The question of whether aesthetic judgements can be objective has bedevilled Western philosophy since Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic. Plato's objection was not to beauty itself but to the unreliability of the human response to it: art appealed to the passions rather than to reason, and was therefore epistemically dangerous — a source of false beliefs masquerading as profound truths.
Kant's solution, set out in the 'Critique of Judgement' of 1790, was characteristically ingenious. He proposed that aesthetic judgements, while not objective in the manner of scientific propositions, were nevertheless universal in their aspiration — that when we call something beautiful, we do not merely report a private sensation but implicitly claim that all rational beings ought to concur.
The beautiful object, on Kant's account, occasions a 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding that is pleasurable precisely because it is unconstrained by concept or purpose, and it is this formal harmony — rather than any sensory gratification — that grounds the judgement's claim to universality. For two centuries, Kant's framework dominated philosophical aesthetics, but the twentieth century brought challenges from directions he could not have foreseen. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in 'Distinction' (1979), argued that what passes for disinterested aesthetic appreciation is in fact a form of social positioning — that the capacity to admire a Rothko or savour a Margaux is not a spontaneous response to formal beauty but an acquired competence that functions, like table manners or accent, as a marker of class.
The implication was devastating: if 'good taste' is merely the taste of the dominant class naturalised as universal truth, then Kant's claim to universality collapses into ideology. Bourdieu's critique was enormously influential, yet it left a conspicuous gap. If all aesthetic judgement is reducible to social positioning, how do we account for the manifest fact that some works of art continue to move people across vast gulfs of time, culture, and class?
The capacity of a Bach fugue to produce goosebumps in a Congolese schoolchild or a Japanese retiree — neither of whom has any stake in eighteenth-century European class hierarchies — suggests that something more than social capital is at work, even if Bourdieu was right that social capital inflects and mediates the aesthetic response. The neuroscience of aesthetic experience has offered a partial resolution. Functional imaging studies reveal that encounters with works judged beautiful — whether paintings, musical passages, or mathematical proofs — activate a common network centred on the medial orbito-frontal cortex, a region associated with reward and value computation.
The activation pattern is remarkably consistent across subjects from different cultural backgrounds, lending empirical weight to the intuition that aesthetic response is not entirely a social construction but has roots in shared neural architecture. Where this leaves the philosophy of taste is, characteristically, unresolved. The neurological evidence does not vindicate Kant, whose universality was grounded in reason rather than brain structure, nor does it refute Bourdieu, whose point was not that the aesthetic response is unreal but that its social distribution is determined by power.
The most honest answer may be that aesthetic judgement inhabits a space that our existing philosophical categories — subjective and objective, natural and cultural, individual and social — are simply too coarse to capture.