FRANKENSTEIN: ABSTRACTION IS EVIL

One of the great scenes in Young Frankenstein is when the creature wanders into the home of a blind man (Gene Hackman at his best).  Blind man and Creature have lots in common: they

are different (blind in one case, large and ugly in the other); because they are different, they are lonely; because they are lonely, they need companionship.

“Companionship” literally means “bread with” another. As a story, Young Frankenstein emphasizes something earlier films missed. The creature is

unloved.  He has no one to break bread with, no companions. What he longs for is a stable, loving family life.

Such domestic felicity is, sadly, closed to the creature because he is so different.  What he most longs for is a companion, someone to share home and hearth, someone who, based on such sharing, will get to know him beyond the physical impressions at which others recoil.  Victor Frankenstein promises that he will put together another creature, this time a female, the much needed, much desired companion. Alas, Victor reneges on his promise.  The creature, betrayed and hurt, turns vengeful and a violent.

It all goes back to “bread together,” and to the awareness that comes from time spent in loving companionship.  The book of Genesis famously has Adam

“knowing” Eve, a kind of knowing that leads to pregnancy. This use of the term also indicates a kind of knowing that emerges from companionship, from spending a life together. It’s a term that suggests awareness of what another is like based on familiarity, on relationality. When we make a claim like "I know her/him really well," it's quite different from knowing that 3 plus 2 equals 5 or that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius.

The sad aspect of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that no one takes the time to “know” the creature along the model of companionship.  The people with whom the creature interacts cannot get past his “otherness.” Instead of thinking and being thoughtful, they remain on the level of abstract, immediate sense perception.  What results is a truncated kind of awareness. The concrete, whole self is ignored. One aspect alone, ugliness, is highlighted

There is an important lesson here for philosophy. Abstraction, often touted by philosophers, is actually an ally of evil. Those who judge the creature based on  his looks are reacting abstractly, just as those who would judge by skin color alone, or gender, or religion.

The surprising lesson for philosophy is one that has been articulated by Alfred North Whitehead.  Philosophy is not the arena for abstractions. Rather, philosophy

should be the critic of abstractions.  Humans feel a strong tug in the the direction of abstracting, of simplifying, of separating, isolating, disconnecting.  Philosophy, tied to wisdom and to thoughtfulness, has a special role to play: it must provide a counterbalance.

The hard corollary: thinking and abstraction do not go together.   Logic and abstraction go together. Calculative rationality (planning in terms of fixed goals and the most efficient means to arrive at them) depends on abstraction.  “Thinking,” or being “thoughtful” is quite different. Indeed, abstraction is a hindrance to thinking and thoughtfulness. The latter’s mode of reflection results in a particular sort of claim, the “I know" that results from companionship.

Martin Heidegger made much of the link between “thinking” and “thanking.” Thinking (and its partner thoughtfulness) is a grateful response to our being in the world. It is not separated from affectivity. Its aim is full awareness about what is, an awareness not accessible to those who remain detached from what they are seeking to understand.

Thinking thus gives rise to a kind of concrete knowing, the one Latin calls cognoscere, French connaître, and German kennen. (As opposed to the more abstract scire, savoir, and wissen.)  This awareness, this companionship-based-getting-to-know, cannot happen when thinking and abstracting are confused.  Abstraction, specifically undertaken for specific purposes, plays an important role, especially in laboratory sciences.  In everyday life, though, the allure of abstraction must be resisted.

In Mary Shelley’s novel, only the blind man is thoughtful in regard to the creature. Everyone else succumbs to abstract perception.  Ugliness, size, and skin texture are all they pay attention to. Abstraction is plentiful. Thoughtfulness is rare.

Young Frankenstein may be a comedy, but its take on the creature’s story is revealing. The characters in Young Frankenstein live out the knowledge of

companionship in relation to the creature. Shelley’s novel depicts the sad state that results when abstract knowledge rather than companionship knowledge dominates.  

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.

