The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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FEMINIST ENGAGEMENTS WITH NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Elaine P. Miller

Introduction

Immanuel Kant’s 1791 Critique of Judgment inspired the best of nineteenth-century European philosophy, including German Idealism and Romanticism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Hance 1998; Kreines 2008; Zimmerman 2005). Many feminist scholars have also found the Critique of Judgment productive, despite thorough critique of some of Kant’s central presuppositions in his other works. Themes of interest to feminists in this work include the turn away from an emphasis on the isolated ego or subject, the value of felt connectedness among humans, the significance of embodiment, and the restoration of narrative complexity (Moen 1997: 214). G. W. F. Hegel’s transformation of Kantian morality into a system that unites universal principles with an acknowledgment of the concrete circumstances and self-correcting possibilities of actual historical events and movements is also arguably important for the feminist critique of traditional metaphysics and of moral values that do not take women’s concerns into account (Gauthier 1997). A growing recognition of the impossibility of understanding the human being apart from her relation to nature and to a broader political context, and the necessity of attributing a very specific type of purposiveness to natural as well as human phenomena can be added to this list.

The philosophies of both Hegel and Nietzsche have been the target of sustained and intensive feminist critique for decades, in what Paul Patton calls “a battlefield of conflicting interpretations” (1993: xii). Other nineteenth-century thinkers have received less attention, although arguably strands of nineteenth-century German thought, including some readings of Hegel and Nietzsche, opened up new possibilities for thinking about sexual difference and gender equality. In addition, a culture of women’s salons in nineteenth-century Europe opened up a new horizon for intellectual contribution by women. In this chapter I will examine the areas of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy that have garnered the most critical attention from feminist thinkers, as well as some lines of thought that also have proved productive but that have received less critical notice. In addition I will consider the intellectual contributions of three of the most celebrated women contributors to nineteenth-century intellectual life: Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Veit Schlegel, and Caroline Schelling-Schlegel.

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Hegel and German Idealism: Being and Thinking

As early as 1970 the Italian radical feminist manifesto “Let’s Spit on Hegel” (Lonzi 1996) attests to the intensity and contentiousness of reaction to the way that traditional views on women have converged onto the figure of Hegel. Even if they do not espouse so passionate a rejection of Hegel’s philosophy, many feminist theorists have been wary both of the apparent biases in Hegel’s writing and of the explicit content of his philosophical claims. Hegel is famous for comparing women to plants because in his view their actions are guided not by reason but by contingent external conditions, inclinations, and opinions (Hegel 1991: 166Z). Hegel’s dialectic, while always taking into account specific historical and material conditions, considers abstraction from every determinacy a necessary condition for spiritual (both legal and symbolic) personhood, leading to the conclusion that any consideration of specific natural difference, including sexual difference, must be left out of a fully articulated account of human development (Nuzzo 2001: 116–121).

Feminist philosophers have extensively analyzed all of Hegel’s central concepts, including both their limitations and their further possibilities for development in directions not anticipated by their author but consonant with his philosophical system. Although the majority of feminist work on Hegel has addressed themes in his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular the sections “Lordship and Bondage” and “Man and Woman”—on Greek Ethical Life, which draws on Sophocles’ Antigone—feminist philosophers have engaged with the full spectrum of Hegel’s texts, including the Logic and the Philosophy of Nature.

Early Hegel scholarship by feminists was often configured according to the pros and cons of reading Hegel at all, whereas more recent scholarship uses contemporary insights into sex, gender, and women’s roles to illuminate aspects of Hegel’s method and central concepts that might be refashioned to ends other than his own (Hutchings and Pulkkinen 2010: 2). Perhaps the most fundamental and important insight that Hegel’s philosophy provides develops out of his reading of Kant. Whereas Kant viewed the connection between nature and freedom as a necessary yet indemonstrable postulate of reason, Hegel argued that this connection not only existed but also could be known. Dichotomies, in Hegel’s view, were not the result of but rather the catalyst for philosophy. Systems of thought that posit static dualities simultaneously present views that are one-sided and abstract, but also motivate philosophy to find a way of going beyond them. Hegel’s dialectical method outlines the movement of a self-positing and self-correcting historically developing system, in which stances that are initially one-sided and mutually opposing overcome themselves and shift to more complex and inclusive positions that preserve the truth of the moments that they supersede even as they destroy their false presuppositions. This movement mirrors the way in which human beings progressively make their home in nature, overcoming obstacles that arise as they proceed in shaping the world to their needs, and making use of their experience and errors to better adapt it to their purposes. Human beings are practically free, according to Hegel, not because they completely conquer a hostile and external world that they view as an antagonist over and against themselves, but rather because they have the capacity to make themselves at home and indeed recognize themselves in and of the world out of which they, like other natural things, have arisen (Hance 1998: 40).

