Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Beginningwise, Part 1

Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) begin their discussion of Beginningwise, which is Part One of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion goes forward.

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Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Confessions of A Young Philosopher (forthcoming), which is a woman's "confession" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She writes a weekly online column, "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column" along with "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Podcast," where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. Many of her articles are accessible at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin. She edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, the late Henry M. Rosenthal. She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She can be reached a dearabbiesilvousplait@gmail.com.We live under the sheltering umbrellas of our worldviews.  To the point where we would feel naked if we were caught in the street without them.

Transcript

Jerry: . . . yes, you look good.

Abigail: We try, we try harder.

Jerry: You try and you come through. You succeed! Yes, trying is important, succeeding is nice too. 

Abigail: Thank you.

Jerry: Well, I’ve been rereading Confessions of a Young Philosopher, which is always for me a page-turner. As I go through paragraph by paragraph, I have many questions. We don’t have endless time, so I boil them down to, I don’t know, six or eight or ten. We start with you and a group of grad students, who all got Fullbright grants to come to Paris for a year.  

Well, Paris is a complete culture shock. Totally different from the America you grew up in at the time of the 1950s–this was the buttoned-down generation of the late 1950s–and Paris is not buttoned-down. And you’re just trying to figure out what you are seeing.

You write, “In the metro, along the Seine’s banks, the river banks, in the crowded alleys of the Latin Quarter, lovers walked. I did not know what they were. I’d never seen anything remotely like them.” Because, in America, people who were “romantically involved” didn’t walk in this way. You describe it as almost a smooth, interlocking flow. And you comment, “Unlike America, on the social map, time and space for this had been cleared. What ideas were being acted out here? What I then surmised, and I am not now possessed of better information, was that the quintessential French story on the subject of romantic love was Tristan and Iseult.” And maybe you could just say something about that. Of course, you say it in the book, but it can frame our discussion on Part One (Beginningwise).

Abigail: It’s a medieval tale, probably existing in many variants, whose scene-setting features are that Iseult is destined as a bride for the king. And Tristan, as a faithful knight of the king, has gone to fetch her from the kingdom where she now lives and is a princess. On the voyage taking them back to King Mark’s domain, they both unwittingly drink a liquid meant to support the royal marriage by rendering the drinkers hopelessly in love. Instead it hits both of them, and they fall hopelessly and unlawfully into what is called the coup de foudre, which is romantic love visualized as a stroke of lightning. And of course it has no place in the social and political world that each belongs to. So it’s immediately an outlaw experience and eventually both die of it because they can’t live it in the real world. And that, I have been authoritatively told by a Swiss-French philosopher, is the essential French love story. 

Jerry: But you say here a social space had been set aside, you might say, basically for this type of romantic love. And a lot of your experience will be about its allure and limitations.

Abigail: The modern version, the updated Tristan and Iseult, emphasized the erotic more than the supernatural character of this kind of gnostic love and it did clear a space and a time. But it was a limited space and time. Instead of conveniently dying, as the lovers did in the medieval prototype, they fall out of love. So it’s got a temporal boundary as well as probably a spatial boundary. You’d best do that in the Latin Quarter. 

Jerry: Yes, so in some way it’s fleeting. 

Abigail: It’s transitory. 

Jerry: A few pages later you raise this question. You’re trying to figure out your place as a woman, both an intellectual and, you might say, foremost as a woman–it’s hard to say which is more important, but anyway, certainly, certainly as a woman–and you raise this difficult question: “Is a woman who is not and has never been considered desirable as a woman, just as much a woman as if she had been desired?” And then you say well, yes, motherhood, you know something like that, but it remains a question for you. Explain, what is the role of desire in being a woman? In being anybody maybe, in being a person?

Abigail: It’s not conceded today. Feminism has blunted these outlines. But pre-feminist young womanhood was very well aware of what may be a perennial fact: that a woman is vulnerable. Not just vulnerable to rape, to pregnancy and so forth, but vulnerable to the danger of not being desired. And that seems to go, at least in pre-feminist America, it was not discussed, but it was widely acknowledged in all kinds of ways, small and large.

