In 1919 Edmund Gosse published Some Diversions of a Man of Letters, essentially a set of essays or lectures on various topics. The topic of his “Preface” is "The Fluctuations of Taste.” Noting that Voltaire wrote a chapter on epic poetry called “Differences of Taste in Nations,” Gosse writes that for today the subject should be redefined as the “Differences of Taste in Generations.” I suppose Gosse had observed the changing of whatever was deemed fashionable in the nineteenth century into whatever was becoming fashionable in art, literature, culture, and literal fashion in the “Roaring Twenties.”
In what appears to be an age-old complaint, Gosse says that in early youth “we fight for the new forms of art, for the new aesthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess.” He then notes that as we age, “Behold! One morning, we wake up to find our own predilections treated with contempt.”*
It happens to most if not all of us. What we find fashionable the next generation throws into its wastebasket. Of course, as we learn from experience or from study, we know that the pendulum swings, and sometimes what was fashionable, then abandoned, becomes fashionable again. Here’s where Gosse fingers the problem. He says “that no canons of taste exist; that what are called ‘laws’ of style are enacted only for those who make them, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting their legislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free to repeal the code.” Face it: Whatever you declare as fashionable is going to change because your declaration is meaningless outside the parish of likeminded thinkers.
Every one of us has to answer a very important question related to Edmund Gosse’s thoughts. Is there no standard? Or is there a standard of beauty (or of truth, or thought, or fashion) regardless of the absence of, as Gosse puts it, “a fixed rule of taste”? It’s a question of relative v. absolute.
You might say that there can be both. Some things are absolutes. Others are not. But are your absolutes absolutes for everyone? Gosse argues that we really can’t produce a standard of beauty (or fashion) on which we can all agree, but “when we observe…that art (or beauty, or culture, or fashion) is no better at one age than at another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm of …beauty [truth, fashion, culture, philosophy, psychology] ? We cannot define it, but in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it.”
Time for you to decide your relationship to absolutes and standards. Fashions of thought, art, literature, and culture are always subject to the vicissitudes of generations, nations, and ethnic groups. Think of political correctness as a fashion of language or culture. Is it a standard of the time? Is it here to stay? If we are to judge by history, no. It might be fashionable now, but…
Think of current standards of beauty, of philosophy, of psychology, and of various artistic media. If they are all relative—all subject to change—do you agree with Gosse that there is an unspoken, unidentifiable standard somehow underlying all fashions and patterns?
If you said, “Yes,” you might be a Platonist or Neoplatonist. You might argue that there is an “ideal tree” even if you can’t picture it because you always think “oak,” “pine,” “maple.” If you said, “No” with regard to standards of any kind, then you need to ask yourself if you belong to that group of philosophers who have questioned whether or not all is illusion, that nothing is “fixed.”
Bertrand Russell framed this by asking in The Problems of Philosophy what we could say about the shape of a table.* Let’s say you see a rectangular table. Is that its shape? Does it look rectangular from every angle as you walk around it, see it from below, from a corner? What if we look at the table through a microscope? Will it appear to have the same texture as it has without magnification? What about the color of the table? Is the same under different lighting conditions? With glare and without? How confident are you that your drawing of the table could capture the nature of the table? Can you capture all the “patterns,” or forms that the table seems to take from every angle, from close in or far away, from being bathed in light or shielded by partial shadow? Or is your “table” an “ideal table”?
If we can’t be sure about a table, what makes us so sure about the fashions, the patterns, and the philosophies to which we so desperately cling? Does our clinging in itself indicate that we recognize without specifying some kind of underlying law of standards?
Just askin’.
* http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18649/18649-h/18649-h.htm#Page_31
Edmund Gosse, C.B., Some Diversons of a Man of Letters (London: William Heinemann, 1919, 1920)
** http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
In what appears to be an age-old complaint, Gosse says that in early youth “we fight for the new forms of art, for the new aesthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess.” He then notes that as we age, “Behold! One morning, we wake up to find our own predilections treated with contempt.”*
It happens to most if not all of us. What we find fashionable the next generation throws into its wastebasket. Of course, as we learn from experience or from study, we know that the pendulum swings, and sometimes what was fashionable, then abandoned, becomes fashionable again. Here’s where Gosse fingers the problem. He says “that no canons of taste exist; that what are called ‘laws’ of style are enacted only for those who make them, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting their legislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free to repeal the code.” Face it: Whatever you declare as fashionable is going to change because your declaration is meaningless outside the parish of likeminded thinkers.
Every one of us has to answer a very important question related to Edmund Gosse’s thoughts. Is there no standard? Or is there a standard of beauty (or of truth, or thought, or fashion) regardless of the absence of, as Gosse puts it, “a fixed rule of taste”? It’s a question of relative v. absolute.
You might say that there can be both. Some things are absolutes. Others are not. But are your absolutes absolutes for everyone? Gosse argues that we really can’t produce a standard of beauty (or fashion) on which we can all agree, but “when we observe…that art (or beauty, or culture, or fashion) is no better at one age than at another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm of …beauty [truth, fashion, culture, philosophy, psychology] ? We cannot define it, but in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it.”
Time for you to decide your relationship to absolutes and standards. Fashions of thought, art, literature, and culture are always subject to the vicissitudes of generations, nations, and ethnic groups. Think of political correctness as a fashion of language or culture. Is it a standard of the time? Is it here to stay? If we are to judge by history, no. It might be fashionable now, but…
Think of current standards of beauty, of philosophy, of psychology, and of various artistic media. If they are all relative—all subject to change—do you agree with Gosse that there is an unspoken, unidentifiable standard somehow underlying all fashions and patterns?
If you said, “Yes,” you might be a Platonist or Neoplatonist. You might argue that there is an “ideal tree” even if you can’t picture it because you always think “oak,” “pine,” “maple.” If you said, “No” with regard to standards of any kind, then you need to ask yourself if you belong to that group of philosophers who have questioned whether or not all is illusion, that nothing is “fixed.”
Bertrand Russell framed this by asking in The Problems of Philosophy what we could say about the shape of a table.* Let’s say you see a rectangular table. Is that its shape? Does it look rectangular from every angle as you walk around it, see it from below, from a corner? What if we look at the table through a microscope? Will it appear to have the same texture as it has without magnification? What about the color of the table? Is the same under different lighting conditions? With glare and without? How confident are you that your drawing of the table could capture the nature of the table? Can you capture all the “patterns,” or forms that the table seems to take from every angle, from close in or far away, from being bathed in light or shielded by partial shadow? Or is your “table” an “ideal table”?
If we can’t be sure about a table, what makes us so sure about the fashions, the patterns, and the philosophies to which we so desperately cling? Does our clinging in itself indicate that we recognize without specifying some kind of underlying law of standards?
Just askin’.
* http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18649/18649-h/18649-h.htm#Page_31
Edmund Gosse, C.B., Some Diversons of a Man of Letters (London: William Heinemann, 1919, 1920)
** http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
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