Let Them Eat Cake
What I watched: Food, Beauty, Mind | Philosophy Tube by Abigail Thorn. Posted August 28, 2021.
One of my pleasures lately is when Abigail Thorn posts a new video to her Philosophy Tube channel. Philosophy is a subject I find increasingly fascinating these days and Thorn discusses it in such a fresh and interesting way that the concepts and ideas seep into you almost unawares.
Thorn kicks off the video as ostensibly about the philosophy of food, but her realization that in all draft versions of the script it ended with the baking of a cake and not with her eating a piece of that cake was troubling. She was afraid to eat that cake on camera.
This adjusted Thorn’s focus of the video to not specifically be about the philosophy of food but rather about fatphobia, beauty standards, shame, womanhood, eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and ultimately about the philosophy of mind.
Philosophers distinguish between objects, like this recipe book, and subjects, people like me and you and Nigella. And they wonder what the difference really is between the two. What does it mean to be a subject? What does it mean to treat a subject as if she were an object? And it turns out that food can tell us a lot.
Referencing English philosopher John Locke and medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna, Thorn says they proposed that when people are born they are blank slates (tabula rasa). Over time, we experience the world which results in us forming ideas and concepts. This idea that knowledge has to come from experience is called empiricism.
Scottish philosopher David Hume decided that he could never have an experience just of “I” (subject) on its own.
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception… I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.
Thorn states that she finds it difficult to imagine a subject (I) who has no perceptions or point of view. But can we have a bunch of perceptions floating around with nobody having them?
Immanuel Kant grabbed on to Hume’s proposition admitting the base of his argument was good but that it could be improved upon. Kant asked is the subject a blank slate? Do you start out empty? Using the metaphor of the bowl in which Thorn is mixing the cake’s ingredients, she mentions that Kant said that perhaps we do all start out as blank slates, empty if you will, but we still start out with the bowl itself.
Hume was correct that we can’t look inside ourselves to experience a subject, but that’s because it would be like trying to put the bowl inside the bowl. Kant said we can never know what the subject is in itself but it is the necessary precondition for experience.
Kant believed the subject (I) can give themselves rules. Morality, Kant contends, is motivating for us in large part because we give those rules to ourselves. Using a food-related, real-world example, Thorn suggests dieting is one such type of self-imposed rule making. We impose those restrictions on ourselves. No one is making us do that.
Weight and dieting live together in a constant push/pull existence. Thorn recounts how when she was accepted into acting school it dawned on her that perhaps she was too fat to be an actor. A ridiculous notion for sure, but having been raised during the peak of moral panic over obesity, Thorn’s fear of being too fat had been propped up by the culture of the day.
To counter her fear of being fat, Thorn went on a crash diet and lost an unhealthy amount of weight which also made her feel bad and experience physical distress because of the sudden weight loss.
Much like so many people do today, Thorn found another mechanism by which she could discipline and persecute herself at the gym with early morning workouts to get muscled and huge.
The philosopher Simon Critchley and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan thought that the subject is essentially in two pieces. There’s that which you experience and there’s your ideal self. The ideal self is the self that you feel you “should” be.
According to Critchley, your ideal self is the source of your conscience, but it’s also your internal critic. So Kant said we can give ourselves rules, and Critchley says, yeah, but the ideal self doesn’t just give us the good rules of morality, it gives us rules, good and bad. And whereas Kant thought we can live according to the moral rules we give ourselves if we formulate them correctly, Critchley says the demands of the ideal self can never be fully satisfied. You can never completely live up to it, because having that ideal there is part of what gives your mind a structure. He says we are most acutely aware of this split when we feel shame.
Critchley put it this way.
What we think of as a self is fundamentally an ethical subject, a self that is constituted in a relation to its good, a self – our self – that is organized around certain core values and commitments… The subject shapes itself in relation to a demand that it can never meet.
Between 1930 and 1980, the markets for products that claimed to help one lose fat exploded. Capitalism being what it is, sellers of these products started to target new markets including women, older people, and children, as well as thin people who were in “danger” of becoming fat. In a university’s business school that marketing strategy would be considered genius because history has shown that most people who lose weight gain it back again, only to repeat the entire cycle ad nauseum. Thereby creating lifelong customers for those products because of the cycle of shame and failure the inevitable up and down weight cycle manifests.
Supply and demand economics says “see a demand, then fill it.” But the truth is you can also create a demand where there was not one prior. Diet supplements, overpromised weight loss from certain exercise programs, and surgical procedures are but some of the products and services that have flourished amid the shame and failure cycles of millions of programmed people unaware they are part of a created, not natural, market.
