Misogynistic or traditionalist views of women lurk in the background of many a philosopher in the Western tradition. For Søren Kierkegaard, a blend of such views sits right at the heart of his philosophical project: how to become a self in the fullest sense. The centrality of an archaic and unjust view of women to Kierkegaard’s philosophy is an unfortunate effect of a rarer and decidedly more interesting tendency of Kierkegaard’s: he models ways of addressing fundamental existential questions on different ways of relating to a beloved. I don’t think this erotic approach is solely metaphorical. Rather, he uses erotic relationships because, for Kierkegaard, the question of being a self is tied up in the details of one’s relation to concrete others. To be sure, the self in question in the pseudonymous works is overwhelmingly a masculine self relating to a feminine Other. The nature of women is discussed throughout the pseudonymous works exclusively through the voices of male pseudonyms, personae, and characters, and the images of women that emerge are always some variety of a being who exists only in relation to a man: innocents used and mistreated in Either/Or I; Judge William’s quiet, charming wife mysteriously in harmony with the rhythms of temporality in Either/Or II, a naïve girl, incapable of comprehending the man’s religious movements facilitated by her very presence in Stages on Life’s Way, to name a few. In each case, an absent woman drives the psychological tension—troubling and frustrating, while also enabling and eliciting, the possibilities of masculine spiritual life.
Feminist philosophers debate whether to dismiss Kierkegaard as hopelessly essentializing and misogynistic or to embrace the preoccupation of his personae with feminine others as a resource for understanding the role of traditionally feminine characteristics and values in the development of the self. Although at certain points Kierkegaard makes clear in his own voice that he is no feminist, his use of personae opens a philosophical landscape irreducible to a set of propositions or arguments, which allows the much discussed but mostly silent feminine figures to show something beyond that which is directly opined about them. In this literary form that demands attention to nuances of character and dramatic context in order to interpret philosophical content, the absent women add a layer of dramatic irony to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts. In discussing women, Kierkegaard’s personae reveal as much about who they are as they do about the nature of the women in question or “Woman” as a category.
One place paying attention to feminine figures reveals the character of the pseudonymous author is Fear and Trembling. There, Kierkegaard’s persona Johannes de Silentio contrasts the Biblical Abraham with a number of different heroes from literature in order to make clear the paradoxical audacity of Abraham and with it the audacity of faith. If one is to praise Abraham as the father of faith, as all Christendom does, one must reckon with the fact that ethically understood, Abraham is a murderer. Unlike Agamemnon and Jephthah, whose violation of their duty to their children serves a higher universal made intelligible by virtue of their roles as leaders of a people, Abraham’s private communication with God cannot be uttered or made intelligible. Johannes shows that the sacrifice alone is not what makes Abraham the father of faith. The audacity of Abraham resides in a paradoxical logic of sacrifice and non-sacrifice, which Johannes lays out dialectically in order to make its impossibility clear. Abraham must believe that he is sacrificing Isaac in order for God to recognize that he has not withheld his son, yet Abraham also accepts Isaac back with a joy that unfolds as straightforwardly as if he had never raised his hand against his son. Thus, Johannes shows that faith must belong to its own category that inverts the ethical necessity of subordinating the particular to the universal, substituting it with the paradox that the single individual becomes higher than the universal by relating to the absolute.
In addition to contrasting Abraham to comic and tragic heroes, thus showing why he must be understood as beyond both esthetic and ethical categories, Johannes translates the dialectic of Abrahamic faith into an erotic fairy tale of a knight who retains a fresh love for a princess whom he infinitely resolves not to marry, and yet, simultaneously does marry. There is some ambiguity here as to whether Kierkegaard is simply offering a metaphor for relating to God or instead demonstrating how possibilities for spiritual profundity might announce themselves in our everyday passions, commitments, and vulnerabilities. Insofar as Johannes’s Abraham walks back down Mount Moriah for a joyful and unremarkable life with Isaac and Sarah, however, I am inclined to think that Kierkegaard is serious in exploring the pedestrian sphere of marriage as a site for religious faith. (Here, of course, the biographical details of his broken engagement to Regine Olsen are highly relevant). A glaring difference 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 because the princess is too wonderful. Johannes makes the violation of the ethical an essential component of the Abrahamic dialectic, but the knight performs no such violation.
Johannes presents us with two other Biblical examples of faith, both women. Kierkegaard considers Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Sarah in the book of Tobit for their own exemplary faith rather than as the impetus for male heroism and psychological development. Neither of their actions involves an outright logical contradiction like Abraham’s, but Johannes’s effusive language indicates that they have made the rare movement of faith. Both of them have been put into conflict with the ethical through no fault of their own, such that they are singled out and isolated by circumstance—Mary through divine pregnancy and Sarah through a curse that ensures that anyone she marries will be killed by a demon. In responding joyfully to what can only be bad news for an unwed Jewish girl in Mary’s case and in accepting Tobias’s love and offer of marriage in the case of Sarah, these women enact a faith that exceeds the ethical on Johannes’s account. “For what love for God it takes to be willing to let oneself be healed when from the very beginning one in all innocence has been botched, from the very beginning has been a damaged specimen of a human being!” This is faith but without the murderous sacrifice of Isaac. For Johannes, it is a particularly feminine variety of faith. If we imagine Sarah as a man, he says, then we have the demonic—a state of despairing spiritual isolation that also involves the individual in an absolute relation.
