A Single Taste
One thing is needful.— To 'give style' to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
, The Gay Science (1882)
In Nietzsche’s account, character becomes art, and the self becomes the medium of a long, patient crafting. To give style to one’s nature requires honest survey, daily work, the addition of second nature and removal of original nature. What matters in the end, he insists, is not whether individual choices were good or bad, but whether a single taste governed them all.
This notion of a single taste illuminates something about the present moment. We have access to tools that generate endless variations, adopt any style, produce without the constraints of individual limitation. Reading Nietzsche, though, we notice what such tools lack: the governing coherence that emerges only from a self that has surveyed its own nature, that knows what to conceal and what to reinterpret as sublime.
Style becomes the visible trace of constraint, the record of choices made from a particular position in the world. The writer who labors over voice, the painter who returns to the same subjects, the musician working within self-imposed limits: each is practicing this rare art, giving style to their work by first giving style to themselves.
We might turn the question inward: what is our single taste? The answer comes only from the honest accounting Nietzsche describes, the recognition of our strengths and weaknesses, and the long discipline of shaping them into something coherent. No instrument can perform this for us. It is the work that precedes all other work.