It hasn't always been this way. I've lately found Reason asserting itself in the details of my life. I stopped eating meat 20 years ago out of compassion for stockyard steers and beakless chickens. I felt an anguish back then, an empathetic connection with the tortured, the butchered, the young. Perhaps it was a felt kinship with the drawn and quartered. I felt the threat of my own intellectual and emotional evisceration by the same corporate antibodies that wrapped body parts in plastic. I ate no flesh out of disgust. I was not so much vegetarian as an anticarnivoran. In my geographic space, it was possible to drive past stockyards and see steers standing on piles of waste, gazing at distant pastures. Northwest spring rains are soft showers but stockyard steers don't feel their gentle cleansing. In summer heat they stink of despair, blood and effluent. I would drop the driver's side glass in an attempt at empathetic connection.

I worked in a prison at the time, teaching philosophy to men who finally had time to think. On the way to the parking lot one day a truck from the hog farm passed. Desperate little pig eyes pleaded with me through the slats. Screaming on their way to slaughter they begged for their mothers.

I forced my MG with the top down around hairpin curves, shifted without brakes, went fast to avoid the questions. Why cry for pigs and steers? You spend your days teaching wisdom to men who've been thrown away. Why not cry for them? I'd long since demythologized criminal justice. I knew they were in prison out of bad luck, misplaced passion, or addiction. Mostly they were victims of the same corporate antibody that bludgeoned yearlings and assaulted my tender heart. Yet I felt little empathy with those convicts, nothing as intense as my anguish for the steers, chickens, the pigs. It was like that with friends and lovers, too. No real connection was possible with anyone who ate animals. Blood on their plate, gnawed flesh in their mouths, they would shake their heads in exasperation at my potatoes, carrots, noodles. At least I drank whiskey then and could usually get past any stockyard visions by mid-meal.

Of all the philosophers, students seem to have the most difficulty with Hegel. Maybe it's because I've only taught Americans, that renowned collective of diehard individualists. At any rate, Hegel's Absolute Reason, cunning and creative, a disembodied psyche struggling its way to self-gratification and self-knowledge, eludes them. Probably it's his insistence that individuality is an illusion. We are letters hidden in words in sentences printed on pages of the thick book he calls Being. My community college students are usually in their early twenties, a developmental stage that cherishes newly discovered individuality. But even the prisoners, who were older, felt distanced by Hegel's claims. It must be his notion that we're no more than cells in the pulsing body of destiny. Convict dreams are of freedom. Incarceration is a silent vowel in a redundant adverb captured within an incoherent sentence on yellowed newsprint blowing in the weeds along a stockyard fence. The prisoner, more than anyone, feels the crush of Hegel's cruel dialectic, and with that feeling, he must reject it with repulsion.

I've sold the MG and haven't seen the inside of a prison for 15 years. It's been some time since I've smelled a stockyard or heard a pig's squeal. I remain anti-carnivoran and anti-antibody. I've come to feel less about suffering, though, and to think about it more. It's not compassion that I attend to now so much as Absolute Reason. It doesn't make sense that we please ourselves by abusing others. Whether it's in tearing at the flesh as animal incarnate or in its torture in the guise of incarcerated felons, universal sadism makes no sense.

What is most foolish is the claim that the butchery and torture of the flesh is not gratuitous. The claim that we need animal flesh in our diet is obviously wrong millions of people around the world avoid its ingestion and function well. The pretence that incarceration is moral retribution is equally ridiculous. Somehow, these impoverished, unlucky, poorly defended, chemically addicted people are said to deserve their shackles. The missing premise is that anyone who can't avoid prison deserves to be there.

Still, I don't feel much empathy for the incarcerated. Even though they have been de-fleshed (for what else could incarceration mean?), the few convicts I have known well were not likeable. They were peculiar men with moldy aspirations. My objection to their treatment is that it twists the flesh of Absolute Reason.

There is a Hegelian thread here, a connection between the carnivorous slicing of the flesh and the incarceration of the felon's body. It's a cruel unleashing of sadistic power against the weakest of the world's flesh, this butchering of abandoned animals and torture of caged men. Eating flesh and locking up dangerous men is antirational because both actions mutilate Absolute Reason's body. It is a sacrilege against the sacred unity of human and animal on the one hand, the internecine dance of right and wrong on the other.

If Hegel teaches us anything, it is that the Absolute is enveloped by flesh. There is one body, the incarnation of destiny. Fate is a whole, an intimate organic unity that binds every fleshly being. The carving up of flesh that characterizes our space and time is Absolute self-flagellation, a danse macabre of self-loathing, bigotry, and sadism. Fools think we can slip past the Absolute, name the steer and pig meat and call the shamed and shattered men criminals, and in these names negate our Absolute unity with them. This denial is the ultimate sacrilege because it blasphemes the very flesh in which the Absolute roams the earth.

All flesh is the unified incarnation of Absolute meaning and destiny. Refusing to abandon the flesh at its weakest, this is my non-empathetic embrace of Reason. How could I have feelings of identity with the Absolute? After all is said and done, Absolute Reason is the perpetrator of its own victimization. I know this about the Absolute, but I do not empathize with it. I wouldn't want to be like that. I love Reason, but don't find it likeable.

I have finally learned to love the Absolute and to love the fleshly destiny of my own geographical history. While this love denies empathy and compassion, it nevertheless affirms my incarnation and my unity with the butchered and shackled. It reveals the three of us as metaphors of our space and time, of our moment. Absolute Reason, above all, makes sense of nonsense, of cruelty, of the sadistic dance that defines our world. I no longer feel anguish over the sizzle of butchered steer. My heart does not cringe at the jarring crash of steel cell doors. No, now I feel less because I know more. The Absolute is, was, and always will be incarnate, alive, and vulnerable. As am I, as are we all.

- Jon Stratton