Bifurcated Life

Johan Ludvig Heiberg

[The following post is part of a series on the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard.]

The very first thing Kierkegaard ever published was an attempt at satirical one-upmanship. The New Yorker (or perhaps the Paris Review) of Copenhagen, in the eyes of aspiring young writers, was the Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post. You wanted to get published there because that meant you had earned the approval of Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Heiberg was a dramatist, poet, critic, popularizer of Hegel; in short, a cultural authority. In the small, connected world of Danish letters, he was the man to impress.

So when another young man named Peter Lind — known to Kierkegaard both from his grade school and from Copenhagen University — managed to get published in the Post, with a snarky little article on the classic counter enlightenment theme of how dumb feminists are; and when Kierkegaard, presumably, read this article and realized he could do better in the same vein, he jumped at the opportunity. Lind’s article, “In Defense of Woman’s Higher Origin” came out in issue 33; Kierkegaard’s, “In Defense of Woman’s Great Abilities”, in issue 34.

Lind’s article purports to iterate and apply the fact that woman is, by nature, “only an object for veneration, and that she ought to act only to display herself in glory” (132). But this, of course, is only an ironic cover for the fact that Lind believes women are intellectually inferior to men and will only embarrass themselves when they purport to do intellectual things like attend public lectures. Lind believes women only go to those public lectures in order to show their fashion off to each other. In light of all this, Lind offers three suggestions: first, that since women are so wise, they might as well lecture each other (rather than attend public lectures, a suggestion meant to deflate any pretensions to real intellectual curiosity, since presumable if the lectures were not good opportunities for public display, by Lind’s reasonging, the women would stay away from them); second, that since they are neglecting their cooking in vain outings, they had better learn enough philosophy to console their husbands for the hunger they will inevitably experience; third, that they ought to demonstrate their more heavenly, spiritual nature by working at embroidery and beadwork which will damage their eyes and prove their disdain for merely mundane pursuits. (Of course that last suggestion is meant to imply the opposite of what it states, since embroidery and beadwork were important elements of female fashion, and for Lind’s readers the notion of being absorbed in those ‘arts’ suggested being absorbed in one’s appearance, a decidedly un-spiritual absorption.)

Lind’s unpleasant article combines two smelly themes of anti-feminism: that women are silly vain things, and that men should treat women with a coy ironic veneration. The latter is an idea by no means new, having been peddled already as early as the 17th century. As Jonathan Israel informs us in the chapter on “Women, Philosophy, and Sexuality,” in Radical Enlightenment, one traditionalist response to the interest of women in the new philosophy of Descartes and the emancipation its rationalism tended to foster, was to assert that women in their intellectual inferiority were the social mainstays of religion — a good thing, which by some obscure logic made them better than men. In this way, traditionalists could maintain their disparagement of the feminine, the association of female ignorance with true spirituality, and their necessary respect for the spiritual. Lind clearly leans more to mockery than veneration, but the woman-as-more-spiritual obviously lingers on in the tapestry of his spite.

19th Century Female Fashion

Kierkegaard thought he could do better. His article pursues essentially the same line — woman’s pretension to theoretical education is at best a cover for sillier purposes, and she might as well confine her silliness to its traditional venues and thereby preserve the male realm of serious thinking from disrespect. But his article lays the classical allusions on thicker, employs a larger number of satiric observations, does a better job of displaying K.’s own erudition, and — I think we can tell, though we are reading in translation — does all this with more elegant and vivid language using about the same number of words. — Women have always been philosophical, he tells us solemnly, look at Eve getting lectured by a snake, look at the way in Eastern countries women are confined in harems and behind veils — the better to contemplate higher things –, and moreover they have developed their own special kind of rhetoric, the nagging-while-in-bed genre. But of course it wasn’t until the French Revolution [which, note, was the most immediate impetus to the ideas of equality that gave rise to larger numbers of women attending public lectures] that woman really came into her own — when the revolutionaries hired a prostitute to act as the goddess of reason in their celebrations. But we don’t need history to demonstrate woman’s intellectual superiority — after all, she never loses an argument. [Who never loses an argument? Only someone who doesn't listen to reason but persists until they overcome by wearying their opponent, perhaps by nagging them in bed.] These days women are doing all sorts of things — and here K. alludes to various topical events and artifacts by women, including a play by Heiberg’s mother — and they are perfecting the sciences, for instance by studying the spirit of the age in fashion magazines. Soon enough, if things keep on their present course, the arena of manly argument which is presently filled with combatants of such illustrious title as Kantian, Hegelian, etc., will be transformed (as in the middle ages) into a pageant of chivalrous and meaningless jousting under the colors of the ladies. Yes, women are really coming into their own as superior in all the manly activities to man — they are rising above the earth — why, just look at that new fashion of puffed sleeves! They’re turning into birds! They’re flying away, leaving us men behind in our doldrums, destitute! And when we finally realize just how much of an improvement they were to the level of our discourse and the seriousness of our sciences, then maybe they will come back…

So, yes, as the above summary demonstrates, Kierkegaard did have a bit more variety in his satire than Lind, and he threw in a little romantic flight of fancy at the end just to show his poetical chops. This publication was an exercise and a gamble for recognition. That doesn’t excuse its dumb chauvinism, of course.

Kierkegaard had reason to consider the publication of this essay an even greater success than most because he had actually tweaked the nose of Heiberg himself in it. In addition to alluding to Heiberg’s mother in his enumeration of the cultural production of modern women, he also wrote, “it is so lovely to see that the man who especially wishes to have an effect upon the ladies does not, however, forget the men and finally extends his philanthropic enthusiasm to all.” This is a clear dig at Heiberg, who advertised some public lectures as open to all, including and especially ladies. Moreover, the whole point of both articles went against Heiberg’s professed commitment to woman’s intellectual equality with man. So it was a coup to have written so well that Heiberg published one — even though he disagreed with one’s thesis, and even though one had directly mocked him.