Masculine Aggression

“And societies are always at stake just because men enjoy killing one another. And you’re a pessimist because reason seems helpless against the irrationality rooted in men’s instinctual aggression.”

“Located in what Freud calls the id, which brings up another important consideration. The id, the instincts, and masculine aggression are part of humanity’s DNA. That means the irrational is inherent to humanity. However, reason isn’t. Reason is an intellectual skill that emerged with language, which enabled humans to think about ideas that are embedded in language. Early humans probably had a rudimentary language that enabled social interaction but not complex ratiocination.”

“So we're basically animals that learned to think.”

“Yes. Did you ever watch the movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”

“I did. I even read the story. So I see what you mean. The primitive man Hyde is the beast inherent in masculine DNA, whereas the rational man Jekyll is the product of civilization. So the story is telling us that the civilized man can revert back to his primitive self because its exists in his DNA, whereas reason is a superficial acquisition.”

“Very good. I believe that’s the heart of the problem. The beast is inherent in men. Reason lacks the ability defeat irrationality, at best it’s barely able to control it, which is demonstrated in the movie. However, not all forms of irrationality are undesirable. Love can be reckless, but without it life wouldn’t be worth living. Besides, transforming humans into robots—which ideologies do—destroys their humanity. A balance is needed but difficult to achieve.”

“In a French lit course I read Emile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine. Our discussion brings the story to mind. Jacques Lantier the protagonist often desires to murder women. His desire to murder is considered an inherited form of madness. The novel ends with Lantier driving a train carrying troops towards the front to fight in a war. The ending would indicate that the desire to kill is not a family trait but gender trait in men. What you call masculine aggression.”

“That’s a terrific analysis. I read the book in English, of course. Zola is considered the father of literary naturalism which examines humanity’s darker side, greatly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

“Which proved that human are animals, not divine beings.”

“Exactly. Though murders occur in the story, most are crimes of passion, Lantier controls his desire to kill. I believe that is an important insight given reason and passion are within him in constant conflict. I’m not sure why he refrains from killing. Kant may be able to help us here. Perhaps Lantier believes it’s his rational duty not to kill in spite of his impulses. That it would be irrational to do so. It would be like driving a train off its tracks, a train, interestingly enough that he loves. So in him we see reason controlling masculine aggression. He calls the train he drives La Lison, and perhaps he respects the rational order of the machine. I don’t know. You probably recall the snow storm the train gets caught in. Clearly storm represent the forces of nature including human passion. Lantier controls the train and will not with the help of the train allow the storm to defeat him. Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for from men.”

“At the end of the story the woman Philomène is beaten by her brother and Lantier wants to go to her aid. But his fireman, Pecqueux, holds him back, saying ‘Ah! the slut! if he could only beat her to death! So there’s lots of masculine aggression—especially toward women. And on a train filled with soldiers heading for war, Lantier and Pecqueux fight one another like beasts, both falling off the train to be decapitated by its wheels, resulting in the train no longer having a driver.”

“I remember the ending perfectly,” said the old seaman. “The soldiers sang patriotic songs as the train disappeared and ‘rolled on and on in the obscure night, going none knew where—yonder. What mattered the victims the engine crushed on the road! Was it not advancing towards the future in spite of all, heedless of the blood that might be spilt?’”

“And the soldiers would die in a train crash or in the war. From what you have told me, the runaway train expresses masculine aggression unrestrained heading into the future where it would create two world wars and endless others. I understand much better the reason for your pessimism.”

“It seems that masculine aggression is as durable and natural as gravity. Thus, as with gravity we have to learn to live with it by avoiding its negative influences and utilizing its benefits, of which gravity has many.”

“I don’t see the benefits of masculine aggression.”

“Freud would say that masculine aggression needs to be channeled into useful and acceptable activities. In his ingenious light experiment Isaac Newton directed white light into a prism that divided it into a beautiful rainbow of colored light. He proved that white light is made up of a variety of colored light. Now think of masculine aggression, better yet, masculine energy that Freud called libido as being similar to white light in that he can be expressed in various actions or ways of behaving. Freud called the process sublimation.”

“I learned about Newton’s experiment with light in high school science. The experiment shows that other forms of light are contained in white light, but both are light. But sublimation doesn’t produce different forms of masculine energy but different actions. That’s not the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t. I’m using Newton’s experiment as a metaphor in the sense that sublimation, like a prism, channels masculine energy into different socially acceptable behavior. Perhaps aggression is only one expression of masculine energy, but a dominate one because the instinct that directs it is primordially powerful.”

“You mean it was the original expression of masculine energy. That makes sense if early humans living in a hostile world had to rely primarily on male aggression to survive.”

“I think that’s it. Though we’re just speculating.”

“Still, the colored light is inherent in white light and is revealed when white light passes through a prism like sunlight passing through drops of rain to produce a rainbow. How does sublimation transform masculine energy into acceptable forms of behavior? What’s the prism?”

“My guess is the prism is very complex. It includes our perceptions of the world, our emotions and ideas, society and culture. In a sense, these influences determine how men and women channel their energy. In humanity’s primordial past, options must have been few. But as you pointed out with the Lascaux wall paintings, about seventeen thousand years ago, some men chose to channel their energy into artistic creation. Men can be aggressive in ways that are creative rather than destructive. As such masculine aggression is expressed as ambition, enterprise, determination, enthusiasm, commitment, dedication and so on. As society evolved socially, materially, and culturally more options became available for men to channel their energy. Such as art, philosophy, science, athletics, religion, politics, and other forms of work, actually they became endless, and of course there were always the primordial roles within the family. All served as potentialities for self-realization—guided by the intellect and emotions.”

“You know that it’s believed that women artists along with men contributed to the Lascaux paintings. I think that’s really cool, men and women working together in that way.”

“It is. And that’s not surprising. Among the ancient Native Americans I believe the majority of artists were women. They crafted blankets, baskets, jewelry and pottery. Women even made and maintained tipis. In the modern era women are often considered the weaker sex, pretty delicate creatures that should be kept at home, but historically that was never their role.”

“Because the modern economy separated men from women. Husbands worked in factories or offices and wives remained at the home with the children, getting out only to go shopping.”

“You’re right. Farming and hunting-gathering kept the family together. Both men and women worked together as equals. And the idea of shopping is interesting. In those early societies people couldn’t buy what they needed. They had to make what they needed.”

“Let’s return to the topic of masculine energy since to me it represents the biggest threat to humanity as the primary source of aggression and violence. With so many marvelous ways for directing masculine energy, why does masculine aggression continue to appeal to so many men?”

“I suppose it’s because masculine aggression is primordial, existing in the very DNA of men. Many of the other options for self-realization are adopted or chosen from society and culture. And in that sense they are artificial.”

“The beast in men is organic.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So all of them can be overruled by aggression like when the medical doctor Jekyll is taken over by the beast man that dwells within him. So what is he answer?”

“Obviously, humanity hasn’t found an answer. Religion, ethics, and psychology have offered many options for dealing with the problem of masculine aggression but have not yet found a successful solution. Buddha principle of living in a way that avoids causing unnecessary suffering and Kant’s principle of autonomy are simple, profound, and workable solutions, but they are the product of the intellect, which is no match against the instincts of the beast, as we have already discussed.”

“Maybe the problem is that masculine aggression is simply there, inherent. All the other possibilities of self-realization require some effort such as requiring using the intellect and acquiring the skills that make them possible. No skill or intellect is needed to be a brute. I saw that much in the fight at Denny’s. And in the story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A lot of energy has to be directed in the hard work needed to become a doctor. No work is required to be a beast man. Men by the thousands joyfully follow to the their deaths and the deaths of others dictators who love war and its destruction. It seems so automatic like lemmings running off a cliff.”

“Primordial is perhaps the key word. As I said before, masculine aggression seems as durable and natural as gravity.”

“It’s weird that men refuse to do what could be easily done to end aggression and wars that could destroy humanity.”

“Not to men who enjoy behaving like lemmings. Fortunately, most men don’t enjoy behaving like lemmings, automatic like as you call it.”

“What is the difference between those two groups of men?”

“Masculine aggression’s greatest threat to humanity is war, and there will be no solution as long as cultures glorify war, and most do.”

“Cultures make war acceptable?”

“Most do. Like the belief in God, the glorification of war is embedded in the culture, and the most aggressive cultures are the product of myths, religions, and ideologies created by men.”

“And men project their aggression into those belief systems.”

“Yes.”

“And what about the other group of men, the good men?”

“I find good men more mysterious than evil men.”

“Because evil is simple, easily understood, but goodness is more mysterious, harder to explain.”

“Very much so. I will give you an example. I would say that the aggressive masculinity of good men is infused with love. They use it to protect rather than to harm. They choose to be heroes rather than villains.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty mysterious. You’re a romantic, Mr. Rieneau.”

“I suppose I am. It reminds me to find the good in life and to appreciate it, especially when masculine malevolence seems inescapable.”

“Is that your philosophy.”

“It’s the philosophy of many thinkers. One of my favorites is Kohelet the unknown author of the book Ecclesiastes written about twenty-five hundred years ago. Like today, evil and injustice were ever present and seemingly insurmountable. Kohelet doesn’t understand why God, whom he believes in, doesn’t confront evil. Still, Kohelet will not allow the evil to discourage him from enjoying and appreciating the many good things that life has to offer. He says, ‘Eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart,’ which he most likely took from the philosophy of the Epicureans.”

“He sounds like my sister, though she would not be disappointed in God because she doesn’t believe in him. She would simply say that we are animals and like all animals we must accept that suffering comes with life. Of course, she would add that unlike humans other animals don’t whine and complain and enjoy life as much as they can without causing other creatures unnecessary suffering.”

“I think that is a very sensible attitude to take toward life. In a sense, predation is an inherent part of reality that all creatures must live with. Whereas Kohelet doesn’t understand why God doesn’t bring an end to evil, for you and I the problem is why men don’t when they easily could by being better behaved. But the important lesson from Kohelet is not to allow despair to cast a shadow over what is good in life such as you and I sharing this moment together.”

Women in Love: Part I

November 16, 198- 

Dear Ruth,

Ever since that day on the beach, I feel I have slipped into an abyss. I have given myself completely to Candice. And when I am with her, I feel a wonderful, paradoxically content yet excited. But when I’m away from her I’m haunted by guilt. Oh, Ruth, am I so lonely that I must make love to another woman? Do I mistrust the world so much, especially men, that I must turn to my own sex for love and pleasure? I have suffered feelings that I believe I do not deserve, but which I cannot drive away. They are the same feelings that drove me from Albuquerque. And I can’t really blame Mother for making me feel like a freakish whore, though I wish I could. And if it were a shallow, indifferent society that makes me feel this way, then I could simply say no to its condemnation. But the condemnation comes from within me. I don’t know what to think.

I love Candice though not as I love you. I didn’t come to California looking for love or expecting it. I came to be alone. It comes as a surprise how easy it has been to find love when I wasn’t looking for love. Or did it find me? I thought that love was no longer possible for me. And now I have friends I love—Robert, Mr. Rieneau, Mr. Sage, Renée, Barbara and Candice. Why has that happened? Is it because loving comes easy to me? I don’t think so. It doesn’t. What I do know is that there is something about each of those people that makes them lovable. I find that amazing because each is so different from the others, unique in his or her own way. It’s a special kind of friendship that possesses love. I suppose my love for Candice goes beyond friendship, but I’m not sure. I do know the love you and I share is even more mysterious because it’s interwoven with the earth-world, a mysterious tapestry, in the way the Indian life was once interwoven with nature. When I’m alone in a wild place I feel at one with the nature that surrounds me. It’s a strange kind of love. It is love. I know that because here I love the ocean. We even play as children do. We intermingle as earthly companions. When I’m with you nature truly become my neighborhood, one we share with nature’s other residents. We see them as friends. We become wild like them, not unruly but organic in the way clouds, trees, and mountains are organic. Your love has defined me in some mysterious way that I don’t fully understand. I don’t fully understand the relationship a child has with the ocean he or she adores. It beckons to them. They rush to play in the foamy surf. I’ve watched this amazing relationship between children and the ocean. Like the painter Edward Potthast I find the relation mysterious. To me you embody everything. It’s as if Earth sent you to me with her knowledge to instruct me in the ways of nature. You complete my relationship with nature, with everything. That is why I love you in the way I love the ocean, sky, and birds, trees and rivers, the hot sun and cold wind and rain. They speak but no to me. They do not love me. But they do not have to. You speak for them. You love for them. They embrace me through you. That’s because you are one of them. I’m not, but you are. I know what you’re thinking: “Silly Chrissie, you overthink life. Just live and enjoy what can be enjoyed. Don’t let the haters prevent you from enjoying life. It comes around only once.”

