FRANCIS HUTCHESON ON THE IDEA OF BEAUTY

An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue

Hutcheson, operating within a framework, the ‘theory of ideas’, that became dominant through the work of Descartes and that was appropriated in due course by John Locke (under whom Hutcheson studied) spoke of things in the mind termed ‘ideas’. We perceive something in the real world and in doing so we are changed, at least to the extent that we thereupon have an idea of the object perceived. Perhaps it is appropriate in some cases to think of the idea as an image of the object, but ‘image’ hints at visible properties and yet an idea can be of something sensed by hearing, touch, taste or smell. If therefore we take an idea, as many do, to be an image, then the concept of an image must be sufficiently broad to encompass tactile and olfactory images amongst others.

Hutcheson terms some ideas ‘sensations’, namely those that are produced or ‘raised’ when we respond perceptually to an external object, and he focuses upon the natural necessity and immediacy of the mental product. That is, if with our well-functioning visual sensory apparatus we stand in front of a dog and look at it, we will thereupon by natural necessity have a visual experience of a dog. By speaking of the mind as passive, Hutcheson attends to the notion that if the will plays a role at all in perception the role is not primary. Of course, the will can have an effect on the content of our perceptual experience in the sense that if we will not to look at something or will to look at it for a longer or shorter period the act of will affects the content. But for the will to make a difference, the well-functioning sensory apparatus must already be in place, enabling us to perceive the object when our sensory receptor is presented with the appropriate stimuli. Indeed we are able to exercise voluntary control over our perceptual experience precisely because we know that this is how nature works, for suppose we know that if we now open our eyes we will immediately and necessarily see X, if we think we ought not to look at X then we must will either to keep our eyes shut or at least to avert our gaze when we open them.

Regarding our perceptions, another immediacy that Hutcheson foregrounds is that of the pleasure or pain afforded by many of them. Without our knowing why certain objects please or displease us, they nevertheless affect us in this way, but even if we did know why , this would affect us little or not at all, in that independently of such knowledge we would still find them agreeable or disagreeable. Amongst the pleasures that arise in us immediately and by nature, there are those associated with objects that we judge beautiful, and Hutcheson argues that , though we perceive the beauty of all sorts of things accessible by the external senses, it is appropriate to posit a further sense, which he terms an internal sense.

Hutcheson posits an internal aesthetic sense for 2 reasons:1) People vary widely in their degree of sensitivity to the beauty of different things, even where their external senses seem equally efficient, and if it were the external senses that were doing all the work in discovering the beauty of things, why should people with equally efficient external senses not be equally efficient at discerning the beauty of external things?

2) A power of sense is clearly at work in the discovery of the beauty of things, for what distinguishes a power of sense is that it operates immediately and purely by natural means in disclosing qualities to us.

The inner sense of beauty is not a sense possessed soley by the aesthetically sophisticated person. This inner sense is no less a part of the original frame of our nature than are the senses of sight, hearing and so on. Some may be better at sensing beauty than others but almost everyone is able to judge some things to be beautiful and some things not to be (Question: Does Hutcheson believe that someone may be born without or come to lose their inner sense of beauty in a way analogous with seeing and hearing faculties?). Admittedly people disagree on aesthetic matters but such disagreement, however extensive, is possible only because we all engage in the application of aesthetic categories to things.

Where is beauty located? Is it in the object perceived to be beautiful or is it in the mind of the perceiver? Hutcheson makes use of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities – between on the one hand those qualities such as size, figure and number, which are possessed by objects whether or not whether or not they are being perceived, and those qualities which are perceived to be what they are because of the particular physiological and chemical make-up of the perceiver. For instance, my visual experience of colour depends no less on the chemistry of the retina than on the physical properties of the pigment of the coloured object. Hutcheson seems to class aesthetic qualities as secondary. As the sweetness or bitterness of food depends upon the condition of the taste buds no less than upon the food, so likewise the beauty depends upon the perceiver who is or is not responsive to the qualities in the thing perceived. On this basis, it seems appropriate to ascribe a form of subjectivism to Hutcheson – at least in respect of aesthetics. Insofar as they have a location it is surely in the mind of the subject.Hutcheson: ‘Beauty has always relation to the sense of some mind; and when we afterwards show how generally the objects which occur to us are beautiful, we mean that such objects are agreeable to the sense of men. ‘

