Hume 's Paradox And The Standard Of Taste

Two objections from David Hume [STRONG]: Hume's first objection: Reason doesn't discover moral rules. Morality is feeling, affect, or sentiment.

As such, we understand the use justice, but also other virtues are only as important so long as they are useful and agreeable not to the business of an individual but also to public utility. Where this view on the utility of vices and virtues, both aspects of public and private morality are determined by sentiment. “It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.” This definition is in close relation to the question posited at the end of the previous section on the approval of the happiness of mankind and the resentment of is misery. It can be said that the said approval or disapproval, the gut feeling translates to one’s understanding of what Hume

Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste centers on Carl Wilson’s quest to discover why we like and dislike certain aspects of our larger culture. Within this search he finds how cultural taste relates to how humans perceive both each other and themselves. Each chapter is an exploration into one part of taste and how it relates to the world beyond the book. In Chapter 7, Wilson explores objectivity. Specifically, he asks: “is there any objectivity in artistic taste?” (Wilson 75). In other words, Wilson is questioning whether objectivity can exist at all in the artistic sphere, or if taste is ultimately ruled by subjectivity and bias. In addition to this question, Wilson also asks how the existence of objectivity or lack thereof

Have you ever wondered about the world beyond its original state? How we know that electricity produces a light bulb to light up or causes the sort of energy necessary to produce heat? But in the first place, what is electricity? Nor have we seen it and not we encountered it; however, we know what it can do, hence its effects. To help us better understand the notion of cause and effect, David Hume, an empiricist and skepticist philosopher, proposed the that there is no such thing as causation. In his theory, he explained the deliberate relationship between the cause and effect, and how the two factors are not interrelated. Think of it this way: sometimes we end up failing to light a match even though it was struck. The previous day, it lit up, but today it did not. Why? Hume’s theory regarding causation helps us comprehend matters of cause and effect, and how we encounter the effects in our daily lives, without the cause being necessary. According to Hume, since we never experience the cause of something, we cannot use inductive reasoning to conclude that one event causes another. In other words, causal necessity (the cause and effect being related in some way or another) seems to be subjective, as if it solely exists in our minds and not in the object itself.

Reference: Roger McMichaels. A Deeper Look at Beauty. New York: Graymark, 1995. The quoted material is taken from page

Beauty and sadness are also similar in the way they are recognized. Beauty, which is outside or inside has always developed and changed in the different time with different people. If the love of Gatsby for Daisy in the classis masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” used to be commented that was illusive and stupid. Then now, there are more and more people agree that it is beautiful as a lofty devotion of fidelity and intension. Clearly, standards of a beautiful love is dissimilar between the people in Gatsby’s age and people in later years. In the same fashion, standards of sadness has never “stood still” and depended enormously on its “audiences.” If most of people in the 1900s thought of the movie “Titanic” that is sad only for the tragic love of

In moving away from the objective property-based or perfectionist theories of the medieval and early modern periods to this sort of subject-based aesthetic, Kant did not intend to give up the idea that judgments of beauty are universalizable. Accordingly, much of the first part of the Critique is given to showing how one person’s reflective aesthetic judgments can be legitimately "imputed" to or expected from all properly-situated human subjects.(3) The famous "Deduction of Judgments of Taste" (§ 38) provides a sketch of this argument. Very briefly, Kant argues that since the faculties under consideration are "required for possible cognition as such," it follows that all who (through communicating with others reveal their ability to) cognize anything are susceptible to the same experience of faculties in free harmony, and to the concomitant aesthetic pleasure. As long as the subject takes himself to be conscientiously beholding the object under appropriate circumstances (e.g. without interest, prejudice, etc.) he can take his judgment of taste to imply in an "a priori" fashion that under similar circumstances other well-functioning human beings likewise will be pleased by it.(4)

The paper starts with multiple definitions of what beauty is defined as and moves to what the experience of beauty is.

Pleasure, contemplation, and judgment are the key elements in aesthetics. Pleasure is what you feel after watching a certain piece of art, which can be positive or negative emotions as the goal of this step is to accept everything you feel from it, so you can think about it in the contemplation phase. Like I said before contemplation is the thinking phase, which means that the goal is to understand all of the emotions that you might be having in the pleasure phase in order to make a clear verdict on the art in the judgment phase. Judgment is basically the result of the two other elements as a person has to feel and handle their feelings after watching an artwork in order to make the conclusion of if they like or dislike the artwork. The three parts make up to be the aesthetic appreciation, however it’s still possible to go further and enter the criticism phase in order to explain why you might like or dislike an artwork while using logical reasons.

Mapping a Conversation on the Standardization of Beauty Many people in this world have their own definition of what beauty is. Beauty can come from inside or the outside. To me, beauty is not only something that pleases the eyes. Beauty is a quality that pleases or delights the senses or mind from one’s own perspective. Unfortunately, society makes it nearly impossible to see our own beauty.

Perception and opinions have shaped the world in very exceptional techniques. Perception is the way in which the person criticizes comments, complains or praises whether on animated or on unanimated objects. Similar positions have been portrayed in the book On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Smith uses various literary works and literary devices to develop her position into describing how animated and unanimated object shape the lives of the characters in the book. Some examples of work of art or aesthetics mentioned extensively throughout the book are Rembrandt’s art, Mozart’s painting and the Caribbean drawing of a naked lady.

Hume begins by noting the difference between impressions and ideas. Impressions come through our senses, emotions, and other mental phenomena, whereas ideas are thoughts, beliefs, or memories that we connect to our impressions. We construct ideas from simple impressions in three ways: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect.

Judgement that are made relative to the quality of a work of art are mostly based on the artist, technique and material used, color, texture, style, etc.

Being the skeptic that he is, Hume believes in the epistemological position that true knowledge is unattainable. Why? Everything we learn to believe about the world through experience is based on matters of fact. “The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness as if ever so conformable to reality” (Hume, p.191). Given that matters of facts “are founded on the relation of cause and effect” (Hume, p.193) we can simply say that experience is the base of everything we know and not a priori reasoning. However, Hume argues that we rely on past experience to predict the future which not a reliable process. This being said, Hume believes that knowledge derives from senses and we can only be sure of what we have experienced and even then, this is merely a representation of your own reality; it is as close as we get to the truth.

A commonly mistaken perception of beauty is its need to be aesthetically perfect, but this is not one of its true qualities. As stated