Chapter 5/6

Let’s look at a particular case. Lisa has lived all her life in Grass Valley, California, a small town in the heart of the Gold Rush country. Her father is a carpenter, her mother a clerk in Lew Howard’s Drugstore. Lisa is the youngest of eight children. Her eldest sister has children Lisa’s age. She is the only one in the family to have attended college. She is the most devoutly religious. She is twenty years old.

Tim had lived in eight towns all over Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, before going to college. He got his entire high school education from Andy Dekaney High School in Houston, where his father was a petroleum engineer and his mother was a traditional, stay-at-home mom. He has two younger brothers that he has little in common with, except they share the same parents. The family is Presbyterian. Tim lived with Sharly for two years before she left him for another guy. He dated very little for the next year, then began seeing Lisa. He is twenty-five. They met at Oklahoma State University where both were enrolled: she as a sophomore music major, he as a second-year senior marketing major. They have been engaged for a little over a year.

How many different thesis-antithesis-synthesis triads could you make of this? I hope they have spent a good bit of their time together this past year thinking about it, talking about it. For instance, take only one small tension they must deal with. She has two brothers and five sisters, all older and with less education. If she is the thesis, they have been the antitheses, and she now brings to marriage whatever synthesis has been made of that. He is the eldest of three brothers. He has never paid them much attention, while, unbeknownst to him, they have looked on him as their hero. He the thesis, they the antitheses, and he brings to marriage whatever family synthesis this has led to.

The Hegelian dialectic says that all reality exists in this triadic relationship; all history develops dialectically, and, therefore, if we are to be in touch with reality, we must think dialectically—thesis, its antitheses, and the multifarious syntheses possible. Life is complex.

The easiest way to simplify it is to embed “but on the other hand” in our minds. Then be alert and attentive to how much lead time we have before decision must be reached.

Donna was a cut above everyone else in my high school graduating class. We were always a bit in awe of her. She was the smartest and most sophisticated, wealthy and good-looking. Art was the playboy of our class, highly sophisticated, wealthy, handsome, and suave. They married within a year after graduation.
I knew the lady who was their housekeeper. She knew what their marriage was like. And she told me. Donna was often out of the public eye for months at a time, recovering from beatings, waiting for bruises to disappear, and afraid to talk with anyone. She had learned that Art was a heavy-drinking, very abusive man. She took it for three years before putting a bullet through her head.

How did this come about? She was the smartest in our class. Always prepared, always knew the answers, intensely involved, she was loved by all our teachers. Where were her smarts when she said yes to Art Hall? Always thoroughly prepared for classes, why did she not know what she was getting into in this marriage?
My best guess is that, perhaps like most of us, once she “fell in love,” her mind took a vacation. Ordinarily, we give little thought to what marriage involves and what marriage to this particular person entails. We are sure that love will work it all out. Not many take the route of killing either themselves or their spouse, but we are well aware of the numbers who find themselves in miserable and failed marriages.


Herbert and Margaret were the classic high school marriage: a big football hero and the smartest girl in the class. She was committed “until death do us part,” so she stayed with him through all his shady and crooked business dealings. She stayed while he spent a year in prison. Never a happy marriage, but she stayed with him.
When they were in their middle-sixties, they bought an elegant new home. The next year, they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. Less than a year later, he moved out and rented an apartment across town. Margaret learned of it when she came home from work to an empty house.

Then came the divorce.
(Not long afterward, to the surprise of all of us, she went on a date to Las Vegas with an old man she had just met, and soon they were married.)


After dating Bobby Lee for her first three years of college, Charlene took a philosophy course where I taught the main ideas that I’m presenting in this book. By the middle of November, she had reconsidered a lot of things about marriage, herself, and Bobby Lee. They had been engaged for six months when she came and told me that the course had taught her how to think, and that it led her to realize marriage to Bobby Lee would be a horrible mistake. I didn’t probe, and she didn’t tell me the particulars.

She had put the academic idea of the Dialectic to work, and thought better of the status of her love life. When you learn how to think, and, rather than following others, think for yourself, your life will begin changing, sometimes dramatically.