There appears here to be a move towards the internalisation of beauty, in the sense that in perceiving something to be beautiful our so perceiving it is identical with our finding the thing agreeable. On this interpretation we cannot perceive something to be beautiful unless we derive pleasure from perceiving it – the feeling wells up.We might go as far as to say that in a universe in which there were no such welling up there would be no beauty. However, there is not in this a narrowly anthropocentric vision, for Hutcheson affirms that there may be other percipient creatures in the universe, beings whose senses are not constituted in the same way as ours, who delight in things of a quite different form from anything we would find agreeable and these things would be beautiful to those other creatures. It may also be implied from Hutcheson’s view that if a person could perceive the beauty of a thing but derive absolutely no pleasure from that perception, then that aesthetic experience would be worthless. In Hutcheson’s view, any creature with an aesthetic sensibility must have the power to feel pleasure, and this pleasure – in so far as it is attached to a perception of beauty – is not a product of a judgement of personal advantage. In short the perception of beauty is disinterested. Something of this thought is already present in Hutcheson’s emphasis on the immediacy of the operation of the inner sense. We look at something and a feeling of pleasure

thereupon arises – it does not do so on the basis of a conclusion drawn about a benefit we will gain from something. If it did arise on that basis it would not be immediate.

Hutcheson also warns against enjoining our inner sense with the foreign ideas of property and the desire of distinction as far as this is possible. The idea of property is ‘foreign’ to this kind of pleasure since the aesthetic pleasure arises directly and solely from the perception of the object, whereas the proprietor’s pleasure at his own object arises at least in part from something outside – namely, the spectator’s approval of the owner’s property. A similar thought attends to the ‘desire of distinction’: considerations such as whether our possessions are more distinguished than our neighbour are foreign to the question of the real aesthetic value of things – a question best answered by factoring out of the equation any consideration of the kind of interest that comes from ownership. Only if we adopt a disinterested perspective will our judgement measure up to the task of estimating an object’s beauty.In this sense, aesthetic judgement requires that the judge secure his freedom. Whatever he judges aesthetically he must judge as if it belongs neither to himself nor to anyone else within whom he is in a relation that could distort his judgement. The judge has to factor out all these features of the situation in which a judgement is to be made. His bid for freedom is a clearing of space between him and the object so that he can respond to the object alone and to ensure that he is looking at it without the distorting lens of categories foreign to the task at hand. When I judge I seek to be free from all of these considerations and therefore disinterestedness is a form of freedom. Disinterestedness is not easily gained but it is right to make the effort for 2 reasons:1) We owe it to the beautiful object; a beautiful thing is a bearer of value and it should be valued according to its value.2) We owe it to ourselves; to fail to achieve disinterestedness is –or even to fail to seek it – is to miss an opportunity to be judgementally free, that is, to secure our autonomy in our judgements concerning the beauty of beautiful things. The disinterestedness of our aesthetic perceptions is an important feature not only of Hutcheson’s aesthetics, but also for its parallel in his moral theory. Link to Adam Smith: Central to Smith’s moral philosophy is the concept of an impartial spectator, which arguably was influenced in part by Hutcheson’s earlier attempts to delineate what is in effect an impartial spectator in the field of aesthetics.

Arguably, the disinterestedness of aesthetic perception relates to the shape of the overall argument in the Inquiry. Hutcheson deals with aesthetic perception in Treatise I and with moral perception in Treatise II. In the latter, he aims to promote the doctrine that we can derive pleasure from the sight of a virtuous act, where the product is in no way a product of our belief that our interest is served by the act. The fact that our inner sense delivers up perceptions which, by their very nature, are not grounded in considerations of self-interest implies that we are not – contra Mandeville – self-interested all the way through. This does not mean that moral perceptions must be like aesthetic ones in being disinterested, but once it is demonstrated that self-interest is not fundamental to all our judgements this opens up the prospect that our moral perceptions are at least sometimes not shaped by self-interest.

A question remains as to what it is on the outside to which we respond by perceiving an object as beautiful. Hutcheson’s answer: Uniformity amidst Variety. Hutcheson’s main idea here seems to be that at one end of the spectrum, there exists extreme uniformity and at the other,

chaos in which there is no evident principle of unity or uniformity. Both cases are likely to elicit the affective response of boredom: the object is simply of no aesthetic interest. However, he offers some examples of this that do not do his thesis any favours: he tells us that we find a square more beautiful than an equilateral triangle because though they are equally uniform the square has greater variety; and that for the same reason a cube is more beautiful than a regular pyramid. These examples fail to persuade – they are perhaps even incomprehensible! It is difficult to see in what sense a square has more variety than an equilateral triangle. A more illuminating example of Hutcheson’s is found in the ‘beauty of history’. He argues that a collection of newspapers merely lists external events and therefore hold less interest than does well-written history, which lists the external events in the context of a narrative within which we are told not only what happened but also why it happened – not just what people did but what their motives and intentions were. The key point being that once we have an account of the inner aspect of a person’s actions we can see that many apparently disparate actions that had previously seemed to add up to a chaotic fragment of a life are in fact systematically related parts of a single plan of action. The narrative unlike the newspapers, has a much tighter uniformity amidst diversity and therefore is found more agreeable than the bare list of external events. While this example does a much better job of elucidating the meaning of uniformity amidst diversity it seems unusual in contemporary discussions of aesthetics – we would not usually class the eloquence of well-written essays, speeches, biographies, etc as beautiful. This is standard practice in the Enlightenment field of criticism however (present in Hume’s aesthetics also). It is more difficult to see what he means by his definition in fine art.

