The Experience of Tasting between Body and Mind, Subjectivity and Objectivity

Abstract

The variability, the fugacity, the subjectivity and "privacy" of taste sensations, their excessive involvement with corporeality, appetites, pleasure, emotions and affectivity, their proximal character, their instability and, last but not least, the difficult verbal translatability of flavors, are the factors that have determined the misrecognition of taste, fueling the prejudice on its unreliability from the point of view of knowledge. Despite its cognitive devaluation, the sense housed in the mouth and responsible for the choice of foods, the recognition and evaluation of the flavors of food and drinks, in our daily life it nevertheless manages to establish such a perfect balance between body and mind, subjectivity and objectivity, need and desire, pleasure and knowledge, intimacy and sociability, to motivate his election as a topic of philosophical interest. Therefore, dealing with sensoriality starting from the “minor” senses, the most rooted in bodily experience, also means trying to show the interweaving of bodily experience, cognition and subjective dimension from an embodied perspective. And in the specific case of taste, it means re-evaluating the body through the daily experience of eating.