Unforget Stomach, Remember Socrates

Rowman and Littlefield has now made I Eat, Therefore I Think available in paperback. This comes as the number of philosophy books addressing food issues  is growing. Some recent examples include:  Paul Thompson, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, Corine Pelluchon, Les Nourritures: Philosophie du Corps Politique,  Julian Baggini, The Virtues of the Table: how to Eat and Think.  In addition, there is the book authored by Lisa Heldke and me, Philosophers at Table.

Why the upsurge? There is renewed interest in everyday activities typically ignored by philosophers.  Food studies has burgeoned.  Both hunger and obesity offer contemporary challenges.  Issues of sustainability and the treatment of animals have also provoked reflection.

Where does my book fit into the discussion?  Perhaps the most important lesson is one the book does not explicitly mention: philosophy is not an abstract discipline.  Philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, is a critic of abstractions.  “But, wait,” readers are probably thinking, “Isn’t philosophy abstract thinking?”  “That’s what we learned in philosophy class.”  

All well and good, but partial and misguided.  In its historical trajectory, philosophy has indeed come to be associated with abstraction and mind puzzles.  I Eat, Therefore I Think aims at changing this take on philosophy.

To accomplish this, I began with a clumsy term:  “unforgetting.”  “Un-forgetting” literally translates the Greek word for ‘“truth,”  aletheia.  My book seeks to unforget that we are stomach-endowed. It might seem obvious that humans are creatures for whom the stomach plays a major role, but philosophers of a particular period have tended to ignore this.   Second the book seeks to unforget, i.e. reinsert, some Socratic elements into philosophy.  

A few Socrates-inspired elements stand out:

Dialogue. Socrates believed that thinking through an issue involved cooperation with others. Thinking is not an isolated activity that goes on in the head. Thinking, in the fullest sense, takes place via dialogue.

Irony. Socrates embraced “irony” in its philosophical sense: an awareness that even our best formulations somehow fall short. Philosophy’s task is unending because our articulations, while they get something right, are, at the same time, lacking in other ways.  Reality is too complex to be captured in any snapshot.

Agora.  Socrates practiced philosophy in the agora, the marketplace, the public square.  The topics he discussed were rooted in the living concerns of flesh and blood people.

What? Socrates showed how philosophy is not concerned with the question “why.” Its purview is the question “what.”  What is friendship? What is love?  What is virtue?  Philosophy means “love of wisdom” and the “what” questions allow for actual, helpful answers that guide “wisdom.” ”“Why” questions, e.g. “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  “Why are we here?” are more the province of myth, non-philosophical ways to deal with questions about absolute origins or absolute ends.  

How does a stomach-friendly help re-invigorate these four Socratic themes?  A major metaphorical alteration is first needed: thinking of conceptual abstractions as recipes. Then, just as recipes, though helpful, can be critiqued and altered, so philosophy can undertake its role as “critic of abstractions.” The same move helps philosophy become Socratic once again.

Dialogue and the Agora.  Recipes involve dialogue.  We start where we are, in the agora. The cultural heritage in which we find ourselves privileges a conceptual framework, a series of recipes.  Engaging in dialogue with that tradition, we critique, we restore, we revise received recipes, we develop new ones. In this process, we are often aided by adding a dialogue with other traditions.  

Irony. Recipes are never fixed, finished and final, i.e. the slippage between formulation and reality, a slippage which identifies genuine irony, is ever-present.  What counts, in the end, is how recipes become manifest in experience.  The philosophical “criticism” of abstractions involves the back and forth between abstractions and the way they play out in lived experience.

What, not why. When we think about recipes, the ‘’what” dimension dominates.  Questions about ultimate origins and ends are unanswerable apart from storytelling, from myths. These, it must be noted, may be religious or they may be evolutionary.  Either way, they are not philosophical.  The recipe focus, which begins by humbly accepting the simple fact of our being here, tends rather to highlight “what” questions.”   What makes a meal delicious and nutritious?  What makes a life good? Starting with only vegetables can we do to come up with a delicious/nutritious combination?  What is the extent of justice?  Does it encompass non-human animals?

I Eat, Therefore I Think offers itself as the kind of corrective that will re-define philosophy as both the critic of abstractions and the friend of Socrates.  Hopefully, the paperback version will allow those ends to be widely discussed and disseminated.

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.

Appetite-Taste/Nature-Culture

Immanuel Kant once disparaged an Iroquois visitor to Paris for appreciating nothing other than “the eating houses.”  Kant wished to sort out humans guided by appetite from others guided by superior tastes.    A recent article in Aeon magazine deals with food metaphors relative to reading. It charts the trajectory from appetite to taste, suggesting how “In the 18th century, writers began to distinguish between appetite (the connection between reading and the body) and taste (connection between reading and the mind).”

