Fasting and Minding: Knowledge and the Body

Pythagoras and his disciples practiced self-restraint. I mean, as a group exercise. They’d have fine foods prepared and set before their eyes, look at it a while to whet their appetites, reach maximum stimulation, and then ask for it to be removed and given to the servants. When they did eat, Pythagoreans followed a vegetarian diet that excluded beans, in order to keep their bodies fit for intellectual activity and the spiritual quest.

By ancient standards, this wasn’t necessarily freakish behavior. And it wasn’t merely what you ate. A Greek truth-seeker ate very little, just enough “to keep life going.” “To eat more than a bare minimum, or to yearn after delicacies,” explains Steven Shapin, “was to compromise the philosopher’s ideal self-sufficiency. The condition for truth was an austere dietetics.”?

What is more, the slightest postures and gestures were calibrated. Constantinos Macris describes how a Pythagorean fully engaged his body “all day long in his everyday life, not only when he speaks, laughs, or carries out his religious duties, but even in such apparently insignificant acts as his way of making his bed, putting on his shoes, giving his hand in greeting, stirring a fire, biting his fingernails, or urinating, so that he never forgets that he is not like the others.” Purifying the body and honing it for the search of truth were accompanied by mundane rituals that “distinguished the Pythagoreans from ordinary people and enabled them to recognize each other.”

A bit much, innit??

Not quite. For one thing, Greek bodily practices like fasting and asceticism continued not only into Ancient Rome and Christianity, but also the European “age of science”. In fact, Shapin reminds us, educated Englishmen took their “counsel of dietary moderation from ancient ethical and political tracts” and “the medical writings of Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, Pliny, and Oribasius.” For another, the body never ceased to be discussed in relation to the mind. Robert Boyle’s abstemiousness and physical delicacy were seen by some contemporaries as a badge of scholarliness. Isaac Newton was widely viewed as a disembodied philosopher, forgetful of food and abstaining from tobacco as to “not be dominated by habits” (though manuscript evidence also suggests a different Newton). Einstein reflected on the physique of those who lived for the belly and those who lived for the mind. Tales and anecdotes “about the special constitution of individuals who give themselves up wholly to the pursuit of truth” are many “and persistent over a broad sweep of Western culture.”?

The body was attended to in Islamic educational thought, as well. Miskawayh’s discourse on character refinement contains a section, “most of which I have copied from the work of Bryson” (supposedly a Neo-Pythagorean), where he outlines approaches for educating the young. Boys, he admonishes, “should first be made to understand that eating is meant only for health and not for pleasure.” This means teaching them “to despise the value of food,” “be satisfied with only one course,” “be content with whatever is near him,” and “offer to others the food that lies near him if it is the kind that he prefers, and to control his appetite so as to be content with the least and poorest of food.” Greek dietetics and medicinal practices made their way into this genre; for another instance, exhortations to “make sparing use of the foods that cause dullness and weakness of the senses, such as sour apples and fava beans,” can be found in Ibn Jama‘ah’s famous treatise on the etiquette of seeking knowledge. Zarnuji, too, reports Galenic dietary guidance and advises readers to fight laziness “by a reduction of food,” reminding them that “the pleasures of knowledge, learning, and insight are sufficient incentive for intelligent persons to acquire knowledge.” This thirteenth-century scholar goes as far as warning against “eating food in the marketplace if possible, because [it] is more apt to be impure and contaminated,” not to mention that “eating in the market [is also] more remote from the contemplation of God.” Other advice in these works derived from Islamic pietism and praxis: turning the gaze away from things that cause forgetfulness; being in ritual purity and orienting oneself in the direction of Mecca when copying from books; having clear penmanship; sitting in high lodgings (upstairs) when studying, for better concentration; dressing formally and covering one’s head when attending lectures.

The body mattered, and so did bodily matters: physical habits and comportment pointed to and shaped a person.