How can I not love Candice? She is beautiful, tender, and caring. As you once did, she gives me the love and security and even meaning that I need here. She makes me happy in a way the other people I care about here cannot. Still the guilt returns, and I think it is as much for the pleasure I experience when I’m touched by her as it is because she’s a woman. I love being touched by her. I want to lose myself in her embrace and in her touch—as I once did in yours. When I left you and Albuquerque, I thought I was leaving those feelings behind, but I did not.

Whatever it is that attracts me to women and women to me, I guess it’s part of my being. I don’t think this attraction has anything to do with my feelings toward men. I like men well enough. You and I have enjoyed their company. But when we returned home, it was always you and I together. It’s just that I feel at ease when I’m with you and Candice, and usually apprehensive around men. It’s awful that my first responses to men are generally suspicion and distrust, but I blame them, not myself. Unlike women, they have to first earn my trust before I will accept them into my life. I know you and Candice enjoy me as much as men do, but you also respect me in a way most men don’t. You’re women, too. You know what it is to be consumed indifferently by a man. A man forgets that you’re a person—another human being. He remembers that fact only after he has satisfied himself, and even then his concern for you is not what it was before. Men feast upon women as lions feed upon gazelle. And afterwards, they lie in the warm sun of forgetfulness. You and Candice never forget me. To you I’m never merely a fresh kill.

And yet, and yet…as much as I care for Candice and enjoy being with her, isn’t there something more than love and security that I should be seeking? Is the meaning of life reducible to passion and pleasure? Perhaps I have allowed California—where there is no mystery—to have too great an influence upon my state of mind. Here everything is veneer. And if I scratch the veneer, will I find only nothingness? I don’t know, Ruth. You always seemed to be in touch with some deeper meaning, but it’s personal, belonging to you alone. But then you belong to the land of deserts, mountains, mesas and endless sky—the primordial world of mysterious meanings. It and you are one. Each day since I arrived in this place that borders the sea I have longed to return to the land of enchantment—to see the red sky and the purple desert. Yet, it was more than seeing as if I were only an observer. I learned from Mr. Rieneau that it was always a matter of being, being a part of what he calls the primordial world, the lifeworld. “We are Earth-clan,” he once said to me. And now I better understand you. Your people are the original Earth-clan, the people who have always belong to Earth.

Perhaps it too is only an empty mystery. But how can that be when it filled my life? It was there to see, touch, and smell. To feel all about me the wind, snow, and rain, the warmth of the sun. Perhaps nothingness lurks there as well. An idea also learned from Mr. Rieneau. If so, at least the nothingness is not hidden behind a plastic veneer. It’s there seen in old and dead things, Georgia O’Keeffe shows us. Her painting Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills reveals the Earth-world trinity. The hills represent Earth, the hollyhock flower life created from earth, and the ram’s skull representing death the return all things to their earthly substance. Death is at the center of the painting as it is the final destination of all things. One’s own ultimate nothingness can be meaningful when it is confronted and experienced as part of the life-death cycle. Mr. Rieneau would say it’s meaningful because it’s the truth. It’s frightening, yet beautiful, a world that creates beauty that is eventually reclaimed by death. That is amazing really. And that’s what O’Keeffe is telling us or at least me. Death does not deny the beauty of the Earth-world. It makes it heartbreaking. The skull tells us to pay attention to our primordial home-world and see its beauty that is more than its appearance. It is the beauty of the life-death cycle that all things are a part of. The struggle and suffering. Mr. Rieneau says that the most meaningful experience he has comes when he is most intensely aware of the insignificance of his own life. It’s then, he says, when he becomes a true child of the cosmos and a brother to all living and nonliving things—though for him, even that distinction is an artificial one.

After my experience with Candice I search for Mr. Rieneau at the pier. There he was standing under the dim amber light of a pier lamp surround by a night blue sky and looking out upon the ocean. It wasn’t long before we got into another long conversation on just about everything, but it was all connected to the meaning of life. It was another philosophical conversation, the only kind I ever seem to have with him. He has introduced me to so many ideas that I feel overwhelmed, yet I don’t want to lose them. Since I met Mr. Rieneau I’ve been going to the Pacific Beach library. I almost feel as if I’m back in school. But I don’t mind. There I sketch out what we talked about and look up some of the people and ideas that Mr. Rieneau mentioned. I now jot down notes when I talk with him, which makes him smile, but he never teases me about it. Then I go home and sketch out our conversation. It seems somewhat artificial but I feel this need to get it all down, all the details of what was said, but to do that I must first get the ideas straight in my head. Besides, I want to understand these things and not just have bits and pieces of names and information. So it seems that my letters are becoming like a book describing not only what I’ve been doing but what I’ve been learning and thinking about.

All this is good for me. My life is in such turmoil right now, yet you would never know it to look at me. I wonder how many people look normal yet are living lives in turmoil? I think the reading and writing and my conversations with Mr. Rieneau give me a way of dealing with the turmoil, and give my life some purpose while I’m in this state of limbo. I’ve discovered that I love talking with people, not just with Mr. Rieneau but everyone. In New Mexico I had long conversations only with you, which was all I needed. When I came to California I thought I would live in silence, like I had after being separated from you. But your absence has been filled by others, which is good because it was an unbearable emptiness. Besides, I’m interested in the people I’ve met here. Each of them has a story to tell, and now I realized that I’m not the only person who has problems, who has suffered. I hate my self-pity.

I was going to say that Mr. Rieneau has become like a surrogate grandfather to me, but that’s not true, except perhaps in the way your people refer to old wise men and women as grandfathers and grandmothers. He’s like a priest but a philosopher priest. From what he tells me the Greeks had philosophers you could talk to about anything, like Socrates and Epicurus. Even women priests who could be consulted until they were banned when Christianity abolished religious freedom during the persecution of the pagans of the Roman Empire. Speaking to a pagan priestess would have been illuminating. Talking with a Christian nun that serves a masculine religion wouldn’t be the same. The God of the Bible would be all they could talk about. Greek priestesses could offer advice from a dozen goddesses on wild animals, nature, vegetation, childbirth, care of children, beauty, love and chastity. From the goddess Athena a woman would be given knowledge of how a woman can be skillful and wise. Jesus protected women but a woman could learn nothing from him about how she should live. He ignored his family and would have families torn apart by his religious ideology. Besides, could nuns really speak their minds? I find it dismaying that the oppression of women lasted two-thousand years, and Christians sought to inflict genocide upon your people just as the ancient Jews did upon the nations of Canaan. I understand even better your hostility toward the white man. The violence and oppression were the product of masculinity, not femininity.

Still, the old cultures did have their wise men, men like Socrates, Buddha and Lao-Tzu. But not today except for mavericks like Mr. Rieneau and Mr. Sage who exist on the outskirts of society. What we have are ministers and psychotherapists. That’s pretty sad. Either you’re confessing or mentally ill. Either way you’re messed up. With Mr. Rieneau it’s just talking about life and ideas, not about being judged. Yes, he is a man and I thought my anger wouldn’t allow me to have anything to do with men, at least for a long while. Robert changed that. Sometimes life just doesn’t play along. Besides, I don’t think of Mr. Rieneau in terms of gender. Well, yes, he is an old man, which does fit the stereotype of wisdom, but believe me, Pacific Beach and La Jolla have many old men who don’t seem very wise to me. Old men driving Porches and Jaguars. Old men trying to hold on to their youth by dating women our age. Old men who continue to live like adolescent beach bums on roller-skates. They seem foolish to me. Like the old women who drive Rolls Royces or cute little white convertible Mercedes.

However, I do enjoy watching the old men sea swimmers at the Cove. They may or may not be wise, but they look like old sea lions, and I like that. There are of course old women who swim there. They love the ocean. You can see it in their coffee-colored sun-tanned bodies and wrinkled faces. I think anyone who loves the ocean as they do must possessed wisdom of some kind. They love the sea more than they love the land because it’s still wild and primordial. They want to be immersed in it. For them it’s a baptism that renews them. It remains primordially pure because it will not allow itself to be destroyed by developers who, if they could, would build giant floating platform communities upon it. Suburbs upon the Sea! Robert said developers pave over open space with tracks of homes as if they were putting down asphalt or Astroturf. I didn’t know what he meant until one day he drove me to where I could see swaths of homes covering the hills like a carpet. The sight depressed me. For the first time I saw a form of urbanization worse than the city of Albuquerque. Lego communities is what Robert called them—clean, hygienic, tidy and soulless.

Robert said they’re called bedroom communities, but that they’re not communities at all. They’re manufactured barracks for commuters. They indicate how reason and wisdom are not always the same thing. Mr. Rieneau said that reason must be used wisely. He said high-rise public housing and suburbs were a rational solution to a growing shortage of housing after the war. They were an efficient use of space, but their designed prevented them from becoming communities. Living space that works for bees doesn’t necessarily work for humans. For one thing, the residents were strangers thrown together. Bees are not strangers to one another. He believes that communities need a unifying principle that used to be ethnicity or the local economy—farms, fishing, and factories. They grow from a single seed, which means that genuine communities are organic even if they located in cities.

Grungy Pacific Beach seems organic to me, even if blemished by endless cars, cheap apartments, and oil stained driveways. What is the unifying principle? The ocean. The name of the town says a much. It grew over time. It doesn’t look like a Lego community as do the manufactured suburbs, but more like quilt made from scraps of fabric randomly yet aesthetically pieced together. My grandmother made quilts with other women. The process was organic. Anyway, I like Mr. Rieneau very much. He’s an old human being full of ideas. And he has lived. His spirit and body bear scars of loss. He was wounded in the American army during the invasion of Italy. He reminds me of an old oak tree scarred by time and the elements yet still standing.

I told him that I felt guilty about my experience with Candice. It wasn’t easy confessing my love for a woman to a him, but I needed to confess and to someone. And that person had to be someone I felt comfortable with and most of all trusted. And Mr. Rieneau shows no interest in sex. He seems indifferent to it. He has evolved to a higher mental and emotional plane, perhaps a level that is spiritual. One would say he is like Jesus, but he isn’t. Jesus wasn’t indifferent to sex. He hated it because it has to do with the body. He says, 

But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. 

I read the Gospel of Matthew because Mr. Rieneau talks about it all the time. But he also said not to trust the words attributed to Jesus. Yet, those words have mattered for centuries. He said the Matthew’s gospel is a gospel of hatred rather than love, and that such an attitude shouldn’t be attributed to Jesus. It’s true that Jesus doesn’t hate women—though I don’t find him expressing much love for them. The love comes from the women. In the passage by Matthew he characterizes sexual attraction as lust, a word that condemns rather than celebrates sexual intimacy. Why? Because it has to do with the body. And, rightly or wrongly, the woman’s body has been considered the epitome of seductiveness, thus the primary cause of lust so is to be hated. But again Mr. Rieneau doesn’t blame Jesus for the hatefulness of the body but another writer, Apostle Paul, who also never met Jesus, but was influenced by Plato who disliked the material world.

So though Jesus was a protector of women, but his words imposed upon them the status of being humanity’s greatest source of corruption. Accordingly to them, he would send to the fires of Hell the adulterous woman he protects from stoning! At least the scribes and the Pharisees consider stoning sufficient punishment of an adulterous woman. According to what he says, Jesus would have you and me and Candice the three of us burn in the fires of Hell. Jesus didn’t improve the status of women. The philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Hypatia was brutally murdered by a mob of his followers, not by pagan men. And because of the Bible women would have to wait two-thousand years before they could once again study philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. They are still waiting in many countries all because of a religion born somewhere in sands of the Canaanite desert with “a gaze blank and pitiless” toward women.

I’m not comfortable with physical intimacy. That was ruined by a man who deserves to go to Hell for terrifying and abusing a child. Still, I wouldn’t want the man tortured. Not because I think he was a sick man. He wasn’t. Men have abused women and children since forever. The Jewish saint Abraham and King Agamemnon prove that much. From what I’ve read Mary was barely a teenager when God impregnated her. She surrender to God’s will when she was engaged to be married, thus against her wishes. And men have taken God’s behavior as permission to take advantage of women.

