What Makes Something Beautiful? The Strange Story of "Taste"

Here’s a strange thing about human beings. You look at a painting, and you feel something. You know, right away, that it’s beautiful. You didn’t reason it out. You didn’t check a list of rules. You just saw it. But try to explain why it’s beautiful to someone else, and suddenly words feel clumsy. You point to this or that detail. You say something about the way the colors work together. But somehow the explanation never quite captures what you saw.

This puzzle—that we seem to sense beauty rather than figure it out—has bothered philosophers for a very long time. And it led them to a weird conclusion. Maybe beauty isn’t something you figure out with your brain. Maybe it’s something you taste.

The Invention of “Taste”

About three hundred years ago, a bunch of philosophers in Britain started arguing about how we judge beauty. They were reacting against an older idea that judging beauty was like solving a math problem. According to that older view, you look at a poem or a painting, you apply the rules of beauty (rules about proportion, about harmony, about how things should be arranged), and then you conclude whether it’s beautiful or not. It’s a logical process.

The British philosophers thought this was ridiculous. Do you really reason your way to deciding whether a stew is good? No. You taste it. You just know. It’s immediate. One of them, a French priest named Jean-Baptiste Dubos, put it this way in 1719:

Do we ever reason, in order to know whether a stew be good or bad? … No, this is never practiced. We have a sense given us by nature to distinguish whether the cook acted according to the rules of his art. People taste the stew, and though unacquainted with those rules, they are able to tell whether it be good or no.

Dubos’s point was that beauty works the same way. We don’t need rules. We have taste. That’s the name they gave to this faculty: taste. Like the sense that tells you whether food is good, except it works on poems and paintings and sunsets.

But here’s a problem the rationalists (the “figure-it-out” crowd) pointed out. Poems and plays are complicated. You can’t just glance at a play and know whether it’s good. You have to understand the plot, the characters, the references, the jokes. You have to do a lot of thinking. Isn’t that exactly what the “taste” people said you didn’t need to do?

The taste philosophers had a clever response. They said: there’s a difference between grasping what the object is and judging whether it’s beautiful. The first step—figuring out what you’re looking at—might require all the thinking in the world. But the second step—the actual judgment of beauty—is still immediate. You do all the mental work to understand the play, and then (if you have good taste) you just feel whether it’s beautiful. The feeling is the judgment. You don’t reason your way to it.

David Hume, one of the most famous of these philosophers, put it clearly. He said that for many kinds of beauty—especially in the fine arts—“it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment.” The reasoning prepares the way. But the judgment itself is a feeling, not a conclusion.

So the first big idea about aesthetic judgment is this: it’s immediate. You don’t infer beauty from rules. You sense it. Philosophers call this the “immediacy thesis.”

The Strange Idea of “Disinterest”

The second big idea came from a different debate. Some philosophers, especially Thomas Hobbes, had argued that when we call something “good” or “virtuous,” what we really mean is that it serves our own interests. You call someone brave because their bravery makes you safer. You call an action just because a just world benefits you.

Other philosophers thought this was cynical and wrong. They said: no, when you judge something beautiful, you don’t check whether it helps you. You just take pleasure in it, period. You don’t own the sunset. It doesn’t protect you. It doesn’t make you money. You just find it beautiful. The pleasure is “disinterested”—not connected to your self-interest.

This is the second big idea: aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. When you judge something beautiful, you’re not thinking about what it does for you. You’re not thinking about owning it or using it. You’re just… contemplating it.

Later, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (who lived in the 18th century in Germany) gave this idea a new twist. He said disinterest doesn’t just mean “not self-interested.” It means the pleasure doesn’t connect to desire at all. When you judge something morally good, you feel a desire to do it. But when you judge something beautiful, you don’t desire to do anything with it. You just stand there looking. The judgment is “merely contemplative.”

This might sound abstract, but think about it. When you’re genuinely absorbed in a movie or a song, do you want anything from it? You’re not trying to own it. You’re not trying to use it for something. You’re just… experiencing it. That’s disinterest.

What Kind of Thing Can Be Beautiful?

For a long time, many philosophers thought that aesthetic value had to be about form—about how things look or sound, not about what they mean. This view is called “formalism.” The idea was that if aesthetic judgment is immediate (you just see it) and disinterested (you don’t care about practical stuff), then the only properties that matter are the ones you can perceive directly: colors, shapes, patterns, sounds. Representational content—what a painting depicts or what a poem means—seemed like something you’d have to reason about, or something connected to practical interests.

Formalism was hugely influential. The art critic Clive Bell argued in the early 1900s that what matters in painting is “relations and combinations of lines and colours.” The music critic Eduard Hanslick said music has no content but “tonally moving forms.” They thought the serious appreciation of art meant focusing on form, not on stories or meanings.

