HegelÕs thought has exerted enormous influence, both direct and
indirect, on the development of feminist philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir, for
example, reworks HegelÕs account of the master/slave dialectic to generate her
theory of woman as manÕs ÔOtherÕ, while Luce Irigaray draws heavily on HegelÕs
political philosophy in formulating her proposals for Ôsexuate rightsÕ and a
culture of sexual difference. Judith Butler, too, mobilises HegelÕs idea of
internal critique to explain how regimes of gendered and heteronormative power
undermine themselves from within.[1]
Despite his huge influence, Hegel is regarded with suspicion – if not
hostility – in much contemporary feminist thought. His philosophy is
widely perceived to centre around a series of hierarchical oppositions –
between spirit and nature, subject and object, state and family, universality
and particularity – which converge, troublingly, with traditional
hierarchical oppositions between masculine and feminine and between male and
female. For this reason, feminist philosophers regularly present Hegel as a
typically ÔmasculinistÕ thinker, who privileges concepts with a masculine or
male connotation and denigrates those interpreted as feminine or female.
Accordingly, HegelÕs influence on feminist philosophy is judged to be largely
negative, and blamed for misleading figures such as Beauvoir into reproducing
masculinist oppositions in their own work.
To Hegelians, this overwhelmingly negative view of Hegel is somewhat
frustrating, as it appears to overlook his pronounced concern to overcome the conceptual oppositions he found entrenched
in the philosophical tradition – to ÔsynthesiseÕ these opposed terms into
higher unities. Kimberly HutchingsÕ central aim is to recover this aspect of
HegelÕs philosophy in a way that illuminates its affinities with contemporary
feminist efforts to go beyond masculinist conceptual oppositions. As she
states:
At the heart of my argument is the claim that Hegel is battling with the same conceptual conundrum which is constitutive of feminist philosophy within the Western tradition. This is the conundrum of how to escape the conceptual binary oppositions É which have associated women with the denigrated term. (p. 2)
Hutchings interprets HegelÕs philosophy as reflecting a uniquely
sustained resistance to dichotomous thinking, on this basis arguing that his
philosophy constitutes a useful resource for feminist philosophers and, indeed,
that one can elicit from his philosophy the contours of a distinctively
ÔHegelianÕ position in feminism. As she progressively outlines this position,
Hutchings contrasts her interpretations of Hegel with those of other feminist
thinkers – including Beauvoir, Butler, and Irigaray, but also others
including Rosalyn Diprose, Patricia Mills, and Carole Pateman.[2]
In this way, Hutchings provides not only an impressively clear and succinct
(though inevitably controversial) overview of HegelÕs entire philosophy, but
also a reasonably comprehensive survey of its previous feminist receptions.
Despite the clarity and originality of her conception of a ÔHegelian feminismÕ,
I do not always find it convincing, as will emerge below.
Hutchings begins with an account of the intellectual trajectory of
feminist philosophy that foregrounds its concern to overcome hierarchical
oppositions. She traces how successive approaches within feminist philosophy
have attempted to inaugurate a non-dichotomous mode of thinking, but each
approach in turn Ôfail[s] to emerge fully from the masculinist mode of thought
which [it] claim[s] to be transcendingÕ (16). Explaining these failures,
Hutchings makes the important point that any attempt to transcend oppositional
thought altogether – to find an uncontaminated ÔbeyondÕ – is doomed
to fail, already encapsulating an oppositional way of thinking. This implies
that one can overcome conceptual oppositions only by remaining within them and
complicating the relations between their terms to render them interdependent
and imbricated in multiple ways. Here Hutchings sees the starting-point for
productive feminist engagement with HegelÕs project of working through
traditional dichotomies to the point where Ôthe inadequacy of thinking in terms
of binary oppositions is demonstrated and overcomeÕ (p. 30).[3]
Hutchings proceeds
to outline readings of HegelÕs Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Philosophy of Right (1821), and – more briefly – his Logic
(1812-16) and Philosophy of
Nature (1817-30), focusing on
three areas in which he articulates a non-oppositional approach. These are
epistemology, in which she construes him as a Ôradical historicistÕ (pp. 4,
43); ethics and politics, in which she reads him as engaged in a
phenomenological project of comprehension; and ontology, in which she stresses
his conception of the identity-in-difference between nature and spirit. Let me
now explain how Hutchings reads Hegel under these three headings to extrapolate
the elements of a Hegelian feminism.
