PYTHAGORAS, MEAT-AVOIDANCE, DEATH, TRUTH

Pythagoras, all high schoolers know, was a mathematician.  He was also, they might not know, the leader of a religious cult, and a vegetarian. Math/religion/vegetarianism--what’s the link?

Most of what we know of Pythagoras comes from later lore.  One strand in those stories: a clear line is drawn between mind and body.  Math, religion, avoidance of meat, fall on the side of mind.

A life purified of bodily entanglements would,  so fans of Pythagoras claim, take up the math/ religion/ vegetarian package. In general, the combination emphasized life over death.  Mathematics dealt with the unchanging and everlasting. Religion promised eternal life (reincarnation for Pythagoreans). Vegetarianism avoided the killing associated with carnivorism.

The last point is well-disguised for those of us who are meat-eating urban dwellers.  In one of her cookbooks

Maya Angelou describes a different, rural, setting. There “after the first frost,” “men killed the hogs and cows selected for slaughter.” It was impossible, in that setting, to avoid the key preliminary to meat eating: kill something.  Avoidance of what is actually the case is to falsify. To falsify, in turn, means setting truth aside.

The connection between truth and inclusive attentiveness was highlighted by the ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia.  It meant, as Martin Heidegger has reminded us, “un-forgetting.”  Lethe was the river of forgetfulness, the river through which humans passed in their post-death return to another life. Extending the meaning of un-forgetting, philosophers stressed that “truth” meant paying attention to what is fully the case. Leaving out details, “forgetting” was what identified falsehood.  Un-forgetting, truthfulness, as the fulness of what is actual, meant inclusive attentiveness.

This is not as easy as it sounds.  Attention can’t help but be selective and partial.  In addition, selective attentiveness (“willful blindness” it is often called) can serve to help humans avoid responsibility.

With regard to food, one basic occlusion for urban dwellers is the meat-death connection. The grocery store is a grand celebration of lethe, forgetfulness.  As is often

remarked, all that grocery store customers get to see are neatly wrapped packages. This fosters the creation of "good," i.e. unthinking, consumers. It does not make for a good grasp of truth as aletheia. Much of what is real continues to be ignored and forgotten.

Occluding the meat-death link does not just take place in grocery stores. On the more expensive side of things, there’s another venue for occlusion: restaurants in which food on the plate has little or no resemblance to the original source.  Often this is accomplished in the guise of bringing “artistry” to food preparation. Within the Pythagorean framework, one which succumbs to the tug of elevating oneself above physiology, “art” becomes the province of a refined, creative realm. Wassily Kandinsky explicitly made the connection in his

defense of the “spiritual” in art.  His canvases, waves of colors, are removed from the push and pull, physical and material world of ordinary experience.  

Food presents a problem for  whoever would identify “art” with those higher things in life. Take a turkey on the Thanksgiving table.  There is plenty there to remind (aletheia) eaters of the living bird that once was. It is in

fancy restaurants, especially those aspiring to aesthetic creativity that the “lethic” temptation remains strong. A piece of meat or fish may be so combined with other ingredients that the plate resembles a modern art canvas.  One old-fashioned critic complained about a famous Spanish chef this way: “This isn’t food.  It’s got nothing to do with food, with the earth, with Spain, with what his grandmothers cooked.”

To be “food,” this critic is arguing, the “lethic” temptation must be avoided.  Aletheia, truth, must be allowed to manifest itself.  When it does, forgetfulness will be diminished, forgetfulness about the the earth, its plants and animals, along with the traditions of one’s ancestors, traditions, yes, that include awareness of death-dealing.

The “lethic’ temptation  encourages separation, veiling, opposition. Exclusion and occlusion dominate.   The “a-lethic’ dimension, on the other hand, encourages integrationist awareness. For the latter, there is even room for a proper kind of meat eating.  

