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Rivista di estetica
78 | 2021
The Senses of Smell: Scents, Odors and Aromatic Spaces

Introduction
Nicola Perullo
p. 3-7
https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.8655

Entrées d’index
Keywords: taste, smell, perceptual knowledge, olfactory art
Parole chiave: sapore, odore, conoscenza percettiva, arte olfattiva

Texte intégral
1 Although recent years have seen a growing philosophical interest in the exploration of
the so-called ‘lower senses’, aesthetic research on taste and smell (the situation is
partially different with respect to touch) still covers a relatively small domain, confined
to a niche. While historical and socio-anthropological research on the two, often said,
‘chemical senses’ are quite copious since decades,1 philosophy is far from having a
proper and specific field of work. Things are changing, however, as multiple and recent
attempts in this direction show.2 But, still today, one of the main topics of the debate
among scholars on taste and smell concerns precisely the reasons for such marginality.
A very common reason has to do with the Western dualistic paradigm of thought, in
which a clear-cut distinction is drawn between the sensory and the intellectual; and,
within it, a further hierarchy between more intellectual and more material senses. There
are, nevertheless, many other reasons (which often revolve around the dualistic
framework), differently facing with problems about the epistemic reliability of tastes
and smells or about their ethical risks. In any case, notably during the last two decades,
many of these traditional objections in support of the alleged philosophical irrelevance
of the ‘lower senses’ have been called into question. Today, a broad agreement is
emerging on the philosophical dignity of taste and smell, on their aesthetic relevance
and on the multiple values they convey. The point I want to suggest here, however, has
not so much to do with reiterating such position but, rather, with remarking that – even
if one accepts some philosophical relevance of taste and smell – it is normally assumed
that they concern only a very small portion of the philosophical inquiry. Is it possible,
instead, to take them, and in particular, as it is here the case, smell, as a vector of a
whole philosophical project?
2 The original idea that motivated the current monographic issue of the “Rivista di
Estetica” stems from accepting the challenge of the question raised above, and it is
cognate to the one that gave rise to a previous issue, published in 2012 (number 51).3
There, a series of essays on wine and taste were gathered, but the attempt was to show
how, through studies apparently dealing ‘just’ with a very peculiar subject, it was
possible to give body to general philosophical issues. Philosophizing through the taste of
wine: that was the ambition. In the 2012, “Rivista di Estetica” made this aspiring
operation, but, in 2018, another notable philosophical journal, “The Monist”, dedicated
a monographic issue to food: times were changed.
3 Now, the present issue faces with smell, odors and fragrances. We can easily agree on
the fact that the ambition of ‘widening’ an apparently restricted topic to the general
arena of thought is here much easier to support. In fact, differently from taste (and even
more so for the taste for wine), smell is always at work and it is not limited to food
consumption. We breathe all along our life, producing an ongoing exchange between
the inner and the outer, the self and the world, the activity and the passivity. We inhale
and exhale; the medium of air is the fundamental condition of life and society, as it
carries everything, not just odors but bacteria and viruses, yeasts and oxygen. As
Merleau-Ponty wrote in Eye and Mind, “There really is inspiration and expiration of
Being”.4 This issue aims at offering the reader a multiplicity of perspectives that can
stimulate not only further research in the fields of olfaction, but reflections on the
nature of aesthetics, its current state of art, and also some urgent emergencies in social
and political terms.
4 Far from claiming any exhaustiveness, I list some of the relevant topics that emerge –
sometimes directly, other times indirectly – from this constellation of papers on smell,
odors and olfaction. I am here introducing only those I find more compelling and
challenging, in order to provide, rather than a list of contents, an ‘overviewing map’ of
the forthcoming pages. It is not a summary of every paper (which readers can easily find
in the respective abstracts), but a sketch of some possible investigations that can be
drawn through and from them.

