The Birth of a Word

When the adjective “vegetarian” was first used in a published text, it was hardly intended as a daring neologism, set to define a new approach to human diet. In the first issue of The Healthian: A Journal of Human Physiology, Diet, and Regimen (1842)—a British magazine edited by the group based at Alcott House in Surrey, including Charles Lane and Henry Gardiner Wright, and published approximately once a month between 1842 and 1843—“vegetarian” was employed as a synonym of “frugiverous,” meaning “eating or feeding on fruit” (broadly understood to include all vegetable produce).Footnote ³ An editorial piece entitled “Flesh Diet [The Editor’s Answer to Barbara’s Letter]” responded to the question posed by a reader named “Barbara”—“Is animal food good or pernicious to man?”—by stating that “the health facts [are decidedly] on the side of the frugiverous portion of the people in this country and clime.”Footnote ⁴ According to this piece, the “vegetable diet” is “more sustentative,” or nutritious, than one including meat, to the extent that it is absurd and “contrary to reason” “to tell a healthy vegetarian that his diet is very uncongenial with the wants of his nature.”Footnote ⁵

In this editorial, the term “vegetarian” is strongly connected not just to “frugiverous,” but also to another adjective: healthy. A vegetarian is someone who chooses a diet based on the fruits of the earth in the broadest sense, and in so doing cultivates his or her own health. The specific reference to climate suggests that vegetarianism might not be an appropriate diet at all latitudes. Yet in general terms, “vegetarian” is viewed as deriving from the Latin vegetus, meaning lively or vigorous. The title of The Healthian could even be read as a synonym for “vegetarian,” since the key claim of the editors is that a vegetarian is healthy, and that to become healthy a vegetarian diet is recommended. On the other hand, a diet that includes meat, here called the “flesh diet,” is viewed as “only a remnant of barbarous ages, and a practice of barbarous natures.”Footnote ⁶ The repetition of “barbarous” suggests that the letter signed by “Barbara” probably represents not the view of an individual by that name, but rather the catalog of traditional arguments in favor of eating animals—arguments that the editorial implies are barbaric and destined to be surpassed by a “healthian,” vegetarian diet.

Technically, the diet recommended in The Healthian would now be called vegan, not vegetarian. The leader of the Alcott House group, James Pierrpont Greaves (1777–1842), effectively chose a “vegetable diet” with a preference for raw food: in the obituary published in The Healthian he is called a “Pythagorean,” another term traditionally used to define someone abstaining from animal products.Footnote ⁷ The border between vegan and vegetarian remained at least partly blurred until the term “vegan” was coined in 1944. It first appeared as a mere suggestion in the first issue of “The Vegan News” (Quarterly Magazine of the Non-Dairy Vegetarians), in which the editor, Donald Watson, stated under the heading “Wanted—a name”: “We should all consider carefully what our Group, and our magazine, and ourselves shall be called.”Footnote ⁸ Watson lamented that the English language lacked a term to define the diet in question in a positive way, without drawing attention to the exclusions it implied, as was the case with the expression “non-dairy vegetarians”: “We need a name that suggests what we do eat.” Furthermore, he highlighted the conceptual unclarity of the terms “vegetarian” and “fruitarian,” evidently a modernization of the nineteenth-century “frugivorous,” remarking that “fruit” can be used metaphorically to denote any non-meat product, including milk or eggs.Footnote ⁹

The force of the fruit metaphor also resided in its biblical undertones. Indeed, a later editorial piece in The Healthian claimed that “every man is still an Adam, and every woman is still an Eve, standing in the garden of Eden,” thus suggesting that humans should return to the vegetarian—or rather frugivorous—diet of their origins.Footnote ¹⁰ It was not by chance that Lane’s friend Amos Bronson Alcott called his utopian community, founded in 1843 near Harvard, Massachusetts, “Fruitlands.”Footnote ¹¹ The community was “exalted into the New Eden,”Footnote ¹² even if Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May, later pointed out sarcastically that “this prospective Eden … consisted of an old red farm-house, a dilapidated barn, many acres of meadow-land, and a grove.”Footnote ¹³ The diet at Fruitlands was what would today be called a vegan one.Footnote ¹⁴ A few years before the foundation of the community, it would have been called fruitarian or frugivorous to indicate that it was based on the fruits of the earth. Louisa May Alcott still calls it a “vegetarian” diet toward the end of the nineteenth century, by which point vegetarian and fruitarian had ceased to be treated as synonyms.Footnote ¹⁵

By the 1940s, Watson’s search for a new term expressed frustration at the absence of clear terminology to define diets that had started to be perceived as substantially different only in recent years. His invention proved successful, even if it did not entirely fulfill his hope of indicating what foods that diet included: “vegan” is simply a contraction of “vegetarian.”Footnote ¹⁶ After its coinage in 1944, “vegan” spread from English across other languages, just as “vegetarian” had done a century earlier.

These neologisms, and especially “vegetarian,” did not abruptly eclipse all other terms that had been used up to that point, but they did start a new trend of defining positively, rather than negatively, the foods included in these diets. In 1842, the editors of The Healthian still proceeded by way of eliminating a series of foods in order to define the diet they were advocating. In a dialogue contained in the first issue of the journal, two strangers debate what to eat for breakfast: G. is an omnivore while A. eats according to the prescriptions put forward in The Healthian. The latter’s diet is progressively defined as foods derived from animals are excluded one by one:

It is significant that the diet which only a few months later, in the pages of the same journal, would be labeled with that now famous adjective—vegetarian—is here defined by way of listing what it does not include.

