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.

RELATIVISM, YOLO, FOOD

Swans, YUM!  Squirrels YUM! Dolphins YUM!  Well “yum” is kind of an imaginative stretch, at least for some of us today. At other times and other places  “yum” made/makes sense.

Can we generalize from this?   Should we, to adopt a philosophical label, embrace “relativism?”  After all, food practices seem to indicate the “yum” reaction has no foothold apart from contingent, changeable cultural conventions.

What might give pause is the radical relativism embraced by the early 21st century “You Only Live Once,” fad. YOLO was (1) encouraged by philosophical

relativism (better and worse are just social constructions) and (2) accompanied by a particular ethic: experience all you can.  The ramifications were problematic: YOLO, so get drunk and drive wildly; YOLO, so, go ahead, urinate and defecate wherever and whenever. Soon came the realization “YOLO is dumb.”

When it comes to food, YOLO can find both defenders and opponents. On the support side: “YOLO, so eat some dolphin ( squirrel, swan).” On the negative side: YOLO, so I’ll just chow down on some fugu, even though the chef is not properly trained.”

A stalemate? Not quite.  A more fine-grained analysis suggests the need for a paradigm shift.  First, eating is interactive. Second, food ingestion exists along a continuum: inedible, somewhat inedible, somewhat edible, culturally approved edible, edible in desperate situations, commonly eaten.   

The relativist position need not adopt the simplistic YOLO pattern.  A better defense is entitled “Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response.” Despite the nuanced, and thus adequate, title, the article goes on to defend a rather strong relativism.  Here is where interaction and continuum make a difference. One thing even refined relativism assumes: a bi-level backdrop. Humans here; world there. Values here; neutrality there. Reason is neutral/Evaluations are non-rational.

These bifurcations are challenged by stressing interaction and continua. In terms of the food continuum, there is, at one end, the biologically inedible (e.g. soap); then, “inedible” in the “it can kill you sense” (emperor Claudius).

“Inedible” could also mean, it’s ok physiologically, but hard to stomach (see disgust museum).   Then, there is the “inedible now in this form” (cashews which are toxic before being heat treated). We could add   “inedible because of allergies;” and the well known “inedible for cultural/religious reasons.” At any point on the continuum a judgment has been made.  The judgment does not result from bi-level (culture here/nature there) opposition. It results from interaction. Intelligent agents try to to figure out clues and indications.

A medieval phrase is helpful here. It’s  cum fundamento

in re, “with a basis  in reality.” Plants and animals do not come with placards that say “tasty but deadly,”  “healthy and nutritious,” “disgusting in odor, but good in taste.” Nor does the absence of such placards mean that all valuations are subjective constructions.  Humans, as hungry creatures, seek to establish which entities are edible and which not. The resulting judgments emerge from a collaboration between inquiring intelligence and properties operative in the world ( cum fundamento in re).

Living in a post-Medieval era, we could add a partner phrase, one sensitive to  cultural pluralism: judgments cum fundamento in tribu.  Interaction would still rule, but in these cases it would signal the the interplay  of intelligence and the practices of a community (or “tribe,” tribus).  

Even here, though, we move too hastily if we apply the relativist label.  Differences are culturally conditioned. This is not the same as being merely subjective. The fundamento dimension (there are clues) remains. Judgments are recognized and welcomed. They just depend on more than clues from nature. Religious judgments build their warrant by including intangible factors. Food regulations, for example, can encourage solidarity via shared behaviors, equality, since the practices impact everyone, and self-improvement, fostered by discipline.  

The paradigm shift that highlights interaction and continua helps draw attention to concrete practices. The totalizing labels “absolutism” or “relativism” offer a bifurcation that is neat. Lived experience is intricate and complex.  Humans are active participants, involved, willy nilly, in interactions. Judgments neither simply read off what is there, nor impose structures. They pay attention to operative factors, aim at properly reading indications, and hope the resulting assessments are accurate.

This (a) leaves plenty of leeway for variation. Variation is not the same as relativist subjectivism. It also (b) allows for intelligent discussion. But, such discussion, technically, for the relativist (recall the non disputandum, in de gustibus non disputandum est) should represent nothing more than an empty exercise. E.g. Gratitude and greed, why bother discussing their relative merits/defects? Non disputandum rules.