And advising gouging out an eye that sees another person as physically enticing is barbaric—as barbaric as symbolically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the God a person worships. What would Jesus think of you and me or of Candice and me? That we should be stoned? We know the Old Testament recommend the death sentence for homosexuals, though I don’t consider myself a homosexual. Just a loving person. He prevents a woman from being stoned for adultery, but if he follows his father’s advice he’d have us burn in the fires of Hell in the afterlife, which is infinitely cruel and morally unjust. The moral wisdom of Mr. Rieneau is simple: Immorality has to do with causing suffering, nothing more. And unlike Jesus he loves the physical world. He said this world is miraculous and deserving of reverence and appreciation. I would add joyful appreciation.

So I asked him if such a relationship that seems unnatural should be considered immoral. His response was that natural and unnatural are irrelevant to moral judgment. He said, “The poet Tennyson rejected nature as a basis for morality when he condemned nature for being ‘red in tooth and claw.’ He asked, ‘Are God and Nature then at strife,’ associating God with love and being oppose to strife. However, the God he believed in encouraged and participated behavior red in tooth and claw. Thus, neither nature nor God are relevant to judgments of morality.

“If one seeks love and security, if one seeks pleasure but is uncomfortable those who usually provide it, then one naturally turns to someone else who can provide those things.” He seemed to sense my discomfort with men, but then he said, “If your relationship with Candice makes you happy, then in itself it isn’t wrong. It’s certainly not morally wrong. Morality condemns causing suffering, not happiness. Altruistic morality commends actions that enhance people’s happiness. Happiness is what morality seeks to encourage and protect. The greatest philosopher Aristotle said happiness is the central purpose of human life and a goal in itself, not philosophy unless studying philosophy makes one happy. A wonderful idea really, the more happiness the better. And Kant would add as long as your pursuit of happiness doesn’t interfere with someone else’s pursuit of happiness then it isn’t immoral. The foundation of morality is really that simple.”

That seemed reasonable to me, though I do not seek sexual pleasure without love. I need love and comfort first. Otherwise, I would feel worthless. And I would want any pleasure I give to be given with love. Apparently, he felt that there was no reason to discuss the topic further. I think he sensed that it made me uncomfortable, so I asked him to tell me why he spent so much time sitting alone, gazing upon the sea....

Women In Love: Part II

Commentary

November 5, 198- 

Two women in love, three I suppose if we include ever-present Ruth, is this not most unusual? It seems so judging by Christine’s response. But if it is love, is not love always good? This is a difficult matter for me to decide for my lack of embodiment gives me insufficient guidance. If I were a man or a woman, then making a determination would be easier. Being neither I am drawn equally to both. I am unable to judge persons according to their sexual desire. Personally and disembodied, I don’t see much advantage in using sexual longing as a standard for judging true love because there is so much more to true love, without which sexual desire does not qualify as love but only as a desire for physical pleasure.

If the love between persons having the same sexual embodiment is true love, that is, love based on respect, devotion, care, and commitment, should it be denounced as evil? Or should it be judged according to the same principles used to judge between persons having different sexual embodiment? If each partner seeks above all the complete happiness of the other, then I don’t see how this cannot not be love. Besides, sexual desire alone is selfishly motivated—be it homosexual or heterosexual. The highest form of love seems to be unselfish. Is that love of Mr. Rieneau’s historical Jesus? So it seems to me. However, I do think Jesus ignored the central role the body plays in all forms of love experienced by most people. Why did he do so? Because as the old philosopher explains, Jesus aspired to a spiritual rather than a carnal existence. And he taught how humans can achieve spiritual transcendence, as he did. Even before Jesus, Plato explained that a relationship based solely on sensual desire is the least fulfilling. For Jesus the highest form of love is altruistic, totally unselfish. Carnal desire is degrading thus sinful. Why? I believe it is sinful because it wrongfully treats a person, most likely a woman, as a material object, a sex object, thus dehumanizing her as a spiritual being. As Mr. Rieneau explains, to treat people as objects is morally wrong because it negates their humanity.

It seems to me that love is inherently drawn to beauty and goodness, the beauty and goodness of the other’s physical being, the beauty of the body but also the beauty of something else expressed through the body—the gentle voice, the loving touch, the concerned countenance. And the beauty and goodness of the other’s actions—especially those selfless, generous actions that seek with enduring commitment the benefit and welfare of the other. If such beauty and goodness might be found in another, what matters the sexual form? Is not the genuine love of the soul expressed though the body? In fact, isn’t it the soul which is sought by the lover, sought through the body itself? Isn’t the body nothing more than the house of the soul? If this is true, I would think true love sees in the body the manifestation of the soul—which is nothing more than the true person. And if the soul is good and beautiful, then it is a proper object for love, regardless of the body and its sexual embodiment.

And if the soul is evil and, consequently, ugly, then it is a proper object for hatred, regardless of its bodily form. And when love or hate fixes upon externals such as the body and fails to see the soul within, then it is said that love or hate is blind.

Christine is able to love both those who wear the female body and those who wear the male body for she is able to see the qualities of goodness and beauty beyond the bodily form. Perhaps this is why she eventually disassociates herself from her body—because she believes that in some deeper way she is neither a man nor a woman but a soul in search of other souls like her own. To her, the dwelling place is less important than the soul of the person, be that place male or female, young or old, black or white or brown. She will love those souls that are good and beautiful and hate, as much as she is capable, those that are evil thus ugly. Is that because she sees the world as an artist? Perhaps.

I speak as if such matters were so very easy to decide, but they are not. Christine herself, as we know, is filled with guilt over her love for Ruth, and her thoughts on this matter of loving are in a state of turmoil. But such turmoil seems to be a natural part of being human, which is, if nothing else, an endless process of searching for what it means to be human, the Universe’s greatest and most mysterious creation.

You are probably thinking that all this philosophizing about love, the body, and the soul is fine but something more must be going on in Christine that would explain her powerful attraction to women. And what if I remind the reader that Christine has also given herself completely to Robert? I know. It was a gift. She was not drawn to Robert as she is drawn to Ruth and Candice. She gave herself to Robert because of his soul, because he is a wonderful human being. It was never a romance, and if Robert had not become ill and lonely and in need of love, Christine would not have given herself to him. They would have remained friends but never lovers. In fact, I would go so far as to say Christine was never his lover. Her giving of herself was a gift of friendship. One of those greatest gift of all that are motivated by selfless love. So does this simply mean that Christine is a lover of women, a lesbian, to use that awful sounding word? That would be a convenient explanation, but is life ever so simple that labels can serve as explanations? No. Never. You know that as well as I, and perhaps that is why you remain unconvinced that I have provided a satisfactory explanation for Christine’s behavior. Certainly, my views are only my own and you are free to develop your own theories about such matters.

Still, there is something more, something I thought would not have to come to light in this story, which has problems enough. It’s Christine I’m concerned about, that her image might be sullied. You know how people are, how they so unfairly judge. Nonetheless, I understand I cannot allow the truth to be compromised because I fear the truth will diminish Christine’s stature in the mind of an unsympathetic reader. And really, any reader who has chosen to read about Christine’s journey and has gotten this far, having even put up with my idiosyncratic and obviously biased commentary, could be neither so unsympathetic or narrow-minded. Nevertheless, it seems I must provide that “something more” in order to provide the reader with information that might further explain Christine’s reluctance to become intimately involved with the opposite sex, information that I had knowingly concealed earlier.

You may recall Christine surprisingly angry comments about having to bow down to a divine HIM. I do not know if her willingness to speak openly of her dislike of the masculine god of Christianity is the result of her conversations with the old fisherman, whose dislike of that anthropomorphic deity is by now evident, but I suspect those plainspoken conversations have enable Christine to think critically about divine matters without the pangs of guilt that she might have felt in the past. We know society strongly condemns freethinking when it comes to the questions of religious belief, often heaping ridicule upon the questioner. Even today in many parts of the world the utterance of any criticism or doubt concerning religion can result in death.

Yet, whereas Mr. Rieneau’s criticisms of the anthropomorphic deity are rooted in what he sees as the destructive and deceptive influence of the God of Judaism, Christine’s criticism seems much more personal, as I believe it is. I know you’re wondering what all this has to do with her budding romance with Candice, but there is, I think, a connection, and this connection takes us back to that unforgettable hellish event that would forever change Christine’s life by inserting into it an evil that shadows her like a demon, a demon inextricably associated with masculinity. You may recall the story of the small, smiling Mexican man who had come to Christine’s door and asked her if he might use her phone because his car had broken down. Yes, now you remember. She looked at the dark, smiling face that appeared to have seen many years of hard, honest work, and then let the man into her home. She did this because she was still a young girl who naively trusted adults. And when the man had determined that she was alone, he took a knife from his pocket and told Christine what he wanted to do and that if she let him do it and did not scream, he would not kill her. And she said yes because she did not want to die. That was the masculine evil that had entered into her life.

But that was not the end of the story—though there can never be an end really for a victim of such violence. It was not long after the incident that it was discovered that the young Christine was pregnant with her attacker’s child. When that became known to the media the case received more attention than it normally would in a city where rape occurs daily. Interestingly, the issue that was addressed in the media was not the crime of rape but the issue of abortion. The pro-life organizations argued that the life of the unborn child should be saved, that it would be a great act of compassion if Christine allowed the child to live and be adopted. What the pro-life advocates seemed to overlook was that Christine was really still a child herself.

The pro-choice advocates argued that every woman has a right to decide whether or not she goes through with a pregnancy because it is her body that is being used as a host in the parasitical relationship between the mother and child. In a pregnancy that occurs out of love the child remains a parasite living off the mother, but it is a beloved parasite, just as children remain parasites until they leave the home, which replaces the womb, to live off their own labor. But this is especially true, the pro-choice advocates argue, in cases in which the father of the child has forced himself upon the woman against her will. In such a case, the mother of the child becomes a slave of an unwanted parasite, just as the rapist made her a slave, a human object, in the act of raping her.

However, Christine’s parents refused to enter the debate. For them, there was nothing to debate. Their child had been rape and implanted with a presence no less unwanted than the rapist himself. Christine’s mother took her daughter to a doctor in San Francisco where an abortion was performed. Christine was then sent to live with Ruth and her father until the trial.

Now the reader can better understand why Christine was withdrawn during her high school years, during which she imagined that she was known as the girl who had been raped, though most likely very few people knew that she was that girl. The traumatic character of the incident also explains why each summer Christine would leave the city Albuquerque, a haunting city for Christine, and why her parents allowed her to go though they did not want her to leave.

So now we come to why Christine has been drawn to Ruth and Candice. It makes perfect sense. You may recall Christine’s remark about the seaman Art’s bright sea-blue eyes that revealed an enchanting wantonness and that she would not allow those who ravaged her once to enter her garden again. But who are those? We know of only the small, smiling Mexican man who forcibly stole Christine’s innocence. I know of no other. Thus, those must refer to all men, to masculinity itself. So now we are able to understand why Christine welcomes the love offered by Candice, a love not tainted by memories of harm done as a result of masculine desire. What about Robert? That Christine would give herself to Robert, not out of desire but out of compassion, reveals the generous nature of her gift to him.

Before you leave me, I wish once again to confess my bias. This story is my world, and its characters are my characters. I cannot escape, though often I wish I could have had at least a minor role to play, the opportunity to love just once… But each of us must be satisfied with the degree of reality that fate pours into his or her small cup. I sometimes think that my cup is a little too small, a demitasse, certainly much smaller than yours. For me, this discussion about love is merely academic. I envy you, my reader. I envy even the confusion you might experience. I don’t envy suffering, though I might pretend to so that I might know more fully the human experience. Suffering is the price that all creatures must pay for their existence. It is a severe price that to my mind make life an inherently tragic affair. I believe the old fisherman said as much. I was saying that old woman fate has been awfully stingy with me. My cup of life is not filled with the wine of life, but only with words—dry, brittle, fleshless words. Yet, perhaps I should be grateful. It is the world I was given, and it is certainly a better world than none at all. And though it be a confined and arid place, it does not lack love, beauty, and charity. Thus, I cannot condemn those young women who are so important to my little kingdom of words and its beauty and goodness. Their generous hearts are too good, their love—amid the eternal elements of the sky, sun, sea, and earth—so extraordinary and indispensable. I cannot condemn two souls drawn together by their own goodness and beauty. I would gladly give up the emptiness of my arid disembodied state to feel such love and tenderness if only for a moment.

An Apology to Italy’s Glorious Giorgia Meloni

For my (not really, I didn’t vote for it…him)

lumbering fool of a president who

insulted Italy’s glorious prime minister.

