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Every nation is motley assemblage of different characters ...
--Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
It is in the domain of aesthetics ... that the tension between individual and collective, subjective and objective, is at its highest.
--Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age
The subject of this essay is what David Hume calls "the delicacy of taste," and its focal point is Edmund Burke's "Introduction on Taste," first published in the 1759 second edition of the work Robert Jones has dubbed "by far the most ambitious examination of taste in the eighteenth century," A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (1) Burke's "Introduction on Taste" establishes two criteria of taste, one involving untutored sensation and another dependent upon a capacity for judgment derived from experience, and he suggests them to be mutually incompatible rather than mutually reinforcing. (2) Burke demonstrates that we lose a capacity to feel strongly as we gain an ability to judge nicely, and his account of the way that our satisfaction in our critical competence---our delicacy of taste--compensates us for the erosion of pleasures that once came easily shows that his own work on the sublime--and on the relationship between social and self-preservative passions--influenced his ideas about taste. In this sense, the "Introduction on Taste" is, as Burke's editor James Boulton suggests, "an organic part" of the Enquiry, though not, as Boulton contends, simply because both are "prize example[s] of Newtonian experimental methods applied to aesthetics. " (3) Rather, the dynamics of the negative pleasure that Burke terms delight structure both his treatment of the sublime and his account of taste, especially his discussion of the relationship between natural and acquired taste (which might also be designated the sense of taste and the faculty of taste). (4) Furthermore, what I am calling the sublimity of taste in the Enquiry complicates Burke's latent agenda in the "Introduction on Taste"--articulating a standard of taste that guarantees "the ordinary correspondence of life" (11), thereby serving as the basis of social and political harmony. (5) According to Terry Eagleton, "[t]he ultimate binding force of the bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections," with the result that "power in such an order has become aestheticized." (6) Eagleton suggests that the aesthetic commonality represented by the standard of taste is the linchpin of social and political coherence in a post-absolutist Britain (20). Paradoxically, though, the very recognition of such aesthetic commonality is for Burke a mark of one's aesthetic discrimination, of one's superior faculty of taste, and thus establishes one's distinction from the "ordinary" community which that aesthetic commonality is intended to underwrite. Burke's "Introduction on Taste" thus reveals taste, in the form of aesthetic discrimination, to be not the "binding force of the bourgeois social order," but a means of exercising power and a force for social differentiation.
The "Introduction on Taste" therefore bespeaks Burke's profound ambivalence about the ideology of aesthetics. He seems committed to a standard of taste as an index of cultural and political commonality, as a means of binding the "morley assemblage of different characters" that, according to Adam Ferguson, comprises a nation. (7) Yet Burke recognizes that, even as the exercise of taste derives from a shared physiology and invites wide participation, it also affords one opportunities to distinguish oneself from the undiscriminating herd. Bernard Mandeville provocatively asserts the compatibility of selfish, socially atomizing pursuits with the greater good of the commonweal in The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), providing one among many examples of the capacity of the "bourgeois social order" invoked by Eagleton to reconcile social and economic differentiation (private vices) with a vision of social harmony (public benefits):
what renders [man] a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, good Nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies ... the Vileness of the Ingredients ... all together compose the wholesome Mixture of a well-order'd Society. (8)
In Albert O. Hirschman's formulation, the dangerously wayward passions of the individual may be countered and contained by forms of commercial self-interest that produce "a strong web of interdependent relationships" and thus serve the interests of the larger community. (9) Hume, for one, states in "Of Commerce" (1752) that "the public becomes powerful in proportion to the opulence and extensive commerce of private men," though he does "admit of exceptions" to this "maxim." (10) In the "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" (1752), Hume further contends that "[t] he chief support of the British government is the opposition of interests." (11)
The Burke of the "Introduction on Taste," however, seems to find the social divisions that result from the refinement of commerce and the arts--from the refinement of taste--a melancholy spectacle. He attempts to articulate a compelling argument for a shared standard of taste as a means of overcoming such divisions, but at the same time drifts toward a vision of the man of taste as an aesthetic aristocrat whose powers of discrimination not only alienate him from the untutored, but also become analogous to the exercise of naked force. Burke's aesthetics do not reflect any particular, programmatic political commitment--his ruminations on taste do not constitute a conservative manifesto or a celebration of "bourgeois" progress in another guise--but the "Introduction on Taste" does discloses a Burke who is pulled in various directions by the contradictions of his enterprise, alternately championing an aesthetic commonality linked by Eagleton to the bourgeoisie, theorizing a "natural" aristocracy of taste, and associating such cultivated taste with a potential for tyranny.
In "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," first published in 1741, Hume argues that, while delicacy of passion, or an extreme sensitivity to "all the accidents of life," is to be avoided, delicacy of taste, an extreme "sensibility to beauty and deformity of every kind," is to be cultivated: "When a man is possessed of that talent," Hume writes, "he is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem or a piece of reasoning than the most expensive luxury can afford." (12) Hume elsewhere contends that delicacy of taste helps temper unruly passions, but in this passage he foregrounds the economic advantages of taste, which provides more substantial pleasures than an appetite for expensive luxuries would afford us, and does so more cheaply. Central to the passage above is Hume's distinction between appetite, an unrefined sense of taste associated with both the body and the materiality of filthy lucre, and taste, a refined capacity for enjoyment linked not to physical gratification but to such pleasures of the mind as poetry and reasoning. Though Hume does note that the man of delicate taste, having rendered himself susceptible to things "which escape the rest of mankind" and "feel [ing] too sensibly, how much all the rest of mankind fall short of the notions he has entertained," might suffer a narrowing of his circle of acquaintance, his emphasis falls squarely upon the advantage--the net gain--enjoyed by those of cultivated taste whose pleasures are constrained neither by their budget for expensive luxuries nor by the physical limit of their appetites (5, 7).
It is not until the publication of "Of the Standard of Taste" in the Four Dissertations (1757) that Hume dwells at length on the importance of cultivating the delicacy of taste. Citing the wine-tasting episode from Don Quixote, in which Sancho's kinsmen can detect the influence of leather and iron on wine drawn from a hogshead in which an old key with a leather thong has been dropped, Hume invokes "the great resemblance between mental and bodily taste" before defining delicacy of taste: "Where the organs are so fine, as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: This we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense." (13) The analogy between bodily and mental taste here might suggest that differing degrees of discernment simply arise naturally, as a result of different configurations or articulations of bodily...
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