The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 26, 1994 by Robert P. George

THE CENTRAL pre-liberal tradition of thought about personal and political morality understood the human body as part of the personal reality of the human being. Persons were not considered to be merely bodies, but their bodies were understood to be as much a part of them as were their minds and spirits. The "person" was understood as a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit.

Belief in the unity of the human being contrasts with the modern idea of humans as nonbodily persons inhabiting subpersonal (i.e., merely material) bodies. According to this idea, the body is a mere instrument of the person whose body it is. It is not difficult to see how the adoption of this person/ body dualism underwrites contemporary liberalism's rejection of traditional moral norms against nonmarital sexual acts, abortion, and euthanasia.

This splendid new book by Leon Kass, a physician and professor on the Committee for Social Thought of the University of Chicago, attacks the "corporealism" and dualism characteristic not only of contemporary liberalism, but also (as he demonstrated in his equally splendid Toward a More Natural Science) of much modern science. The Hungry Soul is not, however, about the morality of sex or killing; it is about the morality of eating.

Of course, compared to sexual morality and the morality of killing, the morality of eating is hardly controversial. More or less everybody agrees that it is wrong to eat other people and not wrong to eat fruits, nuts, and vegetables. The eating of meat and other animal products generates a measure of controversy, but vegetarianism is not (yet) one of the central issues in our culture war.

Nevertheless, as Dr. Kass shows, what we eat, and the way we eat, have profound implications for our self-understanding. And he explores these with a view to discovering (or re-discovering) important truths about human nature, the human condition, and the human good. His conclusions undermine the modern dualistic self-understanding and clear the ground for the reassertion of the older view: "Everything that is ours due to our animality is nevertheless different in us . . . precisely because we are not merely or simply animals."

Like lesser beings, humans must feed in order to sustain our lives. Thus, we share in what Dr. Kass calls "the great paradox of life," namely, that "in eating, each living form homogenizes other forms and denies other life, appropriating them solely for its own use and purposes." Still, though we have no choice about whether to consume, we do choose what to consume and how to consume it. In this apparently merely "animal" dimension of our lives, then, we have an opportunity to "perfect our nature" by choosing wisely. It is given to us not merely to feed, but to feed intelligently, i.e., to eat; and even to eat in a manner that is uniquely dignified, gracious, and ennobling, i.e., to dine.

Dr. Kass reaches his conclusions the old-fashioned way: he reasons to them. He brings to bear a rare combination of scientific knowledge and humanistic learning, and his arguments are rigorous, his scholarship meticulous. In defiance of the relativism and multiculturalist sensitivities of the contemporary academy, he does not shrink from stating boldly that, for example, cannibalism is bad, not because most people find it disgusting, but because it "embodies, in principle, a false view of human life."

Even where one ultimately is left unpersuaded by his arguments--as I was, for example, by his strictures against "even seemingly innocent public eating and drinking" which, he maintains, "can violate tacit social relations"--one cannot help being impressed by the author's moral seriousness and sheer thoughtfulness. Dr. Kass's defense of his refusal to allow students to eat or drink in his classes will at least make me stop to think before I next take a cup of coffee into the seminar room.

The Hungry Soul defies dominant academic ideologies in a particularly subversive way. Its defense of traditional understandings against modern orthodoxies takes the form not of a direct philosophical refutation, but rather of a practical undermining. By reasoning his way to sound conclusions, Dr. Kass demonstrates, against contemporary skepticism, the truth-attaining power of reason. By demonstrating the inferiority of some practices to others, he establishes, against cultural relativism, the determinateness of important aspects of human nature and, thus, the human good.

Nowhere is the potential subversiveness of Dr. Kass's achievement clearer than in the brilliant final chapter of The Hungry Soul, entitled "Sanctified Eating: A Memorial of Creation." Here, in considering the significance of Jewish dietary laws, Dr. Kass argues that the central truths about the embodied, but more than merely bodily, human being that are conveyed in the Bible "do not rest on Biblical authority."

Reading Genesis 1 demonstrates the

truth of its claims about the superior ontological

standing of the human. This is

not anthropocentric prejudice but cosmological