Is Taste Hierarchical? Is High‑Brow Taste Merely Pretence?
People say something “sucks” when they think it has bad taste. Calling something “sucks” isn’t a moral judgment — it’s a complaint about being tacky, vulgar, lowbrow. In other words, about bad taste.
Here’s a scenario. Say you grew up in the era of pop music and love a certain pop superstar. To you, those songs are catchy and genuinely moving. Then at a party someone asks what you listen to, and you answer honestly. They smirk: “I listen to Mozart. You listen to pop music? That sucks.”
Why? Who decided classical music is high art and pop songs are lowbrow? It feels unfair. And yet the hierarchy of taste is undeniably real. Some aesthetics get labeled refined and elevated; others get written off as crude and vulgar.
Classical music is high culture; pop songs “suck.” Serious literary fiction is high culture; web serials “suck.” Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time is high culture; commercial blockbusters “suck.” Impressionism is high culture; pop art “sucks.”
What’s the logic here? Why are some aesthetics crowned as high and others dismissed as trash? One person loves Mozart, another loves a pop star — why can’t that just be a difference of preference? Why do we have to sort everything into high and low?
But flip it around. If taste were purely a matter of personal preference, wouldn’t we slide into aesthetic relativism — or even aesthetic nihilism? We’d lose any ground to say that one work of art is better than another. We couldn’t say Crime and Punishment has more depth than a web serial, or that Beethoven’s Fifth outclasses a disposable pop tune. And when teenagers lose themselves in fast‑food entertainment, we’d have no reason to nudge them toward something heavier, like The Brothers Karamazov.
So here’s the core question: is the hierarchy of taste something objectively real, or a human construct? If it’s real, what is it grounded in? If it’s constructed, what purpose does the construction serve?
To tackle this, I’ll walk through three landmark positions. The ancient Greeks — Pythagoras and Plato — held that the hierarchy of taste is real: beauty itself is an absolute, self‑subsisting order of principles and Ideas. Kant also believed taste comes in higher and lower forms, but he located the basis of judgment not in external objects but in our own inner faculty of judgment. And Pierre Bourdieu argued that the hierarchy of taste isn’t natural at all — it’s a tool society builds, and its job is to mark class distinctions.
Let’s start with the Greeks.
For ancient Greek philosophers, “it’s all a matter of taste” was simply not an option. Beauty has absolute objective standards. Beautiful is beautiful, ugly is ugly, and taste comes in clear ranks.
This rests on a metaphysical assumption: beauty exists objectively, independent of our perception, indifferent to our will.
Pythagoras proposed that things are beautiful because they conform to certain laws of beauty — laws that really exist and hold universally. For him, the essence of beauty was mathematical proportion.
Mathematics is objective and necessary in every possible world: two plus two equals four, everywhere, always. Everything can be explained by math, and math never expires. Pythagoras noticed that when things exhibit mathematical harmony, beauty appears. Take music: a chord sounds pleasing because the string lengths stand in simple integer ratios — pluck strings in that proportion together or in sequence, and you get consonance. Architecture and sculpture work the same way: build to the golden ratio, roughly 1.618 to 1, and the result carries beauty in itself.
The logic is plain. There are objective laws of beauty in the world. Conform to them and you’re beautiful; violate them and you’re not.
Plato pushed this further: the laws of beauty belong to the realm of spirit, and he called them Ideas. Spirit ranks above matter. Everything in the material world is in flux, while Ideas — like mathematics — are eternal. The shifting, particular things around us are all copies and partial participants in the imperishable Ideas. Real things are imperfect, yet they shine with beauty precisely because they partake in, and reproduce, the absolute Idea of beauty.
So where does the hierarchy of taste come from? For Plato, it comes down to the balance of spirit and desire in the soul. Someone lost in short videos and fast‑food entertainment, sunk in low taste, simply has an impure soul: the rational, spiritual part is crushed and eclipsed by bodily appetite, so they can’t perceive the spiritual Idea of beauty at all.
Such a person’s taste is driven entirely by the senses — the pleasures of food, drink, and spectacle — or stays stuck at the level of brute concreteness: no abstraction of form, just raw attachment to the material object itself. All of this counts as low taste for Plato. In a person sunk in low taste, desire rules over reason.
