Staff Writer- Evangelyn Hill
Last December, Lisa Heldke, a Gustavus philosophy professor, gave a talk at the University of Milan concerning her recent book Parasitic Personhood and the Ontology of Eating. “Ontology,” according to the Oxford Languages’ Dictionary means “the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.” Heldke’s book (and subsequent lecture) concerns how human existence correlates in many ways with parasitism.
“Basically, it’s a book that says, what if we take the fact that the most common life form on the planet is parasitism. More organisms spend time as part of a parasitic relationship than any other type of relationship… so how does that change the way we think about what it means to be a person?” Heldke said.
Parasitic Personhood is not her only book about food and philosophy, but it stands out from the others.
“I’ve written another pile of food books that made people hungry… and this book is very unappetizing,” Heldke said.
The idea for her book was first sparked by the book The Parasite by French theorist Michel Serres. As she studied Serres’ book, Heldke began connecting his concepts to science and culture.
“While I was thinking about it, all these books about parasites started coming out… this horror-science book called Parasite Rex… And I started thinking, this isn’t just metaphorical, it’s literal too… we’re all interdependent in these ways which is making us very vulnerable, and that’s a way to understand life,” Heldke said. “The parasite is like the great metaphor that can explain every dichotomy in Western thought. So thinking about the relationship between self and culture… mind and body, good and bad… all of these are actually parasitic relationships in which one concept is biting into another. We only understand one concept because it’s dependent on the other concept.”
Parasitic Personhood took Heldke twelve years to fully develop. She wrote actively during the summers and tried to write an hour a night during the school year. She also spent a significant amount of time researching.
“As a philosopher, I don’t read that much straight up philosophy, to be honest…” Heldke said. “This book involved a fair amount of reading biology, reading in other food studies works… and sort of doing philosophy with it. I also read murder mysteries and popular science… so I think as a philosopher I’m always reading outside of my discipline to see how the ideas that I’m thinking about are represented.”
Senior Philosophy major, Gavia Yount, has taken classes with Heldke before, including a recent class based on Heldke’s research and writing.
“It was called Eating and Personhood, it was a seminar course, and like I said, it was inspired by the research she’s done about parasitic personhood… The fact that we eat, and we are eaten, and we’re being eaten right now while we’re alive by parasites,” Yount said.
Yount added that while the class was centered around topics Heldke was personally interested in, she still worked to make the class centered on her students. Fellow philosophy professor, Peg O’Connor, echoed this sentiment.
“As a teacher, Lisa is constantly looking for ways to engage her students in philosophical inquiry. Whether it is in Old Main or in the Nobel kitchen, Lisa challenges her students to look at familiar things in different ways,” O’Connor said.
Yount said that Heldke was one of the first people to reach out to her at Gustavus, and the person who fostered her interest in the philosophy major.
“I had met Lisa before, so I asked her about it, so she suggested taking Modern Philosophy to get a sense for what the department was like. She taught that class. I think something that struck me about that class was that it was very difficult… but Lisa was immensely skilled at giving us tools… and also [helping us in] finding our own interest in the subject matter and ways that we could… have a really rich discussion, even though for some of us it was our first philosophy class,” Yount said.
Yount also praised Heldke as a person. “I think her efforts in community-building are really admirable—connecting with so many people on campus and getting to know them, and doing so in a sense of genuine curiosity and interest about what their interests are and what they think about… and why that matters to them.”
“I think that [Heldke] has done a lot for the Gustavus community and inspiring people–including myself–to see what they can do in the world,” Yount concluded.