Who Gets to Decide What's Beautiful?

Imagine this: You’re in a crowded room, and someone holds up two paintings. One is a perfectly realistic portrait of a queen—every fold of her dress painted in careful detail, her face symmetrical and calm. The other is a rough sketch of a storm at sea, all dark swirls and angry splashes of white. Which one is better? You might have an instant feeling about it. But if your friend disagrees, is one of you wrong?

In eighteenth-century France, this question wasn’t just idle argument. It was a fight about who gets to say what’s beautiful—and it tore apart the country’s smartest thinkers for nearly seventy years.

The Great Quarrel: Ancients vs. Moderns

The French in the 1700s thought of themselves as the heirs to ancient Greece and Rome. Their schools taught boys to read Latin and Greek poetry. Their playwrights copied Greek plots. Their architects built columns that looked like Roman temples. But some people started asking: Why should we be stuck imitating the past?

This sparked what historians call the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. It had three rounds, like a very long, very intellectual boxing match.

Round one was about epic poetry. Everyone agreed the French had never written a poem as great as Virgil’s Aeneid. (The Italians had; the English were about to, with Milton’s Paradise Lost.) A few French writers tried to fix this by writing Christian epics—poems about the first French king’s conversion, or about Joan of Arc—using all the ancient rules. Their critics, led by a poet named Nicolas Boileau, mocked them so savagely that these poems are now almost completely forgotten. Nobody remembers them, not even French literature professors.

Round two got personal. Charles Perrault—the same guy who collected fairy tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty—wrote a long dialogue arguing that modern life was actually better than ancient life. His evidence: modern inventions, modern science, and modern manners. In Homer’s Iliad, the god Zeus beats his wife Hera. Perrault’s character points out that in polite French society, you’d never see a gentleman hit his wife. He compares Zeus to a French peasant. The Ancients shot back: you’ve gone soft. Your polite manners are just weakness.

Round three was about how to translate Homer. A brilliant scholar named Anne Dacier produced a faithful translation of the Iliad. (She knew Greek.) A poet named Houdar de la Motte then rewrote it—cutting out parts he thought were boring or crude. He removed the long description of Achilles’s shield. He cleaned up the “uncouth” behavior. Dacier was furious. She wrote a pamphlet called On the Corruption of Taste, arguing that modern people had become so obsessed with politeness that they’d lost the ability to appreciate real heroism.

Notice something strange: nobody in this quarrel questioned whether ancient literature was worth admiring. They all agreed it was the standard. They just disagreed about whether modern people could equal it, or even surpass it. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns was really a fight about progress. Was human history a long downhill slide from a perfect golden age? Or were things getting better?

The Salon Way: Taste as a Gift

While the Ancients and Moderns were arguing about Homer, a different group of thinkers was developing a new way of thinking about beauty altogether. These people met in salons—elegant gatherings hosted by wealthy women and men, where writers, artists, and nobles talked about literature, art, and manners over tea and pastries.

The salon thinkers weren’t interested in rules. They were interested in feeling.

A Jesuit priest named Dominique Bouhours came up with a phrase that became famous: je ne sais quoi—“I don’t know what.” His idea was that a perfect work of art has some special, undefinable quality that transcends all rules. You could follow every rule of painting or poetry perfectly, and your work could still be dull. Or you could break every rule, and somehow it works. That special something—nobody can quite say what it is, but you know it when you feel it.

For Bouhours and the salon thinkers, good taste wasn’t something you could learn. It was something you were born with—a kind of sixth sense. The marquise de Lambert, who ran one of the most famous salons, wrote that “Nature gives us what we have of it, we never can acquire it.” Only refined people from the right families had this gift. If you had to ask what made something beautiful, you’d never really understand.

This sounds pretty snobby, doesn’t it? It was snobby. These thinkers were aristocrats, and they thought their refined feelings made them better judges of art than ordinary people. The abbé Dubos, another salon regular, wrote a book arguing that artistic judgment is a bodily response. When you see a great play, you tremble, you cry, you feel a jolt of surprise. It happens in your body before your mind can think about it. But when Dubos said “the public” could judge art, he didn’t mean everyone. He meant high society. He explicitly excluded “the lower class of people.”

There’s a real insight buried in this snobbery, though. The salon thinkers noticed something important: our experience of art is partly bodily and emotional. You don’t decide to be moved by a song—it just happens. And sometimes the most powerful art does have a mysterious quality you can’t quite put into words. The question is: does that mean only certain people can experience it?

The Cartesian Way: Beauty as Truth

But not everyone was satisfied with “I don’t know what.” Another group of thinkers wanted to find objective rules for beauty—standards that would work for anyone, anywhere, in any century.

These thinkers were influenced by René Descartes, who had argued earlier that truth could be discovered through pure reason, not feelings. If truth was universal, why shouldn’t beauty be too?

Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, a Swiss professor of logic and mathematics, published a Treatise on Beauty in 1715. His idea was simple: beauty is a mix of unity and variety. Too much unity is boring. Too much variety is chaos. The perfect work of art finds the right balance. He was aware that feelings sometimes get in the way. Sometimes reason says something is beautiful, but your feelings disagree. Crousaz thought we had a responsibility to discover the real principles of beauty, independent of our messy emotions.