Hutcheson is not implying that in ascribing beauty to an external thing its beauty is nothing but it uniformity amidst variety. There could be uniformity amidst variety in a world in which there were no minds but without minds there would be no one to find pleasure in the uniformity amidst variety and there would therefore be no beauty in that world.

If ex hypothesi almost everyone has an inner sense, ex hypothesi a thing’s uniformity amidst variety raises in us the idea of the thing’s beauty, and ex hypothesi it is not difficult to recognise such uniformity in variety, it seems problematic that there should be any disagreement between people on aesthetic matters and that one person can find something first agreeable and then disagreeable even though there has been no perceptible change in the thing. Hutcheson responds by deploying Locke’s notion of association of ideas. Associations of ideas are habits of thought by which an idea of an X comes to draw an idea of a Y in its train (although X and Y are not related in actuality). Hutcheson gives the examples of a person finding a very wild country agreeable due to his spending a happy childhood there and, conversely, a person finding a very beautiful place disagreeable if a traumatic event occurred there.

Hutcheson seems to deny the extent of aesthetic disagreement amongst people; if two people are having the same identical simple perceptual experience (eg. Listening to the same single musical note) then – so long as their perception is not distorted by associated ideas, the two people will find the experience equally agreeable or disagreeable. He seems to imply that this is a logical truth, but he does not say why it would be a logical contradiction if the two people found the experience to be different in levels of pleasure. It is not clear what evidence supports this. Nonetheless it is equally difficult to disprove (possible link to Winch on individuality – very

difficult for two people’s dispositions and situations to be exactly the same: person A-in situation and person B-in-situation, in practice, are likely to be different).

Hutcheson’s claim that associations can distort the perceptions of beauty is perhaps plausible but there is need for more discussion on the matter than we find in Hutcheson’s work. The development of association of ideas is essential if, as regards any artwork, we are in a position to pass an aesthetic judgement worth attending to. Hutcheson claim that our sense of beauty is natural to us, seems to imply that we are capable of making aesthetic judgements antecedent to any associated ideas that might be factored into the judgement. While this answers the question of what is necessary to make aesthetic judgements, it still leaves open the question of what is necessary if we are to make aesthetic judgements which are valuable or tell us something meaningful. Hutcheson’s focus is almost entirely on associations which distort our perceptions of beauty, with almost nothing on the kinds of associations which enhance our perceptions. Our knowledge and experience concerning the history of artistic forms make all the difference to the quality of our judgements – we need a substantial battery of associated ideas for this (SEE HUME ‘ON THE STANDARD OF TASTE’.

HUME’S AESTHETICS

Hume’s views on art are intimately connected to his moral philosophy and theories of human thought and emotion.

His focus is on ‘criticism’ – a concept not interchangeable with either aesthetics or philosophy of art. These labels were not available at the time in which Hume’s work was published.

Hume’s theory is firmly rooted in the work of earlier philosophers including Francis Hutcheson. Hume retains the idea that the values within the scope of criticism are essentially pleasures of the human imagination. Although Hume acknowledges cases where beauty seems a merely sensory pleasure, he emphasizes beauty’s status as a cognitive pleasure. Hume endorses Hutcheson’s stance on the general question of the nature of both moral and aesthetic value. Value judgements are expressions of taste rather than reasoned analysis. Values cannot be addressed except in the context of a general theory about our shared human nature. However, although recognition of aesthetic and moral beauty is a manifestation of taste, taste must not be dismissed as subjective, idiosyncratic preference.

Hume is neither interested in working out a theory of art nor in analysing aesthetic properties. Due to the seamless connection he posits between moral and aesthetic value, much of his technical discussion of aesthetics appears only as an illustration of his moral theory. The two essays that appear to summarise Hume’s aesthetics are best understood as applications of a larger philosophical account of human nature, including social nature. The construction of each essay suggests a purpose of working out details of the larger project in the face of an obvious counter-example: the relativity of taste (SOT) and the pleasure we take in tragic fiction.

