ELV Takes Break, but Gives Something to Chew On

ELV NOTE: The following is an analysis of why critics and critical standards are necessary/desirable when applying a qualitative analysis to any object being judged — be it art, music or even food.

It was written by our #2 son as part of his master’s program in Philosophy at UNM (Go Lobos!), and uses lots of big words like “explication” and “sine qua non,” but our staff found it fascinating, nonetheless.

As restaurants criticism was still 50 years away when David Hume wrote his original essay, this analysis must be read with that in mind, but can easily be applied to food writing/criticism as well. it may be heavy sledding at times, but will give you something to chew on (and chew on and chew on), whilst ELV is traveling for the next ten days.

Critical Standards:

Hume and the Judgment of Taste

By Hugh Alexander Curtas (The Official Number Two Son of ELV)

The proceeding analysis will perform two roles with regard to David Hume’s 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” First, an explication of Hume’s notion of the “true critic” will be undertaken in order to pinpoint the role this important ideal plays in his overall theory. Second, I will argue that Hume’s conception of the true critic is a robust standard for artistic judgment that, in lieu of some minor alterations, should remain a regulative ideal for all aesthetic encounters.

The true critic is essential to Hume’s overall theory concerning a standard of taste because the true critic is himself the standard. Or, more precisely, it is the “joint verdict” of such true critics that “is the true standard of taste and beauty.”[1] Leaving aside, for the moment, the problem concerning whether or not such a critical consensus could actually exist, we must identify the ideal critic’s constitutive qualities.


The critic occupies a position from which a true judgment of taste can be discerned by fulfilling three main criteria. The first criterion is the “delicacy of taste.”[2] A critic must be pointedly attuned to the constitutive elements of any work in order to render a true judgment – that is, the sensory apparatus employed in the aesthetic encounter must be “so fine, as to allow nothing to escape [it]: and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition.”[3] This criterion is meant to assure that the critic is fully aware of every nuanced subtlety and crude obviousness (“every beauty and every blemish”)[4] the work is attempting to convey. As Hume considers every work of art to have “a certain end or purpose, for which it is calculated,”[5] the delicacy of taste (coupled with the subsequent criteria) is the way in which a critic properly ascertains whether or not a certain work has achieved its desired end. It should also be noted that even though Hume believes “the taste of all individuals is not upon an equal footing,”[6] he stresses how the delicacy of taste can and should be improved by practice and comparison. Only through “frequent survey or contemplation”[7] of particular kinds of art can judgments of taste be perfected; only by having a breadth of experience to draw from can the requisite comparisons needed for aesthetic judgment be made.

The second element of true critique requires freedom from prejudice. Hume argues that the true critic must perform a “proper violence on his imagination”[8] because it is well known that “prejudice is destructive of sound judgment.”[9] This “proper violence” entails, most specifically, an appreciation of the context in which a work was created. The true critic must endeavor to transcend his own societal circumstances in order to position himself as a member of the work’s original audience. Though, Hume also extends the proscription of prejudice to any individual bias a critic might have against the author, genre, medium, et cetera. Hume does complicate the thrust of this requirement however when he admits, later in the essay, that certain biases of one’s “age and country” make a “certain degree of diversity in judgment” unavoidable.[10] Still, it is simple to see the critical value of concerted attempts to abstract away from personal preference when making judgments of taste.

The final critical requirement is “good sense.”[11] This element allows the critic to appreciate the value of delicacy, practice, comparison, and context; the potential biases of observation are recognized and regulated by good sense and, through it, rationality is brought to the forefront of critical examination. This criterion is closely tied to the prejudice-proscription and Peter Jones nicely summarizes how Humean good sense quells the exertion of bias, explaining that it “attends to four features of the context: the ends for which a work has been calculated, the effectiveness of the means to those ends, the mutual relations of the parts to the whole, and the intelligibility of the whole.”[12] Good sense is what qualifies the true critic “to discern the beauties of design and reasoning”[13] requisite for a great work of art – that is, because every great work of art has a telos and must be rationally designed in order to achieve that end, good sense enables the critic to recognize “the consistence and uniformity of the whole.”[14] Good sense also influences the requirement of delicacy, as Jones alludes to, because only by cultivating the ability to discern subtleties in a work can a critic recognize the specific parts, how those parts relate, and how those relations create the “intelligibility of the whole.”

