Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Mystical Merger and Me

Posted on September 9, 2025 by Abigail

Once childhood’s unproblematic days were gone forever, I had to face the question of how to orient myself as a young girl. For some, as I gathered from pamphlets with titles like “Growing Up and Liking It” — that particular title belonged to a sanitary napkin company — the young-girl years would be about dating and wearing prom dresses.

That was not an option for me. Whatever I’d divined about impending womanhood, it probably did have something to do with womanhood in Europe. It would have zero application to the American scene. I guess I went out on a date a few times in the course of going from ages 13 to 19, but if so, memory has mercifully failed to retain the details.

So, what filled the desire gap in those years? Well, two desiderata, each quite distinct but tending oddly to blend: mystical merger with the Absolute and sexual meltdown into the erotic volcano referenced in the novels I read.

Nor is it clear which of the two I preferred to yearn for. I read about the lives of saints who, despite outward deprivation, climbed all the way up to mystical fulfillment. I’m not sure what exactly I expected to gain from such melding, but at the very least I thought it would confer unproblematic poise in any social situation.

As for the alternative ideal, the shattering of separateness when two bodies contrive to merge: in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the American anti-fascist fighter Robert Jordan and his Maria do converge and then, famously – “the earth moves.” The Spanish wise woman Pilar comments that this happens only very rarely. Consequently, that earth-moving species of sexual self-realization seemed to us young American girl readers all the more desirable for its very scarcity.

For the Saintly best case, celibacy appeared to be the sine qua non: the prerequisite. Since no seducers were in sight, that wasn’t hard for me.

Contrariwise, in the best case of the Great Lover, of course I understood that you can’t get to be that while staying untouchable. So … go figure. Actually, I tried to figure. I read everything in English by Gandhi (whom I loved). Also The Long Loneliness, which was the spiritual autobiography of Dorothy Day of The Catholic Worker, to which I subscribed. In response to these exemplars, I resolved to stay nonviolent. (I wasn’t very violent in any case — with or without those spiritual guides.)

As for the Great Lover, well so far I’d not met him — the ideal true love, the one and only — but I was young yet. So really these two youthful life ideals had one great commonality:

they each cost me nothing.

And what happened finally? Did I ever get to live out either one?

***

Re the earth-mover ideal: well, orgasm is one thing; human decency is something else. I could write more about sex some other time. But I will say this about it: it’s not the end-of-the-line of human desire. It’s a byproduct — accompanying rather than defining — the drama of soul-convergence.

Re sainthood: the important thing is not to live a life that, for you, is really Plan B. If all your deepest desires converge on merger with God or the Absolute — go for it, babe. I’m not gonna get in your way.

But if something else calls you more, a different Plan A, whether you found it so far or lost it, your primary responsibility will be to respond to that desire. And as for whatever looks like Life Plan B for you —

don’t chase that.

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged adolescence, American adolescence, anti-romantic views, authenticity and self-responsibility, bodies and souls, childhood days, convergence of souls, Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, erotic peak experiences, European adolescence, European vs American teenage, false hopes, famous saint, fulfillment, Gandhi, Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi’s work in English, good faith, great lover, growing up, growing up and liking it, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, hope and hopelessness, human desire, idealism and cynicism, ideals and delusions, ideals on the cheap, ideals that cost nothing, impending womanhood, life ambitions, life ambitions frustrated, life goals, life ideals, life illusions, life purposes, merging with the Absolute, modern ideals, modern illusions, mystical fulfillment, mystical fulfillment and social poise, mystical merger, mystical vs sexual merger, nonviolence, novels vs real life, overcoming separateness, politician trying to be a saint, religion and social know-how, romantic ideal, sainthood, sainthood as life ambition, saints and celibacy, saints and their God, secular ideals, secular illusions, seduction and modernism, sex when the earth moves, sexual self-realization, spiritual autobiographies, teenage miseries, teenage social success, teenage wallflowers, the Catholic Worker movement, true love, twentieth-century ideals, youthful life ideals | Leave a comment

Where Are the Ex-Friends Now?

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Abigail

This is a week when I’ve been thinking about old friends who are, as it happens, ex-friends. Maybe it’s a special category of friendship.

I’ve devoted a recent column to David, who was a valued philosophical colleague. Together we shared the intellectual trust that allowed us to open a wide array of questions to unfettered thinking. Not tired, not bored, not exasperated, not looking over our respective shoulders to make sure we were safely between the lines of whatever was in philosophical fashion that year. It was fun! And it was real.

I don’t know why he had to go and spoil it, first by temporarily trading his departmental vote for job security without honor, second by borrowing money from me that he didn’t need and didn’t plan to pay back. The latter forced on me a choice between becoming his victim or calling in my lawyer and thereby ending the friendship. Years later, he got into his car drunk and crashed his car, killing the son beside him in the passenger seat.

Though I’ve previously told his story here, there was one sequel I didn’t tell. I saw him again. It was during the fifteen minutes a day I spend on the elliptical – an exercise machine that’s one part of my daily Rehab schedule. We keep exercise paraphernalia on the lower floor, which also holds a wall-length bookcase, a record player, a couch and a TV. (The TV we’ve had no time for, since my fracture of May 2nd.)

Anyway, I was alone on the elliptical, singing along with the hillbilly hymns I play when I exercise. I know, I know, for a New York Jewish girl, it’s an uncommon taste … .

David was standing there.

He stood in front of me. He looked a little different. No boyish charm.