(Seven years ago, she married a medical student. They now have a handful with three boys, and a new medical practice; the marriage looks good, and they seem happy.)

Don’t get serious about dating anyone without stopping for a dialectical checkup. Don’t even think about marrying, until you have given it a dialectical test. Sex, as prominent, important, and fun as it is, cannot be the main consideration. Trust and reliability should be the foremost considerations. Run as soon as you discover a hot temper—it won’t change, it will only get worse. Finances and in-laws are ignored at great cost. Think like an octopus. There are, always, many other hands to consider.

Chapter 5/5

Marriage

Her family had lived on the border of poverty all her nineteen years. Frequently, they crossed that border. One day, frustrated from being told again there was no money for a movie, she said, “When I get married, I’m going to marry a rich man.”

Her father’s immediate response, “You’d better marry someone you love.”

“Well, it’s as easy to love a rich man as to love a poor man.”

We marry because we believe there is something to be gained: wealth, prestige, acceptance, stability, power, or whatever else we feel is lacking in our life. We believe marriage can fill that need. Most of us, however, unthinkingly hope to marry the handsome fellow or the beautiful girl with an attractive figure.

My wife once said she married me for my beautiful hair, my beautiful eyes, and my intelligent mind. My hair has long since been gone, and we were married less than four years before she had to see my eyes through the lenses of glasses. I hope I don’t lose my mind. We had our first date sixty years ago, and I would hate to lose her after all this time.

Ideally, we marry for that vague thing called love. Often this indefinable experience, falling in love, overrides all other intentions, hopes, and dreams.

Where does thought come into the picture? Is choosing a marital partner to be given deliberate consideration, or would that remove the romance and reduce the relationship to careful calculation? The philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the handful of greatest thinkers in history, was once in love, but he realized there were many considerations to be reflected upon. Choosing the idea of marriage as the thesis of his deliberations, he realized the enormity of antitheses, the tensions they raised, and the possible syntheses they might lead to.

On one hand, we should use all the time we have available to think things through before making serious decisions. On the other hand, there are occasions when our time is limited. Sometimes we must decide now or never. Sometimes it is dangerous to wait. Kant did not realize that a prospective bride might grow impatient. Before he had time to consider all that is—or might be—involved in marriage, he learned that she had given up and married someone else. He never married.

Anyone contemplating marriage in the twenty-first century should give some thought to the odds against successful marriage, at least in the United States. When marriage is on your mind, divorce is the most obvious antithesis. Any clear-thinking person must realize the enormous tensions that can develop between the idea of marriage and the potential for divorce, or between the fact of marriage and the possibility of divorce. Being “in love,” while it might be an essential element of a good marriage, provides little assurance of enduring marital stability. Something to think about.
I’ve said that the Hegelian dialectic can be understood simply as the movement from thesis and antithesis to synthesis. I also said that we would need to look beyond this simple pattern into the complexities Hegel had in mind. According to Hegel, we could take our stance anywhere, thus, even an antithesis could be taken as a thesis of its own. The synthesis always becomes a new thesis. Whatever our original thesis, we will find that it is the antithesis to other theses. Each thesis has multiple antitheses and each thesis/antithesis may lead to any number of potential syntheses.

How might this work out when marriage is being considered? Marriage is going to be the synthesis of a male and a female. Ordinarily, however, little thought is given to the obvious: he will think like a man, she like a woman. And men and women are different. This tension will increase across time, being reconciled only as a succession of syntheses are reached.

Chapter 5/4

Getting married made me a better thinker. I am a man and men need to hear from women if they are to complete their thoughts, and if they are to clarify what they think. That is one reason I married. That way I always have a woman handy to serve as my antithesis, my complement—the yin to my yang.

Without dialogue I cannot become a whole person. If in the home we don’t share our inner lives, we remain family, but are familiar with each other only in a limited sense. Without the exchange of ideas, plans, hopes, and fears, we never live in community on this earth. Our pain, our emptiness, and our horrors are, in large measure, rooted in our lack of dialogue. It is a historical commonplace that the declaration of war is immediately preceded by the announcement that “talks have broken off.” They usually have broken down because the negotiation between diplomats is, too often, an exchange of reciprocal monologues. Each tries to convince the other side, but neither seeks to hear and understand the other’s heritage, position, predicament, or philosophy.

