Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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.

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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

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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.

____________

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Getting Sex All Wrong

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Abigail

Satyr and Girl
by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1615

There are some who believe that “You are what you eat.” Differing from those people, I believe that “You are what you think.” And about The Big Subject, what philosophers think and write about sex can trickle down to the assumptions and rationales that affect attitudes and actions in the wider population. With such concerns in mind, I return to The Philosophy of Sex that we looked at last week, to consider three more essays.

The opening essay is by Greta Christina and bears the title, “Are We Having Sex or What?” Christina begins by recalling the bygone time when she “used to like to count” each new partner, it having been “a source of pride” for her to keep this tally. Eventually that practice grew harder to maintain as the numbers began to mount up. At the same time, it was getting to be less clear to her whether or not to include those who’d “almost” become sex partners. Her reckonings got blurrier still when the class of eligible partners widened to include women. All of which has led her finally to ask a question concerning definitions:

“What counts as having sex with someone?”

She’s a freelance writer, not an academic philosopher, so it may be that this conceptual question is what explains the inclusion of Christina’s essay in the present volume.

That there must be some reality to define or demarcate is evident to her since she’s believed (rightly or wrongly) that sex changes a relationship. Rape can be excluded since, “if there’s no consent, it ain’t sex.” On the other hand, it counts as sex, in her view, even if you didn’t really want it. So there’s a pretty wide territory that wants defining.

The territory gets wider still, and its edges blurrier when she includes an “all-girl sex party” where, as she recalls, many varieties and gradations of interactions were enjoyed all round. Yet, despite all the differences in degree and kind, she reports feeling that she’d “been sexual with all the women there.”

As her essay draws to a close, we get treated to a parting (how shall I put this?), uh, shockeroo. It seems our essayist has been employed “as a nude dancer at a peep show.” Permit me to draw a veil over her interactions with a particular customer whom she perceived through a “dingy black box” – a box like an old-fashioned telephone booth – but furnished with a viewing window.

Finally, her essay concludes with the question, Was it sex, or not? to which the writer admits to having no answer.

I’ve got a different question. Was this an essay that belongs in a philosophical collection? She references no philosophic text nor uses any of the philosophic ways of framing a question. Or is the very topic of sex so weird – so far out – for Anglo-American philosophers, that anybody with sexual experience can be deemed eligible to get a foot in the door and to shoulder in thereafter?

I have a second sort of puzzlement. It’s prompted by her remarkably tall tally of intimate partners – none marred by the fear of pregnancy, abortions legal or illegal, sexually-transmitted diseases, getting hurt physically or wounded psychologically or by getting branded by others in unflattering ways – all those invulnerabilities rendering her, so far as I know, atypical for a woman. Am I to understand that Christina has never found herself disillusioned, scorned, disgusted, offended or threatened?

I can testify that I personally have never met a woman like this essayist. I don’t know that any part of her story is fabricated – or else misleadingly described – in whole or in part. But I am sure that she is far from being a typical woman. So her placement in the opening chapter, as scene-setter for this collection, has the effect of disorienting the reader. Henceforth, we are being urged to go forward – to read on – all the while suspending disbelief!

*. *. *

We turn now to the essay by Micah Newman. He is an independent scholar whose essay, “A Realist Sexual Ethics,” is here reproduced with permission from Ratio 28:2. His essay lies at the other end of the spectrum from Christina’s. Newman defends what he terms a traditional view as the norm. His aim is to defend such a view on philosophical rather than religious grounds. To do that, he will draw on the evidence of evolution.

Seen from an evolutionary standpoint, Newman finds that sex must be a biologically-grounded activity with reproduction as its defining essence. Although not every sexual act has this baby-making effect, any other effects (such as felt pleasure or expressed love) would be derivative and – where consistent with sex’s essence and therefore allowable – no more than contributory.

Since human babies need continuous care, their parents ought to be in an exclusive and committal relationship “inviolate for a lifetime … .” So the parents ought to be married. Although romantic love is desirable from the evolutionary standpoint, feelings such as “the subjective high” cannot be “themselves foundational.”

