Josef Seifert

Dear Janet,

thank you for the kind reply. I also enjoy the recollection of our meeting in Liechtenstein and am an old admirer of your good work.
Just to clarify a few points: I never said that I agreed with ALL the criticisms Schindler and Alice von Hildebrand made of West but I do agree with some of them (while you seem to disagree with all of them). I do not know where you take the view from that I agreed with ALL these criticisms? You only need to reread my contributions and you will see decisive differences.
I am in general a bit surprised by your response: Where did your agreements go? First you wrote you agreed entirely with what I said, now you seem to agree with almost nothing? I am confused.  Perhaps partly you mean to say that you agree with all (or most) of the points I make but also West would agree with them and it would be wrong for me or anyone to present any of these points as a critique of his writings or his spoken words in lectures or Interviews?
I hope that regarding his deepest aspirations you are right on this but I cannot agree with your 100% defense of West against all these criticisms and think that you and he ought to ponder them a bit more critically and meditate on them more seriously than just saying these are all misunderstandings. Then you would find that they are not all insinuations and inventions of his critics.
1. As to the comparison with Hefner, I heard the whole interview and still believe that the whole point is extremely misleading. Exactly what West definitely did say about Hefner and Playboy (not only the misleading impressions created by journalists) should be entirely dropped from his speeches, I think. Just about everything is wrong in these statements West makes and they serve only to confuse the world, to turn good allies of his into critics, to sell his books better, and to create sensationalist media stories, but they contain virtually no single valid point except that neither Hefner nor Brigitte Bardot nor Pope John Paul were prudish. Why is the whole comparison dead wrong?
First: in the 50ies there was no general world-wide prudishness at all against which Hefner or Wojtyla had to fight(we must not confuse the 1950ieth with the 1850ieth).
Secondly, pornography abounded before Hefner. When I just began elementary school in 1951, you could buy terrible porno pictures on every street corner and the worse kinds of them from secret vendors,
Thirdly, and therefore, the Playboy did not discover anything new nor did it make any revolution whatsoever but only contributed to a billion Dollar business made out of impurity of all sorts and degrees (many of which worse than Playboy) since a long time.
Fourthly, to even faintly suggest that the views on the disvalue of prudishness of Hefner and Wojtyla were the same and only their response was different is, for the reasons I explain in the earlier comments I made, in my opinion utterly untenable, because the true value of sex cannot AT ALL be understood except through understanding love nor the disvalue of prudishness through impurity and dirt of all kinds.
Fifthly, the way West says “I love Hefner” exactly sounds as when I say “I love Mozart”  (even I do not add the criticisms of Mozart West makes of Hefner), and at any rate more enthusiastic than if West were to say in charity “I love all puritans of the 19th century!”.  Where he should express horror of the antithesis of Playboy to the Theology of the Body, he expresses some kind of enthusiasm over an imaginary similar discovery or first part of the “sexual revolution” both conducted. (Even to speak of the theology of the body as a second part of a “sexual revolution” is deeply misleading).
2. As to “anal sex,” I thought we agreed that to cite a manual does nothing to prove a point. (Moreover, I am morally sure, without having studied them, that 90% of the old handbooks of moral theology do not defend these points at all; most of them even taught that only certain positions of the couple in intercourse are morally permitted).
3. The “kissability” of all body parts I will not argue against at all, even though I would make distinctions here as well, but I think West said more than that in some of his comments.
On points 4 and 5: they cannot be so clearly defined, given that there are nuances of language, of tone of language, of a kind of silence on certain things or a kind of optimistic forgetfulness of the dangers of concupiscence that Alice von Hildebrand notes in West’s speeches and I cannot here analyse all the films and tapes and books of his to show that at least some of these criticisms do apply to West.

To conclude: I am happy! about any of the points I made and West agrees on, as I consider him a great ally with an important mission and I will be glad to see the moment when none of my or any other criticisms apply to anything he says.
In deep esteem,

Josef

Dear Janet, thank you for your good response and for putting what you wrote more in perspective. I am glad to know of our deep agreements. Although it is still surprising to me that many traditional Catholic manuals of moral theology would have defended anal penetration, I believe you and will read the internet site you refer to. However, these manuals cannot replace our search for the truth. Catholic moral theologians have over the centuries and mostly in the last fifty years said so many erroneous things that we certainly need, as you say, reexamine the issues and cannot content ourselves with simply citing some manuals. I completely concur with you and see this as a special task for such a forum of personalist philosophy on which I congratulate its founders the van Schaijiks and for the Theology of the Body Institute.
Josef S

While I agree that a nitpicking and uncharitable or narrow-minded critique can be bad and risk the mission of West, I do not agree in the least with you that ANY true criticism can destroy or endanger West’s mission. On the contrary, he will carry it out better if he pays attention to every, even the smallest truth that is contrary to what he says or to how he says it. I would find it lamentable if you believed, which I hope and trust you don’t, that truth can harm a speaker’s or any person’s mission, which is certainly not Newman’s opinion. On the contrary, when understood, it can only improve the value of a superb speakers mission, and when it is ignored, it can harm up to destroying it, as Plato puts it so wonderfully in the words from the sixth book of the Republic about the philosophers, which are behind our motto of the International Academy of Philosophy (diligere veritatem omnem et in omnibus/ to love all truth and to love it in everything):

“And further, I said, let us agree that they are lovers of all true being; there is no part whether greater or less, or more or less honourable, which they are willing to renounce; as we said before of the lover and the man of ambition.
True.
And if they are to be what we were describing, is there not another quality which they should also possess?
What quality?
Truthfulness: they will never intentionally receive into their mind falsehood, which is their detestation, and they will love the truth.
Yes, that may be safely affirmed of them.
‘May be,’ my friend, I replied, is not the word; say rather ‘must be affirmed:’ for he whose nature is amorous of anything can not help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.
Right, he said.
And is there anything more akin to wisdom than truth?
How can there be?
Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood?
Never.
The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth?
Assuredly.”

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