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Feminist Criticisms and Reinterpretations of Hegel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Alison Stone
Alison Stone*
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
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Abstract

In 1970, the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi published her now-classic polemic urging women to “spit on Hegel”. Disregarding her advice, many subsequent feminist theorists and philosophers have engaged substantially with Hegel's thought, and a wide variety of feminist readings of Hegel have sprung up. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of these different feminist criticisms and interpretations of Hegel. In introducing these various interpretations, I will show how they reflect a range of divergent feminist approaches to the history of philosophy as a whole. My aim is not only to describe but also to evaluate these approaches, with respect to their capacity to generate insightful and productive readings of Hegel's philosophy. I shall argue that what I will call the “essentialist” feminist approach to Hegel is the most fruitful, doing most to illuminate the contours of his thought and to open up new and creative ways of reading his works.

To anticipate, in surveying the various feminist interpretations of Hegel, I will classify them as reflecting four different types of feminist approach to the history of philosophy. The first, “extensionist” approach draws upon the history of philosophy for conceptual resources to understand and explain women's social situation. The second approach is more critical, tracing the pervasiveness of “masculinist” assumptions and biases in the history of philosophy. To call views “masculinist” is to say that they uphold systematic and hierarchical contrasts between masculinity and femininity, contrasts which need not be explicit but may be sustained through contrasts between other ostensibly neutral concepts which actually have tacit gender connotations. This critical approach generates an overwhelmingly negative picture of the philosophical tradition. The third, “essentialist” approach complicates this picture, recovering and highlighting the strands within historical texts which revalorise concepts or items that are given feminine connotations. These often overlooked strands oppose the dominant masculinist tendencies in texts by assigning equal importance and value to “symbolically feminine” concepts. However, proponents of the fourth, “deconstructive” approach object that essentialist readings of philosophical texts accept and reinforce patterns of gender symbolism which feminists ought to challenge. Deconstructive feminists seek to expose and exacerbate the instability within these patterns of gender symbolism by tracing how philosophical texts continuously undermine the gender contrasts present within them.

Type
Hegel and his Critics
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 23 , Issue 1-2: number 45/46 , January 2002 , pp. 93 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2002

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References

1 Lonzi, Carla, “Let's Spit on Hegel”, in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Mills, Patricia J. (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 This terminology may be confusing, as essentialist approaches are themselves “deconstructive” in that they expose how philosophical texts internally undermine their own masculinist contrasts. But the approach that I call “deconstructive” takes this further by eliciting how these texts internally undermine any stable pattern of gender symbolism at all.

3 More recently, extensionist readings of Hegel have been developed by Heidi Ravven and Jeffrey Gauthier. Ravven seeks to extend Hegel's “model of intrapsychic and social liberation” as a model of liberation for women ( Ravven, , “Has Hegel Anything to Say to Feminists?” in Feminist Interpretations of G W. F. Hegel, ed. Mills, , p. 225)Google Scholar. Gauthier endorses Hegel's view of reason as intertwined with emotion and his belief in the social and historical situatedness of action as “effective instruments for understanding the implications of social critical movements such as feminism” ( Gauthier, , Hegel and Feminist Social Criticism [Albany: SUNY, 1997], p. 153)Google Scholar. I focus on Beauvoir because her work best illustrates the general problems facing any such extensionist approach to Hegel.

4 de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, trans. Parshley, H. M. (London: Picador, 1988), p. 96 (translation amended)Google Scholar.

5 See Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. Nichols, James H. Jr., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 36–52 Google Scholar. A good account of how Beauvoir appropriates Kojève is Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's “The Second Sex”, trans. Schenck, Linda (London: Athlone, 1996), pp. 67–82 Google Scholar.

6 However, Beauvoir also believes that modern technology is reducing the onerousness of women's reproductive functions and allowing women to control their own fertility, thereby enabling them at last to risk life and struggle for recognition.

7 See Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 80–102 Google Scholar; cf. p. 7 below.

8 Lloyd, Genevieve, “Introduction” to Lloyd, , ed., Feminism and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2 Google Scholar.

9 See James, Susan, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 19 Google Scholar.

10 Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering (California: University of California Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flax, Jane, “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious” in Discovering Reality, ed. Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill B. (Dordrecht: David Reidel, 1984)Google Scholar; Stefano, Christine Di, Configurations of Masculinity (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hartsock, Nancy, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism”, in Discovering Reality, ed. Harding, and Hintikka, , p. 297 Google Scholar.

12 Ibid, p. 296; see also p. 298.

13 Flax, , “Political Philosophy”, p. 271 Google Scholar. Similarly Stefano, Di applauds “Hegel's distaste for atomistically self-defined intellectuals who deny their relational historical and social identities” (Configurations, p. 108)Google Scholar.

14 Explaining her approach, Lloyd draws on Sandra Harding's distinction between “symbolic gender”, “structural gender” (location in the social division of labour), and “individual gender” (socially formed psychic identity). Lloyd clarifies that her concern “is with what Harding calls ‘symbolic gender’ — with the operations of male and female as symbols” ( Lloyd, , “Maleness, Metaphor, and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason”, in A Mind of One's Own, ed. Antony, Louise M. and Witt, Charlotte [Boulder: Westview Press, 1993], p. 71)Google Scholar.

