PHILOSOPHY AND FOOD
Louis le nain, Peasant Meal, 1642
In his Phaedo, Plato complains that neither "truth" nor "thought of any kind ever comes from the body." The body is a distraction, keeping "us busy in a thousand ways" because of its need for food (66 b,c). Plato thinks he is praising the philosopher who, mainly concerned with the more rarified realms, has stepped beyond the here and now of bodily needs. Novelists, thinking along the same lines, come to an exactly opposite judgment. Melville's Ishmael worries about those who make a point of calling themselves "philosophers." "So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester'". Pasternak's Lara echoes the sentiment, even using her own food imagery: "I don't like purely philosophical works. I think that a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's speciality seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish".
Food, the Greek thinker says, is an annoyance for the real philosopher. The philosopher's unusual and monotonous diet, the novelists say, would give any one a belly ache. We don't know much about the actual food practices of philosophers, but some of what we do know is not encouraging. Wittgenstein, his biographer points out, "did not care what he ate so long as it was always the same". Schopenhauer praised still life paintings, unless, that is, they contained food, except, via a convoluted piece of reasoning best understood by epigones, fruit dangling on trees. What is wrong with food in still lifes? Its connection to edibility, and thus to appetite, that which keeps us shackled to the object-enslaved will. The Greeks offer some counter-examples. Heraclitus, according to Aristotle, welcomed his visitors into the kitchen, assuring them that gods were present there too. Democritus, sensing his one hundred nine year old body slipping into mortality had one major concern, that his caretaker sister would, if in mourning, not be able to participate in the annual women's festival. To fend off the impending inevitability, he asked her to bake bread and leave it nearby as she departed for the festivities. For the three days of the festival, Democritus extended his days on earth by breathing in the aroma of freshly baked bread.
Theoretically, most philosophers have simply ignored food, or denigrated it Plato-style. Only as Modernity (1600-1900) began to wane did glimpses of an overlooked source of inspiration begin to surface. Nietzsche asked why there was no philosophy of nutrition. John Dewey, some thirty years later, wondered why that dimension of human experience concerned with "direct enjoyment" in activities like "feasting and festivities" had "hardly received the attention from philosophers that it demands." More recently, several books have explicitly dealt with the subject of food and philosophy. Carolyn Korsmeyer's Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy, appeared in 1999. Leon Kass's The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of our Nature appeared in 1994. Dean Curtin and Lisa Heldke's anthology, Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food was issued in 1992. In 1996, across the Atlantic, Elizabeth Telfer came out with her Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food. In France, the leading figure has been Michel Onfray, who has written two delightful books: Le ventre des philosophes (1989), and La raison gourmande (1995).
None of this has yet led to an influential trend in philosophy. After all, reflection situated within the context of food and food practices goes against the grain, not only of Plato-inspired thinking, but against the dualistic heritage deriving from Descartes. Within the latter, philosophers are more concerned about whether the "mind" can ever really know the "world." They tend to focus on issues of skepticism as crucial to philosophy and sometimes, yes, it pains me as a fellow philosopher to say it, even wonder whether the table around which they are seated is actually there. Nonetheless, we do not all have to be clones of one another. Several brave souls are paving the way, and it may actually be the case that a real paradigm shift can occur if philosophers will only remember that they are not disembodied minds unfortunately connected to physical bodies, but are, like all other humans, flesh and blood creatures. Taking seriously our status as embodied and encultured is an important lesson professional thinkers have yet to learn. With this reminder firmly in hand, philosophers could actually begin to grasp philosophizing as a "human" rather than as a "mental" activity. They might also follow John Dewey's advice and concern themselves more with the "problems of men" than the problems of professional philosophers. The results of all this might be surprising: philosophy actually concerned, not with mental puzzles, aporia, arcane technicalities, or imaginative excursions into the minds of bats, or brains in vats, but with wisdom, what philosophy (from the Greek philia and sophia, love of wisdom) should be concerned with in the first place.