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On Clarity
When I first heard Brian Eno’s album Another Green World I found the rhythms and musical textures so odd and disconcerting that I felt like jumping from my friend’s car. In time, however, this became one of my favorite albums, one I would listen to again and again, and I soon came to recognize why many consider Eno to be a musical genius. What happened here? Now you could say I became familiar with Eno’s music and that I began to see an inner logic, a musical sense, that first escaped my notice. But to get to this point required repeated listenings. What did I become familiar with? And what were the disconcerting layers that needed to be worked through to reveal the inner logic and sense? Hume’s answer to this question is that with repeated experience I became increasingly sensitive to differences and patterns that were initially experienced as a muddled, confused mess. With a developed and refined ‘delicacy’ of taste and imagination, Hume argues that one’s taste can be affected by subtle differences that are missed by others for whom what is present is ‘all mixed up with other such qualities, so that one can’t pick out all the particular flavours from the jumble in which they are presented.’ There are thus qualities in the work of art, according to Hume, that prompts pleasant feelings, feelings that may, on many occasions, only be accessible to one with finely tuned perceptual capacities – in short, to one that has the power to be affected by this music, a power others may lack.