Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Abigail

Today, Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) are discussing her just-published book Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s share their discussion with our viewers.

***

Jerry: We’re here to discuss your book Confessions of a Young Philosopher. We’re both philosophers, so that’s a doubly intriguing title for me, and we noticed the image on the cover is Rodin’s The Thinker, except in a female version.

Abigail: Yes, she’s a woman.

Jerry: In your book, The Thinker is not just a mythic figure but has the name Abigail. So we’re going to learn about Abigail and her life and thought. And you know, I always tell you that when I read this book—of course, I’ve read it at various times and stages of production—I find it a page-turner. Once I start, I have trouble ending. So I thought, well, I’ll go through the book and come up with a bunch of questions. But as it turns out, I had so many questions by the time I finished the Preface that I’ll just focus on that today.

The Preface seemed to me, as a philosopher, very intriguing. It raises many further questions. Right at the beginning, you’re a young woman leaving home for the first time, on the way to Paris. You state several goals for your life at this stage. First, you say, “I wanted to be conscious“—italicized, emphasized—”I wanted to be conscious of the purposes behind my choices, not to let them guide me unawares.” Why did that consciousness and avoidance of unawareness seem important to you?

Abigail: Well, you know, everybody’s got a personal biography, a personal history. In my childhood and youth, the dominant features had to do with the home my parents built in their New York apartment and in that place, in their home, people seemed to talk with a zen-like echoing profundity. But I couldn’t fathom where their aphoristic sayings came from. I thought, if I’m ever to be free—I’m reconstructing the psychology of me at that time—if I’m ever to be free, to steer my own bark through the waters, I must know for what I’ve done this and that, with what end in view. I wanted the kind of transparency that goes with simplicity. I didn’t want my life to be arcane, a layered mystery. I wanted it to be evident. It seemed to me tied up with freedom, with self-command, and with the possibility of learning the lessons contained in my future, contained in my days.

Jerry: Part of the situation was that your father was a philosopher of a very profound kind, and your mother was also a very interesting woman. Yet, you were out to find your own location in the world. You couldn’t just be subsidiary to the very interesting parents you had. So, okay, I want to be conscious of my purposes, as you say. And then you go on to say, at a different point, “It was a point of honor not to profess views if I was not prepared to put them to the test of living them.” I find very few philosophers have done that. That’s rather striking. I guess you’d say Socrates did that and paid the price for doing it. Here you express it as a point of honor. You know, not a general amorphous goal. And what’s behind that sense? That if you’re going to take any view seriously, you need to try it out in life? Does it work?

Abigail: Again, I think it had to do with—it seems to me—a philosophical point of honor. If you say something, know what you mean by it. How can you know what you mean by it if you haven’t embodied it and acted on it? Assuming that what you think has something to do with what you do. I’d been very influenced by Henry David Thoreau in my teen years. He wanted to live a transparent life. If you don’t want to dust this rock, then don’t have it on your desk just because you admire the way it looks. Throw it out unless you’re going to deal with it. That sense of simplify, simplify—get down to what you actually mean—not what sounds meaningful but you can’t translate into action, into perceptible ways of making a difference.

Jerry: Yes, and I guess Thoreau did that in Walden Pond. You know, he chose to “simplify, simplify,” where simplifying meant getting close to nature. And so he tried living that out and wrote a wonderful book about it. You’re doing something like that with your life. You say, okay, I’m going to live it out and pay attention as I go, which is life on the Thoreau model. See what happens. Well, the next thing you say is something like I wanted to encounter new experiences unencumbered by rigid preconceptions. So you wanted to take in life not necessarily framed in advance.

Abigail: I must have assumed life has something to teach me that I don’t yet know. Maybe all the grownups know, but I don’t know. So I don’t have to approach the unknown with a grid of theories in front of my eyes. What do I know? Not much. I went to college. So?

Jerry: And that’s what all the grownups do within these very heavy and articulated frames— with walls and ceilings and doors and locks on the doors—in their belief systems. And I know you always talk about childhood as if, early in life, you would look at those kinds of grownups and not be impressed.

Abigail: No, for me, “grownup” was almost a pejorative term. I thought they’re encumbered. And they would have ways of saying “you’ll see, you’ll find out,” which carried a threat. “Right now you think you have wings and can fly, little girl. But you’ll see.” They talked like wicked stepmothers, these grownups. “You know there’s a curse on you and it’s called growing up.” But I didn’t see what they were looking at.

Jerry: Yes, they almost want you to be world-weary in advance of the experience that makes one world-weary. I guess what you’re saying is that the experience may be a source of insight but you need to live through it and live through it fresh. So it’s your experience. Well, you then say, and I thought this was very arresting, “I thought a girl or boy had to find true love if the life was to be sincere.” And sincere is underscored here. So what did that mean to you?

