Desire, Dominion, and the Difference Between Men and Women | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 1.5

What does desire reveal about the difference between men and women?

In this episode, married philosophers Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin return to a striking passage from Confessions of a Young Philosopher: “My heavy head of hair bent under his dominion.”

The word dominion is deliberate. Abigail does not mean cruelty, degradation, or the loss of freedom. She means the peculiar power of eros: the experience of being enveloped and overcome within an embrace while remaining fully oneself.

The conversation moves from Abigail’s life in Paris to Plato, Rodin’s The Kiss, Adam and Eve, and the modern effort to make relations between men and women entirely symmetrical. Abigail argues that erotic life has its own form and its own meanings, asymmetrical in nature, which lovers do not invent but discover.

Has modern culture confused equality with sameness? Has it concealed the difference between domination and erotic dominion? And what is lost when sex is reduced to biology, recreation, or power?

In this intelligent and unusually candid discussion, Abigail and Jerry consider desire, sexual difference, and the forgotten choreography of eros.

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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

[ 00:00:15,727 ]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

[ 00:01:36,447 ]Married philosophers discuss confessions. Part one continued.

Narrator

[ 00:01:41,557 ]Married philosophers, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal, discuss her newest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. In this episode, the focus widens beyond the immediate experience to what it reveals about women's lives more broadly. How vulnerability, expectation, and silence shape what can be said publicly. And what must be managed privately. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:02:13,787 ]Pheidias  was what you might call an almost extreme example of the French modern taking over of the Tristan story so that it has its own self-enclosed absoluteness but put inside the modern framework, it's a biochemical origin. It's basically on the psychical plane, on the mental plane, on the plane of consciousness, a delusion. And like any delusion, it asks that you wake up from it.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:13,257 ]So, the two coexist and I'm I guess sort of against both. I'm flattered by the idealization component, but I don't want it framed by this reductionist theory which seems to be the latest modern version of the Tristan paradigm.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:47,067 ]And you say, “Our worldviews were colliding and clashing inconclusively. He gave me arguments for the strange things he said he believed in. The decisiveness of brute considerations.” Of course, that's part of kind of what sounds often like a Freudianism that that's just what's really at the bottom of everything. It's certainly part of Marxism.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:13,487 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:14,467 ]Economic substratum is what drives everything. The ideas and high culture are merely epiphenomena, you know, tossed off by the material dynamics. And you argue about those things a lot, and with no resolution. I know you comment somewhere, I didn't read it now, but that Plato talks about the arguments between the gods and the giants.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:41,347 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:42,327 ]That it's easier for the gods to be made to look foolish or to ridicule the gods. It's easier for the giants to ridicule the gods than the other way around.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:55,477 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:56,137 ]And you're kind of in that mode. Yours can sound like illusions as the worldly wise in an earlier just part of this discussion, the worldly wise said, oh, you're naive. You know, your innocence is an illusion. Your idealism, your romantic ideals are illusions.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:16,457 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:17,177 ]And I hear you keep saying those illusions are better and in some fundamental way truer than your reductionisms and materialisms and worldly-wise, you know, disillusionment.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:32,617 ]Yeah

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:33,977 ] It's like, there's a scene in Plato's Republic where a guy named Thrasymachus comes on the scene. They're trying to define justice and he sort of bangs on the table, as it were, and says, "Justice is nothing but the self-interest of whoever is the stronger party." There is no abstract or ideal entity called justice. It's the decorative name given in the battle, in the combat of life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:12,747 ]And Socrates says, if I had not seen this wolf before he saw me, I would have been turned to stone, alluding to a myth that if a wolf sees you first, you can get or maybe certain kind of wolf, you can get paralyzed, you can get turned to stone. And it's one of the features of the argument I had with Pheidias .

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:51,827 ]Unfortunately, unlike Socrates, I hadn't seen this wolf before he saw me. I was meeting him for the first time.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:03,937 ]And you couldn't have. Paris is new to you. This whole domain, old to him, new to you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:10,037 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:10,657 ]This is a wolf that's lived in Paris for a number of years and learned its arts, its erotic arts, and you're an American girl, you know, showing up and no chance- it saw you way before you saw it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:27,497 ]Oh, yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:29,557 ]He sort of knew me coming and going. I had no idea.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:35,857 ]Yeah