Taken together, the preceding critical requirements establish the standard of taste which, as stated above, is the true critic himself. A standard by which anyone may judge creative work is firmly established by Hume’s criteria – even if this characterization is more egalitarian than Hume would prefer. However, it is precisely the experiential nature of the critical requirements that allow them to adequately fulfill their role as a standard of taste for anyone employing them. If we simply remove the biologistic and elitist components of Hume’s theory (i.e. how differences in taste are reducible to “defects in the internal organs,”[15] and that only “few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art”),[16] we are left with a non-controversial set of standards – based on experience and defended by reasonable evidence – that lend themselves to rational discussion between subjects of aesthetic experience. (Perfecting these criteria is even possible, as was mentioned earlier, thereby lending support to a more egalitarian reading of Hume’s standard.)

It is “natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste”[17] simply because our aesthetic pronouncements are inherently normative and thereby implore others to assent to our proclamations. This normativity entails an appeal to other subjects of experience who are able to defend their suppositions by rational argument. Hume’s critical requirements are non-controversial, as stated above, because they appeal to rational standards we constantly employ in order to reach agreements. In law, in science, and in academia impartiality is a regulative ideal taken to be the basis of all sound judgments. Furthermore, a process of peer-reviewed discussion in these disciplines is a sine qua non of any desired consensus whatsoever. While any pure consensus by way of these requirements does seem replete with optimism – as it does remain contentious “[w]hether any particular person be endowed”[18] with every desirable quality of judgment – Hume’s statement that “such a character is valuable and estimable will be agreed in by all mankind,”[19] is argument enough for attempting this ideal

It may be objected that my defense of Hume’s standards rests on an is/ought fallacy: simply because it is the case that judgments are made in this way does not mean it ought to be so. While it is important to refrain from privileging the is as an ought, it would be difficult to classify my interpretation of Hume’s standard as such. We simply need to hypothesize what critical declarations would be like if they grounded themselves on crude, prejudiced declarations that ignored the subtleties of a work. Such pseudo-critique would fail to recognize the intra- and inter-textual influences and references of a given work (i.e. the parts which organize the unity of the whole). It would be unabashedly biased, unable to abstract itself away from personal preference, unable to fully understand the context of any work. Such critique would be more akin to the subjective approbations of the blogosphere than to the widely respected judgments of critics like Dave Hickey, A.O. Scott, or Harold Bloom. Respected critics strive to rid themselves of bias in order to attend to the work in its proper context, attuned to its delicacies, aware of its influences and proposed ends. Arguing against the merits of such critical standards – those which have stood the “test of time” as it were – seems utterly hopeless when their alternative is brought into perspective.

Hume understands that a standard of taste is desirable yet difficult to attain given the variety of people’s opinions. However, his critical requirements establish a checklist for potential critics, parameters by which a work should be considered before an opinion is proclaimed. Such critics must then defend their statements in the realm of rational discussion, “and the joint verdict of such [critics], wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.”[20] The true critic as the standard of taste – if we understand the true critic as anyone who utilizes Hume’s critical requirements and submits their views to rational discussion – is a productive criterion for establishing the aesthetic merits of any work. Its alternative leads to a subjective chaos of opinions unable to differentiate between any judgments whatsoever. The critical criteria in “Of the Standard of Taste” provide a benchmark for any aspiring critique, a regulative ideal that perhaps comes as close to a concrete standard of judgment as any subsequent attempt.


[1] ¶23 – All citations correspond to Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” as presented at [http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html], unless otherwise noted.

[2] ¶16

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] ¶22

[6] ¶25

[7] ¶18

[8] ¶21

[9] ¶22

[10] ¶28

[11] ¶22

[12] Peter Jones, “Hume’s literary and aesthetic theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 268.

[13] ¶23

[14] ¶22

[15] ¶13

[16] ¶23

[17] ¶16

[18] ¶25

[19] Ibid.

[20] ¶23

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