No half-smile. In fact, no greeting of any kind. But I recognized him – unmistakably. In the years I’d known him, I’d never seen the stern and implacable stance that was his now. But it was oddly telling.

What was he telling me?

He’d been a highly civilized person. Such people are born into a responsibility. They carry the mantle of the civilization they’ve inherited, to which they have a duty. What duty? It’s a duty to maintain that civilization and carry it forward, up to the next level of advancement, in whatever field they are active – insofar as they can.

His ghost told me that he knew that. He knew he had a long, wasted line of life-experience to make up for. Only when that was done, and what he owed had been paid out, could there be any prospect of rekindling our friendship. So not in any literally foreseeable future. Not in this world, or the next.

It was in fact a rather grim visitation. No sentimental hopes from my side were going to be gratified.

*. *. *

While I’m on this topic, there was one other event that occurred during the same week. It concerned another departure. While I was looking on the internet to find out what happened to certain bygone figures, I came across my first love, the thief of my virginity, on the Obit screen. He died this very summer, about a month ago. The funeral notice in French was brief, devoid of encomiums, telling where to send flowers, describing him as a philosopher and painter. For the philosopher part, one communist party-line book was cited, which I am confident the world will never need. As for the paintings, the ones I’ve seen were unfashionably realistic (and only in that sense unconventional) but otherwise uninspired. So, finis? The end?

What I found remarkable was what I felt. Nothing. Really nothing. Das Nichts selbst nichtet, to borrow a line from Heidegger. “The Nothing nothings.” A life totally without distinction, devoid of ideality, a timeline traduced.

In this case, no painful process of self-repair looked to be in the offing. I would have cared about that, had there been any sign of it. But it seems there wasn’t. So far as I could detect, he regretted nothing, having seemingly forgotten that once there’d been something to regret.

With our lives, we write our true stories. And they count for something.

And if we neglect to do that –

that is counted too.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, appreciation, art of living, atheism, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, 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, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged a friend’s ghost, a life without distinction, a life without ideality, Abigail L. Rosenthal’s A Good Look at Evil, avoiding victimization, betraying expectations, betraying one’s heritage, beyond charisma, beyond charm, coming to manhood, communist party line, debts of honor, disappointing expectations, endangering one’s son, ex-friends, exploiting a friendship, fake spirituality, first love, forgetting one’s debts, funeral notice, gentleman who cheats at cards, honor and dishonor, idealizing and manipulation, intellectual trust, intellectual trustworthiness, life as a true story, mediocre philosophizing, message from beyond, misusing one’s charm, obit notices, old friends, painful self-repair, philosopher’s obit, philosophical adventures, philosophical colleague, philosophical exploration, philosophical fashions, philosophical ghost, playing the victim, politics of experience, pulling rank, reckless driving, reckless endangerment, regretting nothing, repairing one’s life, saving grace from the eternal feminine, selling one’s birthright, social predation, spoiling a life, spoiling one’s story, stern ghost, the eternal feminine, the eternal feminine leads us above, the Nothing nothings, thought experiment, timeline traduced, trading honor for security, trading integrity for security, unfettered thinking, uninspired paintings, utopian illusions, wasting one’s talent, women as victims, women idealized | Leave a comment

A Good Look at an Old Evil

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Abigail

Cain and Abel, bas-relief: Orvieto Cathedral
ca. 1310-31

The title of this column plays off my first book, A Good Look at Evil. There I revisited some of the main philosophical ways of understanding evil before I offered my own view, exhibiting its power to illuminate a wide spectrum of situations.

Of course, Jew-hatred — with its political embodiment, the unequal focus on the Jewish state — is merely one instance of evil. But in my personal experience, it’s a pretty telling instance.

My first intimation of the animus that would become global came when a certain philosophical colleague, and friend of my father, began making anti-Jewish speeches all over the New York academic landscape. When — with the idea of a meeting of the minds — I suggested we get together at a neighborhood cafe, he precipitated an extraordinarily unprovoked and discourteous fit of temper.

It was something he would never have done had my parents been alive. Our two families had been on the most cordial of terms. They’d visited us in Maine. My father had been instrumental in securing his appointment to my father’s philosophy department. In his turn, he’d been one of the speakers at my father’s memorial service. So his cafe scene with me — together with his new syndrome of making speeches attacking Jews — seemed to me completely out of character.

A different “small cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” appeared in the sky when a gifted colleague at Brooklyn College’s History Department told me that worrisome signs of Anti-Semitism were now incubating at the college.

Alarmed, I asked two women colleagues who were friends of his, and like me also retired, to meet in midtown. They’d been staunch allies in our successful fight to save the college’s core curriculum. My intention was to discuss what might be done to combat this new and unexpected threat besetting the college we loved, whose educational integrity we had all fought to preserve.

Much to my surprise, my hope was met with ridicule. I’d taken for granted that defending the core — as well as the dignity and safety of Jewish students and colleagues — were linked activities. To mind, both came under the head of Defending Civilization. Afterward, once I was back in Pennsylvania, both colleagues emailed me their assurance of continued professional regard. But they never withdrew their rebuff with regard to the issue of Anti-Semitism at the college, which was what I’d traveled to Manhattan to talk with them about.

Despite these early signs of an unseen fire behind the visible smoke, the events of October 7th and 8th, 2023, were for me a vast and shattering surprise. The relish with which the jihadis of October 7 cut babies from their mothers’ wombs to throw them into ovens, roped whole families together to set them afire, first mutilated, then raped and murdered women — and the hellish jubilation with which these atrocities were filmed and boasted about — such was the first aspect of my shattering surprise.

