These women made important contributions to existential philosophy but were often overlooked. Lou Salome criticized notions of male purity and penetration in her work on eroticism. Edith Stein's work on intersubjectivity explored how relationships can give life meaning or lead to dread. Simone de Beauvoir advocated for creating situations where people can support each other's freedom and growth. Overall they demonstrated how existential themes like ambiguity and commitment are relevant to understanding female experience.

1. 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

4. Regine Schlegel
(née Olsen;
January 23, 1822
– March 18,
1904)
Wife of Danish
Ambassador to
West Indies
Interviewed near
her death
repeatedly about
Kierkegaard
Inspiration of
Either/Or

5. Commentators repeatedly
Emphasize the importance of
Regine Olsen to Kierkegaard,
and his journals suggest that he
remained besotted by her.
Why is she missing as a person
In these accounts?
Why are women so often
left out of account when we
refer to existential thinkers?
But perhaps this is changing?

6. WHY WERE WOMEN SO OFTEN
LEFT OUT OF ACCOUNT WHEN WE
REFER TO EXISTENTIAL
THINKERS?
Why are women still so left out of account when we refer to
existential thinkers?

7. 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

8. 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.

9. I have chosen three women who are
closely linked to famous existential
thinkers
• Lou Salome
• Edith Stein
• Simone de Beauvoir

10. Lou Salomé

13. Lou Salomé
Third International Psychoanalytic Congress 1911

14. Female influence is mediated by sexual
allure

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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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’

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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
• Women know that there is neither
penetration nor being penetrated, only
being joined: copulation

22. Female influence is mediated by sexual
allure
“The most pure virgin is the only one
safeguarded from every stain of sin”

23. “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

24. • 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

30. 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)

31. 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

32. Alter Ego

33. Is there anyone there?
Is there anyone there?
There must be

34. I find myself
immersed in
a world of
people
I’m not really thinking
about it

35. Alter Ego

36. 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”

37. 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

38. Simone de Beauvoir
Second in her year at the École normale
supérieure
Prix Goncourt for the Mandarins
Best-selling “The second sex”
Another 22 books plus articles and
interviews

39. Simone de Beauvoir

40. • 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

41. 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

42. 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)

43. CONCLUSIONS
• Moral reflection
• Devotion
• Ambiguity

44. CONCLUSIONS
• Moral reflection
• Devotion
• Ambiguity
• Community
• Committed relationship

45. • Moral reflection
• Devotion
• Ambiguity
• Committed relationship
• Community
CONCLUSIONS