Ok, so here you are, a person who loves to read and unlike so many others you know who profess to read a lot, you really like to read the classics. You can work your way through a Shakespeare play, a Henry James novel, even a David Foster Wallace novel (how about that?) with no problem. You even like great poetry. You are a certified person of taste. You deserve a sticker for your sticker book. Enjoy being smug.

Or maybe you just like to read and you’ve always wanted to know who it is that decides what literature matters and what doesn’t. In other words, who decides proper literary taste?

I would love to say I can tell you what proper literary taste is, but I have spent much of my professional life reading more cheap paperback Westerns than anybody you probably have ever known. Believe me, I know from experience: tell somebody with real taste that you read paperback Westerns and you’ll find out quick just what kind of taste people think you have.

Our friend David Hume, the Enlightenment thinker we have been looking at the last few weeks, in Of the Standard of Taste, felt he knew pretty well who it is that decides proper taste: the critics, that’s who.

Does he have a point? After all, the critics writing in The Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other similar media certainly maintain powerful influence.

While Hume would not rule out our present-day very powerful critics from his treatise on standards of taste, he also would include qualified readers who have discriminating critical taste as judges of literature. Some people, he says, must be acknowledged to have better judgment than others about the aesthetic value of art, of literature.

Maybe that’s you and me. Let’s see.

So, what are the qualities required to have such taste? David Hume gives his qualifications for this discriminating critic. And he is writing about the person, not just the process of critical reading.

A proper judge of taste must have a strong sensibility, “A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, due attention to the object.” These qualities are not optional, according to Hume. Without them, “we shall be unable to judge of. . . catholic and universal beauty.” Without a strong sensibility, a person will be unable to determine the relationship “which nature has placed between the form and the sentiment will at least be more obscure; and it will require greater accuracy to trace and discern it.” If the only kind of literature you care about is cheap shoot ‘em up Westerns, you might ought to question your sensibility of discernment in literature.

“One obvious cause,” Hume says, “why many feel not the proper sentiment of beauty, is the want of that delicacy of imagination, which is requisite to convey a sensibility of those finer emotions. . . .” A delicate sentiment does not come easily and in our time with the prevailing tastes in popular culture for violence, physical and emotional, as well as anything with shock value, delicacy of sentiment rarely seems even to exist.

A proper judge of taste must be someone with great experience in literature who has plenty of opportunity to compare artworks. How can we expect any sort of measure of taste, be it ever so general or undefined, from someone whose knowledge of literature, from the greatest to the basest, is significantly limited?

Thus Hume says, “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to [this] valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.” A person of proper literary taste, then, must be able to clear the mind of all prejudice.”

“But where are such critics to be found?” Hume asks, and perhaps you are asking. Especially in the second decade of the 21^st century?

What do you think? As I said in my last post, we have plenty of critics around us today, publishing their ideas everywhere—in books, on the web, in blogs like mine, in peer reviewed journals, everywhere. Clearly they can’t be dismissed and aren’t dismissed. What they say carries plenty of weight. But they disagree with each other at seemingly every point of discussion, right?

David Hume ends his essay on the standard of taste saying, “It is sufficient for our present purpose, if we have proved, that the taste of all individuals is not upon equal footing, and that some men in general, however difficult to be particularly pitched upon, will be acknowledged by universal sentiment to have preference above others.”

Do you agree that in fact some people do have very bad taste in literature? If so, would you not also agree that other people have better taste than those with very bad taste in literature? Do you agree that in our culture of the 21^st century there is such a thing as bad taste and, at least, better taste? Whether you or I accept prevailing standards of taste, don’t they exist anyway? We can ignore them if we wish, but does that change anything ultimately?

These are the questions that matter. Not what David Hume said or thought. I used David Hume in this series on taste simply to place in front of you ideas about taste that much of our culture would find outdated but which nevertheless might still have some validity no matter how much we might deny them.

So, who decides proper literary taste today?

Write your comments in the comment box. And let’s see your comments no matter when you read this blog. None of the ideas I am approaching are time sensitive.

Let’s start a conversation. Re-blog. Re-tweet. Follow The Literary Life. The more readers who are posting comments the better.

If you are a person for whom great literature matters and are clicking into The Literary Life for the first time as a result of seeing my title above on one of the social media sites, you might be a bit put off by a question about proper literary taste, or more to the point, about bad literary taste. If so, please read the other short posts on my blog from recent weeks on the idea of #Taste to have a context of a question like this.

David Hume in Of the Standard of Taste, with whom we have been working, gives several criteria for good taste, which we will look at next. But first he takes a look at improper taste and why people have it. Taste is universal, he claims, but not all people possess taste.

People who are disordered, for example: “A man in a fever would not insist on his palate as able to decide concerning flavours; nor would one, affected with the jaundice, pretend to give a verdict with regard to colours.”

Are you “disordered?” Ok, not a fair question. But do you trust your Uncle Louie who you only see at Thanksgiving to have the same proper taste as you presumably have? Or maybe ask yourself, do you know people who clearly do not have proper taste under virtually any definition of taste? Forget good taste for the moment. Is there in fact such a thing as undeniably bad taste? (Case in point, velvet paintings of Elvis.) Well, ok, then. Why?

To some degree all of us have some defects in taste: “In each creature, there is a sound and defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment.” Remember that for Hume “sentiment” is the subjective element in taste whereas “judgment” is the objective and universal side.

So consider how this helps explain our own occasional bad taste even when we really have good taste.

But, probably more importantly, many of us simply do not possess what Hume would call “those finer emotions of the mind” that are “of a very tender and delicate nature.” And even when we possess such, often circumstances get in the way of our proper taste: “Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness, according to their general and established principles.”

Ok, it looks like we are not to rely upon ourselves when developing proper taste. Our sentiments might guide our preferences for this author or that. Some of us might think the Harry Potter novels are tasteful reading and others might shun anything written after 1900. These are simply our sentiments at work guiding our reading. But what about universal proper taste? Who decides for all the rest of us what matters and what doesn’t?

Well, that’s always the sticking point as we have put up in front of us from the beginning. For David Hume, only properly qualified critics have acumen enough to discover universal principles of taste.

Let’s just consider what a properly qualified critic is in the next posting. But even before we see what our representative from the eighteenth century thinks, what do you think? We have plenty of critics around us today, publishing their ideas everywhere—in books, on the web, in blogs like mine, in peer reviewed journals, everywhere. Clearly they can’t be dismissed and aren’t dismissed. What they say carries plenty of weight. But they disagree with each other at seemingly every point of discussion, right? What about the critics? Stay tuned.

Write your comments in the comment box. And let’s see your comments no matter when you read this blog. None of the ideas I am approaching are time sensitive.

Let’s start a conversation. Re-blog. Re-tweet. Follow The Literary Life. The more readers who are posting comments the better.