Entry #13: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Existentialism

Many people lead their lives for other people or in accordance with what they believe to be the dictates of their religion. Existentialism challenges us to face up to our own responsibility in making of ourselves what we become and in living in accordance with our own selected or created values. I was reminded of existentialism by a couple of comments on a recent post relating to why we write perfume reviews. 

The thinkers most associated with existentialism have been Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the nineteenth century; and Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth century. All three had very different takes on the idea, which makes sense, given their views about our subjective role in determining what to do and why.

Kierkegaard was a Christian, but he was not fond of religion in its politicized form. One of his famous mottos is "Truth is subjectivity," an idea which fits right in with our recent discussion of whether there are objective truths in perfume reviewing. In one of his insightful comments, Andrew Buck likened perfume reviewing to a "subjective science," and in that sense it is similar to Kierkegaard's own understanding of man's relationship with God. Perfume experience appears to be equally subjective and must, of necessity, vary from one person to the next.

Nietzsche famously announced "the death of God," by which he appears to have meant that God had ceased to provide man with a value structure anymore. Sure, plenty of people call themselves religious, but the reality of the lives which they lead need not necessarily reflect their alleged beliefs. Consider the case of Catholic mafia members who go to confession after whacking some poor soul. Nietzsche may have meant something like this, that there is a schism between what people say when they mouth words such as "I am a Christian," and then what they do. Another example might be self-proclaimed "Christians" in the twenty-first century who visit YouTube to watch what has regrettably come to be known as "war porn." Are you a Christian? Really? 

Nietzsche also famously denied that morality is absolute. He offered a complex genealogy of the origin of moral concepts, and he appears to have felt that people are driven ultimately by a "will to power". We can convince people to do what we want by imposing our values on them, by getting them to agree with us. Nietzsche wrote thousands upon thousands of fascinating pages of texts, all of which are multiply interpretable, so it's misleading to suggest that he had some sort of "theory". What tends to happen when scholars read Nietzsche is that they find their own ideas in his texts, and then of course they praise him as brilliant! 

People occasionally blame the abysmal behavior of some people at certain points in history on Nietzsche. This seems to me to be a mistake, according to the very basis of existentialism itself. No one forces anyone to interpret the words of Nietzsche in one way or another. We bring our values to bear on the text and decide or choose (whether consciously or not) to find certain meanings in his words.

Sartre added his own distinctive embellishments to the concern with subjectivity expressed by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche before him. One of his most famous ideas is that we are responsible for what we are, and what we do, and who we become. There are no excuses for Sartre. We are free to act or not to act, and to choose not to choose is already to choose. Freedom is the condition of humanity, and this freedom imposes burdens. We must decide what to do with our life. We make of ourselves what we become, for better or for worse. Only we can decide for ourselves. Even if we think that we are following a religion or the guidance of another person, we are choosing to do so, and therefore bear full responsibility for our actions. People who attempt to shirk responsibility suffer from mauvaise foi or bad faith, in Sartre's view.

Which brings us back to the question of why we do what we do, and why in particular some of us write perfume reviews. The existentialists would deny that we must write reviews to please other people or to promote certain perfumes and demote others. No, the answer to the question why we write reviews is just as subjective as is the content of the reviews. Perfume reviews serve the purposes of readers when they interpet them in certain ways. But those purposes are determined by the readers no less than the act of penning a review reflects the writer's values and beliefs.

The Scent of "The Scent of Green Papaya"

Synaesthetic Suggestion and Subjectivity 
in the 1993 film by Tran Anh Hyung

Set in Saigon, Vietnam, in the 1950s, The Scent of Green Papaya relays, on its most obvious level, the tale of a young peasant girl, Mui, who has been sent away from her home to work as a domestic servant as a result of hardships endured by her family after her father's premature death. In some respects, certainly for Western viewers, the story follows a familiar plot, that of the fairytale Cinderella.

There are important deviations from that morality play, however, including the fact that in this film virtually all of the women appear to be victims of circumstances beyond their control. 




Harridans and shrews are nowhere to be seen, and in the one scene in which a woman scolds another, a man is the ultimate cause of her lashing out. The mother-in-law upbraids her daughter-in-law for having failed to please her husband, what the mother takes to be the explanation for her son's flight from the home. 

For the most part, aside from that single scene, the women of the film are quiet, gentle creatures, hard-working, well-meaning, and resigned to their fate. Even the mother-in-law spends the duration of the film in her room lightly beating a drum as she mourns the dead.

The men in the story can be interpreted, in some sense, as the women's oppressors, but this, too, appears to be a result more of the social and economic context than of their own maliciousness. 

The superficially Cinderella-esque plot develops rather differently in the final section of the film, although it is true that upon reaching womanhood, Mui is ultimately “rescued” by a man, a composer whom she met and admired from afar while working as a domestic helper when she was still a child.