“Appetite” is immediate and indiscriminate.  “Taste,” is selective, refined and mediated.  Appetite and taste may, in ordinary minds, be intermingled.  This would not do for Kant. Aided by free-standing substantives like “body” and “mind” his ideal was not proper integration of the bodily and the mental. It was the segregation of body and mind.  Physiological taste relating to food was suspicious because it remained intertwined with mere appetite.    The more elevated tastes would have little to do with food.  

The pattern here is familiar: (a)  a need to sort out better and worse; (b) mapping better and worse isomorphically with mind and body; (c) thinking that humanity, as the  Aeon writer put it, represents little more than a  “cesspit of ungoverned appetite;” and (d) subsequently, celebrating a power of domination, self-control, as the only hope for keeping appetites in check.

On the other side, there have always been philosophers championing  “natural” tendencies. They warned against substituting impositions of artificiality and convention.  The Stoics and Epicureans moved in this direction.  Their “follow nature” mantra was resurrected by a thinker like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romanticism, and by various communal living experiments in the 1960s.

Both tendencies, the superior-taste crowd and the follow-nature crowd, share one commonality: they are autoreferential. This allows them an escape from risk and responsibility. The superior-taste position says says it’s all about the cultural conventions we have imposed.  End of story. The follow-nature school says, I am just following my own true nature. End of story.

What is absent? Risk and responsibility. These emerge with dependence,  hetero-referentiality. The latter asks of us that we respond to signs and signals coming from outside of us.   

The appetite/taste contrast is one version of the wider nature/culture opposition.  Are there ways to rethink this opposition? To break with autoreferentiality?  To embrace, rather than escape, vulnerability and dependence?  To emphasize the unending need for exploration, questioning, dialogue?  

The answer is yes, but the approach may be surprising--taking taste, this time actual physiological taste, seriously.   Such a taste is unavoidably hetero-referential.  It involves responsiveness, i.e. responding to signs and signals coming from outside of us. Some results: natural appetite and taste are not two contrasting forces. They are correlative.  Second, the “taste” that fosters well-being is neither a “construction,” an artificial, merely subjective imposition, nor is it merely hardwired. It is appetite cultivated, channelled,  informed by experience, experiment and tradition.   

“Taste” serves as a good model for hetero-referential responsibility because it cannot use either culture or nature as a final determining factor. Rather than calling on a single foundation, it always involves election among alternatives. This election, in turn, emerges from clues, indications, signs that are present in a world we have not made but on which we depend.   Taste  not only depends on factors apart from us, but is also, as scientists put it, “multi-modal” involving, as it does, taste buds, smell, tactility, family and cultural practices, visual clues, temperature and even sounds.

What does all this mean?  First of all, we have to reintegrate appetite and taste (also nature/culture).   Appetite requires taste, and by nature we require culture.  Second, when using “taste” metaphorically, we should not stray too far from its physiological, food-related associations.  Wanting to get beyond responsibility defined as election among alternatives, we tend to ignore the irreducibility of the multiple and seek some single criterion. This criterion then is utilized as a simple, straightforward guide which mandates a particular behavior.

When, by contrast, we remain close to the multi-modal understanding of taste, we are always (i) dealing with a multiplicity of factors, (ii) many of those factors involve an inseparable blend of nature/culture, (iii) our response is a melange which seeks a proper balance of factors, (iv) we must always take an active role in adjusting the balance, revising  and polishing it, engaging in an experimental back and forth that moves from worse to better, (v) all the while realizing that a perfect unity or un-revisable blend will never be achieved.  

Kant was right to emphasize, taste, just not in the way he envisioned it.

Ferran and Heston OR Julia and Alice

I’ve just returned from a conference on food aesthetics where, no surprise, the food/art connection took center stage.  Use the expression “food art” and what comes to mind?  Well, not really food.  Still life paintings can be beautiful to admire.  They do little for hunger.

  During the 1960s food was used in happenings, happenings far from the experience of the table.  One included a scene of “women licking jam off a car.”

Another  called “meat joy” involved young writhing bodies interacting with dead chickens, fish and each other.  More recently, Felix Gonzales-Torres produced a sculpture made of candy in brightly colored wrappers, a work commemorating the death of Gonzales-Torres’ partner.

What do these have in common? Ordinary eating is bracketed. When Chefs are hailed as artists they tend to be those who have “elevated”  cookery from the realm of the everyday.  Ferran Adria’s molecular cooking and Heston Blumenthal’s playful creations have allowed them to drift upward.  

