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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Leon Kass

The Indian theory of taste

20 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Emotion, Food, Pleasure, South Asia, Zest

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bharata, Bhoja, Constantin Stanislavski, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Leon Kass, Michael Pollan, rasa, Sheldon Pollock, Thailand

I am an amateur at Indian aesthetic theory. I have not studied it much; I can read its Sanskrit source texts, but with some difficulty given how much they allude to literary and dramatic works I don’t know. As with Confucianism and Islamic Aristotelianism, it is a field where I cannot claim significant expertise. Yet I continue to find myself drawn to it, finding ideas that strike me as valuable and relevant – most recently reading Sheldon Pollock’s wonderful Rasa Reader, right from the first excerpt .

The earliest known extant text of Indian aesthetic theory is Bharata’s Nāṭya Śāstra. This text, circa 300 CE, sets out the concept of rasa, central to nearly all later Indian aesthetic thought. Rasa, roughly, refers to the emotion involved in a dramatic or literary work. The tradition often disagrees on where this rasa exists: the actor, the audience, the character, the author or even the work itself. But they all know that the Sanskrit word rasa literally means “taste”; it continues to refer to the sense of taste long after it has developed this more dramatic sense. And this meaning matters. Reading Pollock’s excerpt from Bharata, I am struck by the passage in Bharata’s chapter 6 where he defines rasa:

Here one might ask: What does ‘rasa’ actually mean? Our answer is that rasa is so called because it is something savored. And how can rasa be said to be ‘savored’? Just as discerning people relish tastes when eating food prepared with various condiments [vyañjana] and in doing so find pleasure, so discerning viewers relish the stable emotions when they are manifested by the acting out of various transitory emotions and reactions and accompanied by the other acting registers (the verbal, physical, and psychophysical), and they find pleasure in doing so. Continue reading →

What’s eating Michael Pollan?

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Biology, Food, Health, Pleasure, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Leon Kass, Michael Pollan, United States

One of my greatest passions in life is food, trying out new cuisines and spices in unusual restaurants. In a certain way, a love of food was central to my philosophical development; part of the reason I went to work in Bangkok, where I discovered Buddhism, was my love of Thai food.

So I’m interested in philosophical treatments of food. Recent treatises on the subject, though, have proved disappointing. One of the worst is Leon Kass’s The Hungry Soul, a work that tries to think through just about every aspect of eating except for the pleasures of taste. He mentions them very briefly on pp. 90-91, where he dismisses them as ephemeral, disappearing once enjoyed, and therefore “closed to the permanent or the eternal” – just like music or drama, though this parallel goes curiously unmentioned. Kass admits that he “cooks little” and “has unsophisticated tastes” – basically, it would seem, he doesn’t enjoy food very much. Which makes The Hungry Soul comparable to a treatise on music written by the tone-deaf.

But Kass may be a bit too easy a target. He has already been the target of much ridicule on the Internet for his pompous pronouncements on food etiquette, most notoriously his condemnation of the act of licking an ice cream cone, as “a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.” I know few who take him seriously.

Far more of a hearing is given to Michael Pollan, whose recent work seems to echo Kass’s puritanism in language more acceptable to educated left-wingers. Especially, his work In Defense of Food seems rather to be an attack on it. Continue reading →

Inconsistency in the incest taboo

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Disgust, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Sex

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

conservatism, Dan Savage, incest, Jonathan Haidt, Leon Kass, Martha Nussbaum

I’m often surprised by people who see gay rights as an entirely one-sided, good and evil issue – and then turn around and condemn incest, even consensual adult brother-sister incest, as sick, disgusting and therefore wrong. (The “therefore” is the most intriguing part.) I’ve always enjoyed Dan Savage‘s sex columns, but after his continued attacks on those who condemn gay sex as disgusting (such as ensuring that this (NSFW) is the first Google hit for Senator Rick Santorum‘s name), I lost a lot of respect for him when he repeatedly proclaimed incest to be wrong.

Savage’s arguments are startlingly poor. Continue reading →

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