Abigail: Well, it seemed obvious. There were some examples of true love, also in my childhood. My parents appeared to be examples. There was a couple or two in their circle who also seemed to exemplify this thing. I’d read Tristan and Isolde in French class in college. Even those books that were very absorbing in our teens—For Whom the Bell Tolls and Lady Chatterley’s Lover—they put the emphasis on sex, but they implied an added message: there’s a high-pitched roof in life, there’s a climactic kind of desideratum that life points to, without which you would go away unfulfilled. It was an intimation of fulfillment. Perhaps one senses it biologically, you know, from adolescence on, and to me it was quite persuasive.

Those who adopted some other way of life or purported calling had the look of a compensatory settlement. And you know, children and young people don’t miss that. Is this really you, or are you compensating for something that didn’t give you back to yourself? As near as I could figure, though there were strong claims made for sainthood—you know, maybe you should merge with God, touch the Absolute, become something very special in God’s vocational school—maybe, maybe, maybe, behind that, was there some true love that didn’t work out? You know, how did you get to God? Was that your Plan B? So I surmised, behind what people said and didn’t say, that there would be Plan A for the people I came across, whether lived privatively as something they missed or flourishingly as something they were living.

Jerry: Yes, and is that what you mean where you end the thought by saying that one had to find true love if life was to be sincere? I guess the alternative you mentioned is that otherwise purposes become compensatory. They’re Plan B. You’re trying to pretend that they’re more ultimate than true love, but you kind of suspect they’re not.

Abigail: Nobody who’s got true love complains that, Gee, I never made it to sainthood! Whereas, I must have figured, those saints and candidates for sainthood that I read about, or even ran into, could have said, “I never made it to true love and therefore I decided to work on becoming a saint.” That’s how it seemed from all I could observe. I wasn’t a sociologist, I wasn’t an anthropologist, I wasn’t doing a survey, but children do their own surveys. And young people more strenuously, once the halcyon days of childhood are behind them.

From what I could infer and surmise, it looked as if, for most people, true love was Plan A.

Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Get Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

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The Silver Plus One

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Abigail

During the days following our return from California, we had to postpone the celebration of our 26^th wedding anniversary so the “silver” anniversary plus one – in order first to face the leaning tower of chores and summonses that awaited us at home. By this past Friday, the 7^th of February, we had finally cleared an evening for the anniversary.

Such things are important. You don’t find the right partner in life every week or on every street corner. In fact, at the moment when our paths crossed, neither of us had even been looking.

Jerry, being a sensible fellow, was clearly not on the lookout for True Love, though he would have been glad to make room for compatibility. With the precision of the analytic philosopher that he is, he’d even drawn up a list of compatible traits, in case a lady whose traits matched the list were to show up. As it happened, no such compatible lady had appeared – as yet.

And I? What was I looking for? Certainly not “compatibility” since, in matters of the heart, I can’t sincerely settle for Plan B! However, just then I had put on hold the personal side of my life (which meant time reserved for meeting friends in cafes or wandering through my neighborhood’s fine museums). We had a problem at the college where I taught philosophy. The administration had announced plans to redirect the entire curriculum around … the borough of Brooklyn! This would of course sideline the college’s award-winning core curriculum.

Normally, you don’t win these fights. But that’s no excuse to walk away from them. So I, from the Philosophy Department, together with one woman professor from the History Department, were determined to fight it, win or lose.

Which was how, in the course of that fight, I met Jerry. He headed an organization in Washington D.C. which was founded to defend high academic standards. Since it was obvious that Jerry had more experience in such combats than I, ordinarily I’d just act on his advice without stalling around or asking him to clarify his underlying concepts. Apparently that made me atypical for a professor. In Jerry’s experience at that point, academics mostly thought that if they could read some rare and esoteric text, or clarify some fine abstract point, they had the smarts to win an academic combat. Whereas Jerry, though a trained philosopher and former chair of a well-regarded philosophy department, did not seem prone to making mistakes of that kind. His intelligence went easily from the practical/political to the theoretical, and I enjoyed strategizing with him during daily long-distance phone calls.

Jerry, meantime, had fallen in love.

It was not a case of “compatibility.” When eventually it hit me too, it had the character of an absolute. That doesn’t mean I had lost my moral bearings or would have followed him into some wrong action had he asked me to. (He never did.) It meant I was not weighing and calculating other kinds of advantage or disadvantage.

It meant this was not a weekend diversion where all the privileges of my life could be held constant. We lived in different cities, had different professional commitments at that point, and I did not know in advance what this summons portended for either of us. Also, I was well aware that one can lose such wagers. One can risk all, and it turn out a mistake. I’d known friends who’d taken equivalent risks and been wrong. In the politics of experience, it was impolitic.

It was like riding a unicycle

on a tightrope.

Now, 26 years later, we were celebrating an anniversary dinner and we were taking stock. The restaurant where we did that was new to us. It served ample portions of good food at low prices. The clientele looked to be working people out on a Friday night. Their kids were quiet and well behaved. The tables were decently spaced, so that diners could hear each other when they talked. Or be silent with each other. No voices were loud enough to intrude on adjoining tables. No one tried to impress anyone. No one drank too much. The only unmarried young couple we saw did not seem to be planning their “moves” for later. Instead, they simply looked happy to be together.