Seems sensible enough.  “Sensible enough” though, is precisely what sets philosophers going.  It means that among a possible range of  options, one has become so central that others are forgotten. Thinking, envisioning other possibilities, is then blocked.  

“Art” offers a paradigmatic case.  I often ask students to identify favorite artists. The responses: Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Goya, Pollock,  Monet.  I then indicate how the question was not about favorite painters, but artists.   The sedimented sense of “Art” is well symbolized by the unquestioned and thus unreflected upon assumption that painting is what should primarily come to mind when we discuss “Art.”

Such an understanding of Art  (upper case “A” is important) emerges within a specific philosophical take on things. This particular take characterizes humans as essentially spectators to the world.  Those arts which are most “spectatorial” then move to central prominence.    

The inherited philosophy devalorizes the everyday world of ordinary practices.  Beauty is outsourced.  To the museum, the concert hall, the theatre. This is what allows the complementary conceptualizations “fine” and “applied” to emerge. As a corollary, fine and applied are inversely related.  Works “tainted” with utility, arts like  weaving, pottery, architecture, ritualistic dancing, landscape design and cookery, fall to a secondary status.  

Changing the complementary labels I would say that, in the inherited framework, the only way that  the operative  arts can rise in stature, is to approximate the spectatorial ones.  Heston Blumenthal’s Artist credentials are evident when he re-envisions  sugary, frozen treats of his youth, transforming them into  savory concoctions which stun, surprise and wow his patrons.  Similarly, when a diner bites down on one of Ferran Adria’s liquid “olives” there is surprise, wonderment, astonishment.  Above all, the experience must move well beyond a regular, normal repast.  

But that is to violate one of the great injunctions of creativity: working within constraints while making excellence real.  A vase that is exceptionally lovely but not functional falls short in this regard. When we think of operative creativity as that which offers the best combinations, combinations which include utility, then judgments about what counts as fineness become more suitably contextualized.  There is no longer need to copy the spectator arts in order to achieve fineness.  For the operative arts, living beauty in  day-to-day existence becomes a major desideratum. It also offers special challenges to creativity, challenges that cannot be bracketed.

If this is the case, the contemporary way of selecting food artists highlights the wrong exemplars. We tend to fasten on those who can most imitate and emulate the spectatorial arts, the Adrias and Blumenthals.  If we emphasize day-to-day beauty, stressing the conjunction of beauty and use, insisting that fuller, more replete beauty lives in this combination, a combination requiring high levels of creativity, other models come to mind.  I am thinking in particular of Julia Child and Alice Waters.  What both of these chefs aimed at was  food that looks like food, tastes like food, satisfies hunger, encourages conviviality, is complex, and delicious.  Waters specifically named her restaurant after a hospitable, generous fictional character.  She hoped a meal at her restaurant would be like a convivial dinner at home.

What is important here is how the particular experience, which is participational, tied to nutrition, and associated with sociality, is brought to its highest culmination, a culmination that does not force cookery to mimic the spectator arts.  The operative arts can achieve levels of fineness at the highest level. They serve as models for the rest of us.  They also set a standard for living beauty rather than outsourcing it.  In these regards it seems to me better to celebrate Julia and Alice, not Ferran and Heston.

SEX PORN/FOOD PORN

The makers of Canon cameras have added a “food mode” to one of their models.  Why? Taking food photos is all the rage. “Are you one of the few people left who doesn’t take pictures of your meal before eating?” asked a Huffington post story. More stylized photos are often categorized as “food porn.” Food porn?  Yes, that label, introduced in the 1980s, has stuck.  Does this represent the wisdom of folk psychology, some crafty marketing ploy, or a superficial, ultimately mistaken identification? 

What might the differences and similarities be?  First of all, the very root “porn” comes from the ancient Greek for prostitute, so it’s link with sex is narrow and traditional.  Also pornography’s function as an aid to masturbation marks a functional difference.  The ancient philosopher Diogenes did not need pornography when he masturbated in public.  He was a fan of the “follow nature; all social conventions are contrived and unnatural” kind of philosophy.   When challenged about his public practice, he offered a straightforward retort: “I only wish I could relieve my hunger by simply rubbing my stomach.”  His answer highlights an important difference: Food porn does not seem to offer the same opportunity for direct physiological satisfaction.  In that sense at least, there is a disanalogy.  

So, beyond the similarity of gazing at provocative photos, speaking of both sex and food “porn” ignores some important differences.  

