Hume’s aesthetics and, as will become clear in subsequent chapters, his approach to morals as well. I begin with the central features of Hume’s approach to aesthetics before focusing on the distinction he draws between general rules in their “first” and “second influence.” The latter, it transpires, are abstractions, which, when framed in the course of philosophical reflection, explain the phenomenon under investigation; in “fixing” the standard of taste, Hume thus abridges and expresses in philosophical form the concrete judgments individuals make about beauty. Hume’s approach to beauty then explains conduct by showing in what aesthetic judgment consists, and having fixed a standard, recommending some judgments as constituting good taste while rejecting others as constituting bad.

Hume’s approach to aesthetics

Before turning to the concept of general rules and Hume’s essay on taste, it is necessary to be clear about the main features of his approach to aesthetics. Hume’s scattered references to architecture and painting notwithstanding, he gives little specific attention to the fine arts, and his forays into criticism in the Essays and History of England are concerned largely with the stylistic conventions of literary composition and the classical tradition of eloquence.¹ When Hume writes of “beauty,” however, he clearly speaks the language of what is anachronistically termed eighteenth-century aesthetics, a tradition, which, as a number of commentators have documented, finds its immediate inspiration in the work of John Locke, the Abbe Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Joseph Addison, and Francis Hutcheson.² There are three general elements that characterize Hume’s approach and together these inform what he means when he speaks of judgments in the sphere of aesthetics: a certain manner of conception in which sentiments or feelings arise in an individual with the capacity to be affected by objects that give rise subsequently to pleasure or pain, approbation or disapprobation.

Hume holds, first, that beauty and deformity are matters of human sentiment rather than essential facts about objects themselves, a view he expresses, following Locke, in terms of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.³ “Beauty and deformity,” Hume says, “[no] more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external” (ST 235).⁴ Beauty is not a quality that resides in an object so judged, but a feeling that arises in an individual as a result of the relationship formed between that individual and the world. As Hume says in the Treatise, “Tho’ it shou’d be question’d, whether beauty be not something real … it is not, properly speaking, a quality in any object, but merely a passion or impression in the soul” (T 2.1.8.6, SBN 301). For although it is generally “supposed,” he observes in “The Sceptic,” that the “agreeable quality … [lies] in the object, not in the sentiment,” a “little reflection” is sufficient to reveal that such a view is mistaken and that the beauty of a circle does not lie “in any part of the line whose parts are all equally distant from a common center. It is only the effect which that figure produces upon the mind” (E 165, first emphasis in original, second added; see also EPM Appx. 1.14, SBN 291–92). The beauty of a poem, he writes a few paragraphs later, lies “in the sentiment or taste of the reader” (E 166).

Second, and a corollary to the first point, Hume maintains that human beings are constituted in such a way that certain objects affect them; for this reason, he is sometimes seen as holding a “causal” theory of taste, the view that there is some decipherable causal connection linking objects with the sentiments they elicit.⁵ “The mind of man is so formed by nature,” he remarks in the first Enquiry, “that, upon the appearance of certain characters, dispositions, and actions, it immediately feels the sentiments of approbation or blame; nor are there any emotions more essential to its frame and constitution” (EHU 8.35, SBN 102). “Certain qualities in objects,” moreover, as Hume writes in “Of the Standard of Taste,” are “fitted by nature” to produce perceptions of sense in “external” sentiment and these qualities give rise to “particular feelings” of “internal” sentiment (ST 235). As one has external senses through which physical objects take on their familiar shapes, textures, sounds, and smells, so there is an “internal” sense through which objects are perceived as beautiful. As a lemon is bitter or honey sweet to the taste-buds, so a particular arrangement of parts, a configuration of paint on canvas, or words in a poem are beautiful to the spectator or reader concerned. Individuals do not simply react to their environment, but perception is partly a function of the “human frame”: beauty is conferred by the “passion alone, arising from the original structure and formation of human nature” (E 163). “Beauty is such an order and construction of parts,” Hume writes in the Treatise, “as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul” (T 2.1.8.2, SBN 299). Hence “easy and unconstrained postures and motions are always beautiful” (EPM 5.38, SBN 224), and since all individuals share the same “fabric of … the mind” (E 164), in principle at least, the sentiments of beauty should be similar in each case.

