Perfume and the Pre-Socratics, Part I
Perfume
has been sorely neglected, entirely omitted from the history of
Western philosophy. One reason for such a glaring omission no doubt derives from the
simple fact that the history of Western philosophy was written by
men. White men, to be more exact.
Perfume
has often been regarded as a woman's weapon for attracting men—what
remains true in some circles today—and until rather recently in
human history, a woman's intellectual energies appear to have been
largely directed toward finding a husband to support her. Once
married, many women throughout thousands of years of human society
all over the world and up to the present day devoted nearly all of
their time and energy to raising children. Who has time for
philosophy when toddlers are scurrying about the floor attempting to
turn every available object into an implement of self-mutilation, poisoning, or even death?
Times
have changed, but not all that much, I'm afraid. Most philosophers
still today are men, and although it has become socially acceptable
for men to wear perfume and for both men and women to discuss
perfume, such exchanges have yet to make it into the hallowed halls
of philosophy, where the ideas of men and men alone continue to dominate. Philosophical women dissatisfied with those topics tend to
end up ghettoized, talking amongst themselves about what has come to
be termed “Feminist philosophy.”
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| Plato |
Someone
once said (I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead—a man, of
course) that all of Western philosophy is but footnotes to Plato.
Well, Plato was a man, so it's not that surprising that the same old
ideas and concepts keep getting hashed and rehashed with a few
epicyclic curlicues added on here and there. It is very difficult for
anyone to say anything very new and be taken very seriously in
philosophy. Why is that? Because the people who judge what are good
ideas in philosophy were selected by people who were selected by
other people who wrote footnotes to Plato. QED.
In
some ways, this is just the nature of institutions, of which academia
is obviously one. They are intrinsically conservative, because the
individuals currently occupying the administrative posts of an
institution, including the institution of professional philosophy,
are interested first and foremost in institutional preservation. They
defend, in other words, the status quo.
Revisionist
History: Writing Perfume into the Narrative
I
think that it's time that we struck out on our own, my fellow
fragrant travelers, having now seen the reasons for the total neglect
of perfume throughout the lengthy history of philosophy. Better yet,
let us consider how the history of philosophy might be rewritten more
insightfully, had only the earliest recorded philosophers grasped the
supreme importance of perfume.
Let
us back up to a bit before Plato, or even Socrates, and begin with the pre-Socratic philosophers. I have made a few
passing allusions here at the salon to a couple of these thinkers
before, Heraclitus and Parmenides, but there were others as well.
Since my earlier remarks met with silence from readers, it might be a
good idea to provide a bit more background on the pre-Socratics more
generally.
These
philosophers lived in ancient Greece and, logically enough, preceded
Socrates, who arrived on the scene more than two thousand years ago
in about 500BC. It is a bit misleading to talk as though the
philosophers before Socrates formed a well-defined school or group,
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, because the individual
thinkers lumped together under this label appear to have had very
different theories of reality. The monists were united in their belief that reality comprised one ultimate substance, but they did not agree about what that substance was. Other pre-Socratic philosophers, the pluralists, rejected monism, maintaining that there were multiple primary substances in reality.
Of
course, similar conflations occur in perfumery as well. Consider the
different types of chypre: a classic fruity chypre (YSL Yvresse, Nina
Ricci Deci Dela) is very different from a classic floral chypre (Jean
Patou Sublime, Sisley Eau du Soir).
Adding
leather imparts to such perfumes a very distinctive demeanor (Robert Piguet
Bandit),
yet they are all united by their chypre quality no matter how
different any two of them might be from one another.
Modern sweet patchouli floral chypres (Chanel Coco
Mademoiselle, Van Cleef & Arpels Oriens) bear very little
resemblance to the oakmoss and galbanum-rich chypres of the classical era
in perfumery, pre-Y2K. I would say that the single feature uniting
all of these very different perfumes is a texture which makes all
chypres closer to one another than they are, say, to citrus aromatic
fragrances.
