Seite - 33 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 4:2

31 | www.limina-graz.eu Alessandro De Cesaris | The Taste of Truth close connection between knowledge and pleasure, which I have stressed more than once, is a critical aspect of taste-based experience. The close connection between nourishment and pleasure can lead to forms of over- load that turn nourishment into venom, and pleasure into addiction. A first question could be precisely the following: what aspects of our current ex- perience of technology can be best described by referring to a taste-based hermeneutical model? Once we have identified the role taste plays in our present technological condition, we will be able to ask how to face the problems connected with it. Plato understood the relationship between nourishment and pleasure as an opposition: in his Gorgias, fine cuisine and medicine are considered as completely opposite, since the first aims at giving pleasure, and the sec- ond aims at providing health (cf. Plastira-Valkanou 1998). On the contrary, gastronomy has been conceived precisely as the discipline that takes care of the best possible balance between pleasure and health, gourmandise and alimentation (cf. Vitaux 2007; Brillat-Savarin 2009, 62). Hence the second and final question: do we need a “digital gastronomy”? A taste-based ap- proach to the problems related to our digital experience could help us iden- tify new possible solutions, or at least consider the same problems from a new perspective. As I said, the question is not whether we must abandon our oculocentric approach to technology and adopt a taste-based understanding of cul- ture and of technologically mediated experience. On the contrary, the aim of this analysis is to isolate and identify aspects how we conceptualise the world that are never truly separated: in the concrete flow of our experience, our senses are constantly interacting both on the aesthetical and symbolic level. By studying the cultural significance of taste, we can better under- stand this interplay and we can investigate in more depth the complexity of our relation to ourselves, to each other and to the world.