Basically, as cynical as this may sound, she trades one domestic role for another. The indentured servant becomes an indebted wife. After toiling away for more than ten years for other people, Mui, upon reaching womanhood, is “rewarded” by becoming the wife of the man for whom she was working, and also the mother of his child.

Some Western viewers have no doubt voiced complaints that the story is objectionable in one way or another, and I do believe that in order to be able truly to appreciate this work it may be necessary to “evacuate your critical mind,” as I recall a yoga instructor once exhorted those participating in her class to do (including me, who of course rolled her eyes). 

For some such a feat is easier said than done, but it does seem to me that the plot of this film is arguably beside the point, and the wide-ranging and penetrating feminist and neo-Marxist critiques to which it could easily give rise need to be set to one side if one is to discover what it was that the director here intended to convey.

The film garnered much praise from critics but much less from nonprofessional reviewers, many of whom seem to have found it affected (“artsy-fartsy”) and over-contrived. Other viewers complained about the slow pace and relative dearth of action. The Scent of Green Papaya received awards for its cinematographic excellence, and therein lies the true value of this creation, not in its banal plot.

To focus on the narrative of this film is to miss the beauty which unfolds in infinite complexity from the opening and all the way to the final scene, as the deliverances of the senses are presented so as to create a quasi-synaesthetic sensory odyssey of sorts while capturing and conveying the perspective of the central protagonist at the same time.

The Buddhist philosophy undercurrent of The Scent of Green Papaya, which is unmistakeably symbolized throughout the film, is finally made graphic (flagrant?), for those who somehow failed to grasp it earlier, with the concluding shot being none other than a statue of the Eastern sage.

But if this film is Buddhist in orientation, what does that mean? And can the manifest sensuality of so much of the film be reconciled with Buddhist philosophy? 

Scenes of ablution are interwoven throughout the film, but especially near the end, once Mui has achieved womanhood, bathing takes on a decidedly sensualist cast.



On one level, the message, if you will, of much of this film may seem to overlap with the ethical vision of the ancient Greek Stoics, according to which one must steel one's self against adversities over which one has no control. In this regard, the film might seem to share what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the life-negating aspect of resignation common to most religions, which was a bit later pithily summarized by Karl Marx in the phrase “Religion is the opium of the masses.”

Buddhism is a religion, albeit a godless one, but it enjoins the same attitude toward life on earth as the theistic religions: that our attachment to earthly things, all possessions, including our very life, is vain and otiose. 




Desire is to be squelched, since only then, without the constant yearnings to succumb to temptation, can one be at peace with oneself, living harmoniously and in equanimity with nature. In keeping with this Buddhist-cum-Stoic outlook, one way of understanding the docile acceptance by Mui of her station in life is as an expression of her acceptance of this fate and refusal to struggle against it.

It does seem as though all people are constrained by chains of one variety or another, though most of them are invisible. The men and boys of the film, no less than the women, are born into a context rife with expectations of what they must be and do, and those expectations undeniably play a role in shaping the persons whom they eventually become—to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon the individual's relative propensity toward freespiritedness, on the one hand, and malleability or tendency to conform, on the other. Their ostensibly privileged status certainly does not render the males immune from suffering.

There is another way, however, of viewing Mui's way of looking at and attitude toward the world, and even for those who reject the teachings of the “preachers of death,” there are truths here to be pondered for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a nose to smell. This film illustrates that far more important for the quality of one's own life than external factors beyond one's control are internal factors and the perspective which one adopts toward the people and things in one's experience, a Stoic point, to be sure, but an aesthetic one as well.

Obviously there are extreme cases, where people are physically imprisoned in nightmarish scenarios created by others, and which make it impossible for those shackled to enjoy their own subjective experience of the world. In The Scent of Green Papaya, the focal protagonist retains sufficient liberty to be able think about and to perceive the world as colored by her own values. Her interactions with people and things evince a quiet nobility, despite her low social standing.

Mui lives in a bubble of sorts, entirely unaware of what life might be, were she not situated where she has found herself, as the servant of a well-to-do family. Having received no education, she is illiterate and powerless—not only economically, but also conceptually—to extricate herself from her indentured role. In reality, her station is not so different from the billions of women throughout history whose only hope for economic and social security has been marriage to a man capable of providing those things.

The institution of marriage was initially established to formalize the relation between a man and some of his property, his wife, who took his name and essentially gave her life over to him in agreeing to propagate his name through the production and nurturing of his progeny. 



Today marriage has taken on new meanings, but it will always be tainted by its purely pragmatic and sordid origins, which prevented most women for most of human history from realizing their creative potential beyond the narrow ambits of the home. Many women have flourished, no doubt, in such a role, and many do still today, but for thousands of years they had no viable alternative and so cannot be said to have freely chosen what became their primary vocation. 

