QuestionsIs beauty in the eye of the beholder?Taste is not a gift: it is a mark of class
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?It is all relative

Taste is not a gift: it is a mark of class

Distinction

Pierre Bourdieu 1930 · 2002Sociologist: taste is not a natural gift, it comes from upbringing and social class, and it serves to set oneself apart from others.
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What it claims

Taste is neither a natural gift nor a universal judgment: it is the product of education and class, and serves to set oneself apart. Kant's "pure" aesthetic universalises the dispositions of a particular social condition.

Why

Taste varies with education and social position and serves to place the one who judges: calling something beautiful classifies the judge.

The same idea through history
Pierre Bourdieu1966With Alain Darbel, Bourdieu publishes L'Amour de l'art, a survey of museum visitors: art attendance depends first of all on educational level.
Pierre Bourdieu1979In Distinction he extends the survey to all tastes (music, food, clothes, decoration) and argues that taste classifies those who classify.
Voltaire1764Voltaire showed that beauty changes from one country to another. Bourdieu shows that it also changes within one country, from one social milieu to another.
In short

"Taste is not a gift: it is a mark of class" is an argument by Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction, 1979, 1966) on the question "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" (answer: it is all relative). Its claim: Taste is neither a natural gift nor a universal judgment: it is the product of education and class, and serves to set oneself apart. Kant's "pure" aesthetic universalises the dispositions of a particular social condition. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Distinction, 1979
Valid with an implicit premise

Why does one museum visitor get bored in front of an abstract painting, while another enjoys it? People often say: "a matter of taste". Pierre Bourdieu answers: taste is learned. It comes from the family and the school, and it follows social class. Liking certain music or certain paintings is also a way of being recognised as belonging to a milieu, and of setting oneself apart from others. In Distinction (1979) he goes further: even Kant's most "pure" judgment, the one that depends on no interest, would be the habit of a class that does not have to struggle to live.

P1The gaze that judges "beautiful" is not natural: the "eye" is a product of history, reproduced by education.
P2The "pure" aesthetic attitude (looking at form rather than function) is rooted in an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of life. It therefore presupposes a social condition in which one is sheltered from need.
P3Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier: by distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly, the distinguished from the vulgar, people place themselves in social space.
P4 · implicit premiseA judgment that varies with the education and social position of the one who judges, and that serves to place him, expresses that position rather than a quality that would be in things.
So taste is neither a natural gift nor a universal judgment: it is the product of education and class, and serves to set oneself apart. Kant's "pure" aesthetic universalises the dispositions of a particular social condition.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where taste is learned, requires an easy life and serves to classify, and yet is a universal natural gift: for example if education only developed a capacity all humans already have, as one learns to read a text without school having invented the language. This is Hume's point: education can refine taste without manufacturing it.
With P4 the argument is valid: the eye is educated (P1), the pure disposition presupposes distance from need (P2) and taste serves to classify (P3); so, by P4, taste is not a natural and universal gift.
Analogy. Wines: the person who can taste a great vintage has learned to, often in a family that drank it. Praising it shows that one belongs to that milieu. Bourdieu says the taste for art works in the same way.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Immanuel Kant 1790 · attacks the conclusion

Whoever says "it is beautiful" judges not only for himself, but for everyone. He speaks of beauty as a property of the thing and he demands the agreement of others. Kant's question is therefore one of right: on what condition can a judgment of taste hold for everyone? Saying where my taste comes from does not answer that question.

Bourdieu replies
see the argument
Pierre Bourdieu 1979 · Bourdieu's reply (Postscript of Distinction)
In the Postscript to Distinction, Bourdieu writes that Kant's analysis of the judgment of taste in fact rests on aesthetic principles that are the universalization of the dispositions tied to a particular social and economic condition.
The debate goes on (our summary) Bourdieu answers Kant's analysis in general, not this objection in particular. Kantians reply that explaining the social origin of a belief does not prove it false: a mathematician may have learned maths in a privileged milieu without his theorems being any less true. Bourdieu thinks this reply assumes precisely that there is a point of view with no social origin.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. Basic disagreement: can the social origin of a taste (Bourdieu) bear on whether it is justified (Kant), or not?
David Hume 1757 · attacks premise 4

Tastes vary, but not all are equal: there is a standard of taste, which is the joint verdict of good judges. These judges have delicate feeling, have exercised it by practice, have refined it by comparison, and are free of prejudice. That tastes change with milieu therefore does not show that all are arbitrary: some may be better trained than others.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Bourdieu in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Bourdieu does not answer Hume directly. His analyses can be read as a doubt about Hume's list: practice, comparison and freedom from prejudice take time and study, which are not equally distributed. Hume's supporters answer that the unequal distribution of a skill does not make it false: not everyone tells two wines or two pieces of music apart, and that does not make this knowledge illusory.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. There is no agreement on whether Hume's "good judges" form an elite of competence or a class that imposes its tastes.
J
Jacques Rancière 2000 · attacks the conclusion

Reducing taste to social place is to lock everyone in their condition. For Rancière, aesthetic experience can on the contrary suspend the established divisions between those who judge and those who work: ordinary people also look, judge and feel beauty, and giving them a "class" taste is a way of denying them that right.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Bourdieu in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Bourdieu, who died in 2002, did not answer this criticism in our corpus. Bourdieusians reply that they describe real inequalities in order to fight them, not to justify them.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. The basic disagreement is about what sociology does: unmask a domination (Bourdieu) or confirm it by speaking in the name of the dominated (Rancière)?