Anthony Bourdain

For the past few weeks I’ve had discussions with my friend Paul about the recent suicide of Anthony Bourdain .Paul and his wife Karen had this wonderful perception of Mr. Bourdain. They perceived him as being famous, worldly, engaging, wealthy, and a wonderful connoisseur and spokesman for superb tasting foods. And the fact that he traveled all over the world breaking bread with the natives about wine, food, and food preparation. In fact, he even got paid well to engage in this activity .Paul simply cannot understand this most personal and conscious act by Bourdain, in that it was not rational decision. Paul, being born and schooled in Athens Greece was no doubt versed and familiar with the writings of the famous Greek philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. These philosophers believed that knowledge, rationality, and the search for truth played a major role in virtuous conduct or right or wrong behavior. Further, that virtue through knowledge and rationality could control the passions. This meant that the mental aspect was superior to the sins of the flesh. And Aristotle believed that the highest aspect of human life was the pursuit of happiness, which was achieved through reason. Later on, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about the evilness of impulses. He believed that impulses actually don’t bring pleasure, but instead result in pain. Not only that, but impulse gratification leads to satiation but not happiness. I am reminded of an exercise that I participated in one of my graduate classes held by Jacob Kounin. Briefly, Dr. Kounin drew a figure of a cat on the chalkboard and we were told to do the same, until he asked us to stop. This exercise demonstrated an example of satiation. Starting out, the drawn figure of the cat looked similar to the Professors. After minutes, the drawing errors mounted and the cat’s disfigurement developed more and more so. At the conclusion of the task, the cat drawings were placed randomly on the page. In essence, satiation took over, going from a positive valence, to a negative valence. Perhaps, if one ate a particular and favorite food [positive valence] three times a day, eventually, one would prefer something else as the food item would change from a positive to a negative valence. Sex would be another example. More to Follow