I’m not sure whether my post on Theory of Hamburgers was entirely clear. It surely wasn’t intended to say that knowledge is useless to people. There are a great many things we can do with knowledge, including printing it on newsprint and wrapping fish in it. However, it does amuse me to realize that, with all the effort poured into research, experimenting, theorizing, teaching and publishing our explanations and theories, when all is said and done, a thing is still what it is, no more and no less for all we might say about it.
A lot of philosophy is highly speculative. Some of it is skeptical, some nihilist, and some of it is downright absurd. However, it is doubtful, to me, that people could possibly mean some of the things they say. When you want to know what people really believe about the world, watch how they act. You can study your own beliefs about the world by taking up cooking. Cooking is a marvelous art and craft, which can only be accomplished succesfully by the application of clear thinking, pertinent (if sometimes vague) knowledge, and a great deal of experience and intuition. One thing is clear: when you slide an omelet out of your pan onto a plate, taste it, and realize what a profoundly good thing you’ve made, there is no doubt at all that you have mastered the art, science, and philosophy of interacting with reality. There is no other way to cook.
From cooking we learn that objects have properties. The properties can be vaguely described (a “dash” of spices, a “pinch” of salt), or highly subjective (you flip a flapjack when the puddle of goo on the griddle starts to turn brown around the edges), but something real is going on. All the epistemological problems in the world, of the relationship of mental models to real things, cannot hide the fact that you’ve distilled something meaningful from your perceptions, and that your mental activity has affected real things, creating something which is more or less exactly what you intended to create. The feedback cycle of theory, action, and result, has confirmed the entire mushy, subjective, qualititative, sloppy process. And it is truly wonderful that our minds can grasp reality so effectively as to produce flapjacks, omelets, and ice cream. I am impressed every time I see it. Even more impressed when I taste it.
So I suppose this is distantly related to pragmatism: reality is known most directly through personal and mundane experience. Although I wouldn’t really call it pragmatism. I might call it good sense, common sense, maybe even realism, but more exactly, I think it’s the heart of rationality. The cook doesn’t worry about his subjective involvement; he takes it for granted, and relies on it. The cook has no business speculating about absolute, objective reality, because it has nothing to do with him. The cook is one with the cooking process, and that’s the way it should be. Neither does the cook worry whether perceptions distort reality. The ingredients and the final product both are known by those perceptions, and we love them. They aren’t distractions or illusions, they are the whole point of the cooking.
What we learn from cooking is that we are real, we can know reality, we can influence it, and the flops and failures show that the reality of cooking is not achieved solely through wishing and imagination. No real cook believes the omelet is a figment of his imagination, because, most of all, beyond seeing it, smelling it, and tasting it, he intends to eat it, and no imagination by itself would be sufficient to accomplish that purpose.
So I say, if you want to be a philosopher, first study cooking. Then we will talk.
