Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Women’s Knockout Fights

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Abigail

In Les Liaisons dangereuses, the 18^th-century French novel of cynicism by Choderlos De Laclos, the seductress goads her partner in erotic predation to break off his affair with the lady whose virtue had been surrendered to him. His break is effected in a letter that his female co-predator dictates. When, later, the seducer realizes that he did love his victim, he confides to his co-conspirator his hopes of winning her back. However, his confederate informs him that the case is quite hopeless since his letter breaking it off was composed by a woman and …

women know

how to strike at another woman

irreparably.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about sisterhood and its potentially destructive power. With regard to illustrative incidents in my own life, I’ve been wondering, what was really going on? Since women are subtle, rarely putting all their cards face up on the table, the answers aren’t obvious.

Take my own case, in the aftermath of the death of my parents. They’d been unusually good and interesting people. Around them a circle of friends had gathered who, so far as I could tell, loved and enjoyed their originality and moral authority. I took for granted that these relationships, most especially the friendships with the colleagues, would continue on the same firm footing after my parents were gone.

My closest inherited woman friend, also a philosopher, was single by choice, of Viking descent, and could spend entire summers alone among her ancestral Nordic fjords. She was not interested in ethical judgments, living in a space that was, as she saw it, beyond good and evil. Whereas I loved cafes and museums. We never tried to change each other but enjoyed what she called our “oppositeness” – in a candid, intuitive closeness that it would never have occurred to me to question.

I noted one change after my parents’ death: a relative of mine – not a philosopher – had taken to attacking me behind my back in some of the venues we had shared during the lifetime of my parents.

It had been the custom of my Viking friend to host a party every year whose main guests were other philosophers. As a matter of course, I’d be invited too. This year, knowing of my problem with the relative, my Viking friend checked with me as to whether she should invite her to that annual party. I did not think it fair to exclude my relative from the party merely because she was at war with me. So I said yes.

That turned out to be a mistake. My warring relative entered the party scene with an escort, not with any air of pleasure at being invited, but with a look of theatrical outrage – as if she were the victimized party.

My Viking hostess appeared to miss the aggressive intent of such a display. Instead, she appeared to take it at face value, remarking to me afterward that, so far as she could see, my relative believed herself to have been the wronged party. Subsequently, taking her “misreading” further than I would have thought possible, my Viking friend persuaded a different hostess – whose husband was also a philosopher – not to invite me – but to invite my aggressive relative instead – to their philosophers’ party. The evening after that party, I happened to walk into a neighborhood restaurant where I found the non-inviting hostess dining with my relative-on-the-war-path, now joined by my Viking colleague – all looking like a conspiratorial threesome caught in the act.

There is a lot more to that story, but by now the plotline must be clear. Wherever the relative-on-the-war-path went, she carried fictional tales discreditable to me, that to my amazement were credited by people who knew no evil of me!

The same sort of defamatory gossip eventually separated me from the circle of my parents’ New York friends. While this multi-tiered episode was going on, I was not surprisingly diagnosed with cancer. After the rigors of treatment, the threatening illness did not recur. That may have been because I took the precaution of ending every last one of these betrayed friendships.

It’s been many years since the events occurred that I’m retelling and they are now – along with the hurt of them – safely in the past. But in another sense, the past is present because remembered, and still holds its opacities.

What do I think really happened? First of all, the world’s contents do include intelligent malice. Such malice has influence not merely because its fictions can sound credible but because the capacity to generate defamations registers as power. Those who come in contact with felt power don’t necessarily ask after its pedigree – whether its claims are true and authentic as opposed to barbarously false.

They ask … who is stronger?

When, in a gracious spirit, I gave my Viking friend the go-ahead to invite my antagonistic relative to her party – gave it on the grounds of fairness – and then did not forcefully and persistently fight her “misreading” of my relative’s pretended victimhood – my Viking friend read the performance of social aggressiveness as strength. Which (in a way stupefying to me) it was.

Whatever took shape later, when the consequences had gathered momentum, it was likely that my Viking friend had not initially meant to do me harm. She knew many varieties of discernment, but moral discriminations had never been among them. She could no more wield those than I could spend a summer alone by a fjord.

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Among the Feminists

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Abigail

*The Two Fridas* by Frida Kahlo, c. 1939.

This afternoon I’ve spent catching up with recent feminist theory, summarized in “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I wrote one of the first articles on feminism to appear in a philosophical journal (“Feminism Without Contradictions” in The Monist), and introduced a regular course, “Philosophic Foundations of Feminism” in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. Though I declined to join in setting up Women’s Studies as a separate department at BC, and most of my subsequent work has been on other topics, I share the concern that most of us have about where current thinking about women – about the sexes and feminism – is taking us.

The Stanford article covers five exploratory decades, starting in the 1970’s. One question runs through it:

How much of the male/female difference

is the product of social conditioning,

and how much is biological?

All the feminists distinguish the biological layer, which they call “sex,” from the societal layer, which they call “gender.” And they all labor to widen the realm of “gender” (which is subject to rearrangement) and narrow the domain of “sex” – which is less receptive to modification.

To stretch the gender realm, feminists have pushed for gender-free toys, for fathers’ (as well as mothers’) equal involvement in child care, also for not pushing boys toward rough sports while relegating girls to dolls and tamer games.

