When Ideals Become Dangerous: Courage, Revolution, and Conviction | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 2.3

What happens when living by your ideals becomes dangerous?

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher with the stories of John Armstrong and Anna.

John was a fellow Fulbright student in Paris who wanted to test whether his ideals of courage, honor, and integrity could survive in the real world. His decision to travel through Africa would end tragically.

Abigail also remembers Anna, a friend drawn to the romance of the Cuban Revolution. Her story leads Abigail and Jerry into a discussion of political idealism, revolutionary movements, and what can happen when ideals collide with reality.

They also discuss Albert Camus, existentialism, the philosophy of the absurd, personal integrity, and Abigail's belief that these lives were tragic rather than meaningless.

How do we know when an ideal is worth following? When does courage become recklessness? And what does it really mean to live by what you claim to believe?

Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 2.3 explores courage, revolution, idealism, tragedy, and the difficult cost of conviction.

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Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically.

Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo

Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Transcript

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:00:15,286 ]What kind of a hand have we been dealt as women today, and how can we best play it? It's a large question that's always lurking in the background, and since the answers aren't obvious, I find women's lives to be immediately suspenseful and interesting. Don't you? Wait a minute. Who am I? I'm Abigail L. Rosenthal. Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and while my advice has always been not to take my advice, I do write a weekly blog I call Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column. And so, dear listener, I invite you to pull up a chair at this virtual cafe table, no matter your gender, age, convictions, or style of life. 

Narrator

[ 00:01:35,776 ]Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. Part two, continued. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book,  Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Narrator

[ 00:01:51,036 ]In this episode, the story of a fellow student introduces a different kind of test, one of ideals, courage, and integrity. As Abigail reflects on his decision to put his beliefs into action, the conversation raises a parallel question: What does it mean to live out what you claim to believe? And what happens when you cannot?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:15,366 ]The next chapter is titled Venceremos. We'll find out what that means as we talk about the chapter, but it starts with you say, the only friend you've ever had who made the New York Times front page, John Armstrong, and the front page was of John Armstrong and I think three friends or three people in total killed.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:02:45,316 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:46,166 ]Being killed And you might just share a little of the background. I didn't find a single line that sort of summarized the story.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:02:55,626 ] Well, John was a kind… he was a Fulbright like the rest of us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:01,066 ]So he is in Paris with you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:02,646 ]Yes, an American young man. He's a little older than the rest of us. And he had at least on the side that was turned toward me, he had high ideals. For example, you shouldn't spend time in Paris idly. If you got this fellowship because you've made a promise to accomplish a certain piece of work, then every day you spent in Paris should advance that project and fulfill that promise.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:42,756 ]And there were all kinds of things big and little. There was still an army store where American troops stationed abroad could buy goods, but American civilians ought not to buy there. And John would reprove anyone who wanted to take advantage of the lax surveillance at that PX store and so on.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:20,566 ]And John and I had a, there was a certain kind of clarity talking to John. He didn't go for psychoanalysis. He was literary. He had a… not a believer as a lot of us young Americans were. He didn't think there was any divine element in real life. And he thought Homer's Iliad illustrative of how real life goes. Those guys are fighting and killing each other on the ground, and there aren't any gods in the sky. That's the whole story. Whole story is what happens with Achilles and his opposite number among the Trojans. And John had decided to test his ideals, his values by going with a couple of American  young men in a rented French car that was given, lent to them, in order to prove to be an advertisement for the merits of that car. And they were going to drive from Egypt to the bottom of Africa.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:48,466 ]But how is this an ideal for him? He seems like a guy attached to very honorable…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:55,096 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:55,766 ]attached to high standards and the honor, you know, of meeting those standards, living by them. And how, I don't quite understand how this is among his ideals.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:09,096 ]He wanted to test his… how substantive, to put to the test the substantiveness of his professed ideals. And he figured they were going into sort of rough country one after another, and he would find out, is he going to lie to protect them or pretend to something that is not the case?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:39,216 ]And if that turns out to happen, then he'll know he'll cross off that professed ideal as not really his anymore. So the trip was supposed to be a test of honor.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:56,866 ]Yeah, it's kind of a test of character, maybe of manliness or, you know, some of the substance of being tough enough to handle…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:08,806 ]Integrity.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:10,216 ]Integrity.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:11,396 ]Courage and integrity.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:12,836 ]Hold on to your values and norms

