Leaving Home, True Love, and the Search for Meaning | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Preface

What do you carry with you when you leave home for the first time?

In Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal revisit Abigail's memoir, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, chapter by chapter. 

Married for decades, they look back together on the experiences, relationships, ideas, and historical events that shaped the young woman Abigail once was, and the life she would eventually build.

In this opening episode, they begin with the book's preface and Abigail's departure for Paris on a Fulbright fellowship. As she reflects on the beliefs she carried with her into adulthood, the conversation explores true love, erotic desire, cynicism, faith, Jewish identity, and the determination to test ideas through lived experience rather than merely admire them from afar.

Along the way, Abigail recalls growing up in a household shaped by Holocaust memory, her parents' efforts to help refugee families escape Europe, her mother's role in exposing a suspected Nazi operative in New York during World War II, and an unforgettable encounter with Raphael Lemkin, the architect of the Genocide Convention.

Part memoir, part philosophical conversation, and part historical reflection, this episode introduces the themes that run throughout Confessions of a Young Philosopher: love and longing, intellectual ambition, faith and doubt, family history, moral responsibility, and the search for meaning in a complicated world.

Join us as we begin the journey through Confessions of a Young Philosopher and follow Abigail's story from Paris and first independence through love, loss, philosophy, friendship, desire, and the unexpected lessons of a life fully lived.

Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically.

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

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

[ 00:01:36,377 ]Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Preface. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Narrator

[ 00:01:49,487 ]In this episode, Abigail looks back on the beginning. Leaving home for Paris with a set of commitments about how she wanted to live, to be conscious of her choices, to test her beliefs and experience, and to remain open to what life might teach her. What emerges is not naivete, but a serious attempt to live deliberately, shaped by a belief in true love, a rejection of cynicism, and a sense that life unfolds within a larger, meaningful history. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:21,167 ]Oh, hi sweetheart. We're here to discuss your book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. And we're both philosophers, so that's a doubly intriguing title for me. And we notice the image is Rodin's The Thinker except in a female version.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:02:40,377 ]Yeah. He's a girl.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:42,297 ]is not just a mythic figure, but has the name Abigail. And so, we're going to learn about Abigail and her life and thought. I always tell you that when I read this book, which of course I've read various times at various stages of production, I find it a page-turner. Once I start, I have trouble ending. And so I thought, well, I will go through the book and come up with a bunch of questions.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:15,787 ]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. Maybe we'll come back and do other parts. We'll decide what to do after we do this. But the preface seemed to me as a philosopher very intriguing to raise many further questions and right at the beginning, you're a young woman leaving home for the first time on the way to Paris.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:47,227 ]You state several goals for your life at this stage. First you say, I wanted to be conscious.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:56,707 ]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?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:17,287 ]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 didn't know, I couldn't fathom where...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:57,087 ]their aphoristic sayings came from, and you know, whither they were tending. And I thought if I'm ever to be free, I'm reconstructing the psychology of that remark. If I'm ever to be free, I must have thought, ever to steer my own bark through the water.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:26,577 ]I must know for what I've done this and that and the other, with what in view, with what kind. 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.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:54,707 ]It seemed to me tied up with freedom, with self-command, with the possibility of learning the lessons contained in my future, contained in my days.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:12,597 ]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. And yet you needed to find your own location in the world. You couldn't just be a subsidiary to the very interesting parents you had. So I gather that's part of the context here.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:37,367 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:37,827 ]So, okay, what are... I want to be conscious of my purposes, as you say. And then you go on to say, on a different point, I take it: “It was a point of honor not to profess views if I was not prepared to put them to the test of living them.” And I find very few philosophers have done this. That's rather striking. I guess you'd say Socrates did that and paid the price of doing it. But, here you express it as a point of honor, not a general amorphous goal or something. What's behind that sense that, if you're going to take these views seriously or something like that, you need to try them out in life? Do they work?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:35,207 ]Again, I think it had to do, it seems to me a philosophical point of honor. If you say something, know what you mean by it. And how can you know what you mean by it if you haven't embodied it and acted on it, assuming that it has something to that what you think will have something to do with what you do. So, it seems part of the, you know, I'd been very influenced by Henry David Thoreau in my teen years, and he wanted to live a transparent life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:15,317 ]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. And that sense of simplify, simplify, get down to saying what you actually mean, not what sounds meaningful, but you couldn't translate it into perceptible action, perceptible ways of making a difference.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:57,757 ]Yeah, and I guess Henry David Thoreau sort of did that in Walden Pond. You know, he went, okay, I believe simplify, simplify, and the simplify meant getting close to nature, which is living right there and so he tried living that out and wrote a wonderful great little book about it, the Walden Pond. And you're doing something like that with your life. You say, okay, I'm going to live it out and I guess pay attention as I go, which is kind of the Thoreau model. And see what happens.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:33,257 ]Well, the next thing you say is I want something like I wanted to encounter new experiences unencumbered by rigid preconceptions. So you wanted to take it in what- not necessarily framed in advance?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:50,857 ]Yeah