SEX PORN/FOOD PORN

The makers of Canon cameras have added a “food mode” to one of their models.  Why? Taking food photos is all the rage. “Are you one of the few people left who doesn’t take pictures of your meal before eating?” asked a Huffington post story. More stylized photos are often categorized as “food porn.” Food porn?  Yes, that label, introduced in the 1980s, has stuck.  Does this represent the wisdom of folk psychology, some crafty marketing ploy, or a superficial, ultimately mistaken identification? 

What might the differences and similarities be?  First of all, the very root “porn” comes from the ancient Greek for prostitute, so it’s link with sex is narrow and traditional.  Also pornography’s function as an aid to masturbation marks a functional difference.  The ancient philosopher Diogenes did not need pornography when he masturbated in public.  He was a fan of the “follow nature; all social conventions are contrived and unnatural” kind of philosophy.   When challenged about his public practice, he offered a straightforward retort: “I only wish I could relieve my hunger by simply rubbing my stomach.”  His answer highlights an important difference: Food porn does not seem to offer the same opportunity for direct physiological satisfaction.  In that sense at least, there is a disanalogy.  

So, beyond the similarity of gazing at provocative photos, speaking of both sex and food “porn” ignores some important differences.  

On a wider level, both food porn and sex pornography manifest some identical,  basic, and related human temptations:  Abstraction is preferred over concreteness; the triad of vulnerability, risk and responsibility is shunned, certain habits are cultivated. 

Abstraction, this may strange coming from a philosopher, is evil.  It’s most basic meaning signifies isolating certain factors and ignoring, in effect, erasing, what in actual circumstances accompanies them.  Such constricted focus, unrecognized and uncriticized,  is central to evil.  Take racism, rooted in a straightforward abstraction: highlighting skin color, i.e. abstracting from all other dimensions of the actual, concrete human being in front of us.  Similarly, the carefully posed naked female in pornography is actually more concealed than revealed. At least in the sense that her concrete, complex personhood is abstracted from.  Instead one dimension, that which excites the male libido is isolated and highlighted.

Selective attention is unavoidable, but it must be recognized as the tool it is and not confused with concrete actuality.  This is easier said than done. The temptation toward abstractification of reality is reinforced by certain comforts it brings with it.  In an abstracted, purified, simplified realm, certain accompaniments of concrete, ordinary existence just disappear. Prominent among these is the liability triad of  vulnerability, risk, responsibility. The consumer of pornography need not worry about getting feelings hurt, suffering disappointment, being asked to wash dishes, engage in fair-minded give and take.

As the multi-dimensional becomes uni-dimensional, the level  of the liability triad drops to zero. 

It is here that sex porn/food porn overlap.  The sex photo is detached and disconnected from ordinary human interactions.  The enticing dish of food porn is also set apart from ordinary interactions. Vulnerability, responsibility and risk recede.  Concerns about health and girth? Ignore them.  Time needed for planning, shopping, preparing, cooking and especially cleaning? Poof, they disappear.

On another level, both  also overlap with the general category of ethics.  Pornography is about shaping habits.  And, in general, shaping habits is what ethics is all about.   The very word “ethics” comes for the ancient Greek term for habits and customs. As humans we manifest plenty of spontaneous inclinations.  Sorting them out, cultivating the proper ones, transforming them into habitual dispositions, developing the kind of character that is optimal, this defines the terms of “ethics” as Aristotle understood it.  

The habit shaped  by sexual pornography isolates and encourages the tendency to think of women first and fundamentally as sources of sexual satisfaction, as good places for an orgasm.  Once the habitual disposition becomes second nature, it appears that any other tendency is merely an artificial imposition of culture over “nature.” (We continue to be a lot more like Diogenes the Cynic than we like to think). Similarly the habit shaped by food porn is to think of food, one-dimensionally as simply a source of pleasure.

 So, maybe the “porn” label in “food porn” is not that outlandish. Both food and sex porn embrace constricted abstractness.  Both limit the liability triad.  Both succumb to the temptation of embracing fantasy over reality. What is not fantasy is the shared habitual disposition that is encouraged: fostering connection without vulnerability.