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:16,036 ]And if you can't, don't claim to hold them anymore.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:22,336 ]Aha

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:22,896 ]You know, be exactly what you say you are.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:26,196 ]And his girlfriend Nancy tells him don't go. The writer Richard…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:31,756 ]Richard Wright

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:32,736 ]Was an exile in Paris and talked to the young people, says don't go or you know you won't get past Egypt or Cairo, something like that. But his girlfriend Nancy tries to get him not to go. And John says to her, tell me anything you like, but don't tell me not to go.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:54,076 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:54,956 ]And you didn't either, that comes up later, that you're looking back. You didn't encourage him to go. You saw the danger, but you also couldn't quite flat out go against his testing his ideals.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:12,396 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:13,396 ]I had a sympathy for the romantic motivation that John professed. I thought, you know, people, there was a banalization of life that was urged on young people. The Freudian assumptions that lay back of young people's and middle-aged people's lives in those days was very reductive, almost cynical. You claim to be X but your unconscious is not X.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:52,896 ]And so John's idea of testing his ideals seemed to make sense to me, seemed to belong to what a young man should do.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:07,746 ]Yeah, in fact you asked the question, "What is a man to do?" Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:13,266 ]What is a man to do? He had wanted, you say, to be gallant and true. I guess this is part of fleshing this out, to be gallant and true. It's a worthy aim, but apparently not that easy to achieve.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:28,226 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:28,996 ] But then you go on. I, you, Abigail, “had a similar aim. Yet I could not tell anyone where I'd been.” Okay, so here you've got a bind, double bind. “My silence ringed by its attendant untruths nullified my effective presence in the world. Each ineffective moment ricocheted off the lines that would have connected my past to its future. I had to live a straight course if I was to be myself and I couldn't.”

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:07,766 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:08,846 ]It was a crisis on a major scale going unannounced, precisely because you can't tell anybody. There the silences come, the lies and the silences come in.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:23,986 ]I would be writing my dissertation on Hegel in that time period of several years after Paris. And one of the things Hegel notices in his Phenomenology of Mind, of Geist, of the World Spirit, is that, an arresting point, a stopping point in the unfolding of a dialectical progress that he thinks individuals and cultures in a healthy state are engaged in testing hypotheses and revising as reality requires, but there can come a full stop, arrested development, and that is marked by silence, by what cannot be said. And it seemed that all of a sudden my life was flooded with silence.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:39,956 ]All the things that might have been truly said could not be said.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:46,986 ]Well, your friend, Anka.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:51,226 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:52,156 ] Also from Paris, right? But now back in the States, I guess. I don't know when she said, if you hang out with him, you'll become… you did not like the Communists, their materialism, their violence, their lack of respect for like elections and stuff. You were against them and you argued with them all the time. But she says if you stick with him, he will convert you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:15,606 ]Yes. Yeah, Anka, who lived in Paris and I left Paris. I certainly said goodbye to Anka, but yes, there was a funny way in which missing Pheidias, unable to express, to find any expressive modality that would put out in the public square where people could see it and relate to me to how I really was, how it really was with me.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:56,206 ]Somehow, the communism that was part of his pseudo armor or his shell, perhaps, that I had resisted when I was with him to argue about it, now became a point of connection with him.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:18,376 ]Yeah, so that's strange because you get precisely because he's not there to be resisted, you stop resisting and you do have the romantic longing, the memories and the longing and wanting you sometimes put it in terms of building a bridge between, you know, okay, between who you are and what you believe and who he is and what he believes and the process and there's a general insight that you bring out because he was no longer there to be resisted, he was converting me, you say.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:54,806 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:55,786 ]When the way is blocked, this is a general statement. When the way is blocked to one's original desiderata, eros does not then evaporate. It displaces itself naturally and automatically to other objects. And the other object, the new object of desire, often is the generic revolutionary hero who will make the world safe for one's original desires. And it seems quite natural at the time. It's very sad because it's utterly vicarious.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:35,396 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:36,356 ]People die and they kill, but not for what they really want. 

