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By Root 1020 0

good reason, says Sancho to the squire with the great nose, that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: this is a quality hereditary in our family. Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it; and after mature reflection pronounces wine to be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine; but with reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.

Sweet and bitter, Hume continues, are “bodily tastes” that refer to subjective experience. In this they are qualities not unlike the “mental tastes” of beauty and ugliness. Despite their apparent subjectivity in experience, “there are certain qualities in objects,” literally objective qualities, that predictably produce these experiences. Sensitivity to them, in the case beauty, requires a delicate and practiced sensibility. Remove the typical error-features of aesthetic judgment, Hume is claiming, and we are with an ideal taste that, however rare it might be, would enable us identify greatness in art as surely as Sancho’s kinsmen could identify taste of leather and iron in wine. Hume, in other words, believes that stable human nature means that there are objective aesthetic standards criticism: works of art that pass the Test of Time objectively possess qualities capable of affecting human beings across generations. This empirical fact about them, not just an aesthetic evaluation.

Of the Standard of Taste” itself passes a philosophical Test of Time in aesthetics because Hume is so remarkably alive both to the lasting values of art and to the fallibility of singular aesthetic judgments. Immanuel Kant is another eigh teenth-century philosopher who postulated ideal of taste based on a common human nature. Kant, like Hume, considers that the very idea of a “judgment of taste,” his terminology evaluation of beauty, posits as a necessary condition some conception— whether we’ve worked out its actual content or not—of a sensus commu-nis, or shared human nature. If I say, “I like vanilla (or heliotrope, or smell of burning leaves),” I speak only for myself and do not expect others necessarily to agree: for Kant, a preference for vanilla is a personal, subjective matter. But in Kant’s view, if I say, “Parsifal is beautiful,” I imply that everyone ought to agree with the judgment, even though I realize obviously that many will not. Judgments about beauty are logically separate from mere personal, idiosyncratic preferences since they founded in the disinterested contemplation of works of art. For Kant they about the way the free play of the imagination combines with understanding to give us the plea sure of aesthetic experience. Without a human nature underlying them, judgments of the beautiful would collapse into expressions of personal preference.

Kant differs from Hume in treating the sensus communis as a regulative ideal presupposed or postulated by discourse about beauty; beyond schematic formulations about the free play of the imagination, declines to analyze its specific psychological content. It must be there, but Kant remains agnostic on the question of its empirical features.

III

I have reviewed these signposts in the history of aesthetic theory as a reminder that there is nothing remarkable or awkward about a philos of art taking an interest in some conception or other of human nature. In this respect, it ought to strike us as curious that modern phi phers have been reluctant to connect aesthetic experience to any specifiable notion of human nature, or an empirical psychology that would seek to discover it. There is precious little reference to empirical psychology in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, almost as if phi phers