Ep. 289: Aesthetic Sense Theory: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume (Part One)

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 289 is something like, how can we know what opinions about beauty are correct? And we read selections from the 18th century British philosophers Anthony Ashley Cooper, aka the Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, choosing my favorite authors, just as I choose my friends from a conformity of mood and disposition.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin gradually, haphazardly, randomly educating my tastes in Austin, Texas.

0:50 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, one uniform amidst the variety of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:56 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey detecting both a substrate of leather and an infusion of iron in my wine, New Mexico.

1:05 Mark: Nice.

1:05 Seth: Don't drink out of the jug, Dylan.

1:09 Dylan: It's good for Sancho. It's good for me.

1:11 Wes: See, that's a very. Another St. John's Y type of example to use.

1:15 Mark: Well, now we have to explain it. That's from the Hume. It is a reference to. It's about just. It's like the Princess and the Pea having very refined senses.

1:25 Dylan: Yeah, it's from Don Quixote, Sancho Panza.

1:28 Wes: And it's also how you could tell someone who has a delicacy of taste. How do you tell who that is? So that's part of what that story is accomplishing. But we'll get to that, I guess.

1:37 Mark: Yeah, we haven't done a three different author episode in quite a while. I felt like after doing the Scruton, we wanted to look back at a little the historical stuff that he was referring to. You know, he had a lot to say about Plato's Symposium that we've already covered and about Kant's aesthetic theory that we already covered, but we had not actually covered Hume. And then in looking at Hume. Well, actually Hume took most of his theory from Francis Hutcheson, a very underrated philosopher who in turn, you know, apparently was a direct follow on trying to promote the ideas of this Anthony Ashley Cooper, who just goes by Shaftesbury, and we can just call him Shaftesbury for the rest of the time here.

So having a little bit of all of those, the famous work by Hume was the standard of taste. So that was already a pretty short article. We actually use as our guidance particular Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on British 18th century aesthetics by James Shelley. The first section of that was on what he calls inner sense theory. So it's comparable to. We had a past episode on Hume and Smith on moral sense theory. And so this is the same thing for aesthetics, that somehow aesthetics is the object of a sense as opposed to something that you figure out using reason.

So treating three figures, talking in that. What sounds like an empiricist tradition. Although when we actually look at Shaftesbury, he's not particularly empiricist. How do you guys feel about this approach and these authors? Any initial reactions?

3:10 Wes: I think it's hilarious that you're in the Hutcheson.

3:15 Mark: He was the least hilarious one word for it. He was the least fun of our three articles.

3:21 Wes: His style is the most difficult to read because it's the most archaic, but it's a good comparison to Hume. I mean, I forgot what a great writer Hume is.

3:30 Dylan: I think the smart thing was to read it in the order of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume. Because if I had just read the Hume, I would have just thrown out the other guys. I would have been like, screw this. Hume is awesome. He's so great to read. He's just so clear.

3:47 Mark: Well, and he's also, I'll say, translated. In other words, it was written in English in 1760, so I'm sure there was a lot of archaic spellings and punctuation and things, but somebody modernized that for our easy reading. Whereas the Hutcheson. I don't know, nobody cared enough to do that or how they felt should be presented to us. So, like, almost every noun is capitalized for some reason.

4:14 Wes: Is that really the problem, though?

4:17 Dylan: No, I think that that is a superficial problem. It's like, there's something about your aesthetic that's out of tune there, Mark, if that's the problem.

4:24 Mark: It's also.

4:25 Wes: There's lots of great stuff in Hutcheson, but it is. But it is hard to read.

4:28 Mark: And Shaftesbury is notoriously fun, I guess. Like, apparently this was maybe not this book. So that it was a section from his book the Moralists, 1709. We just read 10 pages because it's near the end, a section on beauty. So it's bringing up beauty in the context of a larger screed about ethics. And it's a dialogue, you know, like our Malebranche. Not a fan of the dialogues.

4:53 Wes: No more dialogues.

4:54 Mark: But apparently, like, his earlier book was the most reprinted book in the 18th century, second only to Locke. So that's crazy, you know.

5:07 Dylan: Is it true that Locke and Shaftesbury were the Stephen Kings or whatever ever of the 18th century? They had the largest number of books printed. That's an amazing thing to be true.

5:21 Mark: So I don't know if when I heard that it was just talking about philosophy books or just that philosophy books were actually the most popular, most. That would surprise me quite a lot that there wasn't, say, some novels going around. So I'm going to say philosophy books, just to be modest, there's someone of

5:39 Dylan: our listeners that has quick access to knowing which of those things is true. I mean, the Bible must have been the most printed one.

5:46 Mark: But then, yes, this Hutcheson was an inquiry concerning beauty, order, harmony and design from 1725. Actually, Locke had something to do with Shaftesbury's philosophical education. Like he was friends with Shaftesbury's grandfather. Yeah, I think Locke actually worked for his grandfather, and so he had something to do with his education. But apparently Shaftesbury, our Shaftesbury, was reacting to, was rebelling against, in some ways, Locke's empiricism. And his theory that we get here is actually very Platonic, that actually what we find beautiful in something.

