Whenever I’ve found myself discussing Hegel’s Dialectic, those I’ve held hostage in my conversations seem to be generally accepting of concepts, but skeptical surrounding potential methodology or practical application. This fault can’t be placed squarely at the feet of the newcomer as Dialectics, as obscured through a societal ignorance of Marx’s interpretation, has mostly faded into the background of day-to-day life. Not only this, but the original works are impenetrable without proper training or guidance, no matter how radically influential they were in the progression of contemporary philosophy and science — through its own negation no less! Yet, even through ignorance, Hegel’s understandings are with us, if only unconsciously or without conscious consequence to thought or practice. Here, I will attempt to correct this through a dialectical description of a methodology we are all familiar with: cooking scrambled eggs.
The first issue that arises, as with any scientific undertaking, is the problem of cause and effect. Any occurrence, a delicious plate of scrambled eggs in this case, can have its causes traced backwards infinitely. For instance, what causes a tree to grow? This answer becomes a delirious series of observations which run through ecological interdependence, cellular division, DNA replication, RNA instruction, biological evolution, chemical evolution, geological change, astronomy, physics and so on all the way back to the theoretical beginning of measured time. What is being observed in each reference point is a particular state of being, each with its own causes and effects. Therefore, to create a coherent methodology, one must set a phenomenological starting state for each of the various phenomenological states that give rise to an accepted end point.
To quantify and qualify these various culminating states, through observation and reasoning, one must “start at the end” so to speak. The book must be completed before a proper preface can be written. A teleology, a retroactive pragmatics, must be applied to a given end state so we might uncover the most effective place to begin. We must set an end point for our desired result as well as starting points for each component that gives rise to said end state. Even then, we must go past this end state to truly understand which end state falls within a gradient of acceptability with regards to our subjective judgment. The culinary dialectician begins each recipe at the start of the perceived universe and ends each recipe with their own death. From there, the “perfect” recipe is a (relatively) simple task of narrowing the scope down.
Scrambled eggs is a particularly easy recipe. You’ll only need: eggs, salt, pepper, and milk (optional).
Now, a word of caution here. This is where the non-dialectical recipe begins; with each component as a self-contained eventuality. However, the culinary dialectician must take a view of life which sees all things in a state of constant flux and flow through various states of being across time. The culinary dialectician sees all parts of life as being in motion, never static. The culinary dialectician relies on their reasoning to allow simple observations to transcend themselves into ever deeper levels of understanding. The culinary dialectician knows that the given is never simply the given, but rather, like an egg, every object or idea contains elements of that which was synthesized and destroyed to give birth to them.
Let’s now consider observations of each of the ingredients in reverse order. To end with the deepest level of understanding, we must begin with the widest possible net of investigation.
Milk. The inclusion of milk in our scrambled eggs begins with the domestication of cows by humans. This beginning state is arrived at through a passing consideration of the geological and biological history of the universe which gave rise both to cows and humans as well as the nutritional needs and objects which command and sustain them. A byproduct of the agricultural revolution, the social acceptability of ingesting cow’s milk gave rise to a new biome within the average human gut. This development allowed humans to digest lactose past infancy for some and continues to not be a given for all. Setting aside the ethical dilemas associated with animal domestication, for our pragmatic purposes, how a cow is raised and cared for will determine the subjective quality of its milk. This implies a sociological examination of how the one who raises the cow came to be in possession of their land and the broader economic systems which govern the farmer’s ability to financially provide for said cow. We must weigh these implications against our end state. Our eventual plate of eggs, through the inclusion of milk, will have a lighter and fluffier subjective potentiality. Its inclusion within the recipe must be visualized in the end state and a subjective value determined. The culinary dialectician considers all of the above and more before they reach a conclusion on the inclusion of milk.
Pepper. Similarly to the above, the phylogenetic history of modern black pepper, Piper nigrum, and its phenomenological eventualities must be considered in our recipe. The sensation of spiciness directed our selective breeding of the modern pepper plant. Those plants whose fruits bore a spiciness within our judgmental gradient for acceptability were bred with one another. This breeding gave rise to new states of being with new needs. The culinary dialectician understands this as each peppercorn seed negating itself as it developed into a fruit-baring plant which in turn negated its own negation in returning to a seed while gaining new genetic complexity along this process. Additionally, the drying process of the peppercorn has anthropological implications which, for the culinary dialectician, have sociological implications. We must consider the socioeconomic factors which would enable or disable the careful process of ensuring each plant is cared for, nutritionally provided for, harvested, and dried along the life of the peppercorn. This includes even a historical analysis of the geographical location of the plant’s growth in regards to past harvests and the level of nitrates in the soil. From this, the same process need be applied to fertilizer and, for our purposes, this, in my subjective opinion, would be an appropriate place to end our retracing of causality. From our retroactive and pragmatic perspective, the spice from the black pepper will add a specific and deliberate dimension to our scrambled eggs which cannot be realized without its inclusion.
