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collaboration and participation. Kerr explains it as follows:
The Thomist wants to say that knowledge is the product of a col-
laboration between the object known and the subject who knows:
the knower enables the thing known to become intelligible, thus to
enter the domain of meaning, while the thing s becoming intelligi-
ble activates the mind s capacities. Knowing is a new way of being
on the part of the object known. For Thomas, meaning is the mind s
perfection, the coming to fulfillment of the human being s intellec-
tual powers; simultaneously, it is the world s intelligibility being
realized.59
In Kerr s Thomistic approach to knowledge as participation, there is a
sense of both object and subject being mutually constituted.60 If, as
I have been arguing in this chapter, taste is a form of knowledge, it is one
that is profoundly intimate, to the extent that it requires both trust and
59
Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 30.
60
For a similar positive and theological argument for constructing truth as a manifesta-
tion of participation in God s creativity, see Robert Miner, Truth in the Making: Creative
Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004). See also Davies, The
Creativity of God.
TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION 65
risk. As I have mentioned, eating and drinking give strength and life, but
can also produce illness, or even death. We are affected by the things we
consume, for they become part of the body, mind, and soul. Moreover,
for Aquinas, besides being affected by that which is known, the intellect
also displays a desire, impulse, or  appetite to know:  intellect only
moves anything by virtue of appetition. 61 Through taste, our appetite
to access the world becomes utterly direct and intimate, so much so that
it is somehow digested by us, and becomes part of us as much as we also
become part of the known. To taste is also to make things intelligible, to
add new dimensions of  being on the part of the object known as Kerr
rightly puts it.
4 Eucharistic Desire and the Eros of Cognition
Knowledge as participation via the tasting in eating and drinking is well
illustrated in Like Water for Chocolate. Through Tita s meal, Pedro
becomes a part of her as much as she becomes a part of him. The desire
of the one for the other is somehow consummated in the sensual and
erotic act of eating and drinking. Paradoxically, in this Mexican narra-
tive, food and drink signify more than the act of eating and drinking:
these activities are a performance of spiritual union whereby the lover
participates in the beloved, in and through the materiality of food and
drink. Matter and spirit constitute one another and illuminate the intel-
lect, but only insofar as the intellect allows itself to be instructed and
guided by the senses, particularly by that of taste. A reversal takes place
here, for the so-called  lower senses are now primary in this erotic
pilgrimage of further dimensions of knowing. The erotic has to do with
the movement of desire to satisfy the appetite for the other: the quails in
rose petal sauce that directly nourish the body, just as another (the lover)
nurtures body, soul, mind, and heart.62
61
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle s De Anima, trans. Kenelm Foster, OP,
and Silvester Humphries, OP (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1994), 245, cited in
Ward, Christ and Culture, 103. It is also important to remark that Aquinas epistemology
integrates a theology of  grace as that which elicits nature to particularly desire the
beatific vision, so that knowledge is also enacted by a  grammar of grace and not by
mere logical or rational abstractions. On this relationship between grace, knowledge, and
language, see Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain (eds.), Grammar and Grace:
Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein (London: SCM Press, 2004).
62
It might be argued that not all appetites are  erotic. However, in this particular text
of Tita s recipe given to Pedro it seems that the appetite for food meets the appetite for the
lover. The two hungers meet in this one erotic desire. The argument for desire as an erotic
appetite will be explored in this section.
66 TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION
In a fashion akin to Octavio Paz s intimations, I would like to suggest
that Esquivel s novel shows that, in fact, eroticism and gastronomy are
intimately related in the eros of cognition. I will then advance this reflec-
tion further and incorporate a notion of the Eucharist, bringing together
the main points discussed in this chapter. In doing so, I will reflect on
notions of knowledge, embodiment, and the construction of meaning
through the experience of savoring that takes place in eating and drink-
ing in general, and the Eucharist in particular.
In 1972 the journal Daedalus published Octavio Paz s article
 Eroticism and Gastrosophy. 63 In this essay, Paz echoes the central idea
of Charles Fourier s Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux, that eroticism and
gastrosophy (the love of food and gastronomy) are the most fundamental
pleasures of human life: the former is the most intense, and the latter is
the most extended. For Paz, these two forms of pleasure are ultimately
related to the reality of desire itself, a desire that  simultaneously reveals
to us what we are and beckons us to transcend ourselves in order to
become the others. 64 Paz describes desire as  the active agent, the secret
producer of changes, whether it be the passage from one flavor to
another, or the contrast among flavors and textures. Desire, both in
Gastronomy and Erotica, initiates a movement among substances, the
bodies, and the sensations. It is the force that regulates connections,
mixtures, and transmutations. 65 Paz argues that eroticism is not (as for
Georges Bataille) transgression, but representation. Eroticism is inven- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]