Food and Language

The central place of food in animal life is undeniable.[1] An animal is a food machine. The reason is fundamental: animals need energy to survive and food is the source of energy (it would be different if they could just get charged up like an electric car). It is fair to say that animals are obsessed with food: for themselves and their offspring, mainly. Starvation is not on the menu. They are designed to obtain and consume food. They know their way around food. Many suffer early deaths for lack of it. They communicate about food: in hunting and food-seeking, in learning about it, in sharing or not sharing it. If they could talk like us, they would surely talk about food constantly. We are animals (not plants, rocks, or gods), so we share this obsession: we need food as badly as other animals. We are also speakers. Go back to our early days as a species when we were still on the inarticulate side: chronically short of food, squabbling about it, eagerly consuming it. We were a cooperative social species for whom the food problem was very real (still is for some). Imagine that spoken language was just getting started: what would we talk about? Food, of course—food, glorious (but scarce) food. We would all be Billy Bunters with his “tuck” obsession. Our first tentative language-game would be food-oriented. We would be talkative foodies. This would help us in our hunting and gathering, in our food preparation, in our feasting (or lack thereof). Let’s be honest: we would talk about food a hell of a lot. Talking is energy-consuming, so you are not going to do it if energy is in short supply; but talking about food is talking about energy and how to obtain it, so you would let the talk flow. You would be a natural-born food-talker: a food critic, a food savant, a food fanatic. You would talk about food from dawn till dusk—even over dinner! Here’s what you wouldn’t talk about: sense-data or Platonic universals or material particulars in space and time. Your ontology would be a culinary ontology, which is quite enough to be going on with. Your tools are also mainly food-involving: tools for hunting, cutting, dining with. Fire is mainly used for cooking. Family meals are the center of social life. Your speech acts revolve around the food arena—sharing, requesting, praising, wondering aloud where your next meal is coming from. As time passes, you branch out a bit: you are not only interested in food talk—you are also partial to some mating conversation or family dramas or even discussions of what the Sun is. But you began with food; that’s where your linguistic resources were forged. It therefore seeps into your more general chatter. You use food analogies, food metaphors, food paradigms, food conceptual schemes, food methodologies. For that is the basis from which your language developed—and your thought too. For example, you needed to distinguish food objects from non-food objects, the edible from the inedible; this led you to the concept of a material object in general. You may also start to wonder about the non-digestive organs of the body and differentiate them from the digestive organs. You get beyond the narrow ontology of food proper.

Suppose that sometime later you even start to ponder what we would now call your mind, including your senses. There’s a reality there, you feel, but how to talk about it? You naturally turn to your tried-and-true food language and its conceptual underpinnings: consumption, digestion, etc. You might then start to talk of your mind (though you don’t use that term) as if it is like your stomach and appended organs: perceiving is like consuming, reasoning is like digestion, knowledge is like satiation, memory is like a full larder. Yes, that’s it, you think, no need to invent some newfangled conceptual-linguistic scheme. Thus, you speak of food for thought, indigestible lessons, a healthy intellectual diet, vomitous propositional content. The senses are clearly food-oriented—good at detecting and tracking food, as well as evaluating it—so they have a lot to do with food. The brain is like the stomach as an ingestive organ that processes and transforms what is fed into it. The mind thus becomes modelled on the body, specifically the food organs. In time, some clever cognitive scientist starts referring to various “mental modules” analogous to physical organs of the body–the food module along with the reproduction module and the aggression module. He claims that the food mental module was the first to evolve and that it led to the other two: that is, it is cognitively fundamental. The cognitive mind in general is run on food-representing computations and suchlike things. We are still anchored to those early adventures in food cognition and food speech. And it is true that food naturally radiates outwards, requiring competence in object tracking, inference from evidence, fire management, utensil production, communal dining, fair shares, moral rights, laws governing the proper control of food distribution, and so on. You can’t just be focused on food itself; you need knowledge of the whole matrix in which it is naturally embedded. There is even food science, food medicine, food culture, food ethics, food politics, food art, the foody lifestyle, food disorders and phobias, and food snobbery. It’s a big field, conceptually rich, but all stemming from those early days of anxiously scrambling to put food on the table (an anxiety that has never left us). In the beginning was the meal (deeds were meal-directed).