He says we shouldn't find the copies. Like Plato, it's sort of undignified to find copies of something more beautiful. It's the original we should look at. Well, so what does that mean? Basically, that what we're admiring when we admire a work, an artwork, is the mind that created it. And in turn, actually, what we're admiring in the mind of the Creator is the creator of that creator, in other words, God. So all appreciation of beauty rolls eventually into appreciating God, which is very much in line with, if you take Plato as saying that beauty and truth and goodness are all the same.

6:57 Wes: So, in other words, what is the special ingredient in an object, right, that makes us think it's beautiful? And we've, of course, talked quite a bit about that. And it has something to do with form and structure and our relation to that is contemplative, or it has an element of disinterest in it. And here Shaftesbury, I think it's really interesting because he gives us a little bit more of an explanation of what it is about formality or form or structure that might be beautiful. And in a way, for something to have a formal property is for it to have something mental imprinted on it.

So, for example, if you enjoy a coin for what it might buy, this is another one of our typical interest disinterest examples. But that's something different than appreciating it for being beautiful in and of itself, if you enjoy it in virtue of its design or form. So that it's not its material properties that are at stake. Then what you're interested in is the effect that some mind has had on it. And so his idea is that the beauty of the coin comes from the imprinting of the mind, so that it's only minds that are beautiful and things partake of that by having that imprinted on them.

8:14 Dylan: Imprinting of the mind. I read that as the same as design.

8:19 Mark: Yeah. This whole thing, sort of the surrounding sections to this, which is all that was in our PDF that we're working off of, we're all about sort of the design argument. And this is something Hutcheson brings up as well of like was kind of reminiscent of what we just read in Malebranche talking about what is the fact that we have a sense of beauty. What does that say about our creator? The fact that there's a. In nature.

8:42 Wes: Right.

8:42 Mark: This is Hutcheson's big thing, is a lot of what we find beautiful is just uniformity amidst variety, is the way that Hutcheson puts his formula. But a lot of it comes down to how everything seems so simple and uniform and everything mirrors everything else. And so you could look at even the actions of nature and the fact that all things of the same species have a lot in common. So scientific laws, the fact that the same sorts of patterns are everywhere, that's like the beauty of the world. And why would God create a world like that? So there's a lot of wondering about God that way. There's still sort of a side issue.

9:19 Dylan: He's taking the presence of those characteristics, things like simplicity, as being positive reflections of God. That's why they. They're both in their own way confirmation of and also obvious natural reflections. Because of course the world was designed and therefore the fact that it's beautiful is reflecting that design.

9:42 Mark: And by the time we get to Hume, that whole element is gone. At least from this section that Hume is not concerned, strangely. I mean, Shaft was known as being kind of a religious skeptic. He couldn't be overtly atheist. I mean, he was like in government. He couldn't, but he was. It was not like Hobbes, where he was widely considered an atheist or something, but he definitely had non traditional views. There was something in the secondary, in the, in the Stanford article that mentioned that he had panpsychist tendencies. That's crazy. Like that there's mind all over the place.

10:11 Seth: Yeah.

10:12 Wes: He's kind of like the Malebranche in this situation. Right. He doesn't want to be a constructivist. He wants to say Beauty is absolutely objective. And so how do you do that? Right? You can't just talk about it as Hume does, in terms of mental faculties. You have to say, what is it out there? And the thing in itself that grounds this. And so in Malebranche's case, we had this rational connection to intelligible extension, for instance. And here ultimately everything is grounded in some sort of. I think the implication seems to be this intuitive connection to the beauty of the divine mind that's manifested in these objects.

So it's not like, you know, whereas Locke and Hutcheson will talk about beauty as a secondary quality, right, like color, like, it's not in the thing itself. It's a matter of the interaction between the object and the mental faculties. Shaftesbury wants to say, no, it is, it's more like a primary quality. Beauty is in the thing in itself. And we have some kind of direct access to that.

11:13 Mark: So the thing that carries through these three though is this. You know how it was categorized in the Stanford article as inner sense theory. So even though you're right, Wes, the metaphysical status of beauty is different in that it is in the object for Shaftesbury and for the other two, well, there's something in the object that properly elicits feelings in us, but it's really, it's subjective. It is something that is in us. But it's still for, you know, why is Shaftesbury not like Malebranche? Why is he not a rationalist? He's considered, I don't know, this is something to discuss perhaps today, but the difference between what you were calling intuition for Malebranche and the aesthetic sense for Shaftesbury, the important thing, why he's not a rationalist, it's, it's not the product of reasoning, right?

It's not like for some of these old fashioned estheticians that like we observe that there is symmetry in the thing. I mean, it could even be like Hutchinson's theory. Like we observe that there is unity amidst variety and we therefore conclude from that, ah, that is actually beautiful. No, it is actually more like a sense of some sort. It is pre rational in that sense. It is a sense. Even though then there's some sort of, it's not one of the five senses, so it must be the mind doing it. Shaftesbury's is focusing on that. And then Hutcheson, you know, we can actually, he has a whole chapter where he very slowly says, like why he's calling it an inner sense.

