Maybe many people have a question in their minds, does the distinction between high-level and low-level aesthetic taste really exist? For example, a stranger guy Rick got a girlfriend, and his girlfriend is not that attractive for other people but Rick. So maybe some people will laugh at Rick’s aesthetic is very “low-end”. Or, a person who listens to classical music will laugh at a person who listens to hip-hop for being inferior. Is Russian literature better than web novels? Brothers Karamazov is just better than Dune? Is Impressionist art better than Pop Art? When going to see the artwork, the guide can say a lot about a piece of black cloth, and when we see these arts, we will wonder if we have gone to the wrong art gallery. You like Beethoven, I like Michael Jackson, can’t it be a matter of every man to his taste? Do these things have to distinguish between an elegant and a vulgar? If so, is there no reason for us to persuade some people to put down pornographic novels and read classic literature? Because classic literature is no more advanced than pornographic novels. So is this aesthetic thought constructed or real? If it exists, what is its foundation?
Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believes the thing beautiful has an absolute standard, beautiful things are beautiful, ugly things are ugly, of course there are high and low aesthetic tastes. Beauty is objective, is something out of human, is something not controlled by human mind. When we think something is beautiful, because this thing conforms to the law of beauty, and this law of beautiful is truly exist. This beautiful law is the proportional relationship in mathematics. For example, an octave is a 2:1 ratio, which is why it sounds harmonious. (Later people claimed the golden ratio makes buildings and art better-looking, but that part is more myth than proof.) Everything is changeable, but mathematics is eternal, and mathematics is immortal. If a thing conforms to the proportion and harmony in mathematics, then this thing will have a sense of beauty.
Plato’s aesthetic theory is founded on his “Theory of Forms.” According to this theory, the real world is fickle and unreliable. The true reality, in Plato’s view, is an eternal world of ideas or forms. Among these forms, the highest is the “Idea of the Good,” a concept only humans can understand and master. This idea is informed by the teachings of Plato’s mentor, Socrates, who proposed “knowledge is virtue.” By combining beauty and goodness, Plato took Socrates’ teachings further through his Theory of Forms. The Idea of the Good, therefore, is not only the truest but also the most beautiful, resulting in the ultimate concept where truth, goodness, and beauty are unified.
Based on this ultimate idea, Plato outlines six layers of beauty:
Beauty of the body: We can perceive the beauty of an individual’s body directly, leading us to realize that all human bodies are beautiful.
Beauty of the soul: Beyond the physical appearance, an individual possesses an inner soul that is equally beautiful, exemplified in virtues and qualities like bravery, wisdom, justice, and prudence.
Beauty of the city-state: Multiple souls forming a community, or city-state, possess their unique beauty, seen in the harmony of collaboration, institutional arrangements, and order.
Beauty of knowledge: The development of a city-state involves the creation and application of various forms of knowledge which, when applied to improve people’s lives, reveal their beauty.
Beauty of the ocean of knowledge: All forms of knowledge, whether it’s legal, debate, architectural, mathematical, theatrical, political, commercial, or military, come together to form a “sea of beauty.”
Beauty of knowledge about beauty: The highest form of beauty is the knowledge about beauty itself, symbolizing the Idea of the Good. These six levels follow a pattern of moving from specific to general and from concrete to abstract.
Plato’s aesthetic theory extends into his view on art, seeing it as an imitation of real life with the sole purpose of serving people’s lives. He differentiates between “true” artists, who possess genuine knowledge and can guide people towards truth (and are therefore ranked highly in the city-state), and “fake” artists, who use their wit and sporadic inspiration to stir desires and interests that lead to false joy and ultimate downfall. These latter artists, according to Plato, should be expelled from the city-state. His criticisms were quite harsh, and as a result, Plato was not popular among many artists.