But while these atrocities were still being perpetrated — the relish with which students and faculty all over the world celebrated these crimes — was the second aspect of my shattering surprise.

In Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867), he affirmed that our civilization rests on two fundaments, Athens and Jerusalem: the effort to know the truth and the effort to act rightly. For me, October 7th and 8th exhibited the crumbling of our two foundations.

With the aim of keeping my personal fundaments from crumbling, I tried to enclose these doubly menacing events inside mental brackets. And I might have brought it off, had not the destabilizing factor come from what I believed to be a thoroughly harmless part of my world.

Though I’m far from the rider I used to be, there was a stable where I still rode, just for the joy of being with horses. And for the add-on that the young woman who was my minder in the saddle was also a horse whisperer. I knew about them from my riding days in Maine. The real ones can tell you what the horse would say — if the horse could talk. And horses do not deceive. They see through the nonsense.

I can’t recall what led the horse whisperer to talk about October 7th — perhaps something I said — but her words were to the effect that the atrocities perpetrated had the significance of children quarreling over toys in the sandbox!

I haven’t ridden there since. I wrote her to explain why. In her reply, she wrote that she’d only been trying to convey the distress that a mare will feel if anything threatens the herd or her colts. However, as time has gone by, that explanation strikes me as less and less credible. I don’t believe that horses are unable to tell the difference between deliberate, boastful cruelty and the victims of it.

It seems to me that, without Jews’ intending to play that role, attitudes toward Jews tend to be a metric of the sanity of a society. Therefore, to trivialize, perpetrate or celebrate the suffering of Jews —

sends shock waves

through the seismograph

of moral sanity.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | The Color of the Sky

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L. Rosenthal’s A Good Look at Evil, academic allies, academic ally betrayed, academic anti-semitism, academic friendship, academic friendship betrayed, academic ingratitude, academics celebrate atrocities, an old evil, Anti-feminism, Anti-Semitism and discourteousness, Anti-Semitism and politics, Anti-Semitism at Brooklyn College, Anti-Semitism unprovoked, Athens and Jerusalem, betraying a friendship, Brooklyn College’s History Department, cat’s away the mice will play, celebrating war crimes, civilization’s foundations, defending civilization, defending civilization against Anti-Semitism, discourtesy, evil of Anti-Semitism, global animus, global anti-semitism, horse sense, horse whisperer, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, moral disintegration, moral downfall, moral free-fall, moral requirement, moral requirement ridiculed, normality and abnormality, Oct 7 and jihad, Oct 8 and academe, perennial anti-semitism, philosophical colleague, philosophical friendship, philosophical friendship betrayed, political hatred of Jews, professional ingratitude, safeguarding Jews in academe, societal breakdown, spiritual implosion, sudden change of character, trivializing Oct 7, understanding evil philosophically, ungallantry, where there’s smoke there’s fire | Leave a comment

Ave Atque Vale (Hail and Farewell)

Posted on August 19, 2025 by Abigail

The other day I scanned the internet for news of ex-friends who’d stayed significant in my memory. “We quarreled,” as French philosopher Sartre said about one former friend, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, “a quarrel does not matter. It’s just one more way to live together.”

Anyway, it was a shock to discover that a certain philosopher ex-friend of mine had died ten years ago! So for ten years, I knew nothing about it! Any mutual friend who would have known must have predeceased him.

So this belated farewell is about David, with surname withheld. I see from the obit with photo that he kept his good looks to the last as well as his creativity as a logician. When death interrupted the enterprise, he’d just patented a new way of adapting logic for computer use.

His gifts as a logician were the reason I passed the logic section of the Comprehensive Exams as a grad student in philosophy at Columbia. The year I took the grad comps, only four out of eighteen passed, but I was one of them. We first met when I’d hired him to tutor me in logic. What I could not do was work with standard logical notation – work with symbols. What David realized was that I could readily grasp the concepts, provided he put them into words! Most logicians would not have been able to make the translation that I needed, from symbols to words. But David understood logic in sufficient depth to have no difficulty doing that.

After a tutorial session, he would often walk me to the bus stop. One time, we shared views of a prof whose emptiness as a philosopher was matched only by the polysyllabic, pontifical wordiness of his lectures. “He probably pastes new words on the bathroom mirror in the morning so he can memorize them while he shaves,” was David’s speculation as we wended along.

Another time I asked him about his early years, before college. He’d been sent to a particularly rigorous prep school, I forget which one. “Send us the lonely, helpless, friendless boy,” I suggested a hypothetical motto, “and we send back the man?”

“We send back the lonely, helpless, friendless man,” he said, supplying the final paragraph for our imaginary school brochure.

Later, when we found ourselves colleagues at The City University of New York, we got together sometimes to share philosophically exploratory conversations. That’s actually rarer than it sounds, among colleagues in the profession. He lacked nothing in the dimension of intelligence or in the dimension of philosophical curiosity.

There was, however, a lacuna in the realm of character. There came a moment when the future of our philosophy department hung on the vote for department chair. The powerful, senior, tenured members of the department backed a candidate manifestly unqualified but (as they seemed to believe) more controllable by themselves. The untenured, young assistant professors backed a rival candidate who appeared more able to do the job properly.

David held the swing vote and at the last minute he swung it toward the cabal of the powerful. When they won, all the young assistant professors who’d voted for the loser got fired at the first opportunity. After he’d rethought the moral price of his ticket to tenure and decided (by means of a more discerning vote of which the reigning cabal did not approve) David was fired as well. And so, belatedly, he too joined the Fearless Fellowship of the Honorable Losers.

