“It is from Plato that we inherit two basic lines of thinking about the body, which I will oversimplify here for the sake of argument. The first is that philosophy consists in the pursuit of truth, which is attained through thinking, and analogous to erotic desire. Second, this pursuit is hindered rather than helped by the body and its hungers, both because the body’s requirement for food and drink is merely a need, not a desire, and therefore bears no useful relationship to the pursuit of truth; and because the body’s demands distract from the real work of thought. Levinas begins his career by agreeing with the first idea but rejecting the second.” (Goldstein, 2010, p. 35)
The abundance of limitless eating has made it easier to see beyond the aforementioned second platonic idea—perhaps there is a relation between eating and the pursuit of truth after all, if we find ourselves constantly tempted by the potential of eating beyond need. Excessive digestive fullness, I reckon, has now even escaped Levinas’s ideas of nausea (quite ironically, as Goldstein quotes from Levinas’s On Escape): we have conditioned ourselves to numb even that biological “[hyperawareness] of our own innards” (35); we might feel the discomfort of the over-filled stomach or the pain of heartburn that comes with it, but the sensation of disgust has lost its meaning as we ask instead whether we had made our money’s worth in our gluttony.
If it is hunger that reminds us to our inherent “positive bond to the world” (36), what does it mean for us to exist in a time of extreme consumerism vis-à-vis increasing poverty, war, and nihilism? Our experiences of hunger have become vastly contradictory. While one bloats with decadent gold-lined gastronomical wonders, another makes do with the consequences of microplastics that seep into what little they can eat from the production lines that enslave them in the day. It is not even the case that these two images are from one side of the globe and from another far from the other. Likely they are in the same so-called nation, with the same predatory institutions that feeds one’s vain food restrictions (so that they might consume something else instead, perhaps) and keeps the over-tired malnourished. The world itself is what looks to be without grounding.
Furthermore, we have now been embedded with a different kind of hunger. The world is no longer merely physical; we have since created a new reality, the digital, tangible through the mediums of technology that had penetrated the very atmosphere. The chronically online is a new kind of hunger, as insatiable as greed and gluttony. On the surface, the phenomena of doomscrolling and Internet ‘addictions’ may seem to be as useless to the pursuit of truth as is hunger to Plato’s line of thinking. Yet there are the faint whispers of ethics in relation to our technological use and dependence. Levinas’s ontology of eating may remind us to ask about the underlying metaphysics in these concerns of the ethical.
Let us go back to the experience of food: it is a matter of interest how the sensation of fullness occurs. In the middle of a good meal (or an expensive buffet, perhaps), the sensation might escape us until it is too late. One minute, we still have the gusto for another plate, and not even another minute later, we are met with something probably akin to nausea. There is then the sudden tension in the stomach that is barely keeping in all the food consumed and more. At times in this state, we may begin to wonder how we had started eating in the first place.
Food nowadays has developed to maintain their allure despite such a sensation. It seems less and less possible to physically feel the sensation of fullness. We are no longer familiar with satiety. Hunger just seems to eventually transform itself into something else. We eat until the time is up and then we realise that we later need to deprive ourselves of food to balance the appearance of fullness.
The same experience can be found online. There is no more end to the scrolling as the digital spaces are being re-designed for a totalising infinity maintained by personalistic algorithms. One thing—perhaps a curiosity regarding a particular question—makes us go online and in the pursuit of that curiosity we are kept in a quicksand of endless content. We no longer feel the physical sensation of proper intellectual exhaustion. We realise our fullness just a little too late when it has already developed into other experiences like that of burnout and addiction and apathy.
Truth be told, these phenomena of limitlessness are what seem to overshadow the true abundance of the infinite which we may aim for in pursuits of truth. Both Platonic ideas on the body are lost when the body is no longer bound to the material, that is when we have forgotten that the finite is not truly limitless and so what we seek is not to be found in its illusions. Maybe this should not be surprising when the rationality sees bodily needs as distractions as oppose to a necessary aspect of this existential transcendence with the ‘pursuit of truth’.
1. Goldstein, David. “Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating.” Gastronomica, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer 2010). University of California Press. 34-44.