The Philosophical Significance of Chewing
The most philosophically important epoch in life's evolution may have been the development of jaws in arthropods. Everything advanced organisms do requires ingestion, and chewing has become essential for that purpose.
Fast forward to humans, and even a quick glance makes it apparent that our entire culture revolves around chewing. We ceremoniously chew our food at the table, psychologically chew the acquiantances around us, chew marginalized demographics, in many thousands of ways. In fact, all of ethics might reduce to issues involved in physical, emotional or symbolic chewing: God allegedly wants to enlighten humans by getting us to chew at a bare minimum, while nihilistic value systems want to maximize the pleasure derived from this many-faceted chewing as much as possible irrespective of psychological consequences.
Seems absurd when expressed this bluntly, but it's really true: the most challenging philosophical task of the modern world may be what to do about our need, compulsion, desire to chew. Is this an irresolvable dilemma?
Fast forward to humans, and even a quick glance makes it apparent that our entire culture revolves around chewing. We ceremoniously chew our food at the table, psychologically chew the acquiantances around us, chew marginalized demographics, in many thousands of ways. In fact, all of ethics might reduce to issues involved in physical, emotional or symbolic chewing: God allegedly wants to enlighten humans by getting us to chew at a bare minimum, while nihilistic value systems want to maximize the pleasure derived from this many-faceted chewing as much as possible irrespective of psychological consequences.
Seems absurd when expressed this bluntly, but it's really true: the most challenging philosophical task of the modern world may be what to do about our need, compulsion, desire to chew. Is this an irresolvable dilemma?
Comments (12)
"No; I am most careful."
"The late Mr. Gladstone used to chew each mouthful thirty-three times. Deuced good notion if you aren't in a hurry"[/quote]
[quote=Lewis Carroll]"You are old," said the youth, " and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak-
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."[/quote]
That's my entire stock of knowledge about chewing.
Thesis a chew sorry. (This is a true story. ) We are chew chew drains. A chew place bikini. The moral of the story is oral. There is chew munch spoke to say what is gong.
Love the quote!
Tell that to a fly. Or a human juicer with a straw. :grin:
Quoting Enrique
But H.sapiens is famously weak chinned and puny toothed for a hominid. We reverted towards the suckling child state as an example of evolutionary neotony. This was possible because we also mastered fire and could cook food and make it soft and tender, minimising any mastication involved.
Quoting Enrique
It is absurd.
We then to get our chews stunk in the mud.
Thank you! I remembered another one -
[quote=JJ]Chin, chin! And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality.[/quote]
(Every online edition I can find has "chimed" but I remember it as "chined", after the chine of an animal) [... and I remember wrong, apparently....]
Chew on that while I ruminate some more on this fascinating topic.
As lll alluded to in a different thread, the consumption of ideas can be analogized to digestion: we parse them into bite-sized pieces so as to better grasp the whole. Likewise, efficient learning divvies up tasks into more digestible portions so we do not get overwhelmed, losing sight of the forest for the trees. Makes you wonder, what is the evolutionary relationship between feeding and part/whole conception? At a fundamental level, could mental contents have been shaped by the way we obtain and ingest a meal? Perhaps mastication is the foundation of mechanism.
I think it's putting the cart before the horse in that one needs to separate out abstract chewing from physical. There is a fundamental aspect of perhaps being and "chewing", in the ways you mentioned, just makes external objects amenable to our being. Obviously not everyone needs to "chew" over the same information. One might consider the orbital or a planet a matter of "chewing".
Not chew in particular, but to ingest, to eat. The real philosophical problem is eating, feeding.
Food for thought:
The body feeds on food.
The mind feeds on ideas.
As we ascend Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we're chewing all the way, but on different kinds of things (first burgers, chicken nuggets, caviar for the affluent; second ideas; third, ?)
:lol: Bingo! Here, have a :broken: a custard apple.