For one writer, whom I’ll call the Power Feminist, gender differences reflect society’s power hierarchy. One of her proposed cures was to ban pornography, whose theme she saw as dominance and subordination.

As it happens, I had dealings with the Power Feminist at a time when I was trying in vain to get feminists to protest the brutal rape of a credible woman whose interview I had watched on NBC. Her alleged rapist had been a popular official at the top of the American power structure. The Power Feminist I’d contacted told me that she would lend her name to the protest I was trying to organize, provided I contacted the victim and secured her consent. When (perhaps to the PF’s surprise) I was able to locate the victim and get her grateful consent, the PF said she was sorry but she had to leave town in a terrible hurry.

So the PF had prompted me to awaken the hopes of a woman who’d been victimized in a ghastly way – and then showed no compunction whatever in dashing those hopes. It’s one of my worst memories.

To go back to the movement’s timeline, it was visited next by feminists who claimed that oppression, patriarchy, etc. were differently experienced depending on your race, class, sexual orientation and classificatory “fit” into the biological categories of male and female which were, it seemed, less rigidly fixed in nature than in social practice.

On the other hand, if most biological distinctions are social – pertain to gender – and all gender distinctions are oppressive, what exactly is the domain of feminism? Maybe there are no such things as women – and so, there is nothing to liberate! Or perhaps the goal of feminism is merely to make such entities as “women” disappear.

Coincidentally, a memory comes to mind. I am one of the guests at an expensive New York restaurant called “The Top of the Sixes,” where a wealthy New Yorker is hosting a dinner in honor of his wife. She’s a well-known feminist. I’ve known her since I was a teenager. She’s a lovable woman who’s done a fair bit of good in the world, for many women – me included.

At my dinner table, the adjoining seat has been reserved for a Founding Mother of the feminist movement. She arrives late – too late to get dinner. I go into the kitchen where I persuade the staff to put a last plate together, which I then bring to her. As we listen to the toasts and brief speeches, enjoying the celebratory spirit of the evening, I remark to the Founding Mother, “It really is ‘feminism without contradictions.’ I am thinking of the article I published in earlier years of the movement, though of course the Founding Mother has no reason to know about that.

“What are you talking about?” she snarls at me. “I bet you don’t even know what a contradiction is! You live your whole life in cliches!”

I get up to wander about the restaurant floor, in shock. Along my wandering way, I see an editor who’s a friend and tell her what the Founding Mother just said to me. “Oh,” she shakes her head sympathetically, “you’re the last person about whom anyone could say that she lives her whole life in cliches!”

Later that year, I learn from my feminist friend – the one who was feted by her husband at The Top of the Sixes – that her marriage is breaking up. What is more, the Founding Mother, who lives in the same New York apartment building a few floors down, has become a chum of the soon-to-be-ex-husband and together they’ve spent time exchanging nasty confidences about her, the soon-to-be-discarded wife.

When I meet the by-now ex-wife for lunch, she tells me of a new fashion that her feminist friends talk of adopting:

safety pins

clipped all over one’s skirt

to ward off men.

“Do you still believe that you’ll find true love?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I nod.

“Well, if you find him, I’ll believe in God.”

I did find my true love, and you can believe what you want. But he was not a referral from the feminists.

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Is Spirituality Natural?

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Abigail

Peak in the Cirque of the Unclimbables, Canada. Photo by Tom Frost.

In last week’s column, I visited the phases of our human development, from infancy to adulthood, as assembled by philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions. Despite my own high regard for Martha Nussbaum, I found her “phases” rather dispiriting. As helpless infants we’re anxiety-ridden, because we have no power over our care-givers. They come and go as they wish, not necessarily as we wish. Then shame comes into our consciousness, supposedly as a side-effect of our vulnerability. Next disgust enters, as we internalize societal mores. After that, we have jealousy and envy to deal with, as we jockey for place in the world.

Finally — if these and a few other ingredients get mixed at the right time and in the right proportions — we can end up with a fine, generous-minded, high-functioning grownup character. Or not, if the mix wasn’t done right.

As I noted here last week, I didn’t recognize me in MCN’s developmental story, grounded though it must be in the well-credentialed researchers whose findings she cites. So, does that mean “The Science Says It”? What should I make of that? Should it overrule my remembered experience? Have I been outvoted?

Looking for light on the Science question, I read Philip Kitcher’s What’s the Use of Philosophy? (Oxford 2023). Here’s the back story, as Kitcher tells it. When the 20th century dawned, it appeared that Science was the magisterium from which all rightly formulated questions could be answered. If you couldn’t put your question in a form answerable by Science, it was likely either to be nonsensical or else detritus deposited by pre-scientific confusions still awaiting cleanup. So philosophers of science set themselves the task of determining the sorts of entities that were eligible for scientific explanation and the sorts that should be excluded as ineligible.

How’d that work out? After careful and laudable investigations, stretching over the course of the whole twentieth century, it became obvious that there wasn’t one all-embracing-umbrella discipline called “Science.” The magisterium wasn’t there. Instead, there were many sciences, each with its own criteria for inclusion and exclusion plus its own investigative methods. Nor could this plurality of sciences undergo reduction from the more complex down to the simpler level (e.g. with life sciences hopefully describable in terms of chemistry) till one landed at physics on the bottom level — foundational to and explanatory of the ones above. The sciences just didn’t seem to work in that layered way.