And then Hume just kind of takes Hutcheson and runs with it. And is more concerned with like, okay, now admitting that it's something that's in the mind, but yet there are some objects that properly give us this sense that something is beautiful. In other words, there are some things that are objectively more beautiful than others. It's not just opinion. But you know, Hume's theory then ends up dwelling on like, well, how do we then tell whether something is objectively beautiful or not? It's like whether competent judges judge it to be so. Well, what are those competent judges about?

And so it's just elaborating that. That's my high level summary of getting through the three of them.

13:15 Wes: So yeah, just maybe to concentrate on the concept of inner sense a little bit more. Yeah, because it's, you know, as, as you pointed out, Mark, it's this really interesting hybrid between what we would normally think of as a sense, right, is a external sensory faculty, eyes or ears or tastes, and you know, the five senses, and this. Of course it's a little bit strange, you might think, to want to call something a sense, even though there are no outward facing faculties that take in data from the world. Right. That's normally what we associate with the senses and with receptivity.

And then when something is inner, we tend to associate that with imagination and reason. Right. Once we get that data, the inner part works on that data. It does something formal to it. So here we get this interesting hybrid between those two things. It's somehow receptive, which is why we might want to use the word intuitive, but we don't have to somehow. Receptive. It's receptive and it's involuntary. It's necessary in the sense that if we are exposed to an object that is beautiful, we don't have any choice about whether it hits us that way.

In the same way we don't have any choice about whether we see a red thing as red. So there's that sense quality to it. And then again, the inner part is just the fact that it's not like an external sense, even though it has that receptive quality. So Mark, as you pointed out, Hutcheson will give us a more detailed argument for each of those components. Why inner and why sense? But we can get into that.

14:41 Dylan: Is it worth pointing out that there's. For it to be an inner sense? There's a correlate to data. Effectively the objects of the inner sense for aesthetics are going to be not raw, something close to raw items like wavelengths of light or something like that, but even closer to just ideas. But they are the raw data at Some level for this inner sense. But the idea is that we have a sensitivity to it that is not reasonable. I guess I agree with you. Calling it an interesting hybrid is. It's like saying that our minds have a natural sensitivity, functioning of desire, something like that. That we get pulled towards or away from things in a natural way.

15:25 Wes: And with Hutcheson, we're in particular sensitive to uniformity amidst variety. Right. And so it might help. Be helpful to give an example because he gives some examples which make that much clearer than it is in the Stanford article, which is to say that if you take an object and you hold its variety, so the amount of complexity of the object, let's say constant, and you increase its uniformity, you increase its beauty. And likewise, if you hold its uniformity constant and you increase its variety, you increase its beauty. So for instance, a pentagon is more beautiful than a square. It's got more variety with the same uniformity. And more variety in that example just means a larger number of sides. Mark, you seem to be.

16:12 Mark: I see in the text that he does mention the Pentagon. I thought he had mentioned that. Well, first, after a certain point, it doesn't matter anymore because we can't tell the difference between 22 sides and 20 sides. And then I think that there was. He says, like a heptagon, seven sides is not more beautiful than a hexagon, six sides, because the parallelism in the hexagon, that's the added uniformity. Even though. So you're upping the uniformity. So pentagon must be. You think the same logic would apply why a square should be better than a pentagon. I think there's something we could have an argument.

16:45 Seth: No, no.

16:46 Wes: The pentagon is better than the square. So that's. The pentagon is in same uniformity, increased variety. An example of increased uniformity with the same variety is a square versus a rhombus. So the square is better than the rhombus because of the right angles. That has four sides, means same amount of variety, increased uniformity, right angles versus the sharp angles. Or, you know, you could add greater degrees of irregularity. But to bring that up is not to want to have an argument about whether our intuitions make sense. At least it gives us an idea of what he might mean with that phrase and then we can move on from there.

17:22 Seth: Okay, that's fair.

17:24 Wes: So inner sense is supposed to somehow be tuned into that. Just want to make the connection to inner sense.

17:29 Mark: Yes. And then he has a section on the beauty of theorems just really to hit the fact that unlike the outer senses, which have to have an object in front of you that you are contemplating, the inner sense can deal with just something that is an object in your mind. Just like talking about the uniformity and variety in a visible shape. You could talk about it in a theorem or in a scientific law or something like that. Something that is a very powerful scientific law that explains a lot of stuff, but yet is so simple, that has the same kind of beauty comparable to the shapes.

18:04 Wes: The argument is that some objects that are beautiful are not outside of us. So if we can think something that's purely internal to us, like a theorem, is beautiful, then beauty can't simply be something external. This is one of the arguments for internality.

18:22 Dylan: The mere fact that we can say that theorem is beautiful in some level, the fact that we could even assign it that character, is evidence that it's internal.

18:33 Wes: Beauty can be a property of external objects as well. But it has to be something that internal objects and external objects could have in common, so it can't itself be external.

18:44 Mark: And that helps us a lot with things like literature, that a lot of what is beautiful in literature is not merely the sound of the words, but is things about their meanings and symmetries and formal elements of the text about the ideas conveyed. So just like you could have a beautiful theorem, you could have a beautiful philosophical theory even. Although I don't think he gives that example.

19:05 Wes: He does bring up the Pythagorean theorem, though. Speaking again of St. John's examples.