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:52,117 ]Assuming, I suppose I must have assumed life has something to teach me that I don't yet know. Maybe all the grown-ups know, but I don't know. And so I don't have to approach the unknown with a grid of theories in front of my eyes. You know, what do I know? Not much. You know, I went to college, so so.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:28,457 ]And that's what all the grown-ups do. Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:32,687 ]Within these very heavy and articulated frames, you know, that have walls and ceilings and doors and door locks on the doors and their belief systems. And I know you always talk about childhood as if, early in life, you would look at those kinds of grown-ups and not be impressed.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:53,607 ]No.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:54,677 ]The grown-up for me was almost a pejorative expression, term. I thought they're encumbered and they would have ways of saying, "You'll see, you'll find out," and it carried a threat, as if right now you think you have wings and can fly, little girl, but you'll see.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:21,687 ]It was like a wicked stepmother, these grown-ups, you know, there's a curse on you and it's called growing up. And I didn't see and I didn't want to see what they were looking at.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:36,827 ]Yeah, they they almost want you to be world weary in advance of the experience that makes one world weary and may be a source of insight, but you need to live through it, I guess, is what you're saying, and live through it fresh.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:50,867 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:51,717 ]So what's your experience? Well, you then say, and I thought this was very arresting.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:56,687 ]”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 does that mean to you?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:12,727 ]Well, it seemed obvious. There were some examples of true love also in my childhood. My parents seemed to be examples. There was a couple or two in their circle who seemed to exemplify this thing. I'd read Tristan and Iseult in French class in college. It seemed as if even those books that were very absorbing in our teens, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Lady Chatterley's Lover, they seem to be about sex, but they carried a message that there's a high-pitched roof in life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:10,027 ]There's a climactic kind of desideratum that life points to without which you would go away unfulfilled. There seemed to be some kind of an intimation of fulfillment perhaps one senses it biologically from adolescence on, it seemed to me quite persuasive. Those who adopted some other way of life or purported calling had the look of a compensatory settlement. And you know, children don't miss that or young people don't miss that. Is this really you or are you compensating for something that didn't give you back to yourself? And so, as near as I could figure, though there seem to be strong claims made for sainthood. You know, maybe you should merge with God, you should touch the absolute.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:40,427 ]You should become something very special in God's vocational school. Maybe maybe maybe, but behind that, I wanted to know, was there some true love that didn't work out? You know what…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:58,237 ]How'd you get to God? Is that Plan B? So, I surmised behind what people said and didn't say that that would be Plan A for the people I had run across whether lived primitively as something they missed or in flourishingly as something they were living.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:32,037 ]And is that what it means, you know, you end that with they have to find true love if life was to be sincere. I guess the alternative you mentioned is otherwise things are like compensatory, they're plan B. You're trying to pretend that they're more ultimate than true love, but you kind of think they're not, you know.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:55,147 ]No, nobody who's got true love complains that, gee, I never made it to Saint... 

