ABSTRACT
Western philosophy long ago established a hierarchy of the senses. Assumed within this hierarchy is the belief that distance – between knower and known – has a cognitive, moral, and aesthetic advantage, while a bodily sense like taste brings one dangerously close to the object of perception (Korsmeyer 1999). Plato, in his famous discussion of the cave in Republic VII, uses a wealth of metaphors to convey the intellectual power of sight: shadows, light, the sun, the darkness of a cave, and Forms. The belief, then as now, has been that vision, though open to creating illusions, is freer from the pull of emotions and appetite than other more corporeal forms of knowledge, like taste. For Plato, the philosophic life required the denial of these lower senses. In his Symposium, for example, friends gathered for a banquet. But as they philosophize about love they make sure not to eat or drink so as to keep their intellect sharp. Similarly, the denial of the more fleshy “lower” senses has been a constant theme in theological scholarship for over two millennia.
