De Gustibus by Peter Kivy;

Author:Peter Kivy; [Kivy, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198746782
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2015-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

It is basic Humean doctrine that all ideas have their source in impressions: are “copies” of them. And if there is no impression, therefore, of necessary causal connection, there can be no idea of it. But, manifestly, we do have an idea of necessary connection. Hume’s problem, then, is where the impression of necessary connection can be found, since he has already established to his own satisfaction, that it does not come from either external perception or introspection of constant conjunction of events.

Hume’s solution to this conundrum, as some of my readers will know, is that the impression of necessary connection is a “feeling” or “sentiment” that arises from our external or internal perception of constant conjunction: something we subjectively add to it. Having observed one event follow another many times over, “the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe it will exist.”8 Furthermore, Hume concludes: “This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing further is the case.”9

But something further is the case. For tucked away in a footnote, not long after the passage just quoted, is the following crucial expansion of Hume’s thought: “we experience only the constant experienced conjunction of the events, and as we feel a customary connexion between the ideas, we transfer that feeling to the objects; as nothing is more normal than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion.”10

What Hume is claiming, here, is that we tend to project, as it were, our sentiments or feelings onto the objects that occasion them, as if they were properties of the objects, and experience them as such. Of course, even if there are such instances as Hume describes, he is greatly overstating the case when he avers that we do this with “every internal sensation.” For there are obvious counter-instances. I have no tendency, for example, to “apply” to my kitchen appliances as properties of them, the anger they arouse in me when they malfunction. Furthermore, I will be neither defending nor defaming Hume’s account of how we acquire the idea of necessary connection. That is not my business here. What is my business here, and what I want to argue, is that when one applies Hume’s notion, as expressed in the above-quoted footnote, to our experience of beauty, whether or not it is correct, we get exactly the right phenomenology of that experience, for at least some cases, whereas Kant had it exactly wrong.

That Hume thought the notion of projecting our inner feelings, our sentiments, onto the objects that occasion them, as properties of those objects, was applicable to our experience of the beautiful seems abundantly clear.11 Indeed, one cannot help thinking that the experience of beauty was at least one of the things he had exactly in mind, as a paradigmatic case, when he penned the footnote to that effect.

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