The carpet embroidered with flowers has sprouted green,
and Kant is like radishes, so fresh and fragrant,
I bite into the flesh and feel the tangy
taste of the argument on my tongue.
halina poświatowska1
In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, Emma C. Spary discusses an array of intersections among the discourses of diet, taste, health, and science in France under the rule of two Louises: xiv and xv. Cuisine was then studied as a tool for consciously forming one’s body and soul. At the opposite pole, food was abhorred as an enemy mighty enough to debilitate one’s physique and one’s morality alike.2 Various foods were attributed the power of whetting or regulating appetite, and thus of molding both individual and collective bodies – of “affect[ing] the body, nerves, and mind.”3 The dispute around food was implicated in a broader conflict in which tradition and nature clashed with innovation and civilization. People began a new practice of looking for advice on what and how to eat in printed sources.
Spary identifies cultural, political, and economic factors which fueled interest in matters of the table. The Enlightenment witnessed transformations in modes of food production, as a result of which some foodstuffs which had been luxuries before, such as sugar, chocolate, and coffee, underwent democratization, and consumption styles changed.4 As chefs perfected the culinary art, nouvelle cuisine came into being. In the 19th century, all these tendencies
Interest in nutrition resulted not only from an urge to improve culinary experiences, but first and foremost from the belief that the stomach was not just the place where food was digested, but also the locus of moral and political anxieties.7 As Spary emphasizes, digestion was perceived in the 18th century as an act in which mind and matter converged.8 Digestive processes, both good and bad, were viewed as a channel through which social institutions (such as culturally recognized culinary practices), political institutions (such as the organizations and offices involved in food supply), and natural factors (such as the climate) affected individuals.9 In other words, digestion was a lens that focalized the relations between the external world and the individual. Consequently, it does not come as a surprise that this natural process attracted the attention of philosophers affiliated with various schools of thought. In the eyes of 18th-century thinkers, the scientific study of nutrition and digestion acquired an exceptionally important role in how people functioned in the world and society. As a result, these processes were easily relatable to the fundamental philosophical questions of the day. The opposition of body and mind is reflected in writings on cuisine, diet, and health produced at the time. After all, proper nutrition was deemed to be one of the manifestations of critical reason. It was then that questions such as what it meant to be a rational person in the kitchen and at the table, or how to make dietary choices more rational and thus improve the physical and moral condition of the nation as a whole, were asked for the first time.10 It was not by accident then that philosophers’ inquiries into nutrition came to ponder whether eating should seek to meet basic needs in conformity with the principles of living a healthy life or should train the refinement of taste. Such disputes are exemplified in the clash between Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński. Rousseau is
The Enlightenment tradition of “scientifying” food continued in a plethora of healthy eating manuals. The most popular writers on food included Grimod de La Reyniere12 and Eugène Briffault,13 who depicted culinary Paris with outstanding expertise, and Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who combined socio-cultural reflection on dietary practices with their medical and scientific examination. Written in 1825, that is, twenty-one years after Kant’s death, his The Physiology of Taste14 resounds with the Enlightenment’s legacy, in which appetite was linked to reason and morals. The relationship between these three factors forms one of the major axes of my argument in this chapter.
As eating became one of the central preoccupations of Enlightenment philosophy, it naturally appeared in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. They both studied taste as a source of corporeal pleasures, and they were also fascinated by taste as a metaphor – as the sense responsible for assessing aesthetic values. While this approach to the notion of taste was as a matter of fact first proposed by Baltasar Gracián, a Spanish Jesuit from Saragossa,15 Hume and Kant are the chief authorities on taste evoked in aesthetic debates today.16
1
In 1755, The Edinburgh Review was founded to spread information about all texts published in Scotland, as well as about foreign publications of the greatest interest to enlightened readers. The range of themes covered by the journal was fairly extensive. Its first issue contained reviews of A System of Moral Philosophy by Francis Hutcheson, of the history of Peter the Great authored by Alexander Gordon of Auchintoul, and of Elizabeth Cleland’s A New and Easy Method of Cookery.17 The latter was the first cookbook to be printed in Edinburgh, and Hume likely had it in his library (Fig. 1).
William Zachs, an eminent bibliophile and author of the catalogue of an exhibition celebrating the tri-centenary of Hume’s birth, suggests that the philosopher had more cookbooks at home and certainly possessed a collection of French cookery books.18 Admittedly, they are not included in the official inventory of his library, but they may have been kept in the kitchen and thus escaped the attention of archivists.
