10.13135/2036-542X/8068
application/pdf
2036-542X
8068
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Ariana Ragusa
Trópos
Tasting Vino with Vico: Full–Bodied Discourse
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
12
Monografica
2019-12-01
2023-08-16
2019-12-01
2023-08-16
87-98
1
Ariana Ragusa
2019/12/01
10.13135/2036-542X/8068
87
Independent Scholar
2036-542X
1
98
Tasting Vino with Vico: Full–Bodied Discourse
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/8068/6783
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                                                                                trópos – ISBN 978-88-255-2800-8
                                                         DOI 10.4399/97888255280089 – pag. 87-98 (dicembre 2019)




                                                    Tasting Vino with Vico:
                                                    Full–Bodied Discourse
                                                                                 A R*




   Abstract
   The experience of tasting wine and our earnest attempt to make sense of it draws
   the body back into discourse, recalling the sensorial and corporeal roots of lan-
   guage creation unearthed by Giambattista Vico in The New Science. Vico’s narrative
   strategy will help us to understand the necessity and utility of the bodily metaphors
   pervading wine discourse. Rather than being mere artifice or ornament, out of a
   poverty of speech; furthermore, they fulfill the need to express new and uncharted
   dimensions of reality. Our examination of the sense of taste and its intimately related
   senses of smell and touch reveals gaps in Vico’s story of how language springs from
   the body. His narrative traces the birth and development of language drawn from
   only two of our senses: sight and hearing. In other words, the corporeal origins
   of language creation in the Western intellectual tradition uncovered by Vico are
   limited to only two aspects of the body; the others remain buried. Finally, we will
   consider how cultivating the hidden and hedonic senses of taste, smell, and touch
   can open up new dimensions of our sensorial experience of the earth, one another,
   and ourselves.
   Keywords: Metaphors, Language, Body, Wine, Taste, Vico.

    The experience of tasting wine and our earnest attempt to make sense of
it draws the body back into discourse, evincing the sensorial and corporeal
roots of language creation unearthed by Giambattista Vico in The New
Science. Vico’s narrative strategy will help us understand the necessity and
utility of the pervasive bodily metaphors found in wine discourse. Rather
than mere artifice or ornament, the metaphors are born of a poverty of
speech and they fulfill the need to express new, uncharted experiences of
reality. Our examination of the sense of taste and the intimately related
senses of smell and touch, moreover, will reveal gaps in Vico’s story of how
language springs from the body. We will see that his narrative is primarily
from only two of our senses: sight and hearing. Finally, we will consider
    ∗
      Independent Scholar. aragusa@gmail.com.
   . Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max and Harold Fisch and
Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). Hereafter cited as NS.


