What happens when an ideology offers certainty at the cost of reality?

In Part 4.2 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher and the danger of replacing lived experience with a ready-made system of belief.

Abigail returns to her relationship in Paris, where even love could become formulaic when experience was filtered through ideology.

She and Jerry also revisit Suzanne, whose confidence, social insight, and apparent freedom once seemed to offer Abigail another way of moving through the world.

Suzanne had an unusual ability to read power and social hierarchy. Abigail now connects that ability less with spiritual insight than with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic - the capacity to see the hidden supports beneath authority and privilege.

That insight did not make Suzanne’s worldview harmless.

Abigail describes how ordinary experience could be pushed aside, while disagreement or resistance became evidence of moral or spiritual failure.

The conversation turns to brainwashing, moral condemnation, social isolation, and the pressure to distrust one’s own perceptions.

For Abigail and Jerry, the danger of ideology is not simply that it can be false.

It can become so complete that reality itself no longer gets the final word.

When Ideology Replaces Reality examines what is lost when certainty replaces experience, and what it takes to recover an honest relation to the world.

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Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.