A friend tells you that a particular song is a masterpiece. You think the opposite: that it is a manufactured product — market-tested, smoothed of anything distinctive, and empty. So you give your reasons. The lyrics are thin. The main melody is lifted from a record twenty years older. There is very little to it: a few chords and a marketable image. Your friend answers that you are not listening properly — that you have missed the production, the restraint, the moment near the end when the arrangement falls away. The exchange grows heated. Two adults are arguing in earnest about a pop song, until one of you says the sentence that ends it.
"It's all subjective. There's no right answer. You like what you like."
And you both agree, with some relief, as though that settles the matter.
But something strange has just happened, stranger than it looks. If there really is no right answer — if this is only a matter of what each of you happens to like — then what were the last twenty minutes? You did not trade feelings. Neither of you said "this gives me a pleasant sensation" and "it gives me an unpleasant one." You traded reasons. You tried to point out something about the song — something you took to be present in the song itself, which your friend had failed to notice and could be brought to hear. You argued as though he were wrong. Not different. Wrong. And he argued as though you were the one who could not hear it.
No one argues this way about salt and vinegar. You have never, in your life, tried to talk another person out of preferring salt. So either an argument about a song is not, after all, the same kind of thing as a preference for salt — or you have spent twenty minutes doing something odd and faintly embarrassing, and so has everyone who has ever argued about taste.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the first of nine episodes about taste and beauty. Across those nine, the whole question comes down to the gap I have just described: the gap between what we say about taste — that there is no arguing it — and what we do with it, which is to argue, hard, with reasons, as if the matter could be won.
Today we take the lightest part of the problem. No theories, no names — only that gap, held open where it can be seen.
One word about how this will go. I am not here to grade anyone's taste — there is no vantage above the question to grade it from. I argue about songs too. I have records I would defend at unreasonable length, and a few I am quietly ashamed to have loved. So this is two people with the same problem, examining it from the inside. You bring your arguments; I will bring the difficulty with them.
Stay with that argument a moment longer, because much of what follows over these nine episodes depends on describing this one ordinary scene correctly.
Play it back and ask what each of you was doing. You said the melody was borrowed. That is a claim about the song — something you take to be true of it, which your friend could check. You said the last verse does not earn its ending. Another claim about the song. He said you were not hearing the production. That is him telling you that you had missed something — that it is there, that you did not catch it, and that if you listened again you would. Every move either of you made had the same form. It pointed at the song and said: it is like this, and you have got it wrong.
Compare that with what an argument about pure preference would sound like — if you ever had one, which you do not. It would run: "I prefer the salty one." "I prefer the sour one." And then nothing. There is nowhere to go; there is no second move. You do not say, "No, you are mistaken to prefer the sour one; let me show you what you are missing about salt." The sentence does not even make sense. Once a thing really is only what you happen to like, the argument has no substance. It ends before it begins, because there is nothing to be right or wrong about.
But the argument about the song had substance. It contained reasons, and the reasons did their work. When your friend pointed to the passage near the end, you went back and listened for it. Perhaps you still were not persuaded. But you checked. You treated his reason as the kind of thing that could move you, if it were good enough. You do not check when someone tells you that you are wrong to like salt.
The first plain fact is only a description of what we do, not yet a theory about it. When we argue about taste, we behave exactly as if there were something to be right or wrong about. We give reasons. We expect the reasons to persuade. We treat the other person as having missed something, rather than as merely having felt something different. And then, the moment the argument becomes tiring, we reach for the opposite — "it's all subjective, there's no right answer" — and use that to leave.
I am not telling you which of these is the truth about taste. That is the rest of the series, and I do not have the answer. I am telling you that you hold both. You conduct the argument as a realist — as someone who thinks there is a fact of the matter — and then you settle it as a relativist — as someone who thinks there is not. And you have never had to make the two agree, because you use each at a different moment and never had to hold the two up against each other.
Tonight we set them side by side. That is the only task.
Consider how deep the realist habit runs — deeper than that single argument, into words we use every day without hesitation.
We call things overrated. You have called something overrated this week — a band, a film, a restaurant that everyone is praising. And when you say it, it does not feel like a controversial claim; it feels simply true. That word — overrated — is the one we take apart next time; keep it. It is the sharpest single instance of the problem. Tonight, only notice that you say it, that you mean it, and that you would defend it.
We think some critics are better than others. Not merely different — better. You trust one reviewer and dismiss another, and if pressed you could say why: this one notices things, that one simply approves of whatever is expensive. That is a ranking. You have ranked people by the quality of their taste — which you could not do if taste had no quality to rank.
We think taste can be bad. You have met someone whose taste you judged to be bad, and you did not mean "different from mine"; you meant bad, and you were slightly embarrassed for them, in the way one is embarrassed for a person confidently wrong about a fact. And we think taste can improve, including our own. There is a record you loved at sixteen and cannot listen to now, and you do not describe that as a change of preference, like a change in shoe size. You describe it as growing up — as learning to hear better. You think your older self has it more nearly right.
