Approach to Aesthetics

"Sibley was a wonderful aesthetician. He wrote interestingly and carefully about the subject. He was very keen to dismiss quick reactions, very keen to give Aesthetics a firm foundation. As he says, to do Aesthetics properly you need to understand a lot of the rest of philosophy. It’s not for amateurs to go in there and simply express their preferences. He’s very good on that front. But there he is, a very impressive high performing writer of philosophical aesthetics who urned to taste and smell. There’s an extended essay in the book I’ve chosen called ‘Taste, Smell and Aesthetics’ and he starts to say look, I’m going to ask whether we can talk about aesthetic experience and the aesthetic values of taste and smell. He points out that usually they’re ignored or relegated as unimportant. He tells us that he’s focusing on taste and smell for two reasons. First — because, he says, that it’ll test what we regard as the boundaries of the aesthetic, how far can we go, and if people think it’s just what I get through vision or audition, especially thinking of painting and music and our engagement through the arts with the eyes and eyes — if people tell you that’s all you can have and everything else won’t count, he says well you’re going to have to tell me why and that will be very interesting. Secondly, he thinks when you look at taste and smell, even if we concede that we could have something aesthetic going on there, many people think it’s trifling or unimportant. His reaction is well, let’s not worry about that. Let’s see what the range of aesthetic experience is. I’m with Sibley, and I take my lead from Hume and others who started the taste aesthetic, that you should see aesthetics as part of everyday life. Questions of aesthetics touch everything from the arrangement of plates in front of you, and how you arrange your clothes or your home, to fashion and food, right up to the finer more rarefied pleasures. Aesthetics is ubiquitous: it’s around us, we’re always expressing aesthetic preferences and choices. He concentrates on taste and smell. For me, he’s one of very few philosophers to have really thought about the interests in and complexity of taste and smell instead of designating them ‘lower senses’ and reducing them to merely bodily experiences. He doesn’t believe that, and, as he says — and for me this is a clarion call — if you’re going to study taste and smell and the aesthetics of tastes and smells, you’d better learn a bit more about those senses. We still know relatively little. So, he’s urging us to pay more attention to the perceptual side of taste and smell. He’s not. But he is alive to what we now call flavours and the distinction between tastes and flavours. He’s one of very few philosophers analysing this, and doing so early on. Look at the basic tastes in his day, I think umami wasn’t really on the map — but you think of salt, sweet, sour, bitter: he said it’s not true that they exhaust what we can taste. He has a lovely list of cantaloupe, and lemon, and mango, and mint, and raspberries, and so on, and says you can’t get those from combinations of the basic tastes. He knows that. Try thinking of the flavour of an onion: what is that? Is the flavour of an onion salt plus something else. If so what? There is no arithmetic to give you the flavour, and yet he wants to say we recognise these, as he said, not simple but single flavours — onion or mint or cinnamon or raspberry. We’re quite good at seeing those as separate and distinct. These are single flavours but he knows they’re massively influenced by the contribution that smell makes to our identifying them. He knows that taste and smell go together because he has realised that you can’t do the arithmetic of making up all the things that we can taste as single flavours composed from the portfolio of basic tastes. “The boundary between the scientist and the chef is disappearing.” Yes. He starts off the essay by saying I’m going to talk about the aesthetics of tastes and smells and I’m not going to wonder whether there is such a thing as works of art that are just made of odours, or whether there are works of art that are just tastes. He wants to put that issue to the side. But he is tackling people like Kant and Roger Scruton who say you can’t have an aesthetics of taste and smell. He says that’s usually asserted rather confidently and from a position of authority with a certain amount of ‘don’t you just agree,’ but when you look for the arguments, they’re not really there. One of his challenges to Scruton is to say, you Roger Scruton say that you couldn’t see aesthetically interesting objects in tastes and smells because we consume these things and they disappear. Whereas, when we’re looking at a beautiful painting or listening to polyphonic music sung by a choir, it’s still there and we can hear it again and again. Sibley simply points out that the whole point of chefs with their classic dishes is their reproducibility. The same is true of perfumes — Chanel No. 5 remains Chanel No. 5. People go to great lengths in the drinks industry to make sure that Johnnie Walker Black Label still tastes the same way that it should do. So, reproducibility is some part of identifying the tastes of that whiskey, or the smell of that perfume, or the classic dish. So, the argument about consuming it and therefore it doesn’t remain as an aesthetic object just doesn’t work."