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Concerned With The Notion Of Taste That Incorporated Beauty, Hume Argued ...


Concerned with the notion of taste that incorporated beauty, Hume argued that it was a matter of something's agreeableness that suggested greatness. He continued this line of thought by suggesting that this agreeableness was essentially the pleasure that we derive from our ‘experience' of music. Furthermore, this pleasure was to Hume a matter of our ‘sentiment' and not a judgement or recognition of something that was intrinsic to the nature of the musician's object ‘because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it' (Hume, 1963). Hume suggested that a standard of taste was evident in our rationalisation of experience, as we would collectively reject 'without scruple' those that suggest that the work of a minor musician was better than the works of a major musician. With reference to our appreciation of music, Hume thought that some particular forms or qualities, ‘from the original structure of the internal fabric [of our minds], are calculated to please, and others to displease' (Hume, 1963). What we can see from Hume's rationale is that the shift in artistic perspective is moving to an aesthetic quality that is primarily concerned with feeling and not with reflection. From this rationale, we can see that the idea of consonance was that which we could define as a matter of good taste, whilst we would reject dissonance as a matter of bad taste due to the aesthetic or aural pleasure that it evoked. What is more we can see that this incorporated the mind within the experience of music rather than the merely a representation of an object.
On the conception of the aesthetic principle a larger critique was given birth to that looked at the way pleasure was derived from the mind. In the latter stages of the enlightenment period the rational philosopher and critic, Immanuel Kant, engaged in the growing discourse of aesthetics and pleasure paying particular attention to the role of judgement that had been put forward at the time. Unlike Hume, who had dismissed the role of judgement as merely the premise of sentiment, Kant delved into a literal investigation of the driving forces that bring us to judge things as good and bad, whilst seeking out what in effect a judgement does. Unhappy with Hume's notion of judgement as the premise of the sentimental experience of pleasure that exists merely in the confines and limitations of the human mind, Kant brought into focus the concept of beauty and brilliance within the realm of aesthetic value.

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