                                                                                                            
      Ariana Ragusa


how cultivating our sense of taste can open up new dimensions of our
sensorial experience of the earth, one another, and ourselves.
    Vico’s first public academic address was titled “On the Sumptuous Ban-
quets of the Romans.” He meditated upon Roman dining and culinary
practices in order to capture their lived experience. In a similar spirit, Vico
turned to the Roman comic poets to catch their living, breathing, and daily
discourse. His choice to present an oration on the gustatory habits of the
Romans during such a momentous step in his career (when he first took
up his position as Professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Naples)
offers us a clue about Vico’s valuation of the body and its habits in the story
of Man. Vico is a philosopher of the body and its ontological relation to place.
Below, we will see how Vico’s narrative tells the story of the simultaneous
transformations of body and place as they expand and diminish.
    Wine tasting suits the habitus of Vico’s cities and academies. The plea-
sures of tasting wine and evaluating its aesthetic value evokes the luxury
and pomp of the sumptuous banquets Vico captures in Homer. The refined
sensuality of this age indicates an age in decline, for Vico. In the age of men,
the once robust heroes have become frail humans, and the masculine has
given way to the feminine. The body lies soft and inert on plush cushions.
This is its proper form — the result of refinement and cultivation. Cultured
and clean, it “has reached the extreme of delicacy” in which men “lash out
at the slightest displeasures.” But in the first age, Vico gives digestion a role
in the story of our primordial emergence from the forests. His narration
begins with the dire search for fresh perennial springs and ends with the
sumptuous banquets of the Greeks. The urgent need for drinking water
motivated the wandering of the first poets. And this need motivates our
powers of invention. For true ingenuity is born of a response to necessity
or utility.
    We might note that wine culture could provide a study in the symbolic
languages of Vico’s heroic age, for it seems to be alive and well today: family
crests, coats of arms, emblems, and heralds still adorn bottles and chateaux,
     . Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico and Culinary Art: ‘On the Sumptuous Banquet of the Romans’
and the Science of the First Meals,” , in New Vico Studies  (): . Here, Vico prefigures Mikhail
Bakhtin’s notion that comedy breaks up centralizing, hegemonic discourse. Parodic–travestying
forms capture the laughing, breathing, and spontaneous discourse of peoples in dynamic relation
to their lived situation. Alternatively, according to Bakhtin, myth has a homogenizing power over
language. The mythos, fables, or true speech that Vico recovers vibrate with life. He captures them
before they become sedimented and centralized into reified myths. There is a strong destabilizing
and decentralizing current coursing throughout The New Science. It would make sense, then, that
Vico took care to stay close to the comics and their unique ability to express the pulsating, lived
expressions of the people. The language of the kitchen, too, is often close to the language of everyday
speech, far removed from the learned discourse of the academies. Vico digs beneath the inert
abstractions of the erudite men to reveal their situated, experiential source.
     . NS, par. .
                                                                      Tasting Vino with Vico         


whose images demarcate plots of land. They evoke the secret symbolic
language of the heroes, meant to induce awe and perhaps a little fear. This
illusory mystique and fabled imagery is especially at work in Burgundy and
Bordeaux. This essay, though, focuses on the experience of taste (though
this would be an enticing study to take up at a later date).
    Recently, there has been growing philosophical interest in taste, food,
and wine. A wave of popular academic works on the topic has come mainly
from the Anglo–American analytic tradition. Various publications include
Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy; Philosophers at Table: On Food
and Being Human; The Aesthetics of Food: The Philosophical Debate; Wine &
Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking; Questions of Taste, The
Philosophy of Wine; I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine; The
Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty, and Intoxication amongst others.
Although philosophical attention upon the traditionally devalued sense of
taste is encouraging, one is disheartened to find these works swamped in
debates over the objectivity or subjectivity of taste. Carolyn Korsmeyer’s
pioneering text, Making Sense of Taste, provides the greatest springboard for
our reading of Vico and taste.
    Korsmeyer elucidates the privileged status of the distal senses of sight
and hearing in the Western intellectual tradition. The three devalued
senses of taste, touch, and smell are traditionally held to be too bound
up with the body to have any substantial cognitive or aesthetic value.
These proximal senses have been regarded as ignoble, hedonistic, and

     . Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, ).
     . Raymond Boisvert and L. Heldke, Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (London,
UK: Reaktion Books, ).
     . Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking, ed. Fritz Allhoff (Oxford: Black-
well Publishing, ).
     . Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, ed. Barry Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
).
     . Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine(London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, ).
     . Cain Todd, The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty, and Intoxication (Montreal: McGill
Queen’s University Press, ).
    . I would like to add that I recently invited Carolyn Korsmeyer to speak at my family’s
restaurant, Giancarlo’s Sicilian Steakhouse in Williamsville, New York. Her lecture was accompanied
by a wine and food pairing meant to invoke the convivial sense of light intoxication and discussion
that colored the ancient Greek symposiums. Korsmeyer related how her work on taste prefigured
the others listed above by ten years or more. Until recently, she was the lone figure in the forests of
taste. I would also like to note that I am currently training to become a certified Sommelier, which
motivates my reading of Vico through the fascinating world of wine. I am also training in order to
nourish the development of my family’s collection of imported wines, Grivani and ana blu: Wines of
the Sea. Our Wines of the Sea are based upon the old world concept of terroir and, in particular, coastal
terroir.
       Ariana Ragusa