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This activity of immanent self-positing and self-overcoming, as well as a continuous transition between nature and spirit, can only be properly conceptualized by understanding the activity and mediation of this process as a living one. This is the legacy Hegel takes from Kant’s third Critique: purposiveness without a (external, determinate) purpose is the movement of life, which constantly overcomes itself and becomes more complex and inclusive (Lindberg 2010: 180). Purposiveness here does not refer to the finite, external teleological movement that Hegel is sometimes incorrectly accused of according to historical movement—a version of which he himself derided by characterizing those who hold it as believing, for example, that nature created cork in order to give humans something with which to stopper their wine bottles (Hegel 1977: 245Z). Rather, Kant calls purposiveness the infinite capacity, common to all living beings and to nature itself, to attain ends already immanent within a living system. Purposiveness entails self-organization and self-regulation, and is present within living beings and in free action.

Purposiveness without a (determinate, external) purpose is a regulative rather than a constitutive principle. For Kant, this distinction marks the difference between the reason and the understanding. The pure concepts of the understanding constitute, or make possible, any given object of experience, whereas reason has ideas that go beyond any possible experience but that nonetheless play an important role in, or regulate, our philosophizing about the unity of experience. For Kant, although it is indeterminate, purposiveness is the a priori principle upon which reflective aesthetic judgment is based. Its unique quality of pertaining both to judgments of beauty, which are sensory, and supersensible judgments of (indeterminate) purposiveness, makes it suitable to mediate between the realms of nature and freedom. Kant’s critique of teleological judgment, in particular the attempt to systematically move beyond a thinking that posited dualistic, static, and hierarchically ordered oppositions, influenced the development of much nineteenth-century philosophy.

This dialectical process of positing and overcoming contradiction has implications for the role of the feminine in Hegel’s work. Some scholars have argued that it is precisely the material and the feminine dimension that is lost or that fails to be preserved in this dialectical process, where the “truth” of positions is distilled and the unnecessary is overcome (Efrat-Levkovich 2010; Lindberg 2010). Two central dialectical oppositions in Hegel’s work in which the feminine is arguably overcome as a significant category of self-positing have been the focus of the majority of feminist critique of Hegel, as mentioned above. These are the dialectic of master and slave, on the one hand, and the dialectic between natural/divine law and human law divided along gender lines, on the other, which form important nodes of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Spirit, here, refers both to the subject and the object of knowing. Spirit spans individual and collective human experience and achievement, the growing human body of knowledge, works, and institutions, and the unity of the whole as a “world spirit” actualizing itself by coming to know itself.

Hegel’s phenomenological description of the progressive development of human consciousness is often figural, depicting constellations of increasingly complex interactions of natural, historical, and symbolic strands of meaning that present the truth of particular moments in history in relation to each other. These nodes are crystallizations, part of a dynamic process and thus incomplete, constantly subject to change, and self-correcting (Lindberg 2010: 178). Hegel uses the figures of master and slave at an early stage of his dialectic in order to illustrate the drama of the most primordial of human intersubjective encounters, what could be called the very emergence of human self-consciousness out of natural human existence.

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Simone de Beauvoir famously described the relation of woman to man as analogous to that of slave to master in the Hegelian master–slave dialectic (Beauvoir 1989: 64). In fact, this section of the Phenomenology of Spirit is not explicitly gendered, although both antagonists are implicitly male. The scene of master–slave conflict depicts the first encounter between two human consciousnesses (not as yet individuated) who have emerged out of a state of nature characterized by the quest for the immediate satisfaction of desire or the perpetuation of pure life, in which sexual desire and reproduction plays an integral part.