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. Hume includes

amongst the arts eloquent public discourse including sermons, essays, argumentative discourse and other categories that we today would regard as too overtly didactic to be fine art.

Hume assumes that every product of human labour has some definite purpose, with only a limited subset of art being produced for the sake of pleasure alone.

It may be easier to specify which labels do not fit Hume’s theory than to attach one to it. He rejects normative realism; he denies that normative judgements 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 judgements of taste. Does this mean he is a subjectivist? Not if subjectivism implies that such judgements are arbitrary. Nor 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 judgements. 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 is an inner sense theorist who treats aesthetic pleasure as an instinctive and natural human response. Successful art exploits our natural sentiments by employing appropriate composition and design; empirical inquiry can establish reliable ways to elicit the approval of taste.

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 or disapproval.

Beauty is a feeling of approbation and an original, simple impression of the mind. Impressions are contrasted with ideas, which are copies of impressions and seldom have the force or clarity of the experiences they copy. For Hume, experiencing beauty is a necessary condition for thinking about the idea of beauty. An individual cannot construct the idea of beauty out of other ideas which is equivalent to saying that the idea derives from the proper sentiment of approbation. In the complete absence of the operations of taste, thoughts about beauty would not occur.

Taste is the capacity to respond with approbation and disapprobation. Hume seems to equate perception of beauty with the experience of the sentiment (this equation underlies the problem of whether all tastes are equal). Does he distinguish between the critic’s experience of the sentiment and the judgement or verdict? If a verbal pronouncement that an object is beautiful is nothing more than an expression or report of the speaker’s sentiment, then Hume faces the difficulty that a critics verdict is not really a recommendation of the object. If your pronouncement that a piece of music s beautiful means no more than that you have felt a certain pleasure upon hearing it, then your verdict expresses your pleasure without saying anything about the music’s capacity to please others. A judgement of taste must involve something more than a pleasing or displeasing sentiment.

Hume observes that there is a difference between expressing one’s own sentiments and making a moral distinction. Both moral and aesthetic judgements require ‘steady and general points of view’ common to others. For instance, when someone speaks of another’s behaviour as ‘vicious, or odious or depraved, he then speaks another language and expresses sentiments in which he expects all his audience to concur with him.’ Hume clearly believes that the critic is required to reflect upon the relationship between the sentiment and its object.

Aesthetic verdicts are unlike ordinary judgements about matters of fact. Matters of fact are relevant states of affairs which render complex ideas either true or false. The same cannot be said about verdicts arising from the operations of taste. Sentiment and sentiment alone determines that a particular object is or is not beautiful. We do not infer that a sunset is beautiful and so deserving of approbation, rather we see the sunset and the visual impression pleases 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 judgement. A parallel claim is made of moral discrimination: pleasure and pain are the essence of moral beauty and deformity.

SubjectivismHume proposes that feeling not thought informs us that an object is beautiful or ugly or that an action exhibits virtue or vice: ‘the very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration’. The feeling or sentiment is itself an aesthetic or moral discrimination. It is prior to and the basis of any subsequent expression of praise or admiration. The sentiment is the beauty of the object and it is the virtue of desirable human action. Sentiment is the sole source of values governing human activity. Taste is a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation. That new creation is ‘beauty and deformity, virtue and vice’. However, because the sentiment is calm rather than violent, an unphilosophical perspective treats it as a property of the object.

Hume’s appeal to sentiment offers a middle position between the two prevailing theories of the period: Hobbesian egoism and ethical rationalism. Hutcheson holds that virtue and beauty are not qualities of the people and things to which they are attributed. We may speak as if objects and people have moral and aesthetic properties but the relevant property is merely an idea raised in us. Hume alters Hutcheson’s theory by imposing his own philosophical vocabulary, making beauty an impression rather than an idea, but they agree that to describe a person as virtuous or an object as beautiful is to make a claim about their tendency to cause a certain response. Again, the analogy is made with secondary qualities. However, the analogy between virtue and beauty on one hand and sounds, colours, temperature etc is not a strict one: a critic’s claim that a work is beautiful involves an endorsement that does not arise in the observation that ice is cold.

Recognitions of virtue and beauty require particular sentiments in human observers. If the discriminations of taste took place without these sentiments in human observers, we would lack any motivation to do what we regard as moral. Moral and aesthetic judgements have practical consequences that mere reason lacks. Although taste responds to real qualities of objects, we cannot replace the exercise of taste with the assent of reason. However, taste is a fallible indicator of beauty and deformity. As effects of our interaction with the world, sentiments cannot reliably inform us about the nature of their causes. It will not always be clear

– prior to careful attention and reflection – which features of a work of art are responsible for our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation.On Hume’s analysis, the chain running from cause to effect turns out to be extremely complex for the relationship is indirect and the human body is a mighty complicated machine with many secret powers. Knowing this, good critics pronounce their verdicts only after they clarify how their own sentiments relate to the object that is being evaluated.