You’re probably thinking about the wide gulf that separates the dignified premodern learner from today’s casual college students. Late to class as a rule, perpetually dragging their sleepy consciousness in mismatching outfits across hallways, dishevelled by necessity, reeking of Red Bull, incapable of penmanship, surviving on 1-dollar samosas and Jamaican patties. But this is temporary. Once a consultant, lawyer, or doctor, there come also the slim fit suits, mandatory ties, waxed Oxfords, professional courtesy, ornate language, custom-made slide decks, morning runs on the canal, sleek profile pictures, and superhuman bios on LinkedIn. Look at it from this perspective and you’ll find a lot more commonalities between the conditions for old-style enlightenment and modern-day accomplishment. We haven’t moved on from the essence of the bios pythagoreios: what you do to your body places you in a particular cultural category, broadcasts your beliefs and aptitudes to others, and shapes your identity. If in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries “meat became central not only to the British diet but to a sense of nationhood and identity,” as Rebecca Woods has shown, then many of our dietary choices today are to nourish our personas, not just our bodies, and flag our commitments to causes and lifestyles. Omar Nasim argues that visual depictions of body poses in Western literature expressed views of knowledge and civilizational progress: “particular kinds of chairs and postures used in Europe and America indexed for a particular class of specific cultural values and ideals,” and the Western “man of science,” always represented as chaired or in a dynamic posture consonant with his “restless energies,” was contrasted with cross-legged, floor-sitting Orientals who were deemed passive and intellectually lethargic. And wouldn’t many of us today look down (figuratively, not just literally) at such a person as primitive and uncivilized??

It has always been a basic precept of human development that body, mind, and soul cannot be fragmented.

More of us should read Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. It’s a longue durée study of how epistemology and ethos intertwine in the context of modern science. Simply put, scientific work has almost invariably involved a strict adherence to procedures and protocols which, in their formality, closely resemble the prescriptions, prohibitions, and ritual observances that once characterized Greek philosophical discipline, Islamic adab, and gentlemanly decorum. This comparison may sit oddly with a popular history of knowledge wherein modern science is consistently portrayed as a radical subversion of whatever came before it. “But even if religious overtones are absent or dismissed as so much window dressing, there remains a core of ethical imperative in the literature on how to do science and become a scientist. The mastery of scientific methods is inevitably linked to self-mastery, the assiduous cultivation of a certain kind of self. And where the self is enlisted as both sculptor and sculpture, ethos enters willy-nilly.” There is a bidirectional relationship between knowledge and practice: how one defines objectivity, interprets evidence, and attains truth is tied to embodied norms and attitudes. We forget that science is carried out by humans with bodies, and that seemingly neutral design choices ultimately forge a persona. Take for instance the still astronomer in his specialized chair. This thing was designed to effectively channel the energies of practitioners from unused body parts to the eye, which was doing the main work. “The relaxation of the astronomer’s muscles,” Nasim writes, “afforded by the comforts of the chair, even in awkward positions, managed fatigue and allowed for longer and thus more observations.” The body must sit back and relax, and let the mind do its job.?

According to current science, food intake, exercise, and other body comportments have biological and cognitive consequences. Self-help books, podcasts, short clips on nutrition and physical health, Jocko Willink, David Goggins have all raised awareness about these relationships. Parents and education aficionados increasingly recognize bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and the importance of sensory, experiential learning in early childhood. I recall how, years ago, a viral TED talk by Ken Robinson propelled people my age to revolt against a narrow “industrial era” approach that confines learning to “the head”; meanwhile Steiner, Montessori, and other eponymous schools rose in popularity as “alternative” offerings that took the body more seriously than their modernist fellows. Less known was how the built environment affects the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. On this topic, a collection of thought-provoking studies and analyses can be found in the interdisciplinary volume Mind in Architecture: “Diverse disciplines such as biology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and phenomenology steadily yielded evidence of the extent to which mental properties depend on the functioning of the human nervous system.” An interactive dependency binds mind, brain, and body, which is itself “actively engaged with the ecological, architectural, social, and cultural environments in which we dwell.” As Sarah Robinson observes, “the kinds of environments we create can alter our minds and our capacity for thought, emotion, and behavior.” Mark L. Johnson and George Lakoff have coined “philosophy in the flesh,” which resonates with Karim Lahham’s remark that “the visual constructs of our built environments [...] embody a philosophy that is imperceptibly imbibed daily.”?

