While Protestantism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe took various forms, almost all of them emphasised a religion of a practical nature. For exam- ple, Deism stripped Christianity bare of unnecessary ritual, idolotry and mystical revelation, leaving a body of doctrine supposedly based on the reason of God. ‘Deists rejected priests, ceremonies, the miraculous suspension of Nature, super- stitions and those parts of Christian doctrine which they regarded as incomprehensible’ (Goodman, 1974: 42). As Hooykaas puts it, for ascetic Protestants an emphasis on the general priesthood of all believers
implied the right and the duty, for those who had the talent, to study the Scripture without depending on the authority of tradition and hierarchy, together with the right and duty to study the other book written by God, the book of nature, without regard to the authority of the fathers of natural phi- losophy.
(Hooykaas, 1972: 109)
In other words, the book of Scripture (the Bible) led to spiritual enlightenment and the book of nature (science) led to worldly enlightenment. It was no longer an affront to God to ask how the world worked, nor was this only the territory of skilled theologians. The general priesthood of all believers implied that these ques- tions were the right of everyone. Hooykaas provides us with an example of this:
The Huguenot Palissy was derided because he, a man ‘without letters’ ... had dared to contradict the view of the ancients, who held that minerals grow like plants. A scholar ... asked him in which book he has read this new opinion, and he retorted that he got his knowledge through the anatomy of nature and not by reading books: ‘I have had no other book but heaven and earth, which is known to everybody, and it has been given to everyman to know and to read this beautiful book’.
(Hooykaas, 1972: 109)
Thus the position of Man in the dogma of ascetic Protestantism prefigures the cel- ebrated Foucauldian empirico-transcendental doublet constructed by both the book of nature (empiricism) and the book of the Scriptures (transcendentalism), the latter being especially important for not only Christian beliefs but also Christian practices. These Christian beliefs were influential for many Enlightenment thinkers, like Immanual Kant.
According to Greene (1960: xiv), the influence of Protestantism, especially Pietism, on Kantian philosophy was profound. Kant was introduced to Pietism through his family and his early education from about 1732 in the Collegium Fridericianum. Although Kant acquired a long-lasting abhorrence of religious emotion, his admiration of Pietist views remained with him. In his old age, he wrote about Pietism to a friend,
Even if the religious conscienceness of that time and the conceptions of what is called virtue and piety were by no means clear and satisfactory, it yet con- tained the root of the matter. One may say of Pietism what one will; it suffices that the people to whom it was a serious matter were distinguished in a manner deserving of all respect. They possessed the highest good which man can enjoy – that repose, that cheerfulness, that inner peace which is dis- turbed by no passions.
(Kant quoted in Paulsen, 1902: 28)
Throughout his education Kant came to know two opposing theological view- points. The first, derived from rationalist theological philosophy proposed by Christian Wolff, proposed that God is the absolute measure of goodness, wisdom and power. Following from this, rational human speculation, being His handi- work, must lead to the best of all possible worlds. Thus the speculative (transcendental) intellectualism of the human mind becomes a moral imperative given by God to humans in the form of universal reason. The second viewpoint comes from Pietism in which it is acknowledged that since the Fall in the Garden of Eden, humans are born into sin. The moral status of men and women is there- fore sullied, and a life of holiness therefore requires a withdrawal of pleasures, especially those of a carnal nature, leading to purification. Kant was able to incor- porate these two viewpoints into his universal philosophy of moral reason. For Kant the ability to take in what the world gives us (experience) and subject this
self-reflection – or critical-reflection – in order to achieve the rank of pure intel- lect (good or pure reason) is the greatest of human achievements. Indeed, it is what distinguishes humans from animals or mere brutes. In short, Kantian philos- ophy elevates pure reason, or ‘good’, as the universal form of humanity. The ethics of turning away from worldly ends towards a cultivation of a perfect will – a practice once reserved for the monastery – now becomes the heart of Kantian universal philosophy. As Hunter puts it, Kant can be regarded as engaging in the familiar reformation strategy of translating the practices of the monks into the mass pedagogies of Protestantism (Hunter, 1995: 11). Central to the Kantian phi- losophy is the notion of freedom and autonomy. But, as Hunter explains elsewhere (Hunter, 1994), this is not any kind of freedom or autonomy; only that exercised self-reflectively against moral judgement. And from where does moral judgement arise? Moral judgement in Kantian philosophy arises out of a rational knowledge of moral principles. Hunter continues, ‘For Kant, we might say, the subject is founded in the subject – in the moral laws of its own constitution’ (Hunter, 1994: 52). In other words the autonomy and choice of the ‘choosing’ subject are always mortgaged to the moral principles that the subject has set for itself. We are, therefore, left with a moral autonomy in which self-enacted princi- ples are always registered against the subject’s rational knowledge (Cooke, 1992), especially knowledge of what is considered to be ‘right’, ‘proper’ and ‘good’. As we shall see, this ‘choosing’ subject has been important to the development of nutrition in which knowledge of a ‘good’ diet has been central.