In another fictional dialogue between G. and A., in the following issue of the journal, A. recommends “abstaining from animal nutriment.”Footnote ¹⁸ This expression is reminiscent of the title chosen by Thomas Taylor for his 1823 translation of Porphyry’s Peri apochés empsýchōn (περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων): On Abstinence from Animal Food.Footnote ¹⁹ Porphyry’s work had long been a classic source of arguments in favor of a diet that excluded animal products, to the point that “abstinence,” the term traditionally used to translate Porphyry’s ἀποχή, had become the cornerstone of philosophical discussions regarding the choice not to eat the flesh of animals. In this text, the disciple of Plotinus seeks to convince his friend Firmus Castricius to abstain from eating meat, a food which he had previously avoided but had subsequently gone back to consuming. Porphyry’s appeal is customarily considered one of the most extensive ancient defenses of vegetarianism, a term which is evidently anachronistic when applied to the third century CE.Footnote ²⁰ In the introduction to his translation, Taylor contrasts the expressions “fleshy diet” or “animal diet” with “vegetable nutriment” or “vegetable diet.”Footnote ²¹ He uses them to explain—presumably without any irony—that a translator of Porphyry requires a diet compatible with an active and not just a contemplative life, and is therefore obliged to eat meat if he is to carry out the hard task of disseminating in English a fundamental text on abstaining from animal flesh: paradoxically, spreading the message of “vegetarianism” requires its conduit to eat meat.Footnote ²²

Although seemingly incongruous, Taylor’s comment on his need to eat the food discouraged by Porphyry does throw emphasis on the traditional term denoting the choice to avoid meat. Abstinence, or abstinentia in the Latin West, had long been a flexible container for a variety of different views, including but not limited to the elimination of animal products from one’s diet. It could be taken as a mere matter of dietary choice, as in Taylor’s claim regarding his nutritional needs, or it could be understood more broadly as the expression of a total approach to (philosophical) life. Porphyry uses the idea of abstaining in the latter sense, underlining the sacrality of philosophy when he states that “the philosopher, priest of the god who rules all, reasonably abstains from all animate food, working to approach the god.”Footnote ²³ Here the adjective “animate” is used in the literal sense of possessing a soul (ἔμψυχος), implying that plants are not alive in the same way as animals: the philosopher abstaining from “animate food” avoids meat and so needs to consume plants.Footnote ²⁴ The concept of “soul” is therefore the key to the diet that Porphyry recommends for a philosopher: he contrasts fattening “our flesh on meat” to feeding the rational soul with intellectual sustenance.Footnote ²⁵ In order to achieve the balance of soul and body, philosophers should not consume foods that are ensouled. Rather than identifying suitable foods via progressive exclusion, as in the dialogue in The Healthian, Porphyry used a single concept—that of the soul—to indicate the consonance between food and eater. The nutrition of the physical body was thus framed as merely one facet of a more complex issue. Compared to the philosophical density, and flexibility, of such interpretations of “abstinence,” the introduction of words like “vegetarianism” in the nineteenth century, followed by “veganism” in the twentieth, appears to accompany a progressive clarification. Without reducing vegetarianism and veganism to mere menus, a map of defined dietary options, each with a specific name, crystallized.Footnote ²⁶

The Development of an Idea

“Abstinence” was the key word in the reception of Porphyry’s text long before it was translated by Taylor.Footnote ²⁷ The editors of The Healthian knew that what they called the “vegetarian diet” was conceptually akin to this enduring concept. An 1842 editorial entitled “Abstinence” claims that in order to appreciate the term’s rich meaning, it is necessary to go beyond the “familiar utterance of the word” to uncover a plural signification, which the authors claim to develop through a piece of speculative philology.Footnote ²⁸ Abstinence, they argue, does not simply mean to forbear, but contains the word “stain”: to abstain would accordingly mean to move away from stain, in both the biblical and more generally spiritual senses. Hence abstinence must at once concern the health of the body and that of the soul. Almost as though in response to Taylor, the article states that

Claiming that the body cannot abstain from meat is therefore not a valid argument within a conception of abstinence which applies to the human being as an interconnected compound, tending to the needs of the spirit as well as those of the body. Nineteenth-century vegetarianism thus negotiated with the entangled trajectories of “abstinence” in the centuries before that new, successful term was coined. The conceptual contours of “abstinence” were inherently permeable, since the concept was inextricably and simultaneously linked with notions regarding both the “soul” and its various practical applications (it is possible to abstain from certain foods and beverages, but also from actions, for instance).

My book Renaissance Vegetarianism (2020) examines this topic, using the reception of Porphyry’s On Abstinence to unravel a set of related discourses pertaining to theology and magic, physiology and medicine, and geographical and anthropological exploration.Footnote ³⁰ As I show, “the philosophical trajectory of what later came to be called vegetarianism is deeply intertwined with the fortune of Porphyry’s book.”Footnote ³¹ This starts at the level of the material circulation of the text: Renaissance Vegetarianism considers early translations and adaptations of On Abstinence (notably that of Marsilio Ficino) in order to investigate what kinds of debate were stimulated by direct engagement with Porphyry. In so doing, I do not seek to replace a systematic approach with reception history, as if to say that in the absence of direct conceptual and terminological links between contemporary and early modern debates on eating animals, what remains is to reconstruct the material afterlives of a single work.Footnote ³² Instead, Renaissance Vegetarianism follows the debates triggered by the reception of Porphyry’s text in order to respond to the challenge of tracing the conceptual contours of dietary abstinence from animals, whatever it is called at a particular moment in time. The table of contents is organized according to four main topics, each signposting key aspects of Porphyry’s appeal to early modern thinkers: first, that an abstinent philosopher need not renounce sacrifice; second, that abstaining from meat does not compromise health; third, that comparison with dietetic otherness reinforces the evidence in favor of abstinence; fourth, that renouncing meat eating could reflect claims regarding the rationality of animals.

