Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

A Subtle Earthquake

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Abigail

The ‘Great Western’ Riding a Tidal Wave, 11 December 1844 by Joseph Walter, 1845.

In yesterday morning’s meditation, the message that came through was unprecedented. It was a large image of me, lying flat on my back, neither going anywhere nor trying to. Usually, when I get an image, I try to discern the words into which the image can be translated. As near as I could figure, they were these:

Any and all attempts at transcendence

or even vision with regard to the future –

any future, long or short –

should not be indulged.

Don’t rise above it,

and don’t try to.

I don’t think I’ve ever got a message of that sort in my whole life. Like most people, I’ve been in the becalmed doldrums before, of course. But I’ve never gotten guidance to be there! Plus this further word of advice:

Try staying there.

It’s alogon. It defies the logos – the light-shedding power of reasonable speech. At earlier times in my life, there have usually been people, human or institutional relationships, or treatment protocols to whom (or to which) I could turn when the inner springs of motivation failed.

Looking at the human resources “in principle” available to me from three of the directions accessible where I live now: there’s (a) Israel, where the most interesting members of my mother’s family have been native since Ottoman times and were part of the founding generation; there’s (b) my Reform Temple, where I continue to attend zoom meetings of Torah Study and pay dues; there’s (c) my California neuropathy specialist, with whom I have a patient/healer relationship.

I put to one side my loving bond with Jerry. Not even true love, not even friendship, can, by itself, fill up the void in personal motivation. Such a void constitutes a crisis in a person’s life, and there’s no point buttering it up to make it taste better.

So, what’s happened to each of these relationships?

Re (a) Israel: a consequential misdeed affecting personal relationships, committed by a close family member, came to my attention and – since there was no one else to do it – I pointed out the woeful wrongness to the person responsible and what he must do to repair it. Whether or not my letter to that person had the hoped-for effect, one consequence would be clear from the outset. Were I to visit Israel and not stay with these relatives, questions would be raised. Why not? So I would not visit, the letter would break my ties with that part of my family and barr any harmonious future visits to family in Israel.

Re (b) my Temple: I was alone in pressing the then temple leadership to banish a certain predator who’d been approaching the women “inappropriately.” As happens all too often with whistle-blowers, I was the one initially blamed. Though the bad actor was eventually ousted, and the failed leadership replaced, at the time, no one stepped forward to repair the broken trust between me and the temple leadership. By now, most of the players have moved on, but my sad indignation hasn’t moved on.

Re (c) my neuropathy practitioner: at last visit, he initiated a new approach, but failed to set aside the requisite time to bring my balance feature into line with the new approach. As a result, I’ve never been at so high a risk of falling and have been virtually house-bound for the past two months. Meanwhile, I’ve naturally wondered whether he can repair my skewed balance, my impaired safety – and with these the trust required for the continued therapeutic relationship.

*. *. *

So what’s brought me to full stop now? Except for the last, neither of the first two events happened recently. Yet the call to stop-in-my-tracks came only yesterday. And it doesn’t seem right to try to pole-vault over the felt impasse that resulted, in order just to “forget it” and get on with new projects. Instead, I might have to take a further look at events #1 through #3.

What about Israel, which was #1 on my psychical list – where “psyche” means soul? What I sense, just now, is an intimation, or dimly moving invitation to connect with God’s people and country (I didn’t say divinity’s only people or country) on a deeper level. To leave the blockage where it lies, uncured, but dig down to a level more fundamental.

What level would that be? I think of what I saw the first time, looking down from my El Al flight, as it circled the Promised Land for a landing:

There it is again.

How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time!

Actually, without knowing how or why, I had just moved to another level. Now for the first time I saw that the turgid torments of my family belonged to the suffering, the blood and the waste, of the birth and rebirth pangs of The Promised Land. So, when I wrote my relative so fatefully, perhaps I helped cauterize some of such wounds and minimize their attendant soul damage.

Now what about #2, my temple? By now at last, the temple has wholesome leadership and can go ahead – wedded to our era, to modernity. What I contributed was to help prevent irreversible harm, and prevent scandal, thereby helping to cauterize the wounds of earlier misdirection. That was my assignment and I have carried it through. Had my efforts received proper credit (which typically such efforts do not receive) – that very credit might have interfered with the completion of the righteous assignment.

Finally, #3, about my neuropathy treatments: what I did today (before setting out to write this column) was to email my practitioner, bringing the whole of my impaired present condition to his attention – I think tactfully but accurately – and doing that prior to seeing him in California next week. It’s all I can now do. But that will give him time to think in advance about my case. Now I’ll see what, if anything, he can do about it. *

With that – the two sets of reflections and the email – it seemed that the subtle earthquake was over. In its place came the inner message that –

I can move on now.

*In an email received this morning, he’s chagrined and eager to repair the damage.

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 a reason for reasoning, absence of sincere motivation, absent basis for reasoning, advocating for oneself with medical care, alogon or inexpressibility, alogon or without reason, avoiding escapism, being in the doldrums, birth and rebirth pangs, breaking an unwritten law, broken institutional trust, cauterizing spiritual wounds, choice between good and evil, circling the promised land, costly choice for the right principle, damaging therapeutic relationship, directionlessness, emotional earthquake, facing problems to move on, facing the present, failure of basis for reasoning, failure of leadership, failure of religious leadership, fake rising above it, fake transcendence, finding personal motivation, inner springs of motivation, institutional trust, Israel modern and ancient, leadership breakdown, moral choice in family relations, morally consequential choice, motivational void as personal crisis, motivation’s absence, multi-generation trauma, ousting a predator, Personal crisis, predator in religious institution, reasonable speech, rebirth pangs of Israel, refusing transcendence, religious leadership that is sacrilegious, repairing soul damage, shooting the albatross, soul damage, spiritual directive to stop, spiritual earthquake, spiritual impasse, spiritual wounds, springboard for reasoning, taking care of business, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the spiritual dimension, therapeutic relationship that is counter therapeutic, void in personal motivation, when reason is powerless, whistleblower | Leave a comment

Revisited: Abigail’s Brilliant Career

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Abigail

The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 17th, 1997: Saving the Core

Early this afternoon – just when I was about to take that rueful look in the rearview mirror promised in the title of this column – Jerry called my attention to something on the Internet that surprised me a whole lot. “Stunned” would be nearer the mark.

Jerry had put on the Internet this question: “What is Abigail L Rosenthal known for?” On a number of sites, the answers (quoting people I greatly respect) were positive and overwhelmingly so – in their seriousness, contentful density, absence of hype or padding, and credibility.

Was I surprised? Yeah. I was pretty much knocked flat, open-mouthed, speechless and not-at-all-geared-for-this.

Mind, when I was a New Yorker, the urban skill that I prized most was my ability to walk the crowded city streets and not be seen! Only one woman I knew was superior in this regard: a Muslim student of mine to whom I was very close, who told me that – if she were raped – her brothers would make her marry the rapist! Okay, so she was better than I was at the Craft of Invisibility. But I was pretty good at it – maybe second best. So now, to find myself portrayed as intellectually accomplished and influential was – let me assure you – no part of my self-image.

To see more clearly the context in which so inconvenient a truth comes to my attention, consider my most recent life review. I’d been calling to mind “my brilliant career” (publications and public talks aside) on three of its former fronts:

Brooklyn College from which, some years back, I had retired as Professor Emerita;
My local Reform temple, from which I had also withdrawn, save for Saturday morning Torah Study;
Manhattan, where I had lived – in the same upper east side neighborhood – almost continuously since shortly after I was born.

In Brooklyn College (1), I had had a string of improbable victories. First – after being fired repeatedly, I mean for seven consecutive years, following my vote for the losing candidate in an election for Head of the Philosophy Department – finally and improbably, I won reinstatement with tenure.

Next I, together with two colleagues in the History Department, successfully defended the college’s much-praised, wide-ranging core curriculum. We defeated the attempt, by the college’s new president, to replace it with “Brooklyn Connections,” a curriculum he wanted to introduce that was narrowly centered on the borough of Brooklyn.

The story of our fight – and eventual win – made the front pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education (see above) and The Jewish Daily Forward, as well as a full-page favorable editorial in the New York Post.