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:43,516 ]My friend Anna became enamored of the Cuban Revolution as it looked at the beginning.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:53,246 ]And it's not just abstract. Cubans come to some of these meetings and then she meets a very good looking Cuban who takes her to the Cuban dancing, which is itself a marvelous thing to do. And you can dance to all hours with this very handsome Cuban. And she ends up going off with him.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:18,256 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:19,126 ]And you perhaps could have stopped her, maybe you couldn't have. But anyway, you don't really try, do you?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:26,266 ]No, once again, I sympathize, you know. I sympathize with the people I know, my peers, my contemporaries, when they want to live a romantic story, a romantic ideal. I sympathize rather than being sensible and saying, look, consider what might happen. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:03,566 ]It's often wrong to be sensible, isn't it? I mean, you struck out twice, you might say. You couldn't tell John Armstrong not to go. You couldn't say, in that section, I couldn't tell him to go, but I also couldn't tell him to stay.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:20,626 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:21,406 ]Couldn't deny his effort to do that, and you couldn't tell Anna, "Look, you don't know what's going to happen to you if you go to Cuba." And in fact, she was never heard from again. Often it's right for people to follow their star, you know, what feels like their destiny, and you fall in love, and it's often a true love. Pheidias was a true love, but an impossible one. And so it was not wrong to do with Pheidias what you did in Paris, even though it ended up hopeless. But you don't know at the beginning a lot of people warned you when, we, you and I fell in love.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:03,716 ]I was just thinking of that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:05,516 ]They warned you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:06,316 ]And they might have been right. Suppose we hadn't worked out, you know. Really, my motivational system was unchanged. It just this time it worked. Maybe one time out of three or four.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:23,416 ]You've got to test your own integrity somehow. Who you are. You have to live out who you are and what you feel is your, you know, what you're drawn to. What has your name on it as you sometimes say.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:37,926 ]Pursue the ultimate Don't adopt a conventional common sense if it's not yours, the desire to live your ideal, rather than give it up.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:02,086 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:03,016 ]The peculiarity with Pheidias was that there was a core of truth in his professions of loving me forever. He probably did, in a way, but there were layers and layers that made up his rather compromised character. Even as a young man, he was compromised in many different directions: deceptive…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:40,706 ]rationalizing that in Marxist or other terms, and so the question of, you know, taking these risks for the love we did have was a very complicated one. It couldn't work out, happily, but I thought it ought not to be crushed because the reality that was a piece of this jigsaw puzzle was, I thought, of ultimate significance. I attended one Fair Play for Cuba committee meeting in which one man there stood up and apparently he'd come back from Cuba and seen the beginnings of a tyranny, and he began to talk reproachfully, reprovingly to the group.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:49,896 ]He stood up alone to testify to what he had seen and they had not seen, and they began to chant rhythmically to the wall, to the wall, which was where you went, what you were stood up against by the firing squad that policed dissent even in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. And seeing this crowd shouting, that was a nightmare come alive.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:28,206 ]I couldn't get the hell out of there fast enough. You didn't play those games.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:38,406 ]My experience with you, sweetheart, is that you do pay attention to the facts on the ground.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:44,816 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:45,556 ]And there's the romance of revolution and a kind of utopian side to that even, and the beauty of the Cubans, you know, that attracted Anna so much, and that he may have been a wonderful person, but he couldn't protect her in Cuba. That's the problem. And now, you encounter why he wouldn't be able to protect her. Any crowd, they call it revolutionary justice. The crowd knows who's guilty. The people, you know, they use this abstraction of the people. It's just the mob knows who's bad, who's guilty. And do them in.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:21:21,796 ]Yeah, the anarchy, Orwell writes in Homage to Catalonia about the same, you know, sort of springtime for the revolution that is so attractive. It's a utopian ideal that apparently gets legs and gets real space and time. But it's an illusion.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:21:47,556 ]You do away with legal safeguards, with police, with all the due process, boringly girding about liberal democracies, and you got the mob. And that's what you... that's what...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:08,896 ]your final note in this chapter kind of sums it up. “Anna had done the very best she could by her then lights.”

