After Innocence: Love, Violation, and the Choice to Continue | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 1.3

In Part 1.3 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their conversation on Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

After her innocence has been taken through seduction and manipulation, Abigail confronts a more difficult truth: beneath the violation, there may also have been something like love. Looking back on her first romantic relationship, she reflects on the authority of intuition, the pity that can arise from love, and the desire to repair an experience that cannot be undone.

Jerry and Abigail examine the mixture of manipulation and romantic idealization that shaped the relationship, including the young man’s vision of Abigail as Dante’s Beatrice and an embodiment of the eternal feminine. Yet the episode moves beyond the question of whether he loved her. It asks what happens when first love, injury, innocence, and philosophical longing become impossible to separate.

At the riverbank, believing herself ruined and without a future, Abigail considers whether her life has ended along with her innocence. Philosophy offers another possibility: to continue the argument, live through the unanswered questions, and pursue the unfinished love of wisdom.

The conversation ultimately turns toward a question Abigail would later ask two women considering suicide: What did you originally want before disappointment made life seem hopeless?

After innocence, what remains is not a simple answer, but the unfinished work of understanding love, injury, and the life one had originally hoped to live.

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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 Martin

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

[ 00:00:01,603 ] Married philosophers discuss confessions. Part one continued.  Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher.  In this episode, the conversation turns to how Abigail understood a violating experience afterward Jerry raises the possibility that it wasn't only manipulation, but something like love. Looking back decades later, Abigail describes how that made what happened harder to make sense of, not easier. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:00:38,573 ] Innocence has been taken away.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:00:42,083 ] Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:00:42,793 ] In this very rough, rather crude, but manipulative way.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:00:48,253 ] Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:00:49,123 ] But there seems to be something more going on. When I read it with my jaundiced male eyes, I think, oh, what an operator.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:00:59,803 ] But you add, “Besides it had not been just a phase of seduction. It had been such a phase superimposed on something else, I felt. Something like love.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:01:23,583 ] Something like love. “(Perhaps all seduction has “something like love” behind it. I couldn't say.) I had no idea what to do. It seemed to me that the love fragment between us should be pursued–backward on the timeline to where it had veered away from us–or forward in time to where we could recapture it.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:01:55,773 ] So that had an authority, you might say, for you, that element of love, subterranean as it was, and yet I think you're feeling nevertheless very discernible. You know, as beneath all this manipulative stuff, obscured by it, obscured by the crudity, but even people with crude worldviews and crude manners and methods can actually be in love.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:02:28,083 ] Yes, that’s the… you know, people can read this in a politically correct fashion and just say, "what a rat," but the problem was my ruination, my defloration, all that he was building in the way of a strategic battle plan was his as well. I knew that he was in love, the way you know those things.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:03:03,623 ] I wouldn't be prepared to write a treatise on how you know those things, but you do, you know. An animal, a dog can tell, hey, that's a bad guy. A horse can tell, that person can ride me. That other person shouldn't even think about it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:03:27,403 ] So these certainties exist on the intuitive level and argument comes in later to try to explain the certainties and people have psychoanalytic theories and which sort of dispose of and deprecate and and deny such feelings and say they're delusive and and compensatory and blah blah blah blah and how's your life lady? Uh, I don't want to hear about the deficiencies of mine when yours are printed all over you. Uh, so, no, you have to take these things seriously. If you're painting a flower, the flower is new. You can't say, oh, here's a stencil for a flower and put it on top of the real flower. You have to look at it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:04:34,003 ] So I knew he hadn't been just ruined, in a way my initiation. He'd never been in love, so far as he told me and I believed that. And he'd ruined his own. So I was sorry.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:04:55,783 ] And the pity came, I think, from the love. I sort of wanted to redo the whole script and get it right this time. You can't rewrite the past. You can't make the first loss of innocence come back again and do that right. It can't be redone. There are things in life like that. A lot of things can't be redone. They can be forgotten, they can be outgrown. You can't redo the beginning.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:05:36,103 ] And so but I didn't quite know that yet. I was inexperienced erotically on many levels. I wondered, you know, you have a responsibility to first love. Can't you do something to make it okay? Can't you repair what's been broken? What do you do, just walk away saying, nobody treats me like that?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:14,823 ] I salute the woman who can do that, you know, more power to you, babe. But I, you know, I was interested in... there are people who paint in oils and they don't keep their colors clean. They smush them together thinking that's modern, that's uninhibited, that's really getting in there. No, you want to paint, you want each color to be distinct.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:45,353] And somehow they'd been smushed together, and that's not how you paint. So I was concerned, get the original colors back, or and I didn't know, perhaps it was an open question, is that still possible? Maybe he didn't know either. He was distracted by his triumph and distracted from his catastrophic failure.