A Taste of Baby Epistemology

Helena Iara is now able to grab things: not with any particular dexterity, but she understand that her hands can manipulate the world.  So a couple of days ago, I passed her Tereza, her smiling rag doll, and watched as she first embraced it, then pulled it closer and closer to herself, and then, finally, reached out with her tongue and licked the doll's face.  It was a very different action than the need to suck that she (and most babies) have, and also different from older babies' desire to put everything they see in their mouths.  Like a six year old with a precious ice-cream cone, she stuck her tongue out and licked the doll's cloth face.

It isn't the first time I have noticed Helena's concern with taste: whenever she take a bath, if water drips toward her mouth, her tongue darts out to taste it with transparent curiosity.  When she can, she licks my and her mom's skin.  Clearly, taste fascinates her as much as sight or sound.

Helena's epicurian research led me to a couple of chats with her over the last couple of days.  I started off thinking about senses, especially about Franz Hikelammert's hypothesis that the Greek metaphor for learning is sight (think of the verb theatreo, to see, for instance), while the Hebrews preferred sound (hearing and hearkening to the word of Yahweh).  These metaphors, however, are formal epistemologies: how people (adults, mostly) come to know, and to confirm that what they know is true.  Helena uses both sight and sounds to learn about her world, but what about taste?  Does that sense fit into any kind of theory of knowledge?

As I told Helena about Hinkelammert's theory, I remembered one of the oddest images from the Phædrus, a dialogue I haven't studied for a long time (sophomore year in college!), but which can break down any simple interpretation of Plato.  The story is distinctly odd, with Socrates telling a myth about how a man can come to know the truth of the Forms, starting with lying with a comely youth (but not culminating the sexual act) and then moving on to a mystic voyage through the land of the Ideas.  And in the end, the knower does not know the forms by sight, but by taste.  Man eats the Ideas.

In Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, the mouth also takes center stage in epistemology: the ethical and ontological commandment of Amazonian Indians is to live the perspective of the other, to see through the eyes of the jaguar or of the enemy tribe.  But the path to this perspective is oral: one either eats the flesh of the enemy, to consume his perspective, or sings his songs, to feel the words of his language on your tongue.  Ayahuasca, the famous shamanistic drug to transform perspective, is also oral, the first thing that people who take it comment on, is how brutally bitter it is.  For the Tupi-Guaranís, new knowledge come about through taste.

In the contemporary West, on the other hand, taste is an æsthetic metaphor: someone has good taste when she dresses well, recognizes good art, or likes the restaurants I like.    I wonder if we aren't missing something important here, and I shared this idea with Helena as she licked the back of my hand.  Could it be that taste is the best way of thinking about new knowledge, ideas and thoughts that break the paradigms we have always used to understand the world?  Could it be that the fact that Christians eat and drink in their essential ritual is much more interesting that I thought when I took communion in church as a kid?

For Plato, for the Tupi-Guaranís, and for Helena, taste serves as a way to understand something that is completely other.  Helena has only tasted milk, so water is a stunning revelation, the salt on my hand an almost mystical experience.  Think about the first time you felt wasabi in your nose, or the hot-sweet of a Thai curry... one has to step out of himself to live the experience.  Learning about a new tree, on the other hand, is something I can extrapolate from my knowledge of other trees, and I can describe music by reference to other kinds of music you have already heard: "Imagine Paganinni played by Metallica...".  Taste, on the other hand, doesn't fit.  Try to describe wasabi to someone who has never tasted it.

So I think Helena is on the right path.  Taste is a way to knowledge, and it will be exciting to see all of the new flavors that she will experience in the coming years.