Elizabeth Cleland, A New and Easy Method of Cookery, 1755 (from the collection of William Zachs)
James Boswell called Hume the “northern Epicurus.”19 Hume did not shun the pleasures of the table – good wine, delicious food, and perfect conversation.20 His numerous portraits show a benevolent, rounded face, which perfectly
2 Beauty: between the Subjective and the Universally Accepted
Though Hume’s essays frequently addressed popular and topical themes, they reflected his philosophical ideas. In the introduction to the Polish edition of Hume’s selected essays (1955), Władysław Tatarkiewicz avers that “in their position on truth […] they subscribe to pluralism: there are many truths. And to relativism: all truths are relative. To subjectivism: good and evil are not properties of things, but products of the mind. And to practicism: the world is known in the practice of life, and philosophy will not come up with anything beyond what life has found out.”29 Other researchers share the notion that there is an affinity between Hume’s essays and his A Treatise of Human Nature. Carolyn Korsmeyer opens her paper “Hume and the Foundations of Taste” with a claim that the gist of “Of The Standard of Taste” corresponds to Hume’s views about
What made Hume revisit the theme of taste? In January 1755, the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufacturers and Agriculture committed to annually funding twenty awards in various disciplines, including “the best discovery in Sciences,” fine writing, “the best printed and most correct book,” an array of paper and textile products (including ruffles, bone-lace, and rags), the best drawing, whisky, strong ale, and “the best hogshead of porter.”32 Some winners received medals and others, money prizes. Among the numerous categories eligible for the awards was the best essay on taste. The prize was not awarded in the first year, and in the subsequent year it went to the Essay on Taste by Alexander Gerard, Professor at Marischal College in Aberdeen. Hume, an active member of the Society from its foundation, sat on the panel that conferred the award on Gerard in 1756. However, he did not agree with all of Gerard’s ideas, and in response to him he wrote “Of the Standard of Taste,” a polemic which has ever since been accused of inconsistency and the adulation of neoclassicism by some, and lauded for its insightfulness and critical sensitivity by others.33 What Hume did not like in Gerard’s argument was his interpretation of the views of Francis Hutcheson, which linked the discrimination between correct and incorrect judgments of taste to the skill of grasping the objective properties of the object under assessment.34 In Hume’s view, “to seek in the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to
I have had in my family, by father’s side, two of the rarest tasters that were ever known in La Mancha; and I will give you the proof of their skill. A certain hogshead was given to each of them to taste, and their opinion asked as to the condition, quality, goodness, or badness of the wine. One tried it with the tip of his tongue; the other only put it to his nose. The first said the wine savoured of iron; the second said it had rather a twang of goat’s leather. The owner protested that the vessel was clean, and the wine neat, so that it could not taste either of iron or leather. Notwithstanding this, the two famous tasters stood positively to what they had said. Time went on; the wine was sold off, and, on cleaning the cask, a small key, hanging to a leathern thong, was found at the bottom.40
The anecdote serves two ends. Firstly, it illustrates the similarity between “mental” and “physical” tastes and, secondly, it emphasizes that both taste and beauty are founded on feelings.
Hume entertains no doubts that the same sensitivity governs culinary and aesthetic assessments. This sensitivity enables one to perceive beauty or ugliness, and to taste dishes so as to appreciate the delicate interplays of their components: “A good palate is not tried by strong flavours; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest.”41 Such a degree of astuteness is rarely encountered, and it takes a perfectly working sensory apparatus, mental incisiveness, and intensive work on self-improvement to achieve it. Insofar as making the judgments of taste is also helped by “the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty,”42 Hume recommends the practice of art as well. Comparable training based on collecting experiences and practical exertions goes into the making of a gourmand, too.
Experience resulting from contact with multiple instances of beauty guarantees the certainty of assessment since “[b]y comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame, and learn how to assign the due degree to each.”43 If a
The substance of art is exceptionally delicate and complex. The mind must be “tuned” to accomplish harmony between form and sensation and, consequently, to experience aesthetic pleasure. Such a “tuning” is premised on a careful arrangement, because
[t]hose finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness, according to their general and established principles. The least exterior hindrance to such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion, and confounds the operation of the whole machine.46
Beauty may only be discerned when multiple conditions are met: “we must choose with care a proper time and place, and bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object.”47 The ultimate standards of taste should be established by negotiating positions within a circle of experts boasting extraordinarily sensitive tastes.
3
Kant credited Hume with waking him up from a “dogmatic slumber,” yet he did not abide by the statements on taste advanced by his Scottish forerunner. Unlike Hume, who defined aesthetic taste by analogy to physiological taste, Kant put judgements on beauty in opposition to culinary preferences.
If we always condemn culinary art to exclusion from aesthetic discourse whenever we think of it from the perspective of aesthetic tradition, we have Kant to blame for this. This relegation ensues from the ambiguity captured by Martin Jay in his Songs of Experience. Changes in aesthetic discourse caused a separation of art from religion and morality, and undermined the belief in inherently beautiful things. Such developments could have bred appreciation for the bodily, sensory responses of the onlookers. This did not happen and, as Jay explains: “The subject who emerged from this discourse was not, however, permitted to follow his fleshly desires and interests, but was instead understood in the tradition that culminated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment as inherently spectatorial, contemplative, and disinterested.”48 Is such a “subject” capable of deriving pleasure from a good meal? Admittedly, Kant himself does not answer this question directly, but his response can be gleaned from his biographers’ accounts and from his own writings.
