Aesthetic Realism by Inês Morais

Author:Inês Morais
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030201272
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

What Budd claims, then, is that community of sentiment is sufficient only for community of ‘affective constitution’. In a note (n. 28), Budd adds that this supports the conclusion that aesthetic value is not (like) a secondary quality. While the ascription of aesthetic value must be understood in terms of subjective states (sentiments), just like the ascription of secondary qualities is understood, for Budd, contrarily to the case of secondary qualities the ascription of aesthetic value does not involve an experience with representational content.

Budd gives the example of the story of Sancho’s kinsmen19 as evidence that aesthetic value is not a secondary quality, and that Hume’s conception of delicacy of taste or imagination is ambiguous (1995, 22). The ambiguity is between the capacity to detect qualities in objects, and the capacity to respond appropriately, emotionally, to those qualities. Budd claims that whereas Sancho’s kinsmen’s judgements are correct in finely discriminating qualities of the wine, ‘nothing immediately follows about the status of their verdicts that the taste is good’ (1995, 23). Judges who agree in the qualities they find may respond, emotionally, in a different way to those qualities and thus make different judgements about their value. So, a finely discriminating taste, though necessary for good taste or evaluation, Budd concludes, is not sufficient for good taste or evaluation. More importantly, if it is possible for the best judges to agree concerning the qualities detected and to disagree on their value, then one cannot say that one sentiment or evaluation is preferable to the other. Accordingly, ‘even if there is uniformity of response, this uniformity cannot provide a normative standard of taste’ (ibid.).

This is in contrast with the case of colour, where agreement counts generally as evidence for a colour judgement. The main contrast is that colour perception is seen as a form of world sensitivity, whereas evaluation is not, because only the latter, Budd claims, ‘enables us to detect differences between objects in situations where, lacking colour perception, we would be unable to distinguish them—we discriminate objects on the basis of the colour appearances they present’ (1995, 21–22).

Budd thus interprets the standard as being constituted (as opposed to being discovered), on the grounds that the sentiment of the true judges is non-representational, proceeding to claim that the project of providing a (normative) standard of taste fails. But if the standard could be discovered, then Hume’s project would not be incoherent.

The assimilation between taste and the imagination can be made in a different way, which would leave room for the interpretation that the standard is discovered by the true judges. In fact Hume seems to suggest in the essay that value is perceived, even if it is not a specific or formal feature of objects:When objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused; and the mind is, in a great measure, incapable of pronouncing concerning their merits or defects. The taste cannot perceive the several excellencies of the performance.

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