As long as you mean something straightforward by "sense of the aesthetic," like "sense of taste" or "discernment regarding beauty," I think most people would consider the answer to your first question obvious: Yes. That doesn't mean the answer "Yes" is true, only that it is a common assumption about beauty and one's ability to discern it. The common assumption lies behind arts-education programs for children. The thinking is that if children don’t get exposed to good music, visual art, film, and literature early enough in life, they will not come to take genuine pleasure in it. And where they do not take genuine pleasure in music or poetry, they will have more difficulty telling the fine examples of each from what is crude or catchy or otherwise vulgar. The process probably makes more sense in connection with such complex and difficult cultural productions as Beethoven’s late quartets and Ozu’s films than with natural phenomena. The person completely unexposed to such cultural productions might...

This feels like a question informed by Kant’s understanding of beauty. Whether it is or not, it’s certainly a question in tune with Kant; because, for Kant, natural beauty dominates his examples of beautiful objects and sets the tone for his analysis of beauty in general. There seems to be a constant suspicion in Kant that art we find beautiful is somehow a contrivance, something put together in a way that the artist knows will appear beautiful to human beings, or at least pleasant in appearance. And because the artist aims at pleasing the human senses, so-called beautiful art threatens to collapse into a species of the merely pleasant. A beautiful flower, on the other hand, has not been contrived. Kant seems to understand nature mechanistically – or rather, he thinks it is always open to a mechanistic interpretation. And given that it is, the spontaneous appearance of something in nature like a beautiful flower or a magnificent sunset gives one the sense of having discovered beauty, not just...

Many answers have been given to this question. Before we try out such answers, consider one broad way to categorize them. Is experiencing beauty about getting us to do something, or is it about our thinking or feeling a certain way? In other words, if there’s a purpose or function to finding things beautiful, do you think that should be a pragmatic function issuing in action? Or can it be a contemplative function issuing in a kind of thinking (or feeling, etc.)? This might even come down to Yes or No regarding the first question. Sometimes people say something like “The instinct to find people and things beautiful originates in sexual desire. It begins with our wish to propagate.” An answer like that connects the judgment of beauty with action. All the way back to Aristotle, philosophers have objected that beauty can be understood without reference to sexual desire; and in fact it can get complicated to try to trace every sense of beauty to such desire. Consider landscapes, sunsets, etc. More...