Image courtesy of: https://www.opploans.com/oppu/articles/wants-vs-needs/
Our April 28th contemplative practice invited us to reacquaint ourselves with hunger, an ostensibly basic human experience. Having successfully avoided food for hours leading up to the video, I could be forgiven for assuming I had indeed realized the stated point of the practice; after all, I certainly wanted food, my stomach hurt a bit, and I resolved that fasting wasn’t really for me. On reflection, however, it occurred to me that I didn’t feel any more connected to basic man than I had at the outset. Where had I gone wrong?
About three minutes into the practice, we’re introduced to Einstein’s philosophy that such baser experiences as hunger, love, pain, and fear create the foundation of self-preservation upon which we define our state of nature– basic man. Hunger (along with the other experiences) thus lacks a purely for-itself purpose; it exists primarily as a tool with which to protect the self. Taking this definition of hunger for granted, it is plainly impossible to experience hunger absent the need for self-preservation, for it is the need of preservation that creates hunger to guide us to safety.
Just as hunger may be ubiquitous in the state of nature, it is equally possible for it to be absent entirely in a relatively affluent state in which the parameters of self-preservation have been redefined. Though we all need food, most of us have never been reduced to a primal, naturalistic being in search of food primarily. Our hunger is not the hunger of the state of nature or even of the rest of the world, and so try as I might, I never stood a chance at connecting with a basic human instinct.
While I never felt hunger, this contemplative practice provided fascinating insight into what hunger really is. I believe that considering hunger a component of self-preservation provides greater credence to arguments that access to food is a fundamental human right (a natural extension of the Lockean ideal that a right to self-protection births all other rights), and thus I consider understanding hunger in this way paramount to creating a compelling argument regarding ensuring universal access to food– an optimistic (if naïve) policy aspiration.