"Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas"
About this Quote
Susan Sontag recasts intelligence as an aesthetic faculty: a discriminating palate for ideas. Instead of treating intellect as a mere capacity to compute or store information, she frames it as sensibility, the ability to notice, prefer, and arrange. Intelligence becomes less a measure of raw processing power and more a matter of taste, the cultivated instinct that knows which ideas are fertile, which distinctions are worth making, which styles of argument are honest and alive.
This stance runs through Sontag’s work, from Notes on Camp to Against Interpretation and On Style. She consistently collapses the supposed divide between form and content, insisting that how we perceive and articulate is inseparable from what we know. Taste in ideas, then, is not snobbery but a discipline of attention. It favors clarity over mere cleverness, rigor over pedantry, freshness over cliche. It is the sense that makes an argument elegant rather than gaudy, a theory powerful rather than merely complicated.
Calling intelligence a taste also democratizes and relativizes it. Taste is learned, trained by reading, looking, listening, and by living among people and artifacts. It is historical and social, shaped by education and milieu, and thus revisable. That view resists the fetish of immutable IQ and acknowledges that minds ripen through exposure and self-scrutiny. At the same time, taste can exclude. Sontag’s elevation of camp and popular forms counters that risk: she urges the widening of what counts as worthy, training the palate to register more, not less.
Her formulation resonates beyond the arts. Mathematicians praise beautiful proofs; physicists prize elegant theories; good criticism and good science both involve the curation of problems and the refusal of bad questions. To cultivate taste in ideas is to cultivate judgment: sensitivity to nuance, a feel for proportion, a nose for falsity, a love of lucidity. That is the intelligence Sontag values, an ethics of attention that prizes the quality of thought as one prizes the line of a poem or the cut of a film.
This stance runs through Sontag’s work, from Notes on Camp to Against Interpretation and On Style. She consistently collapses the supposed divide between form and content, insisting that how we perceive and articulate is inseparable from what we know. Taste in ideas, then, is not snobbery but a discipline of attention. It favors clarity over mere cleverness, rigor over pedantry, freshness over cliche. It is the sense that makes an argument elegant rather than gaudy, a theory powerful rather than merely complicated.
Calling intelligence a taste also democratizes and relativizes it. Taste is learned, trained by reading, looking, listening, and by living among people and artifacts. It is historical and social, shaped by education and milieu, and thus revisable. That view resists the fetish of immutable IQ and acknowledges that minds ripen through exposure and self-scrutiny. At the same time, taste can exclude. Sontag’s elevation of camp and popular forms counters that risk: she urges the widening of what counts as worthy, training the palate to register more, not less.
Her formulation resonates beyond the arts. Mathematicians praise beautiful proofs; physicists prize elegant theories; good criticism and good science both involve the curation of problems and the refusal of bad questions. To cultivate taste in ideas is to cultivate judgment: sensitivity to nuance, a feel for proportion, a nose for falsity, a love of lucidity. That is the intelligence Sontag values, an ethics of attention that prizes the quality of thought as one prizes the line of a poem or the cut of a film.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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