Existentially Yours in Crisis
Thanksgiving! A time for contemplating the endless war between mind and body (as it is played out in the pages of history and philosophy).
Friday, 2004-11-26 | Classic Gin, Commemorative, Social Studies
Thanksgiving is a holiday that is predicated upon a certain asceticism: Nietzsche writes that the ascetic 'makes of virtue a state of distress.'
Consider what we've got to work with: (1) a narrative of cultural connection (i.e. between Pilgrims and Indians) that is about as superfluous and widely discredited as, say, the existence of Santa Claus, (2) a circumstance that demands practiced gluttony and overindulgence and (3) the insistence in the very name of the holiday that we meditate on (or even better, think about) the myriad things we have to be thankful for.
The Santa Claus of Thanksgiving, the fanciful story of multi-cultural community in a time of famine, war and existential certainty, is quite easily dealt with and done away with. We can tell ourselves that is an allegory for children designed to encourage humility; the alternately noble and humble savages put aside their differences with the struggling Pilgrims for a pace in order to share a meal. There is a symbolism that is so pervasive and patently obvious that it is easy for us to divest the story of significance and r
educe it to allegory. It becomes food for thought, so to speak, and poses no consequences for mature thinkers who celebrate the holiday.
The practiced, premeditated and exalted gluttony is slightly more complicated. A holiday predicated upon overindulgence of food and drink calls to mind unbidden the myriad satirical writings on the gluttons and wantons of history. We think of Horace, or of St Bernard or of Fight Club and the manner in which they present an hyperbolic image of gluttony in order to demonstrate how a crowded belly has the tendency to weigh heavily on the mind, reducing its agility and encouraging mental, emotion and thus spiritual sloth. This view of gluttony (it's in Homer, it's in the NT and it's in Dickens) has been almost unwaveringly supported by history and is not hard to sympathize with; stumble into Portillo's with a saw-buck and an empty belly and try to remain aware of how quickly and totally the senses are dulled and the mind relaxes into a state of almost non-existence.
The holiday as an occasion for reflecting on those things we have, but almost certainly do not deserve and certainly cannot rely upon to remain in our possession, also has a history in what John Gardner called 'the great conversation.' As early as the tragedies of C5 BC Athens we have meditations on how possessions are fleeting and favorable circumstances are often replaced with unfavorable ones (and not so much vice versa). We have the early Israelites reflecting at length on the certainty that their good fortune is entirely in the hands of a deity who, if He remains pleased with their conduct, will provide for continued good fortune. Flash forward to Rome before the papacy when the do ut des philosophy of the Hebrews is mirrored in the votives and victims one rendered to Jupiter in the hopes that he might place more good in his jars than evil (the 'Jars of Zeus' in Homer's Iliad were dispersed by the storm-bearer at random and recovered at random by men; some were filled with good but most were filled with evil).
Our holiday, called Thanksgiving, comes to us with this sort of historical baggage--it drags a heavy theological, philosophical and sociological load with it (sort of like Scrooge's partner Jacob Marley who, in death, bears the manacles and chains he forged in life). When this holiday rolls around, we almost cannot help but to revel in the sheer excess of this historical baggage: for about three days every year (Nov 23-26) we're encouraged to contemplate how the Edenic narrative of an altruistic culture-to-culture exchange of customs and fond feeling stands in stark contrast to the shameful legacy of rape and murder that is our shared American heritage while, in the background, we're also forced by the culinary excesses of the season to contemplate the antagonistic duality of the mind and body and how the narratives we blithely invent for our own habits stand in stark contrast to the physical realities of those habits.
It's a complicated holiday, and Nietzsche's aside on asceticism summarizes the existential conflicts it suggests. As the ascetic makes of virtue a state of distress, i.e. as he turns moral uprightness or fortitude into an unnecessary state of suffering, so we have turned these various moments in the history of 'the great conversation' unnecessarily into ritual. Just as the ascetic, mistakenly reckoning suffering as the outward sign of virtue, turns morality into self-flagellation, so the holiday called Thanksgiving unnecessarily transmutes existential musing into an annual ritual, mistakenly reckoning ritual practice as a necessary goad for this sort of self-reflection.
Perhaps it is true that without such goads most men might not reflect on their culture (in relation to others), the problem of gluttony or the fragile state of their good luck; it is certainly true that most men would not think on all three at the same time.
I prefer to think, however, that people would think about these things if left to their own devices. Maybe my head is still swollen from excessive food and drink (my thoughts like emulsified drippings [i.e. gravy], my spirit mired in mashed potatoes, etc.), but I like to think that these sorts of meditations are unavoidable and man will his way to them without guidance.
All men are members of some cultural that exists in opposition to other, different and disagreeing cultures. All men are also in possession of a mind and a body that often interact with one another poorly or destructively. And similarly, all men will at some time or other consider how 'you can't win 'em all' or 'nobody bats 1000' or 'c'est la vie.'
Still, we've got this holiday that forces us to consider all three of these mysteries that explicitly resist solution. We might even think of the Thanksgiving holiday as the sort of unavoidable consequence of the ubiquity of these problems.
That, however, might be taking this thing one syllogism too far and across the borders of good taste into the realm of essential, foundational, totalizing rhetoric.
And to do that on such a holiday seems, if not perverse, then at least in very poor taste.