Third, Hume argues that beauty and deformity arise because the object of which these sentiments are predicated is a source of pleasure or pain, or expresses utility. Indeed, “pleasure and pain … are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence,” an opinion to which “we shall make no scruple to assent,” Hume declares, once “we consider, that a great part of beauty … is deriv’d from the idea of convenience and utility” (T 2.1.8.2, SBN 299). On some occasions Hume treats pleasure/pain and utility as two separate principles. Thus with regard to the former, “a figure, which is not justly balanced, is ugly; because it conveys the disagreeable ideas of fall, harm, and pain” (EPM 6.28, SBN 245). Or, discussing the direct passions, he observes how “a suit of fine cloaths produces pleasure from their beauty” (T 2.3.9.4, SBN 439); “sunshine or the prospect of well-cultivated plains … communicates a secret joy and satisfaction” (EPM 6.22, SBN 243–44); and “beauty of all kinds gives us a peculiar delight and satisfaction; as deformity produces pain” (T 2.1.8.1, SBN 298). Similarly, in the case of utility, “the eye is pleased with the prospect of corn-fields and loaded vine-yards; horses grazing, and flocks pasturing: But flies the view of briars and brambles, affording shelter to wolves and serpents” (EPM 2.9, SBN 179). Utility makes an object more beautiful than it would otherwise be, even if design with a view to use produces “disproportion or seeming deformity” (EPM 5.1, SBN 212).

In general, however, Hume takes pain/pleasure and utility as one, or at least as inseparable parts of a single principle. Since utility itself presupposes a conception of beauty, it should already be a source of pleasure and its opposite a source of uneasiness: to be useful means to be beautiful. “A machine, a piece of furniture, a vestment, a house well contrived for use and conveniency, is so far beautiful,” Hume observes, “and is contemplated with pleasure and approbation” (EPM 2.10, SBN 179). Similarly, the shape of an animal is beautiful because it conveys the utility of strength or agility, the beauty of a palace is derived from both form and function, and a pillar slender at its top and wider at its base gives pleasure because it conveys the convenience of security rather than the inconvenience of danger that attends the opposite arrangement. “From innumerable instances of this kind,” Hume writes, “… we may conclude that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain” (T 2.1.8.2, SBN 299).

General rules

As already indicated, Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” has generated a steady stream of commentary since its composition and publication in 1757. Writing in 1938, S.G. Brown could declare with confidence that the essay “has always been recognized as an important document, from the time of its publication … through the critical debates of the neo-classic period of English letters … [to] contemporary scholars who are concerned with the problems of taste, imagination, rules, and genius in the Age of Johnson.”⁶ Since that time, the rate of critical attention has reflected and kept pace with the growing interest in Hume and his aesthetics. While the essay stands as Hume’s only self-contained treatment of aesthetic matters, the attention it has received is still remarkable when one considers that it occupies so small a space in his corpus and that its composition was an accident of circumstance rather than a self-conscious attempt to make good on the proposed work “Of Criticism” promised in the Treatise. As Hume reports in a letter to his publisher William Strahan, “a new Essay on the Standard of Taste” was composed to replace two other essays – “On Suicide” and “On the Immortality of the Soul” – that had been published, but, given their subject matter, judiciously withdrawn by Hume himself (L 252–54). If not for these circumstances, “Of the Standard of Taste” might not have been written at all.

The outlines of Hume’s essay are well known. It begins with the observation that ordinary language implies a general standard, which the philosophical mind naturally seeks out (ST 228–29). Hume then raises the objection that “beauty is not a quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” From this observation he draws the relativist conclusion that “each mind perceives a different beauty” (ST 230), a philosophical prejudice he then confounds by suggesting that there are “general rules” that govern the appropriateness of aesthetic judgments (ST 235). These rules, he says, are to be met with most clearly in the person of the critic or true judge (ST 241). This conclusion is immediately challenged as premature, however, with Hume himself raising a series of “embarrassing” questions that threaten to throw the whole endeavor “back into the same uncertainty, from which, during the course of the essay, we have endeavoured to extricate ourselves” (ST 241). Hume responds to this threat by acknowledging the co-existence of both “peculiarities of manners” and uniformity of sentiments, an impossible juxtaposition that is clarified as the essay comes to a close (ST 242ff.). The conclusion of the essay thus marks the end point at which Hume has generated and overcome a series of contradictions in an explication of the standard of taste, the proposed existence of which motivated the essay in the first place.