feminine. Although Korsmeyer expends most of her effort upon reeval-
uating taste, touch, and smell, and conferring cognitive and aesthetic
value upon them, she is often pilloried by commentators for her relatively
marginal argument that food and wine cannot achieve the status of fine
art. She cautiously excludes food and wine from the traditional categories
constituting fine works of art.
    But her argument is more subtle than most commentators appreciate.
By establishing the historicity of the categories of fine art, and their ar-
bitrary dependence upon the two masculine senses of sight and sound,
she ruptures the categories themselves. One of her more generous critics,
Raymond Boisvert, explains, “in declining to grant ‘art’ status, Korsmeyer
is suggesting that, given the restrictiveness of the category, granting art
status to food is not the most efficacious thing we can do to recognize
and value it aesthetically” Korsmeyer’s argument points to our need for
a broader, more robust sense of the aesthetics of taste — one not limited
by traditional categories. Vico presents such an aesthetics, as we shall see.
In tracing the sensuous, savage, and wild beginnings of the fine arts and
recondite sciences, Vico boldly destabilizes the traditional categories, while
Korsmeyer’s approach is far more timid and subtle.
    Korsmeyer’s work is important for our purposes for one other major
reason. It allows us to detect a gap in Vico’s recovery of the bodily roots of
recondite concepts. Vico, it turns out, does not trace the beginnings of the
refined arts from the body as a whole, but rather, from only the two distal
bodily senses: sight and hearing.
    To examine the relationship between the senses and language in wine
discourse, let us return to the improper, unruly, excessive bodies of the
first poets in Vico’s ages of the gods and the heroes. Like the first poets,
tasters seem buried in their bodies, groping for a way, in an almost agitated
spirit, to make sense of the beguiling object before them. There is a secret
dialogue between wine and the body that demands fuller expression. The
recourse to metaphor and poetic expression used by wine tasters indicates
a need and a lack. Beyond mere artifice and play, the poetics taken up
conveys an underlying poverty of speech. Although not as dire, this lack and
need mirrors the impulses that drive invention in Vico’s first two ages. The
gross, bodily giants wander the primeval forests in search of freshwater.
Vico is the rare philosopher in the history of Western intellectual thought
who acknowledges the digestive aspect of our being and becoming human.
He elaborates, to a degree, what Raymond Boisvert and Lisa Helde call a
“farmer guided, stomach–endowed philosophy.”

     . Boisvert and Heldke, Philosophers at Table, .
     . Boisvert and Heldke, Philosophers at Table, .
                                                             Tasting Vino with Vico        


    Why is there a poverty of expression in wine discourse? Despite Vico’s
heroic return to the first narratives, the senses of taste, touch, and smell have
left no story to unearth — there is little for Vico to recover. These senses
have remained uncultivated and unexpressed. Though the first beastly poets
carried words over from their excessive bodies, they augmented their distal
senses in the process. Hence, we are left with a story that ends with the
detached, abstract discourse of the age of Man.
    Let us consider poetic logic traversed by the first awakening of sight and
sound in Vico’s narrative. We will look to the creation of the first poetic
character in Vico’s founding myth, the birth of Jove. After the floods, giants
wandered the great forests of the earth. One day, upon the mountain tops,
lightning strikes the air and the hiss of the lightning and the clap of the
thunderbolts cause the strongest of the wandering giants to shake in fear.
They seize their feral wandering and, significantly, stay in one place. For the
first time, they “raise their eyes and become aware of the sky.” There is a
dialogic relationship between the hissing earth and the giants’ shouts; they
are performing a duet. More importantly, they “see” and “hear” the first signs
of the gods. Vision and sound dominate this expressive exchange between
the earth and the body. In this primordial scene, we witness the birth of the
sky–gods. The proto–humans “express their violent passions by shouting and
grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body.”
As the age of gods gives way to the age of heroes and then, finally, the age of
men, bodies and their gods shrink. The excessive bodies of the poetic giants
and the vast bodies of their imagined gods diminish simultaneously. The once
great, animated body of the earth and sky ultimately becomes the tiny image
of the god, Jove, flown about in a chariot.
    Their guttural shouts and songs are quieted in the age of men. Where
the written word prevails, the vigor of the vocalic is lost. This silence in the
last age is a haunting mirror of the primordial silence of the giants roaming
the earth in the first age. They wandered without mothers and “without
ever hearing a human voice.” Sight eclipses hearing and the written word
dominates. The sonorous residue of language is depleted and the power of
our primordial bodily eyes is diminished. Vico relates:

   The nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar,
   by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in,
   and so refined by the art of writing...that it is naturally beyond our power to form
   the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.”