Yves-Marie André went even further. He argued that there are different levels of beauty. The highest level is “essential beauty”—which is universal and unchanging, recognized by pure reason. Below that is “natural beauty”—the harmony of nature itself. And the lowest level is “arbitrary beauty”—the stuff humans make, which mixes reason with personal taste. For André, a beautiful thing isn’t beautiful because it happens to please you. It’s beautiful because it deserves to please you. Beauty is a kind of truth.

These thinkers were trying to rescue beauty from the salon snobs. If beauty has real rules, then anyone who learns those rules can judge art. Taste isn’t a mysterious birthright—it’s a skill you can develop, like mathematics.

But there’s a problem. Crousaz and André couldn’t agree on what the rules actually were. And even if they had, is that really how we experience art? Do you stand in front of a painting and check it for “unity and variety”?

Diderot’s Solution: The More You See, the More You See

The philosopher Denis Diderot tried to find a middle path. He wrote one of the best articles on beauty for the Encyclopédie, a massive project that aimed to summarize all human knowledge.

Diderot noticed a problem that kept coming up whenever people tried to define beauty. They’d say: “Beauty is unity.” Then you’d ask: “But why is unity beautiful?” And they’d answer: “Because it pleases us.” And you’d ask: “Why does it please us?” And they’d answer: “Because it’s beautiful.” This is circular reasoning—you’re just going in circles.

Diderot’s own answer was more interesting. He argued that beauty comes from rapports—connections between different parts of a work. The more connections you can see, the more beautiful the work becomes.

Here’s his example. In a French play, a character says just three words: “Qu’il mourût” —“That he had died.” That’s it. On its own, it’s nothing. But here’s the context: an old Roman father is asked what he would want his son to do, if the son were facing three enemies alone in battle for the honor of Rome. And the father says: “That he had died.” Now those three words are charged with meaning. The father is saying his son should have chosen death over dishonor. The more you understand about Roman honor, about family duty, about the plot of the play, the more powerful those three words become.

For Diderot, the most refined viewer wasn’t the one with the most “natural” taste. It was the one who could see the most connections. A person who knows nothing about painting sees a canvas with some colors. A person who knows about composition, about color theory, about the artist’s techniques, about the historical context—that person sees a thousand connections the first person can’t see. And what they experience is richer, deeper, more beautiful.

This is a radical idea. It means that taste can be learned. The more you study art, the more you understand it, the more you can see. And the more you can see, the more you can feel.

But Diderot didn’t solve everything. He couldn’t explain how people reach that level of refinement in the first place. And he didn’t really answer the question: if two equally knowledgeable people disagree about a work of art, what then?

Still Open

Nobody today thinks the French salon aristocrats were right that taste is an inborn gift only for the elite. But we also don’t think there’s a simple set of rules you can learn to judge art perfectly, like a math formula. The question from eighteenth-century France is still alive:

When you say something is beautiful, are you describing a quality in the thing itself—something anyone should be able to see? Or are you describing something in you—your own feeling, your own history, your own body responding in a way that’s true for you but not necessarily for anyone else?

Most people now think it’s a bit of both. But exactly how those two things fit together—nobody really knows. Philosophers still argue about it.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Je ne sais quoi	Names the mysterious, undefinable quality that makes a work of art special—something you feel but can’t explain
Taste	The ability to recognize what’s beautiful or pleasing; the big question is whether it’s inborn or learned
Ancients vs. Moderns	A long quarrel about whether ancient Greek/Roman art was better than modern art—really a fight about whether history is progress or decline
Rapports	Diderot’s word for the connections between parts of a work; the more you see, the more beautiful it becomes
Sensibility	A refined person’s capacity to feel and respond to beauty; salon thinkers thought you were born with it

Key People

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) — French philosopher who wrote the giant Encyclopédie and argued that beauty comes from seeing connections between parts of a work; he also wrote passionate reviews of paintings
Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702) — Jesuit priest and salon regular who coined the phrase je ne sais quoi, suggesting beauty has a mysterious quality beyond rules
Anne Dacier (1647–1720) — Brilliant Greek scholar who faithfully translated Homer and defended ancient literature against modern “improvements”
Charles Perrault (1628–1703) — Fairy tale collector who argued modern life was better than ancient life, especially because modern manners were more civilized
Marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) — Salon host who wrote that taste is an inborn gift that can’t be learned, and only refined people have it
Yves-Marie André (1675–1764) — Philosopher who argued beauty has universal, unchanging rules that reason can discover, independent of personal feeling

Things to Think About

You probably have a song or movie that feels perfect to you but your friends don’t get. Is it possible that you’re wrong about it being good? Or is beauty always just a matter of personal opinion?
Diderot thought the more you understand about a work, the more you can appreciate it. But could studying art actually ruin your gut-level enjoyment? If you have to learn to like something, is it really beautiful?
The salon thinkers said taste is a gift you’re born with. The Cartesian thinkers said it’s a skill you can learn. Which feels more true to your own experience? Have you ever changed your mind about something you thought was beautiful?
Perrault argued modern manners were better than ancient ones—but the Ancients thought modern manners were just weakness. Are some standards genuinely better than others, or is every era just biased toward its own way of doing things?

Where This Shows Up

Art class debates about whether technical skill matters more than emotional impact, or whether anyone can learn to appreciate “difficult” art
Music streaming algorithms that try to predict what you’ll like—are they tracking objective patterns, or just your personal taste?
Movie and game reviews where critics and audiences disagree: who’s right?
Cultural arguments about whether ancient texts and artworks should still be the standard for education, or whether we should focus on modern works that reflect our own world