ONTOLOGICAL PERSONALISM

In the late 1980s a laboratory experiment produced surprising results.  Bacteria which could not feed on lactose were placed in a lactose-only environment.  Surprisingly, general demise was not the outcome. Instead, the bacteria’s genes went into overdrive and it developed an ability to digest what had formerly been indigestible.  

This energetic, survival-directed dynamism offered a path for altering a long-standing philosophical presupposition: most of the material world proceeds by mechanistic rules. Take a spark plug.  If it is deprived of

a source for sparking, nothing happens. Similarly, if the plug has a crack in it, the crack will remain. Nothing in a mechanical device is self-replicating or self-repairing.

The mechanistic pattern typically hit a wall when it came to humans. The wall should have included the biological realm, but strenuous efforts were made to explain the biological via the mechanistic. One dominant notion, for example, was that although genetic changes (mutations) occurred, they were strictly random. Such random variations were then caught up in the mechanistic process whose laws proceeded by necessity, a position explained in a popular book, Chance and Necessity, by the Nobel-winning biologist Jacques Monod. With the biological realm thought to be explicable via mechanical processes, only the human was left as an exception. There resulted a major

bifurcation: the realm of humans and the realm of matter. Stated differently: on one side the personal, on the other, the impersonal.

So strong, though, was the pull of the machine model, that a serious attempt was made even to include humans within its boundaries.  This was the well-known movement of Behaviorism. It proclaimed proclaimed that (a) humans were not different from the natural world, and (b) this meant that what could not be found in the realm of atomic matter (i.e. the “objective” realm) should not be included in descriptions of what was going on in the human realm.   Behaviorism took a chainsaw approach to eliminate what it considered to be little more than

subjective illusions.

John B. Watson stated it clearly and bluntly: “ the Behaviorist must exclude from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion…”

Standing in sharp opposition to this objectivist, impersonal paradigm is the philosophical movement known as “personalism.” The name, which adopts the personal/impersonal bifurcation, is not that great. Still, the content is worthy of another look. That content, begins, perhaps surprisingly, by sharing a key starting point with behaviorism: the post-Darwinian realization that there is continuity, not a sharp rupture, between humans and the natural world.  What it does next, however, moves it in a different direction.   

The personalist twist: If  humans are indeed continuous with the natural realm, then we can learn something about the natural realm by paying attention to  human experience. That experience is not an alien, mysterious, supervenient irruption. It manifests operative natural processes. As such it can serve to provide indications of characteristics associated with the non-human world. 

“Indications” is an important term. There is no claim that traits associated with humans, say intelligence, purposeful activity, emotional attachment, language, will, in those exact forms, be widely distributed.   There is a middle ground: the old medieval recognition of traits as “analogous.” Traits like awareness, communication, habit, normativity, end-directed flexibility can now be recognized as ‘going all the way down,’ as being generically applicable to our worldd (which includes humans and non humans). The realm of the “impersonal,” far from being prototypical, is now seen as an outlier.  

“Personalism” recently got a big publicity boost: a piece

by David Brooks in the New York Times.  It was entitled: “Personalism: the philosophy we need.” The article did provide a great boost, but the personalism it defended was a truncated one. It highlighted human-human interactions: “Personalism is a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person.”  

This is good as far as it goes.  It is an understandable emphasis given the name “personalism.” At the same time, it misses the more comprehensive dimension of personalism: offering an ontological, not just an anthropological take on things. The Brooks’ perspective actually undermines the notion of continuity.  It preserves the human/nature discontinuity, a discontinuity which personalism seeks to overcome.   

For more on personalism, and its relationship to food, stay tuned for the next installment. 

For  introductions to personalism, some books offer a good starting place. Central among them:

• Emmanuel Mounier’ general introduction,  Personalism;
• Erazim Kohak’s lyrical The Embers and the Stars;
• and Martin Buber’s classic  I and Thou.

MICHEL SERRES (1930-2019).

Michel Serres, who died June 1, was a friend of philosophy and food. He believed that the locus for philosophy was the feast, real feasts, not pretend ones.  Plato’s Symposium (French title: le banquet) was a pretend feast.  The participants lounged on separate couches like clear and distinct units.  Their main interaction was airy discourse. They ignored both the tongue that tastes, and the tongue that loves. They were soldiers for the imperialistic tongue that lives only in words. They spent their time, as Serres indicates,  talking, not making, love.

The participants, as statue-like, missed “the lesson of mixture,¨ a lesson  carried out by slaves who prepare the

wine/water blend in the central serving bowl.   “Noble practices” like baking and cooking, practices which inevitably involve mixing and blending (two of Serres’ favorite words) need more attention paid to them. By contrast, Plato’s banqueters prized  ana-lysis, breaking apart. Their great blindness: failing to realize that life is about mixing/blending or, as Serres put it with great ironic enjoyment, “con-fusion.”

Plato’s Symposium was built around a great forgetfulness.  The “sophia” in “philosophy” means wisdom. “Wisdom,” using a synonym, is sapience. And, sapience, as in homo sapiens, means tasting (the root verb sapere means ¨to taste.¨)  Philosophy, “love of sophia,” loses its bearings when, as with Plato’s

discussants,  it cuts itself off from the kitchen. Some ramifications: the speakers aim, above all else, to rise above it all.  They say “no” to human, incarnate, life. They escape to a rarified world of pure ideas. They forget the very conditions (biological, physiological) which allow them to feast in the first place.

Spiritual and material are, for them, fundamentally opposed.  The kitchen staff, though ill-educated, knows otherwise. Preparing good food requires loving attention to concrete material components.  It demands careful mixing and blending. The statues on couches, seek to rise above the mixings they see as adulterations. They thus become “new ascetics.¨  Seeking good via escape, they actually cut themselves off from the only path that will lead to living goods. mixing and blending.