Even if his evolutionary starting point sufficiently accounted for the above exclusions, it does not explain how Newman can proceed at one bound to his announced goal of human “flourishing.” To bring about that flourishing, he adds moral and cultural refinements that don’t appear to follow with any necessity from his evolutionary starting point, and might even be inconsistent with it.

For instance, among the cultural refinements that assist flourishing he includes the Kantian requirement that we treat others as ends, never solely as a means. But doesn’t the continuous baby-making function previously assigned to women treat them precisely as the means to a biological end? Also, why choose Kant to illustrate moral refinement rather than say Aristotle? The classical philosopher would seem better able than Kant to offer guidelines about how appropriately to treat people in different contexts. So Newman’s examples of “flourishing” seem to be offered without backing other than his personal preferences.

The examples he approves get hedged about with exclusions that (he claims) go back to his evolutionary starting point. On that basis, the following are ruled out: homosexual practices (though not inclinations), masturbation, in vitro fertilization – as an “attempt to change the nature of reproduction to make it not sexual” – and even contraception! What’s wrong with contraception? It carries on “as if sex had no essential connection to reproduction.”

I imagine that Newman would feel quite different about his account of human flourishing were he suddenly transformed into a woman. In addition to the prima facie unfairness of the society he advocates, his argument is marred by an account of what is authorized and disallowed by evolution that appears empty of the requisite biological evidence. From what I understand, species other than our own have mores and preferences considerably more nuanced and complex than can be explained by Newman’s bare bones account of the reproductive requirement. We are much more than the creatures he describes and so for that matter are the rest of the living things on planet earth. And if we are more, wouldn’t our sexuality have more going for it than can be sufficiently encompassed by so reductive a justification?

*. *. *

Perhaps our third essay, David Benatar’s “Two Views of Sexual Ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape,” can provide a dialectical synthesis between the extremes of the first two. As he sees it, because of the sexual revolution, more acts are permitted and fewer condemned than used to be the case. However, the landscape of sexual permissions and exclusions is really more differentiated than at first it seems to be.

If sexual acts are thought of as significant, and justified by loving attachment, the permissions and exclusions fall one way. If on the contrary sexual connections are deemed casual, exclusions will take a different route.

The “loving significance” outlook can’t make a place for promiscuity. In his view, that’s a defect. The “casual” view does make a place for promiscuity but somehow can’t confine it to consenting adults. Therefore he can’t exclude pedophilia (sex with children) and also fails to explain the harm of rape.

Benatar believes that each of the two approaches has some part of the truth but believes too that they are mutually contradictory. And with this impasse, he leaves the whole question – of which option is better – ultimately unresolved. In fact, he also sees nothing against just ending one’s life!

Let me step in and help out here. The least harm and the most fulfillment seems to lie with viewing sex (at its best) as having loving significance. But what about the rights of the promiscuous? Are they to be disrespected?

Personally, I have never known a promiscuous person who claimed that pursuing nonstop sex made him happy. At most, the claim was that this was an addiction against which all resistance had been unavailing. Without here specifying what treatments are available for addictions, I can agree with Benatar that the promiscuous ought not to be shunned or socially penalized for their condition. But isn’t it sad to regard the promiscuous as people whose condition is regrettable? Yes, it’s sad. In my experience, and despite the testimony of Christina, the promiscuous do tend to be rather sad. (Their sadness can also be put to work by them as a seductive operator in social life.) So the somewhat manipulative sadness abides, but still seems morally better than allowing child molestation or rape, both of which Benatar finds to be logical extensions of the casual view.

What conclusion can we draw from these three essays? The first is unbelievable, the second is unlivable, and the third fails to draw the conclusion that obviously follows from the evidence it has been at pains to gather.

So the first doesn’t know why we live. The second doesn’t know how to live. And the third can’t seem to step forward and start living!

Okay guys.

Thank you for sharing.