We can see a perfect example of Kant’s ‘choosing’ subject in the essay ‘On the highest moral-physical good’ published in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant, 1974 [1798]). Here Kant puts forward his view of the pur- pose of the dinner party (the ‘Tischgessellschaft’). In the essay Kant begins by reminding us that ‘The two kinds of good, physical and moral, cannot be mixed together for then they would neutralise themselves and not work at all toward the end of true happiness’ (Kant, 1974: 143). He then proceeds to describe the rules for the dinner party, specifying the number of guests (at least three, but no more than nine) and the composition of the company, which should be young and vital, and of diverse backgrounds so as to enrich the conversation over the meal. In fact, it is conversation which is the meal’s most important purpose. Dining alone is, for Kant, unhealthy for one who needs to philosophise. Unlike, say, the mathemati- cian or the historian – for whom ideas can be written down and rearranged by using universal rules of reason – the philosopher does not build the sciences in that way. Their task instead is to search for wisdom, and the philosopher takes the ‘final end to all knowledge to be his object’ (Kant, 1974: 145). Thus,
A man who, while dining, gnaws at himself intellectually during the solitary meal gradually loses his sprightliness; on the other hand he increases it if a table companion, by presenting him alternatives of his own ideas, offers him new material to stimulate him.
Hinske (1990) has reviewed Kant’s attitude to the dinner party in light of manu- scripts contained in Kant’s estate in which Kant insists that the ‘Tischgessellschaft’ should provide good food and good wine, but, most impor- tantly, it should provide good company. Eating and drinking, pleasurable as they are, should never detract from the real purpose of the ‘Tischgessellschaft’: that of spiritual enlightenment and the expansion of human reason and knowledge. According to Hinske, the ‘Tischgessellschaft’ met Kant’s central idea of general human reason whereby the sensuous experiences of the meal are in the service of the advancement of knowledge and reason. Moreover, the good atmosphere pro- vided by the ‘Tischgessellschaft’ tempered the ‘viciousness of the intellectual fight’, since argumentation can be interrupted by eating; one can oscillate between ‘the thought’ and ‘the bowl’. For Kant, the physical pleasure of eating is mortgaged to the need to advance ideas. Pleasure is subsumed to the attainment of reason and knowledge. Kant thus struggles to balance spirituality and sensuous experience, where spirituality (in the name and practice of Pietism) is always mortgaged to the ideals of pure reason. As Hunter points out, Kant’s universal phi- losophy – whereby one problematises one’s attachment to morally impure senses which are regarded as being in need of intellectual purification – becomes a moral duty, or ‘good’, rather than an act of free theoretical choice. In doing this, Kantianism rehearses a ‘government of the self ’ by transposing a long-standing strategy of Christian spiritualism directly into the register of philosophical peda- gogy (Hunter, 1995: 12).
We need, however, to consider this development of human consiousness within the context of governmentality that we have discussed in previous chap- ters. Even with Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, who declared the motto of the Enlightenment to be ‘Have the courage to make use of your own intellect’ (Greene, 1960: xxxii), there was a recognition that intellectual freedom had to be mortgaged to the affairs of the State. According to Kant, in the business of the State ‘reasoning is not permitted: one must obey’ (Kant cited in Greene, 1960: xxxiii). Kant was therefore fully aware of the other armature of what we have described elsewhere as governmentality, that is, the need for the govern- ment of ‘men and things’. We can recognise in Kant an understanding of the role of the citizen and the role of the intellectual. This distinction can be found earlier in the writings of Hobbes, who well understood that the role of the State was to permit the existence of the twin identities of subject and private person. The first needs to observe public obedience as a condition of social peace, the second might follow his or her own private conscience so long as this did not interfere with public duty. According to Koselleck, this private conscience ‘had been excised from the state and reserved for man as human being’. Enlightenment thought, such as Kantian philosophy, dissolved the distinction between subject and human being so that ‘publicly man was to realise himself as a human being’ (Koselleck, 1988: 39). Thus one’s public life becomes imbued with one’s personal ethics which, in Kantian thought, were based on the universal law of moral reason. In other words, the modern subject becomes at
one and the same time empirical and transcendental. As Rose puts it, ‘Kant [made] individual consciousness the sacred basis of Practical [moral] Reason’ (Rose, 1990: 318).