All in all, Plato believes that most people’s aesthetics are low-level tastes, because they cannot get rid of the influence of carnal desires, so he supports the literary censorship system to eliminate those vulgar things, such as Tik Toks in now.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant also admits that there are high and low tastes in beauty, but the Ancient Greek philosophers believed the tastes of beauty is kind of objective idealism, Kant believes that Aesthetics is not entirely objective, but also has subjective elements. For example, a mare maybe beautiful for a stallion, but it is not beautiful to humans. For the aforementioned stranger guy Rick, his girlfriend is of course beautiful for him, but it doesn’t mean that it is also beautiful for other people. But Kant does not think aesthetics is a relativism. Because he believes that although there are subjective factors in aesthetics, people’s aesthetics has a natural sense of commonality. What I think is beautiful, other people will also think it is beautiful. According to Kant, aesthetic judgment is a subjective and purposeless form of judgment. It is distinct from our judgments about moral behaviour and does not involve moral principles or practicality.
Kant believes that aesthetic judgment is a “concept without concept”, which is not based on rational or conceptual judgment, but on the subject’s perceptual response. In aesthetic judgment, we judge the beauty of a work through our sensual direct experience and response. This perceptual response can be regarded as a kind of “taste”, that is, our direct feeling and enjoyment of beauty.
Kant described this kind of taste as a “purposeless interest”, which does not pursue practical purposes or external effects, but purely enjoys the beauty of the work itself. Kant believes that aesthetic judgment is a form of communication, which can transcend individual subjective feelings and become a universally shared experience. And this is the so-called high-level aesthetics, not low-level aesthetics. So what is Kant’s low-level aesthetics? For example, some people’s love for pornography is a kind of low-level aesthetics, because they like those things because of their own carnal desires, not purely purposeless aesthetics.
All in all, the difference between high and low aesthetics lies in whether you appreciate the form of the object through reason, or appreciate the material of the object with the senses. Like Plato, Kant believes that if a person’s aesthetics is very low, it shows that he has not got rid of the pursuit of sensual pleasure. For example, when you go to see a work of art, such as David of Michelangelo, if you appreciate the beauty of form, then it is high-end aesthetics. If this sculpture arouses the sexual desires, then it is low-end aesthetics.
Pierre Bourdieu, as a sociologist, fundamentally critiques the very philosophical basis of Kant’s aesthetic judgment. Bourdieu asserts that aesthetic judgment and taste are not universal, as suggested by Kant. Instead, he sees them as deeply connected to social context, particularly class status and cultural education.
Bourdieu argues that what we perceive as beautiful or high-end taste is inextricably tied to societal norms, cultural education, and our socioeconomic background. This assertion challenges the Kantian ideal of a universal aesthetic judgement.
In his work “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” Bourdieu developed the idea of “cultural capital,” suggesting that the things we appreciate and consider as “high art” or “refined taste” are not independent or purely based on individual aesthetics, but are largely dictated by the cultural exposure and education we have received. Bourdieu goes so far as to suggest that the whole concept of a pure aesthetic, free of societal influences, is a myth perpetuated by the upper classes to maintain their cultural dominance.
Through empirical research, Bourdieu established a correlation between an individual’s socioeconomic status and their tastes, showing that appreciation for ‘highbrow’ culture such as classical music, fine art, and sophisticated literature, was more common among individuals of higher socioeconomic status. By contrast, individuals of lower socioeconomic status often had tastes that aligned more closely with popular or mass culture.
Bourdieu’s critique of Kant is thus that the universality of aesthetic judgement is an illusion that obscures the social and economic factors that actually shape our tastes. He argued that what we consider ‘refined taste’ is not an objective universal standard but is influenced by societal factors such as wealth, education, and cultural exposure.
Thus, while Kant’s aesthetic theory places emphasis on the subjective and purposeless form of judgement, Bourdieu’s sociological approach focuses on the societal influences and structures that shape and constrain that subjective experience. The difference between what is considered ‘high-end’ and ‘low-end’ aesthetics is not based on some innate, universal quality of the artwork or cultural product itself, but on the societal values and structures that classify them as such.
As such, Bourdieu argue that the task is not to persuade people to exchange ‘lower’ forms of culture for ‘higher’ ones, as if they were innately superior, but to interrogate and challenge the societal conditions and structures that create such distinctions in the first place.
The argument about high and low aesthetics reflects diverse perspectives: from an objective reality of beauty to a blend of objective and subjective elements, and the importance of social and cultural factors. The answer seems to lie not just in the intrinsic qualities of artworks, but also in the viewers’ subjective experiences and the societal contexts in which these experiences occur. This is exactly what Socrates said, ‘All that is beautiful is difficult’.
Lightly edited in November 2026.