The Philosopher’s Diet
Originally posted 9 October 2017
One aspect of being a retired English teacher is that all of a sudden my reading choices become my own. I have six weeks without reading for an assignment for a class (yes, I am going to do a little teaching in retirement). If I can’t read a book in a week or two, I stop midway and move on to something else. This leaves me with a half-read Tolstoy and Melville on the night stand.
I began last week reading Julia Kristeva’s The Revolution of Poetic Language, shifted to an essay or two by Roman Jakobson, but ended up in Richard Watson’s The Philosopher’s Diet (109 pages). None of these books were new to me. With Kristeva’s, I was continually surprised to see what I had underlined and commented upon in my previous attempt to read it. Fifty pages in, I can say I still don’t understand what she is up to, but this time I have a better idea what she means by “semiotic” and “symbolic.” As I said in my diary entry for 6 October, this past week, in thinking about, my goal to lose weight, I began to think of the bran muffin recipe in The Philosopher’s Diet. So I pulled that book from my shelves, made the muffins, and then began reading the book—out of order. I finished it, so I want to write a bit more about this book. I began with Chapter 3, “Roughage.” Then moved to Chapters 1, 2, 4 (“Fat,” “Food,” “Running”). Skipped Chapter 5, “Sex” (come up with your own interpretation for that one.) Then I dove into Chapters 6 and 7 (“How to Live” and “How to Die.” And finally returned to “Sex,” which was a disappointment. (The book was first published in the mid-1980’s and Watson was celebrating the sexual revolution. In this revised edition from 1998, his notes indicate that he is very much aware that AIDS and Feminism deflate much of his revelry.)
Watson is, indeed, a philosopher, who taught at Washington University. Wikipedia indicates that is still living and is 86 years old, which to my thinking lends a little credence to his recommendations. (There are some flaws in that leap in reason, of course.) Watson frees philosophy from the ivory tower and lets it stretch its legs and become, again, a means for thinking about how one should live one’s life. At the heart of the book is the question his mother asked in old age: what was it all for? His answer is: to enjoy life and not hurt anyone while doing it. How do we do that? We take control of our own lives. One way to take control of our lives is to reduce “fat.” Eat well, but less, and exercise aerobically (he recommends running, but allows for swimmers, like me) so as to promote healthy heart and lungs. If you do that, then who knows what good things follow. We just might free ourselves from all sorts of cultural pressures and institutional masters.
Along the way, we get a good deal of family history and philosophy. His mid-century Iowa childhood, with loving and intelligent parents, seems idyllic, right out of a Grant Wood painting. There’s a great deal of Descartes (he has written several books on this founder of modern philosophy). Plato, Pascal, Kierkegard, Hegel, Sartre, and Hume also make appearances.
As inspirational literature goes, the book is a strange one. More than once he predicts that not many people will follow his recommendations and succeed in losing 20 pounds and keeping it off. He is probably correct—I first read the book thirty-years ago, lost my 20 and regained 50. I guess it is good that a philosopher isn’t lying to us. But let’s face the facts: if I, or anyone, wants to lose weight and keep it off, we need to do the following: 1) commit to losing the weight, 2) do what is necessary to lose weight (consume fewer calories than we burn), and 3) once we have lost the unwanted weight, adopt the habits that maintain the weight we want. If we do that, our lives will be immeasurably better, and isn’t that what philosophy is for? In addition, if I can succeed in this, maybe I will develop the attention span needed to finish Kristeva, or maybe Tolstoy and Melville.
Still, it all comes down to habits.