Page - 27 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 4:2

25 | www.limina-graz.eu Alessandro De Cesaris | The Taste of Truth preference for the objects that please the taste» (Brillat-Savarin 2009, 141). In other words: gourmandise is the ability to consider the object of taste independently from the object of nutrition. The importance of this ability cannot be overstated, since it plays a pivotal role in the history of human self-consciousness. While eating has a fundamental symbolic importance in many cultures (see for instance Viveiros de Castro 2014), a peculiar aspect of Christian culture is that it strongly emphasised the importance of gourmandise. The very be- ginning of human culture, the original sin, is nothing but an act of gour- mandise: by choosing the forbidden fruit, Eve chooses taste over obedience, at the same time establishing a long-lasting link between knowledge and pleasure. I will come back to this connection in the following sections, but for now let it suffice to say that the history of Christian ideas is – among many things – also a history of taste-based conceptions of truth and of knowledge. 3.2 The most intimate of the senses If one had to choose one attribute in order to describe the specificity of the experience of taste, “intimacy” would be a very good candidate. The first reason is immediately clear if we go back to Hegel’s remark, that we cannot taste an object without consummating it. Unlike what happens in the case of vision or hearing, it is impossible to taste the same object: the experience of taste is utterly singular, unrepeatable and unsharable. This singularity is not the only reason for the intimate character of the ex- perience of taste. All the other senses are unitary experiences. From a phys- iological standpoint, it is possible to unpack every sensory experience and describe its phases; however, if we consider the perceptual experience, it is clear that taste, much more than any other sense, is a process. Already Bril- lat-Savarin identified three different stages in the process of tasting (with the frontal part of the tongue; with the back of the mouth; swallowing, cf. Brillat-Savarin 2009, 47). Contemporary science has advanced even more in the analysis of the experience of taste (cf. Vitaux 2007). This long, inti- mate process of discovery and deliberation is nothing else than the process through which we turn the external world into ourselves: through taste, the external becomes internal; the object becomes subject. Utterly singular, unrepeatable and unsharable