Trump defined:

ungentlemanlike

impolite uncivil unrefined crude loutish rough vulgar 

inconsiderate insensitive 

unchivalrous indecent undignified

unseemly inept graceless offensive shameless

tactless gauche maladroit

perverse

Please accept my apology, people of Italy, but also appreciate that in spite of the disgusting words of America’s presidential fool toward your triumphant, glorious leader, she and Italy remain untouched by his malicious idiocy that we American must suffer daily. Count yourselves lucky that you are Italians and not Americans. Trump falsely claimed that “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” What he has completely and totally obliterated is America’s integrity, honor, and moral character.

He has destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people—including those of Americans. And unaware of Jesus' parable of the GOOD SMARITAN, he has allowed thousands of mothers and children in impoverished nations to unnecessarily die from starvation and disease.

So, you glorious, life-loving Italians, be grateful that you do not have to burden the shame that Trump has inflicted upon America. My parents were of America’s Greatest Generation. They shone brightly under the suffering and hardships they endured during the Great Depression and World War II. And they endured with dignity. But America’s Greatest Generation is extinct, and there will not be another. Corruption has taken hold of the government and has metastasized throughout the nation. So, take heart my Italian friends that

While you are led by the

Glorious Giorgia Meloni

we Americans must live

under the tyranny

of an inglorious orange

narcissistic monstrosity

because

our Senate, Congress, Supreme Court

are too cowardly

to rein in his madness

which has destroyed

the USA.

The Girl, the Philosopher, and Elephants

 Preface

Trump Appears To Relax Rules On Elephant Trophy Hunting Imports

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDCpmRRTIj4

***

“So how did humans get out of harmony with the world about them?”

“The answer to that question is complicated because there are many reasons. Today humans have trouble living in harmony within their own societies which were designed by them. Living in harmony seems to go against human nature. Schopenhauer would say that humans are inherently willful, and that willfulness is expressed in the behavior of the societies they create. In other words, both individuals and societies are essentially self-serving and that creates a setting of unending conflict.”

“I understand what you mean. Many people take advantage of others. Still, in most people there’s a sense of respect and proper behavior.”

“In cultures that embody those values.”

“You mean the culture of a society teaches people to respect others and even to value them? That respect doesn’t come naturally.”

“That’s the case according to thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Freud. Personally, I believe those values had more clout in the past than they do today because they were backed up by the belief in the sacred. Consider three conditions. I’ll use hunting an elephant as an example. In the first case, the hunter believes that the elephant is a person like himself, but wiser and more powerful, almost a sacred being. He addresses the elephant as father elephant. His attitude toward the elephant is one of awe and profound respect, and if his people did not require meat from the elephant the hunter would allow the elephant to live.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No. The story comes from a little book titled Primitive Song by C.M. Bowra. The hunter here is a West African Pygmy.”

“Primitive Song, C.M. Bowra. I’ll have to get that book.”

“Well then I’m certainly going to have to introduce you to Mr. Sage the bookseller. He sells only used books and would be the most likely to have the book. I doubt it’s even in print.”

“That would be great.”

“Okay, let’s look at a different attitude toward the elephant. This time the hunter’s attitude toward the elephant is purely practical. The elephant’s only value is that of being a food source. The hunter couldn’t care less about its magnificence. It’s simply a living thing or object.”

“You mean like the Japanese who kill whales for food, which seems to me a really wicked thing to do?”

“Yes. To them the whale possesses no more value than a can of tuna does to us. But my point here is that the creature has now been reduced to it use value. There is nothing in the culture to give it special nonmaterial value.”

“That’s pretty sad. So what is the third condition?”

“This would be a situation where the law is used to protect the elephant, but the interesting thing about the law is that it doesn’t attribute a value to the object, though it may imply value. It defines a relationship between a person and other persons or objects. In that way it’s very abstract. The Pygmy culture, on the other hand, attributes a specific inherent value to the elephant, characterized by the epithet father elephant. That cultural attitude is projected upon the elephant and becomes part of the Pygmy’s perception of it—more like him or her, rather than it, to the Pygmy.”

“So culture influences our perception.”

“Absolutely. If the culture projects positive or negative values upon an object, the object is perceived as possessing those values. And as we have seen, artists of the modern era often disagreed with the values of their culture rather than celebrate them. In our age of entertainment, I wish the artists we’ve been discussing had a greater influence on society and its political leaders.”

“Well, art certainly influenced my artist father. He grew up in New York City and the art he saw in the museums convinced him to become an artist. He became a big fan of romantic landscape painting, especially that of the Hudson River School. It’s really weird thinking that he moved to New Mexico mostly because of those paintings and the New Mexico paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. If he hadn’t seen those paintings I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I wouldn’t be at all.”

“Well then I’m very glad he saw those paintings.”

“Yeah, me too. But let’s go back to what you were saying about the law. We were talking about people having difficulty living in harmony with nature, or society for that matter because humans tend to be willful.”

“What occurred in the Garden of Eden is a good place to begin.”

“You mean Eve’s disobeying God’s law.”

“A brave girl standing up to God. Jews and Christians blame Eve for creating disharmony by disobeying God. Actually, God did that by imposing an unjust law on her and Adam.”

“You mean laws can create disharmony rather than the other way around.”

“Bad laws can. There was a time in the U.S. when the law supported slavery, which resulted in the Civil War.”

“What was the injustice in Eve’s case?”

“Eve was curious because God made humans curious. But then he denies her access to the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That denied her from knowing right from wrong—which is the basis of morality. Moral knowledge is the most important kind of knowledge because without it one cannot act morally without knowing the difference between good and evil. God prohibits such knowledge. And the harm and discord that follow are caused by him, not Eve, not from her acquiring such knowledge and sharing it with her boyfriend. The way I see it, God places himself above the law by considering himself as the only one qualified to enact laws. That he considers himself above moral law is illustrated by his unjustly punishing all of humanity for the actions of humanity’s two neophytes. His prohibiting knowledge would be emulated throughout history by religious and secular totalitarian societies. Human morality declares collective punishment, that is punishing the innocent along with the guilty, as immoral. Yet, he engages in collective punishment repeatedly and even punishes people who have committed no crime but simply belong to a different culture”

“So the first law was an unjust law.”

“That has created disharmony even up to this day especially for women by justifying their oppression. The Bible is the greatest source of unjust laws, one of which got Jesus crucified.”

“But law is supposed to create harmony rather than disharmony.”

“What you say raises an important point. Morality must determine what laws are just and unjust, not God, no authoritarian for that matter. Humans must decide what is right for themselves, not just for a few but for all. By eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Eve enable humans to morally judge even the actions of God.”

“So what about harmony? Eve discovered morality for us so we can judge the law, but social harmony still seems illusive. Are there other ways to reduce aggression, which seems to be the greatest source of disharmony?”

“It seems to me the only really good solution is to attribute value to people, creatures, and things in such a way that encourages respect for them. I used the example of a hunter perceiving an elephant as a kind of father figure. I don’t see the elephant as a father figure but as a magnificent creature that deserves respect, appreciation, and preservation. If those values disappear from culture, then they disappear from the creature as well, so that the elephant becomes nothing more than a source of meat, ivory, or sport, in other words, killed just for fun.”

“That means morality works only if that which is to be respected is valued.”

“That seems to be the case. If elephants aren’t valued then there is no foundation for morality to protect them.”

‘”But elephants are valued.”

“Not in the way the Pygmy valued them or in the way Native Americans valued the bison. To them the creatures had inherent value and the relationship between the human and the animal was one of friendship, even love. That might seem farfetched until you consider the relationship people have with creatures such as cats, dogs, birds and horses.”

“So value must be present if morality is to work?”

“Inherent value of some kind. However, neither inherent value nor morality have been very successful in protecting people, much less elephants. The reason being is that people must be capable of appreciative awareness, which, I believe, is also the basis of wisdom. I also believe that appreciative awareness comes naturally in women, even to some men. But most men must acquire it though culture or education. Do you agree?”

“I would hope the number of sensitive men is greater than you suggest. I know there are insensitive, stupid men, but most of the men I know are not like that.”

“That could be because though rough around the edges, America is essentially a civilized society, more today than in the past, that encourages decency and respect in men. Not all societies are so lucky. And even in America laws are needed, less to manage the behavior of women than that of men.”

“Because of the beast that lurks in men.”

“Yes, which emerges in various forms.”

“So laws have to be enacted.”

“And they are effective only because disobeying them results in punishment. Law is a crude method of encouraging decent, respectful, civil behavior, and many men are incorrigible. Laws have been passed to protect elephants though one wouldn’t think they would be unnecessary considering the majesty of the beast, but they are.”

“And they are still hunted.”

“If an ivory poacher thinks he can get away with killing an elephant, he kills it. Worse, elephants are often killed just for fun rather than for profit.”

“By men. I just can’t see women killing elephants or any other creature unless they had good reason, such as putting food on the table or being threatened. My grandmother raised chickens for eggs. She loved her chickens. She would talk to them. But she would kill one to feed her family. But she would never kill one just for the fun of it. Such an act would have been unthinkable incomprehensible to her. She would have considered it senseless cruelty.”

“The masculine gender is the one that has the propensity to harm and kill.”

“That’s sad. So different from the way of thinking of the male artists we’ve been discussing.”

“The importance of their art is that it inspires appreciative awareness, and by doing so makes the world about us more meaningful.”

“Perhaps that is the reason I became interested in art. I wanted to learn to experience the world as artists do. I knew art had something important to tell me. And it wasn’t just about appreciating beauty but understanding and appreciating life as it’s experienced. No books needed, just the art. And what one learns is that life can be appreciated and understood in endless ways. The pursuit of art is an adventure, I guess in the way philosophy is.”

“Both are intellectual adventures, but art is more emotionally satisfying.”

“I see now that the difference between art and law is that law just prohibits certain behaviors. It doesn’t convey value to that which it protects. But conveying value is exactly what art does.”

“That’s right. A poacher will kill an elephant even though doing so is against the law if he thinks he can get away with it. The only value the elephant has for him is profit. To me, the poacher and other killers of elephants are blind though they can see well enough to kill.”

“Blind to the value embodied in the elephant.”

“Yes. And that sort of blindness had a holiday during the white man’s conquest of America, the killing of Indians and the bison, the destruction of forests. ”

“Because there were no cultural values or laws to prevent such behavior.”

“Worse, it was encouraged by just about everyone including presidents.”

“Then it was an ugly process of destruction.”

“Susan Cooper’s father, Fenimore Cooper, was outraged by crudity of the conquest. He lived while it was occurring and he was greatly saddened by what he witnessed.”

“So he escaped into stories about Indians.”

“I suppose he did.”

“And elephants are almost extinct. It’s all pretty disgusting. If humans allow that to happen, I don’t think they deserve the planet.”

“Nature just might agree with you. A cruel and insensitive attitude can have a negative karmic response.”

“Like global warming creating a climatic shift resulting in an extinction event, though I hope not. That would harm mostly good people. And some people must see the value possessed by elephants or else laws wouldn’t be passed.”

“Many people value wildlife enough to want to protect it. They don’t want elephants or whales to disappear from the face of the earth. And African countries that have elephants don’t want to lose an important tourist attraction. Destruction comes from the acts of few men, not the majority. That seems always to be the case. A few dull-minded men can start wars that kill thousand and even millions of people. Such men wanted Indians and the bison destroyed into extinction.”

“Your view of the world is pretty pessimistic. I thought I was the pessimist!”

“I never claimed to be an optimist when it comes to human behavior.”

“So we’re alike. That’s okay.”

“Fellow travelers, young and old.” I smiled. The old man was a complete mystery to me that I was just beginning to explore.

“And you think the big change has been in the culture. That people don’t value nature in the way the Pygmies and Indians did because their culture doesn’t.”

“These changes are sometimes called paradigm shifts. In the old world there were always ceremonies that made offerings to deities representing aspects of nature. Our own Thanksgiving was once such a day—set aside to give thanks to God for a bountiful harvest, but even it has become pretty much a secular holiday during which a big meal is eaten and a football game is watched. As societies have grown larger humans have lost touch with nature. Urbanized society has become a house of mirrors in which humans see everything in terms of themselves. This has contributed to an attitude of indifference toward nature. You can’t really value that which you don’t interact with. The relationship between the Indians and nature was intimate. And it may even be the case that very large societies are inherently out of balance with nature, in the way millions of automobiles inevitably change the natural landscape as well as that of cities.