19:11 Dylan: Yes, the instance of beautiful theorems. Right. There are many, many different proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, but if you look at two or three of them, there are ones that you will consider more beautiful than others, and you might even consider them more beautiful for different reasons. There are examples where it's like the figure that you end up with in proving the Pythagorean theorem is beautiful.

19:35 Wes: Yeah.

19:35 Dylan: And there are others that are. That the beauty is in a kind of simplicity to them, what he says.

19:40 Wes: It's interesting to think about the proof, because I hadn't thought about that part of it, which I think makes sense, because we ultimately. Well, if we were going to be Shafts Barians, we would want to think about the Creator as well. We want to think about maybe implicitly about the process leading to the end result. But what Hutcheson brings up is essentially schematization, something that we discussed in Malebranche as well, and many, many other episodes. But this idea that one proof. So you put down your right triangle and you do the demonstration, you show all the relations this one right triangle represents an infinity of different possible right triangles with different side lengths and different instantiations.

And it's that simplicity and uniformity that we might call beautiful. So all the particulars partaking of the forms. The form is beautiful because it's uniformity among the particulars.

20:35 Mark: And Hutcheson also has a little bit of Shaftesbury's contempt for copies. Not contempt in the case of Hutcheson, but that he has these chapters on original beauty. So that's where we're talking about, like, the shapes, just things that. I think Scruton brings these guys, this whole tradition up as folks that would put forth scenes of nature maybe more likely as their paradigm cases of enjoying something. So, right. This is all about, like, uniformity in nature, creations of nature, how all the trees look the same, but yet different, and every snowflake is individual, yet has its symmetry, that kind of stuff.

But there's also what Hutcheson calls comparative beauty, which is just representational. So as you are drawing a picture of a landscape, well, there's going to be virtues that the picture has a lot of its virtue is just how well it represents the thing that it's supposed to be a picture of. And that is explicable by that same uniformity within variety. This is the uniformity part.

21:38 Wes: Wow.

21:38 Mark: That picture looks just like the landscape that you were looking at when you drew the picture. You did a good job with that picture.

21:44 Wes: The object itself doesn't have to be beautiful. Right. The represented thing doesn't itself. Yeah, yeah.

21:49 Mark: That's one of those puzzles that we've sort of dealt with before of can you have a beautiful picture of a horrible thing? Like. Yes, because it could be a good representation of the horrible thing.

21:59 Dylan: Yeah. And the interesting part about that is what the kind of accuracy you're talking about. Right. Because typically, in that case, the representation of the horrible thing imbues it with something that, for instance, a mere photograph would miss. Or if it was a photograph, it would require that it's been framed in a particular way. Right. There's an intention of the work of art that adds meaning to it beyond merely representation. In fact, it somehow reflects the meaning that is supposed to be gathered out of that representation.

22:34 Wes: Yeah. So, for instance, there's this great painting by Ilya Repin, who I found out about just reading when I was doing background prep for my Subtext episodes on Chekhov. And he's a really great painter, but one of his most famous paintings involves Ivan Terrible holding his son after he has, like, bludgeoned his head in and the sun lays, the son is dying. And if that were simply something we experience in person or a photograph, how could that possibly be beautiful? It couldn't be anything but horrible. And so then the question is, what does Repin do formally, aesthetically, to make it possible to find that beautiful despite the horrible content?

And that's unclear to me. It's unclear to me how that is related to the justness or the accuracy of the representation, as Hutcheson seems to think, and also how the justness of the representation is related to uniformity amidst variety. Those two things actually remain unclear to

23:33 Dylan: me, especially since both, uniformity amidst variety makes me think of universals that you're being called to. But in a painting like that, it's uniqueness that's part of what's going on, and that it's individuality. This is something that Scruton talked about, the way in which the individual is called out in the particular, in some of the most beautiful things. So there is this combination of universality along with resonant uniqueness and individuality that's happening in the most Beautiful things. And I don't think that any of the people that we read talked about this.

24:12 Wes: I mean, you could say, in a way, well, I was going to say it represents some sort of emotional trope or something, or that the pathos is so well articulated or something like that, but now I'm not so sure. But I'm sure we could find ways, right, to get uniformity and its variety out of that.

24:28 Mark: I'm trying to take Danto's word for it, that before the advent of photography, they meant mimesis, they meant exact copies. So even though, Dylan, you were just trying to give a Scrutonian, you know, a more modern. Why is a painting better than a photograph? Hutcheson might have thought, like, yeah, man, if we had photographs, we would just love those. We would just make hundreds of copies of ourselves and spill them, you know, put them in nice uniform squares around us on the floor, like that sort of explains the appeal of capturing everything on your phone and looking through pictures and just that fascination with the image that we got in, like society, spectacle and some of the other stuff that we've read, that there's actually something potentially pathological now that this uniformity, this mimesis, is so readily available to us.

But that maybe does recall why Shaftesbury said, and I forget if Hutcheson actually says that the copies are inferior to the original, but there are different chapters, and the original he's talking about first and that's sort of the thing that's, I think, better.

25:30 Wes: See, I didn't get that impression, but I may just have missed it.

