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In sociology, taste is an individual's personal and cultural patterns of choice and preference. Taste is drawing distinctions between things such as styles, manners, consumer goods and works of art and relating to these. Social inquiry of taste is about the human ability to judge what is beautiful, good and proper. Social and cultural phenomena concerning taste are closely associated to social relations and dynamics between people. The concept of social taste is therefore rarely separated from its accompanying sociological concepts. An understanding of taste as something that is expressed in actions between people helps to perceive many social phenomena that would otherwise be inconceivable. Aesthetic preferences and attendance to various cultural events are associated with education and social origin. Different socioeconomic groups are likely to have different tastes. Social class is one of the prominent factors structuring taste. == Taste and aesthetics == The concept of aesthetics has been the interest of philosophers such as Plato, Hume and Kant, who understood aesthetics as something pure and searched the essence of beauty, or, ''the ontology of aesthetics''. But it was not before the beginning of the cultural sociology of early 19th century that the question was problematized in its social context, which took the differences and changes in historical view as an important process of aesthetical thought.〔Outwaite & Bottonmore 1996, p 662〕 Although Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Judgement'' (1790) did formulate a non-relativistic idea of aesthetical universality, where both personal pleasure and pure beauty coexisted, it was concepts such as class taste that began the attempt to find essentially sociological answers to the problem of taste and aesthetics. Metaphysical or spiritual interpretations of common aesthetical values have shifted towards locating social groups that form the contemporary artistic taste or fashion. In his aesthetic philosophy, Kant denies any standard of a good taste, which would be the taste of the majority or any social group. For Kant, beauty is not a property of any object, but an aesthetic judgement based on a subjective feeling. He claims that a genuine good taste does exist, though it could not be empirically identified. Good taste cannot be found in any standards or generalizations, and the validity of a judgement is not the general view of the majority or some specific social group. Taste is both personal and beyond reasoning, and therefore disputing over matters of taste never reaches any universality. Kant stresses that our preferences, even on generally liked things, do not justify our judgements.〔Gronow 1997, pp. 11, 87〕 Every judgement of taste, according to Kant, presumes the existence of a sensus communis, a consensus of taste. This non-existent consensus is an idea that both enables judgements of taste and is constituted by a somewhat conceptual common spiritual humanity. A judgement does not take for granted that everyone agrees with it, but it proposes the community to share the experience. If the statement would not be addressed to this community, it is not a genuine subjective judgement. Kant's idea of good taste excludes fashion, which can be understood only in its empirical form, and has no connection with the harmony of ideal consensus. There is a proposition of a universal communal voice in judgements of taste, which calls for a shared feeling among the others.〔Gronow 1997, pp. 88-90〕 Bourdieu argued against Kantian view of pure aesthetics, stating that the legitimate taste of the society is the taste of the ruling class. This position also rejects the idea of genuine good taste, as the legitimate taste is merely a class taste. This idea was also proposed by Simmel, who noted that the upper classes abandon fashions as they are adopted by lower ones. Fashion in a Kantian sense is an aesthetic phenomenon and source of pleasure. For Kant, the function of fashion was merely a means of social distinction, and he excluded fashion from pure aesthetics because of its contents' arbitrary nature. Simmel, following Kantian thought, recognises the usefulness of fashionable objects in its social context. For him, the function lies in the whole fashion pattern, and cannot be attributed to any single object. Fashion, for Simmel, is a tool of individuation, social distinction, and even class distinction, which are neither utilitarian or aesthetical criteria. Still, both Kant and Simmel agreed that staying out of fashion would be pointless.〔Gronow 1997, p 83〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Taste (sociology)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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