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:02,267 ]Whereas I I sort of figured those saints and candidates for sainthood that I read about or sometimes ran into, could have said, "I never made it to true love" or somehow we didn't connect in the right wavelength.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:25,177 ]Therefore, I decided to work on being a saint. It just seemed from all I could observe, you know, 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 you and from what I could infer and surmise, it seemed as if true love was for most people plan A.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:06,757 ]Yeah. Yeah. Well, related to that is a longer passage I'll read to you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:13,557 ] Starts with a reflection on cynicism. Because that's one route one can take in life, you know, to give up on X, Y, and Z, whatever your original aspirations were. And you say, “Cynicism was a rigid filter I declined to wear. It too was insincere, I thought. Cynics, I thought, sure, expressed disappointment. To me, it seemed more honest to honor one's original hope and make a second or third attempt to realize it. Better to remember how the first got thwarted and try to not to make the same mistakes again, that would be preferable to abandoning the aspiration.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:05,517 ]So, suppose they're hopeless loves, you know. And so, what's your advice? Well, this one didn't work out and then I thought another one would and that one didn't and now, you know, a third came along and I don't know how that's going to work out, but I think better to abandon this whole effort. You know, people come to that as a kind of practical or maybe worldly wise way of understanding life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:33,467 ]It just comes to me that the people who inhabited and peopled my parents' home were none of them cynics. And by the same token, it comes to me that the rather celebrated intellectuals and achieved public intellectuals that I would come across from time to time immediately failed to interest me because one of the ways they sported their education would tend to be to express their views of life that included, that had an overlay, a patina, of cynicism. They were worldly in what to me was an intensely boring way. Please, I don't want to be bothered with your worldliness. It's a patina, it's varnish. It's not you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:52,617 ]You couldn't be as interesting with your worldliness as you might have once been before you got to be that worldly. You know, your youth has been varnished and that's called worldliness, and it struck me as a human failure.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:16,087 ]They treat people like you with your attitude as naive. And like, oh, little girl, they might even see them patting you on the head, you know, get real or later you'll learn. The older cynic says that to the young romantic. Oh well, you will learn.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:35,257 ]Yeah, and I thought, no, you have to unlearn what you think you learned because it's spoiled you. You know, you're like a tomato or an orange that's been sitting out too long.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:55,907 ]I don't know if you want to say more about this. I didn't particularly have questions about it, but it is a crucial feature of you and your personal situation. You explain, I was a Jewish girl born and raised in Manhattan, now in Paris, away from home for the first time.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:21:19,337 ]Anyway, I don't know if there's more you need to say more about that but you do say in some context that it made you aware of, you might say, in the midst of the Holocaust, which was happening just when you were very, very young, that it made you aware of the, you might say the moral seriousness of history. You've got to take them seriously.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:21:49,727 ]Oh yeah, it would be a… if we're talking about how to understand the Abigail who sets forth on her life journey at the in the opening pages of this book, I could be deemed naive, but about the hovering presence of unspeakable horror at the outside of this visual screen of the world that I was looking at, I couldn't be unaware of that. We had my parents… my father had been in the rabbinate in his younger days.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:22:44,337 ]They brought ten families over, refugee families from Europe while you still could. They found sponsors, you had to find sponsors and I remember my mother repeating what she said to one or more of these sponsors who would assure the State Department that they would not be a public charge. These sponsors would pay for these people if they couldn't get work.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:19,797 ]Mother would say to some rich man, “I promise you, you will never see them.”