At the time of that fight, I was advised to contact Jerry Martin who headed an organization in D.C. that defended excellence in higher education. Since he gave us important guidance, I called him frequently and we talked at length. (A year later, as New York papers also reported, our conversations got more private and personal and we got married!)

So far, all I’ve recounted about Brooklyn College are some of my fights and the victories at their finales. However, when presently I look back at the college I loved, one defeat looms, and it was not a small one. Having heard, from a source we all respected, that Jewish students and faculty at the College were starting to suffer from an unprecedented upsurge of anti-semitism, I met with my two closest allies from the “Brooklyn Connections” fight. What I hoped was that, together, the three of us might figure out what could be done to roll back this strange new tide of bigotry.

Much to my surprise, my two non-Jewish colleagues responded to my concern with – ridicule! The following day, each woman sent emails crafted to be personally and professionally respectful, but not touching the reason I’d met with them. Though we did not quarrel – what for? – I never wanted to see them again.

Moving on now, what do I remember about (2) my local Reform temple – from the days when I was a much more active member than I am now? The present Board and new rabbinic leadership looks to me fine and dedicated. But in former times the relations that I had with my temple were closer. I pass over the struggles – there was one after another – with regard to early signs of the new anti-semitism. By now – after the atrocities of October 7 and 8 of 2023 – and the celebration of them by universities and other respectable types worldwide, the days of trying-not-to-notice are finally over. But then, all degrees and types of eye-avertings were deemed normal. I fought that.

My present distance from the temple has to do with a different issue – the ousting of a predator. He was not a temple member, therefore had no business to be ubiquitous in our environs, but had managed to win over the most influential member of the temple leadership. He was behaving “inappropriately,” as they say, with the women, even including female Board members, and was, as I saw it, a bad guy as well as a public scandal waiting to happen.

Eventually, the predator was kicked out, and the leader who’d defended him ousted. But not before the whistle-blower (that’s me) had first to refute false accusations and anti-social rudeness – at the leader’s behest but with the acquiescence of the Board.

Since nobody who played any part in all that ever apologized, and most of those directly involved have since left the temple, the wound it left in me remains uncured.

Of course, in the real world, not every wound gets cured. In this case, it might be that my pain keeps the record. After all, Jewish memory has the task – the historical assignment – of preserving the record!

And then there is (3) Manhattan. What part did my old neighborhood – once my home town – play in my recent life review? What I cherished in the neighborhood was not only the museums, the cafes and the well-known streets. It felt easier to face my philosophic frontiers, whatever they were, just because the streets retained their ever-welcoming familiarity.

So, did something change? Yes, something did. Someone connected to me by ties of family – whose effort to bring me under her control I had resisted successfully – then took the extraordinary step of meeting with collegial friends of mine and inherited family friends to spread credible-sounding defamatory fictions about me.

Was she believed? Why yes! In her astutely-targeted effort at vengeance, she was almost entirely successful! Regarding the interesting question of how to fight defamatory lies when they are believed by former close friends, I did not – and do not – know the answer. It’s best to have many friends who will believe you. My mother might have known. She had more friends and was tougher than I was. But my structure is permeable and there’s not much I can do about that.

So, my defeat would have had no obvious remedy – had I not just then happened to fall in love with Jerry and had we not then decided, as a couple, to leave our previous environs, his in Washington and mine in Manhattan, to move to our new home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

So, what’s the moral of these three “defeats”? Well, there was one thing I did keep intact:

personal integrity.

And it might be that – without fanfare – that is life’s essential victory.

_________________

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 a woman’s real career, a woman’s unseen career, Abigail’s marriage gets in the papers, academic politics, academic tenure, anonymity as urban skill, antisemitism and denial, antisemitism at Brooklyn College, believing a damaging lie, blaming the whistleblower, brilliant career, Brooklyn College, brothers who are bullies, defamatory fictions, defamatory fictions believed, defending the Brooklyn College core, defending the core curriculum, digital footprint, editorial in The New York Post, failing to defeat defamation, failing to fight the new antisemitism, female self image, fighting defamation, fighting for academic standards, fighting slander, fighting the new antisemitism, fired for voting wrong, former allies turning their backs, former colleagues’ indifference to antisemitism, heaven protects the working girl, historical assignment of the Jews, improbable victories in academe, internet reviews, invisibility as a skill, Jerry L. Martin defending excellence in higher ed, Jewish memory, Jews and preserving the record, life in the rear view mirror, life revisited, Manhattan as hometown, Muslim girls, Muslim women’s unseen tragedies, online reputation, ousting a predator, personal integrity, philosophic frontiers, philosophic frontiers and familiar streets, preserving personal integrity, Reform temple, reputation in multiple fields, scandal waiting to happen, self image of woman intellectual, self image of woman philosopher, slandering the resister to unfair control, the old neighborhood, the old neighborhood and life-memories, the past revisited, uncured social wounds, uncured wounds for the whistleblower, unseen in a crowd, winning reinstatement, woman’s self-image, women’s unseen tragedies, wounds to reputation, write up in The Chronicle of Higher Education, write up in The Jewish Daily Forward, write up in The New York Post | Leave a comment

Women in Real Life

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie’s talk at Stony Brook.

“I hesitated for a long time before writing a book on women. … Are there even women?”

So begins Simone de Beauvoir’s culture-upending book, The Second Sex, in French Le Deuxième Sexe, published in 1949 by Gallimard. Some years later – but years before it was translated – and before “second wave” feminism burst on the American landscape, I read Beauvoir along with other Fulbright fellowship young women in my circle of friends in Paris. Her two-volume book fascinated us. We argued about it. If she won us over, if we took the fateful step and became ourselves “feminists,” would we be risking something – our femininity perhaps? We weren’t sure how to define femininity, but in those days the culture assured us that it was always at risk!

The 1963 launching of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, generally gets the credit for launching “second wave” feminism as a twentieth century American social and political movement. It went beyond women’s earlier-secured right to vote, now targeting the social assumptions, codes, values and boundaries that still affected the lives of women.

I was friends with some of the players in that movement: the late and dear Barbara Seaman, the earnest and devoted Fran Klagsbrun – and feel now honored to count Phyllis Chesler as my friend. She’s the heroine of the battle for women’s rights in psychiatric settings, author of Women and Madness, also An American Bride in Kabul and many other well-documented reports from the frontiers of women’s continued suffering. So the best of the “second wave” goes on.

But where exactly is “the woman question” to be found today? Are young women getting good advice nowadays? What do courtship patterns look like now? Does anyone know? What do women’s hopes, daydreams and disappointments look like at present? Where are women situated in the culture’s imagination – say, its courtship dance – today?

Recently I’ve been devoting several columns to a volume of essays by philosophers, collected under the title, The Philosophy of Sex. By and large, they seem to me to write less astutely about human desire – and to take eros less seriously – than Plato did. I applaud their social courage in trying to think about it, but doubt they’ve got much deeper than the surface.

Also, now that feminism per se is no longer controversial, what recent contributions can be credited to the “public feminists” of today?

Well, where real-life flesh and blood women are concerned, they – the majority of recent public feminists – look to me unprotective. So for example, where in many Muslim-majority countries women lack the legal and social rights taken for granted in the secular West, the typical Western feminists are not even expressing concern. (As usual, the ever-fearless Phyllis Chesler remains the exception to this generalization.) Closer to home, most public feminists haven’t tried to protect women athletes from having to compete against – and naturally losing to – biologically male competitors claiming to be women in tennis matches, foot races, wrestling matches and other such contests! Admittedly, it’s harder to articulate the problem if you’re publicly committed to the view that womanhood has nothing much to do with biology!

Similarly, if you can’t keep curious or predatory men out of women’s bathrooms because you believe that “womanhood is a social construct,” maybe you ought to revisit your belief. And that goes double for men-claiming-to-be-women being housed in prison cells with women made vulnerable to rape thereby. Or the latest horror I’ve read about: men-claiming-to-be-women allowed to strip search newly imprisoned women.

Gosh,

feminists –

if you care about women –

stop these abuses!

You can fix your concepts later!

In sum, “feminism,” in its more recent public appearances, has seemed to lack both the conceptual tools and the sympathy required for the protection of actual women who find themselves vulnerable.

If one doesn’t fix clearly in one’s mind the biological and social vulnerability of women, one’s public “feminism” won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

A question comes to mind: What kinds of acculturation are girls and young women getting nowadays? (Alongside women, the same question goes to young men.)