Where might present-day philosophy operate, according to Kitcher? It can make clarifying contributions to the work of laying out methods and boundaries for the research programs in the sciences and other disciplines. Additionally, it can help people make sense of their life experiences so as to “refine and revise their ‘plans of life’ … .” There remain new topics to explore, methods for framing them and multiple upshots — depending how each topic is framed and what method proves revelatory or fruitful.

Meanwhile, I’ve still got MCN’s developmental psychology jangling round in my brain. So, nerved by Kitcher’s conclusions, I’ve begun reading a very different book with a very different take on developmental psychology. It’s by Lisa Miller, Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University. She holds other titles, seems well published in professional journals and, together with colleagues, has herself initiated and carried through “extensive and groundbreaking research,” including “advances in our understanding of brain science… neuro-imaging, lengthy interviews with hundreds of children and parents, case studies, and rich anecdotal material … .” So, whatever the worth of her findings, she’s not getting her results at second hand. She’s opening doors that were closed heretofore.

What has she found? That children of widely different cultures whose “natural spirituality” is appropriately supported, are “40 percent less likely to use and abuse substances, 60 percent less likely to be depressed as teenagers, 80 percent less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex,” and “more likely to have positive markers for thriving and high levels of academic success.” The title of her book is The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving (St. Martin’s Press, 2015).

What do I make of such findings?

Personally,

I think they’re on to something.

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Psychology! Psychology! Psychology!

Posted on February 20, 2024 by Abigail

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, 1939.

Back in the days when I was coming into the bloom of womanhood, the boys used to tell me that they knew what I needed. Though the heyday of parlor psychologizing may have passed, that’s still the trouble with it. They don’t ask. They know.

In the column before this one, I mentioned reading books by philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum who writes about emotional intelligence. I was very glad to make her acquaintance, since she seems to fill in some of the blanks on the great map of experience that philosophers hope to describe and explain.

In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions, MCN observes a reciprocal relation between our theories and our emotions. On the one hand, theories shape emotions, but also we meet realities that only feelings can discern.

Here’s one example: my Self-Defense for Women teacher taught us to pay attention if we feel reluctant to get into an elevator holding only one passenger. Aggression has an odor, which we may be sniffing fearfully, even if we think our reluctance unreasonable.

I also liked MCN’s reminder that we are not stuck with our present furniture of concepts and percepts. Ordinarily we’re capable of revising both. We do live and learn!

So I read along eagerly. Till I came to her account of developmental psychology. There she reports what she finds to be the present consensus about stages of human development, from earliest infancy to adulthood. I’ll tell you what they say, as she reports it. Among animals, we have an atypically long and helpless infancy. We need protection, food and comfort, yet we can’t control who gives it or for how long. Also, before much time passes, we’ll want our care-givers to get back and allow us the space to explore and master our surroundings.

It’s complicated, but so far so good. But then, two ugly emotions obtrude: shame and disgust. Shame seems primordial. She connects it to our vulnerability. [This doesn’t ring true to me. I’m vulnerable from my neuropathy; it hampers my walk; but I don’t feel shame about it. From the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, as well as from personal memory, shame seems to me connected to sex; but what do I know? MCN has got the report from the experts.]

Now what about disgust? This is the reaction to a perceived contaminant which we want to flee or expel. And, she reports, it’s not natural! It occurs in connection with stuff deemed offensive by parents and society. [That doesn’t ring right to me either. Cats seem rather modest about excretia. If disgust were merely conventional, wouldn’t there be some societies that just relish rolling around in it?]

Next on the upward climb toward adulthood, we meet two more bad guys: jealousy and envy. In jealousy, we want to get rid of the competitor; in envy, we’ll settle for getting in front of her.

So what does the happy land of maturity look like? Once there, we accept boundaries, we allow ourselves to trust, we feel gratitude, empathy, wonder at the richness of the world of experience, and lo! a sense of justice. This seems a rather fine silk purse to get out of the primal sow’s ear …

I hate to say it, but this whole developmental story didn’t ring bells with me. Looking back, I can’t recall wanting to kill my rivals. (In fact, I stopped winning foot races once I noticed that some people had to lose.) I can’t recall wanting to be the center of the universe. And I didn’t want to wipe competitors off the face of the earth.

Here’s a case in point: in Hilltop, the summer place where my family went in New Jersey, the landlady’s son-in-law owned a pet monkey named Benny whom he hoped would make his fortune someday in Hollywood. This son-in-law was named Lenny. My mother, who didn’t have a good memory for names, would ask the landlady, “How’s Benny?” when she meant to inquire after Lenny. Anyway, I didn’t like Benny one bit. He would pee on people from the treetops. But I don’t recall wanting even Benny wiped off the face of the earth! So, maybe I’m in Heavy Denial. How would I know?