A well-fed naturalistic ethicist might venture the hypothesis that our ethics is rooted in food ethics: altruistic sharing, natural eating rights, duties to the starving, promises about when lunch will be served, admonitions against stealing food from others. And it is perfectly true that a pride of lions, say, is sorely in need of ethical instruction when jostling for a bite of a freshly killed carcass (greedy buggers). The political theorist might likewise insist that distributive justice primordially requires that food be distributed according to certain abstract principles of fairness, with all other cases ultimately reducing to the food case. Capitalism might be defined as accumulating all the food you can lay your hands on in a free market, including the means of food production; at any rate, this is the basic case. Charities will plead that famine is the worst evil to befall man. Philosophers of physics, not to be left out, will contend that physics is founded on a bedrock of concepts that go back to the hunting and gathering age when we had to chase big lumps of matter through the jungle and then chop them into small pieces (this leading to ancient atomism). What is mass, after all, other than the size of your helping? At any rate, our conceptual scheme and spoken language have a history, and what kicked them off was an obsession with food—this being what led to our species supremacy and the very existence of physicists. We must thank God for giving us a brain that enabled us to solve the food problem—next gravity! A brain that can perform as well as ours in the food department has essentially all it needs to achieve greater things. Even mathematics was invented to do agriculture and count herds. (Is it an accident that a circle is the shape of a pie? I should think not.) Food is at the root of it all (plus some), as a matter of biological fact. That is a truth recognized by our most respected religions: the apple in the Garden of Eden, food rituals, food taboos, religious feast days, the last supper, fasts, and so on. I conjecture that religion began in food-related contexts and then expanded out from there—no doubt anxiety about food fueled early religious practices. Food crops up everywhere in human and animal life; it is part of our natural history (as Wittgenstein would say), a major part. It deserves more recognition in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology.[2]

[1] See my “Evolution by Nutritional Selection”.

[2] A key theoretical tool should be evolutionary derivation not just conceptual analysis and family resemblance: how did some existing adaptation begin and how did it develop over time? This would be a truly biological (naturalistic) philosophy. Of course, it involves expanding biology beyond its narrow professional boundaries. Bio-philosophy will take in food and its conceptual expression. It beats sex and war (with which it is strongly connected).

Objectifying the Fluid Mind

I have argued that our ordinary language and thought about the mind involves an alien imposition or intrusion originating in our concepts of the external world.[1] Here I will expand on this viewpoint, detailing the types of imposition involved and the nature of that on which they are impositions. The second task is much more difficult than the first. In what ways, then, do we apply external-object concepts to mental reality, creating an impression of object-hood in the mind? There are several. First and foremost, we describe the mind as intentional: that is, directed at objects in the external world—trees, rocks, animals, etc. The mind is said to be of or about such objects, and this is held to be essential to its nature. It joins up with the objectual. It has objects built into its fabric. This can lead to the extreme view that the mind is composed of objects, or has no nature apart from its intentional objects (as in Sartre’s idea of consciousness as nothingness). And certainly, the idea of objectless consciousness verges on the self-contradictory. In addition, if we ask ourselves what is left over when the objects are removed, no answer is returned and we stammer in consternation. If there is anything left over, it is deeply mysterious and suspicious. Second, the body: we like to link our sensations with body parts—pain in the foot, itches on the scalp, pleasure in the palate, etc. So, we are thinking of sensations as inextricably tied to the body-object, which shapes their intrinsic character. Third, and connected with the intentionality point, we are apt to conceive the mind’s ability to focus and attend as a kind of pointing: it is directed at something, oriented towards it. This is a physical concept in that our notions of direction and pointing are physical notions; the mind only does these things metaphorically. How else are we supposed to think of such mental acts (and this phrase also is tacitly body-inspired)? Fourth, we are prone to think of memory as a “storehouse”—a kind of library, perhaps, or crammed attic. We have no other way to understand its ability to hold (note the word) items we are not currently conscious of. Then too, we have colorful talk of corners of the mind, depths of the mind, layers of it, mental compartments, modules, theaters, blank slates, slabs of marble, private spaces, zones of emptiness. All these locutions are tinged (saturated) with images of the external physical world. It can seem as if we are desparate to think of something to fill the descriptive void, so we come up with almost anything to remove the conceptual discomfort. Some of it is reasonable enough, even essential, but some seems like pure poetry. No doubt about it, we are apt to objectify the mind—beyond what the mental facts warrant. Some find this repugnant and seek to fashion a mental vocabulary that dispenses with objectual language, placing their money on a supposedly pure subjective language modelled on the blooming buzzing consciousness of an infant or some such. This tends not to amount to much and smuggles in the objectionable vocabulary. It’s all stabs in the dark, basically.

