The Moral Authority of a Body

On Kate Manne's 'Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia'

René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928, Oil on canvas

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Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs.

Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a tight focus on a clearly defined cluster of points, easily transferable into the bullet-point format (prize juries do not typically read their books cover to cover). This book’s core philosophical notion, and one of the principal bullet points that was likely part of its initial “elevator pitch,” is what Manne calls “the moral authority of the body”: if your appetite makes itself known to your conscious mind, its imperative comes with real moral force. “In my view,” she writes, “bodily imperatives constitute our most important moral imperatives.”

We’ll get back to this notion soon. But let me first briefly note what else might have got mentioned in that short elevator ride shared by Manne’s agent and publisher. It would surely have been clarified that the book is not about fatphobia in general, but about the intersectional experience of fatphobia on the part of women and girls. Eating disorders and harmful dieting will have been said, in that elevator, to be a feature of misogynist societies in particular.

There are undoubtedly gendered dimensions of the problem. Yet too much emphasis on these can obscure from view just how varied judgments about the goodness or badness of fat can be in different times and places, and can also conceal from us many of the genuinely universal problems, philosophical and practical, of human embodiment. This latter point has considerable personal importance to me. When I was a young man, just 19 years old, I began a two-year bout of rather severe anorexia, constantly in and out of hospitals and psychiatrists’ offices, hooked up to IV’s, fretted over. I was six feet tall and I weighed 99 pounds. I purged myself with laxatives and diuretics every morning before my weigh-in. If the scale ever crept up past 100, I doubled down on my efforts at self-starvation.

I was “cured” by my mid-twenties, sort of, though the truth is I don’t think I will ever walk through a doorway without believing, in some part of me, that I am too fat to fit through it. I don’t think I will ever stop declining invitations to attend parties, or to pose in group pictures, for the simple reason that I’m feeling too fat and can’t stand the thought of being seen. I don’t think I will ever eat anything in a vein of pure enjoyment, but will always be inwardly worrying about whether I “should” be eating it or not. This is such a deep part of who I am that I don’t really dream any more of overcoming it. And I certainly don’t think there is any possibility of social evolution or political progress that would help me to overcome it. Whatever its causes are, it has at least something to do with me, personally, spiritually. The eating disorder, and the body dysmorphia, and all these other complicated dimensions of embodiment, are mine, and I feel as if it would concede far too much to the outside world to attribute all or even much of the responsibility for them to any external forces of injustice.

We starve ourselves for many reasons, I mean. Freud tells of the Rat Man, who, without knowing why, ran up and down a mountain in the vain struggle to lose some weight, until his good psychoanalyst explained to him that he was trying to become less dick, the German adjective for “fat,” only because this was also his brother-in-law’s given name, and he, the Rat Man, unconsciously wanted to have sex with his sister. Yes, that’s a bonkers just-so story, typical of Freud’s speculative overreaching. Yet if I had to choose, in explaining my own life of dieting, between blaming the impossible BMIs on display in Calvin Klein ads, and blaming some secret perversion in me that I can only dimly make out and that would likely horrify me if I were ever to gain full awareness of it, I think I’d rather go with the perversion.

One of the most peculiar things about my own dysmorphia is that all this self-starvation hardly gives the results one would expect a man to want: I don’t end up looking like Mark Wahlberg when I diet stringently; I just look wan and sad. What then am I after, exactly? While the evidence did not show up in my Ancestry.com test results, I often imagine that I am at least partially descended from walruses. Everyone in my extended family has an extra layer of adipose tissue that would seem to serve an evolutionary purpose only if we were avid ice-hole divers. I suspect that my life of self-starvation and bodily rigor has something to do with a deep desire to break free from my family and from my origins, to become, as if this were possible, entirely my own person. But it doesn’t work. I can starve my inherited layer of fat down to something much thinner, but I can never get rid of it altogether: it’s always there to remind me where I come from. Even when I weighed 99 pounds, my arms still looked like tubes of dough, just much narrower ones.

All my life I have sought out, as friends, people who are plainly not part-walrus, but sinewy ectomorphs with bulging veins and chiseled jaws. And I stand next to them and talk with them and hug them, and they truly are my friends, yet when I am with them I am absolutely seething with envy, and shot through with the peculiar idea that if only I had their vascularity, if only I were ripped like they are, my life would have been charmed. Instead my life is shit, a waste, a misfire. And so I spend it trying out all kinds of new dietetic variations and exercise regimes, and I am certain I will be doing this until I can’t get up or feed myself at all.

