Paris, Desire, and the Female Predicament | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 1.1

What does it mean to be desired—and what happens if you are not?

In Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, Abigail L. Rosenthal arrives in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship and encounters a culture that seems to make space for romantic love in a way that 1950s America did not. Along the Seine, in the cafés, and throughout the Latin Quarter, she observes a world shaped by different assumptions about love, desire, and the place of romance in human life.

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail and Jerry L. Martin explore the influence of the medieval love story Tristan and Iseult, the French understanding of romantic passion, and a question that haunted many young women of Abigail's generation: Is being desired part of what it means to become a fully realized woman?

Their conversation examines the tension between intellectual ambition and romantic longing, the relationship between feminine identity and fulfillment, and the challenge of pursuing high ideals while remaining honest about the realities of love and desire. Drawing on Jewish history, philosophy, and personal experience, Abigail reflects on why she resisted what she saw as "Plan B" answers to life's deepest questions and why truth, for her, had to be sought in lived experience rather than abstraction.

Part memoir, part philosophical conversation, and part cultural history, this chapter introduces one of the central themes of Confessions of a Young Philosopher: how to reconcile the search for meaning with the realities of love, desire, and human vulnerability.

Join us as we continue Abigail's journey through Paris, philosophy, romance, and the questions that would shape the rest of her life.

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 Martin

[ 00:00:15,761 ]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

[ 00:01:35,631 ]Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Part One. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Narrator

[ 00:01:48,541 ]In this episode, Abigail arrives in 1950s Paris and encounters a culture where love is lived openly and differently than anything she has known. Raising a deeper question: What kind of life makes space for love? And what does that reveal about a society? We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:13,171 ] You look good.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:02:16,191 ]We try. Try harder.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:19,471 ]You try and you come through. Ha ha ha. You succeeded. Trying is important. Succeeding is nice too.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:27,331 ]Well, I've been re-reading Confessions of a Young Philosopher, which is always for me a page-turner. And as I go through paragraph by paragraph, I have many questions and we don't have endless time, so I boiled them down to I don't know, six or eight or ten. And you and another group of grad students I guess who all got Fulbright grants to come to Paris for a year.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:59,391 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:59,951 ]Well, Paris is a complete culture shock, you might say. Totally different from the America you grew up in, you know, that you knew at the time of the 1950s. This was the button-down generation of the 1950s. And Paris is not buttoned down. And you're just trying to figure out what are you seeing? You write: “In the metro, along the Seine's banks, the riverbanks, in the crowded alleys of the Latin Quarter, lovers walked. I did not know what they were.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:38,331 ]Had never seen anything remotely like them. Because in America lovers didn't walk in this way you describe, you know, it's almost a smooth interlocking flow. And you comment, unlike America, you say, on the social map, time and space for this had been cleared. What ideas were being acted out here?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:12,771 ]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. I don't know how to pronounce that.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:04:28,881 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:29,551 ]Tristan and Iseult. And maybe you could just say something about that. Of course, you say it in the book, but I frame our discussion of part one.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:04:38,831 ]It's a medieval tale, probably existed in many variants, and the essential 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. She's a princess.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:05:08,591 ]And on the boat taking them back to King Mark's domain, they unwittingly both drink a liquid that is meant to support the royal marriage, and render the drinkers hopelessly in love, and instead it strikes both of them. It hits both of them and they fall unlawfully and hopelessly and instantly into the passion of love.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:05:54,841 ]It has of course 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 story.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:33,441 ]And long before I was told that, I had read the story and could more or less recognize it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:41,281 ]So, but you say here, a social space had been set aside, you might say, basically for this type of romantic love.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:52,331 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:52,981 ]And a lot of your experience is about both the allure and limitations.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:58,071 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:59,941 ]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, and 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 as you do it in the Latin Quarter.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:42,041 ]So in some way it's fleeting or at least.  That's interesting, and a few pages later you raise this question. You're trying to figure out your place as a woman.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:07:54,831 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:55,631 ]Both an intellectual and what you might say foremost, 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 you it remain it remains a question for you. You know. And explain what is the role of desire in being a woman or being anybody maybe being a person.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:08:38,011 ]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, that your feminine dignity was at stake.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:09:45,161 ]Your feminine authenticity, your feminine, well, I guess people would have said success, or at least the French spoke of le succès, as…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 correlative of um desire…

