(Image taken by Masahiro Ihara)
Many recent readers of jurist and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, including Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jessica Jacques, Roland Barthes, and Michel Onfray, see his magnum opus entitled Physiologie de goût as a foundational text in contemporary gustatory aesthetics – and aesthetics generally – with Jacques going as far as to say that it is “the foundational conceptual apparatus of gustatory aesthetic discourse.” But beyond being a foundational work of contemporary aesthetics, Savarin’s book acts as an originary text for contemporary gastronomic philosophy writ large, a field populated by certain works by individuals like Friedrich Nietzsche, Emanuel Levinas, Nicola Perrullo, Emanuele Coccia, and Corine Pelluchon. What distinguishes the work of these and many others from those working in the “philosophy of gastronomy” and the “philosophy of food,” is that while the latter are concerned with bringing the discourses of philosophy to bear on questions concerning the nature of food and eating, the former begin from the phenomenon and fact of nourishment, and develop a philosophy appropriate to the principles that these experiences provide. Savarin, I argue, occupies the place in modernity that is often (mis)attributed to Epicurus; that is, as a foundational thinker for any philosophy which takes seriously the primordial place of nourishment in the life of the cosmos. As we will see, for Savarin it is the science of gastronomy which acts as the name for the discourse from which such a philosophy can be derived; and to understand gastronomy, the purpose of which is the “restoration of the individual,” we must first begin by understanding the nature of this individual in Savarin’s philosophy.
The Physiologie de goût begins with a series of aphorisms which are intended to create “a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy,” but Savarin does not give us a definite sense of what gastronomy signifies until nearly fifty pages into the text. To work towards grasping the definition he gives there, we should linger for a while with the introductory material, which sets the stage for the definition to come. It is telling that it is the form of the aphorism that opens the text. Like all aphorisms, these maxims derive from the experience of living, rather than from supposedly self-evident truths. In one, he writes that “animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men (l’homme d’esprit) know the art of eating,” and then, anticipating Feuerbach, that “the fate of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.” Several reach beyond the world to the transcendent realm of the gods and the cosmos, as when he writes that “the Creator, while forcing men to eat in order to live, tempts them with appetite and then rewards them with pleasure,” and that “the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.” Although they are presented at the outset of the work like a set of laws or Spinozistic axioms, the insistence on the experiential and desiderative in these phrases cues us from the start that the sense of science which describes his ‘gastronomy’ doesn’t take mathematics as its standard. Rather, for Brillat-Savarin, gastronomy will name some kind of science which begins with the sensuous experience of life and of phenomena. As in the work of Corine Pelluchon, Savarin’s text has a decidedly phenomenological bent, insofar as it is only through experience and experiment that the nourishing can be grasped in and as itself. Throughout the text, Savarin intersperses descriptions and recollections of actual meals, particular eaters, and specific recipes to draw the reader into not just a conceptual, but a sensuous relationship with the text and its ideas.
Following the aphorisms is a series of introductory materials, including a conversation between the (originally anonymous) author of the text and a friend, in which the merits and difficulties of writing a book on gastronomy are presented to the reader. In the “author’s introduction,” Savarin notes that chief among these difficulties is the problem of language, insofar as the conceptual vocabulary of philosophy has done very little to consider the problems of gastronomy, and has therefore left an investigation of the field to the vernacular tongues of the kitchen. He thus writes that “when I need a certain expression, and I do not find it anywhere in my French pigeon-hole, I take it from a neighboring one.” He writes that he is “apparently, on the side of the neologists and even of the romanticists,” since the latter “discover hidden treasures in [their] own language, and the former are like mariners who sail to far lands to seek out what they need.” It is because of Savarin’s preoccupation and creativity with language that Roland Barthes found so much to say about his work in an introduction written for a 1975 edition of the book. For Barthes, it is the link between the gastronomic, the sensuous, and desire, that makes Savarin’s text so compelling. He writes that Savarin “speaks and I desire that about which he speaks (especially if I have an appetite),” and that “because the desire it arouses is an apparently simple one, the gastronomic utterance presents the power of language in all its ambiguity: the sign calls forth the delights of its referent at the very moment it traces its absence.” The text is “from beginning to end, a book about what is properly human, because it is desire (in so far as it is spoken) which distinguishes man.” What this tells us is that desire is an integral part of the concept of gastronomy in the Physiologie. That is, that any theory of gastronomy, and any conceptual scaffolding which is generated by a gastronomic philosophy, cannot be complete without itself integrating desire into its own concept. One cannot, in other words, generate a complete theory or concept of gastronomy without primordially taking desire into account. Barthes’ appreciation of Savarin’s work stems precisely from this insight, which compels “the professor” to include, to whatever degree possible, the experience of eating food to truly allow the reader to thoroughly “meditate” on the concepts generated by the text.
