Developing Taste: A Bit of a Theory

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, March 08, 2007
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Another chart for another theory. This time, it's all about taste. To each his own, that's what they say, but there's no denying some people have better taste than others. But can you quantify such things? I doubt it. Still, it seems to me that there are three stages in the development of taste, and they go something like this. First, there's the "I know what I like" stage, which is where we all start. It's an uncritical acceptance of whatever we happen to love or hate, with no effort to defend or justify our feelings, and little or no interest in governing principles. After we leave this stage, we often look back on it as an Edenic innocence, a pre-critical time when we could simply enjoy.

Innocence is corrupted by knowledge, and the knowledge of the second stage revolves around three poles: the past, the popular, and the provocative. In each case, there are positive and negative polarities. I've tried to illustrate these in my chart. Some people, in developing their taste, christen nostalgia, accepting the premise that the old ways are best. They say "yes" to the past. This affirmative expresses itself in different ways depending on the discipline in question. When it comes to books, they'll prefer the classics. When it comes to clothing, they'll have a predilection for vintage. When it comes to art and architecture, the older the better. They value old things because they are old, first and foremost, the assumption being that we've lost whatever was good and we need to recover it. Of course, there's a negative polarity to this pole as well. Some people reject the past because it's the past, prefering instead whatever is current and new. Old ideas, old habits, old notions of beauty -- all of it is anathema, all of it dated. Again, it isn't so much the value of the individual expressions, it's the fact that they're old that makes them undesirable.

We observe the same thing when it comes to popularity. Some people despise whatever is popular because it is popular, just as some accept it for the same reason. Provocation functions similarly. Some crave whatever is shocking, while others abhor it. In each instance, though, this critical infancy privileges the assumption or principle above the particulars. Things are grouped into categories, judged as a whole, and accepted or rejected based on their consistency with the (often unstated) governing idea.

People in this stage typically look down on their uncritical peers, dismissing them as sheep. The naive inconsistency of the majority seems appalling. Who would want to live such an unexamined life? This snobbery, of course, is a vestige of immaturity. Little do people at Stage 2 realize that the folks who've reached Stage 3 pity them more than they do the uninitiated.

Critical infancy is a stage we must go through, but there's no excuse for staying there. How do you move beyond? I think the answer lies in seeing the either/or assumptions of Stage 2 as false dichotomies. Critical maturity comes when you realize that not all old things are good, not all new things bad (or vice versa), and you begin to judge the particulars, not the generalities. If ignorance involves making no judgments and immaturity consists in judging things on the basis of external abstractions, then maturity lies in jugding them on their own basis. It also involves the ability to place them in a larger context, to link the particular merits and demerits to the world outside, to measure their fidelity to the truth. So critical maturity isn't purged of abstraction, but it roots its general principles in the soil of the specific.