If, for reasons of collective guilt, or guilt-tripping, the culture does not honor itself or celebrate its better angels, it becomes that much harder to find the plotline – the romance – in one’s own personal life story.

These concerns may have gone out of style. However, the motivating realities have not been superceded. In women’s or men’s personal stories, the romantic destiny, lived, unlived, attained or missed is – still and always –

the main event.

__________

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 20th century political movement, admitting women’s vulnerability, American political movement, American social movement, An American Bride in Kabul by Chesler, Barbara Seaman, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, books on women, boys’ contemporary acculturation, claim that woman is social construct, collective guilt and feminists, creating space for women’s equality, creating space for women’s vulnerabilities, current courtship patterns, eros and contemporary philosophy, eros in Plato, femininity at risk, feminism and social courage, feminism and women’s protection, feminism and women’s rights in Islam, feminist concepts and women, feminists and femininity, feminists with unprotective concepts, first-wave feminism, Francine Klagsbrun, Fulbright Fellowship in Paris, girls’ contemporary acculturation, influence of Beauvoir, influence of The Second Sex, men claiming to be women, men in jail cells with women, men’s contemporary acculturation, men’s romantic destiny, personal life story, Phyllis Chesler, Phyllis Chesler and Afghan women, protecting women’s vulnerability, psychiatry and women’s rights, public feminists, reading Beauvoir in Paris, romance and antiromance, romance as the main event, second wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, sympathy for women, sympathy for women’s vulnerability, the courtship dance, The Philosophy of Sex, The Woman Question, unprotective feminists, women and good advice, Women and Madness by Chesler, women and social values, women in the culture’s imagination, women’s biological vulnerability, women’s contemporary acculturation, women’s daydreams, women’s disappointments, women’s equality and biological fact, women’s hopes, women’s life stories, women’s rights, women’s rights in Islam, women’s rights in prisons, women’s romantic destiny, women’s social vulnerability | 2 Comments

The Ins and Outs of Sex

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Abigail

Today I’m getting back to The Philosophy of Sex, the collection of essays we’ve visited before. It’s the volume where philosophers wade hip deep into the dark waters of sex and how to think about it. This time I’ll start with the essay by Thomas A. Mappes, “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person.”

His question is, When is sex wrong? What kinds of moral restrictions should operate in sexual relations? Referencing Kant, he assumes that any human interaction that uses other persons without at the same time recognizing their “authority … to conduct their individual lives as they see fit” must be morally wrong. So, on the face of it, it’s wrong to interact sexually with people who are drugged or drunk or to interact sexually with children. The drugged, the drunk and children all lack the requisite authority. They are not and cannot be making the choice to be intimate.

When else is sex wrong? It’s wrong to engage in sex under false pretenses. For instance, it’s wrong to pretend love to get sexual advantage when you don’t love. Pretending you’re not married when you are is wrong. Likewise pretending that you don’t have herpes when you do. Also pretending you’ve had a vasectomy and can’t get a woman pregnant, when you haven’t (had one) and you can (impregnate her). And it’s wrong to withhold information that‘s relevant to intimacy (such as not telling the desired woman that you’ve already slept with her sister).

Well, no pun intended but Mappes is here helping to map the rocks and shoals of our current, not-so-free “free love.”

And of course coercion is wrong. Here he goes into degrees and types of coercion – also look-alikes that aren’t clear cases. Obviously, rape that uses or threatens force, is coercive – “occurrent” if force is used and “dispositional” if it’s only threatened. But coercion can occur in more subtle ways, via overt or implied threats to reputation, or the withholding of benefits to which the targeted person would be otherwise entitled.

Mappes also provides some fine distinctions that further illuminate the terrain of sexual wrongdoing. Offers of benefits in return for sex, like an undeserved higher grade or a chance to star in a film, don’t qualify as threats if they can be safely refused – however unprofessional or morally questionable such offers may otherwise be. At the same time, Mappes is aware of subtleties such as implied threats.

Finally, Mappes adds that it is wrong to coerce sex (or any human response) by taking advantage of people who find themselves in desperate situations where choice is still available but almost-prohibitively costly.

This essay is modestly instructive in that it describes the don’ts of sexual activity – without pretending to offer any more encompassing theory of the do’s.

*. *. *

Now on to the essay by Seiriol Morgan, which bears the ominous title of “Dark Desires.” His rather arresting (and perhaps atypical) view is that mere noncoerciveness or mutual consent is (while necessary) not sufficient to establish the moral permissibility of a sexual act. Desires themselves can be “dark.” That it feels good is not reason enough to do it. A trait he terms “ethical sensitivity” is also required.

Sexual desire cannot be adequately seen as a simple, unadorned animal appetite. (Morgan doesn’t go into it, but in fact many animal species engage in elaborate courtship rituals prior to their physical consummations.) In our human lives, “mental operations” involving both “self-consciousness and … immersion in society” affect “the character of the pleasure …” And, when the sex is “meaningful … pleasure is taken in an act experienced as being pleasurable for both partners.”

Morgan’s emphasis on the pleasure of the person you care about (which he offers as the corrective to egocentric, me-centered pleasure), still strikes me as abstract and irrelevant to the main event. So what main event am I thinking about?

Passionate merging.

Morgan’s main point is not just that sex is not motivated by pleasurable sensations abstracted from context, but also that sex life admits of a wide range of motivations, including “dark desires.” Thus Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel of cynicism, portrays the aristocratic Vicomte de Valmont seducing a virtuous matron, Madame de Tourvel, for the satisfaction he gets from defeating her virtue!

In addition, Morgan traces some of the subtleties that shadow the new erotic freedoms. Thus it can be a moral mistake to give in to another’s love and desire if that love is unrequited. Or, in a different case: “Sometimes it can be perfectly obvious that someone’s ignorance or inexperience … is leading them to ruin, and that aiding them in their self-destructive project is not the kind thing to do.”

At the close of his essay, we find a change of tone. Morgan is suddenly at pains to counter any impression he may have inadvertently given of himself as a narrow-minded puritan. By way of underscoring this last concern, he lists “consensual practices and relationships” which “demonstrate [his] liberal credentials.” By my count, he lists twenty-four of them, some quite unknown to me.

If it’s not pornographic to ask, isn’t he bending over backwards?

*. *. *

Last, I looked at an essay with a completely different theme: “Asexuality” by Luke Brunning and Natasha McKeever. Their points seem worth making, though the essay’s tortuous struggles over definitions, with charts, shed little light on what look to me to be the actual concerns of these authors.

What do they want to point out? I guess it’s that asexuality is not per se a pathology, sexuality is not necessarily “central to human life,” nor is sexuality “the only respect in which we can be attracted to people.” Nor should asexuality be mistaken for “lack of concern for others.”

So it follows that, whether or not one’s life energies find sexual expression,

an erotic life –

the life of desire –

remains available.

___________

The Three-Tiered Real World

Posted on September 8, 2026 by Abigail

The Three Tiers: The Everyday, The Moral and The Spiritual

As of last night, we’re back from the Eric Voegelin Society meetings in Boston, where Jerry and I each gave talks. The late Eric Voegelin is not widely known among philosophers, religionists or political scientists, though he worked in all three sectors of those contemporary thought-worlds. Among contemporary thinkers about political reality, he may be unique in that (1) he takes in everyday experience, (2) he does not pretend neutrality about the moral dimensions of human experience, and (3) he recognizes that there are spiritual dimensions embedded in human reality.

Of course, anthropologists, sociologists and other academically respectable students of the human panorama do in fact observe and record the styles of life considered good or bad in the cultures they study – which is where those practices do get rewarded or punished. But Western academics would feel obligated by their respective disciplines to steer clear of any evaluative judgment of their own that could be considered “moral.” And the same goes for any rating of a practice within a society in terms of criteria purportedly “spiritual.” The tendency would be to treat any such judgment as an intercultural usurpation where the standards of the observer’s culture were being applied – disrespectfully and out of context – to the culture of the people being observed.

Well, aside from the present requirements of academic protocol, what’s the fact of the matter? Are the moral/spiritual dimensions of human life in society entirely relative – culturally and personally? Is there no fact of the matter? Do the relativists, cultural and subjective, have the last word?