“And that brings to mind how technology has changed our relationship to nature. Today’s big cities that enclose people are technological environments, almost totally artificial in design, material, and objects. And just think that a simple piece of technology, a tool, the plow, made urban civilization possible. In a sense, the plow gave birth to the city, and without cities humans would not have progress much further than hunting-gathering societies. The plow is an interesting symbol of technology because of how it acts upon the earth.”

“It cuts the earth. There is a famous quote from a Wintu woman that says, ‘White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything ... The White people pay no attention... How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? ...Everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore.’ Is that what you mean?"

“Yes, exactly. Where did you learn that?”

“You can’t live in New Mexico and not learn something about the Indians, though the woman I just quoted was from a tribe in California.”

“So you also remember passages that are important to you.”

“I guess we’re alike in that way.”

“And it seems you also know something about Indians.”

“Yeah, a little.”

 

The Girl and the Philosopher and the American Spirit

The Girl and the Philosopher reveals the tripart substance of the American spirit. What the reader discovers is that the spirit of America is not an abstraction, not a myth, not an ideology, not an idea. It is a concrete composite of place, history, and people. First are America’s spiritual soils—its mountains, deserts, Great Plains, oceans and beaches—each possessing a unique spirit of its own. Second, is its tragic yet heroic history that has contributed greatly to what the American spirit has become. Third, the American spirit is embodied in American lives defined by time, place, and circumstance. It does not transcend individuals but is made from the substance of their lives. Christine’s journey of self-discovery reveals the American spirit in the stories of the people who become part of her own story. These stories of struggle, success, failure, and tragedy of ordinary Americans contribute to the substance of the American spirit. Christine’s journey is an introduction to that the mysterious substance that is the American spirit, which is everywhere manifested yet hidden in plain sight. 

I am an American expatriate who has lived for 12 years with my wife Brigitte on the side of a mountain in French Alps. I’ve worked on farms (Texas and Missouri) and for a couple years at Baker Oil Tools on Slauson Avenue in Los Angeles. I began studying philosophy at Long Beach City College where I earned an Associate of Arts in philosophy. I continued my study of philosophy at California State University, Long Beach where I earned a BA in philosophy. Tired of the city life and thinking I should know more about human behavior I moved to Portales, New Mexico, to study psychology at Eastern New Mexico University, where I earned an MA in psychology. The next step would be literature—poetry, drama, short stories, and novels. Still having no desire to return to a big city I moved to Canyon, Texas, to study literature, receiving a MA in English. Then it was time to return to philosophy, this time at the University of New Mexico. I earned an MA in philosophy. Considering pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, my advisor gave me a flyer that said 8,000 individuals with PhDs in philosophy do not work in the field of philosophy. Worst yet, most doctoral students never finish their dissertation. That means getting a job as a waiter since the demand for philosophers in the U.S. is miniscule. Philosopher is not taught in most American high schools, whereas in France it is a requirement. But he noticed that my minor was in English and literature. Thus, he advised that if teaching was my goal I should stick with English and literature. They are taught in all American schools. So, I ended up Greeley, Colorado, a small town surrounded by farms and fields, where I earned a doctorate in English. That was the end of my academic wanderings. It was a terrific journey.

Print length: ‎ 1012 pages

Item weight: ‎ 1.72 kg

Clarion Call for Girls To Become Philosophers

The Girl and the Philosopher is about a girl named Christine who is compelled by a tragic revelation to flee her old life in part to make sense of it. When she serendipitously encounters a mysterious old fisherman who becomes her philosopher, her escape becomes an intellectual and spiritual journey that leads to enlightenment. She is drawn to him because she is lonely and she trusts the old man, and also being a very intuitive she suspects that the old man is much more than he appears to be. And seeing the old man fishing alone at night on a pier above the sea, she thinks he might be a little lonely and in need of company because that is how she feels. What she will discover is that the old man is like a magic carpet that is able to transport her through the intellectual galaxies of art, philosophy, science, history and religion. He is a source of wisdom acquired from other wise men and women. Christine possesses her own wisdom that intuitive and feminine.

During her journey Christine encounters other characters, men and women young and old, whose lives have also been journeys like her own filled with happiness, sadness, and tragedy. Through them she begins to realize that life involves suffering that all people experience in various ways. With the help of the philosopher who becomes her friend, she learns that each life is mysterious and unique and that there is no such thing as an ordinary life. Every life is unique, extraordinary, and mysterious.

The old philosopher’s magic carpet is made of words that explore art, philosophy, science, history and religion—each discipline a constellation of ideas and meanings that are mostly hidden from view in everyday life. Most of the topics and books addressed in the story are listed below. Many of the books on academic topics are mentioned because the old philosopher, Mr. Rieneau, and the equally old seller of used books, Mr. Sage, introduce endless books to the girl causing her to feel terribly ignorant yet inspiring in her an ambition to read every book mentioned to her by the two old bibliophiles. She even goes so far as to record titles on a notepad given to her by the bookseller.

The girl is clearly super bright with a remarkable memory, but her intelligence is most likely not the result of her DNA but because of her solitary nature, which resulted from her being raped as a young girl. The man who raped her stole her trust of people she does not know well. From that time on she became an observer of life rather than a participant. The only exception is when she is with her half-sister Ruth, whose mother is a Mohave Indian. Ruth lives in two worlds. The first is that of the various Indian tribes of New Mexico and Arizona unified by a common history and by the desire resist the corrupting influence of white culture. The second is the wild lands of nature where she disappears for days at a time. Until Christine’s departure from New Mexico, Ruth’s interaction with the world of the white man was limited to Christine, her half-sister, and the artist father they share. To Christine, Ruth’s understanding of life remains a mystery unavailable to her because she and Ruth live in different worlds.

The Feminine Worldview

One goal of The Girl and the Philosopher is the exploration the feminine worldview, which is fundamentally different from the masculine worldview, though the two can be expressed by both men and women—an idea taken from Carl Jung’s notion that the anima and the animus exist in both men and women (discussed in the story). Though the feminine worldview is inherently important, it is presented in the story as a counterbalance to the inherent aggressiveness of masculinity. The feminine worldview is difficult to explain because it is rooted in feminine sensibility, intuition, and emotion. Mr. Rieneau, the fisherman philosopher, represents a masculine philosophical worldview that—unlike the feminine—must be achieve because it is not intuitive. It differs from the inbred feminine worldview by being more analytical and conceptual than intuitive.

However, there is an inbred worldview of masculinity that is contrary to that of the feminine because it is inherently aggressive, whereas the feminine worldview is inherently appreciative. Thus, the appreciative feminine worldview that comes to women naturally or organically is antithetical to the aggressive worldview that comes naturally to men. Certainly, Christine and her sister represent the feminine worldview. And the old philosopher and the bookseller refer to the expression of the feminine worldview by women writers of novels. The yin-yang of the masculine worldview is express between the difference between inherent masculine aggression and thoughtful, intellectual men who reject immoral, dull-minded thinking and behaving.

This rejection is clearly expressed in the life of Jesus. The feminine side of Jesus is as a caregiver. He is a man but transcend the aggressive masculine tendencies that define masculinity.  He is like a combat medic who chooses to save lives rather than take them, even the lives of the enemy. His dislike for violence is illustrated in a passage from the gospel of Matthew that describes the arrest of Jesus. The men who arrest Jesus are “large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people” (Matthew 26:47). The passage illustrates that the men serve an ideology created from a mentality of aggressive masculinity, the ideology of the Old Testament. What is described next reveals that Jesus has rejected the masculine aggression of traditional Judaism and MAGA’s Old-Testament Christianity, which is a corruption of the altruistic, ethics-based religion of Jesus. The old philosopher explains that the genius of Jesus is how he illustrated by his own life that the spiritual life can be achieved through altruistic ethics. He explains that Jesus’s spiritual philosophy is similar to Buddha’s concern for human suffering, but improves Buddha’s ethical philosophy by adding to it active remedial altruism.

Then says Matthew, “the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. ‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him” (Matthew 26:50-52). Jesus’s words are a rejection of masculine aggression that gave birth to Judaism, a religion that deified masculine aggression that eventually killed Jesus.

The old fisherman philosopher argues that Apostle Paul created the Christ Cult and its Christian ideology. Why? Paul had an epiphany after the death of Jesus that said he could take Jesus’s place. It was a career move. Describing his epiphany Paul (known as Saul before the epiphany) says that “He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied. ‘Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’” Paul knew what to do, which is what he wanted to do—to replace Jesus’s religion with his own, and by doing so became the founder of the Christ Cult and the Christian religion. That the event was only imagined by Paul is verified by the text, which says, “The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone.”

He is called Saint Paul for his role in the founding of the Christian religion, especially in terms of his influence on the development of Christian ideology. Britannica Dictionary says that Augustine is “perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. Augustine’s adaptation of classical thought to Christian teaching created a theological system of great power and lasting influence.” In other words, those two men, rather than Jesus, are the composers of Christian ideology. Paul’s influence is revealed by the fact that of the 27 books in the New Testament, 13 or 14 are traditionally attributed to Paul, that is almost 50%. Augustine’s most influential book on the creation of Christian doctrine is The City of God. Perhaps its most influential idea is the concept that world history guided by Divine Providence in a universal war between God and the Devil. That there is a cosmic war occurring between the supernatural forces of evil led by a fallen angel, which is by the way God’s creation, is an expression of reality reflecting the aggressive thinking of men. And why did Satan and his followers rebel against the oppressive masculine deity? Representing free will, they refused to be his slaves. And that is why Satan advised Eve to act freely and go for the brain boost. And she was punished just as Jesus and Hypatia were. Religious and secular ideologies oppress freedom of thought.

However, the idea that a cosmic war is raging between God and his followers and the Devil and his followers was not part of Jesus’s thinking. It came from Manichaeism, which taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between the good spiritual world of light and the evil material world of darkness. Augustine of Hippo converted to Christianity from Manichaeism in the year 387. It too was a career move. He became an Old Testament Christian, a follower of Apostle Paul as Augustine explains in his Confessions. And it should be pointed out that Paul’s religion is rooted in Plato’s religious philosophy, which is rooted in the religious philosophy of Pythagoras, who doctrine of reincarnation of the soul after death was learned from Egyptian priests. So, the idea of the resurrection of the dead came from Paul, not Jesus. It was an alien notion to Western rationality imported from the East. The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead is a guidebook that enable a person to achieve immortality. Under Apostle Paul’s influence the New Testament became a similar book that focuses on death, resurrection, and eternal life, which is contrary to Jesus’s focus on living a spiritual life in the here and now. Not only that, Apostle Paul’s Christianity rejected the value of humanity’s material earthly life, totally unlike the wise man Kohelet’s celebration of humanity’s earthly life in Ecclesiastes (the wisest book in the Bible).

Why is that important? It’s important because whereas Jesus was interested in creating a worldly paradise based on altruistic ethics, the paradise of Paul’s Christianity exists in the postmortem realm of the resurrected dead. Thus, Paul’s Christianity shift away from Jesus’s focus on devoting one’s life to helping others, as he did, to benefitting oneself by simply converting to Christianity and by doing so achieving eternal existence in the postmortem. Paul’s Christianity is a narcissistic religion that is all about benefitting the self. The ethical religion of Jesus required becoming other-centered rather than self-centered. The difference is between living like the Good Samaritan who sacrifices time and money to benefit a person in need or living like Judas who betrayed Jesus in exchange for thirty pieces of silver. Judas cowardly unleased masculine aggression against Jesus, the man who wanted to overcome the mindset of masculine aggression and illustrated by his own life how it can be done.

However, most consequential about Judas’s narcissistic greed is its nihilism. That Judas betrayed a man who had devoted his life to saving people who are poor, sick, oppressed, or threatened by violence but also to saving his people spiritually reveals that narcissistic greed is a form of nihilism. To Judas no one has value except himself, not even Jesus. And it’s important to note that Judas’s narcissistic greed leads to Jesus being tortured and murdered. Who are men like Judas today? Well, Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump have shown nothing and no one has value that interferes with their political or financial ambitions—that includes their own people. Each man has sacrificed thousands of lives in order to achieve his ambitions. All value is conditional. That which serves their ambitions has value to them; that which doesn’t serve their ambitions lacks value. To such men, nothing, including people, has inherent value. This denial of value of others, which includes moral value, is the central characteristic of nihilism.

Masculine aggression is a central concern of The Girl and the Philosopher and is discussed often by Mr. Rieneau and Christine. As noted, when she was a young girl Christine was raped. To the rapist she had only use value, no value as a human being and clearly no moral value, thus no moral rights. After the rape she was sent away to have an abortion. Both incidents made the papers, so she was sent for a summer to live in northern New Mexico with her half-sister Ruth. Both the old fisherman and bookseller served in World War II, and the Vietnam War ended in the decade (1975) preceding the story. And as most people know, masculine aggression made a horror show of the 20^th century and continues to do so today.

