The Problems With "Standard of Taste"

For Hume, quality of literature is discerned according to the longevity of positive reception of a piece. As he says, "The beauties, which are naturally fitted to excite agreeable sentiments, immediately display their energy; and while the world endures, they maintain their authority over the minds of men" (396). Unfortunately, according to this standard, our popular art, our blockbuster films would be more likely to measure up to this definition of beauty than our more intellectual and thought-provoking cultural utterances. To many others, especially today, real art is not enjoyable or even beautiful, but challenging. (The other problem with this statement is that authority often continues to be perpetuated through academic tradition particularly with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the like.) Hume does get to the problem of superficial beauty, but he does not quite solve it: "There is a species of beauty, which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but being found incompatible with a just expression either of reason or passion, soon palls upon the taste, and is then rejected with disdain, at least rated at a much lower value" (399). For this reason, practice is required in order to judge properly and discern the proper sort of beauty. What seems like a simple theory soon becomes infinitely complex as Hume tries to jump the hurdle he set up for himself, which is: "All determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves" (393). He ought to have stopped there.

The parable Hume borrows from Quixote also has its problems. The main problem is that in the parable, we understand who it is that has the greater delicacy of taste when they find the key at the bottom. In life, we will never find the key at the bottom and the two men who perceived the leather and iron in the wine will remain the laughing stock of the group. The common opinion lacks that delicacy of taste, yet it is the common opinion over time that Hume affirms. It is the common people that determine the standards where those with the delicacy may be one in a million. Based on this reasoning, Hume is and is not an elitist.

He resolves this problem of indeterminacy, however, saying that if one does not perceive an influence of either beauty or defect that another does, "He must conclude, upon the whole, that the fault lies in himself, and that he wants the delicacy, which is requisite to make him sensible of every beauty and every blemish, in any composition or discourse" (397). Thus the standard of who has superior taste can only be discerned according to this standard: whoever sees most sees best. If "a thousand different sentiments excited by the same object are all right" then it would follow that whoever has the most sentiments is most right (394).