Customer Reviews

The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature

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This book makes a strong defense of the classical principles of truth, beauty and goodness, jumping from a provoking and very unique starting point: eating. Kass is able to bring the perennial philosophy into the 20th Century, and to create a dialogue between it and modern science, as well as provide a persuasive understanding and defense of traditional ethics, etiquette, and beauty. Kass's analysis of "Babette's Feast" and his speculations on religous ritual are very thought provoking.

One must admire Kass's attempt to pull together so much of traditional philosophy (especially Aristotle) and literature, and still bring this into dialogue with contemporary science (there's reductionism there if anywhere) and culture. His scope is broad, and this book demands a lot of the reader! The argument is purposive, and analysis is difficult--there is so much there, and just about every move is key. (I found summarizing for students very difficult.) Yet Kass's arguments are very much worth considering, and bear more than one reading. To those who are patient, a vision of a very different way of looking at our whole human experience will emerge, one that I believe makes better sense of ourselves than most others offered today.

This is a book about the nature of human beings and ideas that would not have occurred to you otherwise. It is provocative--try to find some satisfying reply to Kass's contention that organ donation is a form of cannalbalism. The writing is fine.I can't recommend giving this book to everyone, but if you have some intellectually-minded friends who love to eat, this would be a tremendous choice. You could then discuss it over a omniverous meal.

One of the reviewers seems to be very upset by Kass's omission of Freud and Levi-Strauss. There is a distinct difference between an academic study and a work of philosophy. The Hungry Soul is not an academic study and should not be expected to quote any specific opinion or previous work. This book represents Kass's own views on the subject and in my opnion they are thoughtful, deep and of a very high ethical character. This book is inspirational and thought provoking.

Martin Buber once wrote that in every animal function human beings are not simply as animals, but instead humanize what they do. In "The Hungry Soul' Leon Kass gives a phenomenological and philosophical basis to the thesis that in eating we can also perfect our nature. Kass is not simply one of the world's senior bioethicists, but a humanist scholar with a medical and scientific background that give his arguments a force in fact and reason. I cannot honestly say I followed the argument of this work throughout but I did understand through it how eating can become a central means of extending our own caring for, and relation to other human beings, a way then of sanctifying ourselves in the world.
I conclude with an illuminating paragraph from Kass' conclusion, a paragraph which I believe gives the true ' flavor ' of the book.
"In the higher animals., the soul energized by hunger gains hunger's satisfaction only through intermediate activities- such as smelling, hearing, seeing, chasing, attacking, capturing, biting, tasting, chewing , and swallowing- activities which themselves become new objects for the hungry soul. Increasingly capable of genuine encounters with the world, with other living forms, and ( especially in birds and mammals) with kith and kin,the souls of the hungry acquire new hungers of their own,and for more nourishment.With the rise of intelligence and especially with the extraordinary development of the upright animal, the hungry soul seeks satisfacgtion in activities animated also by wonder,ambition,affection, curiosity, and awe. We human beings delight in beauty and order, art and action, sociability and friendship, insight and understanding, song and worship. And as self-conscious beings, we especially crave self-understanding and knowledge of our place in the larger whole." pp. 228

I have never read such a neurotic, uptight, angst-filled book as this. The author actually inveighs against the eating of ice cream in public - an expression of his "not only Talmudic view" that "eating in the street is for dogs."

Really. I couldn't make this up.

His detailed review of table manners towards the end is quite interesting, but the book is marred by a long, metaphysical, and wholly irrelevant screed against the materialist, science-driven viewpoint that supposedly dominates our culture. Most authors in the humanities just launch into their subject without apology, but Kass' long justification of Why Science Is Insufficient distracts from, and fatally mars, what might otherwise be a very reasonable (if much shorter) review of the culture of food and eating.

Curiously, the preface contains a detailed explanation of why the author was not qualified to write this book. I'm inclined to believe him on this point.

This book is a fine work of (unintentional?) self parody. Some of you are probably already familiar with a quote from this book in which Kass condemns public ice cream consumption. Some are undoubtedly tempted to guess that this quote as an aberration, a whimsical flight of fancy in which the otherwise sober Kass lets his bizarre pet peeves override his otherwise serious philosophical investigation. Not so! The Hungry Soul consists of nothing but whimsical rants in which Kass makes no distinction between personal pet peeves and universal moral law.

In some sense, one must admire Kass. He makes his blatant contempt for reason clear, and then follows through with this attitude by abandoning it entirely. Kass does not follow in the footsteps of philosophers like Hume who use rationality to probe the limits and uncover the weaknesses and self-contradictions of rationality. He simply has no truck with reason in any manner.

Thus, when Kass exhorts his readers to purge themselves of scientific, enlightenment rationality when they read his book, warning them of what a difficult task that will be, or claims that cannibalism and vegetarianism are moral equivalents, or that the reason behind the biblical prohibition on eating lobster exists is because their mode of locomotion is improper to their environment (i.e., if they walk on legs, they should be land animals and if they live in the water, they should swim like fish), the most enjoyable thing is not to think of counterarguments, nor to reel at the sheer madness of the doctor's thought, but to simply let the wondrous illogic wash over you.

For first an foremost, Kass's thought is not philosophical, nor Biblical, nor conservative (though it has elements of all of these things), but magical. The laws of magic are pre-rational psychological rules-of-thumb, used in pattern recognition, that are found, to varying degrees, in many, if not all, people: the laws of contagion, association, similarity, sympathy, similarity, and the like. It is these magical laws that underpin Kass's thought. Accepted on its own terms, and properly understood, this is a quite enjoyable book.

Just don't look to it for moral guidance.

The product was in the shape you said it was and it also got here in about a week.

One reviewer described this book as "reductionary humanism." I think that is a fitting description. The problem is that Kass ignores Freud and Levi-Strauss, for instance, despite the fact that both, it could be argued, thought about nothing but eating. "Identification" and the "death drive" are, after all, the psychological analogs of swallowing and defecating. Levi-Strauss devoted thousands of pages to the table manners and the rest, but Kass doesn't bother to cite him once. And if he really wanted to treat the hunger in the soul, what about the eating disorder's, bulimia and anorexia and the rest. Kass takes a little too seriously Leo Strauss's injunction that is better to understand the low in terms of the high--he also liked to quote Hegel to the effect that philosophy should not be edifying.