Generally, vegetarianism may be built on two different attitudes to animals – or on a combination of these attitudes. Either humans should abstain from eating animals because animals and humans are part of the same community, or they should abstain from eating animals because humans are on a higher level than animals, and animals are a source of pollution for humans. Thus a vegetarian diet was not only based on the idea of a unity of soul between humans and animals but could just as well be a means of showing the difference between them and making humans distance themselves from animals and move closer to the gods.
The question of vegetarianism was mainly a question of how to relate to tame animals.
Pythagoreans abstained from fish more than from any other living creature, a question that Plutarch discusses in Moralia, 728C–730F. Several reasons are mentioned.
One possible reason is that it was because the early Pythagoreans considered silence a god-like thing and fish are silent creatures (728E);
another is that Pythagoras was influenced by Egyptian sages, who regarded the sea as unrelated, alien and hostile to humans and its creatures as being impure (729A–C);
and a third possible reason is that Pythagoreans usually tasted flesh only from sacrificed animals, and these animals did not include fish.
Animal flesh was conceived of as making humans spiritually gross, although it made their bodies strong: “It is a fact that the Athenians used to call us Boeotians beef-witted and insensitive and foolish precisely because we stuffed ourselves”, says Plutarch.
To cultivate the brilliance of the human soul, one must not burden the body with improper food, he says -
“When we examine the sun through dank atmosphere and a fog of gross vapours, we do not see it clear and bright, but submerged and misty, with elusive rays. In just the same way, then, when the body is turbulent and surfeited and burdened with improper food, the lustre and light of the soul inevitably come through it blurred and confused, aberrant and inconstant, since the soul lacks the brilliance and intensity to penetrate to the minute and obscure issues of active life.” (Moralia, 995F)
I was discussing with a friend of mine and this is what he said,
“People of a predominant nordic constitution should not be vegetarian because that goes directly against their genetics, and their hunter-gatherer history but its not the case of other ethnicities who have developed in differental environmental pressures and conditions.”
I thought that a reasonable perspective.
Remarks?