In his description of this initial state of being, Hegel portrays the human being as a fundamentally animal nature, interacting with the natural world around it as something to be consumed. In this world another human is nothing more than either a means or a threat to the preservation and perpetuation of the species, itself an endless cycle of coming into being and passing away. This cyclical natural activity remains fluid and unchecked until one consciousness comes up against another in a desire, not for food or sexual gratification, but rather for recognition from the other. Recognition cannot be acquired from any other non-human living entity and indeed cannot obtain if one of the antagonists consumes the other. The mutual desire for recognition leads to a life-and-death struggle in which each party strives to bend the other’s will to its own. When one consciousness necessarily concedes defeat and becomes a “slave” or “bondsman” to the other, it is enjoined to serve the other’s needs, transforming both of their existences in the process. The “slave’s” existence now comprises nothing more than procuring for the “master” what the other needs to satisfy its desire, thereby deferring the immediacy of its own gratification.

This check in desire has the unanticipated consequence that the slave emerges as the truth of this encounter. The slave becomes a reflective self-consciousness, as opposed to a consumptive animal, by virtue of having controlled the immediacy of its desire and of having worked on the world as a consequence of this task. This “working” on the world, which Hegel characterizes as the creation of a “thing” for the consumption of the master, brings into being a second, humanly crafted nature. The master consciousness, however, by virtue of having neither checked its own desire nor worked on the world, remains a static version of the original animal human nature and eventually simply fades away in this encounter. It never becomes self-conscious, since even in its domination of the other, it cannot be recognized by one who is not of equal stature. True to the form of the Hegelian dialectic—Aufhebung or “sublation,” denoting both perishing and preserving—one side of the opposition is incorporated into the other, which, here as explicit, reflective, self-consciousness, emerges as the truth of the confrontation.

Feminist commentators have disagreed as to whether or not Beauvoir is correct in aligning woman with the slave in this encounter, and what the implications of reading the dialectic in this way would be. As Tina Chanter notes, Beauvoir not only attributes the woman-as-slave’s state of submission to oppression by the dominant consciousness, but also to what she considers her “bad faith” acquiescence in a role closely aligned with nature due to her childbearing (1995: 62). This alignment with life makes woman more likely to concede defeat in the life-and-death struggle that arises when two self-consciousnesses meet and demand recognition from each other. In tension with this view, however, Beauvoir seems to completely disregard the key transformation of the slave at the conclusion of the encounter (Chanter 1995; Oliver 1996; Miller 2000; Mussett 2006).

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Arguably, however, Beauvoir’s reading of the master–slave dialectic may have a double thrust. If woman actually serves as the catalyst and mediation for man’s transcendence, avoiding the life-and-death struggle that characterizes the encounter between the two consciousnesses, she may nonetheless be emancipated through the activity of labor, or “work” on “the thing.” Beauvoir herself in The Second Sex writes that woman functions as a respite from the constant risking of life that characterizes man’s existence (Beauvoir 1989: 141). Mussett argues that we can cull from Beauvoir’s reading another kind of “absolute negativity,” one that arises not through a life-and-death struggle but precisely through women’s historical oppression and their historical position as absolute other. Since women did not choose their historical situation, their passage out of the position of the slave is more precarious than that of men, who demand recognition through confrontation; however, through working on the world women may follow an analogous, albeit a slower, path to subjectivity (Mussett 2006: 288).

In The Second Sex Beauvoir also suggests that for women to occupy the transformational position of the “slave” they would need to assert distinctively feminine values in opposition to masculine values (Beauvoir 1989: 141; Miller 2000: 122). Only this kind of creation of values could put women in a position to demand recognition from men in the manner outlined by the master–slave dialectic. This argument implies that there might be two distinct subjectivities differentiated along the lines of sexual difference. In Beauvoir’s view the mere demand to “be recognized as existents by the same right as men” has not yet placed women in a position to struggle in the way outlined by the Hegelian master–slave paradigm (Beauvoir 2000: 64–65). This suggests a proximity to the position of Luce Irigaray, who argues that the universal cannot be one, but must be at least two, differentiated along the lines of sexual difference and desire.

