Being hungover is a philosophical problem

I want to begin with a claim that seems obvious and yet has appeared, at best, only in fragments throughout the history of philosophy: being hungover is a philosophical problem. Plato’s Symposium opens with Eryximachus recommending that the company avoid heavy drinking because several guests are still suffering from the previous night’s excesses. The Problems attributed to Aristotle ask why hangovers hurt more than drunkenness. Plutarch remarks, with some envy, that those who dine with Plato feel well the next day. None of this, however, quite grants the hangover the philosophical dignity it deserves. To be sure, being hungover is a problem of poor judgment, and in that sense it belongs to ethics. But before it becomes a matter of practical philosophy, it presents a more basic philosophical scene. I think hangovers make the temporal and bodily constitution of selfhood painfully clear. The night has ended. The drinking has ended. The music and the laughter have ended. And yet the body wakes up carrying what has passed. A hangover makes one thing unmistakable: the past remains active in the present, and it often remains there as pain. Few other experiences (exercise, sex, dancing) offer a clearer vantage point from which to grasp the intertwining of selfhood, temporality, and corporeality. In this sense, the hangover is a quiet scandal for any philosophy that tries to keep res cogitans and res extensa neatly apart. The hungover subject thinks through a throbbing head, speaks through a dry mouth, and acts despite a revolting stomach. A hangover is to Descartes what Diogenes’ plucked chicken is to Plato: a crude, all-too-physical rebuttal of the fantasy of a disembodied human being. It gives us, then, a small but forceful phenomenology of temporality, showing that the present is always already haunted by the past.

True, a hangover is first of all a physiological, metabolic, gastric problem. It belongs to dehydration, irritation, inflammation, and nausea. But that is precisely why I want to place it within what Nicola Perullo calls epistenology: an attempt to think wine as a mode of knowledge and experience. If wine can ground an epistenology, then any serious epistenology must also think through its negative side: intoxication, toxicity, and the morning after. Philosophers and theorists of wine such as Roger Scruton, Nicola Perullo, Steve Charters, and Gisela Kreglinger have given us rich accounts of taste, pleasure, cultivation, and spirituality. The hangover, by contrast, has remained largely unthematized. Perhaps that omission is accidental. Perhaps they were all too hungover to write about it. Either way, a philosophy of wine that leaves out the hangover leaves out one of wine’s clearest philosophical effects. Ancient texts knew these effects well. Scenes of drinking and drunkenness rarely function as episodes of simple excess. They mark thresholds. Enkidu drinks beer and eats bread, and in doing so leaves behind the life of the animals and enters human society. Odysseus gives Polyphemus unmixed wine, and drunkenness becomes the condition under which brute force is outwitted. In Euripides’ Bacchae, Dionysus drives Thebes into ecstatic frenzy, ending in Pentheus being torn apart by his own mother. Noah plants a vineyard, drinks its wine, and wakes naked in his tent, exposed and stripped of patriarchal dignity. Lot is made drunk by his daughters, and intoxication becomes the medium through which incest takes place and a lineage is produced under the sign of taboo. Belshazzar drinks from the stolen vessels of the Temple and is killed that very night. At the Last Supper, wine and bread bind conviviality to betrayal, sacrifice, and the strange proximity of sacramental eating to the specter of cannibalism. In these scenes, drinking organizes passages between wildness and civilization, festivity and catastrophe, pleasure and shame, communion and violence. Wine appears again and again as a substance that tests the borders of the self.

I think Augustine belongs fully to this hungry and thirsty world, and in some ways intensifies it. He writes within a Christian tradition in which the divine is contemplated and heard, but also eaten and drunk. That makes him a strong companion for thinking about hangovers, ingestion, and pain. In Confessions, alimentary language organizes central moments of psychological and spiritual reflection. Augustine describes falsehood and error as deserving to be “vomited forth from the surfeited stomach.” He compares recollection to rumination, asking whether memory brings things back “as meat is in ruminating brought up out of the belly.” Even more so, in Book VII Augustine describes a visionary encounter with Christ, who describes himself as cibus sum grandium—“the food of the ‘grand,’ the ‘adult,’ even the ‘great’.” “You shall not convert me,” Christ tells Augustine, “like the food of your flesh, into you, but you shall be converted into me.” Augustine returns over and over to the same cluster of questions through alimentary and gastric figures: what one takes in, what one can bear, what must be expelled, what can be digested, and what kind of self these acts of incorporation and expulsion make possible.

Augustine is also one of the great thinkers of restlessness and delay. At the beginning of Confessions, he writes: “our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Restlessness names a subject that does not coincide with itself, a subject that seeks, reaches, and remains unsettled. Augustine’s self comes to itself through movement, memory, desire, and belatedness. True, Augustine says “heart.” But in Confessions, it is often hard to distinguish the heart from the stomach. Indeed, Augustine famously describes memory as the venter animi, the stomach of the mind: an interior site in which what has been taken in is retained, worked over, and brought back up again. Recollection thus takes on an alimentary structure. Remembering, re-cordare, becomes a form of rumination, a process of turning over (or even throwing up) what has entered the self and returning it to inward (or outward) experience.