On a wider level, both food porn and sex pornography manifest some identical,  basic, and related human temptations:  Abstraction is preferred over concreteness; the triad of vulnerability, risk and responsibility is shunned, certain habits are cultivated. 

Abstraction, this may strange coming from a philosopher, is evil.  It’s most basic meaning signifies isolating certain factors and ignoring, in effect, erasing, what in actual circumstances accompanies them.  Such constricted focus, unrecognized and uncriticized,  is central to evil.  Take racism, rooted in a straightforward abstraction: highlighting skin color, i.e. abstracting from all other dimensions of the actual, concrete human being in front of us.  Similarly, the carefully posed naked female in pornography is actually more concealed than revealed. At least in the sense that her concrete, complex personhood is abstracted from.  Instead one dimension, that which excites the male libido is isolated and highlighted.

Selective attention is unavoidable, but it must be recognized as the tool it is and not confused with concrete actuality.  This is easier said than done. The temptation toward abstractification of reality is reinforced by certain comforts it brings with it.  In an abstracted, purified, simplified realm, certain accompaniments of concrete, ordinary existence just disappear. Prominent among these is the liability triad of  vulnerability, risk, responsibility. The consumer of pornography need not worry about getting feelings hurt, suffering disappointment, being asked to wash dishes, engage in fair-minded give and take.

As the multi-dimensional becomes uni-dimensional, the level  of the liability triad drops to zero. 

It is here that sex porn/food porn overlap.  The sex photo is detached and disconnected from ordinary human interactions.  The enticing dish of food porn is also set apart from ordinary interactions. Vulnerability, responsibility and risk recede.  Concerns about health and girth? Ignore them.  Time needed for planning, shopping, preparing, cooking and especially cleaning? Poof, they disappear.

On another level, both  also overlap with the general category of ethics.  Pornography is about shaping habits.  And, in general, shaping habits is what ethics is all about.   The very word “ethics” comes for the ancient Greek term for habits and customs. As humans we manifest plenty of spontaneous inclinations.  Sorting them out, cultivating the proper ones, transforming them into habitual dispositions, developing the kind of character that is optimal, this defines the terms of “ethics” as Aristotle understood it.  

The habit shaped  by sexual pornography isolates and encourages the tendency to think of women first and fundamentally as sources of sexual satisfaction, as good places for an orgasm.  Once the habitual disposition becomes second nature, it appears that any other tendency is merely an artificial imposition of culture over “nature.” (We continue to be a lot more like Diogenes the Cynic than we like to think). Similarly the habit shaped by food porn is to think of food, one-dimensionally as simply a source of pleasure.

 So, maybe the “porn” label in “food porn” is not that outlandish. Both food and sex porn embrace constricted abstractness.  Both limit the liability triad.  Both succumb to the temptation of embracing fantasy over reality. What is not fantasy is the shared habitual disposition that is encouraged: fostering connection without vulnerability.  

The Hands of Time

The Culinary Institute of America has a wall full of hand prints.   Not just random prints but those of well-known chefs. That the CIA would memorialize chefs via their hands makes eminent sense.  Everything about the cooking process involves hands: planting, harvesting, cutting, peeling, handling skillets, cleaning up.   Before she got famous with Chez Panisse, Alice Waters worked at a Montessori school. “Montessori went straight to my heart, because it’s all about encountering the world through the senses. That how kids learn best. The hands are the instrument of the mind--that was how Maria Montessori put it.”

Sadly, when it comes to philosophers, the mind-hand couple linked by Montessori tends to be disconnected.  The general trajectory has been decidedly one-directional: moving away from the concrete realm of lived experience (hands) and toward the a more abstract, more simplified, more artificial one (mind).

Take time.  We still use expressions like “springtime,” “lunch time,” “having a rough time” or maybe the “time of one’s life.”  Such expressions remind us of an older, more concrete,  take on time:  a span defined by ongoing activities, permeated by a qualitative dimension.  

We might call this “baseball time.”  

The question “how long a time does a game last?” cannot be answered by referring to a fixed clock counting down the instants.  The “time” of a game, depends on the activities taking place on the field.  Similarly, on the more traditional take,  “noon” is not marked by a clock but by the sun’s position in the sky.  There is no separate, quantitative, “time” running independently of ongoing (qualitative) activities, the two are interwoven.

Our world is filled with phrases like “killing time,” “wasting time,”  “time is money.” To get there required a philosophical shift indicating a more artificial take on time. Instead of thinking time in terms of events, i.e. the day/night cycle, think of it on the model of a detached, homogeneous line composed of separate dots.  The dots, instants, keep disappearing and the line is quite separate from ongoing activities. Think, not of baseball, but of sports regulated by a clock. Springtime, summertime, wintertime, as qualitative markers, fade away. Instead, we highlight a  time-line that ignores the specifics of ongoing activities.  The newer take on time both creates and celebrates the world of 24/7.  In such a world there would, ideally, be no pauses, no suspensions of busy-ness, no limitations on the dominance of commerce in life. Instead of baseball time we now have Las Vegas time.  