“Intuitive eating,” which Manne recommends, isn’t really an option for me: one moment I can sincerely believe I’m eating just because it’s the right thing to do right now, because my body wants it and that is good, only to find a moment later that I am definitely and unambiguously in the depths of a gruesome binge driven by self-hatred and regret. I am so familiar with this dynamic that I have, over time, come to believe that I must maintain some strict rules, rules that often oppose and veto the purported authority of my body. These rules are neither good nor bad; they are just necessary. In particular, banishing whole categories of food is a very effective way for me to ensure that I will not end up bingeing on them. I drive my friends and family crazy with all my restrictions. But I do what I can to help them understand that I need these restrictions, that they help to preserve me from far greater despair. When I adhere to them successfully, they can also, sometimes, deliver to me an experience of something akin to thriving.

Unlike Manne, I have made peace with this arrangement, and I see it as a necessary part of me. Over the years I have also been able to come to understand my uneasy embodiment not just as intrinsic to who I am, but as something that places me in spiritual community with women and men throughout the centuries who have likewise felt a burning in themselves, and have responded through practices of askesis and self-discipline, many of which far surpass my own in their extremism. The Stylites not only practiced self-starvation, but did so while exposing themselves to the scorching sun and the harsh elements at the top of a pillar; Saint Simeon lasted 37 years up there. Saint Rose of Lima not only fasted, but slept on a bed of broken glass. And beyond these uncompromising cases, many more or less “regular” people have alternated between austere fasting and grateful feasting, in accordance with their religious calendars, and when they are in the fasting phase they do indeed get hungry, and they do indeed ignore the “moral authority of the body,” not because they are stubborn or misguided or mistaken about where the real authority lies, but because this practice gives order and meaning to their lives and is central to their own idea of thriving. This is such a common feature of the human experience of embodiment that it is simply negligent to leave any consideration of it out of a book proposing to investigate why people diet.

There is one reference to ascetics in Manne’s book, and it comes in a footnote, and it tells us that these are “people who thought that every pleasure is bad” — note the past form of the verb, as if to claim that ascetics no longer walk among us! Leaving aside the peculiar tense choice, is this a good definition of asceticism? It all comes down to what you mean by “pleasure,” and what you find most effective in delivering it. Manne acknowledges she is out of her element when she attempts to give us even a little bit of canned history, and one cannot help but appreciate the correctness of her self-assessment here. She notes that medieval nuns were often prone to what we today would diagnose as anorexia, and she cites in this connection Caroline Walker Bynum’s excellent work, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987). Yet Manne fails to note here that Bynum herself, subtle historian that she is, gives us a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the ascetic practices of the medieval nuns in question, seeing these as to some extent expressions of a hard-won autonomy, one that, for them, as experienced, is not without its ecstatic pleasures. These aren’t the pleasures for which Manne has decided to go to bat, but if it comes down to determining who has landed on a better way to live, a 21^st century author who insists on the supreme importance of our right to “have the goddamn lasagna,” and a medieval nun in the throes of a fast-induced ecstatic vision of the Godhead, well, let me just say that as far as I can make out the answer is by no means cut and dry.

In a compelling review of Manne’s book, the philosopher Rachel Fraser, who likewise experienced anorexia early in her life, invokes the case of the 20^th century French mystic and Catholic convert Simone Weil, who yearned “to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of chanting and words.” Manne has absolutely zero resources to engage charitably with the profound experience of someone like Weil. But it is a real experience, one that Weil herself surely would never be prepared to interpret as simply the prosaic result of harmful beauty standards imposed on her by boorish men. Weil could not have cared less about such men, or about the fleeting fashions of the age that these men might succeed in imposing on other more malleable souls.

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But let us return to the question of the moral authority of the body. Manne is a prominent and unusually prolific professor of philosophy at Cornell University, whose 2011 dissertation at MIT focused on a problem central to analytic ethical theory, investigating and critiquing the notion of “practical reason.” This work was followed by three books for ever-expanding readerships, each dealing with issues, broadly speaking, in feminist philosophy. The third of these, under review here, is the least grounded in Manne’s disciplinary identity, though it is clear at several points in it, and from what she has written about the book elsewhere, that Manne sees her work on fatphobia as emerging from, and strengthened by, her professional philosophical training. Yet in spite of this training, we never find any real argument in favor of the lasagna. We see a defense of “intuitive eating,” but no plausible account of how we might know when to trust our intuitions, and when they are leading us astray. My own body, like, I take it, most bodies, is just not very good at being a moral authority: the signals it sends me are too confusing, and often contradictory. Manne at one point admits that she “certainly would not want to say that every desire we have” comes down to us from the infallible moral authority of the body, but what we do not see is any admission that we might simply be stuck, as human beings, in a tragic condition of being unable to know, often, for any given desire, whether it is authoritative or not, whether it should be trusted or not. Manne’s moral authority of the body, then, is not exactly Aleister Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Yet it is not exactly not that either: in the absence of any plain and implementable directions for recognizing the body’s fallibility, all we really have is first-order desire, “what thou wilt,” as supreme legislator.

