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.  

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.

The Flight From Food

A meal in a pill?  It’s been a lingering human dream for a long  time. It’s also been regularly contested.  L. Frank Baum created professor Wogglebug who had invented a tablet-meal.  His students were no fans. They hogtied and tossed him into a river.  

Recently, young entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley reversed the student sentiment.  They came up with, not a pill, but a drink, Soylent.   Why substitute Soylent for real food? Time, money, nutrition, according to their web site.   

Let’s face it, such considerations make a kind of sense, at least within a venerable philosophical trajectory.   It’s label is dualism: we are composed of two oppositional elements, mind and  body.  One (mind) is essential, i.e. our main defining trait. The other, (body) is accidental, i.e. an accompaniment, but not crucial to who we are.

As is typical for philosophy, once a general orientation takes hold, the real change is not initially with answers, but with newly invented questions. Some examples within dualism:  If a computer can think, does that make it a person?  Can minds (carbon-based thus far) be downloadable into a silicon based network? In other words, can humans, having moved beyond their limited bodily state, live forever?  A movement called “transhumanism” thinks this is within reach.

Dualism also occasions particular food-related questions.  Eating might provide pleasurable bodily diversions but as long as we get our nutrition somehow, why not move beyond traditional eating, especially if this saves time and money in the bargain?

Here, as we saw above, is where Soylent makes its  pitch.  Just as the transhumanist believes that minds can be separated from bodies, so the fans of Soylent believe that nutrition can be separated from eating whole foods. “Free your body,” says the Soylent web site. Real meaning: “free yourself from your body.” Or,  to push the point further, “free yourself from typical animal-like modes of feeding, and thus move to a higher, less contaminated, human level of existence.” 

Rob Rhinehart, pioneer in Soylent’s development, explicitly referenced the need to break from our animal dimension. He was 6 or 7 years old, eating a salad. "I was looking down at a plate with these leaves on it. I could look outside and see leaves on the trees, and it just seemed a little weird. It seemed a little primitive--like something an animal would do. On this nice plate, in this nice house, why would I eat this thing that grows on trees? I thought 'We can do better.'''
This last phrase, “we can do better,” can be understood in a number of ways.  It can be read, as Rhinehart does, oppositionally.  We must struggle against our physiological (animal) side.  But, “doing better” can also be read transformatively.  Cooking, an activity specific to us, is one way we live our humanity. Animals eat plants. We eat plants. Animals eat meat. We eat meat.  
The basic activity is similar, but with a twist. We cook. We flavor, we sit around with other people, we talk, we clean up.  Here, “we can do better,” means embracing the kind of creature we are; seeking the consummations proper to us.  We do not succumb to an old temptation: seeking to escape our condition. 

Philosophically, it’s about our general attitude toward how we understand ourselves.  Do we follow the bifurcated path that automatically opposes our physiological and psychological sides?   Or, do we embrace our psychological/physiological mix and the fulfillments proper to it?

 Soylent’s supporters embrace the former. When Rhinehart asks “why would  I eat this thing that grows on trees” he shows how much he has bought into the oppositional philosophy.  By contrast, when we focus on cooking, not as a detachable annoyance, but  as central to who we are, we can emphasize continuity with a difference. This represents neither a sharp opposition, nor a simple absorption into the realm of other animals.

The older philosophy privileged opposition.  It sought to break free.  Break free from the chores surrounding cooking for the Soylent crowd; from a bodily limit to life, for the transhumanists. In both cases, the deeper dream was an escape from who we are.   A better  philosophy would not seek an escape. Rather it would seek out appropriate consummations for the kind of complex creature we are.  It would embrace real food, not meals in a pill or in a glass.