Preface, Part 4 - Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions

"God is not fooled. Everybody else could be fooled, but in that respect—just as you can’t fool a child by pretending to be benevolent and love the cute little number when you don’t—the child is not fooled. The dog is not fooled. You know, there are humble creatures in life who are simply not fooled by grown-up pretenses, and God seems to be in that number."

Transcript

Jerry: In the Preface, you raise the question: Did I think there was a God? “Certainly, I was no atheist. For me, God was at least”—and you capitalize them—”Witness and Backup for a hopeful approach to experience that allowed one to look events and feelings in the face without trying to make them other than they were.”

Now, that’s very striking because one often wants to look at things with rose-colored glasses, or to imbue them with ethereal meanings that aren’t evident. But you seem to say you want God as a witness to what? To a hopeful approach to experience that nevertheless looks at things as they are.

Abigail: You know, as we go back over the Preface, certain things come to the foreground for me that I hadn’t quite focused on before. And there seems to be a lot of God-relation in this early setting out. The point of true love: don’t try to get in connection with God, into some meaningful, purposeful connection with God, if you’ve left your own happiness behind. Because God is not fooled by your fakery, by your hypocrisy.

God seems to have a bias for truthfulness. It seems that all these purposes I’m describing are, in a way, shot through with an awareness of God as my Witness. It’s not that I’m looking for a mystical experience. Every once in a while, I’d read some book about or by some mystic, and I’d try to crank myself up to have a wonderful time with God. It would not happen, so I would give it up. All right, nice try, but that wasn’t perhaps the most serious motivating engine in my life.

This purposiveness has to do with getting aligned. There’s some kind of sense of alignment. You don’t want to be out of alignment with regard to your erotic ambitions. You don’t want to repress them, suppress them, or call them something else. If you take your romantic ambitions, your erotic ambitions, to be on a higher plane, then why suppress them? And by the same token, you don’t want to be out of alignment with regard to the God who sees you. Which means you don’t want to be in bad faith, you don’t want to pretend to be something that you ain’t. God is going to know.

God is not fooled. Everybody else could be fooled, but in that respect—just as you can’t fool a child by pretending to be benevolent and love the cute little number when you don’t—the child is not fooled. The dog is not fooled. You know, there are humble creatures in life who are simply not fooled by grown-up pretenses, and God seems to be in that number.

Jerry: Well, interesting, because this is the only place I believe God is mentioned explicitly in the Preface, and God rarely comes up in the book. Maybe His witness is occasionally mentioned. But one of the things that’s striking me now is that God, here, is slightly off stage. Because you’re talking about people who are being sincere in their desires and pursuing those, living them out, looking for true love and being honest about that if it doesn’t work.

And, in Confessions, God is not seen issuing commands, directives or establishing norms—you know, “here are the Ten Commandments, you’ve all got to jump to those commandments,”—and isn’t a big actor, where you pray, “bring me a miracle and make everything all right.” But the crucial role of God is probably captured by the term “Witness.” That we live with a divine Witness. And that doesn’t need to be said over and over. Because it’s not, uh-oh, as if God, like Santa, will know if I’ve been naughty or nice. It’s not that kind of scrutiny. Rather, it’s just that I want to live a life that I’m not ashamed for God to see. That honors the vertical dimension or the ideal dimension in life. And the ideal dimension, the way you talk about it sweetheart, is contained right within life. What follows is that, in principle, you can trust your God-given desire system. That is what has licensed a book which is not about God as such, but about pursuing desires, and pursuing strategies that work for desires, ideas that work, and then you find, over and over, ideas that don’t work, which is how you learn what does work, hopefully, by discovering what doesn’t work.

Abigail: Yes, it seems I was very concerned not to be a phony. And one of the species of phonies, to my eye, was stoicism. “I’ll just grit my teeth, I’ll grin and bear it, I’ll put a good face on a bad scene.” That seemed to me phony. No baby comes out of the womb as a stoic. If you’ve had any, they squall when they’re not happy. So I did not want to be brave in the sense that the grown-up world commends, where adulthood consists in grinning and bearing it. A bad hand of cards is not something to lie to oneself about. I mean, you don’t want to be socially a problem person, always pouting and complaining—that’s not what I’m talking about. But you don’t want to pretend it’s okay when it’s not.

Jerry: You know, there are all these complications in life, and of course you’re going to encounter them. I’m abstracting them from the Preface, and in the book we will see the complications exemplified in 3D, with many more downsides, problems, pitfalls, and so forth as you live life.

Because anyone can say that, “Oh I want to be sincere, I want to live my ideas.” Well, that’s easy to say, right? It could be in a fortune cookie, you know, “Live your ideas.” But to actually live them isn’t that easy, and it has pitfall, pitfall, pitfall, because there’s a limited number of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas. Something like that is what you go through.

Abigail: Yes, you make your way through the human surround, the human scene, in which, unless you’re winning every contest that you enter—and I sure wasn’t—you’re not well understood. People kind of avert their eyes out of self-protection in order to keep their own system, their life system, going. And so you find yourself much more alone than you ever set out to be. You didn’t even ask yourself, will I be alone? But you can make some choices that put you out there alone for one reason or another. So there are all kinds of unforeseen traps, pitfalls, hazards, insuperable obstacles to climb over that they didn’t tell you about.

Jerry: It’s interesting because we’re looking at the complications, challenges, difficulties and so forth. But this is the Preface, you know. You’re leaving home for the first time, headed to Paris on a Fulbright. What an adventure. And you say, was I fearful? No, no, I was filled with desire and thought I was ready for anything. Well, you weren’t quite ready for anything, but you were ready to be ready for anything. And I doubt that you regret that cheerful launching of yourself into the world via Paris.

Abigail: No, it was very sincere. I had comrades, you know, fellow Fulbrights, people I chummed with that year. Many of them were somewhat cynical, somewhat wary, armored, defensive.

Jerry: They’re all young, right? They’re essentially students, advanced students or something, and a bunch of them headed to Paris for this year’s fellowship, right? And so you’re all comparing notes with each other in this new scene, exciting scene of Paris. 

Abigail: Yes. I might have been as open and wide-eyed as any of us got to be. I had a friend or two. I’m thinking of my friend John Armstrong who, like me, wanted to test his ideals against the real world. And that could be thought childish. Most people didn’t talk about their ideals in contradistinction to the real world, but John did. 

Jerry: That’s quite a story. When you get to the book, that’s another story. What struck me as hard as anything in the whole book is the story of John Armstrong. Yes, but this openness—which you still have, sweetheart.

Abigail: Oh, good for me.

Jerry: When we fell in love, your colleagues warned you against it because they’re worldly-wise. But you close yourself off to a lot if you’re just worldly wise. You know, “Oh, don’t go there, you can’t go there, this won’t work, that won’t work.” And your attitude, that you already expressed throughout this Preface is, “Well, let’s find out.”

Abigail: Yes, I’m not a philosophe for nothing. I’m a philosopher. I want to know the truth as I encounter it. I can’t know the truth about things where I have no access—which are multitudinous—but I have access to my own story, and I want to know the truth about it.

Jerry: Yes, and Confessions of a Young Philosopher is the record of that search for truth in your own life.