By contrast, those who can appreciate high art are people in whom reason governs the soul. In Plato’s ideal, that person is the philosopher. High taste is the activity of using reason to grasp the Idea of beauty — something that belongs to spirit as well.
Most high art tends toward abstraction. It isn’t concerned with concrete things but with formal beauty — using a material medium to reach pure spiritual resonance.
Plato, though, believed most ordinary people are trapped in low taste. That’s why his ideal city needs censorship of the arts: all creative work should be reviewed, and popular content that feeds base pleasure should be restricted, so citizens are led toward a temperate, healthy life.
To sum up the Greek position: the hierarchy of taste is real, grounded in the objective, self‑subsisting Idea of beauty. To refine your taste, you rely on reason to grasp pure spiritual beauty.
Now, Kant.
Kant was the first thinker in Western aesthetics to study “taste” systematically and in full. Like the Greeks, he admitted that taste comes in ranks. But on what grounds taste is high or low, he parted ways with ancient philosophy fundamentally.
The Greeks treated beauty as an objective spiritual entity — an objective idealism. Kant argued that beauty is not a pure property of objects; our subjective feeling is deeply involved in the act of judging it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. What strikes a male monkey as a beautiful female monkey does nothing for us.
But Kant’s embrace of subjectivity did not make him a relativist. Yes, aesthetic judgment involves feeling — yet human beings share a common structure of cognition, “the same heart, the same principle.” We possess an innate sensus communis of taste, shared by all: what I judge beautiful, others ought to find beautiful too.
So Kant distinguished two kinds of taste: reactive taste and reflective taste. The former is empirical and sensory; the latter is rational and free.
Reactive taste carries no universal necessity — it’s sheer personal liking. Its core is sensory gratification, the pursuit of direct pleasure. There’s no high or low here, right or wrong. It’s like preferring sweet over salty food: neither is better, and there’s nothing to argue about.
Reflective taste, by contrast, claims universal validity — it expects everyone to agree. If you adore that pop superstar, you tacitly assume everyone else should recognize the beauty too; when someone says “this sucks,” you’re genuinely baffled.
Reactive taste fixes on the matter of the object — the concrete content of the work. Reflective taste fixes on the form — it grasps beauty at the level of abstraction. Kant held that reflective taste is the only genuinely pure aesthetic experience, and therefore the higher one; taste that merely chases sensory thrills is low taste.
What’s so elevated about this free, reflective taste? The beholder mobilizes imagination to see through the work’s material medium and sensory content, and apprehend its inner form. This higher taste is disinterested: the viewer isn’t indulging personal appetite, harboring private desires, or chasing any external end. The aesthetic experience is the whole point.
Precisely because it sheds interest, desire, and external goals, this kind of taste speaks to everyone: the beauty I feel, you should be able to feel as well. In this state, the viewer adopts a stance of contemplation — unlike frenzied idol worship, which is entangled with desire and belongs to low taste. This is what Kant meant by universally valid taste.
Apply free, reflective taste to the pop star’s music and you’d be indifferent to the singer’s real life, contemplating only the work itself. You can check yourself: do you adopt that contemplative stance toward the work? If yes, you’re performing higher taste; if not, you’re just wallowing in sensory preference.
So although Kant grounded taste in our a priori structure of judgment, his conclusion rhymes with the Greeks’: whether taste is high depends on whether we use reason to apprehend a thing’s form, or get swept up in sensory desire, clinging to its material content.
Like Plato, Kant believed low taste means failing to break free of sensory pleasure. Take the Venus de Milo, or Cézanne’s still lifes of fruit: if you read formal beauty in them, that’s high taste; but if Venus stirs lust in you, or the painted fruit merely makes you hungry — that’s textbook low taste.
In short: for Kant, the hierarchy of taste is real, but it is rooted in the a priori structure of human judgment.
Finally, Bourdieu — who built his aesthetics by attacking Kant’s.
Kant split taste into two kinds and declared the hierarchy real and universal, grounded in our innate aesthetic faculty. Bourdieu objected: there is no such thing as an a priori, universal aesthetic faculty. Taste is entirely a product of social conditioning — a byproduct of how society runs.
