David Hume and the Exclusion of the Sublime in His Essays Moral, Political, and Literary

Abstract

David Hume´s first writings include the study of aesthetic evaluations, which achieves its mature statement in the Essays Moral, Political, and Literary under the proposal of a taste standard that allows tutoring and modifying them. This paper aims at showing what the features of what we would call “aesthetic experience” today in Hume´s thought is. The goal is to clarify why the pleasure of the sublime is not included in his writings after the Treatise of Human Nature. Our hypothesis is that such an exclusion accounts for a contradiction or incompatibility between this delight and morality, not for the philosopher´s lack of interest in or uncritical omission of an aspect of taste that had a strong influence on early and mid XVIII century´s British writers.