Nose-wise: Smell Studies Come of Age

This essay argues that to arrive at a proper understanding of the aesthetic and cognitivepotential of smell, we must look outside the western tradition to those traditions wherethe power of smell does not carry all the baggage, all the disqualifications that Kant andFreud, and even Proust, saddled it with. The cases of Indian perfumery, the Chinese incenseclock, and the Japanese incense ceremony known as kōdō, which involves “listening to theincense” (ko wo kiku), are presented by way of example. This essay also seeks to recoverthe original meaning of the term “aesthetic,” which Baumgarten defined as the science ofgrasping “the unity in multiplicity of sensible qualities.”