Dao Academy

CoursesCourse 30

Aesthetics and Taste: training the sense of beauty

Can a person train the sense of beauty? This course follows a lecture series’ five methods (sensibility, a sense of form, breaking new ground, a disinterested attitude, and practice) from a violinist in a Washington Metro station to Hume’s essay of 1757, a Song-dynasty scroll, Rodin’s old woman, and a Ming garden manual. Each claim is checked against sources, the weak ones are called weak, and the evidence that taste can be trained is weighed honestly.

Start lesson 1

Lessons

  1. 1 A feeling that can be trainedA famous violinist played Bach in a Washington Metro station, and 1,097 people passed. What taste is, whether a feeling can have a standard, why a wider taste is not the same as a higher one, and how class and price labels get into a palate. 24 minCompleted
  2. 2 Learning to seeA rustle in the bamboo, a path nobody drew, a sofa nobody dusted. Four habits of looking, and a sense of form: how the parts of a thing echo one another, in a Song-dynasty scroll and a painting by Manet. 27 minCompleted
  3. 3 Stretching what you can enjoyA medieval woman cast in bronze, a storm watched from indoors, a statue with no arms, a harbor in smoke. Taking in the ugly, the frightening, and the unfinished, and learning how far back to stand. 22 minCompleted
  4. 4 Taste as a practiceA paint box in 1915, four stages on a zither, and a garden made by hand that looks opened by heaven. What practice changes, what the five methods share with Hume’s five marks, and what neuroscience can and cannot say about taste. 18 minCompleted

You’ll be able to

  • Say what the lecture means by taste, state Hume’s and Kant’s answers to whether a feeling can have a standard, and explain why a wider taste is not the same thing as a higher one.
  • Name the four habits of sensibility (a small eye, a strange eye, a willingness to be disappointed, presence) and say what a sense of form looks for, with an example of each.
  • Explain how taking in the ugly, the frightening, and the incomplete, and keeping a distance from one’s own wants, can enlarge taste, and where critics push back.
  • Describe what practice does and does not change, compare the lecture’s five methods with Hume’s five marks of a true judge, and say what neuroscience has and has not shown about taste.

About this course

This course covers 审美与趣味 (Aesthetics and Taste), the question of what a person can do to feel more and to judge better. Other courses in this series ask what beauty is and how we judge it. This one starts from the person who looks, and asks whether the looking can be trained. Its connection to the earlier courses is mostly in method: Course 10 shows how a first number or a frame tilts a judgment, which is how a price label tilts a taste, and Course 11 shows how expectation shapes what we see.

The argument and the examples lead, and they come from the lecture series: why taste matters, then five methods for training it. The five are that lecturer’s own scheme, a useful map and not established doctrine, and the course says so. Around them we add what is ours: dates, names, and quotations checked against sources (several turned out wrong in the lecture, such as the picture of a smoky London in Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, which shows Le Havre, and a Du Fu couplet that comes from a poem about the year 756), activities, an “Another view” and a “Closer to home” in every lesson for readers in China and the United States, and, in the last lesson, a comparison of the five methods with David Hume’s five marks of a true judge, which is this course’s own and is labeled as such.