Presented at the workshop on: "The Taste of Wine": its History and Philosophy", held in Paris, Institut Nicod, on May 25th, 2012. Here is the program of the workshop: http://www.tastings.fr/event/2012_taste-of-wine.php?lang=fr

1. Discussion
What is the Ultimate Taste?
Gloria Origgi
CNRS – InstitutNicod
http://gloriaoriggi.blogspot.com

2. How to render philosophically this
experience:

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.)

7. 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)

8. 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…

9. 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?)

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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)

13. 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”

14. 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.

15. Blaise Pascal:
No one dies so poor that he does not
leave something behind…