Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Beginningwise, Part 3

Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) pursue 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, so your innocence has been taken away. It's very rough, rather crude, but manipulative way. But there seems to be something more going on. When I read it with my jaundiced male eyes, I think, oh, what an operator. But you add, “Besides, it had not been just a phase of seduction. It had been such a phase superimposed on something else. I felt something like love, something like love. Perhaps all seduction has something like love behind it. I couldn't say, I had no idea what to do. It seemed to me that the love fragment between us should be pursued. Backward on the timeline, to where it had veered away from us, or forward in time to where we could recapture it.” So that had an authority, you might say, for you, that element of love, subterranean as it was. And yet I think you're feeling nevertheless very discernible. You know, beneath all this manipulative stuff, obscured by it, obscured by the crudity. But even people with crude worldviews and crude manners and methods can actually be in love.

Abigail: You know. People can read this in a politically correct fashion and just say what a rat. But the problem was my ruination, my defloration, all that he was building in the way of a strategic battle plan was his as well. I knew that he was in love. The way you know those things and I wouldn't be prepared to write a treatise on how you know those things. But you do. An animal, a dog, can tell, hey, that's a bad guy. A horse can tell that person can ride me, that other person shouldn't even think about it. So these certainties exist on the intuitive level and argument comes in later to try to explain the certainties.

And people have psychoanalytic theories which sort of dispose of and deprecate and deny such feelings and say they're delusive and compensatory. And blah, blah, blah, blah. And how's your life, lady? I don’t want to hear about the deficiencies of mine when yours are printed all over you. So no, you have to take these things seriously. If you're painting a flower, the flower is new. You can't say, oh, here's a stencil for flowers and put it on top of the real flower. You have to look at it.

So I knew he hadn't just ruined, in a way, my initiation by initiation. He'd never been in love so far, as he told me, and I believed that and he'd ruined his own. So I was sorry and the pity came, I think, from the love. You know, I sort of wanted to redo the whole script and get it right this time. You can't, you can't rewrite the past. You can't make the first loss of innocence come back again and do that right. It can't be redone. There are things in life like that. A lot of things can't be redone. They can be forgotten, they can be outgrown. You can't redo the beginning.

But I didn't quite know that yet, I was inexperienced erotically on many levels. I wondered you know you have a responsibility to first love. Can't you do something to make it okay? Can't you repair what's been broken? What do you do? Just walk away saying nobody treats me like that. I salute the woman who can do that. You know, more power to you, babe. But I was interested in... There are people who paint in oils and they don't keep their colors clean, they smush them together, thinking that's, you know, that's modern, that's uninhibited. That's really getting in there. No, you want to paint, you want each color to be distinct and somehow they've been smushed, you know, together and that's not how you paint. So I was concerned, get the original colors back. And I didn't know. Perhaps it was an open question, is that still possible? Maybe he didn't know either. He was distracted by his triumph and distracted from his catastrophic failure.

Jerry: Yes, it's very striking in what then the next page is. He continues courting you, we might have put a nice term on it. The seduction continues and it has this mix of the materialism, the reductionism, the crude elements, the manipulation, but intermixed also, perhaps manipulatively, was rhapsodic language. You're the ideal feminine, you know. You're like Dante's Barrett, just the girl he's in love with, who leads him through heaven, I guess in the Divine Comedy.

Abigail: From Hell to Heaven, yes, leads him up. The eternal feminine leads one above.

Jerry: Yes, the eternal feminine. You're the eternal embodiment, the present version of the eternal feminine. And he does that just eloquently and by your discernment, also with an element of truth. That was part of the situation. He was manipulative and had these crude aspects and a worldview that justified them, and yet he had a kind of romantic draw that was of true love underneath it, a fragment. So he wasn't a person you could ever marry because he's just not suitable in any respect for a life together.