In theory, of course, such a lifestyle may well be every bit as valid and worthwhile as any other choice which a woman might make—a point underscored by recent gay marriage activists—provided that it really is her own choice and not imposed upon her from outside.

What is unique about The Scent of Green Papaya is that, rather than negating the servant girl's value, this film reveals the preciousness of her subjective engagement with reality, what is typically ignored in social critiques of gender- and class-based inequities. The focus of social critics has typically been on improving the circumstances of such persons, not on revealing their unique perspective on the situation in which they find themselves. The ironic result is that the victims are often doubly negated. They already have no power over the system in which they exist and which rules their lives, but they also have no voice.

This film presents an anthropological tableau, not a social or moral critique, in displaying the economic stratification as well as the patriarchy of the society in which Mui finds herself. Early on it may appear that a critique is forthcoming, as the males of the family are painted in somber shades as capricious and despotic. The father and head of the household, a troubled musician who appears to be dissatisfied with his bourgeois family life, disappears at periodic intervals with the family's savings to indulge in debauchery with prostitutes until the money has all been exhausted, at which time he returns home.

Even the smallest boy of the family manifests ignoble behaviors toward Mui which suggest that in the future he will follow in the footsteps of his father, and will perhaps even grow up to mistreat women. No good will come of any it, suggests the plight of the father, who having apparently contracted venereal disease during the last of his fugues of fornication, succumbs shortly thereafter, leaving the family forever and permanently behind.

Truth is Subjectivity

A social critique can of course be made of this entire situation, with the women at the beck and call and mercy of the men in 1950s Vietnam—as most everywhere else—but what director Tran Anh Hung does instead is to focus upon the subjective perspective of Mui and the lush beauty which surrounds her like a halo. The girl has an artist's sensibility and finds value in every single thing she encounters. She views the world in a state of awe at the infinite richness contained within it, and she perfectly encapsulates the maxim that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Mui takes note of the minutest of details in her experience, watching an ant attempt to hoist a piece of rice or a toad as it croaks. The house is structured openly, making it possible for various creatures, insects, lizards, frogs, to lead their separate existence while harmonizing with the people also present.

Mui's attitude toward these creatures is very different from most people's, and none of what are often regarded as pests appear to be so from her own perspective. Rather than setting out to destroy the ants, as the son of her master does—lighting a candle and dripping wax upon them as he watches them slowly die—Mui observes in a state of awe the beauty of their struggle to survive.

A ten-year lacuna of Mui's life is not covered by the film. The story is taken up again when she is twenty years old, at which point she seems physically different but still a child at heart and in her interactions with the world. In the opening shot of this final section of the film, Mui seems almost retarded, although the intention appears to be to depict her as saintlike—in something like a state of transport achieved through natural mysticism. 

There have been many varieties of mystic throughout history, with some holding a pantheistic view, finding divine elements or “gods” in all that they encounter. Others have understood their extraordinary experiences as direct communications with a canonized God in a particular religion such as Christianity.

Mui's ecstatic encounters with nature are reminiscent of those of many religious mystics throughout history, including Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582AD). The difference between Mui and the mystics of established religious traditions is that she does not possess any of the cognitive or conceptual apparatus to be able to articulate her interactions with God—or the divine—as manifested through nature. It is noteworthy, however, that many orthodox mystics, too, have insisted that the content of their experiences was ultimately ineffable. Incapable of being transmitted to others through human language, the phenomena giving rise to the mystic's experience could only be gestured toward.

As a young woman, Mui seems even less inclined to talk—close to mute—by now, and one suspects that this was how she managed to survive pure and innocent in a system where many analogous people throughout history have suffered corruption at the hands of those more powerful. Having been adopted as a surrogate daughter by the woman of the house (who had lost her own daughter), one senses that Mui benefited from the protection afforded her by this relationship.

Once Mui is sent to work for the composer in his house, preparing his meals and tending to his domestic needs, he ends up falling in love with her, and ultimately forsakes his fiancée, a well-to-do young woman of society who appears to have no use for or real interest in the composer's true calling, music.

The unmistakeable message is that the musician, like Mui, is nobler in spirit than his would-have been wife of high society, who comes off as shallow and superficial. 

The woman becomes outraged upon recognizing that her lover and would-have-been husband has fallen for his live-in servant. She throws a tirade before storming out of the house, leaving her engagement ring behind.