Following recent
scholarship, Hutchings treats HegelÕs Phenomenology as engaging with epistemological problems. On
her reading, the text traces consciousnessÕ repeated failures to know objective
reality, failures which occur because consciousness continually presupposes
that objective reality is both separate from it and yet something to which its
knowledge must correspond. Hutchings argues that (for Hegel) consciousness
educates itself through these successive failures, eventually attaining an
improved – and definitively modern – standpoint which recognises
the fundamental importance of self-determination. From this modern standpoint,
consciousness reconceives knowing as an activity undertaken by self-determining
subjects. Hutchings maintains that Hegel applauds this modern standpoint, and
that in this he Ôis very clearly following in the footsteps of KantÕs critical
idealismÕ (p. 39). That is, for Hutchings, Hegel shares KantÕs view that we
actively construct the objects of our knowledge by imposing structure upon our
experience. Hegel differs from Kant, according to Hutchings, in thinking that
KantÕs interpretation of self-determination one-sidedly opposes autonomy to
heteronomy and individual freedom to social context. Hegel reconceives
individual self-determination as presupposing a social context –
specifically, the context of an intersubjective world whose members recognise
one another as free agents. Hence, both subjects and (subjectively constituted)
objects of knowledge are Ôco-anchoredÕ in this shared context of spirit (Geist) – what Hutchings calls the Ôsolid but
self-moving medium within which claims are both made and judgedÕ (p. 110).
Spirit is Ôself-movingÕ in that it assumes different forms over time: spirit,
or intersubjectivity, is therefore the ultimate locus of the self-determination
that shapes forms of knowledge.
HutchingsÕ reading
of HegelÕs epistemology as a historicised Kantianism broadly concurs with
recent Ônon-realistÕ commentaries by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.[4]
Opposing these, realist interpretations of Hegel are offered by, inter alia, Thomas Wartenberg and Kenneth Westphal.[5]
On these realist views, Hegel believes that reality has a determinate character
independent of human practices, and that we can gain knowledge about this
reality because it is, in itself, organised conceptually: the real is the VernŸnftig – the ÔreasonableÕ.[6]
Realists argue that it is precisely because Hegel sees reality as in itself
conceptual – that is, as embodying the ÔideaÕ – that he labels his
philosophy ÔidealismÕ (specifically, ÔabsoluteÕ idealism). In this way HegelÕs
professed commitment to idealism need not signal commitment to KantÕs non-realist critical philosophy.
Evidently, then,
HutchingsÕ non-realist reading of Hegel is contestable exegetically. She
defends this reading because she believes that, on the realist reading, Hegel
preserves the subject/object opposition, whereas on her non-realist reading he
reconciles both terms within the unifying element of spirit. Yet spirit is, as
Hutchings says, a world of intersubjectivity, and so we may wonder how genuinely this non-realist Hegel has
ÒreconciledÓ subject and object. He seems, rather, to have repositioned
objective reality as a function of the self-determining activity of an enlarged
subject, thereby effectively absorbing the object into the subject. At this
point, HutchingsÕ account threatens to confirm the feminist suspicion that
Hegel reproduces, rather than opposes, masculinist oppositions. For what
feminists suspect is that HegelÕs much vaunted ÒreconciliationsÓ of opposed
terms simply expand the
meaning of traditionally privileged concepts to incorporate their antitheses:
for example, by expanding the subject (implicitly figured as masculine) subject
to absorb the object (implicitly figured as feminine). To allay this suspicion,
Hutchings needs to show that Hegelian spirit is genuinely irreducible to the
subject pole of the subject/object opposition, an ontological question to which
I return below.
