A Lesson on Trendy Fads and Irrational Decisions from Art History and Philosophy
Caprice (n): a sudden and unaccountable change of mood or behavior
Caprice is a funny word I only discovered in my final semester studying philosophy, a semester in which I happened to be reading a lot of things written in the 18th century. This, it turns out, is no coincidence. Google’s convenient chart of the word’s usage shows a massive ballooning of its popularity in the late 1700s (when English speaking philosophers presumably anglicized the Italian and French word “capriccio”), followed by a sharp decline in the subsequent century. Ironically, it appears that the English speaking world’s time with the word caprice was in fact capricious — a fad, a dated mark of a specific era.
In nearly all of the cases that I encountered this word in a philosophical text, it carried a negative connotation. This, the 18th century, was an era of idealism. There was no room for sudden changes of behavior and thought. The ultimate, all encompassing, perfect truth of reality did not wax and wane with the fashions of the age.
Friedrich Schiller is most well known as a playwright, but his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, a series of flowery letters to his patron of the time hailing the importance of art to humanity, has gone down…