Using Critchley’s notion of the idealized self we can understand what’s going on with the weight loss industry. Advertising can give you an ideal. Those ideals worm their way into our psyches to encourages us to develop a particular subjectivity, a particular relationship with ourselves, to get us to purchase the product or service.
Then there’s the societally pervasive notion of calories.
Calories are an excellent example of what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a technology of subjection, a tool that encourages the subject to develop a particular relationship with itself. Foucault was particularly interested in how institutions create the subjects that live under them. We get taught how to relate to ourselves, not just by our families, but also by schools, and the workplace, and the media.
Here is how Foucault states this concept.
The individual is not to be perceived of as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike… In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.
Foucault felt that a large part of how subjects are produced in our modern era is with the cunning use of surveillance.
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a hypothetical prison he called a panopticon. The panopticon is a circularly designed prison in which the cells are arranged with a central watchtower from which a guard can observe inside all the cells 24/7 whenever they want. Whether the prisoners know they are being watched or not is irrelevant because they know there’s always the possibility they will be watched. Therefore, the prisoners come to always act as if they are being watched. There is no need to place a guard at each cell. Instead, the panopticon design cleverly places a guard inside each prisoner’s heads, into their ideal self. This creates subjects who are obedient and docile. (If you’re wondering if I am simultaneously pointing to most of the human population as those obedient and docile subjects, you would be correct.)
Foucault asks us to consider if much like the panopticon prison do other institutions of society function in similar ways.
Thorn points out the tendency, especially in the online left, to interpret Foucault as saying that power imposes things on us and that such impositions are always bad. This was not what Foucault was saying.
If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.
Subjection means producing subjects. What Foucault was getting at was that subjects are produced by the society in which they live, for better and for worse.
Back to calories. They can be viewed as a technology of subjection. Of course, calories are a real thing. They are a measurement of energy. However, the popularized nature of this measurement as created by business marketers, and that there is a recommended daily allowance of these energy units, encourages us to have a quite different relationship with food than did people in the past. One need only look to the example of how many menus now list calories of items to illustrate that it’s something everyone is now thinking about. This is how caloric subjection works.
Putting on and taking off weight does not have a one-size-fits-all explanation nor have cultures throughout history been as obsessed with weight as we are today.
Thorn recounts how her struggle with weight issues was complicated by the fact that at the time she was still living as a man. (Thorn has since transitioned.) While living as a man and in denial about the trans issues percolating inside, Thorn was determined to make manhood work by becoming an ideal man.
One of the post-transition observations Thorn made was to notice that when a man sits down and consumes a large meal it’s tantamount to a victory. For a woman to do the same thing it can be portrayed as a failure. Thorn highlights the utter stupidity of a fat woman somehow being disqualified from having gender, or not being considered beautiful or sexy.
Thorn’s trans womanhood is already seen by many people as questionable. Therefore, the temptation is to try to be the perfect ideal woman regardless of how impossible or dangerous that might be to attempt. And it’s not just weight that’s the sticking point here. Thorn mentions a young social media woman of color who feels that she must always accentuate her femininity because she is a darker skinned black woman.
Many feminist philosophers have concluded that when it comes to food women are taught to regard themselves with discipline and surveillance. With all the published imagery of skinny women amid the countless articles about dieting, women (I contend it’s now starting to happen to men too) are taught that their bodies are being watched by everyone.
Social media is its own quagmire. Our idealized self wants the likes and follows, but American author Naomi Wolf suggests that this reality is far more influential than just getting likes and attention. It’s ultimately about political control. It’s about women being told to regard their own subjectivities as less than men’s. This stops some women from organizing for the rights they quite obviously deserve.
Naomi Wolf put it this way.
The more financially independent, in control of events, educated and sexually autonomous women become in the world, the more impoverished, out of control, foolish, and sexually insecure we are asked to feel in our bodies… A quietly mad population is a tractable one.
As an example from history, Reverend Sylvester Graham (of Graham Crackers fame), was traveling around in the early 19th century giving public lectures to women about the evils of gluttony. But his views weren’t all about fat. Graham felt that mothers who fed their children too much would produce unhappy children who would then discover the evils of masturbation and sex. When these children went on to have children of their own, they would pass on their embracing of such evils and the nation would decline. Through the guise of thinness and diets what Graham was ultimately preaching about was social control of women. This might not have been carried out in any sort of conspiratorial way. Rather, society produces people who are prone to thinking of themselves and society’s problems in a particular way.
Yes, we live in a society, but also society lives in you.
