The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [18]
The same argument applies to size in the other direction, and not the visual arts. How long can a satisfactory novel be? Eight hundred pages? Eight thousand? Aristotle can give us no answer, except to us that there is an upper limit set by the human attention span only suggestion is that the maximum size consistent with coherence and comprehension is very likely best: “greater size, provided clear coherence remains, means finer beauty of magnitude.”
Aristotle’s Poetics takes as unproblematic that human beings have stable intellectual, imaginative, and emotional nature that is universal across cultures. Other major figures in the history of aesthetics have worked under similar assumptions, including two of the most important, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. In his 1757 essay “Of the Standard Taste” Hume claims, “The general principles of taste are uniform in human nature.” In fact, “all the general rules of art are founded only on experience and on the observation of the common sentiments of human nature.” For Hume, this has to be so in order to explain the per sistence aesthetic evaluations through history: “the same Homer, who pleased Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris at London.” Such works pass Hume’s famous Test of Time because they are “naturally fitted to excite agreeable sentiments” in human beings every epoch.
Hume is acutely sensible to the fact that people frequently disagree their aesthetic judgments, which is why so much of “Of the Standard Taste” is given over to what contemporary psychologists would call theory of error. Our uniform human nature, Hume maintains, would ensure that people’s aesthetic judgments agreed with each other, were for the fact that this same uniform human nature is also prone systematic mistakes and types of corruption. These include a lack delicacy: an inability to perceive fine distinctions (of color shade or vocal pitch, for example), on which adequate aesthetic judgments depend. Judgment can also fail because it is insufficiently practiced in actively and criticizing works of art. This fault goes along with unfamiliarity with a wide comparison base on which to make a judgment man who has only seen two operas in his life is not in a position an opera critic) and prejudice against an artist or, perhaps, the work’s cultural background.
To this basic list of the sources of faulty judgment and disagreement, Hume adds two other considerations: “the different humours of par lar men” and “the particular manners and opinions of our age most sophisticated critics. But these too can show systematic patterns: a youth, Hume says, will be more likely to enjoy the hot-blooded poetry of Ovid, while a middle-aged man will prefer the cooler wisdom insight of Tacitus. Culturally induced differences in taste and personal prejudice are hard to overcome, which is why Hume remarks that best judgments of an artist will be made by critics judging from the standpoint of posterity or by “foreigners.” Such critics are least likely swayed by the authority of local cultural and personal prejudice.
A few commentators have mistakenly read a subjectivist “beauty’s in the eye of the beholder” tendency into Hume’s fastidious attention kinds of mistakes human beings are prone to make in aesthetic judgments. But this turns the spirit of his inquiry around the wrong way, since Hume’s straightforward advocacy of a stable human nature— including its foibles—underlies his account of how aesthetic judgments right and how they go wrong. This is demonstrated by Hume’s retelling at one point in his essay of an anecdote from Sancho Panza squire, Don Quixote:
It is with