Why Do You Want Everyone to Like What You Like?

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You say you don't like a song, and the person across from you says "there is no arguing about taste," and the matter is closed. But if that were really so, no one would recommend a film to anyone, no dish would count as "genuinely good," no building could be ugly. So if beauty belongs entirely to you, why do you want everyone to like what you like?

A friend holds out one of their earbuds to you. There is a strange tension in their face; from the moment the song begins, they are not watching you so much as watching your expression. Forty seconds later, when you take the earbud out and say "not bad," something in that face gives way. A small but genuine wound. And yet nothing insulting has happened, there is no quarrel, no clash of interests. There is only a song, and two people who did not feel the same thing about it. So why did it sting so much?

Because when they held out that earbud, they were not really handing you a song. They were handing you a claim. They were saying "this is beautiful," and taking for granted that you would see the same thing. What comes to the surface when you don't is not a difference of taste. It is a refused invitation.

There is a saying everyone knows: there is no disputing tastes and colors. Translated from a Latin phrase, repeated for centuries, laid on the table so that arguments at dinner do not get out of hand. But notice this: the people who say that sentence are arguing again five minutes after they have said it. About which series had a disastrous final season, which singer was never really any good, what music will be played at the wedding, what color the wall of the house should be, who ordered correctly at the restaurant. It may be the most frequently violated principle in human history. We say taste cannot be disputed, and we dispute it without stopping.

Which means the sentence is not an observation. It is an offer of ceasefire. And it does not hold. The reason it does not hold is hidden in a simple confusion of language.

We say two separate things, and most of the time we do not notice the difference between them. One is "I like it." The other is "it is beautiful." These are not two phrasings of the same sentence; they are two different claims. When I say "I love this soup," I am demanding nothing from anyone. If you do not love it, there is no problem; in fact, when you tell me you do not, I do not withdraw my claim, because the claim was confined to my own palate from the start. But when I say "this view is beautiful," the situation changes. When you shrug and walk on, an objection rises inside me. As if you had missed something. As if there were something standing there that both of us were supposed to see, and you did not look.

And the whole matter lies in that word "supposed." The judgment of taste, the most private-seeming judgment we make, carries a hidden "everyone" inside it.

One of the first people to lay this out openly was David Hume, who in 1757 wrote an essay called "Of the Standard of Taste." Hume was standing in the middle of a strange contradiction. On one side, he held that beauty lies not in objects but in the mind that beholds them; every mind sees a different beauty, and no one is in error. On the other side, there was something everyone knew: nobody seriously agrees with a person who sets an ordinary poem next to Homer and says "these two are equally good." Such a person's taste is not different. It is faulty.

To untie this knot, Hume borrowed a scene from Don Quixote. Sancho tells of two of his kinsmen who had a reputation as judges of wine. A cask is to be tasted. The first one tastes it, thinks for a moment, and says, "good, but there is a faint taste of iron in it." The second tastes it and says, "good, but I get a taste of leather." The people around them laugh, and the two men are mocked. When the cask is drained to the bottom, a small key is found there, and attached to the key, an old leather thong.

The conclusion Hume drew from this is that the palate is not an organ of opinion but an organ of perception, and it grows sharper. What those two men felt was not imagined; it was there. It simply lay below the threshold of perception of most people. The same holds for painting, for music, for the novel. This is why Hume argued that taste could have a standard, but he looked for that standard not in the object, in a long labor instead. A good judge, in his account, had five qualities: a refined sensibility, the practice that comes from working through a great many works, the habit of comparison, the ability to shake off prejudice, and good sense. People who carry all five at once are few, but they exist, and in time their shared verdict emerges.

Hume was an honest man; he also wrote that the standard he defended did not settle everything. There is nothing faulty in a twenty-year-old loving love poems while a sixty-year-old loves sober reflection; differences of temperament and age are permanent. So what we have is neither complete arbitrariness nor a measuring stick binding on everyone.