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:37,177 ]I didn't know him. And certainly not on this level.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:42,357 ]And you didn't see each other much after this. You were unresolved, you couldn't go with him, you couldn't go apart from him entirely. But you would see each other on the street sometime, but you're about to leave, I think, in the next thing I'm going to cite. I guess you arranged a last meeting or something. “Then I caught sight of Pheidias  running lightly down the milling Boulevard... He kissed me like quicksilver. And my heavy head of hair bent under his dominion.” Now, I don't know anyone who would dare write such a thing today. You know, they would get in trouble with whoever makes trouble if you say the wrong thing about women. Well, here you're using for a man the notion of dominion. And what did you mean by that? Obviously, he didn't quite have dominion. You're I can't live with you, I've got to leave, you know, and so on.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:51,017 ]So you got your wits about you and you're thinking at the highest level about this and taking it in, processing it, but nevertheless, it comes to you naturally to say that your heavy head of hair bent under his dominion.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:09,967 ]It's the, you know, it's the erotic eidos, the idea. There's a statue by, I guess, Rodin, The Kiss. The woman's not on top of the man. You know, they're embracing. It's very lyrical, it's very harmonious, but the man dominates the embrace and the woman receives it and, you know, line me up against the wall and shoot me but that experience of being enveloped and triumphed over, not sadistically, not masochistically, it's the sort of erotic, it's the triumph of eros. And the, you know, in the biblical story, Adam and Eve get expelled from the garden and a set of new constraints is expressed by God and he's going to have dominion over her, she's going to have a lot of trouble with childbirth, he's going to have to sweat to make a dollar or whatever they had then, and it's asymmetrical. People want symmetry.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:49,957 ]Utilitarians say greatest happiness for the greatest number, each person to count for one.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:59,237 ]Eros doesn't count that way. There's an asymmetry built into Eros, the human eros. In animal couples with the female, the male with the female, and she trots off, shakes herself, and you know, as you were, pair of felines or whoever you are. In a man-woman situation, that's not the case.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:32,397 ]And when these couples, these educated college kids do this to relax, oh no, sweetheart, it's not to relax. That's not…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:48,187 ]you're taking something for another purpose. You could take a canvas and some paints and just write Kilroy was here on them, but that's not what the canvas and the paints are calling for somebody to do. No, no, no. There's an inherent teleology. There's an eros in many things. A plant wants to find the sun.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:18,267 ]You know, I don't want to go on and sound like a poor poet, but there is a musician, a composer, this piece wants to be composed and I don't get a vote. I have to cooperate, the right note has to come over the previous note. A painter is listening for the right line, the right color. Lovers have to hear the choreography of the man-woman connection.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:54,907 ]and even in as unpromising a setting as Pheidias  and I had, there was still a recognizable choreography that had its own claims.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:14,507 ]Well, would this be, correct, you think, that the dynamics of erotic desire, you might say the male desires to do it with the woman, possess the woman, it's often said. The woman, as we talked earlier, the woman wants to be desired and you're so pleased when he sees you naked that there's just desire written all over him, transcendent desire written all over his face. You're not looking exactly to possess him, right?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:53,737 ]But that's what he's looking to do to you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:56,537 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:57,347 ]And in that particular kind of dance, I wonder if a word like dominion has its place. Not dominion in the sense of beating you up at night or any of that kind of stuff, insulting you, degrading you. But some other kind of erotic nuance, you might say.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:16,177 ]Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:16,757 ]It's a celebration of the sex difference, of the he and she character of human life. Human beings are not the same as other species. We have words, we have memory, that is fixed in words for return and review and reinterpretation.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:50,297 ]So erotic connection is fraught with meanings that we didn't invent. We recognize, we come to coincide with them. And I don't think human culture has, I don't know if it can, but our sort of unisex solution to the problem simply denies these mutual realities.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:29,277 ]Well, that doesn't solve it, you know, suppose you're tending a lawn and that's work. Well, you could pave it over with concrete, then you wouldn't have the work with the lawn, but you wouldn't have what you, you know, what you have concealed. So, I think our purported liberation is concealment. And I'm not trying to support some reactionary, you know, return to the bad news of...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:05,587 ] pre-feminist American or Western civilization, but I think there's this denuding of the erotic mysteries of life has robbed young men and women of important experiences that they have an inborn right to.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:39,147 ]Yeah. And for you, that fundamental stratum of reality is truer, I gather, than all of these, might say, theories that people produce.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:52,837 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:53,527 ]You know, it was a discovery. My friend Harper said about me later that I walked around the Left Bank, that that neighborhood, looking awed. I was awed. It was something I had perhaps guessed might be real, that I now knew was real.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:20,917 ]Yeah, yeah. You'd seen enough of the real thing in your relation with Pheidias that you knew the real thing was true, was real.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:31,447 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:32,217 ]Was realer than all this unisex, good sportsmanship and palsmanship and whatever we Americans thought was the truth about boys and girls. I thought, no, no, there's another truth.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:52,717 ]Well, wonderful sweetheart. It's so good for you to talk about all of this, both painful and illuminating because you left Paris a wiser. Think about quest for wisdom. Well, you have a lot of wisdom now, wisdom based on real life experience that you did not have when you first got off the boat in France.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:15,137 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:16,067 ]So that's what I was just...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:17,777 ]Sadder, wiser girl. I wanted Paris to teach me what it knew and I guess one could say I got what I wanted, though it was so much not unwanted, unwanted in the form it took, but you can't always, you know, choose your story. You can be chosen by it.

Narrator

[ 00:18:51,747 ]What becomes clear is that these experiences are not isolated, but part of a larger reality that is rarely spoken aloud. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:16,387 ]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.