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:29,063 ] Yeah, it's very striking in the what then the next pages he continues courting you, if you might put a nice term on it. The seduction continues. And it has this mix of the materialism, the reductionism, the crude elements, the manipulation, but intermixed also perhaps manipulatively, was rhapsodic language. You're the ideal feminine. You know, you're like Dante's Beatrice. Who's a Beatrice? Just the girl he's in love with who leads him then through Heaven in the Divine Comedy.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:08:12,103 ] In Hell, Heaven, yes. The eternal feminine leads one above.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:16,763 ] Yes, the eternal feminine. You're the eternal embodiment, the present version of the eternal feminine. And he does that just eloquently. And by your discernment also with an element of truth that was part of the situation. He was manipulative and had these crude aspects and a worldview that justified them. And yet he had a kind of romantic draw.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:08:44,373 ] Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:45,053 ] Of true love underneath it, a fragment. So he wasn't a person you could ever marry because he's just not suitable in any respect for a life together, and yet there's this phenomenon of love as part of it. And so you do end up going to bed with him, going all the way as they say, at which point, by the ethos of the time and by your own self-understanding as it were, you're kind of ruined. You have no future.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:18,493 ] You can't marry him now by the norms of the time unless you cover it up in some way. You're damaged goods as you put it a moment ago; you can't do anything and at that point. You go down by the riverbank and consider doing what the women in similar situations in Russian novels do, you tell us, and you say, you ponder this question: Should I just throw myself in and escape it all and become at one with the water? You know, or something like that. And you then went, well, where am I then? And my, I haven't lived it out to its end. But you're pondering this.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:42,393 ] ]Just give it all up and end your life here and you reason about it because you're always also a woman but also a philosopher. And here's your reasoning. “If my innocence and life were the same, then in some sense both were ended, and I should opt for the river. If the long horizontal night of embraces had anything to add, its claims were still unmet, and I should choose to know them. If philosophy had anything to teach me, it had not done that yet, and I should go on with the argument, for the sake of the unfinished love of wisdom.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:03,023 ] So, you've got to live out the love. It sounds like you're saying. You have to live out the romantic love to see what is there and to come to understand it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:13,333 ] Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:14,113 ] But this is also part of the philosophical pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom isn't off somewhere else, the way you talk about these things. It's found in living out and thinking the best you can about these sort of moments. So these, in this case, what seems like an impossible thing, you can't live with him, can't live without him, as they say.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:39,5939] Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:40,263 ] There you are with an element of love that you have not yet fully explored and you haven't certainly not yet fully understood something like that.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:53,503 ] Yes indeed. Yes indeed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:55,463 ] And why was that important to you? I mean, a lot of people would say, okay, when some lose, some go on.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:12:01,293 ] How about win all, lose all. And have to go on. No, no, no. Those worldly people have nothing in common with me. They're on plan D. You know, no, no, no, no, no. You have to go back to the beginning to before you were disillusioned. Where were you headed? And it wasn't clear to me that we couldn't be repaired. It wasn't clear to me that there were so many unanswered questions. Philosophy has a dynamic to it, a magnetism.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:12:58,923 ] It pulls you, as Plato knew, in the direction of its own kind of fulfillment, up the ladder of dialectical comprehension, one rung atop the one below, and so on. And I hadn't been able to climb very high indeed, you know, I was on rung one and a half. I had wanted to understand the French, the Tristan myth, the meaning of my first love.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:13:49,713 ] There were many things that I wanted to understand in the course of a larger search for understanding, and now they threatened to pull me down, this failure of expectations, this loss of social and other supports, you know, intimate self-containedness.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:14:20,483 ] This trespas against the vulnerabilities of my first youth that had interrupted a quest for understanding but it had not supplied the understanding, it had not answered the questions, it had obscured them in a way, distracted me. What did I originally want? It's like somebody beginning to make a speech or write a poem and declaim it, and then getting very distracted, perhaps by something of mixed value, partly wonderful, partly hopeless. And where was I? What was I saying when I got interrupted? So I was aware of something not finished. Perhaps in since then in my adult life I've talked two people out of committing suicide, two women.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:15:20,033 ] And in both cases, I wasn't thinking it through as a technique, but what I did was ask, what did you originally want that has been so disappointed that you now think death is the only solution? Are you sure that you know all about why it was disappointed? What in you made you available for such a disappointment? Have you cased the whole situation? Do you know that it's hopeless?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:15:58,493 ] Or are you rushing to judgment about your own career in and through your time. So, that's what came to me perhaps as a philosoph, you know, it wasn't that I was scared of the water, it was that I was scared perhaps I was dropping out of the class before I'd completed the assignments that belonged to that course of study.

Narrator

[ 00:17:49,446 ]This is Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. What remains is not a simple answer, but the question of how to understand something that cannot be undone. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

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.