Irigaray’s famous reading of Hegel, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” opened up a plethora of readings of the second most commented upon section from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, “The Ethical World: Human and Divine Law: Man and Woman” (Hegel 1977: 267; Irigaray 1985: 214–226). Hegel chooses to illustrate the tension that potentially arises between man and woman when human law and divine law are assigned according to natural difference, by reading that tension through the central conflict of Sophocles’ Antigone. Here Hegel initially presents the harmonious first shape of what he calls spirit, the historical stage where human consciousness for the first time explicitly recognizes its world as a product of itself, and the external world begins to appear not as something alien over and against consciousness, but rather as a place in which consciousness is at home. For Hegel, this moment occurs in ancient Greek ethical life, where maintaining allegiance to the law of the family is assigned to women, and the order of the state is assigned to men. Such an historical arrangement presumes that if duties are clearly and distinctly distributed and differentiated, then spheres of human interaction will function seamlessly and harmoniously. The Sophoclean tragedy Antigone, by contrast, presents the inevitable conflict that will arise when such prescribed ethical duties clash. Antigone’s act of following the dictates of divine law and family allegiance by burying her brother Polynices against King Creon’s explicit (human) order leads to the inevitable destruction of the harmonious ethical substance.

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As a result of this breakdown, subjectivity becomes an aggregate of lifeless “persons” rather than the unified substance of ethical life. Irigaray’s reading emphasizes the “undifferentiated opaqueness” of woman in this paradigm, her role as nothing more than the “store (of) substance for the sublation of self,” the historical development of the masculine subject. Woman has no specific historical discourse that would allow her to identify with and return to herself as individuated yet united with a symbolic order; thus her role becomes one of silently facilitating the emergence of the ostensibly neutral but actually masculine individual.

Multiple feminist readings of Hegel’s Antigone were inspired by the dissemination of Irigaray’s essay (Bernstein 2010; Boer 2003; Butler 2010; Chanter 1995 and 2011; Mills 1986; Oliver 1996). In fact, readings of Antigone have overshadowed any other recent feminist discussion of Hegel, with a few notable exceptions, including Carole Pateman on the Philosophy of Right, Alison Stone on the Philosophy of Nature (2010; 2013), and Kimberly Hutchings on the Science of Logic (2005). In addition, Hannah Arendt and Gillian Rose engage with Hegel’s figure of the “beautiful soul” who shrinks from contact with the world and fears to act (Hegel 1977: 383) by reading the role of women intellectuals contemporary with Hegel through this figure from the Phenomenology of Spirit (Arendt 1974; Rose 1992).

The most important themes for feminist philosophy arising out of nineteenth-century continental philosophy in general, and Hegel in particular, then, include overcoming the epistemologically and politically isolated subject in favor of an interconnected system that not only links humans with each other individually and socially, but also humans with broader nature; understanding the human being as essentially not only intellectual and moral but also embodied and broadly material; and the relationship between beauty and morality. The overcoming of one-sided antitheses such as the distinctions between nature and culture, the individual and the universal, inclination and duty, body and mind, also constitutes an important part of Hegel’s legacy for feminist thought.

Nietzsche, the Eternal Feminine, and Truth as a Woman

Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy has generated as concentrated a critique from feminists as Hegel’s, but a number of commentators, particularly from within contemporary continental philosophy, have also recognized the resources for feminist thinking in Nietzsche’s critique of the history of metaphysics and of certain institutions, which, in his words, embody “the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come” (1990: 105). Feminist philosophy, in other words, shares common enemies with Nietzsche. In addition, Nietzsche’s analysis of the ways in which seemingly neutral and universal truths and values develop historically to favor certain groups can contribute to the feminist critique of power relations in patriarchal culture. I will focus here on several particularly productive strains of thought for feminist interpreters of Nietzsche: (1) the idea of truth as a woman; (2) the eternal feminine as a Dionysian affirmation of life; (3) the will to power as an overcoming of philosophical dualisms; and (4) the concept of genealogy. Nietzsche’s critique of the philosophical conception of the atomic autonomous subject also provides resources for the feminist critique of traditional conceptions of subjectivity that privilege qualities historically judged to be “masculine” (Oliver and Pearsall 1998: 2).

