The Problem That Ruins Every Argument About Art

You have almost certainly been in this argument. Someone says a piece of music is brilliant. Someone else says it is not. The first person explains why. The second person is unpersuaded. Eventually someone says, with the air of ending the discussion: "Well, it's just a matter of taste."

And that does tend to end the discussion. Because what it means is: taste is subjective, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are no facts about aesthetic quality, and therefore there is nothing more to argue about. Your preference is yours. Mine is mine. Neither of us is wrong.

This is the position that David Hume (1711-1776) is trying to navigate in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), and he takes it more seriously than most people who invoke it. He does not just dismiss relativism about taste. He acknowledges that it has significant force. And then he tries to show that it is, in the end, not quite right.

Hume begins with the observation that there really is enormous variety in aesthetic judgments. Different cultures admire different art. Different individuals have genuinely different responses to the same work. A poem that moves one reader deeply leaves another cold. This is an empirical fact, not a philosophical prejudice, and any honest theory of taste has to start by acknowledging it.

But then he introduces his counter-observation, which is equally hard to deny. Some aesthetic judgments seem genuinely better than others. The person who says that Shakespeare is a mediocre writer, or that a technically incompetent painting is a masterpiece, seems not just to have a different taste but to be wrong in some meaningful sense. The person who has never been exposed to complex music and finds it all the same is missing something real, not just expressing a different preference. There is something that deserves to be called aesthetic perception, and not everyone has equal amounts of it.

The problem Hume is wrestling with is this: if beauty were simply a property of objects (like size or weight), the variety of aesthetic judgment would be inexplicable. If it were simply a matter of subjective preference (like preferring chocolate to vanilla), there would be no sense in which any judgment was better than another. Neither of these options fits the actual practice of aesthetic judgment, which treats beauty as somehow both subject-dependent and subject-transcendent.

Hume's solution: beauty is not a property of objects, but the sentiment it arouses in qualified observers is not arbitrary either. The standard of taste is located not in the object alone, nor in any individual's response, but in the responses of ideal critics: people who combine strong sense, delicate sentiment, practice in a given art form, breadth of comparison, and freedom from prejudice. Their convergent verdicts, over time, produce something that functions as an objective standard of taste, even though it is grounded in human psychology rather than in mind-independent properties of objects.

This is a genuinely elegant philosophical move. It avoids both the implausibility of pure objectivism (beauty as a property of objects independent of all observers) and the unsatisfying emptiness of pure subjectivism (no judgment is better than any other). But it generates its own problems, and they are worth examining carefully.