Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 87-126 Hume's Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Research TIMOTHY M. COSTELLOE Introduction While there is hardly an aspect of Hume's work that has not produced controversy of one sort or another, deciphering and evaluating his views on aesthetics involves overcoming interpretive barriers of a particular sort. In addition to what is generally taken as the anachronistic attribution of "aesthetic theories" to any thinker of the eighteenth century, Hume presents the added difficulty that unlike the other founding-fathers of modern philosophical aesthetics, he produced no systematic work on the subject, and certainly nothing comparable to his efforts in epistemology, morals, politics, history, and religion.1 Even interpreting Hume's most definitive expression of his views on aesthetic questions—the famous essay "Of the Standard of Taste"—is fraught with difficulties and, as the diversity of views on the piece demonstrates, only the most confident reader would take it as an unambiguous statement of Hume's position.2 Some have also emphasized Hume's relative neglect of phenomena to which one would expect an aesthetician to be drawn. The Treatise, in Peter Kivy's estimation , for instance, reveals an "almost total lack of interest... in works of art"—the examples being confined to the beauty of nature and artifacts—and Peter Jones writes that with the exception of literature, Hume's "references to the arts ... are infrequent and fleeting. He almost never refers to music or to sculpture, Timothy M. Costelloe is at the Department of Philosophy, The College of William and Mary, PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA. e-mail: tmcost@wm.edu 88 Timothy M. Costelloe his asides on painting are inconsequential, and architecture gains more than a passing mention only in his letters from Europe in 1748; what little theoretical or philosophical writing was available to him on these arts gets almost no mention ."3 Even the quality of Hume's own critical acumen has been questioned. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, George Saintsbury could dismiss Hume's "literary opinions" as "almost negligible" when separated from his philosophical thought more generally; even if Hume had "worked them into an elaborate treatise," Saintsbury contends, "... this would probably, if remembered at all, be remembered as a kind of 'awful example.'"4 Some three decades later, one finds John Laird taking much the same view. While "It was natural," he says, "for [Hume] to regard literary criticism as one of the regions in which his philosophy should be developed..., [p]osterity... has declined to admit his eminence in this domain." "Wordsworth," Laird adds with seeming approval, "called him 'the worst critic that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced.'" Although few contemporary commentators would dismiss Hume's views on literature and the arts in such stark terms, his forays into criticism in the History of England do little to undermine John Stewart's blunt assessment that Hume's "judgment of poets and playwrights was notably bad." At best, what Hume has to say is at odds with what one might expect from a true judge in matters of literature.5 Hume's success or failure as a critic, however, can and should be distinguished from the form and content of any aesthetic theory his work suggests. The lack of any systematic treatment notwithstanding, aesthetic questions clearly play a central role in Hume's thinking and, as William Halberstadt writes, while his "major philosophical works are not directly concerned with aesthetics," a number of essays explicitly address themes which now fall under that rubric, and, significantly, "even in the major philosophical writings... there are numerous references to it."6 In the Advertisement to the Treatise, moreover, Hume declares his intention to extend the investigations of the understanding and passions to include an "examination of... criticism" (T 1.1; SBN xii). Although this task remained unrealized, the importance he accorded aesthetic questions in his overall system is evident in the inclusion of the same subject matter in his brief categorization of "moral reasonings" at the end of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (EHU 12.30,33; SBN...