Towards the heteronomy of the aesthetic experience: an alternative approach to David Hume's aesthetics

Abstract

: In this paper is tested an alternative approach to David Hume’s aesthetics from the underlying thesis that he strove to neutralize the undecidability of aesthetics judgment resulting from the centrality granted to subjective experience. Using the  precedents of George Cheyne’s physiology and Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ environmentalism, both know to Hume, it is proposed that Hume reduced the Cartesian subject to physiology, thus making non-viable the aesthetic autonomy. To articulate this thesis, in addition to his aesthetic texts, are used Hume’s connections with anatomy, his critique of personal identity, and his reflections on the materiality of thought. All this converges in the interpretation of the standard of taste as something whose feasibility is evinced by the statistics of the historical process in the figure of the critic, who stand for the state of organic health that anyone could enjoy, all of which makes Hume’s an essential reference for the new aesthetics of heteronomy.