Taste is constrained by circumstance and character.
Taste, as in food or music, is regarded as a personal preference that is inconsequential, but that judgment should not be extended to politics or literature, where people are said to be arbitrary or idiosyncratic but where these judgments are not merely consequential but also matters of character.
Begin with the superficial aren of taste. People like the food they grow up with and therefore often seen as comfort foods or throwbacks to their roots. So I like tongue and Reuben sandwiches because my mother was more or less kosher and some people identify the Italian culture with red sauce pasta rather than Michaelangelo or Dante. My children all knew how to use chopsticks because their family and the families around them frequented Chinese restaurants So food tastes are deeply set, people appalled at being exposed to unfamiliar foods, even though, Levi Strauss’s claim otherwise. In my view, taste is a matter of circumstance and history, however deeply set, and does not they do not convey meaning from or for a food taste. It doesn’t explain a person’s character because they prefer rare to well done steak even if someone can speculate that those who prefer the well done are repressed or that those who eat raw shellfish are more open minded.
Music is also a matter of taste, also associated with the social class or the decade in which you entered your teenage years and acquired your musical tastes because they were the music with which you became familiar. People in the Forties like Big Bands and in the Fifties liked solo male and female singers and maybe you listened to the Met Opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons. It was inconsequential, just a matter of taste, in that everyone was entitled to their choice, even if some people could be identified as high brow or not, though there was just a tinge of meaning in thinking crooners liberating in the Forties and that, in the Sixties, the Beatles were thought to be conservative while Bob Dyhlan was progressive, but, after all, it was just about music and so shouldn’t be made into something serious, treated instead as just an ancillary and insignificant matter, like preferring red to green dresses unless the color didn’t match your skin tone, which was hardly disqualifying because clothes are independent of skin shades.
People are unwilling to consider religion just a matter of taste even though religion is also circumstantially located, people believing what their parents believed, because religion is a matter of moment in a person’s consciousness, people pledging allegiance to the doctrine of original sin or that suffering is redemptive. But, on the other hand, in Western societies that have mastered the doctrine of toleration, people can allow themselves to respect the religions as matters of taste, discounting the substance of beliefs by treating morality or obedient observance as universal and so religions are separated only by verbal formulas or liturgies and so a matter of taste that is placed in your childhood. You can respect the differences because they are today seen as insignificant and circumstantial.
Politics is consequential but thought also to be a matter of taste because it is so circumstantial. People vote because of their family’s party affiliation and their demographics and so people say that politics is like a religious allegiance even though, of late, voters seem unmoored from their circumstances and vote on the basis of a hankering for the personality of the candidate, people by law and custom not required to have a reason for whom they vote and so making a preference because of Kamala’s smile or laugh and Trump’s yellow hair and bluster, or whether, as the recent opinions show, because the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee is a football coach when the fact that he was a high school teacher on history and geography might seem more relevant as a credential. So voting is idiosyncratic and to be respected even if also holding in destain the other political party, an illuminating paradox about taste that also applies to food, where people can find an ethnic food disgusting but think themselves to be tolerant because they are polite about someone else’s preferences. Another paradox is that voting matters, you thinking a different candidate is a disaster for the nation, while still respecting the process of free and fair elections, the excuse being that most of the time the country will survive even if the opposite party’s nominee is elected and because of a belief that the wisdom of the people will prevail and so reject an obviously unfit candidate and that the party leaders will have vetted the potential candidates so that whichever one wins will be minimally acceptable and will be influenced by wise old heads. People can vote their tastes because extreme views have already been eliminated or will be controlled, though that did not happen in 1860 when real choices were made and perhaps in 2025 when Trump might prove irresponsible.
And now for the difficult one, which is a taste in literature, which also seems innocuous because some people like mystery stories and some people like science fiction. These, after all, are just leisure activities, adjuncts to making a living or setting up a family or being engrossed in religion. But think again. What sort of literature or particular work of literature tells you about what you imagine, which is an aspect of character. Mystery readers want puzzles unraveled and solved because murder is an affront to civilized life, though few mystery stories outside Dostoevsky and Capote give the flavor of a person being murdered rather than just the puzzle and the social ambience, as is the case with Agatha Christie. Science fiction readers are out for wild adventures about an isolated and endangered astronaut or the destruction of worlds and civilizations placed within the ambiance of scientific endeavor. The same is true of particular works. It marks a difference whether a reader prefers Jane Austen’s wit and skepticism about characters or the sentimentality and coincidence of Dickens. Which to prefer expresses a sense of one’s own feelings as well as the way the world works even though a reader can partake both and so broadened by their appreciation not only of these two but multiple other writers so that a well read person can be considered sophisticated in mind even if subdued and unadventurous in real life.
