terminals and railway stations. I was as alone and desperate as it was possible to be. My world was in ruins. In time, I would rebuild on new foundations. But between the collapse of one worldview and the construction of another, there was only an abyss. I often wonder where I found the strength to endure that emptiness. Maybe it was simple curiosity, a need to know: If the world was not as I had thought it was, what was it? Or perhaps it was sheer animal survival, the sort of natural evolutionary striving that brought our species up from the primal mud and the dark. Whatever it was that got me to the turning point, I did begin to find my way through a long dark tunnel, into a most intricate labyrinth. Eventually I discerned a shaft of light, which I followed to the point where I could stop stumbling in the darkness and see some kind of road ahead.
Philosophy, purged of theology, became the driving force of my life. In a way I lived through the history of philosophy in my own mind, emerging from the Middle Ages into the modern era and coming in a rush to the conflicting voices of my own time. It was exhilarating, but rigorously demanding and sometimes frightening. There were no shortcuts between the dissolution of a complete worldview and the emergence of a well-grounded alternative. A long and winding road stretched between what was lost and what was yet to be found. I was living a life of unexpected risk, of heightened responsibility, but also of new freedom. Prometheus defying the gods and seizing fire, Sisyphus negating the gods and raising rocks, Zarathustra proclaiming the death of God and the transcendence of man, Atlas, proud and unyielding, sustaining alone the world he had fashioned—these were the most powerful images illuminating the darkness and pointing beyond it. The rebellion, the higher fidelity, the transvaluation of values, the free man’s worship—these were some of the crucial concepts in adjusting to a universe without a master and affirming it as neither sterile nor futile. But learning to say yes to life by searching for the meaning of life in life itself was only a beginning, an orientation. It was not enough.
Existentialism carried me through the transition to the point of taking up the challenges of my own times once again, this time more rooted in concrete experience and aware of the open-ended and precarious character of human existence. However, it had too many lacunae for me to build anything more solid on it. Its emphasis on the individual alone with his fate addressed my own isolation and alienation, but it did not do justice to the sociohistorical context of human existence (or even of the experience of isolation and alienation). Its tendency to undervalue the rational and to reject systematizing thought was a necessary counterbalance to past systems, but it could not form the basis of a new synthesis.
Nothing less than such a synthesis would do. I could not live without a comprehensive picture of the world in which I was living, without seeing my story within a larger story. Even as a child, I struggled to see things whole. I sought to grasp the totality, and could not settle for anything less. Catholicism, a ready-made totality, had nurtured this in me. The intellectual comprehensiveness and ritual grandeur of pre–Vatican II Catholicism had shaped my world. Even when the bottom fell out of it and I could no longer believe in it, leaving me raw, rootless, and roaming a world that felt like a wasteland, it nevertheless left a taste for totality I could not shake, no matter how well I subsequently learned to live without the whole supernatural dimension. Indeed, I believed that I should not shake it. It was an urge too basic to depend on the validity of one particular way of seeing the totality. I acknowledge this debt to Catholicism, however radical my rejection of nearly everything else about it. It inculcated a belief in having a comprehensive worldview and a demand for total commitment to the values flowing from it, which has stood me in good stead, even if it has been turned to purposes the Church never intended. I know all the arguments against this made by positivists, neo-positivists, existentialists, postmodernists, all the sneers about changing one religion for another, but I stand by it. It was not as if I simply took another totality off the shelf. I knew what I was leaving behind, but I did not yet know what I would find ahead.
On a practical level, I had to get a job and a place to live. At first, I found work in a downtown department store as a credit interviewer. I was to ask prospective customers a list of questions, and if certain boxes could be ticked, I could authorize credit. If the boxes could not be ticked, I had to deny it. For borderline cases, I had to consult the credit manager, who would glance out of his office to see who was standing at my hatch. I began to see a pattern. White customers were approved and black ones denied. Once I was sure of it, I confronted him, and was promptly fired. Then I had to get another job, although it was getting difficult now, having been fired twice in a matter of months. Next I worked for a market research company, doing telephone interviews about how certain advertising campaigns were received by the public. It was an intensely repressive environment. Everything was heavily monitored; even every trip to the lavatory was counted and timed. Meanwhile, I got a roof over my head. A classmate from St. Joe’s, a Filipino, took me in, and I slept on her floor for a few weeks. She and her friends introduced me to the New York nightclub scene. It wasn’t really for me, but I wanted to experience what I was rejecting as well as what I was embracing. As soon as I could afford it, I got an apartment of my own.
Life was hard. I completed three years of university in two years, while also working full-time at jobs I hated and traveling long distances on public transport. I studied every possible minute I could. My teachers saw how I was struggling and tried to help me. My literature teacher, John Mullen, suggested I quit my job at the market research firm and work for St. Joe’s. He arranged a scheme whereby I would be paid to grade assignments and exams, starting with his own freshman composition papers. Then Dave Marshall took me on to grade his logic papers. Several others in philosophy, literature, and education did likewise, and I earned enough from this to scrape by under far better conditions than in my other jobs. I even made up with my parents, though our relationship was still strained, and moved back home for a while to make ends meet.
Above all else was the quest for a new worldview. It did not come easily. At the center was the challenge of learning to live without God, to explain the natural world without recourse to supernatural forces. Religion was not the only force in my life being called into question. It was everything. Not only in my life, but also in the world around it, everything was changing. Everything was undergoing a radical reassessment. Gender was high on the list. Finally, I found a means of understanding my extreme unease about gender in a way that allowed me to feel whole. Like many others, I was struck by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and even wrote an article on the book for a college magazine. I questioned traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity. I objected to the life world of a woman confined to the beautification of the body, the seduction of men, the production of children, and the care of the home. I argued for psychological wholeness and social participation.
Situation ethics was creating a buzz at the time. Theology and moral philosophy were shifting from adherence to rules and laws toward consideration of the contingencies and exigencies of concrete situations. The idea was that it was love, not the pastor or judge, that determined whether sex was moral. It applied to matters other than sex, of course, but most of the discussion surrounding it was about sex. I broadly agreed, but needed a firmer grounding for morality. I was acutely aware of my need to build a new ethical position now that the moral precepts of religion had fallen out of the picture. I was less inclined toward case studies of isolated moral or immoral acts and more on an overall moral grounding. I focused on integrity of personality and responsibility to society. I was disposed (at least theoretically) to be flexible about sex, but believed strongly that ethics had to be about truth and justice, and I wasn’t inclined to be all that flexible about deceit or injustice. So many questions. Were the answers really blowing in the wind? I wondered.
I attended my first philosophy conference, at Pennsylvania State University, in October 1966. It was on existentialism and phenomenology. In beautiful autumn weather I took the bus to the center of the state brimming with anticipation. I read the program on the way, which caught the attention of a man seated next to me, who was also going to the conference. It was the first of many conversations with philosophers during that weekend. They treated me with extraordinary seriousness and respect, given how young and new I was to such things. I attended every session and listened with awe. I was particularly impressed with Paul Ricoeur and Richard Rorty. The latter spoke