Thinking about food can serve as a good source of examples for an epistemology of cum fundamento. How? First by replacing bifurcation with a continuum. Second, by emphasizing how eating is inherently interactive.  Both of those factors help overcome the great human temptation toward the hasty generalization: it’s all objective or it’s all subjective.

WHITENESS AS PEJORATIVE: THINK FOOD AND WHALES

Once upon a time, someone had the “good” idea to propose single-color meals. “All-white” and  “all-pink” concoctions are among those identified in Donna Gabaccia's  We Are What We Eat.  They were part of an attempt to Americanize immigrants. Fortunately, good taste prevailed, and multi-hued ethnic cuisines came to be celebrated.

Imagine a monochrome, say all-white, meal. Symbolically, it might seem o.k. After all “white” carries positive associations: no impurities, no contaminants, no adulterations. By contrast, visually and gustatorily (if this is a word), an all-white plate would probably carry different associations: blandness, dullness, absence, and lack.

The color white thus reveals, surprisingly perhaps, conflicting associations.  On one hand, white occasions positive reactions. It connotes cleanliness, purity, and virtue. Such associations have encouraged  people to choose, as names, words meaning white, names like Blanche, Finnian, Gwen, Gavin, Genevieve, and Whitney. Wedding dresses, in most European cultures are white, a fad that took off after Queen Victoria broke with tradition and went with white for her ceremony.

On the other, mostly forgotten, hand, white has also carried negative connotations. Before Victoria and her white gown, there

was Mary Queen of Scots. She is depicted in a painting, wearing white to signal mourning. This was typical in her day.   Fans of Clint Eastwood will recall Pale Rider. The film’s title alludes to “death,” the fourth

horseman of the Apocalypse, who rides a pale, i.e. white  horse.

Even when it comes to wedding gowns, white is not universal. Prior to Victoria, red was a

favorite. It still is in parts of Asia.

Even in the West, a small but real trend, reveals brides in dresses other than white. Red, pink, silver, green and blue are among the favorites.  

Perhaps the most famous negative treatment of white is found in  Moby Dick. Ishmael, the narrator, undertakes  a lengthy disquisition on white and its conflicting symbolic meanings. There are the positives: whiteness as a symbol of “gladness” of “joyfulness” of “innocence as with a bride,”  or used as a pledge of honor (the Amerindians’“white belt of wampum”). There is also, this was considered by some to be a positive, the “white man” assuming ‘ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” (Melville leaves unanswered why Europeans, who are not really white--just holding a sheet of paper next to my skin indicates the gap--nonetheless refer to themselves as white.)

Ishmael then highlights some negatives. As regards Moby Dick,  “it was the whiteness of the whale that above all things” proved appalling. There is an “elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.”  Nature herself, in her “malicious” agencies, enlists, as in snow squalls, the forces of whiteness. Shrouds, paleness, ghosts make it hard to disentangle whiteness from death.

The all-white meal stirs up such negative associations.  Life is colorful. The plants and animals that can grace grace our tables, are colorful.  Red, as in blood, is a hue of life. Green, yellow, red, and orange, are the tints of plants that serve as food. Even white has its place, as with potatoes, rice and turnips.  

The main problem with all-pink, or all-white, meals is not the color itself. It’s the “all.”   Life is mixture, mingling, combinations, amalgamations, as with the multi-hued amalgamation of foodstuffs.  This variegated palate has not ranked high with philosophers. Preferring rational purity, they have looked down on varieties, mixtures, blends. For them, unity and purity rank high. Mixtures and blendings  are relegated to an inferior status and denigrated via terms like “mongrels,” ”’adulterations,” “impurities.”

The draw of purity and unity, along with the fear of mixture, runs deep in the human psyche. One too often unchallenged philosophical presupposition:  the notion that unity/purity is both primal and to be prioritized over plurality/mixture. The Tower of Babel story is typical in this regard.

 

Nutrition should teach us otherwise. Variety is the starting point.  Mixing and blending is the way to go. The way to go not only for pleasurable, but also for healthy, eating.