But then something happened that made formalism look silly. In the 1960s, the artist Andy Warhol exhibited a sculpture that was basically a stack of wooden boxes printed to look exactly like Brillo boxes—the cardboard cartons that Brillo soap pads came in at the supermarket. You couldn’t tell the difference by looking. So if aesthetic value is just about how things look, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and the actual Brillo boxes in the supermarket should have the same aesthetic value. But clearly they don’t. One is a famous work of art. The other is packaging.

The philosopher Arthur Danto used this example to argue that form alone can’t explain what makes something art or why it’s valuable. You need to know the context. You need to know that Warhol was making a point about art and consumer culture. You need to understand the history of art. But all that knowledge isn’t something you can just see. So if aesthetic judgment is supposed to be immediate, how can it depend on all this stuff you have to think about?

The formalists had an answer, but it was basically the same answer Hume gave. Understanding the context is part of grasping what the object is. You have to do that mental work to understand Warhol’s boxes. But once you understand them—once you grasp that they’re an artwork commenting on consumer culture—then you see their beauty (or fail to). The judgment itself is still immediate. The thinking just prepares the way.

Can You Argue About Taste?

If aesthetic judgments are immediate and based on feeling, then it seems like there’s no point arguing about them. “De gustibus non est disputandum”—there’s no disputing about taste. This is an old saying, and it captures something real. If I say a song is beautiful and you say it’s ugly, what could we possibly argue about? We just feel differently.

But philosophers noticed something weird. We actually do argue about aesthetic judgments all the time. A critic doesn’t just say “this painting is good” and walk away. She says things like “the composition is unbalanced” or “the colors clash.” She gives reasons. And those reasons seem to matter. People change their minds about art based on reasons.

So what’s going on? If judgment is immediate, why do we give reasons?

One philosopher, Arnold Isenberg, argued that when a critic points to a feature of a painting, she’s not giving you a premise from which you can logically deduce that the painting is beautiful. She’s giving you “directions for perceiving.” She’s saying “look at this part, see how the line curves here, notice how the figures are grouped.” She’s trying to get you to see what she saw. The reasons don’t prove anything. They guide your attention.

Another philosopher, Frank Sibley, agreed. He argued that aesthetic concepts like “graceful,” “balanced,” “tragic,” and “comical” can’t be applied by checking a checklist of conditions. You can’t say “if a painting has properties X, Y, and Z, then it’s graceful.” You just have to see it. That’s what taste is—the capacity to see these qualities.

But Sibley also noticed something else. Some properties are “inherently positive.” If you say a work is good because it’s comical, that makes sense. Comical is a good thing to be (even if a particular work might be worse because of its comical elements). But if you say a work is good because it’s yellow, or because it lasts twelve minutes, that’s weird. Those aren’t inherently positive. So there are general principles—comicality is a good thing in art, grace is a good thing—that structure our judgments. They just don’t tell you exactly when something is comical or graceful. For that, you still need taste.

So the debate continues. Some philosophers think there really are principles of aesthetic value, just very general ones. Others think any attempt to reduce aesthetic judgment to rules misses the point. Nobody has entirely resolved it.

Can You Enjoy Something Without Being Too Close?

Remember the story of The Fall of Miletus? It’s a play from ancient Greece. The city of Miletus had been captured and destroyed by the Persians, and two years later, the playwright Phrynicus wrote a play about it and staged it in Athens. The Athenian audience—who had a close connection to Miletus—burst into tears. They fined Phrynicus for “reminding them of a disaster that was so close to home.” And they banned future productions.

This is a case where the audience couldn’t maintain the right distance from the play. They were too emotionally involved. Their own sorrow about Miletus overwhelmed their ability to appreciate the play as a play. They needed what one philosopher, Edward Bullough, called “psychical distance.”

Bullough argued that aesthetic appreciation requires a kind of distance between you and your own feelings. Not that you don’t feel anything. Quite the opposite. You need to feel things so that you can then observe them as part of the experience. The person watching a tragedy who feels pity and fear, but also recognizes that those feelings are part of what the tragedy is about—that person has the right distance. The person who is so overcome that they can’t think at all has too little distance. The person who feels nothing at all has too much.

But this idea of the “aesthetic attitude”—a special way of paying attention that makes aesthetic experience possible—has been heavily criticized. The philosopher George Dickie argued that there’s no such thing as a distinctively aesthetic attitude. There’s just paying attention and not paying attention. The person who is “interested” (thinking about how many tickets were sold, or whether their daughter is performing well) isn’t attending interestedly. They’re just not attending.

