Gluttony: on resource, exploitation, and the excesses of freedom
What is gluttony? One of the seven cardinal sins identified by Christian tradition – among other categorizations in different traditions – gluttony, according to Thomas Aquinas, “denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire. Now desire is said to be inordinate through leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists.” [1] As vice, then, gluttony involves a departure from reason. We might then say that gluttony involves an irrational desire to eat or drink, one which relies solely on the sensibilities of the individual. Reduced to the senses, gluttony is a depravement; depravement from the deprivation of the senses, and thus consists in some meaning of need.
The irrational basis of this sense of need plays a central role in the work of another philosopher of critical importance in the history of Western thought. For Emmanuel Levinas, need is man’s original situation, and so man’s “relation with the world is henceforth only need.” [2] For Levinas who attempts to break from prevalent ideas about freedom being the pinnacle of ethics, man’s original state in the world is one of enjoyment, already freely at one in the world which is at his disposal. Poking at Husserlian phenomenology and breaching the confines of reason’s power, Levinas in his Totality and Infinity demonstrates that reason is not necessary for man’s being in the world, as Heidegger would have it, but rather a product of necessity for being in it. Before man is conscious, prior to any comprehension of the objects beyond himself, man is already embedded in the world, living from it as a matter of fact. It is the world which necessarily sustains him; and before he can sustain himself, the world already does. This “enjoyment,” as he calls it, is the nature of man, with the world at his disposal already and unthinkingly consuming, imbibing, and breathing it in. This dependence on the world, however, becomes need when man must work for his survival and wellbeing. As a matter of necessity, man must satisfy his need to eat, to drink, to breathe. Man’s dependence on the world is concomitant with his enjoyment of it, and so the satisfaction of need is enjoyment.
Levinas in his writing is careful to point out every step of the way how each moment in man’s ethical awakening is different from the next. Enjoyment is different than need, need is different than desire, etc. Similarly he differentiates the order of these moments, enjoyment is before need, need before desire. Coextensively, and parallel to these moments, Levinas makes it clear that enjoyment is before consciousness, need demands it, and desire requires it. This is to say that before one desires things, he has already enjoyed them, and before he knows what he wants, he had already had it.
Gluttony for us then lives in the liminal space between enjoyment and desire. It inhabits the essence of need itself; “pure privation,” as Levinas puts it. [2] Yet, to satisfy this hunger, man “must work for his living,” (ibid.) and so must make use of the world as tools to satisfy this craving. Unlike Heidegger who insists that man’s being is naturally disposed to using the world as instruments for his very existence, Levinas to the contrary depicts man as being brought into this sort of relationship to the world – one of utility – and who must make the conscious effort to labor for his sustenance; that is to say, man by virtue of his need must reason – or reckon – with his hunger.
The story goes, then, that in order to satisfy his needs, man enters into a relationship with the world wherein he comprehends it and chooses that course of action which is best suited to his well being. Freedom, for Levinas, consists in this unfettered activity of the self. The satisfaction of desire is the pinnacle of egoism, as it is driven by the memory of a primordial desire between the self and the world, the other. As Levinas very aptly points out, “If enjoyment is the very eddy of the same, it is not ignorance but exploitation of the other.” (ibid)
Today, we know that food precarity is on the rise across the globe. Arguments point to all sorts of “-isms” which are at fault for what can be described as disruptions of our food chains making the demand for nourishment grow while supply tether on the brink of austerity. Whether it is capitalism, socialism, globalism, industrialism, or what have you, and whether the inflated demand is orchestrated or austerity the product of artificial scarcity, the need for food is real and the precarity many families are facing on account of the inflated cost of food and the very real and unavoidable demands of hunger highlight not only man’s dependence on the things of this world, but how certain responses to this need can become so ingrained in our culture, that the -isms which allocate our resources become habit to us, and these forms of consumption and labor which produce such scarcity are no more than the mechanisms of a maladapted need which center on the logic of egoism.
Of course in a world where it is us and the resources at our disposal alone, the paradigm of egocentric consumption makes perfect sense. Yet, there is more to the world than just us and the land and the things that come from it. There are, of course – more than us and it – them. There are other people in the world who also are at hand. Similarly to our encounter with the objects in the world which impress upon us and are disposed to us before we are aware of them or what they are to us or for us, the faces of others appear to us and impress upon us. Yet unlike corn, wheat, rice, water, sunshine, air, hammers, or cars, other persons resist our comprehension insofar as that they contain within them a world of needs, desires, and preoccupations of their own – representations and judgements which are hidden behind the opacity of their face.
Like Spinoza, Levinas insists that we can know the world at our hands, and like Kant he knows that reason is deployed to comprehend the world at our disposal. Yet unlike Spinoza’s hard empiricism and Kant’s transcendental idealism, Levinas insists that our knowledge of the world is not one dependent on reason, and rather that our knowledge of the world is even already a rudimentary sensibility grounded in a primal enjoyment of it, and that it is separation between myself and the things of the world which sustain me that moves me to consider the world as things of comprehension so that I might utilize them at my disposal for my own considerations. It is this moment between desire and satisfaction that is propelled by need where consciousness comes onto the scene. It is at this moment in which a responsibility is awakened in the egoist subject where he must choose what to make of the world, both as concept and as material.
Yet, with a firm commitment to the infinite regression of the human face – that which signals what is beyond comprehension and completely interior – otherwise a commitment to the distinct possibility of a subjectivity in the Other, Levinas believes that this moment of encounter between the self and the face of another is the crucial moment where ethics begins, where the self is opened to its own need and its desire for privation. It is the moment of encounter between myself and some other human where I not only become responsible for them, as I would with any other object in the world, but where I must choose whether to be responsive in such a way as I would treat every other object in the world as a tool at my disposal… as a means to my end… or as a person, as a human deserving of the same dignity to which I deed myself.
Levinas gives us a clear insight to the economy of needs, where economy is figured as the arrangement of our resources in a rational way so as to satisfy our enjoyments. Yet it is the fact of the Other which forces us to act responsibly. The danger of -isms – be it Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, etc. – is its sedimentation into our habits so that we find ourselves able to act according to their logic without thinking about it.
Levinas gives us an accurate diagnosis to the problems which plague humanity: that our heavy handed reliance on our external structures to provide some illusory promise of justice always bears with it the tendency for habitual patterns, modes of being, or states of affairs to become ingrained in our sensibilities so close to hand that there is no need to think before we act; our decisions have been made, and our complacency leads to our demise.
Levinas shows that the logic of egoism, where to choose not to curb our egoes – not enough or not at all – or to order our responsibility to the world-as-other as secondary to our nature and to act on this comprehension in such a way that affirms this judgment is to engage in what Levinas might happily call the excesses of freedom, the uninhibited satisfaction of enjoyment, and the unfettered banality of need.
Perhaps Levinas would happily enjoy the term “gluttony” as the definitive diagnosis of our modern plagues. It is this unthinking, irrational desire to satisfy our hungers which play a role in many of the social ills of the world which have befallen the globe this time in ways which immediately find no quick solution.
Were it to myself to point out the sins of the world, I would wonder how much smaller our problems would be if the logics of egoism weren’t so global and mutually entrenched? If perhaps we found more ways to not see the world as a conglomerate of nodes to be managed, but rather as smaller, intentional encounters between one face and another, would less of us be hungry today if we didn’t feel the need to seek out the fruits of other lands? And even moreso, if this were the case, how do we undo the sins of our excessive appetites?
References
[1] Summa Theologiæ, by Thomas Aquinas.
[2] Totality and Infinity, by Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh. 1969.