These feminine examples of faith do more than simply fill out Johannes’s account of faith. Attention to these figures provides crucial clues for interpreting who Johannes de Silentio is and potentially shifts our sense of what he is up to generally. In addition to Abraham’s faith, one of the clear problems of the text is Johannes’s preoccupation with his own inability to have faith. Johannes repeatedly insists that he can make the movement of infinite resignation but is utterly incapable of the further movement of faith. But he proceeds to say that had he been Abraham, he would have climbed Mount Moriah and joylessly sacrificed Isaac. This bizarre claim conflicts with what Johannes makes clear in Problema I—that Abraham has no refuge in the middle ground of infinite resignation. He either has faith or is a murderer. Thus, Abraham’s sacrifice and receiving back cannot be broken into discrete actions, as the dialectic of faith plays out within a single deed. If Johannes is stuck in infinite resignation, the movement that he cannot make is less akin to Abraham and more to Tobit’s Sarah—that of accepting joy in the finite as a gift of the other. This passive stance is equally what would be needed if he is not infinitely resigned, but is, as Joseph Westfall suggests (and as I think is more likely), a demoniac. Mary’s and Sarah’s more passive examples of faith thus indicate that while the father of faith comes into outright conflict with the ethical in an incomprehensible paradox, there are other ways of reckoning with the universal and being restored to joyful finitude without requiring a violation of the ethical. In perseverating on the paradoxical nature of Abraham’s sacrifice and its conflict with the ethical, Johannes determines faith as an impossibility locked in silence, obscuring the obvious differences between the private call to sacrifice a son and the acceptance of love when one has been cast aside and “botched” by circumstance or one’s own past. But if the logic of these feminine examples is his path out of despair, it seems that Johannes’s focus on Abraham is in part a distraction of and from himself. His despair is tied to his inability to enact the example of the women for himself. Thus, Kierkegaard’s women of faith are not just secondary examples in Fear and Trembling, but quiet figures that put the narrator into question and change the sense of the whole.
Of course, even as these feminine examples indicate a depth of feminine spirituality and make the text much richer, they do not entirely relieve concerns of misogyny in Kierkegaard. As Céline Léon points out, Kierkegaard has a tendency to present women as essentially and naturally predisposed toward the religious. Thus, she says, “It is immediately apparent that, precisely because of her being more religious than man, woman is always less religious than he is.” Obviously, this attribution of feminine virtue can be a backhanded compliment.
Another sort of irony enabled by the pseudonymous style gives this essentializing tendency somewhat less force than it might otherwise have. In a few places where a character relates to a specific feminine other, we get a glimpse of the absent woman that reminds us that she is indeed absent. Cordelia’s tortured letters at the beginning of The Seducer’s Diary are damning evidence of the ethical order that the seducer refuses. More intriguing is Judge William’s reference to his nameless wife, a pliant figure centering his idyllic life. In making his case for the esthetic and ethical superiority of the married life, Judge William occasionally turns to his own wife, narrating her feelings in a way that is flattering to his own view of things and creating the impression of full concord. His account of domestic life is tranquil to an extent that raises any psychologically astute reader’s antenna, and the feeling that Judge William might not be the most reliable source concerning his wife’s feelings only grows when he casually admits the detail of a conflict in his marriage concerning the young man to whom his correspondence is addressed. Thus, in a treatise that determines woman essentially as a solace to man, existing comfortably in her finitude, the occasional allusions to this absent woman remind the reader that, whoever Judge William’s wife may be, she is a freedom—an existence that cannot be fully represented by her overconfident husband. If this subtle tension is not enough to override the sense that Kierkegaard is still making claims about woman as such, it does at least highlight potential problems with the speaker’s perspective, and in so doing, raises questions about the knowability of these women never invited to speak for themselves. In absenting the women in question, but also himself, from the discussions of his personae, Kierkegaard’s style opens a space for a feminist reader to think about the personae’s spiritual pathologies continuously with pathological habits of thinking, knowing, and relating to feminine others.
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Melanie Shepherd
Melanie Shepherd is Professor of Philosophy at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA. Her research focuses on 19th century philosophy, especially Nietzsche, and she also has interests in ancient philosophy and philosophy and literature. Her recent publications include a chapter in Joy and Laughter in Nietzsche’s Philosophy and articles in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and History of European Ideas.
