A feeling that can be trained

A violinist in the Metro

At 7:51 on the morning of Friday, January 12, 2007, a man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap stood against a wall at the top of an escalator in the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C. He opened a violin case, tossed in a few dollars as seed money, and began to play. It was the middle of the morning rush. For the next 43 minutes he played six pieces, among them Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor.

The man was Joshua Bell, one of the best-known violinists in the world. Three days earlier he had filled Boston’s Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats cost about $100. His violin was the Stradivarius of 1713 known as the “Gibson ex Huberman,” which the Washington Post reported to be worth about $3.5 million. The newspaper’s magazine had arranged the whole thing, filmed it with a hidden camera, and asked, in its own words, whether “in a banal setting at an inconvenient time” beauty would transcend.

The article’s count is exact. A total of 1,097 people passed. Seven stopped for at least a minute to listen. Twenty-seven put money in the case, most of them on the run, for a total of $32.17, not counting a $20 bill from one woman who recognized him. The rest hurried by. Exactly one person knew who he was: a demographer from the Commerce Department who had heard him at the Library of Congress three weeks earlier. And every time a child walked past, the writer Gene Weingarten reported, the child tried to stop and listen, and every time a parent moved the child along. The story, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” appeared on April 8, 2007, and won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

What does it prove? Less than its reputation. The article’s own experts said so. Paul Guyer, a Kant scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that a person needs decent conditions to judge beauty, and that “heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss” is not one of them. A curator at the National Gallery of Art, Mark Leithauser, said that an Ellsworth Kelly removed from its frame and hung in a restaurant with a $150 price tag would go unnoticed too. It was also not a controlled study: nobody played the same piece on a Saturday afternoon, or on the platform instead of the arcade, to compare.

David Hume had already said what the Metro shows. In his essay on taste (1757) he told the critic to choose “a proper time and place,” and to bring “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object.” A first hearing, he added, is also unreliable, because of “a flutter or hurry of thought” that confounds the feeling of beauty. So the Metro does not show that commuters have bad taste. It shows that taste has conditions: it needs attention, time, and a mind that is not elsewhere. That is the beginning of this course’s question. If the capacity to feel something is not simply switched on, what is it, and can a person train it?

A faculty, not a fact

The lecture behind this course begins with the word itself. The English word taste names a judgment of beauty and also what the tongue does, and so do gusto in Spanish and goût in French. The comparison is old. Joseph Addison, in The Spectator for June 19, 1712 (no. 409), defined taste as “that Faculty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure, and the Imperfections with Dislike,” and argued that the metaphor was so common in every language because mental taste resembles the taste of the palate. His example was a man who, after tasting ten kinds of tea, could name each one without seeing it, and could even name the parts of a blend. Addison also held that the faculty “must in some degree be born with us,” and that “there are several Methods for Cultivating and Improving it,” such as reading the best authors and keeping the company of people of polished judgment. The Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián had made the same point in 1647, in aphorism 65 of his Oráculo manual: taste has room for cultivation, as wit does, and tastes are “caught” from the people we keep company with.

Immanuel Kant fixed the modern sense in the Critique of Judgment (1790). In Meredith’s 1911 translation, section 5: “Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest.” The last four words matter and are easy to miss; later lessons return to them. The lecture draws a practical point from the first half. A person who listens to Bach and reads Kant every day and feels nothing does not have taste. A person who reads two lines and is delighted does. What counts is whether pleasure arrives, and how finely it discriminates, not how much culture has been consumed. “I have been to the Louvre a hundred times” is a statement about travel.

The lecture’s model of the discriminating palate is a story from Don Quixote (Part II, 1615) that Hume retold in 1757. Two kinsmen of Sancho Panza are asked to judge a barrel of wine. One finds it good but for a taste of leather, the other good but for a taste of iron. They are laughed at, until the barrel is emptied and an old key on a leather thong is found at the bottom. The lecture reads three things in it: the tasters need only a little; they can tell good from bad; and they find an ingredient nobody else can. It adds that fine taste is usually a minority gift, which is why they were laughed at. Hume’s own telling has “leather” and “a leathern thong,” where the lecture, as transcribed, says sheepskin; the point is not changed.

Does visiting a place amount to looking at it? One study suggests the gap can be wide. Observers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art timed 150 visitors in front of the works on display and found the average time spent on a work was 27.2 seconds, and the median 17 seconds (Smith and Smith, 2001). That is a small sample at a single museum, and looking time is not the same as feeling. But it is a reminder that “I have seen it” and “I have taken it in” are different claims.

Is there a standard?

If taste is a feeling, who decides which feelings are right? Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” puts the problem sharply. “Beauty,” he wrote, “is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” That sounds like the end of the argument. But Hume goes on to say that the claim would be absurd if pushed too far: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe.”

His way out is the critic. There are, he says, true judges, and they are marked by five things: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.” Such critics are rare. But “the joint verdict” of those who have all five, “wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.” He gives a test that time performs: “The same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London.” The lecture’s reading of Hume is looser. It says that there is no external standard, since nobody can force you to like anything, but that a person can have a better or worse time with a work, and that it is worth working to have a better one. In Hume’s essay the word for the quality that makes the difference is delicacy.

Kant added a twist that this course will use. A judgment of taste rests on a feeling, he said, and is therefore personal. Yet the person who makes it “must believe that he has reason for demanding a similar delight from every one” (section 6). “This wine is agreeable to me” does not claim anything. “This is beautiful” does. We argue about it, and we ask others to look again. That is why the question of training makes sense at all: if beauty were only a private taste in the sense of chocolate against vanilla, there would be nothing to learn.

Higher, or wider?