My research showed that the impact of each of these arguments depended on specific cultural and historical circumstances, even if they inevitably circulated as part of a more global approach. For instance, the question of sacrifice was particularly pressing for philosophers dealing with Porphyry’s text in the early phases of its Renaissance reception. This might seem surprising, since Renaissance philosophers did not face exclusion from religious ritual in the same way as ancient philosophers might have done when refusing to eat animals or to sacrifice them on the altars of the gods. Yet, Porphyry’s argument on sacrifice had unexpected potential for Renaissance readers: it enabled them to envision the combination of Christianity with a palatable version of Platonism, averse to bloodshed and inclined instead to recognize the value of inanimate offerings.Footnote ³³ Another example is the application of Porphyry’s categories to the diets of populations first encountered as the result of early modern geographical explorations. For Porphyry, the Indian Brahmans were the prototype of abstinent sages, as opposed to the Scyths, traditionally viewed as brutish because of the large quantities of animals they consumed. Yet, to early modern thinkers, the diet of the “cannibals” of the New World seemed an exception to the rule that indulging in the flesh of animals led to the highest level of brutishness, potentially ending in anthropophagy—for the “cannibals” were reputed to eat a mainly vegan diet, with the occasional addition of human meat. In this case, Porphyry’s framework needed to be adapted to accommodate the theoretical impact of geographical expansion.Footnote ³⁴

These examples show that the reception of Porphyry’s appeal in favor of a specific dietary choice often took place in contexts very different from Porphyry’s own. They also highlight the risk inherent in using “abstinence” as a heuristic keyword, due to the sheer quantity of different discourses and publications in which the term appears. And yet, a researcher seeking to trace debates on eating animals before the birth of the modern nomenclature must confront this problem: the issue is widely diffused yet hard to identify on a terminological basis. In early modernity—the period examined in Renaissance Vegetarianism—there are no texts whose titles explicitly announce discussion of what we now call vegetarianism.

Scholars have generally avoided applying contemporary vocabulary to the history of vegetarianism before the birth of this term. In 1935, Johannes Haußleiter published what remains today the most detailed study of ancient philosophical arguments in favor of avoiding meat consumption. Feeling the need to explain why he had chosen the term Vegetarismus to define a series of rather diverse approaches that converged on the rejection of meat—notably Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the philosophies of Porphyry and Plutarch—Haußleiter prefaced his book with a very short section entitled “Moderner Vegetarismus und antike Fleischenthaltung” (“Modern Vegetarianism and Ancient Abstinence from Meat”). There he explains that “vegetarianism” does indeed derive from vegetus, because its main concern is the health of both body and soul—a total approach to life, in which the dietary restriction regarding meat is the central pillar.Footnote ³⁵ Haußleiter claims that his use of “vegetarianism” as an umbrella term for both contemporary and ancient approaches is made possible by defining it in a narrow sense. Broadly, the political, economic, and even aesthetic contexts of diet within society differ sharply between antiquity and the modern world. But in Haußleiter’s more restrictive definition, “vegetarianism” indicates a body of physiological and ethical arguments in favor of abstaining from meat: it is methodologically justified to apply “vegetarianism” in this narrow sense to antiquity as well as to early twentieth-century debates, because according to Haußleiter there is consensus on this point across time and space.

In historiographical terms, the appearance of the word “vegetarian” in the mid-nineteenth century is customarily seen as a watershed moment which distinguishes modern vegetarianism from a variety of previous trends and practices that can only be studied together when reduced to a minimum common factor, as Haußleiter suggests. These are considered only partially in unison with the late modern conception, which came to be expressed by a new, contemporary term. This narrative has produced a strongly polarized literature, which either focuses on the period after the word “vegetarian” started to be used,Footnote ³⁶ or involves general historical reconstructions dependent on a fuzzy definition of the term, often with a heavy focus on antiquity.Footnote ³⁷ Daniel Dombrowski has even theorized that certain ideas—vegetarianism being a case in point—have an “intermittent history,” whereby they appear and disappear over time. Following in the footsteps of Haußleiter, his study of the philosophy of vegetarianism moves from antiquity straight to the nineteenth century. Yet the lack of any discussion of what may have happened in between is particularly striking here: Dombrowski does not explain this transition as a necessary scholarly selection, but rather claims that “the belief that it is wrong to eat animals was upheld by some of the most prominent ancient philosophers,” then “curiously died out for almost seventeen hundred years. After such a long dormancy, all that remained of the idea was ashes, out of which blooms the phoenix of contemporary philosophical vegetarianism.”Footnote ³⁸ What is curious about Dombrowski’s statement is the historiographical certainty that an idea can die and be resurrected in such a way. What could have happened to annihilate it, and when, and what made it come back? Why was it impossible for this idea to find fertile ground for a return any sooner than late modernity?