What
was it that united the pre-Socratic philosophers, aside from the fact
that they preceded Socrates? They shared a desire to explain the
phenomena of empirical reality by appeal to simplifying metaphysical
theories. In some ways, it would be accurate to say that they were
reductionists, who looked for the fundamental principles or
substances or substrates, as they are sometimes called, of reality.
What
is everything else made up of?
What is really real, behind all
appearances?
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| Socrates |
These
were pressing questions to the philosophers grouped together under
the label Pre-Socratics. Socrates'
skeptical stance may have been, in part, a reaction to what he
regarded as the metaphysical excesses or the epistemological
pretenses of those who would claim to have at last grasped the True
Nature of Reality.
Metaphysical
theories are, by definition, not susceptible of empirical
confirmation or refutation, so philosophers who posit such ultimate
substrata are necessarily speculating as to the true nature of
reality. Whose theory is right?
seems to have been Socrates' response to the flurry of substantive
philosophical assertions made by the philosophers who preceded him.
But it's not just metaphysicians who feel threatened by critics such
as Socrates, as his own history clearly reveals.
In
any case, the theories of the pre-Socratics are worth considering,
especially in the light cast by the sun as refracted through perfume.
Perfume
as the True Source of the Wisdom of Heraclitus
We've
been experiencing a lot of very hot weather in Boston over the past
couple of weeks. It is perhaps natural, then, that lately I've found
the thought of Heraclitus rather persuasive. For this pre-Socratic
philosopher, the ultimate substance or principle of reality was fire.
Heraclitus left behind very cryptic, aphoristic texts such as
“One
never steps into the same river twice.”
The
idea for which Heraclitus is most famous is that of change as the
basis of everything:
Everything
is in flux, everything is change.
Let
us consider these two statements in turn. I wonder, first, whether
Heraclitus in making the statement about the essentially changing
nature of a river, into which one can never step twice, was not also
making a statement about perfume perception. I have laid out this
idea in more detail in Everything You've Heard and Read About Perfume is true, and I explicitly brought Heraclitus into the sequel to that lively discussion, which however ended as a monologue, since no one
ever replied. Silence usually signifies complete agreement, so I
cannot really claim to have been surprised.
 |
| Heraclitus |
My
hunch is that Heraclitus, too, if asked a direct question about the
nature of perfume perception would subscribe to more or less the same
theory, which, after all, is a version of his own! The idea,
essentially, is that each time we wear a perfume, our experience of
it will be different. This implies, does it not, that we never wear
the same perfume twice?
To
those who will object that the evidence points only to the changeable
nature of the perfume wearer, I rejoinder: can a person be
mistaken about what she herself perceives? I am not talking
about the object of the perception. I am talking about the perception
itself. It seems to me that, just as a person cannot be wrong about
being in a state of pain—whether or not there is a documentable
physical basis for that pain—if a person claims to smell roses, cat
pee, rubber, jasmine, leather, oakmoss, patchouli, vanilla or
whatever, then she does.
If
she thinks that is what she smells, then that is the nature of her
perception. In other words, she cannot be wrong about what she thinks
that she smells. This is a very different claim from saying that if a
person smells dung, then dung is there. But if dung is what the
person perceives, then that is what she smells, in the sense that
that is the content of her perception.
But
wait, there's more. This would seem to imply that the object of
perception is capable of presenting itself to different noses and
even the same nose in very different ways. Yes, those ways depend to
some extent upon the wearer and the circumstances, but a person
cannot be wrong, it seems to me, about what he or she smells.
Different
notes are salient at different times and to different degrees, which
implies that perfume itself is inherently mercurial, presenting
itself, as it does, to different wearers under various guises. This
is the primary reason why it does not make a lot of sense to me for
people to base their purchases of perfume upon someone else's
perceptions of them, perceptions with which they may or may not agree.
