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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Bread

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

“Give us today our daily bread”, said an itinerant Jewish preacher (Matthew 6:11) and every day the phrase is repeated by hundreds of millions – perhaps even billions – of people. But Jesus, for it was he, never specified if he wanted his bread toasted or not, and that makes a difference. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) has been quoted as saying, “I absolutely love lightly toasted bread. Simultaneously, I also realised that I loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For almost sixty years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with toasted bread.” Yes, it does depend on the perspective and as with other philosophical issues, discussions about bread are open to interpretation.

Aristotle was interested in almost everything, and wrote about almost everything too. Naturally this included bread (though artos, the ancient Greek word he used, can also mean ‘cake’). Anyway, the Macedonian thinker, not content merely to ponder the substance of the doughy stuff we bake, used it to explain the limits of reason and illustrate deliberations in ethics more generally. He wrote, “The end cannot be a subject of deliberation, but only the means; nor indeed can the particular facts be a subject of it, as whether this is bread or has been baked as it should; for these are matters of perception” (Nicomachean Ethics III, Ch.3). So, let’s get back to the tasty stuff.

Is eating bread an indulgence? These days, epicurean means a person devoted to sensory pleasures, particularly those of total and unrestrained excess. However, the word comes from the name of an ancient Greek school of philosophy established by Epicurus (341-270 BCE). Although Epicurus and his followers understood pleasure as life’s chief good and goal, theirs was a strictly controlled vision of it. “Barley bread and, water yield the peak of pleasure” he wrote (Letter to Menoeceus, 131). So forget hedonism; being an epicurean is mainly about eating bread. Yes, it does have a high calorie count, but to indulge in it seems a pretty mild vice.

Other philosophers have written about bread too. “Acorns were good before bread was found”, runs a quote often attributed to Francis Bacon, who also liked this foodstuff. Mary Wollstonecraft was less concerned about the loaf itself and more focused on the fact that women “pass their whole lives working for their daily bread” (A Vindication of the Rights of Women, p.63).

Maybe we should leave the philosophers and focus on the great religious teachers like the one mentioned at the beginning. They all had, it seems, a thing for bread. Buddha – in his Zen incarnation – reputedly said that “the bread in our hand is the body of the cosmos.” The Prophet Mohammed is cited (perhaps apocryphally) as saying “bread feeds the body but flowers feed the soul.” And unlike the product itself, these quotes will never turn stale.

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.