Remaining for now
with epistemology, HutchingsÕ non-realist interpretation of Hegel is crucial
for her further argument that he is a radical historicist, an argument which in
turn underpins her appropriation of his epistemology for feminism. She argues
for HegelÕs radical historicism through a reading of the infamous chapter on
Ôabsolute knowingÕ that concludes his Phenomenology. Hutchings maintains that Ôabsolute knowingÕ
consists in the explicit recognition that knowledge is always conditioned by
social relations (forms of spirit) which are self-determining and, therefore,
ever-changing. This Ôabsolute knowingÕ is relative to its time – it
becomes articulable only in modernity – yet remains absolute in that it
recognises the self-determination that has always characterised spirit, albeit
only implicitly before modernity. Now, Hutchings continues, once one recognises
that knowing is always grounded in changing forms of spirit, one also sees that
spirit cannot Ôprovid[e] a secure, transhistorical ground for [cognitive]
judgementÕ (p. 105). All knowledge-claims have determinate social conditions of
possibility that render them necessarily partial, attached inescapably to these
contingently existing conditions. Knowers should, however, acknowledge this partiality (thereby adopting the
ÔabsoluteÕ standpoint that explicitly recognises the inescapability of
self-determination and partiality). Conversely, knowledge-claims can be
criticised when they falsely portray themselves as absolutely true. Through
this argument for HegelÕs radical historicism, Hutchings affiliates him with
feminist epistemology: insofar as Hegel is read as prescribing attention to the
social specificity and limitedness of all knowledge-claims, his approach
converges with the feminist epistemological project of tracing the contingent
power relations that animate all knowledge-claims.
I am unconvinced,
however, that HutchingsÕ own reading of Hegel on absolute knowing supports her
attribution to him of a radical historicism. According to Hutchings, the
absolute knowledge of self-determination presupposes specific social conditions
– modernity – yet remains ÔabsoluteÕ because its scope and validity
are not limited to modernity, since self-determination is (implicitly)
operative in all epochs. Inasmuch, then, as HegelÕs philosophical system
enumerates categories that appropriately accompany the recognition of
self-determination (as Hutchings states: p. 42), these categories, too, must carry
absolute validity for all ages. The fact that only the moderns can access these
categories does not imply that their knowledge is as partial as everyone
elseÕs. It implies, rather, that modern conditions enable absolute knowledge
whereas pre-modern conditions enable merely partially true claims, claims that
have only relative validity. HutchingsÕ own account of HegelÕs conception of
absolute knowing thus suggests that he adheres to only a moderate historicism, according to which the extent of
our access to the truth varies historically, while its content – the
principle of self-determination – does not. Admittedly, this moderately
historicist Hegel will be less congenial to those feminist epistemologists who
seek to map ubiquitious power relations. But this suggests that HutchingsÕ own
reading of HegelÕs epistemology prohibits her from fitting him into
contemporary feminist agendas as readily as she hopes.
HutchingsÕ account
of Hegel as a radical historicist also underpins her reading of his ethics and
politics as predicated upon a phenomenological project of comprehension. On
this reading, Hegel is not engaged in making moral judgements or outlining a
universal theory of moral agency. Rather, he explores how Ômoral agency and
judgement É [are] strictly and absolutely dependent on a highly complex legal,
social and political orderÕ (p. 127). He aims, then, to show how the Ômoral
point of viewÕ is embedded in ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and so, too, inextricably linked to determinate relations of power and
inequality. Just as, for Hutchings, HegelÕs radical historicism aligned him
with feminist epistemological attention to power relations, likewise his
replacement of judgement with comprehension aligns him with those feminist
thinkers who are critical of any belief in Ôindividual authoritative access to
criteria of moral truthÕ (p. 129). Hutchings adduces, in particular, the ethics
of Margaret Urban Walker, which seeks to map how contingent, socially
constructed forms of social life underwrite the intelligibility and authority
of all moral claims.[7]
Hutchings stresses, though, that a Hegelian feminist ethics devoted to
comprehension need not be quietist: it permits – indeed, recommends
– criticism of those moral judgements which fail to acknowledge their
partiality or which claim applicability beyond their authorising contexts.