*. *. *

At our own table, Jerry and I were enjoying the good food and looking back over the 26 years. In that time, he had published a book, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher that records a religious experience wholly unsought by him and quite unprecedented. Subsequently, he founded a subfield in the American Academy of Religion called Theology Without Walls. He’s now bringing out a second book, Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, as part of a five-book TWW series. It situates his earlier experience within the wider context of religious claims and counter-claims and tackles objections with philosophic care.

And I, in the 26 years? Under my professional name of Abigail L Rosenthal, I published a number of philosophical articles that had been awaiting completion for some years. Also, I reissued my first book, A Good Look at Evil, to which I added two new chapters. Just this year, I’ve published Confessions of a Young Philosopher, in the realized form I’d been trying to achieve for some time. I think a book should have illustrations if possible – and so this one does!

In some ways, our joint life retains the precariousness it had when we first set out to live it together. After all, we are older now. All kinds of things could happen. It’s as if we stand with our feet firmly planted on thin air.

But to us,

it’s holy ground.

Abigail’s Books: Confessions of a Young Philosopher; A Good Look At Evil

Jerry’s Books: God: An Autobiography; Radically Personal (forthcoming)

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How the Story Ends

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Abigail

Early in 2025, I posted a column titled “The Story Didn’t End.” The story referenced began with an incident in late May of 2024 in the stable where I used to ride. It was no ordinary hour in the saddle, but included horse-to-rider communication mediated by the talented young horse-whisperer who walked alongside us.

For many educated people, skepticism is the default. For me, I get to skepticism only after I’ve first tried everything else. In this case, why shouldn’t living creatures beside ourselves communicate and understand each other? Why should that ability be restricted to human beings? Or flow only downward from human to other creatures, but never upward? After all, horses have been in and around human lives for a very long time. They may well know a lot about us.

Coming back to the present story, my hours of riding-with-the-horse-whisperer came to an abrupt end after the whisperer expressed what I took to be callous condescension concerning Israeli victims of the jihadi atrocities of October 7, 2023. I suppose that dark day, and the days of global anti-semitism that followed, had been on my mind, which was why I talked about it during that last afternoon in the saddle. For riding with a horse-whisperer, it’s better to say what’s on your mind. If not, you’re wasting your time because the mare will mimic your reticence and you’ll get nothing from her.

About a month after that last ride, I felt obligated morally to write the horse-whisperer with an explanation of why my rides at that fine stable had come to an end. Since she did not respond, I felt I had done my duty in this matter and considered the case closed.

It stayed in that closed condition till the recent holiday season when a message was left on my phone from the nice woman who owned the stable, and was, as it happens, the mother of the horse-whisperer! After the second such message, I realized that this wasn’t likely to be a call to resuscitate relations with a one-time client. It was probably a personal call. Not to return it would be rude. What’s more, I had reason to respect this woman. Her horses were beautiful and exceptionally well cared for. For me, that was decisive.

What she called to ask was why I had stopped riding there. I explained the reason as discretely as I could, wanting neither to tell tales nor to be frustratingly evasive. What I learned (as told here about a month ago) was that her daughter had never received my letter because they got their mail at a postal box – not at the stable! Which meant I felt morally obligated to revisit these painful memories, possibly be disappointed again, and resend the letter that her daughter the horse-whisperer had yet to read.

*. *. *

Accordingly, I sent my original letter a second time, and waited. When three to four weeks had passed in silence, I concluded that this time the silence must be deliberate. It looked as if the updated story had merely got its earlier unhappy ending renewed and reinforced. This frustrating plot-windup seemed closer to the style of contemporary novels, in sad contrast to the majestic resolutions of the great nineteenth century novels … .

Such was the conclusion I drew – until yesterday. The weekend’s mail included a reply letter from the horse whisperer. Her letter was as lengthy as mine had been, and just as effortful. She had been trying clumsily to translate the lead mare’s instinctive aversion to violence of any kind, for any cause. The lead mare’s job is to keep the herd safe. She had never meant to sound callous or indifferent to the Israeli victims with whom I identified – victims of cruelty that was deliberate, extreme, bragged about by the perpetrators and subsequently, dumbfoundingly, cheered around the planet. I could see that her letter was animated by a strong and evidently sincere religious sense. She apologized for inadvertent harm and hoped forgiveness could prevail between us. She thanked me for having twice taken the trouble to address the situation, by sending my letter a second time. She hoped I would ride again. What she wrote was effortful, respectful and sincere.

It repaired the situation.

Will I ride again? I don’t know. By now, I’m awfully busy. On the other hand, it’s a principle with me not to wait to do in heaven what one can still do down here!