The dramas

of academic departments

are dramas of character.

So David was a mixed character. Perhaps he reckoned that his breeding, good looks and intelligence bestowed on him a wider margin than more plebeian people enjoyed – allowing him to skirt the edges of honor. But he was also intelligent enough to worry about it.

I remember one time when he rang my bell after midnight, asking to come up. Though I was in my blue nylon shorty pajamas, I could sense that this was not a social call. So I said yes.

He took the only comfortable chair in my one-room apartment and began to say what was on his mind. He mentioned that I’d recently uttered some words of warning and concern about the direction that his life seemed to be taking.

“You talked as if you knew. How did you know?”

By now I no longer remember the words I found, but I did recognize the reality of his crisis. However, I also brought up a particular case of dereliction, one that concerned him and me alone. It happened that he’d borrowed five hundred dollars from me in exchange for a post-dated check. Then he called to tell me not to deposit it. By now, more than a year had passed and the unrepaid loan was becoming a burden to me. It forced me to carry my awareness of possible dishonesty. That night I mentioned that I had told a few members of the Fearless Fellowship about it.

“You told them?” he said as if in shock, and immediately got up to write a check, which he left on my dining table. It was not till he was gone that I picked up his check and saw to my surprise that it was in the amount of just $25!

One collegial friend suggested that the money replaced sexual favors never bestowed but I thought otherwise. He didn’t need five hundred and he didn’t need my sexual favors. He was simply toying with wrongdoing – like Augustine stealing his neighbor’s pears – for the sake of doing the wrong thing because it was wrong. He was a young prince and believed he had right and wrong at his beck and call.

Finally, just before the statute of limitations was about to expire on legal redress, I asked my lawyer to act on my behalf. My lawyer called his new employer. The outstanding $475 arrived by return mail. And of course the friendship was over.

I never regretted it and – despite the loss of a friendship important to me – never wished him back with his debt unpaid. Rather, I felt that forcing him to pay his debt was all I could do for him now.

A few years later, when he was driving while drunk, his car accident killed the young son who’d been beside him in the front seat. From what I heard, he became an upright citizen after that, perhaps even a churchgoer. I’m not sure how deep the change went. It might have been merely a case of remorse turning into inward rigidity. But I don’t know how he lived it. In any case, he did change, after this most devastating of life-crashes.

Since our friendship was at an end, I never learned how, in personal terms, he lived the time that remained. But I hope that his inherited sense of honor got the upper hand finally and I do wish him well, wherever he is now.

Perhaps, beneath it all –

we might still be friends.

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic colleagues, academic dramas of character, academic politics, aristocratic decadence, aristocrats and plebeians, Augustine's boyhood theft, ave atque vale, bad debt, belated farewell, code of conduct, code of honor, concepts of logic, creative logician, decadence, dramas of character, drunk driving, ex-friend, fateful choice, filicide, former friends, French philosophers, friends beyond death, friends beyond the grave, friends’ lives, hail and farewell, honorable losers, labyrinth of man-woman relations, legal redress, loan between friends, logic tutor, love of wisdom, man/woman labyrinth, Merleau-Ponty, moral candor, Moral crisis, moral discernment, moral price of job security, moral price of tenure, moral risk, moral temptation, outward repentance, paying one’s dues, philosopher ex-friend, philosophical colleagues, philosophical conversation, philosophical curiosity, playing with good and evil, politics of experience, pompous philosopher, pompous wordiness, potential dishonesty, prep school and manhood, quarrels of friends, reformed character, reformed church-goer, reformed rake, remembered friends, risking one’s honor, Sartre, selling out, selling your vote, sense of honor, significant friends, symbols and words, toying with wrongdoing, trained emotional suppression, training to suppress feelings, unrepaid loan, upright citizen | Leave a comment

When the Stones Speak

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Abigail

Jerusalem, nineteenth-century photograph

Doran Spielman’s When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David

Is the Bible a history book? Did the stories in it (or some of the more literal-sounding ones) really happen? Or are we modern people obliged in conscience to take the Biblical tales as mostly metaphorical, analogical, symbolic, poetical and – in sum – nonfactual? Ought we to take them as stories that – let’s face it – “ain’t necessarily so”?

The question is partly historical – answers to be filled in by archeology. But it is also existential. What kind of creatures are we? And what kind of a world do we live in?

One time an old friend and I got to talking about what would happen if Jesus came back. We meant literally. We pictured him making his way through the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City. Under rulers pre-dating the birth of modern Israel, the Eastern Gate had been made impassable by stones blocking the entrance – but Jesus coming down from above could certainly make short work of that! Continuing beyond the Eastern Gate, we pictured him crossing into West Jerusalem where he’d announce a press conference for that very afternoon, to be held in the lobby of the King David Hotel.

And nobody would come.

Why not? Where was everybody? Where was the press, always hungry for a scoop? Oh, they’d be at a hotel lobby across town, for a scoop that promised to be even more of a headline grabber. Satan would be holding his own (rival) press conference, scheduled for the very same hour!

Hey, if it bleeds, it leads.

These reflections reveal my frame of mind when I began reading When the Stones Speak. Sure, sure, they excavated the actual city of David, the Biblical city, south of the present Old City, and otherwise just as the Good Book describes it. Yeah, yeah. If it’s true and verifiable, nobody will want to accept it; if it’s guesswork, or mere unsubstantiated hypothesis, everybody will jump on that with all the sodden, salivating, grim glee of the post-modern scoffer.

