Hume’s Aesthetic Move: The Legitimization of Sentiment

Abstract

Hume consistently treats all of the passions, emotions, and feelings, so called, as sentiments in the tradition of Shaftesbury. Further, for Hume, sentiment is the epistemic basis of a disciplined form of thinking, and, as such, it implies both a moral and an aesthetic epistemology (though ‘aesthetic’ is anachronistic when applied to Hume). When sentiment is understood in this way, it becomes the primary evidence for knowledge. Properly disciplined, sentiment can play the role that clear and distinct ideas played for Descartes and Locke, and that internal sense played for Hutcheson. Hume thinks that sentiment allows one to escape the contradictions and skepticism that destroy other empiricist systems. The question discussed in this article, therefore, is how Hume’s use of sentiment legitimizes it as the leading form of judgment, and how that judgment is essentially aesthetic as well as moral.

Notes

1. Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1964).

2. Páll Árdall, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

3. Donald Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 26–27.

4. Dominique Bouhours, “‘The Je Ne Sais Quoi’ from ‘The Conversations of Arioste and Eugene’” (1671), in The Continental Model, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), 230–38.

5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2^nd ed., rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1.2.2; abbreviated as T; hereafter references to the Treatise are cited in the text.

6. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), and Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (London, 1790), in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics, ed. Dabney Townsend (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 1999).

7. See Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

8. David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3^rd ed., rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 9.1.

9. Hence, in matters of taste, Hume shifts the burden to the critic and his standing in common life.

10. Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (EHU), in Enquiries, 1.5; hereafter cited in the text.

11. This typology is mine, not Hume’s. His treatment of fictions is interspersed throughout his writings, but especially in the Treatise.

12. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

13. Unlike Hume, Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism takes the form of a defense of the legitimacy of propositional truth claims in the language of morality. Hume certainly would agree that moral judgments are “real” and that one can speak truly or falsely about such matters. But the difference in idiom between sentimental impressions and ideas on the one hand and propositional attitudes on the other makes a direct equivalence problematic.