Let’s say it’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So what?  The casinos, working 24/7, don’t differentiate between this day or any other.  Sunshine is fading, night is arriving.  So what?  Why sleep?  The gaming rooms are open 24/7.   The natural cycle of day/night, along with the cultural cycle of historical/political, religious celebrations become annoyances, frustrations, interruptions in the nonstop frenzy of Las Vegas time.

The 24/7 world of all commerce all the time, transforms many traditional activities associated with hands into  wastes of time.  The handprints at the Culinary Institute remind us of an area which has taken a special hit, cooking.  As mentioned in a previous blog, a Silicon Valley engineer has even invented a food substitute, the ready-made drink Soylent, that can be utilized in  lieu of meals.   Eating food that is the product of loving hands, the preparation and clean-up of which often involves the helping hands of others, becomes more and more an exception rather than the rule. 

  

The personal world of the hands has not disappeared. But, as philosophy goes so goes daily life, and much philosophy has taken us into the world of abstractions.  24/7, along with the outsourcing accompanying it, transforms key instances of natural and cultural time into annoyances and limitations.  How to resist? Well, humans are, after all, the only animals that cook.  They are also the only animals that engage in relaxed conversations. Perhaps using hands to produce meals, cooperating with the helping hands of others in preparation and cleaning up, all the while engaging in conversation, is one way to establish a beachhead.

Trump-ing Thought

As I write this, more than a year and a half prior to the next presidential election, things, as the headlines say, are heating up. This is especially so since Donald Trump announced his quest to be the republican

nominee. His supporters keep repeating a regular refrain: “he says what he thinks” or “he says what we are all thinking.”

The emphasis on “thinking” can’t help but get the attention of a philosopher.  For Socrates, thinking was inseparable from dialogue.  In other words, what goes on inside an individual’s head is just initial raw material, not the activity of thinking.

The French have a saying La musique, c’est du bruit qui pense.  Music is noise that has engaged in thinking. Initial notions floating around in consciousness are noise. Such noise is often misguided, false, self-interested and downright mean-spirited. Plenty of us have notions like the nasty ones from Trump floating around in our heads. That is exactly why we need thinking--to move from noise to music (or in information-speak, to sort out signal from noise).

Where Socrates emphasized dialogue, Plato insisted on the distinction between doxa and episteme.  “Doxa” was his name for the notions that float around in consciousness, i.e. mere opinions, unfounded beliefs, fantasies, sweeping generalizations, noise.  Episteme, knowledge,  could only be achieved via effort.  The result would be justifiable, warranted, reasonable assertions. The effort at moving from doxa to episteme demands some attitudinal pre-requisites not especially evident in the case of Donald Trump.  First, humility in light of facts.  Second, a genuine commitment to truth, rather than to self-satisfaction, power, or manipulation.  Doxa, especially self-satisfying noise, gets along quite well, indeed thrives, without the trio of effort, humility, commitment to truth. This makes it especially tempting for the lazy and self-serving.

There is a straightforward food parallel.   Our biological label homo sapiens, often rendered as the man the “wise” or “rational” man, has a more interesting etymological sense: man the taster. The taster, is the tester, the one who, faced with multiple options, must select among them. In other words, the taster/tester moves from nutritional noise to music.   

The thinking/tasting parallel emerges when we consider the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His advice on how to raise children suggested that, when it came to food, they should just be allowed, in an unfiltered way, to follow their natural tastes.  This is another version of the “embrace noise, forget about making music,” position.   The problem is that there are many tastes, they often conflict, and by themselves they represent a disorganized muddle.  Human responsibility, in the sense of applying experimentation, thought, and experience, thus needs to intervene. Neither good nutrition, nor truth can emerge without effort.

The French word for thinking penser is related to peser,  to weigh, to put in the balance, to evaluate.  In other words, out of all the noise, which combinations make the most sense, which can best be justified?  But this takes work and humans tend both toward laziness and evading responsibility. Saying “I’m simply following my natural tastes”, is just another way of saying “I refuse the difficult work of acting responsibly, i.e. deliberating, in light of experience, evidence and good sense.”  Similarly anyone offering praise by saying “he is just saying what he thinks” should rephrase the assertion:  He doesn’t think. He just says whatever is in his head.