That said, today we have carbon dating. We can tell the age of stones. We have DNA analysis of ancient human remains and the capacity to compare it to the DNA of Jews of today whose tradition deems them descendants of people who’d be numbered among those present at the court of the Biblical Kings David and Solomon, in the period when the twelve Israelite tribes were united under the Davidic monarchy. (On the DNA results, see chapter eight, notes #17 & 18, also chapter fourteen, note #2.). We have the ruins of King David’s palace. (On the ruins of the Davidic palace, see chapter five, note #5.). We have stones that were part of the First Temple (chapter eleven, p. 173).

The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The prophet Jeremiah is recorded advising the king not to resist the Babylonian siege since, on account of its sins, the Lord was not going to defend Jerusalem. One of the courtiers got together with other court flunkies who got the inconvenient prophet out of the way by throwing Jeremiah down a cistern, in hopes he would die there. The ringleader of this effort was a man named “Yehuchal, the son of Shelemiah.” The archeologists have found a seal, with letters on it written in the paleo-Hebrew of Biblical times, bearing the name of a courtier of the period of the Babylonian siege. And that name is, you guessed it, Yehuchal son of Shelemiah (pp. 60f)!

As these digs continue, evidence piles up that a number of Biblical stories are confirmable, at least in terms of the empirical context they reference. Of course, there is no archeological evidence that God was a player in these stories.

The author tells how political enemies from abroad have mounted serious efforts to stop these digs or else discredit them. So far however, at least by the time of the May 2025 publication of When the Stones Speak, these well-financed and intensely motivated adversaries have been unable to stop the archeological digs reported in the book, with the evidence they’ve produced of the Bible’s historicity.

*. *. *

What does it all mean to me personally?

DNA evidence is at least part of the story. That means that I am, at least in part, descended from the Biblical Israelites. No wonder Jews are hated!

Also, for those whose notions of the divine require that the Deity be “ineffable,” “metaphoric,” “analogical,” or in some other way a byproduct of our wishful fantasies – hey, tough luck.

God used to be a real player,

in a real story,

and – for all we know –

God still is!

Related Content: History’s Spiritual Side | The Blessing

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The Fork in the Road

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Abigail

* * *

A realization visited me the other day. It had to do with lost friendships. I’d always pictured these losses as mere phenomena lying on the surface of life. In the depth, in the end – in the hereafter however we understand that term – this thin crust of misunderstanding would lift off. And then, once more, I felt that we would find ourselves back on friendship’s solid ground.

This expectation was strongest in the case of one friendship that I especially cherished. We were both women philosophers but couldn’t have been more different. Referencing a certain rare birth defect where twins are born physically connected to each other, she called us Conjoined-Twin-Opposites.

She was blond and Nordic. As a friend remarked, she “wore shorts with authority.” In winter, she liked to ski. As for summer, there was a remote Swedish island where she would spend a stretch of her time quite alone, finding rest and renewal in nature.

As for me, I liked to nurse a cup of coffee in a favorite café, write in my journal to discover the meanings of my recent days, meanwhile looking up from time to time to take in the people at the other tables – as if our silence as strangers to each other had its own unspoken sense and rhythm.

Since, like me, she was European enough to appreciate cafes, that’s where we would usually meet. Like any friends, we would share with each other the happenings of recent days but, like philosophers, also fit them into the ideas we thought capable of illuminating those events.

My efforts (of those days) to fit the real into a rational scheme would collide with her conviction that the real and the rational were hardly on speaking terms. I felt impelled to try to understand evil in philosophic terms if such understanding should prove at all possible. She contended that reality was beyond good and evil and that philosophy should frankly concede that.

What happened to all that –

to all we were to each other?

I told the story here recently. As time passed, my parents died and, in their absence, a formerly close person became an inventive and brilliantly persuasive social enemy. And my collegial friend – who’d supposed herself safely beyond good and evil – proved an easy mark.

It can happen sometimes that one needs to draw a line – wide and bright – between good and evil. My collegial woman friend had no training, no practice, no interest in doing that. So she was drawn in, blending socially with the widening vortex of false and defamatory gossip then being circulated at my expense.

After a long interval, at my prompting we got together one time in New York. In the telephone call that had prefaced this meeting, she’d denied that the shrewd intrigues of my adversary had played any part in the breakup of her friendship with me! I couldn’t decipher how, in her own mind, she explained our parting. So the sad memory of our rupture did not appear to be a shared one.

We did not meet at our old café, but in a more dingy one closer to the building where she lived. Through the plate glass window I saw her approach, walking with a cane. She brought me up to date on the partnerings and partings in the collegial circle that formerly had been common to us both. Nothing extraordinary had happened but I was happy to know the latest. Meanwhile, I took in the changes in my former friend. Clearly the old athleticism was gone. Likely too the Nordic zest for the solitary life on the fjord.

Still, till just the other day, I continued to suppose that we’d meet again and pick up where we left off – in the Great Café in the Sky.

Until it came to me that – barring a profound change of heart – that is not likely to happen. She’s living out the implications of the choice she made.

Philosophers don’t jump the traces that easily. She has books and articles. She has a persona. These things have the binding character of commitments.

It’s unlikely she will ever return

To the life we once shared.

