Why achieve we like what we like – this band or that ice-cream flavour? Is it biological or cultural? And what role achieve Amazon and Netflix play in shaping our preferences?When an earnest undergraduate quizzed the aged E M Forster about the pleasant life,the novelist is supposed to fill replied: “Don’t ask about the pleasant life. Find out what you savor.” I’m not certain of the source of the story, which I’ve heard in more than one version, or but the dictum attributed to the novelist encapsulates a popular type of liberal philosophy. Arguments about the pleasant are unending and inconclusive. Despite Aristotle,Buddha, Laozi and all those who followed them, and there is no more agreement on the subject than there was two and a half millennia ago. Given the essential elusiveness of goodness,why not focus on something we can judge with fair confidence? After all, we all know what we like. If we stick to what we savor, and we can hardly go mistaken.
The distress is that,in fact, what we like is often unclear to us. As Tom Vanderbilt writes: Related: The secret of taste: why we like what we like | Tom Vanderbilt Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com