  .   NS, par. .
  .   NS, par. .
  .   NS, par. .
  .   NS, par. .
      Ariana Ragusa


    The men of the cities and of the academies are incapable of envisioning
the primordial images that were once created by wholly bodily imaginations.
For the first poets were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the
passions, “buried in the body.” The unbound, excessive giants are reduced
to their delicate human form in the final age of men. And accordingly, the
vast, impenetrable forests are reduced to orderly, demarcated cities and
academies. As man becomes detached from his body, he also becomes
untethered from his sense of place.
    I use the word man because Vico’s is the story of the birth and end of
the concept Man. In the final age, humanity attempts to live through this
concept. In Adriana Cavarero’s words, we may see this as an age where one
“attempts to recognize oneself in the definition Man.” This results in a sort
of rational madness. Donald Verene explains: “Vico shows that to believe in
the reality of the concept is a form of madness.” As women were never
fully included in the universal concept Man, there is a sense in which they
have been spared this tragic fate. Much as Adriana Cavarero has taught us
that women joyfully carried on the art of narrative while men struggled to
live through the concept, women in this case, too, have remained closer to
their bodily senses of taste, touch, and smell. An intellectual tradition that
has cast them out of the sphere of rational discourse and, in turn, out of the
place of the cities and academies has in fact helped to preserve their sense
of self as lived through their proximal, hedonic, and feminine senses. Of
course, this is not to argue that women should be displaced from the cities
and academies. Instead, the feminine realm of sensorial expression should
be celebrated and used as a curative for the fatigue of the concept in the
cities and the academies.
    Taste, touch, and smell do not make a significant appearance in Vico’s
tale of shrinking bodies, then, because these feminine senses have never
been narrated or granted full expression. Vico’s narrative is the story of the
birth, death, and decline of the concept Man. And the distal senses of sight
and hearing are at the origins of this story. The hedonic, proximal senses
remain buried in the body, dormant, feral, uncultivated — without a story.
    But Vico’s demonstration of the poetic transformation of bodies can be
accessed to imagine how a new poetic transformation of the body through
cultivating the hedonic senses might take place. For Vico, the body and its
relationship with place is always in a state of becoming. It is never reified


    . NS, par. .
   . Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Lon-
don: Routledge, ), .
   . Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s New Science of Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
), .
                                                                   Tasting Vino with Vico        


into one fixed form. The first poets struggle and expend great heroic effort
to carve out a sense of themselves and a meaningful place. Their bodily
senses are vibrant and fully engaged. At the beginning of things, they “were
extremely lively.”
      The energetic quest for expression is palpable when witnessing wine
tasters today, as they grope for words and shout out flavors, aromas, and
novel metaphors. Wine discourse is exciting because of the conspicuous
ignorance vibrating along its edges. It evokes the animate, untamed igno-
rance of the first poets. The effort to discover new names for our gustatory
experience is tantamount to creating the experience itself. According to
Vico, “the name creates the character, the word engenders the thing.”
The power of the name to create reality fuels the poetic making of the first
human places.
      The beastly poets create not through knowing, but through ignorance. Vico
affirms that “when men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things
[. . . ] they attribute their own nature to them.” What is more, “the human
mind because of its indefinite nature, wherever it is lost in ignorance makes
itself the rule of the universe in respect of everything it does not know.”
New experiences necessitating new metaphors almost always spring from
bodies. Vico anticipates the cognitive scientists Lakoff and Johnson’s notion
that metaphors arise from our bodily experience of reality. Or, as Goetsche
frames it, “metaphor is based on the metaphysics of the body.”
      In The New Science, the first narrations are concrete metaphors created
through bodily skills. Vico notes that:
    In all the languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things
    are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human
    senses and passions. Thus head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a
    hill; the eyes and needles of potatoes...the flesh of fruits, a vein of rock or mineral,
    the blood of grapes for wine [. . . ] our rustics speak of plants making love, vines
    going mad, resinous trees weeping.

