Objectivity and Distance

Carolyn Korsmeyer ( Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy ) questions the traditional hierarchy of the senses that places vision and hearing at the top of the heap.  Why do they come out on top?  Korsmeyer says that the issue is distance; distance keeps the thing perceived (seen, heard) an object, keeps it at arm’s length, and distance is the precondition of objectivity.  Taste, touch, smell require proximity, even intimacy, and so these senses are considered subjective.

Now, on the face of this, the hierarchy Korsmeyer challenges is nutty.  The further I am away, the more space lies between me and the thing I want to know, the better I know it?? Who but a philosopher would think so?  Who but a courtly lover would think that admiring from afar is better than tasting, smelling, touching?

Another reason for the hierarchy is that distance keeps things external, while proximity brings things closer.  Taste requires that I take a bit of the things tasted into my self, into my subjectivity, and thus is not cannot yield knowledge as scientific and sound as vision and sound.  Korsmeyer begs to differ: Taste and smell, she says, are “chemical senses” that depend on factors that are “as it were hard-wired in the individual and not subject of alteration.”

For Korsmeyer, taste and smell are not mechanistic, merely chemical senses.  Cultural factors and individual experience form taste; edible and inedible are categories that depend on cultural norms and personal experience.  And we can refine our sense of taste.  Taste and touch don’t yield mere “sense experience” as empiricists might claim.  They also receive and construct meanings through their interactions with the world.