I am much more interested in a question on which the ‘salvation of humanity’ depends far more than on any theologian’s curio: the question of nutrition.
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Diogenes – farter, masturbator and cannibal – has invited to his banquet the most emblematic of dining companions: Rousseau, paranoid herbivore and champion of plebeian tastes; Kant, the austere hypochondriac, trying to bring together drunkenness and ethics; Nietzsche, the Germanophobe who champions Piedmontese cuisine in order to purify Prussian nutrition; the nebulous Fourier, who wants to be the Clausewitz of nutritive warfare; Sartre, the viscous thinker, comfortable with lobster à la mescaline; and Marinetti, the experimental gastrosopher, who combines the most unexpected flavours.1
From Cynical alimentary nihilism to futurist culinary revolution, many paths, winding and diverse, can be taken. They link men who are preoccupied – if we may venture the neologism – with Dietet(h)ics, understood as knowledge of tastes. On the banquet table of these guests we find raw octopus and human flesh, milk products and sugared prunes strangely transformed into sauerkraut, a rosary of sausages and a plate of ‘Excited Pig’, a sausage cooked in coffee flavoured with eau de cologne, small pastries, vol-au-vents and gutted crustaceans. Water for abstainers and wine for hedonists. Kant’s Médoc and his choice of cod, spring water and clear fountains, Rousseau’s curd and fresh fruit.
Those absent are otherwise occupied with their orders or their favourite foods. Descartes is too quiet. He, who in his Parisian period was a brawler and libertine, a hedonist and bandit, was not averse to taverns where a Poissy vintage, the table wine of the court, was served from the barrel. Or he would opt for a rough drop from the hills of Montmartre.2 All we know about him is what the overly austere Baillet wanted us to know. It seems that more accurate biographies of the author of The Discourse on Method would be full of women, wine and duels. Spinoza, also, is silent. His life – as is so often the case – resembles his work: regular architecture, a machine without surprises, Apollonian in form. Colerus tells us that: ‘He lived a whole day on a milk soup tempered with butter . . . and a pot of beer . . . another day he ate nothing but gruel served with raisins and butter.’3 A few hours before dying, the Dutch sage ate some broth from an old rooster prepared by the people of the lodging house. Baruch’s taste certainly seems plain. Based on the abstemiousness of the Ethics and the rigour of his proofs, one can hardly infer he ate like a new Gargantua.
Between courses Hegel appears with his wine from Bordeaux. In his hand he is holding a letter to the Ramann brothers that reads:
I once more have the honour of requesting from your graces the delivery of a quarter Eimer [about 11 litres] of wine, this time Médoc. You should have received the money for the barrel: but I pray send me one that is in good condition; the last one was cracked on the top and some of the wine had leaked out.4
It is a pity that we have to deplore the absence of the essential – tears, laughter, wine, women, food and pleasure – in the beautiful artificial machinery that is the oeuvre of Hegel. We can only dream of a phenomenology of food . . .
A few paces behind him the niggardly Victor Cousin makes his way. He once confided that he understood Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the day when, in a German restaurant, a monumental plate was brought to the table, piled high with vegetables and garnishes, topped off with a ridiculously thin slice of meat: the basics reduced to very little. This corporal of the French philosophical ranks was a confirmed bachelor, a skinflint without peer and an inveterate scrounger, with nothing to recommend him except the passion for chocolate that was his undoing. This explains his need for thriftiness the day he invited Kant’s translator, Barni, to lunch. After having ordered and eaten a copious meal, Cousin pretended he had an urgent assignment and made off, abandoning the bill to the forsaken translator.
Should we be surprised to read from the hand of Proudhon, militarist and misogynist to boot, a principled denunciation of Fourier’s gastrophosy, transforming it into a vulgar ‘philosophy of the gullet’? Is there any surprise in discovering that a Freud deaf, or rather melophobic, resistant to music, had installed a repetitive alimentary ritual in his house, providing the same casserole on his table every day, with only the sauces changed?5 Resistance to gastronomy can teach us a lot about the genre, the work and the person. The denial of food and of the pleasure it brings is the parent of asceticism, whatever form it takes. It is also the cousin of renunciation, generating medical, vegetarian or vegan dietetics, those apparently rational regimens that are varieties of anorexia.
