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#4

(a recurring question from the secular world)

Human beings have the most profound interiority, one of you said: and that the temptation is to identify what is human with that which is most interior, as Plato did when he identified humanity with intelligence. That the older I get the more interior I become towards an attempt to discover--against being scattered by a great diversity of experiences--walking, blowing my nose, daydreaming--a vital unity: the I who sees, not the eye. And here, you said, is also the temptation to put aside concrete experience, body, my body, especially where a lack of realism may serve my purposes: I who see, I who love, lucidity, the interior experience of myself. --That the seduction of my intelligence is that though I cannot think outside of my sensible experience, I can abstract from it, and there is something therefore seemingly infinite about my interiority. --That the unique character of intelligence is that it operates on abstraction: "I've never touched a man, never seen a man," you said. You also said "without my body, can I know what it is to live? To reject the body is not ennobling." But if the body does not think, it does not choose, and yet it can be aroused to desire, comforted from pain, coached into substance addiction, panicked into flight: it can ask every minute, why not moderation in all things? Why celibacy and abstinence (for unwed people) where the body is most obviously mobilized to power, if intelligence and consciousness are indeed not tyrannical or uncomfortable with reality? Isn't this call to celibacy, arguably, a lack of realism that serves a repressive ethics?

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