Imagination and Point of View

Informed understanding makes a vital contribution to most aesthetic and moral judgement. For Hume, taste is improved by practice in making comparisons among objects and by the employment of good sense.

Hume blurs traditional distinctions between thinking and imagining. Thoughts would not extend beyond our actual experiences were it not for the imaginative associations established by the force of repetition or ‘custom’. Learned associations encourage us to rearrange our ideas in intelligible patterns – permitting us to create ideas of things never actually experienced. Imagination also creates chains of associated ideas, encouraging thoughts to move rapidly from one idea to another.

Good taste therefore presupposes an active imagination. For example, suppose one smells the distinctive aroma of coffee and the experience is pleasurable. This appreciation depends on a learned, imaginative association: the smell brings to mind its cause, the brewing coffee, and its purpose, the consumption of the coffee. The agreeable sentiment is a response to this complex association of impressions and ideas, not to the smell alone. Critical evaluation is therefore highly contextual. Hume does not regard imagination as a free and unrestrained activity; human thought is constrained by a relatively small set of permanent principles of imaginative association. The universal principles of imaginative association allows artists to predict how their representational and narrative designs will move audiences.

Hume recognises a very small class of cases for which imaginative association is not needed to recognise beauty. In these cases, initial impressions of the mere ‘form’ of a material object generate approbation – such cases are more typical of natural beauty than art. Imagination therefore is not always necessary for discovery beauty, pleasing form is sometimes sufficient.

Hume does not advocate a simple causal relationship between form and sentiment. In most cases, our beliefs about the object alter our sentiments. Forms are generally most pleasing when ‘the order and construction of parts’ suggests a corresponding utility for humans or expresses agreeable emotions. These suggestions need not be accurate in order to trigger approbation and disapprobation. A particular object may appear beautiful despite our knowledge of its limited utility and vice versa.

Hume blocks the conclusion that all taste is equal by distinguishing between two points of view that we can adopt towards any person, object or action. We can respond from 1) the point of view of our own self-interest, but this response is prejudiced and often produces a ‘false relish’, or from 2) the general point of view, a reflective evaluation that is not motivated by self-

interest. The general point of view is influenced by myriad beliefs about the object and its context (for instance, believing that something is rare greatly magnifies our pleasure). For Hume, normative conflicts can only be resolved by moving to a properly informed general perspective wit just conclusions drawn, comparisons formed, complicated relations examined and general facts fixed and ascertained. Hume’s essay on taste defends this position and outlines a theory of how critics can place themselves in such a position.

Hume also invokes the operation of a sympathetic sentiment. Since sympathy plays an important role in his moral theory, he must include it in his aesthetic theory if he is to sustain the close ties he posit between morals and aesthetics. The general point of view takes notice of pleasure that the object is fitted to bring other people. The idea of their benefit generates sympathetic pleasure, increasing the sentiment of approbation. However, the claim that almost all judgements of beauty involve some element of sympathy becomes harder to maintain in cases of fine art. It is not clear how the appreciation of a sonnet or melody involves an idea of the value it has for others. Hume seems to think that the utility of some art is the pleasure it affords (eg poetry), as if he advocates an early art-for-art’s sake position.

Where appropriate, the refined taste of a good critic will weigh the relative contributions of all aspects of the object of taste, in which formal design is a contributing excellence and not the sole focus of aesthetic discrimination. To arrive at a proper judgement all the circumstances and relations must be previously known, and the mind from the contemplation of the whole feels some new impression (approbation or disapprobation). In some situations, a single inharmonious element can upset the beauty of the whole.

Hume is frequently criticised for not making enough allowances for the legitimate differences that readers bring to the same piece of art. No perceives will respond with the same association of ideas. So how can Hume hypothesise a convergence of critical response As a criticism of Hume however this reply backfires, for Hume does concede that ‘each mind perceives a different beauty’. He recognizes an even more radical problem, that every stable object is really a ‘fiction’ posited by the operations of imagination and sentiment. We always bestow on objects a greater regularity than what is observed in our mere perceptions. However this philosophical grasp of the situation has no practical effect in making anyone skeptical of the existence of houses, trees and books. Novels and plays are not special cases. Admitting that they call for complex operations of imagination does not differentiate them from other objects and should not count against the possibility of critical judgement. The crux of the problem is the difference between saying that Hamlet is a play by Shakespeare and saying that Hamlet is a flawed play. The former claim expresses a fact, the latter a normative judgement. Both stem from complex imaginative associations. The presence of imaginative thought poses no special problem for the convergence of evaluative discrimination. The problem is how sentiment, ad the source of value, is subject to principled dispute.

Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’Hume reminds us of the radical difference in kind between matters of fact and the pronouncements of sentiment – verdicts of sentiment lack a truth-value. So we may find it surprising that he endorses the position that many judgements of taste are ‘absurd and

ridiculous’. Although small differences affect taste , most people notice only the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object’. It is only judges with a more refined taste that will respond to the ‘universal appeal of superior art. Because refinement demands considerable practice , such critics are few in number.

It is tempting to read Hume’s argument as a move away from his signature subjectivism and toward some brand of normative realism but a careful reading of the text reveals that nothing is said to deny his earlier support for subjectivism. The standard of taste should provide rules for confirming one sentiment, and condemning another: it must explain why the sentiments of some critics are better and worse , not which are true or false in any absolute sense. This explanation is accompanied by closely associated criteria for identifying good critics:1) Delicacy2) Good sense3) Practice4) Comparison5) Freedom from prejudice

Hume identifies the standard of taste as the consensus of true critics, where ‘true critics’ are those who fulfil all five demands. (It does not follow from this that the same critics will serve as the standard for every work of art – different critics are better or worse at evaluating different kinds of thing.) He ultimately grants that even the best critics however will fail to elicit universal agreement with their verdicts.

Nevertheless he sticks to his motivating insight that sentiment is the essence of evaluation; even the worst critic says nothing false in foolishly saying that one work is better than another, however prejudiced the sentiment. Even the best critics with the most refined taste will retain some immovable preferences, so they will display a variety of responses. However, such preferences can be innocent or blameless in the sense that there is no interference of prejudice. The problem of finding a standard of taste is linked to a closely related problem, that of deciding which disagreements are blameless to distinguish which sentiments should be disqualified as a public recommendation.

Hume highlights 2 sources that contribute to differences of sentiment among qualified critics:1) basic dispositions of character2) moral differences arising from cultural differences.Hume also acknowledges the futility and meaninglessness of comparing two different kinds of object – each with their own species of beauty. He argues that while we can compare the writing of literary authors Milton and Ogilby and between the philosophers Addison and Locke, it is nonsensical to compare Milton and Addison. Not only is there a difficulty in making comparisons across genres, there is also the issue that being qualified in making criticisms in philosophy does not mean one is therefore also qualified to make criticisms in literature.

Different cultures employ different customs when handling the same artistic medium, so the good critic must overcome the challenge of cultural prejudice. He must place himself in the same situation as the audience in order to form a true judgement of it.

Hume insists that moral judgements must sometimes enter into our aesthetic evaluations; he does not offer a sharp distinction between moral and aesthetic taste. Evaluations that subsequent aesthetic theories regard as purely aesthetic, are for Hume concluding sentiments following numerous observations of contributing strengths and weaknesses. When a work of art represents human activity, then Hume’s account of moral evaluation requires that moral sentiment accompany apprehension of the action. The fictional status of the work weakens our sympathetic response but the mere sequence of ideas will be sufficient to produce weaker versions of the sentiments that one would have if one were faced with the actual events. Given Hume’s moral theory there is no possibility of suspending our moral response, as our moral sentiments are natural and immediate. At best, one can gain a better understanding of the cultural context responsible for the work, so that one’s moral sentiments will not be negative through mere prejudice. If we are to have an aesthetic evaluation of a play’s plotting and language then we are going to have a moral response to its display of virtue and vice. Both must enter into our final sentiment of approbation or disapprobation.

2 basic types of taste: vulgar taste and refined taste. Vulgar taste is more idiosyncratic and capricious while refined taste is more properly rule-governed and stable, what Hume calls the more general view. As with moral response, good taste meets with approbation while a prejudiced taste loses all credit and authority.

Delicacy – Hume’s example in Don Quixote of Sancho’s kin and the hogshead of wine. Two men considered experts are given some wine to taste, but are ridiculed when one says that it is good wine apart from a faint taste of metal and the other apart from a faint taste of leather. However, when the hogshead is emptied they come to find that a key on a leather strap was sitting at the bottom of the wine. The result of one inharmonious element which though subtle can ruin an entire aesthetic experience.

