[lit-ideas] Re: A Connoisseur's Guide to the Noumenon
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 08:40:17 -0400
Can we be wrong about our own noumena? Is a connoisseur always right?
Gombrich, relying on Popper in "On Physiognomic Perception", notes that
connoisseurs _can_ (and will) go wrong.
We are discussing the meaning of 'connoisseur'.
Is a gourmand a connoisseur?
A gourmand has of course to be distinguished from a gourmet.
A gourmand is usually a person who takes great pleasure in food.
As such, the phrase,
"I am a gourmand"
triggers a different implicature from the similar phrase,
"I am a gourmet"
-- which emphasises an individual with a highly refined discerning palate.
As such, 'gourmand' and 'gourmet' may still be distinguished from 'food
connoisseur', as per:
How to Become a Food Connoisseur - Celebrity Life
_www.celebritycruises.co.uk/.../how-to-become-a-f_
(http://www.celebritycruises.co.uk/.../how-to-become-a-f) ...
Learn how to become a food connoisseur with our extensive range of onboard
cooking workshops and shore excursions, which will truly test ...
In a message dated 9/11/2014 2:49:07 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
Palma@xxxxxxxxxx writes:
What is the law of Descartes?
It sounds as if
I am a gourmand, then I can’t be wrong about what you have to eat
Sort of.
There is a displacement from the first person (Cartesian -- "I am a
gourmand") to the second person ("what YOU have to eat") which is perhaps not
Cartesian in nature.
But the idea _is_ there
If I am a gourmand, then I can't be wrong about what you have to eat.
The Cartesian connection is clear. Cfr.
I think; therefore I am.
and its reverse,
"I am; therefore I think".
And vulgar variants thereof, as in the well-known adage, Cartesian in
origin:
You are what you eat.
The implicature seems to be that to be fit and healthy you need to eat good
food.
Oddly, this Cartesian phrase has come to us via quite a tortuous route.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes in his "Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations
de Gastronomie Transcendante" (1826):
"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es."
In a vulgar rendition:
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. -- Implicature:
Since I am a gourmand.
In an essay titled Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, 1863/4, Ludwig
Andreas Feuerbach, influenced by Schopenhauer, wrote:
"Der Mensch ist, was er ißt."
That translates into English as 'man is what he eats' -- where 'man' is
gender-neutral.
Neither Brillat-Savarin or Feuerbach meant their quotations to be taken
literally -- without "implicatures", as they did not say it.
They were stating that that the food one eats has a bearing on what one's
state of mind and health.
The actual phrase didn't emerge in England until some time later.
In the 1920s and 30s, the nutritionist Victor Lindlahr, who was a strong
believer in the idea that food controls health, developed what he called,
irreverently, the Catabolic Diet.
That view gained some adherents at the time and the earliest known printed
example is from an advert for beef in a 1923 edition of The Bridgeport
Telegraph, for 'United Meat Markets':
"Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap
foodstuffs."
He added, for good measure:
"You are what you eat" -- perhaps unaware that the source was Cartesian.
In 1942, Lindlahr published a book entitled,
"You Are What You Eat",
with the subtitle, "how to win and keep health with diet".
That seems to be the vehicle that took the phrase into the public
consciousness.
Lindlahr is likely to have also used the term in his radio talks in the
late 1930s (now lost unfortunately), which would also have reached a large
audience (of radio-listeners)
The phrase got a new lease of life in the 1960s hippy era.
The food of choice of the champions of this notion was macrobiotic
wholefood and the phrase was adopted by them as a slogan for healthy eating.
The belief in the diet in some quarters was so strong that when Adelle
Davis, a leading spokesperson for the organic food movement, contracted the
cancer that later killed her, she attributed the illness to the "junk food"
she had eaten at college -- which remained unnamed --.
Some commentators have suggested that the idea is from much earlier and
that it has a religious rather than dietary basis.
Roman Catholics believe that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are
changed into the body and blood of Jesus (Transubstantiation).
This poses the implicature: is the phrase catabolic rather than catabolic?
Witness Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549:
We offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies,
to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching
thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion,
may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus
Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body
with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.
Transubstantiation certainly links food and the body.
But there doesn't appear to be a clear link between the belief and the
phrase, "You [and for that matter I] are [and for that matter am] what you [and
for that matter I] eat.
It's safe to assume the origin is more supper than supplication.
Cheers,
Speranza
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