And yet there's this phenomenon of love as part of it. And so you do end up going to bed with him, going all the way, as they say, at which point, by the ethos of the time and by your own self-understanding, as it were, you're kind of ruined. You have no future. You can't marry him Now by the norms of the time, unless you cover it up in some way. You're damaged goods, as you put it a moment ago. You can't do anything, and at that point you go down by the riverbank and consider doing what the women in similar situations in Russian novels do. You tell us and you say you ponder this question should I just throw myself in and escape it all and become that one with the water or something like that. And then well, where am I then? I haven't lived it out to its end, but you're pondering this. Should you just give it all up and end your life here? And you reason about it because you're a woman, but also a philosopher, and here's your reasoning “If my innocence and life were the same, then in some sense both were ended, and I should opt for the river. If the long, horizontal night of embraces had anything to add its claims were still unmet and I should choose to know them. If philosophy had anything to teach me, it had not done that yet, and I should go on with the argument for the sake of the unfinished love of wisdom.” So you've got to live out the love. It sounds like you're saying you've got to live out the romantic love, to see what is there and to come to understand it. But this is also part of the philosophical pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom isn't off somewhere else, the way you talk about these things. It's found in living out and thinking the best you can about these sort of moments, so these, in this case, what seems like an impossible thing. You can't live with him, not, can't live without him. As they say, and there you are with an element of love that you have not yet fully explored, and you haven't certainly not yet fully understood. And why was that important to you? I mean, a lot of people would say, okay, when some lose, some go on.

Abigail: How about win all, lose all? No, no, no. Those worldly people have nothing in common with me. They're on plan D. You know, no, no, no, no, no. You have to go back to the beginning, to. You know, the first before you were disillusioned, where were you headed? And it wasn't clear to me that we couldn't be repaired. It wasn't clear to me that, uh, there were so many unanswered questions. Philosophy has a dynamic to it, a magnetism, it pulls you as Plato knew in the direction of its own kind of fulfillment up the ladder of dialectical comprehension. One rung atop, the one below, and so on, and I hadn't been able to climb very high, indeed, you know, I was on rung one and a half.

I had wanted to understand the French, the Tristan myth, the meaning of my first love. There were many things that I wanted to understand in the course of a larger search for understanding, and now they threaten to pull me down. You know this failure of expectations, this loss of social and other supports. You know intimate self-containedness, this trespass against the vulnerabilities of my first youth that had interrupted a quest for understanding. But it had not supplied the understanding, it had not answered the questions, it had obscured them in a way, distracted me. What did I originally want? It's like somebody beginning to make a speech or write a poem and declaim it, and then getting very distracted perhaps by something of mixed value, partly wonderful, partly hopeless. And where was I? What was I saying when I got interrupted? So I was aware of something not finished.

Perhaps since then in my adult life I've talked to people out of committing suicide, two women, and in both cases I wasn't thinking it through as a technique. But what I did was ask what did you originally want that has been so disappointed that you now think death is the only solution? Are you sure that you know all about why it was disappointed? What in you made you available for such a disappointment? Have you cased the whole situation? Do you know that it's hopeless, or are you rushing to judgment about your own career in and through your time? So that's what came to me. Perhaps as a philosophe, you know it wasn't that I was scared of the water. It was that I was scared. Perhaps I was dropping out of the class before I'd completed the assignments that belonged to that course of study.

Jerry: You don't know what to do, but you do at several points in the book, you find a good woman to talk to and you find your friend, Harper who's also a Fulbright in Paris at the same time. And in talking to her, you tell her you know what you're going through and, oh my God, I could be pregnant, and so forth. Well, Harper told me her whole sad, comic, picaresque backstory. So you know each person, you think you're all alone in some predicament, and then you talk to someone else and if they're really a good friend, they they say oh well, let me tell you what I've been through, what I've done, the mistakes perhaps made or the difficulties I've gotten myself into, and so on. So you listen to her story and you say, ah, so this is what it's like to be real and get your heart broke like other girls. So what you're going through, yes, that's what it is. “What she gave me was that pearl without price, the feminine solidarity. ‘But, Harper, suppose I get pregnant?’ ‘Well, you'd have to have an abortion.’”