I don’t think so. Here’s a case study from Abigail’s life. Having been originally endorsed by my senior colleagues for promotion, I was fired – then fired again and yet again over seven consecutive years – by the same senior colleagues who had originally voted for my promotion. These firings began at the first opportunity to do so, right after my dissenting vote in a Departmental election for the post of Philosophy Department Head.

In the course of my fight to get my job back, an Arbitration hearing was held. There I testified under oath for five hours. The senior professors who had fired me also testified under oath. When you’re telling the truth, you’re unlikely to get floored by leading questions. By contrast, when you’ve fired a colleague whom previously you had found meritorious – acting not on the merits but because of the way that colleague had voted – you just have to lie more. At some point, one lie under oath or another can get exposed. And that’s why I won the Arbitration.

So the moral dimension is not merely a “matter of opinion.” But what about the spiritual dimension? Certainly academic inquirers into cultures around the world have discovered that there are many approaches to the divine – approaches that differ in accordance with the tastes and talents of different cultures.

So, does it follow that – with regard to the spiritual dimension of human existence – “who is to say” who is right about God, or about whatever really is divine?

Well, that can follow, but only up to a point. Up to what point? Look, life on the spiritual level is not life in one-big-single-happy-but-blurry dimension. Spirituality contains and includes a scale with – I’m sorry but let’s face it – the demonic at the lower end of the spiritual scale and the saintly at the upper end.

All this is background framing our several days at the Boston meetings of the Eric Voegelin Society – Voegelin being the bold modern thinker who did recognize the moral and the spiritual dimensions in his studies of different civilizations in history. I found it refreshing – soothing even – to be in the company of people who were intellectually trained, highly intelligent and honest – whose thinking about human life took in all three dimensions of reality: (1) the ground-level experiential, but also (2) the moral and (3) the spiritual dimensions.

Eric Voegelin

I won’t try to recap the conference papers, which took in many areas of contemporary life – such as the American Bill of Rights, theology in relation to political life, concepts of leadership in ancient and modern life, academic freedom, the political insights available in literature, political trauma, and so on. But I will share a couple of personal anecdotes.

Two of the speakers at the EVS meetings were young Lithuanians, Simas Čelutka and Aistė Noreikaitė, both from Vilnius University. After their session, “Person and Play as the Path of Literature,” I got into conversation with them and mentioned that I had an 18th century ancestor on my mother’s side who was a rabbi known in the more rationalist (as opposed to Hassidic) school of rabbinic study as the Gaon (or Sage) of Vilna.

The Gaon of Vilna

Of course, had he lived and taught in the twentieth century, my ancestor would have been murdered along with the other Jews of Lithuania. But much to my surprise, not only had these two young academics heard of the Gaon, they told me that today – in post-Nazi, post-Soviet Lithuania – he is celebrated! I’m not sure, but I think they said that there is a statue of him in Vilna. Or at least something commemorative. So my ancestor is well known! Anyway, these two young contemporary academics wanted their pictures taken with me, to show their friends that they had met a real-life descendant of the Vilna Gaon!

There were other, meaningful encounters, but the one I’ll share was with James Greenaway. He gave a fine paper but here I’ll single out the brief conversation we had after his session. He told me that, for him, the whole world changed after October 7 and 8, 2023.

As you may recall, that year on October 7th, jihadi invaders of peaceful kibbutzim and a music festival attended by young people, came over the border of Israel – on hang gliders and other unexpected conveyances – to torture, rape and murder the old, the young, the pregnant, babes in utero, grandparents – using modes of torture new even in the long history of atrocity. They photographed these nightmares-they-had-made-actual, bragging about them to their families and to the world at large. Whereas the Nazis and the Soviets hid their crimes, showing some sense of shame or else aware that their public might not like what they did, these jihadis publicized their atrocities.

But there was more. By October 8th, the demonic villainies of Hamas were being celebrated all over our planet, but most saliently by faculty and students in universities worldwide!

These two-fold events assaulted the fundaments of meaning in my world. Their effects, physical and psychological, won’t be described here. Despite what some people claim to believe, atrocities are not interesting.

By contrast real life is interesting. And by real life, I mean the kind of human life that is not demonic. However, I have not typically met with academics – people who live on the intellectual, moral and spiritual proceeds of The House that Plato Built – taking me aside to volunteer that they shared my sense of unassimilable shock. For Greenaway, as for me, the events of those days have divided the knowable world into the contours that it had prior to October 7th and 8th on the one side and, on the other side, an unrecognizable world thereafter.

*. *. *

Such unexpected and varied moments – each characterized by its own empirical, moral or spiritual accuracy – combined to make this Voegelin conference well worth our long drive to Boston.

_________

Related Content: How Can We Know If It’s God?

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 18th century ancestor, 18th century Sage, academic freedom discussed at the Voegelin meetings, academic job fight and arbitration, academic politics, academic protocol, academic protocol and moral judgment, academic quarrel, anthropologists and styles of life, arbitration hearing, assault on fundaments of meaning, celebrating atrocities of October 7, civilizations evaluated morally and spiritually, civilizations in history, complexities of reality, contemporary Lithuanian academics, contemporary thought-worlds, cultural relativism, Eric Voegelin meetings in Boston, Eric Voegelin Society, events of October 7 and 8 2023, fundaments of meaning in Western culture, Gaon of Vilna, human life's moral and spiritual dimensions, human reality, James Greenaway, Jews of Lithuania, jihadi atrocities of October 7, jihadi invaders of kibbutzim, jihadi invaders of music festival, moral dimensions, moral judgment and cultural relativism, moral relativism, October 7 and university celebrations, October 8th celebration of atrocities, papers at the Voegelin meetings in Boston, political insights at the Voegelin meetings, political trauma, post-Nazi Lithuania, post-Soviet Lithuania, presentations at the Voegelin meetings in Boston, Sage of Vilna, Simas Čelutka and Aistė Noreikaitė, sociologists and relativism, spiritual dimensions, spirituality and academic disciplines, spirituality and blurry thinking, spirituality and the demonic, spirituality and the saintly, subjective relativism and spirituality, testifying falsely under oath, testifying truthfully under oath, testimony under oath, the academy before and after October 7, the divine dimension and relativism, the divine dimension of life, the Gaon celebrated in Vilna, the House that Plato Built, the spiritual dimension of human existence, the spiritual scale, the world before and after October 7, theology in political life, Vilnius University, Voegelin and philosophers, Voegelin and political scientists, Voegelin and political trauma, Voegelin and religionists, Voegelin and the moral and spiritual dimensions | 1 Comment

Authenticity Adios

Posted on September 1, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week giving a talk at the Eric Voegelin Society. This column was originally posted on Aril 11, 2023, and continues to be timely. She’ll be back at her post next week.

______________________

The philosopher who first brought “authenticity” to public notice was, I believe, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). According to a recent book, Tyranny and Revolution by Waller Newell, Heidegger’s notion went like this: you and I are to be grasped as localizations of Being – hence Heidegger’s term for us, Dasein – being there. In case you expected that so vast a foundation would give us depth and stability, think again! Being itself is shot through and through with temporality (time’s passage).

To get to the point about authenticity: it’s only reached when our very fleetingness is faced square on, along with awareness that we’re headed toward the end of ourselves (Being-Toward-Death).

So what’s inauthentic, for Heidegger? It would be any assumption that we live in an environment that’s stable and solid. Gossip relies on such an assumption. So do conventional opinions. Ordinary obituaries and condolences carry that implication. They convert the uncanniness at the bottom of human existence into “news” – something seeming familiar and commonplace.

All this sounds pretty deep, does it not? Many people take it that way. Whether or not they like him, Heidegger is widely conceded to be gifted, original and – in his own special way – authentic.

The fact that he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – telling all the students in his class who were Jewish to get out, sending a termination of status notice to Edmund Husserl (his former teacher who’d got him the professorship at Freiburg) and backing Nazi policies that would have got Husserl murdered together with Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former student and lover (if the first had not died and the second escaped) – did not strike him as deleting anything from his authenticity.

I recall mentioning some of these awkward details during a seminar I taught on existentialism and being scolded by a student for my “judgmentalism.” Judgmentalism? Since I’d never slept with any student, nor with my professors, nor tried to get any murdered, this student had a point. Don’t judge someone if you haven’t walked a mile in his moccasins. Or his lederhosen.

