Hume’s aesthetics applied to classical music: Who decides when emotion is too much emotion - what does too much emotion mean? Part One

I’ve been inspired by Steven Isserlis’s interesting and thought provoking Facebook post¹ to start writing about Hume and music because Isserlis raises key notions which, I think, Hume could shed light on in order to help us untangle the complex concepts we often use in the music world. I would like to do something a little different from Isserlis by philosophically analysing the deeper implications of the terms we use casually.

In summary, I understand Isserlis as arguing against “the danger of pouring superfluous beauty” into music, conveying “false emotion” in the way a musician goes about playing a piece. He advocates “judicious” “choices” about how we play a piece to transmit the meaning and truth of the music. He concludes that we must “ensure we are telling the right story” through the music and warns that “it is all too easy to inflame an audience through false passions; but if we do that, we are distorting the truth. And reaching the truth of the music has to be our ultimate aim.”²

Setting aside Isserlis’s post, the concepts within it made me wonder how Hume would analyse such statements. Here, the concept I shall focus on is whether, according to Hume, it is technically speaking more philosophically accurate to talk about false or inappropriate emotions or passions or whether what we are really referring to is an assumption or judgement which we wish to deem judicious or injudicious.

In his ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’³, Hume specifies that, strictly speaking, an emotion cannot be inappropriate or unreasonable. This is because only ideas can disagree, contradict, or oppose a truth, but emotion cannot⁴. This is due to the fact that passions are part of how we are as human beings, we just have emotional feelings and reactions⁵. However, ideas represent objects in the world. So they function differently from emotions which do not represent objects out in the world but instead are within us⁶. So, Hume thinks that passions and emotions can never “be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas”⁷. This means that passion and reason cannot be in direct conflict with one another and that, as Hume famously states:

“Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”⁸

We react to objects through our passions and emotions and this impacts on us and influences our impulses and actions⁹. The role of reason is to engage our reasoning faculties to figure out connections between things and how things relate to one another, for instance, by trying to understand causes and effects¹⁰. Our “impulse” will therefore come from our passions and emotions which will thereby influence our actions and volitions¹¹. Such impulses can only be opposed by another impulse, also arising from the passions, but cannot be opposed by reason or anything arising from it¹².

Hence, the only way Hume thinks passion and reason could clash is if the passions “are accompany’d  with some judgement or opinion” which introduces an error¹³. For Hume, this means that:

“Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it.”¹⁴

Therefore, apart from these conditions:

“…a passion can never, in any sense, be call’d unreasonable…”¹⁵

Hume summarises his point thus:

“In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgement, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ‘tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgement.”¹⁶

In other words, there’s no such thing as inappropriate emotion. When we commonly say things like this, strictly speaking, we are referring to a supposition or judgement which we want to claim is inaccurate, not the emotions surrounding it. So emotions and passions are merely natural states we possess as human beings and they play a vital and positive part in motivating our wants, desires, volitions, character and wish to be ethical human beings, given that abstract reasoning cannot motivate people to act. Our faculty of reason helps us make logical connections and think through ideas in our minds and reach rational judgements. However, how does what Hume writes on emotion and the passions apply to aesthetics? This will be the topic of my next two blog posts. 

¹ Isserlis, S., (23rd September 2017 at 3:24pm) ‘Beware of emotion – well, of inappropriate emotion, anyway… (again)’ facebook post

available at:  https://www.facebook.com/Steven-Isserlis-191956057519364/

² ibid

³ Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, (ed) Selby-Bigge, Nidditch, (1978) Oxford Clarendon Press, 2^nd edition

⁴ ibid ‘Of the influencing motives of the will’, T.II.III.III p415

⁵ ibid

⁶ ibid

⁷ ibid

⁸ ibid

⁹ ibid p414

¹⁰ ibid

¹¹ ibid

¹² ibid p415

¹³ ibid p416

¹⁴ ibid

¹⁵ ibid

¹⁶ ibid