Description: Musing in Florence in June of 1858, Nathaniel Haw thorne said of himself, "I am sensible that a process is going on--and has been, ever since I came to Italy-- that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before". This is a book devoted to the reflective analysis of the enterprise in which many of us, like Hawthorne, find ourselves engaged: the cultivation of our individual taste. Charles Wegener writes for and from the standpoint of thoughtful amateurs, those who, loving the beautiful and the sublime, wish to become more fully the sort of person to whom these goods reliably disclose themselves. Here traditional aesthetic analysis is redirected to a search for the norms that tell us how we use our intelligence, our imagination, and our senses in becoming "more fastidious, yet more sensible", exploring such concepts as disinterestedness, catholicity, communicability, austerity, objectivity, and authority. Finally, Wegener discusses questions about the relation of our aesthetic lives to other activities, norms, and human goods, arguing that taste, far from being a mere grace or luxury, is a necessary expression of that freedom which is at once the fruit and the condition of all culture. The Discipline of Taste and Feeling articulates in a sustained and compelling manner both the singularity and the universality of aesthetic experience. Those wishing to understand their own relation to art and the beautiful will find the book enlightening and enriching.

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