In a couple earlier posts, I wrote briefly and inexpertly about Plato. I did so mainly so I could pivot toward Epicurus, who provides another way of thinking about food and philosophy. I’m not a classicist, nor a philosopher by trade, but I do like to trace things backwards and try to understand how we got to where we are. 1 In pivoting toward Epicurus, I think we might be able to highlight different starting points that aren’t possible if we begin with Plato.
According to peer-reviewed academic sources like the IEP, “Epicurus rejected the existence of Platonic forms and an immaterial soul, and he said that the gods have no influence on our lives.” Epicurus was coming on the scene (figuratively speaking) in Athens as Plato was exiting it. His school was called The Garden. There, he taught the “basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms,” so that “he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife,” according to the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The materialism taught by Epicurus is radical because it frees humans up to stop worrying about death, deities, and the afterlife and pursue pleasure in the life that can be perceived by the senses. 2
The philosophy of Epicurus might be hedonism, depending on how one defines hedonism. However, it’s not gluttony or self-indulgence. It may not even be pleasure-seeking (and it’s certainly not whatever a Google search using the search terms “pleasure” and “seeking” would return). More accurately, from what I understand, Epicurean philosophy could be described as “anxiety avoidant.”
In Epicureanism, Tim O’Keefe writes that Epicurus understood that “lack of bodily pain and freedom from mental turmoil are not neutral states, but themselves pleasurable: indeed, the highest sorts of pleasures. So Epicurean hedonism turns out to be the pursuit of tranquillity.” My reading of Epicurean shows little overlap with popular usage of the word “hedonist.” I suspect this discrepancy might be because our culture’s current understanding of pleasure is vastly different from what Epicurus must have meant by pleasure. We can have almost whatever our pleasure delivered to our door (or wherever we may be) almost instantly. This changes the meaning of pleasure and, thus, the meaning of hedonism. Pleasure for Epicurus was tranquility, but our current tech, media, health, and economic landscapes are not built for the pursuit of tranquility. Instead, they are meant to keep us engaged by scanning and pecking at the keyboard and poking at the screen, collapsing from chronic conditions, and paying middlemen at every step of the way. As O’Keefe writes, tranquility is “attained primarily by shedding the vain and empty desires that lead to anxiety.” So we need to explore desire more fully.
In Living For Pleasure, Emily A. Austin breaks down Epicurean desires into the following categories: necessary desires, extravagant desires, and corrosive desires. Necessary desires are for things that sustain us like friendship and food. Extravagant desires are things that are nice when they come along, like occasional parties with good friends, good food and good drinks. Corrosive desires are things that are “not conducive to human well-being,” according to Austin.
In terms of food, then, excessive want of junk food, candy, or alcohol might be corrosive desires, but a birthday cake at party might be an extravagant desire and caloric intake in the form of rice and beans might be a necessary desire. I have an aversion to talking about food and diet on an individual level. So, I’m not promoting any way of eating, fad diet, or any personal regimen based on what I know about Epicurus. Even more, I’m trying not to use diet or eating habits as a way to pass judgment on myself or others. That said, it’s hard to read the word “corrosive desires” without judgment or at least sorting foods and behaviors into the categories above. What I like to do in these moments is to zoom out. While I have an issue with using diet or eating habits to sort people, I have no problem passing judgment on corporations, marketing practices, policies, and other courses of action that promote corrosive desires to the detriment of more sustainable practices. So, in the world inside my head, a corrosive desire for, say, cheeseburgers (my favorite food), might be manufactured by a corporation like McDonalds. (The old documentary Super Size Me comes to mind.) The burger may not be a great food to eat in terms of health or seasonality or animal welfare, but it would likely have been in the extravagant category for Epicurus. The desire for a cheeseburger can’t be corrosive to an individual until it becomes so easy to obtain (affordable, proximate, fast, and preserved) that it is accessible at every meal. This requires the kind of scale that McDonalds and other burger chains have achieved. So the corrosive desire isn’t created in the mind and body of the individual, but rather in the ecologies in which the individual resides in, works in, shops in, and travels through. As it scales to the point of impacting ecologies, the burger can be seen as corrosive. So what do we do? Personally, I seek out better burgers with better meat from better places, and I often opt for the veggie burger, even though I’m not a vegetarian. The latter feels like it pushes the burger back into the extravagant rather than corrosive desire zone.
Notes
1 I grew up going to church every Sunday, and I was indoctrinated into thinking that old texts, and the communities that grow up around them, have power. Mainstream Christianity stopped working for me in the late ’90s, mainly because of its preoccupation with tightly circumscribing acceptable relationships. So I went in search of other texts instead. In the wake of the postmodern textscape of the past quarter century, any bricolage of texts–from the oldest and most sacred to the most photoshopped and manifesto-y–can be created easily. (It’s about to get easier with AI.) And these pastiches can pass as doctrine if they distributed pervasively and persuasively. Once they gain an audience, a cult may be born. Then things can get dicey. Switching from Plato to Epicurus does not solve any of these problems. However, Epicurean teachings on corrosive desires might help cults from getting out of hand or getting too far into dangerous politics.
2 I phrase life this way not to highlight the role of the human sensorium in Epicurean philosophy (although it wouldn’t be wrong to do so), but to avoid using words like “life on earth” or “real life” or “this life” or “this world” to distinguish “life” from “the afterlife.” I’m not interested in making hard distinctions about when life begins, when it ends, and who gets to police those boundaries.