The “same” perfume has many different appearances, if you will,
and not only do different people attend to different facets, even the
same person attends to different facets at different times, affected by not only
temperature and humidity, but also the wearer's state of mind.
Now,
turning to Heraclitus' second idea, that Everything is in flux,
it seems equally clear to me that the wise philosopher was actually
reflecting upon the undeniable fact that perfumes metamorphose over
time. They change. Not only do perfume wearers change, but perfumes
do, too. They do not remain the same, as much as we may wish for them
to. Even when perfumes are not reformulated, they are bound to change
as the ingredients used to create them depend upon the source from
which they derive, and as they age, they metamorphose over time, all of which raises in a dramatic way the Question of Vintage.
Are these sorts of insights about perfume ever attributed to or said to have derived from Heraclitus? Of course not. He was a man, who could not have thought that perfume had any philosophical significance, or so have presumed perfume-ignorant scholars over the more than two millennia since Heraclitus wrote. It is time, at last, that we set the historical record straight about what Heraclitus really meant and wrote. Could stepping into a river have inspired such profound thoughts alone? I frankly doubt it. Only the joys of perfume could have created the conditions for such an epiphany.
A
neo-Thalesian Theory of Reality
Thank
goodness rain finally came to our rescue, and with it a swift drop in
temperature of more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit! As I watched the sheets of water pour down all around me, and the heat began to dissipate, I felt as though a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders. A clamp holding my brain in a fixed configuration was suddenly loosened, allowing the cells of my cortex to breathe freely and my thoughts to expand. Suddenly my ways of thinking about reality began to change. Questions began to arise and circulate through my mind once again. I wondered whether Heraclitus
was really right after all that fire could be the basis of everything
else. Is not water, at the very least, the source of life?
It
turns out that there was a pre-Socratic philosopher, Thales, who
believed precisely that, and indeed that rather than fire, water was
the basis of everything else. I am quite big on hydration, so it
makes a lot of sense that I should always have found a lot to like in
the theory ascribed by historians to Thales. According to the skimpy extant fragments of texts said to be penned by this philosopher:
All
is water
or,
in French:
Tout
est l'eau
What
does this mean? you may with good reason ask. Thales of
Miletus was struck by the importance of water and hypothesized that
water is the source and first principle of everything else. Or did
he?
I
would no doubt have been kicked out of graduate school for making
such a bold, brash, insolent, and self-indulgent conjecture, but
here, protected within the free-thinker haven which is the salon de
parfum, I am able to express my true beliefs and propose what may
seem initially to be provocative or even outlandish theories.
 |
| Thales |
I
wonder, for example, whether a couple of words may have been missing
from the key fragment allegedly establishing the philosophical
position of Thales. What if the fragment, if found with the words
immediately following it, actually said this:
Tout
est l'eau [de parfum]
All
is eau [de parfum]
Now,
since eau de parfum is a dilute solution of perfume, this would seem
to imply that Thales was in fact asserting a rather different theory
of reality:
All
is perfume
To
those who wonder why Thales would have insisted upon “eau de
parfum” rather than making the more straightforward claim, “All
is perfume,” I reply: where did Thales live? It was indeed a warm
climate, and this makes it doubtful that pure perfumes or extraits
would have been the preferred concentration in such weather
conditions. I know that I've been wearing a lot of light colognes throughout this scorching summer. I do of course recognize that Thales' first stab at a
comprehensive theory of reality may well have been
All
is eau de toilette
But
let us not decant drops. It seems clear to me that Thales' theory of
reality has suffered at the hands of persons all too eager to find in
his words a theory appealing to themselves, reflecting as it does
what they themselves wish to believe. Yes, it easy to see how in
reconstructing Thales' thought, historians of philosophy have been
tripped up over and over again by their inability to think out of the
male cranium. If men were not wearing perfume for most of human
history, then why would they ever even have considered the eminently
worthy theory above? I rest my case.
