Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions

 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. 

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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: 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.