_______________

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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 abortions and risk, academic philosophers on sex, Aristotle on treating people appropriately, Benatar’s Two Views of Sexual Ethics: Promiscuity Pedophilia and Rape, biological meaning of sex, casual sex, casual sex as including sexual deviance, Christina’s Are We Having Sex or What?, commodification of intimacy, commodification of sex, conceptual questions re sex, consent as distinct from desire, counting coups in sex experience, defining what counts as sex, desire and sex, disillusioned women, eligible partners, eligible sex partners, evolution and contraception, evolution and homosexuality, evolution and human flourishing, evolution and in vitro fertilization, evolution and masturbation, evolution and nothing-but-ism, evolution and reductionism, fear of pregnancy, going along to get along, Greta Christina, intimacy and relationships, Kant vs Aristotle on moral questions, love and sex, love and the essence of sex, manipulative sadness, marriage and the role of great sex, marriage as exclusive and committal, marriage as life-long commitment, Micah Newman’s A Realist Sexual Ethics, misleading scene-setter for studying sex, opinions no woman would hold, oversimplifying evolution, parenting and marriage, philosophers influence the culture, philosophers influence the zeitgeist, philosophical defense of monogamy, pleasure vs the purpose of sex, promiscuity, promiscuity and addiction, promiscuity and regrets, rape, rationales re sex, religious defense of monogamy, reproduction as sex’s defining essence, reproduction as the purpose of sex, scene-setting for philosophic discussion of sex, scoring in sex, seductive sadness, sex and disease, sex and evolution, sex and getting real, sex and how to live, sex and its rationales, sex and love, sex and philosophers, sex and physical risks, sex and psychological wounds, sex and real life, sex and reputation, sex and social standing, sex and why we live, sex as a conceptual question, sex as expressive of loving attachment, sex as significant, sex changing a relationship, sex requiring consent, sexual body count, sexual disillusionment, sexual encounter defined, sexual permissiveness, sexual reckoning, significant sex vs casual sex, social mores as protective, social mores as protective of women, suspending disbelief, suspending judgment in philosophic discussion, suspending judgment in philosophizing re sex, suspending moral judgment in philosophizing, suspending moral judgment in philosophizing re sex, The Big Subject, The Philosophy of Sex 2023, the sexual revolution, traditional view of the role of sex, treating women as a means, Was it sex or not?, What counts as having sex?, What makes an essay philosophical?, When is an essay on sex philosophical?, women and getting threatened, women as means to biological end, women being disgusted, women being offended, women being scorned, women’s erotic vulnerability, women’s vulnerability, You are what you eat, you are what you think | 1 Comment

Getting Philosophical about Sex

Posted on July 21, 2026 by Abigail

The Kiss, Auguste Rodin, 1882. Photo by Caeciliusinhorto.

Philosophers debate many things, but do they talk about what makes the world go round? As it happens, a number of philosophical colleagues have been contributing to The Philosophy of Sex (Rowman & Littlefield 2023, eds. Raja Halwani, Jacob Held, Natasha McKeever and Alan Soble)! What is more, this is the eighth edition under that title, with some contributions new, others held over from earlier editions. Since I’ve already read three of the latest edition’s 25 essays, I’ll bring you up to date on those three.

First, in hopes it would put me up to speed on the latest, I read “How to be a Pluralist about Gender Categories” by Katharine Jenkins. Her essay draws on a distinction (that’s had currency for some time) between sex, the biologic fact, and gender, the social fact. Here’s what I take to be her key sentences: “People’s sense of their own social location is also critical for thinking about resistance to oppression. Plausibly, we may need to resist gender oppression by finding new ways to interpret and inhabit the identities of men, women, genderqueer, agender, and so on.” Jenkins, kindly help me out here. Show me how to “interpret and inhabit” all four of the identities you list, and let me know whether you mean to do both – the interpreting and the inhabiting – simultaneously or in succession.

Okay, apart from the vice of writing in a meaningless (albeit avant garde) style, it remains true that few women escape efforts to exploit a female vulnerability that hasn’t vanished, despite all the changes in law and social comportment. But this essay, preoccupied with issues of in-group taxonomy, contributes precisely nothing that I could see to the understanding – much less the handling – of power imbalances. So let’s move right along.

