Framing Hunger: Eating and Categories of Self-Development

I.

Hunger seems, at first glance, to be primarily a biological state, emerging first incipiently and then with insistent, yet extremely varying, sharpness in the wide continuum of sentient and feeling beings. The pervasive lived through, but not necessarily attended to, tonus of somatic well-being is unbalanced by the experience of lack that initiates attempts to restore equilibrium in a cycle that continues until death or its equivalent. Hunger in this sense provokes appetite or appetition. It is satisfied by an appropriate object or even, in extreme cases and with catastrophic consequences, inappropriate objects. Toxicity is specific to the organism. There is no guarantee that what can be ingested can be digested. Although hunger is a spontaneous eruption, rooted in the organism, as the organism becomes more and more developed and differentiated, the types of hungers that begin to define and drive it forward undergo a transformation. In the case of ourselves as "articulate and upright animals" we have the proliferation and formulation of desires that do not push us a tergo, as an appetite does, but lure us de fronte. Hunger associated with appetites, paradigmatically for food and sex, gets transmuted into an array of conscious desires and of elaborated means of satisfying them.

The ethical and critical issue is clearly not just to control and limit our appetites, a theme and task that permeates systems of self-control and existential practices of divers provenance and scope, but to formulate the frames in which we can develop and manage our desires and recognize them for what they are. Framing and recognizing are achievements as well as goals. As achievements they are something that we do, not something that happens to us. As goals they are ends-in-view. But the focal point of "satisfying hunger" in the broadest sense is self-development. What our hungers are and how they are, and are to be, satisfied present a twofold problem: (a) analytical, in that hungers are correlative to the type of organism that is "hungering," and hence hunger is a concept with an "open texture" in need of unpacking and phenomenological description; and (b) ethical, in that the demands that hunger makes on us individually and socially can be ignored or contravened or let proliferate. We can fail not only to satisfy our hunger but also to recognize what our hungers both are and should be. An inquiry into hunger and what we both do and should hunger for, therefore, involves constructing a phenomenologically and conceptually adequate notion of hunger and of establishing how "hunger" as a category and as a fact can take on value, ethical or otherwise, and the implications thereof.

One can readily see that all organisms have a necessity, if not a right and a duty, to satisfy their own "primary" hunger, which involves the conditions of their physical existence. These conditions are the contexts and limits of metabolism itself and of the anti-entropic activities of the self-reproducing organism. But, one could ask, is there a life beyond metabolism? Is there a way to expand the category of "hunger," to lift the articulate and upright animal, the human form of existence, out of the biological world and into a world of distinctively human desires and meanings that have to be "normed"—all the while still remaining within the realm of "the natural"? What does recognizing that our desires, as species-specific potentiations and transformations of our primary hunger, have in themselves, ideally if not actually, no greatest upper bound mean for the development of the self, and communities of selves, that can avoid the Scylla of self-abnegation and the Charybdis of hyperbolic self-assertion? What, in short, is to be included under the rubric of "hunger," and what does it tell us about the ethical task, right, and possibility of self-development? How are we to understand the achieved relation between formulation and control that marks us as distinctively human?

I would like to bring together two intertwined and quite unconventional attempts to answer these questions, undertaken by Raymond Tallis and Leon Kass, both physician...