What, in this metaphor, corresponds to fidelity and happiness in the way that skepticism corresponds to chastity? Is Santayana’s idea that we should search long for The Answer, but having found it, we should turn off our skepticism, stop thinking, and sink into the warm fuzzies of faith? It reminds me of the sea squirt that eats its own brain when it has found a comfortable spot to live and no longer needs it.
Woah! Whole bunch of downvotes. Do you think the subject is inappropriate, the positioning is inappropriate, that my implicit assertion is incorrect? Something like that?
I’m not one of the downvoters (although I certainly wouldn’t upvote it), but it’s a hypothetical question that makes no sense to me. Whatever your implicit assertion was, it hasn’t come through to me. Why is this hypothetical person saving themselves for someone they’re incompatible with? How is this eventuality going to cause “sexual dysfunction”? Why is it interesting to imagine this happening?
The point of the question was to criticize the Santayana quote from the other direction—the sexual-politics position it uses to arrive at the skepticism position.
My understanding is that, often, this notion of chastity as a cardinal virtue causes people to marry people they’re sexually incompatible with (because they miss the highest-bandwidth way to check) and have unsatisfying sex lives, partly because late loss of virginity is linked to sexual dysfunctions (though I’m not sure that significant bidirectional causality is clear yet).
I was asserting that the sexual-politics position assumed in the top comment wasn’t obviously true or universally held here.
Ick.
What, in this metaphor, corresponds to fidelity and happiness in the way that skepticism corresponds to chastity? Is Santayana’s idea that we should search long for The Answer, but having found it, we should turn off our skepticism, stop thinking, and sink into the warm fuzzies of faith? It reminds me of the sea squirt that eats its own brain when it has found a comfortable spot to live and no longer needs it.
For that matter, what corresponds to sexual dysfunction due to ‘saving yourself’ for someone you’re incompatible with?
Woah! Whole bunch of downvotes. Do you think the subject is inappropriate, the positioning is inappropriate, that my implicit assertion is incorrect? Something like that?
I’m not one of the downvoters (although I certainly wouldn’t upvote it), but it’s a hypothetical question that makes no sense to me. Whatever your implicit assertion was, it hasn’t come through to me. Why is this hypothetical person saving themselves for someone they’re incompatible with? How is this eventuality going to cause “sexual dysfunction”? Why is it interesting to imagine this happening?
The point of the question was to criticize the Santayana quote from the other direction—the sexual-politics position it uses to arrive at the skepticism position.
My understanding is that, often, this notion of chastity as a cardinal virtue causes people to marry people they’re sexually incompatible with (because they miss the highest-bandwidth way to check) and have unsatisfying sex lives, partly because late loss of virginity is linked to sexual dysfunctions (though I’m not sure that significant bidirectional causality is clear yet).
I was asserting that the sexual-politics position assumed in the top comment wasn’t obviously true or universally held here.