These are not questions that Dombrowski addresses. Recent historiography, to be sure, has focused more on softening our perception of sudden ruptures in intellectual history than on emphasizing alleged changes of scenery. The notion of the longue durée has become the manifesto of this approach. That is not to say that it necessarily favors broad lines of transmission to the detriment of microhistorical contextualization.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, the methodology of microhistory can often reveal a substratum of details that complicates linear trajectories, leading to the identification of “a combination of continuity and discontinuity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet Dombrowski’s position remains symptomatic of a deeper, unresolved issue affecting the history of philosophy in particular, and which is at the center of the present contribution: the lack of an agreed method for identifying and analyzing conceptual developments among terminological shifts and linguistic creations. From a historiographical point of view, Dombrowski’s surprising thesis is the last step in a precise critical lineage, which has established some relationship between conceptions of “abstinence” in (late) antiquity and contemporary debates on vegetarianism—following the example of Haußleiter—but has not conducted a similar investigation for any other periods. This has created the illusion of a conceptual void, which Dombrowski mistook for the actual death of an idea.

The reluctance to retrace the longue durée of the idea of “vegetarianism” in any period other than antiquity is likely due to the fact that the birth of the term itself is relatively recent. This has encouraged the perception that it is intrinsically linked to a specifically modern understanding of the concept, which bears only limited resemblance to previous conceptual scenarios. Selected historical scenarios have nevertheless been traditionally accepted as part of the intellectual development of the idea, despite Haußleiter’s attempt to define it in a minimal sense. As I will argue in what follows, the methodology of controlled anachronisms allows historians of philosophy to assess more precisely whether the idea of “vegetarianism” truly remained dead, or dormant, between antiquity and the nineteenth century, or whether it was alive and flourishing, albeit under the radar of hitherto mainstream historical methods.

Anachronistic Words and Anachronistic Feelings

The outline of the early uses of the term “vegetarian” given above highlights two main aspects. First, at the moment when it was coined, “vegetarian” coexisted for a while with other words that had been employed to define a diet renouncing the consumption of animal products. In other words, it was introduced as another element in a complex terminological network, before eventually becoming its main point of reference. Second, “vegetarian” did not mean at that time exactly what it means today: the emphasis was on the elimination of all foods derived from animals, including eggs and dairy, and the expected benefits for health, as the Latin root vegetus suggests. Taken together, these two elements call for caution in understanding the appearance of the term as a defining moment in the history of mentalities. Yet historical surveys have emphasized precisely this connection, as though the sheer presence of the word from that point onward justified establishing a direct link from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. On the other hand, the lack of studies on the preceding period, namely early modernity, is a symptom of scholarly unease about using the term “vegetarianism” to describe previous dietary approaches, when the word itself was absent. Its application to antiquity is often prefaced with a series of warnings, as we saw in the case of Haußleiter. In Renaissance Vegetarianism, I sought to approach the question from a different angle: I reconstructed the reception history of Porphyry’s On Abstinence as a way of selecting conceptual facets of abstinence that could be linked to the development of the idea of vegetarianism.

A similar approach to the nexus between vegetarianism and abstinence can be found for the eighteenth century in Renan Larue’s Le Végétarisme des Lumières (2019).Footnote ⁴¹ The author admits in his introduction that he has perpetrated anachronism because, in talking of debates about vegetarianism during the Enlightenment, he attributes to eighteenth-century philosophers a sensitivity which is usually interpreted as distinctly contemporary. Larue is correct in detecting a certain resistance to the anachronistic application of terms that have become part of contemporary ethical discourse, and evokes Lucien Febvre’s dictum that anachronism is the capital sin of the historian, the crime that cannot be forgiven.Footnote ⁴² Yet he appears to interpret the accusation of anachronism as a warning, rather than an interdiction. We must, of course, be vigilant when we interpret a text using a terminology which did not exist when that text was written. But the reason, for Larue, is not a philological one: when we say that there were vegetarians before the nineteenth century, we assume that “their anguish for the death of the animals is comparable to ours.”Footnote ⁴³ The problem is therefore a conceptual one, and it regards the legitimacy of creating a connection between current and past worldviews. For Larue this is inevitable in the case of “moral ideas,” which appear to him as the result of a long gestation: in the moral sphere, “most things are simply said differently” across time, implying that morality is inherently bound to a longue durée perspective.Footnote ⁴⁴ In other words, although the anguish of “vegetarians” would have been expressed differently throughout history, there remains at its core a continuity in terms of the moral compass which prompts humans to abstain from meat.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the wake of Febvre, the accusation of anachronism entails the idea that certain words smuggle in entire worldviews that are then projected onto periods to which they could never belong. Specifically, if we talk about “vegetarianism” before the nineteenth century, we are not simply appropriating a useful, recent term to unearth connections, but inserting a whole complex of assumptions and ethical positions into a history in which they have no place. There are, however, cases in which later coinages are widely accepted as analytically useful and effectively neutral, for example in scholarship on Plato’s “cosmology.”Footnote ⁴⁶ “Cosmology” is an early modern term, and yet there is no horrified chorus pointing out the anachronism of applying this term to Plato’s Timaeus.Footnote ⁴⁷ It has clearly become part of the philosophical vocabulary, acquiring a laissez-passer that frees historians of the discipline from any anxiety that, strictly speaking, this term only became current around the mid-seventeenth century. In this case, the implicit reasoning is that, although the word might have not existed, the concept certainly did, so that speaking of Plato’s cosmology does not reflect a historically dubious methodology but simply the desire for conceptual clarity. Even for such an influential and controversial term as “pantheism,” which similarly dates to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the application to earlier periods is now broadly accepted—despite the fact that perhaps few words are as symptomatic of a specific historical moment.Footnote ⁴⁸ Why, then, does the same not apply to “vegetarianism”?