Are we fixed and solid entities or rather aerial beings? Or maybe a

combination of the two dimensions? This ontological question seems paramount
when we discuss about aerial spaces and olfaction. Smell, thus, can deeply
contribute to challenge the status of ‘individual being’ understood as a clearly
bounded entity and, instead, to open up a relational paradigm.
The ever-emerging fighting between the objectivist view and the subjectivist
view – with the third option, the relational view – is at stake when discussing
about smell. It is obviously an epistemological question, but it is nevertheless
connected to the previous ontological one; more in general, it calls into play the
distinction between ontology and epistemology.
In the aesthetic debate about perceptual knowledge and the senses, smell and
odors concur offering another perspective. The conventional paradigm, assuming
the prevalence of the visual perception, can be questioned not only through the
alternative of the auditory and the tactile perception, but also through the
olfactory one. What are the consequences, once we assume that the whole
perception is immersed into an olfactory environment?
Odors deeply engage with two important aspects of aesthetics today: the
‘everyday life’ aesthetics, and the new art. In fact, on the one hand, smell is
pervasive and surrounds the whole life – better, it is a condition of it; a specific
attention to olfaction thus implies the possibility to live an aesthetic life with
particular values. On the other hand, once we overcome the hierarchy of the
senses both in epistemology and in aesthetics, an olfactory art becomes totally
legitimate.
Through the greater or lesser importance attributed to smell and breathing, we
alight on the core of the dialogue and confrontation between ‘Western’
philosophy and ‘Eastern’ thought. As it is well known, in the Eastern tradition
 olfaction and breathe play a fundamental role that finds little correspondence in
the West (Luce Irigaray wrote about the “forgetting of the air” to feature
Heidegger’s thought),5 at least until the notion of atmosphere began to be
conceptualized.
Social impacts of air, as well as the political consequences of the manifold ways
of manipulating odors, are tremendous. On the one hand, this has to do with
issues on how to use the technological developments (for example, deodorization
or artificial aromas); on the other hand, with wider phenomena such as
atmospheric pollution, a fundamental part of the ecological crisis. Not to
mention Covid-19 emergency, that has to do with air and breathing.

5 I hope that this short, hints-made list, can give just a first idea of the huge
potentialities that might stem from the philosophical study of smell and air. The
following series of papers show how olfaction, odors, fragrances and, more in general,
the aerial dimension of being and knowing cover a huge, and very diverse, range of
problems that even exceed the aesthetic domain in its strict sense. This is why readers
will not find papers exclusively by professional philosophers. The authors are also
curators/philosophers, artists, artists/philosophers, perfumers and semiologists,
approaching the issue from varied points of view and touching a vast domain of
problems. In the sketch below, I grouped them into three main fields in order to help
orientation; but they, in turn, often refer to each other, and essays that seem distant are
instead connected. This presentation does not coincide with the sequence of essays in
the issue.

Three papers – the ones by Larry Shiner, Giulia Martina and Sue Spaid – are
mainly concerned with the relationship between smell, cognition, and expertise.
They mostly rest on a neuroscientific base within a framework that insists on the
analytical tradition of philosophy of mind. Shiner aptly argues in favor of
cognitive powers of smell, linking it to the aesthetic value of olfaction and the
possibility for an olfactory art. Giulia Martina, in turn, endorses this statement
reinforcing an objectivist position that makes a clear difference between the
ontology of smells, the content they possess, and their perceptual appearance.
Lastly, Sue Spaid, also art curator, proposes a theory of value disgust inspired by
Disgusting Food Museum, arguing for the possibility for perceptual learning of
disgust transforming it from negative reaction to value.
The paper by Jenny Ponzo, the conversation with perfumer and sociologist of
smell Diletta Tonatto and the piece written by the artist Wolfgang Georgsdorf,
founder of the Smeller and the world famous event Osmodrama Festival in
Berlin, investigate smells under the lens of art, science, and symbolic meanings.
Jerry Ponzo, using especially the tools of the semiotics of culture, claims the
spiritual and immaterial dimension of fragrances, highlighting the importance of
symbolism for the aesthetic values of smell. Diletta Tonatto, while giving her
testimony as an artisan of perfumes, stresses the beneficial community power of
fragrances, the project she names ‘re-humanization’ of smell. Wolfgang
Georgsdorf recreates the genesis and the development of Osmodrama, one of the
most important and current specimen of olfactory-dramatic art, ‘olfactory
poetry’, worldwide. It is an exemplary history as it intertwines science and art,
chemistry and music.
The final field encompasses the two papers written by the philosopher and
artist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and by Elena Mancioppi, co-editor
of the present issue. They both move towards a more socio-ontological and socio-
aesthetic engagement through the ethical and political implications of smell.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos proposes a call against the ‘ontological anosmia’
highlighting the incessant and ongoing risk of manipulation of the atmospheric
environment. Mancioppi, finally, highlights the – often hidden – relationships
 between smell and politics, also presenting the ambivalence of consumer culture
in relation to aesthetic values.

