Rowman and Littlefield has now made I Eat, Therefore I Think available in paperback. This comes as the number of philosophy books addressing food issues is growing. Some recent examples include: Paul Thompson, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, Corine Pelluchon, Les Nourritures: Philosophie du Corps Politique, Julian Baggini, The Virtues of the Table: how to Eat and Think. In addition, there is the book authored by Lisa Heldke and me, Philosophers at Table.
Why the upsurge? There is renewed interest in everyday activities typically ignored by philosophers. Food studies has burgeoned. Both hunger and obesity offer contemporary challenges. Issues of sustainability and the treatment of animals have also provoked reflection.
Where does my book fit into the discussion? Perhaps the most important lesson is one the book does not explicitly mention: philosophy is not an abstract discipline. Philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, is a critic of abstractions. “But, wait,” readers are probably thinking, “Isn’t philosophy abstract thinking?” “That’s what we learned in philosophy class.”
All well and good, but partial and misguided. In its historical trajectory, philosophy has indeed come to be associated with abstraction and mind puzzles. I Eat, Therefore I Think aims at changing this take on philosophy.
To accomplish this, I began with a clumsy term: “unforgetting.” “Un-forgetting” literally translates the Greek word for ‘“truth,” aletheia. My book seeks to unforget that we are stomach-endowed. It might seem obvious that humans are creatures for whom the stomach plays a major role, but philosophers of a particular period have tended to ignore this. Second the book seeks to unforget, i.e. reinsert, some Socratic elements into philosophy.
A few Socrates-inspired elements stand out:
Dialogue. Socrates believed that thinking through an issue involved cooperation with others. Thinking is not an isolated activity that goes on in the head. Thinking, in the fullest sense, takes place via dialogue.
Irony. Socrates embraced “irony” in its philosophical sense: an awareness that even our best formulations somehow fall short. Philosophy’s task is unending because our articulations, while they get something right, are, at the same time, lacking in other ways. Reality is too complex to be captured in any snapshot.
Agora. Socrates practiced philosophy in the agora, the marketplace, the public square. The topics he discussed were rooted in the living concerns of flesh and blood people.
What? Socrates showed how philosophy is not concerned with the question “why.” Its purview is the question “what.” What is friendship? What is love? What is virtue? Philosophy means “love of wisdom” and the “what” questions allow for actual, helpful answers that guide “wisdom.” ”“Why” questions, e.g. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “Why are we here?” are more the province of myth, non-philosophical ways to deal with questions about absolute origins or absolute ends.
How does a stomach-friendly help re-invigorate these four Socratic themes? A major metaphorical alteration is first needed: thinking of conceptual abstractions as recipes. Then, just as recipes, though helpful, can be critiqued and altered, so philosophy can undertake its role as “critic of abstractions.” The same move helps philosophy become Socratic once again.
Dialogue and the Agora. Recipes involve dialogue. We start where we are, in the agora. The cultural heritage in which we find ourselves privileges a conceptual framework, a series of recipes. Engaging in dialogue with that tradition, we critique, we restore, we revise received recipes, we develop new ones. In this process, we are often aided by adding a dialogue with other traditions.
Irony. Recipes are never fixed, finished and final, i.e. the slippage between formulation and reality, a slippage which identifies genuine irony, is ever-present. What counts, in the end, is how recipes become manifest in experience. The philosophical “criticism” of abstractions involves the back and forth between abstractions and the way they play out in lived experience.
What, not why. When we think about recipes, the ‘’what” dimension dominates. Questions about ultimate origins and ends are unanswerable apart from storytelling, from myths. These, it must be noted, may be religious or they may be evolutionary. Either way, they are not philosophical. The recipe focus, which begins by humbly accepting the simple fact of our being here, tends rather to highlight “what” questions.” What makes a meal delicious and nutritious? What makes a life good? Starting with only vegetables can we do to come up with a delicious/nutritious combination? What is the extent of justice? Does it encompass non-human animals?
I Eat, Therefore I Think offers itself as the kind of corrective that will re-define philosophy as both the critic of abstractions and the friend of Socrates. Hopefully, the paperback version will allow those ends to be widely discussed and disseminated.
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