tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post6132006366882461366..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Another NatureCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59251363548951609302007-01-09T21:21:00.000-05:002007-01-09T21:21:00.000-05:00Also, let's not forget that many people eat withou...Also, let's not forget that many people eat without thinking at all about what they are eating. They are not participating in a human-centered power structure. They are just hungry [haha].Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-41711859189205128112007-01-09T20:12:00.000-05:002007-01-09T20:12:00.000-05:00Also, Karl, you might be pushing a bit too hard on...Also, Karl, you might be pushing a bit too hard on the idea that fish are able to be eaten with less qualms than, say, a cow or a dog, because they are perceived as being less alive, somehow. The issue of what and what not to eat--i.e., dietary proscriptions--has more to do with what you have also intimated: the ways in which we perceive Other animals to be more or less "like us" in their shape, living habits, and supposed reasoning/memory capabilities. It had more to do with embodiment, in other words, or the perceived lack thereof. The fish is not less alive than a dog, from either a medieval or more contemporary philosophical perspective--it is simply less "like us" than a dog.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-3160374471934080942007-01-09T20:04:00.000-05:002007-01-09T20:04:00.000-05:00Karl writes,
"I wonder if there's a way to drain ...Karl writes,<br /><br />"I wonder if there's a way to drain death of its symbolic power."<br /><br />Not only is that likely impossible, I wonder if it is even desirable. I fear a world in which death loses its very real as well as its symbolic power. It may be, as I think Karl has outlined here and in other posts, that when the *terms* of the symbolization of death, viz. all living entities, are set by those in power, who represent only a margin of all living entities, then there are moral and ethical problems. But how can we not invest death with immense symbolic [and terrifying] power? It's the one thing we never really want to happen to us [except in extreme cases of illness, deprivation, and/or depression]. As Woody Allen once said, "I'm not afraid of my own death. I just don't want to be there when it happens." Also, one of the reasons the fallen angels in Milton's "Paradise Lost" choose living in hell over continuing the fight with God by overt means, is that, while they don't fear intense physical and psychic pain, they do fear not existing at all. After Moloch, in Book II, advises open war wityh God, Belial discourages it, saying,<br /><br />"Thus repuls'd, our final hope / Is flat despair: we must exasperate / Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage, / And that must end us, that must be our cure, / To be no more; sad cure; for who would loose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through Eternity, / To perish rather, swallowd up and lost / In the wide womb of uncreated night, / Devoid of sense and motion?"<br /><br />Devoid of sense and motion, indeed--but not here at In The Middle!Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55709089321019201802007-01-09T17:14:00.000-05:002007-01-09T17:14:00.000-05:00Laudine: thanks for your comments and for pushing ...Laudine: thanks for your comments and for pushing me into a more complex direction. I still wonder if there's a way to dislodge death from its place of preference in organizing an ethical system or systems of power. These are thoughts I'm just beginning to work out, but I hope you can see where I'm trying to go with them.<br /><br />So while I know there's no way to get around death and causing death (and this is partially in response to Eileen, partially to Laudine), I wonder if there's a way to drain death of its symbolic power. This is still coming out of my encounter with Marcuse's "Ideology of Death," which remains, and perhaps always will, one of my all time favorites.<br /><br />And Ephraem: I wonder, though, what's the logic of that organization? Lenten rules at various points in the Christian Middle Ages--if we can speak of such a thing--can be exceedingly complex. Hence the reference, partially snarky, to the "doggy portions of the dogfish." Clearly, I think, there's a sense that the doggy portions are more alive, closer to the human, than the piscine portions. I want to argue that these fasting systems organize themselves around relationships of power having to do with proximity to death or to life, with human life being life's ideal form.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-43676940715771982232007-01-07T21:33:00.000-05:002007-01-07T21:33:00.000-05:00The oriental Christian Lenten fast allows anything...The oriental Christian Lenten fast allows anything without a backbone. Some monasteries allowed poultry especially duck (being a waterbird) on fast days. Snails are considered fast food. The taxonomy of food is fairly opaque - the laws of kosher, for example, are exceedingly complex.Diogeneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13017379848939465128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79997032549971269312007-01-07T15:44:00.000-05:002007-01-07T15:44:00.000-05:00The very nature of physics shows us that for every...The very nature of physics shows us that for every amount of energy expended, whether through eating or otherwise, something has to be "used up," or at the very least, pushed around. There's no living without doing some kind of violence, somewhere, to someone or something. You can try to live more mindfully with the idea of always taking the paths of least resistance/least violence, but just to exist, you are object of displacement of something, and you, too, will be displaced.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-81527763211216232542007-01-06T18:51:00.000-05:002007-01-06T18:51:00.000-05:00I don't think we can opt out of organizing diet ar...I don't think we can opt out of organizing diet around death, but I think we can change how we equate certain food categories with more or less death (meat=more death, plant=less death), and thus with more or less sacrifice. If we think beyond the death of the individual animal/plant being eaten, and think in term of food production systems, death manifests in very different ways. If we eat a largely industrial diet--in which I also include organic and vegetarian industrial foods--then our eating involves death of polluted ecosystems, death of genetic diversity, and the gutting of local sustainable economies, which is a kind of death. If we're pescetarians who eat an orange roughy rather than, say, industrial beef, we're still participating in species eradication. So in certain contexts, to indulge in eating a sustainably raised steak causes less death and havoc than the abstemious, sacrificial, and ethical eating of a veggie burger.<br />I suppose that what I'm suggesting is that ethical diets based on these kinds of indulgences and restrictions should be revealed as complex systems that resist easy categorization into binaries and hierarchies.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58956350000176719662007-01-06T16:17:00.000-05:002007-01-06T16:17:00.000-05:00What's interesting to me is that the various speci...What's interesting to me is that the various specialized ethical diets tend to describe the eater's relationship to death. At least that's how it strikes me. In order, from most deadly to least deadly:<br /><br />Carnivore<br />Pollo-vegetarian<br />Pescetarian<br />Lacto-ovo vegetarian<br />Vegan<br />Fruitarian<br />...and finally, if we want to get fantastical, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astomi">Astomi</a><br /><br />I think we can consider the same arrangement as indicating an increasing opting out of society and its discontents; that is, fruitarians are, according to a certain model, far more Utopian or 'spiritual' than pescetarians.<br /><br />What troubles me about the whole arrangement is precisely that death is its organizing principle. I wonder--and here the ideas are still inchoate--if I can conceive of some way to dislodge death from its magnetic ordering force, if I can conceive of some way to empty death, and thus sacrifice, of its power. I suppose it's better to be on the life side of the binary than the death side, but I wonder if there's a way to step outside the binary altogether.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-24828225571456618432007-01-06T15:01:00.000-05:002007-01-06T15:01:00.000-05:00She should join the new 21st century fad and call ...She should join the new 21st century fad and call herself a pescetarian then!<br /><br />Although the problem I find with that label is that it sounds more like you're only eating fish--and not veggies!Glaukôpishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11021360723399801160noreply@blogger.com