Abstract
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is renowned as one of the most extreme misogynists in the history of Western philosophy. However, women writers also promoted his works and also drew on his metaphysics and ethics as they developed their own philosophical and feminist positions. The chapter starts by sketching in the role and range of Schopenhauerian women philosophers and writers. The chapter then focuses on two case-studies: May Sinclair (1863–1946), a neglected British Idealist, and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) whose early passion for Schopenhauer helped shape the negative view of female embodiment evident in her published works. The chapter ends with some comments on the relevance of Schopenhauer to post-1968 feminisms, including the “ethics of care”, and Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Indian philosophical traditions.
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Notes
- 1.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Women,” Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 2, trans. and ed. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 27, §367, 554 [6/655]. The reference gives the chapter title and number, then section number and page numbers. In square brackets is the volume number, followed by the page numbers in Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Mannheim: F.A. Brockhaus, 7 vols, 1988).
- 2.
Schopenhauer, “On Women,” §369, 555 [6/656].
- 3.
May Sinclair, “Letter to Samuel Alexander,” March 16, 1926. Cited in Emily Thomas, “The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5, no. 2 (2019): 137–157, doi:10.1017/apa.2018.45.
- 4.
Helene von Druskowitz, Wie ist Verantwortung und Zurechnung ohne Annahme der Willensfreiheit möglich? (Heidelberg: Georg Weiß, 1887); Erna [Helene von Druskowitz], Pessimistische Kardinalsätze. Ein Vademekum für die freiesten Geister (Wittenberg: Herrosé Zimsen Verlag, 1905).
- 5.
S. Pearl Brilmyer, “Schopenhauer and British Literary Feminism,” in The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, ed. S. Shapshay (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 397–424.
- 6.
E A. McCobb, “Daniel Deronda as Will and Representation: George Eliot and Schopenhauer,” The Modern Language Review 80, no. 3 (1985): 533–549. For Eliot’s Spinozism see Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. George Eliot, ed. Clare Carlisle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
- 7.
Brilmyer, “Schopenhauer,” 404; and see Olive Schreiner Letters Online, letter 55, March 2, 1885. www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=137&letterid=55.
- 8.
Helen Zimmern, Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1876), 228, and see Brilmyer, “Schopenhauer,” 417.
- 9.
1819 appears on the title page of the first German edition of volume 1 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, but it was published in late 1818. All references will be to Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 1, 2010; vol. 2, 2018). [Henceforward cited as WWR, followed by the Volume, Book, Section or Chapter number, then the page numbers. In square brackets is the volume number, followed by the page numbers in Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher (7 vols, 1988).].
- 10.
Frederick C. Beiser. After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 12.
- 11.
Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 12.
WWR2, IV, ch. 48, 620 [3/695]; WWR1, IV, §59, 350–351 [2/382–384].
- 13.
WWR2, II, ch. 28, 374 [3/410]; WWR1, IV, §58, 348 [2/379].
- 14.
WWR2, IV, ch. 42, 526–530 [3/584–589].
- 15.
WWR1, IV, §59, 352 [2/385]. Jacob Golomb, “The Inscrutable Riddle of Schopenhauer’s Relations to Jews and to Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, ed. Robert L. Wicks, 425–445 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
- 16.
May Sinclair, The New Idealism (New York: Macmillan, 1922), x. And see May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (London: Macmillan, 1917), xii.
- 17.
Christine Battersby, “May Sinclair’s Philosophy Books in The London Library (Part II),” The website of the May Sinclair Society, May 11, 2020, https://maysinclairsociety.com/people-and-research/may-sinclairs-philosophy-books-in-the-london-library-part-ii/.
- 18.
May Sinclair, The Divine Fire (New York: H. Holt, reprint, 1905), 269–270.
- 19.
May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (London: Virago, 1980), 232, 294, 254. Since there is no English equivalent of the term Vorstellung (which suggests that which is presented to consciousness or the mind’s eye), the English word “Idea” has often been used instead of “Representation,” and Sinclair follows that convention here.
- 20.
May Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow: A Life (New York: Hutchinson, 1924), 185. See also Battersby, “May Sinclair”; also Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland, 3 vols. (London: Trübner & Co, 1884). Sinclair owned the 3 volume German edition of 1890. For the influence of Schopenhauer on Hartmann (1842–1906) see Beiser, After Hegel, 46–48, 184ff.
- 21.
Sinclair, Arnold, 285, 327, 440–442.
- 22.
Julian Sinclair [pseudonym], Nakiketas and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1886).
- 23.
Theophilus E. M. Boll, “May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, no. 4 (Aug. 22, 1962): 310–326.
- 24.
May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 10, 11, 167, 253, 256–257, 264.
- 25.