What makes a month like Ramadan epistemically curious is the textual-oral element that accompanies the practice of fasting. Depriving oneself of food, drink, and sexual intimacy for a whole day isn’t new, and this is plainly acknowledged in the Quran itself: “Fasting was prescribed to you, as it was to those before you.” Nowadays even “nonreligious” people take to intermittent fasting for body-mind benefits. Of course, the rest of that verse — “so that you may be mindful” — positions the ethos of fasting within an introspective lifestyle marked by, and formative of, an awareness of Authorship. But it’s the status of the Quran in this activity that’s worth mulling over: “The month of Ramadan is that wherein the Quran was sent down as guidance to humankind, as clear proofs of guidance, and as the Criterion. So those of you who witness the month, fast.”

Everyone knows Ramadan as the month of fasting; fewer recognize it as also the month of the Quran. As a result, the connective tissue binding together the acts of fasting, reading, and minding is generally lost. Ibn Khaldun wrote in his well-known Prolegomena that a certain type of knowledge “is achieved only through training in dhikr exercises [and] through abstinence from all distracting food of consumption — of which the most important part is fasting — and through devoting oneself to God with all one’s powers. And God ‘taught the human what they did not know.’” Note the thematic overlaps alluded to in these lines. Over and above what the preceding paragraphs asserted regarding body-and-mind, Ibn Khaldun predicates knowledge on an inner disposition attained through the physical acts of fasting (or emptying) and remembering the Author of existence (or replenishment). This latter contemplation is ignited, guided, amplified, gratified, disciplined, nurtured by reading and pondering, over and over, the Quran in its entirety. It’s as if fasting was to silence all the chatter and nagging inside, suppress the noise; in order for the cosmic symphony to be heard when reading the musical notes. Hence the shift, in that earlier verse, from describing the Book (what to read) to decreeing the fast (how to read it). Fasting and reading live in a symbiotic yin-yang; ethos and epistemology are inseparable.

If this sounds new, then maybe the cognitive shock value of the Quran hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated or taken seriously as a disenthrallment from personal idols and reveries. Perhaps we’re too biased against the possibility that truth may come from such intellectual discomfort. Timothy Winter shares a glimpse of what it’s like to experience the text this way:

“The Quran: literally, ‘that which is often recited.’ A web of rhythm and meaning, the words of which throb through Muslim worship and which, at every point in the believer’s life, break surface, sanctifying existence with the scent of eternity. A paradoxical flash of divine light, penetrating the veil of solid existence into our world. Redolent with symbol, half-hidden meaning and rapier-sharp insight, it transforms the reader by suggestion rather than by formal structures of argument and proof. It demands to be accepted on its own terms: only when the reader is prepared to discard all that he believes a book should be, will he begin to discern its symmetries and its heart-rendering power. [...] One of the most surprising features of the Quran to the Western reader coming to it for the first time is the way in which subjects of many kinds may be found together in a single chapter, or even in the course of a few verses. This is an essential aspect of the Book’s message. It is human nature to endeavor to categorize and label our experience of the world, and we feel disconcerted when our familiar expectations of such an ordering are not fulfilled. The Quran, both in its literary style and in its internal arrangement, conforms to no human norms. It is a message which has broken through the veil of the unseen and causes us to look upwards, bringing us suddenly into a new dimension, a new mode of perception.”

We don’t break the fast, the fast breaks us to make way for this new mode of perception. But it takes a fast-read alliance to clear and train the mind, free it from personal whims and illusions, and teach it “the Criterion” for judgment. Reason has always been the basis of revelation (as hinted at elsewhere). However, seeing this requires epistemic liberation; and the ethos of fasting aims at just that.

Among other things. But the rest has to be tasted.

References and further reading:

Daston, Lorraine, Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity.

Chase, Michael, Stephen Clark, Michael McGhee (eds.). Philosophy as a way of life. See especially the introduction and chapter by Constantinos Macris.

Cook, Bradley J., Fathi Malkawi (eds.). 2010. Classical Foundations of Islamic Educational Thought: A Compendium of Parallel English-Arabic Texts. This volume contains translations of the aforementioned works by Ibn Khaldun, Zarnuji, etc.

Lahham, Karim. “The Intelligibility of the Islamic Tradition in the Context of Modern Thought” (2013).

Nasim, Omar W. 2021. The Astronomer’s Chair.

Otter, Chris. 2020. Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology

Robinson, Sarah, Juhani Pallasmaa (eds.). 2017. Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design.

Shalabi, Abdul Wadod, Timothy Winter (transl.). 2001. Islam: Religion of Life.

Shapin, Steven. 2010. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science…

Woods, Rebecca J. H. 2017. The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900.