Through a mock media interview, Thorn plays a character we’ve all seen numerous times – a highly successful woman who seems to have it all – parroting their own version of the hustle culture that peacocking male counterparts have bragged about throughout these modern times. Apart from pointing out the character’s unhealthy relationship with food and body image, Thorn also illustrates so much of what’s wrong with modern Western hustle culture, hyper productivity mantras, and capitalist consumerism.
Opening up the topic to encompass more than women, food, and dieting, Thorn takes it all a step further and dances upon the precarious stage of capitalism and its reliance on a compliant set of consumers ready to embrace the manufactured idealized self and salve its pains with the continued purchasing of products and services.
We’ve encountered the ideas that the subject is comprised of a relation to itself. And furthermore, that relation is produced and cultivated not always to our own benefit. In the final chapter of this history of dieting, Schwartz makes the point that a society which accepted fat would necessarily question capitalism and the power of markets that mess with people’s lives. It would be a society in which more people got better health care and had more control over their lives, one in which we all had a bit more sympathy with one another, in which we all felt a bit less shame.
What Schwartz describes he knows is a utopia, but he makes the point that the food version of 1984, the totalitarian dystopia, has already been realized through the cultivation of eating disorders.
However, if subjectivity is indeed taught, then it might be possible to unlearn or relearn it. Some feminist philosophers contend that women should simply develop new feminist subjectivities to lay the groundwork for political organizing.
Thorn concludes by clearly stating she is a feminist. She knows that beauty standards are patriarchal constructs that hurt us all. She knows much of the scientific discourse regarding fatness is outright wrong. She has embraced fat advocacy groups and fat activist encouragements to break out of the cycle of recrimination and shame. Yet, she still wants to be impossibly thin. She still wants the unhealthy, unreachable ideal.
I know intellectually that my fear of eating this cake is not rational and that it is grounded in ideas that are harmful to myself and others. And yet I am still afraid. Yes! And – let’s not just individualize and privatize the problem, because this is quite philosophically interesting, right? Knowing that you’re wrong, but believing it anyway!... Fat phobia has real consequences. And I have real privilege as long as I stay thin. But I don’t think that my fear of eating this cake is just about external coercion. We talk about people being pressured to be thin, but I do also enjoy going to the gym. The world would be better if I didn’t feel like I had to, but I also like it. The philosopher Heather Widdows says that when we challenge dominant beauty norms, it can be hard to get through to people because it feels like a threat to the genuine joy that comes with mastering the skills of exercise, or makeup, or voice training, or whatever it is. It’s hard to challenge dominant beauty norms precisely because we sink so much effort into pursuing them [see sunk cost fallacy], and that effort is frequently fun.
Then Thorn mentions something that struck home since I have switched to plant-based eating since March 2020. Vegan is a philosophy as much as an eating style and not one I can always wholeheartedly embrace. I’m happy when I eat mostly plant-based, but at times I find in practice it becomes as much about virtue signaling as it is about health and the planet’s wellbeing.
And there’s something else as well. I mentioned on the show a few months ago that I’m not a vegetarian. I have tried to go vegetarian a few times in the past. And I found that when I started denying myself food on moral grounds, it became quite difficult to stop. I started seeing hunger and mealtime misery as a sign of virtue. Wolf says that one of the things that kept her trapped in anorexia for so long was the genuine pleasure she got from looking down on other women, who, quote, “Lacked the discipline” to do it. There is a dark, addictive pleasure to being a little fascist towards yourself. So it’s not just that I feel pressured from outside to not eat the cake. It’s that I have internalized the unhealthy idea, taken it into my subjectivity, that it would be good to deprive myself of the joy of eating it. And if Critchley is right, then this is always gonna be a problem because the structure of the ideal self is always gonna be there and it’s always gonna be vulnerable to colonization by norms that were not chosen by me.
Thorn offers some hope though. She feels there is something we can do about this quandary. Follow the joy. She said that she has found following the joy has always been better than following the discipline. While there are still certainly things about her body she would like to change, she accepts her body more now than before and she got to that mindset by following the joy.
That is the note on which I want to conclude this post because I feel it has ramifications far beyond food and the ideal self. So often we were told to pursue things in life for an abundance of reasons, but far too rarely is the sheer joy of something considered enough of a reason. I believe much of the philosophy and life advice about living in the moment and embracing mindfulness is about placing joy front and center in our lives as a worthwhile pursuit unto itself.
Entertainer Joyce Grenfell once said it this way.
There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.
Now excuse me while I go eat a piece of cake.
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