Everyone agrees. The television series is a masterpiece — your friends say so, the critics say so, and so does the one person at work who never recommends anything and recommended this. You watched it, all of it, and you think it is merely fine. Less than fine. You think it is slow, and pleased with itself, and far less clever than it keeps announcing. So when it comes up again, and the table is nodding along, you say it: honestly, it is overrated.
That is not a retreat from the argument. It is the opposite. To call the series overrated is to state a view in a room that has settled on the other one. You are not saying it is simply not to your taste. You are not saying you happen to respond coldly where the rest respond warmly. You are saying the others have it wrong — that they have placed the series higher than it deserves, that there is a level the work merits and they have rated it above that level, and that you are the one prepared to say so.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the second of nine episodes about taste and beauty.
Last time, we noticed ourselves doing something strange. We argue about taste with reasons — treating the other person as mistaken, not merely different — and then, the moment the argument tires us, we end it by insisting there is no right answer to be had. Today we take the cleanest form of that difficulty. Not the heated argument, but the ordinary words: the ones we reach for without thinking. For it turns out that one cannot call a thing overrated — cannot lodge even the most casual complaint about taste — without relying on the very thing one claims is not there.
Start with that one word, because it is the clearest case in the subject, and once one has noticed it, it is hard to stop noticing.
Consider what "overrated" means. To call a thing overrated is to say it has been rated too high — rated above something. Above what? Above what it is actually worth. The word has a level built into it: the level the thing deserves, and then the higher level at which people have mistakenly placed it. The distance between where the thing stands in people's esteem and where it ought to stand is the entire meaning of the word. Remove that distance and the word says nothing at all.
Now set that against the view many of us claim to hold. We say there is no fact of the matter about how good the series is. No real worth. Only various people liking it to various degrees, none of them correct. Very well; follow it through. If there is no real worth, there is no level the thing deserves. If there is no level it deserves, there is nothing for the crowd to have rated it above. And if there is nothing to have rated it above, then "overrated" is not a bold judgement, and not a harsh one — it is not even a false one. It is empty. It is like calling something too far north when there is no north — the comparison has nothing to fix it to.
But we did not mean nothing, and that is the difficulty. When we call a thing overrated we mean something precise, and we would defend it at length, with reasons — the pacing, the writing, the way it mistakes length for depth. We are not reporting our own reaction. We are saying the crowd has the level wrong. And "the crowd has the level wrong" means something only if there is a level to be wrong about.
The difficulty, stated plainly: the most casual thing one can say about taste — the offhand dismissal that seems to cost nothing — already contains the whole disputed question. One cannot even be idly rude about a popular work without assuming there is a standard it failed to meet. The dismissal assumes the standard. The standard is doing the work even at the moment we supposed we were being too lazy to hold a real view.
And it is not just that one word. Once one has noticed it in "overrated," one begins to find it everywhere — because our whole everyday vocabulary about taste is built the same way, out of the same hidden part.
We call things underrated: rated too low this time, below what they deserve. The same structure, reversed, with the same buried level.
We speak of an acquired taste — a thing one could not appreciate at first and learned to. But "learned to" conceals a claim. It says there was something there to appreciate that one was missing, and then caught up to. Not "I changed," but caught up. The phrase carries an endpoint inside it: the thing was good before one's palate reached it, and one's palate reached it.
We think some critics better than others. We touched on this last time, but stay with the one word: better. Better at what? Not better at being entertaining. Better at telling good from bad. We trust one reviewer and dismiss another because we think one of them sees the level more clearly. That is to rank a person by how well they track a thing we say is not there.
We say someone has no taste. Not different taste — no taste, the way we say someone has no ear, or no eye. As though taste were a capacity for getting something right, and theirs were missing or defective.
And we say a thing grew on us. Not that our preferences shifted, the way one might go off a colour. Grew — as though one had ripened toward it, the way one comes round to an idea one was not ready for on first meeting.
Every one of these is a word we use easily, sincerely, and would defend in an argument. And every one has the same thing buried in it: a real level, a standard, a fact about how good the thing is — the very thing our stated view says does not exist. This is not the occasional slip. Our entire working vocabulary for taste is the vocabulary of someone who believes in a standard. The creed is five words long — there is no arguing taste — and nearly everything else we say about taste contradicts it. Our own words are the evidence against the view, and there is no shortage of them.
So do not take my word for it. Take your own. Pick the one that is yours — the album everyone reveres that leaves you cold, the restaurant you think is coasting on its reputation, the director people call a genius who simply bores you. Have it? Now give the verdict you would actually give: it is overrated. Then ask the single question that does the work: overrated against what? Try to finish the sentence aloud — "it has been rated above…" — and notice what the sentence reaches for. It reaches for a level. It reaches for what the thing is really worth. One cannot make the complaint without it. And the moment one reaches for it, one has picked up, by one's own hand, the thing one claimed was not there.
That is the whole of it, and it works on any word in the list. Take underrated, take no taste, take it grew on me — try to say what you mean by it with no standard underneath, and the word has nothing left to say.
Now, there is a way out of this that one is probably already reaching for, and it is good enough to deserve its strongest statement — after which I will show why it does not work.
