Despite their preoccupation with the analysis of sensory experience, philosophers have ignored taste, smell, and touch, focusing instead on vision as the most important sense.
German philosopher Hans Jonas’s “The Nobility of Sight” is a prominent example. Only vision, he argued, gives us eternal, universal truths, which have been philosophy’s concern throughout most of its history. Vision puts us in mind of the eternal because time is not essential to it. When we view a landscape we see the visual field displayed all at once, in no time. An object can be visually identified immediately without a sequence of appearances over time, in contrast to sound, touch, or taste that need time to reveal the character of their objects. Visual objects also have stability. We can view an object, look away, and then return to the very same object as if nothing has changed unlike the fleeting, ever-changing objects of taste, smell, and sound.
Furthermore, Jonas argues, with vision we can see objects with accuracy if we maintain our distance from them. With touch, smell, and taste we must be intimate with the object thus increasing the chances that personal bias might influence our understanding of it.
Despite their illustrious pedigree, these are very bad arguments. We learn nothing of the eternal through vision, or any other sensory mechanism, and vision without the opportunity for subsequent confirmation, in time, would be the source of constant error. Furthermore, our sense of the stability of objects is as dependent on the sense of touch as on vision. The stability of our visual field depends on the body’s orientation is space, which is maintained, in part, by our tactile contact with solid objects.
As to the alleged objectifying distance of vision, science shows that vision involves intimate contact with physical objects–swarms of photons. We are just as capable of misinterpreting those photons as we are the signals from taste buds. Psychological research has demonstrated the unreliability of eye-witness testimony and perceptual judgments are hardly immune to subjective bias. Objects are often seen at a distance or under conditions otherwise unsuitable for reliable identification.
At best, vision’s distance and the illusion of simultaneity allow us to spin metaphors about the eternal and universal. But misleading metaphors are bad metaphors.
However, there is an important contrast between vision and the other senses. Through vision we do gain a sense of an horizon, an area beyond our present space. This is surely important for the development of our imagination in our evolutionary history.
By contrast, touch , taste, and smell root us in the here and now. Objects must be spatially and temporally present for them to effect these sensory modalities. But why should experience rooted in the here and now be uninteresting to philosophy?
If taste is philosophically uninteresting, perhaps it is because philosophers lack taste.
As you know if you’ve been reading this blog I’ve long been interested in the expressive potential of music and wine, especially regarding the expression of emotion. Because everyone knows that music is especially good at expressing emotion, explaining how it does so appears to be the more straightforward task since many people would deny that wine could express emotion at all. If we’re going to make progress on the wine/emotion question we will have solve the music/emotion question first.
