Category Independent Aesthetic Experience: The Case of Wine

Category Independent Aesthetic Experience: The Case of Wine Introduction In his much discussed article “Categories of Art” Kendall Walton argues that there are aesthetic features of artworks that cannot be found in the immediately perceptible properties of the artwork alone. Walton attempts to show that the tradition in which a work is made, its societal context, and the intentions of the artist all contribute to how a work is properly experienced; knowledge of these contextual features is what allows one to properly experience the aesthetic properties of a work. The aim of this paper is to consider an extension of Walton’s view of aesthetic properties of artworks to the experience of the aesthetic properties of wine. Such an extension reveals certain problems in the thesis that a work’s correct or true aesthetic properties are only appreciable given appropriate categorization. Although wine may not be an art object, this extension is quite natural, for wine quality is an aesthetic topic that is treated critically in a fashion similar to the treatment of art. There are wine experts and wine critics, people who claim not to understand wine, and those who claim to enjoy it both at a surface and deeper level. There is even some famous disagreement about wine quality amongst critics. otes: Several authors cite a famous dispute between Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker concerning a 2003 Chateau Pavie. See http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/winenews0422.html (accessed January 2012). Further, some philosophers have already happily extended Walton’s view of art-categories to argue that the taste of a wine is a property of that wine which depends on wine knowledge for its proper appreciation. or example, See Barry C. Smith’s “The Objectivity of Tastes and Tasting”, in Barry C. Smith (ed.), Questions of Taste: the philosophy of wine. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 41-77; Jonathan Cohen, “Wine-Tasting Blind and Otherwise: Blindness as Perceptual Limitation”, manuscript of a paper presented at Workshop on Wine Expertise, University of London in Paris, Paris, 13 October 2011; Cain Todd, The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty and Intoxication (Montreal: Queen’s University Press, 2011); especially Ch. 4. See also Steve Charter’s “On the Evaluation of Wine’s Quality”, in Barry C. Smith, pp. 157-181. The possibility of category-free aesthetic experience shall be argued for by considering the epiphany type encounter of the novice who first tastes a great wine as described by Barry C. Smith. The aim of the argument advanced is to show that Walton’s view is unable to accommodate the possibility that there are some immediate and appropriate ways to apprehend the aesthetic properties of at least some kinds of work despite the fact that one may lack category knowledge concerning that work. The sudden appreciation of a great wine by the novice that Smith discusses seems to take place independently of category knowledge. “Independently of category knowledge” here means independently of having some wine-specific knowledge such as: What I am drinking now is a Sauvignon Blanc, which typically has such and such taste properties, x amount of acidity, etc. It is likely the case that all knowledge is categorical, and it is not the aim of this argument to deny that someone needs to know that they are drinking wine instead of cola to have Smith’s epiphany experience. It will instead be argued that the way Walton conceives of art categorization and the way his view is typically applied to wine is difficult to square with a certain sort of aesthetic experience epitomized by Smith’s example; that is, it is possible that one may apprehend the aesthetic properties of an art object without having specialized knowledge of the object of appreciation. Walton’s View Walton articulates a powerful criticism of the tradition within philosophy of art that views aesthetic properties as residing in/supervening on the perceptible properties of the work alone. or a classic presentation of this view, see Frank Sibley’s “Aesthetic Concepts”, The Philosophical Review, 68 (1959) pp. 421-450. See also Nick Zangwill’s “In Defense of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 (2000) pp. 476-493. According to Walton, the art category (for example, painting) in which a work falls affects what aesthetic properties a work has. He holds that a work’s aesthetic properties are not only dependent on the perceptual properties of the work, but also on what category the work is perceived in. endall Walton, “Categories of Art”, The Philosophical Review, 79 (1970) pp. 334-367; 338. To put this point another way, the categories do not just affect what aesthetic properties we see works as having or take them to have, the categories affect the aesthetic properties that are there to be found in the work itself: “at least in some cases, it is correct to perceive a work in certain categories and incorrect to perceive it in others; that is, our judgments when we perceive them in the former are likely to be true…” and “[the relevant historical facts] help to determine what aesthetic properties that a work has…” bid., pp. 356 and 364, respectively. The emphasis is Walton’s. A work’s aesthetic properties and its proper judgment by the critic depend on which of its perceptible properties are standard, variable, and contra-standard to the category in which the work is perceived. It would be wrong to judge a marble bust as an unfaithful likeness on the grounds that the individual portrayed was not