Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

We Don’t Die When We Die

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Abigail

One thing is certain. When we talk, when we act, when we commit ourselves to any project – big or small – when we retire for the night or rise for the day: sooner or later our stories will come to an end.

That end-of-story windup might come suddenly and turn out a surprise, or be protracted and long expected, easy or pain-ridden, dreaded or welcomed. In any case, the kind of death we will have is not foreseeable. As to what follows or does not follow, that’s neither within our personal control nor in the hands of those whose pronouncements on that head have been most persuasively asserted.

And yet, for at least the past hundred years or more, the wise heads – who determine emotional style and the moral parameters – have shared the assumption that the life we’re living now will be the whole story. Long or short, lucky or unlucky, when the final curtain comes down, the play we’re in will be over. The background buzz has been of a jerky, syncopated, politely repressed nihilism.

These assumptions have provided the boundary conditions for modern life. Human life, moderns have assumed, is just for the living. The dead have no share in the challenges that now confront the living. And, although some achievements may be of a size to outlast those who did the actual work to produce them, sooner or later the entire human enterprise will likely be over. At the “it’s all over time,” there’ll be no intelligent survivors left to care about what someone in former times might have done. The people will have all died and the records will be all lost.

*. *. *

But suppose that’s wrong? Suppose we don’t actually go out the way a light bulb goes out when the switch has been flicked? Suppose, when we can’t stay in our bodies, for better or worse we still don’t get to take leave of ourselves! Suppose that in fact we’re all still alive, although no longer in these present time-and-space conditions in the way that we used to be.

In 2020, Christopher Kerr, M.D. Ph.D, and chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo, published Death is But a Dream, a book about the research he’d conducted. His findings were recently publicized by reporter Caitlin Gibson in a June 19th article in The Washington Post, a highly regarded mainstream source.

So what’s the latest news, for us the living, about life’s end? The terminally ill – when interviewed by professionals trained to distinguish between hallucinations and reports that appear sane, clear and credible – report that patients have lively conversations with cherished friends long departed and visit places still held dear. They revisit scenes of combat and comrades killed who now stand ready at hand for reunions postponed a lifetime ago.

Sometimes, present experiences offer confirmation of past events previously unknown to surviving family. Or the confirmation can be of the moral kind. Experiences that were left jagged, broken off or misused, revisit the dying person – this time returning to be mended. For the patient who is not bluffing, but is in earnest about what needs to be faced, fixed or completed, the last days can provide a time for revisitings and repair.

Assuming that Kerr’s research has been as methodical and scrupulous as such investigations can be, what do findings of this kind tell me? For most of my working life in philosophy, I’ve not been an atheist, a philosophical materialist, or a reductionist for whom our humanly-lived complexities were to be construed as “nothing but” perturbations in and among subatomic particles. So the Kerr findings upset no worldview that I happen to hold. But they would overturn cultural assumptions that have been in ascendency among its most educated members for the past hundred years or more.

So what would have to change, in our culture, if the story published in The Washington Post should get around, and be taken seriously?

What would have to give way would be the belief that, in the end, “it doesn’t count.” But what if “the end” isn’t the end? Then, what we do, what we think and say, really does count, in this world and any other. We’re visible, we’re palpable, we’re memorable, and all of it makes a difference. Human lives are not absurd. Each of us affects and influences each other and has a say in the whole course of things. From the grass underfoot to the councils of power in the world, the tiniest gesture might count as much as the largest. We need to honor the narrative we’re in and do our best to make sense of it. This because –

it all counts.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, Industrial Revolution, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, mortality vs immortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, seventeenth century, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Trauma, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged afterlife unknowns, Atheism, Caitlin Gibson’s The Washington Post article on deathbed visions, Christopher Kerr’s Death is But a Dream, credible deathbed experiences, cultural assumptions, cultural changes if death is not the end, cultural implications of surviving death, cultural worldview, Darwinian implications, death and taxes, death unpredictable, deathbed experiences, deathbed mending of misused life, deathbed moral repair, deathbed reunions with cherished places, deathbed reunions with departed friends, deathbed reunions with friends killed in battle, dying different for each person, end of story, end of the line, End-of-Life, exiting present time-and-space conditions, facing the past, fashionable nihilism, fashionable reductionism, fixing the past, hallucinations vs deathbed experiences, human mortality, intelligent survivors, interviewing the terminally ill, interviews of the dying, it ain’t over until it’s over, life concerns the living, manner of death unforeseeable, modern assumptions, modern emotional style, modern moral parameters, modern nihilism, modernity’s repressed nihilism, mortality not the end, oversimplifying human complexities, Philosophical Materialism, reductionism, refusing reductionism, repairing the past, research into dying, surviving death, surviving death and making life count, surviving death and reconceiving power, surviving death and revising the narrative, surviving death and social implications, surviving death vs nihilism, surviving death vs the absurd, the dead still concerned, the dead supposedly unconcerned, the great unknown, the nothing-but fallacy, where personal control stops | 1 Comment

Dreams about Real Life

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Abigail

The night before we left for California, I had what may be the strangest dream I ever dreamed: I was in a passenger plane – flying who knows where – until the airplane was split in two by a lightning strike so fierce that it cleaved the sky itself. There was no salvaging the plane and I lost sight of the other passengers.

However, and despite all, it seems that I landed safely on an undiscovered island, situated somewhere in mid-Atlantic. The island wasn’t empty. It held one tree and one inhabitant. That individual used to be a man but was now identifiably a woman wearing red lipstick. But somehow this turnover-gendered person still continued precision-tooled for an ongoing assignment of Jew-hatred.

Clearly this was a dream that called for decoding. I believe that we as a culture have got past the point where we must pay an expert to decode our dreams. At an earlier era in my life, I had – like many of my fellow New Yorkers – a Freudian psychoanalyst. For him, involuntarily but obligingly, I produced the dreams to which Freud himself had given Latin names. Later, when I’d left the Freudian guy and was either reading Jung or else reading about him, I can recall at least one dream inhabited by Archetypes: with Norse gods who gave way to the Arthurian cycle. Anybody see a pattern here? Anyway at this point, for better or worse Abbie gets to decode her own dreams.

I think the stroke of lightning represents an event that was heaven-shattering. And the individual of flipped gender whom I encountered on the island exhibits the same anti-Jewish hatred – unchanged beneath any and all outward changes – and ever-ready to return to his/her/their unvarying work.