Salt. Sodium chloride (NaCl), or table salt, as inorganic matter, follows a slightly divergent path in our analysis. Ethical considerations of the salt’s well-being can be somewhat dismissed. Instead, these concerns are passed onto the organic beings which mine the salt from the earth. The culinary dialectician cannot dismiss the idea that the subjective life-quality of the salt miners’ being would not, on some level, factor into the quality of the salt’s being just as the joyful carpenter creates the best quality chair. If we assume this relation, the next step would be an examination of the colonial history of salt cultivation and the material conditions which have given rise to our modern ideological conception of the value of table salt. From this perspective a bleak consideration arises, was it necessary that millions be enslaved and killed so our eggs might not taste bland? The culinary dialectician is revolutionary on this point. Causally, all of history needed to occur so that we may add salt to our recipe. However, dialectically, this flow of history was one path among many and history yet continues. This allows us the opportunity to negate our dark past, to integrate it through analysis and transcend it, towards more enlightened futures. For our teleological purposes, we examine the human palette. Salt is a necessary ingredient for the sustaining of the mammalian life process. In the body, salt is thought to aid with the conducting of nerve impulses and the balancing of water and mineral saturation. Throughout history, it was a scarce resource and now we have it in overabundance. We here must go beyond our end state to the socially constructed and materially determinant expectations of our consumer. Salt is so socially expected that its exclusion might even be seen as a revolutionary statement in and of itself. The culinary dialectician not only anticipates this desire for salt’s aiding in our egg’s phenomenological end state, but also understands why these expectations have arisen.
Eggs. This track closely follows our considerations for milk and pepper so we will diverge slightly for the sake of an opportunity for an aesthetic understanding. When we recognize the long evolutionary process which gives rise to a chicken with the ability to lay non-fertilized eggs, we see the importance of proper nutrition for the being in our end states. A fair indicator of a proper nutritional process lays in an aesthetic quality. The orange of the yoke will appear subjectively a much deeper shade if, to this observer, it falls within our acceptable gradient. We ask ourselves here, what does it mean to be a chicken? We observe a seeking of nutrients across particular ecosystems. If we would like eggs with much of their natural essence intact, we must seek the purest form of chicken to begin with in order to give rise to the egg which negates it. Here, the culinary dialectician must place a judgment value on this author’s observations. Similarly to the entirety of this recipe, a careful walking through of my reasoning must be examined before selecting which eggs might be applied. It may in fact be that I am trying to deceive you. The culinary dialectician contradicts the law of non-contradiction when they acknowledge that falsehoods contain truth and as such truth contains falsehoods. The culinary dialectician comes to their own understanding through reasoning and observation.
Like the fruit which takes the place of the blossom, or the eggs of the chicken, or the fruits of the peppercorn, each of these above reagents are teleologically negated by our plate of scrambled eggs. When they are included together, following an acceptable gradient of practice, they each cease to exist and a new, more complex state takes their place. In their combination, each individual part gains a new internal relationship to the various other parts before shortly passing away into something new. This continual passing into new states of qualitative being requires the crossing of particular quantitative thresholds.
We jumpstart this qualitative leap towards order by first applying chaos to quantity. The eggs are cracked and placed together within a bowl. Chaos here need be applied. The culinary dialectician may here use their imagination. On the molecular level, this chaotic motion develops the quantity of eggs into a new, more static, qualitative state. Aesthetically, the color becomes uniform and the texture becomes consistent. Once this state has been reached, one may decide whether to include milk by observing these aesthetic elements and considering the ethical and biological ramifications of its inclusion.
Once this new state is static, more molecular chaos must be applied. Just as radiation catalyses genetic qualitative leaps, heat must be applied to accelerate the molecular revolution of the eggs. Here too there is a gradient of teleological acceptability; we keep the ending in mind throughout. The process need be given time to apply wholly to the concoction without advancing bits into further unacceptable states before the entirety has a chance to develop into a singular acceptable state. Therefore only a small bit of heat need be applied deliberately and consistently with close observation. Without knowledge of the particularities of the ingredients you have gathered or the infinite and infinitesimal peculiarities of the moment in which you’ve undertaken the process, it is impossible here for me to give a universal recommendation for allowing this process to advance through time. It comes down to the judgment of the culinary dialectician to observe and interrupt the process before it advances outside of the subjective acceptability gradient. Since time here is of the essence, we see the value in prior teleological contemplation.
Though the molecular revolution comes on slowly at first (advancing through quantitative change to heat) and all at once rapidly to a new state (a new acceptable qualitative molecular structure), the ceasing of this process must be preempted, either through reasoning or experiment, and gradually halted. Through reasoning we know that heat is the transferring of the excitation of one set of molecules to another. Thus we take into account the pan as well. Though the heat is gone, the pan continues its excitement and, if the acceptable end state is foreseen, can be used to slow the process to a more deliberate static state.
Through an understanding of the relation between discord and harmony, the culinary dialectician gives rise to the new. A new composite state of being the essence of which contains an internal relationship to all of its constituent pieces and a teleological consideration for how that new composite state will go on to be a reagent in a similar process. The newly created object has negated that which it took the place of despite the specters of its parts living on through contradiction within the being of the new object itself. The new object will go on to sustain and inform a subject which will also go on to create the new. The chicken has become the egg has become the meal has become the chef has become the cultivator of further eggs, chickens, and meals. The culinary dialectician knows each meal they create will nourish the bodies which will return to the soil which will nourish future ingredients. The culinary dialectician marvels at the way of the world which sees objects and ideas coming into being, and through contradiction, disappearing only to appear yet again through negation’s negation; spiraling upward through history, gaining complexity as they do. This implies the final tool in the culinary dialectician’s cabinet: time. Repeated experience with the above phenomena will give rise to new understandings of the internal connections between things and thus new knowledge which will go on, like Spirit, to reach down from the heavens into history and push human consciousness towards absolute knowing.
Season to taste and serve.