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:27,607 ]Don't worry, just sign on the dotted line, we'll pick up the pieces if need be. And these refugees were in our house.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:39,037 ]Some gave you your early dentistry, I gather.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:42,437 ]Hello. if they couldn't get an American license, they worked on me and it really hurt enough to scream, but you know, that's life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:56,577 ]The price.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:58,597 ]I mean they were very weird people, many of them. One of them was a communist, he used to leave leaflets in my mother's lingerie drawer, you know, in the bedroom. I don't know why he thought if she picks up the leaflets when she's reaching for a piece of lingerie, that's gonna strike her as revelatory. It certainly didn't. But, I was aware that people were coming from murder, you know, a surround of murder. I don't know if we want to know this story, but my mother captured… We lived on the edge of Yorkville, which is the German-American neighborhood.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:25:03,027 ]Of New York City, right?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:04,897 ]New York City, Manhattan.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:06,587 ]We lived on 86th and Park, and the superintendent takes care of an apartment house, and this superintendent, Mr. Z, would tell the tenants not to go down to the basement. He would carry suitcases that they owned or trunks down to the basement himself. That's where the storage of the building was located.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:35,397 ]And my mother, who was not naive, the daughter of a rabbi, paid attention to Mr. Z.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:51,967 ]And paid attention when Mr. Z was fixing the radiator one time and said, it will be very good when Hitler gets here. You know, an American-born person would just perhaps dismiss that as, well, that's ethnic pride or something, but my mother knew the difference between ethnic pride and a purposeful statement. So her ears went up. And the next clue was two middle-aged men with German accents, who rang a doorbell on a floor beneath ours, and it was opened by an equally middle-aged woman with hair that was not gray, tied behind her head in a bun, severe bun, and they said to her, Guten Morgen, grandmother. And my mother thought, she's not old enough to be their grandmother.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:27:02,327 ]And immediately went down to Park Avenue and 86th Street where their car was parked. In those days, there weren't a lot of cars on the street. And read the license number, memorized it, going back up the stairs to our place.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:27:26,067 ]Saying it again and again to herself carrying my sister and me on one arm and the other and wrote it down got on a bus and went to the FBI headquarters in midtown and they they listened, they paid attention as she did. They made a raid on Mr. Z's basement where the tenants were not supposed to go and found a shortwave radio and, you know, a lot of equipment by means of which he could reach the, I don't know, was it U-boat?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:07,827 ] U-boats off the coast monitoring when the fleet is moving in and out and so you know what the rumors are about where they're going and all of that kind of thing.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:28:18,727 ]Exactly. And they took Mr. Z off to what I think of as volleyball camp for the duration of the hostilities. I sometimes joke that maybe Mother saved New York, you know, but maybe it's not a joke. And she said that she saw him 1946 or 1947 after the war was over and he gave her, you know, he was back on the free side and he gave her a quote very sour look.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:00,627 ]That certainly spoiled the war for him, didn't it?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:03,267 ]Exactly Party's over, mister. Z You know.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:07,927 ]But you put a smile on our face.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:10,167 ]You don't get to destroy New York or whatever he was planning. He was planning something, you know, why did they need a contact on 86th and Park, anyway?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:21,657 ]What was hiding in the basement that they didn't want anybody to see?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:26,047 ]All the neat radios and stuff, you know? All means of contacting, I guess, these U-boats offshore. So, they helped to bring over Raphael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:45,467 ]Oh wow.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:46,587 ]And when I met Lemkin, he came to my high school to talk about genocide as mother said he was a Jew with one idea.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:56,237 ]Okay, but it was a big one.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:59,087 ]Yeah. And I walked up to him after the talk and I said, I'm the daughter of Rachelle Rosenthal, and he kissed me. So, I, you know, with the stamp of Lemkin's kiss and the memory of Mr. Z's excursions in the basement, I was not born yesterday with regard to the seriousness of real life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:30:29,737 ]And I remember feeling in my childhood that my parents are naive to think we will win the war. We might lose it. I don't know why I thought that, but