The phenomenon has been so continuous in the past 2000 years that one can characterize the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) by the kind of Jew-hatred that typified it. Thus:

(a) In the great age of Christendom, Jews were vilified for the newly-conceived crime of deicide, whereby they – collectively and in every generation – crucified God in the person of Jesus. (By contrast, Judaism lists no crime called “deicide” in its conceptual compendium, nor is rabbinic Judaism comfortable with the notion of hereditary guilt – either individual or collective.)

(b) In an age that celebrated universality (e.g. the 18^th century’s Age of Enlightenment) Jews were vilified for their stubborn particularity.

(c) In an age that celebrated particularity (e.g. the early nineteenth century’s Romantic period) Jews were vilified for their universality, often called rootless cosmopolitanism.

(d) In the Darwinian age that celebrated survival of the fittest, Jews were the only “race” deemed inherently unfit and yet a competitive threat to the master race.

(e) In the present “anti-colonial” era, Israeli Jews, and other Jews by extension, are deemed colonialists, even though they were returning to their ancient homeland. Nor does it make any difference that their sincere attempts to live as assimilated citizens in European lands had been answered by the Holocaust.

So it’s been a weird and wacky business – with every indication of worsening in its continuing weirdness. So let me make my own effort to explain the whole thing. There’s an incident in the New Testament that may help out here. Jesus is accosted by the devil who tries to tempt him in the following way:

“If you’re the son of God, prove it! Come over here to the edge of this cliff and cast yourself down. Jump off the cliff! If you are who you say you are, you won’t get hurt!”

Jesus replies by noting that it’s not a good idea to play “I dare you” games with God, no matter who you are.

Anyway, I see the underlying sameness of the hatred-of-Jews as expressing a somewhat similar offer:

“If you’re really the Chosen People, prove it! Show us all that you can survive the Newest Fashion in the Oldest Hatred. N’yah, n’yah, n’yah!”

So far, they haven’t yet managed to kill us all. There’s a tuneful hillbilly hymn with a refrain that says, “I know who holds tomorrow”:

So we’ll see, won’t we?

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, Industrial Revolution, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, seventeenth century, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Trauma, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged age of reason, anti-semitism as anti-colonialism, anti-semitism in the Age of Enlightenment, anti-semitism in the Romantic period, anti-semitism inventing deicide, anti-semitism reflecting the Zeitgeist, anti-semitism the same through outward changes, anti-semitism through history, cast thyself down, decoding dreams, don’t test God, dream figure representing anti-semitism, dreams, dreams decoded by experts, dreams self-decoded, dreams that fulfill diagnostic expectations, Freudian dreams, Freudian psychoanalysis, Freudians and New York fashions, God and air travel, God not liking ugly, God’s anger at anti-semitism, gospel hymn I Know Who Holds Tomorrow, history of anti-semitism, I Know Who Holds Tomorrow, interpreting one’s own dreams, Jesus declines to test God, Jew-hatred unchanged in a changing world, Jewish assimilation and the Holocaust, Jungian dreams, lightning and God’s anger, lightning as heaven-shattering, lightning splitting the sky, meaningful dreams, newest form of oldest hatred, oldest hatred, plane crash, post-Darwinian anti-semitism, precognitive dreams, rabbinic Judaism denies concept of collective guilt, rabbinic Judaism denies concept of hereditary guilt, reproaching Holocaust victims, reproaching Israelis as colonialists, reproaching Jews in their ancient home as colonialists, sibling rivalry as theology, Temptation of Jesus, testing God’s believed favoritism, the chosen people, the Chosen People and perennial resentment, turnover-gendered person, undiscovered island, veridical dreams | 1 Comment

Grief, Martha Nussbaum, and Me

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This column was originally posted on February 13, 2024, and continues to be timely.

Recently, I’ve been reading a highly-regarded woman philosopher whose name is Martha C. Nussbaum. MCN is, along with other fields of her expertise, a scholar of ancient philosophers. She likes the Greek and Roman Epicureans and Stoics who wrote and taught at times when great empires controlled political action, leaving to their subjects just power enough to affect private and personal life. MCN wants to see what we in our time can learn from their therapeutic compositions.

One of her books, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, starts with her mother’s death as MCN experienced it. I read it with great interest since I too loved my mother and grieved at her death. Was MCN’s grief like mine?

MCN was preparing to give a lecture in Dublin, Ireland, when she learned that her mother, then in recovery from surgery, had suffered a sudden, life-threatening complication. Since she could not get an overnight flight home, she gave the lecture and then flew to Philadelphia the next morning. Deplaning, she called the ICU, only to learn that her mother had died just twenty minutes earlier. In the hospital, ushered in by a nurse, she saw her mother “as so often I had seen her lying asleep at home.” She “wept uncontrollably, while the nurses brought me glasses of water” and, for weeks thereafter, “had periods of agonized weeping, whole days of crushing fatigue; nightmares in which I felt altogether unprotected and alone, and seemed to feel a strange animal walking across my bed.”

Some of these emotions, like anger at the innocent smiles of the flight attendants, or at the medical team’s being unable to save her mother, she recognized as unreasonable. Other feelings – like anger at herself for having chosen a professional life that led her to miss the deathbed farewell – fell into juster proportion in the days that followed, when reunions, public ceremonies and related duties filled the times and spaces vacated by the loss.

I wondered how my memory of my mother’s death would look to me, in comparison. In my case, family circumstances did not fall into place so harmoniously. There had been a great many matters to attend to that still obscure my retrospective view of … Abigail in her pure and precise relation to her mother. Allowing for all that, what did I feel at the loss of her? Where did it leave me?

Unlike MCN, I didn’t feel anger or guilt or self-reproach – for all of which the hospice professionals advised me to forgive myself. Of course, I thanked them anyway. It was not the time to suggest that they consider a paradigm shift. They were doing their best to be supportive and I didn’t want to discourage them.

My whole heart was affected, but one emotion stays in my memory. In ordinary times, I don’t believe that death is the end, here differing from MCN. But at the precise time when I lost my mother, I actually hoped it was the end – because otherwise there’d be a point to waiting. I would need to wait my whole life through before I saw my mother again – and that was too long to have to wait!

There was one other respect in which my kind of grief was unlike MCN’s. I would have interpreted her two-part dream in Dublin, which she had the night before her flight home, differently. In the dream’s first part, her mother appeared, “in her hospital bed, very emaciated and curled into a fetal position.” MCN had no comment about this part, but I would say that it registers one elementary fact about death:

it’s as hard to get out of this world

as it was to get in.