The musician's infatuation with Mui during what is a nearly speechless section of the film is revealed through the sketches he has made of her face. It appears that he finds himself drawn to Mui as to a kindred spirit of sorts. The possibility of course exists that the father of Mui's child, too, like the troubled musician at the head of the household where she worked as a child, may grow restless and forsake bourgeois family life. But one senses that Mui is unlikely to be devastated by such a development, because every single thing around her is miraculous to her. She has no identity to lose, because she blends in with the environment no less than do the toads and the lizards and the ants.

Music as a Metaphor for Scent

How can the subjective experience of such a person be captured on film? A virtual infinity of colorful images carefully composed and juxtaposed make up the visuals of The Scent of Green Papaya, but the musical score—comprising both original material and well-known classical music pieces—is just as important, and together the two help to create the synaesthetic illusion of scent throughout the film.

In some ways, the music serves a metaphor for scent, with rapid transitions and modulations signaling abrupt emotional changes, just as occurs when a scent, invisible to the eye, eventually penetrates a person's consciousness as the molecules make contact with olfactory receptors and a message is transmitted to the brain.

I have often felt that scents are colored. I do not suffer from—or is it enjoy?—the literal synaesthetic conflation of sight and scent. I do, however, strongly associate certain scents with certain colors. The Scent of Green Papaya synaesthetically suggests for me the sense of scent through the use of breathtakingly beautiful visual images and sounds, both natural and manmade. As Mui shreds fresh papaya, the music and the image together produce a scent-like experience because it seems to be right there before me.

At first the unpeeled papaya smells vegetal and green, somewhere between Pierre Balmain Vent Vert and Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower, but then it becomes fresh and fragrant and tart like a bright eau de cologne such as Parfums de Nicolaï Cédrat or perhaps one of the Hermès Jardins. The film is literally filled with clean, limpid, aqueous, and vegetal scents, and the musical sound of water—whether dripping or splashing—suffuses the entire work.

The smell of rice in the kitchen is evoked as dinner is prepared, but the rice is scented, as beautiful as Gianfranco Ferre's Ferré eau de parfum, which includes a succulent rice note.

When, as a young woman, Mui applies red lipstick for the very first time, my memory of that scent becomes activated. I think of the smell of Guerlain Météorites or Frédéric Malle Lipstick Rose.

When the composer's fiancée flirts with him at the piano, I sense the presence of Chanel no 5. When she becomes angry, throwing a temper tantrum and destroying beautiful pieces of ceramics before storming out of the house, all of her charm evaporates away, leaving something harsh and ugly, an aura of caustic chemical soup (selection of an apt example is best left to the reader...).

When the composer enters Mui's private quarters for the very first time, I smell something with musk, but a clean, light, sweet and innocent heliotrope-laced musk such as Kenzo Vintage Peace. 

The green incense burning in the home brings to my mind Comme des Garçons Kyoto.

As the couple shares playfully in the process of educating Mui, I sense the juxtaposition of L'Artisan Parfumeur Voleur de Roses and Drôle de Roses. The couple lives harmoniously together, respecting one another as fellow creatures in the Buddhist rock garden which is their home, far from the fray of urban contention and strife.

All of these image-scent associations emerge from my own subjective experience and are likely unique to me of all viewers, but therein lies precisely what I find so fascinating about the sense of scent: our associations arise out of our own memories, shared with no one else in all of space and time. Our interactions with our environment and our reactions to what we see and smell and hear have as much to do with us as they do with the things which serve as catalysts of sorts in causing a flood of memories to rush as from nowhere to the forefront of our mind. Whether we like or we dislike what we see has a great deal to do with our prior experiences and beliefs.

I must admit that I myself disliked the heavy-handed sexual imagery near the end of The Scent of Green Papaya, and feel that the effect would have been much stronger more subtly applied, but overall this film is a richly scented evocative gem and well-worth any perfumista's time.

Should Class and Gender Inequity be Aestheticized?

Social criticism is important. Without it, no progress would ever have been made toward the betterment of the circumstances of marginalized and diminished persons, including all persons who are non-White or lack a Y chromosome—or both. Strides have been made toward equalizing the opportunities of the people of all races and both genders and, more recently, sexual orientations, although there is much more to be done.

Even in ostensibly free and enlightened Western nations, the diminished status of females, in particular, is evidenced by economic statistics revealing that they continue to be paid significantly less than their equally qualified male counterparts for performing the very same work. In other words, women continue to be regarded as less than full-fledged persons equivalent in moral value to males, as has been the case throughout human history. This is a valid concern, and some viewers may find that The Scent of Green Papaya conveys a conservative perspective too ready to condone inequalities and injustice. Such criticisms have a great deal of merit in their own right, but morality and justice are not really what this film is about, when all is said and sniffed.