For Hitler see Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 23; for Franz Marc see Rose-Carol Washton Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents (Berkeley: California University Press, 2013), 162–164. Sinclair scholars have expressed unease with Sinclair’s Journal, not only because of its many inaccuracies, but also on account of Sinclair’s apparently irrational passions and war fever; but without registering the links to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. See, for example, Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), ch. 5.
- 26.
Sinclair, Journal, 157, and see 12, 69, 167–168.
- 27.
Ibid., 218–222, for example.
- 28.
Ibid., 169–272, 255–260.
- 29.
May Sinclair, “The Way of Sublimation,” Annotated Typescript Carbon, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Box 24, Folder 439. With thanks to Rebecca Bowler for supplying the digital files. I have corrected obvious misspellings. The manuscript is only now scheduled for publication in the forthcoming “Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair,” ed. Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery (in preparation).
- 30.
Sinclair, “Sublimation,” 3–4, 23.
- 31.
Ibid., 113–114.
- 32.
May Sinclair, Feminism (London: The Women Writers’ Suffrage League, 1912), 30.
- 33.
Margaret A. Simons, “Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir,” trans. J. M. Todd, Hypatia 3, no. 3 (1989): 13.
- 34.
Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student Volume 1, 1926–1927, ed. Barbara Klaw et al., trans. Barbara Klaw (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Volume 1 of the Diary appeared in English before being published in French as Simone de Beauvoir, Cahiers de jeunesse, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 2008).
- 35.
Beauvoir, Diary, 225, quoting WWR1, IV, §57, 338 [2/367]. I have kept Klaw’s wording which seeks to reflect Beauvoir’s French.
- 36.
Beauvoir, Diary, 252–54, quoting WWR1, II, §26, 163 [2/165]; III, §52, 295 [2/315]; IV, §54, 301 [2/323], 304–305 [2/328], 305 [2/328], 306–307 [2/330–331]; IV, §57, 337 [2/367], 338 [2/368], 339 [2/369], 342 [2/373]; IV, §58, 348 [2/379]; IV, §67, 403 [2/444], 404 [2/446]. In the French edition the Schopenhauer quotations are ascribed to May 11, 1927, Cahiers, 339–341. The disagreement about dates is understandable given the insertions and additions that are a feature of the notebooks.
- 37.
Beauvoir, Diary, 258; Cahiers, 344. In the French edition the enthusiastic comments on Schopenhauer are made in the very next diary entry, after the quotations, dated—as in the English version—May 13, 1927.
- 38.
For Beauvoir on her childish “love match” with Jacques see Le Bon de Beauvoir, “Introduction” to Beauvoir, Cahiers, 27.
- 39.
Beauvoir, Diary, 246.
- 40.
Beauvoir, Diary, 252.; WWR1, II, §26, 163 [2/165].
- 41.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1962).
- 42.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Two Unpublished Chapters from She Came to Stay,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann and Mary Beth Mader, 31–75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). For a more detailed analysis, see Christine Battersby, “Simone de Beauvoir, Stream of Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction: Becoming a Self in the First Draft of She Came to Stay,” Literature Compass 17, no. 6 (2020): e12553, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12553.
- 43.
The epigraph is missing from the English translation: Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, trans. Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
- 44.
Beauvoir, “Two Unpublished,” 44–45.
- 45.
Beauvoir, “Two Unpublished,” 42.
- 46.
WWR2, IV, ch. 41, 484 [3/533, 3/534]; ch. 44, 554 [3/616], 565 [3/629], 566 [3/631].
- 47.
Schopenhauer, “On Women,” Ch. 27, §369, 556 and fn. f. [6/657–658]; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and eds. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2011), 106, 420, 421.
- 48.
Beauvoir, Second Sex, 185, 116.
- 49.
“Biological Data”—the English chapter title—misses the philosophical point. In French editions this chapter is sometimes missing or severely abridged.
- 50.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1966), 489–553.
- 51.
Beauvoir, Second Sex, 293
- 52.
Beauvoir, Second Sex, 35, 38–39.
- 53.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 35, 201–203, 275, 350, 374, 449, 459, 491.
- 54.
Beauvoir, Second Sex, 766–768; Simone de Beauvoir, “Women and Creativity,” trans. Roisin Mallaghan, in French Feminist Thought: A Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 17–32.
- 55.
Beauvoir, Ethics, 129, 55–58.
- 56.
Battersby, “Simone,” 7–9.
- 57.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Lawrence A. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg: Implications for Moral Theory,” Ethics 98, no. 3 (1988): 472–791.
- 58.
Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 1 (1996): 98–99 fn1, 98, 81–90.
- 59.
Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluhácek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), ch. 1.
- 60.
See Joy Morny, Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender, and Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 137–141.
- 61.
For Buddhism see Erin McCarthy, Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese, and Feminist Philosophies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
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Battersby, C. (2022). Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Ethics: Mapping Influences and Congruities with Feminist Philosophers. In: Lettow, S., Pulkkinen, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13123-3_22
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