Reading Kierkegaard’s Absent Women | Blog of the APA

Misogynistic or traditionalist views of ladies lurk within the background of many a thinker within the Western custom. For Søren Kierkegaard, a mix of such views sits proper on the coronary heart of his philosophical challenge: find out how to develop into a self within the fullest sense. The centrality of an archaic and unjust view of ladies to Kierkegaard’s philosophy is an unlucky impact of a rarer and decidedly extra attention-grabbing tendency of Kierkegaard’s: he fashions methods of addressing basic existential questions on other ways of referring to a beloved. I don’t assume this erotic strategy is solely metaphorical. Moderately, he makes use of erotic relationships as a result of, for Kierkegaard, the query of being a self is tied up within the particulars of 1’s relation to concrete others. To make sure, the self in query within the pseudonymous works is overwhelmingly a masculine self referring to a female Different. The character of ladies is mentioned all through the pseudonymous works completely by the voices of male pseudonyms, personae, and characters, and the photographs of ladies that emerge are at all times some number of a being who exists solely in relation to a person: innocents used and mistreated in Both/Or I; Choose William’s quiet, charming spouse mysteriously in concord with the rhythms of temporality in Both/Or II, a naïve lady, incapable of comprehending the person’s spiritual actions facilitated by her very presence in Phases on Life’s Means, to call just a few. In every case, an absent lady drives the psychological stress—troubling and irritating, whereas additionally enabling and eliciting, the probabilities of masculine religious life.

Feminist philosophers debate whether or not to dismiss Kierkegaard as hopelessly essentializing and misogynistic or to embrace the preoccupation of his personae with female others as a useful resource for understanding the position of historically female traits and values within the improvement of the self. Though at sure factors Kierkegaard makes clear in his personal voice that he’s no feminist, his use of personae opens a philosophical panorama irreducible to a set of propositions or arguments, which permits the a lot mentioned however principally silent female figures to indicate one thing past that which is instantly opined about them. On this literary kind that calls for consideration to nuances of character and dramatic context to be able to interpret philosophical content material, the absent girls add a layer of dramatic irony to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts. In discussing girls, Kierkegaard’s personae reveal as a lot about who they’re as they do concerning the nature of the ladies in query or “Girl” as a class.

One place taking note of female figures reveals the character of the pseudonymous writer is Worry and Trembling. There, Kierkegaard’s persona Johannes de Silentio contrasts the Biblical Abraham with quite a lot of totally different heroes from literature to be able to clarify the paradoxical audacity of Abraham and with it the audacity of religion. If one is to reward Abraham as the daddy of religion, as all Christendom does, one should reckon with the truth that ethically understood, Abraham is a assassin. In contrast to Agamemnon and Jephthah, whose violation of their obligation to their kids serves the next common made intelligible by advantage of their roles as leaders of a folks, Abraham’s personal communication with God can’t be uttered or made intelligible. Johannes reveals that the sacrifice alone shouldn’t be what makes Abraham the daddy of religion. The audacity of Abraham resides in a paradoxical logic of sacrifice and non-sacrifice, which Johannes lays out dialectically to be able to make its impossibility clear. Abraham should consider that he’s sacrificing Isaac to ensure that God to acknowledge that he has not withheld his son, but Abraham additionally accepts Isaac again with a pleasure that unfolds as straightforwardly as if he had by no means raised his hand towards his son. Thus, Johannes reveals that religion should belong to its personal class that inverts the moral necessity of subordinating the actual to the common, substituting it with the paradox that the one particular person turns into greater than the common by referring to absolutely the.

Along with contrasting Abraham to comedian and tragic heroes, thus displaying why he have to be understood as past each esthetic and moral classes, Johannes interprets the dialectic of Abrahamic religion into an erotic fairy story of a knight who retains a recent love for a princess whom he infinitely resolves to not marry, and but, concurrently does marry. There’s some ambiguity right here as as to whether Kierkegaard is solely providing a metaphor for referring to God or as a substitute demonstrating how prospects for religious profundity would possibly announce themselves in our on a regular basis passions, commitments, and vulnerabilities. Insofar as Johannes’s Abraham walks again down Mount Moriah for a joyful and unremarkable life with Isaac and Sarah, nevertheless, I’m inclined to assume that Kierkegaard is severe in exploring the pedestrian sphere of marriage as a website for spiritual religion. (Right here, in fact, the biographical particulars of his damaged engagement to Regine Olsen are extremely related). A evident distinction emerges between Abraham and the knight, in that the knight’s “sacrifice” of the princess is a resignation not to marry. The knight doesn’t marry as a result of the princess is just too fantastic. Johannes makes the violation of the moral an integral part of the Abrahamic dialectic, however the knight performs no such violation.