25:33 Mark: Well, I mean, maybe we have to explain like we were, you know, explaining why it could be that a good picture could be better than the original because the original is something terrible. Like that's a sort of a potential sort of counter instance. But anyway, I guess I'm. At least Shaftesbury is very clear that the original is better. And that's the, you know, a thing in Plato. So maybe there's an argument to be made from those guys for why the society, the spectacle, this obsession with copies of copies of copies that pop culture has become is pathological, is like it's adjacent to beauty. But it is a very degraded form of that.

26:07 Dylan: I had never heard of the particular painting that Wes was referring to. I pulled it up, and I think just at a mere glance, you can tell that if it was done with a photograph, it would still require composition and intent in order to get what was going on there. I mean, I think your example, Mark, of the proliferation of images. Even if Shaftesbury would think, oh, yeah, of course, I would just love to have photographs of it. It would take him, like, taking three photographs to realize that photographs don't capture the same thing unless they're done with a specific kind of intent.

I mean, imagine that painting being rendered as a bunch of forensic photographs done on a Polaroid by someone just doing the scene and showing up to the scene. It would not do the same thing at all. And that's just me looking at it for 15 seconds. So there's something added to it, whether it's a painting or a photograph, that makes it beautiful in a way that is not simply reflecting, quote, unquote, the original. It makes me, you know, want to push Shaftesbury in talking about, well, what do you mean by the original? Because I suspect that he would still mean the kind of pathos and stuff like that that's embodied those other truths that are there in the moment.

He surely means that it just isn't that the original is something like a photograph.

27:25 Wes: Higher truth versus the literal truth. Right. So it's not like stories, right? They're all about falsehoods, but they're meant to convey truths. So it's not about the story's accuracy. For instance, Hume brings this up. I think Hutcheson might bring it up as well. But it's about the psychological plausibility of characters, for instance, then behaving in ways that we would expect. And so they're true to life in that sense. But that doesn't mean that's necessarily conveyed by, say, some sort of detailed, analytic, psychological summary case study of the person. That's not the way the novelist does it.

28:01 Mark: And we can come back to some of these issues, but in Hutcheson, starting in section six, it's of the universality of the sense of beauty among men. And then that ends up being the thing that Hume is also like. Pretty much his whole article has to do with that. Hume is less interested than Hutcheson about giving a definition of beauty. It's more just the competent judges know it when they see it. And so the task just becomes, what is a competent judge? And how do you know if you're being a competent judge right now? And how. Hume has a lot of, I think, very insightful things to say about, well, you have to know what genre it's in.

You know, how education works. Whereas Hutcheson stresses more because he's concerned, I guess, more with this epistemology of, yeah, okay, education can help. Right. It can make us see parts of things, like, it can make us grasp more complex structures. But we had to have the basic sense of beauty there for education to work with.

29:01 Seth: Right.

29:01 Mark: It can't actually introduce that.

29:03 Wes: Yeah, we can't teach the blind to see. Right. In the same way. So it's like having sight as well. It's interesting because in this last section, part four of section six, he basically makes the claim that we can show that there's a universality of taste, in part because there's the fact that all men reason and there's some kind of interesting relationship between the capacity to reason and taste, which I think Hume gets more into. But one thing he says is that, you know, we can prove it if we can show that people are pleased with uniformity in a disinterested way.

Right. In a uniformity of something and variety, despite the fact that it doesn't do anything for them, it doesn't serve their appetite. And the example he uses, once again, I love this, is shapes and says we always prefer regular over irregular shapes. So we had to choose between a triangle and just a scrawled irregular whatever on a piece of paper. We would say, yeah, the triangle is more beautiful, more aesthetically pleasing. He basically takes that to be a proof of the universality of it. So for Hutcheson, universality lies in this uniformity and variety thesis.

For Hume, Hume is not going to have that to appeal to.

30:15 Mark: Seth, where are you at with this?

30:16 Seth: I just went down a giant rat hole with that painting that Wes, I was just in the background on Wikipedia and going through various images of it. It's haunting. I mean, it's absolutely.

30:28 Mark: Say what it is again, so people can look it up.

30:30 Wes: It's called Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on the 16th of November 1581. And it's by Ilya Repin, who's really. Now, he's one of my favorite painters. I follow him on Twitter. There are these accounts for painters on Twitter.

30:44 Seth: You can follow R, E P I

30:46 Wes: N. He's known as a realist painter, although if you look at his stuff, there's strong elements of Impressionism in there. And he's very similar to. I don't know if you know John Singer Sargent very well, but there's a lot of similarities to. In fact, sometimes when something comes across in my Twitter feed, I have trouble. I'm like, is that Sargent or is that Repin? So he died in 1930.

31:06 Seth: Yeah. The painting's been vandalized twice. People are moved by it in many ways. Well, so as I was going down that rabbit hole, the Wikipedia rabbit hole on this painting, if you scroll down in the Wikipedia entry, there's an interesting read, a short thing here. And when I was reading it, Dylan was talking about something and it seemed very synchronous. So maybe I'll be able to call that back up, and maybe I won't. In 1855, Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan was shown for the first time to Repin's painter friends. Bunch of names. Here's one of them.