*. *. *

An essay by Alan Soble, “Sexual Gifts and Sexual Duties,” concludes the volume. In it he tells a story from his own earlier life, one that has haunted him for years. As a young graduate student, walking on campus, Soble was accosted by a young woman he did not know who – apparently without ceremony – propositioned him. About that campus encounter, he provides no details. Except one, that he found her notably unattractive. Yet, Soble felt it his duty, his moral obligation, to agree to her invitation. They repair to her room, get in gear for the sexual connection, and he avoids intercourse but performs on her a nonreciprocal act of cunnilingus.

In the years since, he has continued to reflect on that incident, debating in his own mind whether and to what degree the act he performed qualifies as morally right, even as right-beyond-the-call-of-duty (“supererogatory”) or on the other hand compromised by the tiny threads of self-interest that, despite appearances, he can nonetheless detect introspectively.

I won’t go into all the hypothetical cases over which Soble extends his principle of sexual supererogation. We’ll just cut to the chase. Here’s what I think about Soble’s unresolved recollection. First, it’s ungallant. If the girl, by now a woman getting on in years, had read this essay or heard about it, she would have reason to feel utterly stung. His story is deeply, deeply insulting to the woman in the story.

Why do I say that? Look folks, sex is not a commodity in mass production. As the French say, “The most beautiful woman in the world cannot give more than she has.”

But isn’t it unliberal, unemancipated and unliberated to talk like that? Shouldn’t sex be regarded as one of the pleasures on the banquet table of the world? One more note struck in the great concert of life? One vivid dab of color on the wide canvass of human experience?

No. I can’t speak for men, who are somewhat differently put together, but for women, these encounters put rings on the tree, not notches on the gun.

But hey, didn’t the woman Soble writes about “start it”? That doesn’t diminish the insult of telling the whole world about the time you agreed to an act of sexual intimacy with a woman out of pity! But “she asked for it,” Soble might still argue. Maybe if he’d said no, he would have given her time and space to think again – before she asked anyone else for it.

*. *. *

Now let’s revisit Thomas Nagel’s “Sexual Perversion,” the essay that may have launched the enterprise of philosophizing seriously about sex in our contemporary setting and time. The essay’s title carries the implication that there is such a thing as normality in sex. For that reason, much of Nagel’s essay is given over to explicating the sexual norm. Unlike Sartre, whom he first discusses, Nagel believes that sex can fulfill its norm. Desire can be satisfied.

What follows is an intricately abstract account of what hypothetically would happen in the optimal case. Across a mirrored room, a man and a woman perceive each other and they sense attraction. Insofar as the attraction is mutual, the desired one feels something that’s reciprocal with what the desirer feels. As the desire of each is mirrored in the other, each enters into greater identification with his or her own body. Eventually, they come together sexually. When that happens, each desired person merges with the desirer’s image of what he or she wants to possess. At the climactic moment, each becomes precisely what the other longed for.

I’m afraid I can’t agree with this account of the optimal sex act. To me, it appears to describe a delusion from which a rude awakening – or at least a letdown – can be expected.

*. *. *

So, if I’ve disagreed with the two philosophers who discussed the topic substantively, what do I think happens with sex in the optimal case? Look, to begin with, I’m not an atheist. For me, common sense atheism is cold tea.

Something comes into play, in desire at the deep level, where we find love trying to do something about the depth of its desire. Love’s trying is not aimed at the satisfaction of an appetite. Rather, it’s the enacting of a desire with which one’s whole sense of being is bound up. And there is also an open skylight, one might say, above that enacting. The lover is participating in a very large drama. One is carried by that drama. One is not the owner, the master or the mistress of it. It's a concrete case where –

you gain your life

by losing it.

_______________

Related Content: The Desecration of Desire | Here Be Dragons

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The Dance of Desire

Posted on July 14, 2026 by Abigail

"Blindman's Bluff" Francisco Goya, 1789

“Are you still looking for Mister Right?” Lorraine – a well-regarded feminist as well as a stalwart friend – once put that question to me. It was some years ago that this conversation took place.

I avowed as how I was.

“If you find him, I’ll believe in God,” Lorraine responded sincerely. I had known her since prefeminist days, when she’d had what was then considered an enviable job working for a TV personality who gave upbeat advice to other women calling or writing to confide their troubles.

