You might have been told “in vino veritas”. But that’s not true. Wine tends to make you think you know the truth when you don’t. Unlike coffee.
Wine lubricates those late-night discussions, and helps shy people lose their inhibitions, but loosening the tongue isn’t always such a great idea when it comes to serious thought. Coffee, in contrast, can make you sharper. It has been used to enhance focus and concentration for centuries.
Philosophy is very cheap to produce. It just requires a philosopher with some time, a few other philosophers to talk to, and some kind of writing equipment.
There’s an old joke about a mathematics department competing with a philosophy department for funds in a university. The mathematicians just need a blackboard, some chalk, paper and pencils, and a wastepaper basket, the maths professor tells the dean. The philosophers have a response: their department is even cheaper because they don’t need the wastepaper basket.
What both forgot to mention was the need for coffee. The great Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once defined a mathematician as “a machine for turning coffee into theorems” (though some claim Erdős was quoting his fellow Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi). Analogously, a philosopher is a machine for turning coffee into arguments. We can do philosophy in our heads, but without coffee, many of us would find it very hard to get started and difficult to keep going.
Caffeine is the fuel of philosophers, and we have used it to kick-start thinking since the Enlightenment. Voltaire was an addict – a 30-plus-cup-a-day man. Immanuel Kant used strong coffee every morning, brewed by his manservant. He also drank it after dinner. Søren Kierkegaard adored black coffee, filling it to saturation point with sugar.
All three were incredibly prolific and creative thinkers. That doesn’t prove that their coffee habit played any role in this, of course, but it does seem likely. Certainly, it didn’t hold them back.
The latest medical research suggests that, unlike alcohol consumption, drinking coffee is good for health, particularly for cardio-vascular health. That finding could change, but for the moment the outlook is very good for coffee drinkers.
In a previous age just about every philosopher smoked tobacco in some form. Deep inhalation seemed to be a precursor to deep thinking. Philosophers would pause briefly in a cloud of exhaled smoke before passing on a profound insight. Now – wisely – philosophers rarely smoke. For most, coffee is their stimulant of choice. Without it, many of us would be lost.
Despite coffee’s important role in the history of philosophy and its continued widespread use within the discipline, it’s wine that has tended to get philosophical attention. Can one wine be objectively better than another, or is it a matter of individual taste? Can the essential qualities of a wine be reduced to its chemical composition or, as with an art object, does the history of the wine’s production contribute to what it is?
Think of the role of terroir, the history of production in a particular place. If you could produce a convincing imitation of a particular Burgundy vintage in a laboratory, would that be of equal value to a wine drinker, since its taste on the palate would be indistinguishable even to the most experienced sommelier? Would the knowledge of how the wine had been made affect how it tasted?
There have been some excellent explorations of the philosophy of wine, including a collection of philosophical essays, A Question of Taste, edited by Barry C Smith. Philosophers hold conferences where they discuss these questions, often with contributions from neuroscientists, winemakers and excellent après-philosophy wine-tasting events, and so on. It’s easy to see the appeal.
I’ve yet to hear of a conference on the philosophy of coffee or on coffee’s place in the history of philosophy. If there were one, I suspect it would be very buzzy, and the coffee would be much better than the usual fare.
Sadly, climate change is pushing coffee bean prices higher. In the UK they have doubled in the last year. The countries where coffee is grown have experienced extremely high temperatures and excessive rain recently, and this is affecting supply.
As temperatures rise and coffee yields diminish, prices inevitably soar. But coffee is too important to philosophers for us to ditch it for cheaper alternatives, or to take the extreme measure of quitting it altogether. Most of us will take the hit to get the hit.