Related Content: The Story that Didn’t End | Character Witnesses

Posted in absurdism, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art of living, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, martyrdom, 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, 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 a letter never received, atrocities of October 7, break in a personal relation, bringing heaven down to earth, candor and forgiveness, clarifying correspondence, clarifying letters, condescension toward Israeli victims, condescension toward victims, educated people’s skepticism, facing the situation, forgiveness, getting to the bottom of a rift, girls and horses, global anti-semitism, happy ending, honesty in a quarrel, honesty with horses, horse to human communication, horse to rider communication, horse whisperer, horse whisperer and honesty, horses in human culture, human to animal communication, inadvertent harm, inconclusive ending, indifference to victims, keeping the herd safe, lead mare’s aversion to violence, lead mare’s main task, longest hatred, lost in translation, love of horses, mediating a quarrel, moral courage, moral obligation to clarify a quarrel, moral obligation to teach, mother-daughter friendship, mother-daughter relations, negotiating a quarrel, negotiating misunderstandings, novelistic resolutions, painful memories, repairing a quarrel, repairing the situation, repairing the world, risking disappointment, silence as a statement, sincere religious sense, story’s end, sympathy with the jihad, tikkun olam, unfinished story, unhappy ending, waiting for heaven, walking away with closure, well maintained stable | Leave a comment

Civilization’s Erotic Discontents

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Abigail

If you want to talk safely about the topic of sexual preferences, you must begin with the following disclaimer: “I don’t care what people do in …”

In what? The privacy of their homes? Insofar as they’re old enough to be drafted? To vote? So long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses? Whatever the provisos are, so long as you’ve met them and established your credibility, you can proceed (cautiously) to say what’s on your mind.

So why do I bring it up? Is there anything wrong with preliminarily putting down that cautionary proviso? Yes, there’s just one thing wrong with it. You do care. And I care too. Maybe more than we quite know. The degree of our involvement might be of the kind expressed in the song about Kentucky’s Bloody Harlan County:

There are no neutrals here.

As the readers of a recent column may recall, I’ve lately been reading a feminist theoretician named Judith Butler. By now, I’ve gone through her Giving an Account of Oneself, as well as Gender Trouble and recently have begun to read Bodies that Matter. Her message is not easy to reduce to a slogan. But it’s at least clear that she doesn’t want the heterosexual couple to enjoy the social advantages it has monopolized in the post-classical cultures of Western civilization. In her view, equal social favor should go to other erotic combinations: same sex monogamous, or serial, or plural rotating, or what have you.

Sounds fair. So what’s wrong with that? Especially since (as Butler and other feminists have agreed) the boy/girl stuff has got itself hopelessly contaminated by patriarchy. Given that patriarchy is in turn found allied with racism, colonialism and other forms of oppression – isn’t it fairer just to delete from heterosexuality its inherited pride of place? To allow patriarchy-contaminated heterosexuality to remain unaffected by other proposed changes in the erotic playing field would be like giving one team a ten point advantage before the others can even get into the game.

By the way, what game are we talking about? I think it must be the game of life, where the key thing (the condition of trustworthiness in a discussion) is to get real. Real about the stakes. Real about the playing field. Real about the rules of the game.

The stakes here concern the trajectory of desire. Of course, the primary desire must be the desire to go on living – what Spinoza calls the desire to persevere in one’s own being. Most people are instinctively aware that, if you can’t make contact with that desire, you’re in bad trouble. And you’ll need to find some reason to go on. Having talked two friends out of their vehemently-voiced desire to commit suicide, I can speak with some degree of confidence on this point.

Erotic desire concerns the fulfillment of bodily and life purposes, separately or in some kind of combination. So what’s wrong with affirming that non-heterosexuality, formerly downrated, should now get highgrade support from society?

What’s wrong is the bad faith in it. It denies the most salient fact about erotic life. It’s competitive!

One time, a bohemian friend invited me to go downtown with her to a lesbian dance. I no longer recall the auspices of the dance, but it was held in a big dance hall with only women in the room. I wasn’t there to dance, just to see what it was like. You know, qua philosopher? Anyway, the feature that most struck me were … the wallflowers! The girls who didn’t get asked to dance! Tearful girls, or women who had lost their partners to the more assertive women who’d cut in!

My word! Who knew? Is there no erotic safety in this world? And that’s a report – I’m pretty sure generalizable – from within the frame of one same-sex dance hall.

A propos, I recall an upper-class brother and sister, whom we happened to know in Australia, complaining that lately the parties they’d attend with the hope of meeting possible partners of the opposite sex were getting atmospherically dominated by the same sex attendees whose presence made man/woman courtship somehow recessive – overshadowed, as it were.

The human condition includes erotic rivalry.

