Loss of Appetite

Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger features a scene in which a character, despite it being lunchtime, loses her appetite.   Her boyfriend, in the same circumstances, goes right back to chowing down.

Who are they? What are the circumstances? They are Meursault, the novel’s main character, and his girlfriend/fiancee Marie. Meursault, famously, does not play societal games. He does not pretend to be what he is not.  A neighbor, Raymond, has asked him for help writing a letter. The aim of the letter: entrap a young woman with whom Raymond had a relationship. On the day of the disrupted lunch, screams come from Raymond’s apartment. The  letter has worked. The young woman came by. Raymond beat her.

The ruckus causes neighbors to gather in the hallway. Marie, troubled by what she has witnessed, loses her appetite. Meursault remains unaffected.

Camus sought to write a novel featuring an “authentic” central character, one who would not take on roles expected of and assigned by society. What he skillfully depicted is someone completely detached from what goes on around him.  Meursault is indifference personified. He does not care that the letter he has cooperated in writing is part of a vengeful plan. He is not moved by the beating of a young woman. He lives in a self-enclosed world. Societal games might not be for him, but are all evaluative, sympathetic responses part of the false veneer of society?  Meursault does not just refuse hypocritical games. He goes so far as to numb his evaluative response to surrounding events. A young woman is being beaten next door? Duly noted. A mere piece of neutral data. Now, back to lunch.

Not Marie. She cannot remain detached.  The beating scene affects her. She loses her appetite.  Basic bodily needs are eclipsed as non-physiological concerns take center stage.

Abraham Maslow famously identified a “hierarchy of needs.”  It offered a neat framework which ranked the needs in a particular way: the lower needs had to be fulfilled before higher ones could be realized.

It offered a clear-cut system of “axiology”--concern with value and its ranking.  Marie’s loss of appetite suggests how Maslow’s hierarchy was a bit too neat. There are times when the tug of ideals, the commitment to key values, are more important than the demands of physiology. Marie, revulsed by the appalling scene of a young woman being beaten, offers one example.  The injustice, unfairness, general evil of the scene comes to supersede her physiological craving for food.

The same can be said for more well-known scenarios: suffragettes on a hunger strike;  Bobby Sands dying as a result of refusing nutrition; religiously induced fasts; starving artists, the Russian scientists charged with preserving a seed bank who starved rather than eat the seeds entrusted to them. There is also the pathology of anorexia where priorities have been upended and hunger is overridden.

Such scenarios suggest that the Maslow hierarchization needs to be tinkered with in two ways.  First, Self-actualization is not a good name for the highest level. Second, for humans, the hierarchy is flexible, what is higher on the pyramid can, under certain

circumstances, become more fundamental than what is at the base.

Against Self-Actualization.  Suffragettes, Bobby Sands, Russian seed bank scientists: What they held most dear was not actualizing the self. They sacrificed the self for a more communal cause, a cause they saw themselves as serving. One distinguishing  feature of humans is precisely this willingness to place a communal cause as a central ideal, even if it means loss of life.

For a flexible axiology. Humans manifest a cluster of aspirations, impulses, inclinations, wants. Living out the fullness of human life means not being limited by a hierarchy with pre-ordained, fixed levels.  It means being drawn as much by transcendent ideals as by physiological necessity. Both the physiological and the axiological can work together. At difficult times, in certain circumstances, people have to choose.  That the axiological can override the physiological is an indication of how complicated a creature we are.

Of course, humans can always, Meursault-style, numb themselves.  “It’s all the same to

me” they can say. In making such an utterance they situate themselves apart from ordinary human experience.  The position of complete detachment is a seriously artificial one. It requires a lot of work, either individual effort or culturally absorbed effort, to reach the point of neutering, treating as neutral data, the occurrences which make up part of our surroundings.  It is natural for us to hunger for food. It is also natural for us to hunger for fairness, justice, freedom, and respect. What characterizes us, as the special animal we are, is that the prioritization of these hungers is not rigidly fixed.