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Probably more than any single phrase of Nietzsche’s, the enigmatic beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, “Supposing truth were a woman: what then?” (1989: 2) has both intrigued feminist writers and aroused their suspicion. With the publication of two important works treating the subject in France in the 1970s, feminist attention to Nietzsche burgeoned. Jacques Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1979) circles around the above phrase, and is one of the first works to eschew the previous two major attitudes of commentators on Nietzsche’s remarks on women in favor of an attention to the polysemic nature of the use of “woman” in his work. One strand of such early commentary rejected Nietzsche’s philosophy altogether as misogynistic, while the other simply ignored his inflammatory comments on women as peripheral to his project.

The second important seminal work on Nietzsche and truth as a woman, Sarah Kofman’s “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” also avoids this double danger by focusing on Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics for its “perverted” perspective, which Nietzsche likens to a rapacious gaze that wants to strip women naked, that claims to be able to see the world as it really is and not as it appears (Kofman 1988: 37; Nietzsche 1989: 21). As “woman,” in Kofman’s view, Nietzsche’s conception of truth makes a claim to be neither appearance nor reality, and thus cannot be expressed metaphysically.

Nietzsche’s controversial remarks on women cannot be denied. Among the most infamous, the section “On the Friend” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes women as cats, birds, or cows, and makes the claim that “Woman is not yet capable of friendship” (1966: 57). The section “On Little Old and Young Women” states that “everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy,” and has an old woman advise Zarathustra “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” (1966: 67). Yet in the same work virtue, truth, and eternity are female figures and virtue is compared to a mother’s relationship to her child. Also, Zarathustra’s whip is shown to be an ineffective way of approaching life or the feminine (Armstrong, cited in Patton 1993, xiii; Nietzsche 1966: 226). And through Zarathustra’s longing to become pregnant with wisdom Nietzsche compares a relationship to the earth—the corrective to a tradition preoccupied with transcending corporeal life—to the capacity to procreate bodily (Nietzsche 1966: 36, 76, 85, 94, 108–109, 124, 224–227, 228–231). Nietzsche also uses pregnancy as a metaphor for self-overcoming and the eternal recurrence of the same in the same work (1966: 16; 115).

Derrida traces the multiple layers of Nietzsche’s descriptions of woman as a figure for truth and for distance and as a figure of artifice, veils, and skepticism toward the philosophical idols that have heretofore been set up, in particular toward the metaphysical conception of being as unchanging and transcendent. Truth is a veil that both promises and hides something that seems to lie underneath appearances, but the feminine is that which recognizes both the temptation and the deceptiveness of such an appeal. According to Derrida, the heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s text manifests his lack of illusion that he could ever know woman, truth, or the ontological effects of absence and presence (1979: 95). As such, Derrida argues, the figure of woman in Nietzsche performs and unmasks the contingency of every philosophical claim to transcendence and certainty, including those that occlude the claim of women to a specific philosophical role.

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Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche famously responds to Spurs without citing it, insinuating that both Nietzsche and Derrida have appropriated the feminine to their own ends. Marine Lover is a conversation with Nietzsche that both responds to figures of the feminine in Nietzsche with love, as the title suggests, but also critically intimates that in addressing or discussing woman Nietzsche speaks into a mirror that ultimately reflects back only himself, or the feminine as it is constituted in the masculine imaginary. For Irigaray, supposing that truth is a woman and figuring woman as veiled, deceptive, or as purely appearance remains, as does its antithesis, within the metaphysical paradigm of truth, where the opposite grounds the economy of sameness (1991: 77). Irigaray writes, addressing Nietzsche directly, that when he finally allows woman to speak for themselves, as in the figures of Truth, Life, and Eternity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “it is only to bring about—your perspective, your art, your time, your will.” This appropriative mimicry takes woman “away from her surfaces, her depths,” and allows her to speak only through the ventriloquism of Zarathustra (1991: 36). On this argument, Nietzsche’s text remains complicit with the values that it seeks to overturn and does not open up a space for an active feminine subject (Oliver 1995: x–xiii).