After this introductory material, Savarin begins with the text proper, which is composed of thirty “Meditations.” Jessica Jacques argues that the decision to structure the text as a series of meditations is an ironic reference to the work of Descartes, whose work inaugurated a novel theory of the subject as an ego cogito. “In my view,” she writes, “the question that underlies this (in the manner of a Copernican turn), is the following: ‘If Descartes – who said to have initiated reflection on the modern subject in philosophy – meditated on what is most strictly divine, devoting his meditations to trying to demonstrate the existence of God and the soul, then why not meditate on what is the most strictly human?’” Gary Hatfield, in his text on Descartes’ own Meditations, writes that in his day, “the meditative method was well developed in religious writings known as spiritual exercises,” and that “when Descartes says that he wants only readers who will ‘meditate seriously’ with him, we may read this as an instruction to approach his metaphysical meditations like religious exercises.” That is, there is a link between the form of the meditation and religious exercise. To meditate, for Descartes, is to practice spiritual enlightenment, and Savarin’s ironic reference to this practice, already transposed from the religious to the philosophical realm, might cause us to think that his own meditations are parodies of religious exercises. But rather than just meditating on “what is the most strictly human,” as Jacques writes, Savarin’s meditations seek to turn the human, all too human experience of eating into a source of religious and philosophical contemplation.
Savarin’s own meditations should be understood in a similar fashion to those of Descartes, as tools for bringing about a development of the spirit and the emergence of a particular mode of consciousness, albeit one that is decidedly more mundane, although thereby not any less divine, than the disembodied consciousness of the ego cogito. While the purpose of the Cartesian meditations is, ostensibly, to demonstrate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, it makes its proof through reference to the first indubitable Archimedean point — the ego cogito — without which no other experience of the world would be possible. By stripping the world of all the inessentials through the process of methodological doubt, Descartes arrives not just at a point of epistemological certainty, but at the ground level out of which experience of the world becomes possible. That is, his Meditations demonstrate the ego cogito as the condition for the possibility of any other experience of the world. Put simply, thought, and more specifically the thought of thought itself, the self-positing ego which finds its existence demonstrated by the reflexive act of radical self-consciousness, is not only posited as the transcendental condition of the world, but is presented in the text as a fact which anyone can intuit through meditation, given the right guidance.
The consciousness derived from Savarin’s meditations is, of course, much different from Descartes’ ego cogito. As we already noted, the gastronomic thinker doesn’t understand the kernel of thought to be certainty, understood as the negation of doubt. Savarin’s meditations work by clarifying essential parts of the phenomenon of eating, and comes each and every time back to a relation of that part to our desires. Certain chapters, like those on exhaustion, on drinks, on sleep, and so on, explore the causes of hunger and satiation as symbols of the phenomenon of life itself, which sustains itself through a willing towards life. When Savarin does get to a definition of gastronomy, he writes that it has to do with the “preservation of the individual,” the organic ego which seeks to perpetually restore its own integrity against the dissolution of its energy and form that comes from acts of living. The meditations seek to clarify these sources of hunger as well as the will to life, which both act as facets of our desire: hunger being another name for a bare state of desire, the will to life a name for the drive to fulfill that desire. Through the meditations, the gastronomic understanding of life, this particular mode of consciousness that begins thinking with the sensuous and with desire, becomes clarified and allows us to desire better. That is, the perfection of consciousness would not be a state of utter doubtlesness, but perhaps rather a certain familiarity with and clarification of our desires.
Also unlike the ego cogito, the ego that thinks the meditations of the Physiologie is one which is originally driven by an appetite, which means a need to ingest that which stands outside it, and an original and ineluctable dependence on the world. While Descartes’ cogito works its way towards understanding its relation to the world as one of total independence, that of the Physiologie is precisely the opposite. The thinker of this text knows that since it begins with hunger, it always begins with a hunger-for something which necessarily stands before it, both spatially and temporally. Because desire is fundamental to its self-understanding, and because desire is always directed toward a petit objet a, gastronomic awareness includes the antecedent other within its own concept. There will never be, in other words, a ‘pure’ thinker of the gastronomic, because the world always stands before the ego that takes eating seriously, as her condition and (somehow) as an essential part of herself. This dependence on the world, when understood not as an embarrassment, but as a positive existentiale, means also that we find our fulfilment in attaining the world, in meeting our desires in our environment. The consciousness that motivates the Physiologie is, in this way, one that also finds pleasure in the world, insofar as it is in finding the objects we pursue from an internal need already present in the world that our desires are fulfilled.