Go beyond that to different people revealing their characters by the kind of literature preferred. I liked war stories when I was young because I thought it was manly. As I have written elsewhere, people have high brow, middle brow, and low brow tastes, whereby Joyce and Mann, those in the first type, are difficult to master and with complex characters, while middlebrow writers, like Somerset Maughm and Margaret Mitchell, are sentimental and resolve only easy paradoxes, while low brow writing, like Bugs Bunny and Mad Max movies, are long on danger and anger and so to be easily released from its claims as fantastic, however much their imagery lingers on despite the dismissal. Looked this way, literature is a window into the soul rather than a pastime. It shows you what you are, what are your hopes and dreams and a sense of the way the world really works. Don’t ask people to read Rorschach blots. Ask them about their books and movies however much it seems an idle pastime of little moment.
Here is a paradox about literary criticism, that it is an objective and disinterested attempt to what a text says and means, as when a critic can show why “Triumph of the Will” can be so attractive, and is also a subjective response, whereby people inevitably read into what a text says and means, as when a critic feels liberated by romcoms, that paradox illuminating what it means to say literature is a matter of taste. Consider, as a case in point, “The Book of Ruth”, from the Old Testament that is often said to be the most perfect short story ever, following the principles that, like “Ruth”, there can be multiple incidents in a short story but there is a uniformity of tone, while dramas and novels have multiple emotions as well as plural incidents.
As the story goes, Ruth accompanies her mother to her mother’s homeland and her mother arranges to make an advantageous marriage for her. Ruth starts out as someone who is a gleamer, someone who picks up the leftover sheaves of wheat after the wheat has been harvested. That brings her to the attention of Boaz, who owns the fields, and then she seduces Boaz and then gains him as a husband. Mission accomplished.
Here are two objective things to be said about the story. First, it was carefully planned by Naomi so that Ruth would come to Boaz’s attention and seduced in a way that was not so blatant as to make Ruth into a potential mistress or even just a prostitute but a respectable woman overcome by love. That would be difficult to manage, just as is the case in any number of Nineteenth Century English novels. Second, the rehearsal of the events that actually transpire distances the plan from the event just as in “Beowulf” the repetition and altered retelling of events distances what happened from how people recollect what happened. Events and precast or retold stories are part of the human condition and noting that is a literary accomplishment in that literary criticism can note these aspects of human reality.
But then there is the subjective element. A literary critic can reasonably infer that Ruth’s quest was in peril, that it could go astray if Ruth had not played her cards just right. That, objectively, allows a critic to notice that the story involves suspense about whether it will work out. What happens, however, is that the story of Ruth can be thought of as a story on the brink of disaster that somehow did work out or else as a story that accomplished a story of serenity because it does move through its paces to work out satisfactorily as if it had to be. Some critics will emphasize one or the other and so intrude on their objectivity and so some people read Jane Austen as always ironic and people to be mistrusted while some read Jane Austen as floating upon the good will of people who engage in polite society. So I can say I have a taste for the disaster that might be concerning Ruth while other people embrace their taste in serenity. The literary text brings out the deepest of feelings.
What emotions and understandings are people to rely on, to apply to the way the world works? Some people have a taste for the cynical and think there are conspiracy theories everywhere. Some people are trusting souls and think most people mean well. Some people have a humorous view of human nature while others think people malign. These views underlie ideology or theology, just as when William James recognized the division between the first and second born kinds of believers as fundamental orientations for religion rather than dogma or liturgy, and we can therefore use the term ”taste” to describe this very deep and deep felt orientation rather than the reasons that are added on to explain them however much a trained taste can be acquired, cynicism replaced by skepticism, just as people can develop a taste of caviar or Chinese dumplings. Your character is your collection of tastes.