Although there is much debate over how to interpret the form and content of the essay, a good deal of recent scholarship has focused on what many have seen as Hume’s perplexing strategy of characterizing the standard as a rule, but discovering it finally in the conclusion that the “joint verdict of such [true judges], wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (ST 241, emphasis added). While disagreement on this matter still remains, there seems to be consensus on two basic issues. First, commentators who focus on Hume’s characterization of the standard in terms of a rule generally regard it as an inductive generalization, inferred from empirical observation about what has pleased and displeased across time and place.⁷ The text of the essay clearly provides some prima facie evidence for this view. Hume says of “rules of composition,” for example, that they are not “fixed by reasonings a priori’ but are “general observations, concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages,” and are “discovered to the author either by genius or observation” (ST 231). So the “same Homer, who pleased at ATHENS and ROME two thousand years ago,” Hume observes later, “is still admired at PARIS and at LONDON. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory” (ST 233).⁸ If principles governing our sentiment of beauty cannot be derived a priori, then it is reasonable to conclude that, in Hume’s view, they must be empirical generalizations of the “common sentiments of human nature” (ST 231).

Second, many interpret the standard of taste as having some practical value. On this view, Hume’s primary aim is to discover a normative standard that can be employed to guide judgment and settle disputes over taste and beauty when they arise.⁹ Again, Hume appears to make such a claim in the course of the essay. In the case of the “bad critic,” for example, who refuses to “submit to his antagonist” (ST 236), it seems as if the standard can be “applied to the present case,” as Hume puts it, such that the critic “must conclude … that the fault lies in himself” (ST 236). Hume also says that “general rules of beauty are of use [and] … drawn from established models, and from the observation of what pleases and displeases”; these “avowed patterns of composition” are discovered by those of delicate taste and stand as criteria for deciding whether the opinion of critics is informed or should be rejected as mere pretension (ST 235).

Commentators, however, make both these claims – one concerning the empirical nature of the standard, and the other regarding its practical use – without paying due attention to the fact that Hume characterizes the “standard” in terms of “a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled” (ST 229), “rules of art” (ST 231), “general rules of beauty,” and “general rules or avowed patterns” (ST 235), which are founded on experience and “fix” what “has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages” (ST 231). Since Hume explicitly equates the standard with a general rule, it seems prudent to ask what he means by this latter term before drawing any conclusions about the nature of the standard he aims to discover.¹⁰

Hume’s most elaborate discussion of general rules is to be found in the Treatise where he characterizes them as the source of one “unphilosophical species of probability.” These rules are “unphilosophical” because they give rise to false judgments. “We rashly form [general rules] to ourselves,” Hume writes, and they become “the source of what we properly call PREJUDICE”; that, for example, “an Irishman cannot have wit, and a Frenchman cannot have solidity.” Such judgments are “errors” since they go against “sense and reason” and are persistently made despite evidence to the contrary (T 1.3. 13.7, SBN 146).

Why are such judgments made, we might ask, if they are clearly mistakes without basis in experience or matter of fact? Hume’s answer to this question is found in his distinction between two “influences” of general rules, which have their origin in the imagination and judgment, respectively. Hume begins by observing that unphilosophical judgments are one kind of reasoning from cause and effect, and, like all such reasoning, they are subject to the tendency that “when we have been accustom’d to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection, and which cannot be prevented by it.” Custom operates with “full force” when the object presented is the same as that experienced in the past, but still “operates to an inferior degree” when the object is merely similar or “resembling.” “A man, who has contracted a custom of eating fruit by use of pears or peaches,” Hume observes, “will satisfy himself with melons, where he cannot find his favourite fruit; as one, who has become a drunkard by the use of red wines, will be carry’d almost with the same violence to white, if presented to him.” As the resemblance grows weaker, Hume emphasizes, “the probability diminishes; but still has some force as long as there remains any traces of the resemblance” (T 1.3.13.8, SBN 147).

Were it always possible to distinguish sameness from mere resemblance, our ideas would be free of error since they could be traced back to experience and the genuine operations of the understanding. Sometimes, however, the “superfluous” circumstances surrounding a causal relationship influence the imagination in such a way that we arrive at the “conception of the usual effect” even though features “essential” to the relationship are wanting. The force of habit and custom “gives a biass [sic] to the imagination,” and we are led to the corresponding idea as if the necessary circumstances were extant (T 1.3.13.9, SBN 148). Hume offers the example of a man in a cage suspended from a high tower who “cannot forbear trembling when he surveys the precipice below him, tho’ he know himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the solidity of the iron, which supports him; and tho’ the ideas of fall and descent, and harm and d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. General rules and “Of the Standard of Taste”
• 2. Aesthetic beauty and moral beauty
• 3. Antinomy and error
• 4. Reflection and character
• 5. Beauty and moral life
• 6. Progress and prejudice
• 7. Conclusion: Philosophy and moral life
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index