While Savarin does not thematize this theme explicitly, later thinkers like Corine Pelluchon will call this understanding of consciousness the “gourmet ego, which is also a gourmet cogito.” For Pelluchon, this gourmet ego lies “behind the thinking subject,” is “more imperious than the Dasein with its care for existence, more immersed in the element, and more profoundly connected to the living world than permitted by the representation of the self as freedom.” In the first line of her book, Pelluchon quotes Levinas, whose biblical exclamation in his Carnets de captivite that “In the beginning was hunger,” leads her to argue that the fact of hunger “beats back the pretension that consciousness [taken in the Cartesian sense] is at the origin of all sense,” because “the original and primitive character of hunger signifies that existence is not understood in its essence as ‘project’.” Pelluchon and Levinas — and Savarin as well — instead see life not as a project to be undertaken by the free subject, but as immersion in a world on which we depend for our continued existence. By placing immersion and dependence at the beginning of their project, rather than freedom and independence, the thinkers of the gourmet ego establish the need for nourishment as a transcendental condition for existence. Pelluchon writes that “I am immersed in a milieu that is at once natural and artificial,” and that we “live – which is to say that I feed myself – from this milieu, from the air, the light, the foods, the work, the sights.” In this way, she establishes the gourmet ego as one that is fundamentally corporeal and oriented not by contents and categories of consciousness, but by sensuality, desire, and enjoyment.
This mode of consciousness, unlike the ego cogito, takes enjoyment in the dependence its existence has on the milieu in which it is found. Whereas Descartes’ ego is one which is essentially self-sufficient, requiring nothing but its own recognition of itself, the gourmet ego of Savarin and Pelluchon understands that its continued existence is wholly dependent on the existence of the other, and finds not just acceptance, but enjoyment in this fact. The gourmet ego is one for which “living is living from,” as Pelluchon puts it, and it ‘lives from’ its milieu through the original “life in and with things” that she characterizes as sensation itself. “To sense is fundamentally to be in contact with things and to feel, to enjoy in such a way that one lives the transformations of one’s relationship to the world without being able to assimilate one’s sensations,” she writes, concluding that “to sense is to be with the world,” and to “enjoy it sympathetically.” When we “envision the world as food,” we “affirm the nourishing character of the world” and assert that it “could not be reduced to a noeme, to a content constituted by the giving act of sense of a consciousness.” The world, in other words, because it constitutes our existence through nourishment, is not simply something constituted by consciousness, but rather much or more originally something which constitutes us. There is, on this reading, an excess of the world that always transcends our representations of it. Our relation to this surplus, which goes beyond bare need, Pelluchon calls ‘enjoyment.’
The first meditation of the text is entitled “On the Senses” precisely because it is through the sensuous that the gastronomic reveals itself; or, as Brillat-Savarin puts it, “the senses are the organs by which man communicates with the world outside himself.” He proposes a hypothetical history in which “man’s first sensations were purely direct,” which is to say that “he saw but vaguely, that he heard dimly, that he chose without thought the food he ate without tasting, and that he copulated with brutality instead of pleasure.” That is to say, that for Savarin, our first relation to the world is one of ‘naive sense certainty,’ but that “soon one sense came to the aid of another and another, for the use and the well-being of the sentient ego, or, what is the same thing, the individual.” He writes that “touch corrected the errors of sight; sound, by means of the spoken word, became the interpreter of all emotions; taste helped itself through sight and smell; hearing compared the noises that came to it, and was able to judge distances; and desire invaded the precincts of all the other senses.” In other words, Savarin understands the ego as the coordination of the senses, and understands sensuality as the means by which the ego comes to constitute itself in a robust sense. If the meditations of the Physiologie are indeed meant to bring about a more perfect state of gastronomic consciousness, then it must begin with the sensuous and, following the first meditation itself, work to coordinate the heterogeneous inputs received by the different senses in order to perpetuate the life of the individual. This squares with, and elaborates, the nature of the gourmet ego described by Pelluchon given above insofar as both understand the original relation to the world as a sensuous one, and one which constitutes the self as a response to the need for nourishment. Both Pelluchon and Savarin understand sensuality as the desire for that which nourishes us, as when the former writes that “I seek that which I need in order to live, and at the same time, since this fills me with life and satisfies me, I nourish myself on these activities that make me live.” This seeking is understood as the activity of a willing subject oriented by sensation.