When feminism came on scene in New York, Lorraine pitched into that quite as competently, writing a book warning women of the dangers of a then widely-used contraceptive. Lorraine’s husband, a psychiatrist whom I’d known since way back – my childhood and his boyhood – appeared wonderfully supportive of his wife in her new public role. So Lorraine seemed to have it all: a successful career, motherhood, a public role in the new movement to liberate women – plus a supportive husband!

But actually, not so much. The husband conducted his practice at their spacious West Side apartment inside a room with a separate entrance set aside for an office. Though this layout seemed convenient, it turned out not as private as it looked. Some of what went on in his office became quite audible. So Lorraine could not help hearing the sounds of a woman patient who was being brought to sexual climax while repeatedly yelling, “Kill Lorraine!”

The marriage broke up, as did her second marriage, although that one had looked more hopeful. Why he left her – after appearing to celebrate her feminist achievements at a dinner to which All New York was invited – is less clear. But I suppose, in the end, it was for the same reason that the first husband had betrayed their marriage: she was too damn successful.

Although I am at this writing (with God’s help) happily married to a man who appears more than capable of accommodating any pinnacle I might still happen to climb, I can certainly recognize the syndrome that Lorraine had lived through twice.

*. *. *

Here’s an example from my own professional life. When I was first hired as an Assistant Professor at the Brooklyn College Philosophy Department, my male colleagues were congenial and respectful. I was used to dealing with men in academe, since my father had been a professor, so I saw no need to tiptoe around the men.

However, once I and all the other young colleagues got fired (having voted for the loser in a Departmental election) my collegial fellow sufferers became markedly less respectful where I was concerned – and much more inclined to uncalled for mockery. It wasn’t uniform. There were exceptions. But overall the tone changed for the worse.

So, did I fight back? Did I draw the line telling my fellows in the fraternity-of-the-fired how to treat Abigail while we joined forces to try to get our jobs back?

So far as I can recall, I did not. Pretty much I understood what had happened. They felt demeaned – unmanned as it were – and needed to assert their masculine ascendency. I felt that you can’t fight every fight at the same time. If your ship is sinking, that may not be the best time to claim your rank in the navy. Rather, it might be the time to bail water or else start swimming. Hey, real life ain’t the movies.

In her Feminism Unmodified, legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon cites evidence that “only 7.8 percent of women have not been sexually assaulted or harassed.” Assaulted or harassed? That takes in a pretty wide array of potential big city encounters.

To be able to walk down all the downtown Manhattan streets without attracting unwelcome looks or remarks is, in my experience, a rare and rather specific skill. At one time, I actually had that skill. But now, given my walking handicap, I’d be more vulnerable. As to MacKinnon’s data, I have no professional competence to evaluate them. Her extremely broad claim is referenced in extensive endnotes. Therefore, given what everybody knows – the asymmetry in bodily strength, the limits of the law’s reach and the elasticity of her two categories – her high numbers are credible though not particularly useful.

But there is another kind of datum that belongs to the stories of women – and to the love of women. All the stories here lifted from my experience are about Desire thwarted or Hope disappointed. Thus, Lorraine hoped that the two men she had successively trusted would gallantly champion her success, rather than feel unmanned by it. I’d hoped the noble heroes alongside whom I’d got fired would continue to act the hero’s part with me also – not show diminished gallantry where the woman in the case was concerned. I say this knowing that heroism, gallantry and nobility are just what public feminists pretend to have given up hoping for.

What do women want (Freud is reported to have asked)? Thank you for asking or pretending to ask, Herr Doktor. I’ll be glad to tell you what I believe women want:

Gallantry and Nobility

If I’m right about that, then for a woman to give up that natural hope might be a greater hazard than that presented by all the bad guys, separately and together. Among the different kinds of success that life offers, there is such a thing as a woman who is a success as a woman. It’s not like winning a Nobel Prize, but every woman can recognize the difference between these two types of success. Women who, despite their disappointments, continue to live in harmony with – and deserving of – legitimate high hopes are living successfully.

I can be said to love women in the sense of having an instinctive and intuitive sympathy for others of my sex. Also, and perhaps equally consequential, I find women’s life stories interesting and at times fascinating. Because, regarding the challenges that belong to being a woman, really …

it's a subtle and precarious dance.

