Kant on tea tasting

Hi John, I read your piece. While I do think Kant was actually after a more objective a priori principle for judgments of taste, your statement alludes to constructs which probably will lead a lot of people into what they did get in philosophy class over the past 25 years. Which is the basis for a more modern discussion. Now perhaps your forthcoming pieces may work in some of the ideas you researched in Buddhist philosophy?

I’ll probably deal with Kant’s subjective universality myself again at some point since I’m still arguing mentally with my father’s “form without content” Kantian spouting. But you’re clearly in a better position to really lay down some ideas from your study of Buddhism alongside western notions. Looking forward to more of your topics!

Nice, thanks. It did seem like a good place to add more, to describe why Kant and Buddhism would both say that “reality is a construct” in two different senses (although the former may be something of a stretch). Even 8 years ago I wouldn’t have been the right person to fill in a general sketch of Kant’s thinking, even though I’d put in lots of time struggling with the different directions his thinking went related to different types of cognitive aspects. I bet there is more to extend from what he said about beauty to other types of experience, like taste, but it’s a rough go attempting that.

About Buddhism, it’s more about describing errors in the foundations of an ordinary world-view than about describing the best version of one, as I take it. It’s not exactly prescriptive, although it does offer lots of guidance on a few different levels, the 8-fold path idea. Most Buddhist teachings wouldn’t describe a better form of perception, with more focus on negative aspects, like attachment, basically about emotional reactions or shortcomings in assumptions that form a basis of an ordinary worldview.

It’s hard to place something like a rejection of a permanent self but it can make sense and also be functional. The Zen idea of being directly in a moment relates, limiting ego-based interpretation, but there’s not much to that. As I see it describing a tea wouldn’t contradict that type of approach, even though it does drag in a lot of analysis and does change the experience. That goes back to the other discussion here related to other bloggers’ input, about if the most pleasant experience needs to be direct, unmediated by analysis.

Kant tried to separate the idea of pure judgement of taste, as an abstract notion, specifically free of the perception of pleasure, what he called “disinterested.” He wanted his criteria for a pure judgement to come from a priori principles that are abstract, applying to every aesthetic judgement. So, in other words this concept is more similar to the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment.

He did not dismiss the idea of a judgement on taste with pleasure. These are based on “schemas,” what you refer to as constructs. The example Kant uses is the “savage” who has never seen a house. He cannot judge a house because he has no schema. But with repetition he learns about houses and then begins to forms schemas which he uses to judge their aesthetic merit. Judgement with pleasure or based on schemas are what he considers subjective, because the thinking is not pure or disinterested coming from an abstract principle.

A key point is the idea of the “demand for agreement” on one’s judgement. Kant seemed to feel that with pure judgement, everyone is coming from the same abstract a priori principle. But with schemas and judgements that include a pleasure response, the demand for agreement becomes arguable, and therefore end up subjective. People aren’t agreeing because their schemas differ. But under the pure judgement criteria, agreement is unified and stemming from the abstract principle.

Today, the accepted theory is that no objective pure principle exists, that it is all schema or construct and these are laden with political, cultural and personal ideas. That what we once called objective or pure was a notion of European white men etc. etc.

Thanks for that summary; very clear and insightful. It’s interesting to map that line of thinking back to how we ordinarily see tea tasting, to consider if there could be common, universal expected aspects judged in the same types of ways for tea tasting. I’m thinking of the idea of a tea being true to type, perhaps working best for a type like Longjing / Dragonwell. Of course there would always be variation even within the best versions but it seems possible to identify a relatively narrow scope of general best type, a relatively limited range of aspects that we might even expect common judgment related to. A similar process for a more diverse tea type wouldn’t work as well, or for most other types, maybe.

Even if this type of expectation and aspect range is a learned set, back to matching the idea of schema, the question moves to whether these can be expected and then experienced in the same ways for different people. Personal preference would shift which aspects are preferable for an individual, so the question is if that preference can be removed, set aside, so that judgments can rate and score tea based on common expectations instead.

This seems to match issues related to wine scoring, doesn’t it? Wine experts may agree or disagree that the scoring works at all, but in general we might expect them to accept that all could agree a wine scored at 95 and defined as having certain characteristics would be better than a wine scored as 90 with very similar characteristics, and that if someone prefers a wine of a different type that is scored lower there is no conflict there.

As chance has it I am about to post an article on tea evaluation that covers this range, but it stops short of singling out a scoring system that does what the wine system does. I really don’t know to what extent such a thing has been aggressively pursued to score teas in general, or the role one typically plays in a setting like a tea contest evaluation. It’s easy to turn up background on standard tasting process and how one might break down categories of evaluation but I didn’t make it to that next level in the research.