In the early 1970s, a quiet revolution began to ripple through the halls of modern philosophy. Activists and thinkers spoke of animal liberation and a new ethics for our treatment of other species, pointing to environmental crises and the horrors of industrial farming. It felt like a sudden awakening, a novel moral frontier born of the counterculture. Yet, this modern movement was actually the rising of a phoenix, a rekindling of a fire that had burned brightly for nearly a thousand years in the ancient world before being smothered under centuries of neglect.
The history of ideas often moves in these intermittent waves. An idea is suggested, held to be true for a time, ignored, and then eventually rediscovered. When the dormancy lasts too long, the rediscoverers easily mistake themselves for the original creators. This does a deep injustice to the past and narrows our understanding of the concepts we debate today.
To find the roots of this intellectual lineage, we must look to ancient Greece. Pythagoras, a thinker who lived in the sixth century before the common era, is the father of philosophical vegetarianism. He established a mystical, scholarly community in southern Italy where his strictest followers, the mathematikoi, practiced a disciplined abstinence. They viewed their meals as part of a larger spiritual exercise, avoiding flesh and even beans, which they believed had a shared origin with humanity in the primordial slime of creation. Pythagoras did not merely rely on the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He maintained that animals possess intelligence and passion, and he urged his followers to live a life of simple, unvarnished moderation.
Plato later wove these ideals into his own philosophical tapestry. In his dialogue, the Republic, the first and healthiest city constructed by Socrates is a simple, peaceful, vegetarian commonwealth. Its citizens feast on barley, wheat, olives, cheese, and figs. It is only when the citizens demand luxuries, sweetmeats, and meat that the city swells with doctors, huntsmen, and soldiers, inevitably sparking the wars of conquest that destroy human societies. In the Laws, Plato again praised the ancient traditions of bloodless sacrifice and vegetal diets as highly credible paths to human excellence.
The decline of this compassionate perspective began in earnest with Aristotle, who established a rigid hierarchy of the soul. In his view, plants exist for the sake of animals, and animals exist for the sake of human beings. This teleological hierarchy became the foundation for centuries of speciesist thought, particularly when it was absorbed into Christian theology. Saint Augustine argued that animal suffering is of no concern to humans, dismissing vegetarianism as Manichean superstition. Saint Thomas Aquinas solidified this stance in the Middle Ages, arguing that animals are merely instruments, lacking the rational self-motion that would make them worthy of charity.
The absolute lowest point for animal welfare arrived with the scientific revolution and René Descartes. By dividing the universe into mind and body, Descartes reduced animals to automata, mere clockwork machines. He claimed they lacked both reason and the capacity to feel pain. This convenient theory allowed his followers to perform brutal vivisections with clear consciences, treating the cries of a dog under the knife as nothing more than the squeaking of ungreased wheels.
Even the eventual rise of secular and evolutionary thought did little to alter practical behavior, entering what we might call the era of excuses. Jeremy Bentham famously argued that the key moral question is not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer. Charles Darwin proved scientifically that there is no fundamental difference between human beings and other mammals, effectively demolishing the intellectual scaffolding of human supremacy. Yet both Bentham and Darwin continued to eat meat. The weight of traditional culinary habits resisted the logical conclusions of their own discoveries.
To break through this cognitive dissonance, we must return to the ancient concept of arete, the pursuit of moral excellence. Plutarch, the Greek priest and essayist, wrote a fierce critique of meat-eating that remains a masterpiece of ethical journalism. He challenged the casual meat eater to look closely at their plate, to remember the screams of the beast, and to recognize that we slaughter animals not for survival, but for the luxury of taste. Plutarch did not need complex modern theories of legal rights to make his point. He argued that the violent slaughter of sentient life corrupts the human soul, making us more prone to bloodshed and injustice.
This ethical sensitivity was carried to its peak by the Neoplatonist Porphyry. In his masterwork, De abstinentia, Porphyry introduced a remarkably modern defense of animal rights, anticipating the modern argument from marginal cases. He noted that if we base our moral duties only on a high level of human reason and language, we would have no obligation to show justice to infants, the senile, or the mentally disabled. Since we rightfully protect these vulnerable members of our own species based on their capacity to feel and suffer, we are logically bound to extend that same protection to other sentient animals.
Modern thinkers, particularly process philosophers like Charles Hartshorne, have rebuilt this bridge between ancient wisdom and contemporary science. Hartshorne’s panpsychist view suggests that feeling runs throughout the natural world. While a plant is a decentralized colony of cells, a higher animal possesses a nervous system that coordinates its experiences into a psychological unity. When an animal is hurt, it is the animal itself, not just its cells, that suffers. Accepting this continuity in nature requires us to abandon our anthropocentric arrogance.
Vegetarianism is far more than a modern diet or a passing political trend. It is a long-standing philosophical commitment to live in harmony with the sentient world. By looking back to the insights of Pythagoras, Plutarch, and Porphyry, we can give our contemporary debates the intellectual depth they desperately need. The phoenix has risen once more, and it is time we listen to its ancient song.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: The Philosophy of Vegetarianism
- Author: Daniel A. Dombrowski
- Publisher: The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst
- Publication Year: 1984
- Edition: First Edition / Paperback
- ISBNs:
- Cloth ISBN-10: 0-87023-430-7
- Paperback ISBN-10: 0-87023-431-5
- Ebook ISBN-13: 978-0-585-08337-7
- Print ISBN-13: 978-0-870-23431-6
- Historical Period Covered: Ancient Greece (~6th century B.C. to 6th century A.D.) with comparative analysis of the Judeo-Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorian era, and the 1970s–1980s contemporary philosophical debates
- Main Subject Areas: Ancient Philosophy, History of Vegetarianism, Environmental Ethics, Animal Rights, Virtue Ethics (Arete), Metaphysics, Process Philosophy
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