In the next part, her mother “suddenly stood up, looking young and beautiful as in the old photographs … . She smiled at me with her characteristically embracing wit, and said that others might call her wonderful, but she very much preferred to be called beautiful. I woke up and wept, knowing that things were not so.”

Without thinking twice, but instantly and instinctively, I would have seen such a dream as a preview of her mother’s “beautiful” appearance in the world she was about to enter after she left this one. After all, MCN – who has drawn emotional realities previously shrouded in darkness into the light of day where all of us may recognize them –

has no way of knowing

that “things were not so.”

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, alienation, anthropology, art, art of living, atheism, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, female power, femininity, feminism, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, guilt and innocence, health, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, past and future, peace, philosophy, poetry, political movements, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, self-deception, sexuality, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged a mother's death, afterlife reunions, ancient philosophers, being born is hard, classicist, death as not the end, death as the end, deathbed farewell, demands interrupting grief, dream announcing a death, dream visit, dream visit from loved one, dreams with conflicting interpretations, dying as difficult, dying is hard, emotional realities, emotions as informative, emotions as instructive, Epicureans, fear of abandonment, filial piety, getting born as difficult, grief and being orphaned, grief and picking up the pieces, grief as abandonment, grief as anger, grieving a parent, honoring one's mother, hospice staff, intellectual pioneer, interpreting dreams, losing one's mother, love for one's mother, Marth Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum, missing the deathbed, mother/daughter relation, mourning and guilt, mourning and self-reproach, mourning one's mother, orphan syndrome, out of body experiences, paranormal vision, philosophy as therapy, precognitive dream visit, self-reproach, status of mothers, Stoics, the chores of mourning, the work of mourning, unreasonable anger, waiting for the afterlife, where I am death is not, woman academic, woman philosopher | Leave a comment

A Liberated Woman

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie’s talk at Stony Brook.

Homer’s World

The first time I came out in public as a feminist, I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. For some reason, I had decided to give a public talk titled “Why Women’s Liberation?” The topic was then a new one in academe. It was also just crystallizing in my own mind as something to think about.

I’d already read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex before it was translated. All my women friends who, like me, held Fulbright Fellowships in Paris, had read it and we debated it intensely. But raising questions inside professional life here in America – questions about the social status and legal rights of women – was a very different story. If I spoke candidly, might I not be risking present relations with colleagues in the Department, and possibly jeopardizing my future in academic philosophy? How far out on a limb should I go? It was scary.

When you’re scared, you have to go with whatever you know. What I knew was that it doesn’t matter what happens to a woman –

as long as she’s dressed for it!

So I walked out on the stage of that packed Stony Brook auditorium in a black mini-dress, black tights and black boots. As my talk began, with no holds barred, I could hear the sound of feet shuffling and angry whispers crescendoing. At first, it wasn’t clear that I’d be allowed to go on speaking.

But I kept on, and after a while the whispers subsided.

Finally, at the close of my talk, I invited my friend Fred-the-Drifter, who was wearing his blue jeans, green shirt, cowboy boots and carrying his guitar, to come up on stage with me and play behind me – while I sang songs that I’d written (to keep my courage up) for the women’s liberation movement (my new words put to familiar folk tunes).

The roar of applause filled the auditorium edge to edge. I recall one of my students saying as I left the stage, “I have never heard you so eloquent.”

“I thought he [the student] was gonna cry,” Fred said to me later.

Revised and retitled “Feminism Without Contradictions,” my talk was included in The Monist, which was, I believe, the first well-regarded philosophical journal to devote an entire issue to feminism.

So much for one of my pioneering contributions to those daring days. But what about now? What’s the news regarding feminism – especially as that news touches my present life?

Let me bring the question up to this very week. I had sent for a book I saw advertised that promised to foreground the women in Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad concerns some of the decisive episodes of the Trojan War and the Odyssey tells of the long voyage home of Odysseus – one of the victorious Greek heroes in the defeat of Troy. The form in which we have these poems dates roughly to the 8^th century BCE (before the common era). Although it is a man’s story, of war and warriors, one of the important characters in the Odyssey is Penelope, the shrewd and patient wife who waits ten long years for Odysseus, her husband, to return home to Ithaca.

With her personal force and ingenuity, Penelope manages to hold off the young bachelors of Ithaca, who each want her to marry one of them and thereby inherit the wealth and position of the long-absent Odysseus. After many adventures, Odysseus does finally get home to Ithaca, where he slays the suitors and reclaims his and Penelope’s marital kingdom – in all its fine erotic and political contours.

The Odyssey had been a favorite book of mine in my early teens (together with Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers). So I was quite curious to read the new book I’d sent for, which promised to disclose the feminist lowdown on the story that I’d read long ago in the way Homer tells it.

As I began to read the new book, I didn’t find new incidents that had been omitted in Homer. There was a difference in emphasis, but no significant new information that I could detect.

I could see that the book was handsomely illustrated, with photographs of artifacts and detailed maps of Homer’s world. So I turned to the maps to find Ithaca, Troy and other such sites, on maps that took in territory as far away as Egypt. But, much to my astonishment, Biblical Israel – certainly contemporary with Homer’s world – did not figure on the maps. The territory of the Israelite kings, of the prophets – Isaiah would most likely have been contemporary with the dates assigned to Homer – was designated “Canaan” on the author’s historical maps.

I looked under “I” in the index. Hey, Israel was not even in the index!

That night I had a dream, whose graphic unpleasantness I won’t recall in this column. However, it clearly pertained to the book I’d been reading – a book ostensibly about the women in Homer.

By morning, picking up the book again, I noticed that it quoted a woman known world-wide for her belligerent activism against modern Israel. The quote, lifted out of its original context, was in this case being used by the author to condemn some case of unworthy conduct that Homer reports … but it certainly reinforced my unease. What was that woman doing in a book about Homer’s world that deleted contemporaneous historical Israel from its otherwise-inclusive maps?

In the mornings, I routinely sit for prayer and meditation. Normally, from my still and silent listening, I get the sense that I’m pretty much on track and can proceed forward into the coming day.

But the meditation of that morning was unlike my typical meditations. For the first time, I had the sense of a divine Presence very near me. Nearer in fact than I’d ever felt it before. Let’s go ahead and call it God’s face, for that’s what it felt like.

The face, or Presence, gave me a directive:

Throw the book out.

