Hume emphasized that only the judgments of fully competent or ideal critics indicate the presence of beauty or aesthetic merit. The property of beauty is similar in this respect to secondary qualities like colors, as analyzed by John Locke. For Locke, the color red is a power in objects, based on objective properties of their surfaces, to cause red sensations in normal observers in normal conditions. For Hume, beauty is similarly a relation between various objective properties and subjective responses, differences being that, as noted, there is no single objective property to be found here, and that qualified observers are rarer and more difficult to define. Such observers must have developed tastes, be knowledgeable of the type of work they are judging and of the historical tradition with which to compare the work, and be sensitive to the sorts of subtle relations on which the beauty of the work might depend. In the end, even such qualified critics might disagree in their comparative aesthetic judgments, Hume recognized.
Kant was both more emphatic than Hume that there are no universal objective grounds for ascriptions of beauty, and was more confident that such judgments should nevertheless be universally shared.
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