The Philosophy of Women: The Experiences of Love and Sexuality

2. The Philosophy of Women: The Experiences of Love and Sexuality

The nature and role of women were also consistent subjects within Salome’s work, which naturally led her to a consideration of love and sexuality. Salome’s concern with women is hardly to be wondered at, 

for throughout her life critics could rarely say anything about her work, either to praise or condemn it, without making mention of her gender.40 Additionally, she lived in a period when questions about the nature of women were being hotly debated. Salome did not deny the existence of differences between the sexes, only that these differences decidedly did not prove women to be inferior to men. Reacting to the defemi- nizing tendencies of feminists which threatened these values, Salome gained a reputation as a reactionary among some.41

An early essay on women unfortunately has been lost, but we do know that it evoked favorable comments from Nietzsche as a harbinger of things to come.42 The tone of that essay probably was reflected in her later writings, however, where she approvingly described woman as possessed of “a special resonance” for truth which transcends logic.43 Since woman is a “more integrated being” than man, “a man as a person cannot limit her: he too will some time become an image of unities that lie beyond him.”44 The erotic spirituality of women is approximated only by men who are artists and are thus influenced by “that which darkly proceeds beneath all thoughts and will-impulses.”45

The primal element in women is brought to light in Salome’s dis-cussion of six heroines from Henrik Ibsen’s dramas.46 Each is compared to a wild duck who has become trapped in an attic. In fact, the wild duck metaphor is a thinly veiled reference to the role of women in Salome’s own society, specifically the artificial confinement imposed by the conventions of marriage. Salome goes on to analyze each character in terms of their individual reactions to the captivity of social conventions and the deprivation of natural freedom. For some it ends in death, for others in various degrees of liberation from self, society, or both.

Only in the experience of love, Salome claims, does “our deepest entry into our self” become possible, where the beloved serves as the mere occasion for a return to ourselves, a spiritual homecoming.47 So it is that “two are at one only when they remain two”.48 Describing her love for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke she says the experience was “not only without defiance or guilt-feelings, but comparable to the way you find something blessed, through which the world becomes perfect”,49 once again conjoining blessedness and perfection in a Spinozistic way. Hence, for Salome love offered a means of transcending the boundaries of consciousness, by delving our primal depths.50

Salome’s theory of human bisexuality (referring to the co-existence of masculine and feminine traits in each person) supports the value of love 

as self-realization.51 Yet she also chooses a feminine form to represent it:

The firmest union of masculinity and femininity is comprised by motherliness, where woman conceives and bears and also generates, protects, and governs the offspring. So it is with the man when he rules and decides, but as a knight in service, i.e., on behalf of the beloved person.52

For Salome human life is suffused with eroticism - and consequently infidelity.53 This she believed to be especially the case for women, as exemplified in the uniquely feminine symbol of the Madonna as pos-sessed of sanctified sexuality, while male saints are bound to asceticism.54