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:30:51,287 ]Well, you were right, any war could be either won or lost. And they were assuming. It's an assumption that makes it easier to bear each day, to assume we're going to come out on top, whoever the we is in one of these struggles, a war or some other struggle. And you as this child without heavy preconceptions that yikes, we could lose.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:31:16,747 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:31:17,467 ]And then that guy saying it's all going to be different when Hitler gets here, you would find out; what it's going to be like when Hitler gets here?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:31:27,047 ]So I understood life as the English poet says, life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:31:38,427 ]Life was real and earnest. I wasn't proceeding on my little trajectory to Paris, France with the idea of, you know, maybe I'll have a romance, maybe I'll see the Eiffel Tower. You know, I I had a feeling this is closer to where conflicts that have changed history occur and when I wanted to know the real Paris, which all of us Fulbright grantees wanted to know, we didn't want to stay on the touristic surface. We, you know, you go to a place, you want to make contact with the essence of the place. You don't want it to pass you by and you don't want to pass it by. This is your youth. This is something of the greatest consequence. Your youth, something that will mark the future.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:32:42,917 ]So I had all that and it included, I'm sure, a sense that very much hangs on changes in history.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:32:58,827 ]And your mother really gave the demonstration of the fact that an individual can make a big, big difference.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:33:08,987 ]You don't know in advance because history is too big and complicated, but anyone who reads history knows that occasionally someone just puts their finger in the dike at the right moment and saves the day. And there are multiple examples of that or they do the opposite and drop the ball and disaster comes. Just the attack on Pearl Harbor. Messages either not getting through, some ignored, you know, don't call me again, that kind of thing. And then you have the Pearl Harbor disaster, the beginning of World War, you know, war in the Pacific and incredible things happen either way.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:33:49,917 ]Yes. Yes, exactly. So that my desire to live unencumbered by premature cynicism or premature know-it-allism, which is similar, was not a concomitant of youthful illusions. I had a sense that what one… the steps you take in life are potentially highly consequential and life itself is full of consequences.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:34:30,777 ]So in that way you were not at all naive.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:34:34,777 ]No.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:34:35,797 ]Just believed in seeking your passion or something like that, finding out, living sincerely what you desire and you believe.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:34:45,007 ]Well, there's another quote that addresses some of the things we've just been talking about. You say, “I did feel obligated as a Jewish girl who was not stupid to situate my life on the larger map of human striving. In a world that was wide, not narrow. I wanted to know where I was, and not just in the realm of personal options. I sought to get my bearings and location in human history itself. I just wanted to know how to find me in the bigger story.” And that's always struck me because it never occurred to me myself in life to try to find my place in history. You know, where am I? There's a big map.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:35:39,067 ]I mean I would have answered it. I'm twenty-first century American. You know, that would have been about it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:35:46,417 ]Middle class or whatever. But you're asking somehow a deeper question than are you a 21st century American? You want to find me and that word is again emphasized in the text. Wanted to find me in the larger bigger story.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:36:06,707 ]I can't quite, I guess you can't quite catapult yourself back into the body and the mind that you had when you were twenty-one.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:36:21,297 ]And so I can only tell you what comes to mind now, but I believe it's accurate as a memory. And it's a funny thing, what comes to mind now is the Jewish picture, that the people I knew, lineal descendants of the patriarchs. So the span of time which for me represented stood in for human time, which is really hundreds of thousands of years, was about three thousand years. And the people I knew seemed to be silhouetted or given more emphatic contours by their relation, which wasn't a clear one in my own mind, their relation to the biblical prototypes. My grandfather with his white beard could have been any patriarch.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:37:48,447 ]My mother, her name was Rachelle, seemed to me a good stand-in for the biblical prototype.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:38:04,857 ] I don't know whether this is typical of children or typical of Jewish children it's you know an anthropologist could go digging but in my imagination the people of now had a connection to these prototypes and when I meant history I didn't mean merely chronology I meant meaningful history history with consequential personalities who carried some of the freight of the past and some by means of which they supported legitimate projects that touched the future. That human beings stood between a meaningful consequential past and a meaningful consequential future and what they did had to be in line with that lineage of meaningfulness, that lineage of significance.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:39:29,457 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:39:30,417 ]And that's sounds like the kind of history lived out precisely the way you are trying to live life, in a way that's sincere and where you live your ideas. You don't just parade them as ornaments, but you live them. And it sounds like that kind of history has that character, that it's what you call meaningful. And meaningful in the sense that we call life meaningful. You know, not meaningful in the sense I can decipher it, but in that richer sense in which we said, ah,