Be that as it may, we still have to reckon with the notion of authenticity. Ideas travel. This one crosses into France, where Jean-Paul Sartre makes it his own. Sartre puts more emphasis on its contrary: bad faith (mauvaise foi). Though each of us has recognizable traits of character and style, for Sartre these depend entirely on our own free choice, which we can change at any time. So the waiter who brings our coffee, at our usual hangout on St. Germain des Pres, is in bad faith insofar as he believes he really is – the waiter – at which he plays.

Likewise, in another example from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the appealing young woman who has joined someone like Sartre at his café table – he having meanwhile placed his hand on hers – will be in bad faith if she pretends to ignore this little transaction rather than frankly admit her own lusts.

Hmm. I’ve never waited tables but the other incident is as recognizable as it is embarrassing. I can tell you that her main concern will focus on how to slide her hand out from under the hand of a celebrated French intellectual without showing up in a book about bad faith.

Wait a minute! Anecdotes like these can’t possibly add up to all there is to say about authenticity, can they?

Lionel Trilling, one of the leading opinion-shapers of the twentieth century, wrote a book called Sincerity and Authenticity. In it he describes authenticity as a power to resist the opinions of others and instead steer one’s own singular course in life. Citing Sartre’s play, No Exit (Huis Clos), in which a character says, “Hell is other people,” Trilling finds “the infernal outcome of modern social existence” to lie in the fact that “the sentiment of individual being depends upon other people.”

Hey, get real! Without other people, we can’t learn to walk on two legs, we can’t acquire language, we’ll fail to acquire the use of the prehensile thumb and … need I go on? At some point along the road of adulthood, we might well find that our integrity requires us to go against the grain of other peoples’ opinions. We’d prefer to do it quietly and not have to pay too much for it. It’s not fun or enviable to have to do it. Inevitably, it’s a choice between greater and lesser evils.

Back to “authenticity.” In my experience, it doesn’t wear well. At one time, the counter-culture descended on the little town in Maine where my parents had a summer home. It was the era of authenticity. The young men worked on their great, abstract, metal sculptures; the young women taught school to pay for the raw materials. One time, visiting one of these rather beautiful young couples, I asked, feeling thirsty, “Do you have running water?”

“Charge you a nickel if I run,” came the wry response, which to me had the very sound – alike dashing and earthy – of authenticity!

A few decades later, I ran into the same couple at a summer art fair. His pony tail had turned grey, the art was no better, and they were looking remarkably like the bourgeois types that long ago they had so attractively repudiated.

I can’t remember ever wanting to be authentic. I just wanted to find out what belonged to me to do in life,

whether or not

it resembled

what other people did.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, alienation, American politics, anthropology, art, art of living, atheism, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, books, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, female power, femininity, feminism, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, Idealism-, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, institutional power, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, nineteenth-century, novels, ontology, oppression, past and future, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, roles, romance, romantic love, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, 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, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged antihero, Authenticity, before the fall, being-toward-death, bourgeois morality, choice of evils, conformism, conventional opinion, counterculture, counterculture and creative artists, Dasein, death as news, epater le bourgeois, era of authenticity, fashionable nonconformity, fashionable outlaws, female powerlessness, finding one’s calling, finding one’s own path, getting real, girls and French intellectuals, go along to get along, gossip, Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and existentialism, Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, Heidegger and Nazism, Heidegger Rector of University of Freiburg, Heidegger's authenticity, Heidegger's Jewish students, Hell is other people, hippies, hippy communes, inauthentic, inauthentic depth, infant dependency, integrity and conformism, integrity in society, Jean-Paul Sartre's Authenticity, judgment and judgmentalism, judgmentalism, Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, Martin Heidegger, middle class values, nonconformity à la mode, obituaries and condolences, other-directedness, outlaw chic, pony tails turning grey, prelapsarian innocence, put out or I'll put you in my book, Sartre and the waiter, Sartre on courtship, Sartre's advice to young women, Sartre's bad faith, Sartre's Huis Clos, Sartre's mauvaise foi, Sartre's No Exit, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, talent as an excuse, the counterculture and women, uncanniness in Heidegger, Walter Newell's Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger | 1 Comment

Bad Faith at Sartre’s Cafe

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This column was originally posted on December 7, 2021, and continues to be timely.

______________________

It may be of interest to note that post-World War II feminism (the “second wave”) was written-into-being by Simone de Beauvoir, a gifted French philosopher, in The Second Sex (1949). It was conscientiously researched and replete with examples that showed how unfair and arbitrary were the predicaments it cited. Beyond its vivid illustrations, the book had a theoretical framework taken over from Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was the man she loved till his death and beyond. From the start, their relationship was conceived as nonmonogamous. How they got through that is not something I want to deal with here.

Sartre’s magnum opus was Being and Nothingness (1943), where he developed his own version of existentialism. His was a theory of how to live a truthful life — how not to be a phony. To phoniness, he gave the name of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi).

That turns out a rather tricky concept to get hold of, so Sartre explains it with several illustrative types of bad faith. The first type is shown by an imaginary young woman who has agreed to meet a young man for the first time. At a café.

The fictional young people set out to get acquainted. Their conversation starts on a fairly lofty level. Sartre doesn’t say what they are talking about but perhaps it’s some ideals they share. Of the young woman, Sartre says, “she does not quite know what she wants.” Respect? “She would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect.” On the other hand, sexual desire, candid and unadorned, “would humiliate and horrify her.”

Suddenly the young man takes her hand between both of his. Now she has to decide what to do about that. Sartre describes her as dodging the decision. She continues to talk about high-level topics, meanwhile treating her hand as a passive physical object, disconnected from her high-sounding words.

In his bad faith museum, she is Sartre’s exhibit A, though I don’t think he explains what he’d like her to do instead. There’s an implication that she should own up to her own frank desires and let her new acquaintance lead her down the garden path to his place. It seems to me that one thing she would desire is that he not spoil their first date. There’s a rhythm in getting to know someone. He’s getting pretty far ahead of that rhythm.

Be that as it may, his courtship blunders are not what Sartre is spotlighting here. The focus will be on hers. It’s dishonest, in Sartre’s view, to treat oneself (or one’s hand) as an object that is merely physical. Why is that? Because, while we do have bodies and do live surrounded by physical things of all kinds, the attitudes we take toward such things lie within our power. We are metaphysically free. Our consciousness is devoid of infrastructures that could narrow or shape our freedom to interpret ourselves and our situations. On the other hand, it’s equally dishonest to treat oneself as wholly extra-physical – as pure spirit — since social and material contexts can’t be dodged. They are the occasions for our freely choosing how to relate to the contexts that we’re in.

So the young woman is wrong to treat her hand in his on the table as a thing for which she bears no responsibility – but equally dishonest to treat her consciousness as capable of soaring above its circumstances — as if uncontaminated by them.

Okay, got it? She’s in “bad faith.” Now, mind if I join the table? Let’s suppose our young man is Sartre himself (actually not an unrealistic supposition). He’s a formidable talker and intricate cogitator – a Walking Intellect, it would seem. Let’s imagine that, by the time the waiter has brought three coffees, he’s been able to convey his notions of “bad faith” to the girl.

Nobody asked me, but here I might chime in that it’s quite an old-fashioned womanly trait to want to gain approval from a powerfully influential man. No girl would want to be dismissed as Exhibit A for this philosopher’s concept of bad faith. Lord, he might even portray her in a book!

As long as I’m at the table, I might also remark that there was a time when women didn’t go out alone to meet young men at cafés. The youth came to call and be vetted by her parents and guardians. In those days, an uninvited hand at a garden table would be pushed away unceremoniously. A woman would have to do that, so as not to forfeit social approval. Whereas nowadays, she might feel equally obligated to leave her hand clasped in his two hands, for the same reason.

How many situations like Sartre’s case study of “bad faith,” orchestrated by theories-convenient-for-predators, have made their way into women’s short secret history of embarrassments?

De Beauvoir’s Second Sex, which has continued to define feminism into the current century, is framed by Sartre’s view that femininity is a choice that can be discarded at will. Hers was one application of the Sartrean view that the psyche itself has no internal structures and can be given its entire aim by acts of free choice. Also, the Sartrean psyche can be changed, in character and direction, just as freely from one instant to the next. If you believe that, as they say in Brooklyn, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.

