Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough by William Irwin, Michel S. Beaulieu Read Free Book Online

particular perceptions. These perceptions have a strong relationship to certain qualities in the object.
    Hume’s description of a scene from Don Quixote shows us that there is more going on than simply our subjective experience of beauty. 3 In this scene, two wine connoisseurs taste wine from a barrel that is believed to be of excellent quality. They both judge it to be good, but one detects a hint of leather, the other a hint of iron. Later it is discovered that at the bottom of the barrel of wine, there is an iron key with a leather thong. Good judges, like these wine connoisseurs, can detect very small variations in a work. Although beauty is a perception, it does not seem to be entirely accidental. Our perceptions of beauty are affected by properties in the object that can either detract, like iron and leather, or add to the experience.
    An unfortunate side effect of this view is that we are not all able to become good judges of art. Some of us will simply not have the perceptual acuity to notice such detail. But is noticing every detail always best for judging art? Often, artists will have a lot of detail in their works, and the art is best appreciated when these details are noticed. Not all art is about the details, however. Some art is best observed without excessive attention to its specifics. Hume would claim that focusing on these specifics brings the worth of a work down. Or, more precisely, he would say that good judges would agree that the specifics can detract from, rather than add value to, a work. Again, it’s not obvious that Hume is right here. Sometimes the rough edges of a work add to the experience of it.
    Brewing a Remedy : Qualities of Good Judges
    In order to be good judges, Hume argued that we need “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty.” 4 We need serene minds so that our moods don’t influence our judgment. We must be able to carefully recollect the art in question so that we don’t make mistakes in asserting what the art contains, and we must pay attention to details and be able to notice the nuance and subtlety in the art, or we will again fail to judge appropriately. In other words, we start out as if breathed on by the Malboro. We are confused, blinded, and charmed, and we need to alleviate each of these curses in order to judge well.
    First, we need to gain experience in viewing art. Hume didn’t suggest that we battle monsters to do this, however. We need to view different works of art, but not only that, we should engage in repeat viewings of the same works. In the Final Fantasy games, we often find ourselves engaged in battling Imps, Flans, and Chimeras multiple times and developing strategies to deal with them. Hume said we should do the same with art so that we are not charmed into thinking that a lower-quality work is a higher-quality one. More specifically, experience helps us avoid being seduced by art that, as Hume put it, is “florid and superficial.” That is, art that seems pleasing at first but eventually is found to be sorely lacking in quality.
    One reason Hume thought that we need to experience a lot of the art we are planning on judging is that we can’t be fair judges of the art if we don’t know what has been done with it before. It would be like trying to judge the whole Final Fantasy series by only playing any of the Crystal Chronicles games. Not that the Crystal Chronicles games are bad games; they simply are not representative of the series. Final Fantasy games are fairly diverse, even when they share many of the same elements—like Chocobos, Malboros, and status effects. The basic point is that we need to be aware of what has been done in an art medium before we can fairly judge a work in that medium. We might think something is great, only to find out that it has