The Bottle Controversy: A Philosophical Investigation

In thinking about what might be called “the bottle controversy,” that is, whether the vessel in which a perfume is housed should be an object of our attention and concern, I have become more and more convinced that bottles really do matter, and in more ways than I originally supposed. I have always been pleased by aesthetically beautiful bottles, and I occasionally retain a perfume for its bottle, even though I never (or no longer) wear the liquid inside. But the philosophical significance of bottles I now find even more striking than their aesthetic value as functional objects of design.

There are of course bottle collectors, who have made a hobby of the accumulation of perfume bottles in the way in which some people collect stamps or coins or figurines or baseball cards or... you name it: if an object appears in a variety of instantiations and can be possessed, there are collectors of it somewhere.

My interest in bottles is not that of a collector. I am interested in the philosophical importance of bottles. At the first level, I wonder what it could mean to say that the bottle and packaging of a perfume do not or should not matter. Why, from an aesthetic perspective, should a bottle matter any less than does anything else? has always been a persistent puzzle to my mind. To be honest, it's a version of a question which pops up regularly regarding virtually everything in my experience.

Believe it or not, whenever I see a notebook or even a block-colored cooler or trash can marred by an ugly label still affixed, though its purpose was only to bear an SKU so that the product could be sold, I ask myself why the owner did not peel it off, which would have left behind a smooth monochromatic surface worthy of regard. We don't wear price tags on our clothing, so why do some people leave such labels on objects which, too, will be visible to other people's eyes?

Despite my evident belief that everything in our experience has aesthetic potential, even what some consider to be the lowliest of objects, and despite my puzzlement over the sheer arbitrariness manifested by people in their selection of some but not others things as worthy of their aesthetic regard—I think here again of my well-off yuppie friends who have expensive artworks hanging on their walls but flatware which looks as though it was lifted from a local hospital cafeteria—it occurred to me recently that it would behoove us to dig a bit deeper. What I found was that beyond their manifest aesthetic value, perfume bottles possess a metaphysical and an epistemological significance as well. Indeed, even bottles which I do not find beautiful are nonetheless philosophically important to perfume.

The Philosophical Significance of Bottles I: Metaphysics

The Bottle [Body] as the Temple of the Soul

I have occasionally compared perfumes to persons, pointing out such similarities as mortality, natural progression or change over time, including aging, and how fickle our relations with them can be, in part because our perception of them is intrinsically perspectival. We cannot grasp a perfume in its totality any more than we can grasp a person in his or her entirety. What we have as experiences of them are snippets or screen shots, if you will. In reality, the precise properties which we attend to in a particular encounter may have much to do with arguably irrelevant or extrinsic factors. Were we distracted, perhaps multitasking? Did we not attend to the complexity of the story being told because there were other matters on our mind? Were we tired, exasperated or perhaps in a surly mood?

We also may experience radical changes in our affect toward perfumes as toward people. A perfume which we once loved, we may become unable to endure, whether because we have changed or it has. Some perfumes do not age well; others have been reformulated. Some of them don't change at all, but because we do, they no longer seem to be what we once thought that they were.

We may become more sophisticated in our perfume choices, or we may simply change our tastes, in some cases influenced by what happens to be on the market today, dictated by marketing gurus attempting to capture our wallet share. However slim our own investments in the perfume market may seem when regarded individually, the fact remains that we are all members of market niches. There are literally thousands of others like you, my fragrant friends, at least when it comes to perfume-shopping behavior.

As a result of all of these factors, our relationships with perfumes, just as our relationships with other people, may be shaped and even to some extent determined by arbitrary circumstances of chance. At the most fundamental and obvious level, we cannot develop a relationship with either a person or a perfume whom we've never met!

It dawned on me recently that if a perfume is analogous in so many ways to a person—specifically, what is often thought to be the essence of a person, his or her soul—then this would seem to imply that the bottle is analogous to the physical body of a person. In other words, the bottle, like the body, is the temple of the soul.

Now, not everyone buys this reasoning, and some thinkers woefully neglect their physical well-being, eschewing exercise, eating poorly, and in some cases indulging excessively in toxic substances such as alcohol and other drugs, under the arguably false assumption that they are actually benefiting from this self-inflicted bodily abuse. While a few outlier thinkers and artists may flourish creatively as their bodies self-destruct, generally speaking, the health of the body has predictable effects upon the health of the mind or soul. If poisons are coursing through one's body, then the brain, too, is bound to be affected in one way or another, often for the worse.

One possible basis for the folk wisdom that “the body is the temple of the soul” can be found in the thought of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who maintained that human beings are rational animals. Yes, we have minds or souls, but we also are connected in a fundamental way to the earth and the rest of nature as embodied souls.

There is no way for a person to live in this world without his or her body, and there is no way for a perfume to exist without being somehow housed in a physical object which will prevent it for a finite amount of time from evaporating. Eventually, every last drop of any perfume will disappear, no matter how carefully it is stored, and this is precisely what I mean when I say, metaphorically, that perfumes are every bit as mortal as persons are. The question becomes: given that our souls must inhabit bodies, should we not take care of the vessels in which we travel, and should we not care about the image which they convey to others?