However, we are stuck with each other. Our radical individualism and egoism cannot eliminate all the others—people, nature, and God—linked with our life. The twentieth-century French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre argued that “hell is other people,” but he also tells us there is NO EXIT from this world of others. We are inescapably social, made for relationship, and directly linked with the natural order. If we fail to take others into account, we risk denying our humanity and destroying hope for a human and global future. Because everything is ultimately connected and interrelated in one great ecosystem, we must acknowledge otherness, listen and respond to it, and work toward a more satisfying harmony of all its parts, including the part that is our self. Apart from dialogue, we are doomed.
On the other hand, we have available a method of thinking and living that can clear the way to a more promising, satisfying, and humane future. That method is the Dialectic.

Chapter 5/3

Daddy died in 1997. The night before the funeral—at which I was to be the speaker—I stood beside his open casket looking into that face I had known for sixty-three years and cried in lonely anger for the years of opportunity lost to both of us. So few were the hours we ever listened to each other. Precious as those times were, they never began to fill the void that I felt in my relationship to a man who, for nearly forty years, was one of the most loved and respected humans ever known in Blackwell, Oklahoma and Gainesville, Texas. He was a truly great man and, in my confusion and anger, I still was able to speak appreciatively of him to the hundreds who came to the funeral. But I miss him, and not just now; I always did.

Was he afraid? Was he afraid of what he might hear if he listened? Was he afraid that if he revealed much of himself I would lose some degree of respect? There were a few times late at night, after I was an adult, when he hinted at a self-image that he dared not acknowledge. He told me, once, that he wore the stern face and used the no-nonsense voice to ward off any attempt to penetrate his defenses.

Isn’t that the all-too-common human story, at least in the United States? We are afraid to let conversation move much deeper than a recitation of socially accepted pattern of speech. There is a certain reciprocity, but not much, in our exchanges about how we feel, what we think of the weather, the economy, our favorite TV show, or our favorite ball team. I suspect that sports and gossip bring us closest to anything that resembles true dialogue. Beyond that we guard ourselves, and continue to inhabit a silent loneliness.

Mother was different. She was a patient listener—usually. I could talk with Mother about anything—and at length—and did so for over three-quarters of a century. In her presence I could express myself knowing that I was not likely to be squelched. I could dream dreams that had no possibility of being realized in the real world. So I felt much closer to Mother than to Daddy. On the other hand, Mother mostly listened. She never said much, told me little of what she thought about my words, and gave little advice and few instructions. Except on one or two subjects—bird-watching was one—she rarely revealed many of her own thoughts, feelings, or dreams (I’ve often wondered what they were). She listened to my monologues, knowing that listening, all by itself, is good for the human soul and some of the best therapy possible.

So I was raised in a home that knew little dialogue. It was a family with three brothers, who each went his own way, only occasionally acknowledging the existence of the others. I doubt that we were an unusual American family. And other societies would doubtless recognize this experience.

I don’t know how well this describes the homes in which Mother and Daddy themselves grew up, but I have heard enough from cousins and other family members to believe my parents’ homes were much like mine, and that the pattern could be traced back for at least a generation or two. And I fear that my own daughters might see this as a description of their father and their own experience. (My wife was a different kind of mother to our children. She and our daughters dialogued; they connected, not always in the best way, but they got involved in trying to know and be known. This remains true, and continues with our grandchildren. Because of her, we are a close-knit family. Her family was much the same, and I’m sure other such families exist.)

Somehow we don’t take time for each other; we don’t listen to those nearest to us. We are family, that is, we are familiar with each other, but don’t know each other. And, thus, we don’t know ourselves. Without the opportunity to learn what others feel and think, we don’t understand clearly our own inner life. Without sharing our thoughts and feelings with someone else, our own self-perception remains out of focus. We can know ourselves only in dialogue with others.