War and Women’s Voices

Writers discussed in the context of war are Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Virginia Woolf (including her magnificent anti-war novel Mrs Dalloway). Of course, there have been many other great anti-war novels such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (mentioned in the story) and Farewell to Arms. Important here is that Homer lived in the 8th century BC and Woolf lived almost three thousand years later and yet wars continue as they always have. Thus, in spite of the many wise men who have condemned war, war continues to result from masculine aggression as a form of masculine recreation. So, unless the feminine worldview plays a greater role in influencing human affairs, masculine aggression will continue to threaten another catastrophic global war—perhaps a nuclear war since there are approximately13,000 nuclear weapons in the world today.

That there is no easy solution is why as many women as possible must become philosophers with their own philosophical worldview. Such a worldview is expressed in Virginia Woolf’s novels but is not easily accessible to most readers and must be retrieved and explained philosophically. Would men really listen to a chorus of women philosophers, young and old? Men who are wise would. These women would be mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, cousins, and girlfriends. The feminine influence is enormous and cherished by most men and could be a means of restraining destructive masculine aggression by making masculinity more appreciative of values associated with femininity.

Again, this new paradigm is illustrated by Jesus. He protects an adulterous woman threatened by the masculine aggression of Pharasees and their Old-Testament masculine religious ideology. Their inherent aggression would have the woman stoned to death. What is lacking in their masculine mindset is feminine compassion, which is, of course, a cornerstone of Jesus’s altruistic ethics-based religion.   

Women have a greater voice today than they had just a couple decades ago. During the Vietnam War there were few if any women commentators in news media. Today, there are many. Here are a few: 

Susan Glasser

Rachel Ellehuus

Rachel Maddow

Kaitlan Collins

Kate Gerbeau

Jo Crawford

Bethany Elliott

Heather Cox Richardson

Zoya Sheftalovich

Diane Francis

Anne Applebaum: It is interesting that the Applebaum warned America precisely what would happen if Trump was reelected:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-d9g-EMpSI

But being a woman, she was ignored, perhaps because MAGA wanted a dictator, though Biden had used plenty of executive orders in dictatorial fashion. Or perhaps she was ignored because America is an Old Testament Christian nation that pays heed to that woman hating unwise founder of Old Testament Christianity Apostle Paul, who said,

Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)

The Internet gets a lot of credit for allowing independent voices of wise women to push back against unwise men. However, to be truly effective these media women need the support of a very large audience of young female intellectuals with some grounding in a philosophy grounded not in an ideology but in multiple disciplines. I am thinking a tidal wave of young female philosophers. This project is much larger than that of feminism, which focuses on the rights of women.

What is needed is a feminine philosophical movement that presents a feminine worldview that is contrary to aggressive masculinity that is the greatest source of suffering in the world today—as illustrated by Putin’s war against Ukraine that has caused 500,000 to 600,000 deaths, both soldiers and civilians and perhaps as many physically and psychologically injured; Netanyahu’s war that has killed over 72,000 Palestinians and looks very much like genocide; and Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran that has killed 3,540 people since the war began, including 1,616 civilians. The cause of these wars and all others is unrestrained masculine aggression, which includes Hamas terrorists who on October 7 murdered 828 civilians, including 36 children. And it should not be forgotten that the statistics represent individual men, women, and children, each a unique person with friends and loved ones. The murder of a single person is deplorable; the murder of thousands is monstrous.

What is needed is a coherent philosophical feminine worldview to directly or indirectly transform the attitudes of societies dominated by the thinking of aggressive masculinity that is presently causing so much harm to humanity. Philosophically trained women are needed to offer astute criticisms of the destructive and hurtful idiocies of men such as Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump and their alpha-male supporters and shameless adoring female groupies.

The Need for a Multitude of Women Philosophers

Can Christine’s story save the day by creating a multitude of young female philosophers? Could it have a beneficial butterfly effect? As a pessimist, I doubt it, but I believe Christine’s story had to be told. What I do know is that the situation has spun out of control in the U.S. and that there is a lot of right-wing turbulence in Europe—masculine aggression embodied in national ideologies. My story occurs during the 1980s so doesn’t address what is occurring today. But it is critical of us-versus-them religious and secular ideologies that encourage hatred and conflict. (Discussed by Jason Stanley in How Fascism Works.)

The threat of aggressive masculinity has always sought a home in ideologies because such ideologies have always been created by men. Today, however, because of a few megalomaniacal men the world is on the cusp of disaster. What journalist Susan B. Glasser calls “the big, fat, naked emperor in the room” and his posse of wrathful, dull-minded men (and their alpha-male loving groupies) have wrecked the U.S. that was once the world’s valiant knight known for its courage, honor, justice, mercy, generosity, faith, and nobility and transformed the U.S. into a nation used by a Judas to serve only himself. The maniacal Netanyahu believes his God Yahweh condones the carnage he is committing: “However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them” (Deuteronomy 20:16). A truly ugly masculine mindset. One must keep in mind that Yahweh is the deification of aggressive masculinity. And interestingly his first encounter with a human involves the bullying of a girl wanting to become educated.

And then there’s Putin, a demented narcissistic man (they’re all narcissists) who keeps the Bible bedside and has destroyed the nation of Ukraine with his drones, missiles, and army of human androids and who has other European nations (where my grandkids live) in his crosshairs. The president of China seeks to ravage Taiwan but hopefully will listen to the wise words of Sun Tzu: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” China should be Taiwan’s guardian, not its adversary. And all four men control most of the 12,331 nuclear warheads that threaten global society. That is hardly reassuring.

It seems that if disaster is to be avoided, women—young ordinary, everyday girls, not only politicians—must become philosophers and express themselves spunkily. The focus of my book is on the younger generation. The older generation serves ossified values and belief systems or simply serve themselves in Washington, D.C. If the American nation is to be rebooted, it must be accomplished by young Americans. I am not offering a new belief system or an ideology, just a composite worldview based on art, philosophy, science, history and non-ideological religions (Zen, Taoism, Buddhism, and the philosophies of the two wise men in the Bible Kohelet and Jesus (not Christ). There are more admirable and wise women in the Bible than there are admirable and wise men. These would include Ruth and Naomi, Job’s wife (not Job), Mary mother of Jesus, and Mary of Bethany. Compare the Book of Ruth with the Book of Joshua and you will see how the feminine worldview differs from the masculine.

Profoundly revealing is the Canaanite mother who begs Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter who suffers terribly. She kneels before him, and cries, “Lord, help me!” Jesus responds with an insult: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” The Canaanite mother proves herself morally superior to the biblical Jesus who allowed religious ideology to dictate his response to her (unlike in the parable of the Good Samaritan). Her love is the unconditional love of a mother. He helps the woman only after she grovels before him demonstrating her faith in his ability to save her daughter, in other words, the ideology the Biblical Jesus represents. His motivation is not to heal a suffering non-Jewish child. So then how can Jesus be a wise man? Because that man wasn’t the historical Jesus, the existential Jesus who preached the parable of the Good Samaritan. He is an invention, a construct used by the writers of the New Testament who never knew Jesus but used him as a figurehead of the hateful Christ-Cult religion invented by them and Apostle Paul.

Their Christ ideology is filled with masculine aggression and has little to do with the ethical altruism-based religion of Jesus illustrated by his defense of an adulterous woman, his healing of the sick, and his preference for peace, saying “all who live by the sword, shall die by the sword,” which is ignored by Old Testament Christians such a MAGA Christians, in particular J.D. Vance, a big admirer of the theologian Augustine of Hippo, who said that God “actively punishes as a form of showing love,” and “the slave is a slave because God wishes him punished,”  and “every other form of learning had to be subordinated to the scriptures,” and about God’s punishment he says, “he persecutes new born children; he hands over babes to eternal flames because of their bad wills,” and he accepted coerced conversion because “God himself had shown the way,” and finally “Augustine’s rationale for persecution was to be used to justify slaughter (as of the Cathars or the native people of America)” (The Closing of the Western Mind, Charles Freeman 284-300).

The attitude of Old Testament Christians toward Native Americans is reflected in the words of William Bradford, one of the leading members of the congregation of pilgrims who came to North America aboard the Mayflower. Tim Flannery tells us in his The Eternal Frontier that "In 1634 a violent epidemic broke out among the Pequots living inland along the Connecticut River. 'It pleased God,' William Bradford wrote, 'to visit these Indians with a great sickness and such a mortality that a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above the ground for want of burial'" (303). That attitude reflects the thinking of J.D. Vance's favorite theologian—Augustine of Hippo.

In other words, Apostle Paul, the writers of the Gospels, and Augustine transform the ethical religion of Jesus into an aggressive us-versus-them masculine ideology based on Old Testament theology with Paul’s addition of the resurrection of the dead in refurbished spiritual bodies so they can live forever in Heaven or Hell (the “carrot and stick” option to motivate conversion to the Christian ideology).

One book publisher said it was saving the world one book at a time. I’m afraid that a piecemeal collection of sentimental, quirky, heartfelt stories won’t do the trick. My contribution provides a rational framework for a culture, thus a society, based on a feminine philosophy of life. This has been attempted before. One example is Marge Piercy’s feminist science fiction cautionary tale Woman on the Edge of Time. The story argues that humanity will end catastrophically unless it rejects masculine aggression and embraces a worldview based feminine values and a feminine understanding of what is the ideal life based not on a feminist ideology or myth but on a feminine worldview. However, her story doesn’t develop the feminine worldview with facts and ideas offered by art, philosophy, science, history and religion. Piercy simply relies on feminine commonsense—which men, the guys presently ruining the world—are immune to.

Paganism Said Yes to Female Philosophers/Christianity Said No

A chauvinist like most Greek men at the time, Plato, nevertheless, believed that women are capable of becoming philosophers and even philosopher “kings.” Why would chauvinistic Plato think that? Because even as a chauvinist (not a misogynist), he ignored his feelings (as he believed philosophers should) and followed reason. And reason told him that women are as intellectually capable as men, and he accepted female students. (And the Winter Olympic Games showed they are in most cases physically equal to men, though the goal here is to encourage girls to become Eves or Marie Curies rather than Schwarzeneggers.) Other Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Epicurus shared Plato’s view of women’s intellectual ability and accepted female students. In Plato’s words:

Women and men, then, have the same nature in respect to the guardianship of the state, save that one is [physically] weaker the other stronger…. For the production of a female guardian [chief of state], then, our education will not be one thing for men and another for women, especially since the [intellectual] nature which we hand over to it is the same (Republic v).

How does this compare to Augustine’s image of women? He says,

God, then, made man in His own image. For He created for him a soul endowed with reason and intelligence…. He made also a wife for him, to aid him in the work of generating his kind, and her He formed from a bone taken out of the man’s side.  

In other words, Eve was not made in God’s image but cloned from one of Adam’s ribs. Thus, she lacked “a soul endowed with reason and intelligence,” which made her susceptible to being deceived by the Serpent. Augustine says, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” Thus, unlike Plato, Vice President Vance’s champion of Christianity Augustine would believe it unthinkable to allow a woman to be a guardian of a state. His view is the basis for the religious and societal ideology of the Catholic Church: men rule, women serve. This view is based on Genesis, which says, “But for Adam no suitable helper was found [from the animal kingdom].” So, Eve was created to be his helper and baby generator. This view of women as one-dimensional creatures one step above animal companions is the view of Old Testament Christianity.

Unlike Old Testament Christians such as Augustine, Jesus believed women were smart enough to be his disciples:

After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

These women participated in the work of Jesus and were more loyal to him than his male disciples: Judas betrayed him (Luke 22: 4-6), Peter denied him (Luke 22:58), and the entire group abandoned him (Mark 14:50). So why were women excluded by the Catholic Church? Because the Catholic Church was the creation of Old Testament Christianity that reflects the thinking of Augustine who, along with his intellectual mentor Apostle Paul, created the Old Testament Christianity that became the ideological framework of the Catholic Church.

Essentially, it became a religion that rejected the ethics-based religion created by Jesus that was compassionate, merciful, and benevolent, all illustrated by how he lived his life—helping and healing people in need. In that sense, there is a feminine (compassionate, nurturing, caregiving) quality to his philosophy of life, perhaps inherited from his glorious mother Mary and even his protective father Joseph—certainly not the God who abandoned him when he was dying on the cross, whereas “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25).

