Of the Standard of Taste

It is not unreasonable, therefore, for us to say that these are two distinct parts, and to call that with which the soul reasons the ‘rational’ part, and that with which it lusts, feels hungry and thirsty and stirred up with other desires the ‘irrational’ and ‘appetitive’ part, companion of indulgence and pleasure. – That is a natural way for us to think.

I have, I said, heard a story – and I do believe it – that Leontius, son of Aglaion, as he came up from the Piraeus beyond the northern wall, saw the executioner with some corpses lying nearby. Leontius felt a powerful urge to look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away. For a while he fought with himself and covered his face, but then, overcome by desire, pushing his eyes wide open and rushing toward the corpses, he said: ‘See for yourselves, vile things. Drink your fill of the beautiful spectacle!’ – I’ve heard that story myself. (Plato's Republic, 440a)

The Invisible Adjunct has been kind enough to provide Mr. Dalrymple with the Isaiah Berlin quote and comment box his column needed. All this sheds light on Belle's most recent food post. And I myself recently had what seems a semi-relevant experience. Last week I went to see the Singapore exhibition of Gunther von Hagen's "Body Worlds".

Von Hagen's the guy who takes human bodies and 'plastinates' them - i.e. turns them into non-decaying, odorless, intact (right down to the microscopic level) specimens. He displays them, in the service of science, art, and the fact that dead bodies are interesting.

It was interesting but a bit disturbing. None of von Hagen's more notorious compositions were in evidence. But there was a five-months pregnant woman with fetus. She must have signed the form, consenting to be plastinated. But I wonder whether she would have agreed to this. (Having a five-months pregnant wife makes you wonder things like that.) The pregnant woman made me feel ill and sad. Mostly what struck me was the way the bodies looked like food - pulled pork, to be specific. It didn't look appetizing, to say the least. But the pink-brown striated muscle groups, especially the ones pulled away from the bones and organs for display purposes - looked like food. Corpses remind us of our mortality: born to die. These really seemed to say: born to be eaten. I went with a colleague and his wife. Afterwards, we didn't feel up for anything with a skeleton on the inside. We went out for black pepper crab and drunken prawns. Very tasty. Life goes on.

It's OK to donate your body to science. Can there be any real problem, then, with donating it to art? I mean, surely we aren't going to say something so foolish as: science is just more important than art. Or: it's just not healthy to be fascinated by the body, except in a very abstract and cerebral and scientific way.

But if you say dead bodies are fair game for art - if the original owner consents, and isn't illegally evicted from the premises - then the field is pretty much wide open. Cooking is just culinary art, after all. And that's just for starters. (Of course, there are any number of perfectly good public health and safety grounds for making cannibalism categorically illegal. But never mind that. We are doing our best to root around at or near first principles here.)

It's tempting to say: maybe it's all right to make art from dead bodies, but only if it's in good taste. This is not much better than a bad joke, yet seems to be more or less the position in which von Hagen has found himself. He can pose his figures as athletes, or thinkers, so forth. But he runs into trouble and protest when he goes so far as: Drawer Man (after Salvador Dali) - a stout corpse with pull-out drawers, revealing his internal organs. And then there is the rider on horseback, holding his own and the horse's brains in his two hands. But it's a little hard to see the basis for drawing the line. The posed athletes are already art objects, as opposed to scientific specimens. So the fact that Drawer Man is scientifically worthless is no objection. If we are prepared to think that Salvador Dali made OK art, and if we are willing to tolerate von Hagen's more classical compositions, what could be the grounds for disapproving of Drawer Man? (So long as the guy who contributes the raw material for Drawer Man said it was OK.)

In life we do not oblige other people to treat their bodies as temples. Amusement park or carnival sideshow is fine, if that's more your style. Why get serious-as-the-tomb about what people do with their bodies after they are dead? If you are in favor of liberalism for the living, what can be the objection to liberalism for the dead?

Comments

[PZ Myers]

I think the objection, and the reason people are uncomfortable with death, is that we only see dead bodies as a consequence of tragedy and loss, so they bear a particularly unhappy burden of association. Most of us don't think "Happy Meal!" or "Gee, that would look interesting draped on my living room wall" when we see a corpse, we think "I've lost my father" or "am I next?" Those kinds of thoughts usually don't lend themselves well to appetite or art appreciation. I also suspect that it isn't good for a culture as a whole to shed the unpleasant associations we give death.

I'm involved in one particular culture, biology, that treats bodies as routine. I've noticed that I unconsciously compartmentalize by context, though -- blood and gore in the lab or on a slab, and I'm clinical and interested and poke and prod without a second thought. One of my kids gets a little boo-boo and bleeds a bit, and I'm reeling and about ready to faint. While I have no problem with objectifying dead bodies and using them as art or science displays or freak shows (or one you've neglected: horror movies have made representations of the grisly dead rather prominent), it's all about context. What's fair game in a lab is way out of line in a restaurant. And vice versa.

[Russell L. Carter]

PZ Myers makes a lot of sense. I wonder how related to the notion of "modernity" are these feelings you describe. In the last hundred or so years mortality in western societies has decreased significantly, and the display of death's artifacts as well. Whereas before, death and corpses were a much more familiar part of the scenery. I'm thinking about the the display of Cicero's head, the public punishments meted out by the medieval Christian church combined with constant wars of conquest, right up through the enlightenment and more or less culminating in the guillotine. Squeamishness about the corpse seems to be a modern thing.

[PF]

Hi there, I love this blog.

science is just more important than art, isn't it? Why wouldn't we say that? We say it with our dollars, don't we? And in our textbooks, where the results of science are taught, and only the names of artists and their works, in chronological order.

Squeamishness about the corpse seems to be a modern thing.

Except people were punished for studying corpses scientifically, if I recall, until quite recently, relatively speaking. Frankenstein had to get his materials from the cemetary. If you can call that squeamishness, of course, which you can't, really.

[Data]

But I don't think the arts are slighted because the artists & their works "in chronological order" are studied. It's just the nature of the thing - how the arts operate vs. how sciences operate. If we spent our time in science classes learning, say, Cartesian physics, then it would not really be science, would it?

& while I haven't done any studies on this issue, I reckon that money invested in & paid towards the arts - not necessarily "fine arts", but books, pop & movies - is more than a match for government funding for scientific R&D. Probably more.