The Practicing Stoic. Ward Farnsworth

familiarity must be broken, and this is best done by looking at the great range of responses to the same things that have come to seem natural to people in different conditions.

      4. Food. We don’t need to look to Sparta or swordfights to find good topics for the types of comparisons just shown. As a case study, consider some ways the principle of this chapter can apply to food, a common subject of Stoic reflection. Reactions to what we eat feel unavoidable as we are having them, and seem to be brought about by the food rather than anything in ourselves; but those reactions often owe as much to us as they do to what is on the plate. The Stoics are close students of the appetites that produce our reactions to foods and all else.

      My baker is out of bread; but the overseer, or the steward, or my tenants all have some to offer. “Bad bread!” you say. Wait; it will become good. Hunger will make even that bread taste delicate and seem to be from the finest flour. For that reason we should not eat until hunger bids us; I will wait until I can get good bread or cease to be fussy about it.

      Seneca, Epistles 123.2–3

      Who does not see that appetite is the best sauce? When Darius, in his flight from the enemy, had drunk some water which was muddy and fouled by cadavers, he declared that he had never drunk anything more pleasant; the fact was, he had never drunk before when he was thirsty…. Compare [to those who use moderation] those you see sweating and belching, being overfed like fatted oxen; then will you perceive that they who pursue pleasure most attain it least, and that the pleasure of eating lies in having an appetite, not in being glutted.

      Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.97, 99–100

      Our topic in this chapter is the role of our own judgments, or opinions, in producing our experience. An appetite can be considered an example of such a judgment if judgments are understood to include all those things within us that shape our reaction to what we meet in the world. From a certain point of view this is obvious. On the one hand, there is the food – an external thing; on the other hand, there is how much we want it – a judgment of our own. Still, it might seem surprising to describe the appetite for food as a “judgment” in the Stoic sense, because we feel it as a physical fact. Our hunger or thirst presents itself as a sensation of the body, not as something in the mind that we might be able to change with our thinking. But the Stoic would challenge those impressions.

      First, our appetites often are up to us – in advance. We may have trouble changing them once they exist, but we have a lot to say about whether and how they arise in the first place. Stoics become more aware not just of how our appetites affect our experience, but of how our choices affect our appetites. We allow ourselves to get hungry, or not; we tantalize ourselves with comparisons and other thoughts that stir desire, or we don’t. The management of appetites – when and how to cultivate them, when and how not – is part of Stoic practice. (Cultivation is called for in cases like the one Seneca describes above, as when learning how to take satisfaction from simple and natural pleasures.) All this is an example of the reorientation the Stoics recommend in general: spending less energy on getting or avoiding things, and more on knowing why we want them (or don’t) and how the way we think might affect this. We will come back to these points in later chapters.

      Second, though, the Stoic wouldn’t concede too quickly that appetites, even once they exist, are physical facts entirely beyond the reach of the mind. Of course great hunger may be a hard fact of that sort, just like other kinds of pains and sensations. But in this setting and others, it is easy to forget how strongly our minds can influence the sensations that external things create for us. A food that looks delicious can become impossible to enjoy, and cause physical revulsion, if you hear something disgusting about how it was prepared. (You might say then that you’ve lost your appetite.) It is not much better – it may even be worse – if the mind makes such a discovery afterwards.

      Very often, when men have eaten fancy foods with great pleasure, if they perceive or learn afterwards that they have eaten something unclean or unlawful, not only is this discovery attended by grief and distress, but their bodies, revolted at the notion, are seized by violent vomiting and retching.

      Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 4 (442f)

      Montaigne gave a more picturesque illustration.

      I know a gentleman who, having entertained a large group of company at his house, a few days later boasted as a joke (for there was nothing to it) that he had fed them a pie made out of a cat. One of the young ladies in the party was so stricken with horror that she developed a violent stomach disorder and a fever. It was impossible to save her.

      Montaigne, On the Power of the Imagination (1580)

      Food interests the Stoic in another respect as well. It provides a useful source of analogies from the way the stomach works to the way the mind works.

      Just as the stomach, when it is impaired by disease, gathers bile, and, changing all the food that it receives, turns every sort of sustenance into a source of pain, so, in the case of the perverse mind, whatever you entrust to it becomes to it a burden and a source of disaster and wretchedness.

      Seneca, On Benefits 5.12.6

      Such comparisons were recurring themes for Plutarch, who wasn’t a Stoic on the biggest questions but was with them on this and other more immediate issues.

      In a fever everything we eat seems bitter and unpleasant to the taste; but when we see others taking the same food and finding no displeasure in it, we stop blaming the food and drink. We blame ourselves and our malady. In the same way, we will stop blaming and being disgruntled with circumstances if we see others accepting the same events cheerfully and without offense.

      Plutarch, On Tranquility of Mind 8 (468f–469a)

      Have you never noticed how sick people turn against and spit out and refuse the daintiest and most expensive foods, though people offer them and almost force them down their throats – but at another time, when their condition is different, their respiration is good, their blood is in a healthy state, and their natural warmth is restored, they get up and enjoy a good meal of simple bread and cheese and cabbage? Such, also, is the effect of reason on the mind.

      Plutarch, On Virtue and Vice 4 (101c–d)

      Dr. Johnson continued the idea, though reversing the facts of the illustration.

      What we believe ourselves to want, torments us not in proportion to its real value, but according to the estimation by which we have rated it in our own minds; in some diseases, the patient has been observed to long for food, which scarce any extremity of hunger would in health have compelled him to swallow; but while his organs were thus depraved, the craving was irresistible, nor could any rest be obtained till it was appeased by compliance. Of the same nature are the irregular appetites of the mind; though they are often excited by trifles, they are equally disquieting with real wants: the Roman, who wept at the death of his lamprey, felt the same degree of sorrow that extorts tears on other occasions.

      Johnson, The Adventurer no. 119 (1753)

      Johnson refers to an anecdote told by Plutarch. Crassus and Domitius were Roman generals. Crassus was ridiculed by Domitius for weeping over the death of an eel-like fish that he owned; Crassus replied that the tears were more than Domitius had shed over his three late wives.

      Food has been offered here just as an example of how Stoics might think about something familiar. Much of the stuff of daily life can be put through the same sort of analysis. Lest the reader think Plutarch was too preoccupied with food, for instance, here he opens a different field of application to which many of the points just made may be adapted:

      Another illustration is the banishment and retreat of our private parts, which stay calm without trembling in the presence of those beautiful women and boys whom neither reason nor law allows us to touch. This happens in particular to those who fall in love, then hear that they have unwittingly fallen in love with a sister or a daughter. Then desire cowers in fear as reason takes hold, and the body exhibits its parts in decent conformity to that judgment.

      Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 4 (442e)

      5. Metaphors