This takes us to the nub of the issue: what is the mind independently of its objectual entanglements? Even when those entanglements are legitimate, as in intentionality, we still have the question of what is mentally involved apart from the objects of the intentional act. What is this of-ness? What is the mind in its pure unadulterated essence? The question is heady and seemingly unanswerable, but I think I may have an answer of sorts. True, it calls for a drastic revision of our conceptual scheme, a complete revolution in human thought, a step into the intellectual abyss—but hey, nothing ventured nothing gained and all that. Actually, it is not quite as startling as it might sound once you get used to it. The answer is this: the mind is a fluid. I don’t mean water or gin or the nectar of the gods; I mean fluid in a more general sense. The OED (bible of the bibliophile) gives us this: “a substance that has no fixed shape and yields easily to external pressure; a gas or (especially) a liquid; able to flow easily; not settled or stable”. We could paraphrase this as “a dynamic, ever-changing process; not a fixed and rigid entity”. To be fluid (and hence a fluid) is to be not a discrete solid thing but a continuous malleable flowing stuff. A Cartesian dualist might well assert that the mind is an immaterial fluid in this capacious sense. We already speak of the “river of consciousness”; well, the mind is fluidic not static, continuous not discrete, a process not a fixed entity. You see how the initial shock wears off? The mind has a fluid mechanics not a solid-state mechanics. It flows and changes; it doesn’t stand still like a dumb rock. It has a fluid metaphysics not a static metaphysics. Granted, we don’t know what this mental fluid is, but we do know that it is fluid—that it obeys the laws of fluids. It is a shifting, formless, flowing, buoyant, bubbly, energetic, fascinating, fluent…not thing, but “something”. It can speed up, slow down, go quiet, rage, and change its shape as the occasion warrants. It moves silently and rapidly. Consciousness, in particular, is a fluid being, flowing this way and that, changing its shape (but it has no shape): now it is perceptually awake, now it is dreamily asleep. It is protean and animated. The mind minds; it isn’t a static object awaiting an outside force to arouse it. It is all action, hustling and bustling. Don’t we experience a wave of emotion, a torrent of thoughts, a rush of memory? Doesn’t our experience sometimes wash over us? Isn’t the will liquidly mercurial? Aren’t our intentional objects like things floating on the surface of our consciousness? Aren’t some things submerged in the roiling psyche? Freud had a hydrodynamics of the mind, and wasn’t he onto something there? Isn’t consciousness phenomenologically liquidy and gassy? Not like other fluid things, to be sure, but ontologically in the same class. Consciousness courses, gushes, and surges. Aren’t we flooded with the stuff?

