This week, I returned to a work which I began reading about 18 months ago. Written by a Jewish physician and biochemist who teaches university literature and philosophy classes, The Hungry Soul:Eating and the Perfection of Our Nature is self-admittedly (as the “Preface” notes) a strange book. The author, Leon Kass, considers eating, nourishment and all the activities which pertain thereto, then unfolds the implications of these processes for understanding living creatures and, more especially, man. In the first chapter, he effects a brilliant feat. He uses food to demonstrate the existence of the Aristotelian, or animal, soul.

The “Foreward to the Paperback Edition” explains his reasons for beginning with this topic :

“To know the human, if only by contrast and relation, we need to know also the nonhuman, especially the animal. For though we may be, as claimed in many traditions, the most godlike of the animals, we live always an animated and necessitous existence just like our fellow animals. Yet because modern biology with its materialistic and mechanistic biases fails to do justice to the evident vitality of animal life, it will fail also to do justice to our humanized animality. Thus, partly to locate the human within the animal world, partly to show how we might acquire a richer and truer science of all living things, I begin with a chapter on animal feeding–on food, nourishing, and animal form.”

In short, a complete account for human nature must encompass man’s animal powers as well as his immortal soul. But one cannot understand human animality without understanding animal nature in its broader application. Thus, he begins with the lower and more basic aspects of human existence, as a necessary foundation for appreciating the noble whole.

Here is a brief summary of his argument for the animal soul: In the process of nourishment, living creatures preserve their existence by transforming another substance into a part of their own substance, thereby replacing a part of their substance which passes away. Undoubtedly, the same organism persists, despite the loss and addition of material. What persists is a certain organization of matter - the nourishment depends upon this organization. As Kass states: “Though sustained by metabolism, an organism seems to be more than metabolism’s product. It also appears to be its cause.” In other words, a living creature possesses an organizing principle within itself, by which it acts upon things outside itself, also perceiving and desiring other substances in a degree corresponding with its complexity of organization. Thus, an animal is more than the sum of its matter. It is matter organized for the sake of activity. Aristotle called this organization the form, or soul.

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