"Sight and touch, being thus increased in capacity, might belong to some species far superior to man; or rather the human species would be far different had all the senses been thus improved"
About this Quote
Brillat-Savarin sneaks a radical idea into the polite parlor of Enlightenment reason: “human nature” isn’t fixed; it’s calibrated. He frames it as speculation about upgraded sight and touch, but the real target is the smug assumption that man is the measure of all things. If you widen the aperture of perception, you don’t just get better data - you get a different creature, with different values, different appetites, different truths.
The phrasing is telling. “Might belong to some species far superior to man” sounds like taxonomy, not theology. Superiority here isn’t moral; it’s sensory. He’s flirting with the unsettling thought that our hierarchy of beings may be an accident of equipment. Then he pivots: “or rather” - a lawyerly correction that tightens the argument. It’s not that superior species are out there; it’s that we would be “far different” if our senses were. Identity becomes a function of thresholds: what we can detect, we can desire; what we can’t detect, we dismiss as nonexistent or irrelevant.
Context matters. Brillat-Savarin is best known for treating taste as an intellectual subject, not a guilty pleasure, and this line carries that project’s deeper agenda. In a world busy classifying nature, he’s reminding readers that the classifier is also an animal with limitations. Improve the senses and you rewrite the species - along with its philosophy, its ethics, and its politics. The subtext is both humbling and quietly defiant: if our perception shapes our humanity, then cultivating perception (even “lower” senses like touch and taste) is a cultural act, not a frivolity.
The phrasing is telling. “Might belong to some species far superior to man” sounds like taxonomy, not theology. Superiority here isn’t moral; it’s sensory. He’s flirting with the unsettling thought that our hierarchy of beings may be an accident of equipment. Then he pivots: “or rather” - a lawyerly correction that tightens the argument. It’s not that superior species are out there; it’s that we would be “far different” if our senses were. Identity becomes a function of thresholds: what we can detect, we can desire; what we can’t detect, we dismiss as nonexistent or irrelevant.
Context matters. Brillat-Savarin is best known for treating taste as an intellectual subject, not a guilty pleasure, and this line carries that project’s deeper agenda. In a world busy classifying nature, he’s reminding readers that the classifier is also an animal with limitations. Improve the senses and you rewrite the species - along with its philosophy, its ethics, and its politics. The subtext is both humbling and quietly defiant: if our perception shapes our humanity, then cultivating perception (even “lower” senses like touch and taste) is a cultural act, not a frivolity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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