Smith on Sympathy and SpectatorshipThe concepts of sympathy and spectatorship central to the doctrine of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, had already been put to work by Hutcheson and Hume, but Smith’s account is distinct. As a spectator of an agent’s suffering we form in our imagination a copy of such ‘impression of our own senses’ as we have experienced when we have been in a situation of a kind the agent is in: we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure the same person with the agent. Unlike Hume, Smith emphasises the agent’s situation, rather than the actual feelings of the agent. Smith gives 2 examples of cases where the spectator has a sympathetic feeling that does not correspond to the agent’s:1) the agent who has lost his reason, but who is happy , unaware of his tragic situation. The spectator imagines how he himself would feel if reduced to the same situation. In this imaginative experiment, in which the spectator is operating on the edge of a contradiction, the spectator’s idea of the agent’s situation plays a large role while his idea of the agent’s actual feelings has a role only in that the agent’s happiness is itself evidence of the tragedy. 2) the spectator’s sympathy for the dead. Here again Smith emphasises the agent’s situation, and asks how the spectator would feel if in the agent’s situation, deprived of everything that matters to people.

Smith relates sympathy to approval. For a spectator to approve an agent’s feeling is for him to observe that he sympathises with the agent. This account is used as the basis for the analysis of propriety. For a spectator to judge that an agent’s act is proper or appropriate is for him to approve of the agent’s act. Conversely, the agent’s act lacks propriety in the judgement of the spectator is the spectator does not sympathise with the agent’s performance.

Propriety and impropriety are based on a bilateral relationship, between spectator and agent. Smith also attends to a trilateral relationship, between an agent, the spectator and the person who is acted on , the ‘recipient’ of the act. Smith focuses on two responses that the recipient may make to the agent’s act: gratitude and resentment. If the spectator judges the recipient’s gratitude proper or appropriate then he approves of the agent’s act and judges it meritorious. If he judges the recipient’s resentment proper or appropriate then he disapproves of the agent’s act and judges it worthy of punishment. Judgements of merit or demerit concerning a person’s act are therefore made on the basis of an antecedent judgement concerning the propriety or impropriety of another person’s reaction to that act. Sympathy underlies all these judgements, for in the cases just mentioned the spectator sympathises with the recipient’s gratitude and with his resentment. He has direct sympathy with the affections and motives of the agent, and indirect sympathy with the recipient’s gratitude.

In Smith’s account the spectator’s belief about what the recipient actually feels about the agent is not important for the spectator’s judgement concerning the merit and demerit of the agent. The recipient may for whatever reason resent an act that was kindly intentioned and in all other ways admirable, and the spectator knowing the situation better than the recipient does , puts himself imaginatively in the shoes of the recipient while taking with him into this spectatorial role information about the agent’s behaviour that the recipient lacks. The spectator judges that were he himself in the recipient’s situation, he would be grateful for the agent’s act and on that basis – independently of the recipient’s actual reaction – he approves of the agent’s act and judges it meritorious. Question: is there any need for Smith to include this trilateral relationship? In Smith’s model, the three people differ in respect of the weight that has to be given to their work – the recipient does almost nothing. He is acted on by the agent but really he is no more than a place holder for the spectator who will imaginatively occupy his shoes and make a judgement concerning merit or demerit solely on the basis of his conception of how he would respond to the agent if her were in the place of the recipient. The only seeming advantage is the way in which this idea ties in with Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator.

Why be sympathetic? Smith points to the pleasure of mutual sympathy. He argues that it is equally enjoyable to share both pleasant and painful passions (although he does not make it clear whether sympathy is fundamentally a pleasure, a duty or a need).

The principle of sympathy and the dual role of agent and impartial spectator allows Smith to resolve the problem of obligation. Following Hutcheson, Smith distinguished the desire for praise and from the desire to be worthy of praise. This distinction is reflected in the difference

between the agent and the impartial spectator, which as a kind of conscience is capable of balancing egoistic and generous affections.

What about reflective judgement of oneself? In judging the other, the spectator has the advantage of disinterest but he may lack requisite information and much of the work of the creative imagination goes into rectifying the lack. In judging himself, he has or may be presumed to have the requisite information but he has the problem of overcoming the tendency to a distorted judgement caused by self-love or self-interest. He must therefore factor out of his judgement those features that are due to self-love. He does this by setting up, by an act of creative imagination, a spectator, an other who, qua spectator, is at a distance from himself. The point about the distance is that it creates the possibility of disinterest or impartiality. (How is this distance or impartiality achieved if it is the agent himself who imagines the spectator into existence?)

Who or what is imagined into existence? Is the impartial spectator the voice of society, representing established social attitudes? At times, in the first edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith seems to come close to saying this. However, due to contemporary criticism, in the second edition Smith revises the issue, making it clear that this is not the role of the impartial spectator for the latter can and sometimes does speak against established social attitudes – even if the two can often coincide. Smith is clear to differentiate morality from mere social norms. Should we think of the impartial spectator as being one or many? If it is properly to be thought of in a similar vein as conscience then it may be that there are many impartial spectators, as each person creates his own.