So, if I’m so smart, how would I handle the encounter? Let’s picture me as the young woman at the café table, and Sartre as the man I was there to meet. Between worrying about French grammar, hoping to appear philosophically sophisticated and artfully up-on-the-latest, fearing to be nailed as an exemplar of bad faith but feeling not the faintest tug toward the Walking Intellect with the Hands – how would Abbie manage the situation?

With the utmost clumsiness, I can assure you.

In the days I was in Paris, when Sartre and de Beauvoir were to be found at their cafe, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to walk a few blocks over to St Germain des Pres. I’m beginning to see why I never did.

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, alienation, art, art of living, atheism, autonomy, bad faith, bigotry, books, cities, class, conformism, contradictions, cool, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, ethics, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, female power, femininity, feminism, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, immorality, institutional power, life and death struggle, literature, male power, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, ontology, oppression, past and future, philosophy, political movements, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, roles, romance, romantic love, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, 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, time, twentieth century, twenty-first century, victimhood, victims, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged a woman’s honor, bad faith, boundless freedom, café intellectuals, café life, café seduction, courtship blunders, existentialism, fear of women, female helplessness, feminine vulnerability, femininity as a choice, forfeiting social approval, French lovers, French philosopher, Freudian seduction, identity as a choice, intellectual helplessness, intellectual power, intellectual seduction, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre’s fundamental project, mauvaise foi, misogyny, non-monogamous, norms reversed, open relationships, parlor psychoanalysis, philosophic seduction, phoniness, post-World War II feminism, powerful men, resisting unwelcome advances, Sartrean existentialism, Sartrean freedom, Sartrean seduction, Sartrean self-invention, second wave feminism, self-invention, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, theories useful for predators, truthful life, unwelcome advances, using Freud for one's own agenda, weaponizing Freud, weaponizing the unconcious | 2 Comments

Philosophy in a Frenched* Bed

Posted on August 18, 2026 by Abigail

Brassaï, Picasso’s studio, Paris, June 16, 1944. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Lacan standing far left, Beauvoir standing far right, Sartre seated at left, Camus kneeling at center, Picasso standing at center with arms crossed.

Years ago I lived in Australia for a couple of academic terms, my first husband having been hired to teach logic at Sydney University. Under the title of Research Affiliate, I enjoyed freedom to use the library and to join philosophical colleagues at the spirited Staff Club luncheons.

At that time, there were in fact two philosophy departments at Sydney University. We were housed in the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, which emphasized Anglo-American philosophy, bounded by what could be extrapolated from sense experience and the natural sciences. The “other department” was General Philosophy, focused on feminism and Marxism – especially as practiced in France.

The women philosophers were in General Philosophy, where I gave a paper with the in-your-face title, “Getting Past Marx and Freud.” Subsequently, I went out to lunch with one of the women who had inspired the original breakaway into a second philosophy department. As we talked, woman to woman, she told me that she was being targeted in quite a nasty, gangup fashion by a male colleague. He was a former lover and had earlier teamed with her to bring about the original schism.

I had no trouble believing her. These avant garde revolutionaries were not celebrated for their gallantry. What should she do? Well, based on my own experience, I suggested she consider the possibility of moving over to the notoriously male chauvinist precincts of Trad and Mod. “They’re not feminists,” I said, “but they can be chivalrous.”

A few years later, a few of the feminists in General Philosophy did apply for asylum at Trad and Mod. I can’t take credit for those decisions. Other circumstances precipitated them. But what I said at the luncheon might have “shot an arrow into the air”- suggesting a possibility previously unimaginable in that encompassingly French-influenced Department.

*. *. *

The question of the French influence in the field of philosophy is intelligently surveyed in a book I am now reading, The Frenchmen, or my life in theory by Emily Eakin. There are about eight contenders who are deemed philosophers, though they didn’t all get degrees or teaching jobs in philosophy. There is one entry lane to philosophy jobs in France: you have to pass the great exams given by the College de France. Not everybody of philosophical influence tried, and not everybody succeeded. There are also earlier intellectual strands: Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and André Breton, also Structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure. These also influenced intellectual culture in the arts and literature on the Continent and they count as part of this lineage.

So far, the chapters I have read are mainly concerned with Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Here’s my super-thumbnail sketch of the boundaries and character of this world. Although perhaps provoked and set in orbit by the combined effects of Darwinian reductionism and World War One’s shattering of faith in progress – these movements seem to me to start “in the middle of the air.” What do I mean by that?

Well, they don’t seem to be theoretical responses to the shortcomings of previous theories, as philosophies have been traditionally. “Plato is great, but truth is greater,” said Aristotle about his immortal teacher – to whom Aristotelian thought took shape as a response. Ever since, philosophers have continued to pick up the shortcomings in the thinking of their predecessors and fill them in. But in The Frenchmen, the Q & A of philosophy, where a proposed hypothesis meets a response, looks either ultra-compressed (so that I am missing it) or else it’s really missing.

What is more – and perhaps worse, in philosophies that claim to explain or explain-away the assumptions of everyday life – some of these thinkers are endlessly busy with sexual seductions of their protégées, or else making a sensation by daring or shocking moves, or else navigating the pathway between actual mental asylums and their own apodictic claims. They compete with each other for ascendancy in intellectual bravado, where bravado partly exempts the competitors from the dialectical criteria of consistency or adequacy to the relevant evidence. They don’t try concretely to explain or illuminate the problems of lived experience. They tend to mistake cruel criminality for creativity.

One early example: the grotesque double murder of a lawyer’s wife and his daughter by their maids, Christine and Lea Papin. The crime drew excited empathy – even glorification – from Parisian “leftist intellectuals” like Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. The intellectuals were quick to attribute the entire grisly horror to working class grievances. And so it would continue. The intellectuals were busy shocking the bourgeoisie, while the bourgeoisie – to keep up with the latest – got equally busy learning not to be shocked at anything. Depravity would become the new norm.

Overall one feels the thick spirit of disillusionment. It begins grim and it gets grimmer. I would ask, what were the illusions that you personally had before you got so disillusioned – and so self-important about it? Why did you give them up? What do you think might have prevented your disillusionment? “Philosophy,” Aristotle said, “begins in wonder.”

Go back to the beginning!

__________________

*A harmless prank where the bottom sheet is folded up to look like the top so the user can’t stretch out legs full-length.

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 academic feminism, academic Marxism, academic seductions, academic women, Analytic vs Continental Philosophy, André Breton, Aristotle responding to Plato, chivalry vs chauvinism, class grievances and crime, Claude Lévi-Strauss, confusing criminality with creativity, confusing cruelty with creativity, Darwin’s cultural influence, Darwinian reductionism, dialectical criteria, disillusionment as a pose, factions in academic philosophy, Feminism and Marxism in philosophy, Ferdinand de Saussure, French influence in academe, French influence in philosophy, French influence in the academy, General Philosophy at Sydney University, Getting Past Marx and Freud by Abigail L. Rosenthal, glorifying a double murder, Great Exams in France, intellectual bravado, intellectual culture in Europe, intellectual culture in France, intellectual stardom, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, learning not to be shocked, leftist intellectuals and glorifying cruelty, logic at Sydney University, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, normalizing crime, normalizing depravity, overcoming disillusionment, philosophers and seduction, philosophers clarifying lived experience, philosophers competing for the limelight, philosophers ignoring lived experience, philosophers ignoring their predecessors, philosophers in mental asylums, philosophers refuting their predecessors, philosophers sans dialectic, philosophers shocking the bourgeoisie, philosophy as fashion, philosophy department split, philosophy in Australia, philosophy without history, power hungry psychotherapists, qualifying as academic philosopher in France, research affiliate, Research Affiliate at Sydney University, Research Affiliate Dept of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, revolutionaries who mistreat women, safety for academic feminists, safety for women in academe, Salvador Dalí, shocking the bourgeoisie, shocking the middle class, Simone de Beauvoir, skepticism as a style, splits in academic philosophy, staff club luncheons, Staff Club philosophy luncheons, Structuralists, Surrealists, Sydney University, Sydney University Staff Club, teaching logic, the College de France, The Frenchmen or my life in theory by Emily Eakin, the Revolution’s morning after, women philosophers, World War One and faith in progress | 2 Comments

Beyond ‘Beyond Good and Evil’

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Abigail

Vicious Circle by Jacek Malczewski, 1895

Recently, I finished reading a novel, The Far Pavilions, by M.M. Kaye, set in 19th century India. Its hero is a young British officer with a dual identity. He’s been raised as an Indian child after his English parents died – but then reappropriated by his own people and educated in England. Anyway, at a certain point in the saga, he confronts the villainous man whose earlier murders of innocent characters he has finally figured out. In their face to face, the hero iterates the crimes that the culprit has committed. The villain offers one distracting explanation after another for what he claims are “misunderstandings.” Our young hero rebuts all the excuses one by one. Till the villain’s exposure stands uncontested.