Savarin lists six senses in total: the five classical senses, as well as that of “physical desire,” which he writes “draws the two sexes together so that they may procreate.” This final sense, not included in the classical lists, is important to Savarin because he understands the sensuous as the medium through which we live, and the senses as the avenues by which this living occurs. He includes this sense because “if taste, whose purpose is to enable a man to exist, is indisputably one of his senses, then how much more reasonable it is to call a sense that part of him destined to make mankind itself survive.” That is, just as taste is the sensitivity to the world which allows me to find enjoyment and pleasure in my individual need to be nourished, physical desire is that sensitivity to the world which allows me to do the same in my capacity as a member of a species which requires procreation in order to survive. For the gourmet ego, in other words, the senses are faculties for finding pleasure in the things on which we depend for life so that taste, in other words, is not simply a method for discerning the edible and the inedible, but a faculty for the enjoyment of living. Just as Pelluchon argues that enjoyment is a sensitivity to the excess of the world which takes pleasure in the share of life which exceeds basic needs, Savarin understands the senses as sensitivities to that which is pleasurable in living.
Part of this pleasure is, as we have noted, not just in the taste of food, or the sound of melodious songs, or the feel of a warm coat on a cold winter’s evening, but in the physical desire we have for mingling with others. Throughout the Physiologie, Savarin repeatedly returns to the feeling of physical desire that arises in the presence of others, and while it initially appears simply as a desire to go to bed and couple with members of the opposite sex, it gradually opens to a more general desire for sociability which he comes to call the “pleasures of the table.” “Meals,” he writes, “began…at the moment when man ceased to nourish himself on fruit alone” and “the preparation and the distribution of food necessarily brought the whole family together, the fathers apportioning to their children the results of the hunt, and the grown children then doing the same to their aged parents.” After this point, “these gatherings…little by little were extended to include neighbors and friends” until “later…when the human race had spread out” and “the tired traveler came to join in such primitive feasts, and to recount what went on in the far countries of the world” that hospitality was born, “with its rights sacred to all peoples.” With the birth of hospitality, Savarin argues, new experiences arise which give pleasure beyond “the pleasure of eating,” or “the actual and direct sensation of satisfying a need.” These ‘pleasures of the table’ are “a reflective sensation which is born from the various circumstances of place, time, things, and people who make up the surroundings of the meal,” and arise out of the same surplus of the world which exceeds the basic economy which brings people together to eat.
Suffice it for now to say that for Savarin, what unites the arts and the sciences are that they are “nothing more than the immediate result of our continuous attempt to gratify the senses we have developed,” rather than being simply tools or methods for comprehending the world. He writes that the man who has “enjoyed a sumptuous meal, in a room decorated with mirrors and paintings, sculptures and flowers, a room drenched with perfumes, enriched with lovely women, filled with the trains of soft music…will not need to make too great an effort to convince himself that every science has taken part in the scheme to heighten and enhance properly for him the pleasure of taste.” That is, all of the sciences, and above all gastronomy, find their progress measured by the pleasure that they afford the senses as we set about attempting to live. That is to say, that by beginning with an understanding of the nature of the gastronomic subject, we have already made strides in understanding gastronomy itself, insofar as this science develops out of the ego’s attempt to clarify their desires and perfect their ability to satisfy them. Savarin’s ultimate desire for the science of gastronomy is that it affords us the possibility of living well, and in these opening gestures, we see that it is with the ability of a body to engage with the sensuous, and to develop sciences of grasping and accentuating that pleasure, that such a project of living well must begin. And for Brillat-Savarin, it is with taste, and with the labor of the stomach, that these abilities most clearly flourish.
Evan Edwards
Evan Edwards is a chef and teacher living in Grand Rapids, MI. He received his M.A. in the philosophy program at DePaul University in Chicago in 2014, where his focus was on 19th century German Romanticism and Idealism, Classical Greek philosophy, and environmental thought. He has taught in the philosophy and environmental studies programs at DePaul, Loyola University, Waubonsee Community College, and Grand Valley State University. Most recently, he was a visiting faculty member, chef, and resident scholar at Thoreau College, a microcollege located in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin. He is currently completing work on his doctoral dissertation entitled Restorative Gastronomy: On Food and Hospitality. He runs a seasonal plant-based dinner series in the summer where he collaborates with local farmers to present seasonal produce, and teaches classes on cooking and fermentation. He is currently a chef at Gaia House Cafe, and at Green Thistle Farm in Clarksville, where he is learning to work with produce from the ground up.
