The Myth of Kierkegaard’s Misogyny
There was a session in honor of the work of Sylvia Walsh at the years’s annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. The presenters, Sheridan Hough, Céline Léon, and myself, focused on Walsh’s most recent book, Kierkegaard on Woman, Gender, and Love. It was a wonderful opportunity for us to express our gratitude to Walsh not just for her excellent scholarship, but for everything she had done for each of us throughout our careers. Walsh, and her husband, Robert L. Perkins, went out of their way to help and promote the work of younger scholars and those of us who benefitted from that assistance will be forever in their debt.
I’m indebted to Walsh, yet again, for helping me to appreciate what a truly egalitarian thinker Kierkegaard is on gender issues. He was way ahead of his time in his understanding of how gender stereotypes warp the development not simply of women, but also of men. I discovered this in the process of preparing my paper for the session, “Between the Lines: Reading Kierkegaard on Women (and Men).”
“That the social environment into which a woman is born plays an important role in the formation of her character,” observes Walsh in “Issues that Divide: Interpreting Kierkegaard on Women and Gender,” one of the essays in Kierkegaard on Woman, Gender, and Love, “is a viewpoint clearly voiced by Kierkegaard himself in Two Ages, a literary review of a novel by that name penned anonymously by Thomasine Gyllembourg, an accomplished female writer of the time whose works were greatly admired by Kierkegaard” (p. 4)
Unfortunately, Kierkegaard’s admiration for Fru Gyllembourg, as well as his admiration for several other prominent women of his day, has tended to be obscured by the multitude of negative references to women in his works. Some of the most notoriously sexists, even misogynistic, observations about women occur in the portion of Stages on Life’s Way, entitled “In Vino Veritas,” where various characters describe women as “incomplete form[s]” (p. 55), “display fruit[s]” (p. 77), and as lacking sufficient reflection to avoid contradicting themselves (p. 51).
One could argue that it ought to be apparent to readers, and more importantly to scholars, that the negative views of women expressed in ”In Vino Veritas” do not represent Kierkegaard’s own views for the simple reason that the views of the various speakers, about what they purport is woman’s nature, do not even cohere. Fortunately, Kierkegaard tells us himself that those views are not his own. “The purpose of the five speakers in ‘in vino veritas,’ he explains, “is to provide an illumination of woman that is essential yet false” (KJN Vol. 11, part 2, p. 24, emphasis added, the title of this section of Stages is not capitalized in KJN).
There is evidence in the authorship taken as a whole that suggests that whatever differences there might be between men and women that are rooted in their respective biologies, Kierkegaard did not view these differences as having essential significance.
So what is that evidence? The following observation, written around 1849 in one of Kierkegaard’s journals is key: “There really is something to the view that one ultimately finds a bit more self-sacrifice among women,” he observes. It’s tempting to interpret this to mean that Kierkegaard really does think that there are essential differences between men and women based on their biology. But then he goes on to say that this abundance of self-sacrifice one finds in women
is no doubt because they live quieter and more withdrawn lives and thus a little closer to ideality; they don’t as easily acquire the marketplace measures used by men, who get right to the business of life. What saves women is the distance from life that is granted them for so long …. This quieter life means that women are sometimes more loyal to themselves than men are, since men are demoralized from boyhood by the demand to be like others, and become completely demoralized as youths, not to mention as men, by being taught all about the way things are in practical life, in reality. It is this very competence that is ruinous. If girls are brought up in the same way, one can say goodnight to the whole hum. race. And women’s emancipation, which tends toward this very sort of education, is no doubt the invention of the devil. (KJN NB11:159 [1849)] emphasis added.)
To descry “women’s emancipation” would certainly appear sexist when taken out of context (as many of Kierkegaard’s remarks so often are). It’s clear from this journal entry, however, that Kierkegaard believes the problem is not with the idea of educating women, but with the specific type of education the ”emancipation” movement appeared to be advocating for women. That is, Kierkegaard believed this education had a corrupting influence on men, one from which women were at least marginally more protected. Such protection is a social phenomenon, though. It may be based, in the minds of some, on the view that women’s biology makes them less fit than men to survive without such protection. This would not appear, however, to be Kierkegaard’s view. The journal entry suggests Kierkegaard believed that if women were brought up in the same way as men, far from buckling under the weight of “the way things are,” they would become exactly like men.