Others err through lack of conformity in their food. Thus the divine Marquis de Sade who, putting nourishment in the service of sexuality, elevates chicken breasts to the pinnacle, theorizing that they produce the most succulent stools for the greediest of coprophages.6 Or Anne-Marie Schumann, who is only remembered by history because she was particularly fond of spiders, coyly preferring them fried.7 Distantly related to this are Claude Lévi-Strauss’s dining companions, who treated him royally with a bowl of nice white grubs, wriggly and crunchy on the tooth, but in the end releasing subtle flavours and delicate aromas.8 Certain Gnostics have been just as much on the hunt for rare foodstuffs. On this question, we have to say a few words on the topic of spermatophages and their close companions the foetophages. Epiphanius, the Bishop of Pavis in the fifth century, relates that Gnostics wanting to take care of unwanted pregnancies retrieve the foetus with their fingers and, ‘pound it in a kind of mortar, mix it with honey, pepper and various revolting condiments including perfumed oils’.9 They took this meal together, eating with their fingers. Also distantly related are the Guayaki Indians visited by the ethnologist Pierre Clastres, who describes the pleasure they derived from sucking brushes soaked with the human fat that oozed from dead bodies they had roasting on the spit.10
We also have to mention those – neither lacking a sense of taste nor original – who (let us dream a little) might have been able to modify somewhat the rituals of 25 December, so that we no longer celebrate the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem, but rather the feast itself: on a Christmas evening in Saint-Malo the philosopher Julien Offroy de La Mettrie was born. Known primarily as a doctor, author of a work on the treatment of venereal diseases, he is also the author of the admirable Arts of Pleasure in which he teaches the most radical kind of eudemonism. At the table, distinguished and sensual, voluptuous and delicate, philosophers with a taste for La Mettrie sacrifice themselves to the pure pursuit of pleasure. During the dinner,
the bloated glutton, running out of room after the first course, looks like La Fontaine’s swan, and soon has no more desire to eat. The voluptuary tastes all the dishes, but in small quantities; he paces himself, wanting to gain most benefit . . . The others toast with champagne; he drinks it, in long draughts, like all voluptuaries.11
Later we find the rationalist gourmet philosopher at Lord Tyrconnel’s table where a pâté is served. In his Man-Machine the thinker had already warned about meat that was undercooked.12 But at the aristocrat’s table, he fails to notice the advanced state of the pâté he is eating. Death is awaiting him.
Another gastrosophic Christmas evening: in the year 1837 one of the first chroniclers of gluttony, one of the fathers of gastronomic literature, Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, passed away. His grandfather, a pork butcher, had died of suffocation from a pâté de fois gras in 1754. His grandson displayed a striking eccentricity and was to be dignified by a similar fate. Born with deformed hands – half paws, half claws – he hid his palmate appendages under white gloves that also served to disguise a complicated metal apparatus that allowed him prehensibility. A devotee of the blackest humour, he sometimes put his hands on a burning hotplate and invited those present to do the same . . . He was also the instigator of twice-weekly, ‘semi-nutritional’ philosophical lunches. They were wry pastiches of masonic rituals, where one had to drink seventeen cups of coffee in the presence of sixteen dining companions; that is, seventeen people in total. The meal was theatricalized, the food the stuff of fantasy. Always the cynic, Grimod would test the faithfulness of his friends gastronomically by sending them notes announcing his death. He invited them to a meal in his memory. Thinking themselves liberated forever from an eccentric, the opportunists who were only lukewarm friends failed to show up. Others took the trouble. During the funeral dinner, Grimod appeared in flesh and blood, giving the lie to the news. Then, sitting at table, he carried on the revelry with the faithful. The only real faux pas he committed was to draft a pamphlet entitled The Advantages of Good Living over Women. But every eudaemonist worthy of the name knows that the two registers do not compete, but are complementary.
