"ASCETIC FEASTING"

Eid al Fitr is a feast, a communal celebration to mark the end of  Ramadan. Mardi Gras is a feast, a communal celebration. It precedes 40 days of restrained eating.  Feasting is religious because it celebrates a great yea-saying to creation. Fasting is religious  because it acknowledges how the great yea-and-amen saying includes an important ethical dimension: a yea-saying to responsibility. Responsibility means, as the ancient Greeks recognized, responding in a way that finds the right path, a path that typically avoids extremes and seeks balance.  Embodying the right balance in behavior means developing appropriate habits. Developing appropriate habits involves training, exercise and effort. Here is where fasting fits in. Fasting offers a ritualized opportunity to engage in such training.  

Philosophers, sadly, have missed the significance of feasting and fasting. Mind-fixated, they have tended to downplay feasting since it is associated with bodily appetites.  At the same time, they have tended to distort the importance of fasting, describing it in terms of self-discipline as a way to promote the renunciation of bodily desires. The exaggerated positions that result: On one side, all feasting considered as gluttony;  on the other, a need to suppress appetites.

In all of this, a perfectly good word was ruined.  The term

“ascetic” originally meant someone well trained or skilled.  A good athlete would serve as a typical example. So would an accomplished musician. Askein meant to train, i.e. to take natural dispositions and bring them to their proper fruition.  

With regard to virtuous behavior, “asceticism” did not initially mean suppressing or eliminating naturally occurring desires and dispositions. Vice, as excess with regard to desires and appetites, did represent a problem.  The virtuous way to avoid excess was not to suppress the appetite. Rather excesses were avoided by shaping habits, by training, by undertaking an ascesis. Such a training encouraged the development of habits that did not dismiss but rather properly channeled appetites, desires, dispositions. 

For the older, original, meaning of “ascetic” to remain, a particular philosophical position had to be dominant.  Humans had to be understood as continuous wholes, not as bifurcated entities. Once the bifurcation (mind vs body) took hold, once ex-carnation rather than in-carnation became the default understanding, then “ascetic” began to change its meaning.  Ultimately, it became the term we know today, the one that connotes self-deprivation, self-abnegation, self-denial. It is hard for us even to imagine how it once meant something quite different, how it emphasized the need for practices that would help us carry out activities which  brought dispositions to their proper culminations, how athletes and musicians would be good examples of “ascetics.”. 

The shift began with the ancient Stoics as the center of gravity moved from Athens to Rome. For the Stoics, ascesis began its movement toward a particular kind of exercise, one that aimed, not to refine, but to expunge, appetites.  The Stoic understanding, first absorbed and then spread by the Roman empire, eventually became the default position in Europe. 

Swept aside by all this was the pre-Stoic, Aristotelian understanding that emphasized not free exercise vs suppression, but rather behavior that, depending on which habits were cultivated, would become  virtuous or vicious. Virtue and vice did not map simplistically onto suppression or free reign or appetite. Rather virtuous behavior was associated with the proper channelling of appetites, desires, dispositions.   Vice, on the other hand, arose when the proper target has been missed, either by excess or privation. 

To articulate, as best as he could, what it meant to achieve the right target, , Aristotle famously spoke of the “mean.”   We

might translate the “mean” as the right blend at the right time in the right way. Appetites, desires, dispositions are multiple

and a hodge podge of good and bad.  Virtue dominates vice when the better dispositions are cultivated and, via the proper ascesis, well-educated (in the literal sense of drawing out what is already there, making real what initially is present only in the status of possibility).

Food offers a good and prevalent example. Gluttony (nothing but feasting) and anorexia (nothing but fasting) stand as excesses to be avoided.  Eating can be unbounded, careless, sloppy, enslaved by immediate gratification. Overreaction to such excesses can lead to rigid, narrow, schemes of suppression. 

Missing in this wild pendulum swing is the understanding of virtue as the bringing of appetites to their proper consummations. The path of responsibility, of ascesis, of virtue, of getting blends and culminations right in actual practice, is not easy.  But constantly working at getting that blend right is a way to live out the yea-and-amen attitude to the world in which we find ourselves.

