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.

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.  

Cheese and Ethics

Philosophers often talk about “the” good, as if it were a singular thing.  Sometimes that gets thinkers in trouble.  Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. Some kind of balance among multiple elements was always at work for them.  Plato thought in terms of a good society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the diverse elements.  Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.”   A flourishing life involves multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends,  some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, along with a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia, as a result, was always a complex affair.

After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of goodness.  As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, is the most pleasant life.  The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.  

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn.  Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium--all of these arose from what was outside us.  The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasureable, minimally disturbed, life.  The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston : “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Religion added another ingredient.   This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split.  Manichaeism  described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable.   

Evil and good had physical manifestations.  Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become monks.  Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats.  Women labelled witches felt this wrath, as did heretics.  Later writers traced political problems to “parasites”, either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them) or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

I thought of all this when recently visiting an artisanal cheese-making operation, the Kennebec Cheesery in the Belgrade lakes region of Maine. This particular place is homey.  It’s a farmhouse, with lots of  land, goats, sheep, a delivery of manure the day I was there (good fertilizer).  Also, plenty of bugs, some visible, others invisible, still others in refrigerated packets.  The invisible ones are mostly bacteria.  Within the Manichean disposition, bacteria fall under the “evil-to-be-exterminated” category.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E-Coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial.  Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health.  Better to work with them. This is where the refrigerated packets come in handy.  The packets house bugs with names that can sound foreboding like streptococcus thermophilus, or lactobacillus casei. Others, have more recognizable labels,  penicillium roqueforti,  penicillium camemberti. Instead of aiming at elimination, cheese makers actually welcome these “germs.”  The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics, i.e. the inward turn, was doubly problematic.   (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence.  (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode, that is, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered unilaterally and unequivocally evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus,  lactobacillus,  penicillium, we can work together.  We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move.  Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable.  Viruses?  Not eliminate, but Integrate. (We call this vaccination.)  Bacteria?  Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix.  Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize, bring to helpful fruitions. Make cheese.  Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about  the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger.  The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.

Boston and New Orleans

Baked beans; Black beans and rice.  New England boiled dinner; Jambalaya.  Clambake; Crawfish boil. Submarine sandwich; po’boy.  This is a tale of two typical American cities.  Typical? Shouldn’t it be one typical (Boston) and one atypical (New Orleans)?  

Boston was there from the British beginning.  Its protestant citizens played a pivotal role in the country’s founding. Their

descendants took up abolitionism.  Crossing the Atlantic, one intrepid group heard a sermon outlining a wonderful we-take-care-of-each-other, we-will-be-a-model-to-the-world, vision for the new colony. Definitely typical.

New Orleans originated about a century later.  Residents spoke Spanish and French.  It was a major slave trading center. Religion meant Catholicism and voodoo. After the Louisiana purchase, the locals were none too happy about assimilating to their new masters. Definitely a-typical.

Maybe.  The country has not stagnated.  Major changes came with the Civil War, subsequent constitutional amendments, and waves of immigration.  As we enter the 21st century, it’s probably best to say that there are many “typical” U.S. cities, including Boston and New Orleans.

What does New Orleans bring to the mix?  Well, “mix,” specifically non-Anglo mix: Spanish, French, African.  As regards food, the mix shows up in Creole cuisine. “Creole” is a good label for these dishes since they emerge from blending and combining various food traditions.

Back in Boston, the food heritage was marked by the appearance of the “Boston Cooking School” (1879), an institution made famous by Fannie Farmer and her cookbook.  

 The Boston Cooking School movement was also associated with attempts to establish a single American cuisine.  As Donna Gabaccia put it: “By proposing a national cuisine, domestic scientists helped arm a variety of reform movements aimed at limiting, or even turning back,the tide of cross-over foreign foods and eating customs.”  (p. 125).  

The philosophical issue at work here is the question of the one and the many. At the extremes, there is simple opposition, one versus many. Either one model imposed on all, or, complete variety, ignoring any attempt at unity.  In the middle: the dishes of New Orleans. These draw on diverse roots, yet provide new points of unification. The unification is not based on something antecedent, but on what emerges from contact and intermingling.

New Orleans offers a positive model in another way. Some early Boston types, the Puritans, tended to be kind of earnest, if not dour, in their suspicion of whatever seemed frivolous.  Appetites were rigorously kept under control.  Nathaniel Hawthorne was merciless in criticizing such earnestness. His “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” imagines springtime,  young people.  They want to sing and dance.  Cavorting around the Maypole, they exemplify an exuberant joie de vivre.    

The celebrants, unfortunately,  are surrounded by dour puritans. These folks were marked by a “sterner faith,”  They were not interested “in keeping up the old English mirth.” By “festival,” they meant “fast days.” Their tongues were ever ready to scold “the youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance!”  

There was little joie de vivre  in the this “stay busy, don’t let idle hands be the devil’s helpers” kind of world. Some of us interested in food and philosophy, promoting sustainability, locavores, organic foods or vegetarianism can easily slip into Puritan earnestness.  New Orleans offers a counterbalance, a force

well exemplified in relation to food. Food is about beauty, taste, enjoyment, good times shared with others.  A crawfish boil with family and friends is its embodiment.