It occurs within heterosexual social life, within same-sex social life, and between types of erotic playing fields. All erotic modalities are competitive, both internally and externally. If someone tells me that heterosexuality ought now to recede to the periphery of social life, because its previous prestige came at a cost to other erotic forms, I’ll want to know how much social space the new combinations will yet reserve for boy/girl romance. After all, associating man/woman romance with capitalism, racism, colonialism et al is a point-scoring tactical move: now the same-sex spokespersons can capture the high ground by pulling moral rank on their previously-predominant erotic rivals!

Behind all this erotic bad faith, something still more serious is going on. In Plato’s Republic, the state as a whole is conceived as the soul of the individual “writ large.” If there is that part/whole connection, then a civilization plays a role in providing the motivation for erotic desire on the personal level.

Our civilization no longer knows what it should desire and why it should go on wanting to live.

We need to find out.

Related Content: Feminism with Something to Hide

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Feminism with Something to Hide

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Abigail

When I was a girl, nobody thought women weren’t liberated. Heck, we had the vote. We could get as educated as we wanted to be. We could get hired for jobs formerly reserved for men.

Of course, we had to wear nylon stockings even in winter. And pointy bras that paradoxically accompanied the figure-concealing girdles holding up our nylons. Also, we needed to be married by age 23 or 24 latest. And to bring unsullied virginity to the bridal bed.

I fitted into this script less well than many of my women friends. My mother and her friends were European women whose semi-wordless messages led me to expect suitors who would say things like, “I kiss the hem of your robe.”

Since American boys were not in the habit of talking like that, even to girls they fancied, I would be pretty much hors de combat until I got to Paris on a Fulbright fellowship. (If you want to know how that went, read Confessions of a Young Philosopher.)

By now, January 2025, it’s possible that I have gotten to be older and wiser. Just in case that has happened, I’ve been thinking to write something on the subject of women, feminism and uh … real life.

Since Judith Butler seems to stand at the headwaters of current discourse on these interesting topics, I’ve thought to start by getting an intuitive sense of that writer and her message. Though one of the titles that caught my eye appeared first in 2005, twenty years back, Giving an Account of Oneself looked promising for my getting-acquainted purposes.

That’s been the book I was reading this past week, while we were in southern California, getting my neuropathy treatments along with cancellations from friends whom we usually meet for lunch or dinner while we are there. They were cancelling because their homes had been – or might yet be – ablaze. One friend, a minister, returned from vacation to tend to parishioners with shattered lives… .

So what was the account of oneself promised by Butler’s title? Sorry folks. That’s precisely what we’ll never find out. “To tell the truth about oneself involves us in quarrels about the formation of the self and the social status of truth.” You can’t get to the fact of the matter about self-formation, she writes, because you can’t see the primal scene when your sense of self was produced. That primal scene is hidden either because it contained the infant’s reaction to intimations of adult sexuality or else possibly an infantile reaction to adult accusations. Whatever happened at this early stage (and here Butler canvasses an array of thinkers with their conjectures) – two outcomes follow: (1) an unconscious layer is formed, accompanied by (2) a frail, self-concealing subjectivity.

Beyond that obscure primal scene, does anything else occur in the formation of one’s “I”? Yes, we are ringed about by social conditions, which set the terms for what we can say or even privately acknowledge, but these too are mainly occluded. Fractional breakthroughs are possible, but not much is said about how or why.

So can you or I give an adequate account of ourselves? Nah. It’ll be fictional at best.

Is there a windup? Do we have closure? Yeah, I guess but, when I read it, I am not sure what just happened. I think Butler concludes that I – who don’t know who I am or what just happened – ought to “take the risk” of … doing something, but what? It’s either the risk of one fractured person entering into an unbounded relationship with another fractured person – or else it’s the risk of me forgiving myself for all the blunders that my splintered subjectivity will be bound to commit now and in future.

However, though a fair number of readers may regard Judith Butler as authoritative for contemporary feminism –

I have trouble believing any of this.

Butler as narrator must be – if we take her as implicated in her own analysis of “everyone’s” infancy – someone to whom something happened early that formed this hollow core of self-mistrust. Until and unless that self-mistrust can be

lifted into the light of day,

where it might be seen and repaired,

I don’t see what further layers

can be laid down safely

on such a vanishing take-off point.

Related Content: Feminism without Contradictions– Column | Feminism without Contradictions– Article in The Monist | What Do Women Want?

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Book Matters

Posted on January 14, 2025 by Abigail

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard

Clare Carlisle

This is a biography of Kierkegaard, written by a woman philosopher. It tells the well-known story of his jilted fiancée, and just about everything else you might want to know about Kierkegaard.

For myself, there isn’t much else that I wanted to know, because I never much liked Kierkegaard. He’s generally counted the first existentialist, and the father of that development in philosophy. Okay, what is existentialism?

So glad you asked. It’s that orientation in philosophy that foregrounds how it is – subjectively and experientially – to be human, as opposed to what being human involves conceptually. If it’s possible conceptually to give a complete account (a logos) of human reality (as say Aristotle does) – for existentialism that would be neither possible nor desirable.

