Aug 24, 2024
how do you think about taste? what do you think the works that appeal most to you have in common?
i'm asking because, as much as i resent people who deride anything challenging or weird as "pretentious," i can't really object to the idea that reading fiction/poetry should be fun or relatable or whatever, rather than a scholastic exercise. i have some tentative answers but i would be interested in know what you guys think. also feel free to rec essays or books that talk about this.
Personally I think "taste" is a forever evolving concept based on your experiences. To what extent any work seems interesting to you depends entirely on what you've seen before and the context in which you're interacting with the work - when you are young or inexperienced, you are impressed by things that wouldn't impress you later on, given you continue to expand your horizons. In this sense I think there is less a priori value in works themselves, but they accumulate wider value by corresponding to the "taste"s of groups of people with generally the same subset of experiences.
yea i've come around to believing something like this myself. i'm starting to think of taste as something that can't really be conveyed by definition. it's more like a subjective experience that you "know" by experiencing it. other people can put you on the path to experiencing it, but can't demonstrate "good taste" through argumentation. this definitely makes it harder to have arguments about what is good in fiction and poetry, but i don't think we should abandon the enterprise, even if there's no a priori value in literature. maybe im too much of an analytic philosophycel and am clinging onto the illusion that there can be a satisfying definition.
Indeed I wouldn't want to abandon the enterprise of evaluating art. There's clearly some qualities about certain works that distinguish them from others - some will be a lot more successful in appealing to people's artistic sensibilities than others, and not just by pure luck or chance. But to make broad declarative criteria as to what these qualities are is a very difficult undertaking. Too often those who do this try to consider works in a vaccum, that they have those transcendent a priori qualities, yet how an individual relates to art is forcibly based on their complex and ingrained systems of experiences. In terms of philosophy, I think Kant's works on aesthetics hold up reasonably well on this subject compared to most of his contemporaries, so I'd suggest that philosophical projects are still possible just difficult. When I was younger I used to be quite elitist on the question. And though I still consider some works to be more successful than others, I find it more productive to try to consider other people's tastes more anthropologically, based on what I know about their lives and the associations I have between the works they like. It's a useful exercise for understanding the nature of taste; perhaps in future it will lead me to a more concrete construction.