Debra Bergoffen negotiates this impasse by suggesting that Nietzsche’s task was not to investigate the desire of woman so much as to undo man’s desire for transcendence (1989: 82; 1998: 229). Bergoffen relates Nietzsche’s attempt to unravel masculine metaphysical desire to his articulation of the temporality of the eternal recurrence of the same, which intertwines masculine and feminine temporalities in a “nonteleological joyful affirmation of life” (1989: 88).

Likewise, Kofman analyzes Nietzsche’s appellation of truth as “a woman who has grounds for not showing her grounds,” or “Baubo,” in The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974: 8), by recounting the story of the witch Baubo who appeared to Demeter during the Eleusinian mysteries. Baubo pulls up her skirts and exposes herself—or, in an alternate version, shows Demeter a picture of Dionysos drawn on her belly—causing Demeter to laugh in the midst of sorrowing for her lost daughter. As Kofman reads it, in the Eleusinian mysteries the female sexual organs are celebratory symbols of fertility and regeneration, and here they represent a return of the fecundity that Hades had stolen away, becoming assurances of the eternal rebirth or return of spring, life, and all life-affirming things. Kofman argues that Nietzsche both identifies and struggles with an ambivalent cultural attitude toward all things feminine, but that, at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his protagonist respects feminine truth, marries feminine eternity, and becomes pregnant with wisdom, himself taking on an androgynous character. Thus, both Baubo and Dionysos are masks for androgynous, protean life (Kofman 1988: 44–46).

Nietzsche’s writings, in their Heraclitean emphasis on transitoriness and becoming, also provide resources for a critique of static philosophical dualisms, including the essentialist opposition between male and female. Kofman emphasizes that Dionysos, Nietzsche’s privileged metaphorical figure for the principle of will to power and the affirmation of life, lies beyond the metaphysical designations of male and female (1988: 45). Lynne Tirrell juxtaposes Nietzsche’s critical remarks on the untenability of hierarchical and often metaphysically loaded dualisms between becoming and being, appearance and reality, and conscious and unconscious psychic activity, with the question as to why he did not direct this same critique toward the opposition between man and woman (1994: 162). She points out that there is much of value for feminists to study in Nietzsche despite this lack, by virtue of his ground-breaking attack on metaphysical dualisms in Beyond Good and Evil, his analysis of the power of discourse (in the hands of men) to shape cultural interpretations of what a woman is, and his discussion of the importance of power in shaping identities (Tirrell 1994: 177).

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Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy interpreted through the mediation of Foucault and Deleuze also informs the feminist philosophy of Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti. Genealogy, articulated by Nietzsche most forcefully in On The Genealogy of Morals (1967), opposes the search for metaphysical origins or essences lying invisibly “behind the world,” inquiring instead into the contingencies, piecemeal motivations, and above all values and struggle for mastery that inspire the formation of particular cultural standards (Nietzsche 1967: 17). Genealogy critiques both the causes of the emergence of moral values, but also the values to which they in turn give rise once established. Butler turns the critical gaze of Nietzschean genealogy onto the nature of gender roles, arguing that dualistic and essentialist conceptions of femininity (and masculinity) arise out of a series of interpretations, values, practices, and reinterpretations that in turn engender a compulsion to perform gender norms of behavior and appearance (1990: 5). Such performances of gender render it denaturalized and subject to oppressive reinforcement, but also to reinterpretation and change. Braidotti uses genealogy to argue for a materialist conception of the intersection of bodies and power, rejecting any dualistic separation of nature and culture (2011: 145).

It is in this overcoming of metaphysical dualisms and the description of the will to power as an organic process, a simultaneously creative and destructive force that continually interprets and reinterprets (Nietzsche 1968: 539, 342), that Nietzsche’s philosophy reflects the legacy of Kant and German Idealism. However, Nietzsche accords a power to human manipulations of this will to power not found in Kant’s conceptualization of the purposiveness of nature, or even in Hegel’s articulation of the movement of the historical dialectic of being and thought.

