On Being at Home in Ourselves and the World

Abstract

IntroductionHelga Varden’s Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory (2020) is a rigorous, beautiful, and transformative book, which does vital work not only in fully developing how Kant’s complex understandings of desire, reflection, and relationality should inform our understanding of his arguments about sex and love but also in positioning these Kantian arguments as absolutely critical resources to contemporary debates about gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual (in)justice. Rarely is a book so comprehensive, so coherent, and so grounded in a vulnerability we rarely find in philosophy; rarely does it so radically expand the resources we have for dealing with what seems like a familiar problem in such a well-read figure. The literature on Kant and sex is extensive, and yet this book absolutely revolutionizes the kinds of questions we can ask about Kant on sex, love, and gender.Beyond its attendance to essential questions about love, sex, gender, and the phenomenology of human embodiment, Varden’s book makes several key methodological moves. First, she offers a rigorous defense of a “bottom up” approach to Kant, which allows theorists (largely, and not coincidentally, women theorists) to square the sorts of non-ideal experiences with which she is concerned in this book with the systemic features of Kant’s practical philosophy. This is not, as she argues, to decenter freedom in his philosophical project, but to read in a direction that allows these questions to “surface” in our lived, embodied, human experience of freedom. Varden’s Kant, then, is an ideal Kant who is concerned with non-ideal dilemmas, desires, and experiences; he is a reconstructed Kant, whose ample resources for theorizing human experience, morality, teleology, and justice are no longer hampered by his own sexist, homophobic, and cisist preoccupations. There are critical resources here for those drawing on Kant to address a range of non-ideal questions that are beyond the scope of this project.
 Second, Varden opens with a lineage of both Kantian scholarship by women and feminist Kant scholarship, demonstrating the rich and varied ways that Kant scholarship has been transformed over the past four decades by the influx of women into the field, and revealing Kant scholarship as a site of (perhaps surprising) feminist philosophical innovation. For me, this is both resonant and comforting. I came to Kant because it was, at the time, the only seminar taught by a woman in my graduate department, and as such, was the only seminar in which I was not harassed, belittled, or silenced. Writing about Kant not only allowed me to work with a woman advisor; he provided cover for pursuing questions about love, sex, gender, and race that were not understood as “philosophical” within my graduate department, at least at the time I took them up. Varden’s book articulates my own sense of Kant scholarship as a gateway into feminist philosophy, as a rare space in mainstream philosophical scholarship that passes, if you will, a kind of philosophical Bechdel test. My engagement with Varden’s book is oriented through this gratitude, and through the sense of belonging that is at the center of Varden’s project here: an attendance to the ways that women belong in Kant scholarship, that non-ideal questions of love, sex and gender belong in Kantian philosophy, and that the experiences, desires, and traumas of women and LGBTQIA people belong in philosophical inquiries into what it is to be human. Accordingly, I begin by tracing Varden’s argument through a central theme of the book: that one way to think about problems of love, sex, and gender, from both a phenomenological and a political perspective, is to tend to the importance of being at home with oneself, in the world, and with others. I explore how this framework allows Varden to develop a distinctly and innovatively Kantian account of our sexually loving and gendered selves, and their implications both for questions of virtue and morality, and for questions of justice. I then consider the ways that Varden’s analysis provides us with much needed resources to think about how inhabiting a self-defensive stance in the face of oppression may violate our duties to resist our own oppression. Finally, having traced the arguments at the heart of the book, I turn to two puzzles in Varden’s account of the just state: her understanding of sexual consent, and her defense of the state’s right to restrict abortion.