Bibliographie
Bourdieu, P. 1979, La distinction. Critique sociale du Jugement, Paris, Minuit.
Classen, C., Howes, D., Synnott, A. 1994, Aroma. The Cultural History of Smell, London - New
York, Routledge.
DOI : 10.4324/9780203428887
Corbin, A. 1982, Le miasme et la jonquille. L’odorat et l’imaginaire social xviiie-xixe siècles,
Paris, Aubier Montaigne.
Detienne, M. 1972, Les jardins d’Adonis. La mythologie des aromates en Gréce, Paris, Gallimard.
DOI : 10.14375/NP.9782070281121
Han, B. 2017, The Scent of Time. A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering [2009],
Cambridge, Polity.
Hsu, L.H. 2020, The Smell of Risk. Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics, New
York, New York University Press.
DOI : 10.18574/nyu/9781479807215.001.0001
Irigaray, L. 1983, L’oublie de l’air chez Martin Heidegger, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.
Korsmeyer, C. 1999, Making Sense of Taste. Food and Philosophy, Ithaca - New York, Cornell
University Press.
DOI : 10.7591/9780801471339
Jaquet, C. 2010, Philosophie de l’odorat, Paris, PUF.
DOI : 10.3917/puf.jacqc.2010.01
Le Guérer, A. 1998, Les pouvoirs de l’odeur, Paris, Odile Jacob.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964, Eye and the mind (1960), in J.M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception
and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics,
trans. by W. Cobb, Evanston (IL), Northwestern University Press.
Montanari, M. 2006, Food is Culture, New York, Columbia University Press.
Perullo, N. 2012 (ed.), Wineworld. New essays on wine, taste, philosophy and aesthetics,
“Rivista di Estetica”, anno LII, vol. 51.
Perullo, N. 2016, Taste as Experience. The Philsophy and Aesthetics of Food, New York,
Columbia University Press.
DOI : 10.7312/columbia/9780231173483.001.0001
Shiner, L. 2020, Art Scents. Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts, Oxford,
Oxford University Press.

Notes
1 With regard to smell, consider, among others, Detienne 1972, Corbin 1982, Le Guérer 1998,
Classen, Howes, Synnott 1994. On taste, see Bourdieu 1979; Montanari 2006.
2 Cfr. Jaquet 2010, Han 2017, Hsu 2020, Shiner 2020, and also Korsmeyer 1999, Perullo 2016.
3 Perullo 2012.
4 Merleau-Ponty 1964: 167.
5 Irigaray 1983.

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier
Nicola Perullo, « Introduction », Rivista di estetica, 78 | 2021, 3-7.

Référence électronique
Nicola Perullo, « Introduction », Rivista di estetica [En ligne], 78 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 février
2024, consulté le 20 mai 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/estetica/8655 ; DOI :
https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.8655
Auteur
Nicola Perullo
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