Anyway, moving right along, let’s look at one of MCN’s examples of emotional life, this one drawn from Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights. In this romantic English tale, appearing first in 1847, an adopted darker-skinned child, Heathcliffe, grows up to take revenge on his adoptive family’s natural children, who bullied him in childhood. Through the novel runs his early passion for his foster-sister Catherine, who – despite the intensity of their bond – marries for social prestige and safety. The whole novel is marked by excess: Heathcliff’s willful schemes of revenge, the suffering he brings down on rivals, the lovers’ never-quenched, lawless longing for each other, and the peace that settles over the survivors only after the deaths of all who first set the drama in motion.

It’s hard to see what can be learned from this tale of passions going to the end of their string. However, to my surprise, MCN settles on Heathcliff as the novel’s hero! In his “entirely unguarded love” she finds “a deeper sort of generosity and the roots of a truer altruism. …The capacity to throw away all self-centered calculation is at the heart of real altruism and authentic … morality. …The novel suggests that only in this deep exposure is there true sacrifice and true redemption.”

I beg to differ.

The love between Heathcliff and Cathy has its ferocity because it plays out under an iron sky.

Passion without transcendence

morphs into cruelty.

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Grief, Martha Nussbaum, and Me

Posted on February 13, 2024 by Abigail

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.”

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Femininity – A Social Construct?

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Abigail

A professor in one of my graduate departments of philosophy warned me that, if I wanted “to become a philosopher, [I’d] have to destroy [my] femininity!”

On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir opened her path-breaking, paradigm-shaking book, The Second Sex, with the pronouncement, “One is not born a woman; one becomes one.” Meaning that femininity is the result of a process of socialization and – aside from certain inconveniences – there’s nothing “natural” about it.

If de Beauvoir was right, then my professor’s warning would have gone smoothly down – without causing inward trepidation or stifled protest – as the easiest thing in the world. Down like a honey-coated cough drop. But in fact the dictum didn’t go down easy. It hung over the air of the campus like the densest humidity. You breathed it in and it changed you!

One of my female classmates took vows and entered a Greek Orthodox convent where self-flagellation was practiced. Another took the veil as a Catholic nun, though I’d never noticed a nanosecond of religiosity in her. A third girl, whom I remember as long-legged, supple, and largely silent, married an Ethiopian, moved to his country, and told me, the last time I saw her, that she fitted in there harmoniously. Her only shock came whenever she would pass by a mirror and perceive her own preposterously bleached-out complexion! The last of the women in my class had been prepared to go forward toward the degree, provided the professors would accommodate her schedule as the mother of children in primary school. This they declined to do. If femininity is nothing but a social construct, the construct can still put one in a pretty tight bind.

Would my bind have gotten looser had I made a deliberate effort to “destroy my femininity”? And by the way, was there anything objectively irreducible in femininity that might – at significant cost – be destroyed?

Recently I had a chance to talk by phone with a former colleague with whom I hadn’t connected since the days when we were both young assistant professors at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. To my surprise, he remembered me as “a cop-lover”! I did remember having circulated a petition that called for more lighting and police on campus at night. I now reminded my former colleague that, back then, young women students walking to the library at night were being attacked by a slasher who would knick them on the face with a very sharp knife. That danger was forcing young women to take boyfriends solely for personal protection when they used the library at night. Colleagues at the Philosophy Department – more concerned with maintaining their standing as revolutionary cop-haters than with the safety of their women students – mostly shied away from my petition.

It still seems to be good form to maintain that there is no natural difference between men and women – neither of strength nor of bodily aggressiveness.

Is femininity a mere social construct? Or perhaps a social construct with minor inconveniences like menstruation, pregnancy, and certain deficits in muscle mass and testosterone?

The poorer the woman, the harder it becomes to mask such “inconveniences.” But anticipating and dealing with them, however one does that, is a major concern for every woman I know. It is not a concern for any man I know.

Here’s a datum. Among the women I knew in childhood were three – all European – who embodied womanly authority. They never tried to be unisex-beings-with-inconveniences. They moved, they were shaped, their voices identified them as female and distinct from men in a full-bodied, inarguable, naturally persuasive way.

Here’s another datum. Some years back, I had occasion to talk long distance to a woman descended from a Lakota chief who is known to the history books. She was the friend of a friend, and had just emerged victorious from a battle for indigenous rights on the campus of her university. I phoned her out of concern about possible threats to her victory that she might yet encounter. As we talked at our ease for a good long while, in some context I quoted my mother, who had considerable womanly realism. In response, the chief’s great, great granddaughter exclaimed, “That’s just what my grandmother would say!”

What inference do I draw? There is a freemasonry of women – a guild, if you like. Its members know about, and exchange, womanly wisdom. It would be very helpful to know … what such women know.

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As Philosophy Goes …

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Abigail

Dante and Virgil Leaving the Dark Wood.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrations by Gustav Dore, 1861.

I hold the view, borrowed from G. W. F. Hegel, the nineteenth-century’s primo philosopher of history, that philosophy plays an oversized role in shaping human events. So do earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, global warming periods, plagues and nasty fights over water and fertile fields. What philosophy helps to shape are the worldviews of people who live in cultures permeable to its practice.

