Taste and Judgement
Why Your Taste Is Never Really Your Own (And Why That's Fascinating, Not Deflating)
The moment you say 'I just know what I like,' you are almost certainly describing what you've been trained to like — and the gap between those two things is where aesthetics gets genuinely interesting.
The Idea
Taste feels intimate. It feels like one of the few things that is unambiguously, authentically yours — the music that moves you, the room you find beautiful, the writing that makes you stop and re-read a sentence. But aesthetic philosophy has long suspected something more complicated is going on. Kant drew a famous distinction between what merely pleases us (agreeable — subjective, personal, not up for debate) and what we find genuinely beautiful (a judgement we implicitly expect others to share). When you call a landscape beautiful, you're not just reporting a preference, like saying you prefer one food to another. You're making a claim — one that carries a subtle demand that others see it too. This is what Kant called the 'universal voice' in aesthetic judgement. The strange thing is that this universality is felt, not argued for. You can't fully justify why something is beautiful; you can only point and hope. More recently, philosophers and psychologists have complicated this further. Pierre Bourdieu showed that taste is inseparable from the social world that formed you — your class, your education, the rooms you grew up in. What feels like pure, private perception is quietly shaped by enormous external forces. The unsettling and liberating implication: taste is a judgement, not just a sensation. And like any judgement, it can be refined, questioned, and expanded — without ever losing its feeling of being deeply personal.
In the World
In the 1970s, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conducted one of the most extensive studies of aesthetic preference ever attempted, surveying thousands of people across France about their tastes in music, art, food, and home decoration. He published his findings in 1979 as 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste' — and the results were quietly devastating to the idea of taste as pure, self-generated sensibility. Working-class respondents tended to prefer art that was immediately accessible, representational, and emotionally direct. Professional and upper-class respondents gravitated toward formally complex, abstract, or 'difficult' work. So far, so predictable. What Bourdieu made visible was the mechanism: these weren't just different preferences, they were different modes of aesthetic engagement that had been absorbed through years of cultural exposure — school curricula, family conversations, museum visits, or the lack of them. Crucially, those with the greatest cultural capital experienced their taste as natural and obvious, while those without it often experienced their own preferences as somehow lesser. Taste, Bourdieu argued, is one of the most effective instruments of social distinction precisely because it doesn't feel like a social instrument at all. It feels like perception. Knowing this doesn't make your taste inauthentic — but it does mean that cultivating taste consciously, deliberately, and with genuine curiosity becomes an act of intellectual freedom rather than pretension.
Why It Matters
Most of us move through aesthetic experiences — music on a commute, the design of a room, the cover of a book — in a kind of passive reception mode, as if taste were something that simply happens to us. But treating aesthetic judgement as active, as something you can practise and interrogate, changes the texture of daily experience considerably. It means pausing to ask not just 'do I like this?' but 'what is it I'm responding to, and why?' It means being genuinely curious about why someone else finds beautiful what leaves you cold — not to resolve the disagreement, but to understand the different perceptual worlds people inhabit. It also offers a kind of humility that is entirely compatible with having strong opinions. You can hold your taste with confidence while acknowledging it was partly given to you. The philosopher Alexander Nehamas writes about how loving a work of art is always a bet on the future — a sense that there is more here than I have yet found. That orientation, toward the as-yet-undiscovered richness in things, might be the most practically useful gift aesthetic philosophy can offer.
A Question to Ponder
Is there something you've always said you dislike — a genre of music, a style of art, a kind of writing — that you've never seriously asked yourself whether you actually dislike, or whether you simply never had the chance to encounter it well?
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