The Hungry Soul. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1994 by Roger D. Masters

NATURE IS BACK. For most of this century, such terms as "natural law," "natural right," and "human nature"--the basis of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence through the end of the nineteenth century--were banished from popular discourse and academic writing. Liberals spoke of civil rights and social welfare; conservatives emphasized individual freedom, private property, and the laws of the market; Marxists used social class and history. If asked to assess nature versus nurture, behaviorists, Freudians, economists, and cultural anthropologists could usually agree it was nurture that counted most.

As the historian Carl Degler has recently shown (In Search of Human Nature, 1992), naturalist explanations of human society and behavior are returning after decades of absence. There are many reasons for this trend. The promise of orthodox Marxism is dead. Optimism has faded that governmental policies like the New Deal or the Great Society could achieve goals of reform and progress. Above all, the revolution in biology, now commands attention.

Advances in genetics, symbolized by the Human Genome Project, reveal inherited influences on behavior that can no longer be dismissed as ideological artifacts (as was the ease with earlier statistical estimates of genes and IQ). Neuroscientists have discovered more about the brain's anatomy and chemistry in the last decade than in all prior history. Ecologists and environmental scientists have found that, whatever the political context, uncontrolled economic development can lead to acid rain, destruction of the earth's ozone layer, and such disasters as Chernobyl, Bhopal, and the Exxon Valdez.

Leon Kass' extraordinary new book speaks to the transformation in human self-understanding required by these developments. Not that The Hungry Soul(*) will receive universal scholarly approval--many academics can be expected to dislike and criticize the book. This very fact, however, indicates why Kass' philosophic essay on eating, nature, and civilization is worth a careful reading.

ON OPPOSITE SIDES of almost every university, scholars sharply divide body and soul, nature and society, fact and value. The result is odd: more professors are likely to use Prozac than to understand why it works. Philosophers forget their epistemological qualms when they go to the doctor. Geneticists fear the political implications of their own work, yet to prevent abuses of the new genetics they suggest little beyond "democratic control." Is it surprising that the public is confused by emerging biomedical technologies and products?

Kass is bound to be distasteful to humanists who have espoused the post-modernist view that science is as subjective as poetry. To argue that cultural norms are grounded in and need to be consistent with natural ends, as Kass does, will be anathema to those who think values are freely chosen and cultures are a human creation.

Paradoxically, scientists will also probably dismiss The Hungry Soul. Many will consider Kass unscientific because he attacks the materialistic bias and mechanical explanations that predominate in contemporary biology. Using simple language in place of the bewildering complexity of contemporary scientific discourse, The Hungry Soul begins from our everyday experience of living things and challenges the view that an animal's nature (not to mention life itself) can be reduced to DNA, biochemistry, or neuroanatomy.

ALTHOUGH FOCUSED ON eating, Kass presents a profound yet broadly accessible reflection on the most basic issues of nature and human nature. He begins by showing that living things are principally defined by the "form" of an organism, not by its matter. Since living things are goal-directed, our criteria of judgment cannot be divorced from the way our desires satisfy necessity: "understanding human eating throws light on the relation between the nonrational and the rational in man, and between the strictly natural and the cultural or ethical."

Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the application of this perspective to Homo sapiens as an omnivorous animal with an upright posture. Kass presents a highly provocative--some would say ethnocentric--analysis of what he calls "the human food," showing the importance of bread, meat, and salt. This treatment blurs the distinction between the hunter-gatherers (long characteristic of hominid evolution) and human civilizations after the development of agriculture (the precondition of a diet based on bread). While some critics dismiss this as a sign of Kass' ethnocentrism, the analysis has the merit of forcing the reader to focus on the dangers as well as the opportunities of our omnivorous diet.

In the following chapter, Kass looks at the controls on appetite which form the basis of civilized social life. He emphasizes two: the duties of the host (sharing food with non-kin as well as with members of the family), and the taboo on cannibalism (the need for respecting the humanity of strangers). In place of feeding--the satisfaction of need without conscious constraint--Kass shows that humans have developed eating.