Cyrille Rogacki began our December 6th discussion by drawing from George Weigel's Witness to Hope:
In representing sexual morality, the Church tended to focus more on legal prohibitions than on love—and thus was poorly positioned to respond to the challenge of the sexual revolution and its promise of liberation when it exploded after WWII.
In his native Poland of the late 1950s, Wojtyla saw the communist regime posing its own challenges to sexual morality and marital chastity—permissive abortion laws, campaigns against traditional families... Young people on state sponsored summer outings were encouraged to experiment with sex as another means of prying them away from the Church.
Wojtyla's work in philosophy and theology and his experiences as a confessor and counselor had convinced him that the Church's sexual ethic, properly interpreted, contained essential truths that deepened human happiness when they were faithfully lived out. As a spiritual advisor, Wojtyla had discovered that his “task is not only to command or forbid but to justify, to interpret and to explain” the ethics of marital chastity and sexual love. Rules of sexual conduct were important. In a modern cultural climate, though, men and woman would not embrace those rules unless they understood them as expressions of fundamental moral truths and as a road map to basic human goods.
Love is an expression of personal responsibility, responsibility to another human being, and responsibility to God. How, he asked, can men and women become responsible lovers, so that their sexual love embodies and symbolizes a genuine freedom? How can our love become a fully human love?
Analysis of the Verb “to use”
Love and Responsibility opens with Wojtyla's analysis of the verb “to use.”
Its first meaning: to employ some object of action as a means to an end. The Pope says this is OK with things and animals (so long as “use” is never attended by suffering or torture), but anyone who treats a person merely as a means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other.
Wojtyla argues that the moral imperative to avoid using others is the ethical basis of freedom, because it allows us to interact with others without reducing them to objects by manipulating them. We avoid using each other when two genuine freedoms meet each other in pursuit of a good we hold in common. (Love between two people is quite unthinkable without some common good to bind them together.) This encounter of two freedoms is the substance of love. Loving is the opposite of using.
In pursuit of goods—common aims—he says “Marriage is one of the most important areas where this principle is put into practice.... Such an end...is procreation, the future generation, a family, and at the same time the continual ripening of the relationship between two people.”
The second meaning of “to use”:
Wojtyla introduces the “positive charge of pleasure” and the “negative charge of pain.” Thus, the second meaning of to use (=enjoy) means to experience pleasure, the pleasure which in slightly different senses is associated both with the activity itself and the object of the activity.
For man, precisely because he has the power to reason, can, in his actions, not only clearly distinguish pleasure from its opposite, but can also isolate it, so to speak, and treat it as a distinct aim of his activity. His actions are then shaped only with a view to the pleasure he wishes to obtain, or the pain he wishes to avoid.... The belief that a human being is a person leads to the acceptance of the postulate that enjoyment must be subordinated to love.
The Pope’s Critique of Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism argues that pleasure is the essential ingredient of human happiness. It fails to see man is quite conspicuously an amalgam of matter and spirit that creates one personal existence. Per utilitarianism, the primary rule of human morality is the maximization of pleasure accompanied by the minimization of pain.
Principle of unity=maximum of pleasure for the greatest number of people—with a minimum of discomfort for the same number. Love is a “union of egoisms which can hold together only on condition that they confront each other with nothing unpleasant, nothing to conflict with their mutual pleasure.”
The real mistake of utilitarianism is the recognition of pleasure in itself as the sole or greatest good. Not clear how utilitarianism can put us on a plane of real love, freed from the dangers of “using” a person and of treating a person as a means to an end.
The Personalistic Norm
“A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.” Thus, the commandment to love.
The Pope concludes referring to St. Augustine’s distinction between “uti,” intent on pleasure for its own sake, with no concern for the object of the pleasure, and “frui,” which finds joy in a totally committed relationship with the other precisely because this is what the nature of the object demands.
Interpretation of the Sexual Urge
Sex: Instinct or Urge? The Pope concludes: Man is by nature capable of rising above instinct in his actions. Man exercises self-determination, decides for himself about his actions, takes responsibility—this is the point at which human freedom and the sex urge meet.
Although love grows out of the sexual urge and develops on that basis... It is nonetheless given its definitive shape by acts of will at the level of the person. Leaves room for free will. Must be evaluated on the plane of love. Man is at once a social being and a sexual being.
The Sexual Urge and Existence
The existence of the human species depends upon the sexual urge. The man and woman facilitate the existence of another concrete person, their own child, blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh. This person is at once an affirmation and a continuation of their own love. The natural order of human existence is not in conflict with love between persons but in strict harmony.
The Rigoristic Interpretation
The Pope next addresses the “rigoristic interpretation,” the puritanical interpretation built around naturalistic or empirico-sensualist principles. Under this interpretation, conjugal life is only good because it serves the purpose of procreation. Pleasure/enjoyment is a necessary evil.
The Pope’s response to puritanism: “There exists a joy which is consonant both with the nature of the sexual urge and with the dignity of human persons, a joy which results from collaboration, from mutual understanding and the harmonious realization of jointly chosen aims, in the broad field of action which is love between man and woman. The Creator designed this joy and linked it with love between man and woman in so far as that love develops on the basis of the sexual urge in a normal manner, in other words in a manner worthy of human persons.”
The “Libidinistic” Interpretation
Derives from Latin libido enjoyment resulting from use. Freud's pleasure principle: interprets all the phenomena of human life from earliest infancy onward as manifestations of the sexual urge. Procreation is a secondary end (accident). Inner human life almost totally negated—“this conception puts human psychology—perhaps without realizing it—on the same level as the psychology of animals.” (Apes in trousers.)
The sexual urge then, is not purely “libidinistic” but existential in character. A subject endowed with an inner self as man is, a subject who is a person, cannot abandon to instinct the whole responsibility for the use of the sexual urge, and make enjoyment his sole aim—but must assume full responsibility for the way in which the sexual urge is used.
Socioeconomic context—Thomas Malthus. Some argue there is the threat of overpopulation, that production of subsistence cannot keep pace with population. The Pope responds, this may or may not be true, but this matter cannot be solved by contradicting the personalistic norm. We must not succumb to the danger of subordinating the person to economics.
Two basic instincts: instinct of self-preservation and the sexual instinct. Self-preservation is egocentric, centered on the existence of the “I” whereas sexual instinct always transcends the limits of the “I.” Objective purpose of the sexual urge might be called “altero-centrism.” But the “libidinistic” interpretation of the sexual urge confuses these two topics, endowing the sexual urge with egocentic significance.