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:10:25,171 ]The woman awaited the man's entry and she couldn'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. You know, and 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 and almost you might say universally acknowledged in my young days.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:04,711 ]It's not the same socially.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:09,771 ]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 say, being a realized woman, being a fulfilled woman. Those, that kind of language was not frowned upon. It wasn't used much out of fear. The fear that one wouldn't be a realized or fulfilled woman.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:47,911 ]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, primped up and cosmetically, at the ready and languorously enraptured, that girl, we weren't, but we were as vulnerable as that girl.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:23,781 ]You go on to the very next page and I'll put together several excerpts here. It seemed to me then that one rose above this feminine uh this female predicament at one's peril.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:12:41,411 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:42,491 ]”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.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:12:59,451 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:00,631 ]But why wasn't rising above it an option,” you ask?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:06,941 ]”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 in me to hold our argument.” Because for you, God is always a kind of, you know, omnipresent, you know, witness as you put it. God is an ongoing witness.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:36,671 ]”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?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:51,051 ]”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.”

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:14:25,611 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:26,791 ]So that's quite a set of reflections and you know, it's often talked as if people have various self-help approaches today. How some are kind of eastern, you can step out of it, you can the power of now, you invent yourself, you know, you can leap above it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:14:48,461 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:49,181 ]And you do not see those things happening. And I guess they seem what, imaginary?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:14:57,221 ]They seem like compen- they seem compensatory. They have around them as a sort of enveloping parenthesis, Plan B. And okay, you can go to Plan B, but only after you know for a fact that Plan A isn't ever going to be yours. To pretend that these compensatory strat-

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:15:33,421 ]gems that replace a woman's 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.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:16:10,381 ]You know, I just 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. You know, witness meaning, if you will, if you don't like theism, truth. Truth was watching.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:53,361 ]And it's truth in real life, I tell you.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:16:55,761 ]Yeah, 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 I perhaps I know a little more now, but that wasn't the script I was in. I was in the Jewish script. I was in history. You don't maybe want to be someplace else, but I had inherited a sense of history.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:17:35,411 ]I had inherited a sense that we live lives that are consequential in chronological time. And so in chronological time tragedies, realizations, romantic absolutes like I think in the Jewish imagination Jacob and Rachel is a kind of absolute.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:18:03,771 ]When 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. In plural marriage, of course, there's these ugly rivalries between the wives, which eventually, tenth century led the rabbis to abolish polygamy.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:18:43,541 ]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 is a race, there is a not everybody gets everything, and there's no dodging that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:19:10,461 ]And you're against getting out of what you call the female predicament. Yeah. It's full of vulnerabilities, this erotic vulnerability, not just you can be beat up in the alley, but this erotic vulnerability. And you conclude that chapter with the following statement. The big question, here's the big question, the big question you say was how to endow our feminine existence with ineradicable value. And how to endow our values with feminine existence.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:19:46,961 ]Yeah

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:19:48,711 ] I saw things in tension. The philosophic and perhaps even religious traditions that educated young people, young women inherited, we graduated from college, did not put feminine, the romantic kind of feminine existence, in the roster with values.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:20:24,631 ]Values were either impersonal and neuter or masculine. And it seemed to me that one had some kind of quest dynamic inherent in the search for high purpose, high value, and the need that could not, the requirement that nobody could dodge honestly, to realize one's femininity.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:21:06,451 ]The culture at that time gave women a few years in which to accomplish the second, and of course eternity to accomplish the first. That seemed to me to be quite a predicament, and it seemed urgent therefore to find some way to merge eternal values and the very contingent, fragile, destructible value of femininity.

Narrator

[ 00:21:43,731 ]This is Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. What begins here as observation will soon become lived experience. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:22:09,291 ]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.