"Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them"
About this Quote
Hume doesn’t romanticize beauty so much as demote it. In one clean stroke, he strips “beauty” of its supposed residence in marble, sunsets, or symphonies and relocates it to the spectator’s mental furniture: habit, expectation, association, training. The provocation isn’t that beauty is fake; it’s that beauty is a judgment we keep mistaking for a property. You think you’re reporting on the object, but you’re really revealing your own sensibility.
The line lands with the cool audacity of Enlightenment skepticism. Hume is writing against the comforting idea that taste can be settled the way geometry can. If beauty “exists” only in contemplation, then aesthetic disputes aren’t scientific disagreements; they’re collisions of temperament, culture, and history. The subtext is quietly destabilizing: the museum, the canon, the critic, even the lover’s gaze become less like neutral arbiters and more like participants in a psychological transaction.
Yet Hume isn’t just licensing “anything goes.” His larger project in “Of the Standard of Taste” tries to explain why we still talk as if some judgments are better than others. If beauty is mind-dependent, you can still compare minds: whose perception is more practiced, less distracted by prejudice, more attentive to form? That’s the tightrope he walks: dismantling the myth of objective beauty without surrendering to pure relativism.
Read today, the quote feels eerily contemporary. It anticipates algorithmic aesthetics and culture-war taste battles by insisting that the battlefield was always inside the observer.
The line lands with the cool audacity of Enlightenment skepticism. Hume is writing against the comforting idea that taste can be settled the way geometry can. If beauty “exists” only in contemplation, then aesthetic disputes aren’t scientific disagreements; they’re collisions of temperament, culture, and history. The subtext is quietly destabilizing: the museum, the canon, the critic, even the lover’s gaze become less like neutral arbiters and more like participants in a psychological transaction.
Yet Hume isn’t just licensing “anything goes.” His larger project in “Of the Standard of Taste” tries to explain why we still talk as if some judgments are better than others. If beauty is mind-dependent, you can still compare minds: whose perception is more practiced, less distracted by prejudice, more attentive to form? That’s the tightrope he walks: dismantling the myth of objective beauty without surrendering to pure relativism.
Read today, the quote feels eerily contemporary. It anticipates algorithmic aesthetics and culture-war taste battles by insisting that the battlefield was always inside the observer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), essay in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary — contains the line often rendered as "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." |
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