Stefan Kaczmarek, who penned the Polish biography of Kant, observes that the philosopher “liked good food and first-rate wines. He knew about cooking as well.”49 This is not enough, however, Kaczmarek feels, to consider Kant “a sophisticated gourmand.” For his part, Rodolphe Gasché quotes in his “Figure or Form? The Viewpoint of the Stomach” Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, who recalls that Kant had “extremely refined sensual tastes in general.”50 This difference of opinions may be caused by a discrepancy cited by Gasché: “But let us also note that although he appreciated well-chosen and well-prepared dishes,
All in all, the philosopher’s interest in things culinary was remarkable enough for his friend Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel “to openly joke that Kant would write a Critique of the Art of Cooking one day.”53 Meals at Kant’s family home were simple, modest, and dull. The staples of the diet in Prussia, which was famed for good beer, included salted pork, fish, and brown bread.54 Kant’s culinary preferences and habits have been quite well researched. Fresh cod was his favorite dish,55 but he would also eat meat, provided it was not tough. He was particularly careful about it when he himself and most of his guests had bad teeth due to old age: “He insisted that meat should be ‘tenderized,’ that is, left until it began to go off because its natural toughness disappeared then, and it could be eaten easily even without teeth.”56 He believed in the beneficial effects of eating carrots and drinking wine, but did not like beer, which he regarded as unhealthy.57 Kant only ate one meal a day – dinner, which he always downed with half a bottle of wine. When young, he had a preference for red wines and liked light Medoc; later, he opted for white wines.58 In the morning, before work, he settled for thin tea and a pipe. He got up at five every day. The regularity of his daily schedule became proverbial. The order of his day and his selection of foods and beverages were connected to his firm belief that “diet and proper lifestyle could bring relief and improve physical condition.”59 Kant was afflicted by all kinds of ailments throughout his life. He suffered from real and imagined health problems.60
Eventually, Kant purchased a house in December 1783. It was centrally located, spacious, and comfortable. On the ground floor, there were the kitchen and the hall in which Kant gave his lectures. The first floor was occupied by a dining room, a living room, and a modest study decorated with a portrait of Rousseau, the only ornament in the entire house. The bedroom was located on the top floor.62 Owning a house and having a female cook working for him, Kant could finally stop eating at restaurants and pubs, and thus was no longer at risk of awkward situations, such as that related by Borowski: “One day, he left the place because there was a man there who, though reasonable, spoke too slowly and with excessive pathos about trifles. Kant hated such talk, and would change eateries for a reason like this.”63 Another restaurant was dropped from the list of his go-to places when various people “tried to join in without being invited, expecting that he would lecture them at lunch and answer their objections. He wanted to … free himself from anything that exerted the mind and, as he used to say, ‘give honor to the body.’ But apart from those, anyone from any social class was welcome.”64
I was every day with Kant [three days in all], and once I was invited to dinner. He is the most cheerful and most entertaining old man, the best compagnon, a true bon-vivant in the most honorable sense. He digests the
heaviest foods as well, while his readers get indigestion over his philosophy. But you can recognize the man of the world and taste by the fact that I did not hear a word of his philosophy even during the most intimate hours.65
At fifty-nine, Kant could repay the hospitality he had previously received, but his regular famous dinners did not commence until the spring of 1787. Initially, he invited his friend and former student Christian Jacob Kraus as company. With time, the group of diners increased. His frequent guests included the mayor of Königsberg Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, the poet and secretary at the Ministry of War Johann Georg Scheffner, the chemist Karl Gottfried Hagen, doctor Rink, Professor Pörschke, Professor Gensichen, the bank director Ruffmann, Inspector Brahl, the pastor Sommer, the English merchant Robert Motherby, Kant’s secretary Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, and his older brother Johann Benjamin. Briefly, the elite of Königsberg met at Kant’s table.66 For some time, Kraus dined with Kant every day, but he was not really his guest, because he paid for his food.67 Kant himself did not cook, but if he liked a dish, he was interested in how it was made and of what ingredients.68 He was fond of talking about cooking with women, because he believed that “a woman belonged in the kitchen” and that every female should be versed in these matters. Kant was of the opinion that “all women should be educated so as to be able to fulfill their life’s mission in marriage. He advised teaching daughters cooking rather than playing music, because when a future husband returned home tired from work what would be surer to win the wife his love – a good meal without music or music without food?”69 Consequently, as Jachmann reports, every good mistress of the house dreaded Kant’s apt criticism and left no stone unturned in attempting to please the palate of that gourmand.70 Sometimes conversations about housekeeping and recipes occasioned socially awkward moments. Borowski recounts a situation in which an elegant lady rebuked Kant, stating that she resented being treated like a cook. Kant reportedly skillfully placated
Although the fourth – gastronomical – Critique never came into being, let us outline Kant’s standpoints on food and taste.
4 Aesthetic Taste and Physiological Taste
According to Kant, the experience of beauty is characterized by distance and disinterested necessity. The realm of taste is located at the opposite end of the spectrum – the pole of contingency, no commonly shared opinion, and randomness – with distance replaced by maximum union. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant analyzes various forms of our capacity for experiencing pleasure, and identifies three types of it. One of them, which he calls “the agreeable” (das Angenehme) comes from the body, which is stimulated by sensations conveyed by the excited senses. As Martin Jay explains: “Here the individual body with all its appetites and antipathies is the arbiter, not a cultural or universal norm.”72 This norm reigns supreme in pleasures of the second type, that is, “delight in the good” (das Wohlgefallen am Guten), where pleasure is bound up with the need to do good. It is guided by a utilitarian goal, as Jay argues: “In this case there is always a functional or utilitarian dimension to our pleasure which is not an end in itself.”73 The third form of pleasure may resemble the first insofar as the senses – and thus the body – matter in it. Beyond this similarity, however, there is little that links the two kinds of pleasure. Kant refers to this third species as “delight in the beautiful” (das Wohlgefallen am Schönen), and insists that this is the only form of aesthetic pleasure. Crucially, this pleasure rules out any bodily satisfaction, and stands for a manner of disinterested experience of beauty, irrespective of the real existence of the pleasing object. Aesthetic
As Jay elucidates, according to Kant, a meal cannot be regarded as a work of art because “our sensation of the aesthetic object and its intrinsic properties or qualities need not coincide, as they must with an agreeable meal (food may look appetizing, but it must taste good to bring us genuine pleasure). Because of this distinction, we have no direct interest in the object, only in its representation or semblance.”75 Still, despite this division, the term “taste” is used both to denote the sense responsible for the sensation of pleasure from a meal (physiological taste) and to refer to the faculty of making judgments in the aesthetic realm (aesthetic taste). In Kant’s view, the latter variety of taste concerns “making social judgments of external objects within the power of imagination”;76 in other words, it signifies aesthetic judgment which pertains exclusively to the beautiful form of an object, rather than to the entirety of this object. In this respect, aesthetic delight differs from bodily pleasure, because pleasure is here felt by the mind, which is capable of “ideal feelings,” and not by the sensual body. Kant insists that for judgment to be triggered by something else or more than the sense impression of that which pleases, it is imperative that understanding should be involved as a faculty of representing the universal: “The judging of an object through taste is a judgment about the harmony or discord of freedom, in the play of the power of imagination and the lawfulness of understanding, and therefore it is a matter only of judging the form aesthetically (the compatibility of the sense representations), not the generation of products, in which the form is perceived.”77
