Chicanas & Chicanos in Contemporary Society Book

In reading the work of the great critical thinkers one on top of the other, one cannot help but stack their various lines of reasoning atop one another and shuffle them, almost as a deck of cards. Ideas stick together and become conflated with one another and become new ideas; possibly ideas that run contrary to either author’s original intent. Reading David Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste so soon after reading Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, one cannot hope but mingle Pope’s argument that “if you don’t know what you’re talking about you should shut up” with Hume’s statements about the natures of beauty and taste. This essay will explore the idea of if, when read together, the underlying message of Pope and Hume can be said to be that only a positive critical analysis is correct and relevant analysis.
In Of the Standard of Taste, Hume rights “All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it,” (Hume, #). This statement is key to Hume’s argument, as it allows the critic or reader the permission with which to speak with authority upon works that have elicited a sentimental emotional reaction from them. This also harkens back to Longinus’s musings in On Sublimity. The three can be read together create a self-perpetuating ‘permission slip’ for positive criticism (which I envision to be more like a recycling symbol). Longinus argues that one of the ways in which a piece of art can be defined as great is if it causes “inspiration of vehement emotion,” (Longinus, 181), with ‘Vehement’ defined as “showing strong feeling; forceful, passionate, or intense,” (Google Definitions). What this boils down to, is that one of the defining principles of ‘art’ is that it brings about an emotional response. The presence of this emotional reaction has granted to art validity to be brought into the realm of criticism. The next stage would be to validate the critic: can the viewer speak with authority on this work? Because Hume states that “All sentiment is right,” these two things happen instantaneously. The moment a work brings about an emotional reaction, the work is validated as art and the viewer is validated as a critic. The presence of an emotional reaction provides anyone with the ability to speak with authority under Pope’s rules for criticism.
When Hume spoke of sentiment, was he speaking of sentimentality? The two seem to mean the same but are vastly different. Sentimentality speaks to over-romanticizing and soppiness, where sentiment simply means “a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion” or “a feeling or emotion,” (Google Definitions, both). Does this, in turn, provide validation and authority to negative emotions spurred by a work as well? Are negative feelings ‘always right and always real’ as Hume stated? Hume guards against this reading with his very next statement: “But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard,” (Hume, #). Here, Hume states that while the emotion (re: sentiment) itself is always correct, our understanding of our own emotional selves and the reasons for those emotions are not. In this way, Hume pushes toward a greater understanding of the self through the art as it is viewed. To use a personal example, why does The Time Machine by HG Wells bother men and elicit a negative emotional response from me? Is it fair for me to use the position of critical authority granted to me by my emotional reaction to state unequivocally that The Time Machine is ‘bad art’?
Is Hume even speaking of the baser, negative emotions when he grants the viewer this authority to speak? His statement “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty,” (Hume, #) implies that he does not. Hume’s use of the word ‘beauty’ implies that he did not intend ‘sentiment’ to be a shorthand for all emotions, but rather as a shorthand for sentimentality, meaning that only positive emotions (finding a piece of art beautiful) is an acceptable emotional response which gives a viewer permission to become a critic, and even then, only a strict understanding of why the art provided you with that emotional reaction and an analysis of those reasons truly provide you with the authority to speak on the subject. Would I be allowed to speak on The Time Machine at all according to Hume, as I do not find it beautiful, I find it to be in fact quite ugly?
I believe it is from the paradox of this sort of reading that the Freudian method of literary analysis was eventually born from, specifically Freud’s fixation with ‘The Uncanny.’ Freud takes an view that seems in opposition to Hume, focusing not on the positive emotional qualities elicited by a work, but on the negative ones. At the crux of a Freudian Analysis is the idea that the reader or critic must take whatever bothered them most about a work, that which is uncanny to them, and then structure their understanding of the work in such a way that this is what the work was about. This sort of emotional understanding of the self as a method of critique harkens back to Hume’s statement “But all determinations of the understanding are not right,” but with specific focus on the negative aspects of emotion. To return to the above example: Under Freud’s guide, I realize that what bothered me about The Time Machine was the depictions of a European man traveling to ‘another time’ and judging the people there to either be primitive or savage. Through this realization, I conclude that my subjective analysis of The Time Machine is that it is, thematically, an allegory for colonization.
Did Hume intend for only positive emotions to be provided the authority through which to speak when he wrote Of the Standard of Taste? It is possible that he wrote this chiefly as a way to deflate the sort of negative criticism that has long been sensationalized by giving authority only to those who spoke positively and through analysis.