In a similar vein,
Hutchings argues that HegelÕs political philosophy primarily involves
comprehending the social conditions of intelligibility for normative political
principles – an approach, however, which retains a prescriptive dimension
in that it Ôdraws attention to the faultlines in human self-understanding which
precipitate social and political changeÕ (p. 147). Here Hutchings draws on
PatemanÕs analysis of the apparent tension around women and contract in HegelÕs
account of the family (in the Philosophy of Right).[8]
On the one hand, Hegel believes that marriage arises from a contract, hence
that women must be sovereign individuals entitled to make contracts; on the
other hand, he sees marriage as a contract through which women abandon their
sovereignty and become legally subordinate to their husbands. Hutchings
resituates this apparent tension within her phenomenological reading of Hegel
to argue that he is simply describing a really existing social tension. He Ômake[s] clear the dependence of
sovereign individuality upon non-free relations [including, for example, market
inequalities] and a sexual division of labour within the private sphereÕ (p.
147). Rather than endorsing womenÕs confinement to the family, Hutchings
maintains, Hegel describes the contradictory social preconditions for the
principle of sovereign individuality, and by exposing these contradictions he
makes possible their criticism and transformation. His phenomenological
approach thus facilitates social criticism, insofar as it allows us to
Ôunderstand the conditions of possibility for economic, social and political
change and to identify appropriate strategies accordinglyÕ (p. 153).
HutchingsÕ readings
of HegelÕs ethics and politics are lucid, original, and highly suggestive as
regards their potential utility for feminism. But their persuasiveness is
proportional to that of her prior argument for HegelÕs radical historicism. If
Hegel is – as her own reading of him implies – only a moderate
historicist, then he must believe that some ethical claims are absolutely valid
– those that explicate the necessary conditions of full individual and
collective self-determination. It is arguably the goal of his Philosophy of
Right to outline a succession
of such claims, claims which establish the necessary shape that spirit must
take, and the institutions and practices through which it must be structured,
in order to make self-determination an actual reality. The fact that these
institutions become possible only in modernity does not vitiate their absolute
validity, but shows only that past institutions were doomed to merely Ôrelative
validityÕ, existing in ages during which, as Hegel paradoxically puts it, Ôa
wrong is still rightÕ.[9]
This implies, though, that HegelÕs description of the modern, patriarchal,
family simultaneously justifies it as absolutely valid, in virtue of its
integral place within the social structure necessary to realise
self-determination. Evidently, this pits Hegel against feminist theorists, who
are critical of the patriarchal family. Here, again, HutchingsÕ own reading of
Hegel on absolute knowing cuts against the reconciliation of Hegel with
feminism that she endeavours to derive from it.
I have raised two
problems for HutchingsÕ attempt to accommodate Hegel to feminism. Firstly, her
own reading of his epistemology implies that he espouses only a moderate
historicism, which separates him from those feminist philosophers who insist on
a more radical historical partiality. This problem, as I have emphasised,
arises internally to HutchingsÕ interpretation of Hegel, and could therefore
disappear given alternative readings of his view of absolute knowing. This
leaves it an open question how far such alternative readings of absolute
knowing might facilitate a positive convergence between Hegelian and feminist
epistemologies. The second problem that I have raised concerns ontology. On
HutchingsÕ own account, Hegel may not overcome the subject/object opposition so
much as amplify subjectivity into spirit to reinforce its traditional
privilege. Hutchings would, I think, respond that Hegel conceives spirit as a
medium genuinely distinct from both subject and object, a unifying Ôthird termÕ
in which they can be reconciled. After all, she maintains that (for Hegel)
spirit incorporates both
objective components – culture, institutions, and habits – and
subjective experience and existence (pp. 39-40). Spirit acquires this
ÔobjectiveÕ side because intersubjectivity is always mediated through material,
natural, and corporeal elements. Thus, for Hutchings, a central feature of
HegelÕs ontology is that it
rejects radical distinctions between natural and social being and [therefore] takes sexual difference seriously. It does not, however, treat sexual difference as either ontologically uniform or as unchanging. As an aspect of spirit, sexual difference is an aspect of self-changing being É (p. 159)
In her view, Hegel conceives of nature and spirit as not opposed but
intertwined, which enables us to identify sexual difference as both important
(tenaciously entrenched in social life through its dependence on nature) and
mutable (for spirit intertwines with nature in changing ways).