The danger of anachronism is evidently felt more strongly when considering some words rather than others. The key element was indirectly identified by Larue when he asked whether we can compare contemporary morals and feelings with those of the past. For instance, is it legitimate to correlate Montaigne’s attachment to his cat to our own affection for our pets, today?Footnote ⁴⁹ In this case, Larue does not identify an anachronistic term, but a potentially anachronistic feeling. If we assume that what separates us from the sixteenth century is a different anthropology altogether, then Montaigne’s worldview might be lost entirely to contemporary historians, who would be left with the task of merely enabling a view from a distance, without attempting to draw any connections to present-day experiences. The acceptance of anachronisms in historiography is therefore linked to the conviction that the past remains accessible to us, and that a methodology can be devised to connect past and present worldviews.

In a seminal 1993 essay, Nicole Loraux claimed that the fear of anachronism is indeed an emotional, and not simply linguistic, one: all historians (of philosophy) feel an emotional blockage in dealing with their objects of study, at least since Febvre’s daunting warning. This implies that feelings become part of the barrier that separates the contemporary world from the past. Loraux admits having felt glee at apparently discovering that the love or rage felt and named by the Greeks had nothing to do with those passions as we know and call them today.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet, she explains, she soon made another discovery: that it is impossible for historians to contemplate their object of study in a neutral way. The question of the historically contingent feelings and thoughts of the distant people whose lives historians inspect needed to be taken seriously.Footnote ⁵¹ Applied to the case of eating animals, the accusation of anachronism can be reformulated as follows: we cannot know how it felt to have an attachment to animals in early modernity, and, conversely, we cannot interpret the refusal to eat animals expressed by early modern philosophers as an adherence to “vegetarianism.” Here the allegation is that neither the word, nor, more importantly, a certain peculiar sensitivity expressed by it, existed. On the other hand, to use the anachronism “vegetarianism” is to assume that an early modern thinker discussing abstinence from meat eating felt and meant a similar repulsion to that described by the inhabitants of Fruitlands, following that famous coinage on the pages of The Healthian.

These opposing interpretations of anachronism are founded on different understandings of the link between words and concepts. Even if they do not assume that the history of words is the history of concepts, for opponents of anachronism the addition of a neologism to the vocabulary is symptomatic of a specific worldview, which only pertains to that specific historical moment. In general terms, an anachronism is the “action of placing a fact, a usage, a character, etc., in an age within which it does not belong, or for which it is not really suitable.”Footnote ⁵² Yet, as Jacques Rancière has observed, this is not “a horizontal problem in the order of time” but a question of verticality, which allows anachronisms to escape chronology and access a different ontological level.Footnote ⁵³ In other words, when applied to the history of philosophy, an anachronism is not merely a chronological mistake involving terminology, for instance when Porphyry is called a vegetarian rather than somebody who abstained from eating meat. Rather, it is an approach that disentangles a concept from a horizontal, chronological succession of terms, and thus involves a vertical element that lets concepts stand above chronological succession. In this sense, it is evident that the use of anachronisms and their avoidance harbor different conceptions of history altogether.

For Loraux, it is precisely by embracing anachronisms that the work of the historian can properly begin.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this perspective, anachronisms are a tool for approaching the past, for taking the risk of asking questions that connect that past with the present. Freed from the anxious pursuit of neutrality, this work consists in controlling anachronisms—that is, in balancing attention to historical context (and its specific terminology) with the attempt to draw out a trajectory that allows a particular historical topic to enter into a dialogue with the present.

Presentism and Anachronism

If Larue is right that the fear of anachronism does not apply equally to all areas of research, but affects the moral sphere with particular force, then it seems that historians have started to follow Loraux in overcoming it. The climate crisis, for instance, has prompted scholars to appropriate the contemporary nomenclature for historical study. For example, the twentieth-century term “sustainability” has been projected backward to investigate the early modern agrarian world.Footnote ⁵⁵ In presenting the results of this research, the historian Paul Warde warned that it was a “little peculiar” to study “the genesis of a concept within discourses which did not, in fact, use the word.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This “peculiarity” has nevertheless become increasingly popular, and historians, including historians of ideas, have been at the forefront of the rediscovery of the heuristic potential of anachronisms.

Recently, the debate on anachronisms has been reconsidered under the label of “presentism.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Presentism can take two main forms: it can involve either tracing a genealogy of a present-day concern or decontextualization, by which the past is reduced to interpretative patterns to serve the present.Footnote ⁵⁸ The ethical dimension diagnosed by Larue has remained key in these discussions, though in a modified way: a presentist historian might employ an ethical agenda as a methodological framework, as in the case of Marxist or feminist historians.Footnote ⁵⁹ The use of anachronism is thus a feature of presentism, as is the preference for a framework that embraces the longue durée instead of drawing firm lines of separation between the past and the present.Footnote ⁶⁰

Historians of philosophy, meanwhile, have remained reluctant to embrace the systematic use of anachronisms.Footnote ⁶¹ An interesting indication of this is the anonymous report on my book manuscript, in which the reviewer “implored” me to remove the term “vegetarianism” from the title.Footnote ⁶² The argument is a standard accusation of anachronism as malpractice:

This critique of the anachronistic use of “vegetarianism” presumes that abstinence from meat eating is not the same as vegetarianism because the arguments used before and after the mid-nineteenth century were different. This means that the birth of the word is inextricably tied to the crystallization of a precise conception: vegetarianism entails not just abstaining from eating animals, but adhering to a specific nineteenth-century worldview. There is a further assumption at work here: that while it is not acceptable to talk of vegetarianism before the term existed, the latter may legitimately be applied in relation to the nineteenth century onwards, up to the present day. This seems to imply either that the relative stability of the term overshadows subsequent conceptual shifts, or that there is conceptual continuity from the time of The Healthian through to current debates.