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:22:22,166 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:23,336 ]”And so had John Armstrong. And so had I.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:28,856 ]”Anna had done the very best she could. by her then lights. And so had John Armstrong. And so had I.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:41,746 ]And it was tragic, not absurd. You want to explain that difference? Why was it tragic? Why were these three stories not simply absurd, but actually tragic? What's meant by that?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:22:55,666 ]The absurd, which was also, you know, there was a little bit of French existentialism wafting in over the Freud stuff, and it seemed a little more interesting than Freud. But, I remember it was in that general period that Camus died, having driven into a tree. Whether he had been inebriated or drugged or in despair and committing suicide, I think it was never cleared up why that accident happened. Maybe he just skidded on something on the road.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:41,976 ]But he was a philosopher of the absurd, right? Wrote The Myth of Sisyphus and so forth.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:47,466 ]Yes, that life, that human beings are, the existentialists claim they were condemned to be free, but there was no underlying meaningfulness that could be disclosed if you dug deep enough or if you sought the truth persistently enough, there was no way out of the labyrinth. Life was a labyrinth, and the thing to do was simply hold to whatever particular cause, ideal or other seemed to you best at the time you bumped into it. Nothing in the universe would vindicate your success, echo your success, or compensate for your failure. You simply did it anyway because, you know, in the face of the absurd, you lived groundlessly.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:24:57,756 ]You know, without a raison d'être, but there was some kind of…the claim was there was some kind of courage in acting according to your best lights even though nothing supported those best lights. So those claims were beginning to be of interest to Americans perhaps who studied philosophy and thought this is at least more interesting than some of what passed for philosophy in those days. But I thought it's premature. You don't know for a fact that nothing supports your sense of reality. I didn't think that what happened to John was absurd, or what happened to Anna was absurd.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:26:00,836 ]they had lived their best hopes and been crushed. So proven wrong, perhaps.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:12,646 ]Yeah

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:26:13,296 ]What happened to Anna exactly, I don't know, but everybody knows what happened to John. He wanted to live to find out whether his ideals were actionable and livable or mere verbal decoration in his life as an English major, as a student of literature, and I guess he couldn't find out because he was murdered.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:53,826 ] The events with Pheidias, your response afterwards, you know, kind of connecting with him still, in part by fair play for Cuba and so forth, you know, kind of but in a way part of that seems like a way to make sure it's not simply absurd. You know, you are trying to find that Ariadne's thread.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:27:16,736 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:17,566 ]And if you can find that, then it's not absurd. There's a whole story that's sort of meaningful, I guess.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:27:26,606 ]Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:27:27,386 ]Yeah, you know, for me, these two events ending the journey of friends with whom I had identified in varying degrees were like scissors cutting Ariadne's thread.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:27:50,186 ]They were murderously, again, the word is tragic. The effort had been, I thought, commendable. You know, even if they hadn't... John had been warned by Richard Wright, don't do it, they'll never get past Egypt.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:20,286 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:28:21,246 ]Okay, he decided he's going to prove this American writer who's traveled to Africa more than once, going to prove him wrong. Well, no, he proved him right.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:28:35,146 ]And my friend Anna, I think any sensible person would have warned her, for God's sake, don't give up American citizenship. Don't you know how valued that is in the world? But she wasn't happy here. She couldn't live gallantly. The culture itself seemed... We look back with some nostalgia to what used to be called the age of conformity or conformism.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:14,726 ]But it was very banal. It was anti-romantic. It was sensible and the life story opened, offered to members of that culture who accepted the constraints. The life story offered was banal. If it had, it tested nothing except your ability to do what was expected of you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:50,986 ]And so people didn't really know what their full story was because it was never put to any kind of test or even opportunity.

Narrator

[ 00:30:03,826 ]What follows is the recognition that ideals, once claimed, demand something in return. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:30:12,936 ]Thanks so much, dear listener. If this added value to your life, I'd be happy if you subscribed. You can find me at www.abigailrosenthal.com. I've written a book called A Good Look at Evil, and if that's not too scary for you, you can buy it on Amazon. Another book is called Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and that's forthcoming soon with illustrations.