HutchingsÕ understanding of Hegel on the nature/spirit relation emerges
gradually through her engagements with previous receptions of Hegel by
Beauvoir, Mills, Irigaray, and Butler. BeauvoirÕs analysis of woman as manÕs
ÔOtherÕ relies on a sharp opposition between transcendent freedom and the mere
ÔimmanenceÕ to which women have historically been consigned. Yet Beauvoir
repeatedly suggests that women are biologically (not just historically)
inclined towards immanence – reflecting the masculinism implicit in the
transcendence/immanence opposition on which she relies. Feminist critics often
trace this masculinism infecting BeauvoirÕs analysis to her influence by
HegelÕs master/slave dialectic, with its allegedly sharp dichotomy between
organic life and self-consciousness.[10]
Against such critics, Hutchings rereads HegelÕs account of the transition from
life to self-consciousness non-oppositionally, as providing a Ôricher, more
promisingÕ ontological framework than that of Beauvoir. As Hutchings rereads
Hegel, humanity differs from other species in that its members must work, not
merely consume, to survive – which means that human infants must be
educated to be self-conscious and so capable of work. ÔSpirit distinguishes
itself as being dependent on the non-natural process of learning É Õ (p. 74).
Yet, since humans remain equally dependent on the nature upon which they must
work, Ôthe sense in which spirit is understood as self-changing being in
HegelÕs account includes an irreducible natural, collective and institutional
dimensionÕ (p. 76).
HutchingsÕ understanding of spiritÕs Ôirreducible natural dimensionÕ
becomes clearer from her ensuing discussion of HegelÕs well-known account of
the conflict between city-state and families in ancient Greece (found, like his
account of self-consciousness, in the Phenomenology). Most feminist readers – notably Mills,
Irigaray, and Butler – interpret Hegel as contrasting the natural family
with the spiritual polis, and supporting the male citizens in their work of
suppressing women and nature. But, as Hutchings rightly emphasises, for Hegel both types of community are simultaneously natural
and spiritual. The Ôdivine lawÕ, which prevails in the family, mandates respect
for not just immediate kin but all individuals qua Greeks. Moreover, membership both in
particular city-states and in the community of all Greeks is mediated by blood
ties. Hence, Hutchings concludes, HegelÕs Ôdiscussion of nature and spirit in
Greek ethical life É points to the always mutually self-determining relation of
organic and spiritual existenceÕ (p. 98). Against critics who perceive in Hegel
an adversary of nature (which is implicitly symbolised as female), Hutchings
contends that for Hegel Ôspirit and nature are [not] mutually exclusive É
HegelÕs notion of spirit entails the self-conscious recognition of its own inseparability
from nature, an acknowledgement of dependenceÕ (p. 98).
