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In medieval Christianity there were stylites dwelling up their pillars and (some thousand years later) anchorites sealed in their cells, and all this stuff abou

In medieval Christianity there were stylites dwelling up their pillars and (some thousand years later) anchorites sealed in their cells, and all this stuff about life-denying rings true except that Catholics, in the modern era at least, are mostly pro-life and anti-contraception and breed like rabbits. MacIntyre wrote a book called "After Virtue" which is mostly posing Nietzsche against Aristotle, and his late-life conversion to Catholicism was because of Thomas Aquinas, who was an Aristotle fanboy. I don't know how he squared this with the supposed virtues of asceticism and living for the next world. Religion gets into philosophy far too much, and kind of makes a big mess, since it doesn't have to make sense.

cess11 3y ago
Well, catholics, like most christians, consider it worse to have sex for pleasure (or otherwise satisfy desire and gain intense pleasure) than bring more sinners into the world. Celibacy is still the ideal and roman catholics have a long list of rules regarding who can have sex and under what conditions. You might have noticed that christians have a long history of negative attitudes towards men who have sex with men, i.e. performing sexual acts for pleasure alone, as it is understood. Women don't feel pleasure from sex so lesbians have gathered less christian attention, and it's the penis that does the insertion of the homunculus and so on, hence it's the actually sexual thing involved. From the Wikipedia page about After Virtue I get the impression that MacIntyre mainly engaged with Nietzsche through secondary sources. For one I have trouble reading the geneaology as promoting greek morals rather than using them for contrast, and I'll have to agree with Nietzsche that the labour movement, the main egalitarian movement of his time, is unlikely to birth a new kind of person that rises from the carcass of the old morality and initiates a new. If such a person comes it is likely that they will be perceived as elitist or aristocratic. As for complaining about Nietzsche being non-egalitarian, that's rich coming from a christian thinker, who believes this world exists merely to separate the good from the bad so that the good can have some bad ones to gloat at for eternity. And yes, historically, to a religion it's philosophy that is the main threat, since philosophers don't create martyrs, they create dissidents, unlike nasty emperors and the like. Things have changed since then, however. Under the nihilism of modernity the main problem for a christian theologian has changed from the non-believer to the non-person, to paraphrase Rick Roderick (who got it from a colleague in theology, I think). I might have to read After Virtue to figure out whether MacIntyre addresses this, since if it's in there the wikipedians didn't mention it. I kind of doubt it though, if he did he wouldn't have put so much faith in projecting his ideals regarding purpose onto other people since he would have realised that this practice was already in service of capital accumulation.

cess11 3y ago

Well, catholics, like most christians, consider it worse to have sex for pleasure (or otherwise satisfy desire and gain intense pleasure) than bring more sinners into the world. Celibacy is still the ideal and roman catholics have a long list of rules regarding who can have sex and under what conditions. You might have noticed that christians have a long history of negative attitudes towards men who have sex with men, i.e. performing sexual acts for pleasure alone, as it is understood. Women don't feel pleasure from sex so lesbians have gathered less christian attention, and it's the penis that does the insertion of the homunculus and so on, hence it's the actually sexual thing involved. From the Wikipedia page about After Virtue I get the impression that MacIntyre mainly engaged with Nietzsche through secondary sources. For one I have trouble reading the geneaology as promoting greek morals rather than using them for contrast, and I'll have to agree with Nietzsche that the labour movement, the main egalitarian movement of his time, is unlikely to birth a new kind of person that rises from the carcass of the old morality and initiates a new. If such a person comes it is likely that they will be perceived as elitist or aristocratic. As for complaining about Nietzsche being non-egalitarian, that's rich coming from a christian thinker, who believes this world exists merely to separate the good from the bad so that the good can have some bad ones to gloat at for eternity. And yes, historically, to a religion it's philosophy that is the main threat, since philosophers don't create martyrs, they create dissidents, unlike nasty emperors and the like. Things have changed since then, however. Under the nihilism of modernity the main problem for a christian theologian has changed from the non-believer to the non-person, to paraphrase Rick Roderick (who got it from a colleague in theology, I think). I might have to read After Virtue to figure out whether MacIntyre addresses this, since if it's in there the wikipedians didn't mention it. I kind of doubt it though, if he did he wouldn't have put so much faith in projecting his ideals regarding purpose onto other people since he would have realised that this practice was already in service of capital accumulation.