I Drink Therefore I Am by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A philosopher’s guide to wine
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Meaning of Wine

It is appropriate to begin from the feature of wine that has been most abused: its ability to intoxicate. What exactly is intoxication? Is there a single phenomenon that is denoted by this word? Is the intoxication induced by wine an instance of the same general condition as the intoxication induced by whisky, say, or that induced by cannabis? And is ‘induced’ the right word in any or all of the familiar cases? Why all this fuss about wine? Is there something about wine that removes it altogether from the class of drugs, as Chesterton once suggested, when he wrote that ‘the dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They regard wine as a drug and not a drink’? It would be strange if Chesterton, who was right about most things, were wrong about wine.

There is a deft philosophical move which can put some order into those questions, which is to ask whether intoxication is a natural kind – in other words, a condition whose nature is to be determined by science, rather than philosophy. The question ‘what is water?’ is not a philosophical question, since philosophy cannot, by reflecting on the sense of the term ‘water’, tell us anything about the stuff to which that term refers, except that it is this kind of stuff, pointing to some example. Now we can point to a case of intoxication – a drunken man say – and explain intoxication as this kind of state, thereupon leaving the rest to science. Science would explore the temporary abnormalities of the case, and their normal or typical causes. And no doubt the science could be linked to a general theory, which would connect the behavioural and mental abnormalities of the drunk with those of the spaced-out cannabis user, and those of the high-flying junkie. That theory would be a general theory of intoxication as a natural kind. And it would leave the philosopher with nothing to say about its subject-matter.

However, we can quickly see that the question that concerns us cannot be so easily ducked. The drunk is intoxicated, in that his nervous system has been systematically disrupted by an intoxicant (in other words, by an agent with just this effect). This intoxication causes predictable effects on his visual, intellectual and sensory-motor pathways. When my heart and soul lit up with the first sip of Château Trotanoy 1945, however, the experience itself was intoxicating, and it is as though I tasted the intoxication as a quality of the wine. We may compare this quality with the intoxicating quality of a landscape or a line of poetry. It is fairly obvious from the comparison and from the grammar of the description that we are not referring to anything like drunkenness. There are natural kinds to which the experience of drinking wine and that of hearing a line of poetry both belong: for one thing they are both experiences. But the impulse to classify the experiences together is not to be understood as the first step in a scientific theory.

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