Philosophy, Seduction, and the Sorcerer’s Spell

Abigail Rosenthal’s Reckoning

NOTE: The following is an entry by Barry Cooper, PhD, FRSC. Some of you will recognize the name from the two COVID books Haultain published in the last couple of years. Cooper is one of Canada's best-known and prolific political philosophers. He is based in Alberta. So, it is a treat and a pleasure to include Cooper exclusives once a month for all our paid subscribers. This Cooper entry is available to all subscribers.

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Abigail L. Rosenthal’s Confessions of a Young Philosopher is a difficult book to review. I know the author. She and her husband and I have dined together a few times at political science conferences, and I know how affection (and disdain) can cloud one’s judgment. That’s one reason. The other is that it is also a difficult, in the sense of demanding, book to read. It is written retrospectively, as all memoirs must be, and it involves the early experiences of a naïve, open, sensitive young female student of philosophy. Later, she said she was interested primarily in the truth about life, not just the life of the mind or the exercise of mental faculties, philosophy in the conventional and academic sense. Always she has abjured the “rigid filter” of cynicism. Me? Not so much.

The book begins: “when I was a young girl, I wanted to be a great lover or a famous saint.” Did these two options appear antithetical? Is this a juvenile way of contrasting body and soul? Close to the end of her book, Abigail concluded “there is mind and there is body.” By then, she was no longer a young girl. The story of how she matured is tortured and often painful, even to read, let alone to experience. What made it so, still on page one, was young Abigail’s desire for authenticity, sincerity, self-awareness, which included being conscious of being a Jewish New Yorker with enough intelligence to win a prestigious Fulbright grant to study aesthetics in Paris. My guess is that the events about which she wrote took place during the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Let me say up front, there is some very beautiful writing in this book. For instance: “I still needed an Invisible Weaver to repair the jagged tear now stretching from edge to edge of my being, on the hard loom of the world.” And still no cynicism.

Abigail also wanted to discover her own complex story, which eventually would involve God. “Was I fearful? Did I anticipate tragedy, or great suffering at this moment of setting forth? No. I was filled with desire and thought I was ready for anything.” It turned out that she was ready for anything, but her anything did perhaps involve tragedy. It certainly involved suffering.

The first section, “Beginningwise,” began when the 21-year-old met Pheidias, which was the original spelling of the name of the ancient Greek sculptor and friend of Pericles. This Pheidias was a communist, owing to some unpleasant treatment by the Nazis of members of his family during the war. Soon enough, Abigail confided to a friend that she was in love with him and wished to have an affair with him. At the time, she was a virgin, though Pheidias expressed his doubts about that. He had no doubts, it seems to me, when he embarked on his predatory seduction of her. One revealing aspect of their relationship occurred after she returned to America. Pheidias promised to write but never did. A second: when Abigail later announced to Pheidias that, while she may no longer be a virgin (he had seen to that), she would at least remain chaste. He laughed at her. Her friend, Richard Wright, the African-American ex-pat writer, considered Pheidias a creep. So did I.

The second section, called “Analytic,” began with her analysis of “the impossible position of the Jews,” starting with her parents and their generous and understanding response to the Pheidias episode. This more or less comical introduction was followed by a more serious analysis of what it meant for God to have “chosen” the Jews and to have pursued them as a people and as individuals out of love. This action, she said, explained why the event of His choosing so enraged non-Jews. In this section on analytics, Abigail began to analyze her relationship with Pheidias. Central to her reflection was the anxiety of getting pregnant, which “was, quite simply, the end of everything in those days.” There was no return trip and hardly any prior access to contraception.

Around the same time as she met Pheidias she befriended another American, John Armstrong, and his girlfriend, Nancy Sendler. That summer, John and two of his friends embarked in a Deux Chevaux, a small Citroën, to tour Africa, driving south from Egypt. He and his two companions were murdered in southern Egypt, and Abigail was filled with remorse but also guilt for not having tried to talk him out of such a dangerous adventure.

