The Problem Of Standard Of Taste: Comparison Of Hume & Kant

Hume and Kant both respond to the new problem of skepticism about the possibility of objective judgments of beauty and taste in the eighteenth century. Both philosophers accept the premises of the skeptical arguments, but turn this premise to the opposite conclusion in support of a standard. The premise of skepticism is the radical subjectivity of aesthetic taste. Hume and Kant both acknowledge this subjectivity, yet argue that subjectivity is not incompatible with a standard. Both philosophers argue that the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment does not entail the arbitrariness of such judgment. On the contrary, as I will show, for both thinkers, the deep, thorough subjectivity of aesthetic judgment proves how such judgments are grounded in the common essential nature of the human subject. The principal difference between Hume and Kant concerns their understanding of what is most essential to the human subject. For Kant, this essential is the transcendental mental faculties that enable cognition. For Hume, human nature is a contingent natural body, capable of uniform, or nearly uniform, reactions to stimuli. Such reactions are natural, rooted in a common human physical organization, yet alsocontingent----the accidental outcome of human physical organization,without the a priori, transcendental quality Kant emphasizes in his solution to the problem of the standard. Nevertheless, Hume's "naturalistic" approach is not less philosophical or tenable than Kant's "transcendental" approach.