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:40:08,897 ]Thoreau, since we're talking about him, had a very meaningful life. You know, didn't just write well, but had a very meaningful life. And so did Lincoln and various other people one comes to mind. And I've written about Joan of Arc and so on. You know, there are all these people, who do populate history. And it makes it meaningful.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:40:33,767 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:40:35,467 ]I didn't and I don't recall thinking I need to be one of those great ones.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:40:44,027 ]Meaningful for me did not mean famous, did not mean grabbing a headline. It meant getting aligned with a consequential life purpose that was inherently, intrinsically, naturally one's own. That it was there to be found. You didn't make it up. People got into theatricality, you know, habits of being quotes interesting in an eccentric and artificial way. That struck me as definitely Plan B or Plan C.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:41:46,617 ]It's not a pose, it's not an artistic stance or something, a theatrical stance.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:41:53,167 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:41:53,717 ]It's not even as I follow you, trying to, as young people often say, make a difference, but that's a sort of external standard. You know, I could go do something, maybe march on something against something that it's good to be against and make a difference. Well, those may be very good things to do, but that's not quite, that's a little too external and not closely related to, well, what are your deepest desires, which is the way you have talked earlier in this preface. You know, what is it you really desire and you need to be sincere about that. You think people desire true love basically.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:42:33,957 ]And they need to be sincere about that, which means try to live that out.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:42:39,547 ]There were and of course in the biblical archetype life stories, each one, each one is a man, he has to find the right woman to go forward with his God project, his let's start something here that puts God on the on terra firma on the earth, in the historical temporal place where we all have to live.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:43:18,527 ]Let's get that down here. And none of them are robbed of their heart's desires. They're don't… they're not unlucky in love. They're lucky in love. So, I kind of think I put it together. I'm not good at chemistry, but I think I put the formula together.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:43:46,487 ]Oh, I see. They're carrying forward God's plan, and it seems to require the right woman, that they be there as a couple, that they be happy erotically, naturally, on the plane of real life, and not just instead of real life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:44:12,307 ]So in these cases at least, and maybe you think more broadly about this, it's true, loving the person you love is not in competition with God's plan. It's not as though your true love and God are rivals or at cross purposes with one another. Your view seems to be more like the opposite of that.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:44:38,677 ]Yeah, and that, you know, with all due deference to the truths in the New Testament, Jesus seems to represent a more ascetic vocation. Leave your father and mother, leave your earthly obligations, you have a higher calling, follow me and some biblical critics who pondered that suggest that there was a general expectation that Jesus shared that the world was about to end and therefore normal family life should be suspended because something was imminent that would trump all that. But since I wasn't raised in that New Testament, climate of opinion, my prototypes were in the Hebrew scripture and they did not support an otherworldly avenue life plan. And all that plus personal watching the grown-ups led me to think that finding true love had to be plan A, otherwise you were compensating for the loss of true love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:25,977 ]Yeah Well, you in the preface you raised the question, did I think there was a God?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:34,297 ]Certainly, I was no atheist. For me, God was at least, and you capitalized them, Witness and Backup. Witness and Backup. For a hopeful approach to experience that allowed one to look at 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 you want to look at them as having more ethereal meanings than are evident.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:47:10,987 ]But you seem to say you want God as a witness to what? To approach a hopeful approach to experience that nevertheless looks at things as they are.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:47:23,977 ]As we go back over the preface, it's certain things have come to the foreground for me that I hadn't quite focused on before. And there seems to be a lot of God relation.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:47:46,847 ]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, you know. God seems to have a bias for truthfulness and that 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 read some book by about or by some mystic and I try to crack myself up to have a wonderful time with God. It would not happen.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:48:52,287 ]So I would give it up. All right, nice try. But that wasn't perhaps the most serious motivating engine in my life. It was more, 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.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:49:29,157 ]You don't want to repress them, suppress them, call them something else. Your romantic ambitions, erotic ambitions on a higher plane. And you don't want to be out of alignment with regard to the God who sees you. So, that means you don't want to be in bad faith. You don't want to pretend to be something that you ain't.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:49:59,477 ]God is going to know you're pretending.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:50:01,807 ]God is not fooled. Everybody else could be fooled.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:50:06,213 ]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, they're humble creatures in life who are simply not fooled by grown-up pretenses, and God seems to be in that number.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:50:31,353 ]Well, interesting because this is the only place I believe God is mentioned explicitly in the preface.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:50:39,923 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:50:40,573 ]And God rarely comes up in the book. Maybe His witness is occasionally mentioned. But one of the things that's striking me now as we talk about it is God is here, you might say, slightly offstage, you're talking about people being sincere in their desires.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:51:03,113 ]Pursuing those living them out looking for true love, being honest to that if it doesn't work and so on. And God's word, God is not issuing commands, directives, establishing norms, you know, here are the ten commandments, you've all got to jump to the ten commandments or other things like that. Or is not a big actor. So, things may be going wrong but I'll just pray and God will make it, you know,

