3: Taste

What does it mean to have good taste, and is it a meaningful ability?

            To have good taste is similar to doing morally good acts. An amount of experiential “knowledge” makes a person more and more attuned to how to make a morally “good” decision and more and more attuned to their own feelings regarding certain arts. The more one finds oneself in a moral quandary, the more one becomes attuned to the way to make moral decisions. The more one tastes wine, the more one hones one’s skill at knowing oneself—knowing how one feels in response to certain tastes and qualities. This does not mean that one can ever have perfect taste because (1) one can never have all the relevant experiences to reach a maximum level of knowledge about oneself, and (2) even if one were to have all the relevant experiences, they do not reflect a standard law or principle that would mean one could know oneself wholly / maximally at all. As Mothersill points out, no amount of experience can help us actually predict whether or not something will evoke positive feelings, and any kind of principles which seem to govern taste turn out to be mere guidelines or tendencies and are not lawlike at all. But we can still become more aware of personal tendencies and attuned to particular qualities that were previously indiscernible to us. When we become more well-versed in taking in a kind of presentation (wine, paintings, plays, etc.), we are really just continuously modifying our own attitudes. As Hume points out, past experiences hone one’s skills and acclimate the senses to approaching each new experience in a different kind of way than if one is inexperienced.

This means that taste very personal—since it is acquired and modified from experiences which are only one’s own—and subjective—since each individual could come to have slightly different tastes regardless of similar experiences. But there is reason to assume that other people, when approaching the same kind of presentation in the same kind of way as me, will tend to have similar feelings towards the presentations as I do. This is akin to Kant’s conception of “the agreeable” in that we assume certain tendencies of people’s reactions without believing there is a steadfast rule regulating those reactions. We assume that other people like the taste of sugar or sweetness. But we do not deduce from this that everyone who eats this certain sweet thing will like it. We still, however, might assume that someone else will like the sweet thing just because most people do (and we will be mildly surprised when the person tells us they don’t like donuts or chocolate, etc.). Kant explains this with his first two moments of aesthetic judgments, which allow the possibility of agreement without an objective rule.

Kant’s fourth moment—necessity—says that a common sense about taste is presupposed by all aesthetic judgments. Though this common sense is not a reality to be derived from aesthetic judgments, we expect some sort of common sense when relaying our aesthetic experiences to others. I think this is where taste comes in. Taste is that standard that is expected—and must be expected—but is not really actualized objectively. But the subjective experience of an individual well-versed in poetry is taken to be a more respectable and more constructive feeling than the subjective experience of a novice. This only means that others genuinely interested in poetry, who also might want to be well-versed in this particular art form, will trust the “expert’s” opinion over the novice’s.

The kind of subjectivity that Hume, Kant, and Mothersill all point to as a part of aesthetic judgments is actually, I think, what makes this kind of judgment more meaningful. Objective claims are uninteresting in terms of evidence: once all the “facts” are known about an objective thing or phenomenon, a claim is deemed either true or false by everybody and the discussion can end. But with aesthetic judgments—subjective experiences which we take to be universal—there is always meaningful discussions to be had. There are always reasons that can be given for liking or disliking something, but no reason can be true or false. Taste is just how we organize this and how we rank the helpfulness and meaningfulness of people’s experiences with aesthetic entities.