And this was early days, we didn't have all this abortion rights and stuff. You'd have to have an abortion, “‘If I'm still in France,’ Harper says, ‘I'll go with you to Sweden.’ ‘But, Harper,’ I look down to think and then into her eyes directly, ‘isn’t an abortion a sin?’ She shook her head, gave me back a look of pure kindness,” southern kindness. She was from Virginia, I recall, “‘there are many sins, my dear.’” Now I don't know what it is about that line, but it's always one line from the book I particularly remembered. And I've met Harper in real life and I've always, you might say, loved her for that one line and yet I don't think I could explain why that is so helpful. I can sense that that's a very helpful thing to say in this circumstance, but why, why? What did that tell you?

Abigail: It's almost the secret that women know. You know, beyond that it's not a myth feminine innocence. So I don't want to say beyond the myth of feminine innocence and high expectations and hopes, it's not a myth, but it's often the gateway to heartbreak. And then you scramble. You know what can you do? How can you conceal the evidence of your heartbreak? Because the evidence of heartbreak diminishes your value in the marketplace, not of ideas, sometimes people talk about the marketplace of ideas. I don't know what they're talking about. Uh, the good ideas undersell the bad ones. Well, but in the marketplace of feminine eligibility, there's certainly a marketplace and you can be worth zero. So you scramble, and the Southern woman, unlike the Northern woman that I was, has a funny sense. And I don't know, you know I'm not an anthropologist or sociologist. It'd be interesting to track it if anybody cared about such things today. But there's a sense that we belong to the same, I don't know metaphor, sounds, masculine fellowship of them what has been shot at? We're quite aware that you can lose that bloom, that southern bloom, with the parasols and the hoop skirts and the whatever and the you know, suntan lotion. You can lose that thing and your market value goes down below zero. And so you lie. Because where are you going to go? You know, the moon? You still have to live on the plantation someplace. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows everything because of small town gossip. And so you've got to know the arts of concealment. And a Southern woman who was a well-known writer said to me, “My mother told me that men are the enemy.”

Jerry: I can hear that in a southern drawl.

Abigail: My mother forgot to tell me that, but the southern woman, especially of those days, perhaps of these days, knew it. You know men are sneaking out to do what men do and then they're coming back and demanding innocence from women, demanding that this rosebud has never been opened. And you've got to play along. You can have a lot of power, but only if you give them the illusion of power. So these stratagems are not- they're stratagems of mutual bad faith. You know they're concealment and they're coquetry and you know it's deeply feminine, but in another register, and she was inducting me into that society. I can't think of the feminine equivalent. There was a combat cartoonist who talked about the, Bill Malden, who talked about the “fellowship of them what has been shot at,” there's a womanly equivalent of such a fellowship. And she was inducting me into that sisterhood of, maybe you could call it of girls who've been ruined.

Jerry: Yes, that's right. Women whose erotic future has been compromised in some almost fatal way? In part because of their behavior, and maybe, ok, there are those sins, and then abortion. Well, that would just be another long list of things women have in their hidden resumes, the part of the resumes they don't put in the front window. But every woman has them, and men have them too, but men might well be celebrating them. That's the part of the vulnerability of women. There's nothing to celebrate.

Abigail: No, it's a funny thing, I guess no one sincerely wants those days back where your virginity was surrendered on your wedding night and you wore girdles and stockings in the deeps of winter and high heels in the snow, and pointy bras, you know. Anybody who's outlived those days can't sincerely wish them to return. But there were underlying truths on the combat field of erotic life that were acknowledged then and have been publicly renounced, denounced, outgrown, denounced, outgrown, transcended whatever you want now. But I feel a certain... There's a French nasty novelist who's written a book called Pitié pour les femmes Pity for Women. Those are sentiments. There's a 17th century playwright who writes Ne plaignez-vous pas le sort des femmes ? “Do you not pity the lot of women.” And there is a pity for the fate of women that has been suppressed and it's like an erotic suppression. The vulnerability of women has been suppressed, it's censored, it's unacknowledged. It would give men too much power. Blah, blah, blah, blah. So it hasn't gone away, you know, and that's what my friend Harper was, what she knew, yes, that's what she knew.