But an acknowledgement that women are the equal of men in their potential to deal effectively with “the way things are in practical life,” does not necessarily translate into an acknowledgement that they are the intellectual equals of men. Did Kierkegaard believe women were essentially the intellectual equals of men? Is there any evidence to support such a view? The answer is an unequivocal yes. First there is Kierkegaard’s admiration for Fru Gyllembourg, that Walsh observed and that I have already cited. There there is Walsh’s observation that,
Woman’s reflective capacity is … recognized in a … serious and positive manner by Kierkegaard in The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848), where he compares and praises the artistic genius of two actresses of his day (Madame Heiberg and Madame Nielsen) who are able, each in a different way, to bring dialectic or reflection to bear in their theatrical interpretations of the idea of femininity (C, pp. 85-90; cf. SLW, 131n.) (Walsh, p. 10).
And indeed, Kierkegaard refers to the view that women are intellectually inferior to men as a “masculine superstition” (mandelig Overtro) (KJN Vol. 5, p. 229).
Walsh observes that Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Sickness Unto Death, defines woman’s nature as devotedness. This may sound sexist to contemporary readers. Walsh points out, however, that while man’s nature is not defined as devotedness, according to Kierkegaard,
in relation to God … the self [is] defined as devotion for both man and woman, which suggests that ultimately, the self is defined in terms of the feminine for Anti-Climacus and that a distinction must be made between the penultimate selfhood or self-identity of man and woman in terms of their sexual identities, wherein they are different, and their ultimate selfhood as human beings in relation to God, wherein they are the same and equal (Walsh, 8.)
Women thus have an advantage relative to men, according to Kierkegaard, in that the cultural conception of feminine selfhood is far closer to the true self as before God than is the cultural conception of masculine selfhood. It’s important to remember, however, that this advantage is not an essential one, but a culturally constructed one. There is little, if any evidence that Kierkegaard believed this advantage was conferred on women by their biology. Quite the contrary. Kierkegaard’s emphasis is always on the essentially human.
Hence Kierkegaard observes in Works of Love that
Each one of us is a human being and then in turn the distinctive individual [det Forskjellige] that he is in particular [han særeligen er]; but to be a human being is the fundamental qualification. No one [ingen] should become so enamored of his distinctiveness that he cravenly or presumptuously forgets that he is a human being. No one [intet Menneske] is an exception to being a human being because of his distinctiveness. He is rather a human being and then the particular person he is [det han særligen er]. (WOL, 141, emphasis added).
So much for Kierkegaard’s purported misogyny. Not only does he think that the cultural conception of feminine selfhood is closer to genuine selfhood than is the cultural conception of masculine selfhood, but he thinks women are essentially every bit as smart as men, an admirably progressive view for a man of Kierkegaard’s day. This revelation about Kierkegaard also goes a long way to explaining his popularity among female readers, as well as the fact that the women who knew him, and whose recollections are collected in Erindringer on Søren Kierkegaard (recollections of Søren Kierkegaard) (Reitzel, 1980) speak so positively of him.
Kierkegaard’s overriding concern is, of course, with the truth of Christianity and how culture can obscure it by presenting a false and distorted picture of it. Our true selves, the true human self, the true selves of both men and women, as conceived by God, according to Kierkegaard, are devotion, devotion to God. That such devotion seems more natural to women is not, according to Kierkegaard, because they are essentially different from men, but because, as Kierkegaard observes in the journal entry from which I have already quoted, they are brought up differently from men. This means that not only are the various sexist comments made by the characters in “In Vino Veritas,” but indeed all Kierkegaard’s apparently sexist remarks, whether in published works or in his journal and papers, essentially satirical barbs directed by Kierkegaard at a culture, or at worldliness more generally, that can get creation so wrong.
Piety on Kierkegaard 