Maize, for example, is a wonder plant. Still, eaten alone it is disastrous for health. As native Americans realized, it has to be complemented with other foodstuffs, typically beans and squash. Corn-squash-beans; meat-vegetables-fruit.  Multiplicity is our starting point. It does not represent some fall away from initial unity. Getting the right blends and mixes is the challenge. A meal that is all one color favors abstract philosophical concepts over life-enhancing practices. For healthy, not to mention aesthetically pleasing foods, go multicolored.  

GODS WANT TO BE HUMAN

For some reason, several religious traditions have their god/gods fixate on food.  Genesis readers know of the famous divine command not to eat from the tree of good and evil.  In Leviticus the proscriptions get more detailed. Animals of land, sea, air: all are divided into clean and unclean.  

The ancient Greek gods were not  as prone to clear-cut commands. They were, to their discredit, prone to  god-awful (literally) behavior. When it comes to food, the god-awfulness sunk to its greatest depths.  Cronus devoured 5 of

his own kids. The youngest, Zeus, was saved by his mother. Continuing the paternal tradition, Zeus tricked one wife into becoming a fly and then promptly swallowed her.

How about regular food?  Well, the gods had nectar and ambrosia. Both words indicate immortality.  It therefore makes sense that they would be the main intake for deathless divinities.  But, let’s face it, a steady diet of nectar and ambrosia would get kind of dull and repetitive.

The human case offered a sort of reversal. No ambrosia, no nectar (the main human/divine difference, after all, was mortality).  Otherwise, humans had it pretty good, even better than the gods. Roasts, vegetables, fruits, seafood--all of these pleased the human palate.

Hesiod depicted the first, “Golden” age of humans in happy terms. They “lived like gods.”   They “made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils.” Earth was good to them, bearing “fruit abundantly and without stint.”

There was not that much difference between Hesiod's gods and  human beings. What Hesiod got wrong was the direction of longing.  It was the gods who longed for the enjoyments available only to humans. Not surprisingly, when a Renaissance painter, Giovanni Bellini, portrayed gods at a feast, they sure (1) looked, and (2) behaved, like regular old human beings.

This makes sense.  Humans are open to pleasurable experiences  closed off to the gods. Living like gods would necessitate being disembodied. Being disembodied would bring immortality. That´s okay. But at what price?  Imagine what a dull existence would ensue. No eyes to see; no stomach/taste bud combination to savor food; no ears to hear; no tongue to speak; no arms for hugging; no lips for kissing; no ability to interact with anything.  Hesiod, I repeat, got it backwards. It is the gods who wish to live like humans (and in Greek mythology this is just what they do). Otherwise, life’s pleasures, culminatory satisfactions, shared enjoyments, are all out of reach.

This reversal is important when humans dream of eternal life. That case also involves a sleight of hand.  Officially, life beyond this one is characterized by what is known as "beatific vision,” a status of direct apprehension of the divinity. Such a mystical experience, however, doesn’t satisfy the imagination. Much better to envision an unending life that looks a lot like the pre-death one, except that all difficulties and challenges have been eliminated. The illogic of this scenario: such a life would be impossible absent the corporeality that necessitates mortality. Existence would be that of disembodied minds or souls. True, it’s possible to envision such a state. Envisioned honestly, with no sleight of hand, i.e. no sneaking in dimensions of corporeality, such existence would be far from desirable.

A disembodied status, for one, would involve an existence without hugs. Deprived of arms and eyes, immortal

grandparents would be unable to see, not to mention offer warm caress-filled welcomes for their grandchildren. The general status would be one of unalterable deprivation: no lovely sights (without eyes); no enticing odors (without nose/taste buds); no melodious sounds (without ears); no movement (without legs). Within traditional theology, these deprivations would be counterbalanced by the satisfaction of beatific vision. But even that experience, to be attractive, has to be described using a physiological metaphor, the corporeal dimension of sight.

Overall, unending disembodied existence does not provide an enticing picture.  The draw of nectar and ambrosia (immortality) is admittedly strong. But, it is so only if we ignore the rest of the picture.  Once we realize how hugs, conversation, music, good company, and good food would be absent, the temptation toward immortal existence becomes less attractive.  We come to realize why it is the gods who wanted to be more like humans.