marble-colored. It is a standard feature of marble busts to be marble-colored. It is a standard feature of busts in general to be made of a material that is not flesh colored, and as such we typically do not even notice such features. The fact that marble does not look like human flesh is not seen as a flaw in the likeness of the person represented in the bust. A standard feature of a category is a feature in virtue of which the work belongs to that category: “that is, just in case the lack of that feature would disqualify, or tend to disqualify, a work from that category.” bid., 339. Variable features of a category are those features which have no effect on a work’s categorization; the subject of a bust is variable for the category of busts and the colors used in a painting are variable to the category of paintings. Finally, a feature that is contra-standard for a category is one which tends to disqualify the work from a category it might otherwise be found in; Walton suggests, for example, that an object that moves sporadically might not count as a statue since movement is contra-standard for statues. Given the way that categorization affects appreciation on Walton’s view, it is important that we view a work in its correct category or categories. Further, it seems fair to infer that the categories in which a work falls affects the work’s aesthetic properties. ee Brian Laetz’s “Kendall Walton’s ‘Categories of Art’: A Critical Commentary”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 50 (2010) pp. 287-306. We should see the aesthetic properties of a work as being determined by two factors: the perceptual properties of the work, such as the brush strokes in a painting or its color, and the category in which a work falls. Walton holds that when we perceive a work in the correct category our judgments are also likely to be correct, so there appears to be little doubt that he also holds that the category in which a work falls affects what aesthetic properties are there to be found in the work, regardless of what a viewer may perceive. In summary, Walton is essentially saying the following about art and its categories: there is a right way to view a work, and if you view a work in the wrong way, you simply will not appreciate what is going on in it; and to appreciate what is going on, you must know something about the category (categories) in which the work falls. The Case of Wine Wine is typically viewed as an object about which a great deal of knowledge is required for its proper enjoyment, and the expert may even be able to determine the age of the wine or its appellation simply by taste. Smith claims that the experienced taster, that is, one who is familiar with the wine categories, will derive more from the wine drinking experience than the novice. Yet in speaking about wine he also says: We instantly recognize when something is worthy of reflection, when it is great. So we should not think of the immediate experience as just the novice’s domain, in contrast with the reflective judgment of experts…As every wine lover knows, there was a time when they were unaware of the power, depth and beauty that some wines possess. Then came the epiphany. Most wine lovers will remember it: the first time they encountered a rare and astonishing wine. Until that moment they had simply drunk wine, noticing some to be more pleasing than others. mith, op. cit., p. 52; See also Kent Bach’s “Knowledge, Wine and Taste: What good is Knowledge (in enjoying Wine)?” in Barry C. Smith (ed.), Questions of Taste: the philosophy of wine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 21-40. It is hard to see how a Walton-style view can account for the aesthetic experience of the epiphany as Smith describes it. It is not as if Smith’s novice drinker had never had wine before his epiphany; he had had and enjoyed wine. But he had never had a great wine. Therefore he was unfamiliar with what qualities make a great wine great. Yet, when experiencing a great wine for the first time, he realized its greatness by appreciating its aesthetic properties. But how did the novice drinker know how to appreciate its qualities? If a wine’s qualities are in relation to its proper categorization, there should be no way for the novice to appreciate a great wine; such epiphanies should simply not be possible. Perhaps a defender of the application of a Walton-style view to wine would want to claim that such category-free epiphanies are not really possible. Such a person might argue that true appreciation of wine does depend on its categorization. This is just what Jonathan Cohen suggests in his essay “Wine-Tasting, Blind and Otherwise: Blindness as a Perceptual Limitation.” anuscript of a paper presented at Workshop on Wine Expertise, University of London in Paris, Paris, 13 October 2011; I thank Cohen for his correspondence on this issue. There he argues that blind-tasting does not achieve its stated goal—that of unbiased tasting, and further that “blind-tasting positively prevents us from perceiving things that we should want to perceive in tasting wine.” bid., 15 Cohen argues that in tasting a wine without any knowledge of its background, such as varietal, vintage, and appellation, the taster will be unable to direct his attention to certain features of a wine. When one is aware that one is about to taste a Chablis, for instance, one can direct his attention to the delicate characteristics of a Chablis as a Chablis. Cain Todd makes a similar claim in The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty, and Intoxication. There he states wine knowledge will “govern the way in which we taste wine, the