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A review by aldoojeda
I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine by Roger Scruton
2.0
I finish this book while drinking a beer and that will prove to be extremely ironic.
I knew Roger Scruton from his work on the aesthetics and shared many of his thoughts, so when I found I Drink Therefore I am, I immediately put it on my to read list (and stayed there for a long while). I finally decided to read it, mainly because my own struggle with alcohol: I came to the realization that I could not stop drinking, that I enjoyed too much of drinking a nice glass of wine or bottle of beer. ‘Am I wrong, am I an addict?’ were the questions that I tried to find an answer when started reading the book.
But alas, it was a disappointment. The initial thoughts in the introduction were very promising, to explain the virtues of wine and the problems with the excess of drinking, just what I was looking for. Sadly, it took another direction. The first chapter was an exposition of why the wines of France reign supreme over all others. Scruton defended the terroiristes over the garagistes. And I, in fact, agree. The flavor of a wine comes from the land, its culture and history, more than the grapes. But this flavor is absolutely subjective and the author gives a great quote for that:
“it is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.”
To properly enjoy a wine, you must know the wine. But a few pages later, Scruton tries to give an objective quality to the terrroir, arguing that wines from other places of the Earth have not the same gods, as he calls them, than french wines, dismissing almost all of them.
He then, argues for the epistemological innocence of wine, putting it apart from all other ferments, spirits and substances. But by this point, the book is filled with confirmation bias and other fallacies that would put to shame any other philosopher. His arguments against cannabis are just nonse, for example. Also, Scruton uses any opportunity to stamp out his political thoughts; Ok, I do not blame him for this, as I use any opportunity to criticize religion, but his conclusions are biased by his Christian faith. He uses the argument of the contingent being by Avicenna (also used to criticize Dawkins and Hitchens): If you imagine yourself as “...a ‘floating man’, free from all sensations, and all contact with bodies...”, what remains is the self, and that self is the Being, the atman for the Upanishads that connect us with the oness. Scruton insists that this is different from the cartesian dualism, but falls in the same errors of thought that Dennett exposed in Consciousness Explained.
Wine, Scruton tells us, put you closer to the Brahman and helps to get rid of the veil of Maya. Wine puts you closer to yourself, to know thyself. I would argue the other way around: wine gets you rid of the tyranny of the ‘I’ and the illusion of the self.
The book has some good remarques, like the observations on the greek love, agape. Now I believe there is virtue in drink, but the worldviews of the author made him impossible to form a coherent theory of wine.
I knew Roger Scruton from his work on the aesthetics and shared many of his thoughts, so when I found I Drink Therefore I am, I immediately put it on my to read list (and stayed there for a long while). I finally decided to read it, mainly because my own struggle with alcohol: I came to the realization that I could not stop drinking, that I enjoyed too much of drinking a nice glass of wine or bottle of beer. ‘Am I wrong, am I an addict?’ were the questions that I tried to find an answer when started reading the book.
But alas, it was a disappointment. The initial thoughts in the introduction were very promising, to explain the virtues of wine and the problems with the excess of drinking, just what I was looking for. Sadly, it took another direction. The first chapter was an exposition of why the wines of France reign supreme over all others. Scruton defended the terroiristes over the garagistes. And I, in fact, agree. The flavor of a wine comes from the land, its culture and history, more than the grapes. But this flavor is absolutely subjective and the author gives a great quote for that:
“it is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.”
To properly enjoy a wine, you must know the wine. But a few pages later, Scruton tries to give an objective quality to the terrroir, arguing that wines from other places of the Earth have not the same gods, as he calls them, than french wines, dismissing almost all of them.
He then, argues for the epistemological innocence of wine, putting it apart from all other ferments, spirits and substances. But by this point, the book is filled with confirmation bias and other fallacies that would put to shame any other philosopher. His arguments against cannabis are just nonse, for example. Also, Scruton uses any opportunity to stamp out his political thoughts; Ok, I do not blame him for this, as I use any opportunity to criticize religion, but his conclusions are biased by his Christian faith. He uses the argument of the contingent being by Avicenna (also used to criticize Dawkins and Hitchens): If you imagine yourself as “...a ‘floating man’, free from all sensations, and all contact with bodies...”, what remains is the self, and that self is the Being, the atman for the Upanishads that connect us with the oness. Scruton insists that this is different from the cartesian dualism, but falls in the same errors of thought that Dennett exposed in Consciousness Explained.
Wine, Scruton tells us, put you closer to the Brahman and helps to get rid of the veil of Maya. Wine puts you closer to yourself, to know thyself. I would argue the other way around: wine gets you rid of the tyranny of the ‘I’ and the illusion of the self.
The book has some good remarques, like the observations on the greek love, agape. Now I believe there is virtue in drink, but the worldviews of the author made him impossible to form a coherent theory of wine.