Kant dissociates aesthetics from epistemology and ethics. Effected in this way, the autonomy of art uncouples it from the necessity of rational and scientific logic and subordinates it to the principles of “the logic of the imagination.”78 In Kant’s view, since aesthetic judgments are non-conceptual and disinterested, they are devoid of any purposiveness which might constrain the
5 The Nature of Physiological Taste
Kant calls taste and smell the “senses of pleasure” because of their “receptivity for certain objects of external sensation.”82 As a property of the palate, the tongue, and the throat, taste is intrinsically subjective, but it may also take social forms, as is the case with, for example, national cuisines.83 The rules governing eating styles in respective cultures are, of course, of limited compass, and though they are binding for all people in a given culture, they “can make no claim to true universality or, consequently, to necessity either (the judgment of everyone else about taste that savors must agree with mine).”84
Taste “in its use […] is to be understood either as taste that merely differentiates or, at the same time, as taste that also savors [for example whether something is sweet or bitter, or whether what is tasted (sweet or bitter) is pleasant].”85 While the former kind of taste may aspire to being universally recognized, the verdicts of the palate are definitively individual when it comes to pleasure or displeasure that arises from contact with one or another food
Some of Brillat-Savarin’s views dovetailed with Kant’s in a variety of ways. In The Physiology of Taste, he wonders whether marine or freshwater fish are superior, and ultimately leaves this question unanswered, without taking a conclusive stance on it: “Every man reacts differently to a thing: his fleeting sensations cannot be expressed in any known symbols, and there is no scale for determining whether a cod, or a sole, or a turbot is better than a salmon trout, a fine fat pike, or even a six- or seven-pound tench.”87 At another place, however, he authoritatively asserts that truffles and pheasant do not really go well together,88 and insists with an equal emphasis that as for quail, “it is unfortunate to serve it any way but roasted or en papillote.”89 When discussing bouillons, Savarin mentions that “it is generally agreed” that the French cook the best soups.90 Is Savarin’s “it is generally agreed” not redolent of Kant’s sensus communis? Surely authoritative opinions about the superiority of certain textures, products, and techniques over others belie the assertion that the claims of taste are merely private? We remember that Kant’s biographers reiterate the philosopher’s appreciation of good food. This presupposes the possibility of objective assessment and telling good food from bad food. Such assumptions suggest that it is viable to compare sensations and share opinions, despite the relative subjectivity of the sense of taste. Food bloggers and writers of culinary guidebooks, as well as their readers, believe that tolerably credible evaluations of a dish or a restaurant can indeed be provided. If we genuinely agreed that de gustibus non est disputandum, then rankings of the best restaurants – which insist that they represents something like “a universally valid choice” – would altogether lose their raison d’être. Taste is located between the rigor of gastronomic verdicts and the freedom of individual choices. Was Kant right then to contend that physiological taste and aesthetic taste are entirely different?
One of Kant’s central tenets holds that art is essentially characterized by disinterestedness and a distance between the artwork and the audience. Do the utilitarian essence of meals and the maximum unity in the act of ingestion irrevocably remove a perfect soup from the sacred realm of art? A situation
However, it is not always the case that we eat or drink because we are spurred on by appetite or thirst. Brillat-Savarin observes that humans enjoy the privilege of drinking without being thirsty.96 While this privilege does not encompass water – “the only liquid that truly appeases thirst, and it is for this reason that only a small quantity of it is drunk”97 – it covers other “liquors,” among which alcohol reigns supreme and “carries to the nth degree the excitation of our palates.”98 Alcohol is elevated into a symbol of humanity, as Savarin emphasizes that humans differ from animals in caring about the future and in “the desire for fermented liquors.”99 Whereas we share the need to appease hunger with animals, the pleasures of the table are reserved solely for people. These pleasures are bound up with the transformation of nature into culture, as a natural impulse finds its fulfillment in and through a cultural form. By dissociating itself from the primeval impulse of hunger, culture comes to obtain primacy over nature. It is evident that in order to live, we must eat,
We enjoy an aesthetic meal, as it were, without having to taste or swallow the food, as in the case of certain variants of nouvelle cuisine in which visual more than gustatory pleasure, let alone actual nutrition, seems the main purpose of what is on the plate. It is the same disinterestedness that permits the transformation of the lust-arousing naked human form into the idealized marmoreal nude and allows us to distinguish between pornography and high art.101
But if we do not “swallow,” does the situation still qualify as a meal, and can the act still be called eating? This question may be answered in the positive if culinary experience is acknowledged as extremely complicated and involving various sets of culturally processed sensory experiences. The consumption of pure taste is meaningfully embodied in wine-tasting, when the wine is spat out as soon as the senses are satiated.
Kant liked good food and banqueting, but he failed to recognize the emancipatory potential of dietary practices capable of forgoing practical ends. Such eating tendencies germinated in conjunction with nouvelle cuisine in France in the 18th century. The trend entailed cultivating a refinement which dissociated eating from its primary natural uses. In our times, this movement has culminated in conceptual cuisine. Feeding the guest is only one and, to boot, hardly the most essential of the considerations when it comes to orchestrating the most intense experience possible at molecular food restaurants. Besides the sensory element, this experience includes emotional and intellectual components, as well as engaging the sense of humor. Such utter “impracticality” was
6 Eating as a Social Activity
Kant extolls feasting itself as a profoundly human phenomenon, indeed, as a requisite element of humanity: “The cynic’s purism and the anchorite’s mortification of the flesh, without social good living, are distorted forms of virtue which do not make virtue inviting; rather, being forsaken by the graces, they can make no claim to humanity.”103 He perceives an essential difference between eating as necessary to sustain vital functions and banqueting as a practice in which this life-sustaining function is only one among the many purposes that the banquet serves. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View of 1798, the last book to be published in his lifetime, Kant devotes several pages to investigating social get-togethers and to offering detailed advice on how to hold a rewarding banquet. The ideal number of the guests must fit between the number of the Graces and the number of the Muses, which means that there should be no fewer than three and no more than nine people at the table. With more diners present, it would be unfeasible to have one common discussion. Talking in groups, Kant warns, spoils the atmosphere, and has nothing in common with “a conversation of taste, which must always bring culture with it, where each always talks with all (not merely with his neighbor).”104 He never entertained more than six people at a time at his house, and this rule was reinforced by the tableware he possessed and the size of his rooms. Three to five guests gathered at his table as a rule.