expectations and attention we will bring to our appreciation and perception,” and that “This requires experience and practice, and the possession of this background knowledge is just what marks the expert from the non-expert.” odd, op. cit., pp. 108-109. For Cohen, and presumably Todd would agree, when one tastes a wine ignorant of this information, one’s attention is drawn to those features “that are most easily discriminable by us—for example, depth of color, intensity, oakiness, sweetness, density.” ohen, op. cit., p. 17. As a result, when tasting wine blindly or simply without adequate background knowledge, we will actually neglect what may be a wine’s most rewarding taste-features. Cohen explicitly ties his defense of sighted wine tasting to Walton’s categories. Both he and Todd maintain that proper aesthetic appreciation depends on evaluating a wine within its proper category. odd, op. cit., p. 110. Cohen returns to the example of Chablis on several occasions. If we taste a Chablis mixed in with typical Chardonnays during a blind-tasting, with the bare information that we are tasting wines made from the Chardonnay grape, the Chablis is likely to come across as weak. Yet, Cohen notes, Chablis has a noticeably different flavor profile than that of most Chardonnays, and without proper background knowledge we will fail to appreciate the more delicate flavor profile of a typical Chablis, and therefore not properly appreciate it. odd makes an almost identical point; see op. cit., pp. 110-111. One might sum up both Cohen’s and Todd’s point in the following manner: some flavor-notes are standard for certain varietals, and as a result we should know what kind of wine we are tasting and look for those notes in tasting a wine. ohen, op. cit., pp. 19-20; Todd, op. cit., pp. 110-111. It is worth noting that the position of Cohen and Todd may actually be stronger than that of Walton, at least when it comes to the application to wine. Where Walton says “at least in some cases, it is correct to perceive a work in certain categories and incorrect to perceive it in others,” p. cit., .356. the position of Todd and Cohen appears to be that without wine-specific category knowledge the novice will inevitably be drawn to some features of a wine and neglect others. Note above that Cohen says that blind-tasting “positively prevents us from perceiving things that we should want to perceive in tasting wine” and Cohen states that appreciation and perception “requires experience and practice.” The novice wine drinker essentially is tasting blindly precisely because she lacks experience and practice, and so it seems on the Cohen/Todd view a wine novice should be positively prevented from experiencing a fine wine’s aesthetic properties: experience is necessary for appreciation. It appears at times that Smith holds a similarly strong position to Cohen and Todd. Smith similarly maintains that knowledge is part of enjoying a wine and that it enables one to properly enjoy it. He states “The analytical taster and the novice taster are doing something quite different… [The analytical taster] guides his attention towards certain aspects of his experience, selecting some for particular scrutiny.” mith, op. cit., p. 49. He goes on to say: We are seeking out particular types of experience, and this requires knowledge and training. Not everything about the taste of a wine is surrendered at first, or is accessible without a skillful search. A great bottle will not yield everything all at once, or to just anyone. bid., 50 Given the similarity of his position to that of Cohen and Todd, as well as his use of the word “requires”, it seems he too should deny the possibility of the epiphany experience. Thus there appears to be a tension in Smith’s view of wine appreciation: on the one hand he holds that the novice wine drinker may enjoy and appreciate a great wine, while on the other he holds that some knowledge is required for what he calls particular types of experience. This naturally raises the question of how the epiphany experience is possible for the novice at all. Smith distinguishes between what he calls recognition of quality and tasting analytically. owe this point to an anonymous referee. Presumably the novice is capable of the former, but not the latter. It may be true that in making a considered comparison between two wines the novice would be found lacking. However, Smith must at least admit that when the novice does recognize quality, she is surely experiencing the aesthetic properties found in the wine. Smith states, “The tasting impressions on which a considered assessment of a wine are based are first sought out and highlighted by selective attention. We need to prepare ourselves to be receptive to certain kinds of experiences. We need to know what we are looking for.” bid. The novice who experiences the epiphany, however, does not know what to look for, yet she experiences the properties nonetheless—for how else could she have the epiphany? Depending on what Smith means by the phrase considered assessment, a novice may not be capable of this. But it is difficult to square acknowledging the so-called epiphany with talk of proper preparation to experience the aesthetic qualities of a wine. It does not seem plausible that the epiphany depends on a special preparation, nor that the epiphany would be possible without experiencing the kinds of experiences that a great wine has to offer. Further, how can we experientially separate the appreciation of quality and the appreciation of the aesthetic properties within a wine? If one senses that something is of a high quality, surely that judgment is based