Dao Academy

CoursesCourse 28

How we judge beauty: the biology, culture, and choice behind taste

What aesthetics studies, and why people disagree about beauty. This course starts from a word coined in 1735 and asks whether beauty has faded from the field. It then takes apart a judgment of beauty into three layers: the biology we share, the habits of a culture, and the strategies of one person who wants to be different. It ends with why beauty resists definition, where it seems to live, and how to learn to judge it better.

Start lesson 1

Lessons

  1. 1 What aesthetics studiesA French title that Japanese had no word for, a German thesis about poems, and a field named for perceiving rather than for beauty. What it studies, why its subject has to be felt, and whether beauty left it. 23 minCompleted
  2. 2 The layer we shareIn 1993 pollsters phoned 1,001 Americans to ask what they wanted in a painting. What the poll, the savanna theory, babies, and a pair of ancient pots show about a shared biological layer of taste, and where that evidence runs out. 25 minCompleted
  3. 3 Habit and differenceWhy a Greek marble and a Chinese bamboo praise different things, why photography came before Impressionism, and why the people who want to be different end up moving together. Culture sets the habits, and individuals play against them. 24 minCompleted
  4. 4 BetweenProportion, unity, and use were each tried as the definition of beauty and each failed. The golden ratio, a seventeenth-century Chinese essay on allure, a dictionary on a gallery wall, and what it takes to learn to judge. 28 minCompleted

You’ll be able to

  • Explain what the word aesthetics originally meant, what the field studies, and why a study of beauty is unlike a study of crime.
  • Say which claims about a shared, biological basis of taste are established, which are contested, and which are myths.
  • Describe how cultural habits and personal strategies shape taste, using Hume, Kant, Bourdieu, and examples from Chinese and Western art.
  • Explain why proportion, unity, and usefulness each failed as a definition of beauty, why the golden ratio is mostly a myth, and how to practice judging beauty.

About this course

This course covers 美学思维的脉络 (Měixué sīwéi de màiluò), the main lines of aesthetic thinking. Its question is how people judge what is beautiful, and the answer it builds is a three-layer one: biological laws that all people share, cultural habits that a group shares, and personal strategies that belong to one person. It touches ground that other courses cover from another side. Course 8, The journey of life, tells how our senses and bodies came to be, and Course 9, Sex, love, and romantic relationships, takes up sexual selection, the peacock’s tail, and what people find attractive in faces. Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow, explains the shortcuts of judgment behind snap reactions. Course 1, Why science began in Greece, tells where the Pythagorean idea that beauty is number began.

The argument and the examples lead. Around them we add what is ours: names, dates, and quotations checked against sources (several popular claims did not survive, such as the golden ratio in the Parthenon, a “universal” human taste, and the story of Pythagoras and the hammers), background for readers in China and the United States, hands-on activities, and an honest “Another view” in every lesson. Where this course offers a reading of its own, it says so.