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eternalstoke
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Name: Tommy
Country: United States
Metro: Honolulu
Birthday: 6/21/1982
Gender: Male
Interests: Surfing, Literature, Philosophy, Depth Psychology, Mythology, Roman Catholic moral theology, Natural Law tradition, medical ethics and bioethics.
Expertise: I can make you a perfect cup of coffee, discuss the classical fourfold causation in Thomistic action theory, and give you a complete physical exam!
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
3/3/2005
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| So I spent my first week as a working doctor, not working much, and mostly figuring out how to kill roaches around our new little cottage. Five poison smoke bombs were detonated last night and, so far, there are no survivors. Betsy and I both have intense roach phobias reaching all the way back into our childhoods... now we've got to stay strong for our own daughter. Yikes.
I read Kreeft's entire 'Socrates Meets' series in about a month. Socrates meets Machiavelli, Sartre, Descartes, and Marx. I've never devoured so many books so fast. Socrates Meets Hume comes out later this summer, and for the first time ever, I've known about a book, and waited for it to be released. The series is fantastic because it not only trains you in genuine analytic skills, but also seriously engages the modern thinker and exposes the reader in detail to the classic they wrote.
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| Lewis's poem entitled 'Prayer':
Master, they say that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it's all a dream
--One talker aping two.
They are half right, but not as they
Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say,
And lo! the wells are dry.
Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
the Listener's role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
the thoughts I never knew.
And thus you neither need reply
nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.
Btw, I graduated from medical school:
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| My wife Betsy delivered our baby daughter on Good Friday! Name is Hanalei Annabelle Cook. She is just over six pounds and quite cute. We have been resting at home all week but we took our first walk with her in one of those slings that you wear. I play guitar for her when she's not sleeping and she just stares forward wide-eyed...
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| 'You will feel awe because you are riding one of the horses of the gods. Of all the metaphors for waves, perhaps the best is stallions. While the offshore wind wips the crest of the approaching swells and leaves a halo of white spray behind each wave just before it plunges over, and if they are backlit by the sun, you will not be able not to see the waves as heavenly horses with wild white manes, ghost riders from the sky who disappear as quickly as they come.'
'There are two kinds of philosophy. Some philosophy is simply bullshit. Philosophers are smart, and therefore they can fool people pretty well. They are very clever at disguising bullshit as wisdom. The other kind of philosophy is really wise and wonderful and helpful. Socrates is my favorite example of it. If you don't know that both kinds of philosophy exist, you are not fully educated in philosophy.' | | |
| This was a difficult book to read but its insights are profoundly attractive to the heart as well as the mind. JP II was a phenomenalist (hence the insightful profundity) as well as a thoroughgoing Thomist (hence the difficulty, and the almost mentally insupportable clarity). It's quite clear where he's doing a little of each, or a bit of both.
His central argument is integrative. Man's capacity is most complete and most fulfilled when it reconciles, or integrates, man's existence as both subject and object, both observer and observed, lover and loved. In the depths of our own psychology, one of the interesting phenomena we observe, is our experience of shame at being watched, the naked object of another's subjective observation. And at the same time we long to give our own bodies away, and to experience sexual urges toward the opposite sex which put us in the place of a subject. Thus, we experience to contradictory phenomena: we can only love as a subject, and be loved as an object. Yet we long to be loved, and detest objectification. Yet there is a part of us that experiences our own being loved as a higher, sublimated form of objectification. How do we solve this problem? How do we achieve true intersubjectivity which is also fulfilling in the bodily, sexual sense? How do we protect this precarious thing, responsible-mutual-self-giving? By the practice of chastity within marriage, and by avoiding artificial contraception.
1. Chastity within marriage: unless you have self-control, how can you give yourself? You cannot 'give' something unless you 'have' it to the utmost. And if you cannot full 'give' something in the sexual act, namely yourself, then the sexual act becomes merely taking and experiencing. The problem of intersubjectivity fails. Thus, chastity is required, even in marriage, if sexual giving is to rise above mere reciprocal objectification and exploitation. It is also required is we are to maintain 'a conscious attitude towards the sexual instinct: to master the sexual urge means just this, to accept its purpose in marital relations.' Which brings me to the next point:
2. Avoiding artificial contraception. It must be avoided, because it is itself an avoidance of the call to chastity within marriage (a requirement of the rhythm method). In bypassing the need for chastity, man does not 'conquer nature', which he conceives to be the connection between sex and reproduction. For one, he does harm to the deeper psychological motivations behind sex: to achieve true love between persons which is not objectification and exploitation, but true intersubjectivity. Our deepest longing is to penetrate the 'other', not just their body. To touch their soul, not just their flesh. The flesh is an extension, or expression of that deeper longing. Secondly, when we say that man has 'conquered nature' we typically mean that he has tapped into some potentiality within nature. But the 'potentiality' which lies behind the sexual act is that of procreation. But we have not conquered this in the formal sense- we moderns are as terrified of our fertility as ever. This is the fault of contraceptive technology. It is nature which has conquered man: the sexual partner is objectified, and man's ability to regulate and master himself as explained above, is subjugated to his own random and senseless urges, which he does not understand. | | |
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