There is no pure art appreciation, Bourdieu insisted, and no pure aesthetics detached from social reality. In the real world there is only interest and cultural capital. Kant claimed aesthetic experience is disinterested; Bourdieu replied that the pure aesthetic realm is an illusion, and that the core function of taste is to mark class boundaries.
Under the old scheme, class was sorted mainly by ownership of the means of production — by wealth — dividing bourgeoisie from proletariat. But as industrial capitalism developed, wealth became hard to read from appearances. Expensive goods are mass‑produced; ordinary people can now buy what the upper classes buy. Even the very rich can’t pin their bank statements to their chests.
Yet society still needs class distinctions. The upper strata always need badges that set them apart from the masses, keeping the existing order intact. And as economic wealth blurred as a marker, aesthetic taste took over the job.
Taste makes a superb standard for sorting class. Acquiring that abstract, pure, free taste Kant described is no easier than amassing a fortune — it demands sustained, heavy investment of cultural capital.
There’s no shortcut to connoisseurship. No textbook lays out the theorems and standard answers that let you “read” art overnight. The capacity to perceive high art comes from what Bourdieu called habitus.
Habitus is formed by long exposure and education — and specifically by non‑utilitarian education. It requires copious leisure time and full immersion. Only when you’re free from the pressure of making a living, investing ample time and resources, maintaining that so‑called disinterested posture, can the habitus slowly take shape.
Make no mistake: this habitus is not the upper classes putting on airs. On the contrary, after long immersion it becomes a second nature — a bearing that seeps into one’s speech, conduct, daily objects, even one’s expressions.
Even if an ordinary person scrimps for a luxury item, or a lottery winner splurges on fine things, the matching bearing doesn’t come with the purchase. The true cost of a luxury good is not the sticker price — it includes the immense cultural capital spent on cultivating the corresponding disposition, and that part cannot be bought with money.
That’s why taste works so efficiently as a class filter: high taste demands costly cultural capital that only the upper strata can afford to accumulate; ordinary people, lacking the right environment, never develop the habitus.
Possessing high taste means mastering the code of artworks and elite cultural symbols — reading high art effortlessly, without rote‑learned interpretation tricks; deploying prestigious cultural codes appropriately; and speaking the insider language of the circle. Those without the code gravitate toward the direct, the untrained, the emotionally immediate.
Bourdieu illustrated this with photography. For the upper classes, a photograph’s beauty lies in the formal treatment of the shot — anything, however ordinary, can be made artistic. Ordinary people, shooting photos, care about the subject — sunsets, beautiful faces, spectacles — and pay little attention to style or technique; for them, beauty simply is the thing being beautiful.
Thus social aesthetics splits in two: on one side, a crude, body‑pleasing popular taste; on the other, a sublimated, refined, ostensibly disinterested pleasure of distinction. Class sorting happens through taste.
Bourdieu didn’t deny Kant’s description of free, reflective taste — grasping pure form disinterestedly, which parallels Plato’s division. The disagreement is over what such taste is. Plato and Kant believed beauty simply exists — in the world of Ideas, or in the human mind. Bourdieu held that beauty is not given; it is socially constructed, a yardstick the upper classes use to draw their boundary against the masses.
That covers all three positions. A quick recap:
The Greeks (Pythagoras, Plato): the hierarchy of taste is real; beauty is an objective, self‑subsisting order of law and Ideas; your rank depends on how well you grasp the Idea of beauty.
Kant: the hierarchy is real, but grounded in our shared, a priori structure of aesthetic judgment.
Bourdieu: the hierarchy is not a fact of nature — it’s something society builds, for its own purposes.
Which of the three do you lean toward?
The question can be sharpened further: is beauty an independent, objective thing in itself — or a byproduct of how power and society operate? People give very different answers.
When you face something beautiful — a painting, a piece of music, an everyday object — where does the beauty you feel come from? Is it a property the thing carries in itself? Does it arise from your own mind? Or have you simply been trained by society to believe it’s beautiful? There’s no standard answer. It’s worth sitting with, on your own.
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