With that in mind, one of the reading collections I took with me for our week in California was the annual publication of the American Philosophical Association, the November 2023 issue of Proceedings and Addresses. It contains Presidential Addresses for each geographical division, prize-winning lectures, Memorial Minutes and professional news of other kinds. It seemed a good place to see what’s drawn attention within the profession from coast to coast, over the past year.

Three of the nine winning lectures were by men, six by women. Poor guys. Talent has obviously jumped the genders. (I’m kidding.)

Certain lectures, David Chalmers’ Eastern Division Presidential Address, Jonathan Schaffer’s Sanders Lecture, and Jennifer Nagel’s Sosa Prize Lecture, were about what we can know or what reality ultimately is. These are traditional topics and they were handled by each lecturer in a manner consistent with a physicalist worldview. That means, what’s real is whatever physics describes as the ultimate ingredient – that of which everything is composed, in the cosmos as well as the human scene.

Chalmers’ view is that thinking does not require sensory input from our bodies. Setting aside the thinking involved in activities like riding a bicycle, AI can do the thinking just as well as the fleshly-embodied you or I can do it. Whew! Thinking without the human sweat. That’s a relief!

Schaffer aims at an explanatory system of the most encompassing kind: a metaphysical system. He wants one with enough reach to account for everything – from minds to mushrooms to money – but simple enough to print on the front of your T-shirt. So, unlike the logical positivists of Vienna in the 1930’s (for whom only sense data and logical relations were philosophically interesting), Schaffer sees no need to exclude the extra-physical chunks of experience. That said, it turns out that the only features of reality to appear on your T-shirt, ladies, will be the quantifiable ones. So the physicalism that inspired the Vienna positivists is still calling the shots, though perhaps more diplomatically.

Jennifer Nagel begins her Sosa Prize lecture with the recognizably Platonic problem of distinguishing real knowledge from “right opinion”— that is, from the guesses that merely happen to turn out right. Take facial recognition, for example. Can a machine replicate it or does it require some power that sets human beings apart from machines and alone deserves the title of knowledge? When we recognize faces, we do so despite changes of expression, angle, context and so forth. Is it possible to program facial recognition by AI? Well, yes, if millions of photo images are used to train the learning models. Eventually, by trial and error, the success rates will approach ours. Since neither we nor AI models get it right all the time, real knowledge is not housed in some ontological container separate from right opinion. Plato was wrong to idealize knowledge. Like the AI models, we too “learn from prediction errors … .”

Are people like machines? Somewhat like machines? Like machines provided you leave out a lot? If philosophy contributes to the shaping of worldviews within culture, what happens to people when their horizons are shaped in this way by philosophers? Let’s not be in any hurry to answer … .

Eleonore Stump gave one of the John Dewey lectures. Traditionally, those include an intellectual autobiography, where the speaker tells how she began, and how she came in time to her present concerns. In Stump’s case, developments she does not here recount what led her to convert to Catholicism, to work on Augustine, on the theology of Thomas Aquinas, on medieval logic, and the problem of human suffering. Apart from anecdotes I could recognize – recalling the headwinds for women in philosophy in her graduate school days and mine – the rest is a clear and cogent essay, though not particularly illustrative for the present era. It could have been written at any time.

Now for a philosopher with concerns primarily social and political. Ann Gary gave another of the Dewey lectures. Her thinking evolved from a dissertation in what would later be called the field of cognitive psychology to “the 70’s, the decade in which we created academic feminist philosophy and its institutions.” She weathered and even flourished in and through “a crisis” in the feminist journal Hypatia, concerning leadership and inclusiveness. She took over as editor, “we built Hypatia back up … then a highly diverse team … took over in 2019 and pursued interesting new directions.” She omits details but I may be able to fill them in. I don’t know what happened at Hypatia but, in my limited experience of intra-feminist strife, the winner will be the one who can most assertively push through her claim to be the deepest-down-underneath-it-all underdog!

Gary finishes with a plea to bring into the profession people from groups and “ways of life” previously excluded, quoting Mariana Ortega’s exhortation to “ignore the empty promises of justice and neutrality” in order better to understand “each other’s way of life … .”

Anyway, I wish she would supply an example of a “way of life” that’s been hidden from philosophical view by the empty promise of justice and neutrality. Absent concrete illustrations, Gary is at risk of committing what might be called the fallacy of scattershot condemnation.

There were more papers, but this sample suffices for our rapid overview. We were looking for philosophical indications for the future. On the surface, the picture looks somewhat discouraging. On the metaphysical/epistemological side, robots are almost as good as people. On the practical/societal side, the last shall be first, provided the last can get themselves authenticated as truly last by as much inverted rank-pulling as the academic scene will bear.

And yet … and yet … philosophy remains one of the antechambers where the next steps in humankind’s thought-world are prepared. So it might not all be as bleak as it looked at first. If metaphysics still counts only the measurable features of experience as ultimate – that sends a message to philosophers to seek an account of ultimacy that gives equivalent significance to whatever is at least as ultimate even if nonquantifiable. If social philosophy is scattering accusations from the safe perch of someone’s Incommensurable Otherness – that invites philosophers to disdain the game of moral one-upmanship and communicate their worldviews in a style that fosters philosophical friendship across differences.

There is more to philosophy than the fashions of the hour.

There is still the future.

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Léo

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This column was posted on August 29, 2017, but continues to be timely.

