Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard is discussed in The Second Sex as a philosopher whose writing illuminates the contradictory construction of woman as man’s Other. His account of marriage also offers a particularly revealing case: he recognizes that love and marriage belong to different orders, then attempts to join them through a religious decision. Across both subjects, woman is granted immense significance while her independent subjectivity remains constrained by a male-centered frame.

Woman as an Ambiguous Other

Kierkegaard’s description of what it means to be a woman appears in a discussion of why no single predicate can contain the conflicting meanings imposed on her. Beauvoir uses his formulation to show that this confusion does not prove woman is inherently unknowable. It arises because she is apprehended negatively, as she appears to man, rather than positively as a person for herself. The contradictions belong to the position of the Other: she can seem necessary to the whole and at the same time to separate man from it, embodying both promise and threat.

The analysis places this ambiguity within a wider argument about the structure of otherness. The Other may be treated as evil because it stands apart, yet it is also necessary to the good and to the subject’s sense of a whole. Woman therefore appears through repeated reversals—hope and failure, love and hatred, good and bad—rather than as a stable essence. Kierkegaard’s observation helps Beauvoir identify the instability of the myth, but the instability itself is produced by a perspective that makes man the measure and woman the object being interpreted.

Woman as Inspiration and Ideal

Kierkegaard’s reflections on ideality give this asymmetry a specific form. Woman, he writes, can bring ideality into life, and a young woman may help make a man a genius. But his account distinguishes the inspiring young woman from the woman he marries: the idealizing relation depends on distance, while marriage brings the woman into objective reality. Beauvoir cites this distinction to show that woman is welcomed as a source of male transcendence when she remains an idea, but becomes limiting when she exists as a person in her own right.

The resulting pattern is not simply praise followed by rejection. Woman is made necessary to man’s ideal aspirations, yet her value is tied to the condition that she not claim an equal place as an independent subject. The ideal woman can serve as a screen for male projects; the actual woman, limited and self-directed, disrupts that projection. Kierkegaard’s account thus exemplifies how the elevation of woman into an infinite or inspiring figure can coexist with the denial of her freedom and reality.

Marriage as a Paradox of Decision

In his discussion of marriage, Kierkegaard calls it a strange and decisive step that may nevertheless be taken without reflection. The paradox, as Beauvoir presents it, is that falling in love is spontaneous, while marriage is a decision; yet marriage is also expected to awaken or secure the very love that seems to precede deliberate choice. Spontaneity must somehow coincide with a considered commitment, and the decision must not merely follow love as an afterthought. The two are expected to converge at the same moment.

Kierkegaard does not treat this difficulty as a reason to abandon marriage. Instead, he argues that reflection can produce a new kind of spontaneity: decision, formed through reflection, can become an ethical and religious commitment that prepares for love and protects it against dangers from within and without. In this account, a man chooses marriage in faith that feeling and duty can be brought into accord. The husband becomes the figure in whom seriousness and the pleasure of love are meant to remain joined.

Gendered Roles Within the Solution

The proposed reconciliation is not symmetrical. Kierkegaard assigns reflection and ethical decision to the man, while the wife is described as moving from the immediacy of love to the immediacy of religion. In Beauvoir’s account, this means that the man’s marriage is an act of faith that attempts to secure love through a deliberate commitment, whereas the woman is represented as wishing to marry once she is in love. His solution therefore preserves the very division that makes the paradox difficult: the husband is the deciding subject, and the wife’s part is framed as immediate feeling.

Beauvoir sets this doctrine beside the belief, held by an older Catholic woman she knew, in a sacramental falling in love: at the couple’s final vows at the altar, their hearts would supposedly burst into flame. Kierkegaard’s account similarly depends on a near-miraculous accord, while admitting the need for a prior inclination and asking that it be understood as lasting a lifetime. The comparison makes clear how religious assurance is asked to bridge the gap between present feeling and lifelong obligation, without resolving the unequal roles assigned to the partners.

The Limits of the Ideal

Kierkegaard’s reflections connect two problems that Beauvoir treats together: woman is cast as an ideal necessary to man, and marriage is presented as a decision that must preserve the spontaneity of love. In both cases, woman’s importance is unmistakable, but it is organized around what she can mean to the man. As an inspiring figure, she sustains his ideal efforts; as a wife, she enters a religiously sanctioned union whose reflective decision is attributed to him.

The contrast between the young woman who inspires genius and the wife who becomes objective reality exposes the cost of this idealization. Woman is valuable at a distance, where she can represent transcendence, but her independent existence is treated as a limit. Likewise, the marriage doctrine promises to reconcile feeling and duty while leaving the burden of decision unequally distributed. Kierkegaard therefore serves in Beauvoir’s argument not merely as a commentator on love and marriage, but as an example of how reverence for woman can coexist with her subordination as the Other.