desires, likes, dislikes, tastes:
where do they come from?
are they irrational? or are they ALL formed and cultivated by means of association (i barely know my freud, so…), or perhaps even innate within us.
i dont go for the ‘innate in our selves’ thing cuz i believe that existence preceeds essence. if such things are empirical, how do i explain why stout was ICKY upon my first sip?
where do they all come from?
why do i love raw cucumbers? i understand that i hate milk cuz i had bad experiences being forced to drink warm milk as a kid. why does stout repulse me when i drank it for the first time? or for aesthetics in general, why X rather than Y, or Z?
i understand that the questions are very… superficial. but its the surface type ‘tastes’ that puzzles me more. for things like art or literature, it reflects the reader’s self/predicament or at least some interests. but its the origins of these ‘appetites’ that boggles me.
As a child I didn’t like it. Never even wanted to try it. But my father always ate the damn thing. One day I imitated him, and saw why he was such a fan of this fine delicacy.
The point I am getting at is that I believe that certain things are passed on to us through our genes. Others are conditioned through our environment. To piggy-back on Marshall Mcdaniels love for Jose Ortega Y Gassett, “Society is a big school.”
I heard recently that a child’s basic dislike/like of bitter/sweet is a form of basic anti-poison device because mainly things which are sweet are safe to eat and those that are bitter aren’t, hence our instinctive like of sweet and dislike of bitter.
That doesn’t really explain the rest of it though, especially adult tastes.
I heard a similar thing as well. It was said in some news report that a possible reason why children generally don’t like vegetables was because a lot of plants were poisoned. And so we genetically don’t trust the greens but trusts the fruit.
Fascinating! I came into this fruit of the loom thread completely ready to defend nurture, over and above that of nature, as the source for our desires and tastes, but after looking at a couple of these posts, i’m not so sure. Dubito ergo sum (Latin for i doubt, therefore i am). Nurture definitely plays a larger part in man that it does in animals. Still, although genetics can alter our taste for something as basic as food, my guess is that it can do little to alter our taste for the higher cultural things like reading material. And man may be the only creature whose brain can override the needs of his body to the large extent that we can.