Your feminine dignity was at stake! Your feminine authenticity, your feminine, well, I guess people would have said success, or at least the French spoke of le succès. As you know, just as a man was to make money and be important and powerful, a woman was to be desired. And somehow, I mean think of the physical correlate of desire–the woman awaiting the man’s entry and she can’t enter herself, you know, there are things you just can’t do to yourself, and I don’t care how many how-to books people write and publish–it’s not the same. And it’s not the same not just in terms of the boundaries of the sensation. It’s not the same, and this was widely, almost universally acknowledged in my young days, it’s not the same socially. It’s not the same in terms of some deeper sense of success that didn’t have to do with whether or not you won the Nobel Prize. It simply had to do with, I guess we would have said, being a “fulfilled” woman.

That kind of language was not frowned upon. It wasn’t used much, but that was out of fear–the fear that one wouldn’t be a fulfilled woman. We didn’t talk about it, but conversation circled around that danger. One was endangered. Vulnerable and endangered. In spite of all the free and easy style of the American girl, very different from the French, you know, crimped up and cosmetically at the ready and languorously enraptured. That girl, we weren’t, but we were as vulnerable as that girl.

Jerry: You go on, on the very next page, and I’ll put together several excerpts here. “It seemed to me then that one rose above this female predicament at one’s peril, because such an effort to somersault out of one’s chronological place and one’s skin could leave one shorn of the erotic value that alone allowed one to escape being found ridiculous. But why wasn’t rising above it an option,” you ask. Because this was what life was actually like at that point in time, which means, in history. And going down a little: “History, in my eyes, was not just a veil of exile from prelapsarian grace. On the contrary, it was the right place to be, the best place for God and me to hold our argument.” Because for you, God is always a kind of omnipresent Witness. As you put it, God is an ongoing Witness.

And what about the life of the mind, you wonder? Here you are, an intellectual, going to be a philosopher. “What about the life of the mind?” you ask. “Aren’t the ideas, as Plato said, eternal? Although I loved the life of the mind, it was not for me a self-sufficient narrative. What I was interested in primarily was the truth about life, not the exercise of the mental faculties. For me, the truth about life was to be worked out between human beings and the historical God in settings that were real and concrete, not imaginary.” 

So that’s quite a set of reflections and you know it’s often talked about as if people have various self-help approaches today. Some are kind of Eastern, you can step out of it, the power of now, you invent yourself. You know, you can leap above it, and then you won’t see those things happening and then, I guess with enough self-help or other help, they will seem, what, imaginary?

Abigail: They seem compensatory. They have around them, as a sort of enveloping parenthesis, Plan B. And okay, you can go to Plan B as if it were the only plan, but only after you know for a fact that Plan A isn’t ever going to be yours. But to pretend that these compensatory stratagems that replace, for a woman, romantic success, are as good as or better than, or put you at a higher plateau–from which elevated place you can look down on the mad circus of life–all that strikes me as very disguised and very distinguished sour grapes. You know, I just … I knew what kinds of somersaults, internal somersaults, you had to do to arrive there, and I was very busy, trying to be transparent and simple and available to myself, to the world I would encounter and to the Witness that, without talking about it much, I implicitly assumed was watching. Witness meaning, if you will, if you don’t like theism, truth. Truth was watching.

Jerry: And it’s truth in real life, I take it.

Abigail: Yes, and you know, there are all kinds of wonderful cultures that practice tea ceremonies and practice hatha yoga and practice meditation that leads to bliss, and God bless them all. I didn’t know as much about them as perhaps I know now, but that wasn’t the script I was in. I was in the Jewish script. I was in history. Maybe you want to be someplace else, but I had inherited a sense of history. I had inherited a sense that we live lives that are consequential, in chronological time. And so, in chronological time, there occur tragedies, realizations, romantic absolutes. 

For example, I think, in the Jewish imagination, Jacob and Rachel are a kind of absolute. Jacob had maybe four wives, four women with whom he had progeny, but the prophet says Rachel is weeping for her children. The Jewish imagination cleaves to the beloved wife and that means, it knows there is such a thing, even in plural marriage. Of course there are these ugly rivalries between the wives, which eventually, I think in the 10th century, led the rabbis to abolish polygamy. But taking out that superannuated feature of the Biblical stories, what people understand from those stories is that there is a competition involved in love.

There’s a race. 

Not everybody gets everything. 

And there’s no dodging that.

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