The tension between the need for individual freedom and the needs of the busi- ness of State are central to our understanding of the various sites of rationalisation in which nutrition discourse emerged, which we will discuss later. Here though we can say that from the seventeenth century onwards there was a development of the art of governing, in which the faculties of calculation and reflection had to be improvised. Calculation was needed in order to develop expert technical knowl- edge about what needed to be governed (people and ‘things’), and reflection was permitted through the religious tolerance and freedom to worship (Hunter, 1994: 43).
We will now go on to look at the way this system of thought operated in the development of the modern subject of food choice. While we will bear in mind Foucault’s point about the coexistence of technologies of the self and technologies of power, in what follows we will treat the development of a spirituality of food choice separately from its science in order to fully explicate the development of the modern subject of food choice. This heuristic device provides us with fruitful ways of tracing the heritage of nutrition and it helps us overcome two theoretical obstacles which have been problematic for earlier writers in this area. For exam- ple, the disagreement between Aronson and Turner mentioned in Chapter 1 is directly related to this point. We saw that Turner (1982a, 1982b) believes the beginnings of modern dietary sciences in Western culture may be traced to the works of George Cheyne, who promoted diet based on an asceticism to the elite classes of eighteenth-century England. It is Turner’s belief that these dietary prac- tices were spread beyond the professional classes to the poorer sections of the population through religious affiliations between Cheyne and early Methodists like Wesley who preached the importance of hard work, and a sober, spare lifestyle. Turner also argues that a rationality of the diet was part of the ‘Protestantisation’ of the labouring classes, which Weber considered to be crucial to the success of capitalism. Aronson (1983), on the other hand, argues that the rationalisation of the diet sprang from its scientific origins in chemistry, which showed that food in relation to the body obeyed the laws of thermodynamics. With this new knowledge, food could be calculated in terms of productivity, labour, output and so on. Moreover, Aronson claims that the rations of the work- house, armies and prisons were more responsible for the development and popularisation of nutrition than were Cheyne’s dietary regimes, which were only directed to the elite. By examining the emergence of nutrition from empirical and transcendental positions we can, in fact, accommodate both the science of Aronson and the spiritualism of Turner.
The second theoretical obstacle relates again to Turner, who has written widely on contemporary concerns about diet and health. In the previous chapter we men- tioned Turner’s belief that contemporary dietary discourses serve to amplify and elaborate sexuality through images marketed to mass audiences (Turner, 1984:
173–174). In other work Turner (1992: 22) emphasises current dietary concerns in relation to fitness and longevity. Elsewhere still (Turner, 1994: xiii) he sees dietary practices as symptomatic of a modern preoccupation with consumption and a rationalisation, or ‘McDonaldisation’, of the food supply. Furthermore, he sees this rationalisation being echoed in the influence of nutrition and dietetics which promote scientific views of eating. And, most recently, Turner has said that our concerns about what to eat are dependent on the regard of others; what he refers to as the ‘looking-glass self ’ (Turner, 1995: xiii). Turner’s accounts of the importance of diet in modern culture have thus included sexuality and attractive- ness, mass marketing, health and fitness, longevity and the rationalisation and efficiency of the food supply. These explanations appear to radiate in different directions from a centre whose character is unclear. We can, however, place Turner’s positions within the framework we are proposing here by saying that modern dietary concerns, characterised by nutrition, function for modern subjects by providing an empirical understanding of the body, health and food through an elaboration of knowledges about nutrients, pathologies and disease (and with these knowledges come normalising and disciplinary strategies about what, how much and when to eat in order to be fit and healthy). Nutrition also provides mod- ern subjects with an ethics, an askesis, which allows them to produce themselves as moral individuals with a proper concern for their bodies and their souls. In short, nutritional discourse provides a daily conscience through a mode of living – a dietetics – which reminds individuals how to behave in regard to the rules of healthy living. Let us now look in detail at how this happened.