Abstract

Taste, according to Hans, governs our lives. It determines the choices we make in life, the judgments we pass on other people and their actions, the patterns and rhythms of our existence. For such a large claim, one would expect a rigorous account of what taste is and a convincing explanation of the ontological, aesthetic, and moral roles that Hans attributes to it. Unfortunately, the reader will be disappointed. To be sure, Hans tells us that he wants to “resist defining the word” but promises to make the word “richer over the course of the book”, as he thought he did with the word “play” in his first book. However, the reader is likely to feel that, over the course of this book, the word “taste” either has been rendered too rich to be digestible or remains too bland to justify Hans’s own “great claims for taste”. The introduction gives a number of apparently inconsistent characterizations of taste that the patient reader hopes will somehow be made consistent by the end of the book, such as “taste is an inborn capacity”, “Taste is shaped by experience, by cultural milieu, by the historical circumstances”, and “taste is a function of biological mechanisms”. Taste is also said to be a capacity, a faculty, a mechanism, and a device. By the end of the introduction, we already have a rich brew which ironically threatens to produce a bland concept, the concept of “taste [as] everything”.