Virtues: A Lesson from the kitchen

Maya Angelou’s poem satirizing health food
purists starts this way:   

No sprouted wheat and soya shoots

And Brussels in a cake,

Carrot straw and spinach raw,

(Today, I need a steak).

A later stanza addresses the main theme:

Health-food folks around the world

Are thinned by anxious zeal,

They look for help in seafood kelp

(I count on breaded veal).

“Anxious zeal” carries an important
warning. Avoid monolithic fixation.
The ancient Greek temple at Delphi offered
a similar maxim:  “nothing in excess.”

Socrates and Aristotle approached the
issue from a different perspective. They
insisted on the “unity of the virtues.”  In
one way the “unity” was definitional. All
virtuous behavior ashared one trait:
knowledge. People who acted virtuously
knew what do do in challenging situations.
In another way the unity was practical.
They believed that living a good life, in the
fullest sense, required the conjunction of
virtues, ideally a unity that included all the
virtues. Being brave, for example, or loyal
did not, by itself, qualify an individual to be
recognized as admirable.  Isolating any
single factor, even if initially benign, would
lead to its metastasizing. In the end, the aim
of living a good life would be frustrated
rather than served. Without the unity of
virtues, a life could not be described, on
the whole, and unqualifiedly, as
praiseworthy.

Still, the word “unity” in “unity of virtues”
is problematic. It’s not possible to combine
all virtues in a single unified synthesis. This
is especially so since some virtues clash
with each other. Loyalty is good. So is
honesty. Sometimes, loyalty and honesty
clash.  This is even more the case with the
mercy/justice pair. Maximize one and, by
necessity, the other is minimized. Bottom
line: the phrase “unity of virtues” is getting
at something important, but the exact
phrasing is problematic.

Here is where Angelou’s warning about
“anxious zeal” in the context of food
can help. Blends and combinations
underpin good cooking. When we think of
food, we are set in a context where
multiplicity is the rule. (1) There is
multiplicity in terms of ingredients: many
vegetables,,fruits, spices, herbs, meats.
 (2) The sought-after dish is also typically
multiple: taste is important, so is
presentation, and, of course so is health.
(3) Some combinations work better than
others. Some blends just work against
good taste.

Since multiplicity is pervasive with regard to

food, a term like “unity” is problematic.  It
can be understood as encouraging the

focus on a single factor, e.g. health isolated
from taste.  It can also be understood as
encouraging an all-encompassing
combination which forces them into a
unity of all possible factors. Such a unity,
as with “unity of the virtues” is impossible
in practice, if only because some of the
elements are incompatible. Neither unity as
isolation of a single factor, nor unity as the
conjunction of factors, offers a helpful
approach. Instead of unity, it is better to
speak of “harmony.”  Besides allowing
more flexibility as regards blends, harmony
allows for a more graduated scale than the
all-or-nothing connotation that accompanies
“unity.”

“Anxious zeal” revolves in the intellectual
solar system whose sun is “unity.”  It
isolates a single factor at the expense of
others. Thinking in more ancient terms, it
also violates the the Delphic advice to do
“Nothing in excess.” How to avoid “anxious
zeal,” and respect “nothing in excess”?
Update the philosophical advice about the
“unity of the virtues.” In particular,
substitute “harmony” for “unity.”

Harmony’s advantages: (a) It takes account
of what is inevitable, the tug of multiple
virtues. (b) It says “do not isolate one
element,” especially “do not isolate one
element to the degree that the others are
occluded.” (c) It recognizes natural and
inevitable incompatibilities. (d) It replaces
an absolutist scale for one which makes
room for more-or-less, better-and-worse.  

In a sense, going back to Angelou,  it’s like
better-and-worse as regards a meal.  If the
food is healthy, that is a good thing. If it is
healthy, but tastes bad, that is not good.  
Healthy and tasty, is better. If it is healthy,
tasty, and shared with good company, that
is better still.  The food/virtue overlap
allows for important updating of “anxious
zeal,” “nothing in excess,” and the “unity
of the virtues.”  Rephrased, these would
read: either “zeal for harmony,” “everything
in balance,” or “optimal combinations.”

Unforget Stomach, Remember Socrates

Rowman and Littlefield has now made I Eat, Therefore I Think available in paperback. This comes as the number of philosophy books addressing food issues  is growing. Some recent examples include:  Paul Thompson, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, Corine Pelluchon, Les Nourritures: Philosophie du Corps Politique,  Julian Baggini, The Virtues of the Table: how to Eat and Think.  In addition, there is the book authored by Lisa Heldke and me, Philosophers at Table.

Why the upsurge? There is renewed interest in everyday activities typically ignored by philosophers.  Food studies has burgeoned.  Both hunger and obesity offer contemporary challenges.  Issues of sustainability and the treatment of animals have also provoked reflection.

Where does my book fit into the discussion?  Perhaps the most important lesson is one the book does not explicitly mention: philosophy is not an abstract discipline.  Philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, is a critic of abstractions.  “But, wait,” readers are probably thinking, “Isn’t philosophy abstract thinking?”  “That’s what we learned in philosophy class.”  

All well and good, but partial and misguided.  In its historical trajectory, philosophy has indeed come to be associated with abstraction and mind puzzles.  I Eat, Therefore I Think aims at changing this take on philosophy.

To accomplish this, I began with a clumsy term:  “unforgetting.”  “Un-forgetting” literally translates the Greek word for ‘“truth,”  aletheia.  My book seeks to unforget that we are stomach-endowed. It might seem obvious that humans are creatures for whom the stomach plays a major role, but philosophers of a particular period have tended to ignore this.   Second the book seeks to unforget, i.e. reinsert, some Socratic elements into philosophy.  