on the appreciation of its aesthetic properties. In order for an epiphany experience to be possible, there must be a zone of reliable appreciation that does not depend on familiarity with categories. Perhaps the casual-wine drinker pre-epiphany does have general wine tasting categories from her experience with mediocre wine. She has categories concerning color, mouth-feel, etc, so the epiphany is not really a category-free proper aesthetic experience. ohen made this point via email correspondence. Perhaps this is all that is required for one to have the epiphany—the epiphany takes place within those categories. So some knowledge really is required to properly appreciate any wine at all, just not the sort of specialized knowledge that comes from classes on wine tasting. We should not be persuaded by this line of thought. The concept of epiphany has to do with transcending one’s typical experiences. Smith’s epiphany is something along the lines of: What I was drinking before was not really even wine; this is amazing! An epiphany is an emergence from the allegorical cave of taste experience. So, great wine may have aesthetic properties that are simply not to be found in ordinary wine. Therefore we should not believe one’s everyday wine drinking categories can lay the category groundwork for the epiphany. The epiphany is an epiphany because it shatters the groundwork. Further, and more importantly, this response suggests that all wine drinking counts as aesthetic experience. We should certainly not deny that all wine has a taste, but does all wine merit aesthetic appreciation? In other words: does all wine admit of the sustained appreciation that a great wine admits of? If not, it is hard to believe that all wine is then experienced within the same aesthetic categories. So, then, the ordinary wine drinker, although having drank plenty of wine, has not experienced wine as aesthetic experience in the requisite sense. Therefore, it would be safe to conclude that the ordinary wine drinker will not be adequately prepared to appreciate a great wine. If great wine has aesthetic properties that are simply not to be found in ordinary wine, ordinary wine drinkers would not become familiar with those properties. In Steve Charter’s study of wine drinkers he found that certain dimensions, such as complexity, tended to mark out great wines and that even good wines lacked this taste dimension. harters, op. cit., p. 168. Additionally, Todd explicitly states that table wines do not offer the same kinds of satisfaction that a great wine is able to offer. ee Todd, op. cit., pp. 114-115. If the aesthetic experience of a great wine is different in kind from that of table wine, it seems plausible that great wines fall in different kinds of categories than that of ordinary wine and as such ordinary wine simply cannot familiarize a drinker with those categories. If a great Bordeaux offers different kinds of experiences than that of a mediocre Bordeaux, it does not seem possible that they could be appreciated within all the same categories, for they offer categorically different experiences. This is significant because surely Walton would want to deny that all paintings can afford the viewer a significant aesthetic experience and that looking at any painting whatsoever familiarizes one with all the aesthetic categories in which paintings are appreciated. For instance, it is likely that Walton would want to deny that by looking at a child’s painting of a house a person is as a result prepared to appreciate impressionism and that both are appreciated within all the same categories. If we should want to deny that any painting can familiarize a person with the categories by which fine paintings are appreciated, then we should want to do the same for wine. Further, in both the case of visual art and wine, one needs no category knowledge to know if the work is bad; and it is unclear how drinking all the bad wine in the world prepares one for the proper experience of a great wine. Kent Bach essentially agrees with this argument on two counts. First, he believes that mediocre wine is not in the same category as great wine; nonetheless he believes that there is no special knowledge required to appreciate a great wine: Like a great work of art, a great wine has more to notice and more worth noticing than a run-of-the-mill wine… and noticing them and enjoying them is all that is required for appreciating the wine. It really doesn’t go deeper than that. ach, op. cit., pp. 33-4. Bach argues that there may be pleasure derived from knowing a great deal about wine, that is, from being a wine connoisseur, but that this is a cognitive pleasure and that it does not stem from any of the properties within the wine itself. For Bach, the aesthetic pleasures and qualities of a wine are open to any person with normally functioning faculties who drinks it. Intuitively the aesthetic qualities of a wine are in the wine to be tasted, whatever our knowledge about wine. Does it matter if a flavor-note is standard to a varietal for someone to enjoy a wine and taste that note? Smith’s position that knowledge is required for proper appreciation is somewhat odd given that he also holds that a wine has an objective taste; he holds that tastes “are properties a wine has, and tasting [ ] is an experience a subject has.” mith, op. cit., p. 44. Given his position that wine has objective taste properties, it should strike him as plausible that certain flavor-notes are present in a wine and there to be tasted regardless of categorization. A taste property may in fact go un-noticed, but that the taste-property is there to be noticed in no