Curmudgeons will of course reply “No.” They don't give a damn what other people think of their appearance, and some may even revel in their grunge attire and generally slovenly demeanor. In conducting themselves thus, such people sell themselves short, it seems to me, because while they may be rejecting the values of mainstream society, they do so to their own detriment. One reaction to what appears to be the undeniable fact that people really do care how we carry ourselves and how we generally look is to deny that those people's opinions matter.

Another reaction is to cultivate and provoke precisely the sort of disapproval which most people work hard to avoid, endeavoring as they do to conform or to “fit in,” so as not to appear abnormal or deviant. This sort of reaction might be termed the “rebellious teenager” response. People who during adolescence get mohawks and conspicuous tattoos and body piercings precisely in order to mortify their parents, unwittingly find themselves right back with the others, the herd, so to speak, conforming as they do in their nonconformity to the behavior of other members of what is in effect a subculture of "rebels". When the deviant appearance cultivated matches a familiar profile (Sid and Nancy, anyone?), then it all starts to look like a uniform and undermines the initial basis of what once was a creative revolt. Defining one's self in response entirely and only as a reaction to other people is the essence of what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche termed slave morality.

Another, more sophisticated, approach to this question can be found, again, in the thought of Aristotle. The philosophical question for someone convinced of the equal importance of the mind or soul and the body is simply this: if we comprise both a body and a soul, why should we care only about the latter? The Christian response is of course that the soul is immortal, which the body is not. Therefore, the reasoning goes, because the soul exists infinitely, it is infinitely more important than the body.

Is there—or could there be—any compelling evidence for that sort of super-religious view, which pretty much negates the value of terrestrial existence? Many people throughout history have certainly believed in the immortality of the soul, which explains, among other things, the readiness of Christians such as Augustine and Aquinas—among many others—to defend wars whose most obvious and immediate outcomes are to bring some human beings' lives to a premature close. 

In reality, having only the evidence of the existence of our own mind and our own body, as we exist here on earth, it seems to me (and Aristotle) that there is no clear basis for favoring the mind over the body. The fact is that we are embodied beings. 

The question, again, quite naturally arises: are our bodies any less a part of us than our minds?

In the case of perfume, both the bottle and the liquid inside are eventually going to disappear or be discarded, but until then, they are bound together in just the way that we are housed in our bodies. The bottle naysayers take themselves to be exalting perfume, but they do so through a perverse denial of the aesthetic potential of the vessels themselves.

Many perfume houses clothe their perfumes in attire befitting of the glory and nobility of the elixirs which their resident or contracted perfumers have painstakingly created. Others appear to pour their perfumes into n'importe quoi, as though the user could somehow access the perfume without interacting with the bottle. No, I'm afraid that just as we cannot have direct physical contact with a person in reality except through his or her body, we cannot apply perfume without interacting with its bottle.

In fact, this is even more graphic in the case of perfume than in that of human beings. Modern technologies such as the telephone and the internet have made it possible for us to develop meaningful relationships with persons whom we have never encountered physically. 

Not so with perfume. In order to experience a perfume, you must apply it to your skin, which necessarily involves removing it from a physical object, its bottle or some sort of vial. The naysayers proclaim that we need to strip perfume of its irrelevant packaging and experience it as an art object in itself. Let us now examine a bit more closely the prospect of doing such a thing.

The Philosophical Significance of Bottles II: Epistemology

The Bottle as a Metaphor for Context

I find the application of the Aristotelian concept of the person to the case of perfume to be very helpful in understanding the importance of bottles. However, it is possible to ascend to an even higher, metalevel in thinking about bottles as well. It seems to me that bottles ultimately reveal themselves to have not just metaphysical but also epistemological significance.

Epistemology, for those who were too busy in college learning trades to be able bother with electives such as Philosophy 101, is the study of knowledge. What do we know? What are we justified in believing? How do we know what we know, if we know anything at all? These questions are at the heart of epistemology.

When perfumistas today say that they don't care about the packaging, they mean to be expressing a sophisticated view about the importance of taking the perfume on its own terms, as a thing in itself. This all sounds very lofty and nice, but the reality, my fragrant friends, is that no perfume exists in a vacuum. Perfumes arise always and only in social and economic contexts. Perfumes cannot be fully abstracted from this context. Why? Because even the very act of abstraction is culturally prefigured by an antecedent desire to elevate perfume to the status of one of the beaux arts.