Johannes presents us with two different Biblical examples of religion, each girls. Kierkegaard considers Mary, the mom of Jesus, and Sarah in the book of Tobit for their very own exemplary religion moderately than because the impetus for male heroism and psychological improvement. Neither of their actions includes an outright logical contradiction like Abraham’s, however Johannes’s effusive language signifies that they’ve made the uncommon motion of religion. Each of them have been put into battle with the moral by no fault of their very own, such that they’re singled out and remoted by circumstance—Mary by divine being pregnant and Sarah by a curse that ensures that anybody she marries will likely be killed by a demon. In responding joyfully to what can solely be unhealthy information for an unwed Jewish lady in Mary’s case and in accepting Tobias’s love and provide of marriage within the case of Sarah, these girls enact a religion that exceeds the moral on Johannes’s account. “For what love for God it takes to be prepared to let oneself be healed when from the very starting one amongst innocence has been botched, from the very starting has been a broken specimen of a human being!” That is religion however with out the murderous sacrifice of Isaac. For Johannes, it’s a significantly female number of religion. If we think about Sarah as a person, he says, then we’ve got the demonic—a state of despairing religious isolation that additionally includes the person in an absolute relation.

These female examples of religion do greater than merely fill out Johannes’s account of religion. Consideration to those figures gives essential clues for decoding who Johannes de Silentio is and doubtlessly shifts our sense of what he’s as much as typically. Along with Abraham’s religion, one of many clear issues of the textual content is Johannes’s preoccupation together with his personal incapacity to have religion. Johannes repeatedly insists that he could make the motion of infinite resignation however is totally incapable of the additional motion of religion. However he proceeds to say that had he been Abraham, he would have climbed Mount Moriah and joylessly sacrificed Isaac. This weird declare conflicts with what Johannes makes clear in Problema I—that Abraham has no refuge within the center floor of infinite resignation. He both has religion or is a assassin. Thus, Abraham’s sacrifice and receiving again can’t be damaged into discrete actions, because the dialectic of religion performs out inside a single deed. If Johannes is caught in infinite resignation, the motion that he can’t make is much less akin to Abraham and extra to Tobit’s Sarah—that of accepting pleasure within the finite as a present of the opposite. This passive stance is equally what could be wanted if he’s not infinitely resigned, however is, as Joseph Westfall suggests (and as I feel is extra seemingly), a demoniac. Mary’s and Sarah’s extra passive examples of religion thus point out that whereas the daddy of religion comes into outright battle with the moral in an incomprehensible paradox, there are different methods of reckoning with the common and being restored to joyful finitude with out requiring a violation of the moral. In perseverating on the paradoxical nature of Abraham’s sacrifice and its battle with the moral, Johannes determines religion as an impossibility locked in silence, obscuring the plain variations between the personal name to sacrifice a son and the acceptance of affection when one has been forged apart and “botched” by circumstance or one’s personal previous. But when the logic of those female examples is his path out of despair, plainly Johannes’s concentrate on Abraham is partially a distraction of and from himself. His despair is tied to his incapacity to enact the instance of the ladies for himself. Thus, Kierkegaard’s girls of religion usually are not simply secondary examples in Worry and Trembling, however quiet figures that put the narrator into query and alter the sense of the entire.

After all, at the same time as these female examples point out a depth of female spirituality and make the textual content a lot richer, they don’t completely relieve considerations of misogyny in Kierkegaard. As Céline Léon factors out, Kierkegaard tends to current girls as primarily and naturally predisposed towards the spiritual. Thus, she says, “It’s instantly obvious that, exactly due to her being extra spiritual than man, lady is at all times much less spiritual than he’s.” Clearly, this attribution of female advantage is usually a backhanded praise.

One other type of irony enabled by the pseudonymous fashion provides this essentializing tendency considerably much less drive than it’d in any other case have. In just a few locations the place a personality pertains to a selected female different, we get a glimpse of the absent lady that reminds us that she is certainly absent. Cordelia’s tortured letters at the start of The Seducer’s Diary are damning proof of the moral order that the seducer refuses. Extra intriguing is Choose William’s reference to his anonymous spouse, a pliant determine centering his idyllic life. In making his case for the esthetic and moral superiority of the married life, Choose William often turns to his personal spouse, narrating her emotions in a approach that’s flattering to his personal view of issues and creating the impression of full harmony. His account of home life is tranquil to an extent that raises any psychologically astute reader’s antenna, and the sensation that Choose William won’t be probably the most dependable supply regarding his spouse’s emotions solely grows when he casually admits the element of a battle in his marriage regarding the younger man to whom his correspondence is addressed. Thus, in a treatise that determines lady primarily as a solace to man, present comfortably in her finitude, the occasional allusions to this absent lady remind the reader that, whoever Choose William’s spouse could also be, she is a freedom—an existence that can not be absolutely represented by her overconfident husband. If this delicate stress shouldn’t be sufficient to override the sense that Kierkegaard continues to be making claims about lady as such, it does not less than spotlight potential issues with the speaker’s perspective, and in so doing, raises questions concerning the knowability of those girls by no means invited to talk for themselves. In absenting the ladies in query, but in addition himself, from the discussions of his personae, Kierkegaard’s fashion opens an area for a feminist reader to consider the personae’s religious pathologies repeatedly with pathological habits of considering, figuring out, and referring to female others.

The Ladies in Philosophy collection publishes posts on girls within the historical past of philosophy, posts on problems with concern to girls within the subject of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to handle problems with concern to girls within the wider world. In case you are inquisitive about writing for the collection, please contact the Collection Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Affiliate Editor Alida Liberman.