Taste in the 18th Century

Introduction to Taste in the 18th Century

• Taste was highly valued in the polite world and considered essential in arts and sciences.
• People of all classes, from ladies and gentlemen to tradespeople, aimed to demonstrate taste.
• Despite the obsession with taste, its definition remained elusive.

Expansion of Taste

• By the mid-1700s, taste extended to art, architecture, landscape, furniture, dress, manners, and gastronomy.
• The political and economic changes in the late 1600s reshaped civil society into a culture of consumption.
• "Taste became the vogue" and served as a code for knowing what to consume and judging others' consumption.
• The metaphor of consumption, with its tension between taste and appetite, played a key role in the civilizing process.
• Enlightenment philosophers used the gustatory metaphor to eliminate rudeness and cultivate a tasteful identity.

Medical and Philosophical Perspectives

• Iatrochemical models of digestion challenged Galen's physiology.
• The concept of bodily evacuation influenced both physiology and identity formation.
• System-clogging "dregs" symbolized rudeness to be purged for becoming a Man of Taste.
• Shaftesbury and Addison initiated the civilizing discourse of taste.
• Bernard Mandeville's focus was on stomach and nerve disorders.

Shaftesbury's Philosophy

• Shaftesbury believed that individuals are naturally tasteful.
• Purging society's corruptions returns one to purity.
• All citizens are relatively equal members of the body politic.
• Correct judgment comes from being disinterested and purging idiosyncrasies.
• Aesthetic experience requires personal disinterestedness.

"Soliloquy" and Self-Making

• Shaftesbury's "Soliloquy" outlines a theory of tasteful self-making.
• The process is described as a "method of evacuation" to dispose of cultural rudeness.
• Aspiring authors/orators could achieve natural purity as polite Men of Taste.
• Virtuous action is naturally reinforced through pleasure.
• Notebooks reveal a darker perspective, with life elements of recruiting, repairing, feeding, cleansing, purging, aliments, rags, excrements, dregs.
• Shaftesbury presents himself as a physician, advocating this method of evacuation as a private practice.

Mandeville's Counterpoint

• Mandeville focused on physiological problems directly.
• He published "A Treatise on the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases" in the same year as Shaftesbury's work (1711).
• His book offered an alternate view of humanity which was against virtue
• The spleen is where "dregs", "faeculencies", and "muddy parts" of the body as stored.
• Problems happens when the spleen becomes diseased, refuse to perform its functions, and the body is unable to remove the dregs of the blood
• Shaftesbury cautioned against public bodily operations and advocated for private administration to avoid crudities, indigestions, and other issues.
• Poets rave in private, but prose authors cannot get the same benefit of discharge
• Shaftesbury was against novelists, memoir writers, and Grub Street hacks for their printed mental evacuations.

Coryate's Crudities

• Shaftesbury considered it indecent to publish meditations and solitary thoughts.
• He referenced to Thomas Coryate and his work "Coryats Crudities" as a popular seventeenth-century travel narrative.
• Digestion called crudities, which can obstruct functions of the mind
• Shaftesbury saw it as worse to gobble ill-digested matter or crudities, and offer them for public consumption.
• As a term, "crudity" covered all forms of digestive derangement that corrupt humors and influence the mind.
• Early modern pedagogues dealt with textbooks like dietaries dealt with food.

Text as Food

• Milton believes "printed crudities" are odious and should be avoided by those with pure digested influences.
• Knowing how to "manage a crudity’ is essential
• Taste goes physical into the culturally resonant area of mental taste.
• Francis Bacon said "Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested"
• Consumer should cull bits from text, discarding the rest if below standards.

Tasteful Self-Making

• Evacuating effects was just half of self-making.
• The Man of Taste can express taste rhetorically and is a consumer.
• Kant describes self-expression as the positive manifestation of taste.
• Proper, polite, polished removes rudeness

Kant's positive manifestation of taste.

• One is able to external imagine in a tasteful way, only by using hearing and sight.
• Man of Taste must do more than use his faculty of critical discernment, with influence and production.

Taste and Social Standards

• Francis Jeffrey said if we "aspire to be creators", labor must be required
• The category of taste has a proposed division: one for play or private enjoyment and one that must obey rules for the public sphere of production.
• The author must create taste by his own understanding

Discerning the Two Ways of Tasting

• Colman and Thornton understood two ways in the manifestation of taste.
• Man of Taste = Bon Vivant, who enjoys the food before him
• As the Cook, he knows what tastes good together can create exquisite dishes
• Man of Taste is like a gastronomer or chef, and can participate in a wider economy of consumption.

Imagination Influence In Taste

• James Engell elaborates that "critics turned principles of criticism into principles of the imagination itself"
• Critics equate imagination with taste, so that they become nearly inseparable
• Eighteenth-century, Man of Taste is guide creation and provides food for others.

Swift's Parody and the Disposal of Mental Rudeness

• Swift parodied Shaftesbury's "Soliloquy" by suggestion administrators would create a quarter for scribblers to dispose of their mental rudeness.
• Suggests the creation of Grub-street is a market
• Printed works which haven't been properly purged are very distasteful to the consumer
• Swift knows he appeals to people “of nice Noses.” when addressing smell

Disposing of Waste

• Corbin reports on the translation scientific language aimed "to detect irrespirable gases" and discern imperceptible viruses
• Swift alludes to waste systems around European countries

Philosohpical Purity

• Swift and Shaftesbury focused on how an audience can consumed unpredigested material as readily as tasteful rhetoric.
• Swift thought there was less hope for human nature, and hated any activity that made people moral
• Shaftesbury style is similar to Swift, with more of an appetiting rhetoric
• Swift satirezes populace by having work-men blowing his Nose as its work