Throw out a book I had just purchased? Surely not. It must contain some interesting facts that I might yet glean. Couldn’t I at least flip to the end to see how it finishes? I might copy down some references … .

But the more I temporized in this way, the less persuasive I found all these moves-to-postpone. The command had been simple and utterly clear.

So I went to the room where I’d been reading the book and threw it right into the trash. And, as suddenly, all the magnetism that had attached to the book shriveled and emptied out. I felt released, having acted …

the way a free woman acts.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, seventeenth century, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Trauma, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged "Feminism Without Contradictions", a book loses magnetism, Abigail L. Rosenthal's "Feminism Without Contradictions" in The Monist, academic feminist, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, becoming a free woman, biblical Israel, Biblical Israel and Homer’s world, Biblical Israel missing from map of ancient world, breaking taboos, breaking the ice, clothes as a statement, directive to throw a book out, Divine command to discard a book, Divine directive, dodging a divine command, dress for success, dress to impress, feminism in academe, feminism in philosophical journal, feminist, feminist stage performance, Fulbright in Paris, Fulbright scholars, Fulbright women, Greta Thunberg in book about ancient world, Homer and Isaiah contemporaries, Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey, liberated woman, magnetism of a book, maps of Homer’s world, new book on Homer’s women, obeying a divine command, Odysseus comes home, Penelope and Odysseus, Penelope in The Odyssey, Penelope’s shrewdness in the Odyssey, Penelope’s strategy with the suitors, performing on stage, philosophy at Stony Brook, second wave feminism, self-liberation, sensing God’s presence, Simone de Beauvoir, songs for the feminist movement, Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, woman philosophy professor, women and dressing to impress, women in Homer, women's liberation, women’s liberation from false authority, women’s liberation from false narratives | 2 Comments

Traumatic Memories: Past and Future

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Abigail

I used to take pride in my excellent memory. But sadly, it got somewhat less excellent after my first marriage. Perhaps my psyche decided that certain scenes from that part of my life story were best left un-remembered.

With regard to memory, by far the biggest holes were dug in 2023, after October 7th and 8th. At that time, as you may recall, there was rejoicing all round the planet – but especially in the universities – over the atrocities committed against Israelis by invaders from neighboring Gaza. The atrocities were photo-recorded by their jihadi perpetrators who boasted of committing them!

It seems that my psyche found itself unable to bear these scenes. So it dug out craters, forgetteries – psychic oubliettes – into which those memory segments could be dropped. And, since emergency defensive measures can be imprecise, more was dropped into the forgettery than needed to be.

Aware that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I’ve started to read books about memory, trauma and therapeutic treatments for memory loss.

The first book I read, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past, by Peter A. Levine, PhD, offers theoretical explanations of brain function and malfunction, as well as detailed case histories of successful treatments. I assume that the patients shown must have also agreed to be photographed. The differences between their expressions and body language at the beginning and end of treatment are both clear and dramatic. It’s also evident that practitioners who follow Levine’s methods need to be carefully trained and to proceed in a gradual, step-by-step manner when working with clients.

At present, I’m about a quarter of the way into a quite different book. It’s titled Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith L. Herman, MD. Her overview might be called the vertical view: she situates attitudes toward trauma within culture and political history.

Some traumas, such as marital rape and incestuous abuse of children, were present long before the culture was prepared to recognize them. Women’s complaints were dismissed by eminences like Freud as fantasies or unconscious wishes – until the political empowerment of women in the latter half of the twentieth century made room for consciousness-raising groups and began the process of changes in the law.

As in Levine’s reports, it’s become possible to treat trauma because it’s now possible to remove victims from the scenes of their suffering. If you have been accurately diagnosed with PTSD, doctors no longer send you back into combat as they used to. Likewise, domestic abuse is now recognized as grounds for divorce and legal penalties. The judge won’t force a wife to go back to her wife-beater. And, although abused children can’t themselves take legal action, by now some attention has been drawn even to their predicament.

There is one major obstacle to my contacting one or both of these authors for referrals to therapists who might help me get back the full power of memory that I had before the traumatizing events of October 7th and 8th, 2023.

In the cases I’ve read about so far, the traumatizing deed is not being done now. The raped woman who confides her story to her consciousness-raising group isn’t being raped now – not at the same time that she tells the women’s group what happened to her! The traumatized veteran isn’t back at the front at the same time that he tells the therapist what shocked him in previous combat.

But anti-semitism isn’t over! On the contrary. It’s world-wide and it’s growing. So it’s not clear that the therapy that repaired the traumas in these reports could help in my case.

Speaking of anti-semitism, here’s an interesting factual detail: Peter Levine reports that the grandchildren of Holocaust victims carry bio-chemical traces of death-camp trauma that they did not personally experience. Such traces can be detected even in the wombs of grandchildren of survivors! So that trauma is being passed on even to the third generation!

In this context, I wonder whether the sudden reappearance of anti-semitism after October 7- 8 might not itself be a resurfacing of the contempt for Jews that had been commonplace for almost two thousand years. Social anti-semitism was repressed during World War II‘s war against Nazism. Meanwhile the discovery of the Holocaust – it became Exhibit A among the Nazi atrocities – prolonged the suppression of such thoughts. But just as the memories of suffering can be passed down the generations and detected in certain bio-chemical markers, so possibly the even older memories of Christian contempt for and cruelty toward Jews might erupt like a collective “return of the repressed.”

It would be hard to prove such an hypothesis, since by now the grass is green over the present generation’s anti-semitic great-great grandfathers. No doubt there are other influences also in play. But this sudden eruption of hate seems to be a surd in culture for which a fuller explanation might include such factors, conscious and unconscious.

On the brighter side, there is one improvement over the placid surface of earlier years. The Jews whom I see interviewed today, or making speeches of their own, are no longer as deferential and tip-toe-y as they used to be. They’re candid and contemptuous of their anti-semitic contemporaries.

Is it the very existence of Israel – a nation under arms – that gives this confidence? Theodore Herzl, who convened the first Zionist conference where he introduced the idea of a Jewish state, pictured manufacturing and agricultural produce that would enrich the world. There is all that – and Israeli Nobel prize winners have also enriched the world along the lines of Herzl’s vision.

But mainly, today there is a Jewish state. Only one – and it’s a small one – which you can see almost in its entirety from the air. But its citizens, surrounded by hostile forces, are armed.

And they know

how to fight.