If so, we have an answer to our earlier question: we objectify what is really fluidic. That is obviously a bad idea on the face of it: fluids aren’t solid objects. Clearly, our folk fluid mechanics of consciousness is primitive, so we supplement it with more familiar concepts drawn from elsewhere. Thus, we get the mish-mash that now exists in our conceptions of mind: an intuitive sense of fluidity combined with a forced imposition of solidity. We are trying to solidify a fluid, to put it crudely. We are imposing an ontological scheme onto a reality that spurns it in its inner nature. We are not going with the flow but contradicting it. We are like people trying to describe colors by shapes. We are trying to reduce the fluidic to the static. And then there is the fact that the mind isn’t even spatial (as we experience it), so we are committing a double category mistake. That’s okay for practical purposes, but we should at least fess up to it. The brain doesn’t operate by principles of fluid mechanics (more electromagnetics), but the mind is all fluidity.[2] No doubt it needs its own mechanics; it won’t do to treat it as just like water. In any case, this picture enables us to give some kind of answer to the question that troubles us, viz. what the mind intrinsically is beyond its habitual description in objectual terms. I heartily agree that this picture is highly speculative, not to say fanciful, but (as Popper says) science proceeds by constructing imaginative theories that are then subject to falsifying test; you can’t just extract theories from the available data. And the more falsifiable the better. In this spirit, I claim that the fluid theory of consciousness (“fluidism”) has not yet been falsified.[3]

[1] See my “Concepts of Mind”.

[2] If we had opened up the human head and found an elaborate hydraulic system, instead of a solid brain made of chunky neurons, we would no doubt have been more disposed towards a hydraulic conception of the mind. As it is, we have only a vague introspective sense of the fluidity of mind; but it is stronger than any sense of the solidity of mind. The river analogy does not strike us as wildly wide of the mark; we don’t say “Oh no, the mind is nothing like a river; it’s more like a pile of dominoes or Stone Henge”.

[3] I actually think Popper’s methodology applies better to philosophical problems than scientific ones, precisely because in philosophy the data are so exiguous. There is a greater role for imagination in philosophy than in science, and philosophy is largely a critical discipline–that’s how it proceeds. Someone comes up with a wildly ambitious theory from nowhere and then other people attack it like a pack of rabid dogs. We call this “philosophy”.

My Novels

How should my novels be interpreted? I wrote them, so I should know. There are two: Bad Patches and The Space Trap. The first title suggests both bad patches in a life and bad patches in a person—and their interplay. The second title might suggest a science fiction story, but actually refers to the fact that we are trapped in space existentially. David Green is the anti-hero of BP and Alan Swift is the protagonist of ST. Green is unripe, Swift is fast-moving. Dave is a coarse foul-mouthed would-be artist on the make; Alan is a mild-mannered insurance clerk with a wife and family. BP is about the tension between art and morality; ST is about the tension between home and abroad. The characters are trapped in these tensions, riven by them. The first is a punk existentialist novel, the second a domestic drama set on two continents. The first is first-person narrated, the second third-person. Both are comedies with nasty bits. The author puts them through it, chuckling in the background. Neither character is remotely like him. It would be hard to say that either character is very likable, especially the artist (pungent is the best you could say of him). Alan is a bit of a blank slate in search of an identity; he has a punishing imaginative life. He seems on the brink of fading away. Dave is very in-your-face.

What are the literary antecedents to these tales of modern man? BP looks back to Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey) and James Joyce (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and before them Plato. It drastically updates these works, and even surpasses Martin Amis for grimy yob characters. The reader is drawn into reading about Dave’s “adventures” in 1980s London—he or she feels the lure of art, even when morally transgressive. In the case of ST, the obvious references are to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Homer’s Odyssey: the contrast between domestic life and the life of Elsewhere. Alan is both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, full of fear. His imaginary self leads another life altogether. He escapes from Holloway (geddit?) to New York and a new identity, only to be forced back home. We don’t know what will befall him. Dave Green ends his story bored and restless after seeking security and love. Neither escapes the tension in which they are enmeshed.