But Hume's answer leaves the real question open. Very well, some people's palates may be keener. Yet why is it that I, never once certain of the keenness of my own palate, still want my friend to love that song when I play it for them? Why do I not simply say "that is how my palate is" and fall silent? Where does this insistence come from?

The man who asked this question in history's most uncomfortable form was a philosopher who barely traveled anywhere in his whole life, in Königsberg, and whose daily walk was said to be so punctual that his neighbors set their clocks by it. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790, Immanuel Kant went inside the judgment of taste and found there something that looks logically impossible.

Kant begins with a distinction, and that distinction carries everything. He says there are three ways we take pleasure in a thing. The first is the agreeable: the pleasure of the palate, of the skin, of the appetite. The second is the good: what we approve of because it works, because it is right, because it is useful. The third is the beautiful, and it resembles neither of the other two.

To show the difference he gives his own example. A man says, "Canary wine is agreeable." When someone contradicts him, he corrects himself at once: "agreeable to me." Nobody is offended; everyone knows that the pleasure of the tongue is personal, and that the natural home of such a sentence is "to me." Then Kant says the striking thing: when it comes to the beautiful, that line of retreat is closed. The sentence "this building is beautiful to me" is ridiculous. The person who claims beauty refuses from the outset to say "to me," and makes the claim on everyone's behalf.

Where does that right come from? Kant's answer still gives a person pause today. The judgment of beauty, he says, is disinterested. That is, I take pleasure in the thing without wanting to own it, to consume it, to draw any advantage from it. A hungry person's pleasure in bread is interested; they want the bread to exist and to be in their hand. But the person standing before a sunset, before the pattern on a tile, before a melody, wants nothing. They only look, and looking is enough.

And this disinterestedness, for Kant, is the source of the claim to universality. Think of it this way: if my pleasure does not come from my appetite, my need, my interest, then there is nothing peculiar to me in that pleasure. If my stomach is not in play, what remains must be something shared among human beings. And at exactly this point my mind quietly makes a leap: since this pleasure did not arise in me from any private cause, it must arise in everyone who looks at the same thing. I do not do this deliberately. By the moment the sentence "this is beautiful" leaves my mouth, the leap has already happened.

Kant calls this subjective universality, and he is aware of how strange the term is. The judgment is subjective, because what it rests on is not a proof, a measurement or a concept, but a state that wakes up inside me. Yet the same judgment is universal, because it demands that everyone agree. The word Kant chooses here is a very careful one: it demands, but it cannot compel. The judgment of taste begs the other person for assent, waits for assent, believes it deserves assent, and has not a single argument with which to prove it.

Ask someone who finds a painting beautiful, "why?" They will tell you. They will speak of the colors, the composition, the light. But all of it is not proof; at most it is a description, a pointing, an elaborate way of saying "look over there." The other person can accept every word of it and still say, "even so, I do not find it beautiful," and logically they will have made no mistake. Kant writes it plainly: nobody can make me find something beautiful by proof. A hundred people may praise a poem, and I can shake my head and walk on.

And still we insist. This is the real door Kant opens. What makes us insist is not arrogance but a strange promise a person makes to themselves: if the eyes that look are shared, then what is seen must be shared too. Kant calls this the common sense, that shared sensitivity we assume everyone possesses and can never prove. The judgment of taste is a wager that this common sense exists. Every "this is beautiful" really means: I believe I am living in the same world as you.

That is why the friend handing the earbud back is wounded. What was refused is not a song. It is that wager.

And that is why quarrels about taste can be so poisonous. We have no proof, and we cannot give up the claim either; when those two come together, a person raises their voice. Families who stop speaking for two days over the song to be played at a wedding, couples who return for years to the same argument about the color of the house, people who quietly respect a friend a little less for not liking a film, are all inside the same deadlock. Kant does not resolve this deadlock. He names it. Taste cannot be argued, because it does not move by concepts. But taste is contested, because everyone believes the other person could see it too.

Kant stops here. He does not tell us whether there is a way to be taught how to look. And yet, centuries earlier, an entirely different tradition had already begun searching for the answer.