The escape runs like this. "Come now. These are just figures of speech. Loose talk. Everyone says overrated; no one means there is some objective worth-meter suspended in the sky. I know it is really all subjective. The words are merely sloppy. Do not hold me to them."
Take it seriously, because there is something true in it. Words do drift. We all use shorthand we would never defend under close examination. But put it to the test, because it does not survive the test.
A figure of speech is one you can drop and lose nothing. If I say the sun is sinking, and you point out that, strictly, the earth is turning, I shrug and agree; I never needed the sun to sink, and nothing I do depends on it. So: can these words be dropped? Try. Try to spend a single week genuinely not believing that any taste is better than any other. Not merely saying so — believing it, all the way down. No critic worth trusting above another. No album one outgrew, only an album one turned away from, the way one turns away from a coat. No recommendation worth giving anyone, because there is nothing to recommend — only one's own reaction, reported to a stranger whose reaction is no better and no worse. One cannot hold that position for a day. By lunchtime one trusts a friend's word on a film over a stranger's, and that trust is the standard, in plain sight. These are not sloppy words one could tidy away with a little effort. We act on them. We change what we give an evening to on the word of someone whose taste we rate above our own. That is not a figure of speech. It is a belief we are running our lives on.
So the loose-talk escape fails, and here is precisely what it leaves. We say there is no arguing taste — and then we argue it, and rank it, and rate it, and improve at it, with our whole vocabulary and half our week. The truce cannot simply be declared any longer. The "it is all subjective" we reach for to end arguments turns out to be something we do not actually believe — not in the sense of believing it and acting on it — for any other waking minute of our lives. So we owe an account. We owe an account of what we are doing when we argue about taste, and we do not yet have one. That is the new thing. An hour ago we had a creed; now we have a debt.
But here I must go carefully, because there is a cheap move available, and I am not going to make it. The cheap move would be to take this small victory and trade it for the opposite creed — to say: there, you see, beauty is objective after all, there is a real standard, the snob was right all along. That does not follow, and to claim it did would be dishonest. Everything shown tonight is a fact about our practice — that we behave as though there is a standard. It is not a fact about the world — that there is one. Those are two different things, and the rest of this series concerns the distance between them.
Here is the part that keeps the question open, and it should be held firmly before we go any further. There is a serious, modern position — we will spend a whole episode on it later — which agrees with every word said tonight and still holds that there is no aesthetic fact anywhere, in any object, ever. It grants all of it: of course one cannot drop "overrated," of course we rank critics, of course taste improves. And it holds that every bit of that can be kept, and used, and meant, honestly, with nothing out in the world to be right about. On that account our practice is exactly as rich as it feels, and there is still no fact of beauty in the world. I am not going to say tonight whether that view is correct. I am saying it is a live position, fully defensible, and that catching our own vocabulary in this way does nothing to refute it. The argument I have made rules out one position only — the lazy one, the "it is all just whatever I happen to feel, and that is the end of it," which cannot even explain why we call things overrated and mean it. It does not rule out the others. It is what sends us looking for them.
Because that is where the remaining episodes go. We go looking for an honest account of what we are doing when we argue about taste — one that lets us keep the practice, all of it, without lying to ourselves about what we believe. There are five worth taking seriously. Five real answers, each held by serious people who are not easily answered, and not one of them is free: each keeps the practice at a price, and the price differs every time. One of the five is the no-fact view just described. We will walk into each of them and find out exactly what it costs. But that begins next time. Tonight the task was only to expose the difficulty and let it stand.
We came in able to end any argument about taste with a single sentence: it is all subjective, there is no right answer. We leave with that sentence no longer available on its own. Not disproved — but no longer usable by itself, because we have watched our own words refuse to mean anything without the standard we say is not there. Overrated, underrated, a better critic, no taste, it grew on me — each one a small admission that we believe in a level a thing can meet or miss. One can still say "it is all subjective." One simply cannot say it and walk away, because we now know what it costs: nearly every other true thing we say about taste.
The creed is gone; what remains is the debt. But keep hold of what that debt is not. Nothing tonight made beauty objective. The question is wide open. It is only no longer free.
From here we stop catching ourselves out and start looking for an honest account of what we are doing.
Next time we take up the first honest account of what that standard could actually be. It says: of course there is no beauty-fact sitting in the object; the standard was never in the painting. It is in the people. There is a certain kind of judge — wide experience, fine discrimination, no personal stake — and where such people agree, that agreement is the standard. No fact in the thing; a standard built out of the right verdicts. It is the most natural answer in the world. It is how we already handle wine, and film, and music. And it meets a serious objection the moment one asks who counts as one of those judges, and who granted them the standing.
But carry this with you first. Return to the thing you call overrated — the album, the director, the work everyone but you reveres. You are going to keep saying it; we have just established that you cannot help it. So the question is no longer whether you will say it. It is what you take yourself to mean. When you call it overrated, and you mean it — and you do — is there a level out in the world it really failed to meet, a standard it fell short of? Or is there no such fact anywhere, and you have simply earned the right to say "overrated" in some other way, one you have not yet worked out? Those are not the same answer. We have been living as though we never had to choose between them. We do. And we do not yet know, you and I, which way it goes.
So which is it to be?
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.