Without a context, a liquid is just a liquid. It becomes christened as a perfume only as a result of having been created by a perfumer—whether professional or amateur—and then appreciated in a particular context. If a perfume is to be recognized as such, it must be placed into a larger cultural apparatus, a framework whereby other people are afforded the opportunity to experience it as well. All of this is done through the reproduction of perfumes according to recipes or formulas specified by perfumers. The mixing together of the various components is typically carried out by chemists or technicians conversant with all of the different ingredients and aware of the proper procedure to be followed in order to faithfully reproduce the original perfume.

Because a perfume cannot even in principle be shared without being placed into this apparatus, situated within this complex system—what is no more and no less than the business of perfumery—this implies that bottle-free perfume is a sort of intellectual fancy with no correlate in reality.

The fact is that we experience perfumes not in spite but only because of the marketing which is carried out in order to sell the product to consumers. This is true whether the perfume is being purveyed by a large megacorporate conglomerate such as Procter & Gamble, LVMH, Estée Lauder, et al., or by a small independent house such as those of perfumers Andy Tauer and Ineke Rühland or even less well-known perfumers such as John Pegg of Kerosene or Josh Lobb of Slumberhouse.

All perfumes known to us are known to us only because their creators, whether contracted or self-employed, have agreed to play the perfume business game. If they had been content to mix private bespoke perfumes for themselves and their families, then we would never have heard of them and would never have had the pleasure of experiencing their perfumes.

Now, the putative purists will reply, the fact that perfumes come in bottles and packaging and are marketed using a variety of gimmicks and techniques does not mean that there is not an olfactory object there to be appreciated as a thing in itself. We need to clear away all of the irrelevant matter and focus on the perfume, not its packaging—or so the self-styled sophisticate's reasoning goes.

This is all well and fine as an abstract argument, but as a project, it is entirely quixotic, at best. It is not just that our access to perfume requires that it be somehow stored and conveyed to us. No, the problem is much deeper than that, inhering not in fortuitous facts about the world, but in our very capacity to understand anything at all.

The truth is that our entire understanding of perfume derives from the business apparatus in which it is situated. Why do we talk about notes? Why do we talk about development trajectories, longevity, and sillage? Because they are created concepts which we only know about because they have been used extensively for marketing purposes. Why do we discuss perfumes in the terms in which we do? This one is a floral aldehyde, that one a chypre; both are very different from citrus colognes and gourmand perfumes.

The truth, my fellow fragrant travelers, is that we could have no conversation about perfume were we not to avail ourselves of the very language developed in order to sell perfume. What's more, without our memories of other perfumes, presented to us in rich contexts, of which their bottle is a metaphor, we could not identify or say anything whatsoever about a perfume. It would only be a smell.

Some may perhaps suggest that we return to the proverbial state of nature with regard to perfume. My reply:  Why would we want to do that? As a matter of fact, it's rather easy to determine what the untutored sniffer thinks of perfume. Ask any ignorant person whom you encounter on the street. Is that the sort of fresh, guileless naïveté which we should be striving for? In fact, there are plenty of such people opining about perfume all over the place. Their sincere proclamation that this or that new celebrity launch is a breathtaking masterpiece is a reflection, it seems, of their limited perspective on perfume, grounded in a lack of experience of anything but creations made in that mold.

But all of us have the very same problem of skewed perspective, it seems to me. There is no way for us intellectually to process perfume outside of the context in which it has arisen and is sustained in the culture in which we live. We come to any perfume, whether it is in a bottle or an unmarked vial or a room of scent devoid of visual cues so that we'll not be distracted from “the scent itself”, with a robust set of beliefs and theory. We cannot abstract perfume from marketing contexts because our understanding of perfumes derives primarily from our own memories of perfumes experienced in the past, all of which were anchored in that very same apparatus. This implies that in order to smell a perfume in and of itself, we would need somehow to suppress all of our memories of all of our prior experiences.

If we were to succeed in doing that, we would no longer possess the capacity to understand what we encountered. In the paraphrased and translated words of the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant:

Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.

Perfume bottles are, I would like to suggest, a metaphor for the epistemological apparatus which we must bring to any object in order to be able to apprehend it. Without all of our prior beliefs and memories, we would not be able to make any sense whatsoever out of a perfume. Removing it from its natural habitat, the bottle in which it is housed, therefore seems like a vain and arbitrary abstraction. Why should such a feat of isolation yield a more veridical experience than the use of a perfume directly from a bottle, which is precisely the manner in which we came to love perfume in the first place?

It's not just that context matters aesthetically—which it does, as anyone who enjoys fine cuisine will readily aver. Why, after all, was silverware ever invented when we have hands which are perfectly adequate to the task of feeding ourselves? The answer, of course, is that beautiful place settings enhance delectable food. The same, therefore, seems to be true in the case of perfume. Beautiful bottles are not distractions but enhancers of beautiful perfumes.

