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.

Loss of Appetite

Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger features a scene in which a character, despite it being lunchtime, loses her appetite.   Her boyfriend, in the same circumstances, goes right back to chowing down.

Who are they? What are the circumstances? They are Meursault, the novel’s main character, and his girlfriend/fiancee Marie. Meursault, famously, does not play societal games. He does not pretend to be what he is not.  A neighbor, Raymond, has asked him for help writing a letter. The aim of the letter: entrap a young woman with whom Raymond had a relationship. On the day of the disrupted lunch, screams come from Raymond’s apartment. The  letter has worked. The young woman came by. Raymond beat her.

The ruckus causes neighbors to gather in the hallway. Marie, troubled by what she has witnessed, loses her appetite. Meursault remains unaffected.

Camus sought to write a novel featuring an “authentic” central character, one who would not take on roles expected of and assigned by society. What he skillfully depicted is someone completely detached from what goes on around him.  Meursault is indifference personified. He does not care that the letter he has cooperated in writing is part of a vengeful plan. He is not moved by the beating of a young woman. He lives in a self-enclosed world. Societal games might not be for him, but are all evaluative, sympathetic responses part of the false veneer of society?  Meursault does not just refuse hypocritical games. He goes so far as to numb his evaluative response to surrounding events. A young woman is being beaten next door? Duly noted. A mere piece of neutral data. Now, back to lunch.

Not Marie. She cannot remain detached.  The beating scene affects her. She loses her appetite.  Basic bodily needs are eclipsed as non-physiological concerns take center stage.

Abraham Maslow famously identified a “hierarchy of needs.”  It offered a neat framework which ranked the needs in a particular way: the lower needs had to be fulfilled before higher ones could be realized.

It offered a clear-cut system of “axiology”--concern with value and its ranking.  Marie’s loss of appetite suggests how Maslow’s hierarchy was a bit too neat. There are times when the tug of ideals, the commitment to key values, are more important than the demands of physiology. Marie, revulsed by the appalling scene of a young woman being beaten, offers one example.  The injustice, unfairness, general evil of the scene comes to supersede her physiological craving for food.

The same can be said for more well-known scenarios: suffragettes on a hunger strike;  Bobby Sands dying as a result of refusing nutrition; religiously induced fasts; starving artists, the Russian scientists charged with preserving a seed bank who starved rather than eat the seeds entrusted to them. There is also the pathology of anorexia where priorities have been upended and hunger is overridden.

Such scenarios suggest that the Maslow hierarchization needs to be tinkered with in two ways.  First, Self-actualization is not a good name for the highest level. Second, for humans, the hierarchy is flexible, what is higher on the pyramid can, under certain

circumstances, become more fundamental than what is at the base.

Against Self-Actualization.  Suffragettes, Bobby Sands, Russian seed bank scientists: What they held most dear was not actualizing the self. They sacrificed the self for a more communal cause, a cause they saw themselves as serving. One distinguishing  feature of humans is precisely this willingness to place a communal cause as a central ideal, even if it means loss of life.

For a flexible axiology. Humans manifest a cluster of aspirations, impulses, inclinations, wants. Living out the fullness of human life means not being limited by a hierarchy with pre-ordained, fixed levels.  It means being drawn as much by transcendent ideals as by physiological necessity. Both the physiological and the axiological can work together. At difficult times, in certain circumstances, people have to choose.  That the axiological can override the physiological is an indication of how complicated a creature we are.

Of course, humans can always, Meursault-style, numb themselves.  “It’s all the same to

me” they can say. In making such an utterance they situate themselves apart from ordinary human experience.  The position of complete detachment is a seriously artificial one. It requires a lot of work, either individual effort or culturally absorbed effort, to reach the point of neutering, treating as neutral data, the occurrences which make up part of our surroundings.  It is natural for us to hunger for food. It is also natural for us to hunger for fairness, justice, freedom, and respect. What characterizes us, as the special animal we are, is that the prioritization of these hungers is not rigidly fixed.

