Food for Thought: It’s not as Corny as this Title

Food for Thought:

It’s not as Corny as this Title

In the “Science and Philosophy” section of Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson discusses the topic of “positive science”, or the use of our intellect to create and make inventions. In this section, he claims that the human intellect is “at home” with inert, inorganic matter. Matter of this type is easier to comprehend the “inner nature of the inert matter” (Bergson 195). But when “the intellect undertakes the study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the inert, applying the same forms to this new object, carrying over into this new field the same habits that have succeeded so well in the old” (195). Living things are unpredictable, therefore we can’t ever claim to know “the inner nature” of the being, lest have control over it. However, the intellect has a disposition for looking at everything as unmoving and knowable objects. It is accustomed to do so most in part due to the fact that it is more advantageous for us to do so.

Bergson describes another characteristic of the human intellect in the earlier section, “The Function of the Intellect”. In the first part of the section, Bergson explicitly states that the intellect’s first aim is at constructing. And staying true to the claim that the intellect is most comfortable with inert matter, he states that this “fabrication is exercised exclusively on inert matter, in this sense that ever if it makes use of organized material, it treats it as inert, without troubling about the life which animated it” (153). The illusion that we can understand and predict the actions of living objects, combined with human being’s natural tendency to treat “the whole of matter … as an immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we will and sew it together again as we please” (156), have resulted in some pretty incredible discoveries and inventions, but also resulted in some advancements where the intellect got out of hand.

This last fact becomes more interesting when the reader considers that not only is the intellect an “organ” produced by evolution, it can help direct the process of evolution. While this might all sound like a bunch metaphysical jargon, it has its application in the real life. In the face of an obesity epidemic and a rising number of other health concerns that are related to our diet, lately people have been asked to think about the food that they eat. Whether they find out through TV Shows, or books, like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and Fast Food Nation, or films like Supersize Me and Food, Inc., people are learning about what they are putting in to their bodies and for the most part, are not pleased. Most of the shock comes from the discovery of the nutritional value (or lack thereof) in the food, but many others are appalled by the cause of the abhorrent quality of the food, the means of production.

In today’s market, much of the food has been modified one way or another. In the assembly line-production, consumer driven economy that we live in, all companies are pushed to make products bigger and better in the half the time. This is not so much a problem when humans are contained to inert, unorganized matter, but when humans run into trying to apply these standards to living matter, they run into a problem. And this is exactly the situation human beings are in regarding their current practices of mass-producing food. Before this era of food awareness and activism, the question may have seemed obsolete, but knowing what we know now about the production of our food, philosophy has once again come to the forefront of “real life” situations, when we, as many have (even perhaps without knowing they have done so) ask: What is metaphysically wrong about the way that food is being produced?

The production of genetically modified food by human beings is a perfect example of how the intellect tends to treat organisms as inert, predictable beings and exemplifies its inclination to fabricate new things from organized matter, without “troubling about the life which animated it”. Furthermore, when one considers once again that the intellect is an organ of evolution, which is able to direct evolution, one can see the correlation of how our inclination to direct evolution in a way that is preferable to us, without “troubling the life which animated it” could lead to some big problems. This in part due to the fact that the “…intelligence which aims at fabricating is an intelligence which never stops at the actual form of things, nor regards it as final, but on the contrary looks upon all matter if it were carvable at will” (156).

But not all objects are knowable, predictable, or “carvable at will”. We have tried to create an organism that is molded to our will. We have dissected, studied, analyzed, experimented, and theorized features of living beings and in essence tried to turn know everything about the living organism to the point where we “know” that if we add a certain element into an organism’s developmental process or modify this or that gene, we can produce a certain outcome, or a specific organism. We have “understood” the being so well, that we claim to have established a form of predictability in the objects that we have produced.

This desire for predictability, or longing for repetition is one of the other salient features of the intellect as described by Bergson. Much like the other features of the intellect, it has made its way from dealing only with inert objects to transferring its logic on to living organisms also. Scientists have successfully attempted to modify genes in a way that tomatoes grow bigger and redder, apples are hardier and taste sweeter and chickens that are meatier and mature in half the time. They have experimented to the point that they can predict that, when they change a certain element in one generation, it will have an effect in the future generations.

In essence they have attempted to create a perfect predictability, or finalism for the organism they are affecting. But, as Bergson says, we can never truly can predict the future, but furthermore, he claims that we try to modify organisms, without “troubling the life which animated it”. In a typical human manner, we placed ourselves in the focal point, and percieved that everything was suited for our ends, without thought to the greater good. If this is taken for true, than everything is an abomination, because we have actually changed the way that other things live. We not only alter the organisms individual life, but we alter life and the drive for evolution as a whole.

The one feature that causes life and evolution to continue on is the open-endedness of it all. There is no master plan, or final goal that life is striving for. But, by inserting ourselves in the course of evolution and altering life as we see fit, we could end up doing something highly-disadvantageous for the human race as a whole. We seek to cap the open-endedness of life and evolution without understanding, or even having the ability to understand it. If we try to control all aspects of life and evolution, and no check is put on our intellect, we may find ourselves once again in a society that accepts eugenics or ethnic cleansing.

For this paper, I will be focusing mainly on Bergson, put referencing other authors covered in the class where the information is relative. For my research I will be watching Food Inc, and reading Fast Food Nation and Eating Animals. I also intend to use Human Genome Project’s website for any technical or scientific information.