The canon’s lost voices: 5 women who rewrote the rules of philosophy

Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn, known for her “scandalous” plays, is widely believed to be the first women to earn a living by writing in the 17th century. She is also believed to have worked as a spy for King Charles II after her husband’s death, which led to her racking up debt as the King refused to pay for her travels. She was also thrown into the Debtor’s Prison, and thereafter earned her living as a novelist and playwright until her death. She painted honour for introducing shame and formality. She mulled on the concept of love, and the relationships between men and women, and members of the same gender with each other.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Jessie Redmon Fauset was one of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance. However, feminist scholars widely believe that she did not receive her due because of her sex. Fauset wrote about middle-class Black people, with an emphasis on the women and their interior lives. Morgan Jerkins in her New Yorker article, The Forgotten Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset, says, “A look at Fauset’s entire body of work reveals a writer who is more engaged with modern questions of race, class, and gender than she has been given credit for.”

Agnes Heller

Agnes Heller, a Hungarian Jew survived the Holocaust. She was a student of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, but later became a dissident who was purged from the Communist Party for her unorthodox views. She wrote on everything from ethics to Shakespeare to the nature of modernity. However, the question that defined her sensibilities was how to live when the old certainties have crumbled. She rejected both the blind faith of traditional societies and the instrumentalism of modern capitalism.

Etty Hillesum

Etty Hillesum only left behind a diary and a handful of letters, written from Amsterdam as the Nazis tightened their grip on the city’s Jewish population. In 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died at the age of 29. But in the two years before her death, Hillesum produced a philosophy of radical affirmation. She read Rilke and Augustine, studied Jungian psychology, and gradually developed a vision of human dignity. She rejected the split between reason and emotion, insisting that true thought must be felt in the body, in the gut, in the capacity for suffering and joy. From inside the transit camp of Westerbork, she wrote of beauty and the irreducible value of each human life. Hillesum’s philosophy teaches us that the mind need not abandon the body to save itself, that even at the edge of the abyss, we can choose how to meet our fate.