A few Socrates-inspired elements stand out:

Dialogue. Socrates believed that thinking through an issue involved cooperation with others. Thinking is not an isolated activity that goes on in the head. Thinking, in the fullest sense, takes place via dialogue.

Irony. Socrates embraced “irony” in its philosophical sense: an awareness that even our best formulations somehow fall short. Philosophy’s task is unending because our articulations, while they get something right, are, at the same time, lacking in other ways.  Reality is too complex to be captured in any snapshot.

Agora.  Socrates practiced philosophy in the agora, the marketplace, the public square.  The topics he discussed were rooted in the living concerns of flesh and blood people.

What? Socrates showed how philosophy is not concerned with the question “why.” Its purview is the question “what.”  What is friendship? What is love?  What is virtue?  Philosophy means “love of wisdom” and the “what” questions allow for actual, helpful answers that guide “wisdom.” ”“Why” questions, e.g. “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  “Why are we here?” are more the province of myth, non-philosophical ways to deal with questions about absolute origins or absolute ends.  

How does a stomach-friendly help re-invigorate these four Socratic themes?  A major metaphorical alteration is first needed: thinking of conceptual abstractions as recipes. Then, just as recipes, though helpful, can be critiqued and altered, so philosophy can undertake its role as “critic of abstractions.” The same move helps philosophy become Socratic once again.

Dialogue and the Agora.  Recipes involve dialogue.  We start where we are, in the agora. The cultural heritage in which we find ourselves privileges a conceptual framework, a series of recipes.  Engaging in dialogue with that tradition, we critique, we restore, we revise received recipes, we develop new ones. In this process, we are often aided by adding a dialogue with other traditions.  

Irony. Recipes are never fixed, finished and final, i.e. the slippage between formulation and reality, a slippage which identifies genuine irony, is ever-present.  What counts, in the end, is how recipes become manifest in experience.  The philosophical “criticism” of abstractions involves the back and forth between abstractions and the way they play out in lived experience.

What, not why. When we think about recipes, the ‘’what” dimension dominates.  Questions about ultimate origins and ends are unanswerable apart from storytelling, from myths. These, it must be noted, may be religious or they may be evolutionary.  Either way, they are not philosophical.  The recipe focus, which begins by humbly accepting the simple fact of our being here, tends rather to highlight “what” questions.”   What makes a meal delicious and nutritious?  What makes a life good? Starting with only vegetables can we do to come up with a delicious/nutritious combination?  What is the extent of justice?  Does it encompass non-human animals?

I Eat, Therefore I Think offers itself as the kind of corrective that will re-define philosophy as both the critic of abstractions and the friend of Socrates.  Hopefully, the paperback version will allow those ends to be widely discussed and disseminated.

Trump-ing Thought

As I write this, more than a year and a half prior to the next presidential election, things, as the headlines say, are heating up. This is especially so since Donald Trump announced his quest to be the republican

nominee. His supporters keep repeating a regular refrain: “he says what he thinks” or “he says what we are all thinking.”

The emphasis on “thinking” can’t help but get the attention of a philosopher.  For Socrates, thinking was inseparable from dialogue.  In other words, what goes on inside an individual’s head is just initial raw material, not the activity of thinking.

The French have a saying La musique, c’est du bruit qui pense.  Music is noise that has engaged in thinking. Initial notions floating around in consciousness are noise. Such noise is often misguided, false, self-interested and downright mean-spirited. Plenty of us have notions like the nasty ones from Trump floating around in our heads. That is exactly why we need thinking--to move from noise to music (or in information-speak, to sort out signal from noise).

Where Socrates emphasized dialogue, Plato insisted on the distinction between doxa and episteme.  “Doxa” was his name for the notions that float around in consciousness, i.e. mere opinions, unfounded beliefs, fantasies, sweeping generalizations, noise.  Episteme, knowledge,  could only be achieved via effort.  The result would be justifiable, warranted, reasonable assertions. The effort at moving from doxa to episteme demands some attitudinal pre-requisites not especially evident in the case of Donald Trump.  First, humility in light of facts.  Second, a genuine commitment to truth, rather than to self-satisfaction, power, or manipulation.  Doxa, especially self-satisfying noise, gets along quite well, indeed thrives, without the trio of effort, humility, commitment to truth. This makes it especially tempting for the lazy and self-serving.

There is a straightforward food parallel.   Our biological label homo sapiens, often rendered as the man the “wise” or “rational” man, has a more interesting etymological sense: man the taster. The taster, is the tester, the one who, faced with multiple options, must select among them. In other words, the taster/tester moves from nutritional noise to music.   

The thinking/tasting parallel emerges when we consider the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His advice on how to raise children suggested that, when it came to food, they should just be allowed, in an unfiltered way, to follow their natural tastes.  This is another version of the “embrace noise, forget about making music,” position.   The problem is that there are many tastes, they often conflict, and by themselves they represent a disorganized muddle.  Human responsibility, in the sense of applying experimentation, thought, and experience, thus needs to intervene. Neither good nutrition, nor truth can emerge without effort.

The French word for thinking penser is related to peser,  to weigh, to put in the balance, to evaluate.  In other words, out of all the noise, which combinations make the most sense, which can best be justified?  But this takes work and humans tend both toward laziness and evading responsibility. Saying “I’m simply following my natural tastes”, is just another way of saying “I refuse the difficult work of acting responsibly, i.e. deliberating, in light of experience, evidence and good sense.”  Similarly anyone offering praise by saying “he is just saying what he thinks” should rephrase the assertion:  He doesn’t think. He just says whatever is in his head.