On Being at Home in Ourselves and the World: Love, Sex, Gender, and Justice

 Helga 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