Who knows what governs how a moderately engaged undergraduate makes sense of abstruse philosophic texts? As a sophomore, my mind settled on a basic dichotomy: Hegel bad, Kierkegaard good. This was probably what you might call a gendered thought. Hegel's basic How-Things-Work was to my mind aggressive, imperialist, male: thesis absorbs antithesis in new synthesis. Man slays dragon, eats its heart, becomes (relative) superman. Kierkegaard, by contrast, kept apparently irreconcilable opposites in eternal balance, on an eternal toggle switch whereby they could be seen alternately as part of a unity and eternally distinct.
I can't tell you at this distance whether my abstract caricature is accurate, but it has stayed with me all my life, and I tend to class thinkers on one side or the other of this divide. In retrospect, I'm sure that I placed the subject of my dissertation, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (an achoress, i.e. a nun in self-imposed solitary confinement) on the Kierkeaardian side of the ledger, though I never zoomed up the centuries to probe the association. *
Julian had a brilliant trick of subordinating the harsh elements of Catholic dogma that she didn't like (the damned are damned forever) to those that she felt by force of direct revelation to be true (all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well). Her basic dynamic was that God-as-man maintains two "cheres," or points of view: the human, limited one, whereby we must see and condemn our own sin, and the "inward, more ghostly" and more strictly divine one, whereby no one does anything except by God's will, and God is delighted with all, and sin is merely an instrument of human self-education.
I can't tell you at this distance whether my abstract caricature is accurate, but it has stayed with me all my life, and I tend to class thinkers on one side or the other of this divide. In retrospect, I'm sure that I placed the subject of my dissertation, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (an achoress, i.e. a nun in self-imposed solitary confinement) on the Kierkeaardian side of the ledger, though I never zoomed up the centuries to probe the association. *
Julian had a brilliant trick of subordinating the harsh elements of Catholic dogma that she didn't like (the damned are damned forever) to those that she felt by force of direct revelation to be true (all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well). Her basic dynamic was that God-as-man maintains two "cheres," or points of view: the human, limited one, whereby we must see and condemn our own sin, and the "inward, more ghostly" and more strictly divine one, whereby no one does anything except by God's will, and God is delighted with all, and sin is merely an instrument of human self-education.
