Acquiring Taste

There is a saying commonly used in relation to food: “It’s an acquired taste.” The existence of this saying indicates that it is possible to form and change preferences of aesthetics and other kinds of taste. That being said, the question remains of whether it is ever beneficial to do so. Within the Catholic understanding, there are two major factors that suggest that it is, at times, beneficial. 

The first is that there is such a thing as objective truth, goodness, and beauty, and the second is that this is a fallen world. Although even after the fall, human instincts that point toward what is good, true, and beautiful remain, they no longer are perfectly sharp and refined in their pointing in that direction. For this reason, what we are inclined to prefer does not perfectly align with what we ought to prefer. We are like the man in Plato’s allegory of the cave, who, having spent his lifetime looking at shadows, feels at first as if seeing the realities that caused the shadows is a let-down, compared to what he had been used to seeing.

An example of this arose in my life several years ago, when my mom went out to a restaurant with two of her friends. I asked her afterwards how it had been, and she responded, “I just didn’t know enough about food to enjoy that place.” In her seemingly ordinary statement, profound humility and truth was enclosed. She did not place the blame on the food, but instead recognized that the extent of her own knowledge prevented her from appreciating the food’s beauty and goodness. This makes the point that sometimes one needs a level of learned understanding in order to appreciate the value of things.

Likewise, I was sent an article from The New Yorker several years ago with the title, “The Scourge of Relatability.” It told of a radio personality who denounced Shakespeare because he felt that Shakespeare’s work was insufficiently “relatable.” The article went on to argue that relatability is not the ultimate measure of quality, saying,

…to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us…is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare. 

In other words, if some do not find Shakespeare’s work relatable, that is no defect in his work. Instead, one might consider that it is one’s own character and sense of taste that ought to be further developed, in order to better appreciate, and – yes – relate to these great pieces of literature.

C.S. Lewis reinforces this line of thought in “The Weight of Glory,” connecting it with the reality toward which the transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty point — namely, the Lord and his eternal Kingdom. He writes,

…if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half- hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea…The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire.

To say it another way, the desire for the right things is something to be cultivated, rather than something we have in fullness right away. The difficult part is that it has to be cultivated, but the encouraging part is that it can be cultivated. The grace to cultivate and thus acquire the tastes we ought to have is something for which we can petition our Lord.