Although existentialists like Sartre and Camus were atheists, and Heidegger’s thought includes some kind of mysticism not presupposing a deity, some existentialists have been theists. And Kierkegaard is certainly a leading example of an existentialist for whom God was of overriding importance

So why don’t I care for him? After all, in recent years I too have come to reserve a key role for God in the human story. Aren’t we alike in that?

Well, no. I also give a prime place to women in virtually any human story – whether important by their presence or by their absence – and here’s where my dislike for Kierkegaard comes in.

As a young Danish seminarian, he was engaged to a charming young woman named Regina Olsen. From her portrait, we see that there is something endearing about her. After about a year of courtship, during which Kierkegaard professed the most unqualified devotion and commitment to her, he broke off their engagement.

My recoil from Kierkegaard begins with this incident. But not because of his cold feet, based perhaps on a sense (recorded in his journals) that he couldn’t make her happy and might even make her miserable. Nor because he perhaps honestly felt that his talent would flourish only in solitude. Second thoughts of that ilk might even merit a modest measure of sympathy.

What I can’t pardon is his insistence on jilting Regina in such a way as to tie her to himself endlessly afterward . “I will take her with me into history,” he wrote grandly. Because hey, I’m Kierkegaard! To me that looks like a hyper-seduction, which she would not have had the personal force to escape. And indeed, she never did, even though eventually she married another.

Beyond the psychical possessiveness that he insisted on exerting as long as he lived and beyond, I have a qualm about the lessons, purportedly spiritual, that he drew from his broken engagement.

Apparently he drew an analogy between the breaking of his engagement to Regina (unethical but required of him by a higher calling) and Abraham’s submission to God’s command (rescinded at the last minute) to sacrifice his son. Kierkegaard’s name for what occurred on Mount Moriah is “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Which is to say, the transcendence of ethical constraints for a higher – a divinely commanded – purpose.

Here’s the analogy: Just as it was unethical for Kierkegaard to break his engagement with Regina, so also it was unethical for a father to kill his son. But in both cases, Kierkegaard appears to have inferred, the spiritual obligation overrode the ethical.

I take what is called in Jewish memory the akedah, the binding of Isaac, to illustrate, by means of a particularly vivid metaphor, the overriding – the unqualified absoluteness – of the God/human relationship. What that means for each of us in practical terms seems to me a rather open, delicate and subtle question, not easily condensed into a formula where one-size-fits-all.

By contrast, I take Kierkegaard’s abandonment-with-spiritual-seduction of Regina to illustrate his unresolved call to be both (1) a man whose devotion to the woman he loved would be sincere and (2) a seeker whose search for God would also be sincere.

Trying to do both

he failed to do either.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged book matters, Clare Carlisle's Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard | Leave a comment

The Story that Didn’t End

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Abigail

I hold the view that one’s life is best understood as a True Story with many chapters, the story-line running through one after the other, chronologically and continuously.

In the narrative of my life, there was a recent chapter that I mistakenly believed had come to an end, but apparently wasn’t over. As of now, that one still looks unfinished.

It began at a stable where, for an hour on Friday afternoons, I used to ride. It was no ordinary stable. First, the horses looked to be top of the line, Arabians maybe, as I heard them called one time. People went there to train for competitive events. Whatever the precise character of the professionalism, it was real. So, a serious place to ride.

Of course, what with my neuropathy and all, my real riding days are over, or else will have to wait till I get to heaven. Where I have friends with whom I hope to ride again. Here on earth, I’d had friends who lived and farmed in Maine – and knew horses – the way other people know people. So much for my equestrian background.

But locally, down here in Pennsylvania, the stable where I rode had this distinctive feature: the young woman who walked the horse around with me was a horse whisperer. So I would voice whatever was uppermost in my mind and she would put into words his equine responses.

Lest you think, “Oh Abbie,

how gullible can you get?”

I respond – “Very. Just try me!”

I’ve long supposed that we humans intuit a lot more about each other than we let on, so why shouldn’t animals – who aren’t regimented by our social conventions – know a fair amount about us too?

At any rate, one afternoon in June of 2024, the requirement of candor inherent in my relation with horse and horse whisperer led me to mention the October 7th 2023, attacks that, just then, were on my mind. I have family in Israel and a good chunk of my heart lies there. And another heart chunk – lies in academe, now loud in support for those attacks. For me those combined events had been, quite simply, unbearable.

The horse whisperer’s answering remarks – instant and expansive – were plainly her own and not anything a horse would imagine. She caricatured the victims and elevated herself to a moral high ground founded on her own ignorance of the barest rudiments of the actual events.

I had believed myself safe here – far from the combat zone. In our horse-to-rider dialogues, part of the protocol had been to retain no defensive walls. That was the context in which what she said to me became the more deeply wounding.

Though I did not return, about a month later I felt sufficiently repaired to write her a letter explaining my absence. I’m a teacher after all, and thought she should know that words such as the ones she had used had real-life human consequences.

