The process of digestion seems an unlikely target for cultural interpretation. In the early nineteenth century, chymification and chylification remained the objects of some dispute, though empirical science was beginning to find ways to discern the processes at work. The German idealist philosopher, G.F.W. Hegel, was enormously interested in the physiology of digestion. Hegel interpreted the results of empirical science in ways that connect digestion and all it entails physiologically with other realms of animal and human assimilation of the external world. Digestion became for Hegel a master trope of assimilation. His interpretation does not, however, proceed by analogy and metaphor; rather, he pursues the corporeal and material links that connect the body and the scene of eating to other human activities. Thus Hegel modeled a praxis of rigorous metonymical thought capable of uncovering philosophical meaning in the most primary of physical processes. **********
