The Philosophical Significance of Chewing

Enrique

The most philosophically important epoch in life's evolution may have been the development of jaws in arthropods. Everything advanced organisms do requires ingestion, and chewing has become essential for that purpose.

Fast forward to humans, and even a quick glance makes it apparent that our entire culture revolves around chewing. We ceremoniously chew our food at the table, psychologically chew the acquiantances around us, chew marginalized demographics, in many thousands of ways. In fact, all of ethics might reduce to issues involved in physical, emotional or symbolic chewing: God allegedly wants to enlighten humans by getting us to chew at a bare minimum, while nihilistic value systems want to maximize the pleasure derived from this many-faceted chewing as much as possible irrespective of psychological consequences.

Seems absurd when expressed this bluntly, but it's really true: the most challenging philosophical task of the modern world may be what to do about our need, compulsion, desire to chew. Is this an irresolvable dilemma?

Cuthbert

"Ah, what? Oh, an American, yes. They all seem to be millionaires in America. Wish I knew how they managed it. Honestly, I hope. Mr. Peters is an honest man, but his digestion is bad. He used to bolt his food. You don't bolt your food, I hope, Crouchback?"
"No; I am most careful."
"The late Mr. Gladstone used to chew each mouthful thirty-three times. Deuced good notion if you aren't in a hurry" — P G Wodehouse

"You are old," said the youth, " and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak-
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life." — Lewis Carroll

That's my entire stock of knowledge about chewing.

lll

↪Enrique

Thesis a chew sorry. (This is a true story. ) We are chew chew drains. A chew place bikini. The moral of the story is oral. There is chew munch spoke to say what is gong.

lll

That's my entire stock of knowledge about chewing. — Cuthbert

Love the quote!

apokrisis

The most philosophically important epoch in life's evolution may have been the development of jaws in arthropods. Everything advanced organisms do requires ingestion, and chewing has become essential for that purpose. — Enrique

Tell that to a fly. Or a human juicer with a straw. :grin:

Fast forward to humans, and even a quick glance makes it apparent that our entire culture revolves around chewing. — Enrique

But H.sapiens is famously weak chinned and puny toothed for a hominid. We reverted towards the suckling child state as an example of evolutionary neotony. This was possible because we also mastered fire and could cook food and make it soft and tender, minimising any mastication involved.

Seems absurd when expressed this bluntly, but it's really true: the most challenging philosophical task of the modern world may be what to do about our need, compulsion, desire to chew. — Enrique

It is absurd.

lll

↪Enrique

We then to get our chews stunk in the mud.

Cuthbert

Love the quote! — lll

Thank you! I remembered another one -

Chin, chin! And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality. — JJ

(Every online edition I can find has "chimed" but I remember it as "chined", after the chine of an animal) [... and I remember wrong, apparently....]

Agent Smith

Mastication is basically a process that initiates the digestive process, breaking food down into smaller and smaller (manageable) pieces. The basic idea is to increase the surfacre area of the food so that chemical reactions occur faster and more efficiently (digestion is a chemical reaction). Chewing bears a close resemblance to the martial tactic of divide and conquer. Military strategists might wanna make a note of that. Coders too.

Chew on that while I ruminate some more on this fascinating topic.

Enrique

Chewing bears a close resemblance to the martial tactic of divide and conquer. — Agent Smith

As lll alluded to in a different thread, the consumption of ideas can be analogized to digestion: we parse them into bite-sized pieces so as to better grasp the whole. Likewise, efficient learning divvies up tasks into more digestible portions so we do not get overwhelmed, losing sight of the forest for the trees. Makes you wonder, what is the evolutionary relationship between feeding and part/whole conception? At a fundamental level, could mental contents have been shaped by the way we obtain and ingest a meal? Perhaps mastication is the foundation of mechanism.

Shwah

↪Enrique

I think it's putting the cart before the horse in that one needs to separate out abstract chewing from physical. There is a fundamental aspect of perhaps being and "chewing", in the ways you mentioned, just makes external objects amenable to our being. Obviously not everyone needs to "chew" over the same information. One might consider the orbital or a planet a matter of "chewing".

baker

Seems absurd when expressed this bluntly, but it's really true: the most challenging philosophical task of the modern world may be what to do about our need, compulsion, desire to chew. — Enrique

Not chew in particular, but to ingest, to eat. The real philosophical problem is eating, feeding.

Agent Smith

Makes you wonder, what is the evolutionary relationship between feeding and part/whole conception? — Enrique

Food for thought:

The body feeds on food.
The mind feeds on ideas.

As we ascend Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we're chewing all the way, but on different kinds of things (first burgers, chicken nuggets, caviar for the affluent; second ideas; third, ?)

Agent Smith

The real philosophical problem is eating, feeding. — baker

:lol: Bingo! Here, have a :broken: a custard apple.

The Philosophical Significance of Chewing

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