Goldstein David
Gastronomica (Berkeley Calif). 2010;10(3):34-44. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.3.34.
This essay examines the existential philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to issues of food and eating. I argue that for Levinas, the act of eating is central to founding the ethical self, and that any understanding of Levinas's approach to embodiment must begin with what it means for us to ingest the outside world. Even in Levinas's earliest work, food is already a freighted ontological category. As his ideas mature, eating is transformed from the grounding for an ethical system to the system itself. The act of giving bread to another person takes its place as the ethical gesture par excellence. The story is not that we eat. The story is that we eat and develop a relationship to eating, and that relationship in turn helps determine our sense of ourselves in the world. Eating is the ethical event. The essay ends by asking how Levinas can help us answer the question, what would it mean to imagine every bite I take, or give to another, as a direct engagement with my own and my neighbor's existence?
本文探讨了埃马纽埃尔·列维纳斯的存在主义哲学与食物及饮食问题的关系。我认为，对列维纳斯而言，饮食行为对于构建伦理自我至关重要，而且任何对列维纳斯关于身体体现的理解都必须从我们摄取外部世界意味着什么开始。即使在列维纳斯的早期作品中，食物已然是一个承载着诸多意义的本体论范畴。随着他的思想成熟，饮食从一种伦理体系的基础转变为该体系本身。给他人面包的行为成为了卓越的伦理姿态。关键不在于我们进食，而在于我们进食并与饮食建立起一种关系，而这种关系反过来又有助于确定我们在世界中的自我认知。饮食是伦理事件。本文结尾提出疑问，列维纳斯如何能帮助我们回答这样一个问题：将我吃的或给予他人的每一口食物都想象成与我自己以及我邻居的存在的直接关联，这意味着什么？