Related Content: Witness | Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, seventeenth century, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Trauma, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged abused children and PTSD, anti-semitism and higher education, anti-semitism as cultural inheritance, anti-semitism as ongoing trauma, anti-semitism as the return of the repressed, anti-semitism in universities, biochemical markers of Holocaust trauma, biochemical markers of trauma, brain function and trauma, C-PTSD, consciousness-raising groups, cultural attitudes toward trauma, domestic abuse and law, global anti-semitism, healing trauma, Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state, Holocaust trauma, Holocaust victims, increasing anti-semitism, inherited trauma, intergenerational trauma, Israel’s resistance to anti-semitism, Israeli Nobel Prize winners, Jewish resistance to anti-semitism, Judith L. Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, laws against marital rape, laws against wife-beating, lighting a candle vs cursing the darkness, memories of suffering, memory, memory loss, Oct 7 2023, Oct 8 2023, October 7-8, ongoing traumatizing events, past trauma, Peter A. Levine’s Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past, political history of trauma, post-Holocaust suppression of anti-semitism, psychic forgetting and trauma, psychic oubliettes, PTSD, PTSD and combat veterans, return of the repressed, social anti-semitism, Theodore Herzl, therapy for memory loss, therapy for trauma, third-generation Holocaust trauma, training trauma healers, trauma after Hamas atrocities, trauma and brain malfunction, trauma and memory, trauma healing before and after, trauma therapy, traumas past and present, traumas present and future, traumatic memory, unbearable psychic wounds, universities and anti-Israel demonstrations, world-wide anti-semitism, Zionism | 1 Comment

The Lot of Women

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Abigail

A line comes to mind that I first heard spoken in the alabaster French of the Comédie-Française, many years ago in the Paris of my youth:

Do you not pity the lot of women?

Le sort des femmes … the destiny of women. Well, I do and I don’t pity women. Depends on the woman and what exactly befalls her. Barring victimization of the sort the law now forbids and ought to punish, the destiny of women runs along a spectrum. To put it another way: in ordinary circumstances one gets a situation to keep in balance and the question is how to balance it.

*. *. *

A big question, but let’s start somewhere in the middle. I’m the only woman I know who actually watched the interview of Juanita Broaddrick after she reported being raped in her hotel room by (former President) Bill Clinton back when he was attorney general in Arkansas.

Broaddrick sure looked truthful to me. So I believed that the matter deserved independent investigation and thought a letter to the NY Times was warranted, signed by me (with my academic credentials) along with some feminists better known than me. But to my surprise, my feminist friends were not one tiny bit interested. Back then, they were looking to Clinton for legislation on certain favorite issues. Also, one had a book coming out and she needed favorable reviews. But several feminist friends praised my idealism. And so on.

Since then, the fearless Phyllis Chesler, who has helped so many women, told me she would have signed. But at that point we hadn’t met and somehow it didn’t cross my mind to contact her.

One feminist did agree to sign such a letter, but she was not widely known. However, I did eventually locate a feminist who had sufficient public presence: Catharine A. MacKinnon who has written importantly on the topic of rape. She was willing to co-sign a letter. However, MacKinnon put up one condition: Broaddrick herself must approve the project of such a letter.

Now it may be that MacKinnon believed me incapable of tracking Broaddrick and securing her permission. If so, she reckoned wrong because I can be very persistent.

To abridge a long story, I did finally manage to contact Juanita Broaddrick and did speak to her at length. By the end of our conversation, I got her approval for a multiply-signed feminist letter to the Times.

When I got back to MacKinnon with the good news, very much to my astonished chagrin, MacKinnon told me that she was leaving town and couldn’t give any more time for this particular effort! The result? I let Juanita Broaddrick down and likewise all the people who had helped me to track her.

Here’s another case “from the middle” of feminist real-life. At an early point in my career in the Philosophy Department of the City University’s Brooklyn College, I was pressured to vote for a candidate for Chair of the Department whom I thought quite unqualified. I was not the only junior member of the Department who was fired for voting “wrong.” We all were. But my case was striking since the same senior professors who voted to fire me in the fall had – just the previous spring – voted to promote me to a higher rank! To explain why their estimation of me had plummeted so suddenly, they claimed that over the summer I had “lost all my talent”!

The trouble with this story was that by my lost-talent September I’d had another article accepted for publication in the same philosophical journal that had published me in my promotion-worthy June. So the bloc of senior professors would certainly have a use for any additional evidence, to support their flimsy case for firing me.

Anyway, among other avenues, I tried appealing to the faculty feminist group on campus. The experience was not a happy one. Not only did they decline to support my claim of having been fired for reasons irrelevant to my academic merit – they sent a letter to my chairman that endorsed my firing! Even in the annals of academic feminism, that’s probably unusual.

What was behind their extra effort? Well, I had not joined a “women’s bloc” in the Department that had seemed to me more relevant to the personal power of Professor Gertrude Ezorsky, the most senior woman of that faction, than it was to any potential unfairness to women as such in the Department. I’d also thought it rather unfair to extort a promise to join their bloc as a condition of voting for my appointment.

At the time of their putting that condition before me, I had answered them ambiguously – “if the chairman thinks I’m his tool, I’m nobody’s tool” – and of course they held that ambiguity against me once I didn’t automatically join their bloc but instead voted on the merits as I saw them.

Here’s another case from the middle. When I was last in Paris, I had the pleasure of meeting with Catherine Chalier, the closest disciple of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In the course of our conversation, I asked her whether the prestigious French feminists had been of any help in her efforts of that time (since successful I gather) to get a more secure teaching appointment in the French academic arena.

The feminists? Chalier made the sort of gesture one makes when alluding to the preposterous.

*. *. *

Recently I’ve been reading Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by the late Andrea Dworkin. Though she has many bad stories to tell from her own life, Dworkin also concedes that certain advances for women have by now been enshrined in the law. No longer may husbands batter their wives. Sexual harassment in the work place is now illegal. Rape in marriage is now illegal. And, incidentally, Dworkin reports working constructively with Catharine MacKinnon to bring rapists to justice.

MacKinnon? Wait a minute! Wasn’t MacKinnon the feminist who let me down so badly in my effort to get a fairer hearing for the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick? Does that mean that Dworkin’s praise was misplaced? Not necessarily. Perhaps it was in the Broaddrick case, which is the one I know about first hand. But the praise might have been warranted in other cases that Dworkin knew of or worked on.

In real life …

these distinctions can get blurry.

