Appetite-Taste/Nature-Culture

Immanuel Kant once disparaged an Iroquois visitor to Paris for appreciating nothing other than “the eating houses.”  Kant wished to sort out humans guided by appetite from others guided by superior tastes.    A recent article in Aeon magazine deals with food metaphors relative to reading. It charts the trajectory from appetite to taste, suggesting how “In the 18th century, writers began to distinguish between appetite (the connection between reading and the body) and taste (connection between reading and the mind).”

“Appetite” is immediate and indiscriminate.  “Taste,” is selective, refined and mediated.  Appetite and taste may, in ordinary minds, be intermingled.  This would not do for Kant. Aided by free-standing substantives like “body” and “mind” his ideal was not proper integration of the bodily and the mental. It was the segregation of body and mind.  Physiological taste relating to food was suspicious because it remained intertwined with mere appetite.    The more elevated tastes would have little to do with food.  

The pattern here is familiar: (a)  a need to sort out better and worse; (b) mapping better and worse isomorphically with mind and body; (c) thinking that humanity, as the  Aeon writer put it, represents little more than a  “cesspit of ungoverned appetite;” and (d) subsequently, celebrating a power of domination, self-control, as the only hope for keeping appetites in check.

On the other side, there have always been philosophers championing  “natural” tendencies. They warned against substituting impositions of artificiality and convention.  The Stoics and Epicureans moved in this direction.  Their “follow nature” mantra was resurrected by a thinker like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romanticism, and by various communal living experiments in the 1960s.

Both tendencies, the superior-taste crowd and the follow-nature crowd, share one commonality: they are autoreferential. This allows them an escape from risk and responsibility. The superior-taste position says says it’s all about the cultural conventions we have imposed.  End of story. The follow-nature school says, I am just following my own true nature. End of story.

What is absent? Risk and responsibility. These emerge with dependence,  hetero-referentiality. The latter asks of us that we respond to signs and signals coming from outside of us.   

The appetite/taste contrast is one version of the wider nature/culture opposition.  Are there ways to rethink this opposition? To break with autoreferentiality?  To embrace, rather than escape, vulnerability and dependence?  To emphasize the unending need for exploration, questioning, dialogue?  

The answer is yes, but the approach may be surprising--taking taste, this time actual physiological taste, seriously.   Such a taste is unavoidably hetero-referential.  It involves responsiveness, i.e. responding to signs and signals coming from outside of us. Some results: natural appetite and taste are not two contrasting forces. They are correlative.  Second, the “taste” that fosters well-being is neither a “construction,” an artificial, merely subjective imposition, nor is it merely hardwired. It is appetite cultivated, channelled,  informed by experience, experiment and tradition.   

“Taste” serves as a good model for hetero-referential responsibility because it cannot use either culture or nature as a final determining factor. Rather than calling on a single foundation, it always involves election among alternatives. This election, in turn, emerges from clues, indications, signs that are present in a world we have not made but on which we depend.   Taste  not only depends on factors apart from us, but is also, as scientists put it, “multi-modal” involving, as it does, taste buds, smell, tactility, family and cultural practices, visual clues, temperature and even sounds.

What does all this mean?  First of all, we have to reintegrate appetite and taste (also nature/culture).   Appetite requires taste, and by nature we require culture.  Second, when using “taste” metaphorically, we should not stray too far from its physiological, food-related associations.  Wanting to get beyond responsibility defined as election among alternatives, we tend to ignore the irreducibility of the multiple and seek some single criterion. This criterion then is utilized as a simple, straightforward guide which mandates a particular behavior.

When, by contrast, we remain close to the multi-modal understanding of taste, we are always (i) dealing with a multiplicity of factors, (ii) many of those factors involve an inseparable blend of nature/culture, (iii) our response is a melange which seeks a proper balance of factors, (iv) we must always take an active role in adjusting the balance, revising  and polishing it, engaging in an experimental back and forth that moves from worse to better, (v) all the while realizing that a perfect unity or un-revisable blend will never be achieved.  

Kant was right to emphasize, taste, just not in the way he envisioned it.