Discussion

What is the Ultimate Taste?

Gloria Origgi

CNRS – InstitutNicod

http://gloriaoriggi.blogspot.com

How to render philosophically this

experience:

Taste as Authority vs. Taste as

Commonsense

Taste seems to be a instable concept that lies in

a impossible realm between a Culture and

Nature.

Oxford English Dictionary

• OED:

– Taste: Mental perception of quality, judgment, discriminative faculty.

– Taste: The fact or condition of liking or preferring something; inclination, social disposition.

– Taste: The sense of what is appropriate, harmonious or beautiful; discernment and appreciation of the beautiful in nature and art; the faculty of perceiving and enjoying what is excellent in art, literature and the like.

The concept of taste seems to

encompass all these philosophical

oppositions:

• Cultural Relativism vs. Universalism

• Cultural (learned) vs. Perceptual

• Normative (ex.OED “the appreciation of the

beautiful”) vs. Descriptive

• Natural vs. Artificial

• Objective vs. Subjective

Cultural Relativism vs. Universalism

Taste is culturally determined and yet it is a

universal experience of recognizing some

features or qualities in things (ex. universality of

some disgust experiences, preference for

sugar, etc.)

Cultural (learned) vs. Perceptual

• We do not learn to experience colors, but we learn to taste wine

• Taste has been mainly studied in sociology as a capacity of

discrimination that deeply depends on our social and cultural

condition (Pierre Bourdieu: La Distinction). Bourdieu speaks of

an effect of “naturalization of the social world” as it becomes

deeply entrenched in our perceptual experience.

• Yet the perceptual dimension of taste is unavoidable: it is

immediate, encapsulated, bottom-up, cannot be corrected “top-

down” on the spot (although we can educate our taste in time)

Normative vs. Descriptive

• Taste has a normative dimension: there is an

implicit scale on which we measure the

“rightness” of our experience

• Yet, our experience has a content, it points to

some real features of the world…

Natural vs. Artificial

• Our taste faculty challenges the opposition between natural taste and artificial taste.

• In food and wine, we taste the product of craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is based on a special relation between the natural world and the artificial world of production.

• We can reproduce artificially a “natural taste” and what is natural, that is, “picked up in the woods” can taste awfully artificial (have you ever tried wild strawberries?)

Taste as a form of “Perceptual

Wisdom”

What is Wisdom?

– It is based on the “Authority of the Past”

– It is a culturally constructed capacity of judging

“right”

– It is based on what we consider

“commonsensical”, “intuitively right”, reasonable.

What is Common sense?

• Common sense refers historically to an average experiential/practical knowledge dependant on a universal humankoiné

• It is an historically and socially constructed immediacy with an experience (cf. Clifford Geertz: “Commonsense as a Cultural System”)

• Commonsense beliefs cannot be used either to distinguish between what we know through our eyes and ears and what we know through culture. Both kinds of beliefs can be commonsensical.

The “right taste” experience possesses

the natural authority of craftsmanship

Craftsmanship: The intelligence that comes from

afar possessed an authority which gave it

validity, even when it was not subject to

verification.

(W. Benjamin, Illuminations)

Paul Valéry

The authority of craftsmanship is that of the perfect things in nature, flawless pearls, full-bodied, matured wines, truly developed creatures and calls them: the precious product of a long chain of causes similar to one another. The accumulation of such causes has its temporal limit only at perfection.

“The patient process of Nature” was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work of paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are placed on top of the other – all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated”

What is the “Ultimate Taste” or the

“Right Taste” Experience”?• It is experiencing the Authority of Nature, that is, the

“patient accumulation of causes similar to one another”

• It is an experience that reconnects us with a way of telling a story about ourselves, about the way in which our commonsense, our capacity of immediate feeling has been constructed in our life, our childhood, through our authorities.

• It is an act of deference to a past word of authorities we accept because they constitute ourselves.

• Clifford Geerts says that common sense is “the world in its authority.” I would reformulate its motto in conclusion by saying that it is not only the world, rather, the words of our mothers and fathers, their ways of crafting our natural world, intheir eternal authority.

Blaise Pascal:

No one dies so poor that he does not leave something behind…