笔记 | 感知的葡萄酒

大多数人知道伽利略，是因为他以新颖的方式看待地球在太阳系中的位置，以及随之而来的与梵蒂冈的冲突而闻名。

但早在他的宇宙学引起轩然大波之前，在1623年他就创作了一部名为《Il sagiatorre》的非凡著作，此书内容广泛，涵盖科学领域，但重点关注视觉vision。其中有一段这样写：我们应该非常清楚地认识到，如果没有生命，就不会有明暗和色彩。在生命出现之前，特别是高等生命出现之前，虽然阳光明媚，山峦叠嶂，但一切都是看不见的、寂静的。

所以按伽利略的观点，虽然地球的物理属性存在，但在被我们的感官感知之前，它们是不存在的。这个理论既适用于葡萄酒，也适用于其他任何事物。

在那本书里有两段话值得关注：

1，他将葡萄酒描述为水中凝结的阳光 sunlight held together by water。可以讲葡萄酒因为有阳光与水而存在。

2，葡萄酒的味道，并不由葡萄酒本身决定，也不受所有外部因素影响，而只属于饮酒者自己的特别的感官所感知。此时葡萄酒的味道，可被考虑成是一个对象，因为饮酒者而存在。A wine’s good taste does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine and hence of an object, even of an object considered as appearance, but belongs to the special character of the sense in the subject who is enjoying this taste.

在这本书出版的250年后，瑞士的心理学家卡尔荣格也如是说：一个人的存在，是因为另外一个认识他的人，而并不是因为他的存在而存在着。就像此刻我在地球的某个角落因为写着这段文字恰好被你读到，所以我存在了。

Galileo Galilei is best known for his novel way of looking at Earth’s place in the solar system and his consequent problems with the Vatican. But long before all the fuss blew up over Galileo’s cosmology, he had produced a remarkable work called Il sagiatorre (The Assayer). Published in 1623, it ranged broadly across the sciences, with a focus on vision. And the science historians Marco Piccolino and Nicholas J. Wade have recently pointed out how innovative Galileo’s philosophy of perception was. Among other things, Piccolino and Wade quote Galileo as claiming that “we should realize quite clearly that without life there would be no brightness and no color. Before life came, especially higher forms of life, all was invisible and silent although the sun shone and the mountains toppled.” Galileo was saying that while the physical attributes of the planet are present, they are perceptually nonexistent until they have been interpreted by our senses. This theory applies to wine as much as to anything else, and Galileo, who
described wine as “sunlight, held together by water,” did not forget that fact. As he put it in Il sagiatorre, “A wine’s good taste does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine and hence of an object, even of an object considered as appearance, but belongs to the special character of the sense in the subject who is enjoying this taste.”