All three of the Abrahamic religion are masculine creations and are characterized by masculine aggression. Unlike what Plato had in mind for women, the role of women in these religions is passive. Apostle Paul, founder of Christianity explains the Christian role of women, which is essentially passivity and silence:

“As in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14:33–35). When it comes to women, Paul sums up the view of women in masculine Christianity. This view toward women is expressed in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, where God denies the first woman, Eve, the pursuit of knowledge. Paul echoes that view by saying that if women want to inquire about something, they should ask their husbands at home. 

Hypatia

What happened to mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Hypatia illustrates the effect that masculine-centered Old Testament Christianity has had on the lives of real women. A fanatical Christian mob led by a church reader named Peter dragged Hypatia from her chariot. They stripped her and scraped her skin with sharp shells until she died. They then dismembered her body and burned it to ashes. That will teach women not to pursue knowledge as Plato and other pagan philosophers such as Pythagoras and Epicurus thought they should. Was this prevention of women from pursuing knowledge influenced by the story of Eve in Genesis and the teachings of Apostle Paul? Of course it was. Women in the Christian world would have to wait about eighteen centuries until the state separated itself from the Church and allowed women access to higher education (rather than just home economics). 

Ideologies: Wreckers of Worlds

Yes, each culture and its society is a lifeworld—in both senses of Husserl’s Lebenswelt and Wittgenstein’s lebensform since such worlds are created from language—discussed in the story). Somewhere in sands of the desert (Yeats) the first ideology was created—like Victor Frankenstein’s monster—and with it the first terrible totalitarianism was released upon the world. And since then, the consequences of ideologies of masculine aggression have been cultural destruction, oppression, and death.

Important here is that ideologies matter and usually in negative ways as both Jesus and Hypatia found out. Ideologies have destroyed cultures and societies that grew organically and replace them with artificial totalitarian monstrosities. This first occurred in Canaan, as described in the Old Testament, and then spread throughout the globe beginning with the cultural destruction of our Greco-Roman heritage as describe by Charles Freeman in The Closing of the Western Mind, and by Ramsay MacMullen in Christianizing the Roman Empire, and most famously by Catherine Nixey in The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, the world that was the birthplace of western civilization. Western Civilization was infected by an alien masculine ideology that grew out of resentment (explained by Nietzsche) and eventually was destroyed by it. And masculine ideologies would continue to destroy cultures and societies around the world by first destroying the minds of their citizens (usually by forced conversion). In a grotesque way, ideologies acquire greater power from what they destroy. With the conquest of the Roman Empire the Catholic Church became an all-powerful totalitarian institution that initiated the violently oppressive Dark Ages. 

The Glorious Feminine Presence of Classical Culture

This minority view of women by great philosophers might have caught on had it not been interrupted. The life and death of Hypatia illustrates what happened. And what Catherine Nixey describes is the destruction of the feminine in classical civilization—in part by defacing or destroy statues of female goddesses. In ancient Greece there were 67 female goddesses and female priestesses. Pythia was the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. She served as its oracle and was known as the Oracle of Delphi. Thus, the ancient pagan Greeks—like many other pagan cultures—venerated femininity. Why? Because as the yin-yang symbol expresses, reality has two sides—feminine and masculine—both of equal importance. The importance of the feminine-masculine yin-yang balance is illustrated in the novel. In the ancient classical world the protectors of nature were goddesses, unlike the masculine Yahweh who once destroys nature and uses nature’s plagues and fire and brimstone to destroy societies and kill humans (along with all the animals caught in the murder spree as when Yahweh uses plagues against Egypt in the book of Exodus). 

Books and Ideas Matter

The story reveals to the reader why ideas and books matter. They are sources of revelations and a bulwark against aggressive ideologies. My journey as a gypsy scholar—which lasted almost a decade—was motivated by the desire to read books and acquire ideas that would be left unread and unknown if I didn’t attend colleges. The journey began in California and took me to towns in New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado surrounded by the great outdoors. The places—wild lands and farm lands—mattered as much as did the books. As a high school teacher of literature, I learned that most students find reading to be a chore rather than a pleasure. I understand. I was once a teenager whose interests were girls, cars, and sports, not books. Also, I found that when teaching poems, plays, and novels, students took a greater interest if I could reveal ideas (philosophical, psychological, feminist, sociological, etc.) that they considered relevant to their lives.

The advantage of my book over Will Durant’s very readable The Story of Philosophy is that my book is a story, not a textbook. The ideas and books are interwoven with a meaningful narrative. Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World was perhaps first to offer a narrative introduction to philosophy, but his story seems geared to a younger audience and is more playful. There is no rape, abortion, attempted suicide, cancer, or death. The Girl and the Philosopher is a drama about a young woman just out of college who leaves home because of her mother’s malicious revelation that unknowingly Christine had fallen romantically in love with her half-sister. The result was Christine’s life fell apart. In addition, her life and the lives of the other characters reveal the relevance to everyday life of the ideas and books discussed.

The Felt Meaning of Ideas

Ideas matter beyond their rational content. A goal of The Girl and the Philosopher is to explore their felt meaning along with their rational meaning. Ideas can be sublimely meaningful but also terrifying. They can cause happiness, anxiety, and dread. Works of art—literature, painting, sculpture, and film—do a wonderful job of expressing those aspects of ideas. One only has to compare the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir with that of Edvard Munch. Both artists describe the yin-yang sides of reality. But for most audiences, readers, and spectators ideas must be philosophically revealed to bring to light the deeper meaning of the work of art. The reality expressed by the second law of thermodynamics (discussed in the story) is rationally true but emotionally disturbing. On the other hand, Alfred North Whitehead tells us that our senses give the rose its scent, the bird its song, and the sun its radiance, all the qualities that we so admire. That makes us and our relationship to the world really amazing (this too discussed in the story). Christine has always found the world mysterious and amazing, which is the reason she became an artist. Yet, until she met the philosopher, she didn’t understand rationally why she felt that way.

Ethics and Marginalized Populations

Ethics are an important theme in the story. Christine was raped and sent to the mountain hideaway to live with her half-sister Ruth and her father, an artist who had brief affair with Christine’s mother. Only the mother knew that Ruth’s father was also Christine’s father. During the years of exploring the wilds of nature together, Ruth and Christine became playful lovers. Resenting the joy Christine expressed at the prospect of escaping to that mountain hideaway to be with her half-sister, Christine’s mother maliciously revealed to Christine that Ruth’s father was also her father and Ruth was her half-sister. Devastated by that revelation, Christine fled to San Diego, where after a time she falls in love with a nurse named Candice.

Feeling guilty about her relationships with these two women, she goes to the fisherman philosopher, Mr. Rieneau, to confess that she is feeling guilty about her relationship with Candice and wants to know whether or not the relationship is immoral. Old Testament ethics would have male homosexuals put to death (Leviticus 20:13), so one can assume the same rule applies to women given what the Old Testament says about adultery: “If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, even with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and adulteress must be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10). Mr. Rieneau introduces Christine to Immanuel Kant’s principle of autonomy, the foundational principle of rational morality. It is a simple yet profoundly important principle. Combined with Jesus’ altruism and Buddha’s desire to minimize suffering, it offers a recipe for a moral utopia. It says that people’s autonomy is to be respected and that violating a person’s autonomy is immoral or unethical. Most crimes (robbery, assault, rape, etc.) violate the autonomy of their victims. Key here is that ethics prohibit one person from violating another person’s autonomy against the will of that person. The benefit of the principle is twofold: it prevents suffering and harm and maintains social harmony by minimizing conflict.  The principle of autonomy is not violated by two people who voluntarily enter into a relationship. Mr. Rieneau adds that relationships motivated by mutual love should be encouraged rather than prohibited.

In addition, prohibiting sexual orientation or sexual identity also violates a person’s autonomy. Kant believed that because humans are rational they, unlike animals, have the ability to decide how to live thus they—not others—should be allowed to decide their way of life and to decide how to live their lives. And because they naturally have rational ability, to deny its expression is to violate who they are as rational beings. In other words, people’s lives shouldn’t be interfered with as long as they don’t interfere with other people’s lives. Would Kant have agreed to same-sex marriage? Living in the 18^th century, probably not. Nevertheless, the logic of his principle of autonomy says that preventing two women or two men from marrying would not only violate their autonomy and by doing so would also cause them suffering. Thus, to do so would violate two moral principles. This is where Mr. Rieneau brings in Buddha’s ethical view that humans should minimize causing suffering (even for non-human creatures).

In this context, he also refers to Plato’s view that humans have the ability to realize themselves physically, emotionally, and intellectually (Plato’s tripart soul). And Mr. Rieneau refers to Sartre’s existentialism to explain that humans are unique in that again unlike animals they come into the world as pure potentiality and must decide how they will realize their potential. (As noted in the story, slaves are prevented from self-realization, i.e., realizing their potential, thus are haunted by the nothingness of not being the person they want to be.) And as Plato illustrates, the possibilities for self-realization are infinite because the intellect, body, and emotions can be realized in unlimited ways and even interwoven. (Discussed in the story.) In the Old Testament God tells Eve that she cannot acquire knowledge. Thus, the masculine God interferes with her intellectual self-realization and by doing so violates not only her autonomy but her humanity. Fortunately, Satan comes along and tells her to ignore the divine masculine bully and go for the brain boost.

What is amazing about ethics is that their application and efficacy are very simple if only respected. Situations are complicated by men who demand to decide how other people should live, such as the writers of the Old Testament who claimed homosexuals should be executed and women should not engage in acquiring knowledge, men such as Apostle Paul who says, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35). This is a society based a masculine ideology that excludes the wisdom of feminine voices, something history has proven to be drastically needed to counter the cruel, oppressive, and hateful tendencies of masculine aggression.

And then there is Paul’s support of slavery: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord” (Colossians 3:22). (Discussed in the story.) Clearly, slavery is a violation of Kant’s principle of autonomy that imposes restraints on masculine aggression, but men who place an ideology that represents and benefits them above the welfare of humans don’t care. And let’s be clear that in the book of Genesis the masculine God seeks to make a slave of the feminine by keeping women in a state of obedient ignorance.

About the opinions of the Bible, the old philosopher says they can be ignored for three reasons. First, there is no logical or empirical evidence that their claims about God and other supernatural elements are true. In other words, there is no evidence that God exists, and the Bible is full of claims for which there is no extra-biblical evidence. For example, meticulous Egyptian historians make no mention of the biblical exodus. The Bible is mostly a self-serving speculation composed by men who knew nothing of art, philosophy, science, or history—and rejected other religions morally superior to Judaism (not all religious myths are hateful), though their supernatural claims are also false. Second, even if God existed, there is no reason to believe the writers of the Bible knew anything about God’s plan for humanity or even if such a plan existed. It’s been over 3000 years since God spoke to a human being, supposedly Moses. It’s been 2000 years since Christ-God promised to return to the generation of his day. Third, the most immoral character in the Bible is God. He flooded the world killing all life but a boatload, destroyed cities, hated everyone but his followers and often hated them as well, and encouraged wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide—which his people continue today. Therefore, he must be disqualified as a moral authority.

Reevaluation of Beliefs and Values

It’s time for a reset of beliefs and values in the U.S., presently under the rule of Donald Trump—king of toxic masculinity—and his MAGA court of self-serving fools. Reset means to adjust again after an initial failure. Since my birth during World War II, America has spent more time fighting wars than living in peace. I lived during Civil Rights Movement and the hippy celebration of life. I was optimistic then. No longer. Today, America has started one war and threatens more, the government is a racist autocracy, in the world’s wealthiest nation the poor, sick, desperate, and abandoned are denied relief, and hatred divides the nation. (I want to believe good people are still in the majority, but I’m not sure.) The American experiment has failed. Its democracy has been compromised by aggressive masculinity. Perhaps not surprising given the nation began with slavery, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, unbridled greed, destructive exploitation of nature, and vicious racism. The invaders were Old Testament Christians like the MAGA cult who ignored Jesus’s rejection of Old Testament theology and his desire to create a humane society based on altruistic ethics. Like today, the settlers had wise men and women, but they were ignored. Today though, many simply remain silent.