But the view that the creation of the word “vegetarianism” corresponded to the emergence of a new idea does not stand up to closer scrutiny. First and foremost, the nineteenth-century thinkers who introduced the word did not think of vegetarianism as an innovation. On the contrary, they saw themselves as continuing one of the oldest philosophical debates in history. The early issues of The Healthian are particularly significant in this respect, as the neologism “vegetarian” remains less frequent in the pages of the journal than the classical term “abstinent” to refer to a person who does not eat meat. The editorial “Who Is the Abstainer?,” published in the November 1842 issue and cited at the beginning of this essay, clearly underlines this conceptual continuity: “Abstinence has been a question from man’s creation until now. Whatever of novelty may appertain to the present mode of it, the principle itself has always been before man, and in man for his solution and outworking.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Every issue of The Healthian opens with a motto or quotation. Together, these essentially form an anthology of sources that the editors viewed as points of reference for their understanding of vegetarianism. The November 1842 issue, with its cultural, philosophical, and physiological profile of the abstainer, opens with a quotation from Porphyry: “He who abstains from ire-exciting food, feeding on divine wisdom alone, assimilates Divinity.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The idea of abstinence that The Healthian seeks to support is a total approach to life, which foregrounds health as caring for the body and the soul at the same time, and the reference to Porphyry is key in this respect.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, in a companion piece entitled “What Is Abstinence?,” “giving up all animal food” is viewed as merely one aspect of a broader program, which involves further dietary restrictions such as “abstaining from hot dinners, from tea, and coffee, and spices, and every exciting and inflammatory condiment.” All these are but the “outward signs of real inward abstinence,” and are intended to support the abstainer in achieving it.Footnote ⁶⁷ The supposedly new concept “vegetarianism” is clearly presented as a reformulation of Porphyry’s appeal to abstain from animal products as a way of harmonizing care for the body with a philosophical worldview.Footnote ⁶⁸ Porphyry’s conception of abstinence is also mentioned in a contribution which expresses support for the editor in his exchange with the reader “Barbara,” whose letter had afforded the opportunity to label the opposite of “flesh eating” as “vegetarianism”:

The exchange between Barbara and the editors of The Healthian is here interpreted as a gesture toward the controversy between Porphyry and Iamblichus, which had effectively been a reference point for definitions of abstinence at least since Ficino included a paraphrased translation from On Abstinence in his successful Neoplatonic anthology of 1497, which also contained Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis.Footnote ⁷⁰ These nineteenth-century “vegetarians” viewed themselves as successors of the early modern trajectory that I reconstructed in Renaissance Vegetarianism, and which developed under the conceptual heading of abstinentia.

Belying the historiographical tendency to construct vegetarianism as a strictly modern movement, the contributions to The Healthian gesture toward tradition, as if to say that the time was ripe to voice an idea that was not new at all. One of the principal sources cited in the journal was the Bible, and the editors frequently drew on the imagery of Eden. Thus, the June 1842 issue opens with a quotation from Genesis 1:29: “And God said, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree, to you it shall be for meat.”Footnote ⁷¹ The following issue opens with a citation from Alcott, with a biblical undertone: “Conceive of slaughter and flesh eating in Eden.”Footnote ⁷² This emphasis on tradition, rather than novelty, is a trait that The Healthian shares with other early nineteenth-century literature on the topic. Joseph Ritson’s Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802) opens with quotations from Hesiod, Pythagoras, and Herodotus, then goes on to cite the claim made by James Burnett, Lord Monboddo in his Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1774–1792), that a human “in his original state … is a frugivorous animal,” and “only becomes an animal of prey by acquire’d habit.”Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, William A. Alcott, the cousin of Amos Bronson Alcott, included a chapter featuring the “testimony of philosophers and other eminent men” in his Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages (1838). Here he referred to Porphyry’s On Abstinence, a work “addressed to an individual who had once followed the vegetable system, but had afterward relinquished it.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The “vegetable system” proposed by William Alcott is entirely compatible with what began to be labeled “vegetarianism” a few years later. Nineteenth-century advocates of vegetarianism had no reservations about being “anachronistic,” going against time in order to establish a connection between their moral sensitivity and classical positions (whether biblical or philosophical). They emphasized intellectual trajectories, and used a varied vocabulary to describe what they saw as the most traditional of dietary approaches. The editors of The Healthian would have not hesitated to call Adam and Eve “vegetarians.” An article devoted to the question “Do You Eat Meat?” in the 1854 issue of The Vegetarian Messenger called Plutarch “a Vegetarian of antiquity,” without needing to further explain its usage of the term.Footnote ⁷⁵ Another article in the same issue was titled “Old Battles Fought Over Again,” suggesting that the aim of these journals was to rekindle well-known arguments.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this context, the coinage of a new word did not indicate the intention to set a new conceptual trajectory.