There are so many reasons to anoint 25 December as the celebration of feasts, the pretext for banquets. The establishment of other occasions would make up for the rarity of commemorations. Thus would the emblematic moments of philosophy begin to take shape: the melons that figure in Descartes’ dreams, the apple that taught Fourier the theory of Attraction, or the omelette that was Condorcet’s undoing . . .13
Dietetics is a serious modality of paganism, if not of atheism and of immanence. All transcendence is dismissed in favour of a will to self, serving as a gnomon of the real. There is a greater risk of alienation with any recourse to the outside or the beyond. In any case, it is not surprising that independently of his text and of the multiple interpretations given it, it is to Ludwig Feuerbach that we owe the celebrated, ‘man is what he eats.’ In his anonymous review of Max Stirner he writes: ‘Follow the senses! Where the senses take over, religion and philosophy come to an end.’14 And where life begins, one might add. Elsewhere, he states that ‘the body is the foundation of reason, the site of logical necessity’, and that ‘the world of the senses is the foundation and condition of reason and intelligence’.15 It is not irrelevant that Feuerbach was the first theorist of atheism, and the first genealogist of alienation. It was from his pen that definitive writings on the religious, on religion and its multiple forms, first appeared. The sacred is dissected, analysed and reduced, like a sauce. Feuerbach also developed a new sensualist positivity that derives more or less from a French materialist, then English sensualist, tradition. A modernity is taking shape that Nietzsche would soon inherit, and then pass on to our century. Food and sustenance became materialist principles for an art of living without God, and without gods.
There has not really been a science of the mouth as a pathway to an aesthetics of the self since Nietzsche urged us to take note of things close by, to make history from fragments of daily life. If we have to be cognizant of the approaches taken by Noëlle Chatelet, Jean-Paul Aron or Jean-François Revel, we also have to note just how silent contemporary thought is on the central idea. 16 Still, there is an exception: the late work of Michel Foucault, who became ill at the same time as an epistemological turn in his oeuvre. By the end of his History of Sexuality, the structures of the essential – love, pleasures, sexuality and the body – had been highlighted. After the appearances of the social machinery for excluding difference and producing normality, he moved on to the most secret but most exciting of mysteries. Finally a genuine Nietzschean concern for the essentials emerged.
In The Use of Pleasure, dietetics is described as something we might call an art without a museum. It is read as a way to ‘stylize a freedom’, a logic of the body at the same time as an apology for its mastery.17 The choice of a food becomes what it really is: an existential choice through which one accedes to selfconstitution. A genealogy of dietetics isolates medical care as a foundational principle: health is the aim of the dietician. The texts in the Hippocratic body of work should be read on this subject, and followed up with Galen. The evolution of this concern marks a progressive autonomy of mobility. The alimentary regime becomes
a fundamental category through which human behavior could be conceptualized. It characterized the way in which one managed one’s existence, and it enabled a set of rules to be affixed to conduct; it was a mode of prolematization of behavior that was indexed to a nature which had to be preserved and to which it was right to conform. Regimen was a whole way of living.18
A way of living one’s life, certainly, but also a way of imagining one’s body, fantasizing the future, making diet a part of future reality. There is no innocent dietetics. It advises us on the will to be and to become, on the archetypical categories of a life, a thought, a system or a work. Hence our interest in travelling this path among doctrines and books through the history of philosophy, to arrive at our ideas in an oblique and unfamiliar manner. Food is like Ariadne’s thread, saving us from kicking our heels or getting lost in a labyrinth.
The art of eating is art in fine. Foucault writes: ‘the practice of regimen as an art of living was . . . a whole manner of forming oneself as a subject who had the proper, necessary and sufficient concern for his body.’19 With ethics merged with aesthetics, dietetics becomes a science of subjectivity. It shows that there can be a science of the particular as a stairway to the universal. Food as an argument that can penetrate the real. It is, in the end, a stratagem for the construction of the self as a coherent work of art. The singularity that it authorizes and the elaboration of the self that it permits have established as proverbial a Brillat-Savarin aphorism. In his Physiology of Taste, Charles Fourier’s charming brother-in-law writes: ‘Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you who you are.’20
But let us leave theory there, because Schopenhauer and Rabelais are just fleeing the banquet where we had a quick glance inside. The first has just scratched something in the notebook where he regularly maintains a gastronomic commentary inspired by these banquets.21 The second holds some recipes in his hand. One is about the aphrodisiac qualities of wine in which a red mullet has been drowned, and the other is on butter from Montpellier, which he noted on his Diploma of Medicine.