15 Lloyd, , The Man of Reason, p. 92 Google Scholar.

16 Revealingly, Lloyd comments that Hegel thinks that mind should “transcend […] mere absorption in […] life” and should come to “stand above life” (ibid., p. 90).

17 See Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. Cottingham, John, Stoothoff, Robert, and Murdoch, Dugald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul”, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. Cottingham, et al. Google Scholar

18 See, for examples, the articles in Feminism and History of Philosophy, ed. Lloyd.

19 Shari Starrett also offers an essentialist reading of Hegel, in “Critical Relations in Hegel: Woman, Family, and the Divine” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F Hegel, ed. Mills, Google Scholar. Starrett argues that, in the Phenomenology, Hegel esteems family life for its organisation around relationships between individuals, thereby revaluing the symbolically feminine notion of relationship.

20 Irigaray, , Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

21 PR = Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 In what follows, I summarise Irigaray's readings of Hegel in her papers “The Female Gender” (1985) and “The Universal as Mediation” (1986), both in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

23 See also Hardimon, Michael, Hegel's Social Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 146–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Cf. Hegel's, statement that: “The individual who seeks the pleasure of enjoying his individuality [Einzelheit], finds it in the family” (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A. V. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], p. 276)Google Scholar.

25 He equates the female sex with “concrete individuality [Einzelheit] and feeling [Empfindung] (PR §166/206).

26 Alan Patten explains Hegel's (Aristotelian) solution to the reason/desire conflict in his Hegel's Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 56–57 Google Scholar.

27 See, for example, Inwood, Michael, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 68–70 Google Scholar; Reid, Jeffrey, “Hegel and the State University: The University of Berlin and its Founding Contradictions”, The Owl of Minerva 32: 1 (2000), esp. p. 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mackenzie, Millicent, Hegel's Educational Theory and Practice (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1909), pp. 59–65 Google Scholar. Scholars typically construe Hegel as “disciplinarian” partly because the scheme of progression from natural desires to social norms to re-naturalised norms appears to exemplify Hegel's favoured metaphysical pattern of progression from unity to division to higher unity. However, this metaphysical pattern is equally instantiated by what I call the “developmental” form of education, which involves progression from “immediate” natural desires to the accentuation of the rational nucleus within those desires and lastly the successful re-orientation of the desires around their rational element.

28 PP = Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophical Propaedeutic, trans. Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar.

29 According to Irigaray, on the developmental model “spirit [is] […] the means for matter to emerge and endure in its proper form” — to realise its potential. This contrasts with the disciplinary scheme in which “spirit […] forces the body to comply with an abstract model that is unsuited to it” ( Irigaray, , I Love To You [London: Routledge, 1996], p. 25)Google Scholar.

30 Irigaray suggests that Hegel's thought is animated by a “secret model” of cultivation as “living plant growth” — gradual development from sensible to rationalised desires ( Irigaray, , Sexes and Genealogies, p. 112)Google Scholar.

31 Deutscher, Penelope, Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., p. 161.

33 This common idea that dialectical processes are subtended by a masculinist schema is articulated, inter alia, by Mills, Patricia in “Hegel's Antigone” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Mills, , p. 84 Google Scholar.

34 See, especially, Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

35 Deutscher explains her indebtedness to Butler, in Yielding Gender, chs. 1-2 (esp. p. 10)Google Scholar.

36 Butler, , Gender Trouble, pp. 139–41Google Scholar.

37 Butler introduces the idea of the “heterosexual matrix” to designate the system of norms which define the genders as symmetrically opposed to one another and so as naturally heterosexual (Gender Trouble, p. 151, n.6).

38 Butler, , Gender Trouble, p. 7 Google Scholar.

39 Butler, , Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 30 Google Scholar.

40 Butler alludes to this Hegelian source of her argument in Bodies That Matter, p. 217. It is also noted by Colebrook, Clare, “From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings”, in Hypatia 15:2 (Spring 2000), p. 78–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 EL = Hegel, G. W. F., Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. Geraets, T. F., Suchting, W. A., and Harris, H. S. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)Google Scholar.

42 Several recent readings of Hegel's “idealism” stress that it actually rests on a realist epistemology according to which we can know about reality in itself, this reality being fundamentally conceptual (hence the force of “idealism”). See Wartenberg, Thomas, “Hegel's Idealism: The Logic of Conceptually”, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Beiser, Frederick C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, and Westphal, Kenneth, Hegel's Epistemological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 For an analysis of the recurrence of this symbolic schema in the history of philosophy, see, especially, Irigaray, , Speculum, pp. 133–46Google Scholar.

44 Butler recently criticises Hegel's treatment of Antigone ( Butler, , Antigone's Claim [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000]Google ScholarPubMed, but does not fold this criticism back onto the (allegedly) Hegelian anti-realism underpinning her account of gender.

45 One might object that deconstructive approaches need not rely specifically on Butler's understanding of gender. However, such approaches ultimately must rely on an understanding of gender like that which Butler articulates, because they must envisage cultural patterns of gender symbolism as undetermined by any biologically given duality. Hence, the same problem of lingering masculinism will affect any such approaches.