Tea at Trianon: Why We Hunger for Affirmation of Our Bodies

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 21, 2023

Why We Hunger for Affirmation of Our Bodies

From Dr. Angela Franks at Fairer Disputations:

The sexual revolution is the attempt to eliminate horizontal finality from sex. Sex is no longer about babies but about anything we want it to be. And if sex has no intrinsic horizontal finality, it’s hard to see how it has any purpose. It floats free of all three kinds of finality, utterly unintelligible. Yet sexual revolutionary thinking assumes that I can impose my subjective meanings onto sex and still fit sex into a kind of vertical finality—namely, my personal fulfillment as a human being. In Lonergan’s terms, the revolution retains vertical finality, while discarding horizontal finality.

This is a perilous undertaking. Why would the levels of a human person add up to a coherent whole if the levels themselves lack coherence and purpose? And why do we discard horizontal finality only at the level of biology and not, say, at the level of physics? Indeed, contemporary insistence on the absurdity of our sexed bodies is one factor in the rise of nihilism.

In order to “liberate” sex from meaning and ends, thereby making it absurd, the sexual revolution relied on two main technologies: contraception and abortion. Both these technologies aim at eliminating the generative horizontal finality of the sexual act.

Yet the revolution could not, of course, stop there. Once sexual intercourse is rendered meaningless and end-less, many other things become unintelligible. Why are there males and females at all, if reproduction is optional? The queering of gender and the multiplication of sexualities are logical next steps, as the reign of meaningless, end-less sex extends its empire. Pornography, with its infinitely proliferating sexual fetishes, fills the vacuum created by the absent horizontal finality. If sex isn’t about anything, it is about everything. (Read more.)