22-10-2024, 01:08 PM
Popular culture was still echoing Plato in 1951 when John Huston’s film The African Queen was released. Rose Sayer (Katherine Hepburn), disgusted with Charlie Allnut’s (Humphrey Bogart) weakness of the flesh, reproaches him with a philosophically sweeping pronouncement, “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above.” Such a ‘rise above’ attitude has been prominent in philosophy from the beginning. The denigration of food has been one consequence of this prominence. Aristotle needed no more than a comparison with cooking to dismiss music’s role in education. “If they must learn music, [then] on the same principle they should learn cookery, which is absurd.” Arthur Schopenhauer, although separated from the Greeks by two millenia, echoed two familiar ‘rise above’ themes: banishing food and denigrating females. His essay ‘On Women’ stands out as the great European exemplar of philosophical misogyny. His disdain for food is no less palpable. Aesthetics was an area where Schopenhauer made important and lasting contributions. When he discussed still-life paintings, he couldn’t help dismissive comments about the food/appetite connection. Still-lifes are fine, he claimed, unless they contain food. Fruit still on the vines was an approved subject. It could then be contemplated by reason for its beauty. Depicted as food, though, the same fruit would act as a stimulus to appetite which makes us prisoners of the object-enslaved will.
When it comes to actual eating practices, philosophers hardly fare better. Wittgenstein, his biographer tells us, “did not care what he ate so long as it was always the same.” Sartre was philosophically annoyed by the body’s regular cry for nutrition. When questioned about his food preferences, he admitted that they were few. He rarely ate vegetables or fruits unless they were mixed into something like pastry. Seafood of all sorts revulsed him, along with tomatoes. Sausages, sauerkraut and chocolate cake were among his favorites. The most striking thing about Sartre’s daily ingestion was the quantity of non-foods with which he contaminated his body: two packs of especially strong cigarettes, interspersed with constant puffing on a pipe, many glasses of wine, beer, distilled alcohol, tea, and coffee, alternating with amphetamines and barbiturates. His special enmity for seafood came back to haunt him one day when, in a mescaline induced state, he imagined himself being stalked by a lobster
When it comes to actual eating practices, philosophers hardly fare better. Wittgenstein, his biographer tells us, “did not care what he ate so long as it was always the same.” Sartre was philosophically annoyed by the body’s regular cry for nutrition. When questioned about his food preferences, he admitted that they were few. He rarely ate vegetables or fruits unless they were mixed into something like pastry. Seafood of all sorts revulsed him, along with tomatoes. Sausages, sauerkraut and chocolate cake were among his favorites. The most striking thing about Sartre’s daily ingestion was the quantity of non-foods with which he contaminated his body: two packs of especially strong cigarettes, interspersed with constant puffing on a pipe, many glasses of wine, beer, distilled alcohol, tea, and coffee, alternating with amphetamines and barbiturates. His special enmity for seafood came back to haunt him one day when, in a mescaline induced state, he imagined himself being stalked by a lobster
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