Contemporary New Orleans it is true, does not always resonate with joie de vivre.  Instead, exemplified by Bourbon St, a seemingly slight, but significant, substitution has taken place.  The pursuit of pleasure has replaced joie de vivre,  an undertaking, we might say, pursued earnestly.  

Joie de vivre indicates more than a balancing a utilitarian nose to the grindstone attitude with one that makes a similarly concerted effort at gaining pleasure.  It indicates a general attitude of gratefulness and joy at being able to savor existence.   Its ethical model involves a well-integrated life, following the ancient Greek principle of getting the balance right.

Our New England ancestors gave us many good things, notions of a caring community, ideas about a free republic, actions to establish that republic, abolitionism.  What it did not give us was an appreciation for mixture and a sense of joie de vivre.  Fortunately, ours is a big country. In addition to Boston, we can welcome New Orleans as a partner in our joint history.

Cooking and Philosophy

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

We’ve all heard the joke. What do philosophy graduates say:  “Want fries with that?”  Actually, philosophy graduates do well. They may not begin with the highest salaries, but they move up quickly.    

Just as importantly, there is more to link philosophy and food than humor.  No one has trouble recognizing the importance of food--we eat or we perish.  Plenty of people have trouble recognizing the importance of philosophy.  Critics complain of its irrelevance and predict its demise.  Lately, the physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson got on that bandwagon.   Prior to him came the blunt proclamation by  Stephen Hawking: “philosophy is dead.”  

Philosophy has a ready rejoinder: exactly what kind of claim is that?  It doesn’t emerge from a physics experiment, from a chemistry lab, from manipulation of genes.  Isn’t it a philosophical claim?  Doesn’t it articulate a generic take on things, provide some general orientation, give hints about getting our bearings as we navigate life?  Hawking is saying “philosophy is dead,” and “it takes a philosophical statement to articulate its demise.”  The inner contradiction “I’m doing philosophy at the very moment I’m pronouncing its irrelevance” is why Etienne Gilson was fond of saying that “philosophy always buries its undertakers.”

There is plenty of bad philosophy, plenty of highly technical “let’s-only-talk-to-ourselves-in language-no-one-understands-about-problems-of-concern-to-no-one-else” kind of philosophy.  Criticizing these is not the same as outright dismissal.  Philosophy provides a general orientation toward life. Since we all work from a set of comprehensive bearings, we all participate in philosophy, albeit mostly in an implicit, rather than explicit way.

Those who approach it explicitly root their orientation in some basic characterization of what it means to be human.  This often starts by asking how humans are different from other animals.  Some answers are flippant: we are the creatures who are always asking “how are we different?”  We are the creatures who plan out rest room stops. Plato suggested the “featherless biped.” A later thinker plucked a chicken, tossed it in the midst of Plato’s students and said “here is a man.”  Building on the plucked feathers theme, we might say that humans are those creatures who shave off their body hair; or, more accurately, those who force females to shave off their body hair.

More serious characterizations were typically built around the phrase “man is a rational animal.”  Because “rational”

tended to exclude our embodied, emotive dimension, i.e. it identified more Mr. Spock than Captain Kirk, alternatives were sought out.    Homo laborans and homo ludens, the animal that labors, the animal who engages in games, helped emphasize other dimensions of human life, as did “the story-telling animal.” Recently, thanks to Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human,  a new general standpoint  emerged: the cooking animal.

Not only is cooking unique to humans, it is an activity that is integrative where the older “rational” was exclusionary.  “Rational” encouraged detachment, aloofness and neutrality.  Cooking emphasizes involvement, interaction, dependence and concern.  For some strange reason, philosophers have tended to think of humans as outside spectators, dispassionate cogitators receiving, recording and processing data.   It’s not clear where they got this notion, but it has little to do with real people.  There was some pushback. The American Pragmatists, John Dewey, William James, Charles Peirce, situated humans within everyday, ordinary practices, the engaged, value-laden doings and undergoings of everyday life.

When our philosophical orientation works out of a context centered on ourselves as “cooking animals” the philosophical map  tends to favor the Pragmatists.  The Mr. Spock model, cold, hyper-logical, aloof, fades to the periphery, as does any sense that things around us are neutral, “just facts” until we bestow “values” upon them.  As hungry creatures, we are interested participants, not detached observers.  Such engaged individuals are led to ask about the best combinations of foodstuffs for good health.  They lean toward companionship (literal meaning: sharing bread) and enjoyment. They occasion reflection about how best to secure resources for a healthy, vibrant community.  In other words, they dispose us in new ways toward typical philosophical issues: the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of knowing (epistemology), questions about what is good (ethics), issues of political economy (social/political philosophy).

Physicists like Tyson and Hawking are reacting to a narrow understanding of philosophy.  The recent graduate asking “would you like fries with that” could tell them that physics will never answer questions about friendship, about beauty, about justice, or for that matter, how physics fits in to our overall understanding of things.  Like it or not, philosophy always buries its undertakers.