“You can't judge a book by its cover!” some will reply. And it is certainly true that if the text inside is ugly or incoherent, then even the most aesthetically exquisite book cover will not be able to hide this regrettable fact. However, sometimes gorgeously produced books do reflect the value of the text inside. Again, as in the case of collectors of empty perfume bottles, there are book collectors who may or may not actually read the books of which they amass large libraries. They are truly interested in the presentation of what others have claimed to be great works and may or may not have the time or inclination to read all or even any of them.

Some perfume lovers appear to be troubled by the use of bottles to seduce consumers into buying perfumes. In reality, however, if most perfumes are purchased scent unsniffed—as I presume that they are—then marketers are acting rationally in luring potential buyers through the use of bottles produced by designers every bit as talented as the perfumers who created the liquids inside. In some cases, a house or corporate conglomerate may become jaded, fill beautiful bottles with chemical soup, invest far more time, money, and energy in the bottle, marketing, and packaging than on the liquid inside. That was, of course, the take-away lesson of “Behind the Spritz,” the Daily Finance article which revealed that 98% of the purchase price of a bottle of mainstream celebrity brand perfume has nothing whatsoever to do with the perfume itself!

These facts are a reflections of the nature of business and in part the nature of the sorts of human beings who enter into business ventures. They may or may not share our aesthetic values or our interest in what we take to be a worthy object of our affection, in this case, perfume. They may regard perfume as an exalted toiletry which just happens to have a fantastic mark-up potential. (It appears that only cosmetics have a higher profit margin.)

Business people dressed up in artists' clothes may of course seize the opportunity to establish a niche perfumery house having discovered that perfume lovers are willing to spend $100, $200, even $800 for a bottle of perfume! The people who are willing to pay so much money for what hoi polloi regard as a toiletry along the lines of mouthwash and deodorant are investing in luxury products, which generally command huge amounts of money relative to the production costs. The price in fact becomes a part of the aura and fascination.

Many of the most expensive perfumes come in gorgeous packaging. Why? Because the people who consume them are enjoying them as luxury items in the way in which they might enjoy a watch which costs thousands of times more than a Timex but which serves the very same function: to tell time. That is the reply of people who scoff at Rolex timepieces. They prefer to pocket the thousands of dollars in change which they will save by wearing an inexpensive watch because the real reason why they care about watches is only as a source of information. I suspect that with the panoply of omnifunction handheld phone gadgets now in near ubiquity, the watch will soon become purely a piece of jewelry, if that has not happened already...

People who wear perfume as body spray are simply scenting themselves. They are not interested in spending hundreds of dollars for a bottle of perfume, because they have an entirely different attitude toward what they take to be its function. The truth is that perfume is dispensable. Unlike food and water, human beings can live without perfume. That we come to appreciate it at all is a result of the happy fact that some people in the business world, as crass and mercenary as they may sometimes be, have decided that marketing and selling perfumes is a worthwhile venture. 

We may idolize our favorite perfumers, but unless they are also business people or find ways to work with business people, then we can have no access to their creations. Unless they team up with persons interested in profiting from perfume through presenting it to consumers in enticing ways, then we will never have any knowledge of what they do.

Perfume exists in a social and cultural context, not a vacuum. To abstract it from this context would be to evacuate it of all meaning. Can we smell Chanel no 5 as a thing in itself? No, my fragrant friends, we cannot. Our consciousness has been literally flooded by images of beautiful women presumably wearing Chanel no 5. Therefore, our understanding of this iconic perfume derives not only from the smell of the liquid itself, which some maintain is divine, but much more importantly from nearly a century of incessant, relentless marketing campaigns which have created a narrative through which the perfume is understood by us. The very words 'Chanel no 5' evoke an avalanche of visual images and memories, even among people who have no idea what the perfume itself smells like!

The latest chapter of this lengthy, complex narrative is attempting to broaden the base of this perfume's lovers beyond the tuxedo and mink stole crowd to include, well, people who relate to or are attracted by Brad Pitt, whose current incarnation is housed in faded denims, long stringy hair, and a goatee. As one astute Fragrantican aptly wrote (under the moniker "100mlEDT"): "Brad looks like he needs a dollar, a shave, and a shower."

If the campaign succeeds, then Chanel no 5 may still be around a century from now. If not, at some point in time, somewhere down the line, people will decide that the perfume beloved by so many for so long smells dated and inappropriate: a relic from perfume's past. More likely, Chanel will simply recycle its formerly successful ads. A woman is a woman after all...

Whatever may eventually happen to Chanel no 5, no one can truthfully say that they are capable of abstracting it from its rich context and making objective judgments about its value as a perfume in and of itself, or so it seems to me. Without bottles and ad campaigns, perfumes are just smells.