Food builds itself: philosophers like to eat something in their stomachs

Editor's note: When philosophers think, they often forget their bodies, especially what accumulates in their bodies when they eat. However, between the mind and the stomach, there is a complex network of similarities and mutual evidence, which can be mistakenly ignored: If you don't like raw octopus, will Diogenes be the enemy of civilization and civilizational practice? If Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract, had only dairy products in his daily recipes, would he have extolled a simple diet? Sartre's nightmares were filled with crabs, and hadn't he spent his whole life theoretically hating crustaceans?

The French philosopher Michel Onfrey's The Belly of a Philosopher examines the eating preferences of philosophers such as Diogenes, Rousseau, Kant, Fourier, Nietzsche, Marinetti, and Sartre, and re-energizes philosophical dignity to cod, barley soup, wine, grilled sausages, coffee with aromas or cologne. As Nietzsche put it, "human salvation" depends more on dietary problems than any ancient metaphysics of theologians.

"The Philosopher's Belly", by Michel Onfrey, translated by Lin Quanxi, East China Normal University Press, Six Points Book, 2017.1

Diogenes, who loved to fart, masturbate and cannibalize, feasted on guests, and the guests were very symbolic: Rousseau, who was a herbivorous paranoid who praised the tastes of the common people; Kant, who was not smiling and suspicious, always thinking about how to reconcile alcoholism and ethics; Nietzsche, who was hostile to Germania, created Piedmontese cuisine to purify the Prussian diet; Fourier, who had a gloomy face and wanted to become clausewitz in the science of nutritional warfare; Sartre, who thought about sticky matter and cooked lobster with the hallucinogenic cactus toxin And then there's Marinetti, the experimental foodie who recommends the most unexpected flavors.

From the cynical nihilism of diet to the futuristic revolution of cooking, there are various paths in between: connecting people who are concerned with dietetics. We boldly use the new term diet (ethics) here. At the table in front of the guests: a raw octopus and some raw human flesh, dairy products and strange dried plums turned into sauerkraut, a bunch of sausages and a plate of cologne coffee boiled sausages, canned meat sauce, fish mushroom cakes and a crustacean with a broken belly. Those who abstain from drinking drink water, and those who enjoy himself drink. Kant had Médoc wines and his favorite cod, and Rousseau had crisp springs, curds and fresh fruit.

The absentees of the banquet were, of course, elsewhere, and they were concerned with good dishes, or favored foods: Descartes was too silent, a free-thinking swordsman who was not only hedonistic but also angry. While in Paris, he did not mind drinking barreled wine in a tavern, because the wine produced in the Vineyards of Poissy was only a regular drink of the court, nor did he mind the most delicate and delicate drink in Montmartre. The only way to know about Descartes is to say something based on the words of the extremely serious biographer Bayeux. The more authentic biography of the author of the Methodology seems to be more full of women, alcohol, and duels. Spinoza was also silent, and his life was like his own work. Of course, life is like works, which is very common. Spinoza, like a regular building, an uncanny machine, a harmonious form, Colerus said: "He used to drink only one glass of milk with butter all day (...) ) and a can of beer (...) One day, he ate only coarse oat paste mixed with grapes and butter. A few hours before his death, the Dutch wise man drank the old man's chicken soup that someone else had made for him. Spinoza's taste seems very simple: from the simple Ethics and its rigorous arguments, it is impossible to deduce the diet of the new Kaguntuya.

In between the two courses, Hegel appeared with his Bordeaux wine. In his hand was a letter to be sent to the Raman brothers, which said: "I sincerely ask you to send me another barrel of measurement at that time, 1 barrel is about 70 liters." This time for Medoc wine, you should have received money to buy barrels, please use the barrels, the top of the barrel last time rotted, and some wine was spilled. "Hegel's work is a beautiful artificial machine, but it is still regrettable, because the key things are not there: tears, laughter, wine, women, food, pleasure. Let's dream of a phenomenology of diet...

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The art of eating is the art of summing up everything. Foucault writes: "The practice of eating as the art of living is entirely (...) ) to build yourself into a way of forming a subject. The subject's consideration of the body is legitimate, necessary, and sufficient. "Morality and aesthetics are inseparable, so dietetics becomes the science of subjectivity. Dietetics reveals to us that there can be a science of the individual that can lead us to universality like a landing springboard. Food is like getting into real arguments. At the end of the day, food is the way to construct the self into a compact work. It allows for uniqueness, it allows for self-construction, all of which are embedded in the famous sayings of Buria-Savaram. In Taste Physiology, Fourier's charismatic brother-in-law writes, "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are." ”