Eating alone only leads to corporeal satiation, whereas for eating to matter, it must be a social event.105 This is, properly speaking, not even a
[w]hen this first appetite has been satisfied, the party becomes even livelier, for in subtle reasoning it is difficult to avoid the diversity of judgment over one and the same object that has been brought up, and since no one has exactly the lowest opinion of his own judgment, a dispute arises which stirs up the appetite or food and drink and also makes the appetite wholesome in proportion to the liveliness of the dispute and the participation in it.113
Disputing or arguing is an exhausting pursuit; at the same time, the courses that appear one by one transport the diners into blissful languor. Consequently, as Kant observes, “the conversation sinks naturally to the mere play of wit, partly also to please the women present, against whom the small, deliberate, but not shameful attacks on their sex enable them to show their own wit to advantage. And so the meal ends with laughter.”114 Quipping is meant to endear the ladies and boost the spirits of the company, but jokes serve other purposes as well. Loud and good-natured laughter is supposed to buttress the digestion processes by invigorating the slackening body. Kant’s guests embraced this style of dining.
What was Brillat-Savarin’s opinion on the sine qua nons of a successful dinner? Inspired by the tenth Muse, Gasterea, he meticulously detailed the necessary and sufficient conditions of such a gathering, among which four must not be missing: “food at least passable, good wine, agreeable companions, and enough time.”115 A gratifying feast was, according to him, paradigmatically embodied in “the frugal meal that Horace planned for a neighbor whom he might have invited to dine with him or a traveler forced by bad weather to take shelter under his roof: a fine fowl, a kid (without doubt fat and good), and
Brillat-Savarin puts quality before quantity, though the latter also matters in satisfying the needs of gourmets, because “the most delicious rarity loses its influence when quantity is stingy; the first delightful emotion it arouses in the diner is rightly discouraged by their fear that they will receive but a thin share of the dish.”120 Importantly, his ideas about the proper amount of food for lunch or dinner considerably depart from our notions. The gap is vividly illustrated by a breakfast that Brillat-Savarin held for his relatives – a doctor aged seventy-eight and a captain aged seventy-six – with a specific purpose of treating them to his famed fondue of cheese and eggs. Arriving punctually at 10
A closer glimpse at what Kant wrote about shared meals reveals that, like Brillat-Savarin, he found the meeting of people and their intercourse pivotal to them. He would certainly subscribe to the Frenchman’s insistence that “no matter how studied the dinner plan nor how sumptuous its adjuncts, there can be no true pleasures of the table if the wine be bad, the guests assembled without discretion, the faces gloomy, and the meal consumed with haste.”122 Likewise, he would undoubtedly concur with Brillat-Savarin’s maxim that “the most indispensable quality of a cook is promptness, and it should be that of the diner as well.”123
The meal consisted of simple, but well-prepared dishes. Soup was served at the beginning, and then roast beef garnished with English sauce followed. […] The soup was thickened with rice, groats, or pasta. Kant would add bread-roll crumbs to his plate to make the soup even thicker. Pureed beans or peas were his favorite dish. Other dishes included fish, butter, English cheeses, doubly baked crispy bread-rolls, fruit, pastries, desserts, and, obviously, good wine, usually light red wine. A small, quarter-liter bottle per person was the usual amount, though additional bottles were always at hand.124
The English sauce listed by Kaczmarek was in fact mustard, which the philosopher made himself and liked to have with almost all dishes. This detail is
In his biography of Kant from 2001, Manfred Kuehn claims that these dinners served Kant as a way of coping with loneliness. He was eager to host both his friends and, later, also strangers who came to Königsberg and wished to see the distinguished philosopher. Kant made sure that meeting him was a satisfying experience that catered to their notions of what a real philosopher and his life were like. He often welcomed his guests from behind the desk at which he was working. Hasse reports that from the threshold, Kant’s entire house left no doubt that it was a philosopher’s abode.126 Dinner, the highlight of Kant’s day, would sometimes extend into the evening, finishing as late as seven or eight, if only some of his guests were willing to stay that long. Kraus was usually the last to leave.127 Although Kant was eager to invite people over, he did not give up on calling on others. He would visit the palace of the Keyserlingks128 on Tuesdays and spend Sunday afternoons at the house of Motherby.129 He was considered a charming companion whose knowledge, erudition, and sense of humor never failed to enchant.
7 Appetite, Reason, and Health
In Kant’s view, the fundamental goal of philosophy lay in consolidating certainty, that is, in finding a priori moments in knowledge. He dismissed Baumgarten’s hope (a deceptive one, he believed) of “bringing critical judgment of the beautiful under rational principles, and to raise its rules to the rank of a science,” and firmly asserted that “such endeavours are vain. For such rules or criteria are, according to their principal sources, merely empirical, and hence can never serve as determinate a priori laws to which our judgment
For his part, Brillat-Savarin aspired to found a science of gastronomy. Setting the goals of his projected discipline, he explained: “Gastronomy considers taste in its pleasant as well as its unfortunate aspects; it has uncovered gradual excitation of which taste is capable; it has regulated this activity, and has set certain limits to it which any man who respects his own dignity will never pass.”133 Besides, gastronomy prescribes when various food products should best be eaten, evaluates the properties of victuals, and classifies various foodstuffs. It also determines which combinations are salutary and beneficial in terms of gustatory qualities.134 In line with the tradition of the Enlightenment, Brillat-Savarin understands health in a very inclusive manner as encompassing intellectual qualities and moral attitudes. Hence, gastronomy examines “the action of foods on man’s morale, on his imagination, his spirit, his judgment, his courage and perceptions, whether he be awake or asleep, active or resting.”135 The new discipline is expected to help one achieve the highest possible pleasure and, at the same time, avoid crossing the boundary beyond which pleasure morphs into abuse.
