Post-Feudal Taste

Walter Ong ( The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (The Terry Lectures Series) ) takes note of the much-remarked primacy of taste in eighteenth-century European culture, but Ong offers an explanation:

“The sense of taste is basically a discriminatory sense as the other senses are not . . . . Taste is a yes-or-no sense, a take-it-or-don’t-take-it sense, letting us know what is good and what is bad for us in the most crucial physical way, for taste concerns what we are inclined to take into ourselves by eating, what will by intussusception either actually become ourselves or refuse to be assimilated and perhaps kill us. Undoubtedly the eighteenth-century concern with taste, analogously understood, derived in great part from the growing number of acts of discrimination which men were having to make. As feudal society finally bowed out, the individual and even a whole society were being forced to make decisions which an older, more tradition-bound culture used to provide ready-made. With democracy, the concern with taste wanes, as ‘public opinion’ is formed to take over regulatory functions, the crises of decision assume other shapes, and the relationship of the human life-world to the complex of senses changes once more.”

This is illuminating in many directions, not least of which on the question of the “decline of taste,” that eternal critique of democratic society. Ong is suggesting: Of course taste declines in democracy, because the mob is not making decisions about “consumption” that had to be made by individuals. I think Elias’ theory of the “civilizing process” helps explain the elevation of taste as well.