The lecture asks a question that makes the abstract one personal. One person loves Beethoven. Another loves a pop star. The lecture’s example is Jay Chou, the Taiwanese singer (born 1979; first album in 2000); readers in the United States can put in their own. Has the first person better taste? The lecture answers in two parts. In the lecturer’s view, measured by what composers have achieved within a tradition, Beethoven’s achievement is larger, and that is a fact about the music, not the listener. But a taste is a response, and nobody gets to say that someone who likes sweet things is less noble than someone who likes bitter ones. What can be asked is how much each person gets from what they love. Someone who can enjoy both Beethoven and a pop star has two sources of pleasure where the other has one. If “high” is read as wide, then, the lecture says, taste does have a higher and a lower, and the person who can enjoy more kinds of things has more of it.

The lecture then gives the skeptic’s reply, in the form of a story. A man who loves a pop star hears that Beethoven is better and spends three years on lessons, scores, and books to learn to enjoy him. The study is dull, and by the end his old enthusiasm has cooled. He has lost three years and a youthful passion. At best, the skeptic says, his taste has changed; there is no sign it has improved. The lecture attaches a philosopher’s name to this argument, but the name is garbled in the transcript and no source for the argument could be found, so this course names no one. Hume had met the worry, though. He grants that “a very delicate palate, on many occasions, may be a great inconvenience both to a man himself and to his friends.” In an earlier essay, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1741), he says that delicacy “enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery,” and then concludes that it is still “to be desired and cultivated.” His reason is that, unlike our fortunes, our books, pastimes, and company are ours to choose. In the 1757 essay he adds that a delicate taste is “the source of all the finest and most innocent enjoyments” open to us.

He adds a point the skeptic’s story leaves out. Taste changes over a life without needing to be ranked: “At twenty, Ovid may be the favourite author; Horace at forty; and perhaps Tacitus at fifty.” And Gracián, who wrote on taste before any of the others, warned in the same aphorism against the opposite vice: “do not make a profession of being displeased by everything.” A trained taste is not a taste that dislikes more.

The lecture’s own measure, then, is not rank but range, and it comes in two sizes. One is more things: more kinds of music, paintings, flavors. The other, which the lecture thinks more important, is more ways of enjoying the same thing, because traveling the world and listening to every record is tiring, and may not pay. A person who learns to find more in a bowl of chili, a song, or a cup does not need to go anywhere. The next activity makes the arithmetic visible. It is a picture of the lecture’s idea, not a measurement.

Taste in a social world

Taste is private, but it is not played out in private. In La Distinction (1979; English translation by Richard Nice, 1984), the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that what people like is learned in a class position and then used, usually without anyone intending it, to mark distance from other classes. His book rests on a survey of 1,217 people in France in 1963 and 1967–68. His summary is blunt: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” He argued that the “pure gaze,” an attitude of looking at art for its own sake, belongs to people whose lives are far from necessity. The thesis has critics, but no one who wants to train taste can ignore it. A person who learns to love what the powerful love may be doing something quite different from learning to feel.

Bourdieu’s thesis also makes the lecture’s ideal look ambiguous. In 1996 the sociologists Richard Peterson and Roger Kern compared two American surveys of arts participation, from 1982 and 1992, and found that people of high status had become “omnivorous”: they liked more kinds of music, not fewer, and the change continued over time, which they described as a shift from “snobbish exclusion to omnivorous appropriation.” A person who can enjoy both Beethoven and a pop star is, on that evidence, doing what the privileged now do. That does not make the pleasure fake. It does mean that breadth can become a badge, and the lecture’s idea has to be heard with that warning.

Labels are a subtler pressure. In 2008, Hilke Plassmann and colleagues at Caltech and Stanford scanned the brains of volunteers, 20 of whom were analyzed, while they tasted what they were told were five Cabernet Sauvignons priced from $5 to $90. In fact there were three wines. The same wine was sometimes labeled $10 and sometimes $90. People reported the wine as more pleasant when it carried the higher price, and a part of the brain that tracks experienced pleasantness, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, was more active. It is a small, young sample, and the authors note that people may have tried to give the answer they thought was wanted. But the finding fits a larger one. In a study of more than 6,000 blind tastings, people with no wine training liked the more expensive wines slightly less, while experts did not show that pattern (Goldstein and others, 2008). Course 10 shows how a first number can tilt a judgment in the same way.

For readers in the United States there is a famous test of labels against taste. On May 24, 1976, in Paris, nine French judges tasted wines blind. California wines took first place in both categories: a 1973 Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena among the whites, and a 1973 Cabernet from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars among the reds. Only one reporter, George Taber of Time, was there. The caveats matter: wines of different vintages and ages were compared. Later reruns put California on top again (in 1978 in both categories, in 2006 among the reds), though they too compared wines of different ages. But the story sits well beside Hume’s barrel. Taste that works without the label is the kind worth training.

What the lecture proposes

The lecture’s answer to “how do I get more?” is a short course of five methods, one per lecture. They are the lecturer’s own scheme, a useful way of organizing the ground, not established doctrine, and this course tags them as such. The first four change what the person brings to a work; the last changes what the person does.

1. Sensibility. Look small, look strange, let yourself be disappointed, stay in the present. (Lesson 2.)
2. A sense of form. Notice symmetry, proportion, and echo between parts. (Lesson 2.)
3. Breaking new ground. Take in what is ugly, frightening, or incomplete. (Lesson 3.)
4. A disinterested attitude. Keep a distance from your wants and your life while you look. (Lesson 3.)
5. Practice. Make things, and look as a maker looks. (Lesson 4.)

The rest of the course takes them in that order, tests each against sources, and says where the lecture goes beyond them. Lesson 4 also sets the five beside Hume’s five marks of a true judge, a comparison that is this course’s own.