Though the plot is complicated, the story’s denouement is neither obscure nor subtle. Hey, how ‘bout that? The bad guy is a bad guy!

By contrast, one of the beliefs of the 20th and 21st centuries has been that – when you get beyond good and evil – you’ve reached a deeper level, closer to authenticity. But why would I even suggest that there’s some mistake in that outlook? Wouldn’t it accord with being modern and post-modern? And isn’t it less hypocritical and more liberated than a posture weighted down by “judgmentalism”?

A lot of growing up, of coming to adulthood, involves learning the ropes, acquiring the adaptive skills that can smooth one’s path and harmonize with the needs and expectations of others in shared situations. Ordinarily, these kinds of know-how have little to do with good and evil, right and wrong or any judgments about such matters. Whatever goes into those judgments – it doesn’t seem to be the stuff of everyday life. So judgments of good and evil appear to interrupt the rhythms of normality.

There’s another cause for concern occasioned by moral judgment. Children often suffer from adult condemnations – raining down from those cloudy heights that only grownups can see. So childhood often gets recalled not as a time of innocence but as the season of reproof, belittling comparisons, and hopeless condemnations. If that’s the background, childhood will live in memory as the age when one was beset by guilt, with adulthood the redemptive season of relative innocence – or at least freedom from unfair accusations.

So these are cases where appeals to moral judgment appear either irrelevant or manipulative. Nevertheless, despite these well-taken objections, there are situations that call for judgments operative in the realm of good and evil. To be sure, it’s a different realm. And here’s an illustrative case or two.

One time I was giving a talk in Brooklyn College’s Philosophy Department about my then recently-published book, A Good Look at Evil. A young woman whom I’d never seen before – not one of my students and not one of our philosophy majors – took a seat smack in the middle of the front row. And there she sat, gazing directly at me with a look of such gleaming malevolence that I had to avoid looking her way if I was to carry on with my talk. I didn’t think she constituted a physical threat so it wasn’t a matter for Security. But I sure wished my audience had included a competent exorcist.

Another case. It concerns a person whom I had known since childhood. She was troubled by a sense of failure – of being jeopardized both in her career and her romantic life. These troubles she often confided in me. There was nothing unusual about her troubles. The competitions of real life are not necessarily rigged but all the same not everybody wins every round. That said, in her relatively ordinary situation – something had shifted – in a way that was not ordinary.

What I was beginning to perceive was that she had decided to opt for a third way – neither ordinary success nor ordinary failure – but the way of evil. This was a different way entirely.

You could succeed at evil

even when you’d failed at everything else.

In addition, I knew that I was the only person in her life who was both aware of the terrible choice she was making and also cared.

I was not neutral. I remember walking the streets in anguish, literally wringing my hands, beset by this realization and helpless to reverse or cure the outcome of what I felt to be her consequential – nay fateful – moral decision.

Such memories are coming to mind these days as I’ve been reading an excellent biography, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux. I’ve known a number of people who took Friedrich Nietzsche seriously. They regarded him as a philosopher who provided an opening to a freer life, a life unfettered by social constraints. They saw him as inviting the reader to enter the realm to which he gave the title, “beyond good and evil.” Here, from the Prideaux biography, is Nietzsche in early adolescence but looking ahead:

“When I was twelve years old, I conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God, thinking himself, created the second person of the godhead, but that to be able to think himself he had to think his opposite, and thus had to create it.—That is how I began to philosophize.”

What shall I say? People suppose – in the line of intellectual descent and influence including Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger – that you can play with evil and still retain your autonomy.

But no. The so-called freedom that you get when you’ve done your utmost actually to climb up or to climb down to an imagined realm beyond good and evil is not a freedom from moral constraints. It’s the condition obtaining when you’ve given evil free access – to enter and take control.

What follows? I mean, aside from all the funny stuff and not-so-funny stuff that you may then actually do. What also follows are all the excuses, rationalizings, and self-promotings of a life that has denatured itself –

and cannot find its own way back.

____________________

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil (book) | Understanding Evil

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 19th century India, a denatured life, a life denatured, Abigail L. Rosenthal's "A Good Look at Evil", absolutism vs. relativism, adaptive skills, authenticity and immorality, authenticity and liberation, authenticity and modernity, authenticity and postmodernism, awareness of evil, British officer in India, Brooklyn College Philosophy Department, career troubles, children of mixed acculturation, curing evil, double identities, evil and denial, evil and excuses, evil and personal responsibility, evil and self-promotion, evil as cure for failure, exorcism vs voluntary wickedness, exorcist vs voluntary evil, expectations of others, exposing a villain, exposing wickedness, finding one’s path in life, freedom from moral constraints, Friedrich Nietzsche, giving evil free rein, guilt and innocence, heroes and villains, hopeless condemnations, irrelevant moralizing, judgment re good and evil, judgment vs. judgmentalism, literary evil vs real evil, losers and winners, losing grip on one’s story, losing one's way in life, malevolence in a student, manipulative moralizing, moral absolutism and moral relativism, moral accuracy, moral condemnation and bullying, moral condemnation and childhood, moral decision, moral judgment, moral judgment and hypocrisy, neutrality about evil, Nietzsche and authenticity, Nietzsche and Freud, Nietzsche and social constraints, Nietzsche Freud and Heidegger, Nietzsche in adolescence, Nietzsche philosophizing beyond good and evil, Nietzsche philosophizing outside moral constraints, Nietzsche playing with evil, Nietzsche's adolescence, Nietzsche’s dark theology, Nietzsche’s intellectual influence, ordinary failure, ordinary success, philosophy in higher ed, philosophy majors, physical vs psychological threat, pulling moral rank, rationalizing wickedness, real evil, reversing moral categories, romantic troubles, social know-how, social skills and flexibility, succeeding at evil, Sue Prideaux's I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, the choice of evil, The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye, the way of evil, unfair accusations, you don’t win every round | 1 Comment

The Decline and Fall of Sex

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Abigail

Still concerned as I am to discern the ways and means by which the trained philosophers among us have been thinking about sex, I’m going to dig deeper.

From the collection, The Philosophy of Sex, I’m picking out the essay by Alan Goldman, the one whose hopeful title is “Plain Sex.” To see it plain, he’ll want to lift sex out of its “layers of cultural, moral and superstitious superstructure.”

He wants to get at the thing itself, sex itself. And thus to strip away all that is extraneous: the “cultural layers,” as he calls them.

As a woman, I’ve already tensed up. What’s left after all the layers of meaning are lifted? What’s he gonna say in the morning? “Slam, bam, thank you ma’am?”

Parenthetical note: Aristotle distinguished four ways in which anything becomes real: material cause (what it’s made of), efficient cause (what sets it going), formal cause (what constitutes its structure) and final cause (what purpose or aim it serves). Here Goldman seems to be stripping away the formal and final causes of human sexual relations, leaving only material and efficient causes – thus, our bodies and their prompts. He calls the other two layers “cultural,” as if those layers were extraneous or unnatural for that reason. However human beings are not the only species whose life is supported by their cultures – by the surround of assumptions and signals, from which the young learn from their elders how to behave.

Anyway, Goldman proposes to strip away any “external goal or purpose to sexual activity” – purposes such as love, communication, awareness or reproduction – and get down to the sexual desire plain and unadorned: this would be the “desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces … .” Happily, that desire is quite fulfillable – by “sexual activity.”

He then spends some time disposing of other contenders for a definition of human sexuality. In the days before contraception, it was possible to confuse the definition of normative sex with its reproductive purpose. However, although questions about child rearing and parental responsibility remain consequential, these, he believes, no longer come attached to any values that pertain to the sexual activity per se.

