Overview

Now that we have answered the charge that smell is too subjective and emotional to sustain aesthetic reflection and judgment, we need to refute two other claims that, if true, would make cultivating the sense of smell or developing an olfactory aesthetics seem hardly worth the trouble. The first claim, going back at least to Kant, is that the sense of smell is of little use to humans, an idea Darwin also held, viewing smell as little more than an evolutionary vestige. The second claim is that smell’s connection to language is so weak, and the potential of human languages for expressing smell is so poor, that serious aesthetic discussion involving smell would be extremely difficult if not impossible. To answer these charges, we will need to turn from a focus on neuroscience and psychology to several other disciplines—history, anthropology, linguistics, and literature—if we are to demonstrate that the sense of smell has in fact proved its usefulness in many cultures, including those of the West, and that peoples in many cultures are able to cogently articulate olfactory experiences, something even true of many Western poets and novelists....