The Philosophers' Magazine

The philosopher asks you to look at the world awry, to place in question your usual habits, assumptions, prejudices and expectations. In this regard, the philosopher has a family resemblance with the comedian, who also asks us to look at the world awry, askance, to imagine a topsy-turvy universe where horses and dogs talk, where lifeless objects become suddenly alive, where groups of nuns take baths together and bears engage in civilized conversation with hunters before subjecting them to unmentionable acts.

The kinds of questions that have led analytic philosophers to work in all the specialised areas that they work in go back to the same sort of questions that Plato, Aristotle and other great philosophers of the past were working on. But I think that what people have to realise is that if you ask an exciting question, and then you make a serious effort to find out what the answer to it is, you just can’t expect that every step on the way will be equally exciting.

The vicious person may have considerable enjoyment – much of their life may be, to use a notion that Don Giovanni draws on in one of his arias, diverting. But happiness has to be assessed not in terms of particular pleasurable episodes, but in more holistic terms, over a life taken as a whole. And many moral philosophers, including the atheist Scottish philosopher David Hume in the eighteenth century, have argued that vice can’t make you happy in the long run.

Touch is a sense of communication. It is receptive, expressive, can communicate empathy. It can bring distant objects and people into proximity. It is a carnal world, with its pleasures of feeling and being felt, of tasting and touching the textures of flesh and of food. And equally it is a profound world of philosophical verification, of the communication of presence and empathy with others, of the mutual implication or folding of body, flesh and world.

The sensation of smell at its most powerful is more about a peculiarly immediate kind of intellectual association than about pure sensory delight or horror. The most evocative odours resonate with other fragrances in our individual smell vocabulary, and film as a medium is equal to literature in capturing the more peculiar or unconscious workings of the mind. Indeed, this seems to be what cinema does most naturally; it is better placed than literature to make effortless subliminal connections.

Audition, like vision, is a rich source of information about the environment, and we learn a great deal through hearing. Hearing helps us to negotiate oursurroundings, to a degree that is obscured by preoccupation with the visual. Hearing sounds allows us to access music and spoken language, and thus holds strong emotional and communicative interest for humans.

The sense of taste falls low on the hierarchy of the senses because it seems a poor conduit for knowledge of the external world; it directs attention inward rather than outward; its pleasures are sensuous and bodily, prone to overindulgence that distracts from higher human endeavours; and its objects are at best merely pleasant, not of the highest aesthetic value. Such is the traditional assessment; now let us analyse its justice.