ANOREXIA INTELLECTUALIS

The Righteous Brothers had a hit song with a line that highlighted an important stomach-related word.  “I’ve hungered” it went, then, repeating the word, “hungered for your touch”.  It’s a lovely song, but it has nothing do do with eating. Still, that doesn’t matter.  Listeners know that “hunger” and “hungered,” when the context is human beings, can mean more than filling an empty stomach.

Take Aristotle. One of his most cited

lines reads like this: “all men, by nature, desire to know.”

What he says is that we have an "orexis" for knowledge. The term translated “desire” can mean reach for, yearn for, or hunger for. But why can “hunger” a biologically-derived term, apply in contexts of affection and intelligence?  Humans are biological creatures and they are more than that. The metaphorical use of “hunger”  offers one level of support for such continuity with difference.   Aristotle’s entire philosophy was friendly to biology. This did not mean he reduced "human" to the merely biological.  There are continuities and differences. He insisted that all ideals had a natural basis and all natural tendencies had an ideal culmination (to paraphrase George Santayana).

Philosophers are often accused of playing with words. Sometimes this is true.  Sometimes, recognizing distinctions is meaningful. In his book.

Hunger, Raymond Tallis suggests that “hunger” and “appetite” should be distinguished.  The former, along with the non food-centered term, “desire,” is more indicative of all-embracing humanity than is “appetite.”  The difference? Narrative time. “A desire is an appetite that has a story--albeit unfolding, evolving, fragmented, at its heart.”  It is a hunger that narrates itself and tries to make sense of itself.”

Appetites are raw, instinctual, sated in a stimulus-response  way. Desires/hungers are multi-layered. They are often occasioned, not by an object but by a relationship. That’s certainly the case in both the Unchained Melody of the Righteous Brothers and in Aristotle’s claim about human hunger for knowledge. What is yearned for is ongoing (time-factored) actualizing: making love real in one case and satisfying curiosity in the other.

The culminations of such hungers occur only within spans of time. Unfolding within spans of time means not only that they are ongoing, but that they require effort, and, instead of unimprovable perfection, often result in culminations with loose ends.  They are thus precarious, subject to contingency, require that we make ourselves vulnerable, and can be frustrating.

For those reasons, there is a general tendency to an-orexia, the suppression of hunger. This is not just the pathology associated with physiological appetite.

 There is also intellectual an-orexia: the longing for absolutely secure, contingency-free, doubt-free existence. One impediment to such security: thinking. After all, thinking is bothersome, annoying, discomforting.  If only the yearning, the hunger for knowing could be suppressed, if only intellectual anorexia could become the rule, then a sense of comfort, and security could be established. The paths to intellectual anorexia are well-paved and multiple.  Two came to special prominence during the Modern (roughly 1600-1900) era: logical deduction and calculative rationality. Using formal logic to deduce conclusions that are certain has little to do with thinking. The latter always engages complicated situations and arrives at resolutions that are only secure within varying degrees of probability.  Instrumental rationality, which starts with a pre-ordained end and then calculates the most efficient means of getting there, offers a poor substitute for thinking which puts ends themselves into play. Other strategies have been around forever: absolutism and skepticism.

But wait, readers may be thinking, aren’t these opposed to one another.  Well, yes, they are. One says, “the answers pre-exist, all you have to do is accept them.” The other says “there are no answers.”

Despite their differences, and like logic and instrumental rationality, both offer a particular and attractive invitation: stop thinking. It might be “stop thinking because the answers are already at hand.”  It could be “stop thinking because there are no answers anyway.” In each case, the result is the same: peace of mind occasioned by sidestepping the annoying practice of thinking.

For the physiological anorexic, the body’s constant demands for edibles is felt as an oppressive demand. For the philosophical anorexic it is the demands of the mind that are annoying. Thinking involves “trials,” literally the processes of sifting out, of trying one path and then another. Such processes are  are also “trying” in the sense of being annoying, bothersome. Like hunger, thinking never leads to stasis. The practice is unending. How to eliminate such discomfort? Go intellectually an-orexic. Hide behind pure logic. Transform thinking into calculating. Pretend the answers are already obvious. Insist that finding answers is not possible. In other words, suppress a basic human orexis, stop thinking.