Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

“Then said Mary unto the angel, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’” (LK 1:34) I agree that a couple contemplating marriage should know everything about each other, including their sexual “kinks.” But it is not necessary that they know each other intimately, i.e., by experience. They should know each other abstractly, [...]

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defends his practices as follows: “Yet the psychiatrist who enjoys his trade is also receiving constant feedback: the way the patient holds himself, the expression on his face, the hesitation in his voice, the content of the material he brings up in the therapeutic hour — all these bits of information [...]

A sexual act in marriage between a man and a woman consists of three “levels.” The first is sensual pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. The second level is the intellectual love and friendship between the husband and wife. The third level are children and familial bliss. The Catholic Church describes the second level as the “unitive” function [...]

“… many men believe that promiscuity does not suit women. They believe that a woman who has had many partners cannot bind emotionally with a husband. She is never his.” Article by Paul Craig Roberts.

In the beginning of a relationship both the man and the woman want to “keep their options open.” As time goes on, and they learn about each other and come to value each other, their emotional and mental bond grows stronger, their investment into each other increases, the costs of a break-up grow higher, and [...]

My great aunt, when she talks about politics, makes the following odd argument. The Israeli Jews, she says, have built a thriving civilization in a desert. The Arabs, incapable because of their dull and violent nature of a similar achievement, envy them and, since envy is the main source of hatred, as St. Thomas understood [...]

When an NF Rational learns, he is being humble. He submits himself to truth and to his teacher. But in that very humility his powers grow, as he is obtaining knowledge and with its help comes up with his own ideas. Then, having learned a lot and meditated on his chosen subjects, he can teach. [...]

According to Keirsey, it’s knowledge and identity respectively. But I must make a correction to his theory. We must distinguish between proximate and ultimate goals. The NT proximate goal is technological usefulness or highly specialized know-how, while their ultimate goal is unity of knowledge, a system, a picture of how all things fit together which [...]

Aquinas identifies two appetites in human beings, that is, the faculty that seeks and, when found, enjoys pleasure: the sensual appetite and the intellectual appetite, the latter one of which he calls the “will.” Does this distinction correspond to the one between sensation and reflection as two ways of getting knowledge?

Introspective understanding is the unity of knowledge. It’s a picture of how all things fit together. Unity is a condition for harmony within some complex system that is working smoothly “as one” without, however, necessarily having a real identity. The paradigmatic cases of such a system is the free market and the human body. Sensing [...]

Is it true that children are born full of love and innocence until the cruel world stomps them out of them? Or will they naturally behave like the kids in Lord of the Flies? Mises writes, for example, “Man is born an asocial and antisocial being. The newborn child is a savage. Egoism is his [...]

Guilt means “a feeling of culpability for offenses” and is the opposite of righteousness. Shame is “a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute” and is the opposite of glory. Now righteousness is necessary for glory, though not vice versa. For example, glory and happiness are almost synonymous; but “rectitude of the will” is required for [...]

From Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution blog.

Satisficing is a term in decision theory and ethics that is opposed to “maximizing” in the sense that in real rather than idealized decisions an agent will pick not the best choice among those that occur to him but an option which is “good enough.” You rate outcomes as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. A satisfactory outcome [...]

According to many scientists, the clergy and the Church are: fanatical; anti-intellectual; irrational in their mindlessly blind faith; moralistic and intrusive; eager to impose their arbitrary values onto people; prone to persecuting those who disagree with them “for their own good” or to save them from themselves; closet Inquisitors, torturers, and killers for their petty [...]

The active life is led by Guardians and Artisans; the contemplative, by Idealists and Rationals — the first of each pair being the yin, the second, the yang of the temperaments.

Erich Fromm accuses many strands of the modern Christianity of being “authoritarian” rather than “humanistic.” An authoritarian religion depreciates the individual; it makes him weak, unloving, insignificant, even as it glorifies God. “The essential element in authoritarian religion and in the authoritarian religious experience is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue [...]