But does HutchingsÕ view that spirit depends upon and intertwines with
nature sufficiently distinguish spirit from subjectivity? Hutchings has
clarified that spirit depends on nature in having to work on nature, to
transform natural givens into artefacts and habits which mediate
intersubjectivity and compose Ôan environment produced through human labourÕ
(p. 40). It looks, then, as if spirit intertwines with nature to the extent
that it incorporates nature as a subordinate element, which it incessantly moulds into a
conduit for subjectivity. This suggests that, despite her efforts, Hutchings
ultimately continues to construe spirit as an amplified form of subjectivity,
amplifying itself precisely by incorporating a subordinated nature as an aspect
of itself. Further confirmation comes from HutchingsÕ comment that HegelÕs
belief in Ôthe identity and non-identity of natural and social, organic and
spiritual beingÕ agrees with Judith ButlerÕs rejection of the distinction
between biological sex and cultural gender (p. 158). The sex/gender
distinction, feminist critics have argued, invokes an implicit gendered
hierarchy: it aligns sex with femaleness, body, and nature, and gender with
maleness, mind, and culture.[11]
In Gender Trouble, Butler
rejects the sex/gender distinction on the grounds that the ÔnaturalÕ or
ÔbiologicalÕ is itself a cultural construction: sex is therefore internal to
gender, a construction through which culture defines its own limits.[12]
In saying this, though, Butler has not really superseded the opposition between
sex and gender, but has simply reinforced the entrenched privilege of gender,
by enlarging it to incorporate sex. Likewise, HutchingsÕ Hegel incorporates
nature into subjectivity
(which thereby expands to become spirit) – a move which reinforces,
rather than overcomes, the symbolic hierarchy of male over female.
My disagreements with Hutchings might suggest that I endorse the
feminist criticism that HegelÕs philosophy centres on hierarchical oppositions
which it strengthens precisely through its supposed method of ÒreconcilingÓ
them. Actually, I join Hutchings in rejecting this criticism. I think that
Hegel can plausibly be interpreted as espousing a conception of the nature/spirit
relation different to that which Hutchings finds in him, and which more
satisfactorily undoes the traditional opposition between these terms. This
conception emerges once we construe Hegel as a realist who believes that
reality is in itself conceptual or rational (and, therefore, cognitively
accessible). On the realist Hegelian view, spirit and nature are not opposed,
but each contain dimensions of both matter and conceptuality (although in
nature this conceptual element is non-conscious). This conception of the
nature/spirit relationship is, I believe, congenial to feminism because it
locates materiality within spirit and conceptuality within nature. In this way,
a realist Hegelianism conceives of spirit and nature as not opposed but
simultaneously identical and different – both combining matter and
conceptuality, yet in different ways.
My disagreement with Hutchings over realism has arisen within a broader
area of agreement. She convincingly demonstrates that it is important to
articulate and defend a distinctively Hegelian space within the feminist
philosophical landscape, and, more specifically, she shows that HegelÕs primary
significance for feminism lies in his project of overcoming oppositional
thought. My central objection to HutchingsÕ readings of Hegel has been that,
despite her intentions, they reinstate oppositions between subject and object,
spirit and nature, which are problematic from a feminist point of view. I have
therefore suggested that the ÔHegelian feminismÕ which Hutchings has begun to
explore should avoid this problem by assuming a different, realist,
orientation. Here my criticisms of Hutchings remain guided by her own important
and insightful account of the proper direction for a Hegelian feminist
philosophy.
[1] S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Picador, 1988); L. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); J. Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990).
[2] R. Diprose, The Bodies of Women (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 38-64; P. J. Mills, ÔHegelÕs AntigoneÕ, in ed. P. J. Mills, Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 59-88; C. Pateman, ÔHegel, Marriage, and the Standpoint of ContractÕ in ed. Mills, op. cit., 209-223.
[3] HutchingsÕ argument here is informed by Gillian RoseÕs idea that for Hegel identity always presupposes non-identity, since items only ever approach identity through an ongoing – never completed – process of superseding their prior non-identity. See G. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), pp. 48-49.
[4] R. Pippin, HegelÕs Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); T. Pinkard, HegelÕs Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[5] T. Wartenberg, ÔHegelÕs Idealism: The Logic of ConceptualityÕ, in Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 102-129; Kenneth R. Westphal, HegelÕs Epistemological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).
[6] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 64.
[7] M. Urban Walker, Moral Understandings (London: Routledge, 1998).
[8] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 199-219.
[9] Ibid., p. 88.
[10] For a classic statement, see G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason (London: Routledge, 1984).
[11] See M. Gatens, ÔA Critique of the Sex/Gender DistinctionÕ, in Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996), 3-20.
[12] Butler, op. cit., 7.