The limits of sensory effectiveness were also studied by Kant: “Given the same degree of influence taking place on them, the senses teach less the more strongly they feel themselves being affected. Inversely, if they are expected to
Without a doubt, Kant would agree with Savarin that “[m]en who stuff themselves and grow tipsy know neither how to eat nor how to drink.”139 Gluttony and drunkenness both excessively impinge on the senses and the body. As stimuli multiply and proliferate, experience is degraded, rather than enhanced. In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant harshly opines: “A human being who is drunk is like a mere animal, not to be treated as a human being. When stuffed with food he is in a condition in which he is incapacitated, for a time, for actions that would require him to use his powers with skill and deliberation.”140 Social gatherings and sumptuous banquets, which may spiral into excessive consumption of food and drink, are in Kant’s view justified because “there is something in it [a banquet] that aims at a moral end, beyond mere physical wellbeing: it brings the number of people together for a long time to converse with one another.”141
Immoderation breeds serious ramifications. While wine drunk in reasonable quantities “enlivens the company’s conversation,” Kant cautions against the treacherous power of alcohol and other narcotics, explaining that they “are seductive because, under their influence, people dream for a while that they are happy and free from care, and even imagine they are strong, but dejection and weakness follow and, worst of all, they create a need to use the narcotics again.”142 He is perhaps even harsher in condemning overindulgent eating: “Gluttony is even lower than that animal enjoyment of the senses, since it only lulls the senses into a passive condition and, unlike drunkenness, does not
The art of good living is the due proportion of living well to sociability (thus, to living with taste). One sees from this that luxury is detrimental to the art of good living, and the expression “he knows how to live,” when used of a wealthy or distinguished man, signifies the skillfulness of his choice in social enjoyment, which includes moderation (sobriety) in making pleasure mutually beneficial, and is calculated to last.146
Consider, first, the interest of inclination, [which occurs] with the agreeable. Here everyone says: Hunger is the best sauce; and to people with a healthy appetite anything is tasty provided it is edible. Hence if people have a liking of this sort, that does not prove that they are selecting […]
by taste. Only when their need has been satisfied can we tell who in a multitude of people has taste and who does not.147
Hunger is the best sauce, as the German proverb has it,148 but it is only partly true. If hunger, which prompts one to eat, is too strong, it makes palatal pleasure impossible. Paradoxically, starving people may be barred from the pleasure stemming from eating. By voraciously devouring the food, they give their senses no chance of receiving all the impressions which add up to taste, and they often eat too much because, absorbed in hastily downing one bite of food after another, they fail to register the signals of satiety.
Brillat-Savarin was certainly on the mark when he distinguished between gourmandism and gluttony. In a similar vein, Kant cautions that “luxury” and “indulgence” may pervert taste.149 Brillat-Savarin and Kant consent that nature has not endowed all people equally generously. Kant observes that “the more susceptible [a human being] is toward the organic sense (sensitive) and the more inured to vital sense, the more fortunate he is.”150 For his part, Brillat-Savarin, though regarding the pleasures of the table as the most democratic of delights because they “are for every man, of every land, and no matter of what place in history or society,”151 considers gastronomic savvy to be a privilege. Not everybody can be a gourmand, and Brillat-Savarin identifies two major obstacles to the vocation of gourmandism. To be a gourmet, one must boast a properly developed sensory apparatus and “organic delicacy.” This disfavors the “wretches” whose tongues are “so sparsely provided with the sensitive taste buds meant to absorb and appreciate flavors that they can awaken but vague sensations: indeed such people are as blind to taste as true blind men are to light.”152 The other obstacle lies in deficient focus – lack of attention during the meal – which afflicts “the inattentive, the flighty, the overly ambitious and those who try to do two things at once, and eat only to fill their bellies.”153
Besides the natural accoutrement of the sensitive palate, favorable material and socio-economic circumstances are also factors in the development of gourmandism. Brillat-Savarin makes a distinction between gourmands “by
People predestined to gourmandism are in general of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips, and rounded chins […]. People to whom Nature has denied the capacity for such enjoyment, on the other hand, have long faces, noses and eyes; no matter what their height they seem to have a general air of elongation about them. They have flat black hair, and above all lack healthy weight; it is undoubtedly they who invented trousers to hide their thin shanks.155
By talking of predestination, Brillat-Savarin boldly draws on the Christian doctrine promulgated by St. Augustine. As people are predestined to salvation or damnation, they are also predestined to have or to lack good taste. The category of “gourmands by predestination” eludes any social classifications, but the full development and use of the aptitude with which these individuals are endowed is, of course, socially conditioned. At the same time, the fact that there are “gourmands by profession” suggests that deficits in the natural equipage may be compensated for by “persistent” training facilitated by unlimited access to refined dishes.