My letter went unanswered. It’s been half a year since I wrote it. So I’ve understood her silence to be her answer. Believing that I’d met my responsibilities, I did not brood about the matter but considered the case closed.

Until this holiday season, when I received two successive phone messages from the owner of the stables, who was the mother of the horse whisperer. The second message left the impression that she wasn’t just calling to keep a client but really wanted to know why I’d dropped from sight.

That second call left me with a problem. I did not want to go behind her daughter’s back, but I did feel that some sort of honest response was due to the mother – a woman I respected. So, returning her call, I said merely that the topic of October 7 had figured in the course of my last ride, that remarks were made to me that I’d found deeply painful, that I’d written her daughter a letter explaining my view of the incident, which letter was met with silence. Therefore, I had taken the silence to be her daughter’s answer.

“She never got your letter.”

“What?”

“We get our mail at a post box – not at the stable.”

It was the last thing I expected. Novels like Thomas Hardy’s, where the whole plot turns on a letter slipped under the door – never seen because it also went under the rug – always irritated me. Hardy’s unhappy endings had causes that were trivially accidental. In real life, I thought, consequential endings ought not to have inconsequential beginnings.

On the other hand, the truth is the truth. It seems that serious consequences can have trivial causes. Wrong inferences can be drawn because a key bit of information is not known. I’d kept a copy of the misaddressed letter. Having now written down the P.O. box address, I sent it off again.

It reopens a story I thought had ended. Soon we will see –

whether the story continues –

or not.

Related Content: A Moral Crisis | What Is Truth?

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Time Travel

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Abigail

The Expected One by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, c. 1860.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

In present-day America, it is said that young people have little interest in their ancestry. They see their choice of life partner as a personal matter entirely. As to marrying outside the circle of their origins, most would have no hesitation.

That may be less true in Europe, where the past has cut deeper grooves in ancient cities and emotional cartography.

Speaking of the past and the claims it may put on us, I am just now reading What the Wind Knows, a historical romance by a writer named Amy Harmon. The book’s heroine is Anne, a young American woman who travels to Ireland to carry out the last wish of her grandfather: that she scatter his ashes in the county of his birth.

Faithfully, Anne does the requested scattering on a lake in her grandfather’s county. Afterward, drifting in the rowboat, she is overtaken by the mood of reverie evoked by the whole setting, the sad obligation she’s just met, and yearning recollections of the grandfather whose stories imprinted her youth. Meanwhile, a fog has settled over the lake, enveloping her so that she can no longer see how far from shore she may have drifted. When at last another boat comes into view, she calls out to those rowers for directions. To her surprise, the men in the boat point a rifle her way and open fire. When one bullet hits her, she topples into the lake. Once retrieved and rescued, Anne finds herself in the Ireland of 1921!

She falls in love with a young doctor whose worn gravestone she has recently seen as an American visitor fulfilling the familial duty of her 21st-century life. Having the same name, she is assumed to be the missing widow of a fallen Irish patriot. Can she tell the man she now loves who she really is? Having previously read about the Irish struggle for independence from the British crown, there are terrible events that Anne knows will happen, though they have not happened yet. Can she warn people, without raising suspicions?

A story like that makes excruciating demands on the writer’s craft, but Amy Harmon meets them in full. She’s very good.

Bodice busters – as this genre of romance novels got called in the publishing trade – aren’t generally taken seriously. At least not by urbane readers and literary critics. They’re seen as catering to the tastes of women and – believe me – that’s not a compliment.

The critics and fashion-mongers of good taste are mistaken. In reality, romances are interesting because they take True Love to be among the facts of life. In this, they are correct. Then the romance novels go on to show how the immemorial fact of true love may be shaped by the permissions or prohibitions of earlier times. How would romantic love work its will in Tudor times or in Viking times? What barriers might those lovers have to meet? By what means might their obstacles be overcome? The best authors do a fair amount of research as background for their tales.

The advantage of romance novels is that their defining problematics aren’t set out as dry thought experiments. Instead, vicariously we get to live them through – the fresh sweat still glistening on the actors who stand in for ourselves.

In my high school days, I used to pass hours in the Renaissance rooms, and sometimes the Egyptian rooms, or the eighteenth-century rooms of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. With all the imaginative longing I could muster, I would try to feel what it must have been like to live in those past centuries.

Is time travel a real possibility? Is “far memory” (of times we lived previously) a delusion or the hint of an actual experience?

I remember the first time I flew to Israel. As the El Al plane circled lower to land, I looked down at a country that, supposedly, I had never seen before. Unbidden, the words that came into my mind were these:

There it is again.

How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time!

Related Content: The Stroke of Lightning

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Time-Out for the Holidays

Posted on December 24, 2024 by Abigail

Blessings to all!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

When It Has My Name On It

Posted on December 17, 2024 by Abigail

There are moments that put one’s integrity to the test. They aren’t necessarily to be ranked higher than the everyday moments that only require one to keep on keeping on.