way depends on prior category knowledge; if the tastes of a wine are objective properties of the wine, it does not seem that wine category knowledge should be required to taste the notes within the wine. Bach supposes that the tasting-notes on a bottle may simply verbalize what a taster was already experiencing, but was unable to put into words for himself—the verbalization merely reinforces the experience. ach, op. cit., p. 37 If membership in a category were determinable solely in virtue of the art object’s perceptible qualities, then it may make sense to say that the novice wine drinker may happen to experience a great wine’s full flavor profile, or that the epiphany-experience itself makes new categories available to the novice wine-taster through which he experiences the wine. ohen also suggested this in email correspondence. If aesthetic categories (and hence the aesthetic qualities) are there to be perceived in this way then we are able to account for Smith’s observation that “A recognition of quality does appear to precede a detailed understanding of what is going on in the wine.” mith, op. cit., p. 55 But then it seems as if the categories are nothing more than a way of organizing aesthetic properties that are perceptible independently of category knowledge. It is not plausible that aesthetic experience makes us aware of new categories when the categories themselves make the experience possible. The only way to make sense of the categories on such an interpretation is to understand them as simply calling our attention to aesthetic properties and in no way undergirding them; but this is no longer Walton’s view: he holds that “examining a work with the senses can by itself reveal neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive that way.” alton, op. cit., p. 367 So, if aesthetic appreciation really does depend on the categories in some kind of dependence relation, then prior knowledge—knowledge of vintages, varietals, and terroir—is required to properly appreciate a wine and Smith’s epiphany really is impossible. In our original description of Walton’s view in section two we noted that he does not advocate a blanket view: he holds that for some works certain knowledge is required to properly appreciate its aesthetic properties. As a last defense of a Walton-style position on wine appreciation, one might weaken the strong position of Smith/Cohen/Todd described above and suppose something like the following: in some cases individuals are able to experience an art object’s aesthetic properties without the need for any special category knowledge, perhaps because these art objects are more accessible or less complex, and that it these kinds of art objects that allow for the epiphany experience to occur; however, not all art objects may induce epiphany. So by parity of reasoning, only some great wines are able to induce an epiphany, while other great wines may not be properly experienced without adequate background knowledge. his view was suggested to me by an anonymous reviewer. I thank that person for the suggestion. I see two problems with this. First, great wines are supposedly marked by their complexity. The greatness, the appreciable-ness, if you will, lies in the multiple flavor-notes to be found in the wine—so an accessible, non-complex wine would likely not be able to induce an epiphany. Secondly, one is naturally led to ask what makes one great wine capable of enabling an epiphany experience while another great wine is unable to do so; this will likely be a difficult question to answer. The advocate of this position may be thinking that in the case of painting or visual art, certain styles are clearly more accessible and as a result may be more likely to induce an epiphany, while other works, say some modern piece that is attempting a commentary on earlier work, will be much less likely to induce an aesthetic epiphany. Further they believe the more accessible works can be differentiated from the less accessible ones. Perhaps this is correct for visual art. But we can ask a further question that Bach poses concerning wine: does knowing that a visual art piece is attempting a kind of commentary contribute to its aesthetic qualities or the aesthetic pleasure that it may give, or does this knowledge lead to a different kind of appreciation, say an intellectual or cognitive appreciation? Perhaps these two things cannot be separated in the case of some art works. At the very least the case of wine epiphanies, and the epiphany experience in general, does show that for some kinds of aesthetic appreciation specific category knowledge is not necessary. Conclusion The problematic nature of the categories as applied to wine comes out best when we consider the experience of aesthetic epiphany. As the example of visual art discussed above indicates, we should likely be careful generalizing the conclusion beyond the case of wine. We can at least say the following: if the novice wine drinker can try a wine and appreciate its aesthetic properties, perhaps someone completely new to the symphony can appreciate the work of Mozart on her first listening—or at least know that it is good, even if she does not know why it is. With the experience of a highly sensual object such as wine at least, there seems to be a significant arena of aesthetic appreciation that is independent of art categories. would like to thank Jonathan Cohen for his helpful correspondence on this issue. I would also like to thank Carolyn Korsmeyer, David Braun, Patrick Kelly, and Patrick Ray, all of whom discussed this issue with me at great length. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 1