from “take and eat,” chapter 2

The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin rightly said wine deserves philosophical attention. So too does, I would add, the organ that makes enjoying wine—drunkenness included—possible. Much like the commuters (and kings) who eat in absentia, the history of philosophy has endured long tasteless, insipid periods. And yet, long before the fear of the Lord became the beginning of wisdom—initium sapientiae timor Domini—the literal initium sapientiae was the mouth, the Latin sapere meaning both to know and to taste. To recover the mouth is to bring flavor (sapor) back into sapienza, to remind philosophy that knowledge can begin in fear and contemplation as much as in intimacy and incorporation. Perhaps it is time, as Husserl might (not) have said, to return to the flavors themselves.

Brillat-Savarin published his Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante—“The Physiology of Taste: Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy”—in 1825, just two months before his death. The book has never gone out of print. Its title may sound quaint today, but it gestures toward something quietly radical: a speculative anthropology, a satire of disembodied reason, and a proposal for a new kind of philosophical (or even gastrosophical) method. Appearing merely four decades after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Brillat-Savarin’s invocation of “transcendence” reads as an ironic wink at transcendental philosophy itself—not a critique of pure, “raw” reason, but a reasonably palatable (“cooked,” if you will) approach to the classic hierarchy of senses: a philosophy made from the dining table and not from the scriptorium. Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology substitutes Kant’s a priori forms of sensibility—space and time—with hunger, digestion, and the corporeal stirrings of desire: “Taste, which has for its excitants appetite, hunger, and thirst, is the base of many operations whereof the result is that the individual grows, develops, preserves himself.” More than sensation, taste becomes the condition of possibility of life itself, and thus of cognition: “reflex sensation is the judgment of the mind upon the impressions transmitted to it by the organ [of taste and digestion].” His method is serio-comic, ironic, and exact—never merely satirical, never entirely frivolous, maybe borderline Socratic in its stinging, gadfly-like attack on traditional sensorial hierarchies. Honoré de Balzac thought so highly of the work that he wrote an appendix to its second edition in 1838, dwelling at length on the properties of modern stimulants like tea, coffee, champagne, sugar, and tobacco. For Brillat-Savarin, food was not a secondary concern, not a distraction from the life of the mind. Quite the opposite: he regarded it, without apology, as the most important thing in existence.

When Brillat-Savarin turns to the senses, he does not hesitate to assign taste a—if not the—decisive role. “Let us now glance in a general manner,” he writes, “at the system of our senses […] and we shall see that the Author of Creation had two objects, of which one is the consequence of the other: the preservation of the individual, to assure the duration of the species.” Sight teaches man that he is a part of a whole; hearing warns of approaching danger; touch guards against pain; smell detects the poisonous. But “finally,” he says, “taste decides.” It is taste that initiates digestion, and thanks to digestion, life follows. The senses rest, the body reclines, and the cycle begins again. From here, Brillat-Savarin turns—quietly but unmistakably—to the desire that follows nourishment, “a secret fire,” as he calls it, that stirs “a new organ,” drawing man to share his existence, to fecundate, and thus to fulfill “the most holy of duties.” That taste should come first—as the faculty that sets the entire compass of human life into motion—suggests more than physiological realism. It gestures toward a seam where biology and meaning become indistinguishable. Taste marks the passage from mere life (the preservation of both the individual and the species) to form-of-life: “An animal swallows its food,” Brillat-Savarin wrote. “A man eats it. But only a man of intelligence knows how to dine.” It is in dining—not merely in feeding—that humanity emerges, not as a given but as a practice: a ritual of attention, relation, and incorporation. Perhaps, then, in this seemingly incidental sequence—from taste to incorporation to eros—we catch another glimpse of the Evic Distinction: the moment when flavor, sapor, becomes anthropogenic, when homo becomes sapiens.