female existentialists world congress may 2015

Female existentialist thinkers and practitioners

• Digby Tantam

• Director, Existential Academy

• Co-chair, ICECAP

• Emeritus Professor, University of Sheffield

• Honorary Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

Regine Schlegel (née Olsen; January 23, 1822 – March 18, 1904) Wife of Danish Ambassador to West IndiesInterviewed near her death repeatedly about KierkegaardInspiration of Either/Or

Commentators repeatedlyEmphasize the importance ofRegine Olsen to Kierkegaard, and his journals suggest that heremained besotted by her.Why is she missing as a personIn these accounts?

Why are women so oftenleft out of account when werefer to existential thinkers?

But perhaps this is changing?

WHY WERE WOMEN SO OFTENLEFT OUT OF ACCOUNT WHEN WEREFER TO EXISTENTIAL THINKERS?

Why are women still so left out of account when we refer to existential thinkers?

Why is this important?

• It’s interesting

• Because women are still being considered of lesser account

– 1/3rd of keynote and invited speakers at this congress are women

• Because it might throw some light on what is missing in existential thinking

THREE EXAMPLES

I have avoided the current generation, and avoided philosophers in other traditions who write about existential issues such as Martha Nussbaum, Mary Warnock, Hannah Arendt, or Lucy Irigary.

I have chosen three women who are closely linked to famous existential thinkers

• Lou Salome

• Edith Stein

• Simone de Beauvoir

Lou Salomé

Lou Salomé

Third International Psychoanalytic Congress 1911

Female influence is mediated by sexual allure

Andreas-Salomé, Lou: Die Erotik. In: Die Gesellschaft. Sammlung sozialpsychologischer Monographien (Hg. Martin Buber), 33. Band. Frankfurt (Main), 1910


• Men want to separate the penis, and the anus



• Women know that there is a cycle of sexuality, that includes menstruation and birth




• i.e. Men want to maintain a notion of ‘purity’





• Women know that this is a false goal, or obtained only by denying the experience of women






• Men want to penetrate but not be penetrated






• Men want to penetrate but not be penetrated

• Women know that there is neither penetration nor being penetrated, only being joined: copulation

Female influence is mediated by sexual allure

“The most pure virgin is the only onesafeguarded from every stain of sin”

“In womanly purity and gentleness, we find mirrored the spirit which cleanses the defiled and makes pliant the unbending…This “gracious spirit” wants nothing else than to be divine light streaming out as a serving love; nothing is more contrary to it than vanity that looks out for itself, and desire that likes to amass for itself. That is why the foremost sin of pride, in which vanity and desire coincide, is a falling-of from the spirit of love and a defection from feminine nature itself”

From an address to students at Speyer and republished in Essays on Women

• Sentimental, if not sanctimonious?

• Or existential

– The defiled must be held

– ‘Serving love’

– Standing out, in vainglory, is a “falling off from the spirit of love

• Not a bad prescription of psychotherapy

Key facts of Edith Stein’s life

• Born on Yom Kippur 1891

• Youngest child of comfortable off parents who owned a timber yard in Breslau (now Wroclaw)

• Father died aged 2, and mother ‘gave up praying’

• Attended Breslau University, transferred to Gottingen to study with Husserl, and followed him to Freiburg to become his research assistant

• Wrote important monographs combining phenomenology with ‘intersubjectivity’: most famously On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung)

• Denied post in either Freiburg or Gottingen

• Jewish but baptized a Christian aged 31 and then accepted as a Carmelite nun

• Arrested with sister Rosa in convent chapel, and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942

• Miraculously saved child from hepatic failure in 1987

• Canonized in 1998 by Jean-Paul II (whose doctoral thesis was on Max Scheler)

Ideen II

• Stein was Husserl’s research assistant from 1917 to 1922, having following him to Freiburg from Gottingen

• Heidegger succeeded Stein.

• Husserl may have blocked Stein’s application for a tenured lectureship (appointment as a Dozent, a process the involved acceptance of a Habilitation thesis)

• Was it because she was a woman (but Freiburg had already appointed a female professor of mathematics in 1911)?

• Her Judaism may have been the real motive

• But there also a war about phenomenology, and empathy

Alter Ego

Is there anyone there?Is there anyone there?There must be

I find myself immersed ina world of people

I’m not really thinkingabout it

Alter Ego

The consequences of intersubjectivity

• Intersubjectivity

• Making one a part of “Infinite, pure, eternal being”…

• Or simply a family that continues

• Unheimlichkeit and the dread of death arise when intersubjectivity is broken and this sense of being a part of that continuity dies

• Intersubjectivity also leads to self-knowledge

• “When we empathically run into ranges of value closed to us, we become conscious of our own deficiencies or disvalues. Every comprehension of different persons can become the basis of an understanding of values”

Simone de Beauvoir

• Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) p. 137-8

• “…I cannot walk to the future alone…I must therefore strive to create for men situations such that they can accompany and surpass my transcendence. I need their freedom to be available to use and conserve me in surpassing me. “

• “he transcends himself by a forward movement that is his freedom itself, and at each step, he strives to pull men to himself”

• In the almost unendingly pessimistic the Second Sex, she argues that children may provide this forward movement

• A teacher and mentor to many young women

• Regarded her books as her children

Simone de Beauvoir

Second in her year at the École normale supérieure Prix Goncourt for the MandarinsBest-selling “The second sex”Another 22 books plus articles and interviews

Simone de Beauvoir

• Born 1908 in Paris

• Father a lawyer who wanted to be an actor gradually lost his money

• She shared a private language with her younger sister, and played sado-masochistic games with her, in which she was the tortured saint

• Had wanted to be a nun, but lost her faith aged 14 and decided to become a philosopher. Mother disapproved of both

• Her father started to call her ugly in adolescence when she developed acne

• She had difficulty in making friends, and had no boyfriends as an adolescent but academically brilliant

• In love with but always second to Sartre

• (Most famous book Le Deuxième Sexe)

• Looked after Sartre, but probably no sexual relations with him after 40

• Many lovers, including Nelson Algren

• Died 1986, aged 78

Henriette-Hélène de Beauvoir (6 June 1910, Paris – 1 July 2001, Goxwiller) was the younger sister of Simone de Beauvoir. Her art was exhibited in Europe, Japan, and the US. She married Lionel de Roulet, a pupil of Sartre when he taught school, and they were married for 48 years. He became a representative at the Council of Europe, and they moved to Goxwiller, a village near Strasbourg, where she founded a shelter for battered women. She continued painting until she was 85. Her paintings were related to feminist philosophy and women's issues

COMMON EXPERIENCE

• Disappointment

• Being not at home in the world: a common experience of the existentially inclined?

• Ambivalence about families, too?

• Being overshadowed by men or maleness

• Rejecting sexual relations

• Rejecting motherhood

• A life pre-ordained, opening like a flower (the metaphor of female sexual arousal that de Beauvoir used in the Mandarins)

CONCLUSIONS

• Moral reflection

• Devotion

• Ambiguity

CONCLUSIONS


• Devotion

• Ambiguity

• Community

• Committed relationship


• Devotion

• Ambiguity

• Committed relationship

• Community

CONCLUSIONS

female existentialists world congress may 2015

Spiritual