In first youth, one dreams of deeds of heroic daring elevating one to a place among the constellations of the night sky. But … after a few hits and misses in that genre, one comes to realize that sometimes it takes a heroic effort just …

not to be crazy

and not to go crazy.

The name of that realization is “adulthood” and it should be celebrated more than ordinarily it has been. Living normally – as close to a balanced life as one’s immediate surroundings will allow – is quite heroic enough.

In that context, where one has outgrown the yearning for extremes, it can nevertheless happen that one gets called upon to act heroically. Should it come, the call will be quite unwelcome. One’s first instinct will be to look around to see if anyone else – perhaps someone standing nearer to the scene or better qualified than oneself – can take the call.

Yes? No?

Anyone here to answer the call?

Often the only answer will be a resounding silence. Sometimes the matter that’s come to one’s attention is confidential. In that case, persons not directly within reach should not be involved. Perhaps the situation is an urgent one, where time is of the essence. In that case, the response can’t wait for a canvass of all the possible candidates, to find the one best suited for this heroic act. Done well or badly, it must be done now. It cannot wait.

Oddly, I’ve more than once been on the receiving end of such a call. For instance (and this story is told in the last chapter of my book, A Good Look at Evil), on the day before an important vote was to be taken regarding who would become the chair of our philosophy department, my teaching hour was evaluated by a powerful member of the department. A negative evaluation would be grounds for getting fired so his writeup would make a significant career difference for me. Well, after observing my teaching performance, my senior colleague invited me to join him for tea at a nearby eatery. As we took our seats, I asked him whether he was here to lobby me about the next day’s vote. He said no, meanwhile noting how unfortunate it was that some of the junior colleagues were making negative comments about his preferred candidate. I replied that I too didn’t think much of his candidate, and explained why.

“Well, if he’s as bad as you say he is, how do you explain a man like me supporting him?”

And all of a sudden, there it was:

the summons.

Had he asked me the very same question – on any other occasion – I would of course have come up with some polite evasion or other. But precisely because he had my unwritten evaluation in his hip pocket, and was asking me on the day before the vote for chair, his question assumed the shape of a direct challenge to my integrity. It could not be dodged.

“Since I’ve read your very intelligent articles, I can’t explain it, except on the supposition that he’s weak and you think you can use him.”

Okay, my answer would account for the next seven years of getting fired, fighting to get my job back, and getting fired again. So that particular ticket to integrity was a high-priced item. They usually are.

One time, a young cousin confided to me that she had been sexually abused by her father. Of course, she could have been making it up. But she was old enough, sufficiently achieved and otherwise reasonable, not to require bizarre attention of that kind. In any case, and most reluctantly, knowing him and what he’d been through, I did believe her. What she told me had the ring of truth. I did not think she was lying.

But her confidence was the last thing I wanted to hear. I loved her father. He and his wife had welcomed me and given me precious hospitality. They were my foothold in a country I held dear. He had been in about five wars and been multiply honored for outstanding service. You don’t come out of five wars looking like Paul Newman in “Exodus” with only a suntan to show for it. The war wounds had taken their toll on his personality. Yet his daughter’s claim was to me undeniable.

So I wrote her father and his equally-dear wife, laying out what I’d been told, adding that, if her allegations were true, they owed their daughter an admission of the truth and some expression of regret and remorse.

Of course, I did not expect to hear from them again and I never did. That connection – and all that came with it – was lost to me. But in writing that letter, I did what I could for them.

So what is the moral of these stories – so painful, so unwelcome, and so unmistakably carrying my name on each one?

Sometimes ordinary life, which proceeds on its horizontal, earth-bound track, one foot stepping in front of the other, stops short. Suddenly, the vertical dimension, that goes between hell and heaven’s high places, shows up. At that moment,

the choice you make

is of a different kind.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 politics, admitting the truth, all that glitters is not gold, answering a call, avoiding a calling, being put on the spot, breaking the silence, career risk, careerism, child abuse, coming out of the closet, courage to grow up, derring-do, dodging a duty, duties one cannot dodge, earned vs phony status, everyday courage, everyday moments, expressing remorse, familial sexual abuse, family loyalty, family tree, father-daughter abuse, go along to get along, gossip, heroic efforts, imaginary heroics, integrity, integrity on the line, integrity's price, Israel, job threats in academe, life between heaven and hell, life challenge, life on the timeline, living normally, missing one's moment, moral blindness, moral challenge, moral courage, moral evasion, moral summons, morality has no gender, normality as heroic, ordinary choice vs moral choice, outward status vs real merit, Paul Newman in Exodus, power threats in academe, PTSD, putting one's honor on the line, real manhood and pretense of manhood, rising to a challenge, sharing a painful truth, social conformism, the call to courage, the call to heroism, the cost of truth, the courage to be normal, the moral dimension, the truth as reinstating reality, war wounds, war wounds and personality change, yearning for extremes, youthful dreams | 2 Comments

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Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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