However, I also have a second rule which is: some wines are superior to others. There are some wines which one ought to enjoy more than others. This is not to say that one should drink those wines if one does not, but simply that one should recognize that one's tastes have not developed fully. I recognize that my inability to discriminate between a bottle of, say, J. Lohr cabernet and Caymus vintage is a failing in me, not in the wines. And one can expand one's tastes. From white zin one might find a riesling or a gewurztraminer an excellent choice.
Of course, this principle applies to other subjects. Some books are better than others, but I read the ones I like. This means I sometimes read Tolstoy, and sometimes I read non-canon Conan. My taste in low fantasy is not one I'm proud of, and I try to read better books, but I do enjoy the occasional mighty thewed barbarian. Now, genius will out. The books that have been read for centuries have lasted for a reason: they speak to us as humans. No matter how benighted one may be, the books that last will speak to one. The Iliad has been around for millenia because it not only speaks of heroes throwing rocks the size of tractors at each other, but because it tells of the necessity of tragedy in restoring us to full humanity. The first is boring after a few incidences without the second. Depth is what brings us back to a work, and what allows a work to endure. And as we read, we ourselves expand, in understanding and in emotional response. Without the first chapters of Xenophon's voyage to prepare us, we would not weep when the Greeks reach the sea. The great books evoke something from everyone, but the more one reads them the more one is moved, just as a great wine can be enjoyed by anyone, but the connoisseur (which I certainly don't claim to be) will notice the delicate textures, the order in which the aromas reach the nose, and other details to small for those of us who must simply say, "it's very good."
This idea that objects, even works of art, have intrinsic qualities that a rightly developed person will experience upon interacting with them is no longer popular. When Duke University introduces classes on comic books (sorry, sorry, "graphic novels") and claims that they are just as valid as classes on Shakespeare, a cry goes out among the plainspeople, but no one really cares. Our response to something becomes the only criterion of judgment, and is itself never analysed. If I feel oppressed, I must be oppressed, since nothing has any real value except in my feelings. An un-educated seventh grader's response to King Lear ("Just die already, old dude"--tutoring can be an exercise in patience sometimes) is just as valid as my professor's, who has spent a decade studying that play alone.
This refusal to accept any judgment as true amounts to a refusal to accept that there is a way which is the human way, on which all humans ought to progress as far as they can. C. S. Lewis calls it the Tao in The Abolition of Man. Faith in the Tao is what allows us to educate children, for example, since we are trying to instill in them those values which will bring them to be not just human, but homo sapiens, man the wise.
To many it seems that the first rule, "Drink what you like", contradicts the second, "Some wines are better than others". Since no one likes to drink and eat things they find distasteful, they generally decide that the second rule is untrue, and the first should be their only guide (the ones that reverse that are too depressing to discuss. Pompous fools, 'though perhaps more likely to find their way). They've lost the idea of growth. And the catch is, of course, that one must have started on the Tao in order to understand the necessity of the Tao. From outside it, one cannot judge anything (which is, of course, the catch to standing outside the Tao. In the end, travelling the Tao is the only choice). From inside it...well, C. S. Lewis thinks that reason can never justify itself as reasonable. I disagree; I think that a first statement can be like my favorite theory of the creation of the universe: it creates itself, wrapping about in time, but expands as well. Rather than being circular, it leads to new conclusions. Hegel, on this topic, (you knew Hegel would come up, didn't you? I read him over beignets, two paragraphs an hour) says:
In the previous modes [sense-certainty, perception, and understanding] of certainty what is true for consciousness is something other than itself. But the Notion of this truth vanishes in the experience of it. What the object immediately was in itself--mere being in sense-certainty, the concrete thing of perception, and for the Understanding, a Force--proves to be in truth, not this at all; instead, this in-itself turns out to be a mode in which the object is only for an other. The Notion of the object is superseded in the actual object, or the first, immediate presentation of the object is superseded in experience: certainty gives place to truth. But now there has arisen what did not emerge in these previous relationships, viz. a certainty which is identical with its truth; for the certainty is to itself its own object, and consciousness is to itself the truth.
Or, as the Duchess said to Alice, "There's a moral in everything, if only you can find it." Hegel's running on a tightrope between ratiocinari and intelligere here, not just writing about the distinction between them, but I think his conclusion is valid. The moral? Drink what you like, but don't go without education, in wine or in anything. The satisfaction of a gourmet is far deeper than that of a gourmand. And my tips are better when I sell the more expensive bottles.