After returning to New York, her friend Anna, with whom she had hitched to Greece, introduced her to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. She never joined but saw in Anna’s revolutionary romanticism as great a mistake as John Armstrong’s deadly African trip. Her analytic conclusion: “Anna had done the very best she could, by her lights. And so had John Armstrong. And so had I. And it was tragic, not absurd.”

She returned to her philosophical studies at Columbia and then at Penn State. By now, she was very much attuned to the difference between her (male) philosophy profs and her own desire to be a (female) philosopher. “They were defending their masculinity as they understood it, just as I hoped to defend my feminity as I understood it.” Anything not grounded in real concrete experience, which obviously included her feminity, she dismissed, using Hegel’s term, as “the abstract universal.” And her failed relationship with Pheidias, she said, still needed to be understood.

Part Three, “Another Paradigm,” began with her return to Europe, this time to England, for additional philosophical studies and to work on her dissertation. She announced at the start, “I no longer believe in God.” But since she had already noted that God pursued her out of love, her own change of heart was beside the point. This was just as well because the other “paradigm” she encountered was hair-raising.

She was introduced gradually to Suzanne, who called herself a Negro and a person who did not “need” philosophy. She had something better, which she called Gnostic Christianity. Suzanne declared with firmness, and oblivious of any self-contradiction, “I am a Gnostic Christian.” Abigail’s response to Suzanne’s increasingly odd remarks was initially quite commonsensical. The weight of the memories of Pheidias, of Anna in Cuba, and her doubts about philosophy gradually undermined her commonsense and she began to share Suzanne’s attitude in order, she said, “to recapture … the feminine viability I’d been losing, year after year.” Suzanne, Abigail claimed, offered “the skills of a sorcerer.” She would become her “apprentice” in order to learn “how not to be erased as a woman.” She thought she could use Suzanne’s “hidden knowledge” to restore her own life. Abagail called the experience “a conversion” and she began studying Suzanne’s Manual of Gnostic Christianity. Thus began a three-year descent into a life lived in an imaginary second reality.

At first, Abigail sensed only a change “that collided with my Jewish identity,” as well it might. She was also aware that Suzanne used her “as facilitator, sorcerer’s apprentice, and banker!” Abigail decided to take the “risk” of continuing to associate with Suzanne because she thought she did not have the resources to deal with her spiritual problems by herself. It turned out that by sticking with Suzanne, she encountered much more intractable spiritual problems before she was rescued.

They went to Portugal for an indeterminate time, with Abigail footing the bill and Suzanne (to me at least) growing more aggressive, manipulative, demanding, mendacious, and downright evil. At one point, I made the marginal note: “Suzanne is nuts.” Even Abigail, who was under her spell, wondered, “what is wrong with her?”

Whatever it was, Suzanne expanded her net of sorcerer’s apprentices to include Abigail’s father. This was a mistake because he immediately saw that his daughter “is in the hands of a dangerously insane person” and took steps to rescue her by way of the Consul in Lisbon and the Portuguese police.

Abigail’s parents fetched her from Lisbon and together they returned to New York. In the final section, “Aftermath,” she reflected on their love and understanding of what she had gone through. And God made another appearance: God did not want her to have an easy way out from Suzanne. “He wanted me to live through this experience so that I could learn from it and share what I learned with others.” Abigail learned that there was no alternative to reality and that no one could escape it. Hence, the image of God pursuing her out of love. Abigail called this experience “passionate history” and saw she had tried to escape it by way of “the formulaic-erotic, the utopian-political, the gnostic-delusive –all promising to deliver something more perfect than historical time.” But there isn’t anything more perfect into which one might escape. The second reality into which one imaginatively escapes is, she said, “pretend,” and the would-be escapee knows it. “There is nothing for civilized people of good will to do,” Abigail concluded, “except to be present to themselves and their circumstances and to the God who shares history with us.” By the end, Abigail’s memoir had become her account of a pilgrimage.