How sense impressions can be expanded and enhanced is discussed by Kant, who advises that they “are increased according to degree by means of (1) contrast, (2) novelty, (3) change, (4) intensification.”156 Quotidian life and familiarity “extinguish” sense representations, but they can be reactivated by newness.157 In this respect, Kant’s insights are reminiscent of Brillat-Savarin’s observations concerning beverages. In one of his aphorisms, Brillat-Savarin claims: “It is heresy to insist that we must not mix wines: a man’s palate can
8 Sociability
Mirosław Żelazny is indisputably right to conclude that, in Kant, “aesthetic judgment is a purely spiritual, disinterested, intellectual judgment, once and for all disjoined from the sense of physiological taste.”164 Indeed, Kant himself directly professes as much. However, the chasm between the two can be reduced upon closer scrutiny of his various statements. Such a project is
Kant’s concern with food is not merely of the order of an art of eating, or a gastrosophy. Rather, food and its ingestion seem to play a much more fundamental philosophical role in his thought in that gustatory sense serves not only as a springboard for the higher senses, but also provides the model, if not even the schema, for the whole of thought.165
Just as gustatory sense is immediately pleased by what it finds agreeable, so the soul instantly agrees to what it recognizes as wholesome. If subjectivity and sociability are what the ever so different faculties of gustatory taste and aesthetic taste have in common, the immediacy characteristic of both represents the third reason for which a faculty that estimates without judging can come to the designate the faculty of judgment itself.166
Kant conferred subjectivism of the notion of taste, which had earlier been a moral rather than an aesthetic concept and a vehicle of socio-political meanings, denoting “an ideal of genuine humanity,” as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it.167 Standing for the keen discernment of things right and good, taste had been a kind of sensus communis.168 However, Kant equally emphatically argued that human beings were capable of making judgments of taste not because they were sensual creatures, but because they were moral beings. Critique of Judgment uniquely coalesces aesthetics and ethics. Of course, this coupling has no ontological underpinnings, but solely subjective ones. In brief, human beings may experience beauty, because they are beings who discover the “moral law” in themselves.
Gasché opens his discussion of Kant from the point of view of the stomach by evoking a moment during the meal when the old philosopher, no longer capable of fluent communication, arduously articulates a demand that the messy dish on his plate be arranged into a figure. At the end of his paper, Gasché concludes that
with this request that his food have figure, Kant is demanding that even something as undeterminable and incommunicable as the savory qualities of food should, and can yield to a “comparatively universal” judgment. Indeed, what is at stake, in Kant’s reflections on food, is nothing less than the always pending threat that nature may not be in harmonious agreement with reason.169
No wonder that Kant found companionable dining so relevant. Individual and intimate gustatory experiences mutate into a social event at the common table. This sociability becomes a site where the rigors or reason and the imperatives of morality are articulated; it is a moment that asserts the essence of humanity.
Halina Poświatowska, “Zazielenił się chodnik …,” in Halina Poświatowska, Wszystkie wiersze (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000).
Emma C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 18.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 14.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 5, 25.
Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 14.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 17.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 50.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 50.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 5.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 235.
Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reyniere, Almanach des gourmands (Paris: Mercure de France, 2003).
Eugène Briffault, Paris à Table: 1846, ed. and trans. by Joe Weintraub (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. and ed. M[ary] F[rances] K[ennedy] Fisher (New York, London, and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
Mirosław Żelazny, Estetyka filozoficzna (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe umk, 2009), 66.
Debates on the sense of taste proliferated in the 18th century. The position of taste among the other senses and its relationship to aesthetic taste were explored by Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, Johann Ulrich von König, Voltaire, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, and Charles Batteux. For an account and comparison of their views, see Żelazny, Estetyka filozoficzna, 40–90.
James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 357.
William Zachs, David Hume. Man of Letters, Scientist of Man: An Exhibition at the Writers’ Museum Commemorating the Three-Hundredth Anniversary of Hume’s Birth (Edinburgh: Arc, 2011), 46.
Zachs, David Hume. Man of Letters, Scientist of Man, 46.
Traces of this liking found their way into the exhibition held to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Hume’s birth. Among the items on display was Elizabeth Cleland’s book, as well as letters in which Hume addressed culinary issues. The exhibition was put on by The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh between 26th April 2011and 17th September 2011. Hume’s interest in food also shows across the volumes of the history of England he penned. The study registers, for example, typical diets of people from various social strata and lists the traditionally grown and newly imported fruit and vegetables. Hume marks 1660 as the year in which coffee, tea, and chocolate found their way to the British Isles, and claims that asparagus, artichokes, cauliflowers, and lettuce also arrived there at the time. Food appears in the context of economic developments as well, which is quite natural because food products cost money and they might be used as currency. Additionally, food is mentioned in anecdotes about monarchs, and the depictions of luxury meals consumed at monasteries form part of the criticism of the church. See Spencer K. Wertz, “Hume’s Culinary Interests and the Historiography of Food,” in Spencer K. Wertz, Food and Philosophy: Selected Essays (Fort Worth, TX: tcu Press, 2016), 72–92.
Hume, however, claimed that he was not a gourmand, but a glutton. Cf. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 560.
Mossner, Life of David Hume, 560.
For the benefits of cultivating “mental” taste, see David Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” in David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison for A. Kincaid Bookseller, mdccxli), 1–8;
Mossner, Life of David Hume, 560. Spencer K. Wertz believes that this soup was made of chicken breast and almonds. Its royal and refined quality resulted from blending the ingredients into a smooth, dainty purée. See Wertz, “Hume’s Culinary Interests,” 74.
Mossner, Life of David Hume, 560.
Mossner, Life of David Hume, 560.
See Wertz, “Hume’s Culinary Interests,” 73.
Mossner, Life of David Hume, 245.
Władysław Tatarkiewicz, “Eseje Dawida Hume’a,” in David Hume, Eseje z dziedziny moralności i literatury (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe pwn, 1955), xxi.
Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 2 (1976): 201–15.
Harris, Hume, 362.
Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufacturers and Agriculture, Rules and Orders of the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufacturers and Agriculture (Edinburgh, 1755), 24–26;
Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” 201.
See Harris, Hume, 363.
David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects, in Two Volumes: Vol. 1 Containing Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (London: Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand; and A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, at Edinburgh, mdcclxiv), 257.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 257.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 256.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 260.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 261.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de La Mancha, revised translation based on those of Motteux, Jarvis, and Smollett (New York: D. Appelton & Company, 1866), 294.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 263.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 264.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 266.