A few days ago I took a trip to Manhattan, formerly my home town, to visit old friends. One friend was Laurin Raikin, a founder of NYU’s Gallatin Division. We’ve known each other for many years and among the ties that bind us is a shared love for Léo Bronstein. Léo was Laurin’s philosophy of art teacher at Brandeis University. He was also my father’s closest friend and a sort of godfather to me, from my earliest days and continuing into adult life.

As we talked in a Brazilian café on sixth avenue, way downtown, Laurin shared a story about Léo. I have heard him tell it before. I’ve never understood why it has such an effect on me. Maybe if I tell it here, I’ll know its meaning better or someone who reads this can explain it to me.

In his youth, Léo was very handsome and, as long as I knew him, he had a dashing Catalan style. How he acquired the Catalan style is a story in itself. Léo had gone from Russia/Poland to Paris, eventually to study there with Henri Bergson and Henri Foçillon, among others.

His student sojourn did not begin well, however. Soon after arriving in The City of Lights, Léo found himself cut off without a ruble by the Russian Revolution and additionally burdened with the original name (Lev Bronshtein) of a leading revolutionary who is known to history by his nom de guerre: Leon Trotsky.

Léo was down to his last few francs and faced an existential choice: should he eat for a week or spend it all at an expensive concert? The young think they will never die. Léo went to the concert.

At intermission, he got into conversation with a middle-aged Spanish gentleman who was there to soothe the pangs of a last unhappy love affair and noticed a hungry-looking boy in the seat next to him.

As things turned out, Narcis Serradel I Pascual, became Léo’s “foster father in name and deed,” supervising his education all the way through and taking him home to Catalonia on vacation breaks. In return, Léo would take care of Mr. Serradel to the end of his days, even seeing to the last rites requested somewhat embarrassedly by this typically anti-clerical, Spanish free thinker.

Léo was extraordinarily cosmopolitan. He had intuitive depth, a lyrical species of objectivity, a tenderness rare in grownups and an understanding of evil-doers that was not seduced or fooled by them. He simply saw what they prefer to hide but decided not to pull moral rank — even on the worst of us. It was not for nothing that, when he retired, his students at Brandeis named a celebratory weekend after him.

Here is the story Laurin told. In the last year of his life, Léo was diagnosed with leukemia. He was dying. He did not tell our family. We knew nothing of it. In this condition, one day he was walking about Lower Manhattan, accompanied by a middle-aged lawyer friend. Partway through the planned walk, he felt intolerably weary and had to step in to rest at the nearest refuge, a shtibl, one of those obscure and shabby halls where poor Jews go to pray together. There was no Technicolor musical “Fiddler on the Roof” atmosphere about it. It was a hole in the wall.

Without speaking or moving, he sat in one of the darkened pews. Presently a boy of about 15 years of age, assigned to sweep the place, came up and told him to get out. They were getting it ready for Shabbos, the Sabbath, and the stranger couldn’t stay there. He was in the way. Léo did not move and did not reply, so the boy went over to tell Léo’s companion to please get his friend to leave.

“Yes,” said the lawyer friend. “I’ll tell him. Soon it’ll be Friday night. I suppose you want to prepare the challah (sabbath bread), candles and wine.”

“What challah, candles, wine? We can’t afford any of that! We have no money.”

Overhearing this, Léo called the boy over and gave him a sum of money that was more than enough to cover the requirements.

”Who shall I say gave this?” asked the amazed boy.

“No one.” Léo shook his head.

“But I have to tell the congregants to whom we owe this generosity!”

“Tell them …

an old Jew.”

In the aftermath of this incident, Laurin told me, Léo roused himself from his mortal faiblesse. With his new-found energy, he repaired to the New York Public Library daily and began to read and read, everything he could get hold of, about Kabbalah, which is the mystical vein in Judaism. He discovered that all that he’d been trying to teach as the message delivered by art was also the message of Kabbalah. On the basis of this research, he wrote Kabbalah and Art, his last book. At his final medical exam before he left for Europe, all traces of the leukemia were gone.

He traveled to Europe chiefly to see the Gruenewald “Crucifixion” in Colmar in Alsace. Exiting from the cathedral, as he started across the street, the light changed. A motorcyclist speeding across the intersection crashed into Léo and killed him. The summer before his trip, Leo had been puzzled by a recurrent dream in which death was represented as a boy on a motorcycle.

This story of Léo’s last year is very striking to me. Perhaps some reader can tell me the answer to my question.

What does it mean?

Posted in appreciation, remembrance | 2 Comments

Elegy for Ed Erwin

Posted on January 16, 2024 by Abigail

I hadn’t heard from Ed since right after his unexpected surgery. He’d sent me a technicolor headshot showing how he looked when post-operative. Pretty banged up. I didn’t realize that it would be his wordless explanation for ending further communication between us. He was a convinced empiricist: what the senses present is how it is. If you don’t look like yourself anymore, why pretend you still are yourself or ask old friends to pretend with you?

Not being half so committed to empiricism, I didn’t see it that way, and for some time tried to stay in touch, but it was no use. Till the other day, belatedly picking up the November 2023 issue of Proceedings and Addresses, the professional journal of the philosophers. That’s where you find the prize-winning speeches coast to coast, the presidential addresses at Eastern, Central and Pacific Division Meetings, and the Memorial Minutes. As usual, I turned first to the Memorial Minutes. Anybody I know?