Note that the impartial spectator is regarded as a ‘demi’ god: it is not perfect but instead as fallible as the human who created it. 1). It is still subject to issues arising from moral luck: however proper and beneficent may be a person’s intentions, if he fails to produce the intended effect his merit will seem imperfect – even the impartial spectator will regard the agent in this way. - Smith also describes a case in which without any ill intention a person harms another but nevertheless apologises to the sufferer out of the ‘indulgence’ of the impartial spectator who aims to avoid the sufferer’s ‘unjust resentment’. Smith argues that such a task is not a moral duty and in some sense superfluous (‘indulgence’). If the impartial spectator feels some indulgence for what may be regarded as unjust resentment of the other, he must have some sympathy for the unjust resentment and hence is sympathising unjustly. 2) The impartial spectator is also liable to failure of nerve: there can be cases where the demigod becomes fearful and hesitant in judgement in response to a fearsome clamour of real spectators who violently proclaim a judgement that is contrary to the one that the impartial spectator would have passed. (In such cases, our only recourse is to the all-seeing judge of the world whose judgements can never be perverted. Contrasted with the human impartial spectator, God is the impartial spectator of the universe, infinitely better placed than the humanly created spectator who is only imperfectly informed and liable to bow to social pressures).Therefore, NOT a version of the ideal spectator theory: the views of the impartial spectator are defeasible.

Is the impartial spectator’s fallibility a weakness in Smith’s moral theory or a strength in that it fits more closely with a realistic portrayal of the experience of moral decision-making? We as humans are imperfect and prone to fallibility so it would seem absurd to posit that we could bring into existence an indefeasible impartial spectator to help guide our actions. The impartial spectator is a useful mechanism to help free us the prejudices and concerns of our own self-interest that cloud our moral judgement. It is an imaginative method of attempting to ensure that an agent’s first-person judgements align with the moral criticisms he makes of others, making his internal moral principles more coherent and more consistent and preventing self-deception.

The impartial spectator, however does exist because of real live spectators; were it not for our discovery that while we are judging other people, those same people are judging us, we would not have formed the idea of a spectator judging us impartially.

The impartial spectator is a product of the imagination and its mode of existence is therefore intentional. In one sense, we might think of it as not a real spectator who has the merit of being impartial but as an ideal spectator in the sense of one that exists as an idea. In another sense the impartial spectator is real, for it is no other than the agent who is imagining it into existence.

The Impartial Spectator is a useful point of reference in moral thinking. On the one hand, when contemplating how we should act, he can help guide our decision-making. If I say to myself “what would the Impartial Spectator approve of?’, this can help me suppress my more self-consumed passions, and to sympathise with the concerns and values of those around me, perhaps helping me to take the better moral path. Furthermore, the Impartial Spectator in turn functions as a form of conscience – hence why Smith often called him “the great demi-god within the breast”. It is often by adopting the perspective of a disinterested third-party that I realise I have acted in an unacceptable way, and feel shame for my actions.

The Impartial Spectator is underpinned by the same kind of moral thought that is present in the “golden rule” of the Gospel: do not unto others what thou would not have done to thyself, or Kant’s universalizability principle. But it’s better, because it’s more sophisticated and more flexible, so can cover more situations. For example, the Impartial Spectator is not an indifferent spectator. He does not think (mechanistically and simplistically) that all people should all be treated the same in all cases. On the contrary, if a father were to act and (crucially) to feel in exactly the same way towards his own son as to a child who was a complete stranger the Impartial Spectator would condemn this. Why? Because to a morally well-functioning human being in our sort of society, it is right and normal that fathers feel special affection for their own children. Those that do not are not good fathers, and rightly condemned by the Impartial Spectator.

Second and third person moral judgements seem easier to make on Smiths account than do first-person moral judgements. On the former cases, the spectator need do no more than imagine himself in the shoes of the agent and observe an agreement or lack of agreement between the way he himself would feel or behave in that situation and the way the agent actually does feel and behave. Where there is agreement the spectator approves; where there is

disagreement the spectator disapproves, or at least does not approve , of the agent’s feelings or behaviour.A more complex story needs to be told in the case of first-person judgements, for there the agent has to imagine himself as an impartial spectator of his feelings or acts, and has to notes the impartial spectators agreement or otherwise with the agent’s feelings or acts. If he agrees the agent morally approves of his own acts; if not, then not.