   The famous Sangiovese grape of Italy and star of the fabled Super Tuscan
wines is etymologically rendered as the blood of Jove (we wonder whether
    . NS, par. .
    . NS, par. .
    . Nancy Struever, “Vico, Valla, and the Logic of Humanist Inquiry,” in Giambattista Vico’s New
Science of Humanity, ed. Georgio Tagliacozza and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, ), .
    . NS, par. .
    . NS, par. .
    . Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, .
    . Goetsche, Vico’s Axioms, .
    . NS, par. .
       Ariana Ragusa


this is the grape Vico had in mind in his metaphor above). More to the
point, bodily metaphors hint at nascent beginnings. If our proximal, hedonic
senses have no real story, and are uncultivated and unrefined, we should
expect a plethora of metaphors drawn from the body. When a wine is
described as skeletal, full–bodied, moody, or shy, we need only to think back
to Vico’s first poets and their bodily metaphors.
   Bodily metaphors dominates wine discourse. Cain Todd affirms that:
     Perhaps the most striking ways in which wines are typically characterized is in their
     personification; that is, wines are attributed human characteristics and personalities.
     Physically wines can be big, bold, corpulent, fleshy, skeletal, muscular, masculine,
     feminine, thin, emaciated. They can be gentle, inviting, cheerful, pretentious, amus-
     ing, enticing, proud, vicious, capricious, sly, shy, restrained, voluptuous. Wines
     can be straightforward, clean, genuine, authentic, honest, pure, commercial. They
     can possess or lack virtues and vices, and they can be precocious, chic, raunchy,
     demure, smart, elegant, charming, sophisticated, refined, brilliant, distinguished,
     gracious, enticing, sumptuous, seductive, opulent – and their opposites [. . . ]. They
     can be energetic, vigorous, spirited, powerful, combative, aggressive, feeble, punny,
     lacking backbone.

  Furthermore, in her essay, “Can Wines Be Brawny? Reflections on Wine
Vocabulary,” Adrienne Lehrer writes:
     The most interesting words for a linguist are those relating to mouthfeel, which
     involves two general classes of words: ) body, characterized most generally by the
     antonymous pair full–bodied, and light, and ) other tactile sensations like hard or
     prickly [. . . ] Full–bodied wines can be heavy, big, flabby, thick, solid and deep. These
     words, in turn, have associations and yield terms such as strong, sturdy, solid, powerful,
     forceful, beefy, and robust. On the light side we find small, little, thin, weak (all negative),
     delicate, and fragile.

   These bodily metaphors demonstrate that we are at the beginning of
things. As Vico states, “All metaphors conveyed by likeness taken from
bodies to signify the operations of the minds must date from the time when
philosophies were taking shape. The proof of this is that in every language
the terms needed for the refined arts and the recondite sciences are of rustic
origin.” And today a philosophy of taste is just beginning to take shape.
   Vico held the fine arts and sciences up to the light and peered back into
their deep history. But food and wine have never reached the status of fine
arts such as music, painting, and sculpture or what Tim Crane calls the
institutional theory of art. In short, “anything which is in an art museum
   . Todd, Philosophy of Wine, .
   . Adrienne Lehrer, “Can Wines be Brawny? Reflections on Wine Vocabulary,” in Questions of
Taste, .
   . NS, par .
                                                    Tasting Vino with Vico   