Anachronistic Constellations and Rationality

Even if nineteenth-century thinkers did not view themselves as innovators, it could still be maintained that they introduced new arguments in favor of the vegetable diet, arguments that could not have been formulated before the term “vegetarian” was introduced.Footnote ⁷⁷ A key example, already mentioned above, is that of animal rationality, which is at the forefront of current discussions about vegetarianism and the rights of animals.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet this argument was not new to nineteenth-century debates. The reason this position, together with other arguments associated with contemporary vegetarianism, is routinely connected to that context is a tendency to conflate word and concept, which derives from the fear of anachronism. In contrast, as Frank Rexroth has argued for the field of medieval history, anachronisms offer a method for gaining knowledge by avoiding both the assertion of a direct continuity between the past and the present and the presumption of their complete alterity. This use of anachronism can make visible a past that is plausible even if it was not perceived in precisely that way by historical witnesses; in other words, it is not arbitrary but the result of a controlled operation of knowledge transfer enabled by the application of present-day concepts and questions.Footnote ⁷⁹ For the history of philosophy, this means developing a strategy for articulating words and concepts in such a way that it becomes possible to trace conceptual developments amid and across terminological change.Footnote ⁸⁰ The expression “controlled anachronism,” which I borrow from Loraux to describe this process, emphasizes that the efforts of the historian (of philosophy) are directed at regulating this daring operation of going against time. The anchoring to the present is implicit in these efforts, but the method of controlled anachronism avoids the implication that the present is the start and end point of the research, as potentially suggested by the more controversial term “presentism.”

Applied to our case study of vegetarianism, controlled anachronisms can function as the point of convergence of an intellectual trajectory. This procedure avoids dogmatic presentism, whereby the historical context becomes irrelevant to the argument.Footnote ⁸¹ The key question for this methodology is: In the absence of the current terminology, which words would have been used to talk about what we now call “vegetarianism”? The task of the historian of philosophy working with anachronisms is thus to connect the contemporary word with a plurality of terms and expressions that would have expressed ideas related to what we know as vegetarianism. These terms can be visualized as connected within a broad map, or constellation. Some have already been highlighted here: vegetable diet, vegetable system, abstinence, and the adjectives abstinent and frugivorous.Footnote ⁸² Porphyry’s ἀποχή is also part of this constellation, as is the Latin term commonly used in its reception, abstinentia, and the expression de esu carnium (on the eating of flesh).Footnote ⁸³ References to Pythagoras, or the Pythagorean diet, as well as to other ancient sources like Plutarch, can also harbor ideas that have a conceptual connection to vegetarianism. It was following the afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence in this way that enabled Renaissance Vegetarianism to set about an anachronistic reconstruction of early modern debates on meat eating.Footnote ⁸⁴

A further term is important in replying to the critique that the issue of animal rationality did not play a significant role in defining abstinence from eating animals before the alleged contemporary turn: Brahman. In Tommaso Campanella’s utopia The City of the Sun (first published in 1623), the Solarians are said to be descendants of a sect of Pythagorean Brahmans, following the legend reported by Eusebius that Pythagoras had studied in India.Footnote ⁸⁵ In line with the traditional understanding of a Pythagorean diet, the Solarians initially avoided all animal products. The City of the Sun, however, stages a philosophical evolution, as the Brahmans expand their plant-based diet and become omnivores. The reason for this dietary change is a philosophical reorientation: they have realized that even plants can feel, and therefore that eating them involves killing, just as with animals. Renouncing their Pythagorean approach, the Solarians turn toward Campanella’s own pansensistic philosophy. The idea that the entire cosmos is sentient to varying degrees is incompatible with the conception of vegetarianism as a diet that forbids the killing of sentient living beings. This reasoning leads to the conclusion that an omnivorous diet, which includes all kinds of foods, is philosophically more sustainable. The Solarians thus eat per circolo, or by rotation, varying their menu in an attempt to avoid doing disproportionate harm to any one group of beings.Footnote ⁸⁶

The fictional frame of The City of the Sun enables Campanella to stage philosophical ideas in their development, in this case showing how taking seriously the ethical relevance of sensation makes it impossible to spare animals over plants. Similarly, in his Theology (1613–c. 1624), Campanella reasons against the stance of the Brahmans, viewed as the heirs of the ancient Pythagoreans, and presents three arguments in favor of killing animals.Footnote ⁸⁷ First, he claims that if it is acceptable to kill those animals that are harmful to humans, then it is legitimate to kill animals in general: this argument based on marginal cases is used to counter the idea that killing animals is always a crime. Second, the meat of animals is presented as the most beneficial food for humans, because what is closest on the scala naturae nourishes best. This is clearly a reinterpretation of a theory with a long tradition, according to which like nourishes like.Footnote ⁸⁸ The third point is in fact the core of Campanella’s argument: the ban on killing animals is philosophically incompatible with a view of the world as vital and sensitive, to varying degrees, in all its parts. If everything is sensitive, it cannot be especially cruel to kill animals, and conversely to kill plants is effectively an act of slaughter.Footnote ⁸⁹

