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which my reasoning faculty then operates to produce objects of knowledge. Ibid.
28
Ibid., 222.
54 TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION
Carolyn Korsmeyer explores the positioning of bodily perception in a
hierarchy of knowledge. She develops an argument that explores the
cognitive and symbolic significance of the senses, particularly the gusta-
tory sense, which is most involved in eating and drinking.29 Korsmeyer
coincides with Heldke s reading of the Western philosophical tradition
(initiated by Plato and Aristotle) wherein touch, smell, and taste are
considered the lowest forms of knowledge, while vision and hearing are
located at the top of this hierarchy.30 This is not to say that from early
Classic Greek philosophy there was no attention to or appreciation of
the body whatsoever. Korsmeyer is aware that Greek philosophers such
as Plato and Aristotle had a positive appreciation of the senses because
they thought to bring some light to the human natural desire to know.
Nevertheless, she points out that there was also a great suspicion of the
senses because they were considered distorters of the knowledge of the
truth of things. 31 And the senses of smell, touch, and taste were consid-
ered the ones that had a greater propensity to bring about distortions
than the higher senses of vision and hearing.
Korsmeyer points out that one reason for this epistemological hierar-
chy is a traditional understanding of vision and hearing as senses that
preserve a distance from the object perceived.32 This account main-
tains that such a distance allows a more objectifying and scientific
construction of the perceived objects, since they bring attention out-
wardly to the objects perceived, rather than inwardly to the body or
sense experience. The philosophical tradition considers smell, touch,
and taste as senses that are more intimate, even more bodily (than
vision and hearing) in their relation to the object sensed, and thus are
more likely to provide subjective rather than objective accounts.
According to Korsmeyer, this traditional view considers taste a subjec-
tive sense that directs attention to one s bodily state rather than to the
world around, that provides information only about the perceiver, and
the preferences for which are not cogently debatable. 33 Above all,
Korsmeyer argues that the strongest reason for a suspicion of taste as the
29
Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste.
30
I shall later address how Thomas Aquinas offers a reversal of this hierarchy, and gives
a privileged role to taste in the construction of meaning, particularly after a conjecture
upon the experience of tasting and eating as enacted in the eucharistic feast.
31
Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 18, 19.
32
This strong account of distancing, however, is not present in Plato s account of the
relationship between knowledge and the senses. I appreciate Catherine Pickstock pointing
this out to me.
33
Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 68 (emphasis in original).
TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION 55
lowest sense is that it is considered more intimately connected with
humanity s tendency to vice, and thus is in greater need of scrutiny and
control, since it can deliver pleasures that tempt one to indulge in the
appetites of eating, drinking, and sex. 34 The equation of taste with
bodily sexual pleasure reaches a peak with Kant s attempt to bring
aesthetics into a universal category, and thus disqualify sexuality from
his schema. In this Kantian equation, only vision and hearing qualify as
aesthetic senses, and touch and taste are reinforced as the lowest cate-
gories.35 Even today, this legacy of what has been called Western visual-
ism is the result of a primary role that the gaze plays in Western
culture (particularly with regard to visual images in modern consumer
societies), which usually neglects or ignores the other senses.36
Besides her deconstructive reading of a philosophical tradition that is
highly suspicious of the gustatory sense, Korsmeyer also presents an
alternative account that considers taste an important cognitive element
for the world and bodily knowledge, and also for a greater understanding
of the complexities of meaning construction.
To support her argument, Korsmeyer first relies upon scientific
research that considers both smell and taste to be chemical senses.
The relevance of such investigations is the understanding of the complex
mechanisms and operations involved in the relationship of the organs of
sense (taste, for instance) with substances, creating a series of chemical
reactions that stimulate neurotransmitters to send messages to the brain
and produce sensations. 37 If this condition is pre-linguistic, it seems
that it is a fixed reality that can be applied universally to every human
being. At times it appears as if Korsmeyer wants to argue for such a
physiological fixity for the purpose of anchoring taste experience to
what she explains as the physiological factors that furnish and restrict
the ability to taste. And, she adds, these factors are as it were hard-
wired in the individual and not subject of alteration. They consist of
certain basic universal taste dispositions as well as unchangeable indi-
vidual differences. 38 Korsmeyer is therefore trying to move beyond a
34
Ibid., 3.
35
Kant quoted ibid., 57.
36
See e.g. S. Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary
Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Rachel Bouldy, Just Looking: Consumer Culture
in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985); Constance Classen, Worlds of
Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (New York: Routledge,
1993).
37
Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 71.
38
Ibid., 95.
56 TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION
philosophical tradition that sees taste as an inward or merely subjective
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