Festivity: Thanksgiving vs Las Vegas

Georgetown Island, where we spend our summers, is 300 years old. Let the festivities begin!   Wherever there is celebration, there is food. Georgetown’s festivities began, naturally enough, with a birthday cake.

Festivity, despite its prevalence in history, is sort of fading in our age. We have embraced the 24/7-365 world. That means nonstop work, interspersed with diversion. Such diversion, It is important to add, offers a poor and false substitute for festivity. In fact, a defining trait of our time is the substitution of entertainment, pleasure-seeking, and diversion, for festivity.

Festivals are about a combination of factors:  (1) recognizing how we are part of something greater than ourselves, (2) appreciating the dependencies that characterize our lives, and (3) suspending our normal schedules to celebrate those interdependencies.

“Festivity” is at heart a religious affair. Why? Because its mode of responding is built around the nexus identified above: dependence, gratitude, celebration.  The wider world, which includes sources of nourishment, biological ancestors, political and social ancestors, along with the ability to bring about future generations, all of this is understood as a gift.  Within such a context, the festive dimension is fundamental.  The regular workaday efforts at making a living remove us, much of the time, from this festive awareness. They should not, however, completely occlude it.  

Such occlusion is more than ever prevalent today, dominated as we are by the 24/7-365 commerce-and-diversion lifeworld.  In the United States, Thanksgiving long remained a firewall, an inviolable witness to the festive.  Now, as that holiday gets overrun, nothing is left to block the new prototype: Las Vegas.  Here is a place where even major national and religious holidays never interrupt the commerce-and-diversion industry.  The resulting symbol for us: not the social grouping seated around a meal table, but rather the singular self seated at a slot machine.

How did we get here?  In terms of ideas,  the answer has to do with “philosophical anthropology,” the general way we define ourselves.  It is hard to deny that we are creatures of hunger. Hard also to deny that we are creatures of natality, i.e. we have been born. Hunger and natality, these set the stage for the dependence-gratitude-celebration triad that defines the festive.  

But hunger and natality mean dependence, an admission that we are beholden to forces outside ourselves.  Modern philosophy, post-Medieval philosophy, was a huge attempt to escape from dependence.  It was all about self-sufficiency.  To get there, intellectuals had to redefine the human being. This redefinition was rooted in a fantasy about human origins. The fantasy came to be known as the “social

contract” story.  The story starts not with birth from an actual female, not with hungry infants suckling at the breast, not with relatives and community members who are supplying food.  It begins with full grown individuals, portrayed as  “encapsulated selves” as critics call them. These encapsulated selves then agree, rationally and in terms akin to a commercial exchange, to enter into a contract and become social, members of a community.

  

Because philosophy forgot hunger and  natality, it drifted away from the genuinely “festive.” With self-sufficiency all the rage, the encapsulated human became the default position.  In addition, to the degree that humans forgot their hunger and natality, the world to which these connected them was also transformed.  It became more and more mere matter, stuff to be manipulated.  Humans began to understand themselves, not as woven into the fabric of things, but as outsiders somehow stuck in a  natural setting that was neutral, indifferent, waiting to be transformed and mastered.  Dependence, gratitude, celebration?  Not in this newer world.

So our time and that of the ancients sort of reverse each other.  Holidays like Thanksgiving lose their vibrancy.  The draw of Las Vegas becomes ever more powerful.

Food also takes on a different meaning. Fast food is what results from a world in which festivity has lost its primordial pull.  A traditional Catholic calendar identifies each day as a feast day.  Though they may not all be major celebrations, all meals, drawn from the earth’s bounty, shared with others, accompanied by gratitude, should be somewhat celebratory. By contrast, in our 24/7-365 world, pausing to recall how each day is really a feast day and each meal should be celebratory, these become the exception, not the rule.  

Philosophical shifts in self-understanding make major differences. Start with a physiological creature who is hungry, has been born, is thankful and thoughtful.  Then festivity is primordial. Start with an encapsulated self fascinated with self-sufficiency, set over against a neutral reality, a reality simply awaiting manipulation. Then the 24/7-365 world becomes our default condition.  Goodbye Thanksgiving. Hello Las Vegas.