Taste

Theoretical Approaches

To Pierre Bourdieu, taste is the central theoretical concept of sociology. Taste classifies other persons and things and is an object of classification. Importantly, taste not only classifies, excludes, and includes but also places people and things in a hierarchical order, in which some are more valued than others. Taste both creates and maintains inequalities and, as such, is a means of power. The sociology of taste has its origins in the classical philosophical aesthetics of eighteenth-century Europe. This tradition of thought placed great hope in the human disposition of taste, which often reached almost utopian dimensions. Taste did not concern only the beauty of things; even less was it restricted to an instrument of art critique. As several prominent proponents of this school of thought proposed, taste united people in communities, creating social order without suppressing the individuals' subjective inclinations.

Friedrich Schiller argued that basically two instincts guide human behavior. The first instinct is sensual and has to do with the satisfaction of individual needs and wants; as such, it is necessarily egoistical. He called his second instinct the form drive. It is basically intellectual by its nature and helps us recognize universal human norms and laws. Both of these instincts are equally strong and opposed to each other. There is no means of reaching any compromise between them: either people follow their subjective drives not paying attention to the social order or they follow the common norms at the costs of the satisfaction of their own basic instincts. All universal norms and laws that we approve of using our reason will, out of necessity, restrict the realization of our equally natural sensual instincts. In this situation, the aesthetic play instinct comes to the rescue. In contrast to the two other instincts, this third, play instinct has an important task of moderating our two other kinds of instincts. It can teach us to moderate our wants without the use of any force or social coercion. Unlike the form instinct, it does not violate our wild, “animal” instincts. Unlike the sensual instincts, following it does not result in conflicts or chaos. In Schiller's construction, the aesthetic play instinct, just like the law-giving form instinct, creates order and coordinates social interaction without suppressing our sensual instincts. Social interaction without adhering at least to some basic form of order would not be possible.

Schiller's program of aesthetic education of mankind had a strong utopian element. It exercised enormous influence on European humanistic thought for decades. Schiller's program was, despite its name, not a program of art education in any ordinary sense of the word but a social program with strong social goals. In analyzing and characterizing the play instinct, Schiller problematized and proposed a solution to the basic antinomy of human life, between individual freedom and social order, following closely Immanuel Kant's ideas of philosophical aesthetics formulated in his third critique, the Critique of the Judgment Power. Kant postulated a sensus communis, or a community of taste, that likewise mediated between the individual and the collective, or rather reconciled the irreconcilable by overcoming the opposition between the subjective, purely sensual preferences of taste and the universal validity of our claims of beauty. Kant's famous antinomy of taste claimed that it was equally correct to say that our aesthetic judgments are purely subjective and to demand their universal validity. By exercising our judgment power, we both express our genuine subjective likings and demand that other people join in our judgments. This claim of universal validity is, in fact, what separates a real aesthetic judgment from any expression of purely sensual pleasure.

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