* * *

Related Content: The Gang’s All Here | Remembrances

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Women Enemies and Women Friends

Posted on July 29, 2025 by Abigail

In Liaisons Dangereuses, the eighteenth-century epistolary novel of cynicism by Choderlos de Laclos, the plot turns around two aristocrats who co-conspire to seduce their unsuspecting victims. Their purpose is not so much to gratify sexual desire as to enjoy the exercise of power. The power of cynicism over innocence. By their exchange of letters, they advise each other and keep each other in the loop.

At one point, the Vicomte de Valmont, the male seducer, realizes that he has fallen in love with his victim, and writes that he hopes to win her back. His female co-conspirator, the Marquise de Merteuil, who has composed the disillusioning letter for the Vicomte to send to his victim, responds with these words:

Vicomte, when a woman strikes at the heart of another woman,

she seldom fails to find the most sensitive spot,

and the wound is incurable.

You don’t want a woman for an enemy. At least not a woman who’s any good at what she does. There was such a woman in my life – someone formerly close to me who became an intelligent, effective enemy. I’ve referred to her in a recent column where I noted that, after our rupture, I stayed away from mutual friends who were part of her world of work and therefore professionally important to her.

Why did I do that? Because it seems to me obvious that you don’t undermine another woman’s livelihood – her actual means of survival.

Since she was not similarly inhibited with regard to my professional life, I soon found myself shorn of collegial friends who’d meant the world to me! Although, in time and in varying degrees, some drifted back, on the whole it has remained the most amazing feat of social surgery that I’ve ever seen.

It seems a case that vindicates the Marquise de Merteuil – at least in her capacity as diagnostician of social forces.

On the other hand, here’s a different case. I seldom think about it, so the precise dates have faded, but it occurred after my divorce, also after I’d won tenure – thus at the time when I was resuming my life as a single woman in New York.

It was the morning after I’d been told I had breast cancer. I lay in my bed, utterly terrified. No place to hide where the dread verdict wouldn’t be able to find me.

Then the phone rang. It was a friend calling, a woman colleague. I told her my news.

“Come over!” she said immediately. We lived in the same neighborhood.

“I need to go for a walk.”

“Come over after.”

It was a wintry day. I circled the Central Park reservoir, entering at 90th and Fifth, looking down at the water below as I walked. The water looked cold and grey. As did the sky overhead. All nature appeared to join in my despair.

When I came into my friend’s warm apartment, and sat down to talk, I told her that what was bitterest to me in this news about cancer was that it meant she had won. It seemed likely that my body had registered the effect of my defamer’s seductive fictions. Her calumny had peeled off precious friends, priceless collegiality and the protective surround of mutual trust.

Cancer was the residue of all that exfoliation.

If your enemy can kill you anyway, and that’s what this is all about – murder real or symbolic – then in real terms she’s won! Moral victories are insubstantial compared to the vital question of who is left standing when the smoke and the dust clears.

“They envy you,” remarked my collegial woman friend. In her “they” she included all the former friends who gave credit to preposterously belittling fictions.

I don’t know why that was, for me, Balm in Gilead, but it was. It was a woman friend saying that, hey, we see you –

the freemasonry of women –

sees you.

It moved me from a sense of being homeless, without a tie under heaven, to a sense of being once again –

at home in the world.

A woman can give you that.

The Story

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Abigail

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, 1887, by André Brouillet

“The crucial thing is the story.”

That is what I claim in A Good Look at Evil, my book which holds that the person who would live a good life finds her own story while the evil-doer may be detected by her deliberate efforts to undermine and spoil the defining stories of her victim.

At the time I first presented the embryo of this idea to the colleagues at my philosophy department, they scoffed and said I was confusing real life with fiction. Some years later, the term “story” did become philosophically fashionable but now it meant that the very distinction between fact and fantasy was either not worth drawing or else undiscoverable.

But by “story” I did not mean something made up or indistinguishable from fiction. I meant the plotline of one’s real-life efforts to live meaningfully and optimally.

Also, when I defined an evil-doer as someone who accurately discerns the narrative that the victim has been trying to live, I meant what really happens when a persistent attempt is made to harm a person in the worst way.

These definitions (with the examples I gave) were useful because evil can be thwarted if its aim and pathway is discerned. Likewise targeted individuals can be forewarned or helped if the dangers they confront are accurately acknowledged.

By contrast, if someone sets out – deliberately and intelligently – to harm you, psychologizing determinism and relativism, however fashionable, will provide no help at all.

By the way, the sentence quoted at the top of this column is not mine but belongs to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961) in his final work, the autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections. At the time of his finding about stories, he was working as a young assistant at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich.

There was nothing story-like about the training he received there. Jung describes the world of his colleagues and professors as “a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal. Henceforth there were only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, accidents without coherence, knowledge that shrank to ever smaller circles, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine.”

The patients in Jung’s section had been assigned labels without regard to the person’s story or any possibility of remission or cure. For one example, he describes the case of a young woman diagnosed as suffering from “schizophrenia or ‘dementia praecox.’”

Starting with an initial discussion of her dreams, Jung “succeeded in uncovering her past … .” There was a story. Having first fallen for a wealthy and attractive young man whom she thought was not interested in her, she then settled for another, far less appealing man. By the time she learned from a friend that in fact she’d given up prematurely on her first love, she’d already had two children by the husband whom she’d never loved.

In consequence, she plunged into a depressed condition. At that point, while bathing her two children, she’d allowed each child to drink some tainted river water – the little girl from a sponge and the little boy from a drinking glass. Her favorite child, the little girl, had subsequently contracted typhoid fever and died. The boy remained unharmed.

This young woman, Jung’s patient, had become insomniac and suicidal. Narcotics treated the first condition and she was under guard for the latter. Her prognosis had been deemed “poor.”