In Islamic thought, beauty is not an unarguable private affair but, on the contrary, one of the most widely discussed of subjects. The starting point is usually the same tradition: God is beautiful and loves beauty. The ground this sentence opens up is broad, because beauty here is not an ornament but a quality of being itself. The word jamal is used precisely to convey this: a beauty beyond the visible, overflowing from existence itself.

One of those who took the most striking step within this frame is al-Ghazali. In the section on love and affection in his great work The Revival of the Religious Sciences, he asks why the human being loves what is beautiful, and he begins by correcting a common error. Beauty, he says, is imagined to be something the eye alone sees; but the eye captures only a part of beauty. The eye sees the beauty of a piece of writing, but it cannot see the beauty of a moral character. There is a beauty in a just person, in a generous act, in a steadfast friendship, and what perceives it is not the work of the eye but of inner sight, of insight.

Then he offers a criterion that is still unsettling today: the beauty of anything lies in its own perfection. A thing is beautiful to the degree that it reaches the completeness possible for it. The beauty of a horse and the beauty of a piece of calligraphy are not the same thing; what makes the horse beautiful will not make the writing beautiful. Whatever is expected of a horse, the flawless fulfillment of that expectation is the horse's beauty. This is an idea that rescues beauty from arbitrariness without locking it inside a single mold. Beauty is in the object, but in each object according to its own nature.

Avicenna enters the question from somewhere else. In his treatise on love, he says that everything in existence carries an inclination toward its own perfection; the stone tends toward its stoniness, the plant toward its plantness, the human being toward humanity. For him this tending is a kind of love, and at the far end of love stands beauty. That causeless pull a person feels before something beautiful is, in Avicenna's eyes, no whim, but the echo in the human being of the most fundamental movement of existence.

Now put these two ideas side by side and see what follows. If beauty is a form of completeness in the object, and if what perceives it is an inner sense that can be trained, then taste is not a preference. It is an ability. And abilities are learned.

This is where the weight the word zevk carries in this tradition comes from. Zevk means, at root, to taste: not to describe a thing from outside, but to have tasted it directly. A saying often repeated among the Sufis puts it this way: the one who has not tasted does not know. This is not a sentence that shuts the door on knowledge; it says that one kind of knowledge can only be acquired by living it. A person who has memorized a book on swimming does not know how to swim. In the same way, a person who has read an essay explaining why a composition is beautiful has not yet heard that composition.

This is why, in the Ottoman world, art was transmitted not through textbooks but through meşk. In Turkish classical music, meşk means learning a piece in the presence of a master, without notation, by singing it over and over. It takes years. What you learn is not only the melody; it is where a note should bend, where it should be held, where it should not be touched at all. In other words, the ear is trained. Calligraphy has its own version: the student writes the same letter thousands of times, the master takes the pen and strikes a line through it, and one day the student looks at a letter of their own and can say, for the first time, "that has not come out right." The moment they can say it is the moment their eye has opened. Nobody showed them a proof. Somebody taught them how to look.

Now we can return to our opening question, and the answer suddenly becomes much clearer. What lies beneath the wish that everyone should love what you love is, most of the time, neither possessiveness nor a sense of superiority. It is the conviction: I can see this, and you can see it too. Kant named that conviction and could not prove it; this tradition, instead of proving it, turned it into a path. If you cannot see it, you are not defective; it means you have not looked yet, and looking can be learned.

But right here the shadow of the same idea appears. Someone who says that seeing beauty can be learned slides very easily into another sentence: if you cannot see what I see, you are behind. The idea of a trainable sense can turn, in the hand of the one doing the training, into a rod. And the brake inside this tradition is in the same place: beauty invites, it does not compel. Nobody can force meşk on another; a student made to sit down by force will write the letter but will not see it. That is the fine line between invitation and imposition, and holding that line is harder than seeing beauty.

Now we come to a point where this entire discussion is changing seriously for the first time in 2 centuries. Because we no longer hold our tastes out to one another. We record them somewhere.