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:51:33,033 ]Bring me a miracle and make everything all right though you've written about that topic elsewhere but the crucial roles of God then I think if God is referred to later it's probably with 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 ike Santa will know if I've been naughty or nice it's not that kind of of scrutiny it's just I want to live a life that I'm not ashamed for God to see or that, you know, that honor is the vertical dimension or the ideal dimension in life and the ideal dimension in life, the way you talk about it, sweetheart, is contained right within life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:52:19,653 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:20,513 ]You can trust your desire system, you might say, even though certainly in the course of your book, it's mainly a book not about God or such, but about pursuing desires.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:52:33,683 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:34,733 ]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, is by discovering what doesn't work.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:52:48,643 ]Yeah, it seems I was very concerned not to be a phony.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:54,863 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:52:55,913 ]And at the same and not to be one of the species of phoniness 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. You know, if you've had any, they squall when they're not happy.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:53:32,163 ]So, I did not want to be brave in the sense that the grown-up world commends. Adulthood consists in grinning and bearing it, putting a good face on a bad hand of cards. No, a bad hand of cards is not something to put a good face on. Now, I mean you don't want to be socially a problem person, but you know, always pouting and and and complaining.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:54:07,073 ]That's not what I'm talking about, but you don't want to pretend it's okay when it's not.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:15,393 ]Well, I was then struck, you know, there are all these complications in life and of course you're going to encounter them. In the course of the book, the preface is especially the way I'm abstracting these points. Those are rather abstract points about life that we see exemplified in 3D and with many more downsides, problems, pitfalls, and what, you know, and on and on in the book itself as you live life because living your ideas, you can say that, "Oh, you want to be sincere, you want to live your ideas." Well, that's easy to say, right? It could be in a fortune cookie, you know, but, live your ideas. But to actually live them, isn't that easy and it has pitfalls, pitfalls, and pitfalls because there are a limited number of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas. Something like that is what you go through.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:55:19,193 ]Yeah, and you make your way through the human surround, the human scene in which unless you're, you know, winning every contest that you enter, and I sure wasn't, you're not well understood. You know, people kind of avert their eyes out of self-protection out and in order to keep their own system life system going and so you find yourself much more alone than you ever set out to be. You didn't even take for... didn't even ask yourself, will I be alone? 

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:56:08,893 ]And 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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:39,073 ]And therefore, I mean, 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. Oh, what an adventure. And you say, was I fearful? No.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:57,843 ]Ha ha ha. No.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:59,023 ]”I was filled with desire and thought 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, and I doubt that you regret that cheerful launching of yourself into the world via Paris, in the city of Paris and so on.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:57:24,973 ]No, it was very sincere comrades, you know, fellow Fulbrights, people I jumped with in that year. Many of them were somewhat cynical, somewhat wary, armored defense.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:57:46,053 ]They're all young, right? Essentially students, so advanced students, graduate students or something. And a bunch of them headed to Paris for this year's fellowship, right? And so they're all comparing notes with each other.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:58:00,563 ]That's right.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:58:01,623 ]in this new scene, exciting scene of Paris.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:58:05,593 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:58:06,483 ]Yeah

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:58:07,553 ]Yeah, and I might have been as open and wide-eyed as any of us got to be.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:58:19,193 ]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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:58:49,903 ]And, it's quite a story when you get to the book.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:58:58,173 ]It's another story.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:58:59,263 ]What struck me as hard as anything in the whole book is the story of John Armstrong.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:59:04,343 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:05,343 ]But this openness which you still have, sweetheart when we fell in love, your colleagues warned you against it. Because they're worldly wise.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:59:20,393 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:21,243 ]But you close yourself off to a lot if you're just worldly wise, you know. If, oh, don't go there, you can't go there. This won't work, that won't work

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:31,013 ]Well, and your attitude that you expressed throughout just this preface already is, well, let's find out.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:59:39,053 ]Yeah I'm not a philosoph for nothing. I'm a philosopher. I want to know the truth as I encounter it. I don'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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:00:04,533 ]And Confessions of a Young Philosopher is the record of that search for truth in your own life.

Narrator

[ 01:00:15,753 ]What follows is the attempt to live those commitments out, not in theory, but in experience, as we move to part one of Confessions of a Young Philosopher. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 01:00:41,703 ]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.