Hegel and the Dialectics of Digestion

Abstract

Describes Hegel’s interest in the physiology of digestion and his method of interpreting the results of empirical science in ways that connect digestion with other realms of animal and human assimilation of the external world. Claims digestion became for Hegel a master trope of assimilation, but notes his interpretation does not proceed by analogy and metaphor but by a process of identifying the corporeal and material links that connect the body and the scene of eating to other human activities, modeling a praxis of rigorous metonymical thought capable of uncovering philosophical meaning in the most primary of physical processes.