(gallery, concert hall, etc.) is a work of art, and anything that is a work of
art is in an art museum.” The criteria used to judge these works of fine
art hinge upon, as we saw above, the senses of sight and hearing.
    Vico traces the corporeal origins of these refined arts. But since the
hedonic senses were never part of the story, he could not recover them.
For there is nothing to uncover — they had not yet found a place to begin
their story. A refinement or sedimentation of the hedonic senses has yet to
take shape. Although we do not find them in Vico’s backward glance, his
recovery of the rustic, corporeal origins of the refined arts and sciences
helps us to catch a glimpse of the way the dialogic relationship between the
body and the earth gives birth to stories. The nascent languages he digs up
resemble the fledgling metaphors found in wine discourse today and the
poetic transformation of taste is occurring as we speak.
    Because of his intense meditation upon the bodily senses, Vico comes
close to capturing the multi–modal synaesthetic experience of the senses.
His recovery of the corporeal imaginations of the first poets illuminates
our primordial synaesthesia. He writes, “they spoke of hearing the sun pass
at night from west to east through the sea, and affirmed that they saw
the gods.” This elucidates the originary synaesthetic experience that the
French phenomenologist Merleau–Ponty regards as our primordial way
of experiencing reality. Learned men distinguish and separate the senses,
but this is derivative of a more primordial correspondence between the
senses. Tasting wine notoriously brings the interplay of the senses to the
fore. For instance, most of what we take to be taste is in fact retronasal
olfaction. Moreover, the overall situation affects the taste experience: the
color of the tablecloth, the lighting, the music playing, the scent of our
friend’s perfume, etc. Tasting recalls the chaotic interplay of the senses at
work in the primeval forests, where every face appeared to be a new face.
    The hedonic senses still commence with the chaotic whirl of the primeval
forest — they have yet to discover their Jove. The cycle of spontaneous ex-
pression turning toward rigid sedimentation has not run its course. Our
received, established discourse has left a part of our corporeal experience
of the earth unexpressed. In fact, the poverty of expression found in wine
discourse reveals its proximity to the primeval forest. The uncultivated
senses of taste and smell point to the forest, where the senses are mixed up
in a synaesthetic, amorphous play. The creation of the poetic character Jove
lifted the wandering giants out of the chaos and confusion of the senses
characterizing the forest. He was called the stayer or establisher because he
caused the giants to stop their feral wanderings and establish the first place.

  . Crane, Questions of Taste, .
  . NS, par. .
      Ariana Ragusa


    Acting through the poetic character Jove, the poetic beasts burned down
the forest so that they could till the land, and more importantly, read the
signs of their imagined god Jove. They eliminated the treetops that covered
their view of the sky so that they could interpret his divine auspices. Robert
Harrison explains, “We find here in Vico’s text a fabulous insight, for the
abomination of forests in Western history derives above all from the fact
that, since Greek and Roman times at least, we have been a civilization of
sky–worshipper.” Esposito also highlights the savagery inherent in the
clearing of the forest. He writes, “The violent erasure of the originary forest,
as well as being a reduction of communitas, marks a progressive abstraction
from its bodily content.” The loss of the forest triggers the loss of our
connection to the earth, each other, and our own bodies.
    The beastly proto–humans crane their neck to the sky and the start of
our detachment from the earth and body commences. There is a dialogic
response between bodies and place, between the earth and the trembling
giants, at the birth of things, but this dialogic exchange weakens and men
begin to live in abstract palaces, cut off from the earth and their commu-
nities. In the cities, men wander without a place just like the giants did in
the chaotic, undifferentiated forests. What is more, place gives way to space
and they no longer realize themselves as creatures of the earth, dwelling
beneath the sky. Harrison explains, “At the center, one forgets that one is
dwelling in the clearing. The center becomes utopic. The wider the circle
of the clearing, the more the center is nowhere and the more the logos
becomes reflective, abstract, universalistic, in essence, ironic.” Like the
primordial giants, men once again wander ignorant of places.
    Vico’s forest mirrors Nietzsche’s Dionysian forest, and his cities, Niet-
zsche’s antithetical Apollonian force. The Apollonian form, identity, and dif-
ference established in the cities and academies vanish in the forest. Drunken
chaos thwarts the Apollonian impulse toward order and individuation. Niet-
zsche warns, “Drunken reality does not head the individual unit, but even
seeks to destroy the individual.” Barbarism lurks behind both forces. For
Vico, dwelling too close to the forest engenders the barbarism of sense.
Conversely, dwelling inside the abstract palaces of cities and academies
engenders the barbarism of reflection. These barbarisms are characterized