In February 2009, Facebook opened up what is now the most familiar symbol on the internet, the like button. The idea was innocent: people should not have to write a comment on everything; they should be able to give their approval with a single tap. But with that single tap came a silent transformation. Until that day, a liking was a sentence said to somebody; now it became a piece of data given to a system.

The difference looks small. It is not. When you say "this song is beautiful," the one you are addressing is a human being who can contradict you. When you press the like button, the one you are addressing is a model, and it does not contradict; it does not try to understand you, it predicts you. What Kant called the judgment that demands everyone's assent turns into the input of a prediction engine. You no longer need to persuade anyone, because the system is not asking you for a reason. It is only asking for a signal.

The scale of this is larger than people imagine. According to a paper published by Netflix's own researchers in 2015, roughly 80 percent of the hours watched on the platform came from its recommendation systems, the rest from search. YouTube's product manager Neal Mohan said in 2018 that around 70 percent of watch time on the platform came from the recommendation algorithm. So the great majority of what now comes before us is neither something we went looking for nor something a friend held out to us. It is brought toward us.

Eli Pariser, in his book The Filter Bubble, published in 2011, discussed the political consequences of this arrangement; he described how everyone began living inside a feed that confirms their own view. But the side of the matter that faces taste is quieter than its political side, and perhaps more lasting. Because what is lost here is not accurate information. It is the shared object.

Think of it this way. All that contention Kant described rests on two people looking at the same thing. The same painting, the same film, the same folk song. Without a shared object there is nothing about which one can say "you see it too." And recommendation systems dissolve exactly the shared object. Everyone is given their own feed, their own home page, their own cover image; even the poster for the same series is shown differently to two people. To return to Kant's own example, the system serves everyone their own Canary wine, and nobody has to say "to me" anymore, because they are no longer drinking from the same glass as anyone.

The second consequence is more troubling still. A recommendation system is built to predict what you will like. Which means it takes you as you are and serves you as you are. The training described by al-Ghazali, or by the meşk tradition, works in exactly the opposite direction: it sits you down in front of something you do not like today, something you may even find repellent on first hearing, and asks you to stay there. A work that seems dull on the first listening can open up on the third, but only if there is persistence between the first and the third. The algorithm has no such persistence; it sees that you gave up in the first 10 seconds, and it never knocks on that door again. It knows you, but it does not teach you how to look.

And so that old distinction between "I like it" and "it is beautiful" is slowly being erased. The system can measure only the first, because that is the only measurable thing: did you click, how many seconds did you stay, did you watch it to the end. The second, a thing defended on everyone's behalf, enters into no measurement. And what is not measured comes in time to be counted as unimportant.

That is why insisting today carries a different meaning than it did 30 years ago. When you hand a friend a book, when you take a nephew or a niece to their first concert, when you tell somebody "watch this with me," what you are really doing is resisting being predicted. You are building with your own hands a shared object that does not otherwise exist.

But this resistance can easily turn into something else, and it does. We have all seen what arguments about taste look like on the internet: humiliating the person who loves what you do not love, turning taste into a badge of identity, saying with perfect ease, "nothing good ever came of anyone who likes that." This is the diseased form of insistence. To see the difference it is enough to return to Kant's careful word: the judgment of taste demands assent, it cannot extract it. The person who knows they hold no proof invites; the person who imagines they hold proof passes sentence.

Perhaps what this really leaves us with is that the question itself has turned around. When we asked why I want everyone to love what I love, we assumed the answer was selfishness. It was not. That desire turns out to be a refusal to close in on oneself, a way of seeing the person across from you as someone capable of looking at the same world you do. Nobody holds out an earbud to a person they do not care about.

So the real question becomes this: how are we to carry that desire. We have no proof, and we never will; and staying silent is beyond us. One honest posture is left. To sit down beside someone, press play, and stay there, knowing full well that you cannot force anyone to find a thing beautiful. To be hurt if they do not like it, and still not give up. Because that hurt is the firmest proof that we still believe in a world held in common.

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