Women’s Voices in the Nineteenth Century

Although women’s intellectual contributions were increasingly heard in nineteenth-century German culture, the venue for women to express them was primarily restricted to letters, journals, and the conversations of literary salons. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, married at one time to the literary critic and scholar August-Wilhelm Schlegel and later to the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, and Dorothea Veit Schlegel, married to A.-W. Schlegel’s brother Friedrich, formed part of the important Jena Romantic Circle, where they debated with important intellectual men of their time—including Novalis, Schelling, and Ludwig Tieck—and were acquainted with Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel. The contributions of these two women to the literary journal Athenäum edited by the Schlegel brothers cannot be precisely ascertained, since many entries were published anonymously, but it is commonly accepted that their work contributed greatly to early German romanticism. Among themes important to feminist philosophy, these fragments advocated a love relationship characterized by mutual support and respect, envisioned a free society with equal roles for men and women, and critiqued bourgeois marital norms and the notion of forced marriage.

Rahel Varnhagen was a nineteenth-century German intellectual who hosted one of the most prominent Berlin literary salons attended by the likes of the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, the Tieck brothers, the von Humboldt brothers, and even Goethe, as well as being the subject of an early book by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt reconstructed Varnhagen’s life from a series of letters and diaries, proposing to correct the view of her presented after her death by her husband, the bourgeois Prussian civil servant Karl August von Varnhagen, who sought to present his wife in a manner that minimized her Jewishness and presented her as far as possible in line with the conventions of the day. In addition to tracing the evolution of a changing Jewish identity in the Germany of the early twentieth century, Arendt critiques the German Romantic conception of a certain Innerlichkeit, a self-professed desire on the part of Varnhagen to “live her life as a work of art,” which resulted in a kind of claustrophobic worldlessness, a withdrawal from the world that accords with the appellation that Goethe gave to Varnhagen when he described her as a “beautiful soul.” This phrase, which is the subject of a short story “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” that appears within Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, names one who is isolated from society, who freely follows her own impulse rather than any law imposed from without, and could equally be applied to Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Veit Schlegel.

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Dorothea Schlegel was the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, the Enlightenment philosopher. She left her husband, a respectable Jewish merchant, for Friedrich Schlegel, the philosopher and literary critic. As Arendt describes it, Dorothea Schlegel assimilated completely, but not so much to German society as to Romanticism (2007: 24).

Arendt describes Rahel’s Innerlichkeit in a negative vision of this seemingly positive appellation, as one who was “exiled . . . all alone to a place where nothing could reach her, where she was cut off from all human things, from everything that men have the right to claim” (1974: xvi). Like the beautiful soul who lacks an actual existence, “entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself” and dwelling in the immediacy of this antithesis, eventually wasting away in yearning (Hegel 1977: 406–407), Arendt criticizes Varnhagen for the evocation of an endless longing without fruition, concluding that a beautiful soul is not enough.

The philosopher Gillian Rose, however, countered Arendt in proposing that Varnhagen and other nineteenth-century women intellectuals neither accepted exclusion from the universal nor feigned an illusory personal identity outside of the universal, but instead followed a third path beyond clinging to pure-being-for-self, on the one hand, and externalization or actualization in the world, on the other. Instead, Rahel “untangled the contradiction between her pure self and the necessity of that self to actualize itself by refusing to dwell in the immediacy of this antithesis” (Rose 1992: 192). These women intellectuals neither fixed themselves in isolation outside civil society, nor sought solace in an unattainable transcendence, nor reified themselves in one of many available paths through civil society.

Rose argues that by cultivating the life of the salon and the authorship of journals and letters that were eventually published, nineteenth-century women were able to negotiate the limits of civil society and play multiple roles rather than remaining fixed in one of its circumscribed positions (1992: 193). This operation on the borders of civil society allowed nineteenth-century women intellectuals to take on a singular position that eventually worked to effect change in women’s education and philosophical authorship.

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