Feminist Readings of Kierkegaard

Feminist Readings of Kierkegaard by Caitlin Purvin-Dunn Faculty Supervisor: Christopher Latiolais, Ph.D. Kalamazoo College Department of Philosophy A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Kalamazoo College 2005 i I' I' I i 11 Acknowledgements Many thanks to the Beeler Fellowship committee for providing me with the funding necessary to carry out my research for this project. I would also like to thank Jon Stewart and all others at the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center for allowing me to conduct my research at the center. Lastly, to Chris Latiolais, for your faithful guidance over the past four years, I cannot thank you enough. 11l Abstract While the works of Soren Kierkegaard provide us with an insightful analysis of human selfhood within modernity, there remains a certain amount of ambiguity regarding the status of women within his authorship. Primarily, feminist re interpretations of Kierkegaard' s writing have focused either on his seemingly irretrievable misogyny or, more favorably, on the possibility of Kierkegaard elaborating upon an androgynous ideal of selfhood. I want to argue that both approaches are misinformed. I want to argue against the notion that 'androgyny' could be a feminist ideal of selfhood at all, and also, that no conception of androgyny is one that even Kierkegaard would accept. Ifwe are to address the question of how an engagement with Kierkegaard's authorship can inform us as feminist philosophers, our approach must be broader in scope. I will introduce the notion ofthe "defining relation," as it is seen throughout Kierkegaard's authorship as a whole, but most importantly within his religious ideal of selfhood. My analysis will involve an illicit secularization of this concept, ultimately framing the "defining relation" in terms of a radical openness to the otherness of the other. The defining relation can be understood as a secular or worldly form of faith insofar as the existence of particular others is regarded as absolute or somehow constituting my very identity. In placing primary importance upon the defining relation, Kierkegaard' s model of selfhood undermines the illusion of the autonomous self or the self-imposed identity, favoring instead a depiction of the self that involves a paradoxical self-sufficient dependency upon others. This notion of the defining relation can bear significant implications for a feminist conceptualization of the self. i I, I I I I IV Precis As contemporary feminist philosophers, we are presented with the difficult task of inheriting and building upon a tradition led, in large part, by and for men. Although women have had only a marginal presence within the major cannons of Western philosophy, the subject of woman has nevertheless not been excluded from these texts. Sometimes the philosopher addresses the nature of woman directly, defining her particular characteristics and capacities and delineating her proper role within the social arena. More often, though, the subject of woman is only implied or indirectly approached within seemingly gender-neutral philosophies. As feminist philosophers and scholars, we must always be in the process of both leaving behind irretrievable misogyny and of taking with us crucial insights which have perhaps gone overlooked, but nevertheless can establish a foundation for new, more inclusive possibilities. Within this paper, I hope to continue this process of re-reading the cannons of Western philosophy by focusing on the works ofDanish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaardian scholars, Sylvia Walsh and Leslie Howe, both address the question of whether Kierkegaard presents us with an "androgynous" ideal of selfhood. Walsh does so by assessing the significance and appropriateness of the gender categories employed by Anti-Climacus's analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death, while Howe takes a more holistic approach, exploring Kierkegaard's views on the nature of the feminine self as seen throughout his authorship. Both thinkers agree that Kierkegaard consistently characterizes woman's natUre as one of instinct, immediacy, and dependence, while man's nature is one of intellect and self- v reflection. The 'natures' of man and woman will inform their respective modes of despair. Within The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus characterizes 'feminine' despair as the despair of weakness, of not willing to be oneself; masculine despair, on the other hand, is characterized as the despair of defiance, of willing, in despair, to be oneself. According to Walsh's reading of The Sickness Unto Death, in making use of these gender classifications, Kierkegaard is demanding that the individual on the path to authentic selfhood establish within herself, a balance of opposing, gendered, and yet, essentially human characteristics or capacities. It is in this regard that Walsh takes from Kierkegaard a formulation of an androgynous ideal of selfhood. Howe, on the other hand, draws our attention to the hierarchical assumption of the masculine , I characteristics (reflection) over the feminine (emotion or instinct); in doing so, she refutes the claim that Kierkegaard's model of the self could be understood as androgynous in the sense of an embodiment of equally weighted sets of characteristics. She does make the claim, however, that Kierkegaard's model of the self is androgynous in a different sense, arguing that, from a religious perspective, these differences are ultimately unessential and worth overcoming in order to establish a relationship to the divine. In response to the claims of Walsh and Howe, I first want to argue against the assumption that androgyny, understood either as the unification of the masculine and the feminine or as the imperative to overcome gender for the sake of that which is either universally human or ultimately divine, serves as a feminist ideal at all. The I I notion of androgyny espoused by Walsh, as the unification of masculine and feminine characteristics reveals my overarching concern with cultural feminism, namely the VI ---_. --- - - ------------ appeal to troubling essentialist claims about the nature of woman. Whether we understand these definitive characteristics as biologically fated or culturally inherited, the result is still a static definition of gender. What I take to be the most problematic about the striving for this sort of "androgynous" ideal of selfbood, however, is that the notion of androgyny itself entails a binary differentiation of sex and gender that is neither necessary nor natural, but instead rests upon a remarkably stable foundation of what Judith Butler has referred to as "naturalized heterosexuality". Against Howe's notion of androgyny, I want to argue alongside our most sophisticated social constructivist thinkers, that we cannot speak of a self or consciousness that exists somehow outside of and prior to the social, cultural, and historical domain (and here, I take gender as well as sex to be a construction of that domain). My rejection of both of these thinkers rests not only with their troubling assumption regarding androgyny as a feminist ideal, but also what I take to be their misreading of Kierkegaard. While Walsh's approach is far to narrowly focused to adequately address the rhetorical complexities of reading Kierkegaard's authorship, Howe's more holistic approach inaccurately depicts the religious sphere as the abandonment of one's particularities. Furthermore, while Howe's concern regarding the hierarchical assumption of emotion and intellect as representing the hierarchical assumption of man over woman is certainly valid with regards to many of the cannons of Western philosophy, I will argue that Kierkegaard's religious sphere effectively overcomes this problematic dichotomy. In contrast to the feminist interpretations of Kierkegaard's works discussed above, I choose to read Kierkegaard's authorship systematically, as a unified and I vii ~l~l-- _ coherent whole. Read as such, the most important and productive insights that we can extrapolate from Kierkegaard are those that not only run throughout his authorship as a whole, but most importantly those that playa primary role in his religious ideal of selfhood. Within this paper, I will be introducing the notion of the "defining relation", which I take to be the key to a productive feminist engagement with Kierkegaard's authorship. While I will be tracing the development of the individual and the role played by the defining relation from the present age through the lower spheres of existence, I will focus primarily on Kierkegaard's religious ideal of selfhood and the peculiar sort of defining relation found therein. Ultimately, my aim will be to take from Kierkegaard a radicalized model of the non-autonomous, relational self; this insight will prove to be crucial for a contemporary radical feminist, post-structuralist account of selfhood. Within The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard draws a crucial distinction between a human being and a self. While a human being is regarded as a relation between or synthesis of various factors, it is the responsibility of the individual to define and uphold those factors in a particular sort of way. It is in this sense that Kierkegaard defines the self as "a relation that relates itself to itself' (Kierkegaard, 1989, p.43). Becoming a self, in other words, involves taking a stand on who one is or, as Martin Heidegger puts it, the individual (Dasein) is that entity whose being is an issue for it. For Kierkegaard, one takes a stand

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