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.

Festivity: Thanksgiving vs Las Vegas

Georgetown Island, where we spend our summers, is 300 years old. Let the festivities begin!   Wherever there is celebration, there is food. Georgetown’s festivities began, naturally enough, with a birthday cake.

Festivity, despite its prevalence in history, is sort of fading in our age. We have embraced the 24/7-365 world. That means nonstop work, interspersed with diversion. Such diversion, It is important to add, offers a poor and false substitute for festivity. In fact, a defining trait of our time is the substitution of entertainment, pleasure-seeking, and diversion, for festivity.

Festivals are about a combination of factors:  (1) recognizing how we are part of something greater than ourselves, (2) appreciating the dependencies that characterize our lives, and (3) suspending our normal schedules to celebrate those interdependencies.

“Festivity” is at heart a religious affair. Why? Because its mode of responding is built around the nexus identified above: dependence, gratitude, celebration.  The wider world, which includes sources of nourishment, biological ancestors, political and social ancestors, along with the ability to bring about future generations, all of this is understood as a gift.  Within such a context, the festive dimension is fundamental.  The regular workaday efforts at making a living remove us, much of the time, from this festive awareness. They should not, however, completely occlude it.  

Such occlusion is more than ever prevalent today, dominated as we are by the 24/7-365 commerce-and-diversion lifeworld.  In the United States, Thanksgiving long remained a firewall, an inviolable witness to the festive.  Now, as that holiday gets overrun, nothing is left to block the new prototype: Las Vegas.  Here is a place where even major national and religious holidays never interrupt the commerce-and-diversion industry.  The resulting symbol for us: not the social grouping seated around a meal table, but rather the singular self seated at a slot machine.

How did we get here?  In terms of ideas,  the answer has to do with “philosophical anthropology,” the general way we define ourselves.  It is hard to deny that we are creatures of hunger. Hard also to deny that we are creatures of natality, i.e. we have been born. Hunger and natality, these set the stage for the dependence-gratitude-celebration triad that defines the festive.  

But hunger and natality mean dependence, an admission that we are beholden to forces outside ourselves.  Modern philosophy, post-Medieval philosophy, was a huge attempt to escape from dependence.  It was all about self-sufficiency.  To get there, intellectuals had to redefine the human being. This redefinition was rooted in a fantasy about human origins. The fantasy came to be known as the “social

contract” story.  The story starts not with birth from an actual female, not with hungry infants suckling at the breast, not with relatives and community members who are supplying food.  It begins with full grown individuals, portrayed as  “encapsulated selves” as critics call them. These encapsulated selves then agree, rationally and in terms akin to a commercial exchange, to enter into a contract and become social, members of a community.

  

Because philosophy forgot hunger and  natality, it drifted away from the genuinely “festive.” With self-sufficiency all the rage, the encapsulated human became the default position.  In addition, to the degree that humans forgot their hunger and natality, the world to which these connected them was also transformed.  It became more and more mere matter, stuff to be manipulated.  Humans began to understand themselves, not as woven into the fabric of things, but as outsiders somehow stuck in a  natural setting that was neutral, indifferent, waiting to be transformed and mastered.  Dependence, gratitude, celebration?  Not in this newer world.

So our time and that of the ancients sort of reverse each other.  Holidays like Thanksgiving lose their vibrancy.  The draw of Las Vegas becomes ever more powerful.

Food also takes on a different meaning. Fast food is what results from a world in which festivity has lost its primordial pull.  A traditional Catholic calendar identifies each day as a feast day.  Though they may not all be major celebrations, all meals, drawn from the earth’s bounty, shared with others, accompanied by gratitude, should be somewhat celebratory. By contrast, in our 24/7-365 world, pausing to recall how each day is really a feast day and each meal should be celebratory, these become the exception, not the rule.  

Philosophical shifts in self-understanding make major differences. Start with a physiological creature who is hungry, has been born, is thankful and thoughtful.  Then festivity is primordial. Start with an encapsulated self fascinated with self-sufficiency, set over against a neutral reality, a reality simply awaiting manipulation. Then the 24/7-365 world becomes our default condition.  Goodbye Thanksgiving. Hello Las Vegas.