And there was Ed, with a face more austere than I remember. The writeup, by his colleague Mark Rowlands on behalf of the University of Miami’s Philosophy Department, was appreciative and accurate, though it left out a back story to be filled in here.

To frame a portrait of Ed’s honesty, I’ll cite one case where I’m in the picture. We were young colleagues at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, when I decided to give a paper titled “Why Women’s Liberation?” Such a paper was ground-breaking back then, so I decided to make my debut as a feminist as smashing as I could. I came on stage in a black mini-dress, black tights and boots and wound it up with songs, composed by me for the occasion, also sung by me, my buddy Fred-the-drifter playing guitar on stage alongside me. In that large auditorium, the crowd filled every seat and gave it a sustained ovation. One of my students came up afterward to tell me, “I have never heard you so eloquent!”

Afterward, as we prepared to drive Fred to the station, I asked Ed what he thought. “I thought it was a very poor paper,” he said, in his one-note, low-affect voice. (Eventually, after considerable rewriting from me, retitled “Feminism Without Contradictions,” my paper appeared in The Monist, a well-regarded philosophy journal.) When, years later, I reminded Ed of what he’d said, he was a little embarrassed. In fact, I had not been in the least offended. He’d paid me the compliment of assuming that what I wanted from him was a truthful answer!

At a later time, Ed investigated the empirical evidence for the Freudian claims. He sent me an essay he’d written that summarized all the rigorous studies of Freud’s claims then available. The conclusion Ed came to was that psychoanalysis gave no better results for its clientele than other treatment modalities – or no treatments at all!

As I wrote in Dear Abbie, “I took these results to my shrink right away, fully expecting him to expose the methodological flaws of that study. … What he laid out by way of counter-argument was a pastiche of evasions. It happens that I can tell a bad argument when I hear one. Accordingly, I quit him.”

Later I shared my experience with Ed. Here’s what he wrote back: “When I started teaching at Stony Brook about half my academic friends were seeing a psychoanalyst; none showed any inclination of a mind change when I produced counter-evidence. Some of these people followed their shrink in August to his or her vacation spot.”

About then, Ed pronounced me “an empiricist.” Coming from him, I took it as a high compliment. There are other stories, as well as a respectable body of work in the field, but I’ll fast forward to Ed’s last acts as a working philosopher.

One of his colleagues, a well-regarded English philosopher by the name of Colin McGinn, had invited one of McGinn’s doctoral candidates, a young woman in her twenties, to enter with him into an experimental relationship of a peculiar kind. (I know, I know; you’re tensing up already. An English philosopher friend commented that men of McGinn’s generation went to boys’ elite schools where they were socialized to be hopeless around women.) But back to McGinn and his advisee. To what kind of peculiar relationship did he invite her? As I understood it, there was no actual physical contact, but they agreed to get together for the purpose of breaking all kinds of verbal taboos. Does that mean, they got together to talk dirty? Well … I guess. I wasn’t there and I never got an authoritative description, but I got the sense of something like that. The projected result of this taboo-breaking would have been the achievement of psychological liberation. Imprudent as the “experiment” may have been, McGinn saw no reason why it should affect his duties as her thesis advisor. When she turned in work that he thought required revision, he sent her off to redo it.

Instead, she made a complaint to whatever powers were in charge of sex harassment. I don’t know the details, but McGinn was punished in all the ways an academic can be punished nowadays. Ed wrote, “Despite not being charged with sexual harassment and his world-wide renown, and sterling publication record, he has been unable to find an academic job anywhere. He has also been blacklisted in publishing and prevented from speaking at conferences.”

Ed never defended McGinn’s not-so-great “experiment” with his 26-year-old graduate student. But he did not believe that the heavens had fallen on that sole account (whoever is without sin is free to cast the first stone) – and he refused to deny McGinn’s otherwise unblemished record in academic philosophy. In this refusal to lie or to duck, Ed stood alone. Although he and McGinn prevailed in a later lawsuit brought by the young woman, and Ed drew an apologetic retraction from a colleague who subsequently circulated a totally unfounded accusation of a different kind against him, nevertheless the combined denunciations sabotaged his professional life.

He wrote me: “My career as a teacher of graduate students ended … and my isolation in the department began … . No graduate student in the last 5 years has taken a course with me, asked me to write a letter of recommendation, or placed me on a dissertation committee. When I asked {the colleague] why she had forwarded this false accusation without supporting evidence, she replied that the accusation itself was evidence of its truth. [This was the false accusation for which, too late, the colleague apologized to Ed.] After I sent our graduate students a message on academic freedom, they responded by telling me to stop my immoral behavior and to never again write them on this topic.”

Ed thought that the professional bludgeoning had hastened the death of Pat, his beloved wife. I no longer recall what further steps Ed planned to take in his own defense or how far he’d gotten at the time of the sudden illness that killed him in turn.

Philosophy as a serious pursuit began in the love Plato immortalized in dialogues that showed Socrates, his teacher, in speech and action. The love of wisdom naturally becomes the love of those who seek it for those who have it. To have it, and to seek it, is to remain truthful.