But if Manne were to acknowledge that the body’s demands require interpretation, and that there’s no one else to do that hermeneutic work than the moral subject who, like it or not, at least experiences themself as distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the body, then she would by that same acknowledgment be thrust into what I admit is a rather destabilizing existential predicament: one where the determination of any given “should” is entirely up to us, where to follow through on a desire is to subordinate ourselves to no authority at all, not that of the body or of anything else, but rather to take a leap. Should I eat the lasagna or not? It could be that there simply is no authoritative answer to the question. It depends what kind of life you want. And how do you figure that out? Well, it’s tough. Most people never do.

Notwithstanding some dutiful criticism of the utilitarian tradition in philosophy, Manne thus remains entirely within the same Anglo-philistine frame that produced Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and Peter Singer. All four of them appear to take for granted that there is a single knowable calculus to which we may appeal that can tell us, when weighing up two opposed courses of action, which of the two is “better.” There is an impressive bourgeois optimism in this presumption, though Manne, unlike Singer, generally prefers to portray herself as a clear-eyed purveyor of hope against hope, and especially after the return of Trump has been seen saying things to the effect that one might have to settle with envisioning a better world without any expectation that that world will ever be achieved. But if our world is destined to remain in its current miserable and fallen state, for Manne this is mostly the consequence of the malign deeds and intentions of very bad men, and perhaps some women deluded into assisting them. It is not, and cannot be, the result of anything like a “tragic condition”, in Miguel de Unamuno’s sense, in this instance the tragedy of finding ourselves as spirits or minds, capable of scanning infinity, yet at the same time, in W. B. Yeats’s words, “strapped to a dying animal.” That’s a tough predicament, no matter how just or unjust our human institutions are, and it’s bound to lead to some pretty extreme practices, including practices of bodily askesis, in response.

To complicate matters, it is hard not to notice that the commercial forces pushing high-fructose corn syrup and other ultraprocessed foods on us are themselves entirely on top of the language of self-permission that Manne defends. Slavoj Žižek once wrote amusingly in the London Review of Books of a German ad campaign for fat-free salami that went, simply, “You may!” Žižek described this exclamation as “the secret injunction of the authoritarian.” The stern prohibitions of a politically repressive regime, in his view, are necessarily accompanied by an assurance of individual license. Such a duality, indeed, seems very much to characterize the curious formula at work in the early days of Trump 2: wanton Muskian libertinism combined with old-fashioned reactionary scolding and marginalization of everyone who does not share your values. One fears that Manne’s ameliorative proposals likewise tend in such an authoritarian direction: notwithstanding the superficial defense of individual license, she seeks to impose a uniform conception of the human good, a singular bullet point that would settle the matter, in the course of a short elevator ride, of how we ought to be living with our bodies.

The particular example of the lasagna comes from Steven Pinker, who somewhere claims that to choose such a dish over steamed vegetables is “irrational,” since the pleasure of eating it is outweighed by the pleasure of future thinness that would come as a result of not eating it (or of not regularly eating things like it). Manne wonders: “Has [Pinker] considered how drab it is to eat low-fat food every day?” Neither of these two trade-book luminaries has given any thought to the question, as far as I can tell, of the delirious diversity of human experience, to the contentment that might come, for some, from eating bland food day after day, year after year (a contentment I myself know very well), not because, or not only because, it makes us thin, but because many people, though not all, find their greatest thriving in such an ascetic form of life. Ironically, then, while calling for a greater respect for diverse kinds of human body, Manne completely overlooks another, arguably deeper, sort of diversity: that of opposed and irreconcilable conceptions of the good, which anyhow do not need to be reconciled in a liberal society. This inability to discover any appreciation for the different ways people find to lead meaningful lives that are nonetheless often far from pleasurable in a first-degree sense, is a clear reminder that for all the radical posturing, all the performative swearing, the vision Manne offers us is fundamentally bourgeois. Here the good life, for everyone, is one whose goodness will be measured by patterns of consumption, and in which happiness is measured out in morsels. Such a conception of the good has not, to say the least, been the norm for human beings, not anywhere, not ever.

