Convivialism: A Philosophical Manifesto

A key theme in Michael Pollan's first two books dealing with food, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, is the notion of "co-evolution." The first book deals with it somewhat humorously, suggesting that we are manipulated by our plants. These, the claim goes, have gotten us to co-evolve so that we will take good care of them. All they need to do in return is sort of relax and throw us bits of nutrition or beauty now and then. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, a more mitigated tone prevails. This one lays out how important, for a vibrant farm, are all of the components that must function together. The book even highlights a plant whose relationship to humans is one great example of co-evolution: corn. Corn stands as a great example of what biologists call a "cultigen," a plant incapable of seeding itself—one, in other words, that requires a relationship with us, if its survival is to be guaranteed.

What is philosophically significant here is not the more widely commented-upon "evolution" of "co-evolution." It is rather the little prefix "co-." What I would like to explore is an examination of what would happen to our philosophical orientation if we were to take this "co-" seriously. A vibrant twenty-first century philosophy, I am claiming, turns on a simple preposition. This focus is not new. At the turn of the twentieth century, William James, believing that philosophy was on the eve of a "considerable rearrangement," decided to give that rearrangement a significant push. How? By emphasizing neither nouns nor verbs, as philosophers typically did, but rather "grammatical particles" (James 26). The first of those he listed was the one which corresponds to the prefix "co-": the preposition "with."¹

The key question to be posed, says the contemporary philosopher Michel Serres, has to do with our point of departure. Typical traditional choices have been existence, being, language, God, economics, or politics (Serres 101). But why remain within these limitations, which when taken as foundational, give us a kind of absolutism, and when rejected, lead us to a relativism?² The way out for Serres: emphasize prepositions. They are multiple and indicate how relationality is fundamental to existence. Basic to them all is the one identified by James. A simple reflection on prominent terms prefixed by the Latin-derived "co-," "com-," "con-," or "col-," as well as the Greek "syn-," gives us an idea of how fundamental is this sense of omnipresent interconnection.³ Pollan's two books offer contemporary exemplifications of "with" awareness in a food context. My aim is to explore how taking prepositions, especially "with," seriously would give direction for what James called the "considerable rearrangement" of philosophy.

In this regard, the farmer and the philosopher could not be more different. As Pollan's description of Polyface Farm indicates, the owner, Joel Salatin, is hyper-aware of how important is the "co-" dimension of existence. The farm is a veritable carnival of conjunctions. A thriving operation requires humus with its earthworms and bacteria, cultivated land with the forest, with fresh water, with animals, with animal excrement, with crop rotation, with grasses of various sorts, with herbivore/avian rotation, with rainfall, with, ultimately, the energy source of it all, the sun. Ordinary humans, if they move beyond the culture of forgetfulness, realize that food on the table results from the work of soil with sunshine and rainfall, with plants, with animals who feed on the plants, with the bacteria and insects who make the soil fertile, with humans who work the land, harvest the plants, and raise the animals, with the slaughterhouses, with the means of refrigeration and transportation, and with finally, the hands who have prepared the meal. Digestion, too, is a major enterprise made possible by various "co-" factors, including most especially the bacteria that allow cows to digest grass and allow our own digestive systems to work as well as they do.

Philosophers, by contrast, have tended to be especially neglectful in this regard. The story of Modern philosophy, philosophy since the Renaissance, can be summarized by...