Despite professional risks involved, Jung decided to confront her with what he had discovered (from her dreams and other evidences) about her story. “To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was never again institutionalized.”

I am not saying that every psychological problem can be treated by finding out what was sabotaged or self-sabotaged in the person’s story. There are, no doubt, biochemical conditions affecting the psyche that might best be meliorated chemically. I even know of one case where Freudian theory turned out to be the specific that cured a person’s profound sense of “Oedipal” guilt. Okay. Different cures for different ailments.

But I personally have talked two friends out of each one’s determination to commit suicide. How did I do that? By first finding out what the story was that lay back of each one’s decision and then considering together whether suicide would actually be the most effective way to solve the problem presented by her story.

For Carl Jung at least, effective therapy can only begin once one knows the patient’s story.

“It is the patient’s secret,

the rock against which he is shattered.”

When the disrupted story, the self-spoiled story, or the stolen story can be – to the extent possible – repaired and restored –

the shattering too

can safely be outlived.

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In Quest of Lost Friendship

Posted on July 15, 2025 by Abigail

The other night I had a dream in which I met a woman whom I used to regard as a friend. But she’d become an ex-friend – in the following fashion.

An ill-wisher who’d known me from my earliest days had persuaded her into her new condition of former friend. The same ill-wisher had been strenuously getting in touch with people important to me in my New York life and somehow persuading them also – to think ill of me! The people affected included a shared circle of family friends as well as certain colleagues, precious to me and not part of her life.

There were of course a few philosophers, as well as certain valued noncollegial friends, who – exceptionally – rose above these manipulated inversions of trust and truth. But the woman I dreamed about the other night had not been among them.

When I learned that this woman too had been influenced to my detriment, I called her and asked if I could come over to her place to talk. As hostess, she received me in her usual softly pliant manner.

I began by speaking to the untruth of the accusations against me. With regard to the fact that I and my accuser gave differing accounts of the conduct alleged against me, my hostess cited the classic Japanese film Rashomon, where a violent crime is described in four conflicting ways by four different witnesses. In that film, the question of whose memory to trust is given up as ultimately insoluble. So much for the truth standard.

Next we went to the damaging character of my accuser’s allegations. I pointed out that, in light of the rift between us, I’d resolved to avoid meeting my defamer’s professional friends, even though some had been valued friends of mine as well. My reasoning had been that a woman’s work life has to do with her survival. I’d not wanted, even by an involuntary look or unconscious turn of phrase, to affect that in any harmful way. Yet, I now pointed out, this same protectiveness was not being extended to me.

In response, my hostess disputed the view that there was anything special about collegial friendships. They were not a closed system meriting protection from the rest of human interactions. So much for the professional harm standard.

Finally, I went to the special nature of philosophy, the discipline whose name in Greek means “love of wisdom”: its long, layered, successive and mutually accountable efforts to face the big questions. Ad hominem attacks must be ruled out because the discipline requires a space free from prejudice – made safe for the openness of its quest.

But she did not see it that way. The field in which she and I were employed was no different from innumerable other skills that must be learned before they can be exercised. None of them offer shelter secluded from outsiders and their attacks. So much for philosophy’s claims to a protected space set aside for its defining search for wisdom.

With the end of that evening, my effort to restore a collegial sense of trust ended too. She and I had never been particularly close. The evening I’ve described might have been the first and last time we had deliberately met alone. She was a teaching assistant, having never finished graduate study or published work of her own in the field. She claimed to cherish a warm memory of my father, though I don’t know if she’d ever taken a course with him. When we met, it was typically on occasions when a common friend had invited each of us to some larger collegial get-together.

Yet our final interview remained painful in my recollection. Although she was younger than I was, she died unexpectedly. We never met again.

Until the other night, when – in a vivid dream – she appeared. She looked different than she had in life, more compact and pulled together. Here she was not the frail, tall, gangly, junior-level supplicant that she’d looked to be in her earthly career. I wondered if her former appearance had been a put-on.

And speaking of disguises, absent too were her earlier references to Rashomon and how each person’s truth was “true for her or true for him.” Gone as well was her former down-playing of the field of philosophy.

In this reunion, she’d been perfectly aware that deliberately defamatory lies and candid truthfulness are wholly different, in kind and intent. She knew what philosophic work required. In sum, she’d known it all, without ambiguity, ambivalence or confusion.

She apologized, saying that she was now setting forth on a different life path. And she asked me to forgive her.

I hesitated, just long enough to sense her sincerity, and then I did forgive her.

When the truth has been given its due,

there is nothing left to give –

but forgiveness.