Lyotard’s late reading of Augustine sharpens this further. In The Confession of Augustine, he reads Confessions through delay, uncertainty, and the experience of always arriving too late to oneself. That frame matters here because the hangover is a bodily form of too-lateness: knowledge arrives after incorporation, understanding arrives after pleasure, and the self wakes up behind the event, in the mode of aftermath. At one key point, Lyotard pushes this logic into openly gastric Augustinian language. In the notebook material appended to the volume, he writes that confession calls for “panting words, hot off the breath,” because “sin must be vomited out in spasms.” He then contrasts this with writing, where “the thing is not hated, it is not excreted.” What matters in these formulations is that confession becomes a scene of in-digestion and its consequent expulsion. Sin is imagined as something that presses toward discharge. Writing, by contrast, suspends that discharge, arranges it, and delays it.  

So far, this is a philosophy of time. But the hangover also requires philosophy of borders. Headache and nausea are temporal traces, but also signs that the body has reached a threshold. Something was taken in, and now the body struggles to live with it. The drink that entered as warmth, release, and pleasure now returns as burden, threat, and pain. Julia Kristeva gives a name to the crisis in which the body can no longer maintain a confident distinction between what it receives and what it must cast off. She calls that crisis abjection.

Kristeva defines abjection as “what disturbs identity, system, order […] what does not respect borders, positions, rules.” That is, I think, what the hangover reveals: inside and outside, past and present, no longer feel securely ordered. The subject no longer experiences itself as a stable container of its own life. The abject reveals that subjectivity depends on fragile acts of separation. A self is formed by taking things in and by expelling things, by sorting what can remain from what cannot remain. The border holds, but it holds precariously.

Kristeva’s most powerful pages on abjection begin, unsurprisingly, with ingestion. She writes that “food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.” The scene is bodily from the start: gagging, stomach spasms, nausea, bile, sweat, tears, and vomiting. Then comes the crucial turn: “I do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it.” And then, more radically still: “I abject myself.” That sequence reveals the deepest point of the matter. Abjection does not describe a strong subject removing an external object. It describes a subject shaken in the very act by which it tries to establish itself. The expulsion touches the one who expels. Vomit matters philosophically because it stages that instability with brutal clarity.

This is why the hangover is more of a revelation than the consequence of a poor decision. It reveals that incorporation can fail––as it often does. It reveals that what enters the body does not automatically become part of the self in any peaceful way. It reveals that pleasure can survive as remainder, and that remainder can become pain. Nausea belongs to this revelation with special force. Nausea is the body’s refusal of a failed assimilation. Vomiting completes the scene by turning interior disturbance outward. What had been welcomed returns as vengeance. What had crossed the threshold reverses direction. The body declares, with convulsive precision, that its border has been breached and must be redrawn.

Now, a further question emerges: what does one do with this knowledge? I want to suggest that the answer has to do with what I have elsewhere called the Evic Distinction. There I propose the mouth as a gnoseological organ, one in which ingestion and articulation, bucca and oris, are not opposed but held in tension. From this angle, prudence is not an external rule imposed on drinking. It is a practical, somatic phronesis: the capacity to sustain ambivalence at the point where one takes something in. Drinking is always singular—this body, this night, this threshold. The hangover shows what happens when ingestion outruns discernment, when the mouth consumes without asking. Prudence begins in the effort to prevent that split. It is the discipline by which appetite remains tied to judgment, and the wisdom by which the body remembers tomorrow while drinking tonight.

Augustine offers a bodily version of that same insight in Book X of the Confessions, when he writes on appetite and says that “the bridle of the throat” must be held “in the mean of slackness and tightness.” He immediately asks who is never carried beyond “the bounds of necessity.” That is a remarkable ethics of ingestion, I think—an ethics of attunement, of measure, of learning how to receive without letting oneself go. Prudence, in this context, is the art of keeping faith with the future body. It is the wisdom that remembers tomorrow while drinking tonight.

So the hangover teaches way more than regret. It teaches ontology and ethics at once. Ontologically, it reveals a subject whose borders are porous, whose incorporations are incomplete, whose past remains active in the present. Ethically, it calls for a practice of measure adequate to a body that receives, remembers, and hurts. Augustine gives us the language of restlessness and temporal persistence. Lyotard gives us a self marked by uncertainty and too-lateness. Kristeva gives us abjection, the moment when the border trembles and the subject feels its own instability. Taken together, they allow us to say that being hungover reveals the truth of embodiment: what we take in becomes part of our future, perhaps even before it becomes part of ourselves.

Socrates, though, stands as an exception to this logic. In the Symposium he drinks without getting drunk and greets the morning with his composure intact, untouched by the pedagogy of the hangover. I suspect this may help explain why his speech so often arrives indirectly—through quotation, reported teaching, borrowed voices, Diotima’s before anyone else. A man who does not fear death, and who can drink the hemlock without trembling, is hardly likely to fear wine. Or does he? Without the morning hangover, Socrates escapes one of the body’s clearest revelations. Perhaps that is why we still owe Asclepius a rooster. Philosophy remains haunted by the question of what cure, if any, could redeem the pain that follows pleasure—all because Socrates can’t get drunk.

That may be the deepest philosophical lesson of the morning after. The hangover is the past returning in the body as pain. It is the body’s confession that time leaves residues, that pleasure carries a future with it, and that the self is held together by thresholds that often fail. Philosophy can also begin there: in the effort to understand what that pain reveals, and how one should live once one has felt it.