See Peter Kivy, “Remarks on the Varieties of Prejudice in Hume’s Essay on Taste,” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2011): 111–14.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 259.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 259.
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 259.
Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: California University Press, 2006), 168.
Stefan Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant. Portret filozofa (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe uam, 1995), 56.
Rodolphe Gasché, “Figura czy forma? Punkt widzenia żołądka,” trans. Patrycja Poniatowska, Prace Kulturoznawcze 21, no. 2 (2017), 15. The quotations from Rodolphe Gasché’s paper come from an unpublished English manuscript entitled “Figure or Form? The Viewpoint of the Stomach,” which served as the basis of a Polish translation published as Rodolphe Gasché, “Figura czy forma? Punkt widzenia żołądka,” trans. Patrycja Poniatowska, Prace Kulturoznawcze 21, no. 2 (2017), 15–30. The paper has also been published in German, but not in English. While the text comes from the manuscript, the page numbers provided in citations refer to the Polish translation used by the author.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?,” 15.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?,” 15.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 56.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 30.
Michel Onfray, Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and Food, trans. Donald Barry and Stephen Muecke (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 44.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 128.
Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Life and Work,” in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 17.
Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 222.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 81.
Onfray, Appetites for Thought, 45–46. Cf. Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 80.
Qtd. in Kuehn, Kant, 220.
Wood, “Kant’s Life and Work,” 16.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 56.
Qtd. in Kuehn, Kant, 221.
Qtd. Kuehn, Kant, 355.
Kuehn, Kant, xi–xiii.
Kuehn, Kant, 325.
Kuehn, Kant, 222.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 79–80.
Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, and Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Immanuel Kant. Sein Leben in Darstellungen von Zeitgenossen. Die Biographien von Borowski, Jachmann und Wasianski, ed. Felix Gross (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1912), 192.
See Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 80. Hippel, a writer and a political and social activist, had a reputation for his bold views on the role and position of women in society. He advocated equal rights for women in all spheres of life and called for restoring their dignity by enfranchising them and enabling them to take part in public debates. For this, Hippel “was widely calumniated as an unprincipled sexual libertine” (Wood, “Kant’s Life,” 17). Although Kant never subscribed to Hippel’s ideas, he did not officially join his detractors either, but his own writings professed entirely different, thoroughly conservative notions about the role of women in marriage and society, championing a clear distinction into the female and male domains. Cf. Grzegorz Supady, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel. Ekscentryczny literat z Królewca (Warszawa: Semper, 2013).
Jay, Songs of Experience, 142.
Jay, Songs of Experience, 142–43.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?” 19.
Jay, Songs of Experience, 142.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Loudon, ed. Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 138.
Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man: An Introduction to A Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), 137.
Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Historia filozofii, vol. 2 (Warszawa: pwn, 1990), 179.
Tatarkiewicz, Historia filozofii, 179.
Żelazny, Estetyka filozoficzna, 18.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 52.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 136–37.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 136.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 136.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 136.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 98.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 97.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 96.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 85.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 155.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 155.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 160.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 160.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 67.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 148.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 148.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 150.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 151.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 190.
Jay, Songs of Experience, 142.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?” 25. Still, Kant may not have liked French cuisine. Hegel’s biographers, for example, describe his ambivalent attitudes to Parisian cuisine. Cf. Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 553.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 182.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 179.
Cf. “Community around the Table” in this book.
Peter Melville, “A ‘Friendship of Taste’: The Aesthetics of Eating Well in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 206.
Melville, “Friendship of Taste,” 205.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 180–81.
Arsenij Gulyga, Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought, trans. Marijan Despalatovic (Boston, Basel, and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1987), 256.
Melville, “Friendship of Taste,” 208.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 127.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 139.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 181.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 181.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 192.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 192.
Similar instructions are put forward by Eugène Briffault in Paris à Table, which is mentioned along with Brillat-Savarin and Dumas as a compendium of 19th-century gastronomy. Cf. Joe Weintraub, “Dinner in the Current Age: A Translation from Paris à Table,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 26–38.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 194.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 194.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 85.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 195–96.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 193.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 16.
Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant, 128.
Johann Gottfried Hasse, Merkwürdige Äusserungen Kants, von einem seiner Tischgenossen (Königsberg: Hering, 1804), 6f, qtd. in Kuehn, Kant, 325; Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, “Emmanuel Kant raconté dans des lettres à un ami,” in Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, and Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Kant intime, ed. and trans. Jean Mistler (Paris: Grasset, 1985), 45, qtd. in Onfray, Appetites for Thought, 44.
Kuehn, Kant, 271.
Kuehn, Kant, 325.
Kant held up Caroline Charlotte Amalie von Keyserlingk, wife to Count Heinrich Christian von Keyserlingk, as the paragon of womanhood. He was a close friend of the family and usually took the honorary seat at the countess’s side during dinners.
Kuehn, Kant, 334.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 60.
A different position is adopted by Hume, who does not regard the subjective quality of cognition as thwarting the production of scientific knowledge. While the judgments of physiological taste are indeed empirical, aesthetic judgments, as well as those valid in physics, are no less empirical. In all these cases, knowledge is defective, because it is informed by a psychological belief.
Savarin considered himself somewhat of an amateur physician as well.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 62.
See Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 62–63.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 62.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 50.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 51.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 49.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 15.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 180.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 181.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 180.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 181–82.
Kuehn, Kant, 334.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 147.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 148.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Including the First Introduction, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 52.
The literal meaning of the proverb is actually “Hunger is the best cook” (German: Hunger ist der beste Koch). (translator’s note)
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 52.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 50.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 15.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 167.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 167.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 171.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 169.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 54.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 55.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 16.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 53.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 56.
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 57.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 15.
Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 85.
Żelazny, Estetyka filozoficzna, 90.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?” 29.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?” 29.
See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 32.
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 20–29.
Gasché, “Figura czy forma?” 29.