    . Robert Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, ), .
   . Roberto Esposito, Living Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
), .
    . Harrison, Forests, .
   . NS, par. .
   . Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Dover Thrift
Editions) .
                                                       Tasting Vino with Vico   


by the extremes of chaos and order respectively. The savagery at both ends
is comparable to Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian principles. Both
Nietzsche and Vico capture the dynamic tension between the forests and
the cities; between the promiscuous interplay of the senses and the icy logic
of the philosophers; and madness is discovered at both ends.
    For both thinkers, the world is always spilling over in excess and can
never be adequately captured by discourse. Vico further symbolizes this
excess by the gross giants and Nietzsche by the mad god Dionysus. We have
not yet touched upon this aspect of wine tasting, namely, intoxication. Wine
opens one up to the other. Light intoxication can engender the sense of
community that is lost in the solitary boundaries of the cities and academies.
Intoxication invites the god Dionysus in and upends boundaries and distinc-
tions, sometimes dangerously so. Nietzsche powerfully conveys the pole of
madness brought on by Dionysus and his mad sylvan vines. Conversely, we
have seen that living through the concept is also a form of rational madness
in Vico. With the excess of Apollonian form and boundaries, men become
“beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first
men had been made by the barbarism of sense.” Vico writes, “no matter
how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in
a deep solitude of spirit.” The story of the rise and dominance of sight and
hearing has left us detached and divorced from our bodies in a state more
savage than the condition of the multi–modal, beastly poets.
    The birth, rise, and decline of languages in Vico’s narration is situated
between these two poles of excess: the excess of the body and the excess
of form. Discourse emerges from corporeal excess. Esposito writes, “the
origin of life itself, in all its expressions — material, ideal, sensory, cognitive
emotional and intellectual — is embedded in the corporeal magma from
which it can never fully detach itself.” The academies and cities can never
purify themselves of their murky birth. Their reified, sedimented expres-
sions will always bear traces of the spontaneous, corporeal expressions first
born of the forests and its gross beasts.
    Vico’s ages act more as a dynamic tension rather than a cycle. The
creative impulse harnesses forces at opposite ends to give birth to sublime
beauty. Vico affirms, “The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped
us to understand continued for a long time into the historical period, much
as great and rapid rivers continue far into the sea, keeping sweet the waters
born on by the force of their flow.” In order to drink sweet water, or to

   .   NS, par. .
   .   NS, par. .
   .   Esposito, Living Thought, .
   .   NS, par. .
    Ariana Ragusa


indulge in beautiful wines, we need to keep the channels open, and dwell in
a liminal space, somewhere between the forests and the cities. The vineyard
is at the threshold of the forests and the cities.
    A sense of place or terroir remains vital to our experience of wine. Al-
though the French concept is not scientifically proven, one can taste hints of
lavender if the wine comes from a vineyard near lavender fields or mineral,
saline notes when the vines grow near the sea. Today, the overuse of tech-
nology has covered over the grape’s expression of terroir and, in many cases,
it may be impossible to identify where a wine is from. We find our self in
the utopic, the no–place characterizing Vico’s age of men. Wine making
technique can all too often obfuscate the true voice or expression of the
grape and its ontological relation to place.
    When we respond to a wine’s unique expression of terroir or the synaes-
thetic way it conjures up all of our senses, we may reawaken a sense of
ourselves as emplaced, sensorial beings. At the very least, the concept of
terroir offers a beautiful metaphor for the way in which we realize ourselves
through our dwellings.
    The vineyards, like Vico’s clearing in the forest, call us away from the
cities and academies. The taster brings the wine to her nose, feels its texture,
and tastes its flavors, engaging in a dialogic relationship with the wine.
Cultivating this experience awakens the hedonic senses and draws out our
powers of expression to poetically transform our selves and our relation to
the earth. Here we feel how the world always spills over in excess, forever
beckoning new responses. Reminding us, as Vico once did, that the world is
always young.
