Page - 25 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 4:2

23 | www.limina-graz.eu Alessandro De Cesaris | The Taste of Truth 2.2 Beyond objectuality In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel famously remarks how the proper me- dium for the appreciation of the fine arts are sight and hearing, the two «theoretical senses» (Hegel 1988, 38). While sight and hearing require a distance from the object, taste is immediately sensuous. I would like to point out the profoundly tautological character of Hegel’s remark. Sight is the most “theoretical” of the senses precisely because we are used to a visiocentric understanding of thought itself (even the term “theoretical” comes from the Greek theaomai, “to watch”). If we start from this implicit understanding of the nature of rationality, Hegel’s remark is not only true, but circular. The proper question to be asked, therefore, is the following: what is it like to understand rationality and thought starting from the sense of taste, rather than from vision? Before answering this question – something which I will do in the section dedicated to taste as a symbolic form – let us analyse the physiological fea- tures of taste as such. First of all, the most peculiar and unique feature of taste is that it consummates its object. In the process of tasting the object is literally transformed into the subject. Secondly, already Aristotle high- lights (cf. 2016, 43) how the physiology of taste requires the mixture of object and moisture. In other words, there is no taste without mixture of subject and object. These two aspects tell us that, unlike vision, the physiology of taste – and subsequently its aesthetics – is structurally based on the overcoming of the separation of subject and object. 2.3 A Metaphysics of Nutrition This intuition leads us to a remarkable discovery: we live in a world made up of individual objects only if we interpret the world starting from vision. Taste, however, is the clear negation of this standpoint: the ontology of taste refuses any clear separation between living things, or between liv- ing and non-living things. As Emanuele Coccia points out, «nutrition is the evidence of the impossibility to consider the form that informs each living being – in its individual and specific identity – as something substantial, There is no taste without mixture of subject and object.