Of the Standard of Taste

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Of the Standard of Taste, a 1757 essay by philosopher David Hume, was a seminal essay on aesthetics that used as its main innovation an approach focusing on the subject (the viewer, the reader) rather than the object (the painting, the book). This was revolutionary at its time, following as it did a vast number of attempts by philosophers to define beauty, all of which were destined for relative failure given the abstract nature of the term, and the manifold and varying manifestations of beauty in art and nature.

[edit] Premise

Hume took as his premise that the great diversity and disagreement regarding matters of taste had two basic sources - sentiment, which was to some degree naturally varying, and critical facility, which could be cultivated. Each person is a combination of these of two sources, and Hume endeavors to delineate the admirable qualities of a critic, that they might augment their natural sense of beauty into a reliable faculty of judgment. There a variety of qualities to the good critic that he describes, each of which contributes to an ultimately reliable and just ability to judge.