Every one of these — overrated, a better critic, bad taste, taste that improves — is something we say readily, sincerely, and would stand behind. And every one is the speech of a person who assumes there is a standard to be met or missed. None of them sits easily beside "it's all just what I happen to like." If it is all just what you happen to like, then nothing is overrated, no critic is better, no taste is bad, and you did not grow up — you merely exchanged one preference for another, as you might lose your liking for a particular food.
And yet we talk the other way constantly — not occasionally, constantly. Listen to yourself for a single day and count the times you treat taste as answerable to something. You will lose count by lunchtime.
Now I must be careful, because it would be too easy to stop here. It would be easy to say: there — you secretly believe beauty is objective, and have only been too modern, and too polite, to admit it. That is not the claim, and to make it would be to sell you something. For the other half of you is not a mistake either. You have stood in a room while two people you respect disagreed completely about a film — both of them acute, both attentive, neither missing anything — and felt, honestly, that there was no fact present to settle it. You have changed your mind about a painting and been unable to say whether the painting improved or you did. You do think it would be grotesque to send the police to enforce the correct opinion about jazz. The "it's all subjective" instinct is not stupidity. It is tracking something real — that no one has ever produced the fact about beauty and set it out where it could be inspected, in the way one can establish that the melody was borrowed.
So you are not a concealed objectivist in need of correction. You are something stranger: a person running two entire systems, each of which works on its own, and which you have never had to put in the same room.
This is where we now stand, and I will put it as plainly as I can, because the plainness is the point.
You believe there is no arguing taste. You also argue taste — with reasons, expecting to prevail, treating the other person as wrong. You believe beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. You also think that some beholders have a better eye, that yours has improved, and that some people's is frankly poor. You reach for "it's all subjective" to end a quarrel, and for the rest of the week you behave as though it is anything but.
Set those beside each other and they do not fit. That is not a trick played on you; it is a fact that was already true, which I have only brought into view. And there are only a few ways it can be resolved — which is, roughly, the range of directions this series can take.
Perhaps the arguing is the honest part and the creed is a lie told out of politeness. In that case taste does answer to something, and we had better find out what, and who is entitled to say. Or perhaps the creed is the honest part and the arguing is a kind of performance — genuine, human, worth doing, but not tracking any fact — in which case we must explain why the performance is so convincing, even to the person performing it. Or perhaps both are honest, and there is some third thing, neither quite a fact nor quite a whim, that each is half-seeing from its own side. These are not competing slogans. They are serious positions, each held by people who could give you real difficulty, and over the coming episodes we will enter each in turn and see exactly what it costs.
Tonight the task is only to watch the contradiction appear, not to resolve it.
A word on where this fits, for anyone who was here before. In the previous series we stood over a machine and asked whether there was a mind inside it — whether the thing before us was the kind of thing that could genuinely have an inner life, or whether we were projecting one onto it. Tonight is the same step, with a different object. Then the question was whether the machine had a mind. Tonight it is whether the thing you just said — that the song is great — has a standard behind it, or whether you are projecting one onto it. You already know how to do this. You did it to a machine. Now do it to your own speech.
So do it — not with my example, but with yours. Choose the real case: the film everyone but you seems to love; the building in your city that is called iconic and that you regard as an ugly mistake in concrete; the celebrated album whose appeal has always escaped you. You have one. Now hold the argument in your head — the one you would actually have. Make your case. You will reach for reasons: it is derivative; it is cold; it is straining for effect; look at what stands beside it and how poorly it compares. And then catch yourself. Every one of those reasons is you saying: the thing is like this, and the people who admire it have got it wrong — you, who believe there is no getting it wrong. Observe your own speech doing what your creed says cannot be done. That is the whole of tonight. You do not need me for it. You need only to listen to yourself as you would listen to someone you suspected of bluffing.
You came in holding a sentence you have said a hundred times and never examined: it's all subjective, there's no arguing taste, you like what you like. A tolerant sentence. A grown-up sentence. You were right to value it.
You leave holding something more uncomfortable and more honest: that the sentence is not the whole story, and that you know it is not, because you spend your life acting against it. None of your conduct is how a person would act who truly believed there was nothing to be right about — and the creed is not nothing either; you have felt its force, honestly, in the room where no fact settled the argument. Both belong to you. So your practice claims more than your creed admits, and you cannot now un-know that. That is the gain, and it does not yet feel like one. An hour ago you held one tidy belief. Now you hold two that do not fit, and there is no way back to not seeing it.
I said we would only hold the gap open, and we have. It is open, and it does not close.
Here is where it goes next. We will take that word — overrated — and the others like it: underrated, an acquired taste, a better critic, it grew on me — the words we use without a second thought. And we will ask whether even one of them can mean anything at all under the view you say you hold — whether you can so much as complain about a popular but bad film without assuming there is a standard it has failed. That is the clearest the question ever becomes. After that, the actual accounts: the serious explanations of what we are doing when we argue about taste — and there are more than the two you have been moving between, and not one of them comes free.
So carry one question out with you, because the series depends on it, and there is no answer yet to give you. When you argue about a song and treat your friend as wrong, which of you is bluffing? Is the arguing the mistake — the performance you ought to drop? Or is the creed the mistake — the polite lie you reach for when you are tired? You do not have to know tonight. But you can no longer say the answer is obvious. You have just spent an hour watching yourself hold two beliefs that do not fit.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.