This is the third installment of “Power and Pleasure at the Dinner Table.” Find part 1, An Invitation, and part 2, The Party Table, in previous posts.
Community happens around tables: we play puzzles, games, and music, share meals, plan camping trips or political actions. Tables are sites where people celebrate or grieve together. The political thinker Hannah Arendt describes human togetherness by using a table as a metaphor. You may recognize Arendt’s name. She is perhaps best known for her reporting for the New Yorker magazine of the trial, in Israel, of Nazi administrator Adolph Eichmann. The New Yorker essays were later published as a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Or, you may have heard of her genre-breaking investigation, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which has gained renewed interest over the past eight years as populism, fascism, and authoritarianism are on the rise.
For Arendt, human plurality, that each person is a radically unique individual, is a condition of human experience. In her seminal work of political philosophy entitled The Human Condition, Arendt says,
To live together in the world, means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men [sic] at the same time. (p. 52)
Arendt’s philosophy begins with and is grounded in lived experience, and so this metaphor is intended to capture something central about human plurality. Tables orient us in various ways (Ahmed 2024), and when we gather around a table with others, we center relationships.
For Arendt, in a democracy, matters of shared concern serve as ‘tables’ that gather community members to act collectively. If you attended Café Philo’s screening of Tampopo, the film serves as a ‘table’ that gathered us together. Yet we watched from our different seats. In other words, each of us has a unique perspective that we bring to the table. When I teach, I refer to assigned texts as ‘the table’ that brings the class together and facilitates our interactions. No matter our disciplinary backgrounds or personal histories, the class has the text in common.
I find the table metaphor incredibly helpful in capturing the equality that exists between people in a democratic society, without losing a sense of our uniqueness as individuals. Thus, Arendt’s table seems better able to appreciate the diversity of lived experience that was missing from the dinner party in Plato’s Symposium. And, Greek symposiums were relatively homogenous spaces (Boisvert 2014, p. 105). An ability to appreciate our own positionality and others as bringing different perspectives to the table is even more crucial in societies such as Canada, which is diverse across lines of culture, language, and identity.
Two questions
One metaphor cannot capture all dimensions of what it is trying to represent. When I think about Arendt’s table metaphor, two questions arise for me, one about access and one about food.
First, how does a person access the community table? Because Arendt is interested in a participatory democratic scene, I think she assumes that everyone will be invited to the table and able to access it. However, a presumption about equality does not mean that a table is necessarily accessible or equitable. Partly my question is about physical access. For example, are the chairs comfortable enough to sustain the kind of democratic dialogue Arendt imagines? In the lingo of the restaurateur, do we have 10-minute chairs that are going to encourage people to get moving after a quick bite, or three-hour chairs that invite lingering over multiple courses and drinks (Helm and Pashman 2020)?
Second, where is the food? Food is a sign that we human beings are needy creatures. Our ability to come together in democratic politics needs to be sustained, not only civically and intellectually but also by meeting our embodied needs.
If food is absent from Arendt’s table metaphor, it might be because she wasn’t interested in theorizing about the needs of the body (including sexual desire). Arendt viewed the public and the private as separate spaces. The public is the realm of human togetherness, of social interactions, and of political action, whereas the private is the realm where life’s necessities—eating, sleeping, laundry, dish-washing—are cared for. Given this distinction, Arendt relies on the table metaphor to convey social and political dimensions of the human condition.
Although Arendt did not bring food into her table metaphor, she was interested in the aesthetic experience of taste as a dimension of critical thinking. For Arendt (1992), taste is private. We cannot share with someone what it is like for us to experience the world. Yet, drawing from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, there is a ‘common sense’ that enables us to communicate about our private sensations. The common sense is something like a shared context. We have enough in common that we can start a conversation and come to understanding.
Three insights
Adding food to the community table metaphor generates three insights that I think are helpful. First, it better captures why taste is important for philosophical thinking. It indicates that we each occupy a specific and unique position that is different from others, yet we can communicate about our subjective experiences because we have the foundation of a shared common sense. Second, food better connects taste to embodied experience. Rather than being merely an imaginative exercise, taste operates holistically through embodied reflection. Alcibiades was an exemplar of this skill. Third, sharing food can build trust between people in a manner that facilitates democratic engagement.
Let me spend a bit more time on the third insight. Arendt is interested in a robust public sphere, one in which people participate from different vantage points and dialogue about matters of shared concern. Yet, dialogue is a difficult ask for many people. Disagreement often requires trust between interlocutors, and a sense of civil respect and trust in fellow residents is not something our society necessarily fosters. For some people, disagreement generates a visceral experience of discomfort.
For Boisvert, trust can be generated over time through sharing meals, which provides a process whereby a stranger becomes a friend. Aristotle, Plato’s student, must have thought so too: he suggested that there be mandatory civic meals as a kind of public ritual (Boisvert 2014, p. 108). Boisvert thinks Aristotle was too heavy-handed with enforced meals, but he suggests that opportunities to come together over food, such as church potlucks, strengthen and deepen relational bonds amongst participants (p. 120).
Because Arendt’s picture of the community table is strengthened when there is trust between participants, bringing food to the table helps illustrate the importance of forging social bonds that nurture and sustain political dialogue, just as food nourishes our physical bodies. Sharing meals and enjoying food can also capture the sense of joy that being with others provides, perhaps providing the support for the kind of joy people experience in acting together politically.
In sum, my revision of Arendt’s table metaphor amounts to this: Shared meals at the community table bring people together, helping to foster bonds of belonging even as we may disagree with each other, as each of us has unique tastes and different seats at the table.
Stay tuned for the next installment: Inaccessible Tables.