Cooking and Philosophy

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

We’ve all heard the joke. What do philosophy graduates say:  “Want fries with that?”  Actually, philosophy graduates do well. They may not begin with the highest salaries, but they move up quickly.    

Just as importantly, there is more to link philosophy and food than humor.  No one has trouble recognizing the importance of food--we eat or we perish.  Plenty of people have trouble recognizing the importance of philosophy.  Critics complain of its irrelevance and predict its demise.  Lately, the physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson got on that bandwagon.   Prior to him came the blunt proclamation by  Stephen Hawking: “philosophy is dead.”  

Philosophy has a ready rejoinder: exactly what kind of claim is that?  It doesn’t emerge from a physics experiment, from a chemistry lab, from manipulation of genes.  Isn’t it a philosophical claim?  Doesn’t it articulate a generic take on things, provide some general orientation, give hints about getting our bearings as we navigate life?  Hawking is saying “philosophy is dead,” and “it takes a philosophical statement to articulate its demise.”  The inner contradiction “I’m doing philosophy at the very moment I’m pronouncing its irrelevance” is why Etienne Gilson was fond of saying that “philosophy always buries its undertakers.”

There is plenty of bad philosophy, plenty of highly technical “let’s-only-talk-to-ourselves-in language-no-one-understands-about-problems-of-concern-to-no-one-else” kind of philosophy.  Criticizing these is not the same as outright dismissal.  Philosophy provides a general orientation toward life. Since we all work from a set of comprehensive bearings, we all participate in philosophy, albeit mostly in an implicit, rather than explicit way.

Those who approach it explicitly root their orientation in some basic characterization of what it means to be human.  This often starts by asking how humans are different from other animals.  Some answers are flippant: we are the creatures who are always asking “how are we different?”  We are the creatures who plan out rest room stops. Plato suggested the “featherless biped.” A later thinker plucked a chicken, tossed it in the midst of Plato’s students and said “here is a man.”  Building on the plucked feathers theme, we might say that humans are those creatures who shave off their body hair; or, more accurately, those who force females to shave off their body hair.

More serious characterizations were typically built around the phrase “man is a rational animal.”  Because “rational”

tended to exclude our embodied, emotive dimension, i.e. it identified more Mr. Spock than Captain Kirk, alternatives were sought out.    Homo laborans and homo ludens, the animal that labors, the animal who engages in games, helped emphasize other dimensions of human life, as did “the story-telling animal.” Recently, thanks to Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human,  a new general standpoint  emerged: the cooking animal.

Not only is cooking unique to humans, it is an activity that is integrative where the older “rational” was exclusionary.  “Rational” encouraged detachment, aloofness and neutrality.  Cooking emphasizes involvement, interaction, dependence and concern.  For some strange reason, philosophers have tended to think of humans as outside spectators, dispassionate cogitators receiving, recording and processing data.   It’s not clear where they got this notion, but it has little to do with real people.  There was some pushback. The American Pragmatists, John Dewey, William James, Charles Peirce, situated humans within everyday, ordinary practices, the engaged, value-laden doings and undergoings of everyday life.

When our philosophical orientation works out of a context centered on ourselves as “cooking animals” the philosophical map  tends to favor the Pragmatists.  The Mr. Spock model, cold, hyper-logical, aloof, fades to the periphery, as does any sense that things around us are neutral, “just facts” until we bestow “values” upon them.  As hungry creatures, we are interested participants, not detached observers.  Such engaged individuals are led to ask about the best combinations of foodstuffs for good health.  They lean toward companionship (literal meaning: sharing bread) and enjoyment. They occasion reflection about how best to secure resources for a healthy, vibrant community.  In other words, they dispose us in new ways toward typical philosophical issues: the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of knowing (epistemology), questions about what is good (ethics), issues of political economy (social/political philosophy).

Physicists like Tyson and Hawking are reacting to a narrow understanding of philosophy.  The recent graduate asking “would you like fries with that” could tell them that physics will never answer questions about friendship, about beauty, about justice, or for that matter, how physics fits in to our overall understanding of things.  Like it or not, philosophy always buries its undertakers.