You can train it like the intellect. Full knowledge whets desire and increases enjoyment. You may know a noble spirit by the elevation of his taste: it must be a great thing that can satisfy a great mind... Taste can be imparted by intercourse.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Taste sounds decorative and functions structurally: it is the internal standard that decides what you consider good, and therefore what you aim at, settle for, and ship. It is also, the text insists, trainable like the intellect, by sustained exposure to the excellent, and contagious through company. This is why the same person produces better work within months of joining a better room: nothing was taught, but the ceiling moved. The practical program is unglamorous: consume above your level on purpose, keep company whose standards embarrass you slightly, and let the discomfort recalibrate what "done" means. One warning: elevation, not universal disdain. The person satisfied by nothing has not refined taste but replaced it with a pose.
Practice
- Feed on the best in your field monthly, the classic case, the master's work, the gold-standard document, so your eye keeps a live benchmark.
- Borrow taste through proximity: one hour with someone whose standards exceed yours resets more than a course (maxims 11 and 44 supply the people).
- Watch what you tolerate; the standard you accept in small things, meetings, drafts, meals, is the standard training you daily.
Use this when
- Use this raising children and juniors: exposure to the excellent early does invisibly what correction later does painfully.
- Use it as a diagnosis when your work plateaus; often the hands are fine and the eye has stopped demanding.
Ignore this when
- Don't wield taste as a weapon; the loudly unsatisfied are performing rank, not standards (his Quixotry warning, and maxim 28's flank).
- Don't let elevated taste paralyse output; the eye should lead the hand by one step, not by a canyon.
A picture of it
A junior architect's drawings are competent and dead. Her senior prescribes no course, only a habit: every Friday, one hour, the same twelve buildings by masters, drawn over by hand until she can feel where each line chose to go. Nothing else changes. Within a year her own lines start choosing, and clients who cannot name what improved begin paying for it. The hand was always adequate. The eye had simply never been fed.
You rise, at most, to the level of what satisfies you. Feed the standard first.