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, appreciation, art of living, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, Biblical God, bigotry, bureaucracy, chivalry, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, institutional power, 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, mysticism, Nihilism, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic friendships, academic politics, ad hominem attacks, afterlife reunion, afterlife visitation, ambiguity as disguise, believing a damaging lie, broken friendship repaired, candid truthfulness, collegial friends, collegial sense of trust, conversations with a deceased friend, correcting slander, credulous colleagues, credulous family friends, damaging accusations, damaging allegations, damaging gossip, damaging rumors, destroying a reputation, distinctiveness of philosophy, dream reunion, effective defamation, effective slander, evasion of truth, ex-friends, facing the big questions, false accusations, false and damaging accusations, former friends, friends and colleagues, ill-wisher, inauthenticity, intellectual trust, inversions of trust, inversions of truth, legal harm, life pretense vs undisguised afterlife, loss of trust, lost friendship, love of wisdom, meaningful dreams, naïveté as a disguise, narcissism, personal honor, personal honor misrepresented, personality disorders, philosophic friendship, philosophy profaned, politics of experience, pretended ambivalence, pretended appreciation, pretended childishness, pretended confusion, pretended harmlessness, pretended naïveté, pretended non-judgmentalism, professional damage, professional harm, professional patron, professional power, professional protégé, professional protection, protected intellectual space, protecting philosophy, protecting the search for wisdom, Rashomon, repaired friendship, repairing friendship, repentance and forgiveness, restored sincerity, romantic eligibility, search for wisdom, setting the record straight, significant dreams, social demotion, social down-ranking, social terrorism, sowing distrust, spiteful rumors, spoiling friendship, the philosophic life, the philosophic quest, the Rashomon alibi, trust in colleagues, trust in professional life, truth unrecognized, truthfulness vs defamatory lies, trying to undo slander, undermining friendship, undisguised in the afterlife, visitation from the afterlife, wasted words, why philosophy is special, women friends, work friends | Leave a comment

Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me

Posted on July 8, 2025 by Abigail

Some years back I read a book with the title, And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes. The author was Barbro Karlen, a Swedish woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. Anne was the Jewish Dutch girl whose diary, found after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, made her the most famous victim of the Holocaust. The diary was found in the attic of the house in Amsterdam where her family had hidden until an ill-wisher betrayed them to the Nazis. It was translated into many languages and became emblematic of personal resistance to the organized machinery of evil.

Though I’d read Barbro Karlen’s book some years ago, recently I’d felt an urge to read it again. Unable to find my original copy in the overstuffed bookshelves that surround most rooms of our home, I sent for a new copy. It took some time to get here and seems different in certain respects from the edition I had read earlier.

For example, in the (I think mistaken) belief that this will make her account more objective, here the author tells some of her story in the third person. Even her own name is changed. Since, midway through, we find photographs of Karlen from the age of two up to the time of the book’s publication, the author’s identification with the story she tells can’t be overlooked – not even provisionally.

In addition, this account omits one incident from the first version that I thought possibly probative. Her book had come under attack from numerous quarters, including societies formed to commemorate Anne Frank. Meanwhile, for some practical reason, she had gone to see someone (a cousin I think it was) with whom Anne Frank had been close. He now lived in Switzerland. When she knocked on his door, getting ready to explain her presence to whichever stranger might answer her ring, there was the cousin himself standing at the door. Instantly and tearfully they embraced!

Why do I feel so gripped by her story? Well, over a span of years I’d been visited by a sense of having been, in the early 1930’s, a young German-Jewish woman living in hiding from the Nazis. A neighbor had betrayed me along with others. All were loaded into the back of a truck parked in the street outside. The truck was sealed and carbon monoxide was then pumped into it.

One incident from that supposed memory remains vivid. As I exited my body in death, I rose high enough to get a wide view of events on earth. I could see the earth’s curvature, yet take in the human actions far below. And what became visible was the global extensiveness of this murder-the-Jews project. Because of certain weaknesses in the German social fabric, it had first become actionable there. But, as a phenomenon, it was and would be world-wide. Here’s what I thought as I saw this:

This is an outrage.

It should not be tolerated.

I resolve to come back and fight it.

My tools have been the two books I wrote, and probably some of the talks that I’ve given. Of course, I’m not a Nazi-hunter but I have fought it – the murder-the-Jews project – and fought it most earnestly, to the extent that I was able within the frame of ordinary life.

And Barbro Karlen? Personally, I’m inclined to take her at her word, whatever that comes down to in real-life terms. In this life, she’s had to fight calumny and persecution in work situations (where she was a mounted policewoman and dressage competitor) unrelated to any past-life claims.

I can dredge up analogous experiences – in fact quite a tediously long train of them – from personal and professional life. Also, for some years, small incidents would occur that appeared to affirm the reality of the past-life memory that I’ve described. Then, at a certain point, the confirming incidents ceased, so that by now even their colors and contours have faded from memory.

What can we make of such seeming memories? They may reflect sympathetic identification with some sufferer, known or unknown, from a bygone time and place – a past time that it now becomes safe to remember. Such memories, however regarded – veridical or not – strike me as a responsibility.

In the lives we live today, the evil thus remembered should find –

no rationalization or shelter –

no hiding place.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, 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, Nihilism, non-violence, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L. Rosenthal's "A Good Look at Evil", Abigail L. Rosenthal's "Confessions of a Young Philosopher", Amsterdam, Anne Frank, Anne Frank and Reincarnation, Anne Frank commemoration, Barbro Karlen, Barbro Karlen's objectivity, Cain and Abel, combating anti-semitism, commemorating Anne Frank, confirming incidents of past life, credible calumny, defamations believed, emblematic innocence, evidence for reincarnation, evil rationalized, evil remembered, fading past life memories, famous victims, fratricide, global anti-semitism, hidden diary, hiding from Nazis, Holocaust victim, identifying with wrongdoers, innocence and persecution, insight from the afterlife, Karlen's And the Wolves Howled, machinery of evil, Nazism, oldest hatred, optimism, past life memory, past-life and belief, past-life and personal identity, persecution in work situations, persecution of Jews, pro-Nazi betrayal, pseudo-science, reincarnation, reincarnation and personal identity, reincarnation and probative memory, remembering your death, resistance to evil, seeing extensiveness of anti-semitism, status of Jews, sympathy with bad guys, vastness of anti-semitism | Leave a comment

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