I wrote last week about the role of the body in education and quoted from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in order to trace the recent genealogy of our academic elites’ resentment of the physical body and the reality of the natural world we inhabit.
Thank you for writing Patrick; always on point and thought provoking. Last evening we watched Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University—8 June 1978 . Prescient, of course, and it seems there is a connection between what you are writing about with respect to the physical, and what Solzhenitsyn talked about with respect to the spiritual. What do you think? I have written on the blog, years ago now, of the need to "integrate your self," though not nearly so well as you; I wrote that because it seems to me that to be dis-integrated is to create huge amounts of unhealthy stress, aka dis-stress, while at the same time our material existence eliminates eustress from both our lives and the vocabulary. I am fond of saying that we have conflated the notion of an easy life with a good life. And we are far weaker for our efforts, if it can even be called effort.
John, thanks for this I think you're exactly right! I also love the concept of eustress...haven't heard that before, but like it. You might enjoy the Touchstone piece I linked in the article. I wrote it years ago but it explores Dante's take on easy vs good.
Thank you for writing Patrick; always on point and thought provoking. Last evening we watched Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University—8 June 1978 . Prescient, of course, and it seems there is a connection between what you are writing about with respect to the physical, and what Solzhenitsyn talked about with respect to the spiritual. What do you think? I have written on the blog, years ago now, of the need to "integrate your self," though not nearly so well as you; I wrote that because it seems to me that to be dis-integrated is to create huge amounts of unhealthy stress, aka dis-stress, while at the same time our material existence eliminates eustress from both our lives and the vocabulary. I am fond of saying that we have conflated the notion of an easy life with a good life. And we are far weaker for our efforts, if it can even be called effort.
John, thanks for this I think you're exactly right! I also love the concept of eustress...haven't heard that before, but like it. You might enjoy the Touchstone piece I linked in the article. I wrote it years ago but it explores Dante's take on easy vs good.
Have you read Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender? She touches on this topic of hatred for the limitedness of the human body quite a bit.
I have not, thanks very much for the lead!