Happiness of the Catholic Intellectual: Balance, Focus, and Priorities | Prof. Christopher Kaczor

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was offered at the 2020 Student Leadership Conference held in Estes Park, CO.

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Speaker Bio:

Dr. Christopher Kaczor (rhymes with razor) is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He graduated from the Honors Program of Boston College and earned a Ph.D. four years later from the University of Notre Dame. A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Kaczor did post-doctoral work as a Federal Chancellor Fellow at the University of Cologne and as William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He was appointed a Corresponding Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life of Vatican City, a fellow of the Word on Fire Institute, and winner of a Templeton Grant. He has written more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. An award winning author, his fifteen books include Disputes in Bioethics, Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues, Abortion Rights: For and Against, 365 Days to Deeper Faith, The Gospel of Happiness, The Seven Big Myths about Marriage, A Defense of Dignity, The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church, The Ethics of Abortion, O Rare Ralph McInerny: Stories and Reflections on a Legendary Notre Dame Professor, Life Issues-Medical Choices; Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love; The Edge of Life, and Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition. Dr. Kaczor’s views have been in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, National Review, NPR, BBC, EWTN, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, MSNBC, TEDx, and The Today Show.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today what I'm going to talk to you about though is basically what I wish I had known about the intellectual life when I started.
0:10.0	So if I could go back in a time machine to when I was 20 years old or 21, what is it that I wish I had known?
0:18.0	And so basically what I want to talk about are really four things. The first is
0:22.7	happiness. And then the next three things are all about balance. Balance between the intellectual
0:29.4	life and the rest of life. Balance within the intellectual life. And then finally, balance between the life of a professional academic and the
0:42.5	life of a public intellectual. So let me start off with happiness. Happiness, of course,
0:47.8	is a huge topic, and we could easily spend a whole semester talking about what happiness is.
0:51.3	But I'm going to use a very handy way of thinking about
0:56.9	happiness that comes from Father Robert Spitzer. And he divides happiness into four different
1:01.5	levels. Level one happiness is bodily pleasure. That kind of happiness you get from eating food
1:06.9	or drinking alcohol. Level two happiness is various forms of winning and being better than others.
1:14.4	So having more money, more popularity, more fame, things like that.
1:18.9	Level three is all about serving others and helping others, doing good for them.
1:24.0	And level four is about what he calls transcendent happiness, and that's about ultimately loving perfect beauty, perfect truth, perfect goodness, et cetera.
1:34.6	Now, how does the intellectual life fit into here?
1:36.8	Well, you could do the intellectual life for any of those four purposes.
1:40.7	But it would not be a very efficient way of getting level one happiness. There's lots of ways of getting bodily pleasure that are easier and more effective than the intellectual life.
1:49.5	But some people undertake the intellectual life for the sake of what Spitz would call level two happiness.
1:54.8	Right? They want to be famous. They want to be wealthy. They want to be better than others in some respect.
2:01.2	And I would suggest to you that the academic life,
2:03.7	the intellectual life, isn't a very good means
2:05.9	of getting any of those things.
	...

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