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.

24/7, Festivity, Holiness

“Festivus” was made famous by a Seinfeld episode.  It’s also a real thing, first introduced in 1966. The word, associated with “feast,” indicates a joyous time associated with eating.

Special feasting days depend on a calendar that has not been homogenized.  Particular days are recognized as different, special. Typical examples: birthdays, wedding anniversaries, national holidays, religious commemorations, harvest festivals. These are differentiated times, times which encourage recognition of worth beyond  everyday utilitarian concerns. They acknowledge the complex constitution of humans, a constitution that includes a vital orientation to, as the ancient Greeks put it, the good and the beautiful. This means that a well-integrated life will blend various commitments, not allow one to metastasize and rule imperially over all the others.

Today, the imperialistic activity is commerce.  Time not engaged in commerce is said to be “wasted.”  The

culmination of such an attitude is an era in which 24/7 is unreflectively praised as a good thing.  But the 24/7 world is one in which the festive dimension is marginalized. As a result, some constituents of a complete life are sidelined. A fuller experience would incorporate important life-dimensions associated with beauty and goodness, dimensions such as awe, gratitude, savoring, commemoration, and reverence.

The American ancestors of our 24/7 world (“all utilitarian activity all the time”) would be the Puritans.  So worried were they about idleness (the devil’s workshop) that they banned even Christmas. Pausing in the regular course of things, suspending work, marking a special day by conspicuous feasting, partying, joyful activities, these became, not marks of full humanity, but temptations to be avoided.  

Such an attitude can be explained, as Max Weber famously did, by a transformation in religious ideas, specifically by the acceptance of predestination.  In the older, Catholic, culture, anxiety about salvation/damnation could be attenuated by good works, by taking sacraments, by indulgences. Calvinism’s emphasis on predestination swept these away.  Individuals felt a crushing concern about whether their pre-ordained destiny was salvation or damnation. Such high-anxiety discomfort had, somehow, to be relieved. Into this gap came worldly success and well-being. These took on new roles: public signs that one was part of the elect. Work hard, gain material success, separate oneself from the underclass and,  voilà, there is a clear signal of future salvation.

Such a theological understanding occasioned changes in language.  Since words form part of a semantic landscape, changes in meaning are hardly ever isolated. Terms change connotation in relation to one another.  “Labor” no longer signalled: effort to secure sustenance. It became: path to accumulate wealth. Concomitantly, “leisure” took on an association with laxity and laziness.

It had not always been so.  For the ancient Greeks, leisure was schole.  It did not indicate absence of activity, but time set aside for a particular kind of activity, one that satisfied higher aspirations. This is clearly indicated by the English successor term “school.”  Leisure, in the older semantic landscape, was not at all about laziness or wasting time. Quite the contrary. It was about making good use of time, satisfying our vital orientation toward the good and the beautiful.  It might be acknowledgement of athletic excellence at the

Olympics, pursuit of intellectual curiosity at school, or embrace of awe and dependence in a religious ceremony, but it indicated something as crucial to human life as material well-being.

Once “labor” becomes “means of achieving wealth;” once “leisure” is transformed into “waste of time,” the groundwork is prepared for a value system in which 24/7 is widely and automatically praised.

The casualty in all of this is festivity.  More generally, the casualty is an integral, holistic, understanding of the human condition.  “Holiness,” after all, is both a cognate of healthiness and another way of indicating “wholeness.” We can, of course, reject holism and engage  in single-value imperialism. We can minimize the festive. We can transform official festive days into little more than forced time off. In doing so, we dismiss an important dimension of the festive, its role in allowing us to affirm our vital orientation to multiple  dimensions of worthiness. Once this attitude becomes dominant, language is cheapened. The labor/leisure correlative pair becomes the work/laziness set of opposites. In general, the 24/7 world represents the triumph of single-value imperialism.

The original “festivus”  commemorated a married couple’s first date.  Love, life-partnership, family, form important parts of the human aspiration toward the good and the beautiful.  Setting aside time to celebrate them is a is a way of embracing the fulness of human aspirations. A mode of living which minimizes such celebrations, a 24/7 world, is neither healthsome, wholesome, nor holy.