"Pyrrhonian Diet"One of the many potential names for my blog space that didn't make the cut was 'Pyrrhonian Diet.' I know, catchy, isn't it! Worth a second glance? Please stay with me, though, because this is interesting. My aim is neither to bore foodies to tears with disquisitions on ancient philosophy nor to dismay philosophers looking for something sensible on ancient Skepticism, although I recognize that I run the risk of doing a little of both. However, the discipline of the Pyrrhonian skeptic has been inspiring to me in many aspects of life and no more so that in trying to navigate the jungle of contradictions in the world of dietary recommendations, while my attempts to navigate said jungle have constituted the best real-world demonstration I've seen of the merits of Pyrrhonian skepticism. I wanted to do a post on this early on in my blog because I suspect that I'll refer to it again later.
"Pyrrhonian"Before I lose everybody, let me explain what I mean. I'm not going to go on at great length about the Pyrrhonian skeptics: if you want more of an introduction without having to reach for the hardbacks, there are good online introductory essays at the
Stanford Encyclopedia, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
Peter Suber's page . But I am going to explain where I'm coming from, at least, and really hope to show and share why this is so interesting and inspiring to me. In broad strokes, the Pyrrhonian skeptic is a perpetual and perennial seeker. She poses a question and examines possible answers. For any given question, she goes through the process of seeing that there is a multitude of possible answers, and that in different situations or in the eyes of different people, different ones of them appear to contain the truth. Impressed by the equal validity of the different possibilities, she suspends judgment as to a single true answer. Through the repeated practice of this process, she attains peace of mind - the goal of the seeking.
Skeptics also observe the discomfort of those who do not suspend judgment, who make a choice for one worldview/theory or another. A choice, btw, is a hairesis in Greek: in the context of the Christian church later, those who made the 'wrong' choice were the 'heretics.' In the field of philosophy, those who had chosen one or another world view/belief system were 'dogmatists.' This word did not yet hold the forceful connotations o inflexibility and the stigma that it now has: however, in the view of the Pyrrhonian skeptic these might have been applicable. Dogmatists did not suspend judgment and were continually having to defend their position, being caught in inconsistencies, far from the peace of mind that was the stated goal. The Pyrrhonist continues to lead her life as seems best, and in so doing appears to act in accordance with beliefs. However, her propositional attitude toward these actions is not one of enacting belief, and she reserves the right to act differently in the same context at another time. If she is staying with vegetarians, she may choose to refrain from meat, but then if she is offered meat at a business lunch during that stay, she may accept it. A dogmatist would never adjust their diet or dress code to suit context. A Pyrrhonist might sow the seeds of plants according to the phases of the moon, because it seems to work out that way; a dogmatist might do the same thing but because of strict adherence to a belief in a theory.
"Diet"'Diet,' of course, when Hippocrates used the word, meant more than just 'way of eating:' it referred to all aspects of lifestyle relevant for health....
Now for my experience of how Pyrrhonism applies to the question of how to feed ourselves, and especially as relevant for the health seeker. I want to talk about my experience on two levels: the level of seeking information about diet and applying it, and the level of the effect that it has upon your outlook on the world when you assent to a dietary belief system. On the issue of seeking information about diet, as I said, it is a jungle. There are so many possible points of view, all claiming scientific backing for their approach. Not only that, there are so many parameters on which these approaches are based. Some prioritize longevity for the eater above all else. Some prioritize the eater's best integration with their local environment, whether that means using locally harvested herbs and food or getting along with their tablemates and not demanding special treatment. Some are ethically motivated, and I have seen some ethically motivated dietetic advisories espouse meat eating as fervently as the more familiar calls for vegetarianism.
Nowadays, of course, an enormously swollen percentage of the literature in this area is oriented toward weight reduction. And it is here, perhaps, that the valid claim of validity for more than one approach can be seen most readily. Diet styles making opposite recommendations are fervently evangelized and boast legions of faithful, who ascribe their salvation to that diet. Some approaches insist that everyone ought to follow 'their' kind of diet, that anyone who claims it doesn't work for them is doing it 'wrong' in one of a variety of ways. And these approaches seem to have the greatest numbers of 'justified faithful,' rendered righteous and healthy by adherence to the one true way. The approaches that grant that there may be a diversity of different needs among different people seem to draw 'dogmatists' of a less fanatical stripe: however, the stories by which they explain this diversity of requirements within the population (whether this is because of blood type, paleolithic genes, climate zone, physiognomy) may require suspension of judgment in its own right.
When I look at all the information that is tossed back and forth in this arena, all the participants apparently sincere in their beliefs and wishes to help others with them, and to have more people like them sharing their beliefs, I feel most at peace when I suspend judgment about the absolute, objective truth of any of this.
The only subjects on which I haven't been able to achieve this impartiality are trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup: I simply cannot see any way in which they can be healthy for anyone, ever. However, I am in danger of falling into my pet dogma of prioritizing and valorizing what is 'natural' over what is 'man made.' And I'm living among people these days who think that this whole diet thing is a silly mind trip, that food-related health problems are in your head only, that they want their soda and cool-whip and if it makes them happy, then it must be good for them. P.S., veggies are bad for you! If I find myself disagreeing with them, I am taking up a dogmatic stance of my own: for a Pyrrhonian skeptic, their stance would be the cue to suspend judgment on the absolute truth, although I, for example, am free to lead my life as seems right to me and to avoid those things and maybe refuse to feed them to others either.
