Lou salome1 (1861-1937). Sandra A. Wawrytko

4. Lou Salome1 (1861-1937). SANDRA A. WAWRYTKO

Lou Salome represents a unique figure in modern western thought - charismatic and cerebral, feminine and forthright, meditative and dynamic. Her extraordinary life and work is most often associated with three major figures - and areas of thought - of her period: Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophy, Rainer Maria Rilke in the arts, and Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis. Her various liaisons with these central figures has been cause for her inclusion in historical chronicles.

At the same time, however, by being identified with and through this illustrious company, Salome’s position as a philosopher has been com-promised, for she has been deprived of due consideration as a significant thinker in her own right. Indeed, her biographies usually center on her role as astute observer and cultivator of genius, most blatantly in Rudolph Binion’s description of Salom6 as “Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple”.2 Even Salom6’s friend and literary executor, Ernst Pfeiffer, speaks of her as being “dominated” by various male figures at different periods of her life,3 thereby excluding the possibility of mutual influence. Following this trend, the recent resurgence of interest in Salome’s work focuses on her texts which deal with her famous contemporaries.4 Our discussion here gives primary emphasis to Salome’s philosophical contributions, to which other concerns, and people, are ancillary.

I.  BIOGRAPHY

Louise von Salome was born on February 12th, 1861 in Petersburg, Russia. Her father, Gustav, a general in the imperial army, had been raised to the nobility and befriended by Czar Nicholas I. Both parents had roots in Germany and Salome grew up speaking German. The family lived within the exclusive and pampered circle of Protestant German

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 69-102. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

emigre families brought to Russia to supply professional and technical expertise. Moreover, Salom6 led a charmed childhood as the youngest of six children and the only daughter. Despite these advantages and a warm family life, her autobiography reveals as early sense of isolation and loneliness, which she sought to escape through intricate fantasies.5

Salomd’s loneliness, combined with a disillusion regarding God and religion, led her at age seventeen to seek spiritual consolation from Pastor Hendrik Gillot.6 In Gillot she found the religious training she sought, but in addition he displaced her childhood fantasies with a broad philosophical education emphasizing analytical thinking and metaphysics.7 When the student-teacher relationship became fraught with romantic overtones, Salome fled from such attachments. Her reaction first took the form of illness, which in turn became a reason for a move beyond Russia.8

Another factor which freed Salome to leave Russia and explore the intellectual opportunities of the rest of Europe, was the loss of her beloved father early in 1879. Her strong will enabled her to surmount the objections of both her mother (who feared her daughter’s health was being injured by her mental exertions9) and her brother. In 1880 Salom6 arrived in Switzerland, in the company of her mother, to begin a new life using a new name, “Lou”, bestowed on her by Gillot at her confirmation.

Salomd’s higher education now began in earnest, initiated by religious classes at the university in Zurich in the areas of comparative religion, theology, philosophy and art history.10 She devoted herself so fully to her studies that they were interrupted by illness. Fortuitously, this led to her subsequent travels through Italy, Germany, Austria, and France, putting her in contact with sources of vital intellectual ferment through a series of stimulating personal relationships (discussed below).

Eventually Salome persuaded her mother to return to Russia alone, while Salome created a scandal by living openly for several years with the philosopher Paul Rёе, in a platonic mutual quest for knowledge. This arrangement, and relationship, ended in 1887 when Salome contracted an equally unconventional marriage also devoid of sexual relations. Her husband, Fred Charles Andreas, a philologist of exotic heritage specializing in Persia, was fifteen years her senior. Their marriage remained intact for more than forty years despite her intermittent affairs with other men, thus exemplifying her philosophy that sensual love and marital love are not to be mixed. Through this separation Salome was able to experience love without being irredeemably possessed 

by it; she could protect her highly valued personal freedom by never being possessed exclusively, and in all senses, by any one man.II. * 

Salom6 did not so much challenge the sexist assumptions of her times, as transcend them through her own unconventional lifestyle and strength of will. She tended to regard herself as a thinker first and a woman second.14 Hence, she did not sense a need to align herself with either the feminists, or with anti-feminist forces.15 Her writings do not apologize for the “weakness” of the feminine (as compared to the masculine), they vindicate its inherent value.16

Thus, rather than pursuing the cause of women’s liberation, Salome felt that being a woman was a form of liberation - namely, liberation from the social and natural constraints which burdened men. This may explain her seeming resignation to the condition of women, as reflected in her comment to Freud that ambition is “a great lack, but one which must be allowed to us womenfolk, for why should we bother with ambition?”17 In the excesses of intellect and its cultural products Salome senses “a decline of life, a culture obtained by a deficit in life, a culture of the weak [that is, of men].”18

Despite Salome’s advocacy of the feminine, others often described her as being possessed of masculine sensibilities and perspectives.19 This impression probably can be accounted for by her acute and unashamed intellect. Moreover, in regard to her own life, she was determined to let nothing stand in the way of her personal development - neither parental objections nor potentially-stifling love relationships; neither social convention nor religious scruples. This much is made clear in a letter to her first “love” (and first in a series of rejected suitors), Pastor Gillot, as she responds to his objections to her intention to live in platonic bliss with Paul Ree:

I can neither live according to models nor shall I ever be a model for anyone at all; on the contrary - what I shall quite certainly do is make my own life according to myself, whatever may come of it. In this I have no principle to represent, but something much more wonderful - something that is inside oneself and is hot with sheer life, and rejoices and wants to get out.20 

of women, specifically the experience of love and sexuality.21 A strong phenomenological orientation pervades Salome’s philosophy, and is in her lifestyle.22 Thus, in her autobiography she divides her life into a series of momentous experiences - starting with the experience of God, then of her family, love (through Gillot), Russia, friendship (through Paul Ree), and Freud. 23