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.