| | 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 two contradictory phenomena: we can only love as a subject, and we can only be loved as an object. Yet we long to be loved, but we detest objectification... and so we long to be loved in a way that protects our reciprocal role as a subject as well as an object of love. There is a part of us that experiences our own being loved as a higher, sublimated form of objectification... a kind of objectification that respects the subject.
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 1. the practice of chastity within marriage, and by 2. 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 if 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 natural family planning, as opposed to artificial family planning, which bypasses the involvement of chastity and of the free will to 'give' oneself freely in sex). In bypassing the need for chastity, man does not 'conquer nature', which he conceives to be the connection between sex and reproduction. He instead 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. That is the meaning of true eroticism: the bodily expression of the soul, or the mind, or the subject. The erotic desire for flesh is an extension, or expression of that deeper longing for the soul's bodily expression. Finally, to refute the idea that artificial contraception is a form of rightful control of a natural process: when we say that man has 'conquered nature' we typically mean that he has tapped into some potentiality within nature, some potential power 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. Thus we have hardly conquered nature at all, in fact having lost our self control and chastity, we are more enslaved to our fertility than ever. Our fertility seems to loom within us like a dark mysterious, many armed and many breasted pagan god. It is nature which has really conquered man: a) one person's nature (their lust) has conquered man in the soul or subject of the other person, the object of sex: the sexual partner is objectified, and b) nature conquers man within himself also, in man's ability to regulate and master himself as explained above, he is subjugated to his own random and senseless urges, which he does not understand. |
| | Posted 2/24/2009 10:18 PM - 14 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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