Still, the case of The Fall of Miletus seems hard to explain without something like distance or disinterest. The Athenians were attending. They were just attending differently than they would have to a play about something that happened far away and long ago. The difference seems to be exactly that they couldn’t achieve the right kind of distance.

The Big Question That Remains

So here’s where we are. Philosophers have identified two key features of aesthetic experience: it’s immediate (you don’t reason your way to beauty, you sense it) and disinterested (the pleasure isn’t connected to desire or self-interest). But nobody has fully explained what makes aesthetic value aesthetic as opposed to moral or intellectual. And nobody has fully explained what makes it value—why it matters, why we should care.

The most common answer to the second question is “because it gives pleasure.” This is called aesthetic hedonism. It seems obvious. Beautiful things please us. That’s why we seek them out.

But there are problems. Some great works of art are painful. They’re about suffering, horror, despair. Do we really value them because they give pleasure? Maybe, some philosophers say, the pleasure is a higher-order response that includes those painful feelings. But others say no—we value them despite the pain, not because of it.

And then there’s a deeper problem. If we value beautiful things because they give us pleasure, then we should want to experience them in whatever way gives us the most pleasure. But we don’t. We want to experience them correctly. A reader who enjoys The Da Vinci Code more than Middlemarch isn’t just making a different choice. She’s making the wrong one. But if pleasure is what matters, why should we care about correctness?

This suggests something strange. Maybe pleasure isn’t the point. Maybe we value beautiful things because we perceive them as worthy of appreciation. Part of seeing something as beautiful is seeing that it ought to be appreciated in just the way you’re appreciating it. The value isn’t downstream from your pleasure. Your pleasure is downstream from the value.

Philosophers are still arguing about this. It’s one of those questions where the more you think about it, the weirder it gets. And that’s probably why it’s still worth thinking about three hundred years later.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Taste	The supposed faculty by which we immediately sense beauty, like tasting food
Immediacy	The claim that aesthetic judgments happen directly, without reasoning from rules
Disinterest	The claim that aesthetic pleasure doesn’t connect to desire or self-interest
Formalism	The view that aesthetic value depends only on perceptual properties (shapes, colors, sounds)
Psychical distance	The right amount of emotional separation needed to appreciate something aesthetically
Aesthetic hedonism	The view that aesthetic value is just the capacity to give pleasure

Key People

Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670–1742) – A French priest and philosopher who early argued that judging beauty is like tasting food, not like reasoning
David Hume (1711–1776) – A Scottish philosopher who thought aesthetic judgment was a feeling produced by the mind’s structure, but that reasoning is needed to prepare for that feeling
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) – A German philosopher who redefined “disinterest” to mean that aesthetic pleasure doesn’t connect to desire at all, and who thought poetry was the highest art
Clive Bell (1881–1964) – An art critic who argued that only “significant form” (lines, colors, shapes) matters in art
Arthur Danto (1924–2013) – An American philosopher who used Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to argue that aesthetic value depends on context and meaning, not just form
Edward Bullough (1880–1934) – A psychologist who developed the idea of “psychical distance” to explain how we can be emotionally engaged without being overwhelmed
George Dickie (1926–2020) – An American philosopher who argued that there’s no special “aesthetic attitude”—just attention and inattention
Frank Sibley (1923–1996) – A philosopher who argued that aesthetic concepts can’t be applied by rules; you just have to see
Arnold Isenberg (1903–1965) – A philosopher who argued that critical reasons are “directions for perceiving,” not logical proofs

Things to Think About

If aesthetic judgment is immediate, how do you explain changing your mind about whether something is beautiful? Have you ever hated a song or a movie and then later loved it? What happened in between?
The idea of disinterest suggests that to appreciate something aesthetically, you shouldn’t want anything from it. But people collect art, pay money for it, feel proud of owning it. Is that compatible with aesthetic appreciation, or does it get in the way?
If you could take a pill that gave you exactly the same pleasure you get from listening to your favorite music, would that be just as valuable as actually listening to the music? Why or why not?
Psychical distance suggests you need to be neither too close nor too far from what you’re appreciating. What counts as “too close” or “too far” for you? Can you think of a time when your emotional involvement ruined an aesthetic experience? Or a time when you felt nothing when you should have felt something?

Where This Shows Up

When you argue with a friend about whether a movie is actually good or just fun, you’re having a version of the debate about whether aesthetic judgment is immediate or rule-governed
When a museum puts a urinal on a pedestal and calls it art, you’re seeing the problem of formalism—if beauty is just about how things look, why does context matter?
When a teacher tells you to “read more carefully” or “look at the details” before judging a poem, they’re treating reasons as “directions for perceiving” in Isenberg’s sense
When you can’t enjoy a song because it reminds you of something painful, or when you watch a movie about something that just happened to you and it’s too real, you’re experiencing a failure of psychical distance