Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Chocolate

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.

‘Will to Power’ is a name of a chocolate-flavoured protein bar, which promises to “help you get in touch with your inner Übermensch.” That the shortish and somewhat plump Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) should be associated with a bodybuilders’ food supplement perhaps stretches credulity. But the fact that it is chocolate flavoured would have appealed to the moustachioed philosopher. He clearly loved the stuff, and even urges readers of Ecce Homo to “start the day with chocolate” (p.66).

Chocophillia manifests itself in another philosophical classic too. In Albert Camus’ novel The Outsider, the Algerian-born existentialist wrote:“After smoking a couple of cigarettes I went back to the room, got a tablet of chocolate, and returned to the window to eat it” (p.8). Camus eventually fell out with his fellow existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) but the latter continued to eat chocolates with Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) at their legendary Parisian hangout the Café de Flore. It clearly inspired the revolutionary Frenchman in his writings: “well-behaved children… make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time” (Three Plays, p.49). Sartre was a committed and uncompromising Marxist, so perhaps he was inspired in this by Karl Marx (1818-1883) himself. Certainly, the author of Das Kapital had a high opinion the sweet stuff. He wrote approvingly of being “a great lover of chocolate”, and remarked that not only money had value, but that “the sacks of cocoa… in Mexico served as a sort of money” (Critique of Political Economy, p.34).

Adam Smith (1723-1790) had a rather different take on capitalism than Marx, but they did agree that chocolate was a valuable commodity. The prophet of free markets was concerned about ‘duties on foreign luxuries’, of which he particularly singled out chocolate (Wealth of Nations, p.887). Whether Smith actually liked the confectionary he did not say.

Chocolate is not only for eating but also for giving away. The compulsively altruistic French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-43) when she was a young girl would send all her rations of sweets and chocolate to soldiers serving on the Western front. Her contemporary, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) admired her similarly doomed compatriot Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) for following Weil’s example: “He entered into a kind of asceticism. He stopped smoking, gave away all his chocolate” (Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem, 21 October 1940).

You do not have to be a philosopher to be a true chocolate lover. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), the legendary Chilean poet, was more peckish than philosophical when he wrote An Ode to Chocolate: “I want chocolate/on my pillow/and on my lips/frozen chocolate/and melting chocolate/chocolate with nuts/and cherry chocolate/chocolate with sea salt/and chocolate with pepper…”.

Is it just me, or are you getting peckish, too?

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