Conscendere Aequor

Distillations aims to condense the volatile ferment of my thoughts on taste, vision, and form. Its unifying topic shall be spirits, distilled liquors—the arts of making and mixing them, the acts of imbibing and sharing them, and any form of life that flows through these arts and acts.

The field shall be wide, the horizons fluid—yes, spirits, but also cocktails; yes, disillates, but also liqueurs and aromatized wines—wherever my thirst carries me. Yet each post will start out from a particular drink.

In starting out thus, these entries may occasionally resemble criticism or journalism, the kinds of reviewing or reporting one might find on a media platform devoted to drinks and drinking culture.

The telos of this writing, however, is phenomenological and contemplative. It seeks to reflect on the experience of spirits—to unfold the structures of that experience—so as to attain a deeper understanding of the structures of matter, mind, and communication.

As intimated at the outset, one key mission here is to study the relations between taste (gustatory and aesthetic) and vision (sensorial and noetic). This pursuit is guided by the intuition that a carnal hermeneutics of flavor can reveal principles of the world's formal intelligibility—of Being as Logos—principles more typically elucidated via the conceptual nexus of sight and insight, image and idea. To articulate the mutual incorporation of these faculties—to recognize taste, touch, and smell as modes of knowledge and judgment intertwined with image-consciousness; to recognize intuitive or non-discursive thought as involving our capacity to savor as a sine qua non—that is the foremost end of this otherwise open-ended endeavor.

Nevertheless, at bottom, this channel serves to provoke occasional writing on a topic that absorbs me. (At another time, in another pen, the same philosophical investigations could have been done with a more culinary or horticultural focus. I'm simply a philosopher who happens to adore spirits and cocktails, hoping to cultivate better habits of writing.)

So if not to ground my flights of abstraction, may this platform serve as a kind of aerodrome—a locus for launching and landing, procession and return.

Prosit.