Philosophy
The Aesthetics of Taste and the Role of Sentiment in Judgment
Quick fact
In the 18th century, philosophers like David Hume and Francis Hutcheson argued that aesthetic judgments are not products of reason but of sentiment—a special kind of feeling—challenging the idea that beauty is an objective property of things.
Why this is interesting
We’ve all argued that a song is beautiful while a friend insists it’s noise. But if beauty is a feeling, can either of us really be right?
Read the full explanation
Understanding The Aesthetics of Taste and the Role of Sentiment in Judgment
When you say a painting is beautiful, you’re not simply stating a fact about the paint and canvas. You’re expressing how the painting makes you feel. This is the core of sentimentalism in aesthetics: the claim that our judgments of taste are grounded in sentiment, not in rational analysis. The philosopher Francis Hutcheson introduced the idea of an internal sense of beauty, analogous to the external senses, which produces pleasure when we perceive certain qualities. David Hume expanded this: he said that beauty is not a quality in the object itself, but exists in the mind that contemplates it, and each mind perceives a different beauty. So, the feeling of approval is a sentiment, and that sentiment is the foundation of our judgment. But this raises a problem: if each of us has our own sentiments, how can we ever disagree meaningfully about taste? Why not say 'to each their own'? This is the challenge that sentimentalist theories must overcome.
A deeper explanation
The mechanism behind sentiment-based judgment is a shift in what counts as the basis for evaluation. Instead of measuring the object against a rational rule or a theory of objective beauty, the sentimentalist holds that the judgment is a response of the subject—a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. This feeling is immediate and not derivable from reasoning. Hume argued that reason helps us discern facts and relationships, but it is sentiment that determines the value we place on them. For example, we can rationally analyze a poem's structure, but whether it moves us is a matter of sentiment. The universality that we intuitively feel in aesthetic judgments is explained by Hume through the idea of a 'standard of taste'—the common sentiments of idealized critics who possess delicacy of imagination, freedom from prejudice, and extensive practice. Thus, while the basis is subjective, the standard is intersubjective: we appeal to an ideal observer's sentiment to settle disputes. Kant, later, took a different route by arguing that aesthetic judgments claim a subjective universality—they are based on a feeling of pleasure that we expect everyone to share because we all possess a common sense (sensus communis). This mechanism of grounding universality in a shared human nature rather than in objective properties of the object is what makes the aesthetics of taste a rich and complex area in philosophy.