That’s what Ed did.

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The Gang’s All Here

Posted on January 9, 2024 by Abigail

In honor of the new year, I’ve been catching up by phone with some of the friendships that have lasted for the long term. One friend has been in my life since we were both students at the now-defunct High School of Music and Art in New York City. Another is the only friend I’ve kept since our Fulbright year in Paris, many worlds ago.

In both long telephone calls, conversations turned to the friends who’d assembled with us on these important plateaus in life. What had happened to each of them, after the plateau? The questions and possible answers meant a lot to me, because of my idea of a Best Outcome after we die.

I take for granted that this life is not the only one we get. If you think differently, but want to follow along with me, then do this: first, suspend your disbelief for the duration of the thought experiment; second, ask yourself what heaven would look like, if you could design one that met your specifications.

For myself, I have no hesitation in giving the coordinates for my personal heaven. It would have to include the following: long, confidential café chats with my women friends on the meaning of life and love; cantering over unplowed Downeast fields with woman friends gone before me; rollicking reunions with colleagues – men who were friends in good times and bad – as we think over what it all taught us, from the start to now, and from here on. There’s a couple I’ve loved, my whole life long, and I would like to see them again. Also, there were wise parental friends whom I just sat and listened to, and I would like to do that again, curled up as before on the scratchy red couch.

There’s a few more, but in my heaven we all get together, dust ourselves off, and compare notes. Is there more to it? Well, since the reunion would have to be finely calibrated to each returnee – more so than can be described here – obviously I must omit identifying details.

But that’s it. Abbie’s heaven.

It shouldn’t be that hard to arrange. But why, come to think of it, should heaven have to wait till you die? I could convene the party now – at least in thought, I could. So I drew up the list of invitees. If we start with the kids I knew when I was ten, it gets pretty long.

I’ll tell you how it broke down – not the individual names of course, but the broad classifications – as, in my heart’s imagination, I tried to picture each one now.

Some were live-wire kids but would likely have become more staid and settled as grownups, leaving most of their spontaneity behind.

As for my high school girl friends, to retain their full personalities, some would have needed more personal force than they likely had. Others might have used up most of the youthful life-force they possessed in securing safe berths for their futures. (In those days, if you didn’t marry right after college, you were herstory. Author’s note: I was herstory.)

In one striking case, what appeared to be the fulfillment-of-a-young-girl’s dream turned out to have been bought at the price of abject, self-abasing, spiritual surrender to a husband who’d looked like the stranger you tossed coins in Rome’s fontana di trevi to meet. By the time I met them in Rome, she’d been taught to regret her experimental youth and “envy” the Italian girls who brought virginity intact to their nuptials. After they married and had their baby, she brought him to New York. I never found out what happened to the dream romance once he discovered that the streets of New York weren’t paved with gold …

Among the colleagues, some showed honor in a tight spot and paid heavily for it. One, who looked like a young prince, did not overcome a tragic flaw and paid devastatingly for it. And others were never slated for tragedy or else landed on their feet. A life that still pursues wisdom but knows how to have fun too is, for me, a good life!

What did I learn, from this attempt in thought, to round up the guests for a gang’s-all-here reunion? Well, the guest list will have to be shorter than I’d hoped. They can’t all be here. Not at the same time or for the same reunion. In many cases, the life stories of my invitees branched off into side-paths they could not share. Others lingered at roadblocks still unsurmounted. One or two were brought to full stop by cascading regrets.

I wish they could all be there. But more will decline with polite thanks than will prove able to attend.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, alienation, anthropology, art, art of living, atheism, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, 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, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, journalism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, 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, 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, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged "the gang's all here", "Three Coins in the Fountain", a woman's personal force, afterlife reunion, being good at being a woman, cafe chats with women friends, class reunion, collegial friends, comparing notes in heaven, comparing notes in the afterlife, confiding in friends, designing your heaven, discussing life's big questions with friends, dream romance, envying viriginity, eternal friends, experimental youth, femininity and youth, femininity and masculinity, finding a husband, fortune's favorite, friends as life witnesses, friends from way back when, friends gone before, friends in good times and bad, friends who were kids together, friends you want to meet again, Fulbright friends, Fulbright in Paris, growing up and liking it, herstory, high school friends, High School of Music and Art, horse riding with friends, how life worked out for classmates, in search of lost time, integrity is more fun, keeping one's friends, keeping one's honor, keeping virginity, landing on one's feet, life forces that overwhelm, life review, life's plateaus, life's regrets, life's roadblocks, lifelong friends, lifelong friendships, lost friendships, marrying before graduation, outgrowing childhood friends, personal heaven, preperation for life, reflections in heaven, romance and reality, securing your story, seeing friends in heaven, senior panic to marry, sharing life chapters with friends, spinster and old maid, spiritual surrender, surviving the storms of life, taking a side-path, the biological plight of women, the gang's not all here, the meaning of life and love, the price of integrity, the pursuit of wisdom, timeless talks with friends, timeless talks with women friends, tragic flaw, unprepared for reality, vulnerability of women, what happened to classmates, wise parental friends, women's biological clock, young girls' dreams | 3 Comments

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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