I was seized with a feeling of complete appreciation for Repin. There it is, the thing. What a level of talent and how it's painted. My God, how it's painted. And what is this? Murder carried out by a wild beast and a psychopath. A father hits his son with his scepter in the temple. One moment he utters a cry of terror. He sits him on the ground, he raises him, he presses one of his hands on the wounds of the temple, and blood gushes out of the cracks between the fingers. And as he bawls, it's an animal howling with fear. The very spot that the sun has marked with his temple.

Really, this scene is drowning us in half light and a kind of natural tragic. So now's not the time for me to wax poetic about the Russian soul, but two things about that description. The first is, in seeing the painting, the friend is seized with an appreciation for the painter. This is anecdotal validation of when you see beauty, it's not in the object. Right. It's the fashioning. It's the form. It's the creator of the object. So understanding that a thing is created, if you find the thing beautiful, the appreciation is not for the thing, but for the creation of the thing.

The second part is the end of that quote where we were talking about the thing that is represented is not beautiful, but the representation can be beautiful. What's happening, or at least initially what's happening. When you're talking about the representation of a tragic scene like this, if you were to witness or photograph Dylan, as you mentioned, or film a tragic scene versus the representation of it through, in this case painting, there's a sense in which the whole notion of representation just falls away. Because you're not saying, well, the painting is beautiful, but the actual act of accidentally murdering your son is not.

That's just completely irrelevant. The original object disappears. It's irrelevant to the question of beauty in the representation itself. But that calls to question. There's a sense in which no one has seen the original event, the thing depicted in the painting, the thing that the painting is supposed to be a representation of. There is no referent for the painting that you can adjudicate as beautiful or not. So all you have is the painting. But the painting itself is intended to be a representation. And in its attempt to represent this thing, it has that impact in you.

It's beautiful. And so it is both representing and not representing. Or at least it's representing without referring, because there's no referent for us to. It's very bizarre.

34:22 Wes: It's true to something, but it's not true to some historical fact. That's not what it, you know, like a photograph might be. That's not the accuracy that we're looking for.

34:31 Seth: What is it true to?

34:32 Wes: Well, you know, it could be true to that sort of feeling or moment or circumstance. It could be true to the average disposition of the audience. You know, I'm thinking here, too, of kind of connecting it back to Shaftesbury.

34:47 Dylan: Right.

34:48 Wes: There's something of Repin in the painting. Something of the mind of Repin in the painting.

34:53 Seth: Absolutely.

34:54 Wes: That's part of what we're appreciating. And I think we might be able to connect that to representation. This goes back to our talk about the poetics and the tragic and identification with the characters on stage and indirect identification with what the author is doing and the just, the very. And the act of creativity, which is intimately related to the tragic. In a way. What you see represented is what it's true to is the creative act itself. I know that's a weird thing to say, but anyway, and it's comparable, I

35:22 Mark: think we might have concluded one of our last topics in our last episode, talking about the Scruton, was the account of expression and the historical arguments over, like, what constitutes a good expression. Does it have to. Like, is it a copy of the author's mood or the performer's mood? Well, the performer might not really feel like that way. And it's very, you know, an artistic expression is very different than you yelling at your child. That's an expression of emotion, too. And it's not just that one is fancier than the other. So the way that Scruton has said is, well, there's an intransitive way of thinking about expression.

That expression sounds like a transitive expression in that it's an expression of something, but maybe it's just expressive and that a piece of music, it's just expressive. And so maybe there's something here that's like, oh, that's so representational. That's so true. Well, true to what exactly? It's creating its own world. You know, it's not the correspondence theory of truth. This painting is great because it exactly represents some scene that happened. Like.

36:24 Seth: No.

36:24 Mark: Or exactly represents something that was in his imagination.

36:27 Seth: No.

36:28 Mark: A lot of the effects that you're seeing actually might have come out of just the particular brushstrokes and the techniques that he used. It doesn't have to have even been something planned beforehand. It could just be this thing. But we still use this term representation, even though we don't mean it transitively. And this is a theory that is not in line with Hutcheson and Shaftesbury here.

36:48 Dylan: What would be in line with Hutcheson and Shaftesbury is the idea of alignment. And part of what we're wrestling with is alignment to what? Just like a representation of what. And this is where I think you get to the idea, well, part of the reason it's so beautiful is that something about the rendition seems so true. And those two things begin to resonate a lot, like with a painting like that, right? Because if, you know, you look at the eyes of the Father, you look at. There's all kinds of things you can analyze about that representation that aligns with something really, really well.

It's a representation of a particular. You can have an argument about whether or not that representation was the true one for that particular real world incident, but the painting is representing something in alignment with a particular. And the more it resonates with that that's part of what I think would be in line with Hutcheson and Shaftesbury. Is that it is more beautiful in being more representative of that particular. Then that is filtered through Repin in this case, for sure. And to me, part of that is reflected in, again, just incidentally.

It's very interesting that Wesk just Incidentally is such a great example. Because it just only takes a few seconds to even look at it, to get it. But it's been vandalized numerous times. By people who are sensitive to its representation. But in meaning something else in its sort of political context and other kinds of meaning. That they want to destroy it because of them seeing a representation of something else. They're not vandalizing it because it's obscene. In the way somebody might vandalize pornography or something like that. They're vandalizing it as a kind of censorship.