Related Content: Battle Wounds | Afghan Hope

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic feminism, academic merit, academic retaliation, ambivalence of feminists, Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak, believing the woman, Bill Clinton, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Catherine Chalier, Clinton accused of rape, Comédie-Française, distinctions can get blurry, Emmanuel Levinas, faculty feminist group, feminism and changes in the law, feminism in academe, feminist bloc, feminist distinctions can get blurry, feminist friends, feminist hypocrisy, feminist idealism, feminist politics, feminist real life, feminists betraying women, fired for voting wrong, firing not merit-based, French feminists, Gertrude Ezorsky, in-house academic politics, independent investigation, Juanita Broaddrick, le sort des femmes, marital rape, merit-based firing, NY Times letter, Parisian feminists, Philosophy Department of City University’s Brooklyn College, Phyllis Chesler, political loyalty and feminism, political reprisals in academe, politics of feminism, rape and feminism, rape in marriage, sexual harassment, the destiny of women, the lot of women, victims of feminism, victims of sexism, wife battering, women controlling women, women in academia, women’s bloc | 2 Comments

The Lot of Women

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Abigail

A line comes to mind that I first heard spoken in the alabaster French of the Comédie-Française, many years ago in the Paris of my youth:

Do you not pity the lot of women?

*. *. *

Since then, the fearless Phyllis Chesler, who has helped so many women, told me she would have signed. But at that point we hadn’t met and somehow it didn’t cross my mind to contact her.

Now it may be that MacKinnon believed me incapable of tracking Broaddrick and securing her permission. If so, she reckoned wrong because I can be very persistent.

The feminists? Chalier made the sort of gesture one makes when alluding to the preposterous.

*. *. *

In real life …

these distinctions can get blurry.

Related Content: Battle Wounds | Afghan Hope

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic feminism, academic merit, academic retaliation, ambivalence of feminists, Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak, believing the woman, Bill Clinton, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Catherine Chalier, Clinton accused of rape, Comédie-Française, distinctions can get blurry, Emmanuel Levinas, faculty feminist group, feminism and changes in the law, feminism in academe, feminist bloc, feminist distinctions can get blurry, feminist friends, feminist hypocrisy, feminist idealism, feminist politics, feminist real life, feminists betraying women, fired for voting wrong, firing not merit-based, French feminists, Gertrude Ezorsky, in-house academic politics, independent investigation, Juanita Broaddrick, le sort des femmes, marital rape, merit-based firing, NY Times letter, Parisian feminists, Philosophy Department of City University’s Brooklyn College, Phyllis Chesler, political loyalty and feminism, political reprisals in academe, politics of feminism, rape and feminism, rape in marriage, sexual harassment, the destiny of women, the lot of women, victims of feminism, victims of sexism, wife battering, women controlling women, women in academia, women’s bloc | Leave a comment

A Quarrel That Mattered

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Abigail

It was Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote, “A quarrel does not matter.” He was writing about a friend with whom he had broken. I believe it was Maurice Merleau-Ponty of whose death he had just learned. And, in the same commemorative essay, he went to characterize that kind of quarrel as simply one of the ways in which friends who disagree can decide to coexist in the world they still share.

Well, in my experience, that’s not the whole story. Depending on the reason for the quarrel and how deep that reason goes, a quarrel can matter absolutely.

At an earlier phase of my life, I’d had a woman friend who was also a philosopher, with a significant reputation and attainments in her own philosophic milieu. I’ll call her Ingrid. Though we’d parted ways some time back, in the past week Ingrid had been on my mind. So I decided to look her up, to see how she’d been faring and even consider a belated reunion. Perhaps, in the reshufflings and shakeups of life, by now things might look different between us.

However, there’ll be no belated reunion. I learned that she died thirteen years ago.

Had we stayed friends, I would not have published Chapter Eight, “Spoiling One’s Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt,” in A Good Look at Evil. Arendt, a political theorist, had been a friend of Ingrid’s. On my scale of values, friendship trumps publications.

Of what was our friendship composed? We were women friends as well as philosophic friends. Both together. That’s a combination rare and precious. Also, we were what Ingrid called “twin opposites” – almost organically connected and, at the same time, at variance with each other.

How at variance? She was an updated Viking – a lover of the outdoors, a skier, a swimmer, a thinker who could spend a solitary summer on an island off the coast of Sweden reflecting – taking in the austere landscape while shedding the old year to get into form for the year ahead.

Though I had my own affinities with nature, I sure couldn’t have spent a summer alone on a rocky arctic island. Though we sometimes went riding together, mostly we’d meet in the cafes of our neighborhood. There we could really talk – while subliminally sharing the company of compatible strangers – getting it all said and sorted out in that setting.

I was a Hegelian, for whom “the real is the rational.” Or at least reality is to be viewed as reasonably as one can manage to regard it, discerning its lessons as they pertained to the nonfictional, true and ongoing story of one’s life and times.

By contrast, Ingrid had written about thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche – thinkers for whom “the real is not the rational.”

Our differences were fruitful for our friendship. She could contribute the equipoise of a thinker who did not ask life to make sense. Whereas I could produce the highs and the lows, the tragic comedy, of someone who always hoped to pull the meaning out of life’s troubled tangle of situations.

Subliminally I was aware that our differences might someday bring us to a fork in the road where they could become consequential. But I hoped we could manage to step around that fork.

Until one day, there we were – standing in front of the fork in the road. There’d been someone in my life (not in my life by my choice) who’d hated me and wanted to do to me all the harm she could manage to do. For this destructive project, she’d been able to muster quite a lot of theatrical talent for telling lies. Her persuasiveness was such as to peel off from my life many of the people whose presence I had previously taken for granted and who had supplied my life with its protective layers of emotional familiarity, ease and comfort.

But of all the losses, the one I regretted most was the loss of Ingrid. Ingrid – who eschewed moral judgment as a matter of philosophic principle – had lacked both the personal force and the conceptual equipment to resist such an ingeniously malign and mischievous influence.

Talking it over with Jerry, on the morning that I sadly learned of her death, he suggested one way I might have kept her in my life. Had I left aside the moral questions (like questions of defamation or loyalty) and just told Ingrid how highly I valued our relationship as friends, she might have responded to an appeal confining itself to that level.

So I thought about that suggestion, turning it over piece by piece, taking note of what would have been required on my side to bracket, to put out of play the rights and wrongs, and to focus solely on the affective ties – the feeling ties – between Ingrid and me.

It looked to be a question of what I prized most, what I valued, in the shared space of friendship. Especially philosophic friendship. Until finally it became clear and definitive.