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To see the impoverishment of this conception, one would need to be able to step back a bit from one’s own time and place, and to survey a significantly wider range of human experience. But this is something that analytic philosophy, Manne’s home base, which she still invokes with pride in her non-disciplinary trade-book writing, hardly gives a person the scope and the tools to do. Manne’s summary of the role dead men from centuries past played in shaping our current ideal of the thin body, within a context of growing racism and imperialism, is particularly cursory and predictable. We hear, once again, of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus” who has by now launched a million indignant MA theses (I’ve supervised a few of them); we get a quotation from Denis Diderot at his cancellable worst; and we get a curious allusion to the author of the 18^th-century Histoire naturelle, the greatest naturalist since Pliny the Elder, described by Manne as “the Frenchman Georges-Louis Leclerc — who claimed the title ‘Comte de Buffon.’” What a strange thing to say! Buffon didn’t “claim” the title of count; it wouldn’t have worked if he had. King Louis XV bestowed the title on him for the immensity of his contributions to natural history. Perhaps Manne is just being particularly consistent in her commitment to bourgeois values, by denying the legitimacy of aristocratic ranks (if Buffon had lived just a few years longer, after all, he would indeed have been restyled willy-nilly into a mere citoyen). But once we start withholding traditional titles from historical figures, we might also begin noticing that other title-granting institutions, beyond the French ancien régime, can also come to have an air of illegitimacy about them — for example, the ones that ennobled both Manne and me some years ago with the rank of “Professor.” Probably best just to keep the conventional titles as they are, if only par courtoisie.

Anyhow, 18^th century European science did more than put calipers to Indigenous thighs. This is also the period in which nutrition began to aspire to the status of an exact science, as Manne would have learned if she had read, say, Emma C. Spary’s magisterial Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris 1670-1760 (2012). The context of the emergence of haute cuisine is the same as the one that gave us calorimetry, and thus also, ultimately, the Apple watches that now monitor the metrics of our bodily machines from moment to moment, day in and day out. The idea that the body is a machine, although many of its early exponents were French, never fully caught on in France, and today you are much more likely to see French people feasting in complete ignorance of the caloric values of the food they eat, than you are to see Americans, whether obese Texans in reduced-mobility carts or affluent Californians with their step-trackers, doing the same. Here we get a glimpse of an “authority” beyond the individual body, and a reminder that our bodies, fat or athletic or otherwise, are not only shaped by our own authority as self-legislators (whether it’s the body or the mind doing the legislating), but also by ambient ideology and by macroscale political and economic forces. The ideology of control through quantification and calculation is one that has an early history in Paris, and that then migrates through 19^th century English liberalism and all the way to the 21^st century Californian obsession with tech-aided self-quantification passing as a counterfeit form of self-knowledge.

In recent years I have been flying back and forth somewhat regularly between Paris and Houston, and I find that it is simply impossible not to notice that bodies are much, much larger on average in the latter city. The reasons for this are many and varied, and neither Manne nor I would want to spend any time on any supposed moral failures of the Houstonians. I would however want to think about how the centuries-old values of commensality and terroir and so on have shaped French people’s eating habits, and in turn shaped their bodies. And I would want to think about the Nixon administration’s food-policy innovations, which did much to end the constant looming threat of hunger for the American poor, but did so through promoting a few calorie-rich but less than ideally nourishing crops, above all corn and its derivative syrup products.

That’s the top-down aspect of the problem: the way the state shapes our bodies whether we are aware of it or not, whether these are the haggard bodies of tenant farmers in India neglected by their government, or the fat bodies of Texans minimally sustained on highly processed combinations of corn and soy. I would also like to think about the ideology at work in this latter case, the way advertising and the history of colonialism conspire to convince many a Texan that theirs is rightly and naturally a place where, as the saying goes, “Everything’s bigger” — a motto that rationalizes both the massive size of the sodas available at your nearby Buc-ee’s, the massive dimensions of a suburban Texan’s energy-hungry home, and also, I’m sorry to have to say, the formidable waist-size of many a Houstonian’s Wranglers.

If the body has moral authority, as Manne contends, then we must confront the further fact that bodies pass down different moral imperatives in different settings and under different ideological regimes. When the Texan in front of the “Beaver Nuggets” rack at Buc-ee’s hears an inner voice saying “You may!” this is indeed a different moral imperative than the one heard by the Parisian who glances into a patisserie shop-window and says “I better wait for dinner with my family.” It is not at all clear to me that the difference here is that the Texan is practicing salutary self-care while the Parisian is being overly abstemious and self-denying. I am by now sufficiently bicultural to just go ahead and make the call: I think the Parisians live better, by any available standard. And perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Parisians are thinner.

Justin Smith-Ruiu is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité. His most recent book is The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is and his next book is On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of External Reality. He writes on Substack at The Hinternet.