38:41 Wes: I was just reminding myself of how Scruton resolves the expression problem. And the conclusion that he comes to is that we need a model of expression. Which is, as Mark said, is not transitive. It's not an articulation of some inner state. Rather, the artist is fitting things together to create links that resonate with an audience's feelings. So what's expressed becomes irrelevant. And what matters is fittingness. Yeah, what matters is whether something belongs with something. And that has something to do with resonating. Right. So we have to fit things together representationally. We have to fit things together in a certain way. To get that resonant effect with audiences.

39:25 Dylan: It evokes a particular. The way, you know, a resonant thing becomes one sound. Right. It's evoking a particular in this case.

39:33 Mark: So I like that we're getting on these. The idea of association here. Which I don't think is a word that any of these folks use.

39:40 Wes: Wait. Hutcheson talks a lot about association. The ways in which association can create pleasure. It's purely a matter of signification in a way or association. It's not like the object itself.

39:51 Mark: Yes.

39:51 Wes: Is pleasing us because it's beautiful. It's associated with something else that's pleasurable to us.

39:56 Mark: Exactly. So this is actually the kind of thing that he's warning against. Even Shaftesbury. His whole idea is like, we should appreciate beauty. Because that is like, one and the same with truth and goodness. But the things that are adjacent to beauty. Which are just like, in other words, not being thrilled by the appearance of the beautiful coin. But by the association that you have with it can buy you things. So this is their way of introducing this idea of disinterest. And so Kant, you know, has really, by the time we get to Kant, he's really cut to the chase of just form.

Form is what's beautiful, and everything else is association, is something lesser, is something interested. Whereas, you know, I don't think that's as clear in all these folks. But Hutcheson definitely is warning us against the prejudice that arises from associations. And Hutcheson takes a very synthetic. Like, you know, we're starting with the basic things. And this is what proves that beauty's objective is that everybody agrees the hexagon is more beautiful than the square.

40:57 Wes: Everyone.

40:57 Mark: You put it in front of small children, pre verbal. And they would point, oh, I love that. You know, they would grab at the hexagon rather than the square. He thinks that this is scientific. And it's just that when you make complex compositions, then there's so much room for things to go awry, for people to disagree, because it introduces all these associations where I think by the time you even get to Hume, Hume is not concerned with basic shapes. He's concerned with complex compositions and how good judges are going to judge the quality of those things. Like, there's something less reductive about Hume than Hutches. Hutcheson.

41:34 Wes: I still have a fondness in my heart for this shape example, because I think there's something really telling about it. And it's why when children draw things and you look at it, it's like, children are just bad at art anyway. I'm just kidding. So you take a nicely articulated shape, square, whatever, on a piece of paper, and then you compare that to something irregularly drawn, a blob of some sort. And I'm actually very. As absurd as it sounds, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the square is more aesthetically ple. And that that tells us a lot about what it means for something to be beautiful. There's a greater level of articulation and formality and structure in that. Not that we have to embrace uniformity against variety per se, but it's telling.

42:21 Mark: Are there a couple of central points we want to make about Hume just before we wrap up part one here? And then we can immerse ourselves in whatever details of the various articles, because I feel like we've given a lot of the points from Hutcheson. The Shaftesbury was just a short reading, but the Hume, this is obviously the most famous paper, and we've said beauty for him is like a secondary quality for Locke, that it's like color. Color is strictly speaking, something in the mind, but yet there's some object in the world that objectively has the power to normally produce an idea of this color in our minds.

And so how do we define that? Well, it's in a well lit area by somebody that has functioning eyes. You know, that's the kind of thing we would do for color. And he thinks we can do something exactly parallel to that for beauty. You know, he tries to define it in non aesthetic terms. I think if I remember, Scruton finds this all very problematic, that it ends up being circular. Like, how do you tell who the good judges are? Well, they're the ones who picked the right thing. But I don't think that.

43:21 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure that he's right about that.

43:23 Mark: Yeah, Hume doesn't think he's doing that because he's like somebody that can reason well, that has sensitive. This is where that. The leather key, being able to taste a piece of leather and metal that's been put in a giant jug of wine by having a glass from the jug. These are sort of non aesthetic, just qualities about the person that would at least make you think that this is a competent judge. But Hume just admits we can't really know whether any given person is a competent judge because maybe something's gone wrong or they're not familiar with the.

But what we can know is for sure, sure is that there is some better judgment that's better than others, that there are things that are objectively better than others. And he seems to think that. Actually, it seems like he's pretty across the board about that. It's not just that. Well, in general, these are the rules. This Santayana approach to artistic creation. Rules in general, these have proved successful. But I don't know, new works could defy this and in fact be beautiful because they're defying it because they're innovative. I feel like Hume wants to say no, actually, those works are good in spite of their violating the rules.

The rules, whatever they are, they're just as unknowable as ultimate scientific law. They're sort of the thing that maybe the competent judges would find if they had infinite amount of time to think about it and converge on an opinion. This is my Charles Sanders pragmatist view of artistic goodness. But yeah, the rules are objective. They're out there. There shouldn't be any disagreement. Ideally.