Without truth,

such a friendship founders.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L Rosenthal’s A Good Look at Evil, Abigail L Rosenthal’s Spoiling One’s Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt, affective ties, avoiding hope to prevent disappointment, being above moral judgement, bracketing moral questions, broken friendship, combating malice, comfortable with solitude, consequential fork in the road, credible lies, death preventing reconciliation, deep quarrels, destructive lies, destructive lies that are believed, dodging disappointment, envy and defamation, envy and friendship, envy and social influence, existentialists, existentialists vs rationalists, exonerating nazis, feeling ties, finding meaning in history, finding meaning in real life, friends who quarrel, friends who share memories, friendship and disloyalty, friendship betrayed, friendship over professional ambition, friendships between philosophers, friendships with history, getting above bourgeois morality, getting above chronology, getting above history, getting above morality, Hannah Arendt, Hegelian view of history, Hegelians, Heideggerians, Jean-Paul Sartre, jumping the tenses, lifelong friends, loyalty and friendship, meeting in cafes, Merleau-Ponty, moral relativism vs wickedness, Nietzschians, Nihilists, non-conformism, nonjudgementalism vs conscious evil, not asking life to make sense, opposing evil, personal force, persuasive lies, philosopher friends, philosophers of history, philosophic differences, philosophic differences and real life consequences, philosophic differences that become consequential, philosophic irrationalism, philosophic rationale for personal betrayal, Plato is dear but truth is dearer, premature transcendence, pulling meaning out of real situations, quarrel between friends, quarrel unresolved, quarrels that don’t matter, quarrels that matter, refusal to judge, refusing to judge, rights and wrongs and friendship, seeking meaning in real situations, solitude on an arctic island, superficial quarrels, surviving alone in the arctic wilderness, the bad guys who seem to win, the real is not the rational, the real is the rational, the Viking model, transcendence as evasion, transcending moral norms, transcending right and wrong, truth and friendship, truth and philosophic friendship, twin opposites, Viking attitudes, women friends, women philosophers, women philosophers who are friends, women philosophers who were friends | 2 Comments

Five Coins in the Fountain

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Abigail

Before feminism, girls in America were expected to be “popular.” But exceptionally, in my high school, I got an exemption. So, what high school did I go to?

At that time, it was generally thought both democratic and fair to set aside public schools for the gifted. New York City boasted two such high schools: The Bronx High School of Science and The High School of Music and Art. If you could paint or draw, sing or play an instrument, you went to Music and Art. I could paint and draw.

So I didn’t have to be popular! Of course, when the caption under my yearbook photo read, “A good mind possesses a kingdom,” that was going too far, like hanging an albatross around one’s neck. But that was my own fault, for having been too far above it to have provided my own caption, as the other kids knew enough to do.

Eventually, my classmates sorted themselves into the five girls who would become close friends. Together, we participated in “The Literary Club,” with a rotating presidency in which capacity each of us, on our respective college applications, could claim to have served. (We also got a fair number of good books read.)

Looking up at the wide blue sky beyond high school – we each and all intended to grow up to be Wonderful. So, how did that turn out?

After college, Deborah secured a one-year fellowship to study in Rome. I forget what she intended to study. A movie of that period, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” had the theme of three young American girls tossing their coins in Rome’s Fontana di Trevi. Legend had it that, if you made a wish before tossing a couple of coins, and the fountain looked favorably on the wish, you would find your true love in Rome. We were too sophisticated to swallow such a movie straight, but that didn’t mean we were above the wish.

I doubt the fountain had anything to do with it, but Deborah did get herself an Italian true love. During my Fulbright year in Paris, I visited them in Rome. By then they were married, she was pregnant, but alas, her Roman husband had not been the first! He hadn’t been deceived in this respect, nor did he exactly condemn her. He only told her, repeatedly – and in vividly depicted contrast to her own case – how pure and ecstatic was the perfection of a wedding night when the bride was an Italian virgin!

I didn’t know the term “brainwashing” then. When later I saw them in New York, his control seemed tighter and the Fountain of Trevi more distant. But the opinionated, thoughtful, serious-minded girl I had known in Music and Art – that girl I never saw again.

Another in our group of five was Lily. She had been a young beauty and a gifted painter. In both capacities, her method had been simple, direct and intuitive. Like poetry.

She married Steve, her sweetheart from long ago pre-high school days. He’d been more a man of prose than of poetry. Such a husband could have provided grounding and protection, while still respecting her own winged flights in the realm of color, line and vision.

So far as I could tell, it didn’t work out that way. When I visited her after the honeymoon, the colors of the painting she was working on were muddied. Then, in that still-early time of their marriage, a mutual friend had been murdered in their new neighborhood. She pulled back into a syndrome of dread and fear that, in the years ahead, would require periodic hospitalizations.

As the husband of a wife who had morphed into a patient, Steve was what he had always been: a man you could count on.

What about Marian? She’d been an outspoken, politically-committed young woman – farther to the Left than the rest of us. A feature that she’d perhaps kept backstage during the courtship phase of her relationship with Harry. After marrying, she was working at a humdrum job, helping to put him through med school.

We met again after my return from Paris. She told me that Harry had to be very disappointed with her. She’d not proved to be the girl he’d married. Now she was morose, downcast and boring. On my side, I urged her to read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It had not yet been translated, but we Fulbright girls read it in Paris and discussed it with much interest. From that book, I said, she would learn that her sense of failure was not her fault!

I might have been right, but what actually failed that day were my persuasive powers. She was as implacable in her self-condemnation as earlier she’d been in condemning rich capitalists!

It was a couple of years before I saw her again, this time alongside Harry. Now she looked the smiling, unflappable wife of a young doctor. Either she had learned to prize the life she’d chosen or else she’d erased the memory of the outspoken girl she had once been.

Arlette is the only one of the original five with whom I’ve remained friends. We’ve stayed in contact through the years. She continued to be a very fine painter. Her husband had been posted to a Far Eastern country that, oddly, harmonized with the extremely intelligent, truthful and unsentimental girl she had been in Music and Art. She’s had two kids, and loved them as they now love her. Life doesn’t shock her. She’s warmed to it.

And what about me? Well, if you want to know how it worked out, every step and misstep, read Confessions of a Young Philosopher… and the story turns upward from there … .