I'M HUNGRY: HOMER VS PLATO

“I’m hungry,“   “I’m sad.” In some ways our speech bears out an integrative self-understanding.  We could, after all, use disjunctive phrases like “my body is hungry,” “my mind is sad.”  We do, in fact, say disjunctive things like “I’m comfortable with my body.” A best-selling book from 1970 was called Our Bodies, Ourselves.

“I’m hungry” blurs the mind/body distinction. “I’m comfortable with my body” accentuates a difference. It suggests that there is a “me” and there is a  sort of carcass that accompanies me. Are we one or two? Should “my body is hungry” replace “I’m hungry?” The evidence is mixed. Most illnesses impact the physiological side of things (i.e. body). While ill we can still try to keep up our spirits (i.e. mind).  An illness like Alzheimer’s, on the other hand, weakens the mental side of things, even though the bodily dimension remains strong.

As is too often the case, complexities can be oversimplified. Distinctions are transformed into rigid oppositions.  Adjectives become nouns. “Physiological” becomes “body.” “Psychological”

becomes “mind.” In the history of ideas, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) crystallized such reifications into the position known as “dualism.” The two components, mind and body, were not just dual,  but were involved in a constant duel. Still, phrases like “I’m hungry,” and “I’m sad” pull us back from such a sharp separation.

Such a pullback restores the legacy of the ancient poet Homer.  2000 years before Descartes, there was his dualizing precursor, Plato (427-347). Half a century before Plato, there was the more integrative Homer (ca 800 bce).  Homer wrote of humans without sliding into

dualism. He dealt with people as as actants in the world, as clusters of energies. Their physiological dimension did not need to be articulated in terms of “having bodies.”  In battle, a sword would penetrate one’s skin. When Homer used the word “body” (soma) he meant the corpse, the spent leftover of what had once been a full-fledged actant, a human being.

Four centuries later, Plato would frame the situation in the way that is more familiar to us. (We owe words like “in-carnation,” and “em-bodiment” to Plato’s influence.)

For him, there was not just a leading edge (the thinking, motivating, selecting, reflective dimension of our lived energies) but an entity, mind (psyche) that  actually defined the real us.  The physiological dimension then became the “body,” an accompanying presence.

When it comes “I’m hungry,”  it’s not surprising that Homer and Plato would take separate paths. Food and its eating, as demands of the body, were treated by Plato as annoyances. Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, is, as Henry Fielding described it, an “eating poem.” Food is everywhere.  The Phaeacians are depicted as civilized, cultured people. How do we know? They welcome the stranger Odysseus, invite him to share a meal, encourage him to tell his tale, and provide a boat so he can return to his homeland.

The material need for food is not, in The Odyssey, opposed to the spiritual demand for the noble and the good.   A meal like that hosted by the Phaeacians, or the one to which Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, is treated at the home of Hector, do not in any way represent a lowering of human standards. Quite the opposite. The fullness of virtuous humanity (the queen of the Phaeacians is actually called virtue,  Arete), is manifested in the combination amalgamated  in the meal: hospitality, shared eating, intelligent discourse, reverence, sociability.  Homer goes so far as asking a food-related question to determine cultural, civilizational status: “Are there bread eaters here?”  If the locals eat bread, they are civilized. They manifest practices of planting, cultivating, milling, utilization of yeast, and, as a culminating act, bread baking and bread sharing,

“I’m hungry” emphasizes the holistic, Homeric, self.  

“I’m comfortable with my body,” by contrast, lives within the Platonic pattern.

Given the sedimentation of usage, in contemporary English, there is no going back to Homer. That would necessitate using “body” only as a synonym for “corpse.”  At the same time, English usage, with the presence of phrases like “I’m sad,” “I’m exhausted,” and “I’m hungry,” indicates a tilt in the direction of Homeric wholeness.

Temptations to articulate a divided self will always be with us.  Fortunately, the clumsy constructions required by a divided self, i.e. “my body is hungry,”  warn us against going too far in favor of Plato over Homer.