With reproduction disposed of as the raison d’être for sex, the author next turns his analytical hose on love. Although love can benefit a marriage, just as monogamy can, love can also be responsible for “disastrous marriages” prompted by “adolescent confusion.” It can also produce “damaging jealousies.”

What is more, invoking love has been associated with the “double standard which has curtailed the freedom of woman” and has led (by some pathway obscure to me) to "using sex as a political weapon." As for tying sex to “intimacy,” the embarrassment that intimacy can include is “too often the result of artificial sexual ethics and taboos.”

Huh? What’s going on here? Obviously any human activity can be done badly, from painting the side of a barn to riding a bicycle. The danger of doing it wrong does not by itself discredit the activity! To assert that it does commits what logicians call the slippery slope fallacy. As for “the double standard,” that’s never needed “love” to be invoked. Re “sex as a political weapon”? I’ve known of sex used for social or professional advancement. I’ve never heard of it being used as a weapon. Not in literature and not in real life.

What’s he thinking of? The whole peculiar rundown finally ends on a denunciation of “artificial sexual ethics and taboos.” Which ones would he like to get rid of? Show your cards, Alan!

Anyway, although any norms applicable to human activities generally would also cover sexual activities, the author identifies no sexual acts as abnormal or perverted as such. The sometimes fascinated unease which people may feel about acts socially forbidden may come from “latent desires we are loathe to admit.” But no act can be labeled perverted on exclusively sexual grounds.

So finally, at the beginning and the windup of this essay, sex is still about “the satisfaction of desire and the pleasure it brings.” No more and no less.

So what do I think of all this? Well, I don’t like it. But why not? Well, for Aristotelian reasons, funnily enough. Pleasure, that ancient philosopher defines as “the bloom on the rose” of any activity, not the reason to do it.

It’s a side effect, inherently. This would probably be true for our species as well as for any other. Pleasure doesn’t define the action; it’s an abstraction from the entire context and purpose of the action. You could never write a novel in which your lead character does whatever he does just for the sake of pleasure.

Pleasure – in the context where Goldman takes it to explain and justify the sexual action – does have a partner. From his account, we don’t know who she is, or what she thinks, whether before or after. Has this activity affected their relationship with each other? Or with others whom they know or who know of them? Goldman assures us that any requirements otherwise obtaining between decent human beings would still be in force. However, the participants and other people close to them would not be affected by the sexual connection between them.

They’ve just done the most intimate thing that two people can do with each other and it adds no new quality to their relationship? With regard to the sexual connection – and with regard to the people involved in it – all I can say is,

I’m sorry to hear that.

*. *. *

What does the second of our three philosophers have to say on The Big Subject? She’s Elizabeth Brake, with an essay that asks the question, “Is ‘Loving More’ Better? The Values of Polyamory.”

Her notion of polyamory is flexible as to the number of participants in such relationships, also whether those she considers would be exclusively heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual or any mix of these options.

As to objections, on the grounds that these plural partners might occasion jealousy, or – to avert that – secrecy and subterfuge, she stipulates certain virtues as required by polyamorous relationships: honesty, mutual consent, open discussion, nonpossessiveness, and so on.

And she’s expecting to find these outstanding traits among people committed to forming and mutually agreeing to novel and original sexual combinations? And these arrangements will stay in place for as long as any children (from these or previous group comings-together) will need them?

Okay. You believe this and – as they say in Brooklyn –

I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.

*. *. *

We come now to our third philosophic contributor, Robin Dembroff, with an essay that asks the searching question, “What Is Sexual Orientation?”

Dembroff is concerned to resist presumptions that the man/woman attraction “should be privileged within society.” Any new categories she supplies should “reduce or eliminate” that presumption, be in line with “relevant social scientific research” on sex and gender, support legal and social protection for “queer sexual orientations” and help to bring about a new “taxonomic schema of sexual orientation.”

So her aims are avowedly political. They are about transforming society. Her particular concern is to protect those disposed to act along queer, transgender or “gender nonconforming” lines.

Since “someone may be attracted only to transgender men who have not had gender-confirmation surgery, or only to cisgender men and women,” she wants concepts broad enough to take in all the conceivable variations. Nor can her concepts be based solely on behaviors, since social factors might lead individuals to behavior that conceals their actual preferences. So ascription of sexual orientation should be restricted to circumstances where sexual behavior can be engaged in, or not engaged in, willingly. The object of such a preference (not the person acting on the preference) should be what determines one’s classification.

The most flexible concept Dembroff can find is one of her devising: “Bidimensional Dispositionalism.” This gets rid of heterosexuality as the norm, allowing for all kinds and degrees of sexual orientation, and for changes in an individual’s choices. Sexuality is expressed along a continuum. Sexual choice is not irrevocable.

So, what do I think of Dembroff’s solutions to the problems of sexual orientation? Several objections come to mind.

Sexual desire is competitive. Not everybody wins. It includes losers, frustrated people, heartbroken people. This is true within a category such as man/woman sexuality, and also between categories. I recall a young brother and sister whom I knew in Australia complaining to me that the then-new fashion of homosexuality had created an atmosphere at social gatherings unfavorable to heterosexual flirting and courtship. Could it be that Dembroff doesn’t stand above the intricate game of desire? Rather, she is simply loading the dice?

When men claim to have become women, or to be “transgender,” they can spoil women’s competitive chances in sports previously restricted to biological women. They can also intrude on women’s privacy in locker rooms and bathrooms. Finally, they can constitute a physical threat to women when housed with them in prison cells. The scientific basis for changing biological sex surgically and chemically seems unclear.

It may work well in some cases. But I know of two instances where such surgery was performed with tragic results. In one case, the girl who decided to become a boy had been the victim of incest. Needless to say, her condition was not cured by mutilating surgery. In the other case, the young man was disvalued on account of his race, and of course surgery did nothing to heal that social problem. Eventually, both of these traumatized and surgically wounded young people committed suicide.

In her essay, Dembroff presents all her social and biological distinctions as capable of being redrawn free from all harmful consequences – with a mere stroke of her computerized pen.

That’s not true. Her proposed changes are profoundly consequential and certainly not harm-free.

*. *. *

Meanwhile, the eros of human relationships – the eros of loving purpose animating our society as such – that fundamental and profound desire is neglected and forgotten. No one remembers

what sex is and can be.

____________

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 Alan Goldman, Alan Goldman’s Plain Sex, Aristotle’s four causes, artificial sexual ethics, Bidimensional Dispositionalism, competition between sexual orientations, counter-erotic social patterns, defining sexual orientation, difficulty of defining sexual orientation, efficient cause of sex, Elizabeth Brake on polyamory, Elizabeth Brake’s Is ‘Loving More’ Better? The Values of Polyamory, embarrassment about sex, final cause of sex, formal cause of sex, love and adolescent confusion, love and damaging jealousies, love and disastrous marriages, love and monogamy, love and women’s liberation, material cause of sex, meaningless sex, novel sexual combinations, philosophers on sex, pleasure as a side effect, pleasure not an exclusive motive, polyamorous requirements, polyamory, privileging heterosexuality, protection for queer orientations, psychological influence of contraception, pulling moral rank between types of desire, reducing heterosexual privilege, Robin Dembroff’s What Is Sexual Orientation?, sex abstracted from consequences, sex affecting a relationship, sex and frustrated people, sex and heartbroken people, sex and losers, sex and professional advancement, sex and selling the Brooklyn Bridge, sex and social advancement, sex and utopian programs, sex and winners, sex as a weapon, sex for its own sake, sex for pleasure, sex for satisfying desire, sex making a difference, sex making no difference, sex without cultural assumptions, sex without cultural layers, sex without external goals, sex without love, sex without purpose, sex without reproductive purpose, sex-change surgery, sex-change surgery and consequences, sex-change surgery and scientific basis, sex-change surgery and tragedy, sexual choice as changeable, sexual competition, sexual taboos, sleeping your way to the top, slippery slope fallacy, taking sex out of context, the double standard, the eros of society, The Philosophy of Sex 2023, thinking about sex, transforming society re gender-nonconforming identity, transforming society re sexual norms, transforming society re transgender protection, transgender persons in women’s bathrooms, transgender persons in women’s locker rooms, transgender persons in women’s prisons, virtues needed for polyamory, women’s sports and transgender players | 2 Comments

The Three Tiers: The Everyday, The Moral and The Spiritual

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Recent Posts