44:49 Wes: So he's not willing to reduce an ought to an is, but he's willing to reduce beauty to an is. And the way he does that Mark, as you pointed out, is he is going to say we can derive objective standards of taste by knowing who it is who are good critics. Basically, it's kind of reminiscent of some ancient virtue ethics stuff in which we learn what's virtuous by looking at the sage. And then, of course, it does on its face seem circular, because how do we know who the good critic is unless we have reference, you know, objective standards of beauty by which we can judge the critic.

But Hume is going to say no. There's matters of fact about. I say that being a good critic is related to delicacy and lack of prejudice and all these other criteria, and that's objective. I can say that someone has greater delicacy in the sense that they can look at things with a greater resolution, they can see more detail, and they have better background knowledge for thinking about the artistic object. And all those things are objective. So they allow us to give ourselves objective standards of taste through the qualities of the critic. This is a big issue in the secondary literature.

Whether that's circular or whether some of his. Right. He gives five qualities for the critic, whether some of those are circular and others aren't. Scruton thinks they're circular, but that's not like a settled thing in the secondary literature.

46:12 Dylan: There's a kind of bootstrap argument going on. Right. It's like becoming an excellent person. I think you're right. The way of it resonates with virtue ethics. You become virtuous by doing virtuous things. And how do you know where to genuinely point yourself to as you see virtuous people doing virtuous things and so you imitate those things. And the question is whether that's simply circular or not.

46:36 Mark: Another thing for Hume is just posterity. That you could have the fashion of your time could esteem something that is really inferior, but that over time, or when foreigners approach the thing, they're going to be able to tell, you know, he really does think that it's universal.

46:51 Dylan: Yeah. The cauldron of time will definitely filter things out. Things that are truly beautiful will endure.

46:58 Wes: He uses this phrase durable admiration, right?

47:01 Dylan: Yep.

47:02 Seth: So all you need is time.

47:03 Wes: Time will tell.

47:04 Seth: And of course, you just need to preserve those things so they can be admired by. Of course, if you blow it up or tear it down or burn it.

47:11 Dylan: Yes. I was thinking about this when he was bringing this up, is that. But I think he would agree that while on the one hand asserting that things that are beautiful endure, just because something hasn't endured doesn't mean that it wasn't beautiful to your point, if you ignored or burnt it down or for other reasons, didn't place it on the sieve of time, then you wouldn't necessarily have given it the opportunity to endure.

47:39 Mark: And you have to put yourself in the shoes of the original audience that it was aimed for. Hume warns us. So maybe these are forces working opposite to each other. That time gives us the ability to see whether it's going to stand the test of time, but it also puts us farther from the original people that would have fully understood it.

47:58 Seth: It also works against each other in another in a different way, which is. I mean, Hume believes that taste can be cultivated and appreciation of beauty is something that you can cultivate. So I think what's at tension here is like you can't appreciate Michelangelo's David or you know what, that's a cliche. Let's say Michelangelo's Moses. Have you guys ever been to the Vatican? Have you ever seen statue of Moses?

48:23 Dylan: I've seen a picture of it. I haven't been to the Vatican.

48:25 Seth: Well, you need to go to the Vatican. The Vatican Museum and the Vatican are one of the things to behold. Not to mention it houses like, I don't know, 2/3 of the world's great ancient treasures that are plundered from the. Anyway, it's beside the point. So there's something durable about Moses, but I experience it only from the place that I am at. And then the question, this was created for a particular time, for a particular patron in a particular place. Socioge. So the more I educate myself about that, I will come to appreciate the beauty of the art in that context.

And at the same time, though, because it has durable beauty, I'm appreciating it outside of that context. And I'm wondering, did the two things work together or work against each other? Does durable beauty, the fact that something can be perceived as beautiful throughout different contexts, is your appreciation of that enhanced by learning more about the context in which it was created or in which it was originally appreciated? Or does that work against the durable?

49:36 Wes: Well, the durable part, right, is a criterion of sorting out, despite the prejudices of the times, which things are going to turn out to be great works of art. Which is not to say that critics might not be able to argue about that in the moment and that you have great critics who can make the proper identifications, who know that Milton is better than Ogilby. Right. To take two poets by leaps and bounds. But it's also a criterion for the critic, you know, when we get to the point where we're talking about looking at a. So, for instance, a work of poetry from the standpoint of the audience of the times, and trying to abstract yourself out of your own parochial point of view, that's one of the criterions for the good critic.

And that's how you would, you know, if you had that quality, if you were able to do that, then you would be able to tell that some object in the current moment, despite the fact that is wedded to some extent to context. Right. Its aesthetic meaning has to come from the context of the times. You might know as a good critic that it will also transcend that, at least for other good critics at other times who can empathetically inhabit the current moment.

50:50 Mark: Yeah. Just to summarize what a good judge for Hume, he needs a strong sense, a delicate sentiment improved by practice, perfected by comparison, cleared of prejudice. So we can get into some more specifics and see what we think of that in the second half of our discussion. That'll be the next thing in your feed. Go get it. Unless you're using Apple. Then, you know, look, next week. Thanks.