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, seventeenth century, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L. Rosenthal’s Confessions of a Young Philosopher, activities for college credit, anti-feminist bigotry, artistic vulnerability, brainwashing, breaking women’s silence, Bronx High School of Science, commodification of women, courtship and self-disguise, dreams of a wedding night, eligibility for gifted high schools, expected to be popular, extracurricular activities, fear of losing femininity, feminine vulnerability, femininity and innocence, femininity as a duty, femininity as a skill, femininity at risk, Feminism, feminist manifesto, gifted young painter, girls and good books, girls with good minds, girls you can’t fool, high school dreams, high school Literary Club, husbands controlling wives, imaginary fears, imaginary fears and real dangers, innocence lost, intellectual girls, intelligent unsentimental girls, intuitive sensitive women and vulnerability, intuitive young woman, losing innocence, marital brainwashing, marital domination and victimization, not forced to be popular, obligation to be feminine, old maid, originality vs femininity, path-breaking vs femininity, planning to be wonderful, poetic and romantic young woman, poetic young woman, popular girls, post-marital muddying of painter’s colors, prefeminist self-blame in women, public schools for the gifted, putting husband through grad school, reading good books, romance in Rome, romantic dreams, romantic hopes, Rome’s Fontana di Trevi, sexism, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Stepford wives, surviving feminism, surviving pre-feminism, teenage ambitions, the art of womanhood, the freedom of wives, The High School of Music and Art, the silence of women, the vulnerability of being feminine, three coins in the fountain, true love and the Fountain of Trevi, wedding night disappointment, wedding night hopes, wedding night reproaches, wedding night virginity, wife as patient, wife of a young doctor, wifehood and mental health, willed vulnerability, wives and women’s liberation, wives hiding their beliefs, women and self-condemnation, women friends, women not shocked by life, women who live up to their promise, women’s post-marital erasure, women’s stories | 2 Comments

Women Who Want To Kill Themselves

Posted on May 5, 2026 by Abigail

Some years ago, when I was still working full time as a philosophy professor, I got a late-afternoon call from E.S. He was a senior colleague and good friend.

We’d exchanged just a few words when he remarked, with concern, “You sound like hell. What’s the matter?”

I told E.S. that I’d just hung up from talking with a woman friend whom I was soon to meet for dinner. “She said she’s going to kill herself and – from her tone – I believe her.”

As it happened, E.S. had lost a daughter to suicide. So he knew enough to take such a threat seriously. First, he advised, “don’t argue with her. Don’t try to talk her out of it.” Second, “buy her dinner.” Third, “buy her a present.” Fourth, “Whatever you might want to say later, first just listen.”

We met at a nice restaurant in the neighborhood. I told her that dinner would be my treat. From what I recall, my present was a teddy bear. In other words, nothing grim and grown up. And I settled back to listen.

She told me that she had submitted a book proposal to a publisher that had the potential dramatically to upgrade her status in her profession. She’d made her case thoroughly, covering every aspect of the venture, with great care and in detail. Nevertheless, after considering the proposal with much interest and at length, in the end it had been rejected.

Since I wasn’t in her line of work, I couldn’t feel the defeat as she felt it. But I understood that, for her, the setback was major. It came at a time when she was getting romantically involved with a man whom she wanted to impress with achievements and status of her own. Now she was back to being, in her own eyes, nobody special.

“So how do you plan to kill yourself?”

“I’ll rent a hotel room and take enough sleeping pills.”

“So they’ll find your body in the morning and that’ll restore your image? When he finds out, Jack will be devastated. Which do you think he’d rather have – a live fiancée who’s suffered a career setback, but can still be there to plan new initiatives and share the highs and the lows with him – or a dead body in a hotel room?”

I don’t know what I said that might have turned the tide. Or maybe it was nothing I said. Maybe it was the teddy bear.

But I think it was a friend’s seeing that her concern was with losing face – which is a concern with honor. What I did was take that concern as seriously as she did and try to address it on its own terms.

Another friend who contemplated suicide had a more classic motivation. She had joined a self-help group whose members included a guy who took it upon himself to be specially supportive to newcomers. In that capacity, he had managed to get her into his bed. It was unlikely that she was the first, or would be the last, to be taken advantage of in that manner.

Of course, in the aftermath she hated herself and wanted – with all her proud Iberian soul – to die. Nothing less would do justice to such a dishonor.

As a concept, nowadays honor is thought to belong to a pre-modern era. All I can say is, not in my experience.

I began what was understood to be our farewell dinner by accepting her view of honor as well as her view of its defeat. With me that acceptance didn’t have to field objections – whether philosophical, psychological or feminist. Like her, I too thought honor was real – though it played out differently for a woman than for a man – and you could lose it. If I had to defend that view on the terrain of philosophical argument, I might be in difficulties. But in real life, I knew what I knew.

So what did I say? I didn’t contest her loss. I fully granted the difficulties that encounter had put her in. I simply pointed out that this dog-of-a-man and his abuse of power wasn’t worth her life! Why honor him with her uncured defeat? Let him live to regret the loss of her charms and the ignominy of her contempt.

Did my interventions cost me anything? Yes. It cost me both friends. I assume that neither friend wanted an inconvenient witness to moments of defeat that otherwise would have been visible only to themselves. I respected their decisions.

On balance, I’m willing to accept the loss.

As long as they’re alive!

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged a daughter’s suicide, academic colleagues, academic friends, arguing a friend out of suicide, career setback, classic suicidal motivation, collegial friends, dishonor and Iberian culture, dishonor and suicide, feminist objections to “honor”, honor and modernity, honor as premodern concept, honor for men vs honor for women, impressing a romantic partner, loss of honor, loss of honor for men vs loss of honor for women, lost honor and suicide, official feminism and women’s reality, payback for the seducer, philosophical defense of “honor”, philosophical friends, philosophical objections to “honor”, philosophy professor, planning suicide, professional defeat, professional setback, psychological objections to “honor”, reasons for suicide, reasons women kill themselves, responding to a friend in crisis, restoring honor, romance and status, romantic eligibility, romantic setback, saving a friend at the cost of losing her, seducer, seducer as pretended supporter, seducer in self-help group, seduction and abuse of power, seduction and wanting to die, setbacks in work and romance, suicidal woman, suicide, suicide aftermath, suicide and counterargument, suicide and losing face, suicide and loss of honor, suicide and professional setback, suicide and tarnished image, suicide threat, taking advantage of a woman, taking advantage of vulnerability, taking threats seriously, talking a friend out of suicide, vulnerability and the seducer, witnessing a friend’s defeat, worthiness for romance | 3 Comments

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

It's not over.

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Recent Posts