My experience as a 'Diet Dogmatist'Now for the situation of taking on a 'dogma' regarding diet and applying it. As I mentioned in my introductory post, I am recovering from a lifelong proclivity toward black-and-white thinking. Suspending judgment is therapeutic for me, and when I speak of dogma, I am speaking from experience. This post is getting long and I want you to stay with me, so I'm not going to go through all of my experiences as a food dogmatist. I just want to give some brief observations on how my world view was affected and constrained through the lens of the dogma, (and how I have seen other dogmatists affected and constrained in the same way (although how do I know for sure whether they were truly experiencing the same as me?)) and - here is the important thing: how my world view was expanded by surrendering the dogma.
From 2004-7 I was a fruitarian, eating mostly sweet fruit with some greens every day and some nuts/seeds/nonsweet fruit some few times per week. Nothing cooked, no supplements, no oils. I believed that this was the optimal way for me to eat and that any more than 10% fat in my diet was recipe for disaster. I believed that most hunger I felt was probably something other than real hunger and that part of my path to a freer and stronger, more efficient and more spiritually tuned body/mind/spirit was learning to deal with this other than through food.
I even had supportive friends who did this too, and who believed sincerely that it was the way to health for everybody. I regard it as my saving grace that I never professed to believe that this was the only right way to health for everybody. Deep down, though, I probably did think this, that 'ideally' it would be right for everybody but that given the demands of life only a 'chosen few' were suited for it. (I write objectively and honestly now, I intend not to dwell on the shame that arises within me as I admit to this.) This dogma was a wonderful thing for me at the time: it played a huge role in my recovery from anorexia, providing a very highly structured framework within which to focus on the good parts about eating food, and placing beyond the pale all kinds of frightening foodstuffs. However, it also placed beyond the pale a lot of the social interaction that goes along with those frightening foodstuffs, which I now believe are also an integral part of recovery. Not only did I not participate as fully or readily in gatherings where normal food was in evidence: I felt a trickling but constant alienation by its presence. Judgment was always present within me: I could not empathize with people who put those things into their bodies. I could hardly bear to look at a child eating cheese, or candy, or pretty much anything other than fruit.
This physical aversion, this 'not being able to look,' this alienation, affected my study of Classical literature: my brain would simply dissociate and go elsewhere in the descriptions of sacrifice, cooking, meat-eating. If I was reading through a raw food recipe, if it mentioned spices or a cup of nuts, or salt, I would have to look away and stop reading. I was never quite at the level of fervor of the friend who insisted that if Jesus, Buddha and all other spiritual masters had been cooked-food eaters, then they could not really have been spiritually realized, or the friend who suggested that the guy who brought a warmed sprouted grain dish to a raw potluck was secretly cooking his grains and deceiving himself (and the rest of us) about it because he had been taken over by his candida infection. Another friend, speaking about the phenomenon of so many fruitarians being crazy for durian (quite literally (I used to dream of it at night)) whereas many other people (especially those who actually got some fat in their diet otherwise) absolutely loathe it, said that probably the people who loathed it were too toxic and would come to love it if they ate like we did for long enough.
I always maintained that I believed that this way of eating was not for everybody: just that I thought it was for my body. But if I had to go hungry or eat something off program, I'd go hungry every time. I'd even go home hungry from raw food potlucks. I was hungry a lot, and almost always able to explain it away to myself as something other than hunger. If it was a choice between eating something off program or being sick, for a while I'd have chosen to be sick. Eventually, choosing to recognize that my body might have changed and needed something different, when I was very sick with a broken arm and a staph infection on my ankles, I did break out of the dogma.
Releasing the DogmaBut at the time I made that break, I was no longer surrounded by dogmatists of the same stripe. The only person living close by who was a dogmatic fruitarian was so obviously very unwell, so minimally functional, so narrow in scope of interests and world view, that in fact his example might even have nudged me away from that path. The fact that there were other people rendered similarly narrow and judgmental by the dogma I take as evidence that it wasn't just because I was coming to it from anorexia that I took it that way. Nowadays, living as a relative newcomer in a very conventionally-diet-oriented community, I even have a close friend who is a dogmatist of the opposite persuasion: veggies are bad for you, white flour is good. And I see the same signatures of dogmatism: the same lack of ability to comprehend having different needs, the same righteousness.
In contrast, as I gradually came out of the dogma, my experience of the world blossomed. Rather than just paying lip service to the concept that different people thrive on different lifestyles, dietary considerations and all, I felt like I could see and feel that diversity. The farm animals that I had found noisy, stinky, demanding nuisances as a dogmatic fruitarian, I came to have genuine connections with, to love and appreciate. I no longer had the constant feeling of needing to defend myself, whether from attacks concerning my dogma or just from noise and danger and everything else 'out there.' As the months went by, I kept getting comments about how much more grounded I seemed to be, how much more comfortable I was to be around, and I felt so much more accepting in turn.
Perhaps much of this was to do with improving nutritional status. I have to suspend judgment :) but my feeling is that a lot of it was also to do with my altered perspective, with the removal of the blinders that only allowed me to see one possible way for myself to be, the judgment of others implied therein, and the opening up of a much broader and more fluid perspective on life. Probably the two go together. Of course, I think it's possible to be a raw vegan (or anything else) without becoming a dogmatist about it. Although my experience is that for myself, adopting a dietary strategy without falling into dogma is extremely challenging. Maybe I will try that!
