Responsibility to Appreciate What We Don't Like?

From Dr. Powers blog:

…Well, enough about that. Today I'm also interested in Wimsatt and Beardsley and am wondering about the following question: Do we have a responsibility to appreciate things that we don't like? Or even do we have a responsibility to expand our repetoire of pleasures? In our culture today, we tend to think not. Students get offended when they hear Flannery O'Connor's quotation that undergraduates are having their tastes educated--that is, they are being taught what to like and how to like it. Nothing offends our relativistic and basically consumerist spirit more. Indeed, I suspect that far from literature and art as the great undergirding ideologies of capitalism, capitalism might fall apart in the contemporary world if we dared to assume that there were some things that people ought to seek to appreciate or even like, even if they don't like them natively. I think of opera in my own experience, which was first a vague appreciation, then a mild interest, until it finally became a passion and a practice. But I also think of literature. At the least we ask students to appreciate the significance of certain achievements, the first doorway to actually enjoying those achievements. This strikes many folks as oppressive. What right do I have to tell other people they ought to work at appreciating something? Still, I think there's something to the notion that we have an ethical responsibility to expand our repetoire of likes and dislikes. Maybe more on this later…

My response:

…At the end of class a few days ago Dr. Powers posed the question to my classmates and I of whether we have a responsibility to appreciate things that we don’t like. I think this question is paradoxical by nature. How might we sincerely appreciate something that we don’t like? Perhaps the issue at hand here is more about the qualification of the word appreciate. Perhaps this is more about respecting those things that we don’t like, yet even that wouldn’t work. I don’t think that we are necessarily obligated to respect those things that we don’t like. What if the very reason that we don’t like something is say because it is unethical? Dr. Powers suggests that our culture tends to think that we do not have the responsibility to appreciate those things which we don’t like, but again, I disagree. We live in a culture that seems to strive toward tolerance, religious tolerance, cultural tolerance, ethnicity tolerance, political tolerance, the list could go on. I think it is important that we are, at times, exposed to those things that we don’t like, but this in no way obligates us to appreciate such things. I don’t think it is even possible to wholly appreciate something that we don’t like. Dr. Powers suggests his growth in coming to like opera and says that it started with a vague appreciation. In such a way he seems to support that which I have stated above. We have to have that initial interest in order to arrive at a greater appreciation of that thing which we don’t like. This is why it is important to be exposed to even those things that we don’t think we like. In such a way we might awaken an appreciation that we didn’t know existed. However, this does not constitute a responsibility to appreciate things that we don’t like…