Fasting and Freedom

I was discussing Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals with some friends the other day, and realized that fasting most intensely marks us as free beings.

MacIntyre in the early part of this book tries to remind us that human beings are also animals. Although our rationality is a distinctive aspect of human existence, even our rationality is bound up with our animality. He is, among other things, recapturing Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ hylomorphic insight into human beings not being ‘souls in a machine,’ but rather essentially both body and soul. Our experience of rationality is not like that of the angels, but rather is connected to our senses and brain, our physical capacities for knowing. Therefore, MacIntyre argues, we can learn a great deal from our continuity with other animals, in particular the more intelligent ones, like dolphins and chimpanzees.

Nevertheless, human beings are distinct among animals (as far as we know) in possessing language in the full sense: we have “the ability to construct sentences that contain as constituents either the sentences used to express the judgment about which the agent is reflecting or references to those sentences” (MacIntyre, 1999, pg. 54). We can use language to decide if we have a better reason for doing one thing rather than another, judging that we can attain a better good by seeking this rather than that (Ibid.).

What struck me as my friends and I considered these things is that the distinction between language-users and non-language-users is clearest when one good considered is a spiritual good, such as that obtained by fasting. It is easy to think of a dolphin choosing to fight off predators rather than continuing to play or search for fish. It is difficult to conceive of a dolphin fasting on Fridays. Fasting makes manifest the extent to which human beings can self-determine: we can resist the drive to enjoy a present, material good for the sake of a spiritual good that cannot be seen or touched, and which surely will feel bad to seek in the moment. Our freedom is expressed most strongly in this ability to compare spiritual goods with material ones. Humble fasting is, paradoxically, a key to seeing the distinctive glory of human nature, the power of deliberation and choice imprinted upon it.

This, then, is another motive for fasting: to situate ourselves where we belong in the order of being, somewhere between the dolphins and the angels. Like the dolphins, we hunger and play and come to know things through the senses; like the angels, we can self-determine even in regard to the highest things, though our specific self-determination is relative to the most humble, bodily things, such as limiting our food.