Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant

Abstract

The classic aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant which have largely structured modern aesthetics cannot be properly understood without understanding a central dimension and dilemma of which they themselves were not properly aware and which their theories instinctively tried to avoid or minimalize, if not suppress. This dimension is the social and class-hierarchical foundation of aesthetic judgment; and its apparently inevitable introduction of difference, distinction, and conventional prejudice sharply contrasts with and threatens the idea of a natural uniformity of feeling or response on which the Humean and Kantian aesthetic theories are essentially based. This dimension, I shall argue, lurks pervasively in the subtext of these theories beneath their more explicit arguments and constitutes the unacknowledged structural core of their problematic. It is not that the social dimension of taste is entirely ignored in the Humean and Kantian account of aesthetic judgment. For both Hume's “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant's more substantial and sophisticated Critique of Judgement make, as we shall see, clear references to society and culture and to their role in promoting the proper exercise of taste. However, the full force of the social dimension of taste and the contradictions it presents for their attempts to justify a standard of taste and vindicate the normative necessity and universality of aesthetic judgment is never openly and adequately confronted. It is, rather, evasively swept under the carpet with the aid of some vague nostrum of foundational universality, of natural human uniformity, essentially free from social determination and distinction.

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