Image from Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection 1889–1932, pg. His idea that the animal had, in Landecker’s words, the “ ability to turn the environment into itself through nutrition,” was conceived by Bernard as the very condition for the animal’s freedom.
This was the milieu intérieur, the concept for which Bernard is perhaps best known. Organisms clearly require constant inputs from their environment, but Bernard’s work showed that animals have highly organized internal processes that regulate these inputs, turning them into the stuff of their own bodies. For the living organism to be “free,” according to Bernard, it had to possess mechanisms that allowed it a greater degree of agency than, say, a plant. In sociologist Hannah Landecker’s ongoing mapping of the history of the modern concept of metabolism as it emerged from industrial modernity to today, she shows how influential Bernard’s work was not only for the science of nutrition and physiology, but for far-reaching notions of autonomy and freedom. The body doesn’t simply break down the stuff it takes in, it builds new things out of them. Bernard outlined a much more dynamic model of the body’s material constitution, one that showed that the parts not only processed inputs, but were themselves constantly changing. He was eager to distinguish himself from many of his contemporaries in chemistry and physiology, whose mechanistic models of life likened animal bodies to machines, which received inputs of matter that they burned to produce energy. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard sought to produce an experimental framework that would prove objectively what happened when one organism ate another. As such, any understanding of how the body digests is always in some way metaphysical, a product of models for how the body is more broadly situated in the world within a given cosmology.ĭigestion has a well-charted history in Western science. But digestion theories are fundamental representations of how one conceives of the threshold where the body meets the world. 2 In this model, digestion takes on expansive metaphysical dimensions that appear far removed from how we might conceive of digestion today. The human ability to understand and manipulate individual chemical elements would always pale in comparison to the alchemy of digestion, which was designed with celestial complexity. The human stomach was said to be one of God’s greatest inventions, an oven for his earthly chemistry lab. Eighteenth-century alchemists, he explained, perceived God as the greatest alchemist of all. “In some aspects,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in 1938, “ reality is initially a food.” 1 Bachelard wrote this in the context of his reflections on some of the more colorful stories about digestion that proliferated in the prescientific European mind, particularly during the long transition from alchemy to chemistry. Simone Weil, Forms of the Implicit Love of God, 1951 The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations.
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