From abstinence there is thus a shift to moderation, which is also presented as the best approach for preserving the balance of nature. At its core is the idea that sensation is continuous throughout nature. By “sensation,” Campanella means all those capabilities that contribute to a creature’s endeavor to thrive in life, including the protection of its offspring, resistance to external threats, and also, at least to some degree, forms of rationality.Footnote ⁹⁰ He thereby argues that rationality, too, is present in all living beings to some extent, effectively blurring the Aristotelian boundary between feeling and thinking.Footnote ⁹¹ This is not to say that Campanella avoids tracing a line of distinction between humans and animals, since he deems the former able to perform qualitatively better thinking than the latter. But with regard to the kind of thinking which is continuous with rationality, also termed “sensitive rationality,” the author does not define a hard border between animals and humans.Footnote ⁹²

Contemporary arguments in favor of or against vegetarianism focus on different beings’ capacity to feel pain as a mental event.Footnote ⁹³ Not only can Campanella’s position on the topic be compared with such debates, his thoughts on plants seem to have foreshadowed recent developments in the field of biology.Footnote ⁹⁴ If he did not strictly speak of a vegetarian diet, he used the recurring figure of the Brahman as the focal point of a philosophical tradition that rejected the consumption of animals. Even though Campanella was a critic rather than a supporter of “vegetarianism” then, the historian of philosophy can draw this conclusion: the emphasis on animal rationality does not pertain uniquely to the contemporary definition of vegetarianism.Footnote ⁹⁵

The same conclusion may be reached by reading Taylor’s A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), a complex, partly satirical work published long before his full translation of Porphyry’s On Abstinence. In A Vindication, Taylor refers to Campanella in support of the hyperbolic idea that “brutes possess Reason in common with Men.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Taylor appeals to the reader

The idea of using animal rationality as an argument against eating animals—supposedly the core of the contemporary concept of vegetarianism—is ironically subverted by Taylor’s invocation of an early modern philosopher who had used exactly the same reasoning.Footnote ⁹⁸

Taylor quotes extensively from Porphyry in this text, asserting that the idea of “abstinence from animal nutriment” was “by no means a novelty, but may be justified by the practice of the wisest and best of men, in the earliest periods of time.”Footnote ⁹⁹ On the issue of eating plants, he ultimately appears to reject Campanella’s theory, claiming that “the life of a plant is in itself so inconsiderable … that it cannot be supposed to suffer any pain in its decerption; and consequently is not in reality injured, by being made subservient to the nourishment of man and beast.” Like Campanella, Taylor underlines that eating is a necessity, but he draws out a different consequence: the rejection of all food is impossible, and therefore it is also impossible for those who have already decided to abstain from animals to “abstain from a vegetable aliment.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In other words, eating vegetables is essential for vegetarians, and the (ontological and thus ethical) difference between animals and plants must be maintained.

Taylor’s discussion of Porphyry via Campanella shows, once again, that vegetarianism had not out died in early modernity, nor was it awaiting (re)birth as a concept: in those seventeen hundred years in which, according to Dombrowski, the idea was allegedly abandoned, it was simply being discussed with period-specific terminology. Once the relevant terminology is unearthed, the concept starts to emerge in the form of an anachronistic constellation.

In early modern texts we can discern the contours of a position now called vegetarianism, but which was then framed in a context that entailed significant conceptual differences. In this sense, the use of the term “vegetarianism” to discuss Campanella’s stance is a controlled anachronism that becomes a productive anachronism: it allows us to grasp what we are talking about, not as something that is completely unthinkable today, but as a position that has a relationship to a dietary and ethical choice that now has a specific name. To define this diet, the philosophers of early modernity used a variety of terms and locutions, including reference to the diet of the Brahmans, the Indian sages who, at least according to European commentators, followed a vegetable diet. The anachronistic term—vegetarianism—is the telescope that enables us to see historical change, and thus to define concepts diachronically. It is of course always necessary to reflect on the relationship between each of the terms in such a constellation and the anachronism in question, avoiding direct, one-to-one identifications with present-day terminology. This is ultimately what it means to “control” an anachronism.

It is at this meeting point, where contemporary terms and concerns encounter the varied vocabulary of the historical sources, that historical-philosophical narratives emerge. This process might be compared to Francis Galton’s composite photography, which consisted in exposing the same photographic plate multiple times to create an ideal representation of people affected by a certain disease, or belonging to the same geographical area. This photographic process inspired Ludwig Wittgenstein, who used it to explain how we might approach the definition of a concept through multiple, partial descriptions:

If the terms that make up an anachronistic constellation can be superposed like Wittgenstein’s “synonymous expressions,” then anachronisms themselves function as the point of convergence, just like Galton’s plates. These anachronisms even retain the blurred appearance of Galton’s ideal images: historians of philosophy will not find “vegetarianism” in early modernity, but by overlapping a variety of different terms and expressions they can start to tease out the contours of the philosophical issues at stake. Anachronisms thus become an instrument for seeing something that is and is not there: they artificially bring into focus a narrative which is always inflected by the contemporary observer, like the plate for a composite photograph. And yet, just as the final, composite image is based on a series of actual photographs, the controlled anachronism is no arbitrary fiction but an attempt to reconstruct a concept accurately in its historical trajectory. In this way, it makes it possible to foreground contemporary sensitivities without losing sight of historical contexts. In the present essay, “vegetarianism” resembles a piece of composite photography, connecting Porphyry with early modern authors, the nineteenth-century vegetarians, and ultimately contemporary positions. As a productive anachronism, it must be controlled in order to become a tool for evaluating conceptual shifts and continuities—and so a means to gain historical-philosophical knowledge.Footnote ¹⁰²