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Death Frames the Story

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Abigail

Marble stele of a woman, Greek, mid-4th century B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Death is But a Dream, the report of research by Christopher Kerr that I wrote about last week, the author’s interviews with the dying tell of reunions between the dying and those they cared about who had predeceased them. Assuming Kerr’s investigations conform methodologically to those used in more conventional research projects, his conclusions would certainly challenge modern and postmodern assumptions that death terminates your story and mine, full stop.

That said, Kerr’s descriptions of these last encounters had a sameness of tone – reflecting the singleness of their reporter, Kerr himself. Since the topic is not exactly a boring one – rather one of ultimate concern – I turned to another book, Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms by David Kessler. There, witnesses write their own first-hand reports. Of course, those authors cannot be the dying themselves. But they are people both concerned and close at hand, such as spouses, relatives or nurses and doctors who’ve been willing to tell what they saw and heard from the dying.

Should such reports be deemed credible? Kessler tells something I did not know, namely that a dying person’s declaration is admissible as evidence in courts of law. The decision goes back to English medieval jurisprudence which held that “a dying person is not presumed to lie.” Perhaps the credibility of the dying was reinforced by the belief, then shared, that the afterlife would be a domain of divine judgment. But even today, generally speaking, the dying person is no longer looking for gains in this present world. One can imagine a last spark of malice motivating a parting lie, but – though I do know of malicious lies – personally I know of no such lie being told by someone actually dying.

That view from the law is in marked contrast to the typical medical view where “deathbed visions are considered hallucinations” and most likely a “side effect of medication or lack of oxygen.” That still-established view, while surely correct in certain cases, is pretty downbeat. It’s prosaic – not poetic.

By contrast, among the experiences of the dying reported in Kessler’s collection are some that rekindle and verify romance. For example, Nina, a health-care attorney, found true love with Bill, her second husband. He “had become more of a parent to [her] children than their own birth father.” Some years later, when her children were grown, Bill started to complain of headaches. Eventually his symptoms were tracked to a spinal tumor which all the approved medical treatments failed to reverse.

Accepting the inevitable, Bill checked out of the last hospital and finally went home to die. A few days before the end, Nina “realized that our small, self-contained world had a visitor … . I heard him say, ‘Mom, I can’t believe you’re here.’ He told her about the kids and me, as if we were being introduced, with no regard as to whether we could hear him or not. … On the last day of his life, he talked to his mom again. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Come here.’ He gave me the most passionate kiss – the kind you have when you’re dating, not when you’re dying. Afterward, he told his mother, ‘I knew I loved her from the first kiss.’ And to me he said, ‘To the last kiss, I love you.’ He died peacefully that night.” So it seems that, when we die, romance doesn’t have to die.

The two deaths I have witnessed were those of my father and my mother. My father took just a week to die, proving that, as my mother said, he wouldn’t drag it out. To the young physician at the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital who asked him how he was feeling, he replied, “I feel real resuscitated” – with ambiguity and irony mixed together, as was his wont.

At the end, I watched him die, my hand on his heart. From his chest, a current of sensation ran up my arm until – like the conclusion of a wordless paragraph or sentence – the current had conveyed everything it had to tell me. Which was that Love underlies, encompasses and supplies substance to all the perturbations, refusals and reversals, losses and victories of our lives.

I was not with my mother at the end. She died in the hospice during the night. But the last expression I saw on her face – from which by then all the feminine coquetterie had fled – was of the sternest and profoundest Love.

*. *. *

What do they prove or show, these books by intelligent writers that are now going public with their evidences that death is not the end? What effect will such evidences have, if credited, and what changes might they work on the culture, now virtually worldwide, that we share?

Such findings would make everything we do, say, feel and think more consequential than up to now we’ve quite dared to believe. Our lives are carriers of meaning. They are

nonfiction stories.

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We Don’t Die When We Die

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it all counts.

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Dreams about Real Life

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we’ll see, won’t we?

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Grief, Martha Nussbaum, and Me

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it’s as hard to get out of this world

as it was to get in.

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

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

has no way of knowing

that “things were not so.”

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

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

It's not over.

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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