Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eatin

摘要

We worry increasingly about what to eat and how to eat. But rarely do we ask what it means to eat in the first place, in the metaphysical sense.1 What does eating have to do with being or with knowing ourselves? We wonder what kinds of eating are mostethical, but not how the fact of eating contributes to making us ethical. Western philosophy, with its traditional distaste for embodied subjects, has proved highly resistant to considering food as having anything fundamental to do with what it means toexist. To date, the most prominent discussions of food in philosophy have concerned questions of aesthetics, or how tasting food provides or fails to provide a model for other kinds of discrimination.2 Meanwhile, another group of thinkers concerns itself with questions about applied or "practical ethics," or how to eat— whether and how to eat meat, or how to grapple with the environmental ethics of our current systems of food production and consumption, for example.3 These questions are crucial to living our lives, yet they tend to presuppose that we already know what eating is fundamentally about. When we consider the epistemological and ontological bases of food—how and why eating structures thought, and even existence—we find few thinkers who have even asked the questions, let alone posed any answers. "Does anyone know the moral effects of food? Is there a philosophy of nourishment?"4 That was Nietzsche, one of the few to ask. But at least one modern philosopher-Emmanuel Levinas—has both asked and examined, though his work in the context of food has yet to be studied. Levinas's ideas about food and eating provide a starting place for considering the roles of eating in being, knowing, and ethical judgment.