Purity, i.e. what is, for them, free of contamination, characterizes the landscape favored by Plato’s speakers. Such clear and distinct purity is easy enough to envision for those who purposely ignore what goes on with food preparation. The fascination with escaping the grubby world  brings with it some unsavory side-effects. Chief among them: a fetish for separation, exclusion, purgation. In other words, it occasions a combat mode of living. “Against” and “versus” become watchwords. Serres, whose main ethical concern was minimizing violence, offered an antidote: remember the very place slighted by Plato--the kitchen.

The kitchen is where people learn “not to fear the impure.”  There, mixing, blending, combining, “con-

fusing,” not to mention hands-on work, predominate. There, the sapience of wisdom and the sapience of taste go hand-in-hand.

It’s true, the impure, the mixed, can result in a complete mess.  But “mess” can signify both a meal course (older meaning) and jumbled disarray (newer meaning). In other words, there is no escaping the responsibility of seeking proper mixing and blending.  Initial possibilities can be made to materialize in ways that are good or ill. This is where the kitchen serves as a model. The possibilities for good do not just come to automatic actualization.  Their realization depends on how cooks work their blending and mixing.

For Serres, the great enemy of  good was appartenance, i.e. sequestered, non-mixed, non-mongrel group identity.

It led to the attitude of “us” versus ‘them,” to exclusion and, ultimately, to violence.

The table can serve as a counterpoint, but only if the work of the kitchen is recalled and if the participants actually share in the food and drink that is served.  Serres, who had a deep sense of reverence, preferred a meal that, using Matthew Arnold terminology, was less "Hellenic," and more "Hebraic," the Last Supper.

That supper presented several counterpoints to Plato’s Symposium. There was no dream of escaping the ordinary. Sacred and ordinary were interwoven. Purity was de-emphasized, replaced by an emphasis on mixing and blending; instead of great forgetfulness, the supper would stress commemoration; the central figure would be a mediator, an in-between and go-between, fostering harmony in diversity.  That figure, as intermediator, would be a new Hermes, Serres’ favorite mythological figure.

The feast or banquet thus becomes the “place of philosophy.”  At table homo sapiens can remember that sapiens stresses continuities not gaps between taste and wisdom.

SOUP, GOOD, EVIL

“Duck soup,” “soup’s on,”  “primordial soup,” “pea soup.”  None of these expressions is literally about liquid food. O.k. “pea soup” can refer to an actual heated broth-and-vegetable concoction. But, where I live, on the coast of Maine, it mostly refers to an especially thick fog. Similarly,“duck soup” indicates something is easy, “soup’s on” means there is food (not specifically soup) on the table, and “primordial soup” is a scientific expression for the mixture out of which came all life.

As far as the liquid food goes, its prominence translated into a

widespread folk tale, “stone soup.”  Hungry strangers set up a pot over a fire and place a stone in it. Curious villagers are told that a soup, ample enough for sharing, is being prepared.  It is, however, lacking in ingredients. The villagers then add vegetables and seasoning. The result: a hearty product enjoyed by both hungry travellers and villagers.

Soup’s prominence alse played a role in the development of restaurants.  Sold on the streets, it was marketed as a “restoratif,” that which would restore

 tired bodies. Eventually, sit-down places adopted the name. They became places for energy restoration, “restaurants.”

Under a New England name, “chowder,” soup made its way into Moby Dick. Hungry Ahab and Queequeg enter an inn. The owner utters only two words: clam,

cod.  They are codes for the meal choices, chowder with clams or chowder with cod. The inn was an all-chowder-all-the-time kind of place:  “chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish bones coming through your clothes.”

The word ‘chowder,’ from chaudière, heat-allowing pot,  signals an important aspect of soups. They are “needy,”  i.e, they can’t exist without mixtures, combinations inventions.  It’s not just a recipe's mingling of ingredients. Without technology, initially pottery, there can be no soup.

Anthropologists, whose name means ¨those who speak intelligently about human beings,” have come to realize that speaking intelligently about humans is impossible if humans, alone, are the focus of attention.  Something like “ontological anthropology,” dealing with humans in interaction with their surroundings, is needed. Intelligent speaking about humans, for example, should include discussions of clay, fire and the arts that led to pottery .  Once developed,some 20,000 years ago, pottery offered a great advantage: new ways prepare edibles.  Without cooking, as Richard Wrangham has reminded us, humans would have to spend most of their time, as our simian congeners do, eating.

We might also spend that time eating alone or, at best, side by side. This is not the same as the more typically human experiences of shared dining (formal name: “commensality.”) The pot of soup now signals another dimension neediness, positively understood, as interconnection.  What is inside the pot results from mixing and blending. The table, with its guests, is also a place of blending and mixing. The setting is like a little galaxy, with the pot serving as a solar center around which all else revolves.

Soup is important philosophically precisely because it exemplifies intermingling and interdependence. Without earth, fire, and the artisans who produced pottery, soup could not have come into being. Once it comes into being it requires, as “Stone Soup” indicates, combinations and mixtures.  Once those combinations come to fruition, the interminglings are those of hungry individuals congregating around the central food source.

Despite false dreams of isolation and autonomy, living is a matter of fostering interconnections. Creation and goodness depend on constructions that are fragile and easily endangered.  Evil, as anti-creation, moves toward what John Milton

appropriately called "pan-demonium." The demonic dimension is always that of dividing, breaking down, disrupting, in a word, de-creating.  

A good soup moves in a different direction. It gathers, brings together, combines elements in a tasty, nutritious way. That combination, in turn, can foster human connections, collaborations and harmonizations. In that regard a good bowl of soup is often  a bowl that fosters good.