Eat/Die2

Robert Indiana’s Diptych highlights two words Eat and Die.  “Eat,” as we saw in the previous blog, is complicated. Yes, we eat in order to stay alive, but human eating tells us something about what it means to be fully human.

Something similar occurs with “die.”  Martin Heidegger, once again, leads the way.  He suggests that animals “perish” whereas humans “die.” Conscious awareness marks the difference.  Heidegger gets all worked up about this, referring to human life as Sein-zum-tode “being unto death.” On one level the phrase is a truism: we live in the awareness of our mortality.  As a result, prioritization about how to spend our limited span is forced upon us. At its best, it encourages  a more “authentic” existence.

So far so good, but there are limitations.

First, the “being-unto-death” focus is too individualistic.  Fastening on concern about my individual death ignores an important aspect of existence: sorrow and

grief. Grief at the death of others is often the earliest confrontation with mortality.  The experience of grief moves us away from the isolated subject facing his (this is the pronoun Heidegger would have preferred) own death. Grief means we have loved. The love/grief awareness, in turn, reveals something important about our cares, concerns and patterns of significance. Death experienced as grief diverts attention from the atomized subject and its authenticity. It emphasizes, rather, worthiness of a life lived in relation with others.

Second, we are not just “beings-unto-death.”  Our physiologies signal a pattern. Fully articulated, it’s a pattern of birth, puberty (because we do not live forever),

birth of others, then death.  Even if we do not have children of our own, we are attuned to the birth/puberty/birth/death/ cycle.This is where eating, and the mother imagery from the previous blog, come again to the fore.  The gestating mother, the one who is food for the fetus, is about to do something very important, something inseparable from mortality, give birth to a new human being.

Isolating mortality from natality encourages insulated, self-directed, reflection on how to shape our life trajectories.  Admitting we are both “beings-unto-death” and “beings-unto-birth” encourages a more social set of concerns. It encourages us to reflect on the  kind of world we will leave behind for the offspring who will follow (whether we actually produced some or not).

Third, life-time should not be thought of as an unending sequence of instants. When time is envisioned as a line, it makes sense to envision life as possibly going on forever. This is what the 16th century philosopher Spinoza, did when he

asserted  that any finite entity strives to “persevere in its being.” Experience teaches a different lesson. Finite beings realize they are part of a finite cycle.

 

Time is every bit as much a cycle as it is a line. Perhaps, for lived experience, time is actually more periodic than linear. Even philosophers fascinated by an unending line recognize nature’s cycles of seasons and years. They realize how  the sun itself will, at some point, come to an end. Life-time is periodic, punctuated by  beginnings and an endings. For biological creatures, periodicity is marked by overlapping spans, with  newer generations always in the making.

Death may be untimely and thus appear as a dark-garbed, scythe-wielding assassin. But death itself is not opposed to life. It is a necessary constituent of any life-trajectory. Our path as organisms is to live a limited span, make a kind of mark, leave offspring and die.  Emphasizing only the impulse to live on, or thinking of death as a kind of enemy is, in an important sense, to deny our humanity. Contrary to Spinoza we should encourage finite beings to accept their finitude.

When we think mortality, grieving, and natality together, we can recognize how thoughtful reflection can move in a direction different from the existentialist emphasis on an”authentic” life. That

emphasis includes a few important elements: (a) Thinking mortality/grief/natality together encourages us to think in terms of “we” rather than “I.” (b) A fundamental concern moves from  “how shall I live authentically,” to “how shall we make a world for the next generation?” (c) Finally the mortality/grief/natality awareness encourages a shift in time-consciousness. We recognize ourselves as periodic beings, part of a particular span which will impact overlapping, subsequent spans. The emphasis is thus on generosity in terms of what we bequeath. Worthiness replaces authenticity.

Eat/Die. Both unavoidable. Both complicated. Both sources of philosophical reflection. The best reflection will hold them together. We are beings unto life and death. Isolating one from the other falsifies our condition and leads to faulty thinking.