This reevaluation offered in The Girl and the Philosopher is not based on my opinions but on the thinking of artists, philosophers, scientists, historians and religious philosophers such as Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Bodhidharma (founder of Zen Buddhism). In a sense, the book does what philosopher Edmund Husserl suggests doing: suspending (bracketing) judgments and beliefs in order to rebuild a new worldview based on facts that are logically and empirically verifiable. Not all unverifiable ideas should be rejected, such aesthetics, ethical, and other value judgments if they are unharmful, meaningful, and beneficial. The Good Samaritan altruistic principle is logically unproveable yet is a beneficial ethical ideal. Nevertheless, their epistemological (truth value) status must be judged and evaluated. (Discussed in the story.) For example, condemnation and hatred of a people because of their color, race, or ethnicity is based on emotion and false value judgments. The only difference between black cats and white cats is color. The character of people is determined not by color but by culture. Russians, Israelis, and Americans can be condemned and hated for starting wars and committing acts of mass murder, but such condemnation and hatred are based on actions, not race or ethnicity. Following Buddha and Lao Tzu, beliefs that cause suffering and disharmony should be rejected as toxic, that is, unnecessarily causing suffering and disorder.

Below are topics discussed in the story and some of the books used to develop topics related to art, philosophy, science, history and religion. Many are mentioned in novel. The Girl and the Philosopher interweaves life, books, and ideas: 

Topics and Books

A History of Greek Religion—Martin Nilsson

Jesus, Interrupted—Bart Ehrman

Jesus before the Gospels—Ehrman

Who Wrote the Bible? —Richard Friedman

The Jesus Myth—G.A. Wells

The Historical Figure of Jesus—E.P. Sanders

The Rise of Christianity—W.H.C. Frend

The Making of the Messiah—Robert Sheaffer

Jesus: A Life—A.N. Wilson

Paul and Jesus—James Tabor

Natural Theology—William Paley

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World—Catherine Nixey

Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age— Antonia Tripolitis

The Harvest of Hellenism—F.E. Peters

Gibbon on Christianity—Edward Gibbon

The Incoherence of the Philosophers—al-Ghazali: 

Books referred to in the discussions of Eastern philosophy

 Zen Buddhism—D.T. Suzuki

Basho and His Interpreters—Makoto Ueda

Oriental Philosophies—John Koller

Tao Te Ching—Lao Tzu

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches—Matsuo Basho

Christmas Humphreys Zen Buddhism

Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen: An Introduction to their Meaning and their Arts—Nancy Wilson Ross

Books referred to in the discussions of Islam

The Quran—Muhammad

Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman—Montgomery Watt

Islam—Alfred Guillaume

Muhammad and the Origins of Islam—F.E. Peters 

Books referred to in the discussions of science

The Universe: A Biography—John Gribbin

Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science—John Gribbin

Atom in the History of human Thought—Bernard Pullman

The Ascent of Science—Brian Silver

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics—Carlo Rovelli.

A brief History of Time—Stephen Hawking

The Universe in a Nutshell– Stephen Hawking

Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle – G. E. R. Lloyd

 A Universe from Nothing—Lawrence Krauss

Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos—Eric Chaisson

The Cosmic Landscape—Leonard Susskind

The Essence of Chaos—Edward Lorenz

In the Wake of Chaos—Stephen Kellert

Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable—James Gleick

Chaos: Making a New Science – James Gleick 

Topics, Quotations, and Books Addressed in The Girl and the Philosopher:

Philosophy & Science

Ethics

Logic

Induction

Deduction

Philosophy of Language

Ontology, Cosmology, and Metaphysics

Epistemology

Philosophy of Language

Aesthetics

Pierre-Simon Laplace: nebular hypothesis of the formation of the Solar System

Evolution of the Universe

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Feminism

Chaos Theory

 Nihilism 

Philosophers

Thales

Democritus

Thrasymachus

Anaximander

Anaximenes

Heraclitus

Empedocles

Anaxagoras

Philip Wheelwright: The Presocratics

Philo of Alexandria

Plato

Aristotle

Stoics

Epicurus

Ockham

Blaise Pascal: Pensées

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the sublime)

Edmund Burke: Sublime and Beautiful

Thomas Hobbes

Francis Bacon

John Locke: tabula rasa

David Hume

Machiavelli

René Descartes: Méditations

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Emerson

Thoreau

John Stuart Mill: The Subjection of Women

Epicureanism

Transcendentalism

Romanticism

Existentialism

Nihilism

Phenomenology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Edmund Husserl

Martin Heidegger

Arthur Schopenhauer

Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism is a Humanism and What Is Literature?

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals, The Antichrist, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

G.W. Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of History, Early Theological Writings

Henri Bergson

Alfred North Whitehead

D.T. Suzuki

Abraham Kaplan: The New World of Philosophy

Carolyn Merchant: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution 

Psychology

Sigmund Freud

Id, Ego, Superego, sublimation, displacement, defense mechanism

Carl Jung: anima and animus

William James: tender-minded versus tough-minded.

Cognitive Psychology

Erich Fromm: Having & Being Modes of Existence

Escape from Freedom

Authoritarian Personality

Karen Horney: Real self and ideal self

David Riesman: The lonely crowd

Harry Harlow: Consequences of maternal separation and isolation

Victor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death

Socially constructed reality (John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, 1995.)

Religion

Old Testament

New Testament

Judaism

Book of Ruth

Ecclesiastes

Christianity

Islam

Zoroastrianism

Manicheanism

Gnosticism

Buddhism

Zen Buddhism

Taoism

Transcendentalism

Jesus, teacher spiritual ethics (contra supernatural Christ)

Apostle Paul

Augustine of Hippo

Puritan John Cotton

Reinhold Niebuhr: Serenity Prayer

Buddha

Lao Tzu

Freud: Moses and Monotheism

Rudolph Otto: mysterium tremendum

Gilbert Murray: Five Stages of Greek Religion

James Frazer:

Paul Tillich

Rudolf Bultmann

Karl Barth

Karl Jaspers

Gabriel Marcel

Friedrich Schleiermacher: Philosophy of Religion 

Science Books

Victor Weisskopf: Knowledge and Wonder by

Thomas S. Kuhn: The Copernican Revolution, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

E.A. Burtt: The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science

Bertrand Russell: The Scientific Outlook

Stephen Toulmin: Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle

Stephen Mason: A History of the Sciences 

Fiction

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Charles Perrault: Little Red Riding Hood

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park

Charles Dickens: Hard Times

Upton Sinclair: The Jungle

E.M. Forster: A Passage to India

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine

James Hilton: Lost Horizon

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Stephen Crane: The Open Boat

Jack London: To Build a Fire

James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers

A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, The Maypole at Merry Mount

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

Willa Cather: O Pioneers! & The Professor's House

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Emile Zola: La Bête Humaine

Nathalie Sarraute: Tropismes

Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie

Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men

Frank Norris: The Octopus

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Edward Abbey: The Brave Cowboy

Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev: Smoke, Fathers and Sons

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

Franz Kafka: The Trial and The Castle

André Malraux: La Condition Humaine, Les Voix du Silence

Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

John Fowles: The Collector

Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Noble Red Man, Mysterious Stranger

Voltaire: Candide

Albert Camus: The Plague 

Playrights

Sophocles: King Oedipus

Euripides: The Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Bacchae

Shakespeare: Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, The Tempest

Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus 

Nonfiction

Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire

Ernest Renan: The Life of Jesus

Charles Freeman: Closing of the Western Mind,

    A New History of Early Christianity

Theodora Kroeber: Yahi Indian titled Ishi, Last of His Tribe

Will Durant: Story of Civilization

Martin Hengel: Jews, Greeks and Barbarians

C.M. Bowra: The Greek Experience, Primitive Song

Edith Hamilton: The Greek Way

Werner Jaeger: Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture

Mr. & Mrs. Frankfort: Before Philosophy

Lev Vygotsky: Thought and Language

Benjamin Whorf: Language, Thought, and Reality

Mary Austin: The Land of Little Rain

Frederick Douglass: “Self-Made Men”

Susan Fenimore Cooper: Rural Hours

Michael Novak: The Experience of Nothingness

Joseph Wood Krutch: The Modern Temper

Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Jack Kerouac: Lonesome Traveler, Vanity o Duluoz

Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West

Richard Drinnon: Facing West:

    The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building

Langdon Winner: Autonomous Technology

Ted Trainer: Abandon Affluence!

Vernon Parrington: Main Currents in American Thought

John Muir: My First Summer in the Sierra

Lloyd Goodrich: Winslow Homer 

Native Americans

Howard Russell: Indian New England before the Mayflower

Vernon Kinietz: The Indians of the Western Great Lakes 1615-1760

Gene Weltfish (woman author): The Lost Universe. Pawnee Life and Culture

Ella Cara Deloria: Waterlily

Frank Waters: The Man Who Killed the Deer

Oliver La Farge: Laughing Boy

Ruth Underhill: Red Man’s America 

Poetry

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Beowulf

Homer: Iliad and Odyssey

Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

Virgil: Eclogues and Georgics

Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

William Blake, various

William Wordsworth: “The Solitary Reaper,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar”

Percy Shelley

John Keats: La Belle Dame san Merci

Lord Byron: “The Dying Gladiator”

Robert Burns: “To a mouse”

Goethe: Faust

Friedrich Schiller: The Gods of Greece (stanza)

Thomas Hardy: “The Bedridden Peasant to an Unknown God.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The Æolian Harp,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam

Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach,” “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,”

    “The Buried Life”

Alexander Pope’s poem Essay on Man

William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming”

William Cullen Bryant: “Forest Hymn,” “Prairies”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Emily Dickinson: “A bird came down the walk”

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass 

Painters

Hudson River School

Paul Gauguin

Édouard Manet

Claude Monet

Paul Cézanne

Berthe Morisot

Puvis de Chavannes

Jules Eugène Lenepveu

Leonardo da Vinci

Raphael

Botticelli

Michelangelo

Nicolas Poussin

Caravaggio

Caspar David Friedrich

Edvard Munch

Francis Bacon

Caspar Friedrich

Salvador Dali

Alberto Giacometti

George Catlin

John Mix Stanley

Seth Eastman

Thomas Cole

George Caleb Bingham

John Singer Sargent

Frank Benson

Mary Stevenson Cassatt

Elizabeth Nourse

Albert Bierstadt

Frederic Remington

Georgia O’Keeffe

Winslow Homer

Edward Hopper

Stephen Lowry

Renoir

Cezanne

Claude Monet

Van Gogh

Picasso 

Photographers

Edward Curtis

Andreas Feininger 

Movies

Our Town

Lost Horizon

My Darling Clementine

Shane

On the Waterfront

War of the Worlds (1953)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Koyaanisqatsi

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Friedrich Murnau: Faust 

Declaration of Independence from Toxic Masculinity

Toxic masculinity expressed in the Old Testament: “In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them. Put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.” (Deuteronomy) And who are their enemies? People who believe differently and are therefore hated by the biblical God who is a projection of his creators.

Because the world has been a horrific place under the influence of masculine aggression and its ideologies that threaten doom in the near future, perhaps it’s time to allow greater influence from the feminine worldview. For this to be accomplish as many women as possible must become philosophers with their own philosophical worldview. And they will need masculine allies like the historical Jesus who was wise and brave and willing to die to promote his life-respecting way of life. Evil men driven by their ideology of repressive intolerance killed him. Ignoring the wisdom of his wife, Pontius Pilate kowtow to the mob representing masculine aggression and its first ideology. Now is time to listen to the wisdom of the feminine worldview.

The Purpose of Philosophy

There is no single purpose, but its overall purpose is to keep us intellectually honest. Philosophy has many uses—two of which are the evaluation of truth claim (epistemology) and the determination of the moral status of actions (morality). Philosophy is the only discipline capable of dealing with moral issues. Allowing religion to do so has been disastrous for humanity.  And by the way, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism are useful to moral investigations and judgments, but only as philosophies. Because of unleased toxic masculinity, today intellectual mayhem rules in the U.S. White House and in the Republican Congress and Senate. The voices of intelligent women trained in philosophy are needed now more than ever to stem the deluge of toxic masculinity—not only in the U.S. but in other nations as well. We need the voices of young women, including those in high school and college. It is time for women to accept the mantle of responsibility as Lysistrata does when toxic men bring destruction down upon not only themselves but upon women and children and their society.

In The Girl and the Philosopher are good men, bad men, and one evil man. The ideal men who serve as allies to Christine are her two fathers, her brother, a young man who befriends her when she needed a friend most, the old bibliophile Mr. Sage who befriends her and guides her budding interest in books, and the old fisherman philosopher who cherish her company and curiosity.

I am an American expatriate who has lived for 12 years with my wife Brigitte on the side of a mountain in French Alps. 

Print length: ‎ 1012 pages

Item weight: ‎ 1.72 kg